II

VOCAL MUSIC

9 Opera seria and opera buffa

Following the main course of instrumental music halfway through

the eighteenth century has taken us a long way from Italy, but this
country returns to the centre of discussion as soon as the topic of
vocal music, and especially stage music, is considered. Here the
Italian language, traditions and artists provided an accepted basis,
the starting point for any innovations, both in Italy and in the rest of
Europe.
In vocal as in instrumental music, the 1750s saw the twilight of
great figures. Handel ended his contribution to Italian opera in
1741, and up to his death in 1759 dedicated himself to oratorio. In
Paris Rameau's tragedie lynque dissolved after 1750 into pastorales
and less ambitious works. Metastasio, who lived in Vienna from
1730, was admired and surrounded by the court's affection, and
provided an inexhaustible source of Italian operas for all the
European theatres. But in the decade 1730-40 the imperial court
theatre in Vienna, with its tradition of splendour, was approaching
exhaustion. The gap left by Caldara was felt, the court put off
nominating a successor, and one has the impression that the great
operatic spectacle no longer interested the Viennese ruling class.
Hasse, the champion of Italian opera in the years 1730-40, was the
arbiter of Dresden's musical life, but the Seven Years' War put an
end to this happy period and the composer moved to Vienna, where
Metastasio, many of whose librettos he had already set, was living.
But it was rather late for the partnership between Hasse and Metas-
tasio to bear new fruit: it was now 1764, and the Italian opera of the
1730s had been superseded both by a reformed opera seria (from
which Gluck's Orfeo had already been born in 1762) and by the
growing importance of comic opera, which was becoming increas-
ingly popular with the European public just around 1760.
 Vocal music
If opera seria, with its fundamental division of material into
recitatives (simple or accompanied) and arias (mainly da capo), and
with its heroic, noble subject-matter, expressed the element of con-
tinuity with the baroque age, opera buffa (comic opera) or semi-
serious opera was destined to represent the element of breaking
away. In a certain sense one can regard the genre of comic opera as a
theatrical equivalent of the galant instrumental style; as the latter
moved away from counterpoint, so comic opera departed from an
eloquent, turgid expressiveness given over to harsh harmonies,
rhythmic tension and above all florid vocal writing of great dif-
ficulty. One meets the move towards the easy galant style again in
the vocal field: the singers of comic opera, especially in its early
days, were not required to have an exceptional performing ability;
their vocal resources could be modest, and if anything lively acting
was more important. The result was a simplified style of writing, a
regularity or rhythm, a more rational harmonic planning, and a clear
move towards natural dance-like melodies. There is no difference in
musical thought between an aria from Pergolesi's La serva padrona
and an Allegro by Galuppi, while nothing is further from mid-
eighteenth-century feeling than the great arias froni Steffani's or
Giovanni Bononcini's operas.
There was also, of course, the difference in theatrical subject-
matter that in opera seria accentuated links with the old world, with
the age of absolute or enlightened power, while comic opera, on the
contrary, provided an easy way to reflect all the new cultural and
social concepts that were transforming the civilized world.
Opera seria presented heroes from mythology or ancient history,
as well as characters that had been made into legends, international
allegories of the typical passions that transcend time, symbols of
faith, courage, clemency and supreme sacrifice. The mysterious
quality of the castrato voice accentuated the mythical and unreal
component. The court continued to be the centre of life; oppor-
tunities for staging were dependent on the court calendar, and
librettos were full of allusions to important persons. Comic opera,
on the other hand, presented the middle classes or the people, with
their varied surroundings, trades and languages; the events were
commonplace and dealt largely with the family. Even here, apart
from an openly farcical vein, the aim was to set examples (all theatre
was basically educational), but of less exalted virtue, without the
exclusion of all personal interests. Here, too, there was a happy
ending, but not by means of the deus ex machina of the tragedie
lyrique; it was in fact made to spring from the combined action of

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 Opera seria and opera buff a

reason and nature, thus making the edification more persuasive. The
two worlds, opera seria and opera buffa, were musically so different
halfway through the century that they can almost be regarded as
independent languages. This can be seen most clearly when comic
opera approaches opera seria, following a liking for parody that it had
had from its origins. It adopts the language of opera seria (e.g. vocal
virtuosity, wide intervals between high and low registers and accom-
panied recitatives) to indicate someone who is not middle class - a
nobleman or a high-ranking soldier, for example - or else, ironically,
to characterize the other extreme of the social scale, a member of the
common people or the middle class who foolishly aspires to higher
positions. The artifice (i.e. the most consummate art) of vocal
virtuosity was cultivated in this context as an infringement of the
naturalness of behaviour and feeling.
So there were old distinctions and well-worn differences. Yet the
great operatic phenomenon of the second half of the eighteenth
century was to be a convergence of the two genres, serious and comic,
which had become clearly apparent by the final decades of the
century. It was the comic form that was more inclined to change its
mould. The gentle vein of sensibility which has been discussed in
connection with the galant style, the cult of sentiment and of tears as a
sign of a lofty spirit, was to adjust itself spontaneously to the more
flexible course of comic opera. Here, fluctuating between semi-
serious, sentimental and larmoyant genres, the contamination grew up
between tragedy and comedy that Voltaire had predicted in the
preface to his play Nanine (1749) and that the 'bourgeois' theatre of
Goldoni, Diderot (in Le fils natwrel of 1757) and Lessing was
beginning to show.
Still on the tactical ground of comic opera, the musical represent-
ation of 'action' took its first steps forward. If the regime of aria and
recitative suited the heroes of opera seria with their continual alter-
nation of reflection and action, the characters in comic opera,
fundamentally, reflected little and acted a lot, thereby pushing the
flow of action, albeit of a modest, everyday type, forward. The usual
place for this was the finale of the act, a concerted piece in which all
the characters came together, each with his or her own dramatic
potential, thereby welding together a more or less continuous chain of
musical items. The presence of bass voices (not much used in opera
seria, in which high voices were preferred) guaranteed these concer-
ted numbers balance of sound and completeness of the abstract
musical piece. In this way late-eighteenth-century comic opera raised
its social status with elaborate forms, complex architecture and vocal

43
 Vocal music
writing which was just as difficult as that of opera seria. Opera seria,
for its part, became more flexible; the central sections of the arias
gained importance with secondary themes and gentle ideas that had
new life.
Its greater mobility and its orientation towards the future gave
comic opera a special prestige; historical considerations seemed to
favour it, leaving the defence of opera seria to rhetoric. In particular,
the impressive development of comic opera in Italy throughout the
second half of the century coincided with one of the least heroic
moments in the history of the country: the years of peace but also of
distrust and scepticism through which it passed between the peace
of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) and the wars at the end of the century.
When the soldier Tagliaferro in Piccinni's Cecchina sings in his Ger-
manicized Italian, 'Fenir, fenir con me,/ Che alia querra, contenti,/
Star tutte sorte de difertimenti', 1 he seems to be seeing the process-
ion of noblewomen who used to accompany officers on their cam-
paigns, in an Italy that was becoming less and less a military power
and less and less a stage for decisive events (the Seven Years' War
was by now taking place elsewhere, and was no longer concerned
with the Italian regions). Here it was comic opera that seemed
destined to reflect more honestly the climate of humble interests and
real details which distinguished the true Italy of regional states from
the one of imperial dreams. Yet it must be remembered that opera
seria was to remain the most authoritative and accredited form of
music in the theatre until the end of the century; every theatre and
every operatic season opened with an opera seria. Its prestige was
largely literary, and literary culture continued to take an interest in
opera seria in order to improve it, but one must also add to this the
public prestige conferred on it by the castratos (the 'virtuosi') and
the prima donnas, whose art of singing was at the highest level of
professionalism, and whose favourite sphere of action was this illus-
trious genre. Comic opera's greater accessibility to the modern
sensibility (compared with the harder construction of opera seria)
should not make us consider it more representative, more typical, or
even a priori better than opera seria. Furthermore, there were at least
two other factors turning this old-fashioned genre into something
just as deeply rooted in the taste of the mid-eighteenth century: a
new desire for reform, stronger or weaker depending on the place,
but general and unanimous, and a deeper involvement with
antiquity, which threw new light on historical and mythological
material.

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 Italian comic opera

io The European success of Italian comic opera

The European success of Italian comic opera is one of the salient facts
in the musical and theatrical history of the decade 1750-60. The
actual setting of this development could only have been Paris, a centre
of incomparable importance, where the publicity ended up by giving
the debate itself more emphasis than the subject under discussion.
In 1746 at the Hotel de Bourgogne, the home of the Italian
commedia dell'arte, Pergolesi's intermezzo La serva padrona, com-
posed in 1733, was staged. The event passed unnoticed and there
were only four performances; Pergolesi, who had already been dead
for ten years, was described by the Mercure de France as 'a very young
artist from the other side of the Alps'. 2 But six years later, in 1752, the
picture changed: the same La serva padrona, put on by the modest
company of Eustachio Bambini (the director of the Italian opera at
Strasbourg), came by fortuitous circumstances to Paris's greatest
theatre, the Op6ra, which was dedicated to the tragedie lyrique of Lully
and Rameau. The result was as sensational as it was unexpected,
causing as it did a deep split in French musical culture which has
passed into the annals as the querelle des bouffons, the old controversy
about the merits of the French and the Italians brought up to date in
terms of reasonableness and sensibility. In the two years 1753-4
around sixty pamphlets by men of letters, musicians and journalists
appeared. The intellectuals, the Enlightenment circle - Rousseau,
Diderot, d'Holbach and Grimm (a pupil of Gottsched who had been
in Paris since 1749) - were all noisy supporters of Italian music as the
only kind capable of inventing agreeable and natural melodies.
French music, that is, the tragedie lyrique with its respect for ver-
isimilitude in its declamation and passions, was defended by profess-
ional musicians and by the more traditional side of French theatrical
culture. The latter, with Cazotte and the Abbe de Voisenon, sided in
favour of Rameau (who also intervened personally with his Observa-
tions sur notre instinct pour la musique, 1754), above all in response to
Rousseau's Lettre sur la musique franqaise (1753) which had put
forward the theory of the objective inferiority of the French on
account of their dull and unmusical language.
Bambini's company, amazed that the antics of Serpina and Uberto
had set so many famous minds buzzing, hurried to put on other comic

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 Vocal music
works, all of them short and with two or three characters, by
Pergolesi, Latilla, Rinaldo da Capua, Leo, Jommelli and others. The
old Neapolitan intermezzo repertory was thrown onto the scales of
European taste and taken as a model for a new kind of stage music.
Rousseau, in fact, was not content just to contribute articles to the
querelle, but in October of the same year, 1752, put on at Fontaine-
bleau his 'intermede' Le devin du village, a skilful mixture of catchy
little airs, now and again emphasizing sensitive minor keys, dance
rhythms, and, for its 1753 revival at the Opera, even simple recita-
tives. Within a few years the little work was performed throughout
Europe (and in 1790 in New York), translated into Dutch, English
and German. Other intermezzos in French versions put on by
Bambini, like Rinaldo da Capua's La zingara, which became La
Bohemienne, and especially Vincenzo Legrenzio Ciampi's Bertoldo in
corte, a Goldoni subject dealing with a couple of virtuous peasants
who prefer the country to corrupt city life, parodied by Favart in
Ninette a la com (1755), met with similar success.
The name of Carlo Goldoni appears at an important point in the
development of comic opera; with around fifteen intermezzos and
more than fifty drammi giocosi in Venice during the period 1749-62,
Goldoni gave a decisive impetus to the humanization of comic opera
beyond the stereotyped models of the intermezzo. To be sure, the
comedy of errors and disguises was still the accepted basis for the
dramatic structure, and the characterization in his librettos could
scarcely attain the profundity achieved in his great comedies for the
theatre. But if the action woven from the slender threads of the farce
and the intermezzo could attain the breadth of musical comedy, it
was because contemporary ideas entered more and more into his
librettos: Nature as mother and guide; the various fashions of the
Venetian partriciate and middle classes; the taste for the exotic, with
explicit references to modern exploration and colonization of the
world outside Europe; a certain maliciousness in the whole sphere of
love; and a new attention to the arts and crafts and an interest in the
working countryside. In short, a mirror, a tasteful allusion to the
real life of the Venetians which can be extended to the whole of
bourgeois Europe in its standardization of the opera libretto. The
theme of trading and great international commerce resounded
throughout the eighteenth century, from the Voltaire of the tenth of
the Lettres philosophiques to the Goethe of Wilhelm Meister, who
admired those 'crowds of bustling people who, like great rivers,
cross the world, taking away and bringing back their goods'. 3 But
opera seria was completely impermeable to this movement. Goldoni

46
 Italian comic opera
introduced something of it, though without any grand rhetoric, into
comic opera; the emphasis in his librettos on the environment of
middle-class merchants and the continual monetary metaphors
remind one in a small way that beneath military and chivalrous
pretences beats the true heart of modern society, 'the real war that
the people of Europe wage with trade', as Pietro Verri had said.4
Before Goldoni no comic opera libretto had presented such pre-
cision of language in denoting every social type, such variety of
metre, or so many opportunities for the musician to move from the
canzonet to the serenade, the aria and the ensemble. If the develop-
ment of the concerted act finale was bound up with the idea of
involving the audience in the action, it is here that Goldoni con-
tributes to this process in a definitive way, developing in his finales a
type of dialogue on more varied levels and thus expanding on
Metastasio's sharp distinction between quiet reflection and open
declamation. The remarks of the characters who have been brought
together on stage run on three levels here, being addressed to
everyone, to some people (excluding a third party), or just to the
person speaking himself (excluding everyone else). These three
strata are indicated in the text by directions in parentheses; they
interact continually and carry forward both the psychological and
the stage action.
The first composer to be connected with Goldoni in Venice was
Baldassare Galuppi. The partnership was inaugurated with three
comic operas in 1749: L'Arcadia in Brenta, II conte Caramella and
Arcifanfano, re dei matti. There were another three in the following
year - // mondo alia roversa, ossia Le donne che comandano, II paese
della cuccagna and / / mondo delta luna - and then an opera a year
until 1754 when II filosofo di campagna established itself on the
leading Italian stages and was put on in the five years between 1755
and 1759 in Frankfurt, Dresden, Prague, Bratislava, Mannheim,
Munich, Brussels, Barcelona and St Petersburg. / / filosofo di cam-
pagna already presented, albeit within narrow limits, a considerable
repertoire of musical comedy. The basic elements of syllabic, easily
understandable singing and short themes were the same as those of
La serva padrona; but there was more variety of expression, from the
maid Lesbina's canzonets about radishes or chicory to the little
orphan Eugenia's melancholy, from the comic solemnity of Don
Tritemio to the good nature of the philosopher Nardo, who announ-
ces himself by playing a pastoral tune on a small guitar and does not
want to exchange his rural peace for a stormy marriage. There are
more arias than in La serva padrona, and the finale of the second act

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is already a piece governed by autonomous musical laws, with
changes of rhythm at every joint in the action, in which even the
smallest idea, like the laughing 'ah ah ah', is used for a structural
purpose.
Goldoni's encounter with the more fluent Neapolitan style had
even more consistent results. Librettos from the second half of the
1750s, including La ritomata di Londra, II mercato di Mal-
mantile, II signor dottore and La fiera di Sinigaglia, were set to music
in Venice by Domenico Fischietti (i72O?-i8io?), a Neapolitan, who
later moved to Dresden and Salzburg. But the sudden notable rise in
quality came when La buona figliola, taken from Richardson's
Pamela and adapted as a libretto in 1756, ended up four years later
in the hands of Niccold Piccinni, who came from Ban. For a
non-serious opera, it achieved a previously unequalled success,
something which could certainly not have been foreseen eight years
before, when intermezzos and burlettas were causing such a stir in
Paris. Piccinni (1728-1800) was a typical product of early-
eighteenth-century Neapolitan musical culture, a student from the
conservatoire of Sant'Onofrio and a pupil of Leo and Durante, and
nobody was more suited than he, the man who had christened his
daughters Giulia and Chiarella after the leading character and the
cousin in La Nouvelle Heloise, to receive the stream of sensibility
that was softening the heart of eighteenth-century Europe.
Cecchina, an orphan and gardener at the country house of the
Marchese di Conchiglia, is sketched with a consistent humanity that
was to become widespread: the languid minor key, the anxiety of
syncopated rhythms, the melodic caress and the rocking 6/8 are the
musical elements of her self-pity (Tartir6 . . . me ne andrb/ A cercar
la carita,/ Poverina, la Cecchina, poverina la Cecchina'5). Her
femininity is echoed in the peasant Sandrina (she finds herself in a
similar position: 'Poverina, poverina, tutto il di/ Faticar degg'io
cosl' 6 ), and the archetypal lonely woman, full of tenderness and
ready to burst into tears, certainly makes her entrance into the
history of stage music with Cecchina (in the instrumental field
collections 'pour le beau sexe' for harpsichord or clavichord showed
a similar interest). La buona figliola was not, however, just the
portrayal of a character: it was a complete dratnma giocoso. But at the
same time there was an immediately obvious division: the characters
of humble origin (or nobles endowed with worthy feelings) speak the
language of the galant style with its more sensitive formulas; the
noble characters, especially when they put on an air of arrogance,
 The rediscovery of classical antiquity
adopt the vocabulary of opera seria, with a great deal of difficult vocal
display. This helps the early identification of wickedness (e.g. the
Marchesa's aria 'Furie di donna irata') with melodic virtuosity,
inhuman because of its mechanical nature, later taken as an example
by Mozart in Die Zauberflote with the Queen of Night. Action and
music begin to show fruitful links: when Sandrina and Paoluccia
come on and go off to report to their mistress what Cecchina is doing,
their movement to and fro is emphasized each time by developing the
same theme. Symmetry as a law of musical composition establishes
itself at the same time as a vehicle for comedy. In the finale of the first
act, slanders against Cecchina (in the major key, with rapid move-
ment and syllabic, biting, staccato singing) are integrated with the
lament of the Marchese, who is in love (in the minor key, with slower
movement and expressive, legato singing). The finale's whole struc-
ture is based on this dual polarity, while the unified conception is still
secured by the use of a rudimentary rondo form.
After its christening in Rome in 1760, La buona figliola remained
in circulation for thirty years in the principal European theatres. //
mondo delta luna and / / filosofo di campagna dominated London
during the season 1760-1, and this success seemed to Burney to be a
victory for the galant taste over Handelian seriousness. In 1758
Locatelli's travelling company introduced comic opera to St Peters-
burg, where, with works by Galuppi, Fischietti and Rutini, it found
a popularity never achieved before with opera seria. At the beginning
of the 1760s, comic opera, without reforms and programmes, simply
growing from the intermezzo and the comic pastorale, had con-
quered all the countries of Europe as the other authoritative style
beside its serious sister.

11 The rediscovery of classical antiquity

Opera seria had always chosen its settings and characters from classi-
cal antiquity, drawing on Greek mythology, the histories of Livy
and Suetonius, the Aeneid, Plutarch's Lives and Ovid's Metamor-
phoses. In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, this
world was given a new lease of life, separated from contemporary
matters by an ever-decreasing division, across which it seemed
almost possible for modern ideas to join hands with antiquity.

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