The Documents of a History

As the case of Poppea attests, the distinctive and cohesive character of the Venetian operatic tradition is exemplified by the nature of its surviving documents. These fall into two general categories: manuscript and printed, categories that themselves implicate a set of further distinctions, between the musical and the textual, the professional and the public. The manuscripts, that is, the scores, representing the professional side of things, are preserved, if at all, largely by accident, by virtue of the fact that they were reused. Relatively few have, in fact, survived. The nature and purpose of the printed sources, the public documents, primarily librettos, were very different. Quite apart from their practical function of serving the audience during performances, librettos were deliberately created for the purpose of documenting the individual work. Published in large enough numbers to have ensured the survival today of several complete sets, they record the chronological development of Venetian opera from year to year. The sheer accumulation of librettos—there were nine after four seasons, thirty-five after ten, and over one hundred by 1667— provides concrete evidence of the momentum of opera mania in seventeenth-century Venice.

In addition to appealing to the collectionist tendencies of a number of letterati , such as Apostolo Zeno, whose complete sets have come down to us,^[46] the

[46] The Biblioteca Marciana in Venice possesses three such sets. The most nearly complete, containing a number of second editions, and possibly from the collection of the eighteenth-century bibliographer Antonio Groppo, is Dramm. 907-1126, which covers the years 1637-1796. The others are Dramm.3448-3578 (1637-1750), from Zeno's collection; and Dramm. 1127-1418 (1637-1836), from the Rossi legacy. Another virtually complete series is the Cicogna Collection at the Casa Goldoni. There are several others outside Venice, including I-Rig, I-MOe, US-Wc Schatz, and US-Lau. The most comprehensive listing of librettos, which includes the location of multiple copies, is found in Claudio Sartori, "Primo tentativo di catalogo unico dei libretti italiani a stampa fino all'anno 1800" (MS in the Ufficio Ricerca Fondi Musicali, Milan).

librettos inspired another type of historical record: the operatic chronology, for which they supplied the basic source material. The earliest of these publications, neither yet a chronology nor devoted exclusively to operatic or Venetian texts, was explicitly designed to take stock of the rapidly growing genre of the libretto. Leone Allacci's Drammaturgia , published in Rome in 1666, declares its purpose in the printer's preface: to preserve an undervalued and therefore highly perishable product:

It often happens that, after being read, librettos are rejected, and they are no longer valued, because of the silly things that are found in most of them, so that copies are lost, and not only is the memory of those obscured, who with great effort and study made some name for themselves, but also their countries and families. Since, in the opinion of some, [librettos] are in no small part derived from antiquity, and indistinguishable from one another in invention as well as subject matter, there having been no new' discoveries [of ancient plays], they have become so tediously similar in subject matter, usually concerning the disappearance of babies or children during the taking or sacking of a city, that readers assume they have already read them, and they intentionally abstain from seeing them, clearly recognizing them, as Burchiello said, to be patchworks of old rags, twisted and pilfered from here and there, without beginning or end, head or tail. (Appendix II.4)^[47]

Allacci's volume, which underwent an ambitious revision in the eighteenth century,^[48] was soon followed by the first true chronology. This was the work of the Dalmatian Cristoforo Ivanovich, himself the author of several librettos. "Le memorie teatrali di Venezia," published in Venice in 1681 (2d ed. 1688), formed an appendix to Ivanovich's Minerva al tavolino , a collection of letters on the subject of the wars against the Turks.^[49] By providing a list of the dramas performed in Venice, Ivanovich, like Allacci before him, hoped to rescue them from oblivion: "From the reading of the dramas cited in the catalogue of the present 'Memorie,' posterity, for various reasons, will heap greater praise upon the authors than they received when their works were first performed" (Appendix II.6ff). Ivanovich's catalogue forms the climax of a lengthy essay on the

[47] Although he lived in Rome, Allacci maintained close connections with operatic life in Venice. He belonged to the operatically important Venetian Ac-cademia degli Incogniti (see ch. 2 below).

[48] Drammaturgia di Leone Allacci accresciuta e continuata fino all'anno MDCCL V (Venice: Giambattista Pasquali, 1755).

[49] On this important publication, see Thomas Walker, "Gli errori di Minerva al tavolino : Osservazioni sulla cronologia delle prime opere veneziane," in Venezia e il melodramma nel seicento , ed. Maria Teresa Muraro (Florence, 1976), 7-20; see also Miloš Velimirovic^[*] , "Cristoforo Ivanovich from Budva, the First Historian of the Venetian Opera," ZVUK [Yugoslav Music Review ] 77-78 (1967): 135-45.

origins and contemporary practice of opera in Venice, which draws, in large measure, upon the prefaces of the printed librettos. His discussion of Venetian operatic practice remains by far the most explicit and reliable we have; and his chronology served as the foundation of all subsequent chronologies, notably those of the eighteenth-century writers Giovanni Carlo Bonlini (1730) and Antonio Groppo (1745).^[50]

These chronologies, generally trustworthy with respect to titles, authors, theaters, and dates of performances, are less dependable for information not regularly available in printed librettos—most crucially, composers' names. Indeed, Ivanovich, particularly for the years preceding his arrival in Venice in 1657, tended to attribute music rather haphazardly (especially to Cavalli). Many of his attributions, repeated by Bonlini and Groppo, have remained unexamined, unchallenged, and uncorrected until recently.^[51]

Another still insufficiently acknowledged shortcoming of all three volumes is their failure to recognize the inconsistent application of dates in the librettos they catalogued. That is, they ignored the whole problem of more veneto , dating Venetian style. Because the Venetian year traditionally began on I March, Carnival (and the opera season coincident with it), generally over by the end of February, was considered to belong to the previous year. Thus a libretto dated 1640 m.v . actually belonged to 1641, modern style (or 1640-41 if it appeared before I January). But not all Venetian dates were given more veneto . This is made clear in some cases by a discrepancy between title page and dedication date; the libretto of Cavalli's Giasone , for example, bears the date 1649 on its

[50] [Carlo Bonlini], Le glorie della poesia e della musica contenute nell'esatta notitia de teatri della cittá di Venezia (Venice: Bonarigo, [1730]) both acknowledged his debt to Ivanovich's catalogue and recognized its shortcomings: "Il primo, anzi l'unico, che fino ad ora abbia dato al Pubblico qualche succinta notizia in tal genere [dei' drami], fu il Dott. D. Cristoforo Iwanovich . . . il quale se ben Schiavon di natali, é andato del pari in dottrina, ed eruditione a i più fioriti In-gegni Italiani della sua etá. Questo famoso Auttore sul fine del Primo Tomo della sua Minerva al Tavolino , pone un breve Trattato, a cui da il nome di Memorie Teatrali della Cittá di Venezia, e quivi dopo aver dato in ristretto qualche contezza de' Teatri noti sino a nostri giorni, va tessendo un Catalogo de' Drami in Musica sino a' suoi giorni parimente in quelli rappresentati, e s'estende nella seconda Edizione delle sue virtuose fatiche sino all'Anno 1687. Ma questo Catalogo in alcuni Drami riesce non poco fallace, ed in altri ancora mancante, cosicché non é giunto a quella perfezione, che sarebbe desiderabile in una tale materia. E per veritá fattone un rigoroso rincontro con i Libretti ch'abbiamo in stampa, vi si scorgono circa quaranta sbagli di non poco rilevo, particolarmente nella notizia non ben esatta de' veri Maestri di Musica" (preface, 4-5). Antonio Groppo, Catalogo di tutti i drammi per musica (Venice: Groppo, 1745), referred to all three of his predecessors, Al-lacci, Ivanovich, and Bonlini, but without criticizing them (preface, 5-6). A more recent chronology, largely based on the others, is Livio Niso Galvani [Giuseppe Salvioli], I teatri musicali di Venezia nel secolo XVII, 1637-1700 (Milan, 1879). See also the chronology in Francesco Caffi, "Storia della musica teatrale in Venezia" (MS I-Vnm, It. IV, 747-49 [10462-65]).

[51] On Ivanovich's shortcomings, see Walker, "Errori." Walker's corrections resulted in a substantial reduction in the number of works ascribed to Cavalli, from forty-two (nearly a third of them missing) to the much more reasonable number of thirty-three (only five missing); the definitive list is given in Thomas Walker, "Cavalli," New Grove 4: 24-34.

title page, but the dedication is dated 30 January 1648. Clearly, then, the date on the title page should be read in modern style, that of the dedication more veneto ; the work was performed during the 1648-49 season, not that of 1649-^[50] . Other cases are not so clear and can be resolved only through triangulation, using evidence external to the librettos themselves.^[52]

In contrast to the librettos, whose preservation is virtually complete, the proportion of surviving scores is small. In particular, very few scores remain from the first—and, arguably, the most decisive—decade of operatic activity in Venice. Of the nearly fifty operas performed there between 1637 and 1650, music has survived for only thirteen, and by only three of the dozen or so composers known to have been involved: Monteverdi, Cavalli, and Sacrati.^[53] No music at all survives from the operas of either Ferrari or Manelli, two of the most important composers of the decade, who were largely responsible for creating the musical style that came to be associated with opera in Venice.^[54]

Through various circumstances, a number of the surviving scores were dispersed among libraries throughout Europe—including those in Modena, Florence, Naples, Oxford, Paris, and Vienna. Most of them duplicate scores held in the primary repository for this music, the Contarini Collection of the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice.^[55] The 113 opera scores in the Contarini Collection (the period covered extends to 1684) owe their preservation to the efforts of two individuals: in the first place to Francesco Cavalli (1601-76), the com-

[52] Such confusion has affected the dating of works as important as Monteverdi's late operas. According to Ivanovich, three operas by Monteverdi were performed in 1641: Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (S. Cassiano), Le nozze d'Enea e Lavinia (SS. Giovanni e Paolo), and Arianna (S. Moisé); and one in 1643, L'incoronazione di Poppea . Bonlini, who tried to take more veneto into account by introducing what he called the autumn season (for those operas that began before the first of January but continued to be performed until the end of Carnival), revised Ivano-vich's chronology, ascribing Arianna to 1640, Il ritorno and Le nozze to 1641, and Poppea to autumn 1642. In fact, however, the coordination of various kinds of evidence permits a still more reasonable chronology, the one assumed on p. 18 above, which allows for the effort involved in readying a production for the stage. Arianna and Ritorno were performed in 1639-40; Le nozze (and Ritorno revived) in 1640-41 (the preface to the scenario of Le nozze mentions Il ritorno as having taken place the previous year); and Poppea in 1642-43 (scenario dated 1643). In the present study, all dates are given in modern style unless otherwise indicated.

[53] Sacrati joined this elite group only very recently, with the important discovery by Lorenzo Bianconi of a score of La finta pazza , which will be published shortly in facsimile in Drammaturgia musicale veneta.

[54] We can, of course, extrapolate some knowledge of their style from their non-operatic music, as Alessandro Magim did in his thesis at the University of Bologna, "Indagini stilistiche intorno L'incoronazione di Poppea " (1984): esp. ch. 3; see also id., "Le monodie di Benedetto Ferrari e L'incoronazione di Poppea : Un rilevamento stilistico comparativo," RIM 21 (1987): 266-99; and Curtis, preface to L'incoronazione di Poppea .

[55] The only two scores from before 1650 not duplicated in the Contarini Collection are Il ritorno (A-Wn 18763), which may have been brought to Vienna by Benedetto Ferrari, and La finta pazza at the Isola Borromeo (see Lorenzo Bianconi, preface to Giulio Strozzi and Francesco Sacrati, La finta pazza , ed. Lorenzo Bianconi and Thomas Walker, Drammaturgia musicale veneta 1 [in press]).

poser best represented in the collection. Near the end of his career, probably about 1670, Cavalli apparently arranged to have his operas recopied with a view to preserving them for posterity.^[56] He clearly regarded them as important property, a significant part of his legacy, and made special provision for them in his will.^[57] These fair copies, plus some of his autographs (which, we may assume, would also have been copied had he lived longer), eventually found their way into the Contarini Collection.^[58]

The other collezionista responsible for the preservation of the scores was Marco Contarini himself, patrician and patron of opera, who built two theaters for private operatic performances at his villa at Piazzola, just northwest of Venice. Between 1679 and sometime before his death in 1689—probably in 1684—Contarini gradually and purposefully amassed a collection of scores.^[59] Most of the scores in his collection date from earlier than 1679, the year his operatic productions began, and so cannot be connected with his own performances. Indeed, we should regard the entire Contarini Collection, fair copies as well as autographs (figs. 4, 5), as commemorative rather than functional documents, reflecting the desire of both Cavalli and Contarini to preserve a musical heritage.

Imperfect and incomplete as the musical sources may be, they far exceed those for the visual component of these operas. For an idea of what the works

[56] His latest scores were apparently copied first; and then the scribe seems to have started at the beginning and worked forward as far as 1650. On the copying of Cavalli's manuscripts, see Glover, Cavalli , 65-72. The matter is exhaustively treated in Jeffery, "Autograph Manuscripts," passim.

[57] Cavalli's will distinguished between specially bound volumes (the fair copies) and some other scores, which were left to his student Caliari. The document is transcribed in Taddeo Wiel, "Francesco Cavalli (16O2-1676) e la sua musica scenica," Nuovo archivio veneto , n.s., 28 (1914): 142-50. The details are summarized in Glover, Cavalli , 31, and in Jeffery, "Autograph Manuscripts," 81-86. Cavalli's library must also have included the Contarini copy of Poppea , which shows evidence of his hand (see Jeffery, "Autograph Manuscripts," 114). Osthoff's suggestion that Cavalli directed the Naples revival of Poppea ("Neue Beobachtungen," 137-38) has not been substantiated. The presence of his hand and some of his music in the manuscript merely indicates that he was involved in some way with the version of the opera that was eventually performed in Naples.

[58] The Contarini Collection, which included material other than opera scores as well, was acquired by the Marciana from Contarini's distant heirs in 1839; see Taddeo Wiel, I codici musicali contariniani del secolo XVII nella R. Biblioteca di San Marco in Venezia (Venice, 1888; repr. Bologna: Forni, 1969). Some clue to the order in which Contarini acquired the manuscript scores is provided by a handwritten list of operas found on the inside cover of a printed volume of Frescobaldi keyboard toccatas now in the Biblioteca Marciana (I-Vnm Musica 39). According to that list, dated 14 June 1681, which includes none of the Cavalli autographs, most of the scores were acquired in 1681 and 1682, and a few in 1683. (The list also includes a number of works not in the present Contarini Collection.) See Glover, Cavalli , 67-68. The most complete discussion of the development of the Contarini Collection, including a list of its contents, is found in Giovanni Morelli and Thomas Walker, "Migliori plettri," preface to Aurelio Aureli and Francesco Lucio, Medoro , ed. Giovanni Morelli and Thomas Walker, Drammaturgia musicale veneta 4 (Milan, 1984), CXL-CXLVI.

[59] Contarini apparently employed his own copyist for some of them, in particular, those in Hand A (according to Morelli and Walker, "Migliori plettri," CXLV).

4.
Francesco Cavalli,  Gli amori d'Apollo e di Dafne , I-Vnm, It. IV, 404 (= 9928), f. 85v (copy).

5.
Francesco Cavalli, Oristeo , I-Vnm, It. IV, 367 (=9891), f. 41 (autograph).

actually looked like on stage, the historian is forced to rely primarily on descriptions in librettos and to extrapolate from the few published engravings of scene designs.^[60]

Beyond the primary source materials—the librettos and the scores—other kinds of documents bearing on the history and development of opera in seventeenth-century Venice are preserved in various archives. The most substantial and important are two large buste in the Archivio di Stato, Venice, known by students of the period as 188 and 194.^[61] Comprising hundreds of folios each, they are the papers of Marco Faustini, who served as an impresario at various theaters from 1651 to 1668, working with every important composer, librettist, and singer of the period. His papers, which cover earlier years as well, include a wide variety of documents: from correspondence with agents, singers, and composers (Cesti, Cavalli, and Ziani) to contracts and theater budgets. Collectively, they supply the basis for a richly detailed history of opera during the period of his activity.

Other notable and more recently discovered Venetian archival sources include two buste of Cavalli documents from the Archivio S. Lorenzo^[62] and one from the Monastero di Sta. Maria dell'Orazion a Malamocco in the Archivio di Stato,^[63] and the theater documents in the Archivio Vendramin, now housed at the Casa Goldoni.^[64] Still to be fully mined is a cache of documents found in the State Archives in Hannover among the correspondence of Johann Friedrich, duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg. The duke was an important political ally, sup-

[60] The stage designs for Venetian productions of this period were rarely published; but those that were are frequently reproduced. See, for example, Per Bjurström, Giacomo Torelli and Baroque Stage Design (Stockholm, 1961); Simon Towneley Worsthorne, Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera (Oxford, 1954, rev. ed. 1968); Ludovico Zorzi, Maria Teresa Muraro, Gianfranco Prato, and Elvi Zorzi, eds., I teatri pubblici di Venezia (secoli XVII-XVIII ), exhib. cat. (Venice, 1971); Franco Mancini, Maria Teresa Muraro, and Elena Povoledo, eds., Illusione e prattica teatrale , exhib. cat. (Venice, 1975); Héléne Leclerc, Venise et l'avénement de l'opéra public à l'âge baroque (Paris, 1987).

[61] Scuola Grande di S. Marco, buste 188 and 194, henceforth cited as b. 188 and b. 194. They were first mentioned in 1887 by Bartolomeo Cecchetti, "Carte relative ai teatri di S. Cassiano e dei SS. Giovanni e Paolo," Archivio veneto 34 (1887): 246. See also Wiel, "Francesco Cavalli," 135-36 n. 2, and Henry Pruniéres, Cavalli et l' opßra vénitien au XVII siécle (Paris, 1931), 305-6 n. 3. Hermann Kretzschmar, to whom Wiel sent transcriptions, published an article about them in 1907: "Beiträge zur Geschichte der venetianischen Oper," Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters 14 (1907): 71-81. They were inventoried, somewhat inexactly, by Remo Giazotto, "La guerra dei palchi," NRMI 1 (1967): 245-86, 465-508; 3 (1969): 906-33; and quoted extensively in Bruno Brunelli, "L'impresario in angustie," Rivista italiana del dramma 3 (1941): 311-41; Remo Giazotto, "Nel CCC anno della morte di Antonio Cesti: Ventidue lettere ritrovate nell'Archivio di Stato di Venezia," NRMI 3 (1969): 496-512; and Carl Schmidt, "An Episode in the History of Venetian Opera: The Tito Commission (1665-66)," JAMS 31 (1978): 442-66.

[62] I-Vas, Archivio S. Lorenzo, buste 23 and 24. These are discussed in Glover, Cavalli , ch. I, as well as elsewhere.

[63] Busta 3; formerly part of the S. Lorenzo archive. These documents contain important information on Cavalli at S. Cassiano; see Giovanni Morelli and Thomas Walker, "Tre controversie intorno al San Cassiano," in Venezia e il melodrama nel seicento , ed. Maria Teresa Muraro (Florence, 1976), 97-120.

[64] I-Vcg, Archivio Vendramin 42 F 1-16.

plier of arms, and frequent visitor to Venice during this period.^[65] These papers include letters and reports from the duke's agents in Venice, among them the composer Sartorio and the librettists Pietro Dolfin and Nicolò Beregan, who were entrusted with hiring musicians for him. A particularly rich source of operatic gossip is provided by the letters of the duke's secretary in Venice, Francesco Maria Massi.^[66]

Travelers to Venice, who formed an important component of the operatic audience, were occasionally stimulated to comment on the operatic scene in their letters or diaries. Few as they are, these comments shed considerable light on the place of opera in the life of the city.^[67] Somewhat more formal are the weekly avvisi reporting the news from various cities that circulated around Italy and abroad in manuscript and, eventually, printed form, from the late sixteenth century on. Several series of manuscript avvisi from the late seventeenth century have been preserved, in which information about opera is part of the detailed description of everyday Venetian events.^[68] A number of issues of the Parisian journal Le Mercure galant , from the same period, contain lengthy reports of opera in Venice.^[69]

All of these sources, taken together, allow us to assemble a history of opera in Venice. The most fundamental of them, however, are the printed librettos. In regularly supplying dates and names—of patrons, theaters, librettists, sometimes of composers, singers, and stage designers—as well as the actual texts that were sung, they provide the foundation of that history. But they provide much more. Their prefaces and dedications are rich in information. Their form and

[65] Niedersächsisches Haupt-Staatsarchiv Hannover, Aktes-Korrespondenzen italienischer Kardinäle und anderer Personen, besonders Italiener an Herzog Johann Friedrich, Cal. Br. vols. 1-6 (624-29). On the importance of the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg to Venetian political—and operatic—life, see Bianconi and Walker, "Production," 269-70; also, in passing, Craig Monson, "Giulio Cesare in Egitto from Sartorio (1677) to Handel (1724)," ML 66 (1985): 313-37.

[66] There were similar correspondences with other foreign princes interested in Venetian opera, such as the duke of Modena and Mattias de' Medici (archival material in I-MOs Particolari and I-Fas); also I-Rvat (Archivio Chigi), I-Vmc (correspondence of Polo Michiel), I-R (Archivio Colonna).

[67] Such figures include John Evelyn (quoted on p. 9 above), Sir Philip Skippon (Journey through the Low Countries, Germany, Italy, and France [London, 1682; repr. 1752], 520-21); and Francesco de' Pannocchi-eschi; see Molmenti, "Venezia alla metá del sec. XVII," 313, 317. See also Alexandre-Toussaint de Limojon, Sier de Saint-Disdier, La Ville et la Répub-lique de Venise (Paris: Barbin, 1680).

[68] A number of series are preserved in Venice at the Biblioteca Marciana and the Archivio di Stato. For a summary of these, see Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Pallade veneta: Writings on Music in Venetian Society, 1650-1750 (Venice, 1985), chs. I and 2.

[69] Written anonymously by Chassebras de Cremailles during the 1680s, they were collected and republished by Pierre d'Ortigue de Vaumoriére in Lettres sur toutes sortes de sujets (Paris: J. Guignard, 1690). These descriptions are quoted extensively in Harris Sheridan Saunders, Jr., "The Repertoire of a Venetian Opera House (1678-1714): The Teatro Grimani di San Giovanni Grisostomo," Ph.D. diss. (Harvard University, 1985), ch. I. The earliest surviving sources of this kind reporting on opera in Venice date from the early 1660s; they appeared in Il rimino , a newssheet published in Rimini that was a compilation of avvisi from various cities. See Nevio Matteini, Il "Rimino," una delle prime "gazette" d'Italia: Saggio storico sui primordi della stampa (Bologna, 1967).

content change with the developing genre. Carefully read (on and between the lines) and considered in their entirety—from their actual poetic content (form, subject matter, and organization) to the layout of their title pages, from the publishers' and authors' prefaces to the dramatis personae and last-minute addenda—they offer a precise record of public opera at the most important period of its development, just as it was taking shape. It is against the facts and running commentary provided by the librettos that all the other sources, including the music, yield their full historical meaning.