ABSTRACT

“Lamento d’Arianna” originated in Claudio Monteverdi’s opera Arianna (Mantua, 1608, music lost). The lament for solo voice and continuo has become a canon of early opera recitative but in recent history has been mostly performed as a solo concert or recording piece because the music for the full opera has been lost. Witness accounts of the premiere report admiration for the composition and the abilities of the musicians and the singers; amongst them, a standout performance of the lament by commedia dell’arte actress Virginia Andreini, La Florinda that stirred the hearts of the spectators. This transhistorical study considers emotions as culturally embedded practices and explores the production of staged emotions as a means of rhetorical persuasion. Affective responses to staged emotions are traced in witness accounts of the lament’s premiere, and poetry and art of the early seventeenth century connected to the reception of the opera. They are compared through the mechanism of an audience survey to a contemporary rendition of the lament deploying Quintilian’s idea of the “moved speaker” in both concert and theatrical style in a performance that took place at the Mortlock Chamber, State Library of South Australia in 2014.