Dai Barberini all’età dell’Arcadia. Nuove indagini sulla poetica drammaturgico-musicale sacra di Arcangelo Spagna

In the course of a lifetime of almost a hundred years, Arcangelo Spagna (Viterbo, 1632 – Rome, 03.05.1726) was involved in some of the fundamental stages of Roman culture in its complex, and far from straightforward, transitions from the legacy of the age of Urban VIII Barberini, to the splendours of that of Christina of Sweden and Clement IX Rospigliosi, and the various aristocratic and ecclesiastical patrons, down to the «renovatio» promoted by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, in the climate of the first Arcadia (an institution, however, in which Spagna played no part).
The development of his poetics of sacred music–drama can be seen particularly clearly through a philological and critical comparison of the two versions of his melodrama based on St. Eustace: «Il Santo Eustachio, overo Il Trionfo della Fede, nel Martirio del sudetto Santo e Compagni», performed and printed in 1671 for the wedding of Prince Giovanni Battista Pamphili with the Marquise Violante Facchinetti; and «Il Trionfo della Fede nel Martirio de’ Santi Eustachio e Compagni», included in the Second Book of his collection of «Oratorii overo Melodrammi Sacri», published in 1706.
This development in Spagna’s poetics and dramatic writing shows no signs of a “break” with his origins, but seems like a natural process of modernizing them, characterized in the first period by the influence of Giulio Rospigliosi’s “restrained–baroque” melodramas; and later in his renewal of structure and versification when he entered the circle of Cardinal Ottoboni, adopting the lines of taste indicated in the first Arcadia’s appeal to a simple, moderate verse musicality.
A study of the classical and classicistic, hagiographic, literary, dramatic, melodramatic and artistic “sources” of these two versions is combined with an account of their historical–cultural contexts, with the aim of bringing out Spagna’s complex relation with the Tradition, and his clear intention of having a shaping, propelling function, evident in how he re–creates the legendary season of sacred drama of the Barberini’s and Rospigliosi in a manner that is close to, but does not overlap with, Ottoboni.