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Eighteenth-Century Studies 34.1 (2000) 141-144



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Book Review

Felicità sognate. Il teatro di Metastasio

Libretti viennesi. A cura di Lorenzo della Chà

Per Tommaso Crudeli nel 255° anniversario della morte, 1745-2000


Alberto Beniscelli. Felicità sognate. Il teatro di Metastasio (Genova: Il Melangolo, 2000) Pp. 184. L 25.00.

Lorenzo Da Ponte. Libretti viennesi. A cura di Lorenzo della Chà, 2 vols. (Milano-Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo-Guanda, 1999). Pp. lxvi + 1850. L 150.00.

Maria Augusta Timpanaro Morelli. Per Tommaso Crudeli nel 255° anniversario della morte, 1745-2000 (Firenze: Olschki, 2000) Pp. viii + 120.

In the English extract of his autobiography published in New York in 1819, Lorenzo Da Ponte (who at that time was seventy and would eventually die in America, almost a nonagenarian) remembered with nostalgia and pride the years of his almost uncontested success in Vienna, London, Milan and Prague: "I am willing to attribute the continuation of this success to the excellence of the music, and to agree with you that my verses are nothing but a vehicle to the notes; but at all events, these notes could not exist without this vehicle: and this vehicle is a property to which I have an exclusive claim, for which I can say, in common with the composers, "We made those operas." However, the querelle about authorship and supremacy of music or poetry in the eighteenth century soon became a fashionable subject for plots of the opera buffa. The most famous of such intermezzi or one-act operas is perhaps Prima la musica e poi le parole, written in 1786 for the music of Salieri by one of Da Ponte's rivals in Vienna, Giambattista Casti. In the three works under review, Da Ponte, in Lorenzo della Chà's edition of the Vienese libretti, Beniscelli and Morelli, using other noteworthy examples, depict the opera that is staged behind the scenes, replete with personalities, controversy and rivalry. [End Page 141]

Lively and precise, Beniscelli's study of Metastasio is an important achievement, intended for both the scholarly and the more casual reader. The stages of Metastasio's life are skillfully illuminated through the prismatic light of his work: from earliest exercises as an improvvisatore in the shadow of his generous and intelligent mentor, Gian Vincenzo Gravina, to the first step in his career as librettist in Naples (with the help of the beloved virtuosa Marianna Bulgarelli, called Romanina, for whom he wrote Didone abbandonata), and eventually to his triumph in Vienna, where after Apostolo Zeno's departure he was appointed, "poeta cesareo" (i.e., imperial poet, or Caesar's poet) from 1729 until his death in 1782. The title of the book Felicità sognate, is a serendipitous quotation from Demetrio (III. iii), which recalls Cleonice's conviction that Alceste's acceptance of his offer of platonic love could only be a dream. Cleonice is surprised when Alceste responds with the indulgent words: "felicità sognate, / amabili deliri / d'alma gentile" ("yearned after happiness, / sweet delirium / of a gentle soul"). As critics observed, Alceste's maîtrise de soi (to use Corneille's expression) is both a choice and a duty. Metastastian love is really a dream that can only encounter reality under the rules of reason. The dialectic between sensibility and rationality seems to be at the heart of recent interpretations of Metastasio, who is considered the most gifted eighteenth-century Italian poet before Parini, whether his texts are accompanied by music or not. Beniscelli dedicates the first part of his book to the young Metastasio's interest in Tasso's technique of "evidenza" and "spettacolarità," demonstrating how Armida's cantos in the Gerusalemme liberata function as an implicit canovaccio (loose plot upon which actors in the Commedia dell'arte improvised) ready for the stage. Beniscelli not only shows how Tasso's influence predominates over Ariosto's but he also establishes the legacy of seventeenth-century poets such as Guarini (whose Pastor fido is seminal for Demetrio) and even Marino, though to a lesser extent...

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