The Augustinian Ascent

This chapter explores different pre-modern models of emotion. It surveys the sweep of pre-modern Western music, from chant to Monteverdi, in terms of four “flavors” of emotion: the Augustinian ascent, the Thomist descent, Neoplatonism, and Epicurianism. Augustine’s philosophy of love, epitomized by affection, resonated with the surges of chant. Aquinas’s relational model of emotion, based on reciprocity, chimes with “contrapuntal” models of emotion. Neoplatonism, exemplified by Ficino’s theories, resonated with the pneumatic flow of emotion through the cosmos. Petrarchan Epicurianism is reflected in the atomism of emotion, from madrigals to early opera. All told, the history of premodern emotion illuminates the changing musical styles from Hildegard, Machaut, Dufay, Ockeghem, Josquin, and Willaert, to Monteverdi.

Repertories

This chapter establishes that different types of opera were classified differently during the 1920s and considers questions of contemporary canon formation. Early opera and some modern operas were acceptable to highbrow tastes; German opera was preferable to Italian. The chapter begins by establishing what the 1920s British operatic repertoire was and considering the ways in which it was perceived to be ossifying into a ‘museum culture’. It considers the repertoire performed by the touring companies and how they adjusted their programming to suit the tastes of different cities. Innovative attempts by Oxford students to revive early opera are discussed. The chapter examines why nineteenth-century Italian opera was deemed so problematic by highbrow commentators, before considering how Wagner’s works cut across highbrow–middlebrow categories in surprising ways. It concludes by considering operatic topics that were deemed particularly well-suited to British tastes, and whether Britain could properly be called an operatic nation at all.

Ghosting Agrippina

Baroque opera was invented on a deathly premise: reviving a tradition of sung ancient tragedy that had in fact never existed. Modern historiography has struggled with the notion of origins, focusing on relationships among the surviving textual sources to make sense of the proliferation of theatrical subjects. These relationships remain important—but there is also reason to delve deeper into the “haunted” status of early opera. With respect to three central works on the subject of Agrippina and her son Nero (Nerone fatto Cesare, Noris-Perti, Venice 1693; Agrippina, Noris-Magni, Milan 1703; and L’Agrippina, Handel-[Grimani], Venice 1709), the haunted status of performances was made explicit, both in the drama and in contemporary poems dedicated to the main singers. Using terminology associated with the “spectral turn” in the humanities, this essay argues for rethinking operatic genealogies through the lens of hauntological intertextualities. In contrast to traditional theories of compositional influence, this study adopts a non-linear historiographical approach to performance genealogies, embracing text, music, and discourse about opera itself. Contesting the use of the concept of “origins” with respect to both the birth and subject matter of baroque opera, I argue that the genre developed as an already haunted narration.