Although ‘Grand Opera’ is used as a general expression it is actually a technical term It refers to a specific kind of opera rooted in the French repertoire of the three decades following the Restoration. In particular it is associated with the serious operas of Auber, Halévy and Meyerbeer, significantly all written in collaboration with the playwright Eugène Scribe.

The interest in grand opera lies in the works themselves, but also in their integration of words, music and physical presentation. While all operas are designed for stage production, grand operas were inseparable from the production practices and values that were built into their very fabric. This emphasis influenced Verdi and Wagner but beyond that changed the understanding of opera as a theatrical form and the audiences’ expectation.

The central ‘attraction’ of the operatic performance is the singer. But this is not a simple notion. The many ways in which the singer can be used define the operatic experience and, because of its centrality, has the potential to distort it. Consideration of the role and function of the singer entails four overlapping elements. In addition to the scope of the singer's functions as musician, interpreter and focus of public attention, there are the development of the range of voices used in opera (see appendix 2); the (social) history of the profession and training and technical development (see Potter, 2000: Chapters 17and 19). This chapter is concerned with the ways in which how the singer is handled and perceived affect the nature of opera.

The range of roles and attractions of the singer

Just as the singer can be asked to do different things, so audiences come to an opera with different expectations. Just as it is vital to know what any opera was designed to be, so it is essential to understand what the singer is meant to be doing in it. Without this, the opera and the singer are likely to be judged by wrong criteria. In Table 12.1, these roles are divided between those which belong to the singer per se and those which are part of an opera.

The reaction against opera seria was so strong that the critique of contemporaries such as Gluck and Calzabigi was later taken at face value. As late as 1965 the revised edition of The Oxford Companion to Music was still explaining that

The masters of opera seria were able to inhabit the form and create works that stand up in modern production. The root problem was not, therefore the formality per se, but the social and political world that it reflected. This was compounded by the fact that the main reformers, Zeno and Metastasio, were both literary figures for whom opera's essential language, music, was neither a priority nor their expertise. For them, the opera was squarely based on the libretto. The result was a literary structure, within which a place had to be found for the music, the virtually universal da capo aria. Divorced from carrying the narrative, the da capo aria became increasingly self-standing. This was exploited by singers as they came to dominate productions, insisting on opportunities for vocal display and inserting favourite arias into whatever opera they performed – the so-called ‘portmanteau’ arias with which they toured from one opera house to another. Ultimately this led to the ‘pasticcio’, whole operas made up of well-received arias/tunes from any number of works.

The impulse to combine words, music and action has existed from the very beginning of drama. Indeed, musical drama mainly preceded the purely spoken, which immediately begs the question: where does opera begin? One simple but useful answer is at the point where people called their works ‘operas’ (or its equivalent). But to do this gives the impression of opera coming from nowhere, born fully formed, like Athena. Looking further back than the Florentine Camerata suggests the multifarious nature of musical theatre, the range of its potential and priorities.

A performance of The Mask of Orpheus is unthinkable without a director. It needs a single artistic/organising mind to focus its technical and scenographic components. Effectively it is written assuming the director. The rise of the director has changed the way opera is conceived.

From the early nineteenth century parallel developments took place in music, ballet and theatre as a result of growing artistic and technical complexity. The increased size of orchestras and length of scores required the conductor to hold the players and the work together. Once in place this led to the conductor as interpreter – adding, as it were, his own voice to that of the composer. In theatre and opera this had been the responsibility first of the playwright, librettist or composer and then the Stage Manager who understood the technical resources and staging tradition. Until late in the nineteenth century everyone knew what an opera ‘looked like’. Increasing technical resources simply added to the realism of the stage picture: interpretation did not arise. There was almost no currency to the idea of older works having to be performed other than in the current production style. However, as David Pountney says, increased technical resources meant that: ‘This was the era…in which production-books first became common…the scale and intricacy of the stagings that became a fashionable and necessary ingredient of grand opera occasioned the practical demands that would lead to the invention of the director’ (Pountney, in Charlton, 2003: 132).

By the middle of the seventeenth century opera had established itself, moving between the worlds of the commercial, popular opera of Venice or Hamburg and that of the court. The commercial world enjoyed the mixed genre combining comedy and tragedy, a growing star system and a developing audience. By contrast, the courtly world continued to demand classically based plots, high moral purpose and restraint. Musically, too, a series of tensions developed as the attractions of the melodious aria increasingly relegated the monodic, diastematic writing of Peri and Caccini to those passages where information was needed to carry the action forward. Conversely, the aria increasingly became the centre of musical attention while its dramaturgical function contracted. As these two elements became more distinct, opera potentially became a mere vehicle for the aria. France alone withstood these tendencies, here opera continued to develop as a genuinely dramatic form. The direct link between royal/state encouragement of the arts and their centralised control, was established through the Académies. These were designed to ensure that the arts fulfilled their role in enhancing the nation's prestige. From 1661 onwards Louis XIV embarked on a series of military and diplomatic offensives that gave France a leading role in the political life of Europe. The success of the monarchy, its brilliant display in the arts and its Europe-wide political authority, made the king the paradigm for rulers and France their cultural model.

Towards opera seria: first stage – Apostolo Zeno

Significantly, the Italian return to the original seriousness of opera was inspired by French criticism, and the initial response came from writers. The result was the codification of opera and a formalisation of its elements, including the music, which established the dominant form of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the opera seria (serious opera). Opera was to be ‘cleansed’ of the comedy, mangled adaptations of the classics and wilful scenic excesses of works such as Giasone and Croesus.

Opera is a dramatic form whose primary language is music. A successful opera must work both musically and dramatically; to understand opera means understanding both elements, and how they interact. This is what makes the study of opera fascinating: it requires us to keep two art forms in balance to create a third. The challenge of opera lies in the potential conflict between these elements, each of which has its own priorities and structures. In some periods it has been dominated by the music – Handel or Rossini, while in others it is the drama that dominates – Gluck or Berg. But the opposition is a false one. It is never a matter of domination, but of the balance that is appropriate to what the composer is trying to achieve and the meaning he or she wants to create.

To define opera as ‘a dramatic form whose primary language is music’ is very broad – as it has to be if it is going to accommodate works as different as Aida, The Mikado and Lulu, let alone have the potential for coping with West Side Story or The Phantom of the Opera. A broad definition is useful, moreover, because it can help to avoid generic traps. Thinking about opera can be restricted by and to those works that were consciously written as and called ‘operas’ or one of the many variants of the word. Wagner used the term ‘music drama’ precisely because he had defined ‘opera’ to his own satisfaction and decided that what he was creating was different: ‘The history of opera, since Rossini, is at bottom nothing else but the history of operatic melody’ (Goldman and Sprinchorn, 1970: 107).

The impulse to draw these elements together to create the opera itself was provided by the Florentine Camerata, a loose assembly of musicians, artists and poets who were concerned with the performance of Greek drama and music. A great deal of theoretical writing had come down from the classical period, but none of it offered a basis for practical performance, especially frustrating because of the known close relationship between Greek music and the drama. This became central to the debate as to how these admired plays might be performed as part of the Renaissance revival of the classical arts.

The stile rappresentativo

Several members of the Camerata were involved in La pellegrina, among them Peri, Caccini and their patron Giovanni de’ Bardi. In a letter, de’ Bardi's son Pietro later related how Vincenzo Galilei (the mathematician's father) ‘was the first to let us hear singing in stile rappresentativo…Accordingly he let us hear the lament of Count Ugolino, from Dante’, and goes on to say that Caccini and then Peri experimented with the new style and that Peri ‘together with Giulio [Caccini] sweetened this style and made it capable of moving the affections in a rare manner…The first poem to be sung on the stage in stile rappresentativo was the Story of Daphne by Signor Ottavio Rinuccini, set to music by Peri…I was left speechless’ (Strunk, 1998: 523–5). The first experiments with the stile rappresentativo were in the form of the lament followed by a full-scale dramatisation of the legend of Daphne. Like Poliziano, despite their admiration for the classics, these men chose not to set extant classical plays with their own vernacular texts. This was a modern, experimental medium.

Wagner changed opera in terms of its musical form and overall content, as well as how it was perceived – its aesthetic and social function. He was in a position to effect this because of his unique combination of musical, technical, dramatic and philosophical concerns which were expressed in

• opera;

• innovative involvement in all aspectsd of production and direction;

• theoretical writings.

He was, of course, influence by previous composers and thinkers, but what made him so influential was the force with which one person so successfully drew it all together. This turned Wagner into a kind of nineteenth-century hero, struggling to save and redirect art – as he portrayed himself, in figures such as Tannhäuser and Walther von Stolzing. The sheer range of interests in itself created a new ethos for evaluating a form that had become increasingly socialite, redefining it as a serious dramatic art, aimed at engaging the audience in moral, political and aesthetic ideas.

The challenge of integrated operatic form

As in Germany, Italian composers were faced with the problem of how to create a coherent musico-dramatic whole from disparate elements. While the Italians did not have the problem of the Singspiel's alternating song and speech, it had always alternated between recitative and aria. This became exacerbated with the emphasis on virtuosic and melodic writing, which risked overwhelming the needs of the drama. It was against this background that opera of the primo ottocento (early nineteenth century) developed.

At the 1815 Congress of Vienna, the arch-reactionary Metternich had been told that Italy was Austria's affair (see Duggan, 2008: 74). The consequent repression meant that public political life and debate were virtually impossible. Where they did exist, in the movement towards the Risorgimento, they were radical and outside mainstream circles, secretive and often conducted in exile. This was reflected in the public arts, so that intellectual life had no public arena where the pressing issues of freedom and national unity could be addressed. In addition, Italy's lack of raw materials meant that industrialisation occurred late in the century, so that the independent bourgeoisie, who were so active in France, England and Germany, remained part of the Austrian-dominated world, reinforcing the role of the arts as entertainment and escape rather than becoming a force for change.