This resulted in a flamboyant, grandiose production that entertained masses of people for centuries to come.įrench opera took some time to develop. Due to this influx of attention from many more people from a greater range of social classes, there was an effort to mix high tragedy with low comedy, so as to appeal to the majority of the audience. Generally, opera would have been only for those in the upper echelons of society, but with the opening of Teatro San Cassiano in Venice in 1637, opera became a means of entertainment for the general public. This ultimately led to the development of different styles of arias such as the Da Capo aria to keep the audience entertained. However, as time went on, particularly by the eighteenth century, arias began to dominate opera more and more. Initially, there was fairly even sharing between arias, recitative sections, and the occasional madrigal that was dropped in for a chorus section to sing. There was not nearly as much concern about text clarity with the Italians as there was with the French, because they valued talented singers who were able to show off their voices and impress the crowd over intelligibility of the text. Therefore, especially as opera grew, ornamentation became more and more necessary in an Italian opera and all the parts were given either to natural sopranos or castratos. The Italians were also infatuated with virtuosic singing and high voices. To do this effectively, there was often a use of speech-like rhythm and the basso continuo was very static, so that the voice would move in and out of dissonance with what was being played to help it feel more like speech rather than a song. Recitative, or “unheard” music, was used to set the scenes and move the action toward what would be an emotional high point in the aria that followed the section, so the recitative would be used to imitate impassioned speech of various kinds. These would become arias and recitative, respectively.
“Heard” music is music that is sung by a character and is perceived as music by the other characters while “unheard” music is the opposite. In this new style of sung, staged drama, there was an alternation between what was first regarded as “heard” and “unheard” music.
Early Italian opera was called favola in musica or a musical fable and started as early as 1600. Italian opera was by far the one that made the most progress, relatively speaking.
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