From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi's Staging of the Self

From Madrigal to Opera

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of

the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund

of the University of California Press Foundation.

From Madrigal

to Opera

Monteverdi’s Staging of the Self

Mauro Calcagno

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2012 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Calcagno, Mauro P.

From madrigal to opera : Monteverdi’s staging of the self / Mauro Calcagno.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-26768-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-95152-5 (ebook)

1. Monteverdi, Claudio, 1567–1643. Operas.     2. Monteverdi, Claudio, 1567–1643. Madrigals.     3. Petrarchism.     I. Title.

ML410.M77C33    2012

Manufactured in the United States of America

21    20    19    18    17    16    15    14    13    12

10    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

To Jamuna, con amore

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART ONE. LA MUSICA AND ORFEO

1. Text, Context, Performance

Performing Nobility • Authorizing Performance • The Work of Opera

2. Liminality, Deixis, Subjectivity

Prologues as Paratexts • I am Music • The Prologue of Orfeo as Performance • Dialogic Subjectivity • Subject-Effects

3. Performing the Dialogic Self

Music’s Touch • Echoes

PART TWO. CONSTRUCTING THE NARRATOR

4. From Petrarch to Petrarchism: A Rhetoric of Voice and Address

Voi ch’ascoltate • Appropriating the Self • Lyric Modes • Equivocality

5. In Search of Voice: Musical Petrarchism in the Sixteenth-Century Madrigal

Theatricality and Temporal Perspective • Diffracting the Self • Who is Speaking? From Soggetto to Dialogo • The Madrigal Book as Canzoniere

PART THREE. STAGING THE SELF

6. Monteverdi, Narrator

From Narration to Focalization • Combattimento between Page and Stage

7. The Possibility of Opera

The Aesthetics of Nothing: Monteverdi, Marino, and the Incogniti • Focalization in Poppea

Epilogue: Subjectivity, Theatricality, Multimediality

Appendix 1: Tables of Contents of the Madrigal Books

Appendix 2: Monteverdi, Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda: Text and Translation

Notes

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

1. Work, text, and performance in Monteverdi’s Orfeo

2. Diagram of the relationships between deictics and body movements

3. The performance space of Ronconi’s production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo

4. Monteverdi, Orfeo (dir. Ronconi), Prologue: Dal mio Permesso amato

5. Monteverdi, Orfeo (dir. Ronconi), Prologue: Io la Musica son

6. Monteverdi, Orfeo (dir. Ronconi), Prologue: Io su Cetera d’or

7. Monteverdi, Orfeo (dir. Ronconi), Act 3

8. Narrative interference in texted music

9. Monteverdi, Combattimento (dir. Audi): m. 10

10. Monteverdi, Combattimento (dir. Audi): a passi tardi e lenti

11. Monteverdi, Combattimento (dir. Audi): Misero, di che godi?

12. Monteverdi, Combattimento (dir. Audi): e se rubella in vita fu

13. Monteverdi, L’incoronazione di Poppea (dir. Hampe): act 1, scene 1

MUSICAL EXAMPLES

1. Monteverdi, Orfeo: act 1, Nymph

2. Monteverdi, Orfeo: act 1, Orfeo

3. Monteverdi, Orfeo: Prologue, La Musica

4. Monteverdi, Selva morale: opening of O ciechi and Voi ch’ascoltate

5. Monteverdi, Selva morale: Voi ch’ascoltate, mm. 27–29

6. Monteverdi, Selva morale: O ciechi, mm. 13–23, and Voi ch’ascoltate, mm. 44–52

7. Wert, Voi ch’ascoltate, mm. 1–10 and 25–29

8. Verdelot, Quanto sia lieto il giorno, mm. 19–29

9. Arcadelt, Il bianco e dolce cigno, beginning

10. Arcadelt, Quando col dolce suono, mm. 30–41

11. Arcadelt, Chi potrà dir, mm. 20–29

12. Arcadelt, Ahimé dov’è il bel viso, mm. 24–30 and 37–42

13. Arcadelt, Quand’io penso al martire, mm. 37–56

14. Rore, Da le belle contrade, mm. 24–59

15. Marenzio, La bella man vi stringo, mm. 12–18

16. Monteverdi, Batto, qui pianse Ergasto, mm. 42–46 (harmonic interference)

17. Monteverdi, "Misero Alceo," mm. 54–61 (textural interference)

18. Monteverdi, A Dio, Florida bella, mm. 35–42 (textural interferences)

19. Monteverdi, Qui rise, o Tirsi, mm. 49–61 (interferences)

TABLES

1. Adrian Willaert, Occhi piangete, from Musica nova (Venice, 1559): alternation of voices

2. Luca Marenzio, Settimo libro di madrigali a 5 (Venice, 1595): overview

3. Luca Marenzio, Sesto libro di madrigali a 5 (Venice, 1594): overview

4. Giaches de Wert, Ottavo libro di madrigali a 5 (Venice, 1586): overview

5. Luca Marenzio, Nono libro di madrigali a 5 (Venice, 1599): overview

6. Text of Petrarch’s sestina Mia benigna fortuna, in Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (Canzoniere), CCCXXXII

7. Text of Ottavio Rinuccini’s canzonetta Non havea Febo ancora, set to music by Monteverdi as Lamento della ninfa

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To my beloved parents, Elide and Mario Calcagno, I owe an inexpressible debt of gratitude. To Ellen Rosand, my heartfelt thanks for her role in this project and much more. I am also grateful to John and Jehanara Samuel for their support during all the phases of the book.

I am very grateful to Mary Francis, my wonderful editor at the University of California Press, for all of her patience, help, and advice along the way; to Bonnie Blackburn, from whom I had the privilege to receive precious comments on the manuscript; and to Rose Vekony and Eric Schmidt for their invaluable assistance. The two anonymous readers for the Press provided greatly stimulating feedback, from which the book much benefitted. While holding a teaching appointment at Harvard, I appreciated the many courtesies of Virginia Danielson and Sarah Adams as leaders of the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library and of Isham Memorial Library, respectively. At Stony Brook University, besides the generous help of the staff of the Music Library, directed by Gisele Schierhorst, I have been fortunate since 2008 to experience the support of my colleagues in the Music Department, especially Sarah Fuller, Arthur Haas, Perry Goldstein, and David Lawton. For precious suggestions and discussions at various stages of the project, I am indebted to Jane Bernstein, Tim Carter, Paolo Cecchi, Jody Cranston, Beth and Jonathan Glixon, Wendy Heller, John W. Hill, Jeffrey Kurtzman, Thomas Lin, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Arnaldo Morelli, Margaret Murata, Alex Rehding, Federico Schneider, and Anne Stone. I also thank those colleagues who patiently waited years for me to bring this project to conclusion, thereby indirectly supporting it, above all Philippe Vendrix. Finally, I am grateful to Antonia Arconti of the Museo Bilotti in Rome for her help in obtaining the permission to reproduce the image on the dust jacket.

I gladly acknowledge the support of the 2002 Fellowship Program of the American Council of Learned Societies, and of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University (directed by David Freedberg) in 2011–12. Finally, From Madrigal to Opera has also benefitted from the feedback I received when lecturing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2000), Princeton University and The Johns Hopkins University (2004), Oxford University (2005), Harvard University (2007), Stony Brook University (2007), Yale University (2008), the City University of New York-Graduate Center (2009 and 2010), as well as at the Annual Meetings of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music (1999), the American Musicological Society (2000, 2002, and 2006), and the Renaissance Society of America (2007).

This book could not have been conceived, developed, written, and brought to conclusion without my wife, Jamuna Samuel.

Introduction

From Madrigal to Opera examines how selves emerge and are perceived in two musical genres mastered by Claudio Monteverdi. In the early seventeenth century, the madrigal, which began flourishing in the 1520s in Florence, was in its final stage of development. Meanwhile, in the same Tuscan city ruled by the Medici family, the new genre of opera was dawning. Around that time, in the north Italian court of Mantua, a still-young Monteverdi was serving at the court of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga, before eventually moving to Venice, where he remained employed by the local government for the rest of his life. As we listen today to a vocal quintet performing Monteverdi’s madrigal Cruda Amarilli, as we watch a soprano impersonating La Musica and entering stage in his opera Orfeo, or experience the celebrated love duets of Nero and Poppaea in L’incoronazione di Poppea, our senses and intellect are powerfully drawn to the performers, to the music they sing, the characters they enact, and their stories. If this experience is in part like that of watching someone reading a Shakespeare sonnet, or a theater company staging one of his plays, it is also radically different. Why is the compound of words, music, and gesture characterizing Monteverdi’s madrigals and operas still so effective for today’s audiences? How do the agents involved in the creation and performance of texted music interact with one another? How does texted music tell stories (of gods, demigods, mortals) and what is the specific role of music and of the performer in this process? Finally, what did the shift from writing for the chamber to writing for the stage mean for musicians active at the beginning of the seventeenth century? What were the new issues that Monteverdi, for example, had to confront as a composer?

In order to approach these questions, I explore in this book a cultural paradigm that initially developed outside of music: Petrarchism, the early modern literary movement modeled on Petrarch’s love poetry, which affected poets, musicians, and artists, but also publishers, readers, audiences, and beholders, both in Europe and beyond.¹ In its musical guise Petrarchism provides a productive access point to the issues raised above, but especially to the one that underpins, in my view, the others—subjectivity. Since Petrarch’s view on the human subject indelibly marked the course of Western elite culture, it makes sense to assume that music too inflected it in its own ways, not uncoincidentally in conjunction with text, often by Petrarch himself. From Madrigal to Opera investigates music’s own contribution to Petrarchism, as a window on the issue of early modern subjectivity.

But if this book does investigate Petrarchism in works by Monteverdi and his predecessors, its larger claim is that this paradigm is also inherent in today’s performances of madrigals and operas. Petrarchism is not only a cultural and historical phenomenon useful for understanding musical works as written artifacts, but it is also intrinsic to the way we experience them as performances. This has to do with the typically Petrarchan view of the self as inherently dialogic, with its potential of shifting identities and creating roles, which I discuss in their musico-theatrical aspects. Monteverdi’s works inflect this Petrarchan paradigm in ways that are consequential for our experience of opera as a genre. In this respect, discussions of performances—including operatic stagings—are as productive as those of scores for understanding the effectiveness of musical works, and they thus figure prominently in this book. In sum, rather than in distinctions between musical genres, I am interested in interactions among musico-poetic texts, their agents, and their performances, specifically in works by Monteverdi and his predecessors, as they inflect a particular view of the self originating with Petrarch.

But whose self and what is self? The performer immediately comes to mind, that flesh-and-blood agent singing and impersonating a character, be it the abstract lover, Orpheus, or Eurydice, be it a solo or ensemble, with or without instruments or costumes. Performers deserve scholarly investigation both historically and in today’s reincarnations in concert halls, operatic stages, and recording media. The performer, however, is, and was, only a part of a network of agents involved in the creation and performance of musical works, among them patrons, composers, the dramatic characters, the listeners/viewers, and stage directors. On stage, the performer symbolically subsumes in herself all the other agents by projecting a self that is constantly shifting. The performer’s I works as a catalyst of such identity-shifting, and is as elusive and mobile as the fleeting performance before our eyes. This dynamic role of subjectivity, which I trace back to Petrarchism, is at the root of the early modern, as well as of our (post) modern, experience of opera performance.

Monteverdi self-consciously capitalized on this subjective elusiveness and mobility in his late madrigal books and in his three surviving operas (Orfeo, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, and L’incoronazione di Poppea). In the madrigals his experiments with the ways the self is constructed and performed represented the climax of a tradition rooted in the works of Philippe Verdelot, Jacques Arcadelt, Adrian Willaert, Cipriano de Rore, Giaches de Wert, and Luca Marenzio, among others. These composers appropriated the voice of contemporaneous poets in the same way in which these poets appropriated that of Petrarch as their Model. Through this process of appropriation, the musicians themselves became narrators, and, in their works, they were able to represent selves as narrators and perceivers. These composers’ experiments with representing narrative roles in madrigals are precursors of Monteverdi’s staged works. From Madrigal to Opera—a title suggesting a conceptual passage, not a teleology of works or events—thus begins by discussing Orfeo as a paradigmatic work encapsulating the narrative strategies through which subjectivity is articulated in the madrigal. In addition, Orfeo also encapsulates narrative strategies typical of the genre of opera in general, thus bridging past and future. Its prologue, which is discussed throughout the book almost as a ritornello, represents the quintessential operatic act—the prologue to all opera, as it were.

The madrigal embodies the possibility of opera in its staging subjectivity.² In creating such a possibility the madrigal explored the boundaries between music and language in sophisticated ways that today require close inspection. From Madrigal to Opera abounds in analyses of text-music relationships, or close readings. Most of the analyses focus on text and texture as audible components of the listener’s experience of subjectivity. As a consequence, and not out of negligence, an important musical issue that has traditionally been prominent in madrigal studies, modality, is rarely dealt with, since it is less relevant to the general interpretive purpose of highlighting Petrarchan subjectivity.³ In the same analyses, the discussions of poetic texts underemphasize affects or allegorical concepts in order to focus on aspects that are equally or more tied to performance or discourse, as modern linguistics would term them.⁴ It is telling that, in the sixteenth century, some madrigals were performed within spoken plays; and it is equally telling that a particularly perceptive witness of those times such as Anton Francesco Doni could refer to madrigal performances with the words to speak the madrigal (dire il madrigale) rather than to sing it (cantarlo).⁵ The compound of music and poetic texts conveyed discursive meanings, each component contributing to semantic communication. Consequently, the exploration of the links between selves and performance in madrigals demands analyses of poetic texts that go beyond singling out affects and allegories to highlight those communicative and contextual meanings that are studied today in linguistic pragmatics and discourse analysis.⁶

Music fully participated in the age of conversation that characterized early modern Italy.⁷ In the sixteenth century, within a politically fragmented country that, self-reflexively, was engaged in a hot debate about which literary language to adopt (questione della lingua), a relentless activity of formalized speaking and listening in società took place in particularly productive contexts for the interaction of words and music: courts and academies.⁸ In these environments the contiguity between verbal and musical performances—for example, reading a poem aloud and then performing it as set to music—can be interpreted not only as a mere social obligation or a self-fashioning act;⁹ rather, that connection bespeaks deep-seated relationships between two modes of performance, delivering speech and making music. It is the same subject, the same body, that performs in both, whether it is poetry or texted music: a subject that performs to someone and is thus located in a dialogic, relational situation. This, I argue, is the Petrarchan subject, socialized in ways peculiar to early modern Italian elites and thus becoming a Petrarchist subject: a performative self, living in and through voice, via his or her own body, also through music.¹⁰ The much-cited seconda prattica—the compositional practice based on the aesthetic tenet that music is the servant of text—has its roots in this socio-discursive dimension. Tellingly, the word that Monteverdi used for text in defining the seconda prattica was not testo, a written, material artifact, but oratione—speech, performance, something through which a subject interacts with other subjects.

This view of self as speaking and making music—or musicking, as Christopher Small put it—helps in defining also the what (besides the who) of the question about subjectivity as explored in From Madrigal to Opera.¹¹ According to Jerrold Siegel, a broad notion of subjectivity encompasses three dimensions.¹² The first involves the physical, bodily existence of individuals, what makes creatures palpable and gives them temperaments, including passions. The second dimension is the social, relational identity that makes us individuals involved in cultural and political interactions, also through language. Finally, the third dimension of self is that of reflexivity, through which we are able to hold a mirror to ourselves and the world. A communicative performance art such as music involves, I claim, all three dimensions in a particularly active and intriguing relationship. I thus analyze texted music and its performance according to subject-effects related to those three dimensions. These effects are heuristic categories aiming at interpreting musical works as dynamic processes: as performances involving the selves of a variety of agents (primarily the singers), rather than as static and passive instantiations or representations of selves in scores.¹³

In Part I of From Madrigal to Opera (La Musica and Orfeo) the purpose of investigating Monteverdi’s Orfeo is to establish contextual bases, critical tools, and a cross-disciplinary vocabulary for later use in the book. The tools and vocabulary are drawn from linguistics, phenomenology, narratology, and theater and film studies, as areas that allow bridging the gap between the worlds of abstract text and live performance. Historically, the distinction text/performance made even less sense in early modern societies characterized, for music and theater, by patronage of performances more than of permanent products such as scores.¹⁴ In this respect, patronage of music was different from that of artworks such as paintings, sculptures, or buildings. Yet, as viewers/listeners encountered performances, they somehow replicated the situation of beholders of permanent artworks, experiencing the same emotional and intellectual journey, for example by absorbing mythological narratives. This shows that performance occupies a somewhat liminal, or in-between, status. I raise this issue at the outset of the book by briefly discussing a 1973 painting by Giorgio de Chirico representing the paradigmatic performer, Orpheus.¹⁵ This image not only introduces the themes of mythology and modernity but also offers a point of entry into the main character of the book, the performing self. In chapter 1 (Text, Context, Performance) I deal with the relationships between text, context, and performance in Orfeo according to the bifocal perspective characterizing the questions about agency and effectiveness raised at the beginning of this introduction, concerning both the then (the early modern period) and the now (our modern or postmodern times). I discuss, for example, the issue of performance both in its meaning for the Italian courts of the early seventeenth century and in its meaning today as a philosophical concept, as well as in its concrete implications for, say, a stage director producing Orfeo in an opera house. Through an analysis of the Prologue of this opera, chapter 2 (Liminality, Deixis, Subjectivity) introduces the basic terminology about subjectivity used in the rest of the book, including concepts such as deixis, dialogic self, and subject-effects. In discussing a recent production of Orfeo, chapter 3 (Performing the Dialogic Self) provides a first application of these concepts in the life of performance.

In Part II (Constructing the Narrator) I extrapolate backward from opera to identify fluctuating expressions of self created by the composer-as-poet in sixteenth-century polyphonic madrigals. This discourse on a flexible self emerges in the opening sonnet of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, which I discuss in chapter 4 (From Petrarch to Petrarchism: A Rhetoric of Voice and Address) also in musical settings. Petrarch’s view of the self was appropriated, inflected, and socialized in late Renaissance literary Petrarchism, of which the madrigal was an epiphenomenon. I explore how representative figures of the literary side of Petrarchism practiced, and theorized about, what I call a rhetoric of voice and address, a way in which poets communicated to readers/listeners, which was then appropriated by musicians.

In chapter 5 (In Search of Voice: Musical Petrarchism in the Sixteenth-Century Madrigal) I investigate the musical side of Petrarchism in the madrigal before Monteverdi, from the micro-level of verbal resonances and emphasis on specific words to the macro-textual level of modeling print collections of poems and madrigals on the Canzoniere. I explore this range of possibilities from the point of view of creators, performers, and listeners, in works by Verdelot, Arcadelt, Willaert, Rore, Wert, and Marenzio, focusing on these composers’ appropriation of the voice of poets, as well as on the listeners’ perception of it. Through madrigal books, musicians created stories that effectively met the expectations of listeners who stored in their memories narrative patterns absorbed by reading poetry collections. These composers calibrated the relationships between narrator and characters in a variety of ways, assembling texts from disparate literary sources and even modifying them to suit their own purposes. In the case of Marenzio, this musician’s appropriation of Petrarch resulted in a coherent cultural project that spanned his entire career as madrigalist and climaxed in his last masterwork, Book IX a 5 (1599). This chapter (reader be warned!) is by far the longest in the book, forming a musical-historical counterpart to the more literary-oriented chapter 4 and a background to the treatment of Monteverdi’s authorial voice in the last two chapters.

Part III then (Staging the Self) deals exclusively with Monteverdi, whose works are seen as the culmination of the Petrarchist process of progressive appropriation of the narrator’s voice described in chapter 5. In chapter 6 (Monteverdi, Narrator) I show how, on the one hand, the composer develops his voice as narrator to such a degree that in Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda he transforms the epic poetry of Torquato Tasso into a multimedia, semi-staged piece. On the other hand, Monteverdi overcomes Petrarchism by creating full-fledged and flesh-and-blood characters well beyond the classic Petrarchan lover. In this process he adapts for his own purposes the poetics not only of Tasso but also of Giovan Battista Marino, the quintessential Baroque poet. The composer embraces, of Tasso, his ability to create characters and to calibrate narrative distance from them; of Marino, the multiplication of perspectives resulting from the poet’s capacity to create miniature poetic stories. Monteverdi’s impulse to narrative,¹⁶ his creation of fictional worlds, is the result of madrigalistic and operatic techniques that I subsume under the term focalization, meaning perspective or point of view. Narrator and characters project a focalizing effect by acquiring a visual dimension through which they see, perceive, and experience the events of a story, making the audience aware of them. Instrumental music as well becomes a factor in this process. As a result, madrigal and opera become, in the hands of Monteverdi, multi-vocal and multi-focal, with the potential of being developed as multimedia artworks.

Obviously, the performers are crucial to this process since they are the ones who directly affect the audience’s point of view, musically and visually. The singers’ use, for example, of pure voice as empty, non-verbal sounding music, which I trace back to the aesthetics of Marino (chapter 7, The Possibility of Opera), enables them to shift the audience’s perspective toward the narrative power of music per se, as well as toward themselves. Today, the opera director, by locating and moving the singers within the performance space, becomes yet another agent in the chain of appropriations inaugurated by the Petrarchist poets and the madrigalists; and in filmed productions, the video director becomes the last link of this chain. In the highly relativistic world of Poppea, characters such as Otho and the two soldiers provide a perspective on, respectively, Poppaea and Seneca. Thanks to the focalizing effect generated by these characters, but also depending on the choices of opera or video directors, the audience perceives the events of the opera in a particular way, absorbing a worldview conveyed by the performance and mediating it with its own. This multiplication of perspectives has characterized the genre of opera since then, up to today’s age of Regieoper.

We then return to the larger questions of the interaction among the different agents in performance, its effectiveness, and our experience of it: in sum, the question of a self performing before an audience, before society, whether this subject is speaking or is performing music. On an anthropological level, this question emerged almost by necessity in a deeply fragmented, competitive, and multicultural society such as that of early modern Italy.¹⁷ In this context, fluctuations, rather than permanence, of identities and of generic boundaries were the norm. It is not by chance that the work of some of today’s most prominent visual artists, such as Frank Stella, Richard Serra, and Jeff Koons, draws frequent inspiration from the art we still call, after Burckhardt and Wölfflin, Baroque.¹⁸ On the musical side, the revival in the last decades of operas by Handel and Cavalli, not to mention the increasingly more creative productions of Monteverdi’s works (some of them discussed in this volume), testify to the deep affinities between our world and that of the early modern period, between the now and the then. Perhaps it is not wholly surprising that, in listening to and watching today’s performances, the fictional worlds created by Monteverdi still feel so akin to ours, and that we continue to try to make sense of their effectiveness.

PART ONE

La Musica and Orfeo

All opera is Orpheus.

ADORNO¹

GIORGIO DE CHIRICO’S 1973 ORFEO SOLITARIO dates from the last years of the artist’s life, evoking his long-standing connection with opera.² Twenty-four years earlier de Chirico had created the settings for a production of Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo staged at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, one of the most prestigious European music festivals. For such a self-conscious artist—the champion of metaphysical painting and the painter of many enigmatic self-portraits—drawing on mythology allowed him to weave an intriguing network of references to art, reality, and the self. During the rehearsals of Orfeo de Chirico was photographed alone on the stage set he created for act 1.³ Most of this rehearsal photo is occupied by the set, which shows in the deep background, surrounded by bushes and trees, the façade of a Greek temple, to which a slightly inclining ramp leads. Stage right, the viewer can barely see the small, isolated figure of de Chirico, wearing a light jacket and tie, sitting at the foot of the ramp on what looks like the bench of a Greek amphitheater. His head resting on the back of his closed hand, the artist appears in a contemplative pose while enigmatically gazing stage left, as if he were a character on stage—indeed, like Orpheus. In de Chirico’s 1973 painting, Orpheus sits on a bench assuming a rhetorical posture as a half-mannequin whose chest is filled with puzzling objects, those miniature architectural and geometrical elements ubiquitous in the artist’s earlier works. The demigod silently sings with a background landscape evoking sunny Greece, de Chirico’s native land. Orpheus is alone on stage, like the painter in the rehearsal photo, the artist fully absorbed in his own performance, no loss or grief apparent, no audience listening in enchantment.

Like many artists of late modernity, such as Jean Cocteau, de Chirico portrays Orpheus’s loneliness and narcissism as emblematic of the artist as such.⁴ In this light, the demigod’s journey to Hades to regain his spouse represents a process of self-knowledge. In early modernity this process was often exemplified through the parallel between the mythological narratives of Orpheus and Narcissus. For example, in the prologue of The Otherness of Narcissus (L’alterezza di Narciso, 1611) playwright Francesco Andreini refers to Orpheus as a character who learned that nothing in the world/can be found to be eternal, which is the same life lesson that Narcissus bitterly learned at his own expense.⁵ For Marsilio Ficino as well, Narcissus is rightly punished with death: his story, like that of Orpheus, teaches a moral lesson by exemplifying the risks of pursuing earthly beauty.⁶

During the Renaissance, the topic of self-knowledge, inherent in the Narcissus story, had not only ethical but also aesthetic implications, since it was thought to affect the process of art-making itself. In an effort to provide visual arts with the same legitimacy as literature, Leon Battista Alberti described Narcissus as the inventor of painting, emphasizing self-reflexivity.⁷ The pool in which the boy’s image is reflected, and the flower that he turns into after death, are the objects, in the former case, of Narcissus’s gaze, in the latter the gaze of any future observer. Both pool and flower become thus tropes for vision. Both deriving from the same body, pool and flower are metaphors for the mimetic surface of painting and its texture. In Alberti’s interpretation of Narcissus as the prototypical artist, the painter himself becomes embodied, literally, in his own art—as de Chirico is within his set for Monteverdi’s Orfeo in the rehearsal photograph discussed above. Alberti’s view of art betrays the influence of the celebrated version of the Narcissus myth in Metamorphoses (3.339–512), in which Ovid is less interested in the issue of self-love (today instead commonly associated with the word narcissism) than in that of the power of illusion, of which the boy is a victim through his own image. This power, for the Latin poet, is inherent in the meaning of art and spectacle.⁸

In early modern plays dealing with the myth of Narcissus, the focus falls mainly on his lover, Echo, since she offers artists an opportunity to emphasize the medium of voice in both its moral and aesthetic implications. Echo, however, appears less as a mythological character than as pure imago vocis. She is represented as an oracle, responding offstage to questions posed by characters who find themselves in identity crises, confronting life-changing decisions. One of these characters is the shepherd Silvio in Battista Guarini’s 1590 pastoral tragicomedy The Faithful Shepherd (Il pastor fido). This play was an influential literary model for the librettist of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Alessandro Striggio, who included a brief echo scene at the end of the opera. In act 4 of Guarini’s play Silvio’s dialogue with an echo displays his increased self-reflexivity.⁹ This aspect, however, was absent up to that point in the action of Il pastor fido (scene 8) since the shepherd was absorbed by hunting and oblivious to love—love traditionally being thought of as conducive to true self-knowledge. In this respect the echo episode prepares the character’s full self-recognition, which occurs in the following scene, when Silvio mistakenly injures Dorinda (whom he had long been pursuing) and gradually falls in love with her, finally acknowledging his own feelings.¹⁰ In devising his echo scene in Orfeo, Striggio followed not only Guarini’s model but also the suggestion of theater theorist Angelo Ingegneri, who in his influential treatise on drama recommended the use of the echo to loosen the intrigue, or to facilitate the resolution of the plot.¹¹ Striggio, Guarini, and Ingegneri were all active in the neighboring courts of Mantua and Ferrara at various points in their careers, as was Monteverdi.

Within this intellectual context it is significant that in Monteverdi’s Orfeo the nexus Orpheus-Narcissus-Echo surfaces at a crucial moment of the opera, when the issue of the protagonist’s self-knowledge is at stake. In act 5, after Orpheus fails to lead his beloved out of Hades, the protagonist’s actions and ethics are thrown into question. At the end of a powerful lament for the loss of his beloved, Orpheus engages in a conventional dialogue with Echo, which, as Daniel Chua writes, represents "the self-reflective moment of the opera."¹² From the point of view of its position in the plot, the episode does not strictly follow the classic sources of the myth traditionally used in countless artistic and literary elaborations since antiquity, Virgil’s Georgics (4.453–527) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (10.1–85 and 11.1–86). In both Virgil and Ovid, Orpheus is brutally killed by the Bacchantes and his head floats down the river Hebrus, still lamenting Eurydice, the banks echoing her name. In Monteverdi’s opera, the echo scene effectively suspends the action by replacing, in Virgil, the comparison with the nightingale (4.511–15) and, in Ovid, the mythological stories of Pygmalion, Ganymede, and Myrra, narrated by Orpheus himself (10.86–end).¹³

In the echo scene of Monteverdi’s opera, it is not only the action but also the identity of the protagonist itself that is suspended. At this crucial moment the demigod is able to overcome his narcissism only on the condition that he face the acoustic mirror of himself, his pure identity confronting Echo’s pure alterity.¹⁴ Having reached that crucial threshold, the plot may still take potentially diverging paths, including one leading Orpheus to the patent scorning of women and latent homosexuality—a component of the Narcissus story as well. The two surviving finales of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, as we shall see, branch Y-like from the protagonist’s identity crisis performed in the echo scene, strategically placed in a liminal position within the opera’s narrative trajectory.

Issues regarding identity, already inherent in the myth, are a significant part of Monteverdi and Striggio’s construction of the character of Orpheus. In searching for his self through his performance on stage, the protagonist gradually becomes a subject in the modern sense: an agent whose self is inextricably tied to a dialogue with an other, as represented first by Eurydice, then by Echo, and finally by his father Apollo. This dialogic, relational aspect of Orpheus’s construction of his self must have appealed to de Chirico in painting his Solitary Orpheus on stage, so squarely facing the beholder. If it is true that, in a painting, every painter depicts himself (as Leonardo da Vinci once wrote), then, in a portrait, the beholder ultimately gazes at himself, as in front of de Chirico’s Orpheus.

This can also be said, granted their differences, of Monteverdi’s Orfeo. In this part of From Madrigal to Opera—an extended theoretical prologue to the remaining two parts—I explore the discourse of and about the dialogic self articulated in a paradigmatic way in the first authentic opera, as Theodor W. Adorno terms Monteverdi’s masterwork.¹⁵ Interestingly, Adorno adopts the same qualifier authentic for operas such as Freischütz, Zauberflöte, and Trovatore, which he sees as closer to the most particular element of the genre. This theatrical element is revealed in singers’ costumes and gestures, and consists of that aura of disguise, of miming, which attracts children to theater, manifesting itself in cloak-and-dagger scenes.¹⁶ A similar childlike delight in dissimulation can be experienced by looking at de Chirico’s luminous painting of 1973. The artist composed it at the end of his life, looking back at his native land in a serene yet melancholic way, summarizing themes from his past work. Orpheus here stands for de Chirico in the same way as, in the rehearsal photo discussed above, de Chirico stands for Orpheus: image, self, and performance are associated with one another, presence implicating absence, as the present implicates the past. Despite their differences, both the de Chirico images and Monteverdi’s opera pose the question of the relationships between theatrical subjectivity and performance, a question that lies at the core of this book.

1

Text, Context, Performance

Within early seventeenth-century courtly entertainments and festivities, theatrical vocal music was no longer restricted to a mere framing device for a spoken play, as in sixteenth-century intermedi. In the new genre, la musica took center stage. But as a genre entering the crowded and competitive artistic arena of late Renaissance Italy, opera was, from the beginning, in need of articulating a discourse regarding its aesthetic and moral dignity, in order to fully sustain the comparison (paragone) with literature, theater, and visual arts. In the earliest operas, created and performed in the Italian courts of Florence and Mantua around 1600, the choice of mythological characters known for their musical prowess—Apollo and Orpheus—undoubtedly served a legitimizing purpose, justifying music as an art that could fully hold the stage for an entire performance, fulfilling Aristotelian requirements of verisimilitude.¹

In addition to emphasizing ethical and aesthetic meanings implicit in the myths of Apollo and Orpheus, operatic plots capitalized on these two narratives also in order to highlight male progeny, since Apollo was thought of as Orpheus’s father. Such discourses, articulated through mythology, would have been perceived as conveying the values of the north Italian nobility that patronized the arts, including opera.² Early operas—the texts they produced, the values they conveyed, their uses of literary and mythological sources, and the discourses they advanced about subjectivity—were inextricably linked to an early modern patronage system in which artworks functioned as symbols of nobility’s social rank. As Claudio Annibaldi observed in singling out Marco da Gagliano’s definition of opera as a true princely spectacle (spettacolo veramente da principi, in the preface to the published score of his 1608 Dafne), few theatrical genres exemplify better than opera the anthropological norm according to which every social group elaborates its own sonorous countermarks.³ Nobility did so by producing not so much written documents such as scores, but sonorous events—performances—which symbolized the rank of the patron through a musical style that had edifying, ceremonial or recreational aims.⁴ Performances were aimed at displaying the innate moral superiority of nobility, a superiority signified by elevated musical style and sheer magnificence in the productions, and that justified nobility’s social and political power. According to traditional views of early modern patronage, the first operas, like music and spectacles in general, were devised to celebrate the rulers as enlightened patrons and/or were aimed at increasing their political power. But, as important as these celebratory and practical functions were, they resulted less in a politicization of the aesthetic sphere than in an aestheticization of the political sphere, in particular, an aestheticization of the moral supremacy of nobility.⁵

As far as early opera is concerned, patronage issues provide a context that entangles with issues of text and performance. Preliminary to any investigation of performance is that of the context of destination of a given musical event.⁶ In the texts related to a performance—scores and librettos—historians can find signs of their dependence on such a patronage context. Provided that, as Annibaldi claims, performances are events unfolding in time and thus were better suited than mere object-texts like scores and librettos to symbolize the social rank of patrons, what was the relationship between performances and texts? In this chapter I discuss Monteverdi’s Orfeo as a case study that illustrates characteristics unique to the genre of opera in its being constitutively both text and performance, and I raise the issue of subjectivity as being relevant to the nexus among text, context, and performance.

PERFORMING NOBILITY

The immediate sponsor of the first two operas in history, La Dafne (1598) and L’Euridice (1600), was a Florentine pro-Medici nobleman, Iacopo Corsi, who involved musicians Iacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini and poet Ottavio Rinuccini in these productions. In an effort to please Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici and maintain social and political influence at court, Corsi offered to stage the nobile favola Euridice as part of the nuptial festivities for Maria, the Grand Duke’s niece, and Henry IV of France.⁷ Seven years later, in Mantua, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga and Prince Francesco sponsored an academy called the Invaghiti to stage Striggio and Monteverdi’s Orfeo during Carnival, when the preparations for Francesco’s wedding in the following year were underway.⁸ Since Duke Vincenzo’s wife, Eleonora, was Maria de’ Medici’s sister, the couple was present at the 1600 festivities and even lent Mantuan artists. In relationship to these performances, the scores and librettos of both Euridice and Orfeo were published, following a pattern inaugurated by the 1589 Florentine intermedi, staged during the nuptial festivities of the Grand Duke himself.

The early Florentine and Mantuan operas were embedded in a larger cycle of festivals taking place in central and northern Italy, the result of a seemingly contradictory mix of artistic competition and collaboration between the Medicis and the Gonzagas.⁹ Beginning in Florence in 1565, the cycle climaxed in both Florence and Mantua in 1608. The earlier date marked the wedding of Ferdinando de’ Medici’s brother, the heir Prince Francesco, for which the festivities were organized by their father Cosimo I, the first Gran Duke of Tuscany. The year 1608 saw two related weddings: one in Mantua of Crown Prince Francesco Gonzaga (to Margherita of Savoy), organized by his father Duke Vincenzo; the other in Florence, of Crown Prince Cosimo II de’ Medici to Maria Magdalena, niece of the Habsburg emperor, organized by Gran Duke Ferdinando.¹⁰

This broad multi-decade cycle involved festivities themselves devised as mini-cycles spanning several days, the order, location, and public of the performances arranged hierarchically, according to the perceived importance of the works performed. In keeping with a strategy of alliances carefully pursued by both the Medicis and the Gonzagas and accomplished through dynastic marriages, festivals took place not only in Florence and Mantua but also in Turin (ruled by the Savoy family), Modena/Ferrara (Este family), and other Italian courts.¹¹ The performances presented within this large cycle often involved the same or family-related artists, their works featuring similar uses of mythology.¹² Negotiations between the courts to obtain and circulate artists involved the rulers themselves and often turned into complicated diplomatic affairs, revealing high stakes