Pier Jacopo Martello On Opera (1715)

Abstract Literary criticism in Italy around 1700 was very much preoccupied with the dominance of French culture in Europe and the consequent waning of Italian prestige. Gone were the days when Italian literature was held up everywhere as a model to be imitated. Instead, Italy for a century had been in the grips of a literary decadence that soon would acquire the derogatory name of secentismo, “seventeenth-century-ism.” Its poetry, ornate and mannered, was hardly exportable anymore. Instead, the main export item now was opera, and this, if anything, only held Italy up to further ridicule (see Saint-Evremond, p. 51 ff above). It was in this atmosphere that the Arcadian Academy was founded in Rome in 1690. An institution whose goal was the purification of Italian literature in all its forms, including, very importantly, tragedy (a genre in which France had recently offered the world supreme examples), the Academy soon turned its attention to opera. The Arcadians felt (quite rightly too) that opera had usurped the Italian stage, bringing about the decline of “legitimate” theater in Italy. Some writers wished to abolish opera altogether, as a degrading, “venal” spectacle. Pier Jacopo Martello (1665-1727), who helped found an Arcadian “colony” in his native Bologna, was more reasonable: he belonged to those who merely sought to reform opera. He had in fact written several librettos himself, as well as “legitimate” tragedies; and when he came to formulate his thoughts on tragedy in a treatise entitled Della tragedia antica e moderna (On Ancient and Modern Tragedy), he included in its second edition (1715) an entire section on opera. The premise of the treatise is this: on his way to France, Martello has met a stranger who, upon further acquaintance, turns out to be none other than Aristotle himself, the founder of tragic theory, miraculously come back to life. What follows, then, is a series of dialogues, carried on mostly in Paris and environs, between Martello and this latter-day philosopher, who reinterprets the classical “rules” of tragedy, adapting them quite sensibly to eighteenth-century conditions. With a light touch, pseudo-Aristotle teaches his disciple how to write a libretto. He dismisses the notion that such a work might be considered poetry in any serious way and instead gives him a down-to-earth, mildly satirical account of all the components of Italian opera that need to be taken into consideration by the would-be librettist.