One Hundred Venetian Arias of the Late Seicento in the Bodleian Library

Abstract

The rise of aria books in the later seventeenth century parallels, in an uncanny but apparently accidental way, the rise of journalism. The vast journalistic networks that developed in that century aimed to communicate to readers elsewhere long series of short messages about the events of one place. Coherent accounts on any one subject were rare in the great swirl of items that moved with remarkable efficiency from one power center to another. As a phenomenon, aria books of the later seventeenth century present some similar qualities. Long series of short excerpts garnered from recent performances, compiled more with a sense of urgency than of purpose, fill many if not most sources of this kind. Readers at a distance that precluded attendance at a performance seem to have been the main constituents of the intended audience. The arias were copied with a haste and randomness of order that suggests that the compilers had no interest in providing a sense of complete works but only in crystallizing specific moments. No country had a monopoly on aria books. Numerous examples containing quotations from English and French works from the middle of the seventeenth century survive. Italian aria books from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as their contents came to be indexed, prove increasingly valuable in preserving extracts from works that are otherwise lost.