Inevitably a short history of opera is going to leave a lot out. It’s an art form that has existed for over 400 years and taken on many shapes and forms in a great many different cultures and nations. You will however, frequently hear almost every Western opera categorised to a few periods which are definitely a good place to start.
Baroque
The first musical theatre work that we might define as an
opera today was Jacopo Peri’s Dafne, composed in the late 1590s. Unfortunately
little of Peri’s score survives so Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo of 1607 takes the
crown as the earliest work that you are able to hear. Both these composers were
working in Italy, and it was Italian opera that would dominate what is now
known as the Baroque period spanning from around 1600 to the 1740s. This form
of opera came to the fore in wealthy courts across Europe, royalty frequently
patrons of composers, but it rapidly became an art form that appealed to all
classes, George Friedrich Handel’s work, for example, wildly popular in
England.
Some of the major opera composers of this period were
Antonio Vivaldi, Handel and Jean-Baptiste Lully. For much of the 20th Century,
Baroque works were seldom performed but there has been something of a
popularity boom over the last few decades. The H.I.P (Historically Informed
Performance) movement pushing many of these works back into the repertory.
Handel’s Giulio Cesare and Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas are two of the most
commonly heard works today.
In the mid 1700s Willibald Christoph Gluck took opera in new
directions, expanding the structure, harmony and narratives away from the
highly formalised forms that had dominated the previous 150 years. He made the
orchestra more integral by developing “recitativo accompagnato”, recitative
supported by full orchestra rather than just continuo. Opera became steadily
more international and varied in style, Italian opera seria mixing with French
opera comique and German singspiel amongst many other operatic genres.
Some of the major opera composers were Gluck, Franz Joseph
Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Neither Gluck nor Haydn are all that
frequently heard on modern stages but Mozart has an enormous number of works in
the standard repertory, Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute and Cosi Fan Tutte three
of many.
Romantic opera has dominated operatic stages for the better
part of two centuries. Emerging around the turn of the 19th century,
Romanticism was the predominant artistic and literary movement until the 1st
World War. As a movement it isn’t easily defined but it was born out of the
French Revolution and Germany’s Sturm und Drang playing heavily towards strong
emotions and a rebellion against the scientific conformity of the enlightenment
and latterly the industrial revolution. Opera became steadily bigger and more
dramatic, vast choruses and a swelled orchestra, to upwards of 100 players,
building towards the immense operatic works of Richard Wagner.
There are too many composers to mention here but Germany was
dominated by Wagner, Italy by first Giuseppe Verdi and then Giacomo Puccini and
Russia made its first real operatic impact with initially Mikhail Glinka and
then Modest Mussorgsky and Pyotr Tchaikovsky amongst many others.
20th Century
More or less for the first time in operatic history, the
20th Century was dominated not by contemporary works but by those of the
previous three hundred years. Few were writing new Romantic works but the old
ones dominated the modern stage. It hasn’t been all doom and gloom for lovers
of new music though, with sophisticated contemporary music making its way onto
the operatic stages albeit sporadically and seldom popularly. Composers have
become more inventive with the scoring, frequently using fewer orchestral
players and creating more intimate dramas relative to the bombast of the
Romantic period. The first half of the century was dominated by
the modernists particularly Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg who developed
atonal and then twelve-tone techniques (lots of dissonance used to chilling
dramatic effect). Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich came to the fore
through the middle years of the 20th Century, Britten in particular arguably
the most successful opera composer born after 1900. Minimalism came in full
throttle by the 70s, Philip Glass and most recently John Adams.
Source:
Operas's History: https://www.theopera101.com/operaabc/history/
Comments
Post a Comment