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23 - The theatre from Metastasio to Goldoni

from The Settecento

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

Edited by
Peter Brand  and
Lino Pertile
Peter Brand
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Lino Pertile
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
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Summary

Metastasio and melodrama

Metastasio's melodrama is a remarkable expression of some of the main aspirations of the Settecento: the ideal of theatre as a social rite and a vehicle of moral instruction; the nostalgia of scholars for classical tragedy following the French precedent; the hedonism of a courtly society devoted to music. Pietro Trapassi was born in Rome in 1698 of humble parents and died in Vienna in 1782. From childhood he showed an extraordinary talent for improvisation, and he was adopted by Gravina, who oversaw his literary and philosophical education and changed his name from the prosaic Trapassi to the poetic Metastasio. After Gravina's death he moved to Naples, capital of the Austrian Viceroyalty, and was initiated into the musical life of the city by the singer Marianna Bulgarelli (la Romanina) and the composer Niccolò Porpora. He was soon producing compositions for the court, for weddings, birthdays and other occasions, including some dramatic pieces which were very successful. The fashionable mythological idyll was well suited to his liking for the cantabile and sensual poetry of Tasso and Marino, a taste which the severely classical education given him by Gravina had refined but not obliterated.

In his first melodrama, Didone abbandonata, performed in Naples in 1724 (with music by Domenico Sarro), the Virgilian encounter between the Carthaginian Queen and the destined founder of Rome becomes a clash between Dido's unbridled passion and readiness to sacrifice throne and life for the man she loves and Aeneas' anguish as he is torn between love and duty.

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The Cambridge History of Italian Literature , pp. 353 - 362
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

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