Pastiching as Artistic Research: Ifigenia / Ipermestra (Brussels, 2006)*

Opera seria or eighteenth-century dramma per musica has repeatedly fallen victim to critique on account of its apparent lack of formal closedness. When held against the model of (post-)Romantic opera, the (seemingly) coherent and inextricable constructions of which are revered as ‘works’ and ‘repertoire’, opera seria indeed cuts a ramshackle figure. Rarely revived or printed in its own day, the genre relies on open structures with exchangeable components (arias, recitatives, scenes and scene complexes, situations, types and topics, etc.) that can be excerpted at will and moved from libretto to libretto, score to score, stage to stage. No matter how hard modern scholars and music promoters have tried to uphold the integrity of a garland of opere serie by ‘master composers’,

See, among others, H.D. Clausen, ‘Die Opernpartitur als “Werk”. Sommer 1723: Händels neuer Anspruch und Aspekte seiner Realisierung in Giulio Cesare’, Händel-Jahrbuch, vol. 64, 2018, pp. 367–385. Clausen’s view is to be contrasted with C. Deshoulières, L’Opéra baroque et la scène moderne: essai de synthèse dramatique, Paris, Fayard, 2000, p. 92, which considers Metastasian opera composers ‘metteurs en musique éphémères’, by analogy with the contemporary stage directors whose productions swiftly replace each other.

All the more inherently modular is the multiple-author ‘method of construction’ of the pasticcio. Although the pasticcio can be aligned with contemporary concepts of montage and collage,

See B. Over and G. zur Nieden (eds), ‘Introduction’, in Operatic Pasticcios in 18th-Century Europe: Contexts, Materials and Aesthetics, Bielefeld, [transcript], 2021, pp. 9–25.

In this modest essay, I will explain how pastiching indeed provides twenty-first-century artist-researchers with a playful, creative tool to come to grips with the music-dramatic syntax of opera seria. Using the case of two one-act pasticci I assembled for students of the Royal Conservatoire of Brussels, Ifigenia and Ipermestra, I will explain how issues of layout and construction (Quantz’s Einrichtung) can be investigated and resolved in ways that sometimes respect, and sometimes override eighteenth-century convention.

In 2004, the period-instrument conductor Paul Dombrecht informed me that the Royal Conservatoire of Brussels would make funding available for projects in the then relatively young field of artistic research in music. Artistic research can be most easily defined as research that is carried out through making music, rather than research about making music, as traditional musicology does. By conducting an original investigation in and through musical objects and its concomitant creative processes, artistic research can expand knowledge in ways that connect scholarly theory with artistic practice, intellectual with embodied knowledge, or thinking with doing. ‘Characteristic of artistic research,’ Henk Borgdorff argued,

is that art practice (the works of art, the artistic actions, the creative processes) is not just the motivating factor and the subject matter of research, but that this artistic practice – the practice of creating and performing in the atelier or studio – is central to the research process itself. Methodologically speaking, the creative process forms the pathway (or part of it) through which new insights, understandings and products come into being.

H. Borgdorff, ‘The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research’, in M. Biggs and H. Karlsson (eds), The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, London and New York, Routledge, 2010, pp. 45–46.

Although I was pursuing traditional doctoral work in musicology at the time of being asked to join Dombrecht, I responded positively to the challenge as it offered opportunities to combine historical scholarship with my background in composition. I offered the Conservatoire the following plan: Why not perform an opera seria, go ‘historically informed’ all the way, from the pit to the stage, and pin our attention on Graeco-Roman mythology, for the simple reason that the representation of that kind of subject matter was the subject of my doctoral research?

B. Forment, ‘La terra, il cielo e l’inferno: The Representation and Reception of Greco-Roman Mythology in Opera Seria’, PhD Thesis, Ghent University, 2007, http://hdl.handle.net/1854/LU-470855 (accessed 13 July 2021).

The proposition of assembling new pasticci arose from my work in electronic music, and more particularly from the many seamless ‘sets’ I played in the late 1990s and early 2000s using loop-based sequences. In the temporary and unstable nature of their composed linearity, these ‘playlists’ appeared to me as modern analogues of the eighteenth-century pasticcio. In this respect, the pasticheur assumes the role of a deejay, arranging a seamless meta-composition out of existing materials. The examples of Jean-Louis Martinoty’s Pasticcio (1985) and Jean-Claude Malgoire’s Montezuma (1992) convinced me of the possibility of stitching together heterogeneous pieces into thematically coherent flows with dramatic developments that appeal to modern ears without embarrassing Aristotle and the poetics on which opera seria rests.

Martinoty’s Pasticcio is a television film containing music from twenty-one Handel operas; conducted by Jean-Claude Malgoire, it was produced for Südwestfunk, WDR, and Antenne 2. Its underlying dramaturgical premises are dealt with in J.-L. Martinoty, Voyages à l’intérieur de l’opéra baroque, Paris, Fayard, 1990, pp. 195–213. Malgoire re-assembled Vivaldi’s Mo[n]tezuma (the score of which would only be rediscovered in 2002) using music by the composer for the Atelier Lyrique de Tourcoing; a recording was issued by Astrée Auvidis in 1993.

Although the resulting ‘cut & paste’ operas served as credentials for artistic research in music, the budget granted to produce them was minimal – a four-figure amount, with which we could barely hire a stage director and choreographer, Sigrid T’Hooft, for a fifteen-day masterclass in period gesture, rent costumes, have someone do the make-up, print posters, flyers and libretti, obtain help in the transcription of scores, and buy food and drinks for our student musicians.

Since we could not afford scenery, Sigrid T’Hooft came up with the idea of deploying existing timber panels in order to at least suggest theatrical wings on the stage of the Conservatoire’s concert hall. About Sigrid T’Hooft and her praxis, see B. Forment, ‘The Mechanics of Magic (or Vice Versa): Sigrid T’Hooft and the Historically Informed Performance of Opera’, in B. Forment and C. Stalpaert (eds), Theatrical Heritage: Challenges and Opportunities, Leuven, Leuven University Press, 2015, pp. 105–114. The performance edition for our pasticci was edited by Vinciane Baudhuin and myself.

Since singers did not audition until after our score was compiled, rather than before, as was customary in the eighteenth century, we could afford ourselves some modern liberties that our historical predecessors did not have.

The singers were Lore Binon (Ifigenia), Vincent Lesage (Agamennone), Soetkin Elbers (Clitennestra), Helen Cassano (Oreste / Plistene), Emilie De Voght (Diana / Ipermestra), Geoffrey Degives (Oracolo I, Ulisse / Adrasto), and Bertrand Delvaux (Oracolo II / Danao).

The story of Iphigenia in Aulis is well known. An oracle tells King Agamemnon that the Greek ships cannot leave for Troy (to rescue Helen) until Artemis/Diana has been appeased by the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter, Iphigenia. Agamemnon has offended the goddess by accidentally killing one of the deer sacred to her. Despite opposition from Iphigenia’s mother Clytemnestra and her fiancé, Achilles, the young virgin surrenders to the Greek cause. While Euripides installed a deus ex machina at the end of his Iphigenia in Aulis (Athens, 408–406 BC) to refrain from murder, and Jean Racine had Eriphyle stand in for Iphigenia (in Iphigénie, Versailles, 1674), I chose to restore the story’s archaic funesto fine without spilling any blood on the stage, as that would have violated classicist decorum.

R. Strohm details the Iphigenia operatic tradition in ‘Iphigenia’s Curious Ménage à trois in Myth, Drama, and Opera’, in B. Forment (ed.), (Dis)Embodying Myths in Ancien Régime Opera: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, Leuven, Leuven University Press, 2012, pp. 117–138. This volume emerged out of a conference that was held in the context of the performances of Ifigenia and Ipermestra, Brussels, 6 December 2012.

In Ipermestra, the relational cards between father and daughter are laid out differently. Having dreamt that his sons-in-law will murder him, the King of Argos, Danaus, asks his fifty daughters, the so-called Danaids (also Danaïdes), to stab their bridegrooms (and cousins) to death on the night of the wedding. One princess, Hypermnestra, faces the characteristic dilemma between virtù and amore: should she follow her father’s order and carry out the homicide or save her fiancé, Lynceus? After bravely defending her father’s raison d’état, Danaus agrees to the marriage and abdicates in favour of his daughter.

We derived the lion’s share of our pasticcio Ipermestra from two settings of Metastasio’s libretto by Johann Adolf Hasse: the princeps for Vienna (1744) and the version for Hubertusburg (1751; see Table 1).

Consulted scores: A-Wgm IV 1974 (Q 1463) and B-Bc 3264, respectively. Unless explicitly named ‘accompagnato’, all the ‘recitatives’ are secco (semplice).

The highlights of Hasse’s Ipermestra served as a dramatic framework preceded by the overture to another Metastasian opera: Leonardo Vinci’s Didone abbandonata (Rome, 1726), in which oboes were substituted for trumpets in order to save on instrumental resources.

Source: US-Cn Case VM 1500.V77d, as reproduced in facsimile in H. M. Brown (ed.), Italian Opera, 1640–1770, New York & London, Garland, 1977, vol. 29.

While Ipermestra can be perceived as an abridged Hasse opera peppered with Metastasiana from the 1720s and 30s, Ifigenìa constitutes a more contrived, ‘trans-stylistic’ pasticcio (Table 2). Alessandro Scarlatti’s serenata Endimione e Cintia (Rome, 1705) furnished its overture and opening scene (‘Sento un’ aura che dolce respira’), both of which are in the key of D minor and in the Corellian concerto grosso idiom.

Source: D-MÜs SANT Hs 3927; its libretto is anonymous. The Arcadian legacy of the Endymion myth is explored at length in B. Forment, ‘Moonlight on Endymion: In Search of ‘Arcadian Opera,’ 1688–1721’, Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, vol. 14, no. 1, 2008, https://sscm-jscm.org/v14/no1/forment.html (accessed 13 July 2021).

For Agamemnon’s awakening, the King’s contact with Diana, and the reception of the oracle – a supernatural episode few drammi have staged – Paul Dombrecht and I discovered a unique accompagnato in Carl Heinrich Graun and Leopoldo de Villati’s Ifigenia in Aulide (Berlin, 1748), in which the oracle responds to the King’s inquiries with a tenor and bass in octave unison (a feature that reminded me of the mysterious chorale ‘Der, welcher wandert diese Strasse voll Beschwerden’ of the Zwey schwarz geharnischte Männer in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Zauberflöte, Vienna, 1791, Act II, Scene 28). That a twenty-five bar arioso in agitato style followed upon its heels only convinced us to premiere this piece.

Source: B-Bc 2115. For an extensive analysis of this scene, see B. Forment, ‘Frederick’s Athens: crushing superstition and resuscitating the marvellous at the Königliches Opernhaus, Berlin’, Cambridge opera journal, vol. 24, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–42, 34–40.

Occasionally we ventured an experiment on the harmonic level, more particularly between the concluding and opening tonalities of certain numbers (see Tables 1 & 2). The last three entities, for instance, have rather smooth harmonic transitions, from B flat major at the end of the Caldara aria to C major at the start of the Jommelli recitative, with A minor binding the tail of the latter to the Conti aria. The three passages are further held together by the motif of ‘telling and not telling’ – the Baroque interplay between reality and semblance, ostentation and dissimulation (dissimulazione).

See J. Rousset, La littérature de l’âge baroque en France : Circé et le Paon, Paris, Corti, 1953, p. 215.

Figure 1

To delay the finale and heighten the sense of tension, an interlude was inserted in the guise of an unusually extensive scena (‘E’ questo il loco del mio supplizio? … Tardi rimorsi atroci’; Act I, Scene 5) from Niccolò Jommelli’s Ifigenia in Tauride (Naples, 1771), the opera that is said to have flopped so mercilessly that it caused the composer to suffer a stroke.

According to a manuscript note in I-Nc Rari 7.8.13 (28.5.19), unnumbered page facing the title page: ‘Il dispiacere per essersi tolta dalle scene d’opera gli [Jommelli] cagionò un colpo di apoplessia.’ Ifigenia in Tauride premiered on 30 May 1771, whereas Jommelli’s stroke actually occurred in August of that year. Still, Orestes’ grand scene was apparently too challenging for the primo uomo, Gaspare Pacchierotti.

Our apotheosis was all the more built on Jommellian foundations, and more precisely on the composer’s L’Ifigenìa for Rome, 1751, the autograph of which furnished three useful items: a lugubre sinfonia in the ombra key of E-flat major, accompanying Iphigenia’s sacrificial procession (Act III, Scene 8);

B-Bc 2182. The original staging description of the march reads: ‘Si ode lugubre sinfonia, al cui suono si avanzano le guardie reali, che si squadronano verso il porto. Vengono dopo, i ministri del sacrifizio, chi colla bipenne, chi colla benda, chi coll’urna, che dee poi servire per raccorre le ceneri della vittima. Vien finalmente Ifigenìa in bianca veste, coronata di fiori, con numeroso corteggio di damigelle e paggi.’

In his introduction to Machinic Assemblages of Desire (2021), the final instalment in a trilogy of volumes on the relationship between Gilles Deleuze’s philosophies and artistic research, Paulo de Assis states that,

in the field of artistic research … the artist-researcher [on the one hand] scrutinises the materiality and the connectors of her or his objects of practice (as a symptomatologist), while, on the other, he or she invents new relations, interactions, and transversal paths between them. With the concept of assemblage … new modes of thinking and apprehending art objects emerge: not unitarian monuments, but heterogeneously constituted multiplicities; not primarily meaning-oriented realisations, but stimulating[,] non-signifying ruptures; not extensive measurements of quantities (mapping), but intensive explorations of qualities (cartography); not the search for an ‘essence’ of the artwork, but an adventurous exploration of its manifold and heteroclite constitutive parts and flows.

P. de Assis and P. Giudici (eds), Machinic Assemblages of Desire: Deleuze and Artistic Research 3, Leuven, Leuven University Press, 2021, p. 22.

Musical Example 1

Advertised in 2006 as apologies for artistic or practice-based research,

See B. Forment, ‘Ifigenia & Ipermestra: de belichaamde mythe in de opera seria’ [‘Ifigenia & Ipermestra: The Embodied Myth in Opera Seria’], Tijdingen van het Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel, vol. 20, no. 3, 2006, p. 3: ‘Artistiek onderzoek bestaat!’ (‘Artistic research does exist!’).

Pastiching furthermore offered a method of reconfiguring networks of agents or ‘voices’, as eighteenth-century impresarios would have done to satisfy their stakeholders: ‘producers’, such as the Royal Conservatoire of Brussels, which hoped to see a prestigious project implemented on a shoestring budget, versus artist-scholars, who wanted to showcase the music-dramatic power of opera seria; ‘performers’, such as our young singers and period instrumentalists, who gladly used an educational project as a springboard for their careers; and ‘receivers’, such as today’s spectators, whose attention and listening regimes might be more attuned to Lisztian recitals and black-box theatres than to the idiosyncrasies of Baroque music theatre.

Concerning agencies on voices, see R. Strohm, ‘Zenobia: Voices and Authorship in Opera Seria’, in S. Paczkowski and A. Żórawska-Witkowska, Johann Adolf Hasse in seiner Epoche und in der Gegenwart: Studien zur Stil- und Quellenproblematik, Warsaw, Instytut Muzykologii Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2002, pp. 53–81.

Myths with a rich Nachleben can provide modern assemblers or pasticheurs with intertextual playgrounds open to both modern and old codes, on both the horizontal (linear, temporal, dramatic, narrative) and vertical (harmonic or synchronic) levels. Great care was in our case taken to ensure a fluent liaison des scènes (scenic connections), with characters emerging and exiting as in classicist dramma per musica.

The concept of liaison des scènes is discussed at length in R. Strohm, Dramma per Musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 187 and 207–208.

At the same time, we chose not to pursue a contextualist historicism by attempting to emulate a specific type of pasticcio from the eighteenth century, seeking to compose it the way composer or impresario X would have done it. Instead, we made a journey through time and space, with our first act beginning, so to speak, in the Arcadian Academy of Rome, in 1705, and ending with late Jommellian melodramma from 1771. This rich palette offered pedagogical advantages, as our singers and instrumentalists worked their way through a broader anthology of highlights – exceptional, not necessarily conventional, if not atypical pieces, selected from a modern perspective. For the young artist-scholar that I was at the time, pastiching Ifigenia and Ipermestra offered a unique avenue to cultivate Baroque artistry, and to build a trompe l’oreille out of ready-made materials. It would be therefore unwise to declare the Ifigenia/Ipermestra as ‘vintage pasticcio’, and also miss the opportunity to reconsider the praxis of pastiching, not so much as the artifact of a deviant past, but rather as a productive method for artistic research.