Of the OPERA BUFFA, or Comic-Opera, and INTER-MEZZI, or Musical Interludes, during the Seventeenth Century

"The presentation of the book The Evolution of Opera Performance, from Scenographic Miracles to the Opera Productions of the 19th Century, offers a synthesis of our work as a musical theatre director. Our aim is to stimulate the public’s interest in the opera genre and opera staging, by revealing aspects in the history of opera performance(s), as they have been shaped, century after century, by following the gradual effort and the tireless passion of its creators. Our aims are also to illustrate the original charm and the infinite resources of this genre, which continues to delight the public at large and the knowledgeable even today. Keywords: opera performance, opera staging, liturgical drama, vernacular drama, secular drama, dramatic madrigal, intermedi, the Florentine Camerata, Claudio Monteverdi, comédies-ballets, tragédie en musique, semi-opera, opera seria, the comic opera, opera buffa, ópera comique, ballad opera, Singspiel, tonadilla, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart "

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Songs That Run in the Streets

Journal of Musicology ◽

10.1525/jm.2020.37.4.415 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 37 (4) ◽

pp. 415-458

Author(s):

John Romey

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Seventeenth Century ◽

Commedia Dell'arte ◽

Popular Song ◽

Comic Opera ◽

Popular Songs ◽

Early Eighteenth Century ◽

Relationship Of ◽

The City ◽

Comedie Italienne

In the second decade of the eighteenth century, the Parisian théâtres de la foire (fairground theaters) gave birth to French comic opera with the inception of the genre known as comédie en vaudevilles (sung vaudevilles interspersed between spoken dialogue). Vaudevilles were popular songs that “ran in the streets” and served as vessels for new texts that transmitted the latest news, scandals, and gossip around the city. Already in the seventeenth century, however, the Comédie-Italienne, the royally funded troupe charged with performing commedia dell’arte, began to create spectacles that incorporated street songs from the urban soundscape. In the late seventeenth century all three official theaters—the Comédie-Italienne, the Comédie-Française, and the Opéra—also infused the streets with new tunes that transformed into vaudevilles. This article explores the contribution of the nonoperatic theaters—the Comédie-Française and the Comédie-Italienne—to the vaudeville repertoire to show the ways in which theatrical spectacle shaped a thriving popular song tradition. I argue that because most theatrical finales were structured around many repetitions of a catchy strophic tune to which each actor or actress sang one or more verses, a newly composed tune used as a finale had an increased probability of transforming into a vaudeville. Some of the vaudevilles used in early eighteenth-century comic operas therefore originated in newly composed divertissements for the late seventeenth-century plays presented at the nonoperatic theaters. Other vaudevilles began as airs from operas that were also absorbed into the tradition of street song. By the early eighteenth century, fairground spectacles drew from a dynamic repertory of vaudevilles amalgamated from the most voguish tunes circulating in the city. The intertwined relationship of the popular song tradition and theatrical spectacle suggests that the theaters helped to mold the corpus of vaudevilles available to street singers, composers, and playwrights.

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‘Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen’: Cesti, Orontea, and the Gelone problem

Cambridge Opera Journal ◽

10.1017/s0954586700001798 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 12 (3) ◽

pp. 179-217 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

JENNIFER WILLIAMS BROWN

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Seventeenth Century ◽

Historical Data ◽

Opera Buffa ◽

Critical Problems

Cesti's Orontea (Innsbruck, 1656), one of the most celebrated operas of the seventeenth century, is considered a significant antecedent of eighteenth-century opera buffa; the important role of Gelone is deemed one of the first basso buffo roles in opera history. Yet this view is based on incomplete and problematic historical data. This article reexamines that data and develops strategies for handling the text-critical problems that plague seventeenth-century opera. It concludes that Cesti probably designed Gelone for an alto – the most common voice type for buffo servants in the mid-late seventeenth century – and warns against using eighteenth-century models to interpret the seventeenth-century repertory.

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Laughter: In Ravel's time

Cambridge Opera Journal ◽

10.1017/s0954586706002187 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 18 (3) ◽

pp. 225-246 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

STEVEN HUEBNER

Keyword(s):

Comic Opera ◽

Opera Buffa ◽

Insight Into

Ravel's comic opera L'Heure espagnole (1911) has often been criticised for a certain coldness and lack of sentiment. Such characteristics, however, might profitably be seen in light of Ravel's modernity, an art where surface is privileged over depth. Parallels between Ravel's approach and Henri Bergson's nearly contemporaneous theory of laughter developed in Le Rire – in itself an articulate explication of the surface/depth binary – provide insight into Ravel's aesthetic. This orientation unfolds in the detached adaptation of two historical models in L'Heure espagnole: secco recitative from opera buffa and leitmotivic writing from Wagnerian opera.

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