The opera seems to have been the direct descendant of the court-ballet,
known in England as the mask, as that in its turn was derived from the
open-air spectacle of the Italian Renascence, such as survived in
Florence in the seventeenth century. In the beginning the court-ballets
of France, like the masks of England, were not given in a theater with a
stage shut off by a proscenium arch, but in the ball-room or
banqueting-hall of a palace. One end of this spacious apartment, often
but not always provided with a raised platform, served as the stage
whereon one or more places, a mountain, for instance, and a grotto, were
represented, at first by the decorated machines of the artistic
engineers only, but afterward by the canvas frames of scene-painters.
The action of the court-ballets or of the masks was not necessarily
confined to this stage, so to call it. The spectators were ranged along
the walls and under the galleries (if there were any), leaving the main
part of the hall bare; and the performers descended frequently into this
area, which was kept free for them, and which was better fitted for
their dances and processions and other intricate evolutions than the
scant and cluttered stage.
A twentieth-century analog to this sixteenth-century practise can be
seen in the spectacle presented in our modern three-ringed circuses--the
'Cleopatra,' for example, which was the opening number on the Barnum and
Bailey program not long ago, where the Roman troops and the Egyptian
populace came down from the stage and paraded around the arena. Bacon in
his essay on 'Masques,' used the word "scenery" as tho he meant only
decorated scaffolds, perhaps movable; and his expression of desire for
room "to be kept clear" implies the use of the body of the hall for the
maneuvers of the performers. Ludovic Celler, in his study of 'Mise en
scene au dix-septieme siecle' in France, shows that the action of the
court-ballet was sometimes intermitted that the spectators could join in
the dancing, as at an ordinary ball. In the earlier Italian open-air
festivals, and in the earlier French court-ballets there was not even a
proscenium sharply separating the stage from the rest of the hall; but
in England by the time of Inigo Jones the advantage of a proscenium had
been discovered, and we have more than one of the sketches which that
skilful designer devised for his masks. But even then this proscenium
was not permanent and architecturally conventionalized; it was invented
afresh for every successive entertainment, and it was adorned with
devices peculiar to that particular mask. Inigo Jones had also advanced
to the use of actual scenery, that is to say, of canvas stretched upon
frames and then painted. Mr. Hamilton Bell believes it possible that the
invention of grooves to sustain wings and flats may be ascribed to Inigo
or to his assistant and successor, Webb.
Even in the Italian opera, where all the scenery was due to the brush of
the scene-painter, there was for a long while a formal and monotonous
regularity. Whether the set was an interior or an exterior, a public
place or a hall in a palace, the arrangement was rectangular, with a
drop at the back and a series of wings on either side equidistant from
one another. This stiff representation of a locality is preserved for us
nowadays in the toy-theaters which we buy for our children, altho it is
now seen on the actual stage only in certain acts of old-fashioned
operas. It lingers also in the variety-shows, where it is the proper
setting for many items of their miscellaneous programs.
Altho the Italians had discovered perspective early in the Renascence
they utilized it on the stage timidly at first, bestowing this
rectangular regularity upon all their sets, both architectural interiors
or exteriors and rural scenes, in which rigid wood-wings receded,
diminishing in height to a landscape painted on the drop at the back,
thus leaving the whole stage free for the actors. Not until the end of
the seventeenth century did an Italian scene-painter, Bibiena, venture
to abandon the balanced symmetry of the square set, and to slant his
perspective so as to present buildings at an acute angle, thereby not
only gaining a pleasing variety, but also enlarging immensely the
apparent spaciousness of the scene, since he was able to carry the eyes
of the spectator into vague distances, and to suggest far more than he
was able to display. This advance was accompanied by a more liberal use
of stairways and platforms--"practicables" as the stage-phrase is--that
is to say, built up by the carpenters so that the actors could go from
one level to another. Hitherto flights of steps and balconies had been
only painted, not being intended for actual use by the performers.
[Illustration: The set for the opera of 'Persee' (as performed at the
Opera in Paris in the seventeenth century)]
[Illustration: A prison (designed by Bibiena in Italy in the eighteenth
century)]
A similar development took place also in the landscape scenes; the
foreground was raised irregularly, so that the persons of the play might
climb up. Practicable bridges were swung across torrents, and the
earlier formality of pastoral scenes began to disappear. Apparently the
scene-painters were influenced at this time by the landscape-painters,
more especially by Poussin. The interrelation of painting and
scene-painting, each in turn affecting the other, is far closer than
most historians of art have perceived. It is not unlikely, for example,
that Gainsborough and Constable, who were the fathers of the Barbizon
men, had been stimulated by the stage-pictures of De Lutherbourg. David
Garrick profited by the innovating art of De Lutherbourg, a pupil of
Vanloo, who came to England in 1771. Apparently it was De Lutherbourg
who invented "raking-pieces"--as the scene-painters term the low
fragments of scenery which mask the inclines of mounds. To him also is
credited the first use of transparent scenes to reproduce the effect of
moonlight upon water, and to suggest the flames of volcanoes. Thus to
him must be ascribed the beginnings of that complicated realism by which
our latter-day scene-painters are enabled to create an appropriate
atmosphere for poetic episodes.