Essay

Chapter THREE The Librettists “POPPEA IN THE. OPERA BOX” by Edward Muir. Excerpted from The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance : Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera1

While Ferrante Pallavicino languished in the pope’s prison, thus missing the 1642–43 Venetian opera season, Giovanni Grimani’s theater at San Giovanni e Paolo presented what has become perhaps the most notorious and certainly the most lasting work among early operas. With a libretto by that renowned member of the Accademia degli Incogniti Giovanni Francesco Busenello, and music (or at least most of it) by the venerable Claudio Monteverdi, L’Incoronazione di Poppea was the first opera based on historical events, in this case a story drawn from Cornelius Tacitus’s Annals of the emperor Nero. Busenello’s plot altered a story well known to at least some of the audience. The librettist’s argomento lays out the plot, which is an inversion of the courtly love ethic:

Nero, in love with Poppaea, wife of Otho, as a pretext sent Otho as ambassador to Lusitania so that he could take his pleasure with her—this according to Cornelius Tacitus. But here facts are represented differently. Otho, deprived of Poppaea, gives himself over to delirium and exclamations. Octavia, wife of Nero, orders Otho to kill Poppaea. Otho promises to do it; but lacking the spirit to deprive his adored Poppaea of life, he dresses in the clothes of Drusilla, who was in love with him. Thus disguised, he enters the garden of Poppaea. Cupid awakens her, and prevents her death. Nero repudiates Octavia, in spite of the counsel of Seneca, and takes Poppaea to wife. Seneca dies and Octavia is banished from Rome.1

This constricted plot outline, the sort of thing one still reads in programs passed out in opera houses, hardly captures the allure and shock of the actual opera, especially as it came to be performed in a revised version after that first season. An exquisite final scene was added, by a composer whose identity is still debated among musicologists.

Harvard University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/1 lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=3300387.Created from bmcc on 2021-02-02 08:49:59. Copyright © 2007. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Muir, Edward. The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance : Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera, Harvard University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=3300387. Created from bmcc on 2021-02-02 08:49:59. Copyright © 2007. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.

After Nero has forced Seneca to commit suicide and banished his frigid and infertile (“infrigidita ed infecunda”) wife Ottavia from Rome, Nero marries the degraded Poppea and has her crowned empress.

The opera ends with the best-known music in the opera, the love duet between Nero and Poppea,

Pur ti miro, pur ti godo, Pur ti stringo, pur t’annodo

Più non peno, più non moro, O mia vita, o mio tesoro.

Oh, I desire you. Oh, I love you. I embrace you, so I may keep you. No more suffering, no more pain,

O my life, oh, my treasure.

Even by twenty-first-century standards, the immorality of the ending is shocking. A murderous emperor and scheming adulterous woman—a whore, in Venetian parlance— bring down the curtain with a lyrical celebration of the power of love. Is this the triumph of love or lust? Does the opera admit to the possibility of a difference between them? Are the success of Poppea’s intrigues and the futility of Seneca’s reason to be taken at face value or as a warning about the dangers of sensual indulgence?

The immorality of Poppea has created problems having to do with its interpretation and especially an assessment of how seventeenth-century Venetian audiences might have understood it. One solution is to postulate that the story is not what it appears to be. Iain Fenlon and Peter Miller have argued that the opera is marked by irony: “Indeed, a common device in the opera is that meaning is the opposite of what the music at first appears to be saying.”

It may be a curious interpretive move to assert that things are the opposite of what they appear to be, but the reading is not entirely out of keeping with the taste for paradox and the distrust characteristic of the members of the Incogniti, such as Busenello, of the potential of language to convey precise meaning. By understanding the libretto in the light of contemporary Venetian concepts of history, which owed much to Tacitus and his view that the appearances surrounding events had to be penetrated in order for the

deeper meaning to emerge, Fenlon and Miller argue that contemporary Venetian audiences would have been aware of the rest of the story: Nero would later kick Poppea to death while she was pregnant with their child.

These critics assume that Venetian audiences held as part of their common culture the historical knowledge that would have made them aware of “the illusory character of this seeming Triumph of Love.” Read this way, Poppea becomes a philosophical tract on the superiority of stoic virtues, but stoicism is not very sexy. “Such a dull-witted morality play,” as Susan McClary commented about the Fenlon-Miller interpretation, is not one likely to have appealed to audiences then or now. In contrast, Wendy Heller concentrates on the character that should stand most solidly for conventional morality, the spurned wife Ottavia. Heller argues, Listeners in the twenty-first century . . . want to believe that Love would weep for Ottavia rather than fight for Poppea; we want to applaud the institution of marriage, to condemn immoral sensuality, to enjoy the happy ending, to believe in Ottavia’s sweet, unvengeful nature, or, at the very least, to revel in her stoic acceptance of a tragic fate. Yet . . . this is not an opera that endorses any of these more conventional virtues or upholds, in the characterization of Ottavia, a more unambiguous view of female suffering. Instead, we are left with a world in which singing is linked to sexual pleasure. Ottavia, with her unappealing chastity and condemnation of female existence, left out of the erotic triangle, is exiled not only physically but also musically and left to die under ambiguous circumstances. At the conclusion of the opera, it is Poppea’s sensuality that commands the stage.

Heller’s interpretation has the advantage, first of all, because it acknowledges the power of sexuality, but also because it comes closer to conveying the carnivalesque character of early Venetian operatic theater, the fascination of contemporaries with women on the stage and with the sensuous capacity of the female voice, and most of all the peculiar composition of the Venetian audience. Who, after all, was listening in all those opera boxes? I would suggest that there were hardly any Ottavias but plenty of Poppeas— Venetian courtesans or at least women whose connection to their male companions was irregular—and in fact they must have been there simply because so few Venetian patricians, male or female, were married in the 1640s. As Heller has shown, seventeenth-century Venetian opera displayed an abiding fascination with prostitutes and female sexuality, manifest most graphically in the stories of Poppea and Messalina, a fascination that faded in the eighteenth century. Venetian opera came to maturity at a moment when the practice of restricted marriage for patrician men and monachization by force for patrician women left most upper-class members of society out of the marriage market. Venice had become the world of the “single self,” of persons who

defined their social status and their sexuality outside of the bonds of marriage. For many men extramarital liaisons were the norm; as a result, seventeenth-century Venice developed what Laura McGough has termed a thriving sexual economy, which produced not just numerous courtesans but many informal relationships and a network of social institutions created to provide social welfare for retired prostitutes and cast-off mistresses. It was precisely at the moment when Poppea first appeared on the operatic stage that the full implications of the Venetian marriage market had become obvious. With the production of Poppea, the opera box became a model of the opera stage, where the relation between lust and love, sex and marriage, personal fulfillment and stoic suffering were very much thrown into question.

The masked occupants of the opera boxes were temporarily escaping from one of the most rigid marital regimes known to history. Since at least 1422 the Venetian patriciate had attempted to impose on its members a rigorous endogamy that prevented noble men from marrying women from outside the patriciate. The 1422 law of the Great Council denied membership in the nobility to sons born to noble fathers and mothers of lesser status. In 1506 the Council of Ten instituted the Libro d’Oro to register male noble births as a mechanism for disqualifying sons born to lower-class women, thereby protecting the Great Council from “contamination, blemishing, or any other denigration.” By 1526 the burden of proof moved from birth registers of noble sons to marriage registers that provided evidence of the nobility of both husband and wife. Besides barring bastards and sons of non-noble mothers from the privileges of noble status, the new laws imposed a formal civil marriage procedure on the members of the ruling class. Thus, determining parentage on both sides became the means for guaranteeing endogamy within the ruling class.

The consequence of Venetian marriage practices was thus the systematic production of patrician bachelors and patrician nuns. During the fifteenth century about half the mal nobles who lived to adulthood remained bachelors. Some voluntarily chose celibacy, whether within the Church or without, and others were drawn to homoerotic relationships, but most seem to have had little choice whether to marry or not. By the middle of the sixteenth century the combination of dowry inflation, which discouraged many patrician fathers from undertaking the expense of marrying their daughters, and price inflation, which eroded patrimonies, encouraged the practice of restricted marriage: families limited the number of children allowed to marry in order to prevent dispersal of the patrimony. There existed both a financial and a political logic to marriage restriction. In the absence of primogeniture laws, an inheritance had to be shared among all legitimate male offspring in each generation, and a partible

inheritance became a diminished inheritance. For those seeking political alliances through marriage, a potential groom whose brothers did not marry would not be distracted by other affinal connections and could give his full support to his own in-laws, especially when it came to election to lucrative offices.15 The officially unmarried brothers entered the sexual economy of Venice on their own terms through liaisons with male lovers, mistresses, prostitutes, courtesans, or secret marriages with lower-class women.

The same pressures that forced brothers to become bachelors drove an even higher percentage of their sisters into convents, whether they had a vocation or not. Throughout Italy between 1550 and 1650 the mushrooming monachization rates meant that aristocratic women everywhere were more likely to become nuns than wives.

In Venice the increase was particularly dramatic: in 1581 nearly 54 percent of patrician women were nuns, and by the 1642–43 opera season, when Poppea was first produced, 82 percent may have become nuns, although this figure seems inflated. A conservative estimate might be that during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries about 60 percent of Venetian patrician women could be found in convents. Jutta Gisela Sperling demonstrates how the pressures of the dowry system and restricted marriage practices played out differently for women than for men. Even when blocked from marrying women of their own class, patrician men had access to the sexual economy or could marry secretly. In a sample of mid-seventeenth-century secret marriages registered in the Venetian curia, some 35 percent were between noblemen and women of lower class, but there is only one example of a noblewoman marrying a commoner.

Unmarried patrician women were denied access to both the sexual economy and clandestine marriage opportunities. Their fertility and their lives were squandered. In- voluntary nuns were condemned to the hell of convent imprisonment, unpurged of their sensual desires despite their chaste marriage to Christ, as the otherwise antagonistic writers Arcangela Tarabotti and Ferrante Pallavicino both recognized.

The results were a tragic waste of human potential—unbridled sexual exploitation of lower-class women by noblemen; frustration and anger among the nuns deprived of pleasure and fulfillment in life; and the demographic suicide of the Venetian ruling class.

Matters reached a breaking point just three years after Poppea’s debut. In 1646 and again in 1669, the Venetian patriciate had to sell itself, by offering titles of nobility for the

price of 100,000 ducats, in order to provide enough new men to fill political offices and to finance the Turkish wars. The very endogamous strategy the patriciate had devised in the fifteenth century to prevent pollution from below had bled it of vigor by the seventeenth and made class pollution the only alternative that would allow survival.

The suitability of opera as a commentary on the harsh divorce between marriage and sexuality in Venice derived from its connections with Carnival, the season when the theaters were opened and operas produced. Opera owed as much to the traditions of Venetian theater and carnival culture, which had long provided a critique of the city’s peculiar sexual economy, as it did to the musical ideas of the Florentine theorists of opera. At the end of the sixteenth century the Camerata theorists under Medici patronage invented a form of musical drama now called opera for performance in the courtly environment of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. One of the late sixteenth-century Florentine musical theorists was none other than Galileo Galilei’s father, Vincenzo, who wrote what “is surely the most influential music treatise of the late sixteenth century.” Vincenzo Galilei was a lutenist and ardent advocate of the revival of Greek monody to replace modern polyphony and counterpoint. “The key to the power of ancient music was the solitary melody, the single ‘air,’ however many were singing together. Even animals exploit the voice, a natural instrument for expressing their feelings and wants. Yet some rational animals—that is modern composers and theorists—neglect this resource as a means of expressing human passions.”