Opera Seria

Baroque serious opera built on castrato heroes and da capo arias.

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BaroqueOpera SeriaAriaVoice

Opera seria was the serious opera of Italian courts and theatres from the late seventeenth century, in three acts and drawn from ancient heroes and myths. It did not aim at realism; it gave singers a fixed dramatic frame in which to display the voice.

Origins and dates

Around 1690, composers in Rome and Naples cut back the stage machinery of Venetian opera and moved the weight to the aria. Metastasio's librettos were set again and again through the eighteenth century and became the model. Handel wrote Rinaldo and Giulio Cesare in London and pushed the genre to its height. In the 1760s Gluck began replacing vocal display with a more continuous drama.

Listening features

Start with the da capo aria, the A section, then a contrasting or modulating B section, then A again, ornamented on its return. Recitative is accompanied by harpsichord or cello, moves quickly and stays close to speech. The overture is in three parts and was often played alone. High voices dominate, and the castrato sound marks the period.

Composers and works

Scarlatti, Handel, Vivaldi, Hasse, Gluck and Mozart. Mozart's Idomeneo gives more weight to chorus and orchestra and begins to loosen the frame.

Lineage

It grows from Venetian opera and the heroic drama and leads to opera buffa, Gluck's reform operas and nineteenth-century grand opera. Its da capo design survives in the concert aria.

Misconceptions

Opera seria is not all Baroque opera, nor is it merely static. Castrato roles were not female roles, and the da capo return is not plain repetition.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "Opera seria" — definitions and chronology checked, not quoted
• Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 2 — context checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.