The Opera

Opera, The

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Title: The Opera A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions of all Works in the Modern Repertory
Author: R.A. Streatfeild
Other: J. A. Fuller-Maitland
Release Date: July 9, 2005 [EBook #16248]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE OPERA
A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions of all Works in the Modern Repertory.
BY R.A. STREATFEILD
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY J.A. FULLER-MAITLAND
_THIRD EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED_
LONDON
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LIMITED
PHILADELPHIA: J.B. LIPPINCOTT CO.

CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
INTRODUCTION vii
I. THE BEGINNINGS OF OPERA 1
PERI--MONTEVERDE--CAVALLI--CESTI--CAMBERT--LULLI--PURCELL-- KEISER--SCARLATTI--HANDEL
II. THE REFORMS OF GLUCK 19
III. OPERA BUFFA, OPERA COMIQUE, AND SINGSPIEL 40
PERGOLESI--ROUSSEAU--MONSIGNY--GR��TRY--CIMAROSA--HILLER
IV. MOZART 52
V. THE CLOSE OF THE CLASSICAL PERIOD 74
M��HUL--CHERUBINI--SPONTINI--BEETHOVEN--BOIELDIEU
VI. WEBER AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL 87
WEBER--SPOHR--MARSCHNER--KREUTZER--LORTZING--NICOLAI--FLOTOW-- MENDELSSOHN--SCHUBERT--SCHUMANN
VII. ROSSINI, DONIZETTI, AND BELLINI 106
VIII. MEYERBEER AND FRENCH OPERA 126
H��ROLD--MEYERBEER--BERLIOZ--HAL��VY--AUBER
IX. WAGNER'S EARLY WORKS 151
X. WAGNER'S LATER WORKS 176
XL. MODERN FRANCE 214
GOUNOD--THOMAS--BIZET--SAINT SA?NS--REYER---MASSENET--BRUNEAU-- CHARPENTIER--DEBUSSY
XII. MODERN ITALY 262
VERDI--BOITO--PONCHIELLI--PUCCINI--MASCAGNI--LEONCAVALLO--GIORDANO
XIII. MODERN GERMAN AND SLAVONIC OPERA 302
CORNELIUS--GOETZ---GOLDMARK--HUMPERDINCK--STRAUSS--SMETANA-- GLINKA--PADEREWSKI
XIV. ENGLISH OPERA 323
BALFE--WALLACE--BENEDICT--GORING THOMAS--MACKENZIE--STANFORD-- SULLIVAN--SMYTH
INDEX OF OPERAS 351
INDEX OF COMPOSERS 361

INTRODUCTION
If Music be, among the arts, 'Heaven's youngest-teemed star', the latest of the art-forms she herself has brought forth is unquestionably Opera. Three hundred years does not at first seem a very short time, but it is not long when it covers the whole period of the inception, development, and what certainly looks like the decadence, of an important branch of man's artistic industry. The art of painting has taken at least twice as long to develop; yet the three centuries from Monteverde to Debussy cover as great a distance as that which separates Cimabue from Degas. In operatic history, revolutions, which in other arts have not been accomplished in several generations, have got themselves completed, and indeed almost forgotten, in the course of a few years. Twenty-five years ago, for example, Wagner's maturer works were regarded, by the more charitable of those who did not admire them, as intelligible only to the few enthusiasts who had devoted years of study to the unravelling of their mysteries; the world in general looked askance at the 'Wagnerians', as they were called, and professed to consider the shyly-confessed admiration of the amateurs as a mere affectation. In that time we have seen the tables turned, and now there is no more certain way for a manager to secure a full house than by announcing one of these very works. An even shorter period covers the latest Italian renaissance of music, the feverish excitement into which the public was thrown by one of its most blatant productions, and the collapse of a set of composers who were at one time hailed as regenerators of their country's art.
But though artistic conditions in opera change quickly and continually, though reputations are made and lost in a few years, and the real reformers of music themselves alter their style and methods so radically that the earlier compositions of a Gluck, a Wagner, or a Verdi present scarcely any point of resemblance to those later masterpieces by which each of these is immortalised, yet the attitude of audiences towards opera in general changes curiously little from century to century; and plenty of modern parallels might be found, in London and elsewhere, to the story which tells of the delay in producing 'Don Giovanni' on account of the extraordinary vogue of Martini's 'Una Cosa Rara', a work which only survives because a certain tune from it is brought into the supper-scene in Mozart's opera.
There is a good deal of fascination, and some truth, in the theory that different nations enjoy opera in different ways. According to this, the Italians consider it solely in relation to their sensuous emotions; the French, as producing a titillating sensation more or less akin to the pleasures of the table; the Spaniards, mainly as a vehicle for dancing; the Germans, as an intellectual pleasure; and the English, as an expensive but not unprofitable way of demonstrating financial prosperity. The Italian might be said to hear through what is euphemistically called his heart, the Frenchman through his palate, the Spaniard through his toes, the German through his brain, and the Englishman through his purse. But in truth this does not represent the case at all fairly. For, to take only modern instances, Italy, on whose congenial soil 'Cavalleria Rusticana' and the productions it suggested met with such extraordinary success, saw also in 'Falstaff' the wittiest and most brilliant musical comedy since 'Die Meistersinger', and in 'Madama Butterfly' a lyric