Small-Scale Opera Genres in Vienna before and after Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice: Adaptation and Polemics

Abstract

The article is devoted to works pertaining to small opera genres (festa teatrale, azione teatrale, componimento drammatico) created in Vienna during the 1750s and the 1760s. As a rule, they were produced in honor of some significant event in the lives of the imperial family. Most of them were endowed with a festive character corresponding to the spirit of court festivity, an uncomplicated mythological or allegorical plot, relatively short duration and only three or four characters. The article examines genre-related indications of short operas, their varieties (the chamber and the scenically representative) and their indicative examples which has served as a foothold for the approbation of a mixed style, including the components of both the French (the choral and ballet scenes, the immense weight of the orchestral recitatives) and the Italian traditions (developed arias and secco recitatives). The conclusion is arrived at about the special position of Gluck’s azione teatrale Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) among a set of analogous genres. Gluck’s rejection of the genre of the monumental aria indicated his polemics with the poetics of both the opera seria and the festa teatrale. Despite the implementation in Orfeo of a considerable amount of festa teatrale compositional techniques, such a rejection is perceived as the greatest avant-garde reforming gesture of the 1760s.The author compares two operas with Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. These are Florian Leopold Gassmann’s Amore and Psyche (1767) and Johann Adolf Hasse’s Piramo e Tisbe (1768), composed later. In the first case, we can talk about a direct influence, while in the second case, it is possible to observe in Marco Coltellini’s libretto of a set of allusions to Ranieri Calzabigi’s poetical text of Orfeo and at the same time the polemic qualities of Hasse’s positions in regard to Gluck’s score.