Producing Cavalli's Operas: To Dance or Not to Dance?
(Wendy Heller)

In her 2007 article entitled “Hercules Dancing in Thebes, in Pictures and Music,” Barbara observed that “a general assumption persists among musicologists and dance historians that dance in seventeenth-century opera was a French phenomenon, with Italians only occasionally staging a final ballo.” A notable exception to this attitude, as Sparti noted, can be found in the work of Irene Alm, who uncovered nearly a hundred examples of dance music for the balli in Venetian opera. Typically placed at the ends of Act I and II, the balli, as Alm had observed, were not inconsequential intermission features, but rather were of central importance to the pacing and meaning of the opera: they often comment on the action, explore an exotic theme or express some otherwise forbidden notion implicit in the plot, providing visual spectacle and variety, but also created transitions out of the rarefied world of sung drama, articulating the three act structure. Nonetheless,few productions of seventeenth-century Venetian operas today—even those that claim to be historically informed—attempt to grapple with this particular aspect of the performance; instead directors typically omit the dances, add them to places where they don’t belong, and/or use choreographies that are not only anachronistic but disruptive.
My paper explores the treatment of balli in present day performances of Cavalli’s opera. After examining some recent productions in which their omission or misplacement distorts the structure and meanings of the opera, I consider the question from the point of view of the editor of the critical edition, focusing in some detail on the problems raised by the dances in Veremonda, L’Amazzone d’Aragona (1652/3), which I am currently preparing for Bärenreiter. Finally, I hope to establish some guidelines for the inclusion of dance the operas of Cavalli and his contemporaries, and in so doing adhere to the principles exemplified by Sparti’s work.

Wendy Heller, Princeton, New Jersey, USA:

Wendy Heller, Professor and Chair of the Department of Music, specializes in the study of 17th- and 18th-century opera from interdisciplinary perspectives, with emphasis on gender and sexuality, art history, and the classical tradition. She trained as a singer at New England Conservatory, where she also studied dance with Julia Sutton, and received her PhD in musicology at Brandeis University. The winner of numerous grants and fellowships, her extensive publications include the award-winning Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice and Music in the Baroque. She is currently completing a book entitled Animating Ovid: Opera and the Metamorphoses of Antiquity in Early Modern Italy, as well as critical editions of Handel’s Admeto and Francesco Cavalli’s Veremonda L’Amazzone d’Aragona. Heller is also Vice-President of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music.