*Mauro Calcagno (mauroca@sas.upenn.edu) is on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. His work focuses on musical dramaturgy and theatricality, performance studies, digital humanities, Baroque opera, and the madrigal. He received his training in musicology at Yale University and was then on the faculty at Harvard and at Stony Brook University. His monograph From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi’s Staging of the Self (https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520267688) investigates the impact of Petrarchism and Marinism on late Renaissance and Baroque vocal music. Currently he is writing a book on early Italian opera as presented by today’s experimental visual artists and theater directors.
[1] Emanuele Senici, “Il video d’opera ‘dal vivo’: testualizzazione e ‘liveness’ nell’era digitale,” Il Saggiatore musicale 16, no. 2 (2009): 273–312; and Senici, “Porn Style? Space and Time in Live Opera Videos,” The Opera Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2010): 63–80. Quotations are from Senici, “ ‘Live’ Opera on Screen,” paper given at Cornell University, November 5, 2009 (Leonore Coral Memorial Lecture). I thank Prof. Senici for making this text available to me. Finally, see Carlo Cenciarelli, “At the Margins of the Televisual: Picture Frames, Loops and ‘Cinematics’ in the Paratexts of Opera Videos,” Cambridge Opera Journal 25, no. 2 (2013): 203–23.
[2] Useful resources concerning the opera’s historical context are John Whenham, ed., Claudio Monteverdi: Orfeo, Cambridge Opera Handbook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and the chapter devoted to Orfeo in Thomas Kelly, First Nights: Five Musical Premieres (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 4–59. An insightful discussion of historical performance practices is John Butt, Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
[3] Mauro Calcagno, From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi’s Staging of the Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 24, 25, 28, from which I draw for this paragraph.
[4] On Ponnelle’s directorial style in his filmed opera productions, see Marcia J. Citron, When Opera Meets Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 97–135.
[5] See Paola Besutti, “The ‘Sala degli Specchi’ Uncovered: Monteverdi, the Gonzagas, and the Palazzo Ducale, Mantua,” Early Music 28, no. 3 (1999): 451–65. The DVD box set of Audi’s production of the so-called Monteverdi trilogy (Orpheus, Coronation of Poppea, Return of Ulysses) is reviewed by Wendy Heller in “Venice without the Carnival: Pierre Audi’s Monteverdi Cycle on DVD,” Opera Quarterly 24, nos. 3–4 (2008): 293–306.
[6] A fruitful topic for classroom discussion concerns the ways in which individual directors stage the finale of the opera. As known, whereas the libretto ends with the dismemberment of Orpheus by the Bacchantes, the score presents a completely opposite, happy ending, with Apollo and Orpheus ascending to heaven. Unfortunately, many directors decide to conflate the two solutions, interpreting the final Moresca as the dance of the Bacchantes killing Orpheus. Some even anticipate the Moresca and place it before the duet with Apollo, so that the God comes to rescue his son from the aggressive women. Pizzi however, like Ronconi (Ronconi 1998), does not travel that perilous road and ends his production with a joyous reunion of all the characters on stage dressed in modern costume.
[7] I comment on this production in From Madrigal to Opera, 57–69 and 193–95. Useful vocabulary to discuss performance spaces can be found in Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).
[8] On this production and the director’s creative process, see Guillaume Bernardi, “Trisha Brown’s L’Orfeo: Postmodern Meets Baroque,” Opera Quarterly 24, nos. 3–4 (2008): 286–92.
[9] See Jay D. Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Boston: The MIT Press, 1998).
