On Jan 13, 2007, at 3:39 AM, Daniel Wolf wrote:
Italian Opera, and especially that of the mid to late 19th century was quite a different animal to that of late 18th century Vienna. But even then, while, most substantial cities and towns had opera houses, villages did not. The question of to whom a composer catered is inevitably connected to the increasingly commercial nature of the Opera, a factor of significantly less importance in imperial Vienna. But it is not simply a matter of catering to an audience other than the wealthy, as the mechanisms through which music extracted from operatic repertoire becomes widely known, and how or if a composer is compensated are rather subtle. The popularity of Verdi, in particular, also has a political component -- nationalism -- that is not directly paralleled in classical Vienna.
I think you'll find this political component is closely connected to the class component.
Several strands of this thread have bumped into the fact that discussing for whom it was written one can't treat "opera" as a uniform whole. As has been observed here, there are distinct differences in what role opera played in different eras and in different national cultures. It is also true that different trends in opera are closely associated with the different economic classes who were their audiences. This is most pronounced in 19th century Paris where two distinct mainstream classes of opera existed side-by- side -- the aristocratic grand opera and the bourgeois opera comique -- along with at least one thriving demimonde genre (the operetta of Offenbach and those like him). Notice also that significant changes in the history of French opera coincide almost exactly with the major political transformations in Paris (1830, 1871).
Although Verdi's popularity overflowed somewhat into all classes, Verdi's opera was inextricably linked with the Italian middle class, whose career it paralleled exactly. Italian nationalism was born from this middle class, and so does Verdi's work reflect that.
Traditional opera today is an antique art, at least in America. The typical opera fan wants to see and hear opera "as it was" (or so they think; in reality, operatic tradition is tied more directly to the Met of the 1940s and 1950s than to the eras in which the works were written). Contemporary opera is practically a separate genre, which until recently was dominated by orchestral-minded composers whose primary experience is not in theater nor even with voice.
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