Reforming opera and its public in early modern Venice

Around 1700, opera in Italy underwent a period of change often referred to as the “first reform.” This study broadens our understanding of this reform movement to include not only the changes in text and music, the subject of previous scholarship, but also new ideals for performer, spectator, and performance. The dissertation is in two parts: Section 1 (chapters 1–3) shows the conflicts that motivated discourses of reform: conflicts between opera and new standards of good taste, commoners and nobility, public and private theaters, and the spectator\u27s rational soul and his passions. Section 2 (chapters 4–5) examines the meaning of reform in the particular locale of Venice through case studies of two reform operas, both written for the most prestigious and reform-minded theater in the city, the Teatro Grimani di San Giovanni Grisostomo. Chapter 1 examines academic culture in Venice and beyond, including the widespread literary reform of the Roman-based Arcadian academy. Writings by L. A. Muratori, G. Gravina, G. Crescimbeni, and L. Riccoboni inform this chapter\u27s reading of new conceptions of buon gusto and divisions between popular culture, the theater and the academies. Chapter 2 considers contemporary views of opera\u27s effects on the passions and souls of its spectators. Chapter 3 evaluates reformers\u27 criticisms of the public theater with regard to luxury, particularly in the context of Venice, through analysis of travel descriptions, journal accounts, and Venetian legislation. In the second part of the dissertation, chapter 4 discusses Domenico David\u27s and Carlo Francesco Pollarolo\u27s La forza della virtù (1693) as a practical application of reform in sound and text. Through its representation of a soul\u27s progress from mismanaged to ordered passions, this opera employed Venetian operatic conventions to the new end of reforming its spectators. The last chapter evaluates Alessandro Scarlatti\u27s and Girolamo Frigimelica Roberti\u27s Mitridate Eupatore (1707), a “tragedy with music.” This later opera is an attempt to reform opera through genre rather than through subject matter, which led to a conflict between conventions of tragedy and opera. Scarlatti\u27s music, and the implications it held for singers onstage, is shown to contradict eighteenth-century conceptions of the theatrical style