Tragedia Greca, Opera Italiana

Speranza In their efforts to forge the new art form, the earliest Italian composers of opera harked back to Greek tragedy. They also looked to the theory that Aristotle had identified as lying behind the making of the ancient plays. Yet it is also evident that opera was conceived in some circles as working best in the context of smaller auditoria rather than in the dramatic surroundings of large theatres. As well as providing the Renaissance world with philosophical, moral and educational ideals, the rediscovery of the Classical past had specifically artistic consequences. Musicians, poets and men of the theatre were indebted to humanist learning for any number of insights into the aesthetics and techniques of their art, and many of these insights have a direct bearing on the origins of opera. Aristotle was the Greek philosopher whose theory of art influenced early thought on opera. To begin with, the very idea of a 'work of art' designed for 'the recreation or relaxation of the mind, its noble diversion through the appreciation of beauty ... purgation and moral instruction' (B.R. Hanning, Of Poetry and Music's Power, 1980, pp. 25-6) is a Classical one. Classical Greece was historically the first civilization to record works of art intended primarily for aesthetic pleasure, and the first to discuss the philosophical and technical questions they prompted. As far as Christian civilization is concerned, it was not until the sixteenth century, in Italy, that these issues again became a matter of urgent concern. Aristotle's Poetics, a work practically unknown in the Middle Ages, acquired virtually the status of a sacred text, and occasioned a flood of critical discourse, in which the concept of the work of art, and such technical problems as subject-matter, form, imitation and catharsis were debated with unwearying relish. What Aristotle called the 'first principle' of poetics was that art was mimesis, an imitation or representation of life. In the Ancient World critics were apparently unanimous in their assent to this proposition, and in Renaissance Italy it could not be otherwise. The consequences for all the arts were everywhere apparent. Dance began to be imitative. Lyric poetry was justified as being an imitation of the passions. Composers of motets and madrigals devised musical metaphors that enabled them to imitate the ideas in the texts they set. But in view of the almost universal acceptance of Aristotle's principle of mimesis, it is hardly surprising that many critics felt that the loftiest form of art must be that which was most fully and indisputably representational: the drama. It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss the Renaissance debates on the nature of Classical drama. But a few pointers can be given to show how much opera owed to those debates. To begin with, it was in the Poetics that the humanists found drama defined as a form of Gesamtkunstwerk that employed poetry and music, mime, dance and spectacle in a single work of art. This, as the prefaces to the first operas almost invariably show, was one of the chief justifications for the attempt at composing opera. From Aristotle too came the idea that tragedy worked its effects on an audience not by appealing to their reason, but by stirring their passions. In particular by moving them to fear and pity. Once composers had satisfied themselves that music could wonderfully intensify such effects of pathos, the progress towards opera was irresistible. The type of idealizing characterization we find in early opera, indeed in by far the greater part of the Italian repertory, is another of its debts to the Classical heritage. 'The first and most important point', said Aristotle, 'is that the character should be good' (Poetics XV. 1); tragedy differs from comedy in showing men as being 'better than they really are' (II.7). In an age so enthralled with the potentialities of personality it is not surprising that the Aristotelian precept awakened sympathetic responses. Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata is, among much else, a demonstration of the widely held belief that 'the central character of a heroic poem should exhibit exemplary behaviour in respect to one of the moral virtues, and that the ideal hero should be a composite of all the virtues needed in a prince or leader' (B. Hathaway, The Age of Criticism, 1962, p. 144). When Malatesta Porta produced a mildly eccentric variant of this doctrine, according to which the hero of an epic or drama should rather be characterized by excess of emotional experiences, he brings us even closer to a recipe for the principles of characterization that were to be observed in Italian opera. Finally there was the chorus. This too became an integral part of the idea of opera only because of Aristotle's description of the essential role it played in Greek tragedy. So the establishing of opera as a type of music-drama which employed both soloists and chorus, which is heroic and idealistic in tone, and which achieves its effect by stirring and soothing the passions of the spectators, was very largely a work of neo-classical emulation. By 1600 Italian dramatists and critics had been eager students of the extant repertory of Greek tragedy for the best part of a century. Between 1502 and 1518 the entire corpus had been published by Aldo Manuzio, and translations began to be issued at much the same time, at first into Latin, later into Italian. At first sporadically, later, towards the middle of the century, with increasing regularity. The first attempt to compose an original Italian tragedy in the Classical style was Trissino's "Sofonisba" of 1515. Very rarely were such translations and imitations staged. The interest they excited was primarily literary and critical. As far as theatrical practice was concerned the Latin repertory was better known than the Greek, and within that repertory the comedies of Plautus and Terence were staged more frequently than the tragedies of Seneca. Nevertheless, among those who pondered the aesthetic problems associated with drama, among those who wrestled with the meaning of the Poetics, and dreamed of reviving the glories of the Aristotelian Gesamtkunstwerk, there is no doubt that Greek drama, particularly Sophocles, enjoyed the higher esteem. In bringing opera to birth a largely bookish knowledge of the Greek repertory was far more significant than a wide practical experience of the Latin. The ideological and technical ingredients of early opera had been fashioned by humanist scholars and musicians in the last three decades of the sixteenth century. For the first forty years of its history the new art-form remained intimately bound to the kind of world in which such men had flourished: to aristocratic academies and art-loving courts. By the middle of the seventeenth century it was to become, in some cities at least, a widely popular commercial entertainment, but to begin with its home was the court -- the Medici court at Florence, the Gonzaga court at Mantova, the Barberini household in Rome -- and its function was to adorn such great festivities as royal weddings, princely birthdays, or state visits. Peri's "Orfeo", the first opera to have survived in its entirety, owes its origin to such an occasion, an all-female-spectator evening during the wedding by proxy of Maria de'Medici and King Henry IV of France in October 1600. Several musicians of the new art participated in the festivities that marked this event. Guarini and Cavalieri composed "La contesa fra Giunone e Minerva" to act as an interlude in the great banquet at the Palazzo Vecchio that followed the wedding on 5 October. Next day, on 6 October 1600, in the Pitti palace, "Orfeo" had its première, and on 9 October, what was probably regarded as the pièce de réisistance, Caccini's setting of Chiabrera's "Il Rapimento di Cefalo", was performed before an audience of 3,800 guests at the Uffizi. Much of Monteverdi's early dramatic music was commissioned for similar occasions. "Arianna abbandonata da Teseo", the "Ballo delle ingrate" and the intermedi for Guarini's "Idropica were" all composed for the festivities held to celebrate the wedding of Francesco Gonzaga with the Princess Margherita of Savoy. To begin with, opera was very much a connoisseur's entertainment. In the prologue of Peri's "Orfeo" the spirit of Tragedy, 'who loves deep sighs and weeping', appears 'with smiling face'--for no shadow of sorrow must fall over the royal nuptials--and the promise of 'joyful notes' that will 'furnish delight for the noble heart'. Some noble hearts were, we may be sure, delighted by the opera, as the marchese Jacopo Corsi had been 'delighted beyond measure' by Peri's "Dafne" a few years earlier (Marco da Gagliano in A. Solerti, Le origini del melodramma, 1903, p. 80). But they were probably few in number compared with those who revelled in the spectacle of the intermedi or in the boisterous intrigue of a spoken comedy. In a letter to Duke Ferdinand's secretary, Marcello Accolti, Cavalieri reported a resounding flop: 'boredom and irritation' among a group of visiting Roman clergy; 'the music tedious ... like the chanting of the Passion'. And Giovanni Bardi was apparently incredulous that he should not have been commissioned to stage another comedy with intermedi on the model of the great festivities of 1589 (C.V. Palisca in The Musical Quarterly, vol. 49, 1963, pp. 351-2). The fact that both the libretto and the score of Peri's "Orfeo" were published does not reflect a popular triumph. Rather the determination of a group of prosperous and loyal Florentine noblemen to do honour to the great occasion. For some years after 1600 opera was one of several musico-dramatic genres that might grace a festival. Intermedi, mascherate and dramatic ballets continued to flourish for many years, and may well have been more popular with the larger part of the audience. As we have seen, Giovanni de' Bardi (Conte di Vernio) certainly preferred the spoken play with intermedi to the opera that he had involuntarily helped to bring to birth. And those noble AMATEURS who prided themselves on their accomplishments as maskers and dancers would have had even less cause to be partial to a form that depended so much on PROFESSIONAL (i.e. non-amateur, ungentlemanly) skills. The long struggle in which opera asserted itself against the older established forms of courtly entertainment is reflected in the terminology of the new form. It was some decades before such simple generic titles as 'dramma musicale' or 'melodrama' (or 'tragedia per musica') were thought a sufficiently clear indication of the nature of the piece. The term 'opera' -- actually, short for 'opera da rappresentarsi in musica'- - appears only in 1647, in the subtitle to a collection of librettos published in Ancona by Prospero Bonarelli (Solerti 1903: 248-9). Before that, a profusion of such terms as 'favola in musica', 'dramma pastorale recitato ... con le musiche di ...', 'tragedia rappresentata in musica', 'tragedia per musica', 'canto rappresentativo', 'favoletto da rappresentarsi cantando', etc. testified to the flexibility and variety of emphases with which men had blended drama and music. But in an age that was fascinated by the possibilities of combining the arts, and particularly of recharging the traditional arts with dramatic movement, it was inevitable that sooner or later opera should come to be seen as the 'baroque art-form par excellence' (M.F. Robinson, Opera Before Mozart, 1966, p. 13). In his address 'to the readers', Marco da Gagliano, the composer of Dafne (Mantua 1608), praises opera in terms that were to be repeated, echoed and paraphrased by Italian theorists for more than two centuries: "a truly princely spectacle, pleasing beyond all others, since it is the form in which is united every most noble delight; such as the invention and arrangement of the story, judgement (sentenza), style, sweetness of verse, the art of music, the ensemble of voices and instruments, perfection of song, elegance of dance and gesture; and it can also be said that the art of painting, as in the perspectives and the costumes, plays no small part; so that the mind is able to enjoy at one time all the most noble feelings inspired by the most pleasing arts that the human mind has discovered. (Solerti 1903: 82) Opera was invented, experimented with, and established as an art-form in the period of about 15 years from the early 1590s to the Mantuan festivities of 1608, at which Monteverdi's Arianna was first heard. Its essential quality was the way it co-ordinated and synthesized a profusion of established art-forms--as Gagliano's panegyric makes clear. More specifically it arose when the relationship between music and drama, which had always been close, was reassessed in the light of certain preoccupations and ideals--the neo-classic inspiration provided by Greek drama, the rediscovery of the affective powers of declamatory song, the cultivation of the pastoral. It was thanks to these things that the traditional types of dramatic music--where music was incidental to, or decorated, or acted as a diversion within the drama--gradually came to be superseded by opera--where music permeates the whole drama, where music is in fact the medium through which the drama is expressed. There was scarcely one of the first generation of opera composers who did not rationalize the new genre by explaining that it was an attempt to revive the tragic art of the Ancient Greeks. Cavalieri's publisher, Alessandro Guidotti, Rinuccini, Peri, and Gagliano all allude to the belief that Greek tragedy was 'sung in its entirety', and describe their own music-dramas as experiments to ascertain whether or not modern music could achieve similar effects. No doubt there was something of mere humanist habit in such allusions. But it is not until we get to Vitali's "Aretusa" (Rome 1620) that we find a composer who refrains from it, and always the allusion is quite specific. Cavalieri, Peri and Gagliano would not have written music-drama had they not believed that the Greeks had written it. Of the musical elements of opera quite the most important was what came to be known as recitative, and what at this early date is best described as monody or stile rappresentativo. The first opera composers could teach the older madrigalists nothing about the arts of choral writing, or of instrumental and balletic writing. But monody was a field in which they did develop new expressive and dramatic resources. The new art of singing lent itself particularly well to 'moving the passions' by heightening the emotional language of the verse. Gagliano was generous in his tribute to Peri's skill in this style: 'Signor Jacopo Peri discovered that artful manner of declaiming in song which all Italy admires." "I should say that no one can fully understand the nobility and power of his arias who has not heard them sung by him himself." "For he gives them such a grace, and imprints the emotions of the words on the hearers in such a way as to compel them to weep and rejoice as he wills. (Solerti 1903: 81). This power of monodic singing to move the affections was not infrequently seen as analogous to the way in which Greek tragedy stirred pity and terror. But if Greek tragedy provided the inspiration for opera, and monody the technique by which the ideal of continuous music-drama might be realized, there is no doubt that pastoral provided the ethos in which the new form could seem natural. Perhaps in Ancient Greece Agamemnon or Medea did wrestle with their moral dilemmas in song, and perhaps the monodic style could have lent unbearable poignancy to the plight of Oedipus. But as long as composers were experimenting with music-drama they felt the need to work in a genre where music seemed as plausible a medium as possible. The pastoral provided this. As Doni explained, it was more poetic than comedies or sacred plays and as 'it consists almost always of amorous subjects and has a flowery and sweet style ... it could be said to have melody in all its parts, especially as there are represented deities, nymphs and shepherds from that far distant age when music was natural and speech like poetry' (Solerti 1903: 203). Prescriptions for and descriptions of the performance of early opera make it clear that it was essentially a chamber-music genre. It made little use of the spectacular scenic effects or of the sumptuous orchestral resources favoured in the intermedi. Several commentators insisted that it worked best, not in great theatres, still less in the open air--where much Renaissance theatre music was played--but in halls of a comparatively modest size. 'In rooms that are too large it is not possible for everyone to hear the words, so it would be necessary for the singer to force his voice, which diminishes the effect. So much music becomes tedious when the words are inaudible' ('A' lettori', Rappresentazione di anima e di corpo, in Solerti 1903: 6). Clearly Cavalieri's reason for recommending intimacy of scale was his belief that solo song in the new stile rappresentativo was the most important single element in dramatic music. Only when singing was uncluttered by elaborate instrumental ensembles, only when there need be no concern about audibility, could the actor-singer work the full magic of affective song on the audience. Pietro della Valle's encomium of the modern style of singing introduced by the Florentines is manifestly an evocation of the skills required in early opera: 'the art of piano and forte, of gradual crescendo, of graceful diminuendo, of expressing the passions, of judiciously underlining the words and their meaning; of brightening the voice or of making it sorrowful; of making it pitiful or ardent as required' (Solerti 1903: 162). The art of performing early opera was the art of performing monody, and the proper home for both was the princely chamber.