At 1:24 AM -0400 5/23/10, Kim Patrick Clow wrote:
Good day:
Some friends were asking me when did keyboard recitative stop in
opera? Although I'm not all that familiar with the romantic period, I
offered as a suggestion that they ended with Rossini? I've seen Norma
in a live performance, and the recitatives seemed to be completely
orchestrated. I suggested to my friends, that the demise of keyboard
recitative was due to several factors, including the larger opera
houses, and louder instruments that were used in romantic period
orchestras (plus the larger orchestras too). Could anyone else throw
some light on this?
Hi, Kim. I can't pinpoint anything, but I can point out some trends.
First, you're actually talking about two related
but different things: (1) the use of keyboard
continuo, and (2) the use of recitativo secco.
The terminus ante quem for continuo might be
taken to be the Brahms Requiem, which believe it
or not includes a non-notated basso continuo line
for organ, at least in the Kalmus reprint of the
score.
For secco recit, it was more a process than it
was any kind of cutoff date. We have to remember
several things: (a) the recit was what kept the
story line moving forward in 17th and 18th
century opera, while the arias stopped the action
cold while the characters told us how they felt
about it (much like the spoken dialog followed by
the tunes in 20th century musical comedy); (b)
recitativo accompanato was already in use by the
late 17th century, and actually it can be seen
even earlier in Monteverdi's Madrigals of Love
and War of the 1640s.
But the turning point, looking back with 20-20
hindsight, might have been the operatic reforms
proposed by Gluck in the late 18th century, one
of which was to have the music grow out of the
story line rather than having it dropped into the
story, again, a process that was repeated in the
transition from musical comedy to musical theater
in the 1940s, beginning with "Oklahoma!" Gluck's
ideas, put into practice by later generations,
led to more and more continuous music into which
quasi-recitativo could be incorporated but with
more elaborate accompaniment. And Rossini's
"invention" of French Grand Opera with "Guillaume
Tell" in 1829 may have pushed THAT development
past what von Weber had done and toward Wagner's
concept of continuous and never-ending music.
Now I'm not an opera buff or expert, so I don't
know the extent to which recitativo was important
in Verdi's works, but I do know that by Puccini's
time he was incorporating his recitativo right
into his arias while his orchestra kept playing
his beautiful melodies in the background.
And DO NOT forget the incredible force of
tradition, ESPECIALLY in a field like opera in
which tradition is almost worshiped! Yes, opera
houses got larger, but they simply started using
pianos and phased out the harpsichords. And yes,
orchestras got larger, but that would argue for
dropping continuo accompaniment, NOT for dropping
recitativo when that large orchestra was not
playing. No, my guess is that it was a slow but
natural evolution driven by stylistic changes,
which in turn were driven by changes in the
dramatic concepts of what opera actually was and
how it could best present the drama. And the
French Revolution--or rather the series of
revolutions that focused the arts on the common
man and woman for the first time--certainly
helped move things along. And of course at
L'Opéra comíque in Paris the style always HAD
been to use spoken dialog to move the story
forward, again like musical comedy, rather than
to have everything sung as it was in Italian
opera, which made recitativo actually unnecessary.
All the best,
John
--
John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[email protected])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
"We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition
of jazz musicians.
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