The inauguration early in 1637 of the first public opera house, the Teatro di San Cassiano in Venice—a commercial venture for one of the city’s wealthy merchant families—was another decisive factor in the development of opera. This event ultimately removed opera from the exclusive patronage of royalty and nobility and placed it within reach of all but the poorest sectors of the Italian urban population. By the end of the century, Venice had nine such commercial theatres, a number of them devoted to opera. Although the theatres did not all operate simultaneously, they nevertheless attracted, and indeed competed for, domestic and international audiences. Thus began a trend during the mid-17th century in favour of plots with more sensational subjects that included elements of intrigue, disguise, and deception and that demanded elaborate machinery. The commercialization of opera also led to an increase in the influence of singers; the rise to prominence of castrati (men who had been castrated before puberty in order to preserve the high range and purity of their boyish voices, now strengthened by their fully mature chests); and a concomitant emphasis on arias over recitative.

A pupil of Monteverdi, Francesco Cavalli, became the most popular opera composer of his era by furnishing the opera houses of Venice with more than two dozen operas between 1639 and 1669. Cavalli infused the librettos he set to music with dramatic force and directness. The most renowned of his operas was Giasone (1649; “Jason”), whose libretto by Giacinto Andrea Cicognini included farcical episodes. Cavalli’s chief Venetian rival and successor was Pietro Antonio Cesti, whose legacy includes about a dozen operas, most notably Orontea (1656; libretto by Cicognini). Venetian composers in the latter half of the century included Antonio Sartorio and Giovanni Legrenzi and in the early 18th century Antonio Vivaldi, who composed 49 operas for Venice and other cities; many of Vivaldi’s operas are now lost. The expensive publication of opera scores ceased once the genre became established and aristocratic patronage was discontinued. Most operas lasted only one season, after which they were replaced by newly commissioned works. Only since the late 20th century have some of these operas, especially those of Cavalli, been recovered and revived.

Venetian operas were extravagant affairs in which the improbable plots—a mixture of comic and serious elements—unfolded in simple recitative, and the arias took on a new, lyrical idiom. Arias were usually cast in strophic form (stanzas sung to the same music) and flowing triple metre (beats in groups of three), and some had repetitive bass patterns (ostinatos or ground basses) that prolonged the expressive high points of the plot. Venetian composers developed distinctive styles and forms for the many solo arias and duets and paid little attention to the chorus, which had played a more prominent role in Florentine court productions and continued to be important to their Roman contemporaries. The resulting separation between recitative and aria and the concomitant focus on solo singers became characteristic features of opera for the next 200 years. Moreover, the number of arias in an opera gradually increased—from about 24 in the mid-17th century to more than 60 by 1670. Thus, the Florentine (and Monteverdian) view of the music of an opera as inseparable from its poetry and drama was soon reversed by the tastes and wishes of the paying Venetian audiences, who relished the visual elements of sets and costumes, took greater pleasure in musical elaboration than in compelling dramatic structure, and provided an atmosphere in which rivalries flourished between opera companies and among their highly paid star singers.

Development of operatic styles in other Italian cities

Several other Italian cities soon developed recognizable operatic styles in the 17th century. In Rome, where wealthy prelates became ardent sponsors of opera, librettists expanded the range of subjects to include legends of saints. Most of the Roman composers of the time, such as Stefano Landi, Domenico Mazzocchi, Luigi Rossi, and Michelangelo Rossi, followed the Florentine tradition by including vocal ensembles and choral finales (with dancing) for each act. They diverged from the Florentine style by increasing the contrast between the arias and the recitatives, allowing the arias to interrupt dramatic continuity, and rendering the recitatives more speechlike and less interesting musically. They also used comic episodes to lighten prevailingly tragic stories (as did the Venetians) and introduced instrumental overtures and overture-like pieces preceding acts or sections of acts.

Two Roman composers—Mazzocchi’s brother Virgilio and Marco Marazzoli—are often cited as having created the first completely comic opera, Chi soffre speri (1639; “He Who Suffers, Hopes”). Its libretto was written by Giulio Cardinal Rospigliosi, who was to be elevated to the papacy in 1667 as Clement IX. Rospigliosi’s most famous libretto, Sant’ Alessio (1632; “Saint Alexis”), was given a setting by Landi, which required an all-male cast, including castrati in female roles—another feature of opera in Rome, where women were not permitted to sing on stage. The opera was successfully revived in the late 20th century, with a new breed of highly trained, virtuosic countertenors taking the roles originally intended for castrati.

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Opera was also an important part of musical life in Naples, where the city’s first permanent opera house, the Teatro San Bartolomeo, was established in the mid-17th century. By 1700 Naples rivaled Venice as a centre of Italian opera, largely due to the works and influence of Alessandro Scarlatti, who had made his reputation in Rome. Scarlatti wrote at least 32 of his 66 operas for San Bartolomeo between 1684 and 1702, before the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) caused him to return to Rome. Of his operas, La caduta de’ Decemviri (1697; “The Fall of the Decemvirs”)—on a libretto by Silvio Stampiglia that contains no fewer than 62 arias—represents Scarlatti at the height of his theatrical career. He continued to write operas for Rome, Florence, and Venice, before returning to Naples in 1709. There, however, the style of his operas was by then beginning to be outmoded.

A Neoclassical movement in opera, originating in Venice in the late 17th century, had begun to purge libretti of comic scenes and characters and to demand simpler plots, based on the tragedies of the French playwrights Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, which used elevated language and upheld the Classical ideal of unity of time, place, and action, which required that the libretto have a single plot taking place in one day and within a single place or setting. These values were reflected in a type of opera known as an opera seria (plural: opere serie), or “serious opera,” as distinct from an opera buffa (plural: opere buffe), or “comic opera.” Scarlatti’s opere serie are exemplary in their use of unified plots with less than 10 characters, whose feelings and personalities are expressed in a series of da capo arias, a type of aria particularly associated with Neapolitan opere serie. The da capo aria was a large-scale form in three sections (ABA), with the third repeating the first “from the capo, or head”—that is, from the beginning. The form consisted of a pithy, rhymed poem, the main idea of which was captured by one or two characteristic musical motives that were expanded into an elaborate solo full of music and text repetitions framed by instrumental ritornelli. The composer’s aim in each aria was to depict one or two emotions from among a wide range of passions in order to fashion a musical portrait of a given character’s state of mind at that point in the action—a function similar to that of the action-stopping cinematic close-up today. Scarlatti imbued his arias with unusual quality and depth and provided them with rich and varied instrumentation.

Notable among Scarlatti’s immediate successors were such composers as Nicola Porpora, Leonardo Vinci, and Leonardo Leo. This generation often collaborated with the dramatic poet Pietro Trapassi, known as Metastasio—perhaps the greatest of the 18th-century librettists, whose works were set by some 400 composers until well into the 19th century. Continuing the custom of basing librettos on Greco-Roman legend and pseudohistory, with plots revolving around the likes of Dido, Alexander the Great, and Titus rather than mythological heroes, Metastasio and his Venetian predecessor Apostolo Zeno wrote texts of formal beauty and linguistic clarity, preferring solemn, usually tragic subjects (opera seria) in three acts to comic episodes and characters.

The term Neapolitan opera, in addition to its association with opera seria, also came to indicate a light ingratiating style, sometimes called gallant, which was based on the foregrounding of graceful vocal melodies, presented in symmetrical, balanced phrases. These melodies were set against a simpler accompaniment that was free of the driving rhythms of earlier arias (of the Baroque period, corresponding roughly to the 17th and early 18th centuries) and that supported rather than competed with the voice. Many of the qualities that became associated with the so-called Viennese Classic style of the 18th century—especially the instrumental music of Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven—had their origins in the tuneful vocal style of Neapolitan opera.

By 1730 Italian opera, sometimes in translation, had arrived in some 130 European cities and towns, from Copenhagen to Madrid and from London to Moscow. The increasingly rigid and undramatic conventions of opera seria prompted criticism—such as the mordant satire Il teatro alla moda (“Theatre à la Mode”) published in 1720 by the Venetian composer-poet-statesman Benedetto Marcello. The basic elements of recitative and aria, occasional ensembles, and choruses were retained up to the present day, although their proportions in relation to one another varied. In the 18th century, Italian opera was truly an international medium and the only vehicle through which a successful composer could achieve fame and fortune.

Comic opera

Comic opera meanwhile had emerged from its shadowy existence within the acts of opera seria (where minor characters were often involved in their own comic subplots) and from the independent intermezzi, or entr’actes, a genre that flourished in the early 18th century, before ceding place to the full-fledged opera buffa. These were miniature comic operas in Italian that were performed in segments between the acts of opere serie; their plots involved figures related to the stock characters of commedia dell’arte—a type of Italian popular theatre—who inhabited a parallel, subheroic world. Expelled from the precincts of opera seria, especially by the librettos of Apostolo Zeno and Metastasio, the comic spirit had taken refuge in such an expanded intermezzo as La serva padrona (1733; The Maid Mistress), by the Neapolitan composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. From the early, tentative efforts of several 17th-century Roman and Florentine composers, then, comic opera eventually acquired a bustling, rude, independent vitality of its own, often with a satirical bent.

Because opera buffa was free of the traditions that weighed so heavily on opera seria, it became fertile ground for musical and dramatic innovation. It dispensed almost entirely with the magnificent display and grandeur of staging increasingly required of opera seria and concentrated instead on the more realistic situations of ordinary people who sang, as in serious opera, in recitatives and arias.

When comic opera matured, the genre borrowed back some of the more earnest emotional qualities of opera seria, often including “serious” roles interspersed among the comic ones. This led to the hybrid nature of some 18th-century operas, including two works using librettos derived from the plays of Pierre de Beaumarchais—Il barbiere di Siviglia (1782; The Barber of Seville), by Giovanni Paisiello, and Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (1786; The Marriage of Figaro)—as well as Il matrimonio segreto (1792; The Secret Marriage), by Domenico Cimarosa. One of the prominent traits of this mixed genre was the elaboration of fast-paced ensemble numbers at the conclusion of acts.