Eighteenth Century Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The fulfilment of the operatic reform, managed by Christoph Willibald Gluck and his librettist Ranieri Calzabigi in 1760s’ Vienna, is a well-known topic. This event, whose seeds date back to the 1740s, has been examined according to theatrical and literary experiences in France and Italy. However, the question of acting influence on opera can be reconsidered at the light of the latest discovery of symbols collected and labelled as drammatica – metodo italiano. Engraved in some writings, this set of signs is often connected to music and offers the matter for a new critical survey about the discourse on music declamation before and after Calzabigi.
From the 1830s onwards the theory of acting in Italy was supported by handbooks which gathered symbols of pronounce, expression, gesture and, most important, tone of voice. Apart from the effort to establish a supranational graphic system in Italy and abroad, another common trait, which could be recognized in the treatises, concerns the deemed rules useful not only for actors, but also for orators and opera singers. In relationship to the aforementioned reform of Gluck and Calzabigi, running from 1762 to 1784 via Vienna, Paris and Naples, it is interesting to focus on Calzabigi’s theory, who claimed his primacy for the creation of the so-called music of declamation (musique de déclamation). In 1784, the Italian poet reasserted his experience in “trying” the symbols of acting for his Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) and five years later for his Alceste (1767). Aiming to outline the slides and the nuances of the voice, Calzabigi interspersed between the lines of his librettos a lot of symbols, and then he “invented” other signs to give evidence to the melody of verses on which the composer could write the score. Where could Calzabigi find that semiography? Probably in the unique source of his time, i.e. the performing practices of actors, unfortunately not yet recorded by 18th- century Italian treatises, even though the symbols are retraceable in the contemporary theatrical and rhetorical tradition of Great Britain.
The article deals with the various meeting points between acting tragedies and singing operas, as testified by playwrights and musicographers, at the time when the Italian “dramma per musica” was conceived as an unlikelihood mixture of arias and recitatives sung by virtuoso-singers, who usually disregarded the narrative. To point out the reaction to this unacceptable trend there are some books of Benedetto Marcello (Il teatro alla moda, 1720), Luigi Riccoboni (Dell’arte rappresentativa, 1728), Gianvito Manfredi (L’Attore in scena, 1734), Gianrinaldo Carli (L’indole del teatro tragico, 1746 and Osservazioni sulla musica antica e moderna, 1744-1786), Giuseppe Tartini (Trattato di musica secondo la vera scienza dell’armonia, 1754), Francesco Algarotti (Saggio sopra l’opera in musica, 1755), who claimed the dramatic superiority of recitativo secco or obbligato, and the beauty of the aria parlante. Owing to its particular speaking tone linked to declamation, the aria parlante was the preferred dramatic tool by a group of theorists like Algarotti, Milizia and Planelli. At the same extent it is described in detail by John Brown in his own Letters upon the Poetry and Music of the Italian Opera (1789). The book of the Scottish painter and music amateur is the unique source that explains the features of the aria parlante as follows: “Aria parlante,—speaking Air, is that which, from the nature of its subject, admits neither of long notes in the composition, nor of many ornaments in the execution. The rapidity of the motion of this Air is proportioned to the violence of the passion which is expressed by it. This species of Air goes sometimes by the name of aria di nota e parola and likewise of aria agitata”.
At the end of the century this kind of aria represented an ideal conjunction between the emotional unmeasured intonation of the words and the regular beats of the song. To clarify this difficult compromise there are some articles written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Dictionnare de musique, 1768). Nevertheless his Italianized taste, the philosopher refused the Italian recitative preferring that of the domestic tragédie lyrique. The reason of Rousseau’s choice is recognizable in the articles Accent and Acteur. The verses, as Rousseau affirms, contain three kinds of accent: the grammatical one is the result of the alternation of low and high sounds depending on the rhythm of short and long syllables, the logique one is related to the sequence of the words, and finally the pathétique one which takes its shape from the dynamic quality of declamation. Denis Diderot, in the third Entretien of his Le fils naturel (1757), affirms that the composer can help the actor if only he is able to imagine the nature of declamation. In his famous dialogue Le neveu de Rameau (1765) he defines melody as a line flowing over declamation, so the composer is obliged to grasp the sound of words and transform it into music.
During his stay in Naples Calzabigi pursued his project of music declamation. In 1784 he wrote the libretto of Ipermestra in collaboration with the composer and castrato Giuseppe Millico, a follower of Gluck. Alike in Vienna at the time of Orfeo, once again he joined to the libretto the symbols of declamation in connection to verses and acted them for the composer. Further, in 1792 he addressed to count Alessandro Pepoli a letter in form of pamphlet for his opera Elfrida (music of Paisiello). In this essay he clarifies that the authentic melody is embodied in the verses, and the task of the composer is to discover the true music of the poem. In view of this paradox, what remains unexplained is the reason why the Italian thinkers, at the end of the century, were not able to develop a debate like that of the colleagues in Great Britain: among them the actor Joshua Steele, author of the meaningful Essays Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech to be Expressed and Perpetuated by Peculiar Symbols (1775), and the theorist John Walker who edited in 1787 the book Melody of Speaking Delineated, or Elocution Taught like Music by Visible Signs.