Opera
Opera
continued to be Popular throughout the period, and Italian opera was firmly
established in all the capitals of Europe.
Rossini (1792-1868) was the
most popular Italian opera composer, and his opera 'The Barber of Seville' is
still frequently given today. He
was director of the opera house at Naples, and wrote 36 operas in nineteen
years. Then, at the age of 37, with
the production of 'William Tell', he ceased to write any more, though he lived
to the age of 76!
But
this was the period when opera began to be regularly written and accepted in
other languages too. Following on
Mozart's 'Magic Flute' and Beethoven's 'Fidelio' in German, came Weber,
the first romantic German opera writer.
His 'Der Freischtz' is based on a German legend, and is full of
romantic color, as, for example, in the incantation scene, when magic bullets
are cast with, gruesome spells at midnight.
It also contains popular German peasant songs and dances.
'Euryanthe' is a German grand opera and 'Oberon' was written in English
for a London performance. Weber
intended to produce a German version, but he died before he could do-so.
Weber laid the foundation of German romantic opera, on which Wagner was
later to build.
In
France Berlioz wrote 3 romantic operas in the French language.
'Benvenuto Cellini' was a failure, though an interlude
from it became popular as the overture 'Carnaval Romain'.
'Les Troyens' was so enormous that only half of it was given in his
lifetime, while 'Beatrice and Benedict' was a light comic opera that was first
produced in Germany. So he made
little impact on French opera at the time, and composers like Rossini were much
more popular in Paris.
Russia
was another country where Italian opera held sway. But in 1836 Glinka produced
an opera 'A Life for the Czar', which is the first great opera in the Russian
language. 'Russlan and Ludmilla'
followed, and thence forward Russian opera became fully established, leading to
the works of Borodin, Rimsky Korsakov and Moussorgsky in the second half of the
century.