Viennese Opera by Italian librettists (1620-1705)

This project aims at filling a long-lasting gap in the field of History of Western music and History of European Literature: the study of the Italian dramatic texts for music (mainly operas) composed in Vienna before the production of the well-known 18th-century Italian librettists like Zeno, Metastasio and Da Ponte. Recent studies mainly by Antonicek, Seifert, Sommer-Mathis and Noe shed light on the process of consumption of Italian dramatic texts for music in Vienna during the Baroque era: they pointed out for the first time that during the 17th century the newborn musical genres of opera and oratorio were exported across the Alps even before they were established all over the Italian peninsula. Essentially, they noticed that, since the very beginning of the century, Italian texts for music were not only imported but also produced directly at court in Vienna, owing to the perfectly bilingual Italianizing taste of the Habsburgs. The crucial aspects of Italian-language libretti in Vienna that remain to be studied are the linguistic and dramatic features, whose historical influence still needs to be assessed. In the past, the topic of 17 th-century Italian-language libretti for the Habsburg court has remained largely neglected by both Italian and Austrian scholars for a common reason: these texts foreign origins. While Italian scholarship has witnessed a renewed interest in Baroque Italian opera over the past decades with the release of new monographs and critical editions, it has, with very few exceptions, avoided Italian-language Viennese opera of this period. However, there is no reason to believe that Italian playwrights, who produced so many masterpieces in their homeland, lost their skills once across the Alps. This project will examine a selection of Italian-language librettos, written by the four most significant Italian authors who, after writing dramatic texts for music in Italy, left their homeland to work under Ferdinand II, Ferdinand III, and Leopold I between 1620 and 1705. They are Giovanni Battista Andreini, Benedetto Ferrari, Francesco Sbarra, and Nicolò Minato. During the course of this fellowship, I will edit texts by each author according to the most recent philological norms, and I will study the development of each text, from its premiere to its final revival. Finally, I will situate each libretto in two contexts: first, within each writers career, and second, within the broader development of opera in Vienna. Ultimately, my goal is to encourage Austrian students and scholars to reassess this neglected body of work and bring international attention to this transnational genre. I will do this by (1) creating an online database of critical editions (using the newly developed software Synopsis), (2) producing a monograph and two articles on the topic, (3) hosting seminars under the purview of the Institut für Romanistik and the Institut für Musikwissenschaft of the Universität Wien.

The project "Viennese Opera by Italian Librettists (1620-1705): Towards the Birth of a Transnational Genre" aimed at applying to the Viennese dramatic works for music the theories and approaches that were developed in the recent studies about the 17th to early 18th century Italian librettists and their works. My research focused on Viennese libretto production before the Arcadian reforms, under the reign of Ferdinand II, Ferdinand III and Leopold I, from ca. 1620 to 1705. I edited seven secular librettos by Antonio Draghi, all composed and set to music in Vienna ("L'Almonte" 1661; "L'Oronisbe" 1663; "L'Invidia conculcata" 1664; "La Cloridea" 1665; "L'Alcindo" 1665; "La Mascherata" 1666; "Vero amor fa soave ogni fatica" 1667), together with two librettos by Benedetto Ferrari ("Dafne in alloro" Vienna 1652; "L'inganno d'Amore" Regensburg 1653) and "Il pomo d'oro" by Francesco Sbarra (Vienna 1668). Analysing the selected 10 librettos and entering the world of bibliography about the 17th-century Viennese musical life not only allowed me to bring some new insights on the general development of the operatic studies, but also stimulated some new approaches to the analysis of the libretto. The librettos by Ferrari and Sbarra suggest a strong revision to the concept of operatic evolution from private courts to public theatres, contradicting the mono-directional path that we still today find in the books of music history. The works by Draghi, moreover, for their numerous theatrical captions ("didascalie sceniche") and the several indications of actors' movements on the stage suggested an analysis that focused on the gestural and scenic action. This peculiarity stimulated an approach less literary and more theatrical to the reading of Draghi's texts and resulted in a slightly new concept of the libretto as a tool for acting and theatre studies. Apart from the papers presented at international conferences and the publications, one other outcome of my project was the conference I organized in June 2019 at the Institut für Romanistik of the University of Vienna together with prof. Alfred Noe and Dr Adriana De Feo: "I libretti italiani a Vienna tra Sei e Settecento - Italian Libretti in Vienna during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries".