4. Have you ever been to an opera house? What did you see? What was your impression?

What opera composers do you know? Do you know any famous opera singers?

You are going to read an article about the development of opera. Several sentences have been removed from its different parts. Choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap (1-8).

OPERA(Italian for "work"), is a drama set to music, as distinguished from plays in which music is merely incidental. Music has been a resource of the drama from the earliest times.

The real beginning of opera is connected with the first dramas that were set to music in order to be produced as musical works of art at the beginning of the 17th century.

In the last years of the 16th century a group of amateurs held meetings at the house of the Bardi in Florence, with the aim of trying experiments in emotional musical expression by the use of instruments and solo voices. Before this time there was no real opportunity for music-drama. The only high musical art of the 16th century was unaccompanied choral music.

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The first pioneer in the new "monodic" movement seems to have been Vincenzo Galilei, the father of Galileo. The first public production in the new style was Jacopo Peri's Euridice (1600). The general effect of the new movement on contemporary imagination was characterized as something like that of laying a foundation-stone.

Meanwhile those composers who retained the mastery of polyphonic music tried to find a purely vocal and polyphonic solution of the problem of music-drama; and the Amfiparnasso of Orazio Vecchi (1594) is not alone, though it is by far the most remarkable, among attempts to make a music-drama out of a series of madrigals. From the woodcuts which adorn the first edition of the Amfiparnasso it has been conjectured that the actors sang one voice each, while the rest of the harmony was supplied by singers behind the stage.

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ith the decadence of the madrigal, Monteverde brought a real musical power to the new style.

At the beginning of the 17th century no young musician of lively artistic receptivity could fail to be profoundly stirred by Monteverde's Orfeo (1602) and Arianna (1608), works in which the resources of instruments were developed with the same archaic boldness, the same grasp of immediate emotional effect and the same lack of artistic organization as the harmonic resources. The spark of Monteverde's genius produced in musical history a result more like an explosion than an enlightenment; and the emotional rhetoric of his art was so uncontrollable, and at the same time so much more impressive in suggestion than in realization, that we cannot be surprised that the next definite step in the history of opera took the direction of mere musical form, and was not only undramatic but anti-dramatic.

The system of free musical declamation known as recitative is said to have been used by Emilio del Cavalieri as early as 1588, and it was almost the only means of vocal expression conceivable by the pioneers of opera. Formal melody, such as that of popular songs, was beneath their dignity. But, in the absence of any harmonic system but that of the church modes, which was incapable of assimilating the new "unprepared discords," and in the utter chaos of early experiments in instrumentation, formal melody proved a godsend as the novelty of recitative faded.

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By the early days of Alessandro Scarlatti, before the end of the 17th century, the art of tune-making had blossomed into the musically safe and effective form of the aria. From this time until the death of Handel the history of opera is simply the history of the aria; except in so far as in France, under Lully, it is also the history of ballet-music, the other main theatrical occasion for the art of tune-making. With opera before Gluck there is little interest in tracing schools and developments, for the musical art had as mechanical a connexion with drama as it had with the art of scene-painting, and neither it nor the drama which was attached to it showed any real development at all, though the librettist Metastasio presented as imposing a figure in 18th-century Italian literature as Handel presented in Italian opera.

Before this period of stagnation we find an almost solitary and provincial outburst of life in Purcell's art (1658-1695). Whether he is producing genuine opera (as in the unique case of Dido and Aeneas) or merely incidental music to plays (as in the so-called opera King Arthur), his deeply inspired essays in dramatic music are remarkable in their historic isolation.

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he real reason for the stagnation of high opera before Gluck is that the forms of music known before 1750 could not express dramatic change without losing artistic organization.

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he opportunity for reform came with the rise of the sonata style. It was fortunate for Gluck that the music of his time was too vigorously organized to be upset by new discoveries. Gluck was a much greater artist than Monteverde, but he too was not overloaded with academic mastery. But instead of memories of a Golden Age, Gluck had behind him 150 years of harmonic and orchestral knowledge of good and evil. He also had a perfect sense of symphonic form and his melodic power was generally of the highest order. It is often said that his work was too far in advance of his time to establish his intended reform. If this means that undramatic Italian operas continued to outnumber those dramatic masterpieces which no smaller man could achieve, the statement is as true as it is of every great artist.

The influence of Gluck on Mozart was profound, not only where it is relevant to the particular type of libretto, as in Idomeneo, but also on the broad dramatic basis which includes Greek tragedy and the 18th-century comedy of manners.

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ozart, whose first impulse was always to make his music coherent in itself, for some time continued to cultivate side by side with his growing polyphony and freedom of movement certain Italian formalities which, though musically effective and flattering to singers, were dramatically vicious. But these features, though they spoil Idomeneo, correspond to much that in Gluck's operas shows mere helplessness; and in comic opera they may even become dramatically appropriate.

Mozart always extracts the utmost musical effect from every situation in his absurd and often tiresome libretti (especially in vocal ensemble), while his musical effects are always such as give dramatic life to what in other hands are conventional musical forms.

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t cannot be said that in any high artistic sense Italian comic opera has developed continuously since Mozart. The vocal athleticism of singers; the acceptance and great development by Mozart of what we may call symphonic (as distinguished from Handelian) forms of aria and ensemble; and the enlargement of the orchestra; these processes gave the Italian composers of Mozart's and later times golden opportunities for lifting spectators and singers to the seventh heaven of flattered vanity, while the music was steadily degraded. Composers and spectators grew indifferent to the mood of the libretto.

But with the Rossinian decline Italian opera once more became as purely a pantomimic concert as in the Handelian period; and we must not ignore the difference that it was now a concert of very vulgar music, the weakness of which was only increased by the growing range and interest of dramatic subjects.

Occasionally the drama pierced through the empty breeziness of the music; and so the spirit of Shakespeare, even when killed in an Italian libretto unsuccessfully set to music by Rossini, proved so powerful that one spectator of Rossini's Otello is recorded to have started out of his seat at the catastrophe, exclaiming "Good Heavens! the tenor is murdering the soprano!"

The history of Italian opera from after its culmination in Mozart to its subsidence on the big drum and cymbals of the Rossinians is the history of a protected industry.

Verdi's art is far more the crown of his native genius than of his native traditions; and, though opinions differ as to the spontaneity and depth of the change, the paradox is true that the Wagnerization of Verdi was the musical emancipation of Italy.

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fter Mozart the next step in the development of true operatic art was neither Italian nor German, but French. The French sense of dramatic fitness had a wonderfully stimulating effect upon every foreign composer who came to France. Rossini himself, in Guillaume Tell, was electrified into a dramatic and orchestral life of an incomparably higher order than the rollicking rattle of serious and comic Italian opera in its decline. He was in the prime of life when he wrote it, but it exhausted him and was practically his last important work, though he lived to a cheerful old age.

Wagnerian opera, a generation after Wagner's death, was still an unique phenomenon. With Wagner the history of classical opera ends and a new history begins, for in Wagner's hands opera first became a single art-form, a true and indivisible music-drama, instead of a kind of dramatic casket for a collection of objets d'art more or less aptly arranged in theatrical tableaux.

Modern opera of genuine artistic significance ranges from the light song-play type admirably represented by Bizet's Carmen to the exclusively "atmospheric" impressionism of Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande.

A.Thus in Die Zauberflote the extravagant vocal fireworks of the Queen of Night are the displays of one who, in the words of the high priest Sarastro, "hopes to cajole the people with illusions and superstition."

B.His results are now intelligible only to historians, and they seem to us artistically worthless; but in their day they were so impressive as to make the further continuance of 16th-century choral art impossible.

C.The "spirit of the age" can have had little to do with the difficulty, or why should Shakespeare not have had a contemporary operatic brother-artist during the "Golden Age" of music?

D.The French contribution to musical history between Gluck and Rossini is of great nobility. French dramatic sense stimulated foreign composers and widened their choice of subjects, as it also preserved all except the Italian forms of opera from decline.

E.Tunes were soon legalized at moments of dramatic repose when the actors could indulge in either a dance or a display of vocalization; it was in the tunes that the strong harmonic system of modern tonality took shape.

F.So "dramatic music" at that time was as unbelievable as "dramatic architecture." But the literary and musical dilettanti who met at the house of the Bardi were not mature musical artists; their imaginations were fired by the dream of restoring the glories of Greek tragedy, especially on the side of its musical declamation.

G.Nobody cares to follow the plot of Mozart's Figaro; but then no spectator of Beaumarchais's Mariage de Figaro is prevented by the intricacy of its plot from enjoying it as a play. In both cases we are interested in the character-drawing. We do no justice to Mozart's music when we forget this interest.

H.If, however, it is taken to mean that because Mozart's triumphs do not lie in serious opera he owes nothing to Gluck, then the statement is misleading.

Explain the meaning of the sentences given in bold type.

Answer the following questions:

What is the difference between opera and musical plays?

When and how did opera originate?

What have you learnt about Monteverde's impact on the development of opera?

What role was given to recitative in early operas?

Why is there little interest in tracing the development of opera before Gluck?

What composer stands out in the period of opera stagnation in the late 17^th century?

What is Gluck's place in the history of opera?

How was the success of Mozart's operas connected with their libretti?

What can be said about the development of Italian comic opera after Mozart?

What does the author of the article mean by 'Rossinian decline'?

What was the next step in the development of true operatic art after Mozart?

What was Wagner's contribution into development of opera?

Write a summary of the article, trying to formulate the key idea of each paragraph.