Talking About Virtue: Paisiello's 'Nina,' Paër's 'Agnese,' and the Sentimental Ethos

Notes

¹ Thomas Dixon has traced the evolution of and emphasis on the "psychology of the emotions" to what he calls the "newer and more secular network" of meaning that began to emerge in the early nineteenth century (289). Both Sheriff and Bredvold have analyzed aspects of the the debate over sentimentality's indebtedness to Latitudinarianism, arguing that a tension exists between traditional Christian emphases on a system of active virtue and the sentimental self-absorption in one's own "good nature" as an end in itself.

² Markley reviews the literary and critical controversies surrounding Shaftesbury's role in defining Sentimentality as "the affective spectacle of benign generosity" (211), as well as its contested religious origins in latitudinarianism and Deism. Another useful summary of the major debates about sentimentality as a cultural practice can be found in Howard, although her focus is largely on American literature, while Solomon has traced the European and philosophical roots of the concept. There are a number of major book-length studies of the genre, but those most relevant to the focus of this essay are by Barker-Benfield, Mullan, and Marshall.

³ See Bartlet, who very usefully distinguishes between the Théâtre-Italien, the one founded to perform Italian opera buffa and opera semiseria and directed at one point by Paër, and the earlier Théâtre-Italien or Comédie Italienne (the name of the Opéra-Comique until 1793), whose repertoire included Italian plays in Italian, French plays, and opéras-comiques, but not Italian opera (123).

⁴ The basis of Sentimentality's physical appeal has been variously analyzed. Branfman attempts a psychoanalytical analysis of sentimentality as a "magic gesture in reverse," a "wistful observation [in which the audience] passively views" the sufferings and "sadness without pleasure" of the opera's participants (624-25). Ellis reviews the terms sentimental, comedy, and sentimental comedy in a morphological attempt to discern the specific qualities of the genre, while Sherbo defines sentimental drama by examining a number of specific examples.

⁵ I have explored elsewhere and at much greater length the role that Thomas Holcroft's A Tale of Mystery played in the evolution of British melodrama in relation to his own earlier sentimental comedies (i.e., The Deserted Daughter, a work that bears some similarities to the two operas under discussion here).

⁶ See the biographical background provided for the Broadview edition of Opie's Father and Daughter. All quotations from the novella will be from this edition, with page numbers in parentheses in the text. This edition also very usefully reprints an excerpt from Paër's Agnese, along with contemporary reviews, as well as excerpts from both Kemble's Smiles and Tears and Moncrieff's The Lear of Private Life.