Orlando at play: the games of 
Il palazzo incantato (1642)

Abstract

Abstract Just before the denouement of the opera Il palazzo incantato, something remarkable happens. For long hours, the enchanted palace of the title—drawn from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso—has kept the 20-odd characters vainly searching for one another, with rarely more than two or three converging at a time. In the penultimate scene, however, the librettist, Giulio Rospigliosi, and composer, Luigi Rossi, allow nearly the entire company to assemble. But rather than greet and embrace each other, the long-lost lovers and friends suspend the story they have been enacting, abandon their characters’ motivations, and play a round of parlour games. The bizarre events of Act 3, scene 7—heretofore unremarked—illuminate something fundamental about the work as a whole. Indeed, notwithstanding its length and elaborate staging, this opera shows an affinity less with Rospigliosi’s earlier theatrical works than with the typical amusements of the aristocratic chamber, and with the cantata specifically: a difference that may stretch our idea of what an opera could be in Barberini Rome.