History of Italian Opera

Welcome back to the Overdressed Duo Nerd Corner Blog! It's the 2025 season and we are starting with a historical topic! Today we focus on the history of Italian opera!! While classical music is created and performed around the world, opera is an Italian invention. Opera grew and developed in Italy before it began to spread to other countries in Europe. Italian music and culture has had a strong influence on opera throughout history. While there is way too much history to cover in just this once concert, we tried to hit as many of the high points on the timeline as we could. Keep reading to dive in deeper!

We begin our show with something that came before opera: Neapolitan song! If you listened to Pavarotti or Enrico Caruso, you might be familiar with these romantic Italian folk tunes. They trace their roots to the early 13th century in Napoli. These folk songs and fables are embedded in Italian music. They regained popularity in the 19th century but you can bet that the early creators of opera also knew these songs and were heavily influenced by them. We chose a crowd favorite “Torna a Surriento” (Return to Sorrento). Listen to Pavarotti’s version. It’s great.

The first official opera was written in Florence in the late 16th C. A group of humanists, musicians, and intellectuals who called themselves the Florentine Camerata, set out to revive the Greek drama as originally performed in historic plays such as Antigone and Oedipus Rex. They knew there was singing, but the exact notes were lost to time. This group developed what was known as stile recitativo, which is a hybrid spoken/sung type of recitation. We still have this today! Most singers abbreviate it to “recit” and it can be found anywhere from Handel to Mozart to the great bel canto composers. It usually contains the action or dialogue of a scene. Then the aria (the song) is all about how the characters feel about what just happened in the recit.

The first operas were ALL RECITATIVO! Which means there were not many memorable melodies. As opera continued to develop, the royals got a bit bored with all this recit. To keep their attention, composers began to add more aria-like elements. Catchy tunes worked the same way back in 16th C Italy as they do now. Music is much more enjoyable when it is catchy!

This is also why we are skipping composers such as Peri, Monteverdi, etc. and beginning our show in 1733 with Pergolesi.

What is so special about this opera? Stile recitativo was developed to replicate Greek tragedies. From the late 1500s to 1733, all operas were tragic. Then Pergolesi had the idea to write a comic opera! Something light and uplifting. It was the tradition at the time to have a bit of comedy during the intermission of a show to give the audience a break from all the sadness. Typically, this was some other type of performance like dance or the equivalent of a rodeo clown. But Pergolesi wanted to try out comic opera. He wrote a little one act Intermezzo titled La Serva Padrona and it was a hit. Comic opera became much more popular after this point. We are singing the aria “Stizzoso, mio stizzoso”, where a servant girl shushes her master and teases him for being a bully. Due to the class structure and gender roles at the time, this was quite the scandalous aria! Music at this time was very formulaic and structured. This aria follows the typical ABA pattern of its time. There is an initial section with one melody, then it moves into a new B section (often in minor). Then we go back and repeat the A section exactly as it was with maybe an ornament or two. This can get a little weird dramatically, especially if the character seems to be changing their mind in the B section. But lucky for us, Serpina is just cute and sassy all the way through this aria!

Around the mid 1700’s, opera had started to spread to other countries such as France and Austria. Composers from this country began to compose operas, but typically their wealthy patrons required that they write operas with Italian text in order to seem more cultured and sophisticated. That is why you see great Austrian composers such as Mozart composing heavily in Italian. “Deh, vieni non tardar” is from one of Mozart’s big 3 operas. The Marriage of Figaro is the operatic version of a play by French playwright, Pierre Beaumarchais. Mozart wrote this opera in 1786. He wouldn’t write his first German language opera until 2 years later in 1788.

We are now in 1832 and opera is a big industry! It has now shifted from an artform for royals and nobility, into the public sphere. Opera became to the Italians what rock concerts and sports events are to us today. Everyone wanted tickets to the opera! With the shift to public, opera began to depend more on ticket sales to be profitable (instead of just having rich princes pay to have operas written for them). If your income is dependent on ticket sales, you have to write operas that will bring people in. And what did the people want? MORE NOTES! This began the era of bel canto, or beautiful singing. These operas can be tragedies or comedies. What they had in common was this was the era of the soprano diva. Singers became more like celebrities. The craft required more nuance and technique. The focus of the bel canto genre is the sheer beauty and power of the human voice. To show off the voice, the melody lines are decorated with coloratura (little extra notes and turns to make the vocal line extra beautiful). Donizetti and Bellini were the two premier bel canto composers at the time. They were in stiff competition with each other for a while as their careers overlapped. We chose Donizetti’s aria “Prendi me me sei libero” to illustrate the bel canto style. It is a simple and beautiful melody but it contains all the elements of bel canto: legato, coloratura, a cadenza, and it’s an aria that stops the show temporarily and lets the soprano shine (in true diva fashion).

We are closing our show with an aria from Verdi’s La Traviata (because it’s hard to top La Traviata). This opera is credited with being a pivotal player in the transition into our next era of Italian opera: verismo. Verdi focused his story on real people and brought out a grittier side of life with his main character being a courtesan. People loved it. From then on, opera included many more characters from different backgrounds and was more relatable to the broader public audience. To me, the magic of Verdi is that he is both bel canto and verismo. The music is spectacular and the story is more realistic. He is the best of both worlds!

We are also including Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci as an example of true verismo. The music is much more angular and dissonant than the bel canto style. The characters are more well-rounded and realistic as well. Pagliacci uses characters from traditional Italian comedia del’arte. These are stock characters that Italians used in skits. You might know of one: Arlequino (the Harlequin). 

To round out our tour of Italian opera, we have to include Puccini. He is one of Italy’s most famous composers. Puccini was writing around the turn of the 20th C. His writing is considered verismo as well, but at the time, Italians were divided on his writing style. Some thought that the language he used and the way he set the text was too conversational and ‘common’. This can be surprising to modern audiences, as Puccini’s music is now considered some of the most beautiful and passionate operatic music in the repertoire. We are performing “Vissi d’arte” from the opera Tosca. You will hear more ‘spoken’ sections with a small vocal range and many repeated notes. The text is typically set syllabically here to sound even more like speech. But then, in classic Puccini style, the music swells to a beautiful and stirring climatic moment. 

And this is how we leave Italian opera. After Puccini, there really hasn’t been a prominent operatic composer from Italy. It was instead, German and American composers that carried the tradition of opera into the modern era. There are many theories about politics, music, culture, etc about why the last ‘great’ Italian composer died over 100 years ago. If you ever go over to Italy though, I highly recommend finding a theater and seeing an opera. They still repeat the old classics and the culture of opera still runs deep there. I have never been to a more amazing production than I did watching Aida in Verona. 

Thanks for joining us on our whirlwind tour of Italian opera history. I hope you enjoyed learning more about the origins of this amazing art form.