But it is especially from 1652 to 1658 that the rhythm of Cavalli revivals, immediately following their respective Venetian premières, increases to a considerable extent: Veremonda, Le magie amorose (or Rosinda), Il Ciro, Xerse, and Artemisia. All the Venetian operas were adapted to the Neapolitan taste, by musicians native to Naples who were in the service of the Armonici, and were staged in a sumptuous manner under the direction of the most important choreographer of the time, the Venetian, Balbi: before being performed in the public theatres these were in fact all destined for the Vice-regal court. The last three scores were re-adapted for Neapolitan use by an exceptional arranger, Francesco Provenzale, who would become the most important Neapolitan composer of the century, and who probably enjoyed a close collaboration with Cavalli, maybe of a didactic order or maybe one of apprenticeship. Alternatively, from what we know, Il Ciro was composed at Naples by Provenzale and was only later adapted for the Venetian stage with notable changes to the Neapolitan Sorrentino’s original libretto, for which “Signor Francesco Cavalli, Apollo dell’Armonia has made the music”. The Venetian libretto to Il Ciro (January 1654) reveals the gap in operatic performance conception between the two cities, otherwise so closely linked:
“This drama has set out from the Naples of its birth with the happy purpose of serving the Venetian stage: but when it ended up here it noticed that it had not put on its glad rags as is the city’s wont. Had by difference of habit…raised with manners different to Venetian liking…it declared… that it had changed not to improve, but to fit in with custom”.
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The modern rediscovery of Cavalli’s operas, other than the survival of citations and fragments in 19th-century musical bibliographies, is due to the pioneering initiative of Raymond Leppard, who directed at Glyndebourne firstly L’Ormindo in 1967, and then La Calisto in 1970.
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In the same period another front for the spread of Venetian opera opened up in the south. In Sicily, as had happened in Genoa, it was Cavalli who started and dominated the local operatic tradition: Giasone was the first opera to be performed in Palermo (1655), followed up to 1658 by Ciro, Xerse and Artemisia. The situation in Sicily was evidently linked to the Neapolitan seasons, and it is plausible to believe that Provenzale played a part in this insular extension of Cavalli’s operas, albeit interrupted by the plague of 1656. In the following years Cavalli’s interests were to fall in a completely different direction: between 1660 and 1662 he moved to Paris where he worked with Lully and put on Ercole amante, his celebratory opera in honour of the king, and had the death of Mazarin not intervened, he may well have altered the course of French musical history. The last Palermo production was L’Elena, which had first seen the light of day in Venice in 1659, but this time revised by Marc’Antonio Sportonio. The two final Neapolitan productions of Cavalli operas arrived with unusual delay and without the direct involvement of the composer: Statira and Scipione l’Africano were probably destined, in the care of Provenzale, for revivals in Naples shortly after their creation in Venice (1655-56), but this was prevented by the plague.
The new Armonici troupe, assembled by the singer-composer Francesco Cirillo at the end of his career, only came up with these operas again in 1666-67. But by this time tastes had changed: the score for Eliogabalo that Cavalli had composed for the Venice carnevale of 1668 was withdrawn because it was thought to be unfashionable (or maybe for reasons of censorship), and substituted with that of the Roman, Boretti, probably the same one that was then performed at Naples and Palermo in 1669 and 1678, even if symbolically the Neapolitan libretto still attributed the music to the Venetian composer. The theatre abandoned, the last ten years of Cavalli’s life (d. January 1676) were devoted to sacred music, while in the south Francesco Provenzale, finally emancipated from his ideal maestro, brought off his triumphant debut as an autonomous composer with La Colomba ferita, an unpublished mingling of dramma sacro, Sicilian subject matter, arie alla veneziana and comic personalities who sung in Neapolitan.
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