I was planning to do a history of musical theater (an honest one, rather than the nostalgia-blinded laments for a supposedly dead Broadway you generally get in published histories of the form). However, I realized that to start with the beginning of what we call the Broadway musical would be misleading: things ultimately not that different from our ‘musicals’ existed long before Broadway. As such, let’s look at the musicalized drama from the moment it first began to be a major force in art, in the realm of what we now call Opera.
Now, the classic Greek Tragedies were purportedly performed as music dramas when they were new, but since no actual music survives from that period and we can’t be absolutely sure how or even if they were really sung, we’ll pass over them for the purposes of this book. Instead, we’ll start at the point where dramas expressed in music returned to popularity, a popularity that they have maintained continuously in one form or another ever since.
There was a fashionable movement of musicians in Italy called the Camerata that started producing rudimentary opera-like compositions in the early 1600s after reaching the aforesaid conclusion about the Greeks, but they didn’t get much of lasting importance done until opera’s first Genius, Claudio Monteverdi, stepped in and essentially invented Opera. Granted, there were already “Operas” of a sort being written before Monteverdi stepped in, but his surviving Operas are pretty much the only ones that you have the slightest chance of ever seeing performed today, and his works are probably the earliest that a modern audience would recognize as “Opera” in the modern sense.
To illustrate that point, there was one other Camerata member, Jacopo Peri, who is technically credited with writing the “first” Opera. However that work, Dafne, is now permanently lost, and judging from Peri’s only surviving score (which is, like Monteverdi’s first Opera, a retelling of the Orpheus myth), his music was far less interesting than Monteverdi’s. It was essentially “Opera” that consisted entirely of declamatory recitative (think Debussy’s Pelleas and Melisande, but without the rich orchestral texture that actually makes that work interesting), so it’s not really surprising that this one surviving Opera is only performed or recorded on academic grounds today.
Amazingly enough, not only was Monteverdi one of the greatest opera composers of all time, but his operas were far more dramatically integrated than Opera would become for more than 200 years after his death. Of his two most important Operas, the first, Orfeo, does seem a bit dramatically primitive today…for all its gorgeous, haunting music, it’s structured in such a ritualistic and presentational manner that it does come off a bit stiff and stilted to modern audiences (albeit less so than most Baroque Operas). However, Monteverdi’s last opera, The Coronation of Poppea, is a piece of unified musical drama so far ahead of its time that it employs devices and techniques no-one else would think of for centuries. It features some of the most sensual and erotic music in all of the Classical canon, and even looks forward to Carmen in being completely unsentimental, without a single truly sympathetic figure. To demonstrate the sheer extent of this, the romantic leading man is the historical Emperor Nero (yes, that Nero…the one who purportedly fiddled while Rome burned and is the most commonly-nominated candidate for the identity of the Beast of Revelation)…and no, he is not portrayed in a particularly softened or sanitized manner.
The third of Monteverdi’s seminal works in the Operatic field a miniature proto-Chamber Opera called The Combat of Tancredi and Clorinda that was published as part of one of his collections of Madrigals. It tells the story of a European crusader and a Saracen warrior maiden who fall in love despite their warring sides. Sadly, they come face to face in battle, not recognizing one another due to their armor, and he ends up killing her before he finds out who he was fighting. Honestly, this work contains more real human emotion than either of Monteverdi’s other long-standing operatic masterpieces: as I said before, Orfeo is as much a presentational piece as a dramatic one, and Poppea focused on deliberately unsympathetic characters. This one, however, despite being less than a half-hour long, feels like a real human drama: even though more than half the vocals are sung by a narrator, even the narrator’s music bleeds with raw human feeling.
For years, all that remained of Monteverdi’s Operatic output was the aforementioned three works and a single set Aria from his otherwise lost Opera Arianna (which survived primarily because it became very popular outside of the Opera itself). But in the 20th Century, the long-lost score for an Opera called Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, based on the final chapters of Homer’s Odyssey, which, after a decades-long dispute about its true authorship, became accepted as authentic Monteverdi and became a minor staple of the Operatic repertory, if still nowhere near as popular as Orfeo or Poppea. Even by the standards of all-time classic literature, the story of Ulysses’ homecoming in the Odyssey seems to hold a strange fascination for Opera and Theatre composers (and clearly has since the beginning, as this show proves). Some might merely chalk it up to that particular story’s perennial emotional pull and archetypical significance, but my theory is that, since the work in its original form was meant to be a sung drama of sorts, that it stands as one of the very earliest precursors to the Operatic form, which would also go a long way in explaining the fascination. In any case, it certainly fits the Operatic form like a well-tailored glove, and is probably much easier to stage live than the Iliad or the more adventure-based sections of the Odyssey (not that this hasn’t deterred particularly adventurous composers from attempting either of those things).
Opera after Monteverdi’s death actually became a lot less interesting, at least for the next hundred years or so. Baroque opera basically came in two schools: the Italian, which emphasized big showcase arias over actual drama and was ruled far more by star singers than by composers, and the French, which had more dramatic unity but tended to be staid and conventional, and emphasized the librettos so much that most of it was musically earthbound.
The major form of the Italian school, generally dubbed Opera Seria, was codified into its signature format by Alessandro Scarlatti, the patriarch of a musical dynasty like the Bach family that is largely forgotten because it never produced a genius of lasting greatness like THE Bach. But judging from his surviving scores, Scarlatti’s actual music wasn’t really all that good…heard today, it seems sloppily orchestrated, melodically uninspired, and generally sounds like he was in a hurry to finish it, which might be why he too is generally now revived only for academic purposes.
The first real enduring superstar of the Italian school was Antonio Vivaldi, the first of Classical Music’s great speedwriters, and the direct precursor of such later composers as Rossini and Donizetti, who were also speedwriters who specialized in composing for star singers. Vivaldi is said to have written 91 Operas in his lifetime, although this number isn’t really substantiated by the available evidence. However, if he did achieve this feat, it was reportedly by the same means that he managed to write his 500-odd concertos…by reusing the same basic composition with very little variation that many times in a row. I can’t claim credit for that observation…it was Igor Stravinsky who first remarked that Vivaldi had written ‘the same concerto a hundred times’…but the lack of variety in his compositions is obvious to anyone who listens extensively to his work. This is why, while Vivaldi did produce a handful of important classical warhorses (The Four Seasons concertos, the Gloria, the L’Olimpiade Opera), anyone exploring his work in greater detail is likely to be rather disappointed.
In addition to his Operatic works, Vivaldi was responsible for creating one of the earliest examples of another format of musical storytelling, the Tone Poem, which tells a concrete story through instrumental music alone, with no vocals, lyrics or visual elements whatsoever. Vivaldi did not actually invent the form (it dates back at least as far as the Middle Ages), but his famous set of Concertos The Four Seasons are probably the oldest Tone Poems that are still a significant part of the Classical canon. Due to the absence of any inherent vocal or visual aspects, it could be debated whether the Tone Poem really falls under the heading of Musical Theater. Indeed, you could argue whether it should even fall under the purview of this book, if not for one fact: just about every Classical Tone Poem worth its salt has, at some point or another, been used as an accompaniment to a ballet, whether it was written with that purpose in mind or not, and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons concertos are no exception.
Meanwhile, the biggest names on the French side during that first hundred years were Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau. Lully, who was the undisputed king of French opera for a generation, has pretty much disappeared from the scene today. His librettos, essentially Classical dramas by high-class playwrights of the day, were fairly literate and intelligent by opera-libretto standards, but his very formal, dispassionate, recitative-heavy composing style (not to mention his penchant for long-winded, exaggerated prologue sequences heaping praise on his King and patron, Louis XIV), make him rather hard to get into for people weaned on Romantic Opera. About the only things of his that anyone performs today are the ‘Ballet-Plays’ (which resembled an early version of the Broadway Musical format) that he wrote with legendary French writer Moliere, and that seems more due to Moliere’s contributions than his.
Rameau, the later of the two, was something of an innovator; indeed, he might have wound up being the major operatic reformer of the day if his style had caught on more at the time. His work was far more musically sophisticated than most other French operas at the time, and had a dramatic cogency and immediacy not seen since Monteverdi. In some ways, he was more ahead of his time that the Operatic reformers that would come along after him—notably, he was the first to use the structural scheme of free-flowing arioso that occasionally expands into a formal aria. This structure would of course form the basis for Verdi’s Otello and Wagner’s Lohengrin and Der Meistersingers von Nurnburg, as well as the musicals of Claude-Michele Schonberg and Alain Boublil such as Les Miserables and Miss Saigon.
Probably the most enduring Operatic work of this era was Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, but it only further illustrates the problems with the form at the time. The work has remained enduringly popular due almost entirely to a single sublime number, Dido’s “Lament”, or “Farewell to Life”. This aria is indeed transcendent in its sheer beauty, but like such later Opera titles primarily known for a single number as Verdi’s Nabucco or Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, the actual Opera isn’t really all that interesting apart from its one “hit”. Indeed, the libretto sounds downright embarrassing today, and the remainder of the score, while pleasant and enjoyable, isn’t really important Classical music.
The biggest composer to write in the Italian school was George Frideric Handel, who was not actually an Italian at all but appropriated their language and idiom. It’s a pretty well-known fact that Handel was a composer of incomparable genius, but he was not the most cogent of musical dramatists, which is part of why his most enduring works are Oratorios…another kind of Musical Theatre in which the story is narrated rather than acted out…rather than Operas.
Really, the primary legacy of Baroque Musical Theater lies in Oratorios. The genesis of this genre arguably dates back far further than that of Opera…to St. Hildegarde of Bingen, 10th Century Abbess, alleged clairvoyant, and the only female to achieve the ranks of the top-flight Classical composers. Women were pretty strongly discouraged from becoming composers in the secular realm prior to the Twentieth Century…and for a decent chunk of that century, too…but of course in convents, there were no men on hand, and someone had to write the music for the church services, which is why nearly all the female “classical” composers whose work ever reached an audience were Nuns.
Hildegarde’s Ordo Virtutum, a morality play in music set to her trademark brand of composition (which can only be described as a kind of Medieval New Age Music) is the oldest Musical-Theatre piece for which we still have the music, predating Monteverdi’s Orfeo by almost 500 years, and serves as a fairly direct predecessor to the Oratorio model.
Handel would have immense success with this form after his Opera career dried up, most notably with the perennial classic The Messiah. The Messiah actually has a very similar concept to the modern musical Godspell…passages from the Gospels delivered as Musical Theater…but with infinitely better music and an approach that actually does justice to the dignity of the subject matter.
Handel is now mostly associated with The Messiah by the general public, but he actually had several other highly successful Oratorios. One of the most notable was Israel in Egypt, which is still easily the all-time finest musicalization of the Passover story, despite a number of later attempts. Its scene-painting techniques for illustrating the plagues are particularly dazzling, and unlike some modern adaptations, it has no illusions about the tone or content of the story…its most famous individual number is called “The Lord is a Man of War”.
It’s worth noting that both Handel and his half-forgotten then-archrival Giovanni Bononcini (now remembered, if at all, for two or three ‘hit’ arias from his Opera Griselda) were shameless about plagiarizing the works of others, to the point where it’s often hard to tell whether some of their surviving compositions were actually written by them. This is a thing worth remembering for those who accuse Andrew Lloyd Webber of plagiarism…even if the accusations that Webber deliberately copies other people’s tunes are true (which is, by the way, extremely doubtful), at least the vast majority of the material Webber is accused of “cribbing” is currently in the public domain. Handel and Bononcini deliberately plagiarized their own contemporaries, quite freely at that, and were not ashamed to use their wealth and fame to weasel out of the consequences (although Bononcini eventually had to flee his adopted country of England after his career went south and he could no longer use this tactic to avoid plagiarism charges). Handel even once replied, when called out on stealing another composer’s aria, “Yes, but it was far too good for him.”
Of course, the most important and groundbreaking composer of the Baroque era by far was Johann Sebastian Bach. Since all Western music is essentially based on Bach’s innovations, he definitely contributed indirectly to every score written after him, albeit in ways that are too complicated for the scope of this book. You know the saying that “All Western civilization is a footnote to Plato”? Well, all Western music is a footnote to Bach. Even the greatest composers who came after him…even, God help us, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner…still stand in the shadow of the greatest composer in all of human history, even if the full scope of Bach’s genius wasn’t really acknowledged until almost a hundred years after his death. Listening to his music is like looking directly into the sun…it’s a beauty so blindingly intense that you feel it might destroy you.
While Bach he wrote no Operas per se, he did compose two magnificent Oratorios, The Passion of St. Matthew and The Passion of St. John. Both showcase the perfect order and balance and almost blinding beauty found in virtually all of Bach’s compositions, but their ambition lifts them among his most acclaimed works. Indeed, the more famous of the two, the St. Matthew’s Passion, was one of the works most instrumental in Felix Mendelssohn’s efforts to exalt Bach from being seen as just another Classical composer to being enshrined as the Almighty God of Western Music.
The St. John’s Passion has always been quite a bit less popular, for reasons that have less to do with the quality of the music (Bach, alone among pretty much all composers in history, simply didn’t have off days), and more to do with the text to which it’s set. Bach apparently wrote this “libretto” himself (or more accurately, cobbled it together out of a plethora of essentially unrelated sources), and it turns out that for all his incomparable genius as a composer, Bach was not the most stellar of prose writers. The text leaves quite a bit to be desired…it is inconsistent in style, has none of the dramatic unity the St. Matthew’s Passion is famous for, and features some implied anti-Semitic leanings that may or may not have been intentional on Bach’s part, but that may well have had an effect on European (especially German) thinking on the subject that was…not exactly beneficial in the long run, shall we say.
The St. John’s Passion is also the first enduring Musical-Theater work with a modular score. There were no less than four separate editions of the piece revised by Bach during his lifetime, and it is simply not practicable to use the work’s entire body of material in a single performance, so modern productions tend to pick and choose their material from a selection of alternate individual set pieces (all of which, of course, are sublime, this being Bach, which is either fortunate or unfortunate, depending on your view). Granted, plenty of Operas and Oratorios were built like this in that era, many even shamelessly reusing arias from the composers’ earlier works, but scores without a definitive tunestack have become fairly rare in the modern day, and this may be the oldest work based on that model to still be regularly performed.
Bach also wrote a handful of smaller-scale Oratorios, of which the best known today in his Christmas Oratorio. While less ambitious than the composer’s two Passions, it still features the same wonderful music as every other Bach composition, and remains the only Christmas-themed theatre piece that could conceivably compete with Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker in terms of sheer greatness (I don’t by any means intend to denigrate Tchaikovsky by implying that one of his greatest masterpieces is only comparable to relatively minor Bach–that’s actually far better than the vast majority of composers throughout history would come off in that comparison). The Christmas Oratorio even subtly foreshadowed the format of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in that it was intended to be performed over multiple nights to commemorate specific holy days within the Christmas season.
Like pretty much all of Bach’s vocal music, these works were intended to be performed in a church rather than a theater like Handel’s Oratorios, but the structure of the form is essentially the same. In fact, both Passions deal with almost exactly the same subject matter and story as Handel’s Messiah, and both are structured far more like a typical Opera than that work, which consists mostly of choral narration. Indeed, given that the Church had the same attitude toward Opera that it had toward all forms of secular theatre (that it was morally suspect at best and a cesspit of sin and degeneracy at worst), the sacred Oratorio was basically used by the church as a more ‘wholesome’ alternative to the supposedly degenerate genre of Opera. This conveniently enabled the Church to exploit the undeniable power of the Operatic format without acknowledging they were compromising their principles, something they would continue to do until a particularly unfortunate papal decree around the turn of the Twentieth Century reversed the process….but that’s another story for another time.
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