Pietro Metastasio

• Born: January 3, 1698
• Birthplace: Rome
• Died: April 12, 1782
• Place of death: Vienna, Austria

Other Literary Forms

In addition to his plays, Pietro Metastasio wrote a number of oratorios, some stylized love songs of lyric charm called canzonetta, and several volumes of criticism and letters.

Achievements

Pietro Metastasio created the first great libretti in opera. Though they were written primarily as dramatic vehicles for music, his melodramas, as they were called, were so poetic and so dramatically effective that they were often performed as independent plays.

In the century or more before Metastasio, the libretto had sunk from its primacy in the works of the early operatic composers, such as Claudio Monteverdi, to mere episodic threads between scenes of spectacle and exaggerated action, even low comedy. The music, particularly as it allowed for feats of virtuosity and vocal fireworks, made the libretto an almost vestigial part of the performance; indeed, the poetry of most of the libretti during the hundred years before Metastasio was negligible.

Following the pioneering reform of his predecessor, Apostolo Zeno, Metastasio brought an impressive artistic integrity to the form. Subordinating the merely spectacular, he simplified plot structure, creating scenes that both enhanced the music and delineated character and idea. His melodramas were thematically controlled: logical, dignified, and poetic.

His lyric gift was the key to his art. The poetic language had a conciseness, a precision, a fluency that meshed the action perfectly with the music. In effect, he was not only the first great librettist but also the first modern one. In his hands, the opera became genuinely dramatic as well as musical. His influence was such that almost all of his major works were set to music by many major composers: Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Antonio Vivaldi, Alessandro Scarlatti, Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frederick Handel, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven.

Biography

Pietro Metastasio was born Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi, the fourth child of a poor family living in Rome. Though little is known of his early years, he seems to have been a precocious child, gifted with the ability to create lyrics spontaneously. The first important event of his childhood years occurred in 1708, when, at the age of ten, he was reciting and singing extemporaneous verse to a group of playmates and he was noticed by the influential lawyer and literary man Gianvincenzo Gravina. So impressed was he with the boy’s ability that Gravina secured permission from the parents to adopt him and carried the boy into a world of classical and legal studies.

Though the story sounds improbable, the practice of extemporary declamation was not an unusual one in Italy at that time. As a form of public entertainment, it often dazzled and frequently awed the audience, who watched as poets vied with one another to expatiate in eight-line rhyming stanzas on any subject offered. Metastasio himself relates in his letters how, one evening at Gravina’s, he improvised eighty stanzas at a single sitting. Such a feat exhausted the youth, however, and Gravina, fearful for the boy’s health, soon put a stop to such improvisations.

Gravina himself was a member of an important literary club. A coterie of artists and poets who had originally come together in a Roman garden in 1690, the group formalized its association, founding an academy called Arcadia. Its members were devoted to the writing of simple, classically inspired verse, poetry of pastoral clarity and elegance free from the artificial mannerism of the seventeenth century baroque poet Giambattista Marino and his followers.

Arcadia was an important early influence on the work of the young Pietro Trapassi. Indicative of his respect for the classics, Gravina had already changed the boy’s family name to “Metastasio,” a Greek translation of Trapassi, meaning “crossing” and symbolizing, appropriately, the crossing from a humble, untutored station to a position of cultivated study and discipline. Metastasio’s admission to the Academy in 1718, at the age of twenty, provided him with examples of Italian neoclassical poetry that he would bring to theatrical brilliance in his melodramas. The Academy taught him the importance of verse that was musical, precise, clear—verse in which importance was given to the sound of the word, the rhythm of the phrase.

Ironically, Gravina died shortly before Metastasio’s formal admission to the Academy, but he left his protégé a large inheritance so that, for the first time in his life, Metastasio was independent. Both the law and literature now consumed his interest, and he continued to write lyric and conventional love poetry that began to attract notice. By 1719, he had moved to Naples, taking a position as law clerk in the office of one of that city’s most respected jurists. Meanwhile, his fame as a poet was spreading.

Though he had produced only one minor dramatic work, Justin (1717), published in the same volume as his short poems (Poesie), Metastasio received a commission from the viceroy in Naples to write a dramatic serenade in honor of the birthday of Elizabeth, the wife of Charles VI, emperor of Austria and ruler of Italy. He responded with Gli orti esperidi, a short play that was to be a critical turning point in his life and career. The female lead of Venus was sung by Marianna Bulgarelli, one of the most famous actresses and singers of the era. Known as La Romanina, she was impressed by the lyric beauty of the piece and was further taken by the handsome young poet, whose courtliness and quiet elegance so naturally complemented his genius. She fell in love with Metastasio and took him as her protégé.

His relationship with La Romanina was the most significant in his career. Though married, she encouraged Metastasio to live in her household in Rome, where he would have more opportunity to pursue his art. That the two became lovers is probable but not certain. Metastasio’s letters to her are complimentary, tactful, discreet; hers to him have not survived. What is certain is that Romanina convinced him to give up the law and to turn his attention full-time to poetry. She provided him with an intellectually stimulating environment, introduced him to theatrical friends, writers, and artists, and, according to some biographers, served as a critical sounding board for the development of his craft. In her salon, he immersed himself in the study of music. Their relationship was to last until her death in 1734.

For her Metastasio wrote his first melodrama—a play meant to be performed with music. Dido Forsaken was a sensational success. Nothing like it had appeared in the Italian theater before. The melodrama was compact and logical, and the poetry was of a high order, serving not as an excuse for the music but as an integral part of it. Dido Forsaken is one of the first truly modern operatic scripts.

Some half-dozen melodramas followed, and by 1730, Metastasio was one of the best-known dramatists in Italy. On the retirement of Apostolo Zeno as official poet to the Viennese court, Metastasio was offered the post. He arrived there in April, 1730, and from that date until his death more than half a century later, he wrote the works that were to establish him as the greatest of Italian librettists.

His life at court took on the regularity and the ease that made it possible for him to produce with great facility, though his life became, from a biographer’s point of view, one of routine uneventfulness. The first decade of his stay in Vienna, the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, was the most productive of his career. From 1730 to 1740, he wrote the greatest melodramas—libretti—of the age. They appeared quickly, dazzlingly, in succession: Demetrius, The Olympiad, The Mercy of Titus, Themistocles, and Atilius Regulus.

The Countess D’Althan, who had first known Metastasio when he was in Naples, became his patron and his confidante during these Viennese years; she filled the intellectual and emotional void left by Romanina’s death at the height of his achievements. Although he refused to learn German, he was always courtly and diplomatic. Some contemporary accounts scorn his servility, his readiness to bow and to kiss the hand that fed him. He lived relatively isolated from the events at court, seemingly unconcerned with the momentous historical events of the era.

After 1740, Metastasio’s powers began to wane. He had been engaged in almost ceaseless writing, often by command, always for an occasion; by 1750, his melodramas had become competent and crafty but little else.

His final years were not happy. Afflicted with a nervous disorder sometimes identified as hypochondria, Metastasio found writing increasingly difficult. He was aware, too, that the operatic world was beginning to turn away from his style of heroic tragedy—the opera seria—in preference for a more bourgeois, less aristocratic tradition exemplified by Christoph Willibald Gluck and Mozart. In addition, the lighter comic drama—the opera buffa—made the Metastasian conflicts of love and duty seem stodgy and old-fashioned, reliquaries of a pre-Enlightenment age.

By the time of his death in 1782, Metastasio’s vogue had passed. Yet his influence was such that a medal was struck, bearing the phrase “The Italian Sophocles,” in honor of Europe’s most outstanding musical dramatist. His reputation is secure as a great librettist who was also a first-rate poet.

Analysis

The Metastasian themes that seemed so old-fashioned in the late eighteenth century were the very epitome of an artistic reflection of order, of monarchy, of a world controlled by reason and distrustful of the passions. The heroes and heroines of Pietro Metastasio’s dramas are highborn princes, kings and queens who ultimately subdue their baser drives and who adhere to an ideal—patriotism, duty, honor. Conflicts in a Metastasian drama are therefore not physical but psychological. Characters often philosophize and rarely bleed. The action of the drama—static by standards of a later theatrical tradition—revolves about the protagonist’s resolution of the conflict, a resolution sometimes closed by death but more often also by happiness and salvation. In the end, dignity triumphs; order is restored.

Dido Forsaken

Dido Forsaken, Metastasio’s first melodrama and his earliest success, is an excellent introduction to his work because it illustrates some of the major characteristics of his later Viennese period. In his introduction to the drama, Metastasio notes that his source was Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553), in deference to the classics, which typified the eighteenth century’s idea of imitation and adaptation of Greek and Roman literary models. His plot is straightforward and uncomplicated. Dido, widowed queen of Carthage, has fallen in love with Aeneas, the Trojan warrior who has escaped from the fall of Troy and who has been shipwrecked on her North African shores. Aeneas loves Dido, as well, but his mission—he has been ordained by the gods to found Rome—must take precedence over his feelings. After declaring his love, he sets sail for Italy and his destiny. Angry, then forlorn, Dido hurls herself on her own funeral pyre, and in the concluding scene, Neptune rises from the sea and quenches the flames.

To this basic plot, Metastasio fuses an element from Ovid, who, he declares in the same introduction, portrays Iarbas, King of the Moors, as one of Dido’s suitors who destroys Carthage after Dido’s death. In the interest of “good theater,” however, Metastasio introduces Iarbas in disguise and pits him as a rival of Aeneas. Interestingly, the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe had earlier written with Thomas NasheDido, Queen of Carthage (pr. c. 1586-1587), in which Iarbas is portrayed as Aeneas’s chief rival. If Metastasio knew of Marlowe’s play, however (which seemed unlikely), he took little from it.

Metastasio’s piece on Dido, unlike that of Marlowe, is a tight, three-act tragedy that opens with Aeneas having already announced his intention of leaving Dido. Metastasio thereby limited the action to the conflict of emotions and places dramatic emphasis on the psychological forces rather than on the physical. The epic sweep of Aeneas’s story is distilled into a lyric cameo.

Moreover, Metastasio limited the number of characters. To the three major ones forming the basis of the action, he introduced only three others: Selene, Dido’s sister (“Anna” in the Aeneid), who is secretly in love with Aeneas; Araspe, Iarbas’s confidant, who is secretly in love with Selene; and Osmida, Dido’s confidante, who is secretly plotting with Iarbas for the queen’s overthrow. This use of confidants is a marked characteristic of Metastasian drama. The confidant is an effectively economical device for externalizing the conflict by providing alternative courses of action for the main character. The confidant is, in effect, a dramatization of the protagonist’s inner voice, thus eliminating the need for the dramatic monologue or the soliloquy. This second group of characters also provides the grounds for a subplot of intrigue—as opposed to the honesty of Aeneas’s and Dido’s motives—and keeps the play from becoming static by maintaining a tension of opposing forces that alternates with each scene or clusters of scenes.

With almost mathematical precision, the scenes of swordplay between Aeneas and Iarbas—no one dies and there is no bloodshed or violence depicted—occur near the end of act 1 and again near the beginning of act 3, perfectly balancing the main, largely declamatory scenes portraying the emotions of love and hate and the sentiments of duty, honor, loyalty, and even repentance.

Declamation, in fact, is a strategic principle in the structure of Dido Forsaken. The characters declare their love, proclaim their intentions, and assert their feelings in neat, compact recitative—a middle way between speech and song, between spoken dialogue and sung verse. Significantly, major scene clusters conclude with a character’s singing in arietta, or small aria, placed not only for virtuoso effect but also for dramatic emphasis and tension.

Despite the declamation, Dido herself is portrayed as a woman of genuine passion. Though she is willing to die for Aeneas, she is not an infatuated ingenue, but rather a queen who knows how to rule. Angry at Aeneas for denying her love, she reminds him shrewdly that she has presided over Carthage all these years without him, and without him has seen it prosper. She bitterly mocks him at his delay, sarcastically asking him why he was not already in Italy, subduing kings and winning other kingdoms. She is a woman of spirit: When she kills herself at the end, it is as much an act of strength as a gesture of despair.

Demetrius

Dido Forsaken is one of Metastasio’s few melodramas in which the protagonist dies. Those representative of his best work end in reconciliation. These works of his Viennese period established the classic format and structure of the Metastasian drama. The first work of this period, one of his best, is Demetrius, a heroic melodrama suffused with idyllic sentiment. Its author claimed in his letters that the play brought tears to the eyes of even the most bearlike members of the audience when it was performed in 1731.

The plot, like that of Dido Forsaken, is clear and uncomplicated. There is the same limitation on the number of characters, the same logical distribution of arietta among the principals, and the same technique of using the confidant to externalize the conflict, which is resolved by the triumph of Reason and Order over emotional turmoil. Unlike Dido Forsaken, Demetrius ends happily; no one dies, no one is sacrificed.

Cleonice, Queen of Syria, is loved by Alcestes, a shepherd risen to the rank of soldier and reared by a nobleman, Phenicius, who is also the father of Olinthus. Alcestes is in reality Demetrius, son of King Demetrius, who died in exile and who gave his son to Phenicius to rear incognito until such time as he could assume his rightful throne.

Cleonice, meanwhile, must choose a husband to share her throne and is pressured by Olinthus to decide in his favor. The queen, however, loves Alcestes, though she is ignorant of his royal lineage. Urged by the people to choose a consort, she is torn between her love for Alcestes and her duty as queen to choose among the nobled blood and to respect “decorum.” She is encouraged in her choice of a prince by her confidante, Barsene, who is secretly in love with Alcestes and wants him for herself.

The major scenes of the melodrama center on Cleonice’s confrontations with Alcestes, during which she explains her dilemma and her reasons for choosing honor over love, loyalty to the idea of sovereignty over personal feelings. In the end, however, Phenicius arranges for Alcestes’ true identity to be revealed, the lovers are united, and the play concludes with a grand chorus of reconciliation.

The theme of Demetrius is the triumph of harmony over the chaos consequent to the submission to personal desires. Writing for an absolute monarchy, Metastasio is stating in dramatic form the philosophical and political idea that reason, represented by the monarchy, brings order to a disordered world. Cleonice understands, as she tells Alcestes, that the crown is often a burdensome jewel, that the price of sovereignty is selflessness: “Tyrannical Honor! Because of you I must forever be deprived of what I hold dear.”

That she is united with Alcestes in the finale is typical of the idyllic sentiment popular in the eighteenth century, and to later tastes, such an ending appears trite, even comic. In the world order that Metastasio was upholding, her union with the real Demetrius is the logical reward for her loyalty, the natural result of putting honor above personal happiness.

The plot of Demetrius is the reverse of that of Dido Forsaken. Where Aeneas spurned Dido’s love in pursuit of a higher destiny, so Cleonice refuses Alcestes’ love in deference to her high responsibility. Both Aeneas and Cleonice illustrate a glorious self-abnegation in the interest of what should be.

Demetrius is superior to Dido Forsaken in the greater depth of characterization. Olinthus, for example, who is reconciled at the end, is a Hotspur, a fiery, hot-tempered youth who has no false modesty about his preeminence as a match for Cleonice or his desire for the throne. He provides the main physical conflict in the melodrama, which succeeds in holding an audience’s interest even though there are no spectacular effects. Only the verbal sparring keeps the play on the move.

The Olympiad

The Olympiad is the most perfectly structured of Metastasio’s melodramas and, like Demetrius, the product of his “golden age” of accomplishment. The play reveals both the strengths and the weaknesses of the poet’s work. It illustrates Metastasio’s mastery of the melodramatic formula already worked out in the previous plays, but it is a mastery that relies on repetition of and variation on established themes rather than on artistic experimentation, innovation, or growth. Metastasio simply reworked previous material and ideas, polishing, trimming, redressing.

The plot is drawn from classical sources, Herodotus and Pausanias, and the general story outline was probably already known to the courtly audience for whom the work—like all eleven of the melodramas of this period—was first performed. Such foreknowledge on the part of the audience allows the poet to begin, much in the manner of the classical Greek epics, late in the sequence of events. By means of this technique, called in medias res, the characters allude to previous actions, bringing the audience up to date naturally. Such a method provides for a remarkable compactness and for a direct, unflagging progress toward the denouement.

The source is a complicated, involved story that seems a cognate version of the Oedipus legend and that, curiously, anticipates the proxy idea contained in Edmond Rostand’s late Romantic drama Cyrano de Bergerac (1897; English translation, 1898). Clistenes, king of Sicyon, is warned by an oracle that his infant son, twin to his sister Aristea, will one day kill his father. The king thus orders the boy to be thrown into the sea, but the baby is saved by Amyntus, who takes him to Crete, giving him to a childless royal couple to rear as their own. Years later, the young man, called Lycidas, falls in love with Argene, but the king forbids the relationship and Argene thus flees to Elis, where she lives as a shepherdess.

Meanwhile, Lycidas saves the life of Megacles, a young man famous for his athletic prowess. The two men become fast friends. When it comes to pass that the Olympic Games are to be held in Elis, Lycidas decides to participate, sees Aristea, and falls in love with her. She has arrived in Elis with her father, Clistenes, who was to preside over the Games. To win the love of Aristea—Lycidas is unaware that she is really his twin—he determines to win glory in the Games and sends for his friend, Megacles, persuading him to participate in the Games in his name. Disguised as Lucidas, Megacles wins the Games and gains the love of Aristea.

The major conflict is Megacles’ loyalty to Lycidas, a loyalty that prevents him from returning Aristea’s love. At the climax, Megacles is discovered as the false Lycidas, Lycidas almost strikes Clistenes in anger but relents, and by the final scene, all is made straight and reconciliation ensues. Happiness reigns for all. That Metastasio could create an effective vehicle from such a clumsy welter of detail is a tribute to his ability as a craftsman. He opens the play only a short time before the Games are to begin, and in the five short scenes of act 1, he has all the relationships drawn and the background clarified. Furthermore, The Olympiad relies less on the confidants and more on love scenes among the four principals. In addition, effective dramatic use is made of the chorus, especially in the climactic scenes in which the choral ariettas provide suspense and excitement. The action is thus condensed and the theme of loyalty is intensified.

The Olympiad remains one of Metastasio’s finest achievements, not because of its subject matter but because of the way such potentially spectacular yet dangerously confusing material is handled. The play shows the reasons for Metastasio’s reputation as one of the century’s greatest musical dramatists—logical intensity, clarity of outline, quickness of movement, and, above all, structure remarkably adaptable to the musical score.

Bibliography

Charlemont, James Caulfield. Lord Charlemont’s History of Italian Poetry from Dante to Metastasio: A Critical Edition from the Autograph Manuscript. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. This volume, edited by George Talbot, presents Lord Charlemont’s critical review of Italian poetry, including the dramas of Metastasio.

Fucilla, Joseph. Introduction to Three Melodramas, by Pietro Metastasio. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1981. Fucilla presents a brief discussion of the life of Metastasio and his works, focusing on the three melodramas that are translated in this volume, Dido Forsaken, Demetrius, and The Olympiad.

Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget). “Metastasio and the Opera.” Studies of Eighteenth Century Italy. 1907. Reprint. New York, Da Capo Press, 1978. Lee examines Metastasio’s relationship with the opera, for which he wrote the first great libretti.

Neville, Don. Metastasio at Home and Abroad: Papers from the International Symposium Faculty of Music, the University of Western Ontario. London, Ont.: University of Western Canada, 1996. This collection of papers examines Metastasio largely from the musical perspective. Bibliographical references.

Stendahl. Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio. New York: Grossman, 1972. This classic study by the nineteenth century author Stendahl examines the life of Metastasio along with those of composers Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.