At 10:23 AM +0100 1/13/07, Daniel Wolf wrote:
On Jan 12, 2007, at 5:38 PM, John Howell wrote:
Opera was entertainment, and can only be
compared with musical theater today
This is a claim that is made again and again,
but on any close inspection will fall apart.
It's clear that Viennese Opera was a form of
entertainment for upper classes, but the entire
function of entertainment is difficult to map
one-to-one to mass entertainment today.
Absolutely true, for the simple reason that prior
to the 20th century "popular taste" could not
exist in the stratified, class-conscious
societies of Europe and, yes, America, with its
pre-melting-pot amalgam of ethnic enclaves and
rigid class distinctions in the Eastern seacoast
cities, where the upper classes paid for the
construction of concert halls and opera houses.
Many deride the rise of popular music in the 20th
century and its dominant position today, but it
is the first true "music of the people" ever to
exist.
Opera was understood as a vehicle for the
virtuoso demonstration of a body of music and
cultural conventions and patterns, for technical
innovation within the context of those
convention, and also as a civic and moral
instance. The coherence of Opera as a genre
depended less on the coherence of a single opera
as a work of music or literature or theatre than
its coherence within a tradition whose
conventions and patterns would be understood by
a small audience who returned night after night,
over many years, and who would have recognized
the same conventions and patterns in an elevated
literary tradition in which they read, in
sophisticated sacred and secular concerted music
they heard, and in the civic and courtly lives
that they led.
Oh, well put!!! And goes a long way toward
explaining why Greek mythology, which was part of
a classical education, was so popular in early
Italian opera and English masques alike.
One might argue that the _Singspiel_ , with a
wider audience, was particularly close to the
musical, but despite its connections to the
/Prater/, the very best examples of Singspiel
(/Die Zauberflöte, Die Entführung aus dem
Serail/) clearly have their own moral ambitions.
It's interesting that the English theaters of
Shakespeare's time deliberately appealed to both
the connoisseurs and the groundlings, and did so
quite successfully, while opera in ANY country
through the 18th century seems not to have done
so. Certainly Singspiel and Zarzuela had broader
popular appeal than Opera Seria, but we're still
basically talking about court entertainments.
The first public opera house in Venice opened in
1637, but I wonder whether the "public" was not
mostly aristocrats and middle-class wannabe
aristocrats who could afford the subscriptions.
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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