Yes, that's true - or seems to be these days, SH. Why are they almost always done that way? Is it the only way of mediating between distant aesthetics and today's demands for 'realistic' drama? Interesting thought. They certainly lend themselves to campification, but that's only because the modus operandi of the forms employed seem so remote, isn't it? - so some kind of objectifying process is deemed necessary (although isn't, I think).I agree there are all sorts of 'intermediate' mediations
Although in other art forms (cinema, say) people assimilate all sorts of artifice without blinking (perhaps because it seems natural). I suppose the sense of oddness is multiplied by the fact that opera can - if looked at in a certain way ahem - seem to inhabit the edge of a kind of hysteria itself edging the camp (has anyone ever cast the Valkyries as transvestites?)
And, clearly, there is a distance already there - in the texts of baroque operas, in the relation of the texts to music, spectacle. I suppose what makes that stylised and witty in a various way, rather than the universal arch that seems to stand in for that now, is a kind of intimacy with classical myth or ancient 'history' that we don't have.
That's one of the things, I think, that gives Pope so much force: the allusions are granted value, loved, they have the significance of internalised, memorised texts. They stand for & against something, indeed. That intimacy gets weakened in the C18. It does with poetic invocation, for example. In a different textual context, Samuel Johnson thinks the invocations in
Paradise Lost are "machinery." For Milton they clearly aren't, and they must not to be. (The haunting fear that they must not be but are is a part of the poem's crisis, too. Blake understood this). There needs to be a ground that is more than a tissue of text.
As it were
I suppose the other point is that we attend to baroque opera in a way that's very different from the way the - again different - audiences for the various baroque operas attended to them. Perhaps the key is
stylisation not camp. Attempting to find equivalents rather than substitutes for an 'original' aesthetic.
(Monteverdi seems to me much less problematic than, say, Rameau. You could strip Monteverdi down & get something immediate, vivid. I could imagine intimate as opposed to sniggering takes on Cavalli, too. Handel is much more 'operatic' I'd guess - the succession of aria/recitative obviously creates difficulties now of achieving variety & keeping attention. But again a bit of thinking, as opposed to auto-pilot. In Rameau I guess a version of spectacle is required. Preferrably - for me - not dancers pretending to do synchronised swimming in an orchard of paper streamers).
I admit, though, that I've not been in an opera house in years & the productions of baroque opera I went to then (ENO's
Xerxes, especially) I loathed. So it's quite probable this is all out of
Les Boréades. Hot air.
Bws,
