Author: [DELLA LENA (Innocenzo):
Title: Dissertazione Ragionata sul Teatro Moderno.
Description: In Venezia, Presso Giacomo Storti..., 1791. FIRST AND ONLY EDITION. 8vo, 202 x 134 mms.,pp. [2] 3 - 111 [112 blank], B1 and leaves G1 - 4 unopened and G1 attached to a stub, contemporary paper binding, with brown covers and blue paper on spine, orange label; some general wear and tear and soiling to binding, but otherwise a very good copy Despite the obviously Italian name, Innocenzo Della Lena (1741 - 1813) seems to have died in England in 1814, as his will is found in The National Archives, "Will of Innocenzo Della Lena otherwise Innocent Dela Lena, Doctor of Physic of Saint Ann Westminster , Middlesex Date:12 December 1814." He also published in London A Dissertation on the Extraordinary Attributes and Inherent Virtues of Fixed Phlogistic Earth, with one description of it in Copac as "Quackery." A note in a recent hand attributes some information to OCLC: "This book is important for its full information relating to the….greatest Italian opera singers of the late 18th century - Luiza Todi (1753 -1833) and Luigi Marchiesi (1755 - 1829)." In an online paper, the Yale scholar Jessica Gabriel Peritz observes, "Several opera critics in early 1790s Venice wrote that the mezzosoprano Luigia Todi expressed her 'sensibility of soul' through her 'vocal defects' (Gazzetta urbana veneta, 1790). These writers described how she used the idiosyncrasies of her vocal organ—namely, her inability to maintain a uniform timbre throughout her range—to convey the violence of passion, in such a way that she exalted her listeners to the sublime (Innocenzo Della Lena, Dissertazione ragionata sul teatro moderno, 1791). Drawing attention to a singer's physiological weakness as a source of expressivity marked a significant departure from a Classical paradigm of order and balance. As evidenced by Settecento vocal treatises, ease of production and seamless registration were typically of paramount importance in bel canto aesthetics. Even the well-known 'castrato of sensibility' Giuseppe Millico, famous for having starred in Gluck's Orfeo in Parma in 1769, wrote that only voices without 'disgusting defects' could convey emotion through music (preface to La pietà d'amore, 1782). Nevertheless Todi, associated with roles such as Didone and Cleopatra, was celebrated for her unique mode of vocal expression. Some deemed her operatic performances the 'moral cause' of Venetians' sentimental education, believing that she had transformed her auditors into better citizens with the power of her voice (Della Lena, 1791)." OCLC locates just two copies of this item, both in Italy: Biblioteca della Fondazione Biblioteca San Bernardino and Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. I have been unable to access some scholarly articles, namely, Thomas Bauman, "The Society of La Fenice and Its First Impresarios" (Journal of the American Musicological Society Vol. 39, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), pp. 332-354). See also Martha Feldman's book, Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in n Eighteenth-Century Italy (2010).

Keywords: opera singers prose


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