Matteo Noris

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Matteo Noris ( 1640 in Venice - October 6, 1714 in Treviso ) was an Italian poet and opera librettist , best known for his libretto for Tito Manlio , set to music by Antonio Vivaldi , among others .

life and work

Title page of Vivaldi's Tito Manlio without naming the librettist and composer, Mantua 1719

Noris was one of the most ardent librettists of the heyday of Venetian opera in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. He wrote at least 47 opera templates, which were set to music at least 83 times by 37 different composers. With the exception of a period of five years, during which he was practically banned from working in Venice, Matteo Norris worked continuously for important opera houses in his hometown. For two periods, from 1670 to 1686 and again from 1697 to 1703, he worked for the powerful noble family of the Grimani , from which three doges and five church princes came from. During the heyday of the Venetian opera, the family ran three theaters, including the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo , built in 1638, where important works by Cavalli and Monteverdi were premiered, and the Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo , built in 1678, which was built in the following decades due to its excellent performances Performances and the excellent singer was considered the first opera house in Venice.

The poet made his debut on January 10, 1866 at the Teatro San Cassiano with the libretto La Zenobia , set to music by Giovanni Antonio Boretti . It was also the composer's first opera. A sixteen-year collaboration with the Grimanis followed from 1870, which ended abruptly due to a scandal.

sequel follows

The Neapolitan composer Alessandro Scarlatti , father of the more famous Domenico , premiered at least six operas based on Noris libretti in the Real Palazzo and in San Bartolomeo in Naples between 1688 and 1701 . Another opera is not guaranteed. In addition, he presented a revised version of Flavio Cuniberto on September 6, 1702 in the Pratolino in Florence.

For example, Flavio Cuniberto was shown in Modena in 1688 (with music by Domenico Gabrielli ), 1690 in Livorno, 1692 in Palermo, 1693 in Napoli, 1696 in the Roman Teatro Capranica (composed by Luigi Mancia ), 1697 in Florence (in the original version by Gian Domenico Partenio ), 1702 in Genoa and Pratolino (there in the setting by Alessandro Scarlatti ) and 1706 in Lucca.

Noris returned to his hometown around 1692 and began to write libretti again, but not for the San Giovanni Grisostomo , at that time the most important opera stage in Venice with the best singers. He renewed his collaboration with the composer Carlo Francesco Pollarolo , for whom he wrote eight librettos over the next eight years. He wrote a total of fourteen opera models for Pollarolo by 1704 and his son Antonio set another libretto by Noris, Cesare, to music in 1715 .

Noris died in Treviso and was buried there in the Chiesa di San Leonardo.

effect

The encyclopedist Vincenzo Maria Coronelli included him on the list of important librettists in Venice, along with Apostolo Zeno , Francesco Silvani and others. His name also appears in the directory of famous Venetian writers compiled by Giulio Bernardino Tomitano (1761–1828), and he is also mentioned in the Iscrizioni veneziane of the scholar Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna (1824–1853) as a man of letters, worthy of recognition.

Noris' international success came posthumously. Most of his works did not reach the non-Italian centers of opera, London, Vienna and Hamburg until after his death - but all of them were edited or translated, often with a different title and mostly without naming the author. Noris' works in Rome, Florence and Milan fared similarly, where a number of revisions were performed during his lifetime. His libretto for Tito Manlio was set to music four times during his lifetime and performed in some cities in Italy, but the quality of the subject was only recognized after his death - especially through the setting by Antonio Vivaldi , who composed the opera for a wedding in 1714, which then did not take place. Vivaldi's opera was first performed in Mantua in 1719 and was then seen and heard in Venice and Rome. Of course, the composer added a comic character, Lindo, to the plot that Matteo Noris had not planned, and enhanced the opera with seven older successful arias from other operas. The Roman version was a pasticcio of compositions by several composers, according to research without the comical character that Vivaldi had added.

During his lifetime, the lyricist was exposed to unauthorized changes to his texts - copyright in the current sense did not exist at the time. After his death they were the norm.

Rome, Florence, Milan

The colleague and competitor Silvio Stampiglia (1664–1725) made generous use of Noris's work. For example, the reworking of Penelope la casta (1696 at the Teatro Tordinona in Rome, music by Giacomo Antonio Perti ) is ascribed to him. A particularly unfortunate arrangement comes from Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni , who in 1694 remodeled the Traiano for a performance at the Roman Teatro Capranica and immediately gave the opera a new title - L'Eusonia overo La dama stravagante . Noris' work Nerone fatto Cesare (successfully performed in Venice in 1692 and in Naples and Rome in 1695) was textually revised in 1703 by Antonio Piantanida or Pietro d'Averara, re-set to music by Paolo Magni and also under a new title - L'Agrippina - in Milan listed. Tito Manlio fu ripreso a Mantova nel 1719 (Vivaldi) e poi a Firenze nel 1721 (Luca Antonio Predieri) e nel 1742 (Michele Fini)

The librettist Gaetano Roccaforte created a new textual version of Tito Manlio in 1742 , which was first set to music by the composer Niccolò Jommelli (with textual support from Jacopo Antonio Sanvitale), performed first in Turin, later also in Venice and Vienna. Like Noris' Tito Manlio , Roccaforte's version was set to music at least eight times. Admittedly, Roccaforte, as the operator of the important Teatro Argentina in Rome (from 1748), made it easy for composers to set his version to music. Roccaforte's version successfully supplanted Noris' original libretto. In the Teatro Argentina alone, the work was performed four times between 1742 and 1791, always with Roccaforte's libretto.

London
Handel's Flavio, re de 'Langobardi is based on Noris' Flavio Cuniberto (without mentioning the author)

On May 14, 1723, the opera Flavio, re de 'Langobardi was premiered in London's King's Theater . Nicola Francesco Haym was named as the librettist and Georg Friedrich Händel as the composer . Matteo Noris was not mentioned at all, although the opera was a minor arrangement of his Flavio Cuniberto , which was revised for Parma by Silvio Stampiglia in 1696 . Haym probably used the revision of Stampiglia, but this was also not mentioned.

L'odio e l'amor was shown at the King's Theater as early as 1721 , revised by Paolo Antonio Rolli and set to music by Giovanni Bononcini . Roccaforte's version of Tito Manlio was shown in London in 1756, albeit without lasting success.

Germany

Norris had a good reputation in 18th century Germany. The Oper am Gänsemarkt in Hamburg presented at least six of his dramas between 1682 and 1737, all of which were translated and set to music. L'odio e l'amor came out in 1724 and 1731 - in the Rolli revision, with the music of Bononcini and the new title Cyrus and Ciro - at the opera house on Hagenmarkt in Braunschweig and was also shown in Wolfenbüttel in 1724. Feind quote, at least two German composers composed operas based on subjects by the Venetian librettist. During his stay in Italy, Johann David Heinichen set Le passioni per troppo amore to music, which was presented on January 28, 1713 at the Teatro Sant'Angelo in Venice. It was the last world premiere during the librettist's lifetime. The Braunschweig composer Conrad Friedrich Hurlebusch finally set the libretto Flavio Cuniberto to music in 1727 . Of course, his work was never performed.

Performances and recordings in the present

Vivaldi's version of Tito Manlio was rediscovered in the late 1970s by the musicologist and conductor Vittorio Negri , performed at the Piccolo Scala, the small house of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, and recorded for record. This opera is rarely staged, but is always performed in concert , for example in the London Barbican Center or in the Theater an der Wien . It was recorded three times on phonograms. Especially the aria Sonno, se pur sei sonno from the 3rd act became popular thanks to the recordings by Magdalena Kožená , which she regularly presents in her recitals.

Quote

Noris liked to introduce his Argomenti in the libretto booklet with philosophical considerations, which Albert Gier calls somewhat derogatory "moralizing considerations". On the occasion of the premiere of his drama per musical I due tiranni al soglio , set to music by Antonio Sartorio in 1679, he emphasized that injustice always witnesses new injustice. Elsewhere, three years later, he wrote:

“If you look at the goings-on in this world sensibly and in detail, it is ultimately nothing more than a madhouse, a monkey theater, an amusing, ridiculous drama. Wise Democritus always laughs because new follies keep coming up. The wishes are vain, the madnesses varied "

- Matteo Noris : From the Argomento zu Bassano ovvero Il maggior impossibile , 1682

Composers who set his libretti to music

The number of libretti by Matteo Norris that were set to music by the respective composer is given in brackets. The numbers are minimum numbers as not all librettos and settings have been recorded.

   

Recordings

Servilia visits the sleeping Tito Manlio in prison, scene from the 3rd act

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Web links

Notes and individual references

  1. ^ Library of Congress : La Zenobia: dramma per mvsica , accessed on August 9, 2016.
  2. ↑ Nicola Badolato (Università di Bologna): Matteo Noris, “L'animo eroe” (1689) e alcuni drammi per musica del secondo Seicento , ENBaCH (European Network for Baroque Cultural Heritage), accessed on August 11, 2016.
  3. ↑ Vivaldi also set two further libretti by Matteo Norris, 1715 Nerone fatto cesare and 1725 L'inganno trionfante in amore . The former is completely lost, only fragments of the latter exist. Both works were premiered at the Teatro Sant'Angelo in Venice. See Michael Talbot : The Vivaldi Compendium , Woodbridge 2011, ISBN 184383670X , pp. 231 and 232, accessed online [1] on August 8, 2016.
  4. ↑ In two cases, the authorship of the libretto has not yet been proven, as it is not stated either in the librettos or in the present database: (a) in the Tito Manlio composition by Michele Fini , dated several times in 1730, verifiably listed in 1942 in Florence, and (b) in the setting by Giuseppe Giordani , performed in 1784 in the Teatro S. Agostino of Genoa.
  5. ↑ Girolamo Abos is generally given as the composer , but an old source refers to frequent confusion with a composer named Syr. Subscriptions . See: Encyclopedia of the Entire Musical Sciences or Universal Lexicon of Music: A to Bq. 1 , Koehler, 1835, accessed August 8, 2016.
  6. ^ HJ Marx, D. Schröder: The Hamburg Gänsemarkt Opera. Catalog of text books , Laaber 1995
  7. ↑ The work is also called Opera fatta in Italia , which suggests that it could be a subtitle or a description of the work.
  8. ↑ On the occasion of a concert performance of Tito Manlio in the London Barbican Center in 2008, the London music critic Tim Ashley dryly stated: "But it is no masterpiece.", See: Tito Manlio, Barbican, London , in: The Guardian (London), February 21, 2008, accessed on August 8, 2016. Nevertheless, it awarded 4 out of 5 possible stars (and praised the orchestra, conductor and cast, especially Karina Gauvin as Manlio).
  9. ↑ a b quoted here. after Albert Gier : Workshop reports: Theory and typology of the Argomento in the Italian baroque opera libretto , University of Bamberg Press 2012 (Romanic literatures and cultures, Volume 6), ISBN 978-3-86309-084-5 , p. 79, accessed online [ 2] on August 8, 2016.
  10. ↑ Quoted here. according to Tamino Klassikforum : TITO MANLIO. Dramma per musica in three acts - libretto by Mateo Noris , accessed on August 8, 2016
  11. ↑ Quoted here. According to Opera Today : VIVALDI: Tito Manlio , accessed August 8, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Noris, Matteo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian poet and opera librettist
DATE OF BIRTH 1640
PLACE OF BIRTH Venice
DATE OF DEATH October 6, 1714
Place of death Treviso