ABSTRACT
Drama, according to Aristotle, is mimesis 'employing the mode of enactment, not narrative' by making use of certain agents, who by their actions, consisting of diction and song, recount a plot. According to this notion, a text or piece of vocal music was essentially dramatic when its plot was entirely driven by the monologues and dialogues of the characters represented. Since Aristotle's Poetics were taken as the basis of all operatic theory in Italy throughout the entire seventeenth century, librettists and composers drew their idea of what constituted drama directly from these principles, many of them implicitly. The opera Totila, composed on a libretto by Matteo Noris and first performed in Venice in 1677, can serve as a point of comparison, all the more so because it opens with a solo scena that displays all the formal aspects of recitative and aria that are be found equally in Legrenzi's solo cantatas.
