¹ Giovanni Pietro Candi, Idaspe (Carlo Buonarigo, 1730); music by Riccardo Broschi.

² Feldman, Martha, Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³ Strohm, Reinhard, Dramma per Musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century (Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 1, 5–6.Google Scholar

⁴ On ‘performative blackness’ as a tool for ‘colonial aspirations’ in early modern England, France, and Spain, see Ndiaye, Noémie, Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), p. 15 Google Scholar and passim; on ‘cosmetic blackness’ in particular, see pp. 35–136. On changes in the use of dark makeup in French ballet over the course of the eighteenth century, see Bloechl, Olivia, ‘Race, Empire, and Early Music’, in Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, ed. by Bloechl, Olivia, Lowe, Melanie, and Kallberg, Jeffrey (Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 77–107. On bodily and sonic representations of racialized and ethnic difference in seventeenth-century commedia dell’arte, see Emily Wilbourne, ‘Lo Schiavetto (1612): Travestied Sound, Ethnic Performance, and the Eloquence of the Body’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 63.1 (Spring 2010), pp. 1–43, doi:10.1525/jams.2010.63.1.1. Here and throughout this essay I follow Ndiaye’s distinction between lower-case ‘blackness’ as an ‘artificial prescriptive category’ and capitalized ‘Blackness’ as agential self-identification; see Scripts of Blackness, pp. 28–29.Google Scholar

⁵ Within the general context of pre-Enlightenment European art music, Ralph P. Locke dubs such representations as ‘exotic characterizations without exotic style.’ While ‘exoticism’ is not the same framework I take up here, Locke’s discussion of Handelian opera in London makes several points that resonate with those in the present study (keeping in mind that Handelian opera has both affinities to, and significant differences from, Metastasian opera seria); Locke, Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 6, 18–23, 37–38, 76–88, 239–42 (quotation on p. 23).

⁶ Though large swaths of the Italian peninsula were then under the rule of the Spanish Bourbon and Austrian Habsburg empires, the situation in Italy was nothing like that in the colonial Americas, however much certain Italian literati later in the century feared it could become so. For some of the later eighteenth-century Italian discourses of colonization, see Peritz, Jessica Gabriel, The Lyric Myth of Voice: Civilizing Song in Enlightenment Italy (University of California Press, 2022), pp. 83–117 Google Scholar. On northern Europeans’ exoticizing views of early modern Italy, including Rome, as an extension of the Torrid Zone, see Gordon, Bonnie, Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds (University of Chicago Press, 2023), pp. 176–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷ On the Roman Empire as the model for the early modern European imperial-colonial systems of Spain, Britain, and France, see Pagden, Anthony, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500-c.1800 (Yale University Press, 1995), p. 11. On Virgil’s Aeneid, the foundational epic of the Roman Empire, as the literary model for the ‘secular entity of the West’ in humanist early modernity, see Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 3.3 (Fall 2003), pp. 257–337 (p. 281), doi:10.1353/ncr.2004.0015. Barbara Fuchs argues that early modern literary invocations of the ancient Roman concept of empire, ‘imperium’, indexed both ‘domestic sovereignty’ (on the order of the incipient nation-state) and outward expansion, and were not merely metaphorical but also materially influential; see Fuchs, ‘Another Turn for Transnationalism: Empire, Nation, and Imperium in Early Modern Studies’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 130.2 (2015), pp. 412–18 (pp. 415–16), doi:10.1632/pmla.2015.130.2.412.Google Scholar

⁸ The relations between opera seria and early modern empire are discussed in depth in my essay ‘Metastasio’s Lyric Imperium’ (unpublished paper given at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, 2024). The astonishing geographical spread of opera seria is now well established, but for details on the specific locations listed above, see: on Metastasian opera in imperial Russia, Welsh, David J., ‘Metastasio’s Reception in 18-th-Century [sic] Poland and Russia’, Italica, 41.1 (1964), pp. 41–46, doi:10.2307/477437; on Metastasian opera (generally in the form of contrafacts) in eighteenth-century Mexico, Drew Edward Davies, ‘Arranging Music for the Liturgy. Contrafacts and Opera Sources from New Spain’, Early Music, 47.2 (2019), pp. 147–60, doi:10.1093/em/caz020; on Metastasian opera sources in California,CrossRefGoogle Scholar Summers, William J., ‘Opera Seria in Spanish California: A Newly-Identified Manuscript Source’, in Music in Performance and Society: Essays in Honor of Roland Jackson, ed. by Cole, Malcolm and Koegel, John (Harmonie Park Press, 1997), pp. 269–90.Google Scholar

⁹ This is not to claim that ‘race’ as a term was invented by the Enlightenment — the word’s roots reach back through early modern Spain and beyond — but rather to emphasize that vernacular discourses of race as phenotype in the twenty-first-century Anglophone world, along with many scholarly investigations of race, are indebted to Enlightenment thought, and thus (as Ndiaye points out) less useful in earlier contexts. Quotation from Ndiaye, Scripts of Blackness, p. 5, and extended as in Ndiaye, ‘Rewriting the Grand Siècle: Blackface in Early Modern France and the Historiography of Race’, in Race Before Race: Premodern Critical Race Studies, ed. by Dorothy Kim, special issue of Literature Compass, 18.10 (2021), pp. 1–11 (p. 3), doi:10.1111/lic3.12603.Google Scholar

¹⁰ For a summary of this shift in the second half of the eighteenth century see Nicholas Hudson, ‘Introduction: “Race” and the Contradictions of Western Ideology, 1550–1750’, A Cultural History of Race, ed. by Marius Turda, 6 vols (Bloomsbury, 2021), IV, A Cultural History of Race in the Reformation and Enlightenment, ed. by Nicholas Hudson, pp. 6–12; for more detailed discussion, see the other chapters in the volume.

¹¹ Ndiaye, ‘Rewriting the Grand Siècle’, p. 3.

¹² LaFleur, Greta, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), pp. 20–21 Google Scholar; Wheeler, Roxann, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim, but see esp. 26–32, 91–92.

¹³ Nyong’o, Tavia, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 6.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Browne, Simone, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2015), p. 16 Google Scholar; LaFleur, Natural History of Sexuality, pp. 17–20.

¹⁵ Robinson, Cedric, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 3rd ed. (University of North Carolina Press, 2020)Google Scholar, passim, but see esp. pp. 2, 26.

¹⁶ Another such mode was gender, about which see Wendy Heller, ‘Reforming Achilles: Gender, ‘Opera Seria’ and the Rhetoric of the Enlightened Hero’, Early Music, 26.4 (1998), pp. 562–81, doi:10.1093/earlyj/XXVI.4.562.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Pietro Metastasio, Didone abbandonata (Ricciardo, 1724), Act I, Scene 5: ‘Iarba sotto nome d’Arbace ed Araspe con seguito de’ mori, comparse, che conducono tigri, leoni e portano altri doni per presentare alla regina.’ On the relationships between pets (as domesticated animals), enslavement, and discourses of racialization in the early eighteenth century, see Aravamudan, Srinivas, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Duke University Press, 1999), p. 39.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Noémie Ndiaye, ‘Race and Ethnicity’, in Cultural History of Race in the Reformation and Enlightenment, pp. 111–25.

¹⁹ Metastasio, Catone in Utica (Rome: Bernabò, 1728), Act III, scene 12: ‘Al mondo, a voi / ad evitar la servitude insegno.’

²⁰ Ibid.: ‘Ah, non credea lasciarti / in Africa così!’

²¹ In his biography of Metastasio, Charles Burney claimed that the poet ‘chose the subject purposely to please the Romans, supposing that he should gain both applause and gratitude by displaying the virtue of one of their own heroes’; while Burney’s historical claims were often coloured by his own biases, he may well have been on to something here. Burney, Charles, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Abate Metastasio, 3 vols (G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796), I, p. 40.Google Scholar

²² Metastasio’s teacher and mentor, Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina, had argued in his treatise Della ragion poetica (1708) that political events were the domain of tragedy, while private or familial events — especially romantic love plots — pertained merely to comedy. On Metastasio’s attempts to reconcile Gravina’s dichotomy in his libretti, see Lago, Paolo, I personaggi classici secondo Metastasio: Catone in Utica, Olimpiade, Achille in Sciro (Fiorini, 2010), p. 41.Google Scholar

²³ Mendrino, Luca, ‘Metastasio da la Morte di Catone al Catone in Utica: Una revisione selettiva delle fonti classiche’, Seicento e Settecento, 8 (2013), pp. 117–38 (pp. 119–20, 126).Google Scholar

²⁴ Metastasio, Didone abbandonata, ‘Argomento’: ‘Tutto ciò si ha da Virgilio, il quale con un felice anacronismo unisce il tempo della fondazione di Cartagine agli errori di Enea. Da Ovidio nel terzo libro de’ Fasti si raccoglie che Iarba s’impadronisse di Cartagine dopo la morte di Didone, e che Anna sorella della medesima, la quale chiameremo Selene, fosse occultamente anch’ella invaghita di Enea.’

²⁵ Metastasio, Catone in Utica, ‘Argomento’: ‘Tutto ciò si ha dagli storici, il resto è verisimile.’

²⁶ On Metastasio’s delicate situation in Rome due to his mentor Gravina’s schism from the Arcadian Academy, see Mendrino, ‘Metastasio da la Morte di Catone al Catone in Utica’, p. 130.

²⁷ Pietro Metastasio, letter to Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, 16 February 1754, in Pietro Metastasio, Tutte le opere, 5 vols, ed. by Bruno Brunelli (A. Mondadori, 1943–54), III, p. 899: ‘Io ho creduto, scrivendo pel teatro, di dover leggere quanto in questo genere hanno scritto non solo i Greci, i Latini e gl’Italiani, ma gli Spagnuoli ancora e i Francesi; e ho supplito alla mia ignoranza della lingua inglese con le traduzioni che vi sono, per informarmi, quanto è possibile senza saper la lingua, dei progressi del teatro fra quella nazione. […] Talvolta si riconosca in alcuna delle mie opere il cibo di cui attualmente mi nutriva …’

²⁸ For details on the various translations, see Lago, I personaggi classici secondo Metastasio, pp. 49–55; Noce, Hannibal S., ‘Early Italian Translations of Addison’s Cato ’, in Petrarch to Pirandello: Studies in Italian Literature in Honour of Beatrice Corrigan, ed. by Molinaro, Julius A. (University of Toronto Press, 1973), pp. 111–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the political influence of Salvini’s Catone in later eighteenth-century Italy, see Peritz, The Lyric Myth of Voice, pp. 90–93.

²⁹ And it was indeed a big risk: operagoers were horrified by Cato’s suicide, especially because it was set in an underground tunnel (or, as they saw it, a ‘sewer’). Metastasio produced several different endings in hopes of making the libretto less controversial, though he included the original one with the version published in his Opere. On how Addison’s ‘sentimental’ changes to the historical sources helped Metastasio link feelings with politics in his libretto, see Alberto Beniscelli, Felicità sognate: Il teatro di Metastasio (Il melangolo, 2000), p. 43.

³⁰ The name ‘Juba’ will remind many readers of the famous Black minstrel performer and father of tap dance ‘Master Juba’ (William Henry Lane, c. 1825–1852), and of the later stock figure of blackface minstrelsy of the same name. The African-American ‘Juba dance’, from which Lane got his stage name, originated in the set of choreomusical practices known as ‘patting Juba’, which enslaved Africans brought to the American South and adapted for plantation life in the early eighteenth century. Addison’s character thus seems unrelated to the rise and naming of the nineteenth-century figure. However, white enslavers frequently imposed names drawn from Greco-Roman antiquity onto those they enslaved and, owing to the immense popularity of Addison’s play on both sides of the Atlantic, ‘Juba’ soon became as common as ‘Caesar’ and ‘Cato’. This means that many white people without knowledge of patting Juba’s African origins associated the Juba dance with Addison’s character, despite the fact that the Black people who had actually formed and performed the tradition traced it to African Djouba, not to an English stage play. Julie Ellison links the stock figure directly to Addison’s Juba, seemingly without knowledge of the patting Juba tradition; see Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 69. For an overview of patting Juba, see Southern, Eileen, The Music of Black Americans: A History (Norton, 1983), pp. 179–81Google Scholar.

³¹ Presumably the change was made because ‘Arbace’ was easier to set, and hence to sing, owing to its three syllables and open ‘a’ vowels.

³² Literary scholars disagree on what, exactly, Addison’s Cato was saying about race, coloniality, and empire, but they agree it was certainly saying something. I cite several studies here that have influenced my own reading, though I do not entirely follow any one of them: Ellison, Cato’s Tears; Shaffer, Jason, Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Rosenthal, Laura J., ‘Juba’s Roman Soul: Addison’s Cato and Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 32.2 (1999), pp. 63–76 Google Scholar; Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, pp. 103–56.

³³ On American revolutionaries quoting Cato — in some cases, inspired by the 1778 performance of the play at Valley Forge — see Shaffer, Performing Patriotism, pp. 55, 59; Ellison, Cato’s Tears, 68–69; Fuller, Randall, ‘Theaters of the American Revolution: The Valley Forge ‘Cato’ and the Meschianza in Their Transcultural Contexts’, Early American Literature, 34.2 (1999), pp. 126–46 (p. 133).Google Scholar

³⁴ Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, pp. 103–04, 110–11.

³⁵ Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, pp. 103–04.

³⁶ Addison’s personal attitude towards extractive colonialism was that it offered Britain an ‘additional empire’, while his father had celebrated ancient Rome’s imperial domination of North Africa in his writings; see Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, pp. 126–27.

³⁷ Cowan, Robert, ‘Sex and Violence: Gender in the Civil War’, in Reading Lucan’s Civil War: A Critical Guide , ed. by Roche, Paul (University of Oklahoma Press, 2021), pp. 266–81 (pp. 266–67).Google Scholar

³⁸ Cowan, ‘Sex and Violence’, p. 269. On the legal status of citizens versus enslaved people in the early Roman imperial period, see Joshel, Sandra R., Slavery in the Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 31.Google Scholar

³⁹ On the resonances of this scene both in Lucan and in Addison’s Cato, see Francesca D’Alessandro Behr, ‘Lucan’s Cato, Addison’s Cato, and the Poetics of Passion’, in Brill’s Companion to Lucan, ed. by Paolo Asso (Brill, 2011), pp. 525–45 (pp. 535–37).

⁴⁰ Cowan, ‘Sex and Violence’, pp. 268, 280.

⁴¹ Joshel, Slavery in the Roman World, pp. 9–10.

⁴² ‘Il Senato / non è più quel di pria, di schiavi è fatto / un vilissimo gregge.’

⁴³ While the two words, ‘servitù’ and ‘schiavitù’, are not quite synonymous in Italian, the Latin forms from which they derived had long been understood as basically interchangeable. For instance, the major Latin dictionary Catholicon, compiled in the late thirteenth century by a Dominican monk in Genoa, defined servitus by looking back to Rome, explaining that it was the term for what happened when conquered persons were forced to labour and ‘turned into property’ instead of being executed. I have mostly retained the distinction between the terms by translating them into their English cognates, but Metastasio likely used them as synonyms. On the etymology of these two words, including their appearance in the Catholicon, see Epstein, Steven, Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy (Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 20.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ The ancient Roman Empire enslaved people from across its vast holdings, most of whom were what we would now consider ‘white’, and they were thus differentiated from ‘Romans’ across the empire not by skin colour but by their lack of (legal) self-sovereignty; Joshel, Slavery in the Roman World, pp. 10–11.

⁴⁵ In a 1776 letter to Saverio Mattei, Metastasio mentioned living with Caloprese and studying ‘the ingenious Renato’ (Italian for René) with him; see Giuseppe Giarrizzo, ‘L’ideologia di Metastasio tra cartesianesimo e illuminismo’, in Atti dei convegni lincei 65: Convegno indetto in occasione del II centenario della morte di Metastasio (Roma, 25-27 Maggio 1983) (Accademia nazionale dei lincei, 1985), pp. 43–77 (p. 43). See also Raimondi, Ezio, ‘“Ragione” e “sensibilità” nel teatro del Metastasio’, in Sensibilità e razionalità nel Settecento, ed. by Branca, Vittore, 2 vols (Sansoni, 1969), I, pp. 249–67Google Scholar; Giovanna Gronda, Le passioni della ragione: Studi sul Settecento (Pacini, 1984); Don Neville, ‘Moral Philosophy in the Metastasian Dramas’, in ‘Crosscurrents and the Mainstream of Italian Serious Opera, 1730–1790: A Symposium, February 11-13, 1982’, Studies in Music from the University of Western Ontario 7.1–2 (1982), pp. 28–46; Sherrill, Paul M., ‘The Metastasian Da Capo Aria: Moral Philosophy, Characteristic Actions, and Dialogic Form’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University, 2016), pp. 55–70.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ In a 1718 edict, for example, Pope Clement XI advocated for works that would help one ‘learn to rein in one’s passions’; see Petrocchi, Giorgio, ‘Un melodramma romano del Metastasio’, in Orfeo in Arcadia: Studi sul teatro a Roma nel Settecento, ed. by Petrocchi, Giorgio (Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1984), pp. 39–46 (p. 22).Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Sherrill, ‘Metastasian Da Capo Aria’, pp. 59–60.

⁴⁸ Metastasio, n.t. (verses in defense of Catone), repr. in Metastasio, Tutte le opere, I, p. 1409. See also Lago, Personaggi classici secondo Metastasio, p. 28.

⁴⁹ On Metastasio’s sovereigns as demonstrating how to experience and manage the passions within a broadly Cartesian framework, see Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty, p. 273.

⁵⁰ Caesar was such a threatening figure in Addison’s play because, as Aravamudan notes, ‘Caesar’ had shifted from a ‘positive epithet for English monarchs’ in the seventeenth century to the figure of the ‘tyrannical usurper’ in the wake of the Jacobite uprisings; Tropicopolitans, p. 111.

⁵¹ ‘Taci, importuno affetto. / No, fra le cure mie luogo non hai, / se a più nobil desio servir non sai.’ Act III, scene 4.

⁵² Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality’, pp. 288–89.

⁵³ Ibid., pp. 290, 292, and passim.

⁵⁴ Wheeler, Complexion of Race, p. 56–57; Nussbaum, Felicity, ‘Between “Oriental” and “Blacks So Called,” 1688–1788’, in The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory , ed. by Carey, Daniel and Festa, Lynn (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 137–66 (p. 143)Google Scholar. On Barbary captivity in the eighteenth century, see Schwarz, Suzanne, ‘Ransoming Practices and “Barbary Coast” Slavery: Negotiations Relating to Liverpool Slave Traders in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in Ransoming, Captivity and Piracy in Africa and the Mediterranean, ed. by Lofkrantz, Jennifer and Ojo, Olatunji (Africa World Press, 2016), pp. 73–100.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Ferrara, Paul Albert, ‘Gregorio Caloprese and the Subjugation of the Body in Metastasio’s drammi per musica’, Italica, 73.1 (1996), pp. 11–23 (pp. 18–20).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁶ Note that this is different from, though of course related to, the trope of enslavement in Italian comic genres, in which racialized characters were more likely to be portrayed as such through cosmetic means and to be represented as literally enslaved. For one important reading of this racializing matrix at work in Italian comic theatre a century earlier, see Wilbourne, ‘Lo Schiavetto’.

⁵⁷ ‘Arbace, non ti sarebbe già tornato in mente che nascesti africano? […] E pure assai diverso io ti credea.’

⁵⁸ Ndiaye, Scripts of Blackness, pp. 88–98. In writing about this tradition in the French context, Ndiaye draws on Wilbourne’s analysis of Florinda in the 1612 commedia Lo Schiavetto, in which the heroine’s disguise as an enslaved African boy externalizes her ‘emotional turmoil’ by rendering her as a ‘slave to love’; see Wilbourne, ‘Lo Schiavetto’, p. 26.

⁵⁹ Matar, Nabil I., Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 6Google Scholar; Nussbaum, ‘Between “Orientals” and “Blacks So Called”’, p. 145.

⁶⁰ As Ndiaye points out in the seventeenth-century French context, ‘racial lexicons remained highly ambiguous’, with North Africans and sub-Saharan Africans often grouped together as ‘Moors’ [Mores]; Scripts of Blackness, pp. 12–13.

⁶¹ Nussbaum, ‘Between “Orientals” and “Blacks So Called”’, p. 151.

⁶² Ibid., pp. 146–47.

⁶³ On Juba’s role in Addison as representing ‘political transitivity’, with the generalized ‘African prince’s role’ in this period as ‘that of an ideological shifter’, see Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, pp. 116, 124.

⁶⁴ Brown, Laura, Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 179.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ The Juba-Oroonoko link is well established in literary studies, but see Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, pp. 121–24.

⁶⁶ Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave: A True History [1688], ed. by Joanna Lipking (Norton, 1997), p. 13.

⁶⁷ Ibid., p. 12; Nussbaum, ‘Between “Orientals” and “Blacks So Called”’, pp. 154–56.

⁶⁸ Behn may have chosen ‘Caesar’ to highlight Oroonoko’s nobility, but renaming enslaved people after famous classical figures was a then common practice of domination that played on what Aravamudan calls the ‘parodic doubleness of the Roman African’; see Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, p. 64. Note that although Addison’s Caesar was a villainous tyrant, for the royalist Behn (writing decades earlier, before the Glorious Revolution), Caesar was still a viable figure of political virtue.

⁶⁹ At the time of Southerne’s adaptation, Shakespeare’s Othello was the prime model for representing an African man on the London stage, so Southerne whitewashed Imoinda partly to evoke Desdemona. See Macdonald, Joyce Greene, ‘Race, Women, and the Sentimental in Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko ’, Criticism, 40.4 (Fall 1998), pp. 555–70Google Scholar; Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, pp. 49, 59.

⁷⁰ Brown, Fables of Modernity, pp. 180–99, esp. 181, 195.

⁷¹ Fuller, ‘Theaters of the American Revolution’, p. 132; Ellison, Cato’s Tears, p. 69.

⁷² For more details on the first setting of Catone, see Markstrom, Kurt Sven, The Operas of Leonardo Vinci, Napoletano (Pendragon, 2007), pp. 216–31.Google Scholar

⁷³ Interestingly, a year later in Venice, Catone was composed for a castrato (rather than a tenor, as in Rome), thereby pitting three famous castrati against one another: Nicolino as Catone, Domenico Gizzi as Cesare, and Farinelli as Arbace. Due to the ban on women singing in the theatre, the Roman version had had to cast castrati in the female roles of Marzia and Emilia, so a tenor Catone provided a much needed vocal contrast, but in Venice the female parts were sung by women. See Catone in Utica (Bernabò, 1728), p. 8, and Catone in Utica (Carlo Buonarigo, 1729), p. 8.

⁷⁴ Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) was still, in the eighteenth century, considered one of the four ‘canonical’ poets of Italian vernacular literature, if not the canonical poet; invoking Petrarchan tropes was a common way for writers to position themselves in that lineage, and Metastasio undoubtedly knew Petrarch’s Rime sparse (1327) backwards and forwards. On the reception of Petrarch and others in the Settecento, see Duretto, Ida, ‘“Imitare con senno ed emulare con lode”: il canone dei quattro maggiori poeti italiani’, in Con altra voce: Echi, variazioni e dissonanze nell’espressione letteraria, ed. by Bassi, Giovanni and others (Edizioni della Normale, 2022), pp. 253–64.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ Ndiaye, Scripts of Blackness, pp. 87–88, 93–94; Ndiaye, ‘Rewriting the Grand Siècle’, pp. 6–7. For the foundational argument about the racializing (and gendering) deployment of colour tropes in Petrarchan poetics, see Hall, Kim F., Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 62–123.Google Scholar

⁷⁶ Another caricature by Zanetti shows Farinelli as Arbace in the 1729 Venetian Catone, and there is no evidence of dark cosmetics in the sketch (though that is neither proof that Farinelli did not wear any, nor that Minelli would not have done so in Rome).

⁷⁷ While the metaphor of the lyric ‘I’ as a ship tossed about by stormy seas also has Petrarchan origins (e.g. Rime sparse 189), Metastasio identified Cesare with the sea itself, representing the sovereign not as an emotionally battered Petrarchan lyric subject but rather as an elemental, natural, and absolute authority over life and death.

⁷⁸ ‘Dicesette anni à già rivolto il cielo / poi che ’mprima arsi, et già mai non mi spensi; / ma quando aven ch’ al mio stato ripensi, / sento nel mezzo de le fiamme un gielo.’ Francesco Petrarch, Rime sparse 122.

⁷⁹ Greene, Roland, Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (University of Chicago Press, 1999).Google Scholar

⁸⁰ Ayesha Ramachandran, ‘Petrarch’s African Canzoniere: Lyric Anthropology and the Question of Race’ (unpublished manuscript). I offer her my deep gratitude for sharing this in-progress work with me.

⁸¹ On Virgil’s Aeneid and the early modern fantasy of laying claim to Roman imperium, see Fuchs, ‘Another Turn’, and Roach, Joseph R., Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 44–45.Google Scholar

⁸² ‘Ammiro il tuo gran cor.’

⁸³ ‘Combattuta da tante vicende, / si confonde quest’alma nel sen.’

⁸⁴ On Metastasian opera as dramatizing ‘myths of sovereignty’, see Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty, esp. pp. 226–83.

⁸⁵ Roach, Cities of the Dead, pp. 2–6 and passim.

⁸⁶ For one example from among innumerable later repetitions and variations, consider Metastasio’s other Roman republican libretto, Attilio Regolo (written between 1738 and 1740): the poet intended the characters to serve as, in Feldman’s gloss, ‘symbolic members of a Roman body politic’, with the titular sovereign as both ‘microcosm’ and ‘metonym’ for ‘Roman nationhood’; Opera and Sovereignty, p. 248.

⁸⁷ Taylor, Diana, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 28–32.Google Scholar

⁸⁸ Roach, Cities of the Dead, p. 6; Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Vintage, 1993), p. 38.

⁸⁹ For an analysis of this recurring dyad in Metastasio’s Artaserse (1730) — in which the sentimental figure is named, again, Arbace — see Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty, pp. 248–55.

⁹⁰ On the racialization of the castrato, see Serena Guarracino, ‘Voices from the South: Music, Castration, and the Displacement of the Eye’, in Anglo-Southern Relations: From Deculturation to Transculturation, ed. by Luigi Cazzato (Negroamaro, 2012), pp. 40–51; Emily Wilbourne, ‘Little Black Giovanni’s Dream: Black Authorship and the “Turks, and Dwarves, the Bad Christians” of the Medici Court’, in Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity, ed. by Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne G. Cusick (Open Book Publishers, 2021), pp. 135–66; Peritz, The Lyric Myth of Voice, pp. 109–11; Gordon, Voice Machines, esp. ch. 7, ‘On the Cusp’.

⁹¹ On the systematic temporalizing of alterity in the Enlightenment, see Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (Columbia University Press, 1983).Google Scholar