Early Venetian Opera and "Incogniti" Literature

In few other periods has musical theatre been so intimately associated with literary history as in the very first decades of commercial Venetian opera. That some of the early Venetian librettists (Gian Francesco Busenello, Giacomo Badoer, Giulio Strozzi) were members of the foremost literary academy of the time, the Accademia degli Incogniti, is surely no accident and indeed until the late 1640s were different opera libretti put together by distinguished members of this literary ‘club’, not to mention the fact that the brief, but intensive and influential vicissitudes of the Teatro Novissimo (1641-5) are directly linked with Incogniti activity and patronage. Several important studies (by, among others, Ellen Rosand, Lorenzo Bianconi and Wendy Heller) have in the past dealt with the more or less direct influence of the Accademia degli Incogniti on the very creation of the Venetian opera as a genre, but fewer have explicitly tackled the relationship between purely literary output and libretto production of the Accademici. Since most of the Incogniti were extremely active and prolific writers (many of whom were very successful novelists), it would be of interest to investigate the possible thematic and structural connections between libretti and contemporary Incogniti novels and short stories. Among the latter, the most wide-ranging and still largely unexplored are the Cento novelle amorose dei Signori Accademici Incogniti, Venice: Guerigli (1651), which enrich and develop the ‘novella’ or short-tale tradition of Boccaccian ancestry with the typical baroque ingredients of mistaken identities, transvestism and enhanced eroticism, all so commonplace in contemporary opera. And it is between the relatively ‘new’ domain of the novel together with the renewed genre of the short tale or novella, both particularly cultivated and developed in Italy by Incogniti authors, and the equally young and hybrid genre of the libretto that a process of cross-fertilization most evidently takes place, one of the most important points in common being the accumulation of parallel plots.

In this research endeavour I will look for and try to unravel thematic, structural, rhetorical and more topical connections between early Venetian opera libretti in interaction with the extant music, and contemporary, mainly Italian, literature. The proposed chronological boundaries are, roughly speaking, set between the performance of the first commercial opera, Andromeda by Benedetto Ferrari (libretto) and Francesco Manelli (music) in 1637, and 1661, the last year that the Accademici met. Crucial for these decades is the work of Francesco Cavalli (1602-76), the composer by whom the music of most of the early Venetian operas survives. His sensitivity for the slightest rhetorical nuances of the text earns him a place, alongside Monteverdi, as one of the most important opera composers of the 17^th century.

In few other periods has musical theatre been so intimately associated with literary history as in the very first decades of commercial Venetian opera. That some of the early Venetian librettists (Gian Francesco Busenello, Giacomo Badoer, Giulio Strozzi) were members of the foremost literary academy of the time, the Accademia degli Incogniti, is surely no accident and indeed until the late 1640s were different opera libretti put together by distinguished members of this literary ‘club’, not to mention the fact that the brief, but intensive and influential vicissitudes of the Teatro Novissimo (1641-5) are directly linked with Incogniti activity and patronage. Several important studies (by, among others, Ellen Rosand, Lorenzo Bianconi and Wendy Heller) have in the past dealt with the more or less direct influence of the Accademia degli Incogniti on the very creation of the Venetian opera as a genre, but fewer have explicitly tackled the relationship between purely literary output and libretto production of the Accademici. Since most of the Incogniti were extremely active and prolific writers (many of whom were very successful novelists), it would be of interest to investigate the possible thematic and structural connections between libretti and contemporary Incogniti novels and short stories. Among the latter, the most wide-ranging and still largely unexplored are the Cento novelle amorose dei Signori Accademici Incogniti, Venice: Guerigli (1651), which enrich and develop the ‘novella’ or short-tale tradition of Boccaccian ancestry with the typical baroque ingredients of mistaken identities, transvestism and enhanced eroticism, all so commonplace in contemporary opera. And it is between the relatively ‘new’ domain of the novel together with the renewed genre of the short tale or novella, both particularly cultivated and developed in Italy by Incogniti authors, and the equally young and hybrid genre of the libretto that a process of cross-fertilization most evidently takes place, one of the most important points in common being the accumulation of parallel plots.

In this research endeavour I will look for and try to unravel thematic, structural, rhetorical and more topical connections between early Venetian opera libretti in interaction with the extant music, and contemporary, mainly Italian, literature. The proposed chronological boundaries are, roughly speaking, set between the performance of the first commercial opera, Andromeda by Benedetto Ferrari (libretto) and Francesco Manelli (music) in 1637, and 1661, the last year that the Accademici met. Crucial for these decades is the work of Francesco Cavalli (1602-76), the composer by whom the music of most of the early Venetian operas survives. His sensitivity for the slightest rhetorical nuances of the text earns him a place, alongside Monteverdi, as one of the most important opera composers of the 17^th century.