Enlightened Sirens: Naples and Music
1.
Opera arrived in Naples twice, first among the contortions of myth and then in an unlikely twist of history. The myth is an extravagantly famous one about someone who survives hearing some singing that should destroy him.
Homer barely describes the Sirens, but their high voices float all the more forcefully out of the Odyssey as a result. The heaps of bones surrounding them on their island are described, but Odysseus has been told what to do to avoid being pulled by their singing to shipwreck and destruction. So he fills the ears of his oarsmen with beeswax, a material that echoes the honey of the voices that it must exclude, and he gets them to bind him to the mast so that he can listen and yet voyage onwards. No one had ever done so, and no one was meant to do so. We are invited to imagine his cries to be released, so that he could shatter himself in the ecstasy of listening, mingling with the singing of the Sirens. The beeswax was there to keep this out, too. Homer’s poem follows the Greek hero to his next adventures, of course, so it is elsewhere that we learn that the singers were so appalled by his escape that they drowned themselves in the Tyrrhenian Sea. You could call this an atonement for their failure, or conclude that they somehow sacrificed themselves so that Odysseus could survive. One of their corpses washed ashore in what would become the bay of Naples, and her name, Parthenope, was originally given to this city that would become the capital of the singing voice, and of the liquid pull of opera.
Its second arrival waited for modern history. We find the latter starting as it meant to go on, in a mood of fragility, doubt, and bravado. The year is 1650 and the great, sad, violent empire of the Spanish Habsburgs has spent the last three decades throwing enough conflict across Europe, not without help from others, to persuade later historians to invent something called the Thirty Years War; and now, as is the habit of empires, it needs funds. Naples, a seething port with a grand past and a vast population that makes it heave with both wealth and poverty, is one of the oddest and most constitutionally anomalous points within the whole frenzied tapestry that made up Habsburg power. Genoese bankers, Spanish politicians, and Calabrian landowners mix there with hyperactive teams of builders and rivalrous religious orders, and with phalanxes of entrepreneurs on every scale, from ambitious maritime speculators to the most scabrous smugglers. Modern cities are places of layers and knots and tangles, and Naples grasped and was hit by modernity early. The more deliriously modern cities become, the more raw and unresolved the voices with which the past speaks in them are forced or allowed to be.
Naples loved spectacle, and three years earlier a sharply charismatic fisherman and smuggler in his early twenties known as Masaniello had exploited a day of public festivities and war games to turn what had been tremors of inchoate discontent at Spanish taxes into an outright revolt. One especially unpopular tax targeted fruit; a contemporary chronicle reports with dry outrage that it extended to lupins and both red and white mulberries. The Habsburg Viceroy was forced to hole up with a rump of troops in the Castel Nuovo with its access to the sea, and this insurgent conducted the city’s affairs from the door of his meager house, wearing his tattered fishing clothes. His uprising was energetic but its aims were opaque and improvisatory, and it proliferated confusing protagonists, such as the radical and brilliant priest and lawyer Gennaro Genoino, who was a longstanding agitator against Spain, or the rather tremulous current incarnation of the Duc de Guise, who came adventuring down carrying suggestions of French help and dreams of a kingdom of his own.
At one point something called a republican monarchy was declared, as if all that these rebels could do was to throw words into the void that they were uncovering at the heart of power. After Spanish rule had grindingly reasserted itself, the Viceroy knew that this void called for some new version of spectacle, whether to articulate it or to cover it up. Opera had been surging forwards in Italy during the recent strife because of the mixtures of festive splendor with vivid uncertainty that make up its very substance, and so it was to opera’s new-fangled and acute glamour that he turned. A wheeling producer from the Veneto called Curzio Manara was available to bring a troupe, partly because not long before he had been forced out of a similar undertaking in Paris, under suspicion of passing on sensitive city plans to the French.
Thus did a Neapolitan fisherman conspire with continental unrest to set going the processes that would eventually bring something called classical music to creation. And so, in 1650, Naples staged its first opera, Francesco Cavalli’s La Didone. The piece tells its story with a ragged opulence that must have matched the mood in the hectically festooned pavilion in the Viceroy’s palace where it was put on, as the Carthaginian queen Dido takes in and is betrayed by the refugee Trojan hero Aeneas, whose vast destiny of founding Rome precludes her. Reports from Neapolitan newspapers tellingly shift its title to emphasize the sack of the city of Troy, which only begins the narrative; its own recent fits of violence and instability must have made the city’s first operagoers feel as if political reality itself was singing within Cavalli’s music, and much of his most torrid expressiveness does indeed come as the opening act tears nimbly through Troy’s destruction. Ecuba and Cassandra sing with mixtures of excruciating plaintiveness and dire moral menace that preempt, at least as much as they prefigure, the later laments of Dido herself as the future of the world leaves her behind.
Lament thus pervades Cavalli’s opera, but it suddenly departs just where Dido’s story should bring it to its height. While Aeneas finally steers away towards Italy like Odysseus slipping away from the Sirens, her voice has begun gathering together all the opera’s vistas of loss when the tale twists. A local king called Iarbas has been providing dramatic complexity and vocal variety by rivalling Aeneas’ claim on Dido’s heart, and he bursts on stage to turn her imminent suicide into the lieto fine, the happy ending, to which opera seria would often seem wedded. Still, innumerable later settings of her story in Naples across the eighteenth century would prove sonorously sure that they should end with her suffering. But right at the wobbly start of Neapolitan opera, we find this odd clue to what would keep making vocal style there so fluid, dynamic, and restless: the great collision at the heart of the local form. Drives of lament and all the violence and wounds of history collide within the city’s music with comedy, pleasure, and the delirium of form as it keeps limiting and freeing itself.
One argument of this essay is that opera was ultimately a less important musical phenomenon than the aria itself. The claim is complicated, though, because the coming of opera with all its quantities of prestige, investment, and collaboration, all its heightenings of desire and pleasure, did pump new, richly unsteady momentum into the already vibrant world of Neapolitan vocal music across the second half of the eighteenth century. Venice was the undisputed champion, around 1650, of opera in Italy and so across Europe. La Didone is indeed almost exaggeratedly exemplary of the aspect of ambitious seventeenth-century opera that the coming of the new versions of Neapolitan vocal style would overturn, because recitative passages feature so much of its most wrenching, probing music. In Naples the aria became the wings, the flesh, the very psyche of opera, and one consequence of this was the teeming density of interaction between operas and all the other versions of vocal music that arias sing in.
As Europe went about seeking an enlightened entrance into modern history, it was Naples’ version of vocal style that became the crucial artistic vector and analysis of the culture’s minds and bodies, and it did so by concentrating with spiraling relentlessness and finesse on defining and extending how arias worked. Because change and dispute and divergency made up so much of the city’s political and civic substance, it needed an artistic form capable of great flexibility and nimbleness, one filled at once with a teeming simplicity and a sort of tough abundance. It would turn out in fact that arias can only get defined by being extended, because nothing in the world of the aria has any inside except by expanding vociferously outwards. The name of the composer who did most to achieve all this was Alessandro Scarlatti, and the da capo aria, the one that starts again from its beginning and to our ears sounds like a hoary cliché, was the form that he turned into the crucial stylistic driver of the movement to modernize music.
The Scarlattis were a powerful musical clan from Sicily, but the vast reputation that brought Alessandro Scarlatti as a very young man to Naples was made in Rome, where he was the prodigious favorite of that splendid and difficult exile from the wreckage of the Thirty Years War, Christina, the former queen of Sweden. He was just eighteen when he composed the first of his crowds of operas, and Gli Equivoci nel Sembiante repaid the confidence that this exotic tyro evidently inspired in himself as well as others, becoming such a heady success when it was first privately performed in the winter early in 1679 that Christina briskly arranged for it to be put on again for a larger audience. She also immediately made Scarlatti her maestro di cappella despite not having a chapel or anything much else for him to be master of, and a small riot ensued at the opera’s second venue among those pushing to get in. The buzz of controversy continued as more of the city’s movers wanted to see the thing; no one wanted to miss out, so it continued to be performed despite the tendrils of the Pope’s official desire to suppress opera. Bologna’s hunger for aesthetic novelty meant that later that same year it became the first of many cities, around Italy and up to Vienna, to put the opera on. As early as 1680 the work hit Naples, trailing glamorous combinations of prestige and scandal.
Gli Equivoci nel Sembiante is indeed a deliciously unnerving work in its compounds of formulaic efficiency and raking, torrid, creative willfulness. The cascades of excitement that it set off among the day’s cultural grandees are oddly, loopily mirrored in the congested mirrors and loops of desire that its drama sets out. Yet Another Comedy of Even More Errors would be one title for it in English, though the Italian gleams with the suggestive idea that resemblance itself is what is confusing. So two eventual pairs of lovers find themselves driven through a gyrating machinery of misapprehensions and mishaps, their moods and interactions spiraling with such crackling speed and density that the pastoral backdrop feels at points like a sort of hothouse for expressive fervor. At other stages, it starts to feel like the sort of wasteland that such fervor leaves behind; the compounds of giddiness and obsession that make up the inner life of expression in modern culture all the way through to Breton’s surrealism are already present as Scarlatti’s career ignites.
Almost grim in the relentlessness with which it pulls these characters through desire, confusion, and reconciliation, the little opera triumphs because of the stunning stylistic variety with which Scarlatti both offsets and exploits its conventionality. The arias are generally far from the da capo shapes that he would soon start specializing in, and they sometimes nearly choke on everything that he has started asking them to do. Scarlatti’s music languishes and then snarls, and then swaggers into abrasive little bursts of harmonic wit, leaping between moods with a rapidity that keeps threatening to turn cursory. At the same time, though, the recitative passages that carry the actual narrative developments in Baroque opera are still far more prominent and distinctive here than they would remain. But all this is of course the point. As it presses its own forms and rhythms and timbres for their every momentary juice of expressive color and purpose, the opera becomes a sort of manifesto for the world of arias that was looming.
Naples became the place for Scarlatti to expand in because it was large but inchoate, because it was swarmingly copious and various, because it was uncertainly suspended between drives of civilizational uplift and a sort of sheer agglomerative mayhem. It was, in other words, a place markedly like this brilliant, driven, convulsive young man who was now spinning with both worldly success and cultural afflatus. Opera in Baroque Rome was too institutionally embattled and commercially stifled, while other centers offered less room to maneuver than this overpopulated city with its complex governmental structure and its notorious diversity of festive occasions and institutional bodies. The field of action in Naples was remarkably free and abuzz with potential a few decades after opera had been thrown into its extravagant mix of musical and theatrical traditions, and Scarlatti travelled there with an operatic troupe himself in 1683 at a happy moment. Early in 1684 the viceregal maestro di cappella died after only a handful of years in position, and the young man was there on the spot, with his mixture of energetic freshness, expansive reputation, and Roman authority and sleekness.
Viceroys in Naples acted fast when it came to music. Within days Scarlatti got the job, in a hurry that reflects the keenness on some parts to grab him, but also the amounts of distrust that needed bypassing. The hugely talented, hugely spiky figure of the composer Francesco Provenzale was the local favorite, and he had been holding grudges already since being passed over for the post those few years earlier. At the same time Scarlatti’s sister had thrown herself into show business in Naples alongside him, and lurid rumors surrounded her from the start that were both viciously misogynistic and probably fairly well-founded. But then for Scarlatti Naples was always a dazzling problem, a mutating provocation that made him become a master of fluency and flexibility. Constant tensions between the Viceroy’s court and the city’s ecclesiastical leadership typified the political multifariousness that reigned in the place, and would have made themselves felt for someone with his job in the most intimate details of style, of his moment by moment compositional choices.
One of his first major pieces in his new position in Naples was the Passio Secundum Johannem, which he composed in 1685 as a setting of the Easter story, and it is almost vehement in its insistence on the adaptability of his style for such purposes. He deploys his feel for melodic charm in riveting bursts and touches to point up the largely austere sound world; elsewhere, sweeps of harmonic openness spread a keening pathos over crucial but crucially brief passages. The listening priests may have felt reassured by the combinations of tense spiritual pathos with angular stylistic vim, or they may have felt upbraided. Versatility and metamorphosis would be vital to everything that Scarlatti bequeathed to music and so to modern culture. But his versions of them would feed on how endlessly he was also committed to analysis and simplification, and a certain stately curtness.
2.
Inventing the da capo aria is no longer, thankfully, the sort of achievement that music histories tend to confer on someone like Scarlatti merely because he composed so many fine ones that they have survived in teeming numbers. His oeuvre even so has been preserved too patchily and performed far too sporadically for accounts of his development to be very confident, and it was surrounded by misty, colorful seas of vocal music that it now offers us slippery and prismatic ways of listening in on. Using an artistic form strongly enough makes a paradigm of it — and then that paradigm gets cast back onto the blanks of the past and interpreted as a matter of invention. As Scarlatti took up his career in Naples, the da capo aria was probably already turning itself slowly but fiercely into the chief shape available for vocal music. The composer died in 1725, just as the era of the great poet and librettist Pietro Metastasio began to gel, based as it was on an often extremely rigorous alternation of da capo arias with sparsely set recitative passages. Did Scarlatti do more than anyone to make this happen? No one did more to show what the da capo aria could do, to interpret the potential statements within this avid little vessel about what language, expression, and action were becoming.
The da capo term is a simple one, and the shape that it names can sound more like a sort of show-business ruse than like one of the technically rigorous forms that Scarlatti’s epoch of fugues and courtly dances exalted. A da capo aria is simply one that at a certain point starts again from the beginning; it tells its performers to go back to the head or to take it from the top. But no one wanted arias that looped on endlessly, so the idea was not to sing again everything that had come before the da capo instruction, but just to repeat the first of two increasingly rigorously distinct initial sections. Overall the result was thus a ternary form in which the third section repeated the first, and the second was left as a sort of floating pivot that was at once enclosed and richly undefined. The geometry is all the more pliable, expansive, and even rampant for having such basic foundations. One of the stylistic and indeed existential phenomena that the da capo aria keeps under constant, fluid examination is repetition itself. Not even repetition is ever the same thing twice, after all, and a form based on repeating and reversing is an ideal means by which a social world beset by change and obsessed with innovation can try to keep track of itself.
The genius of the da capo aria is to find in this single formal gesture routes to both definition and multiplicity. At the heart of the form was the demand that the repeated section be sung with extensive, often voluble extra layers of decoration and flourish. It is a perpetually weird and thrilling moment: right at the point when the aria has said the two things that it has to say, the thing that everyone has really been waiting for unleashes itself and the singing voice pours out its abundance. Composing vocal music was less a matter of telling the voice what to do than giving it a pliant, suggestive batch of materials to go to work on. Scarlatti’s acute analytical mind must have found this a perpetually equivocal process, one that hands over the keys to arias to their singers and lets them decide whether expressive elucidation or gorgeous obliteration should prevail. Descartes himself had been Christina’s crucial favorite earlier in her hungry cultural progress, and it seems clear that the composer either shared or had taken on some geometrical passion for clarity and the identification of a thing’s essential engines. The da capo aria is the point in the emergence of modern Europe where Descartes and show business meet and conjoin, as singing digs deep into the essence of its resources and turns them into panache and impact.
Is the point of art to discover essence and bedrock, or do we want change and flux and new vistas? Scarlatti had arrived in Naples as a very young man who was both a vastly admired phenomenon and a much distrusted outsider; he had to be zanily productive both to keep the status and to maintain the sheer momentum of his artistic growth, and his every move was sharply scrutinized. Naples itself becomes a sort of constant, noisy, plangent collaborator in these arias as they go on opening themselves to their singers’ voices and the hungry ears of their listeners. Whenever a da capo aria returns to its beginning, the composer’s notes let their authority flow out into the performer’s decisions, the passions and powers of the performative moment that streams between a voice and an audience within the heady or gaudy or stifling atmosphere of this or that dramatic occasion. The aria loops backwards and pulls the character and the singer alike ever further into its present tense of expression, but then reveals deep within itself the audience’s teeming pleasures and demands. Because its machinery of reiteration can so easily seem formulaic but is in fact so filled with potential, the da capo aria offers itself as a state of endless exposure to the judgments of tiers and worlds of others.
Urban life itself is thus in a way the major driver of Neapolitan vocal music, the great song within all its shapes and ecstasies. The city grew and grew through the seventeenth century as a result of deliberate policies and the lure of imperial wealth, but also because controls were lax and the levers of policy slippery and haphazard, and because imperial economics had brought atrophy to the surrounding regions. Scarlatti arrived right during the pivotal passages when this seething, uncertain place began to assert its distinctive claims and logics, began indeed to try to grasp its own breaks with the past and its need to make its own present. Roiling debates about the nature of newness itself and the relationship between ancient and modern styles of art and learning characterized the early enlightenment years across Europe, and in Naples during the 1680s they reached a distinctive pitch.
Giuseppe Valletta was the great businessman, lawyer, and bibliophile who gave crucial direction to the city’s burgeoning enlightenment scene by making his vast and impressively radical library available to arrays of readers and thinkers. He was a promoter of Epicureanism at a time when its strains of atomistic materialism were controversial to the point of danger, and he pushed the new scientific theories that were both promising and threatening a changed world, as they threw their innovations up into the decreasingly heavenly spheres and down into the workings of everyone’s flesh. The hectic flash of presentness itself as incarnated in his rapid, heady brushstrokes was the great Luca Giordano’s constant subject and draw as he became decisive amongst the city’s painters; his sobriquet was “fa presto” because of how fast he worked. As Naples finally pulled its visual culture free of Caravaggio’s shocking impact there early in the seventeenth century, Francesco Solimena became the city’s next great painter, and his work has qualities of intellectual thrust and scrupulous vim that partly explain how he became Scarlatti’s close ally and almost married his daughter.
Naples itself could have been called an Accademia degli Investiganti, the name that belonged to the tangled gang of Cartesians and reformers and sceptics gathered around Valletta. Within music itself, the place was charged with performative life craving compositional shape. Carlo Cailò was establishing a piquant local version of the widely accelerating styles of solo violin playing, setting up symbioses between the instrument and the city’s vocal traditions that would bear complex fruit with Tartini decades later. Matteo Sassano, known as Matteuccio, was by 1690 establishing himself as a vital early megastar in the city’s great, weird, and notorious line of castrato singers. The flesh of the likes of Matteuccio or “the nightingale of Naples,” carried especially livid reminders of how much performance meant in this world: Losing so much makes someone need to be special, and want to use the intensity of the present tense to chase the past from sight. But then the century’s last decade saw the arrival and the graduation in law of Pietro Giannone, the pioneer of secular historiography who by the early 1720s embodied the city’s drives of change and consciousness ever more fractiously, and whose destiny of flight and imprisonment rancidly darkened the enlightenment in Naples. The power of Scarlatti’s vocal style comes not from any simply glamorous opening up of performance and delight, but from fusing such energies with taut and angular sorts of shapeliness, scrutiny, and restraint. It is this fusion that makes him the great pivot, far more influential at least in the short term than those anomalous monsters of drastic technique and pulverizing brio Bach and Handel, between the innovations in musical modernity brought by Monteverdi around 1600 and their culmination towards and around 1800 in Vienna.
The composer and violinist Gian Carlo Cailò arrived in Naples from Rome at around the same time as Scarlatti, and may well have gone as part of his circle. Sassano’s deep and enduring connections with Scarlatti are vastly attested, but only amount to one vista onto the blaze of links, collaborations, affiliations, inheritances, rivalries, and disputes that drove Neapolitan music rapidly forwards as the turn of the century approached. During these decades the city’s famed systems of musical pedagogy began to reach full acceleration, involving not just its seethingly energetic conservatories but drives towards whole new educational methods based in repetitious drilling and the simplification of compositional units. Urbanization and music were pretty much the same thing in Naples, and Scarlatti’s place at the peak of the city’s central musical hierarchy only exposed him to how voraciously other versions of authority and power were proliferating. The noble classes were squeezed between the centralizing pulls of Spanish rule and the city’s dense forests of civic governance, but shinily expensive musical entertainments were forums that they could excel in. In Naples, religion and the throng of urban life flowed together turbulently like two seas on top of each other, as the church gorged on the zeal of local cults and the excitements of festive cycles — and all this needed musical expression, too. Splintering religious meaning and practices filled the city with rivalrous churches or pushy fraternities keen to commission their own masterpieces of sacred uplift. The crisply bountiful Stabat Mater drawn from Scarlatti by one such commission was the precedent for the imperishable setting by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi a handful of decades later, which would become the flagship for Neapolitan vocal style in the twentieth century. Proliferation and simplification were indeed the artistic drives that Scarlatti wielded in answer to the churning commissions, requests, and opportunities thrown his way; proliferation and simplification are the da capo aria’s deep vectors.
It must have sometimes felt like being a city himself. Scarlatti seems to have combined imperiousness and charm in his character as well as his music; a kick of excitement and prestige tends to surround his name when contemporaries mention him, however patchily. But he needed a vehicle as nimble and steely as the da capo aria to negotiate the sheer ferocity with which he was being asked to absorb and to manipulate a vast and mutating cultural world. He sets high spiritual meditations and great Biblical stories, poignant or prim pastoral verses and mighty or obscure passages from ancient or medieval history, severe set pieces of tragic pathos or cleverly caustic blasts of satire. His oratorios on Scriptural stories may have more weaving narrative dash than any of his operas, and among the latter his comic intermezzos have a stunningly sturdy waggishness. But Scarlatti’s most fully achieved body of work may well be his musical monologues — dramatic or chamber cantatas, shorter pieces often full of fragile intellectual verve as they typically alternate a couple of arias with recitative passages, and designed for one singer to perform privately with very limited accompaniment. Their introverted dramas and rarified audiences encourage artistic ambitions that are almost esoterically strenuous, as their recitativi pour speech rhythms and states of high psychic tension down through often extravagantly open musical textures. Paradoxically, the tense expressive momentum that thus feeds into the arias themselves lets Scarlatti turn them into a sort of cumulative laboratory for his love of compression and coolly shaped wit. His chamber cantatas become a massive, ongoing experiment not just in the inner structures by which arias function, but in the shifting and volatile levels of mobility and autonomy with which they do and do not belong to their surrounding works.
One such aria has proved so adventitiously detachable that it has ended up existing as a freestanding little masterpiece, either severed from a cantata or possibly composed in quirky isolation in the first place. It is known as “Sconsolato rusignolo,” from the disconsolate nightingale that its first line addresses, and the neatly silvery sort of soprano voice which suggests that the nightingale of Naples himself may have been the intended singer. But the key word in the first of the aria’s two tercets, and hence the centerpiece of the decorations when that tercet is repeated, is the injunction “rispondi,” “respond,” with which the singer implores the bird to make its song into an iteration of his own. Distinctive scoring deepens the aria’s enigmas and its exquisite sonorousness alike; Scarlatti gives what was already an expanded accompanimental group of instruments a final kick of almost excessively sweet piquancy by adding a very independent part for an instrument that he labels a flautino, and that was probably an especially high recorder. Scarlatti loved playfully literal types of descriptive instrumental writing, and of course this obbligato part is there to draw the nightingale right into the aria’s notes. But who is responding to what here, really? The fiction of address set up by the text is deliciously collapsed in advance by giving the nightingale an instrumental voice that makes it playfully integral to the aria’s musical machinery from the outset. By the point of the da capo section and the singer’s even more expansive pleas for an avian response, it has become an aria with no outside, one that has pulled its own drama inward into how giddily and yet rigorously the music explores and answers itself. Sparse but sturdy sorts of archness and wit bespray the violin writing too, and across the aria overall a certain twitching playfulness emerges from within the poignancy, turning it lustrous.
Across the whole high period of Neapolitan vocal style, zeniths of expression are indeed things that undo or contradict themselves. Richly expressed pains and losses yield pleasure and release, thereby turning themselves into triumphs. Joy and reconciliation reveal again and again their inner loads of fragility and pathos. It is one reason why the famous Affektenlehre or theory of the affects that was so influential then (and remains a favorite recourse for music historians) is mainly unhelpful: the da capo aria is indeed a machine for squeezing the juices out of any given emotion, but it is also a microscope ratcheted up to reveal teeming levels of diversity and ambiguity within every drop of each juice. The two high vowel sounds that surround the lower central one in the word rispondi turn it in this aria into a skittish little effigy of the da capo shape itself, and the decorations that the aria suggests are similarly diagrammatic matters of shifting pitches and intervallic stretches, rather than the sort of engorged melismatic runs that Neapolitan vocal music would increasingly specialize in.
Scarlatti’s background in Christina’s Rome had suffused his youth in the Arcadian ethos that would define the modernizing sides of Italian literature well into the eighteenth century, and reverence for Descartes was indeed compatible to the point of symbiosis with the urges towards order and refinement that powered the Arcadian movement, which set out to rid Italian poetry of its Baroque flamboyance and adopt a more classical and pastoral simplicity of taste. Pastoral itself becomes Cartesian in an aria such as this one, as sheer intensity of artifice exhibits its own structures with a frenzy so polished that it comes across as calmness itself, and a wit so lucid that it can claim those structures as facts of the natural world. The aria can be fairly securely dated to early 1701. Right at the beginning of the eighteenth century, delight itself had to be fierce.
3.
The arc of European history across that century was driven by a sort of frenzy within sovereignty itself, one that led to the flash of the guillotine. Among Neapolitan wags the running joke around its start was to ask whether justice would be done tomorrow. Would the next day bring the widely expected upheavals that would cast judgment on the city and its affairs, and finally reveal where its future led? But the question was also a playfully practical one of whether the chaotic, splintering legal system could function at all for another day. The death of Charles II of Spain in 1700 with no obvious successor laid bare Naples’ pervasive, multifarious uncertainty about who it wanted to belong to or where legitimacy lay or how coherent its constitution was. It took a while for the question of the Spanish succession to swell fully into the jerky, tenebrous war that scrambled territorial holdings across the continent.
Amid swarms of more or less edible smaller players, the Habsburgs and the Bourbons were the grand predators whose vast proclamations of righteous supremacy were matched by the endless, malicious opportunism of their maneuvers. Swagger and panic made up the inner life of their political visions, and they can be heard across much of the period’s music, as the vocal lines of the arias that its regimes loved continue simultaneously to gleam with formal verve and to cascade with often raucous nervous charge. Matteo Sassano himself had been summoned to the Spanish court to see if his singing could assuage the crippling gloom of the emperor’s last years, in a twist that could have been designed to allegorize the tight relationships between high vocal style and the debility of power. Sassano’s greatest successor amongst Neapolitan castratos replicated the allegory a few decades later when the imperious Farinelli went there to sing to another sad monarch. In fact Farinelli became a real political player at the court, as well as an ally of none other than Alessandro’s son Domenico Scarlatti.
Rumors surrounding Charles’ decline and what would follow his death had for years suffused civic life in Naples, endowing the city with the type of cryptic energy that is inseparable from ricocheting doubt. His demise operated like a sort of slow spasm releasing political confusion into the place from long before and until long after the little physical event itself, and seemingly issuing to about equal degrees in mordancy, doomsaying, and plots. The Macchia conspiracy of 1701 to decouple the Neapolitan monarchy from Spain in favor of the Austrian branch of the swaying Habsburg tree must have been lengthily premeditated, to judge by how quickly it got going after Charles’ death. Named after one of the grand but ill-fated aristocrats behind the attempt, the plot dissipated quickly too. It was the lack of hard military backing that doomed it, and the coming of outright war eventually doomed the Spanish themselves, so that by the middle of the 1710s the city’s viceroys were indeed being sent from Vienna. But the transfer of sovereignty only slowly became official, and power in Naples continued to be frayed by the knowledge of its own unsteadiness and fungibility, and by the split allegiances and fallback plans cultivated by any number of its sharper citizens.
Since the Austrian regime only lasted until 1734, when a fairly small Bourbon invasion finally dispatched it, it is important to remember that the political atmosphere of these years was filled with a tenuousness so complex and enfolded as to support plenty of fantasies and indeed fears of durability. It is often noted that early eighteenth-century opera was enmeshed with state power, but less often how rife with such fantasies and fears such power typically was, how giddy with the excitement and bravado of its own improvisatory innovativeness. During these drifting, treacherous crises, Naples was a sea of disparate buildings and jerky projects that did not so much give the lie to Baroque fantasies of the muscular choreography of urban power as reveal their teetering restlessness.
Composers and musicians felt all this with special nervous, and indeed financial, directness because their lives were at once hemmed in and explosively driven by high political affairs. In Naples the commissioning classes were diverse, insecure, and rivalrous, and its music made its styles as much out of these forces as out of the same classes’ drives of aggrandizement and pleasure. The basic terms of engagement changed so often and so vastly that musical stardom must have felt like a special sort of vulnerability. So in 1701 this place that was becoming the pumping heart of European vocal music got an edict briefly banning singing altogether from the stage! Scarlatti and his collaborators devised an outrageously crude workaround whereby puppets enacted the visible drama while behind the scenes the singers carried on.
Understandably, he spent much of the first decade of the new century travelling in ardent search of openings elsewhere. He was increasingly preoccupied by the fate of his prodigious son Domenico, whose posthumous fame has often all but submerged his father’s. As posterity very richly knows, the younger Scarlatti was really a keyboard specialist, and Naples was not the place for his fullest impact. But by the time the new regime was sufficiently settled in Naples to be disappointing those who had vested hopes of regeneration in it, his father had settled himself more fully back there in a spirit of productive resignation to compose through his later years. The Austrians were impressively keen to have him back in his old job, and he did not need to be nearly as productive this time around.
Naples was full of people switching codes, hedging bets, and biding blurry amounts of time over these years. Scarlatti’s reputation and the odd mixtures of haughtiness and flexibility that made up his charisma allowed him to get by on alternations of opaque calm with fits of entrepreneurial energy. The early enlightenment in Naples was a time in which buffoons, tricksters, and high idealists constantly join hands or switch places, in patterns of combination that become crazily familiar later in the writings of such as Diderot. In Andrea Perrucci, a deracinated Sicilian nobleman who wrote a major early treatise on the aesthetics of improvisation right around the turn of the century, Naples had its first great librettist; having failed in elaborate attempts to prove that he had been deprived of his inheritance on his home island, he ended up practicing law in the city while in effect incarnating some thesis about how losing the past drives cultural invention.
There was also the picaresque, erratic aristocrat Emanuele d’Astorga, one more figure to combine Sicilian roots with Neapolitan culture like Scarlatti and Perrucci, a zesty composer who skipped across Italy and far beyond over the early eighteenth century after political shenanigans and familial violence forced him from the island. He wanderingly teamed up with a brilliant, shady Neapolitan poet called Sebastiano Biancardi, who is better known to posterity as Domenico Lalli. The name ostensibly came from the craze for sonorous aliases within the Arcadian movement, but he was something of a con man as well as an entrepreneur of taste and uplift; the two friends were then themselves devastatingly robbed by their own servant in Genoa. Aristocratic titles were handed out over these years with nearly satirical keenness, and lives were filled with departures and reversals, lurches from high to low fortune or status and from episodes of needy sycophancy to ones of bristling showmanship. Names were changed for fun or because of clerical changes across borders, because of debts or as part of some vicious scheme, or as part of a cultural scene where pseudonyms reflected a cult of metamorphosis pervaded with hints of political caution.
Eighteenth-century music is driven by this cultural and political churn. Far from the neatly arranged and stably absolutist jigsaw of courts and territories that its rulers wanted to add up to, and that music historians persist in crediting, the political culture of the first half of the century was volatile, cunning, fitful, inventive to the point of hallucination, anxious to the point of fervor, lurchingly violent. It went on commissioning works of opera seria because it wanted to seem confident, wealthy, radiant. But relentlessly opera seria is a genre where the holes and the wishfulness show through, filled with quantities of lustrous but often spreadeagled extravagance at the levels of music and overall spectacle but also with weird and often stultifying freights of dramatic incoherence or narrative monomania. The aria could absorb all the grandeur of the operas that it lived in, and all the desires that they instilled, while insisting on being mobile, changeable, fluid, on operating as an ongoing bejewelled switching point between lucidity and disorder. Along with the da capo aria itself, the grand innovation associated with Scarlatti is the strict, streamlined alternation between relatively dry recitative passages setting out the opera’s action and the arias that carry the real charge.
Deeply controversial throughout its reign, the operatic system thus created can seem so stiff that the overt rebellions against it that set in around 1750 have ended up defining its reputation far too thoroughly. In fact a flux of reform and rejigging constantly characterized the spread of opera seria. But its results were constantly incomplete, not least because the sharper, quicker voice of the zest for change and innovation was the aria itself. Its fusions of hard definition and streaming potential sent the da capo aria across Europe in a sort of fervor of transmission, as an icon and a prophecy of mobility and possibility; operas kept turning cumbersome or glib in their dramatic workings partly because the real action was in the limber detachability of these gleaming animals. Power in rapidly modernizing societies is always both deficient and excessive; around 1700 Europe’s courts could do far less than they wanted, but they were also filled with drives and capacities that they could not grasp or guide. Opera seria is the lurching aesthetic form in which this deficiency and this excess collide, a vessel of grand ambitions that is also an endlessly haphazard patchwork. But the aria is the sound of the truth of this world’s desire.
Opera has always grown most voraciously as an art when ruling elites and high versions of culture have come into precipitous contact with dense popular energies and with the widest cosmopolitan vistas. The great generation of Neapolitan composers, including Leonardo Vinci and Leonardo Leo and Pergolesi himself, which emerged on either side of 1730 during the later Austrian years, fed their artistry by pressing opera seria and its associated styles into ever more porous contact with the city’s love of comedy, pantomime, and satire. The Bourbon regime was in place to associate itself with the city’s musical pre-eminence as it became increasingly obvious across Europe towards the middle of the century, and deserves credit for building the vast San Carlo opera house, whose opening in 1737 sumptuously announced what was happening. But all the key elements were in place well before the nicely oiled Bourbon invasion in 1734, and most of the most original music had been composed. And in the end no credit should be given to the finally hapless Austrian regime either. Its years in diffuse charge became a crucible in which the city’s writhing relationships to, and revisions of, power were illuminated and summarized. The restlessness of modern culture and the uncanniness of power make the melismas of Neapolitan vocal style ripple and snake. Unmatched amongst the day’s opera houses for its sheer scale, the Teatro San Carlo epitomized the city’s decades of liquid experiment in architecture and theatricality, in institutional life and relationships between classes, and in the routes and folds of space itself.
His intellectually austere, stylistically erudite sides make it possible to forget what a nimble comedian Scarlatti was. His great breakthrough had been with a comedy, but it was not until 1718 that he would compose his one major comic opera set in the sort of satirically realistic urban milieu that commercial Neapolitan audiences wanted. Il Trionfo dell’onore is indeed one of the great revelations of the veering, critical flexibility at the heart of Scarlatti’s aesthetic vision; in fact its own flexibility drives many of that opera’s jokes. The opera’s action scampers about with a brisk combination of carelessness and intricacy between several possible or disputed pairs of lovers, after the caddish young soldier Riccardo arrives in the Pisan household of his rich uncle. Scarlatti gets maximal comic juices out of the ways in which the work’s flailing, largely ignoble characters are mismatched with its conventional and even fulsome aria shapes, and then he gets more comedy and further revelations from how intricately they also turn out to match them after all. Maybe the great man felt resentfully obliged to indulge the growing Neapolitan demand for streetwise comedy, and he may then have taken waspish pleasure in showing how richly his characteristic idioms yielded such deeply light results.
An exuberant anomaly within Scarlatti’s oeuvre that also reveals the pluralism packed into it from his first triumph, Il Trionfo dell’onore is at the same time an acute homage to the sheer multifariousness of its Neapolitan moment. Its characters are so riven with neediness, plangency, or sheer lust that the drives of excess within their expansive arias become astute — severely funny sorts of psychological description. The result is a dramatic world filled with people bamboozled as to what sort of drama they are in, stuck with the emotional intensity that their arias pour out while the plot’s farcical remorselessness churns on, chasing grand prototypes of character or expression that they can no more feel confident of than the citizens in the audience could feel sure of the historical ground beneath the theater. Serious opera in Naples was often oddly light, sprightly, and untragic, while comic opera was often brooding and interrogative. Lurking behind this interchange is the depth with which they share a basic dramatic addiction to moving characters between couples or groups or alignments, removing disguises or revealing origins, unmaking or reconfiguring the orderliness of social surfaces. All the recapitulatory, agile adaptability of Scarlatti’s music amounts finally to a syntax for this vision of social life as a thing of skips and surprises, a substance constantly piecing itself together out of losses and changes and fraying codes.
In 1720 the viceregal court treated itself to a brilliant, lithe entertainment that announced the next expansive phases of Neapolitan vocal style. Nicola Porpora had emerged as an invigorating young composer simultaneously with the coming of the Austrians, and had been cultivating links to Vienna far more energetically than Scarlatti. He also grasped more deeply than anyone the essential fact that Neapolitan vocal music was indeed an art of the voice, and had been merging his compositional practice with an increasing dedication to training and honing the city’s next singers. But Porpora’s feel for talent and indeed for the future did not stop with the voice, and it was his collaboration with a young poet and librettist named Pietro Metastasio that created the dramatic serenata L’Angelica out of a story from Ariosto for performance amid the city’s displaced and attenuated version of the Habsburg court.
Metastasio had recently arrived as another graduate of Rome’s grandest cultural circles, and his surname was another of the Arcadian aliases that such gangs loved. The Roman Arcadians included plenty of flaky idealists and grandiose hacks, but also the occasional really fine mind such as the great jurist Gian Lorenzo Gravina, who indeed fell out with most of the others. Gravina became the major booster during the 1710s of the vastly talented teenaged Metastasio, and he happened to be from Naples. Gravina’s death brought the poet an inheritance which he quickly spent, and Naples was where he took himself around the age of twenty. The legal strand is vital; its divagatory institutional life made the city a hive for lawyers and a hotbed of legal thought. The philosopher Giambattista Vico had to become a professor of law rather than his preferred subject of rhetoric, but he was about to emerge from wrestling in the caves of Neapolitan jurisprudence as the greatest mind of eighteenth-century Italy, while the operatic scene was awash with men who were also or had been or had meant to be lawyers. It is as if music was vying with law to define the European future.
The young Metastasio turned up with the intention of adding himself to the city’s buzz of aesthete lawyers. Instead he became something like the legislator of vast territories of eighteenth-century culture, the librettist who sculpted and polished the aria form to a zenith of nearly icy, nearly fatal perfection. If the enlightenment was the time of the ruses of reason and the trickery of progress, Metastasio’s whole career was a sort of grand and productive ruse exerted against his own values. He was the finest and most stubborn representative of the brilliant aesthetic misunderstanding that was on its slow and controversial way out, in which presenting the dramatic text was the fundamental business of opera, and all the music just a more or less apt and splendid means for doing so. At the same time this meant that he was producing the stanzas whose glistening meters, succulent vowel sounds, and array of consonantal snaps made them irresistible invitations to musical and vocal exploration. The love triangle at the core of L’Angelica between the titular heroine and the great opposing warriors Medoro and Orlando becomes indeed a sort of glintingly unsteady portal into what were already the central drives of Metastasio’s aesthetic on the brink of his takeover of the Neapolitan epoch. His whole art across work after work lived by maintaining a protracted equivocation in the face of authority and power, a sort of double consciousness that asserts itself here in the nearly chilly, nearly satirical exaggerations of languor and idyll as these erotic passions tear away at the heroic world of duty and battle. Emotional expression sounds like an obvious task for an aria and an obvious center for Metastasio’s aesthetic, but it is a sleekly ambiguous undertaking in his vision, something endlessly suspended between the most fastidiously lucid hedonism and a nearly demented turbulence. Opera itself has inhabited this doubleness ever since. So in some ways have we all.
Metastasio was as suited to the da capo aria as a dove is to blue winds. Medoro indeed soaringly likens himself to a lonely dove a few numbers into the serenata as his love for Angelica clarifies, in maybe the first of the many great simile arias penned by the librettist, in which the psychic lives of characters come neatly or grandly alive in expansively stylized comparisons from within a fairly limited repertoire. The lean rhythms and repetitive rhymes of his verses give them a continual sense of rapid, willowy steadiness, and this base is what lets them and the voices that they were made for explore the vast reaches of assonance and meaning opened up by words like tortorella or paterno or agitata with a sort of explosive deftness. Language is simultaneously exalted and pummelled.
It may seem paradoxical that the most official version of opera seria emerged in Naples in the 1720s just as the comic genres that challenged, parodied, and ransacked the seria world were gathering power. But the paradox is really a clue to the paradoxes and doubts afloat within the seria vision. Around this time, the odd, sinuous practice solidified of interspersing the scenes of what therefore became known as a comic intermezzo between the three acts of a seria opera; La Serva Padrona by Pergolesi was the greatest of all such works, and would be the piece to carry the fullest and most delirious impact of Neapolitan vocal music into the heart of the enlightenment, when it became not just a hit but an intellectual craze in Diderot’s circles in Paris decades later. Neapolitan vocal styles leapt between modes or fused discordant attitudes as readily as the same arias could turn up in different operas, or as the same opera could use settings by different composers of different parts of the text and action. Neapolitan vocal music should perhaps not be conceived as the usual sort of sequence of composers, styles, and masterpieces at all. Let us picture instead one brightly churning wave of drives and factors and desires, throwing sirens and their listeners ceaselessly together.
4.
“Galant” style is the idea that gets attached to composers such as Porpora who moved in Scarlatti’s wake towards simplified structures and limpid textures, towards melodic charm and rhythmic swing, who learnt from him how to shimmy away from polyphonic complexity or highly geared counterpoint in favor of quick splashes of harmonic drama and color. A sort of loose and light ethos of venturesome, cosmopolitan, and insouciant hedonism holds the category together better than any strict set of technical changes: galant music is the early enlightenment made audible, turned into sound and its pleasures, and into what those pleasures do to meaning. The seething, shape-shifting reductionism of Diderot’s furthest reaches of materialism can be heard waiting within it. But so can the values of sociable practicality and serviceable craftsmanship that his circles of Encyclopédistes would espouse. Composite and pluriform as it shifts between rhapsody and diagram, the version of Neapolitan vocal style that would triumph in the course of the 1720s carried at its throbbing, artful heart a prophecy about the ambiguities of the whole enlightenment movement.
It was in 1725 that Giambattista Vico’s great, jagged masterpiece known as the New Science made the first of its shifting appearances in the world under the title of Princìpi di una Scienza Nuova, as its author neared the age of sixty. Commentators have argued ever since as to whether he was one of the great Enlightenment thinkers or the movement’s grandest foe, because what they miss is the density with which he really summarizes Enlightenment ambiguity itself. Newness is as vital to his opus as the title suggests, but this newness is packed tight with myths and history as he re-narrates the basic cycles of civilizational progress and decline, crammed with reanimations of past modes of thought and consciousness. Is the book a prophecy of disenchantment or an effigy of mythomania? Since Vico, too, had been living through the zany and dangerous gyrations of the past decades of Neapolitan politics, his arguments filled with intricate, gnarly flexibility. His new science gravitates alongside opera seria itself towards the points of twisting transition between myth and history. Likewise, an enriched idea of creative and political making constitutes his exit from Cartesian doubt, but it is richly unclear whether this move goes in the direction of further intellectual progress or back towards visions that Descartes had meant to leave behind. The book’s combinations of systematic thrust with hectic zigzags of assemblage, as it spins down into the inner workings of historical change, match the spiraling sleekness of Neapolitan vocal music with an apt sort of cryptic rigor.
Newness was vital in the 1720s in Naples, but Scarlatti was no longer new. Maybe this is why Rome was the destination of what has become the very last to survive of his scores of operas; maybe he wanted to plunge back towards the sense of glamour and potential that had accompanied his emergence there decades earlier. But then La Griselda is itself preoccupied with matters of survival and endurance, and much of its fierce, eccentric greatness is in how tightly its own writhingly extreme energies of innovation combine with a certain gritty stylistic aloofness from any full embrace of the gallant. The ordeals by which her royal husband determines to prove Griselda’s virtue make for a work so lavishly harrowing that it can seem determined to show how grotesquely serious opera seria could be. At the same time its story thus pulls the work away from the cruel machinations of authority and politics, and throws an intense spotlight of artistic pressure on the richly desolate, finally triumphant figure of the queen herself. Her arias are the things that the opera must use if it is to turn its own refractory cragginess into a vision of the weird intractability of emotion and expression themselves, and Scarlatti indeed makes them outrageously singular distillations of what his art had become.
As the full impact of Griselda’s situation lands towards the end of the first act, her aria ‘Di’, che sogno o che deliro’ turns the shattering of her reality into a sound world so agitated and angular that it feels at once sparse and superabundant. Starkly skittish rhythms and tight bursts of songfulness that can never quite become melodies render the impact on a vivid mind of a world that is somehow both overwhelming and dissolvent; of course, da capo repetition might as well have been invented to intensify this doubleness. But at the very start of the second act ‘Mi rivedi, o selva ombrosa’ instead surrounds her with a deceptively supportive brand of accompanimental lavishness as she returns to the rural obscurity from which her grand marriage had plucked her. Vastly more variegated string lines are joined by a deliciously figurative role for two flutes, but as so often with Scarlatti the da capo structure makes us linger on an emotional scene that is itself one of return just long enough for unease to enter in. His addiction to pastoral was often addled and always complex, and there is something hectic and anguished here about the very fulsomeness of the musical means, as if the aria knows how complicit nostalgia can be with maltreatment and disaster.
But it is Griselda’s great, bizarre, spiraling third-act aria ‘Se il mio dolor t’offende’ that ends up giving a sort of sharply complex analysis of the meaning of stylistic abundance itself. Griselda has just been told that she must hide any pain at her own sufferings, and this extra twist of anguish brings her to a brief passage of something like musical vertigo that is also replete with stylistic and indeed psychic potential. Her aria begins with a couple of bars in which she sings with almost no accompaniment, as the very word dolor, or pain, rasps and dilates, trying to figure out where it is leading. A jerky rush of accompaniment then arrives, and indeed rapidly intensifies further as her reply grows. If the king is offended by her sadness, so Griselda continues as the aria gyrates, he will instead see joy and smiling. The aria becomes a virtuosic exercise in what might be called reverse anguish: our exhilaration at Griselda’s nerve and resilience is held in cascading check by the pain that is utterly unhidden by her mimicry of joy. But might there not be here one further reversal in the end? Within the anguished, caustic imitation of exultancy given here by the composer to his character, do we not hear a deeper exultancy nearly break through the opera’s surface? Griselda’s suffering inhabits her pretended levity and joy, but a joyful creative levity inhabits Neapolitan vocal style. The great, weird drives within eighteenth century culture towards happiness and happy endings get their richest account in the city’s music, on their way to issuing eventually in the fierce comic exuberance of the classical Viennese symphony and of Hegel’s interpretation of history.
Imagine some vast throat pouring out notes into and across cities and palaces and chambers in all directions, pitching lines of music into churches and inns and spa resorts. Eighteenth-century Europe became more and more such a culture of the throat. Of course, it thought that it was a culture of the classical word and of didactic clarity, of reason. But reason itself would prove to be liquid, voracious, and turbulent as the century continued, a thing made of dispute and mutation. As Kant ended up nearly putting it, the substance of the Enlightenment may have been knowledge, but audacity was its form and its ethos. And the da capo aria was a sort of lustrous compromise, whose repetitions could seem to the partisans of the word to be ways of heightening literary meanings while in fact they were melting words down into syllables and sounds, flinging them into the throat’s pleasures and powers. Voices became hungry laboratories in which the culture’s highest words and meanings were torn apart and examined and remade, and similarly lacerating and joyful processes of scrutiny and recomposition were what the Enlightenment movement lived for and by, too.
It would appear, then, that Adorno and Horkheimer were wrong. Their great, bracing, stifling book Dialectic of Enlightenment turns Homer’s poem into a precocious parable of the bourgeois mind in which Odysseus’ evasion of the Sirens exemplifies the crushing erasures essential to reason. But the myth of the founding of Naples by Parthenope suggests a different interpretation, one in which such voices cannot be outmaneuvered and do not die. Instead they turn into cities. An expanded vision of the enlightenment still awaits within all this music, one more holistic and more alive to its own riptides. Metastasio made his debut in 1724 as a full operatic librettist for the main court theater, and chose the story of the desolate queen Dido, who is such a profuse sister of the Sirens. Neapolitan vocal style carried on drenching itself in her story for decades thereafter: as it went on piecing together ways of turning loss into construction, it kept staring at the sea. Scarlatti’s last cantata was probably Là dove e Mergellina, which does indeed date to the year of his death, and its text audaciously and movingly locates its richly conventional Arcadian imagery in the real pleasures of the world surrounding the composer by this use of a place name from the Neapolitan coast. Its music is full of restrained turbulence as the cantata pursues yet another of its relentless composer’s visions of emotional questioning and ambiguity.
But let us sail forwards five years, to the emergence in 1730 of perhaps the greatest of all Neapolitan da capo arias at the end of the opening act of Metastasio’s Artaserse in Leonardo Vinci’s crisply tumultuous setting. In ‘Vo solcando un mar crudele’, the image of plowing a cruel sea becomes indeed the vehicle for turning personal catastrophe into expressive power. The story is a fierce fever dream of court violence and internecine intrigues, and the first act finishes with the central character of Arbace accused of a regicide that is known only by him to have been committed by his father. Narrative development was never meant to be pushed forwards within an aria like this one, but what Vinci achieves is the transformation of this basic aesthetic condition into an engine of complex drama and insight. Arbace is stuck in an impossible situation, his very innocence part of his disaster, since proving it would inculpate his father; he is as incapable of propelling the narrative as his aria is, and Metastasio’s lyric gives him only its own almost brutally rich elegance and shapeliness. But that is enough for Vinci’s wildly incisive feel for the strengths within galant simplicity to kick in, and the aria’s closed shapes and tight textures turn its exploration of paralysis into a way of converting it into vigor and expansion.
All the turbulent mixtures of triumph and catastrophe that coursed through Vinci’s own life can be heard in the invincible agitation of this music; his death at around the age of forty in the same year may well have been murder, after a life beset by his own torrid rivalrousness as well as by convulsive gambling. The composer does not contradict this text’s visions of misfortune and shipwreck, but transfigures them with a rigorous glee that turns reiteration into refreshment. Sequences of scrambled, rampant triplets for the violins imitate the frenzy of the sea with a pithiness that turns it into an accompanimental basis for vocal ardor and psychic strength. Within the machinery of the da capo structure itself Vinci mines deep possibilities of change and uplift, of survival itself. The game of modernity is one that is won by whoever can drink in the largest quantities of reality and
keep creating.
