Ormindo travestito in Ormindo travestito

Abstract

UNTIL APPROXIMATELY ten years ago, the music of Francesco Cavalliimportant heir of Monteverdi and one of the chief architects of early Venetian opera-was known primarily from fragmentary examples in music history textbooks and a few more substantial musicological studies that attempted to clarify his relationship to the development of opera in the seventeenth century.' The past decade, however, has witnessed a true revival: a flurry of performances, recordings, and editions, which have done much to bring Cavalli's music to the attention of a wider public. Although a critical edition of any one of the twenty-seven extant operas has yet to be published, performing editions of two, Ormindo and Giasone have recently appeared, as have recordings of four works, Ormindo, Erismena, Calisto, and Egisto. A number of individual operatic arias, as well as some sacred music, have also been recorded. The scholarly literature on Cavalli has grown, too: a few studies of specific aspects of Cavalli's music, as well as some general biographical and historical essays, have been published recently or are presently in the course of publication.2 This comparative flood of interest in and enthusiasm for Cavalli's music, however, has stimulated surprisingly little analysis of the music itself. Given the need for a satisfactory critical appreciation of Cavalli's style, the presence of a common aria-dialogue-a lament built on an ostinato bass-in two of the three operas that have been recorded (Ormindo [1644] and Erismena [16551), seems particularly worthy of note, especially since it represents, as far as anyone has yet discovered, the only instance of internal self-borrowing in the rather vast Cavalli oeuvre.3