Pasticcio

An opera made up of various pieces from different composers or sources and adapted to a new or existing libretto. The practice began in the late 17th century but the term came into general use only after about 1730 to describe an opera seria or buffa, typically based on popular librettos of Metastasio or Goldoni. Arias were selected mainly by the singers in a given production, the recitatives and ensembles being supplied by the house composer, music director or even the theatre manager.

1. Definition.

As applied to opera, the term was at first somewhat pejorative. J.J. Quantz, during a visit to Florence in 1725 (though writing in 1755), heard several operas ‘patched together with arias of various masters, which is called “pastry” by the Italians, “un pasticcio”’. The verb form was used more loosely to describe the process of revision. In 1735, when Vivaldi asked Goldoni to fit aria texts into an existing libretto, the poet said he had to ‘accommodate or cook up the drama’ to the composer’s taste, ‘for better or worse’ (‘accomodare o impasticciare il Dramma a suo gusto, per mettervi bene o male le Arie’). During the second half of the 18th century the pasticcio acquired a degree of respectability. In 1742 Horace Walpole wrote: ‘Our operas begin tomorrow with a pasticcio, full of most of my favourite songs’. Later, the designation appears without stigma on the title-pages of librettos and in composers’ contracts. Most first-rank opera composers – including Vivaldi, Bononcini, Handel, Hasse, Gluck, Mozart and Haydn – arranged or at least willingly contributed to pasticcios. Nevertheless, 18th-century critics and modern historians have tended to dismiss such pieces as inartistic medleys. This attitude is unjustified, but no discussion should skirt the issues of originality and authorial integrity.

(i) Revival with substitutions: arias by various composers are substituted for pieces thought unsuitable for the available singers;

	(ii) True pasticcio:

		(a) a patchwork in which singers, librettist or impresario fill out an existing libretto entirely with arie di bagaglio (‘suitcase’ arias), or

		(b) a composite original, in which diverse arias by several composers are fashioned into a new plot;

	(iii) a composer patchwork: a composer incorporates his own arias, old or new, into another’s score; and

	(iv) a self-pastiche: an amalgam of a composer’s own arias in a new context.

There is considerable overlapping among these various types. Parody, defined here as the adding of new words to old music, is a process common to those pasticcios in which care has been taken to fit the borrowed arias into the new dramatic context. Related to the pasticcio is the collaborative medley, a fairly rare type, in which two or more composers divide the labour of setting a new or specially adapted libretto, usually act by act. Examples are Muzio Scevola (1721, London: Act 1 by Filippo Amadei, Act 2 by Giovanni Bononcini, Act 3 by Handel) and La virtù trionfante (1724, Rome: Act 1 by Benedetto Micheli, Act 2 by Vivaldi, Act 3 by Romaldo). Though usually called a pasticcio, Haydn’s La Circe ossia L’isola incantata (1789, Eszterháza), which incorporates parts of J.G. Naumann’s L’ipocondriaco and an anonymous opera based on the Circe story, as well as large chunks of original music by Haydn, would be more accurately described as a ‘collaborative medley’ or a ‘composer patchwork’, type (iii).

2. Origins.

The pasticcio arose from practical exigency. The opening of many new public and court theatres at Venice and then throughout Italy in the 1640s and 50s increased the demand for opera and caused companies to become ever more dependent on revivals. Because operas were almost always composed for specific singers and adapted to local conditions, revivals with new singers in different theatres required extensive changes; even a perennial favourite such as Cavalli’s Giasone was revised from production to production. In works of this period, recitative, aria and ensemble are closely bound together; revisions accordingly tended not to be of the piecemeal kind characteristic of the later pasticcio. But when, by about 1670, the aria had acquired greater musical weight and detached itself from the recitative, it became easier for an impresario to allow singers to substitute arias they already knew than to hire someone to adjust the original music to suit new voices and characters.

Almost all revivals of Italian operas in the last 20 years of the 17th century were subjected to the pasticcio process, in that they comprised diverse arias by more than one composer. The practice seems to have had only one major drawback, apart from the inevitable disturbance of the work’s original integrity (assuming it had any): without the composer or an enlightened impresario to guide them, singers might make substitutions which were inappropriate to the dramatic context or might overlook the need for variety and contrast between arias.

Few 17th-century operas are of type (ii), that is, works assembled entirely from existing arias to old or new librettos. An exception is the Milan production of Arione (1694), the libretto of which lists 27 different local composers whose arias were assembled in a deliberate patchwork. When Italian opera was exported to northern European courts and cities in the early years of the 18th century, local companies without experienced or capable opera seria composers had to turn to the pasticcio. Such works were common in Hamburg, Brunswick, Brussels and especially London.

3. The early London pasticcios.

The first extended discussion of the pasticcio appears in the English translation of François Raguenet’s Paralèle des italiens et des françois, en ce qui regarde la musique et les opéra (A Comparison between the French and Italian Musick and Opera’s, 1709). Raguenet opined provocatively that Italian operas were ‘poor, incoherent Rapsodies without any Connexion or Design … patch’d up with thin, insipid Scraps’. In a footnote the English translator qualified this sweeping remark, explaining that Raguenet meant revivals, in which for ‘Convenience or Necessity … Airs are alter’d or omitted, according to the Fancy or Ability of the Singers, without the Approbation or Knowledge of the Composer’. Appended to the translation of Raguenet is the anonymous ‘Critical Discourse on Opera’s and Musick in England’, an account of the London opera scene during 1705–9 which centres on the pasticcio (called here ‘a patchwork’ or ‘medley’), the dominant kind of Italian opera heard in London before Handel arrived in 1710. Included is the following satirical recipe, which nevertheless describes how several of the London pasticcios were actually concocted:

Pick out about an hundred Italian Airs from several Authors, good, or bad, it signifies nothing. Among these, make use of fifty five, or fifty six, of such as please your Fancy best, and Marshall ’em in the manner you think most convenient. When this is done, you must employ a Poet to write some English Words, the Airs of which are to be adapted to the Italian Musick. In the next place you must agree with some Composer to provide the Recitative … When this is done, you must make a Bargain with some Mungril Italian Poet to Translate the Part of the English that is to be Perform’d in Italian; and then deliver it into the Hands of some Amanuensis, that understands Musick better than your self, to Transcribe the Score, and the Parts.

The principal target of this paragraph is Thomyris, Queen of Scythia (1707), produced by J.J. Heidegger, who helped choose the arias by Alessandro Scarlatti, Dieupart, Francesco Gasparini, Albinoni and Giovanni Bononcini. J.C. Pepusch arranged the music, composed fresh recitatives and directed from the harpsichord, while P.A. Motteux provided the libretto post facto. The castrato Valentino Urbani sang in Italian, the rest of the cast in English.

The author of the ‘Critical Discourse’ did not condemn the pasticcio per se; rather, he claimed that there was no Italian opera which ‘will go down here without some Alterations’. Moreover, he praised the pasticcio version of Scarlatti’s Pyrrhus and Demetrius (1708) in which the arranger Nicola Haym ‘first consider’d what Places of Necessity required new Airs’ and composed them himself according to ‘the Taste of the English’. Perhaps with some knowledge of Handel’s imminent arrival, the author concluded that no Italian operas ought to be produced in London that were not ‘intire, and of one Author, or at least prepar’d by a Person that is capable of uniting different Styles so artfully as to make ’em pass for one’. The implied distinction between good and bad pasticcios resurfaces in criticism throughout the 18th century.

4. The composer as pasticheur.

During the heyday of opera seria, the pasticcio became a genre in its own right, no longer simply the unwelcome by-product of a hasty revival or the last resort of an opera company without a resident composer. Even Handel and Vivaldi, who exceptionally for the time were their own impresarios, produced significant numbers of pasticcios. These works were generally mounted either early in the season, before a new opera was ready, or near the end to fill out the repertory or to appease certain star singers. Though a pasticcio required much less labour than an original opera, the composer-arranger could claim it as his own and be paid accordingly.

Elpidia (1725, London) will serve as an example of Handel’s procedure. He took the dramatic skeleton from a 1697 libretto by Zeno, retaining only the text of two duets and some recitative. Eschewing the first setting by M.A. Ziani, he then selected most of the arias from recent works – Vinci’s Ifigenia and Rosmira fede and Orlandini’s Berenice – while composing himself only the secco recitative and perhaps the duets. The arias were chosen with reference to his singers (Cuzzoni, Senesino, Francesco Borosini and others), some of the pieces being already in their repertories. Naturally, the result is stylistically removed from Handel, but it is not less dramatic or coherent than many of his own operas; and (as Strohm has observed) the pasticcios allowed Handel to test the galant tastes of the fickle London audience more radically than he dared to do in his own operas.

Handel’s Oreste (1734, London), consisting of arias borrowed from his own works with only the recitatives and ballet music newly composed (type (iv)), presents an aesthetic dilemma. Since most Italian operas contained significant amounts of previously composed music (the proportion increased with each revival), and since Handel was anyway a prodigious borrower and adapter of his own and others’ music, there is only a fine line of distinction between this self-pastiche and, say, Rinaldo (1711), his first London opera and the supposed vanquisher of the despised polyglot pasticcios. Ironically, Rinaldo was constructed much like a pasticcio: several arias were taken with little change from earlier works; some were given parodied texts; a few were borrowed from other composers. As with Oreste, the only part of Rinaldo that is entirely new is the secco recitative.

5. The later pasticcio.

London did not of course have a monopoly on pasticcios; all Italian opera houses indulged in the practice to some extent. But the King’s Theatre continued to be the largest consumer till the end of the century. After Handel abandoned opera for oratorio in the 1730s, the Haymarket opera house, which was run as a commercial venture without government subvention, was left with no first-rank composer and tended to pander to the fickle tastes of the audience. Vast sums were spent on singers, while virtually the entire repertory was imported. Later, even with reputable house composers such as J.C. Bach (1762–72), Sacchini (1772–81) and Anfossi (1782–6), the King’s Theatre still relied on revivals and pasticcios for the bulk of its repertory.

Charles Burney, who chronicled this era from direct experience in his General History of Music, did not belittle the pasticcio; with its infinite capacity for substitution, it was an ideal showcase for the latest Italian music and singers. Neither did he make much distinction between the dramatic quality of one-composer operas and pasticcios. One of Burney’s rare criticisms of the pasticcio as drama is directed at the popular 1770 revival of Gluck’s Orfeo, to which J.C. Bach had added recitatives and arias as well as some pieces by P.A. Guglielmi, while the Haymarket house poet Giovanni Bottarelli made the necessary adjustments to Calzabigi’s original libretto: ‘the unity, simplicity, and dramatic excellence of this opera, which had gained the composer so much credit on the Continent, were greatly diminished here by the heterogeneous mixture of Music, of other composers, in a quite different style’. Burney expected less of true pasticcios (type (ii)), such as the 1786 Didone abbandonata, for which he complimented the prima donna Gertrud Mara on her choice of songs.

Other English critics identified ‘a general defect of all pasticcios’, namely, ‘the want of proper light and shade in the disposition of the songs’. A reviewer of Antonio Andrei’s 1784 Silla (music selected from Anfossi, Gluck, Alessandri, Martini, Sarti and Tommaso Giordani) elucidated this defect: ‘the sole objection which can be urged against this opera, with regard to the music, lies in its superlative excellence … a feast, where the viands were entirely of sugar … where the singers, regardless of the necessary imposition of the shades, the chiaroscuro, have no other aim but to elevate and surprize’.

Opera seria, still essentially a succession of self-contained virtuoso arias, was better suited for pastiche treatment than opera buffa, with its much longer and more complicated librettos and greater reliance on secco recitative and through-composed finales. But, while serious pasticcios constitute the vast majority, comic opera was subjected to the same process. Even the early intermezzos, such as Alessandro Scarlatti’s Lesbina e Milo (1701, Naples), were liable to be transformed by patchwork revivals. Full-length buffo pasticcios had become well established by mid-century, both reworkings of Goldoni classics (type (iia)) and those with new plots fashioned from diverse pieces (type (iib)). An example of the latter is La donna di spirito (1775, London), which includes arias and duets by 12 different composers; interestingly, the borrowed pieces are found only in the first few scenes of each act, the much longer finales being newly composed, presumably by the anonymous pasticheur.

By the third quarter of the century ‘pasticcio’ had lost its pejorative connotation. Two drammi giocosi (1759, Venice, and 1791, Udine) were actually titled ‘Il Pasticcio’, the latter being an adaptation of various works by Da Ponte and Vicente Martín y Soler. The adapter of the former explained in a preface that, with apologies to all composers concerned, he had selected the most popular arias from recent Goldoni operas and devised a plot (‘una comica azione’) to link them together. A further sign of acceptance if not respectability is Joseph Mazzinghi’s contract as house composer at the King’s Theatre, London, in 1790–92: he agreed to ‘compose and select all such new Music’ as required and to ‘arrange all the Pasticcios’.

Related to the various types of Italian pasticcio are ballad opera, English comic opera, opéra comique and Singspiel – all of which incorporated diverse, existing music into a framework of spoken dialogue, or mixed traditional or popular tunes with newly composed ones (see illustration). Among the various types of national quasi-opera, perhaps the closest to the spirit of the Italian pasticcio is the late 18th-century English melodrama, such as Stephen Storace’s The Siege of Belgrade (1791, London). Music of various composers (both vocal and instrumental – all but Mozart’s ‘Rondo alla turca’ being clearly identified in the published score) had been fitted with parodied texts, rescored, arranged and abridged. Storace’s pastiche technique resembles Grétry’s plan (not implemented) to produce an opéra comique by selecting certain symphonic movements of Haydn, working out a vocal line from the texture and, finally, adding suitable words.

It is difficult to say exactly when the Italian pasticcio died out. In the 1790s few operas were so billed, but Da Ponte and Martín y Soler, both employees of the King’s Theatre at the time, provided parodies, arrangements and substitute arias for works which are pasticcios in all but name. A growing awareness of the complexity and unity of contemporary opera, together with the establishment of the operatic canon, gradually rendered the pasticcio obsolete. In 1828 John Ebers, a former manager of the King’s Theatre, acknowledged the existence of the canon, but also confirmed the late survival of the pasticcio in London: ‘Experience sufficiently proves to us, that the operas imported from the continent are, both in music and poetry, such as to render nugatory here [in London] the employment either of a poet, or a composer (other than as a conductor and arranger)’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘A Critical Discourse on Opera’s and Musick in England’, in F. Raguenet: A Comparison between the French and Italian Musick and Opera’s Translated from the French (London, 1709)

O.G. Sonneck: ‘Ciampi’s Bertoldo, Bertoldino e Cacasenno and Favart’s Ninette à la cour: a Contribution to the History of Pasticcio’, SIMG, xii (1910–11), 525–64

‘The Life of Herr J.J. Quantz as Sketched by Himself’, in P. Nettl: Forgotten Musicians (New York, 1951), 280–319

F. Walker: ‘Orazio: the History of a Pasticcio’, MQ, xxxviii (1952), 369–83

W.S. Lewis and others, eds.: Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Horace Mann (New Haven, CT, 1954)

K. Hortschansky: ‘Gluck und Lampugnani in Italien: zum Pasticcio Arsace’, AnMc, no.3 (1966), 49–64

K. Hortschansky: ‘Arianna: ein Pasticcio von Gluck’, Mf, xxiv (1971), 407–11

H. Becker: ‘Opern-Pasticcio und Parodie-Oper’, Musicae scientiae collectanea: Festschrift Karl Gustav Fellerer zum siebzigsten Geburtstag, ed. H. Hüschen (Cologne, 1973), 40–46

R. Strohm: ‘Händels Pasticci’, AnMc, no.14 (1974), 209–67; Eng. version in Essays on Handel and Italian Opera (Cambridge, 1985), 164–211

G. Lazarevich: ‘Eighteenth-Century Pasticcio: the Historian’s Gordian Knot’, AnMc, no.17 (1976), 121–45

R. Strohm: Italienische Opernarien des frühen Settecento, AnMc, no.16 (1976) [incl. sources for 61 pasticcios and similar works, c1715–40]

B. Baselt: ‘Georg Friedrich Händels Pasticcio “Jupiter in Argos” und seine quellenmässige Überlieferung’, HJb 1987, 57–71

L. Lindgren: ‘Venice, Vivaldi, Vico and Opera in London, 1705–17: Venetian Ingredients in English Pasticci’, Nuovi studi vivaldiani: Florence 1987, 633–66

C. Price: ‘Italian Opera and Arson in Late Eighteenth-Century London’, JAMS, xl (1989), 55–107

C.A. Price: ‘Unity, Originality, and the London Pasticcio’, Harvard Library Bulletin, new ser., ii/4 (1991), 17–30

D. Burrows: ‘Handel’s 1738 “Oratorio”: a Benefit Pasticcio’, Gedenkschrift Bernd Baselt, ed. K. Hortschansky and K. Musketa (Kassel, 1995), 11–38

E. Cross: ‘Vivaldi and the Pasticcio: Text and Music in Tamerlano’, Con che soavità: Studies in Italian Opera, Song, and Dance, ed. I. Fenlon and T. Carter (Oxford, 1995), 275–311