Venetian Opera Productions: Field List

These fields are searchable at https://venop.ccarh.org.

General principles of order and organization

The table is ordered by sorting date—the exact date of opening of a production. Fields can be toggled on/off using the check-box. The time-span displayed can be limited by specifying the Max. year and Min. year.

The order in which production listings appear can be resorted according to the field of paramount interest by clicking on the field header. The Reset button restores the original order.

Basic parameters

Fields that identify the work and the production are straightforward. In cases in which a composer or librettist is not explicitly named in a libretto, the composer or librettist citation is "attributed".

• Title. Full work titles are given.
• Theater. Venice's nominal "six" theaters was cumulatively seven or eight. For a clear picture of their frequent changes of emphasis see these decade-to-decade comparisons.
• Composer. The usual number of composers per work was one. A revised work might have two. A few collaborations involved three. A pastiche could have many more, but they may not be named.
• Librettist. The usual number of librettists was one. The rise of works revised from earlier decades created many productions involving two.
• Dramatic genre. The usual number of acts was three. For exceptions, the number of acts is indicated in parentheses, e.g. (5).

Dropdown lists on the search form give cumulative numbers for each item in each the field.

Dates and seasons

One of the key differences between "works" and "productions" is guides to works aim to match surviving artifacts, such as libretti. Productions consist of clusters of performances. Here they are all calibrated to the calendar in use today.

• Sorting date. See Dating Venetian Operas.
• Modern year. Reaffirmation of the year in which the production opened.
• Theatrical season. Theatrical seasons were defined in multiple ways and were not necessarily coincident with astronomical seasons. See Dating Venetian Operas.

Entr'actes

The miscellany of dances, pantomimes, and choruses that were performed before or after each act were given by adjunct performers who were not identified until the middle of the eighteenth century. Each theater had different practices and preferences. Comic intermezzi were a specialty of Sant'Angelo and San Cassiano from 1706 onward. San Gio. Grisostomo shunned such frivolous fare and insisted on the dignity of balli. Many of its miscellaneous items were didactic in nature.

• balli. A significant percentage of all opera included two balli. In most cases they ended the first and second acts of a dramma per musica
• comic intermezzi. Comic intermezzi featured two performers—a man and a woman. One was rich, the other poor. The juxtapositions were unpredictable. Yet some cliches−−a poor serving maid and a rich widower or a rich widow and a young bachelor−−were quite common. In contrast to the opera itself, which often depicted heroes or heroines from antiquity, comic intermezzi portrayed the fabric of contemporary society.
• choruses. Numbers called cori were prevalent in the early decades of opera, but in the seventeenth century they always involved several individuals but were not necessarily sung. Some cori were dances or pantomimes. Choruses in the modern sense were few, with sporadic appearances in the mid-eighteenth century.
• prologues. Elaborate prologues for as many as ten performers preceded some operas in the mid-seventeenth century. Prologues featured gods who ruled over the earth and tangled the affairs of the mortals who dominated the principal work. They were in use long before public opera existed. Their details require separate treatment.

Musical sources and fragments

Musical sources, whether full or partial, are hyperlinked to RISM sigla. This allows the user to find the holding library. For detailed elements of a work, such as individual arias in an opera, please consult the RISM catalog. RISM is a global online catalogue of musical manuscripts and early printed music.

• Scores. Users should be aware that a date in parentheses following a specific musical source may refer to a later production, possibly one given in a venue other than Venice.
• Arias, other fragments. Arias that were circulated selectively were usually commissioned by someone (often a noblewoman) who could not attend the staging. Sinfonias were increasingly detached from operas and other large-scale works as the demand for instrumental music grew in the eighteenth century.

Patronage

Most libretti had a dedicatee who was a highly-placed person. In this table such a dedicatee is considered a "patron". Although such a person is named in the singular, he or she was until the middle of the eighteenth century accompanied by a large crowd of family members or other associates. While such groups were primarily aristocratic in the seventeenth century, they were increasingly bourgeoise in the eighteenth. According to travelers' accounts, women predominated in audiences. (Their male relatives were often drawn to gambling parlors, which began to operate within theaters by second quarter of the century.)

• Dedicatee. Usually one person, but sometimes husband and wife, parent and child. By the 1730s many works lacked dedicatees or his identities under collective designations. Titles "rose" over a lifetime, so that a title as given for one work might not serve for another given a decade or more later.
• Dedicatee jurisdiction. Diplomats were especially likely to be dedicatees. They were temporary residents in Venice, where the local nobility were asked to avoid familiar relationships with "foreigners".

Up to 1690, dedicatees were usually persons of high rank whose importance is unambiguous. A central fact of the relationships expressed over later decades through theatrical endorsements is that while the person's identity may be obscure, the plot may portrayed a delicate moment by analogy with a similar situation from a much earlier time. The many operas that introduce make-believe characters or disguised heirs allude to the rapid drop in the birthrate among the nobility, the redistribution of land, even the swapping of protected territories to ameliorate the sense of desperation that pervaded the dwindling supply of future heirs and heiresses. The symbiosis with comic intermezzi could be eminently clear.

• Dedicatee residence. Like titles, places of residence could change seasonally. Some indications given here are provisional. Diplomats who regularly took new assignments and spouses who came from a different jurisdiction as the husband are difficult to pin down.

Further information

The data presented here was developed for use in E. Selfrdge-Field, The New Chronology of Venetian Opera and related genres (1660-1760) (Stanford University Press, 2007).

The subtleties of seasons and dating systems are discussed in separately in the companion book (also E. Selfridge-Field) Song and Season: Science, culture, and theatrical time in early modern Venice (Stanford University Press, 2007).