L'ERISMENA DI CAVALLI

Speranza

 

Erismena in Italian is a delight, but

the englishing of Cavalli’s Erismena is extraordinary enough in itself,

and it is particularly interesting that the sung prologue, for Fortune,

Beauty, Virtue, and Fancy, does not appear to derive from the Italian

versions of the opera.

This specially written prologue thus deserves

our particular attention, not only in itself, but for what it tells us about

attitudes to opera at this time. the Erismena

prologue can be be discussed in relation to other all-sung, allegorical

prologues for works from the Restoration; that all these works were

written for the court may suggest that the English Erismena was also

created for this environment.

In turn, a royal connection to the

manuscript may provide new insight into English cultural identity at

this time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

England is often considered an operatic wasteland.

No all-sung

tradition emerged during the 17th-century to rival or to counter

Continental counterparts, English efforts to compete appear to be

feeble, and what enthusiasm there was for the genre seems to have

been limited to a few practitioners and theatre manques.

At least, that

is what we are (often) led to believe. But it is also true that, in

addressing these issues, scholars have often failed to answer the

question ‘what did Londoners want?’

Indeed, many outside the fields

of English music and drama have not bothered to pose it.

At the same

time, fitting Francesco Cavalli’s Erismena into this scene is

problematic.

We can only surmise when (or, indeed, if) it was

performed; it is not even recorded when the score came to England.

We should re-visit the opera world in London in the late 17th

century, and will consider not only what Londoners wanted, but what

they knew, and how Erismena might have fitted into the scene, had it

indeed been performed during that period.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the preface to his libretto for Francesco Cavalli’s La Didone (1641),

Giovanni Francesco Busenello justifies the opera’s departures from the

rules governing ancient tragedy on the grounds of modern taste.

He

writes:

 “This opera is influenced by modern opinions . . . books are

open, and learning is not a stranger in this world.” This study

examines three stage productions of La Didone that have extended the

process of dramaturgical reinvention that began with Busenello’s own

radical departures from Virgil’s Aeneid.

Europa Galante’s production

(2006; also on DVD) sought to reconstruct the first Venetian

performances through a historically informed approach that drew

heavily upon documentary evidence.

The Yale Baroque Opera Project

 presented La Didone as “opera-within-an-opera” in Capriccio

Barocco, an original pasticcio that fashioned a meta-theatrical

narrative from scenes of several other operas by Cavalli.

The Wooster

Group  explored the opera’s inter-textuality in an experimental

production that grafted excerpts of La Didone alongside the

screenplay of the cult science-fiction film Terrore nello spazio.

Together these performances display the rich variety of approaches to

Cavalli’s operas on stage today and demonstrate how historical

sources can serve as the basis for original stage adaptations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Francesco Cavalli was unique among the first participants in Venetian

public opera.

He alone remained active in Venice’s theatres, and over

the course of a long career, became increasingly successful in

operating under his own terms.

We should explore  Cavalli’s

relationships with a series of impresarios and librettists, and it places

special emphasis on the 1655/56 season, when Cavalli’s operas

appeared in two different theatres: La Statira at SS. Giovanni e Paolo,

and L’Erismena, at S. Aponal.

Both operas underwent a number of

revisions during the season, but it was Erismena that eventually went

on to captivate audiences outside of Venice.

 

      

While the love and war topos was given its most elaborate presentation

in Monteverdi’s Madrigali Guerrieri et Amorosi, it was no less relevant

to Monteverdi’s late operas or those composed by his

contemporaries such as Cavalli and Sacrati.

Indeed, the play with

gender roles that was so fundamental to the carnivalesque nature of

Venetian opera could often be underscored in scenes that focused on

the warrior’s vulnerability to love and the lover’s desire for war, as well

as those moments in which the female warrior adopts not only male

clothing but male virtues.


We should look at several excerpts

from Venetian operas in which the treatment of the love-war topos

higlights contemporary notions about MASCULINITY, including excerpts

from such works as Sacrati’s La finta pazza, Cavalli’s Erismena—

focusing in particular on Veremonda L’Amazzone di Aragona, in which

the battle between the infidels and Christians is given vivid musical

representation.

 

 

 

Since its appearance in the 1961 the English score of Cavalli’s

L’Erismena has attracted numerous tentative theories as to its origins.

Its acquisition by the Bodleian  affords an opportunity to review

the evidence concerning its early history, as well as examining the

volume itself for possible clues as to who was responsible for it, and

where and when it may have been produced.

No detailed physical

description of the manuscript has yet been published.

A close

examination of its internal properties together with information about

the relationship between the English text (musical and literary) and the

main Italian sources can nevertheless shed new light on its date and

place of origin.

In addition, the writing style and notational habits of

its copyist allow us to speculate upon the identity of this individual.
 

While we are some way from putting a name to this scribe, it may at

least be possible to understand something of the social and musical

context within which the manuscript was produced.

 

 

 

The English adaptation of Erismena is remarkable for its literary richness

and stylistic sophistication.

We should analyse the English text of this

little-studied manuscript score to show how the language of Erismena

draws on a fund of words, tropes, and metaphors common to Restoration

drama.

By identifying the poetic strategies behind the English libretto, we should

examine how the English translator reworks the Italian version, hewing

closely to the original rhyme schemes and musical phrases while adding

native poetic artistry in the form of iambic meter and alliteration. I also

speculatively reconstruct the process of adaptation by comparing the

text-setting and music to Erismena’s Italian sources, which consist of two

extant scores and fourteen libretti.

Unlike other 18th-century English

translations of Italian opera, such Arsinoe and Camilla, Erismena does not

bear signs of being modified for performance to a PAYING audience—it

does not transpose voice parts or code-switch between Italian and

English, for example, and all of the recitative is retained.

The remarkably

unified artistic vision behind this careful translation offers intriguing

evidence for the growing enthusiasm for Italian opera in 17th and 18thcentury

England. The text of the English Erismena not

only betrays a meta-theatrical awareness of musical-dramatic genres but

also self-consciously positions the English language as a respectable

vehicle for opera.

 

 

Erismena, the 19th of Cavalli’s 29 operas, which received

its premiere in Venice in 1655, is unique in a number of important

ways.

A collaboration between a composer at the height of his powers

and a skilled librettist near the beginning of a major career, it was one

of Cavalli’s most successful works.

In addition to some thirteen

productions in as many cities on the Italian peninsula over a fifteen-year

period, it is the first—only—known 17th-century Italian opera to

have survived in a contemporary English translation.

In that English

translation, Erismena was also one of the very first Cavalli operas to be

performed in modern times.

Following an examination of the

significance of the opera within Cavalli’s career, we can trace its influence on

the Cavalli renaissance and on the evolution of present-day

performance styles for Baroque opera.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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