The domestication of opera

At the end of the last century opera started to shed elements of its many-sided and hybrid character. Of course there are numerous exceptions, but in general the genre becomes tighter, the expansive five-act form that triumphed at Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century is rejected and several elements, such as the ballet, dismissed as distractions. Musical structures, influenced – among other things – by Wagner's leitmotif system, become denser and even large scores exhibit an exceptional thematic homogeneity. Most striking, all those bandits, pirates, gods and gypsies make way for more conventional figures in mundane urban and rural settings. The fantastic is displaced by the domestic – or, if the old stage-figures survive, they do so, as I will suggest below, in an altered and diluted form that makes them proper subjects for ‘play’.