Outlines:

1. Early Italian Comic Opera
   
   
   1. Italian musical theater of the early eighteenth century gave rise to many of the stylistic traits of the Classic period.
      
      
   2. Opera buffa (also called dramma giocoso, or commedia in musica)
      1. Full-length work that was sung throughout, with six or more singing characters.
      2. Plots caricatured the faults of both aristocrats and commoners.
      3. Characters often resembled the stock characters of the commedia dell'arte, improvised comedies of sixteenth-century Italy.
      4. Dialogue was set in rapidly delivered recitative with keyboard accompaniment.
      5. Arias used short tuneful phrases accompanied by simple harmonies.
         
         
   3. Intermezzo (pl. intermezzi)
      1. Originated as short comic musical interludes between the acts of a serious opera or play
      2. Plots were mostly comedies involving a few ordinary people, sometimes parodying the principal drama.
      3. Example: La serva padrona by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–1736)
         1. Performed in 1733 between the acts of his own serious opera.
         2. NAWM 85 depicts a dialogue between maid and her employer in a variety of moods.
         3. Music consisted of arias and recitative.
            
            
2. Comic Opera Outside Italy
   
   
   1. Took different forms in different countries; usually written in the vernacular. It responded to the demand for naturalness and was the earliest step toward musical nationalism, which would be prominent in the nineteenth century.
      
      
   2. France, Opéra comique
      1. Began ca. 1710 as a form of popular entertainment
      2. At mid-century its songs were mostly popular tunes.
      3. In 1752 an Italian comic opera troupe visited Paris, inspiring composers to create a mixed Italian-French style.
      4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) wrote Le Devin du village (The Village Soothsayer).
         
         
   3. England
      1. The ballad opera became popular, as England rebelled against foreign opera.
      2. The Beggar's Opera by John Gay (1728) satirized Italian opera.
         1. Consists of popular tunes, usually ballads
         2. A few numbers parody operatic airs (e.g., NAWM 87).
         3. Enormously popular, inspiring other ballad operas
            
            
   4. Germany
      1. The Singspiel had been the German comic opera type since the sixteenth century.
      2. The English ballad opera inspired a revival of the Singspiel.
      3. Singspiel tunes became very popular.
      4. In northern Germany Singspiel merged with more serious opera.
      5. Audiences in Vienna preferred farcical subjects with lively music inspired by Italian comic opera.
         
         
3. Opera seria
   
   
   1. Operas whose plots had no comic scenes or characters
      
      
   2. The poet who established its conventions was Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782).
      1. His librettos were produced in Naples, Rome, Venice, and Vienna.
      2. He sought to promote morality through entertainment by portraying heroic characters from ancient Greek or Latin stories.
         
         
   3. Librettos
      1. The conventional cast consists of two pairs of lovers with subordinate characters.
      2. Stories usually end with a heroic deed or sublime renunciation by the principal character.
         
         
   4. Music consists of alternating recitatives and arias.
      1. Recitatives develop the action through dialogue.
      2. Arias are soliloquys in which a principal actor reacts to the events of the previous scene.
      3. Occasionally there are duets, larger ensembles, or choruses.
         
         
   5. Arias were usually in da capo form with variations in detail. Metastasio's two-stanza texts set the standard for the 1720s–1740s (e.g., NAWM 86).
      1. CHWM, p. 307, shows the standard form
      2. In the mid-eighteenth century composers began shortening the repetition of the A section by beginning the repeat later, as indicated by a sign and the words dal segno (e.g., NAWM 85).
      3. Singers began to demand that composers and librettists accommodate their desire for virtuosic display.
         1. Sometimes composers had to change or substitute arias to the detriment of the drama.
         2. Singers added displays and cadenzas excessively.
         3. In 1720 the composer Benedetto Marcello anonymously published a satire Il teatro alla moda (The Fashionable Theater) detailing singers' excesses.
      4. Arias began to borrow principles from instrumental forms in the mid-eighteenth century.
         1. A sections included contrasting affections, often in two keys.
         2. Ritornellos began to introduce material from both A and B sections.
         3. Melodies used four-measure antecedent and consequent phrases, deviating for effect.
      5. Johann Adolph Hasse (1699–1783) was the master of the opera seria.
         1. He spent many years in Italy and worked at the court of the elector of Saxony in Dresden. He was the most popular and successful opera composer in Europe in the middle of the century.
         2. Most of his operas use Metastasio librettos.
         3. Example: NAWM 86 from Cleofide, composed for Hasse's wife, Faustina Bordoni, a professional singer, shows how this melody would have been embellished in the da capo repetition.
            
            
4. Opera Reform
   
   
   1. Beginnings
      1. Some Italian composers wanted opera to be more natural.
         1. They wanted more flexibility in recitatives and arias in order to make the action more logical.
         2. They used the orchestra more and reinstated choruses.
         3. They resisted the demands of the singers.
      2. Nicolò Jommelli (1714–1774) and Tommaso Traetta (1727–1779) were two of the reformers.
         1. Both worked at courts where French tastes were predominant.
         2. Traetta aimed to combine the best of French tragédie lyrique and Italian opera seria, and borrowed material from Rameau.
            
            
   2. Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787) synthesized French and Italian opera.
      1. He traveled throughout Europe.
      2. He was influenced by the Italian reform movement and vowed to purge Italian opera of its abuses and excesses (see vignette in CHWM) in the interest of drama.
         1. He wanted the music to serve the drama and poetry.
         2. He wanted the overture to be an integral part of the opera.
         3. He lessened the contrast between recitative and aria.
         4. His goal was a "beautiful simplicity" (e.g., Che farò senza Euridice? from Orfeo).
         5. His choruses were more integral to the action (e.g., NAWM 88, Chorus of the Furies).
      3. His mature style integrated Italian, German, and French styles.
      4. He wanted to prove that the French language could be used successfully in opera, and his Iphigénie en Aulide (Iphigenia in Aulis), 1774, used a French text to demonstrate this.
      5. Gluck continued to compose operas to French librettos, and his operas became models for later composers working in Paris.