Venetian Opera Documentation

Documentation for https://venop.ccarh.org

The Historical Phenomenon, Then and Now

In our time most professionally-staged operas form part of the "standard repertory" that younger singers aspire to master. With few exceptions, the score, the roles, and the orchestra vary little from decade to decade if financial support is adequate. Title selections change from year to year and entirely new works are introduced as budgets permit, but most choices are drawn from a pool of well known works. More frequent changes may concern a manner of staging, scenery, costumes, and interpretations.

The sheer quantity of works produced in Venice between our target years--1660 to 1760--offers a striking contrast with the few dozen works "in repertory" today and the nearly 900 presented here. Not all the differences are as great as they at first appear. After 1700 new titles could be slapped onto familiar plots. This practice affected the music in unpredictable ways, including

• arias from an earlier version might be pieced together with new recitatives
• portions of the work could be cut or altered
• all the arias for a specific cast member could be changed to suit a demanding singer
• arias detached from one work could be introduced in another at performance

The printed text prepared for an opera might not fully represent the work as staged. By tracing productions, rather than works per se, we can relate a significant amount of rarely seen commentary with perforunctory title information to better understand the constantly shifting values and practices that supported performane.

Essential parameters of Venetian opera

From 1660 until the middle of the next century Venice usually had six theaters operating. (In prior decades the number fluctuated. Some theaters operated for only a few years.) Performances of a specific work were given on selected nights for two or three weeks. With regard to specific opening dates (see Sorting Date), some accommodation between theaters could occur, such as three works might open on consecutive days in an interleaved schedule. Ticket prices for an opening performance might be twice the normal amount. On a more general view, some ebbing and flowing of theatrical activity was associated with wars, pestilences, and economic conditions. (Venice was engaged in the a war in the Aegean--the "War in Candia"--from 1645 to 1667.) The more stable theaters might produce three works in a year in which Easter (and consequently that start of Lent) fell late, but two productions per theater per year was more likely. Operas were permitted only in periods of time uncontested by the Church and explicitly permitted by proclamation by the Republic.) The total number of days when opera was permitted was gradually expanded in the eighteenth century.

Performance cycles

Today we would expect all performances of the same work in the same season to match one another in script, score, cast, and scenery. This attachment to fixity contrasts sharply with the dynamics of Venetian theaters. While composer, librettist, singer, and other staff were hired to a full (autumn-winter) seasonal cycle, details of the content could change from night to night. Temperamental prime donne could appropriate favorite arias (and, rarely, costumes and props). "Suitcase arias" might appear over years in other works and other venues.

Going to the Opera in 1660 and 1760

The cultural distance between the years around 1600 and our own times is coniderable. In early Venetian theaters, important public figures rented or subleased a box for a season (or a lifetime) and bought a libretto at the door to follow the action onstage. Performances were permitted a maximum of four hours. The times of year when they were permitted was strictly regulated. Those lacking a box could rent a folding chair or stool by the evening. A small orchestra sat in front of the stage. In many cases two harpsichordists were present--one to accompany the singers, the other to accompany the orchestra.

The limiting dates of this table mark the confines of a period during which a huge increase in productions forced a degree of predictability on patterns of performance, with significant implications for composers and performers. The same time-span also coincides with an abundance of minutely dated references to opera proudctions in weekly news-sheets, an under-the-radar source of local news organized into vast networks throughout Europe. In their vast accumulation lies the resolution of many questions that are difficult to resovle using standard historial resources. See Dating Venetian Operas.

In modern life, periods considered appropriate for specific social activities are typically governed by commercial considerations and tacit agreements between potential competitors. In Venice, periods of opera production were governed by both civic and ecclesiastical dictates.

The Repertory

Apart from the publication of books, which was another thriving Venetian industry, the sheer volume of material makes an accessible data collection more valuable that a printed book. Many studies of Venetian opera concern a single work, or perhaps a small group of works likened by a common subject (Artaxerxes was a popular one) of a single composer (e.g., Legrenzi or Pollarolo) or a single theater (e.g. San Salvatore). The quantitative volume consists in printed libretti, which could change from night to night during a two- or three-week production period. The survival of music is, in contrast, erratic.

While the historic value of Venetian opera collectively is acknowledged, 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.

Before public opera (1637) dramas with music and such antecedents as Florentine court intermedi were considered appropriate for festive occasions, such as royal weddings. Yet only extravagant court weddings gave occasion to these elaborate presentations, which could continue for days or weeks and invlude many incidental entertainments, often including music. Aristocratic family odysseys to a wedding venue could consume weeks. An array of entertainments might be provided at the destination.

Despite the lack of musical familiarity today's public may have with titles here, a significant number of titles from the eighteenth century were to become familiar in later times.

Structure of this Resource

In contrast to printed bibliographies that are anchored to years, almost every work included here has a verified exact date of opening. Exact dates enable users to order events that concern them--as ordered by composer, librettist, theater, or performer.

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

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 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.

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.