Prima le Parole, Dopo la Musica | Katarzyna Szyszka

Prima le Parole, Dopo la Musica

Have you ever been to an opera and wondered: why is this so weird? The tenor main character goes out onto the stage and half-singing-half-declaiming hurriedly explains the events of the last or next 15 minutes. He then bursts into a longish aria, where he repeats the same three phrases over and over again. He leaves, and the soprano heroine goes out to do the exact same thing. Suddenly, her alto bestie appears and they repeat the whole spiel together. The bass villain emerges and… you guessed it, he gives us another rushed plot summary followed by an aria with his evil monologue of five lines. The main hero catches up with everyone, and the crazy cycle continues. What is going on here?

Not surprisingly, to answer that, we need to go back to the moment when the musical genre of opera was born – or even a bit earlier. In mediaeval times, music, just like other forms of art, was generally austere and subordinate to its higher religious purpose. Or, in the case of songs performed by French troubadours, to its lower recreational purposes.

However, with time, both musical varieties began to evolve in a similar way, with composers gradually making the melody more complex, and, crucially, adding new melody lines with new lyrics to the existing one. The result was the rise of new musical genres, and among the hottest ones were the motet and the madrigal. The first one evolved from the church chorales, and the second from the ludic chansons, but they were both highly polyphonic, which is a fancy word for saying that they had multiple equally important melody lines, or “voices”.

The upside of this development was that the music became more intricate and interesting. The downside was that no one could understand anything. Some extreme examples of motets included the lyrics to different melody lines written in different languages and taken from different art frameworks – for instance, one line could be based on a psalm verse, while another cited a piquant French love song (it is entirely possible that the former practice was rather useful to conceal the latter). The Renaissance audience had a hard time following the substance of the polyphonic music even in its milder forms, and at some point the need for simplification prevailed over the appreciation of the form artistry. Enter the Florentine Camerata.

Also known as the Camerata de’ Bardi, the group gathered notable humanist thinkers and artists residing in Florence in the late 16th century. Their common ground, aside from Count Giovanni de’ Bardi’s patronage, was the idea of reviving ancient Greeks’ artistic style, especially in drama and music. This ambition was additionally fuelled by their dislike for the music of their times which they found contrived and unintelligible. The goal was to go back to the good ol’ days and recreate the music that was performed in Greek theatres. But how did they know what ancient music sounded like?

Well, they didn’t. Their best guess was strongly influenced by the works of Girolami Mei, a scholar studying ancient Greece, whose best guess was that the Greek dramas were mostly sung, not recited, and that the music was a single melody line with simple instrumental accompaniment. How refreshing! How different from that modern overcomplicated noise that the composers nowadays call “music”! What a coincidence!

The group promoted their idea of reviving the classics in a new guise, which they called stile recitativo. As the name suggests, it was a style of singing which resembled reciting. That was achieved by creating a very simple melody line, based on just a couple of pitches, with long phrases of a single pitch being repeated. A singer’s voice was complemented by a rudimentary instrumental backdrop of single chords played sporadically on harpsichord or cello. Beginning to sound familiar?

The pieces composed in this style by the Florentine Camerata artists were called “monodies” (as in, singlevoice melodies), and although they realised the group’s founding principles, they were clearly not enough to satisfy the musicians’ appetites on their own. Soon, Jacopo Peri composed the first full-scale musical piece entirely in stile recitativo. Following the ancient angle, the subject was obligatorily mythological – Dafne, Apollo’s nymph. And because it was a collection of many short monodies, each of them a separate artwork, opus in Italian, it was simply called “works”, the plural form of opus – opera.

But right from the start, it turned out that long half-recited pieces were not as attractive as it seemed to the Camerata members – not to the composers, who wanted their work to feel somewhat more challenging, not to the singers, eager to show off their vocal skills, and certainly not to the audience (just imagine sitting through two hours of just the plot summaries, trying to follow them and not fall asleep at the same time). Quickly, a different kind of vocal genre began to evolve from the recitatives – an aria. Pleasantly melodious, expressive, and demanding performance-wise, it turned out to be a home run. However, the Camerata were anxious. What if arias just developed back into the form-over-substance kind of issue?

Peri was the one to meet everyone halfway – admittedly, not alone, but each big shift story needs its hero. After Dafne, which unfortunately got lost in the course of history, he composed another mythology-themed opera, Euridice (to be fair, Giulio Caccini put in his two cents too; a handful of his melodies were added to Peri’s work, and he actually worked on his own version of Euridice before Peri’s was performed, but got it staged only afterwards – it’s a whole different story). Half of the work was recitatives, which, although less interesting musically, moved the plot forward and explained the action to the non-attentive audience. The other half was arias, which sounded nicely and posed a challenge to the singers, but whose lyrics, often less comprehensible, were shorter, simpler, and more emotion-oriented than event-driven. Euridice is the world’s first surviving opera, it marked the beginning of a new era in the history of classical music, but most importantly – it worked.

To realise just how well it did, go back to the opera pattern I’ve described in the beginning. Since the 16th century, the genre has undergone a lot of improvements and alterations (thank God). It has been the subject of many modern reconceptualisations and experiments, and has contributed to other genres, like the musical or film scores. But the most famous operas you are likely to hear in an opera house are still firmly based on this original structure.

In case it hasn’t been clear so far, I love opera. Many people don’t, and I get it – it’s often long, unevenly paced and repetitive, and thus silly, irritating, or boring. But that’s par for the course, given the context of this genre’s emergence and what motivated it in the first place. I hope that once you have learnt a little about all that, you will see it in a different light – as something quirky, funny, disarming in its nonsense and absolutely unapologetic in being itself. As I do.