(Re)Mediating Metastasio at 300
Chair(s): Martha Feldman (University of Chicago)
This panel revisits the libretti of eighteenth-century poet Pietro Metastasio in order to propose new approaches to the operatic interplay between poetic texts, musical settings, and embodied sonic experiences. The genre of Metastasian opera seria flourished in the half-century before the Enlightenment, meaning that its performance culture operated largely outside of the nineteenth-century work-concept that still haunts music-historiographical inquiry. But what is particularly intriguing about Metastasian opera within the history of sung drama is that it was indeed oriented around “works”: the libretti themselves. Contra opera’s now-standard value system, Metastasio’s libretti were effectively monumentalized, while the innumerable new musical settings thereof were regarded as necessarily ephemeral. And yet, as demonstrated by opera seria’s reception history, it was the music, together with the singers who gave it voice, that provided the genre’s main draw.
With these contradictions in mind, each of the papers in this panel considers how Metastasian opera helps us attend differently to the multiplicitous roles that musical sound can play, not only in opera, but in texted genres more broadly. The first paper argues that Metastasian opera repeatedly rewrote the distant past in order to generate new potentialities for the present; on this view, operatic song becomes a cross-temporal mode of virtual reality in which vocal sound wields worldmaking—and world-destroying—power. The second paper offers a general theory of composer-text relations by unpacking the key practices of Metastasian aria-setting: taking some of the poet’s most frequently re-set aria texts as case studies, the paper demonstrates how opera composers learned to “read” musical sounds and structures from the poetic page. The third paper situates Metastasian libretti at the nexus of sonic inscriptions and imagined soundings, exploring how the literary canonization of these operatic texts marks a crucial overlap between pre-Enlightenment modes of listening and emerging practices of silent reading.
In 2024, the tercentennial of Metastasio’s star-making turn with Didone abbandonata (Naples, 1724), we take the poet and the genre he emblematized as provocations for musing about the tensions that subtend music history writ large—tensions between inscription and prescription, convention and innovation, immediacy and preservation, temporality and history.
Presentations of the Symposium
Metastasio's Lyric Imperium
Jessica Gabriel Peritz
Yale University
How did opera seria—a showcase for castrati singing virtuosic arias about shipwrecks, shades, and sheep—become the most prestigious form of musical theater in eighteenth-century Europe? Opera seria, a.k.a. dramma per musica, had an astonishingly vast reach for a genre steeped in Italian poetics. Originating in Rome, opera seria soon spread from Naples to Venice, Vienna to London, St. Petersburg to Stockholm, Madrid to Rio de Janeiro. As is now well-established, that broad appeal was largely owed to the genre’s capacity for disseminating myths of political power (Feldman 2007), conveniently ratifying the authority of any institution with sufficient resources to stage it.
This paper proposes that opera seria could only present such myths because it proclaimed itself as devoted to re-presenting history. Established primarily through the libretti of Roman poet Pietro “Metastasio” Trapassi, the genre revolved around foundational scenarios of empire-building borrowed from the classical past: Alexander’s conquest of India, Aeneas’s transcontinental journey to found Rome, Caesar’s victory over Cato in Africa. Significantly, however, Metastasio ran these familiar histories through a presentist filter in order to accommodate the political and musical contingencies of his own time—and in so doing, he generated temporally hybrid renditions of the historical past. Through this self-reflexive anachrony and cross-temporal inverisimilitude, Metastasio's operas repeatedly rewrote history. And, by making these temporally hybrid histories sense-able through musical experience, Metastasian opera seria projected new potentialities for the present.
Exploring the temporal interplay within opera seria’s performance culture, this paper argues that Metastasian lyric drama dominated European stages for eighty years because it served as a musico-theatrical proxy for the contested legacy of Rome—the West’s “originary” empire—during a historical moment in which the very notions of both empire and history were up for grabs. Bringing together the literary framework of “imperium” (Fuchs 2015) with studies of history as performance (Nyong’o 2009; Schneider 2011) and theories of virtuality (King 2015; Deleuze 1968), the paper shows how opera seria turned the fantasy of a transhistorical Roman Empire into a virtual reality. All told, then, Metastasio’s lyric imperium invites us to interrogate how music makes history.
Markedness Correlations and the Constraints of Operatic Multimedia
Nathaniel Mitchell
Wesleyan University
When composers flick their eyes across a page of poetry, which musical materials spring to life fully formed and which are the product of careful decision-making? Metastasian opera seria provides a useful repertoire for investigating this question. Metastasio’s libretti were set hundreds of times by countless composers throughout the long eighteenth century, resulting in an incomparably large body of musical work through which to explore fundamental questions about opera’s multimedia codependences. This paper begins from the assumption that any shared musical features between otherwise non-interacting settings of Metastasian texts reflect converging understandings of a particular libretto’s affordances. From there, I propose a cognitive theory to explain how such common understandings emerge within a multimedia lingua franca.
As with Robert Hatten’s account of musical meaning (1994), this theory is rooted in the linguistic concept of markedness: the asymmetrical ascription of narrow meanings to structures that are rare or special (that is, marked) in relation to some unmarked norm with non-specific meaning. By framing the operatic creative process through this lens, I claim that marked poetic stimuli have specific musical affordances, thereby limiting the range of appropriate compositional responses. In Metastasian opera, for example, marked verse types cue a narrow band of rhythmic realizations, the marked tronco line ending cues a musical cadence, marked question constructions cue half cadences, and a marked number of stanzas cues specialized large-scale forms.
Such markedness correlations—conceptual lumps of multimedia material anchored to a marked feature in one component medium—serve as the theory’s basic unit of analysis, and are conceptualized as an associative chain moving from a marked poetic feature, through that feature’s marked effect or function, and arriving at an associated musical feature. I argue that such markedness correlations formed a core part of an opera composer’s musical vocabulary: whenever experienced composers read a new libretto, its marked elements catalyzed a chain of associations that, seemingly automatically, summoned specific musical devices to mind. In thus offering a general theory of composer-libretto interactions, this paper explains which compositional decisions were tightly constrained by poetic features and which were open to variation.
The (In)Audible Master: Reading as Listening in/to Metastasio’s Libretti
Carlo Lanfossi
Università degli Studi di Milano
On December 17, 1726, shortly after the Roman premiere of Leonardo Vinci and Pietro Metastasio’s Didone abbandonata, a company of Italian actors staged a spoken version of Didone at the King’s Theatre in London. Thanks to the production’s printed libretto and contemporary accounts in the local press, we know that this spoken version of Didone followed the first edition of Metastasio’s opera libretto (Naples, 1724) almost verbatim. This London Didone sheds light on an important yet understudied aspect of operatic culture—one that proved significant in both the early nineteenth-century afterlife of Metastasio’s already stubbornly out-of-their-time libretti and in Metastasio’s modern monumentalization as a literary poet: the reading format of libretti.
Musicological and literary studies have positioned the libretto as both a material object and a metonym for the literary essence of operatic productions. Analysis has therefore coalesced around two poles, philology and performance studies, with the latter ranging from a “page to stage” model of inquiry to a more nuanced understanding of the libretto as a dialectical component of “opera’s agitated and multiple signifying systems” (Levin 2007). Yet the case of Metastasio complicates this picture, as an early instance of a practice that is now as widely experienced as it is undertheorized: the spoken (or, rather, non-sung) reading of a libretto. This practice relies on the problematic celebration of an operatic text that has been made as un-operatic as possible. What does it mean to read something that was not meant to be read in the first place? What sound does a word have when the place of its signifier is already occupied by the sonic memory of its operatic usage?
To answer these questions, this paper brings new archival findings, such as printed libretti with manuscript annotations at the Archivio Storico Ricordi in Milan, together with the study of Metastasian scenes that directly refer to acts of reading, and analyses of modern pasticcio stagings based on Metastasio’s libretti. Ultimately I argue for a rethinking of Metastasian libretti as the self-aware inscription of negotiations between changing reading practices and pre-Enlightenment cultures of listening.
|
