opera seria XVIIIth century

The vocal duets of G. F. Handel are distinguished by a greater musical and dramaturgical diversity compared to the duets of his contemporaries, but this diversity has not yet been systematically examined in different contexts. This study investigates them in two genre traditions, that of the chamber duet and that of the so-called “dramatic duet”, a component of genres such as opera, cantata and serenata. It concentrates on London in the period 1706-1724 in order to explore to which extent Handel's treatment of duets differs from the contributions by his Italian contemporaries, who were either active in London at the time (e. g. G. Bononcini) or whose works were performed parallel to his.

"Opera seria" can be understood as a collective artistic manifestation that influenced and was influenced by the ideologies of its time. This work focuses not on its history but on the philosophy behind the librettos, as well as the essence of the arias and recitatives, and the social congregation and interaction that seria represented.

Few books can claim both the popularity and controversiality of Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699), a novel translated into several languages and repeatedly praised for containing « delightful images of practical philosophy » (Muratori, 1706). But Télémaque had more to offer than just reading matter. The dramatic episodes punctuating its epic framework have invited numerous theatrical adaptations. Fénelon’s recasting of Telemachus’s adventures on Calypso’s isle (Books I, IV and VII) bore such conspicuously ‘operatic’ qualities that it became a favorite opera scenario.
Clues as to the reception of this particular episode in settecento opera can be found in Muratori’s widely-read Della perfetta poesia italiana (1706). In fact, the story of a young prince experiencing difficulties in abandoning « the charms of an idle and effeminate life » chimes with Muratori’s rationalist stance on opera and gender. The seducing ‘siren songs’ of Calypso and her nymphs can be seen as representing the debasing effects of music on contemporary audiences, and the discursive persuasion of Telemachus’s counselor Mentor (Minerva in male disguise) as the voice of rationality. As a result, Telemachus’s rejection of effeminacy and sensuality must have provided reformist poets with a powerful tool to redefine operatic virtue.
Alessandro Scarlatti’s Telemaco (Rome, 1718), the first full-scale Italian opera to elaborate on Fénelon’s novel, confirms such reading. Intertextual analysis indicates that Carlo Sigismondo Capeci drew his libretto from a hereto-unknown source, Pellegrin’s Télémaque (Paris, 1714). Yet, while copying Pellegrin’s scenic lay-out, Capeci at the same time restored elements from the novel that were absent from the French opera, most notably the character of Mentor and the semantic devices with which Fénelon had stressed the ‘poisoning’ effect of feminine eros on masculine eloquence. A closer look at Scarlatti’s score reveals how the restoration of Fénelon’s gender ideology has helped to differentiate characters exclusively performed by male singers.

John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera was a sensation when it premiered in 1728, running for sixty­-two consecutive nights, a record in England at the time. Essential to the success of the opera was its multi-­layered satire which Gay rendered in a compact and humorous way. This satire is composed of three primary elements: the aesthetic, which parodied the Italian operatic form then in fashion; the social, which pointed out the hypocrisy and vice within English society; and the political, which concentrated its powers of observation on those ruling the country. These three elements, essential to the meaning of the opera, exposed the failings of England’s society as Gay saw them.

Questo volume è stato realizzato grazie a un contributo del Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Università e della Ricerca, erogato alle Università degli Studi di Padova, Siena e Milano nell'ambito del progetto Libretti d'opera italiana del Settecento (Mariani, Federico, Metastasio, Goldoni, Verazi). Varianti dai manoscritti e dalle fonti a stampa (FIRB 2006) INTRODUZIONE Quarta opera seria di Niccolò Jommelli (Aversa 1714 -Napoli 1774) composta per i teatri romani, Didone abbandonata va in scena al Teatro Argentina il 28 gennaio 1747, secondo titolo della stagione di carnevale. 1 Come per Johann Adolf Hasse, 2 l'incontro con la drammaturgia metastasiana sarà determinante per il teatro di Jommelli: attorno all'universo del poeta cesareo, il compositore di Aversa costruirà e consoliderà il proprio stile operistico con una produzione di drammi per musica in cui un posto numericamente rilevante è occupato da opere ricomposte a distanza di anni su uno stesso libretto. 3 È quel che avviene anche nel caso di Didone abbandonata che Jommelli mise in musica in altre due occasioni: appena due anni dopo, nel 1749, per la corte di Vienna e nel 1763 per la corte di Stoccarda. Non si tratta di revisioni della stessa opera in anni differenti, ma di tre intonazioni indipendenti dello stesso libretto, sebbene, com'è intuibile, si riscontrino soluzioni compositive condivise, soprattutto nel caso della Didone romana e di quella viennese composte nel giro di pochissimi anni.

Few cases as blatantly override their contextual constraints as the ‘numinous’ accompagnato, i.e. a brand of recitative tagged by a homophonic texture for strings underscoring invocations, oracles, and divine utterances. Conceived in Italy in the 1680s, the topos would remain intact throughout the eighteenth century and beyond; yet its inscription in the discourse of early opera seria is surely at odds with the genre’s intellectual framework.

Given its simultaneous presence in opera and oratorio, the numinous accompagnato was deployed to evoke Christian as well as pagan deities with the same degree of solemnity. Initially, the ‘college’ view on mythology (e.g. Bossuet, Gravina), which accepted pagan archetypes in terms of Christian allegories, may have offered a backdoor to escape censorial conflicts. However, rationalist doctrines espoused by Fontenelle and Muratori would rule out representations of ‘idolatry’ and ‘superstition.’ Not coincidentally, a growing number of libretti containing such ‘heathen fantasies’ were prefaced by disclaimers (proteste) that distanced them from the author’s ‘true’ beliefs.

Equally hostile to the deus ex machina and ‘irrationality’ (alogon) as a whole, the implementation of neo-Aristotelian verisimilitude in opera was no less diametrically opposed to the scope of numinous accompagnati. Nonetheless, closer scrutiny of applications by Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Händel, and Jommelli reveals as to how accomplished composers have seized upon this particular topos to display harmonic extravagances, thus substituting the missing visual component with musical suggestions of the metaphysical that transgressed the logocentric borders of plot.

From 1748 onwards, the marvellous made a comeback in opera seria via the Königliches Opernhaus in Berlin. The striking resurgence of myth and magic in the predominantly historical operatic genre appears to bespeak a growing interest in Lullian tragédie en musique, which in turn can be associated with Frederick II’s French orientation in literary and philosophical matters. But how did deities, sorcerers and Louis quatorzien imports chime with Frederick’s notorious resistance to superstition and divinely ordained kingship? The juxtaposition of the relevant operas with theoretical writings from Friderician Prussia yields a multi-faceted, somewhat paradoxical answer, revealing that the marvellous, alongside nourishing a new type of operatic spectacle, served Frederick as a vehicle to impart his philosophical agenda to his state, a former centre of Pietism.

The paper reconstructs the history of creation and performance of the opera "Pirro" by Zingarelli / De Gamerra, and considers the role of castrato Luigi Marchesi in the compositional process, the performances and the long lasting success of the score. Original embellishments by Marchesi on two rondos are discussed within the musical environment the opera was produced (Milan) and for the revivals in Bergamo and Venice.

This article takes Cigna-Santi and Mozart's opera Mitridate, re di Ponto (1770) as a case study for opera seria's engagement with French neoclassical spoken tragedy and the Enlightenment revisionist approach to tragic principles. Far from inheriting a stable source text, the opera adapts a highly contentious play – Jean Racine's 1673 tragedy Mithridate – which became the exemplar for Antoine Houdar de la Motte's contentious new genre of " prose tragedy " in the early eighteenth century. Against the large body of scholarship disparaging Mozart's relationship to his neoclassical predecessors, I argue that the operatic Mitridate undertakes targeted revisions to the original Racinian drama, and moreover that these modifications reflect a tragic theatre in flux rather than in decline.

Jommelli's «Tenacious memory»: reminiscences in L' IfIgenìa (1751) if you have capacious and officious memories, able to receive, contain and preserve much, keep them not as empty Bladders, puft up with Wind and Fancy, but fill them, while you are at the Fountain, with the profitable Knowledg [sic] of God and nature, of sound learning, of true Wisdom, and of those liberal arts and sciences by which you design to be useful and do good in your Generation. 1 once upon a time, memory played a role of such unquestionable prominence that speeches were seldom read from the paper, but rather memorized and delivered by heart in front of an awed audience. long before the word processor assumed control over human expression, thereby exposing our memory to irremediable erosion, it was indeed a very usual thing to imprint large stretches of information in the mind before entrusting them to paper. rhetorical considerations proved instrumental in this matter, as eloquent 'orators' -in the broadest sense -were expected to persuade their listeners through the improvised recall and recombination of so-called 'loci' or 'topoi'. The panoply of aids developed to retain these commonplaces helped the 'art of memory' acquire near-scientific status. 2 although the printing press did little to further this time-honored tradition, scholars and artists alike continued to hinge upon their memories for the conception, arrangement, and performance of their knowledge and artistry. even in the enlightenment, as philosophers attempted to break down the hegemony of rote memorisation in college, mnemonic tools re-1 marius d'assigny, The art of memory: a treatise useful for such as are to speak in public, london, Bell & Bible, 1706 3 , p. vi. 2 see mary J. Carruthers, The book of memory: a study of memory in medieval culture, new york, cambridge university Press, 2008 2 ; W. den Boer, The art of memory and its mnemotechnical traditions, amsterdam, north-Holland, 1986; Paolo rossi, Clavis universalis: arti mnemoniche e logica combinatoria da Lullo a Leibniz, Bologna, il mulino, 1983 2 ; FranCes amelia yates, The art of memory, chicago, university of chicago Press, 2001 14 . a musicological variation on the theme is anna maria Busse Berger, Medieval music and the art of memory, Berkeley, university of california Press, 2005 (it. trans. La musica medievale e l'arte della memoria, subiaco, Fogli Volanti edizioni, 2008).

Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft 30 (2010), pp. 117-161. – In 1675 the monastery of Einsiedeln (Switzerland) acquired by the Jesuits a residence in Bellinzona. This house used until 1852 represents a very important ‘pied-à-terre’ to Italy and especially to Milan. An exceptional cultural transfer occurs along this way with an intense circulation of musical sources. Aim of this study is, on the one hand, to investigate the modalities of circulation of music between Milan and Einsiedeln; on the other, to show how this swiss connection has influenced the selection of Italian music.

Many Classical music lovers are familiar with the composer George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) for his famous “Messiah” oratorio, but are not aware his preferred area of composition was Italian opera seria.  Biographical books explore his career as an opera composer and the rise of the new pious genre when Italian opera was no longer popular in London, but rarely do we find detailed accounts or discussions of that strange period in the 1730s when this shift in popularity forced Handel to leave the Haymarket theatre and join with John Rich at Covent Garden where he tried to carry on the Royal Academy opera company in competition with the new Opera of the Nobility venture founded by the Prince of Wales before he was finally forced to abandon opera in favour of the oratorio. This book explores this rocky transition period and how it affected Handel’s work, namely, his addition of French elements into his operas and other novel innovations in order to regain his chagrined public. There are discussions exploring the possibility Handel was his own worse enemy with regards to his business decisions as impresario-composer, alienating the Italians of London and his public, which nearly cost him his career.

The new version of my paper on two of the most enthralling Venetian operas of the 1780s is based on an additional source: the complete score of Tarchi's "Ifigenia in Tauride" in Paris. The first version of this article had been based only on the incomplete Florentine score. With the help of the Paris score it is now possible to draw a complete picture of that fascinating opera, including several music examples. Luigi Ballarini called Tarchi's "Ifigenia" an opera "in the style of the spectacle of Paris", because it consequently integrated chorus and ballet. Ballarini's letters are analyzed in my paper as a document for the crisis of the Teatro S. Benedetto in 1785/86. The choreography of Tarchi's danced choruses is described on the basis of the authentic annotations by Antonio Muzzarelli, contained in the Florentine score. The extraordinary musical and dramatic tension of Oreste's scenes with the furies is seen as a tribute to the art of Domenico Bedini, the great Soprano castrato, and as a document for Magri's theory of furies' dances. In the second half of the paper, Bianchi's "Alonso e Cora", is analyzed as an opera "in the style of the spectacle of Paris". It was the most authentic Italian opera based on Marmontel's novel "Les Incas" in the 1780s, and it transformed the French "Merveilleux naturel" into scene complexes of fascinating breadth and variety.

Uno dei fenomeni più importanti che hanno favorito l'occidentalizzazione romanza della lingua letteraria romena è stato il largo affluire di traduzioni di letteratura francese e italiana. Nel Settecento predomina la figura del poeta italiano Pietro Metastasio con ben nove testi tradotti: il melodramma italiano arriva nei Principati con modalità peculiari in quanto le traduzioni non sono destinate tanto alla rappresentazione scenica quanto alla sola lettura; esse si basano inoltre non sul testo italiano originale ma su alcune traduzioni intermediarie in lingua neogreca. La penetrazione delle opere di Metastasio nei Principati, come pure di molta cultura occidentale, è perciò legata indissolubilmente alla cultura neogreca e ai gusti della nobiltà fanariota. per modesti compilatori come Slătineanu o Beldiman; la scomparsa del neogreco come lingua di cultura favorirà ulteriormente il processo di rinnovamento linguistico e letterario.

The new version of this paper offers musical transcriptions and a detailed analysis of nine insertion arias sung by Maria Marchetti Fantozzi and Domenico Bedini at Genoa's Teatro S. Agostino during the Carnival season of 1789. Marchetti's personal version of Angelo Tarchi's Rondò "Nel lasciar l'amato bene" is analyzed and transcribed, based on the Berlin score Mus. ms. 21263 and the Milan score. The second part of the paper concentrates on short scores from the Fondo Antico in the Conservatorio Niccolò Paganini in Genoa. They contain arias inserted by Marchetti and Bedini into Guglielmi's opera "Enea e Lavinia" and the Pasticcio ´"Attalo re di Bitinia". Both opera productions are reconstructed in detail, and the short scores are described concerning the arrangement practices and the repertoire of the two famous Mozart singers Marchetti and Bedini: their choice of insertion arias, the textual and musical arrangements, the cuts in the ensembles, embellishments and other strategies, last but not least the impact of the insertions on the dramaturgy of Guglielmi's most famous opera seria. Finally, those arias reveal a number of parallels to Mozart's music written for Marchetti and Bedini in "La clemenza di Tito". Especially Tarchi's Rondò "Nel lasciar l'amato bene" and Cimarosa's aria "Teneri dolci affetti" from "Attalo" can be seen as forerunners of Mozart's aria and Rondò for Vitellia.

Die Buchreihe Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte deckt das gesamte Spektrum der germanistischen Literaturforschung ab und umfasst Monographien und Sammelbände über einzelne Epochen vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Sie versammelt Beiträge zur Erklärung zentraler Begriffe der Literaturgeschichte, zu einzelnen Autoren und Werken. UNTERSUCHUNGEN ZUR DEUTSCHEN LITERATURGESCHICHTE Der Band erkundet den schöpferisch-interpretativen Spielraum des literarischen Übersetzens in der Goethezeit und beleuchtet ihn aus übersetzungshistorischer und literaturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive. Die Fallstudien historisieren die aus der Übersetzung hervorgegangenen Texte als Teil der deutschen Literaturgeschichte und versuchen, die ihnen inhärenten Gattungs-und Theoriekonzepte zu rekonstruieren.

In contrast to what its title suggests, Niccolo` Jommelli’s Cajo Mario (Rome, 1746) has little to do with the consul Caius Marius (157–86 BC). Instead, the opera transposes the myth of Iphigenia in Aulis to the Roman Republic, having Marius, his daughter, her lover and her villainous suitor assume the roles of Agamemnon, Iphigenia, Achilles and Ajax respectively. Thus configured, Jommelli’s opera held the stage until 1772, enjoying fifteen revivals with most of the original music intact – a record in the composer’s oeuvre. This essay seeks to clarify the reasons for that remarkable success. By juxtaposing Jommelli’s score and Gaetano Roccaforte’s libretto with a set of six paintings by the contemporary artist Antonio Joli (c1700–1777), it aims to show how Cajo Mario shares compositional strategies with a connoisseur’s genre in the fine arts: the capriccio. In keeping with Joli’s capricci, which all deploy the same structural motif, Cajo Mario incorporates a narrative structure through which the ‘parallel universe’ of related works imposes itself on the opera’s setting and action, making spectators wonder – as a character does in the course of the opera – whether they are gazing at an event from republican Rome or reliving a legend from ancient Greece.

The government of Archduchess Maria Elisabeth (1725-41) made a more vital contribution to musical life in Belgium than has been presumed. With greater vigour than any of her predecessors, Charles VI's sister sought to erase the Bourbon heritage of the Southern Netherlands by transplanting Habsburg policies. A significant outcome of this 're-Habsburgisation' was the return, after decades of absence, of Italian opera to Belgium. Between April 1727 and February 1730, sixteen drammi per musica and five intermezzi comici musicali put a sudden, hitherto unexplained stop to the Lullian hegemony at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels. With each work celebrating a Viennese court festivity, the operas were framed by Te Deums, balls and cannonades, and their subjects were chosen so that local spectators were exposed to Austria's cultural and ideological hallmarks. However, dark clouds gathered over Maria Elisabeth's operatic campaign. Both impresarios coordinating the productions, Antonio Maria Peruzzi and Gioacchino Landi, went bankrupt and could only escape jail through the Archduchess's personal intervention. Landi's last offering, Attalo (1730), openly allegorised the injustice done to Italian poetry and music 'under the Belgian climate'. Deriving evidence from fresh sources, the present article aims to explain how Maria Elisabeth attempted to attune Brussels with Vienna and why her enterprise was destined to fail.

Of all Handel’s oratorios, Joseph and His Brethren (1744) is the one most frequently associated with the sentimentalism so popular among mid-eighteenth-century authors and playwrights. The libretto by James Miller bears the marks of contemporary sentimental drama, with its tearful family tableaux and moral precepts issued by the faultless protagonist, a Man of Feeling who continually weeps, displaying his sensitive, ardent empathy. Scholars have frequently critiqued this sentimental hero, complaining of his “static” characterization (Paula O’Brien) and his “tearful sensibility worthy of [Laurence] Sterne” (Winton Dean). Duncan Chisholm and Ruth Smith have both attempted to soften these critical blows by claiming that beyond this sentimentalism lay a more exciting political symbolism; they see Robert Walpole lurking behind Joseph, the Egyptian “Prime Minister,” and posit that Joseph’s sensitive goodness contrasted with the distinctly unsympathetic portrayal of Walpole during the 1740s.

Yet by the time that Joseph premiered, Walpole had been out of office for two years, and even Smith admits that such political readings are “opaque.” I offer an alternative explanation for the roots of the protagonist’s lachrymosity. Miller penned not only plays bitingly satirizing his contemporaries, but also sermons embracing the Latitudinarian viewpoints prevalent among religious writers of his time. Such ministers focused on benevolence and empathy, proclaiming this approach as a new and defining feature of contemporary Anglicanism. Like those of his like-minded contemporaries, Miller’s published sermons (as well as his libretto) advocated an ideal person whose love and empathy culminate in Christ-like tears. R. S. Crane once proposed that the most influential models for the culture of sentiment lay not in secular philosophy, but in such Latitudinarian teachings. This religious outlook was intimately connected to the man of feeling whom Miller proffered as an exemplar for his Handelian audiences. To take seriously the sentimentalism of Joseph reminds us that Handel’s oratorios were not only political allegories, but also works that aimed to touch the private lives of the men and women of feeling for whom (and by whom) they were written.

The present article describes an important episode in the prehistory of Mozart's opera "La clemenza di Tito": the sojourn of Emperor Leopold II at Padua in July 1791. He attended performances of "Ipermestra" by Giovanni Paisiello and of a pasticcio "Didone abbandonata", with the famous soprano Luísa Todi and the acclaimed castrato Domenico Bedini, whom Leopold invited personally to his coronation opera in Prague. My paper reconstructs the details of the Emperor's sojourn in Padua with the help of Girolamo Polcastro's chronicle and of reports in the "Gazzetta urbana veneta". Paisiello's "Ipermestra" is intensively analyzed on the basis of the musical sources, including several scores unknown to Michael Robinson. The paper also reconstructs the content of the "Didone" pasticcio and the extraordinary impact of La Todi in her starring role, which is compared to the tragic flight to Varennes of the French queen Marie-Antoniette. News of the latter event arrived in Padua during the Emperor's "opera vacation" and influenced his decision to choose "La clemenza di Tito" as the subject of his Bohemian coronation opera.

My interest in Frances Burney, dramatist is leading me towards a new research monograph. I will explore the relationships between Burney's dramas and the European Romantic stage (partic. Gothic dramas, historical dramas, and opera seria). RSVP if interested in my project and wish to receive updates.