A play with four or more separate episodes or masques which include singing, dancing, instrumental music and spectacular scenic effects such as transformations and flying. The form, which flourished in England between 1673 and 1710, is further characterized by a clear demarcation between the main characters, who only speak, and minor characters – spirits, fairies, shepherds, gods and the like – who only sing or dance. Most semi-operas are tragicomedies adapted from earlier plays. The finest examples are those with music by Henry Purcell: Dioclesian, King Arthur and The Fairy-Queen.
Although its roots lie in the Jacobean masque and early Restoration play with music, semi-opera was invented by the actor-manager Thomas Betterton, who was determined to produce an English equivalent of Lully’s comédies-ballets and early tragédies lyriques, and his collaborators, the playwright Thomas Shadwell and the composer Matthew Locke. They recognized that all-sung opera of the Italian type would not suit ‘rational’ English taste, which was deeply rooted in the spoken play tradition, and their solution was to increase the already plentiful amount of music and dance in the early Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare and to exploit the scenic potential of the new Dorset Garden Theatre in London, which had been equipped as an opera house. Their first great success was a scenically enhanced version of The Tempest (1674), with music by Locke, James Hart, Pietro Reggio, Pelham Humfrey and John Banister. Though the resulting work is far removed from the original play of the same name, the music grows naturally from the plot and contributes to it, an integration generally characteristic of the early semi-operas even though music and speech are clearly separated. In the next major musical work, Psyche (1675, by Shadwell and Locke), Locke claimed to have created ‘an English opera’ distinct from French and Italian models (although it was based on the tragédie-ballet of the same name). In the character of Venus, who both speaks and sings, semi-opera was brought close to the continental mainstream.
After the lavish though musically inferior Circe (1677, text by Charles Davenant), there were no more new semi-opera productions for many years, a consequence partly of financial difficulties in the theatres but also of the death in that year of Locke. In 1684 Dryden wrote what he described as a play in ‘blank Verse, adorn’d with Scenes, Machines, Songs and Dances’ (the classic definition of a semi-opera), but this work, which he later called King Arthur, was not produced at the time. Semi-opera was resurrected in 1690 by Betterton, who adapted Philip Massinger and John Fletcher’s tragicomedy The Prophetess (or Dioclesian) for Purcell. This was a notable success and helped establish a pattern of production which lasted for many years. Because semi-opera involved all the theatre’s resources it was very expensive, with only one new work possible each year. The Tempest, Psyche and all Purcell’s semi-operas were revived from time to time, often updated with new music.
Purcell’s semi-operas differed in conception from earlier works of their kind, in that the music is mostly concentrated into self-contained masques which do not advance the plot. Little attempt was made to integrate music and spoken drama, except at a metaphorical level, and Purcell preferred to write for professional singers rather than the actor-singers who could not do justice to his more difficult music, which tended to distance even further the spoken parts from the musical ones. After Purcell’s death in 1695, the Theatre Royal continued to mount new semi-operas. The most notable, The Island Princess (1699, music by Richard Leveridge, Daniel Purcell and Jeremiah Clarke), enjoyed more performances than any English opera until The Beggar’s Opera (1728).
The semi-opera died out not because there was no composer of Purcell’s genius available to sustain this curious hybrid of music drama, but, rather, because of theatre politics. With the introduction of Italian opera in 1705–6, the London stage, which had survived several years of vicious competition between the two houses Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields (later the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket), reeled under the strain of the high salaries demanded by foreign singers. After several crises the Lord Chamberlain ordered a separation of genres between the two theatres: Drury Lane was permitted to put on plays, but without music, while the Haymarket could produce any kind of opera. This effectively sank semi-opera, which required both actors and singers, and although performances were revived a few years later when the genre restriction was eased, no new works were written.
In Spain, several of the complex three-act mythological court plays by Pedro Calderón de la Barca were performed as semi-operas, with music by Juan Hidalgo. In these comedias with integrated operatic scenes, the gods sing their dialogues as recitative and address the mortals with persuasive airs or tonadas (mostly in strophic form, some with refrains). The mortal characters sing only common songs, largely drawn from a pre-existing repertory of well-known or popular songs. The prototypes for the genre in Spain seem to have been Calderon’s La fiera, el rayo, y la piedra (1652; music lost) and Fortunas de Andrómeda y Perseo (1653; music in US-CA). These plays were produced at court with elaborate italianate staging by Baccio del Bianco. Later semi-operas by Calderón and Hidalgo include Fieras afemina amor (1670 or 1672), and La estatua de Prometeo (c1670–75). In Spain, where only three operas were produced in the 17th century, hybrid genres such as the semi-opera and the zarzuela dominated the repertory at court in the latter half of the century. No other dramatists cultivated the semi-opera (the lighter, pastoral zarzuelas without sung dialogue were easier to produce), but the Calderón-Hidalgo works were revived at court up to the end of the century.
E.J. Dent: Foundations of English Opera (Cambridge, 1928/R)
D. Arundell: The Critic at the Opera (London, 1957)
R. Luckett: ‘Exotick but Rational Entertainments: the English Dramatick Operas’, English Drama: Forms and Development, ed. M. Axton and R. Williams (Cambridge, 1977), 123–41
E.W. White: A History of English Opera (London, 1983)
C.A. Price: Henry Purcell and the London Stage (Cambridge, 1984)
CURTIS PRICE (with LOUISE K. STEIN)