Carnival is a delimited time of the upside-down world that ends on Ash Wednesday with the pre-Easter period of Lent. Carnival allows people to slip into a different role, reverse social hierarchies, turn the usual rules upside down and parody respected personalities – in short, the reign of a “king of fools”, who is deposed at the end of the carnival season. This act also restores the customary, God-ordained order and confirms it as the “right” one. The Viennese court, and the emperor in particular, nevertheless endeavored to maintain a certain dignity as part of a public representation strategy: Carnival at court did not mean extravagant festivities, but rather celebrations defined and staged by a ceremonial, which were accordingly celebrated with a certain serious and stiff dignity.

The courtly carnival celebrations were thus strictly separated from the events of the people. The members of the court particularly enjoyed masked balls and costumes with the opportunity to change roles (especially at the “Wirtschaften”), balls, dances, concerts, comedies, processions, tournaments, carousels, horse ballets, sleigh rides, illuminations, fireworks, hunts and other amusements. This also included several performances of an annual carnival opera composed by Francesco Bartolomeo Conti between 1711 and 1725. The court also maintained a certain contenance in opera and did not perform pure comedies even during carnival. In the tradition of Venetian opera, there was usually only room for the comical in intermezzi between the acts, independent of the main plot. With the tragicommedia in musica, a new genre developed in which the two extremes – serious tragedy and the comical, or high and low style – were mixed together. The libretti incorporate carnivalesque elements such as disguises, role reversals (e.g. king – servant), mock kings and extreme behavior, some of which also contain a hidden criticism of courtly attitudes.

In Pariati’s and Conti’s Penelope, the two comic roles of Dorilla and Tersite are part of the main plot, but the large comic scenes are in the traditional places for intermezzi, namely at the end of Acts I and II. Ulisse is a tragicomic character who only partially fulfills the requirements of his role as a hero or ideal king and thus as a figure of identification for a ruler.

Conti vividly and imaginatively sets the various characters and carnivalesque elements to music; as Johann Mattheson already remarked: “Conti [...] was immensely experienced in such depictions of the characters through musical notes (where is the loss of art?), and his ideas almost have the same effect on mere paper as if one were seeing all kinds of ridiculous, lively postures before one’s eyes.” (“Conti [...] war in solchen Abbildungen der Geberden durch musicalische Noten (wo ist denn der Kunst=Verlust?) ungemein erfahren, und seine Einfälle führen auf dem blossen Papier fast eben die ergetzliche Wirckung mit sich, als ob man mit Augen allerley lächerliche, lebendige Posituren vor sich sähe. ”; Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister, Hamburg: Christian Herold, 1739, p. 40 §46). The comical is expressed primarily in grotesque exaggerations such as oversized leaps, rapid babbling, stuttering, extreme pitches, strong and abrupt contrasts, parodies, emphasized banality and imitations of sounds and noises. In Penelope, too, Conti presents a multitude of comic effects which, in contrast to the serious characters, reflect the ambiguity of the carnivalesque and courtly illusory world.

Literature

Konstantin Hirschmann, "'Mezzanità de' caratteri e dello stile?': die tragicommedia per musica nördlich und südlich der Alpen", in: Musicologica Brunensia 53, 2018, pp. 99–108. https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/140868 

Livio Marcaletti, "La tragicommedia per musica alla corte di Vienna nel primo Settecento. Un genere di importazione o una creazione della corte imperiale?", in: Römische historische Mitteilungen, 65. vol./2023, pp. 115–133.

Claudia Michels, Karnevalsoper am Hofe Kaiser Karls VI. 1711–1740. Kunst zwischen Repräsentation und Amusement (Publikationen des Instituts für österreichische Musikdokumentation 41), Vienna: Hollitzer 2019.