The Society of La Fenice and Its First Impresarios

Abstract

LIKE THE ORDERLY RANKS OF BOXES in the theaters where it was performed, eighteenth-century opera seria has often seemed like a mirror, reflecting and reaffirming the social order dear the Italian social elite, which dominated its cultivation. And as the century progressed, we are often told, opera seria grew ever more remote, artificial, and sterile in its repeated reassurances its increasingly beleaguered patrons were, indeed, the fairest of them all. Daniel Heartz has imputed such received opinions a tendency among historians to see everything, even opera, through the prism of and believe that Opera seria, being out of fashion there, was out of fashion everywhere.' Quite probably, the situation at Vienna did reflect accurately the flagging fortunes of opera seria in most of transalpine Europe. In its homeland, however, the genre remained in favor despite the political and social upheavals of the years following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic invasion of Italy. Nowhere on the peninsula was opera seria more assiduously cultivated than at Venice, both before and after the fall of the Republic in 1797. If the genre were indeed in an advanced state of decrepitude, supposedly awaiting an artistic coup de grace analogous the political one the Venetian oligarchy anticipated, how do we explain its healthy continuity through these troubled years into the next century? Clearly, opera seria's identification with a privileged class offers little if anything toward an understanding of this continuity. Nor does this traditional alignment explain, among other things, why a vigorous, young generation of Venetian poets-many with outspoken democratic sympathies-were drawn opera seria as a creative