The Opera | Page 9

'Dafne' of Heinrich Schütz, the words

of which were a translation of the libretto already used by Peri. Of this
work, which was produced in 1627, all trace has been lost. 'Seelewig,'
by Sigmund Staden, which is described as a 'Gesangweis auf
italienische Art gesetzet,' was printed at Nuremberg in 1644, but there
is no record of its ever having been performed. To Hamburg belongs
the honour of establishing German opera upon a permanent basis.
There, in 1678, some years before the production of Purcell's 'Dido and
Æneas,' an opera-house was opened with a performance of a Singspiel
entitled 'Der erschaffene, gefallene und aufgerichtete Mensch,' the
music of which was composed by Johannn Theile. Three other works,
all of them secular, were produced in the same year. The new form of
entertainment speedily became popular among the rich burghers of the
Free City, and composers were easily found to cater for their taste.
For many years Hamburg was the only German town where opera
found a permanent home, but there the musical activity must have been
remarkable. Reinhard Keiser (1673-1739), the composer whose name
stands for what was best in the school, is said alone to have produced
no fewer than a hundred and sixteen operas. Nearly all of these works
have disappeared, and those that remain are for the most part disfigured
by the barbarous mixture of Italian and German which was fashionable
at Hamburg and in London too at that time. The singers were possibly
for the most part Italians, who insisted upon singing their airs in their
native language, though they had no objection to using German for the
recitatives, in which there was no opportunity for vocal display.
Keiser's music lacks the suavity of the Italian school, but his recitatives
are vigorous and powerful, and seem to foreshadow the triumphs which
the German school was afterwards to win in declamatory music. The
earliest operas of Handel (1685-1759) were written for Hamburg, and
in the one of them which Fate has preserved for us, 'Almira' (1704), we
see the Hamburg school at its finest. In spite of the ludicrous mixture of
German and Italian there is a good deal of dramatic power in the music,
and the airs show how early Handel's wonderful gift of melody had
developed. The chorus has very little to do, but a delightful feature of
the work is to be found in the series of beautiful dance-tunes lavishly
scattered throughout it. One of these, a Sarabande, was afterwards
worked up into the famous air, 'Lascia ch' io pianga,' in 'Rinaldo.' When

the new Hamburg Opera-House was opened in 1874, it was inaugurated
by a performance of 'Almira,' which gave musicians a unique
opportunity of realising to some extent what opera was like at the
beginning of the eighteenth century. In 1706 Handel left Hamburg for
the purpose of prosecuting his studies in Italy. There he found the
world at the feet of Alessandro Scarlatti (1659-1725), a composer
whose importance to the history of opera can scarcely be
over-estimated. He is said, like Cesti, to have been a pupil of Carissimi,
though, as the latter died in 1674, at the age of seventy, he cannot have
done much more than lay the foundation of his pupil's greatness. The
invention of the da capo is generally attributed to Scarlatti, wrongly, as
has already been shown, since it appears in Cesti's opera 'La Dori,'
which was performed in 1663. But it seems almost certain that Scarlatti
was the first to use accompanied recitative, a powerful means of
dramatic expression in the hands of all who followed him, while his
genius advanced the science of instrumentation to a point hitherto
unknown.
Nevertheless, Scarlatti's efforts were almost exclusively addressed to
the development of the musical rather than the dramatic side of opera,
and he is largely responsible for the strait-jacket of convention in which
opera was confined during the greater part of the eighteenth century, in
fact until it was released by the genius of Gluck.
Handel's conquest of Italy was speedy and decisive. 'Rodrigo,'
produced at Florence in 1707, made him famous, and 'Agrippina'
(Venice, 1708) raised him almost to the rank of a god. At every pause
in the performance the theatre rang with shouts of 'Viva il caro
Sassone,' and the opera had an unbroken run of twenty-seven nights, a
thing till then unheard of. It did not take Handel long to learn all that
Italy could teach him. With his inexhaustible fertility of melody and his
complete command of every musical resource then known, he only
needed to have his German vigour tempered by Italian suppleness and
grace to stand forth as the foremost operatic composer of the age. His
Italian training and his theatrical experience gave him a thorough
knowledge of the capabilities of