The Lyric Myth of Voice: Civilizing Song in Enlightenment Italy [1 ed.] 0520380797, 9780520380790

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations and Tables
Editorial Principles
Introduction
1 The Poet Sings
2 The Orfeo Act
3 Civilizing Song
4 Domesticating the Tenth Muse
5 Sublime Suffering and the Good Mother
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Lyric Myth of Voice

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The Lyric Myth of Voice civilizing song in enlightenment italy

Jessica Gabriel Peritz

university of califor nia pr ess

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University of California Press Oakland, California © 2022 by Jessica Gabriel Peritz Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Peritz, Jessica Gabriel, 1984– author. Title: The lyric myth of voice : civilizing song in Enlightenment Italy /  Jessica Gabriel Peritz. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2022] |  Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2022007606 (print) | LCCN 2022007607 (ebook) |  ISBN 9780520380790 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520380806 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Opera—Italy—18th century. | Singing—Italy—  History—18th century. | Voice (Philosophy)—History—18th century. Classification: LCC ML1733.3 .P47 2022 (print) | LCC ML1733.3 (ebook) |  DDC 782.10945/09034—dc23/eng/20220608 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007606 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007607 Manufactured in the United States of America 31  30  29  28  27  26  25  24  23  22 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

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For Mitch

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yes! radiant lyre sing to me become a voice s a ppho, fragment 118, circa sixth century BCE

Orpheus . . . is, above all, a civilized human creature. v e r non l e e , “Orpheus in Rome,” 1889

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con t en ts

List of Illustrations and Tables xi Editorial Principles xiii Introduction 1 1  •  The Poet Sings 18 2  •  The Orfeo Act 53 3  •  Civilizing Song 83 4  •  Domesticating the Tenth Muse 118 5  •  Sublime Suffering and the Good Mother 158 Epilogue 198 Acknowledgments 203 Notes 207 Bibliography 251 Index 271

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i l lust r at ions a n d ta bl es

musical examples 1. Christoph Willibald Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice, aria “Che farò senza Euridice?” (Orfeo), mm. 10–16 47 2. Christoph Willibald Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice, aria “Che farò senza Euridice?” for Guadagni in Vienna, mm. 57–61 50 3. Christoph Willibald Gluck, L’atto d’Orfeo, aria “Che farò senza Euridice?” for Millico in Parma, 102r–102v 50 4. Pietro Morandi, Comala, aria “Neri giorni ed infelici” (Fingallo), 85v–86r 50 5. Niccolò Zingarelli, “Contento al par de’ Numi,” song for voice and string quartet 142 6. Giovanni Paisiello, Andromaca, act 1, scene 1, aria “Ancor mi risuona la voce dolente” (Andromaca), 28r–28v 189 7. Giovanni Paisiello, Andromaca, act 1, scene 1, aria “Ancor mi risuona la voce dolente” (Andromaca), 28v–29r 190 8. Giovanni Paisiello, Andromaca, act 1, scene 1, aria “Ancor mi risuona la voce dolente” (Andromaca), 31v–33r 192

figures 1. Dramatis personae (“Attori”) in Melchiorre Cesarotti, Comala 32 2. Representative page from James Macpherson’s Comala, in prose 32

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3. Sample page from Cesarotti’s translation of Comala, showing the libretto-like layout 33 4. Sample pages from Cesarotti’s translation of Fingal, for comparison with Comala excerpt (figure 3) 33 5. Mixed line lengths (ottonari and quaternari) in Fingallo’s aria “Neri giorni ed infelici,” from Comala by Ranieri de’ Calzabigi 46 6. Francesco Lapegna, Una riunione dei giacobini napoletani nel 1794, sketch depicting Giuseppe Millico at a gathering of Neapolitan Jacobins 84 7. Collectible print published in commemoration of Venice’s “Todi Year,” 1791 159 8. Inserted final aria text “Trionfa o ciel tiranno” for Luigia Todi in La Didone abbandonata, Padua, 1791 172 9. Collectible print published in honor of Todi’s performances as Didone and Cleofide, Venice, 1790–91 182

tables 1. Rondo structure of Morandi’s “Neri giorni ed infelici” and Gluck’s “Che farò senza Euridice?” 45 2. Lyric effusions integrated into rondo form in “Che farò senza Euridice?” 67 3. Simple/French rondo form 70 4. Two-tempo rondò form 70 5. Changing keys, time signatures, and tempi in Zingarelli’s “Contento al par de’ Numi” 140

xii  •   I L LUS T R AT IONS a n d Ta bl e s

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e di tor i a l pr i nci ples

All translations are my own unless otherwise attributed. When working with primary sources, I generally leave the orthography as is, except when doing so would make the text incomprehensible. For quotations, I insert brackets around ellipses that do not appear in the original text in order to distinguish between my own modifications and those ellipses that are original to the primary source. To differentiate between references to general mythical/historical figures and specific characters in particular works, I use the English for the former (e.g., Orpheus, Hector) and the language of the relevant source for the latter (e.g., Orfeo, Ettore). Musical examples have been transcribed by me from original sources. In many cases I have relied on copyists’ manuscripts when the composer’s autograph is lost or otherwise unavailable. Most of these sources do not have measure numbers since almost none of them have been printed; I either refer to the folio number(s) of the excerpt or provide my own numbering where possible.

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The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Simpson Imprint in Humanities. The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the AMS 75 PAYS Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The author gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University.

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Introduction Singer, thing of evil, stupid and wicked slave of the voice, of that instrument which was not invented by the human intellect, but begotten of the body, and which, instead of moving the soul, merely stirs up the dregs of our nature! v e r non l e e , “A Wicked Voice,” 1890

in 1803 an article was published in the Venetian newspaper Il quotidiano veneto that described the vocal apparatus. It recommended tonics to soothe the throat and detailed the cartilaginous structure of the larynx before concluding with a riposte to centuries of European music theory. “Father [Marin] Mersenne and Father [Athanasius] Kircher said that if one could imagine an instrument that was at once a wind instrument and a stringed one, it would be the most perfect of all.” The anonymous author went on to say that, although these seventeenth-century French and German intellectuals claimed to have “discovered” the idea of this “perfect” instrument, “nature [had] spared them the labor. This amazing instrument is as old as the world; and we all possess it in the human voice.”1 For the author, such an amazing instrument was not something that needed to be discovered, nor did it need to be invented or theorized, least of all by Italy’s northern neighbors. The Italian writer, and implicitly his readers too, knew what the French and the Germans had missed: the human voice was primordial, universal, and natural. That an Italian, writing in a Venice recently handed off from Napoleon’s France to the Austrian Habsburgs, would stake a claim to privileged knowledge about the voice is no small point—or so this book claims. In the chapters that follow I sketch out a historical narrative of how and why Italian 1

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ideas about the voice transformed during the second half of the eighteenth century. Specifically, I contend that Italian writers, composers, and singers responded to increasingly pressing questions about the possibilities and limitations of song by rebranding the singing voice as a tool for civilizing humanity and, by extension, for creating modern political subjects. Broadly, I make a series of interconnected arguments about late eighteenth-century Italy through reading its cultural forms as negotiating and naturalizing what we nowadays call voice. In so doing I draw from the transdisciplinary field of twenty-first-century voice studies the premise that we can regard voice both as denoting culturally situated sets of practices and as a quasi-transhistorical, if vexed, category.2 The interlocutors in this book sometimes wrote about voice qua voice (la voce), like the Venetian author quoted above. At other times they referred to song or singing (il canto), to vocal accents or inflections (accenti, inflessioni), or just to the sound (il suono) of speech, poetry, or vocal music. Yet since my focus is on the historical processes through which voice accumulated certain associations, my object is less the terms people used than the stories they spun around them. For I maintain that it was primarily through stories that Settecento Italians created and engaged with the network of discourses and practices I gather here under the category of voice. This, then, is what voice studies affords historical musicology: a provocation, an incitement even, to interrogate how we write histories of embodied practices. What kinds of questions can we ask, and what kinds of histories can we uncover, if we approach the past with an attention to things we now interpret as voice, even if they were not yet so-called? Prying open the past through voice is not tantamount to imposing tenets of philosophical voice studies, which have been inflected by poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, onto historical material that long predated them. Rather, by virtue of its capaciousness and multiplicity of meanings, the category voice highlights both the distance of the past from the present and the potential continuities between temporally distant ways of thinking.3 Both distance and continuity are necessary here because the historically situated myth at the heart of this book, the myth whose beginnings I trace in these chapters, is one that still underwrites vernacular notions of the human voice. In the common view, our voices are presumed, both figuratively and literally, to “naturally” express our feelings, our creativity, our political agency, even our deepest inner selves. Voices thereby seem to render sonorous not only our essentialized bodies but the very building blocks of the modern, Western, 2  •   I n t roduc t ion

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liberal subject.4 A central project of voice studies scholarship, philosophical and otherwise, has been to expose these assumptions as ideologies, and culturally contingent ones at that, rather than ratifying them as natural truths.5 More recently, however, musicological work has turned away from “demystifying” voice toward making space for pluralities in how, why, and to whom voices have “belonged” (to borrow James Q. Davies’s formulation).6 In (re)turning to myth, my aim is neither to reinscribe essentializing beliefs about the voice nor to tear them down. What I want instead is to uncover the kinds of cultural work those beliefs have performed. To that end, I reinterpret Lacanian philosopher Mladen Dolar’s notion of “a voice and nothing more” as an invitation to think historically. If, as Dolar argues, the inherent lack of meaning in the singing voice is precisely what makes it seem capable of “cur[ing] the wound inflicted by culture,” then the stories told about singing voices in a particular time and place might lead us back to the cultural wounds they were supposed to be stanching.7 Put another way, voices are sites where bodies of ideology have been buried. In this book I exhume some of those ideological bodies by unearthing the contingencies of making, hearing, and mediating vocal sounds in late eighteenth-century Italy. Ultimately, such contingencies tell an origin story, if not the only one, for the ur-ideology of voice in modern Anglo-European civilization. My approach here is twofold. First, I make a set of claims about late Settecento music, literature, and society by interrogating how emerging myths about the voice assuaged Italian cultural anxieties. Second, I make a case for seeking out traces of voice across an expanded archive: in musical scores, yes, and in reviews, treatises, and musical paratexts like opera prefaces, but also in poetry, novels, translations, and their respective editorial apparatuses, particularly when concerned with song or singers, ancient and modern; and, not least, in seemingly unrelated but coeval writings on topics like coffee, colonialism, and motherhood. Reading a wide swath of sources as archives of voice grants us access to histories that have eluded the traditional music-historical record, as I have argued elsewhere.8 But it also requires adding a dash of imagination to even the most rigorously historicist methodology. If I do sometimes venture into the speculative or the spectral in my search for traces of voice, I do so in sympathy with my Settecento interlocutors, who themselves made recourse to stories, myths, and poetic language in order to link together disparate ideas and tether abstract ideologies to material bodies. I n t roduc t ion   •   3

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the voice problem The material bodies that most needed ideological rebranding, in the view of Settecento intellectuals, were the ones that belonged to singers, the sources of Italy’s much-beloved and much-maligned voices. In a recent monograph on opera in mid-eighteenth-century Parma, Margaret Butler summarizes the typical backstory of so-called reform opera: this genre “resulted when midcentury critics of Italian opera seria, frustrated with the domination of solo singers and the bad behavior of inattentive and unruly audiences, advocated for a return to dramatic unity.” 9 I quote her gloss because it neatly sums up the major Italian anxieties about voices and those who listened to them. And, as we will see, these anxieties were not limited to opera seria. Similar critiques were launched at the voices connected with popular and nonprofessional traditions as well, including those of street singers, poetic improvisers, and domestic amateurs.10 At first glance the critiques seem to point to straightforward musical and dramatic issues. As attested by oft-cited reform treatises by Francesco Algarotti (1755), Antonio Planelli (1772), and others, the root cause of serious opera’s decline was singers’ self-aggrandizing desire to show off their voices. Much like awe-inspiring stage machinery and lavish costumes, opera singers’ voices, especially those of the castrati, were understood as material components of operatic spectacle. As what Bonnie Gordon calls “instrumentalized matter,” opera’s voices were sonic counterparts to its visual effects, serving up astonishing proof of nature made marvelous through technology and invention.11 Beholden to serving that sonic-vocal spectacle, composers and librettists supposedly enabled singers’ alleged abuses to the extent that the balance of expressive elements became lopsided (as Planelli, for one, insisted). Arias grew ever longer, with fewer words and more melismas, as showcases for singers’ attention-seeking warbling. As the common critique went, singers’ voices distracted from the poetry and the plot alike with virtuosic but empty display, and were thus accused of pleasing the ear and inspiring wonder without ever touching the heart. Audience members, in turn, were either obsessed by these flashy voices or utterly disinterested, but they were certainly not morally edified by the operatic experience.12 Yet notwithstanding reformist critics’ complaints, most operagoers clearly enjoyed the sonic spectacle; singers and their voices were the stars of Italian operatic culture for a reason.13 All told, the operatic singing voice was caught between a public hungry for virtuosity and intellectuals anxious to remake opera into a more literate genre. 4  •   I n t roduc t ion

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Singers were not the sole culprits, however. Many writers also accused the wildly successful poet laureate Pietro Metastasio, whose libretti had long defined the genre of opera seria, of being complicit in these spectacular voices’ reign. His uniform poetic style constrained the composer and the drama, some argued, and so left the way open for singers’ musical transgressions to take center stage. For instance, although the Neapolitan intellectual Saverio Mattei worshiped Metastasio, he worried that the poet’s unsurpassable skill had made it impossible for anyone else to write a decent opera libretto.14 The reform-minded composer Niccolò Jommelli blamed Metastasio more directly, as he felt he could not innovate musically within the conventions of Metastasian-style poetry. When requesting a libretto from his collaborator Gaetano Martinelli, the composer asked for something un-Metastasian in form because “if the poet is so keen to sing, very little indeed is left to the poor composer.”15 Along similar lines, reformist literati like Ranieri de’ Calzabigi and Matteo Borsa praised the universalizing maxims of Metastasio’s opera libretti for their literary merit but declared the verses too rigid, too impersonal, to support genuinely expressive music.16 Poetry and music had failed sung drama by not providing a united front, permitting voices to operate as sonicbodily spectacles, unmoored from meaning, reason, and the nobler passions. This was by no means the first or last time that people fretted over musicalvocal sound becoming detached from semantic content. Such fears have shadowed the voice since at least the Greeks; take Homer’s sirens, for instance.17 Essays by Carolyn Abbate and Michel de Certeau, among others, have approached the ostensible capacity of the sounding voice to exceed or subordinate language as, not a failure or problem, but a powerful refusal to submit to hermeneutics.18 It is tempting to extend such a reading backward to mid-to-late eighteenth-century voices—that is, to suggest that Enlightenment intellectuals were so disgruntled by the vocal-stylistic excesses of singers because they could not interpret them. Yet interpret them they did, and by the end of the narrative traced in this book, the sounds of the voice became a story all on their own. Anxieties over what kind of work voices were supposed to perform reveal that the problem was not simply about changing musical tastes. In fact, as the following chapters will show, aesthetic debates surrounding the flashy voices of opera seria were rooted in far deeper concerns, especially ones about Italy’s political status as a landform carved up by foreign powers and the diminishing authority abroad of Italian literature and philosophy. This was because, as Nelson Moe has claimed, it was around midcentury that Italian intellectuals I n t roduc t ion   •   5

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began earnestly seeking “reconnection with the mainstream of European civilization” after decades of isolation, just when “civilized” Europe decided that Italy was a cultural backwater, and no more than a “pawn” in their own high-stakes political negotiations. Italy had little to offer besides music and ruins.19 So it was particularly distressing that Italy’s astonishing voices, shaped by surgeon’s knives and solfeggi at home and then sent to theaters and courts and churches across the world, now increasingly grated against the enlightened literary-theatrical views promulgated by those at the center of European civilization. What these enlightened thinkers, and their Italian admirers like the members of the Milanese Accademia dei Pugni, wanted from music, literature, and theater was verisimilar feeling—not astonishing spectacle.20 If Italy wished to rejoin European civilization, its voices would have to be reformed.

naturalizing voice One narrative about how Enlightenment thought naturalized the voice into a symbol for the feeling subject is anchored by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages (written circa 1755; published posthumously in 1781). In Rousseau’s conception of the primordial past, gestures and “inarticulate sounds” sufficed for communication because primitive humans were concerned solely with survival.21 Emotions only evolved after “man” first took himself “out of himself ” and “transported” his consciousness, via “imagination,” into someone else’s body—what Rousseau characterized as the genesis of pity.22 This individual, consistent yet imaginatively mobile consciousness was, for Rousseau, “the self.”23 The self forged “social affections” with other selves by signaling their mutual humanity, which was dependent on their capacity for feeling emotions (in eighteenth-century parlance, this was known as their “sensibility”). The way selves signaled their capacity for feeling, and thus their mutual humanity, was through their voices: “man alone sings.” Because “passion makes the vocal organs speak,” Rousseau argued, “voice proclaims a sensitive being [un être sensible].”24 In theorizing the primordial origins of human society, Rousseau positioned the voice as natural proof of a feeling subject. He was not the first to think about voice and song in this way, as others have pointed out (and about which more in chapter 1), but his version is the best known, thanks in large part to Derrida’s extended (if flawed) reading of the Essay in Of Grammatology.25 6  •   I n t roduc t ion

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What is important about Rousseau’s tale for my purposes is less whether he invented the notion of primordial song and more about the role that he assigned to Italy within his larger views on music, language, and society. In the Essay Rousseau lamented that the modern gap between vocal sounds and feelings was irreparable; the progressive complexity of rational human language and civilization forever precluded a return to expressing feeling directly through vocal inflections. Of course, he kept hoping for such a return anyway.26 Within Europe, the best hope seemed to lay in the land of the midday sun: Rousseau had simultaneously fetishized and infantilized the Italians for their purportedly “songlike” language in his Letter on French Music (1753) after attempting to translate that songishness into French in his intermède Le devin du village (1752).27 By presenting the Italian language as less removed from that long-lost originary song, he insinuated that the people who spoke or sang Italian, even in his own time, were themselves less removed from primitivity than, say, the highly rational, civilized French.28 Rousseau’s construction of voice vis-à-vis society thus points to one of the central tensions that undergirds the narrative of this book. An affinity for song was what made Italy special in the eyes and ears of civilized Europe, but it was also what marked Italians as less civilized and therefore implicitly justified their continuing political subjugation. Reforming voice, then, was a double process. Writers and musicians alike sought to re-naturalize Italy’s voices by domesticating and civilizing certain vocal practices. Yet because those practices were connected with singing bodies that troubled Enlightenment ideologies of domesticity and civilization by being “unnatural”—namely, the bodies of women and castrated men—such attempts to naturalize voice also reinscribed the discourses that marked voice as needing to be domesticated and civilized. That paradoxical double process manifested in microcosm the contradictions inherent to Enlightenment constructs of subjectivity writ large.

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The other point of rehearsing Rousseau’s theory of voice is to emphasize that an ideologically motivated origin story, whether his or anyone else’s, did not metamorphose into a naturalized truth through polemical essays alone. The protagonist of such stories—the singing voice—also performed important labor, however difficult it might be to pin down so many centuries later. But where can we seek out the traces of that labor? I n t roduc t ion   •   7

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As Robert O. Gjerdingen notes in his study of eighteenth-century composition pedagogy (and as hinted by my opening gambit), unlike the French and the Germans, the Italians in this period rarely theorized outright about music in writing. The labor of music making was cultural and social, and training primarily carried out viva voce, leaving behind only remnants of practice as evidentiary traces.29 For Gjerdingen’s composition-oriented study, the material remains of practice lay in zibaldoni, or student notebooks, filled with exercises like partimenti and solfeggi, without many straightforward acts of theorizing until much later. The situation with published singing treatises is similar in that they were few and far between in Italy during the mid-tolate eighteenth century. Those that were published were mostly published and sold elsewhere—in Vienna, Paris, London—and tell us more about the commodification of Italianate singing pedagogy than about the nuances of practice, which Italian singing teachers insisted could only be learned through one-on-one instruction.30 By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when Italianate practices of voice were being theorized widely and explicitly, the resulting texts reflected not the initiation, but the culmination of notions of voice that had been coalescing in Italy for decades. One place to look for early traces is, unsurprisingly, in opera scores and their attendant texts—libretti, reviews, prefaces, and so forth. Indeed, there are several well-established opera reform narratives that implicate shifts in vocal practices, even if only as “solutions” to musical-dramatic “problems.” For instance, Gluck and Calzabigi’s Orfeo ed Euridice, which premiered in Vienna in 1762, has long been read as a concerted aesthetic return to the “ancients,” meant to ratify both the Greeks and the Seicento Tuscans as progenitors of opera. By reintroducing into Italianate opera a simpler, more declamatory vocal style, the Viennese reforms ostensibly prohibited the sounds of singers’ voices from intervening between the poetic-musical message and its reception by an audience, successfully placing singers under the authority of composer and librettist. But that is not how things unfolded in Italy. As Daniel Heartz, Martha Feldman, Alessandra Martina, and Ellen Lockhart have demonstrated, Enlightenment-era Italians were by no means immune to reformist strains, yet they dealt with them differently than did their neighbors beyond the Alps.31 Another common but incomplete narrative about the voice in opera reform originated closer to home on the Italian peninsula, and is in fact an essential precursor to the Gluckian tale: the tremendous success story of opera buffa. The genre rose from its humble origins in the intermezzo 8  •   I n t roduc t ion

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through Piccinni’s La buona figliuola to Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (though the latter two are not technically opere buffe).32 Characteristic musical elements of buffa style, including speechlike declamation, songlike melodies, simple accompaniment, and rapid emotional shifts, were presumably what inspired Rousseau to praise Italian music above French in the first place. And, as Pierpaolo Polzonetti has shown, opera buffa in this period had quite a bit to say about Italian political concerns, though they were often filtered through representations of Italy’s others.33 My intention is not to retread these established narratives, although Italian remakes of Orfeo ed Euridice and productions of certain comic operas do appear in my own version; by weaving them in alongside many now lesser-known but no less important Italian serious operas, I attempt to trace shifts in the singing voice across various genres and forms. Simply, I am drawing out a narrative about the voice, not opera itself. What the works I focus on have in common, notwithstanding their various forms and genres, is that they all spotlight confrontations between vocal sound and its mediation. Here I take inspiration from Shane Butler in The Ancient Phonograph, in particular how he reads ancient poetry not as a mere “tool” for the “transmission” of language but as a sonic-vocal medium in its own right.34 With the music I take up here, I consider how vocal sound and expressivity were constructed by, and (re)presented through, the conventions they made audible. More specifically, I think about how the affordances of generic conventions—and the breaking of them—affected how the elements of music, words, and performance staged the voice and its limitations. Foundational to such an approach is Abbate’s classic 1995 essay “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women,” in which opera is a dynamic genre that confers agency on different entities at different times via the interplay between score, libretto, and the immediacy of vocal performance.35 I adapt Abbate’s premise somewhat, however, in that I do not necessarily equate the singing voice on stage with (the projection of) agency. Rather, I attempt to think about what spectators in specific contexts—Venice’s Teatro San Benedetto in 1776, a salon in a private Milanese home in 1794—might have interpreted as coming from a character, from the performer, or from the musico-poetic script, as based on a constellation of local factors. In so doing, I draw on Feldman’s work on the social and metatheatrical making of operatic meaning—as in, for example, her argument that the frictions between fixity and variability in aria performance were essential to the Settecento experience of serious opera.36 I also take cues from studies by Mauro Calcagno, Emily Wilbourne, I n t roduc t ion   •   9

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and Melina Esse, each of whom has read the slippage among various operatic elements in different contexts as representing notions of voice, identity, or agency (in the Seicento and Ottocento, respectively).37

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But, of course, scores can only tell us so much. Even autograph manuscripts are not perfectly preserved remains of voices and voicings: they are highly mediated traces of listenings both real and imagined.38 In scores, as well as in reviews and other texts, people inscribed voices as they thought they heard them, or as they wanted to hear them. This requires some reading between the lines for clues to embodied sonic-vocal practices like ornamentation and expressive inflection, as well as a critical attention to how any “evidence” about vocal sound, especially timbre, has been remediated from acoustic reality into notated music and words.39 In this respect my approach owes much to work on sound in the prephonographic and (post)colonial archive. As Ana María Ochoa Gautier writes, in dialogue with Gary Tomlinson, the “acoustic dimensions” of such archives “are not presented to us as discrete, transcribed works.” Sounds, vocal and nonvocal, were “dispersed into different types of written inscriptions that transduce different audile techniques into specific legible sound objects of expressive culture.” 40 In this book, those “sound objects of expressive culture” are not only musical works but also novels, poems, translations, essays, and much more. I wish to stress here that, despite recent arguments that locate Italy in the Global South, I am not claiming that eighteenthcentury Italy was a land of colonized peoples, not least because it lacked the racial and ethnic power dynamics that characterized colonial contexts outside of Europe.41 I do, however, show in chapter 3 that discourses of colonialism and imperialism inflected Italy’s sense of its own Europeanness, and implicitly its whiteness, in ways that contributed to the nascent link between voice and subjectivity. Just as late eighteenth-century Italy provides fertile ground for excavating the remains of historical voices, it also facilitates a critical study of “universal” and “enlightened” (i.e., white, male, literate, ablebodied, Eurocentric) constructs of subjectivity as negotiated through those voices. In thus reading voice as, variously, a concept, a set of sonic practices, and textual remains, I make recourse to two broad subcategories. First, voice is a set of culturally oriented and historically determined practices of sound 10  •   I n t roduc t ion

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making, language use, and literary production. Second, voice is a metonym or other discursive representation of agency, authenticity, identity, and/or authority; this subcategory is also culturally constructed, but often in such a way as to obscure that constructedness for ideological purposes.42 A central contention of this study is that some iterations of sonic-musical-literary practices of voice reflected and even effected the ways in which voice has been ideologically constructed in and as discourse. But in order to reconnect practices with ideology in a historically and culturally situated way, we need to figure out how that intervening discursive labor was being carried out. This is where the book’s title, “the lyric myth of voice,” comes in.

the lyric song I argue that late Settecento ideas about the voice converged at the nexus of myth and song. In making this argument I take a page from the philosophy of Neapolitan historiographer Giambattista Vico, whose treatise La scienza nuova (1725; rev. 1730, 1744) stakes a claim for the foundational nature of both myth and song in the formation of cultural knowledge.43 Giuseppe Mazzotta has glossed Vico’s understanding of mythology as a “science capable of giving voice to silence,” a “grammar” of “memory and history” in one. As for song, in the Vichian framework it is not set in opposition to philosophy, history, or myth (as in Platonic thought), but as prior to them: song subtends “all forms of knowledge” within a given culture.44 In the Scienza nuova Vico promulgated his own theory of primordial song, a decade-plus before Rousseau, in which song was at once the “violent” expression of strong passions and the frame that “moderated” those passions—simultaneously a naturalizing and a civilizing force.45 Significantly, as Tomlinson has argued, Vico’s notion of song “represented the profound distance” between his own present and the primitive past; in the philosophies of Rousseau, Herder, and other mid-to-late eighteenth-century writers, however, originary song instead became “presentist” and “sentimental,” evidence of continuities between past and present.46 As we will see in chapter 1, it was in both estranging and presentist-sentimental form that Vichian notions of song and civilization diffused through late Settecento culture, and through which Vico’s own focus on song shifted into a preoccupation with the voices that sing. As evidence for the extended influence of Vichian notions of myth and song throughout this period, take the words of Italian poet and novelist Ugo I n t roduc t ion   •   11

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Foscolo. Living in political exile in England in 1822, Foscolo published an essay defending allegories to skeptical non-Italian readers. Writing in English, Foscolo argued that allegories, when used well, enabled artists to contribute to “the improvement and perfection of social life.” 47 He took this stance partly in response to Germaine de Staël’s criticism of Italian neoclassical literature (and opera) in her 1815 essay “The Spirit of Translation,” especially to her urging Italian writers to translate northern works instead of continuing to “sift the ashes of the past” for inspiration.48 Contra de Staël, Foscolo maintained that allegory was not a limit to the imagination, but the most immediate means of activating it: Ridiculous as allegories may appear to metaphysical critics, they have been, nevertheless, the finest and most useful materials for artists to work from; and the disrepute into which they have now fallen has arisen from the injudicious use that has been made of them, [. . .] for every allegory is, in truth, only an abstract idea personified, which, by thus acting more rapidly and easily on our senses and our imagination, takes a readier hold of the mind.49

Foscolo’s last point resonates with Vico’s claim of eighty-some years prior that “the most sublime labor of song is to give sense and passions to things without sense.”50 Whether in song, poetry, or myth, symbolism corralled abstract concepts into figures and stories, making them readily accessible— and therefore capable of shaping the social through the aesthetic. In the same essay Foscolo himself gave shape to a set of abstractions by invoking a particular myth of song. For him, artistic originality and emotional authenticity were symbolized by what he called “the Lyric song,” which “in [ancient] Greece was the spontaneous effusion of genius and the passions.”51 The word lyric (Italian: lirico), derived from the Greek lyra, denotes poetry declaimed or sung to the accompaniment of a lyre. By the eighteenth century, lyric had extended to include most poetry intended for musical setting, and by the time Foscolo was writing his defense, it had become even more than that. His notion of ancient lyric song as a “spontaneous effusion” reveals the influence of late Settecento practices of voice. Foscolo was drawing on the myth of an originary vocal-emotional and poetic-musical unity that had long been personified in the figure of the ancient poet-singer—but had more recently been transferred to some of the real singers who embodied those myths on stage. For literati and musicians in the last decades of the eighteenth century, the archetypal figure of the lyric poet-singer emblematized both a utopian song12  •   I n t roduc t ion

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world and the fantasy of a voice that unified all the elements of lyric. However “ridiculous” such myths might have seemed to “metaphysical critics,” the lyric poet-singer encapsulated for late Settecento Italians the otherwise abstract sense of what was missing, not only from the virtuosic voices of opera seria, but from modern Italian culture in general. Through the heuristic of lyric, then, I bring together the people, practices, and texts that collectively made manifest the origins of the ideology of voiceas-subjectivity—that is, the lyric myth of voice. Lyric has multiple meanings here. It refers to the aforementioned archaic Greek genre of musical poetry (i.e., song), and its eighteenth-century iterations. At the same time, it connotes the late eighteenth-century literary lyric mode, which is typically defined not by generic or formal features but by salient aspects of mood and method. In Italy, the broadening of lyric from musico-poetic genre to literary mode has been linked to its usage in a 1792 novel by Alessandro Verri, whom we’ll meet in chapter 3. The new literary lyric mode was characterized by representations of vivid emotion, expressive immediacy, and, above all, aestheticized subjectivity.52 Yet those lyric signatures had originated in practices and discourses of voice, both poetic and musical, long before they solidified into novelistic prose. As mode and as genre, lyric shares many of the contradictions I have laid out thus far as characteristic of both the myth of primordial song and the double process of reforming voice. For one thing: Was lyric created by a spontaneous, unmediated effusion of subjectivity? Or was it a scripted performance, a set of artistic calculations intended to convincingly imitate feeling and conjure subjectivity? As with the singing voice, the answers are murky. Around the same time that Foscolo defended allegory, Hegel—possibly one of those at whom Foscolo’s defense was aimed—theorized lyric as fundamentally about “inwardness,” with its “final aim the self-expression of subjective life.”53 Taking a similar (but more Foscolian) line in his 1821 “Defence of Poetry,” Percy Bysshe Shelley compared the lyric poet to “a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.”54 Shelley and Hegel each smoothed over the performative aspect of lyric selfexpression by defining it as inherently solipsistic. And yet, the poet who sings to themself can only be recognized as a poet if their songs are (over)heard. Even in the archaic Greece so idealized by authors like Foscolo, lyric had never been the unmediated, impassioned effusion of the moment. As Leslie Kurke notes, lyric in that period was a genre for fostering collective sociability and public edification: it was meant to be heard, not merely “overheard,” I n t roduc t ion   •   13

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however personal or emotionally intimate the poetry might have seemed. The archaic lyric poet-singer figure was a persona, a role, an archetypal representative of the community, not the unique, individual, inward-looking subject of Romantic lyric.55 Nevertheless, as Jonathan Culler declares in his monumental Theory of the Lyric, there is something transhistorical about lyric, from Sappho to Petrarch to Wordsworth to today. The commonality lies in lyric’s foundational tension between its “formal elements,” comprised of the conventions that determine meaning and performance practice, and the contingent elements of immediacy and subjectivity, however they were understood in a given historical context.56 Lyric is produced by the frictions between script and that which appears to exceed scripting. It is thus to a certain extent always self-reflexively concerned with the relationships between poetry or song, subjectivity, and voice.57 These lyric frictions are brought to the fore in live performance. While the singers discussed in this book were experimenting with vocal inflections, timbres, and embellishments as ways to project expressive immediacy, theatrical reformers in places like London and Paris were theorizing about how actors could most convincingly portray “natural” emotions onstage. Denis Diderot famously took the line that actors had to truly feel that which they meant to project, adumbrating Foscolo’s fantasy of ancient lyric song.58 But then, curiously, Diderot did an about-face on the point. By the 1770s, when he wrote the essay Paradox of the Actor, Diderot believed that an actor who felt what he portrayed might be authentic, but could only give a “fine moment,” not a “fine performance,” because the instability of genuine feeling would disrupt the unity of the actor’s portrayal. Any such break would expose, indeed highlight, the artificiality of performance, because the perception of unity was foundational to an audience’s acceptance of a character as a stable, consistent “I”—that is, as a self or subject. (The theatrical equation of subjectivity with unity is also a hallmark of lyric theory, on which more in chapter 2.)59 A great performance required that an actor feel nothing at all, Diderot argued, so that they could calculate how best to present a unified character. Still, if one thought about this paradox too much, the great actor’s performance became “terrifying,” as one realized that the actor had managed to pass off the artificial as natural.60 When it came to reforming voice, both in sound and in writing, the historical interlocutors in this book grappled with that lyric paradox by turning to figures and situations in which vocal performance was already implicated 14  •   I n t roduc t ion

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as a central concern. The lyric figure, so important to the birth of opera, but since edged out by the epic-heroic figures of Metastasian opera seria, allowed for song, voice, and performance to be staged self-reflexively.61 Lyric figures kept the voice center stage while testing its sonic, textual, and expressive limits.

lyric figures For late eighteenth-century Italians the lyric figure primarily materialized through two quasi-historical, quasi-mythical characters: Orpheus, the mythological progenitor of lyric, and Sappho, the archaic author of its swan song. Take, for instance, the entry on lirico in the Italian edition of Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (as the Dizionario di belle lettere, 1795). By way of defining lyric, Jean-François Marmontel declared that moderns like Malherbe and Rousseau were only “pretending” to be poets, while the ancient lyric poets, including Orpheus and Sappho, had had an “authentic character” because they “actually sang to the harmonies of the lyre.” 62 On stage and on the page, indexing these lyric figures served as a shorthand for musical, vocal, and emotional authenticity, such that their songs seemed as spontaneous effusions of feeling. Once that authenticity had been established, the rest of the performance or text could play with the lyric tensions that in other contexts had to remain hidden. The paradox became a feature, not a bug. And as such, it continued to furnish space for music-theatrical experimentation well into the nineteenth century: as Esse has shown in her recent monograph Singing Sappho, the Sappho-esque improvvisatrice figure became in the Ottocento an operatic vehicle for composers and singers to navigate issues of authenticity, spontaneity, and authorship.63 For late Settecento Italians, however, Orpheus and Sappho represented a genealogy of the lyric myth of voice, as well as what that myth might mean for Italy. One version of the Orpheus story limns this genealogy through the lyre itself. After Orpheus was torn to pieces at the hands of the Maenads, his severed head murmured along without a body; his lyre also continued to sound of its own accord and floated away from his bodily remains to eventually land on the shores of Lesbos, transferring its power to the young Sappho.64 Sappho became at once Orpheus’s heir and his double: the mutilation and scattering of Orpheus’s physical corpus was echoed by the mutilation and scattering of Sappho’s poetic corpus (on which see chapter 4). I n t roduc t ion   •   15

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Arrestingly, both poets were believed to have continued singing in fragmentary form long after their literal deaths. These lyric figures thus offered Italians two variations of a mythical allegory—one that resonated with the concept of “Italy”—in which the dispersed self or subject nevertheless sings on, its spectral voice vouchsafing a foundational unity beneath the fractured physical surface. The five central chapters of this book loosely follow the lyre’s trajectory from Orpheus to Sappho, though they trace a set of imbricated narratives rather than a single grand one. These narratives include transitions from poetic presentations of voice to musical ones; from the emblematic Italian voice as heroic to sentimental; from the castrated male singer as Orpheus to the female singer as Sappho; from voice as a set of specific poetic or musical practices, like prosody and ornamentation, to voice as timbre or embodied sound “itself”; and from writing voices as repositories of histories to hearing voices as histories in and of themselves. Chapter 1 begins in the 1760s, when the translator Melchiorre Cesarotti adapted and applied Vichian historiography to (supposedly) ancient Gaelic poetry in order to make voice, more than song, the quintessential parameter of feeling in literature. Before long, Cesarotti’s Gaelic bard metamorphosed into an Orphic figure on the operatic stage, infusing the Greek poet-singer myth with new strains of vocal sensibility. Chapter 2 follows three castrato singers from the 1770s to the early 1790s as they attempted to remake opera (and assure their own survival) through their vocal performances of that new Orphic sensibility, reimagining acting, aria form, and ornamentation along the way. After the primarily literary and operatic focus of the first two chapters, the latter three broaden out into cultural history. Chapter 3 considers how critiques of the Orphic figure of voice in the 1780s and 1790s raised questions about Italian identity vis-à-vis Europeanness, modernity, and empire: such questions included ones about the political and economic stakes of Orphic sensibility; the role of voice in creating intimate publics; and the racialized, classed, and gendered modes of difference pointed up by the notion of “civilizing song.” Chapter 4 turns from Orpheus to Sappho by tracing the twin archaeological and confessional imaginations of the 1780s, showing how writers and composers treated Sappho’s “sublime” lyrics as fragments of her voice and, as such, remains of her subjectivity. This chapter and the next mark a crucial point in the ideological suturing of voice to subjectivity, revealing it as dependent on gendered myths about the relationships between body, voice, and self. Chapter 5 argues that these myths became 16  •   I n t roduc t ion

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audible in the 1790s, for perhaps the first time, as they were projected onto the vocal timbres of opera singer Luigia Todi—with far-reaching aesthetic, political, and cultural effects. Throughout the book, these two figures, the Orphic and the Sapphic, emerge from between the lines of history as symbolic repositories for all kinds of fantasies and anxieties, lending form, flesh, and sound to the lyric myth of voice.

I n t roduc t ion   •   17

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on e

The Poet Sings

continue your song, sweet voice In 1762 a young professor named Melchiorre Cesarotti quit his job at the University of Padua, moved to Venice, and rewrote the history of Italian literature. Invigorated by empiricist and anti-Cartesian philosophy—especially Giambattista Vico’s then little-known treatise La scienza nuova—the erstwhile professor went in search of an alternative to the imitation of classical models, a practice that had dominated Italian literature for centuries. Luckily, the alternative found him: an English friend passed along an unusual text, recently published by the Scotsman James Macpherson, entitled Fingal. It was not in high-flown Greek, Latin, or Italian verse but in terse English prose; it was not drawn from any known written source but stitched together from fragments of Gaelic oral tradition; it was altogether less concerned with detailing grand events than with evoking the emotional immediacy of said events. What is more, unlike the largely omniscient narrators of canonical epics like Homer’s Iliad and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, the narrator of Fingal was personally connected to the stories he told.1 According to Macpherson that narrator was Fingal’s own son, the thirdcentury Caledonian warrior-bard Ossian, and he needed no muses, only his memory, to sing the tragic history of his ancestors.2 Presumably unencumbered by the burden of Greco-Roman influence, this Gaelic poet-singer provided Cesarotti with just what had been looking for: an excuse to break free of poetic conventions by translating these “primitive” songs into modern Italian. Soon published as Poesie di Ossian (1763; rev. 1772, 1801), Cesarotti’s Italian translations and detailed commentary became touchstones for various aspects of European culture over the next half cen18

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tury. The Italian Ossian inspired Napoleon on his military campaigns, laid the groundwork for Leopardi’s genre-defining Canti, and shaped Bellini’s philosophy of operatic melody.3 This book begins with Cesarotti for two intertwined reasons. First, his Poesie di Ossian established a new approach to conceptualizing the voice in late Settecento culture; and second, it (re)introduced the figure of the poetsinger into the Italian imaginary, setting up Orpheus to be reimagined along Ossianic lines. Voice and voices were of course already implicit in European ideas of poetry, both in sung lyric and in the written and oral epic traditions reaching back from Tasso to Virgil to Homer. Each of those poets’ canonical works begins with some form of the verb to sing, after all, and each accomplished political work through and as poetic histories.4 But Cesarotti insisted that Ossian was different from all the others, whether classical or Cinquecento. Cesarotti believed that Ossian’s poetic voice, like Homer’s, had originated in his sounding voice, and that Ossian’s songs, like Homer’s, had been part of an oral tradition that preserved the history of his people. Yet unlike Homer, Cesarotti argued, Ossian had added to the power of his narrations by infusing feeling into them with the sounds of his voice.5 Cesarotti thus claimed to have translated not only Ossian’s words, but the distinctive voice that had once sung them. Such a focus on voice, over and above the epic-heroic plot, was certainly in the spirit of Macpherson’s originals. As Katie Trumpener has noted, the Ossianic poems’ “true subject is not epic heroism but the vicissitudes of oral tradition.” 6 Through his translations and critical framing, then, Cesarotti imaginatively invested the poet-singer’s voice with a cultural power that was connected, but not limited, to the semantic content it conveyed. In ways that would continue to resonate well into the Ottocento, Cesarotti translated Ossian’s poems as though voices themselves—at once the poems’ subject and their medium—contained histories.7 As Cesarotti’s Ossian ushered an unfamiliar oral tradition into Italian literature, it offered readers a sense of what originary song might have sounded like before it had been smoothed out into recognizably modern “music” and “literature.” Although theories of originary, universal, or natural song began proliferating around midcentury, as Polzonetti and Tomlinson have each (separately) discussed, Cesarotti’s version went against the ones promulgated by the likes of Tartini and Rousseau.8 Such theories commonly defined “naturalness” according to a distinctly Italianate conception of what was cantabile, or “singable,” and exemplified it by pointing to the declamatory speech-songs of Italian improvisers, street singers, and gondoliers as modern iterations of T h e P oe t S i ngs   •   19

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ancient Homeric rhapsodic chanting.9 Cesarotti’s Ossianic alternative to that purportedly natural song was neither chantlike nor cantabile, but choppy and colloquial. Cesarotti explained this by making recourse to Vico’s then-obscure theories of societal development (on which more later) and positioning originary song as expressing through vocal sounds what reason had not yet fixed into language. Ossian’s poetry was irregularly rhythmic, disjointed, and unrhyming because, according to Cesarotti, it was that much closer to the impassioned, spontaneous vocal effusions at the prehistoric origin point of both song and language. In turn, the supposed primitiveness of Ossian’s style encouraged an attention to the immediate or present, the individual, and the experiential in the process of reading Italian poetry—and framed it as an attention to the voice within the song.10 This chapter argues that Cesarotti’s literary project advanced a theory about the originary relationships between voice, feelings, and civilization, drawn in part from Vico’s Scienza nuova and put into practice in his translations of Macpherson’s Ossian poems. I first show how Cesarotti privileged (what he cast as) Ossian’s voice as the essence of his poetry, including how he marked certain Ossianic poetic qualities as representing voice in order to legitimize his own breaking of Italian literary conventions. Next, I consider how Cesarotti theorized primitive expressivity, and the function of voice within it, through his application of Vichian historiography to the Ossianic poems. The chapter’s focus then expands outward from Cesarotti to include a more familiar player in 1760s Italian music history—the poet Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, who, along with the composer Gluck, attempted to reform Italian opera using techniques similar to those invented by Cesarotti for his Ossian. My intention with bringing in Calzabigi is neither to claim that the reforms he attempted in the Vienna Orfeo ed Euridice inspired Cesarotti’s translations, nor to imply that these reforms magically transformed opera in Italy— far from it. Rather, the point is to explore the affinities between Cesarotti’s Ossian and Calzabigi’s Orfeo as synchronous articulations of Italian cultural concerns about the status of literature vis-à-vis voice. I suggest that both writers thought of voices as capable of exceeding the content, whether musical or poetic, they were meant to deliver; both attempted to capture voices in writing as a way of rehabilitating poetry; and both used the figure of the poetsinger as a vehicle for exploring the tensions between vocal performance, its prescription, and its inscription. But their shared concerns yielded nearly opposite solutions. Where Cesarotti sought to reinvent poetry by inscribing the sounds of the poet’s 20  •   T h e P oe t S i ngs

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voice, Calzabigi labored to protect poetry by prescribing the sounds of singers’ voices. The two writers’ related but distinct purposes are traced through a case study of Calzabigi’s operatic adaptation of Cesarotti’s/Ossian’s Comala, which offers a salient example of how the Ossianic project merged with the Orphic one. The chapter concludes by considering how Cesarotti’s Vichian framing of Ossian served a purpose beyond justifying his aesthetic innovations: it also staked a claim for the sociopolitical power of song and the central role of the poet-singer’s voice in exercising that power. This point undergirds much of the rest of this book, inflecting Italian discourses and practices of voice throughout the rest of the Settecento. As we will see in chapters 2 and 3, the hybrid Orphic-Ossianic poet-singer figure would eventually assume the political function once assigned to Homer—thanks to Cesarotti’s turn to the voice within the song, and to song within the history of civilization.

the voice of an ordinary man Cesarotti rewrote the history of literature by taking up Ossian’s own instrument: the voice. The Poesie di Ossian conjures voices on multiple levels, from the thematic to the syntactic to the prosodic. Some of this was Cesarotti’s doing, but many of the thematic and structural invocations of voices were already present in Macpherson’s English prose poems. Most obviously, Macpherson’s Ossianic poems feature countless scenes of characters singing. On a more symbolic level, voice functions as a metatrope for the connection between primitive humanity and nature. For one thing, the Highland landscape that gives the poems their tenebrous tinta responds to characters’ voices in kind: the hills, forests, and seas of Caledonia “sigh,” “lament,” and echo “the remembered voices of the past.”11 Structurally, many of the individual poems within the collection, including The Song of Selma, Oina-morul, and The Death of Cuthullin, use voices as framing devices. Ossian-as-narrator usually begins his song—that is, a particular poem—by meditating on the relationship between voices and memory, similar to the invocation of the muses in classical epic. The voices he hears, or imagines, merge with his memories and together summon into presence the epic-tragic narrative that constitutes the poem’s “story.” It does not matter whether these voices are real or imagined, since either way they make the past present. They manifest histories. T h e P oe t S i ngs   •   21

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For an example of a typical Ossianic opening, take the first few lines of Oina-morul. (Note that, in trying to follow Cesarotti’s syntax as much as possible, my translation of his Italian back into English is not entirely idiomatic.) Macpherson As flies the unconstant sun, over Larmon’s grassy hill; so pass the tales of old, along my soul, by night! when bards are removed to their place; when harps are hung in Selma’s hall; then comes a voice to Ossian, and awakes his soul! It is the voice of years that are gone! they roll before me, with all their deeds! I seize the tales, as they pass, and pour them forth in song. (Oina-morul, p. 323)

Cesarotti

Cesarotti in English

Come rotto dall’ombre il sol s’aggira sopra l’erboso Larmo, in cotal guisa pasan [sic] per l’alma mia le storie antiche, nel silenzio notturno. Allor che al sonno dansi i cantori e nella sala appese

As the sun broken through the shade roams over grassy Larmo, in the same way

taccion l’arpe di Selma, allor sommessa entro gli orecchi miei scende una voce l’anima a risvegliar; è la voce questa degli anni che passaro. Essi l’eccelse gesta dei duci, onde son gravi il grembo, mi schierano dinnanzi; io sorgo e afferro le fuggitive storie, e fuor le sgorgo entro vena di canto.

the ancient stories pass along my soul, in the nocturnal silence. Now that to sleep the singers give themselves and in the hall [are] hung, quiet, the harps of Selma, now murmuring through my ears arrives a voice to reawaken my soul; it is the voice, this, of the years that are gone. They line up the exalted deeds of the chieftains, which are heavy in [my] heart, before me; I rise and seize the fugitive histories, and pour them out in a stream of song. (Oinamora, lines 1–13)

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The lines overflow with voices and metaphors, even more so in Cesarotti’s translation because of how he expands Macpherson’s prose into poetry. Tales are like the passage of time, voices are like memories, and they are present, mobile, and material such that they “roll before” the poet and can be “seized” from thin air. Once Ossian has transduced the voice of the past into a story, it becomes invested with the capacity to traverse temporal distances.12 Following this introduction, or similar ones in the other poems, Ossian begins the story proper. Yet even then, within the story, Ossian’s narrative mode continues to switch between action and reflection, pausing the epic passages to linger over lyric moments. In both Macpherson’s and Cesarotti’s versions, Ossian’s stylistic register frequently changes as well, moving abruptly back and forth between colloquialism and lyricism. These registral shifts temporarily redirect attention from the story’s action to how Ossian is telling it. The effect of all of this is to make it seem as though the present is not the moment of the stories’ action but the moment of Ossian’s singing them. This in turn emphasizes the poet’s vocal “performance,” his delivery of the content, as co-constitutive of the song itself. As Alfred Lord wrote of the oral epic tradition in his foundational 1964 Singer of Tales, “Every performance is a separate song [. . .] The singer of tales is at once the tradition and an individual creator.”13 Cesarotti thought of Ossian in a similar way, two centuries before Lord’s study. He understood the “true Ossian” as being any version that conveyed the poet’s “voice,” as literary historian Paola Gambarota has argued, and not simply his words.14 Cesarotti thus described his own role as being “in between translator and author”: his task was to find, and if necessary create, the techniques for inscribing both Ossian’s tales and his voice into Italian.15 By privileging the voice within the song, Cesarotti cannily turned translation into a labor of poiesis.16 Put differently, for the poet’s voice come off the printed page, to be separable from the content it delivered, Cesarotti had to distinguish it from the poetic voices that Italian readers were used to. One way he did this was by mostly avoiding the default versification form of Italian epic, the ottava rima (rhyming octaves made up of hendecasyllabic, or eleven-syllable, lines), famously used by Ariosto and Tasso in their Renaissance epic poems.17 He instead set Ossian primarily in blank (unrhyming) hendecasyllables (endecasillabi sciolti). Cesarotti’s contemporaries would have instantly recognized the blank hendecasyllables as a rejection of the “facile musicality” associated with more standard Italian verse forms and their songlike rhyme schemes.18 Included among such forms would have been adaptations of Tasso in popular T h e P oe t S i ngs   •   23

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gondola songs, improvisers’ “singsong” extemporizations, and the strambotto, or single-stanza ottava rima, which was an important vehicle for lyric performance in the Renaissance and therefore a shorthand for vernacular Italian oral poetry.19 By selecting blank hendecasyllables, Cesarotti ensured that Ossian would sound decidedly other to Italian standards of sung poetry, whether high style, popular, or in between. Still, blank hendecasyllables alone were not unusual enough, so Cesarotti also did something that was unheard of in Italian poetics at the time. He mixed different meters and rhyme schemes, even switching between them within the very same poems. He did not reject ottava rima or other rhyming forms entirely, then, but used them strategically to create specific local effects. For example, several poems break from endecasillabi sciolti into passages of ottava or terza rima, with the unexpected appearance of these rhyming stanzas signaling interludes of “song” within the overarching frame of Ossian’s narration. Even more surprising was how, in other places, Cesarotti interrupted the hendecasyllabic meter with bursts of four-, five-, six-, or even three-syllable lines (some of which were rarely if ever used in poetic Italian), and vice versa, with one long line stretching out amidst consistently shorter ones. Cesarotti justified these unprecedented combinations by arguing that poetic form had to accommodate emotional content—regardless of rules and conventions.20 The implication was that Ossian’s primitive song had originated in impassioned vocal effusions, not from following arbitrary conventions, and submitting his song to modern Italian expectations would destroy its most essential feature: the relationship between narration and emotion. Cesarotti broke even more conventions of Italian poetry by adopting Macpherson’s characteristically uneven prosody, that is, the irregular patterns of rhythm, stress, and intonation found in the English source material. Notice how in the excerpt above the uneven flow of Macpherson’s English prose makes it difficult to grasp the meaning, the basic “plot,” though the language itself is simple and ordinary. (This is partly why the Ossianic poems can be read as lyric poetry rather than epic.) Macpherson’s sentences are grammatically long but rhythmically and conceptually choppy, broken up by unexpected punctuation and intervening clauses. Cesarotti’s Italian verse is necessarily less freely rhythmical than Macpherson’s prose, yet it nonetheless produces a similar effect. In order to Ossianize the tendency toward what he called the “periodic swaying” (ondeggiamento periodico) of hendecasyllabic meter in Italian, Cesarotti fragmented his long poetic lines with punctua­ tion, enjambments, and syntax so as to create varied accentuation patterns 24  •   T h e P oe t S i ngs

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within them.21 (Note that in Italian verse, meter is determined by the position of the last accented syllable: an endecasillabo is defined by having its last strong accent on the tenth syllable, but there can be ten, eleven, or twelve syllables in the line, with multiple internal possible accentuation patterns, so long as the last stressed syllable is the tenth; this is different from English verse meter, which is based on poetic feet.) In addition to fragmenting the lines, Cesarotti also extended them by playing with hypermeter: in line 8 of the excerpt, for instance, the final accent falls on the eleventh rather than tenth syllable, unsettling the flow of hendecasyllables. Cesarotti easily could have avoided this without altering the meaning of the phrase by writing “la voce è” (eliding the two e’s into one syllable) instead of “è la voce,” but he clearly chose not to. He purposefully used the hypermeter to bring out the phrase “it is the voice,” drawing attention to both the “voice” Ossian hears and his own voice as he sings of it. In sum, Cesarotti’s Ossianic prosody evokes the experience of listening to someone tell a story extemporaneously, with multiple asides, run-on sentences, and other hallmarks of everyday speech. But in a broader sense, Cesarotti’s Ossianic prosody evokes the sounding voice by redirecting attention from meaning to rhythm. Rhythm in poetry, according to Simon Jarvis, is “an element in [the] historically saturated, learnt, inculcated and inflicted corporeal practice of thinking”; as such, poetic rhythm invites a kind of practice of history through “using” and “losing your voice into those of the many dead who have gone before you.”22 Unfamiliar and irregular rhythmic patterns, particularly within otherwise long-breathed endecasillabi sciolti, disrupt silent, complacent reading for meaning by confronting the reader with the reminder of voiced, corporeal language. For Cesarotti’s readers, that reminder would have included the histories of Italian song and poetry being rejected therein, as well as how the Italian Ossian reimagined such histories. Cesarotti’s dynamic rhythms, accents, and metrical forms imbued his translated words with traces of voice—not as the swaying, facile musicality that was so ubiquitous as to pass unmarked, but as the disruption of both meaning and expectations through corporeal experience. So important was this sense of poetic voice as corporeal history to Cesarotti’s project that he even dared criticize Homer to make the point. When it came to expressing feeling, the Iliad and Odyssey were inferior to Ossian’s Fingal and other poems because of Homer’s “uniform” singing. “The sound of [Homer’s] narrations really resemble the song of cicadas,” Cesarotti wrote, while Ossian’s variety and irregularity avoided such “monotony” and instead made his narrations “tender” and “touching.”23 It was the sound of T h e P oe t S i ngs   •   25

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Ossian’s voice, or what Cesarotti presented as Ossian’s voice, that infused his narrations with feeling. In Cesarotti’s words, reading Ossian felt less like poetry and more like “hearing an ordinary man recount a fact,” because Ossian’s narrations lacked the singsong monotony associated with the Italian vernacular and classical epic traditions alike.24 It is perhaps no coincidence that in the 1780s opera critic Stefano Arteaga held up “the inflections made by a man in his ordinary voice” as a guide for composing touching vocal melodies. By the last decades of the century, as Lockhart has shown, the figure of the bard would become emblematic of speechlike vocal writing in Italian serious opera.25 I suggest that this later bardic figure of the Italian opera stage first took shape in Cesarotti’s Ossian, thanks to the translator’s theory of the natural, originary connection between feelings and voice.

rough men speak from feeling Shifting from the poems themselves to their translator’s commentary, it becomes evident how Cesarotti thought his translations would change the course of literature. He sought to demonstrate that poetry could move forward only by returning to its originary source—what he conceived as the spontaneous expression of one’s individual experiences of the world. Over the millennia, he claimed, classicist canons and conventions had limited literature to increasingly paler imitations of the same few subjects. Instead of imitating models, modern authors ought to imitate nature itself, as the first poets had done; they could then regain access to the infinite natural array of passions and, from there, create unlimited modes of expressing them. Cesarotti had first begun developing this theory of literature in his Ragionamento sopra l’origine e i progressi dell’arte poetica (Essay on the origin and progress of poetry, 1762), a prolegomenon to his translations of Voltaire’s tragedies, but eighteenth-century French plays based on classical models were not exactly an ideal vehicle for putting his theories into practice.26 Through translating Macpherson’s Ossian, however, Cesarotti was able to show, rather than tell, his revised history of literature. Showing rather than telling was necessary because the inspiration behind his new history—Vico’s dense, labyrinthine treatise—was at that time largely unknown and would remain so until the nineteenth century.27 Nevertheless, certain elements of Vico’s philosophy diffused into Italian culture in the late eighteenth century even though they were not necessarily recognized as 26  •   T h e P oe t S i ngs

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Vico’s. Cesarotti filtered the Scienza nuova through his Poesie di Ossian, both the poems and the accompanying commentary, such that Vichian notions of song, civilization, and history reached readers who had never actually encountered Vico qua Vico. The historiographical premise of Vico’s Scienza nuova is that human history is at once progressive and cyclical. This history moves through three distinct stages, each defined by the inhabitants’ mode of interacting with the world around them. The first, earliest stage is the age of the gods. (It was not that Vico claimed that gods walked among humans, but that he believed that primordial humans were little better than beasts and, lacking social structures, understood everything as the work of gods.) Next came the age of heroes, in which societies began to form around leaders for protection; humanity was still primitive, violent, and nonrational, communicating primarily through tropes. (Though tropes are now often associated with clichés and conventions, that is not at all how Vico saw them; for him, tropic language simply meant figurative or nonliteral language.) Rationality and legitimate government finally developed in the third stage, the age of the human.28 In some ways these three stages resonate with later Scottish Enlightenment theories of stadial history, but unlike those theories, Vico’s does not claim that humanity progresses in an unbroken line toward perfectibility. Vico’s theory is distinguished by a process he termed ricorso, in which a society’s trajectory is interrupted and its people returned to an earlier stage. Society must then evolve again from barbarism to primitive simplicity to a second, and improved, age of humanity.29 Significantly for Cesarotti, Vico’s theory of ricorso implied that returning to an earlier, primitive stage was not only possible but could help moderns attain a more perfect age of humanity. Cesarotti presented his Ossian translations as a time capsule from Vico’s age of heroes, and thus as containing the key to recuperating long-lost originary poetic language: “Speaking in abstract and universal aphorisms belongs to the philosophers, and to lazy rationalists. Rough and passionate men individualize [singolarizzano], and speak from feeling. If this is the most essential quality of true poetic language, as Vico claims, Ossian is a greater poet than any other. No one else is richer in sentiments and scarcer in aphorisms than he.”30 Unlike Cesarotti’s contemporaries, who relied on aphorisms and conventions to universalize their experiences, heroic age people were incapable of such abstract ideas and instead spoke from “feeling.” Poetry, then, meant speaking from feeling; poetic tropes, in turn, ought to originate not in universalizing conventions but in singularized experience. T h e P oe t S i ngs   •   27

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But how could someone in the age of humanity speak this “true poetic language” when reason had long since disciplined feelings into generic passions? For rational moderns, the process of representing a feeling in literary terms began with identifying a discrete yet abstract passion, assigning it the accepted but arbitrary signifier (e.g., love), and then rendering the signifier back into representational language (e.g., I burn). The problem, as Cesarotti had argued in his earlier essay on the history of poetry, was that these categorizable, transpersonal, and universalized passions were merely watered-down representations of feelings, dictated by conventions rather than “singularized” experience. Feelings in their originary forms were infinite, because beyond the limits of categorization; individual, because ascertained through singularized experience; and interior, because construed as a source that could be spoken “from” (rather than “about”). While the end result of the act of primitive expression—a metaphor or metonym—might seem the same as the modern one, the process was utterly different. For Vichian primitives in the age of heroes, there was no intermediate rationalizing process, no definition of an abstract passion, nor was there any assignment of an arbitrary signifier. As Cesarotti read it, Ossian and his people did not represent feelings by making recourse to shared conventions that linked disparate things; they presented feelings by expressing, through tropes, the singularity of passions and experiences they could not otherwise name. What this adds up to is that Cesarotti interpreted “Ossian’s” (Macpherson’s) abundant tropic language as neither “lazy” rhetoric nor conventionalized figures of speech, but as proof of the inherent connections between particular things in the heroic age worldview. The most important inherent connection these tropes revealed was the one between nature, feelings, and voices. That these particular things were inherently connected, rather than brought together by rational means, was evidenced by the fact that nature and voices provided the most common sources of tropes for feeling in the Ossianic poems. Consider in this light another of Cesarotti’s references to Vico in the Ossian commentary. In the first canto of Fingal, Ossian presents the character Svaran’s speaking voice as the rumble of a brewing storm. “Vico would recognize with pleasure” Svaran’s “crude savageness,” Cesarotti wrote in the attached endnote.31 While Vichian ideas of stadial history and poetic language are interwoven throughout his Ossian, Cesarotti cited Vico by name only a few times; here, the callout serves to mark Svaran’s savageness as belonging to the age of heroes. Yet, more than that, it shows Cesarotti’s own 28  •   T h e P oe t S i ngs

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association of poetic language with voice. Ossian conveys Svaran’s savagery with a nature trope: the rumbling thunder presents both the sound of Svaran’s voice and the feeling (fear or apprehension) that his voice engenders in those who hear it. For Cesarotti this one brief moment encapsulated the central Ossianic links between tropic language, voice, nature, and feeling, along with the Vichian historiography required to comprehend it all. By capturing Ossian’s rhythms and accents through unusual Italian versification, Cesarotti proclaimed that he had also captured the immediacy and vocality of a primitive song that expressed nonrational, uncategorizable, originary passions. In his Italian Ossian the voice of infinite feelings resounded, ready to liberate modern literature by heralding a ricorso to an earlier, simpler, more poetic stage of history. And, by infusing the Scienza nuova into his own voice-centric translations, Cesarotti altered a crucial element of Vico’s philosophy. His Ossian turned Vico’s emphasis on the historical role of poetry into an emphasis on the voices that sing poetic histories.

the breath of the hills Many of these connections can be seen at work in Cesarotti’s translation of Comala, a “dramatic poem [poema drammatico]” included in the Poesie di Ossian. Comala is the story of Ossian’s father, Fingal, and his tragic, eponymous beloved, and it hinges on voice as a trope for feeling, memory, and living presence. When the dramatic poem opens, the hunt has just finished and celebrations are in order, signaled by the huntresses’ calls to exchange the bow for the song-harp. Comala anxiously awaits Fingal’s return from battle, convinced she sees and hears portents of his death. One of Fingal’s warriors, Idallano, jealously implies to her that Fingal has died in battle: “Our leaders scattered across the hills, / Nor will they hear again the voice of Fingal.”32 Comala believes Idallano, despite seeing Fingal for herself in the distance. Comala mistrusts her own eyes, but she believes her ears. The sound of Fingal’s voice from a nearby hill affirms that he still lives, and Comala realizes that she was misled. Overcome by sudden joy at hearing him alive, she heads “offstage” with her harp to collect herself. In the meantime the chorus again sings about song (“Here will be heard / Voices of celebration / Voices of the hunt”).33 But when the songs end we learn that tragedy has struck: Comala has died from her excessive emotion. (Cesarotti attempted to explain T h e P oe t S i ngs   •   29

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this bizarre turn of events by citing a story from Livy in which two Roman women died after switching too abruptly from despair to joy; people in the age of heroes felt no distinction between the emotional and the material, apparently.)34 Fingal silently mourns while the drama ends with another collective song. Tellingly, the chorus of bards laments Comala’s death as, first and foremost, the loss of her “sweet voice,” and predicts that Comala’s “harmonious voice will remain in the ears,” “thoughts,” and “dreams” of future generations of young girls.35 It is not only the Ossianic bard’s voice that will keep history alive in song, but transgenerational memories of Comala’s voice, too, as a metonym for her life. In Cesarotti’s translation, Comala dramatizes the Vichian premise that heroic age people communicated through poetic rather than rational language, and it does so by making voice the metatrope for poetic language itself. In both Macpherson’s and Cesarotti’s renditions, voices mediate and even manifest the world in ways visual tropes cannot. The sounds of voices establish presence, whether in body (when Comala hears Fingal’s voice) or in memory (when the girls “hear” Comala’s voice after her death). Similarly, a lack or silence of voices connotes death (as in Idallano’s lie to Comala about Fingal, and then in his realization that Comala has died). Much of this is already in Macpherson, but Cesarotti embellished these tropes further. Take, for instance, Fingal’s first words about Comala: Macpherson I heard a voice like the breeze of my hills. Is it the huntress of Galmal? (Comala, p. 108)

Cesarotti

Cesarotti in English

Ma parmi aver inteso But I seem to have heard Voce simile al soffio a voice like the breath Di fresco venticello, of the fresh breeze, Che spira da’ miei colli. Ah saría That breathes from my hills. Ah,   questa   might it be La voce della bella the voice of the beautiful Cacciatrice di Galma [. . .]? huntress of Galma? (Comala, 2:16, lines 209–14)

Cesarotti extended Macpherson’s terse phrasing to dwell further on the trope (for example, he repeats voce twice for emphasis). Nature, voice, and feeling 30  •   T h e P oe t S i ngs

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thus intertwine: Fingal’s love for his homeland is a metonym for his love for Comala, and both are expressed together, not through the abstract idea and arbitrary signifier love, but through Fingal’s hearing in her “voice” the “breath” of his home. The metaphor of voice and breath operates on a metatextual level as well, in the long-breathed poetic line (line 212) that flows out from between a scattering of shorter lines. The longer line length (that is, the unexpected endecasillabo among the settenari), generated by Cesarotti’s pleonasm, draws attention to the rhythm, the very breath, of the poetry. Similar moments occur throughout Comala, as Cesarotti’s embellishments of Macpherson’s prose foreground the link between voices and the poetic expression of singularized feeling. For example, in Macpherson, Fingal will be simply “alone” without Comala; in Cesarotti, he will be “mute and full of pain,” his silent voice indicative of his internal suffering. In Macpherson, Comala’s memory is only a “voice” without adjectives; in Cesarotti, Comala’s spectral voice will be “sweet” and “harmonious,” as she herself once was, and as her memory will be.36 All told, it was not enough for Cesarotti that Ossian’s characters constantly sing about voices. In his Italian translations, characters self-reflexively sing about feeling-as-voice in order to performatively lend the words vocality, reminding readers to hear Ossian’s prosody as vocal sound made poetry.

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Comala serves as a through line for the second half of this chapter because it offers a salient example of how Cesarotti’s voice-centric project made its way into music culture. After all, an operatic setting was a natural fit for this particular Ossianic excerpt since, as a “dramatic poem,” Comala is not narrated by Ossian himself but rather “performed” by dramatis personae who speak and sing like characters in a play (see figure 1). In his English Ossian, Macpherson had noted that the “original” Gaelic Comala was set in a “variety of meters,” which he cited (or invented) as evidence that it had been sung on special occasions, likely thinking of ancient Greek tragedy as a model. These mixed meters were not reflected on the printed page in Macpherson’s versions, since the English Comala appears, just like the rest of his Ossian, in paragraphs of prose rather than in verse (see figure 2). Cesarotti, however, made the poem’s musical-theatrical potential explicit. His Comala looks suspiciously like a libretto. Unlike in Cesarotti’s other Ossianic poems, in Comala some blocks of text are indented in typical opera libretto fashion, as T h e P oe t S i ngs   •   31

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figure 1.  Dramatis personae (“Attori”) in Cesarotti, Comala. In Poesie di Ossian, reprinted in Cesarotti, Opere, 2:4.

figure 2.  Representative page from an early edition of James Macpherson’s Comala, with dialogue in prose, for comparison with Cesarotti’s libretto version of Comala. In Macpherson, Fingal, an ancient Epic Poem, Dublin, 1762, 97.

if to indicate “numbers” like arias and choruses, while the rest of the text is typeset like recitative (compare figures 3 and 4).37 Cesarotti also supplied the “variety of meters” from Macpherson’s lost Gaelic “original” by combining endecasillabi with quinari, settenari, senari, and quaternari as needed to express different moods and feelings. 32  •   T h e P oe t S i ngs

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figure 3.  Sample page from Cesarotti’s translation of Comala, showing the libretto-like layout. In Poesie di Ossian, reprinted in Cesarotti, Opere, 2:17.

figure 4.  Sample pages from Cesarotti’s translation of Fingal—in hendecasyllabic verse, with Ossian as narrator—for comparison with Comala excerpt. Note the difference in layout (e.g., indentations, stanzas, etc.) between Fingal as a “poem,” here, and Comala as a “libretto,” as shown in figure 3. In Cesarotti, Fingal, in Poesie di Ossian, reprinted in Cesarotti, Opere, 2:144–45.

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By translating Comala as a libretto, though one unconventional in meter and form, Cesarotti proclaimed that Ossian had superseded Homer in myriad ways: by fitting poetic form to feeling, avoiding monotony, and composing in all the major ancient genres of epic, lyric, and now tragic (i.e., dramatic). This proclamation was self-serving, of course, since it suggested that Cesarotti’s own Ossianic song would reintroduce poetic language into the modern versions of those three ancient categories.38 And what was the Settecento’s version of ancient sung tragedy if not serious opera, particularly the Metastasian dramma per musica? Yet Cesarotti’s inscription of heroic age voices was not so easily wrangled into modern music—not until another voice-obsessed Italian poet took it up for his own purposes.

fragmented and varied versification Cesarotti’s rejection of both cantabile musicality and rationalist universalizing made his Poesie di Ossian unlike anything readers had ever seen, and indeed, for these and other reasons, scholars today give it an important place in the history of modern Italian literature.39 But these unusual aspects also made Ossian more or less impossible to set to music, at least by the standards of 1770s Italian practice. According to Saverio Mattei, for one, Cesarotti’s approach to translation was regrettably unmusical. In his 1779 Osservazioni sopra i pezzi lirici e drammatici di Ossian (Observations on the lyric and dramatic parts of Ossian), die-hard Metastasian fan Mattei argued that Cesarotti’s mixed meters and irregular accentuation patterns would impede any attempt at musical setting. Comala in particular, he noted, should have been fitted to Metastasian style, just as Mattei himself had done when translating the Hebrew Psalms into modern Italian. Mattei did acknowledge that the “excessive uniformity” of meter in Metastasio “had sometimes impoverished music and poetry,” but “the regular meter of Metastasian lyric” would have made the Ossianic poems “one hundred times worthier” and given Cesarotti “the pleasure of hearing them sung in music.” 40 In the transition from poetry to opera, Metastasio became a modern double for Homer. With their rhythmic uniformity and canonicity, Metastasio and Homer represented everything that Cesarotti had been trying to disrupt in the first place. It was fitting, then, that the musical style that seemed most suited to Cesarotti’s project had also emerged from a rejection of the Metastasian.41 In the summer of 1776 Cesarotti replied thus to a Viennese acquaintance who 34  •   T h e P oe t S i ngs

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had mentioned the idea of an Italian Ossian set to music by Gluck: “I would be most delighted to see one of the Celtic bard’s pieces in rhyme set to music by that famous maestro [Gluck]. I have no knowledge whatsoever of this art, but nonetheless it seems to me that such imitative versification, fragmented and varied, would generate extraordinary musical beauty.” 42 Who better to make the Celtic bard sing again than Gluck, the composer who had famously given voice to another string-plucking poet fourteen years prior? Cesarotti might even have encountered a version of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice in Padua, where it had been performed in the Santo as a kind of secular oratorio during the early 1770s, or in Venice, where a re-setting of Calzabigi’s libretto by Ferdinando Bertoni had premiered half a year earlier for Carnival.43 Whether or not he had any firsthand experience with Gluck’s music, Cesarotti seemingly regarded Gluck’s aesthetic sensibilities as sympathetic to his own. Perhaps what Mattei heard as the unmusicality of Cesarotti’s translations was simply a different mode of musicality—one closer to Gluck’s (a style Mattei did not much appreciate either). Gluck never did set Cesarotti’s Ossian, but his collaborator Calzabigi must have sensed a kindred spirit. He took up the task of revising Comala into a functional libretto as part of his ongoing mission to innovate Italian opera. For Calzabigi the Ossianic figure occupied an interstitial position between the immediacy of vocal performance and textual inscriptions of such performance. The librettist’s take on Ossian emerges out of some little-known commentary buried in the notes to his mock-epic Il Lulliade, which is a dressing down of Lully and Rameau that denies them any share in Calzabigi’s selfproclaimed invention of declamatory operatic singing. Calzabigi explained: Voltaire supposes that there is no poetic merit in Ossian: he compares him to one of our improvisers who, upon the themes they are given, extemporaneously, to the sound of a guitar or other stringed instrument, sing in different meters whatever comes into their heads. Voltaire was very wrong; [. . .] not even in ex tempore prose does one make compositions like those by Ossian, or supposedly by Ossian; [. . .] if Ossian didn’t write them down, he still must have meditated on them for a long time and, gifted with an extraordinary memory, then sung them to the harp. The famous Gluck was capable of composing an entire musical work without writing a note of it; and of singing it, whenever he was asked, without a single variation; many months later, and when it was necessary, he wrote down the notes.44

The classicizing Frenchman Voltaire had lumped all oral traditions together as equally lowbrow, such that only written verse, understood as the T h e P oe t S i ngs   •   35

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work of a sole, rational, literate author, was accorded aesthetic value. (This shows why Voltaire’s tragedies were not a good match for Cesarotti’s Vichian history.) Calzabigi disagreed with Voltaire’s entire premise by insisting that Ossian’s verses had, in a way, been written down: “extraordinary memory” operates here as a non-graphological technology of inscription. If Ossian had composed not on paper but through such extraordinary acts of memory, then every irregularity had been preserved for an expressive purpose. In other words, Ossian’s songs seemed to have been improvised precisely because their author had “meditated” on how to evoke that response in his listeners. Ossian’s modern counterpart was not some petty cantimbanco improvising mediocre verses in the piazza, but the “famous Gluck.” Or was he? In positioning Ossian as transhistorical kin to Gluck, it might seem that Calzabigi was giving himself the Cesarottian role of translator, tasked with inventing a method for capturing the sounds of voices with Italian poetry. And certainly, writing in 1784, he had portrayed his collaboration with Gluck along those lines—but it was instead Calzabigi’s own voice that had been the Ossianic one, with Gluck as his obliging translator. As the poet told it, Count Durazzo, the theater intendant at Vienna, heard Calzabigi recite the “poem Orfeo” and wanted it performed with music at the imperial court theater. Finding someone to set Calzabigi’s new poem to music was not so easy, since none of the major opera composers at that time, Calzabigi claimed, “understood what I meant by ‘declamatory music.’ ” He ended up with Gluck, who “did not pronounce our language [Italian] very well.” The Italian poet therefore demonstrated with his own voice exactly what he wanted the composer to notate in the score, especially the vocal sounds and rhythms that exceeded inscription in the poetry proper: “The nuances I put into my expression, the pauses, the slowness, the quickness, the intonation, now stressed, now level and glossed over.” According to Calzabigi, Gluck had composed Orfeo by translating the poet’s vocal “performance” into musical notation. In Calzabigi’s self-aggrandizing narrative, his voice had effectively made Gluck’s career by providing the composer with the “basic ingredients” for the “creation” of “dramatic opera.” 45 More than that, however, the story shows how Calzabigi tried to protect his poetry by writing the minutiae of his own voice into the musical-poetic text. He intended to constrain singers’ voices by leaving precious little room for them to exceed the content they were given.

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contain your voice Looking back now to Calzabigi and Gluck’s 1762 Orfeo ed Euridice through Cesarotti’s 1763 Poesie di Ossian, certain technical and thematic similarities begin to emerge around the themes of voice, song, nature, and speech. Consider the Ossianic resonances of Orfeo’s first solo moment (act 1, scene 1). After he sends the crowd of mourners away from Euridice’s tomb, he sings a short aria (in some versions designated as a cavatina), “Chiamo il mio ben così.” These are simple lines of rhyming quinari, sprinkled with phrases lifted from the Orpheus retelling in Virgil’s Georgics (book 4, lines 455–56). Together these features mark the aria as “song,” and a self-referential one at that. Orfeo’s first “aria” utterance engages directly with the relationship between “singing” and singing in that he “sings” in order to describe what his voice does: “Chiamo il mio ben” (I call my beloved). When the dead Euridice does not reply, Orfeo breaks out of his song and sinks back into speech (set by Gluck as accompanied recitative): Euridice! Euridice! Eurydice! Eurydice! Ombra cara, ove sei? Piange il Dear shade, where are you? Your   tuo sposo   husband weeps Ti domanda agli Dei, And asks the gods for you, A’ mortali ti chiede, e sparse Asks mortals of you, [but] strewn to   a’ venti   the winds Son le lagrime sue, i suoi lamenti. Are his tears, his laments.

Here the recitative text is paratactic, and the varying line lengths are fragmented further into smaller syntactic units through punctuation and repetition. Parataxis, as the juxtaposition of clauses without clear indications of subordination or coordination, was an important technique in eighteenthcentury dramatic lyric, while the flurry of punctuation marks is reminiscent of the ellipses, dashes, and extra-grammatical exclamations popularized by contemporary English sentimental novels as the visual markers of impassioned speech.46 Calzabigi’s approach to distinguishing these effusive vocal outbursts from song-as-song is strikingly similar to the techniques Cesarotti was using at the same time to differentiate Ossian’s voice from the facile musicality of Italian poetry. The Ossianic-Orphic sympathies continue from there. Orfeo’s utterances, like Ossian’s, are often performative (in the Austinian sense), accomplishing the

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very thing they are saying—as when Orfeo calls out for Euridice, or describes his lamentation. Also like Ossian, Orfeo sings about voices melding with nature and with memory: his voice teaches a song, which consists solely of Euridice’s name, to the surrounding landscape (“The shores [. . .] and the forests / learned it from me”), and then physically inscribes that song onto nature (“on every [tree] trunk / Miserable Orfeo, unhappy Orfeo wrote [. . .] Euridice”). Orfeo does hear responses to his lament at the end of every strophe, but they are only nature’s voices (“L’Eco risponde”; “Va mormorando il rio / E mi risponde”). Like Ossian’s Scottish Highlands, Orfeo’s natural surroundings resound with the memories of those who are absent and the voices of those who, left behind, lament them. In both of these echoing landscapes, Caledonian and Thracian, voices blur into the sounds of nature, and “written” words, whether as memory or type, strain to preserve their expressive accents. Yet Orfeo’s voice differs from Ossian’s in one deeply significant way. Unlike Ossian’s, Orfeo’s voice cannot make history present; it cannot (yet) make Euridice present. To frame this distinction from another angle, Calzabigi did not invest Orfeo’s voice with such power because he needed to limit voices, not just evoke them, with his written words. Unlike Cesarotti, he was writing a script for real, live, present singers, and so had to worry about their voices exceeding his script. This was his solution to the operatic voice problem, as delineated in his preface (1769) to Alceste (1767), which deals principally with Gluck and Calzabigi’s second operatic collaboration but is typically read as applying retroactively to Orfeo as well. As “Gluck” (ventriloquized by Calzabigi) put it in the preface, he wished to “free music from all the abuses that have crept in either through mistaken vanity on the part of singer, or through excessive complacence on the part of composers. [. . .] I have tried to avoid stopping an actor [. . .] in the middle of a word merely so that he might show off the flexibility of his voice in a long roulade.” 47 The pleasures and excesses of singing voices were part of the business of opera, but too many allowances for the sonic spectacle had permitted singers’ voices to “abuse” the poetic-musical script with ornamentation and embellishments. If, however, those voices could be proactively restrained by the notes and rhythms on the page, then there would be no wiggle room for singers’ malfeasance. Still, as a verbal and musical script brought to life by real bodies, voices, and instruments, Orfeo would only work so long as singers acquiesced to following its script. Calzabigi and Gluck had established that voices could be captured in writing, but not completely so. What was to be done about the qualities of voice that exceeded notation, like timbre, tone, and inflection? 38  •   T h e P oe t S i ngs

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As the opera’s authority figure decrees, they must be disciplined through the action of the story. Following Orfeo’s futile cavatinas and recitatives, Amore (Cupid) appears and tells Orfeo that if he pulls himself together enough to do his job, he will get his wife back: “If you can placate the Furies, monsters, and traitorous Death with your singing [canto], your beloved Euridice will return with you to the light of day” (1.2).48 His voice is now officially invested with the power to make the past present, but with a major caveat. As we know, Orfeo must bring Euridice out of the Underworld without looking back at her, but Amore adds that Orfeo cannot tell her why he does not look back. This second injunction was Calzabigi’s own addition to the Orpheus myth: it allowed for a dramatic scene between Orfeo and Euridice while also laying the foundation for the voice-restraining moral of Calzabigi’s story of operatic reform. Amore goes on to deliver an aria in which he commands Orfeo to control not merely his eyes and speech but the very sounds of his voice: “Withhold your gaze, / restrain your accents” (Gli sguardi trattieni, / Affrena gli accenti). Accenti are “words” in poetic Italian, but with the strong connotation of voiced words; the singular accento denotes tone, inflection, or accent—that is, the sonorous qualities of voiced language. Furthermore, in the Settecento accento also referred to a singer’s stylistic and expressive vocal inflections, including embellishments and ornamentation.49 For Gluck and Calzabigi’s Orfeo, losing control of his voice becomes just as perilous as losing control of his gaze. Amore’s prohibition covers both words and their sonic-vocal surplus, meaning that Orfeo has to watch not just what he says but also how he says—or sings—it. Pushing this reading further, the opera becomes a story of how the archetypal singer learns to follow orders, to sing as commanded and no more. In Gluck’s setting, Orfeo’s cavatina in the Underworld (“Deh! placatevi con me”) is restrained, simple, and text focused, just as Calzabigi desired it. (In the hands of the Venetian cohort who rewrote Orfeo fourteen years later, that would change significantly, as we’ll see in chapter 2.) In his song to the Furies, Orfeo even parrots Amore’s words—Amore’s “se placar puoi” becomes Orfeo’s “Deh! placatevi”—as if to emphasize that he is simply a vehicle for the god’s command. Orfeo placates his cruel, clamoring listeners by doing precisely as the god—a stand-in for the poet—says. His earlier laments and effusions were powerless, but this divinely authorized song achieves what was once impossible and makes Euridice present. Not without conditions, however. Before long Calzabigi shows what happens to those who do not contain their voices. On their way out of the T h e P oe t S i ngs   •   39

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Underworld, Orfeo commands the confused Euridice to stay quiet and respect his authority (“Ma vieni, e taci. / Vieni: appaga il tuo consorte”). Angst-ridden, afraid he no longer loves her, and unable to elicit a response, Euridice does the exact thing Orfeo cannot afford to do and lets her voice spill out. She sings the agitated aria “Che fiero momento,” which hews closer to a traditional prima donna aria than anything else in the opera. In another context Euridice’s aria would pass unmarked. But here, after Orfeo’s consistently restrained singing, Euridice’s emotional and vocal outburst spells trouble by exceeding the limits established by Amore, Orfeo, and Calzabigi. Her refusal to acquiesce to her commanded silence finally forces Orfeo to look at her. Once he does, she disappears. Orfeo has contravened half of Amore’s commands, yet he nevertheless receives a lieto fine. (Anything else would have been shocking until the 1780s, when characters who died onstage were actually allowed to remain dead.) Amore brings Euridice back to life after what might be the most vocally restrained lament of all time, “Che farò senza Euridice?” Maybe, then, the deus ex machina is justified by more than operatic convention. Maybe it is also Orfeo’s reward for confining his voice to the score and libretto. Maybe that was the real test the whole time.

che farò senza . . . comala? In the common view, it seems as though Calzabigi’s efforts to contain voices with writing worked. Orfeo ed Euridice is given an important position in histories of eighteenth-century music, an obligatory stop in survey courses on the road to Mozart and da Ponte. Even setting aside the Germanic prejudices in music historiography that are responsible for giving so much attention to Gluck, the fact remains that in Italy, too, Orfeo went through numerous productions and reworkings from the late 1760s on. I’d suggest, though, that these Italian Orfeos attest more to the fascination the Orphic figure held for Italian audiences—and to the affordances of its plot for playing with musical conventions—than to any enduring desire to apply the Viennese reforms to opera in Italy. And so, with an eye toward marking the convergence of the Orphic with the Ossianic (and, by extension, with the Cesarottian and Vichian), I turn here to Cesarotti’s Comala as revised by Calzabigi. Significantly, Calzabigi wrote his Comala libretto before Cesarotti’s Ossian had gained much cul40  •   T h e P oe t S i ngs

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tural capital: the first edition of Poesie di Ossian (1763) barely made a dent in the literary establishment, and it was only with the second edition (1772) that Cesarotti became a household name. Calzabigi wrote the Comala libretto around 1770, basing it on Cesarotti’s first edition and (possibly) Macpherson’s English version, then published the libretto in his 1774 Opere.50 This timeline is worth mentioning insofar as it indicates that Calzabigi found Cesarotti’s project compelling before most of his contemporaries did, likely because of the many affinities between Ossian and Orfeo and the potential for Comala to be a follow-up to his three Viennese reform operas with Gluck. The only extant musical setting of Calzabigi’s Comala is one by Pietro Morandi, performed in the Italian port town of Senigallia in 1780, so it was not exactly a major event on the order of Orfeo or Alceste.51 Nevertheless, Comala demonstrates how Cesarotti’s and Calzabigi’s projects intersected in practice as well as in theory. For one, Comala shows that Calzabigi understood—and attempted to preserve—Cesarotti’s Vichian poetic history. Although Calzabigi adjusted many of Cesarotti’s mixed meters to facilitate musical setting, he did so in such a way as to keep the appearance of irregularity in print, recognizing that irregularity as essentially Ossianic. Cesarotti had used prosody to disrupt regular meter, and Calzabigi did rather the opposite but to the same end: he ensured that the lines looked uneven on the page but could still be read or sung without actually sounding irregular.52 (I will return to this point below, when discussing Morandi’s musical setting.) Calzabigi’s understanding of Cesarotti’s history is also reflected in the changes Calzabigi didn’t make— namely, retaining the metaphors and tropes that were so characteristic of Ossian’s/Cesarotti’s style but anathema to Calzabigi’s own. In the Alceste preface cited earlier, Calzabigi criticized “flowery descriptions” and “superfluous comparisons,” obviously thinking of Metastasian-style aria texts. Yet not only did Calzabigi keep the abundant tropic language in Comala, but he also actively added to it.53 Calzabigi seemingly followed Cesarotti’s argument that this was originary poetic language that had come from expressing singularized feelings, and not aphoristic Metastasian universalizing. Metaphors and other tropes did not necessarily perpetuate stale conventions but, through a Vichian-Cesarottian lens, could instead open up infinite ways of expressing individual experience. Calzabigi was not the only one to change his mind in this way; over the course of the rest of the century, the rhizomatic spread of Cesarottian-Vichian poetics shifted the perception of symbols and myths from rhetorical figures to immediate, material manifestations of T h e P oe t S i ngs   •   41

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particular culturally and historically situated modes of knowledge (as seen in the Foscolo essay discussed in this book’s introduction, for instance). And yet Calzabigi also turned the Ossianic bard into a Gaelic Orpheus. Despite adopting certain aspects of Cesarotti’s poetics, Calzabigi made other changes to the text that reveal the fundamentally classicizing filter through which he conceived the project of operatic reform—and the role of voices within it. Essentially, Calzabigi made Comala and Fingal into iterations of (his own) Euridice and Orfeo, as if to reinscribe his earlier opera, with all its disciplining of voice through writing, as the new model for imitation. For Calzabigi, as Lucio Tufano has convincingly argued, making Cesarotti’s Ossian suitable for musical setting meant making it Orphic.54 This included adjusting Comala’s climactic scenes to accommodate musical scenarios lifted from comparable moments in Orfeo. First, Calzabigi followed Cesarotti’s and Macpherson’s versions in which Comala mistrusts her gaze, and then later realizes that “Fingallo” is alive because she hears his voice. In Cesarotti, Comala and Fingal each speak monologically and separately from distant cliffs, one after the other. Calzabigi turned the scene (act 2, scene 2) into a duet that echoes the lone duet from Orfeo, “Vieni: appaga il tuo consorte” (Come: appease your husband), when Euridice and Orfeo clash over his refusal to look at her. This Fingallo-Comala duet begins after the hero begs in recitative to hear Comala’s voice, another subtle Orfeo-esque turn. But Comala’s primary purpose, like Euridice’s, is to die—not to sing. In both Macpherson’s and Cesarotti’s versions, Comala expresses her overwhelming emotion at finding Fingal alive by calling for her song-harp (“stiami l’arpa da canto”) and asking the “daughters of Morni” to sing as she recovers, away from view.55 Before leaving the “scene” in Cesarotti’s version, Comala also briefly externalizes her intense feelings, something the translator added to fill out Macpherson’s original; as Cesarotti explained it, Macpherson’s original was too “cold” because it gave no space to Comala’s feelings and so failed to adequately set up her death.56 Here Cesarotti’s translations offered two potential situations for Comala to sing: one, in an aria using Cesarotti’s added monologic material, or two, in some kind of song-assong with her “arpa da canto.” Calzabigi took up neither opportunity in his libretto. His Comala neither calls for her harp nor asks her friends to sing, nor does she even leave the stage. Calzabigi’s Comala remains and, in an extended recitative monologue, dies right before the audience’s eyes (act 2, scene 3). Her monologue is markedly not “song” but an expanded version of Euridice’s elliptically failing vocal death in Orfeo ed Euridice: 42  •   T h e P oe t S i ngs

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Euridice: Orfeo . . . Consorte . . . Ah . . . mi sento . . . languir . . . [. . .] Ben . . . mio . . . Ricordati . . . di . . . me . . . [. . .] Io . . . manco . . . Io . . . mo . . . ro . . . [More.]

Orfeo . . . Husband . . . Ah . . . I feel myself . . . languishing . . . [. . .] Love . . . mine . . . Remember . . . me . . . [. . .] I . . . expire . . . I . . . die . . . [Dies.]

Comala: Lo veddi! . . . L’ascoltai! . . . Vive Fingallo! . . . Mi parlò! . . . Mi rispose! . . . Ah! sì: ritorna Nello splendor della sua fama . . . Oh, come Il perfido Idallano M’ingannò, mi tradì! . . . Fingallo è in vita Ed io stupida! ed io Non corro, non m’affretto, Non volo ad abbracciarlo! . . . Ah! qual sugli occhi Confuso velo a me si adombra! . . . Il piede Qual m’affrena importuno Tremito vacillante! E qual d’affetti Tumulto impetuoso Mi scuote il sen, mi serra il cor! . . . Mi . . . sento Cader . . . mancar . . . languire . . . E . . . nel martoro . . . Nell’affanno crudel . . . Misera! . . . Io . . . moro. [Cade.]

I saw him! . . . I heard him! . . . Fingallo lives! He spoke to me! He replied to me! Ah! yes: He returns in the splendor of his fame . . . Oh, how The treacherous Idallano Deceived me, betrayed me! . . . Fingallo lives And I, a fool! and I Do not run, do not hurry, Do not fly to embrace him! . . . Ah! What Confused veil covers my eyes! . . . What Uncertain, unwelcome trembling Restrains my foot! And what Sudden tumult of emotions Shakes my breast, clamps my heart! . . . I . . . feel . . . [I’m] falling . . . expiring . . . languishing . . . And . . . in torment . . . In cruel grief . . . Miserable! . . . I . . . die. [Falls.]

Comala’s voice, like Euridice’s, progressively fails as her body is overwhelmed by feeling. Affanno, as in the final line of Comala’s recitative, T h e P oe t S i ngs   •   43

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is usually rendered in English as “grief ” or “anxiety,” but it also signifies a shortness of breath. Calzabigi wrote feeling and life itself as intertwined with voice, drawing on Cesarotti’s Vichian poetics, such that the former two are understood through the failure of the third. Typography is another essential tool in Calzabigi’s inscription of voice, even more so in Comala than in Orfeo. The ellipses prescribe the singer’s phrasing, even within the otherwise flexible rhythmic contours of recitative, in a way that resonates with Calzabigi’s story about using his own vocal delivery to teach Gluck to compose. Yet the abundant ellipses inscribe not only a pause or truncation in Comala’s speech but also a lack of utterance. With this elliptical grammar Calzabigi wrote a vocal silence, as a suspension or suffocation of the voice, instead of merely leaving the unmarked silence of the page. Calzabigi used ellipses to inscribe the gaps in the sounding voice and, significantly, discipline vocal silence itself within the text. This might explain why, in Morandi’s musical setting, the recitative accompaniment grows sparser throughout the scene instead of intensifying along with Comala’s overwhelming emotions. Rather than signaling emotional intensity with more active and densely textured accompaniment, Morandi made audible the ellipses, the marked gaps, in Comala’s voice, composing the scene as a disintegration of musical sound into silence.57 If Euridice dies to test the limits of Orfeo’s vocal restraint, the same is true here of Comala and Fingallo. Fittingly, Fingallo does not watch Comala die—but he hears it. In this he becomes an improved Orfeo, one who listens but does not look. This leads to another of Calzabigi’s major Orphic alterations: he added text for an entire aria for Fingallo following Comala’s death. Now, both Orfeo and Fingallo respond to their respective lovers’ elliptical utterances in kind with their own broken recitatives, and both lament their losses in the same way, too, by singing eleventh-hour rondos. In Cesarotti, Fingal only laments Comala’s death in four brief lines of “recitative,” but in Calzabigi’s libretto these expand into a full-on aria text (“Neri giorni ed infelici”). Fingallo gets the opportunity to react to Comala’s death the same way Orfeo does to Euridice’s, and it is no coincidence that the references in “Neri giorni ed infelici” to “Che farò senza Euridice?” abound. The first four lines of each aria text contain sonic and grammatical echoes between the two heroes’ final laments: the similar accentuation and vowel sounds of “Euridice” and “infelici,” the first-person future tenses of “Che farò” and “Io vivrò,” not to mention the matching poetic meter of the first line (both ottonari, eightsyllable lines, with a gavotte-esque opening rhythm created by the short44  •   T h e P oe t S i ngs

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table 1  Rondo structure of Morandi’s “Neri giorni ed infelici” and Gluck’s “Che farò senza Euridice?” Section

Section Type Original Italian

English Translation

fingallo, “neri giorni” A

Refrain

B

Couplet 1

C

Couplet 2

Neri giorni ed infelici Io vivrò— Passerò Senza te, mio dolce amor! Te del monte alle pendici Cercherò— Chiamerò Per dar pace al mio dolor. Nè potranno i cari amici Rallegrarmi— Consolarmi; Che te sempre avrò nel cor . . .

Black days, and unhappy I will live— I will pass Without you, my sweet love! From the mountain to the slopes I will seek [you] — I will call [you] To give peace to my pain. Nor will my dear friends be able to Make me happy— Console me; That I’ll always have you in my heart . . .

orfeo, “che farò” A

Refrain

Che farò senza Euridice? Dove andrò senza il mio ben?

B

Couplet 1

C

Couplet 2

Euridice! . . . Oh Dio! Rispondi: Io son pure il tuo fedel. Euridice! Ah non m’avanza Più soccorso, più speranza Nè dal mondo, nè dal ciel.

What will I do without Euridice? Where will I go without my love? Euridice! . . . Oh God! Reply: I am still faithful to you. Euridice! Ah there is no More help, [no] more hope, Neither on earth, nor in heaven.

note: The final “couplet” is in fact three lines long, so not technically a couplet, but it fulfills the same

function. When set to music by Gluck and Morandi, both arias took the form ABACA (a French-style rondo).

short-long accentuation pattern of the first three syllables; see table 1).58 Just glancing at the line lengths in print, the two arias appear quite different. “Neri giorni ed infelici” alternates in quasi-Cesarottian fashion between long lines (ottonari) and short ones (quaternari tronchi), something that would not have been permissible in a non-Ossianic context (see figure 5), while “Che farò senza Euridice?” is set in straight ottonari. And yet, in practice, the two lines of quaternari in “Neri giorni ed infelici” could be heard as a split T h e P oe t S i ngs   •   45

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figure 5.  Mixed line lengths (ottonari and quaternari) in Fingallo’s aria “Neri giorni ed infelici.” In Calzabigi, Comala, in Calzabigi, Poesie, 187.

ottonario, lending the printed page a “varied” and “fragmented” Cesarottian air without technically breaking the rules of versification. Calzabigi’s workaround also conjured “Che farò senza Euridice?” in a subtler way, most readily apparent to those with Gluck’s aria in their ears. What if we sing the text of “Neri giorni ed infelici” to the tune of “Che farò senza Euridice?” (See example 1.) It’s easy to do, because Calzabigi’s aria for Fingallo imitates the patterns of textual repetitions and phrasing used by Gluck in “Che farò senza Euridice?”—even though those repetitions are invisible on the page, since they would not have been written out in the libretto. It is as if Calzabigi reverse engineered the well-known melodic and rhythmic contours of Gluck’s “Che farò” back into type for “Neri giorni.” It was not only the future-tense quaternari tronchi and “Euridice-infelici” sounds of Fingallo’s aria that indexed Orfeo’s famous one, but the entire aria text and context taken together. Morandi picked up on this and set the three stanzas of “Neri giorni” in rondo form, like the three sections of Gluck’s “Che farò,” even though the two aria texts differ in numbers of lines and metrical organization. In both cases the first stanza of text (whether two lines, as in “Che farò,” or four as in “Neri giorni”) becomes the “refrain,” and 46  •   T h e P oe t S i ngs

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example 1.  Christoph Willibald Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice, aria “Che farò senza Euridice?” (Orfeo), mm. 10–16. The upper line of text, marked “Orfeo,” is from Gluck’s opera; the lower line of text, marked “Fingallo,” is taken from “Neri giorni ed infelici” and underlaid to Gluck’s melody to show the metrical, grammatical, and sonic affinities between them. Note how, in Gluck’s setting, the two ottonari from the refrain are broken up into smaller units, as if they were separate quaternari tronchi. They are then repeated in full as ottonari. In “Neri giorni,” the quaternari tronchi consist of new text rather than partial repetitions of longer lines.

&(c) œ œ œ œ

Orfeo: Che [Fingallo: I - o

& œj œ

fa vi

œ -

Œ

ben? mor!

œ

Do Sen

œ

œ œ œ œ

œ

Do - ve an - drò? Pas - se rò

rò? vrò

œ

j œ œJ œ œ

œ -

œ J

ve za

œ J

œ

an -

drò te

œ

Che fa Sen - za

œ

œ

sen mi - o

j œ œ œ œ œ œj œ œ

sen - za il mi - o mi - o dol - ce a -

rò te

-

j œ œj œ

za dol

il

-

œ

mi - o ce a -

˙

ben? mor!

the other two stanzas (again, two or three in “Che farò” and four apiece in “Neri giorni”) become the “couplets,” creating the structure ABACA.59 Other similarities include the major key, arpeggiated figurations in the accompaniment, and descending motives at the close of each “refrain.” On the surface, these similarities reveal just how much Calzabigi’s inscription of voice “worked.” That is, they show how a certain rhythmic-accentuation pattern and rhyme scheme prescribed particular musical-vocal sounds. This was not entirely new, given the highly conventionalized Metastasian aria texts that dictated da capo aria form. Yet in Comala those sounds and structures were predicated on a paradigm of operatic voice that was no longer Metastasian, but Calzabigian—or, as chapter 2 will argue, Orphic. This is all reiterated by what comes after “Neri giorni.” Calzabigi’s Orphic reframing of Comala includes the opera’s finale, which closes with a bardic chorus mourning at the heroine’s tomb, lamenting that Comala cannot hear Fingallo’s voice: “And nor do you hear the noble laments / Of your dear husband [. . .] It is your husband / Who calls you, who is in pain.” 60 In Ossian’s tales a voice is always more than just a voice; Fingallo’s voice brings him back from the (presumed) dead, but it also sends Comala to her own death. As Vichian-turned-Cesarottian metatrope, voice has powers of life and death, presence and absence—and, above all, memory. Where Cesarotti’s choral finale promises that Comala’s memory will live on through her spectral voice, Calzabigi’s finale focuses on Fingallo’s unanswered calls and unheard laments, entrusting the task of memory to his song alone. Those who had read T h e P oe t S i ngs   •   47

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Cesarotti’s Poesie di Ossian would have known that Fingal’s memories had been preserved and transmitted through the voice of his son, Ossian himself. And so through these bardic invocations of Fingallo’s voice and memory, the Calzabigian finale to Comala instantiates a kind of Vichian ricorso and becomes the beginning of another story. It is now the opening scene of Orfeo, with the bardic chorus as the mourners at Euridice’s tomb, foretelling Orfeo’s unanswered calls and unheard laments. Fingallo’s own words in “Neri giorni” have predicted this Orphic future of searching and calling for Comala, which is exactly what Orfeo does in his first solo. Fingallo sings “Cercherò / Chiamerò” (I will seek / I will call); Orfeo sings “Chiamo il mio ben così” and then “Cerco il mio ben così” (I call/seek my beloved). Calzabigi gave Comala an Orphic finale in order to reaffirm the inevitability, the recursivity, of his inscription and prescription of voice. The finale promises a better ending in which Comala returns to life, just like Euridice does—but only if the warrior-hero fully shifts into a poet-singer. This is the Calzabigian operatic fantasy, and the Orphic bargain, too, as made possible by Cesarotti’s new poetic history. A lieto fine awaits the hero, so long as he is not actually a hero at all in the Metastasian or Homeric mold, but rather an acquiescent singer who obeys the letter of the law.

  • 

•

•

In reality, the Orphic voice that Morandi heard when composing Comala had long since exceeded Calzabigi’s prescriptions. In Morandi’s setting, Fingallo’s “Neri giorni” includes two elements that belonged not to Gluck’s “Che farò” for Vienna but to the particular tradition of the aria as it was performed on the Italian peninsula. These elements stem from the Italian productions that revised the opera without Calzabigi’s involvement in order to appease the tastes of local audiences. They are not particularly important as musical parameters, but nonetheless they serve as a reminder that reality is often more complicated than neat reformist narratives would suggest. First, the “Che farò” in the Vienna production of 1762 was composed in C major, but, beginning with the Italian premiere in Parma in 1769, it was typically sung in Italian productions in E-flat major. The Orfeo for Parma, Giuseppe Millico, was a soprano and not an alto like Vienna’s Guadagni, meaning that Gluck had to transpose and adjust Orfeo’s role to accommodate Millico’s higher vocal range. As shown in Alessandra Martina’s stemmata of sources for Orfeo ed Euridice, the versions of “Che farò” that 48  •   T h e P oe t S i ngs

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circulated in the Italian peninsula were mostly derived from Millico’s Parma one.61 For Morandi and many others, then, “Che farò” was known as an aria in E-flat major—which happens to be the key of “Neri giorni.” Second, the textual repetitions and high notes at the end of “Neri giorni” create a brief coda to the final appearance of the refrain. This is probably not because Morandi ignored the reformist proscription against embellishments; rather, this too reflects the influence of the Parmesan-Italian stemma of “Che farò.” With Calzabigi out of the picture for the Parma production, Gluck himself had extended the austere Viennese ending by adding intensifying repetitions and high A-flats for Millico.62 The ending of “Neri giorni” follows Millico’s Parmesan model, not the Viennese one (compare examples 2, 3, and 4). Morandi reconstituted the sounds transduced into Calzabigi’s poetry, yet he did so through a strain of Orphic voice that testified not to the singer’s acquiescence to discipline, but to the inevitability of his exceeding it. In the next chapter we will meet some of those singers and see how Cesarottian notions of voice as the metatrope for feeling both inflected and made possible their Orphic self-fashioning.

musical myths The Vichian connection between song and history, reimagined by Cesarotti, underwrote many aspects of late eighteenth-century Italian culture, as we will see throughout the rest of this book. (And not just Italian culture, either: Herder encountered Vico through Cesarotti’s Ossian commentary, which was appended to Denis’s 1768 German Ossian translation. Perhaps his theory of folk song is more indebted to the Italians than is commonly acknowledged.)63 The fact that Cesarotti reworked Vico for his own ends is important here. For Vico, as for Herder, the song-history connection was most clearly represented by Homer. Yet, Vico argued, Homer had not been a real individual; he was “un popolo autore,” a figure invented by the Greeks in order to unify their various sung histories. Cesarotti instead portrayed both Homer and Ossian as individuals, because doing so was essential to his voice-centric comparison of their narrations. Through Cesarotti’s Ossian, and its similarities to Calzabigi’s Orfeo, the Homeric figure ceded his privileged position to a more voice-oriented figure of song: the mythological Orpheus who, like Ossian, sang directly from his own singularized experiences. T h e P oe t S i ngs   •   49

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example 2.  Christoph Willibald Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice, aria “Che farò senza Euridice?” for Guadagni in Vienna, 1762, mm. 57–61 (counting from the beginning of the aria).

j j œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œj œ &(c)œ œ œ œJ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ J J œ ˙ Do - ve an - drò?

Che

rò?

fa -

Do -

ve an - drò

sen - za il

mi - o

ben?

example 3.  Christoph Willibald Gluck, L’atto d’Orfeo, aria “Che farò senza Euridice?” for Millico in Parma, 1769, 102r–102v. Transcribed from the manuscript at the Parma Biblioteca Palatina sezione musicale (I-PAc), Corradi Cervi Ms.M.C.C.20. Compare with example 2, and note the higher key of E-flat, along with the extended ending and two high A-flats.

b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ j œ œj Œ œ & b b( c) œ œ œ œ œ œ œJ J œ œ œJ J J œœ fa -

Che

b œ &b b

œ

drò?

b ˙™ &b b

Do - ve an - drò?

rò?

œ œ œ œ

œ

Che

rò?

fa

œ œ

ben

rò

œ œ œ œ J J

œ

œj

œ œ ˙

za_il

mi - o

œ

sen -

-

Che fa -

Do -

ve

œ

sen - za il mi - o

an - drò

œ œ œ sen

ben

ben?

Do - ve an-

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ J J sen -

za

il

mi - o

œj

œ œ

˙

- za_il

mi - o

ben?

example 4.  Pietro Morandi, Comala, aria “Neri giorni ed infelici” (Fingallo), 85v-86r. Transcribed from the manuscript copy at the Conservatorio San Pietro a Majella in Naples (I-Nc), 20.8.13. The repetitions and high Gs extend the refrain, similar to the Parma ending of “Che farò senza Euridice?”

b 2 œ œ œ œœ œ œj œ œ œœ ‰ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ Œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ Œ œ nœbœbœ & b b 4 œ ™ œ œ œ ™ œR œR œ œ J Ne - ri

b j & b b œ œ te

b œ &b b

mor

gior - ni ed in

-

fe - li - ci

œ™ œ œ œ j œj œ

mi - o

Ϫ J

œ R

Sen - za

Peritz-The Lyric Myth of Voice.indd 50

dol

Ϫ J

te

-

ce

j œ

˙

a - mor

œ œ œ œr œr œ R

mio dol - ce

I-o

vi - vrò

Pas - se - rò

Sen - za

œ nœ bœ bœ

œ

œ™ œ œ œ j j œ œ

Sen

te

mi - o

a - mor

-

Ϫ J

za

œ R

Sen - za

Ϫ J

te

dol

-

ce

a -

œ œ œ œr œr œ R

mio dol - ce

a - mor!

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All this talk of Orpheus, Homer, and Ossian as exercising real cultural agency might seem fanciful, but taking myths seriously lies at the heart of Cesarotti’s Vichian project. For what is so unusual about Vico’s historiography, and so crucial to Cesarotti’s adaptation of it, is his emphasis on the “truth” of myth. As intellectual historian Joseph Mali has put it, myth possesses a unique power in Vico’s conception of history not because it is a “representation of reality” or an “abstract treatise on social institutions,” but because myth provides a “concrete story” that relates the abstract to real people and events. Myths, particularly those transmitted by oral tradition and hence through memory, contained historical truths in their “mode of narration” (what Vico calls vera narratio).64 For Vico, modes of narration meant articulate language.65 Yet, as we have seen, for Cesarotti a mode of narration included not only language, but the traces of sounding voices within it: Homer’s narrations were monotonous like cicadas’ buzzing, while Ossian’s were like the voice of an ordinary man speaking from singularized feeling. Cesarotti expanded Vico’s poetic language to include the sounds of voices uttering language, because doing so ratified his own ethos of translation. In practice, his Ossian showed readers how voices, particularly the voices that narrated histories through song, constituted the memories, stories, and “true” myths at the foundations of society. Among those myths was one about the sociopolitical civilizing power— the humanizing power, even—of song. Vico argued that song had enacted the transition from the barbaric age of the gods to the primitive age of the heroes, marking the beginning of human civilization. At that time, all “men” were “poets” because they gave their laws and established civil institutions through (sung) poetry.66 The aesthetic and the social, the poetic and the political, the lyric and the legal—they had all been one and the same. Cesarotti wove this into his editorial apparatus for the second edition of the Poesie di Ossian, tethering his literary-aesthetic innovations to society writ large.67 In one of his historical background essays, published with the revised 1772 text, he spent five pages detailing the many functions of song in Caledonian society, from war to celebration. He summarized it as follows: “The greatest passion of the Caledonians was song [canto]. No one could have more enthusiasm for poetry and music [poesia e musica] than those rough but sensitive [sensibili] highlanders. [. . .] Music thus had a part in all of their affairs, whether serious or joyful; and it could be said in a way that the Caledonians lived a musical life.” 68 The Caledonians provided him a textbook example of Vico’s heroic age society in which everything from waging war to offering hospitality, all the codes of a nascent social order, were T h e P oe t S i ngs   •   51

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performed through and by song. Strangely, however, Cesarotti equated “song” not just with “poetry” but with “music,” taking a stance that was anything but Vichian. As Tomlinson has argued, Vico pointedly estranged the past from the present by distinguishing primitive poesia from modern music.69 Why did Cesarotti drop his Vichian lens at this point, collapsing rather than emphasizing the historical distance between the ancient Caledonians and his own contemporaries? His doing so hints at the bigger ideological aims of his translations. Ossian had been a northern rather than southern European, living among the gloomy mountains of Scotland rather than the land of the midday sun—yet both the ancient Celts and the modern Italians seemed as once-great civilizations that had been reduced to nothing but ruins and song. Non-Italians like Rousseau held up songishness as an inherent sonic-material element of the Italian language, yet, as exemplified by Italian improvisers and opera singers alike, that songishness had devolved into excess sound with no meaning.70 As one French tourist remarked, “The Italians are amused and deceived by the softness and melody of their language. Charmed with the music it affords the ear, they neither look for sentiments nor for thoughts.” 71 Unlike Cesarotti’s contemporaries, his (romanticized) Caledonians had not allowed their songs to become unmoored from feelings, nor from their social purpose. As Cesarotti wrote, the Caledonians had “taught [Ossian’s songs] to little children” in order to preserve them for “posterity,” turning every voice into a repository for the memories of an entire culture.72 “Almost all of the lyric passages of these poems are still sung in the present day by the highlanders of Scotland,” Cesarotti claimed—the lyric passages being, of course, those devoted to expressing feeling and memory in one.73 The vocal-aural history Cesarotti projected onto the Scots superseded even artifactual reminders of the past, like ruins and gravestones, which only communicated in what Vico had categorized as “the mute language of signs and physical objects.” 74 Yet songs, and the voices that preserved them, reminded people of the heroes and events commemorated by ruins, infusing histories into the silent remains of the past through the vera narratio of myth. Through Ossian’s fragmented yet touching poetic language, framed with Vichian historiography and given new voice by Cesarotti’s prosody, modern Italians might reshape their own voices from singsongy nonsense into agents of memory, history, and cultural power. And, through such a poetic-turned-political ricorso, they might even make another attempt at the age of humanity.

52  •   T h e P oe t S i ngs

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t wo

The Orfeo Act

castrati of sensibility In 1782 the singer and composer Giuseppe Millico reminisced about the first Italian production of Gluck and Calzabigi’s Orfeo some thirteen years earlier. Staged in Parma as part of the Habsburg-Bourbon wedding festivities, the one-act opera had been retitled for the occasion as L’atto d’Orfeo, “The Orfeo Act.”1 During the recitative preceding “Che farò senza Euridice?,” Millico marveled, “the singer succeeded in coloring his voice so well” that every listener was moved to tears. He went on: “I realized that here, too, we could achieve the same effects as Greek music by expressing the words with that naturalness which is necessary to the feeling of the opera.”2 Orfeo’s touching recitative had closed the historical gap between the ancients and the moderns—but in Millico’s account it was the singer’s voice, beyond Calzabigi’s poetry and Gluck’s music, that had infused ancient myth with Settecento sympathy. What had begun as Calzabigi’s attempt to contain singers’ voices had quickly become a vehicle for singers to reaffirm their own agency. Driving this home in Millico’s story is the fact that the Orfeo singer he described at Parma in 1769 had been none other than himself. Italian productions of Orfeo provide a starting point for thinking about how poetic reimaginings of voice like those of Cesarotti and Calzabigi influenced vocal performance and musical composition. Orfeo was hardly the only significant reform opera in Italy during the latter part of the century, but because it centers on the figure of the poet-singer and the power of his song, it was the one that most directly addressed the interplay between musicalpoetic script, expressivity, and the singing voice.3 Representations of the Orphic figure enabled singers to experiment with how new ideas about 53

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voice—ones first articulated in works like Cesarotti’s Ossian—could be applied to their own musical-vocal practices. This chapter focuses on the three castrato singers who were most closely associated with the figure of Orpheus in the 1770s and 1780s. Giuseppe Millico, Gaetano Guadagni, and Gasparo Pacchierotti all used the trappings of their Orphic personae to portray their voices as expressing emotion “naturally.” Significantly, it was not only vocal practice but musical form and operatic dramaturgy, too, that they recast in an Ossianic-Orphic mold. By exerting influence over operatic reform through their self-fashioning, these three castrati gradually re-formed the aria, the key element of eighteenth-century Italian opera, in ways that continued to resonate long into the nineteenth century. Central to these singers’ vocal practices was what I referred to above as “Settecento sympathy,” though their contemporaries called it sensibilità, “sensibility.” The concept of sensibility is critical to the arguments that follow, so it is worth taking a moment to unpack it here (especially since the term has taken on a rather different valence in the intervening centuries). In the Settecento, sensibility denoted two kinds of “feelings”: moral sentiments and physical sensations. An individual’s sensibility measured their literal and metaphorical sensitivity to stimuli, that is, their capacity to receive and respond to “feeling.” If twenty-first-century readers immediately associate sensibility with the dyadic title of Jane Austen’s 1811 novel, it makes sense; in the latter half of the eighteenth century, sensibility also referred to a literary mode that was concerned with the production and reception of extreme feelings. The stylistic signatures of the literature of sensibility (which Austen, by 1811, was more critiquing than promoting) include fragmentation and disjuncture, from the syntactic level to the structural.4 Sensibility as a literary mode had many affinities with the Cesarottian Ossianism discussed in chapter 1, and Cesarotti, as we have seen, frequently used the words sensibile and sensibilità to describe the ancient Caledonians. The connections are not surprising, since Macpherson wrote the Ossian poems himself in the late 1750s, no doubt inspired by then emerging currents of sensibility in Anglophone literature. Cesarotti’s Italian Ossian and the coeval Anglo-French novels of sensibility were two manifestations of the same aesthetic-epistemological shift. Here my interest lies in sensibility as a mode of performance, as well as in how musical and verbal texts accommodated the vocal performance of sensibility.5 As theater historian Joseph Roach puts it, drawing on Diderot’s posthumously published essay Paradox of the Actor, in this period an actor 54  •   T h e Or f e o Ac t

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demonstrated his sensibility on stage not by genuinely expressing himself, but by successfully faking the immediacy and spontaneity of his character’s feelings. An actor’s vocal and physical responses had to seem, if not entirely natural, at least “second nature.” 6 Paradoxically, then, actors performed sensibility by calculating how to appear uncalculated. Both on stage and off, in sound and in writing, the castrati of sensibility adopted this premise and presented their vocal practices as “second nature.” Their voices were meant to be heard as sonic doubles for their sensibility— not as the artificial result of dramaturgical conventions and surgical interventions, but as the natural, if cultivated, nexus of flesh and feeling. To that end, these singers rejected virtuosic vocal display and cast themselves as obedient servants of the musico-poetic script (though they continued asserting authority over the script in powerful, if subtle, ways). In ostensibly serving the script, they performed their sensibility through various nuances of vocal delivery, such as modulating vocal timbres or “colors” (as in Millico’s tale), accenting and inflecting certain words for expressive effect, and varying their declamation speed. (All of these are notoriously difficult to represent with musical notation, of course, and incompletely captured by prose descriptions, so we cannot know for sure what they actually did.)7 It is important to note here that these singers’ voices were for the most part understood as practices— hence the term second nature—and not yet as the unmediated emissions of their inner subjectivities. These castrati and their interlocutors insisted that the self-cultivation of voice could be an expression of individual sensibility, but it was still only one mode of voice among many, and as such an instance of what Davies refers to as “people [making] voices” rather than “voices making people.”8 If the castrati of sensibility could successfully (re)make their voices, and thereby establish themselves as the natural alternative to the virtuosic castrato stereotype, then they could carve out space for themselves in a culture that was showing less and less tolerance for external manifestations of “unnatural” bodily difference.9 By aligning perceptions of their voices with literary-theatrical currents of sensibility, these singers presented themselves as neither the subhuman animals nor the dehumanized machines many critics made them out to be. Their voices proclaimed them as natural, feeling human beings. Yet even as the sonically “sensible” (sense-able) transactions of their voices exchanged artifice for cultivation, and spectacular passions for tender feelings, the singers themselves were always calculating how to perform their naturalness for an audience. This chapter therefore also considers how, when T h e Or f e o Ac t   •   55

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self-referentially staged through an Orphic frame, the discourses and practices of vocal sensibility articulated some of the deeper tensions within emerging notions of subjectivity. The Diderotian paradox of acting was underwritten by parallel contradictions immanent in late eighteenth-century constructions of the self—between publicness and inwardness, performance and naturalness, “disengaged, rational self-control” and “expressive selfarticulation.”10 Expressing one’s sensibility through voice became a selfreflexive process, and not just for those who performed it on stage. As people watched, read about, and remembered vocal performances of sensibility, they began to examine and reflect on their own emotional experiences through a similar lens. For singers and spectators alike, the fraught nature of the feeling self—interiorized yet expressible, private yet social, at once aestheticized and ethical—became sensible through the Orphic castrato’s voice.

il ritorno d’orfeo in italia Before Millico took the stage in Parma in 1769, the role of Gluck’s Orfeo belonged solely to alto castrato Gaetano Guadagni. Guadagni had originated the part in Vienna in 1762, but he also had much more of a hand—or voice— in Gluck and Calzabigi’s project than either composer or poet openly admitted.11 As Daniel Heartz has shown, Orfeo ed Euridice was shaped by Guadagni’s then-unusual style of acting. Seria singers, especially castrati, rarely aimed for verisimilitude on stage, but Guadagni had spent the 1750s in London learning from the great Shakespearean David Garrick, the very actor whose uncannily authentic fakery inspired Diderot’s Paradox in the first place.12 In the Garrick-Guadagni approach, projecting a consistent, unified character was the most important thing in making a performance seem like second nature, even if it meant ignoring the audience to stay “in character.” In fact, this got Guadagni in a bit of trouble when he later performed Orfeo in London. After a few seasons singing around northern Italy, he arranged and sang in two pasticcio versions of Orfeo at the King’s Theatre in 1770 and 1771. During the performances, his refusal to acknowledge the audience’s applause while staying in character went over like a lead balloon.13 Still, Guadagni’s devotion to his Orphic role seems to have been less about furthering the Gluck-Calzabigi reform project (since he had no compunction about adding new music to a score that was not supposed to be meddled with) and more about fashioning himself as a new kind of primo uomo. By 56  •   T h e Or f e o Ac t

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taking his personal pasticci of Orfeo on the road and swapping in selfcomposed arias at critical moments, all while maintaining his Orphic persona, Guadagni positioned himself as Orpheus incarnate, singer and composer in one. So powerful was his Orphic mythos, there were even rumors that Orfeo’s entire vocal part had not been composed by Gluck, but extemporized by Guadagni himself.14 In order to give a sense of how Guadagni performed his Orphic voice and sensibility for Italian audiences, I turn here to another of his Orfeos: a full-on “remake” for Venice in 1776, fitted to Guadagni’s specifications. Four years prior Guadagni had returned from England to his nearby hometown of Padua, where he had long been on the choir roster of the Cappella Antoniana. There, along with other singers from the choir, he gave semistaged, oratorioesque pasticcio performances of Orfeo under the auspices of the marchese Giuseppe Ximenes’s academy.15 As Guadagni knew very well, what was possible in a court theater in Vienna, or an academy in Padua, was likely too experimental for a commercial opera theater in Venice. It was not enough to add to Gluck’s score, as he had done in London; instead, Guadagni worked closely with the composer Ferdinando Bertoni to produce an entirely new musical setting of Calzabigi’s libretto for Venice’s Teatro San Benedetto. Bertoni was already in the orbit of the Paduan academy through his own association with Ximenes, and well known in Venice as the organist at San Marco, chorus master at the Ospedale, and a moderately successful opera composer. He also had an ongoing connection with Guadagni, who had sung in several of Bertoni’s operas in Venice in the late 1760s. Bertoni’s Venetian Orfeo shows how Guadagni performed his Orphic persona for a public, paying Italian audience, as well as what the singer thought needed to be adapted to get them on board. Bertoni’s more idiomatically Italianate score made the experiment more palatable, insofar as it tempered reformist oddities like abundant choruses and lack of virtuosic arias with familiar, pleasantly galant musico-stylistic language.16 Otherwise, Bertoni’s setting is strikingly similar to Gluck’s, owing to the idiosyncratic structure of Calzabigi’s libretto and Bertoni’s self-confessed consultation of Gluck’s score. Yet it seems clear that Guadagni also worked to mold Bertoni’s score to his own dramatic and musical ends.17 Together Bertoni and Guadagni rewrote Calzabigi’s parable about the containment of voice (see chapter 1) to instead offer Venetian viewers a self-reflexive exploration of the multivalent expressive registers of operatic voice. As a mythical figure whose song teaches barbarians to feel, and whose emotions repeatedly T h e Or f e o Ac t   •   57

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overpower his reason, Orpheus provided an operatic test case for how sensibility might be represented through music, especially through the singing voice itself. Crucially, the self-referential nature of any operatic Orpheus was also a key aspect of the literary mode of sensibility. The plots of novels of sensibility were aimed not simply at making readers feel, but at studying and commenting on how they did so.18 Now driven by Guadagni, much more so than when under Calzabigi’s authority in Vienna, the 1776 Orfeo explored the paradox of scripting and performing both sensibility and its vocal expression. When presented to Venetian listeners well versed in the conventions of Italian serious opera, the remake invited those listeners to reflect on how such conventions worked—or didn’t—to make them feel something. The opera’s concern with the expressive capabilities and limitations of the singing voice is apparent in Bertoni’s score on several levels, from his approach to recitative to his framing of song-as-song. As Paolo Cattelan has shown, Bertoni’s Italianate “corrective” to Gluck consisted of his investing Orfeo’s vocal part with expressivity through the contours and intervals of the recitatives instead of delegating that work to the accompanying harmony and orchestrations, as Gluck had done.19 My reading expands on this point and considers the dramatic effects of different types of vocal writing. In other words, what would have stood out to Venetian audiences as musically and dramatically marked, even without the harmonic and timbral intensifications of Gluck’s score? Bertoni’s Orfeo presented the effects of feeling on the singing voice by disrupting certain of the typical poetic and musical structures of Italian serious opera—all while giving Guadagni the opportunity to perform his own second-nature Orphic sensibility.

orphic sensibility and the mediocre actor Before delving into how the Venetian Orfeo played with musical-dramatic conventions, let me explain how I read certain of those conventions as framing representations of emotion, immediacy, and voice in typical midcentury Italian serious opera. Drawing on Feldman, I take opera seria as predicated on principles of segmentation and distancing: operas were divided up into what she calls “chunks of sensory gratification,” including numbers like arias (my focus here, as the “high points” of the seria spectacle), comparatively rare duets and ensembles, recitative scenes, and interpolated elements like ballets, intermezzi, and so forth.20 58  •   T h e Or f e o Ac t

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Arias and other solo numbers, while relevant to the plot, enhanced this segmented structure by interrupting the flow of narrative time. Even when other characters were on stage “listening,” arias occurred in a self-contained space within which time was, if not exactly paused, then at least conceived differently (according to musical, rather than verbal, logic, as Andrea Chegai has noted).21 “Aria” is thus commonly designated as the “lyric moment,” both based on the definition of lyric as sung poetry and because the aria has a similar function in serious or heroic opera to that of lyric passages in epic poetry. In Metastasian seria libretti in particular, an aria tended to dilate narrative time in order to allow a character to reflect on their situation. For the most part, they did so musically in da capo form, and verbally through aphoristic or universalizing poetic language (of the kind decried by Cesarotti and Calzabigi but admired by a great many others before and after them).22 An Italian serious opera proceeded as a chain of lyric moments interspersed with dialogue (as recitative), representing emotion through and as a series of selfcontained, rationally delimited aesthetic-musical experiences. I am neither suggesting that seria arias were undramatic, nor claiming that viewers did not feel intense emotions while seeing and hearing them performed—quite the contrary. Seria arias were vocal-emotional events experienced by spectators in real time, and often to great effect, but the point is that they were not intended to be realistic or verisimilar presentations of emotion. Instead, as James Webster has shown, da capo arias represented emotion primarily via specific, varied, local musical effects and topoi, particularly through singers’ embellishments and the intensification of the accompaniment. Only slightly later, as we will soon see, did emotion become directly associated with the aria’s overarching formal structure.23 This explains why the da capo form, which structured the majority of seria arias through the 1770s, seems inherently static to us now. Simply, the form itself does not dictate a clear emotional or psychological trajectory: the A section transitions to a usually contrasting B section, then the A section repeats, producing a circular structure that engendered much hand-wringing from the likes of Algarotti, Planelli, and their followers. Calzabigi and Gluck predictably complained of the da capo in the preface to Alceste, arguing that it shortchanged the expressive impact of the second stanza of poetry and marginalized any sense of internal contrast.24 (Note that Orfeo, whether Bertoni’s or Gluck’s, was never designated as a dramma per musica, i.e., as opera seria, but it was clearly intended by its creators as a revision of and commentary on opera seria.) T h e Or f e o Ac t   •   59

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All told, opera seria’s segmentation of emotions into musical morsels established both a feedback loop between performers and viewers and, at the same time, an “inviolable distance” between them.25 Seria by convention kept viewers at arm’s (or ear’s) length from characters’ emotional states, in part by connecting viewers to the singers themselves rather than the characters they represented. In performance, star singers, especially castrati, appeared as superhuman spectacles whose voices temporarily relocated viewers into a “suprarational,” magical space (as Feldman puts it). I would emphasize that it was not the dramaturgy or the musical form but singers’ voices that made each potentially static lyric moment seem spontaneous, immediate, and dynamic. Because the aria was dependent on a singer’s ornamentation and delivery, it ensured that the immediate, embodied emotional experience it occasioned within spectators was attached to the singer more than to the character they played.26 The aria therefore functioned first and foremost as a showcase for singers’ voices, at once their enabler and their container. As discussed in the previous chapter, this spotlight on singers’ sounding voices (rather than on the poetic content they delivered) was precisely what Calzabigi had been attempting to reform. In his Orfeo libretto he took over the voice’s longstanding role as agent of immediacy and redirected it to serve his script. His poetry prevented both the segmentation of opera into arias and the liberty of singers to embellish those arias, and it did so by prescribing the vocal performance of spontaneous emotional overflow—that is, by writing out preordained interruptions of the lyric moment. In Calzabigi’s libretto, as in Cesarotti’s Ossian translations and, significantly, the coeval literature of sensibility, these bursts of feeling are conveyed in writing through rhythmic, syntactic, and formal fragmentation: ellipses and dashes, nonlexical exclamations, changing poetic meters, hybrid poetic forms, and so forth.27 Calzabigi, like Cesarotti, proposed that singularized feeling became audible when it disrupted or exceeded the songlike. Bertoni and Guadagni’s remake intensified these textual markers of feeling with musical setting, and amplified them with Guadagni’s acting style, in order to render sensibility sonorous through its effects on Orfeo’s voice. Orfeo cannot “sing” when he feels too much, and so his voice “fails” by lapsing into a more speechlike mode. Most obviously, this is what happens when the strophes or refrains of Orfeo’s solos lead to outbursts of obbligato recitative or other declamatory (as opposed to cantabile) vocal writing, as in “Cerco il mio ben così” and “Che farò senza Euridice?” The sense is that Orfeo attempts to “sing” in a lyric moment but then, unable to maintain song, 60  •   T h e Or f e o Ac t

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breaks down and expresses himself instead in disjointed “speech.” The effect of these disruptions likely would have been heightened in Bertoni’s setting because Bertoni’s version of Orfeo’s “singing” was much more like typical operatic singing than was Gluck’s, thereby exacerbating further the contrast between speech (recitative) and song (aria or other closed-form solos). When heard in performance, Orfeo-Guadagni’s vocal presentation of spontaneous emotion must have been surprisingly mimetic—not in the sense of word painting, but as the verisimilar imitation of physiological vocal failure. As noted by both Diderot and Albrecht von Haller, an eighteenth-century Swiss physiologist who studied sensibility from a medical standpoint, the diaphragm is a “plexus of sensibility,” “contract[ing] violently” when an individual suffers with sadness.28 (Think of choking, gasping sobs.) Given that the diaphragm supports the breath and hence the vocal apparatus, violent diaphragmatic contractions make singing nearly impossible. This would have been as apparent to Italian operagoers in 1776 as it is to us today. For example, in a 1781 essay on “imitative music,” the writer Matteo Borsa, who was not a musician, argued that opera characters ought not sing arias while in the throes of grief. Their voices, if realistically expressing such strong feelings, would “break and choke.” As Borsa phrased it, larger-than-life emotions should instead make characters “voiceless” (afoni; literally, unable to phonate). After praising comic opera for appropriately presenting everyday feelings, Borsa declared Bertoni’s Orfeo the best example of “imitative music” in a serious work because its composer had written the emotions’ interruption of singing right into the score.29 Like Diderot’s “mediocre actor,” whose “extreme sensibility” undermines the unity of his performance, the overly sensitive Orfeo ruins his vocal performance by allowing his real feelings to fragment his singing.30 In a commercial opera theater in Venice in 1776, this must have seemed as an immediate burst of sensibility interrupting the lyric moment of aria. Orfeo, the originary superhuman singer, proved he was merely human by accidentally breaking his own magical spell.

seemingly extemporaneous effusions But Bertoni’s Orfeo is still the archetypal poet-singer, not some mediocre stage actor. His self-fragmentation may not occur in the “lyric moment” register of aria, but it has to retain aesthetic value both in the fictional world of the opera itself and for the audience beyond it. His liminal register of vocal T h e Or f e o Ac t   •   61

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expression thus fulfills a similar purpose in the opera to the type of utterance known in later British Romantic poetry as the “lyric effusion.” As scholar of literary romanticism M. H. Abrams defines it, the lyric effusion is “a spontaneous expression of personal circumstances and feelings,”31 much like Cesarotti’s Vichian definition of “true poetic language” from chapter 1. In the context of Romantic poetry, a lyric effusion might range from a single cry (“Ah!”) to a phrase to an entire poem (though, if the latter, a poem that is considered not yet fully formed). For example, in the 1790s Samuel Taylor Coleridge composed various verses that were, in his words, “lacking oneness of thought.” He did not categorize these verses as poems, exactly, but dubbed them “effusions.” The effusion’s lack of “oneness” was not a failure; rather, an effusion could be a precursor to a lyric poem, lending the finished version a sense of emotional immediacy. Continuing with the Coleridge example, several of his effusions are in fact early versions of his better-known poems, such as “Effusion XXXV,” which later became the beloved (not to mention Orphic) lyric “The Eolian Harp.”32 If a typical seria aria projected “oneness of thought,” then a hybrid-form solo scene like Orfeo’s projected the comparative lack of it. This distinction can be seen at work in Orfeo’s interrupted “songs”—that is, both in his cavatinas that are intercut with recitatives (“Cerco / Chiamo il mio ben così”) and in his episodic rondo (“Che farò senza Euridice?”). In musical-vocal performance, the sense of a lyric effusion was signaled by a notated switch from the cantabile to the declamatory. What the Venetian Orfeo did through these musical disruptions was to represent emotional experience as a tug-of-war between aestheticized reflection and the spontaneous feelings that “lack oneness of thought.” This played on listeners’ ingrained understanding of the dramatic significance of different sung registers, namely, accompanied recitative, arioso-like declamation, and aria or otherwise marked “song.” When those different expressive registers were brought together in unexpected ways, as when spontaneous effusions interrupted a lyric moment, then audiences were invited to hear feeling as a dynamic process. Although Calzabigi had prescribed these breaks with writing, pulling them off in performance depended not only on the poetry and score, but also on the singer’s delivery of them. This opened the way for Guadagni to present himself, and not his script, as the source of vocal-expressive immediacy. Guadagni’s Orphic self-projection relied on such an enticing theatrical collapse between character and performer—what Emily Wilbourne, writing about what she 62  •   T h e Or f e o Ac t

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evocatively terms “the virtuosity of vocal failure,” reads as the “intertwin[ing]” of “voice, body, and subjectivity” in the “interpretive process” of theatrical spectatorship.33 Even so perspicacious a listener as Charles Burney struggled to distinguish Orfeo’s scripted voice from Guadagni’s second-nature performance of it. Writing of Orfeo in London in 1770, Burney heard the Orphic “power of melody” as inseparable from Guadagni’s own vocal-expressive practice: “The Music he sung was the most simple imaginable; a few notes with frequent pauses, and opportunities of being liberated from the composer and the band were all he wanted. And in these seemingly extemporaneous effusions, he proved the inherent power of melody totally divorced from harmony and unassisted even by unisonous accompaniment [emphasis added].”34 At first glance it seems that Burney was referring to ornamentation, but that does not match the extant evidence about Guadagni’s style. In her richly researched study, Patricia Howard responds to Burney’s commentary with puzzlement, since her examination of Guadagni’s notated embellishments for the role shows that “effusions are thin on the ground.”35 Having consulted many of the same sources, I agree, and so propose that Burney intended “effusions” not as flashy embellishments but as instances of apparent vocal spontaneity. Guadagni’s “seemingly extemporaneous effusions” were the moments in which his vocal performance blurred the line between script, represented here by “the composer and the band,” and the feeling of bodily-vocal immediacy. Any opportunities for “liberation” had been scripted for Orfeo by the librettist and composer, yet the second nature of Guadagni’s vocal performance persuaded listeners to attribute that spontaneity and immediacy to him instead. Though not entirely. Burney went on from discussing Guadagni’s effusions to comparing his “artful manner of diminishing the tones of his voice” (his diminuendo) to “the dying notes of the Aeolian harp,” the same instrument from Coleridge’s later lyric poem, which sounds when the wind vibrates its strings.36 Burney’s linking Guadagni’s vocal practice to the player-less yet Orphic instrument emphasizes that even castrati of sensibility were liminal figures, their voices just as easily elided with automated instruments as with feeling human selves.37

orphic song and the great actor Burney’s take on Guadagni exemplifies Diderot’s theory of acting vis-à-vis sensibility. Unlike the mediocre actor, whose genuine sensibility makes his T h e Or f e o Ac t   •   63

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performance uneven, the great actor—the David Garrick type—does not express real feelings. Instead, the great actor “imitat[es] the exterior signs of emotion so perfectly that you can’t tell the difference.”38 To fully inhabit his role, however, it was not only the “exterior signs of emotion” Guadagni had to imitate, but also the “inherent power of melody,” as the Orphic act of poiesis itself. Lyric effusions announced Guadagni’s skill and his character’s sensibility, but they present Orfeo himself as a pretty mediocre performer. The opera has to uphold Orfeo’s mythology, not just Guadagni’s own, for mythology is what Orfeo needs to save Euridice: as the god-figure tells him, he must control his voice (“restrain your accenti”) and “placate with song” the denizens of the Underworld.39 Orfeo has to be a great actor, and that means performing his song without letting his sensibility get in the way. The moment when Venetian audiences finally heard Orfeo’s vocal magic was in the Underworld scene, the cavatina con coro “Deh! placatevi . . . Men tiranne,” when he cultivates the Furies’ sensibility through song. Over the course of the scene, the Furies evolve from unfeeling monsters into sentimental sympathizers (in a version of Orpheus’s “civilizing song” narrative, on which much more in the next chapter). Initially the demons refuse him passage in thunderous four-part homophony atop an orchestral racket, with aggressive repeated notes and diminished harmonies. To their harsh, unsonglike clamor the poet-singer responds with little more than his lyre for support: “Ah! be merciful with me.” The obbligato harp figuration approximates the Orphic lyre, and the vocal line spins out in meltingly sustained cantabile phrases for the first time in the opera. Bertoni evidently sought unprecedented legato from Guadagni here, marking a long slur over Orfeo’s phrases in this section—one of the only times this marking appears in any of the vocal parts in the autograph. Through this self-referentially songlike vocal writing, Orfeo’s solos in this scene present, and comment on, the mythical magic of voice itself. Guadagni’s notion of “voice itself ” becomes clearest when Orfeo wins over the Furies by using his voice alone. Setting aside his lyre, as signaled by the harp tacet, Orfeo sings the cavatina “Men tiranne” “unaccompanied.” This was how the composer and the singer together imagined Orphic song for their Venetian audience, and it was quite unlike Gluck and Calzabigi’s conception. Gluck had composed this pivotal moment with his most restrained vocal writing, in a narrow tessitura with straight rhythms and syllabic text setting. The obbligato harp continues throughout Gluck’s ver-

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sion, permitting no space within or between phrases for the singer to make either expressive effusions or embellishments, and it lasts a mere fifteen measures. Gluck’s “Men tiranne” proves the triumph of poetry and simplicity (and, as Cattelan argues, dramatic stasis).40 Bertoni’s “Men tiranne” instead proves the triumph of voice. It does so by completing the dramatic trajectory of the entire Underworld scene, a progression indicated by Bertoni’s increasingly liberated vocal writing for Orfeo. Bertoni’s cantabile setting of “Men tiranne” traverses a larger range, an additional fourth beyond Gluck’s, with galant dotted rhythms and brief, elegant melismas. The Italian composer also cut text from the middle of Calzabigi’s scene—the section “Mille pene”—in order to repeat “Deh! placatevi” with embellishments and allot “Men tiranne” an expansive forty measures. Within those forty measures there are five fermatas in the vocal line, always above sustained or otherwise inactive instrumental parts; this is more than anywhere else in Bertoni’s score, and certainly more than the single fermata on the penultimate note of the vocal line in Gluck’s. Altogether these choices, along with those of removing the rhythmic restrictions of the obbligato instrument and leaving hardly any orchestral accompaniment, gave Guadagni freedom to effuse and embellish, to be “liberated” from composer and orchestra. The scene therefore celebrates rather than condemns the sensual pleasures of beautiful singing, affirming that voice has pride of place even in reformist opera. This is Orphic song, Venetian style. “Men tiranne” is also the “poem” based on Orfeo’s prior lyric effusions. Exchanging fragmented sensibility for flowing song, Orfeo’s “Men tiranne” seems to be the finished form of his earlier attempts to express himself. The gods (and real-life audience) have heard the dynamic process of his inner experience through his lyric effusions, and so recognize his Underworld song as the final product, polished and performed to cantabile perfection. With the reimagining of Orphic song in “Men tiranne,” the accenti that needed restraining were not presented in the same way in Venice as they had been in Vienna. Gluck’s Orfeo restrains his voice from virtuosic display, while Bertoni’s Orfeo restrains his voice from betraying his own sensibility and breaking the critical lyric moment. Guadagni’s Venetian Orfeo thus proved himself to be Diderotian great actor and magical singer in one, capable of moving others without being carried away himself. •

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Across these and other productions, pasticci, and remakes, the role of Orfeo encouraged spectators to reflect on how sensibility ought best be rendered “sensible” on stage. Even before Guadagni and Bertoni’s Venetian version in 1776, the soprano castrato Millico had brought a third version of Orfeo to London in a one-act, all-Gluck format that was a not-so-subtle corrective to Guadagni’s self-composed pasticci. London operagoers wasted no time in comparing the two Orfeos. Apparently the general opinion was that Millico had a “sweeter” voice but “did not play the character so well” as Guadagni.41 In this vein, consider one writer’s contrast between Guadagni’s effusive portrayal and Millico’s sentimental one: “The whole [dispute over the role] comes to this Point, whether a Man should be affected by a sudden Event of distress, passionately & hastily, or with despondency & dejection. These are their two ways of Singing it.” 42 Which Orfeo singer one preferred boiled down to what one imagined as the appropriate expression of extreme sensibility—not only in an opera, but in real life, too. The comparisons serve as a reminder of how differently a role can come across depending on a singer’s expressive and vocal priorities, even a role so carefully scripted as Orfeo.43 Yet, on a deeper level, such accounts suggest that spectators had begun looking to their own experiences, not just to theatrical or musical conventions, for cues on how emotions should be presented on stage. Or, to flip this around, these comparisons show that spectators were increasingly experiencing their own emotions “theatrically, as though oriented toward an audience” (to borrow a phrase from Lauren Berlant).44 The Orfeos’ vocal performances of sensibility encouraged spectators to think about how their own everyday voices expressed their feelings.

re-forming the broken voice While Guadagni’s effusions inflected both Gluck’s and Bertoni’s Orfeos, his Orphic sensibility gained traction beyond those operas thanks to Millico, who turned the Orphic voice toward a different end. Guadagni portrayed himself as something of an Orphic monad, indivisibly embodying singer, poet, and composer in one, and was unique among his contemporaries in having based a career on playing iterations of a single role. Even after his official retirement, Guadagni continued envoicing Orfeo in his home marionette theater in Padua.45 But Millico had other priorities. Instead of committing his career to Orfeo alone, he made his Orfeo act work for him out66  •   T h e Or f e o Ac t

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table 2  Lyric effusions integrated into rondo form in “Che farò senza Euridice?” As set by both Christoph Willibald Gluck and Ferdinando Bertoni

Section Section Type

Original Italian

A

Refrain (I)

Che farò senza Euridice?

B

Lyric effusion / interlude (I)

Euridice? . . . Oh Dio, rispondi! Io son pure il tuo fedel.

What will I do without Euridice? Dove andrò senza il mio ben? Where will I go without my beloved?

A

Refrain (II)

C

Lyric effusion / Euridice! Ah non m’avanza interlude (II) Più soccorso, più speranza Né dal mondo, né dal ciel.

A

English Translation

Euridice? . . . Oh God, respond! I am yet faithful.

Che farò senza Euridice?

What will I do without Euridice? Dove andrò senza il mio ben? Where will I go without my beloved? Euridice! Ah there is no More help, no more hope neither from earth, nor from heaven.

Refrain (III) Che farò senza Euridice? What will I do without (with extended Euridice? ending) Dove andrò senza il mio ben? Where will I go without my beloved?

side the confines of a single role, opera, composer, or genre. Through Millico’s efforts, Orfeo’s broken-and-remade voice generated a new way of composing feeling in Italian opera. The key was the aria Millico mentioned in his “Orfeo Act” anecdote, “Che farò senza Euridice?” It is both the opera’s most famous tune and the scene in which Orfeo’s effusions are actually contained within a closed-form aria. The form of the aria was a rather unusual one in Italian opera, that of the French, or “simple,” rondo.46 Both Gluck and Bertoni set it as such, using three iterations of an upbeat, major-mode refrain (A), intercut with two arioso interludes (B and C), for an overarching ABACA structure (see table 2). On a dramatic level, the aria stages another scene of song and effusion, mirroring the oscillations between cavatina and recitative in the first scene’s “Cerco / Chiamo il mio ben così.” But what was new about “Che farò” in the specific context of the opera was that it formalized those emotional disruptions from the opening scene, weaving Orfeo’s lyric effusions into the very fabric of the aria itself. T h e Or f e o Ac t   •   67

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With the idea of the lyric effusion, then, I offer a prehistory to Marino Nahon’s study of the genesis of the rondo, a term that is a moving target in late eighteenth-century music.47 The general consensus now seems to be that there were two versions of rondo aria form in the late eighteenth century. First, there was the “French” or “simple” one, in ABACA form, with roots in opéra comique (e.g., “Che farò”); second, there was the “two-tempo” rondò, often written with an accent mark to indicate the difference. The two-tempo rondò is best known today as the form of many of Mozart’s leading ladies’ arias and is comprised of a slower first section succeeded by a fast one, with significantly more poetry being set overall than in either the simple rondo or the da capo. In tracing the relationship between the two types, I read both the rondo and the rondò as composing out a sense of immediacy and emotional dynamism through their formal structure. Millico was instrumental in importing the dynamism of Orfeo’s rondo into aria form more generally. His calling card was neither the role of Orfeo nor “Che farò” but the whole still-new-to-Italy form of the simple (ABACA) rondo. He sang such rondos even in Metastasian operas, demonstrating that nonreformist texts could also be remade in an Orphic mode. A few examples: In 1775 in Venice, Millico’s big aria in Paisiello’s Demofoonte (“Non temer, bell’idol mio”) took that unusual form. So too did the arias “Idol mio, se più non vivi” (Armida, Sacchini; Milan, 1772) and “Se il caro ben” (Vologeso, Guglielmi; Milan, 1776), all of them composed expressly for Millico. If Guadagni kept replaying Orfeo all the way into his home puppet theater, Millico kept replaying Orfeo’s vocal-expressive modus operandi—transporting the Orphic songeffusion dynamic from its self-referential origins into his other roles. The influence of Millico’s version of Orphic song extended beyond this tiny subset of 1770s opere serie. The origins of the two-tempo rondò have long been a topic for debate, especially when the instrumental rondo form is thrown into the mix. But looking to singers, not just composers, as agents of formal change provides a missing link between the simple and two-tempo forms. In dialogue with Marco Beghelli, John A. Rice, and Andrea Chegai, Nahon has traced back through Millico himself how the two-tempo rondò emerged from the simple ones of the 1770s.48 Surprisingly, however, Nahon does not mention Millico’s ever having sung Orfeo, though he notes that “Che farò” is an originary example of the simple rondo in Italian opera. The Orphic connection seems to me an essential one. Where did Millico get his fondness for the simple rondo if not from his experience with the vocalexpressive scripting of “Che farò,” the aria that launched his career? 68  •   T h e Or f e o Ac t

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Orfeo aside, the linchpin of the rondo-rondò story is the aria inserted for Millico into a production of Giuseppe Sarti’s Ifigenia in Rome in 1777. Millico joined the cast after the premiere, taking over the role of Achille from the virtuosic castrato Francesco Roncaglia. He wanted a new aria to close out the second act in lieu of the showpiece originally intended for his predecessor. Sarti obliged with “Un amante sventurato,” set in Millico’s favorite Orphic-effusive ABACA form—but sticking to the form would have meant finishing the act without a rousing vocal display. So, after setting all of the aria’s text as expected, in ABACA form, Sarti intensified the ending with a repetition of the first four lines of poetry, set to new music, as a kind of extended coda. As a compromise between Millico’s preference for formalized Orphic sensibility and the audience’s expectations for an exciting closing number, Sarti served up a prototype of the two-tempo rondò.49 Two years later, in 1779, Sarti streamlined the form by removing the final refrain (the last A) and using the C section to lead into the new, fast, final section, thereby composing the first standard two-tempo rondò (see tables 3 and 4). The rondò retained the formal dynamism of its song-effusion origins, but now, thanks to the expansion of the C interlude into a full-on fast section, it enabled singers to finish with a burst of vocal virtuosity. In this new context virtuosity was not empty display, but rather the sonicvocal “culmination” of a character’s emotional trajectory.50 Instead of ending up more or less where they began, as in the da capo aria, a character finished a rondò in a different place—vocally, musically, and psychologically. The rondò thus did something similar to Guadagni and Bertoni’s Orfeo, staging the mobility and immediacy of feeling through different types of vocal writing. Now it was through form, and hence the musico-poetic script, that singers’ voices rendered sonorous a narrative of emotional change. Once condensed into a single number, this formalized emotional immediacy was no longer tied to Orfeo but became a template that could be used to connote an emotional process in any opera, from the comic to the Metastasian. As composer and theorist Vincenzo Manfredini put it in his 1788 Difesa della musica moderna (Defense of modern music), the rondò was not only “more natural, more real, and more expressive” than the da capo aria, it was “grand and heroic,” too.51 The new aria form reconciled the Orphic with the virtuosic by juxtaposing two modes of vocal immediacy: the sensible and the sensual. Guadagni’s and Millico’s interpretations of Orphic sensibility set the stage for Ottocento lyric form. As Chegai has demonstrated, the two-tempo rondò was a progenitor to the cantabile-cabaletta aria type, and thence to the T h e Or f e o Ac t   •   69

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table 3  Simple/French rondo form Tempo and Section

Section Type

Text Lines

Slow/moderate   A   B   A   C   A   [+]

Refrain Interlude I or “couplets” Refrain Interlude II or “couplets” Refrain [Possible extension / brief coda]

1–2 3–4 1–2 5–6 (or more) 1–2 –

table 4  Two-tempo rondò form Tempo and Section

Section Type

Text Lines

Slow   A   B   A   C

Main theme (slow) Contrasting theme I Main theme (slow) Transition from slow to fast section

1–4 5–8 1–4 9–10

Fast   D   E   D   F   D   G

Main theme (fast) Contrasting theme II Main theme (fast) Contrasting theme III Main theme (fast) Coda

11–12 Some of 11, 12 11–12 1–2, 6–7 rearranged 11–12 12

so-called solita forma, which structured Italian opera scenes well into the time of Verdi.52 Though these two castrati of sensibility were composers as well as singers, it was primarily as singers that they re-formed the mode of vocal-musical expression that would resonate throughout the next fifty-plus years of Italian opera.

internalizing nature Millico also theorized the relationship between voice and sensibility outright. The anecdote with which this chapter opened, about the Parma “Orfeo 70  •   T h e Or f e o Ac t

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Act” of 1769, appeared in Millico’s self-authored preface to the opera La pietà d’amore (Naples, 1782), for which he had composed the score. Those who read the preface would have known him as a famous singer, and many would have recognized the ongoing debates to which his preface was contributing.53 He was not merely repeating those debates, however, but proffering his very own proposal for operatic reform. By connecting his epiphany about re-creating the effects of Greek music to (his own) vocal performance, Millico declared that reforming music and poetry alone would not teach virtuosity-loving Italian audiences to feel sympathy through their ears. They did not need more operas like Orfeo; they needed more voices like Millico’s. As with his importing the rondo into other operas, Millico saw that a theory of vocal expression wasn’t much practical use if relevant only to a single role or situation. He therefore suggested that the concepts undergirding his own successful vocal practices applied far more broadly than just to Orfeo, to Gluckian reform opera, or even to castrato singers. His approach, unlike Guadagni’s Orphic fixation, was meant to be universally accessible (about which more will be said in the next chapter). Millico’s preface sets up its claims about voice as though they are instructions for the benefit of young singers. After paeans to Gluck and paraphrases of Planelli, the preface shifts its focus from the musical tenets of opera reform to the miraculous tale of the unnamed Orfeo who awakened the sensibility of his listeners with the sounds of his voice. Here Millico emphasized the singer’s ability to “color his voice” as the cause of his performance’s sentimental effect. This notion of coloring the voice was not Millico’s invention, and it was in common parlance in contemporary treatises like those of Manfredini and Mancini.54 The implication of the phrase was that the Orfeo singer had not spontaneously expressed himself or created his song ex tempore; the “naturalness” of his performance came, paradoxically, from exercising control over his voice. Like Diderot, Millico celebrated the effects of good acting. To put it another way, if Guadagni had attempted to obfuscate the calculation and labor behind his vocal projection of feeling, Millico instead reframed them. For him both voice and sensibility, like nature itself, just needed a bit of cultivation to flourish: “One should cultivate [young singers’] spirits to render them sensible to the movements of nature [. . .] they should be taught to recognize the beauties of poetry, because then they could dress themselves in the sentiments of the poets, and experience in themselves the same effects that they should produce in their listeners, and when this is done, they should practice their natural voice.”55 The “spirit” here is the interiorized agent of T h e Or f e o Ac t   •   71

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individual consciousness—the self. The spirit or self must be “cultivated”—a naturalistic metaphor for labor—as the first step toward using one’s “natural voice.” Millico presented the singing voice not as the result of technological manipulation of the body, but as formed through the care, tending, and nurture of the self. By describing singers’ “natural voice[s]” as contingent on their personal artistic and emotional “cultivation,” he linked the voice to the spiritself through the faculty of sensibility.56 What is more, this implied by extension that one’s physical body was “natural,” too, so long as one’s interiority was “sensible” to “nature”—an important point for a castrato writing in 1782. Millico’s explanation of singing attests to what late twentieth-century philosopher Charles Taylor has termed “the internalization of nature,” an epistemic shift in which nature was believed to be understood through “listening” to one’s own “inner voice.”57 As Taylor argues, in the late eighteenth century “nature” no longer exclusively denoted a rational, static, external hierarchical order that had to be reproduced exactly. Instead, much like feeling, nature was increasingly apprehended as mutable, dynamic, and contingent (as in Millico’s reference to “the movements of nature”). Both feeling and nature could therefore be interpreted and defined primarily through one’s own individual experience of them.58 In Millico’s understanding, sensibility and voice together filled in the interstices between mind and body. Through the process of internalizing nature, as an individual’s cultivation of sensibility, the sounding, physiological voice became “natural.” That “natural voice” then re-externalized nature, rendering outwardly sensible one’s own individual emotional experience. For Millico, who was looking to assert the agency of singers in reforming opera, the purpose of learning to color one’s voice was less self-expression than expressing one’s own experience of “the sentiments of the poets.” Nevertheless, by centering individual emotional experience in practices of voice, and attributing the “natural voice” to sensibility, Millico’s preface marked a significant transitional moment in the emergence of a metaphorical connection between the sonorous voice and selfhood.

completing the scene The growing attention to inner experience in aesthetics included not only the creator or producer of art but the receiver of it—the reader, spectator, or listener. This may be why Millico positioned himself as a spectator instead of 72  •   T h e Or f e o Ac t

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as the singer in his Parma anecdote. An earlier and more straightforward example of this shift can be found in Pietro Verri’s essay on music (“La Musica”), printed in his progressive Milanese journal Il Caffè in the mid1760s. Verri’s essay is an exemplar of sensism—the philosophical counterpart to the literary mode of sensibility—in that it frequently invokes the author’s own “sensibilità” in evaluating the effects of musical sound. For instance, he, like so many others, extolled the “simple” and “natural” in singing, yet he ultimately judged singing by whether or not it could “stir movements” within his own “soul.” Verri measured simplicity and naturalness not by a universal metric but according to his internal, dynamic, emotional response to the sonic sensations of voices. Even more to the point, Verri repeatedly emphasized that his experiences, aural and moral, should not be presumed universal. “I don’t pretend that the same [effect] should befall every ear,” he explained; “I simply tell that which happens within myself [dentro di me].”59 At first this all might seem to hammer home the incompatibility between sensibility and classicism. On the surface, sensibility privileges disruptions and individual experience, however formalized, while classicism ostensibly privileges rational balance and hierarchical order. But in Italian culture of the late eighteenth century, sensibility and classicism were tightly intertwined, and not just in Guadagni’s and Millico’s revoicings of Greek myth. Licia Sirch for one reads late Settecento vocal chamber music as generically exemplifying this overlap, part of the move from a rationalist aesthetics of imitation to a “proto-romantic” one of what she calls soggettività (subjectivity). Sirch highlights two guiding concepts, la grazia (grace) and il pittoresco (the picturesque), which were important because they were not understood as inherent qualities of objects themselves, but as qualities contingent on one’s internal experience of those objects.60 This permitted “classical” lyric texts—from archaic Greek ones by Sappho and Anacreon to the more recently “classicized” ones of Metastasio—to remain in the repertory by inviting readers and listeners to reflect on the “sensations” they felt from them.61 Consequently, both nature and Arcadian classicism, which converged in the picturesque emblem of the landscape, became less fixed models than sites for contemplation.62 Classicism did not have to be completely jettisoned if its material and textual vestiges could be seen as the traces of an idyllic, remote past, tinged with a sense of loss.63 Sensibility did not preclude or replace classicism; it actively encouraged people to contemplate what classical aesthetics made them feel. This self-reflective aesthetics of experience dovetails with a contemporary artistic technique for cultivating sensibility, what Elisabeth Le Guin has T h e Or f e o Ac t   •   73

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called leaving a “semiotic lack.” When an aesthetic object was left “open” or incomplete, as in a landscape painting without human figures or a sonata without a singable melody, the apparent lack invited viewers or listeners to “insert themselves” into the work and, in so doing, “complete” it.64 I suggest that the obbligato, or accompanied, recitative in opera extended just such an invitation. Within serious opera in general, the musical material of recitative was sparse by design in order to allow the singer(s) to declaim freely in an elevated yet speechlike manner. Obbligato recitatives were not so devoid of musical interest as were run-of-the-mill secco (unaccompanied, i.e., continuoonly) recitatives. Accompanied recitatives certainly lacked a songlike melody, but on the speaking-to-singing spectrum of operatic utterances they sit somewhere in between arias and secco recitatives, relying on instrumental support to provide the musical interest and intensification missing from the notated vocal part. Recitative was considered as, at once, the least interesting component of opera—operagoers famously chatted through recitative scenes—and as holding the greatest potential for expressivity, although, more often than not, one left unrealized. Lacking true melodic content, recitative depended for “completion” on the singer’s nuanced delivery, as with Guadagni’s effusive spontaneity or Millico’s vocal colors. Still, the orchestra’s support and the singer’s vocal accents did not completely fill in the semiotic lacks in the accompanied recitative landscape. Any potential emotional effects were also contingent on listeners’ sensibility, on their capacity to fill in the semiotic lack for themselves and respond accordingly. Recitative was an open field, waiting for singer and spectator to complete it together. This, then, was the full story behind Millico’s account of the 1769 “Orfeo Act.” In the recitative leading into “Che farò,” the “singer succeeded in coloring his voice so well” that the audience filled in the historical and musical gaps to complete the scene of sensibility. They wept.

voce di petto By the 1780s, what had begun as the Orphic dynamism of natural vocal expression had infiltrated the performance and composition of distinctly unOrphic operas across Italy and beyond. As the first generation of sentimental singers transitioned from stage performance into teaching, composition, and retirement, a younger star picked up their mantle as castrato of sensibility. Gasparo Pacchierotti sang in Gluck’s Orfeo in a yet another altered form at 74  •   T h e Or f e o Ac t

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the court theater in Naples in 1774, and in 1780 he performed in a concert version of Bertoni’s setting in London. But what would become Pacchierotti’s best-known scene of sensibility took place outside the Calzabigian reform tradition—in a setting of Metastasio’s canonical Artaserse. The soprano castrato was singing Arbace, a favorite character of both Guadagni’s and Millico’s, set to music by Bertoni, Pacchierotti’s teacher and mentor, at Forlì in 1776. As the story goes—and it was retold well into the nineteenth century, attaining mythical status—Pacchierotti sang so expressively in one recitative that the orchestra musicians, utterly absorbed in his pathos, neglected to start playing again. When Pacchierotti demanded to know what was going on, the maestro replied, “I am crying, signore!” The singer’s recitative accents were so moving that even those who were supposedly “in on” the theatrical illusion could not help but complete the scene with their tears.65 Listeners from London to northern Italy heard Pacchierotti’s vocal sensibility as continuing the line of Guadagni’s and Millico’s, though Orfeo played a comparatively small role in Pacchierotti’s own career.66 Pacchierotti’s links to Guadagni include the circumstantial—both lived in Padua, collaborated with Bertoni, and sang Orfeo—and the metaphorical, in that the younger singer was generally recognized as the “spiritual heir to Guadagni” (in Lorenzo Mattei’s words).67 Writers in Italy and abroad invoked Guadagni and Pacchierotti dyadically to serve as shorthand for expressive singing. For instance, in his aforementioned tirade against opera seria, Borsa lamented that “uncultured [. . .] theater people” couldn’t be “civilized” through any means, not even the singing of the “highest geniuses: Pacchierotti [or] Guadagni.” 68 In 1791, Venetian theater critic Innocenzo Della Lena attributed to those two castrati the beginnings of a great theatrical sea change, which “started to be born a little with Guadagni, [and] much more with Pacchierotti.” 69 Pacchierotti soon became an Orpheus figure in his own right, with no need to make reference to either Guadagni or Gluck’s opera. In 1803, Triestan intellectual and opera lover Benedetto Frizzi, who was too young to have heard Pacchierotti as Orfeo, mythologized him as “truly immortal in the art of singing, a true wonder of nature,” like “Orpheus among the Greeks of antiquity.”70 From his other Orphic predecessor, Millico, Pacchierotti inherited an expressive tradition connected with a different scene of pathos: Sacchini’s setting of the aria “Se cerca, se dice” and the preceding recitative “Misero! che veggo!,” from Metastasio’s L’Olimpiade. Though originally composed in 1763, Sacchini revised it for Millico to sing in London in the 1770s. Millico’s celebrated performance of the recitative-aria scene encapsulates his ability to T h e Or f e o Ac t   •   75

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transcend the role of Orfeo while transfusing its sensibility back into Metastasian verse (although, notably, this particular aria text was already recognized as singularly poignant within the poet’s oeuvre, even by the likes of Calzabigi.)71 Pacchierotti sang Megacle, the role with which the aria was connected, in many different settings in the 1770s and 1780s, but it was his rendition of the “Se cerca, se dice” first composed for Millico that confirmed him as the new singer of sensibility on both sides of the Channel. As Feldman reads it, accounts of Pacchierotti’s London performance of Millico’s scene paint a picture not only of the former’s artistic debts to the latter, but of operatic sensibility par excellence.72 On Pacchierotti’s performance of the scene within a Venetian L’Olimpiade in 1786, Della Lena wrote that it had “touched and delighted the heart” and, in Cesarottian fashion, “still lived” in his own “memory.”73 The effects of Pacchierotti’s performance were not necessarily owed to the pleasurable sounds of his voice, as references to his nasal timbre and sketchy high notes abound, but came from the sensibility he touched within his listeners. Frizzi, for one, declared that despite Pacchierotti’s technical flaws, the singer “could, at his pleasure, make every sensible [i.e., sensitive] man weep with the tenderness of his expressions.”74 Notwithstanding the castrato-driven spread of sensibility through opera seria, anxieties about virtuosic voices were anything but quelled. As Pacchierotti’s voice came to be defined by its connections to Guadagni’s and Millico’s, it also emerged in opposition to that of soprano castrato Luigi Marchesi. Marchesi was for many late Settecento writers a kind of castrato bogeyman, threatening to undo the Orfeos’ work by seducing operagoers with his astonishing yet cold technical prowess. Comparisons of the two singers appear frequently in accounts from the 1780s and 1790s, such as those by Pietro Verri and the Earl of Mount-Edgcumbe, most of which recognized them as the best singers of their day but in markedly distinct styles.75 For some listeners, however, there was no longer a place for such heroic virtuosity as Marchesi’s. Della Lena called up his memory of Pacchierotti’s “Se cerca, se dice” to complain of Marchesi’s performance of the same aria. As he put it, the contrast was nothing less than that between a “living body” and a “formless,” “lifeless” “ghost.”76 Without sensibility, he implied, a castrato was a specter best left in the musical past. One Venetian took an unpopular stance in arguing that Marchesi, not Pacchierotti, was the future of feeling in serious opera. For poet and pot stirrer Count Alessandro Pepoli, Guadagni had been the only true “singer of passion and imitator of nature,” while Pacchierotti’s sensibility was merely smoke and 76  •   T h e Or f e o Ac t

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mirrors—“superfluous affectations”—to cover up his subpar vocal technique. Published as a preface to his opera libretto Meleagro (Venice, 1789), Pepoli’s polemical essay was part reform treatise and part Calzabigi fan letter. Praise for Guadagni meant praise for Calzabigi, the poet who had facilitated the singer’s Orfeo act, and Pepoli clearly hoped to capitalize on both of their reputations for his own ends.77 Pepoli’s taste in singers was therefore mostly strategic, an attempt to do what Calzabigi had done with Guadagni: find a singer willing to publicize the poet’s reformist vision. When Pepoli insisted that it was Marchesi who had the potential to be Guadagni’s successor as the “singer of passion,” it was because Pepoli was then in the process of convincing Marchesi to collaborate with him on a new operatic venture, La morte d’Ercole (The death of Hercules). The offer was that if Marchesi would learn from Pepoli to have a “more intelligent, and less cold, heart,” he might just beat out Pacchierotti and supersede Guadagni himself.78 Pepoli’s plan fell through. His Hercules libretto featured a dramatic onstage death scene for Marchesi in act 3, capped off by a big rondò, but it was never produced because the singer rejected Pepoli’s reformist approach. Pepoli printed his unperformed version in 1790 anyway, prefaced by a satirical dialogue in which he rehearsed his artistic differences with the virtuoso castrato. In one particularly rich moment Pepoli’s alter ego, “Cordisasso,” snarkily opposes his own conception of voice to that of “Storditello” (Marchesi): storditello:  [Singing] a Rondeau while sitting down [. . .] How do you expect me to bring forth my voice? cordisasso:  From where? Do you not perhaps bring it forth from your chest [petto], and are you not perhaps in the situation of being a dying man, one that demands very little voice? [. . .] [These situations] give you a wide-open field for acting. [. . .] storditello:  [. . .] Your “beautiful situations” deprive me of too many of my musical delights! cordisasso:  That may be quite true. But I would have hoped to compensate for that [. . .] with the acquisition of an actor, which I hoped (despite your intelligence) to limit you [to becoming].79

By 1790, the rondò (in Pepoli’s French spelling here) had been firmly established as the expressive-vocal high point of any serious opera for its castrato star. But was the rondò fundamentally a vocal showpiece, as Storditello insists, or was it a “wide-open field for acting,” as Cordisasso maintains? T h e Or f e o Ac t   •   77

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Well, the answer to that depends. From where does one “bring forth” the voice? Cordisasso’s petto (chest) has a double meaning. Although he plays on the physiological “chest” as the site of vocal resonance in the lower part of one’s range (as in the chest voice, or voce di petto), Cordisasso/Pepoli obviously thinks the heavier, louder sound of the voce di petto would be ill-suited to an aria sung by the dying Hercules, who realistically should have “very little voice.” This aligns with Borsa’s argument from earlier about the voice failing under great emotional duress, and is compounded in this case by the simultaneous failure of Hercules’s physical body. Storditello/Marchesi’s voice ought not come from his literal chest as a powerful voce di petto, then, but from his metaphorical chest—his heart or breast, as a metonym for inner feeling. For Storditello, bringing forth the voice is a matter of proper singing technique, while for Cordisasso, it means bringing forth inner feeling through and as vocal sound.80 Pepoli/Cordisasso overrules the singer’s vocaltechnical objections, since if Marchesi/Storditello would assent to “limit[ing]” himself vocally and musically, he could finally learn to be a great actor. With such a “wide-open field for acting,” the poet offered the castrato a musico-poetic landscape with a semiotic lack, just waiting to be filled with his vocal performance of sensibility. Marchesi declined the offer, but Pepoli found someone else willing to take the field. A year later the poet wrote some of these vocal tensions into his first major gig as librettist. He provided the poetry and directed the production for the grand opening of Venice’s Teatro La Fenice in 1792, featuring an opera composed by Giovanni Paisiello and starring none other than Pacchierotti.

i may lament in freedom In I giuochi d’Agrigento (The Agrigentan Games), Pepoli and Paisiello took Metastasian elements and unsettled them with signatures of Orphic sensibility, inviting audiences to contemplate the changing aesthetics of Italian serious opera. In particular, they created Pacchierotti’s role, Clearco, as a study in representing verisimilar feeling outside the frame of a self-reflexive Orphic plot.81 The opera’s action opens as Eraclide, the king of Agrigento (in Sicily, now famous for its ancient ruins), crowns a winner at his Olympic-style athletic games. The prize is the hand of his daughter Egesta in marriage. The games’ victor is Clearco, prince of Locri, who has fled his home for Agrigento 78  •   T h e Or f e o Ac t

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because he harbors a secret incestuous love for his sister, Aspasia. Eraclide and his chorus of pagan priests prevail upon the tormented Clearco to wed Egesta, but Clearco concocts all manner of excuses to avoid it. After much ado, Clearco learns he is not in fact the prince of Locri, but a victim of the good old “baby switch” plot twist. He is actually King Eraclide’s son, and therefore Egesta’s brother, not Aspasia’s. Once this is revealed, Clearco marries Aspasia for a happy ending. The pageantry of the athletic arena and temples ensured that La Fenice would have sumptuous sets befitting the inauguration of a new opera theater. And significantly for Pepoli’s purposes, these situations also provided opportunities for Orphic (and Ossianic) juxtapositions of choral and solo singing, which dramatized the opera’s overarching conflict between publicized and interiorized feeling. Pacchierotti, then fifty-two and on the cusp of retirement, sang the role of tormented youth Clearco, while Giacomo David, the Imeneo in Bertoni’s Orfeo, played King Eraclide, and the bravura soprano Brigida Giorgi Banti sang Aspasia. David and Banti were both celebrated for their vocal agility, and the arias Paisiello gave them flaunted those talents. Banti had two, each with a broad tessitura, extensive fioritura, and large leaps reminiscent of Mozart’s Vitellia.82 David’s solos also demanded great range and flexibility, especially his act 1 aria “Vedrò ridente il sole,” which sparkles with chromatically inflected runs and numerous opportunities for cadenzas. In contrast to those of David and Banti, Pacchierotti’s solos as Clearco are positively Orphicsentimental. Paisiello’s vocal writing for the tenor and soprano gave them the heavy bel canto lifting, foreshadowing the central duo of Ottocento opera, and allowing the castrato to linger in the musical landscape of sensibility. Though Paisiello and Pepoli’s writing for Pacchierotti explores different modes of performing sensibility, in light of Pepoli’s griping about “affectations,” it also stages the inauthenticity of such performance. Clearco therefore sings neither rondòs nor da capo arias. Instead, his solos take unusual forms for a primo uomo role. There are two cavatinas set within choral scenes; a single aria in an uncategorizable hybrid form; and an accompanied recitative scena. The two cavatinas con coro, “Dolce di gloria” (1.1) and “Gran dio de’ mortali” (2.5), are both simple and sentimental, as Clearco accepts his victory in the games and prays with the temple priests, respectively. These two moments of song-as-song resonate with Orfeo’s performance of feeling in “Deh, placatevi,” in that they all show how a “command performance” convinces a surrounding choral public of the singer’s sincerity. The difference is that, unlike Orfeo, Clearco is lying to everyone around him. He performs T h e Or f e o Ac t   •   79

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his required public role by veiling his true feelings with the sonic illusion of Orphic sensibility. The Venetian public was certainly convinced, however. According to the Gazzetta urbana veneta, in the prayer (2.5) Pacchierotti “emit[ted] a sweetness, which he always does in his singing,” holding a “monopoly” on “the favor of souls [animi] who are sensible [sensibili] to the subtlety of musical expression.”83 “Emit [sparge]” has a meaning similar to that of “express” in that both denote the externalizing of something interior. Pacchierotti’s performance of the prayer exemplified Pepoli’s notion of the voce di petto as a voice that, restrained from musical showiness, is brought forth from the heart to elicit feeling from other sensible souls. Of course, Pacchierotti’s vocal restraint only went so far. He still broke character, as Guadagni had famously refused to do, and responded to the audiences’ ovation by treating them to an encore of the prayer.84 The same tension between public performance and interiorized feeling is staged without a soloist-chorus frame in Clearco’s one aria, “Sognai tormenti, affanni” (1.10), where it can be heard in the gradual transition from sentimental musical language to flourishes of fioritura. As he sings the aria Clearco attempts to reassure the suspicious high priest that his former turmoil has ceased. At the same time, he struggles to restrain his feelings—he commands them to “be silent,” as though his sensibility is indeed his inner voice (“Affetti miei tiranni / Tacete, oimè! tacete!”). As he tries to silence his feelings, rests interrupt his phrases and break up words (e.g., splitting up the syllables of “tacete,” “be silent”). These breaks in his vocal line give the section a breathless, gasping quality, like the contractions of the diaphragmatic “plexus of sensibility,” while making audible the metaphorical back-and-forth between inner voice and outer voice. From there, the vocal part grows incrementally flashier as Clearco tries harder and harder to convince, or perhaps distract, the priest. These composed-out “superfluous affectations” cover Clearco’s genuine feelings, hiding his metaphorical inner voice behind his literal sounding one. His struggle between socially mandated artifice and inner authenticity also plays out on the broader level of form. Paisiello set Pepoli’s aria text neither as a da capo nor a rondò, but as a bizarre hybrid of the two.85 In sum, Clearco’s interiorized and exteriorized voices—his sensibility and his performance of it—disrupted conventions both longstanding and newly established. This brings us to the only moment in which Clearco is not performing his sensibility for an audience. Unsurprisingly for a Calzabigian acolyte like 80  •   T h e Or f e o Ac t

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Pepoli, that moment took the form of an accompanied recitative, “Eccovi, o sacri orrori” (Here you are, o sacred horrors; 2.11). The recitative comes at the point when the primo uomo’s rondò would usually appear, but, tellingly, it is offered instead of one. The scena begins as Clearco seeks a private place to ruminate on the question of his identity, as he is yet unsure of who his real parents are. He must leave the public world behind in order to express himself, so, for the first time in the opera, “the only witnesses of [his] sorrow” are the “bushes, the stones”—and the audience at La Fenice. The libretto’s scenic description sets the mood: “An open, uncultivated place, scattered with various ancient tombs. Some temple ruins are seen in the background.”86 The scene is at once the classical past haunting the penumbral present and the unpopulated landscape of the semiotic lack. As a recitative it is also, crucially, unfolding in narrative time, not in the lyric moment of aria. For the duration of the recitative the instrumental accompaniment functions primarily to supplement the visual scene, sonically enhancing the sense of place and movement by imitating natural sounds and marking Clearco’s physical gestures.87 The recitative begins in D minor, its oppressive stasis interrupted now and again when the violins outline triads and emit stile concitato scales during pauses in Clearco’s declamation. But everything changes once he finds a spot where his voice, and his feelings, can be liberated (“io posso / Gemere in libertà”). Now in the dominant, and surrounded by “the silence of the dead,” he turns from contemplating the ruins of culture to listening for the graceful and picturesque sounds of nature (while the strings and oboes imitate the wind and birdsong). The arc of the scene stages the internalization of nature and its effects on, indivisibly, voice and self. As the recitative progresses, Clearco’s contemplation of nature leads him to explore the emotions that nature stirs within him. This inward turn is made audible in Calzabigian-Cesarottian fashion. When Clearco experiences the external world in the first half of the scene, his thoughts span multiple lines, but when he turns inside himself, his speech becomes fragmented, with ellipses, exclamations, and interrogatives prescribing his vocal expression of dynamic feeling. The “uncultivated” nature around him cannot tell him who he truly is, but it does guide him to reflect on, and so give voice to, his inner nature—to “lament in freedom” through his natural voce di petto. Clearco’s recitative scena did not need to lead into an aria, then, because in Pepoli’s Calzabigian framework, expressing oneself freely meant effusing in fragments, not in legato lines or fioritura. Throughout the opera Clearco T h e Or f e o Ac t   •   81

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only “sings” when he must, when he has a clear social role to inhabit; now, without knowing who he is, or who his parents were, there can be no proper song because he has no role to perform. Lacking both melody and identity, he can only fill the scene with sensibility. For Pacchierotti, such a scene was more fitting as an eleven o’clock number than any bravura rondò, for it was his performance of recitative that was lauded by writers from Arteaga to Rossini, and which later attained monumental, even mythical, status in the Ottocento.88 After Pacchierotti’s retirement from the stage, memories of his recitative accenti conjured the ruins and tombs of the classical landscape as a synecdoche for the castrato voice of sensibility that was, by the time of Rossini, already lamented as lost. As Pacchierotti’s own nephew put it in 1844, “The wonders of the Greeks’ dramatic music, which were owed to the union of the forces of poetry and song, were intuited and reproduced by Pacchierotti, even in recitatives with the barest accompaniment.”89 It was neither poets nor composers but Pacchierotti, the castrato of sensibility, who had finally reunified poetry and song. A modern Orfeo act indeed.

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three

Civilizing Song

the empire of humanity and civil life A pen-and-ink sketch from 1794 shows a group of so-called Neapolitan Jacobins sitting around a table, deep in conversation. At the head of the table is the librettist and politician Francesco Saverio Salfi; next to him, just offcenter in the image, there is a bewigged man labeled as “Giuseppe Millico” (see figure 6). Surely this must be a different Giuseppe Millico. The singercomposer we met in chapter 2 was an employee of the same royal court in Naples that the Jacobins, including Salfi, would in 1799 overthrow and replace with the short-lived Parthenopean Republic. But it is indeed that very Millico, for his face is nearly identical to the one shown in painted portraits of the singer. So what in the world was the famous Orfeo, singing teacher to the Bourbon princesses, doing at a meeting of radical revolutionaries? Millico’s inclusion in the sketch implies that he did not stumble into the scene by accident, and it is unlikely that in 1794, at the height of Robespierre’s rule in France, a group of Jacobins gathered to discuss singing technique. Was Millico a secret radical? Possibly—and given his position at court, he may have promulgated his political views under cover of aesthetic arguments. In this light, consider again Millico’s La pietà d’amore preface (1782), in which he insisted that the “effects of Greek music” could be revived by cultivating vocal sensibility, and, more fundamentally, that sensibility grew from one’s individual emotional experience. The thing is, centering individual feeling was not just proto-Method acting but a major point in concepts of postabsolutist civil power. By the nineteenth century, as Kyla Schuller aptly puts it, “the feelings of the civilized individual—and only the civilized individual” were understood as “the kernel of liberal democracy.”1 Millico’s preface 83

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figure 6.  Francesco Lapegna, Una riunione dei giacobini napoletani nel 1794. The sketch depicts a “gathering of Neapolitan Jacobins,” including Giuseppe Millico (right); note his name written at the top. Original held at the Museo di San Martino, Naples. Photograph courtesy of A. Dagli Orti / De Agostini Editorial via Getty Images. Reproduced by permission.

adumbrated that premise by suggesting that the sentimental-moral power of voice was indeed democratic: “Some modern singers will tell me that not all voices are capable of these perfections, and that consequently not all of them can produce the effects of Greek music. I reply to them that if the organs of the throat and the tongue, and the chest of the young singer are well formed, all voices will produce more or less the same effect.”2 “Not all voices” could execute virtuosic, bravura singing, according to late Settecento voice pedagogues. Virtuosity was rare, privileged, astonishing.3 But virtuosity was not the “perfection” Millico was talking about when he extolled the effects of Greek music. Not all voices could astonish—but all voices could make people feel. The raw materials of any singer’s voice, albeit with a few caveats, possessed the same immanent moral potential as ancient Greek song, pending only the proper “cultivation” (as Millico wrote in the preceding passage of the preface). This was because the voice should emanate from a singer’s individual feeling, as sensibility rendered audible through the organs that produced 84  •   C i v i l i z i ng Song

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vocal sound. The “natural” voice therefore depended on interiority rather than exteriority—suggesting that Millico’s own voice had itself originated not in the unnatural signatures of his castrated body, but in an internal source that was at once individual to him and universal to all humanity. The Orphic voice he described in writing thus represented neither divinity nor sovereignty, but the potential for democracy. And yet, in order for “all voices [to] produce [. . .] the same effect,” certain markers of difference had to be rejected, flattened, or at least assimilated. As Millico pointed out, singers’ bodies had to be “well formed” to sing with “naturalness.” His caveat points to the flip side of those vaunted Enlightenment values of naturalness, universality, and equality. Putting such values into practice meant that signs of transcendence or unnaturalness, especially those marked on the body and in its behaviors, had to be dealt with. Only “civilized individuals” warranted a voice in liberal democracy; only “well-formed” voices counted toward Millico’s “all voices.” 4 This chapter explores how late Settecento revisions of the Orphic myth confronted the changing resonances of voices in the public sphere. Operatic voices, once reimagined as agents of sensibility and warrants of interiority and individuality, posed challenges not only to operatic institutions and practices, but to the world at large. This was partly because the virtuosicheroic voices of opera seria and the roles they animated had long served as instruments of absolute sovereignty, none more so than those of the castrati, whose visibly marked bodily difference and superhuman voices proclaimed them as simultaneously grotesque and transcendent doubles for the king.5 At the same time, the astonishing voices of opera seria—castrato and otherwise—functioned as sonic luxury objects: courts across Europe displayed their resident primi uomini and prime donne like collectibles while smoothing over the labor of music making by rewarding them with gifts instead of cash.6 This chapter could trace how the Orphic voice of sensibility undid these antico regno structures of power by asserting the primacy of feeling, giving rise to both liberal democracy and modern capitalism by triumphantly ratifying enlightened subjectivity as the exercise of individual agency. But the reality was more complicated and less triumphant. Italy remained politically fragmented for more than half a century after the American, French, and Haitian revolutions, and culturally so into the twentieth century, making any single story about its cultural politics hopelessly reductive. While the case studies in this chapter all date to the 1780s, they are drawn from sites across Italy, from Parma to Venice, Rome, Milan, and Naples, in C i v i l i z i ng Song   •   85

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order to emphasize both the impossibility of a single teleological narrative and the common themes shared among different versions of the story. Although responses to the Orphic voice arose synchronously across various contexts and media, interlocutors grappled with the ramifications of that voice in different, though not incompatible, ways. In what follows I unpack how such negotiations of Orphic voice intersected in what I call civilizing song. I will say more about the term later on, but broadly, civilizing song does double work, as indicated by the two ways of reading the phrase. Taken as a compound noun, it describes song that civilizes those who hear it. When read instead as a gerund and object, it refers to the process by which song itself becomes civilized. These seemingly oppositional meanings are instead dyadic, in that they both grow from the premise that the singing voice has the power to shape feeling subjects and political ones. The notion of civilizing song therefore reveals the imbrication of these two modes of subjectivity, the emotional and the political. This is evident in Millico’s preface once it is revisited with the knowledge of its author’s later Jacobinism. What first seem like aesthetic claims in fact extended beyond the opera stage into the “real world,” thereby articulating the convergence both in theory and in practice between aesthetics and politics—with “feelings” as the central node between them. As we have seen, the aesthetics of sensibility were contingent on singers’ and spectators’ capacities to experience and reflect on their feelings, or “moral sentiments.” Ethics were also understood as derived from an individual’s experience of and reflection on moral sentiments, but ethics were widely recognized as laying the foundations for civil society.7 This chain of connections suggested that experiencing moral sentiments during a theatrical performance of sensibility could—or should—have some effect on civil society. If feeling was not only an aesthetic transaction but, by virtue of its ethical implications, a sociopolitical one, then voice, as a sonic conduit for transmitting feeling, became complicit in politics. The idea that voice operated as a political agent was simmering under the surface of Millico’s project. By casting his Orphic performance in Parma as having revived “the effects of ancient Greek music,” Millico was doing more than dragging out a tired old symbol of song. He was reminding readers that the poet-singer was not merely a symbol of song. Orpheus was proof that voice had been the originary political force. Certainly, in the wake of Cesarotti’s Vichian take on Ossian in the 1760s and 1770s (see chapter 1), Orphic song was frequently cited as having turned the aesthetic to political purposes at the mythical origins of civilization. Orphic song and, later, Greek 86  •   C i v i l i z i ng Song

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music had both operated as sonic media for collective political edification— and, crucially, they had both been disseminated not through writing, but through singing voices. For many late Settecento writers, those voices had once had a civilizing purpose. In 1769, for example, the poet and aesthetic theorist Saverio Bettinelli referred to the original function of Orphic song as taming barbarians. Orpheus, he explained, “became father and lord of the peoples domesticated by his song [mansuefatti al suo canto], and founded the most beautiful empire that has ever been, the empire of humanity and civil life.”8 The word mansuefatto derives from the language of animal husbandry, suggesting that Orpheus’s singing raised subhuman creatures into “humanity” capable of living a “civil life,” much like primordial humans had domesticated wild beasts into livestock. The implicit association between uncivilized people and undomesticated animals is not incidental here. As Lisa Lowe has put it, “the condition of possibility for Western liberalism” in this period inhered in the “distinction between definitions of the human and those to whom such definitions do not extend.” 9 Similar discourses of humanizing and civilizing characterize Planelli’s representation of Orphic song. In his opera reform treatise Dell’opera in musica (Naples, 1772), which Millico drew on liberally for his preface, Planelli compared the effects of ancient Greek music to those of modern opera. Modern opera, he predictably argued, privileged sensual pleasure and so generated, at best, astonishment. But ancient Greek music had achieved ethical and political effects by continuing the work of Orpheus’s song: By Orpheus [. . . people] had been invited to abandon their life of brutality [. . .] and to enjoy, under the protection of law, the sweetness of civil society. [. . .] With a song accompanied by the harmony of a musical instrument [the lyre] men were taught their duties toward the Supreme Being, the laws of a nascent homeland were promulgated, and the principles of justice, friendship, conjugal love, courtesy, charity, compassion for others, and military courage were instilled.10

Millico’s theory of Orphic voice depended on these well-established myths of song, and enabled him to argue, contra Planelli, that “even in modern times” Orphic song could still civilize the public—if not through opera per se, then through the singing voice. Thanks to Orpheus’s voice, the instrument of civilizing song, the Greeks had known not only “true perfection” in music, but also democracy and civil society.11 Perhaps Orphic voices in the opera house could do the same for modern Italians. C i v i l i z i ng Song   •   87

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For musicians and literati alike, civilizing song was key to reforming, edifying, even humanizing modern Italians. And yet determining whether song could civilize or needed to be civilized proved a slippery business. In Parma, a serious opera dramatized how Orphic voice could either destroy civilization or protect it, depending on the song and on listeners’ moral qualities. In Venice, a comic opera satirized the pretensions of Orphic voice while using them as currency in the process of civilizing. In Rome, Milan, and Naples, novels and essays considered how the political power of voice could be contained and redirected for the purposes of civilizing. Across the peninsula, ambivalent representations of Orphic voice sounded out myths of civilizing song, underscored by anxieties about how to create modern Italian subjects.

what are these roman arts that civilize man? Arguments about the eighteenth-century theater as an important site of civilizing processes are far from new.12 Even more established, not to mention historically laden with racist, imperialist, and colonialist ideologies, is the very notion of a “civilizing process.” The phrase gained academic currency in the twentieth century as the (English) title of Norbert Elias’s monumental sociological study, which investigates embodied processes of self-restraint— that is, “manners” or “civility”—through conduct books and other literature, with the aim of tracing how Western Europeans perceived themselves as increasingly “civilized” during the period from around 1300 to 1800.13 Elias made what were at that time innovative connections between “structural” historical processes like state formation and modes of production, and “human” elements like the sociology of the body and management of the emotions.14 Eighteenth-century discourses of civilizing were predicated on such intersections of the structural with the human, and, as we’ve seen already in Millico’s preface, the concept of civilizing song brought certain points of contact to the fore. Before considering how song fit into eighteenth-century Italian discourses of civilizing, I should explain how the theatrical process of civilizing is typically understood. In short, it operated less through sound than along two particular sightlines. The first sightline was from stage to spectator, and the second was between spectators. In the first, spectators learned how to behave by observing characters onstage, as Chandler has argued of the eighteenth88  •   C i v i l i z i ng Song

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century London theater (his prime example is Richard Steele’s sentimental 1722 play The Conscious Lovers).15 Along the second sightline, spectators were themselves spectated by one another within the theater’s public, yet highly regulated, space. Thanks to this second sightline, the theater functioned as a proto-panopticon of sorts in which the possibility of being observed encouraged certain modes of behavior, although the price of misbehavior was less outright punishment than the humiliating revelation of incivility or immorality.16 Enforced by both sightlines, the resulting “regulations of the body” manifested what Stallybrass and White have interpreted as a “profound interconnection of ideology and subjectivity.”17 By looking at the stage and being looked at by others in the audience, theatergoers internalized and enacted ideologies of appropriate behavior. That process is now regarded as central to the historical formation of individual subjectivity in Western culture. Obviously, the sounds made by bodies inside the theater were also collectively disciplined as part of this process, but the clear emphasis on spectatorship, both in eighteenth-century sources and recent studies, positions sight rather than sound as the prime civilizing faculty. Sure enough, the Enlightenment focus on sight was attended by a growing mistrust of hearing and, explicitly and implicitly, by the silencing of voices.18 Coming at this from another angle, then, we might ask who or what was served in civilizing narratives by silences and the mistrust of hearing. Certainly, in mid-to-late Settecento Italy, song and voice were a major source of anxieties about civilizing, in large part owing to Anglo-French concepts of civilization that excluded or marginalized Italy from “civilized” Europe. For now, just tracing the origins of the verb to civilize in Italian— civilizzare—begins to reveal some of the fraught connections between voice, feeling, and civilization in Settecento thought. I have been using the word civilizing thus far because of its connotations for Anglophone readers, but the Italian cognate civilizzare rarely shows up in eighteenth-century sources. Nouns and adjectives with the same root, like civiltà (civility) or civile (civil), were commonplace, but the verb form was a neologism of the kind disdained by the Italian literary establishment and its gatekeepers, the Accademia della Crusca. Civilizzare was first included in the Accademia’s official dictionaries, which are like an Italian OED, in the fifth edition—which began being issued in 1863, following Italian unification.19 Civilizzare did appear often in one particular type of eighteenth-century source, however: in Italian-English bilingual dictionaries, where it was translated back into English as “to civilize, to soften, to polish manners” and “to cultivate.”20 Apparently the neologism C i v i l i z i ng Song   •   89

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civilizzare was a necessary linguistic evil when translating from English, but Italians writing for Italians instead relied on various metaphors. It is no shock then that when the Accademia della Crusca finally added civilizzare to their Italian-language dictionary in the latter half of the nineteenth century, they listed as its exemplary source in Italian literature a translation of an early eighteenth-century English stage play. I want to spend some time here with that play and its Italian translation, as they laid the groundwork for later Italian notions of civilizing by dramatizing the relationships between feeling, politics, racialization, and voice. That the original play was English emphasizes again Italians’ association of civilizing with English culture, but the Accademia’s Risorgimento-era reference to it was probably also motivated by Italian nationalist pride: this early eighteenth-century play about civilizing was dedicated to celebrating, indivisibly, the republicanism and the imperialism of ancient Rome. The Accademia’s source for civilizzare was Anton Maria Salvini’s Il Catone (premiered Livorno, 1714; printed Florence, 1715), a translation of Joseph Addison’s immensely influential Cato, a Tragedy (London, 1713), which Julie Ellison deems “arguably the most politicized drama of the century.”21 Cato follows the eponymous Roman politician who stoically fought to uphold republican values under threat of tyranny and ultimately committed suicide rather than submit to Julius Caesar. It is important to note that imperialism and republicanism were not mutually exclusive; Rome had been an empire with colonies long before Caesar seized power, as far back as the Second Punic War, all while Rome was technically under republican government “at home.” Cato fought against the idea of Rome itself being ruled by an emperor, not against imperialism and colonialism in general. Cato celebrates empire, so long as those under its dominion are not considered full Romans themselves. Like many of Metastasio’s libretti, including the one based on Salvini’s translation (Catone in Utica, 1727), Addison’s Cato explores the interplay between the politics of empire and the management of emotions—the structural and the human, if you will. Yet Cato has no truck with music, in contrast to the many later Settecento texts discussed throughout this book that selfreferentially stage song. Despite the absence of music as a plot point, however, Cato is worth considering for how it introduced the concept of civilizing (properly so-called) into Settecento culture, and how it positions voice in the civilizing process. In Addison’s play the verb civilize is first used by Juba (Giuba, in Italian), the Numidian prince who aspires to emulate Cato and 90  •   C i v i l i z i ng Song

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marry his daughter, Marcia. Numidia was located in what is now Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, meaning that Juba is North African. Yet Addison did not racialize Juba in the ways we might expect given the play’s early eighteenthcentury context of the transatlantic slave trade: the play equates race less with geography or phenotype than with behavior and ideology, what Ellison calls “a state of mind.” A character’s respective Romanness or Africanness emanates from his “soul” rather than his country of birth or skin color, a point that is underlined when Juba eventually inherits Cato’s Roman legacy.22 The play thus offered eighteenth-century audiences a parable about how racialized difference could, in some cases, be contained through the civilizing process. Ironically, Juba’s Africanness was largely overlooked in the eighteenth-century reception of Cato—because he was successfully “Romanized”—but in the nineteenth century, “Juba” became a racist stock figure of African American song and dance in North America. Although these two Jubas had different origins, putting them together outlines, in broad strokes, a shift in concepts of racialized difference across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from a “state of mind” to an identity written on, and performed by, the body.23 Early on in Addison’s play, Juba strikes his own Cartesian distinction between the bonds of shared physical characteristics (body) and what he regards as the superior bonds forged by civilized culture (mind or soul). He explains to his anti-Roman general, Syphax, that his connection to his own people, “Numidia’s tawny sons,” is merely “Bones and Nerves,” whereas A Roman Soul is bent on higher Views: To civilize the rude unpolish’d World, And lay it under the Restraint of Laws; To make Man mild and sociable to Man; To cultivate the wild licentious Savage With Wisdom, Discipline, and lib’ral Arts; Th’Embellishments of Life: Virtues like these Make Human Nature shine, reform the Soul, And break our fierce Barbarians into Men. (Addison, Cato, 1.4)

For Addison’s Juba, as for Planelli’s and Bettinelli’s Orpheuses fifty years later, civilizing entailed imposing laws, fostering sociability, and cultivating learning and the arts. The desired end result of it all was “breaking” ostensibly subhuman, violent “barbarians” into denizens of what Bettinelli later called an “empire of humanity.” Art was particularly important in this C i v i l i z i ng Song   •   91

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process, demonstrated by the fact that, once civilizzare began appearing more frequently in Italian writings (during the 1780s), it was often used in texts concerned with the arts, like Arteaga’s 1783 Le rivoluzioni del teatro moderno, on opera, and Gianrinaldo Carli’s 1781 Le lettere americane, on indigenous American artifacts.24 Back in 1714, Salvini rendered Juba’s speech quoted above into Italian without using the Anglicism civilizzare. His Romanized Giuba, like Planelli, Bettinelli, and others, relies instead on various circumlocutions. Like those later Italian writers, who had certainly read Addison and/or Salvini, Giuba lays out the civilizing process through the language of manual labor and animal husbandry: formare, rendere, domesticare. Salvini holds back the neologism until several lines later, when Siface (Syphax) tries to figure out how these unfamiliar processes are carried out. In the English, Syphax asks, “What are these wond’rous civilizing arts [. . .] that render Man thus tractable and tame?” This is where Salvini introduced civilizzare into his version, not to translate “civilizing,” but for Addison’s “tractable and tame.” In Italian, Siface asks what are these Roman arts “che [. . .] fan domestico l’uomo, e civilizzanlo?” (that domesticate man, and civilize him?; emphasis added). Only after Giuba’s speech full of metaphors did Salvini sum up the process with the unfamiliar foreign-derived word civilizzare. And, ironically, the word enters into the Italian lexicon through the speech of the markedly African Siface, who throughout the play refuses to be Romanized himself. Juba reveals how voice fits into Addison’s British-imperialist concept of civilizing when he answers Syphax’s question. The Numidian prince declares that managing one’s emotions is necessary for self-civilizing, and the first step in doing so is silencing one’s voice. In Salvini’s translation, Siface asks if Rome’s civilizing project isn’t simply forcing the colonized “to mask our emotions” (mascherar gli affetti). Giuba, in response, commands Siface to do just that: “Strike thee Dumb” (in Salvini, tu taccia), and “Turn up thy Eyes to Cato.” The subaltern cannot speak.25 If he is to become civilized, he must silently spectate. Ellison glosses this exchange in Addison’s original play as the Romans offering to Juba what conduct books and journals like the Spectator offered to Addison’s English contemporaries: the opportunity to reform the public’s manners.26 The Spectator was an English print periodical founded in 1711 by Addison and Steele, the playwrights of, respectively, Cato and The Conscious Lovers. For Jürgen Habermas, the Spectator is emblematic of the rise of the bourgeois public sphere, while more recently Chandler has regarded it as an early exercise in cultivating “moral spectatorship.” In Chandler’s reading, the 92  •   C i v i l i z i ng Song

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character of “Mr. Spectator,” a proxy for Addison and Steele, “unburden[s] his full heart in his papers” by commenting on current events from the political to the theatrical. When members of the emergent public sphere read the Spectator in coffeehouses across London and beyond, Mr. Spectator’s observations turned them into “virtual spectators” themselves. The Spectator thus cultivated reader-spectators’ moral sense and instilled in them civilized behavior.27 Addison’s Cato civilized its audiences much like his Spectator did its readers, and as Juba’s Rome did its colonized subjects. Each silenced people’s voices and instructed them to instead read, observe, and spectate. Catone and its Roman imperialist nostalgia provided such an enduring model for Italian concepts of civilizing that 150 years later the Accademia della Crusca selected Giuba’s scene as the exemplary first literary use of civilizzare. Not to foreshadow with too heavy a hand, but nationalist writers in the decades post-unification continued to invoke imperial Rome and its “civilizing mission” as precedent for Italy’s own attempts to colonize Africa.28 By the later Ottocento, civilizing through imperialism formed the core of unified Italy’s nationalist self-image. But so too did opera.29 The question is, how did voice become an ideological tool for Italy’s civilizing process rather than an impediment to it? The rest of this chapter—and the rest of this book—suggests several possible answers.

a theater of theater itself As singers like Millico and Guadagni asserted their own agency in operatic reform, the ethical implications of their Orphic posturing struck some literati as deeply concerning. One writer even based an entire libretto on the premise that Orphic voices further dissolved the already-faded line between the singer’s agency and the poet’s, thereby rendering audiences unable to distinguish between moral edification and artistic tyranny. Anyone could seize power by playing to operagoers’ feelings! And what would happen to society if people couldn’t tell the difference between their own feelings and universal truths? What would happen if the sovereign himself couldn’t tell? For the sake of civilization, singers could not be trusted with the Orphic lyre—or so maintained the court poet of Parma, Count Carlo Gastone della Torre di Rezzonico. In 1782 he reasserted the political rights of poetry by lending his own “noble lyre” to a new dramma per musica for Parma’s Teatro C i v i l i z i ng Song   •   93

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Ducale. His opera, Alessandro e Timoteo, premiered the same year as Millico’s La pietà d’amore, and, like Millico’s preface, it looked back to the 1769 Parma production of Gluck’s Orfeo. After all, the “Orfeo Act” had been Rezzonico’s big break as well. Following Frugoni’s death in 1768, Rezzonico had inherited stewardship of the royal wedding festivities that included Le feste d’Apollo, within which Millico had first appeared as Orfeo. Some thirteen years later Rezzonico’s Alessandro e Timoteo was a similarly high-profile enterprise, being the first serious opera given at the Teatro Ducale since 1769. Like the wedding operas, Alessandro e Timoteo celebrated an important international event, in this case the visit of the “Counts of the North,” future Russian emperor Prince Paul Petrowitz and his wife, Maria Feodorovna. The visiting sovereigns were to be dazzled by a Parmesan extravaganza stuffed with ballets, choruses, and elaborate scene changes, all with new music by Giuseppe Sarti, the maestro di cappella at Milan. To lay the scene for his ambitious musical and political endeavor, Rezzonico penned a poetic prologue for the opera’s premiere that narrated a “competition” among a crowd of “new Orpheuses.” Culminating with his lavish praise for Parma’s “Greek spirit,” Rezzonico introduced himself in verse as the Orphic competition’s victor, the true bard of Parma. It would not be some castrato’s warbling but the poet’s own “noble lyre,” his literary genius, that “recalled Athens.”30 Rezzonico was drawing on the same Orphic tropes as Millico, ubiquitous as they were by that point, but he deployed them to different ends.31 By seizing the metaphorical lyre back from singers, Rezzonico hoped to succeed where the just-deceased Metastasio had, in his opinion, failed. The poet of Parma would liberate serious opera once and for all from the clutches of domineering singers and sycophantic composers.32 In order to highlight his intervention, Rezzonico placed the problem of tyrannical voice center stage, making his opera a cautionary tale about what happened when listeners were too “sensible” to the emotional manipulations of a singer’s voice. What happened as a result of that manipulation was nothing short of violence and chaos: the libretto dramatizes how the ancient Greek musician Timoteo (Timotheus) “excited the fury of [King Alexander the Great] with the Phrygian mode, and calmed him with the Lydian mode,” eventually driving the tyrant to set the city of Persepolis aflame in a musically induced rage.33 Rezzonico juxtaposed the basic plot of Dryden’s ode Alexander’s Feast with material from Athenaeus’s Dypnosophistae, then tweaked the premise slightly to fit his purpose. Significantly, he changed his operatic Timoteo from the tibia player of Athenaeus’s history into a composer, poet, and singer rolled 94  •   C i v i l i z i ng Song

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into one.34 Making Timoteo a lyric poet-singer rather than an instrumentalist killed two songbirds with one stone: it made the character an obvious commentary on the Orphic figure, and gave the poet an excuse to slip in extra barbs against vocal virtuosity and the composers who enabled it. As he put it, writing Timoteo as a singer required “poetry full of sentiment [sentimento] and flattery [lusinghe], in whose expression modern music triumphs.”35 Rezzonico’s king Alessandro, a tyrant whose mismanaged emotions destabilize and even destroy his empire, would have been Cato’s worst nightmare. (Arteaga, for one, deemed Rezzonico’s Alessandro a “raving madman” in his ambivalent review.)36 As such, Alessandro’s slide from bad spectator into bad sovereign reveals the poet’s skepticism about the potentially beneficial effects of theatrical sensibility.37 Rezzonico critiqued the emotional force of theatrical illusions by diverging from his source texts and portraying Timoteo’s musical effects as neither magical nor moral but entirely (meta)theatrical. This kept the libretto in line with both the Aristotelian unities and Rezzonico’s avowed mission of verisimilitude, but more importantly it subverted myths about the capacity of “voice alone” to move listeners. In Alessandro e Timoteo, the emotional power of Timoteo’s singing appears to transport the characters from place to place—the Kingdom of Love, the Tomb of Dario, and so forth—even though they never leave the palace gardens. Alessandro is fooled by these illusions because Timoteo’s songs have been coordinated with “onstage” scene changes, all masterminded by Timoteo with the intention of tricking Alessandro into losing his mind. Rezzonico ensured that the audience at the Teatro Ducale could see the pieces of Timoteo’s scenery being shuffled around the stage, and even drew attention to the play-within-a-play conceit in the printed libretto. His canny dramaturgy invited the real-life spectators in Parma to witness what Alessandro could not: Timoteo’s songs were merely one piece of a unified theatrical illusion. When it came to manipulating theatergoers’ sensibility, seeing was no more trustworthy than hearing. If a singer’s voice seemed to have the power to literally and metaphorically “move” listeners, it was thanks to the equally manipulative magic of stagecraft. With this conceit Rezzonico envisioned Alessandro e Timoteo as, in his words, “a theater of theater itself.”38 By playing out the worst-case scenario of the collision between politics, aesthetics, and ethics, his opera shattered the “magic mirror” function of traditional Metastasian opera seria. Rather than obfuscating opera seria’s underlying power structures with “illogical magicalities,” Rezzonico unveiled those inconsistencies in hopes of resolving them himself.39 Even Alessandro e C i v i l i z i ng Song   •   95

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Timoteo’s title declares that its central conflict is between the dual, and dueling, spectacles of sovereignty and song. Rezzonico wasn’t worried for nothing. The power struggle he imagined became very real once the singers engaged for Alessandro e Timoteo arrived in Parma and started meddling with his reformist plans. Two virtuosos had been hired for the title roles, the celebrated tenor Giacomo David (Imeneo from Guadagni and Bertoni’s 1776 Orfeo) with top billing as Alessandro, and the lesser-known soprano castrato Michele Neri as Timoteo. Immediately the singers prevailed upon Sarti to recompose their arias according to their expectations. Despite reportedly crying and kissing the pages while reading Rezzonico’s poetry, Sarti capitulated to the singers’ demands and forced the poet to sacrifice much of his post-Metastasian vision.40 Small wonder then that Rezzonico’s post-premiere commentary bristles with a recurring trope of Settecento opera criticism: comparisons of singerly privilege to political malfeasance. He deemed singers “Pisistratuses of the stage” for “impos[ing] laws upon the poet” and foiling his attempts to militate against Sarti’s music “usurp[ing] the rights” of his poetry.41 In the offstage drama of producing his unmagical mirror—an opera in which political order is overturned by the machinations of a singer-impresario—art was spilling over into life.

a mercenary lyre Power-hungry virtuosos were not the sole threat to political order. Rezzonico tarred the castrati of sensibility with the same brush, suggesting that even the likes of Millico and Guadagni, with their “second nature” vocal performances of feeling, were only as effective as the productions backing them. He undermined their Orphic pretensions by giving Timoteo his very own Orfeo act, embellished with musical and textual references to the famous Underworld cavatina “Deh! placatevi” from Gluck’s opera. In scene 7 of Alessandro e Timoteo, Alessandro becomes distressed upon learning that the Persian king, Dario, has been slain. In response Timoteo invokes the muses to help him “flatter [Alessandro’s] pain [. . .] with song,” recalling Amore’s/ Imeneo’s command that Orfeo “calm [the Furies] with song,” not to mention the various civilizing myths about Orphic song “taming” and “domesticating” irrational creatures. Yet where Orfeo sings to calm, soothe, and placate (placare), Timoteo sings to flatter, seduce, and manipulate (lusingare). 96  •   C i v i l i z i ng Song

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On the surface, Timoteo’s Orphic musical references are quite convincing. The aria is accompanied by repetitive pizzicato triplet arpeggios in the strings, figuration borrowed straight from the obbligato harp in “Deh! placatevi.” “The orchestra imitates the sound of a plucked lyre,” Rezzonico’s libretto helpfully notes, ensuring audiences (and those following along at home, reading the libretto as poetry) would make the connection.42 Timoteo’s vocal line in the aria is appropriately Orphic-sentimental: short-breathed, syllabic, strewn with dotted rhythms, and devoid of fioritura. He even mimics the closing phrase of Orfeo’s soothing song, “il mio barbaro dolor,” by ending his own tronco poetic line with the very same word, “dolor” (though Timoteo sings his in quinari and Orfeo in ottonari). But “Orfeo” is only one of Timoteo’s many manipulative musical modes, and the aria is clearly a calculated performance. For that reason, notwithstanding the Calzabigian borrowings, the text of the aria exemplifies Rezzonico’s self-proclaimed “poetry full of feeling and flattery”: Pietose lagrime, Ite a torrenti; Col muto cenere Su l’urne algenti Parli il dolor.

Pitiful tears, run in torrents; with silent ashes upon frozen urns may sorrow speak.

Timoteo operates on a flagrantly elevated rhetorical level. Instead of Orfeo’s simple, heartfelt appeals to sympathy, Timoteo shows off by apostrophizing tears and anthropomorphizing emotion. Moreover, by enjoining sorrow to speak, Timoteo teases the Orphic metaphor of giving voice to feeling, but twists it by exposing how easily it can be feigned. Always the performer, Timoteo does not voice his own sensibility in song; he “flatters” Alessandro’s feelings by ventriloquizing, and thereby exacerbating, them. Sarti’s vocal writing similarly pokes holes in Timoteo’s Orphic persona by disrupting phrases of Gluckian simplicity with large vocal leaps, as if Timoteo cannot resist adding a dash of the histrionic to his “natural” portrayal of Orphic sensibility. Just in case the real spectators are, like Alessandro, still fooled by Timoteo’s performance, “Pietose lagrime” is cut off abruptly by another onstage scene change. This metatheatrical break, accompanied by an ominous brass sinfonia, reminds the audience not to become absorbed into the singer’s illusions. Timoteo is acting like a singer of sensibility, one of his many roles, within a production he is also directing. Such warnings were necessary because, as C i v i l i z i ng Song   •   97

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Rezzonico’s erstwhile mentor Bettinelli complained, “Music lovers feel themselves so moved by [. . .] the sensual pleasure of the ear, they believe themselves impassioned in their soul, and praise the art without knowing it, and the artifice without reason.” 43 Dryden’s Timotheus moves hearts and bodies alike with his song, but Rezzonico’s Timoteo misleads them with musical pleasure and theatrical illusion. Still, illusions could have a moral effect under the right circumstances. Those circumstances were right when the veil separating theater from kingship was at its thinnest—when the characters are transported to King Dario’s mausoleum (scene 8) by way of Timoteo’s scene change, the one that interrupted “Pietose lagrime.” By “transporting” Alessandro’s court into the mausoleum with his stage magic, Timoteo foreshadows the king’s own eventual, ineluctable scene change into death and obsolescence. Timoteo makes the point by gesturing to Dario’s sepulchre and asking, “Is it then a dream, a shadow, the greatness of kings?” His question dances around the fact that he has been running a production this entire time, trafficking in dreams and shadows, yet Alessandro is as unaware of these illusions as he is of his own mortal limits. The singer’s subversion intensifies in a lengthy obbligato recitative before climaxing in a fiery aria di bravura (“Nel seno il cor mi palpita”). Wielding his dazzling melismas like a weapon, the singer uses his aria to remind the bloodthirsty king that all men must die. “Pensaci, o Re” (Think about it, o King) Timoteo repeats throughout the aria. Temporarily cowed by Timoteo’s vocal pyrotechnics and Dario’s penumbral mausoleum, Alessandro breaks his sword. How is it that a scheming, usurping singer questions a king’s transcendence—in Bourbon-ruled Parma, no less—and gets away with it? Rezzonico suggested that once kingship devolves into tyranny, the manipulative power of voice becomes a useful tool for restoring order. Never mind that Timoteo has been egging Alessandro on until now. At this moment, the singer’s selfish actions contribute to the greater good. The singer is in fact the only one who can safely challenge tyranny: he is protected from retribution because the king cannot see that what seems like musical magic is just showbiz. Timoteo’s vocal virtuosity flips from self-aggrandizing to politically expedient when it civilizes the badly behaved sovereign-spectator. Luckily for Rezzonico, Timoteo’s provocative question—“Is it then a dream, a shadow, the greatness of kings?”—also resonated with the Teatro Ducale’s real sovereign-spectators. A review of the opera, printed in both

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French and Italian journals soon after the premiere, recounted (or perhaps invented) a conversation overheard in response to Timoteo’s question: The author [of this review] was sitting in the royal box, close to the Count of the North, when that line was sung. [. . .] [Prince Paul] showed the most vivid emotion; he said to the poet: “Count Rezzonico, you should engrave that in golden letters.” [. . .] He then shared some quotes from Antoninus or Marcus Aurelius about vanity and the nothingness of human greatness. The Duke of Parma testified to the poet that it had touched him as well. Rezzonico replied, “There is another one that I believe is even better for a prince like you to learn by heart: [. . .] ‘If the land is happy, I am a god.’ ” 44

Prince Paul and Duke Ferdinand were reportedly “touched” by “vivid emotion,” not as a result of Timoteo’s Orphic posturing, but from the aphoristic question that led them to ponder the limits of their own power. Rezzonico took the opportunity to reassure the duke, his employer, that he was still transcendent: as a benevolent ruler, Duke Ferdinand was a “god.” However mercenary and untrustworthy, Timoteo lent his voice to Rezzonico’s endorsement of the “good” princes (those in the audience) by ostentatiously taming the “bad” one (Alessandro), critiquing and condoning absolutism in one. As Rezzonico staged it, political harmony was to be protected by any means necessary—even the sensual pleasures of voice. The purpose of Orpheus’s civilizing song had not been flattering emotional excess, but taming it with political lessons. Nevertheless, Rezzonico was not interested in fully exonerating singers, so Timoteo’s voice turns destructive again in the opera’s finale. Seeking to stop Alessandro from pursuing his own betrothed, the singer pretends to raise the ghosts of the Greeks left unburied after the Persian wars. At the sight of the fake ghosts, the king becomes overwhelmed by his excessive sensibility and attacks Timoteo’s scenery, then turns his fury on the entire city of Persepolis. Suddenly, here, the site of the onstage action changes. Until the finale the opera has taken place in the palace gardens, which serve as Timoteo’s onstage “theater,” but in the last scene Alessandro’s violence overflows from that contained “theater” into the “real world” of Persepolis. In 1780s Italy, even in so avant-garde an operatic center as Parma, this would have been a shocking ending, especially given the implications of the “theater of theater itself ” conceit. The conflagratory finale to Alessandro e Timoteo warns that letting oneself be moved by theatrical illusions will shatter the magic mirror and incite mass destruction. Timoteo’s singing and his scenery together stir

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up Alessandro’s sensibility, but only Timoteo’s voice succeeds, albeit briefly, in taming it.

taming, domesticating, civilizing In Rezzonico’s opera the figure most in need of civilizing is the sovereign himself, not the subjects under his imperial rule. As with Caesar’s tyrannical control of Rome in Cato, the moral was that problems “at home” had to be addressed before any attempts were made to create and manage an empire. Thus while civilizing was for many Settecento interlocutors a concept inflected by imperial expansion on the British model, it had to start “at home”—meaning both the domestic sphere and some notion of “Italy.” This might explain why the metaphors of domare and domesticare, “domesticating,” are so prevalent in Settecento sources: civilizing began for Italians as an internally oriented project, driven by anxieties about Italian political and cultural identity. That identity, thanks to forces from beyond the Alps, seemed ever more distant from memories of the once-great Roman Empire and the ancient Italy that had been mythologized as the cradle of Western civilization. Yet even if there was no longer a political entity called Italy, only a geographical designation, there could at least be a civilized Italian “state of mind,” akin to the Roman one so prized by Addison’s Juba. Song was crucial to both that geographical designation and the Italian state of mind. During this period, national character was widely theorized as an effect of geography, owing to the so-called climate theory put forth by Charles-Louis de Secondat, known as the Baron de Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws (Paris, 1748). Inspired by a trip from Rome down south to Naples, Montesquieu had argued that “the empire of the climate is the first, the most powerful of all empires.” 45 He posited that “the character of the mind, and the passions of the heart are extremely different in different climates” due to the effects of heat or cold on the nerves (among other things).46 From there, he elaborated the differences between what he called northern, temperate, and southern “races.” The tightness of the nerves caused by the cold meant that northern peoples “have few vices, many virtues, and a great share of frankness and sincerity,” while southern peoples’ heat-induced nervous elasticity made them “indolent” and predisposed to “all manner of crime.” 47 It followed that people in warmer climates had more “sensibility,” a claim Montesquieu demonstrated by—of course—contrasting English and 100  •   C i v i l i z i ng Song

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Italian responses to opera. Respectively, “one is so cold and indifferent, and the other so transported, that it seems almost inconceivable.” 48 Italy was proof of southern peoples’ excessive sensibility, and excessive sensibility to singing, no less. As Moe, Gordon, and others have argued, Montesquieu’s climate theory, along with exoticizing accounts of Italy from Anglo-French Grand Tourists, effectively relocated much of Italy to the Global South.49 The Italian peninsula sat between northern Europe and then Ottoman-ruled Greece, North Africa, and the Middle East, which led northern types to look down on Italy as liminally European, a transitional space between civilization and its (nonwhite) others. “Europe ends at Naples and ends quite badly,” one French tourist remarked in 1807. Everything to the south, he added, “is part of Africa.”50 For those not familiar with Italian geography, south of Naples includes about a third of the entire peninsula, as well as the island of Sicily. Montesquieu’s opera comparison demonstrates how the southern-ing of Italy from midcentury onward was inseparable from Vichian-Rousseauian portrayals of song as a metric of civilization. In the later eighteenth century the category “song” was read, in Tomlinson’s words, as both “the earliest and most immediate of utterances” and, paradoxically, a cultivated high art form. Whether a particular type of song was understood as “primitive” or “modern” was culturally and geographically contingent. Non-European singing, although contemporaneous with “composed” European vocal music, was typically regarded by Europeans as a primitive practice that their own civilization had “long since outgrown.”51 The predominantly oral transmission of non-European singing was taken as evidence that Europe’s others were stuck in an earlier stage of civilizational progress. Italy, while European, famously resounded with voices that exceeded, preceded, or evaded notation, from the poetic improvisers in the piazzas to the opera singers in the theaters, all of which were mandatory stops for gawking northern Grand Tourists. The singing, spontaneity, and superfluous sensibility that signified Italian national character also marked an Italian otherness—not only geographical otherness (as “southern”), but historical otherness (as “primitive”). As Gordon puts it, Italy seemed to those enlightened northern types the home of “the primordial roots of their own ‘civilized’ culture.”52 Italy’s presumed primitivity and southernness were embodied above all by that figure of Italian voice, the castrato, whose continued existence evinced the enduring barbarism of his homeland. (This was despite the fact that, as the century wore on, educated Italians also vociferated against the practice of C i v i l i z i ng Song   •   101

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castration for singing.) The castrato’s voice, an uncanny, irremediably othered sound, emanated from what Serena Guarracino calls the “geographical South located in Italy and its southern regions,” an analogue to the “bodily South” of the castrato’s “mutilated sexual organs.”53 Civilized Europeans projected the Montesquieuian climate map onto bodily difference, hearing confirmation of Italy’s geographical and historical alterity in the castrato’s voice. Geography, history, and song intertwined in a different way to constitute “Italy” for Italians. Consider Ludovico Muratori’s comment in 1749 that “if one compares Italy to France, England, Flanders, Holland and some German lands, a good part of Italy remains inferior in industry and trade to those countries beyond the mountains” (emphasis added).54 In defining “Italy” by opposing it to “those countries beyond the mountains,” Muratori, a historiographer, subtly invoked a treasured lyric geography of Italy. In the Rime sparse, also called the Canzoniere or “songbook,” Petrarch had limned his own fragmented Trecento Italy in sonnet 146 as “the lovely country [. . .] that the Apennines divide and the sea and Alps surround.” Nearly five hundred years later Italy was still not a centralized political entity, but the promise of becoming one remained in its shared poetic-literary culture, geographically defined landform, and memory of the Roman Empire. In the Settecento, as in Petrarch’s Trecento, Italy was song, soil, and ancient history. This is where the earlier discussion of Salvini’s Catone comes back in. Such backward-looking blurrings of lyric and land as Muratori’s also characterized Settecento writers’ circumlocutions for civilizzare. Why did Bettinelli, Planelli, Arteaga, and so many others borrow metaphors from agriculture and animal husbandry in describing Orpheus’s civilizing song, even though they had surely encountered civilizzare either in Salvini’s well-known Catone or elsewhere? For eighteenth-century thinkers from Vico to Kant, changes in land-use practices served to mark moments in the historical trajectory from barbarism to civilization, a kind of practical, material counterpart to the social, political, and cultural change sowed by Orpheus’s civilizing song.55 This suggests that in the later Settecento, anxieties about civilizing song were yoked to anxieties about the working of the land. Italian society was at that time still primarily agrarian, with an economy based on producing crops and other raw materials (commodities) rather than exporting manufactured goods (products). Most Italian writings on political economy from midcentury on were concerned with modernizing a system dependent on agriculture; becoming a commercial power would bring Italy back up to speed with all those industrious nations “beyond the mountains.”56 102  •   C i v i l i z i ng Song

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Modernizing Italy’s economy was a cultural concern as much as a political one. As Pietro Verri, editor of the Spectator-inspired periodical Il Caffè, argued in the 1760s, an economy based on exporting raw materials instead of on manufacturing made “a country good for nothing but transplanting colonies into.”57 Without establishing a modern commercial economy, the already foreign-ruled Italy was at risk of becoming outrightly colonized itself, closer to Giuba’s Numidia or Ottoman Greece than to “northern,” “civilized” Europe. Decades later, in 1798, the nationalist writer Ugo Foscolo took Verri’s concerns about colonization even further—and in so doing demonstrated how Italian notions of voice had shifted in the intervening years (along the lines traced in the second half of this book). Ventriloquizing his novel’s eponymous hero, Jacopo Ortis, Foscolo apostrophized his homeland thus: “Your borders, oh Italy, are these! But every day they are overcome from all sides by the persistent avarice of [other] nations. [. . .] And perhaps the day will come when we, losing our possessions, our intellect, and our voice, will be made like the domestic slaves of the ancients, or trafficked like the wretched negroes.”58 Modernizing song and modernizing the economy were two sides of the same civilizing process, and civilizing was essential to affirming Italy as European (and, implicitly, white).

voice exchange Italy’s singing voices rendered sonorous the political, economic, and cultural limitations generated by the soil and sunlight of the peninsula. The raw materials of those voices, as the musicality of the Italian language and a “natural,” bodily affinity for song and emotional excess, cast Italy as the still-primitive, southern European other to the northern civility and industry of France, England, Holland, and so on. And yet, the two parallel civilizing processes of prehistory hinted at a possible solution for modern Italy. What was the Italian peninsula’s most prestigious “manufactured” export if not song—from the operas that had filled Europe’s theaters for more than a century to the voices engineered to sing them? The notion of Italy as the land of song simultaneously vouchsafed its Europeanness and pointed up its arrested development, presenting Italian literati with a potentially productive paradox. Song was at once a root cause of Italy’s backwardness and its mithridatic antidote. Distilling the antidote required pouring song through a civilizing filter. Millico, Orphic Jacobin that he was, had attempted this himself in several C i v i l i z i ng Song   •   103

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ways. However much he insisted on the universality of Orphic voice—on its independence from bodily difference—he could not force “enlightened” Europe to hear the castrato voice as natural. But there were other ways to civilize song from southern primitivity into northern modernity, especially if one used the tools already being wielded by civilized Europe. This is why, when Millico told the tale of Orphic song in his opera preface, he engaged with the same Anglo-French ideas that had sidelined the singing voice in favor of moral spectatorship, and appropriated for his own ends their discourses of sensibility and liberal edification.59 Furthermore, the fact that Millico published his theory of voice in prose proclaimed that his musicalvocal practices were modern and civilized, because they were literate as well as oral. He also figured out that Orphic song, once notated and printed, had a market value. During his London sojourns in the 1770s, before accepting his position at the Bourbon court, Millico published several collections of chamber sonatas for solo harp and for harp with violin, along with at least four volumes of Italian songs with harp accompaniment. His harp songs are quintessentially “sensible” in style, with simple, appoggiatura-laden melodies perfect for amateur domestic performance. Lest the choice to sell his songs seem mercenary, Millico justified it to Charles Burney by explaining that so many ladies had requested to sing them that he could not keep up with the demand except by having them printed and sold.60 Millico civilized his own Orphic song by turning his voice from a commodity into a salable product. A related approach to civilizing song played out in opera theaters across northern Italy by way of the popular dramma giocoso Li tre Orfei (The three Orpheuses). The comic opera premiered in Rome in 1784 with music and libretto (both) by Marcello Bernardini (also known as “di Capua”) and went through seventeen more documented productions across northern Italy until at least 1800. It was apparently never performed outside of Italian territory.61 As was typical of Settecento comic opera, different productions swapped out jokes, arias, and characters to fit local tastes and performers, meaning that there is no “authoritative” version, especially given the absence of any printed score. Since a study of all the variants is more than this space and the extant sources permit, I focus here on the version produced for the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice in 1787, since it became the most commonly staged one for the rest of the century. Significantly, the Venetian version is also the one that presents most clearly how voice could be modernized through the “market.” Like the dramme giocose being written around the same time by Mozart and da Ponte in Vienna, Li tre Orfei is by turns bombastically silly and care104  •   C i v i l i z i ng Song

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fully attuned to contemporary issues, with its incisive (though generic) political commentary efficiently tempered by its buffoonery. The setting is Livorno, a port city on the Ligurian coast then known for its trade connections to the Middle East, as well as its robust Jewish and Muslim communities.62 The action opens in a piazza, bustling with a market fair and flanked by a coffeehouse and an inn. Madama Linguadoca, a wannabe “Real Housewife of Livorno” carrying a tiny dog, attends the market; she is accompanied by Don Lavinio, a penniless “pretty boy” (“damerino,” in Madama’s words) from the Levant (“un levantino,” according to the libretto’s list of characters) who loves her without return. At the market fair they encounter two rich buffi, the Frenchman Monsù Marmotta and the Marchese Grancio Tenero. The buffoons compete for Madama’s hand throughout the opera while Sgrullina, the wily Serpina type who runs the inn, concocts plans to humiliate them and win Lavinio for herself. Shenanigans ensue, culminating in a finale with a masked ball in which everyone babbles in fake foreign languages. The couples eventually pair off for a happy ending. Setting the opera in a market fair piazza placed it at the nexus of politics, economics, sociability, and theatricality. Since the medieval period the Italian piazza has been a symbol of civic life, and the space it contains “can be at once a market, a theater, a political rally, a coffee house,” as cultural theorist Davide Panagia has written, with these multiple meanings and functions varying according to the “utterances” that fill it.63 In Li tre Orfei, the piazza’s function is declared straightaway by the opera’s opening lines, sung by tutti: “Beautiful day! Beautiful market fair [ fiera]! / Lots of money is spent here; / This one buys, that one sells. / One takes, and the other gives.” 64 This collective utterance, which is repeated many times throughout the first scene, dedicates the festive and civic space to economic exchange. The opening chorus establishes that Li tre Orfei will be concerned above all with transactions—ones in which love, money, and voice are the currency.65 Generally, “transaction” denotes the exchange of some kind of asset for some form of payment. In the late eighteenth century such exchanges were not only the basis of capitalist economics, but also a way of conceiving the relationality and social circulation of feeling. Take two of the eighteenth century’s best-known English-language essays, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) and Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), each of which made its way to Italy soon after its initial publication.66 Both of Smith’s texts are based on processes of transaction: respectively, the exchange of capital and goods as the foundation of political economy, and the exchange of feeling as the C i v i l i z i ng Song   •   105

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foundation of sympathy.67 This latter process, as discussed in chapter 2, underwrote eighteenth-century literary and musical projections of sensibility, in that sensibility is best understood not as a set list of features but as the reader’s or listener’s emotional reciprocity with a text, work, or performance. Representations of “extreme suffering,” for instance, generated “maximum emotional capital.” 68 Li tre Orfei portrays the emotional transactions of feeling as executed in tandem with the economic transactions of a free market. In this way the opera elides the two fundamental modes of subjectivity (as delineated by literary critic Barbara Johnson): the “lyric,” which is “emotive, subjective, individual,” and the “legal,” which is “rational, rights-bearing, institutional.” 69 Voice, as we will see, works in the opera as currency for carrying out the twin lyric-emotional and legal-economic transactions that constituted enlightened subjectivity—and in ways that seemed at once modern and primordial. As Bettinelli and others saw it, Orpheus’s originary song had also merged the lyric with the legal, as he gave laws through his voice and lyre in order to civilize humanity. Li tre Orfei satirizes updated versions of that unified lyric-legal song, and in so doing considers whether civilizing song could actually create modern subjects. Broadly, then, Italian comic operas like Li tre Orfei played out in the tail end of a centuries-long civilizing process in which the emotional merged with the economic, and the human with the structural. For one, Stallybrass and White have read the early modern market fair and the body as analogues, both being bounded spaces that remain open to transaction with others, but whose intimacy and locality are simultaneously contingent on and jeopardized by recognizing the existence of those others.70 G. J. Barker-Benfield, drawing on Elias, Stephen Greenblatt, and J. G. A. Pocock, has argued for an essential connection between “the growth of commercial capitalism” and “the democratization of self-fashioning” (a version of what I cast here as selfcivilizing). Early bourgeois capitalism was therefore accompanied by “the transition from the brief ebullitions of Carnival role-playing to longer-range psychology.”71 This Carnival-to-psychology shift resonates with the changing priorities of Settecento comic opera, especially in northern Italy. Venetian playwright and librettist Carlo Goldoni, arguably the originator of northern Italian comic opera, rejected the masks of commedia dell’arte and carnivalesque role-playing and instead attempted more verisimilar representations of emotion and interiority (what some might call “psychology”).72 By experimenting with portraying these economic/emotional and market/subject 106  •   C i v i l i z i ng Song

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blurrings, Li tre Orfei reveals the transactional nature of the bourgeoissentimental “marrying for love” premise so central to comic opera. Madama says it outright when she tells Lavinio, “Love without gold is a palace without a roof” (1.1). Li tre Orfei pokes fun at the fungibility of economics and emotion by setting their transactions within a public space and operatic genre that were each also sites of bourgeois subject formation. In order to successfully civilize song and create modern subjects, the economic approach to emotion had to be transactional in the right way. This is shown early on by the Marchese’s “Nella real Metropoli” (1.1), a Leporelloesque list aria in which he tries to win over Madama by bragging about his conquests of women across five continents. To a “famous lady of music,” he gave a “can” filled with “all the dates [as in the fruit] of Canada.” To an “Amazon” warrior woman he presented “three thousand pieces of galangal [Thai ginger].” Perhaps the most ridiculous is his claim of bestowing on another lady a silver box containing “the island of Madagascar.” 73 These gifts range from the bizarre to the impossible, but, more importantly, they show that the Marchese misunderstands the principles of the modern market. He has plundered and gifted these exotic raw materials that are entirely useless to the recipients; he operates within an old-fashioned economy premised on aristocratic largesse rather than on industry and open commerce.74 What is more, the Marchese is unable to authenticate his proposed transaction with the vocal performance of sensibility. He offers Madama only basso buffo patter, as meaningless to her as a box filled with the island of Madagascar.

competition in a free (orphic) market The function of voice in Li tre Orfei’s transactional economy becomes more apparent in the later versions of the opera. Beginning in 1787, new characters were often added with little effect on the main plotline—characters that serve only to reinforce the importance of voice to the opera’s proceedings. First, the 1787 Pisan production introduced a fixture of Grand Tour narratives with the roles of Starnotto, a cantimbanco or improvising street singer, and his wife Cardella, who together hustle to exchange their songs for money.75 The street singers were not retained after Pisa, but the new roles created for the 1787 Venetian version became more or less standard. Venice inserted the “virtuosa di musica” Camomilla, an opera singer obsessed with her voice and not catching cold, along with the Marescial del Toppo, a C i v i l i z i ng Song   •   107

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worshipful military officer who escorts her. They arrive and begin praising the city (“Viva Livorno!”), the piazza (“Che tratto affabile!”), and the market (“Che bella fiera!”), taking them all together as promising liberty (“Che libertà!”). This liberty is not political, however, but economic: it is the freedom of exchange at the market. The exchange Camomilla has in mind is that of her voice for listeners’ feeling. After demanding a room at the inn safe from drafts, she declares in her aria “Son di canto virtuosa” that she seeks to be as beloved in Livorno as she is everywhere else in Europe (1.4). Sgrullina bursts into laughter, leading the Marescial to haughtily explain that Camomilla sang this same aria to great applause from the prince of Siberia. “You don’t know what singing is!” he huffs at her (1.5). Only such aristocratic listeners as princes—certainly not middle-class innkeepers like Sgrullina—could appreciate the cosmopolitan artistry of the prima donna, the Marescial implies. Yet the overall effect of the scene, and of adding Camomilla to the opera, is to highlight the theme of vocal-emotional-economic transactions, which then helps explain the opera’s otherwise off-the-wall act 1 finale. The act 1 finale, from which the opera takes its title of “The Three Orpheuses,” is when we see the main characters attempting to execute emotional transactions by giving voice to Orphic song. It is therefore also the moment in which tensions between civilized and uncivilized song are most pronounced, turning up the contrast between the carnivalesque local market fair and the capitalist cosmopolitan market. The situation comes about because Madama cannot decide who to marry, Monsù or the Marchese, and Sgrullina hatches a wild plan (perhaps inspired, at least from Venice on, by Camomilla’s aria about singing in exchange for the public’s love). They will pretend that Madama is actually “the famous dead Euridice,” and Sgrullina “will tell [the suitors] that only Orfeo, with his sonorous lyre, can liberate her from the shades.” The women will then “see who of [the men] is the most tender” (1.10). Sgrullina pays her friends to dress up as the Furies and creates a fake Underworld cave in her garden, selling the hoax to the bewildered suitors with stagecraft that would have made Rezzonico’s Timoteo proud. Sgrullina also clarifies that the “Orpheus” in question is “Orfeo” the opera character by doing her best Calzabigi impression for the suitors: E . . . mor . . . è morta La po . . . vera Euri . . . dice. [. . .] Si udì una voce, Che disse: “Quando Orfeo

Is . . . de . . . is dead The po . . . or Euri . . . dice. [. . .] A voice was heard That said: “When Orfeo

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Con l’Armoniosa Cetra With his harmonious lyre, Sù le porte d’Averno, in meste voci At the doors of [Hades], in sad   words Il canto scioglierà, placato allora Unleashes his song, Il Nume degli Elisi The god of Elysium, now placated, Farà tornarla in vita.” Will return her to life.”

She first imitates in fragmented speech the ellipses of Euridice’s death scene, then repeats the “voice” of the god commanding Orfeo’s song (either Amore in Gluck’s original, or Imeneo in Bertoni’s Venetian remake). Monsù and the Marchese are still baffled, so Sgrullina explains that they must dress up as Orfeo, bring a lyre, and sing a “dolce canto” to save Madama/Euridice (1.11). Don Lavinio is not invited, but he overhears Sgrullina and decides to join the competition for Madama anyway. (It is a free market, after all.) The proposed transaction is this: whoever plays Orfeo the best by singing about feeling most convincingly will receive Madama in exchange, just as Orfeo exchanged his own moving song (“Deh! placatevi”) for the Furies’ sympathy and, by extension, Euridice. Clearly di Capua was poking fun at the ubiquitous Orfeo ed Euridice and its reformist pretensions, not to mention the crowd of Orphic castrati competing for the title of “singer of nature.” But his Orphic satire also reveals the risks of attempting to civilize song, in that the cost of failure is the unmasking of backwardness. When the act 1 finale begins at the cave in Sgrullina’s garden, Monsù and the Marchese enter separately, each dressed “ridiculously” and carrying a calascione (1.12). A calascione is a guitarlike instrument with two or three strings that can be strummed with a plectrum; it is originally from Turkey, but in the late eighteenth century it was associated with southern Italian popular song.76 Li tre Orfei was performed no further south on the peninsula than Rome, meaning that its main audience consisted of northern Italians from Florence to Milan to Venice. In other words, this opera was not written for those “barbaric” southern Italians who had inspired both Montesquieu’s climate theory and northern tourists’ exoticizing condescension. (And condescending indeed such tourists were: after hearing two street singers performing with the calascione in Naples, Charles Burney declared that “the singing [of Neapolitan popular music] is noisy and vulgar.”)77 The two buffi are caricatures of southern Italian popular song, emphasizing their inability to comprehend, let alone imitate, the urbane Orphic voice of sensibility. “Unleash your sad voice in song: you have to soothe the Furies with its sound, the lyre, and your cry,” Sgrullina C i v i l i z i ng Song   •   109

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encourages them (while showing off her own cultural capital with an impressive knowledge of Orfeo tropes). Despite her nudging, the buffoons’ notion of “dolce canto” is not the cosmopolitan strains of Gluck’s Viennese opera, so familiar to civilized northern audiences, but the “vulgar,” southern Italian street singing signaled by the calascione. The foil to their lack of Orphic sensibility is the Middle Eastern “pretty boy” Lavinio, who shows up dressed in what the libretto describes as “natural” Orphic garb, toting a genuine lyre. Monsù, believing the mythical singer himself has reappeared, exclaims, “But this is really Orpheus!” Lavinio not only looks like Orfeo; he also authenticates his realistic getup and lyre with his vocal performance. Riffing on Calzabigi’s paraphrase of Virgil, and imitating the dotted rhythms and anguished leaps of Bertoni’s score, Lavinio intones, “I will make the valley and the forest resound with my laments.” 78 Soon he is joined by the requisite pizzicato, sotto voce triplet figuration in the strings, confirming that his is the winning Orfeo act. Even when the demonic chorus of Sgrullina’s friends terrifies the suitors with Gluckian chromaticisms and Calzabigian sdruccioli, it is Lavinio who wields Orphic song to calm them. The panicked Marchese and Monsù burst into babbling, nonsensical patter while Lavinio soars above them in long, sustained lines. Though armed with a “natural” male voice, not a castrato one, the tenor Lavinio “gets” Orphic song—yet his doing so unwittingly facilitates another angle for satire. Described in the libretto as “un damerino,” not to mention “un levantino,” Lavinio is already sentimentalized, orientalized, and otherized: he becomes a comic send-up of the Orphic castrati of sensibility. Lavinio’s Orfeo act makes sonorous the friction between the cosmopolitan northern Europeanness of Orfeo ed Euridice and the non-European otherness of the castrati, of the Levant, and of song itself. He presents the dual meanings of civilizing song. But Lavinio comes out fine in the end. His tenor voice, the sound of his presumably natural, uncastrated male body, means that he is not truly an Orphic figure and can therefore be domesticated into a suitable husband.79 The penniless Lavinio’s convincing performance of feeling thus results in a much better transaction than he signed up for: he marries Sgrullina, the only intelligent character in the opera who also, as she often points out, happens to have her own money. Together they complete the economic and emotional exchange central to the bourgeois marriage plot, but in an unexpected way, as Orpheus’s civilizing function is transferred to another. Lavinio’s excessive sensibility, effeminacy, and racialized difference, all showcased by his Orphic 110  •   C i v i l i z i ng Song

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performance, are civilized by Sgrullina’s bourgeois sensibility, financial security, and unimpeachable Italianness. The “levantino” Lavinio becomes a Giuba type, in that his racialized otherness and his sentimentality are indivisible, and both conveniently contained through marriage. Whether the bride stands in for the Roman Empire, as with Cato’s Marcia, or for a bourgeois Italy, as with Li tre Orfei’s Sgrullina, these marriage plots show that the task of civilizing had begun to be assigned to women as the labor of domestication (on which more in chapters 4 and 5). And yet, because of the critical role played in comic opera by bodily desires and differences, Li tre Orfei’s Livornese market fair is ultimately nothing like the rational, civilized, purely economic market of bourgeois Smithian capitalist fantasy. It remains a theater of the carnivalesque, the grotesque, and the uncivilized.80 But maybe that was the point all along. Maybe the noisy festivity, market fair masquerades, and Orphic buffoonery of Li tre Orfei fulfilled another purpose entirely: to serve as an amusing showcase for the carnivalesque, hold up a mocking mirror to grotesqueness, and—most importantly—cordon it off from the real civilizing processes being carried out elsewhere.

public bodies, public utility, and intimate publics “Elsewhere” was a range of interior spaces that were at once sites of sociability and closed off to the general masses. Some writers located the civilizing voices of Italians not in the opera house or the piazza, but within the walls of another, adjacent space: the coffeehouse. In 1761 the writer Gasparo Gozzi rhapsodized about the cafés in his native Venice, describing how they were so decked out with mirrors, chandeliers, and plush seats that it made one “believe that one is looking not at a shop, but at some delicious theatrical show.”81 Pietro Verri described his own preferred coffeehouse in Milan as reminiscent of an opera house, in that “at night it is all lit up, so that the chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and the mirrors around the walls cast an iridescent halo.”82 The coffeehouse was where commerce and theater converged in a civilized manner, with the voices that resonated within sounding out a new, civilized “public body.” Energized by the fragrant, caffeinated commodity of the Levant, that public body belonged neither to the king, nor the church, nor the masses in the streets and market fairs, but rather to the C i v i l i z i ng Song   •   111

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private bourgeois individuals who came together to participate in the free and equal exchange of rational discourse. In this idealized coffeehouse, private (and usually male) individuals engaged in a democratic mode of sociability that also fostered, to a further extent, the same kinds of bodily selfregulation as did the theater.83 Coffeehouse culture formed this supposedly modern public body by cultivating modern individual subjects. Italy was home to the first coffeehouse in Europe—founded in midseventeenth-century Venice—although the emergence of coffeehouse sociability is primarily associated with early eighteenth-century London and English printed periodicals like the Spectator. Whether in the Italian context or the English one, however, such a focus on print culture as the medium of coffeehouse subjectivity mutes the fundamentally oral nature of the exchanges being “reported” therein, providing yet another instance of how civilized behavior has been linked to silent spectating (or reading). That muting seems to have been precisely what led Italians like Verri and Gozzi to idealize coffeehouses as theaters for civilizing the public.84 In other words, inscribing the orality of coffeehouse sociability onto the printed page provided a way to disseminate ideas in a civilized manner and, in turn, civilize those who read them. When Verri wrote of his “iridescent” Milanese coffeehouse in 1764, he did so to introduce his own imitation of Addison and Steele’s Spectator and its civilizing project. In that introductory article Verri explained that his journal’s purpose was “recording” the conversations overheard in the coffeehouse and publishing them in service of “public utility,” thereby “spreading useful knowledge among our citizens.”85 (The metaphor of enlightenment is almost too obvious here; note Verri’s and Gozzi’s descriptions of the luminescent chandeliers, reflected by the wall mirrors, that together lit up the café’s interior.) Verri dubbed his journalistic endeavor Il Caffè (The coffeehouse), orienting his work less around the individual(s) doing the “spectating” and more around the quasi-theatrical, quasi-public interior space that hosted them.86 By reading about and discussing current events within the coffeehouse, Verri explained, “men who used to be Roman, Florentine, Genoese or Lombard now are actually European.”87 Instead of remaining as denizens of a fragmented peninsula, they rejoined European civilization, all from inside the coffeehouse. For Pietro Verri’s younger brother Alessandro, the coffeehouse’s public body suggested yet another approach to civilizing song. Il Caffè interiorized voices, legitimated their orality through writing, and promulgated them in 112  •   C i v i l i z i ng Song

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service of “public utility.” But, unlike Pietro, Alessandro looked to tether his own project to a shared past rather than to the disappointing present. Alessandro had been a member of Pietro’s Accademia dei Pugni, collaborating with his brother and friends on Il Caffé in the early to mid-1760s. On a trip through London and Paris later that decade, however, Alessandro met many of the thinkers idealized in the pages of Il Caffé and became disenchanted with their attempts to cure society’s ills. As a budding novelist, Alessandro thought literature, not philosophy, might do the trick—and he was especially interested in how song could be used to disseminate great literary works to a wider audience. Consider an anecdote Alessandro related in 1777, writing to Pietro in Milan from his recently adopted home of Rome: The castrato Millico [. . .] met Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Paris. He went there under the pretext of copying music. Seeing [Millico] was a castrato, [Rousseau] lit up and begged him to sing. Millico obliged and sang, even though the harpsichord was horribly out of tune and a torment to accompany himself upon. Rousseau was astonished and transported, above all by Millico’s singing of the most beautiful ottave by Ariosto and Tasso, for which he had invented music of expressive declamation that was completely new and amazing. Rousseau told him that if Tasso had heard him, he would have written a new [epic] poem for him.

Next, Alessandro went on, Millico courteously asked Rousseau to sing. The philosopher obliged, but performed poorly and had to be comforted by his wife. Rousseau was for Alessandro Verri the emblem of capital-P Philosophy: he lived as a recluse, purporting to fix society while hiding from it. “He is a charlatan,” Alessandro concluded.88 Millico, on the other hand, was the Orphic figure of song. He astonished and transported Rousseau, achieving what Rezzonico’s Timoteo would merely pretend to do. If Rousseau’s harpsichord was out of tune, symbolizing its owner’s disconnection from society, Millico’s metaphorical lyre was precisely tuned to society’s needs, as he “invented music” for setting the words of Italy’s beloved vernacular epic poets, Ariosto and Tasso.89 In Alessandro Verri’s retelling, Millico’s singing was neither uncivilized nor full of meaningless virtuosity. It was “new and amazing,” dedicated to the “expressive declamation” of Italy’s past literary glory. Without making too much of this tidbit—the gossipy story was primarily an excuse to denigrate Rousseau—Alessandro still appears to have considered seriously the civilizing potential of song, inasmuch as he represented C i v i l i z i ng Song   •   113

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Millico as a modern Italian citaredo. The citaredo or rhapsode was a type of singer-poet in ancient Greece who declaimed epic poetry, often Homeric, while accompanying himself on the lyre. (Think of Plato’s Ion, though he is often misrepresented as a “poet” rather than a singer and lyre player.) Instead of composing and performing original verses about his own emotional experiences like the archaic lyric poets, the citaredo figure transmitted his culture’s shared myths through his music and voice. In serving as a mouthpiece for public civil and cultural edification, the citaredo continued the political and social project established by Orphic song, “sing[ing] the glories of the past and educat[ing] the present generations,” as Cavarero has put it.90 His purpose was similar to that of Rezzonico’s Timoteo in the mausoleum scene, but with a longer reach. The citaredo edified not through abstract aphorisms, but with stories of a collectively shared epic past, and he aimed his lessons not at a select few, but at society as a whole. The citaredo had such a broad reach because his message did not require listeners to be literate. Like Orpheus with the barbarians, the citaredo could civilize people through their ears. Alessandro Verri began exploring this civilizing function of the citaredo as early as the next year, 1778, when he initiated work on the novel Le avventure di Saffo, poetessa di Mitilene (The adventures of Sappho, poetess of Mytilene; 1782). We will spend more time with Saffo and its eponymous heroine in the next chapter, but for now I want to look at one of its renditions of the philosopher/singer encounter. The scene is set in archaic Greece (late seventh century BCE), and the philosopher Eutichio, here a proxy for the author rather than his punching bag, is hosting a dinner party. Things get tense at the dinner, but then Eutichio’s citaredo, Melanzio, begins to sing, lightening the mood with his melodious voice mixed with the sound of the lyre. He first unfolded the song with moderate breath like a voice heard from far away that gradually gets closer; and then, growing with full melody, he agitated the rapid notes of the lyre, abundantly spilling out the song, such that all with drooping eyelids had turned to watch in silence. Melanzio sang some verses from the Iliad, animating with harmony that divine meter and those celestial ideas, so that with double delight it descended upon attentive ears to possess the heart.91

Verri devoted ample space to describing what Melanzio’s voice does before even telling us what his voice sings (Homer, of course). Verri’s description is reminiscent of Cesarotti’s Ossianic scene setting, particularly in how song 114  •   C i v i l i z i ng Song

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becomes at once mobile and material, and voice at once medium and message. Melanzio’s “melodious voice” is song and story in one, which is why it bears civilizing power. And, notably, the effects of his voice are not so different from those of a certain caffeinated beverage, which, as Pietro Verri put it in Il Caffè, also “cheers the soul,” “reawakens the mind,” and “takes away sleepiness.” 92 Eutichio’s guests “watch in silence,” perfectly behaved spectators, as the citaredo’s voice teaches them through their “attentive ears.” And what lesson would Verri have them learn? That listening to a voice singing the myths of collective history was more beneficial than agonizing over the present realities of life and death. He proves the point when a volcano erupts during Eutichio’s gathering, and the philosopher ensures that his guests do not panic by distracting them with Melanzio’s Homeric song. Better not to worry about “useless truths,” the philosopher explains, and instead enjoy “nobler and healthier persuasions.” He elaborates: “See how marvelous is the magnanimity of the Trojan and Greek heroes, and, no less, the beauty of the verses of Homer in praising them, and also the skill of my citaredo in animating, with the allurements of music, such excellent ideas; yet neither heroes, nor poets, nor musicians are shaped by the scholastic disciplines.” 93 Eutichio draws a line from the epic heroes through the epic poets to the citaredo as those who (respectively) generate, transcribe, and envoice foundational myths. And they do it all without the interference of pedantic academics like the Accademici della Crusca or pretentious philosophers like Rousseau. By harnessing the sensual pleasures of song for the collective good of society, Verri’s citaredo preserves order and prevents the masses from questioning their existence, or, even worse, rising up in revolution. Writing later, in the 1790s, Alessandro Verri would lay the blame for the French Revolution at the feet of the philosophes he had once revered: “The only fruit of the pride with which the sophists of that time had attempted the reform of mankind was a rapid and continuous destruction.” 94 It is not hard to imagine him suggesting that if the French had had such excellent voices as Melanzio’s to delight them, they would not have been so easily incited to violence. Civilizing humanity was the job of neither philosophers nor kings nor priests, but the singers whose voices transported listeners to a shared, however mythologized, past. In Alessandro Verri’s novel the citaredo’s civilizing song creates a version of what Lauren Berlant has called an “intimate public”: a “market” that “claim[s] to circulate texts and things that express [a group of consumers’] C i v i l i z i ng Song   •   115

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particular core interests and desires,” to the end that its “participants [. . .] feel as though it expresses what is common among them, a subjective likeness that seems to emanate from their history” (emphasis in original).95 A sense of shared feeling suffuses this market, covering over its underlying economic structure by conjuring intimacy, especially intimacy among strangers. In the intimate public formed through the citaredo’s song, the technology of circulation is vocal-musical, with Homeric epic as the listeners’ shared past, their “subjective likeness.” The absorptive distraction Melanzio’s song offers is also a key feature of the intimate public, in that it provides “relief” from both “the political” and “the cold hard world” in general.96 By inviting listeners to feel intimately connected with others like themselves—not only those who are physically present, but those elsewhere in space and even time—the citaredo’s song civilizes them into a public, into an “empire of humanity and civil life” (to bring back yet again Bettinelli’s phrase). Civilizing song was meant to protect its listeners from the destruction and chaos of the world beyond the singer’s voice. The intimate public formed by the citaredo’s song depends on the circulation of emotions, as does Li tre Orfei’s market fair. But instead of laying bare the entanglement of emotions with economics, like the opera does, the citaredo’s song in Verri’s novel masks its transactions as collective choices to subscribe to foundational cultural myths. Feelings and myths circulate together through the sounds of the singer’s voice. •

  • 

•

On a practical level, transforming even such singer-composers as Millico into modern Italian rhapsodes seemed impossible. It was hard enough getting them to respect a libretto, as Rezzonico grumbled, and besides, Alessandro Verri was more concerned with how song functioned in his novel than with actually reforming music. But what if civilizing song didn’t have to depend on Italy’s manufactured voices? If civilizing song could gain purchase in the domestic space, as with Millico’s Orphic songs for the London ladies, it could circulate among private individuals and instantiate an intimate public through those individuals’ own voices.97 So hoped Francesco de’ Rogati, a classics professor and amateur music lover who counted among his friends Cesarotti, Mattei, and Rezzonico. De’ Rogati had a realization one evening in Naples after hearing Millico (yes, again) singing and playing the harp in a friend’s salotto, a social context not unlike a contemporary Parisian salon or Eutichio’s fictional party. Until that 116  •   C i v i l i z i ng Song

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evening de’ Rogati had been worrying over the state of Italian lyric, which he felt had declined to such a point that few verses were suited to song. He wondered how, without “sufficient poetry to be set,” Italian music, and with it Italians, could arise from the cultural doldrums in which they currently languished. The answer came when he heard Millico’s performance of a new musical setting of an ode by Anacreon, the archaic Greek lyric poet, translated into Italian by his friend Mattei. When set to music and sung by “one of the best singers in Italy,” that is, Millico, the “beauties, sentiments, images” of Anacreon’s poetry became even “more alive, more captivating, more brilliant.” De’ Rogati resolved then and there to translate all the extant verses of Anacreon, as well as those of Anacreon’s contemporary, Sappho, in hopes that such worthy lyrics would help composers “awaken the Italian Muses.” In the preface to his 1782 edition of Italianized Anacreontic odes, de’ Rogati credited Millico with inspiring him to usher in this new-yet-classic era of Italian song.98 For de’ Rogati, reforming Italian song was a means to an end, not an end in itself. Archaic Greek lyric had originally “served in general as a means of socialization and cultural education,” as classicist Leslie Kurke explains, and de’ Rogati sought to do the same for his contemporaries by bringing them the “candid simplicity” of Anacreon’s verses.99 Simplicity was for late Settecento listeners an invitation to subjective engagement and completion, as discussed in chapter 2; it was also frequently invoked as the quality that had made Greek civilizing song successful in the first place, presumably because it rendered its lessons more accessible to listeners.100 If the simple, edifying lyrics of archaic Greece could be translated, published, and disseminated across Italy through salotto song, they could civilize listeners both in their own homes and in small social gatherings, creating a pan-Italian intimate public of sonorous refuge from the political world beyond. Instead of civilizing song by allowing voices to openly meddle in politics or peddle in the marketplace, then, de’ Rogati sought to do it by domesticating voices at home. But first he had to figure out how to translate the Sapphic sublime.

C i v i l i z i ng Song   •   117

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fou r

Domesticating the Tenth Muse

sappho is ignited by phaon In Alessandro Verri’s popular 1782 novel Le avventure di Saffo, poetessa di Mitilene (The adventures of Sappho, poetess of Mytilene), the eponymous heroine both finds and loses her voice because of men. The author made Saffo’s poetry an effect of her unrestrained (heterosexual) desire, overwriting histories of the so-called tenth muse in which she was considered a genius in her own right.1 In Verri’s version, Saffo is “ignited” when she sees the young Faone in an athletic competition, after which she improvises her first poem in his honor.2 Faone awakens at once her desire and her voice—only to suffocate the latter with his own. When she hears him speak, “all her thoughts and motions [are] suspended, even her breath.” It is Faone, not Saffo, whom Verri describes as speaking with “a tongue moved by the gods.”3 After many scenes of pleading and tears, the novel ends when Saffo, unable to make Faone love her, throws herself from the cliffs of Leucas. Framed as the translation of a long-lost Greek source, Verri’s fictional novel interweaves details from the ancient reception history of Sappho with elements of the author’s own invention. Verri was able to present his endeavor as a “newly discovered” history because, unlike the mythological Orpheus, Sappho had been a real historical person. She was a Greek lyric poet-singer from the isle of Lesbos who lived during the sixth century BCE; her poetry, as lyrics in the original, generic sense, had been composed to be sung aloud to the accompaniment of a lyre. Nowadays she is best known for her passionate descriptions of embodied emotional experience, including, famously, her love lyrics addressed to other women. In the late eighteenth century, however, authors focused almost exclusively on the stories about her disastrous love for 118

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Phaon, choosing to represent the poet-singer as pitiful, sentimental, and unequivocally heterosexual.4 These predominantly male authors were able to write her that way because the historical Sappho existed, then as now, in nothing but fragments—scraps of lyrics and snippets of stories, mixed with millennia of myths—which allowed them to curate her remains for their own ends, like so many artifacts in a museum case.5 Among such ends in the late Settecento was that of reforming Italian literary and musical culture. By casting Sappho’s lyrics as the breathless confessions of a teenage girl, Verri was doing more than merely updating ancient history with a dash of Settecento sensibility (though that was certainly part of it). He was also simultaneously capitalizing on and asserting control over certain literary aesthetics that were then increasingly associated with women as both writers and readers. In the later decades of the Settecento, conservative literati worried that permitting women agency in Italian literary culture would exacerbate northerners’ critiques of Italy as culturally emasculated.6 Verri therefore used his Saffo novel to, first, propose a narrative about the origins and limits of feminine poiesis and, second, aim that cautionary narrative at the predominantly female readership of sentimental novels. What is more, he legitimized his writing a novel, instead of something in a more elevated genre, by choosing Sappho as the protagonist: such a “novel” literary form was the only way to properly represent in writing an othered, because female, subjectivity (not unlike Cesarotti’s approach to translating the “primitive” voice of Ossian by using new and unexpected poetic forms). In this chapter I read Verri’s novel, along with other late Settecento annotations, translations, inventions, and compositions of Sappho’s voice, as gendering certain modes of poiesis by marking them as the natural products of female bodies.7 That gendering, in turn, performatively domesticated women’s subjectivities—and their singing voices—in order to press them into service to the broader project of civilizing song. Renewed concerns about what to do with women’s writing had taken center stage when, in 1776, the poetic improviser Corilla Olimpica became the first (and last) woman crowned poet laureate on the Roman Capitol.8 She shared the honor with such icons of Italian poetry as Petrarch and Tasso, not to mention her contemporary colleague in the Arcadian Academy, Metastasio. Yet unlike Petrarch, Tasso, or Metastasio, Corilla’s sounding voice was inseparable from her reception as a poet. Her supporters praised the sounds of her voice as though they were inextricable from the verses she extemporized, while the centrality of performance to her art gave detractors D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e   •   119

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an excuse to undervalue her literary skill. They regarded her improvised verses more as vocal performances than as legitimate “texts” on the level of those by her male colleagues.9 Corilla’s crowning by the Arcadian Academy carried significant ideological weight. As Paola Giuli has argued, the honor served as a public declaration of Arcadia’s turn away from Metastasian aesthetics toward the sensist values of immediacy, spontaneity, and sensibility—values that, as we have seen, were by then associated in Italy with both Cesarotti’s Ossian and the Orphic castrati, and hence with singing voices (whether poetic or operatic). In crowning Corilla, the Arcadian Academy stayed in line with such potentially polarizing shifts by using a female poet as their canary in the aesthetic coal mine.10 Thus even as Corilla’s success raised questions for Italian literati about how to grapple with women’s artistic agency within the civilizing process, it also provided them an opportunity to take advantage of the alternative expressive parameters she presented. Invoking Sappho gave a recognizable (and, crucially, gendered) form to those alternative parameters. Just as Orpheus was the exemplary figure of the lyric poet-singer, Sappho was the exemplary figure of the female lyric poetsinger. As the Greek historian Strabo proclaimed in the early first century CE, “Sappho [is] an amazing thing. For we know in all of recorded history not one woman who can even come close to rivaling her” (emphasis added).11 Or, as Ellen Greene has more recently put it, Sappho has long been seen as “a kind of mother goddess of poetry.”12 Since antiquity the figure and mythology of Sappho have provided a set of tropes for representing and evaluating women’s poiesis. Tellingly, Corilla’s admirers dubbed her “Sappho reincarnated” and “the tenth muse,” writing of how, during her improvisations, she would “suddenly ignite” with inspiration.13 It was nothing new to associate women writers with Sappho—but the late Settecento version reworked those tropes in order to make Sappho a figure of, not poetry per se, but embodied voice.14 As a figure of voice, then, Sappho once again became the “tenth muse,” although not in the way Plato had intended it. Like the nine original muses, whose voices were inaudible except to their chosen human mediators, Sappho was portrayed in the late Settecento as an inaudible voice that could be remediated into writing by a privileged few. Writers like Verri presented themselves as capable of turning the tenth muse’s otherwise inaccessible voice into a story, one that was fragmentary and incomplete but, thanks to them, humanly audible.15 Or, to put it differently, the figure of Sappho provided them a voice through which they could experiment with controversial aesthetics like sensi120  •   D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e

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bility and sublimity, while the historical tradition of Sappho reception allowed them to do so under the guise of an authenticating classicism. Late Settecento notions of women’s voices were shaped by these authors’ remediations of Sappho, remediations that were themselves made possible by two new approaches to writing history: first, the rise of literary forms that purported to voice publicly a private self, namely, the lyric, the epistle, and the confession; and second, the coeval archaeological impulse to discover, reassemble, and make sense of fragments. As we will see, there were political stakes in writing such histories. Much like Settecento Italy itself, Sappho remained only as a fragmentary corpus (in both meanings of the word): Italy and Sappho each seemed at once a mutilated physical body and a disparate collection of poetic texts. And yet, if male writers could re-form Sappho’s fragments into the story of her lyric subjectivity, then they might also re-form Italy’s fragments into the history of its political subjectivity. In narrativizing Sappho’s fragmented voice through words and music, late Settecento interlocutors played out a fantasy of how domesticating women’s voices could create Italian subjects.

archaeology and the confessional imagination As literary scholars have long argued, eighteenth-century British and French writers explored female interiority through the nascent genre of the epistolary novel. Since the 1740s the epistolary novel had been largely the province of men writing in female voice, exemplified by Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloïse (1761), drawing on the longstanding connotations of women’s letter writing as inherently autobiographical, authentic, and “natural.” Such assumptions limited the literary merit allowed to real women’s writing while bestowing additional prestige on men who convincingly wrote like women.16 In contemporary Italy, however, the Anglo-French genre of the novel was still widely maligned as lowbrow. Even Verri, when working on Saffo, sniffed at other novels as being written in a “lingua bastarda” (bastard language).17 Conveniently for authors like Verri, there was a well-established classical literary precedent for innovating genre through female interiority and voice, which was set by Ovid’s Epistulae Heroidum, or Heroides (Letters from heroines; composed at the end of the first century BCE). The Heroides are a collection of D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e   •   121

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fifteen “epistolary poems” addressed by mythological women like Medea and Ariadne to the men who have abandoned them, all written in the first person. Epistles are not the same as private letters, of course, being instead selfconsciously public letters that reveal the writer’s awareness of readers beyond the nominal addressee. One of the most famous in Ovid’s collection is Heroides 15, from Sappho to Phaon (i.e., Faone), in which she blames him for destroying her poetic voice and begs him to return, all in a writing-to-the-moment style notably similar to that of the eighteenth-century sentimental novel. (For instance, in what would become a Richardsonian cliché two millennia later, Ovid’s Sappho describes her tears dripping onto the page as she writes.)18 Ovid channeled Sappho’s voice by both borrowing her lyric “I” and imitating her lyric style: her poetic epistle frequently and rapidly shifts among different tones and affects (an aspect of the real Sappho’s style to which I will return later.)19 Ovid claimed that by writing in the “assumed” voices of his heroines rather than in his own, he had invented a new genre.20 His sentimental, heterosexual narrative of Sappho and Phaon was the basis for many late eighteenth-century retellings, but, more importantly, it also provided an ancient model for experimenting with form, style, and genre through Sappho’s voice and interiority. In order to render Sappho’s ancient history compatible with the literarystylistic innovations of their own late Settecento moment, the writers discussed in this chapter combined two synchronous cultural trends. The first of these was archaeology, which fascinated Italians following the rediscovery of Paestum, Herculaneum, and Pompeii around midcentury. The origins of a system for classical archaeology are typically attributed to German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who traced a history of ancient Greek civilization by narrativizing his own emotional-embodied responses to ancient art and artifacts. Winckelmann’s major study was published in Italian translation by Carlo Fea as Storia delle arti del disegno presso gli antichi in 1784, after various excerpts had been published separately in French and Italian.21 Beginning at midcentury, Italy had become the prime destination for philhellenic tourists and scholars from across Europe, as Greece was then under the control of the Ottoman Empire and so largely inaccessible to European travelers.22 As more sites in Italy, especially southern Italy (formerly Magna Grecia), were excavated, artifactual fragments of Greek material culture poured into Italian villas, markets, and imaginations, among them various busts, statues, and portraits depicting female figures identified (erroneously) as Sappho. These excavations and ensuing art histories raised the tantalizing possibility that Sappho’s complete corpus, or at least further fragments of it, might also be unearthed.23 122  •   D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e

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Around the same time, the epistolary novel produced an offshoot, premised on the notion of the voice as transmitter of individualized experience: the literary mode of “confession.” This needs some unpacking, given that in literature confessions are not quite the same as memoirs or autobiography, both of which in the eighteenth century prioritized a writer’s public rather than inner life.24 Literary confessions, by contrast, are concerned with “unveiling” an individualized interiority, in and through writing. As Rousseau put it at the beginning of his posthumously published Confessions (1782), “I feel my heart and I know men. [. . .] I dare to believe that I am not made like any that exist. [. . .] I have unveiled my interior as Thou hast seen it Thyself.”25 Even decades before Rousseau’s Confessions, the resonance of the term had begun changing in Italy. For centuries, a confessional speech act produced by torture was widely accepted in both civil and church-run trials as a performative utterance, meaning that confessing, in and of itself, proved one’s guilt regardless of how the confession was obtained. In the 1760s, however, one of the Verri brothers’ colleagues in the Accademia dei Pugni, Cesare Beccaria, vigorously challenged that assumption in his foundational Dei delitti e delle pene (On crimes and punishments; 1764). Beccaria argued for the untrustworthiness, not to mention inhumanity, of violently extracted confessions, and praised the authenticity of freely given ones. Beccaria’s writings, along with related large-scale shifts in the perceived role of the sacraments, took confession from a speech act of self-condemnation to a practice of self-declaration and exploration.26 The new literary confessional mode assimilated the performative power of legal and sacramental confessions, but the act these new confessions performed was the production of a self. When used as a literary device, then, confession “authenticate[d] the voice behind” the text, in that the confessional mode affirmed the individuality and truthfulness of the self who had freely spoken (or written) about their process of becoming.27 It is no coincidence that this “confessional imagination” emerged at the same time as a renewed interest in lyric poetry: both purportedly “gave voice” to written representations of interiority, individuality, and emotional intensity.28 Moreover, what Culler defines as fundamental to the lyric—the process of “subjectivity coming to consciousness of itself through experience and reflection”—is equally fundamental to the confessional mode, as well as to the notion of sensibility.29 By the nineteenth century the confession, much like the lyric, became “a form that focuses on the problems and processes of writing about the self.”30 D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e   •   123

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Joseph Luzzi has located the transition from memoir to confession in Italy a few decades after Rousseau, but that is with regard to writers’ “real” confessions in literary form. Already in the early 1780s, Italian authors indexed confession in literary fiction to authenticate an otherwise unreliable or unknowable fictional subject. By invoking confession they confirmed for readers the individuality of the fictional speaker’s self, as well as the veracity of the experiences, interior and otherwise, related by the speaker’s “voice.” Confession thus imposed narrative structure on the disorganized bits and pieces of individual experience—yet it did so without precluding the spontaneity and immediacy with which the speaker retold those experiences. In sum, the confessional mode invited readers to imagine themselves as listeners—confessors, even—and to hear fragments of experience as a coherent narrative of the speaker’s selfhood, freely “unveiled” in their own individual voice.31 What these two trends, the archaeological and the confessional, had in common was the desire to (re)construct histories out of fragments. In the years around 1780, just before Rousseau’s Confessions were published, several Italian authors portrayed their experiments in writing women’s subjectivity as the archaeological excavation of voice from fragments of lyric poetry. They then reframed those fragments with context and narrative by making recourse to the notion of confession, all through the Ovidian figure of Sappho.

excavating female interiority Two such works were very popular, and reprinted long into the nineteenth century (sometimes together). One is Verri’s novel, but we will get back to that in a bit. Two years earlier, in 1780, the Arcadian poet Vincenzo Imperiale published his “translations” of “newly discovered” Sappho poems (notice the pattern here) under the title La Faoniade. He claimed that a Russian scholar named Ossur had excavated this unknown cache of Sappho’s hymns and odes from the Temple of Apollo on Leucas, where it had lain hidden for twentyfour centuries.32 In reality, Imperiale concocted them himself, borrowing Ovid’s Sappho-Phaon plot and adding an editorial apparatus for an air of scholarly authenticity. The latter included a preface with the tale of the papyri’s excavation, synopses of each poem to clarify the fictional narrative, and endnotes with historical information. Part one of the Faoniade consists of hymns to Apollo, Venus, and Cupid in which Saffo sings about her secret desire for Faone and her struggle with his indifference. Saffo’s intensely personal mode 124  •   D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e

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of address throughout the Faoniade emulates that of Ovid’s Sappho, while the numerous references to her singing these hymns and odes aloud, before writing them down on papyrus, shifts them into an implicitly confessional, because unmistakably vocal, mode.33 Furthermore, Saffo asks Venus to intercede with her son (i.e., Cupid) for help in what is clearly a pre-Christian version of Marian devotion; this suggests that Imperiale wrote the poems through the lens of his own Catholic religious practices, including that of confession.34 Imperiale also drew on confession explicitly. In hymn 3, addressed to Cupid, Saffo refers to her passion for Faone as her “guilt” (colpa) and sings, “Yes, I confess [confesso] it to you.” To emphasize the point, Imperiale summarized that particular hymn as Saffo “confessing her faults” (gli confessa i suoi falli) to Cupid.35 And Saffo certainly had a lot to confess, according to her self-appointed confessor Imperiale. Unlike Francesco de’ Rogati and Verri, both of whom would later cast the poet-singer as a tragic but mostly chaste figure, Imperiale claimed that this Saffo had been “lascivious” and “prostituted herself.”36 The reader had to take the translator’s word for it, however, because Imperiale admitted that he had bowdlerized several of the more salacious poems out of consideration for the “pure morals of religion in which we live.”37 He did not include transcriptions of the ancient “originals,” either, as that would have required him to forge passable Aeolic Greek. Nevertheless, through his scholarly apparatus Imperiale presented himself as the curator of the tenth muse’s authentic, albeit mutilated, artifactual voice, performing the essential roles of Homer and historian in one. The censored verses themselves were only confessional fragments, but thanks to Imperiale’s synopses and endnotes, they became legible and audible as Saffo’s recovered lyric confessions. Imperiale parlayed his fictional verses into narrative wholeness through a literary maneuver that created Saffo’s subjectivity by forging her voice. He did so by imposing two interrelated metanarratives to reinforce the confessional mode, which in turn raised the stakes by making the poems into Saffo’s ultimate act of self-declaration. The first metanarrative is that of the poems’ “plot,” and the second that of their modern “discovery.” First, the story told through Imperiale’s annotations traces Saffo’s self-destructive passion for Faone and ends with her suicidal leap from the Leucadian cliff. By the final ode in the entire collection (n. 5 of part 2), it becomes apparent that these verses were designed to be read as Saffo’s last confession, her self-defining vocal act, before leaping to her end. Confession in Imperiale’s Catholic context was a sacrament of penance, part of preparing the soul for death, so the last confession frame fit the story. But, as he likely knew, the ancient origins of the term “confession” lay D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e   •   125

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in the material rather than the purely discursive: in first-century Rome, during the earliest years of the church, a Christian martyr’s tomb was called a confessio, designating with a physical marker the site of self-declaration as one of the faithful.38 Only later in the history of Christianity did the term come to denote a speech act or written text. This brings us to the second metanarrative. According to Imperiale, “Ossur” found the Faoniade papyri in a stone box behind a wall in the Apollonian Temple of Leucas, with an inscription announcing that it contained Sappho’s tomb.39 Sappho had been a martyr to passion rather than Christian faith, as Imperiale reminded his readers, but this tomb was nonetheless her confessio, with the corpus Ossur had exhumed from it being not her physical remains but her poetic ones.40 Simply put, Sappho’s lost voice was reanimated and appropriated by substituting her nonexistent body with a male-authored text. In imagining Sappho’s corpus as this dyad of body and text, material remains and speech act, Imperiale made her into a hauntological figure of lyric.41 As a textual voice emanating from inside the tomb, she was an eidolon whose original body was no longer present; her death, then, could be continually staged and replayed—and thereby disavowed. Like Imperiale, Alessandro Verri legitimized his own foray into writing gendered subjectivity as the excavation of confessional fragments, but he spread them out over an entire novel.42 As part of his legitimizing project, Verri eschewed the “lingua bastarda” style of French novels in order to write in what he described as the “simple” and “unaffected” style of “excavated antiquity” (l’antichità dissotterrata).43 Verri even included bona fide fragments of excavated antiquity in his Saffo, inserting extracts from Sappho’s known lyric corpus into the novel’s narrative. These real poetic fragments functioned in the novel as monologues in Saffo’s own voice, refracting authenticity onto the many other, fictionalized moments of interiority relayed by the omniscient narrator. The poetic fragments operated as primary sources that confirmed Verri’s novelistic narrative about his character Saffo, blurring distinctions between lyric confession, archaeologically derived history, and the sentimental novel. Key to blending these forms and genres, and so to authenticating Verri’s literary project, was the audition of Saffo’s lyric voice within the novel itself: she had to sing her confessional lyrics aloud. Verri placed Sappho’s two real odes into a fictionalized scene of archaic lyric performance, a setting that, like the novelistic epistolary mode, connoted a publicized interiority. In the scene, Saffo sings for a group of dinner guests while accompanying herself on the lyre, improvising poetry on various themes as suggested by the audience. (Saffo’s confessional performance of her own original poetry in this scene 126  •   D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e

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contrasts with Verri’s portrayal, elsewhere in the novel, of the citaredo Melanzio, who sings Homer for the benefit of society; see chapter 3.) She is so skilled in her improvisations that she is deemed “favored by the muses”; Verri must have been thinking of Corilla Olimpica here. Saffo then goes on to sing an ode that—the narrator informs us—is secretly addressed to Faone:44 1 Felice al par de’ Numi chi d’appresso Ascolta il dolce suon di tua favella: Più felice di lor, se gli è concesso Destar su quella 5 Bocca il soave riso. . . . E che ragiono? Se ragion più non ho. La prima volta, Che ti vidi, rimasi, come or sono, Misera e stolta. 9 Chiuse il silenzio le mie labra, aperte Solo ai sospiri: e sol per lor faconde, D’ogni altro favellar furo inesperte. L’amor m’infonde 13 Sottil fuoco vorace entro le vene: Mi benda gli occhi: più non odo: sento Che vivo ancor, ma vivo delle pene Coll’alimento. 17 Scorre per le convulse membra il gelo Delle stille di Morte: io mi scoloro

Happy like the Gods, s/he who nearby Hears the sweet sound of your speech: Happier than they [the Gods], if s/he is allowed To awaken on that Mouth a pleasing laugh. . . . And what am I thinking? If I no longer have reason. The first time That I saw you, I remained, as I am now, Miserable and foolish. Silence closes my lips, open Only to sighs: and only in [sighs] am I able to speak, Of all other discourse [my lips] are incapable. Love inspires A slender, voracious fire within my veins: My eyes are blindfolded: I can no longer hear: I feel That I am yet living, but living with suffering That grows. Flowing through my convulsing limbs is the ice Of drops of Death: I lose my color

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Siccome il fior diviso dallo stelo: Ecco già moro. 21 Oh, benchè estremo, avventuroso fiato, Se giunge ad ammollir quel cuor spietato!

Like a flower separated from its stem: Here I die already. Oh, although desperate, daring breath, If you could reach to soften that cruel heart!

Verri authenticated this genuine Sapphic fragment in Cesarottian fashion. For the poetic meter, he approximated the stanza saffica, or Sapphic stanzaic form (three endecasillabi and one quinario), instead of using a standard Italian versification form. As with Cesarotti’s Ossian, the unusual versification emphasized the historico-stylistic remoteness, here the Sappho-ness, of the text being translated. Verri also added his own ending where the original Sapphic fragment is truncated—lines 21–22 are Verri’s own invention—thereby making the rest of the lyric fit neatly into the novel’s Saffo-Faone plot. The purpose of it all—staging the ode as a sung performance, adding the final couplet, imitating Sapphic stanzaic form—was to elide Verri’s character Saffo with Sappho the historical poet. Saffo’s song here becomes a confessional fragment, a repository of her “real” lyric voice and a narrative of her lyric self in one. Through recontextualizing Sappho’s lyric “I” and, with it, her signature lyric style, Verri’s novelistic history suggested that a self could be excavated and reconstructed from fragments of lyric in the same way that a civilization could be excavated and reconstructed from fragments of material culture. Whether individual or political, “histories” were written by placing fragments into narratives. At the same time, by conjuring these hauntological histories, literary reimaginings of Sappho implied that women’s writing originated in the confessional and thus, more fundamentally, in the vocal. Feminine poiesis therefore needed “literate” mediation to become interpretable—that is, to become legible as unified lyric narratives of unified lyric subjects rather than scattered fragments of voice.

a multitude of passions The lyric that Verri staged as “to Faone”—known as Sappho 31, fragment 31, or, in the eighteenth century, Ode II—has long been considered among the greatest lyrics of all time, and, for many, as definitive of the lyric mode.45 It also 128  •   D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e

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provided the basis for the late Settecento framework of female lyric voice, both poetic and, as we will see in chapter 5, musical. To understand why, it is important to say something about the poetic style of the fragment and the multiple layers of mediation that have (always) intervened in its reception. In the third century BCE, Sappho’s works were gathered into nine papyrus rolls and deposited in the Library of Alexandria, which was later destroyed in the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BCE. Most of her corpus did not survive. Only one full poem has been preserved from antiquity: the Ode, or Hymn, to Aphrodite (Sappho 1), which was saved through citation in a treatise by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. The rest of her oeuvre remains in literal fragments, ranging from those as short as a single word or phrase to others comprising multiple stanzas. Among the fragments, Sappho 31 is on the longer side, spanning seventeen lines. If the truncated seventeenth line is cut completely, the fragment lends itself to being read as a self-contained poem, something many translators have chosen to do.46 Famously, the Roman poet Catullus translated it into Latin in the first century BCE and added his own ending, like Verri did eighteen hundred years later. Most of the translations of Sappho 31 from Roman antiquity through the eighteenth century, including Verri’s, appear to have been based on Catullus’s Latin rendering more than the Greek. Notably, Catullus’s version ends with a turn to his own voice rather than continuing to ventriloquize Sappho—which retroactively makes the entire lyric about himself. One could say that versions of Sappho 31 reveal as much about their translators as they do about Sappho “herself,” and that the myriad translations of fragment 31 through the millennia can be read as encapsulating their respective eras’ attitudes toward lyric poetry, gender, and embodied feeling.47 Here is one version of fragment 31, in a modern translation by Anne Carson:48 1

He seems to me equal to the gods that man whoever he is who opposite you sits and listens close to your sweet speaking

5

and lovely laughing—oh it puts the heart in my chest on wings for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking is left in me

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9

no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin and in eyes no sight and drumming fills ears

13

and cold sweat holds me and shaking grips me all, greener than grass I am and dead—or almost I seem to me.

17

But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty [end of fragment]

The speaker gazes upon, or perhaps imagines, an interaction between her beloved and a (real or generalized) man. This leads her to turn inward, to ruminate on her feelings about being in the beloved’s presence. The physical symptoms she enumerates are now clichés for lovesickness: her heart throbs, she cannot speak, she burns and freezes (long before Petrarch), she becomes blind and deaf, turns pale, and feels as though she is dying. With this attention to the slippage between the emotional and the physiological, Sappho fragment 31 is something of an ancestor to the late eighteenth-century literature of sensibility. The speaker vividly describes her mental and emotional state as embodied physical experience. Beyond its affinities to the sensible mode, fragment 31 also intrigued late Settecento writers because it was famously “sublime.” Like Sappho 1, Sappho 31 survived through antiquity as an excerpt in a literary treatise: it is partially quoted in Longinus’s On the Sublime (Peri hypsous, first century CE), which was well known in eighteenth-century Italy via Nicolas Boileau’s 1674 French translation.49 In his treatise, Longinus had excerpted and analyzed Sappho 31 as the exemplar of the sublime style in poetry: Do you not marvel at how she brings together in one the soul, the body, the ears, the tongue, the eyes, and finally the complexion [. . .]? Observe how many contrary movements of the mind and body she excites, [. . .] such that [there is] not one passion, but in it, there seems to be together a multitude of passions. All of this really happens to people in love: but her choice of important events, and their judicious combination, forms sublimity [emphases added].50

The quote above is not a translation of Longinus’s treatise directly, but my translation of an Italian translation of Longinus by Francesco de’ Rogati. De’ 130  •   D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e

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Rogati, whom we met in chapter 3, was on the hunt for poetry that would inspire Italian composers to quit churning out mediocre songs and instead emulate the lyric poets of archaic Greece. After translating Anacreon’s lyrics, in 1783 de’ Rogati published a second volume of translations consisting of the hymns and odes of Sappho. According to his commentary, the two poets were meant to provide different types of poetic inspiration for Italy’s composers. Anacreon’s lyrics exemplified the Arcadian ideal of “candid simplicity,” while Sappho’s expressed a “multitude” of “violent” passions.51 Respectively, the two poets stood in for the rational and the sublime. As the Arcadians did by lauding Corilla’s improvised poetry, and Imperiale and Verri did by forging Sappho’s lyric voice, de’ Rogati used a female poet to test out new and potentially controversial aesthetics. Sappho 31 offered these men authoritatively ancient justification for sprucing up rational, classicist aesthetics with a dash of the irrational—whether as sensibility, sublimity, or both.

from lost voice to sublime lyric When de’ Rogati presented Sappho as a sublime inspiration for Italy’s composers, he also imposed a recognizably feminine frame on her poetry. He did so by subtly rewriting fragment 31 such that it hinges on Sappho’s sounding, rather than poetic, voice. (For the sake of comprehensible grammar, the English below does not always match line-by-line with the Italian, but I have tried to privilege accuracy above idiomatic English to convey de’ Rogati’s interpretation.) Here is his version of Sappho 31, which he dubbed “Ode II”: 1

5

9

Contento al par de’ Numi Parmi colui, che siede Incontro a’ tuoi bei lumi Felice spettator; Che sparse le tue gote Talor d’un riso vede, Ch’ ode le dolci note Dal labbro tuo talor.

As happy as the Gods He seems to me, who sits Across from your beautiful eyes, A lucky spectator; Who sees, now and then A laugh emitted from your cheeks, Who hears sweet notes From your lips, sometimes.

Al riso, a’ detti usati Il cor, che s’innamora, Fra i spiriti agitati

At your laugh, at [your] usual words, The heart that falls in love, Amid agitated spirits,

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13

17

21

Non osa palpitar. Veggo il tuo vago aspetto E alle mie fauci allora Non somministra il petto Voce per favellar.

Does not dare to beat. I see your lovely face And then to my mouth My chest does not give Voice for speaking.

Tenta la lingua invano D’articolar parola, Corre un ardore insano Di vena in vena al cor. Un denso velo il giorno Alle mie luci invola; Odo confuso intorno, Ma non so qual rumor.

My tongue tries in vain To articulate words, An insane heat runs Through my veins to my heart. A thick veil Steals the day from my sight; Around [me] I hear confusion, But know not what sound.

25

Largo sudor m’inonda, Spesso tremor m’assale, Al par d’arida fronda Comincio a impallidir: 29 Sì nelle fredde membra Langue il calor vitale, Che a me vicin rassembra L’istante del morir.

Copious sweat bathes me, Tremors assail me repeatedly, Like a desiccated leaf I begin to grow pale: In my cold limbs Vital heat languishes, Such that it seems to me The moment of death is near.52

De’ Rogati’s “Contento al par de’ Numi” instantly points up the singing voice by following contemporary Italian song form. Unlike Alessandro Verri and, later, Ugo Foscolo, de’ Rogati chose not to use endecasillabi and quinari to emulate the structure of the stanza saffica. Instead, he used settenari (seven-syllable lines) to generate Sappho-for-Singing: stanzas of settenari were “lyric, melic, and suited to little songs,” he explained, owing to their strong affinity to the ubiquitous aria texts of Metastasio.53 The simple strophic form he chose is called, appropriately, the “ode-canzonetta.” It is clearly much longer than the usual twostanza, eight-line Metastasian aria text. Still, according to de’ Rogati, archaic Greek lyrics like Sappho’s lent themselves to translation into the musical Italian settenario, more so than into any French or Latin verse forms, thanks to the “gift of our language” (i.e., Italian).54 In de’ Rogati’s view, modern Italian lyric provided the sole form through which originary Greek lyric could sing again. 132  •   D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e

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But there was a slight problem. Both the number and range of poetic images packed into Sappho’s lyric far exceeded those of the Metastasian template. Metastasio’s aria texts are typically universalizing, balanced, and representative of a single categorizable Cartesian passion, or sometimes two contrasting ones.55 True, the symptoms enumerated in Sappho 31 appear so universal to “people in love” that they are now clichés, but the fragment explores the personal immediacy of those symptoms as bodily experience rather than the universality of such experience. Sappho 31 also leaps among a dizzying “multitude of passions” rather than following a single one throughout. This is exactly why it exemplified the Longinian sublime as the feminine other to the “candid simplicity” of Anacreon’s lyrics. In order to innovate Italian vocal music, then, de’ Rogati had to regulate the sensual multitudes of the Sapphic sublime with Metastasian lyric form.56 The tenth muse’s inaudible, fragmented voice provided the raw materials for de’ Rogati’s own meta-Metastasian song, not to mention the broader civilizing project of his translations. De’ Rogati’s translation turned Sappho 31 into another story about the origins of female poiesis, now familiar from Verri’s and Imperiale’s texts, in which women “wrote” through their voices and bodies rather than with their rational minds. De’ Rogati chalked up his changes to the demands of a cultural translation process that went beyond language. The translator acknowledged that certain Greek expressions, however powerful in the original context, would not have had the same effect for modern Italian readers, so he created translations for those expressions on a metaphorical as well as literal level.57 In his Sappho 31, as “Contento al par de’ Numi,” the overarching cultural translation consisted of replacing the primacy of speech with that of the voice. Sappho’s Greek establishes the tongue as the agent of self-expression, with language as the origin of communication, and without mention of the sounding voice of the lyric “I”: “when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking / is left in me / no: tongue breaks” (Sappho 31, lines 7–9). De’ Rogati instead cast voice as the agent of self-expression, with the tongue and mouth as mere tools: “I see your lovely face / and to my mouth / my chest does not give / voice for speaking. // My tongue tries in vain / to articulate words” (de’ Rogati II, lines 13–18). In his rendition the issue is not a broken tongue but a lack of voice, since without voice the mouth and tongue have nothing to form into words. In focusing on voice rather than the tongue, de’ Rogati seemingly followed Catullus’s translation (which he cited in a footnote) rather than Sappho’s original. Yet Catullus wrote of voice only ambiguously: “nothing is left for me / of my voice [vocis] in my mouth” (Catullus 51, lines 7–8). Like the D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e   •   133

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Italian voce, the Latin vox/vocis can indicate both “voice” and “word”; Catullus’s vocis is normally translated into English as “voice,” but it might be better understood as “word” or “speech,” especially since its location in the speaker’s mouth closely connects it with language. De’ Rogati’s “voce” functions as much more than a convenient replacement metonym for speech. In a footnote he clarified that voice as he understood it originated not in the mouth as speech, as other translations based on Catullus had had it, but in the chest—physiologically speaking, the lungs, which supplied the breath that created vocal sound. Sappho’s “voce” in his version is not words but embodied vocal sound, animated by air from the lungs. This was not only a technical adjustment but a metaphorical one. The voice simply passes through the mouth, while its source is in the “petto” (the chest or, more poetically, breast) which, beyond housing the lungs, was and is an exceedingly common poetic metaphor for feeling.58 This meant that Sappho’s self-expression did not originate in her mouth and tongue as language, but in her chest as feeling, from where it was also made audible by the sound of her embodied voice. De’ Rogati’s Italian translation gave physical voice and metaphorical feeling a shared point of origin, thereby marking body and emotion as jointly constitutive of Sappho’s lyric self-expression. This latter point becomes evident from the genre-defining turn initiated by the loss of voice of the lyric “I.” In the Italian, “voce” begins the final line of the fourth quatrain (line 16), positioning “voice” as the object that finally resolves all the previous lines’ enjambments. “Voce” also marks a swerve in the middle of the ode by instigating an inward turn, a structural characteristic of vernacular lyric from Petrarch to Wordsworth. Beginning in line 17, the speaker abandons her unspoken address to the beloved and turns to her litany of physical symptoms, dismembering herself into a multitude of failing body parts. In de’ Rogati’s Sapphic song, the loss of her sounding voice drives this inward turn, and the ensuing self-reflexive description of the experience of bodily suffering is what renders her lyric into sublimity (following Longinus’s interpretation). Sappho’s lyric “I” is compensated for her physical and emotional suffering, and in de’ Rogati’s version for her loss of voice, by metamorphosing into a sublime lyric text. This change in de’ Rogati’s ode, the new emphasis on voice, is deeply significant. For one thing, the dismemberment or “scattering” of a voiceless female body was a foundational way of generating lyric in Italian vernacular poetics. As Nancy J. Vickers argues in her classic article on the Rime sparse, Petrarch fragments his beloved Laura “into scattered words” by describing 134  •   D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e

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her as a series of beautiful body parts rather than as a subject, all the while leaving her voiceless. Petrarch’s text, his own “scattered rhymes” (rime sparse), is made up of these “individual fragments” of Laura’s body, and it is through reassembling those pieces of Laura into an “idealized unity” that Petrarch’s lyric persona becomes a self.59 (The other two titles given to the Rime sparse are also relevant to the themes outlined here: Il Canzoniere, the songbook, and Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Fragments of vernacular things.) In fragment 31 the lyric “I” is female, and she is not dismembered or scattered by the male gaze. She fragments herself as the result of her own outwardly directed gaze. It would seem that the Petrarchan lyric poetics of self do not accommodate her female lyric “I”—except when her fragments are re-narrativized externally by the reader, who then becomes a Petrarchan subject himself. And that is precisely what Longinus’s theory of the poetic sublime accomplished for de’ Rogati. The Longinian reader successfully overcomes the toomuch-ness of Sappho’s lyric by comprehending it as a unity, solidifying his own subjectivity against the otherness of fragmentation. Here I engage Barbara Claire Freeman’s rereading of the Longinian sublime as a “mode of domination” in which the self “maintains its borders by subordinating difference.” Longinus defines the poetic sublime as instantiated by Sappho’s ability to “creat[e] the illusion of wholeness,” but Freeman takes this as a “misreading.” Sappho 31 is instead, as she puts it, about “an experience of total fragmentation,” of “self-shattering.” Sappho’s sublime lyric resists interpretation. Thus Longinus’s gloss, in Freeman’s argument, becomes an attempt to master a purposefully resistant text, to “domesticate” the multitudes of Sappho 31 and thereby ratify the reader’s own subjectivity as an interpreter.60 Significantly, in this framework sublimity and subjectivity are mutually constituted by a reader’s capacity to make something comprehensible out of fragments. Both emerge from the reader’s self-reflective experience of the text, not from “the text itself.” De’ Rogati, steeped in both the classical tradition and the Italian vernacular one, fused Longinus’s strategy of self-ratifying mastery with Petrarch’s. He reframed Sappho’s verses as the effusions of a voiceless, scattered female body, one whose fragmentation serves to form (male) subjects by teaching them to interpret and master the irrational. In the footnotes he introduced Sappho 31 as at once sublime and, like Petrarch’s Laura, superlatively beautiful: “It is certain that this ode, although incomplete [monca], is one of the most beautiful, not only by Sappho, but of all ancient lyrics.” 61 The ode is incomplete because of the truncated ending, but the word he used, monca, also denotes a person who is crippled, disfigured, or mutilated. Sappho’s fragment 31, like the female body it D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e   •   135

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describes, is discursively mutilated. When that beauty and fragmentation were read together through the Petrarchan poetics of self, so foundational to Italian conceptions of lyric subjectivity, fragment 31 became unquestionably “female.” Once gendered, the lyric’s “multitudes” could be unified, mastered, and domesticated through the Longinian sublime in the footnotes, while unified, mastered, and domesticated through Metastasian rationality on the page above. Now repackaged as a tool for creating subjects, Sappho was ready to inspire Italy’s maestri di cappella and, from there, to civilize Italian song. Men were not the only ones with something to learn from a brush with the Sapphic sublime. By giving voice to this domesticated Sappho, and singing de’ Rogati’s translations as chamber songs, the “fair sex” could learn to become subjects themselves.62

sappho in the salotto Several composers in the 1790s and beyond did set de’ Rogati’s texts as chamber songs, though never as widely as he hoped. Around the time that his translations appeared in print, the culture of salon, or salotto, sociability began to flourish in Italian cities, particularly those like Milan with growing bourgeois populations (although these salons arose much later, and were more oriented toward the middle class, than the aristocratic salons of pre-Revolutionary Paris). The salotto hosted a convergence of the public and the private spheres within which amateur and professional musicians performed alongside political and cultural discussions, poetry readings and improvisations, impromptu theatricals, and the like. This meant that there was a demand for musical works that fit the informal and semiprivate salotto setting by appealing to its highly literate and artistically discerning attendees.63 For most of the century, chamber singing in Italy had consisted primarily of reductions of opera arias and cantatas, but the emerging salotto repertoire of the late Settecento was comprised of simpler, smaller-scale works composed expressly for that space, typically scored for voice with keyboard, guitar, harp, or string quartet accompaniment.64 In this new repertoire, composers expanded beyond settings of Metastasio (though he was still well represented) and took as song texts various classics of Italian poetry, mainly excerpts from Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, in addition to translations and imitations of Anacreon and Sappho and various regional song types.65 De’ Rogati deemed the faux-popular regional songs “tasteless” and stressed instead the 136  •   D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e

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edificatory benefits of quality song texts like his own by striking a comparison between late Settecento salotti and archaic Greek symposia (see chapter 3). By welcoming classic Italian and classical Greek texts back into the lyric repertoire, composers of cantatas and chamber songs took up the contemporary project of rekindling Italy’s poetic past in order to push back against challenges from other European literary traditions. By the time of Rossini and Bellini, the genre of Italian chamber song reached new heights of popularity, with staggering numbers of song collections being printed in Italy and abroad. (There is even one called La lira sentimentale, The sentimental lyre, published by Girard in 1822.) But in the 1780s and 1790s most of these songs circulated in manuscript copies only, testifying to the essential role of salotto sociability in the transmission and preservation of the repertory in its early years. De’ Rogati’s Sappho translations presented something of a challenge for potential composers, the regulated versification notwithstanding, because the imagery and style did not easily lend themselves to the typical musical structures of salotto song. Musical settings for the song repertoire of this period consist of a “base” of an underlying mood, some variant of AB form, and sporadic touches of word painting to highlight particularly “picturesque” imagery in the poetry.66 Pieces in this genre were usually referred to as canzonettas or duetti notturni, even though the latter seemingly denotes a setting for two voices.67 Owing to the stylistic disjunct between even de’ Rogati’s Sappho and typical salotto song, most extant Sappho-themed musical works from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries used new texts that were merely about Sappho, dramatizing her suicide à la Imperiale and Verri instead of setting her poetry directly. There was at least one widely circulated musical setting of fragment 31, composed by Niccolò Zingarelli, which is worth considering at length for how it translates into music the multitudes of the Sapphic sublime. Zingarelli, maestro di cappella at Milan and Loreto, produced a great number of chamber songs and cantatas in the 1780s and 1790s in addition to his operatic output. Many of those small-scale chamber compositions remained in circulation in manuscript copies into the early decades of the nineteenth century.68 His setting of de’ Rogati’s “Contento al par de’ Numi” is included in an assortment of canzonettas labeled Odi di Saffo, all of which are scored for soprano and string quartet. Despite a lack of concrete information regarding its performance and composition history, Zingarelli’s “Contento al par de’ Numi” seems to have been rather popular given the number of manuscript copies that survive in song collections in repositories across Europe. The two D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e   •   137

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extant manuscript copies I have consulted both contain numerous lacunae and minor errors, such as missing accidentals and wrong notes, suggesting that they were made by nonprofessionals and circulated for recreational semiprivate use; this in turn indicates that the songs were performed in salotti rather than in public “concerts.” The string quartet accompaniment (as opposed to keyboard or harp) implies a larger gathering than a strictly private, domestic context, again indicating the salotto as the most likely venue. Zingarelli’s setting of Sappho 31 shares some elements with the song types of the salotto, but only as an exercise in composing out the contrasting passions and images of the Sapphic sublime while keeping them appropriate for amateur performance. The song is in ABA l form, which would only later, in Rossini’s time, replace AB form as the most common chamber song structure.69 Zingarelli’s setting also scales up the word painting characteristic of the 1780s–90s notturno, moving beyond little flourishes of birdsong and so forth in order to mirror on a structural level the sudden shifts between the multitudes of the Sapphic sublime. Essentially, Zingarelli set de’ Rogati’s translation as a series of episodes in which the texture, time signature, tempo marking, key, and declamation style change along with the mood of the text, yielding a through-composed song with multiple internal divisions. The different tempi in his setting function much like mini-movements of a cantata or multipart aria complex, similar to his approach in the cantata Scena del Tasso.70 Unlike that of Zingarelli’s cantatas and scenas, however, the vocal style of “Contento al par de’ Numi” remains accessible for an amateur. The vocal writing, along with the song’s brevity (a mere ninety measures), lie in tension with the episodic structure, blending together elements from the musical registers of public (opera) and semiprivate (salotto). The setting conjures the emotional immediacy and intensity associated with the Sapphic sublime through its rapid, sometimes bizarre shifts, but it ultimately contains them within what we might recognize as a frame of “candid simplicity.” The following analysis is uncharacteristically inchworm-like, but I include these measure-by-measure details to give a sense of the strangely fragmentary quality of Zingarelli’s musical setting. (See table 5 and example 5, which appears after the complete analysis). Initially the musical form matches the translator’s poetic form: the ode begins simply, in a pleasant andante 24 in F major, landing on a half cadence on the final tronco syllable of line 8 (mm. 1–20). De’ Rogati had reminded prospective composers to place cadences on every settenario tronco in order to properly serve the poetry, micromanager that he was.71 When the second ottava begins with “Al riso” (At [your] laugh) (line 9, m. 20), the 138  •   D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e

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meter changes to an andantino 68 , seemingly to evoke laughter. Zingarelli’s madrigalistic approach to the poetry is similarly evident from the staccati on “non osa palpitar” ([my heart] . . . does not dare to beat) (line 12, mm. 26–27). So far the mood of his music seems completely foreign to the turmoil of fragment 31. Yet although the sentimental music for the first two ottave does not fit the overall ethos of Sappho’s ode, it does support the specific text it sets. As we know from the previous discussion of de’ Rogati’s translation, there is a major turn coming, instigated by the speaker’s loss of voice. Zingarelli ensured that the significance of voice would be unmistakable: the first text to be repeated in the song is the final lines of the fourth stanza, “my chest does not provide / voice for speaking” (non somministra il petto / voce per favellar) (lines 15–16, mm. 33–40). The harmonic context surrounding “non somministra il petto,” particularly the appearance of the F sharps, teases a possible modulation and so adds weight to the phrase. Both times these two lines are sung Zingarelli draws attention harmonically and rhythmically to the word voce, giving the first syllable (vo-) the comparatively long value of a dotted quarter while setting it atop a piquant half-diminished seventh chord (mm. 34, 38). The vocal line leaps up from “petto” to “voce” across the enjambment, with no rest or break, as if to sound out the connection between chest and voice by making “petto” vocally and musically run into “voce.” A catch breath is possible there despite the lack of a notated rest, and doing so would dramatize the lack of breath provided by the “petto” for the “voce.” Either way, whether stealing a breath or carrying through the phrase, a performer’s sounding voice cannot help but draw attention to de’ Rogati’s staging of Sappho’s suffocated voice. Suddenly, in the next measure (m. 41) a jarring modulation signals the inward turn. With a chromatic half-step ascent in the cello, the quartet strikes a bright D major chord, immediately moving us from F major to G minor. The vocal part switches abruptly from cantabile singing to declaiming in quasi-recitative, in a maestoso 24 , at the text “Tenta la lingua invano” (My tongue tries in vain) (line 17, mm. 41–44). The lyric “I” has lost her voice and, now, her words; she begins to self-fragment, as indicated by the arresting change of key, time signature, tempo, and declamation style. Following on the heels of the inward turn and modulation, Sappho’s multitudes manifest as increased musical fragmentation, shorter vocal phrases, and more frequent chromaticism. After the accompanied-recitative style of “Tenta la lingua invano / d’articolar parola” (lines 17–18, mm. 41–44), there is a three-bar detour into a frantic allegretto, with sixteenth-note subdivisions in the accompaniment for “corre un ardore insano di vena in D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e   •   139

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table 5  Changing keys, time signatures, and tempi in Zingarelli’s “Contento al par de’ Numi” Line No. Original Italian

English Translation

Measures Key

1

As happy as the Gods

1–20

FM

2 4

Andante

20–40

FM

6 8

Andantino

41–44

Gm

2 4

Maestoso

45–47

Gm

2 4

Allegretto

47–68

Gm/FM

2 4

Andante

5

9

13

17

21

Contento al par de’ Numi Parmi colui, che siede

He seems to me, who sits Incontro a’ tuoi bei Across from your lumi beautiful eyes, Felice spettator; A lucky spectator; Che sparse le tue gote Who sees, now and then Talor d’un riso vede, A laugh emitted from your cheeks, Ch’ ode le dolci note Who hears sweet notes Dal labbro tuo talor. From your lips, sometimes. Al riso, a’ detti usati At your laugh, at [your] usual words, Il cor, che s’innamora, The heart that falls in love, Fra i spiriti agitati Amid agitated spirits, Non osa palpitar. Does not dare to beat. Veggo il tuo vago I see your lovely face aspetto E alle mie fauci allora And then to my mouth Non somministra My chest does not give il petto Voce per favellar. Voice for speaking. Tenta la lingua invano My tongue tries in vain D’articolar parola, To articulate words, Corre un ardore An insane heat runs insano Di vena in vena [al cor]. Through my veins to my heart. Un denso velo il A thick veil giorno Alle mie luci invola; Steals the day from my sight; Odo [un] confuso Around [me] I hear intorno, confusion, Ma non so qual rumor. But know not what sound.

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Time Signature Tempo

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25

Largo sudor m’inonda, I am bathed in copious sweat, Spesso tremor m’assale, Tremors assail me repeatedly, Al par d’arida fronda Like a desiccated leaf Comincio [a] impallidir: I begin to grow pale: 29 Sì nelle fredde membra In my cold limbs 69–73 Langue il calor vitale, Vital heat languishes, Che a me vicin Such that it seems to 74–90 rassembra me L’istante del morir. The moment of death is near.

(V pedal)

2 4

[Andante]

FM

2 4

[Andante]

vena” (an insane ardor runs through my veins) (lines 19–20, mm. 45–47). The tempo then resettles into andante while the accompaniment paints the ode’s “confusion” and “trembling” with agitated sixteenth-note figuration (mm. 55–58) and heart-throbbing syncopations (mm. 59–67). The song modulates back from G minor to F major at “largo sudor m’inonda” (line 25, m. 60), but the preponderance of chromatic half steps and diminished seventh chords exacerbate the tension despite the return to the home key. That tension reaches an almost unbearable level at the beginning of the poem’s final stanza, “Sì nelle fredde membra / langue il calor vitale” (In my cold limbs / vital heat languishes) (lines 29–30, mm. 69–72). Building energy struggles against stasis, with a dominant pedal in F major set to sixteenth- and thirty-second-note repetitions, verging on stile concitato, above a chromatically ascending cello line. As the vocal part approaches the final two lines of poetry, the climax of the piece seems as near as the speaker’s own death: “Ch’a me vicin rassembra / l’istante del morir” (It seems to me / the moment of death is near). But, before that final couplet can be uttered, the built-up tension dissipates unexpectedly with a half cadence in F major. We neatly pick up with music that echoes the opening for those last two lines (“It seems to me / the moment of death is near”), as though the intense, irrational inward turn never even happened. And in a way, it never did. The turn was utterly interior, experienced by the lyric “I” alone, neither heard nor felt by anyone else. Zingarelli likely set the song this way as a practical solution to a difficult text, bookending the fragmentation of the middle stanzas with pleasant simplicity in order to contain its unsettling effects. Like de’ Rogati, Zingarelli wrestled a multitudinous, viscerally imagistic fragment into a manageable D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e   •   141

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example 5.  Niccolò Zingarelli, “Contento al par de’ Numi,” complete song for voice and string quartet. Transcribed from the copy at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi, Milan (I-Mc), Mus.Tr.162.5. Minor corrections and additions appear in square brackets, but please note this is not intended as a critical or performing edition. Some of the poetry in this copy differs very slightly from de’ Rogati’s translation, but these inconsistencies are probably owed to copyist error. Andante

Voice

2 &b 4

∑

∑

° 2 œ. œ. Violin I & b 4 œ™œ œ™œ Bp 2 Violin II & b 4 œ™ œ™œ œ œ . œ. Bp Viola

Violoncello

B b 42 Œ

? 2Œ ¢ b4

œ

r r j j j & b œJ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

° b œJ & ‰

œ ‰ J

sie - de

˙

? j ¢ b œ ‰

œ ‰ J

j œ ‰

Peritz-The Lyric Myth of Voice.indd 142

r j j ‰ œ œ™ œ œ œ J J

Con - ten - to_al par de'

œ ‰ J

œ œ Œ J J Nu - mi œ œ ‰ J ‰ J

‰ œJ

œ œ ‰ J ‰ J

in - con -tro_a tuoi bei

œ œ ‰ J ‰ J ‰ œJ

‰ œJ

œ ‰ œ ‰ j‰ J J œ

j‰ œ

j œ

œœœ œœœ œœœ œœœ œ œ œ œ. œ. œ. ‰ œ ‰ œJ ‰ œJ ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ J J œ. œ. œ.

œ œ œ™j œr œ™j œr œj œj œ

j j ‰ œJ ‰ œJ ‰ œœ ‰ œœ ‰ J ‰ J œ œ œ œ œ œ B b œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ &b ‰ J

Œ

œ r œ. œ. œ. ≈ œ œ. œ. œ. œ œ œ œ ‰ ‰ J . œœœ . . . œ r œ. œ. œ. ≈ œ œ. œ. œ. œ œ œ œ. ‰ ‰ J . . .

œ. œ. œ. œ . p .œ . .œ . r œ œ. œ. œ. ≈ œ œ œ. œ. p

7

par - mi co - lui, che

∑

lu - mi

œ œ œ™j œr œj œj œ œ œ

fe - li - ce spet - ta - tor;

œ œ œ ™ œ œj œ œ œ œ ‰ œJ ‰ ‰ œJ ‰ œJ œ™ œ œj œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ ˙ æ j ‰ j ‰ ˙æ œ œ

œ œ

‰ œJ

Chè

œœœœœœœ œœœœœœœ Œ Œ

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example 5.  (continued) j j j œ œ œ œ œ œj œj œj Œ & b œ œ œR œ œ œR œœ œ ‰ œJ œ™ J R

œ œ œ œ œ Jœ™ œ œ nœjœj œ J RR

13

spar - se le

tue go - te

≈

° b & ˙ &b

œ

œ

? œ ¢ b

œ

≈

œ œ B b œ œ œ œ œ œ æ˙

tal - or

d'un ri - so

ve - de,

œ œœœœ œœœœ ‰ œ œ œ ‰ œ J œœœœ œœœœ

˙ æ

U j j œ œr œ j 6 & b œ œ J œnœ œ ‰ œbœ 8 œ œ œ œ œ œ Andantino

Al

U ° b œ œB œr œ œnœ œ ‰ œbœ & œ œ œ U & b œ œ œ œr œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ

¢

?b œ œ

∑

œœ

U œ Œ

j œŒ

ri -so,_a' det - ti_u - sa - ti

6 œ œj œ œ 8 œ œ

6 Ϫ 8

Ϫ

j . . j j . & b œ œ œ. œ œ œJ œ œJ œ œ. œ œJ œ. œ. œ ™ spir - ti a - gi - ta - ti non o - sa pal - pi - tar.

j œ ‰

œ ‰ œ ‰ J J

cor, che s'in - na - mo - ra, fra_i

j j œ œ œ œ œ œ œ™

Ϫ

Ϫ

Ϫ

Ϊ

j j j j œ œ œJ œ œ œ œ

Veg -go_il tuo

Ϫ

Ϫ

j œ

œ. œ J

j œ. œ œ™

œ œJ

j œ œ ‰ ‰ œJ

va - go_a - spet - to

. j . œ. œ. œ œ œ œ. œ. j . . j ‰ œ. œ œ œ. œ. œœ‰ œœ J . j . j œ. œ. œ œ œ œ. œ. j j ‰ ‰ œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œœ œœ ˙™ Bb ∑ œ œJ œ œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. ∑ J J J . ? œ œ œJ œ œ œ. œ œj œ œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ ‰ œ ‰ œ™ œ™ J J J J ¢ b

Peritz-The Lyric Myth of Voice.indd 143

‰ œj ‰ œj œ œœœ œœœ œ œ

œ œ œJ œ œ œJ œ œJ œ œj J il

j œœ

dal

j j ‰ œ ‰ œ

6 8 œ œj œ œ œ œ j j j œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ™ œ œ 6 ∑ 8 œœ œœ ˙™ œ™

25

° b œ œ. œ œ. œ œ œ & J J J j j & b œ œ œ. œ œ œ. œ ™ œ

no - te

‰ œJ

j œ œœœ œ ‰

˙ æ

lab- bro tuo tal - or.

dol - ci

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ ‰ œj ‰ œj œ œ œ œ œ œ ∑ ∑ œ œ œœ

19

Bb B ˙

ch'o - de le

j œ

e_al-

œ œ œ. œ œ J œ œ œ. œ œ J œ™ œ œ J œ™

Ϫ

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example 5.  (continued) 31

j œ & b œ œ™ J œœ

j j œ œœ

le mi - e fau - ci_al - lo

œŒ J

° b &

œj

œ™ œ œ œ

œ J

œj

- ra

œ

œœ J

œ œ œj œ #œj œj œ œj œ ™ J

j œ œ œ œ œ œj œ™ . .

œ œ œ œ #œ J J J

œ œ œ. œ œ œ. œ œ œ œ œ œ J J

non som - min- i -stra_il pet - to vo - ce œj

Ϫ

Ϫ

j j j j ™ & b œ™ œ œ œ œ œ œ œJ œ œJ œ˙™ œ œ œ œœ™™ œ œ œ Bf Bp œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙™ œ™ œ ™ œ B b bœ f

p

Bf

Bp œ

j œ

¢

?b

Ϫ

Ϫ

Ϫ

Ϫ

Ϫ

Bf

j j œ™ j & b œœ œ œ #œj œ œ

37

som - min - i -stra_il pet - to vo -

j j & b œ œ œ œj œ #œj œ ™ B b œ bœJ œ B œJ B œ™

Ϫ

f

B

U™ œ œ œ. œ œ œj Œ œ™ J .

ce

f

nœ ™

œ

Bf ? b œ œj j ™ œ œ œ nœ ™ ¢ Bf

œ

j r j r j j & b #œ ™ œ œ™ œ œ œ Œ

43

ti - co - lar pa - ro - la,

? œ‰ œ‰ ¢ b J J

Peritz-The Lyric Myth of Voice.indd 144

œ. œ J j œ. œ

U™ Œ U™ Œ

U œ. œ ™ Œ ™ J j ™ U œ. œ Œ ™

Ϫ

Bp

per fa - vel - lar

œ. œ œ J œ. œ J j œ. œ

j ™ œ. œ

Kr ™ 2 4 œj #œr™ œ œJ œR

Ϫ

Maestoso

j œ

œ œ ‰ œJ J J

Ten - ta la lin -gua_in - va - no

2 4˙ ˙ 2 4 ˙ ˙

‰

2 4 #˙

˙ æ

2 4 #˙˙

‰

d'ar-

œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ

‰ œœœ ‰ œœœ

U r œ œ œr œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œj ‰ œJ œJ œ œ œ J J J Andante

cor -re_un in - sa - no ar - do - re di ve - na in ve - na. Un den - so ve -lo_il

œ œU ‰‰ œ œ U ‰ œ œ œ œ œ ‰‰ œœ œœ œœ . œ. œ. œ. . œ. œ. œ. . œ. œ. œ. . œ. œ. œ. œ œ U Œ ‰‰ ∑ ∑ ˙˙ æ ˙

non

j œ. œ œ œ œ œ œ œœœœ œ. œ œ J

Allegretto

° b ˙æ & ‰ œœj ‰ œœj ‰ œ œ œ ˙ œœœ B b #˙˙

per fa - vel - lar.

œ œ œ. œ œ œ. ™ J J œœœ™™ œ œ œ. œ œ œ. œ ™ J J œ™

Ϫ

j j ° œ œ œJ œ œ #œ œ™ b J &

& b ‰ œj ‰ œj œ œ

Ϫ

Ϫ

‰ ‰ œJ

˙æ ˙

œ. œ. . œ. œ. œ. . œ. œ. œ. . œ. œ. œ. . œ. œ œ U œ œ œ œ œ‰ ‰

œ œ ‰ J ‰ J œ œ ‰ J ‰ J

œœœœœœœœ œ ‰ œ ‰ J J

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example 5.  (continued)

j j j bœ j j j œ & b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ #œj œ œ ‰ J

49

gior - no al - le mi - e lu -ci_in - vo - la

un

œ œ #œ œ œ ‰ ‰

œ œ ° &b ‰ J ‰ J

‰

? bœ œ ¢ b J ‰ J ‰

œ œ œ œ ˙æ

œ œ œ œ J J J J

den - so ve -lo_il

œ œ ‰ J ‰ J

œ œ œj œj œj œbœ œj #œj gior - no al - le mi - e lu -ci_in-

œ œ ‰ J ‰ J

‰

œ œ #œ

œ œ & b ‰ œJ ‰ œJ ‰ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ ‰ ‰ J ‰ J ‰ œJ ‰ œJ ‰ œ œ œ : b;œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ :b;œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ bœ œ œ œ bœ œ œ œ œ œ b œ œ b œ œ œ œ œ Bb

j j &b œ œ Œ

55

œ œ œ œ œ J R R J J

vo - la;

œ ‰ œ ‰ bœ ‰ œ ‰ J J J J œ œ ‰ œ J J J

o - do_un con - fu -so_in - tor - no,

° b œ & J œ œ œ

æ ˙

ma

æ ˙

j Ϫ non

œ œ œ œ

r ™ œ œJ #œr œ so qual

Œ

ru - mor.

≈ r≈ r≈ r≈ r œ œ œ œ

æ ˙

≈ r≈ r≈ r≈ r æ æ œ. œ. œ œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. ˙ œ œœœœœœœ ˙ œ œ œ œ . œ œ œ œ B b #œ œ œ œ œ œ#œ œ œ œ œ œ œ#œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ#œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ∑ ? œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. #œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. #œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙ æ ¢ b &b

60

& b œJ

œ œ œ™ R R J

Lar - go su - dor

œ œ œr œj œj Œ

m'in - on - da,

° & b ≈ œr ≈ œr ≈ œr ≈ œr &b ≈ r ≈ r ≈ r ≈ r œ œ œ œ Bb

∑

? r r r r ¢ b œ≈œ≈ œ≈œ≈

Peritz-The Lyric Myth of Voice.indd 145

œ J

œ œ œ™ R R J

spes - so tre - mor

œ œ œjœj œj ‰ m'as - sa - le,

œ J

al

≈ œr ≈ œr ≈ œr ≈ œr ≈ œr ≈ œr ≈ œr ≈ œr

≈ œr ≈ œr ≈ œr ≈ œr

≈ r≈ œ ≈œ≈ R

r≈ r≈ r ≈ r≈ r ≈ r≈ r œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

≈ r≈ r≈ r≈ r œ œ œ œ

r r r r œ ≈ œ ≈ œ ≈ œ ≈ œr ≈ œr ≈ œr ≈ œr ≈

r r r r œ≈œ≈œ≈œ≈

œ≈œ≈œ ≈œ≈œ ≈œ≈œ R R R R R R R

≈œ≈œ≈œ≈œ R R R R

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example 5.  (continued) 64

&b œ par

j œ

j œ œr #œr œj œj œ

d'a - ri - da

œ œ ‰ j ‰ œj ‰ j ‰ J J #œ œ . nœ.

fron - da

co - min - cio_im - pal - li

-

Œ

dir:

œ r Kr j j J œ™ œ œ œ

Sì nel - le fred - de

° b j j j & ≈#œr ≈ œr ≈ œr ≈ œr ‰ œ ‰ œJ ‰ œJ ‰ #œj ‰ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙æ & b ≈bœr ≈ œr ≈ œr ≈ œr ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ bœj ‰ œj ‰ œj œ œ œ œ œ œœœœœœœ œ œ j ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ œ ‰ œ Bb ∑ ∑ œ œ J B J œœ œœ œœ ? r r r r ¢ b œ ≈œ≈œ≈œ ≈

æ j j j j j j œ ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ nœ ‰ ˙

B fp æ ˙ fp

æ ˙˙

B fp æ ˙ B fp

U j r r j j j K œ & b bœj œj Œ nœj œr™ œr œj œj œj œj Œ bœ œ œ œ™ œr œj œ œj œj œ œj œ œJ

70

mem - bra

° b æ & b˙æ fp

& b ˙ææ B fp B b b˙˙ææ B fp ? b ˙æ ¢ fp

lan -gue_il ca - lor vi - ta - le

æ ˙æ

æ n˙æ fp

fp

æ ˙æ

æ b ˙æ

fp

B fpæ b˙˙æ

B

æ ˙˙æ

fp

æ ˙

fp

Peritz-The Lyric Myth of Voice.indd 146

fp

b˙ æ

B fp

lan -gue_il ca - lor

j ‰ bœ ‰ œj nœ œ

vi - ta - le, ch'a me vi - cin ras - sem - bra

U ‰ œj œ ™ œ™ U ‰ j nœ œ ™

bœ œ œ œ œ U™ œ œ

nœ ‰ J

œ ‰ J

U Ϫ

œœ l'i -

‰ œœj ‰ œœj ‰ fp

œj œ œ fp

œœ

‰

j‰ j‰ œ œ

j œ œ

œœ

. . ‰ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ. œ. œ œ. œ. œ. œ œ. ‰ œJ ‰ œJ ‰

æ ˙

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example 5.  (continued)

j r j r & b œ™ œ œ ™ œ œ

77

stan - te del

‰

mo - rir

j ° b j & ‰ œ ‰ œ

j j j œj œ œj œ œ œ J œ

ch'a

me vi - cin ras - sem - bra

‰ œ œ ‰ œ œ

j j œœ ‰ œœ ‰

˙ æ

œ ‰ œ ‰ J J

j œ œ œ

œ œ œ™j œr œj™ œr œ l'i - stan - te del

‰œ J

mo - rir

œ œ ‰ œj ‰ œj

l'i-

œœœœ

j œ œ ‰ œj ‰ œj œ & b ‰ œ ‰ œj ‰ œ œ ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ œj œ œ œ œœœ œœ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ Bb œ œ œ œœ œœœ œ œœ œœœ œ œ œ œœœ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ

? j ‰ ¢ b œ

j œ ‰

83

‰ œ œj™ œr œj™ œr œ Œ & b œj™ œr œj™ r J œ œ stan - te del mo - rir l'i - stan - te del mo - rir.

° &b ˙

‰

&b

‰

˙

Bb ˙ ˙

? ¢ b ˙

œ œ œ ˙˙

œ Œ œ

œœœ ˙

œ

‰ œœœ ˙ ˙ ‰ œœœ ˙

Peritz-The Lyric Myth of Voice.indd 147

Œ

œ Œ œ Œ

j œ ‰

æ ˙ ∑

∑

j œ ‰ ∑

˙ æ

∑

. œ™œ œ™œ œ. œ œ œ œ ≈ œr œ. œ. œ œ œ œ œ ‰ . . . . . œœœ œ™œ œ™œ œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. ≈ œr œ. œ. œ. œ‰ œ. œ œ œ œ. œ. œ. ≈ œ œ œ œ Œ ‰ R . . . œ. œ œ œ œ. œ. œ œ œ ≈ œr œ. œ. œ ‰ Œ . . . . œ. œ œ œ

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form. The result is something quasi-operatic in aspiration but domestic, trite even, in vocal style and scale. As a chamber song, “Contento” domesticated the operatic for amateur performance, contained violent multitudes within the salotto, and, intentionally or not, trivialized the female sublime into a sentimental trifle. In Zingarelli’s song setting, as in all of these Sappho reworkings, there was a process of domination just under the surface. Taken together, these Sappho revisions seem to be another wave of patronizing texts in which male authors and scholars simplified difficult concepts “for the ladies,” using them as a smokescreen for pushing controversial cultural agendas. (The best-known example of this might be Il newtonianesimo per le dame, Newtonianism for the ladies, written by Francesco Algarotti of Saggio sopra l’opera in musica fame in 1737.)72 De’ Rogati certainly gestured toward this “for the ladies” subgenre in the preface to his Sappho and Anacreon translations. He complained that women sang dreadfully tasteless songs in salotto performances, not knowing what real, quality poetry was because they could not read Greek. The “fair sex” needed his translations, he explained, since women were “less likely to benefit on their own from the help of [Greek lyric poetry] because they are lacking in learned language.”73 But his Metastasian mediations of Greek lyric, set as chamber songs, could educate the women who sang and heard them into developing better taste. The Sapphic sublime—once contained, interpreted, and domesticated—provided a tool for simultaneously policing women’s subjectivities and civilizing Italian song.

my song could not make him love me Thanks to the popularity of Verri’s and Imperiale’s texts, the Sappho known to late Settecento readers was a tragic, lovelorn suicide, a kind of Orpheusinflected Dido. Still, writing Sappho’s suicide as a faux history was one thing, and dramatizing it on the operatic stage was quite another. The early 1790s had seen a flood of “death” operas in Venice, beginning with 1788’s La morte di Cesare (Sertor/Bianchi) and followed by La morte d’Ercole (Pepoli’s libretto for Marchesi, never staged), La morte di Semiramide, La morte di Cleopatra, and a pasticcio production of Metastasio’s Didone abbandonata for the famous singing actress Luigia Todi (on which more in chapter 5).74 As women who unapologetically exercised political power, Didone, Cleopatra, and Semiramide all ended up dead. Yet Saffo, now reimagined by Verri and 148  •   D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e

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Imperiale as a sentimental epistolary novel heroine, and by de’ Rogati as a tool for creating male subjects, could still be domesticated and saved. This is why the one Sappho opera to have been produced in 1790s Italy proceeds ineluctably toward the poet’s climactic suicide, only to evade it with an unexpected and unsatisfying lieto fine. Saffo, ossia I riti di Apollo Leucadio (Sappho, or The rites of Leucadian Apollo), composed by Simone Mayr on a libretto by Antonio Sografi, premiered at La Fenice for Carnival in 1794. It featured the “majestic” soprano Marianna Vinci in the title role, tenor Matteo Babbini as her admirer Alceo, and soprano castrato Girolamo Crescentini—who had played the titular heroine in Morandi’s 1788 Comala—as Faone.75 The opera’s reception was lukewarm. The Gazzetta urbana veneta published a conspicuously brief review, mentioning only the overture, one or two unspecified numbers, and the production design (“the rest is not praiseworthy”).76 It was Mayr’s first major Italian opera, but Sografi had recently authored the successful La morte di Semiramide and La morte di Cleopatra, both of which premiered in 1791. Perhaps because there was no “morte” for the eponymous prima donna, Saffo ended up in the dustbin of operatic history. The opera revolves around Saffo, Alceo, and Faone, all of whom converge at the Apollonian temple in hopes of freeing themselves from unrequited love (Saffo for Faone, Alceo for Saffo, and Faone, disturbingly, for his dead wife). They await the prophecy of the High Priestess, who will tell them whether jumping off the cliffs will drown them or purge their suffering. Saffo is committed to taking the leap, even after the Priestess tells her she will die doing so. After much ceremonial ado, Saffo resolves with the marriage of the primary (soprano-castrato) couple: Alceo turns his unreciprocated feelings to a noble end and convinces Faone to marry Saffo, whom Faone does not love, in order to prevent her suicide. For both men duty overrules desire, reaffirming opera seria’s code of honor while proposing to reward selfsacrificing women with conjugal domesticity. This uncomfortable lieto fine goes more smoothly because the opera minimizes its heroine’s expressivevocal agency, in stark contrast to a Parisian Sapho produced eight months later that, as Sin Yan Hedy Law has shown, experimented with envoicing the female citizen.77 That said, the simple expediencies of opera production may account for the disappointing portrayal of Saffo as a typical seria prima donna. The other opera given at La Fenice that season was a repeat of Paisiello’s I giuochi d’Agrigento, and the same singers appeared in both Saffo and Giuochi. In terms of both vocal writing and character type, then, all D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e   •   149

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three of the main roles in Saffo are essentially copies of the castrato, soprano, and tenor roles in Giuochi. For an example of how Saffo’s sublime poetic voice disappears into her sentimentalized persona, consider the only scene that might be taken to represent song-as-song (2.2). Here she sings to her entourage while preparing to enter into the Priestess’s cave, and amid infernal low brass flourishes she declares her intention in recitative: “let the sea be my grave” (siami sepolcro il mar). The cavatina that follows is a love ode, but not to Faone: Soave, dolce, cara è la morte quando ella è termine d’un rio dolor. Voi che provate l’istessa sorte ditelo, amanti, nel vostro cor.

Gentle, sweet, and dear is death when it is the end of harsh sorrow. You who feel the same fate in your hearts, tell me, lovers.

The aria bears all the signatures of song-as-song in Orphic style: plucked, repetitive string arpeggios; collective address to the listeners, asking for a sympathetic response; stepwise motion and dotted rhythms in the vocal line, sprinkled with small leaps and brief melismas to intensify moments of repetition. Yet there is nothing in the libretto designating the cavatina as a “performance,” it has no effect on the plot, and it is wholly unremarked-upon by the onstage listeners. There are no dramatic stakes, and hence no potential for Orphic agency in Saffo’s song. The cavatina was an occasion for Vinci to show off her pianissimo singing and tug at a few heartstrings, confirming Saffo as the pitiful, sentimental heroine who deserves a happy ending. Saffo finally unleashes her vocal power when delivering her culminating aria (2.7), but it is entirely other to the kind of vocal power displayed by Orfeo in representations of his lyric song. In the obbligato recitative leading into this second aria, Saffo rejects her own poetic voice because it has failed to move Faone: “il canto mio / nol potè innamorar” (my song / could not make him love me). For that reason her last song takes a different register from the sentimental one in “Soave, dolce, cara” by privileging above all the astonishing sounds of the prima donna’s voice. The aria “Pallida morte” marks the last time Saffo sings in the opera (aside from a few throwaway lines in the choral finale a whole five scenes later), yet there is no fanfare about it being her “last song.” The audience was not meant to hear it as “song,” for to do so would have meant recognizing Saffo’s poetic (or poietic) voice in it. Instead, the voice here is all bodily sound. The vocal line is pure opera seria, with an expansive tessitura and thrilling leaps. The horns, consistently present within 150  •   D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e

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the woodwind-heavy texture, underscore her seria heroism amidst the contrapuntal interplay of swirling upper strings and ground bass–like cellos. “Pallida morte” invites listeners to luxuriate in the soprano’s vocal majesty. In apostrophizing death with bravura, rather than with the sentimentality of “Soave, dolce, cara,” Saffo renounces her failed song of sensibility: Pallida morte, vieni: guidami al varco estremo; non palpito, non tremo; sull’orme tue verrò. Amor, rossore, sdegno . . . vendetta . . . Affanno e speme, a contrastar insieme mai più vi sentirò. Tra l’ombre delle amanti, delle letizia in seno, splender per me sereno, un astro alfin vedrò!

Pale death, come: guide me to the final crossing; I do not shake, I do not tremble; I will follow your footsteps. Love, shame, scorn . . . revenge . . . Grief and hope, struggling together, I will never again feel. Among the shades of lovers, in the bosom of joy, I will finally see a calm star shining for me!

Sografi had clearly read Sappho’s poetry in some form or another, probably in Verri’s novel and de’ Rogati’s translations. Although highly conventional in form (note the quatrains of settenari), Sografi’s text makes reference to the “shaking” and “trembling” familiar from fragment 31. Furthermore, by enumerating the various emotions “struggling together,” and setting them off with ellipses, it gestures to fragment 31’s multitudes. Yet notably absent from this, as from all of Saffo’s solos, is the musical fragmentation that might have implied Saffo’s poetic-lyric authenticity as the author of her own words. In “Pallida morte,” Saffo verbally casts off the markers of the Sapphic sublime without ever having performed them during the rest of the opera. The figure of the female author was not yet written into the score for the operatic stage, but sublimated into the sheer sensuality of the prima donna’s voice.78 Faone, however, is introduced as an Orphic figure from the very start, underlined by Crescentini’s taking on the role alongside that of Clearco in Giuochi, which had originally been composed for Orphic castrato Pacchierotti (see chapter 2). Amplifying the Orphic resonances, Faone declares in his first vocal appearance that he seeks to challenge the Furies and reclaim his dead wife from Hades (1.8). Faone expresses himself in Orphic

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fragments and effusions, most notably in his dream scene at the dramatic climax of the opera (2.9–10). The opera thus presents Faone as the heir to Orfeo, while it merely uses Saffo to teach him to let go of his wife’s ghost. These characterizations facilitate the opera’s corrective to the tragic ending of Verri’s novel: Saffo and Faone domesticate one another.79 She is not a Cleopatra or Didone but an Euridice, rescued from the clutches of death by Alceo’s tenor ex machina intervention. The purpose of her attempted selfdestruction is to lead Faone to his own patriarchy-approved self-mastery— solidifying the true narrative of the opera as that of Faone’s Orphic struggle to accept loss and banish spectral voices. Saffo is not about Sappho, then, but a male-centric drama of resistant mourning. Faone performs contemporary writers’ melancholic obsession with the loss of the “real” Sappho’s corpus, a melancholy that can ultimately be cured through some kind of domestication. And yet the Sapphic sublime is not entirely effaced in Saffo: it menaces the protagonists as a nightmare of female voice endowed with unwarranted authority. Mayr and Sografi dramatized this via the mastermind of the titular rites of Leucadian Apollo, the figure of the High Priestess or “Pythia.” In a cave beneath the temple, filled with the tombs of unsuccessful supplicants, the Pythia is possessed by divine inspiration and becomes an oracle (2.4). Prophesying the fates of Saffo, Alceo, and Faone, the Pythia appears to the horror-struck onlookers as “throbbing . . . agitated . . . trembling . . .” and “covered by a deathly pallor” (ellipses in original). As we have seen, these physical symptoms were associated with the erotic lovesickness of Sappho 31 as a spectacle of sublime fragmentation. More generally, in the late Settecento they also connoted the “hysterical effects” of female desire run wild—effects that were typically blamed on girls’ reading too many romance novels.80 Even the figure of the oracle itself had gendered undertones, representing a certain type of female poiesis (or lack thereof), as in Abbate’s discussion of the oracles at Delphi as “instruments.”81 Giuli has shown how improvvisatrici like Corilla Olimpica were often portrayed as modern-day oracles or sibyls as a rhetorical move that stripped accomplished women of poetic agency by casting them as mere vessels and voices through which otherworldly inspiration flowed.82 In Saffo, to listen to such a voice, to follow its commands instead of those of a male authority figure, is nothing short of fatal. Sublimity, inspiration, and unauthorized verbal agency twist together into what Alceo calls a “voice [. . .] from hell,” promising death through an uncontrollable, grotesquely suffering female body.83 152  •   D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e

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that little strophe by sappho By choosing domesticity and unity over self-fragmentation, Saffo and Faone together nullify the Pythia’s sublime voice and rewrite Verri’s tragic history. The history that really needed rewriting was not Sappho’s, however, but Italy’s. Indeed, haunting all this talk about unifying fragments was the notion that Italy, dismembered by foreign powers, could be brought together culturally and politically—could be domesticated and civilized—if a proper narrative of its history were cobbled together with archaeology and then pronounced far and wide through literature and music. Of course it was political, the drive to unify and domesticate Sappho’s scattered female corpus—for was that not what Italy “herself” had long since become? Italian poets had been apostrophizing the Italian peninsula as a mutilated or degraded female body since at least the Trecento, as Margaret Brose and Joseph Luzzi have eloquently shown in their respective studies on the trope.84 For a foundational example, take Petrarch’s melancholic “Italia mia” (Rime sparse 128), in which he addresses Italy as a “benevolent and merciful mother” with “mortal wounds” marring her “beautiful body.”85 Some five hundred years after Petrarch, Italy was still imaginatively mapped onto that beautiful female body. In 1810, for example, the neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova designed poet Vittorio Alfieri’s tomb for Santa Croce in Florence as a marble rendering of a young woman in classical draped garments; this lamenting female figure is commonly interpreted as symbolizing an Italy unified in mourning. Not long before Canova designed Alfieri’s sepulchre, Ugo Foscolo imagined a fragmented Italy singing Sappho’s poetry through the body of a maltreated young woman. Foscolo is best known as the author of the epistolary novel Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The last letters of Jacopo Ortis; 1798/1802), though we met him in this book’s introduction as the defender of Italian allegory. Foscolo wrote his epistolary novel in the first-person voice of a male, rather than female, narrator; it is perhaps no coincidence that many regard Ortis, with its male narrator, as the first “true” Italian novel. Born to a Greek mother and Italian father on the Ionian island of Zante (Zakynthos, then part of the Venetian Republic), and bilingual in his mother’s and father’s tongues, Foscolo saw in himself a convergence of the Romanic and Hellenic. He moved from Zante to Venice proper in 1792, where he began to hope that Italy might gain a national consciousness. He even published an ode honoring Napoleon as the “liberator” of Italy after fighting under him against the D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e   •   153

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Habsburgs. But Napoleon handed off the Veneto to those same Habsburgs in 1797, sounding the final death knell of the thousand-year Venetian Republic and betraying Foscolo’s faith in both Italy and her liberator. The quasi-fictional, quasi-autobiographical Ortis begins in the aftermath of Napoleon’s political mutilation of northern Italy. The novel tells the story of the young patriot Jacopo Ortis, exiled from Venice after Napoleon’s betrayal, who falls in love with Teresa, a woman forced by her father to wed a man she does not love. Ortis and Teresa have both been left motherless by the actions of bad father figures: thanks to Napoleon, Ortis must abandon his mother in order to flee the Habsburgs’ proscription, and Teresa’s mother has been cast out by her father for refusing to enforce their daughter’s unhappy betrothal. Teresa is controlled first by her father and then by her new husband, much as Italy was handed off from France to Austria. At the end, Ortis, bereft of his beloved and his homeland, stabs himself to death. The novel blurs beloved and homeland, personal and political; Teresa’s beautiful but suffering female body operates as the symbolic double to Ortis’s idealized Italian nation.86 It is not only suffering bodies that evoke Italy in Ortis, but spectral voices, too. Voice is a central metaphor across Foscolo’s writings, though it is much less noted in scholarship than is that of tombs. Yet voice and tombs work together: Foscolo repeatedly wrote of Italy as the nexus of memory, place, and lyric song, taking up the longstanding lyric-geographic memory of Italy (see chapter 3 of this book). In Ortis the connection is established immediately by an epigram, for which Foscolo translated into Latin a quote from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751). Foscolo’s epigram maps the vocal onto the sepulchral in a way that undergirds his entire novel: “Even from the tomb, the voice of nature cries.” And sure enough, Ortis’s letters are haunted by unseen voices, resonating from sites of memory as aural reminders of the ephemerality of bodies. He listens to the harvest and planting songs of peasant girls in the countryside, picturing his bones one day lying beneath their feet. At Petrarch’s long-abandoned house in Arquà, Ortis imagines the sound of the poet’s “heavenly songs [. . .] still resonating” in “the home of that sacred Italian,” now a ruin covered by rambling foliage.87 He hears the singing of a country girl and lies facedown next to a churchyard cemetery, his “heart [. . .] aspiring to a place much more sublime than earth.”88 In all of these moments, real or imagined voices remind Ortis of his own mortality by marking sites of memory, current (Arquà) and future (his grassy tomb, the churchyard). 154  •   D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e

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Foscolo’s novel depends on these tensions between sight and sound, presence and absence, body and text. The epistolary form articulates those tensions by evoking immediacy, authenticity, and vocality from the printed page. In Foscolo’s hands epistolary form was no longer the experimental domain for men writing women’s interiority, but a medium through which male authors could narrativize their own fragmentation into subjectivity. Ortis is presented as a series of letters written by the protagonist to his friend Lorenzo, who serves as editor and mediator. The letters are deeply confessional in nature and composed in the “writing to the moment” style, by way of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Richardson’s aforementioned Pamela, and the Italian Sappho texts already mentioned. Significantly, several of Ortis’s letters are fragmentary, apparently missing chunks of text (or so “Lorenzo the editor” tells us). In order to fill in the narrative lacunae generated by the epistolary conceit, Lorenzo includes an epilogue after Ortis’s final letter, describing the discovery of the protagonist’s suicide. Lorenzo also introduces the letters by calling their publication a “monument” to stand in for Ortis’s nonexistent “tomb.”89 Foscolo’s framing devices are strikingly similar to Imperiale’s for Sappho’s confessional fragments, especially in how both authors substituted fragmentary texts for missing bodies and drew attention to the vocality of those texts as warrants of their authenticity. Foscolo did the latter in part by making the sounds of the voice reveal what sight cannot. Early on, Ortis writes of how Teresa, overcome by the “sublimity” of nature, speaks to him in a voice he describes as “suffocated.” Her vocal timbre expresses in sound the “sincere joy [. . .] coming from her heart,” despite the “sweet melancholy” on her face.90 Her face is a beautiful but incomplete text, while her sounding voice manifests what is hidden within her sensitive body. For Foscolo, reading text as words on a page, rather than listening for the voice behind it, was to miss something essential. In an essay appended first to the 1814 London edition, and then to the 1816 Zurich edition of Ortis, he explained, “One never reads it [Ortis]; one always hears it; nor does one hear the reader or the narrator, but rather a young man who speaks impetuously, and lets one discern the various colors of his voice and changes of his countenance.” 91 Reading Ortis’s body (his “countenance”) became possible by also hearing his speech, and, only then, by hearing it in Ortis’s voice instead of Foscolo’s. The mediator had to dissolve into his subject’s voice to prove it as authentic, as opposed to Verri, Imperiale, and de’ Rogati, whose mediating authorial presence was precisely the thing that D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e   •   155

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“authenticated” their Sapphos’ voices. As with Sappho’s lyrics, the true form of Ortis was intended to appear as vocal, not textual; in place of a lost voice and absent body, a fragmented text would suffice so long as it contained the traces of voice. By adopting and adapting this Sapphic premise, Ortis’s epistolary voice enabled a confessional archaeology of the markedly male subject, like a modern Petrarch knitting together his own narrative of self from scattered rhymes. And so the voice that haunts Ortis, more than any other, is Sappho’s. Ortis falls in love with Teresa when he overhears her playing the harp and singing “that little strophe by Sappho, translated by me with the other two odes; the sole remains of the poetry of that amorous girl, as immortal as the muses.” After hearing Teresa sing the ode, Ortis flings himself on her harp, weeping, “no longer feeling the weight of this mortal life.” 92 Now resonant with intimations of immortality, Sappho’s ode remains with him as a poor substitute for Teresa’s absent body and voice: “Oh, that little song of Sappho’s! I hum it when writing, walking, reading: I did not rave like this, o Teresa, before I was prevented from seeing you and hearing you.” 93 In a later letter Ortis recounts how he recited Sappho’s odes aloud while sitting with Teresa under a tree, leading to their first kiss and mutual confessions of forbidden love.94 Whether heard through Teresa’s singing, Ortis’s Italian translations, or merely in his own head, Sappho’s voice offers Ortis freedom from “the weight of this mortal life” by portending his eventual suicide. Like Sappho, Ortis becomes a subject by scattering himself into confessional fragments—fragments that are eventually narrativized into the complete story of his selfhood. Sappho thus functioned for Foscolo not only as a metonym for lyric poetry, but also as an allegory for his utopian homeland, with her fragmentary corpus another feminine double for a fragmentary Italy.95 He identified his birthplace of Zante, a mere sixty miles from Sappho’s Leucas in the Ionian Sea, by referring to the strains of Sappho’s song: “I had as my cradle that sea / where there was the naked spirit / of Phaon’s girl, / and if the nighttime breeze / blows mildly over the waves, / the shores resound with the lamenting of the lyre.” 96 Sappho herself is nameless (“Phaon’s girl”) and disembodied (a “naked spirit”), yet as the sound that enveloped Foscolo’s “cradle,” her lament was his lullaby. Sappho’s lamenting lullaby was implicit, perhaps, when Foscolo apostrophized Zante as “my motherland” (o materna mia terra) and offered it his song in lieu of his exiled body (“Tu non altro che il canto avrai del figlio”).97 Sapphic song and the maternal lullaby flowed into one another, making an exiled body present and a fragmented self whole. 156  •   D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e

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I will return to Foscolo’s (re)writing of history through voice at the end of the next chapter. First, we have go back to the winter of 1790, when myths of Sappho’s sublime song and fantasies of the maternal lullaby intertwined to shape the reception of one woman’s voice. For, although these two paradigms of female song were not yet written into music, they were already being imagined as inflecting the very real sounds of women’s singing voices.

D om e s t ic at i ng t h e T e n t h M us e   •   157

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five

Sublime Suffering and the Good Mother

the todi year In 1791 the Venetian theater critic Innocenzo Della Lena described the most enthusiastic audience he had ever seen at a serious opera: “Neither when [. . .] Guadagni played Orfeo, nor when Pacchierotti himself played Orfeo” had he heard “so much applause.”1 What singer could have superseded the famous castrati of sensibility? Her name was Luigia (Luíza) Rosa de Aguiar Todi, and the role in which she triumphed was that of Cleofide in Alessandro nell’Indie. In his treatise on contemporary theater, Della Lena devoted fifty-odd pages to proclaiming Todi the most “sublime” singer to have graced the operatic stage and arguing that she had ushered in a new era of expressive singing.2 Della Lena was one of her biggest fans, but he was certainly not alone in his adoration. The Portuguese singer had already excited the enthusiasm of listeners across Europe, from Marmontel in Paris to Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg, and Della Lena’s fellow Venetians had also become obsessed with her immediately following her first performances in town. Between the fall of 1790 and the summer of 1791, nearly every edition of the local periodical Gazzetta urbana veneta included Todi-related content, and one could find Todi-themed pamphlets, collectible portraits, and poetry collections for sale all over the Veneto. The 1790–91 opera season was even dubbed “anno Todi”—the “Todi Year” (see figure 7). Within the brief span of three months and only two roles, Todi became one of the star female singers of 1790s Italy: her contemporaries compared her to Pacchierotti, and later generations saw in her a forerunner to the diva Giuditta Pasta.3 Such comparisons are telling. Though largely unknown today, Todi played an essential role in the history of operatic voice as the 158

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figure 7.  Collectible print published in commemoration of Venice’s “Todi Year,” 1791. Todi is shown standing behind the keyboard, music in hand, as putti descend from the heavens to crown her with a laurel wreath. Reproduced from author’s personal collection.

missing node in a genealogy connecting the Orphic castrati to nineteenthcentury prima donnas. It was through Todi that the aesthetics of voice in serious opera shifted from the neoclassical sensibility of singers like Pacchierotti to the Romantic subjectivity of ones like Pasta. On one level, then, digging into Venice’s Todi Year sheds light on the emergence of a new paradigm of operatic voice in which the embodied sounds produced by a singer’s vocal apparatus—what we might now call timbre or “grain”—were heard not as artistic practices but as sonic signifiers of embodied “truths.” Yet during that same year, Todi also became a screen onto which Venetian operagoers projected fantasies and anxieties about the place of women in enlightened society. On another level, then, subtending this chapter’s narrative about new vocal practices and aesthetics is a story about voice and gender—specifically, a story about how and why certain myths of voice have become imbricated with gendered forms of sociocultural labor. Simply put, the ideas about women’s voices that were expressed in connection with Todi S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r   •   159

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were emblematic of the broader conceptions of gender and subjectivity that grew out of the project of civilizing song.

a moral cause The Todi Year began in the fall of 1790 when the singer arrived in Venice amid great anticipation for her debut as one of opera seria’s most beloved heroines. Todi was slated to take on the title role in Metastasio’s Didone abbandonata, a libretto that had first been put to music in 1724 and set at least fifty times over the nearly seven decades since. The production mounted for Todi was not even a new musical setting but a pasticcio, assembled from excerpts by composers including Paisiello, Bertoni, Vincenzo Rampini, Johann Gottlieb Naumann, and Giuseppe Gazzaniga. Following the production’s run, the editors at the Gazzetta proclaimed Todi the ideal medium for the esteemed poet’s legacy: “The most sublime actress of the Gallic stage could not better [. . .] express the soul of Metastasio” than had Todi as Didone.4 Central to Todi’s appeal was her apparent capacity to express feeling through her voice. Della Lena, for one, heard in her vocal shadings the very future of sung drama in Italy. Opera needed to engage listeners’ emotions to stay relevant, he argued, and the way to do that was neither new libretti nor Gluckian reforms, but voices like Todi’s. “Words alone can never express the passions without naming them, e.g., I love you, I hate you: but the words themselves, without the very necessary accompaniment of the sound of the voice, suitably sustained and sonorous, express a weak idea instead of a feeling” (emphases in original).5 Like Cesarotti, Millico, and others, Della Lena credited the voice, instead of music or poetry, with a capacity to express feeling through sound alone. The vocal surplus of language, as the accents and vibrations that constituted “the sound of the voice,” shifted words’ site of resonance from the intellectual or rational faculty to that of the emotions. By mediating Metastasio’s words through her voice and body, Todi had elevated his poetry from “ideas” into “feelings.” So far this might seem to be a discussion of nothing more than Todi’s acting skills, in the vein of the Garrick-esque great actor (see chapter 2). She certainly had a background in that verisimilar acting style, having started out as an actor in the spoken theater in her native Portugal, and then transitioning into comic opera roles where naturalistic acting was expected. Only later did she ascend to serious prima donna status.6 What her career trajectory 160  •   S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r

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suggests is that she paid more attention to her delivery of text than was typical among other seria stars, since at that point in the early 1790s, acting through the voice was still a performance style primarily associated with comic opera and, in serious genres, the castrati of sensibility. With this in mind, Della Lena’s emphasis on her vocal acting was a significant rhetorical move: he was setting Todi apart from her (female) contemporaries and placing her in an entirely different vocal lineage, one in which Guadagni and Pacchierotti had become famous for privileging feeling above display. By citing her second Venetian role, Cleofide, as even more successful than their Orfeos, Della Lena positioned Todi as the heir to the castrati of sensibility. He even said as much in the conclusion to his treatise, where he established this genealogy—Guadagni to Pacchierotti to Todi—as the summation of his musings on contemporary theater.7 Casting Todi as the new singer of sensibility struck a critical distinction, since by 1790 she no longer sang roles generically linked to the naturalistic acting style, but instead delivered bravura arias while portraying tragic queens. Yet for Venetians, Todi seemingly transcended those well-worn libretti and da capo repetitions—all the then-outdated constraints of seria style—by devoting her voice to the service of the great Metastasio. As the Gazzetta critic put it, “The dedicated genius of Signora Todi to the dramas of the immortal Metastasio proves the intelligence of her mind, the sensibility of her soul, and that moral sense that makes her prefer the beauties of feeling to the illusions of magnificence.”8 The same critic had previously contrasted Todi with other prima donnas who had “warble[d]” through Didone’s suicide scene, too concerned with singing to bother themselves with acting.9 Even in seria roles, then, Todi embraced verisimilitude over virtuosity just like the Orfeos had, and privileged the poet’s words above her own vocal spectacle, thereby proving her innate sensibility and moral virtue. The “sensibility of her soul” did more than touch listeners’ hearts. In ways previously imagined by the likes of Millico and Rezzonico, Todi’s vocal sensibility reached beyond the opera stage and out into the world, such that the sound of her voice provided the necessary ingredient for activating opera’s latent civilizing function. Della Lena illustrated this by describing how Venetian operagoers underwent a stunning change in comportment during Todi’s performances as Didone. Normally disinterested, rude, and poorly mannered, the audience members were so moved by her that they became absorbed in the drama, and consequently behaved like civilized people. Della Lena celebrated Todi as the “moral cause” (cagione morale) of their sudden S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r   •   161

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edification and improvement.10 By reawakening operagoers’ inner moral sense, Todi’s vocal performance had initiated the process of forming them into better citizens. Finding a prima donna who could transmit her moral virtues through her singing voice was no easy task. As attested by the Gazzetta critic who complained about warbling Didones, Todi’s ability to civilize through her voice was conspicuously lacking among her female contemporaries. Alleged to be among such warbling malefactors was another star soprano, Brigida Giorgi Banti, who had sung Didone in a setting by Anfossi two years earlier at San Carlo in Naples, and against whom Todi was often pitted in the press. Banti’s voice was commonly considered to have been among the greatest of the late Settecento—so much so that an autopsy was supposedly performed on her corpse, not to discover her cause of death, but to determine how she had produced her voice. (Much later, Fétis recounted the apocryphal autopsy and attributed the soprano’s vocal ability to her abnormally large lungs, larynx, and thoracic cavity.)11 Della Lena acknowledged the excellent raw material of Banti’s voice, yet he nevertheless lumped her in with the castrato Luigi Marchesi as “inert, vapid, and cold” on stage; Charles Burney snobbishly deemed Banti little more than the musically illiterate (though vocally gifted) daughter of a Venetian gondolier.12 All three writers—Italian, French, and English—pointed to a purely physiological, rather than moral or musical, source for Banti’s vocal power. Hers seemed to be a voice and nothing more, a felicitous assortment of organs, utterly unlike the innate moral sensibility made audible by Todi’s. One writer pondered in 1791 what new operatic heights might have been reached if Todi had possessed a “vocal organ” like Banti’s. “The world would be given something truly perfect,” he declared, if opera’s most astonishing vocal instrument had belonged to its most touching actress.13 But as we will see, and as that anonymous author knew quite well, Todi likely would not have been heard as having such a sensible soul if her vocal organ had been like Banti’s.

natural defects “Perfection” would have instead undermined the fascination Todi’s voice held for Venetian listeners. The Gazzetta critic, in his 1790 review of Didone, praised her “beautiful and artless voice” before, paradoxically, highlighting her 162  •   S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r

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art in “covering” its “natural defects.”14 What exactly were these “natural defects” in Todi’s voice? The usually loquacious Burney remarked of Todi’s 1777 London performances that “her voice was thought to be feeble and seldom in tune,” but he uncharacteristically had nearly nothing else to say about her beyond acknowledging that audiences elsewhere in Europe found her “touching.”15 A better idea of these “defects” emerges from considering in tandem the two most extensive descriptions of Todi’s voice, both of which were written after February 1791 (a detail which will become significant later on): Della Lena’s from spring 1791, and French author Stendhal’s from 1824, which was probably based almost entirely on other people’s firsthand accounts. According to these two writers, Todi’s main issue seems to have been a difficulty navigating her passaggi, or register breaks, since Stendhal explained that Todi had been unable to maintain an even timbre across her range.16 Della Lena’s account of Todi’s voice confirms this, though it is much less straightforward on that point than Stendhal’s. Della Lena emphasizes his own experience as a listener rather than attempting to delineate a technical explanation: I have observed this effect that occurs in Todi, when the sounds of her voice are weakened through congestion or blockage, but then regain their sonority in singing, especially in expressing the violence of the passions: and that is because the voice rises and acquires more force and melody as our soul departs its ordinary state. But Todi’s singing, which is always vividly animated and expressive so as to soften the heart, serves in this way to correct and amend even the natural or adventitious defect of her voice.17

Della Lena’s inscription is richly suggestive. As he heard it, Todi’s voice often started out sounding weak and blocked, indicating the presence of some interior physical obstacle. This more or less fits with Burney’s account of her “feeble” voice. Once Todi turned to expressing “the violence of the passions,” however, her singing overcame that perceived internal blockage, freeing her voice such that it “acquire[d] more force and melody.” Significantly, Della Lena emphasized that Todi’s expression of extreme emotion enabled her to transition from the weak sounds of her blocked voice to her full vocal “sonority.” Whether her vocal blockage was “natural” to her physiology or caused by external forces (“adventitious”), her expressivity compensated for her vocal “defect.” She did not cover or hide it, but instead she “correct[ed]” it with her inner moral strength. For Della Lena (and Stendhal), this vocal overcoming narrative proved more sublime than the warblings of a “perfect” voice.18 S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r   •   163

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Della Lena’s representation of Todi’s voice is surprising coming from an Italian in the early 1790s. It departed significantly from the predominant aesthetics of Italianate operatic voice in which defects were to be trained away, or at least convincingly hidden, in order to facilitate expressive singing. The dominant view is exemplified by the Gazzetta critic’s remarks on Todi from fall 1790, as well as by Millico’s arguments about singing in the preface to his La pietà d’amore (see chapter 2). Despite his emphasis on individual sensibility, and his positioning voice over music as the sonic medium of sensibility, Millico nevertheless insisted that a singer needed sufficient technical control to modify their vocal colors (i.e., timbres) at will in order to express different feelings. Millico explained that the singer’s “natural voice” must be “obedient and flexible,” without any “detestable defects,” before such expressive shadings were possible.19 Defects, he implied, distracted from a singer’s performance of a role, since the sudden intrusion of the technical realities of voice would disrupt the audience’s absorption in the drama, drawing attention to the singer instead of the character and thereby halting the transmission of feeling from singer to audience. Would Millico have numbered Todi’s blocked vocal timbre among such disruptive defects? Obviously her blocked sound was noticeable, and it changed the way the words signified. Still, her defect had not interrupted her listeners’ absorption at all; in fact, according to Della Lena’s retrospective analysis, her voice had rendered her Didone the “moral cause” of Venetians’ improvement. Yet instead of attributing Todi’s shifting timbres to her acting choices alone, critics and fans alike heard them as evidence of some bodily impairment—and they found her overcoming those “defects” to be both moving and thrilling. Stendhal, writing in the 1820s from a markedly different aesthetic standpoint, glossed this kind of defect as a “suffocated tone.”20 His description suggests similar issues to Della Lena’s, but with modified terminology that implied a genealogy of expressive singing stretching back through Todi to the Orphic castrati, all in the interest of legitimating his own starry-eyed appraisal of Giuditta Pasta (who was not yet beloved by most Italian operagoers). “Suffocated” would become a common descriptor of Pasta’s timbre, as Paolo Russo has shown, and it is no coincidence that Stendhal applied it to Todi as well.21 For the French writer, Todi served as a validating link between the by then beatified Pacchierotti and the rising star Pasta, in that all three were examples of singers who had successfully embraced an “apparent defect [so as] to bring about a most fascinating touch of originality.” That defect, Stendhal explained, was “at once so moving and so natural 164  •   S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r

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in the portrayal of certain instances of violent emotion”—echoing Della Lena. Stendhal may well have adapted Della Lena’s account and others like it for his own purposes since he almost certainly never heard Todi for himself.22 Whether or not Stendhal actually heard Todi sing, the fact that his remarks from the 1820s so readily map onto Della Lena’s shows that things had started changing decades before Pasta took the stage. Already in the early 1790s, ideas about what and how the sounds of the voice signified, and which singers had access to those meanings, had begun to shift in ways that would ratify Stendhal’s vocal genealogy several decades hence. Specifically, Todi’s voice seemed to reveal a tantalizing slippage between physicality and interiority, between bodily vulnerability and moral fortitude, offering audiences an aural glimpse into her “soul”—an early instance of what Joseph Roach calls “public intimacy.”23 Technically speaking, it is quite possible that Todi had an “obedient and flexible voice” but intentionally modified her production in the interest of verisimilitude, just as Millico, for one, had done.24 The point is that her audiences did not hear it that way.

suffocation and compensation Instead, listeners’ responses to Todi’s singing were inflected by coeval representations of Sappho’s fragmented voice and bodily sensibility. As I argued in chapter 4, late Settecento notions of women’s poiesis grew out of a renewed interest in Sappho, particularly her fragment 31, which had long served as the example par excellence of lyric sublimity thanks to Longinus’s treatise On the Sublime. Sappho fragment 31, in which the lyric “I” describes her suffocation, inflammation, blindness, and loss of voice in the presence of her beloved, had reentered the Italian imaginary when Alessandro Verri quoted it in his 1782 Saffo novel, followed by de’ Rogati’s 1783 translation of the fragment into a Metastasian-style song text. Building on Longinus, de’ Rogati had marked Sappho’s fragment as sublime because it contained a “multitude of passions,” and, more subtly, as female because it was at once “beautiful” and “incomplete” (or “mutilated”).25 According to de’ Rogati’s reworkings of both fragment 31 and Longinus’s commentary on it, Sappho’s lyric was sublime because its lyric “I” was temporarily stripped of the sounds of her voice. Sappho’s sublimity, as the lyric poem created from her multitude of passions, was her compensation for the loss of her sounding voice. S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r   •   165

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Up until the Todi Year, Italian narratives of the female sublime had been associated primarily with textual remediations of Sappho’s voice in literary and musical works. Yet—and this is key—Todi seemed to dramatize that narrative entirely through the timbres, the sounds, of her voice. In addition to using “sublime” and “sublimità” liberally when describing Todi’s singing, Della Lena also signaled her sublimity with his remark about how the voice changes when “the soul departs its ordinary state,” a common Settecento locution for the sublime as derived from Longinus. What is more, he described Todi’s voice as “tender, sweet, and affectionate, grave and serious, or pathetic, afflicted and anguished, joyful and exulting”—that is, as expressing a multitude of passions.26 Thus even as her voice unified these multitudes, its sounds were also blocked, suffocated, and registrally fragmented: all told, her voice was an audible yet metalinguistic manifestation of the female sublime. Todi’s singing was heard as enacting the temporary loss of voice and attendant bodily suffering that entitled her to compensatory sublimity. Listeners like Della Lena experienced the sublime by unifying Todi’s multitude of vocal timbres into a narrative, one in which her singing (as her sensibility or moral virtue) compensated for her voice (as her “defective” body). This sublime narrative contained the disruptive material-vocal realities of Todi’s defective singing body within a teleology of overcoming and compensation that was at once “enlightened” and mythologically misogynist. For eighteenth-century Italian operagoers, narratives of song already implied transactions of suffering and compensation through the figure of the castrato. But what is important about the Sapphic version is that it reoriented those narratives away from castrated male bodies and toward ostensibly “natural,” yet nonetheless othered, female ones. This “naturalizing” move gave listeners permission to take pleasure in women’s suffering, whereas the appeal of the castrato had long been predicated on his effacing through skill and art any projection of his real physiological trauma.27 No one seems to have imagined that Pacchierotti was voicing the pain of his castration through his timbre, since that uncomfortable bodily truth, like the “detestable defects” cited by Millico, had to remain covered. The narrative of sublime suffering, however, provided an inherently, markedly, and “naturally” female spectacle. In so doing it reified and maintained through song the Enlightenment doctrine of biologically determined sexual dimorphism—and, consequently, the idea that subjectivity was inherently and necessarily gendered. In this way Todi’s voice of sensibility was heard differently than those of her Orphic predecessors. She sounded out a new yet ancient myth that 166  •   S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r

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positioned embodied suffering and the temporary silencing of voice as a female-coded sacrifice, one that would eventually be compensated for by the power of sublime song. As female counterparts to the Orphic figure, the late Settecento literary reimagining of Sappho, along with the Greek myth of Philomela, together provided the outlines.28 We have seen how Sappho’s loss of voice and self-fragmentation earned her sublimity; far more violent was Philomela’s loss. As her myth goes, she is violated by her sister’s husband, who then cuts her tongue out to prevent her speaking of it. Philomela eventually metamorphoses into a nightingale, “compensated” for the theft of her bodily and linguistic agency with a nonverbal but sonically sublime song.29 For these twin female figures of song, sublimity demanded loss, as physical impairment or violent suffering, together with the beauty typically assigned to women’s voices. Thus Sappho’s and Philomela’s transactional narratives begin with the physically painful loss of their voices as speech, and culminate in the restoration of their voices as sublime song. For Sappho sublimity comes with her survival in Longinus’s treatise as a poetic fragment, and for Philomela it comes with her survival in the European lyric tradition as the lamenting nightingale. Yet for both the designation “sublime” is less the result of choice than patriarchal compensation for unasked-for physiological and emotional suffering. Altogether the end result was a conception of sublime female song as the compensatory voicing of loss and pain, but— crucially—only in nonlinguistic or fragmentary form.

a companion to my lament While nearly all of the texts considered thus far, aside from Sappho’s original fragments, were written by men, culturally embedded narratives of sublime song also shaped women’s constructions of their own voices and subjectivities. As one remarkable example, consider the little-known sonnet “O rondinella” (Oh, swallow), composed around 1778 by Bergamasque poet Paolina Secco Suardo (1746–1801), though only published much later, in her collected works, under the Arcadian alias Lesbia Cidonia.30 (Her alias unambiguously refers to Sappho, who in poetic Italian was often called “Lesbia,” the girl from Lesbos.) This sonnet is unique among Suardo’s published works, most of which are quasi-epistolary poems addressed to famous male contemporaries such as Voltaire, Buffon, and Goldoni, and concerned with sociopolitical topics like Italian identity and prison reform. The poem at hand, “O rondS u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r   •   167

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inella,” is not “public” but rather an inward-turning lament that plays with references to Petrarchan lyric, the Italian vernacular form premised on the relationship between fragmentation and subjectivity. Suardo’s sonnet retells the Philomela myth in order to restore to its heroine the power of choice. Suardo’s lyric “I” apostrophizes a swallow, who would have been instantly recognizable to readers as Philomela’s sister, Procne. Procne’s role in the myth is as listener to Philomela’s silenced voice and, later, her sympathetic companion. After Philomela is brutalized by Procne’s husband, Tereus, Philomela weaves the story into a tapestry (or a robe) and sends it to her sister. In a now-lost play, Sophocles called this “the voice of the shuttle,” referring to the fact that Philomela’s woven text speaks what her silenced voice and absent body cannot. Procne “hears” the woven tale and frees Philomela. She then seeks revenge on Tereus by murdering their son, Itys, and feeding him to his father. Both women and the husband transform into birds, constantly fleeing and pursuing one another for eternity; all the while, Philomela sings beautifully and sadly as the nightingale and Procne the swallow croaks a single word over and over: “Itys.” In Suardo’s sonnet the lyric “I” is positioned as the would-be nightingale to accompany her sister the swallow in their eternal flight, but her Philomela-esque lyric “I” is still imprisoned, not yet metamorphosed into a nightingale: O rondinella che con rauco strido Sembri farti compagna al mio lamento Mentre ti aggiri intorno al caro nido L’antico ripetendo aspro tormento,

O swallow who with hoarse shrieking Seem to make yourself a companion to my lament While you wander around your precious nest Repeating the old, harsh torment,

Quanto t’invidio! io teco e piango e grido, Ma non ho al par di te l’ali onde al vento Franca ti affidi, e d’uno in altro lido Puoi libera varcare a tuo talento.

How I envy you! with you I weep and shout, But I don’t have wings like you, with which You boldly trust yourself to the wind, and from one shore to another Cross freely, as you please.

Se i vanni avessi anch’io n’andrei felice

If I too had wings, I would go happily

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Quel dolce a riveder beato suolo Dove partendo ho abbandonato il core;

To see again that sweet, blessed soil Where, in leaving, I abandoned my heart;

E là vorrei . . . ma lassa a me non lice Per l’ampie vie del ciel seguirti, e solo Fatta simile a te son nel dolore.

And there I would like . . . but alas, I am not permitted To follow you through the wide ways of the sky, and only In pain am I made like you.

The swallow’s song is harsh, repetitive, tormented, yet the wings that came along with her metamorphosis grant her mobility and thus some measure of agency. In Suardo’s sonnet the swallow is no caged songbird, but finally free. Reading a lyric poem by a female author opens up another way of thinking about the female sublime. As discussed in the previous chapter, the sublime was used by the likes of de’ Rogati to mark, contain, and domesticate a gendered alterity. But in Suardo’s sonnet the sublime is a choice the lyric “I” longs to make. For her the ugliness of the swallow’s song signifies freedom and resistance, a rejection of both beauty and domestication rather than a lack that needs to be compensated.31 Yet for the lyric “I” the swallow’s freedom seems as impossible as Procne’s escape from Tereus. Suardo, a female poet who wrote “intellectual” epistolary poems for a cohort of mostly male Arcadians, ultimately sought not to reject their framework but to claim a place for herself within it. This is why the sonnet’s lyric “I” stops herself in the final terzet from confessing her true desires to the swallow: “And there I would like . . . but alas, I am not permitted to follow you.” Suardo’s lyric “I” accepts her contained yet assured place as the domesticated songbird instead of pursuing the freedom that, as we know from Procne and Philomela’s eternal flight, is always just out of reach.

hearing the female sublime The connection between Todi’s voice and sublime song becomes clearer through exploration of a subtle but significant shift in the way her defects were described. As hinted above, for Venetians Todi’s defects went from something she “covered” (for example, in the 1790 Didone review) to audible evidence of her sublime suffering (as in accounts from January 1791 onward, including Della Lena’s). S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r   •   169

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What happened in between the two was this. At the very end of 1790, immediately after the run of Didone abbandonata, Todi withdrew from her remaining public engagements: she had suddenly lost her sight due to an unexplained ocular affliction. There is very little reliable information about her condition to be gleaned from contemporary accounts, but given the sudden onset and short duration of her blindness, it seems to have been optic neuritis, though the underlying cause is still unclear.32 Throughout the period of her illness, Venetian operagoers were anxious and bereft, though Todi had only ever appeared in one opera in their city and would ultimately remain absent from the stage for a mere six weeks. During that period the Gazzetta wrote about her voice, blindness, and suffering in nearly every issue, twice per week, including bizarre speculations on her condition and laments about her presumed pain by fans and “experts” in proto–gossip rag fashion. The very first item in the Gazzetta issue published on 1 January 1791 shows how invested Venetians were in imagining themselves to be spectating Todi’s suffering: the editors promised to share any news with “that enlightened public that turns its sad gaze to the bed of her worries.”33 From that point onward Todi’s voice was heard and mediated into writing through the narrative of the female sublime, fueled by a media frenzy that had melded her sudden blindness with her temporarily silenced voice (both of which were symptoms of Sappho’s “multitude of passions” in fragment 31). One anonymous writer, henceforth “the filarmonico,” as the author of the pamphlet Lettera d’un filarmonico imparziale (Letter from an impartial music lover, 1791), admitted that he had reveled in the histrionic tales of Todi’s affliction. He had imagined the pathos her impairment might bring to her singing should she return to the stage: “I knew not how to resist the idea of a blind Todi.”34 He could not resist, because during the six weeks in which Todi’s voice remained silent, Venetian operagoers had become obsessed by fantasies about her suffering. Todi’s disabled body and defective voice had collapsed into one another, inextricable even when listeners recalled her previous performances. When she regained her sight and returned to the stage on 10 February 1791 to sing Cleofide in Alessandro nell’Indie, she received more applause than had either Guadagni or Pacchierotti. The story of Todi’s temporary impairment is not meant to suggest that her real life followed any sort of myth, or that her success ought to be chalked up to pity. I have purposefully held it back so that knowledge of her impairment would not color readers’ initial understanding of her voice. The point is that the literary-mythological links between silencing, suffering, and compensatory 170  •   S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r

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sublimity provide the cultural framework for the way listeners in 1791 negotiated their emotional responses to Todi’s unusual voice after her much-publicized illness. Such inscriptions filtered the sound of her voice through what listeners thought they knew of the singer’s body and interiority, and then narrativized them through an established paradigm of female aesthetic agency. Listeners were primed to hear her voice this way because the media ramped up their interest and emotional investment, soliciting salutary poetry and op-eds to fill in for the desired content that was still missing: the sound of her voice itself. Yet when Todi “reclaimed” her voice, these textual proxies had already collectively reshaped it such that audiences listened for the sonic corroboration of what they had been imagining during her six silent weeks. Todi’s case was then unique, if not foundational, but such a conception of voice and the collective processes behind it has long since become widespread, with the prime example (in operatic singing) being Maria Callas. Writing of the film Callas Forever, Mary Ann Smart has argued that voice fascinates us because of the voyeuristic feeling of watching “the slippage at certain moments between the composerly musical fabric and the utterance that seems to emanate from the character, and the parallel uncertainty about where the character leaves off and the performer’s personality begins. [. . .] It’s the lack of perfect fit and the sensation of slippage that creates much of the thrill.”35 We might say that things got slippery after Todi’s illness. She led Venetians to morality via feeling not merely because her tragic onstage characters needed their sympathy, but also because they believed she, Luigia Todi, needed their sympathy. If it seemed as though her internal sensibility and physical struggle together created her unstable vocal timbre, they also infused feeling into Metastasio’s cold, intellectual words—making Cleofide all the more sympathetic for being animated by Todi’s “authentically” suffering body. Furthermore, that slippage could be manipulated through the very music that made it possible. It is difficult to know how much agency Todi exercised in performing the myths around her persona, voice, and body—her few surviving letters reveal little—but a revival of the Didone pasticcio offers a tiny clue.36 After her return in Alessandro nell’Indie in February, Todi reprised Didone in Padua (Nuovo Teatro, June) and Bergamo (Nuovo Teatro Ricardi, August). According to the printed libretti, the productions in both cities were essentially the same as in Venice, except that in Padua the star’s final number was swapped. Instead of delivering the declamatory, elliptical suicide cavatina “Vado . . . ma dove?” (I go . . . but where?) from the Venice “original,” S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r   •   171

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figur e 8.  Pietro Metastasio [rev. Alessandro Pepoli], La Didone abbandonata, Padua, 1791, 46, showing the inserted final aria text “Trionfa o ciel tiranno” from Alessandro nell’Indie “to satisfy the desire of many ladies.” Newberry Library, Chicago. Reproduced by permission.

for Padua Todi sang the showiest aria from Alessandro nell’Indie, “Trionfa o ciel tiranno” (Triumph, O tyrannical Heaven). Because Didone abbandonata was a pasticcio, switching out numbers in order to accommodate the singer was nothing unusual.37 But the Padua production diverged from the Venice one in this number alone—“in order to satisfy the desire of many ladies”— while keeping everything else the same (see figure 8). Given the geographical proximity of Venice and Padua, and the number of Paduan operagoers whose letters were published in the Gazzetta, it is safe to say that Paduan audiences would have been well aware of Todi’s illness and her return in Alessandro nell’Indie.38 172  •   S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r

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After her publicized suffering, Todi earned Didone a new ending, one with an aria that sent her to the pyre with virtuosic bravura rather than expressive declamation. Through Cleofide’s aria as musical and poetic intertext, Todi reenacted her successful return in Alessandro nell’Indie and refracted it onto Didone. She now warbled through her death scene like all those other Didones, but, unlike them, she could do so without undermining her capacity to engage the audience’s sympathy. Her melismas and embellishments reminded the audience that even as “tyrannical Heaven” triumphed over Didone and Cleofide, Todi had triumphed over her own body. “Trionfa” made audible the myth that she had overcome her suffering and been compensated with sublime song.

sensibility versus science Todi’s triumph confirmed female sensibility as the savior of opera—for some operagoers. For others, the thrill of slippage had a concerning side effect in that it changed the parameters of musical value. How could opera seria showcase musical-vocal skill if it became a mere exercise in eliciting emotion? Should vocal expressivity carry the same weight as technical ability in evaluating singers? And, most importantly, what did it say about a society when (female-coded) feeling displaced (unmarked, and thus male-coded) skill in the public’s musical imagination? The relationship between sensibility, skill, and opera’s social utility was vigorously debated in Venice during the Todi Year, amplified by the resurgence of a long-standing feud between Todi and the aforementioned virtuoso castrato Marchesi. In 1786 Todi and Marchesi had sung together in Sarti’s Castore e Polluce at the court of Catherine II in St. Petersburg. Behind the scenes, castrato and composer colluded in blackballing Todi, seeking to retain the empress’s favor for themselves. Catherine supported Todi in the conflict, gifting her several pieces of diamond jewelry including a tiara, necklace, and bracelets.39 The symbolism of this gesture is too good to let pass unnoted: Catherine the Great, one of the major female rulers of eighteenthcentury Europe, literally and metaphorically crowned the victimized Todi, who then graduated from singing soubrettes to prima donna queens for the rest of her stage career. Todi spent four years in St. Petersburg (1784–88), then traveled with her husband and children to engagements in Paris, The Hague, Berlin, and beyond. The family arrived in Venice in late fall of 1790 for S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r   •   173

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Didone abbandonata, in which Todi famously donned Catherine’s diamonds as part of her costume.40 By the time of Todi’s Venetian debut, Marchesi had been for several seasons the preeminent singer in town, renowned for his astonishing virtuosity and technical prowess. The local media gleefully dredged up the singers’ past conflict and almost instantaneously gave rise to two warring factions, likened by the anonymous filarmonico to the bloodsoaked Guelphs and Ghibellines of medieval Florence. After Todi returned to the stage in February 1791, the Todi-Marchesi vendetta became “almost the only topic of public discourse” in Venice.41 For the Venetian public, Todi’s and Marchesi’s respective vocal styles stood in for the two sides in a characteristic late eighteenth-century debate over the relative merits of feeling and wonder in the representative arts. In the former camp, Todi’s supporters focused on her interiority as the defining element of her vocal performance. One anonymous poetry anthology in her honor, for example, bore the title A Luigia Todi, un’anima sensibile (To Luigia Todi, a sensible [i.e., sensitive] soul, 1791).42 It notably contains verses not only in literary Italian but in the Venetian dialect, a testament to her popular local appeal. The Gazzetta, as quoted above, similarly lauded “the sensibility of her soul” together with her choosing “the beauties of feeling” over “the illusions of magnificence.” Magnificence, meanwhile, was precisely Marchesi’s brand. His vocal agility was unparalleled, and his scheduled performances in the new opera L’apoteosi d’Ercole (The apotheosis of Hercules) were advertised to Venetians as the triumph of technique: “With the science of music, he has perfected the gifts of benevolent nature, adding, with art, infinite ornaments to his voice.” 43 Ironically, Marchesi’s appearance in another Hercules opera, La morte d’Ercole, had been cancelled the previous year on account of artistic differences between Marchesi and librettist Alessandro Pepoli—namely, Pepoli’s frustration that Marchesi flatly refused to emote with his voice. (Pepoli retaliated by skewering Marchesi’s obsession with vocal technique in a satirical dialogue, on which see chapter 2. Pepoli also contributed new scenes to beef up Todi’s role in Alessandro nell’Indie, including the poetry for her sublime song “Trionfa o ciel tiranno.”) The feeling/skill binary of the Todi/Marchesi feud quickly aligned with gendered stereotypes. Countering representations of Todi’s sensibility and suffering, Marchesi’s fans depicted him as a “hero” who asserted his dominance over nature, an operatic warrior and musical scientist in one.44 In parsing the comparison between Todi and Marchesi, the aforementioned pamphlet Lettera d’un filarmonico imparziale further gendered the 174  •   S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r

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feeling/skill binary, presenting the slippage associated with the female sublime as a threat to the science of music making. This is not immediately obvious, since the pamphlet’s author first criticized Marchesi’s lack of feeling in what seems a prelude to praising Todi’s sensibility: “[Marchesi] has chosen the marvelous, and has realized his intention of making himself admired. But the marvelous is the lowest of the pleasures. His singing—colored, refined, ingenious, very rich—gives joy, pleases, surprises, satisfies, like a flowering garden, a highly polished piece of work, a stupendous machine, an expensive item of clothing. He touches all the keys of pleasure, except that of sensibility.” 45 The author dehumanized the castrato into an assemblage of insensible objects, examples of nature tamed and made marvelous through the application of art and science—much like Marchesi’s own castrated singing body. Surely Todi’s sensibility was worthier than the “lowest of the pleasures.” But was arousing feeling a musical skill on the order of technical display? The contest should be about voice, and the filarmonico insisted that Todi’s Venetian success was owed not to her voice per se, but to her tragic exhibition of female suffering. Audiences not only found women more interesting than men on stage, he argued, but they also preferred the sublime spectacle of sensibility to the representations of political virtue on which opera seria had once been premised: “I agree that Didone is more interesting than Enea [Aeneas] [. . .] and Cleofide more than Alessandro, Poro, and all the heroes of Macedonia and India.” 46 Todi’s performance in Alessandro nell’Indie had indeed been “nothing short of a triumph”—because the audience was “already full of feeling” for her after her illness, as if Todi herself were the tragic spectacle. “There is nothing [Venetians] won’t do to compensate [compensare] with sympathy someone who has fallen,” he remarked.47 As the filarmonico saw it, the excessive sensibility of both female singers and female spectators threatened technical skill as the foundation of musical value. They had thereby disrupted Venice’s civil harmony: “The feud was started by women,” he complained, “who as organs of sensibility [organi di sensibilità] seem more inclined to musical mania than men.” 48 In order to set things right, the filarmonico claimed to make an “impartial” assessment based on musical skill alone. He was not sure that Todi would have been so applauded if she had not been ill, whereas Marchesi’s “applause was completely sincere and deserved” because of his “tireless, profound study of music” (indefesso profondo studio della musica).49 Todi’s study of music was admirable but not the deciding factor: “The merit of a female singer does not consist only in the excellence of her ability.” Todi’s merits also consisted of S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r   •   175

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her “moral qualities,” as she was “perhaps the only woman who brings her domestic virtues [domestiche sue virtù] with her on stage.”50 When it came to evaluating voice as the practice of musical craft, the filarmonico placed Todi in a different category altogether, distinguishing her vocal sensibility from (what he heard as) true, objective, unmarked musical skill. Interlocutors like the filarmonico used Todi’s voice to make literarymythological narratives into sociopolitical ideologies. The allure of the female sublime resonated beyond the page and into society, imperiling the essential political work once accomplished by the men who wrote and embodied histories. Even voices like Millico’s and Pacchierotti’s represented virtue and sensibility through musical skill and vocal science without drawing undue attention to the singer’s interiority. A voice like Todi’s was potentially dangerous: it revealed an uncanny slippage between “exterior” performance and “interior” self, making audible what was supposed to be controlled by writing or kept hidden. When uncovered and externalized as the sublime, her interiority exploded into a tragic spectacle that overshadowed scientificrational objectivity. But perhaps through some rhetorical reconfiguring, the emotional appeal of female interiority could become useful. If feeling now flourished primarily within bodies taxonomized as “female,” then containing those bodies might turn their voices to a socially beneficial purpose (as with de’ Rogati’s chamber songs). If Italians were to be civilized, women first had to be domesticated.

bad mothers The filarmonico’s reference to Todi’s “domestic virtues” likely drew on her well-known practice of traveling with her family in tow, since it was atypical at that time for a prima donna to model such conjugal and maternal affection offstage. (The filarmonico’s lack of elaboration on the point of her domestic virtues suggests that he expected his readers to know what he was referring to.) More broadly, emphasizing a woman’s “domestic virtues” above her “ability” pointed up the Enlightenment ideology of biological determinism (most famously espoused by Rousseau). If invoking the nascent construct of biological sex only implicitly, the filarmonico’s gendered categories of musical value nonetheless exemplify the attendant doctrine of “separate spheres,” in which men idealized the importance of women’s “natural” moral qualities in the private sphere in order to limit their influence in the public sphere. 176  •   S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r

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Feminist historians of eighteenth-century Italy and France like Rebecca Messbarger and Joan Landes have argued that Habermas’s theory of the rise of the public sphere (see chapter 3) obscures the fact that this bourgeois publicness was built on just such a systematic “suppression of women’s subjectivity.”51 Both in Todi’s case and more generally, the Enlightenment gendering and domesticating project operated as the socially oriented counterpart to the aesthetically oriented strategy of the “female sublime” narrative. The female sublime is only half the story; its domestication explains why that story has been forgotten. Ostensibly progressive Italian intellectuals had been insisting since at least the 1760s that women’s public bodies and voices distracted from, and so hindered, attempts at cultural and political enlightenment. The foundational text here, as Messbarger notes, was the mid-1760s essay “Difesa delle donne” (Defense of women), published in Pietro Verri’s Il Caffè.52 The main argument was that if women were to contribute to enlightened society, the best thing they could do was remove themselves from the public sphere. As Messbarger puts it, summing up the work of historian Luciano Guerci, for these male intellectuals “feminine virtue appears to achieve perfection in death.”53 The next best option after death was domesticity. Praising Todi’s “domestic virtues” was an attempt to turn her sensibility from a distractingly tragic spectacle into a model of Enlightenment progress. Once reconceived as the latter, it worked as a reprimand to all the bad mothers and wives who, unlike Todi, abandoned their conjugal responsibilities in favor of flaunting their voices, ideas, and bodies in public.54 Indeed, for decades Italy’s opera houses had been an arena for the public performance of bad motherhood, both on stage and in the boxes. Aristocratic women left their families behind in order to put in fashionable appearances at the opera, often accompanied by cicisbei (noble male escorts in a chivalric mold). While cicisbeismo had mostly faded away by the 1780s and 1790s, and was possibly less widespread than contemporary polemical texts might suggest, accounts of the practice offer a highly visible Italian example of women supposedly shirking their domestic obligations in favor of style and public display. As Feldman has shown, the fashion for cicisbeismo and the depressed marriage market correlated with the tendency of Metastasian-style opera libretti to either lack mothers altogether or to feature superlatively bad ones, like the murderous, incestuous Semiramide.55 For the sake of enlightened progress, women had to become better wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters; clearly, they needed the kind of moral education that Todi’s onstage performance of domestic S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r   •   177

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virtues could provide. Or, more to the point, they needed to hear her voice as modeling those domestic virtues. This sheds new light on the filarmonico’s attempt to distinguish Todi’s feeling from Marchesi’s skill. If hand-wringing about the menace of women in the public sphere proved insufficient, then why not claim that they possessed natural feminine virtues within the domestic sphere that would complement men’s efforts in the political sphere? Many Italian Enlightenment thinkers, not to mention writers elsewhere in Europe, had framed women’s domestic roles as essential to the proper functioning of civilized society. For instance, in a treatise entitled L’amico delle fanciulle (The girls’ friend, 1763), the Venetian writer Gasparo Gozzi declared women “the soul of society” (l’anima della Società), thanks to their innate talents as mothers and household managers.56 These talents were presumably natural yet had long gone uncultivated. The author of the “Difesa” argued that women lacked any “social utility” because men had neglected to educate them properly, leading to women’s disastrous “mismanagement of the domestic sphere.”57 The necessary education was not in the trivium and quadrivium, but in household economy and affective labor. This line of thinking extended the gendered models for education laid out by Rousseau in Émile (1762). One early Italian translator of Rousseau, Giovanni Maria Lampredi, reiterated in his introduction to Julie, ou La nouvelle Heloïse (1761; trans. 1764) the social and political benefit of women’s being properly educated in household matters, but he declared that this was not sufficiently covered in Rousseau’s writings. Lampredi deemed the sentimental, tragic La nouvelle Heloïse, which he published in a heavily bowdlerized version, very dangerous to sensitive female readers. In its stead, he claimed, “a treatise on the good government of domestic manners” would be “a very useful thing, because tranquility, peace, and concord of family members— that is, all citizens—depend on the good organization of the family.”58 Despite Lampredi’s critique of La nouvelle Heloïse, he was clearly influenced by Rousseau’s overall conception of society vis-à-vis the family, in which the domestic sphere constituted a microcosm of the political sphere.59 For the likes of Rousseau, Gozzi, and Lampredi, a functional political society depended on women’s embracing their natural role as the “soul” of the home. These treatises date to the 1760s and 1770s, but the domesticating project still concerned denizens of the Veneto during the Todi Year. Just before Todi’s hotly anticipated return in Alessandro nell’Indie, an anonymous gentleman wrote to the editor of the Gazzetta pleading for help with his ill-behaved wife. 178  •   S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r

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She no longer spent any time at home and had “forgotten, or [was] no longer in the state to fulfill, the duties of a wife, of a mother.” Her behavior, he went on, was “contrary to conjugal happiness and to every social virtue [. . .] and scatters disorder throughout my whole family.” 60 A letter from an anonymous “Honest Lady” (Signora Candida) appeared in the Gazzetta in June, entreating men to correct their wives’ and daughters’ inherent weaknesses. The letter was printed in the same issue as several sonnets and letters lauding Todi’s performance in the Padua Didone (the one with the altered final aria), immediately following the Todi content in the layout.61 For a final example among many, another “lady” wrote to the editor in August 1791 asking what kinds of novels women should be reading for self-improvement. The editor replied by printing an Italian translation of the Wife of Bath’s contribution to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, distributed across three issues of the journal. The tale goes more or less like this. A rapist is told by Queen Guinevere that he may avoid execution for his crime if he can discover what women desire above all else. He fails in his quest until an old hag promises to give him the answer on condition that he grant anything she might ask of him. He agrees, and then gives Guinevere the hag’s correct answer: “Lady, that which your sex desires more than anything is sovereignty, and the right to command your husbands and other men.” The hag compels the rapist to marry her, after which she magically becomes young and beautiful, and all ends “happily” (for the rapist, at any rate).62 There are several ways of thinking about the lessons this story might have been intended to teach young women, but all of them are bleak indeed. Some women writers pushed back against the prison of domesticity, arguing that women deserved equal education not for the purpose of becoming helpmeets, but as a basic human right. Giuseppina di Lorena, princess of Carignano and friend to Verri, Beccaria, and Rousseau, published a novel set on an utopian island complete with a law mandating equality between men and women (Les aventures d’Amélie, 1771).63 Mary Wollstonecraft, whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was translated into French and disseminated in Italy within a year of its initial English publication, wrote, “Would men but generously snap our chains [. . .] they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers—in a word, better citizens.” 64 Wollstonecraft appealed to relational definitions of female subjectivity, dangling the carrot of better wives and mothers, yet throughout the Vindication she vehemently insisted that patriarchy, not nature, had rendered women inferior to men—all while insisting that women were “citizens” too. S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r   •   179

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The writer and activist Carolina Lattanzi brought arguments like Wollstonecraft’s to Italy through the sounds of her voice. She delivered her own revolutionary manifesto, Schiavitù delle donne (Slavery of women), as a public speech to the members of the Mantuan academy in 1797. Even the printed pamphlet of her manifesto emphasizes the vocality of her live speech. It retains Lattanzi’s use of direct address (“Cittadini!”) and expressive vocalizations (“deh!”), reminding the reader that these were not merely intellectual ideas but a moral appeal made through the voice of a fellow citizen.65 For Lattanzi, women possessed greater societal potential than they had been accorded by Gozzi and Lampredi. Subjectivity, political and otherwise, was not inherently gendered but had been made that way through men’s “abuse” of women. For that reason, rather than focusing on the stereotypically feminine virtues (chastity, conjugal devotion) of heroic women like Lucretia and Judith, Lattanzi praised them for their political contributions. These women had protected freedom and destroyed tyranny; they had been, first and foremost, citizens.66 Lattanzi asserted her own political subjectivity through the speech in “the first year of Italy’s liberty,” when Napoleon’s conquest seemingly augured the institution of French republican ideals in northern Italy.67 Alas, her dedicatee Josephine Bonaparte was unresponsive, and we know how Napoleon’s “Italian liberation” turned out. Still, from the late Settecento through the turn of the century, the sounds of women’s voices did in fact have significant cultural work to do. It was just not the kind Lattanzi had intended to do through her speech.

so we babble, and then we speak Verri’s Saffo novel offers an example of the new cultural work assigned to women’s voices. This alternative to Saffo’s sublime suffering is literally written on the wall: above the door to the women’s sitting room in Saffo’s father’s home, a golden inscription proclaims, “Work keeps the soul tranquil, as exercise maintains the health of the body.” 68 So important was this maxim, especially for young women, that Verri drew particular attention to it in his dedication to the 1797 edition of the novel (which he addressed to Caroline Bonaparte, Napoleon’s then fifteen-year-old sister). The ensuing scene in the women’s sitting room illustrates the golden maxim by showing how domestic labor permitted women a voice without the suffering required for sublime song. Saffo’s virtuous sister Dorilla has been weaving at the loom while Saffo 180  •   S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r

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wrestles with her unrequited passion for Faone. Dorilla, however, does not need the “voice of the shuttle” as a proxy for her own: [Dorilla] left off her weaving and, resting her hands on her knees, with her eyes turned to the heavens, unleashed her beautiful voice in a sacred hymn. Her song expressed the prayer of Orpheus, who, pleading, goes in search of Eurydice in the Underworld: and such was the sweetness of her voice that, although it came from a breast that had not yet been ignited by the flame of love, she nevertheless expressed it through her natural sweetness, moving the souls of others without disturbing her own. And thus it was that while Saffo was following the shifting sweetness of the song with the artfulness of her fingers, involuntary tears fell from her eyes onto the lyre, as if she listened to the lament of Orpheus, separated from his beloved by the cruel sentence of death.69

Dorilla’s “sacred hymn” is nothing like Saffo’s earlier extemporized poetry about her desire for Faone’s body. Dorilla’s “soul” is “tranquil” because her domestic labor keeps it so, while Saffo, the voiceless victim of her own excessive sensibility, weeps. Dorilla’s sweet voice infuses Orpheus’s lament with feeling—not in a spectacle of suffering, but as the cultivation of her domestic virtues. By the 1790s, mediating culture by turning “ideas” into “feelings” had been established as an integral component of the good woman’s social utility. On one hand, this mode of mediation opened up a new avenue through which privileged women could engage publicly and appropriately with culture, as Susan Dalton argues in her study of art criticism in Napoleonic Venice.70 On the other hand, it merely dressed up, reinscribed, and naturalized the perennial form/content binary by positioning women as vessels or tools for making men’s intellectual work commonly accessible. Obviously, this simplistic binary did not hold up in practice, since women also had to be educated, intelligent, and privileged in order to exert such influence in the public sphere (as in the cases of Todi and Dalton’s protagonist, Isabella Albrizzi). Todi spoke at least four languages and composed several libretti, and critics did acknowledge her “intellect” in their reviews. Yet it was neither her musical skills nor her intellect that inspired endless dedications, sonnets, and collectibles. While for some Venetians Todi’s voice made audible mythological narratives of the female sublime, for others her singing vibrated sympathetically with coeval shifts in conceptions of women’s social roles.71 Recall Della Lena’s story about how Todi reawakened her audience’s moral sense with the sounds S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r   •   181

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figur e 9.  Collectible print published in honor of Todi’s performances as Didone and Cleofide, Venice, 1790–91, in which the anonymous poet claims that Prometheus “only gave mortals life,” but Todi “instilled feeling” within them. Note that “Elisa” (Elissa) is another name for Dido, here used to address Todi. Reproduced from author’s personal collection.

of her voice. In his L’Amico delle fanciulle Gozzi had singled out “a sweet voice” as a crucial domestic virtue because it enabled women to teach something important, something new, even to old “graybeards”: how to feel.72 Along similar lines, a set of encomiastic stanzas printed with a collectible Todi portrait in 1791 declared that Prometheus’s fire “only gave mortals life,” while Todi’s singing, more importantly, “instilled feeling” within them (see figure 9).73 The filarmonico himself wrote, however sarcastically, that “at the singing of signora Todi, bronze and stone acquire sense and life, as at that of Amphion and Orpheus.”74 Yet another Venetian poem of 1791 dismissed Orpheus as an outdated myth in order to attribute his animating song to Todi instead.75 Prometheus’s fire and Orpheus’s lyre had lost their mythological status as primordial civilizing forces, replaced by the new myth of maternal voice. 182  •   S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r

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Maternal song replaced Orphic song because of arguments about the edificatory potential of the embodied, sonorous female voice that transfused feeling without words. The mother’s voice, unlike Orpheus’s, was imagined as beyond or even “before” language, adumbrating Julia Kristeva’s notion of the maternal chora.76 The late eighteenth-century fantasy of the mother’s primordial song has been studied in depth in the German context. For example, Matthew Head has written of music for women in northern Germany in this period as “a metaphor through which femininity was produced as a discursive ideal,” lullaby collections in particular presenting “timeless” images of idealized motherhood.77 David Wellbery has argued that, in German lyric poetry of the time, “primordial orality is the voice of the Mother.” For Herder, Wellbery notes, even the Homeric rhapsode’s declamation was a “lullaby,” collapsing civilizing function and national consciousness into maternal song.78 (This resonates with Foscolo’s eliding Sapphic lament with maternal lullaby in his poetry; see chapter 4.) Wellbery builds here on Kittler’s claim that, in German-speaking culture circa 1800, Nature and Woman fused ideologically and ontologically in the concept of “the Mother’s mouth.” Kittler bases his argument on the emergence of German theoretical and pedagogical texts that advocated, first, the maternal education of children and, second, a sonic-oral approach to literacy. The good mother did not speak her own words during this edifying process but instead provided the building blocks of language—as her embodied vocal sounds—with which children could formulate speech and, later, men could create culture.79 The Italian version of maternal voice was not so different from that discussed by Head, Kittler, and Wellbery, though it was more tightly bound up with musical-vocal anxieties. An example of the way in which concerns about Italian music and poetry, good and bad mothers, and the power of voice came together circa 1790 can be seen in an epistle written by Saverio Bettinelli in which he espoused his own originary myth of maternal voice. The epistle, number twenty-three, was published in an often-reprinted 1788 anthology of letters from Bettinelli to none other than Suardo, poet of “O rondinella.” The collection reveals Bettinelli’s concerns over perceptions of Italian literature, with song, both maternal and avian, as a recurring theme. For instance, he complained about the French notion of “la musique italienne,” sighing at its implicit presumption that Italians were “by nature nightingales and canaries.”80 Birds served as shorthand for different figures of voice, as we have seen again and again, and Bettinelli took umbrage at what he read as the reduction of Italian culture to the meaningless warbling of animals. S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r   •   183

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Still, Bettinelli invoked both birdsong and maternal lullaby when setting forth his theory of vocality in language. In the twenty-third letter to Suardo, he attempted to explain the linguistic quality of soavità (sweetness) by analyzing several ancient epigrams. According to Bettinelli, the first-century BCE poet-improviser Archias had seen a swallow building her nest in a statue of Medea and had apostrophized the creature in a brief epigrammatic verse: “Why, poor creature, do you entrust your offspring to her who killed her own children?”81 What a strange text to include in a discussion of soavità, this scene of two mythological, voiceless, infanticidal mothers! The swallow, as in Suardo’s sonnet, croaks repetitively after murdering her son while Medea, the archetypal murderous mother, is here a cold and silent statue. Yet, for Bettinelli, what infused words with feeling was what he conceived as the sonic materiality of the words themselves, in excess of their linguistic meaning. Soavità made language not merely understood but felt, both physically and emotionally: “I sense the smoothness and roundness of the word, the various reverberations of every single word, those lovely turns, that harmonious sound of the phrase, of the voice, as well as of the verse.”82 It was this material, sensual quality of language, more than semantic content, that enabled the good mother to enculturate future citizens through her voice. The swallow and the Medea statue were marked as bad mothers by their lack of vocal sweetness, yet the words about them emanated soavità. This silent image of unnatural motherhood led Bettinelli to a longer excursus on soavità, culminating in the myth of good maternal voice. The civilizing potential of female vocality had primordial roots, preceding Orphic song, back in what Bettinelli presented as the maternal-feminine prehistory of Western culture. In this preliterate society women’s voices had been the medium through which music, poetry, politics, and even national consciousness were created and disseminated. His letter continues: “Before the invention of writing, women were the teachers and scholars of poetic eloquence, instructing little children and instilling in them through poetry the glories of their homeland, the memories of their ancestors, the sanctity of laws and of religion, so that for a long time ‘music’ meant ‘literature.’ To such an end, it is useful to have a sweet voice, a musical ear, a soft accento, united with a tender heart.”83 The vocality Bettinelli heard and felt in reading examples of soavità originated in what he cast as women-led practices of enculturation. But any given culture was only as civilized as the women who transmitted its foundational lessons, since their “sweet voice[s]” were necessarily the product of their “climate”:84 184  •   S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r

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Oh how many times have I stopped in the street to listen to the discourses, the conversations, that a mother has with her babe in arms, though she is the only speaker. [. . .] So we babble, and then we speak, and so spoke the children of those women so privileged by their climate—that is, by the homeland [i.e., ancient Greece] of eloquence, of music, of poetry, of good taste, of enthusiasm, of the noblest passions that ever were.85

If only mothers in his own time and place had been formed like those of this utopian preliterate society, Italy might have a national consciousness. In Bettinelli’s Italy, a land dominated by the banal warbling of canaries, such voices were rare—although he did imply throughout the letter that Suardo’s was one such poetic voice. Idealizing and idolizing the maternal figure was not a novel phenomenon in Italy, given the deep Marian devotion of Italian Catholicism. What was new was how the emerging ideology of domesticity positioned the mother’s song as a tool for secular progress—for furthering the civilizing project that many pursued in the wake of Enlightenment thought. The maternal voice now predated the Orphic one as the fons et origo of modern political subjectivity. The good mother neither challenged patriarchal claims to language nor distracted from progress with a spectacle of suffering. Instead, as in Bettinelli’s prehistoric Greece, the good mother inculcated love for family and country through the vibrations, the inflections, the soavità of her voice. When heard through this cultural matrix, Todi’s voice readily replaced in the operatic imagination both the canary-like bravura of Marchesi and the Orphic lamentation of Guadagni and Pacchierotti.86 Hers invited projections of sublime song and life-giving lullaby all in one. In traversing gaps both timbral and metaphorical, Todi’s voice became home to a multitude of meanings. If the good mother was envoiced on the opera stage, then, she could do more than reanimate Metastasian opera seria. She could do what Orpheus himself had failed to accomplish. She could liberate—or perhaps re-create—Italy.

neither mother, nor wife can i call myself Although these ideologies of voice still relied for the most part on literary and pedagogical texts for transmission, they did gradually make their way into music in the early 1790s. At first it was through libretti, as once-absent mothers began to reappear on the seria stage. Some, like Fedra and S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r   •   185

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Semiramide, were still irredeemably bad, but others showed what a good mother might offer society both within the domestic sphere and its political macrocosm. The problem was that the precedent set by these good mothers reinscribed death as the sine qua non of feminine virtue. One of the first good mothers to appear was the title character of Ines de Castro, set in 1793 by Giuseppe Giordani for La Fenice (libretto by Cosimo Giotti). As the culmination of a convoluted plot full of jealousy and political intrigue, Ines commits suicide by poison in order to spare her children from the evil queen of Portugal. The queen is the quintessential bad mother, placing her political ambitions above all else, whereas the good mother, Ines, sacrifices her life to save her children’s. If the greatest show of feminine virtue in the late Settecento was self-sacrifice, Ines de Castro enacted this to the letter. Clearly Ines’s story struck a chord with audiences, since over the next dozen years it provided the basis for several new musical settings by composers including Gaetano Andreozzi, Sebastiano Nasolini, Francesco Bianchi, Stefano Pavesi, and Zingarelli. Self-sacrifice was so powerful it could even redeem a bad mother, as attested by a new opera composed for Todi herself. We follow her from Venice (via Madrid) to Naples, where, in 1796, the Teatro San Carlo premiered Pietro Alessandro Guglielmi’s setting of Antonio Sografi’s La morte di Cleopatra (The death of Cleopatra). This new Cleopatra was less Semiramide and more Ines de Castro. Before committing suicide she sings to the villainous Ottaviano, “I commend to you my poor children, and these desolate, unfortunate people. Only for them do I beg for your grace.”87 Todi’s Egyptian queen was no conniving enchantress but a sympathetic mother, making restitution for her previous bad behavior by sacrificing her life to save her people. In death she becomes a good mother not only to her children, but to her subjects as well. Weeping as the prima donna died onstage would become one of the great thrills of Ottocento opera, but in 1790s Naples, death was not the ideal ending for a good operatic mother. The Kingdom of Naples was run by the Bourbon king Ferdinand IV in name, but de facto by his far more competent queen, Maria Carolina (née Habsburg). A champion of enlightened despotism like her mother, Empress Maria Theresa, Maria Carolina influenced Neapolitan cultural life by patronizing artists and literati, and she acquired no small measure of political power herself after playing the good mother and giving birth to several heirs.88 Watching every onstage mother commit suicide for the greater good might not have appealed much to the real-life queen. 186  •   S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r

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And the need for the good mother’s help grew as, from 1796 on, Napoleon encroached further and further into the Italian peninsula. In January 1797, the year after the Neapolitan Cleopatra, a new opera by Giovanni Paisiello and Giovanni Battista Lorenzi premiered at San Carlo as another starring vehicle for Todi. Entitled Andromaca, the dramma eroico follows the aftermath of the Trojan War through the struggles of the virtuous widow of Trojan hero Ettore (Hector). Andromaca (Andromache, played by Todi) devotes herself to saving their young son and the future of the Trojan people from the nefarious conqueror Ulisse, a rather Napoleonic Odysseus (sung by Giacomo David). Andromaca was dedicated to the king, as were most operas at San Carlo, but the work had been commissioned in honor of Maria Carolina’s name day.89 By celebrating Queen Maria Carolina with the story of Andromaca, the good mother envoiced by Todi, the opera positioned the Bourbon-Habsburg queen as the protector of Naples (and perhaps even of the entire Italian peninsula) against Napoleonic imperialism. Andromaca, like its star, simultaneously sounded out two paradigms of female voice: sublime suffering and the good mother. This Andromaca takes place between the events of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, although notably there is no direct source for the plot in either classical or contemporary literature. Previous libretti featuring the character Andromaca, including the popular one by Apostolo Zeno (1724), tended to follow the plot of Euripides’s tragedy. Lorenzi, however, took the opportunity to shape the plot to fit the occasion: his Andromaca is not primarily a love interest, but a mother. As Troy burns at the hands of the Greeks, Ulisse seeks to murder the dead Trojan hero Ettore’s young son, Astianatte, on the basis of a prophecy. Andromaca has hidden their child in his father’s tomb, but Ulisse threatens to desecrate Ettore’s ashes if Andromaca will not yield the boy for sacrifice. Pirro, son of the dead Achille, secretly promises to save Astianatte out of love for Andromaca. After Pirro rescues the child from Ulisse, Andromaca agrees to marry him and leave Troy. Ulisse warns Pirro that Andromaca will be his ruin, but the opera sweeps this under the rug with a lieto fine.90 Because Andromaca has protected both her husband’s remains and their son’s life, she is considered as having fulfilled her conjugal and maternal duties. She also proves the social and political utility of those duties, as it is through her roles of wife and mother that she contributes to the founding of Rome. The opening scene and aria encapsulate Andromaca’s trajectory from the suffocated voice of female sublimity to the politically beneficial voice of the S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r   •   187

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good mother. The curtain rises on Andromaca’s bedroom, the smoking ruins of Troy visible through a window as the heroine sleeps alone. Following a heroic horn ritornello, Andromaca awakens at what she thinks is the voice of her husband’s ghost. But he is dead and silent, so the voice through which great men speak must be hers alone. Andromaca’s recitative text paraphrases Aeneas’s famous speech from book two of the Aeneid, in which the soon-tobe founder of Rome recounts to Dido his own encounter with Hector’s ghost. Giving life and feeling to Aeneas’s words, Andromaca sings to the imaginary ghost of her husband: “Ah, I saw you, but (ah me!) how different from that Ettore of before, who returned proudly with Achille’s spoils, and when he made the vengeful flames shriek upon the inimical, criminal, barbarous Achaean sails.” 91 In Virgil’s epic Aeneas cannot save Troy from the Greeks, but thanks to his spectral encounter with Hector, he saves Troy’s legacy by going on to establish Rome and, with it, Italy. Here, Andromaca herself envoices Aeneas’s words to Hector and therefore symbolically assumes Aeneas’s heroic nation-building purpose. The choice between sublime suffering and domestic virtue underscores the ensuing aria. The recitative scene flows through the last horn ritornello directly into the brief “Ancor mi risuona la voce dolente,” in E-flat major. The aria begins with repeated sotto voce triplet arpeggios in the strings, which was a rather unusual choice for an aria in this context; such an accompaniment style was still typically associated with song-as-song, originating in operatic representations of Orpheus’s lyre. The Orphic—or is it Sapphic?—lyre haunts the opening of Andromaca’s aria as the specter of sublime suffering (see example 6). Pushing against the “lyric” accompaniment, Andromaca’s vocal line juxtaposes the domestic with the heroic. The short phrases and gasping rests evoke the sobs and breathlessness of the sentimental idiom, often connected with representations of domestic life in comic and semiserious opera, while the aria’s expansive tessitura and leaps of octaves and tenths mark the stylistic register as that of opera seria (that is, “heroic”). The seria elements would have highlighted Todi’s vocal “defects,” too, given that cisgender women’s voices tend to have a passaggio or register break around G5. Her singing through those registral gaps would have been especially noticeable, and thrilling, when her voice leapt from the strained range above the staff down into her chest voice (see example 7). While such vocal leaps had by then become standard fare for prima donnas—think of Mozart’s writing for Vitellia—Paisiello could not have written them without taking 188  •   S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r

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example 6.  Giovanni Paisiello, Andromaca, act 1, scene 1, aria “Ancor mi risuona la voce dolente” (Andromaca), 28r–28v. Note the gasping rests breaking up words and phrases. Violin I

Violin II & Violas

b 4 &b b 4 œ

Ͻ

Ͻ

Œ

Ͻ

Œ

Ͻ

Œ

œ

Œ

œ

Œ

sotto voce

b 4 &b b 4

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ

b 4 &b b 4 w w

sotto voce

Horns (transposed)

Andromaca

w w

b 4 &b b 4 Ó

Œ

w w

‰ œ œ J

Œ

œ

Œ

An - cor

? bb 44 œ b

pizz.

Bass

Vln. I

Vln. II & Vla.

Hn.

Andromaca

b &b b Œ

Vln. I

Vln. II & Vla.

Hn.

Andromaca

b &b b œ

œ

Œ

Œ

ce

Œ

œ

œ

Œ

œ

Œ

œ

Œ

œ

Œ

œ

mi

œ

Œ

ri - suo - na

œ

Œ

Œ

œ

‰ œ œ J

œ

œ

Œ

Œ

la

‰ œj œ

Œ

an - co

-

ra_ho

œ

Œ

œ

do - len - te

œ

Œ

b &b b Πb &b b

œ

-

? bb œ b

Œ œ

Œ

œ

Œ

œ

Œ

œ

Œ

‰ œj

œ

pre -

Œ

œ Œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ Œ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ 3

3

3

3

b &b b w w

? bb œ b

Peritz-The Lyric Myth of Voice.indd 189

3

3

3

3

w w

b &b b œ

sen

Bass

bœ

Œ

‰ œj œ

3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 b & b b bœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b &b b w w w w w w

vo

Bass

œ

Œ

‰ œj

œ

œ -

Œ

te

Œ

‰ œ J lo

œ

Œ

œ

œ

spet

œ

œ -

Œ

j œ

œ

j œ

œ

œ

tro

fu

œ

Œ

-

Œ

œ

ne - sto...

œ Œ

U Œ U Œ U Œ U Œ U Œ

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example 7.  Giovanni Paisiello, Andromaca, act 1, scene 1, aria “Ancor mi risuona la voce dolente” (Andromaca), 28v–29r. Note the large leaps across registers in the vocal line.

Violin I

Violin II & Violas

Andromaca

Vln. I

Vln. II & Vla.

Andromaca

par

? bb ∑ œ b

b &b b Œ

-

Vln. I

Vln. II & Vla.

Andromaca

œ.

Œ

œ.

Œ

œ.

to,

nè

-

non

œ

Œ œ

Œ

nœ.

sto,

-

œ

Œ

œ Œ

re

Œ œ

Œ

3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 b & b b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b j Œ ‰ œJ Œ &b b œ œ™ œ ˙

che

? bb œ b b &b b Œ

Œ œ

tre - mar.

Œ

œ

Œ

œ

Ͻ

? bb œ b

-

to,

nè

Œ

œ

Œ

re - sto,

Nè

Œ

œ

U Œ Œ Œ

3 3 3 3 b &b b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ Œ º œ œ œ j b œj œ œ œ &b b œ

par

Bass

-

Œ

so

Bass

œ.

Œ

3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 b &b b ∑ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b œ œ ‰ œ œ™ ‰ œ & b b œJ œ ™ J œ J œ J J

Nè

Bass

œ.

b &b b ∑ Œ

U Œ Œ

œ

Œ

Œ

œ Œ

œ Œ

nœ

Œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œnœ œ œ œ œœ U œ 3œ j œ œ Œ Œ nœ ‰ œ ˙ non

œΩ Œ U Œ Œ

3

3

so

œ

3

3

che

Œ

œ

tre - mar.

Œ

œ Œ

into account Todi’s particular vocal qualities. She had been singing Paisiello’s music since the 1770s and frequently included his arias in her recitals and pasticci (as in the 1790 Didone abbandonata), so presumably Paisiello was very familiar with the idiosyncrasies of Todi’s vocal registration when he composed Andromaca’s entrance aria for her. 190  •   S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r

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Andromaca: Ancor mi risuona La voce dolente: Ancora ho presente Lo spettro funesto . . . Nè parto, nè resto, Non so che tremar. Incerta, dubbiosa Non trovo consiglio: Non placo il consorte, Non salvo il mio figlio, Nè madre, nè sposa, Mi posso chiamar.

Still I hear the sorrowful voice: Still I have before me the tragic ghost . . . I neither leave, nor stay, I know not what to do but tremble. Uncertain, doubtful I find no counsel: I do not calm my husband, I do not save my son, neither mother, nor wife can I call myself.92

For nearly the entire aria Andromaca sings in breathless, gasping, fragmented phrases. Every time she bursts out in heroic, seria-style leaps she is immediately suffocated back into silence. At the end she finally overcomes her suffocation— not because she is compensated with sublimity, but because she realizes that she must earn the names of “mother” and “wife.” 93 At the aria’s climax she spins out longer phrases for the first time as she sings, “I do not calm my husband, I do not save my son, neither mother, nor wife can I call myself” (see example 8). Andromaca defines herself by her lack, meaning she must overcome not only her suffering but also her failure to perform her designated roles. Only once she has recognized this is she granted a full, sonorous voice, the voice with which she sings the rest of the opera and ultimately assures the future of Italy. Andromaca puts the eroico in dramma eroico by protecting her husband’s memory and her son’s future—by proving her domestic virtues. Meanwhile, Todi’s voice, as transduced into song in Andromaca, heralded both the incipient rise of the new operatic prima donna and the metatheatrical fantasy of the good mother.94

  • 

•

•

Todi returned to Portugal in 1801 and stopped singing in public after her husband’s death two years later. Her final years were marked by a series of troubles, both personal and political: when the Napoleonic army invaded Porto in 1809, she and her family fled, lost their possessions, and were imprisoned S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r   •   191

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example 8.  Giovanni Paisiello, Andromaca, act 1, scene 1, aria “Ancor mi risuona la voce dolente” (Andromaca), 31v–33r. Note the shift from short phrases to long, sustained ones as she sings “Nè madre, ne sposa mi posso chiamar” (Neither mother, nor wife can I call myself). Violin I

Violin II Clarinet (transposed) Bassoon

Horn (transposed)

Viola

Andromaca

Bass

Vln. I

Vln. II

Cl.

Bsn.

Hn.

Vla.

Andromaca

b œ &b b J

œ J

b & b b œj b j & b b œœ J ? bb œJ. b

œ j œJ .œ

b j & b b œœ J b B b b œJ

j œJ

b œ &b b J

˙

Nè

ma

? bb œJ b

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ j œœ Jœ.

‰ œ.

œ

œ

œ

-

œ

-

œ

j œœ J œ

‰ œ

Ϫ so

œ

œ

œ J

œ

‰

œ J

‰

œ J

‰

œ J

‰

œ J

‰

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

ww . œ. œ

œ.

œ.

œ.

œ.

œ.

œ.

œ

j œœ ‰ J œ œ

j œœ ‰ J œ œ

j œœ ‰ J œ œ

j œœ ‰ J œ œ

œ J

œ

œ

Œ

‰

nè

spo

‰ œ. ‰

œ

sa,

-

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ J mi

œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ.

œ

˙

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

˙

œœ

Œ

Ó

∑

œ

Œ

Ó

∑

Œ

Ó

∑

œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

w

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ J J

chia - mar

? bb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b

Peritz-The Lyric Myth of Voice.indd 192

‰ œ.

dre,

b & b b ˙˙ ˙˙ ˙ ? bb ˙ b b j j & b b œœ ‰ œœ ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ œJ œJ J J B bbb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

-

œ j œœ Jœ.

Ϫ

b &b b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

b ˙ &b b

œ

j œœ J œ

‰

œ J

‰

œ j œœ Jœ.

‰ œ.

j œœ J œ

‰

œ J

‰

b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ &b b

pos

Bass

œ J

‰

-

-

-

-

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

-

nè

ma -

dre, nè

w

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example 8.  (continued) Vln. I

Vln. II

Cl.

Bsn.

Hn.

Vla.

Andromaca

b &b b Œ b &b b Œ

Vln. I

Vln. II

Cl.

Bsn.

Hn.

Vla.

Andromaca

Œ

œ

Œ

œ

Œ

œ

Œ

œ

Œ

œ

Œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

œ

∑

∑

∑

? bb b b &b b

∑

∑

∑

∑

∑

∑

œ B bbb

Œ

b œj &b b œ

œ œ œj œ

œ

sa,

-

? bb œ b

œ

Œ

œ

Œ

Œ

œ

Œ

œ

Œ

œ

‰

pos

-

so

œ œ mi

œ

Œ

Œ

œ

œ

œ

w

œ J

chia - mar

-

-

-

-

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

Œ

Œ

œ

Œ

œ

Œ

b ˙ &b b

Œ

œ

Œ

œ

Œ

˙

œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ &b b

œ

Œ

œ

Œ

œ œ

Ͻ

Œ

U Œ Œ

ϼ

Œ

U Œ Œ

b &b b

∑

∑

∑

Œ

Œ

U Œ Œ

? bb b

∑

∑

∑

Œ

Œ

U Œ Œ

∑

∑

∑

Œ

Œ

U Œ Œ

Ͻ

Œ

U Œ Œ

b &b b

B bbb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ &b b J J -

Bass

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ

b &b b

spo

Bass

œ

? bb w b

Peritz-The Lyric Myth of Voice.indd 193

nè

ma - dre, nè

œ œ

j œ

œ œ œj œ

spo

œ

œ

Œ

-

Œ

sa,

œ

œ

Œ

œ

Œ

œ œ œ

Œ

œ

mi

-

so

‰ œ ˙ J

Œ

œ

Œ

Œ

pos

œ

chia - mar.

Œ

Ͻ

U Œ ‰ œJ U Œ Œ Œ

Nè

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example 8.  (continued) Vln. I

Vln. II

Cl.

Bsn.

Hn.

Vla.

Andromaca

Vln. I

Vln. II

Cl.

Bsn.

Hn.

Vla.

Andromaca

Œ

U ‰™

U ‰ ‰

Œ

U™ ‰

r œœ œœ R œ œ R

U ‰ ‰

Œ

U ‰™

U ‰ ‰

Œ

U ‰™

r œœ œœ R œ œ R

U ‰ ‰

Œ

U™ ‰

Œ

Œ

Œ

Œ

U œ ‰ J

œ

U œ

r œ œ

U ‰ ‰

‰™

r œ œ

b &b b Œ

‰™

b &b b Œ

r œ œ

‰™

? bb Πb

‰™

b &b b Œ

‰™

B bbb Œ

‰™

b œ &b b

œ

ma - dre, Bass

U ‰ ‰

b &b b Œ

? bb Πb

‰™

Œ œ™ b œ &b b J ‰ œ

b œ œ &b b œ œ b &b b œ ? bb œ b b &b b œ œ b Bb b œ

Œ Œ Œ Œ

b ˙ &b b

nè

spo - sa,

Œ

œ œj ‰ œ™ œ ‰ œ J

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

Œ Œ Œ Œ

U™ ‰

r œ œ r œ œ

U ‰™

≈

U™ ‰

≈ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

U r œœ œœ ‰™ R œ œ U ‰™ R

≈ ˙˙ ˙ ≈

U r œœ œœ ‰™ R U œ ‰™ Œ

U ‰™

œ œ R

U™ ‰

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

˙˙ ˙

≈ œœj ‰ J

j j j œœ ‰ œ ‰ œ ‰ œJ œJ J ≈ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ ˙ R mi

≈

pos

-

œ œj ‰ œ™ œ ‰ œ J

œ œj ‰ œ œ J ‰ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

Œ

œ œ œ

Œ Œ

œ œ œ

Œ

Ó

-

œ œ œ œ

Œ Œ Œ Œ

∑

˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙

?b œ bb

Peritz-The Lyric Myth of Voice.indd 194

Œ

œ

Œ

œ

Œ

œ

Œ

œ J

so

chia -

œ œ œ œ U Ó U Ó U Ó U Ó U Ó Ó

Ó

U Ó

˙

U Ó

mar. Bass

Ϫ

10/08/22 2:49 PM

by the French (though they were soon freed because the commanding officer realized who she was). She went blind again in the 1820s, and remained so until she died of a stroke in 1833. Despite being praised as one of the greatest singers of all time by Della Lena, Marmontel, Stendhal, Anton Reicha, and others, Todi is now largely unknown outside her native country, never having attained the posthumous status of a Guadagni, a Pacchierotti, or a Pasta. Andromaca was revived at San Carlo in 1804, after Todi had retired, with the opening scene and “Ancor mi risuona la voce dolente” cut from the score. Perhaps the scene no longer had the desired effect when delivered by the voice of a different singer, or perhaps establishing the role of the good mother was no longer necessary because the ideology of domesticity had already been naturalized. The 1804 version began instead with a choral scene, as had become the fashion in French Revolution and Napoleonic-era opera.95 During that same period in northern Italy, the politics of serious opera libretti changed from Jacobinism to quasi-absolutist propaganda, yet the role assigned to the opera chorus remained constant, as the voice of “il Popolo” (the people).96 Perhaps the Neapolitan Andromaca, produced five years after Naples’s own ill-fated Jacobin uprising, also needed to foreground the voice of “the people” in the allegorical tale of Italy’s origins. After the fall of the Parthenopean Republic in the south, and Napoleon’s horse-trading with the Habsburgs in the north, Italy’s national consciousness seemed to depend less on the heroic actions of any one individual than on the collective force of its people. With or without Andromaca’s opening solo scene, both versions of the opera represented the heroine’s conflict between conjugal and maternal love through the symbol of the sepulchre. Ettore’s tomb serves a dual purpose by housing the hero’s mortal remains while also hiding his son from Ulisse. In Ettore’s tomb, past and future converge and conflict—as they do in Andromaca herself. Only by accepting her dual roles as wife and mother does she suture the gap between her husband, whose voice is defunct, and their child, who has yet to gain his voice. (Ettore never appears in the opera, and Astianatte is a nonsinging role.) By commemorating the heroes of the past and enculturating those of the future, tombs and voices together formed a conduit between history and the nation.

one day, the tomb will narrate all For many writers in post-Enlightenment Italy, the tomb was not only a lieu de mémoire but a site of spectral liminality, haunted by the ghostly voices and S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r   •   195

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fragmentary corpora of a past that writers could neither revive nor forget.97 Still, the remainders of those voices and bodies were rooted in histories that could prove fertile soil for a national consciousness. Among the epigrams Bettinelli cited as exemplars of soavità is a funerary inscription that “makes a sepulchre speak, and oh how it makes us feel paternal and conjugal love!” 98 Alessandro Verri’s Le notti romane novel (1792, part one) follows a narrator—known simply as “Italo” (Italian)—who converses with the spirits of Caesar, Antony, and others at the Tomb of the Scipios in Rome, and then (in part two, 1804) takes them on a guided tour of Rome’s ruins.99 The epigram to Foscolo’s Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1798/1802) is his translation of a line from Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), which in the original English reads, “Ev’n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries.” In one of Ortis’s letters Foscolo repeats and extends the quotation: “Nature cries even from the tomb, and her cry vanquishes the silence and obscurity of death.”100 These sepulchral voices all had political implications. In the coeval British context, the popularity of Gray’s Elegy in the latter half of the century coincided with developing connections between mourning and national consciousness in which the church graveyard functioned as a “synecdoche for the nation.”101 Italian writers’ obsession with tombs is typically read in a similar way, as projecting the frustrated desire for an Italian identity onto monuments to Italy’s illustrious dead.102 Italians and foreigners alike increasingly regarded the peninsula as Europe’s “mausoleum,” littered with the ruins of fifteen-hundred-plus years of culture and inhabited by uncivilized masses who had allowed the literary language of Petrarch to devolve into “thoughtless music” (in Foscolo’s words).103 The crumbling mausoleum, the forgotten tomb, the untended graveyard—they were all synecdoches for a politically fragmented Italy. What, then, was this “voice of Nature” that cried out from within them? Foscolo attempted to answer this question with his Dei sepolcri (On tombs, 1807), a long-form poem in which he positioned collective memory of the dead as the foundation of nationhood. As with Ortis, Foscolo composed Dei sepolcri as a reaction to another Napoleonic betrayal of Italy—this time an attack not just on Italy’s future, but on its past. In 1804 the emperor had issued the Edict of Saint-Cloud, which decreed that burials must take place outside the city walls (for sanitation purposes), that all burial monuments must be the same size (in the interest of equality), and that their inscriptions (i.e., epigrams) must be overseen by a special commission. Napoleon extended 196  •   S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r

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the law to his holdings in Italy in the fall of 1806. Foscolo responded with 295 lines of unrhyming endecasillabi sciolti—the same form as Cesarotti’s Ossian—devoted to mythologizing the tombs and legacies of Italy’s great men, from Petrarch to Michelangelo to Galileo. Foscolo’s ode sold even more copies than Ortis despite its unusual fragmented style and abrupt transitions. Foscolo owed much to Cesarotti’s Ossian, but he attributed the poem’s formal irregularities to archaic Greek lyric. The entire poem, which Foscolo dubbed un carme, another word for Greek lyric poetry, presents Foscolo’s Italy as a mirror of the mythical Hellenic-Trojan past. Foscolo thus cast himself as, at once, the Homer who creates a civilization by singing of its heroes and the Orpheus who reanimates the dead through song—unifying the historical with the mythological, the epic with the lyric, the Vichian with the Cesarottian.104 Through these allegories upon allegories, Foscolo mediated the abstract notion of a national consciousness into lyric. Foscolo played the national bard in Dei sepolcri, yet the concept of nationhood that he unfolded within the poem relied on a multitude of voices, especially women’s voices, for performing the essential labor of memory. Before the poet could do his work of nation-building, the people had to remember the names of their dead and, more fundamentally, remember that they shared a history; like Bettinelli, Foscolo regarded that emotional, preliterary work as the province of women. This becomes most apparent in the closing episode of Dei sepolcri, when Foscolo ventriloquizes the Trojan princess Cassandra. She foretells both the fall of Troy and Homer’s creation of the Iliad, the Western urtext of national epic, by prophesying the Trojan women’s lamentations: “And you palms and cypresses, planted by the women of Priam’s family, and who will grow, soon, alas! watered by widows’ tears, protect my ancestors” so that “one day” Homer might find them, “and the tomb will narrate all.”105 In the preHomeric, preliterary moment of Cassandra’s prophecy, the tomb’s narrative is not yet a written history. It is a memory—a future memory—transmissible only through women’s voices, first Cassandra’s, and then those of her countrywomen. Together, the future foretold by women’s voices, the trees nourished by women’s tears, and the memories preserved by women’s mourning would protect the heroes’ tombs until a national bard was ready to sing them into history.

S u bl i m e S u f f e r i ng a n d t h e G o od Mo t h e r   •   197

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Epilogue let me conclude with one more operatic scene of voice, first performed a decade before Foscolo’s poetic invocation of bardic song and feminine mourning in Dei sepolcri, as a hail and farewell to the two lyric figures who have guided us through this book. We find those figures in transmuted and recombined form in the climax (act 3, scene 1) of Foppa and Zingarelli’s 1796 opera Giulietta e Romeo, when Romeo, believing Giulietta to be dead, comes to lament at her tomb. (The basic plot of the opera, including this scene, is more or less the same as that of Shakespeare’s play.) Romeo laments much like Orfeo does: he sends the chorus of mourners away, oscillates back and forth between recitative and aria, and performatively declares what his voice is doing as he does it (crying out, lamenting, singing, and so forth). After drinking poison so that he can join Giulietta in death, he sings the aria “Ombra adorata, aspetta” to her imaginary ghost (“Beloved shade, wait / I will be indivisible from you”). He begins to slowly die on stage, like Euridice and Comala, while drawing on the imagery of Sappho’s sublime love-death from fragment 31 (“I feel spreading through my veins / the cold freeze of death”). Suddenly, as though Romeo’s lament has been granted Orphic powers of life and death, Giulietta reanimates within the tomb. She is Euridice restored—but she is also Fingal, calling to Comala from across the hilltops in a voice that affirms the impossible: the living presence of one believed to be dead. Sound unseen, Giulietta’s voice reaches out from beyond the grave, like those of Foscolo’s Sappho and Ortis, her body still hidden from view within the sepulchre. For a brief moment the two lovers’ soprano voices intertwine in a duet, sonically “indivisible” from one another. Romeo dies, but, unlike Shakespeare’s heroine, Giulietta survives. In a Sapphic twist on the Orphic and Ossianic endings, it is she who lives on, not 198

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only to mourn, but also to heal the wounds of her politically fragmented Verona.1 One could certainly interpret Romeo’s aria as a moment of song-as-song, and even take the entire scene as a self-reflexive staging of voice, though neither character is a lyric figure in any explicit sense.2 This interpretation is possible because the scene traces familiar discursive, thematic, and allegorical ground—both for us now, at the end of this book, and for operagoers in the late 1790s. That ground was even firmer in 1796 considering the two singers who originated the lead roles. Romeo was composed for the castrato Crescentini, who was often regarded as the heir to Pacchierotti’s Orphic sensibility, and whom we encountered as the Orfeo-esque Faone in Mayr’s 1794 Saffo and the Euridice-esque heroine of Morandi’s 1788 Comala. Giulietta was sung by the young soprano Giuseppina Grassini, a season after she had appeared as Euridice in a revival of Bertoni’s Orfeo in Venice. Their roles in Giulietta e Romeo became signature ones, and they sang them together in the 1796 performances in Milan, Venice, and Modena, and later in Paris in 1809 for Napoleon.3 As suggested by the fact that it was performed for a major event some thirteen years after its premiere, Zingarelli’s Giulietta e Romeo had unusual staying power by the standards of eighteenth-century opera in Italy: it was produced at least fifty-seven times between 1796 and 1837, exponentially more than any of the other musical works discussed in this book aside from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. Giulietta e Romeo can therefore be regarded as a kind of bridge between the singers and vocal practices of opera seria and those of nineteenth-century opera, as Feldman has argued through her reading of the aria “Ombra adorata, aspetta.” 4 I would add that the tomb scene offers a glimpse of how the lyric figures of the late Settecento, along with the myths of voice they embodied, were eventually subsumed into the character types, musico-dramatic structures, and vocal aesthetics of Ottocento opera. Though some of the affinities between character types and musicodramatic structures are reasonably apparent from my broad-strokes summary of the Giulietta e Romeo scene, a few additional words about vocal aesthetics are warranted here. Significantly, although there are two versions of Romeo’s aria in Zingarelli’s autograph score, the enduring version of “Ombra adorata, aspetta” was instead a third setting, composed by Crescentini himself—an Orphic castrato move in the spirit of Guadagni and Millico.5 Crescentini’s setting was often attributed to Zingarelli, underlining the new importance placed on the composer above the singer in the transition away from E pi l o gu e   •   199

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Metastasian opera seria. Yet the residues of Crescentini’s singing voice, as his vocal-stylistic practices of phrasing and embellishment, haunted the aria both in script and in practice. After becoming a major star in her own right, Grassini sang Romeo’s parts of the scene à la carte as a kind of chamber cantata in various concert performances, and other singers soon followed suit. Presumably Grassini had learned it, ornaments and all, directly from Crescentini.6 As captured in the collection of scores and living performing tradition of the tomb scene, a hidden lyric genealogy of voices inflected countless others through the decades as new singers took on the roles and new composers imported its outlines into their own operas.7 The scene became a repository for, indivisibly, the vocal practices of late Settecento opera and the fragmented remains of the lyric myth of voice—a tomb and a song in one. Indeed, this book’s investigation of self-reflexive presentations of voice has taken us through a graveyard’s worth of tombs. There have been scenes at Comala’s, Euridice’s, and Saffo’s sepulchres, as well as ones in the mausolea of Dario and Ettore, and in the desolate burial fields contemplated by Clearco and Ortis. Throughout, tombs and their contents—corporeal, textual, spectral—have served as a quilting point for discourses about voice, song, myth, and history. This is no coincidence. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, when delimiting human subjectivity became critical to notions of enlightened civilization, the two fundamental markers of humanity were understood to be the burial of the dead and the voice of feeling.8 In the introduction I wrote that voices are sites where bodies of ideology have been buried. In one sense, this plays on the idea that voices render sonorous certain truths about the bodies that produce them, using the pun on “bodies” to imply that such truths are plural and collectively constructed. Of course, I am not the first to point out that such knowledge, bodily or otherwise, is cultural rather than innate or natural.9 But, I think, I have explored that proposition somewhat differently by taking a Vichian line and looking to modes of knowledge construction that are based on imagination as the originary generative faculty—that is, by focusing on song, poetry, literature, and the myths that subtended them as the science before “science” as we now think of it. In another sense, then, the point about voices as bodies of ideology is to acknowledge that much of what we now call voice has been constructed independently of the bodily organs and cavities that create real vocal sound. Any voice—anything called voice—is itself an archive of foundational myths, compiled from the culturally contingent discourses and practices 200  •   E pi l o gu e

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through which song was conceived and inscribed in a given historical moment. The notions of voice within which we now labor owe much to the foundational civilizing myths of the late Settecento. Standard music historiographical narratives of that moment, around the turn of the nineteenth century, attest to the revaluation (or, really, devaluation) of music’s representative capacities. If the nineteenth century witnessed the “emancipation” of musical sound from language—heralding the birth of the autonomous, transcendent musical “work”—it also witnessed the sundering of voice-as-metaphor from voice-as-embodied-practice.10 This meant that the figure of the composer gained a “voice,” one that could be recognized in the written form of his music. His metaphorical “voice” was expressed entirely through musical tones and their arrangements, unfettered by verbal language, individual and ineffable in ways that were not allowed to sounding voices, which (as we have seen) had to be assiduously taxonomized in order to be interpreted.11 Sounding voices had to be taxonomized because, once music “itself ” was freed from the task of representation, that role was assigned to song and thus frequently associated with the bodies of gendered, disabled, racialized, classed, and otherwise “othered” subjects.12 This, in turn, positioned song as the sonic manifestation of those subjects’ taxonomized essences, subjecting their voices, bodies, and experiences to interpretation according to narratives that had already been ratified as truths. The contradictions within this ideology of voice mirror the ones that structure post-Enlightenment modes of subjectivity. Postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty, taking as a case study the shifting social perceptions of widowhood in nineteenth-century Bengal, argues that modern subjectivity depends on holding in tension two irreconcilable poles, what he calls “reason” and “feeling” (although those are not the only viable terms here).13 Chakrabarty reads the capacity to feel for others, to recognize suffering despite being a disinterested observer, as fundamental to the modern subject. But so too is reason, he continues, being the faculty that slots the individuality of others’ experiences and feelings into recognizable categories of subjectivity by taxonomizing their identities and social roles.14 Through reason the specific becomes, if not universally intelligible, at least interpretable. Thus, however much reason and feeling might seem at cross-purposes, their intersections are precisely what produce modern subjectivity. Extending Chakrabarty’s premise, I suggest that, writ large, the voice as tethered to modern subjectivity supports reason, the taxonomizing impulse, by transmitE pi l o gu e   •   201

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ting language, facilitating sociability, performing roles, establishing law, and representing publicness; while heard large, the voice as tethered to modern subjectivity supports the insistence on individuality within those taxonomies. In this way the metaphorical link between voice and subjectivity was prefigured by the dual civilizing and naturalizing processes of the lyric myth of voice. After all, lyric is similarly produced through sustaining an “inner distance,” with its two poles being music and words (or performance and the performative, feeling and reason, or one of many other dyadic formulations).15 Within the lyric frame, as within the modern subject, the thing that seems capable of traversing that inner distance—and rendering sensible its productive tensions—is the voice. The belief that such a gap can ever be closed, let alone made audible, is a foundational myth bequeathed to us by civilizing song.

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ack now l e dgm en ts

I was able to begin and complete this project thanks to the support of two incredible music departments, each one full of friends, colleagues, teachers, and students without whom I never could have imagined writing this book. I am grateful to all, and apologize if I have missed any names in the following paragraphs. I owe more than I can express to Martha Feldman, my mentor, dear friend, and former dissertation adviser, who has helped me find my way out of many a selva oscura over the years. I hope she doesn’t mind that I rely here on the words of a writer far more accomplished than I am, who put it better in poetry than I ever could in prose: “Tu se’ lo mio maestro e’l mio autore, / tu se’ solo colui da cu’ io tolsi / lo bello stile che m’ha fatto onore.” At the University of Chicago I was lucky to do a PhD alongside brilliant scholars whose creativity and originality energized me throughout the process. I am especially grateful to Julianne Grasso, Anabel Maler, George Adams, Laura Turner, Devon Borowski, Ana Sanchez-Rojo, Mari Jo Velasco, Abigail Fine, and many others named below, all of whom have been cheering presences from the moment we met in the windowless bunker of JRL 264. My deepest thanks to the faculty of the University of Chicago Department of Music, especially Bob Kendrick, Thomas Christensen, Berthold Hoeckner, Seth Brodsky, and the late Erling Sandmo (who visited in winter 2013), each of whom helped me grow as a writer and thinker in immeasurable ways. I also wish to thank the Humanities Division and the Franke Institute for the Humanities for the various grants, fellowships, and prizes that enabled me to undertake research for my dissertation, the precursor to this book. I have been utterly floored by the generosity, warmth, and friendship of my colleagues in the Yale Department of Music, from Stoeckel Hall to our Zoom rooms and back again. Thank you all: first, to my department chair Ian Quinn, who always made time for me, even when steering us through a global pandemic; and to Rick Cohn, Dan Harrison, Pat McCreless, Gary Tomlinson, Michael Veal, and Anna Zayaruznaya for many delightful lunchtime chats, encouraging email exchanges, 203

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and invaluable support both personal and intellectual. Special thanks to Gundula Kreuzer, for East Rock walks, thoughtful comments on several chunks of this manuscript, and being a role model; and to Brian Kane, for Christopher Martin’s, the owl of Minerva, and insightful feedback on the introduction. My newest colleagues at Yale, Braxton Shelley, Lindsay Wright, and Ameera Nimjee, are in fact some of my oldest interlocutors; I am grateful for their friendship and razor-sharp minds, both as members of my graduate school cohort and, now, faculty colleagues. My thanks, too, to the wonderful department staff—Kristine Kinsella, Jennifer GambacciniDenillo, and Sue Penney—for their help and goodwill. I am profoundly grateful to the brave and curious graduate students who have taken my seminars, worked with me on qualifying exam topics, and invited me onto their dissertation committees, especially those whose continuing work on all things voice has given me food for thought: Philip Bixby, Allison Chu, Taryn Dubois, Áine Palmer, and Alec Wood. Finally, thanks to Yale’s MacMillan Center for funding many of the research expenses for this book, and to the Whitney Humanities Center for hosting me as a Junior Fellow during the 2020–2021 academic year. I wish to acknowledge the staff of the following libraries and repositories for their assistance: the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago; the Newberry Library in Chicago; the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Sterling Memorial Library, Bass Library, and Beinecke Library, all at Yale; the Biblioteca Palatina, especially the music section, in Parma; the Biblioteca della Musica in Bologna; the Biblioteca Correr, Biblioteca Marciana, Biblioteca Nuova Manica Lunga (Fondazione Cini), Biblioteca di Studi Teatrali (Casa di Goldoni), and Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi, all in Venice; the Biblioteca del Conservatorio San Pietro a Majella in Naples; the Biblioteca del Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi in Milan; the Conservatorio Francesco Morlacchi in Perugia; the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome; the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; and the British Library. For helping me navigate these repositories and my travels among them, thanks to Valentina Anzani, Gianpaolo Battaglia, Jungmee Kim, and Lucia Marchi. In addition to the institutions already mentioned, I am thankful for the support of the following: two grants from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation (2016 and 2019), which enabled me to undertake deep archival research in Venice and Milan; the 2018 Rome Prize (the Marian and Andrew Heiskell Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies) from the American Academy in Rome, which introduced me to some of my favorite people, places, and pizzas on the planet while supporting my research and writing in the Casa Rustica; the 2019 Mellon Council for European Studies fellowship, which funded my dissertation completion year; and the Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 and Paul A. Pisk Prize, both awarded by the American Musicological Society in 2018, for helping convince me that I just might be a musicologist after all. It has been a joy working on this book with Raina Polivka at the University of California Press. From our first meeting I felt as though she heard and understood 204  •   ac k now l e d g m e n t s

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exactly what I was trying to do, and I am grateful to her—as well as to the UC Press editorial board—for letting me do it under their illustrious imprint. My thanks, too, to UC Press’s editorial assistant Madison Wetzell for answering my mountain of questions with patience and clarity. I am unendingly grateful to the friends, colleagues, and mentors who have read chapter drafts, given advice, suggested readings, responded enthusiastically to my flood of ideas, and otherwise contributed in essential ways to the making of this book. To specify what each has given me would take another hundred pages, so for now I simply offer my sincere thanks to Trevor Baça, Jennifer Birkeland, Liana Brent, Hannah Burnett, Raymond Carlson, Joanna Fiduccia, Diana Garvin, Lauren Donovan Ginsberg, Bonnie Gordon, Ted Gordon, Roger Mathew Grant, Erika Supria Honisch, Elisabeth Le Guin, Pauline LeVen, Anna Majeski, Sophia Quach McCabe, Lisa Messeri, Martha Nussbaum, Rourke O’Brien, John Ochsendorf, Roger Parker, Ayesha Ramachandran, Eugenio Refini, Amy Stebbins, and Claudio Vellutini. Special thanks are due here to Martha Feldman, Danielle Simon, August Sheehy, John Y. Lawrence, Ellen Lockhart, and the anonymous reader for UC Press, all of whom materially improved this book with their sensitive readings of, and perspicacious comments on, the full (or nearly full) manuscript. A version of chapter 5 was published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society 74, no. 2 (Summer 2021) as “The Female Sublime: Domesticating Luigia Todi’s Voice”; my thanks to UC Press, which publishes JAMS, for granting me permission to include that material here. Some of the ideas woven throughout chapters 2 and 3 were first explored as case studies in my article “Orpheus’s Civilising Song, or, the Politics of Voice in Late Enlightenment Italy,” published in Cambridge Opera Journal 31, no. 2 (Summer 2019 [2020]); they appear in related but different forms in the present book. Various portions of this work have been presented at venues including the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society; the International Conference of Europeanists; TOSC@Bologna; the “Operatic Workings of the Mind” conference at the University of Oxford; the “Twenty-First-Century Challenges to the History of Eighteenth-Century Musical Aesthetics” conference at the University of Turin; the Shop Talk Lecture Series of the American Academy in Rome; the History/ Theory Workshop, Theater and Performance Studies Workshop, and Eighteenth/ Nineteenth-Century Workshop at the University of Chicago; the “Viva Voce” Lecture Series of the Department of Italian Studies at NYU, with a generous and thought-provoking response by Shane Butler; and the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale. My effusive thanks to all who organized and attended these events for taking the time to engage with my work. I am grateful to my friends outside of academia—especially Marcelle Duarte, Emily Hofman, Rachael Liberman, and Oussama Zahr—for helping me keep things in perspective and bringing me so much joy over the years. Thanks to my maternal ac k now l e d g m e n t s   •   205

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grandparents, especially Grandma Kay, for supporting what she called my “golden voice.” My paternal grandparents did not live to see me start my PhD, but Oma’s quiet strength and Opa’s passion for opera have stayed with me always. Thanks to my sister, Lynne Haney, for her perennially practical advice, and my nephew, Tristan Tapolcai, for being awesome. My mother, Janice, shared with me her love of words, and my father, Rudy, who passed away when I was in graduate school, shared with me his love of music; I have tried to pay forward both of these inheritances through this book. Above all I thank my partner, quaran-teammate, cat co-parent, and best friend, Mitch Dvoracek. He has followed me without complaint from New York to Chicago to Rome to New Haven, making sure I am sufficiently caffeinated and hydrated, and keeping me sane with his endless good humor and invigorating Strauss horn calls. For putting up with me as I wrote, listening patiently to my attempts to work through ideas, and laughing at my terrible puns, I dedicate this book to him.

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not es

introduction 1.  “Il Padre Mersenne ed il Padre Kirker [Kircher] ebbero a dire, che se venisse immaginato un istrumento che fosse ad un tempo stesso ad aria, e a corde, questo sarebbe il più perfetto di ogn’ altro. Questi Sapienti pretendevano che noi facessimo una scoperta, di cui la natura si risparmiò la fatica. Quest’ ammirabile istrumento è tanto antico quanto lo è il mondo; e questo lo possediamo tutti nella voce umana.” Il quotidiano veneto, 30 December 1803, 1156–57. 2.  Weidman, “Anthropology and Voice.” For a recent take on the many meanings and contradictions of “voice,” see Lockhart, “Voice Boxes.” 3.  On the relationship between historicism and critical methodologies when studying music of this period, see Bloechl, “Race, Empire, and Early Music,” in Rethinking Difference, esp. 102–4. 4.  On voice as manifesting uniqueness, see Cavarero, For More than One Voice. On metaphorical voice and the “modern” self, see Taylor, Sources of the Self, 389–90. On voice, vocal training, and the “good liberal self,” see Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance, 126. For an overview of voice in “Euro-Western modernity,” see Weidman, “Anthropology and Voice,” 39–40. 5.  Dolar, Voice and Nothing More; Weidman, “Anthropology and Voice,” esp. 45; Eidsheim, Race of Sound. 6.  Davies, “Voice Belongs,” in Feldman et al., “Colloquy: Why Voice Now?”; on pluralities, see the other essays in the colloquy, as well as Eidsheim and Meizel, eds., Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies; Feldman and Zeitlin, eds., Voice as Something More. 7.  Dolar, Voice and Nothing More, 31. 8.  Peritz, “Female Sublime.” 9.  Butler, Musical Theater, 2. Many of the reforms she discusses laid the groundwork for the shifts I describe in chapter 2. 10.  On the reception of Italian improvisers, primarily in the nineteenth century, see Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation; Esse, Singing Sappho. 207

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11.  Bonnie Gordon makes this claim about castrato voices in the long seventeenth century but has suggested that it extended both to other voice types and into the eighteenth century. See Gordon’s “Castrato Meets the Cyborg” and Voice Machines. My warm thanks to her for sharing the latter with me before it was published. 12.  For examples of these and other critiques from the mid-to-late eighteenth century, see Algarotti, Saggio sopra l’opera in musica; Planelli, Dell’opera in musica; Borsa, Saggio filosofico sopra la musica imitativa teatrale; Mattei, Memorie per servire alla vita di Metastasio. 13.  On Italian opera culture in this period as revolving around voices and the singers who flaunted them, see di Benedetto, “Poetics and Polemics,” in Bianconi and Pestelli, eds., Opera in Theory and Practice, 1–65, esp. 37–38. 14.  Mattei, La filosofia della musica. 15.  Jommelli to Martinelli, letter of 1769, translated in McClymonds, Niccolò Jommelli, 488. 16.  See Calzabigi, Dissertazione [. . .] su le poesie drammatiche del sig. Abate Pietro Metastasio, in Calzabigi, ed., Poesie del sig. Abate Pietro Metastasio. For a later, private, and far less polite version of Calzabigi’s views on Metastasio, see his letter to Kaunitz on Alceste (6 March 1767), translated in Heartz, Haydn, Mozart, and the Viennese School, 731. See also Borsa, Saggio filosofico sopra la musica imitativa teatrale. Giuseppe “Joseph” Baretti, an Italian expatriate residing in London, attempted to rehabilitate Metastasio’s reputation as a poet by arguing that his verses were indeed high art and only seemed otherwise because they were so consistently ruined by incompetent musical settings. See Baretti, Italian Library, lxxvii. 17.  Cavarero reads the Greek philosophers’ (especially Plato’s) mistrust of voice as leading to the “devocalization of logos”; see Cavarero, For More than One Voice. On anxieties about “new music,” lyric poetry, and voice in fifth-century BCE Greece, see LeVen, Many-Headed Muse. For an example that is more temporally proximate to the period discussed here, consider the critique of “pure voice” as “nothingness” in mid-seventeenth-century Venetian opera, on which see Calcagno, “Signifying Nothing.” 18.  Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?”; Abbate, “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women”; de Certeau, “Vocal Utopias: Glossolalia,” esp. 34. 19.  Moe, View from Vesuvius, 21. 20.  See, for instance, Diderot, Entretiens sur Le Fils naturel [1759], trans. in Diderot: Selected Writings on Art and Literature, 4–79; P. Verri, “La Musica,” in Il Caffè, 2:343–47. On broader eighteenth-century shifts in musical taste from astonishment to verisimilitude and sentiment, see Heartz, Music in European Capitals; Feldman, “Music and the Order of the Passions.” 21.  Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 305–6. For a very different, and brilliantly original, reading of the relationship between gesture, voice, and music, see Maler’s “Music and Deafness” and Seeing Voices. 22.  Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 306. 23.  Taylor, Sources of the Self, x, 32, 35. 208  •   No t e s

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24.  Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 318, 325–26. The translator of this edition renders the French sensible as “sensitive,” which is more idiomatic in English but disconnects it from the important context of sensibility (on which see chapter 2 of this volume). 25.  For a detailed discussion of Rousseau’s presentation of voice, song, language, and writing, along with a critique of Derrida’s reading of Rousseau in Of Grammatology, see Tomlinson, Singing of the New World, 11–17. 26.  Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 329, 331. 27.  See Heartz, Music in European Capitals, 709–18. 28.  Rousseau said this explicitly of the Chinese, but his implications about the Italians were far subtler (clearly a case of non-Europeans versus Europeans, or nonwhiteness versus whiteness); see Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique, s.v. “voix”; Tomlinson, Singing of the New World, 14. On Rousseau’s Letter as otherizing Italians as “primitive,” see Gordon, Voice Machines, esp. chapter 7, “On the Cusp.” 29.  Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style, 3–13. 30.  Aside from Tosi’s Opinioni de’ cantori antichi e moderni (Bologna, 1723), the only major singing treatise published in Italy during the eighteenth century was Mancini’s Pensieri e riflessioni pratiche sopra il canto figurato (Milan, 1777), which had originally been published in 1774 in Vienna. Examples of foreign-published treatises promising to share the secrets of Italianate technique include Tenducci’s Instruction of Mr. Tenducci, to His Scholars (London, 1785) and various editions of Solfèges d’Italie (Paris, 1772–). On the absolute necessity of one-on-one instruction, see Giuseppe Millico’s preface to La pietà d’amore, on which much more in chapter 2. 31.  Heartz, Music in European Capitals; Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty; Martina, Orfeo-Orphée; Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music. 32.  On the development of comic opera see Heartz, “Vis Comica: Goldoni, Galuppi, and L’Arcadia in Brenta,” in Muraro, ed., Venezia e il melodramma nel Settecento, 33–73. On the influence of early opera buffa on Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (via opéra comique), see Brown, Gluck and the French Theater in Vienna, 364–66. 33.  Polzonetti, Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution. 34.  Butler, Ancient Phonograph, 20, 24. 35.  Abbate, “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women.” 36.  Feldman, “Arias: Form, Feeling, Exchange,” chapter 2 in Opera and Sovereignty, 42–96. 37.  Calcagno, “Signifying Nothing”; Wilbourne, “Lo Schiavetto (1612)”; Wilbourne, Seventeenth-Century Opera; Esse, Singing Sappho. 38.  On voice as created not only by the “vocalizer” but also by listeners, see Eidsheim, Race of Sound, 11. 39.  Ochoa Gautier, Aurality, 7–8. 40.  Ochoa Gautier, Aurality, 3; Tomlinson, Singing of the New World. On grappling with the limitations and lacunae of the colonial archive (beyond the study of music and sound), see Stoler, Along the Archival Grain. No t e s   •   209

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41.  For some of these arguments about Italy and the Global South, see Cazzato, ed., Anglo-Southern Relations; Cassano, Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean; Moe, View from Vesuvius. 42.  Weidman, “Anthropology and Voice,” 38. 43.  Tomlinson has persuasively argued that Vico’s poesia is closer to “song” than what we think of with the word “poetry,” and I follow his reading here; see Tomlinson, “Vico’s Songs,” esp. 356. 44.  Mazzotta, New Map of the World, 115, 10. Vico’s positioning of song/poetry in culture is an extreme version of what Tomlinson and Michael Denning have recently called “song formations,” in which one can read “musical acts as implicated in [. . .] the nature and values of the cultures in which they occur.” Denning and Tomlinson, “Cantologies,” 115. 45.  Tomlinson, “Vico’s Songs,” 356. 46.  Tomlinson, “Vico’s Songs,” 358–60. 47.  Foscolo, “Dissertation on an Ancient Hymn to the Graces” [1822], in Opere, 1:147. 48.  De Staël, “The Spirit of Translation” [1815], trans. Luzzi, 283. The French original was translated into Italian by Pietro Giordani as “Sulla maniera e l’utilità delle traduzioni” and published in Milan’s Biblioteca italiana in January 1816; reprinted in Bellorini, ed., Discussioni e polemiche sul romanticismo, 1:3–9. On de Staël’s critique of Italian opera in the essay, see Smart, Waiting for Verdi, 2–3. 49.  Foscolo, “Dissertation on an Ancient Hymn to the Graces” [1822], in Opere, 1:144. 50.  Vico, Scienza nuova, §186. 51.  Foscolo, “Dissertation on an Ancient Hymn to the Graces” [1822], in Opere, 1:143. 52.  Battaglia, ed., Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, s.v. “lirico,” §2. The Grande dizionario lists the first text to use lirico in this particular meaning as Alessandro Verri’s novel Le notti romane al sepolcro de’ Scipioni (Rome, 1792), vol. 1. On the intertwining of voice, history, and politics in Verri’s novel, see Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music, 85–111. 53.  Quoted and translated in Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 92. See also Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics [1818–29], 1038. 54.  Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in Shelley, Poetry and Prose, 512. 55.  Kurke, “Strangeness of ‘Song Culture.’ ” 56.  Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 7; see also chapter 3 in the same volume. 57.  Brewster, Lyric, 34. 58.  Diderot, Entretiens sur Le Fils naturel, trans. in Diderot: Selected Writings on Art and Literature. 59.  On the links between unity and subjectivity in lyric, see Culler, Theory of the Lyric, esp. 2. He notes how some pedagogical approaches treat lyric poems as dramatic or novelistic monologues and criticizes such approaches for boiling the lyric down to the speech of a “character.” That is more or less what Italian writers did to make sense of Sappho’s lyrics in the 1780s, on which see chapter 4 of this book. 210  •   No t e s

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60.  Diderot, Paradoxe sur le comédien (1773–77, published posthumously in 1830), trans. in Diderot: Selected Writings on Art and Literature, 153–54. 61.  In lieu of the terms diegetic song or metasong, I use the simple (if still less than ideal) formulation song-as-song to denote instances in which a character’s onstage singing is meant to represent a “performance” or other singing that occurs within the world of the opera. 62.  Sappho and Orpheus, along with Pindar, Anacreon, and Amphion, are mentioned by name throughout the entry, though not in this specific quote. “Fra noi, Malherbe, Rousseau fingevano di cantar sulla lira. [. . .] Il poeta lirico avea sempre un carattere vero [e] questi poeti cantavano realmente sugli accordi della lira.” Marmontel, “Lirico,” trans. from French to Italian in Dizionario di belle lettere, 2:186. 63.  Esse, Singing Sappho. 64.  Reynolds, Sappho Companion, ix.

chapter one: the poet sings Continue Your Song, Sweet Voice: “Segui il tuo canto, / Voce soave.” Melchiorre Cesarotti, trans., La morte di Cucullino, lines 1–4, in Opere, 3: Poesie di Ossian, 2:41. Unless otherwise noted, all citations from Cesarotti’s Poesie di Ossian and the accompanying commentary are from the version in his 1801 Opere. 1.  On Tasso as an “omniscient” yet “passionate” narrator, like a Greek chorus of sorts, see Raimondi, Rinascimento inquieto, 345; Calcagno, From Madrigal to Opera, 182–83. 2.  Macpherson’s Ossianic fragments are often dismissed as a hoax or forgery, but this is too simplistic a view given that oral traditions do not typically have “authoritative” written sources. On the complexities of Macpherson’s process and its reception in eighteenth-century Britain, see Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, esp. 6–8, 67–127. 3.  On the cultural influence of Cesarotti’s Ossian, see Mattioda, “Ossian in Italy,” in Gaskill, ed., Reception of Ossian in Europe; Folena, “Cesarotti, Monti e il melodramma”; Castelvecchi, “Walter Scott, Rossini e la ‘couleur ossianique’ ”; Chegai, L’esilio di Metastasio, 116–19; Zoppelli, “Fingallo, Comala e Bonaparte”; Broggi, Rise of the Italian Canto; Gambarota, Irresistible Signs, 145–89; Esse, Singing Sappho, 75–99. 4.  The classic study on the political work of epic is Quint, Epic and Empire. 5.  Cesarotti’s view of Homer as a real individual (contra Vico’s view, as well as that of many late eighteenth-century classicists) is discussed at the end of this chapter. Of course this was more Cesarotti’s attempt to distinguish himself from his predecessors than the historical rupture he made it out to be. As Jane Tylus has recently shown, Tasso’s poetic “voce” was an important point of critique for Gerusalemme liberata, and for reasons that resonate with Cesarotti’s Ossian: namely, the poet’s use of a broader, non-Tuscan-only lexicon to lend a self-conscious foreignness No t e s  •   211

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to his style. What is different, however, is that Tasso saw this as a return to Homer’s “sublime” style, while Cesarotti repeatedly insisted he was breaking from Homer (and from Tasso). On Tasso see Tylus, “Non basta il suono.” On “voice” as the quintessential element of the “real Ossian” for Cesarotti, see Gambarota, Irresistible Signs, 159. 6.  Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 75. 7.  On voices, particularly those of female improvisers, as connected with histories in the first decades of the nineteenth century in Italy, see Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music, 85–111; Esse, Singing Sappho, 16–42. The shift from male to female voices between Cesarotti’s Ossian and the period discussed in these Ottocento studies is taken up in chapters 4 and 5 of this book. 8.  Polzonetti, “Tartini and the Tongue of St. Anthony”; Rousseau, Letter on French Music, in Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music; Tomlinson, “Vico’s Songs.” 9.  On gondolier song see Polzonetti, “Tartini and the Tongue of St. Anthony,” 447–48. On the declamation of even the greatest fictional improviser, de Staël’s Corinne, as “monotonous,” and transcriptions of the real improviser Corilla Olimpica’s poems as similarly simple and folk-like, see Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music, 95, 106; Esse, Singing Sappho, 34–35. Comparing vernacular or popular singing to Homeric recitation was a common move in the later eighteenth century; in Russia, for instance, German outsiders compared the serfs’ singing to Homer’s “ancient monotonic recitation,” on which see Karnes, “Inventing Eastern Europe,” 78. Herder, however, took pains to distance “street” people from the “folk,” as the former “never sing or create poetry, but instead cry out and torture the language”; quoted in Denning and Tomlinson, “Cantologies,” 120n22. 10.  On an “attention to the voice” as a focus on expressivity, embodiment, and “a performing present,” as opposed to the broader “terrain” of song, see Denning and Tomlinson, “Cantologies,” 114. 11.  Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 70–71. 12.  On the materiality of song as collapsing time and space, see Ochoa Gautier, Aurality, 80. 13.  Lord, Singer of Tales, 4. 14.  Gambarota, Irresistible Signs, 159. 15.  Cesarotti, “Discorso preliminare,” Poesie di Ossian 2:5. 16.  For a similar, coeval representation of translation vis-à-vis writing, voice, and the self, see Kittler’s reading of Goethe’s Faust in Discourse Networks, 3–24. 17.  As used in Orlando furioso and Gerusalemme liberata, the ottava rima consists of eight endecasillabi (hendecasyllabic lines) in the rhyme scheme ABABABCC, which the Cinquecento poets inherited from earlier poets like Boccaccio and Boiardo, as well as from traditions of oral poetry like that of the canterini; on the latter, including connections with Orpheus, see Wilson, Singing to the Lyre. Interestingly, Renaissance comparisons between Ariosto and Tasso adumbrated the Settecento ones between cantabile forms and Cesarotti’s Ossian, underlining the recursivity of certain concerns in Italian vernacular poetics. As Tylus shows, 212  •   No t e s

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Ariosto’s verses were cast as singable, sweet, and properly Petrarchan, while Tasso’s were supposedly impossible to understand when read aloud because they were too lexically complicated, though both were technically in ottava rima; see Tylus, “Non basta il suono,” esp. 267–68. Some Italian Renaissance poets did use endecasillabi sciolti both for original epics and translations of classical ones, and for similar reasons as Cesarotti’s, but it never fully caught on; my thanks to Eugenio Refini for pointing this out. 18.  Gambarota, Irresistible Signs, 166. 19.  Cesarotti unquestionably would have been familiar with the legacy of these Renaissance oral traditions, as well as with the literate, epic one. On the relationships between oral lyric and Renaissance epic, see Pirrotta, “Orpheus, Singer of Strambotti”; Haar, “Arie per cantar stanze ariostesche.” On the use of ottava rima by Italian poetic improvisers, see Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music, 106; Esse, Singing Sappho, 34–35. 20.  Cesarotti explained in detail his ideas about the connections between rhythm, line length, and feeling in his “Osservazioni” (endnotes) for Comala, in Poesie di Ossian, esp. 2:342–43. Gambarota argues that Cesarotti mixed meters and registers in order to “challenge the [reader’s] imagination”; see Irresistible Signs, 171–73. 21.  Cesarotti, “Osservazioni” on Comala, in Poesie di Ossian, 2:345n1. 22.  Jarvis, “What Does Art Know?,” 69. 23.  “Il tuono delle sue [Homer’s] narrazioni somiglia molto al canto delle sue cicale: è lungo, ed uniforme. La tenera apostrofe di Ossian [i.e., his changes in register] rompe la monotonia dello stile.” A bit earlier, introducing the comparison, he referred to Ossian’s verses as “toccante.” Cesarotti, “Osservazioni” on Fingal, in Poesie di Ossian, 2:296n21. 24.  “Ossian non espone l’affisso di poeta. Si crede d’ascoltar un uomo ordinario, che racconti un fatto.” Cesarotti, “Osservazioni” on Fingal, in Poesie di Ossian, 2:288n1. 25.  Arteaga, Rivoluzioni del teatro musicale italiano, 2:33–34; Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music, 44–84, with a discussion of Arteaga on 64. 26.  On Cesarotti’s translations of Voltaire’s Mahomet and La mort de César, along with the Ragionamento sopra il diletto della tragedia and Ragionamento sopra l’origine e i progressi dell’arte poetica, see Mattioda, “Ossian in Italy,” 275. 27.  Venice was one of the few places in mid-eighteenth-century Italy where Vico’s work was well known, which likely explains how Cesarotti encountered it. Still, Cesarotti’s Ossian had significantly broader circulation—it was a literary work, after all, not a philosophical treatise, and its translator became something of a celebrity by the mid-1770s. On Vico’s reception in eighteenth-century Venice, see Vico, Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, 72–73. On the comparative name recognition of Vico versus Cesarotti in the late eighteenth century, see Clark, “Herder, Cesarotti and Vico,” 669. 28.  For more on Vico’s theory of the three ages and the role of primordial song within it, see Tomlinson, “Vico’s Songs,” esp. 351–52. No t e s  •   213

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29.  Vico, Scienza nuova §1104–6. 30.  “Il parlar per sentenze universali ed estratte è proprio dei filosofi, e degli oziosi ragionatori. Gli uomini rozzi ed appassionati singolarizzano e parlano per sentimenti. Se questa è la qualità più essenziale del vero linguaggio poetico, come vuole il Vico, Ossian è’l più gran poeta d’ogn’altro. Non ve n’ha alcuno più ricco di sentimenti, e più scarso di sentenze di lui. La presente è forse l’unica che s’incontri in tutte le sue poesie.” Cesarotti, “Osservazioni” on Fingal, in Poesie di Ossian, 2:306n4. 31.  Cesarotti, “Osservazioni” on Fingal, in Poesie di Ossian, 2:297n25. 32.  “Son dispersi pei colli i duci nostri, / Nè più la voce di Fingallo udranno.” Cesarotti, Comala, 2:12, lines 124–25. 33.  “Quì solo udrannosi / Voci di giubilo, / Voci di caccia.” Cesarotti, Comala, 2:20, lines 284–86. 34.  Cesarotti, Comala, 2:22n(l). Regarding these sudden deaths in Ossian, Tufano points to Cesarotti’s commentary on a different Ossianic poem, Colanto e Cutona, in which the translator explained, “It will seem strange and unrealistic to some that these deaths are products only of the force of sadness. But the century of softness is not really able to judge the state of the human heart in the centuries of passion.” My translation is based on the original Italian given in Tufano, “Orfeo in Caledonia,” 611, who quotes from Cesarotti, Poesie di Ossian (1763), 2:209n2. 35.  Cesarotti, Comala, 2:26, lines 379, 387–89. 36.  Macpherson, Comala, in The Poems of Ossian, 109. (Note that there are no line numbers given for Macpherson because his Ossian is in prose.) Cesarotti, Comala, 2:23, lines 324–25, and 2:26–27, lines 380, 387. 37.  For more on the libretto-like typesetting of Comala, see Tufano, “Orfeo in Caledonia,” 602. 38.  Folena, “Cesarotti, Monti, e il melodramma,” 326. 39.  See, for example, Broggi, Rise of the Italian Canto; Gambarota, Irresistible Signs, 145–89; Brand and Pertile, eds., Cambridge History of Italian Literature, 394. 40.  “La Comala sarebbe più bella se avesse uno stile più metastasiano. I recitativi poco si distinguono dalle arie, e pare che vi sia una confusione. L’entrata e tutto quel che forma il dialogo dovrebbe esser di versi interi di undici e sette, o pure cominciare con un’aria regolata.” Mattei continued on to discuss specific moments of metrical irregularity in the poem and the issues he thought they caused. Mattei, Osservazioni sopra i pezzi lirici e drammatici di Ossian, letter to Melchiorre Cesarotti of 18 May 1779, reprinted in Cesarotti, Opere, 35:23–32, quotes on 24, 28. 41.  On Calzabigi’s portraying “the new plan of drama which, if not invented, was at least first carried out by me in Orfeo” as fixing some of the issues created by Metastasian opera—including the problem of singers’ “vocal excesses”—see Brown, Gluck and the French Theater, 359–64; the quote, from a letter of 6 March 1767, is translated on p. 360. 42.  “Mi sarebbe al certo gratissimo di veder posto in musico da cotesto celebre professore qualche pezzo rimato del celtico bardo. Io non ho veruna intelligenza di quest’arte, ma parmi pure che quella versificazione imitativa, spezzata e varia, sarebbe suscettibile di bellezze musicali straordinarie.” Cesarotti was probably 214  •   No t e s

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thinking of Comala here, since it is one of the poems with several instances of rhyming stanzas. The letter, along with the one to which it responds, is reprinted in Cesarotti, Opere, 35:259. 43.  The 1776 Venice production is discussed further in chapter 2. On the performances of Gluck and Calzabigi’s Orfeo ed Euridice as an “oratorio” in Padua’s Sant’Antonio, see Cattelan, “Altri Orfei di Gaetano Guadagni,” introduction to Bertoni, Orfeo ed Euridice, esp. xix, lixff. 44.  In the original (Calzabigi, annotations to Il Lulliade [1789], 277): Suppone Voltaire che in Ossiano non vi sia alcun merito poetico; lo paragona a un di que’ nostri improvvisatori che, sopra i temi che loro si danno, estemporaneamente, al suono di una chitarra o d’altro strumento di corde, cantano in differenti metri quello che vien loro alla mente. Voltaire sbagliò assai; [. . .] neppure in prosa ex tempore si fanno de’ componimenti come quelli d’Ossiano o supposti d’Ossiano; [. . .] Se Ossiano non li scrivea, dovea però lungamente meditarli e, dotato d’una straordinaria memoria, cantarli poi sull’arpa. Il celebre Gluck era capace di comporre un’opera intiera in musica senza scriverne una sola nota; e cantarla, sempre che gli veniva richiesto, senza una sola variazione; molti mesi dopo, e quando bisognava, scriveva le note.

Calzabigi’s reference to improvisers’ singing in “different meters” is odd since we know that improvisers relied on regular meter, especially the ottava, to organize their extemporizations. It might be implying a distinction between “lowbrow” cantastorie and educated improvisers like Corilla Olimpica, or it could just be another case of Calzabigi’s embellishing for rhetorical effect. 45.  Calzabigi, letter to the Mercure de France, 25 June 1784; quoted and translated in Howard, C. W. von Gluck: Orfeo, 24–25. Regarding the many musical influences on Gluck’s vocal writing in Orfeo, including opéra comique and ballet, see Brown, Gluck and the French Theater, 364–68. 46.  See G. Gabrielle Starr on Aphra Behn, dramatic lyric, and the soliloquy in Lyric Generations, 54. Stefano Castelvecchi writes about paratactic syntax in sentimental opera of the later eighteenth century, particularly in his work on Paisiello’s Nina; see his Sentimental Opera, esp. 167–80. Michael Vande Berg argues that the infamous typographical oddities in Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy (1759) were “exaggerating the conventional punctuation strategies of the age” in order to “captur[e] the nuances of the human voice”; see his “Pictures of Pronunciation,” 23. See also Barchas, “Clarissa’s Musical Score” and “The Space of Time” in Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 92–152. 47.  Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck [with Ranieri de’ Calzabigi], preface to Alceste (Vienna, 1769); quoted and translated in Howard, C. W. von Gluck: Orfeo, 23. 48.  “Se placar puoi col canto / Le furie, i mostri e l’empia morte, al giorno / la diletta Euridice / farà teco ritorno.” 49.  On accento as denoting a singer’s vocal style, see Feldman, Castrato, 248. 50.  Tufano adduces some compelling evidence for the possibility that Calzabigi read Ossian in Macpherson’s English in addition to, or possibly even before, No t e s   •   215

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Cesarotti’s Italian; see “Orfeo in Caledonia,” 600n14. On the composition date of Calzabigi’s Comala, see Folena, “Cesarotti, Monti e il melodramma,” 328. 51.  For a detailed study of Morandi’s setting and its context, see Tufano, “Orfeo in Caledonia.” Andrea Chegai suggests that Comala had originally been sponsored by the Neapolitan Academy, noting that it is included on the frontispiece to the autograph score (Naples, Biblioteca del Conservatorio S. Pietro a Majella, ms. 16–140); see L’esilio di Metastasio, 158n147. 52.  Castelvecchi discusses this distinction—between lines that merely resemble a mixture of meters on the typed libretto page and ones that actually sound that way when read aloud—in both Sentimental Opera, 174n44, and “Walter Scott, Rossini e la ‘couleur ossianique,’ ” 65. 53.  See Tufano, “Orfeo in Caledonia”; Mattioda, “Ossian in Italy,” 293–94. 54.  Tufano, “Orfeo in Caledonia.” 55.  Cesarotti, Comala, 2:19, lines 248–50; Macpherson, Comala, 108. 56.  Cesarotti, Comala, 2:18n(g). 57.  It is unknown whether Morandi collaborated with Calzabigi directly or just used the published libretto. The latter seems more likely, especially since, in the preface to the 1780 Senigallia version, Morandi ventriloquized Calzabigi by quoting (or plagiarizing) liberally from the preface to Alceste, clearly looking to align his musical setting with the Gluck-Calzabigi reforms. He probably would not have needed to do so if Calzabigi had already been involved. See Tufano, “Orfeo in Caledonia,” 617. 58.  On the opening gavotte rhythm as a defining feature of rondò aria form in the 1770s, see Nahon, “Le origini del rondò vocale,” esp. 37–45. On the distinctions between the spellings “rondo” and “rondò,” see chapter 2 of this book. 59.  Note that these are both “simple” or “French” rondos, comprised of refrains and intervening through-composed sections, and not the then-nascent two-part rondò. On the connections between the two types, see Nahon, “Le origini del rondò vocale,” and chapter 2 of this book. 60.  Calzabigi, Comala, act 2, scene 5. 61.  Martina, Orfeo-Orphée, 87. Martina points out that even in one Neapolitan production where the C major version of “Che farò senza Euridice?” was used, a note in the manuscript described it as a transposition for contralto from the “original” soprano version. 62.  For more on these changes, see Martina, Orfeo-Orphée, 85, and chapter 2 of this book. 63.  Clark, “Herder, Cesarotti and Vico.” 64.  Mali, Rehabilitation of Myth, 203; Vico, Scienza nuova §817. 65.  Mali, Rehabilitation of Myth, 176–77; Tomlinson, “Vico’s Songs.” 66.  Vico, Scienza nuova §470. See also Tomlinson, “Vico’s Songs,” 356. 67.  For details on the reception of the 1763 edition and the difficulties in preparing the 1772 one, see Mattioda, “Ossian in Italy,” 277–81. 68.  “Ma la passione più grande de’ Caledonj era il canto. Non si può spinger più oltre l’entusiasmo per la poesia e per la musica, di quel che facessero cotesti rozzi, ma 216  •   No t e s

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sensibili montanari. Le guerre cominciavano, e terminavano col canto: i canti erano il condimento più aggradevole dei loro conviti; cantando si rendevano ai morti gli onori funebri; i guerrieri s’addormentavano fra i canti al suono dell’arpa; coi canti si andava incontro agli ospiti più distinti e più cari: la musica insomma aveva parte in tutti i loro affari, o serj, o piacevoli; e potea dirsi in qualche modo che i Caledonj vivessero una vita musicale.” Cesarotti, “Ragionamento intorno i Caledonj [1772],” in Poesie di Ossian, 2:58. 69.  Tomlinson contrasts Vico’s notion of primitive song with Rousseau’s presentist representation of it as “music” in the Essay on the Origin of Languages; see “Vico’s Songs,” 363–66. 70.  On Grand Tourists casting Italians as characterized by “excess” and meaningless song, see Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, esp. 14, as well as chapter 3 of this book. The modern version of Ossian’s own tongue (according to Macpherson), Gaelic, was also portrayed by foreigners as “uncommonly vocalic” and therefore “well adapted for sudden and extemporaneous poetry,” as one character states in Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814); quoted and discussed in Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 60–61. 71.  Charles Dupaty, Travels through Italy (1785/1789), translated in Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 25. 72.  Cesarotti, “Ragionamento intorno i Caledonj,” in Poesie di Ossian, 2:59–61. 73.  Cesarotti, “Ragionamento intorno i Caledonj,” in Poesie di Ossian, 2:76. 74.  Vico, Scienza nuova §32. On the three types of language in Vico— mute objects/gestures, spoken tropes/comparisons, and, finally, “epistolary” or modern writing—see Trabant, Vico’s New Science, 86–88. Note that these three types were synchronous with, but not congruent to, the three stages of societal development.

chapter two: the orfeo act 1.  The first Italian production of Gluck and Calzabigi’s Orfeo ed Euridice was part of a three-act pasticcio entitled Le feste d’Apollo, given for the HabsburgBourbon royal wedding at Parma in 1769. Each of the three acts in Le feste d’Apollo was titled after its protagonist(s), so Orfeo ed Euridice was performed under the title L’atto d’Orfeo, “The Orfeo Act,” while the other two acts were called L’atto d’Aristeo and L’atto di Filemone e Bauci. For details of the Parma production, see Martina, Orfeo-Orphée, 59–62, 84–88. For an English-language overview, see my “Orpheus’s Civilising Song.” On the context of opera reform in midcentury Parma, focusing on a period slightly prior to that of Le feste d’Apollo, see Butler, Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century Parma; Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty, 97–140. 2.  Millico, preface, La pietà d’amore (Naples, 1782), [5]. Note that the preface is unpaginated after the first page. The preface is reproduced in its entirety, in the original Italian, in Finscher, “Der Opernsänger als Komponist,” 68–70. On No t e s  •   217

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Millico’s discussion of vocal “colors,” see Feldman, The Castrato, 190, 195. Writing of British poetry from this same period, the 1780s, literary historian Adela Pinch argues that feeling is “that which constructs and mediates between the categories of literary ‘convention’ and personal ‘experience,’ ” much like how Millico used discourses of feeling (i.e., sensibility) to connect Orphic tropes to his personal narrative; see Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, 8. 3.  Butler convincingly argues that “reform opera” was a “performative” term, not a cohesive genre; see Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century Parma, 1–7. For details on Millico’s own operatic compositions, and how Gluck’s collaborations with Calzabigi functioned as metonyms for operatic reform in late Settecento Naples, see DelDonna, “Tradition, Innovation, and Experimentation.” 4.  Manning, “Sensibility,” 81, 86. 5.  There have been various approaches to writing about sensibility in the music, operatic and otherwise, of this period, several of which have influenced my own. See, for instance, Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body; Castelvecchi, Sentimental Opera; Waldoff, Recognition in Mozart’s Operas; Hunter, “Pamela.” 6.  Roach, Player’s Passion, 99. The reference to “second nature” appears throughout, but see esp. 163. 7.  While not my topic here, Diderot, Goldoni, and others included gesture and facial expression along with vocal parameters in their discussions of acting. Admittedly, it is hard to know how much of these singers’ acting depended on physical movements rather than vocal timbre, inflection, declamation speed, etc., since the sources typically do not include such detail. There is evidence that the movements of even such singer-actors as Guadagni were more akin to traditional affective poses than to realistic gestures, but either way, vocal style was only one piece of a bigger picture that unquestionably included physical movements. We do know that Guadagni acted during arias as well as recitatives, which was unusual at that point, and was in large part made possible by the blurring of those two registers in Orfeo (on which more later in this chapter). On Guadagni’s acting and the role of gesture, see Howard, Modern Castrato, 66–77. 8.  These second-nature practices paved the way for the “search for voice” inside the body in the early to mid-nineteenth century, on which see Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance, 123–51, esp. 127–28. The shift from voice as practice to voice as essentialized body and interiority seems to have begun earlier in Italy than in France and Britain—in the 1780s and 1790s, as I argue later in this book—but only in very specific contexts, on which see chapter 5. 9.  On the various ways that later Settecento interlocutors showed their increasing skepticism toward the biologically altered bodies of castrati, see Feldman, Castrato, 177–210. 10.  On inwardness as in tension with publicness, see Berlant, “Intimacy: A Special Issue.” Taylor characterizes the central tension of modern selfhood as “selfcontrol” versus “self-articulation”; see Sources of the Self, 390. 11.  Heartz brings up a story recounted by Zinzendorf as proof of Guadagni’s personal influence on Gluck’s score: the count was at a dinner with Durazzo, Gluck, 218  •   No t e s

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Calzabigi, and Guadagni, during which the composer sang the Furies’ part in the Underworld scene to Guadagni’s singing of Orfeo. Since this took place in July of 1762, nearly three months before the official premiere on 5 October, Guadagni’s participation implies that he was involved before the rehearsal period would have begun, and so he may have influenced the composition of his own part. See Heartz, “From Garrick to Gluck,” 126. 12.  On Garrick’s role in reform opera via Guadagni, see Heartz, “From Garrick to Gluck.” Heartz discusses Diderot’s notion of acting alongside Garrick’s, but he focuses on Diderot’s theory before his change of heart in the Paradox (see the introduction to this book). Roach, however, explains Diderot’s swerve from arguing for acting as feeling (as in Entretiens sur Le fils naturel [1757]), which is Heartz’s focus, to acting as cold skill, which is the point of the Paradox. Roach argues that Diderot’s revised theory was partly motivated by the philosophe witnessing Garrick perform a parlor trick in which the actor expressed different emotions in rapid succession using only his face, which unsettled Diderot and made him realize that real feeling was not necessary for the appearance of it. See Roach, Player’s Passion, 122. 13.  The London pasticci took singerly accommodations far beyond the minimal changes made by Gluck for Parma in 1769. To ingratiate the avant-garde Orfeo with London audiences, Guadagni and his collaborators added extra material so it would seem more like the typical Italianate fare. There were new scenes, populated with multiple new characters and filled out with numbers by J. C. “the London” Bach, Guglielmi, and Guadagni himself. On Guadagni’s London Orfeos, see Cattelan, “Altri Orfei,” in Bertoni, Orfeo ed Euridice, xxvff, and Howard, Modern Castrato, 125–36. 14.  The rumor is mentioned in La Borde, Essai sur la musique (Paris, 1780), 3:317. Cited in Cattelan, “Altri Orfei,” x. La Borde also attributed Durazzo’s decision to stage Orfeo to Guadagni’s acting—emphasizing yet again how different writers have used this opera to make their own claims about the origins and stakes of operatic reform. 15.  Cattelan argues that Guadagni’s extensive experience singing sacred music in the Santo’s Cappella Antoniana, along with his roles in Handel’s oratorios in London, contributed to what he calls a “mythical,” quasi-religious acting style. See “Altri Orfei,” in Bertoni, Orfeo ed Euridice, xiv. On the performances in Padua and Ximenes’s academy, see Cattelan, “La musica della ‘omnigena religio.’ ” On Guadagni’s other Orfeos, from a Munich pasticcio in 1773 to a new setting by Tozzi in Munich in 1775, see Cattelan, “Altri Orfei,” in Bertoni, Orfeo ed Euridice, and Howard, Modern Castrato, 156–82. 16.  For a general English-language comparison between Gluck’s and Bertoni’s Orfeos (though it is a bit dismissive of the latter), see Sven H. Hansell, “Ferdinando Bertoni’s Setting of Calzabigi’s Orfeo ed Euridice,” in Muraro, ed., Venezia e il melodramma nel Settecento, 185–211. 17.  For evidence that Guadagni influenced the score for his own purposes rather than Gluck’s, consider the extensive cuts made to the opening scene in Bertoni’s version, which match the cuts Guadagni had made to Gluck’s score for his London No t e s   •   219

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and Padua pasticci. On Guadagni’s possible reasons for having Bertoni cut the text, including his desire to make the scene less emotionally static, see Cattelan, “Altri Orfei,” in Bertoni, Orfeo ed Euridice, cvii–cvix. 18.  Manning, “Sensibility,” 88. 19.  Cattelan, “Altri Orfei,” in Bertoni, Orfeo ed Euridice, cviii. 20.  Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty, chapter 2, “Arias”; quote on 46. 21.  Chegai, “Muovere l’aria,” esp. 298. 22.  For Cesarotti’s claim that universalizing language belonged to “lazy rationalists,” see chapter 1. 23.  Webster, “Aria as Drama,” in DelDonna and Polzonetti, eds., Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera, 35. Chegai agrees that the da capo form was not dramaturgically oriented but argues that the longer chains of arias and scenes did contribute to characters’ dramatic arcs; see Chegai, “Muovere l’aria,” esp. 353. 24.  Gluck [and Calzabigi], preface [1769], Alceste. 25.  On this feedback loop—what Feldman calls “affective exchange”—see Opera and Sovereignty, 42–45. 26.  Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty, 95, 96. 27.  See note 46 to chapter 1. 28.  See Roach, Player’s Passion, 131. 29.  Borsa, Saggio filosofico sopra la musica imitativa teatrale, 220. Borsa suggested that comic plots made for the best operas because everyday feelings lent themselves to being sung, while the grand passions of seria types blocked the voice. Borsa praised Bertoni’s Orfeo throughout, but see esp. 216, 229, and 231. 30.  As Diderot put it, “Extreme sensibility makes mediocre actors: [. . .] the complete absence of sensibility makes sublime actors.” My translation from Diderot, Oeuvres complètes, 7:370. On an actor’s genuine sensibility as “destroy[ing]” the “unity” of his performance, and thereby creating a “fine moment” but not a “fine performance,” see the English translation of the Paradox in Diderot, Diderot: Selected Writings on Art and Literature, 153–54, and the introduction to this book. 31.  Abrams, Correspondent Breeze, 160. Heartz also uses the phrase “lyric ‘effusion,’ ” though only in passing, to describe Guadagni’s singing in Orfeo; see “From Garrick to Gluck,” 126. 32.  Coleridge published thirty-six of these “effusions” in his 1796 Poems on Various Subjects. In Jerome McGann’s interpretation, the “effusion” in Coleridge’s oeuvre “tries to represent a variety of more primal experiences” before being developed into a full lyric poem; see McGann, Poetics of Sensibility, 20. The Aeolian or wind harp was a symbol of Orpheus, as some myths described him as declaiming his poetry not to his own lyre but to the wind’s accompaniment (i.e., the wind invisibly vibrating the harp’s strings); see Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 102. 33.  Emily Wilbourne, “Demo’s Stutter, Subjectivity, and the Virtuosity of Vocal Failure,” in Feldman et al., “Why Voice Now?,” 660. 34.  Burney, General History of Music, 4:496. 220  •   No t e s

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35.  Howard, Modern Castrato, 139; see also Heartz, “From Garrick to Gluck,” 124. 36.  Burney, General History of Music, 4:496. 37.  On “automated” sound, instrumentality, and castrati (with brief mention of Guadagni at the end), see Gordon, Voice Machines, chapter 1, “Orfobot.” 38.  Diderot, “Observations sur une brochure intitulée Garrick,” Correspondance littéraire (October–November 1770); quoted in Roach, Player’s Passion, 132–33. 39.  In the Venetian remake, the divine authority figure who demands and imposes limitations on Orfeo’s voice is not the cherubic soprano Amore but the tenor Imeneo. The change marks the god-figure differently: he is now the sole “natural” male voice, and as such, the only “low” voice among the three leads in Venice (Euridice was sung by the female soprano Camilla Pasi, and Imeneo by tenor Giacomo David). In contrast to a soprano Amore, David’s tenor Imeneo sounded less otherworldly and more rational, becoming a sonic foil to Guadagni’s Orfeo. The resulting registral, timbral, and character-typological contrast between the authority figure and the singer figure would likely have reinforced the vocal parameters of the god’s commands. 40.  Cattelan, “Altri Orfei,” in Bertoni, Orfeo ed Euridice, cx. For a useful table comparing the two settings, see xcvii–cvi. In most post-1762 performances—but not, apparently, in Bertoni’s version for Venice—Guadagni sang his own “Men tiranne” as composed for the London pasticcio of 1770. 41.  F. Burney, journal entry of 27 February 1773, Early Letters and Journals, 1:256. The reviews appear in The Morning Chronicle (10 March 1773) and The Evening Post (9–11 March 1773), and both are quoted in Howard, Modern Castrato, 196. 42.  George Bussy Villiers, letter to Lady Spencer, 16 March 1773, quoted in Woodfield, Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London, 50. 43.  Diderot takes up this point, arguing that the same role could never be played the same way by two different actors because of how incomplete a script is compared with a performance; see Paradox, 101–2. 44.  Berlant, “Intimacy,” 284. See also Habermas, Structural Transformation. 45.  On Guadagni’s puppet theater, see Howard, Modern Castrato, 172–82. 46.  Brown has persuasively argued that both “Che farò” and “Cerco / Chiamo il mio ben così” are more akin to French romances than to arias in an Italian mold because of their simplicity and songishness; see Brown, Gluck and the French Theater, 365. 47.  See Nahon, “Le origini del rondò vocale.” On the “semantic slippage” of the term rondò, see Beghelli, “Tre slittamenti semantici.” I share Chegai’s view here that the designation rondo was, in the Italian context, more about reception and dramaturgical function than derivation; see Chegai, “Cabaletta dei castrati,” esp. 222–23. 48.  Nahon, “Le origini del rondò vocale.” For an English-language overview of recent studies that touch on the rondo/ò across vocal and instrumental music, as well as extensive theorizing about the form itself, see Hunt, “Review of Formal Functions in Perspective.” For specific discussions of particular composers’ rondos, see Rice, “Sense, Sensibility, and Opera Seria,” and Rice, “Rondò vocali di Salieri e No t e s  •   221

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Mozart per Adriana Ferrarese,” in Muraro and Bryant, eds., I vicini di Mozart, 185–209. 49.  A singing treatise from the Paris Conservatoire refers to Sarti’s 1777 Ifigenia aria for Millico as the first two-tempo rondò: “It is the celebrated composer Sarti [. . .] who first divided the rondeau into two movements. It [was] in Rome, and for the famous singer Millico, that he set the text ‘Un amante sventurato,’ this beautiful rondeau, so well known, and which served as the exemplar for all rondeaus of double character.” My translation from Méthode de chant du Conservatoire de musique (Paris: Le Roy, 1803–4), 81; French original cited previously in Nahon, “Le origini del rondò vocale,” 45, and in Italian in Beghelli, “Tre slittamenti semantici,” 193. 50.  On the rondò as a “culmination,” see Webster, “Aria as Drama,” in DelDonna and Polzonetti, eds., Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera, 37; Chegai, “Muovere l’aria,” 300. 51.  Vincenzo Manfredini, Difesa della musica moderna (Bologna, 1788), 195ff. Martina writes of the rondo/ò as the dramatic climax of the opera, but one that relies on “interior action” (what I interpret as the character’s internal emotional experience rather than external “events”); see Martina, Orfeo-Orphée, 108. 52.  Chegai, “Cabaletta dei castrati.” 53.  In addition to retreading Calzabigi and Gluck, Millico drew from contemporary treatises by Neapolitan literati Planelli and Mattei. See Planelli, Dell’opera in musica (Naples, 1772); Mattei, I libri poetici della Bibbia, (Naples, 1766–74), in particular the section La filosofia della musica in the final volume, which is quoted at length in Fabbri, “Saverio Mattei e la ‘musica filosofica.’ ” For an overview of late eighteenth-century Neapolitan debates on opera, see di Benedetto, “Music and Enlightenment.” Millico’s musical engagement with Neapolitan reform currents in his music for La pietà d’amore is explored along with a thorough analysis of his intellectual debts to Planelli in DelDonna, “Tradition, Innovation, and Experimentation.” For an extended discussion of Millico’s preface, including its use of sensibility tropes, see Peritz, “Orpheus’s Civilising Song.” 54.  See Manfredini, Difesa della musica moderna; Mancini, Pensieri e riflessioni pratiche sopra il canto figurato. 55.  “Si dovrebbe coltivare il loro spirito per renderlo sensibile ai movimenti della natura [. . .] si dovrebbe loro insegnare a discernere le bellezze della poesia, perchè si vestissero dei sentimenti degli autori, e provassero in loro medesimi quegli effetti, che dovranno produrre negli ascoltanti, e quando ciò fosse fatto, si dovrebbe esercitare la loro voce naturale.” Millico, La pietà d’amore, [5–6]. 56.  Note that Millico was not attempting to describe actual singing technique or vocal physiology here. The preface was clearly intended for general readers, not as a substitute for or supplement to singing lessons, especially since it states a bit later that vocal training should be conducted exclusively in person by star singers. Though his phrasing certainly hints at the notion of a metaphorical inner voice (on which more later), scientific and pedagogical arguments for the sounding voice as “inside” or “inner” only became common currency several decades later; see Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance, 123–51. 222  •   No t e s

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57.  Taylor, Sources of the Self, parts 3 and 4, but see esp. 361–62. 58.  Taylor, Sources of the Self, 373. On the related dissolution of Cartesian categories of the passions in musical discourse in the 1770s, see Feldman, “Music and the Order of the Passions.” 59.  P. Verri, “La Musica,” in Verri et al., Il Caffè, 2:343–47, quote on 346. 60.  Sirch, “Notturno italiano,” esp. 161–63. 61.  Sirch, “Notturno italiano,” 161. 62.  Sirch, “Notturno italiano,” 160. 63.  On the late eighteenth-century operatic turn toward contemplating the decadence, rather than perfection, of the classical past, see Lockhart, “Pimmalione.” 64.  Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body, 72, 75. 65.  The story about Pacchierotti’s recitative at Forlì appears in Stendhal’s Life of Haydn and in Pacchierotti’s biography as written by his nephew/adopted son (discussed further below); on the different versions and sources, see Castelvecchi, Sentimental Opera, 115n117. 66.  In his detailed study of Pacchierotti’s career, Willier lists him singing Orfeo twice, in the 1774 Naples production (Gluck) and the 1780 London one (Bertoni). It seems as though he might have sung the role in Venice as well based on the Venetian critic Della Lena’s reference to it, but it is not clear from the extant sources. See Willier, “A Celebrated Eighteenth-Century Castrato,” 111–18; and Della Lena, Dissertazione, 79n1. 67.  Mattei, “Il battesimo della Fenice,” xviii. 68.  Borsa, Saggio filosofico sopra la musica imitativa teatrale, 214. 69.  Della Lena, Dissertazione, 106. For Della Lena this “theatrical change” was completed only by his beloved mezzosoprano Luigia Todi, on whom see chapter 5 of this book. 70.  Benedetto Frizzi, Dissertazione di biografia musicale, n.d. I cite and translate from John A. Rice’s lightly edited version of this text, published in the original Italian, in his “Benedetto Frizzi on Singers.” 71.  “Se cerca, se dice” had long been regarded as one of Metastasio’s most moving aria texts. Calzabigi singled out Pergolesi’s setting of it as an exemplar of “real poetic expression” and vaguely implied that it was among his inspirations for Orfeo; see his letter of 24 August 1784 in the Mercure de France. As Chegai notes, this text was one of the few three-stanza (as opposed to two-stanza) arias in Metastasio’s output; this meant that instead of ending with a repetition of the first stanza, as in a da capo aria, “Se cerca, se dice” made it possible to compose the third stanza as a kind of coda or stretta (though it was set as a da capo as well). See Chegai, “La cabaletta dei castrati,” 260–61. There is also a possible connection with the rondo-rondò narrative here: Sacchini’s revision of “Se cerca, se dice” for Millico wove in elements inspired by the aria “Ah, per questo” from Gluck’s Alceste (the second opera for which Gluck rewrote a role to accommodate Millico), most likely at Millico’s suggestion. Matthew Boyle notes that the Alceste aria in question shares certain features with the two-tempo rondò and suggests that, through Sacchini/Millico’s “Se cerca, se dice,” those No t e s  •   223

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elements may have inflected Sarti/Millico’s “Un amante sventurato” (the first “official” two-tempo rondò). Boyle, “ ‘Se cerca, se dice’ and Rondo Arias,” paper given at Music Theory Midwest, 2018. My warm thanks to him for sharing this paper with me. 72.  Feldman quotes from the journal of Susan Burney, daughter to Charles and younger sister to Frances, who compared her “melt[ing]” and “cr[ying] at Pacchierotti’s “Se cerca, se dice” to her experience of Guadagni’s Orfeo nearly a decade earlier; Burney thus positioned Pacchierotti as heir to, at once, Millico’s sensibility and Guadagni’s Orfeo. See Feldman, Castrato, 196–99. 73.  Della Lena, Dissertazione, 105. 74.  Frizzi goes on for quite a while, and he also mentions Pacchierotti’s skill at recitative, among other things. Quoted in Rice, “Benedetto Frizzi on Singers.” 75.  Feldman, Willier, and Mattei have all explored in greater depth this Pacchierotti-Marchesi opposition; see the citations above. 76.  Della Lena, Dissertazione, 105. Note that Marchesi sang a version of Sacchini’s setting that was reworked for him by Cimarosa and not the same version as sung by Pacchierotti. 77.  Pepoli perhaps took a page from Guadagni’s Orphic self-fashioning when he composed and performed his own part in a production of the opera Pimmalione; see Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music, 74. 78.  Pepoli, “Lettera ad un uomo ragionevole,” in Meleagro, 43–44. 79.  In the original (including emphasis in original): Storditello:  Il Rondeau a sedere [. . .] come volete ch’io possa trarre la voce?

Cordisasso:  Da dove? Non la traete forse dal petto, e non siete forse nella

situazione d’un moribondo ch’esige pochissima voce? [. . .] in quella situazione nuova e interessante [. . .] vi danno tutto il campo di agire [. . .]

Storditello:  [. . .] per le vostre belle situazioni [mi] private di tante mie Musicali delizie.

Cordisasso:  Sarà verissimo. Ma io avrei sperato di risarcirlo [. . .] coll’ acquisto di un Attore, quale sperava (a dispetto della vostra intelligenza) di ridurvi.

The pseudonyms are puns: “Storditello” is a diminutive of “stordito,” which means “stunned,” and indicates someone out of touch with himself or reality; it is also a play on the practice of nicknaming castrati with diminutives. “Cordisasso” translates, ironically, to “heart of stone.” Pepoli, “Le nuvole concedute,” in La morte d’Ercole, vii–viii. Interestingly, Pepoli’s dialogue also contains the first known use of the term “cabaletta” to denote the second, fast section of a two-tempo aria, on which see Chegai, “La cabaletta dei castrati,” 257–58. 80.  On the facts and fantasies of the voce di petto across different voice types, see Feldman, Castrato, 90–96, 105; and Beghelli, “Il ‘do di petto.’ ” 81.  Pacchierotti and the other two leading singers had been engaged before the music was composed, so the role was expressly tailored to Pacchierotti’s talents. On the background of the opera house and Giuochi, see Bauman, “Society of La Fenice.”

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On the political necessity of a Metastasian frame for the opening of an opera seria theater, even in the 1790s, see Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty, 389–435. 82.  Genesi, “La soprano monticellese Brigida Giorgi-Banti,” 157–58; Burney, General History of Music, 4:507. 83.  Gazzetta urbana veneta 42 (26 May 1792), 335. 84.  The reviewer also deemed him “the First Musico in the world for this type of moving song”; Gazzetta urbana veneta 46 (9 June 1792), 363. On Pacchierotti’s giving an encore of the prayer, see Gazzetta urbana veneta 42 (26 May 1792), 335. Pepoli numbered singers’ encores among his litany of the abuses of contemporary opera; see “Lettera ad un uomo ragionevole,” in Meleagro, 42. 85.  Lorenzo Mattei has described the resulting form as a hybrid da capo/rondò; see his explanation and formal chart in “Il battesimo della Fenice,” xviii. 86.  “Luogo incolto e aperto, sparso di vari antichi tumuli. Vista in lontano di qualche tempio rovinato.” Pepoli, I giuochi d’Agrigento (Venice, 1792), act 2, scene 11. 87.  On composing physical movements into the score in late Settecento opera, see Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music, 44–84. 88.  Arteaga, Rivoluzioni del teatro musicale italiano, 3:90; Cecchini Pacchierotti, Cenni biografici, 14; Michotte, Richard Wagner’s Visit to Rossini, 73; Stendhal, Voyages en Italie [1817] (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 112–13. For more on Giuochi, sensibility, and the reception of Pacchierotti in the long nineteenth century, see Peritz, “The Castrato Remains—or, Galvanizing the Corpse of Musical Style.” 89.  “Le maraviglie della musica drammatica dei Greci, dovute alle congiunte forze della poesia e del canto, furono indovinate e riprodotte dal Pacchierotti anche nei recitativi spogli di qualunque accompagnamento, e col divino genere patetico, cui si era principalmente consacrato, strappava involontarie lagrime e grida.” Cecchini Pacchierotti, Cenni biografici, 5.

chapter three: civilizing song 1.  Schuller, Biopolitics of Feeling, 2. 2.  “Mi dirà forse qualche moderno cantore, che non tutte le voci sono suscettibili di queste perfezioni, e che non tutte per conseguenza possono produrre gli effetti della musica greca. Io gli rispondo, che se gli organi della gola, della lingua, e del petto del giovane cantante saranno ben formati, tutte le voci produrrano presso a poco il medesimo effetto.” Millico, La pietà d’amore, [6]. 3.  See, e.g., Mancini, Pensieri e riflessioni pratiche sopra il canto figurato. 4.  Enlightenment thought had many different manifestations and contexts, so my intention here is not to retrospectively universalize it as “universalizing.” For one argument against reading Enlightenment political philosophy as unilaterally devoted to “marginalizing difference,” see Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire. 5.  Feldman, Castrato, 168. 6.  Feldman, Castrato, 162–66. No t e s   •   225

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7.  These tensions between aesthetics and politics are discussed in, for example, Taylor, Sources of the Self, esp. 306; Manning, “Sensibility.” Mike Goode sums up late eighteenth-century “sentiment” as at once “individual emotional response” and “social glue”; see Sentimental Masculinity, 12. 8.  The verb mansuefare can be rendered into English as, variously, to domesticate, to tame, and to civilize. Bettinelli, Dell’entusiasmo, 327–28. This notion of Orpheus as humanizer or civilizer was not, of course, only an Italian one, nor was it the only way the myth was interpreted in the late eighteenth century. On Orpheus’s “lute” as a metaphor for colonizing and civilizing indigenous peoples in the Americas, see Bloechl, Native American Song, 15–18. On representations of Orpheus in eighteenth-century British and German music culture as a problematic figure of difference (in ways that resonate with later parts of the present chapter), see Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus, 122–68. 9.  Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents, 3. 10.  Planelli, Dell’opera in musica, 117–18. 11.  Millico, La pietà d’amore, [5]. On the widespread equation in the eighteenth century of “high style” in (visual) art with democratic politics, exemplified by writings on classical Greece, see Davis, Queer Beauty, 32. Ever contrary, the conservative critic Arteaga read Orpheus’s lyre less idealistically, writing in 1785, “It can be said without exaggerating that the sound of the lyre governed [ancient] Greece with the same tyranny with which our monarchies are ruled today by the management of councils.” Rivoluzioni del teatro musicale italiano, 2:10. 12.  On the institution of the eighteenth-century theater in general as a “civilizing” space, see Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, esp. 90. For a reading of eighteenth-century opera as enacting a “civilizing process,” see Carvalho, “From Opera to ‘Soap Opera.’ ” On shifts in listening practices and behavior in the coeval French context, see Johnson, Listening in Paris. 13.  Elias, Civilizing Process. Note that I am not criticizing Elias’s scholarly project, but rather the ways in which discourses of “civilizing” have long been used to justify racist, imperialist, and colonialist ends. 14.  For a summary and analysis of Elias’s methods and contributions, see Linklater and Mennell, “Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process.” 15.  Chandler writes of Steele’s play and others of its kind as intended to “save theater from its own barbarity,” both by providing good examples and, ironically for a discussion of spectatorship, encouraging people to read plays at home rather than attend the theater; Archaeology of Sympathy, 168. 16.  The panopticon was invented in the 1780s; in Discipline and Punish Foucault famously used it as a metaphor for the disciplinary society that he argued emerged at the same time in the late eighteenth century. 17.  Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 90. 18.  Leigh Eric Schmidt refers to this emphasis on sight as an “objectifying ocularcentrism” and deems it the result of Enlightenment valorizations of vision as the sense of truth; see Schmidt, Hearing Things, 6–7. See also Gaudio, Sound, Image, Silence. Consider as an example Chandler’s discussion of the encounter between 226  •   No t e s

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Tristram and Maria in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Though music and voice—the sad melody of Maria’s flute, which she plays after losing her voice to trauma—initiate the encounter, Chandler focuses exclusively on sight as the source of Tristram’s sympathy. See “Case of the Literary Spectator,” chapter 4 in Archaeology of Sympathy, esp. 162–65. My inquiry here is not directed toward unpacking Italian practices of operatic spectatorship during this period; see instead, for instance, Arteaga, Rivoluzioni del teatro musicale italiano, 1:51ff; Pepoli, “Lettera ad un uomo ragionevole,” in Meleagro; Polzonetti, “Opera as Process,” in Cambridge Companion to EighteenthCentury Opera, esp. 4–5; Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty, esp. 1–41. 19.  See Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, 5th ed. (Florence, 1863–1923), 3:90, s.v. “civilizzare.” There is no entry for “civilizzare” in the fourth edition, which dates to the early to mid-eighteenth century, nor in any earlier ones. 20.  See, e.g., Ferdinando Altieri, Dizionario italiano ed inglese / A Dictionary Italian and English (London, 1726–), and the well-known version by Giuseppe “Joseph” Baretti, Dizionario delle lingue italiana ed inglese / Dictionary of English and Italian Languages (London, 1760), both s.v. “civilizzare.” 21.  Vocabolario, 5th ed., 3:90; Ellison, Cato’s Tears, 51. 22.  Ellison, Cato’s Tears, 58–64. 23.  Reception of Cato for most of the eighteenth century focused on Cato himself, while there was little interest in Juba until the 1790s. See Ellison, Cato’s Tears, 69, 71. In nineteenth-century America the stock figure “Juba” came not from Cato but from the choreomusical practice of “patting Juba,” which is comprised of complex patterns of handclapping and body slapping to accompany song and dance; by some reports, it was brought by enslaved people from the Kongo to South Carolina in the early eighteenth century. For one of the earliest first-hand accounts of patting Juba, dated to the 1820s, see Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself (New York: 1849). There are many references to patting Juba in the historical sources listed in Southern and Wright, eds., African-American Traditions, with an explanation of patting Juba on p. xix. See also Southern, Music of Black Americans, 179–81; Holloway, Africanisms in American Culture, 51–52; Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, 141–42. 24.  Arteaga, Rivoluzioni del teatro musicale italiano, 2:11; Carli, Le lettere americane, 1:164. 25.  The phrase is a nod to Gayatri Spivak’s foundational essay on postcolonial knowledge production and its incompatibilities with Western academic modes; see her “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 26.  Ellison, Cato’s Tears, 55. For a concise overview of the Spectator as steeped in coffeehouse sociability and directed at “a general reformation of manners,” see Ellis, The Coffee-House, 185ff. 27.  Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; Chandler, Archaeology of Sympathy, 167. 28.  For example, in 1882 the poet Giosué Carducci memorialized Garibaldi’s unifying Italy two decades earlier as the return of the Roman Empire: “So the red phalanxes overran victoriously the peninsula; and Italy was freed, completely free, No t e s   •   227

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along the Alps, all of its islands, and the whole sea. And the Roman eagle returned to spread its wings between sea and mountain, and released raucous cries of joy at the sight of ships that freely sailed the Mediterranean, for the third time property of Italy.” Translated and discussed, along with the “civilizing mission” into Africa, in Cassano, Southern Thought, 127–28. 29.  On the very real connections between opera and Italian politics in the Ottocento, see Smart, Waiting for Verdi. 30.  Rezzonico, Alessandro e Timoteo, in Opere, 3:190–91. I translate “cetra” and “cetera” as lyre rather than kithara because they are often used interchangeably with lira in poetic Settecento Italian. The Italian metaphor of the lyre as poetic inspiration or genius had been common since at least Petrarch: “Secca è la vena de l’usato ingegno / E la cetera mia rivolta in pianto.” Rime sparse 292, lines 13–14. 31.  Rezzonico certainly encountered both Planelli’s take on Orphic song (given how influential the treatise had become by 1782) and Bettinelli’s (since he looked up to Bettinelli as a mentor). Rezzonico studied with Bettinelli at Parma’s Collegio dei Nobili (1752–58), and both a 1783 review of Alessandro e Timoteo and Rezzonico’s own commentary list Bettinelli among the librettist’s inspirations. See “Alessandro e Timoteo” [review], Journal encyclopédique ou universel 11 (1 March 1783), 303–8; reprinted in Gazzetta di Parma 14 (4 April 1783), 111–17, and 15 (11 April 1783), 118–20. See also Rezzonico, “Osservazioni intorno al dramma Alessandro e Timoteo,” in Opere, 3:282. 32.  Rezzonico, “Osservazioni,” 3:249. 33.  Rezzonico, Alessandro e Timoteo, 3:193. 34.  Dryden’s Timotheus was a singer, but Rezzonico nevertheless explained that his own libretto combined two musicians named Timotheus from Greek history, one a lyric poet-singer who died before the birth of Alexander the Great, and the other a tibia player in Alexander’s employ. Rezzonico, “Osservazioni,” 3:313ff. 35.  Rezzonico wrote that his libretto consists of “una poesia piena di sentimento, e di lusinghe, nella cui espressione trionfa la moderna musica.” “Osservazioni,” 3:289. 36.  Arteaga, Rivoluzioni del teatro musicale italiano, 3:131–35. He describes Alessandro as “farnetico.” While Arteaga praised the overall “good taste” of Rezzonico’s poetry, he declared Alessandro e Timoteo more fit for a narrative poem than an opera. 37.  The management of Parma’s Teatro Ducale was particularly concerned with the optics of good spectatorial behavior and had been enforcing it since 1759’s Ippolito ed Aricia. See Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty, 105–12. 38.  Rezzonico’s description for scene 1 explains how the theater-of-theater concept works onstage: “Il fondo della tenda s’innalza nelle mutazioni di Scena, e lascia vedere gli oggetti, che le stan dietro.” In his commentary, he elaborated, “Erasi adunque figurato in mia mente un teatro sul teatro stesso. Ne feci Timoteo direttore, ed inventor principale.” “Osservazioni,” 3:286–87. 39.  The phrase and idea of opera seria as a “magic mirror” come from Feldman, “Magic Mirrors and the Seria Stage.” One of her points is that Metastasian opera “ratified” its “propositions” about kingship not by “showing and telling,” but by

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presenting audiences with “illogical magicalities”; see p. 459. This is the exact opposite of what Rezzonico was doing in laying bare Timoteo’s stagecraft. 40.  Rezzonico, “Osservazioni,” 3:247–48. 41.  Pisistratus was the notoriously tyrannical king of ancient Athens. Rezzonico, “Osservazioni,” 3:279, 281. For more on the changes suggested by Sarti, see Ferrero, “ ‘Potrà dirsi questo Dramma,’ ” 286. 42.  As the librettist and impresario of Le feste d’Apollo, Rezzonico was unquestionably familiar enough with L’atto d’Orfeo to make these references. Footnote B in the libretto, attached to Timoteo’s invocation, reads, “L’orchestra imita il suono d’una cetera pizzicata.” Alessandro e Timoteo, 3:215. 43.  Bettinelli, Dell’entusiasmo, 56. 44.  “Alessandro e Timoteo” [French review], 306. 45.  Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws [Paris, 1748] (London, 1750), 1:427. 46.  Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 1:316. 47.  Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 1:320–21. See also Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire, 37. 48.  Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 1:319. 49.  Moe, View from Vesuvius, 23ff; Gordon, Voice Machines. For an overview of the idea of the “Global South” as postcolonial corrective to that of the “third world,” see Mahler, “Global South.” On representations of Italy, particularly southern Italy, as a “space of backwardness and underdevelopment” and an “unfinished version of the North,” see Cassano, Southern Thought, esp. xxxix. 50.  Auguste Creuzé de Lesser, quoted in Moe, View from Vesuvius, 37. As Moe notes, there were gradations of southernness within Italy, such that Verri’s Milan and Cesarotti’s Padua were regarded as more civilized than the lands south of Rome, and still more so than those south of Naples. 51.  Tomlinson, “Musicology, Anthropology, History,” 24. 52.  Gordon, Voice Machines. 53.  Guarracino, “Voices from the South,” 40; Gordon, Voice Machines. 54.  Quoted and translated in Woolf, History of Italy, 81–82. 55.  This was a common argument in the eighteenth century, espoused by Vico, Montesquieu, Kant, and others; on various thinkers’ distinctions between savagery, barbarism, and civilization through analysis of land-use practices, see Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire, 180–81. 56.  On northern Italian theories of political economy in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, see Reinert, “Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism and Political Economy in the Accademia dei pugni.” 57.  P. Verri, “Elementi di commercio,” in Il Caffé, 1:28. 58.  Foscolo, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 136. On race, racialization, and “the coloniality of modern global capitalist power” as central to the national formation of Italy (though with a focus on the period following unification), see Mellino, “DeProvincializing Italy,” quote on 87; Welch, Vital Subjects, esp. 6. 59.  See chapter 2 of this volume and Peritz, “Orpheus’s Civilising Song.”

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60.  Millico’s songs and sonatas circulated first in manuscript, then many were collected and published, even after Millico had left London for Naples. See, e.g., Giuseppe Millico, Six Songs with an Accompanyment for the Great or Small Harp, Forte Piano or Harpsichord (London: R. Bremner, 1773–), 4 vols.; Millico, Musical Trifles: A Collection of Sonatine (London: Bard, 1791). Frances Burney recounted hearing Millico tell her father, Charles, why he chose to have the songs printed; see her journal entry of 9 May 1773 in The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, 1:260. While the bourgeois heyday of the upright drawing-room harp in England would not arrive until around 1807, Gaelic-inspired songs, whether for real harp or keyboard imitation, were already by the 1770s a major trend in English musical culture, owing in part to the Ossian craze. 61.  There was a production given on the Greek island of Corfu in 1793, but at that time Corfu was under Venetian dominion and so still “Italian” territory. 62.  The production given at Triviglio in the province of Bergamo in 1789 changed the setting from Livorno to London, emphasizing how commerce and civilizing were associated by Italians with the English. 63.  Panagia, Political Life of Sensation, esp. 63–64. 64.  Bernardini, Li tre Orfei, 1.1. “Bel soggiorno! bella Fiera! / Gran dinaro qui si spende; / Questo compra, quello vende. / Uno piglia, e l’altro dà.” All references are to the Venice 1787 libretto unless otherwise noted. In describing the music I have consulted manuscript scores (full and partial) from various productions, including those held at the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale, the Städtische Bibliothek in Dresden, and the Conservatorio di Musica Giuseppe Verdi in Milan. 65.  On reading certain vocal performances as “transactional,” see Feldman, “Voice Gap Crack Break,” in Feldman and Zeitlin, eds., Voice as Something More, and the four essays in “Negotiating Voice: Voice as Transaction,” in Eidsheim and Meizel, eds., Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, 439–508. 66.  See Gioli, “The Knowledge of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.” 67.  Manning, “Sensibility,” 92. 68.  Ellison, Cato’s Tears, 98; Manning, “Sensibility,” 81–82. For more on the multivalent relationships between sensibility or sentimentality and capitalism in the eighteenth century, see Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility; Denby, Sentimental Narrative; and Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability. 69.  Johnson, “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law,” 550. 70.  Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 27–28. 71.  Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 86–88; see also Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 49. 72.  On Goldoni’s central role in laying the foundations of comic opera outside Naples, see Heartz, “Vis Comica: Goldoni, Galuppi, and L’Arcadia in Brenta”; Heartz, “The Creation of the Buffo Finale”; Heartz, “Goldoni, Opera Buffa, and Mozart’s Advent in Vienna,” all reprinted in Heartz, From Garrick to Gluck, 11–68. For an overview of Goldoni’s rejection of masks and desire for “realism” in the comic spoken theater, see Griffin, “Goldoni and Gozzi.” See also Carvalho, “From Opera to ‘Soap Opera,’ ” esp. 48, and Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty, 377. 230  •   No t e s

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73.  Bernardini, Li tre Orfei (Venice, 1787), 1.1. Many thanks to Claudio Vellutini for helping me translate some of the more unusual Italian words in this aria. 74.  The Marchese later attempts to perform his cosmopolitanism as making him worthy of “being the husband of Madama.” In 2.4 he sings about how he fits in everywhere he goes: “Nella Francia son francese, / In Pollonia son pollacco,” and so on through Morocco, England, and beyond, imitating the different languages as proof. 75.  Bernardini, Li tre Orfei (Pisa, 1787). 76.  Sometimes spelled colascione. See Dieter Kirsch, “Colascione,” Grove Music Online. The calascione also appeared in several early eighteenth-century Neapolitan comic operas as a way of indicating popular music; see Kimbell, Italian Opera, 318. 77.  Burney did praise the skill of the calascione player, however. See his Present State of Music in France and Italy, 2nd ed. (London: 1773), 307–8. 78.  “Farò di miei lamenti / Suonar la Valle, e il bosco.” Compare with Calzabigi, Orfeo ed Euridice, 1.1. 79.  The fact that Lavinio’s role sits in a tenor range and so was most likely not played by castrato singers does not mean that the character did not “read” as a castrato type. As Marco Beghelli has noted, castrato characters in opera buffa were typically played by tenors. It is possible that Lavinio was sung by a castrato in some productions, since roles in comic operas were often rewritten to accommodate the available singers; as Kordula Knaus has demonstrated, tenor and even bass roles were among those reworked for castrati in comic operas. Both of these points were made in papers presented at the Castrato Singers in Opera Conference, held at the Villa Vigoni in Menaggio, Italy, on 23 October 2021. 80.  Lavinio hints at the incivility, even monstrosity, of the fair by punning on “fiera,” which means both “fair” (as in market, the way the chorus has been using it) and “wild beast”: “Is there a wild beast [una fiera] crueler than a woman?” he asks (see 1.3). On the bourgeois-capitalist definition of “the market” as a rational, abstract economic idea, distinguishing it from the festivity and grotesqueness of the local market fair, see Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 30. 81.  Gozzi, L’Osservatore veneto (1761–62), quoted in Franco Fido, “From the Spectator to Goldoni: Coffee-house Culture and Wishful Thinking in the Eighteenth Century,” in Rittner, Haine, and Jackson, eds., Thinking Space, unpaginated in e-book format. 82.  P. [Verri], “Il Caffè,” in Il Caffè, 1:11. 83.  Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 93–95. 84.  On the fundamentally “oral character” of the Italian coffeehouse, and the idealization of coffeehouse sociability by Pietro Verri and Gasparo Gozzi, see Fido, “From the Spectator to Goldoni.” 85.  P. [Verri], “Il Caffè,” 1:11. 86.  In discussing the oral culture of the Italian coffeehouse, Fido describes it as “an everyday theater of sorts.” Fido, “From the Spectator to Goldoni.” 87.  P. [Verri], “Il Caffè,” 1:11. Verri further underlined the Europeanness of this particular coffeehouse by marking the otherness of its owner, Demetrio, who wears No t e s  •   231

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“Oriental attire” and makes “coffee truly from the Levant,” having fled “humiliation and slavery” at the hands of the Ottomans back in his Greek homeland (11–13). 88.  A. Verri, letter of 22 February 1777, reprinted in Carteggio di Pietro e Alessandro Verri, no. 974, 8:267. See also Feldman, Castrato, 352n54. 89.  I suspect that what Millico performed for Rousseau was an excerpt from his cantata La morte di Clorinda, which sets Canto XII, stanza 69 of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. The cantata, incipit “D’un bel pallor ha il bianco volto asperso,” is scored for soprano and strings, but it could have been adapted for keyboard in a pinch. Millico composed several works based on Ariosto (such as the cantata Angelica e Medoro), but he typically used Ariosto’s story as retold with new poetry; to my knowledge, his Clorinda setting is the only one with text taken directly from either Ariosto or Tasso. There are extant manuscript copies of La morte di Clorinda at the Monumento Nazionale di Montecassino, shelfmark 4-A-10/4, and the SantiniBibliothek in Münster, shelfmark SANT Hs 2685. The Tasso reference is a bit on the nose since Rousseau famously praised the musicality of Tasso’s Italian in his Letter on French Music (1753). 90.  Citaredo comes from the Greek cithara/kithara, which is also the source of cetera and cetra in Italian. As Esterhammer has argued, the figure of the rhapsode (or improviser, in her gloss) reappeared in the European cultural imaginary in the latter half of the eighteenth century because of new debates around the authenticity of “Homer.” See Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 59–77. For Cavarero’s take on the rhapsode (another version of the citaredo) in ancient Greece, see For More than One Voice, 100–101. 91.  In the original (A. Verri, Saffo, 155–56): Incominciò il citaredo Melanzio a cantare [. . .] rallegrandola con la melodiosa voce mista al suono della lira. Egli da prima spiegò il canto con moderato alito, come voce da lungi udita, e che gradatamente si avvicina; e quindi crescendo con piena melodia agitava le rapide note della lira, spandendo ampiamente il canto; verso di cui tutti con ciglio sospeso avean rivolti gli occhi in silenzo. Cantò Melanzio alcuni versi della Illiade, animando con l’armonia quel metro divino e quei celesti pensieri, onde riunito il doppio diletto, scendeva per le attente orecchie a impadronirsi del cuore.

Except where otherwise noted, here and throughout this book I provide page numbers from the 1797 reprint for the reader’s convenience, as that edition is available online while many of the earlier editions are not. 92.  P. [Verri], “Il Caffè,” 1:15. 93.  A. Verri, Saffo, 156. 94.  A. Verri, Vicende memorabili, 520–21. 95.  Berlant, Female Complaint, 5. Berlant exemplifies the intimate public with analysis of twentieth-century women’s sentimental culture in the United States, so I am drawing on this concept only in a broad sense here. Verri’s ideas about violence and intimacy would be echoed decades later, albeit with a sense of hopelessness, by Italian lyric poet Giacomo Leopardi, who argued that “intimate society” (società intima) was essential to making people forget about the “ultimate futility of existence” in the wake 232  •   No t e s

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of the French Revolution. Italians, he lamented, lacked this intimate society and so could not help but be venal and pessimistic. Leopardi, Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’italiani [1824]. See also Moe, View from Vesuvius, 33–34. 96.  Berlant, Female Complaint, 6–7, 10–11. 97.  On the sociability of the democratic coffeehouse versus the “intimacy” of private social gatherings, see Ted Emery, “Casanova’s Coffeehouse: Sociability, Social Class, and the Well-bred Reader in Histoire de ma vie,” in Rittner, Haine, and Jackson, eds., Thinking Space. 98.  Francesco Saverio de’ Rogati, “Discorso preliminare,” in Le odi di Anacreonte e di Saffo, 1:16–19. The ode Millico sang appears in Saverio Mattei’s I libri poetici della Bibbia, 1:64ff, where it is incorrectly identified as Anacreon’s fourth. De’ Rogati was undoubtedly influenced in his endeavor by Mattei’s Libri poetici, where Mattei rendered the psalms into Metastasio-esque Italian verse. This was not de’ Rogati’s first time trying to reform Italian vocal music through translation; on his 1773 attempt to reform Italian opera by translating Rousseau’s Pygmalion, see Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music, 50–58. 99.  Kurke, “Strangeness of ‘Song Culture,’ ” 59–60; de’ Rogati, “Discorso preliminare,” 1:14. Anacreon’s and Sappho’s verses were not epic like those of Homer (their predecessor) or tragico-dramatic like those of Euripides (their successor), but lyric. Yet, as Kurke notes, the lyrics of archaic “song culture” should not be anachronistically taken as poetry intended for silent reading, and so they cannot be mapped directly onto modern conceptions of lyric poetry. Historically, archaic Greek lyric was a genre with a function similar to that of epic, but with a personal/social rather than political frame. Solo lyrics invoked collectivity insofar as they were understood to represent the role of an individual within his or her given community; the soloist was akin to what we might call a chorus leader, portraying a publicized, communally oriented version of his or her lyric “I.” On Sappho as khoregos, or choral leader, see Nagy, Pindar’s Homer, 435, 370–71. 100.  On simplicity and completing the “semiotic lack,” see chapter 2, and Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body, 72–75. On how ancient Greek song moved the emotions and civilized people with its “primitive simplicity,” see Arteaga, Rivoluzioni del teatro musicale italiano, 1:10.

chapter four: domesticating the tenth muse 1.  The sobriquet “tenth muse” is associated with Plato, though it likely did not originate with him. See Plato, Palatine Anthology, 9.506. On everything, or nearly everything, to do with Sappho, see the new Finglass and Kelly, eds., Cambridge Companion to Sappho. 2.  In Henry Tresham’s companion volume of aquatints for Verri’s Saffo, the plate depicting Saffo improvising poetry while gazing at Faone’s naked body is labeled “Saffo si accende per Faone”; Tresham, Le aventure [sic] di Saffo (Rome: 1784), [3]. No t e s  •   233

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3.  A. Verri, Avventure di Saffo (1797 ed.), 88, 90. The full title of the first edition refers to the novel as “[una] traduzione dal Greco originale nuovamente scoperto.” Note that the first edition of Saffo is stamped with “Padova 1780,” rather than 1782, probably to evade the censors. As mentioned previously, here and throughout I provide page numbers from the 1797 reprint except where otherwise noted. 4.  On portrayals of Sappho in the long eighteenth century, see DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 116–97. 5.  On Sappho as fragments, see Pamela Gordon, introduction to Sappho: Poems and Fragments, v–xxv; Carson, introduction to If Not, Winter, ix–xiii. 6.  For a general overview of the ideologically driven exclusion of women from the Italian literary establishment circa 1800, see Carsaniga, “The Romantic Controversy,” in Brand and Pertile, eds., Cambridge History of Italian Literature, 403. Paola Giuli argues that male literati minimized women’s importance in Italian literary culture because they hoped it would protect them from Grand Tourists’ charges of emasculation; see her “From Academy to Stage,” 162. 7.  For a global reception history of Sappho, see the essays in “Part IV— Receptions,” in Finglass and Kelly, eds., Cambridge Companion to Sappho. 8.  On reception of Corilla Olimpica (whose real name was Maria Maddalena Morelli) and changing Italian literary aesthetics, see Giuli, “Poetry and National Identity,” esp. 215, 222. It is widely assumed that the eponymous heroine of Germaine de Staël’s novel Corinne (1807) is based on, or at least inspired by, Corilla Olimpica. Lockhart convincingly reads de Staël’s Corinne as a living yet “statuelike” embodiment of the “Italian nation,” in dialogue with Alessandro Verri’s representation of Rome in his second novel, Le notti romane (1792/1804); see her Animation, Plasticity, and Music, 85–111, esp. 97. On Corilla’s afterlives in nineteenth-century opera, see Esse, “Encountering the Improvvisatrice,” and Esse, Singing Sappho, 43–74. 9.  Giuli, “Poetry and National Identity.” 10.  Giuli, “Poetry and National Identity,” 227. Another famous Arcadian improvvisatrice, Maria Fortuna, published a play entitled Saffo, also in 1776. Bianca Danna suggests that Verri wrote his novel with knowledge of Fortuna’s play because the latter was published by the same printer who put out Verri’s treatise on the theater in 1779. Danna describes Fortuna’s play as “confessional” in style. See Danna, “Saffo, l’ ‘alter ego’ al femminile”; Fortuna, Saffo. 11.  Strabo, Geography, 13.2.3, quoted and translated in Carson’s introduction to If Not, Winter, ix–x. 12.  Greene, ed., Re-Reading Sappho, 1. 13.  Quoted and translated in Giuli, “Poetry and National Identity,” 215, 222. 14.  On Sappho as “a figure for voice in a lyric tradition that mark[ed] the loss of song” in antiquity, see Prins, “Sappho’s Afterlife in Translation,” in Greene, ed., Re-Reading Sappho, 36. 15.  On the muses, see Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 95–96. On “men of letters” writing Sappho in the eighteenth century, although interpreted differently than in the present chapter, see DeJean, Fictions of Sappho. 234  •   No t e s

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16.  Goldsmith, ed., Writing the Female Voice, x. 17.  Carteggio di Pietro e Alessandro Verri, 12.164, letter to P. Verri, 16 January 1782. 18.  “As I write, the tears well up in my eyes and spill over: / see how many blots there are in this part of my letter.” Ovid (as Sappho), Heroides 15, lines 97–98, trans. in Ovid’s Heroides, 176. 19.  See Rimell, “Epistolary Fictions”; Kennedy, “Epistolary: The Heroides.” On the influence of Ovid’s Heroides, especially the Sappho letter, on the development of the epistolary novel, see one of the pioneering studies of feminist literary history, Moers, Literary Women, esp. 5. 20.  Ovid, Ars amatoria, book 3, lines 341–46. The issue here was that the social purpose of the Heroides was more or less antithetical to what writers like Verri intended with their own Sappho stories. Ovid had encouraged women to read the Heroides aloud and to sing Sappho’s poetry as part of the art of seduction: “Let women learn to sing; the voice instead of the face has been a pimp for many.” Late Settecento authors worked hard to change Sappho’s function from seduction to edification, as we will see. My thanks to Lauren Donovan Ginsberg for directing me to the exact passage in Ovid and for her translation of it; private communication, 2 December 2019. 21.  On Winckelmann, see Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, and Davis, Queer Beauty. On Winckelmann’s art history and its implications for histories of musical style, see my “Castrato Remains.” 22.  On neo-Hellenism in eighteenth-century Italy, see Ceserani, Italy’s Lost Greece. 23.  Reynolds, Sappho Companion, 167–70. 24.  Luzzi, Romantic Europe, esp. 128. 25.  Rousseau, Confessions, 1.1, in The Confessions and Correspondence, 5. E. J. Hundert, drawing on the Confessions and Rousseau’s epistolary novel Julie, describes Rousseau’s conception of the self as an “individual [who] establishes his authenticity and moral freedom by making contact with an inner voice rather than responding to the wills and expectations of others” (emphasis added). See Hundert, “European Enlightenment,” 82–83. 26.  Confession as a genre of life writing was also associated with St. Augustine, with whose Confessions (ca. 397–400 CE) Rousseau entered into a polemical dialogue. On the history of the sacrament of confession in Catholicism, including important shifts in the late eighteenth century, see Myers, “From Confession to Reconciliation.” On confession in the French old regime, see Bloechl, Opera and the Political Imaginary, esp. chapter 3. 27.  Levin, Romantic Art of Confession, 9. 28.  Stelzig, “Poetry and/or Truth,” 18. 29.  Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 2. On the importance of experience and reflection to sensibility, see chapter 2 of this volume. 30.  Levin, Romantic Art of Confession, 1. 31.  Stelzig, “Poetry and/or Truth,” 20, 29. No t e s   •   235

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32.  Imperiale, Faoniade [1780], 12–13. It is quite possible that Imperiale was playing with the techniques of verisimilitude like those employed in Pamela and not actually marketing the text as legitimate, but the narrative nonetheless frames his text as an archaeological “discovery.” Eventually Imperiale’s so-called translations would be sold along with Verri’s Saffo novel—as in the 1809 Rome edition, which was a two-for-one deal on fictional Sappho scholarship as well as a testament to the enduring popularity of both works. 33.  For instance, in hymns 3 and 5 Saffo sings about the sound (suono) of her lyre (cetra; plettro Eolio) and of her voice (accenti; canti). 34.  Saffo addresses Venus (Venere) as “Madre,” calls her “materna,” asks for her to intercede on Saffo’s behalf, and so forth; see the two hymns to Venus, part 1, nos. 2 and 4. 35.  Imperiale, Faoniade, 35, 37. 36.  Imperiale, Faoniade, 101. 37.  Imperiale, Faoniade, 14. 38.  Levin, Romantic Art of Confession, 3. 39.  Imperiale, Faoniade, 11–12. 40.  This obviously presented a bit of a paradox for Imperiale: How could the final odes leading up to Saffo’s death have been recorded and preserved? Did Saffo compose them and leave the papyrus on the cliff in the moments before she jumped? Imperiale evaded this issue to a certain extent by relocating Saffo’s immediate experience of her suicide into an earlier ode (part 2, no. 3), staging it as a prophetic dream. The final ode (part 2, no. 5) thus leads up to her death but ends before the scene at the cliff. He even commented that the final ode was comparatively “weak” because Sappho must have been nervous at the prospect of her impending leap, adding a touch of Ovidian-Richardsonian writing-in-the-moment verisimilitude. 41.  The concept (and portmanteau) come from Derrida, Spectres of Marx. Tamara Levitz writes a beautiful excursus on hauntology in her discussion of another Hellenizing fantasy, Stravinsky’s Perséphone; see her Modernist Mysteries, 475–84. 42.  Verri’s aim in writing Saffo is often interpreted as rehabilitating the novelistic genre in the eyes of his Italian literary contemporaries, who until then regarded it as either dangerous or a waste of time. Gaetano Trombatore has argued that Verri’s sentimental, chaste rendition of Sappho and Phaon was an attempt to impart gravitas and morality to the genre. See Trombatore, “I romanzi di Alessandro Verri.” On the commingling of Hellenism with the genre of the novel in Italian Enlightenment literature, including a discussion of Saffo, see Crivelli, “Sappho.” 43.  Carteggio di Pietro e Alessandro Verri, 12.164, letter to P. Verri, 16 January 1782. 44.  Verri, Saffo, 219–20. In Verri’s own footnote to this scene in the novel he argues that the ode must have been addressed to Faone, and not to a woman, because the historical Sappho would not have been so admired if her behavior had been “shameful.” He also claimed that there were two Sapphos from Lesbos, both poets, one of whom was the lover of Phaon. He cited as evidence for these two Sapphos the 236  •   No t e s

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oral histories he claimed to have translated from the denizens of Mytilene and Lesbos. For a more detailed analysis of Verri’s translation of this ode, along with a discussion of Foscolo’s later versions, see Pecoraro, “La seconda ode saffica.” 45.  Lipking, Abandoned Women, 58–59; Prins, “Sappho’s Afterlife,” in Greene, ed., Re-Reading Sappho. 46.  For a brief history of the discovery and transmission of Sappho’s fragments, see Powell, ed., Poetry of Sappho, 45–46. 47.  For a study of several of these translations—though none of the ones I am discussing in this chapter—see Prins, “Sappho’s Afterlife,” in Greene, ed., ReReading Sappho. 48.  Sappho, fragment 31, translated in Carson, If Not, Winter, 63. The original Greek is given there on the opposing page. I am deeply indebted to Lauren Donovan Ginsberg for translating Catullus 51 for me, and to Pauline LeVen for directing me to Carson’s Sappho 31 as the standard among classicists today. Any errors in the interpretation of those translations are, however, entirely my own. 49.  Technically, “Pseudo-Longinus,” because the treatise dates to the first century CE, and the “real” Longinus lived in the third century CE. In the late eighteenth century the text was still attributed to Longinus, and for the sake of simplicity I will use that name here. On the circulation of Boileau’s translation of Longinus in the Settecento, with a focus on its influence on Bettinelli, see Marcialis, Saverio Bettinelli, 27. 50.  De’ Rogati, Le odi, 2:208n–209n. 51.  De’ Rogati, “Discorso preliminare,” in Le odi, 1:19. 52.  De’ Rogati, Le odi, 2:209–15. 53.  De’ Rogati, “Discorso preliminare,” in Le odi, 1:25. In his preface de’ Rogati explained that he was inspired to translate these verses for song after hearing Millico sing a harp-accompanied setting of Saverio Mattei’s translation of an Anacreontic ode (see chapter 3). In his Libri poetici della Bibbia Mattei had translated the psalms into Metastasian-style Italian verse; he even declaimed them while accompanying himself on the psaltery (a plucked instrument similar to a harp, zither, or dulcimer). De’ Rogati apparently took his inspiration for the whole project from Mattei’s endeavor. On Mattei and the psaltery, see DelDonna, Opera, Theatrical Culture and Society, 24, 31. 54.  De’ Rogati, “Discorso preliminare,” in Le odi, 1:27–28, 23–24. 55.  On the eighteenth-century aria as “the ideal presentation of a single, discrete passion” in a Cartesian mode, see Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song, 50. 56.  De’ Rogati, “Discorso preliminare,” in Le odi, 1:19. 57.  De’ Rogati, “Discorso preliminare,” in Le odi, 1:30. 58.  De’ Rogati, Le odi, 2:211. The symbolic link between voice, feeling, and the chest (petto) is also discussed in chapter 2 of this book. 59.  Vickers, “Diana Described,” 266, 272–73. 60.  Freeman, Feminine Sublime, 13–14. Her concept of the “feminine sublime” considers dispossession and self-dismemberment, scattering, or dispersal as acts of extrapatriarchal agency, and resistance to what she calls “domestication.” No t e s  •   237

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61.  De’ Rogati, Le odi, 1:209. 62.  De’ Rogati, “Discorso preliminare,” in Le odi, 1:13–14. De’ Rogati’s translations were set to music only a handful of times, on which more below, but they went through multiple reprints into the first third of the nineteenth century. Even decades later they were still advertised in booksellers’ catalogs as the definitive Italian versions of Sappho and Anacreon. 63.  Steffan, Cantar per salotti, 13–14; Morabito, Romanza vocale, 9. 64.  Caraci Vela, “Il ‘tragico colorito,’ ” 428, 430. 65.  On the various texts used in salotto song, see Sirch, “Notturno italiano.” 66.  See Sirch, “Notturno italiano,” 165. On the chamber song style of Rossini and later composers, see Morabito, Romanza vocale, esp. 7. 67.  Ruth I. DeFord notes that the two terms were often used interchangeably during this period; s.v. “canzonetta,” in Grove Music Online. 68.  Zingarelli also composed a large-scale cantata for operatic soprano and orchestra entitled Saffo: Monologo, setting a new text dramatizing Sappho’s last song and suicide leap. It was composed for public performance (with a “Signora Battaglini” as Saffo) and is clearly an ancestor to such nineteenth-century “Sappho’s leap” works as Morlacchi’s Saffo (1809) and Pacini’s Saffo (1840). Other composers probably also set de’ Rogati’s translation of “Contento al par de’ Numi,” but one by Paolo Bonfichi is the only other version I have found. Bonfichi’s is similar in style to Zingarelli’s Monologo rather than to Zingarelli’s own “Contento” setting in that it is not a chamber piece but a large-scale cantata for soprano and full orchestra. Although the date of Bonfichi’s cantata is unknown, my guess is that it served as his “audition piece” for a post at the Milan Conservatory, where a manuscript now resides (shelfmark Mus.Tr.ms.208); he applied unsuccessfully for a composition post there in 1807. On the circulation of Zingarelli’s chamber songs in manuscript, see Caraci Vela, “Il ‘tragico colorito,’ ” 423. 69.  Morabito, Romanza vocale, 20. 70.  Caraci Vela, “Il ‘tragico colorito,’ ” 429. 71.  De’ Rogati, “Discorso preliminare,” in Le odi, 1:29. This would have been obvious to most composers as the standard practice for setting settenari. 72.  Massimo Mazzotti suggests that Algarotti used the Newtonianesimo, which was set as a series of dialogues, to subvert the religious and political status quo— what I take as pushing boundaries by pretending to cater to the “ladies.” See Mazzotti, “Newton for Ladies.” 73.  De’ Rogati, “Discorso preliminare,” in Le odi, 1:13–14. 74.  For background on the 1790s “morte” operas, see McClymonds, “La morte di Semiramide,” and Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty, 389–435. 75.  Before the premiere of Saffo Vinci had been noted for her “majestic bearing that dominates the scene”; Gazzetta urbana veneta 1 (1 January 1794), 3. 76.  Gazzetta urbana veneta 16 (22 February 1794), 127. The opera premiered on 18 February. It seems as though Saffo was appreciated mostly for its sublime scenery of tombs, caves, and cliffs (designed by Antonio Mauro), and indeed, the libretto describes them in detail. The first act is set on the cliffs of Leucas, Apollo’s temple in 238  •   No t e s

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the background; the cliff’s stones are inscribed with the names and stories of previous supplicants who threw themselves into the sea and emerged alive and purged of their unrequited love. The second act takes place in the cave of the Pythia/High Priestess, which contains a smattering of tombs bearing inscriptions naming those who did not survive their Leucadian leaps—clearly drawing on the same myth that had inspired Imperiale’s story about “Ossur” and Sappho’s tomb. In Sografi, Saffo, 5, 24. 77.  Law, “Composing Citoyennes through Sapho.” The libretto for the French Sapho was written by a female author, Constance-Marie de Salm. 78.  On the female singer figure wresting back agency from the composer in nineteenth-century opera, see Abbate, “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women.” On projecting female authorship in Ottocento opera through the Sappho-esque figure of the female improviser, see Esse, Singing Sappho, 100–127. 79.  Verri’s novel went through fifteen-plus reprints, well into the nineteenth century. It was probably known to most of the audience at La Fenice. On the reception of Verri’s Saffo, see Toppan, Du “Caffè” aux “Nuits romaines,” 53–94. 80.  Convulsions, also referred to as “vapors” or “hysteria,” were a “fashionable malady” associated primarily with women in mid-to-late eighteenth-century Italy and commonly represented as such in plays and poetry of that period. Various medical treatises linked it with emotional or “spiritual” turmoil, usually caused by lovesickness and trashy novels. See Cerruti, “Le convulsioni di Marfisa.” On symptoms of hysterical seizures as including suffocation, convulsions, and “speech disturbances” in the nineteenth century, read through disability studies and performance studies, see Kuppers, “Bodies, Hysteria, Pain.” 81.  Abbate, In Search of Opera, 8. 82.  Giuli, “Poetry and National Identity,” 221–25. Both oracle and sibyl refer to a woman who has the gift of prophecy when possessed by divine inspiration; the former is the Greek term and the latter the Latin (e.g., the Oracle of Delphi and the Cumaean Sibyl). 83.  After the Pythia prophesies Saffo’s suicide, Alceo begs Saffo not to listen but to hear him instead: “That unhappy, deathly voice you heard, it is not a voice from heaven, it is from hell” (Quella, che udisti / voce infausta fatale, / non è voce del Ciel, ella è infernale). 84.  Brose, “Politics of Mourning”; Luzzi, Romantic Europe, 163–94. 85.  Petrarch, Rime sparse 128. See also the famous invective “Ahi serva Italia” in Dante’s Purgatorio, canto VI, lines 76–151, where the poet calls Italy a “bordello” as a synecdoche for the abused and/or sexualized female body. 86.  Brose, “Politics of Mourning,” 3. The basic plot and the epistolary conceit of Ortis were inspired by Goethe’s wildly popular Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774), not to mention Rousseau’s Julie, ou La nouvelle Heloïse (1760). The influence on Foscolo of Cesarotti’s translations of Ossianic fragments (see chapter 1) is also evident. For an overview of Foscolo’s influences, see Fubini, Ortis e Didimo. 87.  Foscolo, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 17. 88.  Foscolo, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 64–65. No t e s   •   239

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89.  Foscolo, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, n.p. 90.  “Il suo aspetto per lo più sparso di una dolce malinconia, si andava animando di una gioja schietta, viva, che le usciva dal cuore; la sua voce era soffocata.” Foscolo, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 11–12. 91.  “Non si legge mai; si ode sempre; nè s’ode l’oratore o il narratore, bensì l’uomo giovine che parla impetuosamente, e lascia discernere i varj colori della sua voce e mutamenti della sua fisonomia.” Foscolo, “Notizia bibliografica intorno alle Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis” (1814), reprinted in Foscolo, Opere edite e postume, 1:172. 92.  Foscolo, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 22–23. 93.  Foscolo, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 27. “O! la canzoncina di Saffo! io vado canticchiandola scrivendo, passeggiando, leggendo: nè così io vaneggiava, o Teresa, quando non mi era conteso di poterti vedere ed udire.” Ortis does not specify which ode he is referring to in these scenes, but, given the fact that Foscolo translated Sappho 31 at least three times over the course of his life—not to mention the appropriateness of fragment 31 to Ortis’s situation—it is probably one and the same. See Fogli, “La ‘canzoncina di Saffo,’ ” 438–39; Pecoraro, “La seconda ode saffica.” 94.  Foscolo, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 67. 95.  Fogli writes that Foscolo’s fascination with Sappho’s song derives from his reading of her “essential poetic voice” as one that “resists the silencing of its own death.” Throughout his oeuvre, she argues, he seeks to reaffirm his own voice by identifying himself with her. See Fogli, “La ‘canzoncina di Saffo,’ ” 434. Among Foscolo’s juvenilia is the 1794 ode “A Saffo,” in which he writes to the poet, “let us weep together” (noi piangerem); it is included in his Versi dell’adolescenza, published posthumously in Poesie inedite (1831). 96.  “Ebbi in quel mar la culla, / Ivi era ignudo spirito / Di Faon la fanciulla, / E se il notturno zeffiro / Blando su i flutti spira, / Suonano i liti [lidi] un lamentar di lira.” Foscolo, “All’amica risanata,” lines 85–90, in Foscolo, Poesie (1803). 97.  Foscolo, “A Zacinto,” lines 12–13, in Foscolo, Poesie (1803).

chapter five: sublime suffering and the good mother 1.  Della Lena, Dissertazione, 79n–80n. 2.  Della Lena, Dissertazione. He uses “sublime” and “sublimità” in connection with Todi at least ten times, but see esp. 55–56. 3.  On Pasta, see Rutherford, “La cantante delle passioni”; Russo, “Giuditta Pasta: Cantante pantomimica”; and Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music, 133–50. 4.  Gazzetta urbana veneta 96 (1 December 1790), 766. 5.  “La sola parola non può mai esprimere le passioni senza nominarle, p.e. io vi amo, io vi odio: ma le parole stesse senza l’accompagnamento necessarissimo del suono della voce convenientemente esteso, e vibrato, esprimono piuttosto una languida idea, che un sentimento.” Della Lena, Dissertazione, 40. Della Lena also men240  •   No t e s

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tions gesture as a necessary component of acting, though he writes very little about it throughout, especially by comparison with his extended discussions of voice. As Russo, Rutherford, and Lockhart have shown in their respective studies of Pasta, gesture was essential to her performance practice. 6.  Todi acted at the Bairro Alto theater in Lisbon as a teenager in the late 1760s, where she made her debut in Molière’s Tartuffe (in Portuguese translation). She switched from spoken drama to comic opera after she married Italian violinist Saverio Todi in 1769, then continued to perform soubrette-type roles in London in the 1770s before making a splash in the Parisian Concert Spirituel in 1778. She turned to serious repertoire in Turin, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and beyond in the 1780s. Her experience in the naturalistic acting-singing style of comic opera presumably colored her later approach to dramatic roles, as is generally acknowledged to be the case with Guadagni (see chapter 2). On Todi’s background see, among others, Della Lena, Dissertazione; Sartori, I libretti italiani, s.v.v. “Luigia Rosa Todi,” “Luigia Todi”; Ribeiro Guimarães, Biographia de Luiza de Aguiar Todi. 7.  Della Lena wrote that Todi had carried to completion the theatrical change initiated by Guadagni and Pacchierotti, contrasting her with castrato Luigi Marchesi; see Dissertazione, 106. 8.  “Il genio costante della Signora Todi per i Drammi dell’immortal Metastasio prova l’intelligenza della sua mente, la sensibilità della sua anima, e quel tatto morale che fa preferire le bellezze del sentimento a’ prestigii della magnificenza.” Gazzetta urbana veneta 97 (4 December 1790), 777. 9.  Gazzetta urbana veneta 96 (1 December 1790), 766. 10.  Della Lena insisted that no other singer, not even Pacchierotti or Babbini, had ever had such an effect on an audience. See his Dissertazione, 65–67. On the connection between sympathy, emotion, and the “moral effect” of theater in the late eighteenth century, see Vincent-Buffault, History of Tears. 11.  Fétis reported on the (possibly spurious) autopsy, its purpose, and its findings in the entry on Banti in his Biographie universelle, 1:237. 12.  Della Lena, Dissertazione, 97. He lists Banti, Rubinelli, and Marchesi as those who sing “senza necessario trasporto” (lacking the necessary enthusiasm) while Todi, Pacchierotti, and Babbini are among the best. Burney, General History of Music, 4:507. 13.  Anon., Lettera d’un filarmonico imparziale, 20. 14.  Gazzetta urbana veneta 96 (1 December 1790), 766. 15.  Burney was recalling Todi’s performances from over a decade later, after she had been celebrated in “France, Spain, Russia, and Germany,” but before she had sung in Venice; Burney, General History of Music, 4:509. 16.  Stendhal, Life of Rossini, 375. 17.  In the original (Della Lena, Dissertazione, 45): Quest’ effetto ho osservato che nasce nella Todi, quando i suoni della sua voce sono affiocati per intasamento o costipazione, che in cantando riacquistono poi la loro propria sonorità, specialmente nell’esprimere la violenza delle passioni: e ciò perchè la voce s’alza ed acquista più forza e melodia, a misura, che la nostra anima esce dal suo No t e s  •   241

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stato ordinario. Ma il canto della Todi ch’è sempre vivamente animato ed espressivo per intenerire il cuore, serve con ciò a correggere, ed emendare in gran parte eziandio il difetto natural o avventizio di sua voce.

18.  Discussion of the “overcoming” narrative is prevalent in disability studies, which locates the rise of this model of construing impairment in the years around 1800—though often with a focus on deafness (as in the reception of Beethoven); see Straus, “Musical Narratives,” esp. 52; see also Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, chapter 3. On the “overcoming” narrative vis-à-vis voice in twenty-first-century musical culture, see Cheng, “Staging Overcoming,” and Holmes and Eidsheim, “A Song for You.” 19.  See Millico, preface to La pietà d’amore, and chapter 2 of this book. 20.  Stendhal, Life of Rossini, 375. 21.  Russo, “Giuditta Pasta,” 497–98. 22.  Stendhal, Life of Rossini, 375. Stendhal was born in 1783, so he could not have heard her in the 1770s in Paris; he traveled in northern Italy in 1799–1800, but Todi’s last recorded performances in Italy were in Naples in 1798. Although he wrote about Todi as though he were personally familiar with her singing, he never actually claimed that he had heard it. 23.  Roach, “Public Intimacy,” esp. 24. 24.  On the aesthetics of vocal “failure” or “damage” in more recent times, see Feldman, “Voice Gap Crack Break,” in Voice as Something More, and Stras, “Organ of the Soul.” 25.  De’ Rogati, Le odi, 2:48–49. 26.  Della Lena, Dissertazione, 44–45; on Todi’s ability to convey and awaken many different passions at once, see p. 42. 27.  Davies has discussed the shift from the castrato’s prized “purity, polish, and science” to the prima donna’s expressing “a physiological presence,” though he locates this in the later context of 1820s London; see his Romantic Anatomies of Performance, 18. 28.  Literary scholar Catherine Maxwell has written about sublime song (as a mode of poetry) as compensation for literal or metaphorical blindness in her Female Sublime, chapter 1. Drawing on Freud, she reads castration, both symbolic and literal, as an essentially feminizing process, with Orpheus and the castrato featuring in this argument; from a musicological standpoint, I read both Orpheus and the castrato differently, but my ideas here have nevertheless benefitted from her discussion of Philomela. 29.  In many ancient sources for the Philomela myth, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Apollodorus’s Library, Philomela metamorphoses into a swallow and her sister Procne into the nightingale. In most vernacular Italian sources, however, the roles were reversed such that Philomela became the nightingale and Procne the swallow, and I follow these here. See, for example, Petrarch’s Rime sparse 310, “Zephiro torna,” line 3, in which Procne chatters and Philomela weeps (“et garrir Progne et pianger Philomena [sic]”). Patricia Joplin offers a wide-ranging and deeply sympa242  •   No t e s

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thetic reading of the entire Philomela-Procne myth through the lens of ritual patriarchal exchange; see her “Voice of the Shuttle.” Ann Rosalind Jones notes how Ovid and Petrarch present male singer-poets like Orpheus and Apollo as “inspirers and practitioners of lyric,” while mythological women are either deprived of voice (Ovid’s Echo, Procne, and Philomela) or stripped of their violent narratives and minimized into metaphors (as in Petrarch’s take on the sisters in Rime sparse 310). Female poets in the Renaissance, such as Tullia d’Aragona and Gaspara Stampa, instead empathized with Procne and Philomela and invited them to lament together; Jones thus makes a case for the feminist reader as an empowered Procne figure. See Jones, “New Songs,” esp. 263. 30.  “Sonetto: O rondinella” [1778], in Suardo Grismondi, Poesie (Bergamo, 1822), 57; reprinted in Tadini, ed., Lesbia Cidonia, 156–57. The largest print collection of Suardo’s poetry came out nearly twenty years after her death, in 1820, but it was reissued in 1822 with a transcript of Saverio Bettinelli’s eulogy for Suardo as a kind of preface. Other versions of her poems appeared in anthologies as early as 1784 and then into the mid-nineteenth century. 31.  On the “feminine sublime” as resistance, see Freeman, Feminine Sublime, especially chapter 1. Note that for Freeman, “feminine” does not necessarily align with “female” but rather serves as the other to “patriarchal”; patriarchy, in her reading, refers to particular dominant sociocultural structures, and not to the genders or sexes of the agents participating in and perpetuating such structures (see p. 4). This is partly why I have chosen to use “female” rather than “feminine” in designating the “other” sublime here; in the late Settecento both bodies and subjects were increasingly marked as inherently and naturally sexed. Please note that these are discussions of eighteenth-century attitudes and not my own personal understanding of gender. 32.  Optic neuritis is an inflammation of the optic nerve that comes on suddenly and causes temporary blindness. It typically affects women in their twenties and thirties and lasts anywhere from two to eight weeks (though it can recur and/or cause permanent vision loss). Causes vary, but optic neuritis is often an early symptom of multiple sclerosis; it can also be a symptom of diabetes or other autoimmune diseases. For an overview, see Kierstan Boyd, “What Is Optic Neuritis,” American Academy of Ophthalmology website, 9 April 2020, www.aao.org/eye-health /diseases/what-is-optic-neuritis. 33.  Gazzetta urbana veneta 1 (1 January 1791), 1. 34.  Lettera d’un filarmonico, 9. 35.  Smart, “Theorizing Gender,” 110. On Callas’s voice as shaped by the media’s constructions of the female body, see Eidsheim, “Maria Callas’s Waistline.” 36.  The only letters of Todi’s that I have been able to find from this period are those addressed to one of her patrons, the Duchess Osuna; see Pimentel et al., “Virtuose,” viaggi e stagioni. 37.  On the continuing practice of aria substitution in a slightly later period, after the heyday of pasticci, see Poriss, Changing the Score. 38.  Metastasio, Didone abbandonata (Padua, 1791), p. 46. The Gazzetta often included reviews and advertisements for operas in nearby cities, and Padua’s No t e s   •   243

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offerings were regularly featured. Bergamo was mentioned, but far less often, and it is much further away from Venice. Regarding changing the aria “for the ladies”: this was a common trope in dedications and the like in opera libretti of the period, but in this case it nevertheless marks the change as being motivated to some extent by public opinion. The sole extant score of “Trionfa o ciel tiranno” is a manuscript copy held in a private collection in Venice with many inconsistencies and lacunae, so I have chosen not to reproduce an excerpt here. The manuscript does, however, make plain that this was indeed a virtuosic aria. 39.  Fragments of the story appear in many different sources, and the “facts” vary accordingly; for an overview, see Ribeiro Guimarães, Biographia de Luiza de Aguiar Todi, 26. 40.  See Gazzetta urbana veneta, December 1790. Todi’s eldest son had died at the age of eighteen in May 1790 during her tour of The Hague. She nevertheless completed her performing obligations, attired in black and “covered in diamonds.” Interestingly, this is not mentioned in the Venetian writings about her. On her performances in The Hague, see Nina d’Aubigny, diary entry of 29 July 1790, quoted in Metzelaar, From Private to Public, 40–41. 41.  Lettera d’un filarmonico, 3–4. 42.  Anon., A Luigia Todi, un’anima sensibile. 43.  Gazzetta urbana veneta 102 (22 December 1790), 817–18. 44.  Gazzetta urbana veneta 3 (8 January 1791), 23. Marchesi is praised here in an acrostic poem using the letters of his last name. It might seem surprising that Marchesi was cast as, at once, a musical scientist and a Herculean hero, but such tropes were often combined in praise for a castrato of his stature. Farinelli, half a century earlier, was another such example. 45.  “Egli ha scelto il maraviglioso, ed ha ottenuto l’intento di farsi ammirare. Ma la maraviglia è l’ultimo de’ piaceri. Il suo cantare colorito, ricercato, ingegnoso, ricchissimo, rallegra, piace, sorprende, soddisfa, al pari d’un giardino fiorito, d’un lavoro finitissimo, d’una macchina stupenda, d’un abbigliamento prezioso. Egli tocca tutti i tasti del piacere, fuorchè quello della sensibilità.” Lettera d’un filarmonico, 22–23. 46.  Lettera d’un filarmonico, 24. 47.  Lettera d’un filarmonico, 13, 25. 48.  Lettera d’un filarmonico, 4. 49.  Lettera d’un filarmonico, 26. 50.  Lettera d’un filarmonico, 15. “Domestico” here signifies “pertaining to the home” or “household,” “concerning the family (as center of affectionate relationships [and] social institutions)” and “private (in opposition to or in relation to ‘public’).” See Battaglia, ed., Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, s.v. “domestico.” 51.  Messbarger, Century of Women, 17. Landes has shown how, before 1789, French salonnières lived beyond the boundaries of marriage and motherhood, and in so doing “subscribed to an ethos of sociability, not domesticity” by daring to exhibit themselves as critics of culture and politics. These women, she argues, seemed 244  •   No t e s

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to progressive-minded men “guilty of altering the masculine monopoly on linguistic meaning and usage”—and guilty of effeminizing men by asserting female agency over language. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, 31. 52.  Anon., “Difesa delle donne,” in P. Verri, Il Caffè, 1:175–82. 53.  Messbarger, Century of Women, 102. See also Guerci, Sposa obbediente, 104–5. 54.  In the French context, Lynn Hunt has read Marie Antoinette as representing the archetypal bad mother within the French Revolution’s Freudian “family romance,” the queen’s “corporeal body” being “the menace that the feminine and the feminizing presented to the republican notions of manhood and virility”; Hunt, Family Romance, 93–94. 55.  Feldman, “Absent Mother.” 56.  Gozzi, L’amico delle fanciulle, 3, 7. For a study of his translation and reworking of the French original, see Pizzamiglio, “L’Amico delle fanciulle.” Gozzi, who appeared briefly in the discussion of the coffeehouse in chapter 3, founded the precursor to the Gazzetta urbana veneta, the Gazzetta veneta, in 1760, modeling it on Addison and Steele’s Spectator. 57.  Messbarger, Century of Women, 94. 58.  Lampredi/Rousseau, La nuova Eloisa, 4. 59.  Rousseau called the conjugal family “the first model of political society” and “the only one that is natural”; see Rousseau, Du contrat social, 46. 60.  Gazzetta urbana veneta 10 (2 February 1791), 77–78, and 11 (5 February 1791), 81–82. 61.  Gazzetta urbana veneta 52 (29 June 1791), 410–12. 62.  The tale is printed across the following issues: 62 (3 August 1791), 494–96; 63 (6 August 1791), 499–500; 64 (10 August 1791), 505–7. The quotation is from the issue of 6 August, p. 500. 63.  D’Ezio, “Italian Women Intellectuals,” 113n21. 64.  Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 182. On the reception of the Vindication in 1790s Italy, see D’Ezio, “Italian Women Intellectuals,” 109–21. 65.  Lattanzi Etrusca, Schiavitù delle donne, 9, 12. 66.  Lattanzi Etrusca, Schiavitù delle donne, 10, 8. 67.  Lattanzi Etrusca, Schiavitù delle donne, title page. 68.  Verri, Saffo, 53. 69.  In the original (Verri, Saffo, 56–57): [Dorilla] lasciò di tessere, ed appoggiando le mani sulle ginocchia, cogli occhi rivolti al cielo sciolse la bella voce in sacro inno. Esprimeva il di lei canto la preghiera di Orfeo, che supplichevole va in traccia di Euridice nell’Inferno: e tant’era la soavità della di lei voce, che quantunque uscisse da un petto non ancora acceso dalla fiamma di Amore; nondinemo, per naturale dolcezza, lo esprimeva, commovendo l’animo altrui senza turbare il proprio. [. . .] Mentre Saffo seguiva coll’artificio della dita la varia soavità del canto, le cadevano dagli occhi sulla cetra involontarie lagrime, come se ascoltasse le querele d’Orfeo diviso dall’amato oggetto per barbara sentenza della Morte. No t e s  •   245

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70.  Dalton, “Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi.” 71.  On the shifting roles of women in this period, especially as related to marriage and motherhood, see Fiume, “Nuovi modelli.” 72.  Gozzi, L’amico delle fanciulle, 5–7. 73.  Anon., “A Lei, mentre rappresenta Cleofide,” in A Lei, mentre rappresenta Didone, unpaginated. 74.  Lettera d’un filarmonico, 12. On the relationship between feeling, the senses, and the trope of animated statues in late Settecento music, see Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music. 75.  Gazzetta urbana veneta 52 (29 June 1791), 410. 76.  See, among an enormous trove of literature, Kristeva, “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini,” in her Desire in Language; Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language; Silverman, Acoustic Mirror, chapter 4; and Cavarero, For More than One Voice, chapter 2.4. 77.  Head, “If the Pretty Little Hand,” 210, 235. 78.  Wellbery, Specular Moment, 190–91. 79.  Kittler, Discourse Networks, 28, 25. 80.  Describing a dinner he had attended with French guests, Bettinelli wrote, “Mi facea ridere a proposito di canto il ritrovarmi obbligato a saper di musica in tali occasioni perchè era italiano. Tutti erano persuasi, che noi siam per natura usignuoli e canerini, perchè tra lor corre in proverbio la musique italienne.” Bettinelli, Lettere a Lesbia Cidonia, 7, 75. 81.  “A che misera affidi i tuoi parti, a colei che uccise i figli?” (italics in original). Bettinelli, Lettere a Lesbia Cidonia, 230. Bettinelli attributes the epigram to the Greek-turned-Roman poet Aulus Licinius Archias (fl. ca. 120–61 BCE). Archias was probably not the author of this particular epigram, nor of many of the epigrams attributed to him in sources passed down from antiquity. The Greek Anthology, which Bettinelli cites as his source (as “l’antologia”), gives as the author of the swallow epigram the Greek poet Philippus, not Archias; see Cameron, Greek Anthology. 82.  “Sento il liscio e rotondo della parola i varj riverberi d’una sola quel giro amabile quel suono armonico della frase e della voce non che del verso.” Bettinelli, Lettere a Lesbia Cidonia, 233. 83.  “Le donne prima dell’invenzione della scrittura furono le maestre e le accademiche dell’eloquenza poetica insegnando a’ fanciullini ed ispirando co’ versi le glorie patrie le memorie degli avi la santità delle leggi e del culto, onde per tanto tempo musica volea dir letteratura. Per tal fin giova una voce soave un musicale orecchio un molle accento uniti al tenero cuore.” Bettinelli, Lettere a Lesbia Cidonia, 233. 84.  Arguments about climate and cultural relativism were common in this period, building on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748); see chapter 3. 85.  In the original (Bettinelli, Lettere a Lesbia Cidonia, 233): Oh quante volte m’arresto per via per ascoltar le dissertazioni i colloquj che fa una madre con un bambolo in braccio, bench’ ella sola sia l’interlocutore. [. . .] Così noi

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balbettiamo, e poi parliamo, e così parlarono i figli di quelle donne sì privilegiate dal clima, cioè, dalla patria dell’eloquenza della musica della poesìa del buon gusto dell’entusiasmo delle passioni più nobili che fosser mai.

In choosing the words “dissertazioni” and “colloquj,” Bettinelli used high-flown academic terminology to describe what we would call “baby talk”; this is in line with arguments made elsewhere in his oeuvre about the superiority of emotion and enthusiasm to academicism and erudition (on which see Marcialis, Saverio Bettinelli). 86.  Considering opera across a longer durée, Abbate has written of Orpheus, the “master-figure of the Opera Composer,” mutating from a low male voice to castrato voice to female voice, part of opera’s secret narrative of “women tak[ing] over musical sound.” See her “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women,” esp. 258. 87.  Sografi, La morte di Cleopatra, act 2, scene 13. Guglielmi had composed some of the music for Todi in a pasticcio of 1794, but this was the first full production. There is also a different setting of Sografi’s libretto by Sebastiano Nasolini that premiered in Vicenza in 1791 and was repeated often in northern Italy in the 1790s. The Guglielmi version was revived in Naples in 1798, again starring Todi. 88.  On Maria Carolina’s patronage of musical tragedy and her self-fashioning as a Bourbon monarch, see DelDonna, Opera, Theatrical Culture, and Society, chapter 3. 89.  In many Catholic countries the “onomastico”—the feast of one’s namesake saint—is celebrated as well as or in lieu of a birthday. Andromaca premiered after Maria Carolina’s name day, but that had been the original intention of the commission; see the dedication in Lorenzi, Andromaca, 5–7. 90.  On Andromache operas, including the unusual aspects of the one for Todi, see Ograjenšek, “Rise and Fall.” 91.  “Ah, pur ti vidi, / Ma quanto, ohimè! diverso / Di quell’ Ettor di pria, / Che ritornò superbo / Delle spoglie di Achille: e quando ei fece / Strider la fiamma ultrice/ Sulle nemiche, e ree / Barbare vele Achee.” Lorenzi/Paisiello, Andromaca, act 1, scene 1. Aeneas’s original speech can be found in Virgil, Aeneid, Book 2, lines 274–76. My warm thanks to Lauren Donovan Ginsberg to bringing these lines from Virgil to my attention. 92.  Italian text transcribed from Lorenzi, Andromaca. 93.  Marmontel had emphasized that “the sacred names of friend, father, lover, spouse, son, mother” were more important than “titles” in eliciting emotion from an audience; see his Poétique française, 2:147. Stefano Castelvecchi thoughtfully discusses Marmontel’s sentimental dramaturgy and “sacred names,” together with the musical signatures of sensibility, in relation to Paisiello’s beloved semiserious opera Nina, o sia La pazza per amore (Caserta, 1789); see Castelvecchi, Sentimental Opera, 136. Incidentally, Marmontel became a great admirer of Todi after hearing her in Paris in the 1770s, as Della Lena proudly noted in his Dissertazione, p. 63. 94.  For a detailed study of the continuation and transformation of these and other gendered tropes through the nineteenth century, both on the operatic stage and in Italian society, see Rutherford, Verdi, Opera, Women; on motherhood in particular, see pp. 164–77.

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95.  On the new opening with chorus in the 1804 Andromaca, see Mattei, “Cori, preghiere e tempeste,” 239. 96.  Monica Nocciolini argues that northern Italian librettists at the time were engaging with contemporary literature, even though composers remained focused on pleasing the audience rather than making political statements or musical innovations; see “Melodramma nella Milano napoleonica.” 97.  The phrase and concept are, famously, Pierre Nora’s; see “Between Memory and History.” 98.  Bettinelli, Lettere a Lesbia Cidonia, 230. This immediately follows the quotation of the swallow/Medea epigram, and it precedes another about a dead father missing his wife and children. The contrast between the bad mother epigram and the benevolent father one exemplifies the struggle Hunt lays out between the two archetypal parental figures; see her Family Romance. 99.  Lockhart interprets Roman ruins through the lens of (proto)nationalism by connecting the idea of “animation” to voice and political agency, with a deft analysis of Verri’s Le notti romane and de Staël’s Corinne; see Animation, Plasticity, and Music, chapter 3. 100.  The epigram to Ortis is the Latin translation of Gray’s line: “Naturae clamat ab ipso vox tumulo,” which Foscolo gives in Italian as “Geme la natura perfin nella tomba”; Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, title page. The quote returns in Ortis’s letter of 25 March on p. 74. 101.  Schor, Bearing the Dead, 53. 102.  Luzzi, Romantic Europe, 5–6; Brose, “Politics of Mourning.” 103.  This is Luzzi’s translation of Foscolo’s phrase “musica senza pensiero.” See his Romantic Europe, 6, 54, 74. 104.  On Foscolo as the Orpheus, Homer, and Virgil of Italy in Dei sepolcri, see Luzzi, Romantic Europe, 40–41. Nora Goldschmidt and Barbara Graziosi read Foscolo’s ode as attempting to “create a nation” through sketching a “literary graveyard”; see Goldschmidt and Graziosi, eds., Tombs of the Ancient Poets, 14–15. 105.  “E voi palme e cipressi che le nuore / piantan di Prìamo, e crescerete ahi presto / di vedovili lagrime innaffiati, proteggete i miei padri. [. . .] Un dì vedrete / mendico un cieco errar sotto le vostre / antichissime ombre, e brancolando / penetrar negli avelli, e abbracciar l’urne, / e interrogarle. Gemeranno gli antri / secreti, e tutta narrerà la tomba.” Foscolo, Dei sepolcri, in Opere, vol. 1, lines 272–75; 279–84.

epilogue 1.  Foppa, Giulietta, e Romeo (Venice, 1796), act 3, scene 1. The opera premiered that same year at La Scala in Milan. Foppa likely based his libretto on either Louis Sébastien Mercier’s French reworking (as Les Tombeaux de Vérone, 1782) or Giuseppe Ramirez’s Italian translation of Mercier (as Le tombe di Verona, 1789) instead of Shakespeare’s play. Alessandro Verri translated some of Shakespeare’s plays into Italian in the 1770s but did not publish them. See Minutella, Reclaiming Romeo and Juliet, 66–67. 248  •   No t e s

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2.  On Romeo’s lament as “metasong,” see Feldman, Castrato, 248–49. 3.  On the 1809 Paris performance, see Feldman, Castrato, 211–37. 4.  Feldman, Castrato, chapter 6. 5.  Malnati, “Per una storia,” 37–38, 40. 6.  Grassini sang the scene as a cantata of sorts in 1803 in Genoa, according to the manuscript score held at the Conservatorio di Musica Nicolò Paganini in Genoa, shelfmark D.3.49.6. On her performances of the scene in 1817 and 1822, see Malnati, “Per una storia,” esp. 46–47. On the transition from castrato singers to female ones as the romantic leads in early Ottocento opera, see André, Voicing Gender. 7.  The young Pasta sang Giulietta to Grassini’s Romeo in 1817 before taking on Romeo herself as a signature role and singing it in at least twenty productions; see Malnati, “Per una storia,” 48. On Pasta’s absorption of the castrato style, see Feldman, Castrato, 234–43. Descriptions of Pasta’s voice and style resonate with those of Todi’s: her voice was often characterized as sounding “suffocated,” while critics analyzed her “expressive sublimity” by “fragmenting” her performances into moments and phrases; see Rutherford, “La cantante delle passioni,” esp. 110, 112, and Russo, “Giuditta Pasta,” esp. 498, 520, 527. 8.  On burial of the dead as one of the essential markers of humanity for eighteenth-century thinkers, see Vico, Scienza nuova, §12, and Ingold, “Posthuman Prehistory,” 83–84. On the voice of feeling, especially the singing voice, as the marker of humanity, see Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 325–26, and the introduction to this book. 9.  Eidsheim, Race of Sound, esp. 11; Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance, esp. 182–83. 10.  The foundational studies on the myth of “absolute music” are Chua, Absolute Music, and Goehr, Imaginary Museum. 11.  For different takes on the idea of the composer’s (metaphorical) voice, see Cone, Composer’s Voice; Taruskin, “Composer’s Voice,” in Oxford History of Western Music, 2:589–639; Seth Brodsky, “There Is No Such Thing as the Composer’s Voice,” in Feldman and Zeitlin, eds., Voice as Something More, 227–46. 12.  See Ochoa Gautier, Aurality, esp. 100–102, and Tomlinson, “Music, Anthropology, History.” 13.  Chakrabarty, “Witness to Suffering,” esp. 63–64; see also Weidman, Singing the Classical, 7–8. 14.  Chakrabarty, “Witness to Suffering,” 51, 56, 63–64. 15.  Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 14; see also Brown, “Negative Poetics,” 134.

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I n de x

amateur performance, 104, 137–38, 148, 230n60 amico delle fanciulle, L’ (Gozzi), 178, 181 Anacreon, 73, 117 Ancient Phonograph, The (Butler), 9 Andreozzi, Gaetano, 186 Andromaca (Lorenzi/Paisiello), 187–95; “Ancor mi risuona la voce dolente,” analysis, 188, 190–91; score, 189ex., 190ex., 192–94ex. apoteosi d’Ercole, L’, 174 apparatus, vocal, 61, 85, 160, 162. See also defects, vocal; timbre, vocal Arcadian Academy (Rome), aesthetic values of, 120–21 archaeology, 122, 124 Archias, Aulus Licinius, 184, 246n81 Ariosto, Ludovico, 24, 113, 136, 212n17, 232n89 Armida (Sacchini), “Idol mio, se più non vivi,” 68 Artaserse (Metastasio and Bertoni), 75 Arteaga, Stefano, 26, 92, 95 artifacts, ancient Greek, 122 atto d’Orfeo, L’. See Orfeo ed Euridice (Gluck/Parma) audiences: European, 158; Italian, 48, 57, 58, 71, 166; London, 56, 163, 219n13; Paduan, 57, 172; Parmesan, 98–99; Venetian, 158–65, 169–71, 173–75, 181–82. See also spectators Austen, Jane, 54 Austin, John Langshaw, 37

Abbate, Carolyn, 5, 9, 27–29, 152 Abrams, M. H., 62 absolutism, 96–99 academies: Accademia dei Pugni (Milan), 6, 113, 123; Accademia della Crusca (Florence), 89–90, 93; Arcadian (Rome), 119, 234n10; Arcadian Academy (Rome), 169; Mantua, 180; Naples, 216n51; Padua, 219n15 accento, 39, 65, 184 acting, 55, 63–64, 218n7, 240n5; and individual experience, 72–74; verisimilar, 55–56, 160–61 Addison, Joseph, 90, 92 Aeneid (Virgil), 188 Aeolian harp, 62–63, 220n32 aesthetics, 72–73, 174–76 affanno, as “breath,” 43–44 agency, 10–11; female, 119–20, 171; Orphic, denied to Saffo, 149–52; of singers, 37–40, 53, 93 Albrizzi, Isabella, 181 Alessandro e Timoteo (Rezzonico), 94–100; “Nel seno il cor mi palpita,” 98; “Pietose lagrime,” 97 Alessandro nell’Indie (rev. Pepoli), “Trionfa o ciel tiranno,” 172, 174 Alexander’s Feast (Dryden), 94 Alexandria, Library of, 129 Alfieri, Vittorio, tomb of, 153 Algarotti, Francesco, 4, 59, 148 alterity. See difference; otherness A Luigia Todi, un’anima sensibile, 174 271

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authenticity: and artifice, 79–80; confessional, 123–24; ratified by suffering, 171; and vocality, 11, 14–15, 126, 156 aventures d’Amélie, Les (Giuseppina di Lorena), 179 avventure di Saffo, Le (Verri), 118–19, 126–28, 165, 180–81; citaredo and civilizing song, 114–16; domestic virtue in, 181; success of, 239n79 Babbini, Matteo, 149 Banti, Brigida Giorgi, 79, 162 Barker-Benfield, G. J., 106 Beccaria, Cesare, 123 Beghelli, Marco, 68 bel canto, 79 Bellini, Vincenzo, 19 Berlant, Lauren, 66, 115 Berlin, 173, 241n6 Bernardini di Capua, Marcello, 104 Bertoni, Ferdinando, 57, 61, 160. See also under Orfeo ed Euridice (Calzabigi) Bettinelli, Saverio, 87, 91, 98, 106, 183, 184, 196, 243n30 Bianchi, Francesco, 186 birdsong, 183–84 Boileau, Nicolas, 130 Bonaparte, Caroline, 180 Bonaparte, Josephine, 180 Borsa, Matteo, 5, 61, 75 Bourbon, House of, 186, 187; wedding festivities, 53, 217n1 breath, 31; and vocal failure, 43–44 Brose, Margaret, 153 buona figliuola, La (Piccinni), 9 burials, Italian, 196–97 Burney, Charles, 104, 162, 163; on Guada­ gni’s performance, 63 Burney, Frances, 230n60 Butler, Margaret, 4 Butler, Shane, 9 Caffè, Il (periodical), 103, 112, 177 calascione, 108, 231n76 Calcagno, Mauro, 9 Caledonian society, 51, 52, 54. See also humanity, primitive Callas, Maria, 171

Calzabigi, Ranieri de,’ 5, 20, 34–36; Comala: Orphic inscriptions of voice, 41–48; Ossianic language, 40–41; on Ossian, 35–36; restraining Orphic voice, 37–48, 60. See also under specific titles Canova, Antonio, 153 “cantabile” musicality, 34, 60, 64; and Italian verse forms, 23–26 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), Wife of Bath’s tale, 179 Canzoniere (Petrarch). See Rime sparse (Petrarch) capitalism and subjectivity, 106–7 Cappella Antoniana (Padua), 57, 219n15 Carducci, Giosué, 227n28 Carli, Gianrinaldo, 92 Carson, Anne, 129 Cassandra, 197 Castore e Polluce (Sarti), 173 castrati: and Italian otherness, 101–2; made “natural” by sensibility, 55–56; as Orphic figures, 53–82, 96; unnatural suffering of, 166. See also Guadagni, Gaetano; Millico, Giuseppe; Pacchierotti, Gasparo Catherine II (the Great), Empress of Russia, 158, 173 Catholicism, Italian, 185 Cato, a Tragedy (Addison), 90–93, 227n23 Catone, Il (Salvini), 90 Cattelan, Paolo, 58, 65 Catullus, 129, 133–34 Cavarero, Adriana, 114 Cesarotti, Melchiorre, 16, 54; literary project, 18–40, 49, 51–52; and opera reform, 34–35; Poesie di Ossian, 18–52, 119, 197, 239n86; Ragionamento sopra l’origine e i progressi dell’arte poetica, 26 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 200 chamber song, Italian, 104, 136–38 Chandler, James, 88–89 character types, 199, 221n39, 231n79 Chegai, Andrea, 59, 68 chest voice, 81. See also petto, voce di chora (Kristeva), 183 choral scenes, 47–48, 195 cicisbeismo, 177

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Cidonia, Lesbia. See Suardo Grismondi, Paolina Secco citaredi, 127, 232n90; and public edification, 111–16 citizens: edified by opera, 161–62; female, 149, 179, 184 civilization, 102, 175, 229n50; and empire, 88–93, 105–7; mythical origins in song, 85–86; and Orphic voice, 86–88; reduced to ruins and song, 52 civilizing process, 88–93, 110, 120, 226n13; accomplished through marriage, 111; and domestication, 100–103; role of coffeehouses, 111–12; role of theater, 88–90, 93–96, 111–12, 160–61 “civilizing song,” 86; and Italian alterity, 51–52, 107–11; Italian civic life, 103–7; as sung myth/history, 114–16; Todi’s voice as, 161–62 civilizzare, 89–90, 92, 93, 102, 227n19 classicism, 120–21, 131, 173; and individual experience, 72–74 Cleopatra, 148 climate theory of national character, 100–101 coffeehouses and intimate publics, 111–16 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, “effusions,” 62, 220n32 Collegio dei Nobili (Parma), 228n31 Comala (Calzabigi and Morandi): death scene, 42–44; finale, 47–48; modeled on Orfeo ed Euridice, 40–49; “Neri giorni ed infelici,” 44–47, 45table, 46fig., 50ex.; Orphic inscriptions of voice, 41–49; Ossianic language, 40–41 Comala (Cesarotti), 29–34, 33fig. comic opera, 61, 161, 188 commedia dell’arte, 106 compensation and suffering, 166–67 confessio (martyr’s tomb), 126 confession, 138, 155, 235n26 confession, literary, 123–26, 155 Confessions (Rousseau), 123, 124 Conscious Lovers, The (Steele), 89, 92 “Contento al par de’ Numi” (Sappho/de’ Rogati), 131–36; Zingarelli setting, 137–48; analysis, 138–41, 148; form, 140–41table; score, 142–47ex.

conventions, 5, 14, 28, 41, 80, 133; literary, 20–26 conventions, musical-dramatic: expressive registers, 62; of opera seria, 58–61, 161 Crescentini, Girolamo: in Giulietta e Romeo, 199; “Ombra adorata, aspetta,” 199; as Orphic figure, 151; in Saffo, 149 Culler, Jonathan, 14, 123 culture, English, as “civilizing,” 90 da capo form, 68–69, 161; and narrative time, 58–61 Dalton, Susan, 181 David, Giacomo, 79, 96, 221n39; in Andromaca, 187 Davies, James Q., 3, 55 death, 154, 177, 186, 214n34; portrayed with vocal failure, 42–44 de Certeau, Michel, 5 defects, vocal, 188; moral/emotional effects of, 162–65; suffering and, 165–67, 168– 70. See also timbre, vocal “Defence of Poetry” (Shelley), 13 Dei delitti e delle pene (Beccaria), 123 Dei sepolcri (Foscolo), 196–97 Della Lena, Innocenzo, 75, 76, 162, 166; on Todi, 158, 160–61, 163–65 Dell’opera in musica (Planelli), 87 democracy and individual experience, 83–85 Demofoonte (Paisiello), “Non temer, bell’idol mio,” 68 Denis, Michael, translation of Ossian, 49 de’ Rogati, Francesco, 116–17; translations of Sappho, 130–31 Derrida, Jacques, 6 de Staël, Germaine, 12, 212n9 Diderot, Denis, 14, 54–55, 61, 63–64, 219n12, 221n43 Didone abbandonata, 160, 172; Anfossi, Pasquale, 162; Metastasio, Pietro, “Vado . . . ma dove?” 171; pasticcio revivals, 171–72; Pepoli, Alessandro, 148; “Trionfa o ciel tiranno,” 172, 172fig. diegetic song. See song-as-song Difesa della musica moderna (Manfredini), 69 “Difesa delle donne,” 177

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difference, racialized, 91–92, 111 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 129 Dizionario di belle lettere (Diderot and D’Alembert), 15 Dolar, Mladen, 3 domestication, 87, 91–93, 153; and civilizing process, 100–103; of female alterity, 133–36, 148 domesticity: and female virtue, 176–77; representations of, 187–88; women’s voices and, 180–81 Don Giovanni (Mozart), 9 Durazzo, Count, 36 dynamism, emotional, in rondo form arias, 68–70 Dypnosophistae (Athenaeus), 94 economies of exchange, 103–11 economy, agrarian, 102–3 economy, market, and circulation of feelings, 105–6 Edict of Saint-Cloud, 196 edification, moral, 161–62, 166, 177 education, 177–79, 182–83 effusion, lyric, 57–58, 67, 220n32; integrated into rondo form, 67, 67tab.; in Sappho, 135; and/as singers’ abuses, 37–40; in speechlike song, 61–63; and uneven prosody in Ossian, 23–26 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (Gray), 154, 196 Elias, Norbert, 88, 106 ellipses, as markers of speech, 37, 44, 60, 81, 108–9, 151, 152, 226n18. See also parataxis Ellison, Julie, 90, 91 embellishments, vocal: and Calzabigi’s reform, 38–39, 49; and emotional experience of opera seria, 60, 63, 65 Émile (Rousseau), 178 emotion, 14, 60–61, 116; in comic opera, 106; in opera seria, 58–61; in Ossianic narrative, 21–26; reciprocity of, 105–6. See also feelings empire and civilization, 88–93, 105–7 Enlightenment: biological determinism, 166, 176; Italian, 177, 178; theories of voice, 6–9; valorization of sight, 88–89, 226n18 “Eolian Harp, The” (Coleridge), 62

Essay on the Origin of Languages (Rousseau), 6–7 Esse, Melina, 10, 15 Euripides, 187 experience, individual: and democracy, 83–85; and vocal sensibility, 72–74; voice and confession, 123 experimentation, literary, and female poeisis, 120, 122 expression of feelings: as dynamic process, 57–58; modern versus originary, 26–29; through vocal sound, 160 failure, vocal, 78; and emotional excess, 60–61; portrayal of death, 42–45. See also timbre, vocal Faone, 151–52 Faoniade, La (Imperiale), 124–26 Fea, Carlo, 122 feeling, singularized: as disruption of the songlike, 60; and poetic language, 27–29, 31 feelings, 76, 110, 160; circulated publicly, 105–6, 115–16; textual markers of, 21–29, 60. See also emotion; sensibility Feldman, Martha, 8, 9, 58, 60, 76, 177, 199 Feodorovna, Maria, 94 Ferdinand IV, King of Naples, 186 feste d’Apollo, Le, 94, 217n1 Fètis, François-Joseph, 162 fiction, literary, confessional mode in, 124 Fingal (Cesarotti), 28, 33fig. Fingallo and Orfeo, 44–46 Foppa, Giuseppe Maria, 198 Fortuna, Maria, 234n10 Foscolo, Ugo, 11–12, 42, 103, 153–54, 183; Dei sepolcri, 196–97 fragmentary texts: absent bodies and, 148, 155; history and, 124, 128; poetic, 126, 129–31; readers’ engagement with, 135; of Sappho, 118–19 fragmentation: domesticated by rational reader, 135–36; of the lyric moment, 60; musical, 138–41, 188; Petrarchan, 134– 35, 168; remediations of Sappho’s voice, 166; and ruins, 196; as stylistic marker, 54, 108–9; and subjectivity, 121, 155; and the sublime, 152, 166

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Freeman, Barbara Claire, 135 Frizzi, Benedetto, 75 Gaelic language, 217n70 Gambarota, Paola, 23 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 227n28 Garrick, David, 56 Gazzaniga, Giuseppe, 160 Gazzetta urbana veneta, 80, 149, 158, 161, 162, 164, 170, 174, 178–79 genres, epistolary, and female interiority, 121–28 Georgics (Virgil), 37 Germany, maternal song in, 183 gift economy, 85, 107 Giordani, Giuseppe, 186 Giotti, Cosimo, 186 Giuli, Paola, 119–20, 152 Giulietta e Romeo (Foppa/Zingarelli), 198–99; “Ombra adorata, aspetta,” 198, 199 giuochi d’Agrigento, I (Pepoli/Paisiello), 78–82, 149 Giuseppina di Lorena, princess of Cari­ gnano, Les aventures d’Amélie, 179 Gjerdingen, Robert O., 8 Global South, 10, 101 Gluck, Christoph Willibald. See under specific titles Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 155 Goldoni, Carlo, 106 Gordon, Bonnie, 4, 101 Gozzi, Gasparo, 111, 178, 181 Grand Tour, 101, 217n70, 234n6 Grassini, Giuseppina, 200, 249n6; in Giulietta e Romeo, 199, 249n7 Gray, Thomas, 154 Greek song, ancient: lyric, 117, 132, 148, 197; moral effects of, 53, 71, 83–84, 94; and Orphic voice, 87–88 Green, Ellen, 120 Greenblatt, Stephen, 106 Guadagni, Gaetano, 56, 161, 218n7, 219n15; comparison with Todi, 158; influence on Gluck, 218n11; as Orfeo, 50ex., 56–57, 60–66 Guarracini, Serena, 102 Guerci, Luciano, 177

Habermas, Jürgen, 92, 177 Habsburg, House of, 186, 187, 195; occupation of Italy, 153–54; wedding festivities, 53, 217n1 Hague, The, 173, 244n40 hauntology (Derrida), 126, 128, 236n41 hearing, 13, 31. See also listening, civilizing power of; sight, valorization of Heartz, Daniel, 8, 56 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 13 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 11, 49, 183, 212n9 Heroides 15 (Ovid), 121–22, 235n20 history: (re)constructed from fragments, 124; sung by citaredi, 111–16; Vico’s theory of, 27 history and song: and mythology, 49, 51–52; in Ossian, 19, 21, 23–26; sung by citaredi, 111–16 Homer, 18, 25, 49, 114, 232n90, 502 Howard, Patricia, 63 humanity, primitive: connection to nature, 21; expressive language of, 27–29; tamed by Orphic song, 86–87 Ifigenia (Sarti), “Un amante sventurato,” 69 Iliad (Homer), 25, 197 illusion, theatrical, 95, 98 immediacy, expressive, scripted, 60 Imperiale, Vincenzo, “translations” of Sappho, 124–26 improvisation and mediation, 35–36 improvisors, 15, 152, 212n9, 212n17, 215n43 Ines de Castro (Giotti and Giordani), 186 inscription, memory as, 35–36 interiority: female, 124–28; natural voice and, 71–72, 85–86; and physicality, 164; sensibility and, 71–72 Ionian Sea, 156 “Italia mia” (Petrarch), 153 Italy: ancient world and, 122, 227n28; cultural identity, 13, 111, 119, 196–97; musicality, 7, 52, 132, 183; national consciousness, 195–97; peninsula as fragmented female body, 153–54; postEnlightenment, 195–96; as southern, 100–104, 108–9

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Jacobinism, 86, 195 Jacobins, 83, 84fig., 195 Jarvis, Simon, 25 Johnson, Barbara, 106 Jommelli, Niccolò, 5 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 242n29 Joplin, Patricia, 242n29 Juba (character), 91, 227n23 Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloïse (Rousseau), 121, 178, 239n86 juxtaposition of solo and choral singing, 47–48, 64, 79 Kircher, Athanasius, 1 Kittler, Friedrich, 183 Kristeva, Julia, 183 Kurke, Leslie, 13, 117 labor, affective, 178, 187, 197 Lampredi, Giovanni Maria, 178 Landes, Joan, 177 language, aphoristic, in da capo arias, 59 language, tropic, 27–29, 41 Lapegna, Francesco, 84fig. Lattanzi, Carolina, 180 Law, Sin Yan Hedy, 149 Lee, Vernon, 1 Le Guin, Elizabeth, 73–74 Leopardi, Giacomo, 19, 232n95 Lettera d’un filarmonico imparziale, 170, 174–75 lettere americane, Le (Carli), 92 Leucas (Greek island), 156 liberalism, Western, 87 lieto fine, 40, 48, 187 lira sentimentale, La, 137 listeners as readers, 124, 155 listening, civilizing power of, 112–16 Lockhart, Ellen, 8, 26 Longinus, 130, 165, 237n49 Lord, Alfred, 23 Lorenzi, Giovanni Battista, 187 Lowe, Lisa, 87 lullaby, 156, 157, 183 Lulliade, Il (Calzabigi), 35 Luzzi, Joseph, 124, 153 lyre, 12, 15–16, 228n30

lyric, 9, 12–15, 24, 128–29, 134, 188, 210n52, 210n59; and confession, 123 lyric figure, 12–17, 198–99; Ossian as, 18–20, 26, 35–36. See also Orpheus; Sappho lyric “I,” 133, 134, 168, 169; stripped of voice, 165 Macpherson, James, 18, 54; Comala, 30–31, 32fig., 41, 42; Poems of Ossian, 21–24, 41 Madrid, 186 magic, vocal, and myth, 64–65, 95 Magna Grecia, 122 Mali, Joseph, 51 Mancini, Giovanni Battista, 71 Manfredini, Vincenzo, 69, 71 Mantua, 180 Marchesi, Luigi, 162, 244n44; in Castore e Polluce, 173, 174; in L’apoteosi d’Ercole, 174; virtuosity of, 76–77 Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples, 186, 187 Marian devotion, 125, 185 Marmontel, Jean-François, 15, 158, 247n93 Martina, Alessandra, 8, 48 Martinelli, Gaetano, 5 maternal song, 183–84 Mattei, Lorenzo, 75 Mattei, Saverio, 5; Libri poetici della Bibbia, 233n98, 237n53; Osservazioni sopra i pezzi lirici e drammatici di Ossian, 34 Mauro, Antonio, 238n76 Mayr, Simone, 149 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 11 Medea, 184 mediation of poetic fragments, 129–32, 155–56 Meleagro (Pepoli), 77 memoir and confession, 123, 124 mémoire, lieu de (Nora), 195 memory, 21, 36, 38, 125, 154, 197; as inscription, 35–36; and voice, 47–48 Mercier, Louis Sébastien, 248n1 merit, artistic, 5, 121, 174–76 Mersenne, Marin, 1 Messbarger, Rebecca, 177 metasong. See song-as-song

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Metastasio, Pietro, 161; classicizing texts, 73; “Se cerca, se dice,” 223n71; uniformity of, 34. See also under specific titles meters, poetic, mixed, 31–34 Millico, Giuseppe, 48–49, 53, 84fig., 103–4, 113; on cultivating natural voice, 72–74; La morte di Clorinda, 232n89; as modern citaredo, 113–16; as Orpheus, 48–49, 50ex., 66–72; preface to La pietà d’amore, 71, 83, 164 mimesis, musical, 61 Moe, Nelson, 5 moment, lyric, aria as, 59–61 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de, 100 Morandi, Pietro, 41, 48–49, 216n57; “Neri giorni ed infelici,” 46–47, 50ex. Morelli, Maria Maddalena. See Olimpica, Corilla morte d’Ercole, La (Pepoli), 148 morte d’Ercole, La (Pepoli), 77 morte di Cesare, La (Sertor/Bianchi), 148 morte di Cleopatra, La (Sografi), 148, 149; Guglielmi, Pietro Alessandro, 186; Nasolini, Sebastiano, 247n87 morte di Clorinda, La (Millico), 232n89 morte di Semiramide, La (Sografi), 148, 149 motherhood, in Italian opera houses, 177 Mount-Edgcumbe, Earl of, 76 mourning, 195–97, 198–200; in Comala, 47–48 Muratori, Ludovico, 102 musicality, Italianate: and Italian verse forms, 23–26; natural song, 19; and operatic tastes, 56–57 myth, 3, 11, 51, 200, 242n29; as mode of knowledge, 41–42; sung by citaredi, 114–16; and vocal magic, 64–65 Nahon, Marino, 68 Naples, 186, 247n87 Napoleon, 19, 180, 187, 195, 199; betrayal of Italy, 153–54, 196 narrative, 18, 81; in opera seria, 58–60; shaped by emotion, 21–26 Nasolini, Sebastiano, 186

national consciousness, 90, 195–97 naturalness, 73, 85; sensibility as proof of, 53, 55–56. See also vocality natural song: irregular and preliterate, 20, 23–26, 41; Italianate musicality, 19. See also song, originary nature, 21, 38, 72, 81; internalizing, 70–72; and memory, 29–31, 38 “nature, second,” 55, 56, 63. See also acting, verisimilar Naumann, Johann Gottlieb, 160 neoclassicism, 12, 153, 159 Neri, Michele, 96 newtonianesimo per le dame, Il (Algarotti), 148 Nina, o sia La pazza per amore (Paisiello), 247n93 notation, musical, 10, 38, 55, 62 notti romane, Le (Verri), 196, 210n52 novels: interiority and, 121–28; sentimental, 37, 54, 119; ventriloquizing Sappho, 124–28 novels, epistolary: and female interiority, 121–23; and male subjectivity, 153, 155 nozze di Figaro, Le (Mozart), 9 Ochoa Gautier, Ana María, 10 Ode II (Sappho). See Sappho 31 (ode) odi di Anacreonte e di Saffo, Le (de’ Rogati), 131, 148 Odi di Saffo (Zingarelli), 137 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 6 Oinamora (Cesarotti), 22–23 Olimpiade, L’ (Metastasio and Sacchini), 75–76, 223n71 Olimpica, Corilla, 119–20, 127, 152, 212n9, 234n8 On the Sublime (Longinus), 130, 135, 165 opera seria, 4–5, 78, 149, 175; character types in, 149–50; civilizing function, 161–62; musical-dramatic conventions, 58–61; Orphic rondos in, 68–70; segmented structure, 58–60. See also castrati; reform, operatic oracles, 152, 239n82 oral tradition, 23, 35–36, 101, 211n2; and myths, 51–52; and Ossian, 18–19

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Orfeo Act, The. See Orfeo ed Euridice (Gluck/Parma) Orfeo ed Euridice, 53–54; and Comala, 42–49; Gluck/Millico pasticcio (London), 66; Guadagni pasticci, 56, 57; Ossianic affinities, 37–40; rondo form in “Che farò senza Euridice?” 66–70, 67table; satirized in Li tre Orfei, 108–9 Orfeo ed Euridice (Bertoni/Venice), 35, 57–66; “Deh! placatevi . . . men tiranne,” 64–65; interrupted songs in, 60–63 Orfeo ed Euridice (Gluck/Parma), 53, 94, 217n1; changes for Millico, 48–49, 50ex. Orfeo ed Euridice (Gluck/Vienna), 8, 36–40, 74–75, 217n1; “Che farò senza Euridice?” 44–47, 45fig., 47ex., 50ex.; “Chiamo il mio ben così,” 37–38, 62; death scene, 42–43; “Deh! placatevi . . . men tiranne,” 39, 64–65, 96, 97; Guadagni’s contributions, 50ex., 56 Orlando furioso (Ariosto), 212n17 “O rondinella” (Suardo), 167–69 Orpheus, 19, 108–11, 181, 226n8; as lyric figure, 15–16. See also lyric figures; Orphic voice Orphic voice, 110, 113, 159–60; and civilization, 85–88, 110–11; and da capo arias, 58–61; in Li tre Orfei, 103–11; as manipulative, 96–100; in Metastasian works, 68; in Saffo, 151–52; as tyrannical, 93–96. See also Philomela; Sappho Osservazioni sopra i pezzi lirici e drammatici di Ossian (Mattei), 34 Ossian, 29–31, 34, 35, 49, 51, 119, 138; Cesarotti’s translations of, 21–26; expressive language of, 27–29; musicality of, 34–36; and oral tradition, 18–19 Ossian, Poesie di (Cesarotti), 18–52, 119, 197, 239n86; Comala, 29–34, 33fig.; influence, 40–41 Ossur, 124, 126 otherness, Italian, 10, 100–103, 229n50; and “civilizing song,” 51–52, 107–11 Ottoman Empire, 122 Ovid, 121–22, 235n20 Pacchierotti, Gasparo, 158, 161, 164, 166; as Clearco in I giuochi d’Agrigento, 78–82;

as Guadagni’s and Millico’s heir, 74–77, 151, 223n66 Paisiello, Giovanni, 78, 160, 187 Pamela (Richardson), 121, 155 Panagia, Davide, 105 panopticon, 89, 226n16 Paradox of the Actor (Diderot), 14, 54–55, 63–64, 219n12 parataxis, 37, 215n46 Paris, 173, 241n6 Parthenopean Republic, 83, 195 Pasi, Camilla, 221n39 passaggio, 163, 188 passions, 27–29; and the sublime style, 130–31, 133. See also emotion; feelings Pasta, Giuditta, 158, 164, 249n7 patriarchy, 179, 243n31 Pavesi, Stefano, 186 pedagogy, vocal, 8, 209n30 Pepoli, Alessandro, 76, 174, 224n77 performance, 14, 79–80; disrupted by vocal defects, 164; sensibility as mode of, 54–56; staying in character, 56, 62–63. See also acting; practices, vocal; singing Petrarch, 14, 134–35 Petrowitz, Paul (prince), 94, 99 petto, voce di (chest voice): in de’ Rogati’s Sappho, 133–34; and/as sensibility, 74–78, 81, 134, 139 Philomela myth, 167, 242n29; in “O ron­ dinella” (Suardo), 167–69 physical experience, embodied, described in Sappho 31, 130 Planelli, Antonio, 4, 59, 87 Pocock, J. G. A., 106 poeisis, female, 119–20, 139, 152; bodily origin of, 133; as confessional, 125–26, 128; as oracular instrument, 152; and the Sapphic sublime, 165; virtuosity without Orphic power, 150–51 Poesie di Ossian. See Ossian, Poesie di (Cesarotti) poetry, epic, 9, 18, 114; Italian, 23–24, 113, 212n17; lyric passages in, 59; sung by citaredi, 111–16 poetry, epistolary, 167, 169 poetry, improvised, 26–29, 119–20. See also poet-singer (figure)

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poet-singer (figure), 12–17, 18–19, 48, 86, 95, 242n29; contrasted with philosophers, 112–16; and improvisation, 35–36; Timoteo recast as, 94–95. See also citaredi; lyric figure Polzonetti, Pierpaolo, 9, 19 Portugal, 191 practices, vocal: civilized through print, 104; coloring, 53, 55, 71–72, 74, 164; delivery, 23, 44, 55, 74; and emotional immediacy, 60, 62; overcoming defects, 161; sensibility, 54–56 preliterate society, 20, 51–52, 184–85 presence, authorial, 155–56 prima donnas, nineteenth-century, and Orphic castrati, 158–59 primitive song. See song, originary print culture and orality, 104, 112 private spaces, 111, 112, 116 private sphere, 176–78 progress, social, hindered by women in public roles, 176–77 Prometheus, 182 prosody, uneven, and vocal effusion, 23–26, 37, 41 Pseudo-Longinus. See Longinus public sphere, 92–93, 177, 181, 244n51; intimate public, 115–16; public intimacy (Roach), 165 quotidiano veneto, Il, 1 Ragionamento sopra l’origine e i progressi dell’arte poetica (Cesarotti), 26 Rampini, Vincenzo, 160 readers, 124, 135, 155 reading, silent, 233n99; and vocality, 25, 26 recitative, 58, 79; interrupting the lyric moment, 60–61; as lyric effusion, 37, 42–44; obbligato, and “semiotic lack,” 73–74, 81–82 reform, operatic, 4, 8–9, 65, 160, 219n14; Calzabigian, 37–42; and female sensibility, 173; Millico and natural voice, 70–72; and sonic expression of feeling, 160–61; voice-centered, 8, 53–82. See also opera seria

registers, operatic: aria, as lyric moment, 59–61; effects of, 57–58; oscillation of song and effusion, 61–63, 67–70; recitative, as lyric effusion, 42–44, 81–82 Reicha, Anton, 195 Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Petrarch). See Rime sparse (Petrarch) response, emotional, 71–72 restraint, vocal, 39–40, 44, 80; in Gluck’s “Men tiranne,” 64–65 Revolution, French, 83, 115, 232n95 Rezzonico, Carlo Gastone della Torre di, 93–100 Rice, John A., 68 Richardson, Samuel, 121, 155 ricorso, 27, 48 Rime sparse (Petrarch), 102, 134–36 rivoluzioni del teatro moderno, Le (Arteaga), 92 Roach, Joseph, 54, 165 Roncaglia, Francesco, 69 rondo/rondò, 44–47, 62, 70table, 222n49; “Che farò senza Euridice?” 66–67, 67table; as expressive/vocal highpoint, 77–78; genesis, 68–70; “Se cerca, se dice,” 223n71 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 113, 176, 235n25; Confessions, 123, 124; Émile, 178; Essay on the Origin of Languages, 6–7; on Italian musicality, 52; Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloïse, 121, 178, 239n86; on originary song, 19 Russo, Paolo, 164 sacraments, 123, 125 sacrifice, 186; female-coded, 167 Saffo, ossia I riti di Apollo Leucadio (Mayr/ Sografi), 149–52; “Pallida morte,” 150–51; “Soave, dolce, cara,” 150 Salfi, Francesco Saverio, 83, 84fig. salotto song, 136–37, 148 Salvini, Anton Maria, 90, 92, 102 Santa Croce (Florence), 153 Sant’Antonio (Padua), 215n43 Sappho, 14–16, 73, 117, 118–20; allegory of Italian fragmentation, 153–57; avventure di Saffo, Le (Verri), 118–19, 126–28; death of, 125, 148, 238n68; Faoniade, La

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Sappho (continued) (Imperiale), 124–26; fragmentary texts of, 128–29; literary mediation of, 120– 21, 124–28; as operatic subject, 148–52. See also Heroides 15 (Ovid); Sappho 31 (ode) Sappho 31 (ode), 128–36, 151, 152, 165, 198, 240n93; Carson’s translation, 129–30, 237n48; “Contento al par de’ Numi” (de’ Rogati), 131–32, 165; and Petrarchan poetics, 135–36; primacy of voice in, 133–34; setting by Zingarelli, 137–48; the sublime and, 130–31, 135–36; Verri’s translation, 127–28 Sarti, Giuseppe, 69, 94, 96 Scena del Tasso (Zingarelli), 138 Schiavitù delle donne (Lattanzi), 180 Schuller, Kyla, 83 scienza nuova, La (Vico), 11, 18, 213n27; historiography, 27, 41, 49, 51–52; language in the heroic age, 26–27, 30, 210n43 Scipios, Tomb of the (Rome), 196 scripts, musico-poetic, 59–61; castrati of sensibility and, 55; imposing vocal restraint, 37–40; and spontaneity in performance, 60, 62–65 Second Punic War, 90 self-civilizing, 92–93, 106 self-declaration, confession as, 123, 125–26 self-expression, poeisis and, 133–34 selfhood: produced through confession, 123; and the sounding voice, 71–72 self-referentiality and sensibility, 58 “semiotic lack,” 74, 78 Semiramide, 148, 177 sensations, physical, and sensibility, 54 sensibilità. See sensibility sensibility: castrati of, 53–56; and climate theory, 100; as false front, 79–80; female, 166–67, 173–76; as mode of performance, 54–56, 58–61; public performance of, 78, 79; versus skill, 173–76; of spectators, 72–74; and vocal effusion, 61–63; and/as voce di petto, 74–78, 81 sensibility, vocal, 54–56 sensism, associated with singing voices, 120

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 13 sibyls. See oracles sight, valorization of, 88–89, 226n18 silence: inscription of, 44; as mark of civilized subject, 89, 92–93 singers: abuses of, 4, 38–39, 225n84; agency of, 37–40, 53, 93; female, criticism of, 162, 176; as othered bodies, 166; of sensibility, 53–56, 158–97; vocal genealogy, 158–59, 161, 164–65, 200. See also individual artists singing, non-European, 101 Sirch, Licia, 73 skill versus sensibility, 173–76 slavery, 91, 103 Smart, Mary Ann, 171 Smith, Adam, 105 soavità, maternal voice and, 184, 185 sociability, 136–37; democratic, 111–12 Sografi, Antonio, 149, 151 song: civilizing potential of, 20, 51, 113–14; destablizing potential of, 94–96; popular, 4, 23–24, 108–9, 136, 212n9. See also voice song, operatic: declamatory song and vocal failure, 60–61; oscillation of register, 61–63, 67–70 song, originary, 7, 13, 51, 106; emotion and, 24, 25, 52; and history, 49, 51–52; as maternal, 182, 184; and mythical origins of civilization, 86–87; theories of, 19–20 song-as-song, 37, 42, 58, 79, 188, 199, 211n61; in Saffo, 150 songs, published, as manufactured goods, 104 Sophocles, 168 Sorrows of Young Werther, The (Goethe), 155, 239n86 sound, vocal, 5, 9, 160, 184; in Comala, 29–31. See also timbre, vocal; vocality southernness and excessive sensibility, 100–101 spectacle, operatic, 4–6, 58–60; suffering as, 175–77 Spectator (periodical), 92–93, 112 spectators, 4, 66, 88–90; civilized by listening, 112–16, 161–62; civilized by observ-

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ing, 88–89; emotional responses of, 59, 60, 66, 171, 175, 247n93; experience of the sublime, 166; mislead by voices, 94–95, 96–97; sensibility of, 56, 59, 72–74 spectatorship, 63, 104, 226n15, 226n18, 228n37; and individual subjectivity, 88–89 speech, ordinary, and irregular prosody, 23–26 speech act, 37, 39, 123–26 Spirit of the Laws, The (Montesquieu), 100, 246n84 “Spirit of Translation, The” (de Staël), 12 Stallybrass, Peter, 89, 106 Steele, Richard, 89, 92 Stendhal, 164–65, 223n65 Storia delle arti del disegno presso gli antichi (Winckelmann/Fea), 122 St. Petersburg, 173 Strabo, 120 street singers, 107 Suardo Grismondi, Paolina Secco, 183, 242n29; “O rondinella,” 167–69 subjectivity, 86, 89, 106, 135, 180, 185, 200; and commercial capitalism, 106–7; female, 119–20; lyric and legal modes of, 106; Petrarchan, 135–36; in Philomela myth, 167–69; in Sappho, 124–31; and vocal practices, 55 subjectivity, individual: given voice in writing, 123; and theater, 88–90, 93–96, 160–61 subjectivity, political, 85–86, 107, 112 sublime, the, 130–36, 138, 152, 242n28; domestication of, 148, 177; female, 169–73, 237n60, 243n31; and loss of voice, 165–67; and reception of Todi’s voice, 170–73; threat to reason, 174–75 suffering, physical: and loss of voice, 134– 35; and the sublime, 165–67, 169–73 suicide, 125, 148, 155, 238n68 Tartini, Giuseppe, 19 Tasso, Torquato, 18, 113, 138, 211n5; Gerusalemme liberata, 212n17, 232n89 Taylor, Charles, 72 “tenth muse,” 233n1. See also Sappho

theater and individual subjectivity, 88–90, 93–96, 160–61. See also acting; actors; performance theaters: Bairro Alto (Lisbon), 241n6; King’s Theatre (London), 56; La Fenice (Venice), 78, 149, 186; La Scala (Milan), 248n1; Nuovo Teatro (Padua), 171–72; Nuovo Teatro Ricardi (Bergamo), 171–72; San Benedetto (Venice), 9, 57; San Carlo (Naples), 162, 186, 187, 195; San Cassiano (Venice), 104; Teatro Ducale (Parma), 93–94, 228n37; Temple of Apollo (Leucas), 124, 126 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 105 Theory of the Lyric (Culler), 14 timbre, vocal, 10, 53, 55; and embodied truth, 159–60; and emotional expression, 162–63; suffocated tone, 164, 191, 249n7. See also defects, vocal; vocality time, narrative, in opera seria, 58–60 Timoteo (Timotheus) as lyric poet-singer, 94–95 Todi, Luigia, 17, 148, 158–59, 159fig., 182fig., 191, 195; in Adromaca, 187–95; in Alessandro nell’Indie, 158, 170, 172, 174; blindness, 170; in Castore e Polluce, 173, 174; in Didone abbandonata, 161, 171– 72, 179; domestic virtues, 173–74, 177, 244n40; feud with Marchesi, 173, 174–76, 178; in La morte di Cleopatra, 186; as singer of sensibility, 160–62; and the sublime, 169–73; vocal defects, 162–65 Todi Year (1790–91), 158–60, 159fig., 173, 178–79 tomb, vocality of, 126, 195–97 Tomlinson, Gary, 10, 11, 19, 52, 101 translation, 118, 129, 133; fictionalized, 124–26; and inscription of voice, 23; mediating Sappho 31, 126, 133 tre Orfei, Li (Bernardini di Capua), 104–11; “Nella real Metropoli,” 107; Orphic song parodied in, 108–11; “Son di canto virtuosa,” 108 Trojan War, 187 tropes, 27, 28, 154; birds, 168–69; father, benevolent, 248n98; female poeisis, 120; and individual experience, 27; Italy as

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tropes (continued) female body, 153; lyre of, 228n30; mother, bad, 176–80; nature, 29; orphic, 94, 108–11; silence, 31 Trumpener, Katie, 19 Tufano, Lucio, 42 tyranny and Orphic voice, 93–96 Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Foscolo), 153–56, 196, 239n86, 240n93; spectral voices in, 154 Venice, 148–49, 153–54, 174, 181; Todi Year, 158–60, 159fig., 173, 178–79. See also under audiences; theaters verisimilitude, 106, 236n32; and virtuosity, 59–61, 161. See also acting Verona, 199 Verri, Alessandro, 13, 112–13, 114, 248n1; Le avventure di Saffo, 118–19, 126–28; Le notti romane, 196, 210n52 Verri, Pietro, 73, 76, 103, 111, 115, 177 verse forms, Italian, and “cantabile” musicality, 23–26, 132–33 verses, improvised, status as texts, 120 versification: endecasillabi, 23–24, 212n17; fragmented, 34–36, 45–46; irregular: mimicked by Calzabigi, 45–46, 46fig.; in Ossian, 23–26; mixed, 24–25, 45–46, 46fig.; musicality and, 35; ottava rima, 23–24, 212n17; quinari, 37; settenari, 132; stanza saffica, 128, 132; terza rima, 24; unusual as marker of remoteness, 128 Vickers, Nancy J., 134–35 Vico, Giambattista, 11, 18, 210n43, 213n27. See also under scienza nuova, La (Vico) Vinci, Marianna, 149, 150 Vindication of the Rights of Women, A (Wollstonecraft), 179 Virgil, 19, 37, 110, 188 virtue, 175, 176, 177, 186 virtuosity, 4, 13, 76, 84, 95, 98, 173, 174; contrated with sensibility, 55; and emotional narrative, 69; as Orphic song in Bertoni’s “Men tiranne,” 65; as tool to restore political order, 98–99; and

verisimilitude, 59–61, 161. See also castrati; skill, musical vocality, 155, 184; and authenticity, 11, 14–15, 148, 156; of confessional mode, 123–24, 125–26, 155–56; and foundational myths, 51–52, 112–16; and maternal voice, 181–85; in Poesie di Ossian, 21–26; and reading, silent, 25, 26 voice, 2–5, 7, 138; inscription of, 10, 38, 40–48; loss of, 134, 135, 139, 165–67; maternal, 182–86; and memory, 38; in Comala, 47–48; in Ossian, 21–23; modernized through the market, 103– 11; moral power of, 83–88, 161–62, 163; “natural,” 72–73, 85–86, 110, 164; poetic foregrounding of, 21–23; sepulchral, 196–97, 198; spectral, 15–16, 47, 188, 195–96; as term, 133–34; unheard, 47–48. See also Orphic voice; singing; vocality voice, silenced, as female-coded sacrifice, 167 Vologeso (Guglielmi), “Se il caro ben,” 68 Voltaire, 26, 35–36 von Haller, Albrecht, 61 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 105 Webster, James, 59 Wellbery, David, 183 White, Allon, 89, 106 Wilbourne, Emily, 9, 62–63 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 122 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 179 women: place in society, 160, 176–81, 244n51; as readers and writers, 119–20; as singers and spectators, 175 word painting, 138, 139 Wordsworth, William, 14 work concept, 200 Ximenes, Giuseppe, 57, 219n15 Zante, 156 Zeno, Apostolo, 187 Zingarelli, Niccolò, 186, 198; Sappho settings, 137–48, 238n68; Scena del Tasso, 138

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