Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".