![]() These stock characters were associated with various regions of Italy, including Naples, frequently speaking in local dialect not fully understood by other members of the cast, thus creating the confusion and misunderstandings central to the development of the plot. Its essence lay in the skill of masked professional actors in stock roles to improvise within a predetermined scenario. ![]() A semi-improvised theatrical entertainment, the commedia dell’arte first became popular in the early part of the sixteenth century. Both feigning and comic madness have their roots in the most significant of all influences on comic opera, the commedia dell’arte. Yet the title alone is revealing, for the words ‘finta’ (feign or bogus) and ‘pazza’ (madness) are both closely associated with what would become stock ingredients of comedy in opera and, ultimately, comic opera itself. We are left, tantalizingly, with only the composer’s reference to it in a letter as a ‘thousand ridiculous little inventions’. Sadly, neither text nor music survives, and it seems likely that since there is no record of it having been performed, the work was never completed. The composer was none other than Claudio Monteverdi, the librettist the renowned Giulio Strozzi. In 1627 an opera entitled La finta pazza Licori was proposed for the court of Mantua. Only an accident of history has deprived us of a work that might have changed the history of comic opera. The Commedia dell’arte and Commedia Erudita However, as will later be seen, Provenzale is an important figure in the move toward the creation of comic opera. Provenzale’s activities as an opera composer were curtailed by the arrival of Scarlatti in Naples, the latter’s appointment as maestro di capella in 1684 causing the disappointed Provenzale to resign his post in a protest that also resulted in a number of other members of the chapel choir leaving the establishment. Provenzale’s earliest operas date from the 1750s and the likelihood that they were at least in part adapted from operas by Cavalli only emphasizes the close interaction between Venetian and Neapolitan opera during this period. ![]() There can be little doubt that the true founder of Neapolitan opera was not Alessandro Scarlatti, as has sometimes been claimed, but Francesco Provenzale (c1626-1704). Bartolomeo theatre, an innovation succeeded by various companies who acted on its stage until 1737, when the theatre was pulled down. ![]() By the mid-1650s ‘Febi Armonici’, an operatic troupe who had been encouraged to move from Rome to Naples by the Spanish viceroy of Naples, were presenting opera at the S. The first operas to be seen in Naples, one of which may have been Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (there is some dispute on the matter), were mostly imported from Venice in the early 1650s, a pattern that was to be largely followed for most of the remainder of the century. During the seventeenth century Naples was largely content to follow the capital of the operatic world, Venice. In view of this it is perhaps strange to relate that the city was relatively slow to adopt the Baroque dramatic form par excellence. It has indeed been justly observed that Naples itself was one huge theatre, its inhabitants the perpetual players on a stage on which the curtain never came down. On major feast days the church itself came to the streets, bringing to them processions and musical entertainment. Music had long played an integral part in the life of the city, not just at court and in its churches, but in taverns and streets that resounded to the sounds of singing and dancing. Like many other visitors, De Brosses was also captivated by the wealth of musical activity he found in the city, which he declared to be ‘the capital of the world’s music’. The traffic, the large population, the continuous noise and chaos of the very many carriages, a brilliant court, the magnificent bearing of the local nobility… everything conspires to give Naples the lively and animated aspect which is possessed by London and Paris but which is totally absent in Rome. To my mind, Naples is the only city in Italy that really feels like a capital. To the French traveller Charles De Brosses, writing in 1739, it was Naples, not Rome that had the aura of a capital: Hot, dirty and overcrowded, it was a city of teeming life and colour that flowed from court and church to the streets. During the eighteenth century Naples was one of the largest and most vibrant cities in Europe.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |