Seventeenth-century Opera Research Articles

Giambattista Marino’s L’Adone: A Drama of Madrigals

ABSTRACT Giambattista Marino’s L’Adone (1623) is the longest poem written in the Italian language. Exceeding even Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581) in length, L’Adone lacks the most central characteristic of epic poetry: a coherent narrative. As the quintessential example of Italian seicentismo, L’Adone was censured by Marino’s severest critic, Tomaso Stigliani, for being a poem composed entirely of ‘a succession of madrigals’. The absence of a comprehensible story coupled with convoluted rhetoric makes L’Adone utterly impractical for musical setting. Why then was it a literary source for seventeenth-century opera? Similarly, why did madrigal composers seem to find it equally attractive? This article proposes that musical interpretations of Marino’s epic presented a challenge to the notion of dramatic verisimilitude; musical settings based on Marino’s epic demonstrate one of the principal musical debates of the century, namely the tension between the verisimilitude of opera and the artifice of the madrigal.

Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell'Arte. By Emily Wilbourne. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016; pp. x + 229, 4 illustrations. $55 cloth, $55 e-book.

Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell'Arte. By Emily Wilbourne. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016; pp. x + 229, 4 illustrations. 55 e-book. - Volume 60 Issue 2

Emily Wilbourne: Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte, reviewed by Stephanie Gunst

Emily Wilbourne: <i>Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte</i>, reviewed by Stephanie Gunst

The Children of Orpheus: How Composers Receive Ancient Texts

Since the Renaissance, classical subjects have exerted an ever-present impact on musical composition. Composers have responded in diverse, revealing ways to the challenge of setting classical texts. Some have harnessed their prestige as a platform for social or political commentary; others have regarded classical literary works as structural archetypes to be preserved by music; still others have re-interpreted or even negated those texts’ original meanings. Combining musical and classical scholarship, this outreach panel consists of four papers specifically chosen because they discuss the musical scores themselves as well as the texts they set. This dual study of music in collaboration with text is a potentially unique contribution to the offerings of the APA. The panel will consider the works of four composers who have set classical texts or subjects: Francesco Cavalli, Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, and Iannis Xenakis. Ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, the pieces represent different genres: opera, art song, incidental music, and concert/theatrical music. Progressing chronologically, the composers engage with their ancient sources in an increasingly direct manner. Cavalli’s seventeenth-century opera Il Giasone, the earliest work, sets an Italian libretto that draws on Apollonius’ and Ovid’s characterizations of Jason as an effeminate hero (Panelist 1). Many of Franz Schubert’s early nineteenth-century art songs set poems by such contemporaries as Goethe, Schiller, and Heine, which regard Greek antiquity from the perspective of German Romanticism (Panelist 2). In the 1840s, Felix Mendelssohn makes a studied attempt to forge a structural connection between music and text by aligning the rhythmic and metrical patterns of his incidental music for Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus as closely as possible with Sophocles’ Greek, albeit by way of a contemporary German translation (Panelist 3). Finally, Iannis Xenakis, alone among the four composers, directly sets ancient text, using original passages of Aeschylus’ Greek in his concert/theatrical Kassandra (Panelist 4).In spite of these varying degrees of distance from the ancient texts, each composer engages deeply with his literary sources, and follows distinct methodologies in setting the text to music. A series of interesting questions emerges, which will be explored by the respondent. For example, are ancient texts a viable platform for political and social advocacy, as the papers on Cavalli and Schubert discuss? In this case, composers may value a text’s classical origin – and its corresponding prestige and exemption from serious reproach (or even censorship) – more highly than any esthetic attributes the text itself may possess. Or, are ancient texts honored archetypes, literary molds into which music may be productively poured? Mendelssohn’s intellectualized experiment, a conscious re-creation of imagined ancient performance practice, could be considered in keeping with this view. Do ancient texts have value as collections of smaller “particles” of meaning and syntax that can be freely divorced from their original contexts, suffer the stretching or negation – both conceptually and performatively – of their significations, and still maintain a central relationship to the expressive totality of the work? Xenakis’ approach in his “Kassandra” seems to pose these questions.Each 20 minute paper will be accompanied by audio-visual and music notation examples to support its major points. The co-organizers are a classicist who has worked on the reception of classics in music, and a composer whose works reflect the classical tradition. The classicist will introduce and moderate. Following the presentations, the composer will offer a twenty-minute response that summarizes the most important points of the conversation, and adresses the questions above to raise issues for future exploration. Remaining time will be taken up with questions and discussion.

HERCULES DANCING IN THEBES, IN PICTURES AND MUSIC

A general assumption persists among musicologists and dance historians that dance in seventeenth-century operas was a French phenomenon, with Italians only occasionally staging a final ballo. In large part the assumption is the result of lack of information concerning dance in seventeenth-century opera, due, particularly in comparison with other periods, to limited source material and limited research. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that when Italian operas included balli at the end of one or more acts, dance indications in the librettos tended to be brief, and the dance music appeared only rarely in scores.

The Oxford History of Western Music: A Review Essay

Reviewed by: The Oxford History of Western Music Douglass Seaton The Oxford History of Western Music. By Richard Taruskin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. [6 vols. ISBN 0-19-516979-4 (set). $699.00.] Music examples, illustrations, timeline, bibliography, index. In my university mailbox recently, I received an advertisement for a quiz book titled Classical Music Trivia. After reading Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music, one might wonder whether there is such a thing—not, however, because the scope of the book appears to take in everything. Rather, Taruskin is capable of finding significance everywhere his attention turns. Experience compels me to observe at the outset that readers will not wish to carry the Oxford History on airline flights. Students will not likely carry it to college classes in their backpacks. At six bulky volumes, it looks like a reference book—yet it does not organize itself like a reference book or read anything like one. Taruskin offers a grand survey of Western music, replete with information, generously laced with opinion (and even sermons), in a style both magisterial and witty. As much as Taruskin has given us a book of music history, he has also given us a book about music history—that is, about music historiography and the assumptions that underlie the writing of music history. In his discussion of the history of seventeenth-century opera he writes explicitly that "it will teach us about the politics of art and (for our present purposes even more pressing) about the politics of art history" (2:12). Inevitably, this means that we find ourselves reading Taruskin's critiques of the ways in which music historians—and musicians, too—have understood music history. This is what distinguishes the book from a series of textbooks or a mere six-volume reference tool. In his introduction, subtitled "The History of What?," Taruskin adopts the idea of "social contention . . . as the paramount force driving [his] narrative" (1:xxiv). As any reader who knows his work at all will expect, he approaches issues contentiously himself. He proclaims his resistance to established metanarratives, identifying the two most invidious ones: the history of the emergence of the autonomous art work, and the history of music as a manifestation of artistic progress. He wants to lead the reader through a history in which "agents can only be people " (1:xxvi), never the works themselves and never what is sometimes referred to as zeitgeist. Regrettably, this did not prevent the jacket blurb from stating, "Sweepingly ambitious [no one will argue with that], The Oxford History of Western Music sets close examinations of representative works within a socially and culturally oriented narrative to illuminate the themes, styles, and currents [no mention of human agents here] that gave shape and direction [coming very close to the image of history conceived as a story of progress] to the literate or 'art' tradition of Western music." Further, "This landmark set considers individual works both with respect to the esthetic and critical paradigms of their own contemporaries [which sounds very like another way of saying zeitgeist].. . ." Indeed, if, as Taruskin claims, any music historians still propose to view the history of music as the narrative of the forward march of musical style toward some teleologically determinate end point (or alternatively toward some already achieved climax, with a subsequent decline), then we ought [End Page 685] to contend mightily against such a project. Hands down, Taruskin would qualify as the ideally contentious champion for the battle. The Oxford History resists assigning pieces to the familiar categories that we have all learned to use, often automatically and insufficiently critically, as the names of the major historical periods. Such pigeonholing raises the danger of implicit (if not explicit) valuations of works that misrepresent them as pawns for what Taruskin refers to as "dueling Zeitgeists." In fact, he refers to his own "strenuous and self-advertising efforts to avoid concepts like 'The Middle Ages' and 'The Renaissance' " (1:583), efforts that he pursues with heroic vigor. Occasionally this manifests itself in some ways that will seem peculiar. Artificially dangling a chapter on the seventeenth century in the end of the first volume, titled "The Earliest...

Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women's Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (review)

GENRE STUDIES: EAST AND WEST Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women's Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice. By Wendy Heller. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. [xix, 386 p. ISBN 0-520-20933-8. $65.00.] Music examples, notes, bibliography, index. Music historians have long needed a thematic treatment of seventeenth-century opera, and here it is. Wendy Heller's Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women's Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice, taking off from Ellen Rosand's influential and monumental text Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), offers an interpretive critique that makes early-modern Venetian opera accessible to students and interested nonspecialists as well as to experts in the field. Those of us who teach opera history welcome Emblems of Eloquence for the engaging fodder it provides for stimulating discussion and the development of alternative perspectives. Heller is a bold scholar who brings a provocative voice to the often staid realm of Baroque opera. Heller's argument in Emblems of Eloquence is three-fold, alternately highlighting conceptions of women, opera, and Venice as a republic. She integrates into her discussions the evolving modes of female eloquence in Venetian opera, the ambivalent ways in which the male-dominated republic of Venice incorporated emblematic women into its mythology, and the ways in which the representation of women forged a relationship between opera and the ancient world (pp. xiii-xiv). For Heller, opera is the medium in which Venice's querelles des femmes were fought, and opera is a metaphor for the Serenissima itself. Strikingly, this confluence of proto-feminist ideology, opera, and the mythology of the state runs its course by the end of the seventeenth century, and Heller therefore defines the early-modern manifestation of the genre along these lines. Heller's book presents five discrete case studies, circumscribed by three introductory chapters (the unnumbered Introduction plus two numbered chapters), and a rather pallid five-page conclusion. introduction lays the groundwork for ensuing discussions. Categories addressed are: opera and the myths of Venice; opera, carnival, and ritual; virtue and the body; courtesan culture; opera and theatrical gender; and representing female eloquence. As one might surmise from the book's title, the first and last categories get the most play, and chapter 1, The Emblematic Woman rightly addresses the confrontation of women writers with seventeenth-century humanists. Heller's discussion here, as well as in chapter 2, Bizzarrie Feminile: Opera and the Accademia degli Incogniti, offers a fine contextualization of the history of humanistic fascination with extraordinary women. One facet of this history is offered in didactic treatises of the sort Heller discusses in chapter 1, where she focuses on the writings of Lucrezia Marinella and Moderata Fonte, written in response to Giuseppe Passi's misogynist diatribe on the defects of women. Interested readers should not neglect also to consult recent publications from the University of Chicago Press's Other Voices in Early Modern Europe series, most notably Lucrezia Marinella, Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men (ed. and trans. Anne Dunhill, introd. by Letizia Panizza [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999]), Moderata Fonte (Modesta Pozzo), Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men (ed. and trans. Virginia Cox [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997]), and Arcangela Tarabotti, Paternal Tyranny (ed. and trans. Letizia Panizza [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004]). Another facet of this history is expressed in exchanges of letters between noted male humanists and prominent literary women. To Anthony Grafton's and Lisajardin's exposition of the letters of Isotta Nogarola with Guarino Guarini, and Cassandra Fedele with Angelo Poliziano (From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe [Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1986]), and to this reviewer's examination of the correspondence between Isabella Andreini and Erycius Puteanus ( Women and Music of the Corn-media dell'arte in the I. …

‘Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen’: Cesti, Orontea, and the Gelone problem

Cesti's Orontea (Innsbruck, 1656), one of the most celebrated operas of the seventeenth century, is considered a significant antecedent of eighteenth-century opera buffa; the important role of Gelone is deemed one of the first basso buffo roles in opera history. Yet this view is based on incomplete and problematic historical data. This article reexamines that data and develops strategies for handling the text-critical problems that plague seventeenth-century opera. It concludes that Cesti probably designed Gelone for an alto – the most common voice type for buffo servants in the mid-late seventeenth century – and warns against using eighteenth-century models to interpret the seventeenth-century repertory.

Towards a Feminist Criticism of Music

Towards a Feminist Criticism of Music. Un article de la revue Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes (Alternative Musicologies) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Production, consumption and political function of seventeenth-century opera

This article was first planned in 1976. It owes its existence to Pierluigi Petrobelli who, charged with organising a round table on seventeenth-century music drama for the Twelfth Congress of the International Musicological Society, Berkeley 1977, invited the authors to prepare a paper as a focus for discussion and offered them constant encouragement throughout its preparatory stages. It is our pleasant duty to mention that during the time of preparation of the paper Lorenzo Bianconi held scholarships from the Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani and the Istituto Storico Germanico of Rome.