This paper was given at the conference “Joseph Haydn & Die Neue Welt: Musik- und kulturgeschichtliche Perspektiven,” Eisenstadt, Austria, 13–15 September 2011. For a version with tables, and with footnotes at the bottom of the page, go to EISENSTADT-ONLINE.PDF
The opera entitled Motezuma that was performed at Eszterház (also spelled Eszterháza) in 1785 is generally attributed to Niccolò Zingarelli, whose opera of that title was first performed in Naples in 1781. The Eszterház Motezuma did indeed begin as Zingarelli’s opera. But by the time it had been subjected to Haydn’s editing, it had evolved into a collection of arias and ensembles by various composers, held together by Zingarelli’s simple recitative.[1]
Scholars disagree on the applicability of the word “pasticcio” to operas such as the Eszterház Motezuma.[2] Some believe we should reserve this word for operas conceived as compilations of numbers by various composers. By this definition Motezuma would not be a pasticcio but rather a very thorough revision of Zingarelli’s opera. I prefer not to think of pasticci and revisions as being mutually exclusive, but as belonging to a continuous spectrum of opera types. From this point of view, a “pasticcio” is any opera, regardless of origin, in which the music of no one composer predominates. I think of the Eszterház Motezuma as a pasticcio because the process of revision went so far that the opera performed under Haydn’s direction was no longer Zingarelli’s. Indeed the libretto printed for that production makes no mention of Zingarelli.[3]
Pasticci of this kind, ubiquitous in eighteenth-century serious opera, have attracted less attention from historians than they deserve. The theme of this volume offers us a chance to study how—and to speculate why—Haydn produced such a drama, using as his framework a libretto about the defeat of an American emperor and fall of the city where, in the libretto’s words, “he has collected all the vast riches of the New World” (“del Nuovo Mondo / Tutti raccolti ei tien gli ampi tesori”).
After briefly discussing the libretto that served as the basis for Zingarelli’s Motezuma and the Eszterház pasticcio, I will consider the process of musical anthologizing with which Haydn transformed Zingarelli’s opera. In what follows I will refer to the Aztec emperor as Montezuma while using the title Motezuma in referring to two eighteenth-century librettos and musical settings of them.
The conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés and the fall of Montezuma inspired relatively few operas, when considered in the context of the hundreds of opere serie produced in Italy during the eighteenth century. Table 1 is a list of eighteenth-century operatic treatments of the conquest. It was an unusual choice of subject in a genre that generally found subjects in the history of ancient Greece, Rome and the Middle East. Furthermore, the historical facts were at odds with some of the most pervasive conventions of opera seria. By “historical facts” I mean the facts as they were known and understood in the eighteenth century, whose main historical source was the Historia de la conquista de México, published by Antonio de Solís in 1684.
One of the most important elements in the conflict between Cortés and Montezuma, as narrated by De Solís, was religion: the Spaniards’ imposition of Christianity on the Mexicans and Montezuma’s refusal to accept conversion. Theatrical censorship forbade the representation of Christianity on the stage, making it impossible for operas to deal openly with the Spaniards’ Christian beliefs and practices.
Another important element in the historical record is Montezuma’s death. The death of a major character at the end of an opera seria conflicted with the convention of the lieto fine, or happy ending, that dominated the genre.
The Montezuma operas that Vivaldi wrote for Venice in 1733 and Graun wrote for Berlin in 1755, are the first and best known operatic treatments of the subject. Both are available on recordings, and Vivaldi’s opera is the subject of a collection of scholarly essays, published in 2008.[4] Both of these operas stand alone, in the sense that the librettos they use were set to music only once. A third libretto was much more fortunate: Vittorio Amedeo Cigna-Santi’s Motezuma, first performed in Turin in 1765 with music by Francesco De Maio, was set to music by nine other composers between 1767 and 1781. It is the only Montezuma libretto set to music more than once: the only one, apparently, in which the librettist achieved a balance between historical fact and operatic convention that largely satisfied eighteenth-century censors, composers, singers, and audiences.[5]
Departing from the historical record to make his libretto consistent with the conventions of opera seria, Cigna made Montezuma a young unmarried man and made his role that of the primo uomo, to be sung by a musico, that is, a castrated male singer. Cigna invented Guacozinga, the queen of a neighboring Indian tribe, to serve as Montezuma’s fiancée. She is the prima donna. Cigna made Cortés the older, more powerful man who in many opere serie threatens the romantic and erotic fullfillment sought by the young couple. Cigna conceived of the role as that of the secondo uomo, normally assigned to a tenor. For the sake of brevity I will focus on the actions and motivations of these three main characters.
At the beginning of the opera, Montezuma learns of the approach of Cortés and his troops, together with their Indian allies. Overcome by fear and indecision, he consults oracles, and interprets natural phenomena, such as a comet, as signs of impending misfortune. His attempts to placate the gods by human sacrifices are not successful. His army attacks Cortés, but is easily repulsed by gunfire. Cortés demands an audience with Montezuma. Guacozinga, who consistently shows more resolve and energy than Montezuma, urges him not to receive Cortés, but he feels he has no choice.
In act 2, Cortés enters the capital. Guacozinga, sensing danger, urges Montezuma to have the Spaniards attacked by surprise, but he refuses. Cortés confronts Montezuma in a climactic meeting, demanding that he pay homage to the king of Spain and that he renounce his religion. Montezuma equivocates on the first demand but emphatically refuses the second.
Cortés returns with soldiers, forcing his way into the throne room. Montezuma takes out his sword to defend himself, but Guacozinga, afraid he will be killed, restrains him; he surrenders. Realizing that a pliant Montezuma will make it easier for him to control the Aztecs, Cortés returns Montezuma’s sword and asks him to continue to rule.
In act 3, Guacozinga conspires with other Indians to attack the Spaniards. Cortés blames Montezuma for the ensuing rebellion, and puts him in chains. Disunity among the Indians keeps Guacozinga’s partisans from killing Cortés.
Cortés, learning that Montezuma did not instigate the rebellion, frees him and returns his sword once again. Moved by this act of clemency, Montezuma joins Cortés in the fight against the rebels, leaving Guacozinga alone to express her despair.
The Spanish and their Indian allies defeat the rebels. One of Montezuma’s officers announces that Montezuma has been killed by Indian arrows and that as he died he asked that his empire and crown be given to the king of Spain. In her grief Guacozinga sets fire to the city. Cortés, ordering that the fire be put out, promises to complete his victory: “Io la vittoria / A compier volo, a stabilir per sempre / Una nuova corona / Sul capo al mio monarca, e di mia fede / Nel nuovo mondo a dilatar la sede.” The opera ends with a brief ensemble that comes as close as the opera gets to a statement about the role of religion in the conflict between Montezuma and Cortés: “Sotto il ferro vincitore / Cada oppressa l’empietà. / Trionfò finor l’errore, / Or la Fè trionferà.
Cigna Santi successfully reconciled the conflicting claims of history, the conventions of opera seria, and, more generally, the expectations of eighteenth-century audiences and censors. He departed from the historical record in making Montezuma monogamous and giving him a fiancée. But he followed history in having Montezuma die at the hands of his own subjects. By having his death take place off stage, Cigna lessened its tragic impact. He even managed to impose something of a lieto fine on his libretto by ending it with a celebration of the triumph of Christianity, carefully worded so that it would survive the censor’s pen. In using this celebration to console his audience for the death of Montezuma, Cigna used one departure from operatic norms to compensate for another.
Cigna’s contemporaries expressed their admiration for his achievement in Motezuma in the frequency with which composers set it to music after its first production. When a composer set to music an existing libretto, that libretto was almost always changed, but the extent of such changes varied widely. In the case of Cigna’s Motezuma, some of the later editions of the libretto were remarkably close to the original. When the young Nicolo Zingarelli made his operatic debut with a setting of Motezuma in Naples in 1781, he set to music a version of Cigna’s libretto in which only a few of the original aria texts were replaced and some of the dialogue was shortened.
Zingarelli’s opera seems to have received only one production after the one in Naples, and that is the production at Eszterház in 1785. But by the time the opera was performed at Eszterház, the largest part of Zingarelli’s music that survived was his setting of Cigna’s dialogue in simple recitative. It was presumably Haydn, as part of the process of preparing the opera for production, who replaced most of Zingarelli’s orchestrally accompanied music with music by other composers. He thus transformed the opera into a pasticcio containing as few as five items by Zingarelli: the overture, three orchestrally accompanied recitatives, and a march.
I say “as few as five” because the evidence about what was actually performed at Eszterház is somewhat contradictory. That evidence consists of three kinds of material: 1) a manuscript score from the Esterházy collection in the Hungarian National Library in Budapest; 2) a set of orchestral parts from the Esterházy collection, also in the Hungarian National Library; and 3) a libretto printed for the Eszterház production, of which only a single copy is known to exist, in the possession of the National Trust of Monuments for Hungary in Budapest. The scholars who have previously studied the production of Motezuma at Eszterház, Dénes Bartha, László Somfai, and H. C. Robbins Landon, had access to the score and the orchestral parts, but not the libretto.[6]
We can see evidence of Haydn’s editorial work in the Eszterház score. The manuscript contains most of Zingarelli’s music, with annotations in Haydn’s hand, very much as in the score of Sarti’s Idalide discussed by Balázs Mikusi elsewhere in this volume. This editing took place in two main stages. In the first stage, Haydn seems to have operated with the intention of performing the opera more or less as Zingarelli wrote it. He went through all the music, correcting copying errors, making cuts, and transposing some numbers. Only later did he decide to omit most of Zingarelli’s music, writing “bleibt aus” at the beginning of each number that was to be omitted. In a third stage of editing Haydn restored some of the music that he had earlier cut. This happened with Guacozinga’s orchestrally-accompanied recitative in Act 1, Sc. 4, “Al sembiante sconvolto,” which Haydn first marked “bleibt aus,” then crossed that out and added “gilt” (Fig. 3).
Only five of the replacement numbers are bound into the score, and only one of those five includes the name of the composer. Many of the other replacement numbers were part of the score at one time, but were subsequently removed. The instrumental parts include most of the replacement arias, but since they lack the vocal parts, they do not include texts. With the exception of the five replacement numbers bound into the score, the texts are available only in the libretto. This libretto occasionally contradicts the score. The texts of several arias by Zingarelli that Haydn marked “bleibt aus” are in the libretto. I suspect that Haydn intended to perform these arias, but that sometime after the libretto was printed he decided to omit them. In one case Haydn kept Cigna-Santi’s aria text (“Di fieri sdegni armato,” in act 1) but replaced Zingarelli’s music—possibly with his own.
Table 2 consists of parallel columns comparing the contents of Zingarelli’s opera and Haydn’s pasticcio. In a few instances Haydn simply omitted arias without replacing them. But more often he replaced Zingarelli’s music with numbers by other composers. With the help of the Eszterhaz libretto and research tools unavailable to Bártha, Somfai, and Landon, I have been able to identify, for the first time, the composers and operatic sources of most of these replacement numbers. The arias whose composers remain unidentified are concentrated in act 1: “Che mi giova, ingiusti dei,” “Nel lasciarti amato bene,” “Tempeste il mar minaccia,” “Non si fidi di lui stesso,” and “Di fieri sdegni armato”. Some or all of these may be by Haydn himself.
Haydn chose music by leading composers of opera seria in Italy: Giuseppe Sarti, Giovanni Paisiello, Francesco Bianchi, Domenico Cimarosa, and Giovanni Battista Borghi. Two other composers who contributed to the pasticcio, Antonio Salieri and Joseph Schuster, were active primarily north of the Alps (in Vienna and Dresden respectively), but Haydn took arias from operas they wrote in Italy: Salieri’s L’Europa riconosciuta (Milan, 1778) and Schuster’s Demofoonte (Forlì, 1776). Novelty was clearly not Haydn’s first priority: he preferred replacement numbers written before 1781 (that is, before Zingarelli’s opera) that by the mid 1780s had perhaps attained the status of classics. His choice of composers corresponded only partially with the repertory at Eszterhaz, which included serious operas by Sarti, Bianchi, and Cimarosa, but none by Paisiello, Borghi, Schuster, or Salieri.[7]
While maintaining the aria-dominated structure of Cigna-Santi’s libretto and Zingarelli’s opera, Haydn gave ensembles a slightly more important place. At the end of act 1 he replaced two arias with a duet by Bianchi; and at the end of act 2 he replaced an aria and a duet with a trio by Paisiello.
An earlier pasticcio provided Haydn with some of the material that he used in Motezuma. At least two of the replacement pieces had earlier been used in a performance of Metastasio’s libretto Zenobia. At the end of act 2 of the Eszterház score is the trio “Fra tanti acerbi affanni” (Fig. 4), which is from Paisiello’s opera Andromeda (performed in Milan in 1774).[8] But the score identifies Paisiello’s music neither by his name nor by the title of the opera for which he wrote it, nor by the names of the characters who originally sang it. Instead, the character names in the Eszterház score are Zenobia, Radamisto, and Tiridate: the three main characters in Metastasio’s Zenobia. The final coro in the Eszterház Motezuma, “Sotto il ferro vincitore” begins with words from Cigna-Santi’s Motezuma, which replace words in the score that have been erased (Fig. 5); the score continues with words from Zenobia (Fig. 6), and on the next page (Fig. 7) the name Radamisto confirms that we are dealing music formerly used in a production of Metastasio’s Zenobia. Haydn probably took these numbers from a pasticcio Zenobia performed in Prague in 1777 under the direction of the impresario Giuseppe Bustelli. The libretto printed for that production includes the text of Paisiello’s trio.[9] When Bustelli died in 1781 Prince Nichola Esterházy bought some of his papers, including scores.[10] These acquisitions presumably included the score of the 1777 Prague Zenobia, thus making Paisiello’s “Fra tanti acerbi affanni” available for Haydn’s use.[11]
Why did Haydn turn Zingarelli’s opera into a pasticcio? I can think of three reasons. First, strange as the practice may now seem to us, eighteenth-century audiences enjoyed the experience of hearing music by many different composers in the course of an evening in the theater. Second, the pasticcio was the best way for Haydn—short of setting Cigna-Santi’s libretto to music himself—to make sure that his singers had music that allowed them to sound their best. And third, Haydn may have lacked confidence in the quality and effectiveness of Zingarelli’s music.
Compare the troupe that Haydn had at his disposal for Motezuma and the singers for whom Zingarelli wrote his opera (Table 3).[12] Haydn’s troupe was a small provincial company that effectively filled the little theater of Eszterház; but it was no match for the operatic stars of the first magnitude who sang in the great Teatro San Carlo of Naples. Most importantly, Haydn lacked musici: the castrated singers for whom Zingarelli wrote the parts of Motezuma and Teutile.
During their early years as professionals in Italy, all three of Haydn’s leading singers, soprano Metilde Bologna and tenors Prospero Braghetti and Antonio Specioli, had appeared exclusively in comic opera, suggesting that—in the size of their voices, their capacity for virtuosity and vocal improvisation, and their stage presence—they lacked the qualities needed to compete with Italy’s leading opera seria singers. Having them sing an opera that Zingarelli had written for San Carlo would have been to invite disaster.
Motezuma was Zingarelli’s first opera, and after its initial production in Naples it was never performed again, except at Eszterháza. In the course of preparing Motezuma for performance, Haydn may have noticed in the music evidence of Zingarelli’s inexperience.
Guacozinga’s aria “Ah che in un mar d’affanni” exemplifies what made Zingarelli’s opera a vehicle for virtuoso display and, at the same time, what made it impossible to present at Eszterháza without thorough revision. This long, heavily orchestrated coloratura aria was almost certainly beyond the capabilities of Metilde Bologna; and its spectacular solo oboe part would also have excessively taxed Haydn’s first oboist. After a 39-measure orchestral introduction, Guacozinga’s opening solo required her to compete not only with the solo oboe but also with a pair of clarinets (instruments to which in any case Haydn had only sporadic access during the 1780s) and bassoons (Ex. 1). For all its flair and beauty, this music may also betray Zingarelli’s inexperience. The descending chromatic passage at measures 57–58, for example, suggests that at this early stage in his career his musical ambition exceeded his compositional craft.
Not all the arias with which Haydn replaced Zingarelli’s were equally successful in offering first-rate music that made the most of Haydn’s cast. Salieri’s “Quando più irato freme” is a brilliant coloratura aria for high soprano with an oboe solo even more demanding than the one in “Ah che in un mar d’affanni.” That is almost certainly why Haydn, after initially inserting it into Motezuma (and having its text printed in the libretto) decided to delete it.[13]
Zingarelli conceived of his three main roles as two sopranos and one tenor; Haydn conceived of his three main roles as one soprano and two tenors. The difference was particularly apparent in ensembles, and thus Haydn probably went to some trouble to find a trio for two men and one woman with which to “customize” the end of act 2. He came up with the piece from Paisiello’s Andromeda that had already been subject to change when, in 1777, it was inserted into a pasticcio Zenobia. Paisiello wrote “Fra tanti acerbi affanni” for Andromeda, her lover Perseo, and her father Cefeo—roles created, as normal in opera seria, by two sopranos (one male and one female) and a tenor. But the troupe that sang Zenobia in Prague evidently lacked a musico. That the two main male characters were both sung in Prague by tenors is suggested by the score of Paisiello’s trio that Haydn used (see Fig. 5), with clefs indicating that both Radamisto and Tiridate are tenors. Paisiello’s trio (Ex. 2) is the work of an operatic master at the very peak of his inspiration. With the vocal parts assigned to Guacozinga, Montezuma, and Cortes, we can see easily why Haydn’s singers would have wanted to perform this music and why Haydn himself would have wanted to direct it.
There is an enormous amount of work still to do in gaining bibliographic control over the eighteenth-century pasticcio (or centone): identifying the music and tracing the use of particular numbers from one pasticcio to another. Archival research promises to reveal new insights into how pasticci came into existence. We still need to construct aesthetic frameworks within which to interpret the choices involved in the production and evolution of pasticci. I hope that this paper, in delving briefly into the complexities of a single pasticcio, will increase our understanding of an operatic phenomenon that played a crucial role in eighteenth-century theater, and will encourage others to explore the pasticcio in more depth and breadth.
[1] I am grateful to Margaret Butler for reading an early draft of this paper and making several valuable suggestions for its improvement.
[2] The word “pasticcio” (literally: pie) was used very rarely in operatic contexts in eighteenth-century Italy, which preferred the word “centone.” For example, in a letter of Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany to his brother, Emperor Joseph II, Leopold wrote: “et quant aux operas serieux il n’y en a qu’en Carneval, et c’est toujours un Centone” (quoted in John A. Rice, “Emperor and Impresario: Leopold II and the Transformation of Viennese Theater, 1790–1792,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1987, 74). The Indice de’ teatrali spettacoli di tutto l’anno, dalla primavera 1787 a tutto il carnevale 1788 (facsimile in Un almanacco drammatico, ed. Roberto Verti, Pesaro, 1996), 117, describes Il tempio della gloria, a cantata performed in Naples on 28 October 1787, as having “poesia del Sig. Gaetano Bongiardino e musica a centone.” Giacomo Gotifredo Ferrari treated the words “centone” and “pasticcio” as synomyms, describing the oratorio Gefte (Naples, 1786) as “un centone ossía pasticcio, ma così ben disposto, che pareva un’opera originale” (Aneddoti piacevoli e interessanti, vol. 1, London, 1830, 170.
[3] On the other hand, the Indice de’ spettacoli teatrali di tutto l’anno, dalla primavera 1785 a tutto il carnvevale 1786, 38, attributes the Eszterház Motezuma to Zingarelli alone.
[4] Vivaldi, “Motezuma,” and the Opera Seria: Essays on a Newly Discovered Work and Its Background, ed. Michael Talbot (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008); see also Daniel Heartz, Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780 (New York: Norton, 2003), 366–73, and Pierpaolo Polzonetti, Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 107–32.
[5] On Cigna Santi’s Motezuma see Margaret Butler, “Exoticism in 18th-Century Turinese Opera: Motezuma in Context,” Music in Eighteenth-Century Life: Cities, Courts, Churches, ed. Mara E. Parker (Ann Arbor, MI: Steglein, 2006), 105–24. My thanks to Margaret Butler for sending me copies of several Montezuma librettos, including Cigna-Santi’s.
[6] My thanks to Christine Siegert for sending me a digital copy of the Eszterház score, Országos Széchényi Könyvtár, Ms. Mus. OE-98, which is of Milanese origin; see Christine Siegert, “Die Aufführungsmateriale des italienischen Opernbetriebs in Eszterháza unter der Leitung Joseph Haydns,” Forum Musikbibliothek 27 (2006), 231–38. Some of the main features of the manuscript are described in Dénes Bartha and László Somfai, Haydn als Opernkapellmeister (Budapest: Ungarische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1960), 290–94, and H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works, 668–69. I am grateful to Terézia Bardi (Müemlékek Nemzeti Gondoksága, Budapest) for sending me a copy of the Eszterház libretto.
[7] On the opera seria repertory at Eszterház see Margaret Butler, “Annährungen an eine Kontextualisierung der Opera seria in Eszterháza. Rückschlüsse aus Turin,” in Bearbeitungspraxis in der Oper des späten 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Ulrich Konrad (Tutzing: Schneider, 2007), 103–25.
[8] For a full score of Paisiello’s trio and a perceptive analysis see Kathleen Hansell, Opera and Ballet at the Regio Ducal Teatro of Milan, 1771–1776: A Musical and Social History, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1980, 529–32, 1078–89.
[9] I am grateful to Milada Jonášová for consulting the libretto of the Prague Zenobia in the University Library in Prague and sending me the texts of the arias and ensembles.
[10] Bartha and Somfai, Haydn als Opernkapellmeister , 96–97, 254.
[11] That all the other replacement numbers in Motezuma whose sources I have been able to identify were written before 1781 suggests the possibility that all of them came to Eszterház by way of Bustelli’s collection.
[12] The Eszterház libretto does not contain a cast list, but Bartha and Somfai reconstruct it on the basis of a cost estimate for costumes (Haydn als Opernkapellmeister, 125).
[13] The text of Salieri’s aria is in the Eszterház libretto, but there is no trace of the music in the score or orchestral parts. Evidently it suffered the same fate as some of Zingarelli’s arias: omission after the libretto was printed.