Viennese masters

Italian opera buffa strongly attracted Viennese audiences, and Austrian composers were naturally influenced by it. Perhaps the most interesting of the Vienna-born composers of 18th-century comic opera was Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, whose Italianate Doktor und Apotheker (1786; “Doctor and Apothecary”), though successful and lively, was overshadowed by the contemporary works of Mozart.

Joseph Haydn composed about 20 musico-dramatic scores: a singspiel, five short operas for marionettes, and several Italianate opere buffe and opere serie for private performance in the Eisenstadt palace theatre of his employer-patrons, the Esterházy princes. Several of Haydn’s operas have had modern-day revivals, including Il mondo della luna (1777; “The World of the Moon,” libretto by Carlo Goldoni), L’isola disabitata (1779; “The Deserted Island,” libretto by Pietro Metastasio), and La fedeltà premiata (1780; “Faithfulness Rewarded,” libretto by Giovanni Battista Lorenzi).

Vienna was an important centre for the operatic career of Mozart, who proved himself as one of the greatest masters of what was still the most prestigious of music genres. He began to write theatrical music when he was only 10 years old, and by age 25 he had created his first opera, in Munich. This was Idomeneo (1781; libretto by Giambattista Varesco in imitation of Metastasio). In this work, Mozart combined the conventions of opera seria with characteristics that reveal the influence of Gluck and the tragédie lyrique. As a result, Idomeneo ranks as the supreme example of opera seria in the late 18th century.

One year after Idomeneo, Mozart wrote a charming singspiel that firmly established his reputation in Vienna: Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782; The Abduction from the Seraglio). Mozart’s music for this farcical romance set in a Turkish harem raised German singspiel to the level of great art without altering its traditional features. Graced with a fine part for a comic bass (Osmin), Die Entführung also contains in “Martern aller Arten” (“Torments of all Kinds”) a soprano aria so extensive in plan and difficult to sing that it has challenged the foremost sopranos of every era. The work is also notable for the psychological depth with which it treats the relationship between its two principal characters.

Mozart’s next full-scale opera was Le nozze di Figaro (1786; The Marriage of Figaro), the first of three seriocomic operas he set to librettos by Lorenzo Da Ponte. The work animates literature’s most clever and audacious servant, Figaro—a character created by French dramatist Pierre de Beaumarchais—who, by outwitting his aristocratic master in the game of love, represented a challenge to the old order and symbolized the new age of social reform. In addition to its purely musical beauty, this work shows Mozart’s genius for musical characterization, not only in solo arias but also in duets, trios, and larger ensembles. The fast pacing of his elaborately constructed ensemble finales added excitement and verve to the comic situations.

Mozart’s next opera, commissioned by an impresario for the National Theatre in Prague, was Don Giovanni (1787), a work Da Ponte based on earlier Don Juan librettos and plays by Tirso de Molina, Thomas Corneille, and others. Some writers in the 19th century regarded Don Giovanni as the greatest opera ever composed, in part because musical elements in it foretold operatic Romanticism and in part because the main character was a prototype of the Romantic hero—a supreme individualist who rebelled against authority and scorned middle-class values. Mozart and Da Ponte wove opera seria figures and situations into their comedy, and the musical styles vary accordingly between the elevated tone of the nobles’ arias and the buffo (comic male) singing styles of the lower-class characters, such as Don Giovanni’s comically long-suffering servant Leporello. Don Giovanni himself participates in both worlds and changes his style to suit his ends. Again, Mozart’s brilliant ensemble finales at the ends of each act allow the characters to combine and clash, bringing the action to a climax without any pauses to disrupt the musico-dramatic flow.

In his last collaboration with Da Ponte, Mozart created another opera buffa, Così fan tutte (1790; “All Women Are Like That”). This is an opera of flawless workmanship reconciled with the dramatic claims of a seemingly artificial and cynical libretto, which in fact exposes human frailty but is tempered by one of Mozart’s most sympathetic and melodious scores.

In 1791, returning to the singspiel in German, Mozart composed his last work for the stage, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute; libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder), an allegorical opera with a seemingly nonsensical but in fact elaborately allegorical libretto full of Masonic symbolism and Enlightenment themes. Reconciling several distinct 18th-century styles and traditions through solos, ensembles, and solemn choral scenes, Mozart created some of his most radiantly beautiful music, assigning it equally to both the serious and the comic and to both the admirable and the mean-spirited characters.

Like Die Zauberflöte, Beethoven’s Fidelio (1805, revised 1806 and 1814) rose above the limitations of its singspiel genre, becoming something bigger and grander. The libretto (by Joseph Sonnleithner, after Jean-Nicolas Bouilly), inspired by French Revolutionary-era literature, has never satisfied anyone entirely, and some of the vocal lines seem more suitable for instruments than voices. Yet the grandeur of much of the Fidelio music and the admirability of the idealized central character (Leonore, who disguises herself as a young man, Fidelio, in order to rescue her husband from political incarceration in a dungeon) permeates the entire work. Its theme—the triumph of the human spirit over oppression—has helped secure Fidelio’s place in the present-day repertoire.