After tentative beginnings in the closed aristocratic courts of Mantua and Florence, opera found a welcome home in the Most Serene Republic of Venice. The first public opera house opened there in 1637. A mere forty-one years later there were no fewer than nine theaters in the city. Especially during Carnival season, Venice nurtured the new art. Opera provided popular entertainment for tourists who doubled the city’s population during pre-Lenten revelries. Hidden behind Carnival masks which themselves spoke a subtle and sometimes subversive symbolic language, people of all social classes mixed freely. The enormously wealthy families that built opera houses used their acute business savvy, honed over centuries of commerce with the near East and Orient, to increase the opera’s

efficiency and economy. Opera itself became a valuable export commodity as troupes brought the more popular shows to other theaters around Italy. As Ellen Rosand argues, the sociology of opera as we know it today was essentially defined in Venice during the seventeenth century.  The hedonistic and symbiotic relationship between audiences and performers, the tireless revelry in the exotic, and earnest attempts to appeal to a broad audience can all trace their roots back to this time and place.

Into the fertile, colorful, and often scandalous urban world of the Serenissima, Daniella da Castrovillari offered his works to the public. La Cleopatra was his third opera and the only one that survives. Although he was a Franciscan friar, Castrovillari was known as an organist and pedagogue in Venice and other nearby cities. Still, very little is known of Castrovillari’s life. Apparently he composed two books of cantatas as well as music for the violin, but this too is lost. All we know of his music comes from La Cleopatra.

A few tantalizing details are known of the circumstances of La Cleopatra’s performance history, but many mysteries remain.  Intended for the Theatro San Salvatore, which was newly constructed in 1661 by the powerful Vendramin family, it is possible that Castrovillari’s opera was never performed there at all. As Eleanor Selfridge-Field writes, the Council of Ten (Venice’s powerful governing body) issued an edict prohibiting the work from being performed and barring its prima donna, Anna Maria Sardelli from singing in it. Surprisingly, a week later a newspaper notice declared the opera a success at the Teatro San Luca. What accounts for the discrepancy in venue? What was the result of the Council’s ban? If the opera was successful, why was it never performed again in Venice? Although Castrovillari prepared to write another work for the following season, the San Salvatore theater decided instead to revive an older opera by Cesti in 1663. As far as we know, Castrovillari’s operatic career came to an abrupt and permanent halt after La Cleopatra.

The circumstances of Anna Maria, Castrovillari’s prima donna, only complicate matters. Known as a talented and beautiful young woman, her 1651 Venetian debut as the lead singer in an opera by Cesti was a success. Subsequently, she sung the role of Cleopatra in Cesti’s next stage work. Letters to Cesti referring to his “chromatic cantata” indicate that the two had a complicated and ill-fated love affair. The danger such a woman represented to the patriarchal authorities may be reflected allegorically in the engraving that graces the front of Giacoma dall’Angelo’s libretto for Castrovallari’s opera. Here, the characters of Anna Maria and Cleopatra may fuse into one, represented simultaneously by Medusa. Depicted in the engraving at the very moment she

transforms Medusa’s hair into a nest of vipers, the goddess Athena holds a shield in one hand and her representative olive branch in the other. As legend has it, Medusa (like Anna Maria and Cleopatra) was a beautiful young woman who transgressed moral authority.

Castrovillari’s experience was not unique: opera was often censored in 1660s Venice. Just a few years after Castrovillari’s La Cleopatra, a work by Cavalli called Eliogabalo drew the ire of the city’s oligarchs. According to Mauro Calcagno, the libretto by Aurelio Aureli contained material including regicide and an erotic scene with a cross-dresser. To placate the censors, another

version had to be prepared which excised or altered the objectionable material. We have no evidence that La Cleopatra had to be modified to satisfy the censor. Was it then solely Anna Maria’s involvement in the opera that raised the eyebrows of the cultural police?

While we may never know the answers to these questions, the music itself tells us much. Castrovillari’s opera follows many of the conventions of mid-century Venetian opera: it begins with a prologue (omitted in our performance) in which allegorical characters lament the continual state of war and appeal to the audience to awaken the spirit of Fortune for the benefit of Cleopatra. The first act presents the main characters and a subplot, ending in confusion. The second act further complicates matters, and the drama reaches its apex in the third act when Augustus arrives and Cleopatra contemplates suicide. Like many other operas of its time, dall’Angelo’s libretto makes no pretentions to historical accuracy, and freely adapts the historical facts to suit modern drama.

Lying just behind these conventional elements, several aspects of the opera merit further attention.

Fortune plays an important but invisible role. At the beginning of Act 2, a brooding Octavia awaits news of her assassin’s success. She sings, “Octavia will live, Cleopatra will die…Octavia will rise, Cleopatra will fall.” Just three short scenes later, Cleopatra plots her own revenge, reversing the locution: “Octavia must fall…” But Fortune is a fickle bedfellow, and Cleopatra observes in Act 2, “fortune hoped for is never won.” Augustus invokes Fortune one last time at the end, when he decides how best to punish Mark Antony’s mutinous transgressions.

Another theme running through La Cleopatra has to do with stoic philosophy. In the stoic ethos, which had its origins in Hellenic Greece and many adherents in imperial Rome, excessive emotions are viewed as the root cause of destructive conflict in the real world. The uncanny power that Cleopatra’s beauty has over men inspires such excess. This is clear right at the beginning when Mark Antony’s servant, Clisterno sings of his voyeurism: “No more, my Lord, or I too will begin to feel in my heart a growing desire…to make love.” The knights Coriaspe and Dolabella come to blows over Cleopatra in Act 1, even though neither one approaches the social level of the Queen of Egypt. Of course, Mark Antony is most defenseless of all under Cleopatra, but he may be even more culpable since he admits his crime in a monologue: “Antony…come to your senses! Be great, and put down that reckless excess.” In dall’Angelo’s libretto, to be truly great requires a stoic mastering of strong emotion.

Throughout the opera, dall’Angelo portrays Mark Antony as a weak and unreliable character, far more “effeminate” (as seventeenth-century gender stereotypes would have it,) than most of the women in the story. After publicly winning Egypt, Antony immediately surrenders his private, domestic ground. Upon seeing Octavia, he promptly abandons her under the pretense of looking into “high affairs of the Empire.” His excuse for protecting Cleopatra in his rooms (“…you have come to enact the Empire’s decrees”) is not only ridiculously implausible but also contains a barely veiled sexual innuendo. Later, Octavia provides vivid proof of Mark Antony’s impotence when she mocks “Cleopatra’s slack lover” to Augustus. Just a few verses earlier, Augustus declares victory over the “feeble lover” Mark Antony.

In contrast to Mark Antony, Octavia wields an impressive ability to control the action, brilliantly conveyed in an Act 1 rage aria that contains many virtuosic vocal passages. If Octavia comes across as someone to be feared rather than loved, Cleopatra’s character is more complex, and forms the most potentially transgressive element of the opera. Cleopatra is clearly not without fault: scheming outright to undo Mark Antony’s marriage and brazenly inciting him to Octavia’s murder, Cleopatra’s ethics are unambiguously contemptuous. But her beautiful laments, such as “Dite, ò Cieli” and “Adio Regni” beg for our compassion even as

we recognize the moral dupli city. But our sympathies for Cleopatra also derive from her vulnerability. Falling asleep on stage, she exposes herself to all sorts of dangers since sleep in Venetian opera was a perilous condition for anyone. As we gaze at the ravishing Queen of Egypt and sigh with her laments, are we also complicit in these crimes? 

The failure of the main characters to point the moral compass leaves an opening for the lower characters exemplify the ideals of  stoic reason, self-control and ethical principle. Arsinoë warns of Cleopatra’s dangers when she chides Coriaspe’s illicit fantasy: “You aspire to Cleopatra? Madman, rather blush at such stupid desires… such reckless love…can find no reward but death.” Refusing to serve the “faithless rebel’s mad excesses,” Dolabella deserts Mark Antony for the emperor’s army. But Filenia, who with her age is presumably immune to youthful vice, provides another kind of wisdom clothed in comedy: “Girls, if you’re pretty, have fun now, and believe me: once you hit forty, no man will be after you.” 

For many years, it was though that only one copy of Castrovillari’s music survived in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice. Recently, musicologist Domenico Martyr turned up a second Naples manuscript containing many Cleopatra arias. Although it was not uncommon to export works from Venice to other cities, La Cleopatra’s popularity in its own time is still difficult to assess. Brother Castrovillari’s work languished in utter obscurity until modern scholars and performers took an interest to it and many other works of the Venetian stage. Today’s performance – its first modern revival – attests to the continuing fascination we have in unearthing music buried under the sediment of many intervening centuries. It provides a fascinating window into the amazingly fertile and scandalous world that opera was born into.