El Cid en la ópera italiana (siglo XVIII)génesis y trayectorias

Abstract

This PhD dissertation arises from the interest in two distinct study areas, Literature and Music, but which have the capacity for converging in a different way, originating particular artistic expressions. One of them, the song, is undoubtedly the most extended form of expression these days. Another one, the opera, is a performance with a fascinating history which nowadays still attracts the attention of critics and researchers. The Spanish bibliography on opera is truly scarce, and consists mostly of some researches which analyse gender from a purely musical or scenic perspective, so that the philological area goes practically unnoticed. That is exactly the starting point of this dissertation: the analysis of the opera libretto as a literary text and more precisely of the 13th century Italian Opera. Having done the exam of the libretto and its different aspects and forms in a global way, the dissertation focus on the presence of El Cid in the Italian Opera that, as we will see later, becomes significant, considering the number of librettos that we have found, which are transcribed below into the appendix. We do not talk about the poetic El Cid, but the character in his youth. The figure of the young Rodrigo, has undergone an evolution since medieval legends, through the chronicles to Las Mocedades del Cid, a drama with which Guillen de Castro set El Cid in the early 12th century as a courtier knight based on the premises in Renaissance. The French dramatist Pierre Corneille takes advantage of the success of that literary work to make a version in 1637 which will gain wide popularity in France. Accusations of plagiarism will oblige to make a new edition in 1660, when the hero's youth theme has already motivated a large amount of translations and rewritings in Italian, where the different states which then made up the peninsula manifested an important French cultural influence. It is in Italy where this material undergoes the step from theatre to opera since the main theme of the work (love-honour conflict) means an ideal issue for the opera genre, which searches for plots different from the mythological ones. The diffusion of the Italian Opera is such in Europe that we found works about El Cid not only in Italy, but also in capitals such as London or Lisbon. In fact, Italian Opera is performed throughout Europe except France, where Lully's lyric tragedy gets its own identity, so that it becomes a genre itself. In any case, we can find examples of sung dramas about Rodrigo in our Northern neighbour, even if they are not part of our corpus. The first opera about the topic we deal with is first performed in 1682 in Venice, and oddly enough it is not about Rodrigo. We are talking about Flavio Cuniberto, written by Matteo Noris, which is about the king of the Lombards story. In this interesting libretto, we get two distinct plots, one of which is clearly based on which Castro and Corneille propose: the King debates between his two ministers, so that one of them rule England in his name. The younger one takes victory for granted, but the monarch chooses the other one, which causes a conflict that concerns the children of the two ministers, who just got married. After this work, which will be set to music by different composers, we finally find the first Italian opera that the characters proposed by Castro in Las Mocedades: il gran Cid, a long libretto in which, during the Baroque period, the author focuses constantly on how the recognised sentiments of the period were expressed. From that moment, new versions of this author appear as well as many others until the corpus of the present research is constituted. Among those libretto writers, it is possible to find Alborghetti himself, Nicola Francesco Haym, Benedetto Pasqualigo, Gioacchino Pizzi and Giovanni Gualberto Botarelli. Regarding the song writers, it is worth highlighting Händel, Niccolö Piccini and Antonio Sacchini. Finally, in order to find some resemblances, we focus on in a less systematic way on the performance on another literary hero from Castile, Amadís, who, in the same vein than Rodrigo, is first played in France and then it would be performed in different European capitals.