This is another Artemisia which has nothing to do with the opera at hand.
I do not like Roberto Cavalli’s Artemisia. I do, however, like Francesco Cavalli’s Artemisia (1657). And—if you’ll pardon the egregious pun—it all comes down to…framework!
Okay, actually, what it came down to was once again the recording. Claudio Cavina and the ensemble La Venexiana do for this Cavalli problem child what Alden did for Così this last weekend at New York City Opera. And, like Così, there are a lot of mental components to the plot (Artemisia is in love with a commoner who may or may not have killed her husband and therefore NO ONE IN HER COURT CAN GET LAID… oh, and did I mention that she drinks the ashes of her dead husband? Is that like an ancient version of the Cinnamon Challenge?) that can be easily glossed over. Not so in Cavina’s musical world, in which there is a great deal of autumnal gloom depicted in Cavalli’s score.
To be fair, I’m not sure how entirely germane this is to the composer’s intentions. In a sense, you get with Mozart and Da Ponte that they are trying to—in the libretto and score—comment on the misogyny of the Enlightenment era. It’s coded in words and notes. But what Cavalli was playing to were Venetian audiences who went for the comedic portions of all these couples trying to bump uglies despite some ash-swilling hot lips’s royal decree. Not seeing the work live, it’s hard to tell with the components at hand. But I actually really like this juxtaposition, in the same way that I like the ironic offsets of Mozart’s music when it comes to making all of his characters totally miserable.
Cavalli makes great and frequent use of laments with his characters, so you hear that played up really poignantly, but here there’s a bigger focus on recitative and dialogue that captures the flurry of couples running on and offstage. And, in the words of the opera’s librettist, Nicolò Minato, they “do nothing other than to present to [the audience] the characteristics of the human passions in a natural way.” Sure, passions often (onstage and off) escalate, often to the point where the only means of expressing them in song (okay, that’s generally reserved to happening onstage). But for the most part, these are circumstances that mitigate passion. Minato was apparently also a lawyer so motivations abound here and that may explain a bit of the economy of text. This is, in effect, an opera that is an early prototype of later character studies, that goes past assuming audience knowledge of Ovidian myths and the like and really exploring what makes characters who they are.
What I’ve loved about going back and knocking a few more Cavallis out of the park is, in particular, their tone-setting prologues. Rosinda’s stopped me cold with its pleasant enough trotting along overture that then morephs into a haunting chorus underscored by sustained strings to create a gauzy, otherworldly effect. It sets an eerie tone, mistily atmospheric. Likewise, Artemisia’s prelude crackles with urgency and frenzy, sexual frustration and moral dilemmas. Tragedy has been inherent to opera since its inception, but there’s something really deep to Cavalli’s catharsis. His tragedies don’t jump off cliffs or writhe on the floor in melodramatic convulsions, rather they sit and stare at a wall for hours on end, vacant and melancholy. And there’s something more mesmerizing about that.
