Le voci arcane. Palcoscenici del potere nel teatro e nell'opera by Tatiana Korneeva (review)

The present volume consists of nine studies that address different issues with regard to the representation of political power in dramatic and musical theatre between the seventeenth and the nineteenth century. It not only focuses on an Italian context; it also explores the Dutch, German, Russian, Spanish, and French backgrounds.

Even though most of the essays share common points, the complexity and particularities of the topics prompted the editor to create a large and single block in chronological order, from the Baroque period to Romanticism. The volume begins with the work of Nicola Usula («Di verità alterate e complesse strategie. Giovan Carlo de' Medici e l'Ipermestra, di Moniglia e Cavalli [Firenze 1654–58]», 25–43), a reflection upon the promotion strategies for dramatic theatre through the emblematic case of the Ipermestra. Even though the performance of the play could initially look like an encomiastic production addressed to the Spanish Crown, Usula demonstrates that it was actually a perfect marketing operation developed by Giovan Carlo de' Medici with a view to ennobling both his own work and his family name. In the following study («La crudeltà nel dramma europeo del Seicento», 45–57) Joachim Küppe wonders why the reigning classes enjoyed watching the death of their counterparts on stage. Furthermore, it studies the particularities around those scenarios of violence in the Europe of the seventeenth century through illustrative examples. Küppe considers this terror on stage as a way to evoke patriotic feelings among matters of the court as well as a distraction from daily misery by means of creating a method to channel their aggression. The third chapter («"Tirannia degli uomini", "tirannia del Cielo" nelle azioni sacre di Zeno, Metastasio, Granelli», 59–84) addresses the first years of the eighteenth century. Elisabetta Selmi explores the techniques employed to display on stage the relationship between the divine plan and the conflicts brought about by the exercise of power in the hands of reigning authorities. The author does so through the meticulous analysis of different examples of Zeno, Metastasio, and Granelli's works, all within the classicist reform context. The fourth chapter («Il sovrano e la legge nella tragedia del Settecento. Un percorso tra Italia e Francia», 85–99) by Enrico Zucchi illustrates the effects of French absolutism in the recovery of Greek tragedies. While French dramas did not dare to question explicitly the limits of the monarch, Italian playwrights did place the tyrants from ancient theatre on their stages and brought into question the relationship between power and law in the first half of the eighteenth century, exposing a political discussion that would not arrive to France until the pre-revolutionary period. In the following study Martin Wåhlberg («L'opéracomique e il dialogo sul potere», 101–118) analyses, through the illustrative examples of La Partie de chasse d'Henri IV (1762) by Charles Collé and Le Roi et le fermier (1762) by Sedaine, the changes that the ópera-comique brought from Italy to France and highlights the abstraction of the figure of the monarch that had worked as a prelude of the radical philosophical criticism against monarchy in the theatrical atmosphere. In the sixth study («Drammaturgie del potere nella tragedia schilleriana. I monologhi politici di Fiesco e Wallenstein», 119–133) Daniele Vecchiato explores the complex political discourse of Friedrich Schiller's work, starting from his play Verschwörung des Fiesco zu Genua (1783) and progressing to his trilogy Wallenstein (1798–99), consisting of one pre- and three post-French Revolution works. Vecchiato emphasizes the evolution from an almost idealized image of monarchy on stage to the use of theatre as a means to reflect the immorality of the State, as well as offer a remedy for its corruption. In the study «L'una e l'altra Clemenza. Le scene dell'impero di Elisabetta Petrovna e Caterina II» (135–152), Tatiana Korneeva compares two Russian rewritings of the metastasian opera La Clemenza di Tito, one written for the...