Books by Carlo Lanfossi
traduzione italiana di "Opera's Second Death" di Slavoj Žižek e Mladen Dolar (Ricordi-LIM), 2019
L’opera va in analisi grazie alle intuizioni e provocazioni di due tra i massimi filosofi del mon... more L’opera va in analisi grazie alle intuizioni e provocazioni di due tra i massimi filosofi del mondo d’oggi: Mladen Dolar e Slavoj Žižek rileggono la storia di una delle forme più complesse del teatro occidentale alla luce delle teorie di Jacques Lacan. Nata già morta in quanto celebrazione fantasmatica della tragedia greca, l’opera officia la sua “seconda morte” agli inizi del Novecento proprio in concomitanza con l’avvento della psicanalisi. Ne nasce un libro che affronta alcuni temi fondamentali (amore, morte, pulsioni, perversioni) concentrandosi su due autori paradigmatici come Mozart e Wagner. Un saggio illuminante e controverso per rimettere in discussione tutte le nostre certezze su opera e dintorni.
Il volume è introdotto da una prefazione di Carlo Lanfossi, che interpreta in chiave lacaniana alcuni aspetti della musicologia italiana, e da una postfazione di Alberto Toscano, che considera il saggio di Dolar e Žižek nel contesto del pensiero critico contemporaneo.
PhD Dissertation, 2018
My dissertation investigates the experience of listening to previously-heard music assembled by c... more My dissertation investigates the experience of listening to previously-heard music assembled by composers through the exploration of a paradigmatic baroque genre, the operatic pasticcio. Focusing on productions by Georg Frideric Handel mounted between 1725 and 1739, my dissertation articulates three main issues: the role of material circulation of music in early eighteenth-century London; the notion of authorship in the context of the literary marketplace, copyright laws, and music appropriation in early eighteenth-century London; and the experience of listening to what a composer already listened to by borrowing music from other authors. Thus, I position the pasticcio in the context of non-music publishing, reading, and copying practices, and I argue that the genre was produced as a form of inscription of these listening and reading habits. By redefining the pasticcio as a form of listening inscription, my project reconsiders baroque opera’s aurality as paradigmatic of pre-Enlightenment reading and listening practices. Drawing on methodologies and concepts from the fields of material texts and performance studies, my research expands previous musicological literature—which focused mostly on textual genealogy—by considering the pasticcio as emblematic of the ‘ghosting’ nature of opera altogether which relies on the memory of previous performances and the issue of musical recurrence.
PhD Dissertation , Dec 2011
1. PROLOGO Introduzione – Lo Stato di Milano durante la seconda metà del Seicento
2. L’ORIONE ... more 1. PROLOGO Introduzione – Lo Stato di Milano durante la seconda metà del Seicento
2. L’ORIONE DI CAVALLI (1653-4), I RAPPORTI CON VENEZIA E IL COMICO MILANESE I primordi del teatro d’opera a Milano e L’Orione – I confronti con i libretti veneziani: gli anni Cinquanta-Sessanta e l’autonomia del comico
3. IL SISTEMA PRODUTTIVO
Una corte, due teatri – Un breve excursus sull’ubicazione del teatro – I costi della gestione dei palchi e l’accesso a teatro – L’arena di potere della gestione teatrale – L’impresario e il Collegio delle Vergini Spagnole – L’intermediario – I cantanti e le stagioni d’opera – Appendice: nuovi documenti in Archivio di Stato di Milano
4. L’IPPOLITA REINA DELLE AMAZONI (1670) E L’IPERFESTA
Il teatro d’opera a Milano negli anni Settanta del Seicento – Il corpo del governatore: il duca d’Ossuna – I preparativi – Una moderna opera-torneo – Il prologo e l’iperfesta – Un mito diffuso, un libretto complesso – Un librettista, tre compositori – Isole, tornei, comici: esempi di drammaturgia musicale – Questioni di morfologia e analisi
5. I NOBILI ALL’OPERA: IL CASO DELLA FAMIGLIA TAVERNA
La famiglia – L’educazione musicale presso il Collegio dei Nobili e le commedie di Maggi – Il palco nel Teatro Ducale – Le opere in casa
6. IL CARNEVALE 1694: GL’AMORI MINISTRI DELLA FORTUNA E L’AIACE
Lo Stato di Milano e la Guerra della Lega di Augusta – Il Carnevale 1694 tra politica e spettacolo – Le opere del Carnevale 1694 – Gl’amori ministri della Fortuna (Francesco Silvani – Marc’Antonio Ziani) – L’Aiace (Pietro d’Averara – Carlo Ambrogio Lonati, Paolo Magni, Francesco Ballarotti) – Soluzioni musicali ricorrenti – Pietro Paolo Benigni: continuità e prassi del comico milanese
7. L’AGRIPPINA DI NORIS-MAGNI (1703) DA VENEZIA A MILANO
Introduzione – Il soggetto e le origini letterarie – Nerone sui palcoscenici italiani – «Per accomodarsi alla qualità e quantità dei recitanti»: il Nerone fatto Cesare da Venezia a Milano – Declinazioni del comico – La drammaturgia milanese «all’ombra d’Agrippina»
Il mito letterario delle vicende amorose della regina Elisabetta I e del Conte di Essex, giustizi... more Il mito letterario delle vicende amorose della regina Elisabetta I e del Conte di Essex, giustiziato nel 1601, rivive nel dramma per musica La regina Floridea (Milano, 1670), uno tra i pochissimi esempi superstiti di partiture del teatro d'opera milanese seicentesco. La prima trasposizione drammatica degli intrighi reali inglesi si deve al commediografo Antonio Coello, il cui Conde de Sex (Madrid, 1633) fu oggetto di rielaborazione in area italiana grazie a tre canovacci della Commedia dell'Arte e al dramma La regina statista di Nicolò Biancolelli (Bologna, 1668). Questo sostrato letterario è alla base del libretto della Regina Floridea, il cui autore, finora ignoto, è qui identificato in Teodoro Barbò (un militare di origini spagnole con la passione per la scrittura), mentre gli autori delle musiche sono Francesco Rossi, Ludovico Busca e Pietro Simone Agostini. L'individuazione di almeno sette riprese in diversi teatri italiani fino al 1722 (oltre ad Arsinoe di Tommaso Stanzani, libretto da cui è tratta la prima opera in stile italiano a Londra, Arsinoe Queen of Cyprus, 1705) testimonia una duratura fortuna del dramma e pone le basi per una riconsiderazione del pregiudizio storiografico che vede nella Milano spagnola un centro operistico dipendente da Venezia. L'edizione critica del libretto e della partitura (conservata in testimone unico presso la Biblioteca Comunale di Como, ms. 3.4.24) è preceduta da un'ampia sezione storico-introduttiva sulla tradizione del soggetto e sulla sua rielaborazione in forma di libretto; fa seguito un'indagine su tutti gli allestimenti rintracciati della Regina Floridea fra il 1670 e il 1722.
The theatres history from its origins to the present day, richly illustrated in colour. La Scala ... more The theatres history from its origins to the present day, richly illustrated in colour. La Scala is the worlds number one theatre, because it is the one that gives the maximum musical enjoyment, wrote Stendhal on 10 November 1816. La Scala had opened in 1778 with the opera Europa riconosciuta by Antonio Salieri, but it had already won itself a prestige that it would subsequently maintain throughout its whole existence. Most of Italy's greatest operatic artists, and many of the finest singers from other nations, too, have appeared at La Scala during the past 200 years. Today, the theatre is still recognized as one of the leading opera and ballet theatres in the world. This sumptuous book - an adept partnership of text and illustrations is one of its calling cards -presents a chronology of the major operas, ballets, composers and players from 1778 to today and represents an invaluable guide for both casual opera fans and aficionados.
Papers by Carlo Lanfossi
The Sound of Žižek: Musicological Perspectives on Slavoj Žižek (ed. Mauro Fosco Bertola), 2023
Prompted by inflamed reactions to a variety of musicological events and publications, in recent y... more Prompted by inflamed reactions to a variety of musicological events and publications, in recent years the role of music studies as a scholarly field within the humanities, and as an academic discipline with a specific historiographical tradition, has been put into question and even declared dead. Calls for a renewal of its theoretical apparatus, or for a return to its presumed origins, are not a new phenomenon, though. As this article shows by tracing the narratives about its history in the West, the discipline has always demonstrated a particular inclination for self-reflexivity, featuring cyclic instances of crisis and recovery which ultimately account for its very own state of being.
By re-reading the history of the discipline in the United States and Europe (with a focus on the ‘Italian difference’ as case study) through the lens of Lacanian theory, this essay aims at redefining the intellectual coordinates of musicology’s ‘split’ identity, particularly in relation to the other fields within the humanities, and to understand its anxiety with language and critical theory.
Sound Stage Screen, 2022
Review of La clemenza di Tito, music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, libretto by Caterino Mazzolà. Or... more Review of La clemenza di Tito, music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, libretto by Caterino Mazzolà. Orchestre de la Suisse Romande conducted by Maxim Emelyanychev. Stage direction by Milo Rau. Live streaming on February 19, 2021, GTG Digital.
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies
Operatic Pasticcios in 18th-Century Europe: Contexts, Materials and Aesthetics, 2021
La seconda morte dell'opera, 2019
Prefazione al volume di Slavoj Žižek e Mladen Dolar "La seconda morte dell'opera" (trad. Carlo La... more Prefazione al volume di Slavoj Žižek e Mladen Dolar "La seconda morte dell'opera" (trad. Carlo Lanfossi; Ricordi-Lim 2019).
Una interpretazione in chiave lacaniana di alcuni aspetti della musicologia italiana in rapporto a quella anglosassone.
The Journal of Musicology, 2019
Baroque opera was invented on a deathly premise: reviving a tradition of sung ancient tragedy tha... more Baroque opera was invented on a deathly premise: reviving a tradition of sung ancient tragedy that had in fact never existed. Modern historiography has struggled with the notion of origins, focusing on relationships among the surviving textual sources to make sense of the proliferation of theatrical subjects. These relationships remain important—but there is also reason to delve deeper into the “haunted” status of early opera. With respect to three central works on the subject of Agrippina and her son Nero (Nerone fatto Cesare, Noris-Perti, Venice 1693; Agrippina, Noris-Magni, Milan 1703; and L’Agrippina, Handel-[Grimani], Venice 1709), the haunted status of performances was made explicit, both in the drama and in contemporary poems dedicated to the main singers.
Using terminology associated with the “spectral turn” in the humanities, this essay argues for rethinking operatic genealogies through the lens of hauntological intertextualities. In contrast to traditional theories of compositional influence, this study adopts a non-linear historiographical approach to performance genealogies, embracing text, music, and discourse about opera itself. Contesting the use of the concept of “origins” with respect to both the birth and subject matter of baroque opera, I argue that the genre developed as an already haunted narration.
GIOACHINO ROSSINI, Petite Messe Solennelle, critical edition, ed. Davide Daolmi, Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 103–116, 2013
Musica e Storia XVII/1, 197–227 , Apr 2009
The tragic love of Queen Elizabeth I and her young lover Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, h... more The tragic love of Queen Elizabeth I and her young lover Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, has created a vast theatrical imagery whose origins are found in contemporary chronicles and popular tales. One of the first plays telling the story was Antonio Coello’s El conde de Sex (1633), a Spanish comedia, which had great impact on Italian comme- dia dell’arte: three scenarios from Italian “comici” and a printed play from Nicolò Biancolelli (1668) formed the literary context for the first dramma per musica based on the events of Elizabeth and Essex ever to appear on the operatic stage, La regina Floridea (Milan, 1670). The recent discovery of the manuscript of La regina Floridea (Biblioteca Comunale di Como, ms. 3.4.24; libretto by Teodoro Barbò, music by Francesco Rossi, Ludovico Busca, Pietro Simone Agostini) casts some new light on late seventeenth-century Italian opera, especially on its models and transmission. The reconstruction of influences led to Arsinoe by Tomaso Stanzani (Bologna, 1676; Venice, 1677), an opera whose libretto was essentially copied from La regina Floridea with different musical setting by Petronio Franceschini. The comparison of the scores of Floridea and Arsine, reveals some musical contamination. But the most significant aspect of Stanzani’s Arsione is that the libretto was the basis for the first English opera ever staged “after the Italian manner,” Arsi- noe, Queen of Cyprus (London, 1705; libretto by Peter Anthony Motteux, music by Thomas Clayton).
Scholars have wondered whether Clayton’s music was original or derived from circulating Italian arias. Based on examples from Italian operas of that period, this essay aims to demonstrate that Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus was an original score whose music had been influenced by Italian tunes, “musical memes”, shared by the majority of late seventeen- th century opera composers.
Milano, laboratorio musicale del Novecento. Scritti per Luciana Pestalozza, ed. Oreste Bossini, Milan: Archinto, 2009, 256–266, 2009
GIOACHINO ROSSINI, Il barbiere di Siviglia, critical edition, ed. Alberto Zedda, Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 2009
Conference Presentations by Carlo Lanfossi
Handel’s borrowing practices have been the object of debate not only in modern scholarship, but a... more Handel’s borrowing practices have been the object of debate not only in modern scholarship, but already since Handel’s lifetime. Charles Jennens, an important figure among the composer’s friends and an avid collector of Italian opera scores, commented in 1743 that “Handel has borrow’d a dozen of the Pieces & I dare say I shall catch him stealing from them; as I have formerly, both from Scarlatti & Vinci,” referring to scores he owned and borrowed to his friend. Jennens’s letter has been interpreted as a censoring disapproval towards the composer’s practice of using other people’s music into his own (Buelow, Roberts). Yet, the sentence could also be read as a sort of request for more “catching.”
Focusing on London’s operatic seasons between 1733 and 1737, around the competition between the Royal Academy of Music and the Opera of the Nobility, this paper will study Handel’s use of music owned by Jennens as a form of aural inscription of the collectors’ listening preferences. It was during these years that Handel assembled an exceptional number of pasticci (Semiramide riconosciuta, Caio Fabricio, and Arbace), two of which directly related to Jennens’s scores. Moreover, Jennens and other patrons were actively involved in the success of either of the rival companies. Through the analysis of such scores and the interpretation of contemporary documentation, this paper rethinks the competition in London for Italian Opera in the context of eighteenth-century collecting and listening practices.
On 9 June 1722, the London newspaper The Post Boy published an announcement by the local printer ... more On 9 June 1722, the London newspaper The Post Boy published an announcement by the local printer Richard Meares, inviting the readers “to send a Note of any particular Song they shall have it added to the Book.” The “Book” was a collection of songs that would include the favorite music from the new opera Muzio Scevola, performed at the King’s Theatre during the previous season and arranged by three different composers (Amadei, Bononcini and Handel). Twenty years later, Horace Walpole wrote that “operas begin tomorrow with a pasticcio, full of most of my favourite songs,” referring to an adaptation by Middlesex company of Handel’s Alessandro as Rossane. Mary Delany on the same performances that she was disappointed “to hear some favourite songs mangled.”
By putting into relation the memory of previous performances and the printed impression in the guise of the Favourite Songs, these two cases unveil an understudied aspect of baroque opera, that of the relationship between listening habits and the material conditions of music circulation. People attended a pasticcio (whether in the form of a new opera with music by previous composers, or a new arrangement of an old production) to listen to what the producers of a show had arranged for them. Scholarship on musical borrowing and pasticci (e.g., Buelow, Strohm and Roberts) has largely focused on tracing content dissemination and textual genealogy. Yet, as seen with Muzio Scevola and the 1742 Rossane, the role of listening expectations on behalf of the audience should be put in the context of the musical marketplace and the circulation of printed items (such as the Favourite Songs).
By looking at the material configurations of both Muzio Scevola and Rossane, and by exploring discourses on listening and hearing in early eighteenth-century England, this paper reconsiders the pasticcio as a “memory machine” (to quote theatre scholar Marvin Carlson), where both the composer and the audiences registered their own sonic memories. Moreover, in light of the peculiar relationship between printed items and aural expectations, the paper argues for a reconsideration of the notion of musical borrowing as a form of listening inscription.
On 6 November 1732, the London newspaper Daily Advertiser commented on the recently premiered dra... more On 6 November 1732, the London newspaper Daily Advertiser commented on the recently premiered drama Catone at the King’s Theatre: “we hear that the Opera was not composed by Mr. Handell, but by some very eminent Master in Italy.” Self-reflexive discourses on author responsibility started appearing on English newspapers during the first decades of the eighteenth century as a result of what Manushag Powell has called “the performance of authorship,” the process of writing through fictionalized authorial personae. This was one of the consequences of the promulgation of the Copyright Act (1710), which affected the realm of music production only tangentially. Yet, as seen from the quoted newspaper, Handel’s own authorial persona was already put into question during his lifetime, in connection with the production of pasticci. Today, musicologists such as Reinhard Strohm and John Roberts have disentangled the complex network of musical and textual sources behind the arrangement of pasticci by Handel and his collaborators, while leaving open the question of authorship. In this paper, I argue that the pasticcio as a genre participated in this ‘performance of authorship’ by self-reflexively displaying the very act of ghost-writing behind their production.
The opera Catone, one of the pasticci assembled and produced by Handel and Heidegger, based on Leonardo Leo’s 1729 setting of the Metastasio libretto, exemplifies the phantasmic nature of the genre in three related ways. First, it was staged in London at a time when the figure of the Roman orator Cato the Younger was pervasively haunting popular imagination. Second, it enticed narratives of skepticism about Handel’s paternity in both public and private correspondence. Third, its libretto was constructed so that the suppression of a character (Flavio) forced other characters to read what were originally his lines through the new setting of typical ‘letter scenes,’ enabling the ghosting of previous voices in metatheatrical manner.
By examining primary sources (both the conducting score, held in Hamburg, and the Leo score preserved in the Royal Academy of Music, London) through the lens of current scholarship on material texts and authorship and performance studies, my paper will attempt at repositioning the production of Handel’s pasticci in the context of pre-Enlightenment discourses on authorship.
When two manuscript scores of seventeenth-century Milanese operas were discov- ered in the 1990s ... more When two manuscript scores of seventeenth-century Milanese operas were discov- ered in the 1990s at the University of California, Berkeley, Reinhard Strohm urged in- vestigation, defining them as “a firm point of departure for a study of local Milanese composers.” One of these operas is Agrippina by Milanese composer Paolo Magni, staged in Milan in 1703. This Milanese Agrippina was a creative rewriting of Nerone fatto Cesare by librettist Matteo Noris, staged ten years earlier in Venice with music by Giacomo Antonio Perti.
The memorable conflict between Nero and Agrippina the Younger was featured in many Italian operas during the seventeenth century, from Monteverdi’s Poppea of 1643 (even if Agrippina is not a character) to Handel’s Agrippina of 1709, both premiered in Venice. In the Venetian Nerone fatto Cesare, the lavish and violent plot depicts Nero’s sexual incursions as a backdrop for a complex psychological clash with his mother. The character of Agrippina, however, remains underdeveloped.
The Milanese version, in contrast to the Venetian one, dramatically expands the tragic dimension of Agrippina in musical and textual ways that, while similar (as I show) to those of Handel’s opera, nonetheless have the effect of shedding a positive, and not a negative, light on the Empress. The composer added a new finale and a mad scene, providing music of unusual dramatic power through sudden shifts from soft ariette to nervous accompanied recitatives. Significantly, Agrippina’s last words as set in this Milanese version, “I am nothing but a shadow” (which I interpret in light of a newly discovered sonnet dedicated to premiere’s singer), highlight the metatheatrical dimension of the character. At the same time, they justify the operatic celebration of such a tyrannical woman. Such celebration, I contend, could only take place in Milan, a city that belonged to the Spanish empire and that, in contrast to the Venetian Republic (traditionally hostile to tyrants, live or staged), had already seen similar theatrical rehabilitations of queens and kings in those same years.
The investigation into the very first years of life of Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia has high... more The investigation into the very first years of life of Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia has highlighted the making of a textual tradition made of cuts and variants somewhat homogeneous, with the exception of the Neapolitan area, where this opera was paradoxically performed more conform to the 1816 Roman première in regard to the music, while – by virtue of local and independent tradition (prose sections and redefinition of characters’ dramaturgical weight) – it presented strong ‘local’ variants not to be find anywhere else.
As a matter of fact, while Barbiere circulated through the rest of Italy thanks to seasonal companies (without leading up to any ‘regional’ version of the opera), recent researches (which brought to light the names of some of the performers and companies who took part in the Neapolitan Barbiere around 1825) show how a distinctive production system can affect an opera’s dramaturgical structure (as in the case of Don Bartolo’s exceptional role improvement).
Recently, Arnold Jacobshagen and Paologiovanni Maione debated over the relationship between prose dialogues and ‘Neapolitanized’ opéra-comique (Cantare e parlare nell’opera napoletana: un equivoco storiografico, «Saggiatore musicale», XVI, n. 1, 2009): our paper’s goal is to point out how the connection of opera and local identity is the result of more complex cross-cultural dynamics, with stratifications and influences which are rarely one-sided. The case of the Neapolitan Barbiere di Siviglia will emphasize these dynamics very well.
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Books by Carlo Lanfossi
Il volume è introdotto da una prefazione di Carlo Lanfossi, che interpreta in chiave lacaniana alcuni aspetti della musicologia italiana, e da una postfazione di Alberto Toscano, che considera il saggio di Dolar e Žižek nel contesto del pensiero critico contemporaneo.
2. L’ORIONE DI CAVALLI (1653-4), I RAPPORTI CON VENEZIA E IL COMICO MILANESE I primordi del teatro d’opera a Milano e L’Orione – I confronti con i libretti veneziani: gli anni Cinquanta-Sessanta e l’autonomia del comico
3. IL SISTEMA PRODUTTIVO
Una corte, due teatri – Un breve excursus sull’ubicazione del teatro – I costi della gestione dei palchi e l’accesso a teatro – L’arena di potere della gestione teatrale – L’impresario e il Collegio delle Vergini Spagnole – L’intermediario – I cantanti e le stagioni d’opera – Appendice: nuovi documenti in Archivio di Stato di Milano
4. L’IPPOLITA REINA DELLE AMAZONI (1670) E L’IPERFESTA
Il teatro d’opera a Milano negli anni Settanta del Seicento – Il corpo del governatore: il duca d’Ossuna – I preparativi – Una moderna opera-torneo – Il prologo e l’iperfesta – Un mito diffuso, un libretto complesso – Un librettista, tre compositori – Isole, tornei, comici: esempi di drammaturgia musicale – Questioni di morfologia e analisi
5. I NOBILI ALL’OPERA: IL CASO DELLA FAMIGLIA TAVERNA
La famiglia – L’educazione musicale presso il Collegio dei Nobili e le commedie di Maggi – Il palco nel Teatro Ducale – Le opere in casa
6. IL CARNEVALE 1694: GL’AMORI MINISTRI DELLA FORTUNA E L’AIACE
Lo Stato di Milano e la Guerra della Lega di Augusta – Il Carnevale 1694 tra politica e spettacolo – Le opere del Carnevale 1694 – Gl’amori ministri della Fortuna (Francesco Silvani – Marc’Antonio Ziani) – L’Aiace (Pietro d’Averara – Carlo Ambrogio Lonati, Paolo Magni, Francesco Ballarotti) – Soluzioni musicali ricorrenti – Pietro Paolo Benigni: continuità e prassi del comico milanese
7. L’AGRIPPINA DI NORIS-MAGNI (1703) DA VENEZIA A MILANO
Introduzione – Il soggetto e le origini letterarie – Nerone sui palcoscenici italiani – «Per accomodarsi alla qualità e quantità dei recitanti»: il Nerone fatto Cesare da Venezia a Milano – Declinazioni del comico – La drammaturgia milanese «all’ombra d’Agrippina»
Papers by Carlo Lanfossi
By re-reading the history of the discipline in the United States and Europe (with a focus on the ‘Italian difference’ as case study) through the lens of Lacanian theory, this essay aims at redefining the intellectual coordinates of musicology’s ‘split’ identity, particularly in relation to the other fields within the humanities, and to understand its anxiety with language and critical theory.
Una interpretazione in chiave lacaniana di alcuni aspetti della musicologia italiana in rapporto a quella anglosassone.
Using terminology associated with the “spectral turn” in the humanities, this essay argues for rethinking operatic genealogies through the lens of hauntological intertextualities. In contrast to traditional theories of compositional influence, this study adopts a non-linear historiographical approach to performance genealogies, embracing text, music, and discourse about opera itself. Contesting the use of the concept of “origins” with respect to both the birth and subject matter of baroque opera, I argue that the genre developed as an already haunted narration.
Scholars have wondered whether Clayton’s music was original or derived from circulating Italian arias. Based on examples from Italian operas of that period, this essay aims to demonstrate that Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus was an original score whose music had been influenced by Italian tunes, “musical memes”, shared by the majority of late seventeen- th century opera composers.
Conference Presentations by Carlo Lanfossi
Focusing on London’s operatic seasons between 1733 and 1737, around the competition between the Royal Academy of Music and the Opera of the Nobility, this paper will study Handel’s use of music owned by Jennens as a form of aural inscription of the collectors’ listening preferences. It was during these years that Handel assembled an exceptional number of pasticci (Semiramide riconosciuta, Caio Fabricio, and Arbace), two of which directly related to Jennens’s scores. Moreover, Jennens and other patrons were actively involved in the success of either of the rival companies. Through the analysis of such scores and the interpretation of contemporary documentation, this paper rethinks the competition in London for Italian Opera in the context of eighteenth-century collecting and listening practices.
By putting into relation the memory of previous performances and the printed impression in the guise of the Favourite Songs, these two cases unveil an understudied aspect of baroque opera, that of the relationship between listening habits and the material conditions of music circulation. People attended a pasticcio (whether in the form of a new opera with music by previous composers, or a new arrangement of an old production) to listen to what the producers of a show had arranged for them. Scholarship on musical borrowing and pasticci (e.g., Buelow, Strohm and Roberts) has largely focused on tracing content dissemination and textual genealogy. Yet, as seen with Muzio Scevola and the 1742 Rossane, the role of listening expectations on behalf of the audience should be put in the context of the musical marketplace and the circulation of printed items (such as the Favourite Songs).
By looking at the material configurations of both Muzio Scevola and Rossane, and by exploring discourses on listening and hearing in early eighteenth-century England, this paper reconsiders the pasticcio as a “memory machine” (to quote theatre scholar Marvin Carlson), where both the composer and the audiences registered their own sonic memories. Moreover, in light of the peculiar relationship between printed items and aural expectations, the paper argues for a reconsideration of the notion of musical borrowing as a form of listening inscription.
The opera Catone, one of the pasticci assembled and produced by Handel and Heidegger, based on Leonardo Leo’s 1729 setting of the Metastasio libretto, exemplifies the phantasmic nature of the genre in three related ways. First, it was staged in London at a time when the figure of the Roman orator Cato the Younger was pervasively haunting popular imagination. Second, it enticed narratives of skepticism about Handel’s paternity in both public and private correspondence. Third, its libretto was constructed so that the suppression of a character (Flavio) forced other characters to read what were originally his lines through the new setting of typical ‘letter scenes,’ enabling the ghosting of previous voices in metatheatrical manner.
By examining primary sources (both the conducting score, held in Hamburg, and the Leo score preserved in the Royal Academy of Music, London) through the lens of current scholarship on material texts and authorship and performance studies, my paper will attempt at repositioning the production of Handel’s pasticci in the context of pre-Enlightenment discourses on authorship.
The memorable conflict between Nero and Agrippina the Younger was featured in many Italian operas during the seventeenth century, from Monteverdi’s Poppea of 1643 (even if Agrippina is not a character) to Handel’s Agrippina of 1709, both premiered in Venice. In the Venetian Nerone fatto Cesare, the lavish and violent plot depicts Nero’s sexual incursions as a backdrop for a complex psychological clash with his mother. The character of Agrippina, however, remains underdeveloped.
The Milanese version, in contrast to the Venetian one, dramatically expands the tragic dimension of Agrippina in musical and textual ways that, while similar (as I show) to those of Handel’s opera, nonetheless have the effect of shedding a positive, and not a negative, light on the Empress. The composer added a new finale and a mad scene, providing music of unusual dramatic power through sudden shifts from soft ariette to nervous accompanied recitatives. Significantly, Agrippina’s last words as set in this Milanese version, “I am nothing but a shadow” (which I interpret in light of a newly discovered sonnet dedicated to premiere’s singer), highlight the metatheatrical dimension of the character. At the same time, they justify the operatic celebration of such a tyrannical woman. Such celebration, I contend, could only take place in Milan, a city that belonged to the Spanish empire and that, in contrast to the Venetian Republic (traditionally hostile to tyrants, live or staged), had already seen similar theatrical rehabilitations of queens and kings in those same years.
As a matter of fact, while Barbiere circulated through the rest of Italy thanks to seasonal companies (without leading up to any ‘regional’ version of the opera), recent researches (which brought to light the names of some of the performers and companies who took part in the Neapolitan Barbiere around 1825) show how a distinctive production system can affect an opera’s dramaturgical structure (as in the case of Don Bartolo’s exceptional role improvement).
Recently, Arnold Jacobshagen and Paologiovanni Maione debated over the relationship between prose dialogues and ‘Neapolitanized’ opéra-comique (Cantare e parlare nell’opera napoletana: un equivoco storiografico, «Saggiatore musicale», XVI, n. 1, 2009): our paper’s goal is to point out how the connection of opera and local identity is the result of more complex cross-cultural dynamics, with stratifications and influences which are rarely one-sided. The case of the Neapolitan Barbiere di Siviglia will emphasize these dynamics very well.
Il volume è introdotto da una prefazione di Carlo Lanfossi, che interpreta in chiave lacaniana alcuni aspetti della musicologia italiana, e da una postfazione di Alberto Toscano, che considera il saggio di Dolar e Žižek nel contesto del pensiero critico contemporaneo.
2. L’ORIONE DI CAVALLI (1653-4), I RAPPORTI CON VENEZIA E IL COMICO MILANESE I primordi del teatro d’opera a Milano e L’Orione – I confronti con i libretti veneziani: gli anni Cinquanta-Sessanta e l’autonomia del comico
3. IL SISTEMA PRODUTTIVO
Una corte, due teatri – Un breve excursus sull’ubicazione del teatro – I costi della gestione dei palchi e l’accesso a teatro – L’arena di potere della gestione teatrale – L’impresario e il Collegio delle Vergini Spagnole – L’intermediario – I cantanti e le stagioni d’opera – Appendice: nuovi documenti in Archivio di Stato di Milano
4. L’IPPOLITA REINA DELLE AMAZONI (1670) E L’IPERFESTA
Il teatro d’opera a Milano negli anni Settanta del Seicento – Il corpo del governatore: il duca d’Ossuna – I preparativi – Una moderna opera-torneo – Il prologo e l’iperfesta – Un mito diffuso, un libretto complesso – Un librettista, tre compositori – Isole, tornei, comici: esempi di drammaturgia musicale – Questioni di morfologia e analisi
5. I NOBILI ALL’OPERA: IL CASO DELLA FAMIGLIA TAVERNA
La famiglia – L’educazione musicale presso il Collegio dei Nobili e le commedie di Maggi – Il palco nel Teatro Ducale – Le opere in casa
6. IL CARNEVALE 1694: GL’AMORI MINISTRI DELLA FORTUNA E L’AIACE
Lo Stato di Milano e la Guerra della Lega di Augusta – Il Carnevale 1694 tra politica e spettacolo – Le opere del Carnevale 1694 – Gl’amori ministri della Fortuna (Francesco Silvani – Marc’Antonio Ziani) – L’Aiace (Pietro d’Averara – Carlo Ambrogio Lonati, Paolo Magni, Francesco Ballarotti) – Soluzioni musicali ricorrenti – Pietro Paolo Benigni: continuità e prassi del comico milanese
7. L’AGRIPPINA DI NORIS-MAGNI (1703) DA VENEZIA A MILANO
Introduzione – Il soggetto e le origini letterarie – Nerone sui palcoscenici italiani – «Per accomodarsi alla qualità e quantità dei recitanti»: il Nerone fatto Cesare da Venezia a Milano – Declinazioni del comico – La drammaturgia milanese «all’ombra d’Agrippina»
By re-reading the history of the discipline in the United States and Europe (with a focus on the ‘Italian difference’ as case study) through the lens of Lacanian theory, this essay aims at redefining the intellectual coordinates of musicology’s ‘split’ identity, particularly in relation to the other fields within the humanities, and to understand its anxiety with language and critical theory.
Una interpretazione in chiave lacaniana di alcuni aspetti della musicologia italiana in rapporto a quella anglosassone.
Using terminology associated with the “spectral turn” in the humanities, this essay argues for rethinking operatic genealogies through the lens of hauntological intertextualities. In contrast to traditional theories of compositional influence, this study adopts a non-linear historiographical approach to performance genealogies, embracing text, music, and discourse about opera itself. Contesting the use of the concept of “origins” with respect to both the birth and subject matter of baroque opera, I argue that the genre developed as an already haunted narration.
Scholars have wondered whether Clayton’s music was original or derived from circulating Italian arias. Based on examples from Italian operas of that period, this essay aims to demonstrate that Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus was an original score whose music had been influenced by Italian tunes, “musical memes”, shared by the majority of late seventeen- th century opera composers.
Focusing on London’s operatic seasons between 1733 and 1737, around the competition between the Royal Academy of Music and the Opera of the Nobility, this paper will study Handel’s use of music owned by Jennens as a form of aural inscription of the collectors’ listening preferences. It was during these years that Handel assembled an exceptional number of pasticci (Semiramide riconosciuta, Caio Fabricio, and Arbace), two of which directly related to Jennens’s scores. Moreover, Jennens and other patrons were actively involved in the success of either of the rival companies. Through the analysis of such scores and the interpretation of contemporary documentation, this paper rethinks the competition in London for Italian Opera in the context of eighteenth-century collecting and listening practices.
By putting into relation the memory of previous performances and the printed impression in the guise of the Favourite Songs, these two cases unveil an understudied aspect of baroque opera, that of the relationship between listening habits and the material conditions of music circulation. People attended a pasticcio (whether in the form of a new opera with music by previous composers, or a new arrangement of an old production) to listen to what the producers of a show had arranged for them. Scholarship on musical borrowing and pasticci (e.g., Buelow, Strohm and Roberts) has largely focused on tracing content dissemination and textual genealogy. Yet, as seen with Muzio Scevola and the 1742 Rossane, the role of listening expectations on behalf of the audience should be put in the context of the musical marketplace and the circulation of printed items (such as the Favourite Songs).
By looking at the material configurations of both Muzio Scevola and Rossane, and by exploring discourses on listening and hearing in early eighteenth-century England, this paper reconsiders the pasticcio as a “memory machine” (to quote theatre scholar Marvin Carlson), where both the composer and the audiences registered their own sonic memories. Moreover, in light of the peculiar relationship between printed items and aural expectations, the paper argues for a reconsideration of the notion of musical borrowing as a form of listening inscription.
The opera Catone, one of the pasticci assembled and produced by Handel and Heidegger, based on Leonardo Leo’s 1729 setting of the Metastasio libretto, exemplifies the phantasmic nature of the genre in three related ways. First, it was staged in London at a time when the figure of the Roman orator Cato the Younger was pervasively haunting popular imagination. Second, it enticed narratives of skepticism about Handel’s paternity in both public and private correspondence. Third, its libretto was constructed so that the suppression of a character (Flavio) forced other characters to read what were originally his lines through the new setting of typical ‘letter scenes,’ enabling the ghosting of previous voices in metatheatrical manner.
By examining primary sources (both the conducting score, held in Hamburg, and the Leo score preserved in the Royal Academy of Music, London) through the lens of current scholarship on material texts and authorship and performance studies, my paper will attempt at repositioning the production of Handel’s pasticci in the context of pre-Enlightenment discourses on authorship.
The memorable conflict between Nero and Agrippina the Younger was featured in many Italian operas during the seventeenth century, from Monteverdi’s Poppea of 1643 (even if Agrippina is not a character) to Handel’s Agrippina of 1709, both premiered in Venice. In the Venetian Nerone fatto Cesare, the lavish and violent plot depicts Nero’s sexual incursions as a backdrop for a complex psychological clash with his mother. The character of Agrippina, however, remains underdeveloped.
The Milanese version, in contrast to the Venetian one, dramatically expands the tragic dimension of Agrippina in musical and textual ways that, while similar (as I show) to those of Handel’s opera, nonetheless have the effect of shedding a positive, and not a negative, light on the Empress. The composer added a new finale and a mad scene, providing music of unusual dramatic power through sudden shifts from soft ariette to nervous accompanied recitatives. Significantly, Agrippina’s last words as set in this Milanese version, “I am nothing but a shadow” (which I interpret in light of a newly discovered sonnet dedicated to premiere’s singer), highlight the metatheatrical dimension of the character. At the same time, they justify the operatic celebration of such a tyrannical woman. Such celebration, I contend, could only take place in Milan, a city that belonged to the Spanish empire and that, in contrast to the Venetian Republic (traditionally hostile to tyrants, live or staged), had already seen similar theatrical rehabilitations of queens and kings in those same years.
As a matter of fact, while Barbiere circulated through the rest of Italy thanks to seasonal companies (without leading up to any ‘regional’ version of the opera), recent researches (which brought to light the names of some of the performers and companies who took part in the Neapolitan Barbiere around 1825) show how a distinctive production system can affect an opera’s dramaturgical structure (as in the case of Don Bartolo’s exceptional role improvement).
Recently, Arnold Jacobshagen and Paologiovanni Maione debated over the relationship between prose dialogues and ‘Neapolitanized’ opéra-comique (Cantare e parlare nell’opera napoletana: un equivoco storiografico, «Saggiatore musicale», XVI, n. 1, 2009): our paper’s goal is to point out how the connection of opera and local identity is the result of more complex cross-cultural dynamics, with stratifications and influences which are rarely one-sided. The case of the Neapolitan Barbiere di Siviglia will emphasize these dynamics very well.