Strozzi 9

Signifying Nothing: On the Aesthetics of Pure Voice in Early Venetian Opera
Author(s): Mauro Calcagno

Source: The Journal of Musicology , Vol. 20, No. 4 (Fall 2003), pp. 461-497
Published by: University of California Press
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Signifying Nothing: On the
Aesthetics of Pure Voice in
Early Venetian Opera
MAURO CALCAGNO
Writing near the beginning of the 18th cen-

tury, Gian Vincenzo Gravina, a member of the Accademia dell’Arcadia
(Arcadian Academy), lamented the separation of philosophy, poetry,
and music in the culture of his time:
The philosopher remains confined to schools, the poet to academies;

and for the people what is left in the theaters is only pure voice, 461
stripped of any poetic eloquence and of any philosophical feeling.1
By characterizing opera as dominated by “pure voice,” Gravina described

a quintessential aspect of the genre since its development as a public
spectacle in 1630s Venice: the magnification of singers’ vocal abilities to
such an extreme as to efface, if only momentarily, word meaning. Gra-
vina’s critique had as its counterpart the disapproval of 17th-century
Venetian librettos expressed a few years earlier (1700) by his Arcadian
colleague Giovanni Maria Crescimbeni, who famously condemned
Cicognini’s Giasone (1649) as a conglomerate of bizarre oddities.2 The
1 “Il filosofo rimane nelle scuole ristretto, il poeta nelle accademie; e per lo popolo
è rimasta ne’ teatri la pura voce, d’ogni eloquenza poetica e d’ogni filosofico sentimento
spogliata.” Gian Vincenzo Gravina, “Della tragedia” (Naples, 1715) in Scritti critici e teorici,
ed. Amedeo Quondam (Bari: Laterza, 1973), 507, quoted in Renato Di Benedetto, “Poet-
iche e polemiche,” in Teorie e tecniche, immagini e fantasmi, vol. 6 of Storia dell’opera italiana,
ed. Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (Turin: EDT, 1988), 3–76: 23. All translations
are mine unless otherwise indicated.
2 Giovanni Maria Crescimbeni, La bellezza della volgar poesia (Rome: Buagni, 1700),
106. The passage on Giasone, Cicognini’s libretto set by Francesco Cavalli, is translated in
The Journal of Musicology 20/4 (2003): 461–97. ISSN 0277-9269, electronic ISSN 1533-8347s
© 2003 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Send requests for permis-
sion to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000
Center Street, Suite 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

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the journal of musicology
two literati shared a concern for the balance between word and voice,
sound and meaning, in the genre of opera as it had developed during
the previous century. But they could have targeted other genres as well.
In Barbara Strozzi’s cantatas for example—to cite a repertoire contem-
poraneous with the first Venetian operas—instances of dissociation be-
tween word and music occur, as Ellen Rosand notices, in “melismatic
passages which, although generally set into motion by the meaning of
a specific word, are so frequent and lengthy that an unusually large
proportion of music remains virtually without any text at all.” 3 In the
madrigals included in the Musiche a due voci by Sigismondo D’India
(1615) the “inexhaustibly florid nature of the two vocal parts,” as
Lorenzo Bianconi observes, is apparent in melismas that are “some
sixty notes long”; in one case, “taken together, the two voices perform
no less than 112 notes of melisma on the final and most important
word of the text . . . ”.4 These phenomena, by which sheer voice mo-
mentarily overrides the meaning of the text, have also been investi-
gated by scholars in later repertoires. Lawrence Kramer for example,
dealing with the 19th-century Lied, suggestively calls these moments
“overvocalizations,” defining them as “the purposeful effacement of
462 text by voice.”5 Recalling Nietzsche’s description of a “‘musical excite-
ment that comes from altogether different regions’ than does poetic
excitement,” Kramer finds overvocalization especially frequent in
Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1991), 275. For the Arcadians’ views on opera, see Di Benedetto, “Poet-
iche e polemiche,” 19–25; Robert Freeman, Opera without Drama: Currents of Change in
Italian Opera, 1675–1725 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981), chap. 1; and Piero
Weiss, “Teorie drammatiche e ‘infranciosamento’: motivi della ‘riforma’ melodrammatica
del primo Settecento,” in Antonio Vivaldi: Teatro musicale, cultura e società, ed. Lorenzo
Bianconi and Giovanni Morelli (Florence: Olschki, 1982), 273–96: 284–93.
3 “The frequently lengthy melismas are an especially important ingredient of
Strozzi’s affective style precisely because they are textless . . . . Strozzi exploits the superior
eloquence of the naked human instrument.” Ellen Rosand, “Barbara Strozzi, virtuosissima
cantatrice: The Composer’s Voice,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 31 (1978),
241–81: 274. The piece that exemplifies these claims is “Che v’ho fatto, o luci” included
in Diporti di Euterpe, overo cantate e ariette a voce sola Op. 7 (facsimile Stuttgart: Cornetto-
Verlag) on pp. 157–63 (the excerpt quoted in the article is on pp. 157–59).
4 Lorenzo Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, trans. David Bryant (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 15.

5 See Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley: Univ.
of California Press, 2002), 63. In song, Kramer claims, there are two opposing trends:
one in which music expresses the words, according to a tradition dating back to the Re-
naissance; the other in which music tends to efface words either through “songfulness”
(as in strophic songs, in which local textual meaning may play an auxiliary role) or
through “overvocalization,” in which the effacement results from a “melisma or sustained
vocalic tones” associated with “emotional and metaphysical extremes.”

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opera, “where ‘musical excitement’ and dramatic action are in a con-

stant tension with each other.”6
In 17th-century opera, the effort of composers to closely imitate
verbal meaning in recitatives—at the same time that they were almost
disregarding it in arias—made overvocalization all the more relevant.
The result was music that engaged in a constant critical dialogue with
its text, on both the large and the small scale. For example, in the oper-
atic arias of Francesco Cavalli (Strozzi’s teacher) “the madrigalistic ges-
ture,” as Giovanni Morelli puts it, “is often both affirmed and negated,
with indifference, as if the composer were advancing a two-faced dis-
course.”7 This asynchronicity, by which the two semiotic planes of music
and language “slide” for a moment over each other, is not only id-
iomatic to the vocal language of the period but it is also symptomatic of
the crucial dramaturgical role that composers—and their proxies,
singers—played in the collaborative enterprise that was opera, over-
shadowing the librettists. Increasingly throughout the century, the pub-
lic of opera developed a taste for sheer vocality—statistically, for exam-
ple, the number of arias came to far outnumber those of recitatives
—provoking in the end stern reactions such as that quoted above by
Gravina.8 Within arias (limiting ourselves to what scores reveal) an os- 463
cillation between associating and dissociating music and verbal mean-
ing emerged in melismas placed not on the words that would have “re-
quired” them as madrigalisms, but on those just preceding them: as in
a setting of the words “voglio fuggir” (I want to fly away) in which the
coloratura falls on the word “voglio” instead of “fuggir.”9
A spectacular example of asynchronicity between vocal gesture and
word meaning in a passage of Monteverdi’s Incoronazione di Poppea
(1643) has recently attracted much critical attention: an awkward, puz-
zling melisma on the article “la” (the) preceding the word “bellezza”
(beauty) as sung by the character Seneca in act I, scene 6 of the opera
(see Ex. 1).
6 See Lawrence Kramer, Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1984), 132. Kramer quotes from Nietzsche’s essay “On Music
and Words,” published in English as an appendix to Carl Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism
and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press), 103–19: 112.
7 Giovanni Morelli, “Scompiglio del lamento (simmetrie dell’inconstanza e in-
costanza delle simmetrie): L’Egisto di Faustini e Cavalli (1643)” in Gran Teatro La Fenice,
Opere-Concerti-Balletti, 1981–82 (Venice: Teatro La Fenice, 1982), 470–626: 615.
8 Most Venetian operas of the 1670s had 60 arias or more, compared to about a
dozen in those of the 1640s. See Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 282.
9 See Olga Termini, “The Transformation of Madrigalisms in Venetian Operas of
the later Seventeenth Century,” The Music Review 34 (1978), 5–21: 14. The example comes
from Domenico Freschi’s Olimpia vendicata (1681), act I, scene 6. But see also the similar
passages from Cavalli’s Egisto (1643) in Morelli, “Scompiglio del lamento,” 615–18.

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example 1. Claudio Monteverdi, L'incoronazione di Poppea (1643), act

1, scene 6, mm. 32–46. From Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale
Marciana, Ms. It. IV 439 (=9963), fol. 29r
Ý Ł Łý Ł Ł Łý ²Ł Ł Ł Ł Łý ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł
ŁŁ
32
¼

Tu dal de - stin col - pi - ta, dal de-stin col - pi - ta Pro - du -

Ý
ð Łý
Ł Łý

Ł Łý

Ł Łý Ł Łý Ł Ł ¼ Ł Ł

Ý Ł Ł Łý Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ð Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł
36

ðý
- ci a te me-de - sma al - ti splen - do - ri Di vi - gor, di for - tez - za,
Ý Ł Ł ð ð Ł Ł ð
Ł Ł Ð
Ł
Ý Łý Ł Łý Ł Ł Ł Ł ŁŁŁŁŁŁ
464
Ł Ł Ł ŁŁŁŁŁŁŁŁŁŁ
40
Glo - rie mag - gio - ri as - sai che la
ÝŁ ð ð Ł Ł Ł
Ł ð Ł
Ł
ÝŁŁ ŁŁŁŁŁŁŁŁŁŁŁŁŁ ŁŁŁŁŁŁŁŁ ŁŁŁŁŁŁŁ
43
ÝŁ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł
Ý Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł
45
Ł Ð
bel - lez - za.
Ý Ð
ð ð

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The passage occurs in the context of an austere recitative, which

renders the effect of overvocalization even more striking. Scholars have
termed this melisma “meaningless” and “inappropriate” (Wendy Heller),
“silly” (Susan McClary), and merely “ironic” (Iain Fenlon).10 This and
similar instances of asyncronicity between text and music, however, not
only represent, as mentioned above, idiomatic features of the style of
the period, but find also, as I shall argue here, full aesthetic justification
in verbal and visual discourses originating in precisely the intellectual
context to which Monteverdi, other contemporary Venetian opera com-
posers, and their librettists belonged. This context consists mainly of
the academies active in the Serenissima during the 1630s, particularly
the Accademia degli Incogniti, an intellectual circle whose importance
for the early history of the genre has been widely discussed by scholars
(although not yet in this connection).11 The aesthetics is enunciated in
still unexplored works by members of this academy, and it is epitomized
by two recurring tropes used by them to refer to pure voice and overvo-
calization: the concept of nothingness and the singing of the nightin-
gale. Both tropes already had a long and independent history before
their adoption by the Incogniti.12 It was these tropes’ association with
465
10 “The meaninglessness and inappropriateness of such gestures is particularly ap-
parent in the absurdly long melisma in measures 54–57 [= 42–45 in Ex. 1], placed on the
article ‘la’ rather than on the noun ‘bellezza’ ” (Wendy Heller, “Tacitus Incognito: Opera
as History in L’incoronazione di Poppea,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52
[1999], 39–96: 67); “Seneca habitually reverts to silly madrigalisms, which destroy the
rhetorical effect of most of his statements” (Susan McClary, “Constructions of Gender in
Monteverdi’s Dramatic Music” in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality [Min-
nesota: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1991], 35–52: 49); “In this context Seneca’s long virtu-
osic melisma on the word ‘bellezza’ is not merely an adaptation of a madrigalesque con-
vention, but is also deeply ironic” (Iain Fenlon and Peter N. Miller, The Song of the Soul:
Understanding Poppea [London: Royal Musical Association, 1992], 64). That this melisma
puzzles not only scholars but also performers is evident in the fact that it is cut (for no
good “philological” reason) from one of the most popular performances of Poppea avail-
able on CD, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner (Archiv 447088-2); the cut is from the
words “Tu dal destin colpita” to “la bellezza,” coinciding with Ex. 1 here.
11 On the Incogniti see Giorgio Spini, Ricerca dei libertini: La teoria dell’impostura delle
religioni nel Seicento italiano (1950; rev. ed. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1983); Paul Renucci,
“La cultura,” in Storia d’Italia, ed. Ruggero Romano and Corrado Vivanti, vol. 2/2: Dalla
caduta dell’Impero romano al secolo XVIII (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), 1085–466: 1394–98;
Rosand, “Barbara Strozzi”; Lorenzo Bianconi and Thomas Walker, “Dalla ‘Finta Pazza’
alla ‘Veremonda’: storie di Febiarmonici,” Rivista italiana di musicologia 10 (1975): 379–
454; Monica Miato, L’Accademia degli Incogniti di Giovan Francesco Loredano: Venezia, 1630–
1661 (Florence: Olschki, 1998); and Heller, “Tacitus Incognito.”
12 One of the oldest sources for the literary tradition of the nightingale singing—
Pliny’s Natural History —is discussed below. On the intellectual tradition upholding the
concept of Nothing and its wide implications, see, among the many contributions to
the subject, Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (London: Macmillan,
1987), whose Shakespearian title also inspires that of this essay, and Sergio Givone, Storia

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the emerging protagonist of opera productions—the female singer—

which produced an aesthetics of pure voice finally able to justify the
vocal excesses so lamented decades later by the Arcadians.
Theorizing Nothing: the Incogniti and the Failures of Language

The Incogniti was one of the largest and most prestigious acade-
mies in 17th-century Europe. Active in Venice between 1623 and 1661,
the academy counted among its 300 members librettists such as the au-
thor of Poppea Giovanfrancesco Busenello, Giacomo Badoaro (the li-
brettist of Monteverdi’s Ritorno d’Ulisse in patria), Maiolino Bisaccioni,
Giacomo Dall’Angelo, Giovan Battista Fusconi, Scipione Errico,
Francesco Sbarra, Nicolò Beregan, and Giulio Strozzi. In addition to li-
brettos and cantata texts, Incogniti members wrote poetic praises of the
divas singing on the stages of Venice, such as Anna Renzi. They also
probably played a role in the activities of the Teatro Novissimo, the the-
ater which, in 1641, saw the premiere of Giulio Strozzi and Francesco
Sacrati’s opera La finta pazza—the best traveled opera at the time, tour-
ing much of Italy to finally be brought to Paris in 1645.13 A subgroup
466 of the Incogniti during the late 1630s, known as the Accademia degli
Unisoni, was (as its name suggests) especially interested in music, hold-
ing its meetings in the house of singer and composer Barbara Strozzi.14
The Incogniti’s reputation spread all over Europe via an effective
self-promoting propaganda machine, in part thanks to several Venetian
publishers (notably Sarzina, Baba, and Valvasense) that, despite the
threat of censorship, continued to print the Incogniti’s licentious
works.15 Many of the academicians were in fact libertines, their reli-
gious views bordering on blasphemy and Protestantism.16 The prime
engine of the Incogniti’s activities was the founder, Giovan Francesco
Loredano, a nobleman who published several narrative works ranging
from lascivious amorous novels to austere religious meditations (the lat-
del nulla (Rome: Laterza, 1995). For the idea of “nothing” as manifested in Romantic in-
strumental music, see Daniel K. L. Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 167–70 (I am grateful to Alexander Rehding
for this reference). On “nothing” in both Baroque and Romantic aesthetics, see Wl-adys-
law Tatarkiewicz, L’estetica romantica del 1600, Accademia polacca delle scienze—
Biblioteca e centro di studi a Roma—Conferenze, fasc. 34 (Wrocl-aw: Ossolineum, 1968),
12–17.
13 See Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, chaps. 6 and 8.
14 See “Barbara Strozzi,” esp. 244–53 and 278–80.
15 See Mario Infelise, “Ex ignoto notus? Note sul tipografo Sarzina e l’accademia
degli Incogniti,” in Libri, tipografi, biblioteche: Ricerche storiche dedicate a Luigi Balsamo (Flor-
ence: Olschki, 1997), 207–23.
16 On this aspect see Spini, Ricerca dei libertini, 149–76.

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ter possibly counterbalancing the former in the eyes of the censors).17

The academicians met in his palace near Santa Maria Formosa, in the
sestiere of Castello. An echo of these gatherings is preserved in a collec-
tion of discourses published in 1635 dealing with the most various sub-
jects, from the trivial (such as cheese-tasting) to the serious (politics,
history and aesthetics).18
The last discourse of the 19 in the collection is entitled Le Glorie del
Niente (The Glories of Nothing) and was written by Marin Dall’An-
gelo.19 Like Busenello and other librettists, Dall’Angelo was a promi-
nent Venetian lawyer. He was also the leader of another academy, the
Accademia degli Imperfetti, to which Busenello and Bisaccioni be-
longed, and the father of librettist Giacomo, both an Incognito and an
Imperfetto. Le Glorie del Niente had been published separately a year ear-
lier as part of a polemical exchange of views between the Incogniti and
certain French intellectuals.20 In this Franco-Italian polemic the issue
at stake was the concept of Nothing, advocated by the Italians but op-
posed by the French.
The exchange started with a discorso by the Incognito Luigi Manzini,
entitled Il Niente (Nothing), published in May 1634.21 Dall’Angelo’s Glo-
rie del Niente must have appeared shortly after it, since a harsh reply to 467
both essays was published in July, written by the Frenchman Raimondo
Vidal and entitled Il Niente annientato (Nothing annihilated), with a
dedication to Gasparo Coignet, the French ambassador in Venice. In the
following month, Jacques Gaffarel, an emissary of Richelieu, attempted
a compromise, but in 1635 a certain “Villa, Accademico Disarmato”
concluded the diatribe with a detailed critique of Manzini’s discorso.
17 On Loredano see Agnès Morini, “Sous le signe de l’inconstance: la vie et l’oeuvre
de Giovan Francesco Loredano (1606–61), noble vénitien, fondateur de l’Académie des

Incogniti” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Paris IV Sorbonne, 1994).
18 Discorsi academici de’ Signori Incogniti havuti in Venetia nell’Accademia dell’Illustrissimo
Signor Giovan Francesco Loredano nobile veneto (Venice: Sarzina, 1635).

19 The discourse appears in Discorsi academici, 267–87.
20 Le Glorie del Niente discorse dal sig. Marin Dall’Angelo nell’academia dei signori Incogniti
di Venezia, in casa dell’illustrissimo sig. Gio. Francesco Loredano (Venice: Sarzina, 1634). The
full documentation of the Incogniti polemic is included in the anthology Le antiche memo-
rie del nulla, ed. Carlo Ossola (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1997). Dall’Angelo’s
Glorie del Niente is on pp. 190–202. Ossola was the first to identify the writings as belong-
ing to the same series of published exchanges, being included in two miscellaneous vol-
umes preserved at the Bibliothéque Mazarin in Paris (see “Notizia dei testi,” pp. xil–xlvii).
My interpretation of the Incogniti writings, as far as their ideological assumptions are
concerned, relies upon Ossola’s introduction to his edition, entitled “Elogio del nulla”
(pp. vii–xxxvii).
21 Il Niente. Discorso di D. Luigi Manzini. All’Illustrissimo ed eccellentissimo signore il sig.
Domenico da Molino, recitato nell’academia degl’Incogniti di Venezia, a Ca’ Contarini. Gli VIII
Maggio MDCXXXIV, sotto ‘l principato dell’illustrissimo signore Angelo Michiele, nobile viniziano
(Venice: Andrea Baba, 1634), reprinted in Le antiche memorie, 95–107.

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This debate, as I have noted, echoed many earlier discussions on

the same subject dating from as far back as ancient philosophy, and
continued the tradition of “paradoxes on Nothing” that flourished dur-
ing the Renaissance.22 Expanding on this tradition, the academicians
extended the philosophical compass of Nothingness so broadly that it
illuminates other aspects of their ideology, including the aesthetics
implied in their support of the genre of opera.
The main thesis of Manzini’s Il Niente—one that was certainly in-
flammatory, to judge from the subsequent reactions—is “that no thing,
outside of God, is more noble and perfect than Nothing.”23 The author
starts his essay by praising novelty over authority, and the “new” over
the “old,” claiming for himself a new freedom (nuova libertà) of judge-
ment. He rejects all philosophical and theological assertions about
the inadmissibility of Nothing as well as scientific claims about Nature’s
avoidance of a vacuum (horror vacui)—impressively so, as this is a full
decade before Torricelli’s discovery of the actual physical vacuum.24
Nothing, Manzini says, “includes in itself all that is possible and all that
is impossible.”25 In a display of virtuoso rhetoric, he initiates a long and
elaborate list of attributes of Nothing by affirming that Man himself is
468 Nothing—a statement that he curiously supports by claiming that the
Latin word Homo contains two Os to represent two zeros that, in turn,
represent Nothing(!). Indeed, all human disciplines and liberal arts,
according to Manzini, evolve from Nothing. He discusses in turn: per-
spective, painting, sculpture, military arts, architecture, philosophy,
politics, theology, arithmetic (here again the zero is his evidence), di-
alectic, rhetoric—and finally grammar, of which Manzini says: “It is an
unhappy discipline that only tries to shape boys’ rough voices; the same
voices which, as soon as they are exposed to air, are dispersed by strong
winds, and which, if pious minds did not collect their fantastic relics,
would—all of them, at the point of their birth—vanish into the wide
22 “The main philosophers of Greece were chary of ‘nothing,’ denying its validity as
fact and as concept. Platonic ‘plenism’ and Aristotelean horror vacui denied existence to
nothing; Christian orthodoxy followed them in this respect, canonizing a single, divine
creatio ex nihilo at which nihil was transformed, for good, by the blast of God’s mouth
into omnis, the cosmos, the universe, the total being.” See Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epi-
demica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), 221.
The Incogniti position, which in many respects echoes that of the Greek Sophists, could
have been easily attacked as heresy by the Church.
23 “Che niuna cosa, fuor di Dio, è più nobile né più perfetta del Niente.” Le antiche
memorie, 98.
24 As Ossola observes in the introduction to Le antiche memorie, xxi.
25 “E pure il Niente include in sé tutto ciò ch’è possibile e tutto ciò ch’è impossi-
bile.” Le antiche memorie, 98.

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sepulcher of Nothing and evaporate.”26 Voice and nothing are in this

passage directly associated.
To the list of what we may henceforth call “figures of Nothing”—
including voice—the author adds sleep, darkness, silence, time, and
death. In his treatment of the last two figures Manzini touches not only
upon the semantic area of the vanitates vanitatum portrayed in contem-
porary painted “still lifes” (one thinks of Evaristo Baschenis), but also
on ideological assumptions common to much early 17th-century Italian
literature: in particular, the poems dealing with the time preceding
God’s Creation, when there was no time.27 For the Incogniti, this nihil,
contrary to Doctrine, is not dispelled by the act of Creation, but is still
within and around us, constantly reminding men of the blurred bound-
aries between Life and Death. Only at the point of death will we com-
pletely “open our eyes” to the “wonders of Nothing” (le meraviglie del
Niente)—until that moment, we can only be alerted to the signs of what
is indeed denoted by absence.28
Manzini’s essay was soon echoed by Dall’Angelo’s discorso on the
same subject, Le Glorie del Niente, which reinforced its main points. Dedi-
cating his essay to the founder of the Incogniti, Loredano, Dall’Angelo
presents a list of figures of Nothing similar to Manzini’s. For example, 469
under the rubric “Life” Dall’Angelo claims that men are no other than
“dust, shadows, and dreams, which in the end only aim to teach us that
our life is an animated trumpet that keeps playing, in the triumph of
death, the admirable Glories of Nothing.”29 Other concepts explored
by Dall’Angelo indicate the aspiration on the part of the Incogniti to-
wards a unifying, even encyclopedic philosophy of Nothing. These in-
clude: “poetics,” described as “a very formal idea of all Nothing” (“can
it,” the author wonders, “be itself without inventions, like fables without
phantasms, which are nothing else than nothing?”); 30 “histories,” which
26 “Che direste della grammatica? Infelice, che non suda intorno ad altro che a for-
mar le voci alla rozzezza de’ fanciulli. Le voci, che non sì tosto vengono esposte all’aria,
che impetuosi i turbini le disperdono e, se di esse pietose le menti non ne raccolgono al-
cuna, anche fantastica reliquia, tutte su lo stesso punto del nascere, nella vasta tomba del
Niente svanendo, si dileguano.” Le antiche memorie, 103. Manzini plays on the word “voci”
as meaning both “words” (as, for example, the entries of a dictionary) and “voices.”
27 See Giacomo Jori, Le forme della creazione: Sulla fortuna del “Mondo creato”, secoli
XVII e XVIII (Florence: Olschki, 1995), which discusses the tradition of hexamerons, po-
ems dealing with the six days of Creation, such as Torquato Tasso’s Il mondo creato, pub-
lished in 1609.
28 Le antiche memorie, 106.
29 “Polvere, ombre, sogni, che finalmente non tendono ad altro che ad insegnarci
non essere questa nostra vita che un’animata tromba che va suonando nel trionfo di
morte l’ammirande glorie del Niente.” Le antiche memorie, 120.
30 “Un’idea formalissima di tutto il Niente. Sa ella essere tale senza l’invenzioni, le
favole senza infantasmi che non sono che niente?” Le antiche memorie, 121.

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are “none other than many glorious annals of the wonders of Nothing”31;
and finally, “politics,” a subject relevant to theater (musical and non):
And if we turn to politics, you see that its aim is nothing else than in-
creasing or augmenting the magnitude of the wonders of Nothing. If
politics teaches how to add to the greatness of one Prince, you’ll see in
it a great master in annihilating the greatness of another one. If poli-
tics has already added to the greatness of somebody in the past, what
else has it done through this help other than having caused the open-
ing of many Royal Theaters, in which the Nothing represents, in the
outcome of the plots, the wonders of its own Glories? In them you can
see how from the fall of the first queen of the world, the Babylonian
monarchy, arises the great throne of the Persian; from the ruins of the
Persian are built the foundations of the Greek; and from the ashes of
the Greek is ignited the flame of the greatness of the Roman one.32
Dall’Angelo affirms that the soul of man is also Nothing, reinforcing

Manzini’s similar claim (but quoting from Sceptic philosophers), and
so are his virtue, history, health, and study. In contrast with the human-
istic ideology predominant in the Renaissance, the author claims that
470 the disciplines of the Trivium (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric), far
from empowering man in his search for knowledge, teach him nothing
else than to embellish “those voices that serve only as midwives to the
vain products of our imagination, delivering them perfect into the air
in order only to vanish into Nothing.”33 The Incognito writer also lists
all four elements (earth, water, air, and fire) as deriving from Nothing.
31 “L’istorie, poi, che sono elle, che tanti gloriosi annali delle meraviglie del
Niente?” Le antiche memorie, 121.

32 “Che se passiamo alla politica, eccovi ch’ella non ha per fine che o d’aggrandire
o d’accrescere materia agli stupori del Niente. S’ella insegna ad accrescere la grandezza
di un Principe, vedetela gran maestra dell’annichilazione d’un altro. S’ella ha di già ac-
cresciuta, e che altro ha fatto, che con quant’ella di nuovo accrebbe, aver di nuovo aperti
tanti Regi Teatri, ove abbia il Niente a rappresentare nella loro Catastrofe le meraviglie
delle sue Glorie? Eccovi nella caduta della prima reina del mondo, la monarchia ba-
bilonica, sorto il gran trono della persiana; nelle ruine della persiana, gittati i fondamenti
alla greca; e nelle ceneri della greca acceso il fuoco delle grandezze della romana.” Le an-
tiche memorie, 122.
33 “La grammatica, la dialetica, la retorica, che v’insegnano elle, che ad articolar, a
dar forma, che ad abbellire quelle voci che non hanno che servir d’altro alla fine che
d’ostetrici parti della nostra immaginazione, per condurli perfetti tra l’aure a disciogliersi
in Niente?” Le antiche memorie, 121. To measure the distance between Dall’Angelo’s (and
Manzini’s) view of voice as Nothing and previous late-Renaissance views, one needs only
to consider the praise of viva voce (living voice) made by Stefano Guazzo in La civil conver-
sazione (1576): “And I want to tell you moreover that it would be wrong to believe that
one acquires doctrine better in solitude among books than in conversation among schol-
arly men. It is better to learn the doctrine by ear than by eye, and sight would not be
consumed nor the fingers sharpened in turning the pages of writers, if you could have
their continuous presence and receive by ear their living voice (la viva voce), which with

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Dall’Angelo’s belief that the disciplines of language can not be

used to gain knowledge of the world has one far-reaching implication
for our discussion: Since the world to which language should refer is
indeed Nothing, words become useless. A comprehensive conception
of an all-involving Nothing—a true Weltanschauung—can certainly not
spare human language.34 Compared to previous, late-Renaissance as-
sumptions, Dall’Angelo’s claims reflect a “paradigm shift,” a shift that,
by extending the concept of Nothing to language, both he and his fel-
low academician Manzini were no doubt conscious of accomplishing
(Manzini, we remember, opens his essay by praising novelty over au-
thority). Their views of the relative value of reality and language bear
significant consequences for music.
First, the Incogniti aesthetics, as we have seen, reveals a profound
distrust of verbal language—words, in their view, are as unsubstantial
as the outside world which they mirror and to which they refer. The
Incogniti skepticism affects in primis the status of written texts. This is
evident in other among their works, both verbal and visual (I will focus
later on the latter ones); for example, in the novels of Loredano, in
which characters often show a remarkable inability to speak normally,
as if they were affected by logorrhea or aphasia.35 Such symptoms of a 471
crisis of language, however, are not only a peculiar characteristic of
Incogniti works but, as modern literary critics observe, they can also be
miraculous force is imprinted in the mind.” See Stefano Guazzo, La civil conversazione, ed.
Amedeo Quondam (Modena: Panini, 1993), vol. 1, 30, and the editor’s comment in vol.
2, 77–78, n187. The Incogniti’s devaluation of the arts of the Trivium contrasts with the
predominant Renaissance view, in which, for example, music gains dignity in being in a
“natural alliance” with the arts of language. As Claude Palisca has shown: “[In the Renais-
sance] with the growing recognition of the natural alliance of music with the verbal arts,
it is not surprising that both musical theorists and writers on poetics make demands on
the composer that earlier were ignored. . . . One such demand was that the composer pay
attention to the grammatical structure of the texts they were setting into music.” Claude
Palisca, Humanism in Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985),
339. The Incogniti aesthetics breaks with the Renaissance tradition, this shift also having,
as I show, significant consequences for text-music relationships.
34 As Ossola observes: “The absence of a referent, which results from embracing
the concept of Nothing as a subject of discourse, forces the word into a ‘description in
absentia,’ pushing writing out of verisimilitude and making it, as Manzini insightfully
says, more subjected to meraviglia than to cognizione. Writing thus, freed from proportions,
and thus from measures and limitations, produces disusati mostri d’eloquenza (abnormal
monsters of eloquence).” Ossola also highlights another consequence of the absence of a
referent resulting from the Incogniti’s linguistic views, that is, that writing becomes not
only freed from verisimilitude but also from imitation, that central Renaissance tenet:
“Writing can grow disproportionately as a monstrum, as a meraviglia del mostrare the inde-
scribable. . . .” Le antiche memorie, xix–xx.
35 See Agnès Morini, “G. F. Loredano: Sémiologie d’une crise,” Révue des études itali-
ennes 43 (1997): 23–50.

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considered one of the main stylistic features of Italian literature during

the period in which the academy flourished, i.e. ca. 1623–1660. In that
period, which critics generally consider the beginning of the Baroque,
many literary genres lost their internal balance, their classic decorum
and equilibrium: Prose texts, for example, either stretched themselves
into multi-volume works of gigantic proportions or shrank into the tiny
dimensions of the aphorism, in both cases disrupting the reader’s tem-
poral expectations.36 The Incogniti philosophy of nothing, with its
distrust in the power of verbal language, may well be considered the
philosophical premise of these stylistic extremes. Most relevant to our
discussion is that these features also characterize contemporaneous
texts written for music, i.e., poesie per musica and librettos, texts of spe-
cial interest to the academicians. In such texts, programmatically, the
semantic “weight” of words tends to evaporate, while their sonorous as-
pect prevails. On a page, arias, for example, appear as short aphoristic
poems, but, in performance, the music stretches the text’s temporal di-
mension, conveying the feeling and the dramatic situation. Distrust of
the meaning of language is compensated by trust in the power of voice.
A second consequence of the Incogniti claims (one not unrelated
472 to the first) affects the fabric of language itself, that is, the dependence
of sound on sense.37 If words (as the Incogniti claim) lose their power
to reflect reality—i.e., if they are disentangled from their meanings—
then the relationship of meaning to sound and voice is disrupted, en-
tering a situation of crisis and instability. To borrow from the terminol-
ogy used by Michel Foucault in describing the linguistic situation of a
wide variety of discourses produced in 17th-century Europe: if words
are no longer the “marks of things,” a void opens up in language be-
tween signifiers and signifieds; the former, emancipated from the latter,
become free to “wander off on their own” and to play with themselves
as pure sonorous entities.38 This dissociation of sound and meaning
36 See Giorgio Battistini and Ezio Raimondi, “Retoriche e poetiche dominanti,” in
Teoria e poesia, vol. 3, bk. 1 of Letteratura Italiana, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa (Turin: Einaudi,
1984), 5–339: 111. These critics describe Baroque prose as featuring two contrasting
styles: laconism (or Attic style, as in Virgilio Malvezzi’s writings) and Ciceronianism (or
Asian style, e.g., in Frugoni, see n54). See also Morris W. Croll, Style, Rhetoric and Rhythm
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966). To these prose styles correspond forms of po-
etry such as the short sonetto concettoso on one end of the spectrum, and, on the other, ex-
travagantly long poems, such as L’Adone of Giovanbattista Marino (1623, on which more
later) and La Venetia edificata of the Incognito Giulio Strozzi (1624). A counterbalancing
trend is represented by the classicistic poems by Gabriello Chabrera and his followers.
37 Ossola speaks of the “progressive dissolution of the referent.” Le antiche memorie,
xxiv.
38 “Writing has ceased to be the prose of the world; resemblances and signs have
dissolved their former alliance; similitudes have become deceptive and verge upon the vi-
sionary or madness; things still remain stubbornly within their ironic identity: they are no

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enables a positive evaluation, indeed a legitimization, of sound in itself,

affecting not only its linguistic but also its musical aspect. Two au-
tonomous sounding structures enter in fact into a relationship when
text and music are joined together. Being equal in status, music does
not need to claim its dependence on texts. The Incogniti’s distrust of
verbal meaning legitimizes new music-stylistic choices. For example, the
use of sound-miming melismas to illustrate textual meaning (madri-
galisms) can coexist with passages that efface meaning. Phenomena such
as those described at the beginning of this essay—overvocalizations re-
sulting from asynchronicities between text and music—become justi-
fied from the aesthetic point of view. After all, why bother to musically
reflect the meaning of words if they signify nothing? I will return later
to this point.
A final consequence of the detachment of res and verba accomplished
by the Incogniti philosophy is the dismantling of a traditional notion
that had dominated the aesthetics of opera since late 16th-century dis-
cussions on the legitimacy of the genre, centering on Aristotelian pre-
cepts of imitation in drama: the adherence to the principle of verisimil-
itude.39 If (as the Incogniti claim) the world has no meaning and signs
are divorced from the things they should signify, then no reality can be 473
persuasively staged, either verbally or visually.40 The Renaissance ideal
of art imitating nature loses its raison d’être, and verisimilitude becomes
dispensable. Indeed, the Incogniti’s innovative views represent the
counterpart—better, the epistemological condition—of two principles
at the root of 17th-century aesthetics in Italy: novelty (novità) and the
“marvelous” (meraviglia). These two principles, positively emphasizing
imagination and experimentation, are diametrically opposed to that of
verisimilitude, with its implications of realism and adherence to received
longer anything but what they are; words wander off on their own, without content, with-
out resemblance to fill their emptiness; they are no longer the marks of things; they lie
sleeping between the pages of the books and covered in dust.” See Michel Foucault, The
Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971),
47–48.
39 See above n34. For a summary of the discussions on verisimilitude during the
first century of opera, see Di Benedetto, “Poetiche e polemiche,” esp. 13 and 18.
40 Later writers from the Accademia dell’Arcadia commented on this connection
between absence of verisimilitude and emphasis on voice, intrinsic to opera. Giulio Ce-
sare Becelli, in prefacing Scipione Maffei’s libretto La fida ninfa set to music by Vivaldi
(1734), wrote that the dramma per musica “instead of expressing and imitating, more of-
ten extinguishes and cancels any semblance of truth; it flatters and allures our anima-
lesque part, that is, sense alone, without any participation of reason, as the singing of
goldfinches and nightingales do” (“in cambio di esprimere, ed imitare, suol più tosto es-
tinguere, e cancellare ogni sembianza di verità, e che lusinga, e molce la parte animale,
cioè il senso solo, senza concorso della ragione, come fa il canto di un Cardello, e d’un
Usignolo”). Quoted in Gino Stefani, Musica barocca (Milan: Bompiani, 1974), vol. 1, 129.

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notions. It is revealing in this respect that, in early Baroque Italy, the

champion and main practitioner of the aesthetics of “novelty” and of
the “marvelous” was also a member of the Accademia degli Incogniti:
Giovanbattista Marino (1569–1625), one of the most important poets
in the history of Italian literature, the author of the prototypical Baroque
dictum “il fin del poeta è la meraviglia” (the aim of the poet is to marvel)
—a sentence that might have been extended de facto to the aims of
opera producers.41
In the final pages of his Glorie del Niente, Dall’Angelo proceeds to
dismantle (one would say, annihilate) another relevant notion that lies
at the core of Renaissance aesthetics: the concept of female Beauty.
That the academician was aware of disrupting traditional notions is
shown by the elaborate rhetorical maneuver to which he resorts in his
essay to introduce the issue as part of his “catalogue” of attributes of
Nothing. Deceptively, he first lists all the reasons why we should indeed
believe in Beauty as the manifestation in the universe of the One, thus
following the Neoplatonic tradition embodied, for example, in much
16th-century love poetry influenced by Petrarch or by the philosophy
of Marsilio Ficino.42 But then the Incognito’s prose takes a brusque
474 turn:
Yet this is not so, listeners. On the contrary: there is nobody else that
can more certainly explain to us the glories of Nothing than Beauty:
she, the glorious hand that in the great painting of the universe brushes
for us the wonders of Nothing; she herself is the vague and most gra-
cious Nothing . . . , the first mother of the glories of Nothing.43
In support of his controversial claim that Beauty is Nothing, Dall’An-

gelo quotes the following lines, without mentioning their author or
provenance:
41 For Marino, see James V. Mirollo, The Poet of the Marvelous: Giambattista Marino
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), and Paolo Cherchi, “The Seicento: Poetry, Phi-
losophy and Science,” in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature. Revised Edition, ed. Peter
Brand and Lino Pertile (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 301–17: 305–8.
Cherchi observes that “overall Baroque writing brought to a critical point some funda-
mental tenets of Renaissance epistemology: truth is not just the equation of man with na-
ture or the mind with things, but of the mind with the mind itself, of words with their
own signs rather than their own referent” (302).
42 For a summary of these views on “bellezza” in Renaissance Italy, see Stefano
Lorenzetti, Musica e identità nobiliare nell’Italia del Rinascimento: educazione, mentalità, im-
maginario (Florence: Olschki, 2003), 125–37.
43 “Non è pero così, uditori, anzi non v’è chi le glorie del Niente più certamente ci
spieghi della Bellezza: ella, gloriosa mano che nel gran quadro dell’universo le meraviglie
del Niente ci pennelleggia; ella stessa vago e graziosissimo Niente . . . , prima madre delle
Glorie del Niente.” Le antiche memorie, 125–26.

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O diletto mortal, gioia terrena,

come pullula tosto e tosto cade!
Vano piacer che gli animi trastulla,
nato di Vanità, svanisce in nulla. (emphasis added)44
Taken out of context (as in Dall’Angelo) these four lines simply

echo the ancient literary topos of Beauty as vanitas, as something that
ends up being nothing (nulla). Thus, on one level, the quatrain helps
Dall’Angelo in supporting his main argument. But another, comple-
mentary reading of this passage is also possible, one that would have
been natural for those, like the Incogniti, who were certainly aware of
its derivation. The writer himself provides a hint by introducing the pas-
sage with the words “Oh come fu di lei sensatamente cantato!” (“Oh,
how meaningfully [it] was sung of her!”), words not uncoincidentally al-
luding to song. But who or what besides Beauty (or in association with
it) could be both “deadly delight” and “earthly joy”? These attributes
are in fact traditionally associated with secular song and female singers,
both appealing to the senses and being morally reprehensible.
Dall’Angelo draws the four lines from the seventh canto of L’Adone,
Marino’s masterwork of 1623, today considered the quintessential
Baroque poem.45 The lines conclude the episode featuring a beautiful 475
singer named Allurement. In Adone VII music and voice are so central
that the canto can be considered a manifesto of the musical aesthetics of
the period, thus highly relevant to our inquiry on the Incogniti’s con-
ception of voice and indeed providing an indispensable background
for understanding their views.
The Ambiguous Power of Song: the Nightingale and Allurement

in Marino’s Adone VII
Marino’s Adone, like its author, was revered among the Incogniti.
Published in France in the spring of 1623 in a sumptuous edition dedi-
cated to King Louis XIII (but, astutely, with a dedicatory letter to his
wife Maria de Medici), it saw a second edition that fall in Venice, pub-
lished by Sarzina, who later published Dall’Angelo’s Glorie del Niente. Ac-
cording to a letter by Busenello addressed to Marino in 1624, “all the
curious people in the city [Venice] are looking for Adone” (in the same
year the poem was censored, which may explain why Dall’Angelo did
not quote it as his source).46 Busenello’s letter—a long list of praises
44 “O deadly delight, earthly joy / how it swarms at once, and at once falls! / Vain
pleasure that amuses souls, / born of vanity, vanishes into nothing.”

45 The lines conclude ottava 95 of the canto.
46 The letter is included in Giovanbattista Marino, Epistolario, ed. Angelo Borzelli
and Fausto Nicoli (Bari: Laterza, 1912), vol. 2, 100–104.

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concluding with an invitation to Marino to join him in Venice—attests

to the Incogniti admiration for the poet. After his stay in France, Marino
did go back to Italy but decided to head south to his native Naples.
There, at the apex of his fame, he died in 1625. In his memory, the In-
cogniti founder, Loredano, wrote a biography that ends with a series of
anecdotes reported by academy members Giulio Strozzi and Francesco
Belli, framed by two poetic eulogies, the official one in Latin written
by the Incogniti as a group, and an ode in Italian by member Pietro
Michiele.47
L’Adone is a poem of immense ambition and proportions, indeed
the longest one in Italian literature (about 40,000 lines divided in 20
cantos). Its refined style has been aptly characterized by a modern
scholar as “grandly musical.”48 Marino often uses language not so much
for its content, or for advancing the narrative, but for its purely
sonorous qualities, almost as if he were toying with language’s signifiers.
In effect the poem is poor as far as narrative elements are concerned,
the plot consisting basically of a gigantic reelaboration (the longest in
world literature) of the myth of Venus and Adonis as recounted by
Ovid, filled with lengthy digressions.
476 One of Marino’s most extensive additions to the myth consists of
the visit of Venus and Adonis to the Palace of the Senses. There the
young boy is “educated” by the goddess in the pleasures of the senses
by walking through five Gardens, those of Sight, Smell (canto VI),
Hearing and Music, Taste (canto VII), and finally Touch (canto VIII).
In canto VII, entitled “Le delizie” (delights, see Table 1 for an out-
line), Adonis and Venus enter the Garden of Hearing after a guardian
playing the lyre welcomes them.49 The famous lines “Music and Poetry
are two sisters / who alleviate the afflicted” (1, 1–2) announce the topic
that repeatedly surfaces in the canto, the relationships between voice
and words.50 Through a detailed anatomic description of the ear and of
its functioning, the guardian of the garden explains to the visitors the
value of hearing (11–17).51 Then he brings them to a large bird cage in
which several species of birds, all described in great detail by Marino,
47 Giovan Francesco Loredano, Vita del Cavalier Marino (Venice: Sarzina, 1633), also
in his Bizzarrie academiche (Venice: Ad istanza dell’Academia, 1643), 314–49.

48 Cherchi, “The Seicento,” 308.
49 I quote from Giovanbattista Marino, L’Adone, ed. Giovanni Pozzi (Milan:
Mondadori, 1976), 2 vols., of which the first includes the text and the second Pozzi’s
commentary.
50 “Musica e poesia son due sorelle / ristoratrici dell’afflitte genti,” Adone VII, 1, 1–2.
51 For a perceptive comment on Marino’s strategy of highlighting the sense of
hearing in canto VII, see Giovanni Morelli, “‘Udire nei poemi’: dalla simbologia alla
fisiologia dell’ascolto,” in Crisi e rinnovamenti nell’autunno del Rinascimento a Venezia, ed.
Vittore Branca and Carlo Ossola (Florence: Olschki, 1991), 407–46.

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sing their “symphony” (18–31). One bird stands out in the group: the
nightingale, the “musical monster” (musico mostro), “the sounding atom”
(atomo sonante), whose performance is described as if it were that of a
virtuoso singer:
To hear a musical monster: oh what a wonder,

one that is heard, yes, but only a little bit,
how it now breaks its voice, and now recovers,
now stops it, now twists it, now soft, now loud,
now it murmurs lowly, now thins it,
now makes of sweet groppi a long chain,
which always, whether it scatters it or gathers it,
with the same melody it ties and loosens (ottava 33).52
The nightingale first sings a “lament” and then a “canzonetta,” while

Adonis listens with “staring ears” (orecchie fisse). Mercury arrives and tells
the lovers a story that reminds them of the price once paid by the
nightingale for such gorgeous singing (38–62): One night an aban-
doned lover took refuge in a forest and started singing his lament ac-
companied by his lute. A nightingale heard him, stopped singing his
plea for the coming day, and started, little by little, to imitate the lover’s 477
lament. The man took pleasure in hearing the imitation of his singing,
so, initially with the intention of mocking the bird, he started playing
some really virtuoso passages on the lyre to see if the bird was able to
follow him. To the lover’s dismay, the nightingale actually managed to
replicate everything that he played, so that a heated contest arose,
which, in canto VII, lasts for nine ottave (44–53). The contest ends with
the brutal death of the nightingale, literally exploding because of ex-
cessive singing (54). Mercury concludes the story as follows: The poet,
after having buried the bird within his lute, kept one of its feathers with
which he wrote his lament for the death of the nightingale (55–62).53
Through the episode of the contest between poet and nightingale
Marino creates a powerful narrative symbolizing the birth of written
52 “Udir musico mostro, o meraviglia, / che s’ode sì, ma si discerne apena, / come
or tronca la voce, or la ripiglia, / or la ferma, or la torce, or scema, or piena, / or la

mormora grave, or l’assottiglia, / or fa di dolci groppi ampia catena, / e sempre, o se la
sparge o se l’accoglie, / con egual melodia la lega e scioglie.” The passage is quoted in
many anthologies of Italian literature as epitomizing Marino and Baroque taste, for
example in Carmine Jannaco and Martino Capucci, Il Seicento, vol. 8 of Storia letteraria
d’Italia (Milan: Vallardi, 1986), 176. For the relevance for music of both this ottava and
canto VII, see Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, 13–14, and Marco Emanuele,
Opera e riscritture: Melodrammi, ipertesti, parodie (Turin: Paravia, 2001), 5–11.
53 On this episode see Victor Coelho, “Marino’s Toccata between the Lutenist and
the Nightingale,” in The Sense of Marino: Literature, Fine Arts and Music of the Italian Baroque,
ed. Francesco Guardiani (New York: EGAS, 1994), 395–427.

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TABLE 1
Outline of canto VII of Giovanbattista Marino, L'Adone
(Paris: Oliviero de Varennes, 1623)
Ottave Events
1–6 Music and Poetry are “sisters.” Condemnation of the lascivious as-
pects of song.
7–10 Venus and Adonis enter the Garden of Hearing, welcomed by a
guardian.
11–17 Detailed description of the ear. The guardian leads the two lovers to
visit a bird cage.
18–31 Description of the birds singing their “symphony.”
32–37 The nightingale's singing.
38–62 Mercury tells Venus and Adonis the story of the contest between the
poet and the nightingale.
63–80 Venus and Adonis enter the Garden of Music: appearance of the
allegories of Music and Poetry; various entertainments (music and
dances).
81–95 Sudden appearance of the singer “Allurement” (La Lusinga). She
478
vanishes into “nothing.”
96–end The two lovers enter the Garden of Taste.
poetry out of the death of singing: it is necessary for the nightingale to

die in order for the poet to start writing (earlier he only improvised).
That is: if music and poetry are indeed sisters (as Marino claims at the
beginning of the canto), the latter can exist only insofar as the former
sacrifices her very essence, although music does survive within poetry as
a memory, an absence (i.e., a nothing).
The episode of the contest also shares important characteristics
with other literary narratives concerning the bird’s singing and, by asso-
ciation, the voice’s relationship with death; for example, with the story
of the Lacaedemonian and the nightingale narrated by Plutarch, which
was adopted in the Renaissance by Erasmus and then repeated as a
topos by many other writers, a story that culminates (as Marino’s contest
does) with the death of the bird and the suggestion that it was always
just a nothing.54 Death is also the outcome in the Greek myth of Procne
and Philomela, at the root of many references to voice in European lit-
54 The anecdote is so reported by F. F. Frugoni, a late 17th-century writer who was
also one of the first critics of opera (see Freeman, Opera, 2–4): “A Lacedaemon, hearing a
nightingale warble and being surprised that such a small bird had such a singing organ,
suspected that the nightingale kept some miraculous machinery in its chest. He thus de-
cided to satisfy his doubting curiosity: he conceived of picking up that innocent little bird

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erature.55 In this instance, as in Marino’s contest, death is followed by

lament: Procne is transformed into a nightingale perpetually lamenting
her child Itys whom she has killed to avenge the rape of her sister,
Philomela.56 As the nightingale’s lament represents Procne’s memory
of the death of her son, so too the poet’s lament in Marino’s episode of
the contest in Adone VII represents the memory of the nightingale’s
death. Marino also follows this death-lament pattern in his short poems,
the Rime boscherecce, part of his collection entitled La Lira. The Procne
myth informs five poems devoted to the nightingale, which frame the
first part of the Boscherecce, consisting of 64 poems: poems 2 to 5 praise
the singing of the bird (similarly to ottava 33 of Adone VII quoted
above), whereas poem 64 (the last one) is a lament on its death. The
narrative implicit in Marino’s arrangement of the five poems thus again
follows the myth’s path from singing to death and lament.57
In Adone VII this narrative pattern—singing-death-lament—is so
pervasive that it can be said not only to concern the episode of the
deadly contest between poet and nightingale (ottave 38–62) but to also
extend backward to the one preceding it (32–37), which includes ottava
33 (discussed above), describing the bird’s joyful and solitary perfor-
mance as a virtuoso singer. In light of this pattern, the second episode is 479
indeed the natural outcome of the first. The assumption that death is
constantly implied in the nightingale’s singing is reinforced by an exam-
ination of the oldest literary source for ottava 33, a passage from the
treatise “Natural history” by the Latin poet Pliny the Elder. Pliny de-
scribes nightingales as singing “harmoniously for 15 days and 15 nights
consecutively, without interruption,” then he adds:
In the first place there is so loud a voice and so persistent a supply of

breath in such a tiny little body; then there is the consummate knowl-
edge of music in a single bird: the sound is given out with modulations,
and now is drawn out into a long note with one continuous breath,
and plucking it; finding it an almost nothing of little skin and little bones, he smiled and
burst out: Vox tu es, praeterea nihil.” Francesco Fulvio Frugoni, Ritratti critici (Venice: Combi
& La Noù, 1669), 449.
55 For a discussion of classics sources, see Charles Segal, “The Gorgon and the
Nightingale: The Voice of Female Lament and Pindar’s Twelfth Pythian Ode,” in Embod-
ied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A.
Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 17–34.
56 As Segal writes, the song of the nightingale-as-Procne moves away “from verbal
utterance to approach inarticulate melody, in order to express a feeling of loss.” See

Charles Segal, “The Female Voice and Its Contradictions: From Homer to Tragedy,” in
Religio Graeco-Romana: Festschrift für Walter Pötscher, ed. Joachim Dalfen, Gerhard Peters-
mann, and Franz F. Schwarz (Graz-Horn: F. Berger, 1993), 57–75: 66–67.
57 See Giovanbattista Marino, Rime boscherecce, ed. Janina Hauser-Jakubowicz (Bres-
cia: Panini, 1991; first ed.: Venice: Ciotti, 1602).

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now varied by managing the breath, now made staccato by checking it,
linked together by prolonging it, or carried on by holding it back; or it
is suddenly lowered, and at times sinks into a mere murmur, loud, low,
bass, treble, with trills, with long notes, modulated when this seems
good—high , middle, low register.58
But what is most relevant to our point is that in Pliny this passage is fol-
lowed by a description of the heated contests occurring between
nightingales. The contests, he says, often finish tragically with the death
of one of the contenders, which would rather stop breathing than
singing.59
The two episodes of Adone VII discussed above (ottave 33 and 38–
62) are thus related through their common Plinian source: the joyful
nightingale singing in ottava 33 is only a prelude to the bird’s tragic
death in ottava 56. Marino absorbs and reelaborates the archetypical
narrative pattern concerning nightingales present not only in Pliny’s
description but also in Plutarch’s tale and in the myth of Procne. In
effect, in canto VII, singing appears to be a “veil” that disguises what
the Incogniti consider, as we have seen, the most inevitable among the
manifestations of Nothingness, death. Since the bird is obviously a trope
480
for the singer—through the performance Adonis learns about the sense
of hearing—Marino then, in these two episodes, is advancing a dis-
58 Pliny’s passage from the tenth book of his Naturalis Historia (XLII, 81–2) reads:
“Primum tanta vox tam parvo in corpuscolo, tam pertinax spiritus; deinde in una per-
fecta musica scientia: modulatus editur sonus et nunc continuo spiritu trahitur in
longum, nunc variatur unflexo, nunc distinguitur conciso, copulatur intorto, promittitur
revocato, infuscatur ex inopinato, interdum et secum ipse murmurat, plenus, gravis, acu-
tus, creber, extentus, ubi visum est, vibrans, summus, medius, imus.” Pliny, Natural History,
trans. Harris Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1940), vol. 3, 345. As Pozzi no-
tices, Marino’s adoption of Pliny’s source is mediated by Famiano Strada’s Prolusiones Aca-
demicae of 1617 (Marino, L’Adone, vol. 2, 363–70).
59 Other nightingales instead (Pliny continues) prefer to listen first to the best
singers and then to start imitating them; then teacher and pupil exchange parts and we
can perceive that often the teacher reproaches the pupil for his mistakes. The idea of
“contest” is a crucial aspect of nightingales’ singing according to the Latin poet, whose
text has been immensely influential in European literature. Among the many works influ-
enced by this description of the nightingale—specifically, the bird’s joyful singing—is
Giovanbattista Guarini’s Mentre vaga angioletta. Monteverdi’s celebrated setting of this
poem, included in his eighth book of madrigals (publ. 1638), features two tenors com-
peting with each other in highly virtuoso passages—an exaltation of pure voice that
might very well epitomize the subject of this essay. Monteverdi’s doubling, however, is not
strictly required by Guarini’s poem, which describes the experience of listening to one
singer only. It represents, in my view, a clear reference to Pliny’s description of the emula-
tion between the birds—a text only implied by the poet but openly suggested by the com-
poser. For Guarini’s poem as set by Monteverdi and his contemporaries see Massimo Ossi,
“A Sample Problem of Seventeenth-Century Imitatio: Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco
Turini, and Battista Guarini’s Mentre vaga Angioletta,” in Music in Renaissance Cities and
Courts: Studies in Honor of Lewis Lockwood, ed. Jesse Ann Owens and Anthony M. Cum-
mings (Warren: Harmonie Park Press, 1997), 253–69.

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course on the power (and dangers) of human voice.60 This is further

confirmed by a third episode, covering ottave 81–95 and following
those involving the nightingales: the manifestation and disappearance
of Allurement, a monstrous but charming character, half-woman and
half-bird (but with fish scales). This episode unfolds a narrative whose
outcome reinforces Marino’s main point, i.e., that human voice simply
disguises death.
After having heard the sad story of the musical contest, Venus and
Adonis enter the Garden of Music and meet the living allegories of Po-
etry and Music, two women, one appealing to the intellect, the other to
the senses. If Poetry learns from music both rhythm and meter, Music
learns from Poetry how to enrich sounds with concepts.61 Marino him-
self provides the clue for the reader to associate the mythological world
he describes in Adone with the contemporary musical world of opera
and singers. In a clear reference to the Florentine camerata and to the
emergence of monody (69–70), the poet claims that only Italy was able
to inherit the ancient Greek art of balancing music and poetry. This
perfect equilibrium of the two sisters, however, is lost soon afterwards
(81), when, all of a sudden, a female figure—Allurement—emerges from
inside a flower and starts singing with an enchanting and magical voice.62 481
Both a moral condemnation and a fascination for the character of
Allurement coexist in Marino’s description of her physical attributes
60 Grazioso Uberti, writing in 1630, so relates nightingale’s and human’s voices:
“The singing of a solo voice with passaggi, gorgie, and trills is very pleasant and is similar to
the singing of a nightingale, which is elegantly described by Pliny . . . . The sweetness of
singing does not consist of uttering words and make them understandable, but in the
suavity of the voice, in the variety of the sound, now low, now high, now slow, now with
diminutions” (“Il canto d’una voce sola con passaggi, gorgie, e trilli diletta assai, sembra il
canto del Rosignuolo, descritto elegantemente da Plinio . . . . La dolcezza del canto non
consiste nel proferire, e fare intendere le parole; ma nella soavità della voce, nella varietà
del suono, hor grave, hor acuto, hor tardo, hor diminuto”). In the last sentence the repe-
tition of the word “hor” (“now”) reveals the dependency on the “nunc . . . nunc . . .” in
the Plinian source. See Grazioso Uberti, Contrasto musico, opera dilettevole [Rome: Grignani,
1630], 85, as quoted by Stefani, Musica Barocca, 129. In his “sacred speech” La Musica
of 1614, Marino borrows again from Pliny in an extensive praise of human voice, para-
doxically in order to demonstrate its supremacy over animal voice (Giovanbattista
Marino, La Musica, in Dicerie sacre e La strage de gl’innocenti, ed. Giovanni Pozzi [Turin:
Einaudi, 1960], 49).
61 “Da lei [poetry] gli accenti impara e le parole, / da lei distinta a scioglier la
favella; / senza lei fora un suon senza concetto, / priva di grazia e povera d’affetto” (68,
5–8).
62 In another reference to the contemporary music world, Marino compares the
character of Allurement to the singers Adriana Basile and Virginia Andreini Ramponi—
the latter, as it happens, being the first protagonist of Monteverdi’s Arianna. Contrasting
the world of yesterday with that of today, the poet in effect juxtaposes the austere ideals
of the Florentine camerata, advocating a classicistic balance between words and music,
with the flashing reality of the divas contemporaneous with him, alluring an audience for
which pure voice mattered more than words.

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and of her singing.63 Before reporting her words, Marino defines them
as “alluring and clear voices, in which death was welcomed into the air ”
(89, 7–8, italics mine).64 The poet is fully aware of the ambiguities in-
volved in dealing with the power of voice. On the one hand, he up-
holds the thesis that song is deceiving and lascivious, that it appeals to
our irrational side and thus is morally condemnable. On the other
hand, Marino describes sound and hearing as an indispensable source
of pleasure and delight. In the end, he does not solve this apparent
contradiction, but simply juxtaposes the two sides of the issue, leaving
the dialectic, so to speak, in place. The danger of voice, for example, is
a theme that indeed emerges at the beginning of the canto (1–7), be-
fore Venus and Adonis reach the Garden of Hearing. There, echoing
the century-long condemnation of female voice within Christian doc-
trine, Marino speculates on whether female voice can be morally ac-
ceptable when it is completely freed from words. This time the poet
gives a negative answer: Voice is indeed conducive to lasciviousness. Yet,
during the rest of the canto, as we have seen, the poet transparently be-
trays (and conveys) his undeniable fascination for pure voice, by high-
lighting its most sensual and physical characteristics through the evoca-
482 tion of both nightingale’s and Allurement’s singing.
The final part of the episode of Allurement shows the dangerous
side of singing, but, again, in an ambiguous way. The singer herself
warns Adonis about the transitory nature of Beauty: “Beauty,” she says
“is a flash of lightening, age a shadow, / which can not stop the in-
evitable flight [of time]” (91, 1–2).65 At this point Allurement disap-
pears, almost dematerializing under the effect of a ray of sun. Her dis-
solving into air is followed by Marino’s final reflection on the whole
episode (95): “O deadly delight, earthly joy / how it swarms at once,
and at once falls! / Vain pleasure that amuses souls, / born of vanity, van-
ishes into nothing.”66
These, we remember, are the lines that the Incognito Dall’Angelo
quotes in the section of his Glories of Nothing dealing with Beauty as “the
first mother of Nothing.” By considering the context of canto VII of
Marino’s Adone (that is, by reading the lines quoted by Dall’Angelo as
the Incogniti themselves would have read them) it emerges that Beauty
(in Dall’Angelo) coincides with Allurement (in Marino): both are in-
deed singers. For Marino, Beauty and Voice converge in the character of
63 “Lunge fuggite / o di falso piacer folli seguaci! / Non ha sfinge o sirena o più
mentite / parolette e sembianze o più sagaci!” (85, 1–4). Even Apollo stops racing his
chariot to listen to her singing (89, 5–6).
64 “E queste furon le lusinghiere e scorte voci, ov’accolta in aura era la morte.”
65 “Un lampo è la beltà, l’etate un’ombra, / né sa fermar l’irreparabil fuga.”
66 “O diletto mortal, gioia terrena, / come pullula tosto e tosto cade! / Vano piacer
che gli animi trastulla, nato di Vanità, svanisce in nulla.”

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the vanishing Allurement. But Dall’Angelo, as we have seen, takes a fur-

ther step. For him, Beauty and Voice fall under an identical semantic
umbrella: They are both vanitates, tropes for death, “figures of Nothing.”
The ramifications of the equation made by the Incogniti among
Nothing, Beauty, and Voice are consequential for the genre of opera
ever since its origins on the public stage in Venice. In operas, female
characters—none perhaps more so than Monteverdi’s Poppaea—were
represented on stage as alluring not only for their physical beauty but
also for their enchanting voices. By enabling the concept of Nothing to
weave into a rich semantic web with Voice, Beauty and Death, the
Incogniti were in effect paving the way to that particular diva, the femme
fatale, who was to dominate the operatic stage for centuries.
Nile, Nihil, Nulla: Nothing Emblematized

Besides their writing, the Incogniti used other means to express
their aesthetic views, in particular, their distrust in the power of lan-
guage to signify and in man’s ability to know through words, a claim
with significant implications for music and opera. Their skepticism for
words, as we have seen, is countered by an emphasis on voice as the 483
“new” power able to capture those shadows of Nothingness that, for the
Incogniti, did not disappear with God’s creation but still loom in and
around us. Given their devaluation of language, it was fitting that the
academicians found ways to articulate their views also through non-
verbal means, including images.
The Incogniti emblem (see Fig. 1) represents the Nile flowing
down a mountain, branching at the Delta and continuing into the
Mediterranean. The motto is Ex ignoto notus, that is, known from the un-
known, alluding to the sources of the Nile, which were then unknown
and mysterious.67 To minds such as those of the Incogniti, trained in the
bizarre oddities of Baroque thinking, the name of the river Nile (Nilo in
Italian) must surely have called up the Latin word Nihil, that is, Noth-
ing (as in the sentence Ex Nihilo nihil fit ). After all, “unknown” is what
Incogniti means.
By virtue of the reference to Egypt, two lines of thought converge
in this emblem, making it a “document” of the Incogniti ideology in the
same way as their writings on Nothing are.68 First, the hermetic tradition,
revived in the Renaissance, which believed in ancient Egypt’s wisdom
67 The Incogniti impresa is discussed by Lionello Puppi in “Ignoto Deo,” Arte veneta
23 (1969): 169–80.
68 These influences are explained by Nina Cannizzaro in “The Nile, Nothingness,
and Knowledge: The Incogniti Impresa,” in Coming About: A Festschrift for John Shearman,
ed. Lars R. Jones and Louisa C. Matthew (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Art Museums,
2001), 325–32.

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figure 1. Francesco Ruschi, emblem of the Accademia degli Incog-

niti, engraving in Le Glorie de gli Incogniti overo gli Huomini
Illustri dell’Accademia de’ Signori Incogniti di Venetia (Venice:
F. Valvasense, 1647). Typ 625.47.428 (B), Department of
Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard
College Library
484

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and viewed the world as a network of hieroglyphics. According to this

tradition, the river Nile is associated with God himself, and thus repre-
sents knowledge.69 Second, the Dionysian tradition of negative theol-
ogy, based on the writings of the Pseudo Dionysius (the Areopagite).
For this philosopher, God is considered unknown and unnamable, and
any linguistic praise of Him is rejected since words are useless and man
can only attain knowledge through silence.70 By conflating these two
traditions, the Incogniti emblem shows the Nile/Nihil representing
God as the unspeakable.
But the emblem encodes a further element—voice—which, al-
though not discernible at first, does emerge within a poem about the
image written by an academy member, Guido Ubaldo Benamati. Per-
haps hinting at the debate about the appropriateness of the emblem—
its adoption as the official one of the Incogniti was controversial, hav-
ing being criticized by the founder Loredano 71—the sonnet points to
the differences between the river and the Incogniti academy:
Is this academy the Nile? But who wants to claim

that the river Nile has a different Home, Bed, Children, and Cradle?
The Nile has its beginnings where the Moon is honored,
485
the academy has its birth where the Sun is glorified.
The Nile generates a crowd of crocodiles,
which kills Man, and then darkens their eyes with tears;
in the academy, instead, a white multitude of swans gathers,
which Man, by singing, makes immortal.
The Nile appears among the dark, the Academy among fair people,
the Nile appears with the voice of thunder, the Academy with that of a
Lyre,
the Nile bold, the Academy gentle.
The old Nile goes through seven mouths to the sea;
The new Nile goes through a thousand mouths to the air.72
69 On the Renaissance revival of the ancient wisdom of Egypt, see the classic studies
by Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press,
1964), and Paolo Rossi, Le sterminate antichità (Pisa: Nastri-Lischi, 1969).
70 See Pseudo Dionysius, The Cloud of Unknowing (London: Penguin, 1961).
71 See Miato, L’accademia degli Incogniti, 253–58.
72 “Il Nilo è questo? E chi tal dire il vuole, / s’ha varii Albergo, e Letto, e Figli, e
Cuna? / Quello ha i principi, over ha gl’onor la Luna, / questo ha i natali, ove ha le glo-
rie il Sole. / Turba di Cocodrilli a quello è prole, / ch’uccide l’Huom, poi l’occhio in pi-
anti imbruna; / di cigni in questo un bianco stuol s’aduna, / che l’huom cantando, im-
mortalare il suole. / Uno tra genti fosche, uno tra chiare, / quel con voce di tuon, questo
di Cetra, / sempre più altier, sempre più mite appare. / Va (più bei vanti il nostro fiume
impetra) / per sette bocche il vecchio Nilo al mare; / per mille bocche il nuovo Nilo a
l’Etra.” In Poesie de’ Signori Accademici Disinvolti di Pesaro (Pesaro, 1649), 114. The sonnet
is partially reported (without mention of its source) in Gino Benzoni, “La simbologia mu-
sicale nelle imprese accademiche,” Studi Veneziani 22 (1992), 117–36: 135. I am grateful
to Nina Cannizzaro for providing me with the complete text.

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In Benamati’s paragone, the Nile’s muddy waters become the Incogniti’s

sweet voices. Just as the Nile’s sources are mysterious and unknown (ig-
notae), so are the origins of voice. What springs out of them—water in
one case, voice in the other—is notus, known; that is, it is knowledge it-
self: the river Nilo in one case, Nihilo (Nothing) in the other. By looking
at the emblem as in a mirror (notice its mouth-like form), the Incog-
nito member could see himself as what best identified him as an aca-
demic, an orator trained in using his voice.73
The association of Voice with Nothing is thus inscribed in the
Incogniti’s official emblem. However, in both “readings” offered above
—the Nile/Nihil as representing God the unspeakable, and the Nile’s
sources as generating Voice/Nothing—the element we earlier investi-
gated in the academicians’ writings as related to Voice and Nothing—
Beauty, personified as female—is definitely absent (after all the academy
was an all-male club and their logo must have been intended to reflect
this aspect). This feminine element does surface however in other im-
ages associated with Incogniti publications. For example, in the fron-
tispieces of three of Loredano’s literary works a veiled woman represents
(respectively) Beauty, Faith, and Truth.74 She is gazed at by a man in
486 the first case, and is in the process of being unveiled in the other two.
The image of Beauty contemplated by a man is accompanied by a motto
that is strikingly similar to that of the Incogniti emblem, Ignoto deo.
As Ellen Rosand first noted, this same motto appears by itself, but
in the feminine version Ignotae Deae, on the dedication page of Barbara
Strozzi’s collection of “cantate and ariette” Op. 3.75 The identity of the
goddess to which the dedication alludes remains unknown—might she
be Barbara herself as Voice’s living emblem? If so, in this dedication
Nothing and Voice are (again) placed in relation to each other, in con-
nection with the acclaimed Beauty of the dedicatee (and dedicator). As
in other Incogniti works, Beauty and Voice have something to do with
the unknown, with absence, Nothing.76 It comes as no surprise, then,
that in a piece within this collection, the lament Sul Rodano severo, we
73 Most of the librettists among the Incogniti were lawyers by profession and writers
only in their spare time.

74 The frontispieces appear in Opere di Gio. Francesco Loredano (Venice: Guerigli,
1653–57) preceding volumes 2, 4, and 5, entitled respectively Dubbi amorosi, Gradi

dell’anima, and Il Cimiterio (but each of them saw also individual reprints). The images
are reproduced in Puppi, “Ignoto Deo,” 171 and 174.
75 Barbara Strozzi, Cantate ariete a una, due e tre voci (Venice: Gardano, 1654). See
Rosand, “Barbara Strozzi,” 248.

76 Among the unusual features of Op. 3, Rosand observes the lack of a traditional
dedication, in contrast to all of Strozzi’s other publications (“Barbara Strozzi,” 249). Also,
Op. 3 was her first work published after the death of her father, Giulio, in 1652. May
Death then (i.e., mors) also qualify as a dedicatee?

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example 2. Barbara Strozzi, “Sul Rodano severo” [“Il Lamento”], in

Cantate, ariette a una, due, e tre voci, Op. 3 (Venice: Gar-
dano, 1654), pp. 15–22, mm. 167–80 (p. 21)
Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł
167
− ð Ł Ł ð ð
š ¼
la for - tu - na si stan - cò la for - tu - na
Ý− ð ð Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł
Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł
½q
171
− ð Ł Ł Ł
š Ł Ł ð Ð ð

si stan - cò. On - de ho pro -
Ý−Ł Ł Ł
Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ½q Ð
Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ð −
487
175
− Ł Ł −Łý Ł ¦Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ð ð
š Ł Ł Ł

va - to ahi las - so co - me dal
Ý− Ð ð ð Ð
− ¦
− Ł Ł ¹ Ł Ł ¼ ¹ −Ł Ł Ł Ł ý Ł Ł ÿq]
178
[
š Ł
tut - to al nien - te è un bre - ve pas - so.
Ý− Ð Ð Ł ½q
Ł
find an allusion to another Figure of Nothing, Death, made through

the peculiar instrument that Strozzi mastered, i.e., voice (see Ex. 2).
The narrator is the ghost of Henry de cinq-mars, who recalls his exe-
cution (1642) ordered by King Louis XIII for plotting against Riche-
lieu. Lamenting how capriciously fortune’s wind turns against him, the
ghost concludes by saying: “Onde ho provato ahi lasso come dal tutto al
niente è un breve passo” (alas, I have experienced how short is the step

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from all to nothing). Strozzi singles out the word “niente” by setting it
to a descending C-major triad arpeggiated over a static bass and framed
by rests, bringing the singer to her lowest note, middle C (m. 178); in
addition, she also frames the setting of the sentence (mm. 174–79)
with two rests carrying a fermata—this last an unsettling, indeed un-
precedented, musical artifice.
But if Strozzi’s setting of the word niente may still be viewed as a
highly original “madrigalism”—i.e., a device matching verbal with musi-
cal meaning—other vocal gestures in her music (as mentioned at the
beginning of this essay) reveal a more experimental attitude, one fully
in tune with the aspect of the Incogniti aesthetics highlighted above:
the dissociation of word and music, the magnification of voice, exalting
language’s signifiers over signifieds, as if music were, if only momentar-
ily, autonomous and dependent on nothing but itself. These long melis-
mas not only were a way for Strozzi to project an image of herself as
composer and singer, but also reveal her adoption of the Incogniti phi-
losophy: if word meaning is “nothing” and voice is all that is left, then
melismas are quick “glimpses” into that evanescent but ever-present
realm which, for the academicians, did not disappear after God’s cre-
488 ation, but still surfaces in epiphenomena such as the song of nightin-
gales and that of singers. As we have seen in discussing Marino’s Adone
VII, the character of Allurement offers precisely such a glimpse into the
fascinating, but also dangerous, realm of sheer vocality. In Marino, Al-
lurement is none other than a trope for the most famous female singers
active in the early 17th century. Although not in an overtly public way,
Strozzi too was one of them, and was probably viewed with the same
ambiguity that Marino expresses for Allurement, as both a fascinating
and dangerous woman mixing voice and beauty.
The Incogniti views of the relationships among Beauty, Voice, and
Nothing offer a way of interpreting those passages in which an asyn-
chronicity between vocal gesture and word meaning makes music speak
for itself, and sheer voice predominates. Seneca’s stunningly long
melisma in Poppea I, 6 (see Ex. 1) is one of these intriguing moments.
Its relationship to the Incogniti philosophy, however, is much more spe-
cific than that of other similar instances, since it shows an effective con-
vergence of aims between composer and librettist, resulting in one of
the most compelling passages in the opera.77
77 By assuming that in Poppea both Busenello and Monteverdi are positively influ-
enced by aspects of the Marinist aesthetics of the Incogniti, I depart from two earlier
interpretations of this opera: the first, articulated by Ellen Rosand, for which librettist
and musician are viewed as somewhat diverging in their respective strategies; the second,

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Busenello, Monteverdi, and the Rhetoric of Nothing

Around the concept of Nothing, as we have seen, the Incogniti
built a constellation of related meanings, which we called “figures of
Nothing.” These included Voice, Death, and Beauty, but also Time,
Dust, Darkness, Dreams, Silence, Sleep, etc. In literary works, these fig-
ures formed a “repertoire” upon which writers drew whenever the sub-
ject fell into the semantic area of Nothing.78 Examples can be found in
various poems written by the librettist of Poppea: 79
Nacqui alla morte e fu il natale un punto I was born to death, and my birth was
a point
che destinommi a ceneri gelate.80 which destined me to frozen ashes.
Huom forsennato, ahi qual follia Frantic man, ah what madness drives
t’induce you
a bramar statue, a sospirar colossi: in desiring statues, in longing for
colossus:
un momento a gran pena viver puossi: you can barely live for a moment:
la vita e il lampo hanno la stessa luce . . life and the lightning have the same
.. light.
489
Gl’anfiteatri, da l’età percossi, The amphitheatres, struck by age,
son polvi, in cui vil titolo riluce . . . . are dust in which the vile claims glitter
....
L’esser è un nulla et i respir son fumi.81 The being is a nothing, and the
breaths are smokes . . . .
advanced by both Francesco Degrada and Gary Tomlinson, who consider Marino’s influ-
ence on Busenello in a negative way, resulting in “decadent” stylistic choices (Tomlinson
extends this critique to Monteverdi’s music). See Ellen Rosand, “Seneca and the Interpre-
tation of L’incoronazione di Poppea,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 38 (1985):
34–71; Francesco Degrada, “Gian Francesco Busenello e il libretto della Incoronazione
di Poppea,” in Convegno Internazionale sul tema Claudio Monteverdi e il suo tempo: Relazioni e
comunicazioni, ed. Raffaello Monterosso (Verona: Valdonega, 1969), 81–102, and Gary
Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), esp.
chap. 9.
78 See, among the Incogniti works, Guido Casoni’s ode of 1602 Fulvia, fu la tua vita,
published in modern edition in Jannaco and Capucci, Il Seicento, 185–86. In this poem,
the word “voce” is closely associated to 22 words related to “figures of Nothing,” each be-
ginning a new line, as in a poetic catalogue. Another Incognito writer who often made
use of these “figures” is Ciro di Pers (see his Poesie, ed. Michele Rak [Turin: Einaudi,
1978]).
79 I quote from I sonetti morali ed amorosi di Gian Francesco Busenello (1598–1659), ed.
Arthur Livingston (Venice: Fabbris, 1911). “Figures of Nothing” are in italics.

80 Vita breve, LXIII, 1–2. Poems are identified by title, number, and line in Liv-
ingston’s collection. For the point as Nothing, see infra, n88.

81 Vanità d’humane grandezze, CIX, 1–4, 7–8, 13.

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Figlio d’eternitade al’hor che piacque Time was born son of eternity at the
moment
Dell’universo al fondator creante in which the Creator wanted
farla in un punto sol madre e regnante to make it [i.e., eternity], at only one
point, both mother
e dal sempre in istante, il tempo and ruler, changing the ‘always’ into
nacque.82 an instant.
Fortuna, horrendo nome, iniquo Fortune, horrendous name, unjust

nume, god,
ch’hai nell’abisso i tuoi principi oc- who have in the abyss your hidden
culti.83 principles.
Nostra vita è un adesso; il ciel, l’inferno Our life is a ‘now’; I always see
per tradurla in un sempre io veggo heaven and hell ready to translate it
pronti; in an ‘always’;
fortuna, amor, con orgogliose fronti, fortune and love, with proud faces,
vi pretendono ogn’hor dominio in turn take domain over it . . . .
alterno . . . .
Polvere ambitiosa in vetro frale, Ambitious dust in frail glass,
atomo terreo alfin, ombra superba earthly atom, superb shadow
è l’huom, che spesso ha tomba anzi al is man, who often has a grave before
490 natale.84 his birth.
Vissi o vivo? Mi ammorzo oppur Did I live or am I living? Am I dying

m’accendo? out or lighting up?
Se un atomo son io, qual segno ho If I am an atom, which sign did I
impresso? . . . leave? . . .
Dell’ombratile vita è sì minuto The time of the shady life is so short

il periodo, ch’un soffio lo rissolve; that a breath dissipates it;
in un punto io l’abbraccio e lo rifiuto in one point I embrace it and I reject
... it . . .
spiro in ombra, opro in fumo, e parlo I breathe in shadow, I operate in
in polve.85 smoke, and I speak in dust.
Given his frequent use of figures of Nothing in his poetry, it comes

as no surprise that Busenello also adopts them in his libretto for
82 Il tempo, CX, 1–4.

83 Alla fortuna, CXVII, 1–2. See infra for Fortune as Nothing.
84 Nostra vita, CXIX, 1–4, 9–11.
85 Vita breve, CXXXII, 1–2, 9–11, 14. Busenello’s 1627 letter praising Marino’s
Adone also includes examples of the vocabulary of Nothing, for instance: “E ci vuol altro
che il compasso che misuri i membri al punto matematico, la bilancia che pesi gli atomi,
l’alchimia che distilli il niente, e la chimera che anatomizzi gli istanti.” Marino, Epistolario,
vol. 2: 109.

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Monteverdi.86 For example, in the Prologue, Fortune says in addressing

Virtue:
(Poppea, Prologue: Fortune to Virtue)

Ogni tuo professore Any devotee of thine
se da me sta diviso, who is divided from me,
rimane un vacuo nulla remains a vacuous nothing,
destituito da numeri, che mai devoid of numbers, that can never
non rileva alcun conto, be counted;
sembra un foco dipinto it is like a painted fire
che né scalda, né splende.87 which neither warms or shines.
In mocking Virtue, Fortune calls her a Nothing. She claims that, just as
zero has meaning only in relation to real numbers (such as 10, 20 . . .),
Virtue (“a vacuous nothing”) has meaning only in relation to her, For-
tune (a “real number,” as she deems herself). But Busenello’s is a
highly relativistic world, one in which everybody and everything are in-
deed Nothing, and Truth depends on the interpreter, just as his fellow
Incogniti show in their works. As a consequence of this relativism, the
same quality that, in the Prologue, Fortune attributes to Virtue—being
Nothing—is also assigned in the opera to a very different character, 491
Poppaea, the opposite of Virtue. This time the “interpreter” (the at-
tributing agent) is the rejected Otho:
(Poppea, I, 1: Otho)
E pure io torno qui, qual linea al And yet I still come back, like a line to
centro 88 the center,
qual foco a sfera, like fire to its sphere,
e qual ruscello al mare. like a river to the sea.
86 I have written on this issue, but from a different perspective, in “ ‘Imitar col canto
chi parla’: Monteverdi and the Creation of a Language for Musical Theater,” Journal of
American Musicological Society 55 (2002), 383–431: 421–25.
87 The lines regarding Nothing (nulla, here lines 3 to 5) are missing from both the
surviving scores of Poppea (Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Cod. It. IV 439
[=9963], and Naples, Biblioteca del Conservatorio S. Pietro a Majella, Rari 6.4.1). But
they are included in the libretto published in Busenello’s Hore ociose (Venice: Giuliani,
1656) as well as in all other known versions of the libretto (interestingly, the libretto pub-
lished in Naples in 1651 with the title Il Nerone has for lines 3–5 the following version: “se
da me diviso, / rimane un vacuo, un nulla, / restituto da’ numeri,” emphasizing vacuum
and nothing as separate although related entities).
88 The association among “centro,” Nothing, and God was common in 17th-century
mystic literature: “To create is to excavate the creation from nothing, and to put it into
being; thus the nothing is a deeper center of the Soul than is its essence; and God is the
center of all centers” (“creare è un cavar la Creatura dal niente, e porla nell’essere;
dunque il niente è un centro dell’Anima più profondo, che non è la stessa essenzia di lei;
e Dio è il centro di tutti i centri”). See Pietro Matteo Petrucci, I mistici enigmi disvelati
(Venice: Herz, 1685), 28, as quoted in Sabrina Stroppa, Sic arescit. Letteratura mistica nel
Seicento italiano (Florence: Olschki, 1998), 98. The “center” to which Otho is attracted in

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(Poppea, I, 11: Otho)

Ahi, chi ripon sua fede in un bel volto Alas, to trust a pretty face
predestina se stesso a reo tormento, destines one to cruel torment,
fabrica in aria e sopra il vacuo fonda, builds in the air and upon a vacuum,
tenta palpare il vento, like trying to catch the wind
ed immobil afferma il fumo, e l’onda.89 or stay the movement of smoke and
wave.
Earth, Fire, and Water in the first passage, Air in the second: All four el-
ements are gathered by Otho to signify the “goddess of Beauties on
Earth,” crowned as such by Love at the end of the opera.90 But Beauty,
we recall, as Busenello’s fellow Incognito Dall’Angelo demonstrates in
his Glorie del Niente, is indeed “the first mother of Nothing” (all four ele-
ments are also Nothing, as we have seen). Otho’s desire towards Pop-
paea thus revolves around Nothing—it is illusory.91
The association between Beauty/Poppaea and Nothing, both in-
tended as a deceptive appearance, as vanitas, is the topos that Seneca,
the skilled rhetorician, uses in scene 6 of the same act to persuade Oc-
tavia that she should continue to pursue constancy despite her hus-
492 band’s demeaning treatment of her:
(Poppea, I, 6: Seneca to Octavia)

Tu dal destin colpita You, struck from destiny,
produci a te medesma alti splendori produce for yourself high splendours
di vigor, di fortezza, of vigor and fortitude,
glorie maggiori assai che la bellezza. glories that are far greater than beauty;
La vaghezza del volto i lineamenti the charm of face and figure
che in apparenza illustre that in luminous appearance
risplendon coloriti, e delicati shine colourful and delicate
da pochi ladri dì ci son rubbati. is stolen by a few thieving days.
the first scene of Poppea may thus have connotations that touch on the semantic areas of
God and Nothing.
89 These lines are missing from the score preserved in Venice but are included both
in the libretto published in Busenello’s Hore ociose and in the score preserved in Naples.
90 See the 1643 Scenario on pp. 17–18 (“Dea delle bellezze in Terra”).
91 As Ellen Rosand has shown, in Poppea I, 1, Monteverdi aptly depicts Otho’s rest-
less motion around his desired love object by anchoring his melody on the tonic degree,
starting the aria at the unison and finishing it with a return to the point of departure. See
Ellen Rosand, “Monteverdi’s Mimetic Art: L’Incoronazione di Poppea,” Cambridge Opera Jour-
nal 1 (1989), 113–37: 119–20. In I, 3, Nero reassures Poppea that he cannot be without
her just as the number one cannot be divided from the zero, or, in another interpreta-
tion, as the point, representing their indissoluble union, cannot be separated (“se non si
smembra l’unità dal punto”—the music cadences on the unison at the word “punto”).
The point is another “figure of Nothing” (“Il punto, limite estremo e termine delle
grandezze, è un Quasi-Nulla . . .”; see Jacques Gaffarel, Nihil, fere Nihil, minus nihilo
[Venice: Pinelli, 1634], in Le antiche memorie, 148–65: 161).

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Through her behavior, Seneca claims, Octavia glorifies Vigor and

Fortitude, and not Beauty, which is only a “luminous appearance,” a
vanitas that disappears with time. To the shining Glories of Beauty—
reminiscent of those of Nothing in Dall’Angelo’s Glories of Nothing—
Octavia should prefer the superior greatness (the “far greater splen-
dors”) of Constancy. Octavia’s virtue, Seneca continues after the lines
quoted above, defeats “stars, fate, and chance.” All these negative im-
ages (beauty, stars, fate, chance) stand for Poppaea, in contrast with Oc-
tavia. Notice that, contrary to the Prologue, in Seneca’s speech it is For-
tune, and not Virtue, who becomes Nothing, as it was in Busenello’s
sonnet Alla fortuna quoted above.
Monteverdi’s setting of the word “la bellezza” in measures 42–46

(see Ex. 1) fully participates in this discourse concerning vanitates. It
underlines the concept behind Seneca’s words, that is, that Beauty is a
mere appearance and indeed Nothing. By assigning a stunningly long
melisma to the article la and a simple syllabic setting to the word bellezza,
Monteverdi thwarts normal expectation. A powerful instance of overvo-
calization, the surprisingly melismatic la is further highlighted by being
framed by “appropriately” placed melismas (madrigalisms): two mea- 493
sures before (m. 40) on the word glorie, and two measures after (m. 48,
not shown in the example) on the word volto, this last occurring after a
change of meter that further sets apart the previous passage. In con-
trast, the inordinately long melisma on la represents a deliberate anti-
madrigalistic gesture, highlighting the asynchronicity of text and music
by deconstructing their conventional relationship.92 In the course of
just a few measures, the relationship between text and music oscillates
between music’s adherence to and distance from text meaning—an os-
cillation that can be characterized as alternatively “mimetic” and
“diegetic” according to the degree of transparency and opacity in mu-
sic’s mirroring of the text.93
On closer examination, however, a similar oscillation also extends
to the overvocalization itself, since the melisma on la can be perceived
as having a twofold purpose. One the one hand, it does annihilate tex-
tual meaning by dislodging elements (the melisma and the word) that
should, in normal practice, correspond to each other. At the same time
however, and paradoxically so, the displacement of the melisma rein-
forces textual meaning in two ways: by increasing the expectation for the
word “bellezza,” thus highlighting it as if the listener were asked to hold
92 As Kramer writes in discussing overvocalization (see n5 and n6) “vocal music al-
ways seems to be struggling against a latent impulse to dissolve its language away.” Music
and Poetry, 132.
93 I borrow these terms from Morelli, “Scompiglio del lamento,” 615.

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her breath; and by shifting the relationship between music and text
from one of direct imitation to one of musical representation: specifi-
cally, the representation of Beauty as viewed by Seneca and by the In-
cogniti, that is, as being a Nothing, a “zero.” Beauty’s musical represen-
tation in fact can not consist of a “one-to-one” correspondence of
mutually related elements, but must be a displacement. This process—a
dislocation of meaning—results in a gap between the signifier (the
melisma) and the signified (the word “bellezza”), a gap that opens up
an empty space—a void—filled by Voice and representing an allegory
of Nothing. Despite transcending the local meaning of the individual
words, the compound formed by the setting of “la bellezza” does repre-
sent the text, indirectly but on a larger scale, as allegories do.94
In conclusion, the melisma on “la” is required by the very meaning
of Beauty in the heterodox aesthetic of the Accademia degli Incogniti.
Seneca’s undermining of “bellezza”—both in his words and in his music
—indicts Poppea’s beauty as a mere appearance, a Nothing. It is a ges-
ture directed not only to Octavia, but also to the Incogniti audience,
who recognized the subject of Seneca’s speech—Beauty as vanitas—and
would have been able to decode Busenello and Monteverdi’s message.
494 By having Seneca sing a melisma to highlight the word “bellezza,” Mon-
teverdi portrays the philosopher as a master of rhetoric, music working
as an additional rhetorical tool that enhances and reinforces textual
meaning.95
94 For the notions of allegory and of signifier and signified in 17th-century dis-
courses, see Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1988)
and Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas. Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis: Univ.
of Minnesota Press, 1993). For “imitation” and “representation,” denoting, respectively,
resemblance and detachment in the relationships between language and things during
the 16th and 17th centuries, see Foucault, The Order of Things, 64; for the use of these
Foucauldian terms in Monteverdi studies, see Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Re-
naissance; Idem, Music and Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993); Tim Carter, “Resemblance and Representation: Towards a
New Aesthetic in the Music of Monteverdi,” in Con che soavità: Studies in Italian Opera,
Song, and Dance, 1580–1740, ed. Iain Fenlon and Tim Carter (Oxford: Clarendon Press;
New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), 118–34; and Jeffrey Kurtzmann, “A Taxonomic and
Affective Analysis of Monteverdi’s ‘Hor che’l ciel e la terra’,” Music Analysis 12 (1993):
169–95.
95 My interpretation of this passage thus differs from that of Heller and McClary
(see above, n10) who both view Monteverdi’s musical treatment of Seneca as eroding his
heroic stature. For Heller (“Tacitus Incognito,” 67) Seneca’s madrigalisms are meaning-
less and inappropriate, part of a “catalogue of musical devices” which “dissuades rather
than persuades, distracting the listener from the intention of the speech as a whole and
raising suspicions not only about Seneca’s oratory but also about the validity of his philo-
sophical stance.” For McClary (“Constructions of Gender,” 49) the madrigalisms are
“silly” gestures that diminish the nobility of the character, the setting reflecting the Incog-
niti’s libertine approach. For Fenlon and Miller instead (The Song of the Soul, 64–65) the
“irony” of the passage “consists of the fact that while the concept of beauty is dramatically
illustrated through a form of direct representation, namely sudden vocal ornamentation

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Monteverdi’s iconoclastic gesture reveals idiomatic features of the

musical style of his time. Two years before the first performance of
Poppea at the theater SS. Giovanni e Paolo in 1643, the Incogniti had
seen, at the S. Cassiano, another opera, Didone, again on a libretto by
Busenello, set by Monteverdi’s student, Francesco Cavalli. At the end of
Act I, Venus invokes Fortune to help her son, Aeneas, overcome the ob-
stacles of his sea journey. Fortune accepts, and in the last lines of the
act, Venus, transported by joy, directly addresses the absent Aeneas:
(Didone, I, 10: Venus)

Figlio mio, caro figlio, invitto Enea O son of mine, dear son, invincible
Aeneas,
non temer punto più di noia alcuna you no longer need fear anything
se teco vien propitia la Fortuna. if propitious Fortune goes with you.
On the article “la” an inordinately long melisma prepares the cadence

on the word “Fortuna” (see Ex. 3). As in Poppea I, 6, the effect is again
that of having the listener “holding her breath” until the name arrives.
And, again, the concept highlighted so unusually—Fortune—is related
to the semantic area of Nothing, as Beauty is in Poppea. 96 By “overvocal- 495
izing” the best singing vowel: “a”—but within a word that signifies noth-
ing: “la”—both Monteverdi and Cavalli enabled the characters—Venus
delivered in largely syllabic ambience, it actually comes from the mouth of Seneca who is
busily engaged attacking its significance.” It is however by precisely illustrating Beauty as
Nothing through a hyper-madrigalism—the melisma on “la”—that Seneca makes his
point in trying to convince Octavia that she should not be bothered by Poppaea’s appear-
ance; indeed his (neostoic) stance is reflected by both text and music. At the same time,
the highly artificial character of the melisma justifies Octavia’s reply to Seneca that his
are indeed only “vanità speciose, studiati artifici” (she herself uses the rhetoric of nothing
to dismiss the philosopher’s rhetoric). However, Octavia’s negative reaction to Seneca—
revealing an attitude similar to that of the Page in the same scene and that of the Soldiers
in I, 2—does not undermine Seneca’s message, neither does it diminish the philoso-
pher’s heroic stature emerging through Monteverdi’s musical characterization of him
throughout the opera, including the passage discussed here. For the composer’s treat-
ment of Seneca as a noble character, see Rosand, “Seneca and the Interpretation of
L’Incoronazione di Poppea.” The scholarly debate on the philosopher’s characterization in
Poppea is summarized and discussed in Tim Carter’s essay “Re-Reading Poppea: Some
Thoughts on Music and Meaning in Monteverdi’s Last Opera,” Journal of the Royal Musical
Association 122 (1997), 173–204 (reprinted in Idem., Monteverdi and his Contemporaries
[Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000]).
96 For Fortune as Nothing, see Busenello’s sonnet CXVII quoted above. In Poppea
I, 6, Fortune is indeed present in the lines immediately preceding those quoted above,
at the point in which Seneca invites Octavia to paradoxically thank the goddess who, with
Love, is helping her rival Poppea: “Ringratia la Fortuna / che con i colpi suoi / ti cresce
gl’ornamenti. / La cote non percossa / non può mandar faville” (“Give thanks to Fortune, /
whose blows / do but add to your graces. / An unstruck whetstone / cannot give forth
sparks”).

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example 3. Francesco Cavalli, Didone (1641), end of act 1. From

Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Ms. It. IV 355
[=9879], fol. 47r
−Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł −Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł
š Ł Ł Łý Ł

- na se te - co vien pro - pi - tia la
ÝŁ Ł −Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł
Ł
−
Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Łý
Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł

ðý ²Ł Ð
š
for - tu - na.
ÝŁ Ł Ł Ł −Ł Ð
Ł Ð
496
in Didone and Seneca in Poppea—to fully convey meaning exclusively
through pure sound.
In their works these composers—but also, as we have seen, Barbara
Strozzi—juxtaposed passages in which music mirrors verbal meaning
with others in which the mirror is provisionally reversed to reflect mu-
sic itself, voice speaking by (and of) itself. Influenced by a cultural envi-
ronment characterized by the Accademia degli Incogniti, with its un-
orthodox philosophy and Marinist aesthetics, Monteverdi and Cavalli
explored the boundaries of the vocal style of their time, finding origi-
nal ways of articulating sound-word relationships. In doing so, they
showed a profound trust in an element in which they recognized an ex-
traordinary epistemological value: pure voice.
Harvard University
ABSTRACT
Operas written in Venice in the 1640s feature surprisingly long
melismas often setting seemingly insignificant words, in opposition to
(although concurrently with) traditional madrigalisms. This magnifica-
tion of pure voice over word meaning is consistent with the aesthetics
presented by members of the Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti, known
for its pro-opera stance. In previously unexplored works the academi-

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calcagno
cians advocate the controversial concept of Nothing as an all-embracing

phenomenon. This includes language, in which the Incogniti empha-
size sound as independent from meaning—a claim with significant
consequences for music aesthetics. The academy’s emblem articulates
a parallel discourse on voice through visual means. By musical means,
passages from works by Barbara Strozzi, Claudio Monteverdi (an oft-
discussed melisma in Poppea, I, 6), and Francesco Cavalli also articulate
Incogniti aesthetics. In elaborating their ideas the academicians relied
upon a work that indeed presented a manifesto for sheer vocality,
L’Adone (1623) by Giovanbattista Marino, an academy member. The
Incogniti ’s Marinist aesthetics was to dominate the rest of the century
until its object, pure voice, came under sharp criticism by members of
yet another academy, the Arcadia.
497

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Signifying Nothing: On the Aesthetics of Pure Voice in Early Venetian Opera

Author(s): Mauro Calcagno

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Writing near the beginning of the 18th cen-

The philosopher remains confined to schools, the poet to academies;

By characterizing opera as dominated by “pure voice,” Gravina described

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bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 15.

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opera, “where ‘musical excitement’ and dramatic action are in a con-

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example 1. Claudio Monteverdi, L'incoronazione di Poppea (1643), act

Glo - rie mag - gio - ri as - sai che la

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The passage occurs in the context of an austere recitative, which

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the emerging protagonist of opera productions—the female singer—

Theorizing Nothing: the Incogniti and the Failures of Language

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ter possibly counterbalancing the former in the eyes of the censors).17

17 On Loredano see Agnès Morini, “Sous le signe de l’inconstance: la vie et l’oeuvre

de Giovan Francesco Loredano (1606–61), noble vénitien, fondateur de l’Académie des

Signor Giovan Francesco Loredano nobile veneto (Venice: Sarzina, 1635).

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This debate, as I have noted, echoed many earlier discussions on

bile.” Le antiche memorie, 98.

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sepulcher of Nothing and evaporate.”26 Voice and nothing are in this

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Dall’Angelo affirms that the soul of man is also Nothing, reinforcing

Niente?” Le antiche memorie, 121.

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Dall’Angelo’s belief that the disciplines of language can not be

ennes 43 (1997): 23–50.

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considered one of the main stylistic features of Italian literature during

36 See Giorgio Battistini and Ezio Raimondi, “Retoriche e poetiche dominanti,” in

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enables a positive evaluation, indeed a legitimization, of sound in itself,

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notions. It is revealing in this respect that, in early Baroque Italy, the

In support of his controversial claim that Beauty is Nothing, Dall’An-

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O diletto mortal, gioia terrena,

Taken out of context (as in Dall’Angelo) these four lines simply

The Ambiguous Power of Song: the Nightingale and Allurement

pleasure that amuses souls, / born of vanity, vanishes into nothing.”

and Fausto Nicoli (Bari: Laterza, 1912), vol. 2, 100–104.

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concluding with an invitation to Marino to join him in Venice—attests

in his Bizzarrie academiche (Venice: Ad istanza dell’Academia, 1643), 314–49.

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To hear a musical monster: oh what a wonder,

The nightingale first sings a “lament” and then a “canzonetta,” while

or tronca la voce, or la ripiglia, / or la ferma, or la torce, or scema, or piena, / or la

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poetry out of the death of singing: it is necessary for the nightingale to

54 The anecdote is so reported by F. F. Frugoni, a late 17th-century writer who was

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erature.55 In this instance, as in Marino’s contest, death is followed by

In the first place there is so loud a voice and so persistent a supply of

utterance to approach inarticulate melody, in order to express a feeling of loss.” See

cia: Panini, 1991; first ed.: Venice: Ciotti, 1602).

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