Following its premiere in 1656 Francesco Cavalli’s L’Erismena was a great success in Venice. An English version was also created. The edition being published as part of the critical edition Francesco Cavalli – Opere offers opportunities for a rediscovery.
“One Opera I saw represented about 16 severall times; and so farr was I from being weary of it, I would ride hundreds of miles to see the same over again: nay I must needs confess that all the pleasant things I have yet heard or seen are inexpressibly short of the delight I had in seeing this Venetian Opera; and as Venice in many things surpasses all places elce where I have been, so are these Operas the most excellent of all its glorious vanities.”
These are the words that Robert Bargrave, a musically-knowledgeable English merchant, wrote in his travel diary. Bargrave, who spent the latter part of the 1656 carnival season in Venice, had the opportunity to view two operas, both of them by Venice’s most experienced and famous opera composer, Francesco Cavalli. Cavalli was, at that time, attached to the Grimani family’s theatre at SS. Giovanni e Paolo, the same one that had seen the premiere of Claudio Monteverdi’s famous L’incoronazione di Poppea (1642/43). Cavalli’s Xerse had played there in the 1654/55 season, followed this next year by his Statira, written to a libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello, the author of the poetry for Monteverdi’s Poppea, and a number of Cavalli’s previous operas as well. Yet Bargrave’s praise was not for La Statira, but for Cavalli’s other opera staged that year in S. Aponal, one of Venice’s smallest theatres: L’Erismena, with a libretto by a relative newcomer to the Venetian stage, Aurelio Aureli. It was a spectacularly successful opera, with thirty-two performances over the carnival season, and thirteen productions in other Italian cities over the next two decades.
Aureli provided Cavalli with a libretto that combined the old and the new. Naturally the opera features a host of stock comic characters, an old nurse and several male and female servants. Yet the text also borrowed some ideas from Busenello’s Poppea, but even more from the libretto of one of Cavalli’s earlier operas, Ormindo (1643/44), which had been written by Giovanni Faustini. Both Ormindo and Erismena featured a flirtatious woman in love with two young men, but attached to a much older king. Erismena is set in Tauris, modern-day Tabriz. Its heroine, disguised as a man, has just fought alongside the invading troops of her native Armenia, now defeated by the Medes. Erismena remains disguised as a warrior until near the end of the opera. As a result, the flirtatious woman (Aldimira) abandons the three men in her life for this new warrior: Erimante, the king of Media, and the two princes Idraspe (disguised as Erineo), and Orimeno. Aldimira is in many ways the typical “sex kitten,” but her devotion to Erismena emboldens her to reject the king’s love and fight for Erismena’s life.
In the most dramatic scene of the opera, Erineo, by order of the king, offers to Erismena a cup of poison intended to kill this perceived threat to the Median empire. In reaching for the cup, however, Erismena recognizes Erineo as the young prince who had abandoned her in her home land, and for whom she had searched far and wide. Her life is saved when she faints at the sight of him. She reveals her identity only after she and Erineo have been ordered by the king to fight to the death. The king enters, not only to find both of them alive, but to learn that Erismena is actually his daughter, conceived while Erimante lived in Armenia. As in most Venetian operas, all ends happily.
Robert Bargrave fell in love with this opera, and commissioned his own copy of Cavalli’s score. Some time after his return to England he made his own score of Erismena, with the libretto translated into English. This manuscript, the earliest surviving score of an opera in English, was in 2008 declared by the British government to be of “outstanding significance for the study of the history of music in the UK,” and was subsequently purchased by the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford.
The Bärenreiter edition of Erismena features complete critical editions of both the Italian and English versions of the opera, based respectively on a score in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice and on Bargrave’s score in Oxford, thus providing multiple possibilities for performance, and enabling 21st-century audiences to appreciate once again the opera so beloved by Venetians and others in the seventeenth century.
Beth Glixon
(from [t]akte 2/2017)