The ‘choice of a subject’, Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782) once confided to Count Luigi Pio di Savoia, was the ‘most tormented phase of [his] poetic efforts’.Footnote 1 The doyen of opera seria seems to have racked his brains repeatedly over the subject of his librettos. Throughout his career, Metastasio maintained a list of annotated topics for future use and expressed anguish over his choices in several of his letters.Footnote 2 On 4 July 1733, for instance, he implored the soprano Marianna Benti Bulgarelli: ‘Do you want to suggest to me a subject for the opera I have to commence, yes or no? I find myself in an abyss of doubt. Oh, don't laugh by saying the disease is in the bones, for the choice of a subject all too well merits such agitation and uncertainty.’ (‘Mi volete suggerire un soggetto per l'opera che ho da incominciare? sì, o no? Io sono in un abisso di dubbi. Oh non ridete con dire che la malattia è nelle ossa, perché la scelta di un soggetto merita bene questa agitazione e questa incertezza.’)Footnote 3 Two years later the irresolute poet informed his brother Leopoldo that he laboured ‘like a galley slave’ and was thus in a bad mood: ‘I have a burst of bile and do not feel like writing. Do you want to help me find a subject for another opera, yes or no? I have to start with it immediately after terminating the one I am writing at present.’ As the work at hand would celebrate the name day of Emperor Charles VI, its plot had to be based on a ‘Roman incident’. Unfortunately, one after another option had to be turned down: Coriolanus, on account of that character's meddlesome mother, Volumnia (or Venturia); the Horatii, because of Horatius's murder of his own sister; Mutius Scevola, for having been recently ‘refried’ at the Viennese Court; and the Scipiones, Fabii and Papirii, because these families had graced the stage so often that they had ‘desiccated humanity’.Footnote 4
Decades of frenzied activity following the Horatian adage of ‘treating in one's own way what is common’ (proprie communia dicere) had clearly taken their toll on the invention of eighteenth-century playwrights, including seasoned librettists of Metastasio's calibre.Footnote 5 Authors of spoken plays, too, recognized the dearth of unoccupied narrative territory. In the letter prefacing his 1743 tragedy La Mérope (or La Mérope française) Voltaire himself apologized to Scipione Maffei for publishing a new tragedy on the subject of Maffei's box-office success, Merope (1713). In defence of his own treatment, Voltaire surveyed the miscellaneous Merope plays before and after Maffei's, only to conclude that a fresh version was a welcome addition. Voltaire soothed his rivals by arguing that the modern theatre had become somewhat of a ‘gallery of paintings’ anyhow, the various exhibits of which ‘represent the same subjects. The connoisseurs enjoy themselves by distinguishing between the diverse manners; everyone embraces, according to his own taste, the character of each painter; it is a kind of competition that serves at once to perfect art and to increase the public's enlightenment’. (‘Il est arrivé à notre Téatre, ce qu'on voit tous les jours dans une galerie de peinture, où plusieurs tableaux représentent le même sujet. Les Connoisseurs se plaisent à remarquer les diverses manieres; chacun saisit, selon son goût, le caractère de chaque Peintre; c'est une espéce de concours qui sert, à la fois, à perfectionner l'art, & à augmenter les lumières du Public.’)Footnote 6
Voltaire's image of the theatrical repertoire as a thematic museum rings true in the case of opera seria around 1750. As Pietro Metastasio reached the zenith of his fame, it was not just librettists and playwrights who experienced difficulty in finding fresh subjects: with opera impresarios resorting to safe, proven materials on commercial grounds, the most sought-after composers were likely to revisit several drammi during their career, while their singing peers would typically perform multiple musical renderings of the same role.Footnote 7 Niccolò Jommelli (1714–1774) stands out among this generation of metteurs en musique,Footnote 8 whose constant but ephemeral (re)interpretations of the dramatic canon to some degree anticipate the practices of today's stage directors or metteurs en scène. During the thirty-four years of his activity in opera seria (1740–1774) Jommelli composed four new scores each to Metastasio's Ezio (1741, 1748, 1758 and 1772) and Demofoonte (1743, 1753, 1764 and 1770), three to Semiramide riconosciuta (1742, 1753 and 1762) and Didone abbandonata (1747, 1749 and 1763), and two to Alessandro nell'Indie (1743 and 1760), Ciro riconosciuto (1744 and 1749), Achille in Sciro (1749 and 1771), Artaserse (1749 and 1756) and La clemenza di Tito (1753 and 1765).Footnote 9 Given the surprising rarity of borrowings in this Herculean oeuvre, one imagines that Jommelli's contemporaries would have endorsed Voltaire's statement and increased their enlightenment by discerning the subtleties of taste and character in the composer's different treatments of ‘what was common’.
But Metastasian adaptation, which dozens of authors have studied since Abbé Vogler's pioneering work, is not the central focus of this article.Footnote 10 This is not to downgrade comparative analysis as a tool to distinguish the hallmarks of a certain composer vis-à-vis those of his rivals.Footnote 11 Quite the contrary: there can be no doubt that the melodic and harmonic schemata (solfeggi and partimenti) of the galant style, which we have recently started to understand anew, are of value as a basis for recognizing the stylistic particulars of a certain master.Footnote 12 Even so, textual disentanglements of the score tend to overemphasize the composer's agency in opera – an artistic construct which, by its very audio-visual nature and performative context, agglomerates the distinct conceptual input of various agents, both artistic and non-artistic.Footnote 13 Moreover, the quest for authorial identity – what makes one composer's Metastasian rendering special in relation to another's – not only runs counter to post-Barthesian notions of authorship,Footnote 14 but also risks passing over the different spectatorships – from untrained and indifferent to highly expert and involved, each informed by a different horizon of expectations – that coalesced into the audiences of Jommelli's day.
It is precisely one such spectatorship, that of the connoisseur, that this essay concentrates on with respect to Cajo Mario (Rome, 1746), Jommelli's most revived opera in his lifetime.Footnote 15 Juxtaposition of the opera's libretto and score with a series of six highly theatrical paintings by Antonio Joli (or Jolli; c1700–1777), a fine artist and set designer in Jommelli's artistic network, reveals how Cajo Mario can be understood as the audio-visual analogue of the capriccio: a dominant mid-eighteenth-century art form that catered precisely to a clientele of sophisticated art-lovers. Both Joli's six capricci and Cajo Mario, as we shall see, push Voltaire's gallery metaphor to extremes, (re)combining classicist inspirations so that each individual creation gains its place in a thematic sequence or ‘gallery’, inviting comparison with related works. Their intertextuality is signalled so overtly, moreover, that their central narratives become suppressed by remote subjects, confusing the most perceptive viewers and making them feel displaced to another realm, fictitious or historical. But let us first consider Joli's legacy.
JOLI'S CAPRICES
Considered by Farinelli as ‘famous in his craft and practice in the Theatre’ (‘famoso nel suo mestiere e prattica nel Teatro’),Footnote 16 Joli may have made a greater impact on the art of his time than posterity has been willing to admit.Footnote 17 Joli was apprenticed with Raffaello Rinaldo in Modena and Giovanni Paolo Panini in Rome before developing a successful career as easel painter, interior decorator and set designer. His multifaceted talent took him to Venice, Padua, Reggio Emilia, London, Madrid and Naples, where Joli ended his career in the capacity of ‘inventore, dipintore, ed architetto delle scene’ to the Teatro San Carlo.Footnote 18 Joli designed several productions that involved music by Jommelli: Merope at the Venetian Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo (1741), Armida abbandonata (1770), Demofoonte (fourth version, 1770) and Ifigenia in Tauride (1771) at the Neapolitan San Carlo, as well as the revivals – under Farinelli's supervision – of Demetrio (1751; originally Parma, 1749) and Semiramide riconosciuta (1753; originally Piacenza, 1753) at the Teatro del Buen Retiro in Madrid.
With only a handful of his set designs surviving, notions of Joli's style must be gleaned from his endeavours in the genre on which his renown now rests: the capriccio (architettonico) or ‘architectural fantasy’.Footnote 19 The capriccio was developed in the early 1700s by Luca Carlevaris, Marco Ricci, Antonio Canaletto and other Venetian artists from two quintessentially eighteenth-century genres: the view painting (veduta), with its (deceptive) topographic precision and luminous palette, and theatrical decor, from which the capriccio adopted the then-popular oblique perspective (vista per angolo).Footnote 20 To a greater extent than the veduta and stage set, the capriccio catered to the taste of connoisseurs through pseudo-realistic tableaus of ancient monuments displaced to different locations and enriched with imaginary staffage (figures and props). In one such work by Joli (Figure 1), a black page is freed by Roman warriors in a Corinthian atrium. Any suspicion that the painter is guilty of realism – of portraying an existing location – is dispelled by comparison of this canvas with a second capriccio by Joli (Figure 2), depicting Alexander the Great's (356–323 BC) discovery of Achilles's tomb. Curiously enough, the spot in question, marked by an equestrian statue, is located in a dilapidated version of the atrium seen in the former painting, despite the action being situated in the Hellenic era. A third capriccio by Joli (Figure 3) places the by now familiar atrium in the garden of an eighteenth-century palace, where it is populated by courtly, fashionable people. Joli expert Ralph Toledano has identified no fewer than three additional versions of the painting in private collections: one has the atrium look out on a Mediterranean coastline, with oriental characters suggesting a Roman settlement somewhere in north Africa; another flips the architecture horizontally and presents alternative statuary, a cupola, stairs, an extra alcove and an arched wall to the rear; while a third copies the two previous capricci but introduces a different narrative and idiosyncratic details.Footnote 21
Figure 1 Antonio Joli, Interior of a Palace with the Liberation of a Black Page. Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della Città di Napoli e della Reggia di Caserta. Used by permission
Figure 2 Joli, Alexander the Great Discovers the Tomb of Achilles. Paisley Museum and Art Galleries, Renfrewshire. Used by permission
Figure 3 Joli, Capriccio: Elegant Figures outside and within a Classical Palace. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Used by permission
The six paintings under discussion do not immediately bespeak the inventive qualities of the capriccio as a genre. Rather than presenting ‘capricious’ or bewilderingly original compositions, each work presents a variation or ‘fantasy’ on one and the same Corinthian atrium, which seems stylistically more indebted to the Settecento than to Roman antiquity. Theatre historians will instantly recognize this architectural frame as a ‘stock set’ (scena di dotazione), the modular ‘flats’ and ‘drops’ of which Joli combined with a variety of ‘backdrops’, ‘set pieces’, ‘props’ and ‘costumed actors’ in order to represent different interiors and exteriors. On a deeper interpretative level, the action, architectural frame, staffage and background engage in an intricate relationship with the Corinthian atrium, which functions as a ‘commonplace’ (locus topicus) in the strictest sense of the term – a generic frame that can denote any type of building at any time, ancient (Figures 1 and 2) or ‘present’ (Figure 3). In keeping with Voltaire's gallery metaphor, each painting actively invites juxtaposition with others in the ‘series’. Variable content fills this frame in the guise of stairs, balustrades, balconies and reliefs, now present in the foreground, then relegated to the back or altogether absent. In sum, Joli's six capricci combine two layers, the one (atrium) permanent and universal, the other (staffage) transitory and idiosyncratic, into a modular or composite representation that invites connoisseurs to recompose the thematic gallery envisaged by the artist. It is this compositional duplicity that provides a vital clue to understanding Jommelli's Cajo Mario, which received its premiere at the Roman Teatro Argentina on 6 February 1746.
OBSCURE STAFFAGE
In contrast to what its title suggests, Cajo Mario has hardly anything to do with the historical Roman consul Caius Marius (157–86 BC), his political strife with Lucius Cornelius Sulla (c138–78 BC) or the ensuing clash between the proletarians (populares) and patricians (optimates) that paved the way for social war and Marius's banishment in the first century BC. Instead, librettist Gaetano Roccaforte (fl. 1743–1759) situated the action on 1 January 104 BC, on which day Rome celebrated Marius's return as victor of the Jugurthine War (Bellum Iugurthinum): a conflict between Rome and Numidia (modern Algeria) that flared in 112 BC and ended seven years later with the handover and execution of King Jugurtha.Footnote 22 Roccaforte's synopsis (argomento) informs the reader that Micipsa, the son of Scipio Africanus's ally Masinissa and ruler of Numidia (148–118 BC), left three heirs: two biological sons, Hiempsal and Adherbal, and an adoptive son, Jugurtha, the illegitimate child of Micipsa's brother Mastanabal.Footnote 23 The eldest of the three princes, Jugurtha considered himself the sole heir to the Numidian crown, and usurped sovereignty by murdering his stepbrother Hiempsal (118 BC). Jugurtha's crime ignited a civil war (118–112 BC) that split Numidia into a western and eastern kingdom, the former governed by Jugurtha, the latter by Micipsa's surviving son Adherbal. Jugurtha's military campaign to annex Adherbal's territory and kill his opponent divided Rome into an interventionist camp, represented by Marius and the proletarians, and a non-interventionist party, endorsed by Sulla, who considered Jugurtha a friend of Rome in light of his past services to General Scipio Africanus. Jugurtha's slaughter of Italian merchants (112 BC), however, compelled Rome to mobilize its troops and Marius to enter the Jugurthine War as consular legate in 109 BC, becoming consul and commander two years later, and conquering Numidia two years after that.Footnote 24
According to Roccaforte, the historical tapestry provided him with no more than a backdrop to a plot he drew in part from Livy's Ab urbe condita (c29–27 BC), Plutarch's biography of Marius in the Parallel Lives (early second century AD), Florus's Epitome of Roman History (before c130 AD), and from his ‘verisimilar’ invention.Footnote 25 What Roccaforte did not disclose was his direct inspiration for Cajo Mario: this was Calfurnia (1713), a Venetian dramma per musica by Grazio Braccioli (see Table 1).Footnote 26 In Braccioli's Calfurnia, too, the title character (a tenor in Jommelli's version) has a daughter named (Marzia) Calfurnia (soprano), after the ‘Calpurnia’ described in the Parallela Minora (also Parallela Græca et Romana) formerly attributed to Plutarch.Footnote 27 The maiden is promised to Annius Trebonius (Annio Trebonio), whose name Roccaforte shortened to Annius (Annio, soprano), either in homage to Servilia's homonymous lover in Metastasio's La clemenza di Tito (1734), or to divert the figure from an anecdote recorded in Plutarch's biography of Marius in the Parallel Lives:
Table 1 The characters in Braccioli's Calfurnia (Venice, 1713) and Roccaforte's Cajo Mario (Rome, 1746)
Caius Lusius, a nephew of [Marius] . . . was a man of good reputation, but he had a weakness for beautiful youths. This officer was enamoured of one of the young men who served under him, by name Trebonius, and had made unsuccessful attempts to seduce him. But finally, at night, he sent a servant with a summons for Trebonius. The young man came, since he could not refuse to obey a summons, but when he had been introduced into the tent and Caius attempted violence upon him, he drew his sword and slew him. Marius was not with the army when this happened; but on his return he brought Trebonius to trial. Here there were many accusers, but not a single advocate, wherefore Trebonius himself courageously took the stand and told all about the matter, bringing witnesses to show that he had often refused the solicitations of Lusius and that in spite of large offers he had never prostituted himself to anyone. Then Marius, filled with delight and admiration, ordered the customary crown for brave exploits to be brought, and with his own hands placed it on the head of Trebonius, declaring that at a time which called for noble examples he had displayed the most noble conduct.Footnote 28
Lusius, the assaulter, also features in Calfurnia and Cajo Mario, albeit as Lucius (Lucio, mezzo-soprano), the (heterosexual) pursuer of Calpurnia and secret ally of Jugurtha's daughter – named Alvida in Calfurnia, Rodope (soprano) in Cajo Mario. Calfurnia follows Plutarch's account in specifying Lucius as Marius's cousin (‘Lucio Nipote di Mario’),Footnote 29 whereas Cajo Mario omits references to the blood relationship between the men. In Roccaforte's libretto, finally, there appears a Roman prefect, Aquilius (Aquilio), whose name may refer either to Claudius Aquilius Gallus, a key figure in Marius's military conquests and reforms,Footnote 30 Manius Aquillius, a lieutenant of Marius in 103 BC and fellow consul in 101 BC,Footnote 31 or to a tribune by that name in Metastasio's Adriano in Siria (1732).
A salient difference between Calfurnia and Cajo Mario lies in their musical afterlife: while Braccioli's work received a mere two settings, one by Johann David Heinichen (Venice, 1713) and another by Giovanni Bononcini (London, 1724), Roccaforte's Cajo Mario held the stage throughout the second half of the eighteenth century in settings by Jommelli (Rome, 1746), Baldassarre Galuppi (Venice, 1764), Niccolò Piccinni (Naples, 1765), Pasquale Anfossi (Venice, 1770), Carlo Monza (Venice, 1777), Domenico Cimarosa (Mantua, 1780), Ferdinando Bertoni (Venice, 1781), Francesco Bianchi (Naples, 1784) and Felice Giordani (Milan, 1791). Far from indicating a lapse of interest in Roccaforte's libretto, the conspicuous eighteen-year interval (1746–1764) between Jommelli and Galuppi's settings marks the outright monopoly of Jommelli's version, fifteen revivals of which are recorded with certainty.Footnote 32
Those examining Jommelli's setting might easily grasp the reasons for this success, discovering in Cajo Mario a crowd-pleaser erected on the commonplaces of opera seria. Slapstick humour, for instance, marks Act 1 Scene 12, when Annius's obbligato recitative to the ‘merciless gods’ (‘Ingratissimi Numi’) segues into a ‘nightingale’ aria, ‘Se perde l'usignuolo’, in which the warrior expresses his fear of losing Calfurnia (Example 1).Footnote 33 No doubt triggered by the vocal profile of the original performer of that aria, Gioacchino Conti detto ‘Il Gizziello’ (1714–1761), Jommelli clothes Roccaforte's lyrics with nearly every vocal and instrumental formula associated with operatic nightingales since Almirena's ‘Augelletti, che cantate’ in Act 1 Scene 6 of Handel's Rinaldo (London, 1711) and Epitide's ‘Quell'usignuolo’ in Act 2 Scene 4 of Geminiano Giacomelli's Merope (Venice, 1734).Footnote 34 That Annius chirps his show-stopper in the atrium of a temple dedicated to Jupiter – a resonant room, indeed, but also one of Rome's most sacred places – makes this aria all the more risible for modern audiences.Footnote 35
Example 1 Jommelli, ‘Se perde l'usignuolo’, Cajo Mario, Act 1 Scene 12, bars 11–18. I-Nc, Rari 7.7.8 and 7.7.9; GB-Lbl, Add. 16030 [I see the light of a dark torch, I hear the ghost . . .]
A second exercise in stereotype occurs in Act 2 Scene 13, as Marius begins to hallucinate out of remorse for the pending death of his daughter – who will naturally remain alive:
MARIO MARIUS
Mora la figlia.
Tutto si versi il sangue . . . Oh Dio . . . ma intanto
E intanto in Ciel giunto colà tra i Numii
La bell'alma felice
Dall'immortal sua sede
Vegga del padre suo
The girl dies.
All her blood is shed . . . Oh God . . . but meanwhile,
Meanwhile in heaven, joining the gods,
The beautiful, happy soul
Sees her father from her immortal seat
Upon which the delusional consul launches an aria that brims with ‘gothic’ imagery:
MARIO MARIUS
Che più tardate, o barbari
Fieri rimorsi atroci
A lacerarmi il cor.
Svenatemi, uccidetemi,
Toglietemi,
All'orrore
Di comparir peggiore
De’ fieri Mostri ancor.
What are you waiting for,
barbarous, fierce and cruel remorse,
to tear my heart apart?
Slay me, kill me,
take away
the horror
of looking even worse
than the fierce monsters.
While Jommelli chooses to underscore Marius's battle against fate, setting the aria Allegro assai and in D major, with oboes, trumpets and horns evoking the consul's heroism, Roccaforte's text is firmly embedded in the tradition of the ombra scene – an artefact of the Oresteian tradition, particularly Orestes's delusions after the assassination of his mother Clytemnestra.Footnote 36 The ombra topos featured in countless operas before Cajo Mario, including such hugely successful works as Jommelli's own Astianatte (Rome, 1741).Footnote 37 Still, Cajo Mario is unique in featuring it twice, both times in soliloquies by Marius that close a section (Act 2 and the first tableau of Act 3). While the ombra foregrounds the remorse causing Marius's delusion in Act 2 Scene 13,Footnote 38 it centres in Act 3 Scene 7 on his audiovisual sensations of his daughter's spirit. After an extensive obbligato recitative, in which the tormented statesman and father reproaches himself for sacrificing an innocent daughter for the benefit of Rome, Marius envisions the ghost of Marzia:
MARIO MARIUS
Veggo un lume di torbida face,
Odo l'ombra, che freme d'intorno:
Ombra, ah taci, deh lasciami in pace:
Non son'io, che ti privo del giorno,
Sono i Numi, è il Destino crudel.Footnote 39
I see the light of a dark torch,
I hear the ghost, quivering inside:
Ghost, please be silent, leave me alone:
It is not me who deprives you of your life,
It is the gods and cruel destiny.
In contrast to ‘Che più tardate’, Jommelli here portrays the ombra unambiguously, having the singer perform a monotone against a haunting orchestral fabric comprised of shivering strings, subdued horns and – as the ‘ghost’ enters the picture – additional pairs of horns, oboes and bassoons (Example 2).
Example 2 Jommelli, ‘Veggo un lume’, Cajo Mario, Act 3 Scene 7, bars 1–14 [I would like to hope . . . oh God . . . I would . . . but then . . . I could not . . . I am afraid . . . despair . . . ah, no]
The question is, of course, whether such musical and textual commonplaces were aimed at an audience of less erudite spectators in the hope of ensuring the opera's success on the provincial stage. Alternatively, might the clever introduction of nightingale arias and ombra scenes in a story not readily associated with such ‘staffage’ have appealed to more sophisticated opera lovers, such as the ‘Roman Nobility and Curia’ to whom Roccaforte dedicated the libretto?Footnote 40 In what follows, I shall suppose that at least part of the audience paid close attention to the opera's imaginative play with commonplaces. In assuming such a ‘connoisseur's perspective’, I will argue that Cajo Mario functioned as an audio-visual equivalent to the six ‘Corinthian frame paintings’ by Antonio Joli.
THE IPHIGENIA FRAME
On closer examination, intertextuality does not merely pervade individual scenes of Cajo Mario, but defines the opera's dramatic nexus, a legend reported in the Pseudo-Plutarch's Parallela minora: ‘When Marius was fighting the tribe of the Cimbri [Germanic tribe] and was being worsted, he saw in a dream that he would conquer if he sacrificed his daughter before the battle’.Footnote 41 Braccioli and Roccaforte allude to this rather obscure episode from Marius's life in their librettos. In the very opening scene of Cajo Mario, Marius refuses to celebrate his triumph over Jugurtha by first referring to Hannibal's unanticipated arrival at the gates of Rome during the Second Punic War (218–201 BC), then to the three consuls that had been defeated by the Cimbri in 105 BC: Quintus Servillius Cæpio, Marcus Iunius Silanus and one ‘Manilius’, whose name should read Gnæus Mallius Maximus.Footnote 42 Still in the opening scene of Cajo Mario, Marius tells Aquilius to wait for him at the temple, where he is to consult the auguries – a hint at Marius's penchant for omens as recorded by Plutarch on the basis of (lost) biographies by Scaurus, Rufus, Catullus and Sulla.Footnote 43
Pseudo-Plutarch's story of Marius's sacrifice of his daughter – or his intention to sacrifice her to satisfy the gods – is evidently built on the foundations of Iphigenia at Aulis, a myth that had already provided the subject for various opere serie, including a work performed at the Teatro Argentina in 1739: Geminiano Giacomelli's Achille in Aulide, after Apostolo Zeno's Ifigenìa in Aulide (Vienna, 1718).Footnote 44 Twelve years later, Jommelli himself would premiere an Ifigenìa at the Teatro Argentina starring the creator of Cajo Mario, the tenor Litterio ‘Lettorino’ Ferrari, as Agamemnon.Footnote 45 In that opera, Calpurnia is transformed into Iphigenia (Ifigenìa, soprano), Annius into Achilles (Achille, soprano), and Lucius into Ajax (Ajace, mezzo-soprano), with motifs such as patriotism, love, jealousy and secret hostility serving as the glue between these characters (Table 2).
Table 2 Principal characters in Jommelli's Cajo Mario and L'Ifigenìa
Roccaforte spared himself the effort of disguising the obvious links between Greek mythology and Roman republican history in Cajo Mario. In Act 2 Scene 3 he consciously opens up the plot by imposing a remote, yet parallel narrative frame (or ‘abyss’) on the opera's setting: Rome in 104 BC. In this scene the déjà vu of seeing Calpurnia undergo the fate of Iphigenia has become so manifest for her lover, Annius, that he openly wonders: ‘Am I dreaming, or I am awake? Am I in Rome, or in Aulis? Is this Marius, or rather the wicked Atreid [descendant of the Mycenaean King Atreus – in other words, Agamemnon]?’ (‘Inorridisco! aghiaccio! / Che Genitor crudel! Sogno? Son desto? / Sono in Roma? ò in Aulide? / È Mario questo, o il scelerato Atride?’).Footnote 46 This one statement forces spectators who have hitherto been unaware of the plot's intertextuality to turn their imagination from one story and site (Caius Marius in Republican Rome) to the other (Agamemnon in ancient Greece) in order to establish explicit, allegorical ties between two realms of fiction. Interestingly enough, the literary technique at work here – called mise en abyme – is itself a commonplace, indebted to Metastasio's Ezio (1728), a libretto Jommelli set in 1741. At the height of her distress, the female protagonist of Ezio, Fulvia, questions whether she is in Rome, breathing the ‘airs of the Tiber’, or on the ‘streets of Thebes or Argos’, seeing the ‘domestic furies from the offspring of Cadmus [founder of Thebes] and the Atreids come to these coasts from Grecian shores, fertile in tragedies’ (‘Misera dove son! / L'aure del Tebro / Son queste ch'io respiro? / Per le strade mi aggiro / Di Tebe, e d'Argo? O dalle Greche sponde / Di Tragedie feconde, / Le domestiche furie / Vennero a questi lidi / Della prole di Cadmo, e degli Atridi?’).Footnote 47
Calpurnia effectively fulfils the role of Iphigenia substitute. Although the young woman only learns of her pending sacrifice in the second act, she has already erupted emotionally on at least two occasions during the first act. Instead of happiness over her betrothal with Annius, her main feelings are torment and fear, expressed in ‘Vorrei sperare . . . oh Dio’, a syllabic aria with multiple rests, off-beat accompaniments and nervous violin parts (Example 3).Footnote 48 For reasons that are still unclear at this point of the story, she is in such distress by the ninth scene of Act 1 that she palpitates with every single movement or breath of wind – an image Jommelli conveys in the introductory ritornello of her aria ‘Sposo, oh Dio!’ through alternations of pizzicato and arco (Example 4).
Example 3 Jommelli, ‘Vorrei sperare . . . oh Dio!’, Cajo Mario, Act 1 Scene 3, bars 32–49
Example 4 Jommelli, ‘Sposo, oh Dio!’, Cajo Mario, Act 1 Scene 9, bars 9–12, violins
Although Calpurnia's premonitions may reflect a young bride's doubts on the brink of marriage, it is tempting to connect them with an occult character Roccaforte chose not to copy from Plutarch's Parallel Lives via Braccioli's Calpurnia: a ‘certain Syrian woman, named Martha, who was said to have the gift of prophecy’, and who
had previously been rejected by the senate when she wished to appear before them with reference to these matters and predicted future events. Then she got audience of the women and gave them proofs of her skill, and particularly the wife of Marius, at whose feet she sat when some gladiators were fighting and successfully foretold which one was going to be victorious. In consequence of this [Martha] was sent to Marius by his wife, and was admired by him.Footnote 49
The Syrian fortune-teller became a ‘prophet of Osiris’ (profetessa di Osiri) in Braccioli's cast: Jugurtha's daughter in disguise, invoking the underworld, transforming idols into monsters and conjuring up furies from a magic mirror. Roccaforte, who admitted anything but the irrational in his version, may have retained elements of Martha in Marzia Calpurnia, having the latter foresee terrible events and, in keeping with Plutarch's account, intrude into the Senate (Act 2 Scene 11), for which she is severely reproached by her father.Footnote 50
Close analysis of Cajo Mario buttresses the hypothesis that the opera can be understood as a capriccio, the framing architecture of which is provided by the myth of Iphigenia in Aulis, while its empty spaces are filled in with staffage from a wide range of sources – from Farinellian nightingale arias to Oresteian hallucinations. Thus composed, Jommelli's hugely successful opera testifies to classicism's paradoxical endeavour to enclose original subject matter in familiar frameworks. Marius's sacrifice of Calpurnia was not a hackneyed subject at all, but Iphigenia in Aulis and other mythological narratives loom so large over the opera's plot that the connoisseur does well to place Cajo Mario in an imaginary gallery of paintings and to take (mischievous) pleasure in the dissection of its inspirations.
