The operatic centre of Europe
Six years after the premiere of Orfeo, its composer took up residence in Venice, having gained the prestigious post of maestro di cappella at the Basilica of St. Mark’s. Meanwhile Monteverdi had composed another opera for the Gonzaga court in Mantua, the now lost Arianna of 1608, but in Venice there was at this stage little opportunity for opera composition and production by Monteverdi, or indeed anyone else. The constitutional position of the Doge as an elected rather than absolute ruler placed severe financial constraints on his personal state expenditure, making his circumstances very different to those of the wealthy autocrats who ruled Italian dukedoms. Patronage therefore devolved upon Venetian aristocrats. One of them, Girolamo Mocenigo, a member of a patrician family whose ancestors had provided several Doges in earlier centuries, commissioned two dramatic works from Monteverdi. Although Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda hardly qualifies as an opera (Monteverdi later published it in his Eighth Book of Madrigals), the preface to the score does explicitly state that the work was intended to be performed with dramatic action, as indeed it was at the first performance in the Palazzo Dandolo on the Riva degli Schiavoni (today the Albergo Danieli) in 1624 or 1625. There is no doubting the operatic status of Proserpina rapita, the other work Monteverdi composed for Mocenigo. Composed for the wedding of the nobleman’s daughter Giustiniana on the 16 April 1630, it is sadly yet another of Monteverdi’s operas to have been lost. A ‘favola’ set to a libretto by Giulio Strozzi, contemporary witnesses described the performance that followed the sumptuous banquet at the Palazzo Dandolo as being set “in music with most perfect voices and instruments, with aerial apparitions, changes of scene and so on”.
Proserpina rapita is the first recorded ‘court opera’ to have been given in Venice and it remained an exception. By the time of its first performance, the focus of operatic production had switched decisively from Florence to Rome, where it shared the stage, not infrequently indistinguishably, with sacred dramatic presentations. During the 1620s and 30s a stream of lavishly produced court operas were presented in the great palaces of influential and wealthy Roman patrons. The scores, the work of composers such as Domenico Mazzochi, Steffano Landi (whose La morte d’Orfeo, recorded on Accent, has an important place in the history of Orphic operas) and the Rossis, Michelangelo and Luigi, were frequently published in lavishly produced editions celebrating the cultural largesse of such patrons.
The hegemony enjoyed by Roman opera was destined to be short lived, its impetus undermined by the death in 1644 of Pope Urban VIII (Cardinal Maffeo Berberini) and a new development that would result in Venice becoming the operatic centre of Europe. Its roots lie in the upsurge in popularity of commedia dell’arte that swept the city during the 1630s. During the earlier years of that decade the noble families of Venice entered into competition to build theatres in which such entertainments were staged before socially mixed audiences, the small, often hastily erected buildings marking the prestige of the family concerned by taking their name. Later many of these buildings would be more substantially reconstructed and some were destined to take their place in operatic history. Pride of place must go to the newly-built Teatro Tron, today generally known as the S Cassiano after the district in which it was located, which in 1737 witnessed the world’s first public performance of an opera. The music of the work in question, L’ Andromeda is now lost, as is that of the other operas written by its composer Francesco Manelli. It was Manelli, working in conjunction with the librettist of L’ Andromeda, Benedetto Ferrari (also a composer whose oratorio Sansone is one of the great rediscoveries of recent years—see Goldberg 13) who was responsible for instigating the feverish operatic activity that ensued in the following years. By the end of 1639 three further operas by Manelli had appeared, the last of them staged at the SS Giovanni e Paolo theatre built by the famous Grimani family and opened at the beginning of that year under Ferrari’s management.
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