Introduced in Paris in the middle of the seventeenth century, Italian opera took a long time to conquer French audiences. The genre of the spoken tragedy, represented by the works of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, had brought French theatre since the 1640s to a point of perfection: the notion of a play being sung throughout was thus met with much scepticism. French desire for cultural hegemony also resisted opera, which was perceived as an Italian import. The fate of this genre was also complicated at the political level: Cardinal Mazarin’s attempt to impose opera in France did not sit well in the hostile climate generated by the Fronde (1648–1653), during which time several members of Parliament and high-ranking nobles vehemently opposed strengthening the absolute monarchy. While Italian influence was considerable in the artistic domain, it was progressively restricted to theatrical architecture, machinery, and décors, all aspects that would nevertheless become paramount for the development of ‘pièces à machines’, that is, spectacular theatrical plays mostly performed on private stages – princely residences, the king’s palaces – and in Parisian public theatres.

As in other European countries, French opera arose from the development of the divertissement de cour in combination with the new expectations of urban audiences, who wanted to enjoy in public theatres the performances usually restricted to the court – thus, the significant imprint left by the ballet de cour on French opera, in which dance is an essential ingredient. All these factors explain the fairly late year – 1671 – of the first public performance of a French opera, Pomone, on a libretto by Pierre Perrin (c. 1620–1675) with music by Robert Cambert (c. 1628–1677). Founded by Perrin and Alexandre de Rieux, Marquis de Sourdéac, in 1669, the Académie d’Opéra (renamed in 1671 Académie Royale de Musique) promptly institutionalised French opera through the suppression of all foreign influences, securing for many decades to come the preservation of a specific French model.

The Ballet de Cour

During the first half of the seventeenth century, the ‘ballet participatif’ (participatory ballet) – today known as ballet de cour – was the prevalent divertissement at the court. It was meant to entertain courtiers, members of the royal family, and the king himself, and offered them the possibility of participating. The practice of hiring commoners as professional dancers and having them mingle on stage with members of the court began in 1630. However, the final grand ballet danced at the end of these spectacles was restricted to courtiers only.¹

Dance – in addition to fencing and horse ballet – was part of the formal education of young French aristocrats. The young king had daily lessons with his maître à danser (dance master). During the seventeenth century, dance played an essential social and artistic role in court life, not only during the increasingly codified great balls but also during exceptional performances that would usually take place during the carnival season.²

The origins of the ballet de cour go back to court festivities and divertissements: prime examples are those ordered by Queen Catherine de’ Medici at the end of the sixteenth century.³ In keeping with the legacy of masquerades and large-scale political ballets of the Renaissance, these ballets were conceived by the intendants of princely houses, or, when motivated by less prestigious demands, improvised by the courtiers themselves.⁴ The content of most of these seventeenth-century spectacles is known to us through their libretti, which remain nevertheless without much detail.⁵ Only the most important or monumental ballets were preserved thanks to commemorative publications in connection with their political agenda.⁶

Historically, a ballet consisted of a succession of very brief danced sequences called entrées (entrances). When the number of entrées was extensive, the ballet was divided into parties (parts). These parties were sometimes unified by a single subject (for instance, the Ballet Royal de la Nuit). Generally, however, variety and surprise were favoured. As a collective enterprise, the ballet nevertheless had one author responsible for the general dessein (design) – that is to say, the subject and organisation of the plot. The responsibility for the music and for the poetic text was delegated to others. In parallel with printed occasional poems lauding patrons, printed programmes or booklets detailed the dessein, with an explanation of the décors and the characters. Later, these booklets would also give the text of the narrations sung by the chorus and the soloists, as well as the ‘verses for the characters’, in either a laudatory tone or a comic vein. These printed materials fulfilled a social function that was much appreciated by the audience, who would attempt during performances to identify the masked dancers.

The composers of the Chambre du Roi (the king’s chamber) provided different types of music according to their own specialties: the dancer and composer Louis de Mollier (c. 1615–1688) composed ballet music, Jean de Cambefort (c. 1605–1661) récits, and so on. These scores usually required an ensemble of lutes, violins, or flutes; choirs set for four or five voices; and solo parts. A group of dancers could also include musicians: the leader could sing, often accompanying himself while surrounded by other musicians. In 1673, the French writer Charles Sorel praised the lute, as ‘there is grace when holding it and pinching [its strings]’, stressing that ‘one can dance and walk’ while playing.⁷

Some ballets were organised around a single plot: Le Ballet comique de la Reine (1581) is about Ulysses being freed by the gods from Circe. Other ballets were based on Italian epics: Le Ballet de Monseigneur le duc de Vandosme ou Ballet d’Alcine (1610), Le Ballet de la délivrance de Renaud (1617),⁸ and Le Grand Ballet du Roi sur l’aventure de Tancrède en la Forêt enchantée (René Bordier, 1619). Most of the music for these three ballets is attributed to Pierre Guédron (1564–d. 1619–1620). Other ballets were thematic: Le Ballet des Fées des Forêts de Saint-Germain (1625) or Le Grand Bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut (Bordier, Antoine Boësset; 1626). Ballets with a laudatory purpose alternated with more informal divertissements and masquerades: some of them – those related to the carnival season – were grotesque, and their performances were often lengthy.

One such work is the allegorical Ballet Royal de la Nuit (Clément, Cambefort, Mollier, Jean-Baptiste Boësset [1614–1685], Michel Lambert [c. 1610–1696]), which celebrated the end of the Fronde conflicts in 1653: it included no less than forty-three entrées, among which was Ballet en Ballet and two short ballets in several acts each: Les Nopces de Thétis and the Comédie muëtte d’Amphitrion. In 1654, Le nozze di Peleo e di Theti or Les Noces de Pélée et de Thétis (Francesco Buti, Carlo Caproli [1615/20–1692/5]) was commissioned by Mazarin after the Fronde as an ‘Italian comedy in music, mixed with a ballet on the same subject, danced by His Majesty’. The opera is augmented by some ten entrées chosen by François de Beauvilliers, Duke of Saint-Aignan, Premier Gentilhomme de la Chambre du Roi, and set to music by court musicians. The king and his family participated in these danced entrées, in the company of the young Giambattista Lulli.⁹

Les Amants magnifiques, the divertissement created by Molière and Lully for the carnival in 1670, is sometimes considered to be the last participatory ballet: it is made up of two small poetic and musical units, bookending a comédie-ballet. Each of them is organised around the figure of the king as Neptune (first intermède) and Apollo (‘Les Jeux Pythiens’). The king, however, did not dance.¹⁰

The ballet de cour is emblematic of the popularity of dance within the court and, more broadly, among the French aristocracy. This explains why the 1669 status of the newly formed institution, the Académie Royale d’Opéra, allowed the nobility to participate in operas, whether as dancers or as singers, without endangering their privileged social rank. The situation was slightly different outside the court: although four courtiers took part in the première of the first opera performed at the Académie Royale de Musique – Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus (1673), a medley of court intermèdes reused by Lully¹¹ – over the years, the separation on stage between amateur dancers (courtiers) and professional ones became increasingly marked. Participatory dance persisted only within colleges, especially those of the Jesuits: pupils who played in Latin tragedies would also dance on stage during intermèdes, often mingling with professional dancers.¹²

Having taken the reins of the Académie Royale de Musique, Lully attached to it a professional ‘corps de ballet’ (which included several members of the Académie Royale de Danse that had been created in 1660) and a permanent maître de ballet.¹³ During the academy’s first decades, professional female dancers, such as the celebrated Mlle Verpré, performed at the court; they were dismissed during the 1670s but continued to be hired by the Académie Royale de Musique.¹⁴ For the Parisian performance of the ballet Le Triomphe de l’Amour (Philippe Quinault, Lully; Palais-Royal, 6 May 1681), Lully hired new professional female dancers to replace the female courtiers who had created those roles earlier in the year at the court (Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 21 January). From that point on, female dancers came to be among the most celebrated performers of the Académie Royale de Musique’s company.

Italian Opera in Paris

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the strengthening of the absolute monarchy was affirmed, justified by the divine-right theory of kingship. Cardinal de Richelieu, Chief Minister of Louis XIII, displayed his artistic patronage through the creation of the Académie Française (1635), the protection of authors, and the development of theatre. Designed on the Italian model by the architect Jacques Lemercier, Richelieu’s own theatre was built in his Palais Cardinal (later Palais-Royal) and inaugurated in January 1641 with a ballet, La Prospérité des armes de la France (Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, François de Chancy, Mollier, Michel Verpré), which he had himself commissioned.¹⁵ It is in this context that Jules Mazarin (Giulio Raimondo Mazarini, 1602–1661) arrived in Paris in December 1643 as the Pope’s extraordinary nuncio. Richelieu designated Mazarin to succeed him as Chief Minister to the king. Pursuing Richelieu’s politics of state interventionism in artistic life, but also seeking to strengthen the ties between France and the Papal states, Mazarin emulated the example of the Barberini family in Rome, who had been among the most important patrons and mentors of his youth.¹⁶

In order to foster spectacles in the Roman style, Mazarin, beginning in 1641, invited the composers Marco Marazzoli (c. 1602–1662), Mario Savioni (1606–1685), and Caproli, as well as Italian singers, to the French court.¹⁷ The presence of an Italian itinerant company, the Febiarmonici, is documented for the year 1644.¹⁸ During the autumn, other musicians arrived at the court, answering the French invitation: the singer Anna Francesca Costa (‘la Checca’; fl. 1640–1654), the castrato Atto Melani (1626–1714), and his brother, the composer and singer Jacopo Melani (1623–1676), were sent by the Médici. The castrato Marc’Antonio Pasqualini (1614–1691) was sent by the Pope; and the tenor Venanzio Leopardi (as Venanzio d’Este), at the service of Cardinal Colonna, was called to Paris by the Duke of Modena. One of the greatest singers of her time, Leonora Baroni (1611–1670), accompanied by her husband, arrived at the French court in 1644 on the invitation, mediated by Mazarin, of Anne of Austria, the queen regent of France. They all participated in the première of Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo at the Palais-Royal in 1647 (more on this later). After that, the company was disbanded, but the habit of bringing Italian musicians to the French court had begun. After the end of the Fronde conflicts, the famous Roman singer Anna Bergerotti arrived in Paris in 1655.

The first attempt to perform musical plays occurred in February 1645 at the Louvre. This was probably an allegorical play, staging the ties between France and Rome: the ‘dramma per musica’ Il Giudizio della ragione tra la Beltà e l’Affetto (Buti, Marazzoli or Marco dell’Arpa; Rome, 1643).¹⁹ Complemented with ballets by Giambattista Balbi, La Finta pazza (Giulio Strozzi, Francesco Sacrati; Venice, 1641) was performed a few times in December 1645 at the Petit-Bourbon in the presence of the queen regent and the young Louis XIV, with machines and stage sets by Giacomo Torelli, who had been sent expressly to Paris by his patron, the Duke of Parma.²⁰ According to a contemporary review from the Gazette de France, the audience was as much dazzled by the music and poetry as by Torelli’s décors, his machines, and ‘admirable changes of scenery, so far unknown in France’.²¹

In February 1646 at the Palais-Royal, several performances were given of the opera Egisto, ovvero, Chi soffre speri (1637), originally written for the Barberini theatre in Rome on a libretto by Giulio Rospigliosi (1600–1669) with music by Virgilio Mazzocchi (1597–1646) and Marazzoli.²² An Italian traveller, Giambattista Barducci, noted the success which greeted the Italian ‘manner of singing’.²³ But, apart from this, the concert version did not meet with much enthusiasm: on Fat Tuesday (13 February 1646), ‘only the King, the Queen, the cardinal [Mazarin], and the inner circle of the Court’ attended. In her memoirs, Françoise de Motteville, the première femme de chambre of Anne of Austria (Louis XIV’s mother) lamented the fact that ‘we were only twenty or thirty people in this place, and we thought that we would die of boredom and cold there. Entertainments of this sort require company, and solitude isn’t in keeping with the theater.’²⁴ Such reactions may have discouraged performances of Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea (Venice, 1643) that had been planned ‘only with beautiful costumes’.²⁵ But Mazarin prepared a brilliant première: in June 1646, he brought Rossi, the Roman composer in the service of the Barberinis, to Paris. The machinery of the Palais-Royal was renovated with the help of the French painter and architect Charles Errard in order to accommodate Torelli’s stage settings. Beginning on 2 March 1647, Rossi’s opera Orfeo (Buti) was performed eight times as Le Mariage d’Orphée et d’Euridice, tragi-comédie en musique et vers italiens, avec changement de théâtre et autres inventions jusqu’alors inconnus en France, with machines by Torelli and ballets by Balbi – the music of which was mostly composed by French court musicians.²⁶

Once again, the queen regent and Louis XIV attended these performances. The Gazette de France praises the décors and machines, notably those of Apollo, noting that the spectators did not know ‘what to admire most’ between ‘the variety of scenes, the diverse ornaments of the theater, and the novelty of the machines’, or ‘the grace and the voice of those who recited’.²⁷ The expressive quality of the music remained nevertheless the main object of admiration. While pointing out that a part of the audience was bored due to their ignorance of the Italian language, a reviewer from the Gazette de France stresses that the music ‘could express no less than the verses all the affects of those who did recite these’.²⁸ Nevertheless, this lavish Orfeo became the target of attacks by the Frondeurs against Mazarin.

Triumph of the Machine

Private companies followed this vogue for the spectacular. Considered since 1644 the most beautiful public theatre in Paris, the Théâtre du Marais reopened in 1647; it accommodated theatrical machines designed by Georges Buffequin and staged monumental plays with musical accompaniment. At around the same time, in 1648, Mazarin commissioned Corneille and Charles Coypeau d’Assoucy (1605–1679), the former lute master of Louis XIII, to create a mythological tragedy mixed with music that could reuse the machines from Rossi’s Orfeo. Andromède was finally premièred in February 1650 at the Petit-Bourbon, after some delay caused by the illness of the child king, then by the Fronde. Composed of four airs, a dialogue in music, and nine choruses, Andromède was favourably received and served to strengthen the association between music, machines, and mythology. Thus, opera made its way into the French public through the importation of Italian décors and the insertion of ballets in the French manner, as in Caproli’s Le Nozze di Peleo e di Theti featuring Torelli’s machines. Some French singers appeared for the first time among a cohort dominated by their Italian peers.

This period saw the French monarchy reaffirming its authority: the victory over the Fronde was followed in 1659 by the signing of the Treaty of the Pyrénées. The termination of the long war between France and Spain (1635–1659) culminated in a reconciliatory gesture, the wedding of Louis XIV and the Infanta Maria Theresa of Spain. Festivities lasted for three years: Italian opera was prominently featured. Francesco Cavalli, who travelled from Venice to Paris in the spring of 1660, was commissioned to compose an opera for the occasion, adapted to the greatest indoor theatre ever constructed in France, the salle des machines at the Tuileries, commissioned in 1659 to Gaspare Vigarani, who was employed by the Duke of Modena. As the construction was still in progress, a new performance of Cavalli’s Xerse (Venice, 1655) took place in November 1660 with six ‘entrées de ballet’ set to music by Lully. The young violinist, who had been admitted as musician to the court in 1652, quickly became extremely popular, first as a dancer and then as a comic pantomime in his own ballets, which featured operatic dialogues (sung by the company of Italian singers) in combination with French récits (L’Amor malato, 1657; Ballet royal de l’Impatience, 1661). Lully staged a competition between the two styles in his Ballet de la Raillerie (1659).

Finally completed after the Fronde, Mazarin’s new theatre was inaugurated on 7 February 1662, after his death in March 1661. Cavalli’s opera Ercole amante (Buti) was premièred there, augmented with eighteen entrées de ballet composed by Lully, in which members of the court and the royal family participated. The cast comprised two French singers, Hilaire Dupuis and Anne de la Barre, and an Italian company led by Bergerotti. The audience was impressed by the imposing size of the décors: the Gazette de France noted that the machine in the final scene could carry ‘as many men as the Trojan horse’.²⁹ Italian guests were more critical. Barducci praised the ballet, the magnificent décors, the costumes, and the machines, but he lamented that the music, which should have been the main ‘reason for the celebration, is entirely lost in the middle of the racket’ caused by the greater part of the audience, who did not understand the libretto.³⁰ The Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Grimani, attributed this failure to the theatre’s poor acoustics.³¹

The Franco-Italian experiment of Ercole amante was abandoned, but the influence of using such vast frescoes in combination with machines remained paramount for the inception of a specifically French form oriented towards the spectacular. Yet the issue of language remained to be addressed, since the majority of French audiences did not understand Italian. This explains the parallel development of the pastorale en musique, a work not only of much smaller proportions but also one that offered the possibility for conveying the passions of the libretto with a typically French musical language.

Return to the Pastorale en Musique

Such smaller dramatic works sung throughout appeared from the middle of the century: the pastoral comedy Les Charmes de Félicie, tirés de la Diane de Montemayor (Jacques Pousset de Montauban, Cambefort; Hôtel de Bourgogne, 1654) and Le Triomphe de l’Amour sur des bergers et bergères, a pastorale in one act (Charles Beys, Michel de la Guerre, music lost; concert version performed on 21 January 1655; slightly revised staged version on 26 March 1657). In his preface to the pastorale La Muette ingratte (concert version, 1658–1659), Cambert referred to his desire to ‘introduc[e] plays in music as has been done in Italy’:

Cambert and Perrin collaborated again with the Pastorale d’Issy (music lost), which premièred in early April 1659 in a private context and was subsequently given, with success, at the court. According to Ménestrier, the work was an attempt to introduce more recitative into French music and render it ‘capable of expressing the most pathetic feelings without losing any of its words’.³³ Going back stylistically to earlier court divertissements, if not to narrative models from the beginning of the century, these works failed to rival the tragedies that had been blossoming on the Parisian stage for more than twenty years. Perrin decided to set to music a serious play, La Mort d’Adonis (Antoine Boësset, music lost), which was performed at the ‘petit coucher’ of the king in 1661. This, as well as a comic play – Ariane ou le mariage de Bacchus (Cambert, rehearsed in public, music lost) – met Perrin’s main purpose, which was to prove that ‘it is possible to succeed in all dramatic genres’.³⁴

Comédies Mêlées

Today referred to as comédies-ballets, comédies mêlées (mixed comedies), which featured songs or musical and danced intermèdes that had been first performed at the court and then in Parisian theatres, began to be incorporated into pastoral plays. Considered the first comédie-ballet, Les Fâcheux (Molière, Pierre Beauchamps; July 1661) was given as part of a lavish series of celebrations in honour of Louis XIV organised by Nicolas Fouquet, the Surintendant of Finances, in his own residence, the castle of Vaux-le-Vicomte. Since the dancers had to change their costumes between the different entrées, Molière decided to insert comic scenes within the danced divertissement. In public theatres, the practice of mixing spoken scenes and musical or danced sequences had started to gain momentum, with an increasing number of plays integrating musical scenes. For instance, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, a comédie-ballet by Molière and Lully first performed at the court in October 1670 and then at the Palais-Royal in November, is a comic play that incorporates intermèdes, the most celebrated of which are ‘La cérémonie turque’ (The Turkish Ceremony), conceived and performed by Lully himself in the manner of his own ballets, and ‘Le Ballet des Nations’, which evokes different European countries and was inspired by the Ballet royal de Flore (Lully, 1669).

The Turning Point: 1671

By the end of the 1660s, the various options available for musical performance, whether at the court or in the city, were ready to converge and fully realise the union of ballet, court entertainment, and plays with machines. Commissioned for the reopening of the salle des machines at the Tuileries Palace, Psyché, a tragedy in vers mêlés (poetry composed of lines featuring different metres) with five musical and danced divertissements, premièred on 17 January 1671. Conceived by Molière, partly versified by Corneille and Quinault (the latter for the sung parts), and choreographed by Beauchamps, Psyché was inspired by Andromède. Its mythological subject justified the use of machines, exemplifying the monumental proportions assumed by the divertissement during Louis XIV’s reign – nevertheless, spectators were particularly sensitive to the suffering of a young girl confronted by the gods’ wrath.

Among Psyché’s highlights, ‘La plainte italienne’ – a scene imitating the Italian lamento – and the final scene – a wedding celebration in the heavens – incorporate both the opulent old tradition of the Florentine divertissement and the French ballet de cour. In a letter relating the event, the Marquis of Saint-Maurice, ambassador of the court of Savoy, counted no less than seventy ‘maîtres à danser’ and more than three hundred violinists, ‘all lavishly dressed’, the singers and musicians suspended by machines, and producing ‘the most beautiful symphony in the world, with violins, theorbos, lutes, harpsichords, oboes, flutes, trumpets and cymbals’.³⁵

In the meantime, a royal privilege dated 28 June 1669 granted to Perrin the authorisation to establish ‘Royal Academies of Opera, or representations in music in French, on the model of those from Italy’. On 3 March 1671, Pomone, his pastorale in five acts, was performed in Paris (Jeu de Paume de la Bouteille; the music by Cambert is mainly lost, except for the overture, Act I, and part of Act II). Presented as an ‘opera or representation in music’, it featured machines built by the Marquis of Sourdéac (who became, later in December, one of the business managers of Perrin’s Académies d’Opéra, with the financier Laurent Bersac, Sieur de Champeron). Entirely sung, its half-pastoral, half-mythological plot narrates in a rather comic vein the loves of Vertumne, the god of the seasons, and Pomone, the goddess of fruitful abundance. Pomone was performed continually over the course of seven to eight months (146 performances), making this work the greatest triumph of its century.

Like Psyché, Pomone offered all the necessary ingredients for the tragédie en musique. It was performed on the Parisian stage at considerable expense, financed by individuals but under the strict control of the royal authority; fully sung and in five acts, it featured dances and machines – the opulence of which recalled the court divertissement – and a prologue praising the king as the protector of the ‘Académie Royale des Opéras’. ³⁶ Nevertheless, the libretto, obviously comic, was generally considered weak and ridiculous, comparing unfavourably with Lullian opera, which, with the help of the librettist Quinault, tended more toward the dignity of Psyché.

In the wake of Pomone’s success, Molière’s company invested generously in a series of new performances of Psyché at his own theatre, the Palais-Royal. The machines were repaired and readjusted for new effects; new musicians, dancers, singers, and acrobats were hired. The intention was clearly to attain a pomp comparable to that of court performances, but also to reaffirm the prestige of the comédies mêlées in response to the triumph of opera. Molière’s attempt was successful, as is shown by the public reception of these new performances of Psyché, as would later be the case for the comedy Le Malade Imaginaire (Molière, 1673), the mythological tragedy Circé (Thomas Corneille, 1675), and, in 1682, Pierre Corneille’s Andromède – all three plays with scores composed by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704).³⁷ This success can also explain the aggressiveness with which Lully, as leader of the Académie Royale de Musique, defended his privileges against other Parisian stages.

Lully and the New Académie Royale de Musique

Lully arrived in Paris in 1646 as Giambattista Lulli. In 1653, he became composer of the king’s instrumental music. He succeeded Cambefort in 1661 as ‘Surintendant de musique et compositeur de la musique de chambre du Roi’. From his first ballet de cour, Le Ballet du temps (Benserade, 1654), through Psyché, Lully gradually established his control over the royal divertissements. Begun in 1664, Molière and Lully’s fruitful teamwork (Le Mariage forcé) lasted until 1671: the causes of their rupture were the success of Psyché and, above all, Molière’s decision to restage the work, most likely without Lully’s permission. In addition, the success of Pomone led the king to encourage other composers: in November 1671, Les Amours de Diane et d’Endymion (Henry Guichard) on a score by Jean Granoulhiet (Grenouillet) de la Sablières (1627–c. 1700) was performed in Versailles, then repeated with ballets in February 1672 at Fontainebleau with the title Le Triomphe de l’Amour.³⁸ In Paris, Sourdéac and Champeron presented another pastorale, Les Peines et les Plaisirs de l’Amour (Gabriel Gilbert, Cambert). Hoping to maintain control over virtually every musical production given on Parisian stages, Lully bought Perrin’s privilege and received a new patent in March 1672 from the king, which gave a quasi-monopoly to the brand-new Académie Royale de Musique. The Académie could from then on exercise complete control over the amount of music in any given performance as well as the number of musicians. For instance, shortly after the première of Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire, Lully stipulated on 30 April 1673 that the orchestra, which had already been dramatically reduced, would number no more than two singers and six violinists – the usual configuration for musical entr’actes in spoken theatre. Protests from other theatres helped to loosen some of these rigid rules, but the Académie kept the privilege for performances that were entirely sung. After Lully’s death, the privilege authorised his successors to trade with private managers willing to open opera houses in the provinces: Lyons in 1687; Rouen in 1688; Aix-en Provence, Marseilles, and Montpellier in 1689; cities in Brittany, Bordeaux, and Toulouse in 1690; Toul, Metz, and Verdun, and other cities in the French Lorraine in 1699.³⁹

The very first première at the Académie Royale de Musique was Quinault and Lully’s Cadmus et Hermione, a tragédie en musique on a mythological plot based on Ovid (Jeu de paume de Béquet, 27 April 1673). It was received with great success, and the king attended the performance. Following Molière’s death in February 1673, Lully was granted royal permission to move the opera house to the Palais-Royal, a venue which had up to that point been occupied by Molière’s company and the Italian comedians. The Palais-Royal could accommodate up to 1300 persons, out of which 700 could be seated in the loges. Although Lully seemed to have wanted at the beginning of his tenure at the Académie to attract a wide audience, the price of admission remained in general much higher than that for spoken theatre.⁴⁰

After Cadmus and the exceptional performance of Alceste at Versailles on 4 July 1674 (see Figure 8.4), almost all of Lully’s operas were first performed at the court in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.⁴¹ The king financed the décors and rehearsals, as well as the exceptional honoraria for his protégé, who usually composed one opera per year, in January, at the beginning of the carnival season: Alceste, ou le Triomphe d’Alcide (1674), Thésée (1675), Atys (1676), Isis (1677), Proserpine (1680), Persée (1682), Phaëton (1683), Amadis (1684), and Roland (1685) were all composed on Quinault’s libretti. Lully also wrote two operas on libretti by Thomas Corneille and Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle: Psyché in 1678 – the score of which reuses the intermèdes Lully had composed for Molière’s Psyché in 1671 – and, in 1679, Bellérophon.

Lully’s masterwork, Armide (Quinault, 1686), was received with unprecedented enthusiasm even though it was not performed at court due to the king’s developing disinterest in opera. A contemporary spectator described the theatre as filled over its maximum capacity and ‘so profusely overcrowded that one could not understand the quantity of people who attended’.⁴² In the title-role, Marthe Le Rochois eclipsed all the other actresses of the Académie Royale. Her imprint on the role lasted until the second half of the eighteenth century, especially in the most celebrated scene, Armide’s monologue, ‘Enfin, il est en ma puissance’ (Act V scene 2):

This long soliloquy offered singers the possibility of showcasing their vocal and acting talents, and expressing theatrical passions. Until the eighteenth century, Armide’s monologue remained the most emblematic piece in the operatic French repertoire.

Following Lully’s death in March 1687, his son-in-law Jean-Nicolas de Francine (1662–1735) became the director of the Académie Royale de Musique until 1704. In 1714, the Académie required that all of Lully’s operas be inscribed in the repertoire of the theatre. The predominance of Lully’s works had already cast a considerable shadow over those of other composers. David et Jonathas, Charpentier’s first tragédie en musique, was performed in 1688 at the Jesuit college Louis-le-Grand: its acts were performed as intermèdes for a Latin tragedy, Saul (François de Paule Bretonneau). Yet Charpentier would have to wait until after Lully’s death for his opera Médée (Thomas Corneille, 1693) to be brought to the stage of the Académie Royale de Musique. Judged exceedingly difficult, it was poorly received.⁴⁴ The composer Henri Desmarets (1661–1741) had more success the same year with Didon (Louise-Geneviève Gillot de Saintonge).⁴⁵

Francine was able to rely on the works of other composers: Lully’s secretary Pascal Collasse (1649–1709) composed the successful Thétis et Pélée (Fontenelle, 1689), which would then be performed over the course of seventy-six years at the Académie Royale. Another major success was Alcyone (Antoine Houdar de Lamotte, 1706) by Marin Marais (1656–1728). Himself a musician of the orchestra of the Académie, Marais solidified the Lullian legacy in Paris before the arrival of a second generation of composers whose works had first been noticed at the court. Such was the case for André Cardinal Destouches (1679–1742) and André Campra (1660–1741), who enjoyed their first successes with ballets and opéras-ballets.⁴⁶ Nevertheless, the genre that continued to bring artistic recognition was the tragédie en musique.

Tragédie en Musique

Lully’s favourite librettist, Philippe Quinault (1635–1688), was renowned not only as a librettist but also as a playwright – he authored several spoken tragedies and plays in a lighter vein.⁴⁷ His double competence served French opera well. The product of a synthesis between diverse forms of court entertainments, it adopted as its referential frame the paradigmatic genre of tragedy.⁴⁸

A paramount requirement of French classical aesthetics was to adapt the theatrical representation to the concepts of vraisemblance (verisimilitude) and bienséance (decorum, implying a general sense of suitability and plausibility).⁴⁹ The fictional plot must adequately observe moral standards and answer to the cultural expectations of the audience. Yet music poses a major problem with regard to verisimilitude, as it creates a distance between the object and its imitation – an issue that was also discussed in Italian opera. The recourse to themes defined as galant and merveilleux (marvellous), encompassing mythological and supernatural worlds and beings, helped to reduce this distance.

Machines were justified by the presence of supernatural characters and their otherworldly powers, increasing the theatrical illusion – thus, magicians and gods fill the universe of the tragédie en musique.⁵⁰ As Charles Perrault put it, tragédie en musique is justified because it belongs to an ‘opposed species’ to comedy, which ‘only accepts the vraisemblable [verisimilitude]’. On the other hand, tragédie en musique can accommodate ‘extraordinary and supernatural events, and this is what operas and plays with machines are about, while the tragedy stands in the middle, mixing the marvellous with the vraisemblable’.⁵¹

Other commentators pointed to the issue of characters who sing instead of speak. Saint-Evremond criticised the prosaism of specific scenes: for instance, a master asking his valet to run errands, dictating military orders through song, singing while ‘killing by sword and spear’, and so forth.⁵² Opera should solve this difficulty by adopting mostly ‘gallant’ subjects. Saint-Evremond’s argument is that some passions and actions are better rendered through song than others, as they harm neither the bienséance nor the reason: ‘tender and painful passions are naturally expressed through some sort of song’.⁵³ Thus one must exclude ‘cold’ passions such as ambition or political reasoning. Pierre Perrin criticised Italian operas for being exceedingly narrative, lacking in passion and lyricism – thus the widespread French criticism of Italian operas based on historical figures such as Nero or Alexander the Great. These characters were deemed generally ‘unfit to song’: these operas are rather ‘recited comedies’ characterised by ‘lengthy intrigues, cold and serious reasonings, as they would happen in a spoken play’.⁵⁴ As late as 1741, Mably declared that tragic heroes, usually cold and sententious with their ‘feelings often locked deep down in their heart’, are unfit as operatic characters.⁵⁵ All is then better in the marvellous universe of French opera: its characters, because completely imaginary, are also more apt to express themselves through song.

The relatively late surge of opera in France can be explained by a general distrust of the efficacy of music for conveying dramatic interactions and by issues surrounding the intelligibility – or absence thereof – of sung lyrics. With his deep knowledge of court tastes, Lully was perfectly aware of the expectations of French audiences in terms of vocal style. Psyché was not entirely sung, while Pomone presented a succession of airs: the invention of French opera had to wait for Lully’s achievement, in which musical scenes would be coordinated with the help of the recitative. By offering a vocal style that could render all the nuances of affect, whether in monologues or dialogues, Lullian recitative became the most remarkable response to these constraints.⁵⁶

Tragédies en musique were built on a hybrid succession of musical sequences: recitative scenes;⁵⁷ ‘airs sérieux’ or ‘petits airs’ – that is, short lyrical airs intertwined within scenes; longer récits for soliloquies imitated from spoken theatre that often privilege the narration of hallucinations, dreams, or laments;⁵⁸ and symphonies – that is, instrumental pieces, often with a descriptive purpose. The ‘chansons’ – dances and choruses inspired by the former tradition of comédies mêlées, and usually the most alien to the dramatic fabric – were gathered within scenes to provide poetic coherence. These scenes were used to represent ceremonies (religious rituals, weddings, sacrifices); popular or pastoral celebrations, including supernatural manifestations of otherworldly creatures; magical rites; infernal demons; allegorical representations of passions; and so on – in short, any type of situation in which music is diegetically or aesthetically justified.⁵⁹

The spectacular dimensions of the tragédie en musique reveal its princely origins. Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel (1690) defines opera as a ‘public spectacle, a magnificently staged representation of some dramatic work, the verses of which are sung and are accompanied by a great symphony, dances, ballets with costumes, lavish decors and surprising machines’.⁶⁰ Alongside dances and choruses, the presence of machines first required musical preludes, then descriptive symphonies: for instance, the evocation of spectres in Lully’s Amadis, the unleashing of demons in Charpentier’s Médée, the tempests in Collasse’s Thétis et Pélée, and Marin Marais’ Alcyone.⁶¹

While Lully enjoyed mixing comic characters with pathetic heroes, the comic became increasingly proscribed in the tragédie en musique. By the end of the seventeenth century, the genre had become perfectly well defined, its dramaturgy remarkably stable until the last decades of the eighteenth century.

A ‘Ballet Moderne’

By the end of the 1680s, as Louis XIV was losing interest in the tragédie en musique, his son, Louis de Bourbon, the Grand Dauphin (1661–1711), became the new arbiter of taste at the court.⁶² This led to the return of older forms of entertainment: in 1681, for the Grand Dauphin’s wedding, the ballet de cour Le triomphe de l’amour was performed in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. In 1685, the prince commissioned a ballet from Lully, Le Temple de la Paix (Quinault; Fontainebleau), and, in the following year, the pastorale Acis et Galatée (Jean Galbert de Campistron; Château d’Anet). Court residences began to offer representations of ‘petits opéras’ (small operas), works of smaller dimensions, often on a pastoral theme.⁶³ Such works met with great success in Paris, including Issé, a pastorale héroïque in three acts (Antoine Houdar de La Motte and Destouches; Fontainebleau, 1697), which was presented in the capital in 1708.

These shifts also explain the necessity to better define the genre of tragédie en musique at a time when the Académie Royale de Musique was struggling with recurrent financial issues. This led the institution to rationalise its offerings: on the one hand, tragedies reinforcing the spectacular and the pathetic, especially at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and, on the other, the development of a new genre, the modern ballet, today referred to as opéra-ballet. Intended to alternate with tragédies en musique and to fill the slower summer season, the opéra-ballet favoured lighter themes. It also attempted to bring to the Parisian stage the distinctive spirit of courtly festivities.

In 1695, the ballet in three acts Les Amours de Momus (Duché de Vancy, Desmarets) paved the way to comedies in music, such as Le Carnaval et la Folie (La Motte, Destouches, 1703). Similarly, separated acts or ballet entrées, each focused on an independent plot, could be connected through a common theme that had been previously developed in the prologue. This strategy was profitable to the permanent company of singers and dancers: they could fully showcase their talents while offering Parisian audiences a wider range of musical styles.⁶⁴ Prime instances of these opéra-ballets are Les Saisons (Jean Pic, Collasse, 1695), which was followed by the triumph of L’Europe galante (La Motte, Campra, 1697). In 1754, Louis de Cahusac gave a well-known definition of the genre in which the hierarchy between action and divertissement seems reversed: compared to the five acts of the tragédie en musique, ‘a vast composition, as those by Raphael and Michelangelo’, opéras-ballets feature ‘several different acts, each representing a single action mixed with divertissements, song and dance. These are pretty Watteaus, witty miniatures that require all the precision of the design, the graces of the brushstroke, and the whole brilliance of the color.’⁶⁵

This taste for lightness goes hand in hand with the revival of the Italian influence, now present inside and outside the court, from the entourage of the Grand Dauphin to Italophile circles in Paris.⁶⁶ Several Italian composers were settled in Paris at that time: Paolo Lorenzani (1640–1713) beginning in 1678; Theobaldo di Gatti (c. 1650–1727) beginning in c. 1675; and later, around 1705, Jean-Baptiste Stuck [Stück] (Battistin, or Batistin, 1680–1755). Lorenzani received two commissions: the pastorale Nicandro e Fileno (Fontainebleau, 1681) followed by an opera in the Venetian style, Orontée (Chantilly, 1688), modelled after Cesti’s Orontea (1649). Fashionable divertissements granted a substantial space to an Italian imaginary world, as in Campra’s L’Europe galante: one of its acts, entitled ‘L’Italie’, brings Italian music to the stage of the Académie Royale. Campra’s subsequent works, Le Carnaval de Venise (Jean-François Regnard, 1699) and Les Fêtes vénitiennes (Antoine Danchet, 1710), evoke the famous entertainments of the Republic.⁶⁷ The Italian style is primarily noticeable in the vocal writing, allowing for the increased virtuosity that would soon launch the swift success of the French cantata.⁶⁸

This Italian vogue explains the controversy provoked by the publication in 1702 of François Raguenet’s text, Parallèle des Italiens et des Français en ce qui regarde la musique et les opéras. Essentially praising Italian music and its musicians, this argument motivated Jean-Laurent Le Cerf de Viéville to publish his Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique française (1704), a text considered to be the first to discuss the ‘goût français’ in music, defining the tragédie en musique versus Italian opera and its aesthetic impact on contemporary audiences.⁶⁹

Beginnings of the Opéra-comique

The comic musical style had been traditionally associated with Italian culture since the end of the sixteenth century. It gained ground at the beginning of the eighteenth century at the Académie Royale de Musique as well as on other stages, affecting the specialisation of theatres that had been carefully decreed by the king at the end of the seventeenth century. In 1680, the reunion of the spoken theatre companies gave birth to the Comédie-Française, which continued to perform comedies featuring divertissements with musical scores composed from 1692–1693 by Nicolas Racot de Grandval (1676–1753) and Jean-Claude Gillier (1667–1737).⁷⁰ On the other hand, the Comédie-Italienne granted a larger place to music: two-thirds of the plays, including the canevas plays printed in the anthology Le Théâtre italien first published in 1694 by Evariste Gherardi, contain sung airs – serenades, burlesque ceremonies, drinking songs, masquerades, and so forth.⁷¹

Following the creation of the Académie Royale de Musique, competition between the different theatres increased: it would lead at the beginning of the eighteenth century to a real war between the different stages. A much favoured tactic was to ridicule the taste for opera. Saint-Évremond’s Les Opéras (around 1676) portrays a young mad girl only able to express herself through song: the theme reappears in the first original play to be staged at the Comédie-Française, Les Fous divertissants (Raymond Poisson, 1680), in which passages from Lully’s tragédies en musique Proserpine and Bellérophon are quoted. Dancourt satirises victims of the opera craze in Angélique et Médor (1685) and in Renaud et Armide (1686). These latter three plays have a score by Charpentier.⁷²

While these practices were a blow to the Lullian hegemony, they also took advantage of the popularity of his works.⁷³ The Comédie-Italienne transposes the intrigues into a lighter setting by presenting comic characters dealing with trivial matters. They sing tragic laments on original music (by Angelo Constantini, known as Mezzetin), but also ‘vaudevilles’ – that is, well-known tunes or famous operatic airs, the lyrics of which are altered following the example of the canevas.⁷⁴ L’Opéra de campagne by poet and musician Charles Rivière Dufresny transports Quinault’s and Lully’s Armide to a rustic farm: Renaud’s air ‘Plus j’observe ces lieux’ (Act II scene 3), in which he is lulled to sleep, is parodied by Arlequin, who sings in praise of a roasting spit.

Eventually, such practices led to full-blown parodies that tweaked the plots of tragédies en musique staged at the Académie Royale de Musique, and, in so doing, opened the path to the genre of the opéra-comique.⁷⁵ Following the expulsion of Italian actors from Paris in 1697, the Parisian fairs (the Foire Saint-Laurent and the Foire Saint-Germain) attempted to take their place. The Académie Royale responded by banning the use of song in works performed at such fair theatres; similarly, the Comédie-Française forbade them to use speech. The fair theatres were obliged to come up with imaginative alternatives to compensate for the loss of spoken and sung dialogues: they required that the audience sing well-known operatic airs (‘timbres’) and vaudevilles.⁷⁶ This type of interaction between the public and the actors was itself viewed as desirable by the Académie Royale, since its audience enjoyed singing along with the actors, especially during the divertissements. Attending a performance of Campra’s L’Europe galante in 1698, the English physician Martin Lister could thus marvel at the large audience and at the ‘great numbers of the nobility that come daily to [the operas], and some that can sing them all’.⁷⁷ This in turn explained the enduring success of the fair theatres where this practice continued, even after they had regained the right to use song and speech.

Eventually, after strenuous negotiations between the Académie Royale and the fair theatres, two directors of the latter, Charles Alard and the widow Maurice (Jeanne Godefroy), obtained in 1709 the authorisation to hire singers and dancers, and to change the décors, the sole condition being that they would not present plays with continuous musical accompaniment.⁷⁸ The convention signed later in December 1714 marked the birth of the opéra-comique, perpetuating in its own terms the legacy and specificities of the French tragédie en musique.

Translated from the French by Jacqueline Waeber and Laura Williams

The French versus Italian Problem

In his Memoirs, the Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni describes the performance of a French opera he attended in Paris at the Académie Royale de Musique in 1763. There is much to admire in this unnamed work, from the technical ability of the dancers to the sumptuous décors, machines, and costumes. But soon, all this spectacle wears him out:

This passage has often been quoted to pinpoint the strangeness of French opera, even its absurdity, at least when judged alongside the expectations of eighteenth-century audiences to whom opera seria provided the normative model. At the time of Goldoni’s description, the tragédie en musique had been weakened by the vogue for opéra-comique and by the absence of a leading composer: Rameau had died in 1764, and his most recent tragédie en musique, Zoroastre, had been premièred in 1749.²

Goldoni perceived French opera primarily as a visual spectacle – the privileged place of ballet and the use of machines had been an essential feature of the tragédie en musique since its inception. His description sheds light on the clichés attached to French opera that had existed since the time of Lully. Goldoni’s argument implies that the French conception of song is problematic, at least for Italian(ate) ears. That Goldoni refers to the French vocal style as nothing other than ‘récitatif’ was not an isolated claim at that time. Discussions about the relevant merits and flaws of French and Italian vocal styles had been going on since the birth of opera in France. These had culminated with the Querelle des Bouffons (end 1752–1754) and were provoked when the Académie Royale de Musique invited Felice Bambini’s Italian company to perform a series of intermezzi comici, among which was Pergolesi’s La Serva padrona.³

The confrontation on the Parisian stage between the tragédie en musique and the repertoire of Italian comic opera triggered the polemical discussions of the Querelle, but this was also much more than the collision of two antagonistic conceptions of vocality as exhibited by French and Italian opera. The Querelle was the culmination of tensions that had accompanied the tragédie en musique since its inception, including the question of its attachment to the tradition of French tragédie classique, the spoken classical tragedy. Moreover, the Querelle led to radical reconsiderations regarding the musicality of French versus Italian – a debate that had been brewing throughout the seventeenth century, well before the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Lettre sur la musique française in November 1753.

Prior to the eighteenth century, the development of the tragédie en musique and other related dramatic genres, such as the opéra-ballet, provided secure outlets for French musicians and their librettists. The absence of real competition with the Italian operatic model helped them promote and preserve their own style. Still, to speak of a complete French rejection of Italian music and its lyric style would be excessive. Since the early seventeenth century, the fashion of ‘Italianisme’ had been encouraged by the presence at the court of the Marquise de Rambouillet, who was of Roman origin, and the marriage of Henry IV of France with Maria de’ Medici in 1600.

Certainly, the French did not come naturally to opera, at least when we conflate the term ‘opera’ with the Italian dramma per musica. Understanding the complex history of the assimilation of Italian opera by the French stage cannot neglect the importance of non-musical factors, such as the political relationships between the kingdom of France and several powerful Italian states. Various attempts to graft the Italian operatic model on the French tradition of court entertainment ended with the advent of the tragédie en musique, which was inaugurated with Jean-Baptiste Lully and Philippe Quinault’s Cadmus et Hermione (1673), a genre intended more as a departure from the Italian opera than a reappropriation of it. After Lully’s death (1687) and throughout the eighteenth century (that is, until Gluck arrived in Paris in 1773), French opera continued to be contrasted with the Italian model. This was primarily due to the centralised system implemented through royal institutions that ruled the arts: it remained crucial for France, home to the second major operatic tradition in Europe, to preserve its own paradigmatic model.

The Persistence of the Tragédie Classique in the Tragédie en Musique

Other factors were paramount for explaining the physiognomy of French opera and its antithetical perception of Italian opera. Assessing the emergence of the French model for opera must first consider the ground on which this model originated: the classical tragedy, France’s most illustrious theatrical tradition. The tragédie en musique was organically tied to theoretical and aesthetic conceptions that defined the genre of spoken tragedy, itself a reaction against the dramatic excesses of the sixteenth-century humanist tragedy. The blossoming of French tragedy was encouraged by improvements to Parisian theatrical locations – such as the reopening in 1644 of the renovated Théâtre du Marais – which better equipped them for the display of spectacular stage settings and machines. Another crucial factor was the emergence of a new generation of playwrights, among whom were the genre’s two most prominent figures, Pierre Corneille (1606–1684) and Jean Racine (1639–1699).

French classical tragedy is defined by a series of paradigmatic features: division into five acts and a plot taken from Classical antiquity – be it history or mythology, as shown in Racine’s plays – or from ancient or early history (for instance, Corneille’s Le Cid). The genre also excluded lowly characters, privileging instead aristocratic, regal figures. This can be understood as an extension of the rule of bienséance (decorum), which prohibited the representation on stage of actions involving physical violence or death. Moreover, anything tending towards an excessive eroticisation of the body or any other physical activity that would have been deemed trivial was banned.

All these aspects transited easily from spoken tragedy to tragédie en musique. However, the crux of the problem originated with the adjunction of music and its entanglement in the requirements of the art of declamation expected for the performance of spoken tragedy. ‘Musicalising’ or not the spoken model of tragedy had been a consubstantial debate in the history of French opera since its inception. At the end of the seventeenth century, the tragédie en musique was a prominent topic among the debates propelled by the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. The writer Charles Perrault keenly defended the new genre of French opera, demonstrating its validity against the arguments in favour of the Ancients in his Critique de l’opéra, ou Examen de la tragédie intitulée Alceste (1674). This opened an enduring tradition of controversies that traversed the entire eighteenth century—the Querelle des Lullistes et des Ramistes (ignited by Rameau’s first tragédie en musique, Hippolyte et Aricie, premièred in 1733), the Querelle des Bouffons, and the Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes (1775–1779).

It would be a mistake to imply that the French resisted the novelty of opera because they were ‘less musical’ than Italians. The model of the tragédie en musique, a consequence of French misgivings regarding Italian opera, was embedded in a paradigmatic conception of lyric poetry. Thus theatrical declamation was perceived as being as musical as it was poetic. To summarise the arguments of French contemporary commentators opposed to opera, why would the French need tragedies set to music when their art of theatrical declamation was already musical?

The Reign of the Alexandrine

The French strongly believed in the musicality of their poetic language, which could be revealed by an adequate observation of accents, quantity, and rules of versification. As Claude Jamain puts it, ‘to bring back song to the spoken text had always been the natural inclination of [French] classicism’, an attitude viewed as antithetical to the vocalic sensibility of Italian opera.⁴

Lyric poetry of that period relied to a great extent on the alexandrin, or alexandrine verse. Popularised during the sixteenth century by the poets Pierre Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay, the alexandrine remained until the nineteenth century the main verse in French poetry. The alexandrine line consists of twelve syllables and is divided by two hemistichs of equal length, separated by a caesura falling after the sixth syllable. When ending on a masculine rhyme, that is to say, any syllable ending with a consonant (as in the words sommeil, fracas, vainqueur, soupir, etc.), the alexandrine counts exactly twelve syllables. When the ending rhyme is feminine, it counts twelve syllables, plus a final one, the mute “e” (as in heure, larmes, venge, soupire, etc.). Both alexandrine lines given here, from Armide’s famous monologue in Quinault’s tragédie en musique, Armide (Lully, 1686), respectively end with a masculine and a feminine rhyme:

In the first line, the caesura of the first hemistich is marked by the tonic accent on ‘ennemi’ and in the second on ‘frémis’. A defining prosodic feature of the classical alexandrine is to echo the caesura on the accented sixth syllable by the syllable of the final rhyme. To this can be added the possibility of other accents within each hemistich. For instance, in the line, ‘Achevons, je frémis; vengeons-nous, je soupire’, the natural rules of French prosody, aided by punctuation and, as indicated here, by the accent falling on the underlined syllables, tend to create within each hemistich an anapestic rhythm (BBL), a frequent one in the French language.

This tendency to create the repetition of rhythmic patterns, added to the length of the alexandrine line, encouraged a restrained declamation that was viewed as ideally suited to the solemn genre of tragedy. But the alexandrine was also frequent in comedies, as, for instance, in Molière’s plays Les Femmes savantes or Tartuffe. Indeed, the declamation of tragedy was defined by a ‘general tempo characterized by a certain slowness’,⁵ what Grimarest had already praised in 1707, stating that the proper use of the French language is to be spoken aloud ‘in a grave and noble manner’.⁶

These declamatory standards and their poetic style were maintained in the tragédie en musique. While a libretto may give less prominence to the alexandrine by mixing it more frequently with other lines, such as octosyllables and decasyllables, the musical setting also tends to enhance the slowness of prosody, at this tempo creating something akin to a magnifying glass effect. In his Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture (1719), Jean-Baptiste Dubos evoked the art of French opera singers as ‘the art of declamation proper for the realization of a recitation slowed down by song’.⁷

If theatrical declamation possessed an inherently musical quality, attempting to outline its rhythm and melodic inflexions through musical notation was the obvious task of the musician. By the end of the seventeenth century, the most emblematic example was the one provided by the actress Marie Champmeslé (1642–1698). As one contemporary commentator put it, ‘the delivery of the actors is a kind of song, and you would well admit that La Champmeslé would not please us so much, had her voice been less agreeable’.⁸ After La Champmeslé’s death, Le Cerf de la Viéville gave a slightly modified retelling of this anecdote in his Comparaison de la musique italienne, et de la musique françoise (1704), according to which Lully was said to have fashioned many of his recitatives on La Champmeslé’s declamation, an enduring tale that continued to be perpetuated well after the eighteenth century.⁹

What appeared to be a porous line between declamation and song was in France an ongoing issue made all the more significant by the rise of the tragédie en musique. But this trope originated before the late seventeenth century and culminated by the end of the sixteenth century with the experiments of the Pléiade, an academy founded in 1570 by the poet Jean Antoine de Baïf. Using the technique of vers mesurés à l’antique, Baïf attempted to recover the Greco-Latin poetic metre by following French rules of prosodic quantity.¹⁰ Baïf and his circle were influential among French composers of the early seventeenth century, who adopted the style of the musique mesurée à l’antique in which the melody must adhere as much as possible to the scansion of the verses. Understanding the style of musique mesurée is essential to understanding both the melodic style of the French air de cour – which would later be incorporated into ballets and tragédies en musique – and the characteristic style of French musical recitative.

The Air de Cour and the Italian Model of Monody

In seventeenth-century French vocal music, the most important genre was the air de cour, which developed by the end of the sixteenth century. The expression ‘air de cour’ appeared in 1571 in the first printed collection of these pieces, which indicates that the form was originally meant for the entertainment of the king and court. Aided by the large number of airs available in collections published by royal printers, it quickly gained popularity beyond those venues.

The air de cour could be either polyphonic (mostly four to five voices) or monodic with a lute accompaniment, as shown in the compositions of Pierre Guédron (1564–around 1619–1620). As its popularity grew, the air de cour made its way into the ballet de cour, where it often had an introductory function by appearing at the beginning of an entrée, usually in a monodic form with lute accompaniment. Guédron himself, as well as Antoine Boësset (1586–1643), composed several airs for these staged works: both composers had a major impact on the incorporation of the air de cour into the ballet de cour.

It would be tempting to view the air de cour as the French equivalent to the new genre of the monody, as heralded by Caccini’s Nuove Musiche (1602). Yet, the treatment of prosody and rhythm and the musical setting of the air de cour continued to be indebted to the French tradition of musique mesurée, with its musical accompaniment carefully supporting the standard accents and syllable counts. The vocal range, usually within one octave, tended to be much narrower than that of the Italian monody. Vocal ornamentation was also much less common, the emphasis being instead on the syllabic setting of the text.

The French did not judge the Italian monody by hearsay only: Caccini came to the French court in 1604 at the invitation of Henry IV. In comparing the two styles, contemporary commentators noted that French song appeared much more restrained than the Italian monody, a feature that could be construed as a flaw or, by those who disliked the excesses of the Italian manner, a quality. In his Harmonie universelle (1636), Marin Mersenne pondered the respective merits of French and Italian song: he described the Italians as ‘more vehement than us when it comes to expressing the strongest passions of anger with their accents, especially when they sing their verses on the theatre to imitate the staged music of the Ancients’.¹¹

As shown by his correspondence with Caccini, Mersenne had a good knowledge of the Nuove Musiche and the Italian manner of ornamentation. He adopted a compromise position, since he was aware of the negative perception that French musicians had of the Italian penchant to embellish melody with extended melismas, ‘exclamations and accents’.¹² French singers rejected this manner, as it smacked too much of the genres of tragedy and comedy. Mersenne offered that it would be entirely possible to find a middle ground by softening these Italian ‘excesses’ of ornamentation and adapting them to the idiosyncratic ‘French sweetness’.¹³

Mersenne also stressed the novelty of the Italian stile recitativo: he mentioned ‘Giacomo [sic] Peri’ as the one who ‘had started to introduce in 1600, in Florence, during the wedding of the Queen Mother, the manner of reciting Music verses on the theatre’.¹⁴ Mersenne’s description suggested the superiority of the Italians, at least when it came to their capacity for representing ‘as much as they can the passions and the affections of the soul and the mind, for instance, anger, fury, spite, rage, heartbreaks … with such an uncanny violence, that one thinks they are being affected by the very affections they represent through their song’. French singers, on the other hand, remained in a state of ‘perpetual sweetness’ that accomplished little else besides ‘flattering the ears’. More importantly, such sweetness lacked ‘energy’, which Mersenne used in the sense of enargeia, the rhetorical manner of offering listeners a description so vivid that they seem to experience it.¹⁵

For Mersenne these differences seemed more of degree than of kind: limited by its ‘sweet’ nature, French music was considered improper for the display of violent passions. Mersenne invited French musicians to unbridle their style – advice he may have gotten from his correspondence with Giovanni Battista Doni, who recommended that French musicians take ‘the opportunity to perfect [their musical style] and change it. … I am assured that if your princes would go to the expense, and time permitted it, this would succeed enormously.’¹⁶ A similar argument was offered by the French musician Pierre Maugars, who spent time in Rome during the 1620s and considered the manner of the Italian song ‘more animated, ornamented’ than that of the French, exhorting his countrymen to travel to Italy and free themselves of the rigidity of their rules.¹⁷

Yet the comparison between French and Italian was unfair, as it took place at a time before the French had devised their own operatic genre. Epitomised by the air de cour that originated outside the world of the stage, the French vocal style was not entirely comparable to the Italian monody nor to the stile recitativo motivated by the expression of passions consubstantial to the dramma per musica. To this must be added the weight of French tragedy, which provided a normative model not only for the dramaturgy of opera but also for the varieties of its vocal style of delivery as first shaped by Lully and Quinault.

French recitative was theoretically rooted in the theatrical and musical practices of the Ancients – another point of comparison with the Italian tradition. The argument was clearly articulated in Dubos’s influential treatise Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture. Originally published in 1719, Dubos’ text was augmented by a third part in the new edition of 1733. Entitled ‘Dissertation sur les représentations théâtrales des Anciens’, this new part scrutinises the conception of music and declamation among the Ancients. Dubos defines the art of declamation as primarily an art of melopeia, a Greek term referring to the art of composing the modulation, thus melody. If melody belongs as much to ‘music’ as it does to the oratory of the Ancients, one can push the syllogism further by affirming that this oratory is a sort of music. Of course, when reading Dubos today we should ask ourselves what the term ‘music’ meant to him and his contemporaries, for whom the minimal separation between music and declamation was being constantly renegotiated. Dubos warns his readers that the art of melopeia should not be considered ‘music’ (in its modern sense); the musical art of the Ancients should be viewed as the crafting of an instrumental accompaniment to sustain tragic declamation.

This is why Dubos argues that ‘the Ancients had a composed declamation that was written in notes, without being a musical song [chant musical]’.¹⁸ Granted, in several instances he describes this declamation as ‘musical’, implying a double meaning to the term. The beauty of melopeia or declamation, which can be described in musical terms, is a consequence of the poetic art. On the other hand, the beauty of music, as in the instrumental accompaniment to a tragic declamation, results from the principles of harmony.¹⁹

In any case, Dubos does not denigrate the art of declamation in comparison to the art of music: they were complementary in ancient tragedies. This is what he finds to have gone awry in modern operas, that is, those departing from the Lullian norm:

The French mistrust of Italian vocality lies essentially in the potential of the latter to supplant the virtues of French theatrical declamation, which they viewed as the most appropriate medium for the rendering of passions in their tragedies.

Experiencing the first Italian operas performed in Paris and at the court, the French perceived in Italian song a problematic mixture in which music appears as an added element to the text, endangering the primacy of the latter. Operatic vocality, for the French, should be a sublimation of declamation without ever becoming full song, and as such it runs the risk of detaching itself from its original textual substratum. The typical French concern for textual intelligibility is anchored in the necessity of finding as close a correspondence as possible between music and text – its syntax and prosodic qualities. The recitative is then viewed as the privileged vocal locus of the tragédie en musique – the pièce de résistance of the operatic spectacle – as long it does not become full song and lose its ties to the theatrical model of declamation (hence the enduring fame of the apocryphal anecdote on Lully modelling his recitative on La Champmeslé’s declamation).

Récit and Air as Paradigmatic Categories

The vocal style of the tragédie en musique is divided into two categories, known as ‘récit’ and ‘air’ in late seventeenth-century terminology. The first referred to a syllabic, recitative-like manner, and the second to a more tuneful style.²¹ In practice, however, the categories could overlap: the delivery of the récit could take the character of an air, while the air could also be referred to as a récit – this can be seen in scores and other sources. In its common usage, ‘air’ refers to a closed form, most frequently a vocal piece following the model of the air de cour, with which it also shares its brevity, especially when compared to the Italian aria. ‘Air’ could also be the name given to an instrumental piece (sometimes the instrumental adaptation of an air de cour), one often used for a specific dance in a ballet or a divertissement: for instance an air de ballet or, more specifically, a dance related to its performance (e.g., air pour les matelots, etc.). Whether instrumental or vocal, the air is defined by its recurrent melodic pattern and its regular metre, which is often matched with a dance rhythm: the 1694 edition of Dictionnaire de l’Académie française defines the air as ‘a succession of agreeable tones that make a regular song’.²²

‘Récit’ has a more varied meaning. When translating it as ‘recitative’, one should keep in mind that its original French meaning is ‘narration’, a relation of some action that occurred. The Dictionnaire de Furetière (1690) gives two entries for the term: ‘narration’ and ‘what is sung by a solo voice and especially by a dessus. A beautiful music should be intermixed with récits and choirs’.²³ The 1694 edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française gives only one entry but addresses both meanings. As a musical term, a récit is ‘what is sung by a solo voice, and that begins a ballet, an opera, or another divertissement by exposing its subject’ and as ‘everything sung by a solo voice detached from a great choir of music’.²⁴ Tellingly, neither definition elaborates on its musical peculiarities, except to mention that it is sung by a solo voice. What prevails is a rhetorical conception of the récit and its function to reveal and develop the tenets of the plot, or the ‘sujet’, to use the seventeenth-century French term.

The musical texture of a récit requires a basse continue written in a harmonic language generally simpler than the Italian recitative (all these features of Lullian opera were going to change dramatically in Rameau’s works, leading many of his contemporaries to label his musical style exceedingly Italianate during the Querelle des Lullistes et des Ramistes). The French récit is easy to notice in a score, due to the changes of time signature and alternations between binary and ternary measures. Since the intention is to follow and emphasise the poetic rhythm of the lines by marking their caesuras and tonic accents, the récit is devoid of any regular beat, a feature that highlights the legacy of musique mesurée.

We tend nowadays to call this French recitative ‘unmeasured recitative’. It was paradigmatic of the style idealised by the Lullian model of sung declamation, but its metrical idiosyncrasies were not systematically observed. Here, establishing a parallel with the Italian practice can be helpful to a certain point. (Italian) recitative is routinely viewed as the primary vehicle for dialogue and for conveying information. As for the aria, it should focus on a more effusive exploration of one or two affects, which is why an Italian libretto easily reveals which verses are intended for the aria: they tend to be shorter than those for the recitative and are gathered in more compact strophes. For that reason, the aria is often said to create a pause in the dramatic unfolding of the action. To this must be added the case of impassioned monologues signalling extreme displays of passion (e.g., mad scenes). These would often be carried by the recitativo accompagnato, that is, a recitative with a more complex instrumental accompaniment, usually strings reinforcing the continuo. While this division of labour is mostly typical of eighteenth-century opera seria, it was already well under way by the end of the seventeenth century.

The function of the recitative in late seventeenth-century French opera could also be used both for conveying information and for rendering climactic moments of passion: but these different degrees of expression did not seem much to alter the style of the recitative itself, when compared with the Italian simple recitative and its accompanied counterpart. A typical instance of such a climactic use of the unmeasured recitative is Armide’s celebrated scene in Lully’s eponymous opera (1686; Act II scene 5). An extended monologue, the scene starts with an instrumental ritornello introducing Armide’s unmeasured recitative, ‘Enfin, il est en ma puissance’, followed by a brief conclusion on a strophe of six lines (starting on ‘Venez, venez, secondez mes désirs’). This conclusion is itself introduced by another instrumental ritornello on a ³₄ time signature, the melody of which is repeated twice in the vocal part. Departing from the preceding unmeasured recitative, this conclusion is written entirely in the ³₄ time signature: the new ternary measure and its recurrent melodic pattern lend the passage the aura of an air. Yet, it would be a stretch to suppose, just by looking at the disposition and length of verses in a French libretto as compared to those of an Italian libretto, that this is where the closed form of an air should take place. Here, the dramatic emphasis of the entire monologue is carried by the unmeasured recitative, not by the concluding and much shorter air-like section.

During and after Lully’s time, it was this section in unmeasured recitative (‘Enfin, il est en ma puissance’) that was regarded as the climax of the scene. Its fame as a model of impassioned monologue continued throughout the eighteenth century.²⁵ An Italian conception along the lines of opera seria would have predicted the contrary: a rather brief recitative, possibly with an accompanied recitative in the middle to emphasise Armide’s trouble (starting at ‘Quel trouble me saisit’). Then, as the climax of the scene, Armide’s ‘aria’ (‘Venez, secondez mes désirs’).

This scene typically uses the unmeasured recitative in contradistinction to another type of récit in which the time signature remains unchanged, as in an air (here the section ‘Venez, secondez mes désirs’). This second type of recitative is usually referred to as a ‘measured recitative’ (récit or récitatif mesuré). However, these expressions (récit/récitatif mesuré and non mesuré) were anachronistic during Lully’s time and at least during the first half of the eighteenth century. Pierre Estève may have been the first to distinguish both categories of recitative by coining the expressions ‘récitatif simple’ and ‘récitatif mesuré’ in his book L’Esprit des beaux-arts published in 1753. Récitatif simple, a French translation of the Italian recitativo semplice, was used by Estève to mean unmeasured recitative.²⁶ Rousseau later followed with his own definition of récitatif mesuré in his Dictionnaire de musique (1768). His article is essentially a critique of this expression, which he finds to be a contradiction in terms. Understanding recitative as an Italian conception, Rousseau rejects the possibility of a recitative being measured, which is to him an absurdity belonging to French opera: ‘any recitative where one can feel any other measure than the one of the poetic lines is not a recitative anymore’.²⁷

The distinction between the two terms only began to be fully realised after the 1750s: for instance, the definition ‘récit’ in the first edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie (1694; quoted earlier) remains unchanged in the 1762 edition, except for this added sentence at the very end of the article: ‘The récits are not subjected to the measure like the airs.’²⁸ By the middle of the eighteenth century the need to differentiate ‘récit’ from ‘air’ owes much to the growing knowledge among French audiences of Italian recitative and aria: ‘récit’ became increasingly synonymous with recitative in its Italian sense, finally and definitively differentiating itself from ‘air’. Before the Querelle des Bouffons, Rousseau, Rousseau defined ‘air’ in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie as the name given to ‘any pieces of measured music [morceaux de musique mesurés] so that they can be distinguished from the recitative which isn’t; and generally we call air any piece of music, be it vocal or instrumental, that has its beginning and its ending’.²⁹

Before the introduction of these eighteenth-century lexical terms, French opera generally used the term ‘récit’ indiscriminately, no matter whether the recitative was unmeasured or measured. This creates another layer of complication: the presence of these terms in engraved scores and writings was far from systematic, making it hard to establish any fixed meaning. Certainly, an unmeasured recitative with its changing time signatures cannot be confused with an air, but the demarcation is murkier between an air and a measured recitative. The recurrent melodic and rhythmic patterns generated by a regular metre, often matched with a dance rhythm, would potentially make any récit mesuré lean towards the air category.

While not a paradigmatic rule, the appearance of a passage written in measured recitative following or preceding an unmeasured recitative is motivated by rhetorical emphasis: affirming a truth or a maxim, asserting a claim or a conclusive sentence. These passages can be woven within the unmeasured recitative in a manner not dissimilar to the Italian practice of embedding a mezz’aria within a recitative.³⁰ When they reach a certain length that allows for the repetition of periods in order to generate a sense of form, these passages could be construed as airs, all the more so when they offer a clear sense of closure.³¹ Among these frequent forms is one that James R. Anthony has labelled an ‘extended binary configuration’, an ABB′ structure often built on a poetic quatrain: its first two lines constitute the section A, the last two lines the section B. These two lines in B are also repeated musically, only with minor alterations to the melodic and rhythmic outline. This extended binary configuration was quite common in seventeenth-century arias in operas and cantatas by Italian composers such as Giacomo Carissimi, Marco Marazzoli, and Luigi Rossi.³² Lully may have been familiar early in his career with this extended binary form: a probable first exposure could have been the performance of Rossi’s Orfeo in Paris in 1647 when Lully was fifteen years old. Lully’s frequent use of this form in his dramatic music contributed to its popularity among French composers in the subsequent generation, especially André Campra, who often relied on it in his opéras-ballets.³³

In any case, these sections perform a structural role that clarifies the architecture of a scene. Act I scene 3 of Quinault and Lully’s tragédie en musique, Atys (Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 1676) counts six sections, the first and the last being the ritournelle (‘Allons, allons, accourez tous, / Cybèle va descendre’). The first section presents a first statement of the ritournelle, sung by Sangaride and Doris, followed by a récit mesuré (‘Que dans nos concerts les plus doux’) leading to the second statement of the ritournelle, now sung by Sangaride, Doris, Atys, and Idas. The final (sixth) statement of the ritournelle, sung by Atys and Idas, occurs at the conclusion of the scene. Between these two framing points, a dialogue between Sangaride and Atys takes place. But this exchange is itself subdivided into four sections, three of them written in récitatif mesuré (see Table 11.1).

Section 2, a dialogue between Sangaride and Atys, starts with an unmeasured recitative (‘Ecoutons les oiseaux de ces bois d’alentour’). The changes of time signature are rather infrequent; compare this with the first part of Armide’s monologue, where the changes of metre happen more frequently. Yet the declamatory style in this scene from Atys is aptly suited for this exchange between two characters who have not admitted their love for each other. Instead, they both continue to feign an amicable indifference.

What follows (Section 3), ‘L’Amour fait trop verser de pleurs’, sung by Atys on the time signature 3, presents features similar to those of an air. The libretto consists of two quatrains, the first in octosyllables (rimes embrassées: ABBA), the second in heptasyllables (rimes croisées: CDCD). The melody of both quatrains and the basse continue evoke the rhythm of a minuet. The whole setting creates a sense of closure characteristic of an air, with the repetition of the two last lines of the second quatrain (‘Sans leurs épines cruelles, / J’aimerais à les cueillir’). The repetition is neither textual nor symmetrical (the first occurrence is longer due to the repetition of ‘J’aimerais’) but saves for the fourth line the cadential gesture V–I in G. After this, Sangaride sings one quatrain (Section 4: ‘Quand le péril est agréable’) in the same time signature. Here as well the récit mesuré takes on an air-like allure, with the exact repetition of the melodic line on the two last lines of the quatrain: ‘Est-ce un grand mal de trop aimer / Ce que l’on trouve aimable?’

Before the conclusive return of the ritournelle, the second to the last section, also in récit mesuré, leans even more clearly towards an air (Section 5; see Example 11.1). It is introduced by two lines: first an alexandrine sung by Sangaride (‘Peut-on être insensible aux plus charmants appâts?’), then an octosyllable sung by Atys (‘Non, vous ne me connaissez pas’: mm. 147–9). The continuo accompanies each line with a descending tetrachord, introducing a new section consisting of a quatrain.

Example 11.1 Jean-Baptiste Lully, Atys, Tragedie mise en musique (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1689), Act I, sc. 3, Sangaride and Atys, mm. 142–90

“A PDF version of this example is available for download on Cambridge Core and via www.cambridge.org/9780521823593”

The first line, an alexandrine (‘Je me défends d’aimer autant qu’il m’est possible’), is also the longest: it is accompanied by three occurrences of the descending tetrachord (mm. 150–62). The second, third, and fourth lines (respectively an octosyllable, followed by two hexasyllables) are accompanied by three occurrences of the tetrachord, with repetition of the fourth hexasyllable, ending on the cadence V–I in G (mm. 163–74). The group consisting of these three last lines is repeated once more (as in a BB′ pattern) with the repetition of the final fourth verse and the cadential ending on G (mm. 175–86). The transition from this air to the conclusion (the final occurrence of the ritournelle ‘Allons, accourez tous’) is rendered by four measures written in unmeasured recitative and sung by Atys (mm. 187–90).

As Robert Fajon observed, ‘when repetitions occur in the literary or musical text, one enters into récitatif mesuré’.³⁴ But the difficulty is to assess when a récit mesuré morphs into an air. The truth is that it remains difficult to establish according to the standards of the Lullian operatic model a clear-cut distinction between récit mesuré and an air, especially when considering these terms through purely musical means. A better angle would be to focus on the rhetorical intentions of the libretto, and consider how these motivate the musical articulations of the scene and how they determine the most adequate style to adopt.

This scene from Atys, as with many others from the same repertoire, is not by any means an undifferentiated flow of recitative: it reveals subtle articulations throughout the exchanges between Sangaride and Atys, here framed by the symmetrical structure provided by the ritournelle.³⁵ After Lully’s death, long scenes in French operas perpetuated this model. Spectators more familiar with the language of Italian opera may have missed these articulations –as Goldoni obviously did. The full reappraisal of this technique and its merging with the binary recitative–aria of the opera seria would become an essential tool for the revitalisation of opera propelled by the reforms led by Christoph Willibald Gluck during the 1770s.

How might we define English opera in the seventeenth century? Whole books have been written on this topic, and because of the variable terminology with which seventeenth-century writers labelled their works (‘opera’, ‘dramatick opera’, ‘masque’, ‘comedy’, ‘tragedy’), it is unlikely that absolute clarity will ever be had.¹ Indeed, the English had a capacious and fluid notion of what constituted opera during the seventeenth century, and we should adjust our overly narrow definitions if we are to understand English opera as people in the seventeenth century did: as a genre that sometimes was fully sung, but, more often than not, included spoken dialogue.²

Although the English were not enamoured of fully sung opera, they had a long tradition of pairing drama with music and dance – elements that would become the building blocks of English opera. Elizabethan and Jacobean plays included instrumental music cues for entrances and exits and underscoring to accompany stage action, and vocal music was required in a range of conventionalised circumstances.³ Servants sing to their masters and mistresses, the inebriated sing drinking songs, and supernatural creatures or characters hoping to summon supernatural forces through ritual also sing. Fools, passionate lovers, melancholics, and mad people lapse into song as well, musico-dramatic signifiers of their instability.⁴ Dances also played a role during this early period – many of Shakespeare’s comedies end with them (for example, As You Like It), but dancing was included in the darkest tragedies (Romeo and Juliet) and even in histories (Henry VIII).⁵

Thus, from quite early on, the English had developed conventional situations for music-making in their drama. Over time, these musical scenes expanded: in a sense, the transition from play to opera was a change of degree, not kind. The transformation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth into an increasingly musical play exemplifies this trend. When it premièred in 1606, the witches probably had no music. At some point in its early performance history, material from Thomas Middleton’s The Witch (1615–1616), a play with substantial music, was interpolated into the Scottish play.⁶ After the Restoration it was adapted and changed even further – music became central to its popularity and success.

Court Masques

The court masque – a genre that was populated by allegorical characters and combined spoken text, songs, and choruses; dances; and lavish scenic effects – was codified during the Jacobean and Caroline eras, and its form would have a profound influence on the development of English opera. Playwright Ben Jonson (1572–1637) and designer Inigo Jones (c. 1573–1652), created the template for the court masque during the reign of James I. It began with an antimasque, which included unruly, disruptive, and/or low-class characters, usually played by professionals. After declaiming, sometimes singing, and often dancing in grotesque ways (as indicated by the rapidly shifting metres found in this music), these characters would be banished from the stage by the noble characters of the main masque, portrayed by a mix of professionals and aristocrats, sometimes even including the queen herself. Although the aristocrats generally left the singing and acting to the professionals, they were keen dancers, and during the lengthy revels at the end of the evening they demonstrated their terpsichorean prowess.⁷ The dances for the main masque were more rhythmically regular, and some used French dance types. Indeed, the influence of the French ballet de cour upon the English court masque was considerable and would only increase with the ascension of Charles I and his French wife, Henrietta Maria, to the throne in 1625.⁸

The composer Nicholas Lanier (bap. 1588–1666) made considerable innovations to the vocal music for the court masque, but we must bear in mind that his experiments with musical declamation were conducted and encouraged by a small group of elites rather than in response to a widespread public thirst for recitative or Italianate opera. Lanier’s ‘Bring away this sacred tree’ from Thomas Campion’s Somerset Masque (1613) is one of the earliest examples of what Ian Spink calls a ‘declamatory ayre’ – the vocal line matches the scansion of the text and is set to a chordal accompaniment.⁹ Ben Jonson claims in his Works (1640) that The Vision of Delight (1617) and Lovers Made Men (1617) both included music in ‘stylo recitativo’. Lovers Made Men was particularly remarkable, for the ‘whole Masque was sung (after the Italian manner) Stylo recitativo by Master Nicholas Lanier’.¹⁰ Scholars have cast doubt upon these claims, believing that Lanier probably would not have composed recitative until after his visits to Italy in 1625 and 1628.¹¹ Whatever the case, Lanier’s 1617 settings do not survive; the first extant example of English recitative is his Hero and Leander (1628 or later), although all the sources date to after 1660, so it is impossible to know when he actually composed it.¹²

Operatic Experiments during the Civil War and Interregnum

The court masque and plays with music for the public stage were the primary forms of dramatic music until the closure of the public theatres in 1642 and the dissolution of the court musical establishment due to the Civil War, which culminated in the regicide of Charles I in 1649. Despite these disruptions, music and theatre did not completely founder during this difficult period. Oliver Cromwell believed the public theatre to be a hotbed of inequity, but he was not entirely opposed to musical entertainments, and some who had served the previous regime, such as James Shirley and William Davenant, found opportunity in adversity. Shirley wrote the masque Cupid and Death in honour of the visit of the Portuguese ambassador on 26 March 1653, potentially suggesting state sponsorship. The first version featured music by Christopher Gibbons (bap. 1615–1676); his score seems to have been revised by Matthew Locke (1621/3–1677) for a 1659 revival at Leicester Fields.¹³ Musically, Cupid and Death is an important forerunner to the dramatick operas (i.e., plays with substantial musical scenes, dancing, instrumental music, and spectacle) of Matthew Locke and Henry Purcell (1659–1695).¹⁴ Locke’s expressive and florid recitative for the 1659 performance paves the way for Purcell’s later experiments, as does his use of choral responses. Indeed, Cupid and Death is an important intermediary between the Caroline court masque and the Restoration musical forms to come.¹⁵ It has an ‘entry’ structure, a holdover from the English court masque as well as the French ballet de cour, spoken dialogue, songs, choruses, dances, and scenic spectacle (i.e., Mercury ‘descending upon a Cloud’).¹⁶ The division of labour found in Cupid and Death – main characters tend not to sing – also becomes the norm, with a few exceptions, in dramatick opera.

Locke’s music for the 1659 Cupid and Death revival may provide a window into an earlier Commonwealth experiment whose music has been lost.¹⁷ In September 1656 Davenant, a Royalist who had written Caroline court masques, penned the libretto for The Siege of Rhodes, the first fully sung English opera. The score to The Siege of Rhodes was a collaborative affair, written by Henry Cooke (c. 1615–1672; the organiser, who composed entries two and three), Henry Lawes (bap. 1596–1662; first and fifth entries), Locke (fourth entry), Charles Coleman (d. 1664; instrumental music), and George Hudson (d. 1672; instrumental music). The versification of the libretto indicates that much of the work would have been sung in recitative, and the chorus played a significant role (as it did in Cupid and Death), appearing at the end of each scene. Also, like Cupid and Death, Davenant’s opera was organised according to ‘entries’. Scenic display, in this case supplied by Jones’s protégé John Webb, was also tremendously important. Davenant continued his operatic experiments with The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658) and The History of Sir Francis Drake (1659), although the precise nature of these entertainments is unclear, as most of the music has been lost. After the Restoration, Davenant appears to have given up on fully sung opera, opting instead for the hybrid approach found in Cupid and Death.¹⁸

Various Approaches: Music and/or Drama

After the Restoration, Charles II sought to emulate the elaborate entertainments he had enjoyed in exile at the court of Louis XIV, although he did not have the financial resources to fully support his ambitions. Nevertheless, he restored the court musical establishment, and for many years there was a free flow of personnel between the public stage and the court.¹⁹ Locke and John Banister (1624/5–1679), two of the primary composers for Charles’s Twenty-Four Violins, the instrumental ensemble at court modelled on Louis XIV’s group, composed much of the music for the public theatres during this period, because this ensemble was working regularly in the theatres by the king’s command.²⁰ The two patent companies – Davenant’s Duke’s Company and Thomas Killigrew’s King’s Company – benefitted substantially from this arrangement. Killigrew’s company mounted a series of highly musical plays, including Sir Robert Howard and John Dryden’s The Indian Queen (1664) with music by Banister.²¹ Davenant’s company was granted the rights to some of Shakespeare’s plays by the king, and he reshaped the work of the Bard to suit new tastes, significantly expanding the role of music in two of Shakespeare’s plays: Macbeth (1663 or 1664) and The Tempest, co-written with John Dryden (1667). ²²

The structure in Davenant’s revisions of Shakespeare affected English operatic conventions going forward. In fact, they are very similar to what John Dryden would call ‘dramatick opera’, as they combine spoken text with songs, choruses, and dance. For instance, in Act II scene 5 of Davenant’s Macbeth, non-singing characters (the Macduffs) encounter the witches singing and dancing. Also, the witches speak and sing in Macbeth, serving as intermediaries between the two modes of discourse: a convention we will see with other characters in English dramatick operas of the 1670s and onwards.²³ Dryden and Davenant’s adaptation of The Tempest functions in a similar way, expanding upon the music in Shakespeare and adding new opportunities for singing that correspond with established conventions. The playwrights amplify Ariel’s singing role, including a new ‘echo song’ for Ariel and Ferdinand, ‘Go thy way’;²⁴ and they add a supernatural musical extravaganza, a ‘Masque of Devils’, which serves a similar musico-dramatic purpose as the witches’ scene in Act II scene 5 in Macbeth.²⁵

The 1670s saw the further expansion of these operatic impulses. In 1670 the actor and theatre manager Thomas Betterton (1635–1710) visited France to learn more about Continental practices, and in 1671 the Duke’s company moved into the new Dorset Garden Theatre, which was equipped with machinery.²⁶ Henceforth, English opera became increasingly indebted to French models and incorporated more special effects.²⁷ The prompter John Downes recalls a revival of The Tempest at Dorset Garden from 1674:

This Tempest was probably revised by Thomas Shadwell (1640 or 1641–1692) and includes songs by Banister, Pelham Humfrey (1647/8–1674), Pietro Reggio (bap. 1632–1685), and James Hart (1647–1718); instrumental music by Locke and possibly Robert Smith;²⁹ and dances by Giovanni Battista Draghi (c. 1640–1708) (lost). The Tempest is also notable for its integration of instrumental music into the dramatic action, with Locke’s ‘Curtain Tune’ being a prime exemplar. In his self-published score he incorporates detailed performance instructions (i.e., soft, louder by degrees, violent, etc.) and this, coupled with running semiquaver and demisemiquaver passages and tortured chromaticism, evokes the flying spirits, sinking ship, blustery winds, and stormy waters described in the opening stage direction of the play (see Example 12.1). In other cases, integration of music and drama is less of a priority. For instance, Humfrey’s Act V ‘Masque of Neptune’ is only tangentially connected to the main plot: Prospero calls forth the entertainment to ‘make amends’ for his misdeeds. We should not presume, though, that masques of this kind were deficient or lacking somehow. These episodes had their own internal logic and were very successful in a dramaturgical sense, as music (instrumental and vocal), dance, and elaborate spectacle worked syncretically to provoke awe and wonder in both the onstage and offstage audience.³⁰

Example 12.1 Matthew Locke, The English opera, or, The vocal musick in Psyche: with the instrumental therein intermix’d: to which is adjoyned the instrumental musick in The tempest (London: Printed by T. Radcliff and N. Thompson for the author, 1675), ‘Curtain Tune’, from The Tempest, 68

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Psyche, also with a text by Shadwell (adapted from Lully, Molière, Pierre Corneille, and Philippe Quinault’s tragédie-ballet, Psyché; 1671) and music by Locke, was presented the following year (1675), and its score, along with the instrumental music from The Tempest, was disseminated by Locke in his aforementioned self-published score, THE ENGLISH OPERA, OR, The Vocal Musick IN PSYCHE (1675).³¹ In Locke’s lively introduction to the volume he makes the case that Psyche, is, in fact, a proper opera, for it possesses all the elements of its Italian counterpart: ‘splendid Scenes and Machines’, as well as varied ‘kinds of Musick as the Subject requires’. He finishes by stating:

Locke’s approach to music and drama – along with the operatic Shakespearean experiments of the 1660s and 1670s – provides a template for the ways in which music, drama, and spectacle could work together on the public stage. In some cases, encapsulated entertainments are presented for onstage auditors, and, in others, music and drama flow seamlessly into each other, in part because one of the main characters, Venus, sings and speaks. Locke also composed a light-hearted drinking song and chorus for Vulcan, Cyclops, and their followers. The combination of the comic with the tragic carries over into later English opera, probably by commercial design.³³

Psyche, like The Tempest, had a multi-national production team behind it. Locke, an English composer, provided the bulk of the music, but the Italian Draghi wrote the instrumental music while the most famous Master of France, Monsieur St. Andrée’ made the dances.³⁴ These collaborations were facilitated by the influx of musicians from the Continent, a result of Charles’s musical tastes and his wife’s need for musicians to staff her Catholic Chapel.³⁵ Other immigrants, such as the Italian Reggio and the librettist and playwright Peter Motteux (1663–1718), a Huguenot refugee, came in the 1660s, 1670s, and 1680s, quickly finding opportunity in the theatre of their adopted land.

French and English Opera

Royal occasions seem to have prompted some of these operatic performances in the public theatre: Betterton may have commissioned Psyche in 1673 for the marriage of the Duke of York (later James II) and Mary of Modena. It is puzzling that it was not performed until 1675, but the delay may have been caused by music politics at court. In 1673 Robert Cambert (c. 1628–1677) – the composer of the first French opera, Pomone (1671) – arrived in England with some French musicians.³⁶ Early in 1674 he presented the Ballet et musique pour le divertissement du roy de la Grande-Bretagne in celebration of the Duke of York and Mary of Modena’s marriage. French music, at least temporarily, had supplanted Locke’s ‘English Opera’. On 30 March, Charles inaugurated a French-style ‘Royall Academy of Musick’ with a revised version of Cambert’s fully sung ‘opera’, Ariane, ou Le marriage de Bacchus, presented at Drury Lane with additional music supplied by French-trained Catalan composer Louis Grabu (fl. 1665–1694).³⁷

Although Cambert’s efforts were not well received, Charles’s Francophilia deeply affected the few court-based entertainments from this period that survive, even if the king balanced his love of French music with the judicious employment of English composers. About some entertainments with music produced at court, such as Rare en tout (1677), performed for Charles II’s birthday, little is known beyond the composer: Jacques [James] Paisible (c. 1656–1721), a French wind player who had come to England with Cambert, provided the score.³⁸ However, there is copious documentary evidence about John Crowne’s Calisto (1675). Almost all of the music is by Nicholas Staggins (d. 1700), Master of the King’s Music, who succeeded Grabu in the post (the Catholic Grabu may have run afoul of the Test Act of 1673, which, although applied inconsistently, required all those at court to take an oath of loyalty to the Church of England).³⁹ Calisto, like Cupid and Death in 1653, is called a ‘masque’ on the title page and has some elements in common with the older English court masque, including amateur performers, in this case the royal princesses, Anne and Mary; the Duke of Monmouth; and other courtiers.⁴⁰ Calisto was deeply influenced by the comédie-ballet and features a French overture, an allegorical prologue, which, like the prologue of Ariane, features a female singer as the River Thames, and danced entries for different sets of characters (gypsies, satyrs, Basques, etc.), a French feature that had been taken up in earlier English court masques and Shirley’s and Davenant’s operatic experiments of the 1650s.⁴¹ With the exception of the sung allegorical prologue, in Calisto, the musical episodes take place at the end of each act. Integration of music and drama is not a high priority. Perhaps this separation was born of necessity; it meant that the youthful performers could practice the musical and dramatic components separately. Indeed, this lack of integration, sometimes seen on the public stage, might have served a practical purpose: to expedite the rehearsal process.⁴²

Through-Composed Operas and Masques of the 1680s

Determined to enjoy French-style opera at home, in the summer of 1683 Charles II sent Betterton to Paris to commission Jean-Baptiste Lully and his Académie Royale de Musique to produce a tragédie en musique. Betterton was unsuccessful in his quest, and so he brought back Grabu, who since 1679 had been living in exile in Paris, ‘to represent something at least like an Opera in England for his Majestyes diversion’.⁴³ Dryden, who had collaborated with Davenant on the adaptation of The Tempest, and Grabu began work on what would become Albion and Albanius, an opera to be performed at Dorset Garden. Dryden’s planned opera originally had a through-composed allegorical prologue in the same vein as Calisto’s, followed by an English-style opera with spoken dialogue, spectacle, dance, and music for soloists and chorus. By August 1684, possibly because the king preferred French-style opera, Dryden had altered his project; the English opera would later be revised and performed as King Arthur (1691).⁴⁴ He expanded the allegorical prologue into a three-act opera, Albion and Albanius, which addressed the key moments of Charles’s reign.⁴⁵ It was completed in 1684 but was shelved because of the unexpected death of Charles in February 1685. Dryden and Grabu worked to accommodate the new political reality, and the opera was finally performed at Dorset Garden in early June, although the run was cut short because Charles’s illegitimate son, the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, attempted to seize the throne from the Catholic James II.

Dryden’s preface to the printed libretto reveals that the battle between French and English music was hardly settled: ‘some English Musicians, and their Scholars’ had objected to Dryden’s collaboration with Grabu, because the ‘imputation of being a French-man’ was enough to prejudice them.⁴⁶ Although Grabu was actually Catalan, he was French by training, and not surprisingly his musical idiom is entirely French.⁴⁷ Grabu set the recitative sections of Albion and Albanius accordingly, incorporating frequent changes from duple to triple metre that are typical of the French récit mesuré – a technique not generally used by English composers. In some cases Grabu’s score incorporates French conventions that would become anglicised, in particular, the use of dance as a structural device in opera. Most impressive in this regard is his lengthy C major chaconne at the end of the second act, ‘Ye nymphs, the charge is royal’, which is admirable for its variety of instrumental and vocal writing.⁴⁸

In 1683, the same year that Betterton departed for France, a native English entertainment was being planned at court. This too would be a through-composed work, but on a mythological topic – Venus and Adonis. One of the earliest manuscripts describes it as ‘A Masque for y^e entertainment of y^e King’,⁴⁹ and circumstantial evidence indicates that it was performed on 19 February 1683.⁵⁰ It may have been associated with Staggins and John Blow’s petition in April 1683 to ‘erect’ an ‘Academy or Opera of Musick’, a possible response to the failed academy associated with Cambert or to the prospect of Grabu’s return to England.⁵¹ Based on stylistic evidence, James Winn has posited that the librettist may have been Anne Kingsmill, a lady-in-waiting to Mary of Modena, the Duke of York’s second wife.⁵² The cast included Mary (Moll) Davis, the king’s former mistress, as Venus, and their illegitimate daughter, Lady Mary Tudor, as Cupid.

Blow’s masque possesses some features seen in previous entertainments: a mythological topic and French-inspired music (a French overture, danced ‘entries’, including a ‘Sarabrand’ [sic] for the Graces, and a chaconne ground), pervasive use of the chorus, a mixture of comedy with tragedy, and a style of florid recitative adapted from Locke.⁵³ In other respects Venus and Adonis was unusual. Musically, the most notable difference between Venus and Adonis and the English-style operas of the 1660s and 1670s was that it was through-composed – Blow was the first English composer to attempt such a thing since the Interregnum. With its comments directed to dissolute courtiers in the prologue (‘At court I find constant and true / Only an aged lord or two’) and its satirical Act II spelling lesson (‘M-E-R-C-E-N-A-R-Y’), the libretto has the quality of a private conversation among a small coterie. Venus and Adonis did eventually find a broader audience, most notably at Josias Priest’s boarding school for girls at Chelsea, where, as noted by John Verney on his souvenir libretto (GB-Cu Sel.2.123 [6]), it was presented on 17 April 1684.⁵⁴

Dido and Aeneas, performed sometime in the late 1680s, is a similar work to Blow’s Venus and Adonis. The only surviving seventeenth-century documentation about this work is a printed libretto from a performance at Priest’s school (GB-Lcm D144), Thomas D’Urfey’s epilogue issued in New Poems (1690), and the song ‘Ah! Belinda’ in Orpheus Britannicus, book 1 (1698).⁵⁵ After the discovery of Verney’s annotated libretto from the school performance of Venus and Adonis, many wondered if Dido also had its genesis at court, and Bruce Wood and Andrew Pinnock argued for a first performance date shortly after Venus and Adonis.⁵⁶ More recently, Bryan White discovered a ‘Letter from Aleppo’ in which a factor of the Levant Company, Rowland Sherman, writes to his friend in London, the merchant James Pigott, and requests that he ask ‘Harry’ to prick down the C minor overture to ‘the mask he made for Preists [sic] Ball’. White’s remarkable discovery has, once again, called into question the date and location of Dido’s first performance.⁵⁷

Musically, Dido incorporates some of the same French components as Venus and Adonis, with its French overture, incorporation of solos with choral responses, and its French-style dances, whose rhythms infiltrate the vocal music, most famously in ‘Fear no danger’, a rondeau duet with chorus.⁵⁸ Dido also includes influences beyond the French, including the English court masque (the antimasque-influenced music and dances for the Sorceress and her band of witches) and Italian-style opera, particularly in the two ground bass laments for Dido, ‘Ah, Belinda’ and ‘When I am laid in earth’. Purcell chooses his ground basses carefully – the oscillating figure in Dido’s ‘Ah, Belinda’ perfectly encapsulates the Queen’s indecision – and the descending tetrachord – an ‘emblem of lament’ in Venetian opera – is used to great dramatic effect in Dido’s ‘When I am laid in earth’.⁵⁹

Purcell’s Dramatick Operas

Purcell’s engagement with theatre music only increased after 1690, as he sought new sources of income due to the reduction of the court musical establishment under William III and Mary.⁶⁰ In 1682 the rival King’s and Duke’s companies had combined into the United Company, so competition had been eliminated, at least for the time being. From 1690 to his premature death in 1695, Purcell composed a remarkable amount of theatre music, including a series of dramatick operas: Dioclesian (1690), King Arthur (1691), The Fairy-Queen (1692, 1693), and The Indian Queen (1695). Continuing earlier practises, most of these dramatick operas were adaptations of earlier works.

The driving force behind these dramatick operas was a by-now familiar figure: Thomas Betterton. Betterton had played both sides of the fence in the 1660s–1680s, during which time he was involved in through-composed operas in the French style (Albion and Albanius) and English-style opera, works that combined spoken text with song.⁶¹ In the 1690s, he took on the role of adaptor as well. His first attempt was John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s tragicomedy The Prophetess (1622), which he transformed into the dramatick opera The Prophetess: Or, The History of Dioclesian.

Betterton expanded pre-existing musical moments and added music in conventional places (for instance ‘What shall I do to show how much I love her’, which Purcell set as a beautiful minuet, performed in Act III as Maximinian gazes longingly upon Aurelia).⁶² The prophetess Delphia instigates many other musical episodes in the opera, using her supernatural abilities to call forth songs, dance, and spectacle. Dioclesian also continues the dramatick opera tradition (cf. ‘The Masque for Neptune’ in The Tempest) of having a spectacular entertainment in Act V with a tenuous connection to the plot, in this case a pastoral interlude that concludes with an extended chaconne, ‘Triumph victorious Love’, a possible response to Grabu’s chaconne in Albion and Albanius.⁶³ There are also scenes of ceremonial praise and ritualised rejoicing, such as Act IV’s ‘Sound, Fame, thy Brazen Trumpet sound’ in response to Dioclesian’s military victory.

Dioclesian contained beautiful and varied music (the pastoral masque at the end particularly struck the fancy of audiences well into the early eighteenth century),⁶⁴ but Purcell’s next dramatick opera, King Arthur, performed by the United Company at Dorset Garden, had a newly written text by the experienced Dryden, and as a result this work achieves an unprecedented integration of music and drama. Employing a strategy found in previous dramatick operas, Dryden included intermediaries between the world of speech and song: the Tempest had Ariel, Psyche had Venus, and King Arthur has the spirits Grimbald and Philidel.

King Arthur incorporates scenic spectacle and dance, as well as stock musical scenes: a sung ritual, a drinking song, a rejoicing song after victory in battle, pastoral entertainments, and a spectacular Act V masque with little connection to the plot. But in other respects, Purcell’s music forges new ground. ‘Hither this way’ in Act II expands upon a dramatic situation seen in the famous action duet ‘Go thy way’ from Davenant and Dryden’s Tempest, where Ariel lures Ferdinand into following him. Philidel and his spirit followers coax Arthur and his men to take the correct path, and Purcell responds to Dryden’s evocative textual cues with vivid text painting: the jagged descending line on ‘down you fall, a furlong sinking’ being a prime example (see Example 12.2). Grimbald gamely echoes the airy sprites, but it is to no avail. As Grimbald explains, ‘I had a Voice in Heav’n, ere Sulph’rous Steams / Had damp’d it to a hoarseness’. He does not give up, but his air ‘Let not a moonborn elf’, with its awkward rhythms and high tessitura, renders his attempt ungainly and ridiculous (see Example 12.3). When the competing spirits chime in with a reprise of ‘Hither this way’, it is all too clear that Philidel and his band will triumph.⁶⁵

Example 12.2 Henry Purcell, King Arthur, ed. Dennis D. Arundell [1928], rev edn. Margaret Laurie (London: Novello, 1971), Philidel, ‘Hither this way’ (excerpt), mm. 26–9.

“A PDF version of this example is available for download on Cambridge Core and via www.cambridge.org/9780521823593”

Example 12.3 Henry Purcell, King Arthur, Grimbald, ‘Let Not a Moonborn Elf’, mm. 1–25.

“A PDF version of this example is available for download on Cambridge Core and via www.cambridge.org/9780521823593”

In the less fully integrated scenes, Purcell also provides music of remarkable invention and variety. The famous Act III Frost Scene, particularly the song for the Cold Genius, is a prime example. Although Purcell may have taken the idea of using wavy lines to signify shivering from Lully’s Isis (1677), the adventurous chromaticism of the Cold Genius’s ‘What pow’r art thou?’ has very little do with the French idiom;⁶⁶ it is an extension of the musical language of Locke and Blow.⁶⁷ And the Act V masque has everything from the rollicking comedy of ‘Your hay it is mow’d’ to the sublime minuet song for Venus, ‘Fairest Isle’.

With The Fairy-Queen of the following year, the anonymous adapter, possibly Betterton, returned to Shakespeare for inspiration. This time the adapter chose A Midsummer Night’s Dream for treatment, but instead of expanding scenes that were musical in the original play, as other revisers had done with Macbeth and The Tempest, he often ignored these opportunities, adding scenes entirely of his own invention. Still, many of these interpolated entertainments tick similar dramaturgical boxes to those we have seen before – not surprisingly most of the music is instigated by the fairies, and these scenes are presented in the style of masques: self-contained entertainments directed toward a specific onstage spectator (or spectators). Only the Act II masque has a direct musical analogue in Shakespearean drama; it takes the place of Shakespeare’s lullaby ‘Ye spotted snakes’, as Titania’s fairies first entertain their queen and then present an allegorical masque of Night, Mystery, Secrecy, and Sleep designed to induce slumber.⁶⁸

Despite the considerable beauties of Purcell’s music, the opera did not turn a significant profit. It was revived almost immediately in 1693, but the state of the musical and textual sources is such that we cannot conclusively know what alterations were made for the 1693 production. The most substantial musical difference between the 1692 and 1693 quartos is the inclusion in the latter of a comical scene of a Drunken Poet tormented by fairies. It is unclear if this was a late revision to the 1692 production that did not make it into the 1692 quarto, or if it was newly written for the 1693 production.⁶⁹

Purcell wrote one final dramatick opera before his untimely death in 1695, an adaptation of an earlier play, Dryden and Howard’s The Indian Queen (1664).⁷⁰ He died before he completed the Act V masque, which was set by his brother or cousin, Daniel Purcell (c. 1664 or later–1717). This dramatick opera was performed by very young performers, as most of the veteran actors, including Betterton and actress-singer Anne Bracegirdle (1671–1748), had left to establish a rival theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields.⁷¹ This means that Betterton was probably not involved with the adaptation, although a document survives from the patentees of the Theatre Royal asking Betterton to undertake the task; Price has suggested that Dryden may have done the adaptation himself.⁷² Despite the difficult circumstances, Henry Purcell wrote sublime music, most notably for an incantation scene in Act III in which the eponymous Indian queen Zempoalla consults the magician Ismeron regarding her fate. The bass singer Richard Leveridge (1670–1758) performed the role of the sorcerer Ismeron, and his ominous and chromatic G minor recitative ‘You twice ten hundred deities’ and air ‘By the croaking of the toad’ are justifiably famous; the latter imitates hopping with dotted rhythms and includes some very thorny harmonies, including a rare augmented sixth chord on the word ‘unwilling’.⁷³

1695 and Beyond

Although Purcell died in 1695, English opera did not die with him. Post-Purcellian dramatick opera took two tracks: one in which music and drama were consistently integrated, and one in which musico-dramatic cohesion was not as pressing a concern. During the theatre season of 1698–9, two competing visions of dramatick opera went head-to-head. The theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields offered John Dennis’s Rinaldo and Armida, with a score by John Eccles (c. 1668–1735) in 1698.⁷⁴ Although it has some elements in common with Lully’s Armide, Dennis’s text, like that of King Arthur, was newly written. Dennis makes clear in his preface to The Musical Entertainments in the Tragedy of Rinaldo and Armida (1699) that he is deeply interested in providing a rational, coherent entertainment in which music, even the act tunes, play a part in the drama. In 1699 Christopher Rich’s company at the rival theatre at Drury Lane presented their own dramatick opera, Motteux’s adaptation of Fletcher’s The Island Princess (ca. 1621).⁷⁵ The Island Princess was a collaborative affair, with music provided by Jeremiah Clarke (c. 1674–1707), Leveridge (the Ismeron of The Indian Queen), and Daniel Purcell, as well as Robert King (c. 1660–c. 1726), Thomas Morgan (fl. 1691–9), and William Williams (1765–1701).⁷⁶ The Island Princess was a massive success; only the 1674 version of The Tempest was revived more often in the first few decades of the eighteenth century.⁷⁷ Although the music in Acts II, III, and IV works in conjunction with the plot (particularly the ‘Enthusiastick Song’ written by Leveridge for his own performance as a superannuated Brahmin), elsewhere the music’s connection with the drama is tenuous (the Act IV rustic dialogue and the Act V ‘The Four Seasons or Love in every Age’).⁷⁸

The other predominant operatic form, the through-composed miniature, was transferred to the public stage, interpolated into otherwise spoken plays, or used as an afterpiece. Most of these miniatures were given at Lincoln’s Inn Fields; as Robert Hume observes, these through-composed works, which prioritise musical pleasures over scenic display, were ‘what an under-capitalised company in a minimal theater could afford’.⁷⁹ Frequently called ‘masques’ on their title pages, these works are akin to Venus and Adonis and Dido and Aeneas – other small-scale operatic works on an intimate scale. Notable examples include Eccles and Gottfried [Godfrey] Finger’s (c. 1660–1730) setting of Motteux’s The Loves of Mars and Venus (1696); Daniel Purcell and Finger’s setting of Dryden’s The Secular Masque (1700); Eccles’s setting of Motteux’s Acis and Galatea (1701); and William Congreve’s (1670–1729) The Judgment of Paris (1701) – set by Eccles, Daniel Purcell, John Weldon (1676–1736), and Finger as part of a ‘song contest’ to encourage music.⁸⁰

Around the turn of the century, native English composers also began to compose full-length, fully sung operas in an attempt to compete with the fashionable Italian opera. In these works, one sees the continuation of older English and French traditions together with an increased engagement with the Italian style. They include Eccles and Congreve’s unstaged Semele (1706) and Thomas Clayton’s (1673–1725) Rosamond (1707; libretto by Joseph Addison, [1672–1719]), performed at Drury Lane. Semele fell afoul of the tumultuous theatre politics of the time, and the failure of Rosamond in March 1707 did not help to make the case that audiences craved fully sung English opera.⁸¹

Conclusions

So why did full-length, through-composed opera in English fail to take hold? Lurking behind such a question is the modern assumption that through-composed opera is superior to opera with spoken dialogue, a sentiment not shared by the majority in seventeenth-century England. It was not until the 1690s that through-composed works were successfully performed on the public stage, and usually only as afterpieces or interpolations into spoken plays, as was famously the case with the masques cited above or Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, inserted into Charles Gildon’s 1700 adaptation of Measure for Measure. Clearly, the English preferred their opera with spoken dialogue – an expansion of the aesthetic found in earlier seventeenth-century plays as well as the court masque. Although some contemporaries bemoaned their compatriots’ lack of appetite for fully sung English opera or critiqued the lack of dramatic coherence in dramatick operas, most audience members seem to have had no such qualms. Dramatick operas by Purcell and others were performed well into the eighteenth century and beyond, demonstrating the genre’s longstanding popularity. As Motteux opined in The Gentleman’s Journal: ‘Other Nations bestow the name Opera only on such Plays whereof every word is sung … experience hath taught us that our English genius will not rellish that perpetual Singing.’⁸²

Statistical Analysis

The beginnings of German-language opera can only be sketched loosely based on available sources. Our knowledge of its early history depends on ‘dates without visual aids’¹ and ‘words without songs’, that is, mentions of performances and dates in more-or-less reliable archives, chronicles, and bibliographies,² as well as mute libretti, which ultimately only hint at how the first opera-like works in German sounded and were performed onstage. The musical losses must be considerable. According to cautious estimates, in the twenty-four known sites of operatic performance in Protestant-Lutheran regions in northern, central, and southern Germany, about 230 works were performed in the seventeenth century alone.³

When reconstructing the beginnings of German-language opera, we must turn to speculation since the pieces that survive only as libretti raise at least as many questions as they seem to answer. Often, it cannot even be determined with certainty whether a certain multi-act libretto was actually intended as a ‘stage action entirely to be sung’ – Werner Braun’s definition for ‘German Baroque Opera’⁴ – or simply as a spoken play interspersed with songs.

Early History

Early efforts towards Singspiele occurred in Protestant regions. Here, in the wake of Luther’s Bible translation, new worship practices, educational curricula, and ultimately the flourishing language societies – especially ‘The Fruitbearing Society’ (Die fruchtbringende Gesellschaft) founded by Prince Ludwig of Anhalt-Köthen – the mother tongue was musically elevated to an art form. In contrast, in German Catholic lands, the language of early opera was Italian (just as Latin remained the language of church music), and the leading composers were ‘imported’ from Italy at great expense.

The earliest documentation for performances of Italian opera in German-speaking areas is comparatively precise, though fraught with some uncertainties. These performances significantly predated German opera, and took place close to the birth of the genre and in Catholic regions, especially the Court of Marcus Sitticus, Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. Here, during carnival in 1614, an anonymous Orfeo was performed in a newly constructed theatre. Two years earlier, the singer Francesco Rasi (1574–1621), who premièred Monteverdi’s Orfeo (Mantua, 1607), had given the prince-archbishop a number of musical items, possibly including a score of Monteverdi’s work; the conjecture arises that this setting may actually have been performed in Salzburg.⁵ Additional (Catholic) German courts that had become centres of Italian opera by 1680 include the Imperial Court in Vienna, Regensburg (in connection with the Reichstag), Innsbruck, and Munich.⁶ These stages were almost exclusively supplied with Italian composers. An exception was the Electoral Court of Munich. Here, the Saxon-born Hofkapellmeister Johann Caspar Kerll (1627–1693) – educated in Vienna with Froberger and with Carissimi in Rome – wrote at least nine Italian operas between 1657 and 1672; the music has been lost.

The Torgau Dafne, 1627

The printed libretto for the ‘Tragicomoedia von der Dafne’ is generally counted as the oldest surviving document related to German-language opera. According to information provided by the title page, Martin Opitz’s libretto (based on Ottavio Rinuccini’s Dafne, 1598) is said to have been brought ‘musically to the stage’ in 1627 in Torgau by the Dresden Hofkapellmeister Heinrich Schütz in honour of the marriage of the Saxon elector’s eldest daughter to the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel. However, Wolfram Steude has plausibly argued that the scanty contemporary statements on Dafne’s structure (from court diaries and other archival documents) point rather to the form of a Singspiel or spoken play, and therefore a work containing limited individual musical scenes.⁷ This is especially plausible because the characterisation of the piece as the first German opera apparently stems from the Leipzig professor of philosophy Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766). Gottsched, who had access only to the libretto, may have concluded from the collaboration between the ‘Father of German poetry’ (Opitz) and the ‘Father of modern German music’ (Schütz) that an epoch-making piece of theatre must have been performed in Torgau at that time. Admittedly, Dafne did not take the most prominent position among the stage works performed in conjunction with the wedding. And the libretto seems decidedly untheatrical. In any case, there is hardly room for the expressive recitative-like style that Schütz himself would later call ‘style oratorio’ in the title of his Kleinen Geistlichen Konzert ‘Eile mich, Gott, zu erretten’ SWV282 (Leipzig, 1636). As late as 1633, Schütz noted in a letter that the Italian manner in which ‘a spoken comedy of many voices could be translated and brought to the stage to be sung … to my knowledge (in the way I conceive it) is still completely unknown in Germany’, and thus established a relatively lagging state of development.⁸

It is possible that Schütz initiated a type of opera project that was ‘still completely unknown’ in Germany when he composed music ‘in an Italian manner’ for the ballet Orpheus und Eurydice (libretto by August Buchner) in 1638 on the occasion of another electoral wedding.⁹

The Nuremberg Seelewig, 1644

The earliest preserved music for an entirely sung German-language theatrical piece is for the Geistliche Waldgedicht [German counterpart to Favola boscareccia] oder Freudenspiel, genant Seelewig by the well-travelled Nuremberg patrician Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (libretto; 1607–1658) and the local organist and town piper Sigmund Theophil Staden (1607–1655).¹⁰ In 1644, Harsdörffer founded the ‘Order of the Commendable Shepherds and Flowers on the Pegnitz’ (Löblichen Hirten- und Blumenorden an der Pegnitz: in short, the ‘Pegnitz Flower Order’) on the model of the Italian academies. The stated purpose for founding this language society was the cultivation and improvement of German language and poetry. This was reason enough for Harsdörffer to publish eight volumes of so-called ‘Spoken Plays for Women’ (Frawen-Zimmer Gespräch-Spiele) during the 1640s. At the end of the fourth volume of the anthology (publ. 1644) is the music for the Geistlichen Waldgedicht that Staden – according to the title – had ‘set’ to Music ‘in the Italian way of singing’. The plot and form of Seelewig point to much older Italian models, especially Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s La Rappresentazione di Anima, et di Corpo (Rome, 1600), although Harsdörffer’s nymph, who must decide between heavenly and earthly joys, is called Seelewig rather than Anima. Her adversary is Trügewaldt (trügen: ‘to deceive’), a cloven-hoofed satyr, who over the course of three acts tries in vain to lure her to ruin, with all kinds of cunning and some outside assistance. Only the prologue, in which ‘Music or Singing’ enters the scene, is reminiscent of Monteverdi and his Orfeo. Otherwise, Seelewig is far from Monteverdi’s principles of seconda pratica, especially in its musical language. Staden’s music and Harsdörffers’s text follow a rather pedagogical, instructive approach, even in the instrumentation: strings and flutes for the nymph, shawms for the shepherd; Trügewald supported by trombones and bassoons; and a theorbo playing continuo. Italian recitative seems foreign to these Nuremberg authors. Protagonists speak almost exclusively in strophic form, whether in solo songs or in strophic dialogue. In both genres, the music remains much closer to the contemporary German lied (as practiced by Heinrich Albert and Andreas Hammerschmidt) than to Schütz’s ‘style oratorio’; phrases in true recitative are the exception, and grand laments are entirely absent. What is operatic is that the print of Harsdörffer’s ‘Liederspiel’ contains eleven stage engravings. The ‘Art of Painting’ (Mahlkunst) even appears onstage in the epilogue, and, in the accompanying conversation, the ideal stage is described as an ‘often-changing scene’ in the form of a ‘round disc’, which is ‘painted with perspective’ and ‘can be rotated’.¹¹

Whether, by whom, and how Seelewig may have been performed in Nürnberg remains unknown. In any case, in 1654 in Wolfenbüttel, a good 300 kilometres away, a performance of Seelewig has been documented in honor of the seventy-fifth birthday of Duke August, brought about by his music-loving wife Sophie Elisabeth von Braunschweig-Lüneburg, who was a composer herself.

The Newly Discovered Pastorello musicale in Königsberg, 1663

The oldest surviving German-language opera manuscript dates from 1663: the Pastorello musicale (title on the partial autograph score) or the Verliebte Schäffer-Spiel¹² (title on the printed text) by Königsberg Hofkapellmeister Johann Sebastiani (1622–1683),¹³ which was performed in the presence of the Great Elector to mark the wedding of Count Gerhard von Dönhoff with the step-daughter of the influential Prussian Oberregimentsrat and Landeshofmeister Johann Ernst von Wallenrodt, Anna Beata von Goldstein (1644–1675).

The libretto is by Johann Röling (1634–1680), who succeeded Simon Dachs as Professor of Poetry at the University of Königsberg in 1660. Even if the piece is dressed in the trappings of a pastoral opera, it is actually a satire of the genre. The plot involves Thyrsis, a foreigner, who has since his youth read and internalised novels, pastoral plays, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Believing all of this literary and mythological material to be true, he decides to go out into the pastoral world in hopes of encountering ‘pastoral desire and transformation’.¹⁴ Immediately after arriving in the supposed pastoral world – a courtly society that takes great pleasure in the confused ‘intruder’ – he falls in love with the beautiful Chrysille. For five acts, the amused company enjoys putting on a series of traditional bucolic scenes, arranged into episodes, for the naïve foreigner. However, these behavioural patterns are used as the basis for parody, in order to take the various models of pastoral literature down exaggerated new paths from the burlesque to the satirical. In the first act, Chrysille becomes a false Echo; in the following act, Thyrsis refuses to fight with a rival suitor bearing a rapier – in his literary pastoral world, the only suitable instrument for a duel is the shepherd’s staff. Eventually, Thyrsis is rejected by Chrysille, flees in tears, falls into a hollow tree stump, and believes himself, like Daphne, to have been transformed into a tree. Goddesses of the forest dance around him, greeting him as one of their own. The absurd story ends with joy all around.

Röling’s text is based on a specific model: Thomas Corneille’s pastoral play Le Berger Extravagant (publ. 1653), itself a stage adaptation of the French novel of the same name by Charles Sorel. Here, Don Quixote is ‘translated into the bucolic’. Andreas Gryphius had already engaged with Corneille’s play in 1660, with his ‘satyric comedy’ Der Schwärmende Schäfer (expanded edition Breslau, 1660).

Sebastiani’s score encompasses eighteen scenes in five acts. Recitative predominates in the approximately 2,000 measures, which otherwise include only seven strophic sections: five arias (some with ritornelli), as well as opening and closing choruses. The recitative is formulaic, primarily ‘babbling’ eighth-notes strung together syllabically in even metres. Sebastiani only sparingly uses effects such as melismas to illustrate the text, changes to triple metre, or the repetition of words and phrases. Nevertheless, his recitative follows certain formal principles and is not without charm. It falls into two types – one more songlike and one more freely structured – and one type often leads fluidly into the other; the song-like recitative resembles the style of the arias, which have ritornelli and a tendency towards symmetry and clear divisions akin to Adam Krieger’s contemporary lieder. In addition, clear echoes of Francesco Cavalli’s canzonetta style of the 1640s can be heard, appearing also in many of Sebastiani’s surviving occasional songs¹⁵ – born in Thüringen, Sebastiani is thought to have travelled to Italy before arriving in Königsberg (1650).¹⁶

What the Pastorello musicale is missing musically are distinctively dramatic passages and a large number of arias and instrumental sections, which, if they were present, would make it easier to designate the Pastorello musicale an opera. Nevertheless, such reservations are subject to a misunderstanding. The apparent defects of the piece are less a matter of Sebastiani’s conception or any potential step backwards in the development of German theatrical music than of the principles of its genre: Sebastiani’s Pastorello is a pastoral opera, whose charm lies in its humour. Röling did not provide models for expressive monodies, and Corneille even less so. The libretto did not even designate a ‘lamento’. Sebastiani created an instrumental one (end of Act II). In any case, Sebastiani convincingly set the conversational text in a natural manner, that is by following speech declamation and avoiding ‘dead pauses’ in the music. The ‘singing recitative’ differentiates the piece, sometimes fundamentally, from the later German-language operas of the 1680s and 1690s.¹⁷ Presumably, Sebastiani was not alone in his treatment of recitative, and so the opera could be viewed as representative of all lost German operas from around 1660. At least, this Pastorello musicale provides the first proof of Johann Mattheson’s claim that German opera was originally – and thus surely before 1680 – sung ‘in time, as our Arioso is now’.¹⁸

Königsberg was certainly not a focal point for the development of German-language opera, and neither was Sebastiani an innovator in theatrical music. The value of his Pastorello musicale lies in the uniqueness of its transmission. It is hardly possible to estimate the extent to which various courts with mid-century operatic activity may have developed forms that were more clearly aligned (and analogous to developments in Protestant church music) with the truly dramatic examples coming from Venice or Rome.

Italians Compose Operas in Dresden

Among Protestant lands, the Dresden Hofkapelle held an exceptional position, even before the elector converted to Catholicism (1697, in order to become King of Poland). In the middle of the seventeenth century, the court was largely staffed by Italians, a situation that led to the formation of two competing ensembles in 1666: a mostly Italian ‘first choir’ for official court music, and a ‘small German music’ (Kleine deutsche Musik) primarily for Protestant worship services.¹⁹

Likewise, it was an Italian who opened a new chapter of opera history in Dresden: Giovanni Andrea Bontempi (1625–1705) of Piegaro near Perugia, a pupil of Virgilio Mazzocchi, and apparently the first castrato employed in Protestant Germany. After entering into the elector’s service as a singer and composer in 1650, his duties soon expanded in theatrical directions: in 1657 he became Vice-Kapellmeister, and in 1664 the architect, machine-master, and inspector of the new comedy theatre. A correspondingly large number of documents exist for Singballette performed under his watch. Bontempi’s first opera for Dresden was a first-rate representational product: in honour of the marriage of the daughter of Elector Johann Georg II, Erdmuthe Sophie, to the Margrave of Brandenburg-Bayreuth in 1662, he composed Il Paride, the first Italian opera performed in Dresden. It would remain representative for posterity as well, as not only the text but also the score was published, a practically unique occurrence north of the Alps.

The libretto, apparently also by Bontempi, embellishes Paris’s famous judgement in the goddesses’ contest for the apple and concludes with the arrival of Paris and Helena in Troy. In part, it follows Giacomo Badoaro’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria. In the preface to the print edition, Bontempi designates the piece – appropriately for the occasion – as an ‘Erotopaegnion Musicum’, that is, a ‘play of love, set in music’. Despite a relatively linear narrative style, it demanded a lot of attention from the Dresden Festgesellschaft: fourteen singers play thirty-one roles, acting out the story of a love triangle. All of the entertainment that Venetian opera can offer is present here: the stuttering Ancrocco, a constantly quarrelling servant couple, and of course some cross-dressing confusion. In short, ‘all these scenes run one to the next like a string of pearls’, without, however, ‘getting entangled in a knot of intrigue’.²⁰

Bontempi’s music offers pronounced declamatory recitatives, with arias mostly in triple time; strophic and cyclical arias stand side-by-side on equal footing. There are also large scenes in which Bontempi artfully combines arioso and recitative sections. What is surprising about the score, however, is that the most dramatic notes are found in the scenes of the comic servant figures – causing, so to speak, ‘dramatic’ strain on the laughing muscles.

In 1667, the new Komödienhaus am Taschenberg designed by Wolf Caspar von Klengel was dedicated with a performance of the opera Il Teseo (music by Pietro Andrea Ziani). In 1671, Bontempi ventured for the first time to write a German-language opera, Musicalisches Schauspiel von der Dafne, which was written together with his Kapellmeister colleague, Marco Giuseppe Peranda. It is impossible to differentiate their styles. In comparison with Paride, a stronger emphasis on strophic arias with instrumental ritornelli is noticeable, which might come from the large number of scenes involving the peasant world.²¹ The libretto is based on Opitz’s earlier text, but in more contemporary clothing: the traditional plot is enriched with additional gods, shepherds, and elements from the world of Venetian opera. For example, the anonymous librettist freely adapted servant-scenes in distinctively lower-class language and with ribald lines, such as when the peasant Urban asks, ‘Did the devil screw us over’ (‘Hat der Teufel uns beschissen?’), or when conversation turns to the ‘damned whore’.

The score was clearly tailored to the capability of the Dresden Hofkapelle, especially regarding the figure of the hunter. The fact that he usually stands alone on the stage and his part is rather more virtuosic than the others points to Johann Jäger, then a singer in the German Kapelle in Dresden. Mattheson reports that Jäger far surpassed the Italian bass whom the elector had engaged for the Hofkapelle, so as to keep up with the emperor in Vienna – ‘not only with his voice, but also with his clean manner’; Jäger ‘lay in wait for the cadenzas of the castrati, which they stretched out; when these had passed, Jäger came along and sang his wonderful passagi, much better than those’.²²

The following year, the same pair of authors brought another German opera to the stage: Jupiter und Jo, of which only the libretto has survived.

Upon the death of Elector Johann Georg II (22 August 1680), the tender sprout of German-language opera withered at the Dresden court. His successor, Johann Georg III, preferred Italian operas, which he procured, together with staff, directly from the source (Venice), namely the successful opera composer and maestro di coro of the Ospedale degli incurabili, Carlo Pallavicino (ca. 1630–1688). After having served as Vice-Kapellmeister (1662–1672) and succeeding Schütz as Kapellmeister (1672) in Dresden, he was called back to the court as Prefect of chamber and court music in 1687 with the goal of establishing Italian court opera. Immediately after his arrival, the opera Gerusalemme liberata (Giulio Cesare Corradi, after Tasso) was premièred, in parallel with Venice, based on one of the greatest texts of Italian literature. The opera centres around the pagan sorceress Armida, who converts to Christianity for the love of Rinaldo. In parallel, the duel of Tancredi and Clorinda is told with a kind of happy ending: Clorinda appears to Tancredi in a dream and confesses her love. In comparison with Bontempi’s work, Pallavicino’s music was a quantum leap ahead: the score is characterised by three-part da capo arias and a marked virtuosity.

Together with his son Stefano (1672–1742), who became Court Poet when he was hardly sixteen, Pallavicino probably began his last opera project in 1687: Antiope. Left incomplete upon Pallavicino’s death on 29 January 1688, the work was eventually completed by the newly arrived Vice-Kapellmeister Nikolaus Adam Strungk (1640–1700) and premiered in February 1689. From the surviving copy of the manuscript, it is impossible to determine who wrote which sections, an indication that Strungk persuasively attempted to imitate Pallavicino’s style.

In the years after Pallavicino’s death, opera culture in Dresden seems to have lost its lustre at times. This is not least because a main figure, namely Strungk (who had been a pioneer of Baroque opera in Hamburg) regularly brought German-language operas to the stage for the elector elsewhere within the electorate: during the fairs, in the civic opera house on the Brühl in Leipzig.

Opera Tradition in Smaller Central German Courts, 1660–1700: Highlights in Halle and Weißenfels

A rich courtly opera tradition developed in the 1660s and 1670s at smaller courts, especially in central Germany.²³ However, research relies exclusively on silent witnesses: printed libretti and here and there other archival material related to performance. Focal points were the ducal courts of Gotha, Halle, and Weißenfels.

Opera in Halle is tied to Duke Augustus (1614–1680), son of the Saxon Elector Johann Georg I, who lived in this city as Administrator of the Archbishopric of Magdeburg – since the Peace of Westphalia, under the toleration of the House of Brandenburg, to whom the archbishopric was to fall after the duke’s death. The artistically minded duke, who became president of the Fruchtbringenden Gesellschaft in 1667, invested remarkable resources in the cultural life of the court. He had a comedy theatre built, whose budget was at times on a par with those of Dresden and Gotha. His Hofkapelle had approximately twenty members, including some singers who later achieved fame on the stages of Weißenfels and Hamburg. Printed libretti and archival materials from Halle between 1658 and 1679, often in connection with festivities and honorary days in the ducal house, document productions of well over twenty stage works: libretto titles call them ‘Sing-Spiele’ with ballets and ‘Trauer- und Freudenspiele’, although it is often not clear whether the latter were sung through, or were rather plays with individual songs and entr’acte music.²⁴ Subjects run the gamut from the biblical and bucolic to the antique and medieval, with texts that are often remarkably substantial and, in many cases, have a moral undertone. The libretti use various forms. Within one piece, such as the fest-opera in honor of a princely marriage in 1669, Liebe krönt Eintract, oder erworbene Prinzessin Mösien, long passages evidently in recitative style stand alongside closed ensemble scenes (canzonettas, madrigals?) or strophic arias and antiphonal conversations.

The primary librettist for opera in Halle was probably – most printed libretti do not list an author – the local councillor and privy secretary David Elias Heidenreich (1638–1688), who was also the secretary for the Fruchtbringenden Gesellschaft. In addition, he made a contribution to church music history: his volume Geistlichen Oden (1665), with texts for all Sundays and festival days with a mixture of biblical dicta and freely written strophic arias, represents the birth of the so-called concerto-aria cantata.²⁵ Initially, Philipp Stolle, the director of court music, seems to have been responsible for the music of the operas in Halle, but, from 1660, Schütz’s pupil David Pohle (1624–1695, Kapellmeister from 1661) took over. However, Pohle left the court over a dispute in 1679, after the duke had engaged as his deputy a student of Rosenmüller, Johann Philipp Krieger (1649–1725), who had matured as a composer in Venice and Rome. From his new home in Merseburg, Pohle then seems to have supplied the Gotha court with several pieces made in the ‘Halle model’ in the 1680s: opera apparently flourished here in the 1680s and 1690s under Dukes Friedrich I and II and Kapellmeister Wolfgang Michael Mylius.²⁶

Meanwhile, Krieger was an opera composer primarily in Weißenfels. After the death of Duke August of Halle (1680), his son Johann Adolf I continued the tradition of rich and ambitious opera activity. In the time before his death in 1697, records can be traced for over thirty opera productions in the ‘Schau-Platz’ in the Neu-Augustusburg, and both of his sons continued the tradition with equal enthusiasm despite the small duchy’s precarious economic situation until the 1720s.²⁷ Most of the scores (all of which have been lost) were by Krieger and were performed by what was, considering the size of the duchy, a relatively large and capable Hofkapelle with additional paid guest musicians. The topics vary widely. Some of the mostly anonymous libretti are slavish translations of famous Italian texts and are entirely up-to-date. Identifiable librettists include Paul Thymich (Thiemich or Thiemick; 1656–1694), teacher at the Leipzig Thomasschule and husband of a celebrated opera singer, Anna Catherina, and the young preacher Erdmann Neumeister (1671–1756). Both were deeply influenced by contemporary opera seria, and Neumeister soon transferred its basic elements – the alternation of recitative and da capo arias – into other genres. First for Krieger and the court at Weißenfels, and shortly thereafter for the entire generation of young musicians around Telemann and Bach, Neumeister developed the poetic form of the church ‘cantata’ around 1700, which he conceived of as looking like ‘nothing other … than a section from an opera, composed of stylo recitativo and arias’.²⁸ Two printed collections include musical material from the early Weißenfels court operas, with ‘selected arias’ from seven ‘Sing-Spiele’, published in 1690 and 1692. The approximately 200 pieces remain largely in the tradition of the German strophic lied with primarily syllabic declamation and instrumental ritornelli; traces of his Italian musical education can be found most clearly in the bass ostinato aria ‘Einsamkeit, du Qual der Herzen’ (from the opera Die ausgesöhnte Eifersucht oder Cephalus und Procris, 1689).

Agostino Steffani: Catalyst for German Opera and Political Opera in Catholic Courts in Munich, Hanover, and Düsseldorf

The centres of Italian opera in Catholic Germany in the late seventeenth century were Munich, Hanover, and Düsseldorf.²⁹ Opera in these three courts is inextricably linked with the name of Agostino Steffani, the ‘key figure for the establishment of Italian culture in Germany’ and a ‘clever transmitter of new musical ideas to the next generation’.³⁰ Born in Castelfranco near Venice in 1654, he came to the court of Ferdinand Maria, the Bavarian elector in Munich, at age twelve. Steffani was a choirboy and composition student of Kerll. Under Elector Maximilian Emanuel II (Ferdinand Maria’s successor), Steffani began his career as a diplomat and opera composer – and quickly excelled in both fields. Ordained as a priest in 1680, he had written at least six operas for Munich by 1688: Marco Aurelio, Solone, Audacia e rispetto, Servio Tullio, Alarico il Baltha, and Niobe, Regina di Tebe. The last two are based on texts by Luigi Orlandi, while the earlier libretti are by Ventura Terzago. Like his career, Steffani’s operas were increasingly political. His Munich operas are all allegories about the elector; they honor the ideal ruler.

Steffani first met his next employer, Duke Ernst August of Hanover, in 1683 while conducting diplomatic inquiries into the possibility of a marriage between the duke’s daughter Sophia Charlotte and the Bavarian elector (she eventually married into the Prussian royal family as the wife of King Frederick I). However, Steffani’s primary diplomatic assignment in the Hanover Court was to help Ernst August to become elector, which eventually occurred in 1692. Musical life in the Hanover court had been dominated by Italian forces. Following Duke Johann Friedrich’s conversion to Catholicism (r. 1665–1679), Kapellmeister Antonio Sartorio (1630–1680) and eight Italian singers provided Catholic church music during the 1670s. Ernst August, who re-introduced Lutheranism, entirely reshaped his Hofkapelle along the lines of Lully, dismissing singers and instrumentalists and replacing them with many French musicians. There began an entirely brilliant period in Hanover musical theatre, initially in the castle theatre (1678), and then from 1689 in the new, larger castle theatre built by Tommaso Giusti (stage machinery by Johann Oswald Harms). Contemporaries called it ‘the best in all of Europe’ due to ‘both the painting and the furnishings’.³¹

Steffani composed multiple Italian operas for these stages, beginning with the highly political Henrico Leone (Ortensio Mauro, 1689). The piece treats the history of the heroic Hanoverian Duke Heinrich (called Henry the Lion) – Frederick Barbarossa’s powerful rival – and thus indirectly supports Ernst August’s claim to the throne.³² Steffani’s remaining seven operas for Hanover were also used for court propaganda, especially as his work for the Welfs increasingly focused on diplomatic service; in 1695, he moved to Brussels as a Hanoverian envoy.

Finally, in 1703, Steffani arrived in Düsseldorf in the service of Palatine Elector Johann Wilhelm, now as a secret councillor, soon to be President of the Palatinate and rector of the University of Heidelberg. His operas composed for the court of Düsseldorf remained political: with his last opera, Tassilone (Stefano Pallavicino, 1709), he celebrated the success of his employer in having taken the Upper Palatinate from the Prince-Elector of Bavaria; the libretto reflects the contemporary political situation rather clearly. Meanwhile, in the same year, Steffani returned to Hanover, now as Vicar Apostolic – a result of his excellent relations with Pope Innocent XI. His main task was the re-catholicisation of Protestant northern Germany; he spent the rest of his life in diplomatic service (d. 1728 in Frankfurt).

Steffani’s operas, mostly preserved, are musically varied. His colourful arias offer imaginative da capo and dal segno forms. Their instrumentation is often more French than Italian; he often uses five-part strings, establishes the oboe in the opera orchestra, and composes arias for obbligato bassoon, cello, and even lute. The chalumeau is used in his Düsseldorf operas, even within recitative.

Niobe, Steffani’s last Munich opera, is surely his most musically important piece from his time at the Bavarian court. Steffani created some enthralling, vividly composed scenes on the tragic story of the Queen of Thebes: to punish her, the gods kill her children, and in her pain she transforms into a stone. One example is the singing of Niobe’s husband, Amphion, in the first act of the opera (Act I scene 13), when he, the inventor of the lyre, stages the harmony of the spheres and transforms them into enchanting sounds. Steffani writes a da capo aria (‘Sfere amiche’) over an ostinato bass in running quarter notes, over which viols and flutes unfurl in a colourful and polyphonic manner typical of his style. Thus, the ostinato represents order on the one hand, and, on the other, the everlasting oscillation of the spheres. Unlike the tonally stable A section (in B-flat major), the B section takes a harmonious journey through seven sometimes remote keys (from D minor through C minor, E-flat major, G minor, and A-flat major back to C minor and E-flat major) – surely a reference to the seven planetary orbits.³³

A remarkable fusion of Italian and French elements is to be found in Steffani’s works, some of which made the leap from courtly stages to the commercial Hamburg stage. Here, they offered the north German generation of Johann Sigismund Kusser (1660–1727), Georg Caspar Schürmann (1672/3–1751), Reinhard Keiser (1674–1739), Handel, and Telemann both a benchmark and a model, which played a not insignificant role in the shaping of their own operatic styles.

Opera Focal Point: Wolfenbüttel/Braunschweig

French and Italian opera came together in the court of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel starting in the 1680s. Numerous German-language opera-like structures have already been documented between 1657 and 1663.³⁴ Surviving printed libretti are mostly by the artistically minded Prince Anton Ulrich (1633–1714), a life-long author who hardly missed a literary or poetic genre from the historical novel and the opera libretto all the way to the religious song. The composer of these early operas was apparently the Schütz pupil Johann Jakob Löwe of Eisenach (1629–1703), who was Kapellmeister in Wolfenbüttel from 1655 to 1663.

After Anton Ulrich had come to know and appreciate Italian opera in Venice in the early 1680s, operatic activity was renewed in Wolfenbüttel in the mid-1680s, now with a notably European perspective and under the leadership of new Kapellmeister Johann Theile (1646–1724), a pioneer of the Gänsemarkt Opera. For a few years starting in 1685, French operas (mostly Lully) and Italian operas (mostly Venetian) were performed in colourful alternation in the original language in the Wolfenbüttel court theatre (built in 1688) or in the summer palace Salzdahlum.

In 1690 in the neighbouring trade-fair town of Braunschweig, Ulrich renovated the town hall on the Hagenmarkt as an opera house. Operas were performed during trade fairs (during carnival) for members of the Wolfenbüttel court, invited nobles, and also a ticket-buying general public. Unlike the performances in Wolfenbüttel, the Braunschweig operas were primarily sung in German. The texts were mostly by court poet Friedrich Christian Bressand, with music by the newly arrived Kapellmeister Kusser, and later (from 1695) by Kapellmeisters Keiser and Schürmann; the operas were closely connected with the Hamburg stage, in terms of both content and personnel. The Italian works heard in Wolfenbüttel were generally imports, with the exception of a few by Clemente Monari (c. ? 1660–d. ? after 1728), who was engaged as the court ‘Maestro di Capella di Camera’ in 1692.

Public Opera Houses in Hamburg and Leipzig, and Their Protagonists

In Germany, opera was relatively slow to move from the closed walls of elite courtly society out into the public. It first became ‘public’ and commercial on 2 January 1678, when the first public opera house opened its doors on the Gänsemarkt in Hamburg; it operated for sixty years before ending in bankruptcy. ‘Public’ refers primarily to the form of organisation: a standing opera house unattached to a court, whose performances were open to anyone who could buy a ticket, and led by bourgeois figures who ran the theatre at their own financial risk. This development is also a striking episode in music history because these public opera houses (Braunschweig in 1690 – though that house was de facto financed and run by the duke – and Leipzig in 1693) provided the playground for a thoroughly original operatic development in Germany, which was initially entirely in the German language.

However, one should approach very cautiously the tempting conclusion that this situation of opera in a public context was the spark for the development of German national opera. Although the repertoire in the first two decades of ‘public’ and commercial opera in Protestant Germany consisted almost entirely of German-language works written by German composers and poets, the libretti and music were both European, that is, under Italian and French influence. Even in 1677 when seeking permission for the first opera in Hamburg, Theile (who would soon join the opera’s permanent staff) expressly requested permission to ‘present a few musical operas in the Italian style’.

Many of the figures on, behind, and in front of the stage who influenced developments beginning in 1693 at the Gänsemarkt Opera in Hamburg and the Leipzig Opera moved in courtly circles. A contemporary witness at the dedication of the Hamburg Opera remarked sceptically: ‘It seemed that Hamburg, with so many merchants and intermediaries, [was] unsuited to opera.’³⁵ And it was no coincidence that Mattheson emphasised in 1728: ‘The performance of opera contradicts the disposition of the residents; to sum it up, operas are more for kings and princes than for merchants and traders.’³⁶

The impulse to found an opera house in Hamburg began with a regent: Christian Albrecht of Schleswig-Gottorf, a deposed duke who had ceded his small state to the Danish king in 1675 and lived in exile in Hamburg. It was the jurist Gerhard Schott (1641–1702), an artistically minded patrician and member of the Hamburg Council beginning in 1693, who put these plans into action; at first he partnered with financiers Johann Adam Reincken (1643–1722; organist at St Catherine’s Church) and Hamburg Mayor Peter Lütkens (der Jüngere), and then served as sole owner and director from 1685, solving several staff and economic crises during this time, and leading the operation until his death.³⁷ Such crises arose, not least because the house and the genre faced a great deal of public criticism early on, especially from religious figures. The initial attempt to establish the cathedral refectory as a performance site was denied by religious authorities. Thus, Schott and his backers had to commission the Italian master-builder Girolamo Sartorio to build a new freestanding house on the Gänsemarkt: a wooden building with a twenty-eight-foot-deep stage, four stories of loges (for the well-off public), as well as a gallery and a parterre; the house accommodated about 2,000 spectators.³⁸ The completed house evidently offered performances three or even sometimes four times per week, with a variable repertory. By 1700, ninety-five different pieces had been staged.³⁹

The house opened in January 1678 with Theile’s Orontes (librettist unknown). It seems as if the singers first performed Der erschaffene, gefallene und aufgerichtete Mensch (libretto by Christian Richter, music likely by Theile), an opera about Adam and Eve.⁴⁰ Against the background of fermenting hostility on the part of the clergy, this was probably a conciliatory gesture. The prophylactic effect failed, however, because, although the subjects of the Hamburg operas in the following years were often of biblical origin, the critics did not hold back. Many pastors preached against opera and the opera house from the pulpit, as well as in polemical pamphlets, calling opera a hotbed of sin – the so-called ‘theological dispute’ (Theologenstreit) on the suitability of the genre produced all sorts of printed texts over the next three decades and quickly grew beyond Hamburg itself, as supporters and opponents attacked each other in heated debates.⁴¹ Certainly, there were a few theologians who sided with the supporters of opera, above all Heinrich Elmenhorst (1632–1704), deacon at St Catherine’s Church in Hamburg. He offered his opponents the written defence titled ‘Dramatologia … Report on Operas’ in 1688. Elmenhorst knew what he was talking about: he was one of the central librettists in the first phase of the Gänsemarkt Opera.

In Leipzig, the situation was different. In 1692, the Elector of Saxony in Dresden granted the request of his Kapellmeister Strungk for a privilege allowing him the exclusive right to perform operas (at his own cost) in the trade city of Leipzig during the three annual trade fairs; for each of the three-week fairs, fifteen performances were envisioned.⁴² The granting of the privilege was also self-serving, in a double sense. On the one hand, the regent and the illustrious fair attendees no longer wanted to be entertained nightly by traveling theatrical troupes alone but also by the increasingly popular genre of opera. On the other hand, Strungk’s opera enterprise was also meant to be a kind of training centre for aspiring musical elites. The privilege has a visionary scope: ‘His Electoral Highness has graciously considered how the study of music would be increasingly cultivated, attracting foreign lovers of this science, and He would have a seminary in His lands, and would be able to fill the empty chapel- and chamber-musician posts.’

The purpose did not overreach: all subsequently famous musicians who studied at the Leipzig University during the twenty-seven-year run of the public opera (until the opera company’s bankruptcy in 1720) were involved with the opera house and acquired their first recognition there, among them Telemann, Johann Friedrich Fasch (1688–1758), Johann Georg Pisendel, and Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (1690–1740). However, the house received this youthful/student character only after Strungk’s death (d. 1700), when his five daughters (singers themselves, one even a librettist) took over the direction of the opera company and soon fell into chronic financial need due to internal family disputes.

Strungk’s initial plan to renovate the old St Peter’s Church (Alte Peterskirche; which had not been used as a house of God since the Reformation) as an opera house was evidently challenged by the supreme consistory. In the end, Strungk had to lease a back courtyard on the northeast end of the Brühl. Here, Girolamo Sartorio (who had already built the stage at the Gänsemarkt in Hamburg and who soon became a co-partner in the Leipzig stage because of Strungk’s financial problems) built a large wooden opera house, with 125 loges on five levels. The building held its own in comparison with others. The Uffenbach brothers from Frankfurt commented after a visit to the Hamburg Opera House in 1710 that it was ‘like the one in Braunschweig but somewhat bigger, though a good deal smaller and much more humble than the one in Leipzig, which surpasses both in daintiness, but the [other] theatres in both places are probably much larger than that in Leipzig’.⁴³

Strungk brought most of his artists with him from Dresden or engaged them from other courts. During each fair, there was one new production, apparently always written by Strungk himself, although only the printed libretti to his works survive. The opening performance on 8 May 1693 was Strungk’s Alceste, with a text by Thymich (based on Aurelio Aureli’s L’Antigona delusa; Venice, 1660); Thymich’s wife performed the role of Alcestis.

The subjects of Hamburg operas at the end of the seventeenth century were of various origins: often biblical at first, and then based on material from antique and medieval times. Occasionally, there were Fortsetzungsopern (sequels), such as Cara Mustapha (Johann Wolfgang Franck, 1686), Die Verstöhrung Jerusalem (Conradi, 1692), and Störtebecker (Keiser, 1701), each of which had two parts. A number of adapted Italian and French libretti have been documented, and even performances of German versions of Italian and French works: Lully’s Achille et Polyxène (Paris 1687) was performed as Die unglückliche Liebe des Achilles und der Polixena in 1692 (rhymed translation by Christian Heinrich Postel, 1658–1705); and Agostino Steffani’s Orlando generoso (Hanover 1691) ran as Der grossmütige Roland (German version by Gottlieb Fiedler) on several occasions between 1695 and 1735(!). The practice of mixing languages within a libretto that would become typical of German opera, especially the juxtaposition of German and Italian operas, first became established in Hamburg in 1703 (in Claudius by Barthold Feind and Keiser),⁴⁴ and was then taken up in Leipzig and Braunschweig.

Under Strungk, the first decade of opera in Leipzig was shaped by antique and mythological subjects. Dependence on Italian operas was even stronger than in Hamburg: of the twenty-nine operas performed between 1693 and 1702, at least half were based on Italian models, especially ones from Venice in the 1670s–1680s. The Italian libretti were often translated directly into German, with what might be called ‘slavish fidelity’ to the original.⁴⁵ The aria forms are correspondingly modern. Characteristic figures from commedia dell’arte, such as Hanswurst figures, were also eagerly adopted in Hamburg and Leipzig, providing humourous moments even in the most dramatic stories, and using parables and more-or-less slanted metaphors to bring philosophical wisdom and sometimes highly politically charged messages to the people. The political meaning and dimension of opera became especially evident in Hamburg under the direction of soon-to-be-councilman Schott. His stages were continually used for performances of so-called festival operas (Festopern) marking important political events or notable days related to important rulers.⁴⁶ To be sure, the subjects appearing onstage were primarily drawn from antiquity, and it was left to the viewer to make connections with present times. On one occasion, however, three years after the 1683 victory of the Imperial Army against the Turkish besiegers of Vienna, this practice was notably broken. The jurist and later major Lucas von Bostel wrote the libretto to Cara Mustapha, which was set by Franck (b. 1644) and performed in 1686. The opera tells the story of the siege of Vienna and the victory of the emperor over the Ottoman army; ‘the false prophet of the Turks’ Mohammed sings during the prologue. The foreword justifies the temporal proximity to the historical core of the plot. It claims it is entirely ‘respectable’ to perform a story in which ‘many [of those who participated] are still alive’, and refers to Jean Racine: the territorial distance from the original setting (a few hundred miles) would adequately mitigate the problem of temporal proximity. Naturally, in this opera there is a Hanswurst figure. He is the ‘amusing servant’ of the Grand Vizier, who sings in low German (Plattdeutsch) dialect, a popular method in Hamburg of symbolising low status.

While no musical sources have been preserved from the first decade of Leipzig Baroque opera (1693–1702), at least excerpts of pieces have survived from the beginnings of opera in Hamburg. Unfortunately, entire scores are hardly available from prior to 1700. Extant sources are often in the form of adaptations – mostly strophic arias in reduced versions – edited for use in the home or perhaps changed and modified for the public in printed collections.⁴⁷ Therefore, it is difficult to reconstruct and evaluate the musical structure of the first Hamburg operas from the early 1680s by composers Theile, Strungk (director of the Hamburg town band, 1679–1682) and Johann Philipp Förtsch (initially a tenor in Hamburg, and then from 1680 Kapellmeister in the court of the Duke of Gottorf). The printed arias from the operas Orontes (Theile, 1678) and Die liebreiche, durch Tugend und Schönheit erhöhte Esther (Strungk, 1680) are almost all strophic. They have predominantly songlike, dancelike characteristics and only occasionally contain melismas, coloratura, word repetition, or concertante passages.

A better evaluation is offered by the surviving material for the operas of Franck, the fourth and perhaps most important composer of the first decade at the Gänsemarkt Opera. Born in middle Franconia, Franck studied in Italy from 1668 to 1672, thereafter becoming ‘Director of comedy’ at the court of the Margrave of Ansbach, until he was forced to flee to Hamburg after committing a murder. Here, he created about fifteen operas through 1686 for the Gänsemarkt, and others for Ansbach.⁴⁸ His works were performed in Hamburg far into the 1690s, and several of his arias appeared in print. The score for his opera Die drey Töchter Cecrops has survived in Ansbach (premièred in Ansbach, evidently in spring 1686, followed by a shortened version in Hamburg).

In his score to Cecrops, Franck provides da capo arias as they were being developed in Italy just then by Legrenzi and Sartorio. In general, Franck’s music shows that he had internalised the means and techniques of Venetian opera and musical drama during his stay in Italy and had incorporated them into his personal style; elements of French opera hardly appear in his music. Franck’s recitative is fluid and interspersed with cantabile elements, and is reminiscent of Cavalli. His arias have contrasting middle sections. The use of tonality is also based on contrast – a well-planned harmonic structure is evident in Cecrops; the spectrum of Franck’s arias ranges from B major to B-flat minor. During a break in performances in 1686/7 he left Hamburg; he is known to have been in London from 1790 and is said to have been murdered in Spain in 1710, allegedly because of his favour with the king.

Up until the arrival of Keiser, who in a sense opened the door to the eighteenth century in 1697 with Adonis, the 1690s were characterised by two artistic figures: Kusser and Johann Georg Conradi (d. 1699). Their works, along with Franck’s, dominated the repertoire. In addition, the alto Jakob Kremberg (c. 1650–1715), who had come temporarily from Dresden as the commercial director appointed by Schott, also influenced the house’s fortune at times; five years had been planned, but this episode ended after a year of fierce quarrels between Kusser, Kremberg, and Schott – and Schott returned to the helm.

Born in Preßburg and initially active at the courts of Baden-Baden and Ansbach, Kusser studied with Lully in Paris in the 1670s–1680s, where he internalised French styles of composition and playing. In 1690, he was given leadership of the newly founded Wolfenbüttel Opera. Here and in the public opera house in Braunschweig (which was financed by the duke), he wrote several works that raised his profile as he sparred with Italian music. Disputes with his librettist Friedrich Christian Bressand seem to have been the catalyst for his eventual move to Hamburg. Starting in 1694, his operas received great acclaim on the Gänsemarkt stage, though they were also associated with some internal disputes. Conradi, born in Oettingen in Bavaria, was Kapellmeister in Ansbach for a few years and can be documented as having held the same position at the Gänsemarkt Opera from 1690 to 1694. Kusser ascribed to him a ‘hot temper’; at the same time, he is said to have been a superb orchestra leader and, according to Mattheson, introduced the modern Italian manner of singing in Hamburg. However, he left Hamburg soon, moving through the country with a travelling opera troupe. He was at the Stuttgart Court from 1698; in London in 1704; and, from 1707 until his death in 1727, ‘Chappel-Master of Trinity College’ in Dublin.⁴⁹ Several arias have survived from his Hamburg operas, including authorised prints with excerpts from Erindo (1694) and Ariadne (Braunschweig, 1692), as well as the recently discovered original performance materials for his Stuttgart opera Adonis (1700?).⁵⁰ Conradi’s score to Die schöne und getreue Ariadne (1691) has been preserved.

Both works show that opera in Hamburg in the 1690s, and probably for the first time, offered a musically notable synthesis of French and Italian styles, and with forms that were rich in variation. Conradi’s Ariadne contains charming arias modelled on French styles, which are not at all mere direct copies: for example, Ariadne’s fantastic aria ‘Auf, auf, erbostes Glücke’ in the form of a large chaconne at the beginning of the second act, which consists of 201 measures supported by a 20-bar ground bass pattern. Conradi takes a similar approach in a large-scale ensemble near the end of the opera: a passacaille based on the familiar Italian bass line, in which the seven following arias seen in the printed text (for Venus, two Graces, and Bacchus) are linked together into a 313-bar through-composed structure, interspersed with ritornelli that include dancing. Conradi may have learned the idea from comparable models in contemporary French opera; however, one must look through many choruses and ballets from the Paris Court in order to find a comparable structure (also artfully shaped by librettist Postel), in which the boundaries between aria, chorus, and ballet blur to such an extent. Conradi’s Ariadne must have become a box-office hit in its day; it was performed as late as the 1720s in a shortened version by Keiser, now enriched with a few Italian arias. In retrospect, Mattheson claimed that Ariadne had ‘paid off very well, and received much applause’.⁵¹ Also, Conradi’s score must have been an important model for him: the great ciacona at the end of Mattheson’s Boris Goudenow (Hamburg 1710) proves itself to be, in many respects, an imitation of Conradi’s abovementioned passacaglia.

Italian and French aria types also appear on equal footing in Kusser’s operas, and he arranged these in unusually colourful fashion. Erindo includes arias with obbligato parts for recorder, oboe, flute, ‘tromba overo hautbois’, long-necked lute (‘colachono’), and violin, as well as pairs of oboes, bassoons, and flutes – this sort of variety was to be found in contemporary Italian opera. Arias without melody instruments often follow French dance types: bourrée, bransle de village, galliard, gavotte, menuet, and passepied. There are also arias patterned on Italian models, such as those with virtuoso basso continuo.

This plurality of styles is also a characteristic of the only surviving opera score from middle-German lands in the 1690s: Christian Ludwig Boxberg’s Sardanapalus. To be sure, the piece came into being in 1698 on the occasion of a guest visit to the Ansbach Court, but its roots lie within the orbit of opera in Leipzig. Boxberg (1670–1729) had been a pupil, overlapping with Keiser, at the Thomasschule under Kantor Johann Schelle, and when the Leipzig Opera House opened, he sang in the performance of Strungk’s Alceste. Boxberg learned the trade of the opera composer and librettist as a ‘pupil of the famous Kapellmeister Strungk’, for whom he provided a few libretti in subsequent years.⁵² He first became noticed as a composer in Leipzig around 1700, before becoming the organist in Görlitz, a post he would hold for the rest of his life. It is very possible that his surviving score in Ansbach gives an idea of how the lost works by his teacher Strungk might have looked. The piece is written in three acts; after the French overture, continuo arias (often da capo) with string ritornelli predominate; arias with obbligato instruments are rather the exception. Contemporary Italian aria types provided models, which Boxberg adapted perfectly, just as he did the French dance types: for example, in the glittering ostinato aria ‘Keine Qual soll mich erschrecken’ (Act I scene 5), in which Belochus unfurls an extensive virtuoso da capo aria atop a rhythmically striking bass. His free-flowing singing could undoubtedly measure up to works by Giuseppe Torelli and Francesco Antonio Pistocchi, whom the young, artistically inclined Margrave Georg Friedrich of Ansbach had enticed, along with other Italian virtuosi, to his court by offering terrific salaries.⁵³

What the few surviving scores and arias from Hamburg and Leipzig (respectively Ansbach) from the 1690s show is that, already before Keiser, Handel, and Telemann brought their music to the stage around the turn of the century, a remarkable synthesis of different European national styles had developed in German-language opera. In addition to features of German tradition, there are unmistakable echoes, imitations, and fusions of elements of French and Italian opera. It is quite possible that the genre of opera was one of the decisive gateways for the way German composers reacted to leading European national styles. At any rate, extant scores already paradigmatically reveal what Johann Joachim Quantz would, one generation later, call ‘mixed taste’, which he described as being characteristic of the German style.

Translated from the German by Kirsten Santos-Rutschman

Opera was produced only rarely in the otherwise vibrant theatrical culture of seventeenth-century Spain and her American dominions, though Italian operas and occasional Spanish ones became a mainstay of public life in the Spanish-held territories in Italy, especially Naples and Milan. At the royal court in Madrid and the principal administrative centres of the overseas colonies (Lima and Mexico), opera was inextricably bound to dynastic politics and constrained by conventions about the gender of onstage singers. Several other kinds of plays with music were produced at theatres both public and private, however, and commercial theatres known as corrales were among the busiest sites of musical performance and cultural transmission. Some 10,000 plays were performed in Madrid in the course of the seventeenth century, although only about 2,000 such texts have been preserved. The principal theatrical genre was the comedia nueva, a three-act play in poly-metric verse in which the tragic and the comic were mingled to recreate the natural balance of human existence with varying degrees of verisimilitude.

From the last decades of the sixteenth century, the Spanish royal court enjoyed spectacle plays with music; partly sung mythological semi-operas and mythological or pastoral zarzuelas were produced beginning in the 1650s. These hybrid genres called for more singing than did the standard comedia, although their incorporation of music was shaped by concerns about the power of musical expression and the ease with which different types of songs could mark the social status, intentions, or nature of the characters onstage.¹ The most definitive of the Spanish musical-theatrical conventions separated divine and mortal discourse, so that in the semi-operas and zarzuelas, the gods and goddesses generally sing in the heavens, speak to each other when they are on earth, and sing especially lyrical airs (tonos and tonadas) to influence the mortals. The mortal characters, who do not have supernatural power, also lack the power to sing in the same fashion as the gods. They converse in spoken declamation and sing appropriately mortal songs – common romances, bailes, or musical settings of well-known poems of the day – in verisimilar situations, just as do ordinary characters in the comedias. This necessary distance between gods and mortals both mirrored the rigid social hierarchy of the monarchy and conditioned the Spanish approach to musical theatre, including opera.²

The First Opera in Spanish

The first opera performed in Spain, La Selva sin amor (Filippo Piccinini and Bernardo Monanni [music lost]; poetic text by Félix Lope de Vega Carpio; Madrid, salón grande of the Alcázar, 1627), was put together by Florentine diplomats at the Madrid court of Philip IV who were hoping to gain some political advantage for the Medici while securing a lucrative position for the stage architect and artist Cosimo Lotti, who had been sent to Madrid from Florence. Lotti designed a series of remarkable visual effects for a short pastoral eclogue, with a prologue and seven scenes (some 700 lines) contributed by the esteemed dramatist Lope de Vega. Lope appears to have studied Florentine pastoral libretti by Ottavio Rinuccini that circulated in print; his Spanish libretto, La selva sin amor, is entirely in the Italian poetic metre suitable for recitative (lines of seven and eleven syllables), except for the short ensemble coros in the octosyllabic metre typical of Spanish song-texts. Because none of the Spanish court composers in this early part of Philip IV’s reign were familiar with opera, or even the cantar recitando of Italian accompanied monody, the Florentine diplomats drafted Filippo Piccinini (d. 1648), the Bolognese lute player who was among the king’s favourite chamber musicians, as their composer. Piccinini was reluctant, pointing out his dearth of experience with recitative and begging assistance from a secretary with the Tuscan delegation, an amateur musician named Bernardo Monanni. Indeed, letters to the grand duke’s secretary in Florence describe the whole project as ‘an embassy undertaking’, hardly surprising since Monanni contributed music for the two longest scenes.

La selva sin amor was performed twice behind closed doors for the royal family in December 1627. A few years after its performance, Lope’s text was published in an anthology of his work with a prefatory letter describing the performance. The dramatist reported that he felt ‘rapture’ at hearing his poetry in song, while Lotti’s spectacular visual effects and fast changes of scene triumphed over all else. The opera did not arouse any other recorded praise or criticism. This experiment in fully sung opera after the model of the Florentine pastoral operas did not establish opera in Madrid.³ Further, La selva sin amor seems also to have been Madrid’s only seventeenth-century production of an opera by a non-Spanish composer.

The Marquis del Carpio and Partly Sung Productions

Spectacle plays with ensemble songs had become a feature of private celebrations for the royal family at royal palaces and during their sojourns at the country estates of high-ranking aristocrats such as the Duke of Lerma in the early seventeenth century. But opera did not grow from or evolve out of these. In contrast, the partly sung mythological plays, zarzuelas, and two fully sung operas produced at the royal court in the mid-seventeenth century were a direct response to the challenges that opera presented in the Spanish system of theatrical production. Partly sung entertainments were organised quite deliberately by a young aristocrat, Gaspar de Haro y Guzmán (1629–1687), known as the Marquis de Heliche (also Liche, Eliche, Licce) and later by his title as Marquis del Carpio (see Figure 14.1). Carpio was the son of Luis Méndez de Haro y Guzmán, Philip IV’s valido or first minister, who played a decisive role in European politics as principal representative of the Spanish crown in the negotiations toward the Peace of the Pyrénées and the marriage of Louis XIV to the Infanta María Teresa of Spain. At a relatively young age, Carpio inherited wealth, art, and a large and excellent library. He became the ‘foremost private collector’ of paintings in Europe in his time, if only for the quantity he possessed, and was a patron of contemporary artists.⁴ He was a zealous producer of musical theatre whose creativity and organisational verve were recognised by his contemporaries, though his contributions to the history of opera in Madrid and Spanish Naples have sometimes been overlooked in modern scholarship.⁵

Figure 14.1 Gaspar de Haro y Guzmán (1629–1687), Marquis del Carpio. Pencil and ink drawing, unnamed artist, in Mamotreto o Índice para la memoria y uso de Juan Vélez de León, ms. c. 1683, E-Mn, MSS/7526, fol. 1r.

By permission of the Biblioteca Nacional de España

Carpio took charge of the royal court’s entertainments at a crucial moment, c. 1650, after the reopening of Madrid’s theatres following several years of national mourning for the deaths of Philip IV’s first wife, Isabel (Elisabeth of France), in 1644, and his only male heir, Prince Baltasar Carlos, in 1646. Philip was married by proxy to his fourteen-year-old Austrian niece, Mariana, in 1647. Following her arrival in Madrid, Carpio spared no expense, entertaining her and supplying the court with all manner of diversion, from the nautical serenades performed by boatloads of musicians on the lake of the Buen Retiro, to staged performances of comedias, zarzuelas, and semi-operas at the several royal palaces, to the hunting parties on the grounds surrounding the Pardo and Zarzuela palaces that he arranged to invigorate the king. He supervised the renovation of the Coliseo theatre in the Buen Retiro palace and was an especially demanding producer of musical machine plays with daring effects, such as the semi-operas La fiera, el rayo y la piedra (1652) and Fortunas de Andrómeda y Perseo (1653) with text by the court dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681) and music most likely by Juan Hidalgo de Polanco (1614–1685). In the loa (prologue) to this work, the character of La Música outlines the most distinctive convention of the partly sung genre when she explains to Pintura (painting) that ‘the deities that you introduce must have a different harmony in their voice than that of the mortals; for it is better that the gods do not speak as the mortals do.’⁶ Songs for the zarzuelas and other partly sung plays, especially later ones such as Los celos hacen estrellas (Juan Vélez de Guevara, 1672), are scattered among an array of loose scores, performing parts, and anthologies, generally without notated instrumental parts beyond a bass line or minimal tablature for harp or guitar.⁷ Many of the songs call for improvised embellishment; most are strophic (easier for the actress-singers to learn quickly) but contain both declamatory coplas and more lyrical, subjectively expressive estribillos. Players of harps and guitars composed, arranged, and directed theatrical music, but seem not to have worked from staff notation. Musicians of all types in the Spanish realms were famous as expert improvisers, but theatrical musicians in particular provided music quickly, with little rehearsal time.

Partly sung genres endured even beyond the lifetimes of those who collaborated during the formative decade of the 1650s, and zarzuelas first organised by Carpio were repeatedly revived after his departure from the court. Many practices established by Calderón and Hidalgo became standard, but a few sources from the final years of the seventeenth century evidence changes in attitude and procedure. Among them, Destinos vencen finezas (1699) – a zarzuela on the story of Dido and Aeneas, with poetry by Lorenzo de las Llamosas and music by Hidalgo’s pupil, Juan de Navas (c. 1650–1719) – is the first printed score of a Spanish theatrical work and the first music issued by the new Imprenta de Música in Madrid.⁸ This beautiful volume is innovative in several ways, most especially because it includes the spoken verse, in addition to what was sung, and instrumental parts beyond the bass. Navas’s solo vocal pieces register the durability of Hidalgo’s approach to setting the poetry, but notated parts for violins, ‘viola de amor’, viols, oboes, bassoon, and clarines reveal new practices at work. Tradition and modernity are fused in the final chorus of Destinos vencen finezas, ‘Hagan la salva’, an ‘ocho con todos los instrumentos’, calling for five groups above the basso continuo – two vocal choirs, parts for two clarín trumpets, an ensemble of violins, and a group of four oboes. Navas’s vocal writing for the two choirs, one slightly higher than the other, is reminiscent of Hidalgo’s in Celos aun del aire matan (libretto by Calderón; Madrid, Coliseo del Buen Retiro, 6 June 1661). Although it was partly sung, this was a royal ‘fiesta’ performed by a large cast (twenty roles) for the 6 November birthday of Carlos II in 1698 and organised by a ranking aristocrat, the Marquis de Laconi (Juan Francisco de Castellví y Dexart). It may be that Maria Anna of Neuburg, Carlos II’s second wife, to whom the printed score is dedicated, encouraged changes in the court’s theatrical music in the last years of the century. The pan-European musical taste of leading court aristocrats returning from their postings abroad was an essential catalyst for change,⁹ coinciding with performances by or collaboration with foreign musicians brought to the Madrid court in the last decades of the seventeenth century.¹⁰

Fully Sung Opera for Royal Celebrations

Opera was reserved for the most significant court celebrations, though partly sung ‘fiestas’ were usually offered on royal birthdays and onomastic days at the royal court. The extensive rehearsals required for fully sung theatre taxed the system of theatrical production in Madrid, which depended on the rapid preparation of new plays for the public theatres. Singers from the acting companies normally were busy preparing almost daily performances in the corrales (singers from the Spanish royal chapel did not perform onstage). Yet Carpio chose to produce fully sung opera to showcase the court’s elegance in its commemoration of two political and dynastic events of heightened importance, though musical theatre at the mid-century did not somehow ‘evolve’ toward fully sung opera, Italianate vocal styles, or Italianate approaches to setting Spanish texts. Well aware that the French were planning to produce an opera by Francesco Cavalli (1602–1676) and were building a new theatre to house it, Carpio commissioned two operas from Calderón and Hidalgo. In 1659–1661, these operas commemorated a long-desired treaty and the most important dynastic alliance of the century – the signing of the Peace of the Pyrénées, and the marriage of the Infanta María Teresa to Louis XIV of France. Note that the Spaniards did not import an opera (as the French did) or invite a foreign composer to Madrid. Hidalgo’s score for the first of these operas, La púrpura de la rosa (probably 17 January 1660), has not been found, though a few pieces from it appear in other manuscript sources.¹¹ The surviving music for La púrpura de la rosa, composed or compiled in Lima (Peru) by the Spanish composer Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco (1644–1728) in 1701, includes music from Hidalgo’s 1659–1660 setting (see ‘La púrpura de la rosa in Madrid and Lima’).¹² The second Hidalgo opera, the three-act Celos aun del aire matan, is the earliest extant Spanish opera for which a complete score is preserved.¹³ The two manuscripts for Celos, together with the music for La púrpura de la rosa from Lima, and the music copied into the special presentation manuscript of Fortunas de Andrómeda y Perseo, are the only bound manuscript musical scores for individual theatrical works from the period.

The one-act La púrpura de la rosa explored the story of Venus and Adonis to celebrate the treaty between Spain and France (signed on 7 November 1659); some of it may well have been heard during the visit of the Marshal-Duke of Gramont in October 1659 when he visited Madrid to request the hand of María Teresa on behalf of Louis XIV. All of the roles except that of the comic gracioso Chato (most likely a tenor) and the figure of Desengaño (a baritone in the Lima manuscript) were sung by young female actress-singers. Hidalgo’s three-act Celos aun del aire matan was the pendant to La púrpura de la rosa and drew a similar cast from two conjoined acting companies. Both operas pour forth with extraordinary lyricism and sound strikingly concordant, though tragic consequences unfold when amorous harmony is disturbed by neglect, jealousy, and vengeance.¹⁴

Carpio produced these operas before he had visited Italy or experienced opera of any kind in performance, though he learned about the genre from his correspondents in Italy. During the years in which the Roman librettist Giulio Rospigliosi (1600–1669; the future pope Clement IX) served as papal legate in Madrid (1644–1653), the Italian stage architect and engineer Baccio del Bianco (Luigi Baccio del Bianco 1604–1657) reported that Rospigliosi was eager to introduce recitative, but had made little progress because the Spaniards were sceptical about the effectiveness of ‘speaking in song’.¹⁵ In 1653 Hidalgo had experimented with a Spanish kind of recitative in Fortunas de Andrómeda y Perseo. A few years later, del Bianco, always opinionated concerning the pre-eminence of Italian music, even attempted, unsuccessfully, to teach Hidalgo to compose an Italianate lament for the nymph Canente, the female protagonist in the court pastoral Pico y Canente (text by Luis de Ulloa y Pereira) in 1656. Hidalgo found a more tuneful and concordant vehicle for declamation than mid-century Italian recitative, thus effectively inventing Spanish recitado. In Celos aun del aire matan, Hidalgo did not employ Italianate recitative; instead, together with recitado, soaring melodies caress the ear in the flowing musical textures of strophic tonos and persuasive declamatory tonadas.

Celos aun del aire matan in Madrid and Elsewhere

Celos is not only the first extant Spanish opera, but the most significant musical-theatrical work to survive from the vibrant culture of the Spanish siglo de oro. In Celos, Calderón and Hidalgo transformed the ancient myth of Cephalus and Procris, such that chastity is dethroned by the power of womanly desire. The date and site of performance for the première of Celos aun del aire matan have often been assumed to be December 1660 or January 1661 at the Alcázar palace, but this date may be ruled out due to the fact that three of the actress-singers listed in the opera’s printed cast list (reparto) were in France entertaining María Teresa at this time (their company did not return to Madrid until April 1661).¹⁶ As for the location, it is unlikely that Carpio would have chosen to present the opera at the Alcázar palace, where the most visually spectacular scenes would have been difficult to stage in the smaller space and with the limitations of the dismountable theatre. The Coliseo at the Buen Retiro, whose design he had supervised, is the site named in the libretto, and it was fully equipped with the necessary tramoyas (machines for stage effects). The likely date of the Celos première is 6 June 1661, when a ‘fiesta grande’ with stage machines was performed there after a dedicated period of rehearsals. A letter sent from Madrid by an Italian diplomat confirms that this fiesta was Celos aun del aire matan, stating ‘the day before yesterday the performances began for the opera in musica called Procri in the large theatre of the Retiro.’¹⁷ Performances of Celos for an enthusiastic public continued until the beginning of the feast of Corpus Christi. The opera was revived in Madrid in 1679, with the involvement of both Hidalgo and Calderón, and again in 1684 and 1697.

Both La púrpura de la rosa and Celos aun del aire matan received private and public performances in Madrid, and both can claim to have been heard in more diverse locations than most Italian operas of the age. Celos travelled beyond Madrid, at least as far as Naples, and probably to Vienna and Mexico, thanks to a web of political and dynastic relationships among Habsburg and Spanish representatives in far-flung diplomatic posts. The score of Celos was sent to Vienna, though it may not have been performed there. The Spanish court regularly sent plays and theatrical songs to Habsburg cousins (the presentation manuscript of Fortunas de Andrómeda y Perseo is just one example). Celos is mentioned several times in letters during the time that the Infanta Margarita was emperor Leopold I’s consort.¹⁸ The emperor requested the music of Celos aun del aire matan for Margarita probably because she had appreciated its Madrid première. The first Spanish play performed for her in Vienna was not Celos, however, but Calderón’s play Amado y aborrecido instead, probably because the Spanish opera would have required more Spanish-speaking female actress-singers than were available at the imperial court.

Celos aun del aire matan served as an epithalamium for a very reluctant bride when it was performed in Naples in 1682 to honour an aristocratic marriage between the Roman Princess Lavinia Ludovisi and the Neapolitan Duke of Atri, from the Acquaviva d’Aragona family. This dynastic alliance was designed to fortify the Spanish cause and reinforce Spanish territorial claims in Italy. The bride’s brother, Prince Giovanni Battista Ludovisi, produced the opera in his apartments within the Castel Nuovo.¹⁹ The large audience that filled his theatre was delighted by the costumes, staging, and overall quality of the production. The opulent staging was rumoured to have cost ‘an almost royal sum’. But the opera was ‘otherwise not in the best taste because it was done with Spanish music, and, as a consequence, was tedious’. The strophic tonos and tonadas composed by Hidalgo just over twenty years earlier naturally sounded old-fashioned in Naples in early 1682, especially compared to the music of the opera that had just been presented by the viceroy for the queen mother’s birthday in December 1681 – Alessandro Scarlatti’s (1660–1725) Gli equivoce nel sembiante.

La púrpura de la rosa in Madrid and Lima

The performance history of La púrpura de la rosa shows just how closely this opera was associated with dynastic alliances, especially those between Spain and France. Its performances in January 1660 (apparently first at the Zarzuela palace and then at the Buen Retiro) were arranged to honour the Peace of the Pyrénées and the engagement between María Teresa and Louis XIV.²⁰ It was revived in Madrid to commemorate the announcement of the marriage by proxy between Carlos II and Marie-Louise d’Orléans in performances that began on 25 August 1679, following rehearsals that had commenced before 11 August, ‘both mornings and afternoons’ in spite of the heat.²¹ Carlos II and his bride met near Burgos, on 19 November 1679, but the bride’s public entry at Madrid was delayed due to the official mourning after the unexpected death of Prince Juan José de Austria on 17 September. Rehearsals for another revival of La púrpura de la rosa began on 6 January 1680, and the opera was performed on 18 January, the birthday of the Habsburg Archduchess Maria Antonia, following the new queen’s formal entry on 13 January. These revivals, supervised by Calderón and Hidalgo, included a number of singers and musicians who had participated in the opera’s 1660 première.²² It is significant that this fully sung epithalamium on the overtly erotic mythological story of Venus and Adonis was performed by a nearly all-female cast to welcome the new queen, whereas a number of the spoken plays performed within the court’s celebrations treated chivalric and heroic themes. La púrpura de la rosa was revived yet again at court in 1690 and 1694, presumably with Hidalgo’s music (as was the case with revivals of a number of other plays).

It is remarkable that we know anything at all about opera in the American colonies governed by Spanish viceroys and their ecclesiastical counterparts, because the history of music in colonial Mexico and Latin America has so often focused on the implantation of the music of the Catholic Church, such that the musical ‘history’ of the colonies has been steered by this evangelising project.²³ Nevertheless Hispanic opera as shaped by Calderón and Hidalgo travelled to the Spanish territories at the behest of aristocrats with the political power and the financial resources to produce it.²⁴ La púrpura de la rosa was the first opera of the Americas, produced in December 1701 in Lima (Peru) for the eighteenth birthday and first year of the reign of the first Bourbon King of Spain, Philip V.²⁵ Philippe d’Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV, had been proclaimed King of Spain in Madrid on 24 November 1700. The Spanish-French alliance in this case was not a marriage, but the enthroning of a Bourbon king. Official accounts of the coronation and the local celebrations in many cities were published across the geography of the Spanish empire. The news reached Lima on 9 September 1701, and Lima’s official commemoration took place on 5 October 1701, more than two months before the opera performances. The viceroy, Melchor Portocarrero y Lasso de la Vega, third Count of Monclova (1636–1705), was reported to have scheduled Lima’s official acclamation without waiting for the official instructions to arrive; according to the published relación, he recognised the ‘general and public joy’ that the loyal citizens of Lima felt at such ‘happy news’.²⁶ It was essential that the city project a positive description of its punctual acclamation.²⁷ La púrpura de la rosa was not part of the official acclamation, because the time-worn protocols for such demonstrations of fealty had been invented well before the invention of opera. Theatrical performances in Lima (at the public Coliseo and the viceroy’s court) had been suspended during the period of mourning following the death of Carlos II, but the opera rehearsals as well as plans for the reopening of the public Coliseo apparently commenced with the news of Philip V’s accession. Because so many female solo singers were called for, actresses from two of Lima’s acting companies probably were recruited to perform together in 1701.

The manuscript of La púrpura de la rosa is the most extensive single collection of secular vocal music from colonial Peru.²⁸ Its title page characterises the opera as a ‘representación música’ and ‘fiesta’ composed or compiled by (‘compuesta por’) Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco (bap. 23 December 1644–1728), the Spanish-born chapel-master at Lima cathedral. The anonymous poetry of the opera’s 1701 loa proclaims “¡Viva, Felipo, viva!”, voicing Lima’s symbolic reception of the new king in a brilliant chorus. Tunes from the Lima manuscript appear in Spanish sources with attribution to Hidalgo, so it likely contains at least some music from Hidalgo’s now lost La púrpura de la rosa composed in 1659,²⁹ though it is unclear just how Hidalgo’s opera (or sections of it) reached Peru. Both Torrejón and the Count of Monclova received letters and packages from Madrid, so either may have possessed music from La púrpura de la rosa before 1701. Torrejón had lived most of his adult life in Peru after travelling there in 1667 at the age of twenty-two as a gentleman of the chamber in the large retinue of the tenth Count of Lemos when that grandee was appointed nineteenth Viceroy of Peru. Before this journey, he had surely received musical instruction while serving as a page in the house of Lemos and Andrade.³⁰ He may even have accompanied the grandees as their page when they attended the first production of La púrpura de la rosa in Madrid. Given the influence and standing of these patrons, Torrejón’s teacher may well have been Hidalgo.³¹

The opera’s performances in Lima are described in a printed newsletter offering the first operatic criticism published in the Americas:

This printed notice conveys the generic quality of an official report, praising the skilful singers, rich costumes, perspective scenery, movable sets, and stage machines – in other words, it conforms to what was typical of such notices about opera elsewhere in this period. The success of the enterprise is attributed largely to the viceroy’s financial investment, but the name of the famous (and by 1701 long deceased) royal court dramatist, Calderón, is offered proudly as a guarantor of the opera’s pedigree. Musicians were rarely acknowledged when their music was heard in Spanish court productions, and even the names of composers were rarely attached to opera libretti and printed notices in seventeenth-century Italy. But it is still somewhat surprising that Torrejón’s name is left off, given his pre-eminence and the circulation of his sacred music (especially his vernacular villancicos) in Latin America. If he actually composed the opera, rather than merely compiling the manuscript, the opera would be his only extant secular composition.

In Torrejón’s lifetime, a certain tension separated music that was defined as cultivated, correct, clean, and appropriate (contrapuntal polyphony setting religious texts) from a profane music associated with or suspected of low habits, dubious morality, and confusing looseness. This separation between correct music copied onto paper and preserved by the Church and music that was conspicuously not preserved in written form must be acknowledged as having shaped the context into which opera was introduced in Lima. Profane music of whatever species, but especially street music and dances (given their capacity to communicate by gestures, without texts or the mediation of an ‘authorised’ translation), was excluded early on from what might be termed the record of official culture, most likely because it could slip past and flourish outside ecclesiastical control. Festive public musical activity typically was generated within or around religious spaces in Lima, a city replete with churches and convents. But the central musical practices that infused performance with identity at all social levels were largely unwritten – rhythmic and timbric conventions, stylistic gestures, bass patterns, modes of embellishment, and vocal production all passed along via oral tradition. The tunes and rhythms of secular songs and dances also brought their associated meanings into pieces such as La púrpura de la rosa and the many vernacular sacred pieces whose manuscripts now lie collected in ecclesiastical archives.

Barely any comment about musical interpretation and technique has been transmitted to us from colonial Peru, with the exception of a few references in treatises and instruction books written by Spanish musicians and published in Spain.³³ Many performers in the Americas, especially the indispensable players of guitar and harp, did not read mensural or staff notation fluently, though Torrejón surely did. The notation of the Church’s contrapuntal polyphony (canto de órgano) was the notation of learned musicians. Seventeenth-century theatrical musicians did not need it because they improvised, and, in most cases, harpists, guitarists, and even keyboard players worked from tablature or cifra when they used written music at all. Profane songs and bailes – the very stuff of Hispanic opera – resided in musicians’ memories and bodies, and in the tunes, patterns, and gestures upon which they improvised. Thus, although the project of fully sung opera was without precedent in colonial Lima, it was possible thanks to the ability of Lima’s improvising theatrical musicians and actress-singers. The music (whether by Torrejón, Hidalgo, or some admixture of the two) incorporates familiar, conventional gestures and patterns from a common Hispanic practice. The actress-singers learned their roles by rote; the opera’s unfolding in reiterative sections of tuneful strophes made it easier to fashion affective shadings and ornamentation expressive of Calderón’s elaborately Baroque poetry. Musicians in Lima shared well-known tunes, skills, and practices very similar to those Hidalgo’s ensemble had deployed a half-century earlier in Madrid.

La púrpura de la rosa was a royal opera revived in the far distant locations of Madrid and Lima to celebrate dynastic alliances. Given his long service to the Habsburg cause, Monclova’s choice of opera in Lima was extraordinary because he had already supported the requisite public acclamation of the Bourbon Philip V. By 1701 he had served in the colonies for twenty-two years, most of them in a Lima he termed ‘la contera del mundo’ (the furthest edge of the world). His official correspondence concentrates on military and administrative matters, the funds needed to restore the city, and the zealous pursuit of pirates, but private letters express nostalgic longing for the culture of the Madrid court of his youth. He surely remembered the many entertainments that Carpio had organised, and he might have attended the first productions of both the Calderón–Hidalgo operas in 1660–1661. It is extremely likely that he had heard the 1679–1680 revival performances of La púrpura de la rosa in Madrid because the nobility were called to court for the celebrations following the marriage of Carlos II and in honour of the new queen. Monclova followed Carpio’s example in producing this fully sung opera for a dynastic occasion. Moreover, just as the public entered the Coliseo theatre in the Buen Retiro palace and the theatre installed in the Palazzo Reale in Naples (see ‘Italian Opera in Spanish Naples’), so Monclova opened the temporary theatre in his palace courtyard to the populace for La púrpura de la rosa.

Italian Opera in Spanish Naples

Naples was the administrative centre of the Spanish territories in Italy and, like Lima, was ruled by successive viceroys whose terms varied in duration. These representatives of a far-away sovereign changed so frequently that ‘it was very difficult or even impossible to establish consistent patterns of patronage’, as Fabris has noted,³⁴ and, with few exceptions, the interests and investments of individual viceroys have not yet been studied carefully. Some Spanish operas were performed in Naples before the eighteenth century, but the first thirty years of opera’s history in this crowded musical metropolis unfold as the story of how interested patrons, producers, composers, and performers worked to create stable practical, financial, and political conditions for Italian opera. Italian opera is rightly understood as an instrumentum regni in Naples – though, with so many viceroys and shifting relationships within Neapolitan society, it is often unclear how individual operas or productions served or were exempt from the exigencies of the Spanish imperial program.

The viceroy who first brought opera to Naples, Iñigo Vélez de Guevara, eighth Count of Oñate (1597–1658), arrived from Rome in 1648 and encountered a Naples partly in ruins and with a starving populace after the ten-month Revolt of Masaniello against his tyrannical predecessor. Oñate was genuinely interested in theatre, but his highest priorities were the rebuilding of the city and renovation of the Palazzo Reale. Propagandistic festivities he ordered in summer 1649 culminated in a partly sung but elaborately staged series of tableaux, the Trionfo di Partenope Liberata, Recitato in Musica nel Palazzo Reale, ostensibly offered to celebrate the passage through Italy of Mariana de Austria, the young bride of Philip IV.³⁵ Of course, inviting the nobility to his palace allowed Oñate to shift their focus of interaction, diverting the nobles from their ingrained practice of staging theatricals independently and behind closed doors. Most of the operas in the first series he financed, beginning with Didone, ovvero L’incendio di Troia (between September and November 1650), were by Cavalli and performed by a company led by the Venetian theatrical engineer Giovan Battista Balbi (fl. 1636–1657). Oñate invited Balbi and his Febiarmonici to Naples in order to produce operas as elaborately as possible with innovations that might draw the nobility to his palace.³⁶

Oñate imported opera to Naples as a complete package performed by a company from elsewhere (‘comici forastieri italiani, chiamati Febi armonici, che rappresentano in musica’) that stayed on after their first season with his direct financial support.³⁷ Their December 1652 production of Cavalli’s Veremonda ‘per ordine di Sua Eccellenza’ in the Sala Grande of the Palazzo Reale had clear political intent.³⁸ First planned as a dynastic celebration for the Queen of Spain’s birthday, it took on deeper shades of political meaning after the victory of the royal troops at Barcelona, though the victory could not have been foreseen when the opera was composed and rehearsed.

The calendar of opera productions in Naples was variable in the early years, but, after the death of Philip IV in 1665, opera increasingly responded to a closer association with dynastic celebration, the same association that motivated musical plays and operas elsewhere in the Spanish empire. Opera production was funded to honour the Spanish monarchy and encourage its fecundity. But the genre’s fortunes were not guaranteed in Naples before the 1680s precisely because opera did not appeal to every Spanish viceroy. Many other kinds of public and private entertainment (the cabalgata, fireworks and maritime displays, equestrian games, carnival processions, processions on saints’ days, Spanish comedias, and the Neapolitan commedia) were already institutionalised by protocol, religious observance, taste, or tradition. For example, the Count of Peñaranda (Gaspar de Bracamonte y Guzmán 1595–1676) preferred Spanish plays, so ‘comedias ‘all’uso di Spagna’ were performed frequently during his time as viceroy by a Spanish company he paid to retain at the palace.³⁹ When the traditional ‘gala’ ceremony for the nobility was held on Prince Felipe Próspero’s birthday at the palace in November 1659 (during Peñaranda’s reign), no opera seems to have followed it. Likewise, when the nobility rode in a torch-lit procession with over one hundred riders to celebrate the Peace of the Pyrénées in the first week of December 1659, they were treated afterward to a traditional ‘festino a ballo’, not an opera. A Venetian opera, L’Eritrea, was staged a few weeks later on 26 December at the viceroy’s palace for the invited nobility, but its Neapolitan libretto carries a dedication signed by ‘Gli Armonici’ to Antonio Fonseca, Count and Marquis del Vasto, Captain of the Guards, perhaps implying that it had already been performed at the public theatre with his sponsorship.⁴⁰

Some degree of collaboration between the royal palace, site and symbol of the monarchy, and the public theatre was essential to opera’s survival in Naples, but reliable mechanisms of production did not develop immediately. As was characteristic elsewhere in the Spanish dominions, theatrical impresarios were obliged to serve the palace, though they mostly did so with financial and material contributions from the viceroys who sponsored opera on two royal birthdays. The season began with the 6 November birthday of Carlos II (b. 1661, prince and later king); a second opera was designed for the 22 December birthday of Mariana de Austria (queen and later queen mother). The December opera most often continued into January at the public theatre, but in some years it did not even receive its première until early January, despite the 22 December dedication date printed in the libretto. Prior to 1696, the first performance or two of each opera was a protocoled event for the nobility and invited officials at the palace. Sometimes public performances continued at the palace, but most productions instead began at the palace and then were moved to the public Teatro di San Bartolomeo following their premières. During the short Neapolitan carnival, one or two operas were staged, but, before 1696, nearly all of them opened with a protocoled performance at the palace. Premières sponsored by the viceroy were the scaffold each season in an enduring political and financial relationship between Italian opera and representatives of the Spanish monarchy.

Opera in Naples was at once private and public, available to the invited nobility and then to anyone who could pay for a seat at subsequent performances. Prior to 1668, for example, performances were offered to the paying public in the Gioco della Pilotta attached to the palace (also known as the teatro del Reale Parco or the Pallonetto), a space that may have reminded Spaniards of their corrales.⁴¹ Later on, operas produced inside the palace were sometimes public. During the 1680 carnival, for example, the Naples revival of Giovanni Legrenzi’s (1626–1690) Eteocle e Polinice at the palace drew such crowds that second and third performances were added. The palace was opened to the public in this way because the opera was among the events celebrating a royal marriage, a ‘festivity celebrating His Majesty, the King and should thus be enjoyed by all of his subjects’.⁴² A similar sentiment had inspired the public revivals of La púrpura de la rosa in Madrid and Lima. A few years later, in a shrewd but typically generous move, Carpio allowed Alessandro Scarlatti’s L’Aldimiro an expanded series of palace performances in November 1683 because the theatre at the palace première had been overflowing. People crowded in, hungry for novelty and with high expectations because L’Aldimiro was a new opera and the first of Carpio’s first season; it would feature music by Scarlatti with special effects designed by Filippo Schor, and its cast included newly recruited singers.⁴³

Beyond the palace, opera as a commercial venture was tested with varying degrees of financial and artistic success. The Santa Casa degli Incurabili (which ran the hospital for the mentally ill) held a monopoly on public commercial theatre, so its permission was required before tickets to any public performance could be offered for sale.⁴⁴ The Teatro di San Bartolomeo had been built in 1621 as a venue for spoken plays but reconditioned on Oñate’s orders in 1652 with the investment of the Santa Casa. Following the Spanish model, a portion of the proceeds from the rental of theatre boxes supported this charity. Carnival was the most lucrative period in the Venetian operatic schedule, but the carnival in Naples was shorter, so carnival operas at the Teatro di San Bartolomeo had limited runs and thus could be more costly to produce. Drawing singers to Naples was another challenge, given the city’s location at some distance from the operatic circuit in Northern Italy (Venice, Modena, Mantua, Bologna, Florence, etc.) where it was easier and less expensive for singers to travel.

The Venetian operas brought to Naples before the reign of the Marquis del Carpio were performed either by previously contracted itinerant companies or by a group of performers dubbed ‘Febi Armonici’ or just ‘Armonici’ but collected in Naples under the auspices of a performer or theatre manager. The series of libretto dedications signed by the stage architect and impresario Gennaro delle Chiave might indicate that the ‘musici del teatro publico’ worked as a stable company under his management. But notices about the performers are scarce, except for those about the infamous singer and prostitute Giulia De Caro, who had managed the company in 1673–1675, thanks to protection from the corrupt and gluttonous Viceroy Astorga and other lovers.⁴⁵ Most of the evidence suggests that operas by local composers were performed by local singers. But the frequent mention of ‘musici forastieri’ recruited by the viceroys or their agents points back to the plan devised by Oñate with Balbi. Little is known about contacts or agreements with agents or performers in Rome, Genoa, and Palermo, for example, probably because musicians, singers, and actors earned little and held such low social status. Naples was full of busy musicians and singers, thanks to its numerous noble palaces and churches, and the training offered in its conservatories, but the rule that singers in the Neapolitan royal chapel (a Spanish royal chapel) were prohibited from performing onstage proved an impediment to the organisation of opera productions for much of the viceregal period. Chapel singers, whether in Madrid or Naples, were not trained to sing onstage and were not encouraged to rub elbows with the likes of those who did, given the anti-theatrical prejudice. Nevertheless, three castrati from the chapel were forced to sing in La Dori, the first opera production sponsored by Viceroy Marquis de los Vélez in November 1675, in observance of the king’s birthday. ‘One or another of the castrati’ (‘Ogn’altro virtuoso eunuco’) joined the cast, alongside singers from the ‘teatro mercenario’ because the chapel singers reportedly could not shrug off the viceroy’s order.⁴⁶ Significantly, for carnival 1676, the viceroy instead paid travel expenses and a subsidy to import an opera troupe from Rome.⁴⁷ Musicians from the royal chapel performed in Il Teodosio for the royal birthday the following November in the Sala dei Vicerè at the palace, and, if the diarist Fuidoro’s report is accurate, their performance was open to both the nobility and other social strata.⁴⁸

Operas designed originally for Venetian theatres and publics were subject to revision in Naples, but titles alone do not reveal the extent to which libretti and scores were reshaped and recomposed for the theatres, casts, and public in Naples, or how local musicians such as Filippo Coppola (1628–1680), Francesco Provenzale (1624–1704), and Severo de Luca (fl. 1684–1734); the chapel master Pietro Andrea Ziani (1616–1684); or visiting composers such as Giovanni Buonaventura Viviani (1638–1692) intervened. Provenzale is named as the composer and praised in the preface to the libretto to Il Theseo (Naples, 1658, with a dedication to the viceroy García de Haro [y Sotomayor] de Avellaneda, count of Castrillo), which also names him as the composer of ‘Ciro, Xerse, and Artemisia’, three previous operas that had ‘enticed’ the Neapolitan audience. It is likely that these titles represent three operas by Cavalli revised by Provenzale for Neapolitan production; much of Il Ciro was composed by Provenzale and ready for performance by Balbi’s company before the end of Oñate’s reign.⁴⁹ Even several years after the hurried departure of Balbi’s company, Provenzale collaborated with a company constituted in Naples but called Febi Armonici (L’Artemisia and Il Xerse were staged at the palace in November and December 1657). A later maestro of the Royal Chapel, Ziani, may have revised his own Le fatiche d’Ercole per Deianira (Venice, 1662) when it was revived in 1679 to open the Neapolitan carnival. As seventeen years separated the Venetian and Neapolitan productions, and Ziani was already in failing health, it seems likely that Provenzale again contributed new music. The opera was extensively revised, according to Andrea Perrucci (1651–1704), dramaturge of the Teatro di San Bartolomeo, whose note to the reader explains that he had responded to local taste and modernised the Naples libretto, replacing aria texts from Venice with his new ones.⁵⁰

Scarlatti’s revisions to Legrenzi’ssss Il Giustino, carried out in collaboration with an unnamed poet (probably Perrucci or Giuseppe Domenico De Totis) for its 1684 Neapolitan production, point to a Spanish viceroy behind the scenes. First performed in Venice in 1683, Il Giustino was chosen for the king’s birthday and start of the opera season in Naples in November 1684.⁵¹ The opera began with a spectacular and lengthy new allegorical loa praising the Spanish monarchy, in which Atlas presides over the glorification of monarchy with arias and ensembles sung by four ancient rulers. The huge globe perched on Atlas’s shoulders is suddenly shaken by an earthquake and breaks into four pieces representing the four regions of the Spanish empire – Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. While a giant statue of Carlos II is thrust outward, Monarchy (a soprano) sings to praise the king and the Habsburg cause. Every visual and musical element of this prologue had obvious significance in the positive representation of Spain’s dominance. The allegory was absolutely typical of the Spanish stage, and Atlas was often associated with Carlos II. More striking is that all of these allegorical figures had appeared years before in loas that Viceroy del Carpio had produced in Madrid – Atlas in the loa to the semi-opera Fortunas de Andrómeda y Perseo (1653; see Figure 14.2), and the four festive choirs for the four parts of the empire in the loa to the zarzuela El laurel de Apolo that he produced in early 1658, for example. Beyond this loa, Il Giustino was given an enhanced staging with machines, effects, and sets designed by the viceroy’s hand-picked production team (Schor, Nicolo Vaccaro, and Francesco della Torre). Conforming to both the Spanish and Neapolitan comic traditions, brand-new scenes for two hilarious comic characters were added as well. Overall, Scarlatti tightened up the opera’s dramatic rhythm, strengthened the role of the female protagonist, and composed new arias and substitute arias for his cast, while retaining some of Legrenzi’s music. Il Giustino shows how an opera designed for Venice was revised for Naples to assert a viceroy’s personal and political agenda, raise the local standard of production, and delight local audiences. Not surprisingly, its long run of public performances at the Teatro di San Bartolomeo extended until mid-December.

Figure 14.2 Atlas in the loa to the semi-opera Fortunas de Andrómeda y Perseo, ink drawing, Luigi Baccio del Bianco, from Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Andrómeda y Perseo: fábula representada en el Coliseo del Real Palacio de Buen Retiro a obediencia de la Serenissima Señora Doña Maria Teresa de Austria Infanta de Castilla en festibo parabién que felices años goze la siempre Augusta Magestad de la Reyna Nuestra señora Doña Mariana de Austria, ms. c. 1653, US-CAh, MS Typ 258, fol. 8.

Image from Houghton Library, Harvard University

In the final decades of the century, the investment of two viceroys – Carpio and his nephew Luis de la Cerda y Aragón, ninth Duke of Medinaceli (1660–1711) – transformed Naples ‘from a way-post on the operatic itinerary into an operatic proving ground with high standards’.⁵² Before moving to Naples, both Carpio and Medinaceli had come to appreciate Italian singing and skilled operatic voices in Rome, and both understood how opera might enhance personal elegance while supporting the Spanish cause. Carpio, the same zealous aristocrat who had produced zarzuelas, semi-opera, and the two Hidalgo operas in Madrid, was the first Spanish viceroy to arrive in Naples with prior experience as an opera producer, though the genre of Italian opera had been new to him before his arrival in Italy and visit to Venice during carnival 1677. He was immediately decisive in Naples, folding opera into his plan for the modernisation of public life and changing the mechanisms for opera production there. Intent on showcasing the best performers available for his first season (1683–1684), he borrowed the famous alto castrato Giovanni Francesco Grossi (‘Siface’, 1653–1697) from the Duke of Modena and financed the recruitment of other singers from Rome and Bologna, some of whom he had heard in Rome. He assigned several opera singers to salaried chapel positions and brought Scarlatti to Naples as the new maestro of the chapel and composer for the operas. Scarlatti, the most fluent aria composer of the age, was born in Palermo and thus already a Spanish subject, so it is unsurprising that Carpio had been among his early patrons in Rome. Three of the new operas by Scarlatti for Naples – L’Aldimiro (1683), La Psiche (1684), and Il Fetonte (1685) – reflected Carpio’s personal history and were based on comedias by Calderón. Their allegorical loas revived favourite stage effects Carpio had featured in his Madrid productions years before. Both Carpio and later Medinaceli renovated or embellished theatres, installed their own productions teams and impresarios, recruited quality singers, and financed operas whose staging was innovative and exciting. It may not be coincidental that their productions occurred just as new urban guidebooks to the city’s attractions were issued; perhaps opera became one more reason for opera-loving tourists to visit Naples.

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Two operatic paradigms – one formed in Madrid, the other in Naples – retained their vitality among musicians, audiences, and patrons in the Spanish dominions beyond the close of the Habsburg era. Opera in Spanish and the conventions of the partly sung zarzuela, invented through the collaboration of Calderón and Hidalgo, proved durable in revival, even if sometimes with newly composed music. The second operatic model, Italian opera as energised in Naples by Scarlatti with support from the last Spanish viceroys, brought Naples to operatic prominence. Both of these very different models seem to have travelled to the Americas in the early eighteenth century. The older paradigm, Hispanic opera, not only reached Lima when La púrpura de la rosa distinguished the celebration of Philip V’s birthday in 1701, but also was heard in New Spain when, apparently, Celos aun del aire matan was performed in Mexico to commemorate the same monarch’s birthday in 1728. According to a notice in the December 1728 Gaceta de México, the news of Philip V’s good health was carried over land and sea from Madrid via Havana and Veracruz before reaching Viceroy Juan de Acuña y Bejarano, Marquis de Casafuerte (1658–1734), in Mexico. The official birthday celebration began with the requisite pealing bells throughout the city, a mass of thanksgiving, and a Te Deum. Then royal, ecclesiastical, and municipal authorities gathered to attend three nights of protocoled performances of Celos aun del aire matan in the ‘sumptuous theatre of [the viceroy’s] royal palace’.⁵³

Nothing is known about this production beyond what is stated in the Gaceta. It is possible that Celos was performed with Hidalgo’s music on this occasion since his tonos and villancicos circulated in New Spain. Italian opera also reached Mexico, when Silvio Stampiglia’s (1664–1725) La Partenope, drama in musica was performed there for Philip V’s birthday, according to the title page of an undated bilingual La Partenope libretto printed in Mexico sometime early in the eighteenth century with the Italian text and a Spanish translation on facing pages.⁵⁴ A nineteenth-century bibliophile suggested 1711 as its date and listed an undocumented attribution to Manuel de Zumaya (also Sumaya; c. 1678–1755), a criollo composer and scholar who served as a singer, organist, and later chapel master at the cathedral in Mexico City.⁵⁵ If Zumaya composed or compiled the opera’s music, no trace of his work has been recovered. Among the versions of Stampiglia’s libretto in circulation in the early eighteenth century, the text of the Mexico City libretto is closest to that of La Partenope set by Neapolitan composer Luigi Mancia for Naples in 1699, though with small variations.⁵⁶ In New Spain during the early decades of the eighteenth century, theatrical singers were surely familiar with fashionable Neapolitan music, just as were their counterparts in nearly every European musical centre.⁵⁷ Italian sonatas and Neapolitan arias were performed, absorbed, emulated, transmitted, and refashioned in the Atlantic world. The mellifluous siren queen Partenope was omnipresent as a symbol of Naples throughout the years of Spanish domination.⁵⁸ With uncanny buoyancy, the Neapolitan siren reached the Atlantic world and Mexico through a network of Spanish aristocrats enamoured of opera.