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"Unity, Originality, and the London Pasticcio" in "Bits and Pieces: Music for Theatre"

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"Unity, originality, and the London Pasticcio" in "Bits and pieces: Music for theatre" The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Price, Curtis, and Lowell Lindgren. 1992. Unity, originality, and the London Pasticcio in "Bits and pieces: Music for theatre". Harvard Library Bulletin 2 (4), Winter 1991: 17-30. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42662011 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA 17 Unity, Originality, and the London Pasticcio 1 Curtis Price he pasticcio is a species of Baroque and Classical opera literally made up of T bits and pieces of other works. Ridiculed by some eighteenth-century critics, it also offends our modem notion of originality and structural unity. Musicologists have been loath to deal with any opera which-however popular and esteemed in its own day-does not exist in a single, authorized version. Apparently beyond the pale, a pasticcio was often written by committee, typically consisting of some sing- ers aided by hack poets who added new words to existing music, and even by lowly house music copyists acting on vague instructions "to cook up something" for Si- gnor Senesino or Madam Mara. But the pasticcio was staple fare at every major eighteenth-century opera house; Handel, Vivaldi, Hasse, Gluck, Mozart, and Haydn all produced or contributed to pasticcios; and it was the prevailing form of Italian opera in London from 1705 until the early years of the nineteenth century. CURTIS PRIG 1s King Edward Yet its prevalence is not the only reason why the pasticcio merits study: by learn- Professor of Music and Head ing how such works were conceived, assembled, and judged, insight can be gained of Department at K111g's Col- into what we consider the more legitimate forms of eighteenth-century opera. I lege, Uni\'ernty of London. would argue that our reverence for a presiding genius and structural integrity, espe- His publications 111cludc Henry cially in the cut-and-paste world of the theater, is misplaced. P11rccll ,111d the London Sta.~e (1984) and an edition ofHmry The pasticcio arose towards the end of the seventeenth century from practical P11rccll:Did,, and Aeneas (1986). exigency. Because Italian operas were almost always designed for specific singers and adapted to local conditions, revivals with singers of different voice or character often required extensive changes. It was far easier for an impresario to allow per- fonners to substitute arias they had successfully sung elsewhere than to hire some- one to adjust the original music or to commission an entirely new work. By r 700 almost all revivals were subjected to the process of wholesale substitution, and it was only a small step to the full-blown pasticcio, that is, an opera assembled mainly from existing arias fitted to an old or new libretto with fresh recitatives. The term "pasticcio" (which literally means "hodge-podge" or "pudding") was not applied to composite operas until much later. One of the first to use the word in connec- tion with music was Quantz; in his autobiography written in I 7 5 5, he recalled a visit to Florence in I 7 2 5, where he heard operas "patched together with arias of various masters, which is called 'pastry' by the Italians, 'un pasticcio'. " 2 The verb form might have been used even earlier: according to Goldoni's memoirs 1 The research for tlm paper was made possible partlv by a Paul Nettl, Forgorte,i :\l"sicia,is (New York: Philosophical grant ti-om the Notional Endowment for the Humanities Librarv. 1951), p 280. "The Life of Herr J.J.Quantz as sketched by himsdC'' m I 8 HARVARD LlilRARY BULLETIN (published in 1787), Vivaldi in r735 had asked the poet to insert new aria texts into an existing libretto, that is, "to accommodate or cook up the drama to his [Vivaldi's] taste, in order to provide a better or worse placement for the anas sung on other occasions by his protege [Anna Giro]" ("accornodare o impasticciare il Dramma a suo gusto, per mettervi bene o male le Arie, che aveva altre volte cantate la sua Scholara "). 3 But the pasticcio as such was well understood long before this; the first extended discussion appeared in A Critical Discourseon Opera's and i\1usick i11E11L~la11d of 1709. Although its anonymous writer, like Goldoni, regarded the so-called "patch-work" or "medley" opera as degraded and degrading, he explains why London, as a re- mote outpost ofltalian art and culture, had to resort to such works. He also pro- vides a spoof recipe whose humor lies in its very accuracy for works produced in London, 1706-1709: Pick out about an hundred ltalim1 Airs from several Authors, good, or bad, it signi- fies nothing. Among these, make use of fifty five, or fifty six. of such as please your Fancy best, and Marshall 'cm in the manner you think most convenient. When this is done, you must employ a Poet to write some E11glishWords, the Airs of which arc to be adapted to the Italian Musick. In the next place you must agree with some Composer to provide the Recitative, and promise to give him, in case the Opera is perfom1'd. as little as possible; by this means you'll nm no Risque, being at little or no Expence. When this is done, you must make a Bargain with some Mungril Italia11 Poet to Translate that Part of the Ett~lislt that is to be Perform' d in Italian; and then deliver It into the Hands of some Amanuensis, that understands Musick better than your self, to Transcribe the Score. and the Parts. 4 The author then goes on to make an important distinction between pasticcios with arias selected gratuitously and haphazardly by singers or by musically illiterate impresarios, and those works "prepar' d by a Person that is capable of uniting dif- ferent Styles so artfully as to make 'em pass for one. "j Any need for someone "capable of uniting different Styles" was supplied just two years later with the arrival in London of Handel, the boldest and most skillful of all pasticheurs. At the King's Theatre, Haymarket, in the 1720s and 1730s, he exercised an impresario's right to bring out pasticcios (figure r). His usual proce- dure was to select arias from the latest Venetian or Neapolitan operas, set by com- posers such as Hasse, Vinci, and Orlandini; he fit them into an existing libretto-which one of his associates modified as required-while composing afresh only the secw recitative and an occasional symphony or duet. Naturally, the result is stylistically different from Handel's original compositions, but most of his pasticcios are not less dramatic or coherent than his own operas; and, as Reinhard Strohm has observed, the pasticcios allowed Handel to appeal to the London audience's growing taste for .~alantmusic far more freely than he could bring him- self to do in his own operas. 1' Handel produced several different kinds of pasticcios, ranging from the true patch-work, in which an existing libretto was filled out almost entirely with arie di ba,Raglie(suitcase arias), to the medley opera, in which each act was set by a different CJr!o Goldorn. T111rele opm'. c'd. Giuseppe Orr0Lm1, 4th nJtioml. 1968), p 70. cdn (Verona: Arnaldo Mond,1dori. 19_19). I. 721. l/Hd . p. 84. -l In Fran\--oi~ Raguenet, A Co111p1.1n·J-011hcruY'CII rhc Frc,ulr '' l:"ssays <111 Handel (wd Italian ()pcm (CJmbridge· Can1- and Italian ,Hi-birk 11t1dOpcr,1\-, Translatcdf,wn the Frt"11rl1 bridge Universitv Press. 198s), pp 1(14-211 (London, 1 709, rpt. Farnborough, H.mts: Gregg Inter- ( ·,111y,Origi11,1/ity, ,111d tl1c Lo11do11 Pas/1ccio I() ~r r j} :;~ -'='='-~ ',, ' / 1n 11 1~1 1.-,f~!I D ' , II II II II Ii• P P • -- f\~1m' 1 f>lrw 1111d scd1on cf the K111g·.1 Thciitn·, H,1y111.irkct,J~\)111 Cl1bnd P,on' .\I1ir£111 [)11nw11r, 1-'.irallc:k ,k pL,m de, plm hdk1 1,1lk1 de 1pectacks d'lulie er de Fr.mce (/>cms 1;;41, 11/atc 21 20 HARVARD LlllRARY BULLETIN composer. Orcste (1734) and Alcrn111droScuero (1738), comprising arias which he chose from his own works and fitted to heavily adapted librettos, are s11i.Rrneris. Since Handel was a prodigious borrower and arranger of his own and others' mu- sic, there is only a fine line of distinction between Oreste, a self-pastiche, and Ri11,1ldo ( I 7 r r), his first London opera. Rinaldo is far from an "on611nal creation," for it was constructed much like a pasticcio: several arias were taken with little change from his earlier works; some of them were given parodied texts; and a frw were bor- rowed from other composers. As in Oreste, the only part of R11,aldowhich is en- tirely new is the scffo recitative.~ By 1741, when Handel finally withdrew from Italian opera, the pasticcio was well established on the London stage. The tem1 itself was no longer pejorative. For example, in 1742 that keen consumer and severe critic of Italian opera Horace Walpole wrote: "our operas begin tomorrow with a pasticcio, full of most of my favourite songs."' Walpole and other English writers, including Charles Burney, judged pasticcios and original, single-author operas by the same criteria and, while often criticizing individual examples of both, did not disapprove of the pasticcio process itself It was fully recognized as a necessary feature of a commercialized theater which demanded that operas be adjusted during the course of a production in response to audience reaction.
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