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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 February 2014
This article traces the Italian reception of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Horace Coignet’s Pygmalion (1770), ultimately arguing that the influence of early melodrama (and not the better-remembered Viennese reform) was behind the emergence of a style of speech-like singing and gestural mirroring in Italian opera in the decades immediately around 1800. Rousseauian melodrama was one of a few related projects subsuming the spoken word within the domain of music during the 1770s and 1780s; another was Joshua Steele’s Prosodia rationalis, which proposed a system of modified music notation in order to preserve and transmit the spoken word. This article suggests (contra most recent historians of melodrama) that such projects were inflected by a kind of twilight classicism, in which the revived object was made to show signs of decay. The revivalist strain in the first melodrama was particularly important for its Italian reception. Rousseau’s ideal of an ancient, onomatopoeic language collapsing meaning and medium was naturalised into the rhetoric of Italian opera reform during the 1770s and 1780s by the Jesuit theorists Antonio Eximeno and Stefano Arteaga. By way of a coda, this article traces the emergence of a ‘melodramatic’ style of Italian opera, first in all-sung adaptations of Pygmalion, thence into Venetian opera of the 1790s more broadly, and finally into Donizetti’s techniques of gestural mirroring and what was called the ‘canto filosofico’ of Bellini’s early operas.
1 Strohm, Reinhard, Dramma per musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1997), 27Google Scholar.
2 The period between approximately 1760 and 1800 saw the birth of musicology in something like its present form, with the creation of several large-scale narratives of music history by figures such as Charles Burney, John Hawkins, Nikolaus Forkel and Padre Martini. The reference to opera seria’s ‘dazzling artifices’ can be found in Richard Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford, 2005), II, 452.
3 Monelle, Raymond, ‘Gluck and the “Festa teatrale” ’, Music & Letters 54/3 (1973), 308–325CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Monelle, review of Musica e cultura nel Settecento europeo, ed. Enrico Fubini, Music & Letters 69/3 (1988), 381–2.
4 Marita P. McClymonds was the first to suggest that opera seria was ultimately transformed by Venetian innovators during the 1790s (‘The Venetian Role in the Transformation of Italian Opera Seria during the 1790s’, in I vicini di Mozart, ed. Maria Teresa Muraro and David Bryant (Florence, 1989), I, 221–40).
5 A few recent studies have filled in some gaps within our knowledge of Italian opera of this period, though they have hardly succeeded in influencing the standard narrative. For scholarship on Italian opera of the period that does not centre around Vienna, in addition to the works cited below, see Mary Hunter, ‘The Fusion and Juxtaposition of Genres in Opera Buffa 1770–1800: Anelli and Piccinni’s Griselda’, Music & Letters 67/4 (1988), 363–80; McClymonds, Marita P., ‘Transforming Opera Seria: Verazi’s Innovations and their Impact on Opera in Italy’, in Opera and the Enlightenment, ed. Marita P. McClymonds and Thomas Bauman (Cambridge, 1995), 119–132Google Scholar; Stefano Castelvecchi, ‘Sentimental Opera: The Emergence of a Genre, 1760–1790’, Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago (1996); and Pierpaolo Polzonetti, ‘Opera buffa and the American Revolution’, Ph.D. diss., Cornell University (2003).
6 Richard Taruskin accounts for this period by tracing a direct line from Orfeo ed Euridice (with obligatory quotations from the Preface to Alceste) through Idomeneo and Kantian Enlightenment, to the ‘sympathetic “representation of humanity” ’ within Mozart’s late operas. Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music, II, 452–96. ‘Representation of humanity’ is Wendy Allanbrook’s phrase in Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart (Chicago, 1983), 16.
7 The critical edition is edited by Waeber, Jacqueline: Pygmalion, scéne lyrique (Geneva, 1997)Google Scholar. The term ‘melodrama’ has, of course, a wide variety of meanings; in a musicological context, it designates a genre (or, later, a technique) in which speech alternates with or is simultaneous to a musical accompaniment. This is the sense in which I use it here. However, the term was not used in this form in the late eighteenth century, nor was its present-day Italian correlate, melologo. As the present study makes clear, and as others have shown in different contexts, a variety of understandings of Pygmalion’s genre coexisted within the late eighteenth century, and the work occasioned a variety of kinds of imitations. For these reasons, in the present article I will refer to individual works by the generic designations assigned to them by their authors, while considering the broader phenomenon of Pygmalion’s Italian reception under the rubric of melodrama. A thorough history of the term may be found within Emilio Sala, ‘Mélodrame. Définitions et métamorphoses d’un genre quasi-opératique’, Revue de musicologie 84/2 (1998), 235–46.
8 Quotations are from Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin (New York, 2004), 351–2.
9 The genesis of Pygmalion is too well known to merit rehearsal here; similarly, I will leave aside any exploration of what the play is ‘about’, adding my own layer to what Paul De Man once called the work’s ‘distinguished tradition of misreading’ (Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, 1979), 176). Important sources not cited below include Coignet, Horace, ‘Particularités sur J. J. Rousseau pendant le séjour qu’il fit à Lyon en 1770’, Oeuvres inédites de Rousseau I, ed. V. D. de Musset-Pathay (Paris, 1825), 461–472Google Scholar; von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Dichtung und Warheit, ed. K. D. Mutter (Frankfurt, 1986), 533–534Google Scholar, 942; Castil-Blaze, , Molière musicien (Paris, 1852), 423–426Google Scholar; Carr, J. L., ‘Pygmalion and the Philosophes: The Animated Statue in Eighteenth-Century France’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 (1960), 239–255CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weber, S. M., ‘The Aesthetics of Rousseau’s “Pygmalion” ’, MLN 83 (1968), 900–918CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Beese, Henriette, ‘Galathée à l’origine des langues: Comments on Rousseau’s Pygmalion as a Lyric Drama’, MLN 93 (1978), 839–851CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 For a cogent analysis of Pygmalion’s ‘style entrecoupé’ see Waeber, Jacqueline, En musique dans le texte: Le mélodrame de Rousseau à Schoenberg (Paris, 2005), 37–39Google Scholar.
11 One was the castrato Gaetano Guadagni, who studied with David Garrick, and created the role of Orpheus in Calzabigi and Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice; see Heartz, Daniel, ‘From Garrick to Gluck: The Reform of Theatre and Opera in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 94 (1967–8), 11–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. During the 1760s and 1770s, Metastasio often professed a growing interest in gestural acting. Jacques Joly, ‘Le didascalie per la recitazione nei drammi metastasiani’, in idem, Dagli elisi all’inferno: Il melodramma tra Italia e Francia dal 1730 al 1850 (Florence, 1990), 95–111. It is worth noting that the texts of opere serie can imply specific gestures: we may assume, for instance, that a character who refers to ‘this heart’ (questo seno) will move a hand to his breast; a character who claims to lack something might show her palms. See Strohm, Dramma per musica, 17 and 224–6; and Barnett, Dene, The Art of Gesture: The Practices and Principles of Eighteenth-Century Acting (Heidelberg, 1987)Google Scholar.
12 The first scholar to address the topic was Becker, Georges, in Le Pygmalion de J.-J. Rousseau en Italie (Geneva, 1912)Google Scholar. Several Italian studies of the past three decades have gone largely unnoticed by English- and French-language musicologists. These include Morelli, Giovanni and Surian, Elvidio, ‘Pigmalione a Venezia’, in Venezia e il melodrama del Settecento, ed. Maria Teresa Muraro (Florence, 1981), 147–168Google Scholar; Emilio Sala, ‘La carriera di Pigmalione: ovvero, Nascita e prime metamorfosi del mélodrame’, in idem, Drammaturgia musicale veneta 22: Rousseau-Coignet Pygmalion; Sografi-Cimador Pimmalione (Milan, 1996), ix–lxxvii; and, most recently, Tufano, Lucio, ‘Teatro musicale e massoneria: appunti sulla diffusione del melologo a Napoli (1773–1792)’, in Napoli 1799 fra storia e storiografia: Atti del convegno internazionale, Napoli, 21–24 gennaio 1999, ed. Anna Maria Rao (Naples, 2002)Google Scholar; and ‘La ricezione italiana del melologo à la Rousseau e la Pandora di Alessandro Pepoli’, in D’une scène à l’autre: L’opéra italien en Europe 2: La musique à l’épreuve du théâtre, ed. Damien Colas and Alessandro di Profio (Wavre, 2009), 125–40.
13 Bauman, Thomas, North German Opera in the Age of Goethe (Cambridge, 1985), 91–131Google Scholar.
14 Historians often quote a portion of the ‘Fragmens d’Observations sur l’Alceste italien de M. Gluck’ in which Rousseau ostensibly explained why he had written Pygmalion (see the Collection complete des œuvres de J.J. Rousseau 8 (Geneva, 1782), I, 553–76): ‘persuaded that the French language, destitute of all accent, is not at all appropriate for music, and principally for recitative, I have devised a genre of Drama in which the words and the music, instead of proceeding together, are made to be heard in succession, and in which the spoken phrase is in a way announced and prepared by the musical phrase’ (‘persuadé que la langue françoise, destituée de tout accent, n’est nullement propre à la musique et principalement au récitatif, j’ai imaginé un genre de drame, dans lequel les paroles et la musique, au lieu de marcher ensemble, se font entendre successivement, et où la phrase parlée est en quelque sorte annoncée et préparée par la phrase musicale’). However, the autograph extends only to ‘un genre de drame’, after which a copyist has written, ‘L’auteur allait parler de Pigmalion’. Waeber, En musique dans le texte, 36. Translation is by Scott, John T. in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music (Hanover NH, 1998), 497Google Scholar.
15 Rousseau, , Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755)Google Scholar and Essai sur l’origine des langues où il est parlé de la mélodie et de l’imitation musicale (written c.1755, first published 1781); in these works, Rousseau was influenced first and foremost by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connoissances humaines (1746), but perhaps also Giambattista Vico (Scienza nuova (Naples, 1725)). Important English contributions came from Mandeville, Bernard (The Fable of the Bees (London, 1729))Google Scholar, Brown, John (A Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions, of Poetry and Music (London, 1763))Google Scholar and Lord James Burnett Monboddo (Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1773–94)).
16 The influence of these ideas on musical debates beginning in the mid-1750s, and the revival of the langage d’action within pantomime dance shortly thereafter, are well known. See especially Rosenfeld, Sophia, A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford, 2001), 57–85Google Scholar.
17 Coignet, Horace, ‘Lettre sur le Pygmalion de M. J.J. Rousseau’, Mercure de France, January 1771Google Scholar. The letter, reprinted in its entirety in Waeber, Pygmalion, 81–2, was published in the Mercure de France alongside a complete edition of Pygmalion’s text. This version formed the basis for all subsequent editions in the eighteenth century. Rousseau’s autograph of Pygmalion (currently housed in the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Neuchâtel) differs in many details from the text published in the Mercure de France. Scholars resistant to Coignet’s explanation include Jansen, Albert (Jean-Jacques Rousseau als Musiker (Berlin, 1884), 302)Google Scholar, Jan van der Veen (Le mélodrame musical (La Haye, 1955), 26–7), Sala (‘La carriera di Pigmalione’, xix–xx), and Waeber (En musique dans le texte, 26–7).
18 See, for instance, Brewer, Daniel, The Enlightenment Past: Reconstructing Eighteenth-Century French Thought (Cambridge, 2008), 179–198Google Scholar.
19 Kurzböck’s edition is re-engraved, along with a brief historical introduction, in Becker, Georg, ed., Pygmalion, par M. J.-J. Rousseau, publié d’après l’édition rarissime de Kurzböck, Vienne, 1772 (Geneva, 1872)Google Scholar, while the first pages of the French, German and Italian editions are reproduced in facsimile in Sala, ‘La carriera di Pigmalione’, xxvii–xxxv.
20 On columnar and interlinear texts in early modern translation, see Billings, Timothy, ‘Jesuit Fish in Chinese Nets: Athanasius Kircher and the Translation of the Nestorian Tablet’, Representations 87/1 (2004), 1–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 A French Pygmalion had appeared in Milan in 1771; for details on this and a list of other Italian editions that is regrettably incomplete, see Ghibaudi, Silvia Rota, La fortuna di Rousseau in Italia (1750–1815) (Turin, 1961), 320–333Google Scholar.
22 See also Lucio Tufano, ‘Francesco Saverio de’ Rogati (1745–1827): Poeta per musica’, Annali dell’Istituto italiano per gli studi storici XIV (1997), 345–93.
23 Quoted in Tufano, , ‘Teatro musicale e massoneria’, 601Google Scholar.
24 In this classical design, de’ Rogati may have been influenced by Coignet’s account of Rousseau’s revivalist intent in the Mercure de France, or its recent plagiarism in Francesco Milizia’s Del teatro. Milizia, Del teatro (Venice, 1773), 48.
25 On conceptions of the ‘spirits’ of French and Italian in the eighteenth century, see Gambarota, Paola, Irresistible Signs: The Genius of Language and Italian National Identity (Toronto, 2011), esp. 59–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 ‘Io mi sono studiato da mio parte di darne al pubblico un’esatta poetica traduzione … non mai allontanandomi dall’originale.’ Francesco Saverio de’ Rogati, Pimmalione, cantata per musica del Signor Gio: Giacomo Rousseau, trasportata dal francese nell’idioma italiana (Naples, 1773), [2].
27 Mattei, Saverio, ‘La filosofia della musica o sia la riforma del teatro’, in idem, Opere del Signor Abate Pietro Metastasio (Naples, 1781)Google Scholar, III, iii–xlvii. See also Robinson, Michael F., ‘The Aria in Opera Seria, 1725–1780’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 88 (1961–2), 31–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 In addition to Calzabigi’s and Gluck’s Preface to Alceste mentioned above, see Algarotti, Francesco, Saggio sopra l’opera in musica (1755)Google Scholar; Baretti, Cesare, La frusta letteraria, 1 November 1763Google Scholar (cit. Andrea Chegai, L’esilio di Metastasio: Forme e Riforme dello Spettacolo d’Opera fra Sette e Ottocento (Florence, 1998), 1); Pepoli, Alessandro, ‘Lettera ad un uomo ragionevole sul melodramma detto serio’, in idem, Meleagro, tragedia per musica, preceduta da una lettera del medesimo sul melodramma detto serio (Venice, 1789)Google Scholar, about which more below. These critiques and others of the period are summarised in Renato di Benedetto, ‘Poetics and Polemics’, in The History of Italian Opera, ed. Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, Part II: Systems, vol. 6, Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth (Chicago, 2003), 38–49.
29 Pepoli, ‘Lettera ad un uomo ragionevole’, ii.
30 ‘Non protrebbe figurarsi maggiore inverisimilitudine, che accompagnare, o preparare con un ritornello di stromenti, una declamazione dell’attore, che non canta, ma parla.’ De’ Rogati, Pigmalione, [2].
31 ‘L’esattezza della comica, la vivacità, la passione del valentissimo attore, l’opportunità delle poche note musiche del signor Aspelmayer, a tempo con saviezza disposte, destavan negli ascoltanti un maggior diletto, che le ricercate, lunghe, e spesso noiose musiche de’ teatri presenti italiani.’ Ibid.
32 Charles Burney noted, after travelling throughout western and central Europe in the early 1770s, that Italian opera prevailed in all countries save France; and even there the Italianate music of composers such as A.E.M. Grétry had made substantial inroads in Paris (The Present State of Music in Germany, The Netherlands, and United Provinces (London, 1773), I, 54). Voltaire’s self-serving praise of Metastasio – that his libretti, benefitting from the supreme musicality of the Italian language, had impeded the development of an Italian tragedy – was repeated approvingly and often. See Chegai, L’esilio di Metastasio, 14. Voltaire’s remark was of a piece with his marginalising support of Italian writers more broadly; see ‘L’Italia di Voltaire’ in Gaspari, Gianmarco, Letteratura delle riforme: Da Beccaria a Manzoni (Palermo, 1990), 21–34Google Scholar.
33 Baretti, Guiseppe, Tragedie di Pier Cornelio (Venice, 1747–8)Google Scholar, I, 4.
34 See, for instance, Alfredo Schiaffini, ‘Aspetti della crisi linguistica italiana del settecento’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 57/2–4 (1937), 275–295Google Scholar; and Marazzini, Claudio, ‘Le teorie’, in Storia della lingua italiana, ed. Luca Serianni and Pietro Trifone (Turin, 1993), I, esp. 291–296Google Scholar.
35 A libretto printed for Grandi in Pisa in 1774 is reproduced in facsimile in the online collection operated by the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in Milan; at the time of writing, the catalogue is accessible at www.urfm.braidense.it/cataloghi/searchrd.php. The classification of Grandi’s 1774 libretto is Raccolta Drammatica 4742. Henceforth, libretti in this collection will be cited by classification only.
36 The libretto’s front page reads: Il Pigmalione del signor Gio. Giacomo Rousseau: Scena lirica dedicata all’eccellentissima nobilità di Napoli da rappresentarsi in lingua francese in prosa nel Teatro de Fiorentini da Giacomo Ceolini, comico italiano.
37 See Rasi, Luigi, ‘Welenfeldt, Bonifazio’, in idem, I comici italiani: biografia, bibliografia, iconografia (Florence, 1897–1905), II, 698Google Scholar.
38 On the improvisatory careers of Monti and Grandi, see Bartoli, Adolfo, ed., Scenari inediti della commedia dell’arte (Florence, 1880)Google Scholar.
39 Il Pimmalione del Sig. G. J. Rousseau Scena Lirica Da Rappresentarsi in lingua Francese nel Teatro di S. Samuele in Venezia (1773). Raccolta Drammatica 4098. The libretto names no actors, but the evidence weighs strongly in Grandi’s favour (see Saverio Franchi and Orietta Sartori, Le impressioni sceniche: Dizionario bio-bibliografico degli editori e stampatori romani e laziali, di testi drammatici e libretti per musica dal 1579 al 1800 II: Integrazioni, aggiunte, tavole, indici (Rome, 2002), 117–18).
40 In 1771, Grandi had played the lead in an Italian production of Mercier’s Le déserteur, translated by Elisabetta Caminer Turra; a letter to Caminer from Francesco Albergati records that Grandi had requested translations of plays by Voltaire (L’indiscret, 1725) and Boissy (Le françois à Londre, 1727), apparently for performances in Italian. Francesco Blanchetti, ‘ “Alto, alto, si sospenda/La sentenza è rivocata”: Parodia del dramma borghese nel Militare bizzarro di Giuseppe Sarti’, Nuova rivista musicale italiana 41/1 (2007), 85–96. On the business of translation in late eighteenth-century Venice, see Catherine Sama, ed., Turra, Caminer, Selected Writings of an Eighteenth-Century Venetian Woman of Letters (Chicago, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Caminer Turra’s friend Giulio Perini produced a verse translation for Grandi in 1777; this was published again nearly a decade later (Raccolta Drammatica 5938), and was given a musical setting in the late 1810s by Giuseppe Verdi’s teacher, Ferdinando Provesi.
41 The preface reads, ‘A different kind of genius is required to translate sublime matter from one language to another. To enter into the analysis of ideas, passions, sentiments, the concepts of a great man, and render all of this natural and clear in a different idiom, is not a vulgar undertaking, as unfortunate custom would have us believe. Owing to incompetence, I am one of the many imperfect translators; but M. Rousseau may be certain at least that I understood the full merit in his work, and that I put into the endeavour all the effort of which I was capable, as well as the desire to honour him and myself’ (‘Vuolsi un ingegno ben altro per tradurre da una Lingua all’altra le cose sublimi. Entrare nell’analisi delle idee, delle passioni, de’ sentimenti, de’ concetti d’un uomo grande, e ridurre tutto ciò naturale e chiaro in Idioma diverso, è impresa non tanto vulgare, come un infelice pratica l’ha fatto credere. Io sono per incapacità del numero degl’imperfetti Traduttori; ma può essere ben certo il Sig. Rousseau, che almeno ho conosciuto tutto il merito dell’Opera sua, e che vi ho messo tutto quello studio, che mi è stato possibile, accompagnato dal desiderio di onorare lui, e me stesso’). Anon., Il Pimmalione (1773), [i].
42 Orfeo, scena lirica del sig. L.B. dell’Accademia degli Arcadi di Roma/Orphée, scène lyrique par L.B. de l’Accadémie des Arcades de Rome (Venice, 1774); mentioned in Tufano, ‘La ricezione italiana del melologo’, 130, 137. See also Franchi and Sartori, Le impressioni sceniche, II, 117–18.
43 Wiel, Taddeo, I teatri musicali veneziani (Venice, 1897; repr. Leipzig, 1979), 303Google Scholar.
44 Ibid. The French text reads, ‘Les silences sont remplis par une musique analogue à l’expression pantomime des acteurs.’
45 By pantomime dance I mean the Noverrian ballet d’action and the genres, such as the Italian danza parlante, that developed simultaneously in other theatrical traditions. On the rise of narrative theatrical dance, see Kathleen Hansell, ‘Theatrical Ballet and Italian Opera’, in History of Italian Opera, Part II: Systems, vol. 5, Opera on Stage, ed. Bianconi and Pestelli, 198–252; and Nye, Edward, Mime, Music and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: The Ballet d’Action (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
46 See my ‘Alignment, Absorption, Animation: Pantomime Ballet in the Lombard Illuminismo’, Eighteenth-Century Music, 8/2 (Summer 2011), 239–59.
47 This score was misattributed to Rousseau himself by Edgar Istel, and transcribed in his Studien zur Geschichte des Melodramas I: Jean-Jacques Rousseau als Komponist seiner lyrischen Scene ‘Pygmalion’ (Leipzig, 1901). I follow Sala in assuming this to be Asplmayr’s score for the Viennese Pygmalion of 1772 (the score is partially reproduced in ‘La carriera di Pigmalione’, lix–lxvi). Noverre was the best-known French practitioner of the ballet d’action; on the indebtedness of his Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets (Lyon, 1760) to the theories of Diderot and Condillac see Rosenfeld, , A Revolution in Language, 59–64Google Scholar.
48 ‘Il jette avec dédain ses outils, s’agite, se promene, s’arrête, porte, malgré lui, ses regards vers le fond de son attelier, où le pavillon lui cache une statue, en detourne les yeux, et tombe dans une rêverie profonde.’
49 The ballet d’action reportedly divided the body in two, with the legs performing the steps and the upper body bearing expressing sentiment. Rosenfeld, , A Revolution in Language, 64–65Google Scholar.
50 Weaver, Robert Lamar and Weaver, Norma Wright, A Chronology of Music in the Florentine Theatre, 1751–1800: Operas, Prologues, Farces, Intermezzos, Concerts, and Plays With Incidental Music (Detroit, 1996), II, 504Google Scholar.
51 ‘Ho imitato qui J. J. Rousseau come in tutte le azioni in cui ella [Galatea] ripete questa parola affermativamente e negativamente. Questa espressione è sì semplice, sì naturale e dipinge con tante verità la situazione di Galatea, che ne credo infallibile l’effetto tanto nella pantomima quanto nel discorso.’ LeFevre’s pantomime on this theme was performed in 1785 at the San Carlo between the acts of Giovanni Paisiello’s Antigono. Quoted in Tufano, Lucio, ‘Un melologo inedito di Francesco Saverio Salfi: Medea’, in Salfi librettista, ed. Francesco Paolo Russo (Monteleone, 2001), 104Google Scholar.
52 Tufano, , ‘La ricezione italiana del melologo’, 134Google Scholar.
53 Raccolta Drammatica 5337.
54 Wiel, , I teatri musicali veneziani, 437Google Scholar. Pepoli is also remembered for having declared himself Alfieri’s rival. For an informative, if fanciful, comparison of the two figures, see Lord Broughton, R. H., Italy: Remarks Made in Several Visits from the Year 1816 to 1854 (London, 1861), II, 331–332Google Scholar.
55 Luigi Ferrari, ed., Le traduzioni italiane del teatro tragico francese nei secoli xvii oe xviii o (Paris, 1925), esp. 279–80.
56 The text and music for Pandora, a ‘favola lirica’, were published in Teatro del Conte Alessandro Pepoli (Venice, 1787), I, 227 to end. See Tufano, , ‘La ricezione italiana del melologo’, 134–139Google Scholar.
57 Jean–Jacques Rousseau, ‘De l’écriture’, Œuvres Posthumes III: Essai sur l’origine des langues (Geneva, 1781), 231–41.
58 See Trippett, David, ‘Bayreuth in Miniature: Wagner and the Melodramatic Voice’, The Musical Quarterly 95 (2012), 71–138CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
59 Rousseau, , ‘Observations sur l’Alceste’, 564Google Scholar.
60 ‘This reunion of the declamatory art with the art of music produces the effects of true recitative only imperfectly, and delicate ears will take notice, always disagreeably, of the contrast between the language of the actor and that of the orchestra.’ Ibid., 563–4.
61 Albright, Daniel, ‘Golden Calves: The Role of Dance in Opera’, Opera Quarterly 22/1 (2008), 24Google Scholar.
62 Steele, Joshua, Prosodia rationalis: Or, An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and the Measure of Speech, to be Expressed and Perpetuated by Peculiar Symbols (London, 1775; 2nd edn 1779)Google Scholar.
63 Conveniently, Steele suggested that the ‘Attic plant’ had been tended best by his own compatriots: ‘I had long entertained opinions concerning the melody and rhythmus of modern languages, and particularly of the English, which made me think that our theatrical recitals were capable of being accompanied with a bass, as those of the antient Greeks and Romans were.’ Prosodia rationalis, 1.
64 ‘To be or not to be’ received another famous musical treatment at the hands of Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg: this poet and musical amateur overlaid a German translation of Hamlet’s monologue to C.P.E. Bach’s Fantasia in C Minor, purportedly to demonstrate the compatibility of instrumental and verbal meanings (Plebuch, Tobias, ‘Dark Fantasies and the Dawn of the Self: Gerstenberg’s Monologues for C.P.E. Bach’s C Minor Fantasia’, in C.P.E. Bach Studies, ed. Annette Richards (Cambridge, 2006), 25–66)Google Scholar.
65 Steele, , Prosodia rationalis, 81Google Scholar.
66 Ibid., 38.
67 Ibid., xvi.
68 The triangles and double and triple dots beneath the syllables identify them as strong, weak and weakest respectively.
69 Quoted in Steele, Prosodia rationalis, 91. The 1779 republication of Prosodia rationalis was made timely by the death of Garrick that year.
70 Boswell, James, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791; Ware, 1999)Google Scholar, 424. Emphasis original.
71 Bow-wow as used here was a colloquial term for onomatopoeic pronunciation; Friedrich Max Müller later used it to stand for all theories of language in the Rousseauian model (Lectures on the Science of Language (London, 1861), 344–51).
72 Eximeno, Antonio, Dell’origine e delle regole della musica, colla storia del suo progresso, decadenza, e rinnovazione (Rome, 1774; facs. edn New York, 1983)Google Scholar. This work is virtually unknown to modern musicologists; however, as it is readily available in facsimile, I do not supply the original language. Quotations in this paragraph are from the Preface, pp. 1–16; page numbers given hereafter in main text.
73 ‘These gestures … proceeding naturally and without reflection from instinct, are extremely beautiful, and apt for pantomime dance, in which Italians have excelled over all nations since the Caesarian age’ (411). As with the first humans, these visual signs were specific enough that words could be omitted entirely.
74 Stefano [Esteban de’] Arteaga, Rivoluzioni nel teatro musicale italiano: dalla sua origine fino al presente, 2nd edn (Venice, 1785), I, xli.
75 Ibid., III, 196–7.
76 Ibid., II, 33–4.
77 Ibid., I, 94.
78 Ibid., II, 251.
79 Pepoli, , ‘Lettera ad un uomo ragionevole’, 22Google Scholar. Page numbers henceforth in main text.
80 PIMMALIONE / SCENA DRAMMATICA / Tratta dalla Scena Lirica / DI MONSIEUR J. J. ROUSSEAU / PER LI SIGNORI / MATTEO BABINI, E CAROLINA PITROT / DAL / SIGNOR SOGRAFI / E posta in musica / DAL SIGNOR / GIANBATTISTA CIMADOR / Da rappresentarsi la Sera di 16. Gennaro 1790 / NEL NOBILISSIMO TEATRO / DI SAN SAMUELE (Venice, 1790). Raccolta Drammatica 4234. The libretto is reproduced in its entirety and the music is reproduced in facsimile in Drammaturgia musicale veneta 22: Pimmalione. The work’s peculiarities are noted in the thorough introductory essay to that volume: Sala, ‘La carriera di Pigmalione’, ix–lxxvii.
81 ‘In essa è ritenuta soltanto l’idea principale del celebre autore.’ Carolina Pitrot, Matteo Babini, [Preface] in Sografi, Pimmalione (Venice, 1790), 3.
82 Barblan, Guglielmo, ‘Un Cimador che divenne Cimarosa’, in Testimonianze, studi e ricerche in onore di Guido M. Gatti, ed. Giuseppe Vecchi (Bologna, 1973), 202Google Scholar.
83 [Pygmalion] sits, observing the statues and statue groups that surround him.
You who surround me,
Dear, enticing objects,
Ah, you bring my thoughts
Momentarily to calm.
He suddenly rises, walking around the scene agitatedly,
Ah, in vain do I hope to find in you
A comfort for my torment:
I feel myself carried
From fervour to fear.
He stops, and turns with great enthusiasm toward the [i e., Galatea’s] pavilion.
Only with you can my eyes
Bring consolation to my soul.
84 For a succinct description of Italian opera’s two ‘times’, see Taruskin, , New Oxford History, II, 154Google Scholar.
85 ‘Getta con dispregio i suoi Strumenti; passeggia agitato, si ferma, e come a forza si rivolge verso il fondo, da cui tosto ritira lo sguardo, cadendo in una profonda meditazione.’
86 ‘Per conoscere il sorprendente effetto di questo periglioso cimento, al quale esponevasi Babini eseguendo ne’ teatri il suo Pigmalione (cantata da lui voluta espressamente in quella forma), basterà chiederne chiunque lo ha udito da Lui a Venezia, a Bologna, a Londra, a Vienna, a Firenze, a Genova, a Parigi, ec. ec.’ The work accumulated political and even nationalist significance during the revolution: Brighenti reported that during the 1800 Siege of Genoa Babini performed Pimmalione ‘with the sole aim of aiding the so-called patriot refugees’ who fought on the side of the French (Elogio di Matteo Babbini (Bologna, 1821), 20–3). A full score was published in Vienna in 1791, and a later Viennese score published four arias. In 1797 ‘five airs plus recitative and a Duett’ were published by the London firm of Corri, Dussek & Co, and that year Giuseppe Viganoni performed it at the King’s Theatre.
87 The libretto is anonymous, while Marcello di Capua wrote the music. Raccolta Drammatica 4672.
88 ‘Al suono d’una dolce sinfonìa và lentamente svegliandosi, e spiega con attitudini proprie della sua circostanza la sorpresa, che gli cagiona la vista dei nuovi oggetti, che se gli presentano.’
89 Giorgio Pestelli noted this passage as an example of ‘humble actions without words that are completely new to the courtly and literary tradition of Italian opera’ (The Age of Mozart and Beethoven (Cambridge, 1984; Turin, 1979), 200–1).
90 Raccolta Drammatica 4744.
91 The portrait is reproduced as a frontispiece in Drammaturgia musicale veneta 25: La morte di Cesare, ed. Piero Weiss (Milan, 1999).
92 Brighenti, , Elogio di Matteo Babbini, 20Google Scholar.
93 We should not assume that this preference resulted from a lack of ease with more difficult singing. Given the regularity with which Babini took over roles written for the flashier tenor Giacomo David – including the central part in Pepoli and Paisiello’s I giuochi d’Agrigento – he must have been fully capable of singing longer arias and more demanding coloratura. On Sertor and Bianchi’s La morte di Cesare, see Feldman, Martha, Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (Chicago, 2007), 431–444CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
94 ‘[C]anto … diretto da una filosifica economia’; Pepoli, ‘Lettera ad un uomo ragionevole’, 43.
95 Raccolta Drammatica 4601. The music for Pietro il Grande was again by Rossi.
96 McClymonds, Marita, ‘The Venetian Role in the Transformation of Italian Opera Seria during the 1790s’, in I vicini di Mozart (Florence, 1989), I, 221–240Google Scholar; and Feldman, , Opera and Sovereignty, 389–434Google Scholar.
97 ‘Se alla patria ognor donai’ (Gli orazi, Act I scene 6) is scored for tenor, chorus, and orchestra. It is reproduced in facsimile in Drammaturgia musicale veneta 29: Gli Orazi e i Curiazi, ed. Maria Giovanna Miggiani (Milan, 2003), II, 154–85.
98 See, for instance, ‘Germe d’illustre eroi’ in Act I scene 5.
99 Rossi, and Mayr’s, L’amor coniugale exists in a modern reconstruction by Arrigo Gazzaniga (Bergamo, 1967)Google Scholar; Beethoven’s Fidelio (also 1805) used Joseph von Sonnleithner’s adaptation of the same play.
100 His first opera, Saffo, ossia I riti d’Apollo Leucadio, had a libretto by Sografi, and had its premiere at La Fenice in February of 1794; Babini sang one of the principal roles.
101 Raccolta drammatica 4923.
102 Gazzaniga, , ed., L’amor coniugale, 223–273Google Scholar.
103 During the lyric portion Zeliska’s stage directions are as follows: ‘alterandosi nel trasporto della passione, e del timore … delira … come vedessi trucidare lo sposo … toccandosi il cuore … resta muta, concentrata, desolatissima. Si scuota poi con tutta forza … si sente suonare le 4 ore. Essa le numera colle dita … colla maggiore, e più viva espressione d’ansietà, d’amore, di speranza, di piacere … con trasporto.’
104 In this scene Antinoo, king of Thebes, discovers from the Sibylline oracle that Adrasto is his son. When the opera had its premiere at La Scala in 1801, the roles of father and son were created by Giacomo David and Babini respectively. Tacchinardi’s performance took place in November of 1818 at the San Benedetto in Venice.
105 The libretto is by Giuseppe Bardari after Friedrich Schiller’s Maria Stuart. Page numbers refer to the recent critical edition: Anders Wiklund, ed., Maria Stuarda: tragedia lirica in due atti (Milan, 1991).
106 Bellini probably knew Cimador’s scene either from David the younger, whose revival occurred the year he arrived in Naples, or the multiple manuscript copies of Pimmalione housed in the library of that city’s conservatory.
107 See Esse, Melina, ‘Speaking and Sighing: Bellini’s canto declamato and the Poetics of Restraint’, Current Musicology, 87 (Spring 2009), 7–45Google Scholar.
108 Rosselli, John, The Life of Bellini (Cambridge, 1996), 48Google Scholar.
109 After a brief pause he extends his hands to the sky, and says,
Merciful heavens, lenient heavens
Give to her my own days;
If I may die for her
I do not fear to die.
110 He is interrupted by a sweet harmony, which is heard around the statue of Galatea.
What heavenly sounds!
What sweet harmony
Enchants my soul! … Yes, yes, I hear you,
Beautiful Goddess of Love, it is you, it is you,
Who takes pity on me.
The sound precedes and accompanies the following words.
To a sweet repose,
At last merciful,
Love invites me.
What peace! … What calm! …
Descends to my soul …
I feel it in my heart.
111 ‘Malheureusement jettant mes projets du côté de mes goûts, je m’obstinois à chercher follement ma fortune dans la musique, & sentant naître des idées & des chants dans ma tête, je crus qu’aussi-tôt que he serois en état d’en tirer parti j’allois devenir un homme célèbre, un Orphée moderne dont les sons devoient attirer tout l’argent du Pérou.’ First published in Œuvres posthumes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau IX: Les confessions, 57–8.
112 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, ed. and trans. Eric A. Blackall. Vol. 9, Goethe: The Collected Works (Princeton, 1989; originally published as Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Berlin, 1795–6), 72–4.
113 Smart, Mary Ann, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley, 2005), 1Google Scholar.