L’Incoronazione di Statira
Back to Busenello! One of Venice’s first public librettist, the man behind the first Cavalli opera (in the Project) and Monteverdi’s swan song comes back for one last spin with Cavalli’s Statira: Principessa di Persia. And in doing so, he kind of takes us back. The prologo takes a bit away from my idea of the “typical” Cavalli prologo/sinfonia, reflective more of Monteverdi’s Ritorno d’Ulisse than a true Cavalli. If it’s Cavalli, it’s Cavalli circa 1640–and what a difference 15 years makes. That isn’t to say that there’s a lack of vocal fireworks with opportunities for singers to show off in a mini-da capo sort of way.
Da capo isn’t for this opera; Busenello heavily relies on recits (indeed, at one point we get eight in a row) in a pattern that breaks the rules of a mid/late baroque opera. Even many of the arias–such as the first one, “Notte ascondi i tesori”–sound more recit like. This leads to a retro (as retro as you can get in 17th Century opera) ambiguity of cadence. Ambiguity, in fact, abounds in this piece. Rosand writes in Opera in 17th Century Venice that the “dramma per musica” (the preferred title for Statira) meant a somewhat imperfect marriage of words and music, and the favor was not on the side of the libretto: “Alone, these little books were but shadows, texts needing music (and staging) to endow them with life. Never intended to stand on their own, they were admittedly, glaringly, and self-consciously incomplete.”
And yet, here’s the interesting thing about opera…
It was kind of a mistake.
In Man and His Music, Alec Harman and Anthony Milner write of opera’s beginnings:
“This ‘new music,’ as Giliu Caccini, one of its creators, called it, is a rare instance in the history of any art of theory preceding practice, for it was deliberately modelled on ancient Greek tragedy, which, so Caccini and the group to which he belonged thought, was sung in its entirety. They were wrong in this, as only the choruses were actually sung, but they were right in that Greek tragedy is essentially a lyrical art which, at moments of great emotional stress, cries out for and almost completely received some kind of instrumental accompaniment.”
Can you imagine if the Camerata had gotten it right? We’d have jumped straight into singpsiel. Or operetta. Or Rock of Ages.
When Statira (whose plot is like a mix between Xerse and Poppea, complete with cross-dressing countertenors, a loosely [and that's being generous] root in history, and a jilted lover) first opened, Busenello was still on about the proper performance practice of Greek tragedy (ironically, in 2009, many are debating the proper perfomance practice of 17th Century Opera). What it boiled down to for Busenello was an excuse to not write florid, poetic libretti similar to those of his contemporaries. Randall explains this with a theory (at least on Bus-Nelly’s part) that since his poetry was to be sung, poetic models need not apply, especially since–if the Greeks DID sing their poetry–their music would be worlds away from what they were hearing in Venice over a millenium later.
Well, duh.
The alyrical aspect of Busenello’s lyricism may also stem from a caveat that apparenty existed since opera’s nascence: the audience could see through the illusion that singing was not speaking (yes, another duh). Randall writes: “What sparked all of these librettists’ preoccupation with the genre, their attempts to justify the combination of music and drama, either through classical precedent or modern taste, was their discomfort with the question of verisimilitude.” What Busenello may have done was try to approximate–to the best of his ability–dialogue within the confines of musicality. Seeing that written out seems harsh; especially for a guy who was responsible, in part, for “Per Te Miro,” but it could be a plausible artistic theory. We see it now in modern opera and it comes and goes in cycles. Apparently the cycle started in Statira. Yet in opera, there has to be a suspension of disbelief, a coat-check for verisimilitude. There’s only so much you can get from the theory of it–that of a sung story. But the music adds another layer of emotion we would not necessarily get from mere spoken dialogue. The music conveys the unspeakable. It shadows, it sets us on edge, it reassures us, it sets a character’s fate, it puts the plot in motion or brings it to a crashing halt. We only have so much time with these characters and we need to know all that we can.
And some things are just better left unsaid.
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Tags: venice, il ritorno d'ulisse in patria, cavalli, busenello, l'incoronazione di poppea, xerse, per te miro, statira, recitative, greek tragedy, greek travesty, rock of ages, alec harman, anthony milner, man and his music
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