1803 – 1830 Beethoven and Rossini

1803 Beethoven's Eroica Symphony
1804-14 Napoleon, Emperor of France
1814-24 Louis XVIII, France
1815 Waterloo
1824-30 Charles X

This generation must be subdivided: 1803-15 was Beethoven's second style period and time of greatest influence, including symphonies 3-8 and Fidelio, and 1815-27 was his third style period in which he revived the art of counterpoint, including the Ninth Symphony, Missa solemnis and "Grosse Fuge" for string quartet. Schubert composing in the second half of the period led the transition to Romanticism. Rossini and Weber's operas also fell into the second half of the period.

 

Italian Opera

The last generation of the Neapolitan tradition, led by Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868), composed the last important roles for castrati and last used recitative secco. This is the last generation of opera seria. Rossini began to write out the important virtuosic ornamentation in his 38 operas composed from 1810 to 1829, including the serious operas Tancredi (1813) and Otello (1816), and the comic operas L'Italiana in Algeri (1813), La Cenerentola (1817), and Il Barbiere di Siviglia (1816).

French Opera

Heroic operas in the tradition of Gluck continued with La Vestale (1807) by Gasparo Spontini (1774-1851) and Joseph (1807) by Nicolas Méhul (1763-1817).

German Opera

Beethoven's Fidelio (1808) was strongly influenced by the revolutionary French operas of Cherubini. Transitional works were Undine (1813) by E.T.A. Hoffman (1776-1822) and Faust (1816) by Ludwig Spohr (1784-1859) The model for German Romantic opera was established with Der Freischütz (1821) by Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826). Less successful were his Euryanthe (1823) and Oberon (1826). Some common features were (a) sonata-allegro overture, (b) spoken dialogue, including melodrama in Fidelio Freischütz, (c) chorus, (d) dramatic arias and (e) important orchestral accompaniment.

Lied

Though the simple strophic style of the Second Berlin Song School prevailed in the early period, the through-composed Romantic Lied was established with Franz Schubert's (1797-1828) "Gretchen am Spinnrad" (1814). His over 600 songs included the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin (1823) and Winterreise (1827) on texts by Wilhelm Müller. Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte (1816) is considered the first song cycle. Carl Loewe (1796-1869) was most successful in songs in the ballade form.

Overture

Beethoven's "Cariolan" (1807) and "Egmont" (1810) were overtures for plays. Fidelio had four overtures composed at different times: Leonore I (1805), Leonore II (1805), Leonore III (1806) and Fidelio (1814).

Gioachino Rossini

These are some of the operas by Rossini:

• La Scala di Seta (9 May 1812) libretto by Giuseppe Maria Foppa
• Tancredi (6 Feb 1813) libretto by Gaetano Rossi
• L'Italiana in Algeri #55 (22 May 1813) libretto by Angelo Anelli
• Il Turco in Italia (14 Aug 1814) libretto by Felice Romani
• Il Barbiere di Siviglia #9 (20 Feb 1816) libretto by Cesare Sterbini
• Otello (4 Dec 1816) libretto by Francesco Maria Berio di Salsa
• Armida (11 Nov 1817) libretto by Giovanni Schmidt
• La Cenerentola #29 (25 Jan 1817) libretto by Jacopo Ferretti
• Ermione (27 March 1819) libretto by Andrea Leone Tottola
• La Donna del Lago (24 Oct 1819) libretto by Andrea Leone Tottola
• Maometto II (3 Dec 1820) Libretto by Cesare della Valle
• Matilda di Shabran (24 Feb 1821) libretto by Jacopo Ferretti
• Semiramide (3 Feb 1823) libretto by Gaetano Rossi
• Il Viaggio a Reims #83 (19 June 1825) libretto by Luigi Balocchi (Paris)
• Le siège de Corinthe (9 Oct 1826) libretto by Luigi Balocchi and Alexandre Soumet
• Le Comte Ory (20 Aug 1828) libretto by Eugène Scribe
• Guillaume Tell (3 Aug 1829) libretto by Victor-Joseph-Ėtienne de Jouy, Hippolyte-Louis-Florent Bis and Armand Marrast

There are many more, but the regularly performed operas are included here.  I have bolded those operas that have played at the Met.  Rossini is the first Italian composer whose works have continued on in the repertoire.  He trained himself in the orchestral style of Mozart and composed a greater percentage of a work than was generally the case.  Donizetti, Bellini and Verdi followed in his steps.

He composed no operas after William Tell.  There may have been more than one reason.  Current thinking points to his ill health.  However we may still point to the presence of Giacomo Meyerbeer and Fromental Halévy and the sudden popularity of Grand Opera.  This new style did not appeal to Rossini.

The Invention of Opera

Opera was invented.  It's an odd story, actually.

Everything about it was suddenly new. To give you an idea, here is a contemporary madrigal by Carlo Gesualdo.



This is what European music sounded like before opera. It is very important to notice how sometimes the different voices sing the same melody one after the other, sometimes in different keys. Soprano sings it, baritone sings it, etc. This is the standard style of the Renaissance and was invented in the Netherlands.  This piece is relatively modern for Renaissance music, so often they all sing together.

Florentine Camerata

Something I cannot find in any book is that if you are walking along a street in Florence and happen to notice it, there will be this sign.

It stands on the side of this unassuming building where met the famous Florentine Camerata.  This is a rough translation:  "In this house of Bardi, Giovanni, conte di Vernio, who fought with great valor against Siena and Malta, held a studio on science and letters, especially poetry and music.  They studied the stories from ancient Greek drama which were set to music, and they invented the sung recitative and reformed melody, creating the musical art of modern times." 

Here is the building in Florence where the sign stands.
 

Count Bardi founded the group in about 1573.  Among the members were the theorist Vincenzo Galilei (father of Galileo Galilei), the composer Giulio Caccini, the poet Ottavio Rinuccini, the musician Emilio de' Cavalieri  and the composer Jacopo Peri.  Bardi collaborated with these and other Florentine musicians in court entertainments from 1579 to 1608. 

Briefly, they were trying to recreate Greek drama.  The word camerata was newly minted to refer to Bardi's group.  The Camerata read everything available at the time and speculated on the actual experience of Greek drama.  They concluded that in a proper play in ancient Greece all the words were sung.  They also concluded that there was no place for counterpoint in such a drama, and composed their own pieces with simple chordal accompaniment.

Hit Tunes

This piece by Caccini from Le Nuove Musiche is in the new style and should be compared to the piece above.



Here is another example.



You can hear how different this sounds from the Gesualdo. There are broken chords and small ornaments, but no counterpoint during the singing.  The point was to emphasize the words.

I apologize for this long sample with no visuals. There are words in Italian and English and some pretty fantastic singing.  I want to try to include a complete opera in every chapter.  The story is of the lost Euridice and Orfeo's brave attempt to rescue her from hell.  It is the first complete surviving opera, but not the first written one.   Caccini's version (some of the numbers are supposed to be by Peri) of Euridice was first performed at the Pitti Palace in Florence on 5 December 1602. This is across the Arno from the Duomo and the Casa di Bardi, and in summer you can sit in the same courtyard and hear music today.



It is strange and unusual but arguably the greatest thing ever invented by a committee.  The words are very clear.  You are unlikely to ever see this piece performed.



Had enough?  Go to Puccini.

Love it and want more?  See the Venetian operas later in the century.

I love Baroque but most people only know Bach and Handel.  Jump to Handel.

Claudio Monteverdi

(1567-1643)

Monteverdi was an extraordinarily gifted composer who composed successfully in all the styles of his era.  This is astounding because of how radically styles changed from what is called pervading imitation of the Renaissance to the homophonic style of the early Baroque.  His L'Orfeo is the earliest opera still performed often today.

As his career progressed, he moved to Venice to work at San Marco.  He wasted no time by starting Venetian commercial opera.

His most popular operas are:

• L'Orfeo (1607) to a libretto by Alessandro Striggio, first performed in Mantua.

• Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (SV 325, The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland), Librettist Giacomo Badoaro Language Italian Based on Homer's Odyssey Premiere 1639–1640 Carnival season Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice 

• L'incoronazione di Poppea  (SV 308, The Coronation of Poppea) with a libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello, first performed in 1643 also in Venice.

Many of his works have been lost forever. This piece is all that is left of one of his earliest operas.

Monteverdi's L'Orfeo

The Opera

First performed in 1607, the music is right at the birth of the Italian Baroque, near the time of the death of Elizabeth I of England.  This is the earliest opera to appear in the repertoire in the 21st century.

Since the purpose of the Florentine Camerata was to recreate Greek drama, the stories of these earliest operas come from ancient European literature, but curiously not from Greek drama.  There doesn't seem to be even one example of an actual Greek drama used as the basis for an opera by these early opera composers.  Their operas were more likely to be from the Roman Ovid's Metamorphosis, a set of transformation myths.  Early opera composers felt that a singer who could charm the gods to release his lover from hell was the best possible subject for a work about singing.

Early operas produced in Mantua were Claudio Monteverdi's (1567-1643) L'Orfeo (1607), considered the outstanding example of early opera, and his Ariana (1608), now lost.  Today L'Orfeo, the most famous of the early operas, stands at number 72 in the list of most frequently performed operas.  L'Orfeo is unusual for the fact that it includes brass instruments, instead of just the usual strings and continuo.  All the high voices were sung by castrati.

There are no hit tunes from L'Orfeo, but this is as close as we come.  Monteverdi was a far better musician than either Caccini or Peri, in fact probably the greatest of his era.  He composed in all the styles of his time and place, and probably invented a few himself.  You can hear that this music is far more sophisticated though it is only a very few years later.
 
The Story

We are greeted by a prologue like in Pagliacci.
 
 

 

Act I

Orfeo and his Euridice are in a field with nymphs and shepherds.  There is dancing.  He sings of his happiness and goes back to town to prepare for his wedding, leaving Euridice behind.

Act II

Orfeo returns to find that Euridice has been bitten by a snake and has died.  Because he holds so much faith in the power of his singing, he decides to descend into hell and plead with Pluto for her freedom.

Act III

Orfeo arrives at the gates of hell and tries to persuade the ferryman to take him in.  When this doesn't work, Orfeo soothes him to sleep and steals his boat.

Act IV

Now we are in the underworld, and Orfeo has persuaded Proserpina to allow him to take Euridice.  She in turn persuades Plutone to allow this, but he agrees only on the condition that Orfeo must not look back at her until they reach the surface.  He starts out boldly but soon gives in and looks back.  Euridice fades away.

Act V

Back in Thrace there is lamenting and a renunciation of love.  Apollo descends and takes Orfeo away with him into the heavens.  Apparently there was originally an ending where Orfeo is assaulted by followers of Bacchus and driven off.

Complete Film

This is an excellent recreation of that opera with Harnoncourt conducting.


 

Had enough?  Go back to Puccini.

Love it and want more?  See the Venetian operas later in the century.

I love Baroque but want only Handel and Vivaldi.

Information About Castrati

Opera from Monteverdi to Rossini contains a dirty little secret: the castrato. Dramatic presentations in Rome in this period, whether operas or oratorios, used all male casts, because of the church’s complete oppression of women. For some reason not clear to modern minds it was felt better to castrate men so that they would retain their high child voices than to allow women to appear in public performances. The Roman opera, from its origin in the 1620’s, performed with all male casts with castrated men playing the female roles.  L'Orfeo by Monteverdi also used all men for the high parts.

The notes to Cecilia Bartoli’s Sacrificium goes into detail about when, where, how and how frequently the castration took place.

Outside Rome, though, the castrati generally played most of the male roles and women sang the female parts. That means that throughout the entire period from Monteverdi to Rossini major male parts were assigned to sopranos and altos.  The dramatic tenor who became the hero in opera in the romantic period had not been invented yet.  I maintain that Florestan in Beethoven's Fidelio was the first dramatic tenor.

It is virtually never the case with comic operas that roles are intended for castrati, which explains why we are so familiar with Mozart’s comedies and only rarely see his more serious operas. There are no castrato parts in the comedies. Cherubino is part of another tradition—assigning teenage boy roles to women.  Castrati were big guys. They just had high voices and no beards, like any eunuch. Cherubino needs to appear pre-pubescent and harmless, and a woman is better for that.  Mozart intended Cherubino to be sung by a woman.

Why castrati? The only possible explanation is the sound. Early opera must simply have meant the sound of castrati singing. The original idea was to eliminate the requirement for women singing in public, but soon many of them became celebrities.

This is a huge body of opera and encompasses all of opera seria, including all the operas of Handel. Mozart, Gluck and Rossini all composed for this voice and all wrote major roles for castrati.  Opera seria is the Italian term for serious opera of the type invented in Naples.

All included roles for castrati which no longer exist in the modern world, and to present these operas to modern audiences this problem has to be solved. Just using the available videos we know easily which solution has worked the best: the Marilyn Horne solution. She can be seen in all her glory on the Bel Canto Society’s Semiramide. For years the San Francisco Opera only presented opera seria when Marilyn was available. In my memory the stunning Orlando Furioso of Vivaldi stands out. As long as Marilyn was still singing, this was the preferred solution.



One solution is to transpose the role down an octave and give it to a tenor or baritone. This was the solution in Maria Ewing’s performance of Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea. The role of Nerone is supposed to be sung by a castrato. To accept the tenor solution you must accept that the music now sounds very different. A duet for two sopranos is quite a different sound from a duet for soprano and tenor. It is also difficult to find coloratura tenors capable of executing the ornamentation. This solution is not preferred.  For those who hate cross-dressing, this is the preferred solution.



Contrast with this version where Nerone is sung by Alice Coote in the original pitch.  In both examples Poppea is sung by Danielle de Niese.



Now that Marilyn has retired we have to move on. In Mozart's Mitridate Re di Ponto there are three castrato parts. In the video I reviewed two were assigned to women and one to a countertenor or falsettist.  If the castrato was a true soprano, it is difficult to find a countertenor capable of singing that high. In Mitridate the part assigned to a falsettist is the lowest of the three.

One curious fact about countertenors is that they’re usually baritones. Maybe it’s easier for a baritone to slip completely into falsetto at a lower pitch. This is key, because the whole role has to be sung in falsetto, not just the high parts. Here is an excellent discussion of how falsetto works. It explains why the tone is so uninteresting.

In Idomeneo the castrato part is sung by Cecilia Bartoli. In Julius Caesar Cecilia sang the heroine, and the three castrato parts were sung by two men and a woman. Julius Caesar was sung by a man—Franco Fagioli. He was actually quite spectacular for a countertenor, but slips occasionally out of his falsetto on the low notes.



So those are the three solutions: transpose it down, give it to a woman, give it to a man singing falsetto. None are ideal. Transposing it down violates the musical intentions. Giving it to a woman creates a certain amount of gender confusion. Marilyn was not very tall, but wore big hats. Susan Graham plays men more often than not and is quite convincing. She was excellent in Alcina. The countertenor solution might appeal to many, but there were no countertenors in Italian Baroque opera.

This is strictly from my imagination, but a castrato voice has to have sounded very much like a powerful woman’s voice. Marilyn was probably not too far off. The one thing we can be absolutely sure of is that they did not sound like falsettists.

Venetian Opera

The first public opera house, Teatro San Cassiano, opened in Venice in 1637.  The most important feature of Venetian opera was the fact that it completely depended on making money from the public.  Florentine and Roman operas were paid for by the ruling class.  

Musical style traits for opera in seventeenth century Venice were

(a) separation of recitative and aria,

(b) use of instrumental ritornelli,

(c) very little chorus or ballet to control expenses,

(d) bel canto singing, "Beautiful singing," smooth melodic arias in triple meter over simplified harmonies, separated from recitative, dominated opera oratorio and cantata.

(e) elaborate stage machinery necessary for the miraculous plot conclusions, "deus ex machine." 

 

(f)  women in the cast, and

 

(g)  no separation of comedy and trajedy.

The bel canto aria was fully established in Didone (1641) by Francesco Cavalli (1602-76), also Giasone (1649), La Calisto (1651) and Ercole Amante (1662).





 
Early examples of this school were the final operas of Monteverdi: Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria (1641) and La Incoronazione di Poppea (1642).  These two operas will appear in modern day productions.

For me a famous modern production of a Venetian style opera is Francesco Cavalli's La Calisto, a work from 1651.

I very much recommend the René Jacobs version of this opera available on the film below.  It is available on YouTube in audio only, but you may buy it on Amazon with full staging.

These people are up to no good. I have a very deep feeling that this production will tell you more about Venetian opera than anything I could possibly write, or anything you will read in textbooks. Gods and goddesses come and go on bizarre stage machinery. Many claims of chastity are proclaimed, but none are actually maintained. Giove starts out as a baritone, and then makes a fabulous change over to falsetto in his disguise as Diana. There is wonderful coloratura throughout and a complete utter lack of pomposity.

Here is a different production with more famous singers and rather bad video.  

 

Viva Italia.