In 2006 Jacques Rancière announced that the so-called ethical turn was causing damage to our societies (‘The Ethical Turn in Aesthetics and Politics’, in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), 192–210). While the distinction between fact and norm – ‘between what is and what ought to be’ (192) – allows for dissensus, which is essential to the political community, the dissolution of that distinction splits people into various consensus-based ‘ethical’ communities that cannot tolerate dissensus and cannot communicate with people who hold different values. This split can generate a dangerous dichotomy between an ethical us and an unethical them, which can corrode both politics and society.

Historians of eighteenth-century opera (and of the performing arts in general, one might add) should, I think, resist the frequent calls for more ‘ethical’ approaches to history, and insist rather on the distinction between the factual and the normative, between what happened in the past and what we would like the past – and the future – to be like. Both scholarly exchange and the practice of careful interpretation are threatened when the desire to confirm our preconceived moral values in research overshadows the desire to understand that which is different from us. Hence, under the slogan of ‘cultural relevance’, we have witnessed in recent years a turning-away from the historically contextualized interpretation of works towards the didactic use of works as illustrations of ideological narratives that are ostensibly more ethical than those of the past. Such arguments can become circular, however, and finally divorced from reality if we fail to allow the works to surprise us and the past to challenge us. Allowing ourselves to be surprised means engaging in open-minded, nuanced, complex, imaginative, daring interpretation that takes the immediate social, cultural and political contexts of the works into account. Allowing ourselves to be challenged means letting go of our complacent sense of controlling the narrative, and of believing ourselves to belong to the most enlightened class of people in the history of the world – a conviction that, ironically, proclaims the blind faith in ‘progress’ for which the Enlightenment has often been blamed, though not always justly. (See, for example, Anthony Pagden’s rejection of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s timeworn theory about the Enlightenment’s supposed cult of instrumental reason leading to the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, as well as his discussion of Immanuel Kant’s and Moses Mendelssohn’s differing views of human progress in The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters (New York: Random House, 2013), 18–19, 368–370.)

Our politics sometimes inform the questions we ask as opera historians, but if we also allow them to inform the answers we find, we not only lose our credibility amongst the public, but also let down our students and the practitioners who turn to us for historical knowledge and interpretative insights. Reductionist historical narratives weaken historical awareness; they also weaken historical curiosity and the belief that the artistic creations of the past – here those of the eighteenth century – have things to offer other than period prettiness and a confirmation of our own moral superiority. If we look only for stereotypes we will find only stereotypes, and what we see on stage will ultimately be only stereotypes. And if we continue down that path, it is plausible that eventually nobody will want to perform eighteenth-century operas any more.

In the following, I have sketched an interpretation of the little-known libretto Amiti e Ontario, o I selvaggi (Amity and Ontario, or The Savages) by Ranieri Calzabigi (1714–1795) from 1772 to show how an opera that might be labelled as a plain example of Europe’s colonial mindset contains many more depths than at first might meet the eye. That raises the question: how do we approach such works in a way that takes account of their dramatic richness as well as of today’s concern with the political issues they raise?

During his tour of the Bohemian lands in September 1772, Prince Louis de Rohan (1734–1803), French ambassador to Vienna, paid a three-day visit to the country estate of Prince Johann Adam von Auersperg (1721–1795) at Žleby, one hundred kilometres east of Prague. The ambassador was lavishly entertained with banquets, hunts and a masked ball, but also with an opera written specially for the occasion by two prominent artists of the Viennese court opera. On 20 September the premiere of Amiti e Ontario, a setting of Calzabigi’s libretto by Giuseppe Scarlatti (c1712–1777), took place in a temporary theatre outside the castle. The hostess, Princess Maria Wilhelmina von Auersperg (1738–1775), sang the female lead role herself, while other performers came from the Italian opera company in Prague.

Set in rural Pennsylvania, Amiti e Ontario centres on the Quaker Mr Dull, who lives on his land together with his widowed sister-in-law Mrs Bubble and her daughter Miss Nab, both of whom are Anglicans. Further members of his household are the Native Americans Amiti and Ontario, who are lovers but are thought to be siblings, and whom Mr Dull has enslaved after capturing them during a war. Opposed to slavery on principle, he plans to free them and marry Amiti. Both Mrs Bubble and Miss Nab want to marry Ontario. Faced with these prospects, the young couple flees. They are recaptured, and eventually Mr Dull forgives them for their apparent transgression and allows them to live on his estate as his adopted children.

Amiti e Ontario has attracted some scholarly attention for being the first Italian opera to address the issue of American slavery. Pierpaolo Polzonetti has devoted both an article (‘Oriental Tyranny in the Extreme West: Reflections on Amiti e Ontario and Le gare generose’, Eighteenth-Century Music 4/1 (2007), 27–53) and a book chapter (‘The Good Quaker and His Slaves’, in Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 228–268) to the work. Scarlatti’s music was considered lost, though, until quite recently, when two arias in the manuscript collection of the Musikwissenchaftliches Institut at the Universität zu Köln were identified as deriving from the opera (https://rism.online/sources/450059408 and https://rism.online/sources/450059279). And virtually nothing was known about the commissioning, location, date, performers and immediate context of Amiti e Ontario until I was able to establish some of the facts through newspaper reports, diaries and letters referring to the ambassador’s Bohemian journey. I discussed some of my findings in a paper read at the online conference of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music in 2021, and they will all be dealt with at length in a forthcoming article.

Reflecting on the historiographical questions provoked by my examination of these sources, I have summarized the principles of my approach as six claims.

First, Enlightenment operas were committed to critical, not to mythical, thinking. In 1784 Immanuel Kant wrote as follows in his famous essay ‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’:

Kant’s famous definition of the term reminds us that the eighteenth century was not called ‘the Age of Enlightenment’ because it was particularly enlightened, but because it saw a countercultural movement rise in opposition to the mainstream discourses of power, promoting independent critical thinking and fighting against myth-making of all kinds. The Enlightenment was and remains an unfinished project, an ideal towards which scientists and humanists still strive today, with the awareness that total enlightenment will never happen. Hence, it is a myth that the Enlightenment brought about modern equality, freedom and self-governance (as Ayana O. Smith reminded us in her editorial in Eighteenth-Century Music 18/2 (2021), 248). But it is a myth because these objectives remain to be achieved today.

Calzabigi, one of the most radical operatic artists of the Enlightenment, wrote four dramas in which he juxtaposed two nations as a way of challenging spectators’ tendency to resort to stereotypes and mythical thinking. In Paride ed Elena (Paris and Helen, from 1770, with music by Gluck), Spartans are juxtaposed with Phrygians; in Amiti e Ontario, English settlers are juxtaposed with Native Americans; in Cook o sia Gl’inglesi in Othaiti (Cook, or The Englishmen in Tahiti, a 1785 libretto attributed to Calzabigi with music by various composers), English seafarers are juxtaposed with Tahitian natives; and in Elvira (from 1794, with music by Giovanni Paisiello), native Spanish Goths are juxtaposed with invading Arab Moors. What makes the four dramas so compelling is that the European groups (the Spartans, the English, the Spanish) tend to be depicted as less humane, honest, reasonable and indeed enlightened than the non-Europeans (the Phrygians, the Native Americans, the Tahitians, the Arabs). Playfully dismantling the traditional dichotomy between ‘civilized’ Europeans and ‘barbarous’ others (in Act 1 Scene 6), Calzabigi makes Ontario warn Amiti against ‘associating with these barbarous people [that is, the English], immersed in their luxuries and their pleasures’ (‘Il frequentar con queste / Barbare genti; immerse / Nelle delizie, e ne’ piacieri’; Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, Amiti, e Ontario, o I selvaggi: dramma per musica (Vienna: Giuseppe Kurtzboeck, 1772), 27). (On the different notions of ‘barbarism’ current in the eighteenth century see Jürgen Osterhammel, Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia, trans. Robert Savage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 299–304.) In this and similar ways, simple identificatory strategies on the part of the audience are undermined. Instead of receiving moral justifications of Europe’s colonial domination, we are invited to question the ideological assumptions underlying European nationalism, colonial divide-and-rule policies and notions of cultural superiority.

Not all operas written during the eighteenth century were that radical, of course. Mr Dull’s pardoning of his absconded slaves in the final scene is a parody of the emperor Titus’s pardoning of his attempted assassins at the end of Pietro Metastasio’s 1734 drama La clemenza di Tito. And the characters’ concluding paean in the scena ultima to ‘loving, smiling peace’ (‘l’amabile / Pace ridente’ (Calzabigi, Amiti, e Ontario, 60) is a parody of the happy ending (Scene 6) of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s and Louis Fuzelier’s 1736 entrée Les Sauvages (from which Calzabigi got his ironic subtitle), where the American ‘savages’ joyfully proclaim that ‘our conquerors bring us peace’ (‘Nos Vainqueurs nous rendent la Paix’ ([Louis Fuzelier,] Les Indes galantes: Ballet héroïque (Paris: Jean-Baptiste-Christophe Ballard, 1736), ‘Les Sauvages, nouvelle entrée’, 13)). In contrast to Calzabigi’s drama, these earlier works reinforced cultural myths, like that of the ‘good savage’, which served to justify different types of domination and inequality. If we accept Kant’s definition of the term, I am therefore reluctant to label these works ‘Enlightenment operas’.

Second, Enlightenment operas engaged with Enlightenment texts; they were not products of an ‘Enlightenment ideology’. Critical thinking must be systematic, but the Enlightenment did not constitute a single or comprehensive ideological system. While concepts like ‘civility’ and ‘civilization’ were terms of praise for Voltaire, they were terms of abuse for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who also denounced ‘progress’ and ‘property’ as constructs that generated harmful social inequalities. The image of a monolithic Enlightenment easily turns into a ‘straw man’ made responsible for the hypocrisy or inconsistencies of individuals, or even for the contemporary crimes of colonialism and slavery – to which many (though far from all) Enlightenment thinkers were opposed.

Calzabigi’s dramas are not carriers of an Enlightenment ideology, but rather engage with the thoughts of specific thinkers. Amiti e Ontario reads as a critical response to Guillaume-Thomas Raynal and Denis Diderot’s hugely influential account of European colonialism, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des européens dans les deux Indes (six volumes (Amsterdam, 1770 [1772]), commonly known simply as L’Histoire des deux Indes), the first edition of which had appeared in print a few months earlier. Calzabigi, who shared Rousseau’s scepticism regarding Europe’s civilizing mission (see Felicity Baker, ‘Rousseau and the Colonies’, Eighteenth-Century Life 22/1 (1998), 172–189), used his drama to expose the contradictions implicit in that narrative. With his satirical portrayal of the Dull family who all long to realize Diderot’s colonial ideal of intermarriage, he offers a sophisticated critique of what Sunil Agnani calls la douce colonisation (Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 26). Sometimes, it seems, opera librettos were more ‘enlightened’ than the books of famous philosophers.

Third, eighteenth-century style categories like ‘old’ and ‘new’, ‘French’ and ‘Italian’ and ‘comic’ and ‘tragic’ may function as useful analytical tools, unlike later style categories such as ‘baroque’, ‘galant’ and ‘classical’. The last three labels have been applied to eighteenth-century music from the early twentieth century onwards. They originally provided the study of music history with a sense of scientificity and didactic clarity that appealed to an age concerned with fitting the histories of the various art forms into teachable and seemingly objective categories. Even today, generalized artistic styles (‘baroque’) are joined with generalized intellectual concepts (for example, ‘rationality’) to create monolithic and historiographically dubious genre categories (‘baroque opera’). Such categories create more problems than they solve, especially from a performance-oriented perspective that takes account of the immediate historical contexts of works and events. They are of little help if we want to find answers to such questions as: how do Scarlatti’s surviving musical settings of arias for Amiti e Ontario render Calzabigi’s poetry? Would the original audience have heard them as old-fashioned or modern, as comic or tragic, or as something in between? What other music might they have sounded like in the ears of contemporaries?

Always sensitive to the ideological implications of genre categories, Calzabigi chose not to call his libretto a dramma giocoso per musica or a commedia per musica, the usual designations given to the elevated opera buffa. Instead, he called it a dramma per musica, the designation given to the heroic dramas of opera seria. While intensifying the Metastasian echoes in this way, he boldly subverted genre expectations by making the Native Americans the serious lead roles while the English settlers became comic character roles. Ontario was even written as a trouser role for one of the two leading sopranos, which would have excluded the stereotyping traditionally associated with exotic male characters. And Scarlatti’s arias for Amiti and Ontario, written in a lyrical and pathetic style, do away with the da capo form and point in the direction of the Viennese opera ‘reform’, in what seems like a deliberate rejection of musical exoticism, with its implicit designation of non-European music as ‘savage’ or ‘barbarous’. (On the notion of ‘barbarism’ in early-modern musical thought see D. R. M. Irving, The Making of European Music in the Long Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), 201–210.) Features of dramatic, poetic and musical genres and styles work together to reinforce the philosophical, social and political questions raised by the opera.

Fourth, theatre can never represent cultural or ethnic identities ‘authentically’. In recent decades, awareness has grown of the harmful effects of racial and ethnic stereotypes in film, television and theatre, and theatre and opera historians have studied the proliferation of such stereotypes on European stages from the sixteenth century onwards. While such studies are necessary, it is problematic when critics and historians claim a distinction between ‘faulty’ and ‘authentic’ representations of racialized or ethnic identities. Writing about contemporary Native American performance, Steve E. Wilmer has differentiated between ‘the attempt by non-Native commercial enterprises to package and sell Native authenticity as a commodity’ and the work of Native artists, ‘who create performances that have evolved from the community and, despite modernization, retain traditional features and values’. Nevertheless, the notion of cultural authenticity can be misleading, he stresses, ‘since culture is always in the process of evolving as a result of changing circumstances, contact with other (Native and non-Native) cultures, and spontaneous improvisation and invention’ (‘Introduction’, Native American Performance and Representation, ed. S. E. Wilmer (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 9).

In short, the notion of cultural authenticity implies a problematic essentializing of cultural identity. Even so, we are left with the awkward question whether all fictionalized depictions of Native people by non-Natives must be regarded as commodification or stereotyping – a question that historians of musical exoticism have tended to evade. The question is awkward because an affirmative answer casts doubt upon a basic conventional practice of Western theatre: acting. As theatre scholar Willmar Sauter points out, an actor is someone who performs certain encoded actions to which a spectator attributes symbolic meaning. Hence, the dramatic character only really exists in the spectator’s mind (The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance and Perception (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 9). While the actor, the spectator and various social, ethnic and national groups have identities, the character has none. Hence, ‘authenticity’ – including the authentic representation of different group identities – is an aesthetic effect that depends on whether the spectator finds the performance realistic (or verisimilar, to use an eighteenth-century term). What we must ask is not whether the theatrical representation of any group identity is authentic, therefore, but whether the theatrical representation of ethnic or racialized groups is likely to generate harmful stereotypes in the minds of the spectators, and whether it commodifies traditional practices by depicting them without their intended content and divorced from their original context.

While Calzabigi’s depiction of the English settlers in Amiti e Ontario is certainly caricatured, the title characters are idealized rather than stereotyped, and there is no attempt to depict Native American cultural practices the way Rameau did with his famous ‘Danse du grand calumet de paix’ (Dance of the Great Peace Pipe) in Les Sauvages. Like Rousseau in his political writings, Calzabigi rather uses the figure of the proudly independent Native American to voice criticism of the greed, materialism, hypocrisy and oppressiveness of contemporary European culture. What should really interest us here, moreover, is how his characters were imagined and understood by the audience at Žleby in 1772. To what extent would the theatrical illusion have been affected, for example, when Amiti, who gets insulted by her slave-mistresses as she pours their tea in the opening scene, was performed by Princess Auersperg, the employer and social superior of all the artists involved (perhaps in line with the long-standing tradition of royals and nobles appearing as shepherdesses, peasants or exotic characters in the context of courtly festivals and entertainments)? Might it not have checked spectators’ impulse to surrender to the illusion and simply believe in the female body on stage as that of a Native American? Perhaps the play with illusion even prompted some spectators to wonder whether Calzabigi’s slaves indeed represented enslaved Native Americans, or whether they were allegorical images.

Fifth, we cannot assume that all members of an eighteenth-century audience experienced and thought the same thing. Within opera scholarship, the monolithic image of the Enlightenment often goes hand in hand with a homogenized image of the audience and the notion that all eighteenth-century operas served to consolidate a collective cultural identity. Here, it is worth keeping in mind that even two spectators never experience the same thing. Women may not experience the same thing as men (see, for example, John A. Rice, ‘Women in Love: Gluck’s Orpheus as a Source of Romantic Consolation in Vienna, Paris, and Stockholm’, Diciottesimo Secolo 1 (2016), 77–94). And eighteenth-century European audiences were highly differentiated when it came to intellectual engagement: a circumstance we see reflected in the period’s dramaturgical practices and ideas about listening and spectating. The distinction between connoisseurs and non-connoisseurs is well known; but we often forget that while some connoisseurs had an ear for musical sophistication or literary allusion, others (or, more likely, the same) had an ear for covert allegorical meanings and subversive political questions. As sapere aude is the motto of the Enlightenment, the enlightened playwrights of the era were keener to provide the audience with questions, riddles, paradoxes and provocations than with answers. Harsh censorship regulations forced them to address different audience groups simultaneously, since open defiance of the authorities or established moral doctrines could cause the show to be banned. As censorship was gradually abolished during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was no longer necessary to operate with a differentiated audience, and the codes of Enlightenment spectatorship were forgotten.

We do not know how any of the spectators who saw Amiti e Ontario on 20 September 1772 understood it, but we know that the audience consisted of various distinct groups: ambassador Rohan and his entourage; the Auerspergs and their friends among the Bohemian nobility; and probably members of the local bourgeoisie as well as household serfs. Clearly, Calzabigi addressed the first two groups simultaneously, and the opera might have carried quite different associations for them. The allusions to Les Sauvages (a work Calzabigi later dismissed as a clichéd expression of French fantasies of cultural superiority) and L’Histoire des deux Indes (some of whose anonymous contributors were connected to the French government) are most likely to have been picked up by the French visitors. Some of them might have sensed a critique of the paternalism of French colonial discourse on Native Americans, although Calzabigi had shrewdly set the opera in a British rather than a French colony. The Bohemian nobles are less likely to have taken an interest in colonial slavery and subjugation, as the Habsburg rulers held no overseas possessions. (On the frustrated colonial aspirations of the Habsburg emperors see Jonathan Singerton, ‘An Austrian Atlantic: The Habsburg Monarchy and the Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century’, Atlantic Studies 20/4 (2023), 673–697.) But they might have recognized in the work the parody of La clemenza di Tito, with a paternalistic landowner posing, grotesquely, as an absolutist emperor. And local members of the audience may have noticed an implicit analogy between colonial slavery and feudal serfdom. Like the slaves in the opera, Bohemian serfs could neither marry nor move to another village without the permission of their masters – who often forced them to work on their fields the entire week – and many lived under slave-like conditions. Of course, we cannot know whether any or all spectators interpreted the opera in these or other ways: typically for eighteenth-century theatre, the political meanings are potential rather than explicit. Moreover, what Ralph P. Locke calls ‘exotic’ and ‘endotic’ readings (in Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 299) are interdependent, since the ‘exotic’ reading refers to an internal French discourse on the colonial ‘others’, while the rhetorical power of the ‘endotic’ reading depends on the analogy between serfs and slaves.

Sixth, reform operas can be revolutionary. Arguing that Gluck’s and Calzabigi’s Viennese ‘opera reform’ represented no ‘new force’, but merely a ‘tendency’ within courtly Italian opera, Reinhard Strohm once pointed out that reforms, unlike revolutions, tend to come from above (Die italienische Oper im 18. Jahrhundert (Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen, 1979), 310). However, when Gluck’s operas premiered in Paris in the 1770s – two of them adaptations of Viennese reform works – they were greeted as a musical révolution, suggesting that the relationship between reform and revolution is more complex. As for the Viennese reform operas, perhaps none deserves the epithet more than Amiti e Ontario, which reflects the Habsburg monarchy’s principal political-reform project of the 1770s: the abolition of Bohemian serfdom. Chancellor Prince Anton Wenzel von Kaunitz, Calzabigi’s patron and a prominent reformer, abolished serfdom on his own estates in the summer of 1773, hoping to inspire other landowners to do the same. And Calzabigi’s opera, which had been premiered just months beforehand in the presence of some of Bohemia’s wealthiest landowners and the French ambassador (who came straight from a visit to the Kaunitz estates), ridiculed the hypocrisy of those who preach enlightenment without practising it.

Strohm’s downplaying of the revolutionary dimension of the Gluck–Calzabigi works reflects his focus on institutional frameworks and formal innovations rather than on reception and aesthetic experience, which are my focus here. Operatic experiences can be revolutionary, I claim, if they touch our aesthetic sensibilities in ways that make us think differently about ourselves and the world. The concept ‘aesthetics’, coined by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in his dissertation Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (Halle: Johann Heinrich Gruner, 1735), and further developed in his treatise Aesthetica (Frankfurt an der Oder: Johannes Christian Kleyb, 1750), was closely linked to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on independent critical thinking: philosophical reflection on our experiences of beauty is an antidote to dogmatism. (For a contemporary rereading of Baumgarten see ‘The Relevance of Aesthetics’, in Dorthe Jørgensen, Poetic Inclinations: Ethics, History, Philosophy (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2021), 49–68.) The theory of the aesthetic, intellectual and moral autonomy of the theatrical spectator was first formulated in Rousseau’s Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur les spectacles (1758), which Calzabigi had certainly read. And the idea of aesthetic and spectatorial autonomy informs the idea of the self-contained operatic work constituting its own form of beauty, which he promoted in the prefaces penned for Gluck’s operas. Each drama has its own unique colour, calling for a unique musical setting. In Paride ed Elena, the composer found his ‘variety of colours’ (‘varietà di colori’) in ‘the different characters of the two nations of Phrygia and Sparta, by contrasting the roughness and savageness of one with the delicacy and tenderness of the other’ (‘carattere diverso delle due nazioni Frigia, e Spartana, con mettere in contrasto il ruvido e selvaggio dell’una con il delicato, e molle dell’altra’) (translation in Patricia Howard, Gluck: An Eighteenth-Century Portrait in Letters and Documents (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 98; original in preface to Gluck, Paride ed Elena: dramma per musica (Vienna: G. T. de Trattnern, 1770)). Though this sounds like stereotyping, Paride ed Elena challenges us to work out whether the constructed duality of ‘Phrygia/Sparta’ stands for ‘Naples/Paris’ or ‘Paris/Geneva’, as I have argued elsewhere (‘The Judgement of Rousseau: Paride ed Elena by Gluck and Calzabigi (Vienna, 1770)’, in Rousseau on Stage: Playwright, Musician, Spectator, ed. Maria Gullstam and Michael O’Dea (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2017), 255–284). Similarly, in Amiti e Ontario, which employs another ‘variety of colour’, the audience would have been challenged to figure out what the duality ‘English settlers/Native Americans’ stood for. Calzabigi did not seek to reproduce ideological frameworks, dualities or hierarchies, but to dismantle them by involving the audience in the aesthetic worlds he created and by constantly subverting any attempt to objectify the ‘others’. Could today’s opera artists perhaps learn something from him?

[ECM Flourish]

As we study and strive to understand the performing arts of the past, we must refrain from universalizing our own culturally and historically embedded notions of performance. To assume, for example, that Italian opera helped shape a racialized group identity, cementing ideological values in the imagination of spectators by persuading them to believe in a world order supposedly portrayed on stage, is to project a modern-day concept of performance that stems primarily from North America onto the works and cultural practices of eighteenth-century Europe. And to expect today’s researchers, teachers and practitioners of Italian opera to help shape a different (and supposedly more ‘ethical’) group identity is to presume that current American and European concepts of performance are the same, and that theatre and opera serve the same function in different cultural contexts. This we cannot take for granted. ‘American performance theory’, writes theatre scholar Marvin Carlson, ‘with its close historical ties to the social sciences, to Deweyesque pragmatism, and to the tradition of rhetoric and communication, has in general looked for the utility of performance in its ability to alter[,] or at least alter the spectator’s thinking about[,] general and specific social situations’ (‘Introduction. Perspectives on Performance: Germany and America’, in Erika Fischer-Lichte: The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (London: Routledge, 2008), 6). This view of the societal function of theatre differs from the German context, according to Carlson, where theatre is generally seen as a form of high art, maintaining close ties to traditional aesthetic theory. The idea of the autonomy of art underlies the idea of the autonomy of the spectatorial imagination, and this fact conflicts with the idea of theatrical communication as a negotiation of cultural and ethical values and of the theatre artist trying to achieve specific pragmatic goals.

As I hope to have demonstrated with my historically contextualized interpretation of Amiti e Ontario, conceiving of the historical audience as differentiated and potentially imaginative and critical is an invitation to conceive of the modern audience in similar terms, and to read and perform the operas of the past in ways that allow for the free play of the imagination. What is true of the meeting of people is also true of the study of works of art: labelling, categorizing, mythologizing and moralizing tend to end conversations, cancelling the liberal exchange of ideas as well as any critical dialogue. Enlightenment works are works that ask questions and expect us to search for the answers ourselves.