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Twenty years of Cambridge Opera Journal: in view of the journal's place in the discipline, the occasion seemed worth marking. When Roger Parker and Arthur Groos founded Cambridge Opera Journal in 1989, it offered the first forum to the musical community for serious opera criticism that took into account changing orientations in literary studies and seriously engaged with ideology, reception history, and representations of race, class and gender. Subsequent editors – Mary Hunter, Mary Ann Smart, and Emanuele Senici – continued to foster this wide intellectual perspective and to engage with an extraordinary variety of methodologies. For the current issue, we gave carte blanche to authors who contributed in the first two years of publication to reflect on their past work, or on opera studies, or on the journal, either informally as an opinion piece or through new scholarship – and so to measure time by developments in the discipline itself.
1 Much of this material may be found in the final chapter of my book, Monteverdi's Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2007).
2 ‘Monteverdi's Mimetic Art: L'Incoronazione di Poppea’, this journal, 1 (1989), 113–37; ‘Seneca and the Interpretation of L'incoronazione di Poppea’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 38 (1985), 34–71.
3 Cassius Dio Cocceianus, Dio's Roman History, Epitome of Book 61, trans. Earnest Cary on the basis of the version by Herbert Baldwin Foster (Cambridge, MA, 1961), 8, 55–7.
4 Ad Anneo Seneca, lettera di rampogna per quel che riguarda la sua vita, e invece di elogio per il suo pensiero. For further bibliography on Seneca's life, see Seneca: Mostra bibliografica e iconografica, ed. Francesco Niutta and Carmela Santucci (Rome, 1999), 23 and n. 36.
5 Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama (New York, 1956), 106.
6 For example, Robert C. Ketterer, Ancient Rome in Early Opera (Urbana and Chicago, 2009), 7.
7 Eric Chafe, Monteverdi's Tonal Language (New York, 1992), 313, emphasis mine.
8 Iain Fenlon and Peter Miller, The Song of the Soul: Understanding Poppea (London, 1992), passim, esp. ch. 7.
9 Robert Holzer, review of The Song of the Soul: Understanding Poppea, by Iain Fenlon and Peter Miller this journal, 5 (1993), 86, 89, 91.
10 Susan McClary, ‘Constructions of Gender in Monteverdi's Dramatic Music’, in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis, 1991), 49, emphasis mine.
11 Wendy Heller, ‘Tacitus Incognito: Opera as History in L'incoronazione di Poppea’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 52 (1999), 67.
12 Tim Carter, ‘Re-reading Poppea: Some Thoughts on Music and Meaning in Monteverdi's Last Operas’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 122 (1997), 179, emphasis mine.
13 Chafe, Tonal Language, 312–13, remarks on the symmetrical placement of Seneca's scenes in Act I, which is illustrated in his figure 14.1.
14 This repetition also suggests that the two scenes might have been conceived as taking place simultaneously.
15 Although Holzer (review of Song of the Soul), 86, 89 and 91, discounts their remarks as unreliable, they are clearly derived from the historical tradition of Seneca reception. Fenlon and Miller (Song of the Soul, 63), speak of Ottavia's mind in disarray in her lament, and interpret her failure to accept Seneca's advice as a rejection of stoicism.
16 Monteverdi's interpretation (inverting the followers' two lines so that they always read: ‘Non morir / Io per me morir non vò’, and setting them to wildly contrasting music) emphasises their rejection of stoicism; cf. Carter, ‘Re-reading Poppea’, esp. 189–91.
17 Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987), 218.
18 Heller, ‘Tacitus Incognito’, 67.
19 Tim Carter, Monteverdi's Musical Theatre (New Haven, 2002), 282.
20 Gardiner, Archiv, 1996.
21 This Seneca is not accompanied by his wife and family, the way the historical Seneca was.
22 The relationship, first pointed out by Wolfgang Osthoff (Monteverdistudien (Tutzing, 1960), 98), is more fully explored by Carter, ‘Re-reading Poppea’, 194–8.
23 Carter, 198.
24 Carter, 201.
25 It seems at least as likely that Busenello named Drusilla after Agrippina's sister (Nero's aunt), as suggested by Wendy Heller, ‘Chastity, Heroism, and Allure: Women in the Opera of Seventeenth-Century Venice’, Ph.D. diss. (Brandeis University, 1995), 228n8.
26 Giulio Ongaro, ‘“E pur io torno qui”: Sixteenth-Century Literary Debates, the Audience's View, and the Interpretation of L'incoronazione di Poppea’, paper presented at the Tenth Annual Conference of the Society of Seventeenth-Century Music, Princeton 4–7 April 2002.
27 It is at the centre of Act II, but not that of the opera as a whole.
28 Mauro Calcagno, From Madrigal to Opera: Performing the Self in Early Modern Italy (in press), ch. 7, part 2.
29 Ketterer, Ancient Rome, 31.
30 Ketterer, 32.
31 Ketterer, 38.
32 Ketterer, 24. The relationship to Strozzi's works is fundamental to my interpretation of Poppea, in ‘Seneca and the Interpretation’, an argument I filled out in Monteverdi's Last Operas. Terming the relationship ‘funny’, in any case, trivialises a much more important historical point.
33 Pietro Moretti, ‘Busenello and his Composers: The Beginnings of Republican Opera’, Ph.D. diss. (Yale University, 2009), 46.
34 Moretti, 175.