It’s a new term and we’re embarking on a serious project, to examine the relation of opera and the comic. It’s not a topic often discussed, and great comic operas have been few and very far between. Comedy in all arts often has lower status than serious or tragic works, even if the latter prove less lucrative. Some operatic comedies are excruciating, others unevenly funny. Arguably, they date more dramatically than tragedies, and modernizing adaptions can expose their follies. But when it’s good, comedy in opera is very, very good. So that’s our focus: what does opera offer to comedy – and vice versa?
We’ll tackle the topic in several ways, usually comparing operas or aspects of operas, or comic moments. Asked to nominate the most comic moments in opera, buffo buffs divide. ROH offered a selection in a blog titled Laughing out Loud, which grew to a second part. Those selections raise one issue we’ll pursue – comic moments can highlight tragedy, and ‘comic opera’ can have serious purpose.
You won’t need to study the history – but it’s intriguing, so here are a few sources. Emergence of the term ‘comic’ in opera isn’t about laughter – more about who’s being laughed at. Opéra comique is a term appearing in France early in the eighteenth century, and by the Revolution it’s associated with operas using spoken dialogue, which didn’t even have to be funny. (Carmen is classified as an opéra comique.) Opera buffa appears in Italy first half of the eighteenth century, and it’s associated not so much with wit as with plots about common people using local dialects. The castrati are gone, and the male voice is celebrated in patter songs for a basso buffo (we’ll get to those later.) As Wikipedia remarks, in opera buffa, “The type of comedy could vary, and the range was great: from Rossini's The Barber of Seville in 1816 which was purely comedic, to Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro in 1786 which added drama and pathos.”
Which brings us to the first of our explorations of laughter and opera, starting where we left off last term – with Figaro!
The comic stories around the figure of Figaro didn’t originate in opera – Beaumarchais wrote him into a trilogy of plays, the first in 1775. Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro appeared in 1786. Then it’s 30 years until Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia1816. We’ve looked at both operas in past meetings but now, in our first meeting of the term, we’ll compare their crafting of comedy in opera from the same literary sources. When is it funny, and why?
(Want some background? Here are links on the composers and the operas from our past sessions: on Mozart and The Marriage of Figaro, on Rossini and The Barber of Seville.)
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