Seicento intersections of Spanish comedy and Italian theatre

Abstract

In January 2015 Fausta Antonucci and Anna Tedesco (specialists respectively in Spanish literature and music history of the 17th century) organized an interdisciplinary conference in Rome, focusing on the intersections of their interests and involving also scholars of theatre and Italian literature. The results are published in the edited volume now under review, where Antonucci and Tedesco each outline their own perspective in separate prefaces. The book comprises eleven chapters by different contributors in three languages, Italian, English and Spanish: the multilingual structure, in addition to the multiple disciplines involved, should ensure a wide circulation among academic readers. The opening chapter is written by Maria Grazia Profeti, the pioneer of research in Spain and Italy on the diffusion of the ‘Comedia nueva’ in the Spanish Golden Age (‘Siglo de Oro’). Profeti, now emerita of the University of Florence, was the main organizer and chair of several meetings of scholars interested in this topic, whose proceedings were later published in the series ‘Commedia aurea spagnola e pubblico italiano’, in which ten volumes have appeared (Florence: Alinea, 1996–). Her chapter summarizes the state of research on this topic during the last three decades, mainly from the point of view of the history of theatre and comparative literature. A similar introductory summary on the musicological side is entrusted to Lorenzo Bianconi, one of the main protagonists in the reappraisal of the Spanish comedias as sources for Italian opera librettos during the 17th century. Around Bianconi, similarly to what happened around Profeti with young scholars of Spanish theatre and literature, a group of young (mostly Italian) musicologists have started a systematic investigation of the Spanish models for Italian operas. The two groups exchanged their results for the first time during the 2015 conference in Rome. In the proceedings their contributions are complemented with work by historians of Baroque theatre (chaired by Silvia Carandini, who includes a further introductory essay, this time on the bibliography of studies on Spanish–Italian theatrical exchanges in the 17th century), and by eminent musicologists such as Margaret Murata and Louise Stein.