opera: Early-Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera

In Italy, the voice remained master of the orchestra, and melody, presented with clarity and directness, ruled out overly polyphonic writing. The early masters of this style were Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini. The arias were often in two large sections, a slow section displaying bel canto singing, i.e., smoothness of vocal line with flawless phrasing and high notes, followed by a cabaletta (a rapid section requiring precision singing). Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers, 1813) and Il Barbiere di Siviglia (1816) are just two of his comic operas that provide sparkling melodies, brilliant arias and ensembles, and fast-moving plots.

Gaetano Donizetti also wrote tragedies (for example, Lucia di Lammermoor, 1835) and a trilogy on the queens Elizabeth I, Mary Stuart, and Anne Boleyn that gave the soprano lead exquisite scenes and arias for displaying her ability at coloratura singing. His two comic operas L'Elisir d'Amore (1832) and Don Pasquale (1843) are in the same bubbling melodic vein of the best of Rossini. Vincenzo Bellini also gave his leading ladies splendid arias combining dramatic and coloratura techniques with unusually long melodic lines, such as those in Norma (1831) and I Puritani (1835). Neither he, Rossini, nor Donizetti slighted the male voices, writing parts that enabled them to display astonishing vocal versatility.

Sections in this article:

• Introduction
• Twentieth-Century Opera
• Russian Opera
• Verdi and the Late Nineteenth Century in Italy
• Early-Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera
• The Development of French Grand Opera and Opéra Comique
• The Romantic Movement in Germany
• German and Austrian Opera in the Eighteenth Century
• The Development of English Opera
• Italian Opera of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
• Early French Opera
• The Baroque in Rome and Venice
• Florentine Beginnings
• Characteristics
• Bibliography

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