Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte

240 Pages·2016·4.351 MB·English

by  Emily Wilbourne

Seventeenth- Century Opera and
the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte

Seventeenth- Century Opera and the
Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte
E M I LY W I L B O U R N E
The University of Chicago Press
chicago and london
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2016 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2016.
Printed in the United States of America
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 40157- 7 (cloth)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 40160- 7 (e- book)
doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226401607.001.0001
This book has been supported by the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American
Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wilbourne, Emily, author.
Title: Seventeenth-century opera and the sound of the commedia dell’arte /
Emily Wilbourne.
Other titles: 17th century opera and the sound of the commedia dell’arte | XVII
century opera and the sound of the commedia dell’arte
Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016033174| ISBN 9780226401577 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN
9780226401607 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Opera—Italy—17th century. | Commedia dell’arte—History and
criticism. | Commedia dell’arte—Influence. | Commedia dell’arte—Characters.
Classification: LCC ML1733.2 .W55 2016 | DDC 782.109/032—dc23 LC record
available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033174
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48– 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
For my family, given and chosen

Contents
Note to the Reader • ix
introduction • 1
“The Tragedies and Comedies Recited by the Zanni ”
chapter one • 19
The Commedia dell’Arte as Theater
chapter two • 51
“Ma meglio di tutti Arianna comediante”
chapter three • 92
The Serious Elements of Early Comic Opera
chapter four • 130
Penelope and Poppea as Stock Figures of the Commedia dell’Arte
conclusion • 165
Seventeenth- Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte
Acknowledgments • 181
Notes • 185
Selected Bibliography • 209
Index • 225

Note to the Reader
Many of the musical examples are based on seventeenth-c entury copies,
whether manuscript or early printed editions. In such instances, note values
and original barring have been maintained. If an excellent modern edition
exists however—f or example, Rinaldo Alessandrini’s edition of Il ritorno
d’Ulisse, or Hendrik Schulze’s edition of L’Artemisia— I have consulted the
relevant texts.
Where I have transcribed Italian lyrics or play texts from original
sources, I have maintained the spelling and punctuation of the originals,
avoiding the common practice of silently adapting the orthography to
modern standards. In this book I am particularly interested in the sound of
early seventeenth-c entury commedia dell’arte and operatic performances,
and in the absence of audio recording technology, it is the written records
that provide our best guess as to how the pronunciation, declamation, and
intonation of such performances functioned— particularly in regard to dia-
lect speech. Frequently it is the presumed errors and exceptions of the
original texts that provide a way for modern readers to approach the noise
of the performances indexed by these words. As a consequence, I have re-
tained the atypical formulations precisely for the witness they might make
to sounding practice.