Opera

    Italy still continued to be the chief home of opera, and opera in the Italian language, with Italian singers, was exported from there into other Countries.  It became very conventionalized, with the singers being considered more important than anyone else, including the Composer, and being idolized as popular favorites, like the film stars of today.

    But Frenchmen went on developing opera in their own language, with its own distinctive features, paying more attention to the words, the drama, and the dancing than did the Italians. Rameau (1683-1764) wrote a number of French operas towards the end of his life, of which the best known is 'Castor and Pollux'.  He also wrote many ballets, including 'Les Indes galantes'.  In addition to his compositions, he is famous for a treatise on harmony, which analyzed and explained the new ideas about chords and their inversions, tonality and key relationships.

    But Rameau did not have it all his own way in France, though he was supported by his friend Voltaire.  There were Frenchmen, including the great Rousseau, who disagreed with his theories and his operas, and who said that opera should be in the Italian style and the Italian language, as the French language was not suited to singing.  People took sides in this famous quarrel, which became known as the " Guerre des Bouffons ".

    Opera spread into Germany also, but at first it was Italian opera, sung in Italian.  Hamburg was the first place to produce opera in German.  Handel played the violin in the opera house there for a time, and even wrote one or two German operas.  But he preferred the Italian kind, and he traveled to Italy as a young man and produced operas there.  Then, when he came to England, he did his best to popularize Italian opera in England.  He thought of himself mainly as an opera composer, and he wrote many Italian operas for production in London.  He imported Italian singers who sang in Italian, side by side with English singers who sang in English in the same opera!  There were a great many conventions about the number of singers, the type of arias they were to sing, and the part of the opera in which they were to sing them.  Male sopranos were common, and were the spoilt darlings of the public.  Although there are many lovely arias in Handel's operas, which are still sung today, the operas are rarely performed in their entirety because they seem so artificial to us.  They brought Handel fame at the time, but they caused him to become bankrupt more than once, because of rival factions, a rival opera house, and a fickle public, which did not really accept Italian opera.  It was his lack of success in establishing Italian opera in England that made him turn to writing oratorio, the type of work for which he is, today, most famous.  

    GIuck (1714-1787) is the other great opera composer of this period.  He was a Bohemian who was educated in Prague, and traveled to Milan, London, Germany, Copenhagen and Paris before settling in Vienna when he was 35. Wherever he went he produced operas of the conventional Italian kind, and became famous fur them.  But he began to have doubts about the artistic value of this kind of opera, and encouraged by a new librettist, who had lived in Paris and heard French opera, he startled Vienna in 1762, when he was 48, by producing 'Orpheus' in a completely new style.

    In 1767 he produced another similar opera, 'Alceste', and this time he wrote a preface explaining his theories.  The true office of music was to serve poetry by means of expression and by following the situations of the story without interrupting the action.  So the da capo aria was out of place, as was also the vocal coloratura, which the Italians loved.  He ceased to use the harpsichord and recitativo secco, and adopted a stromentato or arioso style which anticipated the continuous texture which was later adopted by Wagner.  

    In 1773 Gluck visited Paris, where his views were likely to be more sympathetically received.  He produced French versions of 'Orpheus' and 4 Alceste', as well as some new operas with French texts.  But the French loved artistic controversy, and they set up an Italian composer in opposition to him, so that it seemed like a continuation of the Guerre des Bouffons.  Partisans of one side hissed the operas of the other!  But Gluck’s reforms affected the whole course of the future history of opera, and laid the foundations for the work of Wagner.  'Orpheus' is still in the operatic repertoire.