Opera has always been a risky business; not surprisingly, this was especially the case in Venice after the establishment of its first public theater in 1637, as a variety of noble families, composers, and other artists sought to make their mark in Venice's new cosmopolitan entertainment. The brief operatic career of composer Francesco Lucio provides a fascinating window into the difficult world of public opera production during its second decade. Using a series of newly discovered documents, I follow the young composer's journey from the short-lived Teatri SS. Apostoli and S. Aponal, to the older S. Moisè, and, finally, to the most successful of the Venetian theaters, Teatro SS. Giovanni e Paolo, where Lucio's Medoro was produced in 1658.

At SS. Apostoli, Lucio was part of a company in which partners and benefactors (scenographer Giovanni Burnacini, the artist Guido Cagnacci, and the Flemish businessman Guglielmo Van Kessel) argued among themselves; Lucio, too, had problems with Burnacini concerning his musical responsibilities for Gl'amori di Alessandro Magno, e di Rossane. Lucio next found operatic employment at Teatro S. Aponal (with his Pericle effeminato), under new management after the sudden death of its impresario and resident librettist, Giovanni Faustini; his tenure there lasted only one year. At S. Moisè the composer managed to mount one opera, Euridamante, during a decade when the theater had returned to presenting comedies exclusively. Even at the famed SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Lucio found a company where impresario Francesco Piva, like Burnacini at SS. Apostoli, did not see eye-to-eye with his associate, Iseppo Zolio. Lucio's rise to the Teatro SS. Giovanni e Paolo marked the height of his operatic career, which was cut short only months later by a murderous attack. Unlike a number of his contemporaries such as Giovanni Battista Volpe, Pietro Andrea Ziani, and Francesco Cavalli, he never had the opportunity to travel to foreign lands or to rise through the ranks of St. Mark's Chapel: Lucio died a man of modest means, a musician who had served Venice's churches, monasteries, orphanages, and, in the last year of his life, its grandest theater.

In contrast to the central historical narrative that usually locates the stile nuovo within the vocal mainstream, this paper examines the contribution of singer-songwriters to forging the "new style". Instead of viewing monody as a reaction against polyphony in the way of the famous Monteverdi-Artusi debates, this paper searches for continuities through associating Caccini and other early monodists with the lutenist songsters who flourished throughout the sixteenth century. These musicians were active across a broad spectrum of society and in many ways represent the meeting place of urban and courtly culture, and thus provide a link to both the distinctly popular and erudite genres of early seventeenth century Italian music. In an attempt to draw closer to the elusive unwritten music traditions of the period, the focus will be placed on some of the key incidental players on this flimsy musical stage: the immortal lutenists of Caravaggio, Fabrizio Dentice, Mateo Bezón, Bartolomeo Barbarino (the "other" Barbarino from Naples), and Cosimo Bottegari.

For many, the term commedia dell'arte conjures up pictures of Harlequin, Pulcinella, Pantalone, or Doctor Graziano, with their grotesque masks and clownish attire, possibly engaged in stock comic bits (lazzi), usually slapstick, often obscene. Nino Pirrotta had a fuller and more nuanced idea of improvised theater (or, better, commedia ai soggetti ), which he understood to embrace a wide range of subjects and genres and to feature verbal as well as physical play. His article "Commedia dell'arte and Opera," published a little over fifty years ago, remains the most extensive account of the parallels (he preferred to call them "correspondences" or "analogies") between these two most important Italian theatrical forms of the seventeenth century.

Although Pirrotta suggested that commedia dell'arte and opera were two branches from a common trunk, the correspondences between them that he described are mostly borrowings and adaptations from the former, older, practice into the latter, newer genre. These include plot outlines (scenari), lazzi, character types, performativity (a term Pirrotta did not know and would not have liked), and dissemination by itinerant troupes. Toward the end of his article, Pirrotta also mentions the set speeches memorized (and often written) by professional comedians, of which he finds the operatic analog in the self-contained arias whose wholesale appearance he traces to the mid-century operas of Antonio Cesti.

This paper proposes, instead, that the long set speeches (lettere) and expanses of memorized dialogue (contrasti) typical of commedia dell'arte find their correspondence in opera earlier than mid-century, essentially at the beginning of the Venetian phase of the genre's history, and not in arias but in some of the extended recitatives for one or two characters in which the uncommon expansion, extravagant expression, exaggerated tone, inflated figures, and rhetorical extremes reflect the essential features (and, not infrequently, the details) of the various types of lettere and contrasti of commedia dell'arte, such as concetti, soliloqui, prime uscite, saluti, disperazioni, rimproveri, bravure, sali, motti, arguzie, metafore, continuate, equivoche, dialoghi, chiusette, trappolaria, and, above all, the tirate, all of which professional actors copied into their zibaldoni. The key element in these lettere and contrasti is the large number of rhetorical figures that they contain. Perrucci (1699) names and illustrates scores of these figures. The exact identification of these rhetorical figures is useful because opera composers of the early Venetian period show acute sensitivity to their individuality. Our recognition of them should produce keener perception of the baroque qualities of Venetian opera.

The mature career of Claudio Monteverdi was almost equally divided between two North Italian cities: Mantua, the capital of a duchy, and the Republic of Venice, centre of an exensive overseas empire, with possessions in the Adriatic as well as on the mainland. In the former the composer began his career as a string player at the Gonzaga court, and went on to write five books of madrigals, the operas Orfeo and Arianna, and the Vespers of 1610 during his time there. Monteverdi's appointment as maestro di cappella at St Mark's Basilica placed him in charge of one of the most impressive musical establishments anywhere in Europe. This talk explores some of the ways in which the differing musical traditions, institutional structures, and cultural life of Mantua and Venice affected the experiences and activities of Monteverdi and his contemporaries working in an age of anxiety and decline.

Travellers to Italy in the seventeenth century came from all countries and social classes. In addition to the usual diplomats, state visitors, and students, came would-be painters, mercenary soldiers, Catholic refugees, and merchants. They crossed the Alps and sailed into Venice, Genoa and Naples. Few, of course, left records of their impressions of Italy, and fewer yet had enough interest in or awareness of music to record or remember it, within the confines of their chosen literary genres. The search for evidence of the music that such "tourists" heard in Venice, Padua, Florence, Rome and Naples clearly divides into public encounters and more exclusive private experiences, whether the diarist is an anonymous Frenchman in 1606, a young English baron in 1660 on a typically educational Grand Tour, or a Russian in 1697 who is keen on horses, ships and, seemingly, every church in Italy, Orthodox, Uniate, Armenian, or Catholic. Their lesser known travel journals amplify and enrich the views we know from foreign visitors such as the Englishmen Thomas Coryate and John Evelyn, and the abbé François Raguenet, from early, middle, and late in the century.