Venetian Opera Productions: Analytical Views

These analytical views give overviews of the main aspects of the Venetian opera repertory between 1660 and 1760.

Music

A few composers dominated Venetian opera at every stage of its development, but overall the number of composers covered here totaled more than 140. This excludes 25 pastiches (operas "pasted" together from fragments by a consortium of composers) and 17 unattributed works.

The survival rate of libretti is greater than 99 per cent. The survival rate of musical scores, which is much lower, varies by decade and theater.

• Survival of libretti vs survival or scores (1640-1759)

Incidental items (Entr'actes)

Operas staged in Venice were often adorned with a miscellany of entr'actes. All of them were musical, but some were more elaborate and carefully constructed than others. Up to 1700 the types of entr'actes was varied. Mock battles were popular at San Gio. Grisostomo, but balli eventually eclipsed most other short interludes. The performers of incidental items were usually separate from those of the featured opera. The low survival rate of reflects this. After 1700, comic intermezzi were especially popular at San Cassiano and Sant'Angelo.

• Combined distribution of incidental items

Musical score survival

A relative paucity of operas survive from the century 1660-1760. Percentages vary from theater to theater.

• Score survival

Musical fragment survival

Many arias disconnected from their original contexts were circulated in the manuscript between the 1680s and the 1720s. They are often identified only by singer and sometimes by the position of the parent work in one theater's "season". Overtures were increasingly detached in later decades and circulated as independent pieces.

Readers seeking more exact information may consult the RISM catalog of musical manuscripts. It currently indexes more than 1.5 million scores and fragments. New entries continue to be absorbed. A list of RISM sigla (abbreviations for holding libraries) shows the global abbreviations used to identify holding libraries.

A treacherous obstacle in linking musical sources with premieres is that many scores and fragments represent earlier or later instances of the same title. An opera was rarely the same from one night to the next. The greater the distance between a listing here and a source in hand, the greater discrepancies of content are likely to be.

Most prolific composers

Most prolific composers by decade

Texts

Librettists were slightly less numerous than composers, but over time the number of texts that were reworked by others made blurred the picture of literary authorship.

Literary genres

Venetian operas were overwhelming offered as drammi per musica, but experimentation tested the boundaries of the paradigm at intervals. The dramma per musica remained the dominant genre of opera until 1745, which the dramma giocoso began to attract a growing audience. Pastorals were sometimes performed in the spring and autumn. The tragedia per musica of five acts was a predilection of the 1690s, especially at San Cassiano and San Giovanni Grisostomo.

• Distribution of dramatic genres in opera

Dedicatees by region

Prominent Venetians were clearly a force in the continuation of opera but this was less the case as time went on. Dedications were motivated by the expectation of recognition or remuneration but were dependent on visitor traffic.

• Dedicatees by region of origin.

• Libretti without dedicatees

Text reuse

At first almost all operas featured texts newly or recently written. This reflected a strong patronage network. As patronage declined, so too did new texts. As time progressed, pairings of new music with texts from earlier years and other places steadily accrued.

• Changing relations in musical and textual novelty

Theaters

Because the number of operas produced during this century was so great, theaters drifted into the establishment of separate profiles. Detecting individual traits can be useful in understanding other fluctuations in other parameters. Differences could reflect the tastes of the proprietor(s) and their associates. All the theaters were affected from time to time by economic change and by unexpected occurrences, such as fires.

• Theater activities by decade

Patronage

In 1660 Venice enjoyed considerable mercantile and diplomatic importance. Its steadfast avoidance of political alliances rendered it neutral territory for the negotiation of treaties, marriages, and law suits involving non-Venetian territories. Negotiations brought many powerful figures into the city for several generations. By 1730, however, Venice's critical position was eclipsed by the rise of Vienna and emerging cities of the Veneto (Padua, Vicenza, Verona, and Brescia).

Records of theater-box rentals offer one source of information on the audiences for opera. Theater owners and prominent cast members held boxes. Over time, though, individual boxes were inherited, sublet, or left standing empty. Dedicatees named in printed libretti offer the best proxy for patronage insights. Not uncommonly they visited Venice with large entourages that could fill a tier or two of the boxes.

Rough distribution of dedicatees showing overall decline.

National identities of dedicatees showing the dominance of non-Venetian Italians.