Censoring Eliogabalo in Seventeenth-Century

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxvi:3 (Winter, 2006), 355–377.

CENSORING ELIOGABALO Mauro Calcagno Censoring Eliogabalo in Seventeenth-Century Venice In the letter to the reader that begins his short treatise On Honest Dissimulation (1641), Torquato Accetto writes that his

book has been left “almost bloodless” by self-inºicted wounds. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 “You will recognize the scars,” the author warns, “when you use good judgement.” Accetto calls this treatise the “small book”; behind it lies the forbidden “large book” which can be read only between the lines of the “small book.” Accetto’s distinction between the book permitted and the one not permitted is symptomatic of a historical condition common to writers living in the early modern period: Censorship prevented them from writing their “large” books. To circumvent censorship, Accetto suggests that authors practice the art of dissimulation. But dissimulation, he adds, requires an active response from readers, the ability to decode and recover the “other text,” which conveys full authorial intention. By using the metaphor of “scars” (cicatrici), Accetto alludes to an episode in Book XIX of the Odyssey in which a scar on Ulysses’ body reveals that he is not an old beggar, but the master and hero of the household. Accetto’s point is that any text published in the age of censorship is metaphorically an injured body that readers should use their hermeneutic skills to recuperate.1 Accetto’s methodology of reading texts—a true hermeneutics of “suspicion” avant la lettre—is useful for the interpretation of works revised presumably under the pressure of censorship—including opera librettos. As Mario Infelise writes, “In early modern

Mauro Calcagno is Associate Professor of Music, Harvard University. He is the author of “Signifying Nothing: On the Aesthetics of Pure Voice in Early Venetian Opera,” Journal of Musicology, XX (2003), 461–497; “‘Imitar col canto chi parla’: Monteverdi and the Creation of a Language for Musical Theater,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, LV (2003), 383– 401. © 2005 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc. 1 Torquato Accetto (ed. Salvatore S. Nigro), Della dissimulazione onesta (Turin, 1997; orig. pub. Naples, 1641), 5–7. For this interpretation, including the distinction between “small” and “large” book (libro piccolo and libro grande), I am indebted to Nigro’s comments on Accetto’s work included in the introduction to Della dissimulazione (esp. 6–7, xxvi–xxix), as well as in the chapter “Della dissimulazione onesta di Torquato Accetto,” in Alberto Asor Rosa (ed.), Letteratura Italiana: Le opere. II. Dal Cinquecento al Settecento (Turin, 1993), 976–978. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 356 | MAURO CALCAGNO Europe, between the beginning of the XVI and the end of the XVIII centuries, a system of control over the production, circula- tion and use of books was born, then developed, and ªnally went into crisis.” This system, enacted by both the Catholic state and the Church, affected the “relationships that came to be established between those in control and the booksellers,” as well as the “per- ception of that climate by both authors and readers.”2 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 In this context, the situation of Venice, the most important publishing center in Italy, emerges as unique, given the republic’s tradition of relative independence from Rome. The same city that produced the ªrst “index of forbidden books” on behalf of the Church (1549) was also the site of an extraordinary conºict between a Catholic government and Rome. The Interdict of 1606 and the Jesuit order’s expulsion from Venice were followed by a period of unprecedented freedom in the publishing domain, which lasted until the end of the 1640s, when the new political reality of the War of Candia imposed the re-establishment of a closer relationship between Venice and Rome.3 Venice saw the publication of its ªrst opera librettos in 1637. Soon thereafter, the city became the European capital of dramma per musica. It is difªcult to assess the effect of censorship on these ephemeral booklets in small duodecimo format. No archival documentation survives concerning the Riformatori allo studio di Padova (the state censors) related to them. Opera patrons, however, must have imposed forms of preventive censorship during the production process—“patrons” meaning anyone who had power over a librettist, from impresarios to theater owners. Conjectural evidence of such restrictive actions emerges in librettos examined according to Accetto’s “methodology” of reading between the lines. The case at hand is the libretto published for the premiere of Eliogabalo, written by Aurelio Aureli and composed by Giovanni 2 Mario Infelise, I libri proibiti (Rome, 1999), 4, 42. 3 On censorship in seventeenth-century Venice, see Marino Zorzi, “La produzione e la circolazione del libro,” in Gino Benzoni and Gaetano Cozzi (eds.), Storia di Venezia: Dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima. VII. La Venezia barocca (Rome, 1997), 921–984; Paolo Ulvioni, “Stampa e censura a Venezia nel Seicento,” Archivio veneto, CXXXIX (1975), 45–93; Mario Infelise, “A proposito di imprimatur. Una controversia giurisdizionale di ªne Seicento tra Venezia e Roma,” in Studi veneti offerti a Gaetano Cozzi (Venice, 1992), 287–299; Infelise, I libri proibiti, 71. In his contribution to this issue, Edward Muir links the freedom gained by the Republic with the rise of the Accademia degli Incogniti and the beginning of public opera in Venice. In dealing with freedom restrictions after this “Sarpian moment,” affecting the domain of opera, my essay complements his. CENSORING ELIOGABALO | 357 Antonio Boretti, which opened the 1667/68 season at the Vene- tian SS. Giovanni e Paolo, a theater owned by the Grimani family. Recovering signs of authorial intention in this libretto requires at- tention not only to the text proper but also to what modern literary critics describe as the privileged space of transaction between author and public, or the paratextual elements—in this case, the illustrated frontispiece, the title page, the dedication, the letter to Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 the reader, and the plot summary.4 Genette, who coined the term paratext, deªnes it as a “thresh- old” or “a zone between text and off-text...aprivileged space of a pragmatics and a strategy...afringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text.” The paratext works as an interface not only between author and public—thus representing the locus of authorial intention—but also between text and context. In the case of Eliogabalo, it is the interpretive space between the libretto and the historical circumstances em- bedded in both the surviving archival documentation concerning the ªrst performance and the related artistic and sociopolitical dis- courses produced in the Venice of the 1660s. Paratextuality is also part of a larger phenomenon that Genette calls “transtextuality.” The transtextual relationships of Eliogabalo’s 1668 libretto extend backward in time to its literary and visual sources and forward to the librettos published for performances of the opera throughout Italy after its Venetian premiere. In Accetto’s “methodology of reading,” the interaction of these elements reveals that “other text” with the author’s true voice—one, as it turns out, suppressed by censorship.5

4 ELIOGABALO / DRAMA PER MUSICA / Nel Famoso Teatro Grimano / L’Anno M.DC.LXVIII. / DI / AURELIO AURELI. / Opera Decimaquarta / DEDICATO / A gl’Illustrissimi Signori / GIO: CARLO, / ET / VICENZO / Grimani Fratelli. / IN VENETIA, M. DC. LX VIII / Per Francesco Nicolini / Con Licenza de’ Superiori, e Privilegio. / Si vende in Spadaria. A second edition was published the same year. The librettos are indexed as numbers 8758 and 8759 in Claudio Sartori, I libretti italiani a stampa dalle origini al 1800: Catalogo analitico con 16 indici (Cuneo, 1990). The performances of Aureli/Boretti’s Eliogabalo span the period from 1668 to 1687. 5 Gérard Genette (trans. Jane E. Lewin), Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (New York, 1997), 2. Genette deªnes transtexuality as everything that brings a text into relationship with other texts: intertextuality (quotation, plagiarism, and allusion), metatextuality (e.g., critical commentaries), hypertextuality (imitation, pastiche, and parody), archtextuality (e.g., genre), and paratextuality. See idem (trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky), Palimpsests: Lit- erature in the Second Degree (Lincoln, 1997). For an extension of Genette’s categories to opera, see Marco Emanuele, Opere e riscritture: Melodrammi, ipertesti, parodie (Turin, 2001). 358 | MAURO CALCAGNO a tale of two operas A masterwork of “honest dissimulation,” the letter to the reader that librettist Aurelio Aureli prefaced to his Eliogabalo both obscures and illuminates the turbulent circumstances of this opera’s creation. In it, Aureli writes that the libretto was the “hasty” replacement of a previous version (his revision of a text by an unnamed author) set to music by Francesco Cavalli. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 But, for some “unexpected” reason, he was “ordered” to abandon the Cavalli version. The later work was based on the same subject as the former one, though “completely different in manner and action,” as Aureli seems determined to reassure the reader (and whomever he “had to obey”). The letter mentions his collabora- tors by name, including that of the new composer, Giovanni An- tonio Boretti, who was only twenty-seven years old, much youn- ger than Cavalli (age sixty-ªve).6 The score of Cavalli’s Eliogabalo survives, but the opera never reached the stage. The events to which Aureli cryptically alludes in the prefatory letter of his libretto can be partially reconstructed through the archival documentation regarding the circumstances of this opera’s production. During the months immediately preceding the operatic season in which Cavalli’s Eliogabalo was to be performed, the noblemen who owned the theater—the young brothers Giovanni Carlo and Vincenzo Grimani, respectively nineteen and ªfteen years old—dismissed Cavalli, hired Boretti, and obliged Aureli to write the new Eliogabalo. The Grimanis also abruptly ªred the theater’s impresario, Marco Faustini, and took his place. In the dedicatory letter of the new Eliogabalo, Aureli praises the two brothers as the heirs of the Roman and Greek patrons of theater arts.7 Who, and what, was behind the cancellation of Cavalli’s op-

6 Aureli, Eliogabalo, 5. For the original text of this letter, and other documents mentioned or quoted in this article, see Calcagno, “Fonti ricenzione e ruolo della commitenza nell’ Eliogabalo musicato da F. Cavalli, G.A. Boretti e T. Orgiani (1667–1687),” in Dirko Fabris (ed.), Francesco Cavalli e la circolazione dell’opera veneziana nel seicento (Naples, forthcoming). 7 Aureli, Eliogabalo, 3 (dedication dated January 10, 1667 [?1668]). The scores of both Cavalli’s and Boretti’s Eliogabalo are preserved at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice as Ms.It.Cl. IV, 358 [ϭ9882] and Ms.It.Cl. IV, 413 [ϭ9937], respectively. The events outlined in this paragraph emerge from the surviving archival documents examined in Lorenzo Bianconi, “Caletti, Pietro Francesco,” in Dizionario biograªco degli italiani (Rome, 1973), XVII, 686–696; Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, 1991), 188 n. 75, 195, 210 n. 35; Franco Mancini, Maria Teresa Muraro, and Franca Povoledo, I teatri del Veneto (Venice, 1995), I, 297–298. The documents, preserved at the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, fondo Scuola Grande di S. Marco, are (1) a contract of June 29, 1667 (with receipt of CENSORING ELIOGABALO | 359 era? Since archival documents do not provide an answer, hypothe- ses can be advanced primarily by comparing Boretti’s with Cavalli’s Eliogabalo. The plots of their librettos share two dominant themes: First, Eliogabalo (or Heliogabalus) is more interested in chasing women than in ruling the Roman Empire. Second, Alessandro, Eliogabalo’s cousin and successor, embodies the emperor’s virtuous counterpart; he is virile, diligent in his duties, and Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 faithful to his beloved. As for the musical style of the two operas, Lorenzo Bianconi suggests that the Venetian public probably pre- ferred Boretti’s modern-style canzonette to Cavalli’s style of concise musical drama.8 Bianconi also notes that the most striking difference between the two versions lies in the outcome of their ªnales. In the Cavalli ªnale, the lascivious emperor is brutally killed (offstage), and Alessandro takes power. In Boretti’s opera, Eliogabalo survives his soldiers’ revolt, regrets his evil deeds, and continues to rule with Alessandro’s help. Bianconi suggests that the ªnale of Cavalli’s opera was too pro-monarchy for republican Venice, though apparently not for monarch-ruled Turin in 1678, where the ªnale of Boretti’s opera was replaced by one more like Cavalli’s. The pref- ace to Turin’s libretto reports that changes were necessary because certain passages were more suited to a libera civitate (Venice) than apud Reges (Turin). But, as Bianconi adds, a later and much revised libretto of Eliogabalo published for a 1687 Venetian performance also features the killing of the emperor, despite Venice’s continued status as a libera civitas. The reason behind the divergence between the two ªnales lies, as we shall see, not so much in larger political

July 13) between Cavalli and the manager of the Theater SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Marco Faustini, concerning the ªrst Eliogabalo, whose author is not mentioned (busta 194, cc. 50– 51), partly transcribed in Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 436; (2) a contract of October 10, 1667, between Aureli and Faustini, regarding the adjustments to be made in this ªrst Eliogabalo (busta 194, n. III, c. 31), transcribed in Mancini, Muraro, and Povoledo, I teatri del Veneto, 311, but erroneously dated September 10; (3) a letter of December 15, 1667, by which Faustini renounces the management of the Theater SS. Giovanni e Paolo, in favor of the Grimani brothers. This letter indicates that Cavalli was paid a commission, despite the cancellation of his opera (busta 188, cc. 199–202, transcribed in ibid., 311–312). Rosand, Op- era in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 142, observes that the Grimanis “were quite used to having their theater [the SS. Giovanni e Paolo] compared favorably with those of ancient Rome.” 8 Bianconi, Caletti, 689, supports his claim by mentioning Cavalli’s 1673 opera Massenzio, which was canceled because its music was considered old-fashioned (“mancante di briose ariette,” as Pietro Dolªn writes to the Duke of Braunschweig in a letter of December 23, 1672, transcribed in Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 441–442). See also Jane Glover, Cavalli (London, 1978), 29. 360 | MAURO CALCAGNO contexts (republic versus monarchy) but in characteristics peculiar to Venetian operatic patronage.9 Nonetheless, the ªnale of Cavalli’s work may have played a role in the rejection of the opera, and ideological reasons must have mattered. By showing the repentance of the ruler, instead of his slaying, the action of the Boretti libretto adheres to one of the main tenets of early modern Catholic political thought. According Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 to Jesuit writers, for example, the power bestowed upon a legitimate prince was irrevocable, regardless of his viciousness or tyranny. It was considered acceptable to slay a tyrant who usurped a throne (tyrannus in regimine) but not a proper ruler turned oppres- sor (tyrannus in titulo, as Heliogabalus was). That the ªnale of Boretti’s opera reºected Jesuit-like political thinking is arguable by the fact that four months after its Venetian premiere the opera was performed at the Jesuit college of Parma (Collegio dei Nobili), where many Venetian nobles sent their children. Eliogabalo might have been conceived—and its ªnale changed—with the Parma performance in mind. The repentance of Eliogabalo at the end of Boretti’s opera illustrates one of the most stressed values in Jesuit plays.10 The moral message conveyed by Boretti’s ªnale also ªts the conservative political and cultural atmosphere of Venice during

9 Bianconi, Caletti; idem, “L’Ercole in Rialto,” in Muraro (ed.), Venezia e il melodramma nel Seicento (Florence, 1976), 264–265. For the Turin performance, see also Mercedes Viale Ferrero, “Repliche a Torino di alcuni melodrammi veneziani e loro caratteristiche,” in ibid., 145–171; idem, Storia del Teatro Regio di Torino. III. La scenograªa dalle origini al 1936 (Turin, 1973), 24–38. The Turin libretto is n. 8764 in Sartori, I libretti italiani. I am grateful to Mercedes Viale Ferrero for providing me with a photocopy of it. 10 Robert A. Lauer, Tyrannicide and Drama (Stuttgart, 1987), 60. This protective view of ty- rants is echoed in Cavalli’s Eliogabalo, which features the slaying of a depraved yet legitimate ruler. Eliogabalo repeatedly assaults Flavia, the beloved of his cousin Alessandro, who at the end of the opera becomes the new emperor. Yet, well aware of Eliogabalo’s reprehensible behavior, Alessandro repeatedly disagrees that the emperor should be killed: “Long live the emperor,” he declares, “Long live we the people. Let Heaven punish its own evildoers. We shall not escape sin with greater sin” (III, 10). ELIOGABALO / DRAMA PER MUSICA / Da rappresentarsi in Parma / NEL COLLEGIO DE NOBILI / IN OCCASIONE / DEL BATTESIMO / DEL SERENISSIMO / ODOARDO / PRENCIPE / DI PARMA / IN PARMA, Per Mario Vigna. 1668 / Con Licenza de’ Superiori. Sartori, I libretti italiani, n. 8757. Repentance was an important element in the plots of Jesuit dramas based on Roman history. See Maurice Gravier, “Le théâtre des jésuites et la tragédie du salut et de la conversion,” in Jean Jacquot (ed.), Le théatre tragique (Paris, 1972), 119–129. The other opera performed, besides Eliogabalo, during the 1667/68 season at the SS. Giovanni e Paolo, The Tyrant Humbled by Love, or Meraspe, also features the ªnal repentance of the tyrant, although the setting is no longer Rome but Egypt. CENSORING ELIOGABALO | 361 the 1660s. The Jesuits’ return to Venice in 1657, after a ªfty-year absence because of the Interdict, contributed to a shift toward religious orthodoxy, which also affected the cultural domain, including book publishing. For example, as Muraro observed, the statues crowning the Chiesa della Salute underwent signiªcant icono- graphic changes in the 1660s precisely to reºect this new attitude.

Evidence, though scant, also indicates that the Grimani family Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 supported the Society of Jesus during this time. When the brothers Grimani assumed sole responsibility for managing the theater in 1667, their public image became closely tied to the productions there. Eliogabalo—staged in the Grimani’s ªrst season as managers—must have been in accord with their beliefs as members of the ruling class.11 The only other seventeenth-century Venetian artwork about

11 Giorgio Spini, Ricerca dei libertini. La teoria dell’impostura delle religioni nel Seicento italiano. Nuova edizione riveduta e ampliata (Florence, 1983), 259: “Indeed [in Venice] it is not only the licentious group of the Incogniti that completely disappears. It is also that historic function that Venice had within the world of Italian Counter Reformation (as the antagonist of the Habsburgs, of Rome, of the Jesuits, since the age of Boccalini and Sarpi) which begins to van- ish under the pressures of the Turkish Empire and of the local changes of men and things.” See Giuseppe Gullino, “Il rientro dei Gesuiti a Venezia: le ragioni della politica e dell’economia,” in Mario Zanardi (ed.), I Gesuiti e Venezia. Momenti e problemi di storia veneziana della Compagnia di Gesù. Atti del Convegno di Studi. Venezia, 2–5 ottobre 1990 (Padua, 1994), 421–433; idem, “L’opera del nunzio Carafa per il ritorno dei Gesuiti nella Serenissima,” Studi Romani, XXIV (1976), 162–180. For the effects of the conservative turn on the press, see Zorzi, “La produzione e la circolazione del libro,” 960–962. As a litmus test for this change, between the Interdict of 1606 and the return of the Jesuits in 1657, the enrollment of Venetian noblemen at the Parma Jesuit college dropped. Patricians could show their independence from Rome by choosing to send their children either to the Studio of Padua or to the Somaschi fathers, but not to Parma—to send them to a Jesuit college would have represented a different political statement (see Gian Paolo Brizzi, “Scuole e collegi dell’antica Provincia Veneta della Compagnia di Gesù, 1542–1773,” in Zanardi [ed.], I Gesuiti e Venezia, 467–511). After the Interdict, from 1610 to 1620, only 4 of the 280 students admitted to the Parma college came from Venice, but in the 1650s, this number increased to 16 (of 257), and peaked at 54 (of 395) in the 1660s (these numbers are inferred from Andrea Sabini, Collegii Parmensis Nobilium Convictorum Nomenclatura Universalis, cum notis historicis [Parma, 1820]; Gaetano Capasso, “Il Collegio dei Nobili di Parma. Memorie storiche,” Archivio storico per le Provincie Parmensi, I [1901], 1–248). Evidently, during the 1650s and 1660s, Venice had re-established closer ties with the Compagnia. Michelangelo Muraro, “Il tempio votivo di S. Maria della Sa- lute in un poema del Seicento,” Ateneo veneto, XI (1973), 87–119; idem, “Iconologia e ideologia del tempio della Salute a Venezia,” in Jan Šlaski (ed.), Barocco fra Italia e Polonia (War- saw, 1977), 71–78. Zanardi, “I ‘domicilia’ o centri operativi della Compagnia di Gesù nello Stato veneto (1542–1773),” in idem (ed.), I Gesuiti e Venezia, 103, reports on the failed negoti- ations that occurred from 1661 to 1663 between Zuane Grimani (the uncle of Giovanni Carlo and Vincenzo, the dedicatees of Eliogabalo) and the Jesuits’ highest hierarchies to build a college in Venice. 362 | MAURO CALCAGNO Heliogabalus (to my knowledge) is a wood carving in the vestry of the church of S. Pietro Martire on the island of Murano—Aureli’s birthplace—which shows Heliogabalus as one of the thirty-two statues standing among twenty panels representing the life of St. John the Baptist. Like Aureli’s libretto, it also deals with the theme of repentance. Besides Heliogabalus, thirteen other statues in the church impersonate characters from Roman history. Ten of them Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 were also portrayed in Venetian opera during the 1660s and 1670s, when the subject of tyranny took center stage. These negative political examples matched the element of docere (teaching) with that of delectare (entertaining). The Murano carving, placing notorious historical ªgures side-by-side with the announcer of redemption, emphasized the notion of conversion that contemporaneous operas, including Eliogabalo, implicitly advocated.12 from source to libretto: the senate episode Cavalli’s ªnale, featuring the killing of the emperor, was probably less suited to the Venetian stage of the 1660s than Boretti’s, which highlighted repentance. But the rejection of Cavalli’s opera becomes even more understandable—and the evidence for censorship strengthened— through analysis of another critical episode common to both librettos, Eliogabalo’s appointment of an all-female Senate. Com- parison of this passage with its literary source discovers that its scandalous meanings were much more manifest in Cavalli’s version than in Boretti’s. The librettist had to employ considerable skill to manipulate his source in such a way as to create an association between Venice’s contemporary historical situation and the episode’s sexual and political overtones without being too blunt.13

12 The carving, completed in 1666, was originally placed in the Scuola di S. Giovanni Battista. Aureli’s family played some role in its activities. See Emanuele Cicogna, Delle inscrizioni veneziane (Bologna, 1969; orig. pub. 1824), VI, 372–373, 387. The ten characters were Nero (Claudio Cesare, 1671, and Il Nerone, 1679), Seneca (Il Nerone), Julius Caesar (Giulio Cesare, 1677), Mauritius, Foca, and Maxentius (Heraclio, 1672), Furius Camillus (Cesare amante, 1651), Belisarius (Totila, 1677), Pompeius Magnus (Pompeo magno, 1666), and Germanicus (Prosperità and Caduta di Elio Seiano, 1666). As Paolo Fabbri, Il Secolo cantante: Per una storia del libretto d’opera nel Seicento (Rome, 2003; orig. pub. Bologna, 1990), 213, observes, Aureli’s libretto marks “the ªrst time the character of the monarch himself offers an image of the excesses to which absolute authority can arrive, an authority that cannot ªnd in itself any self-imposed rational obstacle, any control of its omnipotence.” 13 The literary sources of seventeenth-century opera librettos have yet to be fully explored. Some examples can be found in Wendy B. Heller, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley, 2003). CENSORING ELIOGABALO | 363 In the ªrst libretto, the Senate episode occupies three scenes (Cavalli, I, 14–16), whereas in the second libretto, it occupies only one brief scene of just seven lines (Boretti, III, 19). Why did this passage have to be so drastically shortened (although traces of the ªrst version remained in the second one)? The ªrst pages of Aelius Lampridius’ Vita Heliogabali (fourth century a.d.) comprise the main historiographical source for the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 emperor’s life. The section about the women’s Senate, which is emblematic of the emperor’s outlandish behavior, is as follows: “He also established a senaculum, or women’s Senate on the Quirinal Hill. Before his time, in fact, a congress of matrons had met here, but only on certain festivals....Butnow,through the inºuence of Symiamira [the emperor’s mother] absurd decrees were enacted...namely...[regarding] who was to yield prece- dence and to whom, who was to advance to kiss another.”14 In Lampridius’ history, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, called Elagabalus (“deus Sol invictus”), came from Syria, apparently the child of a prostitute, or so was his mother’s reputation in Rome. His ascent to power was rapid, but his turbulent reign had lasted only four years when he was assassinated in 222 a.d. at the age of twenty. He had extravagant habits and sexual perversions. For example, he traveled with 600 chariots “full of his male prostitutes, bawds, harlots, and lusty partners in depravity” (31, 5–6). He dis- carded women but kept the same male prostitute (Zotico, who is a character in Cavalli’s Eliogabalo) as a servant and adviser during his entire reign (24, 2; 10, 2), eventually undergoing surgery to become a castrato. He also loved to perform, one of his favorite roles being the goddess Venus in erotic poses. In Lampridius’ words, life for him was nothing except a search for pleasures...[he] made of any oriªce of his body an instrument to indulge in any sort of pleasure” (19, 6). It is not surprising that Lampridius’ account stimulated Aureli’s imagination, as well as those of many other early modern Italian writers, such as Leonardo Bruni, Tommaso Garzoni, Giulio Cesare Capaccio, Secondo Lancellotti, and Giuseppe Battista, to mention only a few. Unlike Aureli, these writers never made Heliogabalus the subject of an entire work; Lampridius’ biography

14 In the following pages, I quote from Lampridius’ Vita Heliogabali as translated by David Magie in The Scriptores Historiae Augustae (New York, 1924), II, 105–177. 364 | MAURO CALCAGNO served them mainly as a source for quotations, allusions, and translations. Nonetheless, all of these writers, Aureli included, made a conscious decision to adopt a common source. To borrow another of Genette’s terms, their works are “hypertexts” all deriving from a common “hypotext,” that of Lampridius.15 At the end of the plot summary (argomento) of his second libretto, Aureli declares the Latin writer as his only source. This plot Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 summary is another paratextual element that, like the “letter to the reader,” is crucial to an understanding of both the vicissitudes of the opera and the possible reasons for censorship intervention. His list of Eliogabalo’s dissolute habits therein is a miniature replica of the one provided by Lampridius. Yet, Aureli’s more immediate source for the argomento is not Lampridius’ Vita, the hypotext, but a work that borrowed from it, one of its hypertexts—the Historia imperial y Cesarea (1545) by the Catalàn writer Pedro Mexía. Aureli read it in the 1558 Italian translation by Ludovico Dolce, which was reprinted in Venice many times after its ªrst publication.16 A comparison between Aureli’s argomento and Mexía/ Dolce’s Vita di Heliogabalo highlights the librettist’s process of copying and assembling from his source. Each episode narrated in the argomento corresponds to a passage in the libretto itself, except in one case, the episode of the all-female Senate, which pres- ents an ambiguity relevant to the issue of whether Aureli’s libretto was censored. This section of the argomento conºates two episodes that its source, Mexía, keeps separate—Heliogabalus’ concession of the Senate to the women, and the distribution of political appointments to vile and dissolute persons. In Lampridius’ Vita (which Mexía follows more closely than Aureli), the two episodes are chapters apart, but in Aureli’s argomento, only a comma sepa- rates them: “And ªnally he awarded the Senate in Rome to women, distributing the appointments and the honors to the most vile and vicious persons of his court.” The question arises, Are the “vile and dissolute persons” who received Heliogabalus’ political

15 Bruni, Oratio Heliogabali ad meretrices (1408), Garzoni, La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (1576), Capaccio, Il principe. Tratto dagli emblemi dell’Alciato (1620), Lancellotti, Hoggidì, overo il mondo non peggiore né più calamitoso del passato (1623), and Battista, Poesie meliche (1664). For Genette, see n. 4. 16 Le vite de gli imperadori romani da Giulio Cesare sino a Massimino tratte per M. Ludovico Dolce dal libro Spagnolo del Signor Pietro Messia. I quote from the edition closer to Aureli’s Eliogabalo, published in Venice in 1664, 219–225. CENSORING ELIOGABALO | 365 appointments the women senators or other people entirely? Fur- thermore, what kind of “women” held seats in the Senate?17 Most surprising, however, is that Aureli’s libretto for Boretti, which should correspond to the outline in the argomento, con- tains no mention of political appointments distributed to anyone. The penultimate scene of Aureli/Boretti, staged in the Hall of the

Senate, consists only of Eliogabalo’s seven-line inauguration Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 speech to the female senators (“dame romane”), in which he, in women’s garb, addresses them as “females, better parts of the Latin Kingdom,” “sweet adornments of the Tiber,” and “beautiful.” In the next scene, he calls them “audacious comrades-in-arms” (“commilitoni audaci”), an intriguing epithet. Why would he refer to the women as soldiers? Who are they really? The libretto’s hypotext, Lampridius’ Vita, shows that in this scene Aureli again conºates two distinct passages from his source, as he did in the argomento with Mexía’s Historia, in an ingenious (but also dangerous) contamination. Lampridius’ terms for the women in the Senate were mulieres and matrones, simple gender designations. In this passage of the biography, Heliogabalus does not address the female senators at all; he is not dressed as a woman; and the female senators are not described as “audacious comrades- in-arms.” Not before twenty-two chapters after the episode of the all-women Senate, in a totally different context, did Lampridius narrate that Heliogabalus was “dressed as a woman.” On this occa- sion, the emperor was speaking before an assembly rather different from that of his women senators—a gathering of prostitutes (meretrices). These are the women that Lampridius called commi- litones, that is, comrades-in-arms. Hence, Aureli/Boretti’s Eliogabalo conºates two episodes that are unrelated in both the hypotext (Lampridius’ Vita) and the hy- pertext used to make up the argomento (Mexìa/Dolce). The up- shot is that the group of noblewomen senators (dame) to whom the emperor addresses his short speech in Aureli’s libretto becomes

17 In the argomento, the triumphal entrance into the Campidoglio (section II) corresponds, in the libretto, to the exordium of Act I (more later). The exchange between night and day (section IV) and the banquet (section III) results in the setting of two groups of scenes: I, 20– 21, “Piazza di Roma illuminata in tempo di notte,” and III, 1–8, “Apparato di mensa imperiale tra le delizie di un giardino regio.” The events included in sections V–IX are con- centrated in the two ªnal scenes of the opera (20–21), which take place in the “Sala Regia Destinata da Eliogabalo per il Senato delle Donne in Roma.” 366 | MAURO CALCAGNO a gathering of prostitutes, but the allusion is veiled under one little word, commilitoni. revealing scars: cutting the senate episode Examination of Lampridius’ Vita shows that Eliogabalo’s “vile” and “dissolute” appointees in Aureli’s argomento are the prostitutes to whom he addresses his speech in the Senate. But why does the argomento Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 mention a distribution of the appointments occurring in the all- women Senate that the libretto to follow does not include? Could the staging of such political appointments have been too dangerously close to the reality of Venetian contemporary events? The episode of the distribution of the appointments derives from yet another passage of Lampridius’ Vita (6, 1–2): “He used to sell...appointments, honours, important jobs. He admitted senators without considering age, social or economic status, caring only about the price that was paid.” This passage, however, was not the immediate source for Aureli’s appointments in the argomento of the Boretti libretto. He had already used the passage in a section of the previously rejected Cavalli opera, in which he conºated this episode with the appointment of the all-women Senate and the allocution to the prostitutes (I, 14–16). In these scenes of Cavalli’s opera—as in Boretti’s one scene—Eliogabalo appears in “habito femminile” and gives a speech to the female senators, his “commilitoni.” The distribution of political appointments that was mentioned only in the argomento for Boretti actu- ally occurs in this section of the Cavalli libretto; in fact, it is promi- nent, occupying an entire scene (I, 15). Moreover, in Cavalli, the Senate episode is central to the plot, and climactic—spanning 152 lines of text, three complete scenes. In Boretti, the analogous episode is only seven lines long.18 In the Cavalli scene devoted to the distribution of political appointments, the emperor, who in the preceding scene has mocked constancy and ªdelity, announces the inauguration of the all-female Senate. Advised by his servant Lenia, he proposes that the female senators be blindfolded and that they embrace one an-

18 The text of Act III, scene 19 of Aureli/Boretti’s Eliogabalo (73) is: [Eliogabalo, dressed as a woman] “O females, better part / of the Latin kingdom, / audacious comrades-in-arms, / sweet adornments of the Tiber, here is Augustus, / changed from man into woman; / to please you, o beautiful, / I grant you the Senate.” In Cavalli’s score, scenes I, 14–16 are at ff. 40r-49r. CENSORING ELIOGABALO | 367 other. She who guesses the name of the one who hugs her wins a political appointment. Eliogabalo also takes part in the erotic game, dressed as a woman. The emperor suspends the contest when an ex-lover suddenly enters the hall. The seven lines in the libretto for Boretti, by contrast, have no erotic game and no distribution of political appointments, but, more important, these seven lines include textual fragments from Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Cavalli’s opera. As in Accetto’s two “books” mentioned at the beginning—”small book” and “large book”—the shorter Boretti text conceals the longer, unpublished Cavalli text, which appears faintly between its lines. In other words, the stark seven lines of Boretti III, 19, exhibit, to use Accetto’s crude metaphor, the “scars” (cicatrici) of Cavalli’s earlier mutilated text (scenes I, 14–16); to use Genette’s terminology, the later libretto is no longer in a hypertextual relationship with the earlier one (as it is with its sources) but in a fully intertextual one—no longer just alluding but selectively quoting. The summary of the Senate episode in the Boretti argomento, however, does allude to the earlier libretto, through dissimulation, in its passing mention of the political appointments. In an explosive mix, Cavalli’s opera openly includes, in the “body” of its text, all three elements present in the sources used by Aureli—the concession of the Senate, the allocution to the senators/prostitutes, and the distribution of political appointments. Any politically sensitive Venetian of the 1660s—particularly a censor reviewing a work about a loaded subject like Heliogabalus—would have been highly disconcerted by the Sen- ate episode of Cavalli’s opera.19 Besides the argomento, another paratextual element of the later libretto includes an allusion to the Senate episode of the earlier text—the illustrated frontispiece. This image fulªlls a function similar to that of the letter to the reader by working as an en- crypted clue to the earlier text—an interface between text and context, the author and its public. encoding scandalous meanings: the iconography of the libretto frontispiece In one of the Senate scenes of Cavalli’s opera, one of the emperor’s lovers, Atilia, sings: “For the favor

19 Compare the excerpts in n. 18 and n. 28 for words lifted from the Cavalli libretto and included in the Boretti one. 368 | MAURO CALCAGNO you concede, / make us pay a toll of pleasure; / each of us beauties / should pay to you / the Love’s tithe of our sex” (I, 14). Had these lines been allowed on stage during the 1667/68 season, the listener would have certainly caught an allusion to prostitution, a striking reality of seventeenth-century Venice, which was famous across Europe not only for its opera theaters but also for its many prostitutes. Indeed, prostitutes and their gathering in semipolitical Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 “assemblies” were a recurrent theme in seventeenth-century Ital- ian literature, especially in satirical works.20 Relevant to the topic at hand are the clandestine political pamphlets that included critiques and satires of Venice (papal Rome was also a favorite target). During the second half of the seventeenth century, the myth of Venice as a unique and success- ful political experiment, the Repubblica Serenissima, was under at- tack in Europe, but particularly in Venice itself. Modern historians have identiªed an extensive “literature of the anti-myth” in which anonymous pamphleteers criticized Venetian political institutions and their practices. One of its common targets was the sale of political appointments in exchange for money (broglio), a frequent practice among members of the Venetian Senate. The “literature of the anti-myth” also drew comparisons between the noble families involved in Venetian politics and the thousands of prostitutes living in the Serenissima.21

20 Two examples are Ferrante Pallavicino’s Retorica delle puttane (Venice, 1642) and Gregorio Leti’s Il puttanismo romano o vero conclave generale delle puttane della Corte per l’elettione del nuovo ponteªce (Rome, 1668). Because of his Retorica and his numerous writings against the Barberini family, Pallavicino was one of the main enemies of the Papal court. The Barberinis long pursued a scheme to draw him out of the Venetian territory in order to execute him, eventually succeeding in 1644 (see Spini, Ricerca dei libertini, 177–184). A letter (dated Oct. 19, 1641) from Francesco Vitelli, the papal ambassador to Venice, to Cardinal Francesco Barberini complained about Pallavicino’s future writing plans, including a life of Heliogabalus. The letter is transcribed in Sergio Adorni and Albert N. Mancini, “Stampa e censura ecclesiastica a Venezia nel primo Seicento: il caso del ‘Corriero svaligiato,’” Esperienze letterarie, X (1985), 20. Apparently, Heliogabalus was a hot topic the mere mention of which could cause concern in religious hierarchies. Could an unpublished “life of Heliogabalus” by Pallavicino have been the original version of Cavalli’s Eliogabalo, later “adjusted” by Aureli? 21 Piero del Negro, “Forme e istituzioni del discorso politico veneziano,” in Girolamo Arnaldi and Manlio Pastore Stocchi (eds.), Storia della cultura veneta. IV (Part 2). Il Seicento (Venice, 1983), 411–422. See the anonymous pamphlet entitled Della Repubblica Veneta, written c. 1664, published in Pompeo Molmenti, Curiosità di storia veneziana (Bologna, 1919), 359–456 (for the term broglio, 304). The “literature of the anti-myth” makes frequent use of the comparison between nobles and prostitutes. See Giovanni Scarabello, “Le ‘signore’ della Repubblica,” in Il gioco dell’amore. Le cortigiane di Venezia dal Trecento al Settecento. Catalogo della mostra. Venezia, Casinò municipale, Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, 2 febbraio-16 aprile 1990 (Milan, 1990), 34 n. 137. CENSORING ELIOGABALO | 369 The references to prostitution present in Eliogabalo— especially in the libretto for Cavalli—could easily have been read as an allusion to this subversive literature. The conºation of the distribution of political appointments, the Senate episode, and the allocution to the prostitutes in the Senate scenes of Cavalli’s opera could well have caused offense, particularly to the owner and impresario of the theater SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Giovanni Carlo Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Grimani, who was destined to become a member of the Venetian Senate (his brother Vincenzo was probably too young at that time to be involved). The issue of prostitution also surfaces, although encoded cryptically, in the illustrated frontispiece of the libretto for Boretti—a lady on a throne, handing a piece of paper to (or re- ceiving it from) a child holding a torch (see Figure 1). The coat of arms of the Grimani family appears in the background. The piece of paper bears the name “ELIO / GABA / LO.” At the base of the throne appears the motto “Melius eligendum.” The visual part of this frontispiece evokes two characters, Ve- nus and Love, mother and son. A reference to Venus and Love appears in the “body” of the libretto, in its very ªrst scene, staged in the Capitoline. Eliogabalo is sitting with Flora in the manner of a triumphant victor, on a majestic chariot pulled by women. In- voking Love, the emperor appears on stage crowned with myrtles, the ºower of Venus. He is accompanied by Flora meretrix, lover of Pompeius, a prostitute. His ªnal lines refer to the two Venuses of classical mythology—the Venus celestis (Heavenly Venus), whom he mocks, and the Venus vulgaris (Earthly Venus), ampliªed to the “one hundred Venuses” pulling his chariot. This last reference can be understood in light of Lampridius’ Vita (29, 2), in which the emperor appears nude on a chariot dragged by nude women in groups of two, three, or four. Aureli manipulates this passage by joining it with Lampridius’ narration of the entrance of the emperor into the Capitoline (3, 4), by increasing the number of women to 100, and by identifying them as “Venuses.” In classical mythology, Venus vulgaris is the protector of prostitutes. Since the emperor thought of himself as a prostitute and identiªed with Venus, displaying his skills as an actor in her guise (Lampridius 5, 4), presumably the “one hundred Venuses” carry- ing his chariot in the opening scene of Eliogabalo are prostitutes, too, under his protection. Considering these aspects of Helio- gabalus’ characterization, the lady-Venus in the frontispiece of the 370 | MAURO CALCAGNO Fig. 1 Illustrated frontispiece of Aurelio Aureli, Eliogabalo (Venice, 1668) Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 CENSORING ELIOGABALO | 371 libretto can be directly related to the emperor as Venus vulgaris. The sexual ambiguity of the facial expression is telling in this respect, considering that the emperor, according to Lampridius, was a bisexual and a castrato. By representing Venus, the frontispiece image gains further symbolic connotations. In keeping with classical mythological de- scriptions of the goddess as the protector of marriage, Venus holds Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 a mirror and rests her arm on a lion’s head, as in the paintings in which she represents the harmonious city of Venice, in this case as Venus celestis, not vulgaris.22 The personiªcation of Venice also drew upon the ªgures of the Virgin Mary, the goddess Rome, and, most fundamentally, Justice. The iconography of Venice as Justice depicts a lady seated on a lion or a leonine throne, in a pose similar to that shown in the Eliogabalo’s frontispiece, but holding a sword in her right hand. In addition, Justice was also associated with Sol invictus (never- vanquished Sun) or Sol iustitiae (Sun of righteousness). In pagan times, Sol iustitiae overlapped with Apollo-Sun and, later, with Christ-Sun.23 Iconographically speaking, Venice was related to both Venus and, through Justice, the Sun. These two attributes of Venice are identical to those that historical sources assign to Heliogabalus. As Lampridius reports, the emperor enjoyed portraying Venus vulgaris, the protector of prostitutes. Heliogabalus was also known as Sol Invictus Eliogabalus, because he imported the Syrian cult of the Sun-God (Helios) into Rome, whence derived his name. The Venus in the frontispiece of Aureli/Boretti’s Eliogabalo, being both Venus celestis and vulgaris, can be associated with the semantic areas of Venice and Heliogabalus. Representing the two Venuses, Venice and Heliogabalus are, on the surface, at opposite poles. However, might not the intent of this juxtaposition have been to associate Venice with Venus vulgaris, as the “literature of the anti-myth” at home and abroad did? Dangerously and ambig- uously, the frontispiece of Eliogabalo plays on double meanings.

22 This connotation is often found in association with the harmony of music as well. See Ellen Rosand, “Music in the Myth of Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly, XXX (1977), 511–537. 23 David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill, 2001), 6–46; Erwin Panofsky, “Albrecht Dürer and Classical Antiquity,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago, 1982), 256–265, and ªgures 82–84; Lionello Puppi, “Ignoto Deo,” Arte veneta, XXIII (1969), 174–175. 372 | MAURO CALCAGNO The implication of Justice in the frontispiece further increases the ambiguity of the image. The previously mentioned inscription “Melius eligendum”—meaning “one has to choose the better”— invokes the concept of Justice as choice, but, again, with an air of double meaning. Venice, interpreted as the Sun, is associated with Justice in the sense of a choice for the better. But what does the inscription have to do with Heliogabalus, who certainly is not a Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 model of justice? It might simply be conveying the negative idea that Heliogabalus, contrary to Venice, made only the worst, unjust choices. But the motto has a function beyond that of abstractly referring to the historical character of Heliogabalus in opposition to Venice. By highlighting “choice,” the inscription embodies an allusion to the Senate episode of Cavalli’s opera, speciªcally the distribution of political assignments through the game of the blindfolded women. The motto encodes a warning that can be deciphered as follows: “Venice has to choose better when assign- ing political appointments, exactly the opposite of what Helio- gabalus did when he appointed female senators and assigned them political roles.” The frontispiece thus restores to the Boretti opera precisely the part of the Senate episode that appears only in the libretto for Cavalli. The motto, like the argomento and the short Senate episode of its libretto (scene III, 19), functions as an allusion to the Senate scenes of Cavalli’s opera (I, 14–16). Moreover, just like the argomento and the Senate episode, this allusion appears as an encryption, or a “scar.” Through the theme of prostitution, implied in the ªgure of Venus, the frontispiece image crosses the boundaries of its position within the “paratext” of the libretto. By virtue of its liminal position, this image, on the one hand, relates the libretto to artistic and sociopolitical contexts familiar to viewers, whereas, on the other hand, it reaches three elements of the text to which it belongs: One is located in the “paratext”—the argomento (which relates the female senators to prostitutes). The second and third are located in the body of the text—the opening scene of the libretto (which features Flora and the 100 Venuses/prostitutes) and the “Senate episode” two acts later (particularly the words “audacious comrades-in-arms” referring to the female senators/prostitutes). In addition, the image alludes to the distribution of political appointments in Cavalli’s Eliogabalo. Aureli might originally have ac- cepted the image for the ªrst libretto and then used it for his sec- CENSORING ELIOGABALO | 373 ond libretto as a memento of a deleted episode that was important to him. the journey of the senate episode The Senate episodes of the two Eliogabalo librettos encode scandalous meanings that audiences must have considered politically subversive. An act of censorship appears to have forced Aureli to emend the Senate scenes of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Cavalli’s opera. Aureli responded to it with an act of dissimulation—by leaving traces of the previous text in the new one. But who was responsible for the censorship? An examination of the librettos published for the performances throughout Italy between the 1668 premiere and the return of Eliogabalo to Venice in 1687, its third reincarnation, conªrms that the Senate episode was considered subversive and that the Grimanis asked Aureli to revise the Cavalli version. In the libretto’s travels, the Senate episode was indeed the most unstable part of the text.24 In the 1668 Parma libretto, the Senate scene is identical to that performed a few months earlier in Venice, but the choro di Dame is given a few extra lines soon after Eliogabalo’s inauguration of the all-women Senate. The libretto of a second revival in Naples in 1669 includes a dedication written by the performers, which mentions unspeciªed difªculties in staging the opera. In this libretto, the Senate scene of Boretti’s opera is no longer set in the Senate. All reference to this political assembly disappears. The “Senate Hall” becomes “Eliogabalo’s Hall” and, consistently, the crucial line of the 1668 Venetian libretto, “vi concedo il Senato,” is omitted.25 In light of these stratagems, devised to affect seven scant lines

24 That a Senate scene must have been problematical on Venetian stages is shown by the fact that Aureli’s libretto Claudio Cesare, set to music by Boretti, was published in two different editions for its Venetian premiere at the Teatro S. Salvatore in 1672 (see Sartori, I libretti italiani, n. 5737, 5738). In the ªrst edition, the last four scenes of Act III (19–22) are set in a Senato de Romani aperto. In the second, shorter edition (ristampata), scene 18 was deleted, giv- ing no change of setting for the new scene 18 (which was 19 in the previous version, cut in half by eliminating any reference to the Senate); scene 20 was deleted; and the Scena ultima joins the end of scene 21 with the ultima of the previous version. The text of this reprinted version corresponds with that found in the surviving score of the opera (Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, Ms.It.Cl. IV, 401 [ϭ9925]). 25 In the added lines of the Parma text, the chorus ironically reºects on “an array of women entering the Senate” as ragion di Stato, but a “reason” that, being “upside down,” ªts all of the emperor’s other deeds. The two ªnal lines of this text (“It is a noble reason of state / if an array of Women enters the Senate”) seem to echo the sentiments of the students of the Jesuit college who attended the opera, some of whom belonged, as we have seen, to Venetian no- bility. For the title page of the Naples libretto, see Sartori, I libretti italiani, n. 8760. Might 374 | MAURO CALCAGNO of text, the negative reaction that the 152 lines of the Senate episode of the Cavalli libretto must have elicited is not hard to imag- ine. Examination of the librettos published after the 1668 premiere contributes, retrospectively, to an understanding of the ªrst two librettos. Although the four librettos published after the Naples one—related to performances in Genoa (1670), Bologna (1671),

Rome (1673), and Milan (1674)—do not diverge from the Vene- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 tian one, a ªfth libretto, related to the 1673 performance in Turin, shows signiªcant changes. Not only, as Bianconi notices, does the Turin version replace the ªnale of the Venetian libretto with one featuring the killing of the emperor (as in Cavalli), but it also omits the Senate scene altogether. This scene must have been deemed unsuitable to the Turin audience as the outcome of the ªnale. But the most surprising alteration made to the Senate episode since the cancellation of Cavalli’s opera in 1667 is found in the Ve- netian libretto published in 1687. The names of the characters, except those of the emperor and his cousin, changed, and so did the title, which became in a ªrst edition Il vitio depresso e la virtù coronata and in a second, shorter one L’Eliogabalo rifformato col titolo del vitio depresso e la virtù coronata. The music was no longer by Boretti but by Teoªlo Orgiani, and the opera was staged at the Teatro Sant’Angelo. As in Venice almost twenty years before (and as in Naples in 1669 and Turin in 1673), things must not have gone smoothly.26 The ªrst edition of this 1687 Venetian libretto includes a letter to the reader, missing from the reprinted version, which states, “This drama that you are reading is my Eliogabalo which already eighteen years ago you saw performed with much applause in the Famous Grimani Theater of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. It is the same character, but shaped differently than in the version that you saw back then. I was hoping that also this one would appear on the same stage; but my hopes have remained unfulªlled” (7–8). The role of the Grimanis in the vicissitudes of the 1687 libretto clearly emerges. In that year, Vincenzo and Giovanni Carlo some element of the libretto have caused these difªculties (ombre and turbolenze), or are they simply cited in the dedication for rhetorical reasons? 26 Sartori, I libretti italiani, 25105 (Il vitio) and 8767 (L’Eliogabalo rifformato). That one version precedes the other is inferable from the list of performances included in Cristoforo Ivanovich, Memorie teatrali di Venezia (published as an appendix to his Minerva al tavolino [Venice, 1681] in 1688), 444. CENSORING ELIOGABALO | 375 still owned and managed the SS. Giovanni e Paolo, the theater in which Aureli/Boretti’s Eliogabalo had been staged back in 1668. Judging from the letter, the two noblemen rejected Aureli’s new work, as they had rejected the libretto that he had written in 1667 for Cavalli. Two elements that might have prompted the Grimanis to refuse the 1687 libretto might be the same ones that presumably caused them to refuse the libretto for Cavalli twenty years ear- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 lier—the ªnale and the Senate scene. The ªnale of the 1687 Eliogabalo is, surprisingly, that of Cavalli’s opera, featuring the slaying of the emperor in the second revolt of the Praetorians (although the wording is different and the names of the characters change). A character (Flavia in 1667, Emilio in 1687) reports the death of Eliogabalo to Alessandro, who is then crowned emperor and marries his lover (Flavia/ Celia). For ideological reasons, the Grimanis had rejected this same ªnale in 1667, forcing Aureli to change it into the one included in the Boretti version, featuring the emperor’s repentance. Apparently, they considered this ªnale inappropriate in 1687 as well, probably for identical reasons. None of the operas based on Roman emperors staged in the SS. Giovanni e Paolo to that point had featured the slaying of a tyrant.27 The second element that the Grimanis would have deemed unacceptable—the Senate episode—once more reveals its crucial role in the interpretation of the opera. Act I of the 1687 Eliogabalo opens in the “Sala del Senato delle Donne Romane.” The characters participating in this scene are Eliogabalo (sitting on a throne), two lovers, and Roman noblewomen sitting in the Senate. As a text for this opening, Aureli could have easily adopted the seven lines that he had used eighteen years earlier in Boretti’s opera. In- stead, he began his 1687 opera with the seven lines that appear in Act I, scene 15, of Cavalli’s Eliogabalo and nowhere else.28 Aureli, however, made three signiªcant changes to this text of the very ªrst libretto. First, the emperor, unlike in Cavalli’s (and Boretti’s) opera, is not dressed as a woman. Second, the Roman

27 Even Caligula delirante (Noris/Pagliardi, 1673), an opera in which the protagonist be- haves in the same lascivious way as Eliogabalo, has a happy ending. The worst that could hap- pen to a Roman emperor was to be suicidal, as in Domiziano (Noris/Boretti, 1672). 28 The text in the Cavalli opera is “To you, women, the better part / of my kingdom, he- roic sex, / most digniªed supporters, / comrades-in-arms of the august enterprises, / I now grant the Senate. At this moment / let your empire begin: / this notion is both worthy of you and worthy of me.” 376 | MAURO CALCAGNO “women” become “noblewomen,” thus leaving no doubt about their identity. Finally, and most importantly, he omitted the line with the epithet “comrades-in-arms of the august enterprises”— the clearest allusion to prostitutes—substituting for it a blunt “of the glories of the Tiber.” Thus did his reinstatement of the Cavalli passage eliminate the scandalous association between female senators and prostitutes. In light of this reform of the Senate scene, the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 title of the 1687 version (Eliogabalo rifformato . . . ) makes even more sense. Evidently, however, this “softening” was not enough for the Grimanis to accept Aureli’s new version.

Since the two rejections of Aureli’s librettos occurred under the same circumstances, the Grimanis appear to have been responsible for both of them—the later rejection illuminating, retrospectively, the earlier one. Evidently, the Grimanis not only handled their theater’s ªnancial matters but also evaluated the material to be performed therein, aware that their own personal image was also at stake.29 In 1678, the Grimanis opened a second, independent theater destined for opera, the S. Giovanni Grisostomo, which at that point was the most luxurious, spacious, and important opera theater yet built. This opening “represented the climax of a patrician enterprise [that of the Grimanis] which projected in the magnif- icence of a theatrical space their public image, as an expression of family pride.” As they had done with the SS. Giovanni e Paolo, the Grimani brothers assumed total control of both the ªnancial and theatrical aspects of the enterprise.30 Unlike the Grimanis, however, most other patrician families, like the Cappellos and Marcellos, who together founded the Teatro S. Angelo in 1677, engaged an impresario to run their opera businesses. Because these two families treated opera strictly as a proªt-making venture, not as a reºection of their images, they must have been less inclined to censor performances. Their impre-

29 In their forthcoming book, Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice (New York, 2005), Beth and Jonathan Glixon discuss a 1648 agree- ment between the nobleman Francesco Tron and the managers of his theater that he approve all librettos before operas are staged. I would like to thank the Glixons for their help during the writing of this article. 30 Mancini, Muraro, and Povoledo, I Teatri del Veneto, I, ix. See also Harris S. Saunders, “The Repertoire of a Venetian Opera House (1678–1714): The Teatro Grimani di San Giovanni Grisostomo,” unpub. Ph.D. diss. (Harvard University, 1985). CENSORING ELIOGABALO | 377 sario, Francesco Santurini, was more concerned with proªt mar- gins than artistic quality. He held his job for ten years, and the Cappellos and Marcellos continued to rely upon impresarios after he left.31 The S. Angelo theater saw the premiere of Aureli’s 1687 Eliogabalo. During its inaugural season a decade earlier, the only opera to be performed there featured a libretto by none other than Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/3/355/1710441/002219506774929818.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Aureli (Elena rapita da Paride). Already by then, the librettist’s con- nection with the Grimanis had loosened. Though SS. Giovanni e Paolo had been the sole venue for all of Aureli’s librettos from 1658 to 1669 (including Eliogabalo), in 1670 the librettist began to collaborate with the Grimanis’ competitors in the Venetian opera market, but the S. Angelo became the most receptive venue for his works. After his unsuccessful attempt to place Eliogabalo at the SS. Giovanni e Paolo in 1687, Aureli spent a period in Parma at the court of Ranuccio II Farnese (1690–1697) before returning to Venice, where he died in 1709. In the last years of his life, he wrote mostly for the S.Angelo. He never wrote for the Grimanis’ main theater, the S. Giovanni Grisostomo. The vicissitudes of the Eliogabalo librettos, which spanned twenty years, left a lasting mark on his career. They reveal the uneasy relationship between patron and librettist that characterized Venetian opera production during the seventeenth century—a relationship in which censorship played a signiªcant role.32

31 The distinction between noble patrons/managers (such as the Grimanis) and patrons who relied upon a non-noble impresario to run their theaters is relevant to discussions of the role of patronage in early Venetian opera. Clearly, patron/managers had more at stake in opera productions than patrons whose involvement was limited to mere ªnancial reward. Thus, the common view that the Venetian operatic system was driven exclusively by pure commercial reasons, with little or no symbolic value affecting the image of the theater owners, needs to be ªne-tuned by taking into consideration how each institution was run. In this respect, Claudio Annibaldi’s distinction between “humanistic” and “commercial” patronage is too rigid in, for example, “Tipologia della committenza musicale nella Venezia seicentesca,” in Francesco Passadore and Franco Rossi (eds.), Musica, scienza e idee nella Serenissima durante il Seicento. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Venezia—Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, 13–15 Dicembre 1993 (Venice, 1996), 63–77, and “Towards a Theory of Musical Patronage in the Re- naissance and Baroque: The Perspective from Anthropology and Semiotics,” Recercare, X (1998), 173–182. On Santurini, see Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 391–392. On the Teatro S. Angelo, see Mancini, Muraro, and Povoledo, I Teatri del Veneto, 3–62. 32 Twenty years before his relocation to Parma, Aureli had written the version of Eliogabalo performed at the Jesuit College to honor the baptism of Ranuccio II Farnese’s son. A list of Aureli’s librettos can be gathered by consulting Sartori, I libretti italiani.