Colloquium: Wednesday, April 8, 2026, at 11:30am, 622 Dodge Hall
Jessica Gabriel Peritz, Assistant Professor of Music (Yale University)
"Opera's (Un)Natural Histories"
Abstract: The so-called “metaphor aria” is perhaps the most frequently mocked feature of eighteenth-century Italian opera. To modern sensibilities, this musico-poetic form seems not only unnatural but downright ridiculous: a singer, usually a castrato, portraying a historical figure like Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, halts the dramatic action in order to deliver a long, virtuosic solo in which he compares himself to a lion, a river, or a ship tossed on stormy seas. Rather than expressing feeling in straightforward language and implying psychological development via musical-formal structures, opera seria characters represent their emotional dilemmas through seemingly unrelated natural or nautical metaphors, set to music in the circular, embellishment-heavy da capo form. Small wonder then that by the end of the century, opera seria was found guilty of both musical and dramatic inverisimilitude and consigned to the margins of music history.
But opera seria’s unnatural aesthetics point up a far more interesting history than those written by the genre’s nineteenth-century detractors. After all, these overused metaphors must have come from somewhere—and, this talk argues, the origins of those tropes reveal a set of deeper eighteenth-century tensions between art and science as competing frameworks for understanding the world. The talk reframes opera seria as an epistemic contact zone, within which the much-maligned metaphor aria explored the interplay between ancient fantasies of national-imperial history and Enlightenment experiments in natural-empiricist history. Anchored by the genre-defining libretto Didone abbandonata (Metastasio, 1724)—whose racially ambiguous heroine is forcibly unmoored from both historical time and geographical space—this talk shows how opera seria’s not-quite-Aristotelian poetics raise still-pressing questions about what history is, how it should be written, and where music fits in.
Bio: Jessica Gabriel Peritz is Assistant Professor of Music and Affiliate Faculty in Italian Studies and Early Modern Studies at Yale University. A cultural historian of the long eighteenth century, she studies the relations between music, literature, and philosophy through a focus on Italian opera. Her award-winning first book, The Lyric Myth of Voice: Civilizing Song in Enlightenment Italy (California, 2022), explores how late eighteenth-century musical and literary practices of voice expressed new notions of gender, interiority, and political subjectivity. She has received prizes and fellowships including the Scaglione Award in Italian Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association, the Pisk Prize and AMS-50 from the American Musicological Society, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Her research has been published in, among others, the Journal of Musicology, JAMS, JRMA, and Representations. Her new book project, Opera and the Limits of History (under contract with Oxford), investigates the origins and limitations of historicism through opera seria and its queer historiographical afterlives.
