Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth Century Venice

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In mid-seventeenth-century Venice, opera first emerged from courts and private drawing rooms to become a form of public entertainment. Early commercial operas were elaborate spectacles, featuring ornate costumes and set design along with dancing and music. As ambitious works of theater, theseproductions required not only significant financial backing, but also strong managers to oversee several months of rehearsals and performances. These impresarios were responsible for every facet of production from contracting the cast to balancing the books at season's end. The systems they createdstill survive, in part, today. Inventing the Business of Opera explores public opera in its infancy, from 1637 to 1677, when theater owners and impresarios established Venice as the operatic capital of Europe. Drawing on extensive new documentation, the book studies all of the components necessary to opera production, from thefinancial backing and the issue of patronage to the commissioning and creation of the libretto and the score, the recruitment and employment of singers, dancers, and instrumentalists, the production of the scenery and the costumes, and the nature of the audience. The authors examine the challengesfaced by four separate Venetian theaters during the seventeenth century, and focus particularly on the progress of Marco Faustini, the impresario most well known today. Faustini made his way from one of Venice's smallest theaters to one of the largest, and his advancement provides a personal view ofan impresario and his partners, who ranged from Venetian nobles to artisans. Throughout the book, Venice emerges as a city that prized novelty over economy, with newrepertory, scenery, costumes, and expensive singers the rule rather than the exception. Through close examination of an extraordinary cache of documents--including personal papers, account books, and correspondence--Beth and Jonathan Glixon provide a comprehensive view of oper