Category:Berenice--music (subject)

Works of music related to Berenice

Overview

As a love story, the affair between the Emperor Titus and Berenice for almost two centuries (mid-17th to mid-19th cent.) was a favorite operatic subject and attracted the attention of major composers. No work however reached that level of celebrity as to enter the contemporary repertoire.

Berenice always appears in company of Titus, not as an independent character. Her political role is downplayed, to focus solely on her unhappy love.

Berenice is alluded to, but is not present in the most popular libretto, La clemenza di Titus (1734) by Pietro Metastasio, which focuses on the life of Titus after the end of his love affair with the Jewish Queen.

In 1793 Tito e Berenice revived the interest on the love affair between Titus and Berenice and a few more operas followed, based on the subject (Berenice in Roma). Even some late versions of La clemenza di Tito" reintroduced Berenice as a singing character.

In 1909 Magnard made a final attempt to relaunch to character of Berenice. His opera is the only one to have been revived in recent years.

• [[Berenice in Roma, dramma in 2 atti (Verona, Teatro Filarmonico, 1805) by Carlo Mellara (1778-1840)

Berenice of Judaea and the other Berenices

Berenice of Judaea is not the only Berenice performed on the musical stage.

Berenice of Armenia, betrothed with the Parthian King Vologases IV, is a character in the libretto Lucius Verus by Apostolo Zeno. Carlo Francesco Pollarolo was the first of more than 50 composers who set to music the libretto. The opera was commonly presented as Lucius Verus or Vologeso, re de' Parti. It was also revived by George Bronnen (1702) and Johann Friedrich Fasch (1711) as Berenice, by Christoph Graupner (1710) as Berenice und Lucilla, by Davide Perez (1762) as La Berenice, and by Niccolò Antonio Zingarelli (1811) and Carlo Soliva (1817) as Berenice, regina di Armenia. Bartolomeo Vitturi's libretto Berenice also deals with Berenice of Armenia; it was set to music by Baldassare Galuppi (1741), Ferdinando Bertoni et al. (1748), Nicola Conti (1749), and Salvatore Perillo (1759).

Other operas have as their protagonist Berenice of Egypt, daughter of Ptolemy, with a completely different plot. Antonio Salvi's libretto Berenice, regina d'Egitto was set to music in 1709 by Giacomo Antonio Perti, in 1718 by Domenico Scarlatti and Nicolò Porpora, and again by Francesco Araja in 1734 and George Frideric Haendel in 1737. These versions were often known under the shorter title of Berenice.

Librettos like Portugal's La clemenza di Titus adds to the confusion, as the lover of Titus (clearly, Berenice of Judaea) is here introduced as "Berenice of Egypt.

Homonymy creates confusion even in secondary literature where authors not always are able to distinguish correctly between the various Berenices and often assume that an opera titled Berenice was based on Racine. The works presented in this page are exclusively those which deal with Berenice of Judaea.

• @2017 Gabriele Boccaccini, University of Michigan

Performing Berenice (singers)

On some occasions, in the earliest performances, Berenice was played to a male sopranist, like Benedetto Baldassarri in Rome, but already in the 18th century most of the interpreters were sopranos. Among them are two of the most famous primedonne of the time--Faustina Bordoni and Antonia Maria Girelli.

The most celebrated interpreter of Berenice in the 19th century was Clotilde Colombelle in the Naples premiere of Raimondi's Berenice in Rome.

The role of Berenice in Magnard's opera was created by Marguerite Merentié in 1911 and is the only one that has allowed contemporary sopranos the possibility of playing Berenice, from Françoise Pollet to Catherine Hunold.

Performing Berenice (dancers)