Francesco Cavalli was one of the most famous composers of the 17th century. Almost four centuries later the opera world is beginning to take notice of the Venetian composer once again. New editions of Il Giasone and L’Artemisia published by Bärenreiter support this renaissance.

Il Giasone

Il Giasone, by Francesco Cavalli (1602-76), to a libretto by Giacinto Andrea Cicognini (1606-50), was arguably the most successful opera of the entire seventeenth century.  It received its premiere in Venice during carnival 1649 at the Teatro San Cassiano, the oldest of the city’s four functioning opera houses.  By this time, public opera had been a going concern in Venice for slightly more than a decade.  In 1637, in connection with carnival festivities, a small traveling company had produced an opera at the San Cassiano, which had been converted by its patrician owners from a prose theater into a “theatro de musica” for the occasion. Two years later, in 1639, a second opera house opened, then a third (in 1640), and a fourth (in 1641). Within a few short years opera had become a regular feature of carnival: tourists were being drawn to Venice specifically to attend the opera. Further theaters would be added in subsequent years, so that by century’s end a total of nine opera houses had opened. Although all nine were never active simultaneously—the more usual number varied from two to five—those that were often produced two operas in a single season.  In some years, Venetian audiences could have seen as many as ten different operas

The composer of Il Giasone had a lot to do with these developments.  Born in the Lombard town of Crema, Cavalli had been brought to Venice as a young boy of fourteen, to sing at the Ducal Chapel at San Marco, where he came under the influence of the recently appointed maestro di cappella, Claudio Monteverdi. After rising slowly through the ranks, he himself eventually became maestro di cappella, in 1668.  For much of this time, however, Cavalli was also deeply involved in the opera business.  Beginning in 1639, he supplied a steady stream of opera scores, sometimes even two at a time, for every season in which the theaters were open. By the time he ceased his theatrical activities in 1668, he had composed over thirty operas, collaborating with more than a dozen different librettists, for five different theaters, several of which he also managed.  His fame had spread beyond Venice, as his operas were heard throughout Italy as well as North of the Alps.  

Of all his operas, Il Giasone, his tenth, was surely the most popular. Indeed, it was so successful that the libretto went through five different editions during its first season alone, and a revival was planned for the following spring.  Most significantly, however, in the next decade the opera traveled up and down the Italian peninsula and was probably even performed as far north as Vienna, sometime after 1651. Variously edited and modernized, it continued to be heard during the 1660s and ‘70s. A revival in Brescia in 1690, under the title Medea in Colco, was the last known production of any Cavalli opera in the seventeenth century.  For the public of the second half of the century, Il Giasone rightly stood for the best that Venetian opera had to offer.

Although Cavalli was by far the most experienced and successful opera composer of his time, his collaborator Cicognini was something of a novice, the author of a number of prose plays, but so far only one operatic text.  Nevertheless, he managed to produce an unusually effective libretto, and Cavalli rose to the occasion with some of his finest music.  

The libretto draws its historical background from events surrounding Jason’s legendary quest for the Golden Fleece, expanding the story with newly invented situations and characters in order to provide the wealth of intrigue and the happy ending expected by Venetian audiences.  The fairly standard plot focuses on two pairs of noble lovers—Giasone-Isifile and Medea-Egeo—who are kept apart by various complications but finally reunited.  The lovers are aided and abetted by a bevy of mostly comic servants, five in all, who represent many of the standard character types:  the lady-in-waiting (Alinda) who indulges in some love-making of her own; the randy squire (Oreste) who complains, Leporello-like, of his servitude; the confidant and handyman (Besso); the bawdy old nurse who laments her lost youth (Delfa); and the stuttering hunchback (Demo, tenor).

Combining antic moments with the most poignant of situations, the difficulties encountered by this large and lively cast exemplify just about every conceivable complication that might arise to keep the plot from resolution.  Along the way, they participate in many of the scene- and aria-types that audiences had come to expect in their operas: an incantation, several laments, three different sleep-scenes, a mad scene, and a number of stage songs.

Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of Il Giasone, however, is its musico-dramatic conviction, the balance it achieves between recitative and aria, speech and song, action and thought. In this work, speech-like recitative gives way to lyrical aria only, and especially, when the drama requires it.  Indeed, Giasone is one of the last seventeenth-century works to display the kind of integration of music and drama that characterizes the most successful monuments of operatic history.

Ellen Rosand

L’Artemisia

“I have endeavoured to do nothing other than to present to you the characteristics of the human passions in a natural way.” So Cavalli’s librettist Nicolò Minato addressed the theatre-going public in the foreword to L’Artemisia. He then added the wish that the public would rather see opera on the stage instead of just reading the libretto. The public was happy to respond to this wish, since the music of the opera was by no less than the most famous and popular opera composer of his day. Francesco Cavalli was in addition particularly interested in the portrayal of the passions, more than the general attributes of his characters; and thus, he proved himself the ideal partner to Minato in setting his opera to music. In Artemisia, both had chosen an extremely suitable character for their concepts; she was regarded in the 17th century as the personification of a strong and independent woman, whilst particularly faithful to her husband Mausolos. She remained so devoted to him even after his death, that she was even said to have drunk his ashes in order to maintain a bond with him.

What next, Cavalli and Minato wondered, if such a woman was confronted with a new love and, what’s more, with a man from a lower social class? And if, on top of everything, this man turned out to be the person who killed her husband? Confronted with these problems, she has to examine her self-image and her role as queen, something which Cavalli exploits in masterly fashion to portray the inner conflicts and her change of personality musically. At the end comes the realization “forgive my enemies”; wars are called off, adversaries pacified and – finally, we are in the baroque – marriages made.

The plot is enlivened through the use of a whole baroque range of characters including jealous lovers, vociferous, then timid generals, a ghost, recalcitrant and unreliable servants and their wet-nurses lamenting lost youth, all of whom Cavalli and Minato wove into the plot in an original way. Yet, as in the comedies of Shakespeare, serious themes are always presented in humorous, comic scenes with a certain gravity, so that the audience is both entertained and moved.

This all happens in Cavalli’s most expressive musical language which is capable of achieving the greatest effects with the smallest means. The diversity of the passions, and in particular their changes of mood, is reflected in the music in an extensive range of forms of expression. A repertoire of possibilities, probably unique in the history of opera, ranges from matter-of-fact recitative to major aria. In comparison with the early Cavalli operas which are generally performed nowadays (such as La Didone, Il Giasone and La Calisto), L'Artemisia is distinguished above all through its even greater mastery in the shaping and use of arias, which the composer exploits to  portray characters and situations with affection and precision. He is, however, able to skilfully integrate this rather reflective function of his arias into the strand of the plot, so that no break in content between aria and recitative is apparent. As a result, the major arias are not independent numbers, but form part of the whole – as, for example, the aria “Ardo, sospiro, e piango”, which became well-known through Raymond Leppard’s highly-acclaimed performance of Calisto at Glydebourne in 1970, sung by Janet Baker.

L'Artemisia was premiered in January 1657 in Venice and proved – according to everything that we know of it – to be a great success. The first performance using the new scholarly edition will be given on 26 June 2010 at the Festival in Hannover-Herrenhausen by Claudio Cavina and La Venexiana. The work is now available for the first time in a modern edition.

Hendrik Schulze
(from [t]akte 1/2010)