*Wendy Heller (wbheller@Princeton.EDU), Scheide Professor of Music History and Chair of the Department of Music at Princeton University, specializes in the study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opera from interdisciplinary perspectives, with emphasis on gender and sexuality, art history, and the classical tradition. Winner of the Rome Prize and numerous other fellowships, Heller is the author of numerous publications, including Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (University of California Press) and Music in the Baroque (W. W. Norton and Company). She is currently completing a book entitled Animating Ovid: Opera and the Metamorphoses of Antiquity in Early Modern Italy, and critical editions of Handel’s Admeto and Francesco Cavalli’s Veremonda, l’Amazzone di Aragona.
[1] As reported by Ellen Rosand at the meeting of the Cavalli Study Group for the International Musicological Society, Venice, Italy, June 2017.
[2] Beth L. and Jonathan Glixon, Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impressario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 222–25. An exception is Fabio Biondi, who, as Dinko Fabris notes in his detailed study of the performance history of La Didone, employs “instrumental forces as close as possible to those used in Venetian theatres in the first half of the seventeenth century. The only departure was the inclusion of a brass section in order to alleviate what to modern ears risked becoming the monotony of an instrumental timbre based merely on strings, making for greater dynamic contrasts.” Dinko Fabris, “Didone by Cavalli and Busenello,” De musica disserenda 3, no. 2 (2007): 137.
[3] See, for example, Francesco Cavalli, Xerse, ed. Hendrick Schulze (Kassel: Bärenreiter, forthcoming). As Schulze demonstrates, the Venetian score (I-Vnm, Cl. It. IV, 374 [=9898]) presents tidy versions of two completely different endings of the second act adjacent to one another, which are both reproduced by René Jacobs in his recording. Francesco Cavalli, Xerse: Opéra, Concerto Vocale, conducted by René Jacobs, Harmonia Mundi France: HMC 901175.78, 1985, compact disc. For more on the source issues and the problems of editing, see the essays in Readying Cavalli’s Opera for the Stage: Manuscripts, Editions, Production, ed. Ellen Rosand (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013).
[4] For a discussion of this scene, see Wendy Heller, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 101–105.
[5] Marie Goffette, “A conversation with Jean-Yves Ruf, stage director of Elena,” in the program book for Francesco Cavalli, Elena, directed by Jean-Yves Ruf, Cappella Mediterránea, conducted by Leonardo García Alarcón (Aix-en-Provence, 2013: Ricercar, 2014), DVD, p. 21.
[6] The role is notated in soprano clef, but we do not know whether Giove sang the role in falsetto, as Alvaro Torrente has argued in “The Twenty-Two Steps: Clef Anomalies or ‘basso alla bastarda’ in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Italian opera,” in Word, Image, and Song, ed. Rebecca Cypess, Beth Glixon, and Nathan Link (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press; Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2013), 1:102–105, or whether it would have been sung by the singer of the role of Diana, as Jennifer Williams Brown suggests in Francesco Cavalli, La Calisto, ed. Brown (Middleton, WI: A.R. Editions, 2007), xiv.
[7] This production was released on LP (Decca, 1972) and eventually remastered for CD (Universal Classics and Jazz, 2004), but never made available commercially as a video.
[8] Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, 192–95. See also Cavalli, La Calisto, ed. Raymond Leppard (London: Faber; New York: Schirmer, 1975), along with the commentary and analysis by Jennifer Williams Brown in Cavalli, La Calisto, 205–212.
[9] On this scene, see Wendy Heller, “Hypsipyle, Medea, and the Ovidian Imagination: Taming the Epic Hero in Cavalli’s Giasone,” in Readying Cavalli’s Operas for the Stage, 167–71.
[10] Pinchgut Opera’s webpage devoted to their performance of the opera (http://www.pinchgutopera.com.au/giasone/) provides a fascinating glimpse into the ways that Cavalli’s operas can be marketed, with program notes, excerpts from laudatory reviews, audio examples, and high-quality photos of the production.
[11] Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, 127–36.
