The late and much missed actor-writer Dario Fo perfected the art of grammelot: an actor's rendering of character through the physicalized embodiment of sound and gesture. Fo brilliantly realized French, German, English, Lombard, Venetian, and Bergamask figures in the heightened and exaggerated—but also compellingly mimetic—delivery of sonic pitch, volume, and tempo, creating character sense out of his genial fecundity of onomatopoetic “nonsense.” For Fo, a skilled actor's carefully modulated and performed sound itself could generate dramatic action and create a world of real people.
Emily Wilbourne's fine book, Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell'Arte, delivers a scholarly analogue to Fo's lifelong grammelot project, addressing a form of theatre much beloved by Fo but approaching it from a later, baroque stage than the “archaic” commedia dell'arte (tilting back to the medieval giullare, or jester) admired by the Nobel Prize winner. Wilbourne persuasively argues that the rich sonic landscape of the commedia dell'arte in its formative years (1570–1630) was always already musical, even—and perhaps especially—when not explicitly so, and that it prepared audiences for the sounds of the emerging genre of opera. The book begins with an illuminating 1581 quote by a certain Vincenzo Galilei, who argues that musicians can learn much from commedia dell'arte actors about pitch, volume, accents, tempo, and, generally, how sound creates character. Sound, for Wilbourne (following Galilei and confirming Fo), is identity.
The relationship of the commedia dell'arte to both music generally and opera specifically has been discussed many times, but almost always through external connections (e.g., an Arte actress performing an operatic role) or obvious musical inclusions in Arte scripts or scenarios. Wilbourne is the first to tackle the subject by analyzing sonic phenomena in Arte scripts or scenarios that are not explicitly designated as “musical.” But in order to see such dramatic musicality, argues Wilbourne, one must expand the generic palette of Arte performance beyond the expected comic scenarios to include the tragedies, tragicomedies, pastorals, and heroic plays frequently performed by the great Arte companies. By expanding the formal range, Wilbourne can show that central protagonists of Monteverdi's operas might be included within the pantheon of commedia dell'arte characters (Chapter 4).
External connections are still pursued, but usually in the service of illuminating the sonic texture of “regular” Arte speeches. For example, in Chapter 2 Wilbourne nicely juxtaposes text that Virginia Ramponi would have performed in the innamorata role in her husband Giovanni Battista Andreini's 1604 tragedy Florinda with libretto snatches of an operatic role that she, as a last-minute replacement, performed in Monteverdi's 1608 Arianna. Placed athwart the operatic text, the complex and nuanced musicality of the strictly dramatic text, deftly analyzed by Wilbourne, commands attention. In the same chapter, Wilbourne adroitly scrutinizes a manuscript edition of the dramatic text “La paccia d'Arianna,” performed by the actress Marina Dorotea Antonazzoni and clearly indebted to the earlier opera libretto used for Monteverdi's Arianna. This is one of the most compelling moments of the book, one in which she follows her initial contract with the reader to the letter: the musical analysis of a dramatic text.
That much of the book explores instances of overt musicality in commedia dell'arte scripts (as in a fine analysis of vocal and instrumental music from a scene of Giovanni Battista Andreini's La Sultana in Chapter 1) and examines examples of the dramatic nature of early operatic texts (Chapter 3) probably makes it a stronger and more useful book than it would have been if Wilbourne had restricted herself exclusively to the program suggested by the initial Galilei quote—one that she seems, at the beginning, to endorse as the book's project (analysis of dramatic texts for their musicality). One could well argue that the musicality of ordinary dramatic Arte speech can be revealed most clearly by working backward, thus justifying the extended analysis in the book of opera per se. Still, one might have wished for a few more properly dramatic speeches, particularly from that character whose intoxication with sound often gets the better of his sense: the Dottore. Future research by Wilbourne or others could generally fan out beyond her trenchant analysis of musicality in innamorata speeches. Some foray into the large body of cheap print texts, many of which dramatize Arte characters singing in dialect, might also have been useful.
As it is, however, the book performs two important tasks: it proposes and tests the thesis of inherent musicality in properly dramatic Arte texts, which certainly should inspire other scholars to continue in this vein, and it provides new and interesting analyses of external connections between the Arte and music/opera. One becomes convinced by the end of the book that the same audiences were going to Arte plays and early operas, and that new ways of hearing were sparking between the two performance experiences. If the commedia dell'arte and opera constitute what are probably the two most distinctive generic inventions of early modern Italian culture, Wilbourne shows that they were structurally connected via the production and auditory experience of sound.
