Meta-Opera

Speranza

K. Johnston refers to meta-opera and the meta-operatic in the link previously given. Besides the interesting reference to L. Daellenbach, there's further material both preceding and following the other excerpt. It may do to share, in case listers can provide further analyses, or examples, as we provide an anatomy for this animal: the meta-opera. -- Cheers. Speranza

---

Johnston's thesis is on intermezzo. The first section where he discusses metaopera is, precisely, entitled, "METATHEATRE AND THE INTERMEZZO". As Johnston notes, "[t]he term “metatheatre” is one of diffuse meaning." So is metaopera.

"["Metatheatre"] was coined by the literary scholar Lionel Abel in his 1966 book "Meta-theatre: A New View of Dramatic Form."

"Abel explicitly labelled "meta-theatre" as a genre distinct from both tragedy and comedy."

"Abel's central thesis was that “meta-plays” supplanted tragedies in the Renaissance and represented a dramatic incarnation of a changed Western cultural
world-view."

So this may relate to this point about this protoopera by Galileo in Glass -- perhaps the first meta-opera, as it were. "This world-view", Johnston goes on, "was characterized by the acceptance of the illusory nature of existence and the primarily theatrical existence which we live."

"As Abel suggested, "the world is a stage, life is a dream." "Abel borrowed the sensibility of the melancholic Jaques in "As You Like It" in addition to his famous phrase. He saw his categorization of “meta-play” as a fundamentally serious genre which was not comic." On the other hand, Johnston, like me, focuses on the comedic effects, via implicature (Johnston quotes from Attalardo on Grice).

Johnston notes: "Though Abel‟s claims were contentious, a strong strand of meta-theatrical criticism -- especially that concentrating on
Shakespeare -- has maintained Abel‟s notion of meta-theatre as the new tragedy."

Here Johnston quotes from:

James L. Calderwood, "Shakespearean Meta-drama" and R.A. Martin, "Meta-theater, Gender and Subjectivity in Richard II", among other studies.

Whereas we think of it more as metaopera buffa, even.

Johnston writes: "Hamlet is the iconic example of a meta-theatrical play as defined by Abel -- a work in which the meta-theatrical device of a play-within-a-play is used but also one in which the protagonist is acutely aware of his own theatricality."
"Subsequent to Abel's book many authors began to expand the definition of meta-theatre [and metaopera -- Speranza -- vide Alice Bellini] to encompass a greater number of works than Abel prescribed.

"Richard Hornby‟s expansive 1986 book Drama, "Meta-drama and Perception" was the first to categorize systematically VARIETIES of meta-theatre in addition to enlarging its repertory to include works from Sophocles to Pinter."

Hornby describes not only the use of the play-with-the-play [or the opera-within-the-opera, to use the wording in opera-l], but FOUR other features of the meta-dramatic." To wit:

1) the presence of ceremony
2) a character role playing within a play
3) referencing real life or another text
and
4) Daellenbach's, Bellini's, and my favourite: "referencing oneself."

"By 1998, Ringer could claim that meta-theatre “encompasses all forms of theatrical self-referentiality.""
"This expansion of the definition of meta-theatre [and perhaps metaopera. Speranza] from Abel‟s narrow genre designation is mirrored in the expansion of the meta-theatrical repertory to include works of comedy both ancient and modern"
"Slater‟s books on the comedies of Plautus and Aristophanes remain important testaments to the applicability of meta-theatre as a concept to both comedy and works which predate the Renaissance."
And we may consider the classical Greek tragedies as protometaoperatic in connection with Galileo and his invented new genre, the opera.
"That meta-theatre has any currency at all as either a genre or device within a genre is controversial."

"The classicist Thomas Rosenmeyer produced an acid attack on the concept." And I wouldn't be surprised if METAOPERA has its discontents and/or enemies. The word can be abused.

"Rosenmeyer blames Abel for implicitly leaving “meta-theater” open to application to any and all works." Johnston quotes from Rosenmeyer [Metatheatre [Metaopera], an essay on overload]:

"It is evident that “meta-theatre” has, in the wake of Abel‟s overload, been employed to cover *too many* different moves, and to elicit responses that undervalue the tradition of inventiveness and the wonderful immediacy of the emotional power of theater."

Johnston notes that "pace Rosenmeyer, ... the concept [of metaopera, even] can _illuminate_ a distinct practice of librettists and composers working in the [opera and] intermezzo repertory." "The concept of metatheatre [and metaopera] helps us to understand and interpret levels of fiction within a given performance." "This practice of meta-theatre reveals interesting insights into the creation of comedy in the musical theatre."

ENTER METAOPERA proper (to a tune by Puccini). "MUSICOLOGY has only recently taken up the topic" -- with Bellini (Alice) and her advisors at Cambridge and external examiners.

"The most prominent ... scholar to examine the practice of metatheatre in [ITALIAN -- Speranza] opera in the eighteenth century is Alice Bellini." Vide Speranza, "The metaoperas of Bellini."

"In her 2009 Cantab. D. Phil thesis, Bellini discussed the _many_ eighteenth-century *comic* [buffe] ITALIAN operas which feature scenes of performance or are simply about the act of putting on an opera."
"Like Ringer, Bellini defines "meta-theatre" broadly."

"Meta-theatre becomes apparent each
time theatre brings the [spectator]'s attention to
the mechanisms governing theatre itself and to
the fact that all performance is fictional and taking place hic et nunc."

Johnstone notes: "Opera presents a *special* case in the phenomenon of meta-theatre." VIDE: METAOPERA.

"The very fact the text is sung, rather than
declaimed, draws attention to the fact that the actor is performing."
-- or singing, allegedly (Speranza).
"However, there is a spectrum when
it comes to the “theatricality” of _performing_ a text."
-- or singing an aria, for that matter.
"Straight plays with texts that are unmeasured and
unrhymed will fall towards the side
of realism, or to borrow Styan's term, the theatre of the illusory"
"The spectator for this type of play will expect the
text to conform more closely to everyday
conversation and therefore be more “believable” as real dialogue."

"The threshold for identifying meta-theatrical devices, or moments which draw attention to the fact that the play is a performance, is very low for this type of drama."
"Anything that breaks the illusion of the play as reality is easily identifiable as meta-theatrical."
"Plays written in VERSE (which date from before the modern period and therefore also often feature soliloquies and asides) fall in the middle of the spectrum."
"They are _non-illusory_, in Styan's terms, because the audience is made aware through the style of language and mode of delivery (speaking directly to the spectator, etc.) that they are viewing a performance.
"The status of certain events as metatheatre in these plays is more subject to debate."
"An aside draws attention to the theatricality of the dramatic event, but is a familiar convention of the genre."
"Rosenmeyer would contend that to call such events meta0theatrical is to rob the term of any valuable meaning."

----- METAOPERA.
"OPERA lies *further* along the
spectrum towards the point at which, when
watching a performance of a work, the
spectator is continually aware of the
fact that s/he is watching an opera."

Why?
Well, because, "[p]eople" (pace Galileo?) "do not sing their thoughts in everyday life and so we are made aware that opera by its very nature is NOT realistic."

"Here an overly liberal notion of meta-theatre threatens to subsume the entire genre of opera." (as in Speranza, "All opera is metaopera").

METAOPERA. "If we are ALWAYS [or allways, as Speranza prefers to spell this] aware that we are watching a performance when enjoying music theatre,
is there any difference between opera and meta-theatre?"
"The answer is obviously yes."
"Or not so obviously," Speranza doubts.

Johnston: "The difference has to do with the relationship between the spectator and the performer." "While the spectator may be made aware of the opera as performance,
_characters_ in the opera do not share a similar awareness."

Carolyn Abbate stated the problem eloquently: "In opera, the characters pacing
the stage often suffer from deafness;
they do not hear the music that is the ambient fluid
of their music-drowned world."

Abbate continues: "This is one of the [operatic] genre's most fundamental illusions."

"We see before us something whose fantastic aspect is obvious, since the scenes we witness pass to music."
"At the same time, however, opera stages recognizably human situations, and
these possess an inherent "realism" [I'm not too happy with that word -- Speranza -- but what are you going to do about that?]
that demands a special and complex understanding of the music we hear."
--- "We must generally assume, in short, that this music is not produced by or within the stage-world,
but emanates from other loci as secret commentaries
for [the spectator] alone, and that characters are generally unaware that they are singing."
"In true moments of meta-theatre, characters
become aware that they are performing
and they exist in a play as characters."
"Though the mode of operatic performance makes
the fact of performance clear at all times
to the spectator, the characters on stage
do NOT share any similar moment of epiphany."
"There exists an irony in the fact that
opera presents human situations which are
_realistic_, but in a mode which is anything but."

"Only in certain moments do characters become
_conscious_ that they are singing."

Johnston calls these "phenomenal” songs" (not in Speranza's use of the term, "That aria was _phenomenal_!") --- Johnston quotes two pieces of recent scholarship that explores the phenomenon with respect to the use of the “phenomenal image” in opera:

Linda and Michael Hutcheon, The „Phenomenal Image‟ in Opera,” South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 1 (2005): 63-77
Sherry Lee, “ „Deinen Wuchs wie Musik‟: Portraits and the Dynamics of Seeing in Berg‟s Operatic Sphere,” Berg and His World, edited by Christopher Hailey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 163-94.

"These moments of rupture can have a meta-theatrical effect if they draw the spectator's attention to the means of musical performance. Thus, Susanna's guitar playing during Cherubino‟s

“Voi che sapete,”

falerts the listener to TWO artificialities of the operatic genre."

SUSANNA'S GUITAR PLAYING:

1)

"The spectator is first made aware that
music comes from the orchestra, since the
sound source of Susanna's guitar comes from the pit
and not from her lap."

2)

"The spectator is also made aware of the materiality of the instruments themselves."

"Since the “guitar” is played by pizzicato strings, the spectator is alerted to the fact that the orchestra —- with its more or less standardized complement -- is the means of musical production."

"It is conventional to have strings and not a guitar, and so the spectator has a moment of awareness about the practicalities of producing an opera (if not some understanding about the acoustic properties of plucked instruments)."

"Though the performers may not alter their method of voice production for their onstage “performance” of a "phenomenal song", the spectator still is given to understand that the character is aware that they are singing at that moment (and not talking, which is how characters onstage perceive recitative)."

"This creates an interpretive problem for the spectator."
"At what point _does_ the character become aware that they are performing?"

THE MUSICOLOGICAL REPLY:
"Music, in this instance, serves to clarify."
"Unlike text which must include stage
directions to indicate a meta-theatrical manoeuvre,
music has the ability to frame moments all on its own."

"It can delineate something as separate from the illusion of
reality of a particular work."

----

Alice Bellini makes this point clear in her PhD dissertation, and elsewhere.

Alice Bellini writes:

"[p]urely MUSICAL [i.e. score -- Speranza] means can
be used to underline the presence
of more than one layer of
reality -- music can go above and
beyond the dramatic narrative itself in
delineating or
*dissolving the imaginary fourth wall*
between embedded and embedding representations."

Bellini goes on:
"Thus the complex nature of
meta-operatic scores and their
musico-dramatic structures can
be seen to be
A FULL MATCH for
the complexity of their librettos,
along with all their multi-layered plots and the
games they play with dramatic conventions and levels of fiction."

----

Johnston then provides material from the sub-genre of the intermezzo.

"Intermezzos in their earliest incarnations do
_not_ display this level of sophistication", he admits.

"Composers instead seem to have rather quietly followed
the cues IN THE LIBRETTO in order to set meta-theatrical moments in the intermezzos."

THE MUSICOLOGICAL LEVEL.
"By the mid-1720s, however, MUSIC begins to take a more assertive role
in framing these moments and becomes a more independent means of creating humour independent of the text [of the libretto]"

"In this decade we have examples in which the music is “meta-musical,”
drawing attention to itself through the use of
PARODY or disruption."
-- as in "Let us take the road", in Beggar's Opera? Speranza

"Intermezzos are, even more so than opera in
general, meta-theatrical by nature."
"They are "plays-within-plays" in the _literal_ sense.

"Intermezzos are performed within the frame of existing three-act works."

**********************************
"In the case of Naples before 1725,
minor characters from the
"opera seria" perform the intermezzo,
thereby strengthening the relationship
between the two."

"Recall that "Albino e Plautilla", the intermezzo, like its host opera, "Silla Dittatore", takes place in republican Rome."
"Francesco Feo's intermezzo "Rosicca e Morano" (1723) features a Numidian setting like the opera seria in which it was embedded, Metastasio's "Siface"."
"Elsewhere, on the Continent, intermezzos enjoyed greater autonomy from the operas and did not share characters or settings."
"But it would be hard not to see their very presence as a comment on theatrical performance in general."

"Intermezzos and operatic tragedies shared similar conventions -- like the use of recitative and arias."
"By juxtaposing the styles used for comedy and tragedy,
composers drew audience's attention to the differences between them."

"More importantly, many of the techniques by which librettists,
composers and performers create musical
humour are meta-theatrical in nature."
"Contemporary accounts testify to the fact that
performers imitated a number of sounds,
including
“the cracking of a Whip, the rumbling of Chariot Wheels.”

"Troy refers to musical figures which imitate extra-musical sounds as examples of “comic realism.”"

"Ironically, however, these attempts at verisimilitude have the
_opposite_ effect intended by “realism” by
calling attention to the music as performance."

"Just as a speech delivered to the [spectator] breaks the dramatic frame of a play, talking, groaning, or making non-musical sounds has the effect of breaking the musical frame."

"Grover-Friedlander has characterized the operatic medium as one which is dominated by the
“Italian notion of song.”
"Grover-Friedlander means by this that the spectator is always listening
for beautiful singing, which conditions a kind of listening in which
the spectator understands “song,” that is melody,
as the primary mode of expression."

"This is a kind of ecstatic listening, and it specifically acknowledges operatic singing
as an activity bordering on the super-human."
"Such singing is transcendent on the one hand
yet always under the threat of
_appearing ridiculous_ on the other,
being both miraculous and continually available for parody".
"In the intermezzo repertory, which is often *explicitly* ridiculous, these
moments expose the _artificiality_ of musical expression (this artificiality was of course derided by early eighteenth-century dramatic theorists)."

"“Comic realism” therefore ALWAYS threatens to
undermine whatever claims the intermezzo has to verisimilitude."
"If opera is characterized by beautiful singing,
then much of the intermezzo is characterized by ridiculous singing."
"In this sense, the intermezzo cannot help but involve meta-theatre."

The next section in Johnstone's dissertation is, "THE METATHEATRICAL PERSPECTIVE: MARTELLO AND MARCELLO". "The intermezzo‟s existence was brought about by the grumbling of literary theorists."
"In the last two decades of the seventeenth century, concerned
Italian writers began to voice their concerns
about the effects that opera had on its listeners."
"In 1700, Giammario Crescimbeni
famously assigned blame
for the destruction of acting, comedy and
tragedy to Giacinto Andrea Cicognini‟s libretto for Cavalli's opera "Giasone" (1649)."

"Cicognini‟s mixing of serious and comic characters and situations,
Crescimbeni decried, was done for the vilest purposes."
"And once done,
[t]his concoction of characters was the reason
for the complete ruin of the rules of poetry, which
went so far into disuse that not even locution
was considered, which, forced to serve music, lost its
purity and became filled with idiocies".

"A fellow Arcadian," Johnston notes, "the librettist Apostolo Zeno, had already undertaken the task of filtering out the comic from the opera libretto, leaving nothing but specimens of pure tragedy which Robert Freeman -- in the modern era -- famously labelled “opera without drama."".
"Crescimbeni revisited opera in his
"Comentarii intorno alla sua istoria della vulgar poesia" of 1711."
"This time Crescimbeni remarked on many
improvements to the genre, which he noted now adhered
more closely to an Aristotelian notion of tragedy."
"Arias were fewer in number, choruses returned to replace comic episodes and librettists adhered to the unity of time."
"Crescimbeni's complaints about opera ARE
primarily structural."

"With the elimination of comic scenes and a recommitment to the unities, opera can redeem itself as an aesthetic endeavour."
"Ludovico Antonio Muratori was not so easily swayed
by such small changes to opera."

"In his "Della perfetta poesia italiana" (1706), Muratori roundly criticized opera
in not only aesthetic but _moral_ terms."
"Drawing on ancient Greek criticism of the effeminacy of certain types of music,
Muratori put the blame not only on comedy, but

ii. castrati,
iii. melodies,
iv. women and
v. eighth notes.

Johnston quotes:

"Whether this effeminacy is caused by an excessive use of eighth notes, sixteenth notes, and the smallest rhythmic values, which break the solemnity of the melody, or is produced by the voices of the singers, who are all either naturally or artificially womanlike, and consequently inspire undue tenderness and languor in the souls of the audience; or whether it stems from the use of ariettas in operas, which induce excessive enjoyment in anyone who listens to them, or from the words, which often lack integrity and abound in lasciviousness, or from the practice of using women singers in theatres; or from all these reasons put together: it is a fact that modern theatre music is exceedingly harmful for public mores, in that people become ever baser and more prone to lasciviousness when listening to it."

"The problem of opera was not its abandonment of Aristotelian principles of tragedy, but rather opera itself."
"The entire enterprise was debauched and “exceedingly harmful for public mores."".

"Muratori‟s criticisms were echoed in 1715 by Gian Vincenzo Gravina in his essay "Della tragedia""
"Gravina, though no longer an Arcadian, maintained a thoroughly attic attitude
towards ... opera."

"Like Muratori, Gravina felt that the purpose of tragedy was
to improve the moral character of the [spectator]."
"[O]pera, he suggested, did the complete opposite."

"This was because the poet and the composer were not the same person."
"The composer merely pursued his own selfish goals, resulting in a text whose poor literary merit was made worse by the indulgent and fanciful musical setting it received."

Johnston notes: "The intermezzo therefore came of age during a time in
which the operatic enterprise was under attack not only
for its production practices but for every
aspect of the medium itself."

"When, of course, has this not been the case?"
"But in the early decades of the eighteenth century the voices of criticism were louder and more vociferous than they had been at any time previous."
"This despite the fact that Zeno, Salvi and others had successfully implemented many changes which critics had suggested in the previous century."

"But Muratori, Gravina and their ilk could not be satisfied."
"More than calling for the “reform” of opera's ways, they demanded the purgation of its very soul."
"This fevered and somewhat paranoid criticism helped pave the way
for satirical representations of opera."

"The two most prominent of these in literature were
Pier Jacopo Martello, "Della tragedia antica e moderna" (1715)

and

Benedetto Marcello's "Il teatro alla moda" (1720).

Martello's treatise [he uses Aldiviva, that Speranza recently mentioned] had appeared a year earlier, but was republished in 1715 with the addition of a commentary on opera."
Johnston goes on to "explore how these literary works give us a glimpse into the mind-set of learned opera audiences of the 1710s."
Johnston does not want to posit "a simple causal relationship between these works of Martello and Marcello and subsequent meta-theatrical librettos."
"In fact, it is almost certain that none exists."
"The intermezzo satire "La Dirindina" was written in 1715, the same year as Martello's dialogue and some five years before Marcello‟s pamphlet."

"Yet "La Dirindina" seems to pinpoint many of the same operatic topoi which will be satirized throughout the century."
"Librettists may therefore have lampooned the same behaviours and conventions outlined in Martello's and Marcello's works, but they did not look to them for source material."
"The relationship between meta-theatre and these literary works is not so direct."
"Instead, they testify to a particular perspective, a way of looking at opera that began to occupy practitioners and theatregoers in the 1710s."
"It is this perspective which allows for the kinds of meta-theatrical humour we see in the intermezzo repertory."
"This type of humour was diverse and involved a number of different meta-theatrical devices."
"But much of the intermezzo‟s evolving style of humour — which begins to influence its musical language — is dependent upon
a kind of meta-sensibility --
that is, an awareness on the part of creators and performers of the intermezzo medium as theatre."
"Humour is always dependent upon insider knowledge."

"The self-consciousness of the intermezzo — its understanding of itself
as an intermezzo, or as a comment on opera in general — is a
fundamental condition of the
style of musical humour that evolved throughout the 1720s."
"Given that Aristotle figured so prominently in the serious debates among dramatic theorists it is little surprise he was featured as the main character of Martello‟s dialogue."

"Martello meets a supposedly very aged Aristotle on a ship bound for Marseilles and passes the time listening to his lengthy disquisitions on what constitutes a proper theatrical work."
"This Aristotle's views on opera were far more sympathetic to actual practice than what Muratori and others had imagined the real Aristotle‟s to be."
"Regarding the fundamental problem critics had—that the words were subservient to the music—the impostor has no problem at all."

"Martello here cleverly gets around the problem as posed by critics."
"Martello suggests that the text of the opera is not the work of poets at all."

"What opera needs is a different type of writer."

Martello writes: "We have need, then, not of Poets, but
rather of verse-mongers; but no,
not of verse-mongers, either, for
there must be a plot, and that calls
for something more than a verse-monger: not
mere verse-monger, then, nor true
Poets (I am at a loss what to call them) let those
be who are called upon to serve the needs of opera, just as the choregi once served the material needs of tragedy".
"Martello‟s indecision about what to call these writers is telling."
"He is not willing to place them in a totally subservient role, but as he later suggests, merely within a hierarchy of the art form (above the scenographer and costumer, but below the composer)."

"The choregi of Greece may not be remembered as playwrights like Sophocles are, but they were still awarded prestigious prizes for their contributions."

"Martello implies there is no shame in this."
"This practical consideration of opera—the idea that certain roles in a production are required and so there must be artisans to fulfill them—is the defining characteristic of Martello‟s dialogue."
"An artist‟s obligation is to the medium of theatre, not to a moral imperative. This reframing of the role of the librettist signals the turn towards metatheatre in the sense of the term that Abel originally intended."
"Librettists were no longer meant to be original, but should be aware of their own positions as servants of the music and the drama."

"They were aware of the fact they were creating works of theatre, and so their work in some ways is about the nature of theatre and theatrical expression."
"Martello's suggestions about how to achieve success in this realm are familiar to lovers of opera seria. His suggestion for arias texts is very useful."

"In the arias I advise you to use similes involving little butterflies, little ships, a little bird, a little brook."
"These things all lead the imagination to I know not what pleasant realms of thought and so refresh it."
"Marcello advised exactly the same thing."

"The aria must in no way be
related to the preceding recitative but
it should be full of such things as
sweet little butterflies, bouquets,
nightingales, quails, little boats,
little huts, jasmine, violets,
copper basins], little pots, tigers, lions,
whales, crabs, turkeys, cold capon, etc."

"Marcello‟s tone is much more sardonic than Martello‟s (he's also much funnier)."
"But they both get at the overuse of the simile aria in contemporary operatic practice."

"Alice Bellini cautions against viewing Marcello's pamphlet as a documentary account of actual operas." Bellini writes:

"We should attempt to distinguish between
historical data and what appear to be the conventional
traits and literary formulas of this repertoire."
"That this trope appears in both sources suggests the latter."
"It does not, however, imperil our argument because tropes which contribute to the self-conscious sensibility contribute to that sensibility no less than if they were original observations."

"Antonio Salvi introduced this literary satirical trope into his libretto for the intermezzo L’artigiano gentiluomo (1722)." "But rather than directly parodying a simile aria, Salvi has introduced his satire through the back door by sneaking it into the recitative."

Johnston provides an excerpt.
EXCERPT I
Vanesio has just welcomed the Baronessa d‟Arbella (his servant Larinda in disguise) and completed his elaborate salutation meant to impress the noblewoman. What preceded is adapted faithfully from Molière.
"The following, however, is the invention of Salvi":

**********************************************************
Antonio Salvi, "L’artigiano gentiluomo":

"Ma per dirla, com‟è, ritrovo in lei/Un certo brio brillante,/Che piace agli occi miei./Quel ciglio lampeggiante/Dolcemente mi strazia:/Signora mia, per grazia/Si levi in piedi, e mi passeggi avanti,/Poi mi faccia un‟inchino.
Di color porporino/Tingo il mio volto a questa sua dimanda;/Pur son costretta a far quel, che comanda./Che bel taglio di vita!/Che andamento, ch‟alletta!/Par giusto una Barchetta./Che gentil portamento! basta, basta:
Non piu; morir mi sento./Non bramo la sua morte;/Bramo.../Che brama?/D‟essergli Consorte."

English translation: "But to you I say that I find in you/a certain brilliant glow,/which pleases my eyes./Those twinkling eyes/sweetly torment me:/my Lady, please/stand and walk in front of me,/then curtsy for me./I feel my face turning purple/at your request./I feel compelled to grant you that request./What a beautiful figure!/What grace, how enticing!/How like a little boat./What a noble bearing! enough, enough:/No more, I‟m dying./I do not wish you to die;/I desire.../What do you desire?/To be your wife."

Johnston comments:
"Hasse's music leaves large gaps for Vanesio‟s fawning."
"The continuo player could have embellished these moments in order to accompany Vanesio‟s onstage actions."
"Musically the most striking moment occurs at “morir.”"
"Here Hasse has taken Salvi's cue to create a highly affective moment."
"The
--- “mi sento morir”
-- was the ubiquitous cry of the operatic heroine from the late seventeenth century through to at least "Aida"."
"Its chromatic treatment here -- a rising semitone figure supported by a pointed tonal shift from D major6 to F-sharp major —
recalls a madrigalesque sensibility."

"That it is Vanesio‟s bass voice which sings
the line makes it of course seem
ridiculous (to say nothing of the incongruity
of the fact he feels faint at merely seeing the Baronessa walk)."

"It is a short walk from pathos to bathos."

"This scene does highlight a couple of important points
about meta-theatre in the intermezzo."

1)

"The first is that the intermezzo engaged in a
parody even in texts which
originally did not call for such moments."

-- "Molière's text for Le bourgeois gentilhomme did not contain the scene above and yet Salvi felt compelled to add it. This gives strength to this argument that the intermezzos based on works by Molière were not simply adaptations of plotlines from Molière‟s original plays. They were instead collections of elastic gags newly strung together with a newly manufactured plot. It also supports the claim that the intermezzo was metatheatrical in is nature. Librettists felt compelled to include material which burlesqued the opera seria tradition as a matter of course. L’artigiano gentiluomo was written by Salvi for a performance in Florence in 1722, though Orlandini‟s music for that production does not survive."

"Though the libretto was revised for performance in Naples in 1726, no changes were made to this scene and to the aria that follows.38 Whether in Florence or Naples (or any of the seven other cities in which the intermezzo is known to have been performed) it seems that audiences appreciated a good parody of opera seria."

"One of the most remarkable features of Martello's dialogue is how he has recast the moral imperative of opera producers."

"Recalling the quotation above, Martello suggested that arias with charming comparisons were necessary as “these things all lead the imagination to I know not what pleasant realms of thought and so refresh it.” Whereas Muratori and Gravina thought it incumbent upon artists to create works which would strengthen the moral fabric of the audience, Martello sees it as necessary to create diversions from the reality of the real world. His belief that music is the chief means of accomplishing this kind of transcendent experience is one of the great love letters to opera and is strikingly modern in its tone."

"Music alone, in action, contains the all-important
secret of separating the soul from all mortal cares
for at least as long as the notes can keep it absorbed, through the skillful management of consonance, whether vocal or instrumental."

"And if sleep is so universally praised for its power to enthral the senses of unhappy humanity, lifting them up and, for a few hours, making them impervious to misfortune, how much more praiseworthy must an art be which, not robbing us of life as does sleep (whence it is called the Brother of Death), allows us to live ecstatically in delicious, contented peace, our senses fully about us, yet glad and truly blissful."

"Coming at the end of a lengthy and humorous discussion of the many facets (and sometimes excesses)
of opera, Martello's encomium could be easily discounted as hollow praise."

"But the dimensions of what he is suggesting extend beyond the benign enjoyment of an evening‟s entertainment."

"The Italian critics, like their French counterparts, condemned opera in moral terms specifically because the moderation of the passions was seen to be a necessary virtue in matters greater than the opera."

"Philosophers such as Paolo Mattia Doria specifically saw the inability to control one‟s pleasure-seeking as the road to Sophism, skepticism and Epicureanism."

"Doria, like Muratori and Gravina, found refuge in the guidance of the austere Plato."

"Only through the subjugation of one‟s passion to reason could one truly achieve good art, good character and good governance."

"Martello outlines the complete opposite."

"Martello states that it is opera‟s job to give its audience relief from the pressures of life."

"A performance is a time to disengage from the world, turn off one‟s faculties of reason and indulge in the beauty of music."

"What is fascinating is the fact that Martello concedes that operatic enterprise is only useful to the soul “as long as the notes can keep it absorbed.”"

"Meta-theatrical devices, however, are forever undermining music‟s ability to completely absorb the listener since they shock the spectator out of the awe of the moment and bring full attention to the experience as theatre."

The next section in Johnston's thesis is thus entitled, "METATHEATRE IN THE LIBRETTO."

Johnston provides another fragment.

"In the course of his argument with his disbelieving wife,
Bacocco considers what his life would have been had he truly reformed his gambling ways:

--- "Ah sia pur benedetto/chi ha fatto quel libretto!”

"Bacocco's interjection interrupts Serpilla's questioning, and interrupts the spectator's immersion in the domestic drama unfolding onstage."

"Bacocco confronts the audience with the possibility that another libretto would present his situation differently—reminding the spectator that what they are witnessing onstage is the work of an author, that it is a fiction and that the actors are only playing parts."

"Such moments point to a general feature of the intermezzo: its willingness to recognize itself as theatre by referencing aspects of theatrical production."

"No intermezzo is more meta-theatrical in this sense than "Brunetta e Burlotto", set to music by D. Sarro for performance in Naples in 1720"

"It was a great success that was revived in Venice, Rome and Urbino by the travelling intermezzo team of
Santa Marchesini and Giacchino Corrado."

"Its libretto was by the prolific Antonio Salvi."

"The intermezzo features a remarkable second [section] which ... involves the performance of a play within a play, commentary on that play and the self-referencing of the actors as characters."

"It is, textually, the intermezzo‟s Hamlet in its hypermeta construction."

"The intermezzo‟s willingness to reference itself is made more interesting because "Brunetta e Burlotto" is in
some sense about the act of recognition."

"The intermezzo opens with Burlotto waiting outside in the cold on a moonless night for the girl he loves, Brunetta."

"Burlotto sings a short aria in which he steels himself against the inclement weather."

"He who is in love must remain steadfast in the cold, in the heat, in the water and wind”

Chi è innamorato
Ha da star saldo
Al freddo, al caldo
A l'acqua, al vento.

"Burlotto soon sees a light coming down the road and so hides himself in case it is not his lover."

"It is of course, Brunetta, but as the stage directions tell us at the beginning she is carrying a mask in her hand."

"Unsure of whom she is approaching, Brunetta cautiously puts on the mask to disguise her identity."

"The two—still dark figures in the night—then confess to the audience who they suspect each other to be.

(Adesso se ne viene)/(A me pare assai bene/Cambiar la positura)/cammina diversamente dal suo naturale/(Nel camminar non ha la sua lindura)/(Fino su gl‟occhi ei sta inferraiolato,/In altezza, in grossezza, e in tutto il resto;/Certo, Burlotto è questo)/(Sta masherata in viso, al camminare,/E alla veste Brunetta non mi pare./O, che sciocco pur son! Non sbaglio no:/E‟ Madama Margò!)/(Io non mi vo scoprire,/Stiamo a veder, che mai la fare, e dire)/si vede uscir la Luna

Translation: "(Now if it is)/(It seems like a good idea/to change my posture)/walks in a different way than normal/(Her gait doesn‟t have her elegance)/(He‟s cloaked up to his eyes, but,/In height, fatness, and in every respect;/Of course, this is Burlotto)/(A mask on her face, her walk,/And I do not think dressed like Brunetta./O, I‟m such a fool! I‟m not mistaken no:/It‟s Madame Margo!)/(I won‟t be found out,/Let‟s see what he‟ll do and say)/the moon comes out

"Burlotto then introduces himself and a comical exchange ensues."

"Rather than disguising her voice (a favourite tactic in the repertory), Brunetta mutely
nods or shakes her head to Burlotto‟s questions."

"In the course of their exchange “Madama Margò” indicates that she is out wandering in the cold looking for Burlotto."

"Burlotto, fed up with waiting for Brunetta, turns amorous and pledges his allegiance to “Madama Margò” if she will take his hand (though he does admit that in doing so “I may have completely ruined Brunetta” [“Brunetta, sarei proprio rovinato”])."

"At that moment, of course, Brunetta reveals herself and curses the unfaithful Burlotto."

"The scene ends with Burlotto begging for Brunetta to open up his chest and see that he loves her with all his heart."

Brunetta goes on to "agreeing to stay with Burlotto, but only if he takes her as his wife."

"The rest of the intermezzo involves some playful behaviour."

"Little plot is advanced, but at the end they agree to flee together and elope."

Chi è questo mai che viene?/(Chi è costui? O che modo di vestire!/A li Baffi, e al Turbante un Turco pare:/In quel linguaggio or io gli vo parlare.)/Sei Munsulmansin?/Non Sennor/Non Sennor? Sarà Spagnuolo.
Digame Cavallero/Es Espagnol! V.M.?/Nain, Nain/Tedesco esso sarà/Vasfor ein Landasman bist du./Bist en Tarter?/Non Monsieur/Ah, Ah, questo è Francese,/La lingua ancora so di quel Paese:
Feites moy le Plaisir, Monsieur,/De me dire, si vous etes Francois?/No Sar./O Inglese è questo:/Tu tell mi ifu aran Inghlis menn?/Minime, Nequaquam./Tal linguaggio/Ora non intend‟io./O te l‟ho fatta.
(Certo Burlotto è questo:/Fingerò, non averlo conosciuto)/Mi favorisca, quale è il suo Paese?/Son Italiano."

Translation: "Who‟s coming this way?/(Who is this? What a way to dress!/With a mustache, and looks like a Turkish turban:/What language should I talk to him in.)/You‟re a Muslim?/Non Señor
No, Sir? You‟ve become a Spaniard./Tell me, Sir/You‟re Spanish? Yes?/Nein, Nein./You‟ve become German./What kind of countryman are you./Are you a Tartar?/Non Monsieur/Ah, Ah, that‟s French,
I even know that language:/Do me the pleasure, Sir,/Tell me if you are French?/No Sir./Oh, that‟s English:/Do tell me if you are an English man?/Very little, not in the least./Such language/Now I don‟t understand
Oh, I‟ve had it with you./(I‟m sure this is Burlotto:/I‟ll pretend not to know him)/Please, what is your nationality?/I'm Italian."

"Burlotto then attempts to give the disguised Brunetta a fencing lesson."

"Brunetta, of course, handily upstages him by removing buttons from his shirt with her sword."

"The scene is reminiscent of the fencing scene between Nicole and Monsieur Jourdain in Le bourgeois gentilhomme, but does not quote Molière‟s text in any exact way."

"Since Salvi adapted Molière‟s play two years later it is possible that he had it in mind."

"This might seem especially plausible since a scene not in Salvi‟s adaptation appeared in a Neapolitan intermezzo in 1723 (see chapter 3). But in that case the borrowing was much more literal. This scene perhaps took some small inspiration from Molière, but more likely owes a debt to a “theatregram” which seeded both the scene in Molière and here in Brunetta e Burlotto. The intermezzo ends with Brunetta revealing her true identity and the two revelling with their “hearts leaping, butterflies gone, and hoping for love” (“Il cor mi saltella / Non piu budella / Sperando goder”)."

"While the intermezzo‟s third part might appear to be a trifle, the fact that it fits in with the larger theme of recognition that occupies all three parts suggests that Salvi was aiming for some greater unity. The third part brings a kind of symmetry to the work. Parts I and III deal with disguise as deception. Part II examines disguise as theatre. Intermezzos may be farcical in content, but their formal constructions are often more sophisticated than we give them credit for."

Johnston goes on to focus on this section of the "which takes the level of meta-theatricality to new heights."

"It opens with Brunetta and Burlotto agreeing to elope."

"But their thoughts soon turn to how they should accomplish this task."

"A disguise and new identities seem in order and they decide on an interesting occupation."

-----

**************
They will be actors in an opera.
*************

"Brunetta, concerned about their abilities, suggests a rehearsal."

"E così di fuggir ancor dobbiamo noi pensare/Al modo di campare./Io l‟ho trovato:/Ambedue noi sappiamo un po cantare:/Potremo recitare./Recitare? Eh! Non tutti quelli, ch‟escono,/A fare un tal mestier, poi ci riescono./Se tu parli per me,/Io mi confido fare anche da Re./A la prova./A la prova./Recitiamo una scena ora a l‟impronto,/Io per me sono pronto./La scena finge stanza;/Qui ci vorrebbe un trono./Adesso me lo trovo, e ce lo pongo./entra/Questo è un Uomo curioso./E in certe cose è proprio grazioso./Sarà il mio Trono questo Tavolino./Che ci se finge sopra il baldacchino./porta fuori un Tavolino./Or siedi a dar udienza,/Ed io poi verrò a farti riverenza./O che bel Re! O che bel cospettone!/Ad esser tal ci ho gran disposizione./siede sopra un Tavolino.

Translation: "And so to flee we have to think again/about how we want to dress./I‟ve got it:/Both of us know how to sing a bit:/We can act./Acting? Eh! Not everyone, who goes onstage/to make it a profession becomes successful./If you speak for me,/I am confident I can do a King/To the rehearsal./To the rehearsal./We‟ll act a scene now on the spot,/I, for one, am ready./The scene takes place in a room;/In which we would like a throne./I‟ll find it, and place it there./enter/This is an odd man./In some things he‟s just lovely./This table will be my throne./If we pretend there‟s a canopy above./brings out a table./Now sit to hold an audience,
And then I will come to give you reverence./Oh that good King! O what wonderful presence!/To be so greatly at your disposal./sits on a table."

"They then act out a scene in which Brunetta, a young shepherdess, has come to ask for the right to take water from the stream by her hovel. Burlotto, the King, grants her request. Throughout their exchange Brunetta must step out of her character in order to remind Burlotto how he is supposed to act as the King and how it is he should act as an actor. When he reads out an ordinance he forgets that he has to make up what‟s on the blank piece of paper he has in his hand. Brunetta‟s gentle prodding, thankfully, always prompts him to act properly."

"This intermezzo within an intermezzo is particularly interesting because it enacts a scene not dissimilar from the kind that was in the opera seria proper. Brunetta e Burlotto was imbedded in Salvi‟s Ginevra, principessa di Scozia, an opera in which a King‟s wishes play a prominent role. The scene has no comparable one in the opera, but the audience that had been watching an opera with a King giving dispensations would then watch an intermezzo duo enact a scene in which one pretends to be a King giving a dispensation.

"Then things become especially convoluted. Burlotto innocently asks Brunetta what she thinks of his performance. She replies that she does not think him particularly suited to play royal persons, but perhaps comic ones. Burlotto retorts that she could play his servant girl. They then joke that they would have to give each other stage names. He would be “Corrado,” she “Marchesina.” These of course, are the names of the real actors portraying Burlotto and Brunetta on the stage."

"Ora lasciamo un po la Maestà,/E dimmi in verità/Che ti par?/Che mi pare?/Tu avvilisci il costume, e in parte grave/Non ci potrai riuscire./E che ho da fare?/La parte del Buffon puoi recitare./Buffone, mo?
Sbagliai, del grazioso./E tu, cara Brunetta,/Potresti far la parte di Servetta./Servetta, mo?/Sbagliai, di Damigella./Come vuoi caro mio./Sì sì: mia bella./Ma se fane vogliamo,/Com‟ogni Virtuoso, e Canterina,
Chiamiamoci con qualche sopranome,/O pure col cognome./Io mi dirò Corrado./Io Marchesina./Ma ci riusciremo/In questo modo poi di recitare?/Sai che vogliamo fare/Proviamo ancora un poco./Sì mio core.
Faccio io scena di sdegno, e tu d‟amore."

Translation: "Now let‟s leave a bit of the pomp,/And tell me the truth/What do you think?/What do I think?/You debase the costume, and that you/won‟t succeed in serious parts/And what would I have to do?/You can play the part of the buffoon./A buffoon, me?/I‟m mistaken, of the lover./And you, my dear Brunetta,/You could play the part of the maid./The maid, me?/I‟m mistaken, of the Damsel./However you like, my dear./Yes, yes, my pretty./But if we want to be/like every virtuoso and singer,/we have to be known by some nicknames,/or just by a surname./I‟ll call myself Corrado./I‟ll be Marchesina./But will we succeed/in this kind of acting?/You know what we want to do./Let‟s rehearse a bit longer./Yes, my love./I‟ll do a scene of outrage, and you of love."

"They then proceed to sing a duet very similar to the type which ended part one. Brunetta hurls insults at Burlotto, and he begs her to understand how much he loves her. All the while they refer to each other as themselves, that is, Corrado and Marchesina."

"Corrado infido,/Corrado ingrato,/Tu m‟hai lasciato,/E perche mai?/Ahi Marchesina,/Cara, e carina,/A te ritorno,/E notte, e giorno/M‟avrai d‟intorno/Non vo parlarti/No vo ascoltarti/Vatiene via./Brunetta mia
Dici da vero?/No no, ch‟io provo,/O! Che piu meglio non puot-andar/Fingerò piangere./Fingerò ridere./Queste mie lagrime/Sapranno frangere/Il tuo rigor./Ti puoi uccidere,/Ch‟a le tuo lagrime/Ride il mio cor.
Or burli ancor?/Sì sì, ch‟io burlo./Torniam da capo cara/o a provar.

Translation: "Disloyal Corrado,/Ungrateful Corrado/You left me,/And why?/Ah Marchesina,/Dear, and pretty,/I come back to you/Night and day/You shall have me near/I don‟t want to talk to you
I don‟t want to listen to you/Go away./Brunetta deares/Do you speak the truth?/No no, I‟m practicing,/O! What could possibly go better/I‟ll pretend to cry./I‟ll pretend to laugh./These are my tears
They will break/Your severity./You can kill yourself,/Your tears bring/laughter to my heart./Now jest again?/Yes, yes, I‟ll jest./Let‟s take it from the top and try it again.

"The music is highly conventional for this type of duet, except for the two lines in which the characters refer back to themselves as characters and not to themselves as actors. This occurs towards the end of the A section when “Marchesina,” doing her “scene of outrage” tells “Corrado” to go away (“Vatiene va”). Burlotto then asks if she really means it (“Brunetta mia / Dici da vero?”). Brunetta must then break character and tell him that she‟s only playing her part."

This happens again at the very end of the B section when Burlotto asks Brunetta if she would like to take it from the top. Here they both again break character and become Brunetta and Burlotto again. In both of these instances Sarro leaves the strings behind and slows the bass
down to quarter notes marked off with quarter rests. He breaks the musical frame just as Brunetta and Burlotto break the theatrical one.

Salvi and Sarro have concocted a very complex situation. When “Corrado” and “Marchesina” break character to return to “Burlotto” and “Brunetta,” they are in fact actually returning to character since the performers are, in real life, Corrado and Marchesina. --- At this point comes Johnston's use of Daellenbach, as per previous commentary.


The next section in Johnstone's PhD thesis is entitled, "METATHEATRICAL MUSIC IN THE INTERMEZZO"

"The breakdown of musical language serves to enhance a metatheatrical effect suggested in the libretto."

"But the intermezzo repertory also contains music which frames moments of meta-theatricality in a more artful way."

"One of the most famous examples is explored by Alice Bellini."

"Metastasio‟s L’impresario delle canarie -- like "La Dirindina" -- is metatheatrical by nature."

"It is an intermezzo about an impresario, Nibbio, from the Canary Islands who arrives backstage to convince the soprano Dorina to take a contract at his opera house."

-- cfr. Villane

"He has prepared for her an aria to sing (her complaints that she cannot are quoted in chapter 3)."

"The aria, “Amor prepara,” is performed by Dorina with interjections of encouragement from Nibbio. Bellini suggests that Sarro has composed an “ideal” aria in 6/4 which is interspersed with Nibbio‟s “real” interjections in 3/4."

"The metrical structure of the work therefore serves to clarify the two dramatic frames which are occurring."

"Alice Bellini remarks that this does not suggest that separate dramatic frames are inserted in sequence, but rather that there are two concurrent dramatic frames occurring simultaneously."

"Our attention is drawn to one at a time as suggested by the libretto, the character speaking and, in the case of this aria, by the metrical shifts."

BELLINI WRITES:

"Meta-operatic scores mirror this narrative process."

"When realistic music is performed, the music that supports the entire opera is still there -- it may be confined to the background for a while, but does not go away."

"The conflict arises when the two levels of fiction (and of music) are brought to the foreground at the same time, and fixed (or recorded) within the same closed number, with occasionally paradoxical results (such as the metrical shifts mentioned above)."

"Erving Goffman‟s concept of “frames” helps to clarify what occurs onstage."

"He writes that in the normal course of experience we focus on a particular event which holds our attention. We interpret this experience through a “frame.” Goffman suggests that if multiple events are occurring simultaneously one has the ability to “disattend”—to ignore—what is going on in the other events.53 For example, when attending the opera one usually chooses to focus on the stage action and ignore any chatter, coughing or rustling in the house. These things may catch our attention, but we attempt to filter them out and don‟t attach them to the experience of the opera as a work of art—we keep it out of that frame of interpretation. If our neighbour unwraps a lozenge we do not confuse that with part of the operatic work. In musical terms something similar can occur. The composer can choose to ignore what is going on in a particular event onstage musically in order to concentrate an event elsewhere onstage. Sarro, therefore, helps frame the audience‟s attention by “disattending” to certain musical events and composing only those which occur within the frame. When Dorina sings, Nibbio and his competing metre fall silent."

"Sarro helps the audience temporarily “disattend” to his onstage musical world in order to concentrate on Dorina‟s performance of the aria. In this example, Sarro has shown his ability to treat two competing levels of fiction in musical terms. Both Dorina and Nibbio occupy different levels of onstage fiction and so have concomitantly different musical languages. In the Brunetta e Burlotto example, he only chose to sustain one event at a time.

"This kind of interweaving of musical languages Sarro composed is unusual. More common in the repertory is the breakdown of musical material of the kind we saw above. Such moments often involve not only the breaking of character, but as we‟ll see, the reference and parody of certain operatic conventions.
Hasse‟s Dorilla e Balanzone features an aria which parodies the simile aria of the type we explored in 4.3. The rich but crass Balanzone, unsuccessful in his attempts to meet with Dorilla‟s mistress, sings of his infatuation in a buffa da capo aria. The A section is entirely typical of the comic genre in both words and music. The text makes use of questo/quello wordplay and many action verbs. The music sports gruff octave leaps and patter passages. The text of the B section is a silly take on the simile aria.

From: "Dorilla e Balanzone"

"M'ave Amor già sbalordito/E sconvolto m‟ha il cervello;/Bramo questo e fuggo quello,/Prendo quello e lascio questo;/Ed in somma delle somme confuso,/Son stordito, e non so quel che mi far./Son qual pianta fra due venti,/Son qual vento fra due piante,/Son qual nave in mezzo all‟onda,/Son qual onda in mezzo al mar./Son qual nave fra due piante...No,/Son qual pianta in mezzo al mar,

Translation: "My Love has stunned me/and upset my mind;/I crave this and escape that,/I take that and leave this;/So to sum it all up I‟m confused,/I‟m stunned, and I don‟t know what I‟m doing./I‟m like a tree between two winds,/I‟m like the wind between two trees,/I‟m like a ship in the middle of a wave,/I‟m like a wave in the middle of the sea./I‟m like a ship between two trees ... No,/I‟m like a tree in the middle of the sea."

"Hasse creates a wind machine in music for the B section."

"The vocal line continues with patter and vocal leaps, but the strings accompany the line with scalar passages of thirty-second notes.

"At measure 40 the music suddenly stops at the point at which the phrase would normally elide with the next. One imagines that Balanzone would perform some mock-thoughtful gestures as he tried to remember how the rest of the piece is supposed to go. He decides on an ending which is incorrect, but the music is not similarly incorrect. It continues with a literal repeat of the material. The repetition of the last two lines is superfluous as the text had already been set and the music had, at measure 39, arrived at its tonal goal of G minor. But Burlotto was too caught up in his simile and had to continue on incorrectly. In this case the metatheatrical moment—the moment which draws attention to the artifice of the aria—is again a moment in which the music gives out. Silence defines the fictional level at which Balanzone conjures up his thoughts. The level at which he performs his aria—the level the audience is exposed to through Hasse‟s music—is in the familiar style of an intermezzo‟s bass aria."

"Some metatheatrical music in the intermezzo repertory is more subtle in its construction."

"Girolamo Gigli‟s libretto for La Dirindina (1715) is of course firmly in the metatheatrical vein."

"It is a satire of the operatic business with its bad lead sopranos, profligate castratos, stage mothers and horny music masters. One of its arias, “Queste vostre pupillete,” uses a musical analogy to describe the visual charms of the eponymous Dirindina who, despite her mediocre singing abilities, is on her way to great success because of her obvious physical beauty. The aria is sung by Liscione, her castrato confidante. He attempts to convince Dirindina that she will be an enormous success in the theatrical world after she has just been given a contract.

From:

Girolamo Gigli, La Dirindina.

"Queste vostre pupillette,/tanto vive e tanto nere,/son due note armoniose/fatte al metro d‟ogni cor./Son due nuove minuette/della danza delle sfere;/son due chiavi luminose/pel concerto d‟ogni amor.

Translation: "These eyes of yours,/so alive and so dark,/are two harmonious notes/timed to the metre of every heartbeat./They are two new minuets/from the dance of the spheres;
they are two shining clefs/for the concerto of every love."

"The first stanza suggests the musical analogy. The second provides the inspiration for the form of the aria. The text is set as a lilting two-part minuet—a musical joke on the simile of Dirindina‟s eyes being like “due nuove minuette.” Scarlatti further obliges Gigli‟s poetic flight of fancy by setting the piece in D major, a key with “due chiavi luminose.”

"These correlations are the source of humour in an otherwise serious-sounding cavatina. Each couplet follows the familiar versification plan for seria arias of the period with three ottonarii with piano endings and a final settenario capped with a tronco (eschewing the sdrucciolo ending common in humorous arias). This staid textual approach is mirrored in the music which remains within the ambit of minuet propriety. There is of course the potential for humour in the performance of the aria. The scene itself is ironic. Liscione clearly harbours no truly romantic feelings for Dirindina. Theirs is a platonic friendship (and one cannot escape the implication that Liscione is homosexual). A 1985 television production of La Dirindina (the year of its first publication in a critical edition)54 played up the effete character of Liscione by having the falsettist, Gianfranco Mari, squeak out the aria in a kind of high-pitched whine rather than using a more cultivated counter-tenor sound. Nothing is known of the original performer, Tommaso Bizzarri Sanese (which Francesco Degrada suggests may have been a pseudonym)."

Johnston quotes from

Francesco Degrada,
La Dirindina (Milan: Ricordi, 1985).

Johnston notes:

"Degrada was also the continuo keyboardist for this production. The production was broadcast on Radiotelevision Svizzera, featuring the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana conducted by Marc Andreae. Peter Bissegger‟s set design created an appropriate setting for a meta-theatrical work; the intermezzo takes place on a giant harpsichord, which acts as a giant set piece. Liscione performs his aria as a dance on the dual-manual keyboard."

"We do not even know if [the original singer] was a castrato, as his part was written in the tenor clef in Part I and the soprano clef in Part II."

"Given that the libretto makes a lot of comedic hay of the fact that Liscione is a eunuch, it seems unlikely that Scarlatti would have envisioned the role performed in a tenor‟s range."

"The aria‟s mercilessly high tessitura—it contains five a‟‟s and never dips below a g‟—suggests either that Sanese had a remarkably lovely voice above the staff or that Scarlatti accepted that his voice may strain in performance."

"One wonders if Scarlatti here sacrificed his singer just to keep his “two shining clefs” in D major."

"This aria suggests that even in an early stage of the intermezzo‟s development composers found opportunities to apply a metatheatrical sensibility to the practice of composition." ("Sanese did not participate in the pastoral work which replaced La Dirindina in performance during Ambleto. The castrato Domenico Fontana took the female part of Elpina (as he was in La Dirindina) and Michele Salvatici played the baritone role of Silvano. See Sartori 13383 in Claudio Sartori, I libretti italiani a stampa dale origini al 1800: catalogo analitico con 16 indici (Cuneo: Bertola & Locatelli, 1990-1992), vol. 5. Since the work was intended to be performed in Rome a castrato had to play the female lead.")

The next section in Johnstone's dissertation is entitled, "METATHEATRE AND THE AESTHETICS OF MUSICAL HUMOUR"

"An obsession with the “natural” pervades all forms of aesthetic criticism in the latter three-quarters of the eighteenth-century."

"The prevailing view that the comic intermezzo is the manifestation of a kind of “natural” comic expression is largely the retroactive application of mid-century aesthetic notions onto an earlier time and repertory."

"Many musical features are shared between the mid-century and the works we‟ve explored here from the 1710s and 1720s."

"But we have also seen how a metatheatrical sensibility pervades the entire genre of the intermezzo. This contrasts sharply with the ideals of the natural as expressed by philosophers and dramatic theorists in the mid-eighteenth century—especially those disposed to French ideals (like Diderot, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Esteban de Arteaga).56 As we noted in the introduction, for Diderot the Italian comic style (as presented during the querelle des bouffons) was the ideal musical expression. But the intermezzo, as it was, was not so natural. Indeed, many of the basic features of the intermezzo‟s comic style shatter any sense of the natural by exposing the artificial means of theatrical production. Whether containing references to the actors playing a part (as in Brunetta e Burlotto) or parodying musical convention, the intermezzo always reminded the audience of the operatic work as a calculated fiction."

"The intermezzo belongs more properly to a different critical debate that occurred sometime earlier than the mid-eighteenth century. The dramatic criticisms of Muratori, Crescimbeni and Gravina formed the backdrop to the humour of the intermezzo. In the humorous treatises by Martello and Marcello we see further examples of how the criticisms of operatic practice were made manifest as a series of tropes about the excesses of opera. “Butterflies” and “little boats” became metonyms for the medium‟s failure to achieve verisimilitude. To critics and humourists alike, therefore, opera was nothing more than a collection of stock conventions divorced from any dramatic purpose."

"Metatheatre in the intermezzo shows us, once again, that the genre‟s humour is dependent upon earlier theatrical models and upon a high degree of theatrical intelligence. One would not laugh and Marchesina‟s and Corrado‟s jokes about their personalities, their skills as actors and their conventional modes of representation if they were not well educated theatregoers. Humour, as Kozintsev noted, by its nature asks the audience to adopt the author‟s position and view the joke from the “metalevel.” Understanding humour means not merely getting the joke, but getting how the joke came about by understanding the author‟s perspective."

"This point has been made several times regarding comedy in the music of Haydn. Mark Evan Bonds, for example, made clear that the brilliance of Haydn‟s instrumental humour was its ability to capitalize on audiences‟ understanding of convention.57 In the case of the famous surprise symphony, “Haydn does more than merely surprise us: he directs our attention toward his own open manipulation of the various artifices that we as listeners, through our familiarity with this idiom, have come to expect.”58

"What Bonds asserts about the work of Haydn can easily be said about the metatheatrical comedic devices of the intermezzo. Comedy in the theatre obviously contains many more variables. An audience does not simply laugh at the music. But by the manipulation of the intermezzo‟s multiple modes of presentation—its music, its text, its gesture, its costuming, its scenography—producers of opera were able to create a humorous work of art by calling attention to the act of performance itself. The audience‟s expectations of how things are supposed to go are thwarted. But so are the audience‟s illusions about what the operatic experience is. The kinds of metatheatrical devices which generate comedy in the intermezzo make the audience always aware of the art form itself. They annihilate any ability to “suspend disbelief.”"

Johnston does not intend to "a facile line between the humour of the intermezzo and the musical humour of Haydn (thereby crediting it with not only classical style, but with the notion of Romantic irony in music)."

"Many connections exist, but there is a wide temporal and generic gap that is filled with many books and dissertations. What I do want to draw attention to is the fact that in both Haydn‟s music and the music of the intermezzo comedy is dependent upon manipulation of musical material for comic effect. It is not a natural phenomenon, but rather one which is fundamentally artificial. Behind every musical joke is the calculated understanding of an audience‟s expectations. The intermezzo was saturated with an understanding of itself as a work of fiction—with a metatheatrical awareness—from the very start. As we saw at the start of this chapter it owed its existence to a criticism of opera which denigrated the very basis of the form. No doubt influenced by this cultural criticism, intermezzo librettists found humour in making fun of opera, of performing and of the intermezzo itself. Composers‟ ability to support these turns musically is varied. In some cases they aurally composed the cues found in the music (as in the aria in La Dirindina). In other cases they composed music which exposed differing layers of fiction (as in the duet from Dorina e Nibbio). Most of the time they broke the musical frame and resorted to recitative or silence to accomplish their metatheatrical aims. In the very process of doing so these composers have revealed to us a truth about the practice of musical comedy that we will explore in the final chapter: musical humour cannot happen on its own, but is dependent upon the thwarting of listeners‟ expectation."

References:

Robert S. Freeman,
Opera Without Drama: Currents of Change in Italian Opera, 1675-1725 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981).

Renato di Benedetto,
“Poetics and Polemics,” in Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (eds.), The History of Italian Opera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Edward Lippman, A History of Western Musical Aesthetics (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 136-142.

Giammario Crescimbeni,
La Bellezza della Volgar Poesia: Spiegata in Otto Dialoghi (Rome: Gio. Francesco Buagni, 1700).

Crescembeni,
La Bellezza, translated by Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 275.

Robert S. Freeman,
Opera without Drama: Currents of Change in Italian opera, 1675-1725 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981).

Crescimbeni, Commentarj di Gio. Mario de’ Crescimbeni intorno alla sua Istoria della volgar poesia (Rome: Antonio de Rossi, 1711).

Gian Vincenzo Gravina,
Della tragedia (Naples: Nicolo Naso, 1715).

Claudio Gallico, “La „sostanza de‟melodrammi‟ secondo Pier Jacopo Martello: Una rilettura.” Musica e Storia 7, no. 2 (December 1, 1999): 347-349;

Gallico, “Prassi esecutiva nel Teatro alla moda di Benedetto Marcello,” Studi Musicali 1, no. 1(1972): 317-26;

Nino Pirotta, “Pier Jacopo Martello: „Et in Arcadia ego,‟ ma „cum modo,‟ ” Le parole della musica. II: Studi sul Lessico della Letteratura Critica del Teatro Musicale in Onore di Gianfranco Folena (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1995), 33-46;

Ulrich Weisstein, “Benedetto Marcellos Il teatro alla moda: Scherz, Satire, Parodie oder tiefere Bedeutung?” in Opern und Opernfiguren: Festschrift für Joachim Herz (Salzburg: Ursula Müller-Speiser, 1989), 31-57.

Claudio Gallico, “P.I. Martello and La poetica di Aristotile sul melodramma,” in Scritti in Onore di Luigi Ronga (Naples: Ricciardi, 1973), 225-232; Andrea Luppi, “Presupposti estetici del Teatro alla moda di Benedetto Marcello,” A.M.I.S. Antiquae Musicae Italicae Studiosi: Bollettino dell’Associazione 2, no. 3 (February 1, 1986): 14-

Reinhard G. Pauly
“Benedetto Marcello‟s Satire on Early 18th-Century Opera,” The Musical Quarterly 34, no. 2 (1948): 222-233; Nino Pirrotta, “Metastasio and the demands of his literary environment,” Studies in Music from the University of Western Ontario 7, no. 1 (1982): 10-17.

Piero Weiss, “Pier Jacopo Martello on Opera (1715): An Annotated Translation,” The Musical Quarterly 66, no. 3 (1980): 378-403, 385.

Eric Csapo, Actors and Icons of the Ancient Theater (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 21.