This is the first book to trace the rise of opera in Siena and its patronage, production, and performance during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It seeks to amend the view that productions in the city were merely an extension of Medici power to the provinces. Instead, opera in Siena was absorbed into the festive apparatus essential to Sienese self-fashioning. The expatriate Chigi family exploited this impulse, coordinating operatic performances with their triumphant visits home by activating ties of friendship and family as well as their affiliation with Sienese academies, espe ... More

This is the first book to trace the rise of opera in Siena and its patronage, production, and performance during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It seeks to amend the view that productions in the city were merely an extension of Medici power to the provinces. Instead, opera in Siena was absorbed into the festive apparatus essential to Sienese self-fashioning. The expatriate Chigi family exploited this impulse, coordinating operatic performances with their triumphant visits home by activating ties of friendship and family as well as their affiliation with Sienese academies, especially the Assicurate, possibly the first all-female academy in Italy. Opera was thus inserted into larger patterns of sociability that brought honor to the Chigi while expressing the very essence of what it meant to be Sienese: senesità. As Chigi influence waned, another of Siena’s native sons, Girolamo Gigli, assumed the mantle of impresario and attempted to professionalize the operatic enterprise. His efforts to sustain an impresarial business laid bare the difficulties of maintaining opera as an ongoing concern without the necessary personal resources, the good will and deep pockets of a wider community, and the power and status that could transform a performance into a symbol of Sienese identity. The book examines central questions surrounding late seventeenth-century opera, most notably, how revivals were engineered to appeal to new audiences, and how new audiences construed meanings for them. It thus has ramifications for the larger study of opera during the genre’s rapid expansion throughout the Italian peninsula.