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Dreaming with Open Eyes: Opera, Aesthetics, and Perception in Arcadian Rome by Ayana O. Smith

2020; Volume: 67; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/fam.2020.0029

2471-156X

Brian Robins,

Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

Reviewed by: Dreaming with Open Eyes: Opera, Aesthetics, and Perception in Arcadian Rome by Ayana O. Smith Brian Robins Dreaming with Open Eyes: Opera, Aesthetics, and Perception in Arcadian Rome. By Ayana O. Smith. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. [312 p. ISBN 978-0-520-29815-6 (hardcover). £58] The founding of the Accademia degli Arcadi in Rome in 1690 was an event that would come to have immense significance for secular vocal music. A meeting of literati and artists generally known today in English as the Arcadian Academy, it has nonetheless hitherto attracted relatively little attention from music historians. The Academy appears to have grown out of an earlier meeting of intellectuals, the Accademia Reale or Royal Academy, a circle founded by the self-exiled Queen Christina of Sweden, resident in Rome since 1665. A generous patron of the arts and herself an intellectual, Christina had died the year before the founding of the Arcadian Academy, which nominated her as its figurehead alongside the infant Jesus. While the Arcadians owed no allegiance to sacred (or indeed secular) sponsorship, the incorporation of the Christ Child, born in humble pastoral surroundings, was significant to the ambitions of the Academy, the prime objectives of which centred around the reform of Italian literature, which had found itself increasingly under attack from both within and outside Italy (especially in France) for its perceived descent from classical purity and simplicity to mannerism and eccentricity. In order to achieve reform and restore buon gusto (good taste), the Arcadian Academy turned to the simplicity of the pastoral topics of Italian Renaissance poetry and the classical idealism found in the landscapes of Claude Lorrain (1600–1682) and Nicolas Poussin (1594–1655). The work of both French painters was well-known in Rome, where they had worked and died. From birth, the Academy was founded as a democratic society in which those admitted to membership took a pastoral pseudonym to mask their social status, those meeting the stringent membership tests included both women and men. It would become the longest-running and most influential academy in Italy’s history, its aims emulated far and wide in Italy and beyond. Membership was drawn from among Rome’s artistic and intellectual leaders; among composers only Alessandro Scarlatti was admitted, although others such as Corelli and Händel would also become associated with it. Appropriately the Arcadian’s meetings were generally held al fresco, initially because they had no sponsor to provide a suitable meeting place, but later most likely because the membership drew symbolic inspiration from Rome’s open spaces and gardens, many of which evoked the kind of landscape idealised in their poetry and paintings. In 1693, the Academy settled on the large Farnese Gardens on the Palatine Hill, a venue from which could be observed not only the pastures of the Campo Vaccino, but also many of Rome’s ancient monuments of the kind incorporated into landscape painting and stage sets designed by the likes of the architect Filippo Juvarra, who worked in the private theatre of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, a leading light of the Arcadian Academy. The first leader of the Academy was Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni (1663–1728), who wrote on the history, philosophy, and aesthetics of literature. His Historia della vulgar poesia (History of Vernacular Poetry), published in 1698, is a wide-ranging critique of Italian poetry that is of particular interest to opera historians because of its frequently-quoted attack on Giacinto Andrea Cicognini’s libretto Giasone. Set to music by Cavalli and first produced at the San Cassiano theatre in Venice in 1649, Giasone would become the most-frequently performed opera of the seventeenth century. Crescimbeni’s critique of its libretto is actually more even-handed than it has often been purported to be, since he praises the poet for introducing drama to a wider public. But alongside this, Crescimbeni articulates one of the major concerns of the Arcadians, the reform of literature from the [End Page 269] vulgar excesses of the past century, excesses that had taken Italian literature far from the pastoral ‘purity’ of poets such as Tasso and Guarini. In particular, Giasone was castigated for its ‘nauseating vileness’ in allowing low...