Il rapimento di Cefalo
Encyclopedia
Il rapimento di Cefalo was one of the first Italian opera
s. Most of the music was written by Giulio Caccini
but Stefano Venturi del Nibbio
, Luca Bati
and Piero Strozzi
also contributed. The libretto
, by Gabriello Chiabrera
, is in a prologue, five scenes and an epilogue and is based on the Classical myth of Cephalus
and Aurora
.
The opera was the culmination of the celebrations for the (proxy) wedding of King Henri IV of France
and Marie de' Medici
in Florence
in 1600 and was performed in the Sala delle Commedie in the Uffizi Palace
on 9 October in front of an audience of 3,000 gentlemen and 800 ladies. The performance lasted five hours and cost 60,000 scudi
, a huge sum. Among the singers were Melchior Palantrotti, Jacopo Peri
, Francesco Rasi
and five members of Caccini's own family, including his daughter Francesca
and his son Pompeo.
Three days earlier, Caccini and Peri's opera Euridice
had been staged in the Pitti palace. Unlike that work, Il rapimento soon fell into obscurity. Caccini published the final chorus and an aria
in his collection Le nuove musiche (1602) but the rest of the score is lost. Il rapimento di Cefalo contained many elements from the Florentine intermedi as well as making use of the new style of recitative
. The Florentine audience admired the scenery of the production (by Bernardo Buontalenti
), but found the music tedious.
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
s. Most of the music was written by Giulio Caccini
Giulio Caccini
Giulio Caccini , also known as Giulio Romano, was an Italian composer, teacher, singer, instrumentalist and writer of the very late Renaissance and early Baroque eras. He was one of the founders of the genre of opera, and one of the single most influential creators of the new Baroque style...
but Stefano Venturi del Nibbio
Stefano Venturi del Nibbio
Stefano Venturi del Nibbio was an Italian composer of the late Renaissance, active in Venice and Florence. In addition to composing madrigals in a relatively conservative style, works which were published as far away as England, he collaborated with Giulio Caccini on one of the earliest operas,...
, Luca Bati
Luca Bati
Luca Bati was an Italian Baroque composer and music teacher. One of his pupils was Marco da Gagliano....
and Piero Strozzi
Piero Strozzi (composer)
Piero Strozzi was an Italian nobleman and amateur composer.Strozzi was born and died in Florence, where he played an important intellectual role in fostering the "new music" during the late 16th century. He was a member of the Camerata of Count Giovanni de' Bardi and a member of the Camerata of...
also contributed. The libretto
Libretto
A libretto is the text used in an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata, or musical. The term "libretto" is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as mass, requiem, and sacred cantata, or even the story line of a...
, by Gabriello Chiabrera
Gabriello Chiabrera
Gabriello Chiabrera was an Italian poet, sometimes called the Italian Pindar.-Biography:He was of patrician descent, and was born at Savona, a little town in the domain of the Genoese republic, twenty-eight years after the...
, is in a prologue, five scenes and an epilogue and is based on the Classical myth of Cephalus
Cephalus
Cephalus is an Ancient Greek name, used both for the hero-figure in Greek mythology and carried as a theophoric name by historical persons. The word kephalos is Greek for "head", perhaps used here because Cephalus was the founding "head" of a great family that includes Odysseus...
and Aurora
Aurora (mythology)
Aurora is the Latin word for dawn, the goddess of dawn in Roman mythology and Latin poetry.Like Greek Eos and Rigvedic Ushas , Aurora continues the name of an earlier Indo-European dawn goddess, *Hausos....
.
The opera was the culmination of the celebrations for the (proxy) wedding of King Henri IV of France
Henry IV of France
Henry IV , Henri-Quatre, was King of France from 1589 to 1610 and King of Navarre from 1572 to 1610. He was the first monarch of the Bourbon branch of the Capetian dynasty in France....
and Marie de' Medici
Marie de' Medici
Marie de Médicis , Italian Maria de' Medici, was queen consort of France, as the second wife of King Henry IV of France, of the House of Bourbon. She herself was a member of the wealthy and powerful House of Medici...
in Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....
in 1600 and was performed in the Sala delle Commedie in the Uffizi Palace
Uffizi
The Uffizi Gallery , is a museum in Florence, Italy. It is one of the oldest and most famous art museums of the Western world.-History:...
on 9 October in front of an audience of 3,000 gentlemen and 800 ladies. The performance lasted five hours and cost 60,000 scudi
Scudo
The scudo has been used as a unit of currency in several different states:* Bolivian scudo* Italian scudo* Lombardy-Venetia scudo* Maltese scudo* Milanese scudo* Papal States scudo* Piedmont scudo* Sardinian scudoOther meanings:...
, a huge sum. Among the singers were Melchior Palantrotti, Jacopo Peri
Jacopo Peri
Jacopo Peri was an Italian composer and singer of the transitional period between the Renaissance and Baroque styles, and is often called the inventor of opera...
, Francesco Rasi
Francesco Rasi
Francesco Rasi was an Italian composer, singer , chitarrone player, and poet.Rasi was born in Arezzo. He studied at the University of Pisa and in 1594 he was studying with Giulio Caccini. He may have been in Carlo Gesualdo's retinue when he went to Ferrara for his wedding in 1594...
and five members of Caccini's own family, including his daughter Francesca
Francesca Caccini
Francesca Caccini was an Italian composer, singer, lutenist, poet, and music teacher of the early Baroque era. She was the daughter of Giulio Caccini, and was one of the best-known and most influential female European composers between Hildegard of Bingen in the 12th century and the 19th century...
and his son Pompeo.
Three days earlier, Caccini and Peri's opera Euridice
Euridice (opera)
Euridice is an opera by Jacopo Peri, with additional music by Giulio Caccini. The libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini is based on books X and XI of Ovid's...
had been staged in the Pitti palace. Unlike that work, Il rapimento soon fell into obscurity. Caccini published the final chorus and an aria
Aria
An aria in music was originally any expressive melody, usually, but not always, performed by a singer. The term is now used almost exclusively to describe a self-contained piece for one voice usually with orchestral accompaniment...
in his collection Le nuove musiche (1602) but the rest of the score is lost. Il rapimento di Cefalo contained many elements from the Florentine intermedi as well as making use of the new style of recitative
Recitative
Recitative , also known by its Italian name "recitativo" , is a style of delivery in which a singer is allowed to adopt the rhythms of ordinary speech...
. The Florentine audience admired the scenery of the production (by Bernardo Buontalenti
Bernardo Buontalenti
Bernardo Buontalenti, byname of Bernardo Delle Girandole was an Italian stage designer, architect, theatrical designer, military engineer and artist.-Biography:Buontalenti was born in Florence....
), but found the music tedious.
Roles
This is a hypothetical cast list with probable voice types as reconstructed by Tim Carter. In his description of the performance, Michelangelo Buonarotti the Younger claimed that four female members of the Caccini family ("with angelic voices") took part. Carter believes that the most likely candidates are: Caccini's second wife, Margherita di Agostino Benevoli della Scala; his 13-year-old daughter Francesca; Margherita Gagnolanti, his sister-in-law by his first wife; and Ginevra Mazziere detta l’Azzurina, who had been seduced or raped by his son, Pompeo, whom she may have married.| Role | Voice type (hypothetical) | Premiere cast (hypothetical), 9 October 1600 |
|---|---|---|
| Poesia (Poetry) | soprano Soprano A soprano is a voice type with a vocal range from approximately middle C to "high A" in choral music, or to "soprano C" or higher in operatic music. In four-part chorale style harmony, the soprano takes the highest part, which usually encompasses the melody... |
Female Caccini 1 |
| Aurora Aurora (mythology) Aurora is the Latin word for dawn, the goddess of dawn in Roman mythology and Latin poetry.Like Greek Eos and Rigvedic Ushas , Aurora continues the name of an earlier Indo-European dawn goddess, *Hausos.... |
soprano | Female Caccini 2 |
| Cefalo (Cephalus Cephalus Cephalus is an Ancient Greek name, used both for the hero-figure in Greek mythology and carried as a theophoric name by historical persons. The word kephalos is Greek for "head", perhaps used here because Cephalus was the founding "head" of a great family that includes Odysseus... ) |
tenor Tenor The tenor is a type of male singing voice and is the highest male voice within the modal register. The typical tenor voice lies between C3, the C one octave below middle C, to the A above middle C in choral music, and up to high C in solo work. The low extreme for tenors is roughly B2... |
Pompeo Caccini |
| Titone (Tithonus Tithonus In Greek mythology, Tithonus or Tithonos was the lover of Eos, Titan of the dawn. He was a Trojan by birth, the son of King Laomedon of Troy by a water nymph named Strymo . The mythology reflected by the fifth-century vase-painters of Athens envisaged Tithonus as a rhapsode, as the lyre in his... ) |
bass | Melchior Palantrotti |
| Oceano (Oceanus Oceanus Oceanus ; , Ōkeanós) was a pseudo-geographical feature in classical antiquity, believed by the ancient Greeks and Romans to be the world-ocean, an enormous river encircling the world.... ) |
bass | Florentine bass |
| Febo (Phoebus) | tenor | Jacopo Peri or Francesco Rasi (doubled with Giove?) |
| Amore (Cupid Cupid In Roman mythology, Cupid is the god of desire, affection and erotic love. He is the son of the goddess Venus and the god Mars. His Greek counterpart is Eros... ) |
soprano | Florentine boy singer or castrato Castrato A castrato is a man with a singing voice equivalent to that of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto voice produced either by castration of the singer before puberty or one who, because of an endocrinological condition, never reaches sexual maturity.Castration before puberty prevents a boy's... |
| Notte (Night) | soprano | Female Caccini 3 |
| Berecintia (Berecyntia Cybele Cybele , was a Phrygian form of the Earth Mother or Great Mother. As with Greek Gaia , her Minoan equivalent Rhea and some aspects of Demeter, Cybele embodies the fertile Earth... ) |
soprano | Female Caccini 4 |
| Mercurio (Mercury) | ?tenor | Florentine tenor (or Peri or Rasi) |
| Giove (Jupiter) | tenor | Jacopo Peri or Francesco Rasi (doubled with Febo?) |
| Fama (Fame) | soprano | Female Caccini 1 |
| Chorus of hunters, chorus of sea gods, chorus of heavenly signs, chorus of gods | ||
Sources
- Tim Carter: Rediscovering Il rapimento di Cefalo (Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music Volume 9 No.1)
- Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi by Nino PirrottaNino PirrottaNino Pirrotta was an Italian musicologist of international renown who specialized in Italian music from the late medieval, Renaissance and early Baroque eras. In 1931 he earned a degree in art history from the University of Florence after having already earned a diploma in organ performance...
(Cambridge University Press, 1982) pp.236-38 - Italian Opera by David R. B. Kimbell (Cambridge University Press, 1994) p.53
- The Viking Opera Guide, ed. Holden (Viking, 1993) p.175
- New Grove Dictionary of Music entry on Il rapimento di Cefalo by Barbara Russano HanningBarbara Russano HanningBarbara Russano Hanning is an American musicologist who specializes in 16th and 17th century Italian music. She has also written works on the music of 18th-century France and on musical iconography. She earned a PhD in musicology from Yale University...