Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell'Arte
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Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell'Arte
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Overview
Wilbourne considers a series of case studies structured around the most important and widely explored operas of the period: Monteverdi’s lost L’Arianna, as well as his Il Ritorno d’Ulisse and L’incoronazione di Poppea; Mazzochi and Marazzoli’s L’Egisto, ovvero Chi soffre speri; and Cavalli’s L’Ormindo and L’Artemisia. As she demonstrates, the sound-in-performance aspect of commedia dell’arte theater—specifically, the use of dialect and verbal play—produced an audience that was accustomed to listening to sonic content rather than simply the literal meaning of spoken words. This, Wilbourne suggests, shaped the musical vocabularies of early opera and facilitated a musicalization of Italian theater.
Highlighting productive ties between the two worlds, from the audiences and venues to the actors and singers, this work brilliantly shows how the sound of commedia performance ultimately underwrote the success of opera as a genre.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226401607 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 11/21/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 226,035 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell'Arte
By Emily Wilbourne
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-40160-7
CHAPTER 1
The Commedia dell'Arte as Theater
Qui mentre si farà la musica, o di strumenti, o di voci per separazione frà l'Atto Terzo, è Quarto s'udiranno suonar trombe, e tamburi: ma brevemente, nè però la musica, o vero i suoni cesseranno, fatto così due volte finirà la melodìa, & uscirà Parsenio.
PARSENIO: Quest' è un gran rimbombo di tamburi, e di trombe non so quello, che dir voglia.
Qui di nuovo suoneranno le trombe, & tamburi, & udirasci una mano di moschetti, à scaricarsi, poi dirà Parsenio.
PARSENIO: Certo le Galee del Rè hanno fatto alcuna preda notabile, poiche l'allegrezza è verso il mare: ma che gente è questa? Paiono turchi à me.
Here, while the music is playing to separate Act Three from Act Four, which could be either instrumental or vocal, one should hear trumpets and drums sound — but just briefly — however, neither the music or the sound should cease. Once this has happened twice, the melody should finish and Parsenio should enter the stage.
PARSENIO: What great noise of drums and trumpets! I don't know what it means!
Here once again the trumpets and drums will sound, and one will hear the shots of a handful of muskets, then Parsenio will say:
PARSENIO: It must be that the King's galleys have taken some notable spoils, since the celebration is by the sea: but who are these people? They seem Turks to me.
This excerpt comes from the act 4 opening of the commedia dell'arte play La Sultana, published by the actor, poet, playwright, and capocomico Giovan Battista Andreini in 1622. The scene is rich with sonic referents, from the opening stage directions onward. In addition to the spoken text of the act itself, the reader is made aware of the intermedio, with music that "could be either instrumental or vocal," assumed to separate one act from the next. Such details are rarely mentioned by the practitioners or contemporary audiences of commedia dell'arte performance, and when they are, few specifics are given. Andreini also calls for trumpets, drums, and, later musket shot — noisemakers with specific contextual functions — to interrupt and puncture the intermedio itself. The sophisticated bleed-through of stage business into the musical interlude emphasizes the extent to which music was a present and structural force, even where it was not specifically indicated. In addition, the overlap between the contextually different sounds of the intermedio and the dramatic noise performs an important narrative function in and of itself: drums and trumpets herald the arrival of something or someone important. Thanks to Parsenio, described in the character list as "a man of an honest age," we know that the celebrations take place near the port and thus that the imminent arrival has come from afar. The way in which Andreini has staged the arrival through sound — a sound located beyond the typical limits of the stage narrative — performs the same mark of distance. What arrives will be foreign. Parsenio, again, spells things out: these people look like Turks.
From this scene (the rest of which is excerpted and discussed below) one can learn much about the use of music in commedia dell'arte performance. Besides the intermedio, the scene includes literal song with instrumental accompaniment. While the question of commedia dell'arte's music is one that I will address later in this chapter, I want to situate such music within a larger sonic economy. When the focus shifts to the overall staging of sound — including voices, dialects, language, and noises of all kinds — music becomes but a single point on a continuum of meaningful aurality. The consumption of this theater requires an audience (that listens), not mere spectators (who watch) — and it was these listeners and their habits of dramatic comprehension who were to prove essential for the success of Italian opera.
The excerpt of La Sultana quoted above breaks off at the entrance of several Turkish soldiers, whose sound, as we shall see, proves crucial to their characterization. As the scene continues, Mustafà and Ferahat ask Parsenio for directions to the Viceroy's palace. The cast list does not name Mustafà or Ferahat; however, it does call for six generic Turkish soldiers. Quite possibly all six would have been present in this scene, though only two have speaking roles. Mustafà and Ferahat speak Italian, although they do so badly, mangling the syntax and leaving verbs in their infinitive form. Parsenio openly laughs at his interlocutors until they threaten a violent (and, for the time, stereotypically Turkish) retribution:
MUSTAFÀ: Olà, olà ò homo vecchio, se tistar cornuo star anca zentil.
PARSENIO: O questa è bella son un cornuto amorevole.
FERAHAT: O vecchio caurissimo
PARSENIO: Tô quest'altra.
FERAHAT: Ti, ti, ti.
PARSENIO: Titera tipatula.
FERAHAT: Star naspolitano, o nò; si vù star naspoletano, insegnar.
MUSTAFÀ: Insegnar.
FERAHAT: Insegnar.
MUSTAFÀ: Insegnar
PARSENIO: Insegnar, insegnar, che cosa.
MUSTAFÀ: Palazio de vizio Rezio.
FERAHAT: Si, si, si Palazio del vizzio.
PARSENIO: Eh, eh palazio del vizzio eh, eh.
MUSTAFÀ: Cancaro à ti, nò star à rider de mi, che per Machomet, cavar simitara e taiar collo.
PARSENIO: Fermatevi, che burlo.
PRIMO [MUSTAFÀ?]:Ahi ghidy, Ahi Chavo.
SECONDO [FERAHAT?]:Ahi Hain, Ahi Chiupech.
PARSENIO: Son male bestie questi turchi, credono al Fato, e si vò troppo dietro mi tagliano il collo dicendo che così vuol il suo Macometo.
MUSTAFÀ: Insegna ti, se non mi taio adesso testa.
PARSENIO: Olà infodrate quelle scimitare, o povrino me; andate per questa strada diritto, e come siete cola dov'è quell gran Gingante di marmo poco lungi è'l Palazzo.
FERAHAT: Oh, nù metter dentro scimitare, scimitare
Qui tutti dicono scimitare più volte tutti insieme.
Saver che nù semo servitor d'Ambassador persian, persian.
Qui pur tutti insieme diranno questo persian più volte, e così dicendo i turchi anderan via.
MUSTAFÀ: Ho-la, ho-la, old man! If you have horns, be also courteous.
PARSENIO: Oh, this is good: I am a lovable cuckold!
FERAHAT: Oh, dearest old man.
PARSENIO: I'll take this one.
FERAHAT: You, you, you.
PARSENIO: [Latin] Tityre, tu patulae ...
[NB: This is the opening line of Virgil's First Eclogue, "Tityrus, thou reclining beneath the shelter of the spreading beech tree."]
FERAHAT: Are you Neapolitan, or no? If you want to stay a Neapolitan, to tell!
MUSTAFÀ: To tell.
FERAHAT: To tell.
MUSTAFÀ: To tell.
PARSENIO: To tell, to tell what?
MUSTAFÀ: Royal palace of the vice King.
FERAHAT: Yes, yes, yes, the palace of vice.
PARSENIO: Ha, ha, the palace of vice, ha ha!
MUSTAFÀ: Curse to you! No stay to laugh at me, by Mohammed, me to take out scimitar and me to slice throat!
PARSENIO: Stop, I was joking!
PRIMO [MUSTAFÀ?]: [Turkish] Oh, you pimp! Oh, you pimp boy!
SECONDO [FERAHAT?]: [Turkish] Oh, you betrayer! Oh, you dog!
PARSENIO: They are terrible beasts, these Turks. They believe in divine will, and if I continue [to joke] too much, they will cut my neck claiming that it is what their Mohammed wants.
MUSTAFÀ: You, tell! If not I will cut off your head now.
PARSENIO: Ho-la! Sheath those scimitars. Oh, dear me. Go straight ahead on this road, and when you get to the large marble Giant, the Palazzo is not far.
FERAHAT: Oh, we to put away the scimitars, scimitars.
Here everyone says "scimitars" all together many times.
Know that we are servants of the Persian, Persian Ambassador.
Here again everyone together says "Persian" multiple times, and so saying, the Turks leave.
Much of the characterization of the two Turks is encoded into their voices. Their savagery is conveyed by their brutish, incorrect Italian, and by their tendency to repeat themselves. Notably, the two stage directions that accompany this section of the dialogue describe further verbal repetitions, not gestures or other nontextual elements. We can assume that the "Turks" enacted their scene with violent and abrupt gestures (not least, the waving of swords), but we know this because of the way that their threats and questions are phrased, not because the playwright describes the actions that the actors should deploy. Similarly, while their costumes undoubtedly marked the characters as Turkish, it is the sound that renders the bodies themselves as different and not merely "us in funny clothes." At one point, the Turks — enraged — break into Turkish insults: "Ahi ghidy. Ahi Chavo. Ahi Hain. Ahi Chiupech." That the words are actually Turkish (though transcribed using the roman alphabet) adds an unexpectedly realistic touch, while whether the audience (reading or listening) would have interpreted these syllables as Turkish or as mere barbaric noise is an open question. Indeed, the typeset script itself raises the question of how common the working knowledge of Turkish aspersions might have been: not only are the words printed in a different font (presumably intended as a mark of their foreignness), but the names of the two characters are replaced by "Primo" and "Secondo." This error suggests that the two lines in question were added after the dialogue was first drafted, possibly lifted from another text or supplied by a third person with a better grasp of the Turkish language.
Parsenio also speaks a non-Italian tongue, in his case, Latin. Inspired by Ferahat, who repeats, "ti, ti, ti," Parsenio quotes the assonant opening of Virgil's first eclogue, "Tityre, tu patulae," in a phonetically transcribed form ("Titera tipatula") that makes clear the echoic link between the Turkish soldier's multiple "ti"s and his own. A swerve into inapropos Latin is typical of the stock Graziano character, used to demonstrate his elevated sense of his own intellect; here we see the importance of sound to the placement of such gags. Typically paired with a Bolognese or Paduan dialect that would call up audible connections with university towns, Graziano's pompous and elaborate verbal digressions parceled out his personality into sound, telegraphing his sense of self-importance and his desire to lecture. It was not important that his audience comprehend every word of his speech; indeed, quite the opposite — Graziano's ability to transcend the limits of his auditors and cross over into pseudo-intellectual density was an integral part of his verbal shtick. The sound of his speech said as much as or more than the words themselves.
In the case above, from La Sultana, the first line of Virgil's first eclogue would have been well enough known that a large part of any audience would have recognized the reference; certainly anyone educated enough to read the script should have known the phrase, though the phonetic transcription ensures that the joke is not immediately apparent and emerges only once the typeset line is translated into sound. In performance, Parsenio's recourse to pontificating Latin in the face of a barbarous, sword-wielding foreigner would have been funny even to those who missed the meaning of the text: whether or not a listener understood the words, she or he would have understood that they were Latin, with all of the connotations of ecclesiastic authority and university erudition that the language implied. Of course, in the mouth of Graziano/Parsenio, it is precisely the incongruity of such connotations and the performance context that provides much of the line's humor.
The linguistic jokes, however, do not end there. If the Turks in the first half of this scene are humorous for their poor grasp of Italian grammar and vocabulary, their exit ushers in the ambassador's Moorish slaves, who underscore how funny it is that these characters speak Italian at all:
PARSENIO: O che bestie; comincia ad oscurarsi, che diavolo è quello, che quì viene? Per mia fè sono duo camelli, e sopra vi sono duo mori e duo altri neri li conducono, ò uno d'essi vuol sonare una cenamella, l'altro duo timpani cola sopra stando, ò quanti fanciulli seguitano.
Quì s'udiranno i nominati, & i putti gridar tal volta, viva i mori, viva i mori; poi usciranno.
MORO I: Napoli bello tutto pien di fiori Vengon di Persia per vederti i Mori.
Quì faranno le riprese con cennamelle, e timpani.
MORO II: Benche Mori noi siamo del Persiano, In Napoli parliamo ancor toscano.
Quì fanno le riprese simili alle prime.
MORO I: Questi Camelli ogn'hora cavalchiamo
Che de l'Ambasciador i Cuochi siamo
Quì fanno le solite riprese.
MORO II: E quì le masserie d'argento, e d'oro
De la Cucina custodisce il Moro.
Quì fanno l'istesse riprese, e di più li duo mori, che conducono i camelli havranno un cimbalo per uno da suonare.
PARSENIO: O che siate benedetti in Persia, e della Francia, e della Spagna, e dell'Italia per tutte le piazze non solo: ma per tutte le cucine; per voi Mori di bianca pietra voglio segnar questo giorno.
MORO I: Nù star allegri signor, perche morir, nè più cantar, nè piar spasso.
MORO II: Dove palazzo del gran Turco Cristian?
PARSENIO: Volete dire del Vicerè. Andate sempre diritto, e come siete cola dov'è quel Gigante di marmo, che si vede, cola parimente è'l Palazzo.
MORO I: Ti ringraziar mi, e ti ringraziar tutti nù; la cuccurrucù, la cuccurucù.
Qui tutti i Mori suonando cimbali, cennamella, e timpani partiranno facendo gesti di vita, e dicendo tutti insieme, La cuccurucù, più volte.
PARSENIO: Benche s'oscuri, son così vago di maraviglie, tanto più così lontane, ch'io mi dispongo d'andar fino al Palazzo del Vicerè, per veder questo Ambasciador Persiano.
PARSENIO: Oh, what beasts! It's getting darker; what the devil is this thing which now comes? By my faith, it is two camels, and riding them are two Moors and two other black men who lead them. Oh, one of them wants to play a piffero, the other two have drums up where they are. Oh, see how many children are following them!
At this point everyone mentioned and the children should shout several times, "Long live the Moors! Long live the Moors!" then come out.
MORO I: [sings] Beautiful Naples, full of flowers The Moors have come from Persia to see you.
Here they play the refrain on pipes and drums.
MORO II: Although we are Moors from the Persian Gulf
In Naples we speak Tuscan instead.
Here they play the refrain, like the first time.
MORO I: We always ride these camels
For we are the Ambassador's cooks.
Here they do the usual refrain.
MORO II: And here is the silver and gold crockery
Of the kitchen, which the Moor keeps.
Here they do the same refrain, and furthermore, the two Moors leading the camels have a cymbal each to play.
PARSENIO: Oh, be blessed in Persia, and in all the piazzas of France, and of Spain, and of Italy; even more, in all of the kitchens! For you, Moors, I want to mark this day with a white stone!
MORO I: We are happy now, sir, for once dead, we can no longer sing nor enjoy solace.
MORO II: Where is the palazzo of the great Christian Turk?
PARSENIO: You mean the Viceroy. Continue straight ahead, and when you get to where there's a marble Giant, which you can see, the Palazzo is right there.
MORO I: I thank you, and we all thank you; cock-a-doodle-do! Cock-a-doodle-do!
Here all the Moors leave, playing cymbals, the pipe, and drums, and making lively gestures; and saying all together "Cock-a-doodle-do" many times.
PARSENIO: Even though it's getting dark, I so desire marvels, even more those from afar, that I am disposed to go to the Viceroy's Palazzo to see this Persian Ambassador.
The piffero, drums, and cymbals called out in this half of the scene demonstrate the source of the noises heard by Parsenio during the intermedio. Here their function as both noisemaker and instrument is combined, for they simultaneously signify the elevated status of the richly outfitted Moors and provide a refrain to the song that the Moors sing. Even in the absence of notated music, the structure is clear: four strophes are parsed out between two alternating soloists, each separated by a ritornello. The music for each ritornello is, we are informed, the same. This may also have been true of the music for each verse; it is more likely, however, that the melodic content was improvised or varied over a stock chord progression, allowing the singers to provide humorous ornaments on pertinent words. The instrumental ensemble — drums, pipe, cymbals, and (in the intermedio) trumpet — is evocative of Janissary music, which was associated with Turkish forces and diplomatic missions over many centuries. According to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the entrance of Grand Envoy Mehmed Pasha into Vienna in 1665 was accompanied by "four shawms (zurna), two pairs of large kettledrums, two cymbals, three cylindrical bass drums and four trumpets." The music here draws upon the stereotypical sounds of Turkish pageantry, communicating the origins of the characters concerned and narrating essential dramatic content — much as the Turkish words of Mustafà and Ferahat did earlier in the scene.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell'Arte by Emily Wilbourne. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Note to the ReaderIntroduction
“The Tragedies and Comedies Recited by the Zanni”
Chapter One
The Commedia dell’Arte as Theater
Chapter Two
“Ma meglio di tutti Arianna comediante”
Chapter Three
The Serious Elements of Early Comic Opera
Chapter Four
Penelope and Poppea as Stock Figures of the Commedia dell’Arte
Conclusion
Seventeenth- Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index