“La brevità non può mover l’affetto”. The time scale of the Baroque aria

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The article is organized into three sections. The first section shows that arias, according to the correspondence between interiority and exteriority pursued by seventeenth-century culture, probably are popular because they, like monologues, play on the audiences’ voyeuristic pleasure for private aspects: those same aspects that instead, in court life, had to be dissimulated, thus becoming hardly known. Furthermore, contemporaneous considerations regarding the relationship between the shorter length of a monologue and the actual mental process that it represents (or, as we would call it today, between a closed and an open temporality) emphasize the awareness of the meanings implicit in the chronometric dimension of subjective expression; this awareness is perhaps reflected in the tendency to increasingly extend the length of arias. In the second section of the article, the frequent repetitions and the formal circularity of da capo arias are interpreted as projections of a process of mental “rumination.” This process is typical of the cognitive developments determined by emotions and reflections, and it is characterized by a redundant, obstinate, and persisting thought. Both the rumination—which happens in the soul— and the successive externalization of one’s own feeling—which happens in arias—are today defined by psychologists as strategies of “coping,” aiming at producing meaning: by ruminating, one can identify one’s own feelings, understand their implications, and control emotional experiences, keeping an objective as aim. Moreover, the repetitions of lines and sections of arias can be interpreted, based on contemporaneous treatises on rhetoric, as figures of speech that indicate one’s own emotional involvement, as if the power of an emotion were such that it could block the linearity of speech. The last section of the article deals with the chronometric extension of arias, by discussing contemporaneous philosophical and physiological references to a subject’s emotional and cognitive temporality. Its duration is proportional not only to the psycho-physic impulse of a passion but also to the age and maturity of an individual, that is, to his or her capacity for mental elaboration. This explains why in operas, according to conventions, the longest and more complex arias are assigned to the protagonists and to the more noble characters in the drama, since they are indeed those who experience the most intense affects and the most profound reflections. This diversity in affective or gnomic content, however, is not reflected by the formal structure of arias, which remains identical, especially in the da capo version: this may mean that this musical structure embodies a generic discursive model of organized rationalization and communication of interiority. Through arias, then, characters, by representing through music the temporal extension of their conscience, give both a meaning to their selves and a symbolic form to mental processes often triggered by passions.