Music-making ghosts: eighteenth-century Rome as operatic memory machine

According to Marvin Carlson (The haunted stage, 2001), one of the main tenets of theatrical activity lies in ghosting, being the presentation (and contemplation) of an “identical thing … encountered before, although now in a somewhat different context.” Eighteenth-century Rome was particularly prone to such re-presentations of the déjà-vu. During the papacy of Benedict XIV (1740-58), for instance, the Holy City witnessed such a burgeoning interest in its urban self-image that tourists traveled from afar to confirm empirically what was already familiar. This was of course largely due to the many fine artists who captured Roman monuments and ruins in scintillating vedute; yet, Rome’s retrospective façade was as fervently propped upped by the opera houses attracting hundreds of tourists every Carnival season. Drawing examples from the opere serie of Niccolò Jommelli (1714-74) and his contemporaries, I will explore a number of moments on which Rome haunted the operatic stage