Calcagno Mauro. From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi's Staging of the Self

University of California Press, 2012. — 334 p.This pathbreaking study links two traditionally separate genres as their stars crossed to explore the emergence of multiple selves in early modern Italian culture and society. Mauro Calcagno focuses on the works of Claudio Monteverdi, a master of both genres, to investigate how they reflect changing ideas about performance and role-playing by singers. Calcagno traces the roots of dialogic subjectivity to Petrarch’s love poetry arguing that Petrarchism exerted a powerful influence not only on late Renaissance literature and art, but also on music. Covering more than a century of music and cultural history, the book demonstrates that the birth of opera relied on an important feature of the madrigalian tradition: the role of the composer as a narrative agent enabling performers to become characters and hold a specific point of view.La musica and Orfeo
Text, Context, Performance
Performing Nobility
Authorizing Performance
The Work of Opera
Liminality, Deixis, Subjectivity
Prologues as Paratexts
"I am Music"
The Prologue of Orfeo as Performance
Dialogic Subjectivity
Subject-Effects
Performing the Dialogic Self
Music's Touch
EchoesConstructing the Narrator
From Petrarch to Petrarchism: A rhetoric of Voice and Address
Voi ch'ascoltate
Appropriating the Self
Lyric Modes
Equivocality. In Search of Voice: Musical Petrarchism in the Sixteenth-Century MadrigalTheatricality and Temporal Perspective
Diffracting the Self
Who is Speaking? From Soggetto to Dialogo
The Madrigal Book as CanzoniereStaging the Self
Monteverdi, Narrator
From Narration to Focalization
Combattimento between Page and Stage
The Possibility of Opera
The Aesthetics of Nothing: Monteverdi, Marino, and the Incogniti
Focalization in Poppea
Epilogue: Subjectivity, Theatricality, Multimediality
Appendix
Tables of Contents of the Madrigal Books.
Monteverdi, Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda: Text and Translation
Notes