Rescue opera
Encyclopedia
Rescue opera was a popular genre of opera
in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in France and Germany. Generally, rescue operas deal with the rescue of a main character from danger and end with a happy dramatic resolution in which lofty humanistic ideals triumph over base motives. Operas with this kind of subject matter became popular in France
around the time of the French Revolution
; a number of such operas dealt with the rescue of a political prisoner
. Stylistically and thematically, rescue opera was an outgrowth of the French bourgeois opéra comique
; musically, it began a new tradition that would influence German Romantic opera and French grand opera
. The most famous rescue opera is Ludwig van Beethoven
's Fidelio
.
as "das sogenannte Rettungs- oder Befreiungsstück" in Die Oper von Gluck bis Wagner. David Charlton believes that rescue opera is not an authentic genre, and that the concept was coined to make what he believes is a nonexistent connection between Beethoven's work and French opera. Patrick J. Smith, on the other hand, observes: "The 'rescue opera'...antedated the Revolution, but 'rescue opera' as a genre was a product of it."
In French, this genre is referred to as the pièce à sauvetage or opéra à sauvetage, while in German it is called Rettungsoper, Befreiungsoper (liberation opera), or Schreckensoper (terror opera).
Early opéras comiques with rescue themes include Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny
's Le roi et le fermier (1762) and Le déserteur
(1769), and André Grétry's Richard Coeur-de-lion
(1784). These are sometimes called early rescue operas, or conversely predecessors of the rescue opera.
Henri Montan Berton
's Les rigueurs du cloître (1790) has been described as the first rescue opera; Luigi Cherubini
's Lodoïska
(1791) has also been named a founding work of the genre. Other examples from the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, the period when rescue opera flourished, are Nicolas Dalayrac
's Camille ou Le souterrain (1791), Jean-François Le Sueur
's La caverne
(1793), and Cherubini's Les deux journées
(1800).
While the rescue opera was primarily a French genre, the two best-known operas in the genre are not French. Ludwig van Beethoven
's Fidelio
is by far the most famous example today, and was also influenced by the German Singspiel
. Bedřich Smetana
's Dalibor (1868), which contains no spoken dialogue and which bears marks of Wagnerian
influence, has nonetheless been called a rescue opera, in part because of its political themes.
influenced stories of fear and imprisonment; a number of plots, including that of Fidelio and other operas based on the same libretto as well as that of Les deux journées, were taken from real life.
Stylistically, rescue opera was an outgrowth of the opéra comique, a bourgeois genre. Like opéras comiques, rescue operas contained spoken dialogue, popular musical idioms, and bourgeois characters. Works with libretti by Michel-Jean Sedaine
were particularly influential. The influx of suspenseful or tragic subjects into opéra comique caused confusion in a system where tragedy was associated with through-composed scores and comedy with dialogue, precipitating a shift of musical theatre genres that paralleled the political shift which empowered the middle-class. Carl Dahlhaus
writes, "No longer did the bourgeoisie function in comic casts merely as the butt of jokes; it demanded, and received, its part in the dignity of tragedy."
Some scholars describe the plots as featuring a deus ex machina
like the ones present in opera seria
plots, though the resolution still bore a closer resemblance to the endings of domestic comedies. However, others reject this term because the rescue is carried out through the actions of heroic people, rather than gods. John Bokina describes such endings, rather than as a "deus ex machina," as a "populus ex machina," in which virtuous human beings save the day.
These operas were also influenced by gothic fiction
and melodrama
. A number of rescue operas were adaptations of British gothic literature.
Rescue operas incorporated "local color" in the orchestra for operas set in exotic European locations. Folk songs and "picturesque" arias were used to indicate a setting; Lodoïska, for example, set in Poland, contains what may be the first polonaise
in opera. However, melodies as such were avoided.
Dramatic and emotional intensity, as conveyed through music, became increasingly important. The fortissimo directions ff and even fff were often to be found in scores, and chromatic scales, tremolos, and intervals such as the diminished seventh
heightened tension onstage. Jean Le Sueur, whose La Caverne was one of the more influential rescue operas, wrote in his score for Télémaque that arias should be sung with voix concentrée or in a manner that was très-concentrè. Long instrumental passages descriptive of storms or battles were also present.
and, through him, Richard Wagner
. Grandiosity in music and scenery, influenced by the political spectacles of the French Revolution and French Empire, influenced grand opera and the works of composers like Giacomo Meyerbeer
.
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in France and Germany. Generally, rescue operas deal with the rescue of a main character from danger and end with a happy dramatic resolution in which lofty humanistic ideals triumph over base motives. Operas with this kind of subject matter became popular in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
around the time of the French Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
; a number of such operas dealt with the rescue of a political prisoner
Political prisoner
According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, a political prisoner is ‘someone who is in prison because they have opposed or criticized the government of their own country’....
. Stylistically and thematically, rescue opera was an outgrowth of the French bourgeois opéra comique
Opéra comique
Opéra comique is a genre of French opera that contains spoken dialogue and arias. It emerged out of the popular opéra comiques en vaudevilles of the Fair Theatres of St Germain and St Laurent , which combined existing popular tunes with spoken sections...
; musically, it began a new tradition that would influence German Romantic opera and French grand opera
Grand Opera
Grand opera is a genre of 19th-century opera generally in four or five acts, characterised by large-scale casts and orchestras, and lavish and spectacular design and stage effects, normally with plots based on or around dramatic historic events...
. The most famous rescue opera is Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential composers of all time.Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of...
's Fidelio
Fidelio
Fidelio is a German opera in two acts by Ludwig van Beethoven. It is Beethoven's only opera. The German libretto is by Joseph Sonnleithner from the French of Jean-Nicolas Bouilly which had been used for the 1798 opera Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal by Pierre Gaveaux, and for the 1804 opera Leonora...
.
Term
"Rescue opera" was not a contemporary term. Dyneley Hussey used the term in English in 1927 as a translation of Karl M. Klob's 1913 reference to FidelioFidelio
Fidelio is a German opera in two acts by Ludwig van Beethoven. It is Beethoven's only opera. The German libretto is by Joseph Sonnleithner from the French of Jean-Nicolas Bouilly which had been used for the 1798 opera Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal by Pierre Gaveaux, and for the 1804 opera Leonora...
as "das sogenannte Rettungs- oder Befreiungsstück" in Die Oper von Gluck bis Wagner. David Charlton believes that rescue opera is not an authentic genre, and that the concept was coined to make what he believes is a nonexistent connection between Beethoven's work and French opera. Patrick J. Smith, on the other hand, observes: "The 'rescue opera'...antedated the Revolution, but 'rescue opera' as a genre was a product of it."
In French, this genre is referred to as the pièce à sauvetage or opéra à sauvetage, while in German it is called Rettungsoper, Befreiungsoper (liberation opera), or Schreckensoper (terror opera).
Examples
- See: :Category:Rescue operas
Early opéras comiques with rescue themes include Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny
Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny
Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny was a French composer and a member of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts .He is considered alongside André Grétry and François-André Danican Philidor to have been the founder of a new musical genre, the opéra comique, laying a path for other French composers such as...
's Le roi et le fermier (1762) and Le déserteur
Le déserteur
Le déserteur is an opéra comique by the French composer Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny with a libretto by Michel-Jean Sedaine. It was first staged at the Comédie-Italienne, Paris on 6 March 1769....
(1769), and André Grétry's Richard Coeur-de-lion
Richard Coeur-de-lion (opera)
Richard Coeur-de-lion is an opéra comique, described as a comédie mise en musique, by the Belgian composer André Grétry. was by Michel-Jean Sedaine. The work is generally recognised as Grétry's masterpiece and one of the most important French opéras comiques...
(1784). These are sometimes called early rescue operas, or conversely predecessors of the rescue opera.
Henri Montan Berton
Henri Montan Berton
Henri Montan Berton was a French composer, teacher, and writer, and the son of Pierre Montan Berton.-Career:...
's Les rigueurs du cloître (1790) has been described as the first rescue opera; Luigi Cherubini
Luigi Cherubini
Luigi Cherubini was an Italian composer who spent most of his working life in France. His most significant compositions are operas and sacred music. Beethoven regarded Cherubini as the greatest of his contemporaries....
's Lodoïska
Lodoïska
Lodoïska is an opera by Luigi Cherubini to a French libretto by Claude-François Fillette-Loraux after an episode from Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvrai’s novel, Les amours du chevalier de Faublas. It takes the form of a comédie héroïque in three acts, and was a founding work of rescue opera...
(1791) has also been named a founding work of the genre. Other examples from the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, the period when rescue opera flourished, are Nicolas Dalayrac
Nicolas Dalayrac
Nicolas-Marie d'Alayrac, known as Nicolas Dalayrac , was a French composer, best known for his opéras-comiques.- Biography :...
's Camille ou Le souterrain (1791), Jean-François Le Sueur
Jean-François Le Sueur
Jean-François Le Sueur was a French composer, best known for his oratorios and operas.-Life:...
's La caverne
La caverne
La caverne, ou Le repentir is an opera in three acts by the French composer Jean-François Le Sueur. It was first performed at the Théâtre Feydeau, Paris on 16 February 1793. The libretto, by Alphonse François "Paul" Palat-Dercy, is based on an episode from Lesage's novel Gil Blas...
(1793), and Cherubini's Les deux journées
Les deux journées
Les deux journées, ou Le porteur d'eau is an opera in three acts by Luigi Cherubini with a libretto by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly. It takes the form of an opéra comique, meaning not that the subject matter is humorous, but that the piece is a mixture of spoken dialogue and musical numbers...
(1800).
While the rescue opera was primarily a French genre, the two best-known operas in the genre are not French. Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential composers of all time.Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of...
's Fidelio
Fidelio
Fidelio is a German opera in two acts by Ludwig van Beethoven. It is Beethoven's only opera. The German libretto is by Joseph Sonnleithner from the French of Jean-Nicolas Bouilly which had been used for the 1798 opera Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal by Pierre Gaveaux, and for the 1804 opera Leonora...
is by far the most famous example today, and was also influenced by the German Singspiel
Singspiel
A Singspiel is a form of German-language music drama, now regarded as a genre of opera...
. Bedřich Smetana
Bedrich Smetana
Bedřich Smetana was a Czech composer who pioneered the development of a musical style which became closely identified with his country's aspirations to independent statehood. He is thus widely regarded in his homeland as the father of Czech music...
's Dalibor (1868), which contains no spoken dialogue and which bears marks of Wagnerian
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
influence, has nonetheless been called a rescue opera, in part because of its political themes.
Style and themes
Rescue opera was primarily a product of the French Revolution. The social changes of the period meant that opera must now appeal to the masses, and post-aristocratic, patriotic, idealistic themes—such as resistance to oppression, secularism, the political power of individuals and of people working together, and fundamental changes to the status quo—were popular. The TerrorReign of Terror
The Reign of Terror , also known simply as The Terror , was a period of violence that occurred after the onset of the French Revolution, incited by conflict between rival political factions, the Girondins and the Jacobins, and marked by mass executions of "enemies of...
influenced stories of fear and imprisonment; a number of plots, including that of Fidelio and other operas based on the same libretto as well as that of Les deux journées, were taken from real life.
Stylistically, rescue opera was an outgrowth of the opéra comique, a bourgeois genre. Like opéras comiques, rescue operas contained spoken dialogue, popular musical idioms, and bourgeois characters. Works with libretti by Michel-Jean Sedaine
Michel-Jean Sedaine
Michel-Jean Sedaine was a French dramatist, was born in Paris.- Biography :His father, who was an architect, died when Sedaine was quite young, leaving no fortune, and the boy began life as a mason's labourer...
were particularly influential. The influx of suspenseful or tragic subjects into opéra comique caused confusion in a system where tragedy was associated with through-composed scores and comedy with dialogue, precipitating a shift of musical theatre genres that paralleled the political shift which empowered the middle-class. Carl Dahlhaus
Carl Dahlhaus
Carl Dahlhaus , a musicologist from Berlin, was one of the major contributors to the development of musicology as a scholarly discipline during the post-war era....
writes, "No longer did the bourgeoisie function in comic casts merely as the butt of jokes; it demanded, and received, its part in the dignity of tragedy."
Some scholars describe the plots as featuring a deus ex machina
Deus ex machina
A deus ex machina is a plot device whereby a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.-Linguistic considerations:...
like the ones present in opera seria
Opera seria
Opera seria is an Italian musical term which refers to the noble and "serious" style of Italian opera that predominated in Europe from the 1710s to c. 1770...
plots, though the resolution still bore a closer resemblance to the endings of domestic comedies. However, others reject this term because the rescue is carried out through the actions of heroic people, rather than gods. John Bokina describes such endings, rather than as a "deus ex machina," as a "populus ex machina," in which virtuous human beings save the day.
These operas were also influenced by gothic fiction
Gothic fiction
Gothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. Gothicism's origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled "A Gothic Story"...
and melodrama
Melodrama
The term melodrama refers to a dramatic work that exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions. It may also refer to the genre which includes such works, or to language, behavior, or events which resemble them...
. A number of rescue operas were adaptations of British gothic literature.
Rescue operas incorporated "local color" in the orchestra for operas set in exotic European locations. Folk songs and "picturesque" arias were used to indicate a setting; Lodoïska, for example, set in Poland, contains what may be the first polonaise
Polonaise
The polonaise is a slow dance of Polish origin, in 3/4 time. Its name is French for "Polish."The polonaise had a rhythm quite close to that of the Swedish semiquaver or sixteenth-note polska, and the two dances have a common origin....
in opera. However, melodies as such were avoided.
Dramatic and emotional intensity, as conveyed through music, became increasingly important. The fortissimo directions ff and even fff were often to be found in scores, and chromatic scales, tremolos, and intervals such as the diminished seventh
Diminished seventh
In classical music from Western culture, a diminished seventh is an interval produced by narrowing a minor seventh by a chromatic semitone. For instance, the interval from A to G is a minor seventh, ten semitones wide, and both the intervals from A to G, and from A to G are diminished sevenths,...
heightened tension onstage. Jean Le Sueur, whose La Caverne was one of the more influential rescue operas, wrote in his score for Télémaque that arias should be sung with voix concentrée or in a manner that was très-concentrè. Long instrumental passages descriptive of storms or battles were also present.
Impact
In its use of local color, heightened dramatic and emotional intensity, and inclusion of descriptive instrumental music, rescue opera preceded the works of German Romantics such as Carl Maria von WeberCarl Maria von Weber
Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber was a German composer, conductor, pianist, guitarist and critic, one of the first significant composers of the Romantic school....
and, through him, Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
. Grandiosity in music and scenery, influenced by the political spectacles of the French Revolution and French Empire, influenced grand opera and the works of composers like Giacomo Meyerbeer
Giacomo Meyerbeer
Giacomo Meyerbeer was a noted German opera composer, and the first great exponent of "grand opera." At his peak in the 1830s and 1840s, he was the most famous and successful composer of opera in Europe, yet he is rarely performed today.-Early years:He was born to a Jewish family in Tasdorf , near...
.