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Some representations of opera seria in opera buffa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Mary Hunter
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , July 1991 , pp. 89 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 Ratner, Leonard, Classic Music (New York, 1980)Google Scholar, presents the most comprehensive account of both musical topoi and the idea of combinatoriality. Allanbrook's, Wye J.Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart (Chicago, 1983)Google Scholar also relies on topoi for its reading of Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni. The notion of topoi that may suggest extramusical meanings is not unrelated to the idea of a formal or melodic archetype against which a particular musical formulation may be understood. Many scholars have used Koch's, H. C.Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition (Leipzig, 1782, 1787 and 1793)Google Scholar and his Musikalisches Lexikon (Frankfurt a. M., 1802)Google Scholar as the basis for studies of such archetypes as they form a system of purely musical meaning.

2 The young lovers, the wily male servant and the lustful old warden are among the most obvious of the stock characters in opera buffa. This connection is noted in most writing on the genre.

3 Zémire et Azor, set as an opéra comique by Grétry, and translated into Italian thereafter (and performed at least at Eszterháza during Haydn's employment there), is a version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’; Bertati's, and Anfossi's, Il curioso indiscreto (Rome, 1777)Google Scholar is based on an episode from Don Quixote that had achieved the status of a folk tale; and many of the fundamental structures in opera buffa (generational rebellion, for example, or the recognition of true identity) are also found in folk tales and fables.

4 Richardson's Pamela and Marivaux' sentimental novel La Vie de Marianne were models for many opere buffe. Beaumarchais' stage plays Le Barbier de Seville, Le Mariage de Figaro and Eugénie were all adapted as operas.

5 The famous quotations from three contemporary opere buffe in the last act of Don Giovanni are the most celebrated examples of a common procedure. The ‘French topos’ occurs in a number of operas, usually as a subject of ridicule. See, for example, Monsieur Girò's rendition of ‘Que vos yeux sont touchants’ in Gassmann's, L'amore artigiano (Vienna, 1767);Google Scholar or another Monsieur Girò's French barbarisms in the Vienna 1788 version of Livigni's and Anfossi's Le gelosie fortunate.

6 ‘Bricolage’ is one current term for the borrowing that pervades every level of a discourse. The term was originally coined by Claude Lévi-Strauss, but is adapted (and then instantly undercut) by Derrida, Jacques in Writing and Difference, trans. Bass, Alan (London, 1978), 285–6.Google Scholar I am grateful to Malcolm Woodfield for this reference.

7 ‘The Place of Intertextuality in Music Studies’, American Journal of Semiotics, 3/4 (1985), 69–82.Google Scholar

8 Hatten, 70.

9 Bromwich, David, ‘Parody, Pastiche and Allusion’, in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Hoešk, Chaviva and Parker, Patricia (Ithaca, 1985), 328–44Google Scholar, uses the term ‘pastiche’ to refer to the level of intertextuality that is my concern here. However, since ‘pastiche’ in the context of eighteenth-century opera has another, well-defined meaning, I will avoid the term.

10 Dane, Joseph, Parody (Norman, Ok., 1988), 17–18.Google Scholar

11 I teatri musicali di Venezia (Venice, 1897).Google Scholar

12 Hughes, Steven, ‘Allusion and Expression in Eighteenth-Century Literature’, in The Author in his Work, ed. Martz, Louis and Williams, Aubrey (New Haven, 1978)Google Scholar, lays out a useful scheme of types of ‘strict’ intertextuality in literature of this century.

13 Needless to say, these findings are unlikely to be exhaustive. Most of my quotations include a first line from a Metastasian text, and are thus easy to identify. There are probably many more quotations of later parts of Metastasian texts yet to be discovered.

14 I am most grateful to Reinhard Strohm for pointing out the musical origin of this quotation.

15 The same quotation, with essentially the same music, occurs in a later Guglielmi opera, Le vicende d'amore (Rome, 1784);Google Scholar it was evidently found funny enough to bring back (though in Le vicende the dramatic excuse is significantly feebler).

16 First set by Domenico Sarro in 1724.

17 I have not identified a musical source for this quotation; unlike the Vinci, which stands out in every way from its context, it seems to be from the same period as its surrounding aria, if not from the same affective world.

18 For example, in Anfossi's and Bertati's Il curioso indiscreto (Act II scene 7), the heroine Clorinda feigns madness and pretends that she sees her rival lovers as Timante and Olinto, characters from Metastasio's Demofoonte and Demetrio respectively. I thank Bruce A. Brown for help on this point.

19 Squire characters, such as Pasquale in Badini's and Porta's Orlando Paladino (set by Guglielmi and Haydn) are particularly prone to such comparisons.

20 Troy, Charles E., The Comic Intermezzo (Ann Arbor, 1979), 82.Google Scholar

21 Compare, for example, with ‘Odio, furor, dispetto, dolor’ from Haydn's Armida.

22 Hunter, Mary, ‘Così/an tutte et les conventions musicaux de son temps’, L'avant-scène opéra, 131–2 (05–06, 1990), 158–64.Google Scholar

23 For a succinct description of different ‘levels’ of intertextuality, see Prince, Gerald, A Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1988), 46.Google Scholar

24 Johannisberg, 1772 (libretto used: Eszterhâza 1776).

25 Venice, 1772 (libretti used: Vienna 1774, Graz 1778, Eszterháza 1779).

26 Eszterháza, 1782.

27 Vienna, 1787.

28 Included among these settings are Alberti (Venice, 1737), Bernasconi (Venice, 1742), Jomelli (Genoa, 1756) and Fiorillo (Kassel, 1763).

29 Anon., ‘LETTRE d'un habitant de Vienne à son ami à Prague, qui lui avait demandé ses réflexions sur l'opéra intitulé L'Arbore di Diana’. From Michtner, Otto, Das alte Burgtheater als Opernbühne (Vienna, 1970), 435–9.Google Scholar

30 Goldoni is usually credited with being the first librettist regularly to weave such elevated characters into the fabric of his plots; by the last third of the century, they were the norm.

31 ‘Per una morfologia dell'aria metastasiana’, in Metastasio e il mondo musicale (Florence, 1986), 13–37, esp. 23–30.Google Scholar

32 See Rosen, Charles, The Classical Style (London, 1971), 317.Google Scholar

33 Goldoni's settings are remarkable for their extreme localisation – particular streets and squares in Venice, for example. In the repertory I have examined, the settings are less specific; indeed, as Mercedes Viale Ferrero has pointed out in ‘Torino e Milano nel tardo Settecento: Repertori confronti’, I vicini di Mozart (Florence, 1989), 99–138Google Scholar, the same backdrops were regularly re-used in different operas.

34 ‘Teoria e pratica della variatio nel dramma giocoso: A proposito della “Villanella rapita” di Giovanni Bertati’, I vicini di Mozart, 139–63.Google Scholar

35 Bartolomeo Benincasa's preface to his libretto for Bianchi's Il disertore (Venice, 1785)Google Scholar is one of the outstanding Italian examples of an apologia for this sort of generic mixing. See Hunter, Mary, ‘The Fusion and Juxtaposition of Genres in Opera Buffa 1760–1800: Anelli's and Piccinni's “Griselda”’, Music and Letters, 67 (1986), 363–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 In fact, the idea of a ‘middle class’ in northern Italy and Central Europe at this time is Anglo-centric and may be misleading. Berengo, Marino, La società veneta alla fine del Settecento (Florence, 1956)Google Scholar, notes that while there were many groups in the middle ranks of society, there was no ‘middle class’ in the sense of a stratum of society with a collective sense of common circumstances and interests. As far as Vienna is concerned, the late development of a consolidated middle class is also evidenced in the slower development of a fully-fledged publishing industry, and the relatively late establishment of public concerts.

37 This essay is dedicated to my father, G. K. Hunter, on the occasion of his retirement.