Die Etablierung der Opera buffa veränderte die Opernlandschaft des 18. Jahrhunderts maßgeblich. Sie stellte einen inhaltlichen Kontrapunkt zur höfisch geprägten Opera seria dar und löste diese ...zunehmend in den Spielplänen ab. Wie aber ging die europaweite Verbreitung der komischen italienischen Oper vor sich? Wo konnte sie sich rascher als anderswo etablieren und wer waren die zentralen Akteurinnen und Akteure? Welche Rolle spielten mobile Operntruppen und wie verhielten sich die Höfe zu dem neuen Genre? Erstmals nehmen die Autorinnen in einer systematischen Analyse der Opera buffa in Europa Migration, Mobilität, Netzwerke und Transformationsprozesse zwischen 1740 und 1765 in den Blick. Mit einem Gastbeitrag von Tom Brökel und Heike Brökel.
The ludic element contributes substantially to the highly entertaining quality of opera buffa. Within the field of opera research, up to now this aspect has been neglected to a large extent. However, ...the denomination itself of the buffa-genre usual in the 18th century – “dramma giocoso” – typifies the central role of the playful element in this opera form. On the basis of play theories derived from different disciplines – anthropology, psychology, pedagogy and philosophy – the multilayered moments of play in the opera buffa and its performance context are enucleated by analysing the repertory of Venice, the then “capital of amusement”. Thereby, the concept of play is used as an interpretive key applied to this cultural phenomenon as a whole.
Mozart's comic operas are among the masterworks of Western civilization, and yet the musical environment in which Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote these now-popular operas has ...received little critical attention. In this richly detailed book, Mary Hunter offers a sweeping, synthetic view of opera buffa in the lively theatrical world of late-eighteenth-century Vienna. Opera buffa (Italian-language comic opera) persistently entertained audiences at a time when Joseph was striving for a German national theater. Hunter attributes opera buffa's success to its ability to provide "sheer" pleasure and hence explores how the genre functioned as entertainment. She argues that opera buffa, like mainstream film today, projects a social world both recognizable and distinct from reality. It raises important issues while containing them in the "merely entertaining" frame of the occasion, as well as presenting them as a series of easily identifiable dramatic and musical conventions.
Exploring nearly eighty comic operas, Hunter shows how the arias and ensembles convey a multifaceted picture of the repertory's social values and habits. In a concluding chapter, she discussesCos" fan tutteas a work profoundly concerned with the conventions of its repertory and with the larger idea of convention itself and reveals the ways Mozart and da Ponte pointedly converse with their immediate contemporaries.
In 1957 Riccardo Malipiero's La donna è mobile was staged at La Piccola Scala in Milan, with a libretto by Guglielmo Zucconi adapted from Massimo Bontempelli's comedy Nostra Dea. The opera features ...several unusual characteristics. First, it belongs to the genre of opera-buffa, which composers of the time generally avoided. Second, the choice of an almost contemporary pièce, moreover, ran against the general trend of composing old-fashioned operas. Finally, Malipiero persisted in using twelve-tone technique, at that time deemed to be irrelevant to comic theatre. However, dodecaphony as it is employed in La donna è mobile is quite distant from Schönberg's notion: Malipiero rejects the idea of musical elaboration, rather using tone rows as fixed melodic structures. Twelve-note composition is used for dramatic purposes instead of structural ones, since tone rows are employed as Leitmotiv in order to portray characters. Furthermore, in La donna è mobile twelve-tone composition and nearly every element of modernity is softened by more traditional compositional solutions, although this is done with parodistic, even mocking intent. The opera, as some reviews of the première in Milan point out, cannot be regarded as a model for a new conception of comic musical theatre, but rather as the last specimen of a past genre.
