«Ecco reciso alfine il groppo de l’inganno»: Giovanni Faustini’s “Euripo” from the Sources to the Plot

The decade between 1642 and 1652 is marked by one of the most important collaborations in the history of Seventeenth-Century Venetian opera: in these years Giovanni Faustini and Francesco Cavalli produced ten operas that establish some of the most durable stylistic conventions in public musical theater. The construction of the plots, so heterogeneous at the beginning of opera history, is gradually standardized. The dramatic basis of Faustini’s librettos is a conventional love intrigue: two pairs of lovers (sometimes three) are separated at the beginning of the drama, and then reunited at the end after several obstacles have been overcome. Faustini apparently seems to invent his stories borrowing them from different sources: narrative, dramatic, mythological, historical or pseudo-historical, iconographical. Unlike other librettists of the time, he does not refer to the literary sources of his librettos, and if he uses any, he hardly follows them rigidly. Dissimilar stories are jointly combined through syncretic mechanisms. But, what are the real sources from which Faustini derives his plots? And, even if we could identify them, how does Faustini use them in building his plots? Starting with some examples taken from Faustini’s librettos, this paper will offer a hypothetical reconstruction of the sources for L’Euripo (1649), based on a probable and unexplored connection between Venetian musical theater and Spanish comedia aurea.