Date/Time
Date(s) - 26 Oct 2012
2:00 PM - 3:15 PM
Location
Skylight Room, The Graduate Center
Category(ies) No Categories
Please join us for a talk by Professor Emily Wilbourne (Queens College and the Graduate Center) on Friday, Oct 26 at 2 pm at the CUNY GC in room 5414:
“Listening to the Commedia dell’arte: Early opera’s theatrical inheritance”
This is a paper about two works: *La Ferinda*, a libretto published in Paris by Giovan Battista Andreini in 1622, and *L´Egisto o Chi soffre speri*, a Roman opera, first performed in 1637, revised in 1639, with a libretto by Giulio Rospigliosi and music by Virgilio Mazzocchi and Marco Marazzoli. What makes these two particular operas so interesting is also what binds them together: despite the fifteen years, many miles, and wildly different contexts that separate their creation, both *La Ferinda *and *Chi soffre speri* take the characters and characteristic plot twists of the commedia dell´arte and turn them into opera. As such, both works have been treated by scholars as isolated experiments-with few direct descendants and little influence on the canonical stream of operatic history. There is, I would suggest, another way to view the situation. In their explicit focus on commedia dell´arte prototypes, *La Ferinda* and *Chi soffre speri* offer a rare opportunity to trace the sonic parameters of commedia dell´arte performance, and-even more importantly-to map out an epistemology of sound as shared by the two theatrical genres. In the process, this paper reveals the extent to which comedic prototypes underwrote many of the “serious” elements of operatic convention, destabilising assumptions that reduce “commedia dell’arte” to the merely “comic.”
Sponsored by the CUNY Early Modern Interdisciplinary Group (EMIG).
Oct 26, 2 pm
The Graduate Center, Room 5414