Event

“‘The Opera of Cato is not Mr. Handel’s:’ Performing Authorship in Handel’s Pasticci”

On 6 November 1732, the London newspaper Daily Advertiser commented on the recently premiered drama Catone at the King’s Theatre: “we hear that the Opera was not composed by Mr. Handell, but by some very eminent Master in Italy.” Self-reflexive discourses on author responsibility started appearing on English newspapers during the first decades of the eighteenth century as a result of what Manushag Powell has called “the performance of authorship,” the process of writing through fictionalized authorial personae. This was one of the consequences of the promulgation of the Copyright Act (1710), which affected the realm of music production only tangentially. Yet, as seen from the quoted newspaper, Handel’s own authorial persona was already put into question during his lifetime, in connection with the production of pasticci. Today, musicologists such as Reinhard Strohm and John Roberts have disentangled the complex network of musical and textual sources behind the arrangement of pasticci by Handel and his collaborators, while leaving open the question of authorship. In this paper, I argue that the pasticcio as a genre participated in this ‘performance of authorship’ by self-reflexively displaying the very act of ghost-writing behind their production.

The opera Catone, one of the pasticci assembled and produced by Handel and Heidegger, based on Leonardo Leo’s 1729 setting of the Metastasio libretto, exemplifies the phantasmic nature of the genre in three related ways. First, it was staged in London at a time when the figure of the Roman orator Cato the Younger was pervasively haunting popular imagination. Second, it enticed narratives of skepticism about Handel’s paternity in both public and private correspondence. Third, its libretto was constructed so that the suppression of a character (Flavio) forced other characters to read what were originally his lines through the new setting of typical ‘letter scenes,’ enabling the ghosting of previous voices in metatheatrical manner.

 By examining primary sources (both the conducting score, held in Hamburg, and the Leo score preserved in the Royal Academy of Music, London) through the lens of current scholarship on material texts and authorship (Roger Chartier, Dustin Griffin, Peter Stallybrass) and performance studies (Marvin Carlson, Rebecca Schneider, Joseph Roach, in particular the notions of ghosting, reappearance, and replacement), my paper will attempt at repositioning the production of Handel’s pasticci in the context of pre-Enlightenment discourses on authorship.