OPERA BUFFA

(Italian: comic opera), genre of comic opera originating in Naples in the mid-18th century. It developed from the intermezzi, or interludes, performed between the acts of serious operas. Opera buffa plots centre on two groups of characters: a comic group of (usually) five male and female personages and a pair (or more) of lovers. The dialogue is sung. The operatic finale, a long, formally organized conclusion to an opera act, including all principal personages, developed in opera buffa. The earliest opera buffa still regularly performed is Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's La serva padrona (1733; The Maid as Mistress). Opera buffa is distinct from French opra-bouffe, a general term for any light opera. Grand opera and beyond French grand opera Nineteenth-century Paris was to foster and witness the birth of grand opera, an international style of large-scale operatic spectacle employing historical or pseudohistorical librettos and filling the stage with elaborate scenery and costumes, ballets, and phalanxes of supernumeraries. Dispensing almost entirely with the delicacies of bel canto, it vastly enlarged both the orchestra itself and its role in the dramatic happenings. Grand opera naturally had roots in the past, particularly in the Venetian machine operas of the 17th century, such as Cesti's Il pomo d'oro, as well as in the stately scores of Rameau and Gluck. But the immediate drive toward this new style of opera was instituted in Paris by Italian expatriates: Luigi Cherubini, who spent the last 54 years of his life in France, and Gasparo Spontini, whose most impressive operas were designed for Paris. Cherubini was a greatly learned composer in almost all musical forms who won the admiration of Beethoven. His two most imposing operas were the embryonic grand opera Mde (1797; libretto by Franois-Benot Hoffman) and a comdie lyrique, Les Deux Journes (The Two Days, 1800; libretto by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly). Les Deux Journes became something like a national German opera under its German title, Der Wassertrger (The Water Carrier). Spontini, in his French operas, ranged far beyond Cherubini and his other contemporaries in his demands for complex staging, finally reaching a sort of splendid megalomania. Daniel-Franois-Esprit Auber brought out a nearly total grand opera; La Muette de Portici (The Mute Girl of Portici, also known as Masaniello, 1828; libretto by Scribe). The popularity of La Muette became phenomenal in both France and Germany. This opera remains unique on several counts. Its title character neither sings nor speaks, the role being performed by a mime. A performance of it at Brussels on August 25, 1830, set off disorders that led to the separation of Belgium from The Netherlands. Eighteen months after the premiere of Auber's opera, the appearance of Rossini's Guillaume Tell showed that master of opera buffa and bel canto responding to the new genre. Auber's later operas include several charming comedies, among them Fra Diavolo (1830; libretto by Scribe). The final, official birth of grand opera occurred in 1831, with the first French opera of another Parisian expatriate, the German Giacomo Meyerbeer: Robert le Diable (libretto by Scribe and Germain Delavigne). The popularity of this work became a sort of frenzy (by August 1893 it had been sung 751 times at the Paris Opra). Although Meyerbeer's operas are rarely performed in the late 20th century, he remains a controversial figure. Using an expanded, powerful orchestra, with much emphasis placed on individual instrumental colours, requiring almost every kind of singing, filling huge stages with dazzling pageantry, employing characters who pretend to be actual figures from history, four of his operas held their leading positions even through the Wagnerian revolution and into the early 20th century. Besides Robert le Diable, they were Les Huguenots (1836; libretto by Scribe with the collaboration of mile Deschamps), Le Prophte (1849; libretto by Scribe), and the posthumously staged L'Africaine (libretto by Scribe). The author of all of these, Eugne Scribe, was the most phenomenally productive librettist of his time, writing (with the help of various collaborators) a huge number of librettos for many composers, including Auber, Boieldieu, Cherubini, Donizetti, Gounod, Halvy, Meyerbeer, Rossini, and Verdi. He was, in fact, a major force in the evolution of French grand opera. Imitators of Meyerbeer's successes naturally sprang up immediately. Later, numerous men totally unlike him stylisticallyincluding Berlioz, Wagner, and Verdiwere influenced unwittingly by his practices. The first of the imitators was Fromental Halvy, whose works included at least one grand opera that could almost be mistaken for Meyerbeer's: La Juive (The Jewess, 1835; libretto by Scribe). After the times of Meyerbeer and Halvy, grand opera began to respond to new musical and intellectual currents, evolving into a variety of mixed forms. Like most of Hector Berlioz's other compositions, his three operas stand apart from the mainstream of historical evolution. When first staged at the Paris Opra in the shadow of Robert le Diable and La Dame blanche, his first opera, Benvenuto Cellini (1838; libretto by Lon de Wailly and Auguste Barbier), was a complete failure. The second, the lighthearted Batrice et Bndict (his own libretto, based upon Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing), finally was given its premiere at Baden-Baden in 1862 by Franz Liszt. And Berlioz's masterpiece, Les Troyens (his own libretto), is based on Virgil's Aeneid and divided into La Prise de Troie (The Capture of Troy), two acts, and Les Troyens Carthage (The Trojans at Carthage), three acts. It was not performed complete during his lifetime: he heard only the second part as staged in Paris in 1863. Mid-20th-century complete (or very nearly complete) performances of Les Troyens, notably in London, showed it to be a great, noble, idiosyncratic work not without traces of grand opera, but in seriousness and scope much closer to the Wagner of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Berlioz's operas, like his other music, are distinguished by the individual arch of his melody, his revolutionary orchestration, and the dramatic thrust of the whole. Even more popular than Auber as a purveyor of light operatic comedy was Jacques Offenbach, a German migr to Paris who supplied the Second Empire and the early years of the Third Republic with a long series of very tuneful, witty, and satiric operettas of deliberate frivolity. Remembered among them are Orphe aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld, 1858; libretto by Hector Crmieux and Ludovic Halvy), La Belle Hlne (Beautiful Helen, 1864; libretto by Henri Meilhac and Halvy), Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard, 1866; libretto by Meilhac and Halvy), La Vie Parisienne (Parisian Life, 1866; libretto by Meilhac and Halvy), La Grande-Duchesse de Grolstein (1867; libretto by Meilhac and Halvy), and La Prichole (1868; libretto by Meilhac and Halvy). Left incomplete at Offenbach's death was his major serious opera, Les Contes d'Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann; libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carr, after their play of the same name based on tales by the German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann). Recitatives replacing the original dialogue were provided by Ernst Guiraud, and the opera was staged posthumously in 1881. This fantasy involving supernatural interventions rapidly became a worldwide favourite. German Romantic opera , part philosophical, part literary, part aesthetic, made one of its first appearances, and certainly its earliest overt appearance, in opera, in three works composed between 1821 and 1826 by Carl Maria von Weber. Beginning with his masterpiece, Der Freischtz (The Freeshooter, 1821; libretto by Friedrich Kind), Weber successfully challenged the outdated dictatorship of Spontini at Berlin. For the Italian's stiff grandeurs he substituted, in singspiel form, tender sentiment, grisly horrors, manly choruses, moral nicety, and music of extraordinary instrumental and vocal allure. Der Freischutz illustrates the German Romantic writers' love for dark forests, the echoes of hunters' horns, the threatening supernatural, the frustrations of pure young love. Its popularity in Germany and elsewhere was enormous. Weber smarted under the anti-Romantic criticism of Der Freischtz as a mere singspiel (a work with spoken dialogue) rather than a musically continuous opera. His next major composition, Euryanthe (1823; libretto by Helmina von Chzy), was something like a proto-grand opera and therefore contained no spoken dialogue. Almost since its premiere, writers have attacked the remarkable silliness (on paper) of its libretto, but most of them have never witnessed the work in performance and therefore cannot judge how the libretto works on stage with Weber's fine score. His last opera, Oberon, or The Elf King's Oath (1826; libretto, in English, by James Robinson Planch), returns to the singspiel form. Like Euryanthe, it has not held the stage, and again the libretto has been blamed. The overtures to all three of these operas are still played frequently, and whatever future opinion of the operas themselves may be, Der Freischtz opened the floodgates of musical Romanticism in Germany. Louis Spohr (17841859), a violinist, conductor, and composer of instrumental music, sounds pallidly Romantic if compared with Weber, but certain of his harmonic innovations taught something to Wagner, of whose early operas he was a defender. Heinrich August Marschner (17951861), more Romantic by nature than Spohr, borrowed sufficiently from Weber's style to serve as one bridge to Wagner. He displayed talent as orchestrator and melodist, and he applied his gifts to intensely Romantic and equally Teutonic librettos. The finest of his now unheard operas is Hans Heiling (1833; libretto by Eduard Devrient). The other German-language composers of opera active during the WeberSpohrMarschner period were less important. Albert Lortzing composed several operas that have been likened to genre painting. He travelled in the direction of operetta in his popular sentimental comedies, such as Zar und Zimmermann (Tsar and Carpenter, 1837; his own libretto) and Der Waffenschmied (The Armourer, 1846; his own libretto). The same direction was taken by Friedrich, Freiherr von Flotow, whose operetta-like Martha (1847; libretto by Friedrich Wilhelm Reise) continues to be performed frequently. This trend toward operetta as a less intense variety of Romanticism continued in Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (1849; libretto by Salomon Hermann Mosenthal, based on Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor), the major success of Otto Nicolai, and in the extremely popular works of Franz von Supp, a Dalmatian of Belgian ancestry. It culminated in operetta on the highest level of musical accomplishment in the masterworks of Johann Strauss the Younger. Many of Strauss's operettas are known now only by their overtures and waltzes, but one of them, Die Fledermaus (1874; libretto by Carl Haffner and Richard Gene), has never left the stage for long. Only the finest opras comiques and opras bouffes of Auber and Jacques Offenbach match Strauss's elegance, wit, humour, musical invention, and scrupulous workmanship.