Description
Prima la musica, e poi le parole ("first the music, then the words") is the title of a little one-act 1786 operatic satire by composer Antonio Salieri and librettist Giovanni Batista Casti. Nearly two hundred years later, in 1941's Capriccio by Richard Strauss and librettist Clemens Krauss, the opera's main characters, a composer and a poet, argue about the relative merits of their respective mediums. Even to this day, that fundamental argument about opera's primary medium and purpose still continues to rage on.
Achieving a delicate balance between words and music has been at the heart of opera since the genre's inception in the late 1500s in Florence; the germinating idea was to revive the ancient Greek classical style of theatrical performance, in which plays were presented with music. The first original opera as such might be the now-lost Daphne, written by Jacopo Peri; soon, other Italians such as Claudio Monteverdi started writing for this new setting as well, most notably in his 1607 work Orfeo.
Early operas interspersed arias with recitatives, which are dialogues or narratives that push the dramatic action along and that mimic the cadences of speech, punctuated by occasional chordal accompaniment; such recitatives were even still the norm when time Mozart wrote his great operas. However, other operatic conventions evolved at a more rapid speed. The norms of the two main divisions of opera up until the mid-18th century, opera seria ("serious opera," often written in highly stylized form) and opera buffa ("comic opera") began to be less absolute; in works such as his 1768 opera Alceste, Gluck introduced major reforms to opera that resulted in a more realistic and nuanced craft.
In the 19th century, Italy once again became a hotbed of expressive creativity in opera. This is the era in which Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti made their indelible contributions to the genre, in terms both of their own creations and of the aesthetic ideal they espoused and encouraged: bel canto. Literally meaning "beautiful singing," the bel canto style demands from the singer a beautiful, flexible, and continuous tone whose gracefulness is evident in even the most floridly ornamented passages. Bel canto, in turn, set the scene for both Verdi and Puccini: the former produced work of incredible emotional power and of frequently a timely--even overtly political--nature, while the latter created verismo ("realism") operas of great dramatic urgency and, of course, gorgeous singing.
Beginning in the 1840s, Germany's revolutionary Richard Wagner elevated opera to a new level altogether, a process which culminated in his massive, four-opera Ring des Nibelungen cycle. Meant to be heard over four back-to-back evenings, this cycle is the ultimate expression of Wagner's concept of Gesamtkunstwerk: a "total artwork" that is a feast for nearly all the senses. Moreover, Wagner's tonal complexity and plushness inspired legions of composers working in all genres, not just opera who followed him; not the least of these was Richard Strauss, whose own work in some cases reflects the preoccupations and anxieties of the 20th century (such as in Salome and Elektra) but in other operas, such as the iconic Der Rosenkavalier, achieves much more tenderness.
