The Narrative(s) of "Se cerca, se dice"

After reading the essay by Agawu, we will put his theory to work by analyzing 3 different settings of the same poem: the aria "Se cerca, se dice" from Metastasio's L'Olimpiade. This was an extremely popular text in the 1700s, one that served as the basis for roughly 80 different pieces of music. As such, settings of this text provide a good environment to probe the question "what can we say about the contribution of music to narratives in vocal genres?"

For this portion of your class preparation, you will compare 3 settings of the text, all of which were composed in 1778. Listen to the three settings closely, and for at least ONE of the settings, prepare a description of the musical narrative you hear. Emphasize in your description how your chosen setting differs in its narrative from the others. Focus on the musical details that drive your interpretation (If you have experience with music-theoretical tools, you should strive to deploy them in your analysis). You may also choose to focus on a particularly evocative passage or phrase rather than the complete aria. For your convenience, an interpretation of the text that I like is provided below, along with a translation of the aria, but you should feel free to develop alternative readings of the poetry as well!

The goal is to get your hands dirty with analysis: what narratives do these pieces suggest? How does the narrative of one setting differ from the others? How are these narratives connected to what the music does? How do you convince a (potentially skeptical) different listener to hear it as you do? How useful is Agawu's methodology for coming to grip with these pieces?

(At the bottom of the page, more settings of the aria are provided for you in case you would like more context for how composers set this text, but it is NOT required that you listen to these)

Three Settings from 1778

Supplementary Materials: A Repository of Additional Settings