Follow the Money: Public Opera in Baroque Venice

Venice held a unique position in 17th- and 18th-century Italy. As an independent city state, it was free from the oversight of Vatican censors, who kept a tight lid on everything that was performed in Rome and the surrounding regions. As a republic that elected its leaders from a wide ruling class (rather than following the bloodlines of a single noble family), it boasted an unusually large number of wealthy citizens. And as the host of the most famous carnival in Europe, it was never short of people looking for a good time.

The earliest operas were written for royal courts in cities like Florence and Mantua. But in the mid-1630s, the traveling theater artist Benedetto Ferrari wondered if the new art form might not do well playing to a wider audience. If so, he reasoned, Venice’s annual carnival festivities would be the place to try it out. A period of celebration preceding the 40 ascetic days of Lent, carnival was (and is) celebrated across the Christian world. Yet the most famous carnival by far was the one in Venice, where the festivities stretched from the day after Christmas through Shrove Tuesday, a period of nearly two months. Each year, tourists flocked to the city to enjoy the wild masquerades and general loosening of social strictures for which Venice’s carnival was known.

Betting on the readiness of tourists and wealthy Venetians alike to pay for good entertainment, Ferrari set about planning a public opera performance for the carnival season of 1636–37. The resulting opera, which featured a libretto by Ferrari and marked the inaugural performance of the newly built Teatro San Cassiano, opened to tremendous popular acclaim; it also ushered in a fundamentally new economic model for the performing arts. Previously, composers and musicians had been full-time, salaried employees at the courts of noble families, writing and performing operas and other forms of musical entertainment according to their employers’ whims. By contrast, each production at the Teatro San Cassiano was funded by paying ticket holders. This model was soon adopted by other Venetian impresarios: By 1641, three more public opera houses had opened in Venice, and by 1650, over 50 operas had been performed in the city. Yet with their art form now supported by a paying public, opera composers, librettists, and impresarios had to appeal to public taste—or risk going bankrupt. Wildly impressive set designs became the norm, as did the kind of scandalous storyline that was sure to appeal to rowdy carnival-goers.

The most important (and expensive) part of the new opera venture, however, was the singer. By the late 17th century, star singers were commanding prices that, 50 years before, would have paid for an entire performance, stage sets and all. Impresarios may have balked at the astronomical rates these singers demanded, yet they must have felt it was worth it, since star singers kept audiences coming back for more. The power of the singer also inspired the musical format that was to become standard in Baroque opera: short periods of recitative followed by phenomenal solo arias, after which the singer would bask in applause and then promptly leave the stage.