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Myth, Pastoral Music and the Birth of Opera
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Gary Tomlinson |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Although the origins of opera are manifold, myth and pastoral music are widely acknowledged as being among the main influencing factors in the composition of the first operas. Less consensus exists, however, on the actual extent of that influence. Gary Tomlinson, of the University of Pennsylvania, questions some of the traditional assumptions surrounding the birth of opera. |
 f all our dramatic arts, opera demands the most of us. It asks us to accept it as dramatic representation, to immerse ourselves in a sequence of imitated actions far more specific and complex than those offered by the gestural arts of dance or mime. Yet because it is sung it requires, if it is to be taken seriously as drama, a leap of imagination longer than that needed for spoken theater, a suspension of disbelief more uncompromising. |
Perhaps this explains why opera is so often not taken seriously: we have all encountered the superficial allegiances of opera buffs, their cults of divas and heldentenors, and we all have also known people who on some visceral and unselfconscious level reject altogether the notion of sung drama. But difficulty in appreciating opera as serious drama is not the burden of sycophants and the naive alone. Instead we each contend with it, reaching our own more or less uneasy compromises with the genre. We struggle in some part of ourselves to restrain the skepticism that can shatter the spell of its music drama. We strive to accommodate the breach of verisimilitude inherent in its singing talk. |
This is not a stance unique to the twentieth century. The history of opera could almost be written as a chronicle of such accommodations, of the varying means by which skepticism has been repressed. The frequent reform initiatives in this history (no artistic genre, it seems, has more often called for purgation) amount to little other than repeated readjustments of strategy in the face of the fundamental unbelievability of drama in song. This is as true of Gluck's or Wagner's famous refashionings as it is of countless less marked and less clearly self-proclaimed alterations in the genre. |
Opera places us, Voltaire wrote, "in a land of fairies," and because of this "we suffer [its] extravagances, and are even fond of them" (quoted in Ruth Katz, Divining the Powers of Music, 1986, p. 22). It sits just beyond the frontier of our rational, scientific world. It inhabits an unverisimilar, unreal, and finally magical realm that Western culture long ago repudiated but cannot quite shake. From this ambivalent mix of forbearance and immersion arises our enduring fascination with the genre. |
Changing perceptions?
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| Robert Powell reads the story of early operas and the first public opera house in Venice, from Richard Fawkes' The History of Opera. | |
The frontier itself, the borderline between real and unreal realms, between verisimilitude and its absence, has not shifted much since the mid-seventeenth century, the period of opera's establishment as a more-than-sporadic manner of entertainment. Complaints about the artifice of sung drama sprang up soon after the opening of the first public opera theater in Venice in 1637, as research by Ellen Rosand has shown. They are recorded for us in several librettists' tendency to justify their dramatic procedures, irregular from the perspective of Aristotelian guidelines for spoken drama, by citing the general unreality of the sung drama in which they were collaborating. Francesco Sbarra's defense of a libretto of his from 1651 is typical: |
I know that the ariette sung by Alexander and Aristotle will be judged contrary to the decorum of such great personages; but I also know that musical recitation is improper altogether, since it does not imitate natural discourse and since it removes the soul from dramatic compositions, which should be nothing but imitations of human actions. Yet this defect is not only tolerated by the current century but received with applause. (Quoted in Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 1991, p. 45.) |
Statements like this one constitute an acknowledgment of the peculiarly emphatic suspension of disbelief that opera required already by the middle of the seventeenth century. And this has been a requisite of operatic appreciation ever since. |
But such statements seem not to have emerged much earlier than the 1640s. In particular they are not associated with the works music historians consider the first operas, the music dramas produced from 1590 to 1610 at the courts and in the salons of Florence, Mantua, and other north Italian cities. Historians from Solerti on have amassed hundreds of pages of contemporaneous accounts concerning these works, accounts that range from the fulsome and propagandistic to the vituperative and jealous and that were penned variously by the poets and composers themselves and by members of their audiences. |
But from all these accounts there seems to emerge no selfconscious acknowledgment of the unreality of sung drama. Their typical tone, rather, is one of unquestioning acceptance, as in this matter-of-fact report from the Estense ambassador to Mantua on Monteverdi's Arianna of 1608: |
Then they put on the Comedy in music ... and all the well-dressed reciters played their parts very well, but best of all [was] the comedienne Ariadne. The story was of Ariadne and Theseus, [and she,] in her lament in music accompanied by viols and violins, made many weep at her sorrow. There was a [musician named] Rasi who sang divinely, but Ariadne was best, and the eunuchs and the others were awful. (Quoted from Angelo Solerti, Gli albori del melodramma, 1905, vol. 1, p. 99.) |
The first operas, in other words, seem to have been received in an atmosphere not noticeably tinged by the skepticism and aesthetic distance that has colored operatic reception almost ever since. They seem to have answered to a different conception of dramatic verisimilitude than the one that has dominated operatic appreciation since around 1650. The border between real and unreal realms seems, in short, to have been set differently for them than for later music dramas. |
Early opera and myth
With this hypothesis of a shifted border in mind we may reconsider one of the arguments Nino Pirrotta advanced in his "Early Opera and Aria," a virtuosic essay that has guided all students of early opera since its first publication in 1968. There Pirotta noted that the early Florentine and Mantuan music dramas again and again featured legendary musicians among their protagonists (especially Orpheus, in three operas, and Apollo, in two more). He asserted that the creators of these works, in particular the Florentine poet Ottavio Rinuccini, the librettist of most of them, chose such mythical singers in a selfconscious attempt to justify the musical medium of their dramas. (See Nino Pirrotta and Elena Povoledo, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi, 1982, chapter 6.) |
In saying this, of course, Pirrotta implied the felt need around 1600 for such justification, the need, in other words, to help the audience along in its suspension of disbelief. But, as I have said, I see no evidence that the audience in 1600 required this sort of justification for music drama. The closest thing I know to such evidence is a passage in Il corago, an anonymous Florentine treatise on dramaturgy brought to light since Pirrotta wrote, that recommends ancient gods, heroes, and especially mythical musicians as the most appropriate protagonists for sung drama. Here the issue of the verisimilitude of sung speech is clearly raised. |
But Il corago was written no earlier than 1628, and perhaps, for all we know, some years later. It was written, that is, at least a generation after the early court operas. It can just as easily be adduced as evidence for the emergence of new operatic values--for the emergence of views anticipating those of Venetian librettists of the 1640s and 50s--as it can be linked to the positions of the creators themselves of the first operas some thirty years before. |
Pirrotta's contention about the protagonists of the early court operas, in sum, imputes to the creators and audiences of those works reactions for which we have documentation only from later operatic history. (It poses, by the way, the additional difficulty of accounting for Arianna, Rinuccini's libretto for Monteverdi that features, like his Dafne and Euridice, the characters of Ovidian myth but unlike them includes no legendary musicians in its dramatis personae.) |
Rethinking assumptions
The broadened view of musico-dramatic verisimilitude around 1600 may also help to explicate a suggestion I made, I fear somewhat cryptically, in Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (1987): the suggestion that we rethink our general assumptions about realism in Monteverdi's surviving operas. These operas fall into two pairs, Orfeo and the fragmentary Arianna presented in Mantua in 1607 and 1608, and Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria and L'incoronazione di Poppea staged in Venice in the early 1640s: one pair, in other words, from each side of the shift in operatic perceptions that I am suggesting separates early court opera from later Venetian opera. |
Received musicological wisdom holds that the later operas (especially Poppea) display a sort of dramatic realism not evident in the earlier ones. At one level this is true. Their subjects are historical--if distantly so in the case of Ulysses--instead of mythical, and many of the situations and actions they depict have a down-to-earth, everyday quality not found in earlier court operas. But, keeping in mind the skeptical distance from sung drama that I see emerging by the 1640s, we might well suspect that this superficial realism of subject and action conceals a deeper unreality in Monteverdi's last operas. As I put it in Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (p. 218), in these works |
musical speech as a matter of accepted convention, little touched by the demands of verisimilitude, has replaced music as a rhetorical heightening of speech credible in its well-defined mythical context. The humanist ideal of music and poetry as two sides of a single language ... has given way to a modern suspension of disbelief in the face of the anti-rational anomaly of characters speaking in song. |
In Monteverdi's late operas realistic acts and situations can be seen to accentuate the unreality of the medium in which they are presented. I believe this dilemma was a deeply felt one in the 1640s and that it was symptomatic of a manner of perceiving music drama that was then new. Musical speech had solidified into a convention that could either be considered to stand outside criteria of dramatic verisimilitude or be judged according to those criteria; in the latter case it had either to be accepted as whimsy or to be rejected altogether. In 1600, I think, the situation was different. At that time musical speech and dramatic verisimilitude were not yet mutually exclusive. Musical speech could still be viewed as an authentic representation of some aspect of reality, a mimesis embodied in a world-view that would begin to seem much less credible only a few decades later. |
The dramatic genre practiced around 1600 in which musical speech most naturally pressed its claim to verisimilitude, music historians have long believed, was the pastoral play. Pirrotta insisted upon the case of music's admission to the pastoral realm. He quoted Giambattista Guarini's words in his Compendio della poesia tragicomica of 1601 on ancient shepherds' musical and poetic prowess. Guarini asserted "that the Arcadian shepherds ... embellished their speeches with poetic ornaments," that they were all poets, and "that their principal study and their principal activity was music" (Pirrotta and Povoledo, Music and Theatre, pp. 264-65). |
The Florentine theorist Giovanni Battista Doni echoed this view in his Trattato della musica scenica, written in the 1630s. He noted that pastoral dramas "represent gods, nymphs, and shepherds of that most ancient century when music was natural and speech almost poetic." For this reason more than any other, he said, "true song ... is suitable to pastoral plays" (quoted from Angelo Solerti, Le origini del melodramma, 1903, pp. 203, 205). |
Pastoral influences
But we should tread carefully here. For though it may be true that the pastoral play was uniquely congenial to music among the spoken dramatic genres of the late sixteenth century, this does not warrant a number of further conclusions about early opera commonly drawn in musicological writings and elsewhere. These include the notion that the creators of opera chose pastoral subjects and settings for their works in order to revive onstage the shepherds who had once sung in Arcadia (and thus, again, justify their presentation of drama in music), the simpler idea that opera is a genre derived from late sixteenth-century pastoral drama, and the more grandiloquent idea that early opera represents nothing less than the pastoral play confronting its eternal musical essence (here especially the Hegelianism of De Sanctis lives on: "The word," he wrote of Italian literary history around 1600, "no longer being anything more than music, had lost its raison d'être and cedes the field to music and song"--quoted in Francesco de Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana, 1925, vol. 2, p. 209). |
All these conclusions are more than a little questionable. In the first place there is little evidence that the literati who created opera and theorized about it or their audiences believed that shepherds had once spoken in song. Guarini and Doni, after all, said no such thing, but only held that the Arcadians' speech was closer to poetry than present-day talk and that they often sang as well: in Arcadia, as Doni put it, "music was natural and speech almost poetic." |
The picture of ancient shepherds that emerged from such writings, as we should expect, was not so much an anticipation of Metastasio's singing heroes as it was a recollection of the rustics of Vergil and Theocritus, who had easily enough distinguished their normal if poetic speech from their full-fledged song. Surely no historical belief that shepherds once sang instead of speaking served in any important way to legitimize the continuous song of the first operas. Nor did such a belief provide a decisive impetus for the creators of these works to choose pastoral stories and characters. |
Indeed the stories and characters they chose were not pastoral at all, if we define that adjective as they may well have defined it, by reference to the plots and protagonists of spoken pastoral drama in the late sixteenth century. The early court operas, that is, were not pastoral dramas, but rather dramatized myths that happened to be set in the country (and how many myths are set in the city?). |
This distinction is worth pausing over. Louise Clubb has shown, in one of the few studies that attempts an ecumenical overview of the Italian pastoral play in the decades of its most famous exemplars, Tasso's Aminta and Guarini's Pastor fido, that the genre depended on regular cinquecento comedy for its plot structures and for some of its stock characters. Its typical plot was built of the intertwined multiple love affairs, the disguises and mistaken identities, and the intrigues of comedy. Its typical protagonists were mortal rustics ranging in refinement, often in the same play, from barely countrified nobility to satyr-like bestiality and Bottomed-out buffoonery. (See From Petrarch to Pirandello, ed. J.A. Molinaro, 1973, pp. 45-72.) |
Early opera revisited
The first operas showed none of these features. Their protagonists were not Arcadian mortals but instead the gods, demigods, and heroes of Ovid's Metamorphoses: Orpheus and Euridice, Daphne and Apollo, Ariadne, Theseus, and Bacchus, Cephalus and Aurora. Their plots were utterly straightforward in structure, relating their simple, affective tales without peripeties, disguises, recognitions, or intrigues. For this reason, no doubt, the most common generic designation their authors applied to these works was not the favola pastorale or favola boscareccia so frequent in the tradition Clubb has described but rather a stripped-down epithet nowhere to my knowledge found on the title-pages of late sixteenth-century pastoral plays: favola, meaning simply "myth," "fable," or "story." |
Add to all this the fact that the first librettos differ utterly from spoken pastoral dramas in their typical length--much less than half that of even shorter pastoral plays like Aminta--and in their characteristically lyric prosody--madrigalian for the most part, interspersed with ottave, terze rime, and canzonette in Gabriello Chiabrera's novel metric arrangements--and the hypothesis of opera's derivation from pastoral drama crumbles. |
The early operas were not favole pastorali "musicked"; on the surface the two genres share little more than their rural settings. If there is a significant connection between them, it lies not in borrowed dramatic techniques or even in broader patterns of intergeneric influence but at a deeper level of cultural substructure and the expressive aspirations arising from it--at what we may call, with Michel Foucault, an archaeological level of meaning. |
This is an extract from pp. 7-12 of "Pastoral and magical music in the birh of opera," by Gary Tomlinson, in Opera and the Enlightenment, ed. T. Bauman and M. Petzoldt McClymonds. Copyright Cambridge University Press, 1995. Excerpt from Richard Fawkes' The History of Opera, Naxos AudioBooks NA417612, used under licence from Naxos. |
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