Opere pasticcio, arie di baule and Mozart's Idomeneo: the hard life of opera composers in the Eighteenth century

All of us sometimes have hard days at work. But none of us always has hard days at work and will always have for all his life. Or at least I hope so. But being a opera composer in the Eighteenth (and sometimes also in the Nineteenth) century meant having always hard days at work and returning home every day with a big headache.

Why? Because of singers.

Well, you know, I like singers. I also worked with some of them as a composer (I'm not a double bassist all the time), but many opera composers of the past didn't share my friendly idea. They thought singers were vain, stupid, completely ignorant in music and thinking only how to make the audience happier while destroying the masterpieces the author composed. We don't know what singers thought about composers, but we can reasonably assume that their view on them wasn't much fairer.

On the left: the singer as seen by the composer: "What are these fly shits here on the lines?" "It's going to be a hard day..."
On the right: the composer as seen by the singer: "Well, this C represents Manrico's unconscious desiders which appears as archetypes and..." "So I have to sing it  forte as written?" "Yep!"

1. Singers and composers in the Eighteenth century: how it all began

The neverending story of the hate between singers and composers begins in the Eighteenth century, the century of singers' power. Singers could do whatever they wanted: they were the most important part of the show, while composers... well, life for an opera composer in XVII century wasn't exactly full of money and success.  Composers were payed for the music they wrote (and sometimes the wages weren't so good) and had no right on it. An opera could have a great success, but this didn't mean the composer would have seen a penny more for that. After he had written his music, it became property of the impresario who commissioned it and the composer couldn't often either have a copy of what he wrote.

I'm not joking: there were composers who charged their impresarios because they refused to give them a copy of the music of the opera they wrote for them. They made their claim to the tribunal and the judge often said that the impresario had the right to keep the composer's music and not to give him back. But don't feel so sorry for the composers: the copy of the music they wanted back was needed simply to sell it to another impresario in another town faraway, maybe changing the name or some characters of the opera.

This teaches us something: composers have never liked working very much and that's exactly why recycling has always been the first rule for being a good composer.

Singers were very important in the Eighteenth century. They travelled from town to town and took with them a big trunk in which they had sheet music of the arias they performed best. This arias were called arie di baule (trunk arias) and, when a singer got a contract to act in an opera, he had only one goal: he wanted to place in that opera his arie di baule. It's a little bit as a theatrical actor said to his director: "You know, I'm very good at performing Brutus' speech from Julius Caesar . Can we place it somewhere in this performance of Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman? I think it will work!" Well, something like this. But singers really did that in 1700 and you know what? Directors often said yes to what they asked.

The "Aria di baule"

What's more, sometimes some director thought: "Well, we have the singers, we have all those arie di baule they know well... do we really need a composer?" And so the operas pasticcio were born: they were Frankenstein-like operas which were made of singers' arie di baule: someone (often the director himself) wrote dialogues in order to make the opera work properly but the music was absolutely nothing new, it was a patchwork of arias of different authors which had in common only one thing: they all were arias the singers knew well.

The "Opera pasticcio"

It became commonplace among composer to say that singers ruined opera with the changes they made to arias in order to show their vocal abilities: for instance, the Italian composer Benedetto Marcello wrote a whole book, Il teatro alla moda (The fashionable theatre), to be ironic on singers and on how bad was opera in 1700s and Italian librettist Ranieri De' Calzabigi and German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck said, in the Preface they put before their opera Alceste, they wanted to write operas which were not influenced by singers' whims.

2. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart doesn't enjoy his stay in Munich

The problems between singers and composers began when some composer decided to write operas without caring about singers' point of view and one of the first composers to do so was Mozart. What a bad idea, Wolfy!

In 1779, Wolfgang was entrusted by the Prince-Elector Charles Theodor of Bavaria with the composition of an opera, Idomeneo, for the Elector's orchestra, the famous Mannheim orchestra (or "The Mannheimer"), so called because in its first years it was based in Mannheim.

Wolfgang should have said: "Wow! I will write for the best orchestra of my time! I have to write something really beautiful and complex. Er... - He probably should have asked then the Prince - and... what about the singers?" Are you sure you want to know that, Wolfie? Well, in that case, let's meet the two main singers you will write for:

1) Anton Raaff: he used to be one of the greatest singers of his time, but now he's quite old and bad-tempered. He has only one aim for the opera Mozart will write: sing the more he can. The problem is he hasn't  anymore the voice he used to have.

2) Vincenzo Dal Prato: he's an Italian castrato and castrati, in late 1700s, were the stars of the opera. The problem is that Mozart doesn't like his way of singing and says he isn't a good singer. What's more, the experience he had in writing for Dal Prato was so bad that he never wrote anymore for castrati. You won't find a single opera by Mozart after Idomeneo in which one of the characters is a castrato.

The composition of Idomeneo wasn't easy, as you can imagine: Mozart had problems with singers - and he wasn't very gentle with them in his letters -

but he had also problems with the librettist, abbot Giambattista Varesco. Mozart, who after 1780 settled in Munich to compose the opera and follow its rehersals, didn't like the libretto Varesco had written and so he wrote him (Varesco was based in Salzburg): "Can you change this? Can you change that?" Varesco didn't want to change anything and so Leopold Mozart, who was in Salzburg too, had to go to Varesco and ask him gently if he please could make the changes his son wanted.

The opera was at last represented in 1781 and is the first masterpiece among Mozart's operas. The success of this opera persuaded Mozart he deserved a better audience than Salzburg's court, where he had worked since he was very young, and made him decide to go to Wien.

But this is another story and we'll talk about that another time...