18th Century Opera Seria: Aria, Recitative, and Affect
Opera Seria in the 18th Century
Aria and Recitative
Pietro Metastasio, libretto by Demetrio, 1734: The text for the aria begins here: while the dialogue above it is written in prose, the text of the aria is poetry (rhyme, verse etc.). The text of the aria is indented and set in a different, even larger type. The parts written in prose are then set to music as recitative by the composer, the poetic parts as arias.
Recitativo secco (Hasse, Ezio, 1730): The prose texts of the libretto are set to music as a recitative. The setting closely follows the text: the pitches follow the natural tone of voice, pauses between the elements of the movement, stressed syllables are placed on the heavier part of the bar, and the number of syllables determines the number. So, lines of different lengths, different than the symmetrical internal sections of arias. Harmonically, the recitativo secco leads to the key of the following aria.
Examples of arias:
- Aria Parlante: each syllable gets a note, often very fast and virtuoso, often in comic opera. (ex: Leonardo Leo)
- Aria Pathetica (ex: Händel, Rinaldo)
- Aria di Bravura (Bononcini, La Griselda, 1722)
- Da-capo Aria: Aria di mezzo carattere from Vivaldi, Il Giustino) at the same time example for the form of the Da capo aria: A-B (contrast)-A. The A part itself is structured in a and a’ (i.e. a varied), before and after the orchestral ritornello.
Baroque Opera as a Total Work of Art
Opera house, stage design, costumes, orchestra and stage machinery
Affect in Baroque Opera
In the Baroque era, the purpose of art was not to imitate nature, but to evoke emotions in the audience. Artists sought to provoke emotion in their audiences, and ordered the formal structure of their works based on eloquence and the tradition of rhetorical foundation (rhetoric was a discipline that was part of instruction and culture). The fundamental principle in the musical representation of the affections was imitation, that is, the association of movements characteristic of an affection with certain musical characteristics. However – as with madrigalisms – there is no common system for the analysis or handling of the affects. The musical representation could depend on the properties of the different factors:
- Tonality: the choice of a tonality could have certain affective qualities, which differed according to the treatises (for example, E minor, in some cases meant Affeminate and lachrymose, in others Reflection, in others Sweetness…).
- Modality: In addition to the qualities that distinguished the Greek modes in the Renaissance and early Baroque, the Major mode represents the joyful, the serious, the sublime, as opposed to the Minor mode which represents the sad, the tender.
- Rhythmic figures: for example, elongated notes express the serious and the pathetic. The long note/short note combination expresses solemnity.
- Intervals: for example, short intervals express laziness. Wide intervals express boldness.
- Tempo or character indications.
- Dances (according to rhythm and tempo): Sarabande expresses ambition. Menuet expresses moderate joy…
- Harmonic consonances or dissonances
Doctrine of the Affects (Affektenlehre)
The Doctrine of the Affects (Affektenlehre – established by German philosophers and theorists) was based on the ancient analogy between Music and Rhetoric, elaborated by means of “musical figures” in a peculiar way. The whole system of “topics” was conceived as a guide to invention, which facilitated the use of certain figures in relation to affect. One could recognize the main affect of a work by examining the type of rhetorical figures that characterize it. However, neither is it possible to assign a concrete or absolute affective significance to each rhetorical figure. Thus, as in the madrigalisms, the musical figures are ambiguous, for they could even have divergent meanings.
Monteverdi’s three main affections:
- Zoru (“ira”): hohe Stimme and erregt („concitato“).
- MäBignung („temperanza“): mittlere Stimme and GemáBigt („temperato“).
- Demut/Flehen (humilita ò supplicatione“): tiefe Stimme and weich (“mole”).
Monteverdi´s “stille coccitato”: (from: Combattimento di Tancredi et Clorinda, 1624, 8th madrigal book) the “excited” style for the word setting of “vendetta”/revenge: rapid syllabic setting in the singing voice, tremolo in the instruments (this becomes a topos over the centuries).
Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia universalis (1650). Source of affection and figure and one of the 2 most important writings on the knowledge of music in the 17th century.
Figure in Music
The term figure referred to a single musical character (also called a note) in the Middle Ages, which was later extended to whole groups of notes and characters. The term is often applied to sub-thematic elements that have little or no thematic substance. This includes i.a. typical patterns for accompanying voices (e.g. Alberti’s bass), which are sometimes also called accompaniment figures. One then also speaks of figure in counterpoint.