Tradition, Innovation, and Experimentation: The Dramatic Stage and New Modes of Performance in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Naples in the last thirty years of the eighteenth-century was characterized by a fervent climate of theatrical experimentation. Although too often viewed as the last stronghold of Metastasian dramatic principles and traditions, the city was deeply influenced by the “reform culture” of Northern Europe. These exterior influences were bolstered by the contributions of local practitioners, whether composers, performers, and theorists. This essay is a brief consideration of how the ideas of “reform culture” affected contemporary Neapolitan theatrical practices and the emergence of new works in the city. A critical source for “reformed” theatrical philosophy was the work of Antonio Planelli (1747–1803), whose treatise Dell’opera in musica (1772) is a significant exploration and commentary on the dramatic stage of the Bourbon capital. Progressing from theatrical philosophy to existing practice, I will consider how the prevailing conditions animated the creation of the largely unknown cantata/pastorale/opera, La pietà d’amore (1782) by the singer, composer, and Calzabigi protégé Vito Giuseppe Millico (1737–1802), created expressly for Naples under the sway of reform principles and his direct collaborations with the poet of Orfeo, Alceste, and Paride ed Elena. My study concludes with an examination of the emergence of the so-called “Lenten tragedy” or azione sacra per musica, a theatrical form created in the exclusive environs of the Teatro di San Carlo, the royal theater of the Bourbon capital, yet imparting a new theatrical aesthetic and modes of representation for contemporary sacred genres consistent to select ideals of reform culture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".