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Aspects of form in the Ottocento libretto

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Scott L. Balthazar
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Extract

In 1823, Alessandro Manzoni engaged a continuing debate over the merits of ‘Aristotelian’ unities of time and place with his Lettre à M. C*** sur l'unité de temps et de lieu dans la tragédie, a manifesto that synthesises and amplifies earlier polemics by Berchet, Pellico and Visconti. Dramatic expression, coherence and realism, Manzoni argued, are best served by giving priority to unity of action while ignoring the traditional restrictions of time and setting. Although discontinuities might occur between adjacent scenes, the focus on cause and effect and the exclusion of unrelated incidents would provide a coherence that had previously depended on physical and temporal proximity. Manzoni suggested that formal preconceptions be set aside and the action allowed to shape dramatic design. Characters could be introduced throughout a play rather than together in the first act, their motivations and goals allowed to evolve as the situation unfolds. These shifts would encourage writers to cultivate motifs other than love intrigues, which had traditionally held sway because they took little time to develop. In particular, historical plays could enact all important events instead of only the climax, and depict true causes and resolutions rather than ones invented to fit conventional constraints.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , March 1995 , pp. 23 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 Manzoni's essay was written and first published in Paris, in response to criticism of his Il conte di Carmagnola by Chauvet, J. J. Victor.Google Scholar It is reprinted in Manzoni, Alessandro, Opere, ed. Caretti, Lanfranco (Milan, 1973), 853–910. My summary is from pp. 855–86.Google Scholar See also Berchet, Giovanni, Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo al suo figiuolo (pub. 1816),Google Scholar reprinted in Berchet, Giovanni, Opere, ed. Turchi, Marcello (Naples, 1972), 454–92;Google ScholarPellico, Silvio, ‘Vera idea della tragedia di Vittorio Alfieri, ossia la dissertazione critica dell'awocato Giovanni Carmignani, confutata dall'avv. Gaetano Marrè, professore di diritto commerciale nella R. Università di Genova’, published in two parts in Il conciliatore, 6 September 1818 and 2. September 1818,Google Scholar reprinted in Branca, Vittore, ed., Il conciliatore, foglio scientifico-letterario, I (Florence, 1965), 34–8 and 128–35;Google Scholar and Visconti, Ermes, ‘Dialogo sulle unità drammatiche di luogo e di tempo’, Il conciliatore, 24 01 1819,Google Scholar and ‘Seguito del dialogo sulle unità drammatiche di luogo e di tempo’, Il conciliatore, 28 January 1819, reprinted in Branca, Il conciliatore, 90–117,Google Scholarand in Calcaterra, Carlo, ed., Manifesti romantici e altri scritti della polemica classico/romantica (Turin, 1979), 620–37.Google ScholarManzoni's ideas were echoed, for example, in Stendhal's definition of Romantic tragedy as tragedy in prose that lasts several months and is set in various locales. See his Racine et Shakespeare (1825),Google Scholar in Daniels, Guy, trans., Racine and Shakespeare (New York, 1962), 135, and Victor Hugo's arguments regarding realism and the unities in his preface to Cromwell.Google ScholarCarlson, Marvin, Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984), 197–207, provides a useful overview of Italian and French Romantic writings on drama during this period. I wish to thank Philip Gossett, Leonard Meyer and Gary Tomlinson for their valuable criticisms of early versions of this essay.Google Scholar

2 For example the ‘shattering’ of the unities of time and place in operas after 1830 noted by Tomlinson, Gary, ‘Italian Romanticism and Italian Opera: An Essay in Their Affinities’, 19th-century Music, 10 (1986–1987), 56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Mitchell, W. J. T., ‘Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 6 (1979–1980), 539–67, discusses a similar distinction between ‘tectonic’ forms, which emphasise synchronic relationships, and ‘linear’ ones, which emphasise diachronic relationships. See esp. 560–1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 For a discussion of the pleasure created by illusions that immerse the audience in experiences that make them ‘weep and shudder’, see Stendhal, , Racine and Shakespeare, 17–18, 168 and 181. Claudio Toscani has documented the importance of interpersonal conflict as early as the operas of Mayr.Google ScholarSee ‘Soggetti romantici nell'opera italiana del periodo napoleonico (1796–1815)’, in Aspetti dell'opera italiana fra Sette e Ottocento: Mayr e Zingarelli, ed. Salvetti, Guido, Quaderni del Corso di Mmicologia del Conservatorio ‘G. Verdi’ di Milano, 1 (Lucca, 1993), 34.Google Scholar

5 The preference of Rossini's librettists for situations that encourage violence but fail to make it inevitable explains the susceptibility of three of his five drammas with tragic endings— Tancredi in the revision for Ferrara (1813), Otello and Maometto II — to performance with happy endings. While Tancredi's death at the hands of the Turks in the tragic version of the opera — he and Amenaide are happily reunited in the Neapolitan original — may better reflect the libretto's literary sources, it has no direct connection to his primary conflicts with Orbazzano, Argirio and Amenaide.Google Scholar For a discussion of the new ending see Gossett, Philip, The Tragic Finale of Rossini's ‘Tancredi’ (Pesaro, 1977), esp. 12–21.Google ScholarOtello's murder of Desdemona was easily averted, given the context of Berio's treatment of the rest of the story. See my discussion in ‘Tectonic and Linear Form in the Ottocento Libretto: The Case of the Two Otellos’, to appear in the Opera Journal. Similarly, Anna's suicide is avoidable, since it follows the defeat of her captor, and it was readily eliminated for a Venetian production of Maometto II in 1823.Google Scholar See Gossett, Philip, ‘The Operas of Rossini: Problems of Textual Criticism in Nineteenth-Century Opera’, Ph.D. diss. (Princeton University, 1970), 464.Google Scholar

6 Elder Olson distinguishes this type of minor ‘factorial’ incident from the major ‘essential’ incidents of the plot for which they ‘provide the necessary causal conditions’. See Tragedy and the Theory of Drama (Detroit, 1961), 67–8.Google Scholar

7 Friedrich Lippmann also observes both this constriction of intrigues and the infusion of expression into early nineteenth-century recitatives. See Vincenzo Bellini und die italienische Opera Seria seiner Zeit Studien iiber libretto, Arienform und Melodik, Analecta musicologica, 6 (Vienna, 1969), 7 and 16;Google ScholarToscani, , ‘Soggetti romantici’, 24–5, notes the adoption of a new, emotionally high-pitched lexicon by librettists contemporary with Mayr and Zingarelli.Google Scholar

8 Schmidt, Henry J., How Dramas End: Essays on the German Sturm und Drang, Bükhner, Hauptmann, and Fleisser, 2–3, discusses in more general terms the relationship between ethics and closure.Google Scholar

9 Bache, William, Design and Closure in Shakespeare's Major Plays: The Nature of Recapitulation (New York, 1991), discusses Shakespeare's treatment of this sort of tension between a person and the office that he or she holds.Google Scholar

10 Manfred Pfister notes that this type of configurational structure which ‘expands at the beginning and tails off again at the end … was particularly common in the plays of a classical tradition that strove to produce symmetry and perfection’. See The Theory and Analysis of Drama, trans. Halliday, John (Cambridge, 1988), 174.Google Scholar

11 Schmidt, , How Dramas End, 13–16, discusses the broader history of such endings of celebration, moral victory and reconciliation.Google Scholar

12 See Donizetti, Gaetano, Maria Stuarda: Tragedia lirica in due atti, ed. Wiklund, Anders (Milan, 1991).Google ScholarIn the commonly performed three-act version, the shift occurs between Acts I and II. A similar change of emphasis, from the Parisina—Azzo conflict to one between Azzo and Ugo, occurs between Act I and Act II in the original version of Donizetti's Parisina. More complicated structures that interlock two or more triangles (in Donizetti's Anna Bolena, Anna—Enrico—Giovanna and Anna—Enrico—Percy) occur frequently.Google Scholar

13 According to Olson, , Tragedy, 68, a representational incident ‘leads to no direct consequence’. but rather ‘acquaints us with the general situation and with the characters’. In contrast, essential incidents are the ‘major incidents of the plot’.Google Scholar

14 This shift concurs with a broader disjunction between Classic circular and Romantic linear conceptions of history seen in Stendhal's rejection, discussed by Amoss, Benjamin McRae Jr, Time and Narrative in Stendhal (Athens, Ga., 1992), of ‘the presupposition of an ontological identity between the past and the present that is involved in the traditional view of history espoused by the classicists, who would require a nineteenth-century writer to adopt the subjects, style, and techniques of an earlier age’ (p. 11).Google Scholar

15 This tendency is evident as early as Donizetti's Lucrezna Borgia (1833). Among Donizetti's later operas Pia de' Tolomei (1837), Maria de Rudenz (1838), Maria Padilla (1841) and Maria di Rohan (1844) illustrate it particularly well.Google Scholar

16 The operatic roots of these techniques may lie in the dream racconti of the Bellinian period. See Lippmann, , Bellini und Opera Seria, 17. Different aspects of the effect of suspense and anticipation on audience involvement have been discussed by numerous authors. See for example Olson, Tragedy, 45;Google ScholarJones, Emrys, Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford, 1971), 49–65.Google ScholarEsslin, Martin, An Anatomy of Drama (New York, 1977), 44–7;Google ScholarGeorge, Kathleen, Rhythm in Drama (Pittsburgh, 1980), 7;Google Scholar and Brownstein, Oscar Lee, Strategies of Drama: The Experience of Form (New York, 1991), 25–37, 42, 47–8, 51, 55, 140 and 142.Google Scholar

17 Pfister, , Theory of Drama, 204–7, discusses in general terms the importance of scenic presentation versus narrative mediation in creating a dramatic effect.Google Scholar

18 Rigoletto illustrates the emergence in librettos of the 1850s of what Pfister terms the dynamically conceived figure, who undergoes ‘a process of development in the course of the text’. More traditional (for Italian opera) ‘statically conceived figures remain constant throughout the whole of the text. They never change, though of course the receiver's perception of them may gradually develop, expand or even change under the influence of the inevitable linear process of information transmission and accumulation.’ See Theory of Drama, 177–8.Google Scholar

19 See Robinson's, Michael discussions in Opera before Mozart, 2nd edn (London, 1972), 110,Google Scholar and Naples and Neapolitan Opera (Oxford, 1972), 59–60.Google Scholar

20 This characteristic corresponds to and helps to explain the absence of tonal links between arias in the eighteenth century.Google Scholar Carl Dahlhaus has disputed theories of long-range tonal relationships in this repertory in ‘Drammaturgia dell'opera italiana’, in Storia dell'opera italiana, ed. Bianconi, Lorenzo and Pestelli, Giorgio, Part 2, I sistemi, Vol. VI, Teorie e tecniche, immagini e fantasmi (Turin, 1988) 124. Dahlhaus theorises that intrigues serve in Baroque opera to create the range of situations necessary to stimulate such immediate reaction (‘Drammaturgia’, 94).Google Scholar

21 See Dahlhaus, , ‘Drammaturgia’, 77–162, esp. 116–18.Google Scholar

22 See my ‘Mayr, Rossini, and the Development of the Early Concertato Finale’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 116 (1991), 236–66;CrossRefGoogle Scholarfor a discussion of this effect in Cimarosa, see Rossini, Paolo, ‘L'opera classicista nella Milano napoleonica (1796–1815)’, in Aspetti dell'opera italiana, 147–8.Google Scholar

23 Toscani, Claudio, ‘Soggetti romantici’, 23–4, notes this trend beginning as early as the period of Mayr and Zingarelli.Google Scholar

24 The role of the lyric number had already begun to change in Rossini's finales and in his late duets. See my dissertation, ‘Evolving Conventions in Italian Serious Opera: Scene Structure in the Works of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi, 1810–1850’ (University of Pennsylvania, 1985), 152 and 162–4.Google Scholar

25 For more discussion of this issue, see my essay ‘The primo ottocento Duet and the Transformation of the Rossinian Code’, journal of Musicology, 7 (1989), 471–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 For additional discussion, see Balthazar, , ‘Evolving Conventions’, 306–16 and 485–93.Google Scholar

27 My essay, ‘Plot and Tonal Design as Compositional Constraints in Il trovatore’ (in preparation), gives one example of such relationships;Google Scholar others are discussed in Lawton's, David ‘Tonality and Drama in Verdi's Early Operas’, Ph.D. diss. (University of California, Berkeley, 1973),Google Scholar and Cone's, Edward T. ‘On the Road to Otello: Tonality and Structure in Simon Boccanegrd’, Studi verdiani, 1 (1982), 72–98.Google Scholar