Compulsive Masculinity: Hercules and Early Italian-Style Opera in Paris

ABSTRACT This essay investigates the rise of Italian-style opera in Paris through the lens of Ercole amante, an opera composed by Francesco Cavalli to a libretto by Francesco Buti for the wedding of the future French king Louis XIV and the Spanish infanta Maria Teresa in 1660. In the libretto Buti explores the blend of two distinct, and yet intertwined, preoccupations: the investment in the rise of operatic poetics as a new literary genre and the anxiety about the potential vulnerability of the aristocratic body in a time of rising absolutism. Translated after Cardinal Mazarin’s death into French as Hercule amoureux, Ercole amante imagines the French king in the form of the mythological figure of Hercules. Through the lens of the mythological figure, Buti charts the dual strands of genre and gender as a single enterprise while engaging with questions such as male filiation in the context of the French Salic Law.