From the “reform” to grand opera

The remarkable musical achievements of the classical Viennese style during the late 18th and early 19th centuries threatened to leave Italy, opera’s native home, out of the operatic mainstream. Two accidents of history prevented this. One was the voluntary expatriation to northern Italy of a German, Simon Mayr, who, like many other Germans before him, went to Italy to study music and eventually settled there to work. The other was the unpredictable eruption of a native genius, Gioachino Rossini, who became the centre of Italian operatic life until he retired to Paris in the mid-1820s, where he finished his years as an international celebrity.

Mayr, known in Italy as Giovanni Simone Mayr, composed nearly 70 operas in Italian between his first (1794) and his last (1815). He appears to have been influenced deeply by Mozart; he demonstrated a keen dramatic sense, a sophisticated grasp of the conventions of opera seria, and a varied use of the orchestra (particularly of solo horns and woodwinds). Many of his operas were for a long time extremely popular throughout Italy, and his immediate influence was beneficial, particularly on the practice of his most famous pupil, Gaetano Donizetti, and on Saverio Mercadante.

The production in Venice in 1810 of the first opera of Rossini, La cambiale di matrimonio (“The Bill of Marriage”), announced a new operatic phenomenon. Rossini brought originality marked by rude wit and humour and by an apparently effortless gift for melody. He also developed an entirely new approach to comic pacing, regulated by insistent rhythmic ideas that build suspense through repetition and often impart a controlled but infectious energy to his scenes. Both his opere buffe and his opere serie soon became so popular throughout Italy and then throughout the Western world that they all but blotted out his unfortunate contemporaries—Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini excepted. One of the secrets of Rossini’s success and influence was his ability to blend aspects of opera buffa and seria in one opera, as Mozart had done, thereby making his characters seem more appealing and true to life. Another was his modification of the old elements of recitative and aria into a more flexible type of scene structure, or scena, for one or more characters—a series of pieces in contrasting tempi which alternated lyric or reflective moments with more dramatic ones and usually ended in a rousing cabaletta, or fast-paced aria.

Rossini’s dazzling career marked the zenith of the bel canto style, a singer-dominated manner of composition (and at times improvisation) that played to audiences’ delight in vocal agility, smoothness of voice, and long, florid melodies. From the period of Rossini’s greatest Italian triumphs (he had a second career in Paris), and of Donizetti and Bellini, come the names of legendary voices such as Isabella Colbran (Rossini’s first wife), Giuditta Pasta, Maria Malibran, Giovanni Battista Rubini, and Luigi Lablache. For appearances by these performers, composers altered their scores; when they sang, the singers interpolated extraneous arias that displayed their prowess. Rossini tried to insist that his operas be sung as he himself composed or revised them, but it was a losing battle. The polished artistry and technique of such singers, as well as their extraordinarily wide ranges, have made performance of the bel canto operas an enduring challenge for singers.

Rossini’s most famous opera is Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816; The Barber of Seville, libretto by Cesare Sterbini after another 18th-century play by Beaumarchais about the rascally Figaro), perhaps the most exemplary of all opere buffe. Several others among his comedies are also notable for their musical invention, genuine comic energy, and farcical characterization: L’Italiana in Algeri (1813; “The Italian Girl in Algiers”), Il Turco in Italia (1814; “The Turk in Italy”), and La cenerentola (1817; Cinderella). Rossini prefaced several of these operas with swift, witty overtures that have held a place in the repertoire of symphony orchestras.

Though his first serious work was Otello (1816; libretto by Francesco di Salsa), it was only in his Parisian pieces, such as Semiramide (1823), Le Siège de Corinthe (1826), and Guillaume Tell (1829; William Tell), his last opera, that his talent for works on a larger scale found its full flowering. Some of these later works owe their revival in the middle of the 20th century to the appearance of carefully researched publications of his operatic scores, some for the first time, and to a new generation of singers able to project meaningfully their difficult vocal lines.

In 1830, the year after Rossini’s farewell to operatic composition, Donizetti produced in Milan Anna Bolena (“Anne Boleyn”), with a libretto by Felice Romani, who worked with many opera composers of the time. It immediately placed him with Vincenzo Bellini as an inevitable successor to Rossini. What became clear only in retrospect was that it also showed him to be the most important predecessor of Giuseppe Verdi. Donizetti clung to the long, legato (smoothly flowing) melodies and the ornamented vocal lines of bel canto, but he also unmistakably foreshadowed Verdi’s dramatic vigour and compositional methods. Indeed, several apparently unconscious borrowings from Donizetti have been noted in Verdi’s operas.

Like Rossini, Donizetti moved freely back and forth between serious and comic subjects. He composed about 70 stage works in 25 years. After the success of Anna Bolena, he wrote, with a speed and facility that remain astonishing, numerous operas of enduring quality. These include the sentimental comedy L’elisir d’amore (1832; “The Elixir of Love,” libretto by Felice Romani); the popular Lucia di Lammermoor (1835; libretto by Salvatore Cammarano, derived from Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, 1819), an opera that reflects Donizetti’s acquaintance with the music of Bellini; the delightful opéra comique La Fille du régiment (1840; The Daughter of the Regiment); and—judged by many to be Donizetti’s masterwork—the ever fresh and vivid opera buffa Don Pasquale (1843; libretto by Giacomo Ruffini and Donizetti).

Altogether different from either Rossini or Donizetti was Bellini. His operas have become synonymous with bel canto—long, sweeping, highly decorated lines, often with a melancholy tinge. He gave much less attention to ensembles, choruses, and the expressive potential of the orchestra.

Bellini and his librettists—most often Felice Romani—preferred intensely amorous or otherwise emotion-packed dramas, featuring ethical confrontations and usually tragic involvements. Of his 10 operas, all serious, the most important are La sonnambula (The Sleepwalker) and the heroic tragedy Norma (both produced in 1831). In the last year of his life, he scored another triumph with an opera very loosely connected with Cromwellian times in England, I puritani (1835; “The Puritans”). Though the popularity of his operas spread throughout Europe and America, Bellini exercised little or no influence upon the style of his successors, unlike his compatriots Rossini and Donizetti.

French grand opera

Nineteenth-century Paris was to foster and witness the birth of “grand opera,” an international style of large-scale operatic spectacle employing historical or pseudohistorical librettos and filling the stage with elaborate scenery and costumes, ballets, and multitudes of supernumeraries. It was in effect the 19th-century equivalent of the Hollywood blockbuster film epic. Dispensing almost entirely with the delicacies of bel canto singing, it vastly enlarged both the orchestra itself and its role in the dramatic events. Grand opera naturally had roots in the past, particularly in the Venetian “machine operas” of the 17th century, as well as in the stately scores of Rameau and Gluck. The trend toward this new style of opera, however, was initiated in Paris by Italian expatriates Luigi Cherubini and Gaspare Spontini.

Cherubini was a learned composer in many musical forms. His two most-imposing operas were the ambitious Médée (1797; libretto by François-Benoît Hoffman) and a comédie lyrique, Les Deux Journées (1800; “The Two Days,” libretto by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly), which became very popular in Germany under the title Der Wasserträger (“The Water Carrier”). Spontini, in his French operas, ranged far beyond Cherubini and his other contemporaries in his demands for complex staging. Daniel-François-Esprit Auber brought out La Muette de Portici (1828; “The Mute Girl of Portici,” also known as Masaniello, libretto by Eugène Scribe). The popularity of La Muette, which ends with the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius, was phenomenal in both France and Germany. Moreover, this opera has remained unique in that its title character, a mute, dances rather than sings. Eighteen months after the premiere of Auber’s opera, Gioachino Rossini responded to the new genre with Guillaume Tell (1829), which, like La Muette, is a tale of rebellion against foreign domination. Auber’s later operas include several charming comedies, among them Fra Diavolo (1830; “Brother Devil,” libretto by Scribe).

The acknowledged leader of grand opera, however, was another expatriate in Paris, German composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, whose Robert le diable (1831; “Robert the Devil”) created a popular frenzy; by August 1893 it had been sung 751 times at the Paris Opéra. Meyerbeer’s productions required almost every kind of singing, used an expanded orchestra that emphasized individual instrumental colours, and filled huge stages with dazzling pageantry. As a result, four of his operas held their leading positions even through the operatic “reform” of the mid-to-late 19th century. Aside from Robert le diable, these operas were Les Huguenots (1836), Le Prophète (1849), and the posthumously staged L’Africaine (1864). Scribe, the primary author of all these, was the most productive librettist of his time, writing—with the help of various collaborators—a large number of librettos for many composers, including Auber, Luigi Cherubini, Gaetano Donizetti, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Gioachino Rossini, and others. He was in fact a major force in the evolution of French grand opera.

Imitators of Meyerbeer’s successes naturally sprang up immediately. The first was Fromental Halévy, whose works included at least one grand opera that could almost be mistaken for Meyerbeer’s: La Juive (1835; “The Jewess”). After the times of Meyerbeer and Halévy, grand opera began to respond to new musical and intellectual currents, evolving into a variety of mixed forms.

Three operas by Hector Berlioz stand apart from the mainstream of music history by virtue of their orchestral brilliance that merges opera with symphony. When first staged at the Paris Opéra in the shadow of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable and La Dame blanche, Berlioz’s first opera, Benvenuto Cellini (1838), was different enough from expected norms that it failed to appeal to Parisian audiences. His last opera, the lighthearted Béatrice et Bénédict (his own libretto, based upon Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing), received its premiere at Baden-Baden in 1862 by pianist and composer Franz Liszt. Berlioz’s most monumental work for the stage, Les Troyens (“The Trojans”; his own libretto based on Virgil’s Aeneid), adopted the form of grand opera but also drew from older French operas by Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and Christoph Willibald Gluck, particularly in its faithful adherence to the text. Like Meyerbeer’s Huguenots, it is a story of epic proportions in which the needs and desires of individual characters compete with national affairs. Divided into two parts—La Prise de Troie (“The Capture of Troy”) and Les Troyens à Carthage (“The Trojans at Carthage”)—it had a total of five acts, only the last three of which were performed during the composer’s lifetime, in Paris in 1863. Les Troyens has many choral and ballet scenes, a rich orchestral score, and a powerful dramatic thrust.

Even more popular than Auber as a purveyor of light operatic comedy was Jacques Offenbach, a German émigré to Paris who supplied France’s Second Empire (1852–70) and the early years of the Third Republic (1870–1940) with a long series of very tuneful, witty, and satiric works of deliberate frivolity. Remembered among them are Orphée aux enfers (1858; “Orpheus in the Underworld”), La Belle Hélène (1864; “Beautiful Helen”), and La Vie Parisienne (1866; “Parisian Life”). Left incomplete at Offenbach’s death in 1880 was his major serious opera, Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann; libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, based on tales by the early 19th-century German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann). With some recitatives provided by Ernest Guiraud, the opera was staged posthumously in 1881. This fantasy involving supernatural interventions rapidly became a worldwide favourite.