Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth / Edition 2

by Lorenzo Bianconi, Giorgio Pestelli, Kenneth Chalmers, Mary Whittall

Overview

The History of Italian Opera marks the first time a team of scholars has worked together to investigate the entire Italian operatic tradition, rather than limiting its focus to major composers and their masterworks. Including both musicologists and historians of other arts, the contributors approach opera not only as a distinctive musical genre but also as a form of extravagant theater and a complex social phenomenon.

This sixth volume in the series centers on the sociological and critical aspects of opera in Italy, considering the art in the context of an Italian literary and cultural canon rarely revealed in English and American studies. In its six chapters, contributors survey critics' changing attitudes toward opera over several centuries, trace the evolution of formal conventions among librettists, explore the historical relationships between opera and Italian literature, and examine opera's place in Italian popular and national culture. In perhaps the volume's most striking contribution, German scholar Carl Dahlouse offers his most important statement on the dramaturgy of opera.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226045924
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	11/28/2003
Series:	History of Italian Opera, Part II: Systems Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	504
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Lorenzo Bianconi is a professor of musical dramaturgy at the University of Bologna, Italy. He is the author of Music in the Seventeenth Century.

Giorgio Pestelli is a professor of music history at the University of Turin, Italy, and music critic for La Stampa. He is the author of The Age of Mozart and Beethoven. Together they edited Opera Production and Its Resources and Opera on Stage, both books in The History of Italian Opera series published by the University of Chicago Press.

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Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth

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By Giorgio Pestelli

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2003 Giorgio Pestelli
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226045927

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1 Poetics and Polemics

RENATO DI BENEDETTO

1. "TO IMITATE SPEECH IN SONG"

In Battista Guarini's 1588 treatise Il Verrato, amid the barrage of arguments against Dr. Iason De Nores of the Padua studio, refuting the charges of "monstrosity" and "disproportion" that had been laid at the door of the new genres of tragicomedy and pastoral, we read:

And when we come to our own day, what need have we to exorcise terror and commiseration with tragic representations, having the most holy precepts of our religion, taught to us by the words of the Apostles? And so those hideous and threatening sights are redundant, nor does it seem to me that today one should introduce tragic action with any other goal than to entertain.

Twelve years later, on the evening of 6October 1600, Tragedy herself, playing the prologue in the performance of that "tender and most delicate tale by Signor Ottavio Rinuccini" which was to become the fountainhead of opera, raised the banner of a new, modern poetic, thus illustrating the "changed forms" and the "new path" that the followers of Apollo--or, in this case, dramatic poets--would now have to follow:

Io, che d'alti sospir vaga e di pianti,spars'or di doglia, or di minacce il volto, fei negli ampi teatri al popol folto scolorir di pieta volti e sembianti,

non sangue sparso d'innocenti vene, non ciglia spente di tiranno insano, spettacolo infelice al guardo umano, canto su meste e lagrimose scene.

Lungi via, lungi pur da' regi tetti simolacri funesti, ombre d'affanni! Ecco i mesti coturni e i foschi panni cangio, e desto nei cor piu dolci affetti.

Lungi via, lungi pur da' regi tetti simolacri funesti, ombre d'affanni! Ecco i mesti coturni e i foschi panni cangio, e desto nei cor piu dolci affetti.

[I, who, desiring deep sighs and tears, my face spread now with grief, now with menace, once made the faces of those who crowded into the great theaters turn pale with pity,

it is not of blood shed from innocent veins, nor of eyes closed by crazed tyrants, an unhappy sight to the human gaze that I sing on sad and tearful stages.

Hence, hence from even royal palaces, gloomy images, shades of distress! Behold, I change my tragic garb and my dark guise, and waken gentler emotions in human hearts.]

Of course, we cannot know if, and to what extent, Rinuccini was here deliberately echoing Guarini's thesis, presenting it not in the context of a learned treatise but, as it were, on the field of battle, as his own personal contribution to the polemics on Il pastor fido which so concerned Italian literary circles at the turn of the century. In any case, whether conscious or not, the echo is there, and it confirms the natural connections between opera and pastoral tale, indeed opera's derivation from pastoral. Neither is it insignificant that this is taking place on the territory of literary theory, the very territory from which, when discussion of Aristotle's Poetics was at its height, in the sixteenth century, pastoral itself had drawn lifeblood for its genesis and development.

Given that it is part of opera's genetic code, so to speak, a literary spirit seems suited to opera. The endless flow of theoretical writings, declarations, and illustrations or (more often) deprecations, satires, and polemics that have accompanied opera's history from its very beginnings--becoming, to a certain extent, a kind of antihistory--certainly has to be related to opera's uniquely public nature and to the potential for provocation and scandal embedded in a genre that can also, and more honestly, be charged with "monstrosity" and "disproportion." Such writings paint a picture of this weighty, multiform, and contradictory phenomenon we know as opera, either filtered through some abstract concept or other, or else conforming to some need or circumstance; but the picture is only ever partial, and frequently distorted and off-center. And yet it would be wrong to ignore or exclude these writings as if they were a parasitical growth. However hidden or diluted, the connection with that far-off source of the form is always there, and it makes the "literary" strain an essential constituent factor of opera, in its multicolored, vital, contradictory nature. And so we have to take due account of it, to be able to form an accurate and articulate judgment.

In the prologue to Euridice, and in the prefaces and dedications in the published editions of both the story itself and the musical setting, it is already possible to clarify some problematic areas present here in opera's embryonic state and in future discussions on opera (these arise intermittently during the seventeenth century but come thick and fast in the following century). They will become so many inescapable points to be revived and debated with obsessive insistence on every new occasion: the comparison with the tragedy of the ancients, and consequently with the ever-looming phantom of Greek music; affinities with pastoral drama; the need for a happy ending; the admissibility of acting in song--in other words, the possibility of presenting action entirely in music without offending the principle of verisimilitude, a basic criterion in a concept of art as the imitation of the natural world; and finally polemics against counterpoint.

Can, or even should, opera aspire to assume the role of legitimate heir to ancient tragedy and restorer of the mythical, lost unity of text, music, and action? This is the fundamental question, the starting point for all the arguments for and against opera. A positive or negative response will motivate not only acceptance or rejection but above all those plans for reform or regeneration which literary figures have continually proposed as the remedy for its permanently lamentable condition of decline and crisis (and which can be taken, instead, as sure evidence for just the opposite--its excellent state of health).

The same polemicists did not hesitate to credit the librettist and composer of Euridice with the intention of reviving ancient tragedy on the modern stage, even if there is nothing in the printed declarations by either one to support such a statement. It is true that Rinuccini, in dedicating his work to Maria de' Medici, the new queen of France, had opened with an explicit reference to sixteenth-century polemics on the question of whether Greek tragedy was or was not entirely sung; Jacopo Peri had also taken the same starting point to explain to readers what the source of his ideas was for establishing the new style of singing. And it is true that a few months before Euridice was performed Emilio de' Cavalieri, too, in publishing his sacred oratorio Rappresentazione di anima e corpo, had conveyed to his publisher Alessandro Guidotti that "his singular and new musical compositions" were "made in imitation of that style with which it is said the ancient Greeks and Romans were accustomed to move spectators to different emotions on their stages and in their theaters." But their words reveal no restorative purpose or any antiquarian disposition; what we find instead is the will to bring to life a new and "modern" type of theatrical representation, in relation to which ancient tragedy was an ideal model, certainly always to be kept in mind but, owing to the absence of direct evidence, something that could not actually be imitated or recovered. Cavalieri puts eloquent words into the mouth of Guidotti; Rinuccini, too, declares that his involvement in the project was due to a desire "to make a simple test of what song was capable of in our age"; while Peri, after having illustrated the principles of what (to use an expression taken from the title page of La rappresentazione di anima e di corpo) would be generally called recitar cantando, admits that he cannot declare it to be "the song used in Greek and Roman fables," but simply "that which alone can be offered by our music, to suit our discourse."

If, despite the echoes of the sixteenth-century debates, the question of the comparison with ancient theater lingers in the background, like a theory based entirely on conjecture, the pressing, manifest aims of the writers who came to the fore at the time of the first operatic performances are of quite a different nature. First of all, the entertainment itself functions as advertising and propaganda: the performance celebrates some memorable dynastic or political event, and as such it is described in minute detail to magnify the splendor or, rather, emphasize the unique, unrepeatable nature of the event. These writings form part of the dozens of accounts and descriptions of celebrations held in honor of this or that birth, wedding, victory, conquest, and so on. Second, and this is, by contrast, a specific element, there is a lively, if concealed, polemic between writers as to who can rightly claim to be the inventor both of the idea of staging a theatrical performance entirely to music and of a new style of singing that will finally liberate modern music from the fetters of counterpoint and free all its infinite expressive (or, rather, "representative") potential. Last, connected to the preceding, there is an explanatory, in some ways prescriptive and didactic, function: illustrations of the theoretical foundations and the modes of performance of the "new music," including instructions on stage production and mise-en-scene--in other words, a whole body of information closely tied to musical and theatrical practice--fill out the ideological premises stated at the outset. It is worth noting, and not without an element of paradox, that it is precisely in the highly literary phase of its "origins" that literature on opera is so richly embellished with the concrete reality of the musical-theatrical event, much more so than it ever would be again. Similarly, it is worth noting that it is only in this phase that composers are so extraordinarily eloquent; later they would become increasingly quiet, to the point of total silence, objects and no longer the subjects of operatic debate.

Too complex is the confusion of polemics on the paternity of this "marvelous invention" which, in Peri's words, had "made our music heard onstage" and too dense and full of behind-the-scenes intrigues are the battles between factions that were at times--or even at one and the same time--intellectual, courtly, or political to allow more than superficial reference to them here. It is, however, interesting to note how each writer, in claiming for himself preeminence in the fundamental and definitive creation of the new style, illustrates its characteristics according to his distinct point of view, in line with his own basic objectives.

Of all of them, Peri--perhaps because he was the most directly inspired and aided by Rinuccini--is the one who shows himself to be the most sensitive to theoretical problems, going straight to the central issue of verisimilitude. His awareness of how setting a dramatic poem to music necessitates tackling the new and awkward problem of "imitar col canto chi parla" (imitating speech in song) leads him to speculate on how the ancients dealt with this problem and to come up with a theory on a middle course between the movement of the voice that they called "diastemic" (by distinctly intoned intervals) and what was called "continuous," the fluid, tonally indeterminate movement of "ordinary speech." By analogy, it led him to analyze the inflections of spoken Italian in order to distinguish between those more steadily intoned and those that move more rapidly, and to measure the relationships of movement and duration in both types in relation to the expression of emotions: it led him, in short, to the "invention" of recitative, which came into being as a leavening agent of poetic declamation.

Although Giulio Caccini was Peri's direct rival, he did not pursue specifically dramatic objectives. The problems of musical dramaturgy linked to the theatrical purpose of "music for a solo voice" remained outside his orbit, and indeed, if one were looking for his "manifesto," it would be found, not in the preface to his score of Euridice (where propaganda prevails, to claim rights of precedence over Peri), but in the note to readers at the beginning of the published collection Le nuove musiche, which was intended for chamber music performance rather than the theater. Here the composer's principal preoccupation seems to be not so much to provide reasons, or theoretical justifications, as to illustrate, at length and in detail, the attributes of the new style of song and to give singers all the necessary information for them to make best use of the new style and thus achieve the goal of the musician, "that is, to delight and move the affetti of the soul."

It is precisely because of this eminently practical approach that Caccini's preface is ultimately more than a source of information on performance practice, however valuable it may be on that account. In fact, it gives us clear evidence of how the new style of singing was entirely bound up with the new style of composition for those composers who were in the process of forging it. Even more, it shows how the new style of composition--conceived as a stimulus of immense power to move the affections through their varied rep-resentation--came to life in a new style of singing. It is clear that affetto was used to mean not only the response of the spirit to the singing but also the technical procedure put into practice to achieve that response.

For this reason, the preface to Le nuove musiche (a piece of writing that, strictly speaking, is outside the boundaries of the history of opera) clearly records a characteristic of opera from its very beginnings, something that would remain tied to it as a constant element, whatever changes, however radical, would later affect the genre: the central role of the singer, his presence not as a passive instrument--let alone competitor or usurper--but as the natural complement to the composer, his prolongation, so to speak, his active collaborator and the person the music is first intended for (as is the case with Caccini's preface). The central position of the singer did not escape attention in subsequent writing on opera; but commentators changed its significance and cited it, particularly in the eighteenth century, as proof of a profound distortion of opera, a wicked deviation of the genre from its origins. For this reason, it is all the more significant and enlightening to find it proclaimed unequivocally in the earliest literature as intrinsic to the nature of the recitative, or representative, style, which is the indispensable requirement of opera.

If we look principally at singing, it is striking that, in the case of Caccini, who was both composer and singer, there is no document, in this first phase of the history of opera, where description of the effects of music is not associated with praise of the singers' art, which produced those effects. As evidence of "how this sort of music renewed by him moves the listener to various emotions," Cavalieri invokes the "excellence in music" of Vittoria Archilei and her magnificent performance in a pastoral that was already ten years old, La disperazione di Fileno. Jacopo Peri, once past the expected homage to the royal dedicatee, attributes the "greater success" of Euridice compared with Dafne--which he himself considered an experimental prototype--to the fact that the opera had been "sung by the greatest musicians of our day" (and he also emphasizes, in defending himself against the intrusions of Caccini, the close relationship between the composer's and the singer's roles: Caccini had been able to insist on collaborating in the composition of the music because the performers included "his dependents," for whom he "made the arias").

While Peri gives the names of some of his greatest interpreters, another composer, Filippo Vitali, names all those in his opera Aretusa, praising each one's specific skills in the preface to the published work. Indeed he dedicates his publication ideally to the "performers . . . each one of whom had desired it, as a piece in which they had exercised their skills." Similarly, Marco da Gagliano, wishing to draw attention to the "highly important" part of the Messenger in his Dafne (highly important because "the words need to receive the greatest expression"), can think of nothing better than to regret that he cannot "recapture the way it was sung by Sig. Antonio Brandi . . . since he sang it in such a manner that I do not believe he left anything to be desired." And Claudio Monteverdi, when illustrating the difficulties the protagonist of La finta pazza Licori will encounter, should the project of setting the tale to music be realized, also makes a point of giving the name of the designated interpreter, almost as if those difficulties had been, in a sense, measured against her skill.

But the two roles, so closely connected as to be sometimes superimposed, also need to be distinguished. And it was Monteverdi himself who did this (with the sort of grasp of concepts embedded in pragmatic reality that is characteristic of his prose when he considers questions bound up with his art) in what is possibly his most famous letter, the one where he outlines his artistic and theatrical principles with remarkable concision, in the form of a protest against the incongruity of the subject suggested to him. His basic objection is noteworthy: the characters in the tale he is supposed to set to music are not humans but divinities of the sea and air who "do not speak" and therefore do not have emotions whose imitation can move the listener ("Ariadne was moving because she was a woman, and similarly Orpheus moved because he was a man and not a wind"). Monteverdi continues: for such characters, who tend more to "singing in speech" (cantar parlando) than "speaking in song" (parlar cantando), and whose goal is therefore more the seductive power of song than the imitation of the emotion contained in the words, a composer is not needed: the singers can easily provide the music themselves, each one for his or her part, since each will know best how to exploit his or her own abilities. In contrast, subjects of the other kind need the direction of "a single hand" which can guide everything "to a single end," that is, to the representation of emotions.

It would be an anachronism, however appealing, to interpret Monteverdi's distinction as a claim for the status of the author, something composers would not achieve for another couple of centuries. It is possibly more accurate to interpret it, in its historic context, as confirmation of an awareness that music could not by itself produce the desired effects. "In such cases music is not all," Marco da Gagliano had already warned, identifying the new dramatic genre's principal attraction in its very composite nature:

truly an entertainment for princes, and more than any other most pleasing, one in which every most noble pleasure is united, such as invention and presentation of a tale, meaning, style, sweetness of rhyme, art of music, the concert of voices and instruments, exquisite singing, charming dance and gesture, and it could also be said that no small part is played by perspective painting and the costumes; in such a way that together with the intellect, every most noble emotion is flattered by the most delightful arts that human ingenuity has ever contrived.

2. "ONE OF THE MOST HONORED PLEASURES IN DRAMA"

Aimed at coordinating and ordering such a variety of means, the prefaces introducing the first published favole in musica abound, as we have seen, with instructions, which are not limited to musical performance practice pure and simple but extend to the placing of the singers onstage, the rhythm of gestures and movements in time with the music, the use and positioning of the instruments, and so on. Later on, as performances grew more numerous (although in the limited context of courts and academies), the need must have been felt to create a broader, organic ordering of this mixture of material, which would otherwise be lost in the multiplication of observations and directions. It is probably to such a requirement that we owe the creation, in the 1630s, of two treatises which bring together and summarize that multiplicity of experience: one has come down to us anonymously and is entitled Il corago; the other is by the illustrious hand of Giovanni Battista Doni and is entitled Trattato della musica scenica: both, however, remained in manuscript form (the first until our own day, the other for almost a century and a half).

However, the two treatises differ fundamentally in their assumptions and purposes: as a result their documentary value for a modern historian of opera is vastly different. The point of view of Il corago is eminently pragmatic; the title itself refers to "that faculty through which men can prescribe all the ways and means necessary for a dramatic action composed by the poet to be put onstage with the perfection required to produce for admiration and pleasure that benefit and also moral fruit which the poetry will demand." So at least in its declared intentions, Il corago is like a manual of staging, not limited to musical performances but covering all sorts of theatrical presentations. Musical performances take the lion's share in it, however, because of the three forms of performance which the author lists: one "purely in speech," one that makes use of "musica recitativa," and mime. The second is considered superior to the others as "one of the most honored pleasures in drama which have either been newly discovered or derived from ancient usage and custom in our day and age."In practice, it is recognized as the most vital phenomenon in contemporary theater, and the one with the greatest potential. Nor is the author content to provide practical directives on staging, but he goes so far as to make suggestions to the poet as to the plot of the story, the qualities of the characters, the distribution of roles, meter, and rhyme, and to the composer on the appropriate use of recitative and arioso, the reasons for the prevalence of one over the other or of a judicious mixture of the two.

In short, while Il corago does not give the impression of wishing to dictate artistic principles, it is clear that it possesses a clear idea of the principles that must govern the creation of an opera, well in advance of its presentation onstage. Its conceptual clarity, based on the concrete observation of reality and not on abstract, theoretical assumptions, allows it to frame in clear, precise terms, with no burden of erudition, the basic problem of the new theatrical genre: the virtual opposition of music and acting. There is, indeed, no doubt that the true object of the art of music is "harmony, which lies in the relation between many voices and not in the progress of one alone;" on the contrary, the essence of stile recitativo lies in the "modulated imitation of perfect delivery," which can properly and only be achieved with that "progression" of a "single voice," or rather what Il corago defines as "modulation" as distinct from harmony. "Musica recitativa" is therefore certainly a pleasant and enjoyable mode of delivery, but it is also, the conclusion seems to be, a contradiction in terms. And the problems do not stop there.

Running parallel but subordinate to the basic contradiction we find another, between the two alternatives which the composer has at his disposal to set dramatic action to music: aria and recitative (Il corago makes a reference to a third alternative, melodrama, as a purely theoretical possibility and on this account excludes it). We read the peremptory declaration that "the perfection of stile recitativo results not from the charm, eccentricity, or majesty of the aria . . . but from the variety and arrangement of modulation which is closest to our normal way of speaking." On the other hand, charm, eccentricity, and majesty are qualities that belong to the way voices behave, or to that "harmony" in which, as we know, the "perfection of music" lies, and that, as is declared with equally sententious clarity, must "occur as much as possible in dramatic action," to discourage the emergence of the greatly feared "tedium of recitative."

From this apparent impasse, in which a good part of future literature would find itself mired, our writer--whose point of view is from the stage-- manages to grasp the effective flexibility, the richness of articulation, and the multitude of possible solutions: in a word, he is aware of the potential for creative energy which can be activated by the contradiction. He takes account of things as they are and with empirical wisdom suggests clever solutions for distribution and balancing, both in the composition of the music and in the plotting of the fable. Selected locations for aria seem to be the choruses, which he wishes to be as frequent as possible, to break the "boredom" of "musical soliloquy" with the variety and fullness of harmony, the prologue, and those parts where we see characters who "do not act" but sing, and so allow the singer to abandon himself to those "charms" in which "current stile recitativo is lacking."

Boredom can also be avoided through an astute choice of subject: miraculous and fantastic subjects allow for the use of stage diversions (machines, attractive or horrid locations, dances) which will undoubtedly achieve the desired effect. But the preference for fantastic subjects--mythological or sa-cred--was motivated principally by fidelity to the principles of verisimilitude and decorum defined by the sixteenth-century tradition of treatises in the wake of Aristotle's Poetics, the same ones that suggested assigning the arias to the truly "singing" characters. The possibility that high-ranking characters might conduct their public affairs in song was prejudicial to both principles: for this reason, in "serious actions" only "supernatural characters" were to be introduced, even better if they were those whom tradition had consecrated as great "musicians"; "human" characters would be able to appear in comic parts, where "speaking in music" would not appear unseemly, because of their low social rank and the private nature of their actions. But Il corago appears ready to compromise even on these basic principles because, in the name of an empiricism not based on the present but projected into the immediate future, he allows the possibility that "some person near to our time" might also act and display his emotions in music without causing outrage; he allows, in short, that musical-dramatic actions might be constructed around historical subjects as well, once, thanks to greater familiarity with "rappresentazioni armoniche," usage would have transformed the original transgression into convention.

The fact that this sort of development is seen purely and simply in theoretical terms has led to the choice of 1637 as the latest date when Il corago could have been written. And indeed the many suggestions contained within its pages look forward to a type of spectacle that, strictly speaking, is not yet "opera," because it continues to belong to the context of courtly celebrations or the academies and, as such, is an expression of environments where the chain linking the customer, producer, and audience together had not yet been broken. This is possibly the basic reason why the author of Il corago (who must definitely have belonged to such a circle, if he is indeed, as is supposed, Ottavio Rinuccini's son Pierfrancesco) accepts the status quo and does not propose any corrections or modifications. Indeed, he states that there is nothing to be improved in musica rappresentativa: all that is needed is some occasional adjustment to vary the "composition" of its constituent elements, which, viewed in isolation, can be said already to have reached their perfect state.

But this is also the reason Doni's Trattato is completely opposite in approach to Il corago: not a man of the theater but a "pure" man of letters, full of antiquarian erudition, Doni judged things not for what they were but for how he wished them to be, measured against the unchanging, timeless model that is the theater music of antiquity. For him there is no question that modern dramatic music came into being as the restoration or revival of ancient music, but for this very reason it is a long way from being perfect, because it is manifestly unable to produce those magnificent effects that, according to every source, ancient music was capable of making. Certainly at least one serious obstacle on the route to improvement will have been removed once the conviction has been eradicated that contrapuntal (or, as Doni defines it, "madrigalesque") music is "the best and most perfect type of music . . . for too great is the imperfection which causes the distortion of the poetry, the confusion of its meaning, the excess of repetition, and the disturbance of the rhythm." Even what Doni calls "monody" (using a term which would go on to have enduring success) is seriously lacking; in fact, dramatic music cannot be said to have progressed very far from the forms in which its first "inventors or restorers" shaped it. Its serious defect is its lack of variety, which produces tedium. But the remedy he suggests is not, as in Il corago, frequent (although not indiscriminate) recourse to aria; instead, he recommends here a very sparing use of aria and song, for both the soloists and the chorus, as "inessential parts of the story" and so incompatible with the spirit of "representative or imitative melody." The variety which is appropriate to such a melody, and which alone can guarantee it sufficient power to arouse emotions, is that of the infinite subtleties and expressive gradations which were already to be found in the modes and genres of the music of ancient Greece. It would come only to whoever managed to recover that lost richness. For this reason, Doni considers that the responsibility for the defects in modern music lies, not principally with composers, but with theorists, who have not been able to point practitioners in the right direction; thus, page after page of his Trattato indicates how that richness can be rediscovered and reattained.

On another fundamental point Doni disagrees not only with Il corago but also with the entire literature on opera in its first decades: he does not share the opinion that ancient Greek drama was entirely sung but claims that only the choruses and canticles (the lyrical monologues) were. Consequently, he recommends that the same practice should be adopted in modern azioni: principally in tragedy, which in any case seems to contain the type of rappresentazioni "most capable" of melody, but also in comedy. Pastorals are a different matter: as a modern creation, built mostly on amorous subjects, they can be allowed to "have melody in all parts." He does not underestimate, for all this, the abruptness of the switch between song and recitation but once again invokes the authority of the ancients, interpreting literary and figurative evidence to demonstrate that they were accustomed to accompanying with instruments not only the sung passages but also those that were simply recited (conversations and quarrels). Naturally, he declares himself convinced that the same can be done in modern theater: for this reason, melodrama, which Il corago had dismissed as the least successful and practicable way of representing action in music, is here rehabilitated as the best remedy for the glaring basic contradiction of musical theater.

I have referred above to the different significance of the different approaches taken by the two treatises. Reading them in parallel gives rise to unusual but instructive observations. Il corago is for us today a reliable witness and a valuable source of information on the state of musical theater in the period between 1620 and 1630; however, it has remained a dead letter for subsequent operatic historiography. On this point Doni's Trattato has been much more effective, although reality for him is principally the screen against which he projects his theories, to a large extent the product of abstract speculation and destined to remain so. But some of his ideas--the legend of Giovanni Bardi's camerata as the experimental source of modern dramatic music, the birth of opera as the restoration of ancient Greek theater, the consequent virtual equation of tragedy with opera--would remain fundamental in eighteenth-century literature, both that of the Arcadian Academy and that marked by the spirit of the Enlightenment. It is possibly no coincidence that the Trattato saw the light of day, in a monumental edition, at a time when the wind of reform was blowing strongest through Italian opera, and in Florence, to whose prince the most concise and essential manifesto of "reform," the dedicatory preface to Christoph Willibald Gluck and Ranieri de' Calzabigi's Alceste, would soon be addressed.

3. "THE MIND NOT BEING ABLE TO CONCEIVE A HERO THAT SINGS"

The institutional change which had been announced at the end of the 1630s and which rapidly became established--the decline of theatrical celebrations at court and the proliferation of operas organized by an impresario--pro-duced, among other things, the sudden death of the debate on opera, only just after it had begun. The fact that neither Il corago nor Doni's Trattato appeared in print seems to be an eloquent indication of how, now that it had exchanged its "princely" nature for a "mercenary" one--and had thus become a consumer item--opera had ceased to be an object of scholarly attention.

It would be wrong, however, to interpret this silence--which was to go on for a good half century--as a sign of a sudden drying up of that theoretical and literary root which had proved so nourishing to opera at the outset. It might be said instead that the change reinvigorated a provocative and transgressive strain, which, up to this point, had been merely latent and now found the proper place to blossom and expand. It is well known that the new mechanisms of production were determined for a while by literary academies: and it is in this context, at least where the new acerbic ideas which the freethinking current had put into circulation were most lively, that the new, unconventional theatrical genre was identified as an effective platform on which to stage the celebration (and unmasking) of deception, exposing the vacuity of the principles and laws that govern social order, and the falseness of history in its fabrication of false examples to uphold the false authority of laws and principles. It was able to do this under the protection of a poetic directed exclusively toward pleasure and in the context of a celebration that was in itself transgressive, like that of Carnival.

The connection between freethinking and the fate of opera was never made explicit in any manifesto or poetic profession, and on a practical level, the opening of the Teatro Novissimo in Venice by--as seems to be the case--the accademici Incogniti was a brief and limited episode. Certain ideas must, however, have been enduring, if we think simply of how that context produced the event that music historians have ever since indicated as the point of no return, the turning point that led opera on to tracks that it would never leave: I am referring, of course, to the adoption of a historical subject in L'incoronazione di Poppea by Giovanni Francesco Busenello. The choice of this subject did not signify taking up a classicist position, nor did it mean that opera was again to be considered synonymous with tragedy: on the contrary, it expressed a radical skepticism toward history, whose falsehoods and flaws were pitilessly laid bare. There were few qualms on the subject of verisimilitude or decorum: if history itself was an accumulation of more or less fabulous inventions, what was to stop anyone inventing other similar fabulous events, according to caprice and pleasure?

Here we find Busenello advising the reader not to "wince" if "some tale" is found mixed in with history as passed down to us by Plutarch and Lucan, because "in some parts current taste must be accommodated" but particularly because "the writer does not believe he has erred in writing in his own way" (La prosperita infelice di Giulio Cesare dittatore, 1656). Giacomo Castoreo expresses himself even more explicitly in presenting his Pericle effeminato (1653):

If you find therein something historic, be aware that the rest is mere invention. .. . For I do not mean to offer you a history but to represent a fable which is historic in name only. It is indeed true that the main action is drawn from Plutarch, who writes of the loves of Pericles and Aspasia, for which he acquired the description unmanly; but yet in putting them into the drama I have followed my own fancy.

Skepticism attacks the supposedly inviolate nature of the rules handed down by the ancients, together with the authority of history. The comparison between the ancients and the moderns, which underlies all seventeenth-century culture and is a mandatory element in polemics on opera, is naturally resolved in favor of the latter. "Unhappy age," wrote Giacomo Badoaro in the dedication of his Ulisse errante (1644), "if the traces of those who have passed before us made our feet follow an unalterable path; this could rightly be called the century of the blind, for we could do nothing but be led." And he continues preaching the variability of precepts in step with "the changing ages," which "bring into existence the different ways of composing," and their dependence on poetic usage, so that Aristotle himself would have formulated them differently if Homer and Sophocles had written differently; he comes to the terse conclusion: "do not burden me with rules, for the true rule is to satisfy the listener." So there is no limit to the changes in time and place. And there is certainly no curb to the multiplication of arias: in the preface to Alessandro vincitor di se stesso (1651) the librettist Francesco Sbarra is ready to admit that "sung by Alexander and Aristotle" arias are "contrary to the propriety of such grand personages," but he is equally determined to adapt to a defect not only "tolerated by our age but applauded," convinced that "if stile recitativo were not interspersed with such entertainments, it might bring more irritation than pleasure."

In a different cultural context, however, it will be the skeptical, acute rationalism of free thought that will provide the ammunition for a first decisive attack on opera: decisive, it should be understood, not for opera itself, but for debate on opera, now promoted to the rank of a genuine "problem" organically implanted in European literary circles for a century and more. It is no coincidence that this occurred in France, or at least in the context of that part of French culture that had at first rejected the importation of opera from Italy and had then allowed it to be acclimatized only at the cost of radical change. And it matters little if the attack came from a writer--Charles de Marguetel de Saint-Denis, lord of Saint-Evremond--who held an eccentric, outsider position in relation to that culture.



Continues...

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Excerpted from Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth by Giorgio Pestelli Copyright © 2003 by Giorgio Pestelli. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Note on Italian Prosody
1 - Poetics and Polemics
RENATO DI BENEDETTO
1. "To imitate speech in song"
2. "One of the most honored pleasures in drama"
3. "The mind not being able to conceive a Hero that sings"
4. "A composition that must be disordered if it is to please"
5. "Renvoyer cette forme de chant à la musique de concert?"
6. "They are not arias, they are magic spells"
7. "A unified, complete, and musical whole"
8. "Precious stones held together with mud"
9. "The lightest of transparent veils, obscuring nothing of the drama"
10. "The single universal form of musical expression and content"
Bibliographic Note
2 - The Dramaturgy of Italian Opera
CARL DALHAUS
CATEGORIES AND CONCEPTS
1. What Is Musical Dramaturgy?
2. The Drama of the Modern Era and Opera
3. The Means of Musical Drama
4. Methodological Considerations
5. Music Theater, Opera, Musical Drama
THE LIBRETTO AND ITS FUNCTIONS
6. The Librettist's Métier
7. Fabula and Intrigue
8. Parola Scenica and Sounding Silence
9. Text and "Work"
THE THEATRICAL DYNAMIC
10. The Score as Production Book
11. The Primacy of the Present
12. Stage Music as Quotation and Reality
13. Time Structures
FORMS AND CONTENTS
14. Number Opera as a Dramatic Form
15. The Configuration of Characters and the Action
16. Interior and Exterior Dialogue
17. Interior Action
18. "Pathos" and "Ethos"
19. Dialogue and Duet
20. Simultaneity
QUESTIONS OF GENRE
21. The Opera as Novel
22. Tragedy and the Lieto Fine
23. Comedy with Music and Comic Opera
Bibliographic Note
3 - Metrical and Formal Organization
PAOLO FABBRI
1. Meter and Rhythm
2. Open Form: The Prosody of Blank Verse
3. Closed Form: The Aria
4. Recitative and Cavata
5. From Interpolations to the Da Capo
6. Opera in its classical phase: Metastasio
7. The Anti-Metastasio Opposition and Comic Opera
8. The Energy of Comedy in Opera Seria
9. Lines with Even Numbers of Syllables in Romantic Opera
10. Asymmetry as the Norm
Bibliographic Note
4 - Opera and Italian Literature
MARZIO PIERI
THE REASONS
1. Opera as a Popular National Genre
2. Orpheus in the Underworld, or the Rebirth of Tragedy in the Spirit of the Variety Show
3. "Più dolci affetti": Tragedy in Pastoral Mode
4. Forbidden Pleasures
THE EFFECTS
5. Adone, or Opera before Opera
6. From the One-sided Poem to the Segmented Universe, or Opera in Purgatory
7. Don Giovanni
8. Rosina
9. Il duca d'Atene
10. Re orso
11. Ulisse
5 - The Dissemination and Popularization of Opera
ROBERTO LEYDI
THE MYTH OF POPULARITY
1. Preliminary Observations
2. The Phantom of the Opera
3. Bellini's Spinners and Verdi's Crockery Seller (or Baked-Pear Seller)
4. Donizetti (or Bellini) at All Costs
OPERA AND FOLK CULTURE
5. Cimarosa on Your Shoulders as You Wander the World
6. Opera Becomes a Big Stew
7. How Verdi Saved the Anarchist from the Galley
8. Long Live the Band
9. The Village Music Lover and Violetta in Church
10. Radames, a.k.a. Baratieri
11. The Wooden-Headed Prima Donna
OPERA OUTSIDE THE OPERA HOUSE
12. Reading Opera, at Home and in Public
13. Opera in Boxes, Small and Large
14. Signor Galbiati Takes Opera Home with Him
15. The Hammy Baritone, Maestro Muddle, Dinetta, and Margherita, Who Is Not Quite Herself
6 - Opera in Italian National Culture
GIOVANNI MORELLI
1. The Question of Popularity
2. The Unobtainable Cultural Character of the New Nation
3. Hybrids of Old and New
4. How and Why Italian Literature Did Not Become Popular in Italy
5. A Mission for Opera
6. A Cultural Impasse Becomes an Artistic Stance
7. Sublimations of the Subculture
8. Semblances of Unity
9. Opera Goes out of Character
Index of Names
Index of Operas and Ballets
Index of Theatrical Venues