Tag Archives: Enlightenment

The Orpheus theme in opera

The Orpheus saga marked the birth of a new operatic genre and became a model for significant compositional reform. Raniero de Calzabigi, librettist for Christoph Willibald Gluck, stripped the myth to its essential narrative, discarding subplots and intrigues. This shift redirected opera from opera seria toward azione teatrale, emphasizing theatrical action and emotional immediacy. Gluck reflected this evolution by largely abandoning the elaborate arias and coloratura typical of opera seria, favoring instead simple melodies, choral passages, and accompanied recitatives. In 1774, Gluck substantially revised the work for its Paris debut–particularly the recitatives–infusing it with heightened drama and aligning it more closely with the tragédie lyrique tradition of French opera. Later, in 1791, Joseph Haydn’s final opera, L’anima del filosofo ossia Orfeo ed Euridice, offered a humanist interpretation of the myth. Here, Orpheus emerged as a philosophical figure, resonating with Enlightenment ideals.

Poster promoting Jacques Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers.

By the 19th century, interest in Orpheus-themed operas had waned, giving way to a broader exploration of the myth across other musical forms such as symphonies, cantatas, and operettas. As early as 1689, an Orpheus parody appeared, and by the late 18th and 19th centuries, additional satirical operettas followed. The most renowned of these is Jacques Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers (1858), which helped inaugurate the French operetta tradition. In the 20th century, opera composers rediscovered the Orpheus myth with renewed interest. Darius Milhaud’s Les Malheurs d’Orphée (1926), a deliberate break from grand Romantic opera, sets the myth in a pastoral landscape, portraying Orpheus as a humble farmer and miraculous healer who is tragically powerless to save his wife Eurydice from a mysterious illness. This evolving view of Orpheus–as an allegory for the artist–had gained prominence since the late 19th century and is echoed in Oskar Kokoschka and Ernst Křenek’s 1926 play Orpheus and Eurydice. Here, the myth becomes a metaphor not only for the struggle between the sexes–Eurydice, now allied with Hades, refuses to return to Orpheus and ultimately kills him to reclaim her autonomy–but also for the artist’s torment in striving to hold on to their creative muse.

This according to the entry on Orpheus by Britta Schilling-Wang in MGG Online.

A scene from Orpheus in der Unterwelt (based on the operetta by Jacques Offenbach) directed by Spymonkey, the U.K.’s leading company for physical comedy. In this version, Orpheus is a bored music teacher and his wife Eurydice is constantly annoyed by him.

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Filed under Dramatic arts, Literature, Opera, Reception

Rinaldo and the Enlightenment

The resounding success of the premiere of Händel’s Rinaldo, his first opera in England, was tempered by satirical and sarcastic criticism in The spectator, a weekly journal dedicated to combining wit with morality.

The spectacular scenery and costumes, textual weaknesses, and lack of logic were all points of criticism. Joseph Addison, measuring the performance by the standards of reason, truth, and naturalness, hardly found occasion to mention the music and excellent cast.

The main forum for these ideas of a new moral, social, and national function for opera was the London coffeehouse. Thus the Enlightenment, through the medium of opera, came to influence the thought of large groups and stimulated new social behavior and artistic standards.

This according to “Mit Rindern, Schafen und Spatzenschwärmen: Die Londoner Uraufführung der Oper Rinaldo von Händel” by Wilhelm Baethge (Das Orchester XLIII/11 [1995] 17-22; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 1995-14126).

Today is the 31oth anniversary of Rinaldo’s premiere! Below, the opera’s march remains one of its most popular excerpts.

BONUS: John Gay’s celebrated repurposing of the march for The beggar’s opera.

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Filed under Baroque era, Opera, Reception

Boccherini and embodiment

boccherini

Boccherini’s posthumous reputation has suffered because his works do not emphasize the structural coherence and teleology emblematic of 18th-century Classicism; but regarded through the lens of performance—the sensations and images involved in its bodily presentation—his works evoke those aspects of the era characterized by urgent, even volatile, inquiries into the nature of the self.

Contemporaneous theories of embodiment illuminate the heart of Boccherini’s oeuvre, the chamber music for strings, which presents sensibilité through repetitiveness, a hyperattention to details of dynamics and articulation, the grotesque and bizarre timbres and registral excesses, and Newtonian mechanistic philosophy through gestural enactments of rapidity and rigidity.

These works often distance and ironize the performer, particularly in regard to virtuosity. They thereby make a sophisticated contribution to the central Enlightenment tension between subjectivity and appearance so memorably articulated in Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien.

This according to “‘One says that one weeps, but one does not weep’: Sensibile, grotesque, and mechanical embodiments in Boccherini’s chamber music” by Elisabeth Le Guin (Journal of the American Musicological Society LV/2 [summer 2002] pp. 207–54).

Today is Boccherini’s 270th birthday! Below, a work cited by Le Guin as an example.

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Filed under Classic era