Ancient Rome in Early Opera 1643-1798.

Speranza

T. Carter.

This is a fabulous topic for a book, and it probably takes someone with Robert C. Ketterer’s background and training to write it (he is professor of Classics at the University of Iowa).

Early seventeenth-century court opera tended to draw on pastoral/mythological subjects in order to suit its purpose of princely glorification.

But as opera went ‘public’ in Venice in 1637, it also added to its topical repertory subjects taken from epic on the one hand, and ‘history’ on the other.

The latter shift — epitomized in Busenello/Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643) — has been construed as marking opera’s coming of age, the genre now able to represent the actions and emotions of real human beings rather than just the antic hays of classical myth.

Of course, L’incoronazione di Poppea has also been read in the light of other subtexts, not least Venetian republicanism and the consequent condemnation of the vices of imperial Rome (and by extension, its Papal successor).

The difficulty — in part caused by Monteverdi’s music — is that it is hard to sustain a singular reading of the piece, not surprising in the light of its function (Venetian opera needed to be all things to all people in order to achieve commercial success) but necessarily causing some anxiety to modern producers and critics.
                 

Just how real Nerone and Poppea might be is matter for debate, as is their relation to the actions of their historical forebears in 58–62 ce.

 
The librettist of L’incoronazione, Gian Francesco Busenello, freely admits his distortion of history, although he remains silent on his purpose therein.

Later seventeenth-century operas on Ancient Roman themes similarly played fast and loose with fact and fiction.

Francesco Cavalli’s Scipione affricano (1664; libretto by Nicolò Minato) takes the bones of Scipio the Elder’s victory over Hannibal in 203 bce and brings in some version of the episode. And so on.