Acknowledging the experimental beginnings of opera and expressing high hopes for its future, Marco da Gagliano (1582–1643) thus reviews the origins of ‘such spectacles’ in the 1608 preface of his own first effort in the new genre, La Dafne, itself a reworking and expansion of the earliest completely sung music drama a decade earlier. He goes on to explain how, after a great deal of discussion concerning the way the ancients had represented their tragedies and about what role music had played in them, the court poet Ottavio Rinuccini (1562–1621) began to write the story (favola) of Dafne, and the learned amateur Jacopo Corsi (1561–1602) composed some airs on part of it. Determined to see what effect a (completely sung) work would have on the stage, they approached the skilled composer and singer Jacopo Peri, who finished the work and probably premièred the role of Apollo ‘on the occasion of an evening entertainment’ during the carnival of 1597/8 and on subsequent occasions. In the invited audience at the first performance were Don Giovanni de’ Medici and ‘some of the principal gentlemen’ of Florence.²

Gagliano, Florentine composer and maestro di cappella to the Medici court from 1609 until his death in 1643, provides a useful and accurate outline – despite the rivalries and counterclaims surrounding the events (about which more will be said) – of the immediate circumstances of opera’s modest beginnings, one that will serve well enough to organise our discussion.

Florentine Origins

His narration infers, first of all, that it was a completely Florentine affair. This is not surprising since Florence had a long tradition of musical theatre in the sixteenth century, manifested principally in the productions known as intermedi that were staged between the acts of spoken plays. These were but one of many different types of festivities mounted by courts all over Europe. But unlike other centres, Medicean Florence also had a particularly rich history of ‘civic humanism’³ – that is, of involvement by its more educated citizens in the rediscovery of and allegiance to Classical culture via a network of formal and informal academies that were engaged in critical inquiry and philological pursuits, which involved studying the Greek and Latin texts of the ancients. Moreover, as Gary Tomlinson and others have suggested, Florence was the centre of a particular Renaissance worldview that accorded music a ‘magical’ role in the cosmos and in man’s interaction with it.⁴ Before filling in some of the details of Gagliano’s outline, we shall examine each of these three elements – intermedi, humanism, and musical magic – in order to understand how their confluence at the end of the sixteenth century resulted in Florence becoming the birthplace of opera.

Intermedi

Extravagantly staged pageantry involving sumptuous costumes, special effects, music, dance, and song characterised the sixteenth-century Florentine intermedi, which were produced as entr’actes to a theatrical entertainment such as a comedy or pastoral play at court. Sets of intermedi were originally a modest and functional feature of North Italian court entertainments: they served to signal the divisions of the spoken drama, since there was no curtain to be dropped; and they suggested the passage of time by employing allegorical characters and themes unrelated to the main plot. At the court of the Medici rulers, however, intermedi evolved into an elaborately lavish type of spectacle, planned and rehearsed months in advance, whose cost and impact dwarfed that of the main drama and whose raison d’être was to leave no doubt in the minds of the audience – comprised entirely of invited guests gathered to help celebrate a special family event – about their host’s wealth and generosity.

Such an occasion was the marriage in 1589 of Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici of Tuscany to the French Princess Christine of Lorraine, a union that had been in negotiation for nearly a year. The intermedi devised for this event climaxed a month-long sequence of public and courtly pageantry that mobilised the combined intellectual, artistic, and administrative forces of Tuscany at the height of its wealth, power, and cultural prestige. ‘Their splendor cannot be described’, wrote one court chronicler, ‘and anyone who did not see it could not believe it.’⁵ A huge team of artists, artisans, poets, musicians, architects, and technicians was assembled under the intellectual guidance of the prominent Florentine aristocrat and military leader Giovanni de’ Bardi (1534–1612), who formulated the underlying conception of the intermedi, served as stage director, and coordinated all the thematic and antiquarian aspects of the project.⁶ As the moving spirit behind the program, Bardi worked closely with the court poets, principally Rinuccini, who wrote most of the text.⁷ Emilio de’ Cavalieri (c. 1550–1602), the recently appointed superintendent of music at the ducal court who had been in Ferdinando’s retinue while he was still a cardinal resident in Rome, became the show’s musical director. The court architect-engineer Bernardo Buontalenti (c. 1531–1608), who only a few years earlier had constructed for the Medici the first permanent indoor theatre with a modern proscenium arch, remodelled it for the occasion, and designed the sets and costumes.⁸ The music was largely composed by court organist Cristofano Malvezzi and madrigalist Luca Marenzio, with individual contributions by the young composer-singer Jacopo Peri (1561–1633), by Bardi’s protégé Giulio Caccini (1551–1618), and by Bardi himself, among others. Note that both Rinuccini and Peri also figure in Gagliano’s narration of opera’s origins a decade later.

Bardi conceived the set of six intermedi as ‘a sort of mythological history of music’,⁹ fitting for a wedding celebration in that it depicts the descent of Harmony as a gift from the gods and predicts a new Golden Age initiated by the royal couple. Moreover, the individual tableaux are loosely unified by the literary theme of the power of music, a topic of longstanding interest to the Florentines (see ‘Musical Magic’). The opening intermedio contemplates the harmony of the spheres. The next, which represents the ancient rivalry between the Muses and the Pierides (nine daughters of King Pierus who challenged the Muses to a song contest), dwells on the virtues and virtuosity of song. The third, by enacting the combat between Apollo and the Pythic serpent, prefigures the opening scene from the Rinuccini-Peri Dafne about which Gagliano wrote. It thus introduces the first operatic hero, Apollo – god of music and of the sun, and some said father of the legendary musician Orpheus, who became in turn the protagonist of several early opera libretti. The fifth intermedio gave a prominent role to Peri, who composed and performed his first piece for solo voice to portray another musician-poet par excellence, Arion; according to myth, Arion was saved from drowning by a dolphin attracted by the dazzling power of his song. In the concluding allegory, harmony and rhythm are bestowed on mortals who, represented by the nymphs and shepherds of Arcadia, are instructed by the gods in the art of dancing during an elaborately choreographed ballo.

The 1589 intermedi had many of the same players and almost all the ingredients of opera – costumes, scenery, stage effects (for example, the life-size fire-spitting dragon slain by Apollo¹⁰), enthralling solo singing, colourful instrumental music, large concerted numbers, dance – everything except unified action and the innovative style of dramatic singing yet to be created. It remained for a few pioneering individuals to shape these elements into a new and quite ‘noble style of performance’¹¹ that would, by emulating ancient theatre, revive the power of modern music to move the emotions.

Humanism

The catalyst for their experiments, as Rinuccini explains in his preface to the libretto for the first opera for which the music survives in print (Peri’s Euridice, 1600¹²), was the belief by some scholars that the ancient Greeks and Romans sang their tragedies on the stage in their entirety.¹³ Although Renaissance scholars disagreed among themselves about the role of music in ancient tragedy, the amount of attention focused on the practices of the ancients was typical of humanism. Rinuccini, it seems, subscribed to a kind of Greek revivalism that Tomlinson has called ‘ordinary-language humanism’ – a view that underlay ‘the whole late-Renaissance exaltation of music’s affective powers’;¹⁴ indeed, it had been manifest in one way or another across the breadth of Renaissance musical culture in the degree of importance given to expressing the meaning of the text. While philological humanism promulgated the transmission, translation, and interpretation of ancient texts, and rhetorical humanism was built on the principles of persuasive oratory, this ordinary-language humanism placed greater emphasis on the ability of language itself – the very sound and shape of the words rather than the eloquence with which they were arranged – to communicate meaning and emotion.

Where did these ideas come from? Rinuccini belonged to the Alterati Academy – its very name (Academy of the Altered Ones) acknowledged the ability of ideas to effect change in human beings – one of a network of associations of artists and thinkers that flourished in Florence during the sixteenth century. Its membership included the widely read and accomplished Count Giovanni de’ Bardi, who was a member of long standing by the time Rinuccini was initiated in 1586, three years before they collaborated on the wedding festivities discussed above. Another member was the remarkable scholar Girolamo Mei (1519–1594), who, although Florentine by birth, worked in Rome and made known his ideas about Tuscan prose and poetry along with the results of his research into Greek music through correspondence with Bardi and other academicians. An erudite philologist, Mei developed theories about language that were in fact as central to the genesis of the new dramatic style of singing as his convictions about Greek music were to the origins of opera; for not only was it Mei’s belief that poems and plays were always sung in ancient times, whether by soloists or by the chorus, but also that they were sung monophonically so that the words as sounding structures could act on the listeners’ souls. Finally, the Alterati also counted among its members another Florentine nobleman, Jacopo Corsi, the enthusiastic amateur we first encountered in Gagliano’s preface, who partially composed, on Rinuccini’s text, and fully sponsored the production of the first completely sung ‘favola tutta in musica’, La Dafne, in 1597/8. These are some of the reasons that justify Claude Palisca’s having dubbed the Alterati of Florence ‘pioneers in the theory of dramatic music’.¹⁵

Now, Count Bardi also had his own circle of friends with similar humanist and musical interests, a more informal academy which met in his palace and came to be known as the Florentine Camerata.¹⁶ As the courtier chiefly responsible for organising entertainments for the grand duke, Bardi naturally became interested in theatrical or dramatic music and eagerly cultivated his long-distance relationship with Mei.¹⁷ These two, then, were key players in both the Alterati Academy and the Camerata, and it’s easy to see that both groups shared a concern with musical humanism. Bardi’s inner circle also included the singer-lutenist-composer Caccini (whom he involved in the 1589 intermedi) as well as Vincenzo Galilei (c. 1530–1591), another talented singer-lutenist-composer in his employ. Galilei, father of the revolutionary thinker and astronomer Galileo, had studied with the most famous counterpoint teacher of the age, Gioseffo Zarlino, and had already published a text on how to arrange polyphonic music for solo voice and lute (Il Fronimo, 1568), a medium that became increasingly popular during the last quarter of the century.¹⁸ Under the influence of Bardi and Mei, Galilei wrote a treatise that became the Camerata’s revolutionary manifesto, for it articulated the principles of ordinary-language humanism in the most radical way imaginable for a sixteenth-century musician: eschew vocal counterpoint altogether and adopt a type of non-polyphonic composition combining (texted) melody and simple accompaniment (which we now call monody).

Galilei published his inflammatory tract in the conventional Renaissance form of a dialogue – a conversation between two friends (one of whom is named after Count Bardi) debating the merits of ancient and modern music (Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna, 1581).¹⁹ By ‘modern music’ he meant the ars perfecta, the system of counterpoint he and all the leading composers of his day had learned, directly or indirectly, from Zarlino, whose Istitutione harmoniche (1558) was the foremost textbook for writing both sacred and secular music. Galilei challenged the ultimate perfection of counterpoint and advocated instead restoring through a single melody line the expressive powers of which ancient music was capable, judging by the corpus of literature about the Greek modal system that had been revived by Renaissance humanists and was recently newly interpreted by Mei.²⁰ Why monophony? Because it alone was capable of imitating nature – that is, the ‘natural language’ of speech, through which a person’s character and states of soul are reflected. Mei had contended that ancient music always presented a single affection embodied in un aria sola (a single melody). He reasoned that monophony could convey the message of the text through the natural expressiveness of the voice – via the register, rhythms, and contours of its utterance – far better than the contrived delivery of a polyphonic texture.²¹ Like Mei, Galilei was persuaded that counterpoint was ineffective because it presented contradictory information to the ear. When several voices simultaneously sang different melodies and words – pitting high pitches against low, slow rhythms against fast, rising intervals against descending ones – the resulting web of sounds was incapable of projecting the semantic meaning or emotional message of the text. Only by returning to an art truly founded on the imitation of human nature rather than on contrapuntal artifice would it be possible for modern composers to approach the acclaimed power of ancient music.

Plato had taught that song (melos) was comprised of words, rhythm, and pitch, in that order. From that followed the humanist ideal of music and poetry as two sides of a single language, as well as the idea that song arose from an innate harmony within the words that was muted in normal speech. For this reason, Galilei advocated the art of oratory as a model for modern musicians, urging them to imitate the manner in which successful actors delivered their lines on stage:

For Galilei, it is clear that ‘how one speaks’ the words reveals their underlying emotion. For the composers of monody and theatrical song, by extension, it then became a question of ‘how one sings’ the words to disclose their innate significance.²³

Twenty years Galilei’s junior, Caccini built his long career as a singer, singing teacher, and composer on these precepts, claiming to have learnt more from Bardi’s Camerata than from ‘more than 30 years of counterpoint’. After composing solo madrigals and airs with figured bass accompaniment and performing them for Bardi’s circle, where they were received ‘with warm approval’ in the 1580s, Caccini issued his pathbreaking collection of madrigals and airs in 1602 with the title Le nuove musiche (The New Music – more correctly translated as ‘musical works in a new style’).²⁴ Caccini’s was the first set of composed and published monodies, as opposed to the improvised airs that had been ‘recited’ on formulas suitable for rendering sonnets, epic stanzas, and other fixed poetic forms during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; in effect, the new pieces were frozen improvisations. The distinction of being composed also separates them from contemporary solo songs that were actually arrangements of polyphonic compositions. In addition to their new texture, Caccini’s works embody Galilei’s precepts in two more ways: they abjure the common manner and excessive use of ornamentation, and in melodic contour and rhythmic profile they approach the nuances of speech. In the first instance, Caccini was adamant about using ornamentation only to enhance the affections inherent in the text and melody. And, to approximate the flexibility of speech, he advocated that the performer apply his concept of sprezzatura – a sort of nonchalance or casualness of delivery – a concept he adapted from Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortigiano (Book of the Courtier, 1528), a meditation on the qualities necessary for the ideal Renaissance courtier to cultivate.²⁵ Caccini’s innovations had a far-reaching impact on composers of monody in the early seventeenth century. However, once the theatre became the proving ground of the capabilities of modern music in the late 1590s, Caccini staked his claim to primacy in that arena by composing and rushing into print his own first music drama, L’Euridice (1601), in the wake of Peri’s and Rinuccini’s success.²⁶

After Bardi moved to Rome in 1592, having been to some extent unseated at court by Duke Ferdinando’s new favourite, Cavalieri, the field was left open for the wealthy merchant Corsi to become the principal patron of music in Florence (after the Medici) and the standard-bearer of the experimental ‘movement’ in musical theatre.²⁷ With Rinuccini, fellow academician in the Alterati, and Peri, he produced their first offering, La Dafne, in 1597/8.²⁸ In contrast to the 1589 intermedi, performed before several thousand international guests, Dafne was a very modest affair. It first played in Corsi’s home for a comparatively few invited guests, among whom were ‘some of the principal gentlemen’ of Florence.²⁹ It had the distinction, however, of being the first to include the dramatic style of singing now known as recitative. It was soon followed by L’Euridice (by Rinuccini and Peri, with some music by Caccini), performed in October 1600, as a small and fairly inconsequential part of the entertainments for the wedding festivities of Maria de’ Medici and Henry IV of France.³⁰ Because Caccini would not allow the singers under his tutelage to perform Peri’s music, he inserted his own music for some of the roles. Meanwhile, Cavalieri was claiming the distinction of having composed and produced in 1595 the first completely sung ‘pastorals’ on texts by a different poet, Laura Guidiccioni (one with whom he had collaborated in the 1589 intermedi) – a claim which Peri generously acknowledged in his preface to L’Euridice. But Cavalieri’s works are not extant, and, judging by the tuneful style of his later musical play, La Rappresentazione di Anima, et di Corpo, printed in 1600 and first performed in Rome, Cavalieri shared neither the academic perspective nor the humanistic, ordinary-language aesthetic of his Florentine peers.³¹ Still, such private rivalries among musicians were fuelled by the printers who promptly published their works and by the public competition among princes to garner attention with their patronage. These were some of the factors that fostered the endurance of the first completely sung musical tales and their spread to other urban centres – Mantua, Rome, Venice, and elsewhere, both inside and outside the Italian peninsula. Within a decade, the masterful madrigal composer Claudio Monteverdi (bap. 1567–1643) was to make his debut in the field with two dramatic works of his own: La favola d’Orfeo (1607), the first opera to achieve a place in the modern repertory, and L’Arianna (1608), now lost except for the Lament, which was destined to become the most famous piece of music of the seventeenth century. But Monteverdi’s works owe a great deal to Peri’s score, particularly in the way they build on and amplify the rhetorical strategies of Peri’s innovative style of dramatic singing. However, in order to appreciate fully Peri’s accomplishment in inventing recitative, we first need to explore Neoplatonic notions in Renaissance Florence about Orphic singing and its effects.

Musical Magic

More than a century before the first experiments in opera, Angelo Poliziano had dramatised the myth of Orpheus for the Florentine cultural elite. His Orfeo (1480), the earliest secular play in Italian, received numerous editions during the sixteenth century and became, in effect, a Medici literary classic, popularising through the Orpheus legend the marvels of ancient music and musicians.³² The musician par excellence of antiquity, Orpheus had been able to tame the beasts of nature and charm Hades into allowing him to lead Eurydice out of the Underworld – all by means of the power of his spellbinding incantation. Poliziano himself was a member of the Neoplatonic circle surrounding Lorenzo de’ Medici (known as the ‘Magnificent’ because of his brilliance and erudition). The main intellectual figure in his informal academy was another erudite Florentine, Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), a humanist well versed in Platonic thought. As early as 1489, Ficino postulated a ‘music-spirit’ theory, which explained the peculiar power of music by the fact that, unlike other sensual stimuli, it is carried by air, which is also the medium of the spiritus.³³ This is why Ficino and his fellow Neoplatonists counted among the most prized classical disciplines to have been revived in the Florence of their day the art of singing to the Orphic lyre.

So, in the court culture of Florence during the late fifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth, singing – and especially solo singing – took on very special significance. This derived from Ficino’s conviction that the human voice, through music, provided the link between the earthly world and the cosmos. Because Platonic thought held that the individual was connected to the entire universe through harmony, it followed that the best way to express this connection was by giving voice to song. Moreover, the artful singer had the ability to envoice psychological and moral reality and the power to make that reality present to others.³⁴ This is what underlay the Aristotelian concept of imitation or mimesis. By employing certain patterns of correspondence between micro- and macrocosm, between the motions of the human soul and the hidden harmony of the cosmos, the singer could manipulate the listener’s responses. The composer-singer, then, in the guise of the legendary Orpheus, became the expressive agent of that artistic power. And Florentine Neoplatonism, in the artistic manifestation of Poliziano’s Orfeo – a spoken drama with interpolated song³⁵ – helped to stimulate a century-long fascination with the expressive powers of music.

It is now possible to comprehend how Mei, Bardi, Caccini, Peri, and Rinuccini, being products of a culture steeped in Neoplatonic musical mysteries, were all heirs to these Renaissance ideas about the magical effects of song. Mei shared some of Ficino’s ‘music-spirit’ theories, particularly that which held hearing to be superior to the other senses in its ability to act on the soul’s passions.³⁶ As we have seen above, Bardi’s program for the 1589 intermedi revolved around the power of song, while his protégé, Caccini, revitalised the Renaissance ideal of incantatory solo singing for the Camerata. In creating the first opera libretto, Rinuccini, under the weight of Florentine and Medicean tradition, looked back to Poliziano’s fable of Orfeo. Not only was Orfeo a fitting protagonist for a completely sung music drama aiming to demonstrate the power of song, but also, as Tomlinson points out, its outcome and that of the other earliest tales of opera ‘vindicated the occult harmony of the cosmos … : in the answer of Daphne’s just prayers by her magical transformation [into a laurel tree], in the alleviation of Ariadne’s woes by the miraculous descent of Bacchus, in the transformative power of song in … [the] Orpheus librettos’. Like Ovid’s tales of metamorphoses from which they were drawn, these were fabrications or fables (favole) which, by focusing on timeless myths involving love and loss, sought to dramatise, externalise, or represent human sentiment.³⁷ And what better way was there of realising the transformative power of song and Orfeo’s incantatory magic than through musical speech? This was at the heart of the notion of the representational style (stile rappresentativo). Peri’s invention of the dramatic style of singing known as recitative, then, was rooted in the belief that musical speech was capable of transmitting an inner, emotional reality and could therefore represent human affections on stage.

Peri’s Theory of Recitative

Recitative, the most extreme form of solo song or monody, was without question opera’s most radical innovation. It was also the ultimate product of humanism because it sought not merely to place the music in the service of the words, but to eliminate completely the distinction between words and music, between speaking and singing, between art and nature. It did this by synthesising the two elements into an inseparable whole, creating a language which was sui generis – more than speech but less than song, as Peri described it: a language able to communicate simultaneously both to the mind and the body, the intellect and the emotions.

In the preface to the published score of L’Euridice, Peri recounted his search for a new kind of singing with which to render dramatic dialogue (‘the kind of imitation necessary for these poems [libretti]’).³⁸ Significantly, he recognised this creative effort as an act of imitation – not just emulation of the ancients, which it is also, but imitation of natural speech. The resultant ‘theory’ of recitative was partly adapted from his understanding of the manner of performance of ancient Greek drama and partly based on his quite remarkable analysis of the oral inflections of modern speech, perhaps stimulated in part by Mei’s writings.³⁹ In his preface, Peri reflected on the distinction made by the ancient Greeks between the ‘continuous’ or sliding pitches of speech and the ‘diastematic’ or intervallic motion of song in which discrete pitches are sustained. He noted that the first are usually ‘fluent’ and ‘rapid’ while the others are normally ‘slow’ and ‘sustained’ but ‘could at times be hastened and made to take an intermediate course’, or ‘could be adapted to my purpose’. He went on to explain how he deployed the bass line under the voice, which constitutes the most original aspect of his theory. This involved recognising that ‘in our speech some sounds are pronounced [or intoned with a pitch] in such a way [we would say, “stressed” by a tonic accent] that a harmony can be built upon them, and that in the course of speaking we pass through many other [syllables] that are not so intoned, until we reach another that will support a progression to a new consonance [by virtue of having an identifiable pitch]’. So he placed a consonant harmony in the bass to support the ‘intoned’ notes of the melody and held it firm, allowing the ‘continuous’, rapidly declaimed syllables to be uttered over that same harmony while passing ‘through both dissonances and consonances’ until another ‘intoned’ note in the melody ‘opened the way to a new harmony’.

But Peri also built into his method a device for ensuring that the emotional content of the text was respected and that there would be some degree of variety in the recitative’s delivery. ‘Keeping in mind those inflections and accents that serve us in our grief, in our joy, and in similar states, I made the bass move in time to these, now more, now less [frequently], according to the affections.’

The opening of the speech from L’Euridice in which the messenger brings the news of Euridice’s death to Orfeo shows how Peri followed his own prescription for composing recitative (see Example 1.1).⁴⁰ The vertical boxes identify the syllables that are sustained or accented in normal Italian pronunciation (usually the third and sixth, or sixth and tenth syllable of a line, depending on its length) and which, because they linger on a discrete pitch, are capable of suggesting a chordal harmony. Depending upon the degree of calm or excitement he wishes to generate, Peri often uses only one chord per line of text, especially for the shorter lines, and almost always places it under the penultimate syllable. The horizontal boxes contain the syllables that are quickly uttered in speech; these may form dissonances (indicated by asterisks) or consonances with the bass, depending on the affections. The way in which the dissonances are introduced and then left was not an issue for Peri because the new speechlike texture freed the voice from the constraints of counterpoint.

Example 1.1 Jacopo Peri, Le musiche di Jacopo Peri sopra L’Euridice (Florence: Giorgio Marescotti, 1600 [1601, modern style]), Dafne’s recitative, mm. 19–26

Ma la bel-la Eu-ri-di-ce 1   2   3   4       5  6   7	But the lovely Eurydice
Mo-vea dan-zan-do il pie sul ver-de pra-to 1      2    3    4    5      6   7   8    9  10  11	was prancing around the green meadow
Quand’ahi ria sorte a-cer-ba  1         2   3     4    5   6    7	when—O bitter angry fate !—
An-gue cru-do, e spie-ta-to 1     2     3    4     5    6  7	a snake, cruel and merciless,
Che ge-la-to gia-cea tra fio-ri e l’er-ba   1   2   3  4  5    6   7   8      9  10  11	that lay motionless among flowers and grass
Pun-se-le il pie …   1    2     3  4	bit her foot …

“A PDF version of this example is available for download on Cambridge Core and via www.cambridge.org/9780521823593”

Thus, Peri conceived of recitative as a spontaneous-sounding musical language fusing speech and song that was capable of imitating, expressing, and arousing the emotions. It should be noted that neither Peri nor Caccini actually invented basso continuo texture, which had become widespread as a technique for accompanying non-polyphonic music during the last decades of the sixteenth century. However, Peri’s account of the role of the bass in his description of recitative shows that his use of the new texture as a compositional tool was completely revolutionary.⁴¹ In this manner of composing, the bass has no rhythmic profile of its own, and the harmonies adhere to no formal plan; they are there merely to support the voice, which is thus liberated from its contrapuntal framework. Another device which Peri understood to be key to the imitation of speech is the use of ametrical rhythms and phrases, carefully separated by rests and following the flow of Rinuccini’s irregularly alternating poetic lines of seven and eleven syllables. But the crucial question must be: how does Peri’s music reflect the emotional content of the words? He employs a number of devices, some of which are illustrated in Example 1.1: skilful dissonance treatment (shown by the asterisks), with greater density of dissonance signalling more painful emotions; sudden and irrational shifts of harmony, as in the motion from a G major chord to an E major one in the last measure, to intensify moments of grief; poignant and harmonically unsupported melodic intervals such as diminished fourths and fifths; and adjusting the pace of the delivery of words, with slower rhythms conveying laments and doleful sentiments. In the end, Peri knew that he had not revived Greek music; but he believed he had created a speech-song that not only resembled what had been used in ancient theatre but was also compatible with modern musical practice.

Of course, the first operas were entirely sung, but not only in recitative; more traditional styles of singing were also employed, including airs (where the action called for ‘singing’ rather than ‘speaking’) and part-songs or many-voiced madrigals for the choruses, sometimes danced, which marked the separation between scenes and delivered sententious pronouncements about the action and fate of the characters. In this respect, all of the early court operas are alike except, as noted, Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione, which, significantly, employed a libretto not by Rinuccini. But Caccini’s Euridice was also different enough from Peri’s to give the lie to Caccini’s claim of having been the first to use the new style of dramatic singing – if by that we mean real recitative and not just the affective, rhetorical kind of solo singing that was indeed his specialty.⁴² However, even when he was intent on emulating Peri’s recitative, Caccini’s theatrical style resembles his chamber monodies. The dialogue passages in Caccini’s Euridice are more songlike than speechlike: the bass line is more evenly paced, its function closer to that of a contrapuntal line than of a harmonic support; and the melody shows less subtlety and rhythmic variety than Peri’s and uses far less dissonance. Both composers were striving toward the ideal envisaged by Galilei in writing a kind of music that naturalistically reflected ‘how an actor delivers his lines’ so as to convey the character’s emotions. Perhaps the difference between them can be summed up by remembering that Caccini was a singer first and a composer second, whereas Peri was primarily a composer who also sang.⁴³ Moreover, it is clear to anyone who compares the scores of Monteverdi’s Orfeo and Peri’s Euridice that, if Monteverdi can be credited with having brought opera into the future that Gagliano was predicting for it in 1608, he did so by recognising and building on Peri’s accomplishments.

Any attempt to write a history of the libretto is fraught with paradox. Almost without exception, a text is the starting point for any opera. Indeed, before Mozart, and often after, the libretto was normally complete before the composer put pen to paper, for all that it might then be revised according to the musical and other demands made upon it. As we shall see, its poetry usually had quite precise musical implications. Moreover, in early opera the poet was normally the prime mover in the operatic enterprise, not just by devising the subject and fleshing it out with appropriate words, but also given his often standard role as director of the production. The libretto was itself the public face of opera in terms of the artefacts that survive to record a given performance: libretti were usually printed for general consumption inside or outside the theatre, whereas musical scores were, on the whole, regarded as more ephemeral performance materials, to be adopted, adapted, and disposed of at will. Poets also acted as the chief ideologues of opera, promoting and defending the genre against its detractors and inserting it into broader literary and cultural debates. In a very real sense, the history of the libretto is the history of opera tout court.¹

Yet as countless librettists have complained, the words rarely come high on any opera audience’s agenda. The music, singers, mise-en-scène, costumes, and choreography vie for the attention of the eye and the ear, while the text, if it is held in any regard at all, is dismissed as a trying necessity or a trifling irrelevance. The beauties of a poet’s verse are as nothing compared with the beauties of a composer’s music, and, in some minds, both pale in comparison to the beauties of a singer’s high C. In this light, the history of the libretto is just one relatively minor branch of opera studies.

The point is confirmed by a platitude: the best poetry can rarely be set to music because it is too self-sufficient, with nothing to be added. While this may or may not be true, the more damaging corollary – that any poetry for music must be second-rate – ignores the fact that libretti should be judged not by the canons of ‘great’ verse (although some are) but, rather, by fitness to purpose. Most theatre poets accepted, gladly or not, that when writing for music, compromises had to be made in terms of plot design and arrangement, and of poetic language, accent, and even vowel sounds (it is hard to sing a melisma on u). The mere fact that it always takes longer to sing something than to say it conditions the nature of poesia per musica, which, in turn, must always expect completion by something beyond itself. Nahum Tate’s verse for his dying Dido (in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas) is scarcely great, or even good, poetry:²

However, it serves its purpose well. Why that should be the case is something worth exploring.

‘a Poetical Tale or Fiction’

In 1685, the English poet John Dryden published his Albion and Albanius, set to music by Luis Grabu as a full-length opera (the first in English to survive). His preface begins with the nature of operatic subject matter:

This ‘marvellous and surprizing conduct’ extends beyond the implausible plots and dei ex machina so typical of the genre. Still more ‘surprizing’ is opera’s fundamental premise, that drama can be played out in song. The consequent lack of verisimilitude might best be accepted as just a fact of operatic life, but it remained troubling in an age that still paid at least lip service to precepts drawn from Classical poetics, notably the writings of Aristotle and Horace. This explains the subject matter of the earliest operas in the north Italian courts, drawn chiefly from Graeco-Roman myth, where supernatural gods and goddesses could reasonably be expected to differentiate themselves from mere mortals by way of music. It also explains their standard setting in the pastoral utopia of Arcadia, where poetry and therefore music are natural conditions of an idealised life. For Dryden the presence of gods, goddesses, and heroes

The gradual expansion of operatic subject matter throughout the seventeenth century attenuated the pastoral argument and called for further special pleading in printed prefaces, as well as in the other standard forum for operatic apologias, the prologue. Even before opera went ‘public’ in Venice in 1637, its subjects were extending beyond the standard mythological–pastoral fare of earlier court entertainment to embrace epic (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Lodovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, Giambattista Marino’s Adone), and even Greek and Roman history. Sacred operas likewise made the transition from the representation of allegorical virtues and vices (Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo of 1600) to quasi-historical accounts of saints’ lives (in the operas staged in Rome under the patronage of the powerful Barberini family from the early 1630s onwards).

The appeal of epic is easily explained. Tasso’s Rinaldo and Armida first appeared in a set of intermedi by Ottavio Vernizzi (Bologna, 1623), followed by Benedetto Ferrari’s Armida (Venice, 1639), Lully’s tragédie en musique, Armide (Paris, 1686), and John Eccles’s Rinaldo and Armida (London, 1698). Characters from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso appear in Marco da Gagliano and Jacopo Peri’s Lo sposalizio di Medoro et Angelica (Florence, 1619), Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina (Florence, 1625), Luigi Rossi’s Il palazzo incantato (Rome, 1642), Lully’s Roland (Versailles, 1685), and Agostino Steffani’s Orlando generoso (Hanover, 1691), to name only a few. The trend increased in the eighteenth century, from Handel’s Rinaldo (1711) and Alcina (1735) through Gluck’s Armide (1777) and beyond. The line between myth and epic was thin, and both Alcina and Armida owe a clear debt to the classic femme fatale of Homer’s Odyssey and its mythological forbears Circe, save that in the later case – and no doubt to the gratification of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century censors – these pagan sorceresses could ultimately be redeemed by the love of a Christian hero. The chief difficulty in both cases, however, was how to turn epic narration into dramatic representation, which usually involved the introduction of extraneous characters (divine or mortal) to explain the plot.

Any subject drawn from history might seem to cause greater problems, although these may be more apparent than real. Here, the question of verisimilitude comes most to the fore. As the librettist Francesco Sbarra admitted in the preface to his Alessandro vincitor di se stesso (1651, set by Antonio Cesti), dealing with Alexander the Great:

Some ‘historical’ characters inhabit a hinterland between fact and fiction: the heroes of the Trojan Wars (Achilles, Aeneas, Ulysses) may actually have existed, but they also have strong mythical properties, and they occupy a world shaped by divine intervention. Both Ariosto and Tasso drew inspiration from history (respectively, the time of Charlemagne and the First Crusade), and yet they subjected their heroes to trials and tribulations inspired by Classical mythology and by medieval romance. The kings and queens of ancient Mesopotamia and the Middle East that also started to populate operas were probably not significant historical presences. Even Roman dictators and emperors (Julius Caesar, Claudius Nero) were not necessarily to be viewed in the same light as characters in, say, a Shakespeare ‘history play’. Indeed, in all these cases, it is often the exotic otherness of their stories that makes them appropriate for operas, which, in turn, were not to be construed, at least directly, as some kind of lesson in the facts of history, even if they raised important questions about how history might usefully be read.

Much has been made of what has often been called the ‘first’ historical opera, Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (Venice, 1643; libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello), which is based on the erotic antics of Emperor Nero and his mistress, Poppaea Sabina, and the consequent downfalls of Empress Octavia (sent to exile) and the philosopher Seneca (condemned to suicide). In a preface to his own edition of the libretto, Busenello acknowledged the outline of the events treated in the opera as described by Tacitus. ‘But here’, he states, ‘we represent these actions differently.’⁵ Busenello further tempers any claim for historical veracity by typically relying on the intervention of the god of Love (‘without somewhat of which Passion, no Opera can possibly subsist’, says Dryden). Such treatment might or might not be a case of legitimate poetic license, but it does question the extent to which modern critics should judge this famously immoral plot on the grounds of their own historical knowledge (e.g., that both Poppaea and Nero eventually came to sticky ends).

The problem is not restricted to opera. Contemporary spoken drama runs through a similar gamut of genres, styles, and subjects, and seems equally fluid in terms of potential interpretations. So, too, do commedia dell’arte scenarios – which range far more widely than just the stereotypical characters and plots often viewed as standard in the genre – and likewise a relatively unexplored source of material for Baroque opera, contemporary novellas and related ‘popular’ literature. All these establish a number of plot-types that, in turn, prompt variations on a set of standard themes. For example, two young lovers, one or both in an unhappily arranged engagement or marriage, will staunchly resist social and other pressures applied by a pedantic tutor or a busybody nurse, surmounting all obstacles to find true happiness. The fact that this is the foundation of L’incoronazione di Poppea as much as it is of, say, Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia need not cause too much discomfort. But it suggests that originality of invention is not what matters most. In part, this is blatant commercialism: audience familiarity leads to ‘brand loyalty’ and hence increasing consumption. Furthermore, it permits efficient short-cuts in the re-telling of well-known stories. Finally, it creates a strongly intertextual world where operas are to be compared less with ‘real life’ than with other similar works.

While earlier librettists such as Ottavio Rinuccini, Busenello, and Giovanni Faustini had tended to write one-off libretti for a small circle of composers – a practice that, of course, remained in use – some later libretti seem to have become reified as ‘works’ of and for themselves that could therefore gain wider distribution. Giacinto Andrea Cicognini’s text for Orontea had settings by Francesco Lucio (Venice, 1649), Francesco Cirillo (Naples, 1654), Cesti (Innsbruck, 1656), and Filippo Vismarri (Vienna, 1660). Their complex genealogy has yet to be fully disentangled, and, in general, the mechanisms of libretto transmission have not yet been properly studied: presumably they involved complex networks of personal contacts (among impresarios, poets, composers, and singers) and also, and increasingly, of printed editions whether of single works or of collected opera omnia. One result, however, was that some literate audiences might well have started to identify particular works as belonging to their librettists independent of the different musical clothing offered by a succession of composers and singers. The same is true of, say, the libretti of Pietro Metastasio in the eighteenth century, which had a strong literary presence quite apart from their repeated operatic settings.

The latest catalogue of printed opera (etc.) libretti contains some 5,800 entries covering the years 1600–1699, and 24,000 for 1700–1799.⁶ It is hard nowadays to conceive the sheer scale of the operatic enterprise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – especially given the highly limited repertory of most modern opera houses – as the burgeoning opera ‘industry’ created complex infrastructures of supply and demand. But if the various tendencies towards standardisation identified above are certainly to be viewed in this light, they also reflect a codification of genres for further academic and related reasons. Here the need was to resist, rather than promote, certain trends that were coming to be viewed as deleterious to the notion of opera as some kind of drama; it also played into broader debates, such as the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes that animated French (and thence European) cultural discourse from the second half of the seventeenth century into the eighteenth.

For example, the ‘Arcadian Academy’ was founded in Rome in 1690 for the reform and ‘purification’ of Italian poetry, in particular the opera libretto. It emerged like many such Roman gatherings from the circles of specific patrons, in this case Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, although its influence spread widely through Italy and abroad. Librettists associated with the Arcadians included Ottoboni himself, Apostolo Zeno, Gian Vincenzo Gravina, Silvio Stampiglia, and Metastasio. Their spokesmen, including Giovanni Maria Crescimbeni (La bellezza della volgar poesia, Rome, 1700) and Ludovico Muratori, ranged widely in their attacks on the abuses of contemporary poetry, advocating a return to Classical simplicity, in part via French models drawn from Corneille and Racine. Giacinto Andrea Cicognini’s libretto for Cavalli’s Giasone (Venice, 1649) came under particularly harsh critique by Crescimbeni:

Thus the Arcadians sought to restore order by regularising opera’s structures, themes, and affective content. But their appeal for a more ‘moral’ form of art went back to Horace’s dictum that art should not just entertain but also educate. Lip service to the ideal was conventionally paid in operatic prologues that sought to justify, or at least explain away, the action that followed. According to its prologue, L’incoronazione di Poppea is a demonstration of the power of Love over Fortune and Virtue, which, if not ‘moral’ enough in itself, might at least prompt a satirical reading of the work by negative example. Other morals were even clearer in those operas where ancient heroes exhibited the qualities of bravery, virtue, honour, wisdom, and clemency that, in turn, could stand as allegories for modern princely patrons; this provides a basis for reading most of Lully’s tragédies en musique as some form of propaganda for Louis XIV. Yet allegory is always a slippery tool. Stories from the appalling life of Nero might well serve pro-Venetian republican propaganda, so one reading of L’incoronazione di Poppea goes.⁸ But in Antonio Giannettini’s L’ingresso alla gioventù di Claudio Nerone (Modena, 1692; libretto by Giovanni Battista Neri), the same ‘historical’ character serves to celebrate the wedding of Francesco II d’Este, Duke of Modena. Either contemporary audiences were able to make subtle and sensitive value judgements about the subjects placed before them, or they did not care much about these subjects at all.

Of course, different members of different audiences would no doubt read different works in different ways. Indeed, such polyvalence was surely an essential condition for opera taking Europe by storm. But if one can perhaps find common ground in what opera ‘taught’ its consumers, it was probably not so much at the level of grand historical, political, or ethical sermons as it was in more immediate modes of human emotional behaviour. Those who cried or laughed at the characters and actions represented on the stage received a sentimental education in the nature of human feeling through which to construct their lives. Some might view this as social engineering; others might claim it as what is most uniquely liberating about the operatic experience.

‘softness and variety of Numbers’

Dryden also discusses the requirements of poetry for music:

Despite the preposterous notion ‘That Rhyme, on any consideration shou’d take place of Reason’, Dryden says, one can only follow the models established by the masters, in this case, the Italians.

Dryden’s ‘softness and variety of Numbers’ refers to the nature of Italian poetry, defined by the number of syllables in a given line and the position of the final accent.⁹ Poetic lines can be from three to eleven syllables in length (thus ternario, quaternario, quinario, senario, settenario, ottonario, novenario, decasillabo, and endecasillabo): the endecasillabo is the ‘classic’ norm, with its chief component, the settenario, in second place. The verso piano has the final accent on the penultimate syllable. An accent on the final syllable produces a verso tronco, and one on the antepenultimate syllable a verso sdrucciolo. Versi tronchi and sdruccioli are counted as modified versi piani: so, a settenario tronco or sdrucciolo will have, respectively, six and eight actual syllables. Syllable counts are also affected by various treatments of synaloepha and diphthongs.

The verso piano is the standard form, while versi sdruccioli and tronchi are used in special circumstances. For example, in libretti versi sdruccioli often invoke pastoral resonances (on the precedent of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia of 1504); they also have a long history of association (usually, in quinari) with infernal, demonic, or magic scenes, as in the response of the woodland gods to the summons of the wicked witch Artusia in Benedetto Ferrari and Francesco Manelli’s second Venetian opera, La maga fulminata of 1638 (Act III scene 3: ‘Insana femina’) or Medea’s ‘L’armi apprestatemi’ in Cavalli’s Giasone (Act III scene 9; 1649). The verso tronco can be comic – and it is sometimes associated with nonsense syllables – but, on a structural level, it becomes most significant to articulate closure: the result has strong musical implications, given the greater suitability for musically perfect cadences of versi tronchi (with a masculine ending, weak–strong) over versi piani (with a feminine ending, strong–weak).

Italian opera libretti draw only rarely upon the standard poetic forms of Renaissance Italian (Tuscan) hendecasyllabic verse: for example, Dante’s terza rima (rhyming aba bcb cdc…), Petrarch’s fourteen-line sonnet (with two quatrains – abab abab – and two tercets, e.g., cdc dcd) and the ottava rima stanzas of Ariosto and Tasso (abababcc). When they do, it is often for special (archaic, moralising, etc.) effect, as with Orpheus’s ‘Possente spirto, e formidabil nume’ in terza rima in Act III of Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Instead, the basis of early libretti – as of the late Renaissance pastoral plays that provided their most immediate precedent – was a mixture of free-rhyming endecasillabi and settenari, producing versi sciolti (‘loose’ or ‘free’ verse): more regular rhymes and/or metrical consistency could define structural units within this flow, and lines could be divided between characters to enhance the effect of dialogue. However, one major, and crucial, exception is the strophic canzone/canzonetta, generally in other than seven‑ or eleven-syllable lines, that appears even in the first operas. Rinuccini, for example, introduced strophic groupings mixing ottonari and quaternari in Dafne (1598) and Euridice (1600) specifically for the end-of-‘scene’ choruses. His model was the anacreontic verse introduced (in part, on French precedent) by the poet Gabriello Chiabrera (1552–1638), who said that he was catering specifically for composers of the ‘new music’ and their ‘arias’. In Orfeo, the librettist Alessandro Striggio brought such structures into the acts themselves to produce formal songs – often distinguished as such, whether dramatically (e.g., diegetically) or structurally – that stand apart from the prevailing versi sciolti for the recitative. The opening of Act II, for example, has a series of four-line stanzas for Orfeo and his companions (one in ottonari, six in settenari) separated by instrumental ritornelli, culminating in four quatrains in ottonari for Orfeo, producing an aria both in the technical sense (a strophic setting of strophic verse) and in the musical one:

Eleven- and seven-syllable versi sciolti remained standard for recitative (and variants thereof) through the nineteenth century and beyond: their fluidity and flexibility were well suited to its dramatic function and musical style. However, the style of arias (choruses, ensembles, etc.) favoured shorter lines in clear-cut patterns with regular metre and rhyme. From early opera onwards, such dramatic and structural shifts were essentially cued by the librettist, whom the composer could ignore only with potential prejudice to the musical outcome. Thus reading a libretto allows one to predict with a fair degree of certainty what the music is meant to do with it, and therefore also encourages us to be surprised when something different occurs.

Such matters remained fluid throughout most of the seventeenth century as the canons of opera were forged by developing social, political, and even literary contexts. Lodovico Zuccolo (Discorso delle ragioni del numero del verso italiano, Venice, 1623) showed clear contempt for the new canzonetta, claiming it to be a mere sop to musicians. More sympathetic theorists of the second quarter of the century, such as the anonymous author of Il corago (c. 1630), still felt ambivalent about shifts away from versi sciolti: they approved the variety thereby achieved but warned against anti‑Classical improprieties. But as opera entered the public domain, the rising fortunes of the aria could scarce be resisted. Thus at the beginning of Act I scene 2 of Cavalli’s Giasone (1649), Cicognini gives the lovesick hero two stanzas of senari (with a refrain and cadential versi tronchi) before Ercole interrupts his amorous babble. The strong amphibrachs (weak–strong–weak, two per line) almost force a setting in triple time.

The structures adopted for ‘aria’ poetry through the seventeenth century are strikingly varied, at least until the rationalisations prompted by the Arcadians and followed by Metastasio. Here the pattern becomes relatively standard: two isometric stanzas, usually of four or three lines each (settenari – sometimes with concluding quinari – or ottonari tend to be preferred), with regular (and generally parallel) rhyme-schemes, and each often ending with a verso tronco rhyming with its counterpart. This then meshed with the musical structure that was emerging to dominate opera in the early eighteenth century, the da capo aria, with one stanza each for the A and B sections and a subsequent return to A, therefore ending with the first part of the text.

A representative example of what one might call an intermediate stage in this long process of development is provided by a scene from Antonio Sartorio’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto, to a libretto by Francesco Bussani, first performed in Venice in the 1676–1677 season (although the main score that survives comes from a performance in Naples in 1680).¹⁰ Cesare (Julius Caesar) has arrived triumphant in Egypt and is pursued by Cleopatra, who has disguised herself as the maid, Lidia; her servant, Nireno, is also in on the game. In Act I scene 4, Cesare is alone on stage musing on his amorous state – observed by Nireno in hiding – but then is suddenly surprised to hear a voice singing in the distance:

Cesare begins with two stanzas in quinari – which Sartorio sets in ABA′ form, repeating the first stanza after the second – and then moves into versi sciolti (recitative). Cleopatra’s offstage song (‘V’adoro pupille’) is a single four-line stanza (senari) that is interrupted (after line 2) by a brief question in recitative from Cesare (‘What voice do I hear?’); Nireno then takes over this poetic line (indicated by the arrow), identifying the owner of the voice for the benefit of the audience (‘This is Cleopatra’) and then commenting on feminine wiles. The song resumes, and, at its end, Nireno reveals himself (recitative), allowing Cesare to wax rhapsodical over the ‘angelic voice’ he has just heard.

There are several typical games in play here. Cleopatra’s aria is diegetic (performed as a ‘real’ song meant to be heard as such by the other characters onstage), whereas Cesare’s is not (he is just in love); we also have the typically meta-operatic strategy of commenting on the act of singing and on the ‘angelic’ qualities of the singer. It is a scene that invites a mixture of arousal and wry humour; it also merits comparison with Handel’s handling of this same moment in his own Giulio Cesare in Egitto (London, 1724).¹¹

‘they labour at Impossibilities’

Dryden greatly admired the Italian language, ‘the softest, the sweetest, the most harmonious, not only of any modern Tongue, but even beyond any of the Learned’, one that ‘seems indeed to have been invented for the sake of Poetry and Musick’, rich in vowels and with a pronunciation that is ‘manly’ and ‘sonorous’. Other nations, however, can only envy the Italians:

Dryden’s reference to French’s ‘natural harshness’ presumably refers to its consonants, and the ‘perpetual ill Accent’ to the final es left mute in speech but articulated in song. Of course, a seventeenth-century French académicien would not have agreed.

The French equivalent of the Italian endecasillabo is the alexandrine, with twelve or thirteen syllables, depending on whether the rhyme is masculine (accent on the final syllable) or feminine (accent on the penultimate syllable, followed by a mute e). Alexandrines may be subdivided into six-syllable hemistichs by medial caesuras (thus offering the possibility of two parallel musical phrases for a single line of verse). Line-endings tend to alternate between masculine and feminine, often in rimes croisées (abab), although one can also find rimes plates (aabb) and rimes embrassées (abba). But the alexandrine is not always amenable to fluid musical setting given the internal caesura and the strong end-accents; it also seems too long, save where sententiousness or grandeur is required. Accordingly, the French librettist Philippe Quinault tended to opt for freer vers libre, mixing lines of different length. The argument between the flirtatious Céphise and her suitor Straton in Act I scene 4 of Lully’s Alceste (1674) is typical enough (syllable counts ignore feminine endings):¹²

Straton is given alexandrines when it comes to voicing his complaint and when he jumps to the (wrong) conclusion that Lychas has lied to him. The opening couplets are nicely balanced, and Céphise’s final comment wittily plays off two hemistichs to deflate her importunate lover. Her four seven-syllable lines (‘Un ton grondeur et sévère … d’un amant’) also mark a generalised moral that Lully sets apart from the prevailing recitative in the manner of a duple-time aria. However, and in general, French verse has fewer clear structural implications for music than Italian, often making it harder to predict from the text what the composer would do with it. This might have been seen as an advantage, given the French preference for more ‘natural’ and fluid forms of declamation drawing upon (as Lully himself is reported to have done) the rhetorical strategies of spoken drama.

Dryden was equally doubtful about his native tongue:

The suggestion that ‘female Rhymes’ (i.e., based on words with strong–weak endings) are important for song is interesting, while Dryden’s sense of the ‘Effeminacy of our pronunciation’ perhaps relates to the lack in English of strong stresses, equally necessary for good melodic writing.

The standard form of ‘noble’ English verse, the (usually iambic) pentameter, had similar problems to the alexandrine in terms of its length and its tendency to fall into repetitive patterns.¹³ As a result, English librettists of the mid-seventeenth century such as Richard Fleckno (Ariadne Deserted by Theseus and Found and Courted by Bacchus, 1654) and William Davenant (The Siege of Rhodes, 1656) tended to adopt an equivalent of vers libre with two-, three-, four- or five-foot lines: Davenant claimed that such variety was ‘necessary to recitative music’, although the tendency towards rhyming couplets produces a certain sameness. The techniques remained similar in later works. Thus Tate’s libretto for Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is predominantly in rhyming iambic (weak–strong) and trochaic (strong–weak) tetrameters that become rather plodding (this is typical of German verse, too). Take, for example, Dido’s first speech in Act I as presented in Purcell’s score (the 1689 libretto has some differences):

Purcell’s best option is often to treat this almost as prose, with word repetitions and also a tendency to favour enjambments (thus weakening the rhyme) even at the expense of sense: ‘Ah, ah, ah, Belinda, I am prest with torment, / Ah, ah, ah, Belinda, I am prest with torment not to be confest.’ In more dance-like sections, however, Purcell seems to enjoy piquant mismatches between textual and musical metre and stress (as in the duet ‘Fear no danger to ensue / The hero loves as well as you.’)

Given the regularity of much of Tate’s libretto, his ending (given towards the beginning of this chapter) is rather strange. Like any good librettist, he provides an appropriate number of key words to prompt the composer (‘darkness’, ‘Death’, ‘remember me’, ‘ah!’). But the metre is odd. ‘Thy hand, Belinda’ is in tetrameters, although the feminine line-endings (‘… shades me’, ‘… invades me’) maintain a flow. However, after a reasonably regular quatrain, the metre shifts to a pentameter (‘When I am laid in earth, my wrongs create’), a trimeter, and a final pentameter. Tate seems to want to set apart this portion of Dido’s final speech, as indeed does Purcell: ‘When I am laid in earth’ is, of course, Dido’s lament, over a ground bass typically based on a descending chromatic tetrachord. However, Purcell does also offer one further intervention that must be his. Tate’s syntax is somewhat elliptical, and Purcell seems (consciously or not) to have wanted to clarify the subjunctive, leading to the a-metrical ‘When I am laid in earth, may my wrongs create’.

* * *

‘Prima la musica, e poi le parole’ (‘First the music, and then the words’) was a catchphrase enshrined in the title of a satirical divertimento teatrale by Antonio Salieri (1786; libretto by Giambattista Casti). For all that it is a procedural illogicality, it reflects a common aesthetic presumption about the nature of opera. My aim here, however, has been to demonstrate the benefits of taking libretti seriously in terms of their poetic structures, and also, one might add (though I have not covered it here), for what they tell us about staging. Nor are these benefits limited just to early opera. Poetry was the standard format of opera libretti at least until the late nineteenth century and the rise both of Literaturoper and of a preference for more ‘naturalistic’ dramatic and musical prose. Thus the principles established here operated through the Classical and Romantic periods and had no less impact on, say, a Mozart or a Verdi. Ottavio Rinuccini’s legacy was powerful indeed.

Toward a ‘nuova maniera di canto’: A New Way of Singing

By the end of the sixteenth century, attempts to recover Greek tragedy led to the new genre of the dramma per musica. For the Florentine Camerata de Bardi, it meant the reinstatement of the antique melopoeia of the Greeks, that is, declamation emphasizing the word and its correct prosody. The Camerata promoted the excellence of monody, echoing the antique doctrine of the ethos proposed by the Pythagoricians, according to which modes could elicit different emotional responses in the listener: viewed as natural to man, monody was thus appropriate for the expression of affect. Later, also, Claudio Monteverdi would emphasise monody alongside polyphony, as he would argue in the preface to the Scherzi musicali of 1607. There, Monteverdi would define ‘Seconda prattica’ as a style that asked the music to amplify the affections already expressed by the poem and, in practice, to serve this latter.

Within the Camerata, Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini experimented with the new monody, setting to music some of Ottavio Rinuccini’s dramas: Dafne in 1595 (Peri, Florence; it was set to music in 1608 by Marco da Gagliano as La Dafne in Mantua) and, in 1600, L’Euridice by Peri and Caccini (Florence). It was no mere coincidence that the beginnings of opera privileged the myth of Orpheus, which is at the core of L’Euridice and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (Alessandro Striggio, Mantua, 1607). Other mythological themes not only confirmed the antique literary heritage that was enjoyed by aristocratic elites but also permitted performances to dodge one of opera’s thornier issues: theatrical verisimilitude. Constantly sung throughout, opera obviously lacks verisimilitude. Thus, exceptions could be made for mythical or superhuman figures who could assume another mode of expression – supposing that these mythological characters could express themselves through song – and for roles viewed as non-normative in relation to the aristocratic milieu: servants and nurses, and other characters of low social origins who provided comic relief to the main plot.

Peri and Caccini knew that the use of monody required aesthetic justifications. In his preface to L’Euridice, Peri explained the use of monody as this ‘new way of singing’ reflecting the Antique manner, to ‘imitate one who speaks through song’ (imitar col canto chi parla).¹ Monody reaches for a compromise between true singing and oratorical declamation: hence the expression often used to characterise this style – recitar cantando, which could be translated as ‘recitation in song’, or ‘to recite while singing’, according to Nino Pirrotta.² The expression recitar cantando appeared for the very first time in the title page of Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo nuovamente posta in musica dal Sig. Emilio del Cavalliere per recitar cantando (Rome, 1600) and in the instructions ‘To Readers’ of the same.³ However, for Cavalieri, its meaning was ‘to stage through song’ (mettere in scena col canto): recitar cantando identified a kind of spectacle instead of a style or a technique.

As a technique, recitar cantando requires vocal flexibility. Its essential feature is the ability to highlight some words through correct pronunciation and diverse techniques of ornamentation. The accompaniment of the voice by the basso continuo should obstruct neither the melody nor the correct perception of the words. Structured by poetic meter, the verbal text allows music to organise itself into a form. The most common verse in Italian poetry is the ‘endecasillabo’, an eleven-syllable verse (hendecasyllable) with its principal accent falling on the tenth syllable: it was already widely used in sixteenth-century pastoral – Tasso’s Aminta or Guarini’s Il Pastor fido, to name only these. Another frequent verse is the heptasyllable (settenario in Italian), a seven-syllable verse with its principal accent on the sixth syllable. Heptasyllables and hendecasyllables are often combined (versi sciolti; blank verses), mostly because both meters have mobile accents: thus they are able to reproduce the different rhythms of spoken language.

Since the Renaissance, versi sciolti were some of the most widespread solutions adopted in poetry, the mobility of their internal accents resembling the delivery of speech and the heightening of expressions. This resemblance is paramount for the foundation of stile rappresentativo – the expression appeared in the title page and the dedication of Caccini’s L’Euridice, published in 1600. In 1699, Andrea Perrucci could still argue that verses ‘of seven and eleven syllables [resemble] prose more than others’.⁴ In recitar cantando, versi sciolti result in a syllabic style of song in which the melodic embellishments of song are perceived as transgressive elements signalling dramatic tension, just as the few textual repetitions indicate a change in affect and an intensification of said affect. Due to the flexibility of the verse, the rhythm is rather irregular, while the melodic line remains simple and often proceeds stepwise. Stressed syllables coincide with the downbeat of the measure and are often highlighted by values of greater duration. The melodic arc is modelled on the verse, while the cadences function as punctuation, articulating the unity of the text in its more complex poetic periods. What emerges is a mode of expression organised into segments that respect the syntactic trend in a simple linear style, preserving the essential aspect of monody as conveyor of affect through its imitation of speech, here emphasised through musical intonation, and, above all, respecting the prosody. To the elaborated poetic style corresponds a musical treatment characterised by bare simplicity, essentially made on rather elementary sets of melodic and rhythmic patterns. Within this simple melodic outline, the appearance of an unusual rhythmic figure, a specific ornament, or an unusual melodic contour is sufficient to highlight the dramatic intrusion of the affect.

In Caccini’s setting of Rinuccini’s libretto for Euridice, Dafne’s narration of Euridice’s death is treated as a monologue in three parts (see Table 3.1). The first part, A, renders the bucolic setting; the second part, B, introduces the long narration of the snake bite and its fatal consequences; and the third part, C, narrates Euridice’s death.

The musical outline of this monologue is modelled along these three thematic areas, but, most of all, the outline of the melodic phrase follows the meaning of the syntactic sentence. From the beginning of the first section, the voice lingers on metric syllables and stretches their duration (see Example 3.1).

Example 3.1 Giulio Caccini, L’Euridice composta in musica in Stile Rappresentativo da Giulio Caccini detto Romano, Dafne’s narration

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‘Per quel vago boschetto’ (Florence: Giorgio Marescotti, 1600 [1601, modern style]), mm. 1–14

Shaping the Recitative

In the first half of the seventeenth century, the recitative quickly adapted itself to different needs, as shown for instance with the diffusion of entirely sung dramas in Rome. The use of allegorical figures in the Roman theatre – as in that of Florence – was frequent although here motivated by counter-reformationist propaganda, with historical–hagiographic plots addressing a morally edifying content. In Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo (Agostino Manni and Cavalieri; Rome, Oratorio dei Filippini, 1600), the allegorical figures of Body and Soul are subjected to trials of strength and attempt to resist the snares of worldly life. This allegorical action ‘per recitar cantando’ was intended to be staged, yet with a severe style of recitative in accordance with the nature of the plot. On the other hand, the dramma musicale Sant’Alessio (Giulio Rospigliosi and Stefano Landi, Rome, 1631) relies on a recitative style flexible enough to establish different levels of comedy. In Act II scene 8, the Devil appears to the pageboy Marzio, a simpleton. Mistaking the Devil for a hermit, Marzio begins to mock him. The scene is in two parts, the first with a monologue delivered by the Devil, the second with a dialogue between him and Marzio. The treatment of the recitative differentiates the refined, ironic astuteness of the Devil from the good-natured simplicity of Marzio; during their dialogue, declamation is increasingly treated in a histrionic manner. As for the monologue, the absence of well-defined melodic pattern first evokes a sense of statism. The Devil, however, shows off an unprecedented virtuosity with his canto di sbalzo, a style of singing privileging wide intervals and jumps from one extreme to another of the tessitura. As shown in Example 3.2, Marzio’s intervention causes the mood of the scene to depart from the fearsome gravity of the infernal world, resulting in two different comic tones: on the one hand Marzio’s vulgarity, on the other the refined irony of the Devil’s witty retorts loaded with subtle double-meanings that escape Marzio.

Example 3.2 Stefano Landi, Il Sant’Alessio, Act II, sc. 8, dialogue for Demonio e Marzio

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‘Già con desir costante’ (Rome: Paolo Masotti, 1634), mm. 1–27

This search for variety in the recitative is symptomatic of a need to renew musical declamation. Commenting on his own opera La catena d’Adone (Ottavio Tronsarelli, Rome, 1626), Domenico Mazzocchi alluded to the negative effects on the audiences of the recitative, which led him to compose mezz’arie as a way to ‘break the tedium of the recitative’.⁵ This led composers and poets to search for alternative modes of musical declamation, for more varied forms with better defined melodic and rhythmic outlines. Giovanni Battista Doni also evoked in his Trattato della musica scenica (written 1633–1635), a style ‘more vague and adorned than others, and full of varied intervals, which truly requires the scene to avoid tedium and to bring even more delight to the hearers, in order to better express all those different feelings that are subjected to this kind of verse and musical imitation’.⁶ As we will see, the recitative would be increasingly submitted to periodic interruptions taking the form of brief episodes with a more singable style in which vocal virtuosity and lyricism would prevail: the aria.

‘Like sprouts from the roots’: The Aria, Born from the Recitative

In 1744, Francesco Saverio Quadrio wrote that the aria should follow the recitative and have a ‘relationship with [it], and rise from the same, as sprouting from the root’.⁷ While this describes a well-established practice in eighteenth-century opera, the consolidation of the relation between recitative and aria was strengthened during the previous century.

The text of a libretto alternates between two main formal models assuming different functions: recitative and aria. A quick glance at any printed page of a libretto reveals the different types of verses chosen either for the recitative or the aria. During the seventeenth century, recitative and aria gave rise to hybrid structures. Brief and compact strophes were usually preferred for an aria. The poetic meters of these strophes were of various sorts but remained regulated by rhymes following a fixed pattern that facilitated the identification of the strophe in the flow of the discourse. The aria ‘Quanto vale e quanto può’ from Antonio Cesti’s Il Tito (Nicolò Beregan, Venice, 1666) is made up of twelve octosyllables (ottonari: x₈ a₈ a₈ x₈ a₈ x₈ | y₈ b₈ b₈ y₈ b₈ y₈) followed by a series of heptasyllables and hendecasyllables (see Table 3.2).

A syntactically autonomous form, the aria emphasises the dramatic context of specific situations: displays of lyrical effusion, enunciations of paradigmatic sentences, and other instances of rhetorical effects.

During the seventeenth century, strophes could contain from four to ten verses with poetic meters varying between heptasyllables and hendecasyllables. There were also quinari (pentasyllables, i.e., five-syllable verses) and quaternari (tetrasyllables, four-syllable verses), often arranged in polymetric strophes. In general, numeri chiusi (closed numbers) such as arias and choruses were modelled on the forms of the old ballata, the madrigal, and the Anacreontic ode – the latter, popularised in Italy by the poet Gabriello Chiabrera, often used other types of verses than the hendecasyllable usually found in mixed strophes that combined verses of different meters.

Recitative and aria distinguish themselves not only by form and style but also by the varied pace of the plot’s progression. The recitative allows for a dynamic integration of the dialogue into the flow of action; the aria, instead, halts the action, allowing externalisation of affect or a contemplative moment of introspection. The relationship between recitative and aria is regulated by a mechanism that allows the tension accumulated during the recitative to be released during the emotional response of the character in the aria. Such displays of affect (anger, joy, despair, etc.) make the aria the culminating point of the scene.

The affect privileged in the aria is made all the more noticeable by the choice of a melodic line easy to remember and frequently repeated in specific verses. However, the vocal line in the aria does not necessarily model itself on the prosody of the poem, nor does it attempt to emphasise the meaning of each verse. Instead, it privileges the general meaning of the strophe or strophes and their main affect. Thus, each aria possesses an unmistakable physiognomy with a distinctive rhetoric and melodic profile.

With the aria, the recitative creates a ‘system of contrasts’ paramount to the construction and unfolding of the drama. The peripeties of the plot are developed through the contrasting succession of arias along different, if not opposing, moods. The drama unfolds along this succession, so that the spectrum of affects can be ascribable to a paradigmatic system of emotions. A change of meter signals the transition from recitative to aria: the latter is characterised by rhythmic uniformity, the instrumentation is enlivened, and ritornelli are played between each strophe while the basso continuo follows the vocal line with increased animation.

These musical features bring us back to a fundamental issue of verisimilitude on stage, not only complicated by the recitar cantando but also by the textual and melodic repetitions which were also considered to be unnatural. Thus, songs that fulfilled a function of musica di scena (stage music) – and that would also have been sung in spoken theatre – and other situations that elicited song from the character, be it with a prayer or a moment of invocation, were appreciated: exemplary cases are the aria ‘Possente spirto’ in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (Act III), in which the hero sings to placate Caronte; Arnalta’s ‘Oblivion soave’ in Monteverdi’s Incoronazione (Act II scene 12); or Romilda’s aria ‘O voi che penate’ from Francesco Cavalli’s Xerse (Act I scenes 3–4).

A ‘rounded frame’: The Function of the Intercalare

The first formal models of the aria were borrowed from the traditional forms of Italian poetry – for example, the terzina (a three-verse strophe of hendecasyllables using the chain rhyme aba | bcb | cdc |, etc.) and the ottava rima (a strophe of eight verses usually on the rhyme scheme abababcc). The terzina was also known as terza rima, terzina dantesca, or terzina incatenata (chained terzina), as in the aria ‘Possente spirto’ in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (see Table 3.3).

The rigorous terzina contrasts with more plastic and flexible forms – for example, those addressing a theatrical topos destined to become the object of great emulation: the lamento. Originally a literary topos, the lamento was known through famous instances: Armida’s lament (Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, Canto XVI), or Olimpia and Fiordiligi’s laments in Orlando furioso (Ariosto, Canto X [lamento di Olimpia]; Canto XLIII [lamento di Fiordiligi]). The only surviving piece from Rinuccini and Monteverdi’s opera L’Arianna (Mantova, 1608) is its celebrated lamento sung by its eponymous heroine. A long monologue divided in several sections, Arianna’s lamento adopts mostly a syllabic style for its sinuous and unpredictable vocal line, obeying the poetic prosody. The recitar cantando of this lamento requires vocal flexibility – the ability to draw attention to the words through emphatic pronunciation and to signal its most poignant moments with diverse vocal techniques. The monologue’s organisation does not feature a pre-established formal model: instead, the piece proceeds by juxtaposed sections greatly contrasting with each other. Each section focuses on the presentation of one main affect exacerbated by rhetorical effects that shape the vocal line: anaphora, repetition, peroration, to name only these. Example 3.3 gives the beginning of this lamento, with the recurrence of some verses fulfilling the role of a refrain. Monteverdi’s later opera, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (Giacomo Badoaro, Venice, 1640), also displays a lament for Penelope (‘Di misera regina,’ Act I scene 1), in which repeated verses also function as refrains. Of course, Monteverdi was not the only one to emulate the theatrical topos of the lament: other examples are found in La regina sant’Orsola (Andrea Salvadori, music by Marco da Gagliano; Florence, 1624), La Flora (Andrea Salvadori, music by Marco da Gagliano and Jacopo Peri; Florence, 1628), and L’Andromeda (Benedetto Ferrari, Francesco Manelli; Venice, 1637).

Example 3.3 Claudio Monteverdi, L’Arianna, Arianna’s lament

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‘Lasciatemi morire’, adapted from L’Orfeo, L’Ariana, Il Lamento Di Olimpia, ed. Anna Maria Vacchelli (Cremona: Fondazione Claudio Monteverdi, 2014), mm. 1–24

The refrain became an essential element of the aria. A privileged model is the aria adopting the form of the ballata, which relies structurally on the refrain. The ballata’s distinctive feature is the repetition of the first verse, or the first couplet at the end of the strophe, and the rhyme between the last verses of the strophe and the first ones of the repeated verse: such repetition is called intercalare or ritornello.⁸ Arias with intercalare were frequent in Venetian operas: an example is Oronta’s lament in Artemisia (Act III scene 4; Nicolò Minato and Cavalli; Venice, 1657). The aria consists of two strophes separated by an instrumental episode. Its intercalare corresponds to the verse given at the beginning and end of the first strophe (‘Dammi morte o libertà’); it is then repeated in the final verse of the aria (see Example 3.4).

‘Dammi morte o libertà’, ed. Hendrik Schulze and Sara Elisa Stangalino (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2013), mm. 1–87

Example 3.4 Francesco Cavalli, Artemisia, Act III, sc. 4, Oronta’s lament

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Seemingly simple at first sight, the structure of these arias with intercalare can adopt more complex combinations: the length of the intercalare can be extended when made of more than one verse; also, its recurrences can vary. Some arias can have two different texts for the intercalare, that is, one for each strophe. An essential feature for the melody of the intercalare is its simplicity, making it easily memorable for the listeners and triggering the pleasure of identification.

The aria also took from the sixteenth-century madrigal the epigrammatic character of its final couplet, a very efficient rhetorical expedient. Such epigrammatic verses often appear at the beginning of a strophe as a banner for the displayed affect. In Ceffea’s aria from Scipione Affricano (Act I scene 14; Minato and Cavalli; Venice, 1664), the conclusive couplet functions as the intercalare (mm. 22–31 and 63–73; see Example 3.5). The intercalare also allows for rhetorical and structural emphasis when used within the blank verses of a recitative. Highlighting specific verses, the intercalare creates sections in the textual flow. This can nevertheless lead to some ambiguities, as it may obscure the relationship between recitative and aria. In Scipione Affricano (Act I scene 13), the verse ‘Chiedi, o bella, che vuoi?’ occurs twice during the recitative (see Example 3.6). This osmotic relationship between recitative and aria is one of the most fascinating traits of seventeenth-century opera: it is first of all about poetry – more specifically, about drama structured by poetry.

‘Amate pur, amate’, transcription from Italian Opera 1640–1770, 5, ed. H. Mayer Brown (New York, London: Garland Publishing, 1978), 41r–43r

Example 3.5 Francesco Cavalli, Scipione Affricano, Act I, sc. 14, aria for Ceffea

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Example 3.6 Francesco Cavalli, Scipione Affricano, Act I, sc. 13, recitative for Scipione

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‘Dimmi, Ericlea, poss’io’, transcription from Italian Opera 1640–1770, 5, ed. H. Mayer Brown (New York, London: Garland Publishing, 1978), 38v–39v

Another technique consists in the poetic arrangement of aggregates of verses within the fabric of the recitative, out of which the composer can write a mezz’aria (half-aria), also called aria cavata, that is, an aria ‘extracted’ from the recitative. In this case, the declamatory style proper to the blank verses of the recitative is momentarily abandoned. What emerges instead is a strophic passage characterised by rhythmic periodicity similar to that of the aria. In Xerse (Minato and Cavalli; Act I scene 7; Venice, 1655), the king begs for Romilda’s love in a short strophe made of heptasyllables. Cavalli singles out this passage from the recitative by treating it as a brief arioso in the very middle of the scene (see Example 3.7).

Example 3.7 Francesco Cavalli, Il Xerse, Act I, sc. 7, mezz’aria for Xerse

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‘Deh rimirate un re’, ed. Hendrik Schulze and Sara Elisa Stangalino (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2019), mm. 17–25

Such a treatment of the poetic text found its origins in the Monteverdian dramatic recitative, itself reflecting the legacy of the madrigalesque tradition in which blank verses were often declaimed not so much in a brisk manner as at a more sustained tempo, allowing, when necessary, some lingering on a word or on an expression isolated through musical and rhetorical effects. Indeed, the versatile uses of the intercalare explain the variety and flexibility of formal models that define the aria during the seventeenth century. Table 3.4 presents the main formal categories determined by the number of strophes in an aria and by the specific uses of the intercalare – including instances of formal structures without any intercalare (the verses carrying the intercalare are underlined in the table).

Expanding Forms and Structures

In Cavalli’s Xerse, the aria of Romilda, ‘O voi che penate’ (Act I scene 3–4), constitutes a fascinating case of musica di scena. The aria occurs between two scenes and is interrupted on three occasions by passages in recitative, first by Arsamene, then by Elviro, and finally by Xerse. The form of the aria adapts itself to the unfolding of the plot, following the reactions of the three men to the song of the young Romilda (see Table 3.5).

Arsamene’s and Elviro’s recitative interjections are inserted twice during the first verses of Romilda’s aria ‘O voi che penate’. Only later, Xerse enters unexpectedly during the first strophe sung by Romilda. Another aria from the same opera, ‘Ombra mai fu’, sung by Xerse (Act I scene 1), displays an unusual form of extraordinary effectiveness. The aria occupies the entire scene. Made of four quinari, its opening strophe functions as a repeat. The two central strophes, each one made of six verses (abbaCC), evoke a madrigalesque form with their hendecasyllabic and heptasyllabic verses, each strophe ending with a rhyming couplet. The contrast with the repeat is highly significant as regards the form and the meter. The instrumental ritornello provides a frame for the different sections of the text (see Table 3.6).

Another sophisticated instance of the use of the ritornello is featured in an aria from Sant’Alessio, ‘Se l’ore volano’ (Act I scene 2). Hiding in the cellar of his home, Alessio sings of his desire to be freed from the chains of worldly life. The aria is divided into three strophes made of seven verses (pentasyllables and heptasyllables), with a ritornello played between each strophe. Each of its three strophes is subdivided into two sections: the first three verses differ for each strophe, while the last four are identical (‘Chi l’ali a me darà | tanto ch’all’alto polo | io prenda il volo, | e mi riposi là?’). The melody is identical for each strophe but undergoes a major change on the fourth verse to signal the return of the repeated verses (see Example 3.8).

Example 3.8 Stefano Landi, Il Sant’Alessio, Act I, sc. 2, aria for Alessio

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‘Se l’ore volano’ (Rome: Paolo Masotti, 1634), mm. 1–6

During the second half of the century, itinerant theatrical companies and cosmopolitan composers disseminated the model of the Venetian opera in Europe, allowing for the development of its forms and vocal styles. In Cesti’s operas, the separation between recitative and aria is fully realised, the aria being the culmination of the scene. In Venice, Rome, and Naples, the aria became the privileged locus for lyric effusion, asserting its melodic profile. The expansion of its dimensions went hand in hand with new developments in its formal models. The short intercalare of the early Venetian opera, often made of one or two verses, could be extended to the size of a whole strophe and become the focal point of the aria. For instance, Armidoro’s aria ‘Deh rendetemi, ombre care’ (Act III scene 15) from Difendere l’offensore o vero la Stellidaura vendicante (Perrucci, Francesco Provenzale; Naples, 1674) is made of two strophes, A and B, the strophe A (repeated after the strophe B) playing the role of an expanded intercalare (see Table 3.7).

Both poetic and musical structures are simple: first, the instruments enunciate the melody that will be repeated during the first strophe, section A. Repetition plays a structural role: the instrumental episode that follows the first strophe is based on the melody of the introduction, closing section A and introducing section B. A new melodic material is presented, not so much contrasting with the one presented in strophe A as elaborating the last section of A. The second occurrence of the instrumental interlude is followed by the reappearance of the entire strophe A, now subjected to variations and alterations to the original melodic line. The whole results in a tripartite form: A-B-A’, the foundation of the so-called aria col da capo, which would become the dominant form of the aria in the eighteenth century.

During the seventeenth century, an increasing number of formal possibilities and stylistic features allowed arias to become privileged vehicles for the display of affect and emotions: scenes of lament, of madness, of sleep (aria del sonno), invocations, and prayers. An important category is the comic aria. In Venetian operas, these arias were integrated within comic episodes, often located at the end of an act or near a change of scenery or action, thus creating an entertaining intermission between the serious episodes of the dramma per musica. Comic arias were intended for characters frequently embroiled in quid pro quos or involved in degrading situations, and whose low origin – servants, buffoons, nurses, and the like – originated with stock figures of the commedia dell’arte. The verses of comic arias often rely on linguistic manglings, colloquial phonetics, or stuttering, enabling mockeries against the simple-minded or those affected by physical deformities, old bachelors unable to control their lustful desires, and so on.

In Giasone (Giacinto Andrea Cicognini and Cavalli, Venice, 1649; Act I scene 7), the servant Demo sings an aria (see Table 3.8), the comic effect of which is ensured by syllables issued in fits and starts – ‘so-so-’, for example – but also (in dialogue with Oreste) from an obscene allusion: Demo’s stuttering prevents him from completing words starting with ‘ca-’, implying an obscene rhyme with ‘strapazzo’.

The ‘Epilogue’ of the Passion

Demonstrated by their formal variety and their increasing number in operas, arias became from the middle of the seventeenth century the focal point for the musical expression of emotions. Their placement within a scene was also motivated by their dramatic function. An aria could be performed at the opening, at the end, or in the middle of a scene. In the first case, it was called aria di sortita; the second case was referred to as aria d’entrata or aria di congedo; and the third case was aria mediana. Presenting the character, the aria di sortita possessed a signaletic function. The affect was represented through specific repetitions (intercalare, repetition of the first strophe) and rhetorical effects intended to impress the memory of the listener. The aria d’entrata (or di congedo) reasserted the scene’s dominant affect and constituted its climax. Located at the end of the scene, it allowed the singer to gather applause without interrupting the action. Such risk of interruption was much higher with the aria mediana: thus, its frequency diminished by the end of the century while the aria d’entrata became predominant; by singing the aria before leaving the stage, the character did not interrupt the action but rather put it on ‘stand-by’. Furthermore, the aria d’entrata could ideally represent an affect as a universal, absolute quality. As a result, the more the aria focused on such universal truths, the more it could be recontextualisable in another operatic work: thus, arias could be removed from the original dramma per musica and reused in another opera. It could also happen that a singer might favour a specific aria particularly apt to showcase his or her vocal abilities; singers would integrate such arias in their own repertoire, with the possibility of performing these on different occasions: this introduced the concept of the aria di baule, which gained popularity during the eighteenth century.⁹

Indeed, the aria d’entrata became the prevalent type during the eighteenth century, but it was also the object of criticism. Emblematic is the case of Ludovico Antonio Muratori (Della perfetta poesia italiana; Modena, Soliani, 1706), who described the aria as a ‘ridiculous thing’, since it entailed the repetition of verses even when the action required a character’s immediate departure from the scene. Muratori’s objection is exemplary of the issues surrounding the nature of inverosimiglianza raised by the defenders of Italian poetry, who considered these poetic repetitions an obstacle to the unfolding of the dramatic action.

Nevertheless, the aria performed at the end of the scene became the most appreciated formula: in 1715, Jacopo Martello writes that ‘a musician ought never depart without a trill of roundelay. Whether plausible or not is of little concern’.¹⁰ As summarised in 1783 by Stefano Arteaga, such an aria was ‘the climax or epilogue of the passion’,¹¹ and should therefore not be placed at the beginning of the scene nor in the middle: the aria had to be placed at the end of the scene, for it would not be acceptable (verosimile) to have at the beginning of a scene a character already at the height of their passion. The affect should increase during the scene, through the use of dialogues, for instance; thus its climax should be reached with the aria at the end of the scene.

The Verse as Index of Affect

Specific dramatic situations or roles such as otherworldly spirits, satirical or pastoral figures, or comic characters can be efficiently emphasised through the poetic means of proparoxytone verse (verso sdrucciolo in Italian), in which the antepenultimate syllable is stressed. The verso sdrucciolo is also used in structural scenes, such as prologues or finales of acts. In the prologue of L’Orimonte (Minato and Cavalli, 1650), infernal allegorical characters sing a duet of proparoxytone verses (see Table 3.9), heightening a sense of terror.Medea’s scene in Cavalli’s Giasone (Act I scene 15) is another instance that relies on the verso sdrucciolo for the invocation of spirits (see Example 3.9). Comic situations also benefit from the expressive power of proparoxytone verse. In Cavalli’s Artemisia (Act I scene 16), Alindo sings an aria expressing his great delight in receiving a flower from Artemisia, since he hopes that she will return his love. Four scenes later (Act I scene 20), in the same garden, the servant Niso sings the very same intercalare previously sung by Alindo (see Table 3.10). Old Erisbe then sings the strophes, while Niso, snatching some flowers, mocks the woman, alluding to her withered face. Bitter disillusionment at the loss of youth emerges from the sententious couplet that closes both stanzas, while the intercalare is sung by Niso in an obviously mocking fashion.

‘Dell’antro magico’, transcription from ms. [c. 1664–1660], I-Vnm, mss.It.IV.363 (=9887), 58v–59v

Example 3.9 Francesco Cavalli, Il Giasone, Act I, sc. 15, aria for Medea

“A PDF version of this example is available for download on Cambridge Core and via www.cambridge.org/9780521823593”

Back to the Greeks: Prologues and Choruses

At least until the middle of the century, the dramma per musica was introduced by a prologue populated by allegorical or mythological figures. Its strophic structure attests to its derivation from spoken theatre, where prologues were also sung, at least originally. In the prologue of Peri’s Euridice, the allegorical figure Tragedy declares in seven quatrains of hendecasyllables in rima crociata (ABBA) her wish to ban the retelling of the cruellest events and to arouse instead ‘sweeter emotions in the heart’ by tempering the singing on ‘happier chords’ (see Table 3.11). As is typical in allegorical prologues, homogeneity characterises poetry and music: in Euridice’s prologue, the first verse of each quatrain enunciates a well-defined melodic line, which proceeds with regularity if not placidity; indeed, the allure of the prologue must be adapted to the solemnity of the occasion. An instrumental ritornello separates strophes sung on the same melodic line; only the use of some improvised variations, such as melismas affecting the dynamics and melodic turns, enliven these otherwise identical strophes. While not notated in the score, these improvised melismas function not only as ornamentation but also as signals: they are strategically located at the end of each quatrain on the stressed syllable, highlighting the ending of the strophe and the beginning of the instrumental ritornello.

Interspersed with instrumental ritornelli, this strophic structure was a frequent arrangement during the first half of the seventeenth century. Later, the prologue would assume more flexible and elaborate forms, often incorporating the dialogue. In the 1660s, the prologue would begin to disappear, while the opening scene’s significance would increase. Altercations and squabbles between divinities would be abandoned in favour of opening scenes featuring a civil community with a chorus celebrating the actions of the hero.

Commentative Voices

Choruses organised in strophes with well-defined melodies are usually favoured for entrance scenes and finales of acts or demarcative scenes, that is, scenes which separate individual episodes. When interpolated within the dramatic action, the chorus assumes a generic function of commentary, following the tradition of antique tragedy but with more restraint than in its original model.

In one of the choruses of L’Orfeo, Monteverdi avoided declamation and favoured instead a moment of pure spectacle: it occurs at the end of the third act as an intermede between two episodes (Orfeo’s dialogue with Caronte and the dialogue between Proserpina and Plutone). After having made Caronte fall asleep, Orfeo descends into the Underworld where the chorus of spirits comments on the virtues of mankind. Setting the first strophe to a five-voice imitative polyphony characteristic of the late Renaissance madrigal with its dense interweaving of voices, Monteverdi creates a grandiose aural effect. The second section of the chorus brings a new musical texture, its sixth verse split in the typical manner of the Venetian coro battente or spezzato, before all voices reunite again in the seventh verse with some concession to vocal virtuosity (see Example 3.10).

‘Nulla impresa per uom’, adapted from L’Orfeo, L’Ariana, Il Lamento di Olimpia, ed. Anna Maria Vacchelli (Cremona: Fondazione Claudio Monteverdi, 2014), mm. 337–347

Example 3.10 Claudio Monteverdi, L’Orfeo, Act III, chorus for the Spirits

“A PDF version of this example is available for download on Cambridge Core and via www.cambridge.org/9780521823593”

Venetian opera of the second half of the century provides instances of the chorus in opening scenes being assigned to a collective entity or to conflict episodes such as battles, which justify the presence of people or armed men, respectively, rather than otherworldly figures. In these instances, the function of the chorus contextualises and exalts historical events. Devoid of a prologue, Muzio Scevola (Minato and Cavalli; Venice, 1665) starts in medias res with an entrance scene (Act I scene 1) depicting the battle near the Tiber: ‘Tiber at the Sublician bridge. Melvio, Horatius Cocles fighting on the bridge. Publicola, Roman soldiers and sapers cut the bridge from one side. Porsenna, Tarquinius Superbus and the army of Tuscany from the other.’ A chorus delivers a series of senari (six-syllable verses with the main accent on the fifth syllable): ‘Si rompa, si franga, | reciso dall’onda | a l’oste ch’innonda | il varco rimanga. | Si rompa, si franga … ’.

Finally, one may wonder at the horizon offered by the complex spirit of experimentation proper to the seventeenth century and its legacy at the dawn of the Arcadian reform. Setting aside all considerations regarding the ‘purification’ of Italian poetry and its forms, I believe that the answer lies in attempts to conceive musical forms aimed at the expression of human affections in an increasingly universal and standardised sense. This resulted in a reduction of the variety of poetic and musical forms, and in the consolidation of a paramount structural dichotomy: the clear-cut distinction between recitative and aria, and the rise of the aria col da capo as the imitation of affect able to provide for the audience an edifying purpose and a cathartic effect: indeed, in order to be able to recognise the passions in ourselves, it helps to observe them on stage. Which was, after all, the very raison d’être of Greek theatre.

The ‘old regimes’ in Europe marked happy occasions such as births, birthdays, and weddings as conspicuously as they could, often in a series of sumptuous events. For the general public, there might be street processions, races, jousts, and religious rites made special by richly decorated liturgical spaces and extraordinary music. The nobility, however, expected private festivities suited to their place in society. They held banquets and balls for each other and often prepared staged entertainments. Across Europe, the nature of such private amusements varied from palace to palace and court to court; but it is as one of the varieties of occasional celebrations at court that opera began, borrowing and transforming different features from them. It shared with them song, dance, instrumental music, and poetic texts delivered by costumed figures. A set of songs and dances could be held together loosely by a theme. Recited poems and solo songs could pepper a pantomimic ballet; musical intermedi could lighten a spoken play. Any representation could focus on astonishing stage machines – flying dragons and chariots for gods and goddesses, sudden transformations of scenery, or the spouting of fountains. Poetic recitations or musical tableaux could justify or merely adorn these technical wonders. Although opera took on features of court spectacle, it never displaced the other forms. Not only were its special requirements onerous – a stable of singers with the time and ability to memorise and deliver extended roles – but it also demanded acceptance as poetic drama.

Court Spectacles

At both family and formal occasions, children, relatives, and palace pages often gave recitations and danced. Performers could also come from the larger circle of the court and those who served it. A few instances, from modest to elaborate, must serve to illustrate the widespread continuance of this practice from the sixteenth century and the equal importance of reciting and dancing. For a 1609 carnival party in Rome, the sons of Mario Farnese, Duke of Latera, and the nephews of Cardinal Bevilacqua acted in a pastoral written by their tutor that had musical intermedi with ‘balletti’.¹ When the Spanish royal family visited the estate of the Duke of Lerma in 1614, the royal children and twelve ladies-in-waiting performed Lope de Vega’s play El premio de la hermosura outdoors. The prince (and future King of Spain Philip IV) played the role of Cupid, and he and his sister danced between the acts. After the play, the ladies-in-waiting danced a choreographed máscara.² At the wedding of Henry of Lorraine and Margherita Gonzaga in Nancy in 1606, the guests heard recitations by costumed ‘slaves’, Cupid, and Classical goddesses, who sang and danced to the music of violins and lutes. The noble performers unmasked before the last two ballets and joined the court in attendance.³ The princes of the house of Savoy journeyed to Casale Monferrato in 1611 for the birthday of their sister Marguerite, wife of its governor, Francesco Gonzaga. Musicians and actors from the Gonzaga court in Mantua performed the five-act Il rapimento di Proserpina, which had music by Gonzaga’s maestro di cappella, Giulio Cesare Monteverdi (brother of the more famous composer). Three days later, at a villa outside the castle walls, nymphs and shepherds danced to music on the garden paths, with choreography by Gonzaga himself. Back in the city, they witnessed another five-act representation, one on the Classical myth of Psyche, with choruses, music by instrumental ensembles, and stage machines. Venus entered in a chariot drawn by doves; Etna erupted; and the stage became a sea for the entrance of a chariot drawn by sea horses, atop which Neptune sang.⁴

From London to Warsaw and Nancy to Naples, letters, newsletters, and published commemorative descriptions provide abundant, if incomplete, evidence of such entertainments. We call the most lavish of them ‘court spectacles’, a term that also encompasses horse ballets and staged naval battles. Even for those occasions that depended on a script or poems, the texts were more often than not ‘disposable’, composed without pretence to lasting literary value. Though literary enough in style, few were intended to be ‘literature’. After a long description of one Neapolitan occasion, a diarist wrote

Published descriptions of events, given out as souvenirs, served to publicise their magnificence to other, rival, courts. Neither comprehensive nor critical accounts, the booklets themselves were also part of the occasion, often adding a veneer of learned cachet to images of magnificence and largesse – music and figural choreography symbolising harmony and social order, the flourishing of the arts under peaceful government, the Classical gods bestowing their gifts on the reigning houses, or their godly fractiousness yielding to the might and grace of modern rulers, and so on. The full texts of English masques, by comparison, such as those of Ben Jonson and Thomas Campion, were often printed. Jonson especially elevated the ephemeral form, trying to integrate poetry, visual design, music, and dancing into symbolic and philosophical programmes.⁶

Given the lavish surroundings of the great halls in many palaces, costumes alone could create a sense of the ‘theatrical’. Decorated chariots – effectively, processional vehicles brought into the great hall – were appropriate means for the entrances of gods and goddesses. (This was an age in which the lavishness of one’s horse-drawn carriage denoted one’s social status). To construct a temporary stage capable of stage machines or multiple scene changes (by means of revolving or sliding panels) entailed preparation and enormous costs. Not surprisingly, patrons often commemorated the results in engravings of the scene designs. Those for a 1608 Medici wedding in Florence, for example, show a simple woodsy set for the spoken play Il guidizio di Paride by Michelangelo Buonarroti, the younger; but for the six intermedi between the acts, Giulio Parigi designed elaborate pavilions; gardens; ruins; Vulcan’s forge in Hades; the boat of Amerigo Vespucci approaching palm-studded tropical cliffs; and a grandiose, Classical Temple of Peace.⁷ Similar engravings later appeared to commemorate operatic productions. The first opera for which we have engraved scene designs is in fact from Florence, La regina Sant’Orsola of 1624–1625 (libretto by Andrea Salvadori, music by Marco da Gagliano). Its sets were also by Parigi, who had designed the intermedi of 1608.⁸ Although they are more idealised than faithful ‘snapshot’ views of any production, they show us the effects of stage machines (such as figures in clouds), preferred architectural styles, costumes, some notion of the blocking, and a generalised notion of bodily comportment, as well as the figures made by dancers and the positions of their arms and hands. For example, the engraving for Act III scene 4 of the 1636 Ermiona (music by Giovanni Felice Sances, c. 1600–1679) staged in Padua shows Apollo and the Muses on clouds and a ‘ballo’ of six Theban couples on stage. Each couple holds the hand of the other; the wrists of their free arms are bent inward and rest on their hips. The Classical military costumes completely expose the men’s legs; the women’s fairly simple shifts are mid-calf in length. Thus, all their footwork would have been quite visible.

Whether social dancing by the guests, theatrical dancing by members of the court, or choreographies executed by professionals, solo, pair, and ensemble dance was loved across Europe; and in the early seventeenth century, the French did not have the dominant influence they were later to have. The continued popularity of French ballets, staged Italian balli, Spanish saraos, and masque-like presentations in all countries can also partly be explained by the fact that dancing allowed participation by the ladies of the court. Few noblewomen received formal educations. While not unknowledgeable, many were hardly literate. (Some actresses and female singers must have been much more lettered than many of the duchesses and princesses whose praises they extolled). Formal dancing offered women one of the few opportunities for public self-display at court. Noblemen welcomed the chance, too; it was not rare for noblemen to dance solo.

‘Spectacle’, then, did not mean that courtiers watched as mere spectators; they were part of it. Opera, however, limited participation by courtiers, unless dancing followed it, as it often followed spoken plays. Tim Carter has gone so far as to say that the detachment created by the ‘conceptual and physical barriers between the stage action and the audience’ in opera meant that ‘opera failed to meet the demands of courtly entertainment.’⁹ This is in part why it could never supplant court spectacle.

Due to their occasional nature, the musical components of these events – from the most modest to the most costly – have by and large disappeared. Music for choruses and dances was the most functional and could be created quickly or even improvised. Simple, chordal music could also be the basis for a solo delivery, made elaborate by embellishments added by the singer. The solo récits by Pierre Guédron, for example, would appear to parallel Florentine recitative, but their accompaniments are full-textured, and their vocal lines do not borrow Italian techniques of expression. (The French would not adopt basso continuo accompaniments until mid-century).

Sometimes selections were later published in collections, mixed in with non-theatrical music, or preserved in privately held manuscripts. One unusual print was the description of the Delizie di Posillipo boscarecce e marittime (Sylvan and the Seaside Delights of Posillipo) staged in Naples in 1620.¹⁰ In this carnival extravaganza for the viceregal court of the Duke of Ossuna, dances for wild men, monkeys, and swans are interspersed with vocal music for nymphs and shepherds, sirens, Venus, Pan and his satyrs, and Cupid. The music was by at least five different composers (Giovanni Maria Trabaci, Francesco Lambardi, Pietro Antonio Giramo, Andrea Anzalone, and Giacomo Spiardo), which was not at all unusual, given the haste with which most court festivities were pulled together. Pan and his satyrs sing in Spanish, with poetic feeling for the hills and flora that surround the Bay of Naples. Cupid’s final solo, though in Italian, uses a Spanish musical style to remind the spectators that Venus rose from the sea, as he presents twenty-four real cavaliers to the ladies of the court, whose dancing finishes the ‘delights’ of the evening.

Since operas were not published with the aim of either sales or future performances, the fact that more operatic music has been preserved than music for more typical entertainments like the Delizie di Posillipo says the obvious – namely, that the music in musical dramas was of particular importance and its patrons had reason to make it known. A series of public and private events can be described in a printed descrizione; the lavishness of a spectacle can be represented in engravings. But scores were generally published either for professional use in church or as music for informal amateur performance (songs, madrigals, lute and guitar pieces) and teaching. Court spectacles were typically one-time and exclusive presentations; why, then, publish any of their music? The Medici wedding spectacles of autumn 1600 present an instructive case. The principal production, Il rapimento di Cefalo (Giulio Caccini, libretto by Gabriello Chiabrera) had music by at least three different composers and remained unpublished as a whole.¹¹ Jacopo Peri’s opera Euridice, however, was published in full. Although Peri himself and Giulio Caccini had been developing their new manner of solo singing for years and singing in varied declamatory styles in chamber, devotional, and theatrical venues, the publication of Peri’s score connected his new manner of expressive singing indissolubly with ancient Greek drama. Even though the work Euridice was performed at court in the context of a grand wedding, then, the audience for its score was not the wedding guests. It belongs to a third category of musical prints, which, like the madrigals of Gesualdo, was analogous to the learned books of philosophers or historians, representing, one might say, advances in the science of the art of music.

Opera, then, not only was a kind of court spectacle but it also shared almost all of its components with such presentations and continued to do so. Apart from the fact that all of its texts were sung, opera was distinguished by the new kinds of recitative – and the way they were accompanied. Nevertheless, recitative did not remain exclusive to opera; it, too, was soon absorbed into every type of occasional festivity. Delightful as it is, however, Le delizie di Posillipo has a theme but tells no story. It was theatrical, but it was not a ‘drama’. It was rather in the realm of drama that opera went through its growing pains and became more than a curiosity. This was in the staging of written plays – a part of the education of gentlemen and a growing number of nobles in the seventeenth century. As we shall see, both Peri’s Euridice and Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo belonged more naturally in this tradition.

Play-Acting, Spoken and Sung

Reciting plays was a common teaching device in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Boys in noble households memorised plays written by their tutors. Boarders in colleges performed more elaborate projects with larger casts, often with stage sets, machines, and incidental music provided by outside professionals. In Spain, Italy, France, Flanders, Poland, Catholic Germany, and Austria, Jesuit colleges staged verse plays annually, and many a young nobleman acquired his passion for the theatre from being in them. Short skits and five-act tragedies were given at regular times during the academic year, and especially during carnival time. Nobles and other clerics attended the performances, rarely women. At first they were in Latin, but in the course of the seventeenth century, French, German, and Italian took over. Most included some incidental music, such as songs and choruses composed by the college master of music.

The unexpected notion of singing a school play throughout arose in Rome, where choirboys-in-training were often attached to colleges. Completely sung plays were staged by the boys of the Roman Seminary as early as 1606 and by students at the German and Hungarian College in Rome in 1613 and 1628.¹² Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini) founded the Vatican Seminary in 1637 to train boys for service in St. Peter’s. Among their carnival plays were three operas in Italian composed by Virgilio Mazzocchi, music director of the basilica.¹³ The performances included humorous intermedi with schoolboy pranks;¹⁴ and one had a braggart Spanish captain in its cast, a musical portrayal of a commedia dell’arte character. Needless to say, treble voices dominate the casts in these musical dramas, which anticipate by centuries the twentieth-century works for children by Benjamin Britten.

Student actors grew into noble- and gentlemen who produced plays for themselves in private associations and academies. Having recruited Peri and Jacopo Corsi, poet Ottavio Rinuccini created La Dafne between 1595 and 1598 as a ‘simple test of what the song of our age might be capable’, offering the pastorale in three successive carnival seasons in the merchant’s home.¹⁵ Furthermore, Carter says of a later 1600 performance of Peri’s Euridice in which Corsi played the harpsichord, ‘Indeed, Euridice has the air of a family venture.’¹⁶ By the end of 1602, however, many of the original collaborators in the invention of opera had either left Florence or died. A few reconstituted themselves in 1607 as the Accademia degli Elevati, under the patronage of Cardinal Ferdinando Gonzaga, resident in Florence.¹⁷ Among their first carnival projects was another revised and re-set version of the same Dafne, with some music by the cardinal himself, which was given for the Gonzaga court in Mantua during carnival of 1608.¹⁸ Interestingly, Rinuccini’s libretto was chosen for the wedding celebrations in April of 1627 at Castle Hartenfels (Torgau) of Princess Eleonora of Saxony and Georg II, Landgrav of Hessen. But in a land not yet familiar with Italian recitative, the German adaptation of Dafne was produced as a ‘musical comedy’, that is, as a traditional German Sing-Comoedie with spoken dialogue, songs and dances (the German play was by Martin Opitz, the music by Heinrich Schütz).¹⁹

During the previous carnival, the Mantuan court had enjoyed a spoken play ‘on the usual stage and with the expected magnificence’. As a side entertainment, the Accademia degli Invaghiti staged the Greek legend of Orpheus as a ‘favola cantata’, probably with an all-male cast, in one of the former apartments of the duke’s sister.²⁰ The unusual performance of Orfeo with music by Monteverdi pleased so much that the duke ordered a second performance for the ladies of Mantua. This scrap of information indicates the restricted and initially male audience for the Gonzagas’ (and Monteverdi’s) first completely sung drama. Heard as a chamber work with five or six soloists, the fineness of the poetry and the subtleties of the singing could well be appreciated. Later, the composer introduced Orfeo to one of the duke’s correspondents, who wrote back to Mantua:

Monteverdi had success on a grander scale with several theatrical commissions from the Gonzaga court for the prince’s wedding in May 1608. The ‘mainstage’ production was a play, Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Idropica, in a three-hour version with a prologue also by Monteverdi, five additional new intermedi by other different composers, eight scene changes, machines, and balli. Again as an additional work, Monteverdi wrote an opera on the story of Ariadne, a Cretan princess abandoned by the Greek Theseus. Unlike Orfeo, it was not for performance in a chamber but intended for a temporary stage set up in a courtyard to be heard by a huge number of guests.²² The platform stage allowed no scene changes, and the duchess apparently thought the original conception too plain. She requested additional scenes for Venus and Cupid with the usual mechanical devices for their entrances, nudging the work toward the diversity and symbolism of ‘spectacle’. In addition to a hunting party and mock naval battle, the guests also enjoyed two balletti in which the Gonzagas and other members of the court danced. Among them was Monteverdi’s Ballo delle ingrate, whose lead role was performed by Virginia Ramponi Andreini (1583–1629 or 1630), the same actress who played the role of Ariadne in the opera. Thus, the wedding guests heard music by Monteverdi in multiple genres and venues on the same occasion. All had some recitative; it is hard to imagine that they thought to distinguish between them. Tellingly, the score to Orfeo, the academic project, was published, but not the score to Arianna, one item accommodated to the duchess’s desires, on a menu of wedding entertainments.

It was not so much within the realm of celebratory spectacle that opera came into being as musical drama. Instead of emblematic figures warbling pleasant or flattering verse in scenic tableaux, in plays, characters with human qualities experience changing situations that evoke varying emotional responses and demand that they make choices. Monteverdi’s Orpheus reacts with shock to the news of his bride’s death; his grief turns to resolve as he decides to win Eurydice back from Hades; he despairs upon losing her a second time. Characters interact with each other in drama, sometimes with persuasion or deceit, or out of pure lust. They think out loud in soliloquies, sometimes collapsing under the intensity of their conflicting feelings. To deliver such emotive moments, early opera drew on the freedom of rhythm, harmony, and vocal line afforded by the new Italian stile rappresentativo. Monteverdi’s Mantuan Orfeo and Arianna created musical models for such moments, even as their recitative was modelled on Peri’s. As with many other court productions, the complete music for Arianna has not been preserved, but ‘Lasciatemi morire’, its famous surviving recitative lament sung by the abandoned Ariadne, was emulated time and again and absorbed into the vocabulary of opera.²³

Florence and Rome in the 1620s

The 1620s in Italy were dense with academic and court theatricals of every genre, on pastoral, religious, historical, sentimental, and comic subjects. After the death of the Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici in 1621 left his widow Maria Magdalena of Austria co-regent of Tuscany with her mother-in-law Christina of Lorraine, a series of spectacles at the Florentine court continued to project Medici strength, and also their piety, by taking three female heroines as subjects: Saint Agatha in Jacopo Cicognini’s Il martirio di Sant’Agata (music by Giovanni Battista da Gagliano and Francesca Caccini, 1622); Saint Ursula in La regina Sant’Orsola, mentioned earlier; and Judith, slayer of Holofernes in Salvadori’s La Giuditta (1626).²⁴ Their well-known stories made strong dramas, with scenes of sexual advances resisted, the slaughter of war, and martyrdoms – all familiar situations from Jesuit plays about Christian heroes and heroines. For Catholics at war with both Protestants and Muslims, such stories – with their pagan and pastoral romances – reflected how much more was at stake than in the decades just past. New plays and libretti were grounded in history and called forth both human tragedy and victory. Although saints’ lives had long been staples of both popular and collegiate theatre, the shift from the portrayal of Classical myths in music opened up all of drama to musical treatment on a grand scale. Saint Ursula’s ‘heroic action’, it was noted, was staged ‘with the pomp worthy of the grandeur of ancient Rome’. Its author Salvadori noted that his text could also be performed as a play, without music, which points out the dramaturgical closeness of many verse and musical dramas of the 1620s and 1630s.

Cicognini’s Il Martirio di Sant’Agata illustrates a typical opportunistic conflation of musical script, drama, and spectacle. It had begun life in 1614 as a verse libretto for music. During carnival of 1622, it was performed as a largely spoken prose play given by the Compagnia di Sant’ Antonio di Padova. Five months later, for a visit to Florence by the Spanish ambassador Don Manuel de Zuñiga, it was transformed into a court spectacle with choruses, machines, dances, and women singers. Giovanni Battista da Gagliano and Francesca Caccini composed its sung choruses and arias; Parigi designed the scenes. Bearing no resemblance to the classicising tableaux of the earlier ‘favole in musica’, Cicognini’s play has prison and brothel scenes; a woman, disguised as a man, who rescues her beloved; a braggart captain from the commedia dell’arte; an allegorical figure (who represents Free Will); the destruction of a statue of Venus; an earthquake; and the announcement of the death of a Roman proconsul by an angel. Several of Cicognini’s other inventions – combined with elements of Crispus (Bernardino Stefonio, 1597), a standard school play in the Jesuit repertory – were put together compellingly in Giulio Rospigliosi’s opera libretto I santi Didimo e Teodora, given in Rome by Cardinal Francesco Barberini in 1635 and 1636.²⁵

Illustrations of the scenes for La regina Sant’Orsola appeared in one of the three editions of its libretto (see Figure 9.1, representing the battle between Romans and Huns). And although scores were published for two other Florentine spectacles, engravings of their sets were likewise issued with their libretti. (These were Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina – a balletto offered to Prince Władysław of Poland during in 1625 – and a grand spectacle in 1628 to celebrate the wedding of Margherita de’ Medici and the Duke of Parma, Odoardo Farnese: Marco da Gagliano’s opera La Flora on a libretto by Salvadori, whose intermedi were danced by the court). The Barberini family in Rome emulated these Florentine productions. In 1631/2, they chose as the subject of their first opera the life of a celibate Roman saint (echoing the choices of the Grand Duchess Maria Magdalena, with Ursula and Judith as allusions to herself). Stefano Landi’s score to the last Roman staging of Il Sant’Alessio (1634) was the first to be published with engravings of its stage sets.²⁶

An example of what secular Rome was willing to undertake in the 1620s was an academy production for carnival 1626 of La catena d’Adone, under the aegis of Prince Giovanni Giorgio Aldobrandini. As with the Florentine Sant’Orsola, a ten-page scenario was issued, followed by six editions of the libretto by Ottavio Tronsarelli, from five different publishers. Domenico Mazzochi published his score in October of the same year, dedicating it to Farnese and an Aldobrandini nephew. The libretto was adapted from Giambattista Marino’s epic poem Adone, the plot made to fit into the classicist’s span of one day and to suit the use of stage machines, which were engineered by Francesco de Cuppis.

In contradistinction to court spectacle, extraneous entr’actes were omitted. The librettist wrote in the dedication, ‘This tale is presented … not filled up by tiresome stretches of empty intermedi, which, by distracting the minds of the listeners, obscure the action more than they enhance it.’²⁷ Perhaps, then, partly compensating for the lack of the usual songs and dances of the intermedi, Mazzocchi added more tuneful music within the scenes themselves. He called these mezz’arie (‘half arias’), that is, non-strophic songs. Their purpose was ‘to break the tedium of the recitative’ without delaying the narrative with songs of repeated stanzas. Example 4.1 comes from the end of Act II scene 2 of La Catena d’Adone. At his bedside in the golden palace, the sorceress Falsirena has succumbed to temptation and decided to enchain the Adonis she loves. Her previous indecision is transformed into a happy song over a rhythmically moving bass, but only for a single quatrain in poetic metres for recitative. She turns to regard the sleeping Adonis, now ‘speaking’ in tender recitative over a slow bass (‘since it is for love’; ‘che per amor intanto’). The bass line then resumes its motion for Falsirena’s poetic closing lines, as she sings a languid descent of surrender ‘to enchain the one who has sweetly enchained my soul’ (‘per incatenare chi dolce incatenò l’anima mia’.) Though mezz’arie were not an original invention on Mazzocchi’s part, his naming and use of them recognised that passages in simple recitative had a different cumulative effect in a full-length drama than in the few short scenes of a pastoral. Mazzocchi’s short passages in aria style acknowledged that, among spectacles, the different genres posed different problems in pacing and movement; the option of creating mezz’arie freed the composer from the internal divisions of speech and song created by the dramatic poet.

Example 4.1 Domenico Mazzocchi, La catena d’Adone, favola in musica (Rome, 1626), Act II, sc. 2, mezz’aria for Falsirena (Venice: Alessandro Vincenti, 1626), mm. 237–59

“A PDF version of this example is available for download on Cambridge Core and via www.cambridge.org/9780521823593”

Accommodating Spectacle, Drama, and Music

An anonymous treatise entitled Il Corago, o vero, Alcune osservazioni per metter bene in scena le composizioni drammatiche (The Choragus, or Some Observations for Staging Dramatic Works Well) gives us an inside view of producing drama at court in the 1620s.²⁸ Its author had lived in Florence before 1621 and was writing some time after 1628.²⁹ We do not know what kind of circulation, if any, this treatise may have had in its time; nevertheless, its discussion ranges from the ideal script to stage movement and lighting, with unusually detailed opinions by someone who had seen court productions in Florence, Mantua, Ferrara, and Parma; had knowledge of stage engineering; and most likely had supervised performances himself.

The author knew that what keeps an audience pleased is variety and vivacity. What made a production spectacular, however, were its machines.³⁰ The technical illustrations for the stage machines, however, are missing in the source manuscript: five ways of handling a proscenium curtain, six mechanisms for changing scenery, and two ways to represent the sea; using moving carri and clouds; figures and machines that emerge from below; birds and other things that move through the air (e.g., a falling Lucifer); and, above all, transformations to make the audience marvel. Important as they were, though, machines alone could not make a drama. The author advises the playwright to compose stageworthy pieces between three and five hours in length.³¹ He tells writers that a work best performed in a short version can always be published later in its ‘full’ length. Too many solo speeches can bring displeasure, especially if they are more narrative than expressive, and even emotional laments should be varied.

Surprisingly, the first kind of musical recitation the treatise takes up consists of a voice speaking over instrumental accompaniment, a practice for which we have no musical evidence. The second kind of ‘recitation’ consists of strophic arias in suitably different moods. One advantage of arias, says the treatise, is that listeners do not remember tunes after only one hearing but come to remember and enjoy them more in second and subsequent stanzas. Too many strophes, however, will bore listeners, for a happy aria stays happy for all of its strophes, and individual words that differ from the main mood cannot be expressed musically.³² The third type is not tied to a repeated air, but

For singing in this ‘recitative style’, the author recommends ‘qualche poco d’armonia’ – a thin accompaniment, since the aim is ‘to express ordinary speech most naturally’.³⁴ Speaking from experience, the author also describes the disadvantages of this ‘true’ recitative style, namely, the relatively flat contour of the vocal line; the deadening effect of too many cadences (‘especially if not all the audience particularly enjoys music’); the lack of response from the audience, if the singer should lack expressivity in voice and movement; and the absence of vocal embellishments. It is up to the poet to help the composer avoid these dangers.

The choices discussed in each chapter of Il Corago illustrate how the theatrical genre that opera became resulted from specific and often circumstantial decisions. The treatise represents the accommodation of drama and language to musical performance and to the Baroque love of the elements of spectacle – movable scenery, stage machines, music, and dancing. It does not acknowledge the tensions between them per se but points to the problems by the nature of the advice it gives. A published description of the three-act Arione staged in Turin in 1628 apologises for the necessity to accommodate drama and music to each other: ‘In order not to incur tedium due to the length of the music, it was necessary to shorten the material, leaving the two fishermen Millo and Mirino in the story hanging, and not much conclusion in the end for [the character] Aci.’³⁵ In 1635 Calderón de la Barca’s first theatrical undertaking was a collaboration with the Florentine engineer Cosimo Lotti. The Spaniard complained that the Italians cared more about the invention of the machines than the play.³⁶

Although we have few similar statements about dramaturgical concerns from librettists and composers, many of the aesthetic issues associated with early opera inform a series of learned writings by Giovanni Battista Doni (1595–1647), a Florentine jurist and antiquarian who served as secretary for Cardinal Barberini in Rome until he returned to Florence in 1640. His several Lessons and Trattato della musica scenica (Treatise on Theatrical Music) discuss ancient drama hand in hand with general critiques of modern musical spectacles.³⁷ In terms of dramaturgy, Doni correctly maintained that the ancients spoke dialogues in one metre and sang monodies, or cantica, in a variety of lyric metres for emotional soliloquies. After twenty-odd years of hearing varying sorts of dramas in music, Doni claimed that one person in ten would confess to ‘a certain tedium and excess, that does not satisfy the ear. They would say perhaps that the fault is the composers’, who still haven’t found a kind of melody suited to the stage that would have all the desired richness and quality.’³⁸ It was not setting a text to music that made it too long, he asserted, but the fact that too much of the poetry was ‘languid’, whereas ancient drama had lively back-and-forth dialogue, threats, insults, and the like. Basically, Doni argued, dialogue must actively portray strong feelings or the music cannot. He advocated a combination of spoken dialogue, using the best actors for non-singing roles, and the most expressive music for fewer, but choice, singers, who could also act. ‘We would not at times then’, he wrote, ‘see people going onstage who either can’t be heard for their weak voices or who are so inept and clumsy in movement that they cause more laughter than delight.’³⁹ He also counselled against having unrelated intermedi between acts, advocating that scene changes, machines, and choruses be incorporated into the main action, and that a short, pleasant ‘commedietta’ close off the evening (which would parallel the closing satyr play of antiquity).⁴⁰ Doni’s main objections pertained to the presentation of serious dramas. He considered pastorals, in contrast, to be a delightful modern invention, which, being entirely about love, entirely fictitious, and without disasters and revolutions (!), were better suited to be entirely sung.⁴¹

Libretto after libretto and score after score, recitative, aria, and dance music accommodated to each other, discovering the plasticity required for dramatic music. Since so few scores were published or circulated, composers had few models to learn from (only ten opera scores were published before 1630). It is remarkable that, in this still-trial phase, opera was sampled in foreign courts, although it took root in none of them. We have already mentioned the non-operatic adaptation of Rinuccini’s Dafne performed in Hessen in April of 1627.⁴² That same spring some Florentines in Madrid were preparing to introduce opera to the Spanish court. In December they staged La selva sin amor, ‘a little machine play in the Florentine manner’ commissioned from Lope. It had been set to music – with difficulty – by an Italian lutenist, Filippo Piccinini, who had come to Madrid in 1613.⁴³ The king, Philip IV, was pleased, but the work was no threat. Madrid, London, and Paris, unlike Italy, had strong traditions of public theatre, which defined the locus of their ‘national’ dramas. In Spain the comedia nueva, performed outdoors in corrales, was popular at all levels of society and – with its mix of humour, music, philosophy, and moral propositions – proved impossible to supplant. Neither Italian opera nor even the idea of opera took root in Spain until the end of the century.

It appears that Monteverdi’s Orfeo was staged in the Austrian city of Salzburg in 1614. Three years later, an original ‘Sing-Comoedie’ on the life of St. Ignatius of Loyola was staged by students at the Jesuit seminary in Würzburg, Germany.⁴⁴ It was not until 1627 that a probable opera was heard at the imperial court in Austria. The work in question was not an experiment in the local language but an Ovidian pastoral in Italian performed by the professional troupe of actors from Mantua led by Giovanni Battista Andreini.⁴⁵ The following year Monteverdi would send music from Venice for a mascherata. Also in Italian were the efforts of the prince of Poland. First staged in Florence in late 1624, La regina Sant’Orsola was given again early in 1625 with a different cast for the prince’s visit there. When he became King Władysław IV in 1632, he established a court theatre, which presented twelve Italian operas between 1635 and 1648 in Warsaw, Vilnius, and Danzig.⁴⁶

Venice had numerous private academies, but in 1622 only a few public theatres where professional actors played. The social lives and preferred entertainments of the wealthy of this republic were discreet and remain little known. We do know that Monteverdi composed music (now lost, except for a trio, ‘Come dolce oggi l’auretta’) for a post-banquet Proserpina rapita for the wedding of Lorenzo Giustiniani and Giustiniana Mocenigo in 1630 (Venice). The published text by Giulio Strozzi calls it a ‘drama per musica’ and mentions the dance master and the stage designer, Giuseppe Alabardi.⁴⁷ Alabardi would later be involved in the earliest operas given in the public Teatro S. Cassiano, but this is seven, eight years in the future, a story that starts another chapter with the arrival in 1637 of a troupe of Roman musicians.

Influenced by regency spectacle and opera in Florence, the Barberini sponsored at least one musical drama every eligible carnival from 1631 to 1643. Their Sant’Alessio, produced modestly in 1631, was given more grandly in 1632 in the newly completed Palazzo Barberini alle Quattro Fontane. In 1633, Don Taddeo, the married brother, offered a more secular opera, Erminia sul Giordano, based on Tasso’s crusaders’ epic Gerusalemme liberata, with music by Michelangelo Rossi (1601/2–1656) and libretto by Rospigliosi.⁴⁸ Erminia sul Giordano also moved toward spectacle with the engagement of the Ferrarese stage engineer Francesco Guitti, whose inventions spurred the alterations to the 1634 Sant’Alessio, which in turn appear to have been reused in the 1635 Didimo e Teodora (libretto by Rospigliosi; composer unknown).⁴⁹ The more modest spiritual operas for the Vatican seminarians of 1638–1639, 1641, and 1643 have already been mentioned.

In 1637, the Barberini turned in a very different direction when they offered a rather non-spectacular production, but one based on a tale by Boccaccio, to which Rospigliosi added three dialect-speaking characters from the commedia dell’arte, as well as two extra romantic subplots. So many aspects of the libretto of L’Egisto, ovvero, Chi soffre speri are different from the earlier Rospigliosi texts for the Barberini, it is tempting to speculate that some may have resulted from taking Doni’s opinions as challenges. New are the quick repartee and a variety of levels of speech; the lessened melodiousness and speeding up of the recitative dialogue; music from more than one composer – Mazzocchi and Marco Marazzoli, the first operatic undertaking for both – and the integration of the intermedi with the main story. Furthermore, the complex plot lines in Chi soffre speri increased both the number of solo roles and the occurrences of intercutting scenes necessary to carry the subplots forward. It was the first of the Barberini operas to have the language, pacing, and clever intreccio, or interdependence of plotlines, of Venetian opera of the future, as well as a cast of distinct social groups. Its principal figures were landed gentry; servants provided humour.⁵⁰ Both sets of characters sing mostly in plot-driving recitative and have few songs. Sweet longings are expressed by a third group of generic, pastoral would-be lovers, who provide the most lyric music. Innovative as it was, the realism of the non-pastoral characters in Chi soffre speri significantly reduced the opportunities for melody.⁵¹

When Chi soffre speri was revived in 1639, the revised production was mounted in an annex building to the Barberini palace that Rospigliosi reported could seat 3500. New intermedi were written for the pastoral and comic characters of the main play, with special stage effects by the most famous sculptor, architect, and stage engineer in Rome, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680). The second intermedio, ‘La fiera di Farfa’ (‘Market day in the town of Farfa’), became the most famous part of the production, with its lighting that mimicked the rising and setting of the sun, booths for vendors hawking their wares (much as in madrigals composed of ‘cries of London’), animals for sale, and a climactic ‘combattimento’ as a mocking skirmish between the comic Zanni and a cavalier (who while dancing had struck a dog).⁵²

A comparison with La Galatea, an opera published in 1639 by one of the Barberinis’ own singers, castrato Loreto Vittori, shows how different Rospigliosi’s libretti were from the pastoral works still common in the European courts.⁵³ Its central figures – Acis, Galatea, Polyphemus, Venus, and Cupid – are from Classical myth; Vittori added a gratuitous subplot of an older shepherdess in pursuit of a young hunter. Its first recorded performance is for carnival of 1644 in the palace of Prince Cariati in Naples. Thus what is apparently the first opera given in Naples was created by a Barberini musician and organised by a Roman prelate, but was by then not typically Roman.

The 1642 Barberini opera brought in a huge cast of separated lovers from Ariosto’s romance epic Orlando furioso. Rospigliosi’s libretto, Il palazzo incantato, presents a dizzying number of minor subplots surrounding the love triangle of Bradamante, Ruggiero, and Angelica. The many subplots are tangential, but they do allow much more lyrical singing. The composer Luigi Rossi (?1597/8–1653) was the recognised chamber lyricist of the age, but general gossip deemed his first opera too long and too lachrymose.⁵⁴

Barberini opera spurred the migration of Italian opera to the French royal court, due to the strenuous efforts of the Roman Cardinal Mazarin, who had acted in Jesuit plays at the Collegio Romano and had heard the Barberinis’ Didimo e Teodora in 1635.⁵⁵ From 1644 Mazarin used his position as Prime Minister of France to bring Italian musicians, scene designers, and engineers to Paris. Just as a professional acting troupe from Mantua had first brought opera to Vienna in 1627, it was a mixed group of Italian professionals who performed at the Salle du Petit Bourbon in December of 1645, presenting a partly spoken and partly sung La finta pazza, in a version of a Venetian repertory piece of the troupe called the Febiarmonici.⁵⁶ The fact that almost all the comments by the French centred on Giacomo Torelli’s stage machines, the like of which had not been seen before in France, lessens the likelihood that the work was presented as ‘an opera’, as opposed to an elaborate evening created by the comedians and stage engineer.⁵⁷ Candidates for the first completely sung operas heard in Paris appear rather to be the Roman Chi soffre speri in 1646, noted above, and Luigi Rossi’s second opera, Orfeo, composed expressly for Paris in 1647 (libretto by Francesco Buti). These two were performed in the Palais Royal, and with them court opera finally came to the court that defined court culture for the era.

Mazarin had no opportunity, however, to produce another Italian opera until 1654, after his political return from the upheavals of the Fronde. From the extensive correspondence and public reports on Les noces de Pélée et de Thétis, it is clear that one cannot think of it as primarily a musical work by a single composer (the Roman Carlo Caproli).⁵⁸ The ‘comedy’ was sung in Italian, a language the French court had come to detest, by a cast composed of soloists from the Savoy court and from Rome, with mostly French singers in the ensembles. It was given at least ten times at the Petit Bourbon, for an audience that extended beyond the court. The ten ballet entrées were not intermedi to the play but were prompted by each scene. They had their own airs and music written entirely by the French. The ballets were, of course, danced by members of the court, including the King Louis XIV himself.⁵⁹ In March of 1621, Glückwünschung des Apollinis und der neun Musen (Tribute by Apollo and the Nine Muses) had greeted Johann Georg I, the Elector of Saxony, on his birthday, singing music by Schütz.⁶⁰ In 1654 the King of France made his entrance at the Petit Bourbon as Apollo himself, descending in a machine, with an entourage of Muses, all noblewomen (among them Princess Henriette of England, as the English court was still in exile in France). That the score was never published is not surprising, since the genre of the entire presentation was a pure political competition, which the Italians lost.