Opera may be said to have originated in Florence, but it was soon transplanted from the city of its birth, and after the year 1600 the historian finds little of importance in Florentine opera to claim his attention. In 1608 Marco da Gagliano made another musical setting of Rinuccini’s Dafne, which had been set by Peri into the first opera. It may be remarked that Peri generously placed Gagliano above himself. Gagliano wrote a preface to his Dafne in which he gave as his definition of opera, ‘a true entertainment for princes, more pleasing than any other, for it unites in itself all the finest pleasures, invention, the arrangement of a subject, ideas, style, sweetness of rhyme, the art of music, concord of voices and instruments, refinement and delicacy of song, graceful dances and movements; and it may be said that painting also plays a great part in the perspective and the costumes; so much so that not only the intelligence but all the noblest feelings are charmed by the most pleasing arts which have been invented by the genius of man.’ This is a high ideal of opera, not unworthy to stand beside Wagner’s; but the spirit of the age cared little enough about charming the intelligence, and the next opera of importance in Florence, Ruggiero, written by Francesca Caccini, daughter of Giulio Caccini, is little more than a spectacle. Gagliano’s Flora (1624) closes the Florentine period.
In Rome the opera was for many years influenced by the oratorio, that is to say, the texts chosen were oftenest either spiritual or allegorical, following the style of Cavalieri’s Rappresentazione, which has already been treated in the previous chapter. Opera and oratorio were hardly different in form. The influence of the church was strong and decidedly conservative. The most important opera composers in Rome, Stefano Landi and Agazzari, were both in the service of the church, and were, as a matter of fact, primarily church composers. Moreover, there was no public opera in Rome until after the middle of the century. Performances were given under the patronage and at the palaces of cardinals, among them Corsini, Colonna, Rospigliosi, and Barberini. Landi’s two operas, Orfeo (1619), and San Alessio (1634), are both made up of comic and tragic elements. In Orfeo there is a Lethe drinking song for Charon, one of the first comedy scenes in opera, and in San Alessio, which deals with a story of Christ, there are buffoons. These comedy scenes seem to show a reaction against the ecclesiastical influence. Among the musicians in the service of Cardinal Barberini was Luigi Rossi, one of the most admired and best beloved musicians of his day. He was summoned to Paris by Mazarin in 1646 with twenty singers, among them eight male soprani, and in Paris wrote his most famous opera, ‘The Marriage of Orpheus and Eurydice.’ Upon his return to Rome he wrote another opera, Il palagio d’Atlante, and an oratorio, ‘Joseph.’ In general it may be said that the influence of the church was too strong for opera at Rome, and the so-called Roman school of the seventeenth century has its place only in the development of the cantata and the oratorio.
Venice was the centre of operatic music during the greater part of the century. Thither, as we have seen, Monteverdi had been called in 1613 as choirmaster at St. Mark’s, and there he wrote Tancredi, ‘The Return of Ulysses,’ and L’incoronazione di Poppea, all of which, by the color of their orchestration, their genuine dramatic feeling, and their remarkable strength of harmony, left a standard for opera which was nowhere equalled throughout the century. The first opera house in Europe was built in Venice in 1637. Others quickly followed in the same city. Thus here the opera ceased to be a private amusement for the rich nobility and became a public diversion; and composers were consequently forced to take at once into consideration the desires and the taste of the public. No longer free under a rich patronage to experiment, they were obliged to write works for which a popular success might be expected. Furthermore, the financial managers of the opera were by no means willing to pay high salaries and secure the services of the best musicians for the orchestra. Composers could count upon but little skill in the playing of their accompaniments, and, had they been inclined to write elaborately for the orchestra, would have been deterred from so doing by the knowledge that their music would have been mishandled. Thereupon it is hardly surprising that composers quickly lost interest in a detailed workmanship which would have passed unnoticed by the careless ears of the age, that they strove for breadth of effect, at the sacrifice of artistic perfection, that they neglected their accompaniments and the resources of the orchestra and centred their attention wholly upon the voice parts, upon melody for which alone the public had interest. The standards of Monteverdi were forgotten or ignored even before his death. His greatest pupil and his successor, Francesco Cabetti-Bruni, called Cavalli (1599-1676), never lost entirely what he learned from his master. In his operas, of which ‘Jason’ (1649), ‘Serse’ (1660), and Ercole amante (1662) are most often cited, and were in his own day the most famous, the dramatic element never wholly disappears. But, whereas Monteverdi intensified the plays which he set to music by sudden, often harsh, effects, Cavalli tended always toward smoothness. Monteverdi’s style is pointed and concentrated, full of fire, Cavalli’s flowing and diluted. It was to his interest to make the most of dramatic scenes, to expand them to proportions which could not fail to claim the attention of his audiences. Therefore it happens that the recitative, which was the usual medium of musical expression in the early operas, was at places in his opera broadened into more or less sustained melody. The dramatic value of a situation was no longer tersely emphasized by a sharp interval in the voice part or a few harsh chords in the accompaniment, but was extended throughout a long passage tending to become more and more lyrical. In this fashion the aria was prefigured in the operas of Cavalli, and so it grew and was perfected and became the characteristic mark of the Italian opera.
The form became stereotyped. There was usually an orchestral introduction, anticipating the melody. This was followed by the first section of the aria, usually broad, flowing melody within the limits of the tonic key. After this came an orchestral ritornel, and then the second section of the aria, usually in a more broken and sometimes more agitated style, and in a contrasting key. This section was followed by another orchestral ritornel and the return of the first section complete. It became the custom to write the words da capo at the end of the second section, directing the singer to return to the beginning and start over again, singing to a sign placed at the end of the first section. The form is, of course, stiff, but it is not by any means essentially ugly. The recapitulation of the first section gives a sense of balance and proportion to the song as a whole, which is necessary in any work of art. This very balance, however, is in direct opposition to dramatic effect. The action of a drama must move forward. To return in scenes of great feeling to a point already passed and repeat what has already once been sung checks all action and brings the play to a standstill. Yet in the course of the century arias came to occupy the predominant part in opera. Before the end of the century they were classified into various kinds, and a composer was not only forced to incorporate a certain number of each kind into his opera, but to allot to each singer his or her proper share of them. The old dramma per musica became a thing of the past, the new opera merely a series of songs arbitrarily joined by a few measures of indifferent accompanied or unaccompanied recitative.
As we have said, signs of this development are already apparent in the operas of Cavalli, pupil of Monteverdi. Cavalli achieved immense popular success. His fame spread over Europe. He was summoned to France in 1660 and again in 1662 and required to furnish operas for the court of Louis XIV. Lully, whose work we shall consider in the next chapter, was already in control of music at the court, and was commissioned to add ballet music to the operas of Cavalli to season them to the French taste; and in this way had the chance to study Cavalli’s music and to appropriate from it all that was worth continuing. Through Cavalli the influence of Monteverdi therefore passed into France.
It is not in melody alone that Cavalli’s works reflect the spirit of his time. The orchestral parts are carelessly treated. There are instrumental passages for which no special instruments are even designated. There is the same love of show and spectacle which was already evident in the works of England and the ballets of France and in the late Florentine opera. Elaborate scenes and complicated stage machines are constantly employed. There are pompous allegorical prologues and final ballets, and scenes of buffoonery mingled with the classic theme.
All this is far more striking in the works of a later famous composer of the Venetian school, Marc’ Antonio Cesti (1620-1669). Cesti’s most famous operas were La Dori (1663) and Il pomo d’oro (1667). The latter was written after Cesti had gone to Vienna for the marriage of Leopold I and Margareta of Spain. It was produced with the most extravagant splendor. The prologue was sung by characters representing Spain, Italy, Hungary, Bohemia, and even America. There were five acts and sixty-seven scenes. The voice parts are smooth and melodious, but the orchestra is carelessly handled. Giovanni Legrenzi (1625-1690) alone stands conspicuous among the Venetian composers for any attention to orchestral effects. Most of his operas were written between 1675 and 1684 while he was at the head of one of the Venetian conservatories and second choirmaster at St. Mark’s, and nearly all of them were produced in Venice. He seems to have presided over a sort of academy which met at his house. Among his pupils the most famous in the next generation were Lotti, Caldara, and Galuppi.
The list of composers who wrote for the opera houses in Venice is long. Their fertility was enormous. The public demanded novelty and only a few operas won a permanent place in its favor. The opera season was carnival time, during the weeks between Epiphany and Lent, though there were often short seasons in the fall and in the late spring. All operas must end happily, and the comic element was never absent. For the greater part of the century the Venetian opera was the favorite of all Europe. After 1670, however, opera began to flourish in Naples, and by the beginning of the next century the Neapolitan opera was supreme. Here in Naples the victory of the singers was complete. Composers were at their mercy and the public fawned upon them. Bearing in mind that the opera began with the attempts of a few brilliant young Florentines to restore the Greek drama, in which, so far as we know, recitative and chorus were the chief musical adjuncts, we cannot but be amazed to note the state to which it had come by the end of the century. The chorus had been abandoned except for massed effects at the end of the acts, recitative had been cut down as much as possible, and the aria was supreme. Even the arias were distorted or inflated with technical devices to show off the skill of the singers. Of dramatic feeling there was none and of genuine music scarcely a note that has survived the test of time. Practically all of the more than seven hundred operas written between 1607 and 1700 have sunk into oblivion. Many have even perished utterly. As Burney says, often enough the name of the composer of an opera was unmentioned. A century of endeavor might well be reckoned as futilely spent, but that it left a model of smooth recitative, of eminently suitable vocal style and the standard of the perfected aria.
But such an opera as this was what the public wanted, not only in Italy, but in Germany, France, and England as well. Except for the opera in Hamburg there was no attempt at a national opera in Germany during the century. For the most part composers, librettists, and singers were Italian. Heinrich Schütz has the fame of having written the first German opera. The music was burned in 1760. The text was the oft-set Dafne of Rinuccini, translated into German. Remembering that Schütz had received his education in Venice between 1609 and 1612, at a time when the new style was in the air, we may surmise that his music was in the Italian style of the first period of opera, full of dramatic feeling. Daphne was performed in 1627 at the castle of Hartenfels near Torgau in Saxony for the marriage of Princess Sophie of Saxony and George II of Hesse-Darmstadt. Opera was introduced in Munich in 1657 by Kaspar Kerll, writing to Italian texts. In Dresden opera was from the start (1662) Italian. There was no opera in Berlin before 1700.
The French received the Italians coldly at first, but their opera, or rather the ballet from which their opera developed, depended for effect largely upon display. In England the theatres were closed by the Puritans between 1642 and 1660, and there was no opera before Purcell’s ‘Dido and Æneas’ (1688-1690). But both before and after the commonwealth a form of dramatic entertainment called the ‘masque’ was in great favor and attracted the attention of a number of composers. The masque resembled the French ballet, which seems to have come from the same source; but it far excelled its French counterpart in literary workmanship and skill. Like the French ballet, however, it was wholly a private amusement. People of rank and fashion took part in it, usually disguised. It was generally based on a mythological story and was made up of dialogue, songs, and dancing, and was always extravagantly staged. Among the composers who set music to various masques throughout the century should be mentioned Thomas Campion (d. 1620), Nicholas Lanier (d. 1666), who is said to have introduced recitative into England; the brothers William and Henry Lawes, the latter of whom set Milton’s ‘Comus’ to music in 1634; Matthew Locke (d. 1677); and Pelham Humphrey (d. 1674). The masque can hardly be said to have developed into opera. The one very great composer England produced during the century, Henry Purcell, was influenced by it, but his one opera ‘Dido and Æneas’ is almost the only English opera, and immediately after his death Italian opera flooded London to the exclusion of any other that might have grown out of the masque.