Alcina in Arcadia

1 The standard source on the meaning and history of the Latin inscription is Erwin Panofsky’s ‘Et in Arcadia Ego.’ For the early history of the Arcadian Academy, see Storia dell’Accademia, an account by its first president, Giammario Crescimbeni; for a more recent source, see Piromalli. university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 4, fall 2003 D O M E N I C O P I E T R O P A O L O Alcina in Arcadia Originally a rugged and mountainous region of Greece, Arcadia was idealized into a pastoral garden by Virgil and has since been variously embellished by a host of other poets and painters who have walked in his footsteps for two millennia. In western culture Arcadia is now the name of an earthly paradise of natural simplicity and primordial innocence inhabited by people who experience life as joy, beauty, and romance. This idyll exists in spite of occasional episodes of anxiety due to the realization that in all gardens, whether with an apple tree or not, there may be a snake threatening the social order, and in spite of the constant awareness of the fact that there is no way of escaping from our own finitude. A reminder of that finitude can be found in the phrase ‘et in Arcadia ego’ engraved on pastoral tombstones as if spoken by death personified. Until 1690 Arcadia, whether named or not, was the landscape of pastoral literature and art, but on 5 October of that year, in Rome it also became the name of an academy, a group of poets, composers, artists, and scholars intent on giving their creative activity the appearance of the labour of literary shepherds – by assuming pastoral names, by giving themselves a pastoral institutional structure, by governing their meeting through rituals meant to give rise to a pastoral ethos in their company, and, generally, by regarding themselves as a utopian commonwealth or as a fictional democracy. In the pastoral literature of this period, there are two Arcadias: one in the text, sheltering characters from the unpleasantness of life in other genres, and one outside the text, protecting the imagination from the unpleasantness of life in history, literary and otherwise.1 Within a few decades, the academy had established 36 branches in other Italian cities, and had accumulated a membership of over 2,600, including most of the Italian intelligentsia, many political and religious leaders, and a considerable number of foreign men of letters. Its literary ideals reached England early in the century by way of Italian opera, and there it met with generous acceptance as well as strong opposition. The greatest obstacle to its further dissemination was the success of The Beggar’s Opera, which was generated by a conspicuously non-Arcadian rhetoric and which, in 1728, took England by storm. Handel’s Alcina was, among other things, an attempt to re-establish the earlier commercial success of the Arcadian formula. The story of Alcina is the story of a powerful sorceress and of the alcina in arcadia 859 2 See the works with Alcina or Ruggiero in the titles listed alphabetically by Allacci and in the Repertorio of the Enciclopedia dello spettacolo. 3 Textual references are to Segre’s edition. university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 4, fall 2003 vicissitudes of her lovers on an enchanted island. It was first told in part by Boiardo, later again and more fully by Ariosto, and variously imitated in the succeeding centuries in opera, dance, and other dramatic works, the first of which was Francesca Caccini’s theatrical dance La liberazione di Ruggiero in 1625, while the last was an Alcina suite of 1934. Between these two adaptations there are at least twelve others, for a total of four in the seventeenth century, five in the eighteenth, of which Handel’s is one, and three in the twentieth. The libretto of Handel’s opera, derived mostly, but 2 not exclusively, from Ariosto, has remained anonymous, though the librettist’s direct source has been variously identified by scholars. All we know for certain is that Handel got hold of a copy of the manuscript in Italy, at some point before the 2nd of...