Lenten Sacred Drama in Naples, 1818–1830
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MOSAIC PERSPECTIVES: LENTEN SACRED DRAMA IN NAPLES, 1818–1830 by Jonathan Matthew Shold BM, Wheaton College, 2009 MM, Bowling Green State University, 2011 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2017 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS & SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Jonathan Matthew Shold It was defended on April 21, 2017 and approved by Deane Root, Department of Music Francesca Savoia, Department of French & Italian Languages and Literatures Dissertation Co-Advisor: James P. Cassaro, Department of Music Dissertation Co-Advisor: Rachel Mundy, Department of Music, Rutgers University, Newark ii Copyright © by Jonathan Shold 2017 iii MOSAIC PERSPECTIVES: LENTEN SACRED DRAMA IN NAPLES, 1818–1830 Jonathan Shold, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2017 What does it mean to take nineteenth-century sacred music seriously while working from a modern humanities framework? This dissertation explores the tenuous relationship between the Western Christian conceptual tradition of “sacred music” and two Neapolitan Lenten tragic-sacred dramas: Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto (1818), and Donizetti’s Il diluvio universale (1830). Typological models of sacred music have continued to revolve around a binary sacred/secular opposition that privileges the liturgical repertories of institutionalized religion. Secondary literature has implicitly placed Mosè and Il diluvio at the margins of sacred music by describing them as “between the sacred and secular,” a description that silently re-inscribes the binary it seems to deconstruct. This dissertation offers a synchronic genre history of Neapolitan sacred drama and its sympathetic resonance with Lenten rituals such as fasting, prayer, and penitence. In so doing it acknowledges the historical sacred/secular dichotomy while offering new alternatives for viewing Neapolitan theatrical life during the “sacred” Lenten season. Archival evidence gathered in Naples reveals Neapolitan theaters not as “secular” venues, but rather civic institutions that typologically prefigured experiences of Lenten fasting. Some of the same Old Testament characters that the Church used as typological justifications for fasting also appeared onstage, where audiences perceived them not as “sacred” characters, but rather as “tragic-sublime” characters. This discovery enables a “mosaic” of new perspectives on tragic- sacred drama’s cultural underpinnings as a musical genre. These include ecocritical discourse on iv the tragic “catastrophes” of floods in the region surrounding Mount Vesuvius, as well as the musical and allegorical similarities between Mosè and the penitential Catholic Requiem Mass. Sacred drama’s typological resonances were not aesthetically neutral: the “tragic-sublime” Old Testament aesthetic was contingent upon broader historical discourse on Jewish musicality, while the underlying ideologies of catastrophe in Il diluvio and repentance in Mosè reinforced patriarchal gendered tropes of women’s moral culpability. These observations arise from a combination of score analysis and archival research that situates sacred drama at the intersection of historical musicology, religious studies, and Italian cultural studies. v TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE ..................................................................................................................................... X 1.0 INTRODUCTION: IS NOTHING SACRED? SACRED MUSIC AND EPISTEMOLOGIES OF SANCTITY ........................................................................................ 1 1.1 USING “SACRED MUSIC” TO THINK ABOUT MOSÈ AND IL DILUVIO .... 6 1.2 USING MOSÈ AND IL DILUVIO TO THINK ABOUT “SACRED MUSIC” .. 12 1.3 CHAPTER DESCRIPTIONS .............................................................................. 19 2.0 FASTING AND TYPOLOGY IN LENTEN THEATER ....................................... 26 2.1 FASTING FROM THE THEATER .................................................................... 29 2.2 OLD TESTAMENT TYPOLOGIES OF LENTEN FASTING .......................... 36 3.0 TYPECASTING THE OLD TESTAMENT: TRAGIC-SUBLIME CHARACTERS IN TRAGIC-SACRED-DRAMA .................................................................. 44 3.1 THE SACRED/PROFANE BINARY, LIMINALITY, AND SUBLIMITY ...... 46 3.2 OLD TESTAMENT SUBLIMITY IN NAPLES ................................................ 53 3.3 SUBLIMINAL MESSAGES? ............................................................................. 67 4.0 (ANTE)-DILUVIAN CATASTROPHES: TRAGEDY AND BLAME IN DONIZETTI’S IL DILUVIO ..................................................................................................... 76 4.1 TOWARD AN EPISTEMOLOGY OF TRAGEDY IN IL DILUVIO ................ 78 4.2 PATRIARCHS AND PATRIARCHY: PRECIPITATING THE FLOOD ......... 86 5.0 PENITENTIAL GENRES: EXODUS AND PURGATORY IN ROSSINI’S MOSÈ .......................................................................................................................................96 vi 5.1 SACRED/SECULAR CROSSOVER: TOWARD AN ALLEGORICAL READING OF MOSÈ .......................................................................................................... 98 5.2 CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS ON THE POLITICAL AND CULTURAL RELATIONS OF THE REQUIEM TO MOSÈ .................................................................. 117 6.0 CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................... 124 APPENDIX A ............................................................................................................................ 131 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 142 vii LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Comparison of Select Requiem Texts with Passages in Rossini’s Mosè ..................... 105 Table 2. Neapolitan Theater Performances during Lent, 1818 ................................................... 136 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Moses before Pharaoh. Title page of Rossini, Mosè in Egitto. ..................................... 59 Figure 2. Rossini, Mosè in Egitto. Act III: “Dal tuo stellato soglio,” first strophe. ...................... 63 Figure 3. Rossini, Mosè in Egitto. Act III: “Dal tuo stellato soglio,” surprise modulation. ......... 64 Figure 4. Donizetti, Il diluvio universale. Act II Finale: “Dio tremendo.” ................................... 65 Figure 5. Donizetti, Il diluvio universale. Act III: Sela’s blasphemy. .......................................... 87 Figure 6. Donizetti, Il diluvio universale. Act III: Sela’s death and onset of the flood. ............... 88 Figure 7. Mozart, Requiem. “Rex tremendae,” mm. 1-7. ........................................................... 109 Figure 8. Rossini, Mosè in Egitto. Act I: “Eterno! Immenso! Incomprensibil Dio!” ................. 110 Figure 9. Rossini, Mosè in Egitto. Act II Finale: Mosè’s judgment of Osiride’s death. ............ 113 Figure 10. Mozart, Don Giovanni. Act II: mm. 59-73. ............................................................... 114 ix PREFACE Of the many sources of intellectual inspiration that led me to this dissertation project on Neapolitan Lenten sacred drama, two in particular deserve special mention. The first was a 2012 musicology seminar offered by Rachel Mundy on “Animal Musicalities,” which culminated for me in a presentation on New Age nature recordings at the 2013 national meeting of the American Musicological Society in Pittsburgh. This research was driven by a general thematic interest in how music intersects with religious experience, and this interest soon found another historical home during a 2014 musicology seminar offered by James P. Cassaro on operatic innovations at the turn of the nineteenth century. While scanning a list of Rossini’s operatic compositions in search of a term-paper topic, I was struck by Mosè in Egitto for its Bible-based title that initially seemed to render the opera an outlier to broader currents of nineteenth-century Romanticism. Upon learning that Mosè had been commissioned for Lent, I was reminded of John Rice’s claim that “opera seria put Carnival on the operatic stage: elaborate costumes, disguises, cross-dressing, plots with only the flimsiest resemblance to the historical events on which they are supposedly based, and happy endings.”1 This vivid quote ended up generating the primary research question behind this dissertation: if opera seria put Carnival on the operatic stage, how might operatic works like Mosè have “put Lent on the operatic stage?” Addressing this research question over the past several years has meant heading down well- marked paths as well as trailblazing new ones. It has meant learning to integrate score-based musical analysis with broader questions of how quasi-religious imagery has been used to represent 1 John A. Rice, “Mozart’s Operas: Functions, Genres, Archetypes,” in Mozart on the Stage, 19-38 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 27. x difference. At the same time, it has meant learning to think critically about civic-religious Lenten practices while simultaneously writing charitably about the nineteenth-century individuals who observed them. Not insignificantly, it has meant learning to speak Italian and travelling to Naples to conduct archival research. And perhaps most of all, it has meant learning to ask for and receive help—financial, intellectual,