Venetian Opera Productions: Analytical Views
These analytical views give overviews of the main aspects of the Venetian opera repertory between 1660 and 1760.
Composers and 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.
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.
Source survival
A relative paucity of operas survive from the century 1660-1760. Percentages vary from theater to theater.
Musical sources
Librettists and Texts
Librettists were slightly less numerous, but over time the number of texts that were reworked by others made the overall picture of literary authorship fuzzy.
Literary genres
Venetian operas were overwhelming offered as drammi per musica, but experimentation tested the boundaries of the paradigm at intervals.
- Source survival [1]
Text recycling
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.
- Theater activities by decade [2]
Patronage
In 1660 Venice commanded a growing profile of mercantile and social importance. Its steadfast avoidance of political alliances rendered it neutral territory for the negotiation of treaties, marriages, and law suits involving non-Venetian territories. This brought many powerful figures into the city for several generations. By 1730, however, Venice's position as an international center was eroded by the rise of Vienna, and by 1760, however, many of the city's functions were fading as provincial centers gathered strength.