Teacher's Guide Cambridge Pre-U MUSIC Available for teaching ...

24
Cambridge Pre-U Teacher Guide
Verdi’s last two operas, Otello (1887) and the comic opera Falstaff (1893) were both written for La
Scala, Milan, to libretti (based on Shakespeare) by Boito. They sum up all the achievements of Verdi’s
long career, with a developed sense of musical continuity, subtle characterisation of the protagonists,
a flexible and sophisticated harmonic language and sumptuous orchestration. Verdi wrote no
treatises on the theory of opera, unlike his German contemporary, Wagner, but in very different
ways he achieved a similar sense of the interdependence of words and music through a process of
continuous evolution from the works of his Italian predecessors.
At the end of the nineteenth century a vogue developed in Italy for operas based on the naturalistic
literature of Emile Zola and Giovanni Verga, that has come to be known as verismo. These operas
usually had a contemporary setting, and typically explored violent situations. The principal
composers concerned in this movement were Mascagni (Cavalleria rusticana, 1888), Leoncavallo
(Pagliacci, 1892; La bohème, 1897) and especially Puccini (Manon Lescaut, Turin 1893; La bohème,
Turin, 1896; Tosca, Rome, 1900). Puccini’s later operas, produced between 1904 and 1926, fall outside
the scope of this topic – including the one-act Il tabarro, which is a perfect example of the verismo
ideal.
(c) Germany and Austria
Weber, Wagner, Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss
Germany was the country in which the first truly romantic operas were written, and where the ideals
of the Romantic movement reached their fullest expression. The origins of German romantic opera
can be traced back to Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte – a Singspiel (i.e. a musical drama in German, with
spoken dialogue rather than recitative), in which the story is a kind of fairy tale laden with symbolism
and many of the characters represent the forces of good or evil. A second formative work was
Beethoven’s Fidelio, another Singspiel, an heroic story of love triumphing over injustice.
It was Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826), however, who firmly established the romantic thrust of
German opera, especially in Der Freischütz, which was composed relatively slowly between 1817
and 1820 and first performed in Berlin in 1821. During that time Weber had been working as director
of the opera house in Dresden, where he had set about establishing a permanent German opera
company (before this, permanent opera houses had been almost exclusively devoted to Italian opera).
Der Freischütz was a triumphant success and it set a pattern for German opera that was to be
followed for many years. It is a Singspiel with a quasi-historical plot and a naturalistic setting in the
Bohemian forest; there are important supernatural elements in the story, with ghostly apparitions and
invocations of the devil; the characters are embodiments of good and evil forces, but in the end it is
good that triumphs (it is therefore open to interpretation in almost religious terms); and the harmony,
thematic organisation and orchestration are essential to underlining the significance of the action.
Weber used particular harmonies (notably the diminished 7th chord), keys and themes as recurrent
ideas that foreshadow the Wagnerian technique of the Leitmotif. The dramatic centre of the work is
the scene in the Wolf’s Glen (the finale of Act II): this is a Melodrama – a scene in which the words
are spoken, rather than sung, over an orchestral accompaniment. 2 The Wolf’s Glen scene, with its
unprecedented dramatic force, was one of the most significant factors in the success (or even the
notoriety) of Der Freischütz.
2 The Melodrama had a distinguished history in Germany since the late 18th century, especially in works by Georg Benda
and several composers of the Mannheim school. There are examples in Mozart’s Zaide and Thamos, König in Ägypten, and a
particularly famous one in the dungeon scene of Beethoven’s Fidelio.
www.cie.org.uk/cambridgepreu