Francesco Cavalli

Like many kinds of popular entertainment, the opera of seventeenth-century Venice relied heavily on formulae. From the lamenting queen to the comic servant, creators had numerous stock characters and plot elements to draw upon, recombine, and vary almost endlessly. However, the genre’s daring treatment of sexuality often overshadows a significant stock character-trait: sworn chastity, the rejection not only of one specific courtship, but of sexual (and usually romantic) intimacy in general.

Characters that assert such convictions (particularly women, and most such assertors are female in these operas) stand firmly apart from societal norms. Yet, far from embodying a monolithic stereotype, these characters offer a wide range of perspectives on desire, charting diverse courses through their respective music-dramas as they attempt to reconcile their vow with the pressures of a world (and sometimes a person) that seeks to invalidate them.

This paper surveys some of the character-type’s most prominent incarnations, many of whom separate sex not only from romance but also from sensuous pleasure (partnered and otherwise), validating non-standard relationships in a manner strikingly evocative of twenty-first century asexual discourse. It examines both the origins and outcomes of such convictions, from necessity to fear to genuine disinterest, and from empoweringly happy to disturbingly ‘corrective’ and cautionary endings. And it interrogates the numerous ways in which the characters themselves portray their convictions, from the identity crisis faced by Diana upon realizing that she has fallen in love, to Penelope’s carefully cultivated (yet not necessarily dissembled) image as a perpetually mourning widow.

How the Baroque idea of 'meraviglioso'  (wonder)  is reflected in modern performances of seventeenth century opera? Is it still important for  audience, performers and directors ? This paper aims at exploring the different meanings that the 'meraviglioso'  assumed in the seventeenth century art and culture; moreover modern stagings of Francesco Cavalli's operas are discussed.

The blind street singer Paolo Britti  (fl. 1619-ca. 1660), who performed in the piazze and calle of Venice during the third and fourth decades of the seventeenth century, composed poems of popular nature which were published for the most part in Venice and Treviso. Printed to be sold at the time of their performance, some two hundred of these ephemeral  works have survived up to today. In over forty cases (this number does not not include reprints) Britti indicates on the title page the ‘arias’ to which the poems should be sung. In some cases they are airs of a popular nature: some with titles in dialect - and some others of obviously popular derivation, such as the aria di Codognella, which can be identified with the Aria di Codognella published in Francesco Corbetta’s De gli scherzi armonici trovati, e facilitati in alcune curiosissime suonate sopra la chitarra spagnuola, published in Bologna in 1639.  But others, unexpectedy, derive from works which we can identify as being by such composers as Tarquinio Merula, Francesco Cavalli, Claudio Monteverdi and Carlo Milanuzzi, That is to say, they derive from monodies and operatic arias by these composers, which is most unusual for the performance of popular poetry sung by a blind musician in the piazze of Venice A setting of the aria dimandata Quando volsi l’altra sera can be found in Tarquinio Merula’s Curtio precipitato et altri capricii, published in Venice in 1638. Moreover, Britti cites two arias from Francesco Cavalli’s opera Gli amori di Dafne e Apollo which was produced in Venice in 1640: Gradita povertà, from Act One, scene one, and Ben da dovero stolti, from Act One, scene seven. Both can be found in a manuscript collection of arias today held by the Biblioteca Comunale of Jesi, together with another aria cited by Britti, Supplice penitente.  But the best known of Britti’s aria dimandate is certainly Monteverdi’s Eri già tutta mia, from his Scherzi musicali (1632), cited by Britti in a Bellissima canzoneta of 1633. Carlo Milanuzzi’s Sesto libro delle ariose vaghezze ... opera decimaquinta (1628) contains two works which can be identified as arie dimandate: Vedilo là, and Che mi val che tu mi ami. Moreover, its very last work is an instrumental Veneziana sopra l’aria di Catte: Catte is one of Britti’s personages in his ‘serial’ works which revisit characters in a number of poems.  Britti’s publications open our eyes to a world of Venetian street music which we could not have imagined without his extraordinary testimony.
The article concludes with an index of arie dimandate cited by Paolo Britti.

The Greek myth of Endymion, a shepherd who fell in love with the moon, is attested as early as 200BCE. The moon’s goddess reciprocated, but as writers began to shift the role of lunar deity to Diana, the story became confusing. How could this goddess, famed for chastity, form half of an iconic couple?

In La Calisto, a 1651 operatic adaptation of the myth, Endimione and Diana resolve that confusion with a simple realisation: that bodily pleasure, even when partnered, need not necessarily be sexual. Released from a traditional status as precursors to copulation, the acts of kissing, and to a lesser extent of caressing and embracing, acquire new weight for the couple, as mutually pleasurable experiences, and as means to explore new forms of identity-expression. Simply put, ‘foreplay’ becomes an end (the end) in itself. Through their romantic, sensual, but sexless relationship, Diana and Endimione reconcile apparently binary opposites into complementary facets of a coherent identity: the celibate lovers.

This paper argues that the relationship thus queers normative concepts of intimacy and celibacy, and that the opera’s creators drew on well-known tropes of their genre to convey this unconventional nature. The paper examines the complex interactions of gender, status, and agency in the opera, attempting to explain why Diana, the story’s only fully divine celibate, is also the only one to reconcile celibacy with partnered pleasure. Finally, it posits La Calisto as a moment in the spotlight for one of Venetian opera’s least-discussed stock characters: the sworn virgin.

The Greek myth of Endymion, a shepherd who fell in love with the moon, is attested as early as 200BCE. The moon’s goddess reciprocated, but as writers began to shift the role of lunar deity to Diana, the story became confusing. How could this goddess, famed for chastity, form half of an iconic couple?

In La Calisto, a 1651 operatic adaptation of the myth, Endimione and Diana resolve that confusion with a simple realisation: that bodily pleasure, even when partnered, need not necessarily be sexual. Released from a traditional status as precursors to copulation, the acts of kissing, and to a lesser extent of caressing and embracing, acquire new weight for the couple, as mutually pleasurable experiences, and as means to explore new forms of identity-expression. Simply put, ‘foreplay’ becomes an end (the end) in itself. Through their romantic, sensual, but sexless relationship, Diana and Endimione reconcile apparently binary opposites into complementary facets of a coherent identity: the celibate lovers.

This paper argues that the relationship thus queers normative concepts of intimacy and celibacy, and that the opera’s creators drew on well-known tropes of their genre to convey this unconventional nature. The paper examines the complex interactions of gender, status, and agency in the opera, attempting to explain why Diana, the story’s only fully divine celibate, is also the only one to reconcile celibacy with partnered pleasure. Finally, it posits La Calisto as a moment in the spotlight for one of Venetian opera’s least-discussed stock characters: the sworn virgin.

In: Antonio Addamiano, Francesco Luisi (eds), Atti del Congresso Internazionale di Musica Sacra : In occasione del centenario di fondazione del PIMS : Roma, 26 maggio - 1 giugno 2011. 3 vols. Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2013, vol. 2, pp. 639-664

The aim of this paper is to analyze the reception of the myth of Dido and Creusa in the Didone, Opera in three acts by Busenello-Cavalli (Venice 1641). The episode of the appearance of Creusa in the opera shows similarities to the Virgilian text, whereas the librettist creatively rewrites the epilogue of Dido’s story. A final marriage between the queen of Carthage and Iarba, king of Getuli, gives the tale a happy ending, which is completely different from the tragic context of the Aeneid.

There is little doubt that modern stagings of Baroque classics have become increasingly common in the international opera scene. Yet such modernizations do not always add anything substantially insightful to the drama. David Alden’s New York production of Francesco Cavalli’s "La Calisto" (1651) at Opera at the Academy in 1987 is an exception. The director’s vision closely matched original elements of the plot while highlighting its relevance to contemporary viewers. Instead of characterizing Endimione as the young, handsome shepherd typically depicted in classical mythology, Alden presented Endimione as a blind dying AIDS victim confined to a wheelchair.

My paper examines Alden’s strikingly modern interpretation of Endimione. I argue that Alden’s Endimione reflects a queerness of the character as originally written by Cavalli and his librettist Giovanni Faustini. Endimione is a castrato whose high voice evokes both the innocence of a boy and the erotic appeal of the castrato; his love for Diana rests between erotic desire and courtly love. Using musical and textual examples, I show how he embodies a seemingly contradictory binary between innocence and perversity. This binary resembles a similar one discussed in recent queer theory; by combining Freud’s ideas of the child as both innocent and “polymorphously perverse” and the homosexual as someone stuck in a state of perpetual childhood, queer theory has labeled a binary between innocence and perversity as a particularly queer phenomenon. I also connect Alden’s work to mainstream AIDS rhetoric, which portrays AIDS as both a welcomed punishment for social transgressors and a plague tragically affecting “innocent” victims.

I conclude by suggesting that Alden mapped AIDS onto Endimione to allow the audience to understand the innocence and perversity the character embodies on more readily relatable modern terms.