Projektdetails
Abstract
The 17th-century phenomenon of dramatic texts for music is generally recognized as inherently “Italian” because of its geographical, cultural and linguistic origins. However, even before this repertoire was established throughout the Italian peninsula, it traveled across the Alps where it was composed in large quantities at the Habsburg court. The result was a tradition of Viennese production and consumption of indigenous Italian-language secular and sacred “drammi” that had no counterpart in Europe.Unlike the more familiar Italian opera tradition, which had its origins in the court and moved gradually to public theaters, Viennese opera was completely private and aristocratic. Because of this, many have judged its style, content, and systems of production as insular, anachronistic, or outdated compared to other examples of operatic writing (BIANCONI 1982). Consequently, with very few exceptions, scholars have paid it relatively little attention. I argue, however, that this genre warrants new study. These operas lay the foundation for the later, influential libretti of Zeno, Metastasio, and Da Ponte. To understand their contributions to opera, we need to take into account their Viennese forebears.To demonstrate this, I build upon recent studies by Antonicek, Sommer-Mathis, Seifert, and Noe, who have done pioneering work in this field, showing that the quantity and quality of Italian-language dramatic texts for music in Vienna during the 17th century can be compared only with the leading Venetian producers. To their work, my research adds a study of the local and transnational influences on these libretti, determining which features were recognizably “Italian” and which originated in Vienna. The historical value of these librettos still needs to be restored since there is no reason to believe that the same Italian playwrights who produced so many masterpieces in their homeland lost their skills across the Alps. Furthermore these Viennese works can be easily compared to the same authors’ Italian ones in order to recognize which features could be identified as Italian, and which ones, on the contrary, were more easily exported and soon made operatic genre become transnational.To carry out this project, in cooperation with the co-applicant Professor A. Noe (University of Vienna) and the international cooperator Professor L. Bianconi (University of Bologna), I propose to edit ten works by four of the most significant Italian playwrights who, after writing dramatic texts in Italy, relocated to Vienna to work for the Habsburg court between 1620 and 1705: G. B. Andreini, B. Ferrari, F. Sbarra, and N. Minato. Using ‘Synopsis’ software, a program developed at the University of Padua to produce editions of libretti, I will create a website that will make these Viennese operas available to the scholarly community and wider public as an open-access resource, hosted by the Institut für Romanistik and the Institut für Musikwissenschaft of the Unviersität Wien.
Status | Abgeschlossen |
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Tatsächlicher Beginn/ -es Ende | 1/09/17 → 31/08/19 |