Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (review)

The musicological literature does not exactly abound with comprehensive escapades into the universe of opera seria, the dominant form of music theater in the Enlightenment. Since Reinhard Strohm’s magisterial collection of essays, Dramma per musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), no single book in English has in fact captured the genre’s cultural-historical breadth, much less explained its remarkable popularity and versatility. From this respect alone, Martha Feldman’s Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy fills a notable void. In addition, the volume presents an original topic: the multifarious technologies through which opera seria engaged with the ideological horizon of absolutism. How did opere serie stage and mobilize the powers overseeing their production in contexts as diverse as Bourbon-controlled Parma or revolutionary Venice? Feldman requires no fewer than five bulky chapters, four case studies, and a shorter epilogue to tackle this conundrum.

The introductory chapter, “Evenings at the Opera,” immediately confronts the reader with a basic paradox: while opera seria constituted a “protocapitalist bourgeois form, attended by a mixed populace . . . and managed through various combinations of state, court, and private persons and funds” (p. 7), its narratives spotlighted the “absolutist trope of sovereignty” (p. 6) through a “rigid set of conventions” (p. 11), among which were star-studded cast hierarchies and exit arias. “[U]nderstanding these conventions as part of a ritual and spectacular process,” Feldman argues, “elucidates their premodern status, with its wider political and artistic implications” (p. 11).

The musical ramifications of this “ritual process” are explored in the second chapter, “Arias: Form, Feeling, Exchange.” Drawing analogies with the magical rituals of indigenous populations, in particular the Trobriand of New Guinea, the author engages with the da capo aria and its inherent dualism between stereotyped structures and aleatory elements (i.e., cadenzas and improvised embellishments) in terms of a “script for rhetorical exchange” (p. 61) that allowed singers to interact with their audience, as well as to stir the “senses into states of enchantment” using (varied) “repetitions of formal elements” (p. 83). What this “exchange” resulted in on a most practical level, however, is left open to speculation: “My description,” Feldman acknowledges, “intentionally overdetermines suggestions immanent in the score to point up the possibilities of a performative reading . . . that foregrounds the interactions of singer and listener, not with the hope of recuperating how singer-audience interactions actually went, but of learning what aria scores can tell us about how they could have gone” (p. 61).

The question, of course, is whose interactive listening behaviors we can hope to deduce from the silent page. Interesting (and lethal) on this matter are Robert Gjerdingen’s words about “Romantic listening,” which according to him “favors music that affords sonic analogues to a thrill ride, a quest, the supernatural, or a melodrama. By contrast, eighteenth-century courtly listening habits seem to have favored music that provided opportunities for acts of judging, for the making of distinctions, and for the public exercise of discernment and taste” (Music in the Galant Style [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], 4). Given the established heterogeneity of Italy’s operatic audiences and the iconographically established fact that many spectators hardly listened, it is deplorable to find Feldman upholding the absorbed, “enchanted” listener, rather than encompassing alternative modes of spectatorship.

All the more monolithically posited is Feldman’s hermeneutic reading of Tommaso Traetta’s Didone abbandonata (in “Abandonments in a Theater State, Naples, 1764”). “As a text,” she argues, “Didone abbandonata resonates with the crisis faced by royalist politics” (pp. 224–25) during the great famine that struck Naples in 1764. Metastasio’s original libretto (Naples, 1724), with its “fragile, impermanent, marginal, feminine, and avowedly mythical view of monarchy,” suited this critical moment, “when the display of hierarchy was threatened even as it was being choreographed for public consumption” (p. 225). The difficulty with this rationale lies not so...