Tommaso Traetta and the Fusion of Italian and French Opera in Parma

George W. Loomis

Description

In 1759, the court of the Italian Duchy of Parma adopted the inspiration of cultural creators who recommended a reform of Italian opera along French lines. These writers favored combining Italian-style music with the wider range of musical genres and scenic variety of French opera. As the music critic and commentator George W. Loomis shows in this groundbreaking volume, the young composer Tommaso Traetta was engaged to create new operas responding to these demands.
As Loomis deftly demonstrates, Traetta’s operas were largely oriented toward the formal aria, a byproduct of making Italian music an essential component of this cross-cultural fusion. Nevertheless, they were strikingly innovative in their use of chorus, integrated dance, and accompanied recitative. Structurally, the operas reflect the French distinction between scenes of action and divertissements. After a brief flowering, the project was abandoned, primarily for lack of interest, but Traetta’s Parma operas deserve a previously unrecognized place in the history of Western music for their stimulation of opera seria in Italy and beyond. This included the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose genre-defining Idomeneo (1781) proved a turning point in the development of opera.

Sujets

• Styles
• Genres
• HISTORY
• MUSIC
• Multiple signal classification
• Eighteenth-Century Studies
• General officer
• Italy
• History of Europe
• My Last Duchess
• General
• Parma
• Tommaso Traetta
• Opera
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• France
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Academica Press
• Date de parution: 02 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781680538083
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Tommaso Traetta and the Fusion of Italian and French Opera in Parma
George W. Loomis
Academica Press Washington~London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Loomis, George W. (author)
Title: Tommaso Traetta and the fusion of italian and french opera in parma | George W. Loomis
Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2022. | Includes references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021931247 | ISBN 9781680532227 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781680538083 (e-book)
Copyright 2022 George W. Loomis
To the memory
of
Claude V. Palisca
Contents Preface Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Ippolito ed Aricia Chapter 3 I Tindaridi Chapter 4 Le feste d’Imeneo Chapter 5 Enea e Lavinia Chapter 6 Recitative Chapter 7 Arias Chapter 8 Other Genres Chapter 9 Aspects of Traetta’s Musical Style Chapter 10 Traetta’s Reform Operas After Parma: Sofonisba, Ifigenia in Tauride, Antigona Chapter 11 Epilogue What to Listen to Bibliography Index of Names
Preface
Like others who have studied the four reform operas that Tommaso Traetta wrote for the court of Parma in 1759-1761, I was attracted by their reputation as precursors to the reform efforts by Christoph Willibald Gluck and his librettist Ranieri de’ Calzabigi in Vienna. For better or worse, music historians had lumped the Parma operas together with Gluck’s three Italian reform operas and operas with similar characteristics by Niccolò Jommelli for Stuttgart-Ludwigsburg, and by various composers for Mannheim, and conferred the term “reform” upon them all. It was an article of faith that Gluck’s reform pointed the way to the future. Even now, the current edition of Strunk ’ s Source Readings in Music History , in its introduction to Gluck’s Dedication for Alceste (1769), describes him as “the master who liberated the opera from the conventions of contemporary opera seria and created a new operatic style based on truly dramatic expression.” 1 Accordingly, when one discovered that the Parma operas perpetuated certain “abuses” that Gluck’s reform opposed, such as numerous da capo arias connected by simple recitative, a natural reaction was that Traetta’s was a reform manqué , and many who have written about the Parma operas regarded it as such.
I came to appreciate, however, that the Parma project constituted an equally valid, if less radical reform effort. As will be apparent from the book that follows, the 1750s was a fertile time for writings about opera and not least the respective merits of French and Italian opera. Views were all over the map, but they fueled an appetite for innovation. One strand of thinking favored combining the best elements of French and Italian opera, with the Italian contribution to consist primarily of its music, which was regarded as superior. In this approach pursued in Parma, aria-driven opera seria , as embodied in the drammi per musica of Piero Metastasio, was not thought to be in need of surgery but rather viewed positively as a resource for the Italian contribution. Other components, including choruses, dances tied to the drama, scenic effects, and aspects of the libretto, would come from the French.
French ties were strong in the enlightened Duchy of Parma, and Guillaume Du Tillot, a powerful political figure who ran the theaters and later became prime minister, chose to put the plan into action. Francesco Algarotti’s influential Saggio sopra l ’ opera in musica , rightly regarded as an important guide in shaping the Parma operas, was recognized at the time as advocating that Italian opera be more French-like, but he, too, had complaints about opera seria and was no fan of da capo arias. Algarotti corresponded with Carlo Innocenzo Frugoni, who fashioned librettos from French models for three of the four operas, as the project got underway. One can imagine Du Tillot, Traetta, and Frugoni walking a tightrope in trying to keep Algarotti happy while ignoring some of his criticisms of Italian music for fear of losing popular support. Their strategy proved partially successful, for in a letter to Voltaire, Algarotti proudly pointed to Ippolito ed Aricia (1759), the first of the Parma operas, as proof that his ideas about opera had not fallen on deaf ears; 2 on the other hand, subsequent editions of the Saggio made no reference to the Parma operas or the personalities involved. The operas, heavily promoted and widely heralded, were given in special spring seasons, in which Ippolito ed Aricia was followed by I Tindaridi (1760) and Enea e Lavinia (1761). Le feste d ’ Imeneo was given in September 1760 as the principal musical work of Parma’s celebration of the royal wedding of Isabella of Parma, its Bourbon princess, and the Habsburg Archduke Joseph, the future Emperor Joseph II (r. 1780-1790), an event of major diplomatic significance.
When my study of the Parma operas initially appeared in dissertation form in 1999, it broke with earlier studies by not faulting the operas for taking a tepid approach to reform, and by not regarding them simply as an intermediate stage on the way to the more confrontational and thorough-going reform advanced by Gluck and Calzabigi. Rather, it recognized that preserving the essence of opera seria and introducing new elements was also a valid approach to change. And it marshalled an appreciable amount of contemporaneous critical opinion in support of that approach. In the years since, I have realized that, if anything, I could have argued more strongly on its behalf. The old bias against opera seria has continued to wane, both with the public and in academia, while concurrently the favored status historians accorded the Gluck-Calzabigi reform has also receded. 3 At a time when several of Handel’s operas are now firmly entrenched in the repertoire, it seems pointless to go on disparaging the “rigid” alternation between simple recitative and aria. Over time, I have come to appreciate the ability of opera seria to foster music of quality and variety, to facilitate artistic singing though the mellifluousness of its poetry, and even to generate involving drama. As a music critic, I have witnessed performances of drammi per musica by Vinci, Vivaldi, Pergolesi, Hasse, Graun, Jommelli, (non-reform) Gluck, and others that have excited modern audiences—Traetta too, counting Ippolito ed Aricia (a tragedia ) and Antigona (a tragedia per musica ).
Opera seria was a vital force in the late 1750s, yet the Parma project was founded on the premise that there was room for improvement. Musical styles had changed considerably in the thirty years since the initial settings of Metastasio’s librettos signaled his emerging hegemony, yet the dramaturgy of opera seria remained essentially the same. Among other problems, Algarotti criticized the exalted position held by star singers, but his complaint went beyond their excessive displays of vocal prowess to their high fees, which skewed the economics of producing opera, making it difficult for productions to achieve scenic splendor or theaters to maintain choruses. One modern scholar aptly characterized the Parma operas as a response to “the inertia of custom and the stagnation of taste.” 4 Frugoni, in his preface to the printed libretto of Ippolito ed Aricia , described Parma’s response as an “innovation.” 5 While respecting “the style and the laws of a predominant type of music that delights Italy and Europe,” Ippolito ed Aricia , he continued, sought to add to its “pleasures … without taking away anything that has long been part of their composition.” He mentioned three such additions: choruses, (which, he pointed out, had been employed by Italian theaters “in other, happy times”), dances suitably tied to myth, and myth itself, the latter “as fertile a field for the lyric theater as history,” then more prevalent than myth in opera seria . Curiously, Frugoni did not mention visual splendor, a French element also present in the Parma operas.
The “fusion” of the book’s title refers to the initial stage of the process of assimilation by which French elements to varying degrees became part of the vocabulary of Italian opera; other words, such as “synthesis,” “union,” or “amalgamation,” would fit as well. Traetta’s Parma operas, and his other reform operas, also exhibit traits, sometimes in response to recommendations by Algarotti for improving opera seria , such as increasing the amount of accompanied recitative, that have the effect of moving stylistically toward French practice. Others include a more flexible approach to scene structure that allows action to unfold in scene complexes over longer spans and a greater variety of musical forms. Opera seria thrived by accommodating these elements. Traetta’s reform operas, with their measured approach to change, were harbingers of the future. Marita McClymonds has cited over 70 productions in Italy of reform or reform-inspired operas during the years between 1761 (the date of Enea e Lavinia ) and 1780. 6 As Reinhard Strohm put it, in words that give a twist to the term “reform,” “it seems that the dramma per musica reached the nineteenth century alive because it was always a reform genre striving for an ever-increasing identification of music and drama.” 7
One of the best reasons for studying the Parma operas is Traetta’s music. His place in history has been so bound up with the idea reform, with its connotation of virtue and striving for a cause, that it can be refreshing to look at his work from other perspectives. When Du Tillot engaged Traetta for his operatic project, he chose a young composer of the Neapolitan school with a notable record of accomplishment that included comic operas and, most recently, several operas with Metastasio librettos conceived for Northern Italian cities. Traetta’s experience with reform was nil—it could hardly have been otherwise—but he quickly grasped what was required and went on to enjoy an international career set in motion by his work in Parma. Details of his life are sketchy, and we know virtually nothing ab