Opera

Opera's origins lie in the various festivals, pageants, masques, ballets, intermedi, and other theatrical entertainments that took place across Europe in the sixteenth century, which combined drama with music and often lavish visual spectacle. The multimedia character of these performances was retained as opera established itself across seventeenth-century Europe, and has remained a part of its conception ever since: all opera necessarily includes the arrangement and movement on stage of individual characters and choruses, together with scenery, costumes, and special effects and lighting. The element of visual spectacle proved to be particularly fascinating to the French court at the turn of the seventeenth century: alongside the comédie-ballet and tragédie en musique (as exemplified by the works of Jean-Baptiste Lully) it cultivated the opéra-ballet, which was more closely related to trends in poetry and the visual arts. The form consisted of a prologue and three or four entrées, in which the sung element served as a pretext for a splendid divertissement, as typified by André Campra's L'Europe galante (1697), in which each entrée offered a contrasting stereotype of love (in France, Spain, Italy, Turkey); Louis de Cahusac described them as “pretty Watteaus, piquant miniatures that demand precision of design, grace of brush stroke and brilliance of color.” ¹ Indeed the integration into the drama of ballet, pantomime, and visual spectacle inspired by painting continued to characterize the French approach to opera: Jean-Philippe Rameau's tragédies (including his first, Hippolyte et Aricie, 1733) included a spectacular fête or divertissement in each of their five acts, which enhanced the dramatic action. In Hippolyte, this included a sea monster carrying off the hero in Act IV. French traditions were incorporated in Gluck's reforms to Italian opera seria in the second half of the eighteenth century as well: in his final work, Iphigénie en Tauride, created for Paris in 1779, he integrated aria, chorus, and ballet into dramatic tableaux of great flexibility and effect, and in so doing achieved new levels of expressive power.