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Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice. The Creation of a Genre
... In the early stages of his theatrical career, around 1724, the Italian 'business of opera' had already crystallized into a very efficient production system, adopted even for court operas, as the distilled product of nearly a century of commercial enterprise. 41 The initial Venetian system underwent a critical change around 1700, reducing the number and typologies of characters, which resulted in what we now call opera seria. 42 The effectiveness of this 'product' made possible its replication throughout Europe, allowing for the massive dissemination and consolidation of the genre during the following decades. ...
Music historiography generally describes opera seria as an archetypal genre built on two premises: role typology and the number and placement of arias. Approaches from the perspective of theatre scholarship (Gilles de Van) and musical dramaturgy (Dahlhaus, Bianconi, Feldman, Heller), however, highlight the importance of the constellation of characters and the complementarity of actions in the construction of the drama. Adopting the latter perspective, this article explores the distinctive characteristics of the twenty-six dramas written by Metastasio, considering the singular constellations found in each of them (in terms of status, kinship and emotions) as well as the convenienze teatrali imposed by the business of opera. We show how Metastasio built a twofold dramaturgy in his dramas to meet both the expectations of dramatic literature and the requirements of musical expression of emotions. This explains why the primo uomo (Poro) could be the antagonist of the hero (Alessandro) in Metastasio's Alessandro nell'Indie .
... La situazione appare ancora più chiara se si prendono in analisi i dati rela-tivi alle sottoscrizioni separate, ossia quelle relative al 17 gennaio e al 16 febbraio, riassunti rispettivamente nelle Tabelle 6 e 8. Se si analizzano i dati relativi alle prime sottoscrizioni, effettuate in un momento in cui il teatro doveva ancora aprire i battenti (Il Vespesiano andò in scena il 20 gennaio 1678), 87 si nota come vengano occupati sessantaquattro (più sei sottoscrizioni per il solo 1678) palchi su un totale di circa duecento. 88 Il numero di palchi sembra essere stato di trentatré per ogni ordine, per un totale di centosessantacinque palchi. ...
This intervention aims to analyze the spatial arrangement of the tenants in the different orders of the San Giovanni Grisostomo’s theater during the opening season, through the study of the documents from the notary of the Grimani’s brothers (named Fratina), now preserved in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia. The opening years of San Giovanni Grisostomo are significant from a political point of view; tensions within the aristocracy had worsened after the entry of a substantial number of families, obtained thanks to the outlay of a large sum of money. The phenomenon will be so destabilizing that it will take years to reach a new balance in the Maggior Consiglio. The evidence found allow us to affirm that not only the theater layout reflected the divisions within the patriciate, but also that the tenancy of the boxes from some rapidly growing families may have underpinned an intention of social ascent, thanks to the physical closeness between the new acquisitions and the historical affiliates of the patriciate. Finally, it is found that the positioning of some families, ambassadors or important political personalities could become a pretext for the establishment of new alliances.
... Recordemos que, junto con la actividad literaria, en la Accademia se promocionaron también otras artes como la pintura o la música, particularmente el teatro musical, con la fundación de un teatro propio, el Teatro Novissimo. Rosand, 1991. 18. Es significativo que hayan podido localizarse casi trescientas ediciones de sus obras. ...
... As stated by Rosand in her monograph on Venetian opera, " [t]he device [of dissimulation and, in particular, transvestism] was carried to an extreme in the last opera performed at the Novissimo, Ercole in Lidia (1645)" 16 by Maiolino Bisaccioni, with music, now lost, by Giovanni Rovetta. 17 Here, even the name of one of the main characters is itself a disguise. ...
Ferrante Pallavicino (1615–44) counts as one of the most controversial authors of his time. His manifold literary production includes many of the genres then en vogue, like poetic eulogies, novelle (short tales), polemical pamphlets, historiography and, above all, novels, of which he wrote around ten. Some of these novels may have been influential not only on other novelists, but also, indirectly, on a few opera libretti, although Ferrante himself did not author a single libretto. In fact, in many of his writings he airs a sharp contempt and antipathy towards singers and castrati in particular, the major protagonists of early opera. This aversion may have partly originated from a thwarted love affair and is clearly articulated in a few passages from his epistolary novel Il corriero svaligiato (1641) and, most provocatively, in his pseudo-rhetorical dialogue La retorica delle puttane (1642).
... When it emerged again as a public entertainment in mid-seventeenth-century Venice, Francesco Cavalli figured out how to forego the allegorical complexity of Monteverdi in order to set an entire play in a matter of a couple of weeks, much like a film composer. The result was a stripped-down standardized procedure that became the template for tonality (Rosand 1991). ...
... This reality is not far from opera distinctions determining in the history of society, all the more so because opera was programmed by its inventors at the very beginning exclusively as courtly entertainment -especially in Florence, Mantua and Rome (Anderson 1994:25-29), where opera significantly became dependent on various patronage systems by finding a home in different political institutions and social and cultural environments. Only when the first opera house, Teatro San Cassiano was built in Venice, followed shortly by other houses opened especially for this new genre that was brought to Venice as late as in 1637, opera, which was until then a completely aristocratic domain became more public, more accessible and more open to all (Rosand 1990). Venice certainly had strong theatrical traditions, whether in private houses or in the more public forums providing a special social and economic environment in the seventeenth-century Italian cities. Venice also provided civic and ceremonial life in the city which always took on a theatrical aspect, especially during the carnival. ...
The paper examines some mythical aspects of social representations of opera, and is supported by examples from the Slovenian operatic environment. The argumentation rests on three key premises: firstly, considering the mass of words and images which surround the opera phenomenon in public spheres, it is strange that there is a relatively small number of interpretations of the opera which would surpass the canonised notions, such as opera as a work of art, as heavenly music, as "high culture", as a phantasmagoric world, and, particularly, as a "national thing", etc. The world of production of modern mythologies within the context of the contemporary westernised societies likes to connect the operatic arena with some "mythical" ritualisation of "national societies", which all have placed the opera on an incontestable pedestal of "representative art", "elite culture" or "national tradi-tion". Secondly, it is argued that the usage of myth in opera historically shows a specific continuity of operatic appropriation of mythological material which served and still serves as an example how to reinvent traditions for the construction of new modern myths. Thirdly, if we take opera as a social practice then we could acknowledge also that opera as a social phenomenon creates an interesting segment of "mythologisation" of society, which is most evident in images of myths, produced by opera repertoires, and in images of "typical" institu-tionalised theatrical life, extensively spread in public and surrounded by indisputable and obstinate stereotypes about opera in society. The article is an attempt to tackle the anthropology of reading of the myth structures and the social aspects of opera imaginarium.
... Technologies have afforded multiple new platforms through which gen- res thrive and proliferate, including print, broadcast, and internet. In all these me- dia we are able to characterize different kinds of typified artifacts and interactions, and genre has accordingly been theorized in film studies, media studies, and vari- ous fine arts disciplines (for example Altman 1999;Bondebjerg 2001;D'Acci 2001;DiMaggio 1987;Langdon 1999;Lena 2008;Mittell 2004;Rosand 1991). While these disciplines are not primarily concerned with 'discourse', they offer a variety of theoretical propositions and provocations that could inform an account of dis- course genres. ...
Genre marks large-scale repeated patterns of meaning in human symbolic production and interaction. Approaches to genre can be divided into the formalist-thematic, attending to categories and discriminations based on linguistic or textual elements and drawing from cognitive theories; and the pragmatic, attending primarily
to use-patterns drawing from social theories of function, action, and communal interaction. This overview draws from disciplines explicitly concerned with natural language, including literature, rhetoric, and several areas of linguistics. A distinction between rational and empirical approaches to genre affects both how genre is conceived and what methods are used for analysis. The rational approach grounds genre in a principle or theory determined by the theorist, yielding a relatively small, closed set of genres; the empirical grounds genre in the experience of those for whom genres are significant, yielding an historically changing, open set of genres. Genre analysis is applied in many discourse disciplines and for a variety of purposes, both descriptive and prescriptive.
The author of the article disputes the established opinion according to which the great tradition of 17th century Venetian opera lost its significance in the European musical theater a century later. Emphasis is made of the vanguard role of opera in Venice in the first half of the 18th century, which has been marked by a set of phenomena. They include: the birth of heroic opera, the base of which was the Teatro San Govanni Crisostomo; the stake on virtuoso singers made by the Teatro San Cassiano; the productions of comic intermezzi initiated by the Teatro Can Cassiano; and the creation of the genre of opera buffa with the participation of the great Venetian comic dramatist Carlo Goldoni. A number of reasons that stipulated the leading role of Venice in the history of the development of opera is highlighted. They are connected with the emergence of accessible music theaters, which became magnets for the general public and which provided for a flourishing of the art of the theater; with the creation of a specific artistic milieu that exerted an influence on the art of decoration. A considerable amount of contribution in the creation of the fertile ground for the development of opera in Venice was made by the theatrical element, which determined the ways of living of the city dwellers and the out-of-town visitors during the period of the carnival, as well as the Venetian academies, the walls of which held unfolding disputes about opera. The intensive development of Venetian opera in the 18th century was also enhanced by the preparation of singers who mastered the new style of vocal performance.
The first universally recognized operatic diva Anna Renzi (c. 1620 – after 1661) performed in cross-dressed roles for the first paying audiences in seventeenth-century Venetian theatres. In this article I examine her 1645 performance in the titular role of Deidamia cross-dressed as Ergindo in the first public theatre dedicated to operatic performance Teatro Novissimo. I analyze the role and the reception of Renzi’s virtuosic cross-dressed performance as she pioneered a new profession for women in Italy and abroad to achieve celebrity status in the nascent arena of commercial theatrical culture. In this article I employ the theoretical lenses of celebrity, embodiment, hybridity, and gender to tease out the social impact of her onstage and offstage performance of gender as a sexualized object for purchase contextualized within Venice’s tightly controlled patriarchy. As public performers, professional women singers were perceived to transgress the social boundary limiting most women to the domestic sphere subservient to male prerogatives. When a woman worked as an independent agent in the public realm she was thought to “become” male and to embody hermaphroditism. This is a subject that I explore here in connection with Renzi’s cross-dressed performance as Ergindo.
Il existe peu d’opéras ou de tragédies traitant du mythe d’Orphée en France à l’époque classique. Les deux oeuvres étudiées ( Orphée de Louis Lully et Michel Du Boullay, Orphée de François-Joseph de Lagrange-Chancel) s’inscrivent résolument dans le moule du théâtre racinien et font appel aussi aux canons esthétiques en vigueur dans la tragédie lyrique telle que l’a créée Lully. Il s’agit de montrer combien ces deux oeuvres portent un éclairage nouveau sur le mythe en y intégrant une réflexion sur la notion de tragique ainsi que sur le Mal. Il faudra aussi interroger le positionnement par rapport à la tradition, italienne notamment.
Relevance of the study. The object of research in the history of music usually is the spiritual component of artistic culture, it's genre- and style-centric processes of the art itself. Specific conditions of artistic artifacts's existence, locations where the premiere and subsequent performances took place, draw less scientific attention. At the same time, without taking this information into account, the musico-historical aspects of the past appear devalued and deformed; certain things remain not understood completely, certain moments fall out of sight. The purpose of the study. It is extremely important to study the components of the infrastructure of musical life as a way of existence of musical culture. The opera theatre is one of the basic components of the infrastructure of the musical life of modern Europe. This study is based on generalization and system analysis methods. Attention is focused on the parametric characteristics of the locations of the first opera performances, where the requirements for future opera houses were formed. In particular, performances that took place in adapted palace premises ("Euridice" by Peri — Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Sala delle Commedie; "Orpheus" by Monteverdi — Mantua, Palazzo Gonzaga, chambers of Margarita Gonzaga d'Este; "Saint Alexius" by Landi — hall of the palace Barberini alle Quattro Fontane) and court theaters mainly of the Renaissance type ("Il rapimento di Cefalo" by Caccini — Florence, Teatro degli Uffizi; "Ariadne" by Monteverdi — Mantua, temporary theatre on the Cortile della Cavallerizza). The results and conclusions. It is emphasized that the implementation of the essential functions of the opera genre in the New European culture (the development of the anthropo-dimensional space by musical means, the creation of generalized stylistic norms of opus music and ensuring the stability of the formed tradition) is possible under the condition of provided reach and continuous professional development. It is noted that the reach is determined, firstly, by the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the audience and, secondly, by the significant volume of body of the texts. Both of these factors, being prepared in the locations of the first opera performances, were fully developed and realised in the following period, marked by the appearance of publicly accessible opera houses, the first of which was the San Cassiano theater in Venice (1637).
Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s debt to Italian music is widely documented. Recently, Graham Sadler has drawn attention to specifically Venetian operatic influence on the composer’s Latin-language oratorios, particularly their use of versi sdruccioli (poetry with STRONG–weak–weak line-endings), set to a characteristic musical rhythm, for rustic speech and for incantation in supernatural (‘ombra’) scenes. The latter use is evident both in Francesco Cavalli’s Il Giasone and in Charpentier’s Mors Saülis et Jonathae. Charpentier’s French-language operas also feature such scenes; however, due to their noticeable lack of versi sdruccioli, Sadler asserts that they ‘make no allusion to this Italian tradition, at least in their versification’.
Taking Sadler’s observation as its starting point, this paper argues that the ombra scene from Charpentier’s opera David et Jonathas does indeed allude to Venetian tradition (and to Giasone in particular), not in versification, but in handling of musical styles, in overall musical form, and in dramaturgy. The paper also explores larger-scale structural-rhetorical similarities between these two ombra scenes and the one from Mors, revealing an identical four-part pattern in the magician-characters’ spells: First attempt – Failure – Second attempt – Success. This pattern’s prominence in Giasone, and absence from other Venetian ombra scenes, strongly suggests the influence of this particular opera on Mors and David. Furthermore, the Second attempt’s aggressive, even threatening nature has implications for character-construction, both here and in another incantation from which the Failure and Second attempt are conspicuously absent: the ombra scene in Charpentier’s French-language opera Médée.
The series mainly includes original studies devoted to classical literature and the classical heritage in the medieval and modern literary civilization, as well as collections of writings by philologists of recognized international value. It is also open to historical studies with a strong focus on textual sources.
The article deals with two genres of Italian vocal music of the beginning of the 17th century: the duet and the dialogue. The preconditions of their emergence and stylistic differences are revealed based on the principles of expressing poetic texts in music. This difference manifests itself most fully in the harmonic solution of a vocal piece, so special attention is paid to both the poetic text and its musical expression; in so doing, certain regularities of the musical-poetic formal structure are revealed, illustrated by analytical essays as exemplified by two vocal pieces of the stated time period.
The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera is a much-needed introduction to one of the most defining areas of Western music history - the birth of opera and its developments during the first century of its existence. From opera's Italian foundations to its growth through Europe and the Americas, the volume charts the changing landscape – on stage and beyond – which shaped the way opera was produced and received. With a range from opera's sixteenth-century antecedents to the threshold of the eighteenth century, this path breaking book is broad enough to function as a comprehensive introduction, yet sufficiently detailed to offer valuable insights into most of early opera's many facets; it guides the reader towards authoritative written and musical sources appropriate for further study. It will be of interest to a wide audience, including undergraduate and graduate students in universities and equivalent institutions, and amateur and professional musicians.
In the first half of the twentieth century, Robert Haas, Edward J. Dent, and Donald J. Grout studied the history of the term "opera." Based on the study of some libretti, they underlined its marginal place in the seventeenth century, stressing that other labels, such as favola in musica or dramma per musica, were preferred by librettists and composers. They also concluded that "opera" was only commonly used after 1637, and then only in a very limited way. From them derives what we tend to think about this puzzling term, which certainly deserves further study. This article revises the genealogy of the word. It considers its connection with the Latin term opus, widely used in music in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when it was adjectivized in various ways until it became the name of a genre. The operatic meaning was more widespread, began earlier, and was much more significant than the aforementioned scholars thought, both in Italy and other countries. Certainly, it was used in very different ways depending on the institutional context, but its development in various European countries shows its richness rather than its ambiguity. For this reason, the history of the term could help solve both lexical and ontological problems.
The Standard Western Approach cannot be salvaged for world theatre history because it is predicated on three historiographic fallacies. First is the fallacy of the mainstream, which involves both ethnocentrism and presentism, and leads to the fallacious belief that there is a mainstream of theatre history that runs directly through Europe. Second is the fallacy of the East-West dichotomy. By dividing the world into a pair of ostensibly equivalent units, it seeks to draw a line between “us” and “them,” implicitly serving to glorify the Western “us.” (A newer dichotomy draws a no less dubious line between the West and “the world.”) Third is the fallacy of progressivism, which holds that theatre history is marked by an ineluctable progress from ritual, song, and dance, to the civilized theatre of spoken dialogue and naturalism—a progress to which “non-Western” theatre is seen as being largely irrelevant, and therefore excusably marginalized or ignored.
Few people would suggest that theatre historians should categorically avoid studying the theatre of lands that are conventionally spoken of as “non-Western,” but it is apparent that world theatre history is frequently taken to be problematic in one or more ways. This chapter examines why that might be so, presenting eight arguments against world theatre history. Anyone interested in the global perspective needs to understand these arguments, if only to be able to contest them. The first four arguments are practical in nature and concern the difficulties of studying theatre history on a global scale. The following four arguments are ideological, attacking the very idea of world theatre history from a variety of perspectives. While discussing and rebutting these eight arguments, the chapter offers further clarification on what world theatre history entails, and why the academic disinclination toward it is self-defeating for theatre studies.
Establishing a plausible scheme of periods for world theatre history is a critical historiographic task, but the confused mass of period-concepts currently in use draw heavily on criteria from beyond theatre itself and are often relevant only to European theatre, if even that. This chapter seeks to establish a periodicity that reflects the broad reality of world theatre history. After reviewing existing approaches to periodicity, it offers a set of principles that can yield a more satisfactory periodization. It then applies those principles to a data-set of theatre forms and discovers that over the past thousand years, there have been three distinct inflection points in theatre history, the first two occurring across the many regions of Eurasia, the third being truly global. The chapter concludes with a brief account of the historical forces that might have given world theatre history its particular shape.
The first modern audiences to inspire the creation of a new art form in fact created a kind of musical “genre fiction” – opera. Christophe Willibald Gluck's reforms, which moved to blend recitative and aria further and create greater musical and dramatic unity, were reflected in the growing popularity of opera buffa. Opera buffa's major contribution to opera and the reason for its great popularity is its lighthearted, more naturalistic “observation of human foibles” in the audience's society. Invariably Elmore Leonard's central conflict is over identity and the only thing that matters in the end is how well protagonists have come to terms with the absurdity of their world in good faith by undertaking authentic action oriented toward self‐made meaning. Opera seria had undergone its own reforms, mainly under the influence of Gluck and his most influential follower, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
La investigación pretende descubrir y demostrar el punto de inflexión en la concepción del acompañamiento pianístico que efectuó Franz Schubert a través de sus lieder. Se podrá comprobar la evolución conceptual del acompañamiento pianístico vocal desde sus inicios hasta la actualidad, y cómo Schubert cambió su configuración, afectando su planteamiento al desarrollo posterior del mismo.
Para ello hemos analizado la parte pianística tanto de los lieder de Schubert como de las composiciones para voz y piano anteriores y posteriores a él, mediante la selección de los lieder más relevantes para nuestro estudio. De este modo hemos establecido los puntos de encuentro y las diferencias entre la concepción del acompañamiento pianístico de Schubert y el resto de compositores. Fruto de este análisis conoceremos cómo entiende cada compositor el papel del piano en las obras vocales con acompañamiento pianístico para así realizar un estudio comparado, pudiendo esclarecer sus semejanzas y/o diferencias. Una vez establecidas podremos constituir los elementos significativos que utiliza Schubert y su aportación a la concepción del acompañamiento pianístico posterior.
The investigation tries to discover and demonstrate the inflection point in the conception of the piano accompaniment that Franz Schubert carried out across its lieder. It will be possible to verify the conceptual evolution of the vocal piano accompaniment from its beginnings up to the actuality, and how Schubert changed its configuration, affecting its exposition to the later development of the same one.
For it we have analyzed the piano part so much of the lieder of Schubert as of the compositions for voice and piano previous and later to him, by means of the selection of the most excellent lieder for our study. This way we have established the meeting points and the differences between the conception of the piano accompaniment of Schubert and the rest of composers. Fruit of this analysis we will know how every composer understands the role of the piano in the vocal works with piano accompaniment this way to realize a compared study, being able to clarify its resemblances and/or differences. Once established we will be able to constitute the significant elements that Schubert and its contribution uses to the conception of the later piano accompaniment.
Iako je prema tradicionalnom poimanju (imenska) složenica u hrvatskome jeziku jednorječna, ona je sveza dviju leksičkih sastavnica pa ju se stoga smatra vrstom višerječnog naziva (Blagus Bartolec, 2012: 49). Višerječni nazivi jedna su od osnovnih značajki jezika struke (Kereković 2012: 125) te je njihov opis bitan za razumijevanje prirode strukovnih jezika, a također su nezaobilazna cjelina u poučavanju jezika tehničkih struka. Cilj je ovoga rada istražiti višerječne nazive u engleskome i hrvatskome jeziku brodostrojarske struke na usporedivom korpusu znanstvenih članaka, tj. u znanstvenom funkcionalnom stilu koji karakterizira visok stupanj objektivnosti i sažetosti iskaza. Ovaj rad nastavlja se na prethodno istraživanje imenskih složenica u obrazovnim tehničkim tekstovima (usp. Kegalj i Borucinsky, 2017) te se potvrđuje koje su imenske složenice tj. višerječni nazivi najfrekventniji u jeziku brodostrojarske struke i kakvog su sintaktičkog ustrojstva. Pretpostavka od koje polazimo jest da su engleski višerječni nazivi ustrojstva tipa pridjev + imenica i imenica + imenica, dakle, da je riječ o predmodifikaciji, dok je u hrvatskome češća postmodifikacija (imenica + imenica u genitivu ili imenica + prijedložno- padežni izraz) i da je u višerječnim nazivima dopušteno ispuštanje sastavnica kada je značenje jasno iz konteksta. Također se polazi od pretpostavke da oba jezika teže implicitnom izričaju i da eksplicitna konstrukcija tipa imenica + odnosna surečenica nije uobičajena. U radu se također ispituje jesu li višerječni nazivi koji se rabe u znanstvenim člancima tehničke struke u skladu s normom hrvatskoga standardnog jezika. Rezultati istraživanja mogu biti od koristi prevoditeljima koji se bave prevođenjem stručnih tekstova, studentima tehničkih usmjerenja, no rezultati također upućuju na neke značajke višerječnih naziva koje ne vrijede samo za jezik struke već se mogu primijeniti i na opći jezik.
The paper examines the reception of the Achilleid, an epic fragment by the Flavian poet Statius, in the Baroque opera. The Achilleid weaves unique connections among the issues of gender, succession, and genre, and as such merits an important place in studying the operatic reception of antiquity. The elements mentioned above (gender, succession, genre, as well as transvestism etc.) have been significant in establishing the opera as an art form; indeed, in the light of their historical influence some of the operatic works inspired by Statius may be perceived as major, well-nigh constitutive building blocks of the operatic art.
In 2018, audiences in the millions are watching opera productions on screens. The twenty- first century has seen a formidable increase in filmed broadcasting of opera from productions in major opera houses and audiences can now watch live or relayed productions from the comfort of their local cinema or home. The increase in broadcasting has heightened the need to talk about acting within opera. Acting on the operatic stage has been a historically contentious issue; although opera prizes the virtuosity of the human singing voice, opera singers have always been critiqued on their ability to match their singing body with relevant acting craft. An examination of the historical relationship between opera and film, as well as opera and acting, establishes the influences and the challenges that opera has had in evolving alongside theatre and screen. A review of opera singing pedagogy, operatic structure, and stagecraft further reveals the inherent differences that set opera aside from other forms of theatre, film, and television. This study then explores changes in acting within contemporary opera broadcasts by assessing criticism and feedback from the opera community. Analysis of filmed productions and the effect of current cinematography and high definition technology provides insight into the effect of media on our perception of stagecraft and raises further questions around genre and artistic agency.
Rewriting and reinvention of previously told stories and recognizable themes build upon an established literary canon, creating new connections amongst texts, while creating increasingly hypertextual works. This article explores the nature of rewriting, the reinvention of previously existing themes within literature, and the dialectic between past, present, and future embodied within this " process. The specific focus of this study is the Dalmatian author Giovanni Kreglianovich, who, with his tragedy Orazio (1797) rewrites and adapts the ancient Roman legend of the battle between the Curiatii and the Horatii to reflect the political, social, and literary changes of the late 1800s in Europe. Primary sources such as Livy's Ab urbe condita, Aretino's Orazia (1546), and Pierre Corneille's Horace (1640) are compared to and contrasted with Kreglianovich's Orazio in order to highlight the differences between these works and to bring to the fore how and why the source material was rewritten. Utilized as a vehicle to espouse contemporary concerns, Kreglianovich employed aspects of antiquity and transformed them into a means through which social and political issues pertinent to the time could be revealed. In reusing one of the most famous identity myths of ancient Rome, Kreglianovich was able to create a unique tragedy that partakes in the literary phenomenon of rewriting, while promoting patriotism, as well as a sense of identity and belonging in his fellow Dalmatian compatriots. © 2016 Canadian Society for Italian Studies. All rights reserved.
This article explores the late Victorian fascination with the defunct voice of the operatic castrato as manifest in two texts by Vernon Lee - Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy and "A Wicked Voice" - and in George Du Maurier's Trilby. Each text imagines a revenant castrato, using the life and body of the violated singer as a source of enchantment and endless aesthetic speculation. Though these texts implicitly acknowledge their exploitive nature, they lack the self-mastery to resist the pleasure of making the surgically altered and socially wanting castrato serve perfection fantasies. Still, the representations of the revenant castrato bear with them a social and moral history that interrupts the pleasure of speculation and highlights the brutality of what art lovers have nominated as an ideal.
Commercial operas of seventeenth-century Venice, the earliest public operas, are generally described as rigorously literary from 1637-1660. Various tools, including sets, machines, and musical forms helped audiences from various classes and places understand this Venetian Carnevale entertainment. The goal—to create a commercial entertainment industry that reflected and highlighted the wonders of Venice—was identified early in the history of Venetian commercial opera. This paper seeks to define the extent to which nascent commercial enterprises like newspapers, the mail, publishing, and advertising defined the content and nature of these early operatic works.
Arcangelo Spagna's Oratori overo melodrammi sacri con un discorso dogmatico intorno l'istessa materia is always considered a milestone in a history of a Baroque oratorio. Published in Rome in 1706, it consisted of the oratorios written probably many years before that date. Recently earlier versions of two works from Spagna's Oratori has been found and described by scholars: the case of Il trionfo dell'onestà negl'avvenimenti della casta Susanna (Christian Speck) and Il trionfo della fede nel martirio de' santi Eustachio e compagni (Mauro Sarnelli). My research allow me to identified the third such case: an earlier version of L'Amazone hebrea nelle glorie di Giuditta, entitled Giuditta trionfatrice d'Oloferne, published in 1701 in Florence. The two versions, although the dates of their publication are very close, differ quite substancially from each other. The dramatic shape of Giuditta trionfatrice d'Oloferne, although without Testo, has many archaic features, proving that it could have been conceived as early as in the sixties or seventies of the 17th century. The comparison of the two versions shows strategies that Spagna employed to make his oratorio more operatic (theatrical) and to preserve its spiritual atmosphere as well. The final version, however, is far from being perfect, especially from dramatic point of view.
In the newly popularized genre of opera during the seventeenth century, the allegorical prologue was commonly used as a preface from about 1600 to 1670, with no fewer than 98 opera prologues composed throughout Venice during this period. These prologues, often sung by allegories and/or
characters from myth, set the stage for the proceeding drama. In the prologue to Francesco Cavalli's 1640 opera Gli Amori d'Apollo e di Dafne, its characters, the gods of sleep and dreams, set the stage for an opera that revolves around a dream. This article explores the act of wishing
the audience peaceful and pleasant dreams by using oratory as a method that the allegorical figures use to sing the audience a lullaby. The purpose of this lullaby is to instigate the suspension of disbelief required to allow the story to gain the audience's credibility. This article will
show how Cavalli's opera does so uniquely by spatially extending its effects outwards onto the audience rather than only onto the characters onstage.
During the seventeenth century, the growth of opera created the need for a large number of artists to perform in theatres throughout Italy and, increasingly, in much of Europe. The biographies of nearly all the singers who performed in Venice, the centre of opera during the middle of the century, and in other cities of Italy remain unwritten and, in most cases, unwritable. For some singers, including Giovanni Antonio Cavagna, Nicola Coresi and Vincenza Giulia Masotti, letters survive that convey something of their personalities. Yet, for the most part, we know nothing of their families and the early years of their careers, nor of their lives as performers. This article will explore several episodes in the career of the Roman singer Silvia Gailarti Manni, whose operatic appearances during three decades have been known to scholars through librettos, but whose life has never before come into focus.
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