France from Lully to Rameau

3. ‘Opera seria’.

Once such performers were under contract, and provided they were not too fractious, the staging of opera seria was a relatively simple matter. The strong segmentation of the form allowed for discrete cells of activity. If there were ballets, battles or ceremonials to attend to, there was likely to be a maître de danse on hand (and perhaps an associated fencing master) to arrange them; a machinist could advise performers about any theatrical coups they might be involved in (descents of airy chariots, magical transformations, collapsing of city walls and the like); and a creative scenographer, or simply a resourceful scene-store keeper, would be ringing the changes on elaborate perspectives (‘straight’ or per angolo) which rendered a fairly limited range of motifs: palace, temple, street, harbour, cave, camp, garden, wilderness and so on. As for the principals working up the recitative-and-aria scenes of psychological interplay that are the staple of the seria form, their rehearsals of a new piece may quite possibly have been brief and not strongly directed, but need not be thought of as careless or primitive. For one thing, there were the stage directions of the libretto to be observed, not only for entrances and exits but often also for characters' moods and stage business. For another, performers could easily and independently apply to their recitatives the age's basic courtly stage deportment (a singer could find several primers in print for tragic acting in the spoken theatre, many of the techniques of which would apply equally well to opera). Again, since at the centre of opera seria was a spectrum of general emotions expressed one after another in a series of arias, an experienced performer coming to a new opera would almost certainly have given formal histrionic expression to all his or her character's feelings before – sometimes in exactly the same words (as multiple settings of successful librettos were common), sometimes even in the same music if the ‘new’ piece was a pasticcio. Stage performance of a seria aria seems to have been not unlike the 18th-century speaking actor's delivery of a tragic tirade or soliloquy.

Hence a group of competent principals might achieve a fluent, decorous, pointed and telling staging of an opera seria (in all but any spectacular or balletic parts) with no more external help than was needful for recording which wings were used for which entrances, the assigning of courtly retinues of comparse and the resolution of any points of princely etiquette or clashes of artistic temperament. Sometimes the impresario or manager might provide such help, or the prompter or the maestro di cappella (who might anyway be the opera's composer). But most often it was the theatre's resident poet, in which case he might perhaps take on a more consequential, directorial role at rehearsals.

The comic ironies of Benedetto Marcello's Il teatro alla moda (D1720) carry the strong implication that a theatre poet worth his salt would explain the dramatic conception and intentions of his text to the performers in rehearsal, advise them on costume, gestures and the proper sides of the stage for their entrances and exits, and insist on a clear enunciation of his words. Later, Goldoni, who himself had had responsibility ‘for directing and coaching the performers’ during a stint as poet to a Venetian opera house in the 1730s, put such a figure into his comedy L'impresario delle Smirne (1761). There his Maccario, armed with the works of Zeno and Metastasio, some old plays and a rhyming dictionary, practises his specialities of writing new librettos, adapting old ones, fitting new words to old music, instructing the singers in acting, directing the scenes, attending the ladies to their boxes, looking after the comparse and blowing the traditional whistle for scene changes. Metastasio himself would have recognized at least some of this activity. Though it would not have been possible for him to rehearse all the settings of his librettos in person, his letters from Vienna to various sorts of theatre people from the 1730s to 50s show him to have been a careful director – concerned with the effective ‘blocking’ of scenes, making diagrams of the disposition of characters on stage, supplying detailed analyses of principal characters for composer and singer, offering suggestions for optional stage business over and above that in the printed text to busy intendants three or four countries away. Metastasio's letters also reveal that, however formalized the stage action may have been in opera seria, the genre's leading librettist was convinced that telling theatricality in the communication of feeling was the essence of its staging, not the blind following of formula or protocol.