Performing the Self

"Then 'tis my Hand that sees, and that's all one: for is not seeing, touching with your Eyes?"¹

What is performed today when we use the score of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo as the point of departure for a staging? The lavish 1609 edition of the score, reissued six years later, is indeed a problematic text.² It was probably not meant to be a vehicle for future stagings, but neither was it a mere commemoration of the 1607 premiere. The score differs in too many ways, including a radically different finale, from the 1607 libretto, the latter reflecting the original performance in Mantua's ducal palace.³ If the publication of Monteverdi's score was an afterthought, then what was its purpose?⁴

A possible answer can be found in an entry of a Venetian publisher's commercial catalogue of 1621, in which the score is listed among other works as, simply, Orfeo del Monteverde under the rubric "music to be played and sung with chitarrone, theorbo, arpicordo, Spanish guitar, and other similar instrument."⁵ The score was thus sold to appeal to a wide segment of the consumer public (together with arias, madrigals, scherzos, and canzonettas), broadening the impact of the work well beyond the elite present at the Mantuan premiere. It does not seem to have been published for the purpose of generating public stagings. The presence of the score for Jacopo Peri's L'Euridice under the same rubric of the publisher's catalogue suggests a context for L'Orfeo. The performances and the publications of the Florentine and the Mantuan operas were sponsored, as is known, by the Medicis and the Gonzagas. Neither of these noble families had a commercial interest in financing the performances and the publications. Rather, they sponsored them as symbolic acts representing their social rank and signifying their moral superiority, within an economy defined today by social historians as one of "conspicuous consumption."⁶ Viewed in this light, the publication of the scores partakes, as much as the performances, in the wider "performance" of nobility taking place on the "stage" of northern Italy within the context of a fierce competition among dynastic powers.

Contrary to L'Orfeo, however, the "noble fable" of L'Euridice was created from the start to perform, through staging, that symbolizing act.⁷L'Euridice was a part of the sumptuous 1600 Florentine festivities celebrating the marriage of Maria de' Medici and Henry IV of France, resonating across Europe through posterity also thanks to Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger's description.⁸La favola d'Orfeo [The Fable of Orpheus], as the libretto of Monteverdi's opera title reads, was instead staged with little fanfare and echo beyond the Gonzaga court. It was an experimental and, as it turned out, successful novelty included within the traditional performative activities taking place during ordinary carnival festivities in Mantua.⁹

Two years later Prince Francesco Gonzaga, the dedicatee of the score of L'Orfeo, capitalized on this local success by having the score printed in Venice, the publishing capital of Europe, thus magnifying the impact of the performance. The publication transformed an almost private event—the performance among the restricted circle of the Accademia degli Invaghiti—into a symbolic and public one addressed to the "great theater of the universe," as the dedication letter says.¹⁰ The publication was, in a sense, another "performance" that could be "consumed" all over Europe, if only in the listening minds of the consumers. As a result, every music lover could claim L'Orfeo, and not only L'Euridice, to be indeed a "spectacle truly of princes," as Marco da Gagliano termed the new genre of the "representations in music."¹¹

The score of L'Orfeo includes two kinds of performing indications: those in the past tense, such as "this song was accompanied by all the instruments," appear to point back to the premiere, and thus have the function of commemorating it; other indications, in the present tense, such as "Charon sings at the sound of the regal organ," are more prescriptive and imply that the publication was a vehicle for future performances.^12...