There is, however, the possibility that Bach dipped his toe in these theatrical waters and recoiled – not from any kind of Lutheran prudery but simply because the music he heard there left him cold. While he might have admired and learnt from Keiser’s use of orchestral colour and rhetorical word-painting,j just as likely the short-breathed structure, the deficiencies in coherent tonal planning, the failure to sustain the musical argument, and the fudges and compromises to which opera is prone were likely to disenchant a musician of Bach’s seriousness of purpose.k As a result he chose to distance himself from a line of development that most composers of his generation seemed hell-bent on pursuing. The very particular training Bach had received to this point, with its concentrated Lutheran emphasis, meant that there was always a cleft separating his outlook, preoccupations and expectations from those of his peers, one that in time would open into a vast chasm as each stuck doggedly to his respective path.
So the bookmakers of 1703, noting an absence of declared operatic ambition, would automatically have expected Bach to be a back marker. Career prospects were less glittering without the social advancement that rubbing shoulders with those who patronised opera normally brought. But that does not imply that Bach was insulated from, or unaware of, the ‘stuff’ of opera in the state into which it had by then evolved, let alone reluctant in future to make use of such techniques within his own work whenever it suited his purposes. Friedrich Blume’s half-century-old conclusions are still valid today: ‘there remains the possibility that the youthful Bach may have absorbed influences here [at the Hamburg opera] that did not bear fruit until later in his life, an assumption that is all the more likely since from 1714 on Bach reveals himself in his cantatas as a dramatist of high rank, and also since he could scarcely have had any other opportunity between 1702 and 1714 to become familiar with the operatic world. In his cantatas it can be seen on many a page that this world was not foreign to him. Where else could he have gotten to know it if not from his Lüneburg period and from his trips to Hamburg?’12 We shall see shortly that Bach was to seize on a mutant type of opera that was to serve his purpose when composing the more dramatic of his church cantatas and Passions.
The rest of his peer group no doubt shared the underlying assumption, later voiced by Burney, that opera was now the dominant artistic form and Italian-style opera its only true and pure cultivar. Any composer of stature and with an interest in theatre will sooner or later therefore write an opera.l From this many music historians have concluded that opera in its first hundred years gradually got ‘better’. On the contrary, in the course of the seventeenth century, bleached of narrative coherence and with its initial energetic feeling for contrasts diminished, it actually faded. The immediate background to the emergence of the Class of ’85 is the feverishly creative development of a parallel alternative organism, one that we should not equate with opera, although it has many features in common with it. Four representatives of seventeenth-century musical genius, Monteverdi, Schütz, Charpentier and Purcell – each in a different country, each blessed with a vivid theatrical imagination, acute responsiveness to language and exceptional musical inventiveness – sought to control its flow and to find new outlets for it. The results of their work in giving dramatic life to poetic texts are to be found not only in the mainstream but in variant forms and tributaries: in oratorios, biblical dialogues and histoires sacrées, as well as in different kinds of secular music composed in ‘theatre style’ that was not necessarily intended for the operatic stage. So that when we say that opera was ‘in the air’ circa 1700, therefore, we can point to two broad manifestations: on the one hand, Italian-style opera as it had by then evolved, heading towards a Metastasian ideal of drama that depicted moral forces, with a poetic style adjusted to the vocal lines; on the other, instances of dramatic music in which a probing exploration of music’s capacity to encompass and to express powerful human emotions had already led to compositions of striking originality.m For a variety of reasons the latter did not require – or, in some cases, actively rejected – scenic representation in a conventional theatrical mould. The ’85ers were the first generation in a position to confront these two poles and to choose or seek a synthesis between them. The way we define opera circa 1700 may help us to throw light not just on the choices facing Bach and his brilliant peer group at the outset of their careers, but on the cultural milieu which demarcates the changing role of music in early-eighteenth-century society.
The path to that definition begins at some point in the second half of the sixteenth century with the emergence of an identifiable ‘spirit of music-drama’ – one, but only one, manifestation leading to what is commonly classified as opera. Convenient as it is to date the inception of the genre from 1600, and to narrow it down to ‘court opera’, it is salutary to remember that its pioneers never referred to their works as ‘opera’ at any stage, nor even as drammi per musica. Wholly caught up in exploring erudite techniques of what they called ‘speaking in melody’, they were not primarily concerned with consistency of musical means in expressing dramatic action. Indeed, that they could not come up with a single name for the new genre suggests a fair degree of uncertainty, or at least ambiguity, as to what it really was they were inventing or reinventing. We in turn should be wary about projecting on to their experimental works our latter-day notions of what might typically constitute opera – preposterous, expensive, and prone to diva tantrums and self-indulgence. It was not as if the Florentine Camerata were suddenly able to deliver ‘opera’ from the primordial soup: it needed an exceptional musician – a composer of genius – to make sense of this rich but sometimes crude miscellany of stylistic initiatives and to bind them together with a convincing dramatic thread. At the turn of the century there was not enough purely musical interest to hold the listener’s attention, nor sufficient invention to supply and shape the sung line to its text. Giulio Caccini blew his big opportunity in Il rapimento di Cefalo in 1600 by boring his Florentine audience with long stretches of unvaried recitative. No one had yet hit upon a coherent musical idiom that could ensure musical continuity and clear structural paragraphing.
Claudio Monteverdi, amazingly, provided all of these missing elements in his very first through-composed work for the stage, L’Orfeo, given at the Mantuan Court in 1607. He recognised that the hitherto unexploited potential of what the Florentines called the ‘new music’ was to allow the singer’s voice to fly free above an instrumental bass line, giving it just the right degree of harmonic support and ballast. Melodic shapes and rhythmic patterns no longer needed to be tethered by the guy-ropes of rigid polyphonic structure. Before L’Orfeo no one had grasped this potential freedom to manoeuvre or used it to plot expressive rises and falls for singers that encouraged spontaneous spurts of movement: to rush, drag or clash against the metrical beat and regular strummings of the plucked continuo instruments. It was with L’Orfeo that Monteverdi made the decisive creative leap – from a pastoral play, intended to be sung and not spoken throughout, to a musical-drama with emotions generated and intensified by music. Not only was speech treated dramatically, but the drama of sung speech now also approached the condition of music. By stealing the clothes of the Florentine Camerata, Monteverdi showed up the inadequacy of the original wearers. The radicalism of L’Orfeo may not be fully recognised by audiences even today. In an age when the emotional life of human beings was becoming a topic of the utmost fascination – with philosophers and playwrights trying to define the role of passions in human destiny, and with painters as varied as Velázquez, Caravaggio and Rembrandt all intent on portraying the inner life of men and women – Monteverdi stood head and shoulders above contemporary musicians in the consistent way he explored and developed musical themes of ‘imitation’ and ‘representation’. We now refer to L’Orfeo as an opera and think of it as the beginning of the genre; but that is because we are looking at it backwards via the perspective of Wagner or Verdi. To Monteverdi it was a favola in musica, a fable in music: the sur
prise for the contemporary listener was that ‘all the actors are to sing their parts’, as Carlo Magno wrote in 1607, revealing that he did not know quite how to describe the new style of recitar cantando.13 Indeed, Monteverdi was mapping out a new musical terrain with a fresh vision of music capable of pursuing a life of its own, one that would dominate composition for the next century and have an indirect but decisive bearing on Bach’s development.
Some unconscious inkling of the way the senses vary and clash in their receptivity to visual, aural and tactile stimuli may have been at the root of the anxiety that churchmen on both sides of the denominational divide in 1600 felt about religion borrowing the clothes of secular theatre. They bridled at the infiltration of ‘operatic’ techniques within their walls and liturgy. Contemporary musicians found ways, as musicians invariably do, to skirt around these rigid functional categories and, magpie-fashion, to pick and steal just what attracted them, maintaining only the thinnest formal veneer for the sake of propriety, while choosing the frame, design and modes of expression. They selected, first, the appropriate affective response and then the musical shapes to describe it – and not the other way round. Monteverdi and Schütz might have reasoned that their audiences, whether in church or in the theatre, were similarly susceptible to the persuasive power of music to enhance and vivify narrative. When it came to story-telling, the Bible was a proven repository, rich enough to match any of the ancient secular myths or historical accounts of the past. From the moment that the listener accepts the inherently ludicrous notion that characters, whether biblical or historical, are in the habit of singing, rather than of speaking, their thoughts, there is, in a sense, little to choose between, say, a Cleopatra mourning the loss of Caesar’s love or a Mary Magdalene grieving at the sepulchre: both are ‘operatic’ characters with whom the listener can identify. It is not the physical space or auditorium, or the presence or absence of sets and costumes, which decides what does, or does not, truly qualify as ‘operatic’: the common denominator is music linked to a poetic text as a means for the transmission and expression of human emotion in a hundred different ways that can reach the listener’s heart.n
The least troubled in this regard were the Venetians. Even in the early spasms of economic decline and embattled by the Ottoman Turks, Venice was still the fulcrum of the arts in Italy. Proud of their mythical Republican image and cussed opposition, both political and theological, to Rome, Venetian citizens valued their basilica as a shrine in which state ceremonial music and an adroit deployment of choral groups – in antiphony, en échelon or in echo permutations – coexisted with the most rapt, intimate meditations in sound now stealing the voluptuous vocabulary of early opera. When Monteverdi put these styles side by side in his great Vespro della Beata Vergine (1610), he made the richest and most highly patterned mosaic in music hitherto composed – a veritable opera sacra in performance – demonstrating just how likely was the failure of any insistence by the Counter-Reformation on the formal separation of sacred and secular in terms of dramatic representation. It is significant that the first monodic sung dramas performed in Florence coincided in 1600 with the first surviving play set entirely to music: Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s sacred La rappresentazione di anima, e di corpo (Illustrations of Body and Soul), performed in the Oratorio del Crocifisso, Rome, in the presence of high-ranking clerics and nobles. If any of these amounted to ‘opera’ – albeit the first hesitant experiments in that direction, whether sacred or secular, we should resist the idea of a smooth teleological progress towards Mozart and beyond. For opera did not emerge organically as did other new musical forms such as the concerto or the symphony. What appeared in the years around 1600 was a tangled skein of disorderly threads. To achieve a future coherent identity these needed to be woven tightly enough to pass through the eye of a needle. That simply did not happen in any consistent way for several generations. It is therefore more instructive to treat music-drama (not to be confused with ‘opera’) as what Richard Dawkins calls a ‘replicator’, an organism that mutates through successive generations, sometimes with enough success to perpetuate the line and, at others, falling away as expendable and non-regenerative. This might help to explain the many false starts, spluttering initiatives, parallel genres and unpredictable re-appearances, often in improbable contexts, over the next hundred years. The seventeenth century is rich in the emergence of such experimental operatic offshoots, many of which burgeoned into the cultural habitat of our Class of ’85.
For its first half-century, then, music-drama coexisted in church and the milieu of secular courts. One of the early criticisms of sung drama, including of Monteverdi, was its inherent lack of naturalness – something he, for one, was determined to rectify, convinced that where spoken theatre might fail, music could bring the stiff figures of heroic tragedy to life. All through his career Monteverdi was devoted to moving the passions of his listeners, convinced that only by means of music could words be cuffed and bullied into prising open the door to the deepest realms of feeling. He was supreme in judging how and when to increase the emotional heat and to enhance the intensity of discourse by varied musical techniques. By the time Venice opened its doors to public opera in 1637, Monteverdi had ensured that the old world of the madrigal, in which he had served his apprenticeship, and the new world of opera had grown steadily closer. A comment of the time was that the ‘general public’ had learnt ‘to appreciate anything and everything represented in music’ – in other words, ‘why people sing’ even in the throes of passion.14 Where previously court audiences could learn to accept divinities, demigods or fictitious Arcadian personageso – or even biblical figures – breaking into song, now to a mercantile Venetian audience there was nothing incongruous about a pair of real lovers expressing their desire and pain of parting in song. This is what Monteverdi does with exemplary skill in the first scene for the two main lovers in L’incoronazione di Poppea (Act I, Scene iii). At this point not only had he totally mastered the Florentine ideal of recitar cantando, but he had learnt to vary the mixture by the strategic placement of little arias or duets in music that was responsive in its rhythmic suppleness to every single word. Remarkably he showed how the fluidity and seeming fragility of stretches of music-drama could be maintained at a time of increasing standardisation of form.
In this he was vastly influential. Take as an example the descending tetrachord which, through Monteverdi’s treatment of it, becomes from then on a comprehensive musical symbol for expressing grief, sorrow and regret.p Cavalli employs it to poignant effect for Cassandra in his Didone, as does Purcell in an even more famous lament sung by his Queen of Carthage. In due course Bach will use it for the opening chorus of his Weimar cantata BWV 12, Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, which in time will grow into the Crucifixus of the B minor Mass. Giovanni Rigatti, a singer and junior colleague of Monteverdi at St Mark’s, takes it as the basis of a psalm-setting, Nisi Dominus, and even puts a gloss on Monteverdi’s rubric about varying the tempo to suit the mood and affetto of the words.q But Monteverdi also knew when a song was called for – and there is no shortage of them in his final opera, L’incoronazione di Poppea – some catchy, almost like folksongs, some rhythmic canzonettas or ariette (a Venetian speciality that persisted right up to the time that Handel wrote his Agrippina there in 1708), and some more sensuous as in the Nero/Poppea love scenes. Therein lay a danger – of a formal separation between recitative and arias. As long as there was the masterly control of a Monteverdi – and to some extent that goes also for his successors Cavalli and Cesti, and for Domenico Mazzocchi in Rome – to bring pressure on the librettist to vary the poetic metre and ensure gradations in discourse through a fluid transition from expressive sung speech to song and back again, it could be averted. But even Monteverdi’s protégé Francesco Cavalli, with his keen ear for poetry and the varied affective mood of his Venetian operas, could not overcome the tedious regularity of the six-syllable verses on offer from his librettists. The moment that fascination with exploring t
he emotional reactions of the participants was allowed to dominate, the search for purely musical ways to convey the action was lost. A notable strength of Monteverdi and Cavalli (but one not shared by many of the next generation of composers) was to allow this affective reaction to fuse with and become the action, just as it would do in due course in many of Bach’s cantatas and Passions.
From the middle of the seventeenth century onwards, the Venetian theatres, without the limitless resources that the Barberini family were throwing at operatic productions in Rome at around the same time, bobbed up and down on the tide of free-market forces and the threat of incipient bankruptcy. Under the twin pressures of the demand by a paying public for novelty and constant innovation on the one hand, and the inflationary fees paid to the leading singers on the other, Venetian impresarios began to urge composers (who were normally paid half the fees of the singers – just a one-off sum as opposed to nightly pay-cheques) to extend both the number and the length of the arias they provided. Singers now travelled with ‘suitcase arias’ that they were expected to sing on their perambulations, regardless of the composer or the opera for which they had been hired. What earlier had been an exception – the momentary suspension of the narrative for the insertion of an arietta for a minor character or for a strophic aria – now became a commonplace. By 1680 the da capo aria was the dominant form; ten years later its hegemony was complete. The result was that dramma per musica developed into an increasingly two-paced affair. A damaging cleavage was opening up between the dull patter of recitative and the drama-sapping nonsense of da capo arias. Recitative became more and more perfunctory, its phrases increasingly and predictably grouped into tonally closed paragraphs mirroring the sectional articulation or shape of the poetry. It was now the principal means to propel the action forwards, but then, at the point where an aria was called for, things came to a juddering halt.
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 16
