Some praised his harmony, others the dramatic afflatus of his works. Jommelli in fact brought a salutary mastery to the world of opera, in particular opera seria. European before his time, Neapolitan at heart—he would return to Naples to die—Niccolò Jommelli passed on an exalted lesson in opera to Venice, Rome, Vienna, and Stuttgart. From Naples, the home of Pergolesi, that is to say of the treasures of opera buffa, which by its insolent theatricality had set the stage on fire, Jommelli held the secret laws that ally music, singing, and the stage. By his inventiveness, his imagination, a true instrumental sensibility at the service of the imperatives of dramatic verisimilitude, until its resolution with Mozart, he accompanied the evolution of Baroque opera’s late, pre-classical grace to a syntax whose fruits his contemporary Gluck would be able to gather.
A new opera
Jommelli was born in the same year as Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Christoph Willibald Gluck, Like them, he embodies the ultimate evolutions of Baroque musical style and, after 1750, accompanies the advent of classicism, whose elements, around 1770, will be suitable for Mozart’s early style—let us say a career whose stylistic maturity makes its favoured contribution between 1740 and 1770. His theatrical output is registered in that moment of the Golden Age of court and public theatre opera, at the period when musical theatre reaches an essential stage in its evolution. Around 1755, that is to say when Jommelli took up his functions at the court of Württemberg, the necessity of a revision of lyric drama became specific. Since 1730, Italian opera seria had been the object of bitter criticism. The conventional patterns that fixed its framework had run out of steam. Partisans of truth castigated works where nothing counted but the gorgia effects promised by castrati and prima donnas. The recitative/aria division imposed a harsh and severe alternation, mechanical and desiccating, systematic and rebarbative. To Jommelli falls the merit of having brought about a reform that rescued opera seria. He re-established a just balance between dramaticism and vocal prowess. Responding in that, like his friend and disciple Traetta, to the wishes of the poet and playwright Metastasio (the official poet of the Viennese court), Jommelli undertook a linguistic revolution that urged opera seria out of a seemingly inevitable sclerosis, particularly from 1756, when the Neapolitan broke the congealed mould of opera seria by imagining duos, trios, and vocal ensembles in sequence, varying the type of accompaniment, and demanding more and more from the orchestra. In this way, while adapting it to his own preoccupations, he illustrated the Metastasian ideal of the lyric theatre, whose aesthetic designs aim at dramatic truth and positive heroism.
The composer’s native milieu nourished his sensibility to the theatre by evoking a particular response to opera’s requirements: dramatic truth/ lyrical virtuosity/scenic verisimilitude/ecstatic vocal poetry. In Naples, Jommelli belonged to the generation which followed the first great creative talents: of these, the most important born at the end of the 17th century were Francesco Durante (1684–1755), Nicola Porpora (1686–1768), and Leonardo Leo (1694–1744).
Jommelli and Pergolesi
In so benign a mould, the birth of two stars therefore seemed natural. Niccolò Jommelli was born four years after the one who lit up the constellation of Naples like a prodigious comet, Pergolesi (1710–1736). Both were children of the city. Like the latter, Jommelli was trained in the bosom of the city’s charitable and musical institutions. He was the pupil of Nicola Fago at the Conservatorio dei Turchini. Like Pergolesi, he began with sacred compositions before reaching the boards, for opera, buffa or seria, remained a major objective for every creative artist aware of the dignity of his art.
As much as Pergolesi, who composed the prototypes of the genre—Lo frate ‘nnamorato (1732), particularly the intermezzo La serva padrona of 1733—Jommelli also succeeded in the comic category of opera buffa. His comic works, like those of Pergolesi, performed during the Querelle des Bouffons in Paris, would inflame spirits and incite the enemy clans: Jommelli and Pergolesi then represented the pure jubilation lavished by the Neapolitan theatre, a vein of simple and homely truth for which the Encyclopaedists and their champion Jean-Jacques Rousseau would grow passionate against the defenders of lyric tragedy headed by Rameau. The truthfulness of the Italian theatre against the magic and improbability of French opera. Jommelli’s work delicately put its finger on the fundamental quarrel that poisoned creation in the 18th century: the question of truth that analyses form and means in order to achieve it. Could the plausibility of the drama be sacrificed for reasons of style, idiom, or fashion? It is true that, since the beginning of the century, opera had become terribly desiccated: the strict alternation of recitative and aria had made it mechanical. The exceptional virtuosity of the castrati and sopranos had upset the ways of functioning, giving priority to performance at the expense of the poetic progress of the drama.
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