Venetian Conservatism

By 1640, Roman librettos distinguished quite clearly between aria and recitative verse; they contained numerous closed forms (suggesting musical interruptions), especially strophic ones, in a wide variety of meters. By comparison, early Venetian librettos are remarkably undifferentiated in poetic style and exceptionally poor in arias. The first two Venetian librettos, Ferrari's Andromeda and La maga fulminata , contain very few hints of anything but recitative. Interruptions of the open-ended recitative style in Andromeda are limited to five strophic texts, all but one for chorus (i.e., structurally external to the dramatic narrative), and a few rhymed quatrains or otherwise patterned metric arrangements for Venere and Astrea that suggest some kind of closed setting. In La maga fulminata the number of such indications is somewhat greater, particularly in connection with the comic nurse, Scarabea. Her speeches are quite highly organized in meter and rhyme, lending them a sing-song quality that tends to emphasize their humor. In addition, strophic texts are provided for several characters, including the god Mercurio and the enchanted mortal Pallante. While strophic arrangements of settenario and endecasillabo lines are the most common formal signals, both librettos also contain individually closed sections marked by unusual metric organizations involving regular successions or alternations of short and long lines, many of them in versi misurati .^[6]

In light of the progress toward integration of music and drama in the works of his predecessors to the south, Ferrari's reticence toward closed forms is somewhat surprising. Lacking Manelli's settings, we cannot be sure, but the musical highlights of both operas seem to have been the choruses—or "madrigali," as they were called in the descriptions published soon after the works were performed. Apparently, the question of verisimilitude, rendered less urgent through experience in Florence and Rome, was still an issue in Venice. Perhaps this was because of the wider social range of the opera audience there, an audience that may have been less willing and able than its courtly counterparts in central Italy to suspend disbelief for entertainment's sake. ^[7]

Elaborate scenery and, of course, mythological plots should have helped to diffuse the need for strict verisimilitude or at least have expanded its limits. But, as I suggested earlier, perhaps even more than for the aristocratic Medici and Gonzaga audiences, satisfied by implicit connections between opera and classical drama, for Venetian hoi polloi identification with the actions on stage was a prerequisite for the appreciation—and success—of a work. Plays with songs, commedie , had been the usual fare of Venetian audiences during the early years of the century, and they provided the standard for verisimilitude in its early operas.

The absence of firm poetic distinctions between recitative and aria (and the limited number of arias) in early Venetian librettos may also be the result of another, quite opposite, influence, that of the academic librettists, who, as we have seen, took control of opera in Venice during its crucial formative period— the first decade. It was they who felt the pressures of classical precedent most strongly; and, aside from Ferrari's first two librettos, it is their texts that adhere most closely to notions of propriety that frequent arias would have violated. To be sure, whereas the problem of verisimilitude was attenuated considerably in mythological or magical contexts, it was especially troublesome in librettos that dealt with more realistic, historical subjects—subjects that the academic librettists introduced quite deliberately in their attempts to emulate the classical dramatists.^[8]