The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 23 (2017) No. 1

Introduction

Rose A. Pruiksma*

1. The state of current resources: an overview

2. Challenges and opportunities

Appendix

References

1. The state of current resources: an overview

1.1 There have never been more resources available for teaching seventeenth-century opera in the college classroom. Scores and librettos have become more widely accessible, thanks to scholarly editions, facsimile editions, and the digitization of major research library manuscript and early print holdings. Musicologists working on seventeenth-century opera have expanded our knowledge of the business of opera, its cultural contexts, performance practices, staging, and audiences for a variety of European centers of opera production.^[1] Building on these foundations, others have opened up new perspectives on the cultural practice of opera, with close readings of specific works and repertories.^[2] Using interpretive tools drawn from cultural studies, gender studies, and new historicism, these scholars have offered important new insights into early modern European culture and the ways that operatic practices and tropes reflected and shaped early modern audiences’ social and political perceptions and ideals.

1.2 As scholarship has offered new perspectives and expanded our knowledge of early opera, musicians have explored a range of performance approaches both within and outside of the historically informed performance movement. They have directed their energies to well-known works such as Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo and to less familiar works by composers such as Cavalli, Lully, Steffani, and Tomas Torrajon y Velasco. There are now audio recordings, sometimes even in more than one version, of many works that, until the beginning of the twenty-first century, had very little representation. In 1974 Jean-Claude Malgoire made the first full-length audio recording of a Lully opera, Alceste (released commercially in 1975), and a decade went by before there was a second: in 1984 Philippe Herreweghe put out the first of his two recordings of Lully’s much-anthologized Armide.^[3] Today, twelve of Lully’s fourteen tragedies en musique have at least one commercial sound recording, and Cadmus, while not released as a sound recording, is available on DVD. As for video, a substantial number of productions of operas composed between 1601 and 1701 have become available on DVD in the last two decades (see Appendix). Multiple stagings of L’Orfeo are available in video format, from the 1977–1978 production by Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Jean-Pierre Ponnelle to the 2017 Caen Opera production directed by Paul Agnew. Four of Lully’s operas are now available in this format, and there are at least two different productions of Cavalli’s Giasone and his Didone along with DVDs of Calisto, Ercole amante, and La virtù de’ strali d’Amore. Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, like Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, has multiple stagings available on DVD, and interest in Purcell has led to productions of some of his other works. In addition, video clips, and even complete live performances of works that are not commercially available on video, circulate on YouTube (www.youtube.com).^[4] All of this material sheds a great deal of light on a period once described as the “dark ages” of opera.^[5]

1.3 DVDs of staged productions raise many questions in the classroom beyond the usual details of music, plot, and character. How do available video materials shape perceptions of early opera? Whose “Baroque” is being staged in these productions? What notions of “authenticity” does a production engage? What happens to a production when modern dance is introduced, or even more, when it becomes the focus of the work? How might stagings that seem to contradict the drama as originally conceived be useful tools for teaching Baroque opera in the college classroom? While courses such as history of opera, a semester survey of Baroque music, or special topics courses—opera on film, or even Monteverdi on film, for instance—offer more time and opportunity for addressing and unpacking these kinds of questions, addressing them within the constraints of the traditional music history sequence will become increasingly necessary. Even if the instructor chooses not to show any video in the classroom, our media-savvy students can easily find performance videos on YouTube of both canonic and non-canonic works.

2. Challenges and opportunities

2.1 This forum took shape as an evening panel discussion at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Philadelphia. The panel addressed the challenges and rewards of the relatively recent wealth of video resources in early opera. As teachers of students who are saturated in digital media—who both consume and produce it in multiple formats—we confront daunting gaps between the culture of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europe and our students’ present lived experiences. The stories and myths that underpin twenty-first-century students’ diverse worldviews do not generally include the Greco-Roman mythology, ancient Roman history, or medieval romance from which many Baroque opera plots are drawn. Our students have come of age in a world where computers have always existed, where information, conversation, video clips, mp3 files are just a click, tap, or few keystrokes away. Theatrical, visually spectacular, musically compelling opera performances on DVD can help bridge the gap between the seemingly distant world of seventeenth-century opera and our students’ present-day culture.

2.2. Bringing Baroque opera in performance into the classroom via DVD can open up interesting avenues for learning and discussion, but it also requires a significant investment of time and care on the part of instructors, as they confront sometimes disconcerting staging decisions, notions of authenticity, and the illusion of transparency and immediacy that video can engender. These issues, while they are pertinent to all filmed opera performances, are especially pressing for early opera. Unlike well-known and beloved late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century operas such as Le Nozze di Figaro, Fidelio, or La Traviata, much of the Baroque opera repertory is unfamiliar on every level, and a number of the performances captured on DVD are the only versions of a work available. Several useful tools for thinking about some contemporary performances of Baroque opera have emerged in the last two decades, most notably the 2004 issue of the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music (vol. 10, no. 1: https://sscm-jscm.org/v10no1.html) devoted to the Toronto 2000 performance of Lully’s Persée (a production subsequently released on DVD in 2005) and the summer–fall 2008 issue of Opera Quarterly (vol. 24, nos. 3–4) devoted to early opera.

2.3 Musicologists working on opera and film—mostly focused on late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century repertory—have drawn on the language and tools of film studies to inform their approaches; these tools are equally useful for thinking about early opera on film. When we bring video of early opera into the classroom, we invite our students to experience in real time not an “authentic” enactment of a fixed work, but rather an encounter with a living, flexible theatrical piece, frozen in its current interpretation, in dialogue with the concerns, ideas, and interpretations current to its performance. Even if we choose not to use video in the classroom, we must still offer students tools that might enable them to consider a performance such as the 2012 production of Cavalli’s Giasone, with the bed of disembodied caressing hands during “Delizie contente” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWWsHP7OooM), not as a representation of “the way things were” or “the way it should be done” but as a set of choices and decisions made by the production team that have little relationship to the ways seventeenth-century Venetian choreographers, set designers, and stage directors would have conceived of a production of the same piece. The video presents only one possible approach to staging this work, and students might usefully consider other viable approaches.

2.4 The short essays included in this forum expand our musicological toolkits to facilitate incorporating audio-visual documents of performances, in all their interesting permutations, imperfections, and ingenious interpretations, in our teaching. For better or worse, DVD materials have brought early opera to life in ways that, even if they frequently go well beyond anything the original composers and librettists may have imagined, open up an ongoing and vital dialogue about the nature of performance and its relation to past works. The plots, staging, and music of these works may be quite distant from our own lived experiences, but they may yet be made to speak to us in relevant, interesting, and thought-provoking ways through audio-visual performances recorded on DVD. As musicologists have opened up new areas of knowledge and inquiry regarding early opera, performers, in dialogue (if not always agreement) with the scholarship, have offered new ways of thinking about, doing, and seeing early opera, through the lenses of their productions. In time, perhaps this dialogue and its resultant performances and scholarship will reshape our canon and ways of teaching.

Appendix

Appendix. Seventeenth-century operas (and related genres) on commercial DVD