ABSTRACT
The power of 18th-century singers to compel the insertion of arias of their own choosing into productions of Italian opera has long been a source of fascination to historians of performance practice. Such arias, carried from town to town in a singer’s baggage, so to speak, are thought to have been specially selected by virtuosos as a means of displaying their voices to best advantage wherever they appeared, no matter what the opera. The modern view of this practice has traditionally been shaped by the opinions of two Italian critics of the early 18th century, Benedetto Marcello, in his well-known satire Il teatro alia moda (1720), and Pier Jacopo Martello, in his essay Della tragedia antica e moderna (1715). While Marcello alluded occasionally to concessions made by impresarios to singers who wished to add their own arias, Martello advised librettists not to resist the pressure frequently put on them to permit the substitution of their aria texts; it was simply not worth the trouble. As he said:
Be willing to exchange good arias for bad ones: if singers want to force on to the end of your recitative an aria that had won them applause in Milan, Venice, Genoa or elsewhere, and even if it expresses a sentiment at great variance from what is required, what difference does it make? Let them put it in, or else you will see all of them piercing your temples with the complaints of sopranos and altos. 1
