"An assiduous frequenter of the Italian opera": Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and the opera buffa

Notes

¹ Shelley writes to Peacock on 6 April 1819, "This is the holy week, & Rome is quite full. . . . Great feasts & funzioni here, for which we can get no tickets; there are 5000 strangers & only room for 500 at the celebration of the famous Miserere [by Allegri] in the Sixtine Chapel" (PSL II, 93).

² "The elaborate dramatic mythological plays [Calderón] wrote for the court, including La fiera, el rayo y la piedra (1652), Fortunas de Andrómeda y Perseo (1653), La estatua de Prometeo (c1670) and Fieras afemina amor (1670 or 1672), can be classified as semi-operas, in that they include fully-sung scenes with sung dialogue (and recitative) for the gods and goddesses of antiquity." See "Calderón de la Barca, Pedro." The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Ed. Stanley Sadie. Vol. I. London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1992. 687.

³ The seven types of aria are: Aria Cantabile; Aria di portamento; Aria di mezzo carattere; Aria parlante; Aria di bravura; Aria di agilita; Rondo; and Cavatina. See Brown, 35-40.

⁴ Despite his general suspicion of Italian opera, Addison approved of the innovation of sung dialogue in recitative, remarking that "[t]he Transition from an Air to Recitative Musick being more natural than the passing from a Song to plain and ordinary Speaking." (Joseph Addison, The Spectator, Tuesday, April 3, 1711).

⁵ Havergal Brian wrote his opera based on acts I and II of P.U. from 1937-1944. Brian also wrote operas for PBS’s The Cenci and Goethe’s Faust. For more, see the Havergal Brian Society <<http://www.musicweb.uk.net/brian>>. Similarly, Sir Hubert Parry probably quickly realized the intrinsic challenges of Shelley’s language in composing his oratorio "Scenes from Prometheus Unbound" (1880).

⁶ All references to Prometheus Unbound are from the 2000 Longman edition previously cited, TPS, II, 471-649.

⁷ As Ione and Panthea are mirrors of each other, line 336 corresponds to Ione’s rhyme of "cloud" in line 333.

⁸ Shelley also was exposed to this tradition through Rossini, who perfected this technique, as is demonstrated in the finale to act I of Il barbiere di Siviglia (1810).

⁹ See George Gordon, Lord Byron, Manfred (1816) in Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, 7 vols, edd. Jerome McGann et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980-1993) IV.

¹⁰ See Tetreault, 161-6; and Stuart Curran, "The Political Prometheus," SIR 70 (1986): 273-281. See also Carlo Ritorni, Commentarii della vita e delle opere coreodrammatiche di Salvatore Viganò e della coregrafia e de'corepei (Milan, 1838).

¹¹ Shelley called Otello "the most splendid spectacle I ever saw[;]" while Claire Clairmont pronounced it a "most magnificient Ballet Pantomime" [Shelley, Letter to Peacock, 6 April 1818, PSL, II, 4; Claire Clairmont, 8 April 1818, The Journals of Claire Clairmont, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1968) 87].

¹² See Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews, footnote to Prometheus Unbound, IV (TPS, II, 612-3).