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
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