Musical Form
Overture
The orchestral curtain-raiser that opens an opera, or stands alone.
Orchestral
An overture is an orchestral piece that opens a larger work - typically an opera, but also oratorios and ballets - played before the curtain rises or the action begins. Its job is partly practical (settling the audience, signaling the evening is starting) and partly musical: many overtures preview melodic material that will return later in the work, giving the audience a taste of what's ahead.
Two early models
In the Baroque era, two standard types emerged. The French overture, developed by Jean-Baptiste Lully at the court of Louis XIV, opens with a slow, stately section in jagged, dotted rhythms, followed by a faster section full of imitative counterpoint - Handel opens Messiah with one. The Italian overture, or sinfonia, runs fast-slow-fast; composers soon began playing these as concert pieces in their own right, and they grew into the symphony.
The opera overture
Classical and early Romantic overtures were often built loosely on sonata form, the same structural logic used in symphony first movements, which is part of why some (like Beethoven's Egmont and Leonore overtures, written for a play and an opera respectively) hold up so well as independent concert pieces even after audiences stopped seeing the stage works they introduced.
Mozart's overtures set the mood of the drama to come - the overture to The Marriage of Figaro is pure bustle - and according to a famous story, he wrote the overture to Don Giovanni overnight just before the premiere. Gioachino Rossini made overtures into crowd-pleasing showpieces, with a signature long crescendo built from a repeated phrase; his overtures to The Barber of Seville and William Tell are still concert favorites.
Later in the Romantic era, Wagner pushed in the opposite direction, blurring the boundary between overture and drama entirely by having his preludes flow directly, without pause, into the opening scene rather than standing apart as a separate curtain-raiser. Verdi and Puccini often used short preludes, or skipped the overture altogether.
The concert overture
Over time, composers also began writing concert overtures: standalone orchestral works in the same single-movement, curtain-raiser style, but not attached to any opera at all. Felix Mendelssohn wrote his overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream at seventeen, and his Hebrides Overture ("Fingal's Cave") paints a stormy Scottish seascape. Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture is the most famous example, written to commemorate a historical event rather than to open a stage work, and his Romeo and Juliet "fantasy overture" is a love story in miniature. The concert overture in turn helped lead to the symphonic poem.
Famous overtures
- Mozart - The Marriage of Figaro (1786).
- Beethoven - Egmont (1810).
- Rossini - The Barber of Seville (1816) and William Tell (1829).
- Mendelssohn - The Hebrides (1830).
- Brahms - Academic Festival Overture (1880).
- Tchaikovsky - 1812 Overture (1880).
- Bernstein - Candide (1956) - a fizzing modern example.
Where to start listening: Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture is a spectacular, self-contained entry point; Rossini's overture to The Barber of Seville shows the form's lighter, wittier side. For a sound picture, try Mendelssohn's Hebrides.