In 1663 Giustiniano Martinoni, in his updating of Francesco Sansovino’s Venezia città nobilissima et singolare, wrote of one of Venice’s most important ornaments, its theatres. As Martinoni explained,

‘Public opera’ famously commenced in Venice in 1637 at the Teatro S. Cassiano, owned by the Tron family, with Andromeda (libretto by Benedetto Ferrari, c. 1603–1681; music by Francesco Manelli, 1595–1667). In this account, that theatre’s foundational role in the history of opera scarcely matters to the author, for the most important opera theatre in Venice in 1663 was SS. Giovanni e Paolo. The other opera theatre, S. Salvatore (also known as S. Luca), had only presented its third season and, quite possibly, its first one of excellence. (The man in charge that year was Vettor Grimani Calergi, cousin to Giovanni Grimani, and a seasoned connoisseur of music, theatre, and singers).

Martinoni’s description speaks of opera as practiced in Venice in 1663, rather than retelling the two-and-a-half decades now past as the opera chronicler and librettist Cristoforo Ivanovich would do two decades later in his Memorie teatrali di Venezia (1681; 2nd edn. 1688; Ivanovich’s book was dedicated to Grimani’s nephews and successors Giovanni Carlo and Vincenzo Grimani).² Moreover, to the modern scholar the blank spaces between Martinoni’s words reveal something of the fragility of the system, for a number of theatres from the first two decades of public opera were not worthy of mention: S. Moisé (where Monteverdi’s Arianna was performed in 1639), SS. Apostoli, and S. Aponal (also known as S. Apollinare, Aponal in the Venetian dialect), which had operated for seven years in the 1650s. Martinoni’s inclusion of S. Cassiano is, in the end, a nod to its importance in Venice’s theatrical history, as that theatre had ceased to present opera with the departure of impresario Marco Faustini to Giovanni Grimani’s theatre after the 1659/60 season.

Opera at the Grimani theatre began during S. Cassiano’s third year – the 1638/9 season – and Giovanni Grimani’s dedication to Venice’s operatic enterprise was unfailing. His passion for his theatre must have contributed a sense of stability to Venice’s burgeoning but shaky opera industry. Indeed, the family seems to have made a conscious decision that their enterprise would not fail. As far as we know, of all the Venetian theatres operating until the time of Giovanni’s death, only SS. Giovanni e Paolo remained more or less immune from notarial and legal disputes. This is not to suggest that the Grimani theatre did not suffer financial or artistic setbacks: no theatre could have been immune from those difficulties. Rather, Giovanni Grimani must have resolved to settle nearly all claims internally. This level of commitment is suggested by his tax declaration in 1661 for the theatre, two years before Martinoni’s encomium to him:

Giovanni Grimani might be looked upon as one of the heroes of what had become that staple of Venetian entertainment – public, commercial opera. Financing and running these theatres was at best unpredictable: S. Cassiano, for instance, saw many problems during its first decade.⁴ When Francesco Cavalli (1602–1676) agreed in 1648 to come back to the theatre, then operating under a new management team, he did so with extraordinary perks, a sure sign that he had wavered, given that his librettist, Giovanni Faustini, was by then mounting operas across town at S. Moisé.⁵ For much of the century, S. Cassiano would present opera only sporadically, and it never again matched the consistency and excellence it boasted during its first decade of operation.

Although publicity such as that provided in libretti would have served to broadcast the allure of public opera, the timing of the opera season during the carnival itself increased the odds of success, as this event occurred when the city teemed with visitors, and at a magical time when masks lent an aura of mystery and excitement to the city: Venice’s tradition of carnival entertainment, and its existing theatres supplied with boxes, made the transition from comedy to the production of opera easier than it might otherwise have been.⁶ (A secondary season sometimes took place at the time of the Ascension fairs, when the city was filled with merchants from a wide area of Italy).

SS. Giovanni e Paolo, S. Salvatore, S. Cassiano, S. Moisé, and S. Aponal had at one time hosted commedia dell’arte troupes. All of them would eventually be called into service as opera theatres, some of them alternating between comedy and opera. Other occasional opera theatres included the Saloni and the Teatro Cannaregio. Three more theatres, the Novissimo, S. Angelo, and S. Giovanni Grisostomo were built new in order to present opera. What is clear is that each theatre might operate according to a different model and change even from season to season. We have seen how Giovanni Grimani was intimately involved in the running of the theatre (as would be his nephews), though many theatre owners for all intents and purposes removed themselves from the management altogether, relying on impresarios, and sometimes even other noblemen to manage and promote their theatres.

New Theatres

What began at S. Cassiano with the Tron family soon spread to other spaces in Venice. The Grimani family opened SS. Giovanni e Paolo in 1638. In 1640, in advance of the fifth season of public opera in Venice, came the Teatro Novissimo, unique in the history of Venice’s theatrical life: it was built on the grounds of the Dominican monastery of SS. Giovanni e Paolo (so that it was quite near to the theatre that bore that name), not on the property of a private family. The theatre was built, apparently, by Girolamo Lappoli, a Tuscan businessman who had resided in Venice from the early 1630s and formed contacts with Venetian noblemen. In recent decades the theatre has been associated with Giovanni Francesco Loredan’s academy, the Incogniti, to the point that it has been called by some the ‘Incogniti theatre’.⁷ While it is true that three Incogniti members wrote libretti to be performed there – Giulio Strozzi (1583–1652), the Messinese author Scipione Errico (1592–1670), and Maiolino Bisaccioni (1582–1663) – and that Giacomo Badoaro (1602–1654), one of Monteverdi’s librettists, later had some connection with the theatre, the financial underpinnings of the enterprise are far from clear. Various creditors, from artisans and artists to other ‘benefactors’, deluged the impresario Lappoli with their demands to be repaid. One of Lappoli’s associates was Joseph Camis, a Jewish doctor who had guaranteed the fees of the singer Anna Renzi (c. 1620–d. after 1661) at a time when she might otherwise have gone to sing at a different theatre. Late in the theatre’s life Lappoli attempted to turn it over to Bisaccioni.

For its inauguration in 1641 the Teatro Novissimo presented Francesco Sacrati’s (1605–1650) La finta pazza on a libretto by Giulio Strozzi. This first production was extensively praised (especially in Il canocchiale per la finta pazza published by Surian in 1641). La finta pazza not only made a star out of its prima donna, Renzi, but it became the first Venetian opera to travel not only to various cities in Italy, but also to Paris. The publicity that emanated from the pens of the Incogniti must have helped to increase the viability of the theatre (despite the frequent debts that went unpaid by Lappoli), but it also would have served to augment attendance at the other theatres. Yet, no matter the excellence of its artists and its operas, there was no family to stand behind the theatre: after several years of wrangling between the Dominican friars and the impresario, the Novissimo was torn down, by which time two of its stars, the scenographer Giacomo Torelli (1608–1678) and dancer and choreographer Giovan Battista Balbi (fl. 1636–1654, formerly of S. Cassiano), had moved to Paris.

Also extraordinary was the eventual sharing of personnel between the Novissimo and SS. Giovanni e Paolo. Lappoli later rented the Grimani theatre, and artists such as Torelli and Renzi, who had gained their initial fame at the newer theatre, worked at both, most famously with Renzi’s performance as Ottavia in L’incoronazione di Poppea during the 1642/3 season.

As mentioned above, theatres such as the Teatro S. Moisé (under the ownership of the Zane family for much of the seventeenth century) and S. Cassiano (the Tron theatre), alternated between comedy and opera. S. Aponal, once a comedy theatre (most likely in the late 1620s and early 1630s), rose to great heights under the direction of Giovanni Faustini, and then his brother Marco. But, as Marco later moved on to other venues, S. Aponal eventually ceased to operate altogether in that capacity.⁸ It was not until the 1670s that two new theatres were built in Venice – each important in different ways and quite opposite in terms of size, repertoire, and management – and both long lived, unlike the Novissimo. They opened in 1677 and 1678, respectively: S. Angelo (built by Francesco Santurini on land owned by the Marcello and Cappello families), then S. Giovanni Gristomo, built by Giovanni Carlo and Vincenzo Grimani to serve as their second opera theatre, a more luxurious and elite theatrical venue. S. Giovanni Grisostomo was known for its ‘high’ libretti and the excellence of its singers. S. Angelo often served as an entry point for young singers, and it offered a wider range of types of libretti.

The Financing of Operas

Commercial opera in Venice began with musicians who had travelled there from other regions, that is, it had not come into being as a result of a local desire to promote a new sort of carnival entertainment. Many of the artists had earlier mounted the festa teatrale Ermiona in Padua (1636; score by Giovanni Felice Sances, c. 1600–1679, on a libretto by Pio Enea degli Obizzi, 1592–1674).⁹ The production of opera depended on a theatre (and in the case of Venice, all the theatres were permanent rather than temporary structures), a librettist, a scenographer, carpenters, painters, a composer, dancers, and musicians. To this could be added a dedicated impresario, though, during the first season at S. Cassiano, the artists had no need of one, as they served as a self-contained unit. When they needed capital, one of the singers agreed to make a loan of 100 ducats. Surely the company needed much more.

The dedication of the next opera at S. Cassiano, La maga fulminata (libretto and music once again by Ferrari and Manelli) referred to an overall cost of 3,000 ducats, but the company may have recouped much of their ‘investment’ from box rentals and ticket receipts.¹⁰ It is likely, however, that Ferrari and Manelli did at some point seek investors from Venetians of various stripes. During the next few years we see evidence of loans from a variety of noblemen. Often the company had difficulty repaying them, and the interested parties would end up in court. In other cases help came not in a formal loan but through a guarantor, who would promise payment when members of a company were short of funds. These guarantors were essential to the success of the opera business, as, for the most part, liquid cash was not available until the season was underway, through box rentals and the sales of tickets and refreshments.¹¹

Some of the early companies were sustained through investments of a small group of partners, as we see in Marco Faustini’s at S. Aponal and S. Cassiano. Here any profits and losses would be shared by the members, which in Faustini’s case varied between cittadini, noblemen, and artisans. Later companies were sustained through a more general financing system called carati, or carats (the purchasers of these carats were called caratadori), whereby a number of investors supported a business scheme, thus spreading among the group any given individual’s profit or loss. This fundamental practice of business in Venice dated back to at least the fifteenth century. At least in theory, it protected both the investors and those in need of payment (in this case the theatre owner, artisans, and all the musicians), and it resembles the practices of academies who sponsored opera theatres in other parts of Italy.¹²

The box system provided the surest source of income, whether for the theatre owner or for the impresario. Indeed, the fees for individual boxes came to be the source of funds payable to creditors of all types. In the latter part of the seventeenth century, the Grimani brothers, having hundreds of boxes in three theatres under their control, frequently transferred the box income, sometimes to singers, but also to tradespeople or many others who held credits. Eventually the boxes would become an even greater source of income for the theatre owners when they were put up for sale, in essence becoming the property of a buyer who could transfer the box or pass it down to his or her descendants.

While the ‘orchestra’ (ground-floor seats) would be rented by a wide variety of people, both Venetians and foreigners, the boxes were occupied by Venetian nobles (in the prime locations), and, higher up towards the ceiling, less wealthy nobles and a number of cittadini. Some boxes were rented on a more or less permanent basis by visiting dukes such as the Hanover Brunswicks.¹³ Others were chosen by lot, by the doge himself, for the benefit of ambassadors serving in Venice.¹⁴ The boxes offered a modicum of privacy, especially when the spectators wore masks. They also provided an opportune location from which to launch printed sonnets in honour of favourite singers. They might also prove to be places of violence, whether by means of fists or pistols, or places for amorous assignations. The opera box, then, served as a locus for passions of varying kinds.

At S. Aponal, in the 1650s, impresario Marco Faustini personally held the rights to the box income: even if the company lost money over the season, he, at least (rather than his partners), was guaranteed an income. Naturally, he was free, but not required, to reinvest those funds in order to cover debts. But what, or who, was an impresario? He (or she) ‘ran’ the company, arranged for the musicians, and paid everyone involved with the enterprise.¹⁵ Yet the responsibilities might well vary from theatre to theatre. In the case of Faustini, the most well-documented impresario in seventeenth-century Venice, his duties varied according to the theatre. At S. Aponal (1651–1657) and S. Cassiano (1657–1660) he pretty much ran the show. Despite the difference in social rank his importance in the company was greater than that of his noble partners. In both cases the theatre owners had little to do with the company other than to see their rental fees well in hand. At SS. Giovanni e Paolo (1660–1663), though, the situation could not have been more different. Here Faustini was not responsible for the rent, and he would have dealt with the most knowledgeable theatre owner in the city. Giovanni Grimani would have had strong views on the singers to be hired and, most likely, the repertoire. During the end of Faustini’s career as an impresario, the owners were the teenagers Giovanni Carlo and Vincenzo Grimani, so that Faustini would have been the one with far greater experience.

Venice continued to welcome other men who ran theatres over long periods of time, such as Santurini and Giovanni Orsato. Impresarios in Venice included artisans, librettists, noblemen, and businessmen, but, generally, except for Francesco Cavalli around the cusp of 1640, not composers, at least until the time of Antonio Vivaldi in the early 1700s.

Making Opera

Singers and Competition among the Theatres

Unlike opera in France and some Italian cities, a chorus did not figure into Venetian opera during the seventeenth century. Rather, operas might end with an ensemble featuring the main characters. ‘Extras’ did figure into the opera, but their role was to add grandeur to the stage in scenes where the ‘people’ were present, not to augment the musical forces. Nor did audiences hear ‘big’ orchestras such as that featured in Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Through the 1660s they heard an ensemble of strings (and an occasional brass instrument) accompanied by continuo instruments. Later in the century, winds and brass would routinely find their place in the orchestra.

Every opera needed a corps of singers, often from ten to twelve, so that over the years many singers passed through Venice. Some of them, whether Venetian or from elsewhere, sang both in Saint Mark’s Chapel and on the stage. Although several Venetian women (including Elena Passarelli, Margarita Pia, and, later, Vittoria Tarquini and Faustina Bordoni) sang in the theatres of their native city, most female roles were filled by women from Rome, Bologna, and elsewhere. In Venice, female roles were played by women, whereas in many other locales they would have been played by castrati.

Some singers, both male and female, had careers in Venice that lasted for more than a decade, while others sang there only rarely. As noted by Martinoni in the description that opened this chapter, singers were brought in not only from Italy, but from Germany and Austria (that is, Italian singers employed by various foreign courts). Indeed, impresarios in Venice sought the best they could afford, no matter where they might be found: by the end of the century, especially owing to the growing number of theatres, hundreds of singers had passed through Venice, had built up reputations, and were then available to sing elsewhere. One never knew when the next singer would arrive who would ignite the passions of both listeners and impresarios, as the Roman Anna Renzi had done earlier at the Teatro Novissimo in the 1640s.

The debut of the Roman Vincenza Giulia Masotti in the 1662/3 season was one of these occasions. It occurred at S. Salvatore, newly led by Vettor Grimani Calergi, when Masotti performed in Cesti’s Dori (Giovanni Filippo Apolloni, Innsbruck, Hof-Saales, 1657). Giuseppe Ghini, a member of the cast, wrote to his patron:

This account emphasises the singing, pure and simple, of a new singer who would change the dynamics of impresarial dealings for years to come, for Masotti was the singer impresarios lusted over. One of Marco Faustini’s colleagues declared that the efforts to hire her in the mid-1660s had driven him mad.²¹ Masotti sang at S. Salvatore during Grimani Calergi’s years there, and then at SS. Giovanni e Paolo after the death of Giovanni Grimani. Masotti’s ascendance, perforce, upset the status quo at the two opera theatres in Venice: Caterina Porri, prima donna at SS. Giovanni e Paolo since 1653, would find her way to S. Salvatore. Faustini, in his prolonged and fruitless efforts to hire Masotti for SS. Giovanni e Paolo for the 1665/6 season, would have to ‘make do’ without either Porri or Masotti: in the last weeks before the opening of the season, he was forced to settle on women with lesser reputations.²²

The Visual Element: Scenery, Costumes, Dancers, and Extras

Venetian Opera and the Venetian Republic

Opera in Venice differed from that mounted in other duchies and kingdoms regarding who or what was being honoured or celebrated. If in France, it was designed to reflect the splendour of the Sun King, Louis XIV, and in various duchies that of the reigning duke; in Venice it could be said to celebrate the magnificence of the Most Serene Republic, whether overtly or not. Most likely, the doges would only have known opera in Venice from those years preceding their reign, when they were free to socialise in their families’ boxes: Venice’s power resided not in the doge – practically a prisoner in the Doge’s Palace – but in its governing bodies made up of nobles of ancient lineage, who filled most of the boxes.

If it could be said in the late 1630s that in Venice one could see such splendour as was normally seen in the palaces of kings, comparisons were no longer necessary as opera became firmly established. An overview of opera libretti published both in and outside of Venice is revealing. A libretto dedication served multiple functions, one of which was to enrich the purse of either the librettist or the opera company. But with one early exception (written by Benedetto Ferrari, a native of Reggio, in 1639, for L’Armida) no libretto was dedicated to a doge. Rather, most were dedicated either to visiting princes and dukes and their families, or to Venetian nobles. In both cases Venice’s reputation was enhanced: theatres were graced by the ‘patronage’ of important personages, and, moreover, dedications to nobles often pointed to the service of their families to the Republic. Just as a libretto such as Busenello’s L’incoronazione di Poppea might celebrate the superiority of the ‘republic’ over a corrupt emperor, so too could Venice’s opera industry serve to shine light on a republic which, despite a loss of power compared to the supremacy of earlier centuries, still emanated an aura of independence and wealth.²⁸

‘Public’ Opera outside of Venice

Opera began at Italy’s courts, and private entertainments of various stripes would continue throughout the century. The Barberini family’s dedication to opera started during the reign of Urban VIII in the 1620s and continued after the pope’s death²⁹. Other families (such as the Colonna and the Chigi) and institutions such as embassies would continue the practice, given that public opera was generally discouraged in Rome. Gradually theatres offered up opera in other cities and towns. Often they were ‘sponsored’ by a local ruler, who might supply some, but not necessarily all of the funds. In Florence, several theatres operated under the sponsorship of academies, whereby the costs were borne by their members, but various Medici princes were active in their support of them.³⁰ In times of civic celebration, such as during the marriage of the future Grand Duke Cosimo III to Margherita Luisa d’Orléans in 1661, the celebratory opera was Ercole in Tebe by Giovanni Andrea Moniglia (1624–1700) and Jacopo Melani (1623–1676). Also presented that year was the Venetian Erismena by Aureli and Cavalli. Then, in turn, Moniglia’s libretto travelled to Venice ten years later for the 1670/1 season, revised by Aureli in order to please Venetian audiences, and newly set by Boretti.³¹ Whether travelling from or to Venice, both the libretto and the score were malleable, adapted to the occasion and the strengths of the performers.³²

The establishment and growth of the opera industry in Venice either directly or indirectly led to an expansion of the entertainment. As more and more singers were recruited to sing there, they would have been available for hire in other locales during other seasons; as these singers’ popularity waned, they could be hired to sing during the carnival season outside of Venice. In some cases the spread of certain operas seems to have been promoted by singers. Aureli and Ziani’s Le fortune di Rodope e Damira (Venice, S. Aponal, 1657) circulated widely throughout Italy until the last known performance in Reggio in 1674. In a number of the early performances (Bologna, Milan, Bergamo, and Turin), though not in the original, the role of Rodope was performed by Anna Felicita Chiusi (c. 1635–1664), who also signed the libretto dedication in Milan in 1660 (as well as the dedication for Aureli and Volpe’s Costanza di Rosmonda in Milan the next year). Yet Chiusi was one of the prima donnas in the opera performed the previous year in Venice at S. Aponal, Erismena, by Aureli and Cavalli. Given that Erismena was also performed in Milan around the same time (1661), it is likely that she performed in it as well.

Chiusi is one example of a new breed of female singers who would help to mount opera in cities across Italy – as she was living in Venice at the time of her death (1664), she would have maintained numerous contacts with the musicians of that city. The Roman Anna Francesca Costa (fl. 1640–1654), under the protection of Cardinal Giovanni Carlo de’ Medici, brought Moniglia’s Ergirodo (composer unknown) to Bologna in 1652.³³ Another was Elena Passarelli, a Venetian who had performed at S. Cassiano in the 1650s. Having already appeared in Siena in Cesti’s Argia in 1669 to great popularity, she signed a dedication for a performance of the same composer’s Dori in Florence in 1670. She had been prepared to have Dori mounted in Siena, where she would have served as ‘impresaria’, but the performance had to be cancelled, and she took it ‘elsewhere’.³⁴ Much of the history of these travelling productions remains to be written.

Public opera, or rather opera that was in part commercial and in part subsidised, spread to many cities and towns throughout Italy. In the seventeenth century, Bologna had two theatres, the Formagliari and the Malvezzi: both presented operas previously performed in Venice, along with others.³⁵ Opera in Milan flourished at the Teatro Ducale, with a mix of Venetian revivals and works by local composers and librettists, including Carlo Maria Maggi (1630–1699). The types of operas presented throughout Italy, and the interactions between theatre and city, changed from town to town. The next section looks briefly at two examples, Siena and Naples.

Siena

As recently shown by Colleen Reardon, the nature of operatic production in a particular locale could change over time. In Siena – a city with a rich theatrical tradition – it went from being a product of the patronage of a reigning government (as represented by Prince Mattias de’ Medici) to an entertainment in part sponsored by an important local family (the Chigi), and then to a more typical impresarial and commercial model.³⁶

Datira, a work by Pietro Salvetti and the Medicean singer Michele Grasseschi, was sponsored by Mattias at enormous cost in a theatre renovated by him; the opera was performed in 1647. This type of enterprise was not to be repeated: the more permanent establishment of opera in Siena came about later and arose through a more organic and more local motivation.

Not until 1669 was another opera presented there. Cesti’s Argia (Giovanni Filippo Apolloni, Innsbruck, 1655), was mounted in a theatre restored with the help of funds from the Roman Chigi, as well as many other Sienese families. Related to Pope Alexander VII who reigned 1655–1667, this branch of the Chigi (principally Cardinal Flavio Chigi and the younger Cardinal Sigismondo) were noted sponsors of music both in Rome and at their villa at Arriccia, just outside the Holy City. Although they helped to choose the opera, the whole production was very much a communal effort, with financial support coming from many of the city’s noble families. Argia’s prima donna was Passarelli, whose enthusiastic reception, replete with generous gifts, must have encouraged her to return to Siena the next year.³⁷

Perhaps the pinnacle of opera production in Siena occurred in 1672, when three works were presented to celebrate the visit of Princess Maria Virginia Borghese Chigi. They were Cesti’s Dori, the same composer’s Tito (Nicola Beregan, SS. Giovanni e Paolo, 1666), and Melani’s Girello (Filippo Acciaiuoli, Rome, Palazzo Colonna, 1668), all of them connected in some way with Rome and some with the Contestabile Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, a frequent ally of the Chigi regarding issues of musical patronage. The whole enterprise was pulled together by the librettist and impresario (at the Roman theatre the Tordinona) Filippo Acciaiuoli (1637–1700), in Siena for the duration of the productions.

The next decade brought a number of operas, most of them pastoral in nature and often mounted in connection with Chigi visits to Siena. One of them, Bernardo Pasquini's La sincerità con la sincerità, overo Il Tirinto (1673), had previously been mounted at the Chigi villa in Ariccia at great expense. The production of these Sienese operas was always facilitated through the assistance and support of a number of local academies, and, in the case of Il Tirinto, by the ad hoc ‘L’Accademia del Tirinto’, who signed the dedication of the libretto to Virginia and Olimpia Chigi, two of the nieces of Pope Alexander who had remained in Siena.

By the end of the century, Chigi involvement lessened and that of one of the Sienese academies, the ‘Rozzi’, increased, beginning with a revival of Scarlatti’s L’honestà negli amori (Rome, 1680) in 1690. Then in 1695 came the noted playwright and historian Girolamo Gigli, born in Siena in 1660. As impresario, he would guide Sienese opera into the next century.³⁸

Seventeenth-century Siena embraced opera, supremely conscious of how it operated within what Reardon has called the city’s ‘sociable’ network, which would fade after Gigli’s time, when opera would become a more occasional entertainment with less involvement by the Sienese populace and more reliance on travelling companies.

Naples

Opera in Spanish-ruled Naples often took place at the pleasure of the Viceroy of Naples, a Spanish representative of the King of Spain. As in Milan, also under Spanish rule, the same entertainments were frequently presented in two venues, first at the royal palace and then in the public theatre, the most prominent of them S. Bartolomeo. One important way in which opera production in Naples (and Milan) differed from that in the rest of Italy was the result of a Spanish law dating from 1583, by which a percentage of the box income went to a charitable institution: in the case of Naples, the Ospedale degli Incurabili (which had, in 1621, played a part in the building of the theatre). Moreover, no tickets could be sold to public performances without the permission of that institution.³⁹ In this way, Neapolitan opera could not have been more different from that of Venice.

Lorenzo Bianconi and Thomas Walker examined the early history of public opera in Naples and explored how opera flourished under the auspices of Count Oñate, who, rather than relying purely on local artists, made use of a travelling company of musicians, the Febiarmonici. A number of operas performed there came by way of Venice, including La finta pazza, L’incoronazione di Poppea, and Cavalli’s La Veremonda (often, in the 1650s, through the direct intervention of the dancer and choreographer Balbi).⁴⁰ But viceroys came and went (eleven of them during the second half of the seventeenth century), and the fortunes of opera in Naples were in large part dependent on the interest of the viceroy. The repertory mixed the music of local talents such as Francesco Provenzale (c. 1626; d. Naples, 6 September 1704) with Venetian scores such as those by Cavalli. In the 1670s, S. Bartolomeo largely specialised in operas from Venice by Ziani, Cesti, Boretti, and Carlo Pallavicino (c. 1640–1688). This theatre enjoyed some notoriety as a result of its impresaria, the former prostitute Giulia De Caro, who had first appeared there as a singer. Here was another difference from Venice, where singers were not impresarios, nor were women.

As Louise K. Stein has shown, during the last quarter of the seventeenth century the patronage and support for opera at the palace and at S. Bartolomeo emanated in large part from the coffers of the viceroy himself, and some of the funds came from the Spanish government.⁴¹ The financing behind Neapolitan opera, then, was inevitably a mix of private and public support, with the management of the ‘public’ theatre undertaken by an independent impresario.

Some viceroys arrived in Naples with little knowledge of Italian opera, and their support varied widely. However, Gaspar de Haro y Guzmán, Marquis del Carpio (1629–1687), had been an important patron of drama in Spain and had seen opera in Venice. He came to Naples from his ambassadorship in Rome, where he had come to know the music of the young Scarlatti. Carpio placed his stamp on opera in Naples, and he saw personally to many aspects of the operas mounted during his tenure; he also helped to bring Scarlatti to Naples, where his fame and importance would grow. A link between Carpio’s activities as a patron in Spain and then in Naples lies in three of the operas presented there, based on the same Spanish plays by Pedro Calderón de la Barca that he had had produced in Spain and then in Rome. Nine years after Carpio’s residence in Naples came Luis Francisco de la Cerda y Aragón, Duke of Medinaceli, who also had previously been the Spanish ambassador in Rome and was able to use contacts from the Holy City, Venice, and Florence in order to recruit top musicians to Naples. As in the case of Carpio, Medinaceli’s patronage of Scarlatti was particularly significant for the history of opera there.⁴²

A Night at the Opera

In Venice as elsewhere in Italy, months of preparation culminated in the première and subsequent performances of an opera. In the end, the audience dictated the success or failure of a production. Was the music pleasing? Did the singers live up to their reputations? Would hisses and boos force the librettist and composer back to their desks, or would the management decide, after nights of cheering audiences, to add new arias to delight the listeners? Anything was possible. In Venice there were those operas that closed after one night, and others whose success defied the odds. Some listeners would even move from theatre to theatre in one night to catch their favourite singer or aria. Indeed, the diversity of the city’s offerings not only made such nocturnal wanderings possible but also added to the richness of the carnival season, to the sense of competition, and to questions of which theatre would mount the best show, whatever that might mean. The experience differed in other cities, where, generally, only one opera could be seen at any one time. Yet the spread of public opera – however that might be defined – in all its myriad manifestations meant that, all across and down the Italian peninsula, this expensive and multi-layered entertainment could be enjoyed. Listeners could experience astonishment and wonder, or they could just enjoy a night out with friends and watch the others who made up the audience. And, despite the passage of more than three hundred years, little has changed.

The birth of opera around 1600 is intimately tied to singers. Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini are known not only as composers of the first complete published operas but also as superb vocalists. In October 1600, as part of the Florentine celebrations for the wedding of Maria de’ Medici to Henry IV of France, Peri starred as Orfeo in his own setting of Ottavio Rinuccini’s Euridice.¹ On stage with him were Caccini’s daughters, Francesca (1587–after 1641) and Settimia (1591–c. 1660), who, instead of performing Peri’s music, sang the settings their father had insisted upon inserting. In future years, Francesca would go on to be celebrated for both her vocal prowess and her compositional acumen: she was the first woman to compose an opera, La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’Isola di Alcina (1625).² The spread of opera thus cannot be separated from the talented performers who brought the works to light on the stages of courts and public theatres over the course of the century.

That said, Sergio Durante has noted that the career of opera singer was ‘a professional role that really came into being only gradually’.³ Such a change could happen only after opera had vaulted to the public stage in Venice in the late 1630s and after cities all over Italy began to mount such works on a regular basis throughout the year (and not just in carnival season). The careers of Peri and Caccini played out before this sea change. They were both initially employed at the Medici court in Florence for their skill as singers and instrumentalists, but their duties also comprised the composition of many different kinds of works, including instrumental pieces, songs, and court entertainments. After 1600, Peri worked mostly as a composer, collaborating with Marco da Gagliano (1582–1643) on both operas and sacre rappresentazioni. Caccini was a sought-after voice teacher – he had a hand in training both of his daughters – and later in life he dedicated himself to gardening. Singing in opera was but one small facet of their storied careers.

It was only in the last decades of the seventeenth century that it was possible for a singer to devote a career to opera; some well-known vocal stars, however, chose not to do so. The castrato Matteo Sassani (or Sassano, c. 1667–1737), for example, began and ended his professional life singing in serenatas and religious services; he mounted the operatic stage for about ten years of his long career, more rarely than other great singers of the time.⁴ Pier Francesco Tosi (1654–1732), who sang perhaps once on the operatic stage in the 1680s and who went on to write a highly regarded treatise on the voice, noted that all singers should be able to sing recitative in three styles: one for church, one for chamber, and one for opera.⁵ Even in the late seventeenth century, then, singing opera was sometimes just one part of a larger professional life that arose out of a confluence of talent, training, and patronage.

Training

The institutions that offered musical instruction were already well established in Italy by the time opera rose to importance and included churches, conservatories, and seminaries (especially the national colleges in Rome).⁶ Boys entered or were recruited to those organisations at very young ages and learned their foundational skills there. Pedagogical programs doubtless taught them the techniques that are the basis of any vocal training, even today: how to produce a healthy tone, how to sing in tune, how to develop vocal flexibility, how to enunciate clearly, and how to avoid grimacing. Since the ability to decorate a vocal line was so important in the seventeenth century, students needed to practice how to apply and sing various ornaments, such as trills.⁷ Boys also received instruction on the keyboard and learned basic theory and counterpoint as well.

The need for male sopranos in church choirs was so great that the administrators at some cathedrals began to recommend talented young boys with beautiful voices as candidates for castration and either to pay directly for the procedure or to reimburse parents who had already had it done. The attraction of the operatic stage was so powerful that churches issued contracts specifying a standard length of service before the boy could leave the choir and seek his fortune as an opera singer. In Siena, for example, boys had to serve the cathedral choir for six years before they could leave the employ of the institution; otherwise, they had to repay half of the cost of the operation and half of the salary they had earned.⁸ As long as the boys remained on the payroll most of the year, however, the administrators at Siena Cathedral did allow them to take short leaves of absence to sing on the stage; in this, they were much less severe than their peers at San Francesco in Assisi, whose rules forbade castrati to perform in opera until the tenth year of their service.⁹

Talented girls in Italy could not avail themselves of this kind of comprehensive, institutional education unless they were placed in convents with active and lively traditions for musical performance. Nuns were some of the most highly regarded singers on the Italian peninsula during the seventeenth century, and some sang theatrical works in the convent.¹⁰ In 1670, for example, the Grand Duchess of Florence consigned to a Sienese nunnery a young girl ‘highly predisposed’ to music, perhaps in the hope that she would blossom into an excellent performer.¹¹ The Duke of Savoy adopted a similar strategy in 1688 when he sent the singer Diana Aureli (fl. 1691–1696) to a Milanese convent to perfect her vocal technique.¹² Since the majority of convents in Italian urban centres during this period were, however, intended for ‘surplus’ women of aristocratic birth whose status would not permit them to sing on stage, not many professional opera singers came out of this environment.

Most girls had to receive their training privately, and, in this, some were more fortunate than others. The Caccini sisters, for example, were raised in a musical household (both Giulio and his wife Lucia di Filippo Gagnolanti were singers) and probably began their musical apprenticeship at a very young age. Other parents made different decisions. Silvia Galiarti (c. 1629–c. 1677), whose mother was a talented opera singer unattached to a court, entrusted her daughter’s musical education to a private tutor, whose seduction of the young woman sparked a legal case.¹³ The gifted Caterina Martinelli (1589 or 1590–1608), on the other hand, found a good home away from home. She came to Mantua from Rome as a thirteen-year-old and boarded with Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), who took on the responsibility of teaching her and subsequently wrote the title role in Arianna for her.¹⁴ Her unfortunate death from smallpox at the age of eighteen forced the composer to look elsewhere, and he turned to a woman best described as an actress with an excellent voice, Virginia Ramponi Andreini (1583–1629 or 1630). The trend of using actress-singers in opera did not, however, persist into the mid- to late-seventeenth century, as the musical skills required became more specialised.

The case of Lucrezia d’Andrè (fl. 1694–1704) is illustrative in this regard. In 1694, the Roman noblewoman Lucrezia Colonna Conti wrote to Cardinal Francesco Maria de’ Medici in Florence, seeking to induce him to hire d’Andrè for an opera. Her letter briefly describes the background and character of the young woman (she was the daughter of one of Colonna Conti’s servants and was modest and hard working) but is most effusive as to her musical training. The young woman had learned her vocal technique from Giuseppe Fede (1639 or 1640–1700), an accomplished castrato singer in the papal choir, a veteran of operatic performances, and an admired teacher. She had studied harpsichord with Bernardo Pasquini (1637–1710), a keyboard virtuoso and a renowned composer of oratorio and opera. Colonna Conti also notes that another famous opera composer, Giovanni Bononcini (1670–1747), and a singer under the protection of the Medici, Giuseppe Canavese (fl. 1684–1707), had heard her perform, undoubtedly at the Colonna household. By the late seventeenth century, it appears that (with some exceptions) a high level of musical training, as well as a good stage presence, was necessary to be able to sustain a career on the operatic stage.¹⁵

Beyond her training, a woman who wanted to perform in opera could unleash another weapon in her arsenal, if she possessed it: the ‘lovely letter of recommendation’ in her face.¹⁶ John Rosselli quotes a 1663 document concerning the requirements for female singers at the Venetian theatre of SS. Giovanni e Paolo: ‘beauty’ and ‘rich clothes’ were the first items on the list and only then was ‘attractive singing’ mentioned.¹⁷ In her plea to Francesco Maria, Colonna Conti made sure that the cardinal knew of d’Andrè’s physical charms in addition to her good character and first-rate musical education. When the Bolognese singer Angela Cocchi (‘la Linarola’, d. 1703) arrived in Parma in late 1697 to perform a role in L’Atalanta, the castrato Giovanni Battista Tamburini (1669–after 1719) observed that if her voice were equal to her beauty, she would be marvellous.¹⁸ That said, beauty went only so far. A Sienese correspondent once described Vincenza Giulia Masotti (c. 1651–1701) as an extremely ugly woman (‘una gran brutta figliola’), but audiences went into raptures during her performances, and she was one of the most highly regarded singers of her time.¹⁹

Many singers made their débuts on the operatic stage at a relatively young age: Masotti first appeared in Venice when she was probably eleven or twelve years old, and Vittoria Tarquini (‘la Bombace’, 1670–1746) made her première at age fourteen.²⁰ The alto castrato Francesco Bernardi (1686–1758), the singer for whom Handel would write some of his most celebrated works, was thirteen when he first mounted the stage in his native Siena. Girolamo Gigli, the impresario for the production, was probably responsible for adding the part tailored just for him in the libretto, and the local chapel master, Giuseppe Fabbrini, doubtless set those new additions with music suited to his young voice. Bernardi then continued his instruction at Siena Cathedral under Fabbrini for another eight years before going off to seek his fame and fortune.²¹ Anna Renzi (c. 1620–after 1661), on the other hand, was probably near twenty when she first sang in opera; nonetheless, her voice teacher, Filiberto Laurenzi, accompanied her to Venice for her début.²² Voice lessons thus could continue after singers were launched in opera, especially if they were young; at times, however, such training could extend into adulthood.

Tamburini provides an interesting example of a singer whose schooling we can follow for many years. He was one of the numerous boys for whom the religious authorities at Siena Cathedral paid the expenses of castration and provided a foundational education in music. His tenure at the institution lasted from 1683 to 1695, that is, from the age of fourteen to the age of twenty-six. He came under Cardinal Francesco Maria de’ Medici’s protection sometime in his early twenties and mounted the stage in minor roles for productions in Florence and Siena from 1690 to 1695. Then the cardinal packed him off, first to Rome and then to Parma, to study under the composer Bernardo Sabadini (d. 1718). Tamburini sang in several operas during this further period of study. When Sabadini left for Madrid in 1700, Francesco Maria sent his protégé to the composer Carlo Antonio Benati in Bologna, despite the fact that Tamburini was nearly thirty-one years old and had already performed in sixteen operas. It is true that the lessons in Parma probably consisted primarily of Sabadini coaching the singer on the music he had written especially for him and perhaps also refining his acting skills. Tamburini did, however, tell his patron that ‘sometimes my teacher will have me sing scales to make sure my technique is secure’. Although we have some insight into singers’ basic training during the seventeenth century, we still know little about how they continued to perfect their craft once they were established on the operatic circuit.²³

One additional category of singer deserves mention here: the talented dilettante. In small cities with strong academic traditions, noblemen sometimes took the stage for local performances. In Siena, for instance, we know of at least two productions featuring a mix of professional and amateur performers: L’Adalinda (Apolloni, Agostini, 1677) and L’innocenza riconosciuta (1698). In the latter opera, three members of the Sienese patrician class mounted the stage alongside Pietro Mozzi (fl. 1686–1729) and his son, the young castrato Giuseppe Mozzi. One of them, Tolomei, perhaps less skilled than the others, lost his voice during the last act of the second performance and accused the elder Mozzi of instructing the instrumentalists to play so loudly as to drown him out.²⁴ Such were the perils of the lack of professional training.

Patronage

Opera singers depended on powerful patrons for protection. Italian rulers in numerous urban centres hired and maintained salaried singers to use in operas performed under their aegis. The ecclesiastical courts in Rome also patronised singers. But if Peri’s Euridice was mounted in Florence using singers on the Medici payroll, the performance of Monteverdi’s Orfeo only seven years later depended on the talents of at least one performer who was not part of the musical establishment at Mantua. The Florentine court loaned one of Caccini’s pupils, the castrato Giovanni Gualberto Magli (d. 1625), to the Mantuan court for the opera; he sang at least two and probably three roles in Orfeo.²⁵ When public operas began to be staged in Venice starting in the late 1630s, it was paramount that singers be able to move from one city to another to take advantage of the opportunities to sing. This was especially true for female singers in Rome, who were forbidden from taking the stage in that city.

Several solutions to the problem presented themselves. In the first half of the seventeenth century, self-financing touring companies, sometimes called Febiarmonici, travelled from city to city to put on operatic performances. Ellen Rosand has noted that such troupes (often with Roman singers) were responsible for the first operatic performances in Venice; after carnival season, they then took their shows on the road.²⁶ By the 1680s or so, when opera was well established as a feature of cultural life all over the Italian peninsula, performers were the star attractions. Impresarios wanted to hire the best, and a number of rulers with singers under their protection often responded to requests to send them to perform elsewhere. Thus was the ducal or gentlemen’s circuit born – with the enthusiastic participation of courts in Florence, Mantua, Ferrara, Parma, and Rome (to name but a few), whose rulers loaned out musicians to one another as well as to impresarios in the public theatres of Venice. The system benefitted everyone. Rulers who loaned out one of ‘their’ coveted singers symbolised their social rank through a display of ‘good taste and knowledge’, thus earning honour for themselves as well as the more prosaic right to borrow a singer from another member on the circuit for their own productions. The singer had the protection of the ruler as a guarantee against ill treatment, an opportunity to perform in a new setting with new colleagues, and the chance to earn more than he or she ever could as a court employee.²⁷

Some patrons kept a tight rein on their protégés. Rosand describes how Pietro Dolfin, a librettist and composer in Venice, exercised his power over the singer Lucretia, a young woman who came to live in his house in the late 1660s. Dolfin controlled all the young woman’s contracts, refusing to allow her to sing when he thought the part too small or the cast mediocre.²⁸ Francesco Maria de’ Medici did the same with Tamburini, arranging for his début in Florence in 1690, informing him (through a proxy) that he was to turn down a role in a ‘dreadful, feeble work’ in Rome in 1697, and instructing Sabadini on the operatic environment in which his protégé was likely to shine: as the singer of a secondary role (parte di mezzo) in an opera with a cast of excellent singers.²⁹

Tamburini’s situation was not unlike that of many singers in the later seventeenth century. Francesco Maria paid Sabadini for his role as Tamburini’s teacher and for the expenses of housing and feeding the singer in Parma; he also gave his protégé a modest yearly annuity until about 1705. Tamburini was, however, never resident in Florence as a court employee; instead, he spent his life on the road.³⁰ The same was true for other singers of the time, such as the contralto Francesca Vanini (or Venini; d. 1744), Maria Maddalena Musi (‘la Mignatta’, 1669–1751), and Barbara Riccioni (fl. 1684–1707), who received small stipends as court musicians in Mantua but spent most of their time travelling the Italian peninsula to perform in opera.³¹ Although some dukes and princes served as agents, many functioned simply as clearinghouses for their singers. It is thus ironic that during the last years of the century, libretti start to emblazon the names of not only the singers in operatic productions but also those of their patrons: ‘Elena Garofalini, Bolognese, virtuosa of the Most Serene Duke of Mantua’, ‘Diana Caterina Luppi of Ferrara, virtuosa of Count Ercole Estense Mosti’, and ‘Signora Diamante Scarabelli, virtuosa del Sereniss. Di Mantova’ (see Figure 6.1), and so on.

Figure 6.1 Giuditta di Baviera (Siena, Stamperia del Publico, 1702). The dedication of the libretto (librettist and composer unknown), to Count Francesco Sansebastiani, is dated 3 July 1702.

Detail of the cast and beginning of the libretto, 8–9. Image from Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, Siena

The Rise of the Prima Donna

At opera’s birth, Rosand notes, singers were ‘merely the mouthpiece[s] of the librettist and composer’.³² That began to change by mid-century, with the woman who has been called the first prima donna of opera, Anna Renzi. Renzi came from Rome to Venice to create the role of Deidamia in the Giulio Strozzi/Francesco Sacrati opera La finta pazza (1641). Later, she would première the role of Ottavia in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643). A book was issued in her honour in 1644, praising her voice, her acting, and her ability to embody a character through gesture and spontaneity of expression. Her fame and popularity meant that during the 1643–1644 season, she was able to command a far higher salary than any other woman who had sung on the Venetian stage up until that point.³³

The control singers had over the very fabric of opera began to be audible by the 1660s and into the following decades with the proliferation of arias.³⁴ By this time, singers could request that the composer make changes and additions to their parts, and were able to reject arias they did not like and substitute them with works of their choosing – even if not by the composer of the opera – that they felt showed off their voices to greater advantage. The practice of performers repeating arias on stage when an enthusiastic audience demanded it also became a commonplace.

As singers’ fame and influence grew, so did their power to negotiate all manner of things relating to the production. Masotti offers a good case study of a singer who knew her worth and knew how to work the patronage system to her best advantage.³⁵ She was obviously a talented young woman; in Rome, Margherita Branciforte, Princess of Butera, had taken her under her wing and Masotti had received her musical training in the princess’s home from Giacomo Carissimi (1605–1674), one of Rome’s most celebrated composers and maestro di cappella at S. Apollinare. A Tuscan resident in Rome, Torquato Montauto, became her protector and probably helped arrange her début in Venice at the Teatro San Luca for the 1662–1663 season. Despite the fact that Giulia was no older than twelve, she made a huge splash in the title role of La Dori, an opera with a libretto by Giovanni Filippo Apolloni (c. 1635–1688) and music by Antonio Cesti (1623–1669). She reluctantly returned in 1663–1664 to perform in two operas, one of them Francesco Cavalli’s Scipione affricano. Around this time, she gained new patrons: the Contestabile Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna and his wife, Maria Mancini.

Masotti refused to go back to Venice in the 1664–1665 and 1665–1666 seasons, but the impresario Marco Faustini (1606–1676) insistently requested her presence for 1666–1667. Using the Contestabile Colonna and the Venetian nobleman Girolamo Loredan as intermediaries, Masotti dug in her heels and once again refused to go until promised a salary that was twice as much as she had been offered (and had turned down) in 1665. She also received travelling expenses and was given lodging with the Grimani family. She was similarly shrewd in her negotiations for the 1668–1669 opera season in Venice, using both the Colonna and her new patrons, members of the Chigi family, to guarantee herself a large salary and other concessions. She must have been gratified that the opera chosen that season was a revival of L’Argia, a work by her preferred librettist, Apolloni, with music by her favourite composer, Cesti. In 1671, in fact, she tried to persuade Cardinal Sigismondo Chigi to ask Apolloni for a new libretto with a ‘part that does me honor above everyone else’. This was one of her few requests that came to nothing. Throughout her career, she managed to convince impresarios to mount operas that she liked and to cast her in the roles she wanted to sing. In other words, although she depended upon patrons to protect and help her, she was in charge of her own professional life.

Other singers sometimes took hold of the reins in an even more authoritative manner. Elena Passarelli (‘la Tiepola’, fl. 1658–1673) was not only a well-respected singer, but also cast herself at least once in the role of impresario, perhaps in tandem with her husband, Galeazzo. In 1670, she signed the libretto issued for a Florentine revival of Cesti’s La Dori, dedicating the work to Margherita Luisa d’Orléans, the Grand Princess of Tuscany, whose marriage to Cosimo III was then in a final period of reconciliation. Passarelli and her company mounted the opera in Florence and then were scheduled to go on to Siena, where the singer had performed the previous year in a revival of L’Argia. She astutely supposed that an opera by the same librettist–composer team that had triumphed in Siena a year previously with her in the lead role would be sure to please the Sienese, who were indeed waiting with impatience for the performances. Unfortunately, the show was cancelled due to the death of Grand Duke Ferdinando II in 1670. A correspondent in Siena observed that Passarelli was responsible for the company and since the show could not be staged there, she would pay the salaries and take the cast on to the next performance.³⁶ In 1704, in Siena, the singers Maria Anna Garberini Benti (‘la Romanina’, c. 1684–1734) and Vittoria Costa (fl. 1701–1719), aided by the Florentine chapel master Giuseppe Maria Orlandini (1676–1760), decided to serve as impresarios for a little pastoral opera, taking the lead roles, establishing the ticket prices, and hoping to make a profit from the enterprise.³⁷ Their plans may not have come to fruition, but they show that more than one female singer was unafraid to venture into new realms to direct her own career.³⁸

Payment and the Gift Culture

The first singers of opera performed those works as part of their normal court duties. That changed once an operatic circuit was established and it was necessary for singers (or their agents) to negotiate salaries. As is clear from the discussion of Masotti above, singers who had to journey to foreign cities also often asked for travelling expenses and requested free lodging with the impresario or with a nobleman; otherwise, they might not have taken much money home after a long season. No one formula determined how much a singer could make, and salaries varied according to the locale and the size or importance of the role, as well as the reputation of the singer. Women were the most coveted performers during this period and generally earned higher salaries than men, an imbalance that would change in the eighteenth century when the castrato rose to great prominence. One thing appears to be true for opera productions throughout the Italian peninsula in the late seventeenth century: the costliest items on the budget were the salaries paid to the singers.³⁹

Although private agreements between an impresario and a singer were by far the most common throughout Italy, a few publicly registered contracts for singers in Venice survive and help clarify some of the details of payment and the expectations placed on singers and impresarios. A contract for Renzi from the 1643–1644 season, for example, establishes a payment schedule, which seems to have been the normal one for that city: the singer was to receive the honorarium divided into three portions and distributed at the beginning, middle, and end of the opera’s run. If she were to fall ill, she would collect only a portion of her salary. She also received the use of a box in the theatre at the expense of the impresario and all the costumes she would need (although these remained with the impresario at the end of the run). In return, she agreed to attend all rehearsals and performances.⁴⁰ What may be the first printed contract for singers, issued in Siena in 1703, lays out basically the same expectations, although it specifically excludes payments for travel and food.⁴¹ Even with a contract in place, if a show did not succeed as planned, singers might receive only a portion of the contracted fee and have to lodge complaints or initiate legal cases to collect what was owed them.⁴²

Payment in cash was, however, only one form of remuneration that performers acquired during the run of an opera. Both men and women (but especially women) expected to receive gifts, including rings; bracelets; necklaces; watches; earrings made of gold and silver and often encrusted with precious jewels; and items of clothing comprising hats, gloves, ribbons, and stockings. The cash portion of the payment to a singer, especially a beautiful female singer, sometimes paled in comparison to the presents she received from admirers. When Passarelli performed the title role in the Sienese revival of L’Argia (1669), the women of the town ordered culinary delicacies from Florence for her on a continual basis, and over thirty gentlemen contributed money to buy her a gift worth 700 lire. She left town at the end of the opera’s run with 2,800 lire in cash and gifts, probably more than she had earned in Venice in the early 1660s. From accounts of the revival of Bononcini’s setting of Silvio Stampiglia’s Camilla, regina de’ Volsci in Siena in 1700, we know that the star performer, Maria Domenica Pini (‘la Tilla’, 1670 or 1671–1746), carried away about 1,400 lire in cash and almost 600 lire in gifts. Her colleague, Maria Maddalena Vittori (‘la Marsoppina’, fl. 1699–1704), went home with about 400 lire in cash and perhaps as much as 600 lire in gifts.⁴³

Critical Assessment

It is difficult to find true critical assessments of an opera singer’s voice in the seventeenth century; most comments tend to the generic, comparing singers to swans or sirens, or waxing lyrical about how divinely or magnificently or wonderfully they perform.⁴⁴ The quotation given in the title of this essay – ‘una bella voce, un bel trillo, ed un bel passaggio’ – comes from a letter penned by Leonardo Marsili about the singer ‘Aloisia’, and it begins in typical fashion: she had a ‘beautiful voice, a beautiful trill, and beautiful ornamentation’. He does go on to note that the singer was able to modulate her voice depending on the size of the room; that is, she knew to sing more softly in a chamber setting than on the operatic stage. Sometimes observers commented on the strength of the voice; Caterina Galerati (fl. 1701–1721), for instance, apparently had a small instrument but compensated for its size through the use of trills and other musical ornaments.⁴⁵

Stage deportment and acting skills were also addressed and evaluated, as in a commentary from a performance of Pirro e Demetrio (Adriano Morselli; Alessandro Scarlatti) in Siena in 1695: Maria Rosa Bracci (‘l’Acciaiola’, fl. 1695–1726) was the technically superior singer, but Maria Domenica Marini (‘la Cappona’, fl. 1695–1702) made the best impression because she moved naturally and nobly. In the same cast, a tenor from Pistoia was judged to be a good actor with a terrible voice.⁴⁶ It is clear, however, that assessments of a singer’s acting skills were situational. The Siena 1704 carnival season featured two works with the same cast of singers: revivals of Scarlatti’s La caduta dei decemviri and of Tomaso Albinoni’s La Griselda. In the Scarlatti opera, Anna Maria Coltellini (‘la Serafina’, fl. 1691–1704) was praised as the singer who held the show together and was superior to all, but Maria Maddalena Fratini (fl. 1690–1705) was disparaged for poor acting skills, despite a pleasant voice. In the Albinoni opera, however, Coltellini cut a poor figure because she did not know how to act her part, whereas Fratini was lauded for her acting skill; the commentator asserted that no one would recognise her as a woman when she was onstage in a pants role.⁴⁷

Public Images

In the culture of Renaissance and Baroque Italy, silence was understood as a sign of a woman’s chastity. The eloquent woman was in danger of being considered unchaste; indeed, the famous courtesans of the period were renowned for their skills in both rhetoric and music. Female singers on the operatic stage thus faced a dilemma; they had to be eloquent to be successful in their careers, but their very powers of musical persuasion marked their virtue as suspect. A female singer thus was in jeopardy of being considered little better than a prostitute – her profession required her to ‘speak’ in song and to do so in front of a paying public.⁴⁸ To be sure, some were courtesans, although, for the most part, their careers seem not to have lasted long.⁴⁹ Female singers thus had to be vigilant about their image. They often travelled with family members (mothers, husbands, and brothers) as protection and took care to manage their offstage behaviour in a way that was above reproach.

Notwithstanding their precautions offstage, female opera singers on stage often aroused sexual desire, a desire that could be intensified by the adoption of pants roles, in which women cross-dressed as young men. Wendy Heller has illuminated the ways in which operatic heroines embodied seventeenth-century ideas about female sexuality and anxieties about the fluid gender boundaries between men and women. Heroines on the Venetian stage ran the gamut from the chaste but undesirable Ottavia; to the nymph Calisto rejoicing in her amorous same-sex encounter; to the virile, cross-dressing warrior queen Semiramide; to the sexually rapacious Messalina. Singers who brought these heroines to life were both ‘desired and condemned’ for their erotic power and control, and they often risked creating a public image that might have greatly diverged from their private identity.⁵⁰ Renzi’s portrayal of the scheming and vengeful Ottavia in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, for instance, was so incongruous with her own character that several critics provided interpretations of the role that ‘transcend[ed] the virtues and vices of her own musico-dramatic representation’.⁵¹

Castrati also had to deal with a public image that might have been at odds with their own private personae. In their glorious artificiality, castrati were understood as ‘purely sensual’ creatures ‘frozen’ in the state of everlasting boyhood. In the one-sex system of the day, that meant that they stood somewhere between a submissive woman and an adult man who had gone through puberty; their eternally soft, attractive features rendered them the objects of desire for both men and women.⁵² Their status was often reflected in the affectionate and slightly condescending use of diminutives for their stage names: Luigi Albarelli (fl. 1692–1707) was ‘il Luigino’, Francesco Bernardi was ‘il Senesino’, and Matteo Sassani was ‘Matteuccio’.

The cult of the castrato took hold in the last half of the seventeenth century, just as the penchant for lyrical display in aria accelerated in operatic scores. Castrati were cast as ‘effeminate’ men; that is, as men too much preoccupied with loving women and with erotic adventures rather than with proper masculine activities such as war. The ‘lush vocalism’ inherent in aria style rather than the ‘lyric restraint’ characteristic of recitative, helped make the voice type the pre-eminent choice for operatic heroes at the end of the seventeenth century and into the following century as well.⁵³

Private Lives

The life of an opera singer was not an easy one, despite the fame and adulation that could come with it. It often involved tiring travel, protracted and vexing negotiations with impresarios, quarrels with composers and librettists, and the possibility of not receiving promised payments. All who chose the profession faced these frustrations, but women were in a much more precarious position at a time when, as John Rosselli so succinctly puts it, most men operated under the assumption ‘that almost any woman was available for fumbling at the first opportunity’.⁵⁴ Beth L. Glixon has documented the dangers that lay in wait for young women at the earliest stages of their careers. Giovanni Carlo del Cavalieri not only seduced his thirteen-year-old pupil, Galiarti, but also hoped to kidnap the girl and poison her mother. In 1685, the father of the then fourteen-year-old Tarquini complained to the Council of Ten in Venice that she had been raped.⁵⁵

Now, it is true that some singers were in thrall to powerful men, often their patrons. Ferdinando de’ Medici seems to have carried on sexual relationships with both the castrato Francesco De Castris (c. 1650–1724) and with Tarquini.⁵⁶ Most female singers, however, chose to marry at some point in their careers, although their reasons varied. Some wed while still professionally active and chose husbands in their field. Elena Lorenzoni married Galeazzo Passarelli, who served as impresario for productions featuring his wife and who seems to have toured with her when she was performing outside Venice. Some took husbands out of convention and lived apart from them; Dionora Luppi (also known as Leonida Presciani) is a case in point, as is Tarquini. Galiarti married Pietro Manni at age sixteen when her mother’s death left her alone and unprotected in Venice; her husband might have been an impresario or possibly a singer.⁵⁷ Some women waited to marry until they decided to leave the Italian circuit. Masotti retired from the Venetian stage in 1673 at the young age of twenty-two or twenty-three and took up a court position in Vienna. Two years after her arrival, she met and married her younger husband, the violinist Ignaz Leopold Kugler. Their union produced four children, including a daughter whom Masotti trained as a singer.⁵⁸

Castrato singers were in an especially circumscribed position, especially if they wanted to form a family, because the Catholic Church denied them the sacrament of marriage. One castrato who managed to wed did so outside the Italian realm. Bartolomeo Sorlisi (1631 or 1632–1672) spent his adult career in Munich and Dresden and was so well regarded at court that Elector Johann Georg II suggested he retire in Saxony. While looking for appropriate property to buy in the early 1660s, he fell in love with Dorothea Lichtwer, and she with him. After a long battle with Lutheran ecclesiastical authorities, the two wed in 1667.⁵⁹ The same option was not open to castrati working in Italy. At the age of thirty, for example, Tamburini fell in love with Vanini, who apparently had returned his affection at some point. It is possible that the patrons of both singers did their best to quash the blossoming love affair; a description of Tamburini’s fruitless attempts to meet and speak with Vanini after an operatic performance in autumn of 1699 is heartbreaking.⁶⁰ Castrati were created to be singers; once their operatic careers were over, some returned to live near extended family, some sought out adoptive sons, and some created an extended network of close relationships through teaching. As Rosselli has eloquently noted, ‘the chief hazard’ for a castrato singer after retirement ‘was probably loneliness’.⁶¹

Epilogue

It remains to remind the reader that seventeenth-century composers did indeed cast roles for natural male voices. The tenor Peri created the role of Orfeo in his own setting of Euridice; Gagliano praised the manner in which he could make his listeners ‘weep or rejoice’ through the grace and style of his singing and his interpretation of the emotions latent in the text.⁶² Monteverdi likewise cast the role of Orfeo in his eponymous opera for a tenor, Francesco Rasi (1574–1621). By the end of the century, however, casting tenors in primary roles happened more rarely. It is notable, however, that among the many women and castrati Tosi cites in chapter seven of his treatise on the voice, he names only one man with a natural voice, the tenor Giovanni Buzzoleni (fl. 1682–1722), whom he praises for his ability to ornament while keeping a steady tempo.⁶³ Buzzoleni was in the service of the Mantuan court and sang in opera during the last two decades of the seventeenth century, often in main roles.⁶⁴

Basses generally played older men in important positions, such as generals and counsellors.⁶⁵ Sometimes these were title roles (even if they were not the largest in the opera). The talented and irascible bass Pietro Mozzi, for example, took on the part of the Roman king Tullo Ostilio in Alba soggiogata da’ Romani (music by Ziani; Pisa, 1701), but could more often be found in secondary roles. Mozzi had a remarkably long career, first mounting the stage in the mid-1680s. Later in life he transitioned to playing comic characters, and his last known appearances in opera took place in 1729.⁶⁶

Natural male voices would come into their own during the eighteenth century, but during the seventeenth century, high voices – both male and female – ruled the stage.

The invention of opera not only introduced musical, dramatic, and aesthetic innovations, but it also prompted unexpected changes in gender roles and social relationships, in particular the appearance of the first women to sing on the operatic stage as professionals and the rise of the castrato. The stricter gender roles of early modern society meant that a professional female singer appearing in public was perceived to be committing a significant transgression. The public sphere was primarily a male space where men could act professionally and still maintain their honour and prestige, whereas the reputation of a woman who performed on stage was considerably more precarious: her career was likely to be viewed as indistinguishable from prostitution. The embodiment of an object of desire, the female singer was viewed as both threatening and appealing. Crossing the border between public and private spheres was therefore a bold move for a woman and exposed those who did it to all kinds of attacks. In everyday life, chastity, moderation, silence, and invisibility were the major virtues associated with an honest woman. Female opera singers became visible and professionally active by exhibiting themselves onstage; they also transgressed the border between silence and voice.¹

Castrati were not subjected to the same social bans on their behaviours, though they were certainly ambivalent figures both in gender and sexual terms. Controversies about the morality of opera, bans on women’s voices, and the paradoxical figure of the castrato were also influenced by medical discourses on the body, sexuality, and gender. As such, it is necessary first to assess how the body was understood in medical terms and to examine how it defined gender and sex distinctions in the seventeenth century.

Gender, Sex, Voice, and Morality

Until the end of the eighteenth century, natural philosophy and medicine were still largely based on Hippocratic and Galenic doctrines, themselves conceived in accordance with the theory of the humours.² Physical and psychological health depended on a balance of blood, phlegm, and yellow and black bile. The sexual difference between men and women was determined by ‘vital heat’, or innate heat: women (and children) had less vital heat than men, and were thus colder and weaker. It was believed that vital heat was produced by the heart: maintained by the pneuma (air in motion, breath, and, by extension, spirit or soul in early modern medicine), vital heat circulated throughout the body via the blood vessels. It was considered to be an intelligent organ that controlled and directed all the others, shaping the body and the humours. Sexual difference was not understood as qualitative but quantitative, in gradual and hierarchical terms. The male represented anatomical perfection, while the female was a lesser, imperfect version of man. Both were situated on a continuum, called the ‘one-sex model’ by historian Thomas Laqueur.³ The castrato was positioned exactly in the middle: not as perfect as the uncastrated man, but less imperfect than the woman. Due to a lesser amount of vital heat and its ensuing retention within the body, female genitalia were considered identical to male ones, but turned inside instead of outside.⁴ These anatomical considerations also determined divergent psychological attributes for both sexes: dry and hot were viewed as male qualities; wet and cold defined female ones. A man was naturally inclined to honour, bravery, and strength of spirit, whereas a woman was predisposed to instability, depravity, and an uncontrollable sensuality. In this one-sex model, male and female did not exist as binary or even distinct sexual entities: being a man or a woman was first and foremost a difference in gender and behaviour, not an ontological difference between the sexes. Moreover, the relative positioning and incremental continuity of the sexes across this one-sex continuum created a space for fluidity, though at the same time gendered and social constructions accentuated the difference between them.⁵

The emergence of the castrato was linked, first, to the ban on women’s voices in the church and, second, to the rise of opera.⁶ Roger Freitas defines the castrato as a ‘temporally extended boy’ who embodies a suspension between masculinity and femininity.⁷ Physically and spiritually viewed as superior to women, boys represented the supreme ideal of love for men. In the early modern world, friendships, sometimes involving tutoring, between adults and young boys were common. Such relationships could remain chaste, be eroticised, or also take sexual expression, even though the Church had condemned sodomy as an act against nature since the late Middle Ages.⁸ With their round baby faces devoid of facial hair, their soft skin and high voices, castrati embodied the ideal boy. Castration prevented the production of sex hormones that normally stopped bone growth, which explains why castrati were usually taller than average and had extraordinary lung capacity. Trained since childhood, their only viable career path was to become professional singers. That said, some did perform diplomatic missions, working as spies for their patrons, thus using their singing career as a ladder to achieve a better position in society.⁹

The castrato did not occupy the middle ground of the continuum alone; it was also populated by ambivalent creatures such as hermaphrodites, effeminate men, and virile women. Stories of spontaneous physiological sex changes abounded, underscoring how the passage from one end of the continuum to the other could easily be achieved.¹⁰ It should come as no surprise that cross-dressing games and ambivalent figures such as the castrato and the female professional singer were key to the popularity of opera in the seventeenth century.

From Aristotle until the early eighteenth century, the voice was viewed merely as a wind instrument. It was only in 1741 that the French surgeon and anatomist Antoine Ferrein discovered the vocal cords – a term he also coined, describing his discovery in his treatise De la formation de la voix de l’homme (1741). Before the eighteenth century, it was widely believed that women and children had high voices because they were weak and could only move a small quantity of air, while men’s low voices were attributable to their greater strength. Castrati, again, occupied a middle ground, demonstrating feminine vocal qualities, yet with more strength. According to Galenic medical theories, physical activities such as singing, exercising, playing, or acting onstage produced heat, which was conveyed through the body by the animal spirit. Made of blood and air, the animal spirit originated in the brain and circulated through the whole body by way of the arteries. Its role was to maintain the body’s natural heat; it also conveyed the passions, impressing them in the mind and body.

Medically, singing was recommended in several situations, for instance as a form of physical exercise that stimulated the pulse and balanced the humours. It was also thought to be beneficial for digestion and relaxation before sleeping; and it was thought to facilitate childbirth as well.¹¹ By singing, imperfect creatures such as women or effeminate castrati could increase their bodily temperature, thus becoming similar to men. In so doing, they transgressed a border, stepping into the territory of masculine identity. Advocates of opera as well as its moral detractors considered this transgression either appealing or disgusting, either sensual or threatening: yet everyone agreed on the eroticism conveyed by women performing onstage. The marvellous and sensual effects of song were always described from a masculine point of view and thus always relied on the same trope: seeing and hearing a female singer moved an audience to rapture.

Medical considerations with misogynist undertones led to the construction of highly differentiated gendered roles in society. Social behaviour was subjected to moral scrutiny, especially for women, and even more so for women who acted as men, such as professional opera singers. Therefore, moral condemnations of theatre and opera were not rare; the most fervid attacks were directed at women performing onstage. In his pamphlet Il puttanismo romano (1668) depicting an imaginary conclave of prostitutes electing the pope, the Jesuit Gregorio Leti condemned the nepotism of the papal court and ferociously attacked women playing a public role. Among the latter were aristocrats such as Princess Olimpia Aldobrandini, Queen Christina of Sweden, Mazarin’s niece Maria Mancini, and the singer Leonora Baroni:

It is no coincidence that these noblewomen were also involved in opera patronage.¹³ Giovanni Domenico Ottonelli, another Jesuit who authored a book on the danger of keeping company with women, ‘especially singers’, and no less than six volumes condemning theatre, affirms:

Crossing the line between private and public, between silence and singing, led many female singers to be equated, at best, with courtesans and, at worst, with prostitutes. In fact, some of them actually were courtesans, including, for instance, Barbara Strozzi¹⁵ and the Neapolitan prima donna Giulia De Caro, detta La Ciulla (1646–1697). The latter, described as ‘singing actress, harmonious whore and princess of the brothel’ in a contemporary text, became famous by interpreting ribald songs with a company of mountebanks, abandoning her husband, and becoming a member of the Febiarmonici, the first opera company in Naples.¹⁶ Between 1673 and 1675, De Caro had also been impresario of the Teatro S. Bartolomeo, Naples’s first opera house. Her career, however, exemplifies the trend of professional singers needing to develop self-fashioning strategies to elevate their reputation – even when not engaged in prostitution.

Myth or reality, notorious rumours of affairs abounded between male and female singers, involving aristocrats or prelates.¹⁷ Scandals did not spare the stages, as is shown by the famous controversy around the production of Domenico Mazzocchi’s opera La Catena d’Adone (Rome, 1626; libretto by Ottavio Tronsarelli), commissioned by Prince Giovanni Giorgio Aldobrandini (1591–1637). A heated rivalry opposed two famous Roman singers regarded as courtesans, Margherita Costa and Cecca del Padule, about the respective importance of their roles as Venus and the enchantress Falsirena. The scandal grew even further in notoriety, passionately dividing the Roman nobility. Finally, it was resolved by the patron’s mother, Olimpia Aldobrandini Borghese the elder, who dismissed both female singers and had them replaced by two castrati.¹⁸

Singers who were not engaged in prostitution were not spared accusations of debauchery, and had to preserve and defend their moral integrity. It is not surprising, then, that even artistic praise had to be expressed according to masculine standards. For instance, the singer, instrumentalist, and composer Adriana Basile (c. 1580–1583, d. after 1642) and even more so her daughter Leonora Baroni (1611–1670), who had moved to Rome in 1633, were praised by their admirers as ‘virtuose’,¹⁹ a term that draws on the classic Roman ideal of manliness (‘vir’) and, later, the Renaissance ideal of masculine ‘virtù’. Thus, women or castrati praised as ‘virtuosi’ involved a transgression, a shift from the feminine to the masculine as they exhibited themselves in the public or semi-public sphere, increasing their body temperature through the act of singing.

Staging the Passions in Italy: Female Singers and Castrati

The first professional women onstage were actresses, such as Isabella Andreini (1562–1604). Along with her husband, she directed a commedia dell’arte troupe called La Compagnia dei Gelosi, which performed the celebrated intermedi of La Pellegrina at the wedding of Christina of Lorraine and Gran Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici in Florence in 1589. Isabella was the star of the festivities with her stunning performance of the mad scene in La pazzia di Isabella, an improvised comedy in which she sang several pieces.²⁰ She also was the mother-in-law of Virginia Ramponi Andreini (1583–1629/30; known as ‘la Florinda’), actress, singer, and poet, and the first wife of Giovanni Battista Andreini, with whom she founded the Compagnia dei Fedeli.²¹ In Mantua in 1608, during the festivities for the wedding of Francesco Gonzaga and Margherita of Savoy, Ramponi sang the title role in the première of Monteverdi’s opera Arianna and also played the part of an Ungrateful Lady in the first production of his Ballo delle ingrate.²² Her performance of Arianna’s lament was so moving that ‘not one lady present failed to shed a tear’.²³

Tears pouring from the singer onstage and from the female audience clearly allude to humoural humidity in women. As a topos in opera, tears signal the achievement of Aristotelian catharsis through drama.²⁴ They also represent the submission of women to the will of men and the ritual of lamenting at wedding ceremonies as a mark of women’s sacrifice and subjugation to men.²⁵ Like Ramponi, Anna Renzi (c. 1620–after 1661) – the first prima donna in opera – was famous not only for her virtuoso singing technique but also for her acting skills.²⁶ She performed exceptionally in Francesco Sacrati’s (1605–1650) La finta pazza (1641). Il Cannocchiale per la finta pazza, an elaborate account of the opera, its machinery, and the singers’ performance, described her as follows: ‘Signora Anna Renzi from Rome, a young woman as skillful in acting as she is excellent in music, as cheerful in feigning madness as she is wise in knowing how to imitate it, and modest in all her habits.’²⁷ In the preface to the libretto, Strozzi describes her as ‘a most gentle siren, who sweetly steals the heart and charms the eyes and ears of the listeners’.²⁸ In the description of Sacrati’s Bellerofonte (Vincenzo Nolfi, 1642), Giulio Del Colle characterises her as the ‘true embodiment of music and the only marvel of the stage, who, during the course of the performance first gave vent to, then hid, then disguised, then revealed, and then lamented her amorous passions’.²⁹

The fascination exerted by female high voices on audiences was constantly described in erotic terms. Interestingly, the same effect was achieved by castrati but not by lower male voices. The castrato Atto Melani (1626–1714) who had played the role of Achille in La Finta pazza along with Renzi, is described in such gendered terms: ‘a young castrato from Rome of beautiful appearance, who resembles an Amazon in his mixture of warlike spirit and feminine delicacy’.³⁰ The following description from Il Cannocchiale demonstrates the effect his singing had on his listeners:

Pietro Della Valle affirms that castrati ‘cloaking themselves in the affects, … enrapture the listener’.³² All singers – and especially those with high voices such as female singers and castrati – were often admired for their virtuosity, but the rapture was caused by an association of both aural and visual effects. The affects expressed by the text were not only sung but also staged, appealing to the eyes and the ears of the spectators simultaneously. In his description of the female consorts employed at the courts of Mantua and Ferrara (the concerto delle donne developed in late Renaissance, originally at the court of Ferrara), Vincenzo Giustiniani gives us a valuable insight into how these singers had such a powerful effect on their audience:

According to the Neoplatonic theory of love, sight was the sense that allowed the image of the beloved to penetrate the soul: entering through the eyes, it literally took possession of the lover’s soul.³⁴ Female singers and castrati represented symbolic embodiments of the lover onstage: they had a similar effect on their audience. Thus, opera was considered the most appealing expression of the affects, while still considered a threat to the spectators’ souls.

Empowering the Female Voice: Francesca Caccini and La liberazione di Ruggiero (1625)

Even when women were seen to be transgressing their gendered role by stepping onstage, their presence was certainly acknowledged, whether they were praised or despised. The growing popularity of public opera made them all the more visible, and heard. Composing, however, was an entirely different matter as it was almost exclusively a male domain and prerogative. One remarkable exception was Francesca Caccini (1587–1641), who worked at the Medici court in Florence and was the first woman to compose an opera, La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina (The Liberation of Ruggiero from Alcina’s Island, 1625).³⁵ She was raised in a musical household; her father Giulio Caccini (1551–1618) was her teacher; her mother Lucia di Filippo Gagnolanti, her stepmother Margherita della Scala, and her sister Settimia (1591–c. 1660) were all gifted singers. Francesca served the Medici from 1607 until 1627 as a singer, instrumentalist, and music teacher; she was also the most prolific female composer of her era. The musician with the highest salary on the Medici payroll, she composed the music to at least thirteen court entertainments. Her unique role as a female composer is undoubtedly linked to the joint female regency (1621–1630) in Florence and to the destinies of two outstanding women, the Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine, widow of Ferdinando I de’ Medici, and her daughter-in-law, the Archduchess Maria Magdalena of Austria, widow of Cosimo II. The contrast between the two of them could not have been more marked. A delicate, elegant French aristocrat with a dominant and controlling attitude towards power, Christina had been the de facto sovereign of Tuscany since 1607 and during her son’s reign. Maria Magdalena, on the other hand, was an unusually robust and manly woman – an accomplished dancer, horsewoman, and huntress. Both, however, were united in legitimising their unprecedented female regency, and one privileged means was patronage of the arts. Continuing a Medici tradition of myth-building and self-fashioning through pictorial, musical, and textual productions, the female regents adapted it to the purpose of gender politics by portraying positive models of female leaders; theatrical spectacles played a central role in this campaign. In 1607, Christina commissioned La Stiava (The Female Slave, libretto by Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger), Francesca’s first opera and also her very first composition. Unfortunately the score is lost, but it was described as having ‘marvelous music’.³⁶ The grand duchess was involved in the preparations and had the librettist rewrite the script to transform the female slave from an object of male desire to a sovereign kidnapped by pirates, and from a mute object to a singing subject. The political justification of the female voice was essential to Christina as a legitimisation of her regency: as Cusick puts it, the opera was ‘a conquest of disorder by sonic order’.³⁷

The Archduchess Maria Magdalena commissioned La liberazione di Ruggiero dell’isola d’Alcina in 1625 to celebrate the visit of her Polish nephew, Prince Władysław, hoping to arrange a marriage with her daughter Margherita – the plan was destined to fail. The opera was performed at the Villa Poggio Imperiale, the family’s summer residence, which had just been redecorated at Maria Magdalena’s request with female imagery of Amazon warriors, heroines of ancient history, and female saints. Maria Magdalena attended nearly every rehearsal to maintain control over the production. Drawing on both Ariosto and Tasso, the libretto by Ferdinando Saracinelli (d. 1640) is an allegory of female power, staged as a struggle between two sorceresses to win Ruggiero. The benevolent Melissa eventually succeeds in freeing him from the charms of the evil and sensual Alcina, who has kidnapped him. The character of Ruggiero is utterly passive, prey to the two women’s contradictory desires. Allegorically, the opera stages a struggle between chaos and order, between Alcina’s uncontrollable and threatening sexuality characterised by her immoderate behaviour, and Melissa’s forceful call to duty and eventual restoration of Ruggiero at the head of the Christian armies. Musically, Caccini uses various styles and modes to depict gender. Alcina and her attendants sing in flat keys; Ruggiero and his male attendants sing in sharp keys; the bi-gendered Melissa – first appearing as Atlante, a male warrior, then shifting into the role of a female benevolent sorceress – sings mostly in C natural.³⁸

Francesca chose specific musical genres: canzonettas for a trio of sopranos; an evocation of the concerto delle donne; elaborate strophic arias for the lovers’ duet with ornamentation inspired by her father’s collections of monodies, Le Nuove musiche (1602) and Nuove musiche e nuova maniera di scriverle (1614); musically dispassionate recitatives for the narration; and a five-part madrigal for the chorus of the enchanted plants. To restore masculinity to power, Melissa dissociates herself from her gender: she first appears onstage in male disguise as the non-Christian prince and warrior Atlante and musically appropriates male speech and reasoning.³⁹

Published in 1625 and dedicated to Maria Magdalena, La liberazione is one of the few operas to have been published at that time, which attests to its political importance. It is also rare for its inclusion of five engravings of stage designs by Alfonso Parigi. One of the political purposes of La liberazione had much to do with the legitimisation of Maria Magdalena’s regency: intended to contribute to her self-fashioning as a benevolent cross-gendered ruler, the work reinforced her image as the dynastic guardian of Medici sovereignty. Saracinelli’s allusion to Maria Magdalena’s manly manners must have been unequivocal to the audience. Her call to duty ‘Atlante a te se’n vien’ (‘Atlante is coming to you’) is set as a diatonic, slow recitative in a narrow range: it follows the words, emphasising the domination of the rational male sphere of the logos over the lascivious female sphere of the melos. Her speech condemns sensual love, glorifying war and manly duties. She shames Ruggiero for his effeminacy, and calls him to action once he has regained his virility. By adopting a male disguise and voice, Melissa convinces Ruggiero to abandon his lover. Alcina’s long lament ‘Ferma ferma crudele’ (‘Stop, stop cruel one’) is on the contrary musically excessive and immoderate – two typical female vices. Switching rapidly from intense pain to joy and laughter, the libretto evokes extreme passions, enhanced by a musical setting based on melodic and harmonic extravagances.

Confronting her unfaithful lover in a chromatic complaint, Alcina constantly switches from one affect to another. Florid passages alternate with bursts of anger, erratic melodic motions with grief-stricken lamentations. Extreme dissonances, chromatic passages, and abrupt modal changes characterise her long lament. Failing to regain Ruggiero’s love by the beauty of her sensual song, she unleashes demons and fire against him, failing again to avenge herself. On the contrary, the moderate Melissa ultimately triumphs and restores the male power of Ruggiero.

In the hands of two powerful women who desire him, Ruggiero remains effeminate and passive. Overtly emotional and confused by passion, his song acquires a feminine quality in his love duet with Alcina, ‘Quanto per dolce’. His vagaries are set to capricious music, featuring erratic changes in the melodic line and in the harmony (see Example 7.1). Melissa reproaches him for his immodesty, a typical feminine flaw: sensual excess has transformed him into a womanish figure.

Example 7.1 Francesca Caccini, La liberazione di Ruggiero dal’isola d’Alcina, baletto (Florence, 1625), Ruggiero, ‘Quanto per dolce’ (Florence: Pietro Cecconcelli, 1625), mm. 138–62; 223–37

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

The Situation in France: Hatred of Castrato Voices

The court of Louis XIV was by no means a gynocentric form of government, and it certainly did not favour female artists as the Florentine regents did. To escape the predatory misogyny of the court, the précieuses – women belonging to the French nobility and advocating a new, sophisticated literary style referred to as ‘précieux’ (precious) – created alternate spaces known as ruelles where the arts were cultivated. Their refined language and activities, including parlour games, exuded exquisite elegance and manners. A form of resistance against the coarseness of the Court, the ruelles allowed them to discuss controversial political topics, focusing on women’s independence from social and sexual submission, and on improving their access to knowledge.⁴⁰ The air de cour was their favoured musical genre, much more than opera, which was strongly tied to the politics of absolutism.

One exceptionally talented woman who performed regularly at Versailles – the first and only female composer to write a tragédie en musique – was Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre (1665–1729). A child prodigy born into a family of musicians, she performed on the harpsichord from the age of five and sang at the court of Louis XIV under the protection of his mistress, Madame de Montespan. In 1684, she married the organist Martin de La Guerre and left the court to give lessons and concerts in Paris. In 1691 she wrote a ballet for the King, Les Jeux à l’honneur de la victoire (music lost).⁴¹ Céphale et Procris, her only tragédie en musique, was performed in 1694 in Paris at the Théâtre du Palais Royal, but it met with little success. Its failure can be attributed to several factors, the first of which was a confused plot with weaknesses in the libretto written by Joseph-François Duché de Vancy, a protégé of the king’s morganatic wife, Madame de Maintenon, but not the best poet.⁴² Second, in the 1690s, the king, influenced by the religious conservatism of Madame de Maintenon, had started to show less interest in opera. Third, the church intensified its attacks on the theatre and particularly opera in 1693, condemning it as inappropriate and excessively sensuous.⁴³

Duché’s libretto does not feature strong female characters, but rather a love triangle with traditional gender roles. Céphale and Procris’ love is thwarted by the gods, who declare that Procris will marry Borée. Attempting to intervene in a fight between her two male rivals, Procris is inadvertently killed by Céphale. Musically, the overall structure of this opera follows the conventions of the tragédie en musique of Lully and Quinault. The modal organisation – its style and structure – adheres to and depicts the characters’ passions but does not establish gender distinctions, as was the case in Caccini’s opera. About to be married to Borée, Procris invokes death to escape her destiny in a lament, ‘Funeste mort, donnez-moy du secours’, set to the descending tetrachord in F with many dissonances illustrating her defeat.

Jacquet de La Guerre was the only woman to appear among the composers listed in Évrard Titon du Tillet’s chronicle Le Parnasse françois (1732). However, Titon du Tillet mentions several other women with less important positions, mostly singers on the Parisian stage, where professional female singers did not have to share the limelight with castrati, as was the case in Italy. The French distaste for castrati was first and foremost moral and sexual; aesthetic considerations only came second. None of their detractors objected to the quality and virtuosity of their singing, but the mutilation they endured and the resulting gender ambiguity caused physical disgust among women and sexual anxieties among men.⁴⁴ Castrati’s physical appearance and their manners were perceived as extravagant by the French, whose culture privileged language and declamation over sheer vocal beauty. Castrati seemed unconvincing from a dramaturgical point of view, especially in cross-dressed or heroic male roles. The poet and librettist Pierre Perrin (1620–1675) described them as ‘the horror of women and the laughing stock of men’ and advised banning castrati from opera, where they offended decorum and verisimilitude.⁴⁵ Moreover, contrary to Italian practice, the French did not privilege high-pitched voices, and the pure vocality embodied by the female singer was frowned upon: the female voice was perceived as a threat to logos, since it conveyed overwhelming passions that deformed the semantic content of the text.⁴⁶

Anne Chabanceau de La Barre (1628–1688), daughter of the organist Pierre de La Barre, sang in the French production of Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo in 1646 and Francesco Cavalli’s Ercole amante in 1662 as La Bellezza (The Beauty).⁴⁷ She was praised for her excellence in both the French and Italian styles, as well as in court ballets and Italian operas. Queen Christina invited her to the court of Sweden in late 1652 or early 1653, where she remained until the queen’s abdication in 1654; she then briefly performed at the court of Denmark.⁴⁸ In 1661 she was appointed ordinaire de la musique du roi – the first time such a title was granted to a female musician.⁴⁹ Her marriage in 1667 signalled the end of her career, as was the tradition for female singers once married.

Marie Le Rochois (c. 1658–1728) sang at the Paris Opéra from 1678 until 1698, where she premièred all the major female roles in several of Lully’s operas – Proserpine (1680), Mérope in Persée (1682), Arcabonne in Amadis (1684), Angélique in Roland (1685), Armide (1686), and Galatée in the pastorale héroïque Acis et Galatée (1686). Her portrayal of Armide made her famous and caused quite a stir. The French critic Jean Laurent Le Cerf de la Viéville (1674–1707) affirmed that ‘he had never been moved so deeply’ and that he still shivered when he remembered Le Rochois’s marvellous voice and performance.⁵⁰ Titon du Tillet describes her as

On the other hand, François Raguenet, an ardent defender of the Italian style, wrote in his Parallèle des Italiens et des Français (1702) that ‘if a principal actress such as Le Rochois should step aside, not only Paris but all of France would not be able to find another one that could replace her’.⁵² In the English translation of Raguenet’s text (1709), the translator added that Le Rochois was ‘a wretched Actress, and sang insufferably out of Tune’.⁵³ In Titon’s description, however, Le Rochois fell in line with French expectations, advocating more realistic staging and less florid singing.

Marie-Louise Desmatins (fl. 1682–c. 1708) sang together with Le Rochois in several secondary roles from Lully’s tragédies, alternating with her in the title role of Destouches’s Issé (1697), a pastorale héroïque. She sang Médée in Lully’s Thésée in the 1698 revival and the title-role in Armide in 1703. Although Desmatins is referenced in very few sources, she is prominently featured in La musique du diable ou le Mercure Galant dévalisé (Paris: Robert le Turc, 1711). Just as the Italian Jesuits had before, this cautionary pamphlet criticised opera and the decadence of theatre. La musique du diable was written as an attack on women performing onstage and offers a satirical depiction of an afterlife in hell in which Desmatins, together with Lully and the most famous musicians of the king, are transformed into porpoises.⁵⁴ Rumoured to have had her fat removed by a butcher, Desmatins then organises a dinner where she serves food prepared with her own fat and dies soon after. At the outset of Pluto’s reign, she faces a host of serious charges. Accused of prostitution, transmitting venereal diseases, spoiling marriages, robbing respectable merchants, poisoning prelates and fellow actresses, neglecting confession for twenty years, and having had four abortions, she replies: ‘I have done nothing that an opera girl as tolerably pretty as I should not have done.’⁵⁵ Pluto eventually welcomes her to hell with the highest honours.

Fanchon Moreau (1668–1743) made her début in the prologue of Lully’s Phaëton in 1683. She premièred the roles of Oriane in Lully’s Amadis (1684) and Créuse in Charpentier’s Médée (1693); she also sang in Campra’s L’Europe galante (1697), in Destouches’s Issé (1697), and in several Lully revivals. Her elder sister Louison was also a singer, and both were mistresses of the dauphin, Louis de France.⁵⁶ But no singer’s life was as tumultuous as that of Julie d’Aubigny, or La Maupin (c. 1673–1707). She started her career by giving fencing exhibitions and singing in roadside taverns in France, and made her operatic début in a revival of Lully’s Cadmus et Hermione in 1690; she then sang in new productions by Henri Desmarets, Destouches, Campra, and La Barre. Her voice was a ‘bas-dessus’ (more akin to our modern mezzo-soprano). Claude and François Parfaict’s Dictionnaire des théâtres described her voice as being of unequaled beauty.⁵⁷ Married and openly bisexual, she often cross-dressed and was an accomplished swordswoman. Her idiosyncrasies were such that already during her lifetime many unverified stories circulated about her. Her tumultuous love affair with Fanchon Moreau also inspired the imagination of her biographers – according to a rather dubious anecdote, La Maupin attempted suicide when Fanchon rejected her.

La Maupin’s unusual vocal range, her acting skills, and her androgynous appearance made her a favourite of French audiences. Since a fundamental principle of the operatic genre in France was its adherence to the rules of classical theatre, the singer’s principal task was not so much to sing well (‘le beau chant’) but to act well in order to represent the drama.⁵⁸ The sung voice, and especially the female one, expressed extreme passions that were conceived as a threat to eloquence and to the verisimilitude of the tragédie en musique. A shift in perspective during the eighteenth century eventually enabled the female singer to become a diva, as musical listening was increasingly understood as a form of sensory and emotional participation, creating a liberating space for female voices that had previously been restrained.⁵⁹ Through her daring personality and overtly sexualised image, La Maupin highlights some of the changes that took place during the seventeenth century with respect to female musicians.

The Exportation of the Italian Model to the Germanic Countries and England

While the French started their own national tradition with the tragédie en musique and their decisive rejection of castrati, the rest of Europe imported the Italian genre, along with its style and, most importantly, its performers. The diaspora of Italian singers spread in the early seventeenth century to the German-speaking countries.⁶⁰ Vienna and Innsbruck became outposts of Venice for operatic production. The Compagnia dei Fedeli, who had premièred Monteverdi’s Arianna in Mantua in 1608, was at the service of the imperial court of Vienna from 1626–1628. Antonio Cesti (1623–1669) was chapel master and opera director in Innsbruck from 1652–1658 and 1661–1665, premièring among others his celebrated Argia in 1655 for the conversion to Roman Catholicism of Queen Christina of Sweden.

Women were always chaperoned and usually travelled around Europe with companies to perform operas. Typically, they were married to other singers. Some exceptionally gifted singers were appointed to northern courts. Invited by Maria de’ Medici, Ramponi performed with the Compagnia dei Fedeli in France; they also toured in Prague and Vienna. Margherita Basile (d. after 1639), sister of Adriana Basile, started her career in Mantua from 1615–late 1620s and was appointed to the imperial court of Vienna in 1631. She also accompanied one of Emperor Ferdinand II’s daughters to Poland in 1637. The prima donna Giulia Masotti abandoned her operatic career in Italy in 1673 to enter the service of Empress Claudia Felicitas as a chamber musician in Vienna. There, she encountered a very different setting than the spectacular one offered by the Italian stages to which she was accustomed. Also, she was an anomaly at the Habsburg court, where female singers had little public presence and did not usually appear on the operatic stage. Giulia performed in at least two operatic productions by Antonio Draghi, Il ratto delle Sabine and Il fuoco eterno custodito dalle Vestali (both 1674), with additional music by Emperor Leopold and Johann Heinrich Schmelzer. She stayed at the court after the death of the empress, but no records of her musical activity have survived.⁶¹

In England, the operatic tradition started later, and the celebrity culture surrounding operatic singers only developed at the turn of the eighteenth century in London. Cavalli’s Erismena (Venice, 1655) may have been performed in an English version in London in 1674;⁶² Lully’s Cadmus et Hermione (Paris, 1673) was given there in 1686, probably in the public theatre of Dorset Garden by a French company.⁶³ Like the French, the English had an enduring tradition of plays and court masques combining music, dance, and scenic spectacles with spoken dialogue instead of recitative. By the end of the century, resistance to Italian opera was not only motivated by aesthetic and patriotic considerations but also by what the English saw as a lack of dramatic coherence, and by issues surrounding gender in tandem with recurring arguments against castrati and the poor moral reputation of female singers.⁶⁴

The Italian soprano (Francesca) Margherita de L’Epine (c. 1680–1746), who had started her operatic career in Venice in the 1698–1700 seasons, arrived in London in 1702 as the mistress of the German composer Jakob Greber (d. 1731). She became the first leading female singer in London, just at the time when Italian opera was beginning to be produced on the English stage.⁶⁵ Immensely popular and courted by many English aristocrats, she had a brilliant career as a singer and dancer, and could sing in both Italian and English.

L’Epine’s first known London performance in an opera was Haym’s adaptation of Bononcini’s Camilla at Drury Lane in 1706. She then appeared in almost all operatic productions in London until 1714, often playing male parts because of her looks. Burney described her as ‘so swarthy and ill-favored that her husband used to call her Hecate … But with such a total absence of personal charms, our galleries would have made her songs very short, had they not been executed in such a manner as to silence theatrical snakes, and command applause.’⁶⁶ The anti-theatrical newspaper The Observator wrote in 1706: ‘Can we help laughing and weeping at the same time, to see a secretary retiring from the great affairs of state to an alcove with Donna Margaritta de la Pin [sic], alias Pegg Thorn, to hear her sing “Colly my cow” and “Uptails all”?’⁶⁷ As was the case in France and Italy, attacks against female singers were common and were directed at the sexual threat they represented.⁶⁸

* * *

Opera, whether in its Italian homeland or as an exported genre, always raised aesthetic and moral concerns. Along with castrati, female performers embodied this peril, which explains the simultaneous singling out of female singers as the worst examples of debauchery while showering them with praise for their angelic voices. On stage, their acting bodies – projecting sound and conveying passions to an audience – were powerful tools for the sensuality of music, which could threaten reason and dramatic coherence. Librettists, composers, and critics alike tried in various ways to repress the voice, containing or sublimating its dangers, whether because of its unhinged nature and ensuing threat to logos, or because of the performers’ excessive display of virtuosity.

In the wake of Catherine Clément’s influential study, Opera, or the Undoing of Women (published originally in French in 1979), opera has long been considered a place of defeat for women. Yet, through its performative aspect, opera also became a space for the empowerment of the female voice. Conventional scenes in early opera often feature a female protagonist gripped by passions, a lament scene, a mad scene, or an incantation scene – from Monteverdi’s lament of Arianna to Armide’s scene ‘Enfin, il est en ma puissance’ in Lully’s eponymous tragédie en musique. Through their colourful careers, opera performers were the embodiment of the characters they represented onstage. With its proliferation of crossed-dressed female warriors or lamenting heroines, effeminate or virile characters, seventeenth-century opera offers a most fertile ground for studying the performance of gender.

Dance and opera had a much closer relationship in the seventeenth century than most histories of opera convey. It is well known that for the French dance was a fundamental part of the work, integrated into every act, but even across the rest of Europe audiences almost always watched dancing as part of an evening spent at the opera. What audiences saw varied considerably according to genre, time, and place; even in important operatic centres much remains to be learned about the intersections of opera and dance. Nowhere is it possible to fully perceive how dance functioned across an entire work, but there are a surprising number of surviving choreographies for individual dances, all from either the beginning or the end of the century. Moreover, enough accounts of dancing exist, some of them in libretti, to show that both action dances and dancing based on abstract floor patterns co-existed throughout the period. By the end of the century the technique of dance was expressed via terminology in French – a vocabulary still used in classical ballet – but local traditions helped define national and even regional styles that impacted operatic practices.

Pre-Operatic Practices in Italy

Early court operas absorbed practices from the intermedio tradition, which included dance. In fact, several of the genres of court entertainments, such as ballo, balletto, mascherata, or festa, either allude to or imply dancing in their very names. The particularly well-documented festivities for the wedding of Ferdinando de’ Medici and Christine of Lorraine in Florence in 1589 were far from the only instances of interspersing intermedi between the acts of a play but were probably the most splendid – and exceptional, because most of the music survives.¹ The play in question, La pellegrina by Girolamo Bargagli, had six spectacularly staged intermedi, two of them embellished with dancing. The texts were written by several eminent poets, including Giovanni de’ Bardi and Ottavio Rinuccini, and the music was composed primarily by Cristofano Malvezzi and Luca Marenzio, with additional contributions by Bardi, Giulio Caccini, Jacopo Peri, Antonio Archilei, and Emilio de’ Cavalieri, the latter of whom supervised the performance of the music. In the third intermedio, pastoral dances by nymphs and shepherds are interrupted by the arrival of a monster, who is vanquished by four expert dancing masters (one of them performing as Apollo). One eyewitness account reveals the mimetic nature of the movement:

The sixth intermedio had a much grander and more ceremonial character: its twenty-seven dancers, sixty singers, supernumeraries, and twenty-five instrumentalists brought the evening to a spectacular conclusion in a paean to the newly married couple. Remarkably, Cavalieri’s choreography for the concluding dance of this intermedio survives; set to his own chorus ‘O che nuovo miracolo’, it is transmitted in the ninth partbook of Malvezzi’s 1691 publication of the music, in lengthy instructions accompanied by two diagrams.³

The music alternates sections in duple and triple metre, switching between five-voice chorus, doubled by instruments, and trios for three sopranos (probably representing the three Graces); all of the sections were danced. Whereas ambiguities arise in reconstructing this choreography,⁴ its general outlines can be discerned: of the twenty-seven dancers, seven (four women and three men) were featured; the floorplan positions the twenty group dancers in an upstage arc, with the soloists either in the centre of the arc or downstage in a smaller arc; much of the choreography alternates figures for the men and for the women, with all seven sometimes dancing simultaneously; the remaining twenty dancers join in toward the end. This dance is based on abstract and symmetrical figures, in distinction to the mimed dancing of the fourth intermedio.

The steps prescribed by Cavalieri (seguito scorso, continenze, capriole, tempi di gagliarda, etc.) are familiar from the large dance treatises by Fabritio Caroso – Il ballarino (Venice, 1581) and Nobiltà di dame (Venice, 1600) – and Cesare Negri, whose Le Gratie d’amore (Milan, 1602) was revised as Nuove inventioni di balli in 1604. Moreover, Negri’s treatise provides two additional choreographies from intermedi, ones performed in Milan during the late sixteenth century. The ‘Brando per otto’, which followed the last act of the eclogue in five acts, Arminia by Giambattista Visconte (Milan, 1599), was attributed to four nymphs and four shepherds who danced across seven musical sections. In Negri’s treatise, one of these is labelled a ‘gagliarda’; others appear to include a pavana, saltarello, and alemana.⁵

Court Opera in Early Seventeenth-Century Italy

The works we now identify as the earliest operas, starting with La Dafne (Rinuccini, Peri; Florence, 1598), were created by many of the same people who had contributed to intermedi and other musical entertainments, most notably Rinuccini, Bardi, Peri, Caccini, and Cavalieri. These early works incorporated similar dance practices, in which dancing was strongly associated with pastoral characters and featured in choruses, especially, but not exclusively, those that ended the entire opera. Even Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo incorporated dancing, notwithstanding its allegorical subject and performance in a church (the Chiesa Nuova in Rome, February 1600). Moreover, in the preface to his published score, Cavalieri even underlines the contributions dances make to this and similar works, noting that they ‘truly enliven these plays, as, in fact, has been judged by all the spectators’.⁶ Cavalieri distinguishes between dances that are ‘unusual’ (‘fuori dell’uso commune’), such as battles, and ‘formal dance’ (‘ballo formato’), by which he means ones organised around abstract patterns. He recommends that the concluding dance be ‘sung and also played by the same persons who dance, with good occasion, holding the instruments in their hands’.⁷ This general advice is, however, modified later in the introduction, where instructions given for the strophic chorus, ‘Chiostri altissimi, e stellati’, that concludes the work imply two groups of dancers: mixed couples who perform during the sung portions and four maestri (that is, highly trained male dancers) who dance the ritornelli in a more technically advanced manner, ‘without singing’. For both sections, the description names some of the steps to be performed:

As the separate identification of the maestri suggests, the singing chorus and the dancers associated with it were not necessarily the same people; contemporary evidence suggests the co-existence of both singing-dancers and dancing-dancers. Peri’s Euridice, performed in Florence later the same year, also ends with a strophic chorus, labelled a ballo, which shows the same alternation: the entire chorus sings and dances during the strophes, while the ritornelli are ‘danced by two soloists from the chorus’. Both Cavalieri’s and Peri’s concluding complexes end with a choral strophe that must have been danced as well as sung.⁹

The score to Monteverdi’s Orfeo (Mantua, 1607) refers to one piece as a balletto – the chorus ‘Lasciati i monti’ in Act I. Like several dances from earlier works, this one takes place within a pastoral realm and, structurally, consists of a strophic chorus with an instrumental ritornello; its first verse and ritornello are repeated later in the act, just before ‘Vieni Imeneo’. The other clear dance comes at the end of the opera, where a strophic chorus is followed by a moresca – a dance that some recent commentators have interpreted as a remnant from the ending of the opera found in the libretto, where Orfeo is killed by Bacchantes. At least one other piece seems a likely candidate for dancing – Orfeo’s strophic song, ‘Vi ricorda o boschi ombrosi’ in Act II; both the song and its ritornello feature an alternating hemiola pattern found in other triple-metre Italian dances from the period.

Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggiero, dall’isola d’Alcina (Ferdinando Saracinelli, Florence, 1625), called a balletto in its sources, uses dancing by the sorceress Alcina’s female followers as an enhancement to the seductive attractions in Alcina’s enchanted gardens; this is but one instance among many in operatic history of dancing being used as seduction by women of questionable motives. Toward the end of the work, Alcina’s followers join with Ruggiero’s knights to celebrate his liberation; the whole is followed by a horse ballet.¹⁰

Opera in Venice

When opera became a public spectacle in Venice in 1637, dance remained one of its components. Ground-breaking work by Irene Alm has allowed us to see how extensive dance was in Venetian opera, and how, as the anonymous librettist for Monteverdi’s Le nozze d’Enea con Lavinia (Venice, 1641) put it, the balli should be ‘derived in some way from the plot’.¹¹ One key figure, dancer and choreographer Giovan Battista Balbi (fl. 1636–1654), was involved from the start, and had already been mentioned in the libretto for the first opera produced there, L’Andromeda (Benedetto Ferrari, Francesco Manelli; 1637). Balbi’s Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo (1639), with music composed by Francesco Cavalli, has a particularly large number of dances – some vocal, some instrumental – across all three of its acts. In one lengthy scene (whose music is extant), ‘Bacco and Sileno praise the virtues of wine, and the choruses [fauns and Bacchantes] dance to their melody.’¹² Although subsequent operas by Cavalli and his contemporaries did not approach this degree of sumptuousness, there are indications in more libretti than not that dance was part of the performance: Alm has documented the presence of balli in 297 of the 346 operas performed in Venice up until 1700.¹³

Whereas the strength of the pastoral tradition meant that nymphs, dryads, shepherds, and fauns remained numerous among the dancing populations, dancers also embodied animals, soldiers, sailors, supernatural beings (demons, spirits, phantoms), comic pages or servants, gardeners, hunters, mad people, and exotic foreigners (Turks, Moors, Spaniards, etc.; see Figure 8.1). In La Calisto (Giovanni Faustini, Cavalli; Venice, 1651), four bears come out of the forest and dance at the end of Act I (foreshadowing the heroine’s transformation into the Great Bear constellation at the end of the opera), and at the end of Act II dancing nymphs with arrows come to the aid of Linfea, who is the object of unwanted sexual attentions by a young satyr and his dancing followers.¹⁴

Figure 8.1 Conclusion of the ballo for the Turks, with dancing bears, as it was performed in Paris in 1645. Engraving by Valerio Spada, in Balletti d’invenzione nella Finta Pazzadi Giovanbattista Balbi (n.p., c. 1658).

By permission of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

No choreographies survive for any Venetian opera, although occasionally libretti provide tantalising glimpses of the dancers’ movements. As with the intermedi, some of the dance pieces seem abstract, whereas others mime actions: for instance, a battle or an emotional state such as madness. In Mutio Scevola (Nicolò Minato, Cavalli; Venice, 1665) there is a ballo for eight statues who leave their pedestals surrounding a statue of Janus, dance while throwing flames from their mouths, then return to their places. Other stage descriptions call for the dancers to leap and spin, whereas calmer group dances might move in graceful curves, as in the following description from Adriano Morselli’s libretto to Falaride tiranno d’Agrigento (Giovanni Battista Bassini, 1684): ‘The ballo circles through the porticos … . The dance circles around and they exit from the porticos.’¹⁵ With the exception of Balbi, choreographers are rarely named in libretti and individual dancers not at all. As for the music, whereas a great deal more dance music survives than has generally been recognised, a significant proportion of it has been lost. Its absence from many of the Venetian opera scores has often been taken to mean that the composer of the vocal music did not write the dances, but Alm argues that the evidence does not support drawing such a categorical conclusion, especially in the face of scores such as Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo (Orazio Persiani, Cavalli; Venice, 1638/9), where the dance music is so interwoven into its surroundings that it must be by Cavalli. She argues further that practices from later periods or from other cities should not be read backwards into mid-seventeenth-century Venice.¹⁶

Dances could be set either to instrumental pieces or to vocal ones, most usually choruses. The earlier practice of choruses whose members both sang and danced appears to have given way to greater separation in the functions of the performers; it appears that in Venice, perhaps even as early as Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo, the singers and dancers were different people. Whereas some solo songs or duets may also have been danced, there are clear instances, such as in Cavalli’s Gli amori d’Apollo e di Dafne (Francesco Busenello, Venice, 1640) that a song by Dafne (not danced) alternates with a chorus (danced; Act I scene 4); even when the bodies were different, the association between dancers and a singing chorus remained. The instrumental dances tended to be sectional, in two or three repeatable strains, often with irregular phrase lengths. As the century progressed, the proportion of dances in binary construction increased. Instrumental dances, whatever their form, rarely have generic designations, notwithstanding the few identified as ‘giga’, ‘corrente’, ‘ciaccona’, and the like. More often they are identified by the characters dancing, such as the ‘Ballo d’Eunichi’ in the 1663 Venetian performances from Antonio Cesti’s La Dori (Giovanni Filippo Apolloni; Innsbruck, Hof-Saales, 1657) or the ‘Ballo de Paggi e de Pazzi’ from Carlo Pallavicino’s Diocletiano (Matteo Noris, 1675) – titles suggesting that characterisation was key to the movement style.

As Venetian opera became more and more an art of solo singing, the number of choruses declined. Dancing, however, retained its place inside the opera – largely via instrumentally accompanied scenes at the ends of Acts I and II; these were connected to the plot, however loosely, although the connections grew more tenuous as time went on. Celebratory choruses that included dancing, generally found at the ends of acts or of the entire work, never entirely disappeared.

Opera in France

When Italian opera made intermittent appearances at the French court, under the patronage and encouragement of the Italian-born prime minister, Cardinal Mazarin, and the regent, Anne of Austria (widow of Louis XIII), the operas adhered to mid-century Venetian practices. Balbi drew upon his own experiences in Venice and Florence in choreographing the dances for two of the operas in Paris: in 1645, Francesco Sacrati’s La finta pazza (Giulio Strozzi, Venice, 1641) and in 1647 the creation of Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo at the Palais-Royal, both of which integrated the dances. Balbi later published eighteen designs for La finta pazza (see Figure 7.1). A vivid description of Balbi’s ballets in Paris was written by Olivier Lefèvre d’Ormesson, who attended a performance of La Découverte d’Achille par les Grecs (1645) that contained three ballets: one for monkeys, another for ostriches and dwarves, and one for parrots and Ethiopians.¹⁷

In Rossi’s Orfeo, on the other hand, the dances are mostly pastoral; in Act II, for example, a joyous sarabanda danced by twenty-four dryads sets up the shocking reversal when Euridice is bitten by a viper. But by the time Mazarin induced Cavalli to come to Paris in order to celebrate with due pomp the marriage of Louis XIV to Spanish Princess Maria Theresa, the composition of the dance music had been put into the hands of a local – the young Jean-Baptiste Lully – who, by birth, was Italian. Cavalli’s first opera for Paris, the 1660 Xerse (Minato, Venice, 1654), modified one of his Venetian works to suit French tastes: it was still sung in Italian by Italian singers but acquired a prologue honouring the union of the two countries; three acts became five; and six ballets, performed by French dancers, were inserted between the acts. Xerse was fully professional as to both the dancers and the singers, but Ercole amante (Francesco Buti, Paris, 1662), Cavalli’s new commission for the wedding celebrations, still carried vestiges of the ballet de cour, in that members of the royal family and the upper aristocracy danced alongside professional dancing masters in the purely instrumental ballets that ended the prologue and each of the five acts. The king himself, who was an excellent and enthusiastic dancer, performed four roles (the House of France, Pluton, Mars, and the Sun), his bride one (the House of Austria).

Lully absorbed much from Cavalli, but when, in 1672, he opened the Académie Royale de Musique (the Paris Opéra), he chose to integrate dancing inside each of the five acts of every opera, not to relegate it to between them. In his new model, the plot was carried primarily by the singers, but the divertissements were dramatically and thematically connected to their surroundings, and the dancing was interleaved with vocal music.¹⁸ This integration has more structural relationship to the comedy-ballets Lully had earlier developed with Molière – in which danced divertissements are part of the plot – than it does to his court ballets, which were constructed around a series of instrumental entrées interspersed with occasional vocal numbers.

During his lifetime Lully had a monopoly on composing opera in France; his creative team included librettist Philippe Quinault (1635–1688) and dancer Pierre Beauchamps (1631–1705), who had served as choreographer for the king’s ballets de cour. Quinault was responsible for structuring the divertissements into the opera, although Lully must have been the one to design their inner workings. Whereas in dialogue scenes Lully’s musical language is restrained, featuring a kind of heightened speech that operates in something akin to real time, divertissements call attention to their own musicality: ‘Chantons, chantons, faisons entendre / Nos chansons jusques dans les cieux’ (‘Let us sing, let us make our songs be heard all the way up to the heavens’), sings Apollon toward the end of Alceste (Quinault, Paris, 1674). Such an invitation allowed for long choruses, strophic songs, and instrumental dances using the full resources of the orchestra; time relaxes and music takes precedence over words. In order to conform to French principles of theatrical verisimilitude, the character types who appear in divertissements are either defined as beings who by their very nature express themselves through dance and song – Arcadian nymphs and shepherds, demons in the Underworld, and so forth – or, if they are ordinary mortals, find themselves in situations, such as wedding celebrations, that make dancing plausible.

Lully’s divertissements serve to expand the world of the opera beyond the main characters to the societies that surround them. One of their functions is to uncover power relationships among individual characters: a hero such as Renaud in Armide (Quinault, Paris, 1686), who is acted upon during divertissements but does not control a single one of them, is revealed as weak. Often the anonymous characters in divertissements represent words or actions that the principals cannot or will not express for themselves: Cadmus arranges a divertissement as a subterfuge for communicating with the captive Hermione; the goddess Cybèle cannot bring herself to admit her love to Atys, so she sends dreams. Such reciprocities between the main characters and the worlds they inhabit are a fundamental feature of the operatic style that Quinault and Lully created together.

The members of the dance troupe, like all their colleagues, were salaried employees of the Académie Royale de Musique. Their numbers are not known for Lully’s era, but in 1704 there were eleven men and ten women. As a practical matter, the functions of singing and dancing were supplied by different people; libretti show that a chorus consisted of group characters, ‘some of whom sing, the others of whom dance’. In other words, every role inside a divertissement is assigned two sets of bodies, although the number of singers and dancers need not be equal. The members of the singing chorus generally stood around the perimeter of the stage, leaving the downstage area free for the solo singers and the dancers, who entered and left the space as appropriate. Quinault’s libretti scrupulously distinguish between male and female roles (e.g., Bergers and Bergères), even though all of the dancers were men until 1681. Even after four women joined the troupe, starting with the ballet Le Triomphe de l’Amour (Isaac de Benserade, Quinault; Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 1681), men still danced some female roles. Their training prepared them to dance in many different styles, and their versatility can be seen in the role assignments shown in libretti; ballet remained a male-dominated art until well into the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, it is clear that the availability of women to dance on the stage changed the character of the divertissements Lully and Quinault wrote into their operas.

The internal structures of Lully’s divertissements are enormously varied, but almost all of them reveal close connections between instrumental and vocal music.¹⁹ Often a chorus or an instrumental march brings all the group characters on stage, to be followed by dance-songs, other choruses, and instrumental dances – almost never more than two of the latter in a row. Generic dance types – bourrée, menuet, sarabande, and so on – account for approximately one-third of the dances in any opera. Many more are called ‘entrées’ or ‘airs’ followed by the name of the characters performing them, a musical choice in line with contemporary theorists such as Michel de Pure, who wrote that ‘the first and most essential beauty of an air de ballet is appropriateness – that is, the correct relation that the air must have to the thing represented’.²⁰ Dance pieces are either musically related to adjacent vocal pieces (this accounts for approximately two-thirds of them) or, if they are musically independent, are in close proximity to vocal pieces to which they have dramatic connections. Strophic dance-songs, which can be for solo voice, duet, or chorus, are usually performed in the following order: instrumental dance, the first strophe of the song, a repeat of the instrumental dance, and the second strophe. This means that the audience receives the visual sign before the texted one, since the norm was for the dancers to stop moving during the singing, even when the vocal music was identical to their dance. Choruses could sometimes be danced, if their texts invited movement or if they occurred at the end of a celebratory divertissement, but not solo songs, no matter how danceable the music. Thanks to the integrated structures that Lully and Quinault designed, dance in his operas is presented not as an interruption or as a parenthesis within the action, but as part of a natural continuum that incorporates multiple modes of expression.

During the 1680s three systems of dance notation came into existence in France.²¹ The best known among them was developed by Beauchamps but exploited commercially by Raoul Anger Feuillet, author of the 106-page book Chorégraphie and a choreographer in his own right. Although Chorégraphie was not published until 1700, the sophistication of the system and the enormous movement vocabulary it records demonstrate that this style of dance had existed for many years. Moreover, a number of basic stylistic principles – not to mention dance terms – have been handed down over the generations as part of the technique of classical ballet. Beauchamps-Feuillet notation preserves over 350 individual choreographies, among which may be found forty-seven that originated on the stage of the Paris Opéra. Figure 8.2, for example, representing a choreography by Guillaume Pécour for two divinités infernales, can be dated to the revival of Persée in 1710. All of this group post-dates Lully’s lifetime and was choreographed between 1690 and 1713 by Pécour, Beauchamps’s successor as ballet master at the Académie Royale de Musique.²² These choreographies, all of them for one or two dancers, show that the dancing space is oriented around an invisible axis running from front to back through the centre of the stage; when one couple dances, whether same sex or mixed, the two dancers do the same steps and patterns in mirror image. Even in group dances, the patterns are symmetrical (see Figure 8.3).

Figure 8.2 Guillaume Pécour, ‘Entrée for two men danced by Messieurs Marcel and Gaudrau in [Lully’s] Persée’. Michel Gaudrau, Nouveau recüeil de dance de bal et celle de ballet (Paris: Chez le Sieur Gaudrau et Pierre Ribou, [1715]), 91.

By permission of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

Figure 8.3 Jean Berain, a symmetrical grouping of six couples dancing with a soloist. Ink drawing, s.d., c. 1700.

By permission of Stockholm, Nationalmuseum (Photo: Cecilia Heisser, Nationalmuseum)

After Lully’s death in 1687, Beauchamps retired, yet the templates they had established for constructing divertissements remained in place, even in the new genre of opera-ballet, which was introduced in 1697 by André Campra’s L’Europe galante. The lean Lullian divertissement only gradually put on more weight through the addition of more instrumental dances and elaborate ariettes. The introduction of contemporary Italian themes onto the stage of the Opéra, which reached its apogee with Campra’s Les Fêtes vénitiennes (1710), expanded the range of dancing roles and allowed the dancing body to become a site for humour, via characters borrowed from the commedia dell’arte. But the dance styles, however comic, remained French; it was not until 1739 when the first Italian dancers made guest appearances at the Opéra that the more athletic Italian dance style began to make serious inroads in Paris.

Operatic Dancing outside of Italy and France

Opera houses outside of Italy and France often borrowed musical and choreographic practices from one or both of the dominant styles, either by importing works, composers, or performers, or through imitation, generally tempered by local practices. Opera in Italian had the greater geographic spread but did not necessarily include Italian dance practices. In fact, France exported dancers and choreographers, and, to a lesser degree, composers of dance music; it was not rare for French-style divertissements to be taken up into diverse types of opera.

German-Speaking Areas

The court operas performed upon occasion before the advent of public opera houses tended to adopt Italian models, although the same German courts might perform ballets de cour and not infrequently employ French dancing masters. Jacques Rodier and his son François choreographed both ballets and operas at the court in Munich; another major French dancer, Jean-Pierre Dubreuil, worked there later. The most sumptuous court opera, however – Cesti’s Il pomo d’oro (Vienna, 1668), commissioned for the wedding of Leopold I and Margherita of Spain – not only had an Italian librettist and Italian composer, it had an Italian choreographer, Santo Ventura; only the stylistically mixed ballet music was local, composed by Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, who between 1665 and 1680 supplied ballet music for most of the theatrical works at the Habsburg court. A ballet connected to the plot ended each of the five acts.

The public opera house that opened in Hamburg in 1678 presented most of its operas in German, whether they were original to Hamburg or translations, although Lully’s Acis et Galatée was performed in French in 1689. (It was performed again in 1695, this time in German; six operas by Agostino Steffani were presented in German translation between 1696 and 1699). Johann Georg Conradi’s Die schöne und getreue Ariadne (1691) adopted both Venetian and French dance practices: the end of the first act unexpectedly ushers ribald scissor-sharpeners onto the stage, whereas Act III features an integrated divertissement for the singing and dancing followers of Bacchus, and the opera ends with a passacaille, both instrumental and vocal, followed by a celebratory chorus. Subsequent operas performed in Hamburg by composers such as Reinhard Keiser, the young Handel, and Telemann reveal a similar mixture of styles that leans towards Italy in the vocal music and France for the overture and the dances, although the stylistic boundaries are porous.

Another measure of the penetration of French dance styles into Germany is the large number of books published there on the topic – no fewer than nine between 1703 and 1717.²³ Most of these concentrate on ballroom dancing, but Die neueste Art zur galanten und theatralischen Tantz-Kunst (Frankfurt, 1711), written by the French dancer Louis Bonin, who had moved to Iena after a career at the Paris Opéra, focuses primarily on theatrical styles.

The Low Countries

Operas performed were initially French, riding in part on the wave of émigré Huguenot musicians and printers from France. The first two operas performed in Antwerp, both in 1682, were Lully’s Bellérophon and Proserpine. The company was, however, very small and included only four dancers.²⁴ In The Hague the first opera performed was Lully’s Armide (1701); Atys, Thésée, and Campra’s L’Europe galante were next in line. One of this troupe’s most highly remunerated employees was Pierre de La Montagne, who was imported from Paris. His duties required him to train the dancers, to choreograph, and to dance; the operatic divertissements he oversaw appear to have been performed in full.²⁵

Sweden

Despite a few scattered attempts to import Italian opera, it was not until 1699 – when the Francophile Swedish architect Nicodemus Tessin the Younger promoted the formation of a troupe of French actors to come to Stockholm – that dancing in a semi-operatic context can be documented. At first the troupe, headed by Claude de Rosidor and including twelve actors, four singers, and four dancers, mostly performed comedy-ballets by Molière, plus a few operatic extracts by Lully. In 1701, however, the troupe mounted what has come to be called the Ballet de Narva, a ‘Ballet meslé de chants héroïques’, with a text in French by Charles Louis Sevigny, in honour of King Charles XII’s victory at Narva over the Russians. The vocal music was composed by Anders von Düben the Younger, but the dance pieces and the final chorus were borrowed from the pastorale Le Désespoir de Tircis by Jean Desfontaines, with two additional dances from Lully’s Cadmus et Hermione.²⁶ By 1706 all of the members of Rosidor’s troupe had departed, and opera did not become firmly established in Sweden until well into the eighteenth century.

Spain

The plays written by Lope de Vega for public theatres and, later, by Pedro Calderón de la Barca for the court, were punctuated by music and dance, although the instrumental music rarely survives. Two operas were written in 1660–1661 for the wedding of the Infanta María Teresa with Louis XIV of France: La púrpura de la rosa (text by Calderón, music by Juan Hidalgo, lost) and Celos aun del aire matan (text by Calderón, music by Hidalgo).²⁷ The stage directions in the latter do not explicitly call for dancing, but the loa (prologue) that probably existed at the time could well have incorporated dances.²⁸ Although no other fully sung operas were composed in Spain during the seventeenth century, zarzuelas and other theatrical genres continued to incorporate dances such as jácaras, seguidillas, zarabandas, and chaconas.

England

When English theatres reopened after Charles II returned from exile in France, the musical entertainments put on between the acts of plays included dancing among the songs and acrobatics. Sometimes dances were integrated into the plot – in a scene of celebration, for instance – but most were individual set pieces that had little or no connection with their surroundings. Intermittent visits to London by dancers from the Paris Opéra kept English audiences aware of French styles.²⁹ The earliest operas – for example, John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (c. 1683) and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1689) – followed Lullian models in incorporating dances into the storyline; Dido and Aeneas, short as it is, calls for no fewer than ten. All the dances appear in scenes involving the chorus, such as ‘Fear no danger to ensue’ in Act I, where the libretto says ‘Dance this Cho.’, or the Sailors’ Dance at the start of Act III, which precedes a musically related song by a solo sailor that the chorus joins. The duet in Act I sung by Belinda and the Second Woman, ‘Fear no danger to ensue’, may also have been performed instrumentally, in alternation with the chorus, by simply leaving out the choral parts: not only is it in binary form but it adopts the rhythm of a seventeenth-century French minuet step .³⁰ The opera closed with a dance by Cupids mourning the death of Dido, although the music for it, as for some of the other dances, does not survive.

Purcell’s four semi-operas (1690–1695), performed publicly by the Theatre Royal company, also drew upon conventions established by Lully in constructing the masques performed between acts; the Frost Scene in King Arthur, for example, uses the same musical figure to evoke shivering as do Lully’s Trembleurs in Isis. On the other hand, some of the dances Purcell inserted into his scores – such as country dances and hornpipes – are purely English. The semi-operas were choreographed by Jo. Priest (Josias or Joseph, who may have been the same person³¹), but none of his choreographies survive. Handel’s first opera in London, Rinaldo (1710), has a single danced scene, and dancing is found intermittently in other operas; in some later works, such as Alcina (1725), Handel took advantage of the visiting French dancers to build in elaborate ballet sequences.³² That the dancing technique and style were French can be seen by the frequent performances by French and English dancers together, the two almost simultaneous translations into English of Feuillet’s Chorégraphie (by Siris and Weaver, both in 1706), the numerous choreographies in Feuillet notation published in England, and the French dance types that appeared on the English stage (minuets, rigaudons, sarabandes, chaconnes, etc.).³³

* * *

By the end of the seventeenth century, French dance practices had penetrated even into Italy, albeit unevenly. Some Venetian operas dating from the 1680s and 1690s incorporate minuets, bourrées (borea), or rigaudons, and composers such as Carlo Francesco Pollarolo sometimes structured divertissements in a French manner, with instrumental dances related to and interwoven with solo songs and choruses.³⁴ However, these tendencies were in the minority; more and more the danced sequences were independent, done as intermezzi after Acts I and II of a three-act opera; by the time Metastasian opera seria arrived, the transformation was complete.³⁵ But even as French and Italian approaches to the relationship between dance and opera grew farther apart, the technical bases of dancing grew closer. The dearth of choreographic sources from the middle of the seventeenth century in both Italy and France makes tracking actual dance practices almost impossible, but it is clear that by the early eighteenth century French and Italian dancing shared a common technique whose lingua franca was French.

One important testimonial is Gregorio Lambranzi’s Neue und curieuse theatralische Tantz-Schul (Nuremberg, 1716), an illustrated book of theatrical – mostly comic – dances in the Italian style, which uses French names when it mentions steps, as can be seen in Figure 8.4: ‘Scapino dances alone, executing, among other pas, his ballonnés, chassés, contretemps, and [pas de] rigaudon, with his arms twisted from side to side. The air is played at will.’ Yet Lambranzi’s book also underscores differences between the two styles that transcended the steps: Italian athleticism that contrasted with French refinement, the greater latitude given to comic dancing and to mime in Italy, and greater allowance in Italy for choreographic improvisation.³⁶ When Italian dancers first appeared at the Paris Opéra in 1739, they created a sensation; their appearances were but one step in a process of greater hybridisation of the two styles.

Figure 8.4 Gregorio Lambranzi, Neue und curieuse theatralische Tantz-Schul (Nuremberg, 1716), book I, plate 34.

Private collection

Opera, ‘as every school boy knows’, started life in the 1590s; and we might well suppose that such a novel phenomenon would cry out for entirely new techniques of staging. But in this we would be wrong. Most of the elements which fused to create opera as a form were already present in other musical and dramatic modes in the later sixteenth century, and that was the case, too, when it came to putting the form on stage.

Precedents and Continuities

To begin with, opera’s most obvious theatrical requirement was the singer-actor. This wasn’t a species that had to be created in 1598. There were already professional singers who made movement, gesture, and facial expression important parts of their projection of the solo songs they performed: for instance, the talented anonymous Italian lady who, coming to the front of the stage during a musical episode in Alidoro, Gabriele Bombasi’s spoken tragedy of 1568, ‘altered the expression in her face and eyes, and her gestures and movements, to accord with the changes in meaning of the words she sang’.¹ And among the professional actors whose usual stage-medium was speech, there were some who could act and sing simultaneously, not least those practising that thriving late sixteenth-century form, the commedia dell’arte, which, though it was mainly spoken, often included song. As it happened, versatility of this sort saved the situation when it came to the première of Ottavio Rinuccini and Claudio Monteverdi’s opera Arianna (Mantua, 1608). Some weeks before, there had been a big casting crisis through the death of the opera’s leading lady, but a noted actress from a commedia troupe, Virginia Ramponi (‘la Florinda’, 1583–1629/30), was able to step in to play and sing the heroine, and seems to have done it very well.²

The staging of choruses also grew out of pre-operatic theatrical activity. A couple of late sixteenth-century dates and places exemplify this: 1585 at Vicenza and 1589 at Florence. The ambitious production of a modern Italian translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, which opened Andrea Palladio’s remarkable, still-standing Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza in 1585, was in the main spoken, but it included musical settings by Andrea Gabrieli of four of the Theban Elders’ choric odes, and these were sung and acted in character by a well-drilled chorus of fifteen. Then in 1589, six sung and staged ‘interludes’ or intermedii on the theme of harmony – musical, social, cosmic – were placed between and around the acts of Girolamo Bargagli’s spoken comedy, La Pellegrina, during the lavish celebrations of the wedding of Ferdinando de’ Medici and Christina of Lorraine at the theatre of the Medici in Florence. A versatile singing chorus played a range of parts in the six interludes: the inhabitants of a Greek island, the denizens of Hades, sundry sea-nymphs and pirates, the ‘company of heaven’, and so on. It would have been a short and simple step from that – via the singing huntsmen, cupids, zodiac-signs, and such of the highly intermedio-inflected Florentine opera of Gabriello Chiabrera and Giulio Caccini, Il Rapimento di Cefalo (1600) – to the choric fishermen and soldiers in Arianna.

As with performers, so with décor. Libretti in opera’s first decade called for stage spectacle in the form of scene-changes (e.g., from a rural landscape to the Underworld and back) and special effects (e.g., a god descending from the heavens to sort out a fraught situation); but this didn’t involve the invention of a new technology, rather the adoption of aspects of a tradition. By 1598 the Renaissance fascination with geometric perspective had for several decades been an important impulse behind the development of three-dimensional scenic arrangements in Italian court theatres, supplying apt backings for comedy (modern streets cunningly evoked), for ‘satyric’ drama (woodland glades), and for tragedy (vistas of classical city architecture, as can be seen at the Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza). Though only a few metres deep, these backings gave the illusion of much deeper space through the foreshortening of their perspectives, which looked particularly convincing when viewed from the prince’s or duke’s or cardinal’s seat at the centre of the auditorium. At first it had been a case of one setting per show, but as the sixteenth century wore on, ways were found to change the scene during the performance in full view of the audience and seemingly without the intervention of human hands (bringing the curtain down to cover a scene-change didn’t come in till centuries later).

This was first done by installing periaktoi (from the Greek, ‘periaktos’, turning on a centre): big rotatable triangular columns with elements of three different scenes painted on their three faces, placed symmetrically at the sides of the stage and complemented with a backdrop or a bigger central periaktos. By simultaneously rotating these ‘triangles’ and changing the backdrop, the whole scene would seem to change – from a town, say, to a forest, and then to a garden. The practical need to hide the backstage functionaries operating the periaktoi was one of the things that led to the installation of a ‘proscenium’ arch downstage of them (with the stage itself continuing in front of the arch as a forestage). And once you had created that kind of picture frame, you could put roped ‘flying’ devices behind it: devices developed and elaborated from those which had earlier been used for angels and other celestials in church dramas but which might now fly in a pagan god, an allegorical personage, or a consort of singers perched on a wood-and-canvas cloud. Upstage of the arch you could also install theatrical machinery that would simulate ocean waves – perhaps with mobile boats (on invisible wheels) or creatures rising through stage-traps from the deeps – or even perhaps suggest the flaming gulf of Hades itself. So the way was open, once the operatic time was ripe, for the hero of Alessandro Striggio and Monteverdi’s Favola d’Orfeo at Mantua in 1607 to journey (per a scene-change) to the Underworld, cross the River Styx in Charon’s ferry, meet the King and Queen of the Shades in their palace, return to the fields of Thrace, and finally be led up to the heavens by his vertically mobile father Apollo.

The 1589 interlude-sequence in La Pellegrina with its versatile chorus (and its many spectacular scenic effects, too) was devised and designed by the Florentine poet Giovanni de’ Bardi and scenographer Bernardo Buontalenti (Bernardo delle Girandole, c. 1531–1608). The pair went on to supervise a large part of its practical preparation and rehearsal, but the grand duke eventually put his recently appointed controller of arts and entertainments, Emilio de’ Cavalieri, above them in the hierarchy of control. On the spine of the new controller’s account-book for the show it is described as ‘la commedia diretta da Emilio de’ Cavalieri’: a nice marker of the arrival in secular theatre of a ‘director’.³ This idea of some kind of supervisor or organiser for an elaborate theatre-piece can be traced back to the religious drama of the Middle Ages and High Renaissance.

There are records of the activities of such figures in connection with some of the age’s big annual open-air Passion Plays (the versatile Renward Cysat, for instance, who was the controlling ‘regent’ of the play at Lucerne in the 1580s and 1590s); and the function moved into secular theatre not only in Medici Florence but in other north Italian cities too. At Mantua the highly professional Leone de’ Sommi Portaleone was for decades the hands-on controller of drama at the Gonzaga court and around 1565 wrote a guide to theatrical practice, his Quattro Dialoghi di Rappresentazioni Sceniche (Four Dialogues on Scenic Representation).⁴ Then there was Angelo Ingegneri, a man of the theatre known to be ‘capable of such things’, ⁵ who was put in charge of the rehearsals of the already mentioned Italian translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus (Vicenza, 1585), later publishing a little book about staging that made special reference to the Vicenzan show: Della Poesia Rappresentativa e del Modo di Rappresentare le Favole Sceniche (On Dramatic Poetry and the Ways of Performing Stage-Plays, Ferrara, 1598).⁶ In all, then, there would have been nothing strange or particularly novel about an expert in theatre arts in the line of Sommi, Ingegneri, and Cavalieri taking responsibility for the overall smooth running of one of the new operas in the years that followed – ‘directing’ them, that is to say. In fact, Cavalieri himself did pretty much that. A decade after his work on the Pellegrina interludes in Florence, he was central to the Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo (the quasi-operatic Roman oratorio The Play of the Soul and the Body, 1600), not only composing the music for it but being involved with its première production and writing some memoranda on the staging of ‘the present work, or others like it’, which are added to his colleague Alessandro Guidotti’s introduction to the published score.⁷

Court Opera: Mantua, Florence, Rome

This is not to say that in the earliest decades of opera such a director-figure was always considered necessary. True, there were people who cared deeply that up-market court and college shows (operas among them) should be done to the best of everyone’s abilities and who felt that this could only be achieved if there was a controller with a distinct job-description: a figure who might sometimes take the Latin name of choragus in Jesuit college theatricals (where Latin was the norm) or corago in Italian-speaking court circles. But there were also situations when the librettist and composer of a new opera along with the whole theatrical team – singer-actors and dancers, chorus and instrumentalists, choreographer, scene-designer and the special-effects people responsible for ‘props’, lighting and stage-machinery – were able to collaborate harmoniously without the need for a specially appointed co-ordinator or dictatorial regent.

As it happens, we have illuminating documents from the period that reflect both ways of arranging things. In Mantua in 1608 there was a new opera on the Daphne myth for which Marco da Gagliano made a fresh setting of Rinuccini’s 1598 Dafne libretto, slightly revised. It seems to have been a happily cooperative production, and one so successful that the composer included a description of how it had been staged in the preface to the score, with the recommendation that, if it were to be performed again, it might well be done in much the same way. About twenty years later an anonymous gentleman, almost certainly at the Medici court in Florence (possibly Pierfrancesco Rinuccini, son of the pioneering librettist), wrote a treatise, not published at the time, on the proper staging of operas and other court shows with a well-informed expert in overall charge. He called it (after the expert) Il Corago, o vero alcune osservazioni per metter bene in scena le composizioni drammatiche. The printed Dafne preface and the Corago manuscript complement each other nicely and give us a good view of operatic staging in the early years.⁸

Both writers are concerned that their principal performers should act properly while never forgetting that everything they do has to mesh with the music. It’s interesting to find in that connection that a question still asked today about operatic acting was already being asked in Il Corago: ‘whether one should cast a tolerable musician who is a perfect actor or an excellent musician with little or no talent for acting’.⁹ Though aware that musical connoisseurs might demur, the author feels that audiences as a whole prefer good actors who can sing tolerably, pointing out that this needn’t wholly exclude fine singers with small acting talent, since they can be given roles involving stage-machines (heavenly chariots, floating clouds, and such) which will, so to speak, do their moving for them. The competent singer-actors permitted by the corago to tread the stage-proper are recommended to follow the rules of ordinary spoken acting – at this period quite a presentational, rhetorical affair – but urged to supplement them with some precepts specific to opera. For example, they should normally stand still while singing, only moving about during instrumental ritornelli, though they might break this rule when the music is ‘specially meant to convey motion’.¹⁰ They should keep their gestures quite slow, since sung words don’t move as quickly as spoken ones. And it would be best if they didn’t gesture violently (except when playing infernal gods) – best, too, if, when singing in dialogue with other characters, they only turned half-way towards them, since turning further might render their words inaudible to the audience.

Gagliano in his 1608 Dafne preface has similar feelings about singer-actors delivering their performances clearly and visibly out to the audience and integrating the vocal with the gestural. He stresses that physical movement should correspond both to the music’s emotional contour and to its actual beat. As an example, he gives a detailed, almost step-by-step, account of how the character of Ovid in the opera’s prologue should move while delivering it. He should make his entrance ‘at the fifteenth or twentieth measure’ of the prologue,

Gagliano also suggests groupings of characters on stage that will make the action easy to ‘read’ – solo singers, for instance, should keep several paces clear of the chorus – and recommends careful rehearsal of difficult scenes involving pairs of characters, especially the energetic dumb-show encounter at the start of Dafne between Apollo and the writhing, fire-breathing Python: ‘The fight’, he says, ‘shall be in time with the music.’¹² He’s equally keen that roles requiring more subtle skills should be carefully cast and is eager to praise the young castrato Antonio Brandi, ‘a most exquisite contralto’, who brought great verbal and gestural expressiveness to the role of the opera’s messenger-figure. Indeed, he seems to have considered ‘Il Brandino’ the star of the show – an early example of the star-making that would become a permanent characteristic of opera.

Gagliano is just as concerned with the deportment of the chorus of nymphs and shepherds (about seventeen of them at the première, though the number might vary at a revival, depending on the capacity of the stage). The choristers should, he thinks, be focused, alert, and well synchronised, though they should not have the regimented look of a dance-troupe. Most of the time they should form a half-moon, backing the principal singers, visibly responding with gesture and facial expression to the prevailing emotion, kneeling at appropriate moments, rising in good order, and accompanying sung choral numbers with group movements to left, to right, and back again to upstage centre (which suggests that the dancing master in 1608 had been looking at accounts of choric movements in ancient Greek tragedy). The blend of psychological realism and courtly formality that is characteristic of seventeenth-century opera is nicely reflected in Gagliano’s view that, even when vividly ‘imitating flight and terror’, the chorus should never turn their backs impolitely on the distinguished audience.¹³ Il Corago’s author agrees; it’s something that a good corago would ensure, as he would that the chorus’s gestures are unanimous and their ‘processings and interlacings’ telling. (One way of guaranteeing that choristers end up in the right stage-positions after such complicated movements, he suggests, is ‘to make marks on the stage floor’ that they can steer by – much as Ingegneri fifty years before had used the coloured marbles patterned on the floor at Vicenza as markers for his Oedipus chorus).¹⁴

It’s likely that the stage for a court opera in the early seventeenth century would need to be set up especially for the event. That done – Il Corago advises at length on this – a lot of care was called for to ensure the show’s technical smooth running. For instance, both the Dafne preface and Il Corago are at pains to secure optimum placing for the instrumentalists. The convention that would later be established of a band settled permanently in an orchestra-pit just in front of the stage didn’t apply at the time. Instruments and their players, largely hidden, could be located before or behind or above the action as seemed best for any particular situation – Monteverdi went to some lengths to get this matter right when he made a professional visit to Parma in 1627.¹⁵ Il Corago, in a chapter on the rival claims of strings and winds to be the best support for sung drama, stresses that careful placing of either group is essential to achieving good vocal–instrumental balance and ensuring that there are clear lines of communication between players and singers during the performance. (For instance, putting an organo di legno in the wrong place in the wings would not only risk impeding the periaktoi and the work of the stage-machinists but might also mean that the organist, having ‘the inconvenience of not being able to see or hear the actors well, would be constrained to adopt a [regular] beat [sarà forza cantar a battuta], which is something considered improper for the recitative style’.¹⁶ Gagliano is keen on this too, and he’s eager to explain a related special effect when his Apollo seems to be playing his lyre exquisitely during his lines in praise of the metamorphosed Daphne, though the sound is actually coming from a consort of viols placed just out of sight behind the scenery.

Rather surprisingly, Gagliano doesn’t feel called on to praise the designer of that scenery, but maybe this is because the opera was done against a single pastoral set which had already been used for earlier shows. Il Corago, on the other hand, is full of praise for one scenographer, Bernardo Buontalenti, he of the Pellegrina interludes back in 1589. Though dead for about twenty years by 1630, the treatise reveres him as the father-figure of the whole fashion for changeable perspective-scenes, stressing that proper management of such scenery is one of the two most important responsibilities of a corago (the other being instruction in acting). It discusses the means of maximising illusion in scene-painting and scene-changing, along with effective techniques of illumination with candles and oil lamps, the provision of apt but rich costumes for the cast (peasant roles included: this is court opera after all), and the use of a stage curtain at the very beginning and end of the show. Machines that fly singer-actors down from above are another special concern: their safety (check it regularly), their smooth operation (soap the ropes and pulleys frequently), and the speed of their descents and ascents (keep these slow when a performer is actually singing on one of them).

Records from other north Italian princely courts and from the establishments of equally princely cardinals in Rome reveal similar activities and concerns.¹⁷ We learn that staging an opera was something that consumed time and ingenuity, though the preparation time could vary widely: about five months were set aside for rehearsals of the Mantuan Arianna after the singers had learned their parts, but a mere forty-four days covered the writing, composing, preparing, and rehearsing of a ‘favola in musica’, the Roman Aretusa (Ottavio Corsini and Filippo Vitali) in 1620. Records of that Aretusa and of Monteverdi’s Orfeo give us glimpses of the care that was taken to recruit properly talented singer-actors and of the appreciation that such people received if they came up to expectation. And away from the soloists and chorus, we see groups of anonymous ‘extras’, the non-singing comparse, being put through their paces effectively. The conflict between the Romans and the Huns in La Regina Sant'Orsola (Andrea Salvadori, Gagliano; Florence, 1624) is an instance. The engraving in Figure 9.1, made for the libretto of the 1625 revival by Alfonso Parigi (son of the show’s designer), shows the battle, staged by the dancing master Agniolo Ricci, raging beneath the walls of Cologne: the Temple of Mars to the left, the Romans defending the city walls to the right. Equally elaborate crowd-work is evident in the remarkable scene of a country fair, the ‘Fiera di Farfa’, designed by one of the greatest artists of the Roman Baroque, the sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and staged in Rome as an interlude for the 1639 version of the opera L’Egisto, ovvero, Chi soffre speri (Giulio Rospigliosi, Virgilio Mazzocchi, and Marco Marazzoli; first performance 1637). This featured street-cries, popular songs, dancing, duelling, and a bevy of comparse energetically enjoying all the fun of the fair – the whole rounded off with an impressive sunset.¹⁸

Figure 9.1 Andrea Salvadori and Marco da Gagliano, La regina Sant’Orsola (Florence, 1624), Act II: the battle, staged by Agniolo Ricci. Engraving by Alfonso Parigi, from the libretto printed for the 1625 revival.

By permission of the Getty Research Institute, Research Library, Los Angeles

The backstage wizards who devised scenic devices in connection with such spectacles could be singled out for praise: for instance, the architect Francesco Guitti (1605–c. 1645), who worked in Ferrara, Parma, and Rome, and whose ‘excellence in inventing, setting up and controlling machines and theatrical effects’, a contemporary said, ‘was attested by universal amazement and applause’.¹⁹ Sometimes even the composer was amazed at what his backstage colleagues had done, as at the Roman staging of Rospigliosi and Stefano Landi's Sant’Alessio in the 1630s. (Figure 9.2 represents the final scene of the 1634 version: a ‘tragic street’, possibly designed by Pietro da Cortona, with Religion singing Saint Alexis’ praises as the Virtues dance and a host of heavenly musicians descends on two cloud-machines). ‘What shall I say’, Landi enthused,

Things went best when the stage-hands were properly trained; thus Nicola Sabbattini in his Pratica di Fabricar Scene e Machine ne’ Teatri of 1638 says that the scene-shifters should be ‘familiar with sound and time cues, so that during the playing of the music, they cause the [scenic] frames to be run to their positions all at one time’.²¹

Figure 9.2 Giulio Rospigliosi and Stefano Landi, Il Sant’Alessio (Rome, 1631), final scene of the 1634 version. Engraving by François Collignon, from Il S. Alessio: dramma musicale: dall eminentissimo, et reverendissimo signore card. Barberino (Rome: Paolo Masotti, 1634).

By permission of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

As several of these instances have shown, some of the liveliest operatic action in the middle decades of the century took place in Counter-Reformation Rome. Interest in staging there was apparent in the highest circles, both of the Church and of the community of talented artists who served it, especially if they were in the sphere of the powerful Barberini family. The prime instance of ecclesiastical involvement was the copious librettist Rospigliosi, who would be elevated to the Chair of St. Peter as Pope Clement IX in 1667, but he seems earlier to have been very closely involved with the staging of his sophisticated yet highly moral operas.

Extensive records survive of the circumstances of their productions at the Palazzo Barberini, the most revealing perhaps being the marginalia in one manuscript of Dal Male il Bene, the libretto he had written with his nephew Giacomo in 1654. The notes indicate scenic locations, itemise props (right down to a couple of candle-holders and a broom), cue scene-changes, refer to sound-effects, and make clear which of the numbered routes for getting on and off the stage the performers should use for particular entrances and exits.²² If that document embodies the minute concerns with staging of a highly placed librettist, an entry in the diary of the English traveller John Evelyn for 19 November 1644 illustrates the breadth of the operatic interests of the great Bernini:

Add to that the information from Filippo Baldinucci’s life of Bernini that at the rehearsals of his theatre pieces, he ‘would himself take all the parts to teach the others how to play them’, and you have an omnicompetent centraliser of opera who out-Wagners Wagner at the Bayreuth of the 1870s.²⁴

Public Opera: Venice, Paris, London, Naples

Such stories of Bernini in Rome may have improved a little in the telling, but we can take Evelyn’s account of the operatic Venice of the 1640s at face value, as he was there to see things for himself. He was witnessing the momentous innovation of opera given not at court as part of the munificence and magnificence of a prince but as a commercial proposition open to all – all anyway who could afford the price of admission. Court opera, of course, didn’t come to an end, and among the vivid accounts of its staging in the decades after the 1640s there are several which stress the numbers of comparse in stately retinues, energetic armies, and the like that rich courts could display, and the grandiose sets that they could display them in. The shop-window example was Il Pomo d’oro of Francesco Sbarra and Antonio Cesti, given at the Viennese court in 1668 on the empress’s birthday, with its fifty named characters, its twenty-three sumptuous sets by the architect Ludovico Burnacini, and an action which found room for a fiery flying dragon, a collapsing temple, a pair of elephants drafted into siege-work, and more besides.

The focus, however, was now on public opera, and Evelyn had an eye for its practicalities when he saw the Ercole in Lidia of Maiolino Bisaccioni and Giovanni Rovetta in Venice at the Teatro Novissimo in Ascension Week 1645 (the year of its première):

Although several aspects of Venetian staging were seamless continuations of Roman and north Italian courtly practice, Evelyn here points up three things which were different and which would in time become important over the whole of operatic Europe. The first is the (to us) simple concept of ‘going to the opera’, which implies a choice of performances to see – ‘comedies and other plays represented in recitative music’ – and, if we are lucky, a choice of opera houses to see them in. In the first five years of public opera, four such houses came into existence in Venice, the city having invented the purpose-designed (or at least purpose-adapted) public building devoted to the staging of operatic performances under the management of an impresario who had to think carefully about investments and returns when providing these ‘expensefull diversions’ for a paying audience.

Establishing an influential precedent, the auditoria of these Venetian houses tended to be U-shaped, centring on a crowded ‘pit’ for in-the-main male spectators (who might stand for the whole show or perhaps pay to sit on benches), surrounded on three sides by balconies or galleries generally divided into ‘boxes’: an arrangement deriving from earlier Venetian theatres for the commedia dell’arte. Renting a box – sometimes even buying one – implied social stature, though the view from it of the scene-stage behind the proscenium arch could be so bad that a production might sometimes have to be modified out of consideration for such box-holding gentlefolk as wanted to watch the action. Thus Aurelio Aureli reports an emendation to his 1659 libretto for La Costanza di Rosmonda (music by Giovanni Battista Volpe [Rovettino, c. 1620–1691]) which meant that one singer-actress’s delivery of an important monologue would be moved from its rightful place (on a balcony that was part of the scenery) to the stage floor, ‘in order to make her visible to the eyes of everyone, especially those seated in the boxes’.²⁶

Evelyn’s counting the thirteen changes of scene in Ercole in Lidia is a second revealing point. Though it seems that in some places the older triangular periaktoi-method of scenic display and transformation was still in use in the mid-seventeenth century, from the 1610s and 1620s onwards it was being widely replaced – partly under the influence of the architect and designer Giovanni Battista Aleotti – by the new-fangled ‘wing-flats’ (with matching ‘borders’ above): sets of two-dimensional, perspective-painted and profiled units which were set up in grooves to the right and left of the stage behind the proscenium arch so as to complement and frame a backdrop. These were capable of being drawn back – and the backdrop raised – to reveal another set immediately behind them, thereby changing the scene in a few seconds from, say, a meadow to a city street. In the early years, simultaneously drawing back such a set of perhaps eight flats – four each side – was decidedly labour-intensive; but the scenographer and machinist Giacomo Torelli (1608–1678), active in Venice in the late 1630s and early 1640s before moving influentially to Paris, hit on a system related to naval rope-work whereby all the flats in a set were attached to a single counter-weighted capstan-drum beneath the stage, which could be operated by one man. ‘The artifice of this device is amazing’, a contemporary wrote; ‘a fifteen-year-old boy can work it by himself!’²⁷

Torelli was closely connected with the Teatro Novissimo that Evelyn visited, and he may well have had a hand in designing the numerous easily changed scenes the diarist saw in Ercole. Henceforward for many decades, no self-respecting Continental opera house would be without a scene-changing system somewhat in the Torelli style and a collection of Torellian perspective-scenes that could be used for a wide range of shows: a city street or two perhaps, some rooms of state, a dungeon, a temple, an army camp, a cave, a seashore, a wilderness, an arbour, or a grove. Figure 9.3, for instance, shows a design by Torelli for Niccolò Bartolini and Francesco Sacrati’s Venere gelosa (Venice, Teatro Novissimo, 1643): a woodland scene on the island of Naxos (tree-flats with city backdrop) with the goddess Flora appearing in a machine above, supported by Zephyrs.

Figure 9.3 Niccolò Bartolini and Francesco Sacrati, Venere gelosa (Venice, 1643). Anonymous engraving from a libretto published in 1644 to accompany a revival of the opera.

By permission of University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Research Center), Ann Arbor

Within and in front of these scenes, lit by candles and oil-lamps, which also lit the auditorium during the performance, were the singer-actors – which brings us to the third significant element in Evelyn’s account of the Novissimo: his concern to rank-order the voices he heard in Rovetta’s opera and his noting the star-status of Anna Renzi (c. 1620–d. after 1661). Singer-actors, as much as or more than libretto, music, or décor, were becoming a principal operatic talking point in Venice, and la Renzi could be rated as the first big star of public opera. Indeed, in 1644, the year before Evelyn’s visit, she had been the subject of the first operatic fan-book, the librettist Giulio Strozzi’s Glorie della Signora Anna Renzi Romana. Strozzi celebrates his heroine’s compound of intellect, imagination, and memory; her versatility; her powers of character-observation; her ability to ‘transform herself completely into the person she represents’ – and her voice.²⁸ Voices were at a premium. A French visitor to Venice in the 1670s, Alexandre-Toussaint Limojon de Saint-Didier, describes the gentlemen who ‘bend themselves out of their Boxes, crying Ah cara! […] expressing after this manner the Raptures of Pleasure which those divine Voices cause to them’, along with the gondoliers in the pit whose earthier acclamations ‘are not always within the bounds of Modesty’.²⁹

The surviving documentation of the financing and management of operatic houses and companies in seventeenth-century Venice is considerable, but very little of it has to do with staging in the sense of training and rehearsing particular casts or making decisions about particular décors. This may be in part because a figure like the courtly corago could have no place in the busy commercial environment of the new impresarios; in part because opera singers and backstage technicians were becoming more experienced, so needing less and less documented instruction; and in part because the librettists were themselves quite often impresarios – there are several known instances in mid-century Venice – and so could include a director-like function as part of their daily work in the theatre without there being any call to put that fact on record. Giovanni Faustini, for instance, the author of eleven libretti for Francesco Cavalli, was at one time or another impresario at three different Venetian houses.³⁰ Even a librettist with no impresa or other opera house job might include in his word-book so many details of moves, asides, and emotional states, along with details of scenery, props, and machine-effects, that almost all the staging-information needed for the rehearsal of his opera was there in the printed text, and the cast and crew needed no further guidance. Thus Matteo Noris’s (d. 1714) libretto for Totila, his fate-of-the-Roman-Empire piece staged in Venice in 1677 to a score by Giovanni Legrenzi, has stage-directions (called in Italian ‘didascalie’) galore, covering movement (‘Attempting to leave, Desbo is waylaid by Publicola’ [Act III scene 15]), mental states (‘Longing to kiss Marcia’ [Act II scene 16]), and scenic spectacle (‘A storm breaks out’ [Act II scene 8]; ‘Slaves drag from a distance a huge gold-covered elephant’ [Act I scene 17]).

Across the Alps to the northwest, however, a powerful director – a near-dictator indeed – was alive and well and working in Paris, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and Versailles: Jean Baptiste Lully (1632–1687). When French opera truly got under way in the early 1670s with his Cadmus et Hermione and Alceste, it was formed by combining things imported from Italy (continuous music, a narrative conducted entirely in song) with something that had been characteristically north-European for generations: an enthusiasm for dramatic dance, fanciful costumes, and spectacular sets in allegorically themed court entertainments. In the earlier years of the century, the French manifestation of this enthusiasm, the ballet de cour, had had a tradition of determined directors: sometimes the aristocratic devisers of the ballets themselves and sometimes their subaltern maîtres de l’ordre – gentlemen who worked closely with dancing masters, costume and mask designers, and latterly set designers to produce a successful show. Regarding such a maître’s responsibilities – involving not only such preparatory matters but also stage-managing ‘on the night’ as well – there is a lively chapter in a little treatise of 1641 by one M. de Saint Hubert, La Manière de Composer et Faire Réussir les Ballets. Ballets ‘mastered’ in that way may have flowed the more easily into the early development of operatic tragédie en musique because the new form’s creative organiser had been born Giovanni Battista Lulli in Florence in 1632: almost certainly the place, and very close to the time, of our treatise on the idea of a corago.

Along with his Florentine background and his contracting into the ballet de cour tradition, Lully had a third reason for taking a dictatorial approach to the staging of his works: the direct responsibility he had from 1672 onward to the absolutist grand monarque Louis XIV for making a success of a uniquely French style of opera. (Figure 9.4, an engraving by Jean Le Pautre, shows an open-air, scenery-less performance of Philippe Quinault and Lully’s Alceste as staged on 4 July 1674 at Versailles before the king some months after the opera’s indoor première in Paris. Having defied the Fury Alecto, the hero Hercules, right of the central group, is claiming Alceste from the King and Queen of the Underworld, who stand on either side of her). Things went on the more swimmingly for Lully because he was working at a time when the procedures and achievements of French spoken and danced theatre were of a remarkably high standard, and when gifted theatre-artists – librettists like Quinault (bap. 1635–1688), designers like Jean Berain (1640–1711), choreographers like Pierre Beauchamps (1631–1705) – were available for co-option or conscription. Further, before he began his operatic career, Lully had collaborated on comédie-ballets with the great playwright, actor, and company manager Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, bap. 1622–1673), perhaps studying the method of rehearsal by instruction, demonstration, and energetic, sharp-tongued good humour that Molière sketches in his rehearsal-play of 1663, L’Impromptu de Versailles. Beyond that he could recommend to his leading ladies that they study the art of the heroines in Jean Racine’s newly written spoken tragedies. With all this in the background, Lully was able to be a highly effective autocrat. In 1705, eighteen years after his death, his admirer the critic Jean Laurent Le Cerf de la Viéville recalled that the brilliant Florentine had ‘an extraordinary talent for everything connected with things theatrical’. Lully, he said, knew as well how to have an opera performed and how to govern

Figure 9.4 Philippe Quinault and Jean-Baptiste Lully, Alceste, Versailles, fête de 1674, 4 juillet. Engraving by Jean Le Pautre.

By permission of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, département de la musique, Paris

Across the English Channel, there’s a finely farcical demonstration of how such shows of omnicompetence do not work if the would-be autocrat has neither the personality nor the skills to bring them off. It’s in the Duke of Buckingham’s burlesque comedy The Rehearsal, staged in London in 1671 around the time of the first stirrings of what would become the characteristically English form of ‘semi-opera’. Buckingham’s Mr Bayes – probably a satiric amalgam of the poet-dramatists William Davenant and John Dryden – is a thoroughgoing coxcomb who has written a grotesque hybrid of a ‘heroic’ play which features songs (including a ‘battel in Recitativo’), much scenic spectacle, and dances to music of his own composition ‘apted for the business’. But the poor performers can’t understand it in rehearsal; Mr Bayes’ attempts at explanation only make matters worse; his music resists being danced to (‘Sir, ’tis impossible to do any thing in time, to this Tune’); and when he tries practical demonstration, he ‘puts ’em out with teaching ’em’, at one point tripping and falling flat on his face when attempting to show off a particular move (‘Ah, gadsookers, I have broke my Nose’).

But more accomplished stagings could be expected in England when towards the end of the century the actor–manager Thomas Betterton was in charge of the fairly rare manifestations of public opera in London.³² They were mainly works in the ‘semi-operatic’ mode that combined spoken dialogue with very extensive and picturesque masque-like sung and danced passages, music often by Henry Purcell (1658 or 1659–1695) and choreography by Josias Priest (c. 1645–bur. 3 January, 1735). Where their special scenic effects are concerned, these formed something of a summa of the Baroque tradition. Thus one can see the surfacing from the stage-ocean of Britannia’s island in the last act of King Arthur (Dryden and Purcell; London, 1691) as reflecting the surfacing of the pearl-rich island of beautiful princesses in the first intermède of Molière’s Les Amants magnifiques of 1670 (its music by Lully) and that of the American coral reef in the Amerigo Vespucci interlude of the Florentine multi-media show Il Giudizio di Paride of 1608³³ – which itself derives technically from the thrusting-up of the Mountain of the Wood Nymphs in the second intermedio of La Pellegrina in 1589. And the scene of the sun rising after the mistakes of the night in the Shakespeare-Betterton-Purcell Fairy Queen (London, 1692) – Purcell writes a big orchestral ‘sonata’ for it – recalls the sunset Bernini had devised for the ‘Fieri di Farfa’ in Chi Soffre Speri at Rome in 1639, which itself could be traced back to the radiant dawn that had come up at the beginning of La Pellegrina’s final intermedio fifty years before.

Late in the same decade as King Arthur and The Fairy Queen, but a thousand miles away in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Naples-based Andrea Perrucci wrote his Dell’Arte Rappresentativa (1699), stressing the desirability of someone who will take care and pains to monitor the preparation and performance of spoken-scripted plays and commedia dell’arte improvisations, and of operas as well. This corago – Perrucci reverts to the word – will act as construction-supervisor, troubleshooter, props master, stage manager, and general cast co-ordinator: a central figure who ‘guides, plans and trains, for […] in this sort of business it is better to go for a monarchy than a republic’.³⁴ And it is doubtless this corago who will insist on Perrucci’s behalf that the singer-actors in his operas should act just as well as speaking actors do and who will ensure that there are no occasions for confusion among – let alone collisions between – performers over entrances and exits. His recommendation for avoiding such things is the posting of a list behind the proscenium arch detailing who comes on, who goes off, and when they do it at entrances numbered 1–6 or lettered A–F, though for opera he also suggests another way of ensuring good stage-traffic, one clearly in line with growing practice in opera seria where the ‘exit aria’ was concerned: a matter of entering the scene as far upstage and exiting as far downstage as possible.³⁵

Meanwhile, opera in Paris and at Louis XIV’s court was coping with the aftermath of Lully’s death in 1687. His royally authorised monopolies over tragédie en musique and the long shadow they threw forward helped to ensure that the staging of French opera, like its composition, stayed broadly Lullian for years to come. Significantly, when the structure, management, and running of his Académie Royale de Musique at the Palais-Royal theatre were overhauled and rationalised by two royal ordinances in 1713 and 1714,³⁶ the company was required to keep a production of a Lully opera permanently ‘in readiness’ in case it was needed, and also to appoint two Syndics responsible to the company’s court-connected Inspector General. One of these was ‘the official responsible for theatrical control’ (le syndic chargé de la régie du théâtre). He was to see to artistic planning and casting (along with the composer, if contactable) and to oversee all rehearsals and performances, during which everyone connected to the production – front-of-house, onstage, and back-stage – was answerable to him.

Lully’s ghost would have been pleased, as it would have been by the continuing didactic influence of the singer-actors he had trained, the fiery-eyed Marie Le Rochois (c. 1658–1728) especially, who had created the role of the lovelorn sorceress in his Armide and held audiences breathless with it. However high the style of her performances, there was clearly a level of close psychological identification involved in their preparation. The story is told of her instructing a younger singer in the correct approach to role-play in lyric tragedies like Armide and asking her at one point what she would do if, like the character she was playing, she were abandoned by the man she passionately adored. ‘Get another one’, said the pupil. ‘In that case, mademoiselle, we are both wasting our time’, said Le Rochois and ended the lesson abruptly.³⁷ It was an involvement with the role in hand which would doubtless have appealed to Renzi, creator of Ottavia in L’Incoronazione di Poppea (Giovanni Francesco Busenello, Claudio Monteverdi; Venice, 1643), and to Ramponi, whose performance as the despairing Ariadne at Mantua in 1608 had, in Marco da Gagliano’s words, ‘visibly moved the whole theatre to tears’.