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Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

The Gilded Stage is a comprehensive tour of the world of opera. From its origins in the courts of northern Italy, to its internationally recognised position in modern culture, Snowman explores the social history of opera houses and impresarios, composers and patrons, artists and audiences. Even the most flamboyant composers could scarcely have imagined the global reach of opera in our own times. More opera is performed, financed, seen, heard, filmed and broadcast than ever before, and the world's leading performers are worshipped and paid like pop stars. Yet the art form is widely derided as 'elitist' and parts of the classical recording business appear close to bankruptcy. Pinpointing the scandals, forgotten history and key revolutions in the form with light erudition and a brilliant anecdotal eye, Daniel Snowman reveals that the world of opera has always known crisis and uncertainty - and the resulting struggles have often proved every bit as dramatic as those portrayed onstage.

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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

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Leseprobe

THE GILDED STAGE

DANIEL SNOWMAN was born in London. A lecturer at Sussex University in his twenties, he went on to work at the BBC where he was responsible for a wide variety of radio series on cultural and historical topics. A long-time member of the London Philharmonic Choir, and currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research (University of London), his books include critical portraits of the Amadeus Quartet and Plácido Domingo and, more recently, Historians and a study of the cultural impact of The Hitler Emigrés.

ALSO BY DANIEL SNOWMAN

America Since 1920

Eleanor Roosevelt

Kissing Cousins: An Interpretation of British and American Culture, 1945–1975

If I Had Been... Ten Historical Fantasies (editor)

The Amadeus Quartet: The Men and the Music

The World of Plácido Domingo

Beyond the Tunnel of History: The 1989 BBC Reith Lectures (with Jacques Darras)

Pole Positions: The Polar Regions and the Future of the Planet

Plácido Domingo’s Tales From the Opera

Fins de Siècle (editor, with Asa Briggs)

PastMasters: The Best of History Today (editor)

The Hitler Emigrés: The Cultural impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism

Historians

Hallelujah! An Informal History of the London Philharmonic Choir

Copyright

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2009 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This trade paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2010 by Atlantic Books.

The moral right of Daniel Snowman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

ISBN: 978-1-848-87436-7

First eBook Edition: January 2010

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Cover

The Gilded Stage

Also by Daniel Snowman

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

PART I: Down the Road from Arianna to Zauberflöte (c.1600–1800)

1. The Birth of Italian Opera

2. The Opera Business, Italian Style

3. Opera Crosses the Alps – and the Channel

4. Cultural Confluence in Mozart’s Vienna

PART II: Revolution and Romanticism (c.1800–1860)

5. Napoleon and Beethoven

6. After Napoleon: Opera as Politics, Art and Business

7. Opera Reaches New York – and the Wider Frontier

8. L’Opéra

9. Fires of London

PART III:Opera Resurgens (c.1860–1900)

10. Culture and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe

11. New York’s Gilded Age

12. Prima la donna

13. The Lion Tamers: The Ascendancy of the Conductor

PART IV: Opera in War and Peace (c.1900–1950)

14. Opera Goes West

15. Spreading the Message

16. Repercussions of War

17. Opera under the Dictators

18. Total War

PART V: The Globalization of Opera (c. 1945– )

19. Emerging from Apocalypse

20. Building Opera in America

21. Opera Goes Global

22. New Ways of Presenting Old Works

23. The Show Must Go On…

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

INTEGRATED ILLUSTRATIONS

p. 13 Performers outside St Mark’s. Author’s collection

p. 21 Title page for Fiori Poetici. © Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 24 Title page for Orfeo. © Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 27 La Vita Humana. Jens Gustafsson, The National Library of Sweden

p. 31 Set by Giacomo Torelli. Private Collection/Lauros/Giraudon/ The Bridgeman Art Library

p. 35 Venetian theatergoers. Courtesy of Biblioteca Casagoldoni

p. 39 Senesino, Berenstadt and Cuzzoni. Author’s collection

p. 44 Costume design for The Marriage of Thetis and Peleus. Bibliotheque de l’Institut de France, Paris/Lauros /Giraudon/ The Bridgeman Art Library

p. 51 Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus. © Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 55 Saint-Laurent. © Lebrecht Authors/Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 58 Eighteenth-century London. © Historical Picture Archive/Corbis

p. 62 George Frideric Handel. Author’s collection

p. 66 Bordoni, Cuzzoni and Senesino. iStock

p. 68 The Enraged Musician. Author’s collection

p. 71 Statue of Handel. Author’s collection

p. 74 Frederick the Great’s opera house. akg-images/Erich Lessing

p. 76 Vienna’s Kärntnertortheater. akg-images

p. 79 Leopald Mozart. © Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 82 Nancy Storace. Timothy Neal/ArenaPAL/Topfoto

p. 86 Don Giovanni. akg-images

p. 89 Emanuel Schikaneder as Papageno. akg-images

p. 90 Playbill for Die Zauberflöte. akg-images

p. 99 Occupied Vienna. © Bettmann/Corbis

p. 104 Vienna’s Theater an der Wien. akg-images

p. 107 Dedication to Prince Lichnowsky. akg-images

p. 110 Anna Bolena. © Costa Leemage/Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 113 Beethoven’s funeral. © Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 117 La battaglia di Legnano. Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense Ufficio Ricerca Fondi Musicali

p. 118 Uproar at the opera. Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België

p. 123 Nabucco at La Scala. © Teatro alla Scala

p. 126 The Ricordi offices. akg-images

p. 134 Manuel García. © Private Collection/Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 136 New York’s Park Theatre. nypl Performing Arts/Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 141 Cairo Opera House charity ball. Author’s collection

p. 143 Gold rush Australia. The Granger Collection/Topfoto

p. 146 American railroad. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, lc-usz6-1366

p. 148 Nellie Melba’s welcome. National Library of Australia, 24071457-v

p. 149 Tabor’s Opera House. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

p. 152 Paris salon. The Granger Collection/Topfoto

p. 157 Foyer de la danse. Author’s collection

p. 160 Box at the Paris Opera. © Roger-Viollet/Topfoto

p. 163 Paris’s Théâtre Italien. © Electa Leemage/Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 167 Emperor Napoleon iii, Empress Eugénie, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Getty Images

p. 169 ‘O.P.’ Riots. Public domain

p. 172 Playbills from the 1820s. Author’s collection

p. 177 Fire inside Covent Garden. Author’s collection

p. 179 Fire outside Covent Garden. Author’s collection

p. 181 Crystal Palace. Author’s collection

p. 184 The ‘Royal Italian Opera’. Author’s collection p. 188 Prague’s National Theatre. Author’s collection

p. 191 Russia’s ‘Mighty Handful’. © ria Novosti/Alamy

p. 194 King Ludwig ii. © Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 197 Bayreuth Festival. © Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 201 Tristan and Isolde. © Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 203 Italian immigrants. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, lc-usz62-7307

p. 204 Little Italy. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Photographic Collection, lc-d418-9350

p. 207 Phineas T. Barnum drums up support for Jenny Lind. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, lc-usz62-1425

p. 210 The New York Academy of Music ‘Russian ball’. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, lc-usz62-77757

p. 213 Poster for the opening night of the New York Metropolitan Opera. The Metropolitan Opera

p. 216 The New York Metropolitan Opera. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, lc-usz62-74655

p. 217 Christine Nilsson. The Metropolitan Opera

p. 220 Adelina Patti. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, lc-usz62-68664

p. 225 A box at the New York Metropolitan Opera. The Granger Collection/ Topfoto

p. 229 Mathilde Marchesi. © Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 231 Maria Callas. © Corbis

p. 232 Nellie Melba. National Library of Australia, 23323403

p. 234 Beverly Sills and Marilyn Horne. © Teatro alla Scala

p. 238 ‘A Dandy Fainting or – An Exquisite in Fits’. Author’s collection

p. 243 The Vienna Court Opera. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, lc-usz62-42624

p. 245 Gustav Mahler. © Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 247 ‘The Music of the Future’. © Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 249 Carl Maria von Weber and Giuseppe Verdi. Author’s collection

p. 254 Giulio Gatti-Casazza. Author’s collection

p. 257 Dinner in honour of Gatti-Casazza and Arturo Toscanini. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, lc-usz62-53400

p. 260 Geraldine Farrar. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, lc-dig-ggbain-26939

p. 261 Gatti-Casazza with Toscanini and Farrar. The Metropolitan Opera

p. 266 Crosby’s Opera House, Chicago. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, lc-usz62-2516

p. 268 Chicago’s Auditorium. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, habs ill,16-chig, 39-89

p. 270 Mary Garden. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, lc-usz62-55587

p. 272 Chicago’s Civic Opera House. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, lc-usz62-107493

p. 274 San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House. nypl Performing Arts/ Lebrecht Music & Art

p. 278 Enrico Caruso. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, lc-usz62-61520

p. 280 Thomas Alva Edison. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, lc-usz62-67878

p. 283 Direct relays of opera on the Electrophone. The Raymond Mander & Joe Mitchenson Theatre Collection

p. 288 Farrar on set in Carmen. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, lc-dig-ggbain-19541

p. 292 Toscanini leading military band. © Lebrecht Music & Arts p. 293 Giacomo Puccini and Tito Ricordi. © Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 296 Rosa Ponselle. The Metropolitan Opera

p. 301 Otto Klemperer. © Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 303 The Kroll Opera. akg-images

p. 304 Rudolf Hess enters the Kroll. akg-images

p. 309 Mussolini with Gabriele D’Annunzio. © Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 313 Toscanini on tour. © Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 315 Stalin outside Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. akg-images

p. 317 Poster for Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. © Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 321 Adolf Hitler and Winifred Wagner. akg-images/ullstein bild

p. 327 Bruno Walter, Thomas Mann and Toscanini. Getty Images

p. 331 Berlin’s bombed State Opera House. Time & Life Pictures/ Getty Images

p. 335 Beniamino Gigli and Hitler. © Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 339 Wilhelm Furtwängler and Hitler. © Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 342 Orchestra at Auschwitz. The State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau

p. 349 Vienna’s bombed State Opera House. Time & Life Pictures/ Getty Images

p. 353 Sir Thomas Beecham. © Michael Nicholson/Corbis

p. 356 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Getty Images

p. 360 Joan Cross in Gloriana. © Milein Cosman/Lebrecht Music & Arts

p. 364 Kirsten Flagstad demonstrations. Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

p. 366 The 1948 Met tour. The Metropolitan Opera

p. 369 Edward D. Stone, Mrs Stephen Smith and George R. Marek. © Bettmann/Corbis

p. 371 Hollywood Bowl. Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

p. 375 The Metropolitan Opera at New York’s Lincoln Center. Getty Images

p. 380 ‘Sutherland–Williamson’ tour. Allan Studios

p. 383 Sydney Opera House. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis

p. 388 Beijing’s National Theatre for the Performing Arts. Getty Images p. 391 Natalie Dessay. © Shannon Stapleton/Reuters/Corbis

p. 393 Advert for opera in Dresden. Courtesy of Tourism Marketing Company of Saxony mbH

p. 397 Paris’s Opéra Bastille. © Patrice Latron/Corbis

p. 399 Poster for Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. Royal Academy of Music/ ArenaPAL

p. 406 Anthony Minghella’s Madame Butterfly. Johan Persson/ArenaPAL/ Topfoto

p. 408 Surtitles for La Bohème. Colin Willoughby/ArenaPAL

p. 412 ‘Dynamite in Spain’. Mary Evans

p. 414 Franco Zeffirelli’s Turandot. Ken Howard/ArenaPAL

p. 419 Rudolf Bing. The Metropolitan Opera

p. 423 turbocharged marketing campaign. Concept and Design by Dewynters/Getty Images

p. 427 Poster for Jerry Springer – The Opera. Colin Willoughby/ArenaPAL

p. 431 Olavinlinna Castle in Savonlinna, Finland. Courtesy of Kate Hampton

FIRST PICTURE SECTION

2. Ticket for The Beggar’s Opera. Author’s collection

3. Turin’s Teatro Regio. akg-images

7. John Philip Kemble, Charles Kemble and Sarah Siddons. Author’s collection

8. The nouvelle riche at play. Author’s collection

10. Riots at the Astor Place Opera House. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, lc-uszc2-2532

11. Paris Opera House. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Photochrom Collection, lc-dig-ppmsc-05181

13. Ricordi’s Tosca poster. akg-images/Joseph Martin

SECOND PICTURE SECTION

1. The Met’s Gatti-Casazza and Manhattan’s Oscar Hammerstein. © Collection of the New-York Historical Society, USA/The Bridgeman Art Library

2. Théâtrophone. Private Collection/The Stapleton Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library

3. Met stars listening to a live broadcast. The Metropolitan Opera

4. Gramophone advert. Author’s collection

9. Leontyne Price recording with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. akg-images

10. Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and John Culshaw. Brian Seed/Lebrecht Music & Arts

13. Somtow Sucharitkul’s Das Rheingold. Courtesy of Somtow Sucharitkul

Acknowledgements

While researching and writing this book, I was able to try out some of my emerging ideas through a number of broadcasts, lectures and articles. For BBC Radio 3, I presented a series of six features for which I recorded interviews with a number of experts on opera history in Britain and around the world, and was also able to mine invaluable seams from the sound archives of the BBC and the New York Metropolitan Opera. Some of this material has helped enrich the book and I am grateful to my producer, Kate Bolton, for her help as we prepared these programmes together. My thanks, too, to the editor of Opera Now, Ashutosh Khandekar, who kindly invited me to write a series of articles, and nuggets from these, too, have found their way into what follows. I am also grateful to Chatto & Windus for permission to adapt and re-present brief passages derived from material previously published in my book The Hitler Emigrés.

Much of the research for The Gilded Stage was undertaken in London. As a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Historical Research (London University), I had access to all the resources of the IHR and, indeed, the entire University of London library system, while I also worked in the British Library and in the archive collections of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and London’s Theatre Museum. My thanks to all concerned. I have learned much, too, from many visits to opera in other parts of Britain and, over the years, to most of the world’s great opera centres – where I have often had the pleasure of meeting scholars, archivists and librarians as well as managers, press officers and artists, all of whom have generously helped with my researches and pointed me in useful directions for further study. While working on this book, my operatic peregrinations were also enriched by the opportunity to lead some thirty opera tours for companies such as Martin Randall Ltd, Cox & Kings and others with whom it has always been a privilege and a pleasure to work.

Countless conversations, email exchanges and interviews (some of them recorded) with friends and colleagues in Britain and around the world have proved invaluable, and I am grateful for instruction, help and advice from the following: Julian Anderson, Rosamund Bartlett, Tim Blanning, John Brewer, Stephen A. Brown, Peter Burke, Sir David Cannadine, Margaret Carson, Michael Chance, Peter E. Clark, David Coke, Roger Covell, Julia Creed, Stephen Dee, Gabriele Dotto, Katharine Ellis, Iain Fenlon, Francesca Franchi, Bernard Greenberg, Alison and David Gyger, Ulrike Hessler, Raymond Holden, Eric Homberger, Geoffrey Hosking, Alfred Hubay, Robert D. Hume, James H. Johnson, Paula Kaplan, Thena Kendall, Helene Lindroth, Hugh Macpherson, Dennis Marks, Judith Milhous, Edward Morgan, Gary Murphy, Jiří Nekvasil, Moffatt Oxenbould, Roger Parker, Nicholas Payne, Maurice Pearton, John Pennino, Graham Pont, Sir Curtis Price, Therese Radic, Ivan Ruml, Jan Spacek, Donald Sassoon, Marc Scorca, Elizabeth Silsbury, Somtow Sucharitkul, Gerhard Strassgschwandtner, Jula Szuster, Tanya Tintner, Owen Toller, James Torniainen, Robert Tuggle, Walter Wells, Frank Whitford, Rupert Wilkinson and Hin-Yan Wong. Some of these kindly read through various sections of my text, while Roger Parker (to whom special thanks) was good enough to read and check the entire manuscript. All this expert scrutiny has, I hope, helped save me from too many egregious mistakes.

Remaining errors of fact or judgement remain mine, of course – though I hope few have survived the rigorous production process for which I have to thank Toby Mundy and his colleagues at Atlantic Books. The book was Toby’s idea in the first place and I am also grateful to Caroline Knight and Sarah Norman who helped steer the book editorially through various hazards, and to Mark Handsley who transformed the normally mundane job of copy-editing into what became a shared creative process. My thanks, as always, to Dinah Wiener, supportive agent extraordinaire. Also, to Janet, whose unquenchable enthusiasms and burgeoning iconographic expertise led me to images, ideas and sources I would never otherwise have encountered. And, finally and alas belatedly, to my parents, whose warm encouragement enabled me as a child to learn and love music and opera in the first place. They would have relished the idea of my undertaking a book which is, at least in part, my grateful homage to their memory.

Introduction

In a letter published in The Times (London) on 8 April 1853, a gentleman signing himself ‘C.T.’ reported that he had been refused admission to the Royal Italian Opera, Covent Garden, ‘because the cut of my dress coat was not what it ought to be according to the ideas of the doorkeeper’. With scarcely disguised indignation, he goes on to say:

I put on my evening suit, with clean linen and everything necessary to have admitted me to any resort of ladies and gentlemen… and according to respectable witnesses at the door (who tendered me their assistance if I would bring forward the case) there could be no objection to it.

After protesting for twenty minutes or so (‘and finding all expostulation in vain’), C.T. agreed to leave, retrieved his coat and went round to the box office to ask for the seven shillings he had paid for his ticket. Here, ‘the same person who sold it to me refused to refund the money, on the ground that it had been accounted for to the Theatre.’ Meanwhile, he noticed several people entering the theatre ‘in frock coats and great coats, and others positively dirty’. ‘To my certain knowledge,’ he says, the attire he wore that evening would have gained him admission ‘to any part of any opera house’ between London and Naples. ‘I returned home,’ reports C.T. deeply disgruntled, ‘without seeing Masaniello.’

That was not the end of the story, for the next day he confronted the manager of the Covent Garden theatre, Frederick Gye, asking for his seven shillings, plus a further five for cab hire. Mr Gye, he reports, ‘again referred me to the ticket office, although he could not object to my coat’.

‘What redress is there, Sir,’ asks our correspondent in a final flourish, ‘but the County Court, where I shall, perhaps, obtain my own after loss of time and temper?’

Many books about the history of opera concentrate on the traditional trio of composers, works and performers. My shelves – like those of every opera lover – are packed with them (and a quick glance at the Notes will reveal how indebted I am to some of the best). But in addition to being an art form, opera has always been a social, economic and political phenomenon, and elements of each lie between the lines of that indignant letter. The appropriate dress code, the price of a ticket, the behaviour of fellow audience members, the supposed omni-competence of a beleaguered manager, the threat of legal action – all are part of the story. Then there is the work C.T. never got to see. Auber’s Masaniello (or La Muette de Portici) is a stirring piece about a Neapolitan political uprising; when performed in Brussels in 1830 it was said to have aroused local patriotism to such a pitch as to have contributed directly to the achievement of Belgian independence. In The Gilded Stage,we explore the broader context in which opera has been created, financed, produced, received and perceived. It is not the operatic stage itself and what goes on within its gilded confines that we concentrate on. Here, our focus is as much on the demand as the supply, not just the production of opera but also its consumption: the many chains of connection linking opera houses and impresarios, monarchs and money makers, art, artists and audiences.

Sometimes, I am tempted to start a campaign to abolish the word opera altogether. After all, it simply means a work. But for many it has become heavily loaded with resonances of grandeur, wealth and ‘elitism’ (another word I would like to banish). In my campaign I suspect I would have the ghosts of some of the greatest composers on my side. Monteverdi called Orfeo, first performed just over 400 years ago,a Favola in musica: a fable set to music. So far as I know, nobody at the time used the word opera to describe an art form that, in effect, was an attempt to combine all the arts, as the ancients were believed to have done and as an ambitious production of a movie or musical might aspire to do today: a Gesamtkunstwerk, to use the term associated with Wagner. He would be on my side, too.

Opera is certainly the most complex of all the performance arts, the form that attempts to reconcile the greatest number of contributory elements. The longer the chain, the greater the risk of weak links, and opera lore is replete with legendary tales of catastrophes, amusing in retrospect but doubtless appalling when (and if) they actually occurred. Part of the appeal of opera, indeed, is that, as with tightrope walking or motor racing, there is a constant sense in a live performance that something might go wrong. Or spectacularly right. From the start, it was the sheer ambition of opera, the attempt to integrate so many art forms into one transcending arch of aesthetic achievement, that made it so attractive to those who encouraged, commissioned, composed, performed and patronized it. In this sense, opera might be thought of as one of the crowning artistic legacies of the Renaissance.

In The Gilded Stage, we follow the story of opera as it spread from the cities of northern Italy through Europe, America and the wider world, becoming a global business in the digital age. The book makes no claim to be a comprehensive history of opera, rather a sequence of ‘scenes’ from a rich and colourful story. Thus, our historical helicopter lands in a succession of times and places across the operatic map, sojourning for a while in each before taking off again for another. Many of our way stations provide the immediate environment in which some outstanding operatic composers lived and worked. But the helicopter refuels, too, in locations germane to our story not on account of particular composers or works but because of the resonant operatic culture that developed there. Thus, our journey takes us from Renaissance Italy to the Paris of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great’s Berlin. Later, we note how the post-Napoleonic settlement, intended to bestow a sense of political stability, came to be undermined by an eruption of cultural nationalism across much of Europe. By the middle of the nineteenth century, attendance at the opera houses of London or Paris might have represented the acme of fashion; but soon the most significant productions were as likely to be staged in Munich or Milan, Bayreuth or Budapest, Prague or St Petersburg.

Nor was opera a European monopoly. The more cultured among the American Founding Fathers encouraged and aped European tastes, while Mozart’s librettist and Rossini’s first Count Almaviva help take our story to New York and thence to New Orleans and Mexico. We catch glimpses of opera, too, alongside the bravado and bawdiness of the Australian and American frontiers as mining millionaires flaunt their flamboyant and anomalous claim to culture (much as the rubber barons of the High Amazon would later signal their parvenu wealth by erecting an opera house in Manaus). By the late nineteenth century, a typically ‘Anglo-Saxon’ patron of the New York Metropolitan Opera, that archetypal product of Gilded Age America, might have caught a French work sung by a Czech, Polish and Italian cast led by a German conductor at what came to be affectionately dubbed the ‘Faustspielhaus’. Twenty years later, one might have heard Caruso singing Puccini in Havana or Toscanini conducting Wagner in Buenos Aires.

Even Caruso and Toscanini could scarcely have imagined the global reach of opera by the end of the twentieth century. For opera lovers, its worldwide popularity was undoubtedly a cause for celebration. Some, however, felt that the presentation of opera was in danger of becoming too democratized, its jagged edges filed down for mass consumption, exploited and commodified by people primarily concerned to make money out of it. Others sensed opera becoming a museum art appealing to a well-heeled social group contentedly revisiting old masterpieces rather than writing, producing or attending new ones. One reading of operatic history, indeed, might be said to reveal its rise and fall over the course of a 400-year trajectory. Or, perhaps, the gradual democratization of culture as serious music theatre, like artistic endeavour in other fields, struggled to widen the social base of its audiences while at the same time maintaining aesthetic standards. We consider such questions before moving on to one more: where does opera go from here? The book will end with some speculation about possible futures in an era of instant international communications, global finances and interactive digital technology. And we conclude – like Madama Butterfly – on an unresolved chord.

In writing this book, I have tried to take account of two rather different historiographies. First, there is a large and growing volume of excellent scholarly material on the history of opera, often by people trained as musicologists. Much of it tends to be fairly close-focused, with books and articles concentrating primarily on composers and their works and performers. Second, there is an even larger corpus of material on social history, an approach to the past that was in its infancy when I first encountered it but which has grown and flourished in the decades since. It will be no surprise to toilers in both fields if I say that, until recently, wire fences and closed gates rather than well-trodden pathways often marked the boundary between the two. Of course, the standard traditional biographies of the great operatic composers have routinely mentioned something of their family background and historical environment: Mozart’s extraordinary childhood, for example, or Verdi’s prominence in Risorgimento-era Italy. One could nevertheless read otherwise excellent composer biographies by the fistful and search in vain for anything more than cursory consideration of the wider context of their subjects’ lives and work.

Those trained as historians rather than musicologists could be just as territorial. ‘That’s not my field,’ says the Bismarck scholar pressed for a view on Frederick the Great or the Medievalist when asked about the Renaissance. The Americanist will deny expertise on the history of France, the French historian on that of Russia. This is partly a question of intellectual integrity; none of us is omniscient and we all have to defer to experts in ‘fields’ not our own. Perhaps it also reflects deeper attitudes, however, about the proper nature of historical study. Two or three generations ago, history as taught in the academy tended to concentrate on the great political, diplomatic and constitutional events of the past and the men (for they were mostly men) who effected them. Much of this was to change during the 1960s and 1970s, when, concomitant with the new radicalism of the times, the historiographical barometer swung towards the story of ‘ordinary’ people whom history had hitherto tended to marginalize or ignore.

Today, social history has been augmented by the emergence of cultural history; here, historians have learned much from anthropology and have brought to the fore such issues as gender, ethnicity and ritual. ‘Culture’ has thus come to mean many things. What it does not mean to most historians, however, is precisely what it probably signified to their grandparents: painting, architecture, literature and ‘classical’ music. Just as music history often gives short shrift to the wider context in which composers composed and performers performed, so social or cultural history tends to avoid consideration of the ‘high’ arts. Perhaps there is a vestigial class bias at work here, as historians intent on elevating the role of ‘ordinary’ people disdain to consider such ‘elite’ pastimes as opera – while opera historians prefer to concern themselves with ‘great art’.

In recent years, the fences have begun to be breached and the pathways better trodden than before, thanks to the efforts of a number of notable and courageous pioneers. This book is an attempt to build on their work and to pull together into a single volume some of the essential elements of a large story. It is not an encyclopedia, however, and individual readers will doubtless, according to taste and interest, find this or that location, period or personality given too much or too little attention. Sometimes the historical helicopter lands in a particular time or place that demands close and detailed coverage. Elsewhere, relatively flimsy coverage might result from paucity of data. We simply do not know enough about (for example) life at the Mantuan court when Monteverdi’s Orfeo was first produced, or even with absolute certainty where in the palace it was performed. How widely known would Handel and his music have been in early Hanoverian London, or Mozart and his in Habsburg Vienna or Prague, and what sort of people played in their orchestras and sang in their choruses? Did the Italian immigrant community in late nineteenth-century New York provide a substantial proportion of the audience at the new Metropolitan Opera? Perhaps; but there are no accurate data to substantiate or contradict what must remain a hunch.

So the scope and scale of this book have necessarily been restricted by both editorial considerations and the limitations of available evidence. But if it is necessarily an exercise in historical synthesis, it will not, I trust, read like one of those interminable chronicles that recount ‘one damn fact after another’. On the contrary, I have tried to remain aware throughout of the need to keep hold of the big picture, the broad themes that inform the overall narrative. Five themes in particular run through much of the book.

The first is political. When a Gonzaga or Wittelsbach duke or a Bourbon monarch promoted opera, the aim was usually to impress someone (a rival ruler, perhaps), while ‘popular’ opera could often be more subversive. Mozart quit the secure employ of an archbishop to freelance in and around the court of an emperor where he encountered his finest librettist, a Venetian Jew who ended his days in Martin Van Buren’s America. Napoleon appeared at the opera to show himself to ‘the people’ whose cause he was supposedly fighting in foreign lands. In the wake of the French Revolutionary wars, much of central Europe gradually became immersed in a rising tide of cultural nationalism, a theme that many of the producers and consumers of opera embraced and which survived well into the twentieth century – notably and notoriously under the Third Reich. In our own times, public debate about the supposed elitism or popularity of opera has sometimes taken a fiercely political turn.

Alongside politics is finance. It is impossible to talk about an art form that aspires to combine all the others – and is therefore liable to be the most expensive – without discussing money and management. Detailed financial information, except for more recent times, is often scanty. Thus, there is only sporadic evidence, and that largely anecdotal, about the wages paid in earlier times to operatic comprimari or to the members of choruses or orchestras. We do know something about the sums paid to celebrated soloists and, here and there, the cost of buying a box at the opera for a season or the cost of tickets for individual performances (when these were sold). The foot soldiers are an all-important part of our story, but it is the finances – and debts and deficits – of the field marshals that the historical record tends to preserve. Opera has rarely managed to be self-financing, and if there is one issue that recurs like a rondo theme throughout our story, it is the question of who pays. Or, rather, who picks up the deficit. The story of opera is therefore in part that of a succession of dukes and monarchs, risk-running impresarios, syndicates of bountiful bankers and industrialists, grants from local or central governments, and latterly of various ingenious, more or less tax-exempt schemes to raise money from sponsorship and private donation.

In the course of the book, many different currencies are mentioned, from Venetian ducats via French francs and Italian lire to modern British pounds and US dollars. There is no way these could realistically be converted for comparative purposes into a single currency comprehensible to modern readers. Rather, I have tried to give an idea of monetary values by quoting, alongside (say) a prima donna’s fee or the price of a theatre ticket, the typical daily wage of a worker at the time or the cost of a loaf of bread or restaurant meal.

Opera is a social phenomenon, too. The shift in the nature of the operatic audience, or at least the broad outlines of that shift, is easily plotted; it parallels other historical changes as power and money moved from the aristocracy, church and higher soldiery to the emergent bourgeoisie and, latterly, to a wider social spectrum. This shift is evident in everything from the physical shape of the opera house itself (for example, the relative absence of boxes and other social distinctions in most modern opera houses), to the way audiences behaved and dressed at the opera and such matters as pricing policy, the style of playbills and programmes, and the food and drink on offer. Equally remarkable is the changing social status of those in the operatic professions – especially, perhaps, among talented women singers to whom opera at times offered a rare opportunity for substantial social and economic improvement.

Alongside these social changes, we also note changes in technology that transformed the nature of opera. From earliest times, opera flaunted magical stage effects as Eros flew overhead, Jove or Juno descended from the heavens or the plot’s wicked miscreant was dragged, Don Giovanni-style, down into a fiery hell. ‘Scenes’ and ‘machines’ were as much remarked as the music or drama. Indeed, the latest scientific wizardry often featured, sometimes in parodic form, in operatic plots (such as the caricature of Dr Mesmer in Così fan tutte). We will talk of candle, gas and electric lighting, of gauzes and swimming machines and of the arrival of laser lighting and surtitles. Our story also includes the development of new means of spreading the word (and sounds and sights) of opera beyond the confines of the theatre: music publishing and copyright laws and the successive invention of photography, recording, film, TV, video, and the latest satellite and digital technologies.

Finally, of course, opera is an art form, and this book is therefore, to some degree, a cultural history. Here, several great arcs are discernible, each of which parallels broader historical trends. The first concerns the people who actually make opera happen. The singer has always been important, and our story is replete with the supposedly extravagant behaviour, funding and achievements of operatic superstars. But everyone else’s relative weight on the scales of significance has shifted radically as our story lurches from what might loosely be labelled as ‘patrons’ opera’ (from the Gonzaga dukes of Mantua to the Austrian Emperor Joseph II), to ‘composers’ opera’ (from Gluck and Mozart to Puccini and Strauss), to ‘conductors’ opera’ (the Mahler/ Toscanini era), to ‘producers’ opera’ in more recent times. Who, or what, is the principal attraction when you decide to go to the opera?

Then there is the changing nature of the art itself. Broadly speaking, two strands weave their way in and out of our narrative. The first, which we encounter in the courts of late-Renaissance Italy, in Handel, Wagner, Verdi and Benjamin Britten, is what we might dub ‘serious’ opera, usually through-composed and dealing with heightened emotions, situations and characters. The other, a more ‘popular’ style of music theatre with catchy tunes and vernacular dialogue, emerges in everything from Venetian commedia dell’arte, The Beggar’s Opera and The Magic Flute to Viennese operetta, Gilbert and Sullivan, and beyond. In earlier times, opera goers liked to attend something new, rather like today’s cinema audiences. By the early twentieth century, however, it was becoming clear that they preferred to revisit a standard repertoire of acknowledged classics, an emerging ‘canon’ to which few new works were subsequently added. Running alongside this fundamental change has been the way operatic plots and productions have altered focus over the centuries from high authority and quasi-mythical heroes towards ordinary people and ‘victims’. The music of operas, similarly, has tended to shift from stylized aria and recitative towards more integrated music drama, thence perhaps to psychodrama and, in parallel, the popular ‘musicals’ of recent decades. Ah, but are these ‘operas’?

Maybe opera is simply the word we apply to a music drama produced in what we call an opera house; if Sweeney Todd is mounted at Covent Garden, it is ipso facto an opera.* Some would argue that what distinguishes opera from other forms is that it is aimed to be sung, live, with a properly focused ‘operatic’ voice capable of projecting without electronic amplification. We all know an operatic voice when we hear it: Bryn Terfel has one, Elton John does not. Perhaps it is safer not to attempt too rigid (or too loose) a definition; opera, like the proverbial elephant, is something most of us recognize when we come across it but would be hard-pressed to describe precisely to someone who had not. So I am not urging a broad, all-embracing new definition of opera; just suggesting we should avoid too narrow a one.

That said, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that opera, at least as widely construed, is an art form which reached its acme during the long nineteenth century, from around the time of Mozart to the death of Puccini. In which case, this book might be said to document the rise, decline and fall (and possible demise) of an elite art form. According to this reading, opera has become at best a museum art, a kind of old-fashioned religion re-enacted inside great temples before a dwindling audience of the devout. Or perhaps we have been chronicling the democratization of opera, the gradual diluting, or ‘dumbing down’, of a once great art form to the point where any appeal it has beyond the narrow world of the cognoscenti is necessarily derived from the imposition of hype, shock and bogus sex appeal. If, on the other hand, you are of the ‘glass half full’ disposition, it seems to me that, despite death agonies more protracted than those of Gilda or Tristan, opera is resolutely refusing to die. On the contrary, there are, as I will try to show, potent signs of a revival in this most protean of all art forms.

PART I

Down the Road from Arianna to Zauberflöte c.1600–1800

CHAPTER I

The Birth of Italian Opera

Anna Renzi was Venice’s prima donna, one of the leading singers of her day, a ‘sweet siren who gently ravishes the souls and pleases the eyes and ears of the listeners’, according to one of her admirers, the dramatist and poet Giulio Strozzi. A portrait of Renzi shows an elegantly, expensively dressed young woman. Her richly coiffed hair is bedecked with flowers and jewellery, and her slashed two-tone bodice, tightly gathered in at the waist, is edged with a delicate filigree lace collar and cuffs. In Renzi’s hand is a sheet of music, but her eyes are looking out knowingly and confidently at the viewer. A ‘woman of few words’, says Strozzi, ‘but those are appropriate, sensible, and worthy for her beautiful sayings’.

As a young man, the English diarist John Evelyn had visited Venice in June 1645 as part of the Grand Tour he was undertaking. During Ascension week, Evelyn went to hear Renzi in an opera about Hercules in Lydia. He was duly impressed (though he thought ‘an eunuch’ in the cast ‘surpassed her’), and he attempted to describe the attraction of the new art form:

This night… we went to the Opera, where comedies and other plays are represented in recitative music, by the most excellent musicians, vocal and instrumental, with variety of scenes painted and contrived with no less art of perspective, and machines for flying in the air, and other wonderful notions; taken together, it is one of the most magnificent and expensive diversions the wit of man can invent… The scenes changed thirteen times… This held us by the eyes and ears till two in the morning.

Opera was one of the entertainments presented in Venice as part of Carnival, a winter-time festivity that in theory ran from the day after Christmas until Shrove Tuesday but which in practice came to be extended in both directions. Here were gathered every kind of freethinker: sexual libertarians, disillusioned priests, rich young Grand Tourists like Evelyn, and a stream of louche actors and musicians from all over Italy seeking work, money and audiences in the city most likely to provide them. During Carnival-time, the wearing of masks guaranteed anonymity to their wearers and broke down social (and sexual) barriers. So long as you kept out of trouble with the city authorities, your life was pretty much your own. Evelyn, revisiting Venice in January 1646 ‘to see the folly and madness of the Carnival’, noted ‘the women, men and persons of all conditions disguising themselves in antique dresses, with extravagant music and a thousand gambols, traversing the streets from house to house, all places then accessible and free to enter’. Here, ‘the comedians have liberty, the operas are open… and the mountebanks have their stages at every corner’. Evelyn records that the ‘diversions which chiefly took me up [were] three noble operas, where were excellent voices and music, the most celebrated of which was the famous Anna Rencia [sic]’, whom he and his companion later invited to supper.

Unlike Florence, Mantua and other northern Italian city-states, Venice was a republic, in many ways an exceptionally liberal, independent-minded one. In 1606, the entire city was, in effect, excommunicated by the papacy for its religious toleration (including towards Protestants). If something was attractive, the Venetian instinct was to flaunt it, perhaps to sell it. The city had long been an essential stopover for wealthy tourists from all over Europe seeking a frisson of danger. In 1594, Thomas Nashe, a contemporary of Shakespeare, published a vivid account in which his characters meet a pimp in Venice who leads them to a brothel, ‘Tabitha the Temptresses’. Tabitha apparently maintained a house of such elegance and refinement that, like ‘any saint’s house’, it contained ‘Bookes, pictures, beades, crucifixes [and] a haberdashers shop… in every chamber’. Tabitha’s whores had not a hair out of place, says Nashe, while on the beds there was ‘not a wrinkle’ to be found and the pillows were as smooth as a ‘groning wives belly’. Nashe’s young men had no complaints. ‘Us for our money,’ he concludes, ‘they used like Emperours.’ At Carnival time, Venice exploded into a riot of license and danger. Evelyn described the way Venetians would ‘fling eggs filled with sweet water, but sometimes not over sweet’, while they also had ‘a barbarous custom of hunting bulls about the streets & piazzas, which is very dangerous, the passages being generally narrow’. Here, by the waterways of La Serenissima, visitors found an exuberant crossroad between cultures where the legacy of the Renaissance met that of Byzantium, art met commerce, East met West.

For all its flamboyance, Venice was also in decline. The Imperial armies that routed Mantua in 1630 brought plague to Venice a year later, killing a quarter of the city’s population of some 150,000 over the next couple of years; fifteen years later, Venice embarked on two decades of recurrent warfare with the expansionist Ottomans, a campaign that drained the exchequer and culminated in humiliating defeat for the Republic in 1669. Deeper, longer-term trends also pointed to inexorable decline as foreign trade gradually diminished and the great trading routes Venice had once dominated were superseded by new roads to the East. Poverty became widespread while the men running the city responded with ever more petty rules and regulations. The Most Serene Republic, it became evident to anyone prepared to peer out beyond the civic mask, was in terminal decay. ‘My eyes are very pleased by Venice,’ commented the French political philosopher Montesquieu; ‘my heart and mind are not.’

In this 1610 engraving from Venice, singers, actors, masquers, jugglers and a snake-charmer perform outside St Mark’s. Many smaller piazzas would have witnessed similar scenes, especially during Carnival: a socially mixed crowd enjoying open-air, multimedia entertainment. Cover the piazza and you have the essence of the early opera house.

Yet, throughout these years, Venice continued to face the world with a broad smile, or at least the fixed semblance of one. Not only during Carnival but throughout the year a sequence of festivals and processions packed the calendar in a triumph of show over substance. Art and artifice acted as an addictive drug, a way of neutralizing traditional moral codes, a permanent diversion from uncomfortable realities. Life imitated art and became something far more comfortable: theatre. Venice was itself the most theatrical of cities, its very fabric providing the greatest spectacle of all: there was theatre on the canals, in the piazzas, in churches, in homes, and people would walk, talk and dress with a vivid sense of theatricality. Above all, this was a city of public theatres, often built by noble families on their vacant city properties, in which travelling troupes of players could usually be sure of a paying audience made up of not just the aristocracy but, potentially at least, of all ranks of society. Performances would typically contain a spoken comedy, interspersed with elements of song and dance and, if the spectators were lucky, some clever stage trickery of the kind that impressed Evelyn. Back in the 1590s, when Thomas Nashe was writing, there were two such public theatres in the vicinity of San Cassiano alone, a short walk west of the Rialto. One of them burned down in 1629 and was promptly rebuilt with brick and renamed the Teatro S. Cassiano. After a further fire and rebuild, it was here at the Cassiano, from 1637, that something like operatic life as we know it today was inaugurated: a form of publicly promoted musico-dramatic entertainment available on a regular or recurrent commercial basis in purpose-built theatres before a paying public.

At the time, the leading musician in Venice and the man in charge of music at St Mark’s Cathedral was the seventy-year-old Claudio Monteverdi. Few Venetians would have known that, thirty years before, in the confines of a Renaissance court in Mantua, their maestro di cappella had also composed perhaps the earliest genuine masterpiece in operatic history: Orfeo.

The origins of opera can be dated back a lot earlier still. Throughout history, many societies, often inspired by religio-political motives, have tried to link drama, spectacle, music and movement, and scholars have found fragmentary evidence of some of the words, instruments and stagings used in (for example) Pharaonic Egypt, the amphitheatres of ancient Greece, or the streets and churches and the courtly jousts and banquets of medieval Europe. We have little knowledge of the actual music sung or played in these quasi-ceremonial music dramas, however. In any case, it was probably not until Renaissance times that serious, systematic attempts were made to integrate and to stage all the elements of story and song, words, dance and music. Thus the roots of what we call ‘opera’ can realistically be traced no further back than the stage jigs and courtly masques of the sixteenth century, the intermedi performed between the acts of plays in the Renaissance courts of northern Italy, and that popular semi-improvised Italian theatrical entertainment, the commedia dell’arte, which featured much-loved stock characters such as the lovers Harlequin and Columbine, the miserly old Pantalone and the sad but comic Pulcinella.

In the 1570s and 1580s, a number of well-connected Florentine cultural figures used to gather at the home of the military leader and humanist intellectual Count Giovanni de’ Bardi, where they would discuss the essentials of music and drama. Among the regular members of the Bardi Camerata were the musicians Giulio Caccini and Vincenzo Galilei (father of the astronomer Galileo). Galilei wrote a treatise arguing for a ‘dialogue between ancient and modern music’: a revival, in effect, of what he believed to have been the aesthetic ideas of the ancient Greeks and Romans, most notably the complete integration of music and poetry. After Italy had suffered ‘great barbarian invasions’, lamented Galilei in his Dialogue, ‘men had been overcome by a heavy lethargy of ignorance… and took as little notice of music as of the western Indies’. Nowadays, he asserted, ‘there is not heard the slightest sign of modern music accomplishing what ancient music accomplished’. Neither the novelty nor the excellence of modern music ‘has ever had the power of producing any of the virtuous effects that ancient music produced’. Today’s musicians, Galilei thundered, ‘aim at nothing but the delight of the ear, if it can truly be called delight’. One of Galilei’s concerns was about the ways in which texts were set to music. ‘The last thing the moderns think of,’ he sniffed, ‘is the expression of words with the passion that these words require.’ And he took particular objection to the fashion for polyphony, in which a number of musical lines run alongside each other, advocating instead the clarity of a single vocal line. This, he thought, was how the music of the ancient world had been able to make so powerful an impact.

Italian commedia dell’arte, with its stock characters and story lines, fed directly into what later became known as opera. Its influence is still evident in Rossini’s Barber of Seville, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale and the play-within-a-play in Leoncavallo’s I pagliacci.

Galilei’s views were not original to him, and he and his colleagues were swimming with an already powerful tide. Throughout the Renaissance, there had been an attempt, especially but not only in northern Italy, to revive what came to be regarded as the superior culture of the ancient world and to place the individual human being centre stage. Architects, painters and sculptors, poets, historians and philosophers all aspired to build upon the supposedly humanistic principles underlying surviving Greek and Roman models. The Greek Parthenon and Roman Pantheon, the sculptures of Pheidias and Praxiteles, the works of Aristotle and Virgil – all served as inspiration in the era of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Machiavelli. For one cultural form, however, there were no ancient models, and that was music. Philosophers, including Plato, had reflected on the nature and impact of music, and there were plenty of surviving pictures of ancient musicians and music-making and descriptions of musical occasions. But the music itself had vanished. This only served to present a greater challenge to those, such as the Bardi circle, interested in the revival of the ancient arts and learning.

Renaissance art and scholarship received encouragement and funding from some of the wealthiest and most powerful political figures of the day. The munificence of Lorenzo de’ Medici (‘The Magnificent’) helped make Florence a leading cultural centre, while it was the Vatican that commissioned St Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel. In Ferrara, the ruling Este family had long been accustomed to putting on elaborate banquets at which musico-dramatic presentations would be performed for the delectation of guests between the many courses. Here, and in Mantua, courtly entertainments would also often feature elegant, classically based pastorals in which the drama would be set to music and include dance sequences. In Florence, the Medici would mark opportunities for political display such as dynastic weddings with not only gentle pastorals but also more impressive (and expensive) forms of stage entertainment and, between the acts, a series of extravagant, multimedia intermedi. In 1589, the celebrations of a marriage linking the houses of Tuscany and Lorraine culminated with a series of intermedi played in the entr’actes of a drama called La pellegrina. Devised by Bardi and calling upon the talents of several prominent members of his circle, these included not only spectacular scenic effects but also sequences of richly textured vocal and instrumental music and a ballet. ‘Through the depredations of time,’ we read in a pamphlet by one who was there, ‘we have lost the ability to perform such things with the musical modes of antiquity.’ However, although ‘presented to the accompaniment of our modern music’, it was evidently to the credit of the composer (Luca Marenzio, who wrote the music to the second and third intermedi) that he apparently did ‘his utmost… to imitate and re-create the music of antiquity’.

Such intermedi – still, theoretically, mini-performances between the acts of a play – could overshadow the play itself. Some complained about this: one did not go to a show for its intermission features. ‘The wondrous show – alas! – of the intermedi,’ complained ‘Comedy’ in a line by the sixteenth-century Florentine poet and playwright Antonfrancesco Grazzini. However, if pastorals could be so popular and intermedi so potent, some wondered why not extend them. It was thus a natural step to argue, as Vincenzo Galilei did, that music should be played throughout a full-length dramatic performance. Further, Galilei argued that the music should reflect the emotions seen on stage. As in ancient Greece (it was presumed), singers should be given words and music both clearly embodying the feelings they were required to express. To underline the emotions, said Galilei, not only should one melody be played or sung at a time, but the music should follow the natural inflections and rhythms of speech. Galilei composed illustrations of how these principles might work in practice. His compositions have not survived. Some of Caccini’s have, however, and are among the earliest embodiments of principles that, with variations, have tended to lie at the very root of what later generations came to call ‘opera’.

The Florentine Intermedi of 1589 were an early attempt to recreate what was believed to be the ancient world’s integration of music, drama and staging. One featured Apollo’s descent from the clouds to defeat the dragon Python.

It would be misleading to suggest that intermedi or pastorals simply gave way to the new form. On the contrary, there was at first little substantive distinction between the genres. But it is perhaps not altogether fanciful to date the origins of opera as we have come to understand it to around the year 1600 and, more specifically, the celebrations in Florence in October that year of the marriage of Maria de’ Medici to the King of France, Henri IV. The festivities marking the event were highlighted by a performance of a work called Il rapimento di Cefalo in which most of the music was by Caccini. Less noticed at the time, perhaps because it took place in the confined space of the Pitti palace, was Euridice, with text by Ottavio Rinuccini and music mostly by Jacopo Peri (with some unwelcome additions by Caccini). This is the first opera for which complete music has survived, perhaps the first ‘opera’ of all. Rinuccini, although not using the term, seems to have implied as much in his dedication to Maria de’ Medici, where he wrote (almost as if it were a matter of accepted fact) that ‘the ancient Greeks and Romans, in representing their tragedies on stage, sang them throughout’ – something, he added, that nobody had done since because modern music was so inferior to that of the ancients.

If the aesthetic origins of opera can be traced to earnest Renaissance theorizing about the Greeks and Romans, the historical context in which it first developed leads us into rather less elevated social and political considerations. Beneath the celebratory surface of the nuptials of 1600, there were severe off-stage squabbles between some of the artists. Thus Peri and Caccini competed over which singers the other could use, while the man who directed Euridice, the musician, dancer, choreographer and diplomat Emilio de’ Cavalieri (another member of the Bardi circle), was excluded from the principal musical offering, the Rapimento, and left Florence in disgust for his native Rome. As for the wider political stage, the high hopes some held of this dynastic marriage were to be repeatedly frustrated over the years that followed. Henri IV was assassinated and Maria (now Marie) became the incompetent Regent of France. Ousted by her son, Louis XIII, she realigned herself unsuccessfully with Catholic Spain and by the time she was painted by Rubens in the early 1620s had become something of a frumpy has-been.

Nothing of this was of course visible to the army of notables who attended the spectacular marriage celebrations in 1600. And if the law of unexpected consequences lurked above those Florentine festivities, it was in at least one respect to uncharacteristically benign effect. For before long, the tender new art form, incorporating elements of drama, poetry, music, dancing and acting, took firm root. The creations of Peri, Caccini and the rest involved the painting of scenery, too, and the production of costumes as well as the engineering of ambitious stage machinery, all topped by a style and quality of solo singing never heard before. The results were variable and there was no single word to describe them; each was simply a ‘work’ (or opera in Italian) inspired by the lofty and probably unachievable ambition of integrating all the arts.

One of those present at the wedding festivities in Florence in 1600 was Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of nearby Mantua, and he doubtless attended the performance of Euridice with his long-term secretary, the poet Alessandro Striggio. A few years later, the Duke’s chief musician, Claudio Monteverdi, collaborated with Striggio to produce a far greater work on the same theme.

It is February 1607 and we are in the richly panelled room of a Renaissance palace. The room is long and narrow, not particularly large – maybe fifteen metres by eight – and is part of the ground-floor apartment of the widowed sister of the Duke. On this particular occasion, it has been decked up as a temporary theatre, with a curtained dais at one end faced by a pair of comfortable armchairs, a few more basic wooden chairs, and several rows (or raised rings) of seats or benches which are beginning to be filled up by eager, elegantly dressed young men. The room is lit by the naked flames of torches and candles, which give it a warm, wan look, and sufficient light for the more enthusiastic to wave across to each other in lively anticipation of the show they have come to witness. Word has spread that the performance will be rather special, with the actors singing their parts. Suddenly the chit-chat diminishes to silence. The Duke and his entourage enter, take their seats to the accompaniment of a musical fanfare and the show begins.

Was this how things seemed to those who attended the first performance of Orfeo