La virtù de’ strali d’Amore

A director’s note about the staging

For the audience seated in the Teatro S. Cassiano during the 1641–1642 opera season, La virtù de’ strali d’Amore must have created a sensation. The theatrical demands for this opera, as suggested in the archival score and printed libretti (one for the 1642 Venice production and another printed for a revival in Bologna in 1648), are immense and, if realized fully, must have amazed the audience on that opening night in Venice. Archival research by Beth and Jonathan Glixon reveals that the sets and machines for this opera, as designed and built by Tasio Zancarli, a member of Cavalli’s opera company, are similar to the grand scenic demands commonplace in those operas written for the new public theatres in Venice during the middle and later decades of the 17th century, a time when investors were busy “inventing the business of opera.” La virtù de’ strali d’Amore was also the first operatic collaboration between the established composer Francesco Cavalli and the young librettist Giovanni Faustini. Faustini’s libretto for La virtù de’ strali d’Amore, his first libretto for the operatic stage, must also have created a sensation.

In this libretto, Faustini did not strictly follow familiar classical sources favored by other librettists at this time, plots created from adaptations of Ovid or some other classical myth. Instead, I would argue, in the literary tradition of Meander’s New Comedy or the works of Plautus, Faustini crafted an original plot for his first opera libretto, a story wherein human interactions with the gods form a complex comedy of errors. Faustini’s libretto also reflects the influence of poetic epics and classical myths through the use of Greek deities and themes of chivalry, virtue and magic forces (characters and actions derived from classical myths and familiar plot points popularized through the circulation during the 16th century of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s epic, Orlando innamorato and Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso). Nonetheless these materials, when embedded within Faustini’s complex plot devices, seem surprisingly fresh and original. This libretto brought to the operatic stage several plot devices and themes that would later become operatic conventions (disguises, long lost brothers united, love triangles and the resultant portrayals of masculine and feminine virtue and vice).

Interestingly, as argued by Hendrik Schulze, Faustini’s libretto for La virtù de’ strali d’Amore also works intertextually to echo themes from operatic performances familiar to audiences at the Teatro S. Cassiano, specifically those opera patrons familiar with performances of Claudio Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, staged at the Theatro SS. Giovanni e Paolo in 1640 and 1641. Faustini’s contribution to the establishment of opera as popular entertainment in Venice during these years, his plot innovations and intertextual references, may be seen as artistic strategies used to attract public audiences to this emerging art form. Characters and themes in his libretto for La virtù de’ strali d’Amore can also be interpreted as reflections on Venetian society, an operatic public, as Wendy Heller argues, engaged onstage and off in serious and learned debates about the intersections of theology, sexuality and gender and the Venetian political landscape.

During the middle decades of the 17th century, Venice served as the crossroads of Europe in much the same way that Macao operated as the crossroads of Asia. Indeed, during the middle decades of the 14th century, reports of Marco Polo’s journeys across the silk roads of Asia into China were a sensation in Venice and beyond. And as early as 1557, the Portuguese had established the first European colony in China on the peninsula and islands later known as Macao (maintaining a colonial presence there until recent times). During the early decades of the 17th century, Macao emerged as an important trading post, a crossroads from ports of call in Japan, China and India with Lisbon. Given the importance of this global sea trade to the political and economic life of Venice, it is not difficult to understand why characters in Faustini’s libretto refer not only to locations and characters commonplace in classical literature, but also to locations known to them through traveler’s reports from the Middle East and Asia, strange and wonderful tales from the trade routes between China and Europe.

It is this fascinating mix of 17th century European and non-European locations and characters in Faustini’s story that inspires the setting chosen for this production. Faustini placed the action of La virtù de’ strali d’Amore on the island of Cyprus, in some magical time, when the lives of humans from the classical world (Athens, Cyprus and Thrace) could be imagined controlled by the immortal powers of Giove, Venere and Marte (Jove, Venus and Mars), and most importantly, the controlling power of the “strali d’Amore” (Cupid’s arrows). Our production builds on Faustini’s references to Asia (where the pirate Meonte first saw Cleria’s portrait and fell in love with her and where the evil Ericlea claims dominion) by shifting the setting of the opera to the islands and peninsula of Macao in the year 1642. Consequently, the confused young lovers, Portuguese settlers on Macao, are manipulated by Asian deities and other mythic forces. In short, our production stages Faustini’s plot within the landscape of Macao, a place not unknown to Faustini and his audience, a colorful land visited by their contemporaries.

This exotic setting, inspired by specific details in Faustini’s plot, also allows this production design to do something more. Besides presenting the beauties of Cavalli’s score as the composer intended through the expert guidance of Vince Corrigan (who created the modern performance edition) and Paul O’Dette (our music director and conductor, who also leads the Eastman School of Music Collegium Musicum in this performance), our theatrical goal with this production is to recapture some of the visual magic and spectacle that impressed and attracted opera audiences in Venice (a challenge for us today without benefit of a full complement of Baroque stage machines). Our production this evening attempts, without the benefit of a fully-equipped Baroque theatre, to create the visual splendor required by the action in Faustini’s La virtù de’ strali d’Amore through acting conventions and traditions of spectacle and stagecraft borrowed from two contrasting 17th century theatrical worlds: the scenic traditions of Venetian opera (painted drops and shutter scenery) and selected traditional forms of Asian performance (scene shifts, puppetry and masks). And through it all we have the nuanced and surprising beauties of Francesco Cavalli’s operatic score, music that constantly shifts to support and contribute to the action and emotion onstage.

—Dr. Ronald Shields, Chair, Department of Theatre and Film, College of Arts and Sciences

Sources:

• Beth L. Glixon and Jonathan E. Glixon. Inventing the Business of Opera. Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Wendy Heller. Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice. University of California Press, 2003.
• Donald R. Lach. Asia in the Eyes of Europe: Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries. Exhibition, The University of Chicago Library, January 23–May 1, 1991. Catalog published by the University of Chicago Library Society. Found on-line at: www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/southasia/lach.html
• Hendrik Schulze. “Giovanni Faustini’s and Francesco Cavalli’s La virtù de’ strali d’Amore (1642) as a Contribution to Contemporary Operatic Debate,” an essay presented at the Society for Seventeenth Century Music, Thirteenth Annual Conference, Northwestern University, April 2005.