The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera (review)

The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance has its origins in Muir’s essay “Why Venice? Venetian Society and the Success of Early Opera,” which sought to find justification for the rise and flourishing of opera in Venice in the mid-seventeenth-century.¹ The activities of the Incogniti, one of the most important academies in seventeenth-century Venice, form the core of Muir’s discussions. The Incogniti have been the focus of numerous historical/literary studies, such as those by Spini, Miato, and Cannizzaro, and musicologists Bianconi and Walker, Rosand, Heller, and Calcagno have written persuasively concerning the importance of the Incogniti to the history of opera.² Muir helpfully devotes the first third of his book to Cesare Cremonini, who taught many of the Incogniti, and his environment in Padua, with an emphasis on Cremonini’s philosophical and educational conflicts with the Jesuits. The genesis of The Culture Wars came at a fortunate time, as new studies on Cremonini have emerged recently, with a monograph by Kuhn, and a two-volume set of essays.³

In the second chapter, Muir spends considerable time on Ferrante Pallavicino and Antonio Rocco, two of the most outspoken of the Incogniti, as well as on Arcangela Tarabotti, a Benedictine nun and prolific writer, who had ties to the Incogniti and has become the object of numerous studies in recent years. The author also weaves into his arguments the various sexual and societal tensions that surfaced during the seventeenth century as many noblemen forsook marriage vows in the interest of maintaining the family wealth; likewise, large numbers of noblewomen entered convents, many of them more out of a sense of filial devotion rather than religious piety.

Most of the topics that Muir introduces in the first two chapters reemerge in the last. The author keeps the Incogniti, problems associated with thwarted marriage, and the influences of the Jesuits well in focus in his attempt to explain the forces that led to the establishment of opera in Venice. These themes, however, receive too much emphasis in Muir’s explanations for the popularity of opera. Moreover, in focusing on the Incogniti and, for example, Giovanni Busenello’s and Claudio Monteverdi’s masterpiece L’incoronazione di Poppea (1642), Muir neglects the more representative body of works that flourished during the first few decades of public opera. For better or for worse, the majority of operas do not match the particular idiosyncratic brilliance of Poppea. Indeed, although the absence of the Jesuits from Venice during the first half of the seventeenth century may have enabled the publication of numerous libertine tracts (and works such as Poppea), most operas of the time would have been far less offensive to the Jesuits. Conversely, the decades following the reinstitution of the Jesuits saw a rise in the number of risqué productions on the stage despite their presence.

Since Muir bases his arguments on a wide array of secondary literature rather than on his own research of primary documents, it is often difficult to distinguish his ideas from those of the sources that he quotes.⁴ Moreover, his reliance on secondary literature, particularly regarding the history and business of opera, leads to numerous generalizations that will not hold up under close scrutiny. For example, no documentation yet confirms his thesis that the patrons and financiers of opera were libertines. Moreover, by pinpointing restricted marriage (and frustrated sexuality) as a boon to the popularity of opera, he ignores the numerous married noblemen who rented boxes and bequeathed them to their wives and children. Muir’s tendency to paint the opera boxes of Venice as filled with the unmarried nobles of Venice and their women friends, though certainly accurate in some cases, neglects the fact that operagoing was often a family affair, as evidenced by household accounts listing an evening’s opera expenses.

The Culture Wars provides a welcome introduction to the cultural world of late sixteenth-century Padua for...