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Carlo Goldoni and the Dramma Giocoso Per Musica View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE Venetian playwright and pioneer of modern theatre Carlo Goldoni provided by Archivio istituzionale della ricerca - Università degli Studi... (1707-1793) led a ‘double life’ as a librettist, authoring nearly as 24 many libretti as comedies- libretti which, born from the same mind Pervinca Rista and the same hand that brought forth his famous, and famously controversial, overhaul of the practices of comic theatre, could not but push the limits of the standing tradition to open a new chapter in opera history. Goldoni became one of the first to give shape to the dramma giocoso per musica, an innovative, realistic, and enduring new genre with intimate connections to prose comedy that met with overwhelming international success, becoming the foundation for the works of future generations, including W. A. Mozart and his Italian librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. Perhaps because of his stature and At the origins of influence as a comic playwright, Goldoni has rarely been considered Rista Pervinca as an innovator in the musical sphere. This study aims to shed new Classical opera light on his primary role in the evolution of Classical opera, and on the legacy of his innovations in the European musical tradition. Carlo Goldoni and the dramma giocoso per musica aria Musicologica Pervinca Rista (b. Italy) holds a PhD in Comparative Literature (Johns 24 Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA), along with numerous advan- ced degrees in Violin Performance earned in both the US and Italy. She has won numerous academic and musical awards, and performs con- certs regularly worldwide. She has authored texts for music, has transla- At the origins of Classical opera ted numerous works from Italian to English, and has published research in class-A international journals. Her research and teaching interests aria include the history of Italian literature and culture, the relationship bet- ween literature and music, the history of opera, and Italian comic thea- tre of the Enlightenment. She is a Marie Curie Research Fellow based at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, having won an Individual Fellowship usicologica grant from the European Commission for her original project “GoldOpera: Carlo Goldoni and Europe’s New Opera Theatre.” ISBN 978-3-0343-3551-5 Peter Lang www.peterlang.com Venetian playwright and pioneer of modern theatre Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) led a ‘double life’ as a librettist, authoring nearly as 24 many libretti as comedies- libretti which, born from the same mind Pervinca Rista and the same hand that brought forth his famous, and famously controversial, overhaul of the practices of comic theatre, could not but push the limits of the standing tradition to open a new chapter in opera history. Goldoni became one of the first to give shape to the dramma giocoso per musica, an innovative, realistic, and enduring new genre with intimate connections to prose comedy that met with overwhelming international success, becoming the foundation for the works of future generations, including W. A. Mozart and his Italian librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. Perhaps because of his stature and At the origins of influence as a comic playwright, Goldoni has rarely been considered Rista Pervinca as an innovator in the musical sphere. This study aims to shed new Classical opera light on his primary role in the evolution of Classical opera, and on the legacy of his innovations in the European musical tradition. Carlo Goldoni and the dramma giocoso per musica aria Musicologica Pervinca Rista (b. Italy) holds a PhD in Comparative Literature (Johns 24 Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA), along with numerous advan- ced degrees in Violin Performance earned in both the US and Italy. She has won numerous academic and musical awards, and performs con- certs regularly worldwide. She has authored texts for music, has transla- At the origins of Classical opera ted numerous works from Italian to English, and has published research in class-A international journals. Her research and teaching interests aria include the history of Italian literature and culture, the relationship bet- ween literature and music, the history of opera, and Italian comic thea- tre of the Enlightenment. She is a Marie Curie Research Fellow based at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, having won an Individual Fellowship usicologica grant from the European Commission for her original project “GoldOpera: Carlo Goldoni and Europe’s New Opera Theatre.” Peter Lang At the origins of Classical opera Varia Musicologica Herausgegeben von Peter Maria Krakauer PETER LANG Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles •• New York • Oxford • Warszawa • Wien Pervinca Rista At the origins of Classical opera Carlo Goldoni and the “dramma giocoso per musica” PETER LANG Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles •• New York • Oxford • Warszawa • Wien Bibliographic information published by die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at ‹http://dnb.d-nb.de›. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain. Library of Congress Control Number: 2018946493 Cover illustration: Gateano Latilla, L'Amor Artigiano (dramma giocoso in tre atti su libretto di Carlo Goldoni), 1761. MS I 12, from the holdings of the Biblioteca del Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi, Torino (Italy). Use by permission. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellow- ship grant agreement n.701269. ISSN 1660-8666 pb. ISSN 2235-5685 eBook ISBN 978-3-0343-3551-5 pb. ISBN 978-3-0343-3563-8 eBook ISBN 978-3-0343-3564-5 EPub ISBN 978-3-0343-3565-2 Mobi DOI 10.3726/b14367 pen Open Access: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 unported license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This publication has been peer reviewed. © Pervinca Rista, 2018 Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2018 Wabernstrasse 40, CH-3007 Bern, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com Table of Contents Preface...................................................................................................7 Introduction ...........................................................................................9 I. The other Goldoni ........................................................................13 i. “State of the art” .....................................................................15 II. The foundations of musical comedy ............................................19 i. The limits of opera seria ........................................................20 ii. Naples and the commedia per musica ....................................24 iii. Venice and the intermezzo ......................................................34 III. New directions ..............................................................................37 i. Goldoni’s apprenticeship with musical texts ..........................37 ii. New directions for comedy ....................................................51 iii. A new art for a new society: the dramma giocoso takes shape in Venice .............................................................55 IV. A new source for Classical opera: Goldoni’s drammi giocosi ......63 i. The real world ........................................................................66 ii. The mezzo carattere ...............................................................75 iii. Buffo, serio, and the space between .......................................88 V. How comedy changed opera ......................................................115 i. The musical elements of comedy .........................................117 ii. Comedies that became drammi giocosi ...............................130 iii. Goldoni as musical reformer ...............................................147 VI. Goldoni’s Musical Legacy ..........................................................151 i. Globalization? Old news! International drammi giocosi and diffusion of a new genre ....................................152 ii. Mozart and Goldoni ............................................................159 iii. Conclusions .........................................................................166 5 Preface This book explores the origins and evolution of Classical opera, a musi- cal tradition so unique with respect to those that preceded and followed. In particular, we travel to 18th century Venice and into the world of Carlo Goldoni, a Venetian lawyer who, in adolescence, ran away from school to join a troupe of traveling actors. His father held high hopes for his diplomatic career, but his own life and all his hopes lay in theatre. His true calling was comedy. Goldoni wrote comedies for the musical stage, too. In fact, close to 100 libretti. He became so famous as a playwright that, to this day, the public knows little of his ‘musical’ career, yet it had a tremendous impact on how Classical opera developed. In the past, researchers sep- arated his theatrical texts from his musical texts, but when considered together, new discoveries come to the surface. We will trace the history of Classical opera and its signature genre, the dramma giocoso per musica, from its early antecedents to its fully evolved form. Traveling from the Neapolitan commedia per musica and the
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