Le lamento d’opéra: un langage politique dans l’Italie du XVIIe siècle

Lament in seventeenth-century Italian opera has often been studied either as the scene of the explosion of emotions (sadness, melancholy, disappointment, anger), or as a gendered genre that comments on patriarchal society. In this essay, lament is considered as an implicit political discourse: through examples selected from the origins of the lament (l’Arianna of Monteverdi) and from its developments (Venetian opera of the 1640s, influenced by the Accademia degli Incogniti), the purpose of this paper is to prove 1) how emotions, in Italian opera, are linked to political concepts; 2) why lament, even if apparently unpolitical, takes charge of a political discourse which implies a consideration of Power and Government; 3) how, shaping a real "politics of lament", the Italians of the seventeenth-century (especially the academicians) were reshaping the ways of conceiving political efficiency.