Lord Mount Edgcumbe in his “Reminiscences of the Opera” gives a fair account of the reforms introduced by Rossini into the operatic music of Italy, which is interesting as proceeding from an old operatic habitué to whom these changes were anything but acceptable. It would be a mistake to suppose that Rossini’s operas encountered formidable opposition anywhere; and in England, as in France, those musicians and amateurs who, here and there, made it their business to decry them, did so with the more energy on account of the immense favour with which they were received by the general public.
“So great a change,” says Lord Mount Edgcumbe, “has taken place in the character of the (operatic) dramas, in the style of the music and its performance, that I cannot help enlarging on that subject before I proceed further. One of the most material alterations is that the grand distinction between serious and comic operas is nearly at an end, the separation of the singers for their performance entirely so.[4] Not only do the same sing in both, but a new species of drama has arisen, a kind of mongrel between them called semi seria, which bears the same analogy to the other two that that nondescript, melodrama, does to the legitimate drama and comedy of the English.”
Specimens of this “nondescript” style are of course to be found in Shakspeare’s plays and in Mozart’s operas; but let Lord Mount Edgcumbe continue his perfectly intelligible account of Rossini’s reforms.
“The construction of these newly invented pieces,” he proceeds, “is essentially different from the old. The dialogue, which used to be carried on in recitative, and which in Metastasio’s operas is often so beautiful and interesting, is now cut up (and rendered unintelligible if it were worth listening to) into pezzi concertati, or long singing conversations, which present a tedious succession of unconnected, ever-changing motivos having nothing to do with each other: and if a satisfactory air is for a moment introduced which the ear would like to dwell upon, to hear modulated, varied, and again returned to, it is broken off before it is well understood, by a sudden transition into a totally different melody, time and key, and recurs no more; so that no impression can be made or recollection of it preserved. Single songs are almost exploded ... even the prima donna, who would formerly have complained at having less than three or four airs allotted to her, is now satisfied with one trifling cavatina for a whole opera.”
Rossini’s concerted pieces and finales described are not precisely a “tedious succession of unconnected, ever-changing motivos;” but from his own point of view Lord Mount Edgcumbe’s account of Rossini’s innovations is true enough.
It seems strange, that in the year 1813, when Rossini produced “Tancredi,” the mere forms of the lyric drama should have still been looked upon as unsettled. For though opera could only boast a history of two centuries—little enough considering the high antiquity of the spoken drama—it had made great progress during the previous hundred years, and was scarcely the same entertainment as that which popes, cardinals, and the most illustrious nobles in Italy had taken under their special protection in the early part of the seventeenth century. No general history of the opera in Europe can well be written, for its progress has been different in each country, and we find continual instances of composers leaving one country to visit and even to settle in another, taking with them their works, and introducing at the same time and naturalising their style. But its development in Italy can be followed, more or less closely, from its origin in a long series of experiments to the time of Scarlatti, and from Scarlatti (1649) in an unbroken line to Rossini.
Indeed, from Scarlatti to the immediate predecessors of Rossini, the history of the development of the opera in Italy is the history of its development at Naples; and Rossini himself, though not educated at Naples, like almost all the other leading composers of Italy, soon betook himself to the great musical capital, and composed for its celebrated theatre all his best Italian operas in the serious style.
Without proposing to imitate those conscientious historians who cannot chronicle the simplest events of their own time without going back to the origin of all things, I may perhaps find it more easy to explain to the unlearned reader what Rossini did in the way of perfecting operatic forms if I previously mark down the steps in advance taken by his predecessors.
The first operas seem to have been little more than spoken dramas interspersed with choruses in the madrigal style. “Dafne,” performed for the first time in the Corsi palace in 1597, passes for the first opera musicale in which recitative was employed.
In “Euridice,” represented publicly at Florence on the occasion of the marriage of Henry IV. of France with Marie de Medicis in 1600, each of the five acts concludes with a chorus, the dialogue is in recitative, and one of the characters, Tircis, sings an air which is introduced by an instrumental prelude. Here, then, in germ, are the overture, the chorus, the air, the recitative of modern opera.