Saffo's Lyre: Improvisation and Neoclassicism in Italian Opera

FAIN: FT-58287-10

Melina Esse
University of Rochester (Rochester, NY 14627-0001)

The emergence of an unadorned, dramatic singing style in Italian opera of the mid 1800s is often credited to increasing composerly control over singers "taste for improvised ornament" as a triumph of the written text over an oral culture of ephemeral sensation. My project, in contrast, suggests that this style may have been inspired by operatic encounters with the improvvisatrice, a female improviser of (often chanted or sung) poetry. Giovanni Pacini's Saffo, for instance, embodies an ideal of performance in which creation and execution are fused together in a moment of divine inspiration. Now overshadowed by caricatures of capricious divas, the improvvisatrice challenges traditional histories of opera because she represents a uniquely Italian alloy of Romantic and neoclassical aesthetics.