Reviving early opera: the past as progress

Abstract

As the Verdi anniversary year begins, we should bear in mind his celebrated statement: ‘Let’s go back to the old ways: it will be progress’. Opposing the Wagnerian ‘art of the future’, Verdi praises what we today consider ‘early music’: Palestrina ‘in primis’, then Carissimi and Cavalli for the 17th century, and Scarlatti, Leo, Pergolesi and Piccinni among later masters. Not Monteverdi, however, whom he regarded as ‘incompetent in setting voices’!1 But it was Monteverdi’s music that sparked the rediscovery of early opera at the beginning of the 20th century, with multiple revivals of his Orfeo. A century later, the early opera revival appears to be the most significant facet of the early music movement of the post-war era.2 I outline here one paradigmatic case: the discovery of Francesco Cavalli, which was a consequence of the immense international popularity gained by Monteverdi over the last 50 years. Because there are only three surviving operas by Monteverdi, conductors and artistic directors started searching quite early on for other works similar to Monteverdi’s masterpieces, which could be presented in festivals or at the opera house. The most obvious choice was Cavalli, not only because he was a pupil of and the faithful successor to Monteverdi in 17th-century Venice, but also because no fewer than 23 opera scores by him survive and are readily available: a treasure-trove left almost untouched until the late 1960s (the first modern revival was Didone, in a 1952 Florence production conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini). Around that time, Raymond Leppard inaugurated a series of Cavalli performances—some of which were recorded—and so the Cavalli renaissance began. In the generation following Leppard, the most important figure in the revival has been the Belgian singer and conductor René Jacobs: his 1985 Xerse recording with Concerto Vocale soon became the model for a new way of performing Italian 17th-century opera, and Cavalli in particular.