Eighteenth Century Italian Theatre

In the eighteenth century Italy was not yet a unified country. Instead, the Italian peninsula was occupied by several different nations. The Austrians held a large portion of the country, the Papal States held Rome and its surrounding area, Naples and Sicily were separate kingdoms, and Venice was a republic. At the end of the century Napoleon conquered the entire peninsula, and it became the property of France until 1814.  Still, much Italian culture continued to be exported throughout Europe. Italian composers and architects worked for courts all across the continent, even to places as distant as St. Petersburg, Russia, newly built in the Italian style.

You might say that the theatre in eighteenth century Italy played second fiddle to opera, which had been tremendously popular since the mid-seventeenth century. Most playwrights in Italy also worked on opera libretti, and made more of their money writing for opera than for the theatre.  Metastasio, the most important serious Italian dramatist in the early 18^th century, for example, focused more attention on operas than on straight plays.

The theatrical center of eighteenth century Italy was Venice, with 14 active theatres, more than in any other European city at the time.  Many of these theatres produced more opera than plays, but spoken drama flourished in Venice as well.  The two best-known writers worked in Venice, and both wrote comedies still regularly performed throughout Europe and the U.S.

      

Carlo Gozzi and Carlo Goldoni both made use of the popular form that had dominated the entire continent for nearly two centuries: commedia dell’arte.  This physical, improvised, low comedy with stock characters, featured young lovers blocked from their amorous pursuits by older “blocking” characters. Comic servants (some very clever, some rather stupid) found ways of fooling the old farts and getting the young lovers together.

After 200 years of improvised variations on a theme, by the mid-eighteenth century, commedia had become repetitious, a tired old form.  And it didn’t fit into the trend towards sentimentalism in theatre, which as by now you can guess was spreading throughout all of Europe.  Both Gozzi and Goldoni had solutions, radically 

different in approach; both were bitter rivals.  Let’s look at Gozzi first.  This aristocratic and conservative fellow loved commedia, advocated keeping the masks that identified the stock characters, and insisted that at least portions of the action remain improvised for the sake of spontaneity.   Using masks and partial improvisation, 

Gozzi created new and fanciful plots that he called “fiabe” or

“fantastic parodies.”  He used grotesque, absurd, and magical plots

that he connected to the real and current world through satire.  Among Gozzi’s most famous plays were Turandot (later operatized by Puccini) and The King Stag (based on stories from the Indian epic Ramayana). 

Here is the intricate plot of another Gozzi play, The Love of Three Oranges, (operatized by Prokofiev in the twentieth century):

A melancholy prince, Tartaglia, is doomed to pine for the Three Oranges, which are kept in an enchanted castle.  The prince retrieves the Oranges, but after he’s given them to his servant Truffaldino, the two become separated.  Although Truffaldino has been warned that the oranges must not be cut open unless a fountain of water is nearby, he gets very thirsty and opens one -- a young girl appears, and begs for water. The terrified Truffaldino, who has no water, cuts the second orange open so that the young girl can drink, but instead another young girl appears, begs for water – and both die of thirst! Truffaldino is about to cut open the third orange, when the prince finds him, goes to a lake, opens the orange, and when a beautiful young maiden appears, he gives her water from the lake – she revives!  It seems she’s a princess, and the two plan to marry, but when the prince goes off to prepare the wedding, a wicked Moorish girl turns the princess into a dove, and takes the princess’s place! Truffaldino saves the day by restoring the princess to human form. Curtain!

Gozzi mocked the new sentimental mode, and among his favorite targets for ridicule were the comedies of Carlo Goldoni.

Goldoni wrote libretti for opera seria and opera buffo (serious and comic operas) throughout his life, in fact one of his collaborators 

was Antonio Vivaldi.  Goldoni began his career by writing soggetti (scenarios) for commedia troupes, but he soon came to despise the same old tricks played time after time, and began to experiment with both character and plot.  He still made extensive use of commedia’s stock characters, but sentimentalized and humanized them.  For example, Pantalone, the old buffoon and butt of servants’ humor in commedia, became in Goldoni’s plays a rather sweet old fellow, 

who  sometimes is even heroic.  In one play the merchant Pantalone’s daughter has married into a decadent aristocratic family.  Pantalone uses virtue and common sense to salvage the situation.  Note that Goldoni is playing here on the “marriage” between the aristocracy and middle class merchant families. He also wrote a treatise in 1750 called The Comic Theatre.  In it he insisted on getting rid of masks, and especially getting rid of improvisation, on using elegant speech on stage, and focusing on “real life” situations.

It’s not that Goldoni’s plays weren’t funny.  His writing certainly sentimentalized commedia, but it was a far cry from the comédie larmoyante of La Chaussée.  His best plays, which include The 

Servant of Two Masters and Mistress of the Inn are very clever and hilariously funny.  In the latter, Mirandolina, the fun-loving and beautiful inn-keeper, is wooed by a decadent nobleman and a rich count, and she herself cleverly woos & wins an indifferent Cavalier, but after much comic action in which the mistress of the inn makes fools of the men, she finally marries the man she truly loves, a servant at her inn.

   

So while Gozzi moves towards fantasy and satire and retains much of old-style commedia, Goldoni moves towards realism and sentimentality, and away from standard commedia.  The rivalry between the two was public and bitter, and caused Goldon to leave Venice for for good. He ended his days in Paris where he wrote for the Comédie Italienne in the French capital. 

      

After the eighteenth century Gozzi’s plays went out of fashion until they were discovered by avant-garde directors in the early 20th century.  In the last 30 years, Gozzi has become quite popular

 in American regional theatres, especially in more experimental ones like ART in Cambridge Mass.  At ART Julie Taymor designed a production of The King Stag and produced an amazing version of The Green Bird off Broadway in the late 1980s, which Doctor Jack was lucky enough to see.  On a personal not, the good doctor’s colleague Norm Johnson directed a lovely production The King Stag at Ithaca College in the mid-1990s.

      

Goldoni’s plays have enjoyed regular if not frequent productions in America’s best regional theatres, and are very popular in Italy and on stages throughout Europe.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, one more writer of serious plays deserves some recognition.  Vittorio Alfieri wrote using classical themes (one of his plays is titled Cleopatra), but he used these themes for patriotic and political purposes, as a protest to foreign occupation of Italy.  Alfieri became known as one of Italy’s first writers in the Romantic mode, but is seldom produced today.

More important than eighteenth century Italian dramatists, however, were Italian designers.  Renaissance Italians had used forced perspective and the single vanishing point as the basis for stage design.  They now produced a new style of scenic spectacle that swept the continent.  The most important name in design is 

Bibiena design

Bibiena, a family from Bologna full of designers.  Ferdinando, the oldest, invented scena per angolo -- angled scenery.  Instead of a single vanishing point, Ferdinando created two or three different vistas.  In addition, Ferdinando made the buildings in his set designs look gigantic by extending theme beyond the top of the proscenium arch, not letting the audience see all of them.  The feeling in scena per angolo was of monumental size and splendor.  Other Bibiena family members took up Ferdinando’s new invention in their designs and traveled throughout Europe introducing the new style, which was especially popular in opera. 

     

In addition to designing settings in the grand style, the Bibiena were frequently called upon to design theatres. On of the most famous of these (which you can visit by the way - Dr Jack did!) is the Teatro Scientifico in Mantua. Below are a few photos of it:

Filippo Juvarra, working in Naples in 1706, used scena per 

angolo with a curvilinear approach.  In Juvarra’s method, the eyes of the audience are led in a circular pattern back to the foreground, as opposed to off in the distance(s) in the Bibiena style. 

      

The chariot and pole method was used to change settings, and most of the monumentality created by scena per angolo was painted on.  Some structural elements appear downstage, but all other architectural elements were cleverly painted on flats and drops.

      

Later in the eighteenth century mood began to be painted on settings. Italian Gian Battista Piranesi engraved Roman ruins in a 

rather realistic fashion using chiaroscuro, starkly contrasting portions of the ruins in sunlight with those in shade.  He also made good use of this technique in a series of imagined prisons (prigiones). Piranesi used the same conventions in his engravings as in angled scenery, and soon scene designers began to use Piranesi’s marked contrasts of light and shadow in their settings. So by the end of the century, especially in the opera, you could to an extent set mood for dramatic effect by exploiting chiaroscuro.

Goldoni’s realistic comedies required domestic and often rural settings, and in this way local color and more realistic touches began to creep into Italian scene design, as it had through the rest of Europe...to which we now turn!

Note: Doctor Jack is placing a slide show of eighteenth century theatres in the blog, in the area below the main post, as he has taken many photos of theatres from that era, particularly in Italy, and he'd like to share them with his readers. Enjoy!