In collaboration with Convergence, VOICE OF ASIA is proud to present timeless articles from the archives, reproduced digitally for your reading pleasure. Originally published in Convergence Volume 9 in 2011, we present this story on the mystique of opera, and the long history behind it.
The splendour and magnificence of opera can often seem daunting to the uninitiated, who often have misgivings about its supposed inaccessibility. Convergence attempts to demystify this most august of artistic traditions by tracing opera’s development through the centuries, beginning with its Italianate roots in the 1600s to its 21st century incarnation as a global art form, noting the great and grand composers along this journey through the history of operatic theatre.
Often regarded as the pinnacle of European ‘high culture’, opera incorporates many elements of classical music and performance art while exuding a character that is all its own. In Italian, opera is the plural for opus or ‘work’ and implies the laborious process of combining singing, orchestral music, acting, dancing, lighting, makeup, costume and scene design that must be undertaken to perform successful opera. As one author dryly observed, “Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.”
Meanwhile, the stories of opera draw from a variety of sources, ranging from history and current events to legends and mythology, as was the case with the first opera ever performed.
The Origins of Opera
The distinction of being the forerunner of opera belongs to L’Orfeo, composed by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) in 1607 for the Italian court of Mantua, that tells the tragic story of Orpheus, who had descended to the Underworld to rescue his lost love, Eurydice, only to lose her again on the ascent. L’Orfeo is notable not only for being the first of its kind, and beginning a two-century long operatic tradition but also for featuring a castrato, a male singer castrated so his voice remains as high as a boy’s, for the role of Orpheus. Monteverdi would go on to write for the Venetian opera house, which opened to public in 1637, thus breaking opera out of its initial aristocratic stage.
Contemporary accounts of these first operas told of audiences weeping at Monteverdi’s arias, which are sung solo, attesting to the composer’s gift for expressing drama through vocal music.
The Baroque Era
In 1706, a 21-year old George Frederic Handel (1685-1759) travelled from his native Germany to Florence, on the invitation of the ruling Medici family, journey that would have a lasting impression on the young composer and on the art form itself. Although Handel had already composed several operas while working at the Hamburg opera house, it was in Italy that he began making a name for himself as a composer of orchestral and vocal music, both sacred and profane.
This set a precedence for Handel’s preference for Italian opera, adhering strictly to the form typical of that era. Even after moving to London where he composed his Messiah, this prolific German composer would add to his body of operatic work – an impressive total of 42 – with only compositions written in the opera seria genre, a solemn style of Italian opera, marking its dominance throughout Europe and reflecting the continent’s taste for Baroque.
The Classical Era
But opera seria had its share of critics, who believed that the musical and performance elements of opera – turned into spectacle and embellishment in opera seria – should serve only to emphasise its narrative drama. Chief among them was Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787), a Viennese composer, who called for a back-to-basics approach to opera and was a pioneer of this new genre that would come to be known as the Classical style.
The reforms advocated by Gluck were far reaching and would eventually find a disciple in a certain musical prodigy named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791). Heavily influenced by Gluck’s ideals, Mozart began to write emotionally and dramatically – charged compositions that were well-received by an audience accustomed to Baroque trappings of opera seria. Mozart’s operas – The Marriage of Figaro, for example – were often comedic and light-hearted, favoured contemporary events over mythology and were celebrated for their balance of the technical and narrative elements as well as their willingness to diverge from convention.
The Golden Age
Turning opera into a tour de force would not be attempted again until the turn of the following century. In the intervening decades, the art form that had put down roots across Europe in preceding centuries, began to blossom into different artistic styles like bel canto – meaning ‘beautiful singing’ – delicate compositions that showcased a singer’s range and ability, and operatic traditions whose ownership was claimed by different European countries.
This emergence of national opera set the stage for Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) and Richard Wagner (1813-1883), in Italy and Germany, respectively, and a golden age for opera.
Verdi eschewed the intricate vocal work of bel canto. Instead, his compositions called for forceful cogency from his singers and, indeed, his operas were demanding undertakings for their singers, orchestra and production crew. The grand opera Aida is a seminal example with a cast of hundreds sharing the stage at one time. Verdi displayed a knack for writing in a human voice, and his compositions ingrained themselves in popular conscience, earning him the title of the greatest Italian opera composer.
While Wagner had similarly grand designs, he was firmly against Verdi’s sensational style of opera, and began his own remarkable overhaul of the art form. Hearkening back to the ideals espoused by Gluck, Wagner took a holistic approach called Gesamtkunstwerk that subsumed the individual visual, musical and dramatic arts under a common purpose. It stirred controversy among the European artistic community, and still does, but its culmination in Wagner’s four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen was breathtaking and it continues to inspire as an opera.
Modern Opera
The impact that Wagner and Verdi had on opera cannot be overstated and a generation of opera composers struggled to emerge from their shadows. Few succeeded but Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) was one who did. Composing romantic, sentimental works that tugged at the heartstrings, Puccini was a student of verismo or ‘realism’, a genre of theatre that immersed in the daily struggles of the common people, and violence and passion were frequently themes explored in Puccini’s operas like Madama Butterfly.
By the 20th century, opera would find itself spread across oceans and continents, spurred by technology that closed the gaps on the tyranny of distance. Composers like Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) and Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), who cut stark and uncompromising figures in Russian opera, were vividly contrasted with the vitality and innovative spirit of American composers such as George Gershwin (1898-1937) and Phillip Glass (b. 1937).
Today, Broadway and West End musicals owe a debt of gratitude to opera, as they absorb and use operatic conventions to tell stories that would not be out of place in its ancestral form. As the demands and expectations of modern audiences continually change, opera has had to evolve accordingly while, at the same time, continue to influence new genres of artistic expression.
