W rokokowym blasku podróży na Cyterę… Dramaturgiczne antecedencje formowania koncepcji postaci w XVIII-wiecznej operze seria na przykładzie Alciny Georga Friedricha Händla

Abstract

This study presents the effect of the principles of dramatic poetics with regard to the way the concept of a character in eighteenth-century opera seria was formed. Similarly to the rococo message of Antoine Watteau’s paintings, this genre of opera was characterised by melancholic sophistication, the rule of the artificiality of the presented world and an allegorical plan of reference that assumed an intellectualised strategy of reception of a work of art. The article presents the path to the formation of a model eighteenth-century-opera character, from the transformation of the principles of Aristotelian poetics due to the influence of the rhetorical and scholastic tradition and later due to that of the poetics of French classicism. Händel’s Alcina serves as an example of the superiority of ethos and pathos, i.e. of the presentation of the affects and internal states of the titular character, over other elements of the drama. It is also used to explain to what extent the project of the rococo opera, artificial and challenging the probability rule, practises the mimetic postulates of artistics presentation.