The Birth of Opera and the New Science

Abstract

Since its birth in 1600 opera has been interpreted as an attempt to revive Greek tragedies in its marvelous music. Its provocative presentation of action and narration entirely in music has been seen as a manifestation of the enchanted universe of sixteenth-century hermeticism. Viewed as a final homage to the magical incantations of the premodern era, late Renaissance operas have been interpreted as the culmination rather than the dissolution of Renaissance culture. This paper proposes that the relationship between the natural and the supernatural in early opera represents a rational mediation between the real and the unreal rather than an enchanted bond between these realms. The paper situates the birth of opera in the context of the epistemological shift of the new science and suggests that opera played a key role in the transition from the old to the modern notions of meaning and truth.

Notes

NOTES

1.  The literature on the birth of opera is extensive. For a recent comprehensive and highly insightful discussion of Renaissance hermeticism and the birth of opera, see Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 9–33; and Gary Tomlinson, “Pastoral and Musical Magic in the Birth of Opera,” in Opera and the Enlightenment, ed. Thomas Bauman and Marita Petzoldt McClymonds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 7–20. For the Florentine roots of early opera, see Warren Kirkendale, “The Myth of the ‘Birth of Opera’ in the Florentine Camerata Debunked by Emilio de’ Cavalieri – A Commemorative Lecture,” The Opera Quarterly 19 (2003): 631–43; Piero Garguilo, ed., Lo stupor dell’invenzione: Firenze e la nascita dell’opera (Florence: Olschki, 2001). Richard A. Carlton, “Florentine Humanism and the Birth of Opera: The Roots of Operatic ‘Conventions,’” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 31 (2000): 67–78. For classical sources and influence, see Frederick W. Sternfeld, The Birth of Opera (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). On the relation between early opera and archetypal symbols, see Robert Donington, Opera and Its Symbols: The Unity of Words, Music and Staging (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 5–40.

2.  There are obviously too many books and articles on the scientific revolution to be cited here. For a concise and up-to-date survey of the classical and new perspectives, see David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, eds., Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

3.  See Rivka Feldhay, Galileo and the Church: Political Inquisition or Critical Dialogue? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 29–44.

4.  See Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 177. Whether one concedes an operative role to empirical experimentation in the new science, concrete experimentations were undeniably very often complemented by hypothetical reasoning, such as Galileo's imaginary calculations, which could never have been conducted, observed, or tested under ideal or counterfactual conditions.

5.  It is true that imaginary ideal states were invoked in the Middle Ages in theological discussions on divine omnipotence. Counterfactual and alternate worlds were devised in the name of God on the assumption that they were utterly irrelevant to the exploration of nature, as they were incommensurable with the factual states from which they were extrapolated.

6.  For a different interpretation of the relation between music and late Renaissance scientific discourse, see Timothy Reiss, Knowledge, Discovery, and Imagination in Early Modern Europe: The Rise of Aesthetic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 136–54; 169–87.

7.  Many other aspects of the new musical aesthetics may be interpreted as reflecting the impact of the new science. For a recent analysis of the interconnection between music and science see, Paulo Gozza, ed., Number to Sound: The Musical Way to the Scientific Revolution (Boston, MA: Kluwer, 2000), 1–67. For the dissolution of the Pythagorean tyranny over music, see Claude V. Palisca, “Scientific Empiricism,” in Claude V. Palisca, Studies in the History of Italian Music and Music Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 200–238.

8.  For an interpretation of supernatural protagonists as a justification of the unnaturalness of sung drama, see Pirrota Nino and Elena Povoledo, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi, trans. Karen Eales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 262–64.

9.  Related to this aspect of the new science are the jokes of nature, those extraordinary phenomena that defy any familiar classification. For the role of such jokes in the discourse of the new science, see Paula Findlen, “Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 293–331.

10.  Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions, trans. Edward Rosen (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 4.

11.  Girolamo Mei's to Vincenzo Galilei, 8 May 1572, cited in Claude V. Palisca, The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 61.

12.  Vincenzo Galilei, from “Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna,” cited in Oliver Strunk, Source Reading in Music History (New York: Faber & Faber, 1952), 307. For a recent and complete translation of Galilei's text, see Palisca, The Florentine Camerata.

13.  Cited in Palisca, The Florentine Camerata, 57.

14.  The ideal of symmetry, as derived by Renaissance philosophers and artists from Vitruvius onward, is best understood as the principle of commensurability. For its application to the visual arts of the Renaissance, see Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955), 276–78.

15.  Language theory and developments of the mathematical sciences were interconnected in the early modern world. Recent studies have pointed to the transition from referential language to relational language already in the Renaissance. See Timothy Reiss, Knowledge, Discovery, and Imagination. For a recent study on the effects of the changing interpretations of the Word of God on the reading of the Book of Nature in the sixteenth century, see James J. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 167–98.

16.  For a broader discussion of music within the world of Renaissance magic, see Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

17.  Ibid., 27.

18.  Keith Hutchison, “What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution,” ISIS 73 (1982): 267–86.

19.  Palisca, The Florentine Camerata, 59.

20.  For a detailed study of the books of secrets and their constitutive role in shaping the intellectual revolution of the time, see William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 94–107; 269–85. These books highlight the continuity and interaction between magic and science in early modern culture.

21.  Ibid., 9.

22.  For an edition and translation of Caccini's Le nuove musiche, see Giulio Caccini, Le nuove musiche, ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock (Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 1970), 43–56.

23.  Ibid., 49.

24.  Ibid., 51.

25.  Paulo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. Salvator Attanasio (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 42.

26.  For a broader discussion of the naturalization of wonders, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 220–54.

27.  Palisca, The Florentine Camerata, 62, 74.

28.  Ibid., 70.

29.  Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 3–10; 23–97.

30.  The following translations from the second discourse of L’Artusi are cited in Strunk, Source Reading, 393–404. This famous manifesto of the theorist and composer Giovanni Maria Artusi against Monteverdi's uncontrolled dissonances has been analyzed by many scholars. For the most recent analysis, see Massimo Ossi, Divining the Oracle: Monteverdi's Seconda Prattica (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 27–57.

31.  L’Artusi overo delle imperfettioni della moderna musica (Venice, 1600), ff. 39–44. The complete text is available online at URL: http://www.music.indiana.edu/smi/seicento/ARTIMP TEXT.html.

32.  Strunk, Source Reading, 396.

33.  Johann Clauberg, Opera omnia philosophica, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Georg Olms, 1968), 2:1217–35. His Differentia inter Cartesianam et in scholis vulgo usitatam philosophiam is cited in Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 155.

34.  Strunk, Source Reading, 396.

35.  Ibid., 397.

36.  Ibid., 400.

37.  Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song, 31–33.

38.  For a different view on Monteverdi's lieto fine, see Jeffrey L. Buller, “Looking Backwards: Baroque Opera and the Ending of the Orpheus Myth,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 1 (1995): 57–79. See also Sternfeld, The Birth of Opera, 79–115.

39.  Galileo Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, trans. Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio (New York: Dover, 1954), 27.

40.  Carlo Ginzburg, “High and Low: The Theme of Forbidden Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Past and Present 73 (1976): 28–41.