The essay by Luca Lupoli is coming out: “The Melodrama of Pietro Metastasio, the Primacy of the Text”
Naples, May 30th, 2024 – The publication of the new essay by Maestro Luca Lupoli, entitled “The Melodrama of Pietro Metastasio, the Primacy of the Text”, published by the publishing house “Pagine”, is expected in mid-June. A work that represents an in-depth study of the works and correspondence of the famous poet Pietro Antonio Domenico Bonaventura Trapassi, known as Metastasio (1698-1782).
Lupoli’s work, enriched by the biographical, bibliographical and source research conducted by the soprano Maestro Olga De Maio, is based on an accurate analysis of Metastasio’s correspondence.
The essay explores the poet’s theory of the text for music, examining in particular his letters, which allow us to reconstruct a Metastasian vision of the primacy of the musical text.
A fascinating journey into the memory of eighteenth-century melodrama, the work of the great reformer who influenced the greatest opera composers such as Verdi, Wagner and Puccini, and who seeks to demonstrate the superiority of the poetic text compared to other performing arts.
The poet, through verbal language, is presented as a prestigious intellectual, to whom painters, architects, composers and musicians should pay great attention, while on stage they have always behaved as rivals.
Hence the affirmation of the expressive superiority of poetry, over all other “subaltern” arts, emerges forcefully in Lupoli’s work, which exalts poetry’s ability to speak to people’s minds and hearts, in an analysis that recalls the model of Greek tragedy.
The essay develops through three main paths:
1. Metastasio’s correspondence as a place for a theory of the text for music;
2. Culmination of the first phase with Dido Abandoned, textual verifications;
3. The Caesarean Poet, text and ideological debate in Vienna, textual verifications.
The preface was edited by Prof. Ettore Massarese, director, actor, playwright and professor of Italian Theatre Literature at the Federico II University of Naples.
The cover graphics were designed and created by Prof. Giuseppe De Maio, professor of Art in State Institutes.
While waiting for the date of the first presentation in Naples to be set, it is possible to reserve a copy of the essay in the best online bookstores, at the following links:
