Mitridate’s Operatic Poetry

While the encyclopédistes were left grappling with the theoretical viability of de la Motte's audacious genre of prose tragedy and the littérateurs staged public disputes about its implications, the Enlightenment operatic stage was quietly absorbing these polemics into its evolving praxis. This second room in our exhibit shows how one opera in particular—Vittorio Amadeo Cigna-Santi and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Mitridate —found itself resonating with Télémacomania's literary reverberations. Neither the opera nor the Racinian play on which it is based has enjoyed the same popularity as Mozart and Racine's better-known works, and yet both stubbornly persisted throughout the eighteenth century and beyond. Having achieved unexpected (and surely unintentional) notoriety as de la Motte's exemplar for prose poetry, Racine's Mithridate enjoyed an afterlife well into the nineteenth century, not as a spoken drama but in countless operatic adaptations by composers and librettists. Despite de la Motte's mixed success convincing his contemporaries, his controversial agenda lingered in literary circles and infiltrated dramma per musica through the migration of Racine's play from the domain of spoken tragedy to the operatic stage. Continuing our tour through Télémacomania as a nexus for the Enlightenment's experiments with “la Poésie,” we will use this room to scrutinize Mitridate as a case of complex “transfert” across genres, from spoken tragedy, through poetic reformism, and into dramma per musica. Versions of the Mithridates legend appeared regularly on the operatic stage. A handful are recognizable adaptations of Racine's original play, including Benedetto Pasqualigo's version set by Giovanni Capelli in Venice (1723), Filippo Vanstryp's libretto set by Porpora in Rome (1730), and the Villati/Graun version in Berlin (1750). Apostolo Zeno's much looser adaptation was also popular and inspired settings by Caldara (Vienna, 1728), Sarti (Florence, 1779), and Sacchini (London, 1781). Many of these works do not survive in their entirety and are no longer performed. One notable exception to this trend, however, is Cigna-Santi's Mitridate, re di Ponto , set by Quirino Gasparini in 1767 and, more famously, by Mozart in 1770. Ostensibly, Racine's influence towers over several generations of librettists and composers, yet the playwright is also oddly remote from this repertoire. For Zeno, Racine's tragedy supplies a plot setting and the occasional character name, but he does not adapt the play so much as borrow loosely from its historical world.

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