Famous for its periodic banishments of opera, Rome c1700 was a hothouse for vocal genres outside of the theatre – oratorios, serenatas and cantatas. In her new book Stefanie Tcharos argues that opera retained a formative influence among Rome's composers of vocal music in all genres. She measures contrasting works against operatic procedures, and against ‘ideal’ compositional methods endorsed by critics linked to the Arcadian Academy. Tcharos's readings are original, her contextualization is deep and her command of sources is formidable. But her readings of evidence are often wilful, and appear to be led not by the data but by the theories she wants to impose. Words are used imprecisely and sometimes incorrectly, clouding her intended meaning. This extends even to the book's title: while the subtitle speaks of opera's pull, the main title suggests that opera orbited around something. The centre of gravity in Tcharos's historical account remains elusive.
Tcharos opens the book, as she did her PhD dissertation, by explaining her methodology. Influenced above all by Mikhail Bakhtin's theories on genre, Tcharos, in her words, uses ‘layers of analytical reciprocity between . . . selected [historical] domains’ to show how interactions between these domains ‘affected the simultaneous maintenance and resetting of genre boundaries, with opera often at the centre of this network of cultural brokerage’ (12–13). Her choice of words obscures her scholarly practice. Many questions are begged here: for instance, how can reciprocity be analytical? What is a ‘network of cultural brokerage’ and who might be the agents within it? Gradually, however, her project becomes clear: to illuminate the many relations and tensions between genres by recontextualizing works, primarily in terms of Arcadian-led debate.
Within the fog of words lurk penetrating insights. Tcharos shows, shrewdly and originally, not just that vocal genres interacted, but that tension between ‘opposing binaries’ – rather than shared practices and characteristics – actually defined genres. Arcadian-led commentary on music, drama and literature was indeed crucial to generating and articulating opposites; this debate in turn was interspersed throughout Rome's peculiar social and political life. In Tcharos's analysis, binary opposites which might appear self-evident – sacred/secular for oratorio; public/private for serenata; past/present for cantatas – stand revealed as symptoms of complicated anxieties. She delicately probes these anxieties to interpret the works she has unearthed and to re-read compositions studied by other modern scholars. Her dissection of Arcadian debate provocatively links musical material to critics' dismay over the twilight of the ancien régime, which they mitigated with an ideal of reform.
As Tcharos emphasizes in her first chapter, conflicting policies on opera between popes reigning from 1690 to 1720 persistently challenged and rechannelled the production of vocal music in Rome. While the Barbarini dynasty had made opera the premiere representative form, the seventeenth-century infiltration of Venetian ‘public’ opera via the impresario-run Teatro Tardinona sparked contention. The fortunes of this theatre – opened in 1671, closed in 1676, reopened in 1690 and razed in 1697 – speak volumes about the opposing forces that tugged at Rome's vocal genres generally: between sacred and secular music, between court and impresarial entertainment and between composers, singers and poets whose constitutive function critics contested. Contrasting with the flux of Roman ‘public’ opera was the steady investment by patrons, churches, colleges and confraternities in staged vocal music, both sacred and secular. Opera, serenata and cantata production at ambassadorial and papal residences was aesthetically confluent, yet varied in order to fulfil diverse functions. In seeking to mediate Rome's cultural life, church officials had persistently to negotiate, and absorb, the innovations of secular repertories containing works designed typically to aggrandize their patrons. Arcadian discourse provided intellectual cover for this work of amalgamation: at Arcadian gatherings nobles, church officials and artists could together forge new ‘universal’ aesthetic paths, in part by appearing to transcend more partisan representations. In surveying Rome's vocal music landscape, Tcharos deftly pinpoints characteristics and tensions endemic to its productions.
She also, however, shifts awkwardly and unaccountably between vantage points. We move from the carnival season of 1690 (20), to the history of Roman staged music drama, 1660–1720 (21–23), to snapshots of Rome's music-producing institutions, 1690–1710 (24–26), to a history of the Arcadians, 1674–1692 (29–31), to a penetrating critique of Arcadian pastoralism as escapism (32–45). Because she does not join up her topics, no clear picture of Rome emerges, making comprehension of her subject difficult, particularly for the uninitiated reader.
In her second chapter Tcharos analyses turn-of-the-century oratorios, which she reads through the lens of Arcangelo Spagno's celebrated Discorso intorno a gl'oratorii (1706). Although not an Arcadian, Spagno – Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni's maestro di casa – shared Arcadian ‘strategies of retrieval’ (of an idealized past) and ‘maintenance’ (of a genre). For Tcharos, Spagna's advice to writers revolved around twinned wishes, to revisit Roman oratorio tradition and to erase distinctions between oratorio and opera. This contradiction, she argues, prompted Spagno to demand that oratorio librettos contain complex rhymes, that composers eschew da capo arias, and that music serve the meanings of words. She maintains that this tension between remembrance and erasure also underpinned the productions staged by Cardinal Ottoboni, who seemingly used oratorio to bundle representations of his piety with those of his power. She calls attention, as others have, to how temporary stages, academy-style sermons, additional seating and paintings placed behind singers turned nominally devotional music into theatrical or academy events. With its scene changes and dances, Tcharos notes, the Ottoboni-sponsored Sant'Eustachio was generically a sacred drama, yet called in print an ‘oratorio’ (64). Whereas Spagno wanted oratorio to recall its Roman legacy, Ottoboni opened it to spectacle to promote himself, in rivalry with the Colonna family's opera.
The credibility of Tcharos's argument breaks down, however, in her analysis of Scarlatti's two settings of the story of Judith (La Giuditta, 1694 and 1697). She makes untrue assertions, for instance that stage tragedy and oratorio were both characterized by ‘the absence of the visual’ (80) – ignoring the highly visual presence of the performer, whose body and gestures mediated the action for audiences. Sometimes her points are self-disproving, such as the assertion that the ‘musical voice’ – a sonic, non-corporeal presence – gives ‘body to the unseen’ (81). She also solders modern reaction onto an imagined history: ‘tension [in La Giuditta, 1694] builds not only in the moment of murder but in anticipation of violence’ (81). She disguises tautology as argument: ‘Judith overcomes her enemy … through song’, as if there were an alternative means a character in an oratorio might use (81).
Most egregiously, Tcharos assumes that the lullaby as a genre would have been recognizable to the audiences of La Giuditta. But the ‘lullaby’ first coalesced as a genre in art music genre during the nineteenth century, as a völkisch composition. In early eighteenth-century Rome, as Norbert Dubowy explains in an article challenged by Tcharos (‘Le Due “Giuditte” di Alessandro Scarlatti: due diverse concezioni dell'oratorio’, in L'oratorio musicale italiano e i suoi contesti (secc. XVII–XVIII), ed. Paola Besutti (Florence: Olschki, 2002), 259–288), the ‘ninnananna’ was a topos (not a genre) signalled musically by high-style practices such as obbligato line, woodwind scoring and ostinato bass. If Roman audiences recognized any genre in Scarlatti's two ‘ninnananna’ treatments, it would likely have been that of a Lullian sommeil. In such scenes, the protagonist is lulled to sleep before a transformation. A celebrated sommeil is found in Armide (Act 2 Scene 4), an opera which, as Tcharos mentions, stirred up debate after a 1690 production in Rome. In Armide, the action of the sommeil parallels that found in La Giuditta: the male sleeps as the female draws her dagger. Strangely, Tcharos omits the sommeil in her discussion of the ‘slumber scenes’ in both of Scarlatti's Judith oratorios.
Drawing on her earlier publications, Tcharos argues more convincingly for the multiple functions and layered meanings of the serenata in chapter 3. Designed for festivals, yet composed as cantatas, large-scale serenatas were carefully choreographed to encompass processions, carriages, liveried musicians and the display of noble invitees. Tcharos focuses on Pietro Paolo Bencini's Le gare festive, occasioned by the birth of Louis XIV's grandson, and designed to broadcast Bourbon aspirations even as France's power waned. Besides vividly reimagining the event, Tcharos probes its contradictions: how allegory merged with ritual; how spectatorship, music and poetry were designed to distinguish power brokers from occasional spectators; how massed forces, by making audible and visible a putative Bourbon supremacy, nudged the serenata generically away from the cantata and toward the renaissance festa. Above all, Tcharos shows how Le gare festive fulfilled the Arcadian remit to serve the meaning of the words, while its instrumental sections stood for a musical autonomy of the future.
Yet despite its strengths, the chapter on the serenata highlights two of the book's persistent problems. First is the ubiquity and vagueness with which Tcharos uses the term ‘ritual’. As Martha Feldman, evidently an influence on Tcharos, has shown, the anthropological concept of ritual extends far beyond the mere repetition of formulae; the crux of ritual is a liminal moment during which participants perceive themselves as transformed (see Feldman's ‘Magic Mirrors and the Seria Stage: Thoughts toward a Ritual View’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 48/3 (1995), 423–484, especially pages 434–437). Tcharos does not show how the serenata, or any other genre, engages with liminality. By making practically every musical event she discusses ‘ritual’ – private or public performances, academy gatherings, street processions, church services – she renders the word meaningless. Second, Tcharos elides evidence with conjecture to make music analyses fit her argument.
Be assured, her readings can be powerful: she elucidates clearly how the trumpet obbligato instantiates Bourbon power in Bencini's aria ‘Ad onta dell'oblio’ (Le gare festive), sung by Fame, who swoops down in a macchina del fuoco (137). But she relies purely on the libretto to posit that the instrumental music of another serenata, La notte festiva (1694) – from which only two arias survive – might have challenged the work's (Arcadian-influenced) stated aim to ‘persuade by noble verse’ (123). The solemn ‘sinfonia’ indicated in the libretto means, according to Tcharos, that the instruments ‘express a specific tone’ (119), but she provides no hard evidence for this reading. Tcharos believes it ‘likely’ that sinfonias bracketed one aria to heighten Apollo's entrance. Here, as elsewhere, Tcharos slips from informed reinvention to tendentious hypothesizing.
Revisiting scholarship on Arcadians, Tcharos in her final chapter shows how debate about cantatas, and cantata practices, teetered between the drives for exclusion and inclusion. As she explains, the Arcadian cantata glorified connoisseurship partly by emphasizing its courtly provenance. For Arcadians, the pastoral's simplicity redressed the extravagances of Marinist poetry. Yet pastoral stories also redeemed and counterbalanced the complexity of the music itself, allowing da capo arias sometimes to overpower poetry with musical excess. Sophistication of composition, epitomized by Scarlatti's cantatas, thereby expressed the social prerogatives of Arcadians, who were wistful for top-down, courtly control of cultural production. In historic and modern debate over Arcadian-endorsed aesthetic goals, writers have posited Giuseppe Bononcini as Scarlatti's antipode, misguidedly counterbalancing – as Tcharos points out – Scarlatti's ingenuity with Bononcini's lyric simplicity.
Whether cerebral, as with Scarlatti, or graceful, as with Bononcini, cantatas contained aesthetic solutions to the ‘problem’ that opera was held to pose: how to clothe words in music to optimal effect. As genres, opera and cantatas were related, not opposed; they were produced in dialogue with one another, and amidst shared concerns about social privilege. Tcharos concludes with Crescimbeni's famous account of an Arcadian gathering of literati at which Giambattista Felice Zappi competed with Scarlatti to extemporize in verse and music. She points out how Crescimbeni sought to mythologize, rather than ‘report’, in order to join up Arcadian practices with those of the ancient world. Her conclusion is compelling: Crescimbeni, like other Arcadians, reached back to glories past to try to expunge a troubling present (204).
My review cannot do justice to the richness of texture, complexity of argument and depth of research in Tcharos's book. I am grateful for her boldly synoptic view – historical and theoretical – of Roman vocal music c1700. Her insistence on the artifice of genre, and her challenge to scholars who fail to interrogate boundaries set by others, casts new light on the music and contexts she carefully dissects. Yet I baulk at her premise, borrowed from formalism, that discourses are primary agents (‘opera was as much about its discourses as it was about its practices’, 197). I find misleading her disembodiment of music-writing and music-making: why should not Scarlatti claim responsibility for his own inventiveness? Although extensive, Tcharos's research does not account for two highly relevant publications, by Edward Olszewski (The Inventory of Paintings of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni (1667–1740) (New York: Peter Lang, 2004)) and Reinhard Strohm (‘Les Sauvages, Music in Utopia, and the Decline of the Courtly Pastoral’, Il Saggiatore musicale 11/1 (2004), 21–50). Above all, I object to her use of terms apparently to impress, rather than to clarify. This book is both a great achievement and an object lesson of the dangers of being caught in theory's orbit.
