Date/Time
Date(s) - 23 Mar 2016
5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Location
501 Hamilton, Columbia University
Category(ies) No Categories
Lecture by Karen Raizen:
Operatic Orlando, Two Ways:
Arcadian Madmen on the Eighteenth-Century Stage
Wednesday, March 23, 5:00–6:00
501 Hamilton Hall
Columbia University (Morningside campus)
The mad Orlando became a popular operatic hero in the eighteenth century, as librettists and composers wrote and re-wrote “spinoffs” of Ludovico Ariosto’sOrlando Furioso. Two early eighteenth-century opera libretti based on the Furiosowere particularly popular: Carlo Sigismondo Capece’s 1711 text Orlando, ovvero la gelosa pazzia, which became the basis for George Frideric Handel’s Orlando(1733), and Grazio Braccioli’s 1713 text Orlando Furioso, which was set to music by Antonio Vivaldi and performed dozens of times in Venice in 1713 and 1714; Braccioli’s libretto was used as the basis for a number of later productions. The two librettists, both active in the Arcadian Academy, depict Orlando’s madness in different ways; these two modes of madness both speak to and challenge Arcadian notions of language, poetry, opera, and literary reform. This work-in-progress presentation is based on two chapters from my dissertation, tentatively entitled Arcadian Madness: The Language of Orlando in Eighteenth-Century Opera.
Karen Raizen received a BA in Classics (with a concentration in ancient Greek literature) and a BMus in viola performance from Rice University, as well as Master degree in viola performance at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Switzerland. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Italian Language and Literature at Yale University. Her dissertation, entitled Arcadian Madness: The Language of Orlando in Eighteenth-Century Opera, explores operatic adaptations of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in pre-Enlightenment Italian circles. She has translated articles into English for Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, and the opera L’Eritrea, for the forthcoming Cavalli Opera Edition (Bärenreiter Verlag). She also works on operatic adaptations of the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as sound in the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini.
The lecture is free and open to the public.
Department of Italian, Columbia University