The purpose of a business is to make a profit. Opera has a reputation as one of the most effective methods yet invented of losing money. A connection between the two is surely a contradiction in terms?

Daniel Snowman, in his Social History of Opera series for the BBC, argued that the history of opera tells the story of who picks up the deficit. Private or public funders; idealistic artists or intrepid entrepreneurs; individuals or consortia: these are the players with the power to shape the way opera is made. Nor is it a story with a straightforward chronological progression from a primitive example to the complex model(s) of today. At different times during opera’s four centuries and in different places, different practices may be contrasted. Sometimes they are locked in combat, at others one or other is in the ascendant. While there is no blueprint of best practice, judgements may be made as to how well the opera business adapted itself to the needs of its creative forces. And questions may be asked about how the opera has been moulded to the needs of the business.

The question of genre might appear more attuned to the interests of the natural sciences than to opera studies: to the need to identify a specimen in terms of genus and species, and to name and list each item into ordered sets, with thoroughness and precision. And yet such laborious collecting and classifying is unavoidable in the realm of opera too, as attested by the copious and disparate typologies offered by musicological dictionaries. So, what is opera in terms of genre? Since the concept of genre refers quite simply to kind or sort, then we have to ask first of all what sort of art (and craft) is opera? How does it define itself: as a kind of music? Or, perhaps, as a kind of theatre? Then, a second question emerges as soon as we try to account for a specific work from the past, or if we decide to compose or produce an opera: which sort of opera is this opera?

These basic questions already invoke a theory of opera (or what historically has been described as a ‘poetics’, after Aristotle’s own genre-defining text of that name on literary and dramatic theory). Genre, in other words, is a term that pertains to abstract conceptualizations of opera whose coordinates may not necessarily coincide with specific cases. Rather than retracing the exhaustive paths of musicological dictionaries in enumerating all the genres of opera, these pages will instead offer a transversal historiographical and theoretical account. Also, rather than adopting the literary discourse of genre theory in a search for how it can be relevant to opera, this chapter will pose the problem the other way around and ask what opera can do for genre theory. The first section returns to the questions above in order to introduce theoretical issues invoked by the term ‘genre’. This is followed by a historiographical outline of generic definitions in opera. The closing section returns to theoretical discourse on genre and maps out some possible intersections between concerns typical to opera studies and their relevance more broadly for genre theory, in particular in relation to performance.

In a volume in the ‘Cambridge Studies in Opera’ series, Victoria Johnson has pointed to the ‘blossoming of opera studies’ that has occurred in recent decades in the wake of the cultural and historical ‘turns’ experienced by the social sciences and humanities since the 1970s. Two new directions in opera research which Johnson has termed the ‘material conditions’ and ‘systems of meaning’ approaches have reshaped in a fundamental way our thinking about the relationship between opera, the state and society, and in so doing have laid a firm foundation for further work in this area. While the ‘systems of meaning’ paradigm with its roots in the New Cultural History has reconstructed the time-bounded ‘horizons of expectation’ that opera’s librettists, composers and audiences shared during different periods of the genre’s four-century lifespan, the ‘material conditions’ approach, strongly influenced by social history, has delineated the ways in which political and legal – as well as social and economic – factors have shaped operatic production and reception.

This research has uncovered three paradigmatic systems of production and reception that one might call the impresarial, the statist and the impresarial-statist, each of which embodies a distinct pattern in the relationship between opera, the state and society. In the impresarial system, found in its purest form in Italy between the advent of public or commercial opera in 1637 and unification in 1861, in Britain until 1939 and in the United States right down to the present, central states and local governments create the framework conditions for opera production through the enforcement of contracts but provide only minimal financial assistance while leaving the organization of opera seasons in the hands of private businessmen (the impresarios) or associations aiming – but often failing – to turn a profit. Local urban-based social and economic elites choose the opera house as a locus of sociability and status differentiation while influencing the character and content of works through their expectations and tastes.

One of the most often-quoted descriptions of opera is that of Dr Samuel Johnson, who famously defined opera in the mid-eighteenth century as ‘an exotic and irrational entertainment’.

Johnson’s response to opera was at one with a prevailing English attitude of curmudgeonly roast-beef-and-ale xenophobia presented as bluff common sense, and was aimed primarily at Italian opera. His suspicion of Italian opera was shared by writers such as Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in The Spectator, the poet Alexander Pope (who represents opera as a foreign ‘harlot form’ in The Dunciad), and the painter William Hogarth, who satirized the Whig aristocracy’s cultivation of Italian opera (and other such foreign affectations) in prints and paintings.

The literal meaning of exotic is, indeed, ‘foreign’ (as Johnson’s own dictionary explains), and this may be all that Johnson implied when he used the term, in this instance quite accurately; for, despite indigenous attempts at the form in the seventeenth century, by the eighteenth century opera was perceived as an essentially foreign import to Britain, being largely performed there in a foreign language with foreign performers. And for most countries in the world for the first two centuries of its existence opera would be exotic beyond Italy since, France aside, it was generally assumed that opera was Italian per se. The majority of opera composers were Italians, many working in countries outside of Italy; but many non-Italian composers such as Handel, Gluck, Haydn or Mozart predominantly set operas in Italian, usually outside of Italy too.

The singer is the defining feature of opera: the living crucible in which music, drama and spectacle coalesce into a single art form. The history of opera was thus shaped in part according to changing concepts about the singer – about his or her relationship with each of opera’s constituent arts; about ideas of vocal and dramatic virtuosity; about the singer’s place within the hierarchy of the opera house and the gaze of the spectator. In the discourses around opera, the singer is considered both as an embodied musical performer, and also in more abstract terms as pure ‘voice’. Modern opera studies draws on both aspects in its exploration of the singer’s art and performance practice, the social history of the singer, and the investigation of the singer as cultural phenomenon.

Initially, however, the singer was largely ignored during the awakening of critical interest in opera in the 1980s. Despite an opening article by John Rosselli in the first edition of the Cambridge Opera Journal in 1989, it was not until the mid-1990s that English-language scholarship began to take the same interest in the singer as was already evident in continental Europe, albeit from rather different methodological perspectives. This chapter explores various aspects of both historical and contemporary approaches to the singer in relation to voice, text, spectacle, technology, the operatic market place and the audience.

In 1998 the American soprano Renée Fleming fell foul of what one journalist has called ‘the style police’ at La Scala in Milan. Performing the title role in Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia, Fleming encountered opposition from the conductor Gianluigi Gelmetti when she introduced some decorative appoggiaturas into her vocal lines. As Philip Gossett puts it in his account of the event, Gelmetti has ‘an exaggerated respect for notation’. Since composers like Donizetti normally left appoggiaturas to the intelligence of performers they did not write them into their scores, and Gelmetti had taken this as authority for refusing Fleming’s additions. The tensions that occurred in preparation for the performances led to a classic La Scala brouhaha on the opening night in which, in Gossett’s words, ‘general havoc reigned and Gelmetti collapsed’.

The incident was caused by two contradictory understandings of the nature of the operatic score: an approach that understands the score as a prompt for performance, and a more fundamentalist understanding of the score as a quasi-biblical authority whose every letter must be observed in performance. In his study of nineteenth-century music the German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus argued that musical activity in that century could be divided into these two camps, characterized by Italian opera (but also including virtuoso instrumentalists such as Liszt and Paganini) and German instrumental music:

In 1778 the Italian journalist and historian Pietro Verri, noting the frequent complaints by critics from northern Europe about the lack of dramatic coherence in Italian operas, wrote ‘In my opinion, northerners are wrong to criticise our opera with the laws of the theatre;…ours are a spectacle of another sort.’ In this chapter I want to examine what Verri may have meant by ‘spectacle of another sort’, and to suggest that any operatic performance might usefully be understood as a ‘spectacle of another sort’.

In Chapter 10 I suggest that an operatic text should perhaps be seen as the pretext for a performance, rather than the performance serving to realize the operatic ‘work’. But we also have to recognize that performances themselves serve as pretexts for events. Reinhard Strohm has suggested that baroque opera in particular must be understood as primarily ‘event-like’ rather than ‘work constituted’, but Carolyn Abbate insists that this is true for all operatic performance: ‘what counts is not a work, not, for example, Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in the abstract, but a material, present event’. Although modern cultural activities are often work focused (I attend a performance of Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler because I want an opportunity to experience an infrequently performed opera, not to hear the particular singers or to be seen at the Royal Opera House), even today this is far from being exclusively the case: many people attend performances because they are more interested in singer x, conductor y or director z than in the work being performed. And people also attend theatrical or musical performances as a social activity: to celebrate an event in their lives; as the occasion for a date; to identify themselves as part of a particular community; to participate in a social or political ritual.

In 1860 the French poet Charles Baudelaire heard a concert performance of excerpts from Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser. Writing about the overwhelming impact that the music had upon him he expressed his desire to understand better its ‘mysterious intentions and method, which were all unknown to me. I resolved to make myself master of the why and wherefore, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.’

We could have no better account of why we might be led to study something, most particularly something that gets under our skin, as Wagner had got under Baudelaire’s skin, and as opera gets under many people’s skins. We study something firstly because we want to understand ‘the why and wherefore’ of it: why it is, and why it is as it is. We want to understand its constituents: how they are put together and why they are put together in that way. And, secondly, we want to understand why it has the effect that it has upon us, so as to know better the values that form our own subjectivity; to gain understanding of the basis of our own pleasures or displeasures, as individuals and members of particular groups and communities. And, finally, we study something for the light it casts upon the society and culture within which the object of our study exists (or existed). Even if Baudelaire didn’t express this last concern immediately, he was certainly one of the first critics to have understood how works of art tell us about their specific historical moment. These three modes of explanation broadly provide the map by which this book has been put together, indicating what I take to be the three main fields of interest in current opera studies.

Opera is a multivalent art form: it combines dramatic and literary traditions with vocal and instrumental music and the visual and plastic arts to tell a story. One recurring question in opera studies is exactly how do these diverse modes of expression interact with one another? In an art work that brings together multiple, and possibly competing, expressive ‘systems’ what creates structure and makes an opera cohere? Is the poetry the primary purveyor of narrative and form? Is the music the chief dramatic and structural agent? If so, do recurring melodies or tonalities take primacy in determining form? Or should we be concerned with formal coherence at all?

How critics and musicologists have answered the above questions – in fact, even the questions raised – depends upon which of opera’s domains has been given precedence and what analytical approach has been taken. At various points in opera studies’ history, incongruencies and frictions between expressive systems have been smoothed over in favour of demonstrating synthesis, tonal progressions have received more attention than texts, thematic relations across a work more priority than individual numbers. Which parameter has been used as a starting point has resulted in a number of seemingly conflicting, yet overlapping, findings to questions of form. In short, opera’s musico-dramatic structures stand in counterpoint to one another, a counterpoint that the field of opera studies itself reflects.