A NARRATIVE HISTORY OF MUSIC
CHAPTER I
THE REGENERATION OF THE OPERA
The eighteenth century and operatic convention—Porpora and Hasse—Pergolesi and the opera buffa—Jommelli, Piccini, Cimarosa, etc.—Gluck’s early life; the Metastasio period—The comic opera in France; Gluck’s reform; Orfeo and Alceste—The Paris period; Gluck and Piccini; the Iphigénies; Gluck’s mission—Gluck’s influence; Salieri and Sarti; the development of opéra comique; Cherubini.
While the deep, quiet stream of Bach’s genius flowed under the bridges all but unnoticed, the marts and highways of Europe were a babel of operatic intrigue and artistic shams. Handel in England was running the course of his triumphal career, which luckily forced him into the tracks of a new art-form; on the continent meantime Italian opera reached at once its most brilliant and most absurd epoch under the leadership of Hasse and Porpora; even Rameau, the founder of modern harmonic science, did not altogether keep aloof from its influence, while perpetuating the traditions of Lully in Paris. Vocal virtuosi continued to set the musical fashions of the age, the artificial soprano was still a force to which composers had to submit; indeed, artificiality was the keynote of the century.
The society of the eighteenth century was primarily concerned with the pursuit of sensuous enjoyment. In Italy especially ‘the cosmic forces existed but in order to serve the endless divertissement of superficial and brainless beings, in whose eyes the sun’s only mission was to illumine picturesque cavalcades and water-parties, as that of the moon was to touch with trembling ray the amorous forest glades.’ Monnier’s vivid pen-picture of eighteenth century Venetian society applies, with allowance made for change of scene and local color, to all the greater Italian cities. ‘What equivocal figures! What dubious pasts! Law (of Mississippi bubble fame) lives by gambling, as does the Chevalier Desjardins, his brother in the Bastille, his wife in a lodging-house; the Count de Bonneval, turbaned, sitting on a rug with legs crossed, worships Allah, carries on far-reaching intrigues and is poisoned by the Turks; Lord Baltimore, travelling with his physician and a seraglio of eight women, with a pair of negro guards; Ange Goudar, a wit, a cheat at cards, a police spy and perjurer, rascally, bold, and ugly; and his wife Sarah, once a servant in a London tavern, marvellously beautiful, who receives the courtly world at her palace in Pausilippo near Naples, and subjugates it with her charm; disguised maidens, false princes, fugitive financiers, literary blacklegs, Greeks, chevaliers of all industries, wearers of every order, splenetic grands seigneurs, and the kings of Voltaire’s Candide. Of such is the Italian society of the eighteenth century composed.
Music in this artificial atmosphere could only flatter the sense of hearing without appealing to the intelligence, excite the nerves and occasionally give a keener point to voluptuousness, by dwelling on a note of elegant sorrow or discreet religiousness. The very church, according to Dittersdorf, had become a musical boudoir, the convent a conservatory. As for the opera, it could not be anything but a lounge for the idle public. The Neapolitan school, which reigned supreme in Europe, provided just the sort of amusement demanded by that public. It produced scores of composers who were hailed as maestri to-day and forgotten to-morrow. Hundreds of operas appeared, but few ever reached publication; their nature was as ephemeral as the public’s taste was fickle, and a success meant no more to a composer than new commissions to turn out operas for city after city, to supply the insatiate thirst for novelty. The manner in which these commissions were carried out is indicative of the result. Composers were usually given a libretto not of their choosing; the recitatives, which constituted the dramatic groundwork, were turned out first and distributed among the singers. The writing of the arias was left to the last so that the singers’ collaboration or advice could be secured, for upon their rendition the success of the whole opera depended; they were, indeed, written for the singers—the particular singers of the first performance—and in such a manner that their voices might show to the best advantage. As Leopold Mozart wrote in one of his letters, they made ‘the coat to fit the wearer.’ The form which these operas took was an absolute stereotype; a series of more or less disconnected recitatives and arias, usually of the da capo form, strung together by the merest thread of a plot. It was a concert in costume rather than the drama in music which was the original conception of opera in the minds of its inventors.
Pietro Metastasio, the most prolific of librettists, was eminently the purveyor of texts for these operas, just as Rinuccini, the idealist, had furnished the poetic basis for their nobler forerunners. Metastasio’s inspiration flowed freely, both in lyrical and emotional veins, but ‘the brilliancy of his florid rhetoric stifled the cry of the heart.’ His plots were overloaded with the vapid intrigues that pleased the taste of his contemporaries, with quasi-pathetic characters, with passionate climaxes and explosions. His popularity was immense. He could count as many as forty editions of his own works and among his collaborators were practically all the great composers, from Handel to Gluck and Cimarosa. As personifying the elements which sum up the opera during this its most irrational period we may take two figures of extraordinary eminence—Niccola Porpora and Johann Adolf Hasse.