La sublimità della greca melopea

Speranza The opera is set in Sicily in the twelfth century AD. As the curtain rises on Act III we see the ruins of an ancient Greek theatre there: auditorium to the right, stage to the left. It is night. Though the building is decayed, it still has its votive altar in place. Soon a Norman king sacrifices at that altar—and experiences a Nietzschean epiphany. The auditorium fills with spectral presences and the god Dionysus himself appears on the stage, an audible chorus attending on him, calling seductively to the king . . . This scene from King Roger, the symbolist opera of 1918–24 with a score (and much of the libretto) by Karol Szymanowski, must be the most complete evocation in the whole operatic repertoire of the physical theatre of antiquity: its shape, its performance conventions, its tutelary spirit, its allure. However, significant evocations of aspects of that theatre had preceded it in the centuries since the first Euridices and Dafnes at Firenze and Mantova in the late 1590s and 1600s, though they were used not as part of the decor and action of a particular work, but in support of projects which might affect the development of the operatic mode as a whole. For while we may tend to think of the contribution of ancient theatre and drama to opera very largely in terms of the later medium’s adaptations of a dozen-or-so surviving performance-texts (King Roger as a reworking of Euripides’ Bacchae is a case in point), the ‘institutions’ of ancient theatre as a practical concern—one involving architects, performers, and organizers—have had their parts to play too. The roles of four of these institutions are especially worth investigating: the singing of actors on the ancient stage; the presence behind that stage of a controlling or enabling figure; the shaping of the auditorium; and the placing of choric odes around the episodes of the drama. Each of these has been seen at one time or another as the precursor of some (1 On this opera, see Robert Cowan, Ch. 17 in this volume.) important aspect of operatic activity, supplying a stimulating precedent perhaps, or perhaps a convenient pretext that would add respectability to something which was in fact an innovation. ---- The importance to the early operatic world of the notion that the performers in Greek and Roman theatre sang their roles comes over well in the tribute paid by Marco da Gagliano to one of the triumphs of opera’s first decade, the Arianna (‘Ariadne’) of Claudio Monteverdi and Ottavio Rinuccini, first staged in 1608 at Mantua. In the preface to his own opera of the same year, Dafne, Gagliano (a Florentine who was almost certainly in the audience for Arianna’s premiere) claims that Monteverdi had set Rinuccini’s words for the heroine ‘in so exquisite a way that one can truly affirm that the excellence of ancient music was revived [si rinovasse il pregio dell’antica musica], since he visibly reduced the whole theatre to tears’.2 It might seem strange at first that Gagliano links Ariadne’s ‘Lasciatemi morire’—seventeenth-century monody at its most expressive and significantly the only part of the score to survive—with an ancient music whose excellence (a tiny handful of fragments aside) he would have had to take entirely on trust; but it becomes less so if we set what he says against three decades of a particular strain of Italian humanist thought about the nature and science of music: thought that was especially coloured by the surviving writings on the subject by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Monody was a buzzword—a buzz-concept rather (the word itself wasn’t used in this sense until the 1640s)—with the so-called ‘Camerata’: the circle of humanist gentlemen and musician-prote´ge´s who gathered in Medici Florence in the 1570s and ’80s around the scholar, poet, and courtier Giovanni de’ Bardi. The concept of a single vocal line (monolinear, monophonic, monodic) pitched somewhere between traditional solo song and heightened speech appealed to them strongly because they were convinced that its promotion and dissemination would restore a long-lost balance between the sister arts of music and poetry, making sung texts audible, significant and properly powerful again after far too many decades of barbarous madrigalian polyphony: a music they considered ‘Gothic’ (or so Bardi’s son tells us). Added significantly to which, they believed that pure monody had been omnipresent in the performance of metrical texts in antiquity—‘one single air, such as we hear in church’, as their Roman mentor in classical matters Girolamo Mei put it—which meant that antiquity could be a stick with which (2 Carter and Szweykowski (1994), 53. (Where there are modern editions and/or translations of the texts referred to in this chapter, it is they that are cited in these notes. Translations are taken from such modern volumes as provide them; where they do not, the translations are my own.)) to beat depraved polyphonic modernity.3 Ancient drama was particularly interesting in this respect to Bardi’s especial prote´ge´ Vincenzo Galilei and to the Ferrara-based literary historian and theorist Francesco Patrizi, a good friend of Bardi’s, perhaps because the evidence they collected about it suggested something counter-intuitive. They would surely have been justified in assuming at the outset that the performance of a Greek tragedy, with its series of choric odes framing episodes of dramatic monologue and dialogue, had involved the odes being sung in three- or four-part harmony and the episodes being delivered in plain speech. But their research suggested that the odes had in fact been sung in unison, probably with the unison support of an aulos or kithara, and —- even more intriguing -- that the monologues and dialogues had all been sung too. Vincezo Galilei in his Dialogue of Ancient and Modern Music (1582) and Patrizi in the ‘Historical Decad’ of his Poetics (Della poetica, 1586) found support for these views in some paragraphs about the chorus in Plato’s "Laws" (665) and in sentences and passing phrases to do with individuals acting and singing in Cicero, Quintilian, Suetonius, and the rubrics to the comedies of Terence. But they put especial weight on their prize exhibit. Sentences from the collection of Problems attributed to Aristotle (918b and 922b). These talk of ‘songs sung by stage actors’ and suggest that there are certain especially noble musical modes that are apt for the stagesinging of heroes but not for the chorus, whose members should be content with humbler ones. This they interpreted as implying that the heroes did nothing but sing, and their faith in their interpretation led them to play down the statement in Aristotle’s Poetics (1449b30–31) -- borne out by scholarship in our own time -- that the episodes in tragedy were in fact part-spoken and part-sung: ‘some parts delivered with metre alone and others delivered with song’, as Aristotle puts it. If they had paid more attention to the likelihood that the book of Problems was only ‘pseudo-Aristotle’, Bardi and his friends might have had second thoughts and given more weight to the information in the Poetics, instead of dismissing it—as Patrizi did—as only applying to the decadent phase of tragedy.)4 Still, however shaky their case for all-sung Greek tragedy—and by no means all savants of the period went along with it—the humanists’ combined distaste for sixteenth-century polyphony and enthusiasm for their vision of antiquity led soon to practical experiments in writing and performing a new monody. And before long these included brief theatrical scenas which could be put into court entertainments that in the main used quite other musical techniques. A significant instance was the big set of dramatic interludes or intermedii which Bardi (3 P. de’Bardi to G. B. Doni: Strunk (1998), 524. Mei to Galilei: Palisca (1989), 57; cf. Galilei (2003), 251 and 261. For monody in the ‘Camerata’ and related circles, see Carter (1989), vol. 1, ch. 4; Palisca (1994), chs. 12–17, and Palisca (2006), ch. 7. 4 Patrizi (1969), 1. 331–6, and Palisca (1985), 412–18 and 424–6. Galilei (2003), 152–3 and 362–3; cf. liii–lxi. For a recent gathering of ancient sources on solo- and chorus-singing, see Csapo and Slater (1995), 331–68 (whence the translations from Aristotle above). For modern studies of the subject, see Easterling and Hall (2002), 3–68 (essays by E. Hall and P. Wilson), and Hall (2006), 288–320.) Bardi himself helped to devise for the performance of the comedy La pellegrina (‘The Pilgrim Woman’) celebrating the marriage of Ferdinando de’ Medici to Christine of Lorraine in 1589, which had FOUR monodies slotted into it, among them a lament with echo-effects for the mythical musician Arion. It is not surprising then that, when figures connected with the Bardi circle and the related circle of Jacopo Corsi -- notably those rather uneasy bedfellows Emilio de’ Cavalieri, Giulio Caccini and Jacopo Peri -- began about a decade later to write music for the new all-sung plays (which developed generic subtitles like "favola in musica" and "tragedia in musica"), they should make extensive use of monody and in so doing feel pleasantly in touch with antiquity. True, their subjects were pastoral or piously Christian rather than fully Aristotelian-tragic. Their choruses in the main were harmonized rather than sung in unison, and their monody wasn’t 100 per cent monolinear or speech-like, since it involved a supporting basso continuo played on a keyboard and/or a plucked stringed instrument and even occasionally indulged itself by calling on more traditional song-forms (‘arias’ in the making). Nonetheless, these composers were using a technique for solo singer-actors that could be linked to classical practice and might achieve an affecting eloquence approaching what they imagined was that of an Antigona, Elettra, or Medea on the ancient stage. So Caccini could announce in the dedication to Bardi of his music for Euridice in 1600 that it was composed in a dramatic style (the stile rappresentativo) which Bardi himself had said at Camerata gatherings ‘had been used by the ancient Greeks in performing their tragedies’. And Peri could add in the preface to the Euridice music he composed in the same year that, in his ambition to ‘imitate with song him who speaks’, he had ‘judged that the ancient Greeks and Romans (who, according to the opinion of many, sang their tragedies throughout on the stage) used a harmony which, going beyond that of ordinary speech, fell so short of the melody of song that it assumed an intermediate form.’ Such classical precursors were worth taking seriously. And if we factor in Alessandro Guidotti’s description in 1600 of Cavalieri’s recent compositions as ‘done in likeness of that style with which it is said the ancient Greeks and Romans on their stages and in their theatres were wont to move the onlookers to various emotions’, we can see that Gagliano’s praise for Monteverdi’s Arianna, an opera which at its climax had ‘visibly moved the whole theatre to tears’ and so revived ‘the excellence of ancient music’, made good sense as part of a tradition. It was a tradition which Gagliano himself was sure would yield even finer fruit if there was enough creative talent and princely cash forthcoming, since the operas of the north Italian courts would then be on course ‘to arrive at a much greater perfection, and perhaps such that one day they might be able to come close to the so celebrated tragedies of the ancient Greeks and Romans’.5 (5 Carter and Szweykowski (1994), 37 (Caccini), 25–7 (Peri), 71 (Cavalieri), 53 and 49 (Gagliano); cf. Rinuccini at 17–19.) Such prefatory declarations of emulation and association largely faded out once opera as a form was fully up and running; but the question of the form’s connections or lack of them with the drama of antiquity went on concerning people. Was opera’s birth around 1600 in fact a rebirth of ancient drama or was it in essence a new thing? (It was acceptable, it seems, to be undecided about this; witness the anonymous author of the treatise Il corago of around 1630 (on which see Section II below), for whom the form was equally to be welcomed whether it was ‘newly discovered in our own times or taken from ancient usage’: a view shared by Andrea Perrucci in his book on the theatre arts at the end of the century.)6 Again, was opera a worthy equivalent to what had flourished in Athens two millennia before—and if it was, was it perhaps part of an unbroken tradition going back to the Greeks which had survived incognito in the centuries intervening? Of course assertions of equivalence and/or continuity required as premise a continuing conviction that Greek drama had been all-sung. Some notable writers would not accept this, among them the Seigneur de Saint-Evremond in his letter on opera to the Duke of Buckingham (c.1677) and Pier Jacopo Martello in his treatise on tragedy of 1714. The latter quotes the former’s epigram that ‘the Greeks made fine tragedies where some things were sung while the Italians and French make bad ones where everything is sung’, glossing it by limiting song on the ancient stage to choric odes and declaring that solo-actors at the time simply relied on sonorous speech:7 a view taken further by Jean-Baptiste du Bos in the third volume of his Re´flexions critiques (1740), which spends much time arguing that Greek dialogue in performance was amatter of ‘composed declamation’ (III. v). Other writers, however, took the Camerata line. Claude-Franc¸ois Me´nestrier, the Jesuit chronicler of all types of spectacle and performance, attests in his Representations en musique of 1681 that ‘the Greeks had no kind of poetry that was not sung’ and that ‘their theatre pieces were sung things, as it is easy to establish’. In his Della tragedia of 1715 the dramatist and critic Gianvincenzo Gravina is equally convinced, using the same ‘testimonies’ as Mei, Galilei, Patrizi and their friends but adding a few more from other parts of Cicero and from Livy, Strabo, Lucian, and Donatus. And Gravina’s famous pupil Pietro Metastasio silently takes over much of this evidence when making the same assertion in chapter 4 of his ‘abstract’ of Aristotle’s Poetics, the Estratto dell’arte poetica d’Aristotele (1782) which he worked on from the 1740s to the 1770s and which serves as an apologia for his own practice as an opera-librettist in the light of what he sees as the best of ancient theory. The concept of all-sung tragedy among the ancients is far too good a precedent for the most illustrious writer of modern opera-texts to be in a hurry to question it, especially since he considers the witnesses he cites to be ‘sufficient, authoritative, and indisputable’.8 (6 Anon. (1983), 41. Perrucci (1961), 74 and 87. 7 Martello (1963), 273 and 303–5. Cf. Freeman (1981), 38–9 and 47–8. 8 Me´nestrier (1972), 36. Gravina (1973), 557–68. Metastasio (1947), 2. 978. Cf. Burney (1935), 1. 133–42.) Not that expressing this opinion, and even pointing out that there might be formal points of comparison to be made between ancient drama and modern opera, necessarily implied that the commentator was an enthusiast for the latter, let alone thought that it was a wholly worthy equivalent to the works of antiquity. Voltaire is a case in point. In his ‘Greek Tragedies Imitated in Certain Italian and French Operas’, the first part of the Dissertation on Ancient and Modern Tragedy which he places before his own tragedy Se´miramis (1747), he is happy to assert that Italian recitative is ‘precisely the melopoeia of the ancients’—melopoeia being Aristotle’s term for the ‘song-making’ element in tragedy—and that operatic choruses mesh with recitative in the same way that choric odes meshed with episodes in Greece. Yet in spite of this (and in spite of his admiration for some of Metastasio’s librettos), he holds that opera as a form is ‘monstrous’ on account of its addiction to arias. Gravina had made a similar point. For him, aria-grounded opera had about as much mimetic validity as a Chinese painting or a Gothic statue (very little, that’s to say); yet the works of the ancients had structural similarities to it. ‘The song of the episodes’ in Greek tragedy, he says, ‘had to be closer to nature and that of the choruses more artificial’, much as, in ‘the ridiculous dramas of the infamous theatre of today’, recitative is ‘more simple and natural’ while aria is ‘so figurative that it loses resemblance to nature’.9 Of course, Gravina’s one-time prote´ge´ Metastasio will have none of this sniping. As he sees it in the Estratto, ancient tragedy and the operatic mode that has come to be known as opera seria are both great forms, with the latter perfectly reconcilable to Aristotle’s ideas about the former, provided those are interpreted with a proper latitude. Any connections demonstrable between the two forms, then, can only be grist to his opera-promoting mill. One connection he notes links him with several seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers who in their differing ways see opera in at least some of its elements as stretching back far, far beyond 1600, or ancient drama as stretching forward towards the medieval period. For instance, in a paper on ‘The Performance of Ancient Tragedy’ given in 1729 to the Parisian Acade´mie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, the Abbe´ Vatry (another believer in all-sung Greek drama, who felt that its episodes and choruses were like modern French opera’s re´cits and airs) argues from antiquity forwards, speculating that theatrical song found its way into early Christian liturgy during the decline of the Roman empire: The theatre [of antiquity] was still open when chant was introduced into the Church and, the Passion of Our Lord being a kind of tragedy, it is very likely that tragic song was imitated in the singing of it to the people, from which comes its being sung by different persons in different tones. I leave it to the savants to decide if this notion has any merit. (Any enthusiastic savant contemplating going one stage further and linking late ecclesiastical chant with operatic recitative c.1600 might relish Cavalieri’s report (9 Voltaire (2003), 141–3; cf. Me´nestrier (1972), 78–9. Gravina (1973), 556 and 560.) of the general response to the premiere of Peri’s Euridice: ‘the music was tedious, . . . it seemed like the chanting of the Passion.’)10 Then Antonio Planelli, Metastasio’s younger contemporary, looking at the prehistory of opera in his Dell’opera in musica of 1772, claims that, broadly defined, the form can be traced by way of various kinds of Italian music-theatre as far back as the mid-thirteenth century at least, which leads him to speculate whether at that stage it may have been ‘a continuation of ancient tragedy’. For Metastasio himself it is a matter of prosodic links. Thinking of the connections as he sees them between the strophe–antistrophe–epode form of the ancient choric ode (‘A.i–A.ii–B’, so to speak) and the ‘A–B–A’ form, strophic in a sense, of the operatic ariette for which he provided the words, it strikes him that the two work in the same way— as well as contrasting similarly with ancient episode-singing and modern operatic recitative—‘by virtue of an immemorial custom, apparently handed down to us from the ancient theater’. It strikes him too that both have something in common with the whole long tradition of Italian odes, canzoni and canzonette. Aren’t all these Italian forms past and present parts of one continuity, ‘visible and evident relics of the theatre of the Greeks’?11 Well, perhaps not. From the beginnings of Italian opera there had been sceptical voices cautioning against over-confident, over-precise claims that the stile rappresentativo, let alone any lyric forms that came to be associated with it, reproduced the actual song of the ancient stage or could be very directly connected with it. Jacopo Peri had spoken for the sceptics in his Euridice preface of 1600 where, although happy to regard the theatre music of antiquity as a precursor of the new monody, he refused to be ‘so bold’ as to claim that his own monodic style was ‘the type of song used in Greek and Roman plays’.12 But the most trenchant ‘No’ to any suggestion of continuity or resemblance between ancient drama and opera on the Italian model would come a hundred years after Metastasio, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Geburt der Trago¨die aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, 1872). It is Nietzsche’s argument that true Dionysian tragedy was driven from the earth in the fifth century BC by the unholy alliance of Euripides and Socrates, and that only now is it returning in the form of such music-dramas as Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. So for him, the monodic, logocentric operatic project of the 1600s was a false dawn. The inventors of recitative were, he felt, profoundly mistaken in their belief that ‘stilo rappresentativo had solved the mystery of ancient music, the secret that alone was able to explain the enormous effect of . . . Greek tragedy.’ Only ‘truly unmusical listeners’, he growled, could have ‘demanded that the words should be understood above all else; so that a rebirth of music could only occur when a 10 For Metastasio, see Weiss (1982) passim and Michael Burden, Ch. 10 in this volume. Vatry: Recueil (1717–48), 211, 223–4; cf. Me´nestrier (1972), 38–9. Cavalieri: Palisca (1994), 403. 11 Planelli (1981), 7–8. Metastasio (1947), 2.970 and 1068: the former in the tr. on p. 389 of Weiss (1982). 12 Carter and Szweykowski (1994), 29. Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 7 way of singing was discovered in which the words would hold sway over counterpoint as a master holds sway over his servant’. He was especially amazed that this demand should be made at the turn of the seventeenth century: Is it conceivable that the music of opera, thoroughly externalised and incapable of reverence, should have been enthusiastically welcomed and cherished, as a rebirth, so to speak, of all true magic, by an age that had just produced the ineffably sublime and sacred music of Palestrina?13 So much for the Camerata! Of course, Nietzsche is doing intelligent composers c.1600 less than justice, since they were aware all along that there could be no absolute abandoning of the contrapuntal principle. Monteverdi himself made the point trenchantly six years after the premiere of Arianna by reworking its heroine’s solo-voice-and-continuo monody ‘Lasciatemi morire’ in a rich fivevoice polyphonic texture and publishing it as a sequence of madrigals. Any surviving diehards of Bardi’s circle must have thought that the Goths were back at the gates. Poetry and music; acting, dancing, and instrumental playing; costumes and props; ‘scenes and machines’: people had been aware from its beginnings of the variety of media, techniques, and talents that opera involved. Some had been aware too that, in consequence, the preparation and performance of a particular piece would need careful supervising; and it would not have been a new notion that the responsibility for this might be vested in one person or a close partnership of two or three. It was an idea that had antecedents in the activities of the performance-controllers of the big late-medieval religious festival dramas (the ‘regent’ of the Lucerne Passion Play for instance), and more recently in the skills of the drama teachers at the new Jesuit colleges and of the gifted courtiers or associates of polite academies who were charged with devising, casting, rehearsing, and staging ambitious shows of one sort and another: pastoral dramas, classicizing tragedies, dramatic intermedii, and so on. There was Leone de’ Sommi at Mantua for instance, theatrical servant of the Gonzaga through much of the second half of the sixteenth century; there were Angelo Ingegneri at Vicenza in the 1580s and the not-too-fractious duumvirate of Bardi and Cavalieri to whom the Grand Duke gave overall responsibility for mounting the big Florentine intermedii of 1589. So, when the first operas were staged in northern Italy, the necessary skills were to hand; and, like their immediate predecessors, operatic performance-coordinators (or admiring colleagues of theirs) might occasionally write treatises or detailed memoranda in connection (13 Nietzsche (1993), 89–91) with their work. The most revealing of these perhaps is Gagliano’s account, in the preface to his 1608 Dafne, of the circumstances of that opera’s premiere, of the variety of media involved in its success, and of the techniques employed in almost all departments of its production: matters of musical balance, synchronization and ornamentation, of stage movement and apt posture for soloists and chorus, and of special effects and significant props.14 What these figures holding the show together lacked was a widely accepted title that would set them off as masters of a particular metier. Perhaps they were content to be characterized by the verbs that commonly described what they did: controlling, guiding, directing, arranging, executing, setting in order (regolare, guidare, dirigere, disporre, condurre, ordinare). But was there an appropriate noun to be found for them? Well, yes; and in the records of Greco-Roman theatre. The chief singer-dancer of the chorus in early Greek tragedy had been known as the choregos (‘chorus leader’) before gaining the more common classical name of coryphaeus (‘head man’), at which point the term choregos attached itself to the chorus’s non-playing captain, the moneyed citizen who, once appointed by the city’s chief archon, had the privilege and responsibility of organizing choric matters: recruiting the chorus members, finding a space in which they and the aulos player could rehearse, providing the means to feed and water them, and fitting them out with costumes and masks for the performance. (It was left to a chorodidaskalos to do much of the practical ‘directing’.) Later—to confuse or enrich things—the word ‘choregos’ gained a further and different kind of life, migrating from Attic to Doric Greek and then to Latin, changing vowels as it went, losing class somewhat but maintaining its acquired Greek sense of ‘provider’ and coming to be used in Roman theatre for a troupe’s supplier of costumes, perhaps of props too: a practical working choragus now, contracted to the aediles who bought in the shows that were staged for the citizenry.15 So sixteenth-century commentators could find a range of meanings attached to the one word (which they generally spelt the Latin way)—and they proceeded to add another. Looking at choregia and choragia in Aristotle’s Poetics (1453b8) and the De Architectura of Vitruvius (V.xi.1), they hazarded that these terms, beyond their primary meaning of ‘theatrical gear’, were connected with the active preparation and rehearsal of a show, taking the hint perhaps from the Greek lexicographer Phrynichus, who had defined the choregeion as ‘the place where the choregos, bringing together choruses and actors, would knock them into shape’. From the angle of the Renaissance, then, the choragus of the Greeks and Romans might be seen as a rehearser as well as an organizer, financier, performanceleader, costumier, and props master. (Mid-century writers on poetics seem (14 Carter and Szweykowski (1994), 46–67; cf. Savage (1989) passim and Savage (2002a), esp. 297–307. 15 Greek choregos: see Wilson (2000), esp. 50–95, 114–16, 260–2, and Csapo and Slater (1995), 139–57. Roman choragus: see Gilula (1996), 479–84, and Marshall (2006), 26–8) particularly keen to see him as a kind of stage manager too.)16 It is hardly surprising therefore that theatre folk with humanist connections in the 1590s and early seventeenth century were moved on occasion to give the word a modern application, and one that implied a wide competence. For instance, in 1591 the dramatist Muzio Manfredi wrote to Leone de’ Sommi at Mantua about the costuming of one of his tragedies there. Manfredi offered some details but allowed that he could leave most of the decisions in de’ Sommi’s capable hands, believing that his would be ‘the office of corago’ for the show and knowing that he was a ‘master of those arts’.17 The modern man-about-practical-theatre seemed to have acquired a classical precursor. Around that time the term choragus began to get institutionalized at the Jesuit colleges. These regularly staged pious plays in Latin, often involving dance and song: plays which were important events educationally, socially, and sometimes artistically. They were generally the responsibility of the college’s professor of rhetoric or languages, and in his capacity as writer, caster, rehearser, and general organizer of a show he was sometimes called its choragus. The term may have got into the Jesuit mindset from learned commentaries on relevant classical texts, or helpful syntheses like the chapter on the Greek choregos in book 9 of the Historical Decad of Patrizi’s Poetics, or from literary borrowings such as the passage (deriving from Lucian’s journey-to-the-shades dialogue, Menippus) in Erasmus’ Praise of Folly where the controller of the roles that humankind plays on the Great Stage of the World is called the choragus. Thus the German Jesuit Jakob Bidermann, active in college dramatics at Ingoldstadt, Augsburg, and Munich from 1598 to 1615, is described in the preface to his collected Ludi Theatrales (1666) as a busy, multi-tasked choragus, hard put to find time to sit down and write his plays because he had to see the theatre readied, instruct the performers on stage, attend to matters of costume and scenery, get the stage-machines to function, prepare the programmesynopses for the printer, and on top of this to undertake all the other tasks needful in someone seeing to a theatrical enterprise. . . . I’ve often heard grave men say that they believed that the leader of a great army on the day he had to fight with a fierce enemy was not troubled with more cares than the choragus of a big show on the day it was to descend into the theatrical arena. (The coupling at the end here perhaps derives indirectly from Demosthenes’ striking contrast, in the First Philippic of 351 BC, between the efficiency with which the Athenians could organize a choregia and the inefficiency that characterized their military expeditions.)18 16 Phrynichus: see Revermann (2006), 93. Vitruvian commentators and writers on poetics: see Savage and Sansone (1989), 508–9, n. 21, and 496. 17 MacClintock (1966), 176–7. 18 Patrizi (1969), 1. 421–5; cf. I. 300–301. Bidermann (1967), I. (þþ)[1]v.- (þþ) 2r; cf. (þþ) 3v. Demosthenes: Wilson (2000), 50–1. 10 Roger Savage From the 1610s onwards there is a growing number of references in surviving documents to the activities of choragi at some of the Jesuit colleges;19 and it is against such a background, where its title is concerned at least, that one could place an anonymous manuscript of about 1630 which was only put into print in the late twentieth century and which its editors have speculatively attributed to Ottavio Rinuccini’s son Pierfrancesco: The Corago, or Certain Observations on the Good Staging of Dramatic Works (Il corago, o vero alcune osservazioni per metter bene in scena le composizioni drammatiche).20 The corago here, evoked as a wonderfully necessary figure and given twenty-three chapters of helpful instruction and urbane advice, is a courtier rather than a college professor, and spoken drama and all-sung opera—musica recitativa is the term used—are both important to him, with opera (‘one of the most esteemed of theatrical pleasures’) getting special attention. The first chapter makes it clear that the author’s approach to his subject is practical and up-to-date yet also as rooted as he can make it in the classical tradition. Regretting that the provision of public entertainments is not what it was, he claims that the relevant skills have become rusty. Among them, the art of the ancient corago, a vital support for dramatic poetry, is so obliterated that to Italians it no longer even has a name of its own, or if it does keep the old one, most people do not know what it means. The correct meaning of the word corago, then, was that person whose task it was to find, maintain and set up when needed all the decorations, devices and equipment pertaining to plays and other shows and entertainments. (Hence in Vitruvius the corago is the back room or hall where all the decorations and furnishings used for the scenic apparatus were stored.) But, keeping pace with the individuals who held the office and arising from specific needs, this corago sometimes extended his function to include the arrangement and planning of performances (even to the extent of directing the chorus: corago among the Greeks originally having the same meaning that coryphaeus has for us). So, since staging dramatic works with artistry and perfection calls for—or makes extremely useful—a person who directs and sees carried out not only matters of external de´cor but also many other necessary activities, and since the traditional office of corago was at least close to this, the corago’s art will here be taken to mean that competence which enables a man to lay down all the needful ways and means by which a drama, once it has been written by a poet, may be staged with the perfection it requires . . . It seems that in modern times he should be most trained and proficient in the arts of stage machinery and acting, [ . . . the latter including the art of] directing the choruses (which is said to be the origin of the corago’s name).21 The philology and theatre history may be a little wobbly here, but they indicate the concern that runs through the whole manuscript to call on classical parallels and contrasts wherever possible. For instance, the author mounts a full-dress if 19 e.g. for Fribourg before 1635, see Ehret (1921), 45 for the year 1619, 125 for 1625 and 1629, and 75 for 1634. 20 See Anon. (1983) for Italian text and editorial introduction; see Savage and Sansone (1989) for partial Eng. tr. and commentary. 21 Savage and Sansone (1989), 499–500. Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 11 inconclusive disputation on the relative merits and defects of ancient and modern theatrical architecture and decor; he contrasts ancient scales, harmonies, and tunings with modern ones, and adduces page after page of Julius Pollux’s Onomasticon as evidence in considerations of stage-dancing and the pros and cons of wearing theatrical masks. But along with all this, opera gets several chapters of prime focus, and the operatic duties of a court corago are made clear: among other things to foster the writing of effective librettos and telling settings of them; to supervise the invention of fine theatrical machines; to deploy choruses so that their movements can be read with pleasure and ease by the audience; to cast singers in appropriate roles, instruct them about stance, movement, and the alliance of musical and physical gesture, and to make sure on the night that they have proper wardrobe assistance, that the instrumentalists accompanying them have the chance to tune up discretely, and that the machines are safety-checked. Perhaps if Il corago had found its way into print at the time, as did significant treatises by Sabbattini and Saint-Hubert on stage decor and theatrical dance, the term corago might have taken off as the proper one for the person staging a spectacular show, an opera particularly. But it stayed in manuscript and so didn’t provide an easily citable alternative to staging’s tendency over the next century and a half to be subsumed under the responsibilities of another figure connected with the piece in hand: the librettist perhaps (as with Giulio Rospigliosi in Barberini Rome in the seventeenth century or Metastasio in Habsburg Vienna in the eighteenth), the composer (for instance Jean-Baptiste Lully at the court of Louis XIV or Niccolo` Jommelli at that of the Duke of Wu¨rttemberg), court Intendants such as Farinelli during his stint with the royal opera in Bourbon Madrid, or house-poets on the staff of commercial companies—a sizeable tribe that included Carlo Goldoni in Vivaldi’s Venice. Yet the term itself stayed alive in some corners of practical theatre well up to and into the eighteenth century. Thus Andrea Perrucci, the Sicilian/Neapolitan dramatist and theorist who includes opera and scripted-spoken drama as premeditated forms and commedia dell’arte as the most notable improvised one in his Dell’arte rappresentativa premeditata ed all’improvviso of 1699, insists on the importance for each of these modes of the corago: ‘the man who guides, harmonises and governs the performers’. He is ‘the good Palinurus who will get the ship into port’ and company members are urged to obey him, since ‘to be frank, in these matters a monarchy is better than a republic’.22 Again, at some Jesuit colleges the professor in charge of plays went on being called the choragus, notably the Bavarian Franz Lang, who put a lot of his teaching on stage movement (and advice on writing plays too) into his posthumously published treatise on acting, the Dissertatio de actione scenica (1727). This includes a lively job description: 22 Perrucci (1961), 143; cf. 144, 263–4 and 266. Cf. also Martello (1963), 277 and 311. 12 Roger Savage In a choragus I require these gifts. Besides natural ability . . . , he should first be a poet and fluent in Latin, should have an acute fancy or imagination, should be an outstanding moralist, a fine actor, and finally adept in manual theatre-skills. . . . If he can further have abilities in music and visual art, . . . he will win all votes.23 By the mid-eighteenth century, however, ‘choragus’ seems to have lost most of its currency as a term referring to contemporary theatre practice, at least where opera was concerned, perhaps because the word’s natural habitat was the court or college at a time when the operatic world as a whole had become more and more dominated by commercially-minded impresarios in the public theatre: men of a tribe founded back in the Venice of the 1640s by the likes of Marco Faustini, and men who would be unlikely to include a corago on their pay-roll. So the word shrank back to the sphere of ancient history, though it still had a resonance and relevance, as when the French Encyclope´die suggests in 1753 that the position of a chore`ge in fifth-century Athens was analogous to that of a directeur—one of the company administrators under government surveillance—at the Paris Ope´ra, or when Francesco Algarotti calls in his influential Essay on Opera (Saggio sopra l’opera in musica, 1755) for a centralizing, coordinating, standard-maintaining operatic figure, another Palinurus who will ‘steer everything’, and declares that he would be the equivalent to the ‘corago or aedile’ who had supervised the theatres in happier times. Yet two decades later, when Planelli writes his Dell’opera in musica in 1772 with a view to forming and educating just such a figure—one who is especially concerned to combat the creeping power of those impresarios (grasping fellows so unlike the ‘respectable magistrates’ who ran theatre in the ancient world)—the word corago never appears and he consistently refers to his ideal as il direttore,24 quite possibly deriving the term from the French court-connected directeurs at the Ope´ra. After which (at a time when a person primarily dealing with the day-to-day practicalities of operatic staging was coming to have some such title as regolatore di scena, Regisseur des Schauspiels, metteur en sce`ne, ‘stage manager’), any currency the term choragus had outside classical studies seems to have been figurative, notably in Britain, perhaps because of the existence since the 1620s of an office of choragus at the University of Oxford: in that context a director of practical music-making under the professor of music theory. But the word had its figurative uses on the Continent too. Witness the nineteenth-century German architect Gottfried Semper enthusing that in the ancient world it was the role of his art to be choragus to all the others in order to ensure that they contributed harmoniously to the project in hand, as a result of which ‘the [architectural] monument became the quintessence of the arts’: an idea which can’t have been lost on Semper’s great friend Wagner, then contemplating music’s role in his vision of the Gesamtkunstwerk.25 23 Lang (1975), 61. 24 Faustini:Glixon B. L. and Glixon J. E. (2006), ch. 3, esp. 62–3.Diderot and d’Alembert (1969), 1. 574 (¼ 3 (1753). 367), s.v. ‘Chorege’. Algarotti (1963), 151. Planelli (1981), 125–9, esp. 128. 25 Semper (1989), 52; and see Mallgrave (1996), 60. Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 13 Still, actual choragi have occasionally appeared on the physical stage in the last 150 years. The leader and spokesman of the chorus-group that performed the prologues to the many acts of the Bavarian Passion Play at Oberammergau in the nineteenth century was known as its Choragus. Pietro Mascagni and Giovanni Illica include the speaking part of Giocardo, ‘Impresario e Corago’, in their commedia dell’arte opera The Masks (Le maschere, 1901), opening it with a scene in which Giocardo in his corago-role calls a cast meeting to discuss the plot and characters of the show to come: a homage to Perrucci perhaps, who recommends such meetings in Rule 14 of the commedia section of his Dell’arte rappresentativa. And a character named Choragus is not backward in coming forward in Harrison Birtwistle and Stephen Pruslin’s opera Punch and Judy of 1968, where he is chorus leader, presenter, narrator, confidant, props master, and twice a victim of Mr Punch’s homicidal tendencies (though happily he comes back to life again quite soon on both occasions). I I I . CAVEA AND ORCHESTRA The classicizing impulse that led to the evocation of ‘the music of the Greeks and Romans’ in connection with the earliest operas and to the adoption of a Greco- Latin word to characterize a man adept at staging them did not show itself at once in the creation of opera houses drawing on the theatre designs of the ancient world. Still, in a related musical field a few years earlier—and then much later in connection with theatres for opera during periods of reform—there was a concern to build practically on the example of antiquity. This above all involved the auditorium’s reflecting the classical cavea, a stepped arrangement of seats rising on a curved rake, rather like a substantial segment cut from a shallow bowl: something that had been illustrated in such printed editions of Vitruvius’ De Architectura as Cesare Cesariano’s (1521) and had been proposed for incorporation in modern theatre-construction as early as Sebastiano Serlio’s Second Book of Architecture in 1545. Thus when the Accademia Olimpica of Vicenza staged Orsatto Giustiniani’s Italian version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus in 1585, the show was notable not only for the mise en sce`ne of Ingegneri (its corago in all but name) and for the classicizing chorus-settings by Andrea Gabrieli, who had been charged by the Academicians with ensuring that the text was enunciated ‘distinctly’ and ‘clearly’, but also for its being the inaugural production in the academy’s flamboyantly classical theatre (Fig. 1.1), designed a few years earlier at the end of his career by Andrea Palladio. Filippo Pigafetta, a first-night enthusiast who reported that the Teatro Olimpico was built ‘in the ancient manner’, could see—as we still can— that its auditorium comprised a steeply raked cavea of thirteen curved steps or gradi, crowned above by a colonnaded gallery and centred below on a derivative of the Greek choric dancing floor or orchestra, the whole facing a wide stage 14 Roger Savage backed with an elaborate permanent architectural feature, the frons scaenae, its doors and grand central archway fitted out by Vincenzo Scamozzi in the years after Palladio’s death with illusionistic street perspectives. The design in its pristine Palladian state paid homage to the theatres of antiquity, theatres which had commonly been planned on the grid of a circle, though the nature of the Vicenzan site forced Palladio to squeeze his ideal circle into an ellipse. The line of the ellipse’s maximum diameter marks the meeting of cavea plus orchestra with the front of the stage, for in terms of Vitruvius’s treatise (V. vi–vii), the Olimpico’s design is not Greek but Roman. Rather than the near-fully circular floor of pre-Hellenistic theatres, its orchestra alludes elliptically to the semicircle typical of Roman practice: a space envisaged by Vitruvius as being filled not with a dancing chorus but with seated VIPs—as it was by ‘the ladies’ at that inaugural performance of Edipo tiranno in 1585. Which means that the audience looked to the stage not only for the play’s episodes—spoken ones, monody being as yet unknown in Vicenza—but for its sung choruses too.26 Sophocles would have been surprised. Figure 1.1 Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza: design by Palladio (1580) with street-perspectives added by Scamozzi, 1584. 26 See Gallo (1973) passim, esp. liv and 53–5; also Schrade (1960) for Gabrieli etc. For circularity and semicircularity, see Wiles (2003), ch. 6. Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 15 The Olimpico was a humanist academy-theatre and so had only a limited impact on the design of those auditoria and stages for opera at seventeenthcentury Italian courts—temporarily erected in some cases, permanently set up in others—whose influence would spread around the rest of Europe by the midcentury, in the process generating new-fangled commercial opera houses, initially and most famously in Venice: houses which followed the Venetian pre-operatic theatrical model by incorporating boxes for the city’s nobility and other special people.27 (These courtly auditoria and their commercial progeny tended to a ‘U’-shape rather than a semicircular one, in part so as to give stronger emphasis to the prince’s seat at the base of the ‘U’; and the installation of boxes—as many as five tiers by the time of the high baroque—tended to minimize any rake the auditorium’s floor might have.) Still, the Olimpico and the Vitruvian ideas it embodied did have their admirers. In distant London, for instance, theatre designs by Inigo Jones, John Webb, and Christopher Wren show the influence of the Vitruvian–Palladian ideal. True, these were not intended for opera, but John Vanbrugh, heir to that ideal in his theatre architecture at least, did build a commercial theatre in 1705, the Queen’s in the Haymarket, which was earmarked for opera as well as spoken drama and which quite soon became exclusively a home for the former, became indeed London’s principal Italian opera house for most of the eighteenth century. The building seems at first to have been strikingly Vitruvian (Fig. 1.2). Its design, recent scholarship has suggested, was based on a series of interlinked circles, the one that contained the auditorium being articulated by dome-supporting columns and featuring a semicircular cavea of pit-benches, gently raked and backed (where Vitruvius would have placed a colonnade) by a single wall of boxes facing the scenic stage. However, acoustic and other problems with the building soon led to its auditorium being modified, in part to allow for the incorporation of boxes at the sides to join those already at the back. So Vanbrugh’s singular humanist theatre became something close to a standard baroque one, regressing to what had become the norm of the pan-European opera house with its ‘U’-shaped or horseshoe-shaped or bell-shaped auditorium and fairly flat floor: a norm which was largely unchallenged until the middle of the eighteenth century and which lingered on in some places long after that.28 From the 1750s onward, however, there were signs of a classicizing backlash. Algarotti in the Saggio sopra l’opera of 1755, Enea Arnaldi (a champion of Palladio from Vicenza) in his Idea di un teatro of 1762, Planelli in Dell’opera in musica (1772) and George Saunders in his Treatise on Theatres (1790) all celebrate the perfection of Greco-Roman theatre-building, especially its curvaceous auditoria and (in Saunders’ words) ‘the great elevation of the seats rising their whole height above each other’. These features, they agree, are conducive to 27 Glixon and Glixon (2006), 17–23 and 295–304. 28 Jones etc.: Leacroft (1973), 65–98; Orrell (1988), 119–85. Vanbrugh: Barlow (1989), passim. 16 Roger Savage good sightlines and fine operatic acoustics, and although they allow that there are some seemingly irreversible modern developments—instrumentalists at the front of the pit, boxes around the walls, a wide proscenium arch downstage—that are likely to put a brake on headlong neoclassicism, they urge that the great classical precursors should become precedents and their principles be adopted in the building of new theatres, so as to make these—Saunders again—‘the most analogous to the antique that it is possible for our arrangements to permit’. Advanced theatre-practice follows their lead.29 At Besanc¸on in 1784 Claude- Nicolas Ledoux sets up a semicircular auditorium with something of a cavearake. Semicircularity also reigns inE ´ tienne-Louis Boulle´e’s huge, visionary, never realized ‘Projet d’Ope´ra’ for Paris in 1781 and equally in the tiny court theatre for ope´ra-comique and spoken drama devised in the late eighteenth century to fit into one of the circular medieval towers of Gripsholm Castle in Sweden, where it can still be seen. In its final form as designed by Erik Palmstedt in 1781–4 Figure 1.2 Reconstruction by G. F. Barlow of Vanbrugh’s Queen’s Theatre, London as at 1705: Barlow (1989), 519. Reproduced by permission of the Editor of Early Music and the Estate of G. F. Barlow. 29 Algarotti (1963), 187–8. Arnaldi (1762), 4–13. Planelli (1981), 105–8. Saunders (1790), 51 and 87. For theatre practice, see Forsyth (1985), 108–19. Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 17 (Fig. 1.3), the Gripsholm auditorium features quite steeply raked semicircular gradi which seat about 100 people. But as in all these eighteenth-century theatres, the audience faces not a semi-abstract architectural frons scaenae like Palladio’s at Vicenza but a wide baroque-rococo scenic stage fitted with the standard illusionistic paraphernalia and fronted by a space set aside for the theatre band.30 Alluring classical precedents and pressing modern concerns combine again sixty years later in the fertile conversations between Gottfried Semper and Richard Wagner, first at Dresden in the 1840s and later at Zu¨rich and Munich. Wagner had been struck in his operatic wander-years from 1833 to 1839 by the very occasional theatre in which a steeply raked auditorium, a semi-sunken musicians’ pit or a restriction of the number of side-boxes gave the audience as a whole a better chance of seeing the scene-stage clearly, saved it from being distracted by the band’s having too distinct a presence (visually, acoustically), and allowed it to feel like a socially united entity. These fine features suggested to the 30 Mattsson (1991), 104–19 and 138–45. Figure 1.3 Gripsholm Castle, Sweden: theatre by Erik Palmstedt (1784). 18 Roger Savage composer that an overall reform of physical theatre was possible, and since he was becoming more and more taken with the connections he saw between ancient Greek tragic drama and his ‘music drama of the future’, a ‘Greek’ solution to the problem of bringing such reform about would have appealed to him. As for Semper, his own Wanderjahre in the early 1830s had taken him to Italy and Greece, where he had seen and—keen archaeologist and erudite theatre historian that he was—stored up memories of theatrical sites such as those at Pompeii and Epidauros (treading gingerly through the aftermath of the Greek War of Independence to see the latter). Returning, he made his mark with the Hoftheater at Dresden, finished in 1841 and extending the classicizing tradition with its use of a semicircular outer wall which expressed the shape of the auditorium within. But heavier with future significance perhaps was his project for a full-fig Roman theatre—elaborate frons scaenae and all—to be built in one of the transepts of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace when it was re-erected at Sydenham in south London after the Great Exhibition of 1851.31 Though the idea came to nothing, Semper held on to his plans, coming back to them a few years later when Wagner and his wayward patron King Ludwig II of Bavaria called him to Munich to build a very grand opera house there for the premiere staging in 1867 (or so it was hoped) of The Ring of the Nibelung. Ideas were to be tried out in a temporary theatre within Munich’s Glaspalast (a derivative of the Crystal Palace); and in Semper’s plans for this we can see him adding a sunken pit for the band to the Sydenham scheme and rethinking its frons scaenae so that it could become the picture frame for an extensive receding Wagnerian scene-stage. It was from these amended plans, also unrealized, that the design for Ludwig’s mighty Wagner Theatre proper was developed. This reduced the cavea-area from the full 180-degree semicircle of the Crystal and Glass Palace designs to a fanlike segment of close on 100 degrees. Semper’s guiding concept, he said, was governed by two specifications: (i) Complete separation of the ideal world on the stage from the reality represented by the audience. (ii) In accordance with this separation, the orchestra [i.e. Wagner’s instrumentalists] to be unseen, perceptible only to the ear. . . . The only way to conceal the orchestra from every member of the audience, without placing it so low beneath the floor of the auditorium and the stage as to impair [co-ordination with the latter] is to model the auditorium on the ancient Greek and Roman pattern with rows of seating rising step by step (cavea), and to abandon altogether the modern convention of vertical tiers of boxes.32 Semper’s coup, plotted probably in connivance with the composer, was to house the instrumentalists in the area of the ancient orchestra, reconfiguring this as a flight of broad, steeply plunging gradi screened off fromthe auditoriumand spreading into a 31 Wagner: Baker (1998), 242–4; and see Borchmeyer (1991), 59–72. Semper: Mallgrave (1996), 38–53, 117–29, 215–16 etc. 32 Barth (1975), 206. For Munich (and Bayreuth subsequently), see Mallgrave (1996), 251–67; Forsyth (1985), 179–92; Baker (1998), 258–69. Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 19 further space created by building a ‘double proscenium’: one arch at the front of the audience’s cavea and the other further back at the front of the scenic stage. This Munich house of Semper’s was destined to be the grandest opera house never built; but Wagner carried the ideas that he and his architect had worked out for it to Bayreuth, where in 1872–75, with Otto Bru¨ckwald, he did finally build his still-standing Festspielhaus (Fig. 1.4). There the cavea-segment facing the Semperesque double proscenium was further reduced to about 60 degrees of the implied circle centred a few feet back from the mid-front of the stage, and the quasi-Greek orchestra was further extended under the stage itself to house (and intentionally to mute) a full symphony orchestra. Wagner gave his reasons during his speech at the laying of the foundation stone: Figure 1.4 Festspielhaus, Bayreuth (1876), by Wagner and Bru¨ckwald. 20 Roger Savage The orchestra had to be placed . . . at a depth such that the spectator could look directly over the top of it to the stage; [ . . . and] the only way to place the seats was in rows climbing in regular steps. [ . . . The] system of tiers of boxes was thus ruled out. . . . And so the arrangements of our seating took on the character of the amphitheatre of ancientGreece, except that there could be no question of the amphitheatre’s extending itself so far round on both sides as to form a semicircle or even greater segment, because while spectators in the Greek theatre directed their gaze on the chorus in the orchestra that was thus almost entirely surrounded, the object of the spectators’ vision in our theatre is the stage. . . . As soon as he has taken his seat, the spectator finds himself quite truly in a ‘theatron’, . . .while themusic rising ghostlike from the ‘mystic abyss’, like the vapours arising beneath the seat of Pythia from the holy womb of Gaia, transports him into that visionary rapture in which the scene spread before him now becomes the truest image of life itself.33 As Houston Stewart Chamberlain, one of Wagner’s most fervent apologists, put it in the 1890s, ‘however different the technical demands of modern art are from those of the time of Sophocles, everyone who enters the festival house feels the summer breath of Greek art playing around him, [though] here is no mechanical restoration of things long past; it is spiritual rebirth of that which is old and yet eternally young.’34 The Festspielhaus soon had descendants and derivatives of its own: a fewin bricks and mortar, like the Prinzregenten Theater designed by Max Littmann at Munich in 1900 and the Ku¨nstlertheater by Littmann and Georg Fuchs that opened there seven years later—and a few in vision. The poetW. B. Yeats, for instance, enjoying a Shakespeare season at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1901, felt nevertheless that the old Memorial Theatre’s interior needed remaking in ‘the shape of a half-closed fan, like Wagner’s theatre’; and the librettist and animateur Reginald Buckley tried with no success in the early 1910s to get the Stratford theatre entirely replaced by a Bayreuth-type house with classical portico added and with Teutonic and ‘Anglo- Celtic’ opera staged alongside Shakespeare. Later he collaborated with the architect Stanley Adshead in planning just such a building for theGlastonbury Festival hewas helping to found, though the sad coincidence of the first Festival’s opening within a day of the declaration of the GreatWar led to the project’s being abandoned.35 With its orchestra taken away from it, did the Greek chorus have any significant place in the development of opera? It was certainly much discussed in the late Renaissance,36 and as we have seen, at least one attempt was made in the 33 Barth (1975), 221–2. 34 Chamberlain (1900), 370. 35 Yeats (1924), 117–35. Buckley (1911), 119–32. Adshead: see Hurd (1993), 65–8. For further developments along this line, see e.g. Breton (1989), esp. 6–13 and 106–17. 36 See e.g. Palisca (1989), 140–51. Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 21 non-operatic music-theatre of the period to give a re-creation of it something apt and affecting to sing: the settings by Andrea Gabrieli of four of the odes in Giustiniani’s Edipo tiranno of 1585.37 But in opera the chorus of antiquity wasn’t a strong presence for at least a century and a half, and then only fitfully. That is not to say that, from the beginnings to the mid-seventeenth century in Italy and later in other parts of Europe, operas did not field choruses on occasion, but rather that these tended to function differently from the Greek. Their ancestry lay more in the Renaissance’s own dramatic intermedii, pastoral tragicomedies, court ballets, and masques.38 True, Ottavio Rinuccini had looked to the ancient chorus in his pioneering librettos; thus the anonymous nymphs and shepherds of his Dafne are constant in their presence and sympathy, and the attendant fisherfolk in Arianna even rise to something of a classical kommos by interspersing the heroine’s lament with their expressions of concern, which reflects the hope Rinuccini expresses in his prologue to the opera that the audience may ‘admire the ancient honour of the Argive stage in [these] new songs’. But it wasn’t a line much followed. Most operatic chorusgroups did not, once they had entered, stay on stage in the one character till the bitter end in the antique manner but came and went as the twists of the plot dictated; and besides, they might be rustics in one scene and infernal spirits in the next, fairies and then fairground folk, satyrs then soldiers. Partly perhaps because they were making relatively brief appearances, they tended too to foreground their picturesque or grotesque characteristics rather than take the reflective, philosophizing stance that could characterize Greek tragic choruses. Librettists and composers did manage sometimes to achieve that stance in passing. It would be hard, for instance, to avoid an adjective like ‘Sophoclean’ for the fairly brief Spirits’ choruses about Orpheus’ experiences in Hades in Acts III and IV of the Monteverdi/Striggio Favola d’Orfeo (‘Story of Orpheus’) of 1607 or for the even briefer meditation of the courtier-chorus before the queen’s lament and suicide in Henry Purcell and Nahum Tate’s Dido and Aeneas of the 1680s. But these are exceptions that prove the rule: one spelt out by Metastasio in his Abstract of the Poetics of Aristotle with respect to the constant presence of a single choric group. Times have changed, he says, since the ancient City Dionysia: As a flower or fruit emerges from its covering, so the [Greek] drama emerged from the bosom of the chorus, [ . . . and] it could never detach itself from that covering . . . because the religious cult of Bacchus and his praises sung by the chorus formed the principal object of the festivals. [ . . . But] our modern authors, lacking the excuse of superstition and habit, would no longer be pardonable if, to parade their masterly (as they might 37 See Jason Geary, Ch. 3 in this volume. 38 For the first and second, see Grout (1963) passim; for choral variety, see Perrucci (1961), 153–5. 22 Roger Savage think) and rare erudition, they persisted in considering the permanent chorus as an essential and principal part of the drama.39 Operatic choruses acting rather more consistently like Greek ones do return, however, in works that, according to their lights, are fairly close adaptations of Greek originals, notably the Gluck/Guillard Iphige´nie en Tauride after Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians of 1779, with its much-in-evidence sisterhood of priestesses,40 and the Stravinsky/Cocteau ‘opera-oratorio’ Oedipus Rex after Sophocles of 1927, where the assembled men of Thebes see all the stage action and comment on much of it. And if after the Gluck the technique didn’t really take on in the following decades, after the Stravinsky there are occasions when the choral practice of antiquity does seem to be evoked throughout operas unconcerned with classical myth, as when a chorus of ‘laughing children’ watch, comment on, and are never very far from the ritual action in Michael Tippett’s Midsummer Marriage (1955)—Tippett gives them a high-profile parodos and exodos as well—or when in John Adams and Alice Goodman’s Death of Klinghoffer (1991) a series of big choric odes frame and intersperse the presentation of a very specific news-event so as to widen its resonance and significance. However, a mutation of the choric tradition had taken place in the ancient world which could be seen as leading eventually to a different but equally remarkable development in opera. Paradoxically, this arose from the decline in expressive importance of the choric ode in the Athens of the late fifth and fourth centuries BC. After being central in different ways to the plays of dramatists like Aeschylus and Aristophanes, the ode, though remaining structurally important, made over time a less and less significant contribution to the argument and import of a play, so that by the age of Menandrian comedy around 300 BC a dramatist could content himself with providing an ode-cuing speech like ‘Here come the revellers’ without feeling the need to give that revelling chorus anything specific to sing or to integrate it further with the plot. This marks the beginning of the ‘interlude’: an irruption of music (with or without song, with or without dance) which maintains the energy of a play, allows the actors a chance to get their collective breath back behind the scenes, covers the passing of time in the plot, provides the dramatist with the means to distinguish the play’s ‘acts’ when such things become a preoccupation—but adds little or nothing to its action or ideas. With the blessing of the admired tradition of New Comedy, such interludes or intermedii became important in Italy in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Free-standing songs and courtly or characterful dances might serve as entr’acte material, and out of such things grew the ‘dramatic intermedii’ we 39 Metastasio (1947), 2. 1059 and 1061, tr. Weiss (1982), 393. Cf. Carter and Szweykowski (1994), 173. 40 Ewans (2007), 44–6. Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 23 have encountered already: quite short, often mythological or allegorical pieces which at sixteenth-century courts on festive occasions could be things of great splendour—and could give ideas to the pioneers of opera. But the less grandiose purely instrumental or vocal interlude kept its end up too. (For instance, it had enough appeal to the academicians of Vicenza in the 1580s for them to consider inserting ‘concerti di musica vocale ed instrumentale’ between the ‘acts’ of their Edipo tiranno before deciding to stick instead with Sophocles’ own choruses.41) The use of this simple type of interlude spread in the seventeenth century to northern Europe, where, after something of a detour, it would have its own impact on opera. Fiddle music between the acts—‘act tunes’ in London theatre parlance— became a particularly important element in the French and English theatre of the later part of the century, but it was music which for decades had little integration with the text of the spoken play. However, there were classicizing theorists in Paris and London who found the modern act tune in spoken drama embarrassingly unsatisfactory. Some argued that its total abolition and a return to sung choruses a` l’antique was the only way to give plays a proper unity, but others felt that they had to find some way of living with the act tune since, as Boileau put it in his Art poe´tique (3. 92), fiddles had irreversibly taken the chorus’s place: ‘le violon tint lieu de choeur.’ To which the English dramatist and critic John Dennis suggested a solution: accept this, but rethink inter-act instrumental music so as to make it at one with the action and changing moods of the drama. He worked his idea out with the composer John Eccles in the prefatory material, script, and score for their Rinaldo and Armida of 1699. It was a remarkable prefiguring in theory—the inter-act score itself is lost—of ‘incidental music’ as it later flourished, and it embodied ideas which were reflected and developed in the 1730s (quite possibly through direct influence) by the German theatre composer and musical theorist Johann Adolph Scheibe in his periodical Der Critische Musikus. Scheibe’s essay of 8 December 1739 on instrumental numbers specifically and sympathetically fashioned for new plays and providing proper continuity between scenes is particularly important because in 1767 it would be quoted and given overall approval by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his influential set of essays on theatre, the Hamburgische Dramaturgie. 42 Lessing is explicit: ‘the orchestra in our dramas in a measure fills the place of the ancient choruses’; so the entr’actes or Zwischenspiele the band plays have to live up to the responsibility implied by that. There must be ‘suitable symphonies to every play’.43 It is a view which seems to colour some at least of the composition of such things in the Viennese ‘classical’ period, most momentously in the case of Beethoven’s 1810 score—overture and songs but especially the four 41 Gallo (1973), lii. 42 For Dennis, Scheibe etc., see Savage (2002b), 144–59. 43 Lessing (1962), 70; cf. 70–7 (i.e. Nos. 26–7 of HD). For partial antecedents to such ideas in the sixteenth century, see Sadie (2001), 12. 479–80. 24 Roger Savage entr’actes carefully cued into the play-script—for Goethe’s historical tragedy Egmont. It was the Egmont music that had an operatic significance. Wagner loved it dearly. He had a lively distaste for the run of music in unreformed spoken theatre, finding almost all of it trivial, intrusive, not integrated a` la Lessing, and anyway largely ignored by the audience; but he made a big exception for the ‘splendid’ Beethoven. In his youth it had been the first stimulus to his taking composition lessons, as he wanted to write music like it for a callow play of his own; in his maturity he conducted it (on one occasion complete, on two others in part) at his concerts in Zu¨rich.44 And its influence can surely be felt in his pioneering of the orchestral interlude in opera, moving the audience’s imagination seamlessly, with no musical break, from one episode to the next during a general stage-blackout or lowering of the curtain: from the big quintet in Hans Sachs’s workshop to the arrival of the guilds at the St John’s Day meadow in the last act of The Mastersingers, from the Rhine to Valhalla and Valhalla to Nibelheim in Rhinegold. Here, as Lessing might have put it, the orchestra fills the place of the ancient choruses in a measure; and there are parts of the Ring where it attempts to fill it completely. As we have seen, Wagner is often happy to link his ideas about progressive music-drama with instances of ancient Greek achievement, and one of his ways of doing so is to compare the orchestra’s reflective role during the dialogue scenes of his later operas with the chorus’s role—and more particularly that of the coryphaeus—in antiquity. Indeed, he thinks that if anything his orchestra is more Greek than the Greeks, since its continuous eloquence beneath the action beats the occasional interjections of the coryphaeus and his chorus members at their own game.45 From this it might seem to follow that Wagner’s orchestra would never need to express itself in the equivalent of a formal ‘ode’. Yet at the tragic climax of The Twilight of the Gods there is such an ode: an orchestral movement explicitly marked Zwischenspiel in the full score and best known today as ‘Siegfried’s Funeral March’. As Wagner put it to his wife Cosima: I have composed a Greek chorus . . . but a chorus which will be sung, so to speak, by the orchestra; after Siegfried’s death, while the scene is being changed, the Siegmund theme will be played, as if the chorus is saying ‘This was his father’; then the sword motive; and finally his own theme; then the curtain goes up. . . . How could words ever make the impression that these solemn themes, in their new form, will evoke? Music always expresses the direct present.46 44 Wagner, R. (1892–99), I. 4–5 and VII. 348–9; Wagner, R. (1911), 1. 36–7 and 2. 580; Walton (2007), 178. 45 Wagner, R. (1892–99), 1. 32–3, 2. 335–6, 3. 338–9, 5. 306 etc.; see Borchmeyer (1991), 160–77 (and cf. 73–80). 46 Wagner, C. (1978–80), 1. 417–18. Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 25 ‘As if the chorus is saying . . . ’ It’s a fine blend of Wagner’s nineteenth-century Hellenism with his extension of the Dennis–Eccles–Scheibe–Lessing–Beethoven tradition, a tradition which had a Hellenic origin too. After the Funeral March, and arguably as a result of it, the big symphonic interlude in opera comes to flourish, for example in Debussy’s score for Maeterlinck’s Pelle´as and Me´lisande and Berg’s for Bu¨chner’s Wozzeck. The interlude in the Debussy after Me´lisande is tormented by Golaud in the presence of King Arkel and that in the Berg after Wozzeck is drowned beneath a blood-red moon are especially choric in Wagner’s sense: ‘sung, so to speak, by the orchestra’. And the tradition has gone on: one could instance Hindemith’s Mathis the Painter after the death of Regina or the Richard Strauss/Clemens Krauss Capriccio before the Countess’s final entrance. An anti-Wagnerian, modernist reaction has been in evidence too. Thus in The Rape of Lucretia by Benjamin Britten and Ronald Duncan, what in Wagnerian mode would have been a big orchestral interlude depicting Tarquin’s ride to Rome—think of Siegfried’s to the Rhine—and an even bigger one reflecting on the rape itself become respectively a narrative by a single solo singer called the Male Chorus and a chorale in unison for just two voices, Male Chorus joined by Female (choric figures that had been the invention of Andre´ Obey in his source-play, Le viol de Lucre`ce). The wheel has come almost full circle—though for the monodic aulos-player of ancient Athens the formidable complexity of Britten’s instrumental accompaniment to the chorale would be like something from another planet. ‘The melopoeia of the ancients’; the corago with his double life in Greek and Roman theatre; the semicircular cavea; the choric ode as at least a structural element and sometimes as much more: each of these can be seen hovering at some distance behind things we now think of as important in operatic composition, performanceorganization, and architecture, though it might not occur to us to look for them there unless we were specially alerted. Other more ‘classicizing’ ages were more aware of such things, and it is not surprising that operatic developments citing ancient precursors have tended to happen at times we might associate more generally with classical revival. Thus opera itself as a through-sung favola in musica and the corago as a figure equipped to service it came into being near the end of a great age in Italy of classically influenced literary criticism and eager discussion of the relations between ancient and modern music. The idea of the structural equivalence of choric ode and act tune along with the urge to do something reformative about it grew out of the classicist concerns of the bevy of intellectuals under Louis XIV and of some English admirers of theirs. (The same bevy of savants and the French tragedians theymost admired were to influence the development of the opera seria libretto too.) Enlightenment neoclassicism in the later part of the eighteenth century lay behind the return to ideas of the cavea in books and on building sites from the 1750s to the 1780s and to the invocation of the ancient choragus as a guardian of theatrical probity in blueprints for the proper running 26 Roger Savage of modern opera houses. And nineteenth-century philhellenism in northern Europe—‘the Tyranny of Greece over Germany’ (to borrow the title of E. M. Butler’s ‘Study of the Influence of Greek Art and Poetry over the Great German Writers’, 1935)—clearly fuelledWagner’s obsession with the circumstances and achievement of Greek tragedy, manifested inter alia in his aligning the chorus of antiquity with the modern symphony orchestra and his pioneering, armin- arm with Semper, of the ideal of the cavea-segment for the operatic auditorium. Classical renaissances didn’t stop there. The next phase of thought about the ancient world to resonate influentially outwards and make an impact on opera was that initiated by James Frazer in the 1890s with The Golden Bough and carried forward by the so-called Cambridge Ritualists, especially Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray, and Francis Cornford: scholars eager to impregnate the study of the arts, sports, and ceremonies of Greece with the period’s new archaeology, anthropology, and sociology. Their joint study Themis of 1912 (masterminded and largely written by Harrison) and Cornford’s Origin of Attic Comedy (1914) celebrate the ritualized contest or agon which they see at the centre of Greek drama and of athletics too, a seasonal rite of the triumph of the ‘new year spirit’ which is reflected all over the agrarian world: in village games for instance, in primitive dramas like the English Mummer’s Play, and in rough presentations of conflict such as the traditional Punch and Judy Show. It may well be that Ralph Vaughan Williams, who knew Murray and Cornford personally and who in 1909, at the height of Ritualist activity, had written elaborate incidentalmusic for a Cambridge production in Greek of Aristophanes’ Wasps, called on the group’s ideas when devising the plot for the ‘Romantic Ballad Opera’ he finished in vocal score in 1914, Hugh the Drover, with its mumming-play structure, Maying ceremony, and agonistic prize-fight. It is certain that Michael Tippett drew on them when working out the action thirty years later for The Midsummer Marriage, which he described as ‘a mixture of pantomime, Aristophanic comedy (as conceived by Cornford) and ritualism’, and which presents the triumph of summer fire and the thwarting of the king of the old year: events witnessed by those choric ‘laughing children’ between whose parodos and exodos there is a seasonal agon plus almost all the other ritual building-blocks of Greek drama as identified speculatively in Themis and the Origin (though if one didn’t know those books in depth one might well not realize that that was what they were). And it is evident that Ritualist ideas lie somewhere behind much of the work of Harrison Birtwistle, which includes not only Tragoedia, a concert piece shaped by Greek choric conventions, but several ritual operas: among them the ‘dramatic pastoral’ with Michael Nyman, Down by the Greenwood Side (which incorporates a Mummer’s Play) and the hyper-stylized, Tragoedia-related ‘tragical comedy or comical tragedy’ Punch and Judy with Stephen Pruslin (the opera with the resurrecting Choragus).47 47 Vaughan Williams: Savage (2002c), 392–9. Tippett: Kemp (1984), 224–30 and Tippett (2005), 292. Birtwistle: Adlington (2000), 6–12, 16–17, etc. Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 27 Tippett, like his mentor T. S. Eliot in the case of his own ‘Aristophanic melodrama’ Sweeney Agonistes, acknowledged the influence of the Cambridge Ritualists on the making of his libretto, though only in private correspondence and one or two oblique public remarks,48 while Vaughan Williams and Birtwistle seem to have stayed silent on the subject. In contrast, our earlier advocates of operatic development, living at times in which connections with antiquity were at a premium, are upfront and forthcoming about their having precursors in the classical world. It’s something of an open question, however, whether they treated the activities of those precursors as real precedents on which to build or as pretexts for activities that were in fact largely innovative. Given the complex ways of the working of the classical tradition in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, a precedent–pretext distinction may actually be something of a blunt instrument; but it does help to show how the four cases we have been looking at differ in their uses of antiquity. Thus at one pole the summoning of the corago can be seen as an adroit piece of sleight-of-hand: a manipulation of the classics so as to come up with a plausible, well-meant pretext. The ancient world presents the sixteenth century with a range of instances and definitions of choregos /choragus and choregeion /choragium. Looking at these, at commentaries glossing them, at humanist books of poetics and theatrics and at literary borrowings by such writers as Erasmus, theatre people confect a serviceable, multi-skilled choragus / corago: a seemingly classical figure who strictly speaking never was, but who could be cited as a fine role-model for people entrusted with the staging of modern sung and spoken drama. The central treatise on the subject, Il corago, gives the game away when it allows that the figure of the corago in the book will be defined ‘perhaps more exaltedly and extensively than was ever the case among the ancients’.49 He certainly is. At the other pole, we are clearly dealing with real precedent in the recommendation of the cavea to modern theatre-designers. The monuments were there; plans of ancient theatres existed; Roman ruins could be visited and from around the turn of the nineteenth century Greek ones too. Beyond their grandeur and allure—Szymanowski captures these well in King Roger—the buildings had fine acoustics and sightlines, but, apart from Semper in his Crystal Palace jeu d’esprit, their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century champions didn’t have the production of exact architectural facsimiles in mind. They acknowledged that, in adapting those shapes to modern opera-house use, difficult issues to do with the placing of instrumentalists, with theatre-boxes and with the taste for illusionistic scenery had to be faced, accommodations made, and bold or cunning solutions found. Their concern was simply that architects should build sensibly on sound precedent. George Saunders articulates this nicely in 1790 when, mixing idealism and realism, he commends designing theatres ‘the most analogous to the antique 48 Eliot: Crawford (1987), 161–6. Tippett (1959), 80–1; Tippett (2005), 292, 300–1, 363. 49 Savage and Sansone (1989), 499. 28 Roger Savage that it is possible for our arrangements to admit’: a phrase relevant also to the idea of the instrumental interlude as the modern equivalent to the ancient choric ode. Once the analogy between ode and act-tune had been drawn in the late seventeenth century, a remarkable process of analogy-enrichment began, rather as though the history of the Greek chorus were being run backwards from Menander to Aeschylus, so lending weight perhaps to Nietzsche’s view in The Birth of Tragedy that his age was ‘experiencing the great epochs of Hellenism in reverse order’.50 This meant that by the 1870s Wagner could claim that the last act of The Twilight of the Gods would include a choric ode but that (as was right ‘for our arrangements’, in Saunders’ phrase) it was purely for orchestra: something very apt to the Age of the Symphonic Poem. Controversial analogy becomes stimulating precedent. And what are we to make of the pseudo-precedent of all-sung Greek and Latin drama that fascinated certain humanists in the late sixteenth century? From the evidence of the dedications and prefaces c.1600, the composers of the first operas seem to have behaved scrupulously within the terms of the precedent they were given. This appeared to come with good credentials and it provided an intriguing, possibly exciting stimulus, though the composers sensibly drew back from claiming that what they wrote with it in mind was a simulacrum of actual ancient Greek or Roman music-drama. The problem—if scholarly accuracy is one’s criterion—is that the precedent was flawed. The theorists of the 1570s and ’80s, devoted as they were to the idea of monody, assumed that the considerable body of evidence from antiquity establishing that solo-actors sang proved that they did so all the time. Still, if it doesn’t speak very well for their scholarly standards that they failed to tease out the implications of the use of different metres in Greek tragedy—failed even to attend properly to Aristotle’s words in the Poetics—this was surely a felix culpa, since it enabled them to give Peri, Caccini, Cavalieri, Gagliano, and Monteverdi an especially bright green light for some rather important innovations and achievements. But just as interesting as the factors that separate our four cases is the factor that brings them together. They can all be seen as instances of calling on precursors from antiquity in aid of a cause which can benefit from classical support but which has an independent existence and validity. In the case of ancient melopoeia, establishing that the music of the ancients was monodic was a great boost and boon in the first and largely theoretical phase of late sixteenth-century Florence’s preoccupation with pure melos, while in the second, practical phase—the writing of favole in musica for a courtly audience—the card of connection with ancient tragic practice was a telling one to play, as the nobility would have to sit up and listen. In the case of the corago, opera, like Jesuit college drama, was a new form in the early seventeenth century, and both of them needed to make a case and space for themselves, and to deliver efficiently. It would help if they could promote 50 Nietzsche (1993), 95. Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts 29 a specialist skill, that of the ‘director’, with a professional name that had a classical derivation of sorts: a name combining respectable authority from its Greek strain with hands-on practicality from its Latin. With the cavea, its cult (which didn’t impact directly on opera until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) can almost always be seen as helping with needful reformation: a calling on classical precedent, geometry, and acoustics partly to suggest that there are better performance conditions for opera than can be delivered by the standard baroque ‘horseshoe in a rectangular shoebox’ and partly to give opera a becoming seriousness, this latter having its apogee in 1870s Bayreuth. (Wagner’s associations of his opera house with the Theatre of Dionysus—‘which reared itself around the God’s altar’ and which was a ‘broadening of the temple of the Gods to the assembled People’s show-place of the highest human art’51—could help with the stand he needed to take against the prima donna, the impresario, the chatter in the boxes.) And similarly with the orchestral interlude as Greek chorus, first in spoken drama and then in opera. The citing of a serious classical precursor and the setting of it up as a point of departure helped defend theatre against charges of randomness, lack of focus, and triviality, instead promoting integration, continuity, earnestness. In each of these instances, then, the theatre of antiquity is brought in to aid a good cause. And it is not accidental or even simply attributable to the longstanding glamour of classical connection that it can do so. European opera and Greco-Roman drama after all are both major manifestations of music-theatre in the broadest sense. They ought to be able to help each other. The Abbe´ Vatry, thinking about links between them in the 1720s in that paper on ‘The Performance of Ancient Tragedy’, makes a shrewd and nicely Dionysian point when he observes that, though modern opera is often lacking in good sense, it does have other virtues. The transforming presence of music, which ‘adds to the liberties that poetry has a right to take’, enables it to provide an acceptable home for things that would seem ridiculous in spoken drama: sheer fictions, the supernatural, lengthy monologues, transports of passion. But these things are to be found in the poetry of the ancient tragedies too. And what is it that enabled them to find a home there? Why, song of course.52 51 Wagner, R. (1892–99), 1. 158–9. 52 Recueil (1717–48), 210