‘La donna di poche parole’ from Page to Stage: Envoicing Enchantment in Epic Poetry and Early Opera

Abstract

ABSTRACT ‘Alle donne si addice il silenzio’: in early modern Italy these words aligned women’s public eloquence with wayward behaviour and their silence with chastity, thus generating significant and widespread debate. This essay traces how such considerations emerged across fiction and history in Ariosto’s and Tasso’s epic poems, and in early operatic representations of their siren-enchantresses: the Orlando furioso’s surprisingly speechless Alcina, and the Gerusalemme liberata’s loquaciously alluring Armida. The salvific qualities of Armida’s speech and song – her ‘vocal expression’, to follow Adriana Cavarero – influenced the development of female personalities on the seventeenth-century operatic stage. The performance practices analysed herein bring together threads of intertextuality and intermedial reception. Such interweaving of materials and modes in the construction of early opera’s musical poetics, which recalls the art of entrelacement, illustrates how poets, librettists, and composers transformed the complex coordination of agency and obstacles into which women – fictional and historical – were often embedded.