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‘Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen’: Cesti, Orontea, and the Gelone problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2002

Abstract

Cesti's Orontea (Innsbruck, 1656), one of the most celebrated operas of the seventeenth century, is considered a significant antecedent of eighteenth-century opera buffa; the important role of Gelone is deemed one of the first basso buffo roles in opera history. Yet this view is based on incomplete and problematic historical data. This article reexamines that data and develops strategies for handling the text-critical problems that plague seventeenth-century opera. It concludes that Cesti probably designed Gelone for an alto – the most common voice type for buffo servants in the mid-late seventeenth century – and warns against using eighteenth-century models to interpret the seventeenth-century repertory.

Type
Regular Article
Copyright
© 2000 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Many thanks to the late William Holmes, Beth Glixon, and Matthew Brown, who were gracious enough to read versions of this essay. Also to Roger Freitas, Margaret Murata, Roberta Marvin, and Ralph Locke for assistance at crucial points. This essay is an expansion of one aspect of a 1996 conference paper that will be published as ‘Reconstructing the Innsbruck 1656 Première of Cesti's Orontea,’ in Austria, 996–1996: Music in a Changing Society, ed. Walter Kreyzig ( Vienna, forthcoming) vol. I, section III.