Topics and Opera Buffa

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Visual Cues ◽  
Opera Buffa ◽  
Classical Style

Opera buffa is cited as the source for the topical variety of classical style instrumental music. It is also cited as a topic within instrumental music. This essay argues, with examples from works by Haydn, Mozart, Galuppi, Cimarosa, and Martín y Soler, that musical devices of opera buffa were not on the whole exported to instrumental music but rather were translated to the subtler and more refined instrumental idiom. When opera buffa is identified as a topic in instrumental music, it is more often the presumed gestural world of the comic stage that is evoked than the actual musical devices most characteristic of the genre. And when we study topics in opera—either buffa or seria—it is worth taking into account that they have the capacity not only redundantly to confirm verbal and visual cues, but also to complicate them by suggesting irony or parody, among other things.

Some representations of opera seria in opera buffa

1991 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Folk Tales ◽  
Opera Seria ◽  
Opera Buffa ◽  
Combinatorial Process

It is becoming increasingly usual to think of music of the Classical period as conveying its meanings at least in part through a rhetoric of topoi. According to this model, such elements as rhythm, texture and melody evoke both musical and extra-musical ‘echoes’. Woven into the structure of the music, these echoes form a collage of connotations from which meaning can be inferred. As a genre of its time, opera buffa is in no way exempt from this ‘combinatorial’ process, or its corollary system of associative meaning. Indeed, every level of meaning in opera buffa arises from the combination and recombination of textual, musical and dramatic elements. For example, the characters, plot types and comic riffs of opera buffa are often drawn from the commedia dell'arte; we also find stories from folk tales and fairy tales, and from fashionable novels and spoken theatre. We find gestures and scenes from opera seria and tragédie lyrique, as well as quotations from and allusions to other opere buffe. The music also ranges widely in stylistic origin and reference, moving from low comedy to elevated coloratura, from bland neutrality to affecting sentimentality, and from extended expressions of a single emotion to lightning changes in Affekt. Thus the rhetoric of topoi characteristic of instrumental music of the period is included within a structure of reference and resonance that invokes textual and dramatic ‘sources’ as well as musical ones. Opera buffa is, in other words, a fundamentally intertextual genre.

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