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The pastoralization of Baroque opera: two operas and their contexts

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The pastoralization of Baroque opera: two operas and their contexts

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Content THE PASTORALIZATION OF BAROQUE OPERA:
TWO OPERAS AND THEIR CONTEXTS
by
Arthur Omura
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(EARLY MUSIC PERFORMANCE)
August 2012
Copyright 2012 Arthur Omura
T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S
List of Figures . . . . . . iii
Abstract . . . . . . iv
Introduction . . . . . . 1
Arcadia in Literature . . . . . . 2
The Pastourelle . . . . . . 5
The Italian Renaissance . . . . . 11
On the Italian Stage . . . . . . 12
L'Astrée . . . . . . 14
Arcadia in Art . . . . . . 16
The Pastoral Garden . . . . . . 21
The Bosco Parrasio . . . . . . 24
Arcadia the Place . . . . . . 27
Musical Instruments in Arcadia . . . . 31
Handel and Acis and Galatea . . . . . 36
Rameau and Les Sauvages. . . . . . 38
Conclusion . . . . . . 42
Bibliography . . . . . . 43
Appendix: The Arcadians . . . . . 47
ii
L I S T O F F I G U R E S
Illustration 1: Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino,
Et in Arcadia Ego, 1618-22,
Rome, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica. . . 16
Illustration 2: Nicolas Poussin, Les Bergers d'Arcadie, 1630,
Derbyshire, Chatsworth House. . . . 17
Illustration 3: Nicolas Poussin Les Bergers d'Arcadie, 1638,
Paris, Musée du Louvre. . . . . 18
Illustration 4: Francesco Trevisani, Rest on the Flight to Egypt,
1715, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. . . 19
Illustration 5: Dessin de l'Hermitage et de la Maison Blanche,
Paris, Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque nationale de
France . . 21
Illustration 6: Israël Silvestre, plan of the Petit Parc, 1680,
Paris, Cabinet des Dessins, Musée du Louvre. . . 22
Illustration 7: Plaisirs de l'Ile Enchantée, 1664,
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. . . 23
Illustration 8: Antonio Cavenari, Project for the Bosco Parrasio,
1725, Rome, Accademia di San Luca. . . . 24
iii
A B S T R A C T
This paper examines the pastoral genre as represented in operatic works from the early 18th
century and juxtaposes them with pastoral works of other media: literature, including plays and
poetry; painting; and architecture. Through this comparison, I will show that the musical
pastoral must not be treated as a restrictive set of characteristics, but as a style or affect and as a
way of looking at the world, and thus almost any artwork can be pastoralized. This examination
and subsequent new definition will give the performer of Baroque music a better understanding
of what the pastoral is, and how it might be recognized and interpreted.
iv
I N T R O D U C T I O N
It seems to be a universal human compulsion, especially during times of social or
political hardship, to look for solace and respite in nature, usually mythological or
abstract nature: specifically, a time and place where people were in harmony with nature,
and lived a life devoid of politics, finance, bureaucracy, etiquette, and all the other
trappings of contemporary society. This Arcadia: a pure, unspoiled Eden, only exists in
the imagination, of course. Arcadia exists without the burden of reality.
In Western literature, this pastoral concept seems to go back as far as it can go: even
perhaps to Homer, who sends Odysseus through what is, according to M. Owen Lee, a
proto-pastoral seascape.
1
Homer records the character of Polyphemus, the monstrous,
gigantic goatherd, who later becomes one of the regular denizens of Arcadia. The
pastoral genre is created in earnest by Theocritus and Virgil. It is rediscovered during
the Renaissance, along with the writings of Plato and Aristotle. By the Baroque period,
the pastoral evolves into a movement of fashion, music, architecture, and philosophy.
This thesis attempts to show that the pastoral, whether in music or the other arts, is
not really a genre, defined by parameters. It is a mode: a way of doing things and a way
of seeing things to produce a quality or affect. Vernon Hyde Minor refers to it as a
“mode,” perhaps in reference to Schiller's phrase “mode of experience.”
2
The term
implies that the subject of a pastoral can be anything, so long as it is experienced in the
right way.
1 M. Owen Lee, Death and Rebirth in Virgil's Arcadia (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1989), 14.
2 Geoffrey Chew and Owen Jander, "Pastoral," In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.libproxy.usc.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/40091 (accessed
May 1, 2012).
1
A R C A D I A I N L I T E R A T U R E
Pastoral literature has its roots in the Classical past. The writings of Homer and the
Mediterranean literary traditions contain elements of what would become the genre.
Homer's monstrous cyclops Polyphemus follows the pastoral profession of goatherding
and lives in a cave apart from the others of his kind.
3
The Alexandrian poet Theocritus
was the first to condense the pre-pastoral particles and to pull the genre out of obscurity.
Theocritus lived and worked around the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, in the mid-
200s BCE.
4
He seems to have come from Sicily: some of his pastoral poems, the Idylls,
are set there. The Idylls are short works, related not by their content but by their mode or
their scale: Each Idyll contains only one event, very few characters, and each takes place
duing a single moment in time. Each is a microcosm. Minor says that the pastoral is an
examination of small things: things “which greatness overlooks.”
5

While the pastoral mode may have originated with Theocritus, the content is not
wholly original. Many of the Idylls are retellings of legends, such as Polyphemus'
serenade to Galatea in Idyll 11, or the first labor of Heracles, who strangles serpents in
Idyll 24. This phenomenon is what Ellen Harris calls “pastoralization”: the application of
the pastoral mode to preexisting literature. Pastoralization blurs the solid boundaries of
the genre.
The topics of the Idylls are various: Idyll 2 tells of a witch casting a love-spell upon
3 Homer, The Odessy, trans. A.T. Murray, in the Perseus Digital Library,
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0136%3Abook
%3D9%3Acard%3D161 (accessed April 1, 2012).
4 Richard Hunter, introduction to Idylls, by Theocritus, trans. Anthony Verity (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002), viii.
5 Vernon Hyde Minor, The Death of the Baroque and the Rhetoric of Good Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 63.
2
the object of her desire.
6
A few (Idylls 4, 5, 10, 14) are simply conversations between
shepherds. Idyll 7, is a song contest. Some (13, 14, 22, 24, 26) are taken from legends.
Idyll 17 is composed of nothing but praise for Ptolemy.
When Virgil composed his Eclogues, it was to Theocritus and to the Alexandrian
tradition that he turned for a model. The Eclogues, too, are short poems. Both
Theocritus and Virgil present microcosms in their poetry: nothing is extraneous. The
Eclogues were composed in the forties and thirties BCE (the first seven completed in 39
or 38)
7
when Virgil was in his thirties. Like Theocritus, Virgil writes autobiographically
about his own home: the evictions in Eclogue 1 seem to be related to the land crisis of 42
BCE, when farms were taken away from their owners and given to returning soldiers.
8

Virgil, having grown up on his father's farm, may have treated the Eclogues as means of
remembering a nostalgic past.
Ovid, a generation after Virgil, was not a pastoral poet. However, Renaissance
writers and composers, and their subsequent Baroque counterparts, use his
Metamorphoses as a font of subjects. His characters: Pan, Echo, Narcissus, Cupid,
Orpheus, and Polyphemus take to opera stages in pastoral works well into the 18
th

century.
The Metamorphoses is like the Eclogues in that it is a collection of short(er) episodes
skillfully arranged. Moreover, many of the episodes are set in Arcadia. Unlike the
Virgilian pastoral, in which each Eclogue seems to take place in a single, timeless
moment, each episode of the Metamorphoses deals with the transformation of something
6 Theocritus, Idylls, trans. Anthony Verity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 7.
7 Edward Coleiro, An Introduction to Vergil's Bucolics with a Critical Edition of the Text (Amsterdam:
B.R. Gruner Publishing Co., 1979), 14.
8 Ibid., 7.
3
into something else, like Syrinx the nymph transformed into a reed in Book I. The entire
work is arranged chronologically: it begins with the creation of the universe, recounts the
ages of man, the time of legends, early Greek and Roman history, up to the
transformation of Julius Caesar into a star.
9

The Classical world gives two kinds of writing to future pastoral authors: one in
which nothing changes, and one in which everything changes. These two are not
incompatible, but benefit from the convergence of extremes: both represent a kind of
constancy. The affinity between the Eclogues and the Metamorphoses is demonstrated in
the Renaissance and the Baroque, when Ovid's work becomes one of the most popular
targets of pastoralization.
9 P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses, ed. Brookes More, in the Perseus Digital Library,
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0028%3Abook
%3D15%3Acard%3D745 (accessed March 30, 2012).
4
T H E P A S T O U R E L L E
During the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, the pastoral of Virgil and
Theocritus was not entirely forgotten; it influenced the pastourelle, a genre of poetry and
song of French origin which shares many qualities with the pastoral.
The recorded history of the pastourelle genre begins in the 11th century with the
writings of Marcabru, a troubadour from Southern France.
10
His song L'autrier jost'una
sebissa is the first to pair the clumsy knight with the sharp-whited shepherdess, the core
characters of every pastourelle.
11

The typical pastourelle presents a conversation between a high-bred knight and a
lowly shepherdess. The knight tries to woo the shepherdess in high, courtly language,
but she rebuffs him in her peasant dialect. They may or may not end up consummating
the relationship
12

The genre is heavily influenced by the language of courtly love: the character of the
knight is a parody of the ideal (male) lover, and the shepherdess is the opposite of the
chaste ideal lady.
13
To understand chivalry's role, at least in literature, we must turn to
other works. The anonymous 15th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
exemplifies the importance of chivalry within the context of Arthurian legend; it
dramatizes the importance of moral rectitude by turning indiscretion into a deadly
10 Geri L. Smith, The Medieval French Pastourelle Tradition (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2009), viii.
11 Charles Fantazzi, “Marcabru's Pastourelle: Courtly Love Decoded,” Studies in Philology 71, no. 4
(October 1974): 388.
12 William Paden lists five essential elements of the pastourelle: 1) Its literary mode is the pastoral. 2) Its
cast includes a man and a girl. 3) Its plot has a discovery and an attempted seduction. 4) Its rhetoric
includes both narrative and dialogue. 5) Its point of view is the man's, that is, the poet speaks in the first
person. Paden then goes on to find exceptions to each of these points. See William Paden, “The
Medieval Pastourelle: A Critical and Textual Revaluation [with Texts of Pastourelles in Several Foreign
Languages with Translations and Notes]” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1971), 119.
13 Ibid., 92-3.
5
mistake.
In the middle of the poem, Gawain finds himself at a welcoming castle. Every day
for three days, the lady of the castle tries to woo him while her husband is away on the
hunt (in a reversal of the pastourelle relationship).
14
Later, Gawain must reveal every gift
he is given, every indiscreet encounter he has had to the lord, her husband. For every
truth Gawain tells, the lord, later transformed into the supernatural Green Knight,
intentionally misses with his ax as he makes to cut off Gawain's head. On the third strike,
the Knight nicks Gawain's neck; Gawain failed to reveal that the lady had given him her
girdle as a talisman of protection.
15

This deadly game dramatizes the importance of truth and righteousness to the courtly
lover. Contrarily, the pastourelle has no dire consequences for indiscretion, no Green
Knight. The sylvan setting is one of amorality against the backdrop of courtly love and
Christian zeal: its distance from cultured society is both real and metaphorical.
The pastoral and pastourelle have many things in common. Both are set in an
abstract, small-scale cosmos consisting of a natural spot: a shady glen or deserted field
away from society's moral norms. The temporal scope is quite small: all the action takes
place in a single moment, on a single day.
16
Characters from both the pastoral and the
pastourelle are similarly abstract. They must be, in order to exist within their world; a
fully-developed character would be dissonant in such a simple context. These characters
are therefore vague, anonymous, or made to fit into a preexisting type.
17

14 Simon Armitage, trans., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2007), 101.
15 Ibid., 175-79.
16 Smith, Pastourelle Tradition, 21.
17 Ellen T. Harris, Handel and the Pastoral Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1980), 7.
6
As in the pastoral, pastourelle characters are stock characters; their names are
signifiers more than specific appellations.
18
The shepherdess may be called “Marion,”
“Marote,” or “Marguet” while the shepherd may be called “Robin,” or “Rogier.” The
Knight (usually the narrator) is almost always anonymous, except when the author
identifies himself.
19
William Paden points out that the characters are sometimes not what
they seem: the knight may simply be play-acting at knighthood, and the shepherdess may
have the qualities of one high above her status, particularly loyalty to her lover.
20
As we
have already seen, Baroque pastoral characters are equally interchangeable.
Birds and their music are an important element of the pastourelle, as they are of
French chanson generally. Renaissance poets ascribed particular qualities to certain
birds; the turtledove was used as an emblem of chastity in courtly chansons: it was
thought not to take another mate after the first mate died.
21
The nightingale, whose song
aroused the passions, was a lover's envoy, as in the chanson “Je suis desheritée”:
Rossignol du bois joly, Beautiful nightingale of the woods,
Sansplus faire demeurée, Without remaining any longer,
Va t'en direa mon amy, Go to tell my lover,
Que pour luy suis tourmentée. That for him I am tormented.
22
In low poetry, like the pastourelle, birds may be interpreted as phallic symbols. In
Adam de la Halle's Jeu de Robin et de Marion, the Knight asks Marion, whom he's trying
to seduce, whether she's seen his falcon.
23
The same scene is repeated in the anonymous
18 Smith, 22.
19 Ibid., 22.
20 Paden, “The Medieval Pastourelle,” 212 ff.
21 Kate van Orden, “Sexual Discourse in the Parisian Chanson: A Libidinous Aviary,” Journal of the
American Musicological Society 48, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 9.
22 Ibid., 7.
23 Adam de la Halle, Le Jeu de Robin et Marion, trans. and ed. Shira I. Schwam-Baird (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1994), 29.
7
“Dieu te regard, bergere”
Ne l'as-tu point veu, mon oyseau sauvage?
Depuis le matin, il est au rivage,
Mon oyseau sauvage, mon joly faucon, don, don,
Qui prent la becasse, connins de saison, don don.
Haven't you seen my wild bird?
Since the morning, he is at the river,
My wild bird, my pretty falcon, don don,
Who catches the woodcock, rabbits in season, don, don.
24
The shepherdess can be a sexual character because of her closeness to the animals she
tends. In a poem by Gilles de Vieux-Maisons, the girl (called “Goaty” because she
watches after goats) makes love three times.
25
Birdsong becomes an important theme in
later pastoral writing, not only to sexualize the bird-like character, but also to demonstrate
the characters' closeness to nature.
Both the pastoral and the pastourelle share a self-reflexive property. The Knight in
Marcabru's L'autrier jost'una sebissa says to the shepherdess, as a way of flattering her,
that she must be from noble blood: the offspring of a knight like himself and a country
woman.
26
She is the product of a relationship exactly like the one he wants with her.
27
In Eclogue 6, we find a pastoral within a pastoral: Damoetas and Daphnis have a
singing contest, a common activity for the Arcadian shepherd. Their subject is the (one-
sided) romance of Polyphemus and Galatea, another common topic of pastoral
literature.
28
In Guarini's Il pastor fido, Ergasto tells a story to Mirtillo.
29
The story is
24 The rabbit is a metaphor for the female sex. See van Orden, 11.
25 Paden, “The Medieval Pastourelle,” 288.
26 Fantazzi, “Courtly Love Decoded,” 395.
27 Paden, “The Medieval Pastourelle,” 218.
28 Theocritus, Idylls, 23.
29 Robert Hogan and Edward A. Nickerson, eds., The Faithful Shepherd: A Translation of Battista
Guarini's Il pastor fido by Dr. Thomas Sheridan (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), 35.
8
itself a mini-pastoral about another Arcadian, Amyntas, who goes through the traumatic
(though typically Arcadian) experience of having to kill his lover as a sacrifice to Diana,
and ends up killing himself instead.
The reflexive properties of these genres seems to be the result of their insular
qualities. The worlds they inhabit are so small that the characters and plots invariably
must retrace the same ground, like an ant walking around an orange.
The pastourelle may be a song, as in El mois de mai.
30
This same pastourelle is
found in the motetus voice of a 13th-century motet, Quant florist la violete / El mois de
mai / Et gaudebit. The motet takes advantage of the harmonious contrast between sacred
and secular meanings of the shepherd by placing a pastourelle motet against a tenor from
a chant used on the feast of the Ascension.
31
In the text of the chant, Jesus predicts his
death and return from the dead. In the text of the pastourelle in the motetus voice, the
shepherd is absent, and the shepherdess is faithful to him despite the temptations of the
knight.
32
Both texts are about absence. Hoekstra glosses this situation thus: the shepherd
is Christ, who is absent from the world but will one day return. The shepherdess is the
church, patiently awaiting that day.
33
The otherwise bawdy pastourelle is given a second,
religious significance by giving the shepherdess and the knight allegorical meaning.
Adam de la Halle's Jeu de Robin et de Marion is a pastourelle, though it is a play
with music. De la Halle augments the form with extra characters and rustic
celebrations;
34
in form it resembles the later Renaissance pastoral works. With the
30 Gerald R. Hoekstra, “The French Motet as Trope: Multiple Levels of Meaning in Quant florist la violete
/ El mois de mai / Et gaudebit,” Speculum 73, no. 1 (January 1998): 35.
31 Ibid., 37.
32 Ibid., 38.
33 Ibid., 37.
34 De la Halle, Robin et Marion, 38.
9
coming of the Renaissance's fascination with Greek and Roman writing, the old-
fashioned pastourelle was put aside in favor of the newly translated style of Virgil and
Theocritus, but the themes of courtly love carry on into the newly reinvigorated pastoral
genre.

10
T H E I T A L I A N R E N A I S S A N C E
Sannazaro's Arcadia was one of the first newly written works in the genre, and the
first to be set in Arcadia.
35
He began composing its first epigrams in the 1480's while
accompanying his patron, Alfonzo II of Naples, on military campaigns.
36
Virgil's
Eclogues were first published in the vernacular around the same time, in 1482.
37
Arcadia
was completed nearly 15 years later when Sannazaro was in exile with a later patron,
Federigo.
38
Each of the chapters was composed individually, and only later compiled into
a single work. The prose passages linking them together was semi-autobiographical,
inspired by Sannazaro's childhood love Carmosina Bonifacio, who died at the age of 14.
39
Sannazaro took Petrarch, an author who lived more than a century before his writing,
as one of his inspirations. Petrarch, too, placed love-lorn characters in secluded woods,
and like the later pastoral authors, he treated the woods as private, nostalgic space; a
space where one could introspect.
40
Arcadia was a popular work, so much so that the first printed edition was published
by book pirates in 1502, while Sannazaro was still in exile.
41
There would be three other
unauthorized printings before Sannazaro could produce the official version. The work,
pirated or not, would go on to influence many other writings and works for the stage.
35 David Kalstone, “The Transformation of Arcadia: Sannazaro and Sir Philip Sidney,” Comparative
Literature 15, no. 3 (Summer 1963): 234.
36 William J. Kennedy, Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral (Hanover and London: University
Press of New England, 1983), 22.
37 Ibid., 13
38 Ibid., 24-26.
39 Ibid., 23.
40 Kalstone, 236.
41 Kennedy, 25.
11
O N T H E I T A L I A N S T A G E
The pastoral play in Italy was an especially musical one. According to Crescimbeni,
head shepherd of the 18
th
-century Arcadian Academy in Rome, the Italian pastoral is shot
through with music: choruses, instrumental accompaniment, and the actors were all
singers.
42
The constant use of music was partly legitimized (in a cultural milieu which
favored “authenticity”) by the fact that the shepherds of Arcadia were musical to begin
with: they are always involved in singing or piping contests. Certain characters from
Classical mythology, Orpheus first among them, were known for their musical skills.
Guarini's Il pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd), published in 1589 after a gestation
period of a decade, was one of the more influential works for the Italian stage. Guarini
set out to refine the pastoral genre (particularly in relation to Tasso's Aminta another
popular work from the time), and to defend it from critics who accused pastoralists of
mixing tragedy and comedy and making their genre a philosophical monstrosity. Part of
Guarini's argument in Il pastor fido is that these two genres can coexist: that high and low
characters can interact with one another because the pastoral genre by its nature vitiates
class differences.
43

Il pastor fido
44
recounts the story of the love between Mirtillo and Amarillis.
Amarillis, a nymph, is promised in marriage to the unresponsive Silvio, in order to lift a
curse on Arcadia. The curse was caused by Amintas, a priest, falling in love with
42 Harris, Pastoral Tradition, 20.
43 Lisa Sampson, Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy: The Making of a New Genre (London: Modern
Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2006), 137.
44 This short summary was compiled from Robert Hogan and Edward A. Nickerson, eds., The Faithful
Shepherd: A Translation of Battista Quarini's Il pastor fidopastor fido by Dr. Thomas Sheridan (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 1989).
12
Lucrina, a Nymph. But Lucrina falls in love with a “rustic swain.”
45
Amintas calls upon
Diana to ease the pains of his broken heart, and Diana sends an incurable plague to
Arcadia. An oracle says that only the death of Lucrina at the hands of Amintas will stop
the deadly curse, but Amintas commits suicide rather than face that tragic outcome.
Lucrina, similarly, kills herself when she hears the news of Amintas' death. The curse
remains unbroken, and Diana demands each year a virgin sacrifice, until two of celestial
blood are joined in marriage. Unfortunately, Silvio and Amarillis, the only descendants
of the gods in Arcadia, do not love one another. After more than a few intrigues, it is
discovered that Amarillis' true love, Mirtillo, is actually the long-lost son of Montano,
and thus their illicit relationship can be consummated, and Arcadia saved from Diana's
Curse.
45 Hogan and Nickerson, The Faithful Shepherd, 35.
13
L ' A S T R É E
Like Sannazaro's Arcadia, Il pastor fido was immensely popular.
46
It, and Tasso's
Aminta, would remain touchstones throughout Europe in the remaining years of the
Renaissance. Authors like Honoré d'Urfé, whose pen produced another monumental
work of pastoral literature, surely read these works, along with the writing of Cervantes,
even though works like his Galatea were not translated.
Honorée d'Urfé came from a wealthy family and benefited from a large library at
home and from a Jesuit education.
47
Along with Christian morality, d'Urfé would have
studied the Classical epicurean philosophers Plutarch and Seneca. These two ancient
sources figure in the philosophical elements of his magnum opus, L'Astrée.
L'Astrée, like the Eclogues and the Idylls, is partly autobiographical. The setting is
an idealized version of Forez, where d'Urfé grew up. The characters and events in
L'Astrée, particularly the continually unfulfilled relationship between Astrée and
Céladon, may have been inspired by d'Urfé's love interest in Diane de Châteaumorand,
his brother's wife.
48
He would later marry her (after her divorce and his release from the
Order of the Knights of Malta) but the marriage would end in unhappiness.
49
L'Astrée was begun in the 1580s, and was not finished when d'Urfé died in 1625. It
is an enormous work. It is also fragmentary and disjointed According to Horowitz,
“there are several worlds within the book called L'Astrée, worlds of words and worlds of
acts, the spiritual ideal and the libidinal dream, the mind and the body, all falling in a
46 Sampson, Pastoral Drama, 129.
47 Louise K. Horowitz, Honoré d'Urfé (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984), 3.
48 Ibid., 1.
49 Ibid., 9-10
14
diffuse vacuum of authorial silence.”
50

A plot summary here is impossible. Generally, L'Astrée chronicles the various
amorous adventures of Astrée and Céladon, Célidée and Calidon, Hylas, and so on,
whose stories interweave with one another in a novelistic mélange. There is much cross-
dressing and intrigue.
The work presents two different philosophies of love. Hylas is interested only in
physical love: “only diversity makes the world beautiful.”
51
Silvandre and Adamas, on
the other hand, are interested in the spiritual aspect of love, their philosophy is a
combination of Renaissance Neoplatonism with the earlier traditions of courtly love.
Renaissance authors left their genre with new thematic and philosophical
developments by combining the mode of Theocritus and Virgil with new interpretations
of Greek philosophers (particularly Plato), Medieval concepts of courtly love, and their
own original content. Their work would be continued in the Baroque by not only the
great authors of the age, but also by its composers, painters, sculptors, and architects.
The Baroque would see the pastoral mode's influence creep into nearly every aspect of
life.
50 Ibid., 69.
51 Ibid., 32.
15
A R C A D I A I N A R T
Pastoral literature is filled with descriptions of the landscape and the vegetation,
often given by the Arcadians themselves. For this reason, the genre lends itself well to
visual depiction. Nature has forever been a subject in the visual arts. To make a
landscape a pastoral landscape, it requires certain qualities: a countryside which exudes a
sense of calmness, naïve shepherds, and an elegiac element or a ruined building or statue
to act as a reminder of the distance, both moral and physical, between nature and
civilization. Most importantly, pastoral painting retains the literary mode's abstract or
surreal qualities. This section examines paintings on one explicitly Arcadian subject: the
phrase ET IN ARCADIA EGO which is translated roughly as “I too am in Arcadia,” and
one painting which is not set in Arcadia at all, yet shares many qualities with its pastoral
counterparts.
ET IN ARCADIA EGO first
appears in a painting by Il
Guercino (“the Squinter”) in
1618 (Illustration 1).
52
Two
shepherds, one older, one
younger, peer at a skull sitting on
a decrepit tomb, which bears the
doleful inscription. Around the
52 Thomas Bauman, “Moralizing the Tomb: Poussin's Arcadian Shepherds in Eighteenth-century England
and Germany,” in Opera and the Enlightenment, ed. Thomas Bauman and Marita Petzoldt
McClymonds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 23. Image: Wikimedia Commons,
“File:Et-in-Arcadia-Ego.jpg,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Et-in-Arcadia-ego.jpg (accessed January
1 2012).
16
Illustration 1
skull are a fly, a mouse, and a goldfinch. The phrase seems to be spoken by Death,
symbolized by the skull.
This painting is firmly in the tradition of the memento mori: a genre of painting with
the moral message that all pleasures of life will one day come to an end. The skull, with
fly, is common to vanitas paintings from the Low Countries;
53
the fly, a carrion eater, is a
symbol of sin, disease and death, as is the mouse. The colorful goldfinch represents the
antithesis of death; the Golden Legend
54

says that this bird, which normally eats
thistles, pulled a thorn out of the brow of
Christ as he was hanging on his cross.
55
This act of piety marked the bird forever
with bloody-red plumage, and associated it
with the Passion and Resurrection.
56

Guercino must have been aware of the
vanitas tradition, despite never having
visited the Low Countries. He was born in
Cento in 1591, and stayed in Northern Italy
for the rest of his life, excepting a two-year
53 Ingvar Bergström, Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Hacker Art Books,
1983), 158.
54 The Legenda aurea is a 13th-century collection of the lives of the saints. Though they were apocryphal,
they were immensely popular, and were translated into every language in Europe during the Middle
Ages.
55 Sheridan Germann, “Monsieur Doublet and his Confrères: The Harpsichord Decorators of Paris,” Early
Music 8, no. 4 (October 1980), 449.
56 The skull, the tree-of-new-life, and the goldfinch are all also found in images of St. Jerome, the
translator of the Vulgate Bible. It was well known that Jerome spent many years in the wilderness: his
biography also appears in the Golden Legend.
17
Illustration 2
sojourn to Rome to work for Pope Gregory XV in 1621.
57
Unlike the Dutch and Flemish
vanitas paintings, Guercino's work is not presented as a domestic still-life, but as an
Arcadian landscape. The painting represents a combination of an elegiac, pagan subject
with a moral, Christian message.
As if to emphasize the difference between vanitas and pastoral, there are the two
rustics, one young, one older, who have happened upon the scene. They, like the viewer,
contemplate their own mortality (or are about to, once they move around to the front of
the tomb). Their presence implies an affinity between the viewer and the rustics; by
viewing the painted image, he becomes like them. Guercino uses this technique of
blurring the boundary of the painting elsewhere, and more explicitly. In his Erminia and
the Shepherd, Erminia's left hand is raised in a gesture which seems to ask “where are the
music makers?” In response, the shepherd points out of the frame, into the space of the
viewer. The implication is that his sons, the music-makers, are next to the viewer, in real
space.
58
Poussin's paintings (1630,
1638) on the same subject
seem much more Arcadian,
that is, more elegiac or, as
Bauman puts it, more
“ambivalent.”
59
The first
(Illustration 2)
60
seems to
57 Julian Brooks, Guercino: Mind to Paper (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006), 1-3.
58 Shilpa Prasad, Guercino: Styalistic Evolution in Focus (San Diego: Timken Museum of Art, 2006), 21.
59 Bauman, “Moralizing the Tomb,” 24.
60 Image: Wikimedia Commons, “File:Poussin1627.jpg,”
18
Illustration 3
retain Guercino's moral message: two shepherds turn away from a bare-breasted
shepherdess in animated contemplation of the sepulchre before them, a skull peering
back. The second (Illustration 3)
61
shows a similar group, only the emotion is much more
muted. Guercino's painting and the first Poussin invite the viewer into the space of the
painting with the rustics' gazes and gestures, but Poussin's second painting is so self-
conscious that it invites the viewer to realize that he is looking at a painting. It is as if
these shepherds have not come to terms with death, but have realized that the sepulcher
before them contains no corpse, but only pigment and oil.
This approach causes the viewer to reexamine his relationship with the artwork: to
reexamine himself. The technique is similar to ekphrasis; a written description of a
visual work of art, found in pastoral writing. In Theocritus' first Idyll, for example, we
find a highly detailed description of an ornamented cup, to be used as a prize.
62
Pastoral
art is especially adept at blurring the
boundaries of medium.
The subjects of this mode of
pastoral painting were not always
“realistic” (e.g. about shepherds); they
could be biblical as well. Take, for
example, Francesco Trevisani's Rest
on the Flight to Egypt (Illustration 4),
63

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Poussin1627.jpg (accessed January 1, 2012).
61 Image: Wikimedia Commons, “File:Nicolas Poussin 052.jpg,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nicolas_Poussin_052.jpg (accessed January 1, 2012).
62 Theocritus, Idylls, 1.
63 Image: Minor, Good Taste, 67.
19
Illustration 4
in which the holy family is shown resting in the shade of a pleasant tree next to the
pedestal of a broken statue. The family seems completely unperturbed by having to flee
their homeland because of a murderous tyrant. They're lounging about, while putti
collect fruit and water the donkey. The family is not in the Holy Land but in Arcadia, and
is therefore within its calming, peaceful sphere. Like the Arcadians around Poussin's
tomb, they are beyond worries.
Minor points out the silliness of the image: it is completely ridiculous, to the point of
being self-consciously so.
64
In fact, this seems to be the point: in the very small scale of a
pastoral cosmos, the characters within are often given over to self-reflection, and within
this self-reflecting, there may be an element of self-consciousness.
Trevisani was a member of the Arcadian Academy in Rome, a society dedicated to
reforming art, literature, theater, and also to reforming its members.
65
Trevisani would
not only have painted in a pastoral style, but would also have tried to live more like an
Arcadian. The Arcadian lifestyle, with the upper classes playing at being rustics, became
more popular in the 18th century, inspired by literature and works for the theater and
opera stage. Meanwhile, pastoralization spread to include garden design and architecture.
64 Vernon Hyde Minor, Good Taste, 66.
65 Ibid., 65.
20
T H E P A S T O R A L G A R D E N
The idea of presenting a garden and the structures within as Arcadian grottoes or
sylvan groves seems to come, as the pastoral genre itself did, out of Renaissance Italy.
The heavy rustication of Giulio Romano's Palazzo del Te near Mantua, for example, is
not explicitly pastoral, but it does imply an affinity with the building's countryside
location. Rustication is a decorative technique used on stone buildings: the stones are left
roughly cut, or their surfaces are gouged unevenly to resemble natural stone.
The French adapted this mode of landscape architecture during the second Italian
invasion. Notably, Cardinal Charles de Bourbon built himself an elaborate pastoral
garden complex at his Château de Gaillon in the 1550's.
66
At one end was the Maison
Blanche, a two-story pavilion built on an island at the end of a canal. It was apparently
intended as a kind of theater-piece; pastoral masques would be performed before it. At
the other end of the canal was a large artificial mountain, the Parnasse de Gaillon,
66 William Howard Adams, The French Garden: 1500-1800 (New York: Brazillier, 1979), 25. Image:
Adams, 26.
21
Illustration 5
complete with a secluded grotto. It, too stood on an island, and was only accessible by
drawbridge.
67
The theatrical element
would remain in the French
garden for at least the
century that followed. At
the Palace of Versailles,
head gardiner Le Nôtre
organized the ever-
expanding gardens by
dividing the land with
enormous allées; straight,
gravelly roads which
strongly resembled the
forced perspective stage
scenery popular in Baroque
opera and playhouses.
Indeed, outdoor festivals took advantage of this effect, situating the audience and stage so
that allées could be used as scenery.
68
Sometimes, as in the festival of the Plaisirs de l'Île
Enchantée of 1668, the effect was augmented by actual set pieces built specifically for
the event (llustration 7).
69
67 Ibid., 26.
68 Ibid., 67.
69 Ibid,, 69. Image: Adams, 70.
22
Illustration 6
Towards the end of his life, in the
1690s, Le Nôtre began to make his
heretofore temporary garden-sets
permanent. These were the bosquets
(“woods”), built between the petit-parc's
heavy axes. Often isolated from the
main allées by twisting paths, the bosquets offered garden visitors an enclosed space,
perhaps adorned with statuary, theaters, and fountains. There was even a labyrinth to get
lost in (upper right side of illustration 6).
70
They recreated, on an imperial scale, the
locus amoenus of pastoral literature.
70 Image: Adams, 87.
23
Illustration 7
T H E B O S C O P A R R A H S I O
In Rome, another group was attempting to live the pastoral lifestyle, but these
players had a more sophisticated goal: to make all of the Italian peninsula more like
Arcadia, in literature at least, and
perhaps also in music and drama. The
Academia degli Arcadi was founded by
amateur writers in 1690, a year after the
death of Queen Christina of Sweden.
71

Christina had abandoned her throne and
moved to Rome many years before after
a crisis of religion (she converted to
Catholicism), and become a major
patron of the arts. The Academia was
founded partly in her honor, partly to
give those she patronized a venue. The
Arcadians were interested in literary
reform, and the subsequent reform of theater and music (and, as we have already seen,
painting). They desired simplicity in their writing, as opposed to the extended allegory,
heavy metaphor, and hyperbole that characterized Baroque writing, and which the
Arcadians thought was in bad taste.
72
One of the tenets of the Academia was that it should always meet in a bosco (a
71 Susan M. Dixon, Between the Real and the Ideal: The Arcademia degli Arcadi and its Garden in
Eighteenth-Century Rome (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 19.
72 Ibid., 30.
24
Illustration 8
wood) just as their fictional Arcadian counterparts did. This proved easier said than done:
the Accademia moved from one home to the next in the thirty-six years after its founding.
They met in a boschetto owned by the Padri Minore Riformati, in the garden at the villa
Matteo Orsini, in the garden of the Palazzo Riario in the Orti Farnesiani, at the Palazzo of
the Duke of Giuliano, in the garden of Principe Vincenzo Giustiani, in the Giardino
Ruspoli, in a garden owned by Cardinal Gennasi on the Aventine Hill next to Santa
Sabina, and so on.
73
Eventually, the Accademia built its own garden, the Bosco Parrasio
(Illustration 8). It was designed by Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, the charismatic head
shepherd of the Accademia, and modeled after the triumphal theater sets used in Arcadian
plays staged at the Palazzo della Cancelleria.
74

The hillside site used two sets of curving staircases to bring the Arcadians up a series
of terraces to an amphitheater. The inward-outward journey up these stairs was
punctuated by woodsy places and views of a grotto, of Rome, of a statue of Pan or
Apollo, or of a plaque with an epitaph for a former member.
75
The gates at the bottom
and the structure at the top of the garden served as the Academy's office space, but were
built as set pieces. The entire Bosco is essentially a real-life theater set on which the
fantastical Arcadian lifestyle could be more fully realized. The upward journey from the
street below to the amphitheater above, through the levels and staircases, and past
Crescimbeni's dense symbolic program, transformed the pastori from their regular selves
into their shepherd personas. Additionally, academy members took on Arcadian names to
73 Ibid., 55-61.
74 Cardinal Ottoboni, who lived at the Pallazo della Cancelleria, was one of the most prominent members
of the Academy. See Dixon, 46.
75 Vernon Hyde Minor, “Ideology and Interpretation in Rome's Parrhasian Grove: The Arcadian Garden
and Taste,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 26 (2001): 202-4.
25
make the transformation complete.
All architecture is essentially experiential, but Arcadian architecture is explicitly so:
designed so that its physical elements are augmented by the cultural and literary
environment to create an atmosphere of transformative tranquility. The existence of this
kind of architecture attests to the pastoral mode's ability to retain its identity even through
drastic changes in medium.
26
A R C A D I A T H E P L A C E
In the 1950s, Gavin Maxwell traveled to northern Sicily to interview the people of
this mostly rural, poor land. One of the interviewees, a boy of 15 named Nene, was a
cowherd. His remarkable account of daily life is eerily reminiscent of life in Arcadia.
Nene made a flute out of bamboo, with which he could imitate birdsong so well that the
birds themselves would sing back. He would sing love songs when alone, and when he
met other shepherd boys, they would play their flutes together, or sing songs in
competition, sometimes making up new verses. These songs, which Nene called botta e
riposta, are sung when the two singers are out of sight of one another, across the empty
fields. Nene also describes having a masturbation race with four other boys (he wins),
drinking the milk from a cow's teat when he is very hungry, and his sexual relationship
with his boss, Don Paolo, who seduces Nene after teaching him to milk a cow.
76
All of
these things; an intimate connection with nature, often represented by the pathetic fallacy
or, specifically, by the ability to communicate with birds, competition in music and in
poetry, and fluid, ever-present sexuality are all hallmarks of the pastoral genre.
The real Arcadia is a land-locked region of the Peloponnese in Greece; it is rocky
and mostly empty. Perhaps this lack of distinguishing features allowed Polybius, the
second-century BCE Greek historian, to say that this was a land of musical shepherds, the
Arcadia of Theocritus and Virgil.
77
Here, lonely workers of the field pass the long hours
in poetic discourse, lamenting lost loves, falling in love anew, and taking part in friendly
musical competition. They are invariably in some pleasant place: a shady grove close by
76 Gavin Maxwell, The Ten Pains of Death (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1960), 45-52.
77 Kennedy, Uses of Pastoral, 115.
27
a fountain of cool springwater, distant physically and metaphysically from the rigors and
the moral values of the city.
This imaginary Arcadia is fundamentally different from the real one not only because
it is unreal, but because it can never be real: it is an abstraction, a plane of existence
which does not suffer from the alterations of the passage of time. It is a place where men
and nature are reduced to their essential qualities, and in this reduction become more pure
and more potent.
The pastoral realm exists outside of time, just as Arcadia is a place without place.
Therefore, the genre is perfectly synthetic, completely abstract. Its abstraction is the
perfect venue for self-reflection: Arcadia's peaceful groves and grottoes can be seen as
nothing but the insides of the mind, recalling, perhaps, the woods in which Dante finds
himself at the beginning of the Divine Comedy. Otium, then, is not repose after the
completion of a hard day's labor in the fields, but is more akin to the stillness of sleep,
when outside influences and troubles have been cut off, leaving room for dreams.
Arcadians themselves are abstractions, stock characters. Their interchangeability,
their vacillating loves (both between lovers and between the sexes), perhaps also the
nature of their nomadic profession, makes their individual identities mercurial.
Much of what is pastoral seems to be from the realm of memory: a distant, legendary
past, or from the childhood of the author. Therefore, the pastoral genre is often elegiac
and tomb-ridden, as in Virgil's Eclogue II or in Poussin's painting on the subject Et in
Arcadia Ego. In Theocritus' seventh Idyll, the narrator, Simichidas, says that he meets
Lycidas, a goatherd, before seeing the tomb of Brasilas.
78
The effect of finding a tomb in
78 Theocritus, Idylls, 25.
28
a nostalgic genre is one of multiplication: looking at a reflection of a reflection.
Because the pastoral cosmos is so small, pastoral writing can become self-referential,
perhaps even self-parodying. Eclogue 6 contains a pastoral within a pastoral: Damoetas
and Daphnis have a singing contest, a common activity for the shepherd. Their subject
happens to be the (one-sided) romance of Polyphemus and Galatea, another common
topic for pastoral literature.
79
In Guarini's Il pastor fido, we learn how Diana placed a
curse upon Arcadia through a story told by Ergasto to Mertillo.
80
The story is of another
Arcadian, Amyntas, who goes through the traumatic (though typically Arcadian)
experience of having to kill his lover as a sacrifice to Diana, and ending up killing
himself instead.
The sea is an important element of the pastoral landscape. There are characters in
pastoral poetry who decide to throw themselves into the sea to escape the pain of rejected
love. Galatea, one of the recurring characters in the pastoral genre, is a sea-nymph.
Streams, rivers and fountains, sometimes anthropomorphized as a nymph or a river-god,
are prevalent: the spirit of a river, Alpheus, gives the opening monologue of Guarini's Il
pastor fido. The Bosco Parrasio of the Arcadian Academy would not be complete
without its watery grottoes.
Arcadia's unspoiled nature recalls the long-lost Golden Age described by Ovid and
Lucretius, or the garden of Eden; pseudo-historical periods which came before the
corruption of mankind. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, describes the Golden Age:
The first age of mankind was a Golden age, which, with no one to give
79 John Van Sickle, Virgil's Book of Bucolics, the Ten Eclogues Translated into English Verse (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 23.
80 Hogan and Nickerson, The Faithful Shepherd, 35.
29
punishment, of its own free will cherished what was right and good. There was
no punishment and no fear, but men lived in safety without judges. Mortals
knew no shores but their own; not yet did protective ditches surround cities.
There were no helmets, no swords. Without the need for soldiers, nations lived
in pleasant peace, free from care. The earth gave forth all things of her own
accord, and mankind, content with foods created without labor, picked the fruit of
the trees and the mountain strawberries and the cornel-cherries and mulberries
clinging to the wild thickets and acorns that fell from the spreading oak of
Jupiter.
Spring was eternal, and the gentle breezes caressed the flowers, all springing
forth without seed, with clear warm air. Soon, also, the unplowed earth was rich
with grain, and the fields, always fertile, were white with the heavy beards of
corn. Then rivers of milk, then streams of nectar flowed forth, and golden honey
dripped from the blossoming trees.
81
Ovid's Golden Age and Arcadia are not necessarily the same, though they share
certain qualities: the endless springtime, and the closeness of mankind to the fertile land.
Moreover, Ovid provides authors of pastoral literature with their most abundant source of
material.
Late Renaissance pastoral drama makes the connection explicit through the inclusion
of a “Golden Age chorus” in which the chorus proclaims the setting of the play itself to
be during the Golden Age of mankind.
82
Such a chorus appears in Tasso's Aminta and in
Guarini's Il pastor fido. Both choruses depict the Golden Age as virile, sexual, and
unsullied by human corruption, especially false honor.
83
81 Rhoda A. Hendricks, ed. & trans., Classical Gods and Heroes: Myths as Told by the Ancient Authors
(New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1972), 28.
82 Gabriel Niccoli, Cupid, Satyr and the Golden Age: Pastoral Dramatic Scenes of the Late Renaissance
(New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 69.
83 Ibid., 70.
30
M U S I C A L I N S T R U M E N T S I N A R C A D I A
Pan, the god of Arcadia, plays a bundle of reeds which he calls a syrinx, named for a
nymph who he fell in love with, but who was transformed into a reed before Pan could
have her, according to Ovid.
84
Therefore, a flute (of the pan-pipe variety or not) can be
used to evoke the goat-hooved god.
The flute is also useful for its ability to mimic birdsong. The pathetic fallacy is
especially potent in pastoral literature; it is not unusual for nature to share the emotions of
prominent characters, especially when those characters make music. Sympathy with
birds is a less potent form of the fallacy.
The hurdy-gurdy and bagpipes are closely associated with shepherds. Baroque
composers would often imitate these instruments and their particular quirks to evoke a
rural setting, as in Handel's masque Acis and Galatea discussed later.
The hurdy-gurdy is a stringed instrument in which the strings are agitated by a wheel
instead of a bow. The wheel is mounted into the body of the instrument between the
bridge and the key-box, and the strings rest lightly upon it. When the wheel's crank is
turned, the rosined rim of the wheel vibrates the strings. A hurdy-gurdy may have many
strings or few, but it usually has both drone strings and melody strings. The melody
strings are stopped at the proper length by tangents mounted to small keys in the key-box.
The instrument may also have a trompette: a drone string mounted upon a loose bridge.
When the crank is given a little extra push, the loose bridge (called the chien (“dog”)
because of its shape) vibrates against the surface of the soundboard and produces a
84 Anthony DiMatteo, trans., Natale Conti's Mythologies: A Select Translation (New York: Garland
Publishing, 1994), 264.
31
buzzing sound, which can be used as a rhythmic accompaniment or as a kind of
articulation.
The bagpipes are a set of reed pipes attached to an air bladder, inflated by the breath
and squeezed by the player, causing air to flow over the reeds. The bag is usually made
out of sheepskin or goatskin.
85
A bagpipe has drones along with a chanter: a pipe with
finger holes used to play the melody. Bagpipes may have more drones or fewer, and be
larger or smaller depending on regional variations.
The hurdy-gurdy is, compared with other instruments in common use during the
Baroque, quite ancient. Its first appearances date back to the Middle Ages: in stone
carvings on the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostella, and in the painted ceiling panels
of Peterborough Cathedral. The bagpipe is even more ancient, its ancestors dating to
ancient Rome and possibly earlier.
86
The musette, a kind of French bagpipes, is a recent
development, probably dating to the early 17
th
century. It appears first in Praetorius' De
Organographia, published in 1619.
87
These instruments appear in iconography, especially religious iconography, all
throughout the Middle Ages. During the Renaissance, however, they lost their religious
associations and picked up the characteristic of being commonly played by beggars, the
poor, and country folk.
88
Susan and Samuel Palmer believe that farmers played the
hurdy-gurdy during the wintertime, when there was no farming to do.
89
During the
85 Emanuel Winternitz, “Bagpipes and Hurdiy-Gurdies in their Social Setting,” The Metropolitan Museum
of Art Bulletin, New Series, 2, no. 1 (Summer 1943): 56.
86 Ibid., 62.
87 Frayda B. Lindemann, “Pastoral Instruments in French Baroque Music: Musette and Vielle” (PhD
dissertation, Columbia University, 1978), 36.
88 Susan Palmer and Samuel Palmer, The Hurdy Gurdy (North Pomfret VT: David & Charles, 1980), 72
89 Ibid., 112.
32
Baroque, however, the popular image of these instruments changed dramatically.
During the 18
th
century, these instruments found new favor among the upper classes,
which increasingly wished to associate themselves with the rustics of pastoral literature.
90
The aristocracy occasionally had their children portrayed in painting as Savoyards: farm
workers or chimney sweeps; itinerants from the lower classes.
91

Instruments from this time tend to be more delicate and ornate than their Medieval
and Renaissance counterparts, occasionally with precious stones inlaid.
92
In France, the
unrefined, cumbersome mass of the bagpipes was reduced, the reeds made lighter, the
tone more singing and pretty. The drones were eliminated altogether, replaced by a
barrel-like block that contained the reeds, channels, and layettes: small slivers that could
be slid to adjust the tuning and pitch of a drone note.
93
The blowpipe was replaced by a
small, elbow-worn bellows that was much more appropriate for a young woman to use, or
anyone else who did not want to suffer the indignity of blowing into a tube.
94
The
resulting musette's light reeds give it a very sweet sound which could be played in duet
with the refined vielle-à-roue; both instruments operated in the same keys of C and G.
95

The hurdy-gurdy went through a similar transformation. Unusual body shapes (some
resembled the wings of large flies or open books) began to be modeled after the more
refined viol, guitar, or lute. Their edges were decorated with inlays of ebony, ivory, or
pearl; their cranks augmented by ivory knobs; and their peg-boxes capped by fanciful
figureheads, sometimes representing turbaned Turks or men wearing fanciful Chinese
90 Ibid., 135.
91 Ibid., 140-3.
92 Ibid., 145.
93 Lindemann, “Pastoral Instruments,” 40.
94 Winternitz, “Bagpipes and Hurdiy-Gurdies,” 76.
95 Lindemann, 75.
33
hats.
96
In France, this instrument was called the vielle-à-roue, or simply the vielle.
The pair of musette and vielle-à-roue was popularized in the early 18th century by
two virtuosos: Colin Charpentier and Monsieur Danguy, who worked in Paris and played
for the Concerts Spirituels.
97
Their concertizing coincided with the publication of works
specifically written for the musette or the vielle by composers such as Boismortier,
Corrette, and Naudot. Rameau composed for Charpentier and Danguy, and used the
instruments in his pastoral operas.
The two instruments work well together because of their similar tone quality, and
because they share certain quirks. Because its tone never ceases, when the key of a
vielle-à-roue is not being pressed, the melody strings sound their lowest pitch, usually a
G. Therefore, the articulations between melody notes are not silent as on an organ, but
have the tone of this G. A musette player must also sound a different note, often in an
ornamental way, when making articulations, as stopping and restarting the wind is
difficult.
While playing on country instruments such as the vielle-à-roue and the musette
allowed the French aristocracy to more accurately live their pastoral fantasies, these
instruments also began to color the way pastoral musical works were written.
96 A special thanks to Curtis Berak of Los Angeles, who's instrument collection has been a great source of
information.
97 Robert A. Green, The Hurdy-Gurdy in Eighteenth-Century France (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1995), 18-19.
34
H A N D E L A N D A C I S A N D G A L A T E A
Handel had the privilege of working with two different Arcadian societies of the 18
th

century. While in Rome, he was employed by the Marquis Ruspoli, a prominent member
of the Arcadian Academy. Handel was in Rome from the fall of 1706 to 1710, and thus
was been present when Ruspoli became the host of the Academy in 1708. Before the
construction of the Bosco Parrasio, Academy meetings were held in the private gardens
of its more illustrious members. Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, a festival piece, was composed
for the summer of that year.
98
Years later, Handel became associated with the Scriblerus
Club: a group of authors of pastoral writing, including Alexander Pope, John Gay,
Johnathan Swift, and John Hugues. This group would collaborate on the libretto of Acis
and Galatea. It was first produced at the residence of the Duke of Chandos at Cannons in
1718.
99

A later staging of Acis and Galatea was produced in London in 1732. It was
significantly different from the original, incorporating elements from Aci, Galatea, e
Polifemo, the first Acis, and Cor fedele, a cantata Handel produced in 1707 while he was
in Rome. It was staged as a response to a production of the original Acis, mounted by
Thomas Arne (Sr.) at a competing Haymarket theater.
100

In England the pastoral opera was not at all popular, except in certain circumstances:
schools, and functions for families. The pastoral masque, in the tradition of Purcell's
Dido and Aeneas, was popular. Such works were used as interludes and end-pieces. It
98 Harris, Pastoral Tradition, 152-68.
99 Ibid., 198-99.
100Ibid., 211-12.
35
was “the only healthy English musical dramatic form,” according to Harris.
101

The plot of Acis and Galatea follows it's Ovidian model closely. Acis, the simple
shepherd, and Galatea, a sea-nymph, are lovers. Their peace is interrupted by the brutish
Polyphemus who sings a clumsy love-song to Galatea. She rejects him. In jealous rage,
Polyphemus crushes Acis with a boulder, whereupon Galatea transforms him into an
immortal river-god. Ovid's story, which features a jealous, brutish lover trying to win the
heart of an emotionally distant maiden, is remarkably similar to the standard pastourelle
plot.
The first act chorus begins with an imitation of rustic instruments: a drone in the
continuo is like the drone pipes of a musette, while the upper voices, moving in close
immitation, mimic the bagpipes' chanters.
The leaps that begin
in the eighth measure
mimic the open string of a drone instrument.
Galatea is closely associated with birdsong. In her aria, “Hush ye pretty warbling
quire,” she is so moved by their song that she must sing back:
101Ibid., 195-6.
36
Hush, ye pretty warbling quire!
Your thrilling strains
Awake my pains,
And kindle fierce desire.
Cease your song and take your flight,
Bring back my Acis to my sight!
102
In “As when the dove laments her love,” Galatea's melody leaps like the cooing of a
dove. Animalistic calls were a sign of low birth or of increased sexuality (or both); a
phenomenon with antecedents in the pastourelle genre.
Each aria is highly controlled thematically. There is not much difference between
the A-section of an aria in Acis, and the normally contrasting B-section. Harris believes
that Handel's use of the ritornello form reflects not only the pastoral's Italian heritage, but
also the “Arcadian mood,”
103
a mood of familiarity and repetition. Within each section,
deviations to related keys and changes in phrasing are brief. The affect is preserved
throughout, with the effect that the work attains a wonderful simplicity.
Acis and Galatea is a wonderful example of the pastoralization of an Ovidian
subject. As we have already seen, Ovid is not a pastoral author, but his Metamorphoses
are easily pastoralized.
102George Frideric Handel, Acis and Galatea, edited by Friedrich Chrysander (Lepizig: Deutsche
Händelgesellschaft, 1858), 1.
103Harris, Pastoral Tradition, 206.
37
R A M E A U A N D L E S S A U V A G E S
Jean-Philippe Rameau is known today as an opera composer and a theoretician. His
Traité de l'harmonie, published in 1722, postulates that all musical harmonies are derived
from the overtone series, thus music has a rational basis in mathematics.
104
The work is
fraught with faults, which Rameau would spend the rest of his life, about four decades,
trying to rectify.
Rameau was acquainted with Enlightenment thinkers. The encyclopedist Diderot
met Rameau in 1748, and asked him to compose an article on music for his in-progress
Encyclopédie.
105
Rameau was sixty-five, Diderot was thirty-five. Diderot was an admirer
of music, but knew nothing about the subject. Rameau, perhaps feeling that his own
publications were sufficient, declined to write for the Encyclopédie, deferring instead to
Rousseau, who finished the article in a very quick three months. Diderot and the
encyclopedists greatly respected Rameau as a musician and a theoretician, at least in the
beginning of their relationship. Their relationships later soured over technical
differences.
106
Rameau also knew Voltaire; they collaborated together in 1733 on an
opera, Samson, which was never produced.
107

Among V oltaire's startling critiques of religion and government, there are
descriptions of ideal, primitive societies which bear remarkable resemblance to the
fictitious Arcadian society, or the Golden Age of man. The entries in his Philosophical
Dictionary that describe native Americans and Hottentots, for example, contain such
104Thomas Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 5-6.
105Ibid., 212.
106Ibid., 252.
107Ibid., 188.
38
language:
The Hottentots, towards the south, still live as people are said to have lived in the
first ages of the worldfree, equal, without masters, without subjects, without
money, and almost without wants. The flesh of their sheep feeds them; they are
clothed with their skins; huts of wood and clay form their habitations. They are
the most dirty of all men, but they feel it not, but live and die more easily than we
do.
108
V oltaire uses similar language in the “Equlity” entry:
If the earth were in fact what it might be supposed to beif men found upon it
everywhere an easy and certain subsistence, and a climate congenial to their
nature, it would clearly have been impossible for one man to subjugate another.
Let the globe be covered with wholesome fruits; let the air on which we depend
for life convey to us no diseases and premature death: let man require no other
lodging than the deer or roe, in that case the Genghis Khans and Tamerlanes will
have no other attendants than their own children, who will be worthy enough to
assist them in their old age.
In that state of nature enjoyed by all undomesticated quadrupeds, and by birds
and reptiles, men would be just as happy as they are. Dominion would be a mere
chimera-an absurdity which no one would think of, for why should servants be
sought for when no service is required?
109
French society could easily associate the pristine environment and uncivilized
peoples of India and America with the long-lost Golden Age of mankind – except that, in
those distant climes, this Golden Age had not yet ended.
110
Americans still lived in
harmony with the earth and with each other, or so it was thought; images of the peaceful
and naïve Native American had been circulated centuries before by those opposed to
Spanish exploitation. Bartolomeo de las Casas' Short Account of the Destruction of the
Indies (written in 1542, and full of descriptions of Native American simplicity contrasted
108Haskell M. Block, ed., Voltaire: Candide and Other Writings (New York: Random House, 1956), 393-4.
109Ibid., 403.
110Joellen A. Meglin, “'Sauvages, Sex Roles, and Semiotics': Representations of Native Americans in the
French Ballet, 1736-1837, Part One: The Eighteenth Century,” Dance Chronicle 23, no. 2 (2000): 94.
39
with accounts of their holocaust on a massive scale) was particularly effective. The Abbé
Guillaume Raynal and Diderot included Las Casas in their Philosophical and Political
History of the Two Indies.
111
Louis Fuzelier, Rameau's librettist for Les Indes galantes seems to have utilized the
concept of the bon sauvage (“Noble Savage”) when penning “Les Sauvages,” the fourth
entrée of that opera.
“Les Sauvages” is set in the New World. Don Alvar, a Spaniard, and Damon, a
Frenchman, are both courting Zima, the Chief's daughter. Zima, however, chooses
Adario, a brave of her own tribe, as her husband because Don Alvar is too jealous and
Damon is too fickle.
“Les Sauvages” is not explicitly a pastoral, but the act does have many pastoral
elements. It is set in a wood in a far-away place. The plot is similar to that of Acis and
Galatea, and to the Middle-Ages pastourelle: a powerful man is (men are) trying to win
the heart of an unaffected woman. As in Il pastor fido, the true lovers who are meant to
be together, Zima and Adario, are prevented from doing so by factors beyond their
control. The two suitors, Don Alvar and Damon, represent two different philosophies of
love, much like Silvandre and Hylas in L'Astrée.
Furthermore, the act is shot through with pastoral imagery. Take, for example, Zima
and Adario's duet, set to an orchestration of Rameau's famous harpsichord piece, also
called Les Sauvages:
Forêts paisibles, Peaceful forests,
Jamais un vain désir ne trouble Never a vain desire troubles our
111Anthony Pagden, introduction to A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomeo de Las
Casas (London: Penguin Books, 1992) xiii.
40
icy nos coeurs: hearts here:
S'ils sont sensibles, If they are smitten,
Fortune, ce n'est pas au prix de It is not at the cost of your favors,
tes faveurs. Fortune.
Forêts paisibles . . . [refrain] Peaceful forests … [refrain]
Dans nos Retraittes, In our retreats
Grandeur, ne viens jamais Greatness, never come
Offrirtes faux attraits; To offer your false attractions;
Ciel! tu les a faites Heaven, you have made them
Pour l'innocence & pour la paix For innocence and for peace.
Forêts paisibles . . . [refrain] Peaceful forests ... [refrain]
Jouissons dans nos aziles, Revel in our havens,
Jouissons des biens tranquiles: Relish the tranquil fruits.
Ah: peut-on être heureux Ah, can one be happy
Quand on forme d'autres voeux? When one forms other desires?
Forêts paisibles . . . [refrain] Peaceful forests … [refrain]
Regnez Plaisirs & Jeux; Reign Pleasures & Games;
triomphez dans nos Bois: triumph in our Woods:
Nous n'y connoissons que vos loix. We recognize only your laws here.
Tout ce qui blesse All that wounds
La tendresse Tenderness
Est ignoré dans nos ardeurs. Is in our ardors unknown.
La Nature qui fît nos coeurs Nature who makes our hearts
Prend soins de les guider sans Takes care to guide them without
cesse. cease.
Regnez Plaisirs & Jeux; Reign Pleasures & Games;
triomphez dans nos Bois. triumph in our Woods.
Nous n'y connoissons que vos loix. We recognize only your laws here.
112

In this pitch-perfect pastoral text, the two lovers reject the idea of glory (and all of
the civilized activities, such as warfare, that this implies) in favor of the simplicity of
sylvan life. Fusilier has successfully translated the chronologically distant pastoral
landscape onto the physically distant shores of America with the help of the philosophes.
Exoticism is transformed into abstraction and simplification.
112Meglin, “'Sauvages,” 98-9.
41
C O N C L U S I O N
The essence of a pastoral is difficult to define. It may inspire an ancient poem, or a
Baroque opera, or a building, or a painting, or a Renaissance play. It cannot be contained
in a single medium or time-period; the pastoral seems to be one of the earliest modes of
writing, and has lasted well beyond the end of the Baroque.
The universality of the pastoral mode is due to the power and attraction of simplicity.
In a pastoral cosmos, the complexities of the world are reduced to a single moment, and a
single place and time. In that moment, the world and its inhabitants become simple.
Emotions are heightened. Realities, in their abstraction, become more real. The pastoral
is a mode of amplification through simplification.
Under this definition, almost anything can be pastoralized. The challenge to
musicians, then, is to determine what can be considered pastoral. One can search the text
for references to shady groves, wooded fountains, and peaceful repose. One can search
the music for imitations of birdsong, or drone-instruments and country dances. These are
the superficial signs. To positively identify a pastoral work, one must recognize the
mode: the affect of simplicity, the character of peace. This you cannot do by reading
papers, but by experiencing it firsthand, in art and in life. In fact, it may be that only life
experience can teach the musician about pastoral otium, and that only by knowing
peaceful repose can one perform pastoral music. Therefore, one should disregard
everything you have read in this paper, and spend some time out-doors.
42
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
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Armitage, Simon, trans. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2007.
Bauman, Thomas. “Moralizing the Tomb: Poussin's Arcadian Shepherds in Eighteenth-
Century England and Germany.” In Opera and the Enlightenment, edited by Thomas
Bauman and Marita Petzoldt McClymonds. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995.
Bergström, Ingvar. Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century. New York:
Hacker Art Books, 1983.
Block, Haskell M., ed. Voltaire: Candide and Other Writings. New York: Random
House, 1956.
Brooks, Julian. Guercino: Mind to Paper. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006.
Chew, Geoffrey, and Owen Jander. "Pastoral." In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music
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Christensen, Thomas. Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Coleiro, Edward. An Introduction to Vergil's Bucolics with a Critical Edition of the Text.
Amsterdam: B.R. Gruner Publishing Co., 1979.
Diekhoff, John S., ed. A Masque at Ludlow: Essays on Milton's Comus. Cleveland: The
Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1968.
Dixon, Susan M. Between the Real and the Ideal: The Accademia degli Arcadi and its
Garden in Eighteenth-Century Rome. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006.
DiMatteo, Anthony, trans. Natale Conti's Mythologies: A Select Translation. New York:
Garland Publishing, 1994.
Fantazzi, Charles. “Marcabru's Pastourelle: Courtly Love Decoded.” Studies in
Philology 71, no. 4 (October 1974): 385-403.
Germann, Sheridan. “Monsieur Doublet and his Confrères: The Harpsichord Decorators
of Paris.” Early Music 8, no. 4 (October 1980): 435-453.
43
Green, Robert A. The Hurdy-Gurdy in Eighteenth-Century France. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1995.
De la Halle, Adam. Le Jeu de Robin et Marion. Translated and edited by Shira I.
Schwam-Baird. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994.
Handel, George Frideric. Acis and Galatea. Edited by Friedrich Chrysander. Leipzig:
Deutsche Händelgesellschaft, 1858.
Harris, Ellen T. Handel and the Pastoral Tradition. London: Oxford University Press,
1980.
Hendricks, Rhoda A. ed. & trans. Classical Gods and Heroes: Myths as Told by the
Ancient Authors. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1972.
Hoekstra, Gerald R. “The French Motet as Trope: Multiple Levels of Meaning in Quant
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32-57.
Hogan, Robert, and Edward A. Nickerson, eds. The Faithful Shepherd: A Translation of
Battista Quarini's Il pastor fido by Dr. Thomas Sheridan. Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 1989.
Homer. The Odessy. Translated by A.T. Murray. Perseus Digital Library,
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Kalstone, David. “The Transformation of Arcadia: Sannazaro and Sir Philip Sidney.”
Comparative Literature 15, no. 3 (Summer 1963): 234-249.
Kennedy, William J. Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral. Hanover and London:
University Press of New England, 1983.
Lee, M. Owen. Death and Rebirth in Virgil's Arcadia. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1989.
Lindemann, Frayda B. “Pastoral Instruments in French Baroque Music: Musette and
Vielle.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1978.
44
Mack, Sara. “Acis and Galatea or Metamorphoses of Tradition.” Arion 6, no. 3 (Winter,
1999): 51-67.
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Carol E. Robertson, 257-87. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.
Maxwell, Gavin. The Ten Pains of Death. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1960.
Meglin, Joellen A. “'Sauvages, Sex Roles, and Semiotics': Representations of Native
Americans in the French Ballet, 1736-1837, Part One: The Eighteenth Century.”
Dance Chronicle 23, no. 2 (2000): 87-132.
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183-228.
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45
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Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, 2, no. 1 (Summer 1943): 56-83.
46
A P P E N D I X : T H E A R C A D I A N S
The Arcadians are a slippery bunch, characterized more often than not by their
mercurial properties. To complicate things, an Arcadian may have defining
characteristics within a single work. One may be implicitly or explicitly older than
another. There may be two generations of Arcadians (i.e. children and parents)
represented in the same work, though they may differ only in age: the old are simply
older versions of the young. One may be culturally superior to another, as in the
relationship of a priest to a layperson or a master to a servant, but these relationships
often seem superficial. Arcadians cannot be jaded or cynical, but they may differ in the
level of their naivety and innocence.
What follows is a list of Arcadians, with a short description of their roles, found in
the works discussed earlier. It is rare to find a name consistently attached to a single
character.
ACIS (m) – A shepherd. Acis appears in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book 13, as the love
interest of Galatea. He is crushed to death by a boulder hurled by the jealous
Polyphemus, but Galatea uses her divine powers to transform Acis into a river, thus
preserving his form forever. This story is set as opera by Handel, Lully, Vittori, and
Antonio de Literes, among others.
Adamas (m) – Léonide's uncle in Honoré d'Urfé's novel L'Astrée. Adamas helps Céladon
escape from a palace where he is being held captive by three amorous nymphs.
AESCHINAS (m) – In Theocritus' Idyll 14, Aeschinas complains of lovesickness to
Thyonichus, after his (Aeschinas') love cheats on him. Thyonichus in turn advises
47
him to go to Egypt.
ALCÉ (m) – Astrée's father in Honoré d'Urfé's novel L'Astrée. In his youth, Alcé was the
rival of Céladon's father, Alcippe, over the love of Amarillis. As a result, the love
between their children, Astrée and Céladon, is banned.
ALCIPPE (m) – Céladon's father in Honoré d'Urfé's novel L'Astrée.
ALEXIS (m) - the object of Coridon's affections in the second of Virgil's Eclogues.
113
In
L'Astrée, Céladon is disguised as a woman and given a new name, Alexis, so that he
can be near his forbidden love, Astrée.
114
ALPHEUS (m) – a river god. Alpheus gives the opening monologue of Guarini's play Il
pastor fido.
115
AMARYLLIS / AMARILLIS (f) – loved by Tityrus in Virgil's first Eclogue.
116
Theocritus
makes the unnamed narrator of his second Idyll give a love-lorn serenade in her
honor. In Il pastor fido, Amarillis is a nymph. She is betrothed to the reluctant
Silvio, but ends up marrying her true love, Mirtillo. In Honoré d'Urfé's novel
L'Astrée, Amarillis is loved by both Alcé and Alcippe, the fathers of the two main
characters. It is Céladon's father, Alcippe, who wins her love.
117

AMYNTAS (m) – In Theocritus' Idyll 7, Amyntas is traveling to Haleis with Eucritus and
Simichidas. In Il pastor fido, Amintas is a priest of Diana, forced to murder the one
he loves on the sacrificial altar. The story of his downfall is told by another
character, Ergasto.
113Van Sickle, the Ten Eclogues, 80.
114Horowitz, Honoré d'Urfé, 27.
115Hogan and Nickerson, The Faithful Shepherd, 22.
116Van Sickle, the Ten Eclogues, 77.
117Horowitz, Honoré d'Urfé, 26.
48
AMINTHE (f) – Céladon must pretend to be in love with Aminthe in Honoré d'Urfé's novel
L'Astrée in order to avoid the suspicions of his father, who does not want him
(Céladon) to be with his true love, Astrée.
118

ARETHUSA (f) – A Nymph. Arethusa calls Pan back to Arcadia in Virgil's 10
th
Eclogue.
ASTRÉE (f) – The main character of Honoré d'Urfé's monumental novel L'Astrée. Astrée
is in love with Céladon, and spends the novel trying to find her way into his
affections.
119
BATTUS (m) – In Idyll 4, Battus and Coridon have an irreverent conversation about their
master, Aegon, who is away at the Olypmics.
BOMBYCA (f) – The object of Bucaeus' affections in Theocritus' tenth Idyll.
120

BUCAEUS (m) – In Theocritus' tenth Idyll, he is a reaper in love with Bombyca. He sings
her a love-song while working in the fields.
121
CARINO (m) – “dear little one.” The adopted father of Mirtillo in Il pastor fido.
CASTOR (m) and POLYDEUCES (m) – two twin brothers, the sons of Hera and Zeus. Their
“hymn” is sung in Theocritus' Idyll 22.
122
In the first half, the twins are sailing with
Jason on the Argo, when they meet Amycus, the leader of the Bebryces. Amycus
challenges Polydeuces to a boxing match and loses, after which Polydeuces causes
Amycus to nevermore mistreat travelers. In the second half, the twins pick a fight
with Lynceus and Idas by stealing their brides. Lynceus is killed in the fight by
Castor, Idas is carbonized by Zeus' thunderbolt when he tries to avenge his brother's
118Ibid.
119Ibid., 25.
120Theocritus, Idylls, 30.
121Ibid.
122Ibid., 61.
49
death.
CÉLADON (m) – Astrée's lover in Honoré d'Urfé's novel L'Astrée. Céladon and Astrée are
constantly thwarted in their attempts at romance.
123

COMATAS (m) – Comatas and Lacon have an insult contest in Theocritus' fifth Idyll.
CORYDON / CORIDON (m) – In Virgil's second Eclogue, Corydon pines for Alexis.
Corydon and Thyrsis have a poetry contest in Eclogue 7. In Theocritus' fourth Idyll,
Battus and Coridon have a conversation about Aegon, who is away at the Olypmics.
In Il pastor fido, Coridon is in love with Corsica.
124
CORSICA (f) – In Il pastor fido, Corsica's jealous love for Mirtillo causes her to scheme
against him. Corsica, the strong-willed, independent woman, might be considered
the “villain” of Il pastor fido, but for the fact that her villainy is explained at the
beginning and redeemed at the end.
DAMETA (m) – Montano's old servant in Il pastor fido.
DAMOETAS (m) – Menalcas and Damoetas have a song contest in Virgil's second Eclogue,
judged by Palaemon. Neither is judged worthy of the prize (a cow from Damoetas,
two cups from Menalcas). In Theocritus' Idyll 6, Daphnis and Damoetas have a song
contest. Their subject is the story of Polyphemus and Galatea.
125
Neither one wins
the contest, but they do share a kiss.
DAMON / DAEMON (m) – Damon pines for Nysa, who has married Mopsus, in Virgil's
eighth Eclogue. He then sings of jumping into the sea. In Henry Lawe's masque
Comus, Daemon is a guardian demon disguised as a shepherd. He guides the two
123Horowitz, Honoré d'Urfé, 26.
124Hogan and Nickerson, The Faithful Shepherd, 134.
125Van Sickle, the Ten Eclogues, 23.
50
Brothers to the palace where Comus holds the Lady in a wicked enchantment.
126
In
Handel's masque Acis and Galatea, Damon is also a helpful character, giving Acis
the good advice to not love Galatea too much.
DAPHNIS (m) – In Virgil's fifth Eclogue, Daphnis has died, and is described by Menalcas
and Mopsus as a god on Olympus. In Theocritus' sixth Idyll, Daphnis and Damoetas
have a song contest, which ends in them sharing a kiss.
DORINDA (f) – in love with Silvio in Il pastor fido.
ECHO (f) – Echo was a nymph cursed by Juno to only repeat the last words spoken to her,
and say nothing else. After falling in love with Narcissus and being spurned, she
wasted away until nothing but her voice was left. She may still be heard in the rocky
valleys. Narcissus himself would later waste himself away, pining after an
unattainable love: his own image reflected in a silvery pool.
127
Echo appears in Il
pastor fido, in conversation (such as it is) with Silvio.
128
ERGASTO (m) – Ergasto is Mirtillo's companion in Il pastor fido.
EUCRITUS (m) – a traveling companion of Simichidas in Theocritus' seventh Idyll.
GALATEA / GALATHÉE (f) – a sea nymph. She is in love with Acis, and transforms him
into a river god after he is crushed to death by Polyphemus. In L'Astrée, Galathée is
the one who finds Céladon on the banks of the Lignon river after his unsuccessful
suicide attempt.
129
She falls in love with him, but he manages to escape from her
palace with the help of Adamas.
126John S. Diekhoff, ed., A Masque at Ludlow: Essays on Milton's Comus (Cleveland: The Press of Case
Western Reserve University, 1968), 224.
127Hendricks, Classical Gods and Heroes, , 93-6.
128Hogan and Nickerson, The Faithful Shepherd, 136.
129Horowitz, Honoré d'Urfé, 27.
51
GORGO (f) – Gorgo and Praxinoa are gossipy housewives in the 15th Idyll.
130

HERACLES / HERCULES (m) – Theocritus' Idyll 24 tells the story of the infant Heracles
and the serpents.
131
Hera sends two horrible serpents to kill Heracles, only ten
months old, and his brother Iphicles, but Heracles strangles the snakes bare-handed.
The Idyll continues with Heracles' education at the hands of many famous people.
HYLAS (m) – Theocritus' Idyll 13 is a recounting of the story of Hylas.
132
He was
abducted by water nymphs while sailing on the Argo in search of the Golden Fleece.
Heracles, who was in love with Hylas, searched for him, but in vain. Hylas is one of
the major characters in L'Astrée: he believes only in the physical aspect of love, not
the spiritual, and therefore is the model of infidelity.
133

INO, AUTONOE, and AGA VE (f) – Three Sisters. Their story is told inTheocritus' Idyll
26.
134
They are making sacrifices to Semele and Dionysus, when Pentheus, son of
Agave, is caught spying on the rites. Dionysus sends the three women into a frenzy,
during which they tear Pentheus to pieces, killing him.
LACON (M) – Lacon and Comatas have a singing insult contest in Theocritus' fifth Idyll.
135
Lacon is in love with Cratidas (m).
136
LÉONIDE (f) – a nymph. Léonide falls in love with Céladon in Honoré d'Urfé's novel
L'Astrée.
137
LINCO (m) – Montano's old servant in Il pastor fido.
130Theocritus, Idylls, 44.
131Ibid., 71.
132Ibid., 38.
133Horowitz, 31.
134Theocritus, 77.
135Ibid., 18.
136Ibid., 20.
137Horowitz, Honoré d'Urfé, 27.
52
LUPINO (m) – a goatherd, Dorinda's servant in Il pastor fido.
LYCIDAS (m) – Moeris complains to Lycidas of newcomers to his land in Virgil's ninth
Eclogue. In Theocritus' seventh Idyll, Lycidas is the goatherd who meets Simichidas
on the way to Haleis.
138
The two have a singing contest, and Simichidas wins
Lycidas' crook. Lycidas is Céladon's brother in L'Astrée.
139
He is in love with
Phillis.
MELIBUS (m) – “Sweet singer.”
140
In Virgil's first Eclogue, Melibus has his land taken
away from him, and therefore could be a representation of Virgil himself. In the 7th,
he narrates a meeting he had with Daphnis, Corydon and Thyrsis.
141

MENALCAS (m) – Menalcas and Damoetas have a song contest in Virgil's second
Eclogue, judged by Palaemon. Neither is judged worthy of the prize (a cow from
Damoetas, two cups from Menalcas). Mopsus and Menalcas discuss the death of
Daphnis in Eclogue 5.
MILON (m) – a reaper in Theocritus' tenth Idyll. Bucaeus sings about his love for
Bombyca to Milon, and Milon replies with a song about being content to work.
142
MIRTILLO (m) – a shepherd. In Il pastor fido, Mirtillo is Amarillis' eventual lover after
his divine lineage is discovered.
MOERIS (m) – Moeris complains to Lycidas of newcomers to his land inVirgil's ninth
Eclogue.
MONTANO (m) – In Il pastor fido, Montano is a priest who nearly sacrifices his son,
138Van Sickle, the Ten Eclogues, 25.
139Horowitz, 29.
140Van Sickle, 75.
141Ibid., 99.
142Theocritus, Idylls, 30.
53
Montano, after a cruel twist of fate.
MOPSUS (m) – Mopsus and Menalcas discuss the Daphnis' death in Eclogue 5.
NICANDRO (m) – A priest in Il pastor fido.
NYSA (f) – Damon pines for Nysa, who has married Mopsus, in Eclogue 8.
ORPHEUS (m) – Orpheus appears in the 10
th
book of the Metamorphoses. Orpheus is not
an Arcadian. However, his control over nature and his musicality make him a strong
candidate (the pathetic fallacy is often used in pastoral writing). According to Ovid:
“There was a hill, and atop the hill was a broad field green with grass but without
shade. When the heaven-born bard sat down there and played his sweet-sounding
lyre, shade trees came to that place.”
143
Orpheus' power over nature is such that he
can call up his own shady grove.
PALAEMON (m) – Palaemon judges Menalcas and Damoetas' song contest in Virgil's
second Eclogue. Neither is thought worthy of the prize.
PAN (m) – Pan is the god of Arcadia, of shepherds and flocks.
144
He is also associated
with the seaside, or with places that touch the sea.
145
Although the real Arcadia is
entirely land-locked, both Virgil and Theocritus mention the seaside (mostly by
writing about people who would throw themselves into it). Pan, according to the
Homeric Hymn, loves noise. When returning from the hunt, he plays his pipes
sweetly and is accompanied by choruses of nymphs.
146
He was the one who joined
reeds together to form the Syrinx, named for one he loved who was transformed into
143Hendricks, Classical Gods and Heroes, 207.
144DiMatteo, Mythologies, 260.
145Ibid, 265.
146Hendricks, Classical Gods and Heroes, 91.
54
a reed.
147

PHILLIS (f) – Astrée's cousin in Honoré d'Urfé's novel. Phillis is in love with Lycidas.
POLYPHEMUS (m) – a cyclops. Polyphemus appears in the Metamorphoses, Book 13, as
the inept, unfortunate lover of Galatea. Polyphemus appears in the same role in
Theocritus' Idyll 6 and Idyll 11.
148
In both of these, he pines for the ever-distant
Galatea, who does not return his love.
PRAXINOA (f) – Gorgo and Praxinoa are gossipy housewives in the Theocritus' 15th
Idyll.
149
PYRAMUS (m) & THISBE (f) – star-crossed lovers. They appear in book 4 of the
Metamorphoses. These unhappy lovers are not Arcadians; in fact, they are
Babylonians. However, when they decide to escape the confines of their fathers'
houses in the city, they go to the shade of a Mulberry tree, next to a pleasant spring
and the tomb of Ninus – a very pastoral setting.
150
Thisbe arrives first, but is
frightened away by a lion, leaving her shawl behind. When Pyramus arrives, he
believes that the lion has eaten Thisbe, and commits suicide. When Thisbe returns to
find Pyramus dead, she too takes her own life. Tragic suicides such as theirs are a
common trope in pastoral literature. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and his A
Midsummer Night's Dream were informed by this story, and nearly a century later,
Henry Purcell would write a masque based upon A Midsummer Night's Dream, The
Fairy-Queen.
SATYR (m) – A Satyr is a mythological creature: half man, half goat. Satyrs are
147DiMatteo, Mythologies, 264.
148Theocritus, Idylls, 23.
149Ibid., 44.
150Hendricks, Classical Gods and Heroes, 288-9.
55
characterized by their rough manners and their strong sex drive. “Satyr” is also a
proper name: in Il pastor fido, Satyr is Corsica's former lover.
SÉMIRE (f) – the jealous lover of Céladon in Honoré d'Urfé's L'Astrée. Sémire's
deception causes Céladon to jump into the river Lignon at the beginning of the
novel.
151

SILENUS (m) – a minor fertility deity. Silenus is the subject of Tityrus' story in Virgil's
sixth Eclogue.
152
He himself tells a story within that story.
SILV ANDRE (m) – a major character in L'Astrée. Silvandre, unlike Hylas, values the
spiritual, Neoplatonic aspect of love.
153

SILVIE (f) – a nymph. Silvie is one of Galathée's attendants in L'Astrée.
154
SILVIO – (m) a shepherd. In Il pastor fido, Silvio is promised to wed Amarillis despite his
reluctance.
SIMICHIDAS (m) – the narrator of Theocritus' seventh Idyll. He is a poet, and has a
singing contest with Lycidas.
SYMAETHA – In Theocritus' second Idyll, Symaetha casts a love charm against the object
of her affections, Delphis.
155

THYONICHUS (m) – In Idyll 14, Thyonichus advises Aeschinas to go to Egypt to escape
the pangs of rejected love.
THYRSIS (m) – Thyrsis sings a song about Daphnis and wins a marvelous cup in
Theocritus' first Idyll. Corydon and Thyrsis have a poetry contest in Virgil's seventh
151Horowitz, Honoré d'Urfé, 26.
152Van Sickle, the Ten Eclogues, 97.
153Horowitz, 31.
154Horowitz, Honoré d'Urfé, 27.
155Theocritus, Idylls, 7.
56
Eclogue.
TITYRUS / TITIRO (m) – Tityrus appears in Virgil's first eclogue as one who has been
given the gift of leisure. He tells a story about Silenus in Eclogue 6.
156
He is
mentioned in Theocritus' Idyll 3 as the one watching over the anonymous narrator's
flock while he (the narrator) serenades Amaryllis. In Il pastor fido, Titiro is the
father of Amarillis.
157
URANIO (m) – Carino's companion in Il pastor fido.
156Van Sickle, the Ten Eclogues, 97.
157Hogan and Nickerson, The Faithful Shepherd, 21.
57

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This paper examines the pastoral genre as represented in operatic works from the early 18th century and juxtaposes them with pastoral works of other media: literature, including plays and poetry

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Asset Metadata

Creator Omura, Arthur (author)

Core Title The pastoralization of Baroque opera: two operas and their contexts

School Thornton School of Music

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Early Music Performance

Publication Date 08/01/2012

Defense Date 07/02/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Architecture,Baroque,Handel,Literature,Music,OAI-PMH Harvest,opera,Painting,pastoral,Rameau

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Gilbert, Adam Knight (committee chair), Brown, Bruce Alan (committee member), Carver, Lucinda (committee member)

Creator Email aomura@usc.edu,rthrmr343@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-81469

Unique identifier UC11290131

Identifier usctheses-c3-81469 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-OmuraArthu-1098.pdf

Dmrecord 81469

Document Type Thesis

Rights Omura, Arthur

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

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