A dire new threat to the colony's survival has arisen. Unbeknownst to all, the vital trading route to Tormalin is no longer secure. The reclamation of a lost southern settlement is in the offing, but those involved, Livak included, must await the spring arrival of the first ship from the mainland - an event that will never take place. Contesting the use of the concept of “origins” with respect to both the birth and subject matter of baroque opera, I argue that the genre developed as an already haunted narration./ Series: Tales of Einarinn The Assassin's Edge Juliet MckennaĪfter a long winter spent in the Kellarin colony, the crafty and beautiful Livak is anxious to move on. In contrast to traditional theories of compositional influence, this study adopts a non-linear historiographical approach to performance genealogies, embracing text, music, and discourse about opera itself. Using terminology associated with the “spectral turn” in the humanities, this essay argues for rethinking operatic genealogies through the lens of hauntological intertextualities. With respect to three central works on the subject of Agrippina and her son Nero (Nerone fatto Cesare, Noris-Perti, Venice 1693 Agrippina, Noris-Magni, Milan 1703 and L’Agrippina, Handel-, Venice 1709), the haunted status of performances was made explicit, both in the drama and in contemporary poems dedicated to the main singers. These relationships remain important-but there is also reason to delve deeper into the “haunted” status of early opera. Modern historiography has struggled with the notion of origins, focusing on relationships among the surviving textual sources to make sense of the proliferation of theatrical subjects. With theoretical approaches centered on embodiment, gender, reception, celebrity status, and sound, I work to discover remnant traces of ephemeral presence.īaroque opera was invented on a deathly premise: reviving a tradition of sung ancient tragedy that had in fact never existed. Finally, I theorize how Renzi’s sonic emissions and vibrant performances resonated socially as an energetic electric force transgressing the librettist’s texts and the composer’s musical composition to effect society and the status of women in it. I place Renzi’s work into a performance genealogy from commedia dell’Arte to the dramma per musica. To comprehend the reception of the diva, I examine the career of Anna Renzi (c.1620- c.1661) and her riveting performances in La finta pazza (1641) and La Deidamia (1644) contextualized in Venetian cultural history and the performance events in Teatro Novissimo. In this, I examine the music and texts of five performance scores to understand how composer Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676) and his librettist collaborators tailored iconic warrior woman roles to fit the voices of lead women singers. This interdisciplinary approach knits together material historical data, formal text, and music readings, with performance theory. I apply the analytic lens of performativity as employed in gender and performance studies scholarship to analyze the social impact of the early operatic diva’s performance of self. In this project, I trace the reception of the early modern diva’s sonic transmissions and her transition across the stage, out the door of the theatre’s sounding architectural space, and into the city. They exceeded and reworked accepted norms performatively while modelling independent agency to pioneer a new profession for women. Their performance transgressed normative gender codes and is one way early modern divas overcame misogynist perceptions. From such spaces, the sounds of their voices and the memory of their performances in cross-dressed, madwomen, and warrior woman roles spilled out on the cutting edge of performance to spread the novel form across Europe. They accomplished this partly in prototypical commercial opera houses. Seventeenth-century Venetian operatic divas pioneered a new social identity for women both onstage, as virtuosic opera singers, and as independent professionals in Venice.
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