Opera and comedy: Jacopo Melani, Il potesta di Colognole, ed. James Leve, Yale University Collegium Musicum, Second Series, xiv (Middleton WI: A-R Editions, 2005), $152

Abstract

From its beginnings opera has always been a mixed genre. Elements of tragedy, comedy and the pastoral exist in varying proportions in any sample of early opera. But theorists (including a sizeable contingent of librettists) seem to have emphasized the tragic side of the genre, stating, for instance, that the comic was indecorous and thus unfit for the general public. By the 1640s the idea of opera as a mixed genre finally seems to have gained general acceptance, coinciding perhaps with the establishment of the term dramma per musica. As a result of this and the development of a full set of operatic conventions, questions of genre were less frequently discussed. It is all the more surprising that in Florence, a place where the audience would perhaps contain a higher proportion of nobility than in Venice, a tradition of strictly comic opera was established during the following decade. The opera that founded this tradition is Il potestà di Colognole (1657), libretto by Giovanni Andrea Moniglia and music by Jacopo Melani. James Leve, editor of the publication reviewed here, notes that no other 17th-century opera tradition can claim to be as close to the classical definitions of comedy as the Florentine one. The librettist, Moniglia, took his inspiration from the Roman comedies of Terence, as well as from the 16th-century Italian tradition of comic theatre. However, it is hard to see how Il potestà di Colognole is significantly different from the usual dramma per musica of the time.