Kellgren's libretto for 'Aeneas i Carthago' (Score by Joseph Martin Krauss)
2000; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 72; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2163-8195
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
ResumoTHE FIRST SIX BOOKS of Virgil's Aeneid, and especially the plight the oppressed Dido and her people in book four, have attracted the sympathies and energies of artists throughout the course of history. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such writers such as Giovanni Francesco Busenello, Ortensio Mauro, Pietro Metastasio, and Nahum Tate, and composers such as Francesco Cavalli, Johann Adolph Hasse, Nicolo Jommelli, and Henry Purcell are among many others who dealt with this story. It was one popular theme among many derived from classical antiquity, whose gods and heroes provided the substance of most musical dramas to the end of the eighteenth century.(1) Up to 1800, for instance, there were at least fifteen operas written and performed on the subject of Dido and AEneas (not all of which were about both together).(2) The popularity of mythological and quasi-mythological subjects is hard for us to understand nowadays, despite such modern stage works as Cocteau/Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, Sophocles-Holderlein/Orff's Antigono, Oedipus der Tyrann, and Orff's Prometheus (using AEschylus's text), and Gregor/Strauss's Daphne, not to mention Tippett's Trojan opera, King Priam.(3) With the possible exception of Strauss's opera, we take these works in a modernist context and apply readings to them that attempt to reach beyond their appearance. We usually say that opera, in our current use of the term, began at the end of the sixteenth century with an intent to rediscover and imitate Greek tragic performance. As with the authors of those ancient plays, the founders of opera chose the tales of antiquity for their matter. Opera was an aristocratic pursuit and, outside Italy, remained for a long time a court and upper-class diversion. We may reasonably assume it reflected the taste, if not necessarily the values and attitudes its supporters held or tolerated of its chief characters, perhaps also of themselves. Thus, it is clear that in the heroic ballet-pantomimes of the seventeenth-century French court or in the masques of the English one, the assumption into the action of the monarch and his court allowed the exalted participants to take upon themselves the attributes of the heroes and heroines they represented. Or, rather, such participation allowed them to express to themselves and to others those heroic characteristics with which they considered, or wished to consider, themselves endowed. And yet, to see the choice of Classical subjects solely as a response to patronal egoism, however attractive such an explanation might be, is to simplify the issue overmuch. Such an explanation still fails to account for the persistence of the antique on the musical stage as late as the end of the eighteenth century. Even allowing for the general reluctance to put, say, Biblical figures on the stage, it is hard to account for the almost equal reluctance to portray dramatically the great historical figures of the identifiable past.(4) It seems to have been only in the realm of comic opera that characters of human scale appeared, a situation that helped shape a distinction between high and low genres which was to have great practical consequences for the Gustavian theater in general and for its musical stage in particular.(5) It is nonetheless clear that, for whatever reason, Gustaf III's early choices for the opera company of which he was the founder, producer, and paymaster were of heroic, Classical subjects. Most of the operas produced on the royal stages in his lifetime and most of the plays as well were on mythological subjects. Indeed, the first Swedish opera, Wellander/Uttini's Thetis och Pelee (1773), to a plan by the King himself, ran in the Classical furrow. It is in this sense that his choice of the story of Dido and AEneas is typical of the age.(6) Of course, every combination of librettist, composer, and subject produces a unique piece of art. Paisiello's and Rossini's versions of The Barber of Seville, for instance, differ greatly from one another, as do all the many settings of Metastasio's libretto for the Dido and AEneas story. …
Referência(s)