ROME AND ITS MUSIC
Subtexts: The Dedication as Source
in Early Seventeenth-Century Roman Music Prints
Mary Paquette-Abt (Wayne State University)
Inscriptions in
seventeenth-century music prints are usually noted for their addressees,
but scholarly perceptions of them as puff pieces constrained by rhetorical
convention has sometimes diverted attention from the contemporary cultural
commentary they contain. New ways of reading such texts, albeit ones
with different purposes, have been approached in the work of Tim Carter,
Susan Lewis and others, with valuable contributions from Raimund Redeker
for a slightly earlier repertory. These readings shift attention to
the writer—usually the composer—and the insights that critical
reading can offer about contemporary music and context. I believe such
texts in early seventeenth century Rome offer special insights into
the music profession, seen through its practitioners, particularly figures
less well-known to us, who were active professionally and published
in large numbers, and formed the backbone of Roman musical life in the
era.
The particular evidence I use is from
the dedications to the series of anthologies of sacred and secular vocal
music compiled by Fabio Costantini from the 1610s through the 1630s,
the only such series with Roman composers and repertory published during
that time. His dedications are as varied in tone and content as are
the character and personalities of his dedicatees, but consistent throughout
is the voice of the author, which grows bolder with the passage of years,
particularly concerning changes in the music profession. If we look
past Costantini’s more conventional uses of dedicatory language,
he becomes an increasing presence in his texts, reflecting on his own
endeavors as composer, compiler, performer, and director. When viewed
in the larger context of Costantini’s biography, the specific
meanings of his texts emerge. Because his career is typical in many
ways of the Roman musician in this era, his words can be read as contemporary
commentary on Roman musical culture. Yet this commentary comes from
a quarter different than that of often-quoted contemporary cultural
critics, among them the aristocratic amateurs Vincenzo Giustianiani
or Pietro Della Valle, whose opinions have influenced our understanding
of the era. This reading of evidence from the profession also indicates
the potential of pursuing this avenue of research within a systematic
study of music printing in early seventeenth-century Rome.
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'Fu cantato un poemetto graziosissimo':
New Light on the Rise of the Oratorio volgare in Rome
Christian Speck (Universität Koblenz-Landau, Germany)
It is a widespread
opinion that the oratorio, coming from Roman antecedents, had fully
developed by the mid-seventeenth century and that the rise of the oratorio
volgare is primarily connected with the practice of oratorio-music
at the oratory of the church Santa Maria in Vallicella at Rome. But
an examination of sources from about 1625-1630, such as oratorio-librettos
by Giovanni Ciampoli, Ottavio Tronsarelli and Giulio Rospigliosi, or
oratorio music by Kapsberger, sheds new light to the dark early history
of the genre. Their conception of the oratorio was rather different
from that of Anerio's "Teatro," as well as from the mid-century
type at the Vallicella. Oratorios were written for festivities at Roman
palaces from about 1625 on, and they seem to have had an important influence
on the oratorio music at Roman churches and oratories. The new thesis
will be presented that the emergence of the oratorio volgare
in Rome is essentially to be seen in the context of the artistic-religious
program of the early reign of Pope Urban VIII. (1623-44). There is evidence
that Urban saw in the oratorio a new instrument of combining sacred
poetic art and self-representation, as he was to some years later, from
1631 on, in the Rospigliosi operas promoted by the Barberini.
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The
Triumph of Jephte’s Daughter: Religious Symbolism,
Gender and Role Exchange in Carissimi’s Jephthe
Beverly Stein (California State University)
Jepthe’s
daughter has no name and occupies only six verses in the book of Judges.
But in his Jephte, Counter-Reformation composer and Jesuit
master of persuasion Giacomo Carissimi transforms the unnamed young
woman into the oratorio’s hero, surpassing in importance even
her father, the military hero who rescued Israel from destruction. While
musicologists have tended to focus on the literal meaning of the story
(the human tragedy of the vow) and its musical and rhetorical expression,
the deeper religious symbolism of the oratorio has gone completely unnoticed.
This paper will explore how and why Carissimi accorded such distinction
to this particular female character.
The famous mutatio toni at the
midpoint marks not only a change of affect but, more importantly, the
point at which the daughter begins to usurp the dramatic and symbolic
role of her father, represented through explicit musical shifts from
father to daughter at three levels of scale. The small-scale textual
shift in Jephte’s "Heu mihi" lament resonates musically
through tonal descent, when Jephte refers to himself, and ascent when
he refers to his daughter. The role reversal becomes even clearer after
Filia offers herself in sacrifice, and Jephte simply parrots back his
daughter’s previous statement. The father’s character then
disappears, while his daughter wrings every heart with her moving lament.
The daughter of Jephte is no ordinary
woman: she is, according to Augustine contemporary Quodvultdeus and
others, a prefiguration of Christ, and it is for this reason that Carissimi
raises her up as the oratorio’s hero. She has been seen by writers
such as Isidore of Pelusium as manly and strong, after the manner of
virgins whose pure state endowed them with the physical and moral strength
of men. Carissimi suggests such a view when Jephte falls into lament,
a feminine utterance, while his daughter takes over his role as leader,
making decisions and commanding nature to obey her as her father formerly
commanded his troops; they not only switch roles, but genders. The apotheosis
of her character over his may echo the shifting emphasis of the Counter-Reformation
from militancy to triumph of the Church.
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In the Calm Evening Air: Music and Text of
the Solo Serenata
Marie-Louise Catsalis (North Carolina Central University)
In the eyes of
modern scholars, the well-known genre of the solo cantata has tended
to overshadow, if not subsume, the less-known solo serenata. Yet, in
fact, composers and poets did distinguish solo serenatas from cantatas,
often in the same manuscript. In the words of Carolyn Gianturco, "the
terms opera, oratorio and cantata [were] used with assurance and familiarity.
In each case it meant something specific" (Journal of the Royal
Musical Association, 1994). But what about the serenata? (Here
I restrict the focus to the solo serenata as distinct from larger-scale,
multi-voiced works.) What did the seventeenth-century composer, patron,
or indeed audience member understand by this designation? The role of
the poet in providing the composer with the initial structure of the
work deserves emphasis. Many common features can be discerned from a
study of works bearing this title. For example, the use of obbligato
instruments is typical, whereas continuo accompaniment is by far the
norm for the solo cantata. The frequent use of Petrarchan textual imagery,
in itself widespread in this period, points to another tell-tale element:
the incipit. The often-used "Hor che ..." incipit, together
with its nocturnal setting, is derived from Petrarch’s Sonnet
164: "Hor che’l ciel et la terra e’l vento tace"
("Now that the heaven and the earth and the wind are silent…").
It has deeper roots in Dido’s soliloquy in Book 4 of Virgil’s
Aeneid. With these musical and poetic considerations in mind,
analysis of Alessandro Scarlatti’s Hor che l’aurato
nume (ca. 1690) will make it possible to stake a claim for the
solo serenata as a genre in its own right.
LECTURE-RECITAL
Il pianto di Rodomonte
Creating a Performance of Abbatini’s Cantata drammatica
Andrew Schultze (Chicago, IL) This lecture-recital
explores Antonio Maria Abbatini’s 1633 "dramatic cantata"
Il pianto di Rodomonte and will include excerpts from it performed
live by soloists from Ars Musica Chicago.
Antonio Maria Abbatini (ca 1600-79) was
an important composer and pedagogue. His surviving works include liturgical
music, operas, vocal chamber music, Il pianto di Rodomonte,
a lively autobiography (in verse) and a counterpoint tutor. Among his
students were the notable composers Giovanni Paolo Colonna, Antonio
[Pietro]Cesti, the castrato Domenico Dal Pane and hundreds of other
musicians from Rome to Peru (according to the Autobiography). While
Abbatini’s present renown rests on his later operatic achievements,
Il pianto, his only published secular work, remains obscure.
This lecture-recital will present a performance of excerpts from this
significant work, the lecture will focus on questions of performance
practice encountered in its re-creation.
Il piano di Rodomonte, published
in Orvieto with a dedication to the "Accademici Assorditi"
by Abbatini’s protégé Pietro Antonio Ubaldoni, is
for four vocal soloists; Rodomonte, bass; Isabella, soprano; Romito,
tenor; and Cupido, soprano; and basso continuo. The text, by one of
the Assorditi, is drawn from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. Compositionally
Rodomonte is transitional in nature and contains much information
relative to the development of the Roman School, specifically to the
recitative, arioso and the strophic aria. Of special interest is a strophic
aria, a brindisi for Rodomonte with written out embellishments.
The lecture will include a formal and harmonic analysis and information
about Abbatini’s life and times drawn from his autobiography and
other writings and studies of his work and times by Margaret Murata,
Galliano Ciliberti, Karin Andrae, John Walter Hill, David Fuller and
others. Among contemporary sources consulted vis-à-vis
issues of performance practice are Le nuove musiche by Giulio
Caccini (1602), the Syntagma musicum by Michael Praetorius
(1619), La selva di varii passaggi by Francesco Rognoni (1620)
and Christoph Bernhard’s Von der Sing-Kunst oder Manier,
Penna (1672); and Abbatini’s own counterpoint tutor, the Lezioni
accademiche (1663-68).
MUSIC
AND THEATER
Revisiting Arcadia:
The Ideology of Nostalgia and the Problem of Musical Drama
Stefanie Tcharos (University of California, Santa Barbara)
The difficulties
in delineating the role of music in the context of the Academy of Arcadians
are well known to scholars of late baroque Rome. There are few excerpts
from Arcadian literature that deal directly with music; most are authored
by the society’s custodian, Giovan Mario
Crescimbeni, or by his renowned Arcadian associates, Muratori, Gravina,
and others. We may gain limited information about music in the Academy
from records of payments made by patrons to musicians or composers.
Yet in the end, we know little about how the Arcadians integrated music
into their ideological vision.
My presentation revisits a passage in
Arcadian literature in which musical and poetic composition takes center
stage, Crescimbeni’s account of a competitive exchange between
the poet Giovan Battista Felice Zappi and the composer Alessandro Scarlatti.
I consider the moment in the larger context of Crescimbeni’s L’Arcadia
(1708), the text from which the passage derives. My study explores
how this narrative fits the author’s larger project to create
a pastoral fantasy—a fantasy that uses nostalgia as an ideological
tool to fictionalize the present as an Arcadian past. Using this discussion
as a framework, I consider the juxtaposition of past and present in
the Arcadian cultural construct. Specifically, I explore the relationship
between this phenomenon and current practices of setting pastoral drama
to music. I speculate why a detailed description of musical drama, which
might consider more explicitly how contemporary music can be "pastoral"
or "ancient," is suggestively lacking.
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"When Conquering Beauty Fills that Heavenly
Sphear":
A Reappraisal of Allegory in Purcell’s The Fairy Queen
Tim O’Brien (University of Minnesota)
Although scholars
have devoted attention to potential allegorical readings of Purcell’s
major stage works, The Fairy Queen is not generally regarded
as a political allegory. Scholars have identified a few isolated political
references, but no analysis of the opera has offered a comprehensive
allegorical reading. This study asserts that contextualization of The
Fairy Queen in terms of the literary traditions on which it draws
and the political climate in which it was performed reveals that the
work was clearly designed as a cogent dramatic allegory. Approaching
the drama both in terms of its formal design and its relationships to
its principal literary sources (specifically, seventeenth-century fairy
literature and the Stuart court masque) I argue that The Fairy Queen’s
adapter deliberately situated it within a literary tradition explicitly
associated with allegory and carefully designed it with the purpose
of advancing a complex allegorical program. Evaluating the opera’s
dramatic, visual, and musical images with respect to the events and
iconography surrounding the Revolution of 1688, I assert that The
Fairy Queen was intended and would have been understood as a carefully
veiled Jacobite satire of the Williamite monarchy. This assertion ultimately
reevaluates The Fairy Queen’s role in the complex relationships
obtaining between art and the politics of religious succession in Purcell’s
London and corroborates other studies of allegory in the composer’s
stage works.
Opera on Canvas: The Paintings of Il Padovanino
and Venetian Opera of the 1640s
Douglas L. Ipson (The University of Chicago)
Although many important
iconographic studies of opera have appeared in recent years, none has
fully explored the interconnection of painting in the Seicento and opera.
This paper proposes a direct relationship between several Venetian operas
of the late 1630s through the 1640s and contemporary paintings by Alessandro
Varotari, called Il Padovanino (1588–1648).While no documentary
evidence linking Padovanino to a specific opera production has surfaced,
a comparison of Padovanino’s late paintings to Venetian operas
from approximately the same period does reveal a remarkable number of
correspondences. Not only do many paintings and operas feature the same
themes and characters, they share similar attitudes toward their subjects.
These attitudes betray the influence of the Accademia degli Incogniti,
with which Padovanino and virtually every librettist of the period enjoyed
a close association.
The paper explores three points of intersection.
The correspondence between Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria
(1640) of Monteverdi and Badoaro and Padovanino’s Penelope
Brings the Bow of Ulysses to Her Suitors has already been noticed
by many, while another—that between Ercole in Lidia (1645)
by Rovetta and Bisaccioni and the two versions of Hercules and Omphale—has
gone unremarked until now. Finally, the paper attempts to understand
Poppea, that most enigmatic of opera heroines, by comparing her to a
pair of no less enigmatic Padovanino Venuses. Intended as a rapprochement
across disciplinary divides, this paper seeks above all to provide a
clearer understanding of how the Venetian opera-spectacles of the 1640s
relate to each other and to their cultural context, by viewing them
from a previously neglected but fascinating perspective, that of contemporary
painting.
Scrambled Eggs and Hams:
Theatrical Music in Siena at the End of the Seventeenth Century
Colleen Reardon (Binghamton University)
The performance of theatrical music in Siena depended on several different
kinds of patronage, none of which has yet been fully explored. The Medici
governors who ruled the city from 1627 to 1731 sometimes strove to promote
musical theater. Two academies, the Rozzi and the Intronati, began to
mount operas by the late 1660s. The Collegio Tolomei regularly presented
oratorios beginning in the 1680s. And aristocratic families such as
the Chigi sponsored theatrical performances.
Recently discovered letters in the Florentine
State Archives help shed light on musical theater in Siena at the end
of the Seicento. Between 1697-1700, the Sienese aristocrat Fabio Spannocchi
wrote regular missives to Cardinal Francesco Maria de’ Medici,
the city’s largely absent governor. Spannocchi was a musical dilettante
who was intimately involved with at least one theatrical project. His
letters document the academic, personal, and class rivalries that plagued
the productions, the misadventures of various singers engaged to perform,
and the financial, logistical, and artistic problems involved in mounting
opera and oratorio. They also demonstrate that despite these difficulties,
opera was staged in Siena more frequently than one might imagine in
a small city, sometimes by hitherto unknown local groups such as the
Academy of Good Humor. Most importantly, the letters reveal the interdependence
of patronage systems in a small city. Sienese impresarios succeeded
in producing opera independently because they learned how to exploit
to the fullest the pool of local talent, their academies’ assets,
the prerogatives claimed by the aristocratic class, and the resources
of the ruling Medici.
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RHETORIC, AFFECT AND STYLE
English "Baroque" Style and the Politics
of Change
Candace Bailey (North Carolina Central University)
The influence of
the keyboard music of Orlando Gibbons on later generations is a topic
ripe for consideration, for there can be no doubt that his legacy continued
long after his death in 1625, and I will propose that it is in his oeuvre
that we can locate the beginnings of English "Baroque" style.
One of the areas that best demonstrates his impact on future generations
is the fantasia, for Gibbons’s fantasias were clearly the most
popular representations of that genre copied in English keyboard sources
after 1620. Perhaps surprisingly, the transmission of his fantasias
did not initially lie within the London-Oxford area, but rather some
distance removed from it. In fact, during the 1630s and 40s, the main
proponents of the English organ tradition continued in the south and
west, situated around a group of composers active from Bristol to Exeter
to Canterbury.
This paper will examine how a hitherto
unrecognized group of composers—ones closely tied to each other
not only by musical tradition but also by philosophical, political,
and religious beliefs—are responsible for the evolution of the
English organ tradition in the mid-seventeenth century. The intricate
web woven by these men kept alive a tradition that until now was thought
to have lain dormant, only to be resurrected with the Restoration in
1660 with the works of Christopher Gibbons and Matthew Locke. Quite
to the contrary, new evidence shows that this tradition never died nor
was it reborn, rather it continued throughout the tumultuous years of
the 1630s-50s, carried on in less conspicuous areas of the country where
such a style flourished far from the prying eyes of London. New editions
of this repertory, discoveries of new manuscripts (even within the past
year), and my piecing together the provenance and transmission of the
music indicate that our previous interpretation of English "Baroque"
keyboard music beginning only after the Restoration is inherently incorrect
and will be reconsidered here, alongside recognition of a stable, progressive
tradition that endured because it was supported by extra-musical factors,
much like musical repertories elsewhere in Europe.
Musicalische Vorstellung einiger Biblischer Historien
(1700)
Johann Kuhnau’s Conception of Affect as Form and Expression
Stefan Eckert (Northwestern University)
Between 1689 and
1700, Johann Kuhnau (1660-1722) published four collections of keyboard
music containing 14 suites and 14 sonatas. In the preface to the last
collection, Musicalische Vorstellung einiger Biblischer Historien,
which consists of six sonatas that programmatically deal with biblical
themes, Kuhnau extensively addresses the role of musical affect in the
context of instrumental music. Although Kuhnau precedes each individual
sonata with a lengthy description of its biblical content and identifies
specific programmatic moments through annotations in the music, he worries
in the preface that his audience might misunderstand his intentions.
In the preface, Kuhnau distinguishes between
music that expresses a specific affect and music that moves the audience
to experience a specific affect. The former is linked to musical expression
by means of word painting and imitation of real-life sounds (for example,
bird songs), while the latter is concerned with musical realizations
of an affect, quasi as a musical analogy that is embedded into
the structure of a work. Kuhnau further discusses the role of musical
affect in relation to sense perception and musical composition in his
novels Des klugen und thörichten Gebrauchs der fünf Sinnen
(On the Clever and Foolish use of the Five Senses) and Der
musicalische Quacksalber (The Musical Charlatan). Based on Kuhnau’s
writings, I demonstrate how the musico-dramatic unfolding of the sonatas
contains both aspects of the affect, and how both are embedded into
the musical structure.
Chromatic Dialectic: A Phenomenological Approach
to Louis Couperin
Jessica Wiskus (Duquesne University)
Chromatic juxtapositions
employed within the Préludes of Louis Couperin defy
analysis from either modal or tonal paradigms. And so when approaching
this music, we are uncomfortably snatched from the task of determining
"what" the piece represents (i.e., what paradigm does the
work approximate), to the task of exploring "how" the piece
is experienced. The methodology that we must employ, therefore, is that
of phenomenology, and our guiding question for a phenomenological analysis
will be: "How do we experience Couperin’s chromatic juxtapositions
as coherence?"
Turning to Couperin’s Prélude
[M3], we begin by investigating musical practice of the time. A brief
exploration of the hexachord system by means of reference to treatises
of the seventeenth-century, including those that proposed revisions
(Mersenne, la Voye, Delair, and Denis), highlights the effect of chromatic
oscillation as an essential characteristic of the hexachord system.
Then we develop a reductional analysis of Couperin’s Prélude—focused
upon his use of chromaticism as an expressive device—that enables
one to follow Couperin’s points of oscillation as governing structures.
This analysis discloses Couperin’s use of oscillation, not as
an unquestioned embodiment of the ancient hexachord system, but as a
reference to the effect of the system in accordance with the proposed
revisions of his theorist colleagues. By transposing the effect of oscillation
from the surface level to a structural interpretation, Couperin generates
a "chromatic dialectic"—a balanced unity of opposites.
It is the unity inherent to the chromatic dialectic that enables us
to experience Couperin’s chromatic juxtapositions as coherence.
Reflections of Changing Public Tastes:
Lambert’s Revisions to His 1689 Airs
Robert A. Green (Indiana University)
Michel Lambert
was regarded by his contemporaries as the greatest composer of airs
in late-seventeenth-century France. He was heavily involved in court
musical activities from 1650 until his death in 1689. He published two
collections of his works. Les Airs de Monsieur Lambert (1660)
solidified his reputation, but the Airs à II. III. et IV.
parties avec la basse-continue (1689), the most ambitious publication
of its kind in the period, is a summation of his contribution to the
music of his time.
Thirty-two of the eighty airs found in
the latter edition had been previously published anonymously in two-part
versions between 1661 and 1688 in the annual anthologies prepared by
the Ballard family of printers Airs de différents autheurs.
Their composition dates are not known, but given the Ballards’
and the public’s thirst for new music, they were likely composed
within a year of publication. Although Ballard’s readings differ
from the 1689 version; although it is unclear that he obtained his versions
directly from Lambert, a comparison between them and those of the 1689
edition reveal large-scale changes that tell us much about the evolution
of Lambert’s musical style.
Changes in rhythm and form, as well as
increased harmonic sophistication, show substantial rethinking of the
means of expressing the poetic text and the relative importance of the
individual poetic lines, mirroring the changes in style then taking
place in France. The 1689 edition affords a dynamic view of the French
air as it reaches its culmination at the end of the seventeenth
century.
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LECTURE-RECITAL
Rhetoric and Expression in the Mid Seventeenth-Century French
Air:
A Rationale for Compositional Style and Performance
Catherine Gordon-Seifert (Providence College)
with
Elisabeth Belgrano (Ensemble Éclatante Amarante),
soprano
Although scholars
have generally recognized that the union of music and rhetoric is
a distinct feature of seventeenth-century music, little attention
has been given to how rhetorical principles influenced compositional
style and performance practices in France. This lecture-recital applies
a rhetorical analysis to the most abundantly cultivated genre of vocal
music before Lully’s tragédies en musique: the
solo song or air (1650-1670). The lecture demonstrates how,
in practice, lyric poetry and the rhetorical devices used therein
provided a basis for the expression of affect, which in turn served
as a rationale for the creation and performance of this repertory.
The presentation begins with a brief review of rhetorical theory and
music as interpreted in French treatises on rhetoric, poetics, and
music. The analysis is organized according to the three components
of rhetoric most relevant to an analysis of the airs. 1)
Inventio, the identification and portrayal of topics, concerns
how composers represented the affects most commonly named in the texts
and their correspondence with descriptions of passions given by Descartes
and rhetoricians Bary, Lamy, Grimarest, and Bretteville; 2) Dispositio,
the organization of expressions, regards how composers conceived their
musical settings as imitations of impassioned discourse. Particular
attention is given to the function of the doubles or ornamented
second verses; 3) Actio (with reference to Bacilly and Grimarest)
addresses performance practices, including pronunciation (syllabic
quantity), ornamentation, gestures, and accompanimental procedures.
Ultimately, the presentation shows that while song-texts defined the
structure of the air, rhetorical principles imparted to composers
a means of realizing the dominant aesthetic of the period: to captivate
the auditor by moving the passions.
ITALIAN OPERA AT MID-CENTURY
Monteverdi and the "Madness" of
Iro:
Asylum Seeking and a Return to Homeland?
Naomi Matsumoto (Goldsmiths’ College, University
of London) In 1989 Ellen Rosand
published a searching analysis of the character of Iro in Monteverdi/Badoaro’s
Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria (1641). That analysis not only reversed
traditional views of Iro, from comic to tragic and from sane to mad,
but it also situated the meaning of the character’s actions within
the discourses of seventeenth-century Academicians. The argument was
that the bodily sensuality of the insane glutton Iro needed to be eradicated
(through his "tragic" and "culminating suicide")
to allow the rational and virtuous love of Ulisse and Penelope to succeed,
whereas, in Monteverdi’s "sister" opera Poppea,
it was the rational and virtuous Seneca who had to commit suicide in
order for the sensuous Nero and Poppea to triumph. For Rosand, Iro was
thus a "moral exemplum," part of a binary opposition that
drove home the ethical point and demonstrated that Monteverdi was "a
debater far exceeding any letterato."
This present paper will re-examine these
issues. First, it will claim that Iro’s character-type is comic
rather than tragic, and that Rosand’s use of Giulio Strozzi’s
definition of the "Hilarode"-type of role and its supposed
implications for "giocoso" characters needs re-evaluation.
Second, it will argue that there is no evidence that Iro actually does
commit suicide. Third, it will show that such an act, in any case, would
not confirm his "tragic" status since there was already a
strong tradition of "comic" suicides in the theatre (for example
in works by Angelo Beolco, whose influence on musico-theatrical works
has, so far, been neglected). Fourth, that Iro’s music, even in
his final "lament’ has many links to comic or light, "non-lamenting"
traditions—as, for example, in the opening walking bass (found
in the 1607 Scherzi musicali) and Iro’s "ciaccona"
refrain. Fifth, that the diagnosis of Iro as "mad" does not
seem fully to comply with the historical conventions of "the mad"
in opera. And finally, that Monteverdi was fundamentally a "dramatist"
rather than a "debater" and that therefore we may need to
re-focus some of our methodologies for reading the dramaturgy of seventeenth-century
opera.
Il Nerone impasticciato:
The Lover and the Tyrant in the Characterization of Nero
in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea
Beth Szczepanski (The Ohio State University)
Ambiguities in the seemingly amoral plot of Gian Francesco Busenello
and Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea
have led scholars to develop a number of opposing interpretations. Previous
studies have focused primarily on Poppea, Seneca, and Octavia as carriers
of the works’ moral message. In this paper I examine the characterization
of Nero to argue for a bivalent moral interpretation of this work. Through
comparison of Busenello’s historical sources—the writings
of Cornelius Tacitus, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, and Cassius Dio—with
representative musical and poetic passages of the opera, I will show
that the operatic Nero incorporates two characters of contrasting morality,
the operatic lover, conveyed primarily through Busenello’s text,
and the historical tyrant, conveyed largely through Monteverdi’s
setting of that text.
While the ancient historians portray Nero
as an exhibitionistic, effeminate, childish, and murderous despot, Busenello
downplays these negative characteristics to such a degree that Nero’s
misdeeds, such as forcing Seneca to commit suicide and exiling Octavia,
can be viewed as actions of an ardent lover rather than those of a tyrant.
The most tyrannical acts of the historical Nero are either omitted entirely
or simply mentioned in passing. Monteverdi, however, characterizes Nero
as the historians described him, rearranging Busenello’s text
and using a nearly hysterical form of stile concitato to emphasize
the emperor’s incompetence and lack of self-control. Moreover,
the role is most virtuosic when Nero is most tyrannical; Nero’s
musicianship was a negative trait in the eyes of historians.
By creating this ambivalent Nero, Busenello
and Monteverdi provided their Venetian audience not with a morality
tale, but rather with a titillating story that invited the viewer either
to cheer for the inevitable triumph of Love—likely a popular choice
in Venice during Carnival—or to take heart in the eventual downfall
of the tryant. The same choice faces audiences and scholars today. Those
who choose the former read the opera as a celebration of hedonism, and
those who choose the latter read it as a censure of the political and
personal transgressions carried out by Nero in his quest for amorous
fulfillment.
Felice Ottavia:
Taming the Vindictive Queen of L’incoronazione di Poppea
Patricia H. Firca (The University of Chicago)
Focusing on Busenello’s distortion of Ottavia’s historical
character, this paper re-examines the "irrational" behavior
of the psychotic queen of L’incoronazione di Poppea by
revisiting one of the opera’s sources, the pseudo-Senecan play
Octavia. The intertextuality with the fabula praetexta
(hitherto dismissed or ignored) suggests that Ottavia’s second-act
transformation into a "monster" can be seen less as her proto-feminist
empowering in the midst of a mid-seventeenth-century Venetian patriarchal
society, and more as a caricature of theatrical elements already present
in the Roman play.
Yet in pushing history and providing Ottavia
too truculent a posture, Busenello opened the door for a growing wave
of sympathy for her character. A study of the opera’s (somewhat
neglected) Neapolitan version further problematizes the second transformation
of Ottavia, from "monster" into "martyr," specifically
a martyr of love. While this tempering of Ottavia’s character
can be explained by the political context of mid-seventeenth-century
Naples, it also stands at the beginning of a later process of taming
the vindictive queen of L’incoronazione, in an attempt
to work her character out of the literary impasse into which Busenello
had locked her. Indeed, the Ottavia felice of operas from the
1690s and 1700s witnesses not only an increased preoccupation with the
convention of the lieto fine, but also the fascination that
her character continued to exert on early modern audiences. Significantly,
the reworking of Ottavia into a virtuous queen represents not a silencing
of her voice, but the pursuit of a "rescue agenda" on behalf
of an ultimately popular protagonist.
La virtù de’ strali d’Amore
by Giovanni Faustini and Francesco Cavalli (1642) as a Contribution
to Contemporary Operatic Debate
Hendrik Schulze (Universität Salzburg)
The opera based on Giovanni Faustini's first libretto La virtù
de' strali d'Amore was first performed in 1642, a time when Venetian
opera still was in its formative years. The aesthetics of opera were
widely discussed in prefaces to other librettos by authors such as Giacomo
Badoaro and Gian Francesco Busenello, as well as in the Venetian academies,
most notoriously in the Accademia degli Incogniti. Faustini seems not
to have been a member of the Incogniti, nor did he take part in their
debates—the preface of La virtù is concerned with
different matters. But a closer look at the opera itself reveals a text
that contributes to the ongoing debate. The allegory is directly opposed
to the one propagated by Badoaro in Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria
(1640). There Human Frailty is shown as subject to Fortune, Time, and
Love; in La virtù, humans can take their fate into their
own hands. A passage directly alluding to Il ritorno emphasizes
the discursive function of allegory in La virtù. Faustini
also opposed the Incogniti's emphasis on epic models by establishing
a new dramaturgy oriented more toward the drama. Instead of Badoaro's
single protagonist, Faustini built his drama upon the relationships
of four equally important characters, thus rejecting inflexible allegory
in favor of the more variable love intrigue. The resulting narrative
is more dialogue-based, and therefore more dramatic.
La virtù offers insight
into the development of opera from an angle different from that of the
Incogniti. The ideas of Incogniti members were much publicized, but
they do not represent the full picture of Venetian operatic development.
Although never codified, Faustini's ideas proved much more successful
in the long term.
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MUSIC AND DEVOTION
"What devil’s Pater noster mumbles
she?": The Sounds and Music
of Witchcraft in Early-Modern English Broadside Balladry
Sarah F. Williams (Northwestern University)
The witch craze in early modern England produced a multitude of artistic
representations on the subject from countless dramatic works to broadside
ballads and consort songs. Ben Jonson described the music of witches
to be "confused noyse" accompanied by "spindells, timbrells,
rattles and other [infernal] instruments" (Ben Jonson, Masque
of Queens). Other literary and musical representations
feature witches "mumbling," "swearing" and spewing
gibberish and profanities. The studies charting sound spaces and the
threat of noise in early modern Europe in recent years have neglected
perhaps one of the most interesting acoustic phenomena of the era—that
is, the aural qualities of witches as performed in the early modern
representational arts. This study will examine the acoustic properties
of witches and witchcraft in the most popular and prolific art form
of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean eras—the broadside ballad.
Dozens of witchcraft ballads were produced
during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in England,
and most describe the aural and even musical qualities of their demonic
characters. The accompanying tunes to these early modern musical "newspapers"
often became associated with certain ballad subjects and could thus
reinforce or subvert the ballad’s message. Just as the tune "Fortune
my Foe" became associated with murder and execution ballads, certain
tunes appear more frequently with ballads describing witches, wayward
women, and pacts with the devil. Common tunes, coupled with descriptions
of the witches’ speech patterns and "unnatural" sounds,
offer us a window into early modern attitudes about these women and
their powers.
Awarded the Irene Alm Memorial Prize for 2005
Culture
and Ceremony in the Wedding Motets of Jacob Praetorius
Esther Criscuola de Laix (University of California,
Berkeley)
All but three of
the eleven known motets of Jacob Praetorius (1586-1651), organist at
the church of St. Jacobi in Hamburg, are wedding motets, composed on
commission for the weddings of family and friends. They thus fall into
the category of "occasional music" or "ceremonial music,"
and both their opulent musical characteristics and luxurious printed
format mark them as such. Except for Frederick Kent Gable’s edition
(RRMBE, vol. 73), these motets have received little scholarly
attention. I aim to explore the active roles they play within their
cultural and ceremonial context. Praetorius’s wedding music was
part of an intricate ceremonial complex surrounding marriage and weddings
in early modern Hamburg. These pieces, grandly presented in both notes
and print, were not simply ornaments for wedding ceremonies. Each one
was a token of personal alliances, actualizing the new relationship
between bride and groom and the relationship of Jacob Praetorius with
both. Each was a social document, placing bride, groom, wedding, and
music in a larger socio-cultural order. Most importantly, the music
of Praetorius’s eight wedding motets embody the ceremonial of
the early-modern Lutheran wedding in Hamburg, particularly in their
sometimes-gendered disposition of quasi-alternating polyphonic and homophonic
textures—so often written off as "typical" for music
of this period. All these aspects, encapsulated within this small repertory,
paint a vibrant and vital picture of music, society, and culture in
early modern Hamburg.
The Emperor’s Voice: Style, Structure
and Meaning in a Motet
from the Habsburg Court of Ferdinand III (1637-57)
Andrew H. Weaver (Northwestern University)
The early 1640s
was a disastrous time for the Austrian Habsburgs, marking an inexorable
turning point in the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48). In late 1642,
shortly after a crushing military defeat, one of the star members of
the imperial chapel, Giovanni Felice Sances, published a motet book
featuring a number of pieces that spoke directly to the tribulations
of the time. This paper examines one of these works, the four-voice
"Audi Domine," exploring how Sances’s music conveyed
an important message to Ferdinand’s subjects, seemingly straight
from the emperor’s mouth.
On one hand, Sances’s motet is a
powerful work of universal appeal, using a wide range of styles as well
as unexpected changes within an otherwise predictable structural framework
to project a sense of confident optimism, despite the entirely dolorous
and uncertain text. On the other hand, however, Sances also tailored
the motet specifically for the immediate political situation. In its
original Biblical context, the text is a prayer spoken by King Solomon.
Through a variety of musical means, Sances’s motet allows for
an identification of the Old Testament monarch with Ferdinand III; the
work thereby gives listeners the impression of hearing the emperor’s
voice speaking directly to them, delivering a message of comfort, hope,
and unwavering faith in God. Musicology has long aimed to answer the
question, "How does music speak to us?" This paper demonstrates
the possibilities available to us, if we broaden this question to "Who
is speaking to us, and why?"
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