Agostino Agazzari’s Eumelio at Cornell

Abstract

On 19 March 2016 Cornell University mounted the American premiere of Eumelio, a pastoral drama in music written by Agostino Agazzari (b. c.1579–81; d. Siena, Dec. 1641–Jan. 1642) for the 1606 Carnival season in Rome. While any early opera premiere is a rare event in itself, perhaps even more notable was the fact that the project was organized entirely by graduate students of Cornell’s Department of Music. The idea behind Cornell’s production of Eumelio took root during a graduate seminar on the origins of Italian opera taught by Neal Zaslaw during the Spring semester of 2015. When planning the course, Zaslaw observed that Agazzari’s Eumelio was the only example of an early opera or pastoral play with extant music that does not exist in a modern edition. He also noted that a majority of the PhD students enrolled in the course were also experienced professional early music performers. Thus Zaslaw designed his course around the twin goals of researching various facets of Agazzari’s work on the one hand, and collaboratively creating a modern edition on the other.