Title — Of Ariosto's legacy in seventeenth-century Italian musical drama
Author — Edward Milton Anderson AB MA PhD
College — St John's College in the University of Cambridge
Supervisor — Professor Patrick Boyde FBA, Serena Professor of Italian Emeritus
Approved by the Degree Committee of Modern and Medieval Langauges — Tuesday 14 October 2008
Admitted to PhD — Saturday 21 March 2009

Summary

This study offers a critical assessment of musical dramas based on the Orlando furioso (1532) by Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) from the beginning of the genre ca. 1600 to the end of the seventeenth century, and supplies a companion volume containing transcriptions of nearly all of the relevant poetic texts. It is the most complete study in any language of the Italian musical reception of a canonical vernacular work in the first century of opera. The Introduction (Chapter I) provides an outline the history of the Orlando furioso in music in the madrigal through 1632, an assessment of monody and the Camerata, a survey of Seicento Ariosto reception studies, a reflection on modern Italianist scholarship and music, the main elements of the publication history of the Orlando furioso in the Seicento, remarks on the influence of the pastoral drama in the period, a consideration of the literary critical reception of the poem in Seicento commentaries, the method by which texts inspired by the Orlando furioso were identified and selected, and a detailed presentation of the three historical periods around which the central chapters of the thesis are organised. The introduction ends by summarising the central thrust of the thesis, namely that poetry deriving from the Orlando furioso plays a more significant role in the history of Seicento musical drama than has previously been suggested, and that important differences among the texts of Ariosto-inspired musical dramas in point of narrative structure, visual poetics, language and style (especially meter and syntax) invite a three-part reading of Ariostean musical drama in the period 1600-1699, and provide valuable empirical evidence — in the absence of radical changes in subject matter or genre due to a shifting literary source — of the evolution of musical drama in the Seicento. Chapter II presents a reading of the exciting variety of Ariostean musical-dramatic texts (libretti and manuscripts) in the early period (1609-1635) which focusses on questions of authority and defines a new musical poetics of meraviglia. Chapter III takes account of the Ariostean libretti and one manuscript of the middle period (1642-1675) and identifies developments in narrative poetics and arioso style, and the role of the new public theatres in Venice in the evolution of musical taste. Chapter IV analyses the five Ariostean libretti of the late period (1682-1699) and links narrative reform and the emergence of the aria da capo in the period to a prevailing Arcadian poetics of clarity and an increasing demand for tuneful diletto. The Conclusion (Chapter V) suggests that this new history of Ariosto in musical drama has significant implications for future Tasso musical reception studies, summarises the pattern of development that emerges from a historical reading of the Orlando furioso in musical drama from the origins of the genre c1600 through the end of the Seicento, and points forward to elements of the history of the Orlando furioso in the Settecento of particular note. (xv + 214 pp. [15 illustrations]) The transcriptions of the three manuscripts and the twenty-one libretti are bound separately in the second volume. (iv + 526 pp.)
— Dedicated to the memory of Jean-Marie Poilvé (1954-2003)

Email: edward.m.anderson@rice.edu