GAUDIGUAD

Opera Order

When the Opera buffa "Serva padrona" by the Italian composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710 to 1736) was performed in Paris in 1752, the so-called Buffonist dispute broke out from 1752 to 1754, in which the party loyal to the king "Coin de Roi" and the party loyal to the queen "Coin de la Reine" fought over the predominance of the now musically, more closely harmonically all too complex French opera and the introduction of the musically simpler and therefore more entertaining and fashionable Italian opera. The latter party also included the French poet and composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 to 1778), who believed that the Italian language was better suited for opera than the French because it was "gentle, sonorous, harmonious and well accentuated". When the dispute became politically dangerous, it ended in 1754 with the expulsion of the Italian opera company from France. It was not until 1801 that the "Italian Théâtre" was founded as a venue for the Opera buffa.

The Opera buffa, which in Italy was first called Dramma giocoso per musica, in English "cheerful drama for music", had been separated from the Opera seria, which processed serious subjects according to the Italian adjective "seria", but also often comical characters which were then completely absorbed in the Opera buffa. Opera seria then became another name for the Italian Dramma per musica, which can be translated literally into English as "drama for music", or "music theater" for short. Since the 1720s this has been strictly structured by the famous Neapolitan librettist Pietro Metastasio (1698 to 1782), who was later also very successful in Vienna. But in his treatise "Saggio sopra l'opera in musica" from 1755 Francesco Algarotti (1712 to 1764) criticized Metastasio's musical concept as unsuitable in a number of numbers. For example, he found that the solo songs, which were all too virtuoso with many decorations, served more to show off the singers than to represent good music.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Grand Opéra developed in France, which now consisted of up to five acts, an opulent plot and music, was thoroughly composed, that is, sounded continuously and no longer had any individual musical numbers, by an army of musicians and singers and choirs with a playing time of more than three hours in some cases and treated and represented fabulous subjects in a fabulous manner.