Truth and Perspective in Domenico David's "La forza della virtù"
The premier of La forza della virtù (The Power of Virtue), an opera in three acts, at Venice’s Teatro San Giovanni Crisostomo (or Grisostomo) on 29 December 1692 was met with immediate and long-lasting success, firmly establishing the reputation of its Venetian librettist Domenico David (d. 1698). It was restaged and revived numerous times, and later set by distinguished composers, deeply influencing Metastasio's first libretto, Siface (Naples 1723), among others. Apparently accompanied by “more pomp and magnificence than Venetian opera [had] provided for a long time,” (Il Corriere ordinario, 3 gennaio 1693), it is recognized as one of the first “Arcadian operas,” the significance of which becomes particularly evident through a consideration of not just its initial Venetian staging but also its subsequent production on the Bolognese stage.
Carlo Antonio Buffagnotti (1660-ca. 1715), Salone, Act III, Scene XV, after scenography by Marcantonio Chiarini (ca. 1652-1730). From Domenico David (d. 1698), La forza della virtù drama per musica da rappresentarsi nel Teatro Malvezzi l’anno m.dc.xciv... Dedicato all’Eminentissimo, e Reverendissimo Sig. Cardinale Marcello Durazzo Legato di Bologna.... Bologna, Antonio Pisarri's heirs, 1694.
Read the complete description of this copy here.
Set to music by Carlo Francesco Pollarolo (or Pollaroli), a native of Brescia, La forza della virtù was dedicated to Giovanni Carlo Grimani, patron of the opera and owner of the Teatro San Giovanni Crisostomo. Grimani and David were both members of the literary reform group known as the Accademia degli Animosi (“Academy of the Spirited”), founded by Apostolo Zeno in 1691, which held meetings at the Grimani family palazzo. Like their more famous model, the Roman Accademia degli Arcadi (known in English as the Arcadian Academy), founded in 1690, the Animosi championed a return to classical “purity” in response to the perceived corruption of Italian literature as Mannerism gave way to the ornate, exaggerated style typified by Marinism.
Vincenzo Maria Coronelli, Teatro Grimani a San Giovanni Grisostomo, 1709. Biblioteca del Civico Museo Correr (public domain). The theatre is known today as the Teatro Malibran.
Extravagance of this sort was particularly visible in opera, where convoluted, impossible plotlines and elaborate productions had significantly shifted the focus from its Florentine origins as the telling of Greek drama through music. New presentation forums were partly responsible. With the founding of Venice’s Teatro di San Cassiano—the first public opera house—in 1637, opera moved beyond the exclusive realm of the elite and became subject to commercial interests. One of the consequences of this was the development of the spectacular show, a “comical-historical-tragical-pastoral-mechanical-musical commerce" (N. Burt, “Opera in Arcadia,” The Musical Quarterly, vol. 41, 1955, pp. 149-150) which prized the marvelous and the surprising at the cost of coherence and structure.
The lavish stage machinery designed by Giacomo Torelli for Venice’s Teatro Novissimo, which opened in 1641 and which had earned Torelli the nickname of “il gran stregone” (the great sorcerer), had also made scenery and scene changes an attraction in themselves, the audience now delighting in the spectacle of their shifts, which had previously been kept hidden or reserved for between acts. A great success in Italy, Torelli went to Paris in 1645, where he further disseminated the rapidly growing trend for “machine-plays.” Such elaborate sets marked the height of Baroque theatre, which, as in painting, sought to engulf the audience into its drama by obliterating the separation between viewer and viewed.
Israel Silvestre, etching after a design by Torelli for The Wedding of Pelee and Thetis, 1654. Metropolitan Museum of Art (public domain).
Just as scenography could overwhelm, so music had been increasingly employed as the primary means for achieving affective responses, leading to a shift in the balance of words to music. Opera was originally considered a literary endeavor, rather than the musical genre it is considered today, but in these productions the recitative had to make way for the appearance of an ever-increasing number of arias. It’s no surprise then that discussion of operatic reform was in fact already under way in Venice by the second half of the 1670s, when the Teatro San Giovanni Crisostomo opened its doors. It would still only be with David’s dramma per musica that the “new” ideals of the classically inspired opera seria would finally be made manifest.
In contrast to the entertainment value of generally implausible events and timelines, abundance of arias, and distracting, over-the-top scenery and stage machines, reformers sought a return to classical simplicity through an emphasis on rationalism and verisimilitude, especially by way of credible storylines with plot advancement motivated by the characters and their interactions, rather than superfluous supernatural or contrived interferences. David’s libretto, printed in Venice by Nicolini in 1693 in 12° format, emphasizes just such reconceptualization.
Frontispiece of La forza della virtù, Venice, Nicolini, 1693.
In his preface, David emphasized his intent to produce more than simply the sort of entertainment audiences had come to expect, and to work instead toward “a purification of human morals” in accordance with the aims of tragedy. To this end he drew from history—specifically from an account of Rodrigo, the virtuous last king of the Visigoths. David’s resultant narrative is a story of impassioned souls and centers on the virtuous Clotilde who faces much hardship and indignity following her arrival to Toledo where she is intended to marry King Fernando of Castille. In vast contrast to the elaborate confusions of Baroque productions, David is decidedly clear about the characters and their motivations, the need for formal decorum, and the allegorical nature of the work as an investigation into passions in the face of reason. With its ethical dimension securely folded into the tragic form rid of external adulteration (as with the incorporation of other generic conventions), he thus underlined the literary value—the readability—of his libretto. The text itself is notably unillustrated, but the frontispiece includes a depiction of an audience in Roman-inspired dress, pointing to the legacy the Venetian aimed to revive and continue.
The Animosi became a local branch of the Arcadian Academy in 1698, the year of David’s death, but his significance to the reform was highlighted in La Bellezza della Volgar Poesia written by the leader of the Roman Arcadia, Giovanni Maria Crescimbeni and published in 1700:
It seems at present as if Italy is beginning to open her eyes, and to recognize the uselessness which comes from having abandoned her old traditions. Although she still has not reclaimed true comedy, nonetheless, choosing the lesser of two evils, she has corrected many manifestations of that monstrous mixing of character types practiced till now, managing at least to establish entirely serious libretti like those used today in the theaters of Venice, which do not use comic characters and which, by diminishing the excessive number of arias, allow some opportunity in the recitatives for the affetti. In this enterprise our fellow Arcadians the late Domenico David and the most learned Apostolo Zeno have been prime movers; and, therefore, the honor of the achievement is principally theirs. (G. M. Crescimbeni, La bellezza della volgar poesia, Rome, Gio. Francesco Buagni, 1700, pp. 106-108)
If the first staging of La forza della virtù helped usher in a new era of reform libretti, the opera’s second staging, at the Teatro Malvezzi in Bologna the following year, still more decisively altered the way audience members engaged with the performance as it unfolded before them.
The key innovation is in the form of a perspectival shift, captured in the rare first illustrated edition of the libretto presented here. Published on the occasion of this second Bolognese staging, it is dedicated to Cardinal Marcello Durazzo (1633-1710) and set to music by Giacomo Antonio Perti (1661-1756), whose name is not mentioned in the work.
Domenico David (d. 1698), La forza della virtù drama per musica da rappresentarsi nel Teatro Malvezzi l’anno m.dc.xciv... Dedicato all’Eminentissimo, e Reverendissimo Sig. Cardinale Marcello Durazzo Legato di Bologna.... Bologna, Antonio Pisarri's heirs, 1694.
Read the complete description of this copy here.
This edition is enriched with twelve splendid plates illustrating the different stage scenes of the 1694 production engraved by the artist and printmaker Carlo Antonio Buffagnotti (1660-ca. 1715) after scenography by the renowned Bolognese artist, architect, and scenographer Marcantonio Chiarini (ca. 1652-1730). Chiarini had trained with Francesco Quaino and Domenico Santi, under whom Buffagnotti had trained as well, and was particularly active in Bologna and Milan as a quadratura specialist and creator of festival decorations and apparatuses.
In the 1680s Buffagnotti had produced print suites of architecture designed by Santi or of his own invention. An accomplished cellist, he also produced print sets of instrumental music. In 1694 and 1695 he etched two suites of prints after Chiarini's scenography, one for the present drama and one for the Nerone fatto Cesare, an opera by Matteo Noris and Giacomo Antonio Perti staged in Bologna in 1695. In fact, Nerone fatto Cesare was originally staged in Venice, where it opened at the Teatro San Salvatore just two days before La forza, and the sumptuousness of the scenery in both productions was well noted, making it a particular shame that the printed libretti are unillustrated.
By contrast, the plates included in this illustrated edition have a great story to tell, for they include the first documented use of scena per angolo, or multipoint perspective, in scenographic history. This is a major innovation in seventeenth-century stage design that has generally been misattributed to Francesco Bibiena, owing to the latter’s coinage of the term “scena per angolo” and his further development of the concept with regard to stage sets in publications appearing in the early 1700s. The concept of two-point perspective itself, however, was first diagrammed by Jean Pélérin (aka Viator) in his De Artificiali perspectiva (1505), the first printed treatise on perspective.
Diagram from Jean Pélérin, De Artificiali perspectiva… Paris, Toul, P. Jacques, 1505.
As opposed to one-point perspective, which entails objects receding in height toward a single vanishing point, multipoint perspective involves multiple vanishing points and is necessary to render objects that are presented at an oblique angle to the viewer. Its use is evident, for the first time in stage design, in the prison scene at the start of Act III of David’s La forza della virtù, where and when Clotilde faces imminent forced suicide before ultimately melting the stony heart of King Fernando.
Compared to the one-point perspective typical of scenery before this, the difference is clear. Chiarini’s set would have allowed for a much more complex rendering of space, and thus a different order of experience for the audience. No longer was the stage set an extension of the auditorium: now a separate world is created, one that continues in multiple directions and enlists the imagination of the viewer as they contemplate the distant environs.
The idea of perspective is important to the internal coherence of the opera as well as its ethical aims, as David was careful to show how each character’s actions are logically motivated by their particular viewpoints, a departure from earlier Venetian opera. As Ayana O. Smith points out, it is through the layering of these perspectives that David is able to achieve Arcadian verisimilitude, the layering functioning as an “important vehicle[] for transmitting ‘truth’ to the seventeenth-century audience.” (A. O. Smith, Dreaming with Open Eyes, Oakland, 2018, pp. 174-176) The prison in Act III provides the scenic context for the climax of the narrative action, as truth and perspective come to a head. Clotilde seems on the verge of death, and a series of events unfold that would only seem to bring her closer to this fate. She is saved only by Fernando’s change of perspective, brought about when he realizes the depths of his blindness in the face of her true virtue.
To emphasize the significance of perspective in La forza, Smith points to the frontispiece of the 1693 libretto, finding a “metatheatrical” statement in its presentation of multiple viewing frames, since we, the reader, see the action on stage and through the action to the audience beyond, seeing them looking back at the narrative unfolding on stage and again through that narrative back at us. With Chiarini’s scena per angolo, this metatheatrical commentary gains, literally, a new platform.
For perhaps the most important issue raised by the new technique is its suggestion of the decreasing status of the king or prince. Until this time, court etiquette held that perspective should be rendered so as to perfectly align with the royal box placed directly in front of the stage. This meant that from that royal viewpoint, the scenic rendering created an ideal perspectival image, but as one moved away from this vantage point, the perspective would be increasingly skewed. Two-point perspective, by contrast, allowed for a more realistic portrayal of space across the great variety of audience viewpoints. A comparable shift has been observed in the marked perspectival play in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, 1656, which decenters the king and queen in favour of placing the viewer in the central space.
Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656. Oil on canvas. Museo del Prado in Madrid (public domain).
The significance of the new scenographic device of scena per angolo therefore cannot be overstated, as it ultimately created a much broader field for engaging with opera while providing audience members a greater sense of subjectivity in that engagement.
This shift aligns with the Arcadian Academy’s democratic basis. Though admittance requirements were stringent, the Academy was open to men and women alike, and members assumed pastoral pseudonyms (David’s Animosi pseudonym was Osiro Cedreatico) as a way to mask social standings. To be sure, one-point perspective and its elitest allegiances still remained in use, and as the “new” perspective was further developed by the Bibiena it carried little of this “democratizing” sentiment, their work generally catering to aristocratic patrons. But in 1694, in the dawn of the Age of Reason (notably published by Thomas Paine that same year) the perspective evident in the Bologna staging of La forza della virtù undoubtedly heralded the values of truth and reason of the century to come.
References
Frati, 8208; Gaspari V, 396; Gregory-Sonneck, p. 526; Grove Dictionary of Opera I, p. 1086; Sartori, Libretti italiani a stampa, 10875; Schatz 7948; Philobiblon, One Thousand Years of Bibliophily, no. 218; N. Burt, “Opera in Arcadia,” The Musical Quarterly, vol. 41 (1955): 154-155; R. Freeman, “Apostolo Zeno's Reform of the Libretto,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 21, no. 3 (autumn 1968), pp. 321-341, p. 325; A. O. Smith, Dreaming with Open Eyes: Opera, Aesthetics, and Perception in Arcadian Rome, Berkeley, 2019.
How to cite this information
Julia Stimac, “Truth and Perspective in David's 'La forza della virtù',” PRPH Books, 27 October 2021, https://www.prphbooks.com/blog/forza. Accessed [date].This post is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.