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".
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 vocabulary. 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 fundamental contribution to the problem of dating operas is that while church officials all over italy considered the year to start on January 1, Venetian officials held it to start on March 1. Theaters were secular enterprises, but many librettists and composers were priests. Printers had no fixed preferences. The result was rampant contradictions of the quoted year in printed libretti.
Standard approaches 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.
====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.