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Busenello’s first literary works were odes, tributes to the glory of the diva Adriana Basilo, and in particular to the glory of Venice. They reveal a fanatical patriotism that also appears in several of his librettos. He next tried his hand at the novel, the modern genre par excellence, which (along with opera) was making Venice’s name: almost 80% of seventeenth-century Italian novels were written in the city. Busenello outlined two novels, La Floridiana and Il Sileno, both dealing with the vagaries of Fortune, but neither, like the vast majority of his literary production, was published. Though the works are commendable, they are also prolix and often difficult to digest. Their style and themes, however, are closely related to his librettos, notably to Statira. Busenello also wrote a great many poems in Venetian dialect. Their free tone, somewhere between obscenity and disenchantment, gave rise to a realism in the depiction of seventeenth-century Venetian life that was rarely attained elsewhere, and which also partially explains the often crude and colourful style of his music dramas.
Following close on the heels of his friend Badoer, who had written Il ritorni d’Ulisse for Monteverdi in 1640, Busenello penned his first libretto, Gli amori d’Apollo e Dafne, the same year. It was written for the promising Venetian composer Francesco Cavalli, the Monteverdi student whose Nozze di Teti e Peleo, the earliest Venetian opera whose music has survived, had triumphed at San Cassiano in 1639. Gli amori d’Apollo bears Busenello’s inimitable stamp. This three-act pastoral fable uses the same form as Guarino’s Pastor fido (which is explicitly mentioned in the libretto) and was also inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses (probably Giovanni Dell’Anguillara’s Italian version, which had met with enormous success at the end of the sixteenth century). Though the libretto remains more or less faithful to the myth, Busenello’s additional secondary plots mix together the stormy love affairs of Tithones, Aurora, Cephalos and Procris (whose changes of fortune do not exactly follow Ovid), creating a happy disorder that succeeds in tarnishing the sacred aura of the gods of Mount Olympus. Tithones is portrayed as a stay-at-home old man who is jealous of his young wife Aurora, who in turn flirts with the handsome Cephalos. The resulting light comedy contains some wonderful moments worthy of Offenbach. Cupid takes revenge on Apollo (who has insultingly called him a “pygmy of love” and a “soldier in short pants”) by exciting his ardour. Busenello also adds several aging nurses to the mixture. One of them advocates wise stoicism, while the other exhibits epicurean sensuality; the latter, as expected, has the last word. This first libretto, enhanced by Cavalli’s superb music, is valuable above all for the beauty and richness of its poetry, qualities also apparent in Busenello’s subsequent librettos. Apollos’ despair, after the nymph has been turned into a laurel tree, resulted in one of the first great laments of Venetian musical drama (the piece is also one of the first of Cavalli’s beautiful lamenti). This acerbic and lyrical work, based on a typically Baroque metamorphosis theme, also includes numerous more or less direct borrowings from Dante, Petrarch, Marino and other contemporary poets, as well as a number of other influences. It can also be linked retrospectively with Busenello’s later librettos: the entire body of his writing, gathered together and published in 1656 under the title Delle ore ociose, makes a perfectly coherent whole in terms of theme and style.
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