The chorus of baroque opera on the contemporary stage: formal issues and stage direction’s solutions

Abstract

When we think about the choral element with reference to Italian opera, our minds are immediately drawn to the grand choral masses of nineteenth-century opera, capable of evoking strong emotional impact in the audience. Yet, within the overall framework of the dramatic action of the Ottocento operas, the significance of choruses is often rather marginal and secondary. In contrast, in the so-called ‘early opera’, the chorus and choral elements assume fundamental importance not only in terms of scenic and musical outcome, but also in the whole dramatic construction. The absence of a direct transmission of representational traditions and customs from early seventeenth-century operas, as well as the instability of the status of the musical texts that preserve them, pose operational challenges for contemporary opera stage direction. This contribution investigates these challenges with particular reference to Orfeo (1607) by Claudio Monteverdi with libretto by Alessandro Striggio, through the analysis of several productions that represent different approaches to the original text and, more broadly, different trends in contemporary opera stage direction.