4: Carnival Opera in Rome and Venice
A concert in the Teatro Argentina, Rome, in 1747. Painting by Giovanni Paolo Panini
Recordings
Figure 4.2 (Hasse's "Pallido il sole"): "Andreas Scholl: Heroes," Andreas Scholl, countertenor, Decca; includes Hasse's "Pallido il sole" (available on iTunes); this recording also on Youtube; another fine performance, with a slower tempo, by the mezzosoprano Sonia Prina, on Youtube
Example 4.1: Gaetano Latilla, La finta cameriera, Cappella de' Turchini, cond. Antonio Florio, Opus 111
Lattilla, La finta cameriera, Giocondo's aria "Agitato il mio cor si confonde," sung by Roberta Invernizzi, on Youtube
Vinci, Semiramide, "In braccio a mille furie," David Hansen, countertenor
Example 4.2: Tommaso Traetta, Ippolito ed Aricia, cond. David Golub, Dynamic (available on Naxos Music Library); Patrizia Ciofi, soprano, on Youtube
Joseph Mysliveček, Il Bellerofonte, cond. Zoltán Peskó, Supraphon; aria "Palesar vorrei col pianto," Gladys Mayo, soprano, on Youtube
See also "Audio and Video Recordings to Accompany Anthology" (click on left)
David Allan, "The Arrival of a Young Traveller and his Suite during the Carnival in the Piazza di Spagna, Rome." This satirical drawing brings together in one image much of what a wealthy young Englishman might experience on the Grand Tour, including poverty, violence, sex, art, music, and dance. Looking from left to right, we first see a tourist paying for the privilege of ogling a pornographic painting. Another tourist pays an old woman in order to enjoy the favors of a young woman (an example of what we now call "sex tourism"). Musicians playing the mandolin, violin, and tambourine accompany a pair of dancers. The graceful dancer on the right lifts a skirt provocatively to reveal the stockings and breeches typical of eighteenth-century men's dress; the dancer, like those who depicted female characters on the Roman stage, may be a man. Residents at the Hotel Ville de Londres (City of London) enjoy the spectacle of beggars fighting over coins tossed from the window.
Website
Venice in the Eighteenth Century (Metropolitan Museum of Art) http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/venc/hd_venc.htm
Documentary
Vivaldi's Women (BBC, 2006; on music in the Venetian ospedali): Youtube
Marc'Antonio dal Re, Violante Vestri (Vestris) as Apamia in Carcani's Tigrane (Milan, Carnival 1750)
Reading
Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Edgar Peters Bowron and Joseph J. Rishel (London: Merrell, 2000) Worldcat
Butler, Margaret. “Italian Opera in the Eighteenth Century,” The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music, Simon Keefe, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 208–226 Worldcat
Cotticelli, Francesco and Paologiovanni Maione. “Metastasio: The Dramaturgy of Eighteenth-Century Heroic Opera,” The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera, ed. Anthony R. DelDonna and Pierpaolo Polzonetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 66–84 Worldcat
Feldman, Martha. Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 141–87, 226–83 Worldcat
Canaletto, The Bucintoro on Ascension Day. On the Feast of the Ascension, a great religious and civic holiday in Venice, the doge renewed the city's marriage with the sea by throwing a ring into the water from his gorgeously decorated galley, the Bucintoro. The celebration overflowed into the surrounding days: a Carnival-like season of masked balls and operas
Heartz, Daniel. Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780 (New York: Norton, 2003), 171–293 Worldcat
Heartz, Daniel. From Garrick to Gluck: Essays on Opera in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. John A. Rice (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2004), 11–51, 69–104
Italy’s Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour, ed. Paula Findlen et al. (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009) Worldcat
Gaetano Latilla directing the performance of an opera seria in Rome, 1739. Caricature by Pier Leone Ghezzi. On the floor is a manuscript full score of the opera, bound in three volumes (one volume for each act), and a pile of manuscript vocal parts (one for each singer).
Johnson, James H. Venice Incognito: Masks in the Serene Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011) Worldcat
Libby, Dennis. “Italy: Two Opera Centres,” The Classical Era: From the 1740s to the End of the 18th Century, ed. Neal Zaslaw (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989), 39–60 Worldcat
McClymonds, Marita P. “The Venetian Role in the Transformation of Italian Opera Seria during the 1790s,” Essays on Opera, 1750–1800, ed. John A. Rice (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 447–64 Worldcat
Farinelli in a female role in Rome during Carnival 1724. Caricature by Ghezzi, who in the inscription refers to him as "famoso cantore di soprano." This was one of Farinelli's last female roles. Once he had fully established his reputation, he, like most other musici, insisted on portraying young male heroes and lovers.
Rice, John A. "The Roman Intermezzo and Sacchini's La contadina in corte, Cambridge Opera Journal 12 (2000), 91–107 JSTOR Also accessible on academia.edu
Strohm, Reinhard. Dramma per musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) Worldcat
Taruskin, Richard. The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 2: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 150–76 Worldcat
Torre, Robert. "Operatic Twins and Musical Rivals: Two Settings of Artaserse (1730), in Discourses in Music 6 (2006): http://library.music.utoronto.ca/discourses-in-music/v6n1a1.html
Weiss, Piero. Opera: A History in Documents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) Worldcat
Engraved portrait of Hasse by Lorenzo Zucchi, based on a drawing by Pietro Rotari
Study Guide
Names, titles, and terms introduced in chapter 4
Lent
Carnival
Pietro Metastasio
exit aria
Susannah Burney
Johann Adolf Hasse
Farinelli (Carlo Broschi)
Hasse's Artaserse
Per questo dolce amplesso
Pallido il sole
Gaetano Latilla
La finta cameriera
O questo o quello
Agitato il mio cor si confonde
Venetian ospedali
Caterina Gabrielli
Tommaso Traetta
Ippolito ed Aricia
In questo estremo addio
coloratura
messa di voce
Joseph Mysliveček
Bellerofonte
Palesar vorrei col piano
Topics for discussion
Great singers like Caterina Gabrielli demanded fees far higher than even the most famous composers. How did such singers contribute to musical life in eighteenth-century Europe? Should we think of such arias as "Palesar vorrei col pianto" (written by Mysliveček for Gabrielli) as the product of the collaboration between composers and singers?
The print by Marc'Antonio dal Re reproduced above depicts with amazing detail the performance of a Carnival opera seria in mid-eighteenth-century Italy. What can we learn from this print about operatic staging, the orchestra, and the audience?