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.