Venetian Opera Documentation

Documentation for https://venop.ccarh.org

Public opera in Venice flourished from 1637 until the collapse of the Venetian Republic in 1797. The core of this period is represented by the 889 works produced between 1660 and 1760. Court opera and near approximations to it had flourished in a few places since the later sixteenth century. Occasionally, the celebration of a royal wedding gave occasion entertainments that might include dramatic texts set to music (musica recitativa), other entertainments such as ballets, and pantomimes or other pageantry. For reasons that seem unusual today, tragedies were thought appropriate to such occasions.

Quick start guide: Search on fields of your choice by checking them on the query form (https://venop.ccarh.org). Limit your search to a specific timeframe by indicating the earliest and latest years that that pertain to your interest. The cull appears beneath the search form.

Repertory covered

While the historic value of Venetian opera collectively is easily recognized, only a handful of Baroque operas are in the repertory today. The reasons are many: the lack of survival of the music, the paucity of modern editions for works that survive, the expense of staging long, elaborate works of earlier times, and the lack of training in Baroque performing techniques in many potential venues.

Despite the lack of musical familiarity the user may encounter, many titles from the eighteenth century were to become familiar in later times. This reflects the fact that many libretti were used over and over, some for as long as a century. By the mid-eighteenth-century a few select texts had been set by more than a dozen composers. More commonly, old texts were fitted out with new music.

Structure of this Venetian Opera Resource

Almost every work sincluded here has a finite date of opening that is verified in weekly accounts. Access enables users to order events that may interest them--by composer, librettist, theater, and much else.

Dating Venetian Operas

The origins date back to the early 1980s, when my goal was to construct a single chronologically-ordered resource for Venetian opera of the Republican period. The density of titles for single years contained many pitfalls for careful assessment. These resided in unlikely places. Among these coded language for certain aspects of time that varied from one occupation to another was a big one. Ordinary people did not have calendars or clocks. Information about the significance of particular occasions was entrusted to clergy and accountants, but they did not share a common set of terms for the many segments of a year that were partitioned on one or both ends by moveable feasts. Today, when fewer and fewer people observe Christian feasts, the penitential seasons of Advent (pre-Christmas) and Lent are difficult to get into focus.

Standard Solutions to the Dating Problem

Traditionally, librarians and historians have relied on standard bibliographical studies to assign a year to a work. No opera of the time was published. Only the putative text for the work was available to attendees in a small-format print called a libretto. However venerable a bibliography may be, its designated year can be off by one because of implicit disagreements about when a new year began. According to the Church, the new year began on January 1. According to the Venetian State (Republic) it began on March 1. Through the time of Napoleon, the majority of Venetian operas opened in January or February. Libretti can have as many as three sstatements of the year--one on the title page, one when the censor authorized the libretto for publciation, and one given by the printer at the time of publication. Bibliographers confront discrepancies between these, so that the "source" cannot be counted on to offer a year that will be uniform in the work of interpreters.

A Dating Solution with Reliable and Consistent Years

In the late 1970s other research introduced me to the weekly news-sheets that flowed

Venetian culture of times past followed many prescribed rules, but which one was operative at any specific time might be open to question. The regularity that databases require for smooth operation requires supression of irregular spellings.

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 support for targeted topics--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

The most revealing insights may come from viewing a few fields at a time. To facilitate some popular motives for search, we have selected clusters of fields related to musical elements of an opera, literary aspects of a work, patronage, and the complex variables that determined when any specific work was permitted to open. These complement the cluster of core fields.

The purpose of this resource

The original purpose of this resource was to establish a clear, incontrovertible chronology of Venetian operas, which were first given in public theaters in 1637. The genre was unstable and the early venues ephemeral: no one anticipated the durability of opera as a genre. The component parts of the genre and manners of performance changed often. The main elements became more stable as the number of theaters increased (1660, 1677-78). When in the 1740s the theaters were beset by sundry problems, the opera buffa began to displace the dramma per musica, the course of opera again became choppy and unpredictable. Satires of opera, caricatures of singers, and tracts against opera rose to the fore.

How to use this resource

Notes on Development

This resource was compiled over decades. It has many perfunctory uses. In my own work it differentiates between legacy "facts" (e.g. attributed authorship) in secondary sources and statements that are verified in weekly news-sheets, most of them unpublished. The biggest single area of conflict in imputed year of performance.

Why is dating Venetian operas a problem?

Venetian culture thrived on inspiration, expression, and imagination. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Venice had eight different nomenclatures for identifying years and seasons. Because there were so many operas (889 in the century annotated here), small questions about topics like the sequence of works of a composer or theater or about competing between theaters can never be definitively answered. As many as 23% of the years given in opera bibliographies are incorrect.

The root of the problem lies in erratic information given in printed libretti, which number many multiples higher than the number of works. Opera played no direct role in the church of the church, but it was not specifically a civic product either. Libretti were caught in the draft between a church year that started on January 1 and a civic year that advanced on March 1 (the mors veneto). The details and intricacies of the many conflicts caused by the difference are spelled out on my Song and Season: Science, Culture, and Theatrical Time in Early Modern Venice (2007). This database is closely connected to three of my earlier book Pallade Veneta: Writings on Music in Venetian Society, Venice: Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi, 1985.

The monthly print Pallade veneta often shows the seams of weekly news reports. After 17 issues (from January 1687 through May 1688), it ceased publication. However, it continued in manuscript circulation. Most weekly issues are lost, but some surviving ones are from the year 1751.

The great virtue of weekly news-sheets in historical research is that they provide incontrovertible dates for events. These can be deduced from named weekdays (as in "Last Sunday the bones of Julius Caesar were resurrected in the Theater X"). Why are dates from these humble writings incontrovertible? In each locale from which they were issued, the dispatch was consistently made on a same day of the week. In Venice it was Saturday. The same date could not fall on Saturday in two consecutive years.

In a field such as opera history, otherwise served by multiple loose chronologies depending on carelessly edited period prints and modern interpretations, conflicts between the supposed implications derived from concentrating on years and seasons arise often.

Two discoveries emerged from the fact that opera openings are mentioned ubiquitously in weekly news-sheets. One was that the idea of establishing a secure chronology was entirely feasible. The other was that while there are many series of weekly news-sheets from Venice (and several dozen other cities), not one of them is complete. The pursuit of a fixed timeline thus came to depend on tracking down more and more dispatched assembled, patchwork style, in collections of Notizie, Diari, and other forerunners of modern newspapers. Full source citations are given in the New Chronology. In all, I consulted sixteen weekly series for any part of the century at hand I could find.

In assembling my New Chronology of Venetian Opera, I gave a letter code for the source of each date, e.g. (A) for avvisi, (M) for Mercuri. Extensive archival citations are not useful: news-reports are ordered by week, and it is very easy to find the original once an exact date is in hand. (None of these series is digitized for online consultation.) To convey and resolve all the complexities of dating at practical, cultural, and arithmetic levels, I wrote the book Song and Season: Science, Culture, and Theatrical Time 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, sources and how they arrived at their current locations, and--at a general level--how much Europe and the motives for staging opera changed between 1660 and 1760. Whole genres came and went, with each change reflected in patronage patterns, choices of entr'actes, dramatic genres, and, of course, musical style.

Manners of production and performance changed along with them. Yet this century from 1660-1760 offers a level of corpus coherence that exceeds to be found in partly overlapping periods of a hundred years. The most conspicuous demarcations are the rise of theaters that were enjoy decades of stability from 1660 and the rapid demise of the dramma per musica in the 1740s to make way for opera buffa.