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 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 by theater

• Works survived by the greatest number of copies

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

• Libretti without dedicatees

Text (and music) 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

Most prolific librettists

• Most prolific librettists

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.

• Proportional contribution of each theater (1660-1760)

• Proportions by theater and 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.

• Venetian, other Italian, and foreign dedicatees

• Further breakdown of dedicatees by civic identity.

Understanding the calendar of Venetian opera

Many methods of time-keeping were used in the Venetian Republic. Narratives that depend on primary sources, as this one does, must take account of the variability of Venice's many vocabularies for time. The multiplicity of descriptions remained in effect until the fall of the Republic to Napoleon in 1797, but many commentators have failed to recognize this plurality.

The most valuable aspect of these labels is that so many shed light on germain considerations including the seasonal availability of patrons and composers, the hidden analogies of libretti, and the seasonal reciprocity of improvised commedia and opera. Further exploration the resonances between them is warranted.

Interpreting the modern year or its equivalent is a fundamental cause of conflict between sources. According to the Church, the New Year fell on 1 January. In the civic records of the Venetian Republic, it began on 1 March. Until after 1730, most operas opened in January or February, causing widespread confusion. Librettists, censors, and printers were at liberty to make their interpretation, and each could specify the year independently in the same libretto.

Theatrical seasons and periods

The most effective means of clarification has been to think of the calendar in the ways the Venetians did, which was in terms of the accounting year, the liturgical year, and the civic year. Among these, the liturgical year is essential to interpreting dates in news reports, the accounting year to understanding contractual agreements and identifying detached fragments of music. It is the strong imprint of the liturgical year that requires the subdivision of theatrical seasons into theatrical periods.

The most widely theatrical season was Carnival, but its dates were not as liberal as many sources claim. The first day of Carnival was selected anew each year by the Venetian Council of Ten. Start dates varied somewhat with the moveable feast of Easter, which ranged over a 35-day span. The stringent Lenten period (forty days plus six intervening Sundays) followed immediately. From the point of view of the Council, Carnival imposed the need for surveillance of crowd behavior. This was because Carnival allowed the use of masks (which were required in theaters) from after the midday meal, while in other periods of the year masks could not be worn until sundown.

Parsing the theatrical year

The most important influence over the divisions of theatrical periods was the moveable date of Easter. The liturgical calendar interspersed fixed and moveable feasts. As a Christian feast, Easter celebrated Christ's triumph over death. It was marked on the first Sunday after the first full moon after 21 March. While festive, it was preceding of forty days (not counting six intervening Sundays) of penitence known as Lent. Feasts dependent on the date of Easter ranged over a 35-day span. These included Ascension forty days later and Pentecost fifty days after Easter.

Complements of theatrical seasons and periods

The primary theatrical season was Carnival, but as opera evolved and audiences grew, performers were pressed to expand the calendar and colonize venues outside Venice. The complementary patterns that emerge from comparing (a) opera in Venice with opera in nearby provinces and (b) opera and other kinds of theatrical and musical entertainment in Venice argue strongly for the importance of recognizing theatrical seasons and periods in other venues.

A further benefit is that parsing the repertory into theatrical periods enables us to recognize the subtle dramaturgical links between subjects and seasons. Composers grew continuously more aware of the primacy of having one's opera scheduled during the formal period of Carnival. It brought greater prestige and publicity than other times of year. Mozart, Rossini, and Mascagni are among those whose memoirs specifically comment on the enviable status that accrued to composers of Carnival operas in other venues.