Metamorphosis in reverse: Diana, from goddess to woman in Da Ponte and Martín y Soler’s L’arbore di Diana

LEONARDO J. WAISMAN

Il mito di Diana. Arte - Letteratura – Musica

Venaria Reale/Universidad de Turín

Lugar: Turín; Año: 2012;

Lorenzo da Ponte and Vicente Martín y Soler’s L’arbore di Diana, the most performed opera in Vienna in the final decades of the 18th Century, is exceptional in many respects. Although its format and performing forces place it within the tradition of opera buffa, its mythological subject-matter was highly unusual within that genre. Its musical style was novel, following on the footsteps of the same authors’ successful Una cosa rara and building up on its innovations. The treatment of the myth was a mixture of erudite knowledge and brash irreverence. At every step Da Ponte took the opportunity to allude to diverse mythological stories, thus creating a complex plot centered on the encounter between Diana and Endymion, but incorporating topoi from other episodes, sometimes only distantly related to the hunting goddess. The Virgilian “Omnia vincit Amor” is the unifying theme, but different kinds and levels of love are portrayed. Most striking is the transformation that Diana undergoes. Presented initially as a selfish, childlike, opinionated goddess, she gradually acquires maturity together with human frailties, to end up as a real woman. This process, only hinted at in the libretto, is fully developed in its musical setting. Her means of expression in the first act are derived from the standard musical language and forms of opera seria, designed for heroes and gods; these are then gradually replaced by the style and procedures of opera buffa (associated with middle- and lower-class characters). Finally she resorts to the rondò, the vehicle par excellence of the sentimental heroine of the late 18th Century, ennobled not by divinity or birth, but by the virtue of her very human heart. L’arbore di Diana thus reverses the traditional metamorphosis of man glorified into divinity, emphasizing the Illuminist and bourgeois exaltation of humanity as an end in itself, and of human feelings as a mark of virtue.