Grand opera and beyond

Romanticism—part philosophical, part literary, and part aesthetic—made its first appearances in opera in three works composed between 1821 and 1826 by Carl Maria von Weber. Beginning with his masterpiece, Der Freischütz (1821; “The Magic Marksman,” libretto by Friedrich Kind), Weber successfully challenged the outdated hegemony of Gaspare Spontini in Berlin. Der Freischütz illustrates the German Romantic writers’ love for dark forests, the echoes of hunters’ horns, the threatening presence of supernatural forces, and the frustrations of pure young love. Its popularity in Germany and elsewhere was enormous. Weber’s other operas—Euryanthe (1823) and Oberon, or The Elf King’s Oath, (1826)—did not meet with such success, in part because of the fantastic nature of their librettos and in part because Romantic critics looked down on singspiel. (Oberon exhibits the distinctive feature of singspiel: spoken dialogue interspersed with singing.) The overtures to all three of these operas, however, remained in the symphonic repertoire.

The other German-language composers of opera active during this period were less important. Heinrich August Marschner displayed talent as orchestrator and melodist, and he applied his gifts to intensely Romantic and equally Germanic librettos. The finest of his now-unheard operas is Hans Heiling (1833; libretto by Eduard Devrient). Albert Lortzing moved in the direction of operetta in his popular sentimental comedies, set to his own librettos, such as Zar und Zimmermann (1837; “Tsar and Carpenter”) and Der Waffenschmied (1846; “The Armourer”). The same direction was taken by Friedrich, Freiherr von Flotow, whose operetta-like Martha (1847) has remained in the repertoire. This trend toward operetta as a less-intense variety of Romanticism continued in Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (1849; based on Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor), the major success of Otto Nicolai, and in the extremely popular works of Franz von Suppé. It culminated in operetta on the highest level of musical accomplishment in the masterworks of Johann Strauss the Younger. Many of Strauss’s operettas are known now only by their overtures and waltzes, but one of them, Die Fledermaus (1874; “The Bat”), has never left the stage for long. Only the finest opéras comiques (part sung, part spoken comic operas) and opéras bouffes (light operas) of Auber and Jacques Offenbach match Strauss’s elegance, wit, humour, musical invention, and scrupulous workmanship.

Verdi

When—at age 26—Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi premiered his first opera, Oberto, conte di San Bonifacio (1839) in Milan, Rossini had not offered a new opera for 10 years, bel canto composer Vincenzo Bellini was dead, and Donizetti was composing for Parisian audiences. Welcome as the debut of a new talent was, no one could predict that Verdi’s 26 operas—the last written in 1893, when he was 80 years old—would completely dominate Italian music in the last half of the 19th century. Loyal to the traditions of Italian opera and to the cause of Italian political unification, Verdi was revered by a faithful public and became a national hero. Even today his operas remain among the most frequently performed works, not only in Italy but also on the international stage.

Except for his Requiem Mass (1874) and a few other sacred works, opera accounts for Verdi’s entire creative output, which has been divided into three periods: Oberto (1839) to La traviata (1853); Les vêpres siciliennes (1855; “The Sicilian Vespers”) to Aida (1871); and Otello (1887) to Falstaff (1893). Many of the operas in the first group relate stories of personal tragedy, such as Nabucodonoser (1842; “Nebuchadnezzar,” commonly called Nabucco), Giovanna d’Arco (1845; “Joan of Arc”), Macbeth (1847), and Luisa Miller (1849). Some are also influenced by French culture, such as Rigoletto (1851) and La traviata (1853; “The Fallen Woman”), adapted from plays by Victor Hugo (Le Roi s’amuse, or “The King Enjoys Himself”) and Alexandre Dumas, fils (La Dame aux camélias, or “The Lady of the Camellias”), respectively.

Having found librettos that fired his imagination—including those based on Hugo’s and Dumas’s plays—Verdi produced toward the end of the first period three fine works that established him as a musical dramatist of enormous vigour and rich melodic invention. The first of these works was Rigoletto (libretto by Francesco Maria Piave), in which his abundant creation of melody was at the service of his gift for musical characterization, evident in the libertine Duke of Mantua’s aria “La donna è mobile.” Less than two years later came Il trovatore (1853; “The Troubadour,” libretto by Salvatore Cammarano) and very soon thereafter La traviata (libretto by Piave). Although the latter opera was at first not well received, it later came to be accepted as a masterpiece, and it ultimately established a composer’s right to set librettos dealing with contemporary life. Indeed, the musical portrait of Violetta, the tubercular courtesan heroine, is extraordinary for its depiction of the effects of love and sorrow on her character. In terms of his scene structures, Verdi followed and expanded on the formulas that Rossini had established, allowing lyrical high points to coexist with dramatic action.

An important influence on Verdi’s middle period was French grand opera. For Parisian audiences he wrote Les vêpres siciliennes (1855) to a libretto in French by Meyerbeer’s collaborator, Eugène Scribe, and Charles Duveyrier, which blended French and Italian elements and contributed to Verdi’s growing international fame. Invited by the khedive of Egypt to compose an opera for the new opera house in Cairo, Verdi responded with Aida (libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni, based on a scenario by Auguste Mariette, the French Egyptologist, and Camille du Locle, with the collaboration of Verdi), which received its premiere in 1871. Aida combines the heroic quality and spectacle of grand opera with the composer’s penchant for vivid character portrayal and rich harmonic and orchestral colour.

After Aida, Verdi retreated to his country villa. Although he remained musically active, he did not compose any operas for 16 years, until he was coaxed by his publisher, Giullio Ricordi, into writing his late work, Otello (libretto by Arrigo Boito, adapted from Shakespeare’s Othello). During those intervening years, opera had been transformed into a very different affair by Richard Wagner in Germany, a metamorphosis that threatened to undermine the prized vocal sumptuousness of traditional Italian opera. Verdi’s publisher was therefore anxious to give Italian opera a boost. The result was one of Verdi’s most varied, intensely dynamic, compressed, and tragic scores—the product not only of his ripened genius but also of nearly 50 years of operatic practice. Instead of employing the discrete scene structures of his previous operas, Verdi provided each act with a musical continuity that reinforces the dramatic momentum, with the lyrical high points (arias, duets, and ensembles) connected by long transitions rather than presented as a series of separate units.

Verdi’s last work, performed in 1893, was the comic masterpiece Falstaff (libretto by Boito, derived largely from Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV). An opera buffa with serious overtones, Falstaff always has been praised by critics and enthusiasts, but it has never become a true popular favourite.

Wagner

If Verdi conceived of opera as a human drama focused on the voice, Richard Wagner crusaded for an anti-Italian type of reformed musical theatre in which mythological or legendary characters are caught up in forces larger than themselves—among them a musical score focused on the orchestra, which he treated as the driving force of the drama rather than as a mere accompaniment to the singers. A larger-than-life figure with a powerful intellect, an enormous ego, and a desire to control all aspects of his theatrical works, Wagner wrote both the music and the librettos of his operas, giving instructions for scenic design, staging, and action, and conducted most of their premieres. His ideal was what he called a Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”), meaning a work in which all these elements are united in the service of drama.

Wagner began his career, except for a youthful attempt, with two grand operas mixing the influences of Meyerbeer, Marschner, and Weber: Das Liebesverbot (“The Ban on Love,” based on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure), performed in Magdeburg in 1836, and Rienzi, performed in Dresden in 1842. In 1843, with Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), he began to develop a novel method of operatic construction using leitmotifs—brief melodic and other motifs symbolizing situations, characters, or abstract ideas—as materials for spinning a more or less continuous web of music in which the voice was only one strand. Already, at age 30, he was giving harmony, in very un-Classical guise, a central constructive role in the creation of both drama and characterization.

While patiently and provocatively elaborating a vast interlocked system of musico-dramatic theories in many published books and essays, Wagner’s personal style continued to evolve in two large-scale transitional operas, Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin (1850). Tannhäuser again displays some characteristics of grand opera (particularly in the revision that Wagner prepared for a performance in Paris in 1861). Lohengrin is less spectacular but is still rooted in folklore and Germanic legend and is imbued with allegorical meaning, as are most of Wagner’s mature operas.

The earliest example of what Wagner called music drama (a term that emphasizes its distinction from opera) was the sensuous Tristan und Isolde (1857–59; first performed 1865), with a libretto that reflects his obsession with his own real-life love affairs. The score’s advanced harmonic language was so chromatic (using pitches that are foreign to the established scale) that it fostered the destruction of orthodox concepts of harmony. At the same time, it served the dramatic action extremely well by expressing the lovers’ unconsummated desire for one another, since Wagner’s harmonies hover continuously on the verge of completion. Tristan requires singers possessed of powerful voices capable of penetrating a vastly enlarged orchestra. It came to be regarded as the greatest German opera of the late 19th century, and its influence upon compositional methods and techniques continued into the 20th century.

In Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868; “The Mastersingers of Nürnberg”), Wagner partly abandoned his continuous-music style because central episodes in the libretto required self-contained numbers. Warmhearted and overflowing with young love countered by the bitter wisdom of age, Die Meistersinger ranks with Verdi’s Falstaff among exemplary comic operas of the late 19th century.

From 1853 until 1874 Wagner worked intermittently on the four poems and the four scores of Der Ring des Nibelungen (“The Ring of the Nibelung”). It is an epic, based on Germanic myths, of such proportions and implications that it defies summarization. Musically, Wagner organizes all four operas around a network of leitmotifs that he varies, develops, and transforms as the plot progresses. Performed in its entirety and without intermissions, the Ring cycle lasts about 16 hours. Its revivals, performed over a period of days or over an opera season, have been a staple of a number of the world’s major opera companies.

The last of Wagner’s operas, Parsifal (1882), introduced no structural elements that were not already present in his previous works. Wagner called it Ein Bühnenweihfestspiel—a sacred festival drama—and it is heavy with religious and ethical messages. It perfectly illustrated both his musico-dramatic theories and the unsmiling solemnity with which he approached opera.