Why are there no major English-language operas?

by Gankom

I understand that Purcell and Handel wrote some important and popular operas in the Baroque era, and of course today's musical theatre scene is dominated by English-language content from Broadway, Hollywood, and London's West End. However, in the genre's heyday, all the major operas were French, German, and Italian. What happened to the English-language opera writers?

nmitchell076

So this is a deceptively simple question with a really complicated answer. It is asking about nearly 300 years of history, which of course makes a simple answer impossible. But we can pretty much not worry too much about the 20th century, at least, since there are a decent number of operas written in English during that century (Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, Britten's Peter Grimes, Glass's Einstein on the Beach, etc.). My own specialties concern the 18th century, and so I can best speak to that. But the short of it is: opera was Italian, British people were constructing their identities in contrast to Italian values, and none of the good musicians were very good at speaking English.

So as to the first point. Opera emerged and flourished as an Italian cultural product in the 17th century. And while France soon developed its own robust operatic tradition, Germany and England were late to the party. Perhaps the only real reason German opera is so well known today, despite their late arrival as major operatic players, is that so many of the greatest composers from the late 18th and 19th century were German. It took major works by German born composers like Mozart (Die Entführung aus dem Sarail, Die Zauberflöte), Beethoven (Fideleo), and, especially, Weber (Der Freischutz) to really get German opera going as an artistic genre, basically 2 centuries after the first sparks of the genre set Italy aflame. So it took a while and the efforts of some of our most well-known musical voices to establish a substantial Geramn tradition.

England had a weird relationship with opera -- and Italian culture more broadly -- in the eighteenth century. Italy represented a weird mixture of backwards values and artistic wonder for British people. All the best composers and singers were Italian born or, at the very least, Italian trained (as Handel was). So if you wanted good music, you hired Italians. But Italian opera presented a value system that was weird for British audiences. Many British audiences could not understand Italian, so they had English translations printed side by side in their booklets to understand what was going on. Moreover, the people singing in this strange language were themselves strange creatures -- many of them men who sang in a soprano register as a result of being castrated as youths (they were known as "castrati"). It was deeply weird for emerging modern British masculinity to see castrated men playing the part of great heros like Alexander the Great but singing in the voice of a woman. All this made opera seem line a very effeminate thing to Englishmen, as did Italian culture more generally (see, for instance, the use of macaroni as an insult [credit to /u/chocolatepot]. That post touches on the "grand tour" that brought British youth into contact with Italian culture, which created friction with a largely ambivalent attitude towards that same culture back home).

So England, culturally, has an extremely strained relationship with Italian opera. It was undoubtedly popular with audiences, but it was largely dismissed in intellectual circles. But there was a more practical barrier to establishing a proper English musical theater: there were no really good English-born musicians, which in turn is a consequence of the fact that England did not really have the institutions that trained musicians (such as the many conservatories in Naples and other major Italian cities). Moreover, English was by no means the lingua franca of Europe (French was). So the Italians who came to England to write and perform music were often very, very bad at speaking it. This of course had practical impact on the attempts at making English opera work. First you usually had Italians or Germans trying to set a non-native language, often resulting in weird text setting (Handel is somewhat notorious for this, though he usually actually does a pretty good job) or, even if they are native speaking composers like Thomas Arne, they often have to deal with singers who just aren't very good at pronouncing the words, especially during the plot driven parts like recitative.

So basically, England didn't really like Italian culture all that much (or, more accurately, certain politically powerful segments of the population were anti-Italian-culture), they didn't for a long time have the educational infrastructure to train a substantial pool of native professional musicians, and, as a result, their concert culture was driven by foreign composers and performers, many of whom simply were not all that great at speaking English.

For more reading:

On the spread of Italians throughout the European world, see Reinhard Strohm, “Italian Operisti North of the Alps,” in Eighteenth-Century Diaspora of Music and Musicians, as well as the edited collection Italian Culture in Northern Europe by Shearer West.

On Castrati, see Feldman, The Castrato.

For a good primary source on eighteenth century british musical culture, see The Journals and Letters of Susan Burney. Burney is in a camp of firm Italian opera lovers (she's the daughter of one of the first modern music historians, Charles Burney). But she befriends many Italian composers and singers, and through her eyes, you can get a really clear sense of just how little Italian composets knew about English.

flotiste

Hooookay, so there's a whole lot behind this question, and I'll try to unpack it piece by piece.

First, English is a terrible language to sing in. Singing is all about vowels (because you can't sing a consonant), and you want pure vowels, which are commonly known as Latin vowels. English has a huge amount of diphthongs and schwas, in that most vowels in English are comprised of multiple sounds, most of which end on a schwa, which is an unstressed, kind of "ungh" sound. None of these are very conducive to singing, and singers have to make a lot of modifications to singing in English to make it a) comprehensible, and b) pleasant to sing. Pure vowels are far more common in Romance languages, although French has a lot more diphthongs in its vowels than Italian does. Italian tends to have a very consistent pattern of

consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel

which also makes singing it a lot more straightforward.

Second, Italian is the birthplace of the Western operatic art form. While plenty of other countries have adopted it, it has remained more popular in Italy than almost anywhere else. It's very much an Italian art form, and where a huge chunk of the operas were written, performed, etc., so there's a ton of opera in Italian for that reason as well.

Third, Italian was (and in many ways still is) the *lingua franca* of music. Speaking Italian, if only at a basic level, was very common for musicians, and particularly for singers. Most instructions in music are written in Italian, and you're expected to know what *pianissimo, molto allegro, maestoso*, and *pizzicato* all mean if you're going to be a musician. Even now, the vast majority of Western printed music still uses Italian nearly everywhere, and a basic knowledge of Italian is taught to most musicians.

During the Classical/Romantic period (I assume what you're referring to as the "heyday"), the opera composers we know the best today were either Italian (Rossini, Puccini, Verdi, Bellini, Donizetti), or were writing operas with Italian librettos (Mozart, Meyerbeer, even Handel). That being said, there was still French Opera, German Opera, Czech opera, and a TON of Russian opera during the same time.

Another factor is that while the Italians were creating their operatic tradition, and modern-day Germany, France and others were jumping on board, England was in the grips of the English Civil Wars, the Commonwealth of England, Puritanism, and the Restoration. During that time a TON of art, artists, musicians were banned, theatres were closed, and very little was created and performed. Whether as a result of that, or other factors, opera didn't catch on in England to the extent it did elsewhere, and composers were definitely not inclined to write for English audiences when they were more likely to get much better success on the continent.

All of that being said, you're forgetting about the 20th century. Totally apart from musical theatre, English is BY FAR the most popular language in opera today. Einstein on the Beach, Akhnaten, Nixon in China, Flight, Billy Budd, Peter Grimes, The Rake's Progress, Candide, you're almost hard pressed to find a successful NON-English modern opera. English has become the *lingua franca* of today, in the same way it was Italian 300 years ago.