Clouds, nuptials, nubifications: At the origins of operatic poetics

Abstract This essay compares the manifold manifestations of clouds in Francesco Buti’s libretto, Le nozze di Peleo e di Teti (1654), the libretto’s anonymous French translation, Les nopces de Pélée et de Thétis, and Giacomo Torelli’s cloud machines for the Parisian stage. The Latin word for “cloud”—nubes, a cognate of nubere, “to veil,” “to marry”—discloses the gendered aspect of clouds and gestures to weddings as privileged occasions for the poetic and artistic presence of clouds. This essay envisions the oscillation between the French and Italian poetics of the libretto and the stage machines as a cross-media process of “operatic nubifications” in which clouds emerge as a powerful, if heretofore less studied, mediating instance not only between these two registers, but also between the male and the female gender. The dual goal of this essay is to investigate the complex tension between the page and the stage as it emerged out of the collaborative work between the librettist and the stage engineer and to disclose, through the cloud, new avenues to rethink the artistic, cultural, and, last but not least, cosmological transformations which took place in the course of the seventeenth-century.