Comic Opera

Comedy has been an essential element of opera since its advent at the beginning of the 17th century. While early Italian court operas were tragedies, they would quickly begin to incorporate comic characters and comic scenes; these, along with concomitant musical developments that facilitated comic timing and delivery, proved overwhelmingly popular to audiences of all types. Subgenres of comic opera eventually developed all over Europe, flourishing especially in the latter half of the 18th century. The gravitas of 19th-century Romanticism and the advent of the high seriousness of early-20th century modernism lessened the prevalence and import of comic opera; by the mid-20th century, the musical comedy had taken its place.

While one of the precursors of opera is the so-called madrigal comedy of the late Italian Renaissance, opera at its time and place of origin— Florence in 1600—was serious courtly entertainment. The earliest operas did not immediately admit comic elements: As an aristocratic art form, it was highly mannerist and concerned with the musically heightened expression of tragic poetry. Tragedy, in the late Renaissance and early Baroque, was associated with the ruling classes, and comedy with the lower classes; moreover, an important social function of serious opera in its early years was the glorification of the ruling classes, while the comedic tradition, of course, includes satire and parody, which often target and threaten to undermine the powerful: Early serious opera, therefore, eschewed the comedic.

It was not long after the advent of opera, however, that comic characters—often drawn from the lower, servant classes—and scenes began to creep in. By the early 1630s, operas such as Roman composer Stefano Landi's eclectic work Sant’Alessio (Saint Alexis), first performed in 1631, combined an historical plot concerned with the life of a 5th-century saint with comic scenes reflecting contemporary life in Rome. Some years later, in 1637, a work heralded as the first true comic opera, Chi soffre speri (Who Suffers May Hope), was also performed in Rome. Composed by Virgilio Mazzocchi and Marco Marazzoli and designated a commedia musicale, it featured a serious love story underpinned by supporting comic servants, who appear in a majority of the opera's scenes and employ low-brow humor: puns, jokes, and sayings drawn from folk traditions, and singing in dialect. Some music scholars regard Chi soffre speri as one of the important forerunners of the later opera buffa [Page 151]tradition because of its focus on love and contemporary domestic situations rather than the gods and goddesses of earlier serious opera, and also for its stock characters drawn from the commedia dell’arte theater tradition of the Italian Renaissance.

In the latter half of the 17th century, Italian opera contained more and more comic characters and scenes, so much so that it became possible for singers to specialize in comedic roles. The increasing heterogeneity of opera seria (serious opera) with its admixture of tragedy and decidedly popular comic elements led, in the late 17th century, to calls for the reform of Italian opera. Groups such as the Arcadian Academy and influential poets such as Metastasio and Apostolo Zeno promoted libretto reform, calling for an end to genre mixing and for the purging of comic elements from serious opera. Opera seria, as a result, became a rigidly structured, formulaic, and rather narrowly conceived operatic form that was free of comedy: George Frideric Handel's operas of the 1720s and 1730s exemplify the genre. Comic opera, however, remained popular and in demand. The solution to this problem was the creation of a new genre, the intermezzo, a short, fast-paced work that could be performed between the acts of a serious opera, thereby satisfying an audience's desire for comedy. Typically, an intermezzo (literally, “in the middle”) would comprise just two or three stock characters, two acts, little instrumental music, and relatively simple melodies and harmonies. The intermezzo lacked the grand scale of serious opera but was lively and fast-paced; plots focused on mildly erotic domestic intrigues, such as the wily servant girl who tricks her bumbling master into marriage. The intermezzo was an important genre, for two reasons: It was a precursor to the full-fledged comic opera—opera buffa—of the later 18th century and also led—with its periodic phrasing, homophonic textures, strong melodic emphasis, and simple, slower moving harmonies— to the advent of what would become known as the classical style in music.

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