Opera in the 17th and 18th centuries: the evolution of national styles.

Miguel Campinho

Entertainments of the Italian courts of the late 16th and early 17th centuries
entailed a variety of ‘theatrical’ events: stage plays, accompanied intermedii (musical
interludes to spoken plays); dance or pantomime; staged military actions on mythological
or chivalric themes; masquerades and other genres focused on dance. Lois Rosow writes
that “a courtly entertainment celebrating a politically significant occasion belonged to a
larger whole: a festival comprising a series of events. With the Medici in Florence as
their model, the ruling families of Mantua, Modena and Ferrara, Parma, and Savoy strove
to impress their guests with festivals of enormous magnificence and complexity.”1
The stile rappresentativo of Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini was introduced in one
such festival in Florence, the wedding celebrations of Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici
of Tuscany to the Princess Christine of Lorraine, in May 1589, as part of the intermedii
for the comedy La pellegrina by Girolamo Bargagli. On October 1600, the favola in
musica titled L’Euridice (poetry by Ottavio Rinuccini, music by Peri with interpolations
by Caccini, sponsored by Jacopo Corsi) was presented during the celebrations of the
wedding of Maria de’ Medici and King Henri IV of France. L’Euridice is divided in five
episodes, separated by chorus and strophic verse. A prologue in strophic poetry serves as
introduction. Each episode is dominated by an expansive monologue, and the chorus
alternatively participates in the action, or offers commentary on said action at the end of
the episode (“Greek chorus”). The final scene concludes with a ballo (dance). The stile
rappresentativo can be defined as a musical version of dramatic declamation: basses
move very slowly, with harmonic changes limited to major stressed syllables, selected to
mimic the natural cadences of speech. Instruments placed backstage provided a basso
continuo accompaniment: a harpsichord, a large lira (bowed instrument), a large lute and
a chitarrone.2
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) presented his Orfeo of 1607 at the court of
Mantua (where he was employed) during Carnival, performed not for the court but for an
academy (the Accademia degli Invaghiti, “Academy of those captivated [by the arts]”),
with the support of Prince Francesco Gonzaga, the reigning Duke Vincenzo’s heir. The
poetry was by Allessandro Striggio, court secretary and member of the Academy; the
libretto was printed and made available to the audience. No women took part in the
production, and a castrato was loaned from the Medici court to sing the female roles.
Again, the libretto is divided into five ‘acts’ (more like episodes or scenes, to be
performed without break); the chorus participates in the action, but also comments at the
end of episodes. The plot breaks from the original myth to provide a lieto fine, or “happy
ending”, brought about through a deus ex machina. “The building blocks [of Orfeo] are
drawn from the standard musical fare of late Renaissance Italy, along with such forward-
looking elements as vocal virtuosity, duet textures for two treble voices or instruments
with bass, ritornello structures and recitative. There are strophic songs (representing
actual songs sung by the characters in the drama), both in traditional verse forms and in

1
in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, Carter, Tim and Butt, John, eds. (New York,
Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 214.
2
Cf. Lois Rosow in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, Carter, Tim and Butt, John,
eds. (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 209.
the light canzonetta poetry that had recently become popular; five-part madrigals sung by
the chorus; a balletto in a succession of mettres (sung as well as danced); and sinfonias,
ritornellos and accompaniments provided by a large and colorful array of instruments.
Complementing these elements are introductory and linking statements in recitative,
expressive recitative monologues that reflect Monteverdi’s longstanding techniques as a
composer of madrigals, and occasional moments of passionate recitative dialogue.”3
The ‘large and colorful array of instruments’ comprised a fundamento or continuo
(two harpsichords, two flute organs, one reed organ or regal), plucked instruments (three
chitarroni, two mandolinlike citterns, and two harps) and three bass viols. There was also
a string ensemble, mainly for ritornellos, comprised by twelve ripieni and two soloists, all
playing “French violins” (small dancing-master “pocket fiddles” or pochettes). Finally, a
brass ensemble (some of which reserved for the infernal scenes): two whistle flutes or
recorders, two cornetti, three trombe sordini (“mute trumpets”), five trombones, and a
clarino trumpet.4
Both Peri’s and Monteverdi’s achievements with the Orpheus myth were
important in that they established models for emulation (very much as Monteverdi’s was
modeled on Peri’s), but although novel, it was too much of a mix of different ingredients
to take hold as a genre. But the template was set: mythological dramatic plot (with a lieto
fine), classical act/episode design, recitative, song, chorus and dance. These elements
derived directly from the mélange of court entertainments of the time. The great shift, and
the birth of “opera” as a genre, occurs with the opening of the first public opera theater,
the Teatro S. Cassiano, again for Carnival, this time in the Venice of 1637. Venice was a
“republic” (nowadays we would call it an oligarchy), and the theaters now had patrons
(who subsidized the productions through “rental” of boxes, for life), as well as a ticket-
buying audience. The first production at S. Cassiano was Andromeda, text by Benedetto
Ferrari and music by Francesco Manelli. As an enterprise outside of court patronage,
expediency and economy were the rule in mounting these productions: roles were
doubled, machinery was reduced, instrumental ensemble was (drastically, compared to
Monteverdi’s Orfeo) reduced. Its success sprawled a multitude of new theaters, so that by
1700 more than 400 productions had been given, of which seven would be functioning at
the same time by the end of the century.5 This flux of public entertainment supposes a
flux of public. Venice during Carnival was “the pleasure-garden of Europe”, according to
Tim Carter, “an essential stopping-point on the ‘grand tour’ and a common winter resort
for Italian and northern princes or prelates who, traveling incognito, could enjoy the
licence of Carnival in apparent anonymity. […] Sex came high on the agenda, and for all
the noble claims of seventeenth-century Venetians and modern scholars, the opera
consumed in Venice presented the perfect combination of wine, women and song.”6
In fact, women could be seen singing on stage with relative freedom (forbidden in
the Papal States). Subject-matter ranged from myth to epic (Homer, Virgil, Ariosto,
Tasso) to Ancient History. From the 1650s, librettos start to add intrigue and comedy

3
Ibid., pp. 211-2.
4
Taruskin, Richard, Oxford history of western music. 2, Seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (New York,
Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 18.
5
Walker, Thomas, in History of Opera, Sadie, Stanley ed. (New York, Norton, 1990), p. 21.
6
in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, Carter, Tim and Butt, John, eds. (New York,
Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 251.
(tension and release) in detriment of the classical structure of Euricide and Orfeo. Some
elements become conventional, such as a “lament”, a “sleep scene”, an “invocation”.
Musically, there are more arias, arioso becomes less prominent, and recitative style less
melodically coherent. The instrumental bodies also became streamlined: a foundation
group (harpsichords, theorbos, lutes) and a four- or five-part string group (usually solos).
They played sinfonias, ritornellos and accompanied some of the arias, but continuo-
accompanied arias were in the majority. There is a considerable increase in passage-work
writing for the solo voices, along with an effort to present famous singers from all over
Italy. 7 This efficiency-driven process, which went along with a commercial care for the
public tastes, allowed for works to be more portable than they ever had been, and
travelling troupes began mounting operas in other cities, and impresarios started opening
new theaters.
Court opera, by contrast, became the standard in Louis XIV Paris. Part of the
success of the new genre in the Italian peninsula had to do with the fact that the Italians
didn’t have a strong tradition of spoken plays, as well as the fact that, being independent
city-states, each competed with the others in everything, court and public entertainments
included. France had by the middle of the 17th century a great tradition of playwrights:
Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, Jean-Baptiste Molière. Also, France was an absolutist
monarchy. And finally, there was a considerable tradition in court ballets. Opera would
have to adapt. It was through a ballet that Giovanni Battista Lulli (1632-87) first
appeared in court, in 1653. He was admitted to court as a composer, and in 1661 he was
appointed superintendant of the Musique de la chambre and was granted French
nationality by the king. Jean-Baptiste Lully collaborated with Molière in several
comedies-ballets, plays ranging from pastoral to burlesque, with extended passages of
song and dance.8 The king himself would dance in these plays, but since he retired from
doing so (in 1670), so did Lully of writing them.
In 1672 the king grants Lully a monopoly of opera in French, and from this point
on Lully initiated a fruitful collaboration with the poet Phillippe Quinault (1635-88). In
1673 Lully and Quinault presented their first tragédie en musique, Cadmus et Hermione.
Again, a pattern is set with the choice of source-material for the libretto: ancient myth
and chivalric romance. “Laden with supernatural spectacle, they mingle heroic
tragicomedy, pastoral and ballet. For dialogues and monologues, Lully invented a
melodious sort of recitative over an active bass line. […] The musical style as a whole is
short-breathed and characterized by the artful arrangement of linked and nested segments,
much like the organization of plantings in a French garden. Miniature airs (each
crystallizing a thought or emotion), cadential refrains for solo singers, brief ensembles
and occasional instrumental ritornellos mingle with passages of recitative to create large-
scale, patterned scene structures. The scenes within a given act, in turn, are elided;
modulatory gestures in the continuo mark the entrance and exit of characters. Finally, at
the highest organizational level, the five acts - performed without pause and marked by
spectacular changes of scenery during the entr’actes - form a symmetrical structure, with
keys and dramatic settings often pivoting around a weighty action in Act III.”9 An
important addition: in each act there is a divertissement, with use of dance-types

7
Cf. Walker, Thomas, op. cit., pp. 22-3.
8
Cf. Rosow, Lois, op. cit., pp. 231-2.
9
Rosow, Lois, op. cit., pp. 232-3.
(sarabande, gavotte, passacaille, etc, highly influential in the European instrumental
music of the turn of the century), pantomime, chorus and solos. We also find sommeils
(“sleep scenes”), by now a stock-and-trade convention. Lully is responsible for an
innovation that lasted well into the 19th century, the “French Ouverture”, a combination
of a slow section in dotted rhythm with a fast, imitative one. This became the standard
overture for almost a century. His tragédies lyriques always featured an allegorical
Prologue, flanked by overtures.
Here are the most telling differences between the Venetian public tradition of
opera and the French Lully canon: in the tragédies lyriques the subject-matter was always
a dramatic one, not a comedy; “French” Ouverture; mandatory prologue; division in five
acts; fewer and shorter arias, focusing instead on ensembles; no comic characters; more
interventions of the chorus; and a preponderance of ballets within each act. These were
the foundations of the French operatic tradition, which in turn would influence Italian
opera seria of the 18th century.
England, like France, had a strong raditiont of spoken plays. Ben Jonson,
Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare were both tradition and core repertoire,
which accounted for the difficulties of opera gaining ground as a stage genre (much like
in France). Also, the main musical staged events in the beginning of the 17th century in
England were masques, “which lay somewhere between a costume ball and the prologue
to an early Italian or (especially) French court opera.”10
During the republican Commonwealth (1649-60), theater performances (tragedies
and comedies) were banned, and a genre called heroic plays came into being: myth/epic
subject-matter, written in (English) verse and sung in recitative. The Restoration
playwright John Dryden saw the music as stemming from the Italian, and the dramatic
characters from Pierre Corneille and other French poets.11 We now see those as the first
English operas, the precursors to Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.
The Restoration king, Charles II, had been exiled in France, and exposed to
comedies-ballets at the court of Louis XIV. His reign marked the rise into prominence of
a particularly English genre, a dramatick opera, called today a “semi-opera”. According
to Taruskin, “semi-operas, in effect, were comedies-ballets or tragédies lyriques adapted
to the tastes, and above all the longstanding prejudices, of the English theatergoing
public. To the decorative songs and dances and instrumental tunes of the masque […]
was added the spectacular stage machinery for which the French court opera was
particularly renowned. The major compromise was the insistence that major characters
never sing, following the old pre-Lullian prejudice […] that sung words are poorly
understood, and that therefore a sung drama could not really be a drama but only a
concert in costume. The result was a peculiar split between protagonists who never sang
and incidental characters who only sang, making the new genre quite literally a semi-
sung play.”12
Henry Purcell (1659-95) wrote several semi-operas, but the one fully-sung opera
that he wrote, Dido and Aeneas (1689) is the one cited as reference to an English operatic
style in the 17th century. In Purcell’s time it was an oddity, in the way Monteverdi’s
Orfeo had been at the beginning of the century. Both are considered for what they

10
Taruskin, Richard, op. cit., p. 113.
11
Quoted in Weiss, Piero, op. cit., p. 60.
12
Taruskin, Richard, op. cit., p. 127.
prefigure of what the genre eventually became. In Purcell’s case, the novelty is the
adaptation of recitative and aria singing to English prosody, along with some melismatic
writing reminiscent of madrigals. The most obvious is the characteristic short-long
rhythm (“Lombard”), in settings of lines like “did he” or “so much”. Purcell’s Dido also
offers the first instance of an outsider combining different traits of the Italian and French
traditions: the story (from Virgil) comes from myth, the scene structure (recitative-aria-
chorus-dance) follows the French model (as does the instrumental style, with a “French”
Ouverture), the solo singing style is markedly Italian; the choral style is akin to English
madrigals. One of the emblematic moments of this opera, Dido’s death aria “When I am
laid”, is a Venetian lamento (“lament”), and a testimony to an international set of
conventions for the operatic genre.
The Venetian opera scene of the end of the 17th century is described in Giovanni
Maria Crescimbeni’s La belleza della vulgar poesia (1700) in this manner: “with it
[Giacinto Andrea Cicognini’s libretto for Francesco Cavalli’s Giasone, from 1649] he
brought the end of acting, and consequently, of true and good comedy as well as tragedy.
Since to stimulate to a greater degree with novelty the jaded taste of the spectators,
equally nauseated by the vileness of comic things and the seriousness of tragic ones…
[he] united them, mixing kings and heroes and other illustrious personages with buffoons
and servants and the lowest men with unheard of monstrousness. This concoction of
characters was the reason for the complete ruin of the rules of poetry, which went so far
into disuse that not even locution was considered, which, forced to serve music, lost its
purity, and became filled with idiocies. The careful deployment of figures that ennobles
oratory was neglected, and language was restricted to terms of common speech, which is
more appropriate for music; and finally the series of those short metres, commonly called
arietta, which with a generous hand are sprinkled over the scenes, and the overwhelming
impropriety of having characters speak in song completely removed from the
compositions the power of the affections, and the means of moving them in the
listeners.”13 The mixing of comic and tragic elements for the sake of the paying public,
and the debasement of the language to fit the pacing of the music, was viewed
simultaneously as a decline from the high traditions of the dramma per musica, and also
as having a pernicious effect of society. In turn, knowledge of the tragédies lyriques
marked a turn towards drama. But the most significant composer of the period,
Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725) worked not in Venice, but in Naples.
The kingdom of Naples was in the 17th under the rule of the Spanish king, and
governed by a viceroy. Iñigo Vélez de Guevara, Count of Oñate, was the viceroy to
Naples 1648-53. During his tenure he imported a professional opera troupe from Venice,
and the first opera theatre, the Teatro di San Bartolomeo, opened in1654. Scarlatti wrote,
by his own account, 114 operas, a staggering number. According to Taruskin, he was
under contract in Naples (as maestro di cappella to the viceroy) to compose, rehearse and
perform an average of four operas a year; provide music for the viceroy’s chapel
(including a yearly Lenten oratorio and one or two Te Deum for occasions of state); and
he worked on commission, providing untold cantatas and miniature operas (serenatas) for

13
Quoted in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, Carter, Tim and Butt, John, eds. (New
York, Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 270.
various nobles. 14 Although this was not the only reason, it was certainly an important one
for Scarlatti in the standardizing process he brought to operatic composition.
The formulaic writing observed in much of Scarlatti’s output was testimony to the
consolidation of conventions marking the first hundred years of the genre: the pair
recitative-aria, already written as such by the librettists; the recitative is commonly secco
(accompanied by continuo only) and the main aria form is the da capo aria (an evolution
from strophic song, containing two contrasting sections, the first one being repeated after
the second one); accompanied recitative (or arioso) was reserved for moments of
heightened drama, when the voice would be accompanied by strings also; a sinfonia (or
overture, but with a new template, fanfare - slow episode - dance); few ensembles (except
duets); minimal dance and chorus.
The turn-of-century Italian opera was the opera of the castrati, who most often
would sing the hero roles. They would also sing the feminine roles in places where
women were not permitted on the stage. The biggest evidence of the relevance of the
castrati in this time can be obtained by the dazzling virtuosic solo writing that some arias
of the period exhibit. Also, the da capo aria provided, on the return of the first section,
ample opportunity for embellishment, and thus became the ideal vehicle for the virtuoso
castrato. Quoting Richard Taruskin, “the art of such a singer only began with the written
notes. Many theatrical virtuosi did not read music well, if at all, and learned their arias by
rote as a basis for personalized embellishment. Recitatives were often improvised
outright, based on the harmonies the singers could overhear from the pit, and the words
they overheard from the prompter’s box. In a more literal sense than we would ever guess
today, only the libretti (or more narrowly yet, only the words of the recitatives) were fully
fixed and ‘literate’ in opera seria.”15 Concurrently, Tim Carter points out that “to see
these operas not so much as individual works [but] as instantiations of such traditions
may in fact be a useful way of negotiating their position, and also their achievement,
within a repertory not strongly determined by an authoritative work-concept.”16
This streamlining of the music (and the need for malleability) was complemented
in the beginning of the 18th century by the streamlining of libretti. Its pinnacle was the
work of Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782), who wrote between 1720 and 1771 around 60
libretti, of which about 27 belong to dramma per musica (or opera seria, as this genre is
known nowadays). His texts were set more than 800 times by more than 300 composers.
Educated in the Arcadian Academy, he was “imbued with the classical ideals of clarity,
dignity and purity of style and with an essentially optimistic and conservative view of the
hierarchic social order.”17 Thus his schematic plots, in three acts, normally would include
six main roles, deployed as two pairs and a “remainder”. The first pair was of noble cast,
and was comprised by the primo uomo and the prima donna, the star singers of the
production, and who would sing the most arias (as many as 6 each - and only they could
sing a duet); the second pair, also noble, would sing 3 or 4 arias each; and the remainder
consisted in confidants, servants, villains, whatever the needs of the plot.18 The arias were
14
Cf. Taruskin, Richard, op. cit., p.142.
15
Taruskin, Richard, op. cit., p. 174.
16
in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, Carter, Tim and Butt, John, eds. (New York,
Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 270.
17
Heartz, Daniel; Troy, Charles; Robinson, Michael, in History of Opera, Sadie, Stanley ed. (New York,
Norton, 1990), p. 71.
18
Cf. Taruskin, Richard, op. cit., p. 153.
topical: arie di bravura, aria d’affetto or cantabile, were all anticipated by the librettist
on choosing the subject-matter of the text, since these aria types had become
conventional. The source for the libretti shifted from myth to epic and chivalric poetry
(the “history” of old), but at times little more than the names of the heroes or heroines
came from said “history”, for they invariably become involved in intrigues, of which
result moral dilemmas, of which they emerged triumphant and purified (with few
exceptions), through the deliverance of a deus ex machina figure, conspicuously the ruler
in the play.
Italian opera seria was exactly what Georg Friedrich Händel (1685-1759) brought
to London, effectively dominating the operatic scene of the city for the first half of the
century (the later part with the “English Oratorio”, but still operatic in nature, and written
for the theater). George Frideric Handel (the anglicized version) was already the music
director of the court of Hanover when his employer, in 1714, was elected King George I
of England. The king did not spend much time in England, and his music director was
largely free of official duties, so he gained the right to act as a free agent and re-fashioned
himself as an independent operatic entrepreneur in London.
Handel’s opere serie present an apparent paradox, that of a German composer
writing Italian music in England. It was the first time in the history of opera that a
composer in a foreign idiom, writing in a foreign land, achieved this high a recognition.
Handel’s style was, predictably, a mix of several influences, both old and new. In the
instrumental parts, he chose a “French” Overture in detriment of a Sinfonia; in the solo
parts, he eschewed longer recitative in favor of more complex arias. The great novelty of
Handel’s style was created by what was at the beginning a contrivance: the fact that the
audience was being treated to a drama in a foreign language. Fully acknowledging the
handicap, Handel set out to provide music of dramatic power as to hold even a listener
completely out of step with the text. In this, he greatly refined the orchestral writing
above his seria contemporaries. His aria writing also displays this approach, and most of
his arias resemble more easily Arcangelo Corelli’s violin concerti than the standard
Italian aria. Thematic material is worked into instrumental ritornellos, and the tonal plan
is dramatized. Taruskin writes that “Handel’s work is indeed more craftsmanly and
structurally complex than that of his actual Italian contemporaries, who were much
concerned with streamlining and simplifying those very aspects of motivic structure and
harmony that Handel continued to revel in. His work, in short, was at once denser (and, to
an audience foreign to the language of the play, perhaps more interesting) and
stylistically more conservative. In his far more active counterpoint […] he affirms his
German organist’s heritage after all, for all his Italian sojourning and acclimatizing. And
by making his music more interesting in its own right than hat t of his Italian
contemporaries, he gave performers correspondingly less room to maneuver and
dominate the show.”19 It is telling to observe that Handel’s Italian operas, for all its
musical and dramatic achievements, remained a London curiosity, whereas the Italian
seria products spread throughout Europe.
In France, Handel’s contemporary Jean-Phillipe Rameau (1683-1764), already
famous with his Traité de l’harmonie (1722) and his Pièces de clavecin (of 1724 and
1729/30), astonished in 1733 the Parisian opera public with his Hippolyte et Aricie,
modeled on the Lullian tradition (mythological drama, prologue and five acts, expressive
19
Taruskin, Richard, op. cit., p. 311.
accompanied recitatives or arioso, chorus and ballet). However, what made it (and
Rameau’s style) novel was the harmonic intensity (some heard “complexity”). Graham
Sadler writes that “to his contemporaries, Rameau’s operas at first seemed revolutionary.
With hindsight, however, they appear securely rooted in French operatic tradition both in
their subject matter and overall dramatic structure and in many musical details. Rameau’s
achievement was to rejuvenate that tradition by bringing to it an astonishingly fertile
musical imagination, a harmonic idiom richer and more varied than that any French
predecessor, and a boldness of expression that can still seem almost overpowering.”20
Indeed, his colleague André Campra said of Hippolyte that it contained enough music for
ten operas, and this same work has the dubious distinction of being the first musical work
to which the adjective “baroque” was attached. Both comments make explicit the shock
of Rameau’s intricate musical style in his contemporaries.
Everywhere else in Europe, Metastasian opera seria was dominating the stages.
In excising all comic scenes and characters, the seria librettists took out some of the
audience’s favorite moments, especially in Venetian opera. In order to cater to everyone’s
tastes, a compromise was reached, and opere serie began to be presented with comic two-
act works during intermissions - intermezzi. These were the beginnings of comic opera,
or opera buffa.
The earliest surviving libretto of an intermezzo dates from 1706, and in the 1730s
said intermezzi were performed as standalone performances. Traveling Italian troupes
took them to various European capitals, with great success. “Everything about it is
impoverished. The texture is reduced to unisons. The vocal line is reduced to asthmatic
gasping and panting with insistently repeated cadences that prevent phrases from
achieving any length at all. The structure is reduced to a patchwork or mosaic of these
little sniffles, snorts, and wheezes. It might be thought a mere parody, and so the music of
the early intermezzos is often described. And yet it came, particularly to foreign
audiences, as a revelation.”21
The most famous intermezzo in opera history is La serva padrona, written by
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-36), who despite his short life managed to write 10
works for the stage, of which four were opere serie, and two to texts by Metastasio. La
serva padrona was written as an intermezzo for Pergolesi’s own seria, Il prigioniero
superbo, at the Teatro San Bartolomeo in Naples, in 1733. The opera seria was forgotten,
but the intermezzo was posthumously picked up, and by the end of the 1740s had already
been staged in as disparate places as St. Petersburg and Madrid. The name of the heroine
(Serpina) comes from serpe (snake), identifying the character with a stock figure
ultimately derived from commedia dell’arte, the “sharp-tongued” woman. “Contrast as
irony - the very essence of comedy - replaces the “unity of affect” in which the opera
seria had found its version of truth. Here we see the psychological, dramatic, and
representational roots of the contrast-and-balance technique that became the universal
stylistic medium of art music by century’s end.”22 La serva padrona was performed in
Paris in 1752 by a troupe of buffi led by impresario Eustachio Bambini, and became a
potent argument in the Querelle des Bouffons (“War of the Buffoons”) that ensued in the
Parisian press, with clear political and social subtexts.

20
in The Penguin Concise Guide to Opera, Holden, Amanda ed. (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 346.
21
Richard Taruskin, commenting Bajocco’s aria from Orlandini’s Il giocatore, from 1715. op. cit., p. 435.
22
Taruskin, Richard, op. cit., p. 439.
 The opera seria destined to “reform” Metastasian opera seria was written by the
Austrian (Bohemian) Christoph Willibald Gluck, to a libretto by the Italian Ranieri
Calzabigi, and presented in Vienna in 1762. The opera was Orfeo ed Euridice, and the
aim of reform was a return to the preponderance of the dramatic enunciation, over the
artifice and virtuosity of Metastasian opera. Gluck sought to replace these artifices “by
returning to the most ancient, uncorrupted ways, as then understood. His was a self-
consciously “neoclassical” art, stripped down and, compared with the seria virtually
denuded.”23 Orfeo shows many influences, and in a way presents a kind of synthesis of
the many European traditions: of opera seria itself, in the language, the choice of an alto
castrato for the title role, the mythological plot, the high ethical tone of the tale; of
French tragédie lyrique, with the use of chorus and dance, and also by relinquishing
secco recitative, as every recitative in the opera is accompanied by orchestral strings
(recitativo accompagnato, or stromentato). Orpheus’s last aria (a “lament”), ‘Che farò
senza Euridice’, shows once more the French leanings of its creators: it is not a da capo
aria, but a rondeau with a refrain.
Gluck went to Paris in 1773, at the invitation of his former singing pupil in
Vienna, Princess Marie-Antoinette. In 1774 he presented in Paris his first tragédie opéra,
or drame heroïque, none other than Orphée et Eurydice. In this new version, the title role
was recast so that a haute-contre (a French high tenor) could sing the role. This amounted
to a “French readaptation of what had already been a Gallicized version of opera seria.”24
It amounted to the culmination of an aesthetic conversion, shedding the last visible
outside traits (Italian and castrato) of its seria origins.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91) was the consummate genius of the operatic
stage, and indeed of his contemporary musical life. It is fitting that his operatic
masterpieces touch all of the main trends of the century, making his works in effect a
summation. Idomeneo, from 1781, is an opera seria without any apologies for the genre.
In fact, Mozart had the opportunity to work with the Mannheim orchestra for this
production, and that resulted in some of his most exquisite solo orchestral writing in
opera. In Italian, to a venerable libretto that originated in French for André Campra in
1712, it has a castrato role (Idamante), and also the French style chorus and ballet. Le
nozze di Figaro, from 1786, the first collaboration with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, is an
opera buffa with nobles and servants, with highly differentiated characters (by his own
admission, he wanted two, possibly three, female roles: one seria, one mezzo carattere,
and the last one could be entirely buffa, together wih all the male roles; it also includes a
travesti role, a buffa convention). The libretto is an adaptation of Pierre-Augustin Caron
de Beaumarchais’s La folle journée, ou le marriage de Figaro, already famous as a play.
Don Giovanni (from 1787) and Cosí fan tutte (from 1790) are both called dramma
giocoso, and both once more have the prescribed female characters of seria, mezzo
carattere and buffa. Cosí also boasts what can be seen as the ultimate stylistic joke, the
Metastasian plot scheme turned on its head: two couples, an “old philosopher” and a
maid, in which the two “remainders” help the two couples exchange betrotheds.
Mozart’s last two operas were composed at the same time, and premiered within a
month of each other, in September 1791. La clemenza di Tito is an opera seria, to a
libretto by Caterino Tommaso Mazzolà, itself a reworking of an earlier one by Metastasio

23
Taruskin, Richard, op. cit., p. 452.
24
Taruskin, Richard, op. cit., p. 459.
(from 1734). It was written for performance at coronation celebrations in Prague.
Taruskin writes that “it is claimed that Mozart accepted the commission with reluctance;
but while his letters complain of some fatigue […], there is no evidence that he felt the
century-old genre of opera seria to be an unwelcome constraint. In any case, his setting
of La Clemenza was fated to b the last masterpiece of that venerable genre, which barely
survived the eighteenth century.”25
Die Zauberflöte (“The Magic Flute”) is a singspiel, and was designed for the
Freihaustheater auf der Wieden, in Vienna, run by Mozart’s friend and librettist Emanuel
Schikaneder, who also played Papageno. Interspersed with spoken dialogue, Mozart
presents a veritable kaleidoscope of styles. Sarastro and the Queen are seria characters,
Monostatos, Papageno and Papagena are buffa stock types. Tamino and Pamina are
mezzo carattere, lyrical. The Three Ladies and the Three Boys introduce a type of “Greek
chorus”. The music is also remarkably varied: the overture is “French”, and it contains a
fugue (German); Papageno’s “arias” are in folksong style; the Queen’s aria ‘Der Hölle
Rache kocht in meinem Herzen’ is a “rage” aria; Pamina’s aria ‘Ach, ich fühl’s’ is a
“lament”; Tamino’s final trial is presented by a chorale prelude (in the style of J. S.
Bach).
Peter Branscombe and Stanley Sadie write that “Mozart was not a deliberate
reformer of opera. He instituted no real changes in the theatrical forms of his day, and the
influence on him of Gluck and other reformers of the third quarter of the century was
modest. As his correspondence shows, however, he had a high degree of sophistication
and percipience about his fellow human beings. This human insight, combined with his
readiness to apply current symphonic techniques to operatic composition, enabled him to
bring to the operatic stage a new depth of characterization and urbanity of manner.”26

25
Taruskin, Richard, op. cit., p. 485.
26
History of Opera, Sadie, Stanley ed. (New York, Norton, 1990), p. 104.