Beyond the boundaries of opera: Conceptions of musical drama in Rome, 1676--1710 (Italy)

From the last quarter of the seventeenth century into the turn of the eighteenth century, Rome was both exceptionally rich and unusually constrained as a context for music and drama. Although the city had a multitude of patrons, composers, and performers, the production of opera was limited by the Church's intermittent bans on staged entertainment. Rome was therefore a unique center for musical drama; opera was performed, but only periodically and mainly in private theaters or other provisional spaces. At the same time, Rome developed a tremendous market for vocal music, both for intimate chamber venues, as well as for performances of a grander theatrical scale. This dissertation looks beyond opera as a subject of study and explores how operatic culture influenced the reception of a wide range of dramatic music performed in the papal capital during this period. My research focuses on three important dramatic vocal genres developed in Rome, namely the oratorio, the serenata, and the chamber cantata. I consider how each of these genres, though not perceived as “opera” in a conventional sense, did serve as a form of theater. I examine the ways in which composers engaged formal and stylistic features of opera in each of the forms. I also look at how their performances involved diverse notions of spectacle, creating a broad conception of theater for contemporary audiences. This study breaks fundamentally from previous literature on the oratorio, serenata, and cantata by challenging accepted principles of generic boundaries. Although I consider how individual genres were uniquely shaped by operatic culture, I also stress the extent to which all three genres in this study overlapped with and mutually influenced one another, and how they formed part of a larger phenomenon of musical and dramatic innovations inspired by opera.