Feasting and Fasting in Opera

From Renaissance Banquets to the Callas Diet

Pierpaolo Polzonetti

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226805009
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

Feasting and Fasting in Opera shows that the consumption of food and drink is an essential component of opera, both on and off stage. In this book, opera scholar Pierpaolo Polzonetti explores how convivial culture shaped the birth of opera and opera-going rituals until the mid-nineteenth century, when eating and drinking at the opera house were still common. Through analyses of convivial scenes in operas, the book also shows how the consumption of food and drink, and sharing or the refusal to do so, define characters' identity and relationships. Feasting and Fasting in Opera moves chronologically from around 1480 to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Wagner's operatic reforms banished refreshments during the performance and mandated a darkened auditorium and absorbed listening. The book focuses on questions of comedy, pleasure, embodiment, and indulgence—looking at fasting, poisoning, food disorders, body types, diet, and social, ethnic, and gender identities—in both tragic and comic operas from Monteverdi to Puccini. Polzonetti also sheds new light on the diet Maria Callas underwent in preparation for her famous performance as Violetta, the consumptive heroine of Verdi's La traviata. Neither food lovers nor opera scholars will want to miss Polzonetti's page-turning and imaginative book.

PART I

Convivial Beginnings

Opera was born and nourished at a time when conviviality was a vital aspect of social life. There are many traces of the convivial spirit that shaped the beginning of operatic culture, but we do not find them in the vast literature of music history. In the first three chapters of this book, I will attempt an archaeology of opera, which is to say, of operatic theory and practice before the early written descriptions of opera performances that date from around 1600. Long before then, elaborate Renaissance banquets included music and theater as essential parts of the kind of multisensory experience that would eventually become a defining characteristic of opera. The reason modern narratives about the birth of opera neglect the links between music, drama, and food has in part to do with the modern experience of opera, which became akin to a religious ritual, where eating and drinking were highly inappropriate. As I show in chapter 4, however, roughly until Wagner, going to opera still was a convivial experience, at least insofar as eating and drinking during a performance was admissible and even encouraged.

The history of opera before 1600 that I want to tell starts in chapter 1 with an examination of the convivial gatherings of the humanist academies that produced the body of theories from which opera was born. My narrative then proceeds backward in time, as in an archaeological excavation, where the upper strata are more recent than the lower ones. Classical Greek culture is by no means the beginning of the prehistory of opera. One need only pick up the shovel and keep digging to extend it back to the epic singing of Demodocus at Alcinous’s banquets in Homer’s Odyssey or to the highly dramatic Paleolithic paintings at Cro-Magnon, revealing in their dynamism, color, and rhythm a formidable musical sensibility.

In chapter 2, I gather traces of how banquet culture and banquet art developed production strategies and aesthetic orientations that led to opera. In chapter 3, I focus on a fifteenth-century convivial event that included the performance of a seminal operatic prototype: Politian’s Orfeo, which ends with a wild drinking chorus of bacchants. Chapter 4 explains why the practice of eating during opera performances stopped in the course of the nineteenth century and why it should be reinstated as a means to energize opera culture.

CHAPTER ONE

The Symposium and the Birth of Opera

The story goes that opera was invented in Florence about 1600. The earliest surviving scores and libretto for Euridice, based on the myth of Orpheus, were produced there and then. Beyond this familiar narrative, a look at the symposia of the Florentine academies that came up with the theories of music drama leading to early opera productions offers evidence that opera was first theorized at the banquet table. Indeed, opera was a humanist attempt to re-create processes, modes, and rituals of creative production typical of Greek classical culture, which included conversations at table accompanied by music and drama. This tradition can be traced back to Plato’s Symposium, retrieved by Italian Platonist humanists such as Marsilio Ficino, who had a tremendous influence on late Renaissance musical philosophy, which shaped early opera.1

A well-known anecdote about the creation of opera is the one Giulio Caccini offered in the dedication of his printed score of L’Euridice, with a libretto by Ottaviano Rinuccini. Here the Roman singer and composer thanks his patron Giovanni Bardi and acknowledges his “camerata” as an academic team whose studies led to the retrieval of ancient music drama.2 Caccini’s account has contributed substantially to the legend that the Bardi Camerata was the think tank that single-handedly conceived opera, despite much evidence to the contrary. The myth has been in part debunked,3 but like every myth it contains a kernel of truth: the leading role of academies and their members in developing music-dramatic theories that led to the invention of opera.

Other academies, as well as artists without academic affiliations, contributed important music-dramatic ideas and practices to early opera. Two such academies were named Umidi (humid) and Alterati (altered), suggesting that a generous amount of alcohol was served during meetings. I will focus on the minutes of the meetings of the Alterati, which, together with the published speeches and essays of their members, provide a gold mine of information on the relation between conviviality and early theories of opera. While their convivial rituals have been studied far less than their theories, they are equally relevant to an understanding of their discourse on operatic theories and modalities of sharing aesthetic and intellectual experiences.

In Praise of Alteration

The Alterati, to which both Rinuccini and Bardi belonged, was, according to Claude Palisca, “the [academy] that contained the greatest number of musical amateurs.”4 An eighteenth-century study by Domenico Manni shows that their debates and theories were still influential during the Enlightenment. Manni records that the Alterati first met in 1569, choosing as their logo a bucket of grapes with a motto traceable to Horace’s “Quid non ebrietas designat?” (What does alteration not unlock?)—a rhetorical question suggesting that alteration can unlock everything.5 Horace writes to his friend, the lawyer Torquatus, inviting him to a vegetarian lunch, to be accompanied by a carefully chosen wine produced in the year 26 BC in Minturno, close to where Falanghina wine is still produced. The Roman poet and master orator framed his praise of wine within two rhetorical questions, presenting it as a desirable stimulant to a beneficially altered state of mind: “What is it that inebriation cannot make possible? It unlocks secrets, turns hopes into reality, thrusts the unmoving into the battlefield. Wine frees hearts from the load of anxiety, teaches new art. Have not plentiful cups always made every man eloquent, and given comfort to the poor?”6

Members of the Alterati were admitted with nicknames and emblems, usually containing references to wine or other alcoholic beverages.7 In December 1574 Giovanni Bardi entered the Academy as “Il Puro” and used as his insignia a flask for distilling pure brandy with the motto “I am altered and I distill” (Alterato io raffino). Distilling was a trendy profession and magical activity at the time, subject of a number of treatises on natural magic and often used as a philosophical metaphor for separating purity from impurity, incorruptible from corruptible matter, and ultimately as a way to manipulate the forces of nature and abstract its essences.8 Ottaviano Rinuccini, who probably could not hold his liquor during the endless speeches, was “Sleepy Head” (Sonnacchioso). Other members had even more colorful names. Vincenzo Martelli was simply “The Drunk” (L’Ebbro). Senator Popoleschi was “Dizzy” (Lo Svanito) and used as his insignia a wine cask and grapes with the motto “In those I hope” (In quelle spero). Giovanni de’ Medici, who presumably had a better head for liquor than Rinuccini, was called “Steady” (Il Saldo); a wine cask was his emblem. Federico Strozzi’s emblem was just a cap filled with wine. Pietro Ruccellai was called “The Humid” (L’Umido), while Eleonora de’ Medici’s nickname was “Burning” (L’Ardente), suggesting that after a few glasses she became a hothead, as did Cavalier Ricasoli, called “The Flamer” (L’Infiammato). Bishop Alamanni chose the motto “Sweet in autumn” (Dulcius in autumno), the time of grape harvest. Archbishop Bonciani, called “Sour” (Aspro), had an emblem of a wine cask exploding. The most notable prelate in the academy was Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, who was elected in 1623 as Pope Urban VIII, continuing in Rome his mission as a passionate supporter of opera. His emblem was a grapevine adorned by laurel branches with the motto “And fruits not its own” (Et non sua poma), a reference to grafting techniques described in the second book of Virgil’s Georgics (Agricultural things) (2.82), a part of the poem that begins by praising Bacchus and wine.

Reenacting Plato’s Symposium

The Alterati’s convivial gatherings and philosophical conversations were explicitly modeled after Plato’s Symposium. In the opening speech, delivered at the academy’s banquet on the night of February 16, 1575, the academy regent, Giulio del Bene, addressed the other guests by confessing that “while ruminating about what we could reason about tonight, I picked up Plato’s book . . . and looking into his Symposium I saw that neither Plato nor the erudite Ficino—who walking in Plato’s footsteps brought him back from memory to the present—were much concerned with banquets, types of food, cooks, nor by sobriety, but were concerned with speculative reasoning and knowledge.”9

Although the primary reason for Plato’s gathering was not to consume food and wine, such sustenance was needed if participants were to engage in philosophical discourse. In fact, “as man has two natures, body and soul, so he needs to feed both.” But in a typical conflation of Aristotelianism and Platonism, del Bene explains that “the soul without food to keep her alive cannot engage in discussions or in contemplation,” and reasons that “like us, [the ancient Greek philosophers] used to eat a light meal to nourish the body so that then they could nourish the soul with great study.”10

How light the meal was is hard to say. Del Bene seems to imply that they had antipasti before the opening speech and afterward a serious banquet that supported conversation about the paper that had been read. Their diet for philosophizing was based on fruit and white meat. For a different supper, held during the summer, they bought an impressive amount of fruit (strawberries, grapes, prunes, pears) and white meat (six legs of veal, six turkeys, three capons, twenty-four doves or pigeons), along with other ingredients for cooking. In addition to the food listed, which probably served more than thirty people, the Alterati consumed a generous but not excessive amount of wine (twenty-one bottles of generic red, plus three nicer bottles of “Greco di Chianti”).11 The wine was a social lubricant that altered the state of mind enough to allow the free flow of ideas without provoking a bacchanal.

Alteration and Music Theater

Del Bene’s speech discusses alteration in relation not only to the effects of wine, but also to those of music and drama.12 The premise of the speech was Ficino’s translation of and commentary on Plato’s Symposium, which had created a long-lasting trend of convivial philosophy informing Italian Renaissance academies. Ficino begins the proem of his commentary with an anecdote about Plato’s final supper: “Plato, father of philosophers, the day of his eighty-first birthday, on November 8, washed his hands, sat at the dining table, and died.”13 With this Ficino relates the death of Plato to the death of Plato’s teacher Socrates, who also died shortly after his lethal last meal.

Ficino’s major contribution to bodily, mental, and spiritual health is his Three Books on Life, a work that abounds in recipes and reflections on food. It starts with a proem addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici in which he evokes “Bacchus, the supreme prelate of priests,” rather than Apollo, “for [Bacchus] perhaps heals more salubriously with his nourishing wine and his carefree jollity than [Apollo] with his herbs and songs.”14 Notwithstanding this playful dismissal of Apollo, Ficino, as a practitioner and promoter of Orphic music therapy, believed deeply in the medical and spiritual healing power of music.

Del Bene’s definition of the concept of “alteration,” based on Ficino’s earlier idea of music as psychologically therapeutic, captures an essential function that opera will have as a form of collective healing and education. We see here in embryo the idea of music drama as a “school of feelings,” to borrow Lorenzo Bianconi’s definition of opera’s pedagogical value.15 Del Bene, in fact, envisions music drama as a powerful way to alter how and how much spectators feel without altering what they think or what they are. His theory of alteration...