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”; be- hind 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 evi- dence of such restrictive actions emerges in librettos examined ac- cording 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 il- lustrated 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.

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