On Sun May 23, at SundayMay 23 12:29 PM, John Howell wrote:
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
This is probably going to be less that useless to Kim, but I wanted
to point out something interesting (to me, anyway) in your comments,
John. Your point about the music growing out of the story line is
even more reinforced by the use the of the verse in pre-WW2 musical
comedy. The verse was typically (though not always) rubato, and it is
WAY easier to accompany a rubato singer with a single instrument like
piano than with a full orchestra (such as it was. Except for the
largest theatres, orchestras were closer to combos than to
orchestras). The role of a verse in an American Songbook song was to
set up the chorus, kind of a transition between dialogue and full-out
singing. A typical changeover in those days might have been something
like this:
"Darling, what's wrong?" "Nothing, really. It's just that..." [start
the verse, rubato in semi-recitative, where he explains the
situation, ending with...] "...and that is why I say..." [now starts
the chorus, a tempo, bel canto, full orchestra, and the main point
that he is trying to get across].
Musicals like Oklahoma were trying even more to blur the line between
dialogue and song, with registers chosen to put some of the singing
in a similar area of the voice used in the dialogue, and the rhythms
used in a typical verse were speech rhythms rather than musical ones.
The ideas were more prosaic than poetic, too, so as to give an easier
transition to song. So roughly, if you have to say in a song, "I can
never get any of my shirts clean" you would put it in recitative,
whereas if you have to say, "Your eyes are as dark and exciting as
the night" you would put it in a soaring bel canto melody. And
everyone knows that great melodies sound better with more
instruments. A lighter (or piano alone) accompaniment to a rubato
verse not only makes logistical sense, it makes a better transition
to full orchestra AND gives the audience's ears some much-needed
variety of texture.
Now, I know none of this was brand new to early Broadway. But I
suppose it made sense to keep a concept from operetta that worked.
Christopher
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