Opera in the hands of the burghers had become the vehicle of free and modem thought. The courts made eager efforts to make opera their own.

By the time opera appeared on the cultural scene, they too needed an easily understood art form that would be suitable for their self-glorification. These courts, once decisive in all cultural endeavors, were losing their economic primacy to the bourgeoisie, and their aesthetic level had sunk below that of the culture-hungry middle class. While the middle class thus created its own art form, it also satisfied the vulgarized taste of the lavish courts of France and Austria. Little by little the music was simplified and stripped of its contrapuntal intricacies in order to clear the way for dramatic action. The wider the new audience became, and the more it made its power felt in cultural affairs, the more necessary it became to emphasize the plot and subordinate the music. The dramatic plot offered a guide into the mysteries of art-or at least a substitute pleasure-and at the same time permitted the expression of the ideas by which the bourgeoisie justified and ennobled itself.

But the new bourgeoisie, now coming to power, needed a short cut to understanding. The medieval aristocrats, raised in a leisurely tradition of art appreciation, had required no dramatic plot to make music palatable to them. At the end of the 16th century, when an association of rich Florentine merchants sponsored the first operatic venture, it did so with the express purpose of creating a new art form that would speak to the middle classes by other means than the “pure” language of music. Many for whom the Metropolitan is the embodiment of aristocratic “culture” might be surprised to learn that opera was originally created and developed as a musical spectacle for the masses. No matter that eleven million people listen to the Saturday matinee broadcasts no matter that it was the one-dollar contributions of plain Americans that saved the Metropolitan from ruin a few years ago-in the minds of most Americans, opera still means wealth: the Golden Horseshoe, the Vanderbilts, and the Van Rensselaers. When the curtain goes up on season’s opening at the Metropolitan Opera, the audience presents a picture of aristocratic splendor and ostentation.

Opera music examples