Opera Production Research Articles

Opera production and its resources

Abstract Opera Production and its Resources, edited by Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. The History of Italian Opera, Part 2 (Systems), volume 4. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1998. xviii + 439 pp. ISBN 0 226 47012 1. Reviewed by Winton Dean Opera in Context: Essays on Historical Staging from the Late Renaissance to the Time of Puccini, edited by Mark A. Radice. Portland, Oregon, Amadeus Press, 1998. 410 pp. ISBN 1 57467 032 8. Reviewed by Winton Dean

Reading and staging again

In a recent issue of this journal, David J. Levin proposed an approach to evaluating the work of directors and producers of opera. The idea that one might be able to theorise the difference between good and bad stagings is appealing, not least because many of us would like to feel able to raise the standard of debate on this subject. Most public discussions of opera productions (or at least of those productions that generate public discussion) can be predicted in advance, more or less verbatim; the persistence of the arguments used on all sides is in itself enough to suggest that little progress is being made. On the other hand, it is not easy to see how academic debate contributes. Theatre is where operas enter public discourse. Performance might seem like a decisive act of interpretation – choices have to be made about how to present the given work – but, paradoxically, it also marks the point at which opera escapes the attentions of the academy in favour of a constituency which is (presumably) less grounded in theory and less committed to consciously interpretative acts. With understandable reservations, Levin suggests the use of commercially available videos to analyse details of a staging, but details of this sort are not likely to contribute significantly to a theatre audience's experience of how a production works and what it has to say. Videotape permits us the mastery of freeze-frame enquiry, and at the same time confines us within the flattened perspective chosen at each moment by the camera's eye. Both its advantages and its drawbacks are incommensurate with theatre, where (especially in opera, with its simultaneous but distinct modes) the stream of information is diverse and continuous, and our eye moves in relative freedom, never capturing the totality of the stage. One might draw an analogous distinction between academic criticism, which works by isolating certain elements of the ‘text’ or its contexts and subjecting them to intense scrutiny, and the more holistic act of sitting in the opera-house watching a ‘work’ unfold. The pause button creates a sequence of discrete images submitted to the critic's intellectual play. In the theatre, a staging is more likely to achieve its effects through what we might call its ‘feel’, its general character and stance. When Peter Sellars setCosì fan tuttein a diner, the air of incongruous modernity – conveyed through costume, set, the characters' ways of behaving–must have determined the audience's sense of his interpretation far more powerfully than (for example) the fact that he had Ferrando and Gugliemo sing ‘Secondate, aurette amiche’ in their own characters rather than their assumed ones.

The virtual orchestra; pedagogical and creative issues

The interactive multichannel computer music system known as the ‘‘Virtual Orchestra’’ has been used several times in professional opera and theater as an alternative to a live pit orchestra. The technical issues associated with this emerging technology, and the logistical problems of implementing it are presented in a companion paper. This paper describes the equally important issues regarding the creative and pedagogical impact this technology will have on the industry. In particular, the paper suggests that many of the fundamental premises of opera production will change as the industry begins to retool. This would include the way opera is rehearsed and performed, how it is created and disseminated, and how it will adjust to the changing demographics of the country. In addition, the paper addresses the notion of the technologist/musician and examines the role of education and professional training in computer music and musical acoustics.

The Quay Brothers: Choreographed Chiaroscuro, Enigmatic and Sublime

Twins Stephen and Timothy Quay are among the most accomplished animation filmmakers to emerge from under the umbrella of Britain's Channel 4, which funds independents. The Street of Crocodiles, made in 1986, is their best-known animation film and has a puppet as its central character. Besides puppet films, the Quays' work includes animated shorts, biographical documentaries, and TV station breaks. They also design sets for theater and opera productions on various European stages and can count pop videos among their commissions. The combination of striking decors and unique puppets used in their films, their attention to the “liberation of the mistake,” and their casual and lingering close-ups produce an ingenious alchemy of animated cinema..

Reading a staging/Staging a reading

In February of 1929, the German National Party raised a matter of pressing concern in the Prussian State Parliament: the party requested a parliamentary investigation into ‘the transformation of the State Opera at the Platz der Deutschen Republik (popularly known as the Kroll Opera) into a laboratory for Bolshevik art experiments’. The crisis had become particularly acute in the wake of the Kroll Opera's production ofDer fliegende Holländer, which had been premièred a few weeks earlier on 15 January 1929 and which, according to the party, brazenly ‘mocked the spirit of Richard Wagner’. For anyone who has worked on Wagner or, for that matter, simply attended performances of his works, the sentiments come as no surprise. Indeed, the fact that they arose in the wake of Otto Klemperer's and Jiirgen Fehling's famously abstract production (with sets by Ewald Dülberg) make them almost predictable. Fehling and Klemperer incurred the wrath of the National Party for producing what I want to call a ‘critical reading’ of Wagner's text. In Klemperer's and Fehling's reading, the Dutchman's ship may be anchored in the mid-nineteenth century, but it is not permanently mired there. And that is precisely what enraged the National Party, just as years later Patrice Chereau would incur the wrath of countless like-minded Wagnerians, whose recourse to the official channels of government for the redress of their aesthetic grievances was, however, no longer so direct.

Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth Century London. Volume I: The King's Theatre, Haymarket, 1778-1791 (review)

Reviewed by: Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth Century London. Volume I: The King’s Theatre, Haymarket, 1778–1791 Byron Nelson Italian Opera In Late Eighteenth Century London. Volume I: The King’S Theatre, Haymarket, 1778–1791. Curtis Price, Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995; pp. xxv + 698. $85.00 cloth. Although the title announces a narrow topic, this study of the production of Italian opera in the space of a dozen years at one theatre in late eighteenth-century London proves richly rewarding. The product of immense scholarly labor, the book provides a meticulous reconstruction of the financial, legal and artistic milieu in which the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, presented opera and ballet from June 1778, when the playwright Richard B. Sheridan acquired the company, through the fire which gutted the theatre in June 1789. The trio of authors present “a full-dress account” (viii) of the company’s fortunes simply because (as they state with needless modesty) the King’s Theatre “housed an ambitious and interesting company in the 1780s” (vii). Although the figures at the center of their study are scarcely towering presences now—such as Giovanni Andrea Gallini, William Taylor and Gasparo Paccheriotti—numerous great figures do appear, if only fleetingly in these pages—Luigi Cherubini, Haydn, the “London” Bach and Sir John Soane among them. Had Mozart accepted the company’s invitation to come to London in 1791, he might have been spared his early death and enjoyed a long career like Handel’s. This was a transitional period, between the death of Handel and the rise of Romantic opera; none of the operas presented by the company remains in the repertory, and even the idea of a canon of operas had not yet come into existence. In this era, the repertory was determined by the singers, among whom the leading castrati, such as Paccherotti, Rubinelli and Marchesi, drew the crowds. We are told that the audiences came to hear the “primo uomo,” who then was a castrato, not a tenor, and that they enjoyed hearing a variety of singers and watching a generous share of dances, which followed each act of the operas. Far from presenting the latest Italian operatic hits in reasonable facimiles of their European originals, the King’s Theatre favored “pasticcios,” in which the scores were cobbled together from many different composers and operas. The notion of the pre-eminence of the composer and the autonomy of the operatic score lay in the future, and the concept of a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk would have baffled the King’s team. In the 1780s, the operas usually had to be new; Gallini justified his 1783 revival of Handel’s Giulio Cesare by pronouncing it “ancient music but tolerably good” (373). The King’s Theatre in Sheridan’s first season boasted the services of both the estimable Antonio Sacchini and Johann Christian Bach, whose La clemenza di Scipione is properly hailed by the authors as “the high-water mark of Italian opera in London” in the period of this study (195). But even the best operas often left little impression on the fickle audiences. Cherubini’s impressive Giulio Sabio was yanked after a single performance, and Haydn’s long-awaited L’anima del philosofo was never completed or staged, for reasons the authors ponder at some length. One area which could have been further explored is the composition of the King’s audience: who attended, and how much did they pay? One of the book’s most valuable features is its examination of the season-by-season repertory. The reader will find generous discussions of the plots, singers, and performance history and several valuable (but frustratingly brief) musical illustrations. There are intriguing discussions of forgotten operas which seem worthy of rediscovery, such as Sacchini’s Enea e Lavinia, which might be paired profitably with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. But often only the “favorite airs” of these operas survive, with the manuscripts having been casually plundered to serve other pasticcios. While theatre buffs will enjoy the season-by-season glimpses at the repertory, they will find the chronicle of the daily squabbles among the managers, singers, creditors, and lawyers all too drearily...

Intorno a Locatelli: Studi in occasione del tricentenario della nascita di Pietro Antonio Locatelli (1695-1764)

Intorno a Locatelli: Studi in occasione del tricentenario della nascita di Pietro Antonio Locatelli (1695-1764). Edited by Albert Dunning. (Speculum musicae, I. 1.) Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1995. [2 vols. (xiv, 1250 p.) ISBN 88-7096-143-5. L250.000.00.] This massive two-volume collection of twenty substantial essays on subjects concerned directly or obliquely with Pietro Antonio Locatelli constitutes the proceedings of a congress held in 1995, presumably at Cremona, to commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of the composer's birth. Most of the contributors were young Italian scholars. Many were students of the volume's editor, Albert Dunning, at the University of Pavia. Three of the essays by non-Italians have been translated into Italian in order to create a unified work. The boxed set has been lavishly produced under the sponsorship of the Fondazione Pietro Antonio Locatelli of Amsterdam and Cremona, which is also underwriting the Locatelli complete works edition beaded by Dunning, the leading Locatelli specialist of our time. Among the essays tangential to Locatelli is the very long one (128 pages) that opens the collection, on musical patronage in Venice during the early eighteenth century, by Alessandra Bernardi, essentially a revision of her 1990 dissertation at the University of Pavia completed under Dunning's direction. It includes a comprehensive overview of musical activity in that city, set within the context of its political, social, cultural, religious, and economic institutions. It draws upon unpublished diaries, travelers' accounts, administrative records, archives of public bodies, and literary and musical sources. Much of it is organized according to category of patron, and contains new information relating to the careers of Antonio Vivaldi, Tomaso Albinoni, Francesco and Michele Gasparini, Giovanni De Porta, Giuseppe Boniventi, Carlo Tessarini, Giorgio Gentili, and Alessandro and Benedetto Marcello. Similar to this essay in originality and scope is Franco Piperno's account of musical events, patronage, and institutions during the first half of the eighteenth century. Piperno, an associate professor of musicology at the University of Florence, concludes with a precise chronological table listing known performances of operas, oratorios, cantatas, serenades, and other items of musical spectacle in Rome from 1710 to 1725, with citations of primary and secondary sources. Likewise tangential to Locatelli but of undoubted value are Margherita Canale Degrassi's essay on the purposes and performance practices of Giuseppe Tartini's violin concertos, Galliano Ciliberti's study of the Christmas concerto in the eighteenth century, Stefano La Via's exposition of new documents relating to the musical patronage of Cardinal Ottoboni in Rome (1700-1740), Paola Pozzi's catalogue of Italian concertos from the first half of the eighteenth century preserved in the elector's library in Dresden, and Giovanni Sgaria's life and works of the estimable Roman composer Giovanni Mossi (ca. 1680-1742), this one, too, a Pavia dissertation supervised by Dunning. Giacomo Fornari's discussion of the decline of instrumental music in Italy during the eighteenth century confronts a very large and fascinating problem, probably beyond the reach of such a young scholar. His essay relies heavily on quotations from travel accounts, treatises, and music journals of the eighteenth century to establish, basically, that opera overwhelmed Italian musical culture of that period and that, given the abysmal condition of the Italian economy under foreign domination, many aspiring musicians migrated to Northern Europe, where there was a market for instrumental music that did not exist in their homeland. Consequently. Italian instrumental music, although extremely influential during the first half of the century, was essentially an aspect of emigrant culture. as Carl Dablhaus called it. Left unexplored is exactly why economic hardship in Italy favored opera production over instrumental music and why, in some parts of the peninsula, instrumental music flourished nonetheless. …

Paul Bunyan (review)

Reviewed by: Paul Bunyan Mary Louise Hill Paul Bunyan. Libretto by W. H. Auden, score by Benjamin Britten. Glimmerglass Opera Festival. Cooperstown, New York. 15 July–20 August 1995. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. James David Lynn, Thomas R. Trotter, Kevin Murray, Scott Murphree, and Jeffrey Lentz in the Glimmerglass Opera production of Britten’s Paul Bunyan, conducted by Stewart Robertson, directed by Mark Lamos. Photo: George Mott/Glimmerglass Opera. The Columbia University premiere of Benjamin Britten and W. H. Auden’s opera Paul Bunyan on 5 May 1941 was met by negative criticism, most of it finding fault with the work’s weak text and predictable score. Auden himself ultimately apologized to Britten for the libretto. The composer subsequently withdrew it from his repertoire for about twenty years. [End Page 229] Only in retrospect, and through a carefully staged presentation such as Glimmerglass Opera House’s summer 1995 production by Mark Lamos, can the timeliness and foresight of this much-maligned opera crystalize. Lamos’s conception exposed the ambivalent undertones in American mythology that Auden saw with an insight that perhaps only an expatriate Englishman in 1941 could have possessed. Indeed, it may well have been this insight that his contemporary critics really found fault with. Influenced in part by Kurt Weill’s work, in particular on Der Jasager with Bertolt Brecht, Britten and Auden wrote a “school opera” that asked young singers to contemplate the death of American collective myths and the rise of individual responsibility. Auden’s text calls attention to what might happen should that responsibility go astray, and the result is a sizzling, satirical pill that depression-weary America might have not wanted to swallow—at least not in the theatre. Auden’s libretto met with considerably more understanding laughter from the Glimmerglass’s audience, sitting in an opera house known for its daring productions and in part maintained by unreliable NEA funding. Similarly, the contemporary audience had no problem with the absent Bunyan, another detail that put the 1940s critics into a lather. People expected to see Bunyan at its 1941 premiere, but Britten and Auden’s work called for a disembodied voice on high—something perhaps better realized by today’s technology. Furthermore, in performance this detail incriminated America’s tendency to substitute a state religion with a state mythology that advocates nationalism, unity, and a certain kind of progress, no matter what the cost. The emphasis on such costs proved one of the most powerful elements of Lamos’s production. The opera begins with a chorus of trees, most of which resist the inevitable approach of progress. Realizing the possible triteness of dressing people as trees, set and costumer designers Paul Steinberg and Constance Hoffman produced a striking stage picture of blue rocking chairs in which blue-clad chorus members rocked against a yellow background, holding trees on their laps while they sang. The rocking chairs, the chorus, the trees, and the contrasting blue and yellow became recurring [End Page 230] scenic elements of this production’s own unique language, a language that often expressed itself through minimal movement or tableaux. The first stage picture presented a gently swaying forest that gained energy and action less from physical movement than from the build-up of music and voices. With bitter irony, the opera’s final tableau contrasted this first picture with the aftermath of the Bunyan myth: as the lights dimmed, business-suited men and women collapsed one by one onto the bare stage floor, where their weary bodies joined a clutter of dead, used Christmas trees. In the grey shadows cast just before the curtain dropped, the audience saw the physical shape of what can be lost in the name of progress: the whimsical forest, the brilliance of myth, and with it, collective hope. Between these powerful opening and closing images, the opera cartwheeled forward, a collage of brightly colored, corrugated cut-outs and various musical and theatrical styles. Lush orchestral buildups gave way to musical comedy patter, to bluesy interludes, to reflective arias. In addition, the ballad singer, an ever-present reminder of Britten’s American folk sources, kept the narrative going through tales with a...

C] Extracts from the Notebooks of Alexandre Benois for the Year 1924

Museum in Stockholm, in the catalogue for his forthcoming Benois exhibition. The following entries relate to the Paris Opera production of Giselle in 1924. They have been transcribed from his notebooks by M. Vicheney and translated and annotated by Clement Crisp. The editor is grateful to M. Vicheney for his cooperation in this enterprise and for giving us permission to use this valuable material, the copyright of which he retains.

Music and Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Barberini Patronage under Urban VIII

Part 1 Mirabil congiuntura - the programme of the Papacy: the programme of the Papacy the context of magnificence the Barberini - Urban VIII, the brothers, the nephews household musical establishments and instruments - Urban VIII, the nephews, the Barbareni instrument collection, the theorist - Giovanni Battista Doni, academies and repertory. Part 2 Symbolic spectacle - the achievement of the nephews: the fiesta - sociology, typology, sources, the Roman carnival musical patronage of churches - Roman churches and their music, the nephews and the Roman churches, Cardinal Antonio and the Jesuit centre the Barberini and the Cappella Pontificia baroque opera - the origins, the production of opera, gesture, dance and dance music Barberini opera 1628-1644 - the Barberini operas to 1634, the prince's carnival of 1634, Cardinal Francesco's operas to 1642, Cardinal Antonio's enchanted palace. Appendix: checklist of Roman festivals in the reign of Urban VIII.

On the road with the “suitcase aria”: The transmission of borrowed arias in late seventeenth‐century Italian opera revivals

Abstract The “suitcase aria” tradition, in which singers introduce arias they have sung in one opera into another, is familiar from eighteenth‐century satires and is often considered proof of the “decadence” of Italian Baroque opera. This paper reinterprets this view, demonstrating that suitcase arias were actually rare in the late seventeenth century. Although arias were frequently borrowed, the modes of transmission were more diverse than the “suitcase” model implies. The paper identifies one singer who probably served as an “aria broker,” and presents singers as vital participants in the production and dissemination of opera in the seventeenth century.

Margaret Webster: a bio-bibliography

Preface Biography Chronology Stage Productions Opera Productions Discography Awards and Honors Archives Bibliography Subject Index

The power of the ?Real?: Hegemony and the production of a British soap opera

Cet article tente de deceler l'expression de la visee hegemonique des valeurs dominantes du thatcherisme a travers le discours tenu dans une serie televisee. Le desir d'imposer un nouveau sens commun dans toutes les aires de la societe trouvait au sein des medias un enjeu ideologique de choix. L'A. montre comment une certaine vision du reel dans le feuilleton considere traduit cette tendance, notamment a travers les valeurs liees au sexe ou a la ruralite. Elle montre egalement comment la television, en tant que produit negocie et siege de pouvoir reel ou symbolique, peut etre le vehicule des influences contradictoires des differents acteurs intervenant dans le processus de production

Viktor Parma - raziskovalna izhodišča

Viktor Parma - raziskovalna izhodišča

‘Entoiling the falconet’: Russian musical orientalism in context

This essay originated as a contribution to a symposium organised by the Dallas Opera and Southern Methodist University around the Opera's production of Boro-din's Prince Igor in November 1990. Since many Soviet guests had been invited, the poster and programme book were printed in English and Russian side by side. I found that the word ‘orientalism’ in my title had become tema vostoka – ‘the Eastern theme’ – in translation, even though orientalizm, or more commonly, orientalistika, are perfectly good Russian words (well, Russian words, anyway). It was a sensible precaution. ‘The Eastern theme’ is neutral: from a paper with that phrase in the title one expects inventories, taxonomies, identification of sources, stylistic analysis. ‘Orientalism’ is charged. From a paper with that word in the title one expects semiotics, ideological critique, polemic, perhaps indictment. The translator was quite right to err on the side of innocuousness, rather than saddle me with a viewpoint I might not wish or manage to live up to.

The History in Literature: On Value Genre, Institutions (review)

REVIEWS HERBERT LJNDENBERGER. The History in Literature: On Value Genre, Institutions. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. xix + 269 pp. Herbert Lindenberger's latest collection of essays investigates the relentlessly historical nature of literary study with clarity, knowledge, and elegance. In addition to providing a sane view of some hotly debated issues, he also includes a wealth of fascinating details. The book is centered in the nineteenth century, but extends into the present with essays on canon formation, on opera, and on the new historicism, with which this collection joins forces. It begins with a useful glossary, recontextualizing such terms as canon, genre, history, institutions, literature, opera, romanticism. The essay on "The Normality of Canon Change" gives a much needed historical perspective on the subject. For one thing, it is comforting to be reminded that our predicament is not new, such a perspective may serve to lessen some of the animosity which debates about the canon have generated. Given Lindenberger's central role in such debates at Stanford, I wonder whether that diffusion of hostility may have implicitly inspired this levelheaded essay. In it he considers three instances: a current debate over a humanities reading list, the mid-nineteenth century formation of the German classical canon raising Goethe, Schiller and Lessing to star status while includingbut dimming slightly the lights ofKlopstock, Wieland, andJean Paul, and the formation of the canon of Greek tragedy sometime between the third century B.C. and the second A.D., the selectors seeming to have favored plays with catastrophic endings but not those with melodramatic action. The next essay reports on the much publicized debate about what should be included in a general course on western culture taken by all undergraduates at Stanford. Here again, we get a valuable sense of particular history, we learn, for example, that many western civilization courses stemmed from one given at Columbia in 1918, which "sought to introduce Americans to the European heritage in whose defense they were soon to risk their lives." (One might bistoridze Lindenberger's text from an interamerican comparative perspective , and note that our language is not quite pluralistic enough yet, for he, like many of us, still uses "American" rather than "North American" to refer to this continent.) Lindenberger usefully contextualizes the polemics of these debates, reminding us, for example, that Allan Bloom's criticism ofStanford's revisions of the canon as "indoctrination with ephemeral ideologies" and "surrender to the present" are strikingly similar to complaints against Rousseau in the British press during the 1790s. He ends the essay with the wise observation that the move toward a more "globally oriented" course represents not only the university's multicultural student body but also the waning of America's power in the world—an implicit testimony to the continuing importance of comparative perspectives. The chapter on opera and postmodernity includes an instructive comparison of opera house and art museum, in which Lindenberger investigates why opera houses have been less hospitable to contemporary music than art museums to contemporary art: whereas the production of new and unpopular operas tends to alienate rich patrons, the acquisition ofnew art works attracts such patrons via new display rooms named for them. 140 THE COMPARATIST Other chapters, on "RomanticPoetryandthe Institutionalizing ofValue," and on "Evaluation as Justification and Performance: The Leech Gatherer as Testing Ground," in the "Value in History" section; on "Theories of Romanticism : From a Theory of Genre to the Genre of Theory," on "The History in Opera: La clemenza di Tito, Khovanshchina, Moses andAwn," and on "The Literature in History: Danton's Death in the Texts of Revolutions," in the "Genre in History" section; and on the new historicism, in the "Institutions" section, are equally rich in historical insights and information. The book ends with an epilogue in the form of an interview, where Lindenberger ironizes to himself, expressing his views, for example, on the new historicism as both a valuable corrective to earlier trends, and "the only viable career move the past ten years," demonstrating that "canon change is as normal in criticism as in literature." Finally, he predicts that the issue for the 1990's will be style, but "style in a much broader sense, the styles...

Marco Faustini and Venetian Opera Production in the 1650s: Recent Archival Discoveries

O pera achieved its first commercial success in seventeenth-century Venice. The city offered an environment conducive to the growth of the emerging genre. It was already a cultural center and tourist attraction, and its large and affluent population was 48 enriched by a considerable number of cosmopolitan transient visitors during the carnival season. More important, Venice was the commercial city par excellence, with many people willing to invest capital in new ventures, and others possessing the legal and financial skills needed to run a complex business in a competitive market. Members of the leading aristocratic families owned many of the theaters.' Others, often of a less exalted class, oversaw the day-today operations; this group included a number of composers and

Marco Faustini and Venetian Opera Production in the 1650s: Recent Archival Discoveries

Marco Faustini and Venetian Opera Production in the 1650s: Recent Archival Discoveries

"Day after Tomorrow": Audience Interaction and Soap Opera Production

In the lines quoted above, Palmer Cortlandt (the leading capitalist patriarch of the soap opera All My Children) succinctly argues one side of cultural studies' continuing debate over the function of mass culture. In this view, the culture industry (like the hospital cafe) supplies its own choice of, for example, televisual food to the starving masses, ignoring audience needs and opinions completely. Forced to fill up on empty calories, the viewer consequently suffers (like Palmer's daughter Nina, for whom he seeks protein) from diabetes. The inability to control blood sugar levels is a suggestive metaphor, recalling the plethora of arguments which, beginning in the early nineteenth century and continuing through our own, castigate producers of popular fiction for force-feeding a vacuous or even dangerous textual diet to a voiceless, passive audience.

Theater Architecture at the Time of Purcell and Its Influence on His “Dramatick Operas”

L ATE seventeenth-century English opera is generally regarded with skepticism by present-day audiences. These operas-or semi-operas, as they are somewhat disparagingly called-do not conform to our contemporary esthetic, which requires a text that is continuous in its development of a coherent plot. The disjunction of spoken dialogue and musical masques as well as digressions in the story line for the purpose of scenic display are generally regarded as flaws in the typical semi-opera, or dramatick opera, as the seventeenth-century writers called these entertainments. Of the composers who made significant contributions to this genre, Henry Purcell must be reckoned the supreme master. Nevertheless, Purcell's only work that has remained a staple in the operatic repertoire, Dido and Aeneas, is atypical of Purcell's extended theater pieces because of its very limited orchestral resources and its consistent use of stile recitativo for the delivery of the narrative texts. The fact that this opera was composed for Josiah Priest's school for young gentlewomen in Chelsea rather than for the public theater in London also sets it apart from Purcell's other extended dramatic compositions, all of which were composed after Dido and Aeneas. That Purcell's dramatick operas were greatly admired by the theater goers of his time can be easily documented. What is more difficult to explain are the reasons why these theatrical masterpieces were successful during the seventeenth century, whereas in our day productions of the dramatick operas usually