Opera (Ital. Opera in Musica, Dramma per la Musica) is a drama which is sung throughout to the accompaniment of a full orchestra. The various forms of aria or song, recitative or declamation, duet, trio, &c., concerted piece or instrumental interlude are used as the exigencies of the situation demand. The whole is usually introduced by an introduction, vorspiel, or Overture (q.v.), and often one of the acts contains a ballet or pantomimic dance. It is a direct development from the discovery by the Florence Academy (see MUSIC) of Monody or the musical expression of a single individuality by a single voice. As every country, every school since 1600 has felt the fascination of the art problem, and nearly every great composer has been ambitious to solve it, the opera is a universal possession, and its range is almost as wide and varied as the history of music itself. Three schools may be distinguished. Italian Opera is marked by its spontaneity and melodious character, and even more by the honour of priority; German Opera is the product of greater geniuses than the other two schools can boast, but lacks the continuity which makes the French school so interesting to the student.
Italian School.—The experiments in scena-writing (1582-90) culminated at Florence in the first real opera, Dafne (1594), by Peri and Caccini, the more successful Euridice (1600), and the very advanced work of Monteverde. The new departure in music soon spread its influence beyond Florence to Venice, where Monteverde spent the last thirty years of his life, and to Naples, where Alessandro Scarlatti (1659-1725) took up the work and founded the Neapolitan or 'beautiful' school. Scarlatti, by the prominence he gave to melody, may be said to be the founder of Italian opera, which to this day is noted for so-called melody in profusion, and the comparative indifference to other as important qualities, such as harmony, orchestration, and dramatic unity. No Italian work of the 18th century has survived save Cimarosa's Il Matrimonio Segreto (1792), which, very similar in style to Mozart's greater works, has been overshadowed by these. The most famous modern Italian composer is Rossini, a brilliant vocal writer, whose charming Barber of Seville (1816) is a model of opera buffa, and whose serious opera, William Tell (1829), also keeps a place in the repertoire of the European stage. Bellini's Norma, La Sonnambula, Puritani, and Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and Lucrezia Borghia still survive out of more than 100 melodious works. The earlier operas of Verdi are quite Italian in style (Trovatore, 1851; Traviata, 1853, &c.). Aida (1871) shows a leaning to, and Otello (1887) complete adhesion to the modern music drama. The veteran composer at the age of eighty-eight produced still another work, Falstaff (1891).
German Opera.—During the 17th and early part of the 18th century the opera in southern Germany was purely Italian. Dresden, where Hasse reigned supreme, and Vienna were the two centres. It was in Hamburg that the National school was founded by Keyser, who wrote (1694-1734) over 100 operas in which a high dramatic ideal is apparent. Gluck, though a German, belongs more to the school of French Grand Opera. Mozart, after beating the Italians on their own melodic ground in Idomeneo, Die Entführung, Figaro, and Don Giovanni (1781-87), wrote the first national romantic opera, The Magic Flute (1791). Beethoven, desiring nobler plots of a more serious and moral character than had satisfied the light-hearted Mozart, chose Bouilly's Léonore as the foundation of his single opera Fidelio (produced 1805, rewritten 1814). The operas of Weber were deeply imbued with the romanticism of the early 19th century, and in Der Freischütz (1821) he uses the national folklore with immense effect. To this new Romantic school also belong the operas of Marschner and of Spohr, the beauty of whose music is buried, like Weber's Euryanthe and Schubert's Rosamunde, under absurd libretti.
Melodrama in opera is an effective device which originated in Germany. The singer recites his part in an ordinary speaking voice accompanied by orchestral music, which seeks to convey the meaning of the situation and scene to the audience. Benda first used it (Ariadne, 1774), and Mozart, who heard it in 1778, was much impressed by its possibilities. The most successful example is the grave-digging scene in Beethoven's Fidelio; Weber in Der Freischütz and Mendelssohn in A Midsummer Night's Dream have also used it with happy effect.
The French Grand Opera School is extremely important, not only on account of its continuity and consistence, but because at various times, and for various reasons, great men were attracted from foreign countries to it as a centre. It was founded by the Florentine Lully, reformed by the German Gluck; and Italians like Cherubini, Spontini, Rossini, Belgians like Grétry, Germans like Meyerbeer and Wagner have both learned from it and contributed to its various stages of development. Lully (born 1633) arrived in Paris a boy of thirteen in the train of the Chevalier de Guise, and by his diplomatic and social, no less than by his musical talents, he gradually pushed his way to the very summit of musical success, and lived in great favour with King Louis XIV. In 1672 he obtained a patent conferring the sole right of producing operas in Paris, and this monopoly he held till his death in 1687. Musical Paris was sharply divided between his followers and those of Rameau (1683-1764), until the arrival of an Italian company made them unite their ranks in opposition to the foreigners. The characteristic of this French school from its beginning was its attention to rhetoric and dramatic requirements. The treatment of recitative in particular has always been a feature since Lully's time, and he it was also who invented the overture. Gluck arrived in Paris in 1774, and produced his Iphigénie en Aulide and Iphigénie en Tauride there; and the ideal expressed by Peri and Monteverde, embodied to a considerable extent in these and other works (see GLUCK), has at last found its goal in the music drama of Wagner. Cherubini's seriousness and nobility of style (Les Deux Journées, 1800), Méhul's fine ear for effect (Joseph, 1807), Spontini's magnificence of conception (Vestale, 1805), and Halévy's dramatic truth (Juive, 1835) were all ranged under Gluck's banner, and the roll of French grand opera is brought to a gorgeous close with the name of Wagner's predecessor, Meyerbeer (Robert le Diable, 1831, Huquenots, 1836, Le Prophète, 1843). The new blood he brought with him from the schools of Germany and Italy invigorated it, and the time was ripe when the experiment of Rienzi was made in 1842. Other important contributions to grand opera were Auber's Masaniello (or Muette de Portici, 1828) and Rossini's Guillaume Tell (1829).
Opéra Comique (by no means comie opéra) is a title applied to all works which, on account of spoken dialogue, were not eligible for performance at the Grand Opéra. Grétry's Cœur de Lion (1784), Méhul's Joseph, Boieldieu's La Dame Blanche (1825), Hérold's Pré aux Clercs (1832), and Auber's Le Maçon, Les Diamants de la Couronne, &c. are the most famous. This Opéra Comique, so purely French, had a large share in the development of the modern lyric opera, of which Gounod's Faust (1859), Thomas's Mignon (1871), and Bizet's Carmen (1875) are good examples.
The Ballet (entirely pantomimic) attained a very high pitch of development in Paris, where Delibes (1836-91) produced his charming Coppélia and Sylvia.
Comic opera proper (Opera Buffa) is represented in Italy by Rossini's Barbiere, Donizetti's Figlia del Reggimento (1840), and Verdi's last great work, Falstaff (1893); in Germany by Flotow's Martha (1847), Nicolai's Merry Wives (1849); in France (Opéra Bouffe) by Offenbach's Orphée aux Enfers (1858), Grande Duchesse (1867), &c., Lecocq's Madame Angot (1873), &c., and numberless other bright works; and in England worthily by the charming Gilbert-Sullivan series (Pinafore, 1878; Patience, 1881; Mikado, 1885).
Music Drama is the ideal which Wagner has sought to embody in Tristan und Isolde (1865), Meistersinger (1868), Ring des Nibelungen (1876), and Parsifal (1882). Rienzi (produced in Dresden in 1842) establishes his connection with the Grand Opera of Meyerbeer, and in the Flying Dutchman (1843), Tannhäuser (1845), and Lohengrin (1849) the growth of his method is distinctly seen, as well as his indebtedness to many predecessors, especially, in orchestration, to Berlioz. Wagner seeks to make the 'Art Work of the Future,' as he calls it, equally dependent on music, drama, and scenic art—the requirements of none being sacrificed to the demands of the other, but all contributing to one perfect unity. His influence is clearly traceable in all modern operas—e.g. Goldmark's Queen of Sheba, Merlin, Boito's Mefistofele, Ponchielli's Gioconda, Verdi's Otello, &c.
English Opera.—Purcell's early work, Dido and Æneas, written at the age of seventeen, his chef d'œuvre King Arthur (1691), and other works gave promise of such an English school of opera as the 'Masques' of Lawes and others had suggested (1613-75), but no one was ready to carry on the work after his early death in 1695 (aged thirty-seven). Dr Arne's Artaxerxes (1762), out of thirty-four operas, is the only other English opera which calls for mention. Italian opera became the fashion in London (Handel wrote forty-four, 1710-39), and England's attention has been divided between that school and the highly inæsthetic and, from an operatic point of view, worthless form of Ballad Opera, founded by Dr Pepusch (Beggar's Opera, 1728), until recent years, when Dr Mackenzie's Colomba (1883), Villiers Stanford's Canterbury Pilgrims (1884), Goring Thomas's Esmeralda (1883) and Nadeschda (1885), and lastly Sullivan's Ivanhoe (1891) have sought to win recognition for England among the European schools of opera.—English opera was introduced into America in 1750, in the shape of the Beggar's Opera, and Italian opera in 1825.
See Hogarth, Memoirs of the Opera (1851); H. Sutherland Edwards, Essays on Modern Opera (1881); D. Hanslick, Die Moderne Oper, in three parts (1885); the articles in Grove's and other musical dictionaries on Opera, &c., and on GLUCK, MOZART, WEBER, WAGNER, &c. in this work.