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[edit] Opera in English write-up
Opera in English describes operas set to libretti in the English language. This includes the majority of operas by British, American, Canadian and Australian composers, as well as works such as Oberon by the German Carl Maria von Weber and The Rake's Progress by the Russian Igor Stravinsky.
[edit] Origins
Incidental music to plays had been a fundamental part of the English dramatic tradition considerably before the Italian birth of opera. Moreoever, the Jacobean tradition of the French-inspired masque blended poetry, music and elaborate theatrical staging: much of the words used for these entertainments have survived, but the music, by composers such as Thomas Campion, William Lawes, and Henry Lawes, has for the most part been lost: in particular, little of Henry Lawes' music that John Milton praised so highly for his masque Comus has survived. Imitation of sung-through Italianate models, with sung recitative replacing spoken dialogue, seemingly makes an appearance in the lost music Nicholas Lanier composed for Ben Jonson's masque Lovers Made Men: Jonson described the masque as "sung after the Italian model, stilo recitativo."
In 1639 Sir William Davenant procured a license to build a theatre for "musick, musical presentations, dancing, or any other the like". Had this been built, it would have been the first public opera house outside Italy. Possibly due to the approaching Civil War, Davenant did not carry out his intention to construct this theatre. After the war, during which William Lawes was killed, the approach of the English Commonwealth closed theatres and halted any developments that may have led to the establishment of English opera. However, in 1656, Davenant produced The Siege of Rhodes. Since his theatre was not licensed to produce drama, he asked several of the leading composers (Lawes, Cooke, Locke, Coleman and Hudson: the first three responsible for the vocal music, the latter two for the instrumental) to set sections of it to music. This success was followed by The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658) and The History of Sir Francis Drake (1659). These pieces were encouraged by Oliver Cromwell because they were critical of Spain.
With the English Restoration, foreign (especially French) musicians were welcomed back. In 1673, Thomas Shadwell's Psyche was produced, patterned on the 1671 comédie-ballet of the same name produced by Molière and Jean-Baptiste Lully. William Davenant produced The Tempest in the same year, which was the first Shakespeare play to be set to music (composed by Locke and Johnson). It is though possible that Cavalli's Erismena was staged in London in 1674, and Lully's Cadmus was certainly performed in 1686. A full-blown English-language tragédie lyrique, Albion and Albanius, set to a libretto by Dryden, was written by French-trained composer Louis Grabu in 1685. The French influence on English music at this time can be traced to the enthusiasm of Charles II for the court opera that entertained him during his exile in France.
[edit] Purcell
Further development of English-language opera arrived with the maturity of Henry Purcell and his older friend John Blow. Blow wrote a pastoral opera-in-minature, Venus and Adonis, often named as the first English opera that has survived to the present day. This work was an important stylistic influence for the only genuine opera that the younger Purcell ever composed, Dido and Aeneas: both works are marked by the complete absence of the spoken dialogue of the English tradition in favour of continental-style recitative. Purcell, in particular, blended elements of the French and Italian operatic models of this time in Dido: his repeated use of the pattern of ariette-chorus-dance derives from French traditions, and self-contained arias come from the Italian models.
Despite this, however, the bulk of Purcell's work was given over to the more commercial format of semi-opera, where the bulk of the dialogue was spoken, not sung, and the acts of the drama in question were interspersed with musical scenes, or masques. This practice is particularly notable in The Fairy-Queen, where Purcell did not set a single word of Shakespeare's original text: King Arthur, set to a libretto by Purcell's friend and collaborator John Dryden, moved closer to genuine opera: at the time it was labelled a "dramatick opera". Purcell's early death in 1695 left a major vacuum in the development of English-language opera.
[edit] The 18th century
In England, Purcell's death left a colossal void that was quickly filled by the arrival of Italian-language opera seria. The enormous success of operas such as Bononcini's Camilla and Handel's Rinaldo, coupled with the entrance of immensely skilled foreign performers such as the castrato Nicolini, meant that serious English-language opera was largely buried under the popularity of the opera seria and of composers such as Handel, Bononcini and Ariosti. Works such as Eccles's Semele lay unperformed, while Thomas Clayton's Rosamund failed.
This is not a universal picture. Handel was, at various times in his career, was tempted by the vision of serious English-language opera along Italian lines, and his Acis and Galatea represents a step in that direction. Yet this remained an undeveloped trend, and successful English-language opera remained largely restricted, throughout the 18th-century, to the field of comedy. The colossal success of The Beggar's Opera, with a libretto written by John Gay and ballads arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch, set the tone for other works such as John Frederick Lampe's The Dragon of Wantley. Over 100 ballad operas were performed in the ten years after The Beggar's Opera, and comedy of all types flourished, from Thomas Arne's Thomas and Sally and Love in a Village, to William Shield's Rosina (now recorded), and the works of Samuel Arnold and Stephen Storace.
[edit] The 19th century
For most of the 19th century Great Britain's operatic activity was dominated by Italian opera. Attempts to permanently establish opera in English proved almost uniformly abortive, certainly as far as serious opera is concerned. Irishman Michael Balfe made a genuine attempt to buck the trend: this most successful of 19th-century English opera composers scored a Europe-wide hit with The Bohemian Girl; even Balfe, however, used Italian-style opera as a basic model. John Barnett made a serious attempt to follow in the footsteps of Weber with his opera The Mountain Sylph (1834), the first through-composed (i.e. completely sung) English opera of the 19th century, which was a major success in its time in England (and was later parodied by Gilbert and Sullivan in Iolanthe).
Despite the fact that opera could be heard in London in at least 6 different theatres, such isolated events as Sullivan's Ivanhoe inaugurating the Royal English Opera House (which soon closed, partially due to the lack of another opera to follow Ivanhoe), and around 200 initial performances of English-language operas, the lack of stellar talent meant that the story of 19th-century opera in English is one of near-universal gloom.
The exceptions, of course, are the Savoy Operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. In direct competition with French operetta, Gilbert's witty libretti, combined with Sullivan's subtle yet light-hearted music, resulted in a combination that was at the time, and remains to this day, extraordinarily popular. Sullivan raised English-language operetta to new heights, but his more serious works, both operatic and non-operatic, have remained neglected for much of the century following his death.
[edit] The early 20th century: Britain and America
[edit] Britten and after
[edit] America
[edit] Canada
[edit] Australia
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