English ⁄ Français ⁄ Italiano ⁄ Text ⁄ Tracklist Menu Thwarted Love Eros averted in the baroque period by Jean-François Lattarico The baroque period declared war on the Renaissance. Instead of poetic avowals glorify- ing female beauty and pure, courtly love, the baroque age proposed frustrated affections, with the earlier ideal of eternal beauty replaced by the ugliness of everyday life, an al- legorical reflection of the conflicts that Italy, and Europe as a whole, were experiencing during the 1600s, the “Iron Century”. The men of letters who made up the libertine Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti comprised numerous librettists, including Giovanni Francesco Busenello and Giulio Strozzi, who wrote poems, theatrical works with music and novels in which the concept of love was subject to Mars and the sphere of Anti-Eros. Love became a place of eternal conflict, fired by expediency, as the Academy philosopher Antonio Roc- co argued in his discourse Amore è un puro interesse. The literary works of the Incogniti 2 clearly represent the main models for the unhappy loves presented in Venetian operas of the 17th century. In the novels of Ferrante Pallavicino, Francesco Pona, Giovan Francesco Loredano or Luca Assarino, there is no happy love. The encounter between two different individuals no longer heralds the Platonic ideal of the fusion of body and soul. Cupid is treated as a capricious rascal who constantly makes trouble. Eros becomes a literary ob- ject of derision, tied to an intrinsically negative function of the senses. In his tragic novella Jean-François Lattarico is professor of Italian literature and culture at the Université Lyon 3 Jean Moulin. He is a specialist in the literature, rhetoric and music of 17th and 18th century opera. He has translated into French La Lena by Ludovico Ariosto (La Lena ou l’entremetteuse, Paris, Allia, 1999) and La Messalina by Francesco Pona (PUSE, 2009). His publications include Venise incognita. Essai sur l’académie libertine au XVIIe siècle (Paris, Honoré Champion, 2012) and Busenello. Un thèâtre de la rhétorique (Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2013). He is editor of the most recent edition of the librettos by Busenello, Delle ore ociose. Les fruits de l’oisiveté (Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2016). His latest book focuses on the animal world in opera (Le chant des bêtes. Essai sur l’animalité à l’opéra, Classiques Garnier, 2019). English Gli amori infelici [Unhappy Love], Loredano actually declares: «When love’s sole aim is the senses, it can only lead to dismal effects». Because love is a complete illusion that alien- ates whoever is possessed by it. And in most of the stories in the anthology Cento novelle amorose (Venice, 1651), people who constantly move from one passion to another, from a given feeling towards its opposite, forever in a heightened state regardless of the nature of the emotion, acutely aware of the transience of pleasure, justify the negative definition of love provided by the author of the preface, Francesco Carmeni: «Love, that is a plague and a vice, not a passion of the heart». This concept of love is central to the present recording, most of which derives from the greatest Venetian operas of the 17th century. In Busenello’s libretto for Gli amori di Apollo e Dafne, his first in an extensive and fruitful collaboration with the great composer Cavalli, Cupid is treated as a pygmy of love in nappies, which so irks him that he unleashes an arrow on Apollo, who becomes immediately besotted with the lovely nymph Daphne. The latter rejects his advances, however, and following various escapades calls for help from her father Peneus, who turns her into a laurel tree. Faced with the vision of her meta- morphosis, Apollo sings one of opera’s first and most moving laments, («Misero Apollo, i tuoi trionfi or vanta»), emblematically based on the descending tetrachord, before being 3 consoled to discover that Pan can involve him in a comparable experience. In La Didone, the fruit of Busenello’s second collaboration with Cavalli, the librettist diverges from Virgil’s account by having the Queen of Carthage marry Iarbas, King of Getulia, who is madly in love with the woman abandoned by the cowardly Aeneas, more concerned about his claims for future glory than her love for him. Driven by his obsessive passion («Per eccesso d’affetto»), he proclaims his love, complaining about the wretched trick played on him by Cupid, who fashions «laberinti d’angosce / e meandri di pianti» [labyrinths of anguish / and trails of tears]. In the poignant aria «Che ti diss’io», in a succession of rhyming couplets he begs Dido for pity, and following a scene of memorable madness his prayer is answered and the opera closes with the wedding of the reunited couple. Busenello also worked with the greatest composer of his time, Monteverdi, on what was to become the most famous opera of the 17th century, L’incoronazione di Poppea, Monteverdi’s last opera and the first historic opera produced for a fee-paying audience. The passionate love between Nero and Poppea has produced two victims: Ottavia, the rightful empress, and Ottone, who loves Poppea and lets his rancour explode in a major quarrel with the woman who has become Nero’s mistress at the end of the first act. In a succession of seven sestets in seven and eleven syllables full of metaphorical turns and separated by a refrain, the two characters alternately voice their convictions: the favourable influence of Fortune for Poppea, and the cruel wretchedness of Love for Ottone. The discursive structure of the stanzas al- lows Monteverdi to achieve an admirable synthesis of the recitar cantando tradition, in which the singing bonds perfectly with the words, and the more seductive suppleness of cantar recitando, with its changes of rhythm and tempi reflecting the flow of feelings. The insistence on the same poetic and musical structure for all the stanzas reveals the degree of non-communication that has come about between the two characters. In the middle of the second act, Ottone finds himself alone and thinks about killing Poppea in his rage, following the most sensual duet of the whole opera between Poppea and Nero (alas this scene is missing from the two musical sources). The bitterness of the recitative, which culminates in regret at such a terrible thought, turns into an exquisite lament («Sprezzami quanto sai»), a song of desperate love richly embellished with musical figurations andpas - saggi that coincide with the elements of greatest emotional impact. Premiered in 1641 for the opening of the Teatro Novissimo, the first theatre deliber- 4 ately built for hosting operas, La finta pazza by Strozzi and Sacrati was one of most suc- cessful Venetian operas, in time performed throughout Italy and even in France, where it was the first opera to be staged. In the third act, Deidamia has already feigned madness – the high point of the whole score – and finally regained the trust and love of Achilles, while Diomede, still enamoured of the daughter of King Licomedes, ruefully accepts that he can no longer win her back. A short, highly expressive recitative, almost an arioso, pre- cedes the aria in two parts separated by a trenchant couplet («Son le donne incostanti / e voglion a giornata oggi gli amanti.» [Women are fickle / and now want lovers every day]). The first stanza is plaintive, wistful and sadly languid, with Diomede declaring his rejec- tion of love, a bit like Orpheus following the definitive loss of Eurydice. The second stanza is more vehement, a castigation of venal love that corrupts all faithfulness. Another of Cavalli’s great successes as a composer was Erismena, on a libretto by Aurelio Aureli, an opera that was probably also performed as far afield as England, to judge by the discovery there of a manuscript score with the libretto in English dating back to the 17th century. The fanciful plot is full of misunderstandings, with Erismena disguised as a soldier, her betrothed Idraspe in the guise of Erineo, who falls for the slave Aldimira, who in her turn is English besotted with the “soldier” Erismena. For Cavalli, all this amounted to a perfect opportunity for focusing on the full range of topoi of Venetian opera, especially the lamenti, which are indeed numerous. At the end of the second act, given the inconstancy of Aldimira, who at the start of the opera is surrounded by many suitors, Idraspe gives voice to his despair and threatens to take his own life in one of the loveliest of Cavalli’s laments («Uscitemi da cor, lacrime amare» [Take leave of my heart, bitter tears]). The first line of each of the two verses is repeated at the end of the stanza, like a deeply expressive Leitmotif, with the long note held on the second syllable to create a truly dramatic musical figuration. Cavalli is certainly the foremost Venetian opera composer, but the inventor of the genre was Benedetto Ferrari. Unfortunately not one of his opera scores has come down to us, yet his style is evident in numerous canzonette that constitute arias comparable to the closed forms that his operas would have comprised. One of the most famous is «Amanti, io vi so dire», which is included in the third book of his Musiche e poesie va- rie (1641). Based on the typical use of basso ostinato, it takes the shape of a curiously cheerful chaconne featuring a distinct rhythm with plenty of syncopation and anticipa- tion, leaving the singer free to unfurl the long melodic phrases with all due ornamentation. The aria by Frescobaldi, «Così mi disprezzate», handled as a passacaglia, belongs to the 5 same stylistic sphere, allowing the singer a similar degree of freedom of pitch and tone.