Metamorphosis and Animation

Abstract

For those of us who think about musical genres of eighteenth-century theater —opera, festa teatrale, melodrama, pantomime—Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a consistent ambivalent presence: an unimaginably rich font of ancient stories and characters, but one that, by and large, was drawn on for works appearing outside the mainstream. An obvious exception must immediately be made for the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, which has supplied a mythology for opera’s origins as well as its expressive power. Yet this story is an oddity within Ovid’s poem, involving no metamorphosis save death and dismemberment, and possessed of an unusually detailed narrative structure and affective trajectory. What is more, there were so many Orpheus dramas within opera of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that to craft an Orfeo or an Orphée for the opera house was to engage with this theatrical intertext far more than with the imaginative world of the Metamorphoses. For the most part, Ovid’s volume of stories about bodily transformation was a second-tier source for serious drama, lagging far behind the Aeneid, Racine’s dramas, and various Roman histories. None of Metastasio’s opera seria libretti, which dominated serious opera for most of the eighteenth century, used stories from Ovid’s magnum opus. Why not? Metastasio did not leave behind an explanation, of course, but one may speculate that most of the stories in the Metamorphoses were too short, too redolent of “myth” as opposed to ancient history, too difficult to stage (how could a woman change into a cow and back in the theater?), and too lacking in developed or potentially heroic characters. As Pierpaolo Polzonetti tellingly writes, Ovid’s stories were used “more often than not for celebratory works for birthday and wedding festivities of the wealthiest aristocracy”: occasional works, in other words, the most conservative and propagandistic of eighteenth-century music-theatrical genres. However, as Polzonetti also notes, Ovid’s tales could also be found in abundance within explicitly experimental genres during this period. Gluck