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82-468: The theatre was built by Antonio D'Alibert for the performance of opera seria . It was a project long planned by his father Jacques D'Alibert (1626–1713) who had been the secretary to Queen Christina of Sweden and had managed the Teatro Tordinona . The Teatro Tordinona was Rome's first public theatre but was demolished in 1697 on the orders of Pope Innocent XII who considered public theatres

164-414: A Medici wedding, the occasions for the most spectacular and internationally famous intermedi of the previous century, was probably a crucial development for the new form, putting it in the mainstream of lavish courtly entertainment. Another popular court entertainment at this time was the " madrigal comedy ", later also called "madrigal opera" by musicologists familiar with the later genre. This consisted of

246-500: A corrupting influence on the populace. The Teatro Alibert (as it was then called) was constructed in wood on a piece of land formerly used for playing pallacorda (a game similar to real tennis ). According to the Italian theatre historian Saverio Franchi, the architect supervising the construction was probably Matteo Sassi (1646–1723). When it was inaugurated in 1718 with the premiere of Francesco Mancini 's opera Alessandro Severo ,

328-434: A few Metastasio libretti for his London audience, preferring a greater diversity of texts. At this time the leading Metastasian composers were Hasse, Caldara , Vinci, Porpora, and Pergolesi . Vinci's settings of Didone abbandonata and Artaserse were much praised for their stromento recitative, and he played a crucial part in establishing the new style of melody. Hasse, by contrast, indulged in stronger accompaniment and

410-532: A few exceptions, opera seria was the opera of the court , of the monarchy and the nobility. This is not a universal picture: Handel in London composed not for the court but for a much more socially diverse audience, and in the Venetian republic composers modified their operas to suit the public taste and not that of the court. But for the most part, opera seria was synonymous with court opera. This brought with it

492-591: A number of conditions: the court, and particularly the monarch, required that their own nobility be reflected on the stage. Opera seria plot-lines are heavily shaped by this criterion: Il re pastore displays the glory of Alexander the Great , while La clemenza di Tito does the same for the Roman emperor Titus . The potentate in the audience would watch his counterparts from the ancient world and see their benevolent autocracy redound to his own credit. Many aspects of

574-548: A permanent imprint upon the history of opera, however, was Gluck. Gluck tried to achieve a "beautiful simplicity". This is illustrated in the first of his "reform" operas, Orfeo ed Euridice , where vocal lines lacking in the virtuosity of (say) Handel's works are supported by simple harmonies and a notably richer-than-usual orchestral presence throughout. Gluck's reforms have had resonance throughout operatic history. Weber, Mozart and Wagner, in particular, were influenced by his ideals. Mozart, in many ways Gluck's successor, combined

656-527: A response to French criticism of what were often viewed as impure and corrupting librettos. As response, the Rome-based Academy of Arcadia sought to return Italian opera to what they viewed as neoclassical principles, obeying the classical unities of drama, defined by Aristotle , and replacing "immoral" plots, such as Busenello 's for L'incoronazione di Poppea , with highly moral narratives that aimed to instruct, as well as entertain. However,

738-554: A series of madrigals strung together to suggest a dramatic narrative, but not staged. There were also two staged musical "pastoral"s, Il Satiro and La Disperazione di Fileno , both produced in 1590 and written by Emilio de' Cavalieri . Although these lost works seem only to have included arias , with no recitative , they were apparently what Peri was referring to, in his preface to the published edition of his Euridice , when he wrote: "Signor Emilio del Cavalieri, before any other of whom I know, enabled us to hear our kind of music upon

820-425: A series of recitatives containing dialogue interspersed with arias expressing the emotions of the character, this pattern only broken by the occasional duet for the leading amatory couple. The recitative was typically secco : that is, accompanied only by continuo (usually harpsichord , theorbo , and cello, sometimes supported by further bass and chordal instruments). At moments of especially violent passion secco

902-401: A significant influence on the development of comic opera. This was a type of musical drama initially considered as a condensed version of a longer comic opera, but over time it became a genre in its own right. It was characterised by: vocal virtuosity; a more refined use of the orchestra; the great importance given to the production; the presence of misunderstandings and surprises in the course of

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984-481: A superb sense of drama, harmony, melody, and counterpoint to write a series of comedies, notably The Marriage of Figaro , Don Giovanni , and Così fan tutte (in collaboration with Lorenzo Da Ponte ) which remain among the most-loved, popular and well-known operas today. But Mozart's contribution to opera seria was more mixed; by his time it was dying away, and in spite of such fine works as Idomeneo and La clemenza di Tito , he would not succeed in bringing

1066-405: A threshold for a new operatic era in which speech patterns are paramount. Opera had become a marriage of the arts, a musical drama, full of glorious song, costume, orchestral music and pageantry; sometimes, without the aid of a plausible story. From its conception during the baroque period to the maturity of the romantic period, it was the medium through which tales and myths were revisited, history

1148-402: A type that attempted to imitate Petrarch and his Trecento followers, another element of the period's tendency toward a desire for restoration of principles it associated with a mixed-up notion of antiquity. The solo madrigal, frottola, villanella and their kin featured prominently in the intermedio or intermezzo, theatrical spectacles with music that were funded in the last seventy years of

1230-483: Is an Italian musical term which refers to the noble and "serious" style of Italian opera that predominated in Europe from the 1710s to about 1770. The term itself was rarely used at the time and only attained common usage once opera seria was becoming unfashionable and beginning to be viewed as something of a historical genre. The popular rival to opera seria was opera buffa , the 'comic' opera that took its cue from

1312-514: The Pitti Palace in Florence . The opera, Euridice , with a libretto by Rinuccini, set to music by Peri and Giulio Caccini , recounted the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. The style of singing favored by Peri and Caccini was a heightened form of natural speech, dramatic recitative supported by instrumental string music. Recitative thus preceded the development of arias, though it soon became

1394-424: The aria da capo began to fade, replaced by the rondò. Orchestras grew in size, arias lengthened, ensembles became more prominent, and obbligato recitative became both common and more elaborate. While throughout the 1780s Metastasio's libretti still dominated the repertory, a new group of Venetian librettists pushed opera seria in a new direction. The work of Gaetano Sertor and the group surrounding him finally broke

1476-458: The castrati , often prodigiously gifted male singers who had undergone castration before puberty in order to retain a high, powerful soprano or alto voice backed by decades of rigorous musical training. They were cast in heroic male roles, alongside another new breed of operatic creature, the prima donna . The rise of these star singers with formidable technical skills spurred composers to write increasingly complex vocal music, and many operas of

1558-440: The frottola and the villanella . In these latter two genres, the increasing tendency was toward a more homophonic texture, with the top part featuring an elaborate, active melody, and the lower ones (usually these were three-part compositions, as opposed to the four-or-more-part madrigal) a less active supporting structure. From this, it was only a small step to fully-fledged monody. All such works tended to set humanist poetry of

1640-457: The serenata Gli orti esperidi ("The Gardens of the Hesperides "). Nicola Porpora , (much later to be Haydn 's master), set the work to music, and the success was so great that the famed Roman prima donna , Marianna Bulgarelli , "La Romanina", sought out Metastasio, and took him on as her protégé. Under her wing, Metastasio produced libretto after libretto, and they were rapidly set by

1722-434: The 16th century by the opulent and increasingly secular courts of Italy's city-states. Such spectacles were usually staged to commemorate significant state events: weddings, military victories, and the like, and alternated in performance with the acts of plays. Like the later opera, an intermedio featured the aforementioned solo singing, but also madrigals performed in their typical multi-voice texture, and dancing accompanied by

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1804-584: The Arcadian ideals of opera seria seemed increasingly irrelevant. Rulers were no longer free from violent deaths, and under new social ideals the hierarchy of singers broke down. Such significant socio-political change meant that opera seria , so closely allied to the ruling class, was finished. Italian opera Italian opera is both the art of opera in Italy and opera in the Italian language . Opera

1886-511: The Barberini. Among the composers who worked in this period were Luigi Rossi , Michelangelo Rossi , Marco Marazzoli , Domenico and Virgilio Mazzocchi , Stefano Landi . Since the 1630s, the subject of the works changed greatly: those of the pastoral tradition and Arcadia, it is preferable that the poems of chivalry, usually Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso , or those taken from hagiography and Christian commedia dell'arte . With

1968-461: The French operatic tradition. Jommelli's works from 1740 onwards increasingly favored accompanied recitative and greater dynamic contrast, as well as a more prominent role for the orchestra while limiting virtuosic vocal displays. Traetta reintroduced the ballet in his operas and restored the tragic, melodramatic endings of classical dramas. His operas, particularly after 1760, also gave a larger role to

2050-633: The Italian Lully). This set the pattern until well into the 19th century: the Italian tradition was the international one and its leading exponents (e.g. Handel, Hasse, Gluck and Mozart) were often not natives of Italy. Composers who wanted to develop their own national forms of opera generally had to fight against Italian opera. Thus, in the early 19th century, both Carl Maria von Weber in Germany and Hector Berlioz in France felt they had to challenge

2132-529: The Romantic period. His first success was an "opera buffa" (comic opera), La cambiale di matrimonio (1810). His reputation still survives today through his Barber of Seville (1816), and La Cenerentola (1817). But he also wrote serious opera, Tancredi (1813) and Semiramide (1823). Rossini's successors in the Italian bel canto were Vincenzo Bellini (1801–35), Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848) and Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901). It

2214-584: The Teatro Alibert was the largest theatre in Rome with seven tiers of 32 boxes each. In 1720 Francesco Galli Bibiena enlarged and redesigned the interior, reshaping the auditorium into a "phonetic curve" (midway between a rectangle and a horseshoe). The theatre was an artistic success but not a financial one. Matters were not helped by the Jubilee Year of 1725 when all Roman theatres were closed for

2296-524: The absolute dominance of the singers and gave opera seria a new impetus towards the spectacular and the dramatic elements of 19th-century Romantic opera. Tragic endings, on-stage death and regicide became the norm rather than the exception. By the final decade of the century opera seria as it had been traditionally defined was essentially dead, and the political upheavals that the French Revolution inspired swept it away once and for all. With

2378-419: The art form back to life again. Romantic opera, which placed emphasis on the imagination and the emotions began to appear in the early 19th century, and because of its arias and music, gave more dimension to the extreme emotions which typified the theater of that era. In addition, it is said that fine music often excused glaring faults in character drawing and plot lines. Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868) initiated

2460-410: The beginning of bel canto ("beautiful singing") style, and more attention to vocal elegance than to dramatic expression; (3) less use of choral and orchestral music; (4) complex and improbable plots; (5) elaborate stage machinery; and (6) short fanfarelike instrumental introductions, the prototypes of the later overture. Opera took an important new direction when it reached the republic of Venice . It

2542-559: The choice key for a composer's typical "rage" aria , while D major for pomp and bravura, G minor for pastoral effect and E flat for pathetic effect, became the usual options. After peaking during the 1750s, the popularity of the Metastasian model began to wane. New trends, popularized by composers such as Niccolò Jommelli and Tommaso Traetta , began to seep into opera seria . The Italianate pattern of alternating, sharply-contrasted recitative and aria began to give way to ideas from

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2624-413: The chorus. The culmination of these reforms arrived in the operas of Christoph Willibald Gluck . Beginning with Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), Gluck drastically cut back on the possibilities for vocal virtuosity afforded to singers, abolished secco recitative (thereby heavily reducing the delineation between aria and recitative), and took great care to unify drama, dance, music, and theatrical practice in

2706-639: The city, performing works for a paying public during the Carnival season. The opera houses employed a very small orchestra to save money. A large part of their budget was spent on attracting the star singers of the day; this was the beginning of the reign of the castrato and the prima donna (leading lady). The chief composer of early Venetian opera was Monteverdi, who had moved to the republic from Mantua in 1613, with later important composers including Francesco Cavalli , Antonio Cesti , Antonio Sartorio , and Giovanni Legrenzi . Monteverdi wrote three works for

2788-512: The composers Carlo Francesco Pollarolo and the enormously prolific Alessandro Scarlatti . During the 18th century artistic and cultural life in Italy was heavily influenced by the aesthetic and poetic ideals of the members of the Accademia dell'Arcadia . The Arcadian poets introduced many changes to serious music drama in Italian, including: By far the most successful librettist of the era

2870-570: The conventions of the High Baroque era by developing and exploiting the da capo aria , with its A–B–A form. The first section presented a theme, the second a complementary one, and the third a repeat of the first with ornamentation and elaboration of the music by the singer. As the genre developed and arias grew longer, a typical opera seria would contain not more than thirty musical movements. A typical opera would start with an instrumental overture of three movements (fast-slow-fast) and then

2952-484: The court of Mantua . Monteverdi insisted on a strong relationship between the words and music. When Orfeo was performed in Mantua , an orchestra of 38 instruments, numerous choruses and recitatives were used to make a lively drama. It was a far more ambitious version than those previously performed — more opulent, more varied in recitatives, more exotic in scenery — with stronger musical climaxes which allowed

3034-437: The custom to include separate songs and instrumental interludes during periods when voices were silent. Both Dafne and Euridice also included choruses commenting on the action at the end of each act in the manner of Greek tragedy. The theme of Orpheus, the demi-god of music, was understandably popular and attracted Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) who wrote his first opera , L'Orfeo (The Fable of Orpheus), in 1607 for

3116-415: The days of the intermezzo. Operas were now divided into two or three acts, creating libretti for works of a substantially greater length, which differed significantly from those of the early 18th century in the complexity of their plots and the psychology of their characters. These now included some serious figures instead of exaggerated caricatures and the operas had plots which focused on the conflict between

3198-457: The drama. Opera seria had its weaknesses and critics; a taste for embellishment on behalf of the superbly trained singers, and the use of spectacle as a replacement for dramatic purity and unity drew attacks. Francesco Algarotti 's Essay on the Opera (1755) proved to be an inspiration for Christoph Willibald Gluck 's reforms. He advocated that opera seria had to return to basics and that all

3280-515: The duration. Antonio D'Alibert went bankrupt and the Roman authorities put the theatre up for auction in 1726. It was bought by a consortium of Roman nobility and renamed the Teatro delle Dame. The theatre's management eventually passed to the Knights of Malta , with whom some members of the consortium had close links. The order was to maintain control of the theatre until well into the 19th century. In

3362-519: The early years of the 18th century was the comic genre of opera buffa born in Naples and it began to spread throughout Italy after 1730. Opera buffa was distinguished from opera seria by numerous characteristics: In the second half of the 18th century comic opera owed its success to the collaboration between the playwright Carlo Goldoni and the composer Baldassare Galuppi . Thanks to Galuppi, comic opera acquired much more dignity than it had during

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3444-468: The enormous influence of the Italian Rossini . By the end of the 17th century some critics believed that a new, more elevated form of opera was necessary. Their ideas would give birth to a genre, opera seria (literally "serious opera"), which would become dominant in Italy and much of the rest of Europe until the late 18th century. The influence of this new attitude can be seen in the works of

3526-431: The full scope for the virtuosity of the singers. Opera had revealed its first stage of maturity in the hands of Monteverdi. L'Orfeo also has the distinction of being the earliest surviving opera that is still regularly performed today. Within a few decades opera had spread throughout Italy. In Rome , it found an advocate in the prelate and librettist Giulio Rospigliosi (later Pope Clement IX). Rospigliosi's patrons were

3608-836: The greatest composers in Italy and Austria, establishing the transnational tone of opera seria : Didone abbandonata , Catone in Utica , Ezio , Alessandro nelle Indie , Semiramide riconosciuta , Siroe and Artaserse . After 1730 he was settled in Vienna and turned out more librettos for the imperial theater, until the mid-1740s: Adriano in Siria , Demetrio , Issipile  [ de ] , Demofoonte , Olimpiade , La clemenza di Tito , Achille in Sciro , Temistocle , Il re pastore and what he regarded as his finest libretto, Attilio Regolo  [ de ] . For

3690-973: The improvisatory commedia dell'arte . An opera seria had a historical or Biblical subject, whereas an opera buffa had a contemporary subject. Italian opera seria (invariably to Italian libretti ) was produced not only in Italy but almost throughout Europe, and beyond (see Opera in Latin America , Opera in Cuba e. g.). Among the main centres in Europe were the court operas based in Warsaw (since 1628), Munich (founded in 1653), London (established in 1662), Vienna (firmly established 1709; first operatic representation: Il pomo d'oro , 1668), Dresden (since 1719) as well as other German residences , Saint Petersburg (Italian opera reached Russia in 1731, first opera venues followed c.  1742 ), Madrid (see Spanish opera ), and Lisbon . Opera seria

3772-491: The increased number of characters, the Roman operas became very dramatic, and had several twists. With these came along a new method of fixing the lines of the recitative, better suited to the various situations that arose from the rich storyline and that was closer to speech, full of parenthetical at the expense of the paratactic style that had so characterized the first Florentine works. The principal characteristics of Venetian opera were (1) more emphasis on formal arias; (2)

3854-400: The librettos, Metastasio and his imitators customarily drew on dramas featuring classical characters from antiquity bestowed with princely values and morality, struggling with conflicts between love, honour and duty, in elegant and ornate language that could be performed equally well as both opera and non-musical drama. On the other hand, Handel, working far outside the mainstream genre, set only

3936-469: The local Roman dialect . Prince Alessandro Torlonia acquired the theatre in 1847 and had it reconstructed in brick with an even larger stage which could accommodate equestrian shows. On the night of 15 February 1863, the theatre caught fire yet again and was completely destroyed. Later, an inn known as the Locanda Alibert was constructed on the site. In the early 2000s the Locanda Alibert building

4018-530: The mid-1730s, the building underwent extensive renovation and embellishment designed by the architect Ferdinando Fuga and reopened in 1738 with a performance of Nicola Logroscino 's opera Quinto Fabio . By the 19th century, the Teatro delle Dame (like its rival the Teatro Capranica ) had ceased being a leading opera house in the city. Operas were still performed there, but it was increasingly used for public balls, acrobatic shows, and plays written in

4100-408: The most celebrated example of the form. Cavalli's reputation caused Cardinal Mazarin to invite him to France in 1660 to compose an opera for King Louis XIV 's wedding to Maria Teresa of Spain. Italian opera had already been performed in France in the 1640s to a mixed reception and Cavalli's foreign expedition ended in disaster. French audiences did not respond well to the revival of Xerse (1660) and

4182-593: The next generation: Francesco Cavalli , Giovanni Legrenzi , Antonio Cesti and Alessandro Stradella . In the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth a tradition of operatic production began in Warsaw in 1628, with a performance of Galatea (composer uncertain), the first Italian opera produced outside Italy. Shortly after this performance, the court produced Francesca Caccini 's opera La liberazione di Ruggiero dall'isola d’Alcina , which she had written for Prince Władysław Vasa three years earlier when he

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4264-409: The often tragic endings of classical drama were rejected out of a sense of decorum: early writers of opera seria librettos such as Apostolo Zeno felt that virtue should be rewarded and shown triumphant, while the antagonists were to be put on their way to remorse. The spectacle and ballet, so common in French opera, were banished. The age of opera seria corresponded with the rise to prominence of

4346-435: The operas consisted of three acts, unlike the earlier operas which normally had five. The bulk of the versification was still recitative, however at moments of great dramatic tension there were often arioso passages known as arie cavate . Under Monteverdi's followers, the distinction between the recitative and the aria became more marked and conventionalised. This is evident in the style of the four most successful composers of

4428-411: The present instrumentalists. They were lavishly staged, and led the scenography of the second half of the 16th century. The intermedi tended not to tell a story as such, although they occasionally did, but nearly always focused on some particular element of human emotion or experience, expressed through mythological allegory. The staging in 1600 of Peri's opera Euridice as part of the celebrations for

4510-432: The public theatres: Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1640), Le nozze d'Enea con Lavinia (1641, now lost) and, most famously, L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642). The subjects of the new operas by Monteverdi and others were generally drawn from Roman history or legends about Troy, in order to celebrate the heroic ideals and noble genealogy of the Venetian state. However they did not lack for love interest or comedy. Most of

4592-518: The royal chapel, or they may have been among the Italians imported by Władysław. A dramma per musica (as serious Italian opera was known at the time) entitled Giuditta , based on the Biblical story of Judith , was performed in 1635. The composer was probably Virgilio Puccitelli. Cavalli's operas were performed throughout Italy by touring companies with tremendous success. In fact, his Giasone

4674-436: The same name , and which is described by critics as the finest of Italian romantic operas with the traditional components: the solo arias, the duets and the choruses fully integrated into the melodic and dramatic flow. Verdi's last opera, Falstaff (1893), broke free of conventional form altogether and finds music which follows quick flowing simple words and because of its respect for the pattern of ordinary speech, it created

4756-749: The second half of the 18th century Christoph Willibald Gluck , Niccolò Jommelli , Tommaso Traetta , Josef Mysliveček , Joseph Haydn , Johann Christian Bach , Carl Heinrich Graun , Antonio Salieri , Antonio Sacchini , Giuseppe Sarti , Niccolò Piccinni , Giovanni Paisiello , Domenico Cimarosa , and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart . By far the most successful librettist of the era was Metastasio , others were Apostolo Zeno , Benedetto Pamphili , Silvio Stampiglia , Antonio Salvi , Pietro Pariati , Pietro Ottoboni , Stefano Benedetto Pallavicino , Nicola Francesco Haym , Domenico Lalli , Paolo Antonio Rolli , Giovanni Claudio Pasquini , Ranieri de' Calzabigi and Giovanni Ambrogio Migliavacca . Opera seria built upon

4838-411: The social classes as well as including self-referential ideas. Goldoni and Galuppi's most famous work together is Il filosofo di campagna (1754). The collaboration between Goldoni and another famous composer Niccolò Piccinni produced with La Cecchina (1760) another new genre: opera semiseria . This had two buffo characters, two nobles and two "in between" characters. The one-act farsa had

4920-517: The specially composed Ercole amante (1662), preferring the ballets that had been inserted between the acts by a Florentine composer, Jean-Baptiste Lully , and Cavalli swore never to compose another opera. Cesti was more fortunate when he was asked to write an opera for the Habsburg court in Vienna in 1668. Il pomo d'oro was so grandiose that the performance had to be spread over two days. It

5002-424: The stage". Other pastoral plays had long included some musical numbers; one of the earliest, Fabula di Orfeo  [ de ; fr ; it ] (1480) by Poliziano had at least three solo songs and one chorus. The music of Dafne is now lost, except for the 455 line verse libretto. The first opera for which music has survived was performed in 1600 at the wedding of Henry IV of France and Marie de Medici at

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5084-618: The staging contributed to this effect: both the auditorium and stage were lit during performances, while the sets mirrored almost exactly the architecture of the palace hosting the opera. Sometimes the links between opera and audience were even closer: Gluck's serenata Il Parnaso confuso was first performed at Vienna with a cast consisting of members of the royal family. However, with the French Revolution came serious political upheavals across Italy, and as new, more egalitarian republics were established and old autocracies fell away,

5166-442: The standard romantic sources: Friedrich Schiller ( Giovanna d'Arco , 1845; I masnadieri , 1847; Luisa Miller , 1849); Lord Byron ( I due Foscari , 1844; Il corsaro , 1848); and Victor Hugo ( Ernani , 1844; Rigoletto , 1851). Verdi was experimenting with musical and dramatic forms, attempting to discover things which only opera could do. In 1887, he created Otello which completely replaced Rossini's opera of

5248-479: The synthesis of Italian and French traditions. He continued his reform with Alceste (1767) and Paride ed Elena (1770). Gluck paid great attention to orchestration and considerably increased the role of the chorus: he also cut back heavily on exit arias. The labyrinthine subplots that had riddled earlier baroque opera were eliminated. In 1768, the year after Gluck's Alceste , Jommelli and his librettist Verazi produced Fetonte . Ensemble and chorus are predominant:

5330-448: The text it carries, which is accompanied by a relatively simple sequence of chords rather than other polyphonic parts. Italian composers began composing in this style late in the 16th century, and it grew in part from the long-standing practice of performing polyphonic madrigals with one singer accompanied by an instrumental rendition of the other parts, as well as the rising popularity of more popular, more homophonic vocal genres such as

5412-500: The theatre's stage—the first one was the soprano Teresa Bertinotti . Operas which received their world premieres at the theatre include: Further reading 41°53′47″N 12°27′48″E  /  41.8962584°N 12.4632232°E  / 41.8962584; 12.4632232  ( Teatro delle Dame ) Opera seria Opera seria ( Italian pronunciation: [ˈɔːpera ˈsɛːrja] ; plural: opere serie ; usually called dramma per musica or melodramma serio )

5494-473: The time were written as vehicles for specific singers. Of these the most famous is perhaps Farinelli , whose debut in 1722 was guided by Nicola Porpora . Though Farinelli did not sing for Handel, his main rival, Senesino , did. Opera seria acquired definitive form early during the 1720s. While Apostolo Zeno and Alessandro Scarlatti had paved the way, the genre only truly came to fruition due to Metastasio and later composers. Metastasio's career began with

5576-665: The usual number of exit arias slashed in half. For the most part, however, these trends did not become mainstream until the 1790s, and the Metastasian model continued to dominate. Gluck's reforms made most of the composers of opera seria of the previous decades obsolete. The careers of Hasse, Jommelli, Galuppi , and Traetta were effectively finished. Replacing them came a new wave of composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , Joseph Haydn , Johann Christian Bach , Carl Heinrich Graun , Antonio Salieri (a disciple of Gluck), Antonio Sacchini , Giuseppe Sarti , Niccolò Piccinni , Giovanni Paisiello and Domenico Cimarosa . The popularity of

5658-494: The various elements—music (both instrumental and vocal), ballet, and staging—must be subservient to the overriding drama. Several composers of the period, including Niccolò Jommelli and Tommaso Traetta , attempted to put these ideals into practice. In 1765 Melchior Grimm published "Poème lyrique" , an influential article for the Encyclopédie on lyric and opera librettos . The first to really succeed and to leave

5740-403: The world. Dafne by Jacopo Peri was the earliest composition considered opera, as understood today. Peri's works, however, did not arise out of a creative vacuum in the area of sung drama. An underlying prerequisite for the creation of opera proper was the practice of monody . Monody is the solo singing/setting of a dramatically conceived melody, designed to express the emotional content of

5822-484: Was Pietro Metastasio and he maintained his prestige well into the 19th century. He belonged to the Arcadian Academy and was firmly in line with its theories. A libretto by Metastasio was often set by twenty or thirty different composers and audiences came to know the words of his dramas by heart. In the 17th century comic operas were produced only occasionally and no stable tradition was established. Only in

5904-482: Was in Italy around the year 1600 and Italian opera has continued to play a dominant role in the history of the form until the present day. Many famous operas in Italian were written by foreign composers, including Handel , Gluck and Mozart . Works by native Italian composers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Rossini , Bellini , Donizetti , Verdi and Puccini , are amongst the most famous operas ever written and today are performed in opera houses across

5986-477: Was Verdi who transformed the whole nature of operatic writing during the course of his long career. His first great successful opera, Nabucco (1842), caught the public fancy because of the driving vigour of its music and its great choruses. " Va, pensiero ", one of the chorus renditions, was interpreted and gave advantageous meaning to the struggle for Italian independence and to unify Italy. After Nabucco , Verdi based his operas on patriotic themes and many of

6068-480: Was a tremendous success and marked the beginning of Italian operatic dominance north of the Alps. In the late 17th century, German and English composers tried to establish their own native traditions but by the early 18th century they had given ground to imported Italian opera, which became the international style in the hands of composers such as Handel . Only France resisted (and her operatic tradition had been founded by

6150-576: Was completely restructured and turned into a congress and event centre. Throughout most of the 18th century, women were forbidden to perform on stage in the Papal States . During that period operas were sung at the Teatro delle Dame by all-male casts with castrati singing the female roles. Amongst the famous castrato singers to appear there were Farinelli , Giacinto Fontana ("Farfallino"), Giovanni Carestini , and Luigi Marchesi . From 1798 when Rome came under French rule , women began appearing on

6232-457: Was here that the first public opera house, the Teatro di San Cassiano , was opened in 1637 by Benedetto Ferrari and Francesco Manelli. Its success moved opera away from aristocratic patronage and into the commercial world. In Venice, musical drama was no longer aimed at an elite of aristocrats and intellectuals and acquired the character of entertainment. Soon many other opera houses had sprung up in

6314-419: Was in Italy. Another first, this is the earliest surviving opera written by a woman. Gli amori di Aci e Galatea by Santi Orlandi was also performed in 1628. When Władysław was king (as Władysław IV) he oversaw the production of at least ten operas during the late 1630s and 1640s, making Warsaw a center of the art. The composers of these operas are not known: they may have been Poles working under Marco Scacchi in

6396-420: Was less popular in France, where the national genre of French opera (or tragédie en musique ) was preferred. Acclaimed composers of opera seria included Antonio Caldara , Alessandro Scarlatti , George Frideric Handel , Antonio Vivaldi , Tomaso Albinoni , Nicola Porpora , Leonardo Vinci , Johann Adolph Hasse , Leonardo Leo , Baldassare Galuppi , Francesco Feo , Giovanni Battista Pergolesi and in

6478-476: Was regarded at the time as the more adventurous of the two. Pergolesi was noted for his lyricism. The main challenge for all was achieving variety, a break from the pattern of recitativo secco and aria da capo . The mutable moods of Metastasio's librettos helped, as did innovations made by the composer, such as stromento recitative or cutting a ritornello . During this period the choice of keys to reflect certain emotions became standardized: D minor became

6560-572: Was replaced by stromentato (or accompagnato ) recitative, where the singer was accompanied by the entire body of strings. After an aria was sung, accompanied by strings and oboe (and sometimes with horns or flutes), the character usually exited the stage, encouraging the audience to applaud. This continued for three acts before concluding with an upbeat chorus, to celebrate the jubilant climax. The leading singers each expected their fair share of arias of varied mood, be they sad, angry, heroic or meditative. The dramaturgy of opera seria developed largely as

6642-459: Was retold and imagination was stimulated. The strength of it fell into a more violent era for opera: verismo , with Cavalleria rusticana by Pietro Mascagni and Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavallo . Some of the greatest Italian operas of the 20th century were written by Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924). These include Manon Lescaut , La bohème , Tosca , Madama Butterfly , La fanciulla del West , La rondine and Turandot ,

6724-410: Was the most popular opera of the 17th century, though some critics were appalled at its mixture of tragedy and farce. Cavalli's fame spread throughout Europe. One of his specialties was giving his heroines " ground bass laments ". These were mournful arias sung over a descending bass line and they had a great influence on Henry Purcell , whose "When I am laid in earth" from Dido and Aeneas is probably

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