The early history

Opera was imported into France from Italy well before 1650, but it long failed to take firm hold there with royal and other audiences, initially having to compete on unequal terms with the spoken drama (often with musical interludes) and the ballet, the favourite form of musical entertainment at court. Pomone (1671) by Robert Cambert, on a pastoral libretto by Pierre Perrin involving ballet, spectacle, and machinery, is commonly called the first French opera. Its premiere almost certainly inaugurated the Académie Royale de Musique (now the Paris Opéra) on March 3, 1671. Only the overture, the prologue, the first act, and part of the second act survive.

Jean-Baptiste Lully transformed opera into a French art under the royal patronage of Louis XIV, who was himself a fine dancer. A talented and shrewd composer, Lully synthesized the classical French tragedy of spoken theatre and the sumptuous court ballet into tragédie en musique, or tragédie lyrique, a form typically having a prologue and five acts. Though originally a Florentine, Lully played down the extended, formalized Italian aria in favour of shorter, more instantly captivating “airs.” He formed recitative after the declamatory manner of the Comédie-Française theatre company and also evolved the “French overture” (a stately slow introduction followed by a quick fugal section), as distinct from the “Italian overture” (a three-part structure, fast-slow-fast, developed by Scarlatti and others). His operas assigned great importance to dancing, choruses, instrumental interludes, and dazzlingly complex stage settings; often he combined all these elements into long divertissements, or entertainments extraneous to the dramatic action. From 1672, with Louis XIV’s support, Lully exercised a monopoly in the production of sung drama in France. This fact, along with the strengths of his literary collaborators—first the dramatist Molière in the comédie-ballet (a genre with a humorous tone that combines spoken or sung passages with ballet) and then the fine playwright Philippe Quinault, with whom he wrote 11 operas, including Alceste (1674) and Armide (1686)—contributed to Lully’s style becoming pervasive in France and remaining virtually unaltered by his successors until well after his death in 1687.

Lully’s most important successor and the leading composer of 18th-century French opera was Jean-Philippe Rameau, whose memorable works include the tragédie Hippolyte et Aricie (1733; libretto by Simon-Joseph de Pellegrin), the opera-ballet Les Indes galantes (1735; “The Courtly Indies”), the comedy Platée (1745), and, particularly, Castor et Pollux (1737; libretto by Pierre-Joseph-Justin Bernard), a tragédie that was performed at the Paris Opéra 254 times in 48 years. Rameau, like virtually every other French opera composer, set the language to music with such elegance and clarity that it can easily be understood when sung. Some of his operas have been successfully revived since the late 20th century.

Just as immediate acceptance of opera had been made difficult in France by the entrenched ballet and the preference for 17th-century drama of Racine and Corneille, so it was delayed in England by the court masque, an aristocratic 16th- and 17th-century entertainment derived largely from ballet. Most often dealing with allegorical and mythical subjects, the masque mixed poetic text, instrumental and vocal music, dancing, and acting. The most familiar masque is Comus (1634; text by John Milton and music by Henry Lawes). Further impediments to opera’s gaining a foothold in England were the impoverished state of the monarchy and the mid-century Civil Wars, which further drained the country’s economy. Another factor, perhaps, was the strong tradition of spoken theatre in England.

The two earliest English operas, both composed for private audiences, were Venus and Adonis (c. 1683) by John Blow and Dido and Aeneas (1689) by Henry Purcell. The latter, with a libretto by Nahum Tate, contains one of the earliest arias to remain in the repertoire: Dido’s Italianate lament,“When I Am Laid in Earth,” composed over a ground bass. By synthesizing Italian, French, and English elements, Purcell succeeded in creating one of the most enduring of English operas. However, the work had no successors, and England did not develop a native tradition of fully sung opera until the late 19th century.

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Western theatre: Opera

The arrival of German composer George Frideric Handel in London in 1710 after a brief apprenticeship in Italy decided the direction of opera in that city. With Rinaldo (1711), he and his opera company began 30 years of stubborn dedication to the traditions of Neapolitan opera seria. He created a dozen or more of the most inspired operas of the first half of the century, including Giulio Cesare (1724; “Julius Caesar”), Rodelinda (1725), Orlando (1733), and Alcina (1735). Handel transcended the formal conventions of opera seria with his melodic inspiration, harmonic ingenuity, and dramatic aptitude as a composer and his independent nature as an impresario. His operatic reign was challenged at its height by a faction that set up the Neapolitan composer Nicola Porpora in a rival opera company. The premier opera composer of his age, Handel assembled in his company some of the greatest (and highest-priced) divas of the time, including the sopranos Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni and the male castrato-soprano Senesino. Tastes were changing, however, and Handel’s London audiences eventually turned away from Italian opera, causing financial difficulties for the composer and leading him to concentrate on the creation of a monumental series of oratorios; set to biblical texts in English, these works for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra appealed to the middle-class Protestant sensibilities of his public. Handel’s operas all but vanished from the repertoire in the 19th century, but they were increasingly revived after the 1920s and had become a staple of opera companies by the end of the 20th century.

An event that contributed to the defeat of Handel as an opera impresario was the London production in 1728 of The Beggar’s Opera (arranged by John Christopher Pepusch, with a libretto by John Gay). That work, complete with bawdy characters and popular English ballads, satirized highbrow opera and became phenomenally popular, spawning a family of imitations that ultimately accustomed audiences in London and elsewhere in the British Isles to hearing a staged play sung in the vernacular.

Early opera in Germany and Austria

Although Heinrich Schütz composed a setting of Dafne (now lost), the first known opera with a German text, and heard it played at Torgau in 1627, the active history of opera in Germany began with the Italian composers residing there. A remarkable Venetian composer-diplomatist-ecclesiastic, the Abbé Agostino Steffani, carried much of his native city’s early operatic manner to Munich, Hanover, and other German centres. He began his operatic production in Munich with Marco Aurelio (1681), and thereafter he continued to compose operas for 28 years. In his use of both Italian and French procedures, particularly in handling overture and recitative, Steffani evolved a sort of international Italian style that was adopted by other “transplanted” composers. For the next 100 years, the influence of Italian opera was so pervasive that even native German composers adopted the Italian operatic style and used texts in Italian.

The German word Singspiel was originally used for all sorts of opera. The earliest known entertainments so designated were composed by a pupil of Heinrich Schütz, Johann Theile. One of them, Adam und Eva, inaugurated Germany’s first public opera house, in Hamburg, in 1678. During the mid-18th century the term singspiel came to be reserved for what the English called ballad opera and what the French called opéra comique: light, usually comic operas that incorporated spoken dialogue. The comic singspiel of the 18th century was born in London with The Devil to Pay (1731) and its sequel, The Merry Cobbler (1735), both English ballad operas with texts by Charles Coffey. These had pasticcio (“assembled” from preexisting works) scores capitalizing, not very successfully, on the great popularity of The Beggar’s Opera (1728), the score of which was similarly assembled by John Christopher Pepusch. In German translation, the Coffey texts attracted the attention of German composers, most notably Johann Adam Hiller, who also composed several other singspiels and brought to fruition a style that came to be known as the Leipzig school. Both Berlin and Vienna inevitably took up the singspiel, and the genre held the interest of major composers well into the 19th century.

The most important opere serie composed in Germany during the early 18th century were created for the Hamburg Opera, where Reinhard Keiser held sway and influenced the young George Frideric Handel, who worked there for a brief interval before going to Italy and London. Keiser composed more than 60 operas, mostly to German texts, of which only 19 survive. He was highly regarded by both his peers and his public, who were attracted by his uncomplicated lyrical arias, many with colourful and varied instrumentation. Keiser also introduced into his German operas arias with Italian texts, sometimes by other composers, and even incorporated comic characters. He was particularly adept at depicting nature and at portraying suffering heroines, as in Iphigenia (1699), which is now lost, and Ariadne (1722).

German by birth but almost wholly Italianate by disposition, Johann Adolph Hasse spent most of his career working for the Saxon court at Dresden, although he became one of the most successful and popular composers in Europe around the middle of the 18th century. He promoted the traditions of opera seria in some 80 operas, mostly set to librettos by Metastasio. The Italian contours of his best melodies, supported by harmonic adventurousness and imaginative instrumentation, did almost as much as Handel’s operas to prolong the glory of the Italian tradition.

France, 1752–1815

In the early 1750s, political changes and intense intellectual discussion led to a polemic “war”—the guerre (or querelle) des bouffons (“war [quarrel] of the buffoons”). This was mainly a literary confrontation between the solemn past of opera seria and tragédie lyrique on the one hand and the farce and sentiment of opera buffa on the other. Essentially a rivalry between Italian and French opera, the battle was fought mainly in nationalistic terms. In 1752 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the leaders of the Italian faction, staged in Fontainebleau, France, his one-act comic opera Le Devin du village (“The Village Soothsayer”), a setting of his own libretto. In the score he brought together, in the pasticcio manner, melodies from the very popular romances (love poems, sung in verse to light instrumental accompaniment) and vaudevilles (short satirical songs) being heard at the Paris fairs. Because the work was very French in manner and sentiment but very Italian in that it was through-composed (continuously set to music) and employed recitative, it pleased partisans on both sides of the operatic war and eventually gave impetus to a new type of opéra comique, which incorporated Rousseau’s theme of rural simplicity while at the same time making use of spoken dialogue.

Several French composers followed in Rousseau’s footsteps. One of the most interesting was François-André Danican, called Philidor, also a famous chess player, who wrote about 20 opéras comiques. More sentimental—in fact, tending toward the tenderly tearful—was Pierre Alexandre Monsigny. Probably the finest of the 18th-century composers of opéra comique was a Belgian, André Grétry, who expertly balanced the French and Italian styles. He was an original and extremely productive composer over a 30-year period spanning the French Revolution (1787–99).

The leading composer of opéras comiques in Paris during the period of the Revolution and empire was Étienne-Nicolas Méhul, whose innovative works ranged in style and subject from lighthearted and comic (Une folie [1802; “An Act of Folly”]) to chivalrous and sentimental (Ariodant [1799]) to serious and even biblical (Joseph [1807]). Also a composer of symphonies, Méhul developed new and flexible forms in his operas, increased the role of the orchestra, and achieved powerful dramatic effects through an enlarged harmonic vocabulary. He was an important influence on the opera composers of the Romantic period (corresponding roughly to the 19th century).