Busenello and his composers: The beginnings of republican opera

At the heart of this study lie Gian Francesco Busenello's dramatic works, gathered---with one exception---and published in 1656 in the collection entitled Delle hore ociose. The most unusual feature of Busenello's publication is that it brought together five such librettos, written over a time span of fifteen years, comprising an unprecedented collected edition of sorts. Whatever the motivation behind Busenello's edition of his dramatic writings, this unusual "collected works" publication invites us to consider his librettos as a group. Understanding a librettist's motives, his aesthetic notion of the libretto at a time of infancy of the genre, his development, and the themes and subjects dear to him, can shed light on the composers' aesthetics and musical responses. The fact that his composers were none less than Claudio Monteverdi and Francesco Cavalli, the most important at the time (and, retrospectively, of the time), should comfort those readers who are mostly interested in the musical rather than literary aspects of early opera. Indeed, the aim of this work is not to examine Busenello's aesthetics for its (or their) own sake---despite his relevant place in the early developmental stages of the genre---but rather to further our understanding of the music and of Venetian opera in general.;Though Busenello wrote six librettos, this study is mostly concerned with his first four, written and performed (with the exception of Viaggio d'Enea all'inferno) in three consecutive seasons (1640--41, 1641--42 and 1642--43). Gli amori d'Apollo e di Dafne, Didone (with its aborted precursor Viaggio), and L'incoronazione di Poppea constitute a kind of trilogy, each drawing from and elaborating a specific, distinctive source: pastoral, epic and historical. In these librettos, Busenello develops and celebrates a new dramatic aesthetic, as he transforms a courtly genre not solely into a public spectacle, but also into a republican one. Mixing the comic and the serious, the historical and the newly-invented, and most importantly the literary and the political, he created texts that would speak to all members of the varied audience that attended opera performances in the Republic of Venice. Through an analysis of Monteverdi's and Cavalli's musical settings, I will discuss the composers's different responses to Busenello's republican theater.