Abstract
G.F. Busenello's libretto forL'incoronazione di Poppea, first performed in Venice in 1643 to music by Claudio Monteverdi, is based on material from Tacitus and the pseudo-SenecanOctavia. It depicts the defeat of virtue, as embodied in the figures of Seneca and Octavia, by the lust and ambition of Nero and Poppaea Sabina. This analysis examines how the neostoic moralizing of the character Seneca is overcome by the use of an Ovidian sensibility which makes the affair of Nero and Poppaea into a lover's campaign, as described most clearly inAmores 1.9. Monteverdi's music underlines the pattern suggested by Busenello's text, using the distinctive agitated style (stile concitato) developed in his Book VIIIMadrigals of War and Love. This bold Ovidian triumph of vice was sanctioned by its performance during Venetian Carnival, where the immoral was celebrated and abuse of the old moral order was “erotic and life-giving.”
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References
A. Curtis,L'incoronazione di Poppea (London: Novello, 1989), pp. v-ix, and in more detail in “La Poppea Impasticciata or, Who Wrote the Music toL'Incoronazione (1643)?,”Journal of the American Musicological Society 42 (1989), pp. 22–45, identifies the hands of Monteverdi's younger contemporaries, Francesco Sacrati and Benedetto Ferrari. The issue is not settled. See further discussion by E. Chafe,Monteverdi's Tonal Language (New York: Schirmer 1992), Ch. 13. I do not believe that my conclusions are affected if, in an attempt to reconstruct a version of the opera closer to the original performance, one eliminates the theophany and duet, since these are really elaborate workings-out of dramatic conclusions already made in the earlier scenes.
R. Donington,The Rise of Opera (London and Boston: Faber 1981), pp. 233–234. N. Pirrotta, “Monteverdi's Poetic Choices,” in: Id.,Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 316. My attention was drawn to this judgment of the opera by R. Holzer's review of Fenlon and Miller (see n. 3 below) in theCambridge Opera Journal 5 (1993), pp. 79–92.
See, for example, I. Fenlon and P.N. Miller,The Song of the Soul: Understanding ‘Poppea’ (London: Royal Music Association, 1992), who conclude (p. 93), “On the surface the Triumph of Love, [the opera] is in reality a celebration of [neostoic]constantia...” See also the excellent analysis of E. Rosand, “Seneca and the Interpretation ofL'Incoronazione di Poppea,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 38 (1985), pp. 34–71. Rosand establishes the libretto's debt to theOctavia; available to Busenello both in the original Latin and in an Italian translation by Hettore Nini, published in 1622 (Rosand, n. 20). She provides relevant parallels between Nini's translation and Busenello's libretto in her footnotes to pages 42–44, but does not firmly establish which text Busenello was consulting. Rosand believes that a positive view of the character Seneca is a key to the meaning of the opera, and concludes that Monteverdi's music transcends the libretto's cynicism and ambivalence and asserts a “more credulous but nobler vision of human nature.”
The apparent moral reversal has been ascribed to the influence of theAccademia degli Incogniti, an intellectual circle to which Busenello belonged, which prided itself in its scepticism and denial of conventional standards of all sorts. For the Venetian librettists as members ofL'Accademia degli Incogniti, see E. Rosand,Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 37–40. Fenlon and Miller (see previous note) deal in detail withGli Incogniti in Chapter 5, “Neostoicism and the Incogniti.”
Even Pirrotta elsewhere qualifies his certainty of the moral content: “The moral,if there is one, is in Seneca's detachment in contemplating such vain desire and raving...” [emphasis mine] (“Monteverdi and the Problems of Opera,” in: Id.,Music and Culture [n. 2 above],“Monteverdi's Poetic Choices,” in: Id.,Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984, p. 252. Compare also the uneasiness about the Tacitist reading of Fenlon and Miller in the review by M. Ossi,Journal of the American Musicological Society 48 (1995), pp. 506–7. Producers of the piece are also less certain of the moral lesson. Peter Hall, who directed a video-taped production for Glyndebourne (New York: Thorn EMI/HBO, 1984), calls it “a great amoral play,” to be compared in this respect with Marlowe'sTamerlaine the Great. Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's production (1981) takes a thoroughly cynical view of all the major characters, including Seneca. (The effort was condemned by Ellen Rosand as “misbegotten,” in: “Seneca” [n. 3 above], “Seneca and the Interpretation ofL'Incoronazione di Poppea,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 38 (1985), p. 35, n. 1.) Tim Carter, in liner notes for the 1996 recording by John Eliot Gardiner (Archiv) wonders “whether such arguments [explaining the immoral tone] do not run the danger of taking things a mite too seriously, reflecting too Romantic a concept of the morally unimpeachable artist and art work. Perhaps one should accept that the devil after all has the best tunes.” Carter now has elaborated this view in an article titled “RereadingPoppea: Some Thoughts on Music and Meaning in Monteverdi's Last Opera,”Journal of the Royal Musical Association 122, no. 2 (1997), pp. 173–204, where he concludes that “the notion of a musically serious Seneca steeringPoppea on a moral course... is problematic.”
Comic beginnings of a poetic diction for love-as-war are decribed,inter alia, by P. Murgatroyd, “Militia Amoris and the Roman Elegists,”Latomus 34 (1975), pp. 57–79, and E. Fantham,Comparative Studies in Republican Latin Imagery (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 26–33.
See further J.C. McKeown,Ovid: Amores, vol. II (Liverpool: F. Cairns 1987), on poem I.9, especially pp. 257–60 for the development of the idea of love as war.
J.A. Barsby, trans.,Ovid's Amores, Book One (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 106–112.
The definitive study of the form is F.O. Copley,Exclusus Amator: A Study in Latin Love, Poetry, Philological Monographs 17 (Madison, Wisc.: American Philological Association, 1956).
For the text, translation, and score of “Ogni amante è guerrier,” number 6 in the Book VIII collection, see G.F. Malipiero and S. Applebaum,Claudio Monteverdi: Madrigals, Book VIII (New York: Dover 1991), pp. xx-xxii and 99–117. Ottavio Rinuccini (1562–1621), in addition to writing shorter lyrics, was essentially the inventor of the opera libretto, producing the poetic texts for Peri'sDafne (1598) andEuridice (1600), as well as Monteverdi'sArianna (1608). All these libretti show a serious interest in Ovid'sMetamorphoses andHeroides. (See F.W. Sternfeld,The Birth of Opera [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993], especially Chapter 1, “Orpheus, Ovid and Opera.”) The full debt of Rinuccini and the other poets in the Book VIII madrigals to Ovidian elegy has not, as far as I know, yet been fully explored. For some considerations of their Ovidian character, see R. Holzer (below, p. 393, and n. 24). Certainly Ovid'sAmores was being read and used by Italian love poets in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; an elaboration ofAmores I.5, Marino's “Trastulli estivi” (“Summer Pastimes”), was put on the Index of Forbidden Books for its raciness. (G. Tomlinson,Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987], p. 250.)
Monteverdi, “Foreword” to the Book VIII Madrigals, conveniently translated in O. Strunk,Source Readings in Music History: The Baroque Era (New York: Norton, 1965), pp. 53–55; also S. Applebaum and G.F. Malipiero (n. 10 above), G.F. Malipiero and S. Applebaum,Claudio Monteverdi: Madrigals, Book VIII New York: Dover 1991, p. xiv. All examples from “Il Combattimento” are from G.P. Malipiero, ed.,Tutte le Opere di Claudio Monteverdi, vol. 8, part 1 (Vienna: Universal, 1967). For the general question of the adaptation of classical meters to Italian verse in Late Renaissance dramatic music, see C.V. Palisca,Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), chapters 12–14.
C.V. Palisca,Baroque Music, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1991), pp. 132–34; D. Arnold and N. Fortune, eds.,The New Monteverdi Companion (London & Boston: Faber, 1985), pp. 244–45. For more detail on the problems involved, see G. Drebes,” Monteverdis ‘Kontrastprinzip’, die Vorrede zu seinem 8. Madrigalbuch und das ‘Genere concitato,’”Musiktheorie 6 (1991), pp. 29–42, and Chafe,Tonal Language (n. 1 above) (New York: Schirmer 1992), pp. 234–42. Generally the style was more varied and flexible than Monteverdi described in his preface (see n. 11 above), G.F. Malipiero and S. Applebaum,Claudio Monteverdi: Madrigals, Book VIII (New York: Dover 1991), and by the time ofL'incoronazione cculd include a large variety of “warlike” effects, as will be described below. Chafe seems to prefer the termsstile incitato orguerriero.
Torquato Tasso,Opere, vol. 1, ed. E. Mazzali (Napoli: Rossi, 1969), p. 620, n. 21. For an analysis of Tasso's Clorinda in regard to her classical forebears, see M. Migiel, “Clorinda's Fathers,”Stanford Italian Review 10.1 (1991), pp. 93–94, 98–103. Ultimately, of course, the character goes back to Penthesileia, the Amazon loved and killed by Achilles. The story is in various authors including Proclus' summary of theAithiopis; Quintus Smyrnaeus,Posthomerica I; (Pseudo-)Dictys of Crete,Bellum Troianum, IV; and Diodorus Siculus, II.46.5. On the ancient sources and some modern uses see W. Schadewaldt, “Goethes Achilleis,” in: Idem, W. Schadewaldt,Goethestudien. Natur und Altertum (Zürich & Stuttgart: Artemis, 1963), pp. 301–395.
The translations reproduced here of “Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda” are from S. Applebaum and G.F. Malipiero (no. 10 above), pp. xxiii and xxiv.
G. Moses, “Tasso to Monteverdi: Intertextual Poetics” in: G. P. Biasin, et al., eds.,Studies in the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Memory of Arnolfo B. Ferruolo (Naples: Società Editrice Napoletana, 1985), pp. 251–53, notes that already in Tasso's original poem there is direct positioning of the episode in relation to the Ovidian metaphor of love as war inAmores I.9 and II.12, but observes how Tasso “unmetaphors” the topos by presenting the man and woman engaged in a real battle.
Curtis labels this final cadence the “Clorinda cadence,” which was taken up especially by later composers as a mark of special moments (L'incoronazione [n. 1 above], p. vii).
See also G. Moses, “Tasso to Monteverdi” (n. 15 above “, p. 254, on Tasso and the translation of heroic love to love of God. For the general pervasiveness of Renaissance neoplastonism on the musical stage at this period, see Donington,Opera (n. 2 above)The Rise of Opera (London and Bostons: Faber 1981), pp. 233–234, Chapters II, V, etpassim. See also H. Leclerc, “Du Mythe Platonicien aux Fêtes de la Renaissance,”Revue d'Histoire du Théâtre 11.2 (1959), pp. 106–171, for neoplatonism on the late-sixteenth-century stage.
From this point I employ the Italian versions of the characters' names used in the libretto.
The character may derive from Ariosto'sOrlando Furioso rather than from a classical source. Fenlon and Miller,Song (n. 3 above), p. 43. However, Wendy Heller, in an article forthcoming in theJournal of the American Musicological Society, argues she is named after the sister of Agrippina and Caligula.
Nerone's formal rejection of Virtue is signalled by the forced suicide of Seneca in midopera. Ottone and Ottavia themselves supply Nerone with the means of getting rid of them when they conspire to murder Poppea and are caught in the act.
See also Ottone's line in I.11: “Aperte stan le porte/A Neron, ed. Otton fuori è rimaso.” (“The doors stand open for nerone, and Ottone is left outside.”)
All musical examples fromL'incoronazione are taken from Curtis' edition (note 1).
Cf. Rosand,Opera, p. 329–30 and n. 13: “In Poppea's aria ‘Speranza tu mi vai’ (I.5) a vivid trumpet figure is heard several times in association with the refrain ‘Per me guerreggia Amor’ and thus becomes thematic of the aria.” I would add further that it is thematic of the opera. Chafe,Tonal Language (n. 1 above),Monteverdi's Tonal Language (New York: Schirmer 1992), p. 325, points out the tonal similarities of Nerone's passages with those of Poppea in I.4 (“Per me guerreggia Amor”), a linkage which suggests that Nerone'sconcitano passages are also meant to be part of the “campaign of Love” I am describing.
R. Holzer, “‘Ma invan la tento et impossibil parmi,’ or Howguerrieri are Monteverdi'smadrigali guerrieri?” in: F. Guardiani, ed.,The Sense of Marino: Literature, Fine Arts and Music of the Italian Baroque, Literary Criticism Series vol. 5 (New York and Ottawa: Legas, 1994), pp. 429–450.
See Curtis,L'incoronazione (n. 1 above), pp. vii-ix.
Even discounting the final duet “Pur ti miro”: a preceding duet for Poppea and Nerone in III.5 is a triumph of eroticism. “Pur ti miro” merely restates its conclusions.
Muir,Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 177.
Muir, p. 178, quoting Bakhtin'sRabelais and his World, trans. H. Iswolsky, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968), p. 202.
Translation by Paul Shorey,Plato: The Republic, ser. Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1963 [orig. 1930]).
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Ketterer, R.C. Militat omnis amans: Ovidian elegy inL’incoronazione di Poppea . Int class trad 4, 381–395 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02686424
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02686424