Page - 358 - in Musiktheater im höfischen Raum des frühneuzeitlichen Europa - Hof – Oper – Architektur

Juan José Carreras 358 to put him in his proper cultural and historical context, which means, in the first place, to consider the theatrical system of Madrid and the ceremonial and political functions of theatre and music at the Spanish court in the late 1730s. This will set the neces- sary frame to fully understand the dialectics between Farinelli’s agency and the struc- tures and interests he found on his arrival in Madrid. My final aim here is to question Farinelli’s dream of the perfect opera theatre against the actual experience of his the- atre direction at the Buen Retiro Palace in Madrid between 1747 and 1758. I propose here to approach the problematic question of the cultural meaning of these operas fo- cusing on the audience and spaces where the operas took place. From this point of view, these performances—embedded in a complex system of management and production procedures—were, in the first place, part of a greater ensemble of festive court practices, such as acting, dancing, banqueting, gambling or masking. Among all these entertain- ments, opera stood out as an extraordinary and costly theatrical spectacle, with deep political implications as a social and symbolic practice.4 “Spent in the first courts of Europe,”5 the extraordinary life of Carlo Broschi detto il Farinelli cannot be separated from its political background. But biographies of the singer have generally not taken great pains to integrate court politics in a coherent historical narrative.6 They have rather tended to transform this essential background into a collection of more or less amusing anecdotes, extracted from a vast and colourful array of impressions supplied by diaries, letters and memoires of courtiers and diplo- mats, without being always being sufficiently aware of the frequent ambiguous mean- ings and problematic interpretations of this sort of source.7 In fact, all these discourses around what we call the court form a labyrinth of conflicting strategies, interests and ambitions in which orientation was difficult for all its agents and where concealment was an essential condition for their success. In recent years (and largely unknown to musicology), substantial new research on the political meaning of the reign of Ferdinand VI (1746–1759) has stressed again the 4 See Bianconi  /  Walker 1984; Reimer 1991; Riepe 2006; Sommer-Mathis 2006. 5 Burney 1959, pp.  152–153. 6 Farinelli’s main biographies include Sacchi 1784; Bouvier 1943; Barbier 1994; and Cappelletto 1995. For a useful outline and bibliography up to 2000, see Harris 2001. The last survey, with special emphasis on Farinelli’s rich iconography and the key Bolognese background of Sacchi’s first biography, can be found in Bianconi  /  Casali Pedrielli 2018. 7 The discovery of 67 autograph letters from Farinelli to his patron and friend Count Sicinio Pepoli dated between 1731 and 1749, edited by Francesca Boris and Carlo Vitali in 2000 (but partially known through different articles from the late 1980s), meant indeed a significant increase of factual information about Farinelli’s personal opinions and professional strategies (see Vitali 1992 and Broschi 2000). The car- teggio Pepoli modified the perspective on Farinelli’s biography, a change reflected in the publication in the mid-nineties of the works by Barbier and Cappelletto and by the renewed momentum of research with regard to the legendary singer’s achievements as well. But, of course, far from providing simple ‘biographical truth’ through the use of a private key to explain public events, the letter’s successive statements weave instead a complex and changing discourse directed to a specific addressee.