Venetian Opera Documentation

Documentation for https://venop.ccarh.org

Venetian opera is celebrated for many reasons. This collection of tabular information was inspired by the most mundane of them: the sheer bulk of operas (889) performed in Venice between 1660 and 1760 cried out for a comprehensive resource to untangle the countless threads of activity that exist within and between them. It turns out, though, that the fundamental tool for untangling many aspects of this complex artform is a detailed, day-by-day chronology. Every record shown here has a finite date of opening. Access to it enables users to order events in many other fields.

Venetian culture of times past followed many prescribed rules, but which one was operative at any specific time was often an open question. The regularity that databases require for smooth operation inherently conflicts with the serendipity that grounded many aspects of Venetian culture. The need of the moment often supravened.

How to use this resource

Although it is possible to generate plots and tables for substantial periods of time, much of the power of this assembly of data comes from its richness to a focus on a specific topic--a composer, a librettist, a theater, a genre, a trail of musical sources. The difference is one of dimensions. A flat list of all the works at one theater, for example, can be immensely valuable. Yet a more nuanced view can be had by viewing, in a hypothtical case, the mutual occurrences of a specific genre, season, and incidental pieces (balli, intermezzi). It is also possible to collect several fields related to one perspective by using the tabbed choices at the top of the home screen.

Perspective views of the data

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How and why was this resource compiled?

My interest time at the seasonal level was stimulated by the discovery of a small book from which a few leaves of printed vocal music peeped out at an antique fair in Venice in 1977. Although the item followed me home to California, it took several years to unravel what its motives were and why music played an important role in its commentary. See E. Selfridge-Field, Pallade Veneta: Music in Venetian Society, Venice: Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi, 1985.

My quest for other issues of Pallade Veneta led me to scads of weekly news-sheets. The earliest examples we know today come from the mid-sixteenth century, long before the advent of public opera. The network of writers of avvisi by which news was conveyed dotted the whole of Europe and selected points on other continents. They functioned (mainly in manuscript) much as wire services do today, but with the difference that dispatches went only to subscribers on half-year plans. A great many of these reports have been lost over five centuries, but no comprehensive list of all the titles under which they existed has yet been compiled. For my putative "complete" chronology I investigated sixteen series. What may seem excessive owes to the incompleteness of any given series. Many printed news services, especially in the eighteenth century, reiterated material received in manuscript but each copy could admit new distortions or transcription errors. Dates missing in the top tiers of a network transmission will be missing in all their progeny.

In assembling my New Chronology of Venetian Opera (2007), I gave a letter code for the source of each date. Since news-reports are ordered by week, it is very easy to find the original once an exact date is in hand. To convey all the complexities of dating at practical, cultural, and arithmetic levels, I wrote the book Song and Season: Science, Culture, and Theatrical Time (2007) as a companion to the New Chronology.

I never aimed to compile such a sprawling mass of data when I started assembling a few details for the 1680s and 1690s. My hope in 1982 was to establishing the sequential order of performances. I supposed that the position of a few perennially undatable works would match up with random holes in this provisional sequence.

By a circuitous path I was able to explore many topics pertinent to Venetian opera, which was a cornucopia of microhistories of theaters, personnel, creators, musical sources and how they arrived at their current locations, and--at a general level--how much Europe changed between 1660 and 1760.