Ancient Rome in Early Opera (review)

This is an exceptionally intelligent and well-informed book on a topic of some importance for the reception of classical antiquity in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period rich in operas based on Roman history. In an introductory chapter, Ketterer traces with admirable lucidity not only the main outlines of ancient history from Alexander to Hadrian but also the intellectual, social, and political movements that both led to the establishment of opera as a genre and influenced the first two centuries of its development; he ends this chapter with some basic facts about the circulation of librettos and the evolution of performance practices in the period studied. In the following eight chapters he discusses a representative sample of operas from 1643 to 1797, mainly to do with Scipio Africanus the Elder, Julius Caesar, Cato the Younger, Nero, and Titus, elucidating above all the development and interconnectedness of two themes, "the myth of the clement prince" and "the myth of liberty." All these works used Italian librettos, and Ketterer's approach is "essentially literary" (20), a study above all of the libretto texts, though he has pertinent things to say about their musical settings at many points. He provides translations, generally his own, of the passages discussed, quoting the original text in his endnotes or in the appendix of "Passages from unpublished Italian sources."

The works discussed are The Coronation of Poppaea (Busenello and Monteverdi, 1643); Scipio Africanus (Minato and Cavalli, 1665); Agrippina (Grimani and Handel, 1709–1710) and Otto in his Villa (Lalli and Vivaldi, 1713); Zeno's libretto for Scipio in Spain (1710); Julius Caesar in Egypt (Haym and Handel, 1724) and Cato in Utica (Metastasio and Vivaldi, 1737); Corradi's libretto for Germanicus on the Rhine (1676), the anonymous libretto written for Arminius in London in 1714, and the Arminius of Salvi and Handel (1737); Metastasio's libretto for The Clemency of Titus (1734) and the Julius Sabinus of Giovannini and Sarti (1783); and finally (under the title "The Revolution and the End of a Myth") Mazzolà and Mozart's version of The Clemency of Titus (1791), Salfi's libretto for The Pisonian Conspiracy (1797), and The Horatii and the Curiatii (Sografi and Cimarosa, 1797). The arrangement is largely diachronic, but works have been grouped together so as to bring out thematic points in the development of the genre. In each chapter we are given a summary of the historical (or quasi-historical) events underlying the drama and of the historical context within which the librettos were written. Nor is the literary context neglected: Addison's Cato is given due prominence in the chapter on Julius Caesar and Cato, for example.

Themes of republicanism and resistance to tyranny are shown to have different resonances in different contexts, and the myth of the clement prince (an almost inevitable ingredient of works written for royal courts) is seen gradually to give way to the myth of liberty. But the example of Nero in particular had shown from the start that princes were not always clement, and some "happy endings" had rung quite hollow long before they ceased to be required by convention. Ketterer's rich analyses enable us to follow the fortunes of these themes and to tease out the often subtle relationships between the events on stage and in life at the ruling courts of the day. He also analyzes, for instance, Platonic, Ovidian, and Stoic elements in The Coronation of Poppaea; and Ovidian and Stoic elements in Scipio Africanus. There are many comic elements to examine, too, particularly in the earlier operas discussed, though Ketterer's final remark, that "Plautus and Terence, not Sophocles and Aristotle, were the real fathers of dramma per musica" comes as a bit of a surprise as the conclusion to this book: if it is a trailer for his next, I look forward eagerly to that.