lawyer’s office, and promised to secure for him fame and independence,
if he would devote his talents to the musical drama.
In La Romanina’s house Metastasio became acquainted with
the greatest composers of the day—with Porpora, from whom he
took lessons in music; with Hasse, Pergolese, Scarlatti, Vinci,
Leo, Durante, Marcello, all of whom were destined in the future
to set his plays to melody. Here too he studied the art of
singing, and learned to appreciate the style. of such men as
Farinelli. Gifted himself with extraordinary facility in composition,
and with a true poetic feeling, he found no difficulty in
producing plays which, while beautiful in themselves, judged
merely as works of literary art, became masterpieces as soon
as their words were set to music, and rendered by the singers of
the greatest school of vocal art the world has ever seen. Reading
Metastasio in the study, it is impossible to do him justice. But
the conventionality of all his plots, the absurdities of many of
his situations, the violence he does to history in the persons of
some leading characters, his “damnable iteration” of the theme
of love in all its phases, are explained and justified by music.
Metastasio resided with La Romanina and her husband in Rome. The generous woman, moved by an affection half maternal half romantic, and by a true artist’s admiration for so rare a talent, adopted him more passionately even than Gravina had done. She took the whole Trapassi family—father, mother, brother, sisters—into her own house. She fostered the poet’s genius and pampered his caprices; Under her influence he wrote in rapid succession the Didone abbandonata, Catone in Utica, Ezio, Alessandro nell’ Indie, Semiramide riconosciuta, Siroe and Artaserse. These dramas were set to music by the chief composers of the day, and performed in the chief towns of Italy. But meanwhile La Romanina was growing older; she had ceased to sing in public; and the poet felt himself more and more dependent in an irksome sense upon her kindness. He gained 300 scudi (about £60) for each opera; this pay, though good, was precarious, and he longed for some fixed-engagement. In September 1729 he received the offer of the post of court poet to the theatre at Vienna, with a stipend of 3000 florins. This he at once accepted. La Romanina unselfishly sped him. on his way to glory. She took the charge of his family in Rome, and he set off for Austria.,
In the early summer of 1730 Metastasio settled at Vienna in the house of a Spanish Neapolitan, Niccolò Martinez, where he resided until his death. This date marks a new period in his artistic activity. Between the years 1730 and 1740 his finest dramas, Adriano, Demetrio, Issipile, Demofoonte, Olimpiade, Clemenza di Tito, Achille in Sciro, Temistocle and Attilio Regolo, were produced for the imperial theatre. Some of them had to be composed for special occasions, with almost incredible rapidity—the Achille in eighteen days, the Ipermnestra in nine. Poet, composer, musical copyist and singer did their work together in frantic haste. Metastasio understood the technique of his peculiar art in its minutest details. The experience gained at Naples and Rome, quickened by the excitement of his new career at Vienna, enabled him almost instinctively, and as it were by inspiration, to hit the exact mark aimed at in the opera.
At Vienna Metastasio met with no marked social success. His plebeian birth excluded him from aristocratic circles. But, to make up in some measure for this comparative failure, he enjoyed the intimacy of a great lady, the Countess Althann, sister-in-law of his old patroness the Princess Belmonte Pignatelli. She had lost her husband, and had some while occupied the post of chief favourite to the emperor. Metastasio’s liaison with her became so close that it was even believed they had been privately married. The even tenor of his existence was broken in the year 1734 by the one dark and tragic incident of his biography. It appears that La Romanina had at last got tired of his absence. Could not Metastasio get her an engagement at the court theatre? The poet at this juncture revealed his own essential feebleness of character. To La Romanina he owed almost everything as a man and as an artist. But he was ashamed of her and tired of her. He vowed she should not come to Vienna, and wrote dissuading her from the projected visit. The tone of his letters alarmed and irritated her. It is probable that she set, out from Rome, but died suddenly upon the road. All we know is that she left him her fortune after her husband’s life interest in it had expired, and that Metastasio, overwhelmed with grief and remorse, immediately renounced the legacy. This disinterested act plunged the Bulgarelli-Metastasio household at Rome into confusion. La Romanina’s widower married again. Leopoldo Trapassi, and his father and sister, were thrown upon their own resources.
As time advanced the life which Metastasio led at Vienna, together with the climate, told upon his health and spirits. From about the year 1745 onward he wrote but little, though the cantatas which belong to this period, and the canzonet Ecco quel fiero istante, which he sent to his friend Farinelli, rank among the most popular of his productions. It was clear, as Vernon Lee has phrased it, that “what ailed him was mental and moral ennui.” In 1755 the Countess Althann died, and Metastasio was more than ever reduced to the society which gathered round him in the bourgeois house of the Martinez. He sank rapidly into the habits of old age; and, though his life was prolonged till the year 1782, very little can be said about it. On the 12th of April he died, bequeathing his whole fortune of some 130,000 florins to the five children of his friend Martinez. He had survived all his Italian relatives.
During the long period of forty years in which Metastasio over lived his originality and creative powers his fame went on increasing. In his library he counted as many as forty editions of his own works. They had been translated into French, English, German, Spanish, even into modern Greek. They had been set to music over and over again by every composer of distinction, each opera receiving this honour in turn from several of the most illustrious men of Europe. They had been sung by the best virtuosi in every capital, and there was not a literary academy of note which had not conferred on him the honour of membership. Strangers of distinction passing through Vienna made a point of paying their respects to the old poet at his lodgings in the Kohlmarkt Gasse. But his poetry was intended for a certain style of music—for the music of omnipotent vocalists, of thaumaturgical soprani. With the changes effected in the musical drama by Gluck and Mozart, with the development of orchestration and the rapid growth of the German manner, a new type of fibretto came into request. Metastasio’s plays fell into, undeserved neglect, together with the music to which he had linked them. Farinelli, whom he styled “twin-brother,” was the true exponent of his poetry; and, with the abolition of the class of singers to which Farinelli belonged, Metastasio’s music suffered eclipse. It was indeed a just symbolic instinct which made the poet dub this unique soprano his twin-brother.
The musical drama for which Metastasio composed, and in working for which his genius found its proper sphere, has so wholly passed away that it is now difficult to assign his true place to the poet in Italian literary history. His inspiration was essentially emotional and lyrical. The chief dramatic situations are expressed by lyrics for two or three voices, embodying the several contending passions of the agents brought into conflict by the circumstances of the plot. The total result is not pure literature, but literature supremely it for musical effect. Language in Metastasio’s hands is exquisitely pure and limpid. Of the Italian poets, he professed a special admiration for Tasso and for Marini. But he avoided the conceits of the latter, and was no master over the refined richness of the former’s diction. His own style reveals the improvisatore’s facility. Of the Latin poets he studied Ovid with the greatest pleasure, and from this predilection some of his own literary qualities may be derived. For sweetness of versification, for limpidity of diction, for delicacy of sentiment, for romantic situations exquisitely rendered in the simplest style, and for a certain delicate-beauty of imagery sometimes soaring to ideal sublimity, he deserves to be appreciated so long as the Italian language lasts.
There are numerous editions of Metastasio’s works. That by Calsabigi (Paris, 1755, 9 vols. 8vo) published under his own superintendence,
was the poet’s favourite. Another of Turin (1757) and a