Opera Remade, 1700–1750

Charles Dill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351555722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Opera in the first half of the eighteenth century saw the rise of the memorable composer and the memorable work. Recent research on this period has been especially fruitful, showing renewed interest in how opera operated within its local cultures, what audience members felt was at stake in opera performances, who the people-composers and performers-were who made opera possible. The essays for this volume capture the principal themes of current research: the "idea" of opera, opera criticism, the people of opera, and the emerging technologies of opera.

Part I
Librettos

[1]
Why early opera is Roman and not Greek

ROBERT C. KETTERER

Abstract: During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the models of Greek tragedy and Aristotelian theory were appealed to repeatedly, first to invent the dramatic genre we call opera, and then in an effort to use theory to rid that genre of what were perceived to be its self-indulgent excesses. This essay argues that despite these theoretical claims, influences from classical Rome were so thoroughly ingrained in European librettists that it was the experience of the Latin that prevailed. Roman subject matter, dramatic structure, philosophical fashion and imperial performance-context produced a musical theatre that was in essence Roman rather than Greek.

Early opera was of course neither Roman nor Greek, but Italian, French, German or English, each musical drama a product of its own age and venue. But it is also fair to say that the sensibilities of Europe in the period when opera was invented and thrived were essentially Roman imperial and almost never classical Greek in nature. Although appeal was made to Greek stories, forms and ideals, even by those who would violate them, this was not an age that admired Athenian democracy or copied classical Greek culture in any fundamental way. Rather, ever since the advent of Renaissance humanism, school education had centred around the study of Latin and the Roman classics.¹ The philosophy of the seventeenth century was Roman Stoic. The political climate was autocratic and aristocratic, run by patronage, and imperialistic in ways that reflected the values and practices of Rome far more than those of classical Athens. Political philosophy was derived from Tacitus and Livy by Machiavelli, and then from the Stoics by Lipsius. Where the classical and even, finally, the Hellenistic Greeks failed, and where the Romans notably succeeded, was the acquisition and retention of world empire; and imperial power was the issue with which early modern Europe, whether the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs, or the French Bourbons, or the Venetian Serenissima, or the English, was most concerned, and which opera one way or another most often celebrated.²

Moreover, the Baroque age, as Robert Harbison has written, ‘is set apart from what precedes it by an interest in movement above all, movement which is a frank exhibition of energy and escape from classical restraint’.³ This lack of restraint, I would argue, is also the spirit of the comedies of Plautus, the energy of Ovidian elegy and epic, and the excesses of Roman imperial architecture and its literary contemporary, silver Latin, in nearly all their manifestations. Even when early modern theorists asserted the values of classical balance and decorum, they were apt to quote the precepts of Horace’s Ars Poetica, precepts that Horace expressed using the genre of verse epistle. The verse epistle was a uniquely Horatian invention in itself, though in fact it was barely distinguishable in style from his satires, a genre which Quintilian called ‘all Roman’.⁴ But in spite of Horace’s call in Ars Poetica for artistic unity, the epistles and satires generally, and the Ars Poetica in particular, are arguably Baroque in movement and open-endedness, rather than classical in balance.⁵

Nevertheless, European opera has been held up to a Greek tragic standard from the time of its invention around 1600, at the very threshold of the Baroque, through the libretto reforms in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to Nietzsche on Wagner, and the neo-Aristotelian analysis of Kerman’s Opera as Drama. The usual story of the invention of opera, suggested by the writings of the inventors themselves, was summarized in 1755 by Francesco Algarotti in his ‘Saggio sopra l’opera in musica’: ‘The intent of our poets was to revive Greek tragedy in all its lustre and introduce Melpomene on our stage, attended by music, dancing, and all that imperial pomp with which, at the brilliant period of a Sophocles and Euripides, she was wont to be escorted’.⁶ A recent handbook makes the same point in a more prosaic way: ‘In bringing opera to birth, a largely bookish knowledge of Greek repertory was far more significant than a wide practical experience of the Latin’.⁷ This essay argues that quite the opposite was true. Throughout the first two centuries of opera’s existence, and despite the claims of its theoreticians, patterns of thought and writing flowing from classical Rome were so thoroughly ingrained in European librettists that, whatever they might overtly intend, it was the experience of the Latin that won the day. For that experience informed dramatic expectation, and so, also, the patron and audience response, which in turn directed the efforts of librettists and composers.

A word on the boundaries of this discussion is needed. First, it is principally concerned with librettos produced in Italian for the various operatic centres of Europe, since it is that tradition of writing which was so pointedly said to derive from Greek tragedy, and which prevailed everywhere outside France. However, if the ballets and choruses are stripped away from the tragédies lyriques one can see Ovidian themes and Roman imperial values similar to those that dominated Italian opera, even in such an overt imitation of Euripides as Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie. Second, I do not mean to suggest that Greek drama and theory had no influence on early opera, for such a claim is clearly refuted by the printed record. I wish rather to call into question an assumption which has become a commonplace – that opera really was the early modern re-invention of Greek tragedy it claimed to be – and to see what the limits of that assumption may be.⁸

The Greek standard used by the early modern theorizers of opera was defined by vague references to Sophocles and Euripides, but inevitably returned for authoritative statements to Aristotle’s Poetics. Aristotle’s prescriptions that there must be order to create beauty, for example, accorded well with early modern notions of what counted as ‘critically acceptable postures’:⁹ ‘[T]he beautiful’, wrote Aristotle, ‘whether a living creature or anything that is composed of parts, should not only have these in a fixed order to one another, but also possess a definite size which does not depend on chance – for beauty depends on size and order; hence neither can a very tiny creature turn out to be beautiful (since our perception of it grows blurred as it approaches the period of imperceptibility) nor an excessively huge one (for then it cannot all be perceived at once and so its unity and wholeness are lost) …’.¹⁰

But Italian Baroque operas – which had three to five acts whose action came to be punctuated and elongated continually by the in-turning repetitions of da capo arias, and which, in Venice at any rate, could last from early evening into the wee hours of the morning – might well be called ‘excessively huge’, and their unity not always very obvious. In Piero Weiss’s words, ‘Opera flourished in Italy with the abandon of an uncultivated vegetation, its constituent parts barely, if at all, held together’.¹¹ When the genre of opera strayed from the canon of Aristotelian perfection, as it inevitably and gleefully did, it was found wanting by its critics, and attempts were made by both theorists and practitioners of the art to change it. Over the first two hundred years of opera’s existence, the Greek model was appealed to, first by the Florentines to invent the stile rappresentivo; then by Arcadians such as Zeno and Metastasio to rid opera of the excesses of Marinist barocchismo; and then again by reformers in the mid-eighteenth century to rid Metastasian opera serìa of its own self-indulgent excesses. As Herbert Lindenberger has observed, ‘The ancient example [of Greek tragedy] was little enough understood that it could be used to defend almost any operatic style’.¹² Benedetto Marcello’s Il teatro alla moda of 1720 put it more sardonically: ‘[The librettist] in his description of the [opera’s] plot… will discourse at great length on the precepts of tragedy and the art of poetry, following the reflections of Sophocles, Euripides, Aristotle, Horace, etc. He will add, in conclusion, that the poets of today must abandon every good rule to adopt himself to the genius of the present corrupt age, the licentiousness of the theatre, the extravagance of the conductor of the orchestra, the indiscretion of the musicians, the delicacy of the bear, the supernumeraries, etc.’¹³ I would argue that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at least, the reformers were fighting a losing battle against a genre which from the beginning owed more to Roman than Greek sources of inspiration, being at once Senecan and Plautine, Virgilian and Ovidian, imperial and republican.

The actual source of the operatic stories is perhaps the least important factor for this argument. A Greek-style tragedy might, theoretically at least, be written on any suitable subject, ancient or modern. But it is worth noting that the Orpheus story, which served Peri, Caccini and Monteverdi for their invention of opera around 1600, and Gluck for his eighteenth century reform, came from Book IV of Virgil’s Georgics and Books X and XI of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and not from any extant Greek tragedy. Aristotle had observed that ‘the finest tragedies are composed about a few houses: they deal with Alcmaeon, Oedipus, Orestes, Meleager, Thyestes, Telephus and whichever others have had the misfortune to do or undergo fearful things’. By contrast, Francesco Algarotti, while creating his neo-Aristotelian ‘Saggio’, observed that ‘Daphne, Eurydice, Ariadne, were made choice of by Ottavio Rinuccini [for the texts of the first operas] and are looked upon as the eldest musical dramas’.¹⁴ The difference in these lists is striking, for no extant Greek tragedy includes any of the figures in Algarotti’s list. The fact that opera began its imitation of tragedy not with the violent misfortunes of the traditionally dysfunctional Greek families, but with subjects that were Ovidian ‘tragical-comical-historical-pastoral’, was both telling for what its inventors meant their new genre to express, and formative for the way it would develop.

Another striking difference between Aristotle’s list of eligible tragic figures and Algarotti’s is that Aristotle’s is exclusively male, while Algarotti’s list is exclusively female. This is at least in part due to the gravitational centre contributed by the female lament to the new genre; the formative example was Monteverdi’s lament of Arianna (i.e., Ariadne), well known from Catullus’ Poem 64 on the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, as well as Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (1.525ff.) and Heroides (Poem X, ‘Ariadne to Theseus’), but not, once again, from Greek tragedy. It was the musical centrepiece of the 1608 opera Arianna, revived in 1640; the lament was so popular in the mid-seventeenth century that a copy was said to be in every music room in Italy. The influence of this ‘Roman’ piece on subsequent laments was profound, as Ellen Rosand points out.¹⁵ Its influence shows in the equally formative laments of Ottavia in Monteverdi’s Poppea, and of Isifile in Cavall’s very popular Giasone, both of which also derive from Roman sources: Ottavia’s from the pseudo-Senecan tragedy Octavia, and Isifile, when not imitating and sometimes mocking the Monteverdian laments, from Ovid’s Heroides.¹⁶

In terms of sheer volume...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I LIBRETTOS
• PART II GENDER
• PART III THEATRES AND PERFORMING
• PART IV HANDEL
• Name Index