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PERFORMING COMMUNITY
Venice, 1620 Venice has always been a city apart. Cut off from the European mainland by tricky wetlands, Venetians elevated their access to the sea and their seamanship to secure incredible wealth through trade and commerce. Unlike other European city states of the early modern era, Venice was a Republic. The key executive position of Doge rotated among elite families who established a tightly controlled oligarchy over all aspects of Venetian life. The Republic was, in important ways, one of Europe’s first secular authoritarian regimes. Music and art always have been important to the city. Both were put in the service of legitimating the regime while simultaneously providing expressive outlets in a society that was tightly organized from above. Following the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, Venice’s control over trade with the East waned. Europe’s major trade routes steadily shifted to the Atlantic, taking economic supremacy and political power with them. By the turn of the seventeenth century, Venice faltered and began redefining itself as Europe’s pleasure capital. The city leveraged gambling, courtesans, luxury goods, music and drama, and festivals to preserve its economic well-being. One new art form, opera, led the way. Opera emerged from the attempts of late-sixteenth-century Florentines and their
neighbors in other commerce-dominated Northern Italian principalities to recreate the music of the ancient Greeks. Although recent historiographical research has altered some of the details in the story, it is clear that new theatrical forms combining drama, dance, song and instrumental music came together in Northern Italy just before 1600 as something that was qualitatively new. This innovative performance style which eventually would become known as “opera” emerged in response to debates over the extent to which the emotional impact attributed to ancient Greek drama was related to the music provided by the chorus. Many of opera’s originators, including Galileo’s father Vincenzo Galilei, desired to break out of the limitations of medieval polyphonic choral music and looked to imagined Greek roots for validation of the new style. This pioneering form of vocal dramatic theater was strikingly new, like many of the royal regimes of the time. Opera was associated as well with Greek and Roman classicism, the core of legitimacy in European culture. Young Absolutist rulers across Europe hoped that such legitimacy would attach itself to their own sovereignties. Opera offered important armament for consolidating state power. Initially, opera’s words were more important that its music. The poet Ottaavio
