Zenova reforma

American Musicological Society

Apostolo Zeno's Reform of the LibrettoAuthor(s): Robert FreemanSource: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Autumn, 1968), pp. 321-341Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/830538Accessed: 24/11/2009 17:23

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Apostolo Zeno's Reform of the Libretto* BY ROBERT FREEMAN

OPERATIC HISTORY ABOUNDS with references to a reform of the libretto undertaken by Apostolo Zeno, an Italian scholar and poet active

as librettist in Venice at the turn of the i8th century and at the Habsburg Court in Vienna between 1718 and 1729. The historiographical tradition of Zeno as reformer, which goes well back into the I8th century itself, was crystallized by Max Fehr's often-cited Apostolo Zeno und seine Reform des Operntextes (1912). This tradition, treated by some recent writers with tacit caution, is still strong enough to have produced so

misleading a reference to Zeno's activity as librettist as that which appears in the opera article of MGG (vol. X, col. 9), where one reads of ". . . a transformation of the operatic genre carried out in connection with the textual reform begun by Zeno and carried to victory by Metastasio." Here I shall try to re-examine Zeno's role as reformer, through a review of all the known testimony from Zeno's contemporaries and in the light of libretti from the period.

Criticism directed at the bizarre libretti of such late I7th-century Venetians as Aurelio Aureli, Nicolo Minato, and Matteo Noris had begun at least twenty years before Zeno wrote his first libretto in 1695. Ap- parently originating among French Aristotelians who flaunted what they alleged as the superiority of French to Italian culture, these attacks turned

explicity on Italian opera only with the publication in 1685 of Saint-Evre- mond's essay "Sur les opera";' but the publication in Venice in 1675 of an essay written by Francesco Fulvio Frugoni to accompany his own "opera melodrammatica," Epulone,2 indicates that a clearly articulated body of critical opinion against the habits of Italian librettists existed well before the appearance of St.-Evremond's essay. Frugoni takes what he considers a moderate position somewhere between the conservative Aristotelians, who allow music only a circumscribed role in a drama constructed on the most rigid schemes, and the Venetian librettists, who hold the stage of 1675 with works permitting every license. The art of producing dramas, begins Frugoni, has become nothing but the art of ruining human society. In-

*This paper was read at a meeting of the Greater New York Chapter of the American Musicological Society on March i8, I967. 1 For more information on these attacks, see the first chapter of my Princeton dissertation (1967), "Opera without Drama; Currents of Change in Italian Opera, i675 to 1725, and the Roles Played Therein by Zeno, Caldara, and Others."

2 Francesco Fulvio Frugoni, L'Epulone, opera melodrammatica esposta, con le prose morali-critiche dal P. Francesco Fulvio Frugoni (Venice, I675). See esp. pp. i62, i7Iff., i86ff.

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stead of imitating nature for the ethical betterment of mankind, literature, painting, and the theater have become monstrous fantasies which corrupt. The musical theater in particular has elevated the means of expression to a position above that of the dramatic goals they are supposed to serve: scenery and stage machinery attract too much attention; and the singers, who are unjustly paid more than their intellectual superiors, the librettists, take no interest in the dramatic character of their roles. Indeed, the characteristic weakness in contemporary Italian drama of all kinds, continues Frugoni, stems from the poet's inability to stand up for any reasonable dramatic ideals.3 Too many unconnected episodes too often obscure the

principal dramatic idea, if indeed the poet has even considered the possi- bility of building his work around a single idea. Frugoni recognizes the foolishness of uncritical obedience to regulations laid down by recent commentators on Aristotle's Poetics, but he is equally critical of those who fail even to consider the applicability of Aristotelian principles. He sees nothing sacred about Aristotle's famous unities of time and place, but he abhors the frequency with which his contemporaries change setting and the liberties they take in prolonging the temporal limits of a drama to include the passage of 50 years or more. Serious and comic characters should not be indiscriminately mixed in a work of art, nor should serious characters be permitted to behave like buffoons. Frugoni does not contend that sung or spoken tragedy is the only worthwhile form of dramatic endeavor, but he distinguishes carefully between the kind of dialogue one can enjoy reading and the kind of slapstick humor which delights on the stage but which seems senseless in print.

Additional evidence that many of the ideas later attributed to Zeno were already in the air when his career as librettist began is provided by Poetica toscana all'uso, a book of instructions on writing several kinds of contemporary Italian poetry, published in i69i by the Neapolitan librettist Giuseppe Gaetano Salvadori.4 According to Salvadori, contemporary librettists should pay more attention to the wishes of the public than to the writings of those whose standards of judgement he calls outmoded and impractical, critics whom he identifies as "members of the Crusca5 and other silly chatterers." In Salvadori's view, too much emphasis on morality is boring. Brevity is the password of dramatic success. Exaggerations, hyperbole, the falsification of history, unintegrated episodes, and the use of improbable incidents are all justified if the audience approves.

3 For a summary of criticism blaming the ills of Italian tragedy during the i7th and I8th centuries on the cancerous popularity of Italian opera, see Emilio Bertana, "II teatro tragico italiano del secolo xviii prima dell'Alfieri," Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, supplementary series IV (Turin, I9oi), pp. 143ff.

4 A copy of Salvadori's treatise is to be found among the holdings of the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III, Naples. For the passages discussed here see pp. 5off., 6o-6I, 80-88. All English translations in this article are my own.

For a short history of the Accademia della Crusca, see Michele Maylender, Storia delle accademie d'ltalia II (Bologna, i926), pp. 122-146.

APOSTOLO ZENO S REFORM OF THE LIBRETTO

Salvadori's only restriction on the use of the marvelous is the avoidance of spectacular effects that do not surprise. As he sees it, there is nothing improper about dramatic solutions through gods in machines, but it is senseless to use them too often:

I will give (poets) the license not only to transform ships into shepherdesses, as did Virgil, but also for an ant to overturn the world, and for the stars, transforming themselves into oxen, to descend and plough the earth (p. 52). There is no point, continues Salvadori, in arguing about sad and happy endings, for although his contemporaries prefer happy endings, either

variety is acceptable. There is no point, similarly, in insisting that every king be a serious figure and every peasant a buffoon, for the dramatic rep- resentation of comic kings and dignified peasants presents a welcome occasion for variety. It is senseless for librettists to try to develop plots that are verisimilar, for the public will believe what it chooses to believe. The invention of new dramatic ideas is entertaining, but a librettist pressed for time should not hesitate to purloin the ideas of others wherever he finds them.

Salvadori concludes his essay with a series of warnings for librettists unfamiliar with music. Modern composers are men of power whose textual changes it is useless to resist. A prudent librettist familiarizes himself with the talents of the singers who will perform his work, and he collaborates wherever possible with the composer. Since arias are what the public most desires, it is senseless to emulate those who try to include in their works as many as three or four scenes devoid of arias. Arias are sometimes used at the beginnings of scenes, but experience shows that recitative is more effective in that position. No individual singer should have more than three or four arias in succession, as happens in the libretti of some unthinking poets. It is unwise to write libretti that involve fewer than four or more than seven characters. Lengthy scenes should be avoided, as should aria texts whose accented syllables involve vowels other than "a" and "o".

Zeno, then, did not invent such ideas as the needs for more serious, more rational, and more readable libretti.6 Nor was he the only librettist

6 That libretti of literary pretentions were being written in Italy before the inception of Zeno's career as librettist is evident from a variety of protests released during the closing years of the i7th century by several Italian librettists of the then more normal species. One of the more amusing of these protests appears in the preface to La serva favorita, a libretto published during 1689 in Florence: "If the censors of belles lettres severely punished any person of mature age found reading Italian poetry, as Boccalini tells us, what would they have done had they found some- one reading the libretto for an opera? This genre is designed to be heard in a different context, and poetry is required to clothe its various defects in order to make them appear, in their proper context, like so many virtues, precisely in the manner of those painters who design in one plane what they wish to have appear as a three-dimensional image. It is for this reason that the more famous poets, in those of their works which are intended for musical setting, make a note of their

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credited during his operatic career-between 1695 and I729-with having written operatic texts that took account of such needs. Salvadori's col- league, for example, the Sicilian actor and librettist, Andrea Perrucci, in I699 published an informative treatise on theatrical production,7 contain- ing a chapter on contemporary opera that does not mention Zeno. But just after listing more than a dozen recent librettists whose familiarity with Aristotle he guarantees, Perrucci has special praise for the Marchese G. G. Orsi of Bologna, a poet ". .. whose libretti and theatrical works combine the rigidity of the antique style with the ease and grace of the modern." Later in Perrucci's treatise (pp. I48-I50), again without reference to Zeno, he alludes to the increasing recourse by Italian librettists at the turn of the I8th century to the technique of retaining, during any stage set, at least one character on stage between scenes-a technique known among French tragedians as liaison des scenes. Too often, writes Perrucci, actors enter in scenes where they do not belong or, even worse, collide while entering with actors who are exiting-leaving the stage empty, the worst sin of all. Perrucci takes pride in his manner of avoiding such problems: a cue sheet posted backstage, and an invariable regulation that exits take place from the front of the stage but that entrances be made from the rear.

Nor is Zeno included by Giovanni Maria Crescimbeni in the second chapter of his compilatory history of Italian poetry where fifty liv- ing poets are credited as leaders in the revival of Italian poetry. At least eight of the fifty described are poets who had already written opera libretti, and the libretti of five of the eight are specifically included by Crescimbeni among works worthy of mention: Abate Alessandro Guidi is praised for his L'Endimione (a dramma pastorale in five acts for which Queen Christina herself is said to have contributed verses), Giro- lamo Gigli and Count Giulio Bussi for their "various dramas," Paolo de' Conti di Campello for his "dramatic works," and Silvio Stampiglia for the "several dramatic works he has published."8

intention, in order that the reader may know how the text is supposed to reach the ears of the public. Would it not be absurd if Aristarchus were to try to judge a distant painting through a microscope? The artifices of one variety of poetry are errors in another. A person who wished to use the lyric style in writing an epic, or epic style in writing a text for music, would surely commit a serious mistake. There are, that is to say, many muses, and they do not all play the same instrument." Alan Curtis, who reminds me of the relevance in this respect of the title for Ivanovich's catalogue, Minerva al tavolina (Venice, i68I and I688), feels that the tradition of the libretto per stampa may go back without interruption as far as Busenello.

7Andrea Perrucci, Dell'arte rappresentativa premeditata ed all'improviso (Naples, I699), p. 63. A new edition of Perrucci's treatise, by A. G. Bragaglia, appeared in 1961 (Florence: Sanson).

8 G. M. Crescimbeni, L'istorii della volgar poesia (Rome, 1698), pp. 169-i74. Poets whose libretti are not specifically mentioned are C. M. Maggi, Francesco

de Lemene, and the Marchese Orsi. In Crescimbeni's index the term "drama" appears

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APOSTOLO ZENO'S REFORM OF THE LIBRETTO

The second occasion on which Crescimbeni treats what he considers the recent improvement in form and content of the libretto occurs just before the end of the sixth section of his La bellezza della volgar poesia, a slim volume of Arcadian dialogues first printed in Rome in 1700. In a

long speech put into the mouth of Paolo di Campello's nephew, Francesco Maria, Crescimbeni divides the blame for the miseries of Italian theater

during the seicento between Rinuccini and Cicognini. But, in Crescim- beni's view, the situation has begun to improve. The quotation cited below is taken from a passage which, often quoted out of context, especially during the i8th century, helped materially to build Zeno's reputation as reformer.

It seems at present as if Italy is beginning to open her eyes, and to recognize the uselessness which comes from having abandoned her old traditions. Al- though she still has not reclaimed true comedy, nonetheless, choosing the lesser of two evils, she has corrected many manifestations of that monstrous mixing of character types practiced till now, managing at least to establish entirely serious libretti like those used today in the theaters of Venice, which do not use comic characters and which, by diminishing the excessive number of arias, allow some opportunity in the recitatives for the affetti. In this enterprise our fellow Arcadians the late Domenico David and the most learned Apostolo Zeno have been prime movers; and, therefore, the honor of the achievement is principally theirs. In Rome we have seen the return of tragedy which, as everyone knows, although without music and full of sadness, has been much honored and applauded by all Rome, especially since Stilicone and other tragedies translated from the French by our good friend P. D. Felippo Merelli appeared at the Theater of the Collegio Clementino. But, more than to any other person, the honor of having brought back good taste to Italy is owed to our much-acclaimed friend, Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, author of a fine pastorale, Amore eroico tra i pastori, which was the first to concern itself once more with the old rules, introducing choruses and other qualities pertaining to good comedy. When told that he condemns all operatic libretti, Francesco Maria di

Campello objects, continuing as follows:

For my part I not only have not condemned any, but confess with freedom that I take no little pleasure in listening to them, especially those by our fellow Arcadians Silvio Stampiglia, Count Giulio Bussi, Giovanni Andrea Moniglia, Giacomo Sinibaldi, Pietro Antonio Bernardoni, Carlo Sigismondo Capece, and Girolamo Gigli, which seem to me rather better than all the others I have heard. I admit, however, that the person who invented opera would have done better not to have invented it and to have left the world as he found it.9

only in connection with poetry intended for musical setting, as was customary at the time.

9Crescimbeni, La bellezza della volgar poesia, pp. io6-io8. Francesco Maria's apparent implication that even the best libretti are worthwhile only in performance is yet another early instance of the distinction (repeated often during the i8th century) between texts that are better heard in the theater and texts that can be read with pleasure.

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Of importance for our understanding of Zeno's place in the history of the Italian libretto are both Crescimbeni's praise for fellow Arcadians'? and his apparent attribution to David and Zeno of two specific changes in libretto construction: the elimination of comic characters and the de- creased number of arias. Crescimbeni's comments probably stem, at least in the case of Zeno's libretti, from personal familiarity with the libretti themselves, for the published correspondence of Zeno shows that, between May and August I698 and apparently at Crescimbeni's request, Zeno sent the operatic libretti he had completed by that time to Cres- cimbeni in Rome." Since Zeno made no critical comments on his libretti in any of his extant letters to Crescimbeni, and is not known to have mentioned on any other occasion either of the points included in La bellezza della volgar poesia, one presumes that Crescimbeni's remarks about the dropping of comic figures and the diminished number of arias were the result of his own observations or of remarks made to Crescimbeni by per- sons whose familiarity with Venetian opera he trusted. That they cannot have resulted from a familiarity with contemporary Venetian opera as a whole is evident when one compares the libretti written by Zeno and David during the 690o's with those of their Venetian contemporaries. Comic servants appear in two of the four historical libretti of Zeno which were produced in Venice before the summer of 1698, and in all three of the David libretti produced there before that time.l2 And there were poets other than Zeno and David who wrote libretti for Venice during the I690's-works which, although they contain no comic characters, are not mentioned by Crescimbeni.13 There are, moreover, two places in the published correspondence of Zeno where his feelings about comic characters in the libretto are recorded; and in neither does he take what could be called a stand against comic figures. In a letter to Antonfrancesco Marmi, dated February 24, 1703, Zeno comments on the addition to his Griselda (for performance in Florence later in 1703) of raucously comic scenes for an octogenarian nurse who is madly in love with a male servant less than half her age:

I have read Griselda, and am extraordinarily well pleased by the comic scenes which Signor Gigli has made for you with so much skill. The changes you

10 Crescimbeni's lists of "improved" librettists include, in fact, none but members of Arcadia. For a list of the Academy's early members, complete through March 9, 1711, see the appendix to Crescimbeni's Arcadia (Rome, 1711), pp. 329-375.

11Apostolo Zeno, Lettere (Venice, 1785), nos. 12-15, 20, 22. 12Zeno: Gl'inganni felici (1695), Odoardo (1698); David: L'amante eroe (1691);

La forza della virtuz (1693); Amor e Dover (I697). 13 G. C. Corradi, L'amor di Curzio per la patria (Teatro SS. Giovanni e Paolo,

I690); R. Pignatta, La costanza vince il destino (Teatro SS. Giovanni e Paolo, x695); Frigimelica-Roberti, Rosimonda (Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo, 1695); G. C. Godi, Eraclea (Teatro San Salvatore, 1696); Burlini, La forza d'amore (Teatro SS. Giovanni e Paolo, I697).

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have made are of so little consequence that they have not bothered me in the least, nor have they made the work appear different from the manner in which I first published it.14

The eight comic scenes which Zeno finds so unimportant comprise, it should be noted, just less than 20 per cent of the length of the entire work!

Nearly fifteen years later, in a letter to Marchese Giorgio Clerici of Milan, dated January 22, 1718, Zeno outlines the tasks required of him in the post of imperial poet he is about to undertake in Vienna.

I shall not be involved in any comic works, since I have neither talent nor inclination to test myself in that direction. I beg Your Excellency to intercede in order that I may be excused from any poetic commissions beyond my theatrical labors, since these latter would distract me from my principal charge and since I would not be able to bear the double burden.15

Hardly the words, one would think, of a reformer who had purged the Italian libretto of what he considered an excretion.

David, who had died on June 30, I698, could not reply to Crescim- beni's words of praise; but Zeno, who thanked Crescimbeni (Lettere, no. 51) for his complimentary copy of La bellezza before it had reached him, did not respond to Crescimbeni's remarks on the libretto-and went on to write at least three more works with roles for servants.16

What then of David's and Zeno's ostensible roles in ". . . diminishing the excessive number of arias"? Here, too, Crescimbeni's remarks represent half-truths apparently based more on hearsay than on a thorough knowledge of the recent Venetian repertory. Because of the dearth of musical sources for Venetian opera during the I690's, because some Venetian librettists failed to distinguish as unambiguously as did their I8th-century successors between the rhyme schemes and metrical patterns used in recitative and aria, and since late I7th-century Venetian printers of libretti made little apparent effort to distinguish typographically between arias and recitatives, it is impossible to make absolutely accurate calculations about the number of arias in most Venetian operas of the period. But an aria count based on the repertory to which Crescimbeni alludes shows clearly that neither David nor Zeno was remarkable for

14 Zeno, Lettere, no. 75. 15 Ibid., no. 412. 1 Lucio Vero (1700); Griselda (1701); Artaserse (I705). Zeno's servants seldom

indulge in the coarse jests common in some 17th-century libretti, but they resemble seicento servants in other respects: in the awkwardness with which they intrude on intimate moments, in the difficulty with which they express themselves, in the freedom with which they comment on the actions of the principals, in tendencies to malice and mendacity, and in their function as (often unreliable) messengers. It is true that, after the first few years of the settecento in Venice (somewhat later in other cities), comic characters did in fact disappear from the printed libretti of historically oriented Italian operas, surviving thereafter in set-separating intermezzi. But while this change must have helped produce a different impression on those who judged the libretto as a literary genre, it cannot have made much difference for the opera-going public.

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an exceptionally low number of arias (a table based on such a count appears in my dissertation, vol. I, pp. 27-29). In the works of both poets there is a general decrease in the number of arias, both absolutely and in proportion to each libretto as a whole, but neither decrease is any more marked than in the cases of several poets not mentioned by Crescimbeni and of no reputation as "reform" librettists. The general decrease is not connected with settings by specific composers or with works performed in specific theaters, but seems to have been a general trend of the period, at least in Venice.

In the first volume of the supplement to Crescimbeni's general history, published in 1702, the so-called Arcadian Custodian complains once more about the evil effects wrought on Italian literature by the degeneracy of Italian libretti during the second half of the I7th century. He repeats the by now familiar view that conditions had finally begun to improve, but then discusses in more detail than before his ideas on the ingredients of that improvement. The immoderate use of arias has begun to abate, as has the too frequent use of set changes. The ends of acts are still too often marked by intermezzi of every kind instead of by choruses, but in recent years, especially in Rome and Venice, poets have begun turning back more and more to the chorus, used in the Greek manner as a commentator out- side the frame of the dramatic action. More attention, says Crescimbeni, has been given of late to restricting the action of each drama within reasonable temporal limits and, although the traditional operatic three-act division is still prevalent, some poets have turned back to the older-fashioned division into five acts. This time Crescimbeni calls for the early arrival of a savior for Italian dramatic poetry. He does not mention either David or Zeno, but stresses the dramatic merits to be found in what he calls the "favola pastorale," particularly in Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni's Adonia, ". . . com- posed with the best antique taste and heard privately with the music of five of Italy's best composers, each of whom set one of the five acts into which the work is divided."17

Four years later, in 1706, Zeno's reputation with the literati had

progressed so far that, as the climax for a case against opera in an Arcadian treatise on the reform of Italian poetry, Lodovico Antonio Muratori used a paragraph Zeno had addressed to him in a letter written during August I70I.

To state sincerely my feelings about libretti, although I have written many of 17 Crescimbeni, Comentarii intorno alla sua istoria della volgar poesia I (Rome,

1702), pp. 234ff. The division into five acts, which so reminded Zeno's generation of Greek tragedy, was used in some of Zeno's Venetian and in some of his Viennese libretti, in all the libretti of Frigimelica-Roberti, in several by Piovene, and in occasional works by other librettists active early in the i8th century. But the five- act division was generally thought to make an opera too long, and it seems to have died out altogether after 1730. The full-length libretti of Metastasio are all in three acts.

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them, I would be the first to condemn them. Long experience has taught me that unless one employs many abuses, one misses the primary goal of such compositions-that is, pleasure. The more one wishes to insist on the rules, the more one displeases. And if the libretto is praised, the theater has little business. A large measure of the guilt belongs to the music which, because of the stupidity of the composers, weakens the best scenes. And the singers, who not understanding the text have not the least idea of how to act, are also to blame.18

Evidently pleased by the quotation which Muratori had included in Della perfetta poesia italiana, Zeno wrote to thank him for the honor, concluding in a fashion characteristic of Zeno but not to be expected from a person devoted to the carrying through of a reform.

The quotation in your book serves me as a public apology against the criticisms of those who either do not understand the business of writing libretti or who think they understand it too well.19

Public apology it may have been; but despite the bitter attacks on Italian tastes initiated in I705 by the French journalists of Trevoux, and despite Zeno's prominent role in defending Italy against those attacks,20 there was no slackening in his production of opera libretti. Between the beginning of Zeno's career as librettist in 1695 and the publication in 1706 of his letter against libretti in Muratori's treatise, Zeno had written at least 15 libretti. He equalled that output during the decade which followed, if one counts the works on which he collaborated with Pietro Pariati. Mura- tori's treatise was intended for an audience that looked askance at the world of opera and whose good opinion Zeno valued. But until 1711, when Zeno obtained his first regular appointment in Venice at the age of 43, he was in constant need of funds, not only for the support of his family but also for the proper pursuit of his expensive antiquarian interests in the collection of inscriptions, coins, rare books, and manuscripts. It was a need that, during the I69o's, Zeno discovered he could most easily supply through the composition of occasional libretti; but though he struggled throughout his career as librettist to improve the literary quality of his works, he never overcame his embarrassment at earning his livelihood in a manner that he felt compromised his integrity as a writer and degraded him in the eyes of many of his literary compatriots.21

18L. A. Muratori, Della perfetta poesia italiana (Modena, I706), II, 55. For the context from which the passage cited was excerpted, see Zeno, Lettere, no. 59. 19 Zeno, Lettere, no. 165.

20For the details of this famous early i8th-century polemic, see Adolfo Boeri, Una contesa franco italiana nel secolo xviii (Palermo, 90oo).

21 For Zeno's interests in the libretto as a commercial genre, see the Lettere, nos. 43, i68, 432, 469, 1093. Especially during the earlier part of his career he sent copies of his libretti to close friends among the literati (Lettere, nos. 12-15, 20, 22, 28, 35-36, 54, 74, 76, o9, 96, 178, i94, 434-35, 448, 455, 482, 638, 701, 719, 749), but his disenchantment with the libretto increased as he grew older (Lettere, nos. 14, 62, 9I-92, x65, I8o, 310, 413, 430, 432, 495, 653, 666, 672, 691, 724, 743, 745). For Arcadian apologia in behalf of a poet whose reputation had been stained through activity as

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The keenness with which Zeno, one of Italy's best known scholars of the period,22 must have felt the humiliation of his career as librettist cannot have been lessened by a volume published in 1714 by Pier Jacopo Martello, a Bolognese Arcadian who had himself written libretti during his youth. In the fifth part of Della tragedia antica e moderna,23 a series of six dialogues between Martello and an old hunchback who claims to be Aristotle himself, preserved over the centuries through the use of a secret elixir, Martello contributes a satiric review of the contemporary operatic scene. Pseudo-Aristotle, whom Martello labels the "impostor," opens by asserting that although some writers imagine Greek drama to have been given a complete musical setting, Saint-Evremond was correct when he wrote, "The Greeks used to produce wonderful tragedies in which some parts were sung; the French make wretched tragedies in which they sing everything." The "impostor" claims that he has listened to Italian opera in Venice, Genoa, Milan, Reggio, and Bologna, and that what he has heard is fully as bad as Saint-Evremond found French opera. Martello agrees, but wants to be certain that the "impostor" shares his esteem for the libretti of several of his Italian contemporaries: ". . . the works of severe Moniglia and those of graceful Lemene; Tolomeo, Achille, and the two Ifigenias of Carlo Capece; Santa Cecilia, Costantino, and Ciro of a very eminent author;24 all of the works of the most learned Apostolo Zeno; the charming Dafni of Eustachio Manfredi; La caduta de'decimviri of Silvio Stampiglia; Onestd negli amori of Monsignor Bernini, and the greater part of the libretti of Monsignor di Totis, to include praise one owes the works of those already dead." The "impostor" concurs in Martello's judgement, but says he is sorry to see so

a librettist, see L. A. Muratori, Vita di Carlo Maria Maggi (Milan, 1700), pp. 29-34, 91-93. To appreciate Zeno's position, one need only imagine the reception which would be accorded in our own day to a distinguished medievalist, say, who busied himself writing (even exceptionally good) scripts for television westerns.

22 On Zeno's career as a scholar, see Giovanni Chiuppani, Apostolo Zeno in relazione all'erudizione del suo tempo (Bassano, I900); Luigi Menghi, Lo Zeno e la critica letteraria (Camerino, I901).

23 Pier Jacopo Martello, L'lmpostore (Paris, 1714, but printed in Italian); reprinted in an amplified version the following year in Rome as the second volume of Martello's Teatro italiano, this time under the title Della tragedia antica e moderna; reprinted in i963 under the latter title as part of an anthology of Martello's works edited by Hannibal S. Noce, Pier Jacopo Martello, scritti critici e satirici (Bari, I963), Vol. CCXXV in the series Scrittori d'ltalia. I am preparing for publication an annotated translation of those parts of Della tragedia that concern opera.

24 An apparent allusion to Pietro Pariati, Zeno's Venice-based assistant for libretto versification early in the i8th century, then court poet in Vienna (and occasional collaborator with Zeno, after the latter's arrival there in 1718) from I714 until his death in 1733. For a biographical study of Pariati and a review of his works, see Naborre Campanini, Un precursore del Metastasio (Florence, 1889), reprinted in 1904 as volume 43 of the series Biblioteca critica della letteratura italiana. It is hard to imagine why Martello's reference to Pariati should have taken so cryptic a form; Ciro and Costantino had been produced in Venice's Teatro San Cassiano during 1710 and 171 respectively.

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many otherwise worthy poets waste so much of their time on a genre so impermanent as the opera libretto. Martello continues with a remark that is reminiscent of Zeno's already-quoted letter of August 1701 to Muratori: Martello never more resented the time spent on his own libretti, he says, than when the things that pleased him most were ruined

through insipid music, or when poetry that would nauseate when read so aroused the audience that Martello was pleased in spite of himself. The "impostor" replies that mediocre poetry is actually more suitable than the best for musical settings, adding that one should begin with the postulate that in contemporary Italian opera, music, not poetry, is primary. The problem with the critics of Italian libretti, says the "impostor," is that they resent the relative unimportance of poetry's role in opera; and he goes on to propose three novel solutions to the problem: i) since poetry's role in opera is so minor, perhaps one might drop poetry altogether; 2) since serious poets are offended by the fact that the authors of libretti are also known as poets, perhaps one could avoid hard feelings by calling the latter "versifiers," "mere versifiers," or some-

thing even less honorific; 3) since composers know the sort of poetry they can set best, why not put the composition of both poetry and music into the hands of the same man, as was successfully done in Berlin with the famous castrato, Pistocchi; his text was weak and insipid when read, to be sure, but it was perfectly suited to the music Pistocchi wrote for it and with which it made an impressive effect in performance. This latter arrangement, decides the "impostor," is doubtless the best of the possibilities proposed.25

Much more enthusiastic than Martello about the quality of modern Italian libretti was Johann Mattheson, the compiler of a list of praise- worthy librettists as miscellaneous as that of either Crescimbeni or Mar- tello. In the 1722 volume of the periodical Critica musica, Mattheson reprinted and in facing columns translated into German Raguenet's Paral- lele des italiens et des fran?ais, adding occasionally lengthy footnotes of his own. Raguenet is enthusiastic in his praise for Italian music, but he praises the dignity of French characterizations and the dramatic appro- priateness of the French passions, asserting that there are few tragedies or comedies better than the majority of musical texts by Quinault.26 This is too much for Mattheson, who unburdens himself of the following, characteristically outspoken lines in defense of Italian librettists.

The author has perhaps seen and read only the most miserable of Italian operas.... As we shall see from what follows in this Parallele, Raguenet was

25Della tragedia antica e moderna, ed. Noce, pp. 273-274, 276-278. 26 For an English translation of Raguenet's essay and of LeCerf de la Vieville's anti-Italian reply of 1704-05, Comparison de la musique italienne et de la musique franfaise, see Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History (New York, 1950), pp. 473-507.

33I


in Rome during 1698. Whether at that time he met only rhapsodic libretti of the type he describes is uncertain. We, at any rate, have quite different information and examples not only of recent Italian works, particularly of the outstanding Viennese operas by the incomparable Apostolo Zeno, but also of quite old libretti in which both the intrigues and dramatic expression are beyond criticism. Croeusus, a work translated from Italian more than 30 or 40 years ago, can serve as an example of the first. This is a piece in which there are dramatic denouements of a kind that I doubt has ever been shown in a French work. Whoever has the Venetian operas available, let him have a look at the year 1695, where he will find a so-called pastorale-tragedy for music entitled II pastor d'Anfriso, a work which gives the greatest satisfaction in the world. So far as noble sentiments are concerned, I know of no single French opera which in this respect outdoes the libretti which the famous Francesco Silvani prepared and entitled II miglior d'ogni amore per il peggiore d'ogni odio. It was performed in Venice during the year 1703 with music com- posed by Francesco Gasparini. Whoever wishes to take these and similar works, of which I have seen entire volumes, for rhapsodies, must certainly be deranged. It has been true for several years both here and in England that many libretti are disgracefully torn apart, shredded, and trimmed up with all sorts of rags like a harlequin's costume. But the authors of the works are not guilty on that account; the guilt lies rather on some occasions with the whim of a lady virtuoso, on others with the lack of sense of an impresario who thinks only that whatever is pretty ought to be equally suitable in all places. On still other occasions the guilt lies with the taste of spectators for whom one often cannot make things bizarre enough. Except where this happens, however, Italian poets know how to give their works coherence, consequence, and most important, a nice intrigue.27

Writing no more than four years after Zeno's move to Vienna in 1718, Mattheson indicates the extent to which Zeno's already burgeoning reputation had been furthered by the appearance of his first Viennese works; but nothing is said of any reform. Corradi, Frigimelica-Roberti, and Silvani, the authors of the three libretti cited by Mattheson, are a trio of poets mentioned by no other critic in connection with recent

"improvements" in the Italian libretto. Strikingly, none of the three seems ever to have been a member of Arcadia (none is included, at any rate, in the previously cited list of early Arcadians).

We come finally to Scipione Maffei, the Veronese Arcadian who first

separated Apostolo Zeno from the assortment of poets already credited with having improved the contemporary libretto-and the last writer known to have commented in print on Zeno as librettist before 1729, the date of the latter's retirement. In the introduction to Teatro italiano, an anthology of Italy's greatest tragedies, published by Maffei in 1723 as a stimulus to reawakening Italian interest in the performance of tragedy and as a defense against French criticisms of Italian poetry, Maffei sketches the history of theater in Italian, attributing a large share of the blame for its decadence during the I7th century to the popularity of opera. Like several of the other critics discussed thus far, Maffei is

27 Johann Mattheson, Critica musica I, io8.

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willing to admit that contemporary libretti are more reasonable than those he had known in his youth, but he emphatically rejects Martello's idea that the Italian theater has any room for a dramatic type in which

poetry acts as music's servant.

It is true that in most recent times several poets of talent have managed the genre with much honor. Among those writers I would name one man, if I did not fear displeasing him, who has written more than forty libretti, who has often taken scarcely a week to write one of them, and who has known how to merit the approval of an emperor who, with marvelous penetration, immediately distinguishes the strong from the weak, an emperor who no less for his knowledge and wisdom than for his virtues and victories, will be immortal in every era. But until the present variety of music is moderated, it will never be possible to construct operas so that they do not always appear like one form of art distorted for the sake of another-a situation in which the superior miser- ably serves the inferior, where the poet occupies the same position as a violinist who plays for dancing.28 Maffei never names the author of the forty libretti to whom he alludes in the paragraph just quoted, but his identification is so precise that there can be no doubt whatever that he is referring to Zeno. There was only one emperor in Europe and only one poet in his service who had written as many as forty libretti. But the reluctance to mention Zeno's name may well have stemmed from deeper roots than Maffei's apparent respect for Zeno's modesty.

Maffei, we have seen, credits Zeno with the composition of reasonable libretti, but he neither specifies the nature of their excellence nor alludes to anything called a reform. It is not, in fact, from Zeno's contemporaries but from writers on operatic history active after Zeno's retirement that the notion of Zeno as reformer develops. These writers, usually in at-

tempting to describe the operatic milieu in which Metastasio, Zeno's suc- cessor in Vienna, came to maturity, adopt a simplified picture of operatic history in which snippets of material from writers like Crescimbeni, Muratori, and Maffei are juxtaposed to show a progression from late

I7th-century decadence to Metastasian perfection through the agency of a reform undertaken by Zeno. It is, then, in the works of such writers as Quadrio, Carli, Calsabigi, Martinelli, Rousseau, Napoli-Signorelli, La- Borde, Tiraboschi, Arteaga, and Burney29 that Zeno is credited with

28 S. Maffei, Teatro italiano (Verona, 1723) I, vii-viii. 29F. S. Quadrio, Della storia e della ragione d'ogni poesia (Milan, 1744), III/2,

425ff.; R. de' Calsabigi, "Dissertazione," Poesie del Signor Abate Metastasio (Paris, 1755) I, xxiv, cxxxi-cxxxii; J. J. Rousseau, "Opera," Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1768), p. 350; P. Napoli-Signorelli, Storia critica de' teatri antichi e moderni (ist ed. 1777) (Naples, 1813), X i33ff.; J. B. de La Borde, Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne (Paris, 1780) III, 256-257; G. Tiraboschi, Storia della letteratura italiana (Modena, 1772-81), vols. XXII-XXV in Biblioteca enciclopedica italiana (Milan, 1833) XXV, 568-570; S. Arteaga, Le rivoluzioni del teatro musicale italiano dalla sua origine fino al presente, 2nd ed. (Venice, 1785) II, 69-77; C. Burney, A General History of Music (London, 1776-89) IV, 63, 204, 225, 231, 424, 517. The relevant passages from

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such achievements as having purged the libretto of inadequately prepared denouements and of its dependence on supernatural inventions and machines, having made possible a rebirth of Aristotelian principles outlined in the Poetics, and having made his plots conform to the supposed facts of political history.30 It is in the works of these and later writers, many of whom read Zeno's libretti but not those of his contemporaries, that Zeno, attaining a more dynamic role than the one he seems actually to have played, is credited with such formal innovations as the division into five acts, the developments of a tighter liaison des scenes, and the elimination of arias other than scene-ending exit arias. A comparison of the formal aspects of Zeno's libretti with those of his contemporaries shows, in fact, not that Zeno's libretto formats were especially modern for their

day, but that in this respect Zeno responded to the same influences af-

fecting other Italian librettists of the period. One can infer Zeno's view of his achievement as a librettist from a

letter he addressed in 1730, the year after his retirement, to a Marchese Gravisi of Capodistria. After trying to soften the position on opera which he and Muratori had taken twenty-five years earlier in Della perfetta poesia italiana, Zeno continues:

There are, of course, a great many improbable things in musical dramas, and some of these stem from the necessity of the genre, such as the frequent changes of scenery and the necessity for so many arias. For these and for similar difficulties there is no remedy. But other problems derive from the insuf- ficient care of the poet, who preserves neither the unity of action, nor the conformity of the characters, nor the decorum of the tragic stage, nor the purgation of the affetti, nor the movement of these to compassion or to ter- ror, nor the proprieties of a dramatic development and of an untying of the dramatic knot that is adjusted to good rules.31

Zeno's aim, it is apparent both from his correspondence and from his libretti, was not to set about reforming the power structure of the

opera house, but to achieve both popular and literary success through libretti which could be both staged and read. Zeno believed, as he indicates in his letter to the Marchese Gravisi, that opera itself was an

inevitably unhealthy patient. But he was convinced that certain aspects

Carli and Martinelli, and from other, later settecento writers not cited here, are summarized by Remo Giazotto in Poesia melodrammatica e pensiero critico nel settecento (Milan, 1952). 30 A brief look at the lists of stage machines indicated in several of Zeno's Viennese libretti, and at the denouements of even his most celebrated secular works is sufficient to undermine the idea that Zeno was seriously concerned with the first two of the "contributions" cited. He did refer with pride on more than one occasion to his frequent success in dealing with the so-called Aristotelian unities, but the listing in his libretto prefaces of historical sources seems to have been intended as much as a defense against charges of plagiarism as in an effort to use plots which conform in every detail to historical tradition.

81 Zeno, Lettere, no. 756.

334

APOSTOLO ZENO S REFORM OF THE LIBRETTO 335

of its illness were essentially literary, and hence susceptible to essentially literary cures. These cures, he imagined, lay in more serious and more rationalistic libretti, where characters were drawn in greater depth, and dramatic development was more logically motivated than it had been

previously. Although Zeno was by no means the only librettist of his generation

who sought such cures for the patient, he was certainly among the most skillful. The nature of that skill is illustrated by a comparison of two

typically contrasting treatments of the same subject: Minato's Seleuca, printed in Venice in i666, and Zeno's Antioco, written in collaboration with Pietro Pariati and printed in Venice in I705.32 The casts of characters which follow will introduce the reader to the bases for the dramatic developments outlined below.

Minato's Seleuco: Seleuco, King of Syria Antioco, Seleuco's son, in love with Stratonica, Queen of Asia, Seleuco's bride-to-be, who returns Antioco's

love Lucinda, former lover of Arbante and Antioco's bride-to-be Arbante, a prince, in love with Lucinda Ersistrato, a royal physician Eurindo, a page Rubia, an old woman Silo, a servant

Zeno's Antioco: Seleuco, Antioco, Stratonica-as above Argene, Lydian princess, in love with Antioco Tolomeo, Egyptian prince, in love with Argene Arsace, an old friend of Antioco who has just arrived in Syria to plead

for the forgiveness of the Phoenicians, the recent rebels against tyrannical satraps placed over them by Seleuco

The principal differences between the two versions are best exemplified when one compares the two main plots. Minato's version of the story begins with Antioco's reception of Stratonica at the seaside, and a dramatic if improbable scene in a darkened cave where, in the light of a lantern, Antioco recognizes the mysterious beloved he has known only in a cherished portrait. Zeno, preferring to concentrate his attention on the development of character through conflict, opens his version some- time after Stratonica's arrival in Syria, after her liaison with Antioco has already been established. In Minato's version, Seleuco spends the whole of the first two acts attempting to discover the cause of Antioco's obvious unhappiness, then offers Stratonica to his son almost as soon

82 Copies of the two libretti are to be found in the Rolandi Collection at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, and in the Biblioteca Marciana, respectively. The preface of the i666 libretto indicates that that text represents a somewhat revised version of an original first produced in Naples.


as Ersistrato informs him of the affair between Antioco and Stratonica- thus making it necessary that the second half of the final act be elab- orated from an improbable intrigue resulting from Antioco's unwitting failure to deliver a note from Seleuco to Lucinda. Zeno's version is much more involved, dealing with more complicated characters whose inner conflicts and misunderstandings of each other's motives and actions provide a "natural" basis for the variety of causative plot elaboration that Arcadian critics required. Seleuco is torn between his genuine af- fection for Antioco on the one hand, and his natural assertiveness and royal responsibility for civil obedience on the other; Antioco must choose between his sense of filial duty and his love for Stratonica. One does not doubt the depth of Stratonica's love for Antioco, but she is clearly perplexed in Zeno's version by the thought that she could con- ceivably lose both Antioco and the chance to be Queen of Syria, an ambition which once undermines even Antioco's confidence in her. Argene loves a man she knows cannot be hers, but whose loss she finds difficult to accept. Tolomeo is enough of a realist to mistrust Argene's offer of her love in exchange for his services as an avenger on Antioco, but enough of a dreamer to hope that he may eventually win Argene even so; his sense of personal virtue is weak enough towards the beginning of the libretto for him to become convinced that the winning of Argene justifies any means, but it is later strengthened to the point that he begs Antioco's pardon and offers to sacrifice his own life for Antioco's. Although Arsace has come to Syria in order to win Seleuco's pardon for the Phoenicians, he allows nothing to stand in the way of his loyalty to Antioco. In the realm of misunderstandings, Zeno's version includes Seleuco's misinterpretations of Antioco's friendship with Arsace (I/I3- 14, II/I3-15), Antioco's misinterpretation of Stratonica's advice that he

marry Argene (1/9-II), Tolomeo's misinterpretation of Antioco's rela- tionships with both Arsace and Stratonica (I/13-14, II/4, 11/14), Stra- tonica's misinterpretation of Seleuco's allusions to Antioco's accomplice (III/2), and Arsace's misinterpretation of an Antioco soliloquy (II/II- 12). The exposition, development, and solution of these interacting conflicts and misunderstandings are the means that enable Zeno to create a more or less continuously unfolding drama whose inevitable surren- ders in the opera house to the requirements of singers, machinists, dancers and the like would have been, he hoped, but minimally reflected to an armchair litterateur.

In Minato's version the sub-plots help extend the length of the libretto and provide the necessary opportunities for the secondary singers, but in Zeno's version they are integrated into the drama, often acting to impel the main plot. Arsace's friendship with Antioco provides a reason for Zeno's Seleuco to mistrust Antioco (I/14, II/2, II/13-I5) before he learns of his son's affair with Stratonica (III/3). Argene's

336


feelings for Antioco provide a reason for Stratonica's helpless jealousy concerning Antioco (I/7); and Tolomeo's feelings for Argene provide a means for keeping Seleuco disposed against Antioco (I/13, II/15), thereby delaying until Zeno's final act the increased tension which re- sults when Seleuco learns of the Antioco-Stratonica relationship. In what Zeno himself considered his best libretti,33 every scene, exposing ap- propriately varying characteristics of the several figures in the drama, had a dramatic justification of its own beyond the contribution of yet another scene-ending exit aria. Although there was nothing Zeno could do in his libretti about the embarrassing presence of aria texts, in his best works he was able to avoid reminding the reader-as one certainly is reminded in Antioco 1/15-18, where Antioco sends Arsace to tell Stratonica what Antioco himself will tell her immediately afterwards- that the poetry in question is not a legitimate tragedy but a text for music. This is especially striking in the Viennese works that Zeno considered his best efforts; here, because Emperor Charles was fond of plots centering on questions of politics and royal ethics, Zeno was able further to reduce the tell-tale role of love,34 concentrating instead on dramatic motives worthy of Scipione Maffei or Antonio Conti.

"Zeno's reform" involved, then, an attempt to create-while making money from the only marketable variety of contemporary Italian poetry -a new literary genre. This is an end served by giving more care to the construction of a coherent scenario and by increasing the share of the recitative in the printed text, thereby asserting the libretto's claim to consideration as a species of respectable literary value.35 There were, to be sure, important musical and musical-dramatic implications in such a view of the libretto, but the early Arcadians were not equipped by interest or background to deal with either.36 So long as the interests of

83 Zeno admitted that earlier works normally tend to be forgotten in the glow of later successes (Lettere, no. 749). But he seems, nonetheless, to have been fond of particular works: Merope (1712), Ifigenia in Aulide (1718), Nitocri (1722), Cajo Fabbricio (1729); for his comments on these, see the Lettere, nos. 310, 435, 588, 749. In a letter dated 30 December I740 and addressed to the Modenese impresario Domenico Vandelli, Zeno recalls that it was with Lucio Vero (1700) that he first made his reputation in Italy; but he adds that his Viennese works represent his best achievement in the genre. While in Vienna, Zeno called Antioco ". . not a bad work, but not one of my best" (Lettere, no. 642). 4 For a plot summary of an Arcadian libretto from 1699, wherein a "logically" motivated scenario involves characters impelled wholly by conflicting amorous interests, see my article on a text by Stampiglia, "The Travels of Partenope," Studies in Music History; Essays for Oliver Strunk (Princeton, 1968), pp. 359-365. 5 Certainly a large measure of the success with which Zeno and others were credited by Crescimbeni, Martello, and Maffei-all writers who had given up writing libretti rather than acquiesce to the importance in opera of non-literary elements-derived from Arcadian semi-approval of the "improved" libretti as literature.

86On Zeno's self-confessed lack of musical background, see the Lettere, nos. 207, 434, 505, ii8o.

337

338 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

singers, machinists, and ballet masters were not affected, so long as Italian

impresarios had recourse to the virgolette to cut those sections of a libretto felt to be unnecessary in the opera house, the generally increased

length of the recitative was meaningful only for those who read their libretti at home. In the Vienna of Charles VI, however, where great length of performance time seems to have been regarded as a virtue, the

implications for musical drama were very real-not only in what are

probably history's longest stretches of secco recitative, but in the dichot-

omy between the dramatic and musical functions of recitative and aria, and in the resulting composition of arias lacking appropriate musical-dramatic impact. A representative aria from the first act of the work which Zeno considered his masterpiece, Ifigenia in Aulide, the first work he

completed after his 1718 arrival in Vienna, makes this point quite clearly. In the recitative which opens Act I, Scene 4, Elisena, the second soprano, learns that her beloved Achilles is about to marry Ifigenia, then decides to commit suicide. The musical setting is by Antonio Caldara, the Venetian composer responsible for all but two of the 25 original set-

tings of operatic texts completed in Vienna by Zeno and Metastasio between I718 and Caldara's death in I736.37 The opening of Caldara's da

capo aria is given in Ex. i (its very pedestrian quality is maintained

through to the end). It is only in a very special sense that Zeno can be said to have under-

taken a reform of the libretto. The toxic effects of the literary medicine he helped to administer, especially evident in scores such as Caldara's

setting for Ifigenia in Aulide, were to keep the musical-dramatic aspect of serious Italian opera in a lethargic condition for decades.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 87 That Metastasio at least was not a special admirer of Caldara's operatic art

may be inferred from that librettist's reply to Eximeno's proposal in 1776 to bring out a complete edition of the original musical settings of all Metastasio's libretti: ".. . How would it be possible for me to inform you of the best music that has been set to my libretti, having scarcely heard any except for those works performed in the theater of the Imperial Court? And of these the great preponderance were set by the celebrated Caldara, an eminent master of counterpoint but a composer ex- ceedingly deficient in expression and in his attention to what pleases." Pietro Metastasio, Tutte le Opere, ed. B. Brunelli (Milan, 1943-54), V, 402.

APOSTOLO ZENO'S REFORM OF THE LIBRETTO 339

Ex. I

Caldara, "A vista del crudele," Ifigenia in Aulide. Vienna, Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Caldara autograph no. 40.

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