Ketterer, "Ancient Rome in Early Opera" -- Romanitas -- Britannico.

Speranza

Mellor.


We now live in a world of academic “interdisciplinarity,” in which scholars bring materials or methodologies from other fields to enrich their own.

But it remains rare for a classicist to become so deeply learned in a remote discipline that his or her work is taken seriously by scholars of that discipline.

R. C. Ketterer, both in his earlier papers and in this remarkable book, has shown himself such a
scholar.

I have been a regular, even obsessive, opera-goer for the last
half-century and have attended more than a dozen pre-Mozart operas—
often in multiple productions—but I am in awe of Ketterer’s vast
knowledge of obscure works and his sensible judgments on more
familiar operas.

This book will be of great interest both to musicologists
and to historians of early modern European history interested
in the subtleties of artistic patronage and imperial ideology.

Perhaps fewer classicists will find "Ancient Rome in Early Opera" immediately
appealing.

It does not so much shed light on antiquity as
demonstrate the enduring importance of antiquity in the cultural
and political conversations of Europe between the Renaissance and
the Age of Revolutions.

But many classicists in recent decades have
turned to Nachleben to make our knowledge of ancient poetry and
drama, mythology and religion, sculpture and architecture, philosophy
and political thought available to modern historians and literary
critics.

Ketterer's essay is a splendid example of that worthy enterprise.
Even classicists need to know how succeeding centuries used, transformed
and sometimes abused ancient material.

Before we bluster
about the fictional characters of Ben Hur or Maximus in Gladiator, or
the inventions in I, Claudius or HBO Rome, it is useful to see how the
librettists invented characters or devised happy endings:

Catone
spared by Giulio Cesare in Vivaldi’s 1724 "Catone in Utica" --

much as
English actor-directors in the 18th century tacked happy endings onto
Hamlet and King Lear.

Hollywood is certainly inaccurate, but it is
no more disreputable than centuries of Italian
librettists, who rewrote Ancient Roman history
to serve their own purposes.

We should ask ourselves how and
why this material inspired both imitation and innovation through
the centuries.

 Ketterer examines Italian opera during the two centuries from
its origins in Florence about 1600 until the end of the 18th century.

The quadricentenary of opera was celebrated at the Getty Center in
Los Angeles in October, 2000, with a performance of the first surviving
opera, Peri’s Euridice.

Though those Tuscan intellectuals claimed
to be recreating the declamation and music of Greek tragedy, Ketterer argues
(as he has earlier) that it was "Ancient Rome" that more truly inspired
the great majority of librettists and composers.

Not only were
most of the subjects Roman, but the central themes (or Myths, as Ketterer prefers) of

"the clement prince"

and the quest for

"liberty"

are more dependent on Roman historians
and Stoic philosophy than on Athenian drama.

Ketterer rightly identifies
the Stoic themes of constancy, clemency and friendship as the
moral basis for eighteenth-century serious opera.

Even when the
characters are Greeks, these and other Roman values and attitudes —
"romanitas" — inform the operas.
To most classicists, early Italian opera is relatively terra incognita —
and with good reason.

These works were almost universally ignored
between 1800 and the middle of the 20th century.

New York’s Metropolitan
Opera’s excellent on-line archives reveal that in 125 years it
has offered one single performance of Monteverdi — a concert Orfeo in
1912 with a New York Times headline: “Primitive Opera Heard” and a
review that mentions the audience’s bewilderment.

The Metropolitan Opera has offered
no Cavalli, and presented no Handel operas until its 1983–1984
centennial season.

It has since offered four.

Even the revered Mozart’s
opere serie were ignored until "Idomeneo" was offered (for Luciano
Pavarotti) in 1982 and "La Clemenza di Tito" in 1984.

It was OTHER groups, such
as the Handel festival in Halle, Drottingham, and, notably, the Glyndebourne
festival, that did much to bring Baroque opera to wider attention, as have
the recording industry and diligent scholars such as Winton Dean
(Handel) and Ellen Rosand (Monteverdi and Cavalli).

Rosand, with
funding from the Mellon Foundation, now directs the Yale Baroque
Opera Project, which presents several evenings of Cavalli
excerpts.

Our aim in recounting this operatic history is to demonstrate
that Ketterer is truly at the cutting edge of research, and I hope that
his work will inspire even more attention and even performances.
Musicologists and scholars of Italian literature will doubtless focus
on Ketterer’s discussions of the scores and librettos of these operas.

But for
classicists the primary interest remains how these works make use of
ancient literary models and, indeed, ancient Roman history.

We are well
aware of the dangerous erotic power of Didone and Cleopatra in Roman
literature.

But the other North African femme fatale and suicide,
Sophonisba, wife of King Masinissa, features in spoken tragedies in
Italian as well as a number of operas.

This
shows how the early modern dramatists might prefer relatively minor
figues from Roman history — Ottone, Berenice, Britannico, Ottavia—
to create powerful protagonists.

Ketterer argues well that Ovid’s
image of love as a battle
pervades Busenello's and Monteverdi’s
treatment of Nerone and Poppea in his 1636 "L’incoronazione
di Poppea".

Ketterer's claim of a Stoic program in that seemingly
a-moral opera may not be entirely convincing.

Yet one of Ketterer's interesting
threads is the initial appearance of comic, even Plautine
elements in 17th-century Venetian public opera, before such elements
were reduced in the operas for the Hapsburg court of the Holy Roman
Empire, which preferred to see its forbears as moral and
clement rulers.

Still later, in Handel’s Italian operas for the London
stage, comedy returns, with Claudio depicted in "Agrippina" as the
stereotypical foolish Roman senex.

Since the librettists were regarded as dramatists, Ketterer reasonably links
the spoken plays with libretti on the same topics.

An enormously
popular Roman on the 18th-century stage was Catone.

Joseph
Addison’s 1713 Catone divided the Whigs and Tories at the London
performances — each regarded Catone as reflecting their views and
the tyrannical Caesarians as their opponents.

The Whig interpretation
prevailed, and the play became popular among revolutionaries
in Europe and America.

Washington’s officers even performed it at
Valley Forge.

Metastasio’s 1723 libretto "Catone in Utica" was set by
more than a half-dozen composers, including J. C. Bach, and played
in dozens of opera houses.

The temper of the time can be gauged by
which Romans became popular on the stage.
We can hardly correct Ketterer’s impressive knowledge of the libretti and
operas, though we  might have liked more discussion of the music.

His
most extended musical discussion—of Sartorio's and Handel’s "Giulio Cesare in Egitto"—is
excellent.

There are also occasional slips.

The defeat of Annibale at
Zama is twice given as 203 BCE (p. 42) instead of 202 BCE.

The
suicide of Cleopatra and the end of her reign is placed in 31 BCE (p.
43) instead of 30 BCE.

Ketterer’s desire to differentiate between the historical
figure (“Nerone” and “Poppea”) and the operatic role (“Nerone”
and “Poppea”) can be confusing.

On pp. 74–5, he refers to “Claudio,”
“Claudius,” and (twice) “Claudios” — We take these last to be typos.
When writing for two groups of readers, it might have been clearer
to regularize the nomenclature.

In an Epilogue, Ketterer offers some testy comments about the 2005 Salzburg
production of Mozart’s Lucio Silla.

It is in the grand tradition
of operaphiles to complain about unconventional stagings.

We  did not
see Silla, but at the same Festival we were revolted by a production of
The Magic Flute in which the Queen of the Night was good, and
Sarastro seemed to be presiding over an old age home for former
Nazis.

So much for Mozart’s devotion to freemasonry.

We only wish Ketterer
had told us more about other contemporary productions, especially
those available on DVD.

He briefly mentions Peter Sellars’ "Giulio
Cesare in Egitto", but several other excellent directors (Hytner, Negrin) have
updated that work to the 19th (Napoleon) or 20th centuries.

The
themes of European imperialism, orientalism and racism certainly
merit this sort of reexamination, and I imagine that Ketterer would have
interesting things to say.

In conclusion, this is a marvelous book and by no means a simple
survey of obscure material.

Wehave mentioned Ketterer’s arguments about
the effect of Stoicism.

Particularly interesting is his discussion of how
two popular themes — the myth of the clement prince and the myth
of liberty— both contradict and reinforce each other.

This dramatic
conflict was often reconciled by imperial generosity.

Dramatists and
composers moved between tragedy and happy endings as changing
aesthetics and political developments challenged the older conventions
of opera seria.

Ketterer shows how the rise of the chorus is an indication
of democratic stirrings as the Age of Revolutions approached.

Ketterer has performed a signal service in bringing his classical knowledge to
the attention of musicologists, and his musical perceptiveness to the
community of classicists.