There are not many wonderful biopic movies about baroque opera singers and composers that one can find easily online or offline. It takes a lot of talent and guts to go through with the film project about opera nowadays. There just isn’t much money to make. Why watch a maestro who performs beautifully an opera aria on a big screen? After all, isn’t it much easier to shoot another movie for the masses and earn loads of dough?
So, in case you missed this magnificent film “Farinelli: Il Castrato” made in 1994 by Belgian director Gérard Corbiau, I would recommend it to you wholeheartedly. As the title hints about the king of castrati singers Farinelli who ruled the baroque opera stages of Europe in the 18th century.
The most difficult task for the film authors was the attempt in recreating the sound of castrato singer. It was impossible to find anything similar today. That is why Farinelli’s singing voice was provided by two singers: a soprano, Ewa Małas-Godlewska and a countertenor, Derek Lee Ragin. Each singer was recorded separately and then their voices were digitally morphed.
The film team made its best to show the ups and downs of Farinelli’s life. That is why they took some real events and turned them into a drama. For example, in this film famous composer George Frideric Handel is presented as some kind of nemesis, of the opera singer. And he has a lot of animosity and hostility when Farinelli perfoms in his pieces. But as we know, in reality Handel and Farinelli were quite friendly.
One of the earliest musical works that we recognize as an opera was created for an annual carnival in Mantua on February 24, 1607. Its creator revolutionary opera composer Claudio Monteverdi created it on the text by Alessandro Striggio. Today we know this early opera under the name The Legend of Orpheus or in Italian as “La Favola d’Orfeo”. Pretty simple libretto is based on the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus, who attempts to rescue his dead lover Eurydice from the underworld.
The significance of this early opera is in its combination of new Baroque music genre and Renaissance elements. Besides, The Legend of the Orpheus is the first large composition that survived to our days with its exact instrumentation, while many other operas of that period are lost to us. It is an entirely new style of music which we know today as musical drama.
The Legend of Orpheus consists of 5 acts, Even today it preserved its dramatic power and lively orchestration. That’s why, Starting with its modern debut in 1904 in Paris, this Monteverdi opera returned to us and since that time saw many productions.
In 1733 during empress of Habsburg celebrated her birthday. All cities and towns belonging to the vast empire launched their festivities in her honor. In Naples the festivities program included opera Proud Prisoner created by brilliant Italian opera composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi on a libretto written by Gennaro Antonio Federico.
As an intermezzo a rather smaller comic opera Servant Mistress was included as well. It went on for only 45 minutes and was performed between the acts of the Proud Prisoner to entertain the audience. Servant Mistress or in Italian “La serva padrona” was written in the genre of opera buffa which has its roots in the improvisatory commedia dell’arte.
Well, “Proud Prisoner” miserably failed. Even today it does not exist in today’s opera repertoire. However, its intermezzo became huge success and wrote its name into the history of opera. Pergolesi separated it from its bigger brother and made it an opera in its own name that enjoyed fame throughout Europe for years after its premiere.
“La serva padrona” was appealing to people of different European nations because of its characters who motives were easy to understand. Audiences enjoyed the tricks of the cunning maid Serpina who felt that she was the mistress of the household and tricksed her aging master Uberto into marrying her.
The importance of this comic opera is significant. Modern specialists consider it the quintessential piece that bridges the gap from the Baroque to the Classical opera period.
During baroque opera rehearsal with Jean-Christophe Spinosi and his orchestra – Ensemble Matheus…. Famous contra tenor Philippe Jaroussky sings Vivaldi’s opera arias ‘Nisi Dominus’, ‘Cum dederit’ and ‘Amen’. And contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux sings an aria ‘Stabat mater dolorosa’ from Vivaldi opera ‘Stabat Mater’.
Up to this day, specialists still have ongoing discussion trying to understand who invented opera. With some certainty we can say that the history of opera started the end of 16th century. The birth of the opera was the result of curious discussions among the tight circle of Florentine elite himanists known as “Camerata de’Bardi”. They were trying to revive the best traditions of the antiquity which was so characteristic at the times of the Renaissance. Humanists attached great importance to classical Greek drama but they did not really know the way it was performed in the ancient times.
For some reason, probably, under the influence of the famous scholar Girolamo Mei, they decided that ancient Greeks sang rather than spoke the verses during drama performance. Mei was considered an expert of ancient Greece at the times, so he easily convinced the others that ancient Greeks not only sang the chorus part but also entire text of all roles. This movement of “returning back to the roots” made composer Jacopo Perri create first opera Daphne around 1597. It is lost to us, but his next creation – opera Euridice, written around 1600, survivied to the present day.
No matter what we may think of this attempt, during the development of both operas Peri invented first recitatives and arias that instantly became the integral part of the play. The star of Jacopo Peri quickly dimmed while the fame of a new opera composer Claudio Monteverdi was on the rise. The latter’s opera L’Orfeo created in 1607 is still regularly performed and mistakenly presented as the first opera up to this day.