The Grand Theater of the World. Music, Space, and the Performance of Identity in Early Modern Rome

At the turn of the sixteenth century the chivalric spectacle was already a strange survival of its splendid past for the European nobility, now in full crisis of identity. Nevertheless, the taste for tournois, joustes, carrousels et autres spectacles—to use the title of a successful treatise published in 1669 by the French Jesuit Claude-François Ménestrier—remained strong and widely popular until the end of the baroque period. Scores related to the genre of Italian opera-torneo of the seventeenth century almost never preserve the music employed for the combat itself. To the few traces surviving ee can now add a new source, never before mentioned in musicological literature: the complete score of the opera performed as part of another torneo held in Bologna a few years after La Contesa, I Furori di Venere, produced in 1639, This unknown music score is described comparing it to the surviving librettos and other sources, revealing its importance for recostructing this kind of baroque spectacles. also in honor of Cardinal Sacchetti.