The consecration of Anna Girò Griselda, a dramma per musica premiered at the Teatro S. Samuele in Venice in May 1735, marks the apotheosis of the singular artistic relationship between Vivaldi and his famous pupil Anna Girò, which lasted more than twenty years in all. An apotheosis in the form of a consecration for the singer, after a period of turbulence in the relations between this enigmatic couple which had prompted the Vivaldian diva to take on several engagements in operas by rival composers. Following their reunion at Verona during the 1735 Carnival, Griselda constituted a veritable gift of reconciliation from Vivaldi to his protégée. In an eloquent piece of symbolism, it was the first of the composer’s Venetian operas in which the singer was assigned the title role, dominating the drama from beginning to end and cornering every musical form, from aria to ensemble, from accompanied recitative to arioso. It also marked a turning point, since from Griselda onwards, with just a single exception, Girò was to sing exclusively in Vivaldi’s operas or in pasticcios drawn from his works. It was only after 1741, once the composer was dead and buried in Vienna, that ‘L’Annina del Prete Rosso’, widowed of her mentor, again agreed to appear in works by other composers, including the young Gluck.
For Vivaldi too Griselda was in a sense a consecration: the commission from the Grimani family, proprietors of the two most prestigious theatres in Venice, represented a key event in his long operatic career. For the first time, the doors of the Teatro S. Samuele opened to admit him, bringing to an end twenty-two years of ostracism by the great theatres on the lagoon. With Griselda, then, Vivaldi wrote a crucial chapter in the history of his tumultuous relations with his native city.

The patricians’ surrender
Since his sensational debut in 1713, the composer had made a number of obstinate enemies in the patrician circles which controlled the most important theatres of Venice, and the Grimanis, the owners of the Teatro S. Giovanni Grisostomo and Teatro S. Samuele, had always refused to invite the composer-impresario of the Teatro S. Angelo onto their stage, considering him too atypical, too ambitious, too controversial – in a word, too plebeian. Since he was also on bad terms with Domenico Lalli, the administrator of the Grimani theatres, Vivaldi had thus been kept away from these flamboyant symbols of patrician Venice, and in particular from the S. Giovanni Grisostomo. This ‘Phoenix of theatres’, located in the elegant Rialto district, boasting more than 180 sumptuously decorated boxes and equipped with a stage capable of accommodating elephants, remained, along with the renowned S. Samuele, the impregnable stronghold of the Prete Rosso’s adversaries.
This situation was suddenly to change early in 1735. A number of factors, including the removal of Lalli and the worsening of the economic crisis which had already been affecting the Venetian theatres for several years, prompted the sagacious Michiele Grimani to reconsider his position concerning the perennial rejection of Vivaldi. At this time the seasons at the S. Giovanni Grisostomo and the S. Samuele generally ran at a loss, since the exorbitant fees of the singers and the substantial maintenance, surveillance and lighting budgets for the theatres were no longer covered by rental charges for the boxes and revenue from ticket sales. Grimani, a shrewd manager, had probably been keeping a watchful eye on the career of Vivaldi, who over the past few seasons had become known as a saviour of loss-making theatres. He had doubtless also been impressed by the composer-impresario’s recent successes in opera houses on the Italian mainland, notably at Verona in the 1735 Carnival season. Without straining his budget by offering costly fees to hard-to-please castratos, he had led two operas to triumph there by the expedient of assembling young, practically unknown talents around his prima donna assoluta Anna Girò.
It was in this context that the idea of proffering an invitation to Vivaldi must have worked its way into the patrician’s mind. Thus, as soon as the Verona season was over, the unhoped-for commission was placed with the composer, thus enabling Griselda to be premiered on the stage of the Teatro S. Samuele during the season known as the Ascensiontide Fair.

Griselda or the triumph of virtue
In choosing (doubtless in consultation with Grimani) to set the story of Griselda, Vivaldi might have been seeking to illustrate this unexpected invitation with a mischievous symbol: the fate of the queen, scorned by her subjects because of her lowly origins but gaining their love and fidelity by dint of courage and endurance, must have aroused some unsettling echoes in the breast of the modestly born musician disdained by conservative Venice and the teacher whose pupil had been so often disparaged.
The chosen libretto was a celebrated work by the Venetian poet Apostolo Zeno, based on one of the stories in the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio, the Florentine humanist. With this work, conceived as an artistic and moral antidote to the ravages wrought on social relationships by the Black Death, Boccaccio had been one of the first writers to break with the dogma of divine determinism and assert the free will of the new man, entirely master of his own destiny. Such was the underlying moral of the tale of Griselda, the patient, loving wife of the cruel Gualtieri, marquis of Saluzzo, who subjects her to a rare degree of matrimonial suffering. Through the trials imposed on this archetype of the faithful wife, and behind the apparently schematic view of a conjugal relationship founded on arbitrary male power and female submissiveness, Boccaccio sought to depict an inverted figure of the so-called weaker sex, whose feigned debility conceals strength and determination, demonstrating crushing moral superiority over the male of the species. The message also had a political dimension, expressed in a provocative moral bordering on the revolutionary. For, at the end of his tale, the author writes: ‘What can one say, except that even under humble roofs divine souls descend from heaven, just as there exist in royal dwellings people who are worthier of looking after swine than of exerting lordship over other men?
Zeno took this story as a pretext more than a model. With him, Gualtieri, now Gualtiero, is no longer marquis of Saluzzo but king of Thessaly. Above all, Griselda is no longer put to the test to satisfy her husband’s sadistic self-interest, but out of necessity: whereas Boccaccio explained the marchioness’s sufferings by a deliberate desire on Gualtieri’s part, Zeno lays the blame on the people of Thessaly, whose rejection of a queen of humble birth prompts the king to place her constancy on public trial. Such imputation of error to the people and nobility of heart to the king was natural at a time when the triumph of royal absolutism was an invitation to depict an enlightened monarch faced with the obscurantism of his subjects.
Zeno’s libretto was staged for the first time at the Teatro S. Cassiano in Venice in 1701; the music was by Antonio Pollarolo, the great master of Venetian opera. This premiere marked the beginning of a notable career for the work in the first quarter of the Settecento: between 1701 and 1735, more than thirty settings of Griselda are to be traced, the most celebrated being those of Tomaso Albinoni, given in Florence in 1703, and of Alessandro Scarlatti, premiered at the Teatro Capranica in Rome during the 1721 Carnival.

Goldoni,‘murderer’ of poets
By 1735, however, when fashion favoured the librettos of Metastasio, the champion of the new literary reform, the work was already out of date. So, logically enough, Vivaldi subjected Zeno’s old librettoto a thoroughgoing revision intended to adapt it to the tastes of the time, the needs of the season, and his own wishes. This new version was to provide the occasion for a historic encounter between the composer and another Venetian earmarked for celebrity, since Grimani entrusted the task of rewriting to the young Carlo Goldoni, then a tiro dramatist. Fortunately, the author of La locandiera left us two truculent accounts of this meeting, in the preface to the thirteenth volume of his Commedie (Venice: 1761), then in his Mémoires published in Paris more than twenty years later. These still constitute the liveliest description of the composer in action that has come down to us – Vivaldi is sketched in the privacy of his study by a pen as amusing as it is ferocious. The frequently acerbic tone employed in his recollections reflects the tense nature of this short-lived relationship between two men whom everything divided, starting with their age: Vivaldi, an ‘old man’ of fiftyseven in the eyes of Goldoni, embodied a fusty past, while the young poet, a whippersnapper of twenty-eight, was for the composer the herald of a whole new world which was already no longer his. Moreover, the antagonism between two artists could only be strengthened by the ungrateful character of the reviser’s role. As Goldoni wrote, ‘Vivaldi set great store by finding a poet who would arrange, or disrupt, the drama according to his tastes by more or less successfully adapting arias that his pupil [Anna Girò] had sung on other occasions…’ Already fairly unenthusiastic about the business as he made his way to Vivaldi’s house, the young man seems to have received an icy welcome once he got there. ‘He received me rather coldly’, we read in the 1761 account. ‘He took me for a novice, in which he was not mistaken; and finding me little versed in the science of rehashing librettos, he clearly had a strong urge to dismiss me . . . I too felt like leaving.’ In his Mémoires, written more than fifty years after the meeting, Goldoni gives an even more caustic version of his reception by the musical priest, describing a Vivaldi ‘surrounded by music . . . breviary in hand’, greeting his guest with ‘a sweeping sign of the cross’, setting his breviary aside to present ‘the customary compliments’ then, after some polite exchanges, taking it up again, making another sign of the cross, and falling silent . . . ‘Sir,’ the young man then interposed, ‘I would not wish to distract you from your religious occupation; I shall come back at another time.’ This time, Vivaldi went to the heart of the matter, saying to Goldoni: ‘I am well aware, my dear sir, that you have a talent for poetry . . . But this is quite different: one may produce a tragedy, an epic poem, if you will, and yet be unable to fashion a musical quatrain.’ We can well imagine the reaction this provoked . . . Vivaldi then picked out at random a scene from the libretto of Griselda and outlined the nature of the changes he would like to see effected there. Cut to the quick, Goldoni boldly took the offensive and asked the composer to allow him to show his mettle there and then. Vivaldi eventually agreed, sat the playwright down, gave him pen, paper and libretto, and ‘went back to his desk’ where he resumed saying his breviary. Goldoni plunged into the libretto, wrote the text of what was to become Griselda’s secondact aria ‘No, non tanta crudeltà’, and presented it to Vivaldi. The composer reacted with enthusiasm, if we are to believe the preface of the Commedie: ‘With his breviary in his right hand and my sheet of paper in his left, he began reading quietly; and when he had finished, he threw the breviary into a corner, rose, embraced me, ran to the door, and called Signora Annina. In came Annina and her sister Paolina; he read them the arietta, shouting: “He did it here, he did it here, he did it right here!” And again he embraced me and congratulated me; and I became his Friend, his Poet, his Confidant…’ The enthusiasm of this extravagant Vivaldi verges on sacrilege in the version related in the Mémoires, where we learn that in his joy the composer threw his prayer-book to the ground.
The happy ending to this impromptu meeting, Goldoni tells us, is that he finally ‘murdered Zeno’s drama, exactly as [Vivaldi] wanted’, and the resulting opera proved a success.

Tragic histrionics
Grimani’s primary purpose in inviting Vivaldi to the S. Samuele seems to have been at once to inject a change of orientation into a programme very much dominated by Neapolitan opera, and to try out on his stage a cast of singers entirely different from those he had assembled until then, of whose limitations and exorbitant cost he was all too aware. It is true that the list of guest artists at the S. Samuele in previous Ascensiontide seasons had been as prestigious as it was expensive: in 1731, the illustrious Carestini had come to sing the role of Neptune in Francesco Corselli’s Venere placata; the following year, the proud Caffarelli, Farinelli’s great rival, accompanied Francesca Cuzzoni in Hasse’s Euristo; in 1733, a young pupil of Porpora’s, Felice Salimbeni, was the star attraction in Ginevra by the Neapolitan composer Sellitti. And if the first indications that the galant movement was beginning to run out of steam prompted Grimani to take a new turn in his artistic policy in 1734 by engaging Baldassare Galuppi, the sole representative of the Venetian operatic school in the post-Vivaldi generation, he still maintained the policy of expensive casts dominated by famous castratos: hence La ninfa Apollo by ‘Il Buranello’2 employed both Monticelli, the rising star of galant singing, and the celebrated Appiani, an extraordinarily gifted Porpora pupil whose fees tended to exceed even Carestini’s.
With Vivaldi and his Griselda, the formula changed completely. No more renowned castratos, no more pupils of Master Porpora, no more costly tinsel combined with capricious demands: the castratos occupied a subsidiary place in this opera dominated by female voices and a tenor role of mammoth proportions. Vivaldi chose to assign the evanescent part of the lover Roberto to the Milanese castrato Gaetano Valetta, a decent but unassuming contralto whose merits he had already tested in his Atenaide at Florence in 1729. To play the knight Ottone, he called on a budding virtuoso, the Florentine Lorenzo Saletti, a prodigy just emerging from his chrysalis. A tough assignment awaited the young singer, whom Vivaldi had decided to make into the Neapolitan bishop of this game of artistic chess with his competitors. With Ottone, the prete rosso was, in the most sublime fashion, thumbing his nose at the school of Naples: the provocative writing of this outsized role demanded the skills of a pyrotechnician, stoically facing the monstrous intervals that stud the part, impassive before the sections of inhuman coloratura that punctuate his arias. Indeed, the demands were perhaps excessive for a singer at the start of his career: the score of Griselda, which reveals the cutting of two positively Dantesque bars in ‘Vede orgogliosa l’onda’ and the hasty composition of an aria to replace the diabolical ‘Scocca dardi l’altero tuo ciglio’, makes this hypothesis plausible, at the least.
Yet the beating heart of the cast lay elsewhere. First of all, in Margherita Giacomazzi, a Costanza of dazzling virtuosity, with whom Vivaldi launched a feminine riposte to the domination of the castratos. Standing up to all the Farinellis of the time, this intrepid singer exhibited astounding talent and facility, as is demonstrated by the fearsomely difficult arias Vivaldi composed for her. Among them is the sublime ‘Agitata da due venti’, written for the role of Matilda in the Verona production of Adelaide but immediately reused in Griselda, as witness the pages torn out of the former score for insertion in the latter! Another key player in the cast was Giorgio Babbi, a virtuoso in the service of the Grand Duke of Tuscany who was twenty-seven at the time. The composer may have met this young tenor in Florence in 1734, when he sang in the anonymous opera L’ultima esaltata (sometimes ascribed to Vivaldi), but Babbi was doubtless warmly recommended, if not actually chosen, by Grimani himself, who had already arranged for him to be invited to the S. Samuele. The importance of the part of Gualtiero in Griselda, as well as the dramatic commitment and virtuosity required by his arias, attest to the considerable talent of this artist, still at the start of his career. The magisterial aria di bravura ‘Se ria procella’, the first aria in the opera, offers a striking illustration of his impressive resources as soon as the curtain rises.
But the true apex of Griselda’s cast was Anna Girò. This singer was undoubtedly the most celebrated personality of Vivaldi’s entourage, both for her omnipresence in the composer’s works from 1726 onwards and because of the rumours born of their close relationship. Such rumours were to persist and grow throughout their joint career and cause considerable difficulties for Vivaldi, who was accused of a suspect ‘friendship’ for Girò. The composer always denied having reprehensible relations with her, and notably the gossip that the two lived under the same roof. However, such protests are undermined by certain historical documents revealing an unsettling degree of intimacy between the two artists . . .

Anna Girò was a mezzo-soprano of limited compass, described by contemporaries as a modestly gifted singer with excellent acting skills. The Abbé Conti, who heard her sing in Farnace at Venice in 1727, was the first to point this out, in a letter addressed to the Comtesse de Caylus: ‘She performs wonders, although her voice is not especially fine.’ This judgment is confirmed by a letter to Vivaldi dated 1 July 1735, in which the Marchese degli Albizzi, impresario of the Teatro della Pergola in Florence, refers to comments he received after performances of Griselda. Quoting correspondents of his, he writes: ‘When they were in Venice for Ascensiontide . . . they told me that she . . . was a good actress but her voice could not be heard.’ Anna Girò’s vocal capacities also provided the occasion for a scintillating verbal skirmish between Vivaldi and Goldoni when they met. In 1761, the playwright said that she ‘did not have a beautiful voice and . . . was no great virtuoso in music’ but was ‘comely and graceful’. In his Mémoires, he wrote: ‘She was not pretty, but she possessed grace, a dainty figure, fine eyes and hair, a charming mouth, not much of a voice, but considerable acting ability.’ If Goldoni is to be believed, this opinion of Girò’s capacities was one shared by Vivaldi. The dramatist relates to us the striking description of the singer’s tastes (and hence resources) which he gave to justify the revision of Zeno’s libretto: ‘Mademoiselle Giraud3 does not like to sing in the languorous style; she would like an aria of expression or of agitation, an aria that conveys passion by different means, by words, for example, interrupted by heaving sighs, with action and movement…’ All these characteristics may be found, exactly as described here, in many arias composed by Vivaldi for Anna Girò, and notably in Griselda. These character arias, designed to be acted as much as sung, are indeed full of such heaving sighs which chop up words, an effect achieved by a succession of rests which are absolutely fundamental in performance. Such Vivaldian pauses are the equivalent of silences in Mozart: languorous or grief-stricken, they form the framework for these moments of tragic histrionics. Here Vivaldi fashioned a subtle crown for the consecration of his protégée.

A showcase opera
With a troupe of this quality, Vivaldi had the ideal cast for offering the S. Samuele audience a work that blended his personal language and the currently adulated idiom of his competitors in perfect equilibrium. The veritable peak of Vivaldi’s late operatic style, Griselda contains some of the composer’s most pyrotechnical arias, specially written for the occasion or taken over from his most recent scores, in which the galant spirit is merged with expansive orchestral writing. The arias for Ottone and Costanza belong to this category, in which acrobatics and elegance vie for supremacy. But with this work conceived by Vivaldi as a ‘showcase opera’, the composer only approaches the language of his competitors the better to assert his indomitable uniqueness. He does not swear allegiance to the Neapolitan style, he faces it down: Griselda affirms the triumph of this new language, with its blend of inimitable personal signature and intent to modernise an idiom challenged by changing fashion. Vivaldi here seeks to offer new spaces to his singers while denying the omnipotence of dizzying vocalism, on which he imposes a sumptuous instrumental setting, very different from the airy, slender accompaniments of Hasse and Broschi, which add colour but no spice to the drama. Naples is called to order by a Venice who raises her head high once more, at the same time widening her universe to admit the new language: while Vivaldi puts his stamp on the music by his choice of keys and tempos, harmonic and rhythmic direction, melody and orchestration, Naples contributes vocal exhilaration and expressive grace, in a refined, virtuosic flowering of the Vivaldian lyric genius. With the most virtuoso arias in his score, Vivaldi sets against such famous specimens of the Neapolitan style as ‘Son qual nave’ or ‘Qual guerriero in campo armato’, those symbols of the limitless dominion of the voice, what might be termed a display of pyrotechnics on probation, sentenced to respect the drama and not to supplant the orchestra. This same spirit of balance between the lessons of tradition and the delights of fashion is to be found not only in arias of varying moods and structure but also in the closing trio of the second act, ‘Non più regina ma pastorella’, a formidable moment of psychological tension where voices and orchestra relinquish their hierarchical struggle to place themselves, in perfect harmony, solely at the service of the drama.
In fact, far from forming a mere string of memorable arias, the score of Griselda is deeply marked by the instincts of a dramatist, obstinately refusing to hand the operatic stage over lock, stock and barrel to the acrobatic arabesques of the virtuosi. With extraordinary skill, the prete rosso disturbingly explores the tragic recesses of Zeno’s somewhat academic libretto, especially in the masterly portrait he paints of the sposa dolorosa Griselda. The poignant humanity of this icon, a wife and mother exemplary in her abnegation, vibrates in every bar of her superb recitatives and her arie d’espressione or d’agitazione. For, as always, the recitative is no simple accessory to the opera’s achievement: the soul of the Vivaldian theatre, it remains a crucial element in the language of the composer’s late maturity, an inalienable dramatic territory which he reserved for himself whatever the circumstances. In comparison with his rivals, Vivaldi was always unsurpassable in this sphere: sometimes he was applauded even for scenes consisting entirely of recitative. As to the reaction of the S. Samuele audience to Griselda, Goldoni wrote in the preface to his Commedie: ‘The opera was successfully staged.’ A similar assertion is to be found in the Mémoires: ‘The opera was an outstanding success.’ A highly symbolic reception for this masterly lesson in music and theatre which Vivaldi gave his adversaries on their home ground, and which remains one of the brightest jewels of the prete rosso’s operatic late maturity.

Frédéric DELAMÉA
April 2006