Music and Women of the Commedia dell'arte in the Late Sixteenth Century (review)

Abstract

Music and Women of the Commedia in the Late Sixteenth Century. By Anne MacNeil. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. [xii, 360 p. ISBN: 0-19-816689-3. $85.] Music examples, illustrations, chronology, documents, bibliography, index. The semi-improvised dramatic tradition known as the dell'arte has long been mendoned in passing in musical narratives of early modern Italy, especially in the context of early operatic history. Systematic investigation of the interactions between the comici and musical life has been lacking, however, and Anne MacNeil's study opens an invaluable new window onto the fluid interplay of text and -verbal and musical-that characterized the creative efforts of the emerging professional entertainment class. Several of the most stylistically influential members of this class were women-and whether they defined themselves primarily as musicians or as actresses, these virtuose shaped the new multimedia rhetorical landscape of late sixteenth-century Europe. These women left relatively little permanent trace of their activity; much of their skill and power (to judge by contemporary accounts) resided in their ability as performers, whether of their own texts or of others'. Music history, long concerned with texts and composers, has only recently begun to evaluate the crucial contribution played by performers and performances in the shaping of style, especially in early modern Italy; witness, for example, the remarkable refiguring of the Ferrarese tradition in the scholarship of Laurie Stras (and the Dangerous Graces project as a whole; http: //www.soton.ac.uk/~lastras/secreta/ [Web site accessed 24 November 2004]). Through her discussion of the wide varieties of meaning and influence shaped by the women who led some of the most important commedia troupes of the last decades of the cinquecento, MacNeil shows us that our past concept of music performance is far more limited than the historical evidence would warrant. MacNeil's prologue provides a wideranging historical contextualization for the role of the commedia troupes and players in court dynastic celebrations, emphasizing the political importance of the rulers' choice of performers. From the start MacNeil emphasizes the continuity between sung and recited performance, whether in narrative dramas or shorter self-contained intermedi of various types; she also observes the role that the commedianti played in integrating dance, arguably the most fashionable and sought-after aspect of courtly musical celebration, into the complex of multimedia spectacle. This opening chapter is broadly conceived, and serves as an elegant introduction to the topic: meaty enough for those familiar with the period, it is eminently comprehensible to non-specialists, and is likely to be a useful resource for course readers on early modern Italian music. The three central chapters of the book provide individual studies of interactions between commedianti and their patrons in the creation of celebratory performances. The first case study unpacks Isabella Andreini's trademark Le pazzie d'Isabella, one of the central performances of the Medici-Valois wedding celebrations of 1589, widely excerpted and emulated well into the seventeenth century. MacNeil approaches this production from a variety of perspectives: crucial to her argument is the inextricability of socio-political, literarypoetic, and musical strands in Le pazzie. The second case study uses a later musico-poetic landmark, Giovanni Battista Guarini's Il pastor fido (performed in Mantua in 1598, perhaps with the involvement of Andreini herself) to frame discussions of gendered self-fashioning by Isabella Andreini and her fellow actresses and actors: the problematics of the wearing of masculinity by women on stage-both physically and rhetorically-are the focus of MacNeil's investigation here. The final case study takes us from Isabella to her daughter-in-law Virginia Andreini, and her creation of the tide role in Monteverdi's Arianna: again female rhetorical self-fashioning is the focus, this time in the context of modeling for the political purposes of dynastic weddings: MacNeil explores multiple facets of the lamenting woman as a rhetorical trope in early modern Italy, concluding with an examination of the seemingly paradoxical political function of that trope for the Gonzaga-Savoy wedding for which Arianna was designed. …