CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE NEW STYLE OF VINCI AND THE NEW SCIENCE OF VICO

According to Charles Burney, in the last volume of his A General History of Music published in 1789, Leonardo Vinci brought about a revolution in opera in the middle 1720s.1 Vinci, a Neapolitan opera composer had restored the clarity and intelligibility of recitative to the pristine form of that of Peri to whom Burney attributed the first opera recitative. More importantly, Vinci's arias allowed the poetry a voice without impoverishing the music. This was a bold judgement given the evidence available to him, but one that indicated his grasp of the Italian musical scene. In general, in Burney's view, opera, especially that of Naples, reached a period of excellence from about 1725 to 1740: there was a conjuncture of the achievements of com• posers, librettists, singers and stage designers.2 Vinci began his career writing music for Neapolitan comic opera. After a number of tri• umphs in this genre, he wrote his first opera seria, Publio Cornelio Sripio, which was quite a hit in Naples; his 1726 setting of Didone abbandonata gave him a European reputation; his Artaserse of 1730, his last work, was one of the most popular operas of the first half of the eighteenth century.3 He died in mysterious circumstances that may have been related to his excessive passion for gambling. His early death, fol• lowed by that of his fellow composer Pergolesi a few years later became the eighteenth century's examples of the tragedy of unfulfilled genius until the career of Mozart displaced them both. The poet of the Didone and the Artaserse was the greatest librettist of the age, Pietro Metastasio, the pupil and heir of Gravina. The lives of Metastasio and Vinci exemplify aspects of the kind of rags to

1 Charles Burney, A General History of Music, 2, 916-917. 2 David Kimbell, Italian opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 190- 198. 3 Reinhard Strohm, Essays on Handel and Italian Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni• versity Press, 1985), p. 213. Robert Meikle, "Vinci, Leonardo" in The New Grove Dic• tionary of Music and Musicians, 19, 785-787; and Kurt Markstrom, "Vinci, Leonardo", The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, 4, 1013-1016. VINCIS NEW STYLE AND VICO'S NEW SCIENCE 231 riches and fame that made a musical career in Naples seductive. The story of Metastasio is well known; snatched from the slums of Rome by Gravina, who heard him singing improvised poetry, he adopted this Pietro Trapassi, educated him, and changed his name to "Metastasio", which might be fittingly translated as "The Trans­ former". Gravina, to whom posterity has not been kind, has even been ridiculed for this relationship; but whatever else it was, it showed remarkable prescience to identify genius in this urchin. On Gravina's death Metastasio inherited his fortune; and, being no Horatio Alger figure he squandered the money on wild living and opera stars. To be sure he wrote poetry for Naples' memorial volumes, but that was not enough to support his sort of life style. He had lacked the disci­ pline needed for a law degree; and by 1724 the prospect of work was staring him in the face. It was under the influence of the soprano Marianna Bulgarelli, also known as "La Romanina", that he wrote his first opera, Didone abbandonata (Abandoned Dido). She was the first Didone, and persuaded him to give her the final number in each act, a revolutionary innovation breaking the typical aria pattern in the opera seria tradition. This opera was the beginning of his remark­ able career as a librettist. Naples had its own expectations for a pro­ duction; an opera had to include parts for comic characters and usually they were sung in Neapolitan. These scenes were cut when Didone was not performed in Naples and consequently the only bass voice in the work was removed from the score. In Rome there was the further stipulation that women could not perform in public. All sing­ ing roles were performed by men.4 In the Roman production of Didone abbandonata the parts of Dido and Aeneas were both sung by castrati.5 In 1730 Metastasio went to Vienna to take on the post of Caesarean Poet, and the special patronage of another Marianna, the Countess of Althann. He lived there until his death in 1782, having had a full and active career.

4 Gender studies, to my knowledge, have not dealt with the symbolic significance of castrati for this period. Roland Barthers' S/Ζ is a partial exception. See Rudolfo Celletti, A history of bel canto, trans. Frederick Fuller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 108-115; John Rosselli, Singers of Italian opera: the history of a profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 32-55. Anne Rice's novel Cry to Heaven is a sym­ pathetic presentation of the life of a castrato in eighteenth century Venice and Naples. 5 It may be mere coincidence but it is only after this Roman production that made both Vinci and Metastasio's reputation that Vico came up with his hypothesis that Dido was in fact a man, or at least a poetic universal representing men defeated in an heroic contest. Vico had mentioned the stories concerning Dido and Aeneas