A Short History of Opera, fourth edition

ALTHOUGH THE BEGINNING of opera is commonly reckoned from the Florentine performances of 1600, it would be almost more appropriate to date it from the opening of the first public opera house in Venice in 1637. Itinerant troupes of singers, rivaling the troupes of the commedia dell’arte and borrowing from them many features of both libretto and music, had begun to circulate in Italy before this date. But the destined center of the new kind of musical drama, based on a combination of broad popular support and prestige appeal to the upper social classes, was Venice.¹ Court operas of the early seventeenth century had always kept a certain reserve, a refinement, almost a preciosity of form and content. After 1640, as opera became increasingly a public spectacle and tickets were sold for performances, changes were inevitable. The popularity of the new form of entertainment at Venice was amazing. Between 1637 and the end of the century, more than 350 operas were produced in the new theaters in Venice itself and probably at least as many more by Venetian composers in other cities. No fewer than nine opera houses were opened in Venice during this period;after 1650, never fewer than four were in operation at once, and for the last two decades of the century this city of 125,000 people supported six opera troupes continuously, the usual seasons filling from twelve to thirty weeks of the year.² Sustaining this rise in commercial opera were the aristocratic families of Venice who rented loges by the season and the general public, including foreigners visiting during Carnival, who gained admission by purchasing tickets.

The transformation that took place in the character of both libretto and music is attributable in part to these new circumstances; yet signs of the change had already become apparent in Rome, and the whole movement was part and parcel of the changing literary and musical tastes of the time. The genuine Renaissance interest in antiquity being exhausted, only the shell of classical subject matter remained, and even this was frequently abandoned in favor of episodes from medieval romances, especially as embodied in the epics of Ariosto and Tasso. Moreover, the outlines of history or legend were overlaid with so-called accidenti verissimi—incidents invented and added by the poets—to the point of being no longer recognizable. In these operas, Perseus, Hercules, Medea, Alcestis, Scipio, Leonidas, Tancred, Clorinda, Rinaldo, and Armida were not so much human (or superhuman) persons as mere personified passions, moving through the drama with the stiff, unreal air of abstract figures (despite the vehemence with which their emotions were expressed), preoccupied with little more than their eternal political or amorous intrigues and caricatured in comic episodes that might take up half the opera. Mistaken identity—a device rendered somewhat less implausible by the presence of castrati in male roles—was a dramatic stock in trade. The Aristotelian unities gave way before a bewildering succession of scenes, sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty in a single act, full of strong feeling and suspense, abounding in sharp contrast and effects of all kinds. Lavish scenic backgrounds added to the spectacle. Pastoral idylls, dreams, oracles, incantations, spectral apparitions, descents of gods, shipwrecks, sieges, and battles filled the stage. In particular, the machines—ingenious mechanical contrivances for the production of sudden miraculous changes and supernatural appearances—attained a degree of development never surpassed. Heritage of the medieval mysteries, beloved adjunct of the Renaissance intermedi and the seventeenth-century court spectacles, the machines formed an indispensable part of opera in this period, though their magnificence declined before the end of the century.³

A striking feature of the scores after about 1645 is the virtual disappearance of the chorus. There are a few choruses in operas from around this time, and occasional indications that more were planned but apparently never composed. The mystery of these missing choruses has not yet been satisfactorily solved, but it is possible that they were replaced by ballets, the music of which was written by some other composer(s) and consequently not included in the regular score. At any rate, the absence of a chorus was primarily a matter of aesthetic propriety, for the stately, antique choral group of the Florentine pastorales had no place in the lusty melodrama of later seventeenth-century opera. Moreover, the public cared little for choral singing on the stage, preferring to hear soloists. Giovanni Andrea Angelini-Bontempi (1624–1705), in the preface to his opera II Paride (Dresden, 1662), stated bluntly that the chorus belonged in the oratorio, and managers soon found that the money it cost to maintain such a large body of singers could be more advantageously spent for other purposes.⁴ Only in the festa teatrale or festa musicale, for which extraordinary sums of money were available, did the chorus remain.⁵ Its place was taken by ensemble solo voices, particularly in the prologues and epilogues, where divinities and allegorical figures of all kinds came forward to sing greetings to distinguished spectators or make general moral observations and topical allusions to events of the day. The decline of the chorus was followed by the rise of a typical operatic phenomenon, the virtuoso soloist, for whose sake numerous songs having no connection with the drama were interpolated in the score.

Along with these external changes, the music of Italian opera in the course of the seventeenth century developed some fundamentally new features of style. The works of the Florentines and early Romans were essentially chamber operas, which were relatively short, with a limited range of musical effects, sophisticated in feeling and declamation, calculated to appeal to invited guests of aristocratic tastes and education. Many of the later operas, on the other hand, were destined for performance in public theaters before a mixed audience who had paid admission. Box office appeal was essential. Broad effects by simple means, direct and vivid musical characterization, continual sharp contrasts of mood were required. Tuneful melodies, unmistakable major-minor harmonies, a solid but uncomplicated texture, strong rhythms in easily grasped patterns, above all clear formal structure founded on the sequential repetition of basic motifs—these became the elements of a new operatic style.

In the summer of 1612, Claudio Monteverdi was asked to leave the Mantuan court for reasons as yet unknown. He returned for a brief time to his native Cremona before being named maestro di cappella at St. Mark’s Cathedral at Venice in August 1613, a position he held for the rest of his life. His duties at St. Mark’s required him, among other things, to recruit and train members of the choir and to compose music for the major feasts. Since nothing in his contract prevented him from also writing secular dramatic music, he accepted commissions from the courts of Mantua and Padua for several such works between 1627 and 1630. The first of these was a commission to compose music for Giulio Strozzi’s libretto, La finta pazza Licori (1627), a comic opera in which the title character, Licori (soprano), disguised first as a man and then as a woman, has to feign madness. Monteverdi was particularly enthusiastic about this libretto; he described it in a letter (July 24, 1627) to Alessandro Striggio at Mantua as a “very beautiful and unusual play,” having “a thousand comical situations.”⁶ In this same letter Monteverdi mentions that he has completed almost all of the first act. Whether he completed the full score before Striggio rejected the opera is not known, for the score no longer survives.⁷ What has survived are the letters Monteverdi wrote to Striggio from May through July 1627, which contain specific suggestions for Strozzi concerning the structure of “mad” scenes. So effective were these suggestions that they became a guide for other librettists who wanted to include this type of scene in their librettos, as did Giovanni Francesco Busenello (Didone) and Giovanni Faustini (Egisto). They similarly guided Strozzi in his writing of La finta pazza for Venice.

Monteverdi also composed dramatic works for noble families, academies, and eventually for public opera houses in Venice. The dramatic cantata Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624) and the opera Proserpina rapita (1630), for example, were written for Count Girolamo Mocenigo and performed in his Venetian palace. Il combattimento may be briefly mentioned here because of its significance in the development of a new type of musical expression and because of its use of two new devices of instrumental technique. In the preface to his Madrigali guerrieri ed amorosi (the collection in which Il combattimento was first published in 1638), Monteverdi explains that music hitherto has not developed a technique for the expression of anger or excitement and that he has supplied this need by the invention of the stile concitato (agitated style), based on the meter of the pyrrhic foot (two short syllables.) This is a typical Renaissance theory to justify the use of rapidly reiterated sixteenth notes on one tone. Monteverdi claims credit for the discovery of this device, as well as for the pizzicato, which he likewise uses in this work to depict the clashing of weapons in combat. The orchestra of Il combattimento consists of only strings and continuo, an instance of the trend during the early seventeenth century toward reducing the number and variety of instrumental groups and centering interest on the strings.

The birth of commercial opera in Venice came during the 1637 Carnival season, when Francesco Manelli’s (c. 1596–c. 1667) Andromeda was performed at the Teatro San Cassiano by his traveling troupe.⁸ The success of this initial enterprise initiated additional operatic performances at the Teatro San Cassiano and subsequently at other theaters as soon as they were either renovated (Teatro SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Teatro San Moisè) or newly constructed (Teatro Novissimo) to accommodate this type of entertainment. Within the first three Carnival seasons, four more new operas were brought to the stage: Manelli’s La maga fulminata (1638) and Francesco Cavalli’s Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo (1639) at the Teatro San Cassiano; Manelli’s Delia (1639) and Ferrari’s Armida (1639) at the Teatro SS. Giovanni e Paolo.⁹

None of Monteverdi’s dramatic works can be found among the earliest offerings, a fact noted with surprise by some of his contemporaries.¹⁰ In fact, not until 1640 did Monteverdi participate in the Venetian experiment: Arianna was revived as the inaugural production for the redesigned Teatro San Moisè;¹¹ Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria, an entirely new opera based on a libretto by Giacomo Badoaro, was presented during the 1640 Carnival at the Teatro San Cassiano, then had a revival there the following year, and subsequently was performed outside of Venice. Over the course of the next several years, Monteverdi composed at least two more operas for the Venetian stage: Le nozze d’Enea in Lavinia (1641), a tragedia di lieto fine based upon a Trojan-Roman subject, and L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643), both produced at the Teatro SS. Giovanni e Paolo.¹²

Although Monteverdi’s operas were well received by the Venetian public, they nevertheless encountered stiff competition from some of the other works that were staged between 1637 and 1643. One of the most successful of these productions was La finta pazza, an opera that had its premiere in 1641 as the inaugural event for the Teatro Novissimo.¹³ The libretto was by Giulio Strozzi, the scene designs by Giacomo Torelli, and the score by Francesco Sacrati (1605–50).¹⁴ The theme of the madwoman, already developed by Strozzi in his La finta pazza Licori, was so new to opera that it attracted considerable attention and was soon imitated by other librettists. Strozzi’s use of disguise was also a rather novel idea and, judging from the number of opera librettos thereafter that incorporated disguise into their plots, it would appear that La finta pazza initiated interest in this feature as well. Sacrati mirrors the wide ranging emotions of the principal protagonist, Deidamia, with vocal lines that span a wide ambitus, and references in the text to the army are underscored by martial rhythms and repeated notes simulating trumpet fanfares. The basso continuo provides most of the accompaniment for the singers, with the strings (upper two parts and continuo) reserved for special dramatic moments such as those found in scene x of Act II.¹⁵

So popular was La finta pazza with the Venetian public, all performances during its first season were sold out. But the Venetians were not the only ones who could take delight in this opera. Traveling troupes, such as the Febiar-monici, seized the opportunity to perform La finta pazza in a number of other cities in Italy between 1644 and 1652, including Piacenza, Florence, Bologna, Genoa, Reggio Emilia, Turin, Naples, and Milan.¹⁶ Parisian audiences also had an opportunity to see the Torelli-Balbi traveling production of the opera in 1645, the first Italian opera staged in France.

A glance at the scores of the two full-length Venetian operas by Monteverdi that have been preserved, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and L’incoronazione di Poppea, shows what striking changes had taken place in the generation since his Orfeo.¹⁷ The recitative in Ulisse is no mere rhapsodic declamation of the text, with dramatic high points underlined by startling shifts of harmony; it is constantly organized into patterns, with sequences and canonic imitation between the solo voice and the bass. Sections of free parlando on a single note alternate with melodic phrases at the cadences. The recitative frequently gives way to short arias, mostly in triple meter and strophic form. There are several arias on a ground bass. The parts of the gods and goddesses are filled with elaborate coloraturas. Ensembles, particularly duets, are abundant. Conventional word painting is evident—long-held notes over a moving bass for words like “costanza,” melismatic runs on “lieto,” long coloratura phrases on “aria,” and the like. Serious, comic, and spectacular scenes follow one another closely. Every possible occasion for emotional effect is exploited. From beginning to end, one senses the effort to be immediately understood, along with an almost nervous dread of monotony, of that tedio del recitativo, which had been so severely criticized in the early Florentine operas. There is little instrumental music: a few sinfonias that recur in the same fashion as the ritornellos in Orfeo, and one sinfonia da guerra to depict the combat between Ulysses and the suitors at the end of Act II. The high points of the opera are undoubtedly the monologue of Penelope in the first scene of Act I (reminiscent of the famous lament in Arianna) and the opening solo of Ulysses in the seventh scene of this same act. At the beginning of Act III there is a comic lament, a clever parody of this favorite type of scene. Some of the little strophic songs in popular style, such as Minerva’s “Cara, cara e lieta” (Act I, scene viii), are very attractive.

On the whole, however, Ulisse is not to be compared with Monteverdi’s next (and last) opera, Poppea, a masterpiece of the composer’s old age.¹⁸ The libretto of this work, by Busenello, deals with the love of the Roman emperor Nero for Poppea, the wife of Nero’s general Ottone. Nero banishes Ottone and divorces his own wife, Ottavia, in order to make Poppea his em press. This rather sordid subject is handled by the poet with consistency, good taste, and dramatic insight. Monteverdi altered many details of the libretto in the course of composition, for the sake of more effective musical treatment. The music is not spectacular; there are no display scenes and few ensembles except duets. The composer’s greatness lies in his power of interpreting human character and passions—a power that ranks him among the foremost musical dramatists of all times. One example is the dialogue between Nero and Seneca in Act I, scene ix, where the grave admonitions of the philosopher contrast with the petulant outburst of the willful young emperor (example 6.1).

The delineation of comic characters is delightful.¹⁹ The song of the calletto or page boy (example 6.2) has a naïveté comparable to Mozart’s music for Cherubino. Not less remarkable is the power of pathetic expression, as in the profound grief of Ottavia’s lament “Disprezzata regina” (Act II, scene v), or the noble resignation of Ottone’s “E pur io torno” (Act I, scene i), the characteristic motif of which is deliberately recalled in Act I, scene xii and again in Act II, scene xi.

Monteverdi has long been credited with the music for Poppea, but it should be noted that this attribution did not arise until many years after the composer’s death. Evidence that a performance of an opera with this title took place in Venice rests solely on the printed Scenario, which listed neither composer nor librettist. Two different printings of the librettos were made in the 1650s, but neither lists a composer. Curiously, Poppea is not even mentioned by Matteo Caberloti Piovan, who wrote about Monteverdi’s final years in Venice.²⁰ Not until 1681, when Cristoforo Ivanovich published an opera catalog in connection with his Minerva al tavolino, did Monteverdi’s name appear in print as the composer of this opera. Interestingly, the validity of Ivanovich’s attribution was not challenged until the 1950s.²¹ Over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century, on the basis of investigations of the surviving manuscripts of Poppea and research into operas by other Venetian composers, scholars have concluded that Monteverdi did not compose the entire final scene containing the famous duet “Pur ti miro–Put ti godo.” They also have questioned whether he composed the music for some of the other parts of the opera, such as the prologue, several scenes in Act II, the final sinfonia, and portions of Ottone’s role. Of all the sections questioned, the most important is the final duet, for prior to the 1980s, this number was considered to be not only the most beautiful of Monteverdi’s duets but also a model that was replicated by other composers in the latter part of the seventeenth century.²² If not Monteverdi, then to whom might this duet be attributed? Filiberto Laurenzi, Cavalli, Sacrati, and Ferrari are other composers whose names have been suggested. Discovering who was responsible for the final duet (written in da capo form over a passacaglia bass), however, is far less important than acknowledging that the opera concludes with an especially poignant number in which the frankly sensuous passion of Nero and Poppea is matched by voluptuous, incandescent music: what is dramatically important about this duet “is that this piece at this very moment of this drama is nothing short of a true coup de théâtre.”²³

No operatic score of the seventeenth century is more worthy of study and revival than Poppea, as recent modern performances have amply shown. In it, Monteverdi applied the full resources of a mature technique to a dramatically valid subject, creating in a great variety of musical forms and effects a unified, moving whole. The perfect balance between drama and music here achieved was soon to be upset by a trend toward musical elaboration at the expense of dramatic truth and consistency. Yet the influence of the work was far-reaching. Just as Orfeo marked the climax of the old-style pastorale, so Poppea marked a definitive step (foreshadowed ten years earlier in Landi’s Sant’Alessio) in the establishment of modern opera, centering about the personalities and emotions of human characters instead of the artificial figures of an ideal world.

The leading figure in the first period of opera at Venice was Monteverdi’s pupil Pier Francesco Caletti-Bruni (1602–76), who (following a common practice of the time) took the name of his patron, Cavalli.²⁴ About thirty of his operas appeared in the Venetian theaters between 1639 and 1669.²⁵ Cavalli’s fame during his lifetime is attested to by the fact that many of his works were performed in other cities, including Paris. His best-known opera was Giasone (1649), based on the legend of Jason, Medea, and the Golden Fleece.

In the works of Cavalli and later Venetian composers, a standard type of overture developed, consisting of a solemn, pompous, chordal opening movement followed by one or more movements in contrasting tempo, which occasionally introduced themes that would reappear in the prologue or elsewhere in the opera.²⁶ In addition to the overtures and a few descriptive sinfonias, the orchestra accompanied some of the songs or played short ritornellos between sections of them.

Solo arias were, of course, a regular feature of opera by this time, and they grew constantly more numerous in proportion to the whole as the century went on. At first, arias were given mainly to secondary personages;they were usually quite short, easily singable, mostly in triple meter with rhythmic patterns characteristic of popular dances or songs. Some were elegiac, minor in tone, with gently curving melodic lines, as in the beautiful “Delizie contente” from the first act of Cavalli’s Giasone. Others were livelier, sometimes introducing trumpet-like motifs for an expression of rejoicing (example 6.3). Many arias of these and other types were strophic in form, with orchestral ritornellos.

Another favorite form was the lament on a ground bass, in which the contrast of passionate expression with one of the most rigid of musical forms gave rise to a typically Baroque species of tension.²⁷ Each of Cavalli’s twenty-seven surviving operas has at least one lament located near the finale where it can create the greatest possible contrast with the lieto fine. Of particular interest is Climene’s lament in Cavalli’s Egisto (1643), its ground bass built on a descending chromatic tetrachord, treated in a strict ostinato manner with cadential extensions (example 6.4). The lament became an increasingly prevalent feature of Cavalli’s operas—Statira (1656), for example, has four—that found favor with many other composers of his generation. Most of Cavalli’s laments are in strophic form, in triple meter, employ a ground bass based on either a strict ostinato or a more flexible pattern, and are accompanied by strings.

*This broadening at the final cadence—a “built-in” ritardando—was a common device in baroque music in triple meter. It was usually notated, as here, by “blackening” the notes affected, resulting in a change from 2 × 3 to 3 × 2 beats images

but without chang of duration of the individual notes.

Certain traits of style peculiar to Cavalli may be especially mentioned. His comic scenes are marked by robustness, even crudity. Quite unlike the badinage of Monteverdi’s page boy and maid-in-waiting is the scene in Giasone between Orestes and Demo, who is a stutterer—a typical farce figure, one of many such characters that were always welcome on the Venetian stage. Cavalli’s characteristic way of establishing a mood is to reiterate one striking figure, as in the conjuration scene in Giasone, where the motif comprising four quarter notes is repeated twenty-one times with hardly a break, using (except at cadences) only the chords of E minor and C major (example 6.5). This scene remained famous for a long time; it was parodied at Venice as late as 1677 in Legrenzi’s Totila.²⁸

Despite the presence of well-marked arias and distinct sections of recitative, especially evident in Giasone, the formal separation of the styles is by no means complete in the operas of Cavalli. Most of the scenes are a mixture, or rather a free alternation of the two, as in Monteverdi, except that the arias in Cavalli form a somewhat larger proportion of the whole than is the case with the older composer. The method is not fixed; the form arises in each case out of the dramatic requirements. A typical example is the scene from Ormindo (1644), which consists of (1) a dialogue in recitative, C minor, eighteen measures; (2) an eight-measure solo recitative, ending in G minor; (3) a lament on a ground bass, in E-flat major, fifty-six measures; and (4) a closing solo recitative in G minor, thirteen measures.²⁹ The constant use of scene-complexes of this sort (that is, scenes made up of different musical elements freely assembled) shows that opera in Cavalli’s time had not yet altogether sacrificed dramatic values to the demands of abstract, symmetrical musical form. Cavalli, while not critical of details, showed sound judgment in choosing dramatically effective librettos by Busenello, Faustini, and Cicognini. He was not an artist of Monteverdi’s caliber, but his music has virility and a kind of elemental directness in dramatic expression comparable to Musorgsky—qualities that justify his position in history as the first great popular composer of opera.

The most celebrated composer of opera after Cavalli was Pietro Antonio Cesti (1623–69), whose dozen or so extant operas were written principally for Venice, Innsbruck, and Vienna between 1649 and 1669.³⁰ His music is more facile than Cavalli’s, less vigorous, more feminine; his melodies are clearly defined and graceful; his harmony is more conventional than Cavalli’s—that is, it sounds less bold and experimental, more like the style of the eighteenth century; and his rhythmic patterns are more regular, sometimes almost stereotyped. In his operas, the already growing fissure between recitative and aria is noticeably widened; the center of musical interest moves away from the former, and the chief attention of composer and audience shifts toward the lyrical songs. The latter achieve larger proportions and clearer outlines, blossoming forth in an unprecedented variety of forms and types, offering frequent opportunities for vocal display. Thus the outline of the future “singer’s opera” begins to come into focus in the works of Cesti.

This step, involving as it did a complete reorientation of operatic ideals, was of capital importance for the evolution of opera. The doctrines of the camerata had emphasized poetic values at the expense of music. Monteverdi, by means of organizing the recitative, deepening its content, and introducing arioso or aria forms at critical points in the action, had made the music an equal partner with the text. But by the middle of the century, composers were becoming more familiar with the new musical idiom; their interest in problems of form began to outweigh their concern for dramatic propriety. It must be said in their defense that the type of libretto the poets supplied justified this attitude in some measure. As audiences demanded more and more music, they cared less and less about the poetry. The trend was hastened, moreover, by another influence, that of the cantata, a genre in which both Cesti and his teacher, Carissimi, excelled. The cantata, although semi-dramatic in form and employing recitatives and arias like the opera, was not theater music.³¹ Designed for performance before a small audience, the cantata was a vehicle for fine singing rather than for dramatic expression. Its virtues were those appropriate to the chamber: symmetrical forms, correctly balanced phrases, pleasing melodies, unadventurous harmonies; logic, clarity, elegance, and moderation. It was a musical style founded on these ideals, a style that Cesti introduced into the opera and for which the widespread popularity of the cantata had already prepared composers and audiences. With him may be said to begin the reign of the composer over the dramatist, and of the virtuoso singer over both, which was to characterize Italian opera for the next hundred years.

A number of the Italian opera composers of the seventeenth century were ordained priests or monks, including Cesti. He was born in Arezzo, took vows as a Franciscan monk, and briefly held positions as organist and maestro di cappella at cathedrals in Volterra and Florence. As early as 1647 he began to sing leading roles in operas, and within a few years he had also gained fame as a composer of theatrical entertainments.³² When serious conflicts of interest developed between his lifestyle as a life-professed member of a religious order and that as an actor-singer and composer, he petitioned to be released from his vows. His request was granted in 1659.

There has been considerable debate concerning the composer responsible for the Orontea opera performed at Venice in 1649 at the Teatro di SS. Apostoli. Some continue to believe it was composed by Cesti; others attribute the opera to Francesco Lucio.³³ That Cesti did compose at least one version of Giacinto Andrea Cicognini’s Orontea, namely that which was performed during the 1656 Carnival in Innsbruck, has not been called into question, and it was this version that was later revived in Venice in 1666, with four arias added from his opera Argia (Innsbruck, 1655).³⁴ Among Cesti’s extant operas, three were written for Venice: Alessandro vincitore di se stesso (1651) and Il Cesare amante (c. 1652) were composed before Cesti accepted a position at the court in Innsbruck (1652–57); Il Tito (1666) was produced the same year he moved to Vienna.³⁵

Among other leading composers in the second half of the century who worked principally at Venice were Antonio Sartorio (1630–80), Giovanni Legrenzi (1626–90), Pietro Andrea Ziani (c. 1616–84), Giovanni Domenico Freschi (c. 1630–1710), and Carlo Francesco Pollarolo (1653–1723). Sartorio was not a resident of Venice until 1676, the year when he became assistant maestro di cappella at St. Mark’s. Nevertheless, he composed a number of operas between 1661 and 1676 for one of that city’s principal theaters, the Teatro Vendramino à San Salvatore, where he was the “house composer.” Prior to 1676 Sartorio was maestro di cappella at the court in Hanover, and one of the reasons he could spend so much time in Venice was that his patron, the Duke of Braunschweig, also delighted in regularly attending theatrical entertainments there. Chief among Sartorio’s offerings were Adelaide (1672), with its well-wrought arias incorporating the trumpet(s) as an obbligato instrument; Orfeo (1672), the first time an opera on this mythological hero was introduced in a Venetian theater;and Giulio Cesare in Egitto (1676). Similar to many other librettos of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that drew upon the life of Julius Caesar, that by Francesco Bussani for Sartorio’s Giulio Cesare centered on episodes having to do with Caesar’s journey to Egypt and his amorous encounter with Cleopatra.³⁶ Here comic and serious characters interact freely and there is much use of travesty and disguise. The characters portrayed on stage may even have been designed to conjure up images of contemporary historical figures, thereby adding a veiled political agenda to the production.³⁷

Legrenzi excelled in the genre of the “heroic-comic” opera, which intermingled serious and comic scenes; he was also noted for the unusual care he gave to the orchestra, both in independent instrumental numbers and in accompaniments. His principal operas were Totila (1677) and Giustino (1683). At the hands of these later composers the trend was toward comedy or parody, with lightening of the musical texture, lessening musical importance of the recitative, increasing dominance of the aria, and larger use of the orchestra for accompaniments. As arias came more and more frequently to be assigned to principal characters in the drama, the three-part da capo form became more common, and many arias were written in a difficult virtuoso style.³⁸

The songs of the earliest operas usually had been accompanied only by continuo instruments improvising in a more or less elaborate texture over a figured bass. Orchestral ritornellos, first used on an extensive scale by Monteverdi in Orfeo, were eventually brought into close relation with the vocal part by the simple device of using the same thematic material in both.³⁹ A further step was taken when the orchestral instruments, instead of being confined to the pauses between sections or stanzas of the aria, played with the voice, either as a continuous supporting accompaniment or constantly alternating with the vocal phrases in echoes or imitations.⁴⁰ During the latter part of the seventeenth century the simple continuo accompaniment of arias declined in favor, with the number varying according to circumstances. For example, in Cavalli’s Giasone (1649), only nine out of twenty-seven arias were accompanied by the orchestra. A later generation of Venetian composers, especially Pollarolo, introduced the orchestra more frequently, while Handel in his Agrippina (Venice, 1709) provided thirty-one of the forty arias with orchestral accompaniment. By the next decade many composers, such as Alessandro Scarlatti in Telemaco (Rome, 1718), dispensed with the continuo-accompanied arias altogether.⁴¹

After 1650, when many other Italian cities opened public opera theaters, the style developed by Cavalli, Cesti, and their followers at Venice came to be experienced as a national, and even an international, possession.⁴² Operas by the Venetian composers were given performances in other cities—Freschi’s, for example, at Bologna; Cavalli’s Giasone in at least fourteen other Italian cities within eighteen years; Cesti’s Argia (Innsbruck, 1655) at Rome, Naples, Venice, Milan, Siena, Genoa, Reggio Emilia, and Udine.

When Cesti’s Argia was performed at Venice in 1670, it was provided with an unusual prologue. The scene is the interior of a library; the five characters are seen browsing through the collection. Each, in turn, selects a volume of music from the shelves and sings an aria from it. Among the arias sung are two by Antonio Draghi (c. 1634–1700), taken from his opera Il ratto delle Sabine, presumably written for a Venetian production in 1670 but not staged until 1674 in Vienna.

In addition to the composers already named, others in this period had either limited connection or none at all with Venice. Carlo Pallavicino (c. 1640–88) began at Venice, where he was “house composer.” Twenty of his operas were staged in that city, including his Vespasiano (1678), which inaugurated the Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo. Later he worked principally at Dresden.⁴³

At the Teatro San Bartolomeo, the first public opera house in Naples, the repertoire included a number of Venetian works along with those written by two Neapolitan composers of importance, Francesco Cirillo (1623–c. 1667) and Francesco Provenzale (c. 1626–1704). Cirillo, whose Orontea regina d’Egitto (1654) and Il ratto d’Elena (1655) were among the first operas performed at the new theater,⁴⁴ was actively involved with Venetian opera as a singer and member of the Febiarmonici and also as a director, arranger, and producer of the Venetian repertoire.⁴⁵ In contrast, Provenzale seems to have had little connection with Venice. Although only two of his operas are extant, the music from them shows a fine quality of expressiveness and a subtle use of chromatic harmony comparable to the best Italian style of the period (example 6.6).⁴⁶

Another notable late seventeenth-century composer was Alessandro Stradella (1639–82), whose roving and adventurous life, spent mainly in Rome and Genoa, has furnished the subject of operas by Flotow (1844) and others. His stage works, as well as some 250 cantatas, show a facility and sensuous grace of melodic invention that justify his position in history as an important predecessor of Scarlatti and an influential link to Italian opera of the eighteenth century.⁴⁷ Stradella’s best-known stage works are La forza dell’amor paterno (Genoa, 1678) and Il Trespolo tutore, his only comic opera. Il Trespolo tutore was first performed in Genoa in 1679, then revised and expanded for what is believed to have been a production in Modena in 1686. A manuscript related to this later version survives, providing the sole source from which to derive information about the score. One of the more unusual features of this opera is Stradella’s casting of a buffo bass in the leading role. The composer sustains the comedy by introducing many repeated notes into the vocal line. This is evident not only in the recitatives, which are declaimed in a “patter” style, but also in some of the arias (see example 6.7). Sinfonias and ritornellos that conclude the continuo-accompanied arias are scored for the full instrumental ensemble, which in this case is limited to two violins and basso continuo; this same instrumental ensemble also accompanies eight arias.

Stradella’s sole connection with Venice appears to have been limited to the new prologues and intermezzos he composed for revivals of Venetian operas staged in cities other than Venice. Among these were Cavalli’s Giasone, Freschi’s Helena, J. Melani’s Il Girello, and Cesti’s La Dori.⁴⁸

ALTHOUGH VENICE BY NO MEANS had a monopoly on opera in the second half of the seventeenth century, it was preeminent among Italian cities and always had a certain glamour for foreign visitors interested in this form of entertainment. Some of their observations are worth noting, such as those of John Evelyn, who recorded his experiences at a Venetian theater in 1645:

This night, having … taken our places, we went to the Opera, where comedies and other plays are represented in recitative music, by the most excellent musicians, vocal and instrumental, with variety of scenes painted and contrived with no less art of perspective, and machines for flying in the air, and other wonderful motions; taken together, it is one of the most magnificent and expensive diversions the wit of man can invent. The history was, Hercules in Lydia; the scenes changed thirteen times.⁴⁹

At Venice they Act in several Opera’s at a time:The Theaters are Large and Stately, the Decorations Noble, and the Alterations of them good: But they are very badly Illuminated: The Machines are sometimes passable and as often ridiculous…. These Opera’s are long, yet they would divert the Four Hours which they last, if they were composed by better Poets, that were a little more conversant with the Rules of the Theater…. The Ballets or Dancings between the Acts are generally so pittiful, that they would be much better omitted; for one would imagine these Dancers wore Lead in their Shoes, yet the Assembly bestow their Applauses on them, which is meerly for want of having seen better.

The Charms of their Voices do make amends for all imperfections: These Men without Beards [that is, the castrati] have delicate Voices (des voix argentines) besides which they are admirably suitable to the greatness of the Theater. They commonly have the best Women Singers of all Italy.… Their Airs are languishing and touching; the whole composition is mingl’d with agreeable songs (chansonettes) that raise the Attention; the Symphony [orchestra] is mean[,] inspiring rather Melancholy than Gaiety: It is compos’d of Lutes, Theorbos and Harpsichords, yet they keep time to the Voices with the greatest exactness imaginable.

They that compose the Musick of the Opera, endeavor to conclude the Scenes of the Principal Actors with Airs that Charm and Elevate, that so they may acquire the Applause of the Audience, which succeeds so well to their intentions, that one hears nothing but a Thousand Benissimo’s together; yet nothing is so remarkable as the pleasant Benedictions and the Ridiculous Wishes of the Gondoliers in the Pit to the Women-Singers … for those impudent Fellows (canailles) say whatever they please, as being assured to make the Assembly rather Laugh than Angry.⁵⁰

Ten years later, Maximilien Misson, obviously no enthusiastic devotee, had this to say about the Venetian opera:

The Habits are poor, there are no Dances, and commonly no fine Machines, nor any fine Illuminations; only some Candles here and there, which deserve not to be mentioned … they have most excellent Ayres … but I cannot forbear telling you, that I find a certain Confusion and Unpleasantness in several Parts of their Singing in those Opera’s: They dwell many times longer on one Quavering, than in singing Four whole Lines; and oftentimes they run so fast, that ‘tis hard to tell whether they sing or Speak, or whether they do neither of the Two and both together.… The Symphony is much smaller than at Paris; but perhaps, it is never the worse for that. There is also one Thing which charms them, which I believe would not please you; I mean those unhappy Men who basely suffer themselves to be maimed, that they may have the finer Voices. The silly Figure! which, in my Opinion, such a mutilated Fellow makes, who sometimes acts the Bully, and sometimes the Passionate Lover, with his Effeminate Voice, and wither’d Chin[,] is such a thing to be endured? … There are at present Seven several Opera’s at Venice, which Strangers, as we are, are in a manner oblig’d to frequent, knowing not, some times, how to spend an Evening any where else.⁵¹

1. On Venetian opera, see Mercure galant (Paris, 1672–74, 1677–1714); Bonlini, Le glorie della poesie; Groppo, Catalogo di tutti i drammi; Wiel, I codici; Wolff, Die venezianische Oper; idem, Oper: Szene und Darstellung; Worsthorne, Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera; Pirrotta, “Early Venetian Libretti at Los Angeles” Muraro, ed., Venezia e il melodramma nel seicento; Bianconi, Il Seicento (trans. as Music in the Seventeenth Century); Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice (with 200 pages devoted to musical examples).

2. For a contemporary account of the impresarial organization of Venetian theaters from 1637 to 1681, see Cristofor Ivanovich’s “Le memorie teatrali di Venezia” (1681), excerpts of which are reprinted (in English) in Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, 302–10.

3. Of the relatively few stage designs of seventeenth-century Venetian opera productions that were published, see those illustrated in Bjurström, Giacomo Torelli and Baroque Stage Design; Worsthorne, Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera; Zorzi et al., eds., I teatri pubblici di Venezia; Leclerc, Venise et l’avènement de l’opéra public à l’âge baroque. See also Theatrical Designs from the Baroque through Neo-Classicism.

5. Many of these festival-type operas were written to celebrate a patron’s birthday or name day. See, in particular, operas written for the Habsburg court in Vienna.

6. For an English translation of this letter, see Stevens, “Selected Letters of Monteverdi,” 68.

7. The scores of La finta pazza Licori, Arianna, and Armida that Monteverdi presented to the Gonzaga court to fulfill his commissions were destroyed in 1630 when Mantua was under siege by the imperial troops. For an informative article with details concerning the creation of La finta pazza Licori, see Tomlinson, “Twice Bitten, Thrice Shy:Monteverdi’s ‘finta’ finta pazza.”

8. Manelli’s opera scores do not survive. Opera performances in Venice during this period were confined to the Carnival season, which meant that members of the various opera companies had to seek additional employment opportunities for the remaining months of the year. This was not a problem for many of the Venetians, some of whom were employed as members of the capella at St. Mark’s. Those associated with itinerant troupes, however, had to look for work elsewhere; usually they took their productions to other cities and courts, such as Bologna, Naples, and Milan.

9. Benedetto Ferrari (c. 1603–81)—poet, theorbist, impresario, and composer—wrote the librettos for Andromeda and La maga fulminata and created both text and music for Armida, Il pastor regio (1640), La ninfa avara (1641), and Il principe giardiniere (1644). None of the music for his operas survives.

10. Giacomo Badoaro decided to entice Monteverdi into creating a work for the Venetian public by writing a libretto, which he hoped the composer would want to set to music. Badoaro reveals this in a note addressed to Monteverdi, which appears in the preface to Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria. For the original Italian and an English translation of this note, see Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 17 and 408.

11. Arianna was revised to suit the taste of Venetian audiences. For example, the word tragedia was removed from the title and many of the choruses were eliminated.

12. Two additional libretto manuscripts for Poppea were discovered in the late 1980s, one in Warsaw and the other in Udine. The Udine libretto is entitled La coronatione di Poppea, and since this manuscript seems to be very closely related to the Scenario that was printed in conjunction with the premiere, it is conceivable that the original title of the opera was indeed La coronatione di Poppea, not L’incoronazione di Poppea. See Fabbri, “New Sources for Poppea.” The traditional date of Carnival 1642 for the premiere of Poppea should perhaps be read according to the Venetian calendar (more veneto) as Carnival 1643, particularly in light of the fact that the published Scenario is dated 1643. In other words, the opera was produced during the 1642–43 season. See Fabbri, Monteverdi (1994), 310n. 193.

13. This theater, the fourth to open for public opera performances in Venice, was newly constructed by a group of noblemen who were members of the Accademia degli Incogniti. This was in sharp contrast to the first three theaters to open, for they were privately owned by families.

14. A score related to the 1641 production of La finta pazza was uncovered in 1984 by Lorenzo Bianconi. See the preface to his and Thomas Walker’s forthcoming edition of Sacrati’s La finta pazza. Prior to 1984 only a 1644 version of La finta pazza was thought to be extant. For a discussion of this important Venetian opera, illustrated with musical examples, see Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, chap. 4.

16. Febiarmonici was the name of both an academy and a traveling troupe. See Bianconi and Walker, “Dalla Finta pazza alla Veremonda: Storie di Febiarmonici.”

17. In the first chapter of his Opera and Politics, Bokina discusses all three of Monteverdi’s extant operas in the context of their political stance. He notes, for example, that in Ulisse, a new historical perspective is manifest in the way the principal protagonist is portrayed, namely, as a human being who cannot escape the vicissitudes of the mundane world.

18. For a recent study of this opera, see Fenlon and Miller, Song of the Soul: Understanding Poppea.

19. The roles of the two nurses may have been patterned after the comic governess, a male role, in La maga fulminata.

20. Matteo Caberloti Piovan di San Thomà wrote about Monteverdi’s final years in his Laconismo delle alte qualità di Claudio Monteverde (1644). For a discussion of this source, see Curtis, “La Poppea Impasticciata or, Who Wrote the Music to L’Incoronazione (1643)?”

21. Cavalli, in his own hand, had written “Monteverdi” on the title page of a score of Poppea that he owned. It was from this source that Ivanovich derived the attribution that appears in his opera catalog. As early as the 1950s, questions began to be raised concerning whether or not Monteverdi was the sole composer of Poppea in the form in which the opera has been preserved, namely two manuscript copies that are not linked with the initial performance and may date from the 1650s. Beginning with Osthoff’s articles, “Die venezianische und neapolitanische Fassung von Monteverdis Incoronazione di Poppea” and “Neue Beobachtungen zu Quellen und Geschichte von Monteverdis Incoronazione di Poppea,” the debate over the provenance and composition of Poppea has continued to the present day. For example, Bianconi and Walker have concluded that two sections of the prologue to Sacrati’s La finta pazza reappear in Monteverdi’s Poppea. Consider also the findings of Chiarelli, “L’incoronazione de Poppea o Il Nerone, problemi di filologia testuale”; Curtis, “La Poppea Impasticciata”; Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 22, 256n. 18; and Fabbri, Monteverdi (1994), 260.

22. For example, the beauty and significance of this duet was acclaimed in studies by Schrade, Monteverdi, Creator of Modern Music, and Stevens, Monteverdi: Sacred, Secular, and Occasional Music, among others.

24. On Cavalli, see in particular Goldschmidt, “Cavalli als dramatischer Komponist”; Glover, Francesco Cavalli; and Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice.

25. For a list of Cavalli’s operas, see appendix I of Glover, Francesco Cavalli. See also Jeffrey, “The Autograph Manuscripts.”

26. Cf. Heuss, Die Instrumental-Stücke…die venetianischen Opern-Sinfonien; Wolff, Die venezianische Oper, appendix no. 67; Worsthorne, Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera, 106ff.

27. See, in particular, Sternfeld, The Birth of Opera, which has an entire chapter devoted to the lament, and Glover, Francesco Cavalli, 77, 87–88.

28. A parody of the incantation scene from Giasone can also be found among the ensembles to Il podestà by Melani (cited in chapter five).

30. The operas he composed for Innsbruck and Vienna will be discussed in chapter seven. See C. Schmidt, “The Operas of Antonio Cesti.”

31. “Eine Cantata sieht aus, wie ein Stück aus einer Opera.” [Hunold], Die allerneueste Art (1707), 285.

32. For example, it is entirely possible that he sang in the initial production of Cavalli’s Giasone. 33. The misattribution of the 1649 Orontea to Cesti was argued convincingly by Bianconi and Walker in “Dalla Finta pazza alla Veremonda: Storie di Febiarmonici.”

33. The misattribution of the 1649 Orontea to Cesti was argued convincingly by Bianconi and Walker in “Dalla Finta pazza alla Veremonda: Storie di Febiarmonici.”

35. C. B. Schmidt, “An Episode in the History of Venetian Opera:The Tito Commission (1665–66).” JAMS 31 (1978), 442–66.

36. Bussani’s libretto was later adapted by Nicola Haym for Handel, whose Giulio Cesare was performed in London in 1724.

37. For an interesting discussion of how Venetian operas may have been put to political use, see Bianconi and Walker, “Production, Consumption, and Political Function in Seventeenth-Century Opera.”

38. One can observe the steady increase in the number and length of arias and the corresponding decrease in the recitatives by studying the various revisions of Cavalli’s Giasone that were undertaken during the revivals this opera had until the end of the seventeenth century.

39. Examples can be found in Landi’s Sant’Alessio (see Goldschmidt, Studien, 1:211); Rossi’s Orfeo (see Goldschmidt, Studien, 1:301); Monteverdi’s Ulisse (finale of Act III) and Poppea (see Wellesz, “Cavalli und der Stil,” 32).

40. An example of continuous supporting accompaniment is found in Oronte’s aria “Renditimi il mio bene,” in Act I of Cesti’s La Dori. See Eitner, ed., Publikationen, 12:129.

41. Mattheson, in his Die neueste Untersuchung der Singspiele, 162, written in 1744, laments the passing of the continuo arias, which he says had long since gone out of fashion.

42. For a list of the local histories that discuss these theaters, see Bustico, Bibliografia delle storie.

44. For a study of the role of the “Warrior Amazon” in Venetian opera, see Freeman, “Warrior Queens in Venetian Baroque Opera,” which includes a list of “Warrior Queen” productions in Venetian opera theaters c. 1650–1730.

46. A facsimile edition of Provenzale’s Il schiavo is in Brown, ed., Italian Opera, 1640–1770, vol. 7.

47. See Giazotto, Vita di Alessandro Stradella; Gianturco, Alessandro Stradella: His Life and Music; additional studies by Gianturco, Della Corte, Hess, Jander, and Roncaglia.

49. Evelyn, Diary, 1:202. The opera referred to was presumably Ercole in Lidia (Venice, 1645), with music by Giovanni Rovetta (c. 1596–1668).

50. [Limojon de St. Didier], The City and Republick of Venice, part 3, pp. 61–63 (a 1699 translation of his 1680 book).