Information about British Opera

The history of opera in the English language commences in the 17th century.

Earliest examples

In England, opera's antecedent was the 17th century jig. This was an afterpiece which came at the end of a play. It was frequently libellous and scandalous and consisted in the main of dialogue set to music arranged from popular tunes. In this respect, jigs anticipate the ballad operas of the 18th century. At the same time, the French masque was gaining a firm hold at the English Court, with even more lavish splendour and highly realistic scenery than had been seen before. Inigo Jones became the quintessential designer of these productions, and this style was to dominate the English stage for three centuries. These masques contained songs and dances. In Ben Jonson's Lovers Made Men (1617), "the whole masque was sung after the Italian manner, stilo recitativo".

Purcell and his contemporaries

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, the dramatist Sir William Davenant produced The Siege of Rhodes. Since his theatre was not licensed to produce drama, he asked several of the leading composers (Henry Lawes, Cooke, Locke, Coleman and Hudson) 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, 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).

About 1683, John Blow composed Venus and Adonis, often thought of as the first true English-language opera. Blow's immediate successor was the better known Henry Purcell. Despite the success of his masterwork Dido and Aeneas (1689), in which the action is furthered by the use of Italian-style recitative, much of Purcell's best work was not involved in the composing of typical opera, but instead he usually worked within the constraints of the semi-opera format, where isolated scenes and masques are contained within the structure of a spoken play, such as Shakespeare in Purcell's The Fairy-Queen (1692) and Beaumont and Fletcher in The Prophetess (1690) and Bonduca (1696). The main characters of the play tend not to be involved in the musical scenes, which means that Purcell was rarely able to develop his characters through song. Despite these hindrances, his aim (and that of his collaborator John Dryden) was to establish serious opera in England, but these hopes ended with Purcell's early death at the age of 36.

18th and 19th centuries

Following Purcell, for many years Great Britain was essentially an outpost of Italianate opera. Handel's opera serias dominated the London operatic stages for decades, and even home-grown composers such as Thomas Arne and John Frederick Lampe wrote using Italian models. This situation continued throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, including in the work of Michael Balfe and William Vincent Wallace, and the operas of the great Italian composers, as well as those of Mozart, Beethoven and Meyerbeer, continued to dominate the musical stage in England.

The only exceptions during these centuries were ballad operas, such as John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), musical burlesques, European operettas, and late Victorian era light operas, notably the Savoy Operas of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, all of which types of musical entertainments frequently spoofed operatic conventions. John Barnett made a serious attempt to follow in the footsteps of Carl Maria von Weber with his opera The Mountain Sylph (1834), the first through-composed (i.e. completely sung) English opera, which was a major success in its time (and was later parodied by Gilbert and Sullivan in Iolanthe).

Sullivan wrote only one grand opera, Ivanhoe (following the efforts of a number of young English composers beginning about 1876), but he claimed that even his light operas were to be part of an "English" opera school, intended to supplant the French operettas (usually in bad translations) that had dominated the London stage throughout the 19th century into the 1870s. London's Daily Telegraph agreed. Sullivan produced a few light operas in the late 1880s and 1890s that were of a more serious nature than most of the G&S series, including The Yeomen of the Guard, Haddon Hall and The Beauty Stone, but Ivanhoe (which ran for 155 consecutive performances, using alternating casts -- a record then and now) survives as his only real grand opera.

20th century - today

In the 20th century, English opera began to assert more independence, with works of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Rutland Boughton and later Benjamin Britten, who, in a series of fine works that remain in standard repertory today, revealed an excellent flair for the dramatic and superb musicality. Other British composers writing well-received operas in the late 20th century include Richard Rodney Bennett (e.g. The Mines of Sulphur), Harrison Birtwhistle (Punch and Judy), Peter Maxwell Davies (Taverner) and Oliver Knussen (Where the Wild Things Are). Today composers such as Thomas Adès continue to export English opera abroad.

Also in the 20th century, American composers like Gershwin, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Carlisle Floyd began to contribute English-language operas infused with touches of popular musical styles. They were followed by modernists like Philip Glass, Mark Adamo, John Coolidge Adams, and Jake Heggie. Moreover non-native-English speaking composers have occasionally set English libretti (e.g. Hans Werner Henze, We Come to the River).

Audio link

References

• The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, edited by Stanley Sadie (1992), 5,448 pages, is the best, and by far the largest, general reference in the English language. ISBN 0-333-73432-7 and ISBN 1-56159-228-5
• The Viking Opera Guide (1994), 1,328 pages, ISBN 0-670-81292-7
• The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera, ed. Roger Parker (1994)
• "Purcell, Henry" in Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition, 1986. ISBN 0-85229-434-4.
• Orrey, Leslie and Rodney Milne. Opera: A Concise History, World of Art, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 0-500-20217-6.
• Basil Walsh's extensive site on the life and work of Michael W. Balfe
• Ainger, Michael (2002). Gilbert and Sullivan, a Dual Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
• Donald Mitchell, "Britten, (Edward) Benjamin, Baron Britten (1913–1976)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. Accessed 18 October 2004: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30853