In the scenario of his Three Oranges, a play not preserved in its entirety, Gozzi has explained how he burlesqued his rivals, as, for instance, when the long journeys which Chiari’s personages are supposed to perform within the compass of a single action are ridiculed by Tartaglia and Truffaldino being propelled two thousand leagues by the devil with a pair of bellows. (“They sprawled on the grass at the sudden cessation of the favouring gale.”) The success of the Three Oranges was immense, and contributed to drive Goldoni from Venice. It was followed by a rapid succession of similar pieces, tending, however, to assume more of a literary character, and become more and more remote from the original type of the Comedy of Masks. This, if diminishing their value as illustrations of popular manners and sentiment, renders them more generally enjoyable; and they would have a wide European reputation were they not principally composed in the Venetian dialect. Turandot, in the translation, or rather imitation, of Schiller, is known wherever German literature extends; but the scarcely inferior merits of the Blue Monster, the Green Bird, and the like, have not in general induced foreigners to learn the Venetian patois.

Gozzi, in truth, just missed greatness; he had the artistic talent to work out a clever idea, but not the poetical fancy requisite to elevate this lo a region of ideal beauty. As suggested by Symonds, his pieces would supply excellent material for operatic libretti. Tieck subsequently undertook the task with higher qualifications, but the favourable moment had gone by. Gozzi’s plays are the true offspring of the national spirit, Tieck’s merely importations. After four years of brilliant triumphs, Gozzi slopped short, fearing to fatigue the public taste, or conscious of having exhausted his vein. The remainder of his career as a dramatic author was chiefly occupied with adaptations from the Spanish.

While in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century the Comedy of Masks was decaying, a new form of drama was silently growing up, the operatic, “a thing,” says Vernon Lee, “born of scenic displays and concerts, moulded into a romantic, wholly original shape, by the requirements of scenery, music, and singing.” Its character as a literary production is indicated by the fact that its proper title of melodrama has become synonymous with something quite different, the prose tragedy which aims at strong sensational situations, while melodramatic evokes no association with music.

The chief representatives of new literary forms are frequently heralded by precursors, who, if serving in some sense as foils to their genius, yet deprive them of the praise of absolute originality. What Phrynichus was to Æschylus, and Marlowe to Shakespeare, APOSTOLO ZENO (1668-1750), a Venetian of Candiote extraction, was to PIETRO METASTASIO. It was not Metastasio but Zeno who gave the musical drama literary rank, and proved that poets as well as musicians might make their reputations and their fortunes by it. Zeno produced his first serious attempt in musical drama in 1695, and long held the position of chief dramatic poet of Italy. After founding and for many years conducting the influential Giornale de’ Letterati, he became court poet at Vienna in 1718, and eleven years afterwards retired voluntarily in favour of the rising Metastasio, who completely eclipsed him on the stage, but could not deprive him of the honour of having first taught Italy how dramatic poetry of a high order might be associated with music. Zeno, moreover, was no mere playwright, but a good lyrical poet with a strong dramatic instinct, a scholar, moreover, and antiquary, and a renowned collector of medals. His last years were spent in honour and comfort at his native Venice. Ere his life terminated in 1750 the productiveness of his successor had almost come to an end.

Metastasio’s long prosperous life was not destitute of romance. The son (born 1698) of a petty Neapolitan druggist settled at Rome, he was adopted by the famous jurist and excellent dramatic critic Gravina, who had heard him singing in the street, for although at the time an inglorious, he was fortunately not a mute Milton. Victor Cousin was similarly snatched from the gutter, for different issues and from different motives. His sonorous appellative was the gift of his patron, who Hellenised his protégé’s original name of Trapassi, and left him a fortune. After wasting most of his benefactor’s legacy, Metastasio articled himself to a Neapolitan lawyer named Castagnola, who received him on condition that he should not even read, much less write, a line of verse. This pledge was broken by the composition in 1722 of the Gardens of the Hesperides, a little mask composed under compulsion from the Austrian viceroy. The secret of the authorship was ferreted out by La Romanina, the celebrated cantatrice, who pounced upon Metastasio, bore him from Castagnola’s house to her own, and made him a dramatic poet. She was a married woman much older than Metastasio, and there seems no suggestion that her affection was other than maternal. It ended, however, unhappily, perhaps tragically.

The immense success of his Didone Abbandonata, performed at Rome in 1723, and followed by a number of similar pieces, had made Metastasio the undisputed sovereign of the lyric stage, and in 1730 he was invited to Vienna to replace the veteran Zeno. He went. La Romanina wished to follow, but never did, and died very suddenly in 1734. Had Metastasio, now devoted to Countess Althan, to whom he is said to have been privately married, obstructed her journey? and was her death natural? There is nothing but surmise as to the precise nature of the case; but Vernon Lee’s tragical summing-up is true as a statement of fact: “Thus ended the romance of Metastasio’s life, and with it his youth, and soon after his hope and his genius.” His Vienna period between 1730 and 1740 was artistically the most brilliant of his life, but he wrote little afterwards; though his dramas long monopolised the Italian lyric stage; and the decline of his productive power seems to have been chiefly owing to the untoward interruption to dramatic performances occasioned by the Austrian war of succession in 1740 and following years. When peace returned, Metastasio had become nervous and hypochondriacal; he yet gained his culminating triumph with the Atilio Regolo in 1750, and the later half of his life, which ended in 1782, was embellished by his friendship with the Italian singer-statesman, Farinelli. Metastasio was selfish, but not cold-hearted; he pined for affection, but shrank from self-sacrifice; and his self-regarding instinct was not ennobled by devotion to any of the causes or pursuits which inspired Goethe. Yet he was a connoisseur in virtue, and his dramas represent her in some of her most attractive shapes. He saw forty editions of his works in his own library; he had not only accumulated but had refused distinctions; if he could feel free from blame towards La Romanina, there was nothing with which he needed to reproach himself. His life had been a continual triumph; no wonder if he had become weary of it at last.

Operatic success requires two endowments rarely united in the same person, the ingenuity of a playwright and the melody of a nightingale. Both these are combined in Metastasio; he is a very Scribe for briskness, deftness, and clever contrivance of plot; ere he had become nervous and depressed, his Neapolitan brain seethed at a dramatic situation; his Achille in Sciro, one of the best of his pieces, was written, provided with music and scenery, and thoroughly organised for representation, within eighteen days. Other Italian librettists may have rivalled him in tunefulness or in the faculty of dramatic construction, none in both these respects, and none have been able to impart the like literary quality to their compositions; partly because he possessed and they lacked the indescribable something that makes the poet; partly because the sentiment which with them is merely theatrical, is with him sincere.

The general inferiority of operatic libretti has occasioned the musical drama to be despised as a branch of literature; although, to say nothing of the recent achievements of Richard Wagner, the Euripidean play, with its frequent predominance of solos over choral parts, approximated to the modern opera. It is no doubt true that the first requisite is that the words should be a vehicle for the music, and that, supposing this object attained, it is feasible to dispense with poetry. It follows that poetry usually is dispensed with, and that the only literary gift deemed absolutely indispensable for opera is that of dramatic construction. It is the great distinction of Metastasio to have been at the same time a consummate playwright and a true lyrical poet. Other great playwrights have been great poets in blank verse; but, at any rate for the first half of his life, Metastasio’s bosom was as affluent a storehouse of melody as Rückert’s; to sing was for him as easy as to speak. He was constrained to submit himself to the laws of the opera, inexorable because founded upon the reason of things. As an opera can be nothing without a cantatrice, it follows that it must turn chiefly upon the passion of love; as the principal performers’ throats will not bear a perpetual strain, they must necessarily be sometimes relieved by inferior executants; hence the necessity of an underplot, and of constructive ability to interweave this with the main action. As the musical drama is not, after all, natural, the audience’s attention must be kept occupied by continual action and bustle; as the singer must leave the stage at his best, the recitative must be followed by an air. Such tags must be judged simply with reference to the musical effect, which with Metastasio was always very great. On the whole, few writers have adapted means to ends more successfully than he has done, or have more completely solved the problem of investing the amusement of the moment with abiding literary worth.

The most celebrated of Metastasio’s lyrical dramas are perhaps the Olimpiade, the Achille in Sciro, the Clemenza di Tito, and the Atilio Regolo. The Artaserse, the Temistocle, the Zenobia, have also a high reputation, and in truth the intervals of merit among his pieces are not very wide. The operatic dramatist is released from many of the obligations which press most heavily upon the tragic or comic poet; he is at liberty to mingle the manners and ideas of different ages and nations as much as he pleases; no great profundity of psychological analysis can be expected from him, for if he possessed this gift the conditions of his field of art would debar him from manifesting it. It is enough if his subject is interesting, his action lively and well combined, and his melody copious and spontaneous. Metastasio selected his themes with consummate judgment, and showed a Scribe-like power of devising bustling action and sudden surprises, while his tunefulness is remarkable even for an Italian poet. His pieces would have enthralled audiences even without literary charm. That they retain their place in the library after their disappearance from the stage proves him a poet as well as a dramatist. His oratorios resemble his secular pieces, but are less interesting. His cantatas have the air of loppings from his dramas. The chief merit of his other lyrical compositions is their inexhaustible melody.

The vogue of the lyrical drama under Zeno and Metastasio was not favourable to the more legitimate forms of the art. “Ce beau monstre,” said Voltaire, “étouffe Melpomène.” If so, the Italian drama was stifled, like Desdemona, in her sleep. The extravagance of the first half of the seventeenth century had been succeeded by the torpor of the second, and nothing really good had been produced in either. It was not until 1713 that a tragedy appeared which deserved and obtained a European reputation. This was the Merope of Count Scipione Maffei, whose principal work, his Verona Illustrata, has already been mentioned, and who, besides many other claims to distinction, gained an honourable fame as a natural philosopher, as the critical historian of chivalric orders, and as the denouncer of duelling. A man of this stamp, however gifted, was not likely to be richly endowed with the poetical temperament, and Maffei’s Merope shares the almost universal fault of modern tragedies on classical subjects, it is essentially a work of reflection. It was composed with the deliberate purpose of retrieving the Italian drama from its degraded condition, and was the result of conversations wilh the actor Riccoboni, author of an esteemed work on the Italian stage, who lamented that the theatre of his own country afforded him no fine parts. The want was well supplied by Merope, the plot being highly dramatic, and the treatment, in the opinion of Matthew Arnold, more poetical than that of either of Maffei’s successors, Voltaire and Alfieri.