7 - The dramaturgy of the operas

Summary

The idea of a ‘Rossinian dramaturgy’, which is occasionally given an airing, may be a misleading abstraction: much as Tancredi or La Cenerentola may seem epiphanies of a personal poetic, to what extent were they the largely predictab le results of contemporary artistic convention? The ‘author's intentions’, however powerful, always have to reckon with a sort of ‘opera's intentions’, a fixed framework within which the composer has limited space for manoeuvre: to compose within a genre means, after all, submitting at least partially to its language and structure, if one does not want to see the work excluded from the genre itself. While this is the case for every artistic genre, it is all the more so for Italian opera, which until the early nineteenth century flourished on this fertile dialectic between originality and convention.

What is more, opera could be called a trinitarian text: a syncretic product resulting from the confluence of three distinct texts, verbal, musical and visual, technically known as the libretto, the score and the mise en scène or staging. Each has a different author: poet (librettist), composer and staging director respectively. (The identity of this last gradually changed over time, and is fragmented today into the different professions of director, scenographer, costume designer, choreographer and lighting designer. For convenience we will consider these as one ‘author’, similar to librettists or composers who worked as a pair.)