pietro metastasio's l'olimpiade and the survival of...

OLYMPIKA: The International Journal of Olympic Studies

VOLUME XIV – 2005 PAGES 1 - 28

Pietro Metastasio’s L’Olimpiade and the Survival of the Olympic

Idea in 18th Century Europe1

J E F F R E Y O . S E G R A V E *

n their book on the ways in which the “Italian genius” has contributed to world culture, D’Epiro and Pinkowish2 argue that the Italians have always possessed a certain panache, a certain sprezzatura, a certain “aesthetic pragmatism;” that functionality and beauty have always served as the foundation, indeed the essence, of Italian civilization.

In other words, at the same time as the “Italian genius” has tended to be practical and down-to-earth, it has also emphasized form, harmony, and radiance. “The greatest achievements of the people who brought us the Renaissance,” D’Epiro and Pinkowish write, “have occurred mainly in the useful pursuits of life . . . and those that enhance life’s beauty and pleasure.”3 None other than Baldassare Castiglione, author of The Book of the Courtier and one of the most prominent figures in Italian Renaissance literature, advises his ideal courtier to do everything with style and grace.4 Even a quotidian necessity as functional as language developed a certain sprezzatura in Italy. Given the historical proclivities and sensibilities of Italian culture it is perhaps unsurprising that one of the greatest contributions of the “Italian genius” to the world, and quite remarkably to the survival of the Olympic idea, was opera.

I

Opera was, as Lee argues, “a necessary product of Italy; it existed in germ in the very essence of the Italian language; it developed by the very pressure of Italian culture.”5 While philosophy, literature, and fashion emanated in the 17th century primarily from Paris and London,6 drama and comedy emerged from the intellectual and artistic soil of Italy. The artistic efflorescence that characterized 17th and 18th century Italy resulted, as Lee puts it, in what “antiquity had not dreamed, which the Middle Ages had not divined, which the Renaissance had but faintly perceived—Music.”7 Out of the fusion of drama, music, and scenic display—the celebrated trilogy of melody, recitative, and mimetic and mechanical show—materialized the opera, an entirely national form of art that Lee describes as “the assemblage of the finest gifts of a whole civilization, the masterpiece of the eighteenth century as the chryselephantine colossus was of antiquity.”8 Radiating from 17th century Venice with its numerous public opera houses, opera established itself as the most popular of all forms of musical drama. The famous music historian Charles Burney wrote: “the musical drama in Italy seems to have attained a degree of perfection and public favor which perhaps has never been surpassed.”9 As a result, the 18th century has rightly been celebrated as the

∗ Jeffrey O. Segrave is the David H. Porter Endowed Chair and Professor in the Department of Exercise Science at Skidmore College, U.S.A.

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operatic years of European culture and Italy stood at the height of its fame as the home and hearth of the opera. Italian opera, Burt writes, became “the esthetic lingua franca of the age”10 and the 18th as well as the 19th centuries witnessed a remarkable pan-European dissemination of Italy’s illustrious dramma per musica.

Ironically, no single composer occupies a central, ascendant place within the tradition of 18th century opera, a distinction that belongs rather to an Italian poet, Pietro Metastasio, whose productive career and genius presided over the lyric theater well into the early 19th century. Over the course of 50 years, Metastasio wrote nearly 30 libretti that resulted in over a thousand different operas that were performed throughout Europe. As Mordden puts it, Metastasio’s poetry became “the deathless verse of the genre.”11 The greatest composers of the age including Mozart, Johann Sebastian Bach, Vivaldi, Handel, Gluck, Pergolesi, Hasse, and Jommelli set a Metastasio text to music. So influential and exclusive was Metastasio’s reputation that, according to Burney, the stagings and singings of his verse rendered the likes of “Pergolesi, Venci, Jommelli, Sacchini, and Farinelli, Caffarelli, Pacchierrotti, and Marchesi, as celebrated in all parts of Europe as Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire.”12 Among Metastasio’s most famous works may be included Alessandro nell’Indie, Artaserse, Demofoonte, and La clemenza di Tito,13 and of particular salience to the history of the Olympic Games, L’Olimpiade,14 about which, as the eminent poet Giosue Carducci once wrote: “all of the eighteenth century joined in acclaiming the divine L’Olimpiade, in which the lyricism and the Italian songfulness joined in an unequalled and unattainable perfection.”15 But despite the renown of Metastasio’s L’Olimpiade, the work remains largely unknown.16 None of the established histories of the modern Olympic Games, including histories of the arts festivals or even histories of music in the Olympics,17 acknowledge Metastasio’s dramatic verse, a fact rendered even more surprising since there were over 50 settings of his famed libretto during the course of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Even in Olympic publications Metastasio’s L’Olimpiade has received little attention.18 To his credit, in The First Modern Olympics, Richard Mandel at least identifies Pergolesi’s overture, although he erroneously reports the title of the piece as L’Olympique.19

The purpose of this essay is to offer an historical account of Metastasio’s L’Olimpiade, including its genesis, life span, and ultimate demise. But more than that, I want to make sure that Metastasio’s work assumes its rightful place in the panoply of Olympic Games history and that it is recognized as an important ingredient in the survival of the Olympic idea during

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the Age of Enlightenment and beyond into the 19th century and as an important although hard to define element in Coubertin’s modern Olympic Games creation. Historians have identified a whole series of traditions and developments throughout the course of medieval, Enlightenment, and modern times that have contributed to the survival of the Olympics, including the English tradition of medieval peasant recreations and aristocratic tournaments, the “pseudo-Olympics,” as Redmond calls them,20 the professional records of historians, travelers, archeologists, cartographers, and palaeographists, the prominence of ancient Greek ideas in the works of educational theorists and philosophers, and the growth of international sport. But in all of this, little attention has been paid to Metastasio’s L’Olympiade in the genealogy of the Olympic idea.21

The essay is divided into three sections. In the first section, I contextualize the emergence of opera in general as well as the emergence of Metastasio’s work in particular. In the second section, I focus on the history of L’Olimpiade itself, give an account of the opera paying attention to the work’s historical background and antecedents, the dramatic narrative, the composers and singers that gave it life, longevity, and pre-eminence, and its transmogrification and ultimate denouement.22 And in the third section I ruminate on the impact of Metastasio’s work on the survival of the Olympic idea and its possible influence on Coubertin’s thinking. I end with some concluding thoughts.

From the Olympics to L’Olimpiade: The Reform of Literature and the Emergence of Opera Seria

The intellectual life of 17th and 18th century Italy was a matrix of innumerable academies—“networks of molecular intellectual life,” as Lee calls them23—dedicated to reforming Italian literature, to cleansing it of the extravagance, artifice, and conceit of the Baroque tradition.24 The names of the academies included the Transformed (Transformati) of Milan, the Frozen Ones (Gelidi) of Bologna, the Crazed Ones (Intronati) of Siena, the Phlegmatics, Frigids, Fervids, Drunkards, and the Olympics. While most of the academies were local, the most important one, the Arcadian Academy,25 was national in its scope and influence. The precepts and hegemony of the Arcadians spread rapidly throughout Italy and their influence lasted an entire century. Comprised of poets, artists, musicians, actors, scientists, princes, popes, and other dignitaries, the Arcadians interrogated the tradition and quality of Italian literature and determined to rectify deficiencies by encouraging clarity, originality, and moral simplicity. While imitation may well have become the canon of Arcadian art, the upshot of a craving for the artificial and over-refined Petrachism of an earlier age, the Arcadians countered what they considered the perverted taste of secentismo and embraced what ultimately took the form of neo-classicism, the idea being, as Lee puts it, “to supply Homers for any chance Achilles who might turn up.”26

Although not specifically athletic, the competitive Olympic spirit infused the intellectual life and practices of the Arcadians. The Academy in fact reckoned by Olympiads and at the beginning of each Olympiad, Olympic Games were celebrated in the form of literary competitions in which “the clumsiness and sloth of literary racers and wrestlers were displayed in honor of some illustrious stranger.”27 The Italian historian of literature and poet Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni chronicled the meetings of the Academy of Arcadia, Conversatione di belle lettere, and published octavo volumes adorned by the chosen emblem of the Academy, the sphinx surrounded by pine and laurel branches. The Olympic competitions were generally of five types: theoretical discussions, eclogues, canzoni, sonnets, and madrigals and epigrams.28

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Like the Arcadians, the originators of the operatic movement, Peri, Caccini, and the Florentine group, were literati rather than musicologists and they, too, advocated for a return to a simpler and more natural style in Italian prose and poetry. Reacting to the extravagance and pretentiousness of Baroque art, Frugoni wrote that: “The art of producing dramas has become nothing but the art of ruining society. Instead of imitating nature for the ethical betterment, literature, painting and the theater have become monstrous fantasies which corrupt.”29 Early opera was intended as a literary rather than a musical form, its inspiration drawn from the classical world and patterned on the fundamental purity of a geometric Aristotlean universe in harmonious motion,30 words unencumbered by the rhythmical complications of the polyphonic style.31 This dramma per musica was a modern Italian version of the lyric theater of the ancient Greeks; opera was based on Greek drama. Music was either the recitative, expressively conceived to heighten the effect of the words, or the arietta, an interpolation designed for immediate appeal. And this was the basis of the Arcadian reform, an effort to eliminate from opera an encroaching tendency in the 17th and early 18th centuries toward what Grout describes as “erratically motivated plots, reliance on supernatural inventions, machines, irrelevant comic episodes, and the bombastic declamation”32 and a return to the literary-humanist, neo-classical ideals of the Florentine camerata -- the restoration of the drama to its ancient pastoral dignity. The end result was the elimination of flamboyance and licentiousness and the ascendance of a more sophisticated formalism: As Burt notes, “Bawdiness, confusion, improbabilities, irrelevancies, all were tamed into elegance and refinement.”33 But what the Arcadian reform movement did not accomplish was the subordination of words to music, rather the opposite. As Symonds notes of Tasso’s prescient Aminta, acted as early as 1572:

This pastoral drama offered something ravishingly new, something which interpreted and gave a vocal utterance to tastes and sentiments that ruled the age. Poetry melted into music. Emotion exhaled itself in sensuous harmony. The art of the next two centuries, the supreme art of song, of words subservient to musical expression, had been indicated.34

The end result of the Arcadian reform effort was the opera seria, a genre brought to its cultural eminence by Metastasio, and to which belonged the famed L’Olimpiade.

Opera seria, or Neapolitan opera,35 swept across Europe during the first half of the 18th century, functioning as an international system of ad hoc recitative and aria constructions and reconstructions that in effect commercialized and popularized Italy’s distinctly national art form.36 Two of the most important librettists were Apostolo Zeno and Pietro Metastasio. Before Metastasio and in keeping with the tenets and ambitions of the Arcadian reform movement, Apostolo Zeno sought to contain the chaotic profusion of the Seicento theater by the application of Aristotlean rationalism and to correct what he saw as the theater’s indifference to matters of taste, style, and morality by adopting a lofty, more dignified humanism.37 As Groppo writes, Zeno

was certainly the first to elevate our theater. He was the first to remove the ridiculous and foolish abuse of those characters called buffoons, introduced into libretti during years gone by. Moreover, he selected actions to stage which are the most illustrious and famous in ancient Greek and Roman history: and finally he gave the libretto an orderly arrangement.38


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Zeno’s textual reform transformed the operatic genre, purging the libretto of the grotesque fantasies and inadequately prepared denouements that had previously corrupted drama. He divested the libretto of its dependence on supernatural inventions and machines and instead offered texts that were morally doctrinaire, dedicated to the edification and betterment of human society. But as successful as Zeno may have been in refining Italian opera, it remained for the greatest Italian poet of the first half of the 18th century, Zeno’s successor as Imperial Court Poet of Vienna, Pietro Metastasio,39 to bring opera seria to its ultimate fruition, to the zenith of its continental fame and prestige.

Such was Metastasio’s stature that his compatriots seriously compared him to some of the greatest writers in history. Burney celebrated him as the successor to Sophocles and Euripides, and perhaps even an improvement on them: “he has more pathos, poetry, nature, facility than we are now able to find in the ancient Greek tragedians.”40 Even a writer as renowned as Voltaire maintained that Metastasio’s aria verses were “passionate and sometimes comparable to the best odes in Europe” and he declared that, since the ancient Greeks, only two dramatists had rivalled Metastasio: Racine and Joseph Addison.41 Rousseau called Metastasio “the Italian Racine,”42 “the only poet of the heart, the only genius sent to move us with the charm of poetic and musical harmony.”43 The Queen of Spain, Maria Theresa, simply declared Metastasio the greatest poet of the age.

As Lee points out, the opera as elaborated by Zeno and perfected by Metastasio was not a classical creation in the style of French and even Italian tragedy, strictly constructed on the basis of purported Aristotlean principles and in an avowed imitation of antiquity, but rather in the end a romantic product, the culmination of the Arcadian reform effort whose aims at least superficially were not dissimilar to the aims of the Romantic-Classicism of the late 19th century.44 Metastasio’s operas were, as Hogarth noted, lyric tragedies, intended to arouse the feelings and sympathies of the audience, “to touch the soul by tender strokes of art” and “to exalt the mind by noble sentiments and pictures of heroic virtue.”45 Or, as Dean more recently writes, Metastasio’s libretti “aimed at dignity and a lofty humanism in the spirit of his age, and were designed to present a standard of conduct suitable to princes” based on the classical values of antiquity.46 Metastasio’s libretti were in fact complex and stylish expressions of both the utopian aspirations of the Settecento as well as the conventionalized proclivities of a languid courtly society. Opera seria offered what Towneley calls “an alluring hedonism infused with the charming atmosphere of the pastoral.”47

Metastasio’s libretti were purified and polished, ornate and elegant, formalized in subject matter, and restrained in emotion—in the number of acts, in the dramatic structure of individual scenes, in the number of characters and their types, in verse form and even in the very rhetoric and vocabulary used.48 The subjects of his melodramas invariably spoke in blank verse or in a series of hendecasyllables, were highly stylized personifications of human traits painted with gentle not extravagant affections and depictions of emotions, and were usually taken from classical antiquity. The story line was dutifully constructed around variations on one principle theme: the conflict between love and duty. The mood was exclusively serious and all levity and flippancy were banished to the opera buffa or the intermezzi. Like the solipsistic tendencies of other dramatists, including Shakespeare, Shelley, and even Poe, Metastasio’s stories typically resulted in the victory of virtue and the resultant reestablishment of the state of perfect harmony. Of Metastasio’s 27 opera seria, only three—Didone abbandonata, Catone in Utica, and Attilio Regolo—end tragically. All the rest, including L’Olimpiade, sport the traditional lieto fine.

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But while Metastasio’s libretti may well have suffered from an imposed uniformity and even a lack of originality, they were written with no other purpose than to be set to music: “I cannot write anything that is to be set to music,” Metastasio wrote, “without imagining what the music might be.”49 The sheer beauty of his work was acknowledged from the very beginning and throughout the 18th and even early 19th centuries his texts were set time and time again by numerous composers, including some, most notably Hasse, who even set some of his dramas twice, including the famed L’Olimpiade.50 But above all, Metastasio wrote moral, literary dramas. Grounded in a blend of Aristotelian, Horatian, and Cartesian moral philosophy, Metastasio sought to “reinforce the moral issue by arousing the emotions for the sake of the moral purpose.”51 Throughout his career, he embraced and applied the Horatian precept, renovated and reinvigorated by Renaissance writers and artists, of the utile dulci dilectando. “Pleasures,” he wrote, “that do not succeed in making impressions on the mind and on the heart are of short duration.”52 As a result, he specifically used his poetry, and indirectly music, to evoke and stir emotions in favor of virtue, the prerequisite, as he saw it, for general happiness.

Despite the remarkable success of opera seria, Metastasio’s dramas ultimately lost their hold over Italian and European publics partly because their ideals were too lofty, too noble for an eclectic and cosmopolitan audience who increasingly embraced entertainment and amusement rather than moral enlightenment and edification.53 In 1774 the Board of Directors of the San Carlo Theater in Naples declared that Metastasio’s texts:

celebrated as they are, have been used for so long and have enjoyed such common popularity that they are beginning to get tiresome, besides which they have been set to music over and over again by the best composers in Europe, so that it is impossible to find anyone who can set them again, with new music able to stand comparison with the many excellent compositions already written on these same texts. Thus for the most part these operas . . . no longer please the public.54

By the late 18th century, opera buffa and equivalent forms from abroad, such as opera comique and comic songspiel, had gained ascendance. In the end, the music of Jommelli, Galuppi, and even Paisiello and Cimerosa was rejected by audiences seeking more vehement emotions and violent sensations; spectacle usurped the prerogative of eloquence. The popularity of the symphony and the oratorio and a burgeoning demand for works in their own language estranged English and German audiences who began to tire of the domineering Italian operatic style and form. The symbolic demise of opera seria came in 1778, the year Jommelli wrote his last great work, the solemn and tragic Misere. In 1780 Sarti wrote Giulio Sabino and Mozart penned Idomeneo: “the comic opera gave laws to the serious one,” wrote Lee, “and classic tragic music was buried for ever.”55

While opera seria did not survive into the 19th century, giving way rather to a French style of opera, nonetheless for much of the 18th century composers, performers, and audiences alike found Metastasio’s work irresistible, unforgettable, and sublimely engaging and his librettos served as the wellspring of an operatic genre that colonized the tastes of an entire continent. As Burt notes: “Decoration, music, drama and poetry all sacrificed to each other and to performance, but still met in as elegant and as exalted a blending as the history of the west has ever known.”56 And one of the most beloved of Metastasio’s libretti was L’Olimpiade.


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L’Olimpiade: A Triumph of the Arcadian Rationalistic Spirit The premiere of Metastasio’s eleventh dramma per musica, L’Olimpiade, with music by

Antonio Caldara—likely overseen by the Caesarian poet himself—was held by order of Emperor Charles VI in Venice in the garden of the Imperial Favorata on August 28th, 1733, to celebrate the birthday of the Empress Elisabeth. Over the next 100 years, more than 50 different settings of Metastasio’s libretto were produced throughout Europe.57 Forty-seven composers58 are known through contemporary scores, librettos, and reports to have produced complete settings of Metastasio’s text including some of the most prominent composers of the day—Vivaldi,59 Pergolesi,60 Scarlatti, Hasse, and Leo.61 Multiple performances were held in all the leading cities of Europe, from London to Prague, from Moscow to Rome.62

Metastasio’s libretto was held in high regard in both literary and musical circles. Bruno Brunelli, the editor of the poet’s complete works, wrote: “Many have considered it the most perfect of Metastasio’s dramas both for the skillful handling of the story and for the nobility of its dramatic eloquence.” And Hogarth argues: “It is not only beautiful as a whole but contains some of the purest gems of Metastasio’s poetry.”63 Jean-Jacques Rousseau chose “the beautiful and moving” aria, Nei giorni tuoi felici, for his dictionary example of the ideal heroic duet.64 Two of the most important recent Metastasian scholars rank the libretto equally highly: Claudio Varese calls it “the most perfect, the most Metastasian of the operas”65 and Walter Binni considers Demofoonte and L’Olimpiade the dual climax of Metastasio’s career and the year 1733 as “l’anno felice,”66 the same year, incidentally, Lee claims as the beginning of Metastasio’s “period of perfection.”67 The work also assumes a place of prominence in the oeuvre of numerous distinguished composers. Krauss68 argues that L’Olimpiade is “the chief work” of the Czech composer, Mysliveček, and Loewenburg judges L’Olimpiade the “most successful” of Galuppi’s operas69 and “the best” of Pergolesi’s.70 Reichardt regarded L’Olimpiade his “beste and grösste arbeit.”71 Jommelli’s version72 proved to be such an enormous success that Jose Antonio Pinto DaSilva, the Director of Royal Theaters in Lisbon at the time, was moved to write upon receipt of Jommelli’s subsequent work, Sinfonia di Clelia: “No doubt coming from your pen, the same must be excellent music, but it will never match the perfection of L’Olimpiade, which Their Majesties like extremely well, and which has surpassed the beauty of your other music given here thus far.”73 Attesting to the continuing fame of L’Olimpiade well into the 19th century, Stendhal quoted from Act II, Scenes 9 and 10 to support his claim that Metastasio equaled Shakespeare and Virgil and far surpassed Racine and every other great poet in constructing compelling characters. In short, both contemporary and historical accounts judge L’Olimpiade, as Wilson puts it, “a triumph of the Arcadian rationalistic spirit.”74

The influences and antecedents for Metastasio’s L’Olimpiade are many. Metastasio, himself, in his argomento, names Herodotus, Pausanias, and Natale Conti. Pennacchietti adds Tasso’s Torrismondo and L’Aminta, Guarini’s Pastor fido, Aristo’s Orlando Furioso, and the style and manner of Petrarch.75 Interestingly, Metastasio used Olympiads as a metaphor for age: “If I had a few Olympiads less on my shoulders . . . “ he once wrote;76 and again: “Unless you could remove a number of Olympiads from my shoulders . . . “77 Most obviously, though, the basis for L’Olimpiade’s plot was taken from Herodotus’ well known story, the Trial of the Suitors,78 in which Cleisthenes, the tyrant of Sicyon, publicly announces during the Olympic Games his intention to find from among a coterie of suitors a worthy husband for his daughter, Agarista. The most immediate forerunner to Metastasio’s libretto, however, was not Herodotus’ vignette but Apostolo Zeno’s, Gl’inganni felici,79 Zeno’s first libretto produced for the first time on November 25th, 1695, at the Teatro di Sant’Angelo, Venice,

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and set to music by Carlo Francesco Pallorolo—who also set David’s, La Forza del Virtu. The opera was staged four more times, twice set to music by Alessandro Scarlatti, in Naples in 1699 and in Florence in 1705, and clearly devolves from the same basic pivot of Herodotus’ narrative. Interestingly, and without any feeling of apparent obligation, or even acknowledgement, Metastasio uses the same plot and the same characters as Zeno. In Metastasio’s text, Clistene, King of Sicyon, offers the hand of his daughter, Aristea, in marriage to the winner of the Olympic Games, on this occasion, Megacles, who enters the Games under the assumed name of Lycidas, a friend whose life he once saved. Lycidas, once betrothed to Princess Argene of Crete is unaware that Megacles and Aristea love each other and subsequently tells his friend of his prize, the beautiful Argene. Meanwhile, Argene in disguise as the shephardess, Lycoris, seeks to win back Lycidas.80 Like Zeno’s Gl’Inganni felici, Metastasio’s L’Olimpiade relies on the same artificialities of plot, the same disguises, ruses, mistaken identities, and last minute revelations to carry the contorted narrative to a satisfactory conclusion.

Despite the similarities, the manner and attitude of L’Olimpiade are distinctly and importantly different from that of Gl’Inganni felici. Reflecting the continuity as well as the development of Arcadian reform, the tone in L’Olimpiade, as Burt points out, is “universally moralized” and the “gallant artificiality” of Gl’Inganni felici gives way to the “pseudo-classic high sentiment” of L’Olimpiade. Buffoonery is eliminated and L’Olimpiade is almost completely divested of humor: the “titter” of Gl’Inganni felici is replaced by “the merest trace of a smile” in L’Olimpiade, Burt writes.81 In keeping with the lofty ambitions and high ideals of opera seria, L’Olimpiade ends in a universal avowal of nobility: “Everyone here has displayed courage, the King declares; “must I be the only example of weakness? The world shall not hear about me. Priests, stir up the fire on the altar.”82

L’Olimpiade, despite its title, is not of course about the Olympic Games. Rather the Olympics provide a fittingly heroic context for a melodrama about the conflict between honor and friendship, love and loyalty. Metastasio’s characters are courtiers, not ancients, chivalric figures chiseled more out of the tradition of Aristo’s Orlando Furioso than Pausanias’ prose.83 Moreover, Metastasio takes significant poetic license in his account of the ancient Olympic festival. For example, while Greek fathers may well have brought their daughters to the Games with the intension of securing a wedding match, perhaps even with an Olympic champion,84 women were not offered as prizes, substituted for the venerable wreath of wild olive leaves. Likewise, Metastasio simplifies and in fact misrepresents the entire registration and training protocol that distinguished and structured the ancient Olympic Games. In other words, the popularity and longevity of Metastasio’s L’Olimpiade was based on the beauty of the poetry, the strength of the story, the adaptability of the dramatic structure, and the practicality of the character groupings for musical purposes, not on the appeal of the competitive Hellenic athletic model, the historical accuracy with which Metastasio describes the Games, or the political salience of the ancient ceremonies at Olympia.

Nonetheless, the Olympic venue does provide a powerful setting for L’Olimpiade. Act I is set in the country of Elis, close to the city of Olympia, on the banks of the Alpheus. In fact, the greater part of Act I, Scene I is given to a descriptive evocation of the Olympic atmosphere, the religious rituals and obsequies, the mass excitement, the sports, the rules, and the prizes. Act III opens at the ruins of the ancient hippodrome, which is now covered with ivy, thorns, and wild vegetation, and Act III, Scene VI is held before the majestic Temple of Jove from which descends an imposing flight of stairs; in front is an open piazza


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with a burning altar and all around are woods of sacred wild olives “from which the wreaths of the victorious athletes have been gathered.”85

Throughout most of its history, L’Olimpiade bathed in the reflected glory of well-positioned composers, stately occasions and venues, and renowned and popular singers. Among the almost 50 composers who set L’Olimpiade, five were directors of a prestigious Venetian conservatory—Traetta and Sacchini of the Conservatorio dell’ Ospedaletto and Hasse, Galuppi, and Jommelli of the Conservatorio degli Incurabili—four, Galuppi, Traetta, Paisiello, and Cimarosa, held the position of composer and music master at the Court of St. Petersburg and were, together with Manfredini and Sarti, composers explicitly employed by Catherine II. L’Olimpiade maintained an equally high profile in the calendar of state and was performed in honor of a variety of royalty including Philip V, Catherine II, Queen Mariana Vittoria, and Charles III. L’Olimpiade was also performed by some of the greatest virtuosi of the day,86 including Belardi d’Ancona (Virtuosa di Camera di S. A. S. L’Elettor di Baviera), Maria Marchetti (Fantozzi Virtuosa di Camera di S. A. S. La Sig. Duchessa di Modena, Massa, Cararra), Faustina Hasse (the wife of Johan Adolph Hasse), Teresa Colonna, Felice Salimbeni,87 Gaetano Guadagni,88 and Luigi Marchesi.

Of all the stagings of L’Olimpiade, Pergolesi’s remains one of the most highly esteemed.89 First commissioned for the Teatro Tordinona in Rome and performed in January 1737, Pergolesi’s setting was subsequently performed for many years all over Italy, England, and Germany. Numerous other composers, including Galuppi, Hasse, and Jommelli based their own settings of the text on Pergolesi’s model. Beyle, writing in 1841 under the name of Stendahl, praises Pergolesi’s particular interpretation as “the unrivalled masterpiece of dramatic expression in the whole repertory of Italian music.”90 Rousseau called the aria, Se cerca, se dice, “the classic aria.”91

But not all settings of L’Olimpiade were successful. Although sung by Manzoli who, according to the Gazette and New Daily Advertizer, “is at present the principal object of operatic attention.”92 Thomas Arne’s production was only performed twice and it was never printed.93 Ironically, Pergolesi’s premiere also met with less than glorious acclaim. By all accounts the opening was an abject failure. As Burney notes, the Romans “by some unaccountable fatality, received his opera with coldness.” Nonetheless, following Pergolesi’s premature death,94 “[i]t was now brought on the stage with the utmost magnificence, and that indifference with which it had been heard but two years before, was now converted into rapture.”95

Beyond the full settings, some of the most striking set pieces of L’Olimpiade maintained a life of their own through attention from composers such as Gluck, Johann Sebastian Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.96 Gluck included a setting of Fiamma ignota nell’ alma mi scende in his 1755 Vienna production of L’Innocenza giustificata, the festa teatrale whose dialogue by Durazzo integrates texts from a variety of Metastasio librettos. Bach set the aria Non so donde viene for his very successful Alessandro nell’ Indie (Naples 1762) as well as contributing a revision with a new second strope to Ezio which was given in London on November 24, 1762. Also, in Bach’s Alessandro Nell’ Indie, Poro’s short aria, Se mai piu saro geloso, featured several verses that were lifted from Act III, Scene 6 of L’Olimpiade.97 In fact, twice on later occasions, Bach lifted the aria to insert in pasticci: Ezio (London, 1764) and L’Olimpiade (London, 1769). Familiar with Bach’s settings and in the process of making the first of his two concert settings with orchestra, Mozart used the same poem for his soprano version for Aloysia Weber (Mannheim, 1778) and for his bass version for K. L. Fischer in Mozart’s first Osmin

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(Vienna, 1787).98 Beethoven made a setting of O care selve for unison choruses and one of Ne’ giorni tuoi felici for soprano and tenor with orchestra, both of which were undertaken as exercises in Italian text setting which Beethoven studied under Antonio Salieri; Salieri himself published his own version of O care selve among his 28 divertimenti vocali (Vienna, 1803).99

Numerous pasticci—a popular and very successful way of offering opera—included pieces from Metastasio’s famed L’Olimpiade.100 At the King’s Theater, London, alone, nearly 40 pasticci featuring L’Olimpiade arias were performed between 1770 and 1780, including works by Piccini, Sarti, Traetta, Bertoni, Gluck and Paisiello.101 During the middle of the 18th century, Pergolesi’s music monopolized L’Olimpiade pasticci. At least four productions were based directly on his original setting: Perugia (Pavone, 1738), Cortona (Accademia, 1738), Siena (Accedemia Inconsiderati at the Teatro Grande, 1741), and London (King’s, 1742). The 1742 London pasticcio, entitled Meraspe o L’Olimpiade, was probably the first time Pergolesi’s serious compositions were publicly heard in London. So successful was Pergolesi’s work that:

the first air, Tremende oscuri attroci, in Monticelli’s part, was sung at concerts by Frasi for ten years, at least, after the run of the opera was over and the whole exquisite scene where Se circa, se dice occurs was rendered so interesting by the manner in which it was acted as well as sung by Angelo Maria Monticelli, that I have been assured by attentive hearers and good judges, that the union of poetry and Music, expression and gesture, seldom have had a more powerful effect on an English audience.102

Also of interest, according to Downes,103 the symmetrical scenes from L’Olimpiade (Act III, Scene 1) in which on the one hand Megacles is held back by Amyntas from committing suicide because he believes his beloved Aristea is dead, and on the other hand Aristea is held back by Argene from suicide because she thinks Megacles has committed suicide, influenced DaPonte and Mozart when they arranged the mock double suicide in Cosi fan tutte.

Over the course of the 18th century, L’Olimpiade, like numerous other Metastasian libretti, changed to accommodate new tastes in music and style: recitatives and arias were deleted, ensembles and choruses added, more attention was given to the orchestra, and other aria forms employed.104 Even plot, structure, and the ranking of singers were modified. Cimarosa’s 1784 version offered the greatest structural alterations to date, presenting the story in two rather than the hallowed three acts, and in Reichardt’s 1791 rendition, orchestral accompaniment for recitative replaced the old continuo accompaniment.105 Among the last settings of Metastasio’s long-lived libretto was one by Luigi Cherubini (ca. 1793), which was never produced, one by Johann Nepomuk Poissl, which was translated as Der Wettkampf zu Olympia oder die Freunde (Munich Court Opera, April 21, 1815), and one by Gaetano Donizetti (Bologna, 1817), which remained unfinished.106 By the end of the first quarter of the 19th century, Metastasio’s L’Olimpiade had disappeared from the operatic stages of Europe, an artifact of history that for the better part of 100 years had graced the cultural environment of Enlightenment Europe but which was not to be heard again until 1939, at least 40 years after the establishment of the modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896.

From L’Olimpiade to the Olympics: The Legacy of an Opera The questions now arise: What role did Metastasio’s Olympiade play in the survival of the

Olympic idea? And what impact, if any, did Olympiade have on Courbertin’s particular version of Olympism? First, let me suggest that Metastasio’s famed dramma per musica both


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sustained and popularized the name and fame of the Olympic Games—after all, Hasse’s Dresden rendition (1756) was rendered as Das Olympische Spiel, and Fiorillo’s 1745 version was revised in 1749 and presented under the title Die olympischen Spiele. Opera seria was the major operatic form of the 18th century and Olympiade remained one of the most well-liked and beautiful opera seria of the entire era. According to Fucilla, “The excellent structuralization of its plot, finesse in the characterization of both its primary and its secondary personages, its moving arias—all fuse to make it a little masterpiece.”107 Not surprisingly, L’Olympique ranked in popularity with Demofoonte and Didone abbandonata, dramas excelled in esteem and admiration only by Artasere and Alessando nell’ Indie. For the opening of the Teatro Communale in Bologna in 1763, Gluck would rather have set L’Olympiade than the newly written Il trionfo di Clelia.

Metastasio himself commented to Saverio Mattei that L’Olympiade had been “performed and repeated in all the theaters of Europe.”108 And, indeed, as Metastasio boasted, L’Olympiade was equally as successful outside as it was inside Italy. According to Burney, Sacchini’s 1777 Paris Olympiade, even though performed in French, not the language for which is was originally intended, made Sacchini so fashionable “that the operas composed expressly for the use of that country . . . were heard with willing and heart-felt rapture.”109 L’Olympiade also enjoyed enormous success in London. Almost 20 performances of Cimarosa’s setting graced the stage at King’s Theater between 1788 and 1789. Theater records in 1788 show that over 3000 tickets were sold each week and a total of 26,630 for the entire year. Fourteen percent of the theater’s annual income in 1788 was derived from Cimarosa’s productions of L’Olympiade.110

The name of L’Olympiade was also kept in the news because it was a common fixture on the calendars of royalty and the aristocracy, gala openings, and civic functions. Opera premieres were often scheduled to coincide with royal birthdays, special name days, weddings, and coronations, and Metastasio’s L’Olimpiade was no different in that regard. What is of interest is the number and significance of the monarchs, including Philip V, Catherine II, Charles III, Empress Elizabeth, and Queen Mariana Vittoria, for whom L’Olimpiade was deemed fitting. In 1767, Pietro, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, specifically chose L’Olimpiade to commemorate the visit of Emperor Joseph II and his sister, Maria Josepha. As the Baronet Horace Mann, “Ambassador extraordinaire,” informs us at the time, “the Grand Duke and his first minister [Count Rosenberg] have regulated the whole of a very magnificent opera.” The court paid almost one half of the cost, which was many times the normal budget of La Pergola in Florence.111

Furthermore, because L’Olimpiade was performed in some of the most prestigious and wealthy courts, the opera was performed by the greatest virtuosos of the day. Of Luigi Marchesi, who featured in Cimarosa’s 1788 London L’Olimpiade, the World wrote, he “is a singer whose voice is beyond all comparison the finest in Europe,”112 and singing on opening night, March 9, 1780, at the King’s Theater in London, in a pasticcio entitled L’Olimpiade, Pacchierrotti was described as “superior to any Singer in this country since Farinelli” and as “the greatest of the late eighteenth century castratos.”113 L’Olimpiade was also presented with extraordinarily extravagant and lavish embellishments. According to Hogarth, the forerunner for the likes of L’Olympiade was Domenico Freschi’s 1680 production of Berenice, a spectacular opera that featured a hundred virgins and soldiers, a hundred horsemen in steel armor, a hundred performers on a variety of instruments, as well as lions, horses, and elephants.114 In keeping with Freschi’s “style of splendor,” Jommelli’s 1761 Stuttgart production held in honor of Karl Eugen’s birthday in the Herzoglider Schauplate,

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included a prologue, on this occasion a licenza for the Duke, which featured Eugen’s portrait on stage undergoing elaborately and ornately choreographed adulations:

The Muses laid their attributes before it, Apollo added his lyre and Mars crowned it with laurel . . . finally, while Terpsichore led a ballet, the portrait was hoisted majestically to the summit of Parnassus, and the gods grouped themselves admiringly beneath it.115

Sacchini’s 1777 Paris production brought a different type of notoriety to L’Olympiade: it was successfully arranged to figure prominently in the infamous querelle célèbre over Gluck and Piccinni, an incident that spilled over into the volatile politics of Louis XVI’s court. The vicissitudes of the intrigue were covered by Le Mercure de France, received attention in the international press, and led to partisan diatribes by such illustrious writers as Melchior von Grimm, Jean Francois La Harpe, P. L. Ginguene, and the translator-adapter, Nicolas Framery.

Nor did L’Olympiade resonate just with the sensibilities of an elite European audience. There is no doubt that classicism in opera first took root in the habits and consciousness of the upper classes: opera was the product of groups of aristocratic amateurs, camerata, and in the early years the art remained a much-admired although exclusive princely and patrician spectacle. But by the mid-18th century the opera was far from being a reserved entertainment only for the ruling or privileged classes. As Robinson points out,116 opera itself served no distinctly high or low class group. Various features of opera reflected the taste of aristocratic and royal patrons, including lavish stage productions and superb singing, while other features reflected more popular influences, especially comedy and farce. While opera seria appealed more to the privileged classes and opera buffa more to the bourgeoisie and working classes, in the end, as an art and as a public performance, opera appealed as much to princes as to gondoliers. L’Olympiade most certainly would have had a life and a reputation beyond the confines of its predominantly regal heritage.117

Furthermore, the world of opera was also deeply connected to the worlds of the other arts, each in its own way publicizing the reputation and heritage of the ancient Olympic Games. In other words, the Olympic idea was a shared, not isolated reference. Numerous 18th century ballets and opera-ballets featured Olympic sports including La Mort d’Hercule, Les Jeux Olympiques, and Les Fêtes grecques et romaines. Jean-Georges Noverre’s heroic ballet, La Mort d’Hercule, for example, specifically featured wrestlers competing for the Olympic prize. According to Uriot’s description at the time:

This entrée is authentically based on the knowledge which has been transmitted to us concerning ancient Gymnastics, particularly Wrestling, and the four wrestlers modeled their different attitudes on the Antique, so that one seemed to see those famous Athletes who disputed the prizes when the Olympic Games were celebrated.118

In literature, Pindar served as inspiration to numerous poets who employed the Olympic allusion including Keats and Milton in England, Ronsard and Du Bellay in France, Kochanowski and Szymonowic in Poland, and Hölderlin and Goethe in Germany. During the 18th and 19th centuries, musicians and dancers partook of common experiences, relationships, and even friendships, crisscrossing Europe in a constant traffic of creative energy. Among 18th century Italian composers of standing, almost all of them became active


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abroad, including those who set L’Olympiade: Jommelli, Paisiello, and Traetta went to Vienna and still more, including Hasse, Galuppi, Anfossi, Lampugnani, Traetta, Guglielmi, and Sacchini, traveled to London. Musicians also shared common teachers: Durante taught Pergolesi and Traetta and perhaps Piccinni, Sacchini, and Paisiello; Vinci likely taught Pergolesi and Leo probably taught Traetta and Sacchini. Cimarosa studied with Piccinni, and Nicola Porpora, who taught Haydn at Vienna, also taught Hasse and Traetta. Musicians and dancers shared residencies, worked on creative endeavours together, and even enjoyed a common training: Jommelli, for example, wrote ballet music and Guglielmi was a student at Noverre’s Theatrical Dance School. Collectively, the arts created a living tradition of the Olympic Games and in so doing would have raised the consciousness of a widespread European audience.119

But L’Olympiade did more than just keep the name of the Olympic Games alive in the consciousness of a European public, whether it be patrician or plebian: it kept a certain type of name alive. If, as Neville argues, Metastasio’s texts contained ideals and precepts that greatly enhanced the image of the Hapsburg monarchy through association and identity, and played a critical role in the “image of majesty” essential to the welfare of the monarch itself,120 then I would argue that L’Olympiade played an equally vital role in enhancing the “image of majesty” that increasingly came to dignify the Olympic Games themselves, an image that appealed to and in fact helped rationalize Coubertin’s idealized and romanticized vision of Olympism.

Prescient of Coubertin’s athletic moral cosmology, L’Olympiade is a chivalric story in which the noble values of patriotism, loyalty, filial love, honor, and the claims of community are verified and extolled. Megacles, like numerous other quintessential Metastasian heroes, offers his human emotions as a holocaust to individual virtue as well as communal harmony:

Brave youth! who ‘midst thy glory still retain’st Thy graceful modesty; permit me now To press thee thus with fondness to my bosom.121

Sounding remarkably Coubertinesque, Metastasio further valorizes the heroic quest of the noble protagonist in Ezio, where he notes that:

It is a great test of courage To meet the deadly waves, To sail through the tempests And not lose one’s way.122

As Hogarth writes: “What can be more sublime than the heroism of Metastasio’s Regulus and Cato? What more noble than the magnanimity of Titus, or more pathetic than the tender and devoted friendship123 of Megacles?”124 In other words, reminiscent of Metastasio’s concept of pleasurable instruction, Coubertin envisioned sport as both a moral exercise as well as an enjoyable activity. In this sense, Coubertin’s pedagogie sportive was very much a reflection of the Renaissance, as well as the Metastasian, principle of l’utile e il dilettevole.

Coubertin’s Olympism remains lofty and transcendent. In L’Olmypiade’s ultimate victory of virtue and the resultant re-establishment of community harmony the way is prepared for Coubertin’s later progressive rationalistic morality in which the individual dramatic hero, in Coubertin’s case the athlete, instantiates the “sentiment of honor” and personifies heroic

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qualities which speak to the “physical, moral, and social” role of sport in the quest to inculcate equilibrium in both the individual athlete as well as serving the greater good of society as a whole.125 Both Metastasio and Coubertin validate “the efficacy of virtue in producing stupendous results.”126 Coubertin’s athlete is no less chivalric or heroic than Metastasio’s Megacles, and no less ascetic too, just more modern. To Coubertin, the Olympic athlete became the very personification of:

true chivalry . . . its high ideals, its healthy ruggedness, its generous ardor; all that modernized, detached from war and blood, turned towards the less picturesque but wider horizons of the new democracies, within which a man serves the cause of the general good more directly than in former times by perfecting his own individuality.127

As de Sanctis notes of the Metastasian hero, so also for the rhetoricized version of the modern Olympian: “The generosity of the hero makes the others generous too; the heroism runs like a current through the characters, and all ends satisfactorily, all are heroic and all are happy.”128 Interestingly and noticeably, in both Metastasio’s and Coubertin’s worlds, the power to smother human feelings that should be tragic ultimately remains purely elegiac, indeed idyllic and invariably romantic.

Encoded in the lieto fine of the Metastasian Olympiade resides another ideal embraced by Coubertin—the notion of the cumulative advancement of humanity. To Metastasio and many of his contemporaries, the happy ending represented a rationalistic morality more civilized and evolutionary than the devastating catastrophes of classical drama. As Planelli wrote at the time, the “evolution of the Drama from sad ends to the happy end is a certain proof of the progress of civilization and the development of human attitudes, whatever our misanthropes may say.”129 Likewise, Coubertin subscribed to an ideology of unilinear progress, to a view that history was a process in the progressive revelation and self-realization of the human spirit. He believed, like so many other Victorian modernists, in the infinite development of knowledge and the infinite advance towards social and moral betterment. In Metastasio’s dramma per musica, the triumph of human virtues bore a striking resemblance to the agonetic philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment—after all, Metastasian virtues were habitually required to prove themselves through a contorted series of intricate inner conflicts as well as intimidating external trials before attaining final vindication; and in Coubertin’s rhetoric, the promise of sport reflected the agonetic ideology of an incipient capitalism -- human betterment through athletic struggle. Ultimately, both Metastasio’s and Coubertin’s oeuvres evinced an optimistic faith in the rational perfectibility of the sovereign individual:130 “O Sport,” wrote Coubertin in his pseudonymous Ode to Sport, “You are Fecundity, you tend by straight and noble paths toward a more perfect race . . . O Sport, You are Progress.”131

Perhaps, on deeper reflection, Metastasio and Coubertin simply reacted to the world in which they found themselves. Metastasio worked during the 18th century, “a voluptuous, languid, sentimental age,” as Donadoni describes it. Here Metastasio found favour among “an elegant society” that was “unencumbered by any depth of thought and which asked of its theater only the intoxification of love’s dream.”132 Like Coubertin, Metastasio was a creature, indeed mirror, of his age and the Abate’s audiences were doubtlessly awe struck by the presentation of an heroic ideal they were incapable of emulating, trapped as they were in an anti-heroic spirit defined by an idillico-sentimentality and melancholy. Coubertin responded to a late 19th century world in the process of being transformed by industrialization, urbanization, and secularization, and to the ascendance of moral disorder and the potential


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obliteration of the heroic: “In this modern world so full of possibilities, and yet threatened by so many risks of degeneration,” wrote Coubertin, “Olympism may be a school of moral nobility and purity.”133 Indeed, as de Sanctis had once recognized, “the more unheroic the age, the more wildly heroic is its literature.”134 In the end, Freschi’s histrionic and excessively idealized Berenice provides a fittingly prophetic epitaph and forerunner to both Metastasio’s L’Olympiade as well as Coubertin’s Olympic Games because, as Hogarth noted, at the conclusion of the opera “an enormous globe descended from the sky, which divided into lesser globes, suspended in the air, on which were seen allegorized figures of Fame, Honor, Nobility, Virtue, and Glory.”135 Perhaps we would wish to add to this list only the allegorical figure of Progress.

But as noble and progressive as Metastasio’s sentiments may have been, or as tender and magnanimous were his characters, L’Olympiade not only acknowledged the ancient Olympic Games as the sacred preserve of men but, as a forerunner to Coubertin’s regressive ideology and on the basis of his dramatic construction, Metastasio specifically reaffirmed the marginal, occasional, and indeed demeaning role of women within the Olympic rite. Metastasio, in fact, takes advantage of the gendered specificity of the Games to enervate his drama with even greater suspense. While Aristea and Argene wait for news of the Games outside the arena, Aristea exclaims: “No, beautiful Argene. The regulations forbidding us women from being spectators are unnecessarily harsh,” and in a prelude to the patronizing, and indeed inferiorizing attitudes that were to govern Coubertin’s fin de siècle games, in which women were celebrated more as spectatorial accessories to cheer on men rather than as athletes themselves, Argene notes that: “Nevertheless, it would perhaps be a severer punishment to see one’s love in such great danger, and, without being able to help him.”136 As Coubertin was to declare at least a century later: “In the Olympic Games, as in the contests of former times,” the “primary role” of women “should be to crown the victors.”137 The Olympics, he wrote, instantiate “the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism, based on internationalism, by means of fairness, in an artistic setting, with the applause of women as a reward.”138 In other words, while L’Olympiade bore witness to the triumph of human virtues, it would also have conjured up as well as created in the minds of an audience another conception of the Games, one which will have well served not only Coubertin who was besotted with the ancient Hellenic model but other commentators and idealogues who, during the late 19th century, proselytized sport as a worthy institution in which to feature Anglo-Saxon, amateur, and generally male, and distinctly not female, accomplishments.

It is also worth noting that beyond the text of Matastasio’s libretto lies the music itself. And here, even in the hands of composers as diverse as Caldara and Vivaldi, Pergolesi and Mysliveček, Paisiello and Hasse, the musical interpretations of L’Olympiade appeal to noble passions and higher ideals through scores that feature wind, strings, timpani, and voice in the production of martial processionals, heroic fanfares, stately anthems, grandiose choruses, and exhilarating and touching arias. Like the musical arrangements of L’Olympiade, the Olympic music of the 20th and 21st centuries remains equally majestic and heroic,139 an impressive and living tribute to the legacy of Metastasio. It also comes as no surprise perhaps that, in his efforts to launch his Olympic project for the first time, Coubertin himself resorted to music to impress the delegates who attended the 1894 Congress of the Sorbonne. He specifically chose the elegant Delphic Hymn to Apollo. Theodore Reinach provided a commentary and translated the verses, and the celebrated French composer, Gabriel Fauré, offered a choral accompaniment to the ancient melody. Jeanne Remacle sang the ode. According to Coubertin: “The two thousand persons present listened in a religious silence to the divine

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melody risen from the dead to salute the Olympic renaissance across the darkness of the ages.”140

The question of whether Coubertin had read or was even aware of Metastasio’s work, and especially of course, L’Olympiade, remains unresolved. I can find no reference, direct or indirect, to Metastasio’s work in any of Coubertin’s voluminous writings. But we do know that Coubertin was born into the French middle aristocracy; that the De Fredys, his father’s family, were wealthy royalists who could trace their nobility back to the 15th century and their ancestors to medieval Rome; that his mother’s family, coming from the noble de Mirville family, was equally well positioned; that his father was a painter of religious, historical, and patriotic themes; that the young Coubertin received a classical education befitting the noblesse oblige; and that he was a student of the Age of Enlightenment and its philosophers. We also know that he loved classical music. In 1927, in his celebratory speech on behalf of the new Panathenean Games, he proposed a musical festival in the theater Herod Atticus featuring what he called a “Gluck Cycle:” “Those divine harmonies which put us—if one may dare the phrase—in the presence of the soul of antiquity . . . Now, where could a more perfectly appropriate setting, a more propitious atmosphere or more favorable circumstances be found?”141 And as late as 1935, he thrilled at the inclusion of the Finale of Beethoven’s IXth Symphony as part of the opening ceremonies for the Berlin Olympiad: “I hope that in the future such choral singings, so well adapted to express the intensity of the aspirations and joys of youth, will accompany ever more frequently the spectacle of its Olympic exploits.”142 In short, it is hard to imagine that in some way Coubertin did not encounter Metastasio’s work. But whether he did or did not, I would argue that Metastasio’s Olympiade contributed yet another favourable and generally unified perception of the ancient Olympic Games that endured across time and that influenced a European consciousness in such a way that Coubertin’s particular ideas about an internationalized and indeed Hellenized form of educational sport did not seem at all alien or problematic.

Finally, I do not want to suggest the gradual emergence of an identifiable, historical, Coubertinesque Olympic Idea, that I am uncovering what Best and Kellner call “great chains of historical continuity and their teleological destinations.”143 Rather I wish to add to the complexity of the historical accounts that constitute the Olympic story, particularly as the story unfolded within the tradition of 18th century opera seria, and theorize Metastasio’s literary and musical references to and use of the Olympic Games as profound dimensions in the construction of the social practices and power relations that helped to define Courbertin’s modern Olympic Games edifice. In other words, the repeated performances of Metastasio’s Olympiade constituted some of the “echoes” in history, as Foucault beautifully puts it,144 that helped create a favorable atmosphere in which Coubertin could rationalize and legitimize, in fact normalize, indeed sell, his particular Olympic Games ideology and praxis, one that embraced a noble and honorable conception of sport at the same time as it served discrete class, race, and gendered ends. Clearly, Coubertin used his historical references effectively and persuasively as he sought to proselytize the Western world to the benefits of his athletic cause.

Marx famously noted that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”145 L’Olympiade, I would aver, was an important ingredient in the unfolding history of the Olympic tradition, one that served Coubertin’s ambitions well and one certainly worthy of recognition in the panoply of modern Olympics Games and sport history.


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Postscript On January 28th, 1750, the Abate Pietro Metastasio, Imperial poet to the court of

Charles VI of Austria, King of Hungary, Emperor of Germany, King of Naples and Sicily, sovereign of the Milanese, Caesar Ever August, hurried off an epistle to his friend, the Cavalier Broschi, court singer and royal favourite of Philip V of Spain, his successor, Ferdinand VI, and his Queen, and, in a moment of mock humility and insightful buffoonery wrote that: “In the eighteenth century there lived a certain Abate Metastasio, a tolerable poet among bad ones.”146 Ultimately history would prove him to be prescient and astute, but not before his fame had undergone a variety of vicissitudes. Much of the disrepute into which Metastasio’s operas fell in the 19th century was born of the assumption, propagated by predominantly German and English writers, that his dramas were, to use Monelle’s words, “trifling gallanteries, apparently tragic, but in truth merely ridiculous.”147 As a result, “composers used the short aria texts as opportunities for endless coloratura irrelevant to the words, and set recitative in perfunctory secco to which nobody listened.”148 By the 19th century, according to Lee, Italians mentioned his name “with a contemptuous smile and a contemptuous shrug, often with a rhetorical mixture of pity and taunt, of stinted praise and restrained abuse.” But for much of the 18th century he “was petted by kings and empresses and popes, and looked up to like a sort of prophet by his countrymen.”149 To the end of his life, Mozart hankered to stage a Metastasian libretto. Recently, Metastasio’s reputation has undergone something of a rehabilitation. Monelle, for example, argues that Metastasio’s “love poetry has all the lyrical tenderness of the poesia populare, combined with the purity, ecstasy, delicacy, freshness, psychological precision of Petrarch’s Rime.”150

While Olympiade may seem in its conceits and artificially-righteous approach to life far removed from our current sense of reality and from our own contemporary values, it nonetheless remains an excellent example of Metastasio’s writing at its most accomplished. Born of the Arcadian rationalist spirit, heralded during the latter years of the Age of Enlightenment, and temporarily buried under the exotic sentimentalism of the cosmopolitan 19th century, L’Olympiade has today enjoyed something of an awakening. After more than two centuries, Vivaldi’s Olympiade was revived on September 19, 1939, at the Vivaldi Festival in Siena and Pergolesi’s setting was re-staged in 1937 at the Teatro della Fortuna in Fano, under the direction of Roberto Falk.151 L’Olympiade was specifically held in conjunction with the Olympic Games as part of the 1976 Montreal festivities. Walter Kunstler’s historically- inspired exhibit of graphic material and photographs, Music and the Olympic Games, was further illustrated by a series of three concerts by the McGill Chamber Orchestra that included Antonio Sacchini’s complete opera, Olympiade, sinfonia Olympiade from Vivaldi, Pergolesi, and Leo, and excerpts from two works entitled L’Olympiade by Johann Christian Bach and Pergolesi.

Most recently, under the aegis of the Athens Cultural Olympiad, Olympiade has enjoyed a particularly remarkable renaissance. On November 12, 2003, excerpts chosen from several different versions of Metastasio’s L’Olympiade, including those by Vivaldi, Pergolesi, Paisiello, Jommelli, Traetta, Hasse, Mysliveček, and Caldara, were performed at the Athens Concert Hall by the Virtuosi di Praga under the baton of Nikos Tsouchlos. Interpreting the works were soprano Isabelle Poulenard, mezzo-soprano Claire Brua, tenor Jean Delescluse, and bass Gerome Correas. Soloist Markellos Chrysikopoulos played the harpsicord. The program drew encomia. The idea behind the performance at the Dimitris Mitropoulos Hall belonged to Maria Gyparaki who, together with Mirella Giardelli, worked in the Music Department of the National Library in Paris researching musical scores, selecting aria and recitativi, and considering stage adaptations. Gyparaki’s reconstructions were actually

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presented for the first time in Rhodes in 2002, followed by a dress rehearsal in Prague where the work was recorded. In 2001, the Cultural Olympiad presented Vivaldi’s particular version of L’Olympiade at the Volos Center of Musical Theater.152 To date, ironically, no performance of Metastasio’s Olympiade has been planned in conjunction with the 2006 Winter Games in Turin.


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Endnotes 1 I would like to thank several colleagues for their helpful suggestions and critical

comments in the generation of this manuscript, namely, Bob Barney, Giuseppe Faustini, and Dan Nathan, but, most especially, I would like to acknowledge the constructive criticism, expert advice, and generous help of Don Neville, without whose input this paper would be far less worthy than it currently is.

2 Peter D’Epiro and Mary Desmond Pinkowish, Sprezzatura: Fifty ways Italian genius has shaped the world (New York: Anchor Books, 2001).

3 Ibid., p. xv. 4 Castiglione Baldassare, The book of the courtier, trans. by George Bull (New York:

Penguin Books, 1967). 5 Vernon Lee, Studies of the eighteenth century in Italy (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978),

p.159. Originally printed in London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1887. 6 A French architect wrote in 1765: “Travel through Russia, Prussia, Denmark,

Wuttemburg, the Palatinate, Bavaria, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, everywhere you will find French architects in the highest places . . . Paris is to the Europeans what Athens was to Greece.” Also, as a Sussex landowner wrote to his son: “A man who understands French may travel all the World over without hesitation of making himself understood, and may make himself perfectly agreeable to all Good Company, which is not the case of any other Language whatever.” Quoted in Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (London: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 53.

7 Lee, p. 4. 8 Ibid., p. 158. 9 Charles Burney, A general history of music: From the earliest ages to the present period, 1789,

Vol. 2 (New York: Dover Publishers, 1957), p. 561. 10 Nathaniel Burt, “Opera in Arcadia,” The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 2, April 1955,

p. 146. 11 Ethan Mordden, The splendid art of opera: A concise history (New York: Methuen, 1980),

p. 34. 12 Charles Burney, Memoires of the life and writings of the Abate Metastasio, Vol. 3 (London:

G. C. and J. Robinson, 1796), p. 301. 13 Although Metastasio may have regarded Attilio Regolo as his masterpiece, as Neville

has pointed out to me (Personal Correspondence, 2005), this was because Metastasio saw himself as a literary figure. Actually, Attilio Regolo had very few musical settings.

14 The full text of Metastasio’s L’Olimpiade, and all his other librettos, are published in John Hoole (trans.), Dramas and other poems of the Abbe Pietro Metasatasio, 2 Vols. (London: Otridge, 1800). The text of L’Olimpiade appears on pp. 81-158. An excellent modern translation of L’Olimpiade is provided in Joseph G. Fucilla, trans., Three Melodramas by Pietro Metastasio (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981), pp. 113-155. Let me also note that I have chosen to use the Italian spelling of L’Olimpiade throughout this manuscript, i.e., L’Olimpiade with an “I,” not with a “y,” as is commonly employed.

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15 Giosue Carducci, “Pietro Metatstasio,” in Prose di Giosue Carducci MDCCCLIX-

MCMIII, 3rd edition (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1907), pp. 903-904. Also quoted in Patrick Smith, The 10th Muse: A historical study of the opera libretto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), p. 85.

16 It is perhaps no surprise that L’Olimpiade remains unknown. As Neville has suggested to me (Personal Correspondence, 2005), nearly all of Metastasio’s works remain unknown, except La clemenza di Tito, and that was only because Tito was set by Mozart, and even then, Tito only returned to the repertoire of the big opera houses in the 1970s.

17 See, for example, Richard Stanton, The forgotten Olympic arts competitions: The story of the Olympic art competitions of the 20th Century (Victoria, B.C.: Trafford, 2000); William K. Guegold, 100 years of Olympic music: Music and musicians of the modern Olympic games, 1896-1996 (Mantua, OH: Golden Clef Publishing, 1996).

18 The only references that I have found are in “Les Jeux de la XVIIe Olympiade à Rome—1960” (pp. 17-18) and “Un spectacle à la glorie des Jeux Olympiques de 1960” (pp. 19-20), Bulletin de CIO, 1960, Vol. 62, 63, and 64.

19 Richard D. Mandel, The first modern Olympics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 178, fn. 9.

20 Gerald Redmond, “Prologue and transition: The ‘pseudo-Olympics’ of the nineteenth century,” in Jeffrey O. Segrave and Donald Chu (Eds.), Olympism (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1980), pp. 7-22.

21 See only Jeffrey O. Segrave, “The Olympic Games, 393AD-1896AD: The genealogy of an idea in literature, music, and dance,” OLYMPIKA: The International Journal of Olympic Studies, 2004, Vol. XIII, pp. 53-74.

22 I do not mean to suggest here the demise of Metastasio’s L’Olimpiade. As Neville writes (Personal Correspondence, 2005), Metastasio’s works left the stage at different places and at different times, but when they did leave they migrated to the libraries of the most pre-eminent households.

23 Lee, p. 8. 24 For a history of Italian literature, see Peter Brand and Lino Pertile, The Cambridge

history of Italian literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Eugenio Donadoni, A history of Italian literature, translated by Richard Morges, 2 Vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1969); Ernest Hatch Wilkins, A history of Italian literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); Francesco de Sanctis, History of Italian literature, translated by Joan Redfern (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931).

25 The Academy of Arcadia was specifically named after a region in ancient Greece noted for its pastoral and poetical character.

26 Lee, p. 17. 27 Ibid., p. 18. 28 Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, Notizie Istoriche degli Arcadi Morti, 4 Vols. (Rome, 1721). 29 Francesco Fulvio Frugoni, L’epulone, opera melodrammatica eposta, son le prose morali-critiche

da L. P. Francecso Fulvio Frugoni (Venice: Carlos Palese, 1675), pp. 162, 171ff, 186ff.


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30 For a history of opera, see Donald Jay Grout, A short history of the opera (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1965); Lee; David Littlejohn, The ultimate art: Essays around and about opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Ethan Mordden; Patrick J. Smith; Michael F. Robinson, Opera before Mozart (London: University Library, 1966); Michael F.Robinson, Naples and Neapolitan opera (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972);

31 Edward J. Dent. “Italian opera in the 18th century and its influence on the music of the classical period,” Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, 1912-13, Vol. XIV, p. 501.

32 Grout, p. 185. 33 Nathaniel Burt, “Plus ça change: Or, the progress of reform in the 17th and 18th

century opera as illustrated in the books of three operas.” In Harold Powers (Ed), Studies in music history: Essays for Oliver Strunk (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 325.

34 Dent, 501. 35 Needless to say, there are numerous definitions of opera seria. Winton Dean in

Handel and the opera seria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969, p. 5), for example, defines opera seria as “all Italian opera other than opera buffa during Handle’s lifetime” Littlejohn defines it as “all totally noncomic opera with Italian texts between the first by Alessandro Scarlatti and Handel (1705-1707) and the late blooming “heroic” operas of Rossini (1813-1823)” (p. 95). Any effort to define opera seria as distinct from Neapolitan opera is fraught with even more difficulty. As Edward Olin Davenport Downes writes, Neapolitan opera does not correspond “to any ascertained reality and is . . . to put it bluntly, a myth . . . In present day musicological usage, a Neapolitan opera may have been written in London by a German composer” (“The operas of Johann Christian Bach as a reflection of the dominant trends in opera seria, 1750-80,” doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1958, p. 2). For further discussions of Neapolitan opera and opera seria see Edward O. Downes, “The Neapolitan tradition in opera,” in International Musicological Society, Report of the Eigth Congress, 1961, pp. 277-284; Grout, p. 181ff; Lee, pp. 141-230.

36 It is worth noting here perhaps that Italy was not strictly unified until 1860-70. 37 See Robert Freeman, “Apostolo Zeno’s reform of the libretto,” Journal of the American

Musicological Society, Vol. 21, No. 3, Autumn 1968, pp. 321-341. 38 A. Groppo (Ed.), Catalogo di tutti i drammi (Venice: Forni, 1745), pp. 76-77. 39 Pietro Bonaventura Trapassi, born of humble Roman origin, became known by his

Hellenized name of Metastasio, bestowed on him by his mentor and adoptive father, the well known Roman Abbott, Gian Vincenza Gravina. For a good biography of Metastasio see Lee, pp. 141-230 and for a succinct sketch of his life and work see Don Neville, “Pietro Metastasio”, in Stanley Sadie (Ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of the Opera (New York: Macmillan Press, 1992), pp. 351-361.

40 Burney, Memoires, Vol. I, p. 12. See also Vol. III, p. 306. 41 Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire, “Dissertation sur le tragedie ancienne et

moderne”, in Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Oeuvres completes (Paris: Garnio Freres, 1885), IV, p. 490f; XIV, p. 564.

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42 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique (Amsterdam: M. M. Roy, 1779), p. 350. 43 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “La novelle Heloise” quoted in Gustave Desnoirerterres,

Gluck and Puccini (Paris: Didier, 1875), p. 47. 44 Lee, p. 169. 45 George Hogarth, Memoires of the musical drama (London: Richard Bentley, 2 Vols.,

1838), p. 323. 46 Dean, p. 56. 47 Simon Towneley, “Metastasio as a librettist,” in Arts and ideas in 18th century Italy:

Lectures given at the Italian Institute, 1957-58 (Roma: Edizioni Di Storia E Litteratura, 1960), p. 145.

48 Downes, pp. 51ff. According to E. Surian, “It is to Metastasio that we owe the fluidity and melodiousness of our arias: his metres inspired the composer’s musical figures and ideas; and the clarity of sentiment and of expression combined with the sweetness of its outer form enchanted everyone, indeed ravished them, so that within a few years theatre music had reached its summit.” See “Metastasio, i nuovi cantanti, il nuovo stile, verso il classicismo, osservazioni sull Artasere (Vicenezia 173) di Hasse,” in T. M. Murano (Ed), Venezia e il melodrama nel settecento (Florence: Sansoni, 1978), p. 350.

49 Burney, Memoires, p. 45. 50 As Lee points out, there were two main reasons why opera seria were invariably set

numerous times. First, “the opera must be new, at least new for the place”, and second, “it must have been composed expressively for the principle performers.” As a result, “each theater could scarcely prepare more than one opera each season, as the performers and audience both required to be perfectly familiarized with it; the same opera was therefore performed 20 or 30 successive times and then packed off to another place. Moreover, as the music was all and everything, the music alone was required to be new, while the words were as old as possible” (pp. 131-132).

51 Quoted in Neville, The New Grove Dictionary, p. 353. 52 Ibid. 53 For a full evaluation and critique of Metastasio’s work see Sven Hostrop Hansell,

“The solo cantatas, motets, and antiphons of Johann Adolph Hasse,” Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois, 1966; Towneley, pp. 135-145.

54 Report of 12 July, 1774 by the Royal Neapolitan Giunta dei Teatri, fascio 19, Carte del Administrazione dei Teatri, in the Archivio di Stato, Naples. Quoted in Bernedetto Croce, I teatri di Napoli (Naples: Pierro, 1891), p. 589.

55 Lee, p. 129. According to Lee, Jommelli, the last of the old school, found the “new style, with its broken-up melody, its easy modulation, its light, brilliant ornaments, its strong rythmn, its wind instruments constantly used and used in the same fashion as the others; all this easy, lightly pathetic music seemed trivial, effeminate, undramatic and unmeretricious.” As a result, “the more they dealt in wind instruments and slightly tripping rythmns, the more vigorously did he adhere to his violins and the more varied and complicated became his accompaniments.”


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56 Nathaniel Burt, “Opera in Arcadia,” The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 2, April 1955,

p. 147. 57 For a full list of the premiere productions of Metastasio’s L’Olympiade see “Pietro

Metastasio”, in Stanley Sadie (Ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of the Opera (New York: Macmillan Press, 1992), p. 356. For full biographies of these and other composers mentioned in this paper see also Sadie.

58 Scores by only 23 composers are known to survive in manuscript or printed form. See J. K. Wilson, “L’Olympiade: Selected Eighteenth-Century Settings of Metastasio’s Libretto,”dissertation, Harvard University, 1982, pp. 21-22. For prefaces to facsimile editions of L’Olympiade scores, see Howard Meyer Brown (Ed.), Italian opera librettos, 1640-1770 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1978), Vols XXXII (Caldadr), XXXIV (Pergolesi), XXXVI (Leo), XLI (Galuppi) and XLVI (Jommelli).

59 For a CD recording of Vivaldi’s L’Olympiade, see L’Olympiade, by Antonio Vivaldi, Concerto Italiano, Director Rinaldo Alessandrini, 3 CDs, Opus 111, 2000 Regione Piedmonte.

60 For a CD recording of Pergolesi’s symphony, Olympiad, see Pergolesi Symphonies, Orchestra da Camera di Santa Cecilia, Conductor Alession Vlad, 1996 Arts Music, Track 1.

61 Leo’s Olympiade is in Ludwig Landshoff (Ed.), Alter meister des Bel Canto, 5 Vols (Frankfurt, NY: C. F. Peters, 1912-1927).

62 L’Olimpiade was also performed in Venice, Milan, Naples, Turin, Lisbon, Copenhagen, Parma, Dresden, Vienna, Stuttgart, Munich, Salzburg, Berlin, Warsaw, and Paris.

63 Hogarth, p. 340. 64 Rousseau, Dictionnaire, pp. 182-184. 65 Claudio Varese, Saggio sul Metastasio (Florence: Sansoni , 1950), p. 79. 66 Walter Binni, L’Arcadia e il Metastasio (Florence: Sansoni, 1963), p. 350. 67 Lee, p. 190. 68 Rudolf Krauss, “Die Buch-und Notendruckerie der Hohen Karlsschule,” in

Württembergische Vierteljahrshefte für Landesgeschichte, Vol. XX, 1911, p. 281. 69 Alfred Loewenberg, Annals of opera: 1597-1940 (New York: Rowman and Littlefield,

1970), p. 208. 70 Ibid., p. 183. 71 Berlin Musikalische Zeitung, 1805, p. 102. Quoted in Walter Salmen, Johann Friedrich

Reichardt: Komponist, Schrifsteller, Kappelmeister und Verwaltungsbeamter der Goethezeit (Friberg: Herman Boehlaus, 1963), p. 71.

72 It is also interestingly the only opera of Jommelli’s of which the score was presented. 73 Letter # 91: Jose Antonio Pinto Da Silva to Niccolò Jommelli, May 3, 1774. See

Marita P. McClymonds, Niccolò Jommelli: The last years, 1769-1774 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1978), p. 681.

74 Wilson, p. 12.

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75 Berenice Pennacchietti, “Studi metastasiani: Sulle fonti dell’ ‘Oliampiade’ e di altri

melodrammi di P. Metastasio,” Studi di letteratura itialiana, XI, 1915, pp. 155-202. 76 Burney, Memoires, p. Vol. 1, p. 321. 77 Ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 2-3. 78 Herodotus, The histories, Trans. Aubrey de Selincourt (New York: Penguin Books,

1972), pp. 365-368. 79 Gl’Inganni felici is featured in Alessandro Scarlatti’s Scene buffe which is in the

permanent repertoire of the Warsaw Chamber Orchestra today. 80 For more complete synopses of Metastasio’s L’Olympiade, see Burt, Plus ca change, pp.

335-338; Smith, pp. 85-89; Wilson, pp. 97-104. 81 Burt, pp. 338-340. 82 Fucilla, p. 155. 83 As Lee wrote (p. 196): “The original chivalric color of the story is never lost: the

Olympic Games, despite their choral processions and olive wreaths, retain something of the medieval tournament . . . Antiquity and Aristo, Artists and Herodotus, are fused.” Calzabigi saw in the chorus praising the victor, “Del forte Licida,” a “truly Pindaric hymn” (Raniero de Calzabigi, “Dissertazione su le poesie drammatiche del Sig. Abate Pietro Metastasio,” in Raniero de Calzabigi, Ed, Poesie de l Signor Pietro Metastasio (Paris: Vedora Quillan, 1766), Vol. 1, p. clxxxvi.

84 Tony Perrottet, The naked Olympoics: The true story of the ancient games (NewYork: Randon House, 2004), p. 73.

85 Fucilla, p. 149. 86 See Lee, pp. 119-120 for an evaluation of the importance of the singer in the musical

life of 18th century Italy. As Lee notes: “The composer remained a comparatively abstract creature in the eyes of the Italians of the eighteenth century; they applauded him, indeed, vehemently, but, once the opera was over, he was rarely to be met except specially musical houses and among others of his profession. It was the singer who awakened personal enthusiasm, and who became the musical idol of society at large” (p. 119).

87 Salimbeni, who played Megacles at one point, was suggested by a young pupil of Porpora. “The part is made for him,” Metastasio wrote to his brother. “I have trained him with great care, and he has succeeded so perfectly that the opera will not have half its effect where he cannot perform it.” See Lee, op. cit., p. 194.

88 Gaetano Guadagni, of Vicenza, who attracted the attention of Handel, was a counter tenor who sang L’Olympiade in 1769 and 1770 in London, a pasticcio chiefly by Piccini although the favorite song in the performance was Quel-labbro addorato by Bach.

89 Scores of some of Pergolesi’s 1735 L’Olympiade arias are contained in Max Spicker (Ed), Voices from the golden age of Bel Canto: A collection of twenty-six opera songs of the 17th

and 18th centuries from rare manuscripts and early prints collected by Henry Edward Krehbiel (New York: G. Schirmer, 1910) and Francois Auguste Gevart, Les glories de L’Italie: Chef-D’Oevuvre anciens et inedits de la musique vocale italienne aux XVII et XVIII siecles (2 Vols) (Paris: Heugel, 1868). The former contains Gemo in un punto e fremo, aria for


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soprano (pp. 80-89); Ne’ giorni tuoi felici, duet for two soprani (pp. 96-102); and Se al labor mio non credi, aria for alto or mezzo-soprano (pp. 90-93). The latter includes Air de L’Olympiade (S’il cherche, m’appele), aria for soprano (pp. 74-78). The latter also contains Cimarosa’s 1784 Rondo de L’Olympiade (A sa piene mon Coeur succombe), aria for mezzo-soprano or contralto.

90 Henri Beyle (Stendahl), Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio, trans. by Richard N. Coe (New York: Grossman, 1972), p. 219. See also, Stendahl (Marie Henri Beyle), Lettres éscrites de Vienne en Autriche, sur le célèbre compositeur Jh. Haydn, suivies d’une vie de Mozart, et de considérations sur Metastase (Paris: De L’Imprimerie de P. Didot, 1814), pp. 375-376. Interestingly, Hogarth argues that Piccinni’s version of the aria, ‘Se circa, se dice’, “excels every other in beauty and expression.” Vol. II, p. 136. Herman Kretzschmer recognizes Pergolesi’s rendition as “one of the finest opera seria of the early 18th century,” the arias illustrating “tenderness of sentiment . . . noble, attractive, enthusiastic feeling, an innocent, touching, childlike quality” (Herman Kretzschmer, Geschicte der Oper in Herman Kretzschmer, Ed, Vol. VI. Kleine Handbucher der Musikgeschicte nach Gattungen, 14 Vols. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1905-1922, p. 172). Unlike Vivaldi’s production, which offers an unusually penetrating psychology of the characters during the course of the action, Pergolesi’s, as Hucke and Monson put it, “is characterized by idyllic and delicate tone-colors, smooth, expressive melodies,” a true expression of Pergolesi’s genius and a tribute to his originality and fecundity (Helmut Hucke and Dale E. Monson, “Giovanni Pergolesi,” in Sadie, p. 954).

91 Rousseau, Dictionaire, p. 234. 92 A. Footman, Gazette and New Daily Advertiser, May 21, 1765, p. [lc]. 93 On Burney’s account, Arne had “written for vulgar singers and hearers too long to

be able to comport himself properly at the Opera-house in the first circle of taste and fashion . . . A different language, different singers, and a different audience and style of music from his own, carried him out of his usual element where he mangled the Italian poetry, energies, and accents nearly as much as a Native of Italy just arrived in London would English, in a similar situation (Burney, A general history, op. cit., pp. 868-869). Footman offered an alternative explanation: “Its condemnation was previous to its representation . . . the Italian junto were determined to destroy all interlopers” (Ibid). Apparently, the Italian contingent in London would have insured the failure of any Italian opera, no matter its excellence. In either case, the first and last performances of Arne’s L’Olimpiade were heard at the King’s Theater in London on April 27, 1765. The only Italian operas by Englishmen performed at the King’s Theater during the last 40 years of the 18th century were Mount-Edgcumbe’s Zenobia and Arne’s L’Olympiade (See Petty, p. 330).

94 He died in 1736 at the age of 26. 95 Burney, A general history, pp. 921-922. 96 As Neville writes (Personal Correspondence, 2005), “Over 400 composers set

Metastasian texts, and in many cases the settings were simply of arias drawn from the various texts to serve as independent concert arias.”

97 “I know the source of this tender affection” to “of pity alone.” See Downes, p. 201. 98 Respectively K. 294 and K. 512.

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99 For a CD recording of Ne’ giorni tuoi felici see Beethoven’s Mass in C Major, soloists

Croydon Singers and the Croyden orchestra (Mathew Best, conductor, and Josef Frohlich, leader), Hyperion Records, London, CDA668930, 1996.

100 A pasticcio, as its name implies, mixed arias from a number of operas, usually from a diverse group of composers, and adapted them to a particular libretto that invariably had no previous relationship to those arias and were often strung together regardless of rhyme or reason. See Herbert Lindenberger, Opera in history: From Montiverdi to Cage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 57) and R. A. Streatfield, The opera: A sketch of the developmenet of of opera with full descriptions of all works in the modern repertory (London: George Routledge n.d., ca. 1907), p. 17. According to Lindenberger: “If opera seria in general undermines any dogmas about the necessary relationship of words and music, the pasticcio through its indiscriminate mélange of tunes drawn from a multitude of sources, foregrounds the very arbitrariness characteristic of operatic form through a long period” (p. 59).

101 See Petty, pp. 105-250. 102 Burney, A general history, Vol, 2, p. 840. Another pasticcio Olympiade chiefly by

Galuppi was heard in London, on December 9, 1755 about which Burney wrote: “Of the favorite songs of this Olympiade, the first is an agreeable air by Galuppi. The second, by Minati, despicable! The third a pretty minuet by Galuppi. Then follows Superbo di me stresso, a pleasing air by the same composer. Grandi e ver, by Pergolesi, but not his best manner, but without Stoicisms. And, lastly, an agreeable air in a comic style was sung by Frasi” (Vol. 2, p. 834).

103 Downes, pp. 61-62. 104 See Grout, pp. 217-218. 105 See Wilson, pp. iii-iv. 106 Ibid., p. 28. 107 Fucilla, p. 3. 108 Burney, Memoires, p. 328. 109 Burney, A general history, p. 974. 110 See Petty p. 384. The records show that L’Olympiade sold 3241 tickets each week, a

more than respectable showing compared to the most successful operas of the season, including Sarti’s Sabino (5886), Paisiello’s Il Re Teodoro in Venezia (5565) and Gli Schiavi per Amori (3953), Storace’s La Cameriera Astula (3642), Cimarosa’s La Loceandiera (3517), and Paisiello’s La Frascatona (826).

111 Ugo Morini, La Real Academia degli Immobili e il suo teatro La Pergola (Pisa: Simoncini, 1926). See p. 61 for details of the actual budget. According to Weaver and Weaver, “the response of the public was overwhelming. Showers of sonnets and gold fell from the balconies and boxes” (p. 38). The orchestra for “the Grand Duke’s opera” consisted of 19 violins, four viola, two violin cellos, four contrabases, two harpsichords, two flutes, two oboes, a bassoon, two horns, two trumpets, and timpani. And this was the first accurate and complete listing for an orchestra at La Pergola (p. 88). See Robert Lamar Weaver and Norma Wright Weaver, A chronology of music in the Florentine theater: 1590-1750: Operas, prologues, farces, intermezzo, concerts, and plays with incidental music (Detroit: Information Coordinates, 1978).


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112 World, June 9, 1788, p. 2d. Burney wrote in equally glowing terms of Marchesi,

declaring that his talents “have been the subject of praise and admiration in every great Theater of Europe, where musical dramas are performed in the Italian language.” Quoted in Frederick C. Petty, Italian Opera in London: 1760-1800 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1980), p. 7. Marchesi also gave several equally memorable performances in Sacchini’s L’Olimpiade at the King’s Theater, Haymarket, London (See William Smith, compiler, The Italian opera and contemporary ballet in London, 1789-1820: A record of performances and players with reports from the journals of the time. London: The Society for Theater Research, 1955, p. 7).

113 Susan Burney, The letter-journals of 1779-1780. Letter extract 1: Pacchierrotti’s Benefit Night, King’s Theater, London, 9 March 1780. B. L. Egerton MS 3691 [fol. 75], London, British Library. L’Olympiade was arranged by Ferdinando Bertoni with music by Paisiello and Christoph Willibald Gluck.

114 Hogarth, Vol. I, p. 23. 115 Alan Yorke-Long, Music at court: Four eighteenth-century studies (London: Weidenfeld &

Nicolson, 1954), p. 56. See also Josef Sittard, Zur Geschicte der Musik und des Theaters am wurttembergischen Hofe, 1458-1793, II (Stuttgart: Georg Olms Verlag, 1890).

116 Robinson, Opera before Mozart, p. 38. 117 Grout, p. 200. 118 Joseph Uriot, Description des Fêtes donnees pendant 14 jours a l’Occasion du Jour de naissancee

Son Altesse Serenissime Monseigneur le Duc Regnant de Wurtemberge et Teck (Stuttgart: Verlag, 1763), pp. 69-70.

119 Segrave. 120 Don Neville, “Metastasio and the image of majesty in the Austrio-Italian baroque,”

in Shearer West (Ed.), Italian culture in Northern Europe in the eighteenth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 140-158.

121 Hoole, p. 115. 122 Pietro Metastasio, Ezio, I, xiii. See Hoole, p. 43. 123 Sacchini’s 1777 Paris edition was also appropriately entitled Le triomphe de l’amite (the

triumph of friendship). 124 Hogarth, p. 343. 125 For example, see Pierre de Coubertin, “Why I revived the Olympic Games,”

Fortnightly Review, 90, July 1908, pp. 110-115. 126 Cf. Metastasio’s letter to Hasse in Burney’s Memoires I, op. cit., pp. 351-330.

Metastasio, like Coubertin, placed a high value on “change of sentiment” in a character. Argene’s change to virtue is motivated in large part by the selflessness of Megacles, Lycidas’ partly by the honor and dignity of Clistene, partly by the loyalty of Megacles

127 Pierre de Coubertin, The Olympic idea: Discourses and essays (Stuttgart: Carl-Diem-Institut, 1967), p. 103. See also pp. 112-113, 132.

128 de Sanctis, History, Vol 2, p. 846.

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129 A. Planelli, Dell’ opera in musica (Naples: D. Campo, 1771), p. 72 ff. 130 Cf. Carl L. Becker, The heavenly city of the 18th century philosophers (Yale University Press:

New Haven, 1932), especially pp. 31, 49, 128-129, et passim. 131 de Coubertin, The Olympic idea, p. 40. 132 Donadoni, Vol. 1, p. 316. 133 De Coubertin, The Olympic idea, p. 100. 134 de Sanctis, History, Vol. 2, p. 846. 135 Ibid. 136 Fucilla, p. 128. 137 de Coubertin, The Olympic idea, p. 133. See also p. 136. 138 Quoted in Norbert Müller (Ed.), Pierre de Coubertin, 1863-1937: Olympism: Selected

writings (Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 2000), p. 713. 139 For examples of 20th century music inspired by the Olympics, see the CD, Summon

the Heroes, Boston Pops Orchestra, Conductor John Williams, 2000 Sony Music Entertainment.

140 Pierre de Coubertin, Memoires Olympiques (Lausanne: Bureau international de pedagogie sportive, 1931), p. 18.

141 de Coubertin, The Olympic idea, p. 104. 142 Ibid., p. 134. 143 Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern theory: Critical interrogations (New York:

Guildford Press, 1991), p. 46. 144 Michel Foucault, The history of sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 149. 145 Karl Marx, “The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1851), excerpted from

David McLellan (Ed.) Karl Marx: Selected writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 300.

146 Lee, p. 143. 147 Raymond Monelle, “The rehabilitation of Metastasio,” Music & Letters, July 1976,

Vol. 57, No. 3, p. 268. 148 Ibid. 149 Lee, p. 143. 150 Monelle, p. 276. 151 Loewenberg, pp. 179-183. 152 See Vassilis Angelikopoulos, “A patchwork of Metastasio’s Olympiad,” Kathimerini

(November 7, 2003), p. 1.

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