The old wet nurses in Seventeenth Century Italian Opera
a link between the spoken and the musical theatre
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-6377.2008.54929Keywords:
Venetian opera, Theatre, Commedia dell’arteAbstract
Through the analysis of the characters of nursemaids, nurses and “vecchie” we will define the boundary but also the shared features of spoken and sung seventeenth-century theatre. After tracing a brief history of these roles in the spoken theatre, we will examine their arrival into the Italian opera librettos, to end with some observations relating to musical matters and performance practice. The presence of a nurse in a 1660s Venetian libretto was considered necessary for the success of an opera. This role’s tradition, both in spoken and sung theatre, demonstrates that it was mostly assigned to men “en travesti”. This is a crucial point as not only it gives us a chance to reflect on matters of performance practice, but also on seventeenth-century perception of older women.
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