Chapter 4 - Reform: the reintegration of elements

Summary

The reaction against opera seria was so strong that the critique of contemporaries such as Gluck and Calzabigi was later taken at face value. As late as 1965 the revised edition of The Oxford Companion to Music was still explaining that

[there] lived and worked, during the first half of the eighteenth century, some of the greatest composers of the whole history of opera…but not one of their operas has any place in the operatic repertory now…chiefly…from the excessive formality of their treatment. It is just possible that the world may come to take pleasure again in these one-time favourites, but the greater probability is that they will merely continue to be revived occasionally for the interest of historically-minded connoisseurs.

(Scholes, 1965: 711)

The masters of opera seria were able to inhabit the form and create works that stand up in modern production. The root problem was not, therefore the formality per se, but the social and political world that it reflected. This was compounded by the fact that the main reformers, Zeno and Metastasio, were both literary figures for whom opera's essential language, music, was neither a priority nor their expertise. For them, the opera was squarely based on the libretto. The result was a literary structure, within which a place had to be found for the music, the virtually universal da capo aria. Divorced from carrying the narrative, the da capo aria became increasingly self-standing. This was exploited by singers as they came to dominate productions, insisting on opportunities for vocal display and inserting favourite arias into whatever opera they performed – the so-called ‘portmanteau’ arias with which they toured from one opera house to another. Ultimately this led to the ‘pasticcio’, whole operas made up of well-received arias/tunes from any number of works.