Comic opera

“ Grand opera has its foundation not in nature, but in Meyerbeer's nature. It was born with Meyerbeer and died with him. Its decease is not universally admitted, and many people still imagine that what corresponds in music to the natural and eternal distinction of comedy and tragedy, whatever names one may give them, is the distinction between comic opera and grand opera. But that is an error. Grand opera is in no way musical tragedy; I allow that it more resembles tragedy than comedy, though it commonly contains a large comic element—an involuntary element, it is true. ”

“ This strange comic opera life down here seemed so empty, so little worth—sitting about and watching the dark-skinned servants—ten thousand years apart from her modernity; going with her cousin to dances, bridge parties and teas, helping to make and re-model the little girls' frocks; riding with one man and another; feeling, as all these exiled women did, the days slide useless out of her hands. ”

“ We would, moreover, be spared the absurdity of watching singers with beautiful voices make themselves ridiculous by clumsy actions. As to comic opera—the music's appeal would suffer no tarnish from the merely physical fascination of the star or the chorus ... I know the thought is radical; it seems impossible to imagine a piano recital without long hair, electric fingers, or visible melancholia; opera with only the box-holders as appeals to the eye seems too good to be true; but—I assure you it would emancipate music from all that now makes it the most vicious of the arts. ”

“ The decline of comic opera commenced with the ascendency of the English 'musical comedy.' There are, it is true, many works of the latter order that contain pages of music far better than what is to be found in many of the more strictly operatic works. ”

“ Important agencies in the popularizing of comic opera were the early performances of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, the brilliant seasons of French and Viennese opera at the Casino Theatre in New York, and the excellent services of the Bostonians in presenting ideally some of the most charming of the standard répertoire, besides revealing the merit of our native composers, in giving with success some of the first American comic operas to reach public hearing. ”

“ About the beginning of the eighteenth century a rival to the serious opera sprang up in Naples—the comic opera, the direct offspring of the people, and of lower artistic standing. But as the serious opera became more stately, more scientific, more purely formal, less human, less the expression of direct feeling, cultivated more for art’s sake solely, the comic opera throve on the very qualities that its elder sister rejected, till at length the greatest musicians of the day, Pergolesi, Cimarosa, Mozart, wrote their masterpieces for it. ”

“ For if we are ever to have a national English opera, we shall get it by writing English music, not by producing elaborate exercises in the manner of Wagner, Verdi, Massenet, Strauss, or anybody else. Most great artistic enterprises spring from humble sources, and our young lions need not be ashamed of producing a mere comic opera or two before attacking a full-fledged music-drama. ”

“ The idea that dramatic poetry should represent human nature in its naked reality, which had emanated from the encyclopedists, found its realisation in the drama of common life, and had considerable influence on the development of the comic opera.
The strict line of demarcation between opera seria and buffa did not exist in Paris. The effort to give more dramatic interest and freer scope to operatic music led to the portrayal of the deeper and noble emotions, and opera approached more and more nearly to serious comedy in plot, situations, and psychological intention. ”

“ The plays, too, while they may have been delightful to our Hellenic predecessors, would hardly draw a corporal's guard at the present time, when spectacular melodrama is all the rage, and the only chorus the average theatre-goer cares to see is the aggregation of pretty girls in entrancing tights, and with the utmost scantiness of clothes to hide their personal charms, who sing the concerted music in comic opera. ”

“ But since the old Casino days there has been no public in New York for comic opera and in that respect the fashion of New York has been followed by the rest of the country. No comic opera which has come before the public on its own merits and without the support of some such stimulus as the 'Soul Kiss' waltzes of the new Viennese school, has been able to win any measure of success. ”

“ Modern comic opera has adopted in a modified and refined form the chief characteristics—one of them the woman in tights and another of them the clown with his perfunctory low comedy—of the old-fashioned burlesque. ”

“ There is wit, criticism, and caricature;, but it does not cut deep, and it is neither hot nor fierce. There is some pleasant tom-foolery; but at a comic opera we enjoy this graceful nonsense. We see in every page the trace of a powerful mind ”

“ If there's anything in this world [Pg 506] that I hate more than another it is a sombre comic opera. I've been to a lot of 'em, and I give you my word of honor that next to a funeral a comic opera that lacks gaiety is one of the most depressing functions known to modern science. Some of 'em are enough to make an undertaker weep with jealous rage. ”

“ For them it is entertainment, and as such it is devastating. It is quite true that many a piquant comic opera shows more actual frivolity, and no one will underestimate the shady influence of such voluptuous vulgarities in their multicoloured stage setting. ”

“ Opera bouffe, light opera, operetta or comic opera, as you will, was in its hey-day. Musical comedy and the revue were yet unborn. In numbers and importance light opera ranked second only to the drama itself. Musically the United States had produced little of its own beyond Stephen Foster's negro songs, and we imported virtually all of our light operas from Austria, Germany and France, with the notable exception—Gilbert and Sullivan, who had just burst upon a delighted world. One McCaull company headed by Digby Bell was singing Gilbert and Sullivan and paying the authors' royalties ”

“ Don’t you think intelligent people are beginning to get just a trifle sick of burlesque, and spectacle, and sensation, and melodrama?’
‘Why, my dear sir,’ the manager answered promptly, ‘that’s the exact chance on which I’m calculating when I venture to accept your comic opera from an unknown beginner. It’s clever, there’s no denying that, and I hope the fact won’t be allowed to tell against it: but the music’s bright and lively ”

“ They have all kinds, from the gorgeous Italian opera down to the small and cheap affairs in which burlesque comic opera of the funniest, and melodrama of the most lurid character is performed, for the especial delectation of the lower classes.
The theaters devoted to the melodrama are of the most melodramatic kind. There can be no crime too horrible for representation, and the situations cannot be too intense, or the plot too complicated. French life, like French cooking, must have any quantity of pepper in it. ”

“ Now, when in a so-called Comic Opera your two principal low comedians have very little to do, say, or sing, and when that little is not of a particularly side-splitting character, and when the plot is not replete with comic situations, such a work must depend for its success on the freshness of its melodies, on the popularity of its artistes, and on the excellence of its mise-en-scène. ”

“ The spirit of the old romantic comedy had long since fled; the graceful artificialities of the pastoral drama, even the light texture of the mask, ill suited the demands of an age which made no secret to itself of the grossness of its sensuality. With a few unimportant exceptions, such poetic elements as admitted of being combined with the poetic drama were absorbed by the opera and the ballet. No new species of the comic drama formed itself, though towards the close of the period may be noticed the beginnings of modern English farce. ”

“ On the stage of the French comic opera, it has been adopted, and here also a similar change is required; but with the will to accomplish it, say its partisans, the means, perhaps, might still be wanting. The greater part of the old performers have lost their voice, and those who have not, do not appear to have sufficiently followed the progress of modern taste to be able all at once to embrace a new manner.
The first singer at the opera, in point of talent, is LAÏS. He even leaves all the others far behind him, if we consider him only as a singer. ”

“ I shall say very little about the ballad operas of England, which are no longer played, which led to nothing, and which do not interest me personally. The lowest style of Italian comic opera, again, has not only exercised no influence, but has never attained even a moderate amount of success in this country. Not so the Opéra Comique of France, if Auber is to be taken as its representative. But the author of the Muette de Portici, Gustave III., and Fra Diavolo, is not only the greatest dramatic composer France has produced, but one of the greatest dramatic composers of the century. ”

“ The unlimited number of theatres may be a proper subject for the interference of the government: but as to the liberty of the theatres, included in the number that may be fixed on to represent pieces of every description, such only excepted as may be hurtful to morals, seems to be a salutary and incontestable principle. This it is that, by disengaging the French comic opera from the narrow sphere to which it was confined, has, in a great measure, effected a musical revolution, at which all persons of taste must rejoice, by introducing on that stage the harmonic riches of Italy. ”

“ On the other hand, when the Florentine coterie created dramatic recitative, it was to use it in a drama wholly serious and poetic in purpose. It was not till some years later that recitative acquired sufficient flexibility to fit itself into the plan of the rapidly growing opera buffa. Yet even in this lyric species we discern something of the large influence of the humorous madrigal play, for in time the comic opera and the ballet spectacle both found homes after public opera houses had been thrown open to an eager public. ”

“ The overture is notable for being in genuine concert form,—the first instance of the kind in comic opera for many years past,—and thus naturally sets the pace, as it were, for the opera, and gives the clew to its musical contents. The most noticeable numbers in the first act are the Cellarer’s Toast, “The Cellar is dark and the Cellar is deep,” a rollicking song for Scarlet, Friar Tuck, and chorus; the charmingly melodious “Song of the Falcon,” “Let one who will go hunt the Deer,” for Maid Marian; the Sheriff’s song, “I am the Sheriff Mild and Good,” which is always popular ”

“ In our general survey of opera in America we have touched on the comic opera activities which went on more or less in association with grand opera, and it only remains for us to refer briefly to the activities of such companies as devoted themselves exclusively to the lighter form of entertainment. The first of these, of course, were the French companies from New Orleans who familiarized the country with Pergolesi, Rousseau, Piccini, Cimarosa, Méhul, Grétry, Dalayrac, Boieldieu, Auber, and other masters of the light opera. ”

“ The majority of young men and maidens love comic opera, which seems, indeed, to be one of the paying "lines" in the London of to-day. Music-halls flourish; it is an eloquent sign of the times that the large and ornate "Palace Theatre,"—opened, with such a flourish of trumpets, a few years ago as the "New English Opera House," and known far and wide by its flashes of brilliant search-light,—should now have descended to a "variety" show. The great middle-class supports Shakespeare and the "legitimate" drama; shop-girls, and dressmakers' apprentices, like the "society" plays of the St. ”

“ That laughter has for its proper excitant men and their doings, at once suggests that only those arts which represent human ideas and actions on a large scale have a considerable field for the exhibition of the ludicrous. Architecture, apart from sculpture, is heavily handicapped here. Music, as the expressive art par excellence, has a certain though narrowly limited range of effect, as may be seen in the characteristic rhythms, such as combinations of light staccato with deep-pitched notes, incompleted phrases and so forth, which do duty in comic opera. ”

“ Imagine an atmosphere of opera-bouffe in which all the comic business of stage statesmen, brigands, etc., etc., all their farcical stealing, intriguing, and stabbing is done in dead earnest. It is screamingly funny, the blood flows all the time, and the actors believe themselves to be influencing the fate of the universe. ”

“ The term—fast becoming obsolete—is French and purely conventional, and denotes a lyric drama in which spoken dialogue is excluded, and the business is carried on in melody or recitative throughout. It may contain any number of acts, any ballets or divertissements, but if spoken dialogue is introduced it becomes a 'comic' opera.
Grand opera, though till lately all but exclusively written for the French stage, has from its origin to the present time been contributed to by the musicians of every musical country but our own ”