Some representations of opera seria in opera buffa

Abstract

It is becoming increasingly usual to think of music of the Classical period as conveying its meanings at least in part through a rhetoric of topoi. According to this model, such elements as rhythm, texture and melody evoke both musical and extra-musical ‘echoes’. Woven into the structure of the music, these echoes form a collage of connotations from which meaning can be inferred. As a genre of its time, opera buffa is in no way exempt from this ‘combinatorial’ process, or its corollary system of associative meaning. Indeed, every level of meaning in opera buffa arises from the combination and recombination of textual, musical and dramatic elements. For example, the characters, plot types and comic riffs of opera buffa are often drawn from the commedia dell'arte; we also find stories from folk tales and fairy tales, and from fashionable novels and spoken theatre. We find gestures and scenes from opera seria and tragédie lyrique, as well as quotations from and allusions to other opere buffe. The music also ranges widely in stylistic origin and reference, moving from low comedy to elevated coloratura, from bland neutrality to affecting sentimentality, and from extended expressions of a single emotion to lightning changes in Affekt. Thus the rhetoric of topoi characteristic of instrumental music of the period is included within a structure of reference and resonance that invokes textual and dramatic ‘sources’ as well as musical ones. Opera buffa is, in other words, a fundamentally intertextual genre.