In recognition of this, the first great genius of operatic composition, Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), suggested in one of his scores that the number of string players could be doubled, if necessary, to suit the hall. The necessarily larger public theaters required both expanded orchestras and singers capable of greater projection and volume. The expenses involved in producing opera were great, so when public ticket sales-instead of the royal treasury-were paying for it, a large audience was needed. No longer would musical theater be the exclusive domain of royalty and the court: now anyone with the price of admission could attend. There was a rapidly rising middle class in European society, and the year 1637 saw the opening, in Venice, of the first public opera house. It would also mean that someday, someone positioned here, using gestures that could be seen by all, could establish tempi, signal dynamic instructions and generally control the performance not just of the instrumentalists, but of the on-stage singers as well. This was an important decision, as it increased the distance between the stage and the audience, and meant singers would evermore need to sing at intensity levels that could carry across this space. It was finally decided that the best place for them was down in front of the stage where, in ancient Greek amphitheaters, there had been a 'dancing place' or orcheisthrai. Various arrangements behind, over, and on the stage were tried (there were no wing areas as yet). What was paramount was that the hero was a virtuosic vocalist.Įxperiments were made with where the instrumentalists should be located. Thus a Baroque hero may have looked like, sounded like, and been a female soprano, but the idea that he was any less a hero because of it, never crossed their minds. We must appreciate that at a time when the term soprano could mean a female, a male falsettist or either of two neuters (a boy soprano or a castrato), the concept of a voice type being exclusively linked to a particular gender had not yet developed. The element of virtuosity was so prized in their casting it quite outweighed whether the gender of the performer and the role matched. Instead, Baroque logic dictated that the most important roles be cast with the most skilled singers. In assigning performers to roles, for example, no thought was given to which voice type was most appropriate for a particular dramatic role. There were no compositional models or performance traditions everything was new and untried. The early years of opera were a time of experimentation. (The long established sacred style had offered little opportunity to make music sound as though it had either emotional content or programmatic meaning.) Singers were drawn to opera for the same reasons: it offered them new challenges and more artistic latitude than had sacred music. Composers came to the new form not only because their royal patrons demanded it, but because the theatrical style, stile rappresentativo, let them exercise their expressive skills and find ways to represent varying emotions and dramatic situations with their music. What began as a cerebral salon experiment by the Florentine Camerata, quickly became an elaborate and expensive entertainment format that allowed the leisure class-royalty and courtiers-to exhibit their wealth in displays of extravagance and excess and to do so under the guise of art and culture. Pertinent steps in the development of opera (conveniently, the longest active span of any musical form) now become the path of choice in tracing the evolution of vocal performance. Throughout its history, opera has consistently presented singers with the greatest challenges of any vocal genre.
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