[Production of accentuated personality traits in baroque opera : Opera buffa Arcifanfano-Re dei matti (1749)]

Madness served primarily as a form of amusement for the spectators in operas of the seventeenth century. This representation was far removed from clinical reality. This circumstance changed in the eighteenth century at the time when tragic madness emerged in numerous operas.

The opera buffa Arcifanfano-Re dei matti (Arcifanfano-King of fools, premiered in 1749 in Venice, text by Carlo Goldoni 1707-1793 and music by Baldassare Galuppi 1706-1785), which continuously enacts a realm of fools and is meant to appear amusing, is riddled with psychopathological abnormalities for which a retrospective diagnosis is methodologically rejected. However, the opera presents many subjects for working out a typology of fools based on outlasting personality traits of the protagonists. The libretto is investigated. A musical analysis is spared.

The conceptualized typology of fools in the opera, which is oriented towards the seven main vices or deadly sins serves, in the tradition of moral satire, to critically hold up a mirror to the audience to reflect their own vices by an amusing characterization of the latter. Historically classified, the treatment of fools by means of isolation, custody, locking up in cages as well as authoritarian measures of submission reflects the custom in those days before humanizing the treatment of people with mental illness in the course of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

The opera Arcifanfano is essentially characterized by continuous madness. A typology of the fools can be worked out from the precise depiction of the personalities. A mirror is held up to the spectators in terms of vices, in the tradition of the contemporary baroque opera. At the same time, the opera can be classified psychiatrically and historically as a seismograph of its time when in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries people with mental illness were isolated and incarcerated.