In opera, a banda (Italian for "band") refers to a musical ensemble (normally of wind instruments) which is used in addition to the main orchestra and plays the music which is actually heard by the characters in the opera. A banda sul palco (band on the stage) was prominently used in Rossini's Neapolitan operas. Verdi used the term "banda" to refer to a "banda sul palco", as in the score for "Rigoletto". He used the term "banda interna" (internal band), to refer to a band which is still separate from the orchestra but heard from the off-stage wings. The early scores of "La traviata" use a "banda interna".
Origins.
Diegetic depictions of music making are present in the earliest operatic depictions of Orpheus accompanying himself but larger onstage ensembles seem to have first appeared in "Don Giovanni", most spectacularly in the polymetric Act I ball where the wind "Harmonie" is joined by two violin-and-bass bands to simultaneously accompany minuet, contradance and waltz. Giovanni Paisiello's opera "Pirro", which opened weeks later in December 1787, marks the first use of the term "banda" in the sense of a wind band. While Almaviva's serenade is accompanied from the pit in both Paisiello's (1782) and Rossini's (1816) "Il barbiere di Siviglia", by 1818 Rossini's opera "Ricciardo e Zoraide" the "banda" was established as an independent institution in Italian opera houses.
Organisation of the "banda".
Composers such as Rossini and Verdi made use of the "banda". Composers wrote music on two staves, and the bandmaster added clarinets in the upper register and brass in the middle and lower. At the Paris Opera in the mid-nineteenth century, Adolphe Sax used only brass instruments, many of them saxhorns.
The "banda" was much like a military band. It comprised about twenty players, but was generally not part of the opera company - usually, the local impresario selected the players. In Palermo, Bourbon troops were recruited for operas, and, in Venice, Kinsky's Austrian army regiment, in a similar capacity, was highly regarded.
Verdi and the "banda".
According to Warrack and West, the "banda" "makes its most marked appearance in Verdi's operas, where its stirring, frankly vulgar sound accorded well with the general Risorgimento feeling of such early works as "Nabucco" and "I Lombardi". In his later operas he used the "banda" convention in a more flexible fashion, ranging from the subtlety of the ballroom scenes in "Rigoletto" and "Un ballo in maschera" to the stridency of the auto-da-fé scene of "Don Carlos"." Julian Budden, dismissing Rossini's use of the "banda" as "always naturalistic and perfunctory", continues by dismissing Donizetti's and Bellini's "banda" music, and finally writes "It was left to Verdi to plumb the depths of vulgarity with his "banda" marches, even at a time when his style as a whole had reformed. ... The so-called Kinsky band at Venice had a very high reputation, and Verdi, who had refused to write for it in "Attila", took good care to include it in all his subsequent Venetian operas".
References.
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Further reading