The influence of one piece (or style) of music on another is a perplexing issue. The continuum of musical references ranges from the subtlest detail (for example, a similarity in orchestration or a motivic resemblance) to whole-scale appropriation, and examples have been decried or defended as coincidence, plagiarism, incompetence, creative economy, tribute, poetic resonance and brilliant satire. ‘Borrowings’ have long attracted musicological interest; recent studies have turned to more subtle allusions and the meanings behind them. Christopher Reynolds's sophisticated analysis of motivic allusions in nineteenth-century art music explores a complex (and intentional) interrelationship between four parties:

The situation of musical allusions in the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan is somewhat more complicated. It is by no means clear that Sullivan's references were always intended to be recognised as such, nor indeed if he was always conscious of the allusions latent in his music. To be sure, there are clear examples of actual quotations which he expected to be recognised and appreciated: the fugue subject from Bach's G minor organ Fantasia (bwv 542) given to clarinet and bassoon as the Mikado sings ‘By Bach, interwoven with Spohr and Beethoven’ is only the most famous such case (‘Amore humane Mikado’, The Mikado, Act II).

Tracing artistic legacy and ancestry is always a complex affair, and must ultimately depend more on persuasive example and argument than on an abundance of hard evidence. In the case of Gilbert and Sullivan and the American musical, there can be no real question that the influence of the former on the latter was profound, especially with HMS Pinafore (1878) coming so soon after The Black Crook (1866). The huge success of HMS Pinafore and its successors in America – then and since, in adaptations and repertoire – provided both motive and opportunity. Moreover, there is ample testimony, especially from lyricists, regarding the formative impact of Gilbert and Sullivan on important contributors to the American musical. But a broadly based, direct connection is nevertheless hard to argue in the face of stark differences in sensibility. The earnest optimism and elaborate choreography and stage effects typical of the American musical from its late nineteenth-century origins through its twentieth-century maturity seem quite distinct from the wry topsy-turvydom of Gilbert and Sullivan, and the differences multiply quickly upon fuller consideration.

There are, to be sure, more than a few incontrovertible homages. George M. Cohan's ‘Captain of the ten day boat’ (Little Johnny Jones, 1904) is a direct parody of ‘Captain of the Pinafore’. George and Ira Gershwin's Strike Up the Band! (1927), Of Thee I Sing (1931; the first musical to win a Pulitzer Prize) and the latter's sequel, Let ‘em Eat Cake (1933), follow the larger Savoy tradition in offering full-scale political satires that are both oblique and ridiculous enough in their particulars not to offend, with songs such as ‘The illegitimate daughter’ (from Of Thee I Sing) to reinforce the connection to Gilbert and Sullivan.

‘When you go home at night, it's still swimming around in your head. And when you wake up in the morning, the tunes are still there, you know. And I suppose there could be worse things in your head’, says a member of the Edmund Rice Choral and Musical Society (ERCMS), interviewed in August 2001. ‘I enjoy it when it's on, but I'm also glad when it stops and my life's my own again. I feel I can go and cut the grass, or do the mundane, ordinary things that just get left.’

The Savoy operas occupy a unique place in English performing history as a self-contained genre of light-hearted, accessible (though not always easy) tonal music with plenty of chorus involvement, solo parts of varying dimensions, and (in most cases) a guaranteed happy ending. For decades they have provided amateur performing groups with a reliable formula for fun in rehearsals and popularity with audiences. Out of copyright and with relatively straightforward costume and staging requirements, performing Gilbert and Sullivan is a reasonable aim for amateur groups, and one which musical societies from around the UK and further a field celebrate at the annual Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in Buxton, Derbyshire. An empirical study of audience and performer experience at the 2001 festival considers the impact of the Savoy operas on the individuals participating there and on amateur performing culture as a whole.

Pursuing post-graduate research into the comic operas of Arthur Sullivan was, in 1975, considered in some academic quarters as frivolous, if not virtually a contradiction of terms. I was fortunate, however, in having been delivered into safe hands. The Professor of Music at the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth, Ian Parrott, was himself a pioneering Sullivan scholar – a perceptive article by him on Sullivan had appeared in Music and Letters as early as 1942.With the additional support of Sullivan's biographer, Percy Young, one of the department's external examiners, a provisional title was accepted for a PhD thesis: ‘The Theatre Music of Arthur Sullivan’. Broadened beyond the comic operas so that it could include the music written for the (respectable) Shakespeare plays, the subject was accepted.

Investigation

To get inside the music, though, it was essential to study it in full score. These had been published for some of the Shakespearean music, such as The Tempest, Henry VIII and The Merchant of Venice, and for Ivanhoe. Copies, however, were collectors’ rarities; but rarer still were the three comic opera full scores published in Germany during Sullivan's lifetime: the Bosworth editions of The Mikado and the Zell and Genée adaptation of The Yeomen of the Guard (Der Königsgardist), and Litolff's German version of HMS Pinafore (Amor an Bord). Examining these required a trip to the British Library. Fortunately, however, the university library had acquired a copy of the facsimile of the autograph full score of The Mikado issued by Gregg International Publishers Limited in 1968. Beautifully produced, this was to have been followed by a facsimile of the Iolanthe autograph with a preface by Ian Parrott but, alas, this never appeared.

The analysis of comedy in Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas regularly centres on Gilbert's librettos, as if they were the sole source of humour. Indeed, Sullivan seems to have shared this view, although Gilbert did not. Gilbert once said of Sullivan, ‘He used to maintain, oddly enough, that there was no such thing as humour in music, but in my humble judgment he was, himself, a musical humorist of the very highest order’. To be sure, words and music each have humour, but there is a third kind of humour at work in Gilbert and Sullivan, as is most vividly shown in their patter songs. This humour stems from the formal relationship between words and music. In patter songs, consonants and vowels tumble over each other in sheer sonic joy, careering at the absolute edge of intelligibility. The question of intelligibility that these songs raise forces a re-evaluation of the boundaries between words and music. It then seems necessary to ask how this effect is produced and why the patter song's status on the border of intelligibility is funny.

Despite the frequent use of the term ‘patter song’ in Gilbert and Sullivan criticism and reviews, the form is not clearly defined. Its properties are usually left to be inferred from examples like ‘I am the very model of a modern Major-General’. Even the gold standard of music dictionaries, The New Grove Dictionary of Music, does not give a richly formal definition: ‘A comic song in which the humour derives from having the greatest number of words uttered in the shortest possible time’. A patter song is not defined by its structure at the level of bars or sections (like a blues or a symphony), but by a much smaller unit of measure: the relationship between words and time.

A study of the correlation between the so-called Savoy operas and Sullivan's other major works seems at first glance a non-controversial subject of musicological inquiry. Sullivan was by no means unique in writing works that succeeded on the popular stage and in the concert hall. Elgar and Copland are highly respected composers who wrote popular marches or ballets in addition to symphonies and concertos. Leonard Bernstein is famous – aside from his great conducting career – as the composer of West Side Story, but Age of Anxiety, Jeremiah or Chichester Psalms are not proscribed because of his Broadway popularity. George Gershwin wrote popular songs and Broadway musicals. He also wrote concert works and the great American opera. His reputation in both fields is exemplary.

Sullivan's comic operas and serious works were frequently performed during his lifetime. After his death in 1900, the comic operas retained enormous popularity, while the concert works gradually sank into oblivion. Very early acoustic recordings were made of The Yeomen of the Guard and HMS Pinafore in addition to extensive excerpts from The Golden Legend and Ivanhoe. World War I precipitated the collapse of the Victorian–Edwardian world order – the society of which he was a distinguished member – thus terminating Sullivan's reputation as a great composer. Only in those works that stood aside from – indeed parodied – that now discredited sociopolitical system did Sullivan's music live on as a vital force.

The reign of John V

During the seventeenth century, Portuguese musical practice had remained essentially confined within the limits of the Iberian repertory. The arrival of Italian music and opera in the country in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, at a time when it was rapidly becoming the main international tradition all across Europe, was a direct consequence of the changes in Portuguese musical life and institutions brought about by the artistic and cultural policies of King John V, who reigned from 1707 to 1750. Confronted with the power and dominance that the Catholic Church had acquired during the previous century, the king tried to curb this power by appropriating it himself. To this effect he invested a significant part of the crown's new wealth connected with the discovery of gold in Brazil in the prestige of the religious establishment in general and of his own royal chapel in particular, which he managed to elevate to the status of patriarchal see at the beginning of his reign. In the ironic words of Frederick II of Prussia, “Priestly functions were his amusements, monks his armies, convents his buildings, and nuns his mistresses.”

The reform of musical institutions and the importation of Italian musicians are directly connected with the reform of the chapel, in an attempt to make it emulate the Papal Chapel. Several papal singers, and in 1719 the master of the Cappella Giulia of the Vatican himself, Domenico Scarlatti, were hired for the Portuguese chapel, which in 1730 had as many as 26 Italian singers. A court orchestra was also formed whose main members were foreigners, some of whom established dynasties of court players which were to last up to the second quarter of the nineteenth century. In 1713 a music school was created adjoining the chapel, the Seminário da Patriarcal, which would remain the main music school in the country during the whole eighteenth century.

Production and re-production

Eighteenth-century opera is experiencing an unprecedented revitalization. New productions are increasingly presented to us in a manner that resonates as much as possible with our modern sensibilities, such as McVicar's recent staging of Handel's Giulio Cesare, set in British colonial style with Bollywood-inspired choreography (see cover illustration). Although productions of the same opera in the eighteenth century and in our time result in theatrical events that on the surface seem radically dissimilar, they also share fundamental traits. No matter how distant the story of an opera is set in time or in space, opera was and still is meant to engage with the present audience. To do so, it places the audience at the forefront of the performing event by adopting a system of production that favors re-creation over re-production, or process over work. In this chapter I will examine who and what was involved in this process and how it functions in contemporary practices. The basis of this investigation is Vivaldi's Motezuma (Venice, 1733), which exists in two modern and completely different recorded versions. A close reading of this work can reveal the process through which opera was produced and disseminated in the eighteenth century as well as the techniques of creative philology that are practiced in our contemporary production of early opera. As demonstrated in later settings of the Montezuma story beginning with Graun's version (Berlin, 1755), the reform of opera, which was famously exacted by Gluck, attempted to address some of the problems related to a system of production that was perceived as too chaotic and diffuse.

The eighteenth century can be described as the epoch of “Theater and Revolution” and the two are not completely unrelated. Italian theater, primarily opera, played a fundamental role in the establishment of contemporary “show business” and in the dissemination of ideas across social classes and nations. Comic opera was not a new genre, but it did represent a modern artistic and economic phenomenon, which involved the collaboration of musicians (whether composers, singers, or instrumentalists), librettists, architects, set and costume designers, impresarios, publishers and many other professional disciplines (as outlined in the first chapter of this volume). The hierarchical organization of the dramatic roles became more prevalent and it influenced not only the casting of an opera, but also structure and content, whether serious or comic. Although serious opera roles reflected primarily the virtuosic qualities of the singers, comic roles required a rich variety of skills, namely acting and singing were merged together, and had a particular importance to the plots. The Baroque conception of theater generated the star-system in Italy with strict lines of demarcation between leading roles and secondary roles. Surviving documents, mainly contracts for singers, illustrate a burgeoning and bureaucratic phenomenon on the Italian peninsula, which produced hundreds of operas performed in the major cities (Venice, Naples, Milan, Turin, Florence, Bologna, Rome) and in outlying areas of the country. The hierarchical organization of roles also reflected the economic growth of comic opera, which increasingly required a form of organization to “classify” the various components of a cast.

Ensembles and finales are synonymous with opera buffa. In heroic opera, which focuses on single characters and confrontations between individuals in alternating arias and recitatives, duets and choruses are limited. In contrast, opera buffa specializes in character interactions through ensembles. In these extended, often sectionalized movements featuring multiple characters, the dramatic action switches its focus from the individual to the relational, that is, to the interactions between different groups of characters and the varying and changing dynamics of their interpersonal or professional relationships within the larger community. While furthering the goals of the medium to offer pleasing theatrical entertainment through music, ensembles and finales also typically increase the pace of the dramatic action. They introduce a series of sociable and often-times comedic situations – events, conditions and environments that throw into dramatic relief the many complexities between different members of society, and the methods employed by individuals and groups when negotiating within and between various classes, genders, ethnicities, and age groups. In a medium where communication, interaction, and group dynamics are paramount, a continuous musical backdrop over which naturalistic conversations are conducted openly between a mixed company of aristocrats, servants, professionals or other character configurations, perhaps even with some participants in disguise, works to compound and intensify the potential for instruction in manners, morals, conversational strategies, and social mobility. Various permutations of contemporary societal relationships were enacted on stage. Here, the dynamics of home, family, friendship, the workplace, and other relational communities were played out and “performed” (self-consciously or not) before an opera-going public.

Introduction

Opera in Naples has often been characterized in convenient historiographic terminology such as “Neapolitan opera,” which was the result of a “Neapolitan school” of musicians. These descriptions encourage, however, a narrow interpretation, which has obscured the broad significance of opera practices in Naples. In particular, they posit the suggestion of opera in Naples as limited to local traditions and the locus of their creation rather than recognize the highly innovative stylistic phenomenon at the national level in the Italian states. Opera in eighteenth-century Naples, similar to Viennese Classicism (as espoused by Haydn and Mozart at the end of the century) was the fullest expression of a cultural matrix of creators, practitioners, theorists, patrons, and entrepreneurs (whether aristocratic, public, or sacred), which not only benefited from prodigious local talent, but also the dense nexus of theatrical establishments, conservatories, and culture at large. The cumulative effect of such an artistic environment was to establish operatic styles (whether seria or buffa) that reflected local practices and also established an international presence of significant importance for the eighteenth century. This phenomenon was verified not only by the gravitation of non-native artists to Naples, a European cultural epicenter, to assimilate, perhaps even learn the latest conventions, but also by the considerable international dissemination and acceptance of a Neapolitan repertory in Italian and European practices. This chapter addresses the history of opera in Naples, focusing on how local genres were both typical in the context of the eighteenth century and also highly idiosyncratic to the city, which together helped to distinguish the Neapolitan repertory within contemporary traditions.

During the eighteenth century, a night at the opera almost always included ballet. Such a fundamental fact of life in the eighteenth century is so far removed from our own experience of opera that its reality is easy to overlook, yet it was the case across Europe, even in Italy. Opera audiences anticipated spending part of every evening watching dancers, but depending on where they lived, they had differing expectations as to what they would see and how the dancing fit (or not) into the opera. In France dancing was structured into every act of every opera. In Italy ballets were performed between the acts and only rarely made connection with the plot of the opera. England and the German-speaking areas tended to follow the Italian model, but with local variations. The presence of so much dancing meant that opera houses supported dancers as well as singers. Even today, many European opera houses have a dance troupe, although the functions of ballet and opera have increasingly grown apart.

France

The French operatic model was created in the late seventeenth century by Jean-Baptiste Lully and his primary librettist, Philippe Quinault, who wrote twelve works together between 1672 and 1686. The conventions they established, including the integration of dance into each opera, prevailed throughout the eighteenth century as well. In Lullian opera the dancers function in essence as part of the chorus, some of whom sing, others of whom dance. Every act includes at least one scene that brings large groups of people on stage, in musically and visually sumptuous scenes that came to be called “divertissements.”

This chapter is an invitation to look again at eighteenth-century opera – similar, in some ways, to the invitation uttered by Leporello to his master Don Giovanni in the midst of their graveyard escapade. It may be argued in fact that attending to the visual aspect of eighteenth-century opera results in seeing statues nod – a “truly bizarre” scene indeed. In recent years opera scholarship has shown a growing interest in the study of staging and acting of operas from the past, both as a historical enterprise and as an attempt to engage with their performance in the present. Such interest tends to crystallize around later operas, for instance those by Verdi and Wagner, which come with a variety of supplementary materials ranging from contemporary descriptions and reviews, prompt books, pictures, and photographs. Also privileged are those operas that are firmly established in the repertory and therefore are made the object of more or less provocative and authored productions, subsequently disseminated on television and available on DVD.

With the exception of about a dozen operas – including a few by Mozart and a handful by Handel – very little of the exceedingly large and multifarious European operatic production of the eighteenth century is performed in today's opera houses. Even those few to arrive to us do not come with much information about their original staging, sets, lighting, costumes, etc. Staging and acting practices remained throughout the century unswervingly topical and contingent on the economic and socio-cultural conditions of individual theaters.