‘Misero pargoletto’: Kinship, Taboo and Passion in Metastasio’s Demofoonte

Abstract

This chapter presents a study of Metastasio’s drama Demofoonte from the perspectives of Descartes’ theory of passions and Aristotle’s ideas of tragedy, taking into account how these were reflected or challenged in Metastasio’s own writings and with a special emphasis on the characters’ circumstances, relationships and social status, as well as on the contrast between their passions and actions. It aims to demonstrate that this drama was designed to create circumstances allowing the expression of the extreme passions of pity and aversion when, in the third act, the principal character, Timante, suddenly realises that he has committed the most terrible of crimes, i.e. incest, having unknowingly married his own sister and having bear Olinto, a true ‘misero pargoletto’, an unhappy little boy born out of sin. As the drama was naturally conceived to be set into music, this study concludes by analysing and comparing manifold musical settings of Metastasio’s original arias for the drama, in order to explore the compositional association between key musical features and specific passions as materialised in some forty settings of Timante’s aria.