Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: The Oxford History of Western Music by Taruskin Richard

Author:Taruskin, Richard [Taruskin, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-06-24T01:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Enlightenment and Reform

THE OPERAS OF PICCINNI, GLUCK, AND MOZART

NOVELS SUNG ON STAGE

Throughout the eighteenth century, opera and its endless “reforms” continued to encode the social history of the age. That is why opera criticism so often makes good and exciting reading, even when the composers and the operas of which it treats have been long forgotten. Both by design and by its nature, it can mean far more than it says.

And again both by design and by its nature, the burgeoning comic opera continued to bear the heaviest freight of what is now called “subtext” (that is, the stuff you read between the lines) even as it continued to be “the best school for today’s composers,” in the words of the German musician Johann Adam Hiller (1728–1804), who reacted to it both as composer and as critic.1 “Symphonies, concertos, trios, sonatas—all, nowadays, borrow something of its style,” Hiller wrote in 1768.

The composer whom Hiller had first in mind was his exact contemporary Niccolò Piccinni (1728–1800), who certainly qualifies today as “long forgotten.” In his day, however, Piccinni was not only a prominent figure but a controversial one as well. He became the focal point of a “cause” and, in his rivalry with the somewhat older (and today much better-remembered) Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–87), the object of a querelle, a Parisian press war. The issues his career raised for contemporary audiences, critics, and composers continued to reverberate long after the decades of his greatest fame. They were issues of social as well as musical import.

The best way of approaching Piccinni’s “cause” and its social repercussions might be to note that his most famous opera, La buona figliuola (“The good little girl,” or “Virtuous maiden”), was one of the earliest to be based on a modern novel, then a new literary genre with distinct social implications of its own. The opera’s success was virtually unprecedented: between its Roman première (with an all-male cast) in 1760 and the end of the eighteenth century, La buona figliuola played every opera house in Europe, enjoying more than seventy productions in four languages.

Its plot came by way of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), a novel in the form of letters that tells of a chaste maidservant who so resourcefully resists the crass advances of her employer’s son that the young man finally falls seriously in love with her and marries her with his family’s blessing. Pamela achieved phenomenal popularity with a new class of readers, the same “bourgeois” readership that made the novel the paramount literary genre for centuries to come, and who were especially susceptible to Richardson’s idealistic moral: to wit, that natural virtues and emotions—pertinacity, honesty, love—can be practiced both high and low, and can level artificial barriers of rank.

This is only a variation, of course, on an ancient pastoral prototype, in which virtuous maids fend off or are rescued from lascivious aristocrats. But it was indeed a novel variation, and a telling one, this sentimental version in which the bar of class is actually overcome and maid and aristocrat find happiness together.

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