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". 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.