theatre music

theatre music

▪ musical genre
Introduction

      any music designed to form part of a dramatic performance, as, for example, a ballet, stage play, motion picture, or television program. Included are the European operetta and its American form, the musical (musical performance).

      Music as an art of the theatre has its roots in primitive ritual and ceremony and its branches in every modern means of theatrical presentation. Its functions are as varied as the forms require and range from being the primary reason for performance, as in opera, to mere noise, filling a vacuum in imagination for some screen and stage presentations.

      Theatre music is all music composed to govern, enhance, or support a theatrical conception. Music composed for theatrical purposes obeys different laws than does the music for concert performance or conventional opera. Whereas in opera the music dictates the form in which the dramatic visual imagery is presented and governs its development, in other kinds of theatre the music is, at best, an equal partner among its principal elements. In concert, of course, the music is the sole factor that determines the experience.

      In the West, the concept of music as an intellectual experience for its own sake emerged only in the second half of the 18th century. Theatrical music is variously related to something other than itself, whether as an enrichment of words (as in operetta), a factor in structure and mood (ballet), or an intensification of situation and feeling (as in incidental music for plays and films).

      In some instances music is dominant, in some it is subservient, and in operetta or stage musical the emphasis alternates between speech, song, and dance. In opera and spoken drama, in which words are wholly sung or spoken, a convention once set is consistently sustained and thereby creates its own kind of reality. The constant change of focus in operetta and musical, from music to speech and back again, emphasizes the artificiality of the illusion they seek to create.

      The classical mainstream of theatre music in the West extends from the mid-17th century to the 1930s, and the instances of drama and music meeting on an equal level of imagination are relatively few. More frequently great music was lavished on weak or corrupt theatre, or great drama was embellished with indifferent music. From the early 20th century new dramatic developments were seldom directly matched in music. A German-Italian composer, Ferruccio Busoni (Busoni, Ferruccio), wrote in 1906:

The greater part of modern theatre music suffers from the mistake of seeking to repeat the scenes passing on the stage, instead of fulfilling its own proper mission of interpreting the attitudes of the persons represented.

      The German composer Kurt Weill (Weill, Kurt)'s score for Der Silbersee (1933; The Silver Sea) was the last major musical contribution to a serious play requiring a full orchestra and chorus. Thereafter, for economic reasons, the dramatic theatre had to equip itself with small-group music or prerecorded tapes. The orchestra and chorus became the prerogative of stage musicals and films. The more these were commercially debased the more they came to rely heavily on the clichés of 19th-century music, to the exclusion of newer musical developments.

      Producers of stage musicals, the choreographers of dance, and the directors of drama need to be wary of the properties of music. It is more demanding of attention than is often thought, and its use should ideally be confined to circumstances where it can provide something that none of the other theatrical elements can offer. The more its qualities are understood and respected, the better it can be guided to an effective theatrical purpose.

Music (musical performance) for ballet
      During the 20th century the element of music in all forms of ballet has changed and developed its significance to an unprecedented extent. It has acquired the status of an equal partner with the choreography, where once it was entirely the servant of the ballet master. In the 19th century he asked little more than that the music should decorate his ballets (ballet) prettily and give rhythmic support to the movements of the dancers. His modern successors have been made aware that the highest level of balletic achievement now requires the music and choreography to become extensions of each other, to be heard and seen on equal levels of perception.

      The finest modern choreographers are not content simply to ride the surface of their chosen music, whether it is specially written, borrowed, or adapted. They seek to exploit the relationship of eye and ear, recognizing that the effect of any danced step can be changed by the stress of the musical rhythm, the degree of loud or soft in its dynamics, the nature of its harmonic character, and the expressive quality of its instrumental timbre. All these factors can make a positive contribution to the balletic image, and they give coherence to the sequence of movement as they merge into its continuous momentum.

      Until the end of the 19th century, each new ballet customarily had music specially composed for it, but it was rare for any composer of distinction to write ballet music, unless it was part of an opera. There were exceptions—such as Beethoven (Beethoven, Ludwig van)'s score for Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (1801; The Creatures of Prometheus), originally a ballet by an Italian choreographer, Salvatore Viganò (Viganò, Salvatore)—but the great era of Romantic ballet from about 1830 was seldom enhanced by music of intrinsic worth. When ballet gained a musical interest, the difference was soon apparent; it has been well said that Léo Delibes gave ballet music a heart, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky gave it a soul, and Igor Stravinsky (Stravinsky, Igor) made an honest woman of it.

      Stravinsky was the dominating figure for nearly half a century (beginning in 1910) in composing music for ballet. He gained international acclaim with the first products of his collaboration with the Ballets Russes of the Russian impresario Sergey Diaghilev (Diaghilev, Sergey Pavlovich): The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). The first two continue to be performed in their original choreography by Michel Fokine (Fokine, Michel), also a Russian, each with a narrative basis illustrated in music notable for its expressive colour and harmonic innovations. The Rite of Spring provoked one of the most notorious scandals in theatre history when Vaslav Nijinsky (Nijinsky, Vaslav)'s original ballet reduced its first Paris audience to verbal insult and physical assault; its rhythmic audacity has since remained a recurring challenge to other choreographers.

      Largely as a result of the standard set by Diaghilev's flair and artistic success, most leading composers in the 20th century have contributed something to the art of dance. Diaghilev directly commissioned two outstanding examples in the French composer Maurice Ravel (Ravel, Maurice)'s Daphnis et Chloé (1912), which the composer defined as a “poème choréographique,” and The Three-cornered Hat (1919) by the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla (Falla, Manuel de). Distinctive original scores for ballet continued usually to be the outcome of specific commissions. Composers do not yet normally think in terms of dance (as they do in terms of song), although in Great Britain the composer Peter Maxwell Davies (Davies, Sir Peter Maxwell) incorporated an integral role for solo dancer in his otherwise instrumental work, Vesalii icones (1969).

      Contrary to what is still sometimes thought by musicians and a section of the public, music for ballet is not necessarily written to be “interpreted” in dance. Stravinsky has emphasized:

Choreography must realise its own form, one independent of the musical form though measured to the musical unit. Its construction will be based on whatever correspondences the choreographer may invent, but it must not seek merely to duplicate the line and beat of the music.

      The composer was writing from the experience of a long collaboration with a Russian-born choreographer, George Balanchine (Balanchine, George), mainly for what is now the New York City Ballet. Their partnership began in 1928 with Apollo, reached a peak in 1957 with Agon, and was to the 20th century what the collaboration of Tchaikovsky with choreographers Marius Petipa from France and Lev Ivanov from Russia (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) was to the 19th.

      In the former Soviet Union and present-day Russia, a post-Revolutionary equivalent to the classical three-act narrative ballet has continued to be in demand. This form has been furnished by many composers of ballets that have not been performed outside of Russian cultural circles, but it has been chiefly distinguished by the work of Sergey Prokofiev (Prokofiev, Sergey). His full-length scores for Romeo and Juliet (1940), Cinderella (1948), and The Stone Flower (posthumously staged in 1954) have variously succeeded in reconciling an older classical form to new expressive demands. Its offshoots in western Europe have included, in Great Britain, Benjamin Britten's music for The Prince of the Pagodas (staged by the Royal Ballet, 1957) and Hans Werner Henze's music for Ondine (Royal Ballet, 1958).

      The stronger emphasis in western Europe and the United States in the late 20th century was on one-act ballets, varying from about 15 minutes' to more than one hour's duration. Composers continue to show some reluctance to write music specifically for dancing, partly because they are seldom closely involved with the art and also because they have relatively less control over the finished performance than in opera and in most other forms of musical theatre. Apart from works already mentioned, however, the ballet repertory has been enriched by such scores as the French composer Erik Satie's Parade for Diaghilev in 1917; the British composer Vaughan Williams' Job (1931) and the English composer Sir Arthur Bliss's Checkmate (1937) for the British choreographer Ninette de Valois, in Britain; and the American composer Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring (1944) and the American composer Samuel Barber's The Serpent Heart (1946; later revised as Cave of the Heart, 1947) for the choreographer Martha Graham, in the United States.

      Nevertheless, the greater proportion of new ballets in the West during the last half-century have been created to preexisting music, and it is evident that choreographers have felt a greater freedom to experiment visually in the use of such music. The practice dates principally from the first orchestration (by the Russian composer Aleksandr Glazunov, 1894) of an arbitrary suite of piano music by Frédéric Chopin (Chopin, Frédéric) to which Fokine created Chopiniana (1908)—a title retained by Soviet ballet companies for what Diaghilev renamed Les Sylphides (1909). More than 60 years later, another arbitrary suite by Chopin, although retained in its piano form, proved to be no less fruitful for the American choreographer Jerome Robbins in Dances at a Gathering (1969).

      Almost every category of music—from medieval music to advanced electronics and from symphonic compositions to the simplest pop tunes—has now been used for choreographic purposes. The function of music in a dance context has varied almost as much—staining the ballet's surroundings as a kind of aural decor at one extreme, as with the soundscapes of John Cage for Merce Cunningham's dance works in the United States, to the mutual absorption of music and choreography phrase by phrase in such works as the British choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton's Symphonic Variations to the music of César Franck (Royal Ballet, 1946), as well as the Balanchine-Stravinsky Agon (1957) and Movements (New York City Ballet, 1963).

      Sometimes the same music has been used for several different ballets within a short time by various choreographers. An outstanding example is the Sinfonia by an Italian composer, Luciano Berio (Berio, Luciano), written originally in 1968 as a concert work. By the end of 1971 it had been taken over for at least eight separate ballets in almost as many countries in western Europe alone.

      Another trend in ballet in the second half of the 20th century has been to make ballets apparently more concerned with musical associations than with human personality. Instances include Balanchine's Agon and Movements, already mentioned, and the British choreographer Kenneth (later Sir Kenneth) MacMillan (MacMillan, Sir Kenneth)'s The Song of the Earth (1965) to the song-symphony by the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler. The dancers seem required to assume the “personality,” or expressive character, of the musical instruments they parallel, as if the choreographers were moving toward a form of “ideal” dance once postulated by a French poet, Stéphane Mallarmé (Mallarmé, Stéphane), who envisaged music and dance not only as equals but also equally devoid of human personality.

      In the view of most ballet critics, the antidote lies in the continuing appeal of narrative dance-dramas with their illustrative music, although the success or otherwise of any ballets that engage preexisting music is basically governed by a single crucial principle: the level of choreographic imagination should never be less than that of the music. A ballet can be better than its music, but it can never afford to be worse. There will always be ballets dependent on music for no more than expressive colour and supporting rhythm, but the “perfect analogous concord between what we see and what we hear,” recommended as the ideal nearly 150 years ago by Carlo Blasis (Blasis, Carlo), a great Italian teacher, still remains the most desirable aspiration for every kind of ballet music.

Stage musicals
      When, in the 1930s and '40s, dancing became an integral element in a genre governed chiefly by song—instead of being merely a diversion—the “musical” established itself as the legitimate theatrical heir to “musical comedy” and a form of popular theatre art that dominated the latter half of the 20th century. It has been challenged by the newer “rock musical,” using a variation of the common musical vernacular and techniques related more to the recording studio than to the theatre, the effect of which is not yet determined. Meanwhile, what originally started as a democratic counterpart to aristocratic opera reached its fruition as the theatrical association of sentiment with illusion.

      The sentiment is usually dispensed by the narrative; the illusion is created by the music. The most potent narratives in stage musicals have often been adaptations of classical drama and literature—for example, Romeo and Juliet transformed into West Side Story; The Taming of the Shrew into Kiss Me, Kate; Don Quixote into Man of La Mancha; and Oliver Twist into Oliver—or the many variations on the Cinderella-Pygmalion legend by which rags are transformed into riches (from The Shop Girl in 1894 to My Fair Lady in 1956). A distinction was at one time drawn between the frivolous musical comedy and the “musical play,” denoting a dramatically serious or even tragic narrative, but both are now equally defined as musicals.

      Their specifically musical character is born from a marriage of convenience between first- and second-generation descendants of European operetta and music-hall variety, on the one hand, and American jazz and American music hall, on the other—plus the romantic balladry of both continents. An English musicologist, Wilfred Mellers, asserts that, although most successful stage songs contain subtleties unappreciated by the nonmusical listener, they all reflect “an illusion that we can live on the surface of our emotions” and that “the world of musical comedy never gets beyond, or wants to get beyond, this illusion.”

      The first musical comedy to be called so was A Gaiety Girl, staged in 1893 by George Edwardes at the Gaiety Theatre, London. A romantic farce adorned by the songs of Sidney Jones, it was successfully exported to New York in the same year. John Hollingshead (Edwardes' predecessor at the Gaiety Theatre) wrote in 1903:

The invention or discovery of musical comedy was a happy inspiration of Mr. George Edwardes's. It provided a new form of entertainment for playgoers who go to a theatre for amusement and recreation, which was more elastic in plot or story than the old burlesque . . . [It] exhibited a little of the old burletta and vaudeville, most of the best elements of farce, a dash of the French revue . . . and much that would not have been out of place in Parisian opéra-bouffe.

      Some 50 years of development in musical theatre are reflected in the contrast between the foregoing remarks and the following comment in 1952 by Jack Burton, American theatre historian, on Oklahoma! (1943), an epoch-making musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein:

This phenomenal production set a new pattern in which every line, every song, every dance routine is an indispensable part of a closely-knit whole. It was a show that had dramatic substance and never ran off the plot track, and so real, so simple, so engrossing was its story that its narrative could be safely entrusted to other than big-name stars.

      The years embraced by these comments set up a dominant axis of theatrical exchange between New York and London. Success in this field is governed more by economic than artistic considerations, with longer and longer runs of each production becoming necessary to recover increasingly heavy expenditures before profits can be made. The primary requirements for the composer are, therefore, quick assimilation combined with durability. His music should also be easily adaptable to other media such as motion pictures and phonograph or tape reproduction, whereby it becomes a commonplace of experience to a mass audience far beyond the reach of the original theatrical context.

      Although musical theatre of this kind has developed toward a closer integration of music and story, its primary feature has remained the individual song. Lehman Engel, a leading conductor of stage musicals in the United States, has defined five types of song basic to the stage musical: ballad—usually but not exclusively romantic in feeling; rhythm song—varied in emotional character but primarily propelled by a prominent musical beat; comedy song—enhancing verbal humour and divided into “short joke” and “long joke”; charm song—generally delicate, optimistic, and lightly rhythmic; and musical scene—in which a song may form part of a continuous dramatic episode. Engel further asserts that the successful impact of any song in the first instance is generally governed by the following considerations: the tempo, the mood of the scene, the song's position in relation to the whole production, the inherent value of the song itself, and the relative importance of the character who delivers it. It will be noted that integral musical quality is subordinate on this scale, although it is specifically the musical appeal that establishes success in the first place, disseminates that success through other media, and may later lead to revival in the country of origin and to reproduction in other countries.

      One of the most successful specimens is My Fair Lady, with music by Frederick Loewe, a Viennese-born American composer. This musical had first runs of 2,717 performances in New York (from 1956) and 2,281 in London (from 1958), and it has since been staged in translation in most European countries. It is rare for the English-language dominance of the musical-comedy genre to be breached by other countries, as France did with Irma la Douce (1956) or pre-Nazi Germany did with Die Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera, 1928) and Im weissen Rossl (1930; White Horse Inn); but in most European countries except Britain the line between musical and operetta (see below) is less distinctly marked.

      In Italy such lighter forms of musical theatre are submerged in an already popular taste for the broadest range of opera, while in Spain they manifest themselves in the category of zarzuela (discussed below in conjunction with operetta). Differences of idiom are often more the outcome of theatrical or other conditions in their respective countries than of theatrical or musical distinctions in the work itself. In the erstwhile Soviet Union, the musicologist Andrey Olkhovsky once noted that

the numerous attempts which have been made to create a Soviet repertory have led to no results. At best the plots of comedies are based on episodes from Soviet life, but musically they are still imitations of the pre-Revolution operettas.

      Stage musical comedies in the Western sense have produced their own original talents among composers—notably Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers in the United States and Noel Coward, Vivian Ellis, Ivor Novello, Lionel Bart, and Sandy Wilson in Great Britain. They have also had occasional recourse to adaptations from classical composers, including Franz Schubert and Edvard Grieg, who are dramatically characterized respectively in Lilac Time (originally Das Dreimäderlhaus; 1916) and The Song of Norway (1944); Georges Bizet, whose music became the basis of Carmen Jones (1943); and Aleksandr Borodin, for Kismet (1953).

      Musicals ought to be adaptable to varied instrumentation, because theatre orchestras can vary considerably in size and composition from place to place. Paradoxically, the looser form of the rock musical is propelled by a much more rigid instrumentation derived from the ensemble used in pop-music recording, itself determined by studio techniques. In Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) the covering of the orchestra pit, the permanent amplification of instruments, and the use of voices entirely dependent on microphones amounts to a replacement of the illusion of theatre in any traditional sense with the actuality of a modern recording studio made visible.

Music for motion pictures
      Many successful stage musicals have become additionally popular through the medium of motion pictures, but music as a basic element in filmmaking has gained recognition only since midcentury as something more than a means to heighten local colour or intensify emotional expression. In the early silent films, all kinds of music were recorded, classified, and adapted to fit different moods (Beethoven overtures for cowboy-Indian chases, for instance). Several talented hacks also wrote short descriptive pieces. A few bigger films, such as The Birth of a Nation, had special scores fitted to them. Since the 1960s it has turned a full circle of the wheel back to extensive musical quotation from classical resources for similar ends but in different ways.

      Russian filmmakers first gave serious consideration to the contribution music could make. V.I. Pudovkin (Pudovkin, Vsevolod Illarionovich), a Russian musicologist, defined a theory and practice of film music in the early 1930s, advocating a close and contrapuntal relationship between sound and sight. The Russian film director Sergey Eisenstein (Eisenstein, Sergey Mikhaylovich) described his careful collaboration with Prokofiev in making Alexander Nevsky (1938). His perceptive observations on the potential link between cinematic rhythm and musical rhythm suggested a technique that has influenced others, such as the British composer Sir William Walton in his score for Hamlet.

      Hanns Eisler, a German-born composer, formed his own theories of film music, based on empirical experience composing in this medium. His published findings recommended short musical forms in a film context, the composer's conscious awareness of the film's realistic sound element (the “where” and “when” of its location), and music that could suggest an objective, universal character for the film's emotions, rather than being introspective on its own account. Eisler also supported Pudovkin in maintaining that film music should create its own sense of line independently of, although related to, the film narrative.

      Film music has travelled through five broad phases: an initial borrowing from existing conventional sources; the use of musical-cliché catalogs, which enabled any musician of modest ability to assemble an emotional or dramatic sequence and which served as the basis for most later background music in films; the active interest of major composers in writing original scores; a subsequent reaction of either near silence or advanced techniques of electronic sound generation and transformation; and the borrowing from classical sources for new purposes.

      In France, in particular, the regular participation of leading composers in film music has been the rule rather than the exception. The opposite holds true in the United States and Great Britain, although most composers of distinction in both countries between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s made some original contributions to the motion-picture medium. In the United States these included Aaron Copland, Marc Blitzstein, and Virgil Thomson, who received the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to film music—for Louisiana Story (1948); in Great Britain, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, Sir William Walton, Alan Rawsthorne, and Richard Rodney Bennett.

      Isolated experiments to marry films to specific classical music have been made from time to time. These include the Austrian director Max Reinhardt's film of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (Midsummer Night's Dream, A) (1935), which varied the cinematic structure to incorporate the complete suite of Mendelssohn's incidental music originally written for the play. The American filmmaker Walt Disney's celebrated Fantasia (1940) adapted the technique of the animated cartoon to illustrate a sequence of musical classics, outraging some people because the visual relationships were held to be irrelevant to the music but continuing to the present to entertain audiences, especially young ones, on an international scale.

      When the making of motion pictures became an industry more than a craft, a situation developed in which music was recognized as desirable by the manufacturers, who nevertheless made no claim to “understand” music in the way they would be expected to understand motion-picture techniques. A parallel attitude among musicians unfortunately came to regard the skilled provision of a score tailored to the demands of script and camera as a spiritually impoverished relation of aspiring symphonic or operatic works.

      In the late 1960s original film composition tended to decline in favour of renewed and often extensive borrowing from existing concert music. The slow movement from a Mozart piano concerto served to express the passage of time as well as for emotional mood in Elvira Madigan. The American film director Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) led an audience's imagination outward into space by a transition from the diatonic (using the natural scale of five tones and two semitones) C major of the introduction to Richard Strauss's tone-poem Also sprach Zarathustra to the polytonal Kyrie from the Requiem by the contemporary Hungarian-born composer György Ligeti. In the Italian film director Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice, four repetitions of a long passage from the Adagietto movement of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 5 achieved a different expressive purpose in association with the visual scene each time it was heard.

      Examples like these achieved an even greater impact than many original scores because they formed an organic part of the filmmaker's conception. Conversely, even scores distinguished by their own merits—such as Copland's for Of Mice and Men (1939) or Walton's for Henry V (1944)—were added only after the film itself was more or less finished. The major hope for the future of this medium lies in what Vaughan Williams urged: the composition of original scores but prepared in conjunction with the director from the film's inception. Film music might then be turned to more constructive instead of merely decorative purposes, without the dramatic license of the British film director Ken Russell's treatment of extensive passages from Tchaikovsky's music in his film The Music Lovers (1971).

Music for television
      The screen medium's first law, that the visual element must come first, has been intensified by television. On the home screen, the experience of music performed for its own sake customarily operates under a double disadvantage. First, it runs the risk of being swamped by its visual presentation, which may range in character from the matching of nonmusical images in varying degrees of relevance to the technique of using close-ups of musicians in action. Secondly, it suffers the continuing handicap of inadequate reproduction by the average television receiver.

      Apart from rare exceptions—such as an occasional “television opera,” a dance-film, or Stravinsky's mixed media The Flood (1962)—original music to television is chiefly confined to the provision of theme passages or supporting music hopefully intended to enhance verbal or dramatic presentation. Like the cinema pianist who played for silent films, television music has a limited repertory of conventional gestures. Even when these are given a more contemporary harmonic or instrumental garb, they remain basically governed by the 19th-century mode of musical thought, to which it is assumed that mass audiences will most easily react.

      Programs about, rather than of, music have obtained a modicum of television success. While the occasional theme quotation has perhaps introduced a famous musical classic to millions who would not otherwise haveheard it, the “workshop” program, showing how music and musicians go about their business, has broken down barriers of technique and exposed the raw materials of music in a way that has probably helped to foster a wider interest in the finished product. Television cannot otherwise be accepted as a musical medium, until sets have a higher standard of musical reproduction.

incidental music for the theatre
      Incidental music in the theatre, whatever its idiom or degree of stylistic emancipation, justifies itself through its exclusive concern with a specific play or theatrical presentation. Its three main uses involve songs, intensified dramatic effect, and interlude filling, and these have been clearly defined in Western theatre since Renaissance drama freed itself from the church in the 16th century.

      A major modification of its character since the 1920s has been brought about largely by the wider use of mechanical techniques of amplification and recorded music. This has encouraged short musical fragments rather than fully composed pieces, except where the latter are specifically called for. Examples of this technique were heard in modern times in the musical productions of the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company in Great Britain. Such carefully planned but more informal use of incidental music has replaced the elaborate suites customary in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which presupposed the complete performance of each piece and required the stage drama to be produced so that the music could be accommodated in it (a characteristic example is Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream at Potsdam, Germany, in 1843).

      Economic conditions are now the principal factor governing the provision of incidental music. Theatres not concerned with opera or ballet can no longer afford to hire musicians for a pit band. Trade-union restrictions in the musical profession also limit the public use of recorded music in many countries. The trend is consequently for spoken drama either to dispense with music, to restrict it to one or two musicians with a singer, or to make increasingly fruitful use of electronic sounds on prerecorded tape.

      Some famous 19th-century suites of incidental music were brought into being by conditions that favoured resident musicians at court theatres in Germany or lavish orchestral resources in Tsarist Russia. The music has since acquired independent status on its own merits and has become part of the classical concert repertory, such as the Mendelssohn just mentioned and Beethoven's music for Goethe's Egmont (1810); Schubert's for the German playwright Helmina von Chézy's Rosamunde (1823); Schumann's for Lord Byron's Manfred (1852); and Grieg's for Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1876).

      Earlier theatre music was often, for long periods of time, governed by measures of censorship and legal restrictions that varied greatly from one country to another. In England, for instance, the monopoly of spoken drama was vested by King Charles II in the Theatres Royal in the 17th century, and this continued until 1843. Other theatres that opened during this time—including those catering to a new working class—were licensed only on condition that plays included five musical items in each act or a “musical accompaniment.” The latter condition was sometimes held to be satisfied by no more than a chord struck at intervals on a piano during the performance. Such conditions inevitably brought about a profusion of inferior music, which in turn gave rise to the traditions of music hall (music hall and variety) and burlesque.

      The renaissance of secular theatre, from the 17th century onward, led in Italy to the evolution of the predominantly musical forms of opera and oratorio, in France to the court ballet, and in England and Spain to the cultivation of spoken plays with incidental music. The unparalleled achievements of secular drama in the latter two countries are the roots of present-day musical theatre and help to explain why opera failed to flourish in competition. The drama in England expanded into the allied form of masque and involved the participation of such composers of distinction as Henry Purcell.

      The masque in relation to its own period might well have been defined as “mixed media.” This term has now come to stand for theatre presentations in a line of descent from Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat (1918; The Soldier's Tale), which combines speech, song, mime, dance, and instrumental music with pictorial design. These elements have since been supplemented by the mechanical techniques of film or photographic projection, and of electronic sounds, in almost infinite permutations, together with a free form of expression no longer necessarily shaped by a narrative content.

      Most of these manifestations incorporated two different kinds of musical contribution. One has been defined by a 20th-century German composer, Bernd Alois Zimmermann:

All elements of the theatre of movement, including film, sound, speech, electronic music, must be mobilized into one great time-space structure, whose arrangement will be constituted by music as the most general form of temporal order.

      Zimmermann's ideas were embodied in his opera, Die Soldaten (The Soldiers). The alternative is described by another composer, John Cage (Cage, John), as “Single sounds or groups of sounds which are not supported by harmonies but resound within a space of silence” and are added more or less at random to the other elements. It remains to be discovered whether the future of theatre music in drama or mixed media lies primarily with the highly organized patterns of interaction postulated by Zimmermann or with Cage's arbitrary combination of simple, disparate activities into a complex whole.

operetta and allied forms
      It seems unlikely that any future exists for operetta except as part of a “museum” repertory, because the contemporary musical has taken its place in musical theatre. Operetta in the usual sense of a work of lesser musical pretensions than opera, with spoken dialogue linking the musical episodes, was a direct descendant of comic opera, overlapping this category, on one hand, and early musical comedy, on the other. It was born as a democratic expression of popular wit and social satire, flourished for almost exactly a century (c. 1840–1940), and died from a surfeit of sentiment.

Offenbach (Offenbach, Jacques)
      The satirical, romantic operetta emerged primarily in Paris in the mid-19th century with the French composer Jacques Offenbach; two of his works are still widely staged: Orphée aux enfers (1858; Orpheus in the Underworld) and La Belle Hélène (1864; Beautiful Helen). The character of Offenbach's operettas established several musical precedents, including the burlesque of Italian opera, the romantic ballad in 3/8 or 6/8 metre, and the drinking song and the ensemble de perplexité (“ensemble of confusion”). In England, Arthur Sullivan (Sullivan, Sir Arthur) followed in Offenbach's wake with his fruitful partnership with the author W.S. Gilbert, bequeathing a commentary on aspects of Victorian society through music of popular and enduring, if somewhat relentless, charm.

Viennese operetta
      Charm is the main ingredient of the more sentimental Viennese operetta, and it usually submerges the rarer shaft of social comment. The younger Johann Strauss (Strauss, Johann, The Younger) made operetta an international entertainment by an expert blend of charm and craft, and his Die Fledermaus (1874; The Bat) remains a classic of its kind. A second generation in this tradition was chiefly distinguished by Franz Lehár (Lehár, Franz), whose Die lustige Witwe (1905; The Merry Widow) represents the genre at its peak of romantic elegance, demonstrating a style and craftsmanship that seems in serious danger of being lost altogether.

      Such operettas remain current in today's musical theatre mainly as an indulgence of musical and emotional nostalgia. Their popular style enabled them to take root and flourish far from their native territories, including transplantation to the United States. The indigenous tradition of the U.S. stage musical, already mentioned, first had to compete with European-style operetta. That the latter keeps a tenacious hold on popular affections is demonstrated by figures listing Rudolf Friml's Rose Marie (1924) and Sigmund Romberg's The Desert Song (1926) as the most frequently performed works in U.S. musical theatre, in terms of both amateur and professional performances.

      Spain was a prominent exception to the wide dissemination of operetta, preferring instead the flourishing native variety of zarzuela. This form customarily incorporates regional songs and dances, sometimes with traditional rather than original music. It continues to some extent as a staple fare in Spanish musical theatre, although the general contemporary trend toward a more universal style of musical expression has meant that the younger Spanish composer has shown much less interest in the zarzuela form as an outlet for his musical imagination.

      The Romantic zarzuela has little resemblance to the aristocratic and courtly character of its 17th-century namesake and emerged with French and Viennese operetta during the 19th century. It divided into two forms—the zarzuela grande in three acts, equivalent to romantic operetta, and the género chico in one act, invariably comic, usually satirical, employing the broadest musical vernacular, and verging on revue. In the former category, the names of Francisco Barbieri, Amadeo Vives, and Federico Moreno Torroba are probably the most significant representatives of their respective generations.

      The Spanish character and language of the Romantic zarzuelas made them exportable to Central and South America, where they became a model for the limited indigenous musical theatre. The South American centres are otherwise dominated by imports or imitations of the Italian opera tradition or used as transit bases for the latest North American stage musical on its theatrical circumnavigation. Certain examples of the Spanish zarzuela, such as Moreno Torroba's Luisa Fernanda (1932), have achieved popular success in Latin American countries, where local contributions to the genre have notably been made by Juan Bautista Massa in Argentina, Andrés Martínez Montoya in Colombia, Luis Delgadillo in Nicaragua, and Teodoro Valcárcel in Peru.

Oriental musical theatre
      Theatre music generally serves different purposes in non-Western idioms—usually adding dimension and perspective to song and dance, indicating symbolic associations, suggesting mood, and even inducing a desired response in an audience. Most Oriental streams of music divide between popular music of a folk character and a more sophisticated style for a cultured elite. The distinction is often less clearly defined than in Western music and is now not so firmly maintained in the wake of recent political and social changes.

China
      The classical Peking opera (ching-hsi (jingxi)) in China (arts, East Asian) is a form of musical theatre in which music is one among several elements rather than a governing factor, as in Western opera. The vocal writing alternates between styles broadly equivalent to recitative and song, distinguished by a forced high falsetto tone required from the male singers. A less stylized variety is the all-female yüeh ch'ü , in which natural singing voices perform musical plays in realistic and decorative scenery, and the Manchurian P'ing Hsi, which has developed into an operetta-like equivalent, with traditions and subjects derived from strolling players and folk legends.

      Since 1964 the performance of classical Peking opera in Communist China has been mainly restricted to festival occasions (although state-sponsored schools continue to train performers especially for it). More emphasis has been put on entertainments closer to Western musicals, involving contemporary dialogue, everyday dress, and less stylized music. As a popular form of musical theatre it has been turned to political and social advantage with a new and adapted repertory of dramatic ballets and musical plays, bearing such titles as Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy and The Red Detachment of Women.

Japan
      Music is as much a regular part of theatre performance in Japan as it is in China. The highly formal tradition of Japanese Nō (Noh theatre) drama incorporates music as an integral feature, usually performed by flute, a variety of stringed instrument called the samisen, drums, and singers. The music varies in content and character with the subject of the play and obeys detailed melodic rules—especially in the central dance episode designed to reveal the spirit of the play's principal character. A less formal counterpart, the Kabuki theatre, has almost as impressive an ancestry as the Nō and continues to be widely performed, with music used to indicate period, place, time, or mood and often functioning by phrase association like the principle of leading motives in Richard Wagner.

India
      Japanese theatre also incorporates music dramas of Indian origin, and the Indian theatre tradition is a full combination of poetry, music, dance, and symbolism. The music is often interpolated rather than specially composed and is likely to be drawn from the repertory of widely known songs without aiming at a high classical standard. The close association of music with drama in Indian culture has been carried over into Indian film, which cannot hope to enjoy wide success among its modern audiences unless it is liberally embellished with songs and other forms of music.

The history of theatrical music

Formative period
      What is thought to be the oldest document of musical history depicts a man wearing an animal mask, manipulating what is possibly a form of musical bow, and dancing in the wake of a herd of reindeer. This is a prehistoric cave painting dating from the Stone Age, discovered at Ariège in France. Masks (mask) are tangible signs of that transfer of personality on which every form of theatre is based and in which song and dance have participated since the dawn of communication and animated ritual. Music in dramatic entertainment reached early peaks of development in European and Oriental cultures in, respectively, the ancient Greece of Homer and, some centuries later, the Chinese classical drama.

      Descriptive evidence of the earliest Greek theatre indicates that music, mostly sung by a chorus, was essential but not continuous. At drama festivals the poet wrote his own music (as well as being actor, producer, and choreographer), probably based on some kind of traditional repeated formula. Later Greek theatre, after the fall of Athens (404 BC), initiated both the repertory system and a category of musicians trained more highly than the populace. Amateur and professional became separated for the first time, and increasing sophistication brought about its counterpart in popular pantomime expressed in song and dance, often satirical or bawdy in character.

      The Roman (ancient Rome) musical theatre derived directly from the Greek, ousting a short-lived native form with Etruscan actors who also danced to pipe music. Latin versions of the Greek theatre with music were supplemented by a Roman variant of the pantomime as a dramatic solo dance with chorus and orchestra. It implied some prior knowledge on the audience's part of the subject and the dance vocabulary. Amphitheatre shows of gladiatorial contests were regularly accompanied by music, sometimes involving up to 100 horn blowers and 200 pipers, as well as such extra devices as water organs.

      About the time the Roman theatre flourished, an Oriental equivalent emerged in China from ritual ceremonies that came to be repeated for their entertainment value. The puppet theatre was a significant intermediate stage in this process, and the forms evolved into different styles of entertainment for courtier and commoner. Strings, flute, and handbells accompanied the songs and dances in upper-class entertainments; a form of mouth organ replaced the bells in shows for the common people. By the time of the Sung dynasty (Song dynasty) (AD 960–1279), from which the earliest written music survives, a type of musical variety theatre, the tzarjiuh, was widely popular.

      The Chinese classical opera tradition has already been mentioned as a modern form of musical theatre. It first developed during the Yüan dynasty (Yuan dynasty) (1206–1368) and reached its peak of style and classical form in the Ming period (1368–1644). Its evolution was accompanied by a less formal counterpart based on the dramatization of folk songs linked by a thin narrative plot (Chueichang). The full-scale opera and its regional variants remained the most significant form of Oriental musical theatre until the modern post-revolutionary times, but throughout the Far East the indigenous forms of music have always played a prominent part in theatrical presentations.

      In Europe the vestiges of Greco-Roman culture were submerged by the early Christian Church. By the 6th century the church had suppressed drama and adapted pagan rituals to its own liturgical purposes. A small flame of musical theatre was left burning only in the form of religious ceremonial (for example, in the mass). Festive religious celebrations eventually expanded into the liturgical music drama that slowly developed from about the 10th century. This brought in its wake the equally religious “mysteries” and miracle plays (miracle play) of the Middle Ages in Europe, which were performed in the vernacular instead of in Latin, had a strong musical element, and, in due course, developed a secular counterpart.

      In a pattern that was to repeat itself after the birth of opera 200 years later, the secular theatre in the Middle Ages established itself either as lighthearted interludes in serious moralities or as deliberate parody tolerated by the church as a safety valve to consistent piety. The annual Feast of Fools (Fools, Feast of) in 15th-century Paris, for instance, incorporated an obscene parody of the mass performed in song and dance within the church. By the year 1400 numerous comedies and farces had appeared, usually performed on festive occasions in aristocratic houses or on open stages in municipal squares.

      These plays often employed musical forces comparable to those of the religious plays and used them for similar purposes. Choirboys from the church sometimes took part, but surviving texts suggest that there was little choral music as such. The individual actors incorporated parts of songs chanted monophonically to embellish or heighten the dramatic effect, and dancing to specific instrumental music also had a regular place in the entertainment. Professional musicians might be hired and might also be required to act; the constituent parts of the entertainment varied widely from place to place.

      The fact that, except for songs, documents of the period contain almost no music directly linked with the theatre is thought to indicate that very little original instrumental music was written for theatrical purposes at this time. Whatever was suitable for weddings, banquets, and other feasts perhaps served a theatrical purpose just as well. Musicians probably had little or no acquaintance with musical notation and played pieces from their regular repertory. These seem to have included arrangements of vocal melodies as well as dance tunes, among which the play texts most frequently identify basses-dances and branles.

The Renaissance and Baroque periods
      When Catherine de Médicis married King Henry II of France in 1533, she brought from Italy a taste for entertainments in which dancing was prominent. Her encouragement established the court ballet (ballet de cour) as the foundation of classical ballet, the source of a new theatrical identity for music and a precursor of French opera. As a unified blend of poetry, music, and movement, the court ballet dates from the performance of the Ballet comique de la reine at a court wedding in 1581. The form comprised an optional number of scenes in mime and dance, prefaced by explanatory verses that were either spoken or sung; the scenes were accompanied by solo and choral songs with lute, and instrumental ensemble pieces for strings.

      In about 1605 a more mannered style of singing had become customary, and by 1620 the court ballet was more a vehicle for display than drama. Unified dramatic plots were restored by the poet Isaac de Benserade (Benserade, Isaac de) in midcentury, and Jean-Baptiste Lully (Lully, Jean-Baptiste), who entered the service of King Louis XIV in 1652, endowed the music with fresh distinction. He favoured dramatic musical expression with the use of larger choral and orchestral forms and formulated such dances as the minuet, first danced by Louis as “Le Roi soleil” (the sun king), the gavotte, rigaudon, bourrée, passepied, and loure—each with its particular rhythmic metre.

      Lully collaborated with the playwright Molière in a famous succession of comedy-ballets, of which Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670) is probably the best known. Thereafter the character of Lully's work became essentially operatic, and music in the French theatre was left to function in a more subsidiary role. The dramatist Pierre Corneille (Corneille, Pierre), for instance, wrote “I have employed music only to satisfy the ear while the eyes are occupied with looking at the machines.” In another category, the pastoral comedies derived from Italian models were liberally embellished with songs loosely strung together and alternating with spoken verses.

      The French court ballet exerted an influence on the English masque, which took its name and some of its early character from the medieval Italian mascherate (masquerades) in carnival entertainment. At a time of distinctive English literary achievement, the masque reached a high artistic level, performed mainly as an aristocratic entertainment. It combined instrumental and vocal music, mixed with dancing and acting, in the representation of mythological and allegorical subjects. At the same time, the first public theatres in London came into being. They date from 1576 (61 years before the first public Venetian opera house); the earliest public plays are known to have incorporated some form of music.

      Cues for music recur throughout Shakespeare (Shakespeare, William)'s plays, usually for simple songs or dances. Music between the acts of public plays was customary by 1600, with the audience often calling for the tunes they wanted played. Instrumental music was employed for supernatural effects and to heighten dramatic tension; it was usually performed behind, at the side of, or even under the stage. After the suppression of playhouses during the Civil War, the restoration of the English monarchy with King Charles II brought an even richer flowering of theatre music, led by Henry Purcell (Purcell, Henry).

      Besides those works of Purcell that are nearer to masque than drama, such as the Shakespeare adaptations for The Fairy Queen (1692) and The Tempest (1695), he composed suites of incidental music for more than 40 plays. These generally comprised overtures, “act-tunes” (interludes), dances, and songs. Rather than growing out of the verbal drama, however, they are often so arbitrarily interpolated into it that only the quality of the music can justify most of them. After Purcell's death, English theatrical music ceased to contribute significantly to the theatre, but Thomas Arne (Arne, Thomas), who wrote numerous masques and ballad operas such as Love in a Village (1762), was very popular in the mid-18th century, and his simplicity of expression has a certain direct appeal.

      The flourishing tradition of Spanish Renaissance drama precluded much opera from taking root in Spain, but the music for plays had generally less distinction than the English equivalent. The early zarzuela (not to be confused with the later Romantic version already mentioned) originated in the 17th century as a court entertainment. It was the Spanish counterpart to the court ballet and acquired a strong Italian influence on its musical character. Spanish music and musicians travelled to the Western Hemisphere with the early explorers, and by the late 17th century the Peruvian capital of Lima had become musically important. The composer José Diaz worked there and wrote much incidental music to the plays of Calderón de la Barca.

      Renaissance theatre in Italy bred the intermedio, which consisted of songs and instrumental music added before or after the acts of a play. The words of the songs were generally relevant to the action of the drama, and this development—together with more extended musical settings in pastoral plays—became the direct precursor of Italian opera. As a new form of “drama in music” which rapidly acquired serious artistic pretensions, the opera inevitably brought in its train a less aristocratic variety of musical theatre variously termed opera buffa (comic opera), vaudeville, ballad opera, singspiel (literally, song-play), or tonadilla, always performed in the vernacular of its audience and often in dialect.

      These depicted current events instead of historical or mythological subjects, involved elements of parody and social satire, and usually depended on modest musical resources for economic reasons. They began as interludes performed between the acts of serious opera and comprise an essential link in the history of musical theatre. By about 1700 the scenes (usually two) had acquired a linked plot, and by 1740 they were performed apart from the opera as a genuinely popular entertainment. Eventually they responded to the demands of the rising middle classes by raising their own standards into the category of comic opera.

Classical developments
      The Italian commedia dell'arte entertainment of strolling players in mainly improvised comedy had left its mark on French fairground theatre, although the performers were expelled from France in 1697 for having ventured their satire too close to court topics. Ten years later French satirical comedies were also banned, whereupon the resourceful performers found a new way round by employing monologue, mime, and music. They thereby developed a new form of popular entertainment to contrast with the aristocratic opéra-ballets, which were soon to be dominated by the spectacular productions with Jean-Philippe Rameau (Rameau, Jean-Philippe) as composer, and in 1713 two theatrical managements in Paris were given license to perform “Le nouvel Opéra-comique.”

       opéra-comique was a contraction of opéra rendu comique (“opera made comic”), signifying parody and satire at the expense primarily of serious opera. The entertainment soon came to veer either toward comédie vaudeville, mostly made up of bawdy satire or simply songs of disparaging social comment, or to the alternative comédie à ariette, involving a generally more decorous musical parody at the expense of Italian styles. The Guerre des Bouffons (“war of the comedians”) between partisans of French and Italian theatrical styles was eventually resolved by the emergence of the opéra bouffe (literally, “comic opera”)—the French variety of operetta. It is usually dated to the Paris production in 1753 of Les Troqueurs (“The Barterers”), based on a fable by Jean de La Fontaine and having original music by a court violinist, Antoine Dauvergne.

      Ballet was declining about this time from courtly heroics to simple diversion unrelated to any dramatic point. Apart from the opéra-ballets of Rameau, little significant music was composed for the dance until the German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (Gluck, Christoph Willibald), who initiated the major reform of serious opera during the century, first turned his attention to a move for balletic reform involving a more dramatic style. In 1761 Gluck composed the music for Don Juan, a ballet by Gasparo Angiolini (Angiolini, Gasparo), the Italian ballet master at Vienna, who maintained that dancing should be self-expressive without recourse to verbal explanations.

      Gluck's vividly descriptive score contains 31 musical pieces, alternating between formal dance and narrative drama. It made the music a foreground element in the ballet instead of a background accompaniment and could have brought about—if its example had been followed up—a revitalization of ballet music almost as significant as the operatic reform Gluck launched in Orfeo ed Euridice a year later. In the ballet, the fight scene near the beginning and the dance of the Furies at the end (itself later incorporated into Orfeo) have a concentrated intensity of musical expression, and the graveyard scene has a degree of imaginative orchestration that is unsurpassed in any other music at that date.

      For reasons that belong more properly to the history of ballet, Gluck's influence on its future course was less fruitful than in opera. Perhaps his example, nevertheless, encouraged the participation of such composers as Mozart with Les Petits Riens (1778; “Sweet Nothings”) and Beethoven in The Creatures of Prometheus (1801). It was, otherwise, an era theatrically dominated by opera of various kinds, so that there was at first little call for music in relation to spoken drama. Haydn (Haydn, Joseph), however, composed some music (1796) for an early German translation of Alexander Bicknell's The Patriot King, or Alfred and Elvida, and Mozart (Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus) contributed a suite of superior choral and orchestral music for Thamos, König in Ägypten (1773; Thamos, King of Egypt), which was never used for the play in his lifetime but which has survived where the play has long been forgotten.

      Eighteenth-century opera nourished musical developments in the theatre chiefly through establishing regular orchestras of some quality. Outside of cities with more than one theatre, such as Vienna, Prague, Paris, and London, the numerous court theatres needed to keep a resident and costly orchestra reasonably occupied, with interest divided between opera and drama. It therefore became customary either to commission incidental music for existing plays whenever possible (especially the historical classics, as more and more of them were translated from one language to another) or to commission new plays that would incorporate ample provision for orchestral and sometimes choral music.

Romantic (Romanticism) expansion
      Examples of commissioned incidental music have previously been cited in Beethoven's music for Egmont, which belongs to the first category just mentioned, and Schubert's for Rosamunde, which is in the second. The practice spread as a matter of rivalry and prestige to cities without a court but which maintained a municipal theatre (for example, Hamburg and Leipzig) and to other countries with a thriving theatrical interest and ample funds. In Russia, for instance, Mikhail Glinka (Glinka, Mikhail) composed music to Prince Kholmsky (1840), an otherwise obscure drama by Count Kukolnik, and the Shakespeare repertory brought the collaboration of such composers as Mily Balakirev (King Lear, 1861) and Tchaikovsky (Hamlet, 1891).

      France and England, having different systems of patronage, produced different results during the 19th century. English theatre music was confined for most of its course to a taste for crude melodrama and burlesque at a low level, apart from a sporadic interest in mostly imported opera and ballet. Arthur Sullivan, however, provided incidental music for Shakespeare plays as well as cultivating, in his collaboration with the author W.S. Gilbert, a native variety of operetta derived from the French model. France fared somewhat better with the popularity of opéra bouffe, and the birth of romantic ballet in Paris also kindled a new kind of theatre interest, even though its musical quality was usually secondary.

      Music for Romantic ballet developed in two directions. From the time of the French composer Adolphe Adam (Adam, Adolphe)'s score for Giselle (1841), ballet composers made rudimentary attempts to express mood and scene, to create dramatic tension, and to characterize personality in music. The general level was somewhat raised by the French composer Léo Delibes (Delibes, Léo) in his music for Coppélia (1870) and more especially for Sylvia (1876); the latter was a score that Tchaikovsky (Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich) came to know and admire. The second feature in many ballet scores of the period was the attempt to compose suitably flavoured music to match the new growth of interest in national and regional dances, which were regularly incorporated into the ballets.

      Music in 19th-century ballet reached its peak of achievement with Tchaikovsky, whose instinct for the theatre was probably stronger than his talent for the subtleties of symphonic argument. He treated the art of ballet as worthy of real musical imagination and told a colleague who adversely likened some of his Symphony No. 4 to ballet music: “I cannot understand why the term should be associated with something reprehensible. There is such a thing as good ballet music.” Tchaikovsky demonstrated its possibilities in three original scores for ballet that enjoy continuing universal popularity in the theatre: Swan Lake (first performed 1877); The Sleeping Beauty (1890); and The Nutcracker (1892).

      Swan Lake achieved lasting success only after the composer's death—a fact which accounts for the recurring problems of the relationship of music to choreography, because some of the original musical sequence was changed for the 1895 production at St. Petersburg from which most current versions of the ballet are descended. The two later scores benefitted from detailed choreographic specifications. According to Stravinsky, The Sleeping Beauty is “the convincing example of Tchaikovsky's great creative power,” and The Nutcracker in its theatre context has a narrative vividness much beyond the limited charm of the concert suite that Tchaikovsky arranged from it.

      Adolphe Adam's contribution to the development of ballet music had its parallel in the sphere of romantic operetta. By incorporating a measure of frivolous vaudeville into the otherwise conventional comedy of Le Châlet (1834), Adam stimulated a popular taste for what became the mainstream of operetta. Its source was in Paris, and it flowed in turn principally to Vienna, to London and thence to North America, submerging the German singspiel and its Scandinavian offshoots but leaving the Spanish zarzuela to cultivate its own regional idiom.

      Adam's enterprise in opening a theatre in 1847 to stage his own works and those of other young composers disdained by the operatic establishment in Paris was brought to a premature end by the political uprising a year later, but Offenbach was poised to take advantage of the subsequent situation. He opened his Bouffes-Parisiens theatre in 1855, whence travelled such immediate hits as Orpheus in the Underworld, La Belle Hélène, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, and La Périchole over almost all of Europe. The Parisian operetta was principally continued to the end of the century by Charles Lecocq and André Messager.

      Offenbach meanwhile had paid several visits to Vienna from 1858, when Franz von Suppé was quick to turn the French model to local advantage, notably with Die schöne Galatea (1865; The Beautiful Galatea). The younger Johann Strauss was eventually persuaded to follow this trend by turning the Viennese craze for his waltzes, polkas, and other social dances to theatrical purpose. With the aid of an unusually good libretto, Strauss created the supreme example of Viennese operetta in Die Fledermaus. The Viennese tradition was continued in turn by Franz Lehár and Emmerich Kálmán.

      Offenbach's influence extended southward to Bohemia, where the composer Bedřich Smetana (Smetana, Bedřich) compared his first song-and-dialogue version of The Bartered Bride (1866) to an Offenbach operetta, and Antonín Dvořák (Dvořák, Antonín) composed an outstanding but little-known example in The Peasant a Rogue (1878). Otherwise, no particularly distinguished composer of operetta emerged in southeastern Europe, nor in Poland or Russia, where there were only occasional contacts with forms of musical theatre other than full-scale opera and ballet for the moneyed classes.

      The northward spread of the Offenbach model reached England, where it influenced the character of Sullivan's first operetta, Cox and Box (1867). It led in due course to the success of H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), in collaboration with Gilbert, and the subsequent line of “Savoy operettas” (their collective nickname derived from the London theatre where they were first performed by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, Ltd.). England made no other contributions of comparable musical interest to the operetta repertory until it was overtaken in due course by the trend to musical comedy in the 20th century.

      English operetta represented by Gilbert and Sullivan nevertheless put down fresh roots in North America after the D'Oyly Carte company first travelled there in 1879, in the wake of a pirated version of H.M.S. Pinafore. The impact of Sullivan's music in New York and Boston was comparable to that of Offenbach in Vienna. Instead of stimulating an American equivalent, it first opened the way to 20 years or so of European imports to the American stage. The composers Reginald De Koven and Victor Herbert later established a short-lived local counterpart to European operetta, before it was overtaken by the indigenous idiom of American musical theatre noted earlier.

      The language of ragtime and early jazz, with its rhythmic syncopation and varying degrees of harmonic innovation within a common musical vernacular, brought the first new element to the idiom of musical theatre (in musical comedy) since the emergence of national folk characteristics in 19th-century Europe. As the trends already described succeeded one another during the 20th century, in and out of fashion, and the musical theatre tried to reconcile the nostalgia for its past heritage with the need to experiment in search of a viable future, the immediate present can be seen to represent only one turn of a larger wheel across seven or eight centuries. The religious rock musical of the contemporary musical scene is but a variant of the mysteries and miracle plays that initiated all our modern forms of musical theatre when Western civilization first groped its way out of the Dark Ages.

Noël Goodwin

Additional Reading
Mark Lubbock, The Complete Book of Light Opera, with an American section by David Ewen (1962), gives synopses and background dates of numerous European and American operettas and musicals. Gervase Hughes, Composers of Operetta (1962), is a reliable critical and historical account of classical operetta. Stanley Green, The World of Musical Comedy, rev. ed. (1969), gives a comprehensive account of the American musical in terms of its composers; and an informed discussion of its character and constituents is in Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theatre (1967). Ivor Guest, The Romantic Ballet in Paris (1966), contains much little known background on music of its period; and Natalia Roslavleva, Era of the Russian Ballet Music (1966), performs a similar but less well-documented service for its own subject. Roger Fiske, Ballet Music (1958), is the only musically informed analysis to date of certain major ballet classics. Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (1947), remains a useful account of applied research. The wider historical aspects of theatrical music as a whole are included in the various volumes of the New Oxford History of Music, projected 11 vol. (1957– ); and are comprehensively summarized in the excellent 1-vol. Man and His Music by Alec Harman and Wilfrid Mellers (1962).

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