15 - Producing Stars in Dramma per musica

Summary

Stars were perhaps more crucial to dramma per musica than to any other musical enterprise in Italy during the eighteenth century. Yet modern research on eighteenth-century singers generally fails to provide any methodology for how stars were produced, and how they interacted with the works they performed. This essay seeks to fill this gap. I will first outline influential twentieth-century theories in musicology on the relationship between the vocalist and the dramma per musica. I will then examine the means by which scholars in other disciplines recognise stars both as historical phenomena and as signifying elements within productions. Finally, I will suggest methods for applying theories about star production to dramma per musica in a manner that fits the historical conditions of this repertory.

The Work-Concept and the Performer

Dramma per musica came into being by ‘clothing’ a revered libretto in music written for specific performers; once the cast changed, so did the music. For this genre, the live production as well as the prepared text could constitute the work. This process of realisation challenges two hypotheses central to traditional notions of the ‘work-concept’ and the role of the performer: that ‘works’ are benchmarks that must be preserved and imitated, and that the work emerged as such because composition had divorced itself from social function and from lyrics.

Historical evidence tells us that the drammi per musica were considered works without fulfilling either criteria. While the librettos constituted a much revered literary canon, librettos were consistently adapted and music generally newly composed for each run. Social function was a means of helping to fix a work’s status, with court rituals generating elaborate productions that were later commemorated. Acclaimed performances by singers could also be recalled and reinvented; a performance such as Hasse’s 1730 setting of Artaserse with Farinelli could become, like a post-1800 musical work, a ‘fictional object’ existing ‘over and above [other] performances and the score’ that was reimagined in print, iconography and later productions.