![]() ![]() The greatest influence on the opera seria's development and formulation came, not surprisingly, from two opera librettists, Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782) and Apostolo Zeno (1688-1750). In so doing, these reforms led in essence to "the restriction of the music's role in dramatic developments," claims Sadie, and left the part of explaining occurrences and events in the story to the rather dry and unaccompanied recitatives. These reformers wanted above all to subject the Italian opera to the guidelines of Greek tragedy in other words, they aimed to purge the older Baroque operas of their extravagant characterization and complex plots, as well as to take away the comic elements and to regulate the opera's composition, both musically and structurally. One of the early forms of impetus for these changes in opera came from the scholars at the Arcadian Academy in Rome, led primarily by Gian Vincenza Gravina. Thus, write Grout and Palisca, Italian opera seria "aimed to be clear, simple, rational, faithful to nature, of universal appeal, and capable of giving pleasure to its audiences without causing them undue mental fatigue." The philosophers of the Enlightenment, when they turned their ideas to opera, maintained that this musical-dramatic form should reflect the new ideals of clarity and unity, which were based primarily off of ancient Greek philosophical treatises. In its very essence, as both the libretti and the musical composition demonstrate, the opera seria was a product of the philosophical movement that arose in the late 1600's, the famous Enlightenment, that seized all of Europe and affected so many different aspects of life. ![]() The opera seria, which first arose in the cities of Naples and Venice, had taken on a clear, practically inflexible form by around 1720. These two forms arose out of common ancestors, but, as is fairly evident to modern scholars, each was exposed to several different influences that shaped them into the forms we know today. These changes, by around 1720, had produced two visibly different forms of opera in Italy: one was the serious, tragedy-like type known as opera seria, while the other, a lighter, often more earthy and comic style, was called opera buffa. Serious and Comic Opera in Eighteenth-Century Italyīy the end of the seventeenth century, in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, the musical drama known as opera was fairly well-established it was, however, undergoing many changes and alterations which were later to affect its standing in several important ways. ![]()
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