Dating Venetian Operas

Why are finite dates so important in understanding the phenomenon of Venetian opera? The short answer is "because there were so many of them".

The origins of this resource reach back almost a half century. When my aim was to construct a reliable chronologically-ordered resource for Venetian opera, the increasing density of titles without recourse to such a list put other seemingly simple tasks out of reach. It is evident now that some of turbulence one encounters in interfacing historical tidbits (e.g. random, isolated commentaries on a single performance) with reputable research instruments arises in the gap between catalogs of static objects and the dynamic world of opera productions.

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 (the libretto) was available to attendees in a small-format print called a libretto. In the context of time-keeping in the Venetian Republic, the 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. The detailed examinations underlying what is reported here show that there was no uniformity of thought in the preparation of the libretto. The permission slip to authorize its publication could have a "seasonal" mention of the year (e.g. Carnival 1707), a printer's date (5 January 1708), and a censor's authorization date (4 January 1707). How shall one render the year? In most cases bibliographers rely on the most accessible information: Carnival 1707.

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 purpose of the penitential seasons of Advent (intended for devotional anticipation of Christmas) and Lent (devotional preparation for Easter) are becoming increasingly elusive.

A Dating Solution with Reliable and Consistent Years

In the late 1970s other research introduced me to the network of weekly news-sheets that flowed across Europe, post by post, from the 1560s to the end of the eighteenth century. In good conditions, a courier (the forerunner of a mail delivery agent) would ride for about five hours in a day. Increasingly over time, dispatches were gathered together into bundles of new from other points. Some collections began to be printed and sold on subscription in the eighteenth century. Venice was an important hub for the exchange of news but its avvisi (news-sheets) in print only in collections issuing from such cities as Rome, Bologna, Amsterdam, and Vienna. Much of the distribution of news in the seventeenth century initially focused on news of battles and the position of troops, but when war news was scarce, cultural news found favor in many dispatches.