I
Niccola Porpora (1686-1766), while prominent in his own day as composer, conductor, and teacher (among his pupils was Joseph Haydn), is known to history chiefly by his achievements as a singing master—perhaps the greatest that ever lived. The art of bel canto, that exaltation of the human voice for its own sake, which in him reached its highest point, was doubtless the greatest enemy to artistic sincerity and dramatic truth, the greatest deterrent to operatic progress in the eighteenth century. Though possessed of ideals of intrinsic beauty—sensuousness of tone, dynamic power, brilliance, and precision like that of an instrument—this art would to-day arouse only wonder, not admiration. Porpora understood the human voice in all its peculiarities; he could produce, by sheer training, singers who, like Farinelli, Senesino, and Caffarelli, were the wonder of the age. By what methods his results were reached we have no means of knowing, for his secret was never committed to writing, but his method was most likely empirical, as distinguished from the scientific, or anatomical, methods of to-day. It was told that he kept Caffarelli for five or six years to one page of exercises, and then sent him into the world as the greatest singer of Europe—a story which, though doubtless exaggerated, indicates the purely technical nature of his work.
Porpora wrote his own vocalizzi, and, though he composed in every form, all of his works appear to us more or less like solfeggi. His cantatas for solo voice and harpsichord show him at his best, as a master of the florid Italian vocal style, with consummate appreciation of the possibilities of the vocal apparatus. His operas, of which he wrote no less than fifty-three, are for the most part tedious, conventional, and overloaded with ornament, in every way characteristic of the age; the same is true in some measure of his oratorios, numerous church compositions, and chamber works, all of which show him to be hardly more than a thoroughly learned and accomplished technician.
But Porpora’s fame attracted many talented pupils, including the brilliant young German, Hasse (1699-1783), mentioned above, who, however, quickly forsook him in favor of Alessandro Scarlatti, a slight which Porpora never forgave and which served as motive for a lifelong rivalry between the two men. Hasse, originally trained in the tradition of the Hamburg opera and its Brunswick offshoot (where he was engaged as tenor and where he made his debut with his only German opera, ‘Antiochus’), quickly succumbed to the powerful Italian influence. The Italians took kindly to him, and, after his debut in Naples with ‘Tigrane’ (1773), surnamed him il caro sassone. His marriage with the celebrated Faustina Bordoni linked him still closer to the history of Italian opera; for in the course of his long life, which extends into the careers of Haydn and Mozart, he wrote no less than seventy operas, many of them to texts by the famed Metastasio, and most of them vehicles for the marvellous gifts of his wife. While she aroused the enthusiasm of audiences throughout Europe, he enjoyed the highest popularity of any operatic composer through half a century. Together they made the opera at Dresden (whither Hasse was called in 1731 as royal kapellmeister) the most brilliant in Germany—one that even Bach, as we have seen, was occasionally beguiled into visiting. Once Hasse was persuaded to enter into competition with Handel in London (1733), the operatic capital of Europe, where Faustina, seven years before, had vanquished her great rival Cuzzoni and provided the chief operatic diversion of the Handel régime to the tune of £2,000 a year! Only the death of August the Strong in 1763 ended the Hasses’ reign in Dresden, where during the bombardment of 1760 Hasse’s library and most of the manuscripts of his works were destroyed by fire. What remains of them reveals a rare talent and a consummate musicianship which, had it not been employed so completely in satisfying the prevailing taste and propitiating absurd conventions, might still appeal with the vitality of its harmonic texture and the beauty of its melodic line. Much of the polyphonic skill and the spontaneous charm of a Handel is evident in these works, but they lack the breadth, the grandeur and the seriousness that distinguish the work of his greater compatriot. Over-abundance of success militates against self-criticism, which is the essential quality of genius, and Hasse’s success was not, like Handel’s, dimmed by the changing taste of a surfeited public. Hasse’s operas signalize at once the high water mark of brilliant achievement in an art form now obsolete and the ultimate degree of its fatuousness.
Hasse and Porpora, then, were the leaders of those who remained true to the stereotyped form of opera, the singers’ opera, whose very nature precluded progress. They and a host of minor men, like Francesco Feo, Leonardo Vinci, Pasquale Cafaro, were enrolled in a party which resisted all ideas of reform; and their natural allies in upholding absurd conventions were the singers, that all-powerful race of virtuosi, the impresarios, and all the great tribe of adherents who derived a lucrative income from the system. Against these formidable forces the under-current of reform—both musical and dramatic—felt from the beginning of the century, could make little head. The protests of men like Benedetto Marcello, whose satire Il teatro alla moda appeared in 1722, were voices crying in the wilderness. Yet reform was inevitable, a movement no less momentous than when the Florentine reform of 1600 was under way—the great process of crystallization and refinement which was to usher in that most glorious era of musical creation known as the classic period. Like the earlier reform, it signified a reaction against technique, against soulless display of virtuosity, a tendency toward simplicity, subjectivity, directness of expression—a return to nature.
Though much of the pioneer work was done by composers of instrumental music whose discussion must be deferred to the next chapter, the movement had its most spectacular manifestations in connection with opera, and in that aspect is summed up in the work of Gluck, the outstanding personality in the second half of the eighteenth century. In the domain of absolute music it saw its beginnings in the more or less spontaneous efforts of instrumentalists like Fasch, Foerster, Benda, and Johann Stamitz. First among those whose initiative was felt in both directions we must name Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, the young Neapolitan who, born in 1710, had his brilliant artistic career cut short at the premature age of twenty-six.