Venetian Opera Productions: Analytical Views
Opera had debts to medieval pageantry and many other sequential entertainments over several centuries. The component parts were always in flux. The modern expectation of a single aim or intended meaning to which each component contributes does not suit the genre. The possibility if combining selected components into particular perspectives can yield fascinating results. A representative series of examples appears here.
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. 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.
Most operas had a variety of musical components--arias and recitatives, overtures or sinfonias and ritornellos, and dance numbers (balli) or pieces for other miscellaneous group performances (see Incidental items). In productions, these could vary from one day to the next.
Incidental items (Entr'actes)
Operas staged in Venice were often adorned with a miscellany of incidental items. All of them were musical, but some were more elaborate and carefully constructed than others. Up to 1700 the types of incidental items was varied. Mock battles were popular at San Giovanni Grisostomo, but balli eventually eclipsed most other short interludes at other theaters. The performers of incidental items were usually separate from those of the featured opera. The low survival rate of scores reflects this. After 1700, comic intermezzi were especially popular at San Cassiano and Sant'Angelo.
Musical score survival
A relative paucity of operas survive from the century 1660-1760. Percentages vary from theater to theater.
Musical fragment survival
Many arias detached from their original contexts were circulated in manuscript between the 1680s and the 1720s. They are often identified only by singer or by the position of the parent work (first, second, third) in one theater's "season". Expressions such as "the second work at San Cassiano" are the only clue to the parent. Sinfonias opening an opera sometimes enjoyed independent circulation as "overtures" or "symphonies".
Readers seeking more exact information about fragments 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) decodes 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 versions 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 the discrepancies of content are likely to be.
Most prolific composers
Underneath the numbers looking across the century, the profiles for individual decades create very different impressions.
Texts
Librettists were slightly less numerous than composers, but over time the number of texts that were reworked by third parties blurred the sense of literary authorship.
Literary genres
Venetian operas were overwhelming offered as drammi per musica, but experimentation tested its boundaries at intervals. The dramma per musica remained the dominant genre of Venetian opera until 1745, when the dramma giocoso or opera buffa began to attract a new audience. Pastorals were sometimes performed in the spring and autumn. The five-act tragedia per musica was a predilection of the 1690s, especially at San Cassiano and San Giovanni Grisostomo.
Most prolific librettists
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.
Theaters
Because the number of operas produced during this century was so great, theaters acquired 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 military campaigns and fires.
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 figures. Such negotiations brought many powerful people into the city for several generations. By 1730, however, Venice's critical position was eclipsed by the rise of Vienna and the Hapsburgs and by expanding 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 the lease-holders could remain the same, while the occupants had inherited or subleased their spaces. Dedicatees named in printed libretti offer the best proxy for patronage. Not uncommonly they visited Venice with large entourages of family members or military regiments that could fill a tier or two of the boxes. Expectations of such crowds had a pronounced influence on a work's content and style of presentation.
Dedicatees by region
Prominent Venetians were clearly a force in the continuation of opera but their incluence dwindled as time went on. Dedications were motivated by the expectation of recognition or remuneration but were dependent on visitor traffic.
Parsing the calendar of Venetian opera
Conflicting systems of time-keeping contribute the greatest element of complexity but also the most revealing insights into the totality of opera productions. According to the Church, the New Year fell on 1 January. In the civic records of the Republic of Venice, it began on 1 March. Until after 1730, most operas opened in January or February, causing later historians widespread confusion. Librettists, censors, and printers were at liberty to make their interpretation, and each could specify the year independently in the same libretto.
Narratives that depend on primary sources must take account of the variability of Venice's many vocabularies for time and establish the sympathies of the narrator. A multiplicity of descriptions remained in effect until the fall of the Republic (1797), but many commentators have failed to recognize this.
The most valuable aspect of these labels is that so many, when compared, shed light on the seasonal availability of patrons and composers, the hidden analogies of libretti, and seasonal reciprocity with other forms of entertainment, notably serenatas in the summer and prose commedia during the autumn and winter seasons in some theaters.
Theatrical seasons and periods
The most effective means of clarification has been to think of the calendar in the ways 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. (In historical perspective, periods gradually coalesced into "seasons".)
Theaters were permitted to open only by explicit permission of the heads of the Council of Ten. The number of periods increased slowly over the century. The number of seasons was fixed at three--autumn, winter, and spring. These did not precisely correspond to the astronomical seasons used in calendars today. The autumn season was influenced by patterns of adjournment (usually early October) and convening (early December). Even these dates were often indicated by correspondence to a liturgical occasion--St. Luke's (adjournment of the Great Council of all noblemen), St. Martin's (reopening of the Council and numerous lesser bodies, and St. Andrew's (the formal opening of the highest bodies of government).
The most famous 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.
The character of works performed was often influenced by the nature of the theatrical period to which it belonged. Long before the establishment of opera, St. Martin's was associated in Continental Europe with certain festivities that could be highlighted by the appearance of a traveling commedia troupe. In Venice the St. Stephen's period was highly popular, but it was less festive than Carnival, when sumptuary rules were eased and masking was permitted in the afternoon. St. Luke's and the eventual Ascension season both complemented commercial motives. The last few days of Carnival (labeled Giovedì Grasspo [Fat Thursday]) barely counted as a season because so many competing events were occurring. At San Giovanni Griostomo the final night (a Monday, because the day advanced at sunset) began with the first act of the designated work but continued with a feast and a ball in the theater.
Parsing the theatrical/non-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 (the spring equinox). 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.
The accounting year began on the first day of Lent. New contracts were written, especially for librettists and much sought singers, for the following autumn and winter. (The spring period, that began in 1720, had separate contractual conventions.) Overdue accounts from the previous season had to be settled by the first day of Lent.
Complements of theatrical seasons and periods
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 (b) opera in nearby provinces is reflected in comparisons of (c) Venetian opera generally with off-season entertainments in Venice.
Parsing the repertory into theatrical periods enables us to recognize subtle dramaturgical links between types of subjects and theatrical periods. Composers grew continuously more aware of the prestige of having one's opera scheduled during the formal period of Carnival and came to argue vociferously for their latest works to be staged then. Carnival works enjoyed greater publicity, and probably elicited greater attendance, than works performed in other periods. Mozart, Rossini, and Mascagni are among those whose memoirs express anxiety about being assigned to a lesser slot in the calendar!