Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu (Cambridge Studies in Opera)

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O P E R A A N D S O C I E T Y I N I TA LY A N D F R A N C E F R O M MONTEVERDI TO BOURDIEU

This edited volume is the first book to bring together academic specialists writing on the multi-media operatic form from the disciplines of musicology, comparative literature, history, sociology, and philosophy. The presence in the volume’s title of Pierre Bourdieu, the leading cultural sociologist of the late twentieth century, signals the editors’ intention to synthesize recent advances in social science with recent advances in musicological and other scholarship on opera. Through a focus on opera in Italy and France, the contributors to the volume draw on their respective disciplines both to expand our knowledge of opera’s history and to demonstrate the kinds of contributions that stand to be made by different disciplines to the study of opera. The volume is divided into three sections, each of which is preceded by a concise and informative introduction explaining how the chapters in that section contribute to our understanding of opera. v i c to r i a j o h n s on is Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies at the University of Michigan. ja n e f. f u lc h e r is Professor of Music (Musicology) at Indiana University. t h o m a s e rt m a n is Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN OPERA Series editor: Arthur Groos, Cornell University

Volumes for Cambridge Studies in Opera explore the cultural, political and social influences of the genre. As a cultural art form, opera is not produced in a vacuum. Rather, it is influenced, whether directly or in more subtle ways, by its social and political environment. In turn, opera leaves its mark on society and contributes to shaping the cultural climate. Studies to be included in the series will look at these various relationships including the politics and economics of opera, the operatic representation of women or the singers who portrayed them, the history of opera as theatre, and the evolution of the opera house. Published titles

Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna Edited by Mary Hunter and James Webster Johann Strauss and Vienna: Operetta and the Politics of Popular Culture Camille Crittenden German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner John Warrack Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London: The King’s Theatre, Garrick and the Business of Performance Ian Woodfield Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France: The Politics of Hal´evy’s La Juive Diana R. Hallman Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien R´egime, 1647–1785 Downing A. Thomas Three Modes of Perception in Mozart: The Philosophical, Pastoral, and Comic in Cos`ı fan tutte Edmund J. Goehring Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to Puccini Emanuele Senici The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815–1930 Susan Rutherford Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu Edited by Victoria Johnson, Jane F. Fulcher, and Thomas Ertman

Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu Edited by

Victoria Johnson, Jane F. Fulcher, and Thomas Ertman

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521856751 © Cambridge University Press 2007 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2007 eBook (NetLibrary) ISBN-13 978-0-511-27940-9 ISBN-10 0-511-27940-X eBook (NetLibrary) hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-85675-1 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-85675-2

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To the memory of Pierre Bourdieu, in gratitude

CONTENTS

List of illustrations xi List of tables xii List of musical examples xiii Notes on contributors xv Foreword xxi Craig Calhoun Acknowledgments xxxii Introduction: Opera and the academic turns Victoria Johnson

1

I The Representation of Social and Political Relations in Operatic Works Introduction to Part I Jane F. Fulcher

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1 Venice’s mythic empires: Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera Wendy Heller 2 Lully’s on-stage societies Rebecca Harris-Warrick

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3 Representations of le peuple in French opera, 1673–1764 Catherine Kintzler

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4 Women’s roles in Meyerbeer’s operas: How Italian heroines are reflected in French grand opera 87 Naomi Andr´e 5 The effect of a bomb in the hall: The French “opera of ideas” and its cultural role in the 1920s 115 Jane F. Fulcher

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II The Institutional Bases for the Production and Reception of Opera Introduction to Part II Thomas Ertman

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6 State and market, production and style: An interdisciplinary approach to eighteenth-century Italian opera history 138 Franco Piperno 7 Opera and the cultural authority of the capital city William Weber

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8 “Edizioni distrutte” and the significance of operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 181 Philip Gossett 9 Opera in France, 1870–1914: Between nationalism and foreign imports 243 Christophe Charle Translated by Jennifer Boittin 10 Fascism and the operatic unconscious 267 Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg III Theorizing Opera and the Social Introduction to Part III Victoria Johnson

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11 On opera and society (assuming a relationship) Herbert Lindenberger

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12 Symbolic domination and contestation in French music: Shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu 312 Jane F. Fulcher 13 Rewriting history from the losers’ point of view: French Grand Opera and modernity 330 Antoine Hennion Translated by Sarah Boittin 14 Conclusion: Towards a new understanding of the history of opera? Thomas Ertman Bibliography 364 Index 395

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I L LU S T R AT I O N S

7.1

“Le suprˆeme Bon Ton,” frontispiece, London und Paris, 1800 Source: Library of the University of G¨ottingen 163

9.1 Revenues of the Op´era and the Op´era-comique, 1875–1905 Source: Annuaires statistiques de la ville de Paris 248

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TA B L E S

4.1

Principal roles for women (and castrato) in Meyerbeer’s Italian operas 89

4.2 Roles for two leading women in Meyerbeer’s French grand operas 107 6.1

Sacred operas for Neapolitan Lent seasons (1785–1820, premieres only) 146

6.2 La finta cameriera by Federico-[Barlocci?]/Latilla: productions 1738–1751 151 6.3 Some opera buffa productions with the Baglionis 154 8.1

Hymns and choruses published by Ricordi in 1848, whose plates were later destroyed, according to the Ricordi catalogue of 1857 209

8.2 Some hymns and choruses published by Lucca and Canti in 1848 221 8.3 Poetic meters of the “edizioni distrutte” 230 9.1

French composers of operas and op´eras-comiques most frequently performed abroad 253

9.2 Number of cities outside their home country where the works of foreign opera composers from the sample were performed 255

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MUSICAL EXAMPLES

1.1

Giovanni Antonio Boretti, Claudio Cesare, Act i, Scene 9 (I-Vnm It IV, 401[= 9925]), f. 16v–17r. 45

2.1

Jean-Baptiste Lully, Atys, Act i, Scene 7: “Entr´ee des Phrygiens” (Paris: Baussen, 1709), p. 72. 62

2.2

Jean-Baptiste Lully, Atys, Act i, Scene 7: “Second air des Phrygiens” (Paris: Baussen, 1709), p. 73. 63

8.1

Giuseppe Verdi and Goffredo Mameli, “Suona la tromba” (1848): the irregular first phrase (five measures plus three measures) of the first strophe. From the first edition published by Paolo de Giorgi (Milan, 1865). 192

8.2 Gaetano Donizetti and Salvadore Cammarano, Belisario (1836), Aria of Alamiro, “Trema Bisanzio”: the first eight measures, in which Donizetti ignores the enjambment between the two verses. From the first edition of the vocal score published by G. Ricordi (Milan, 1836). 193 8.3

Gioachino Rossini and Luigi Balocchi and Alexandre Soumet, Le Si`ege de Corinthe (1826), Sc`ene et Air Hi´eros avec Chœur, “R´epondons a` ce cri de victoire”: the melody subsequently used by Rossini in his Cantata in onore del Sommo Pontefice Pio Nono (1846; first performed 1 January 1847). From the first edition of the vocal score published by Eug`ene Troupenas (Paris, 1826). 198

8.4 Gioachino Rossini and Canonico Golfieri, Grido di esultazione riconoscente al Sommo Pontefice Pio IX, “Su, fratelli, letizia si canti”: the melody derived from the Coro dei Bardi in Rossini’s La donna del lago (1819). From the first edition published by G. Ricordi (Milan, 1847). 206 xiii

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8.5

List of musical examples

Albino Abbiati, Il 22 Marzo 1848: Valzer per Pianoforte ossia Musica allusiva alle cinque giornate: the composition consists of variations on Rossini’s Grido di esultazione riconoscente al Sommo Pontefice Pio IX. From the first edition published by G. Ricordi (Milan, 1848). 207

8.6 Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti and Giulio Carcano, Inno nazionale in occasione delle solenni esequie pei morti nella rivoluzione di Milano, “Per la Patria il sangue han dato”: opening phrase. From the first edition published by G. Ricordi (Milan, 1848). 225 8.7 Prospero Selli and Carlo Matthey, La partenza per Lombardia: canto guerriero: syncopated cadential phrase, “Oh si voli; chi e` vero italiano / Varcher`a le bell’acque del Po.” From the first edition published by G. Ricordi (Milan, 1848). 227 8.8 Pietro Cornali and David Chiossone, Canto degli italiani, cadential phrase, “Con l’aurora invocata dai forti, / Italiani sorgiamo, sorgiamo, / e la terra che disser dei morti / Sia de’ prodi la patria e l’onor.” From the first edition published by F. Lucca (Milan, 1848). 229

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Victoria Johnson is Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies at the University of Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University, where she wrote her dissertation on state/administrative relations at the Paris Opera from its founding in 1669 to the French Revolution. A book based on her dissertation research is forthcoming. Jane F. Fulcher is Professor of Music (Musicology), Indiana University. In 2003–2004 she was “Edward Cone Member in Music Studies” at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. She has been awarded research fellowships by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the National Humanities Center, and the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (Paris), and she was twice a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. She is the author of The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (Cambridge, 1987), French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (1999), and The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914–1940 (2005). She was also the editor of and a contributor to Debussy and His World (2001). Thomas Ertman is Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University. He is the author of Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), which was awarded the Barrington Moore Prize for the best book in historical sociology. He is presently completing a successor volume tentatively entitled Taming the Leviathan: Liberalization and Democracy in Western Europe from the French Revolution to the Second World

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War and has just begun a new project on the sociology of opera in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany. Naomi Andr´e is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan and holds a B.A. from Barnard College and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Music from Harvard University. Her research focuses on Verdi, nineteenth-century opera and women in music. Her book, Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti and the Second Woman in Early NineteenthCentury Italian Opera, forthcoming, explores the changing meanings of women’s voices and characterization in nineteenth-century Italian opera. She has published on Schoenberg and Verdi and has written articles for The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and The International Dictionary of Black Musicians. Currently she is working on a project that explores “blackness” and “blackface” in opera. Craig Calhoun is President of the Social Science Research Council and University Professor of Social Sciences at New York University. His book Cosmopolitanism and Belonging will be published in 2006. Also forthcoming are the edited collections Lessons of Empire? Historical Contexts for Understanding America’s Global Power (with Frederick Cooper and Kevin Moore, 2005), and Sociology in America: the ASA Centennial History (2006). Christophe Charle is Professor of Contemporary History at the Universit´e de Paris-I Panth´eon-Sorbonne and director of the Institut d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (CNRS/ENS). Among his many books are La Naissance des “intellectuels” 1880–1900 (1990); A Social History of France in the Nineteenth-Century (1993); Les Intellectuels en Europe au XIXe si`ecle (1996, 2001); Paris fin de si`ecle, culture et politique (1998); and La Crise des soci´et´es imp´eriales (1900–1940), essai d’histoire sociale compar´ee de l’Allemagne, de la France et de la Grande-Bretagne (2001). He is presently working on theatre in three European capitals (Paris, Berlin, Vienna) and is leading a comparative project on the cultural history of European capital cities in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

Notes on contributors

Philip Gossett is the Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He is general editor of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi and the Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini. In 2003 he was elected a Socio Onorario of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Rome. Rebecca Harris-Warrick is Professor of Music at Cornell University. Her work focuses on French Baroque music and dance, and opera in France from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Her publications have appeared in such journals as Early Music and Cambridge Opera Journal. She prepared the critical edition of Donizetti’s opera La Favorite, in Edizione critica delle opere di Gaetano Donizetti (1997) and is co-editor, with James R. Anthony, of the critical edition of the ballet Les Amours d´eguis´es in the Oeuvres compl`etes de Jean-Baptiste Lully (2001). Her most recent book, co-edited with Bruce Alan Brown, is The Grotesque Dancer on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Gennaro Magri and His World (2005). Wendy Heller is Assistant Professor of Music at Princeton University. She has written extensively on gender, opera, and the classical tradition. She is the author of Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (2003). Antoine Hennion is Director of Research at the Ecole des Mines de Paris and the former Director of the Center for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI). He has written extensively on the sociology of music and the sociology of media, innovation, and cultural industries. His recent publications include a book on music-lovers (Figures de l’amateur, La Documentation franc¸aise, 2000, with Sophie Maisonneuve), a book on the use of J. S. Bach in nineteenth-century France (La Grandeur de Bach, Fayard, 2000, with J.-M. Fauquet), and Music as Mediation (forthcoming), the English translation of his 1993 book La Passion musicale. Catherine Kintzler is Professor of Philosophy at the Universit´e Charles de Gaulle Lille-III. She has written extensively on aesthetics and politics in the eighteenth century. Among her books are

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Condorcet, l’instruction publique et la naissance du citoyen (2nd edn., 1987); Jean-Philippe Rameau, splendeur et naufrage de l’esth´etique du plaisir a` l’ˆage classique (2nd edition, 1988, prix Charles Cros 1983); and Po´etique de l’op´era franc¸ais de Corneille a` Rousseau (1991). Herbert Lindenberger is Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Stanford University. He is a literary scholar and cultural historian who has published two books on opera, Opera: The Extravagant Art (1984) and Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage (1998). His diverse other writings include such books as On Wordsworth’s Prelude (1963) and Historical Drama (1975). Franco Piperno is Professor of Music History at the University of Florence (Italy), Dipartimento di Storia delle Arti e dello Spettacolo; he also heads the Faculty (“Corso di laurea”) of Discipline delle arti, della musica e dello spettacolo. He has published several studies on Italian opera of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and has also studied musical patronage in Italian Renaissance courts (with a book on this topic appearing in 2001) and seventeenthcentury Italian instrumental music. Michael P. Steinberg is Director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities and Professor of History and Music at Brown University. He also serves as Associate Editor of The Musical Quarterly and The Opera Quarterly. He is the author of Austria as Theatre and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival (2000), of which the German edition (Ursprung und Ideologie der Salzburger Festspiele, 2000) won Austria’s Victor Adler Staatspreis in 2001. Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music appeared in 2004. A new book called Judaism Musical and Unmusical is forthcoming. Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg teaches Italian Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. She is the author of Sublime Surrender: Male Masochism at the Fin-de-Si`ecle (1998), as well as of numerous articles on the constructions of masculinity in the nineteenth century, on psychoanalysis and gender, and on Italian literature in the

Notes on contributors

post-unification period. Her The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians is forthcoming. William Weber, who teaches history at California State University, Long Beach, has written Music and the Middle Class: Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris & Vienna, 1830–48 (1975) and The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England (1992), and he coedited Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (1984). He has also taught at the University of York (UK) and was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Music.

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F O R E WO R D

Opera is delightfully contradictory. I don’t mean simply that it is endlessly productive of arguments, though that is true. Opera fans debate favorite performances, praise or decry new productions in extravagant terms, and ally themselves passionately with Mozart or Verdi. Opera companies are equally ripe with controversy, dubious over conductors who seek too much authority, contentious about roles and repertory. Opera critics delight in provoking clashes over whether celebrity singers are past their prime, whether theatrical spectacle has triumphed regrettably over music, and whether restaging old favorites is driving out innovation. All these and other arguments are simply evidence that opera commands the passions of its varied participants. In the language of Pierre Bourdieu, it is a field of serious play to which they are committed. The controversies reflect artistic taste, but also relationships of art to audience, to money, and to social organization. And herein lie some contradictions that shape the field of opera as a field of careers and companies, not only compositions and performances; and a field embedded in several changing contexts as far beyond the opera hall as nationalist politics and globalization, changing media and class structure, and shifting structures of patronage. This book reflects the interest of opera as a social phenomenon. This is an interest that extends beyond aesthetic evaluations and the engagements of fans, critics, or performers. But social studies of culture need not ignore aesthetics and can contribute to the understanding of fans, critics, and performers. The chapters in this book are informed by serious understanding of opera as music and theatre even while they enrich such understanding by considering other dimensions and contexts of opera. The opera field, for example, is simultaneously structured by art and commerce: opera is expensive and yet ostensibly an art produced xxi

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for art’s sake. Opera is an insider’s art yet closely attentive to box-office receipts. Its fans master mountains of detail, like baseball fans with their statistics, cricket fans with their histories. They volunteer as docents to be close to stars and opera houses. They listen to broadcasts preceded by pedantic prefaces. Yet its musical leaders and business managers alike curry contacts among patrons, hire publicists to reach beyond the cognoscenti, market their wares widely, and worry anxiously if single ticket sales don’t make up for any slip in pricey subscriptions. Carreras, Domingo, and Pavarotti are all wonderful tenors who have sung difficult roles with distinction, and that isn’t why they went on tour and recorded as the Three Tenors. In fact, opera companies and houses have long been business institutions.1 This is not an innovation in itself, though the forms of business organization have changed over opera’s history. The patronage of the Doge or the Medici has unsurprisingly given way to that of capitalist corporations. The rise of the middle class changed the pattern of ticket sales (and also the meaning of being an opera fan). Recordings now rival performance in the economy of opera. And of course these changes affect even the aesthetic content and experience of opera. The experience of listening, for example, is transformed by the availability of recordings; so too even the performers’ sense of pitch. And films of opera add still another dimension to this (and this hardly exhausts the range of interesting ways in which opera appears in film and has influenced the development of film and other genres).2 Art is sometimes seen (and artists sometimes portray their world) as the inverse of economic life. As Pierre Bourdieu famously wrote, however, the idea that the world of art is the economic world reversed reveals not the absence of strategic, even economic, interests in art but a systematic opposition between capacities to mobilize cultural and economic capital.3 It is not, in other words, that those with cultural distinction do not want more of it and thus deploy their resources strategically to secure it. Nor is it even that they don’t want cash. Neither is it the case that the rich have no need of strategies to secure cultural prestige or to pass their wealth on to their children by making

Foreword

sure they gain intellectual credentials and the patina of artistic taste. It is the case, however, that cultural and economic capitals are distinct and are accumulated by contrasting strategies, even though ultimately it is crucial that each can be converted into the other. Moreover, for this to work it is also important that the nature of values be misrecognized – as though there is no culture in the economy and no material interest in culture. It is no accident that I have cited Pierre Bourdieu twice in just a few paragraphs. He was an important inspiration to the present project. Indeed, before his fatal illness intervened, Bourdieu planned to attend the conference on which the book is based and offer introductory remarks. He was and is much missed. His work has been influential nonetheless.4 Not least, it is important for elaborating an approach to the different “fields” of social life that stresses their differentiation from and relations to each other (and thus often boundary struggles); the importance of emotional commitment of participants to social fields and their capacities for practical action within them; the importance of struggle over resources and prestige within fields; and the organization of fields by the way they relate to the accumulation of capital (including not only on an axis of greater or lesser capital but also in terms of the differentiation of forms of capital). The idea of field is not simply a corrective to individualistic accounts of production. We should agree that “art worlds” require many more collaborators and participants than only the frontstage figures commonly credited with genius. But the notion of field goes further to posit a determinate relationship to a larger field of power and contestation – as opera is related to money and politics and social prestige. It posits an internal organization in terms of specific struggles for distinction (and possibly other “stakes”). And it is this which organizes ideals of purity, of art for art’s sake, and denigrations of mere journalists in relation to literature, mere decorators in relation to painting, popular music in relation to serious music (and more narrowly instrumental purity in relation to singing). Opera is at once a challenge to these ideals of aesthetic purity and a terrain of struggle over them:

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Poetry is contrasted to the work of mere hack librettists; “true opera” is contrasted to operetta and musical drama; performers and scholars both take pains to distinguish themselves from fans (even while they rely on them). And the oppositions are reproduced in fractal images on a smaller scale: proper musicologists distinguish themselves from literary scholars poaching on operatic turf, and both sometimes from sociologists. These ideals, moreover, reflect not simply timeless truth but an organization of knowledge in the modern era through the practical struggles that form fields and construct their specific species of capital. Bourdieu stressed, in other words, the extent to which all of us in practical action shape trajectories through contradictory social pressures and opportunities. Like the innumerable operatic heroes and heroines (and sometimes comedic minor characters) who navigate seemingly improbable plots to conclusions that appear almost inevitable, we derive our identities and biographies from the ways in which both our origins and our actions – and those of others – situate us in relation to basic social contradictions. And so too opera itself has a history and social identity shaped by its often contradictory relations to its social context and organization conditions. It is “delightfully contradictory” as I said at the outset because it illuminates a great deal. Consider, for example, opera’s locations in relation to the class structure (or in Bourdieusian terms to the accumulation of different quantities of capital). Opera is impossible to place – or rather, it occupies multiple places at the same time and shifting ones through history and in different contexts. In the contemporary United States opera is often seen as the epitome of “high art” – a special taste requiring significant cultivation and economic as well as cultural capital (and indeed it has been among the last of the major performance arts to surrender the notion that audiences should dress formally). But it does not look so in Italy or Argentina. And in many settings seating – and (more often in earlier years) standing – arrangements offer striking indices of class relations. Opera is popular and high art at once, and a source of insight into the way the distinction itself is deployed both by social analysts and by aesthetes and consumers. Notoriously expensive to stage, opera is

Foreword

particularly dependent on patronage. Yet it is also successful enough at securing both patronage and paying customers to be less dependent on state subsidies than most forms of “classical” music. Opera is also interestingly contradictory in geopolitical terms. It is among the art forms with the strongest national traditions. These include aesthetic traditions, such as preferences in composers, differences in singing styles, greater or lesser emphases on spectacle, and patterns in popular plots and settings. Opera also figures in national political traditions in extra-aesthetic ways, however, as crowds at opera houses have reveled in a populist response to The Marriage of Figaro, found occasions to express contempt for unpopular ministers, and sparked influential riots. Yet at the same time, opera was a pioneer in globalization. Singers learned multiple languages and along with conductors and instrumentalists often moved from one nation to another. There is today a global operatic circuit traveled in different forms (and with different privileges) by stars, less famous performers, and indeed fans. I won’t go on. The point is simply that while there are virtues to social studies of all genres and fields of art, there are some sources of distinctive interest to opera.5 Just as internally the tensions among music, theatre, and poetry shape opera, so various other contradictions shape its relations to social contexts. As articles in this book reveal, the relation of opera to politics is rich and instructive. So are opera’s relations to economics and business, to transcultural relations, and to the social organization of cultural life more generally. At the same time, culture is communication and creativity and important for the ways in which it represents the rest of society. Opera is of interest not only for its institutional organization and its relation to other social fields but for its portrayal of social and political relationships. Operas variously evoke and comment on social life in specific cities and countries and in entire eras. As essays in the first part of this book detail, they reveal much about themes from empire to gender. But the role of operatic representations is not merely to represent; opera is not only a tool for historians looking for indices as to how eighteenth-century French or Italian people thought about

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empire or gender. Operas, because they were seen by so many people and because they offered “schemas” for grasping social relations, played a constitutive as well as a reflective role. The way “the people” were portrayed on the operatic stage in ancien r´egime France was part of the way in which what we might call the “social imaginary” of a monarchical society was reproduced.6 As Bourdieu stressed, it would be a mistake to think that because much cultural work is creative, its function is all the production of new social relations. On the contrary, creative work is usually harnessed by the operatic field – as by the literary and other fields – in the service of social reproduction.7 Once again, we see the relevance of Bourdieu’s work. I cannot take the place of Pierre Bourdieu, or say what he might have said. But I do want to pay brief homage to him and suggest the importance of his work for projects such as understanding not only the relationship of opera to society but opera as a social phenomenon. Bourdieu was a remarkable scholar – deeply educated in theory but always in pursuit of empirical knowledge, passionate about the importance of both art and science yet reasoned in his approach to them, a thinker who transcended disciplines without giving up intellectual discipline. He was trained initially in philosophy but gave up the “caste profits” available to philosophers for the more mundane but empirically informed approach of sociology. His sociology was never simply contained by academic boundaries, though, and he made fundamental contributions to anthropology, education, and literary studies, as well as to intellectual life broadly understood. Bourdieu wrote more extensively on literature and painting than on music, more on museums than theatres, but his analyses of the development of the ideal of the pure aesthetic and of the relationship between cultural and economic capital are of potentially great importance in music scholarship as well. The time seems ripe for this undertaking. Musicologists have questioned ideologies of the pure aesthetic – without abandoning aesthetic concerns – and begun to ask increasingly interesting questions about the nature of listening, the social organization of both performances

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and audiences, and the social impact of music. Social science should prove helpful. At the same time, many (I’m afraid not enough) social scientists have tried to throw off the common allergy to aesthetics that has impeded the integration of cultural and social analysis. Too often they may have embraced approaches to aesthetics that seem oldfashioned to scholars of music or art, but not always, and in any case there is an important revolution simply in bringing aesthetic concerns – and thus concerns for experience, meaning, and judgment – into the heart of social science. This offers the potential for social analyses of cultural productions that are not simply reductions to social causes and effects. Equally, a rich study of opera’s involvements in social contexts means going beyond the reading of libretti for an exploration of social significance. Obviously scholars have also studied riots outside opera houses and social pressures influencing taste in operas. But too few studies work adequately on music and staging as well as verbal content (just as too much music scholarship treats libretti and theatre as poor cousins).8 I think of some of this as the Tamu-Tamu effect. It happened that I was at the 1973 premiere of this late Menotti opera, since it was commissioned by the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. The opera concerns the displacement of Southeast Asian refugees into an American suburb to disturb the serene obliviousness of its residents and comment on global conflicts (this was the era of the Vietnam War). Its politically correct libretto and dramatic action are perhaps no more absurd than those of many operas. But note that the way in which Menotti sought to have relevance to the time, to politics, and to social science was overwhelmingly contained within libretto and dramatic action; the music had a supporting role. Menotti also chose a staging that made a minimal break between audience and action. He did not find in opera a specific form of expression that gave him any more license to explore controversial themes than did the form of academic paper, welcoming address, or ordinary theatre (and this may be less a matter of his choices than of the times). In this, the premiere of Tamu-Tamu was significantly different from, say,

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the famous Paris staging of The Marriage of Figaro. Mozart’s music was not only more beautiful and interesting (forgive the gratuitous evaluation) but played a more important role. Right from the overture, it opened up a space in which the radical content of Beaumarchais’s play could be presented without similar repression. The opera created a liminal space, more distant from political critique than the spoken word theatre, more outside of everyday life, and yet able to engage its categories.9 Of course music did far more than that; it served also as more than just an aid to memory, more than an added aspect of entertainment. It was and is also part of the meaning of the opera, and certainly part of what makes Mozart’s opera endure beyond Beaumarchais’s play. Conversely, the libretto is less than meets the eye. In the obvious sense, potentially controversial parts of the play were dropped from the opera. But it is crucial to recognize both that audiences knew this and were able to supply some of the missing content, and that the very omissions signaled the significance of the unstageable actions. This is a relatively commonplace bit of opera history; I don’t claim to adduce new facts. I want merely to illustrate the importance of working beyond the confines of a conception of social significance or impact which focuses on manifest content – of either operas or responses to them. I would note also, finally, a minor bit of the Tamu-Tamu story that suggests the renewed relevance of an old issue in a changed context. The soprano Menotti chose to sing the lead was Sung Sook Lee. TamuTamu gave her a big break and she went on to a distinguished international career. At the height of it, however, she converted to evangelical Christianity (reversing some of Menotti’s East comes West imagery) and announced she could no longer sing opera, which she regarded as inherently profane, but only sacred music. Of course opera had run afoul of clerical disapproval before. Indeed, it is a musical tradition that has proved interestingly refractory to religious appropriation (though a genre of sacred opera was created to provide for performances during Lent). One of the senses in which opera has generally been “popular” rather than high art is precisely that it has been profane. This is a different axis from that usually used to distinguish popular from high art,

Foreword

but the history which it calls to our attention is in fact very relevant, even if forgotten by most sociologists thinking about the categories. This reminds us again that the operatic tradition is not just internal, not something that can be grasped only by attending to opera. Attention is also required to operas intertwining with other cultural traditions, including in such oppositions as profane or secular to sacred. And as Lee’s example suggests, this is not just textual but a matter of the lives and careers of artists. The very notion of tradition needs interrogation. When we speak about the development of the Italian opera tradition (or later the French or German) and on this basis also make claims about what constitutes “real” opera, we need not only good and plentiful facts, and also careful considerations of just what we mean by Italian, French, or German at different points in history or from the different perspectives of performers, patrons, and audiences. We need also care in considering just how tradition – literally, passing on or handing over – is accomplished. What are the different roles of explicit teaching and of imitation? What is the relationship of tradition over time to integration at one time – as among the many different crafts involved in producing an opera? How are the parts of tradition that result in or depend on written records to be related to those that do not? How do elite and popular participants in tradition influence it (and each other)? Is it always innovation that is in need of explanation or should analysis focus as much on the recuperative, reproductive capacity of tradition? My point is not, alas, that social science has the perfect theory of tradition and musicologists need only to import it. Rather, the point is that opera is a terrific site for the interrogation of what tradition means and how its different dimensions interrelate. Conversely, of course, there is the curse of becoming “classical” and all the debates about the relationship of old to new in operatic repertoires. What does it mean for so much of the core repertory to have been composed by the nineteenth century, and for that composed later to fare so much better with conservatories and critics than broader publics? What are the implications of the aging of opera audiences in many countries?

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There are many more questions, of course, and undoubtedly many will be stimulated that neither I nor the contributors to this volume have imagined. This is just one of the many reasons that I am very pleased that the Social Science Research Council was able to organize the conference from which this book developed. I would also thank NYU for the use of its magnificent Villa La Pietra, allowing us to meet in the vicinity of Florence during the opera festival. I would like to thank the editors for helping to establish the link between the ephemeral event and enduring scholarship. In Pierre Bourdieu’s memory I am pleased to note their passion for their intellectual undertaking, their openness to perspectives from numerous fields, and their willingness to see how claims to disciplinary boundaries and professional expertise are also claims to specific forms of capital and can sometimes be blinkers as well as aids in the pursuit of knowledge. They and the contributors have used disciplinary expertise but also transcended its limits. Craig Calhoun Social Science Research Council

n ot e s 1 See Beth L. Glixon and Jonathan E. Glixon, Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Victoria Johnson, “Founding Culture: Art, Politics, and Organization at the Paris Opera, 1669–1792 (Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 2002). 2 See chapter 10 below by Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg. 3 See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) and “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed,” in The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 29–73. 4 Jane Fulcher’s recent work is both indicative of the growing influence of Bourdieu among musicologists and an influence on expanding that. See

Foreword

5 6 7 8

9

French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), and more substantially The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); also chapter 12 in this volume. This theme is developed especially in Part III of the current book. See chapter 3 below by Catherine Kintzler. See Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Culture, and Society (London: Sage, second edition, 1990). It is helpful, thus, that in this book several of the studies that address the representation of society on the operatic stage directly consider not only the libretti, but the music and indeed the use of dance, sets, and specificities of staging. See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (New York: Aldina, 1969) on liminality. The term simply refers to a threshold; operas use a variety of devices to mark a distinction from the quotidian, including not only music but the very pomp of the opera as event and the style of the opera hall.

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AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

The editors would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Office of Global Education, New York University, and the Social Science Research Council. Doug Guthrie (NYU) and Craig Calhoun (SSRC and NYU) were crucial in helping this project to fruition. We are also grateful to the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Michigan and the Dean’s Office of the School of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan for their additional financial support. Justin Bischof, Neil Brenner, Franc¸oise Escal, Priscilla Ferguson, Paul Johnson, John Merriman, David Stark, Charles Tilly, Duncan Watts, and Harrison White offered ideas and assistance along the way. We would like to extend a special thanks to David Chaillou, without whom this project would never have happened. Pierre Bourdieu provided moral support and intellectual inspiration from the very beginning, and it is to his memory that we dedicate this volume.

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INTRODUCTION: OPERA AND THE AC A D E M I C T U R N S

Victoria Johnson

Opera, created in Florence in the 1580s by a group of artistically inclined noblemen and other city notables, has been in continuous production for more than four centuries in Europe, and three in the Americas. Throughout its history, creators and audiences alike have understood opera as a multi-media art form, one that includes music, text, visual elements, and (often) dance. Because of the great expense of opera performance, local political and economic elites have wielded considerable power over its creators, with the strength of these ties depending on the demands of artistic and institutional conventions. Though the distribution and differentiation of labor in opera performance has varied somewhat according to the historical moment, it has nearly always included – even at its sparest – singers, a stage with a set, instrumentalists, and an audience. And even in the context of quite modest production values, opera has required an enormous variety of material and human resources. The complexity entailed by opera’s combination of multiple artistic media – a complexity which arguably surpasses that of any other art form – means that the study of operatic history demands the analytical tools of a variety of academic disciplines. Nevertheless, until recently, scholars for decades pried opera apart into the discrete fragments most susceptible to their preferred methods of analysis: music, words, singers, theatres, directors, audiences. The operatic unity thereby lost is not the unity of words and music, nor is it the sense of dramatic unity sometimes invoked by critics in favorable reviews of individual opera performances. It is, rather, the original historical unity of the specific practices comprising the production and consumption of something conventionally labeled “opera.” Over the last decade and a half, however, the terrain of opera studies has been dramatically altered by an explosion of interest in opera across 1

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disciplines as well as by an increased interdisciplinarity in approaches to opera. In the wake of the cultural and historical “turns” that transformed the humanities and social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s, musicologists in particular have turned in increasing numbers to the study of opera, and in doing so they have often drawn heavily on the methods of literary criticism and cultural history. Scholars in a range of disciplines beyond musicology have also made important contributions to this wave of new work on opera. Despite this blossoming of opera studies, however, scholars from the various disciplines concerned have had few opportunities to juxtapose and compare their differing approaches to their common object. The present volume aims to create just such an opportunity and, at the same time, to extend it to a broad audience of readers. The short introductions to each of this volume’s three sections discuss and compare the various approaches taken by the contributors to the task of re-embedding opera in its social, political, and cultural contexts of creation and reception. In the present introduction, however, I have a different purpose: to situate the current major themes and methods in opera studies through a brief examination of the recent history of the academic disciplines involved, including musicology, history, literature, and sociology. To this end, I offer a series of maps: first, a map of the current division of academic labor in the study of opera; next, a map of the recent intellectual developments – the so-called “turns” – that have helped to transform opera studies in highly promising ways; and, finally, a map of the major paths of inquiry evident in recent work on opera. Depending on the reader’s disciplinary home turf, the territory covered in this introductory essay may at times be quite familiar; more often, I hope, the reader will find the brief introductions to the concerns and recent histories of less familiar disciplines useful and informative. O P E R A A N D T H E D I V I S I O N O F AC A D E M I C L A B O R

For more than a century, musicology has been the natural repository of opera scholarship, despite the somewhat marginal position accorded the operatic form in a discipline that has often considered “pure” music

Introduction

a more legitimate concern.1 Opera has, until relatively recently, been thought of by many musicologists as a poor relation in the musical family, in large part because of its commingling of music and text. It is precisely this textual element, of course, that has sometimes made opera seem more accessible to non-musicologists than purely instrumental music. For example, literary scholars concerned with drama have occasionally opened libretti to ponder such questions as how Shakespeare’s plays were altered when they were wedded to music or how the dominant literary conventions of a given historical epoch were translated into the libretto form.2 But, in a parallel to the somewhat marginal status of opera among musicologists, the libretto has long occupied a marginal position among the genres studied by scholars of literature, in part because of a perceived subordination of text to music and the concomitant decrease in the libretto’s value as “pure” literature.3 Other academic specialists who might fruitfully contribute to the study of opera have been even less attentive than musicologists and literary critics to the history of opera. The most important reason for this inattention is the timidity with which non-musicologists approach musical works. The apparent non-representational nature of music (itself the subject of centuries of heated debate) and the technical difficulty of learning to read music have combined forcefully to discourage scholars not fluent in the language of music from putting their analytical tools to work in this area. And a further obstacle to the production of rigorous non-musicological work on opera, as the historian William Weber has pointed out regarding his own discipline, is the long-standing habit among humanities scholars of examining artistic movements from within a narrow “history of ideas” paradigm.4 This paradigm has limited the ability of historians to examine thoroughly the relations between the political and the philosophical ideas of a historical era and the translation of these ideas into artistic movements, including those that have structured the world of opera over the centuries. Where opera has seemed to bear explicit political messages, or where its composers were themselves directly implicated in national politics, historians have indeed ventured to comment on opera.5 But they have largely remained unable or unwilling to come to terms with

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the importance of opera as a site of social, cultural, and political interaction in modern European history. Still other disciplines have been no more proficient or prolific in the analysis of opera, sometimes for the same reasons that confront historians, but sometimes for reasons specific to particular disciplinary trajectories. For example, despite Max Weber’s early contribution to the sociology of music and Theodor Adorno’s extensive mid-century writings, sociologists have shied away from examining the specifically musical content of musical works in favor of explaining the social and economic structures behind their production.6 In this sense, sociologists have been no more confident than historians about directly confronting the difficult questions surrounding the relation between musical content and social context. Despite the textual element of opera, this sociological reluctance towards the study of music in general has done nothing to encourage attention within the discipline to the operatic form. And there is a further obstacle to the study of opera facing sociologists, an obstacle that derives from the discipline’s own history. Having once (in the 1960s) taken up the gauntlet thrown down by the Frankfurt School in its diatribes against the American “culture industry,” sociologists of art have for decades been engaged, on the one hand, in the fruitful work of specifying the precise mechanisms by which commercial interests shape popular culture, and, on the other, in documenting the liberating powers of popular culture.7 “High” culture forms such as opera have largely remained in the shadows, except when they have appeared in their modern incarnations in organizational studies of non-profit institutions.8 European and American operatic history has therefore received almost no attention at all from American sociologists since at least World War II.9 Disciplinary divisions of labor, internal disciplinary concerns, and the apparent impenetrability of musical works have thus served to hamper the analysis of opera production and consumption by specialists in literature, history, and sociology who in principle have much to contribute to such an analysis and whose own disciplines stand only to gain thereby. In the last twenty-five years, however, a set of linked transformations in scholarly concerns and methods throughout the

Introduction

humanities and social sciences has laid the groundwork and provided the inspiration for a wave of innovative new works on opera, including musicologist Jane Fulcher’s The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (1987), musicologist Carolyn Abbate’s Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (1991), and literary critic Herbert Lindenberger’s Opera in History (1998). The Cambridge Opera Journal, launched in 1989 with an inaugural issue featuring contributors from the disciplines of philosophy, musicology, literary criticism, and history, heralded – and has since nurtured – the new spirit of opera scholarship. These scholarly undertakings, and others like them, bear witness to the interest within many disciplines in new kinds of cultural and historical analysis as well as to a new degree of disciplinary cross-fertilization. The intellectual developments that made these and other similarly innovative works possible are often referred to today as the cultural and historical “turns.” In the following section, I briefly trace the origins and effects of these developments in history, sociology, literary criticism, and musicology – all key disciplines in the study of opera – before examining the major lines of inquiry that have emerged in opera studies with the help of the turns. THE TURNS IN THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

These turns, by no means smooth or unilinear processes, are the unevenly achieved result of a set of loosely linked critiques of traditional methods and objects of study that cut a swath through a wide range of disciplines from the 1970s onward. However contradictory and fitful these developments have been, their end product has been a massive reorientation of scholarly concerns and methods in history, sociology, and literature. History History’s “cultural turn” took place in the 1970s and 1980s and had its origins in a reaction to two important currents of historical

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scholarship: traditional political history and the social history inaugurated by the Annales school in the 1930s and carried on in a more Marxist vein by a second generation of French historians such as Albert Soboul and George Rud´e.10 The success of this reaction is evident in the broad influence of the school of historical studies known as the New Cultural History, whose most prominent representatives are the French historians Roger Chartier and Jacques Revel and the American historians Natalie Zemon Davis, Robert Darnton, and Lynn Hunt. In the 1970s and 1980s, these French and American scholars found themselves dissatisfied with the huge gaps left in the explanation of historical processes and events by historians’ dependence on two sources of historical information: on the one hand, the published, learned texts of politically and socially prominent figures, and on the other (with the inception of the Annales school), quantifiable information about social and economic life. Influenced by E. P. Thompson and Michel Foucault, among others, the new culturally oriented historians began to explore alternative ways to capture the experience of the past by mining unconventional historical sources such as accounts of popular festivals or visual representations of public and private life. These sources guided scholars toward new answers to old questions – particularly those that have never ceased to surround the causes, trajectory, and effects of the French Revolution – and they often raised utterly new questions as well. A central accomplishment of the New Cultural History has been to show how cultural practices are embedded in a relation of mutual constitution with social and economic structures, an approach that stands in stark contrast to traditional understandings of the historical role of “culture” once prevalent among left-leaning and conservative historians alike.11 The cultural turn in history was accompanied by another kind of turn, this one – strange as it might seem – historical. Unhappy with the Annalistes’ failure to take seriously the power of actors to alter social structures, historians such as Pierre Nora and Lynn Hunt made the event and other processual and temporal categories central to historical analysis and explanation.12

Introduction

Sociology Like history, American sociology has also undergone both a cultural and a historical turn, though these were initially separate lines of influence which have only in the past decade begun to join into a single current of sociological inquiry. Sociology, deeply historical in the hands of its founding fathers, had by the 1960s become focused on contemporary American social structure and social problems. However, a new school of sociology, initiated in large part by the historian and sociologist Charles Tilly, imported some of the concerns and methods of the Annales school (itself deeply sociological in its methods) into the study of perennial sociological questions such as the origins of revolutions and the nature of modernization.13 Tilly, along with Theda Skocpol and other influential historical sociologists, has since trained several generations of students to think about sociological questions from a historical perspective.14 However, some of these students (and in fact some of the teachers) came to believe that historical sociology as practiced in the 1970s was not “historical” enough. A major complaint of this “third wave” of historical sociologists was the ahistoricity of the quantitative and comparative methods initially developed in order to help legitimize historical sociology as a sociological subfield.15 In the 1990s, historical sociologists such as Andrew Abbott and William Sewell, Jr., argued that historical sociology had not yet taken time and temporality seriously, while Craig Calhoun suggested that historical sociology had allowed itself to be “domesticated” instead of using its tools to analyze the “historical constitution of basic theoretical categories.”16 This historical turn in American sociology was accompanied by a cultural turn. By the time Tilly began trying to acquaint sociologists with historical methods and concerns, American sociology had already experienced a small revolution against the dominant sociological paradigm of the mid-twentieth century, American structuralfunctionalism. Sociologists of culture were appropriating the revision of Marxism generated from within British Cultural Studies, along with the work of anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, as they attempted

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to develop convincing critiques of the critics of mass culture.17 Some sociologists of culture gradually began to revise their own assumptions about their central concept and to expand the definition of culture to include practice, discourse, and symbols. From France, the various poststructuralist critiques of Levi-Straussian and Saussurian structuralism, especially those of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, made their way into American studies of popular culture and also inspired culturalist studies of social spheres that had previously been considered outside the purview of cultural sociology, such as banking, railroads, or the insurance industry. For certain American sociologists, “culture” has become as ubiquitous and powerful a tool for explanation as it has for the founders and the inheritors of the New Cultural History, no longer viewed as a mere emanation of economic and social structures nor as a severely circumscribed sphere of artifacts in modern society. The multiple influences of poststructuralism, Geertzian anthropology, feminism, and cultural studies have combined to produce a set of aligned, if not always compatible, definitions of culture in sociology as a potential locus of political struggle and as a producer in its own right of social and economic structures. Literary criticism For its part, the discipline of literary criticism, by definition already a deeply “cultural” one in the narrower sense, underwent a historical turn marked by the ascendancy of the “New Historicism” in the early 1980s. Literary criticism’s historical turn was, in spite of individual differences in emphasis and outlook, above all a reaction to the brand of literary analysis that had dominated since the late 1920s, the “New Criticism.”18 American literary scholars working in this tradition, whose foremost representatives were Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren, chose to bracket the historical context of literary works in favor of attention to the texts alone. These scholars shared a conviction that literary works held the key to appropriate understanding between their covers and that criticism should be deployed for the close analysis of texts without recourse to

Introduction

extra-textual information. Attention to historical context was largely eschewed in the quest to understand the work on its own terms, an approach which often served to identify innovation or creativity as emanating from the author alone. The “New Historicism” marked one current of reaction to this sort of autonomous understanding of the text. Scholars working in this vein began to explore the historical contexts in which literary works were created to examine how their authors were beholden to contemporary modes of discourse and other collective social phenomena for the structure and content of their supposedly autonomous literary creations.19 Meanwhile, another strain of reaction to the New Criticism was triggered by the influential reinterpretation of Saussurian semiotics by Roland Barthes, which opened up a whole new range of “texts” to be “read” by critics, including pictures, social practices, and the objects of daily life.20 To this expansion of subject matter, British Cultural Studies and the many varieties of French poststructuralism contributed a revised understanding of the individual text as permitting multiple and equally valid readings and as thus exhibiting “multivocality.” By the 1980s, the kind of textual interpretation practiced by the New Criticism had largely been replaced by a new flexibility (or laxness, depending on one’s perspective) of method, a new set of questions, and a new range of literary “sources.” As we shall see, it was these developments in literary theory that were to have the heaviest impact on the study of opera, contributing to a wave of new works on the subject in the 1980s and 1990s, both within musicology and beyond its borders. Musicology It has frequently been noted that musicology has been the discipline most resistant to, and even ignorant of, the dramatic changes in the humanities and social sciences that began to make themselves felt in the 1970s.21 The transformations in methods, sources, and concerns that were profoundly altering the study of literature hardly touched musicology for at least a decade, as the discipline remained curiously

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impervious to the kind of cross-pollination that made sociologists and literary critics alike claim Raymond Williams and Roland Barthes as their own, or that made Foucault at one and the same time an anthropologist, a literary theorist, a historian, and a sociologist. One of the long-standing exceptions to this rule of disciplinary insularity, Leo Treitler, has suggested that musicology, troubled by its lack of documentary sources before the medieval period – compared, for example, to the ancient documentation available to scholars of literature and the visual arts – has been resistant to the new academic currents because it has focused most of its energy on securing its own tradition through the painstaking reconstruction of historical facts and sources.22 Though these studies have vastly expanded our historical record of musical life, they have usually made only a limited contribution to questions about the place of music in the history of human societies. While many musicologists have moved beyond the traditional “internalist” study of musical works to the documentation of extra-musical phenomena such as markets and politics, many of these same musicologists have continued to treat the musical works themselves as objectively autonomous entities, rather than examining the way such autonomy is socially constituted (or blocked). Like nonmusicologists who may romanticize music as a fundamentally difficult and mysterious art form, musicologists have often implicitly endowed music with a timeless autonomy that discourages them from posing questions about the relations between musical form and content and extra-musical context at all. Gradually, however, beginning in the mid-1980s, a series of unusual conferences and the research of a few bold musicologists resulted in the publication of several pathbreaking volumes that have questioned the assumptions behind the dominant concerns and methods in American musicology as well as exploring possible approaches to questions rarely posed by musicologists about music/society relations. These works include (but are not limited to) Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology ( Joseph Kerman, 1985); Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (edited by Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, 1987); Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality

Introduction

(Susan McClary, 1991); Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons (edited by Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman, 1992); Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (edited by Ruth A. Solie, 1993), and Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Lawrence Kramer, 1995). The titles of these books clearly signal that musicology itself has undergone a turn of sorts in the last fifteen years. And while musicology might appear to be a discipline that is cultural and historical by definition, it has acquired a new historicism and culturalism that have transformed research methods and concerns. Many musicologists have become more truly “historical” in their methods and conclusions by building contingency, path dependence, and links to non-musical features of given historical conjunctures into the analysis of the musical work itself. Whereas they had previously been (and many still are) more comfortable identifying the historicity in a work as a question of strictly musical influence, a handful of musicologists are now working to re-embed musical life and musical works in their specific extra-musical historical conjunctures. This re-evaluation of the social processes shaping the history of musical works has also led to a revision of musicological assumptions about the nature of “culture” by encouraging the analysis of music as social practice and discourse rather than as a set of largely self-contained artifacts. These currents in musicology, which have touched methodology and subject matter alike, parallel and draw on the developments of the last three decades in sociology, history, and literary criticism. Musicologists have found inspiration in sociology and cultural history for analyses of canon construction, for studies of the economic, political, social, and cultural structures in which musical life is embedded, and for investigations into the social functions of classical music. In a move reminiscent of Pierre Bourdieu’s French application in Distinction (1979) of anthropological methods usually reserved for “primitive” cultures, some scholars of Western classical music have begun to take their cues from the subfield of ethnomusicology.23 Following the lead of the New Cultural Historians, musicologists have explored the ways in which music not only mirrors, but also contributes to,

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the production and reinforcement of social structure, social practices, and systems of meaning. And just as cultural historians have expanded the repertoire of legitimate archival sources, musicologists have supplemented the common tools for studying music – namely, the analysis of scores and the interpretation of biographical details of composers’ lives – with such unorthodox sources as pictorial representations of musical production and consumption.24 In a similar vein, composers’ sketches for works in progress, used heretofore in a fashion that has tended to buttress the notion of the isolated, inspired, creator, have been recast as evidence for the contingent, even haphazard, nature of musical composition.25 Musicologists have been more directly influenced by developments in literary criticism than by those in any other discipline, in part because the literary concern with a particular form of artistic creation demonstrates most directly the possible advantages for the study of music of applying the assumptions and methods of the new culturalist work in sociology and of the new cultural history. But besides mediating between musicology and these other disciplines, literary criticism has itself been the source of a number of promising new approaches to the study of music. Theories of reception in music have been modeled on literary reception theory to reveal the multiple meanings available to listeners and to contest the usefulness – and sometimes the possibility – of reconstructing artistic intentions. Feminist scholars have examined the distribution of gender work in various musical cultures, and some have argued for the interpretation of musical works as themselves “gendered” or as reflecting and reinforcing gender hierarchies in the extra-musical world.26 Semiotics has made great strides with some musicologists, who have employed its principles and methods to examine how “linguistic” codes tie musical works to their social contexts through the notes themselves.27 It is important to note that these developments represent a double movement away from traditional musicology. First, progressive musicologists have firmly embedded what is often known, misleadingly, as “musical culture” or “the music world” into a larger and more complex set of social structures, thereby paving the way for the historicization

Introduction

of the implicitly claimed autonomy of this sphere. And more daringly, they have bared the musical work itself to the new ways of thinking about history and culture, dismantling the ideas that musical works are inherently autonomous and that they are locked in an eternal and insulated dialogue among themselves. Such traditional approaches to the study of music have in some quarters given way to an assessment of the ways in which even “pure” music is the carrier of extra-musical symbols and codes and is the producer of meaning and social structure. A P P R OAC H I N G O P E R A A F T E R T H E T U R N S

Both directly and indirectly, the turns have helped effect a profound transformation in opera studies. Opera scholarship within musicology, for example, has been a major beneficiary of the new movements in that discipline in part because musicologists specializing in opera, given their inevitable confrontation with the text of the libretto, have been more likely to be aware of developments in literary criticism than have musicologists specializing in instrumental music. Another group of musicologists working on opera has found in cultural history the inspiration and models for approaching opera with new methods and questions. And beyond musicology, the expansion of acceptable subject matter in both literary criticism and cultural history has freed scholars in those fields to take opera seriously as a topic of intellectual inquiry. A review of opera scholarship published in all disciplines in the last decade and a half reveals three major lines of inquiry, which can be roughly classified as the “critical” approach, the “systems of meaning” approach, and the “material conditions” approach. The “critical” approach, pursued mainly by musicologists and literary critics, involves a search for present meanings, either social or personal, in operatic works. The “systems of meanings” approach, practiced mainly by musicologists and historians, betrays the influence of the New Cultural Historians in its concern with the historical meanings available to the creators and consumers of operatic works. Practitioners who are primarily engaged in the second line of inquiry often also take up the third line of inquiry (although the opposite is not as likely). This third

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line, the “material conditions” approach, involves the reconstruction and analysis of the organizational, political, and professional structures underpinning opera production and consumption in specific historical contexts. The “critical” approach in opera studies traces its roots to a work that long predates the “turns”: Joseph Kerman’s pathbreaking Opera as Drama, first published in 1956 and reissued in 1988. As the musicologist Susan McClary has noted, early critical works such as Kerman’s “remained more or less isolated voices calling for the grafting of critical projects onto the mainstream of the profession.”28 It was not until the 1980s and the pioneering work of McClary herself that musicologists began to question traditional musicological approaches to opera, which privileged close readings of musical passages and excluded considerations of the music’s expression of social relationships and meanings. McClary’s innovative writings, which deal with both instrumental and operatic works, have centered on the expression of gender relations in these works. Musicologists inspired by her critical approach have often similarly focused on gender and sexuality in opera. Aiding this double shift toward criticism and gender issues in musicological studies of opera was a spate of books on opera by literary critics, among the most influential of which has been Catherine Cl´ement’s Opera, or the Undoing of Women, first published in French in 1976 and published in an English translation, with a foreword by McClary, in 1988. This work draws on anthropology, semiology, and psychoanalysis to analyze the fatal end that awaits the heroines of so many operas. Arguing that the sumptuous music accompanying their deaths encourages forgetfulness of the true nature of the events unfolding on stage, Cl´ement focuses her analysis on the frequently morbid plots: “What awarenesses dimmed by beauty and the sublime,” she asks, “come to stand in the darkness of the hall and watch the infinitely repetitive spectacle of a woman who dies, murdered?”29 Cl´ement’s and McClary’s studies have inspired a wave of research on representations of sexuality and gender in opera. And encouraged, perhaps, by the success of literary critic Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat, research on sexuality and gender has expanded beyond

Introduction

specifically feminist criticism to include analyses of lesbian and gay musical experiences and musical meanings.30 By searching for such unorthodox meanings, this work on gender and sexuality goes beyond traditional musicological readings of musical scores and libretti. But it is not the subject matter – gender and sexuality – that distinguishes these studies from other scholarship on opera, both past and present. More significant for our purposes here is their treatment of operatic works not as historical artifacts but as texts that invite contemporary and often avowedly personal readings.31 The second line of inquiry evident in recent opera scholarship – one that is quite distinct from the “critical” approach – is largely the product of the transformation of political and cultural historiography in the last three decades, although it also owes a good deal to the comparativist Edward Said’s work on orientalism and opera.32 Studies in this vein, which have come primarily from musicologists and historians, focus on reconstructing the “systems of meaning” (musical as well as extra-musical) that have shaped the production and reception of operatic works in specific historical contexts.33 It is no accident that some of the musicologists most attentive to the turns in cultural and political history are scholars of French opera, since it is historians of France (British and American as well as French) who have been the prime catalysts for this set of turns. The musicologist Jane Fulcher, for example, states at the outset of her 1987 study of French grand opera that she is offering “not narrowly a ‘reception history’ but . . . a cultural history. For what interests me,” she writes, “is how grand opera was implicated in a social and cultural context – how it arose within these larger structures and in turn reacted back finally upon them.”34 Similarly, in her book French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War, Fulcher offers an analysis of Gustave Charpentier’s opera Louise that again shows deep affinities with the defining concerns of the New Cultural History: By focusing on stylistic codes of meaning as understood within the period, this study seeks to avoid imputing political meanings on the basis of our current perceptions of political homologies or metaphors. Such an

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Victoria Johnson “essentialist” approach . . . must be replaced by the historical and anthropological study of meaning. We must attempt to excavate the systems of meaning in which specific works were both conceived by composers and then understood by audiences of the time – which were not necessarily identical. In the case of Louise, we shall find that the two were indeed substantially different; moreover, the context of performance played a central role in determining how the contemporary public and critics “read” the work . . . [A]lthough politics was not always present in the messages or modes of communication of the music, it affected conditions of both presentation and reception.35

Like many cultural historians working today, Fulcher’s explicit purpose is to reconstruct, as far as possible, past “systems of meanings” – what sociologists often refer to as “cultural schemas” – in order to understand the constraints and possibilities shaping musical expression and reception at particular historical conjunctures. Otherwise, one runs the risk of reading into musical works what was not there for the composer, or – since the relevance of the composer’s intentions have been called into question by so many scholars – for both initial and subsequent historical audiences. In his 1995 study of musical reception in Paris between 1750 and 1850, Listening in Paris, the historian James Johnson – taking aim at Susan McClary – points out the stakes of the same problem far more polemically: I cannot doubt McClary when she claims to hear a narrative of rape and murder in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony . . . [b]ut such a view of musical meaning, which I think neglects the actual musical features that frame our perceptions and delimit possible musical content, is arguably as one-sided as its opposite extreme, which dismisses listeners’ own aesthetic and ideological expectations as irrelevant in deriving some supposedly fixed musical meaning.36

At least in part, the third major line of work in opera studies sidesteps such contentious debates by turning from the works themselves to the material conditions of operatic production and reception. Among the most prominent research in this line is a series of institutional studies of Italian operatic history by the historian John Rosselli, including The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario;

Introduction

Music and Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Italy; and Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession. A 1998 volume on Opera Production and Its Resources (part of a series entitled History of Italian Opera), edited by the musicologists Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, similarly aims to document the organizational and professional contexts in which operatic works have historically been created and consumed. A major and quite recent contribution to the institutional approach is Beth and Jonathan Glixon’s 2006 study Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice. Although a great deal of such work has centered on Italian opera, a handful of historians and musicologists have posed the same questions in studies of French operatic history. In an early article on the eighteenth-century Paris Opera (one that can itself be considered a contribution to the cultural turn in French history), the historian William Weber, for example, argues that the unusually dated repertoire on offer to the Parisian public up until the mid-1770s was the result of a combination of institutional factors, including royal cultural policy, the geographical concentration of the French aristocracy in and around Paris, French musicians’ educational and career trajectories, and the relative expense of the dominant French operatic genre (trag´edie lyrique).37 And the musicologist Elizabeth Bartlet employs painstaking archival research to uncover the precise institutional processes by which the repertoire of the Paris Opera was altered during the French Revolution.38 Since scholars concerned with the reconstruction of systems of meaning often ground this project in the reconstruction of the organizational and professional structures shaping production and reception, these second and third approaches – the “systems of meaning” approach and the “material conditions” approach – are more closely linked with each other than is either with the “critical” approach. Nevertheless, while practitioners of the first approach have already seen their efforts brought together in several interdisciplinary edited volumes, no similar volume has jointly presented the efforts of opera scholars working in multiple disciplines who are committed to reinscribing opera in its historical circumstances of production and reception.39 It is for this reason that we have chosen to focus here on interdisciplinary

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contributions to the second and third approaches. In order to take advantage of the potential for cross-national comparisons offered by the history of opera, we have brought together scholars of Italy and France, yet for the purpose of maintaining focus we have limited the countries represented to these two. The first section of the volume (“The Representation of Social and Political Relations in Operatic Works”) presents readings of French and Italian operas that firmly ground these works in their specific historical contexts, while the second section (“The Institutional Bases for the Production and Reception of Opera”) is devoted to studies primarily concerned with understanding the conditions shaping the production and reception of operatic works in France and Italy. The third section of the volume (“Theorizing Opera and the Social”) brings together three essays explicitly addressing the question of how best to approach the analysis of the social dimensions of operatic works and practices. The questions addressed by the contributors to this volume include some of the most central in opera studies today. By what methods should we analyze and interpret operatic works and operatic practices? Is meaning in opera fixed or malleable? Do composers’ intentions matter, and if so, can we know them? Where does the operatic “work” to be analyzed actually reside – in the score and libretto, in operatic performances, or perhaps nowhere? And how, if at all, are social relations represented in operatic works? An edited volume cannot pretend to offer tidy solutions to such complex puzzles. But by juxtaposing a variety of disciplinary approaches to a wide historical range of operatic works and practices, we hope to introduce readers to some innovative ways of thinking about these pressing questions. We also hope to provoke new questions entirely.

n ot e s 1 Joseph Kerman’s Opera as Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), which located opera’s dramatic power largely in its music, did much to galvanize and maintain interest in opera despite the genre’s

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2

3

4

5 6

subordinate status in musicology. Regarding the status of opera vis-`a-vis “pure” music, see Susan McClary, “Foreword: The Undoing of Opera: Toward a Feminist Criticism of Music,” pp. ix–xviii in Catherine Cl´ement, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. xii; see also Susan McClary, “Turtles All the Way Down (On the ‘Purely Musical’),” pp. 1–31 in McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, “Introduction: On Analyzing Opera,” in Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, eds., Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner (Berkeley: University, of California Press, 1989), pp. 1–24; see pp. 3–4. See, e.g, Peter Conrad, Romantic Opera and Literary Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Ted A. Emery, “Goldoni’s Pamela from Play to Libretto,” Italica 64/4 (1987), 572–582; Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and Opera (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Paul Bauschatz, “CEdipus: Stravinsky and Cocteau Recompose Sophocles,” Comparative Literature 43/2 (1991), 150–170; and L´eonard Rosmarin, When Literature Becomes Opera: Study of a Transformational Process (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999). The 1988 volume Reading Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press), edited by Arthur Groos and Roger Parker, offered an important challenge to the marginal status of libretti among musicologists. William Weber, “Beyond Zeitgeist: Recent Work in Music History,” Journal of Modern History 66 (1994), 321–345; pp. 322–323. See also Weber, “Toward a Dialogue between Historians and Musicologists,” Musica e Storia 1 (1993), 7–21. E.g., Paul Robinson, Opera and Ideas from Mozart to Strauss (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Max Weber’s fragment on music was first published as Die rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik, ed. Theodor Kroyer (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1921); it has been reissued in the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe as Zur Musiksoziologie 1910–1920, ed. Christoph Braun and Ludwig Finscher (T¨ubingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 2003). The only available English translation is The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, trans. and ed. Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel, and Gertrud Neuwirth (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958). A number of Adorno’s writings

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Victoria Johnson on music have recently been reissued in Adorno on Music, ed. Robert Witkin (New York: Routledge, 1998). 7 Some key early works in the former tradition, known as the “production of culture” approach, include Paul Hirsch, “Processing Fads and Fashions: An Organization-Set Analysis of Cultural Industry Systems,” American Journal of Sociology 77 (1972), 639–659; Richard A. Peterson, ed., The Production of Culture (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976); and Paul DiMaggio, “Market Structure, the Creative Process, and Popular Culture: Toward an Organizational Reinterpretation of Mass-Culture Theory,” Journal of Popular Culture 11 (1977), 436–452. The strongest sociological tradition in the study of art consumption (as opposed to production) has come from Marxian cultural sociologists generally grouped under the rubric British Cultural Studies; key works include Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock’n’Roll (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Methuen, 1979); Paul Willis, Profane Culture (London: Routledge, 1978); and Stuart Hall, Culture, Media, Languages (London: Hutchinson, 1980). Art consumption studies in the USA have been deeply influenced by British Cultural Studies; see, for example, Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); and Elizabeth Long, Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 8 Examples of such studies include Richard A. Peterson, “From Impresario to Arts Administrator: Formal Accountability in Nonprofit Cultural Organizations,” in Paul DiMaggio, ed., Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts: Studies in Mission and Constraint (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 161–183; Paul DiMaggio, “Nonprofit Organizations in the Production and Distribution of Culture,” in Walter W. Powell, ed., The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 195–220. Important exceptions to the presentist tendency in sociological work on high-culture production include DiMaggio’s two-part study on nineteenth-century Boston (“Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” Media, Culture and Society 4 [1982], 33–50, and “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston, Part II: The Classification and Framing of

Introduction American Art,” Media, Culture and Society 4 [1982], 303–322) and Tia DeNora’s study of Beethoven (Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995]). 9 See, however, Rosanne Martorella, The Sociology of Opera (New York: Praeger, 1982) and Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Boundaries and Structural Change: The Extension of the High Cultural Model to Theater, Opera, and Dance, 1900–1940,” in Mich`ele Lamont and Marcel Fournier (eds.), Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequalities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 21–57. 10 Lynn Hunt, “Introduction,” in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History, pp. 1–22; p. 2. As Hunt notes, the journal founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre is still published today, since 1946 under the name Annales: Economies, Soci´et´es, Civilisations. Key works in the Annales tradition include Marc Bloch, “A Contribution towards a Comparative History of European Societies,” in Land and Work in Medieval Europe: Selected Papers by Marc Bloch, trans. J. E. Anderson (New York: Harper and Row, 1967 [1928]), pp. 44–81; Fernand Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), and The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siˆan Reynolds (London: Collins, 1972–1973). Albert Soboul’s most influential work is The Parisian Sans-culottes and the French Revolution, 1793–4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), while Rud´e is best known for his The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). 11 Prominent work in the New Cultural History includes, e.g., Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975); William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and Roger Chartier, Cultural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). For an excellent critical discussion of history’s cultural turn, see William H. Sewell, Jr., “The Political Unconscious of Social and Cultural History, or Confessions of a Former Quantitative Historian,” pp. 22–80 in Logics of

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14

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History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See, e.g., Pierre Nora, “Le retour de l’´ev´enement,” in Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, eds., Faire de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). See, for example, Charles Tilly, As Sociology Meets History (New York: Academic Press, 1981); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and Arthur Stinchcombe, Theoretical Methods in Social History (New York: Academic Press, 1978). For an overview of major methods and scholars in historical sociology to the 1980s, see Theda Skocpol, ed., Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). For an overview of more recent trends, see Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens and Ann Shola Orloff, “Introduction: Social Theory, Modernity, and the Three Waves of Historical Sociology,” in Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens and Ann Shola Orloff, eds., Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 1–72. The term “third wave” is borrowed from Adams et al., “Introduction: Social Theory, Modernity, and the Three Waves of Historical Sociology.” Craig Calhoun, “The Rise and Domestication of Historical Sociology,” in Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 305–337; p. 328. On the institutional history of American historical sociology, see also Andrew Abbott, “History and Sociology: The Lost Synthesis,” Social Science History 15/2 (1991), 201–238. On British Cultural Studies, see above, note 7. By far the most influential work by Geertz is his “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” first published in 1972 and reprinted in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973). For some foundational documents as well as more recent reflections on the New Criticism, see William J. Spurlin and Michael Fischer, eds., The New Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory: Connections and Continuities (New York: Garland, 1995). For an introduction to the concerns of the New Historicism, see H. Aram Veeser, “The New Historicism,” in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism Reader (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 1–32. See also Steven

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Mullaney, “Discursive Forums, Cultural Practices: History and Anthropology in Literary Studies,” in Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 161–189. Barthes’s most influential work was Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957). See, e.g., Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, “Introduction,” in Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, eds., Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. xi–xix; p. xii; and Ann E. Moyer, “Art Music and European High Culture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 39/3 (1997), 635–643; p. 635. Leo Treitler, “The Power of Positivist Thinking,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 42/2 (1989), 375–402; p. 378. See, for example, the “Prelude” to Catherine Cl´ement’s Opera, or the Undoing of Women, pp. 3–23; and Bruno Nettl, “Mozart and the Ethnomusicological Study of Western Culture,” in Katharine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 137–155. On relations between musicology and ethnomusicology in the 1980s, see Joseph Kerman, “Ethnomusicology and ‘Cultural Musicology’,” chapter 5 in his Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). For a more recent discussion of related issues, see Philip V. Bohlman, “Ethnomusicology’s Challenge to the Canon; the Canon’s Challenge to Ethnomusicology,” in Bergeron and Bohlman, eds., Disciplining Music, pp. 116–136. See especially Richard Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Richard Leppert, “Music, Domestic Life and Cultural Chauvinism: Images of British Subjects at Home in India,” in Leppert and McClary, eds., Music and Society; and Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 63–104. Roger Parker makes novel use of visual representations in “Falstaff and Verdi’s Final Narratives,” in his Leonora’s Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 100–125. See also Carolyn Abbate’s discussion of The Magic Flute in her In Search of Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 55–106.

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Victoria Johnson 25 See, e.g., Roger Parker’s analysis of La forza del destino in Leonora’s Last Act, pp. 61–99. 26 Key studies and collections on music and gender by musicologists include Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Ruth A. Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and “Feminist Approaches to Musicology,” in Susan C. Cook and Judy S. Tsou, eds., Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 15–34; and Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York: Routledge, 1994). A rare look at male (hetero)sexuality is offered by Richard Leppert in chapter 2 (“Music, Socio-politics, Ideologies of Male Sexuality and Power”) of his Music and Image. For reflections on feminist work by one of its most vocal champions, see, Susan McClary, “Of Patriarchs and Matriarchs, Too: Feminist Musicology, Its Contributions and Challenges,” Musical Times 135/1816 (1994), 364–369, and “Paradigm Dissonances: Music Theory, Cultural Studies, Feminist Criticism,” Perspectives of New Music 32/1 (1994), 68–85; for a critique of McClary, see Leo Treitler, “Gender and Other Dualities of Music History,” in Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference, pp. 23–45; see esp. pp. 35–45. 27 Musicological work drawing on semiotic analysis includes Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Susan McClary, “Constructions of Gender in Monteverdi’s Dramatic Music,” in her Feminine Endings, pp. 35–52; V. Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) and “The Challenge of Semiotics,” in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, eds., Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 138–160; and Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 28 McClary, Feminine Endings, p. xiii. 29 Cl´ement, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, p. 47. 30 See, e.g., Corinne E. Blackmer, “The Ecstasies of Saint Teresa: The Saint as Queer Diva from Crashaw to Four Saints in Three Acts,” in Corinne E.

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Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith, eds., En Travesti: Women, Gender, Subversion, Opera (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 306–348; Patricia Juliana Smith, “Gli Enigmi Sono Tre: The [D]evolution of Turandot, Lesbian Monster,” in ibid., pp. 242–284; Elizabeth Wood, “Lesbian Fugue: Ethel Smyth’s Contrapuntal Arts,” in Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference, pp. 164–183; Mitchell Morris, “Reading as an Opera Queen,” in ibid., pp. 184–200; Philip Brett, “Britten’s Dream,” in ibid., pp. 259–280; and Philip Brett, “‘Grimes Is at His Exercise’: Sex, Politics, and Violence in the Librettos of Peter Grimes,” in Mary Ann Smart, ed., Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 237–249. For a recent critique of these writings, see David J. Levin, “Is There a Text in This Libido? Diva and the Rhetoric of Contemporary Opera Criticism,” in Joe Jeongwon and Rose Theresa, eds., Between Opera and Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 121–132. Writings by Said that have been especially influential in musicology include his seminal Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978) and his analysis of Verdi’s A¨ıda in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 111–132. For musicological responses to Said, see, e.g., Thomas Betzwieser, “Exoticism and Politics: Beaumarchais’ and Salieri’s Le Couronnement de Tarare (1790),” Cambridge Opera Journal 6/2 (1994), 91–112; Mark Everist, “Meyerbeer’s Il crociato in Egitto: M´elodrame, Opera, Orientalism,” Cambridge Opera Journal 8/3, (1996), 215–250; Steven Huebner, “‘O patria mia’: Patriotism, Dream, Death,” Cambridge Opera Journal 14 (1 & 2) (2002), 161–175; and Ralph P. Locke, “Constructing the Oriental ‘Other’: Saint-Sa¨ens’s Samson et Dalila,” Cambridge Opera Journal 3/3 (1991), 261–302 and “Reflections on Orientalism in Opera and Musical Theater,” Opera Quarterly 10/1 (1993), 48–64. Though he is a literary scholar by discipline, Herbert Lindenberger’s work on opera, particularly his Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), investigates the political and cultural meanings and contexts of opera in a manner that aligns him more closely with historians working on opera than with many literary critics. See also his Opera: The Extravagant Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). Jane F. Fulcher, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 9–10.

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Victoria Johnson 35 Jane F., Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 8. The earlier French orientation of much work in this vein has given way to an increasing number of Italian studies; see, for example, Wendy Heller’s Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) and Emanuele Senici’s Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to Puccini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 36 Johnson, Listening in Paris, note 4, pp. 287–288. 37 William Weber, “La musique ancienne in the Waning of the Ancien R´egime,” Journal of Modern History 56 (March 1984), 58–88. 38 M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, “Revolutionschanson und Hymne im Repertoire der Pariser Opera 1793–1794,” in Reinhart Koselleck and Rolf Reichardt, eds., Die Franz¨osische Revolution als Bruch des gesellschaftlichen Bewußtseins (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1988), pp. 479–510; “The New Repertory at the Op´era during the Reign of Terror: Revolutionary Rhetoric and Operatic Consequences,” in Malcolm Boyd, ed., Music and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 107–156; and Etienne-Nicolas M´ehul and Op´era: Source and Archival Studies of Lyric Theatre during the French Revolution, Consulate and Empire (Heilbronn: Musik-Edition Lucie Galland, 1999). 39 See, for example, Smart, ed., Siren Songs, and Blackmer and Smith, eds., En Travesti.

PA RT I

The Representation of Social and Political Relations in Operatic Works

Introduction to Part I Jane F. Fulcher

As the historian (and contributor to this volume) Michael Steinberg has astutely noted with specific reference to the Catholic “Baroque” world, “the theater represents the world, but more than that it reflects the authority to represent and thus to order the world.”1 This observation, of course, is just as valid in other cases in which power employs the theatre, and in particular opera, to represent either the authority and social order that sustains it or that which it aspires eventually to ensconce. Theatre, however, and particularly opera, is neither transparent in its agenda nor entirely instrumental: it is a form of representation – “unique and irreducible, and in a constant, complex dialogue with the world of discourse that surrounds it.”2 We must, then, be aware of what Louis Marin has described (with reference to painting) as “the gap between the visible – what is shown, figured, represented, staged – and the legible – what can be said, enunciated, declared.”3 Each mode of communication, including those of the arts, embodies a different “register” of representation, and although they “intersect, connect, and respond to one another” they never merge, which makes opera a uniquely complex enunciation.4 Several of the chapters in this section concern attempts to use this inherently semiotically unstable genre to implement a world of symbolic domination – both social and political – and the distinctive articulation that results. Catherine Kintzler explores how “the people” are represented in different manners in French classic theatre and in opera as a result of the inherent logic of the different media; her interest here is in the message that could emerge through each mode and their revealing, dialogic, interaction. As she observes, French Baroque tragedy is inherently political, and hence “the existence of the community is fundamental”; yet despite the fact that it is a constituent part of the drama, it never appears on the stage. In musical tragedy crowds are 29

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rather visible, but the political element here is only secondary, for there is essentially no “outside” to the drama – “all that can be shown is” – the genre rests upon an aesthetic of spectacle. The collective presence is thus visible but not as an agent in the lyric tragedy: it functions “as a kind of extension of the monarch to whom they are subject,” representing the established social order in a manner recalling the ancient chorus. Rebecca Harris-Warrick further examines the collectivities or “societies” that are represented on the French Baroque lyric stage, the manner in which they are constructed in the drama, and the specific means of communication that they employ. Her focus is on the different manners in which the social groupings interact with the protagonists, or how the operatic characters function within a social universe, either in an unproblematic manner (as in the case of Alceste), or more complexly (as in Atys and Armide). As she argues, both the choral numbers and the divertissements are here fundamental dramatic components, and the latter, she observes, is related, intertextually, to the real celebrations that were held at court. Just as in these celebrations, spectacle scenes in French opera represent groups that “are engaged in social practices that uphold the values and structure of society,” but this is here communicated through opera’s distinctive register, or “magnified” through the stage dancing and music. It is important at this point to observe that while the two chapters on French trag´edie lyrique analyze how social bodies were represented in opera in the interests of established political power, the work of the late M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet focused rather on how new social possibilities were envisioned on the stage. We were all greatly saddened by her untimely death, which prevented her from completing her projected chapter for this volume; it is of central importance to point out the implications of her work for the theoretical premise of this section. Bartlet’s research illuminated how the French operatic stage throughout the Revolutionary period served to mediate between old and new social orders – to shape social perception, imagination, or possibilities – as a result of its inherent liminality, or its complex relation to the real social world outside it.5

Introduction to Part I

The study that she planned for the volume, “The Op´era and the Terror (1793–1794): La R´eunion du 18 aoˆut, ou l’inauguration de la R´epublique franc¸aise and its context,” sought to illuminate (as did her other work) how the Revolutionary government attempted to use opera to instill patriotism and a sense of citizenship in the new Republic. Her particular interest was in the manner in which the consciously pedagogical Revolutionary fˆete and the Op´era intersected in works such as La R´eunion du 18 aoˆut (dedicated “Au Peuple souverain”), which represented the real “Fˆete de l’Unit´e” within its dramatic context. With costumes modeled after the “stations” of the fˆete and extensive “divertissements” replete with Revolutionary airs and hymns, it blended different realities in a new theatrical whole. The question of verisimilitude which Bartlet explored in Revolutionary opera also figures prominently in the chapter by Wendy Heller, which examines the role of opera in seventeenth-century Venetian society. Heller underlines the “unique kind of relationship between Venetian opera and the society that produced it,” and specifically how opera here was “shaped by a variety of forces unique to the Republic.” One might add that, although Venice was a strictly limited (or oligarchic) republic, its opera still had to attract a paying public from a broader social stratum, as well as foreign visitors, which fostered a distinctive kind of social representation. The questions that Heller thus explores concern the topics and settings of these works, most of which take place in ancient realms, mythic empires, or even monarchies, as opposed to a republic like Venice. As she notes, while the other arts represented and celebrated the Republic, opera, which was not subject to the same kind of centralized control, responded by projecting a “more fractured” – perhaps realistic – sense of identity. The Venetian population could here envision itself differently, and in some cases in a manner that was diametrically opposed to “the well-regulated social structure of the Venetian Republic.” The question of how social ambiguities or anxieties concerning identity are addressed on the operatic stage is similarly at the core of Naomi Andr´e’s chapter on “Women’s Roles in Meyerbeer’s Operas.”

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Her concern is with the way in which both social conventions as well as transgressions with regard to established gender roles were addressed on the nineteenth-century Italian operatic stage as it slowly evolved. She thus traces shifting systems of signification with regard to gender as articulated through this specific mode, and how the operatic stage in particular could mediate a fundamental change in gender roles. Andr´e explores not only shifting embodiments of masculinity and femininity in early nineteenth-century Italian opera, but their complex dialogue with social expectations and with new paradigms of the male protagonist in Romantic literature. Her focus is on how “the conventions surrounding masculinity and femininity in opera were now realigned,” together with definitions of the masculine and feminine, in terms of sound, as women’s voices were reconfigured in accordance with new “aural codes.” Hence she analyzes changing constructions of women in opera – in texts as well as in vocal types – as the male hero underwent an inevitable change from the paradigm of the castrato to the female “travesti” singer, and finally to the modern tenor. My own chapter, “The effect of a bomb in the hall: The French ‘opera of ideas’ and its cultural role in the 1920s,” similarly concerns social transgression as represented on the stage, and the complex relation between it and the cultural or political world that surrounds it. In the specific case of opera in France between the wars, one encounters confrontation between representations of the political and social world, but also a unique kind of dialogue as conflicting ideologies were articulated or mediated through operatic means. The “opera of ideas,” as I argue, was fostered by French governments of both the Left and the Right in the politically polarized postwar period; however, when articulate ideologically it failed to convince artistically. My interest, then, is in the changing function of French opera in the twenties, or its evolving intellectual and political role as it became an arena for a new kind of exchange – for an attempt to enunciate ideology which, when aesthetically successful, led to an effacement of former ideological lines. The so-called “opera of ideas,” a sub-genre throughout the twenties in France, is thus an example, once again, of how

Introduction to Part I

ideas or ideologies can emerge, transformed, from this semiotically unstable and emotionally compelling art. Opera, in sum, with its unique power to “represent” in an inimitably charged register that combines several arts, is capable not only of reinforcing social hierarchies, but of destabilizing and even of contesting them. The social transgressions that can occur on its stage have often entered into complex counterpoint with social realities that lie outside it, serving to stimulate not only new reflections, but in some cases political and social change.

n ot e s 1 Michael P. Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 51. 2 Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 90. 3 Louis Marin, Des pouvoirs de l’image: Gloses (Paris: Seuil, 1993), pp. 18–19, as cited in Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff, pp. 90–91. 4 Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff, p. 91. 5 See M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, “The New Repertory at the Op´era during the Reign of Terror: Revolutionary Rhetoric and Operatic Consequences,” in Malcolm Boyd, ed., Music and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 107–156; and M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, “Gossec, L’Offrande a` la Libert´e et l’histoire de la Marseillaise,” in Jean-R´emy Julien and Jean Mongr´edien, eds., Le Tambour et la harpe: oeuvres, pratiques et manifestations musicales sous la R´evolution, 1788–1800 (Paris: Du May, 1991), pp. 123–146.

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Venice’s mythic empires: Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera Wendy Heller

The notion that works of art have some sort of relationship to the society that creates them is perhaps axiomatic. The difficulty, however, is untangling the numerous threads that link these cultural products to the people and institutions that produce and consume them. Inevitably, this task is made simpler when a work seems to express the ideology of a single patron or a centralized power base. Wealth and prestige, for example, might be demonstrated simply by opulence, grandeur, and spectacle – only the magnificent can produce magnificence. Ostentation can sometimes be imbued with simple, yet effective, messages: “benevolence and wisdom are noble attributes”; “duty is more important than physical love”; “reason and restraint are better than desire” – or any number of precepts that might exemplify the virtues of whichever ruler is at the helm. Occasionally, seemingly contradictory ideals are melded together in ways that resist easy analysis. This is the case, for example, with L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643), in which Busenello’s poetic fancy and Monteverdi’s incomparable music create an ambivalent moral frame. For example, we still can’t decide whether Seneca is a pretentious buffoon (Act I) or a worthy citizen and martyr to the Stoic cause (Act II), or whether the ambivalence is simply part of the game – as well as a demonstration of Monteverdi’s unmatched ability to trip us up on our search for meaning.1 The types of complexities apparent in a work such as L’incoronazione di Poppea highlight the unique relationship between Venetian opera and the society that produced it. Unlike the sung entertainments presented sporadically at the various courts in northern Italy, Venetian opera – for better or worse – was an industry, shaped by a variety of forces unique to the Republic. Foremost among these were the absence of centralized control (e.g., a monarch), a more or less regular schedule of productions, and a paying audience that functioned not 34

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only as spectators but also as collaborators in the formation of the new genre.2 Most importantly, this was a repertoire in which success depended upon an appropriate balance of variation and repetition, in which the “audience whims” so decried by librettists in their prefaces were of fundamental importance in the establishment of the aesthetic principles of the genre. What resulted was a surprisingly flexible art form, stabilized by a rich vocabulary of shifting literary, dramatic, and musical conventions or habits, which could be used to represent Venice not only to her own citizens, but also to the numerous visiting nobles, dignitaries, and foreigners who flocked to the Most Serene Republic during Carnival.3 There is, however, an implicit contradiction here. The topics chosen by the first librettists are marked by their apparent temporal, physical, and even political distance from the Republic of Venice. Most of the dramatic action takes place in realms far removed from normal daily existence along the canals – that is, in such distant, ancient realms as Arcadia, Troy, Ithaca, Rome, Carthage, or Alexandria. Moreover, these mythic empires were not governed by a sober body of Venetian senators and a duly elected Doge. Rather, the favored political model in so many operas was, in fact, monarchy. On the surface, this is certainly counterintuitive. Venice was a republic; she prided herself on (and was lauded for) her longevity, her political wisdom, and her supposed immunity to the ills that had befallen all other republics.4 It would seem reasonable to assume that she would want to express this unique sense of identity with whatever art forms were available. This is certainly apparent in painting, sculpture, and particularly architecture, as can be seen in the spaces that came to represent Venice for the rest of Europe – the Piazza San Marco and Palazzo Ducale – where, as David Rosand has shown, the arts took on the noble and serious task of political allegorizing.5 But, as discussed above, Venetian opera was not subject to the same degree of centralized control and – as Joseph Kerman infamously reminded us years ago – rarely aspired to dignity and nobility.6 Patriotism was certainly a factor, particularly among those works created under the influence of the Accademia degli Incogniti, whose ideological concerns became an integral element

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of Venetian opera conventions.7 Nevertheless, given the idiosyncratic nature of opera production in Venice, Venetian opera arguably projected a more fractured sense of identity than those operas produced within a court system. So why these distant, mythic empires – why stage the virtues and vices of a host of ancient kings, queens, courtiers, and their servants who seemingly had so little to do with Venetian sensibilities? Or, to put it another way, how could such overtly foreign social and political models, freely adapted from numerous ancient sources, so easily express a sense of Venetian identity? As this essay suggests, the answer may well lie in the capricious manner in which opera dealt with myth and history. Much of the cultural work, as we shall see, occurred in the apparent space between the respected ancient sources and the operatic reality adapted to the stage. Night after night, year after year, Venetians and their visitors witnessed an unrealistic world in which people sang rather than spoke, and which bore only a superficial resemblance to their own. In this essay, I will explore some of the ways in which librettists and composers used notions of verisimilitude and truth – a sense of what was plausible and what was actually true – to create alternative realities or mythic empires in which they could try on new identities. Emboldened by the license of Carnival, Venetians could be victorious in wars fought centuries ago by distant ancestors; they could envision themselves as kings, queens, and slaves in a society in which the hierarchies associated with monarchy had been replaced by the wellregulated social structure of the Venetian Republic. In so doing, they could come to a better understanding of their own world. T RU T H A N D V E R I S I M I L I T U D E

Some of the most important clues to understanding Venetian opera are to be found in the printed libretto. While the scores for Venetian opera were never published and provided only minimal information about the production, libretti, as Ellen Rosand has amply demonstrated, are a treasure trove of information.8 In addition to providing some version

Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera

of the opera’s poetic text, this most tangible souvenir of a given opera production typically featured such information as the lists of characters, scene changes, choruses, and balli. The libretto would also include a dedication to one or another person of importance – who could be either Venetian or foreign – as well as some sort of “letter to the reader,” most often penned by the librettist (whose name was usually listed on the title page), but occasionally signed by the publisher or someone else connected with the production. Indeed, the power accorded the librettist and the potentially subversive nature of these documents is apparent in the fact that a number of Venetian authors used pseudonyms and anagrams to sign their libretti.9 Other collaborators were often named, including the composer, choreographer, set designers, and occasionally singers and even dancers. The front matter of most libretti contained the usual effusive language for the dedications and inevitable apologies from the librettist or printer for succumbing to audience tastes, and other similar conventional gestures. But, as Ellen Rosand has discussed extensively, these statements of intent in the form of letters to the reader have also provided us with some of the most explicit statements about the aesthetic premises of Venetian opera.10 For our purposes, one of the most important elements of the libretto is the argomento or “argument” of the opera. This was no mere description of the plot; in fact, many argomenti omitted some of the salient details of the story, but nonetheless often acknowledged the historical or mythological sources upon which the opera was based, and alluded to the ways in which the librettist might have altered those sources. Librettists had a variety of different ways to account for their playful variations of myth and history. During the first decades of Venetian opera, such references were quite casual. In L’incoronazione di Poppea, for example, Giovanni Francesco Busenello mentions only one incident from the writings of the historian Cornelius Tacitus – Nero’s decision to banish Otho to Lusitania – and then proceeds to tell the reader: “But here fact is represented differently.”11 He then goes on to describe some (but not all!) of the well-known idiosyncrasies of that particular opera. Busenello provided somewhat more information in the

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argomento to Didone (1641). His “apology” for having his Dido marry the suitor Iarbas rather than commit suicide after Aeneas’s departure takes special account of the liberties granted to the poet: “He who writes satisfies his own fancy, and it is in order to avoid the tragic ending of Dido’s death that the aforementioned marriage to Iarbas has been introduced. It is not necessary here to remind men of understanding how the best poets represented things in their own way; books are open, and learning is not a stranger in this world.”12 By the second half of the seventeenth century, the custom of differentiating the historical or mythological sources from the act of operatic fantasy became integrated into the structure of the argomento. In the libretti of both Aurelio Aureli (1630–1710) and Nicol`o Minato (1630– 1698), for example, the argomento was actually divided into two separate sections. The first would include a description of the basic material plucked from the ancient sources – often somewhat capriciously. The second section would explain the librettist’s act of fancy, such as invented characters, plot twists, and other poetic liberties. Librettists used suggestive language to refer to their dramatic licenses. Sometimes these second sections would simply be set off with the phrase “si finge” – one pretends. Indeed, notions of verisimilitude or supposition were often a feature of the argomento. For example, the librettist for the opera Il Tolomeo (1658), attributed only to the Accademia degli Imperturbabili, begins his digressions with the phrase “Laonde fingesi verisimilamente” (therefore one pretends realistically or verisimilarly).13 For the argomento in his libretto Sesto Tarquinio (1679), Camillo Badovero refers to the second part of the argomento as “scherzi dell’inventioni supposti” – jokes of presumed invention.14 In the argomento to L’Antigona delusa da Alceste, an opera inspired by Euripides’ Alcestis, Aurelio Aureli refers to his variations as “accidenti verisimili” or realistic incidents.15 Giulio Cesare Corradi concludes his brief discussion of Nero’s vices in the argomento to Il Nerone (1679) with the following: “This activity, which blazed forth under the Roman heavens, with all sorts of magnificence, united with other incidents, in part true, in part verisimilar [parte veri, parte verisimili] inspired me to write the present drama . . .”16

Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera

The language used by all of these librettists is suggestive as it invokes a notion of verisimilitude that was in circulation in seicento Italy in an unexpected context: early modern historiography. One of the most explicit discussions of poetic verisimilitude can be found in Agostino Mascardi’s well-known treatise, Dell’arte istorica (1636). Mascardi presents an intriguing discussion of the poet and the historian, and their differing attitudes towards truth (il vero) and verisimilitude (il verisimile).17 Mascardi observes that there are in fact two categories of verisimilitude. False verisimilitude is exemplified by Virgil’s invention of the anachronistic meeting between Dido and Aeneas in The Aeneid. Queen Dido of Carthage, as we know, never actually met Aeneas and therefore could not have killed herself after he abandoned her.18 However, since – according to Mascardi – women frequently commit suicide for love, Virgil’s poetic conceit could be considered verisimilar, albeit false. True verisimilitude, on the other hand, can be seen in Livy’s discussion of Scipio’s generosity towards a beautiful Spanish woman who was his prisoner. After the defeat of Carthage, Scipio’s soldiers had brought him a young maiden of exceptional beauty. Scipio, however, learned that she was betrothed, and proved his generosity and continence by returning her to her parents and intended husband with virtue intact (Livy, Roman Histories, 36.50).19 This account, Mascardi tells us, is not only plausible (given Scipio’s worthy character), but – in his view – is based on an actual event. Mascardi’s juxtaposition of Virgil and Livy illustrates the differing tasks of the poet and the historian. The poet, Mascardi tells us, has the privilege of availing himself of both types of verisimilitude – that which is true, and that which is false, but at least plausible or realistic. The historian, on the other hand, must seek the truth, il vero, and is in fact obligated to reject the verisimilar in those instances in which it has little to do with the pursuit of truth. In other words, truth may not always be realistic, and realism is not always truthful. Notions about verisimilitude, of course, have long been invoked in discussions of early opera. Nino Pirrotta was among the first to explore the idea that the earliest librettists and composers were concerned about the apparent lack of realism of sung drama, and were

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drawn towards patently unrealistic myths, particularly those involving gods and goddesses, in order to justify the use of song.20 By this reasoning, Orpheus was the ideal opera hero, because as a musician he was justified in singing rather than speaking. By the middle of the century, however, concerns about the dramatic viability of song were necessarily replaced by a certain acceptance of and even delight in opera’s special incongruities. Once song became an acceptable expressive medium for all operatic characters – the sane as well as the insane, mortal or immortal, Roman emperors as well as servants or children – a different notion of verisimilitude necessarily develops. The task for the creators of opera – as both composers and librettists intuitively recognized – was to develop a new set of rules or so-called conventions that, while no less implausible, might be deemed verisimilar within the closed universe of the operatic stage. What we see again and again in the Venetian libretto of the mid seicento – and which is made explicit in the argomento – is an almost ostentatious demonstration of the tension between the responsibilities of the poet and the historian, between historical truths and operatic verisimilitude. This is something that Mascardi might well have appreciated, since he readily acknowledged the importance of other forms – sculpture, painting, poetry – for the recounting of history.21 He therefore anticipated the dilemma faced by librettists and composers drawn to ancient sources several years before the establishment of public opera, while at the time unwittingly providing them with a solution – a way of illuminating the paths that linked early modern Venice to both the ancient world and the alternate reality of the operatic stage. MONARCHY AND VENETIAN IDENTITY

Of the many alternative realities constructed for the operatic stage, representations of monarchy and empire were perhaps the most appealing and enduring. This is not to say that Venetians were not occasionally attracted to overtly republican topics. Libretti such as Busenello’s La prosperit`a infelice di Giulio Cesare dittatore or Nicol`o Minato’s Pompeo Magno, for example, dealt quite eloquently with ancient Rome’s

Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera

vulnerability to imperial ambitions during the final years of the Republic.22 Nevertheless, there were a number of practical advantages to using a monarchy as the focus for an opera. Model republics were relatively difficult to find, particularly among the ancient historians favored by mid-seicento librettists, including Tacitus, Herodotus, Dio Cassius, Plutarch, Justin, and Suetonius. Arguably, the sometimes loving, sometimes disparaging portrayal of kings and queens gave Venetian opera a certain cosmopolitan appeal, rendering it a satisfactory form of entertainment not only for those committed to republican values, but for the numerous visiting dignitaries and members of royal families to whom many libretti were dedicated. The fact that a given opera might feature a ruler whose vices were greater than his virtues seems to have been of little concern either to the dedicatee or the author of the libretto. Some of the most disparaging characterizations of Roman emperors, for example, can be found in several libretti dedicated to the Hannoverian Dukes, Georg Ludwig, Johann Friedrich, and Ernst August, who were passionate devotees of Venetian opera.23 Moreover, restraint, lack of private ambition, concern with the good of the state, and a properly functioning government – all attributes associated with republican virtues – did not necessarily inspire good drama or spectacle. We have only to think about the propaganda-laden operas produced in the aftermath of the French Revolution to see that republicanism is not necessarily the ideal ingredient for a compelling operatic experience. Venice and San Marco might be a wonderful advertisement for the Most Serene Republic, but short of presenting Venice herself on the stage (as was the case for example, in Bellerofonte),24 it was empire that provided the rich and exotic backdrops that would prove to be so popular – and, in practical terms, eminently recyclable from one season to another. Consider, for example, some of the Roman settings used in Aureli’s Claudio Cesare (1672), set by Giovanni Boretti. In addition to numerous indoor stage sets associated with imperial rule – the Emperor Claudius’s palace, royal galleries, and salons – there are also stunning outdoor panoramas, such as Agrippina’s garden on the Roman hill of Montecelio (a “loco deliziosa”) and a royal prison in a castle on the shores of the Tiber – surely a reference to the Castel

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Sant’Angelo. Giulio Cesare Corradi’s Il Nerone (1679), presented at the luxurious Teatro S. Grisostomo, features even more elaborate settings: a Roman piazza with triumphal arches, an illuminated ballroom with a high rotunda used for the imperial dance, the royal baths, and even a music room for Nero’s academies (“sala di stromenti musicali per l’accademie di Nerone”). Bussani’s Antonino e Pompeiano (1677), set by Antonio Sartorio, describes Roman vistas with extraordinary detail: a Roman street with two towers and triumphal arches illuminated at night, the Aventine hill on the Tiber, and an imperial hall with statues of the great emperors.25 Aureli’s Alessandro Magno in Sidonia (1679) includes not only lakes, gardens, and bowers, but even an amphitheatre for gladiatorial combat – complete with wild animals – as well as a fresco that descends from the ceiling and comes to life, revealing Apollo and his muses playing instruments.26 Monarchy not only provided better spectacle; it also opened up the possibility of presenting a highly diverse society on the stage. The population that inhabited these royal settings differed profoundly from the ostensible homogeneity of the male oligarchy, which was at the core of Venice’s political identity. The royal apartments, banquet halls and galleries accommodated characters of varied occupations, social classes, nationalities, and personalities: benevolent or tyrannical monarchs, loyal or scheming servants, a rebellious or patriotic populace, as well as women of power who necessarily had no role in Venetian public life. The lush gardens, lakes, fountains, and bowers also conjured up fantasies of romantic interludes, erotic acts, and political machinations for an imaginary society in which public virtues were always vulnerable to private vices. Such conflicts, in fact, were at the heart of the “accidenti verisimili,” and a primary source of the tension between truth and poetic fantasy. This is particularly evident in operas based on history. In Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, as we recall, Busenello’s “different” representation of the facts altered the historical record in suggestive ways. History may tell us that Nero banished Otho to Lusitania so that he might enjoy Poppea. In the world of opera, however, we are asked to imagine a series of more or less plausible private events that this single

Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera

action would have set into motion. We might recall how Mascardi had described Dido’s death as a false verisimilitude because women were, in his view, likely to kill themselves over love. Many of the events in Poppea could be understood in the same context. Otho certainly might have been driven to madness and desperation over the loss of Poppea, since men often lose their heads over beautiful women; the innocent and gentle Octavia might have become ruthless and ambitious, because powerful women rejected in love are often vengeful. Both suppositions – masculine vulnerability and female ruthlessness – would certainly have been regarded as verisimilar in Venetian circles. Arguably, the most shocking events in Poppea are those that Mascardi would have described as historical truths: the death of Seneca (albeit several years too early), the banishment of Octavia (alluding to her eventual murder), and the crowning of Poppea as empress, events precipitated by amoral behaviors that demonstrated the liabilities of empire. In Bussani’s Antonino e Pompeiano historical truth provides inspiration for one of Venetian opera’s more shocking occurrences – the murder of the tyrant Antoninus Caracalla (ad 118–217) on stage in the final act. Bussani’s libretto does revise some of the more indelicate aspects of Antoninus’s life. Rather than presenting the lurid details of Antoninus’s incestuous marriage to his stepmother Julia, as reported in chapter 10 of the book on Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (Caracalla) in Scriptores Historiae Augustae (SHA M. Ant. 10), for example, Bussani contrives for her to actually be the wife of the consul Pompeianus, the opera’s hero.27 But the appearance of Antoninus disguised as Hercules, brandishing a bow and arrow (Act II, scene 12) and a club (Act II, scene 17) is in fact inspired by the historical record: it is noted in the Scriptores Historiae Augustae that Caracalla’s soldiers sometimes referred to him as Hercules because he had killed many wild beasts (SHA M. Ant. 5.4), and the emperor himself boasted that he was as strong as Hercules (SHA M. Ant. 5.9). Like L’incoronazione di Poppea and Antonino e Pompeiano, Giovanni Boretti and Aurelio Aureli’s Claudio Cesare (1672) also uses games with truth and verisimilitude as a means of touting Venice’s political superiority and mythical link to ancient Rome.28 The first portion of the

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argomento includes numerous historical details borrowed directly from Book 12 of Tacitus’s Annals concerning events from the years ad 49– 50. These include Agrippina’s marriage to her uncle Claudius (Tacitus, Annals, 12.1.3–2.3), her affair with the freedman and imperial advisor Pallas (Tacitus, Annals, 12.25.1), a series of evil portents and natural disasters (Tacitus, Annals, 12.4), Claudius’s eventual subjugation of the rebellious King Mithridates of Bosporus (Tacitus, Annals, 12.15–20), and the momentous event with which the opera concludes – Claudius’s adoption of Nero as his successor (Tacitus, Annals, 12.25.1). The second half of the argomento presents those events and characters ostensibly invented by Aureli, such as a banished Roman consul who returns to Rome in disguise in order to see a beloved daughter who had been raised by an old nurse. What is particularly intriguing, however, is the way in which Aureli uses these carefully culled historical facts to create a verisimilar version of Roman history that accorded with the norms and political concerns of Venetian opera. Aureli’s opera opens in the Temple of Diana with the arrival of Mithridates in Rome, where he contritely signs a peace treaty with Claudius. This provides the occasion for both Claudius and Mithridates to become enamored of Julia, the daughter of the aforementioned Roman consul, thus undercutting the sincerity of the ceremonies in honor of the chaste Diana. The conquered Mithridates, however, is actually depicted with greater dignity and heroism than the bumbling and immoral Roman emperor. In this alternative reality Aureli thus not only distances Venice from her corrupt and decadent imperial ancestor in the name of republicanism but also uses the subjugation of the rebellious Eastern monarch to confirm notions about Western hegemony that were no doubt of relevance to the Venetian Republic, locked in perennial conflicts with the Turks.29 Moreover, Aureli’s imaginative use of historical detail is particularly evident in one of the opera’s most strikingly original gestures: an earthquake, reported by Tacitus as having occurred in the year ad 49 (Tacitus, Annals, 12.43). The earthquake takes place in the opera precisely at the moment when Agrippina declares her intention to control destiny and put her son Nero on the imperial throne. “Fierce destiny,”

Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera 1.1 Giovanni Antonio Boretti, Claudio Cesare, Act i, Scene 9

she sings, “I do not fear your blows; if I am Empress of the Tiber, if in my scepter every power is joined, I will nail down the wheel of Fortune.”30 Boretti’s musical setting leaves little doubt as to Agrippina’s belief in her power to change history. The simple recitative suddenly breaks into florid arioso for the final line, which she sings twice, moving from C minor to a cadence on B flat, and then abruptly turning toward G minor for the final show of power (see Example 1.1). Although the earthquake is, of course, part of the historical record, the circumstances surrounding it here are mere conjecture. Where else but in Republican Venice would audiences have been so entertained by a natural disaster precipitated by Agrippina’s misplaced ambition? What better way

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to join operatic spectacle with a profound statement on the dubious politics of empire? The examples discussed above show how the historical record could be altered verisimilarly to accommodate Venetian social or political interests. In other instances, the sense of plausibility is created not by the use of the past – of historical events – but rather with the present – that is, the insistent presence of events or situations belonging to seventeenth-century Venice. Notably, these excursions from fantasy into reality are rarely indicated in the argomento. Rather, it is as if there is something unrelenting about Venice that managed to penetrate the distant realm presented on the stage. This is the case, for example, in the opera Amore inamorato (1642), which deals with the tale of Psyche and Cupid, best known from Apuleius’s Metamorphoses.31 When Psyche is ordered by a jealous Venus to descend to the Underworld, Psyche is accosted by a well-known figure in Venetian life, literature, and art: a Ruffian woman or procuress who attempts to persuade Psyche to forgo Hades for the life of the prostitute.32 In this version of operatic verisimilitude, even those destined to become immortal are vulnerable to the same temptations of worldly pleasures that were so much a part of Venetian Carnival life. A similar approach can be found in Aureli and Marco Ziani’s Alessandro Magno in Sidonia (1679), whose exotic settings were cited above. In this opera, there is no attempt to juxtapose Eastern and Western values. In fact, Alexander the Great is represented in an almost entirely positive light: he is the good prince, able to resist the allure of decadent women and the intrigues of his courtiers – thus possessing, ironically, all of the qualities of a good republican. On the other hand, the early modern courtesan was likely the model for the beautiful Thais – desirable, immoral, fascinating, greedy, and ruthless in matters of the heart. Like several other operas produced in the late 1670s, Alessandro Magno in Sidonia also includes the signs and symptoms of Carnival. For example, following the extraordinary descent of the frescoed ceiling with Apollo and the muses at the opening of Act II, the players provide the music for a ballo danced by courtiers disguised as Germans and Spaniards. This creates the ideal occasion for Thais to don a mask and further her own ambitions and desires, all in accordance with Carnival

Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera

sensibilities. In this instance, an Eastern monarchical story and setting becomes a vehicle for affirming republican values – the triumph of male virtue and self-restraint over female vice, in the midst of the same sort of carnival activity with which Venetians (and their visitors) could readily identify. A final example shows how even the very act of making music might become verisimilar within the context of a historical opera. As noted above, Corradi’s Il Nerone includes a scene that actually takes place in the music room designation for Nero’s academies. On the one hand, this is certainly a verisimilar truth: Nero, as all the historical sources tell us, was an enthusiastic, if not accomplished, musician, and spent a good deal of time producing both music and poetry – much to the detriment of the Roman Empire. That he would have had such an academy is not surprising; in fact, it may be this sort of event that is depicted in the duet between Nero and Lucan in Act II, scene 6 of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea.33 In Act II, scene 10 of Il Nerone, musical performance has an important dramatic function – it gives the three protagonists – Nero, the Armenian King Tiridat, and his wife Gilda – an opportunity to express their hidden emotions through music. Nero, sitting at the keyboard, gazes at the beautiful Gilda and sings an aria about his passion; Gilda, in turn, performs her own aria about pain and suffering – with Nero at the keyboard. Finally, the jealous Tiridat accompanies himself at the keyboard and presents an aria in which he condemns lies and betrayal. In this case, the verisimilar truth – the fact that Nero was actually a musician – provided the inspiration for the staging of an event that would have been familiar throughout the Italian peninsula: the performance of cantatas and arias in an academic setting. In the subsequent scene (Act II, scene 11), however, Corradi also invokes the art of opera itself. Nero’s “favorite” Lepidus arrives to distribute the parts for a comedy entitled “The Loves of Venus, Mars, Cynthia, and Endymion.” The protagonists choose their roles for the ensuing dramatic performance in which their love triangle can be played out in the context of a familiar myth involving adultery: Nero proposes to play Mars, Tiridat chooses Vulcan, and Gilda, of course, becomes Venus. This mixture of ancient history and modern musical and dramatic styles thus blurs

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the boundary between fantasy and reality – between historical truth and verisimilitude – rendering this verisimilar incident from the life of Nero surprisingly relevant in early modern Venice. At the same time, the fact that the operatic characters are actually singing – what is often referred to as phenomenal song – playfully draws attention not only to the role that music can play in real life by expressing the passions, but also the genre’s inherent lack of verisimilitude – which had once been so troubling to the creators of opera.34 Opera, of course, is a patently unrealistic genre. It asks spectators to accept a universe in which our most fundamental mode of communication is eradicated in favor of something much grander and more elaborate – music and song. Indeed, opera’s inherently fantastic nature may have allowed for such playful engagements with notions of truth and verisimilitude. Once song became a valid substitute for speech and the laws of music were permitted to control the natural flow of time, the possibilities for manipulating truth and appearances may well have seemed unlimited. Venetian opera was no simple mirror of society; rather, in establishing an art form that presented the Most Serene Republic both to itself and to the world, the creators of opera seem to have discovered not only how the past could inform the present, but also how the present could inform the past: how the transformative power of poetic license could render even the most outlandish social and political models instructive and pleasurable to modern eyes and ears. This, perhaps, was Venice’s most important legacy to the opera of subsequent generations – the creation of mythic empires in which truths were best expressed through an unfettered imagination.

n ot e s 1 For differing views on Seneca’s characterization, see Ellen Rosand, “Seneca and the Interpretation of L’incoronazione di Poppea,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 38 (1985), 34–71; Tim Carter, “Re-Reading Poppea: Some Thoughts on Music and Meaning in Monteverdi’s Last Opera,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 122 (1997), 173–204; Robert C. Ketterer, “Neoplatonic Light and Dramatic Genre in Busenello’s

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2

3

4

5 6 7

8 9

10

11

L’incoronazione di Poppea and Noris’s Il ripudio d’Ottavia,” Music & Letters 80 (1999), 1–22; Iain Fenlon and Peter Miller, The Song of the Soul: Understanding Poppea (London: Royal Musical Association, 1992); Wendy Heller, “Tacitus Incognito: Opera as History in L’incoronazione di Poppea,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52 (1999), 39–96. Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Beth L. Glixon and Jonathan E. Glixon, Inventing the Business of Opera, American Musicological Society Studies in Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Wendy Heller, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), esp. pp. 6–9. William Bouwsma, “Venice and the Political Education of Europe,” in A Usable Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 279–280; Heller, “Tacitus Incognito.” David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama, revised edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 41. On the relationships between the Incogniti and the Venetian opera industry, see Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, pp. 37–40, 88–109; Lorenzo Bianconi and Thomas Walker, “Dalla ‘Finta pazza’ alla ‘Veremonda’: Storie di Febiarmonici,” Rivista italiana di musicologia 10 (1975), 379–454, particularly pp. 410–424. See also Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, pp. 48–81. Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, pp. 25–28, 40–59. The pseudonyms and anagrams are traced in Irene Alm, Catalog of Venetian Opera Librettos at the University of California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 775–883. Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, pp. 40–46. For a transcription of numerous prefaces from libretti, see Rosand’s Appendix I, pp. 407–421. Rosand provides a valuable discussion of the ways in which the librettists self-consciously (and often apologetically) flaunted the dramatic rules set forth by Aristotle. Busenello, L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643) in Delle hore ociose (Venice: Giuliani, 1656), sig. a3r: “Ma qui si rappresenta il fatto diverso.”

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Wendy Heller 12 Busenello, La Didone (1641) in Delle hore ociose (Venice: Giuliani, 1656); translated by Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, pp. 60–61: “Che scrive sodisfa al genio, e per schiffare il fine tragico della morte di Didone si e introdotto l’accasamento predetto con Iarba. Qui non occorre rammemorare agl’uomini intendenti come i poeti migliori abbiano rappresentate le cose a modo loro, sono aperti i libri, e non e` forestiera in questo mondo la erudizione.” On the argomento to La Didone and Busenello’s idiosyncratic treatment of this material, see Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, pp. 82–135. 13 Il Tolomeo (Venice: Valvasense, 1658), p. 10. The entire passage reads: “Sopra la storia predetta stanno appoggiati tutti gl’avvenimenti di questo drama; laonde fingesi verisimilmente.” 14 Camillo Badovero, Sesto Tarquino (Venice: Nicolini, 1679), p. 5. 15 Aurelio Aureli, L’Antigona delusa da Alceste (Venice: Batti, 1660), p. 5. 16 Giulio Cesare Corradi, Il Nerone (Venice: Nicolini, 1679), p. 5. “Questa funzione, che sfolgor`o nel Cielo Latino con tutti i numeri della magnificenza, unita ad altri accidenti, parte veri parte verisimili, m’innvogliarono a scrivere il presente drama, a cui imposi il titolo Nerone.” 17 Agostino Mascardi, Dell’arte istorica (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1859; reprint, Modena: Mucchi Editore, 1994), pp. 112–113. 18 On the Virgilian and pre-Virgilian Dido, see Richard C. Monti, The Dido Episode and The Aeneid: Roman Social and Political Values in the Epic (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981). 19 This episode was also a popular subject for painting by artists such as Giovanni Bellini, Pompeo Battoni, and Niccol`o Dell’Abatte. 20 Nino Pirrotta, “Early Opera and Aria,” in Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 275–280. See also Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, pp. 44–45. 21 Mascardi, Dell’arte istorica, p. 23. 22 Giovanni Francesco Busenello, La prosperit`a infelice di Giulio Cesare dittatore in Delle hore ociose (Venice: Giuliani, 1656); Nicol`o Minato, Pompeo Magno (Venice: Nicolini, 1666). 23 For an index of the various dedicatees for Venetian opera, see Alm, Catalog, pp. 956–972. A number of operas dealing with Roman emperors were, perhaps coincidently, dedicated to the Hannoverian dukes. See, for

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24 25 26 27

28

29 30

31

32

example, Domenic Gisberti, Caligula delirante (Venice: Nicolini, 1672), presented at the Teatro SS. Giovanni e Paolo, dedicated to both Johann Friedrich and Ernst August, and Aurelio Aureli; Claudio Cesare (Venice: Nicolini, 1672), presented at the Teatro S. Salvatore, dedicated to Johann Friedrich; Giacomo Francesco Bussani, Antonino e Pompeiano (Venice: Nicolini, 1677), presented at the Teatro S. Salvatore, was dedicated to both Johann Friedrich and his wife the Duchess Benedicta Henrietta. On the relationship of the Hannoverian dukes to Venetian opera, see Vassilis Vavoulis, “A Venetian World in Letters: The Massi Correspondence at the Haupstaatsarchiv in Hannover,” Notes 59 (2003), 556–609; also Wendy Heller, “The Beloved’s Image: Handel’s Admeto and the Statue of Alcestis,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 58/3 (2005), 559–637. On the presentation of Venice on the stage in Bellerofonte, see Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, pp. 104–106. Bussani, Antonino e Pompeiano. Aurelio Aureli, Alessandro Magno in Sidone (Venice: Nicolini, 1679). Scriptores Historiae Augustae is our most authorative source on the lives of the Roman emperors from the time of Hadrian to Numerianus (ad 117–284), and was evidently a source of inspiration for a number of Venetian operas. On Caracalla, see Scriptores Historiae Augustae, trans. D. Magie, vol. ii, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924). For a detailed consideration of the uses of Tacitus in Claudio Cesare, see Wendy Heller, “Poppea’s Legacy: The Julio-Claudians on the Venetian Stage,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36/3 (2006), 379–399. See, for example, Paolo Preto, Venezia e i turchi (Florence: Sansoni, 1975). Aureli, Claudio Cesare, Act I, scene 9: “Fiero destin i colpi tuoi non temo / Che se del Tebro Imperatrice io sono, / Se nel mio scettro ogni poter s’aduna, / La rota inchio dar`o della fortuna.” Giovanni Battista Fusconi, Amore inamorato (Venice: Surian, 1642). According to the preface, the plot was presumably suggested by the Incogniti leader and founder, Giovanni Francesco Busenello; the actual poetry was written by the poet Pietro Michiele, and was revised by Giovanni Battista Fusconi. The procuress figure would have been well known from the Roman comedies of Plautus, the commedia dell’arte and the spoken plays as well as the commedia erudita. She is also an instrument of social satire, as

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Wendy Heller brilliantly demonstrated by Pietro Aretino in the Ragionamenti. See Aretino, Dialogues, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Stein and Day, 1971). See also Paula Findlen, “Humanism, Politics and Pornography in Renaissance Italy,” in Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York: Zone Books, 1996), p. 75. 33 See Heller, “Tacitus Incognito.” This interpretation is suggested in Tim Carter, “Re-Reading Poppea.” 34 On phenomenal music, see Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

2

Lully’s on-stage societies Rebecca Harris-Warrick

Aside from their numerous and well-discussed musical differences, French and Italian Baroque operas depart radically from each other in their construction of on-stage societies. As a general rule, Italian operas present a small group of individuals who find themselves in unstable situations to which they seek individual resolutions. They may be rulers or generals, and the fate of thousands may depend on their actions, but their subjects or soldiers have no role within the musical world of the opera. French operas, on the other hand, bring crowds of people on stage at least once an act – singing and dancing in the most extended and musically sumptuous passages of the entire work. The protagonists function not as isolated individuals, but within societies that are visible and audible for as much as a third of each opera. I had this difference brought forcefully to my notice recently when I saw a production of a Handel opera in which the director seemed to chafe at its restricted social world and used two methods to modify visually the string of solo utterances that composed the musical fabric of the work: introducing supernumeraries from time to time; or having any other singers who happened to be on stage engage in actions that put them into relationships with the soloist that created, however briefly, a sense of a community. But I remained struck by how different an occasional visual sign of togetherness is from the world of the crowded French stage.1 In contrast to a visible but mute community that may be imposed by a modern director, the societies in French opera were constructed into the drama. Moreover, they get the richest music. The group characters have three means of communication – words, music, and dance – and their sound-world involves not only their own joined voices, but the full resources of the orchestra, in the most musically extended pieces of the opera. This distinguishes them from the protagonists, who have 53

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only two modalities available – they lack the medium of dance – and whose words, closely wedded to the rhythmic patterns of poeticized speech, are usually accompanied only by the continuo.2 On musical grounds alone, then, the group scenes command attention, and the dance that they virtually always include provides a kinetic medium of communication that begs to be taken into consideration in any serious account of this style of opera.3 For the sake of convenience, the title of this article mentions Lully alone, but his librettist, Philippe Quinault, was the one responsible for laying out the story, and it is also important to give Pierre Beauchamp, the choreographer at the Paris Opera during Lully’s lifetime, recognition for his contribution, even though its precise nature is harder to recover. (A number of choreographies made for the Op´era during the generation after Lully do survive, although these represent only individual dances – nothing approaching an entire divertissement, let alone an entire opera.4 ) The system the three collaborators used was built around performers who specialized; libretto after libretto tells us that some of the members of groups sing and some of them dance. Nonetheless, the group functioned as a collective entity (“the population of Athens”) and as such had access to both modes of communication.5 In this essay I will not attempt any kind of comprehensive overview of the societies that operate within these operas (for a broader view of le peuple in French opera, see Catherine Kintzler’s chapter in this volume), but will look instead at three of them – Alceste, Atys, and Armide – where the relationships between the protagonists and the societies that surround them are radically different.6 Whereas Alceste plays to our preconceptions about court-derived opera by presenting social worlds that unproblematically uphold a monarchical hierarchy, the other two operas offer more complex perspectives on how operatic protagonists interact with the societies that surround them. The key word – societies – is plural, because in French Baroque opera the social world invoked is rarely the same from one act to another. These operas are not like Verdi’s Rigoletto, where the members of the chorus are always the male courtiers of the Duke of Mantua. Instead, since unity of place was not held to be necessary to opera, inhabitants

Lully’s on-stage societies

of many different realms could figure within the same work.7 Here, for example, are the group characters who appear in Alceste (1674). Act I:

Thessalians, the subjects of King Adm`ete, and, later in the act, sailors under the orders of Licom`ede, King of Scyros; Act II: two groups of soldiers: Thessalians besieging the city of Scyros versus the defenders; Act III: mourners bewailing the death of Alceste; Act IV: shades and demons, the followers of Pluto, god of the Underworld; Act V: “a multitude of the different peoples of Greece,” plus, later in the act, various pastoral followers of Apollo, all celebrating the return of order. In Alceste only one of the groups cannot be found here on earth (the scene in the Underworld has no equivalent in Euripides’ tragedy, on which the opera was based), whereas in Atys, where one of the main characters, Cyb`ele, is a goddess, the groups have more recourse to the realm of the supernatural – what the French called le merveilleux. Act I: Phrygians (the local populace), invoking and then celebrating the arrival of the goddess Cyb`ele; Act II: the larger world, “peuples diff´erents,” who include among the dancers Indiens and Egyptiens, honoring Cyb`ele’s choice of Atys as chief priest of her cult; Act III: dreams – both sweet dreams and nightmares – sent by Cyb`ele to Atys to tell him of her love for him and to warn him what will happen if he does not reciprocate; Act IV: demi-gods, followers of the river god Sangar, celebrating the wedding of his daughter Sangaride to C´el´enus, King of Phrygia; Act V: demi-gods, followers of Cyb`ele, mourning the deaths of Atys and Sangaride. Thus in Atys there are five different social groups: two of them human, two that involve different kinds of demi-gods, and one from the realm of the fantastic. The part of the act dominated by the group characters

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was generally referred to as the divertissement, a term that is useful as a shorthand reference, but whose name carries the unfortunate implication that this type of scene represents a diversion from the main business of the opera, whereas, as we shall see, it is a fundamental and often very dramatic component. Moreover, mechanistic lists of the type given above run the risk of falsifying the operas by making it seem as if an extrinsic demand for variety was the main criterion for including group characters at all, and thus feeding all too easily into a long historiographic tendency to dismiss the divertissements in French opera as serving only decorative purposes. So let us quickly leave lists behind and look instead at how these societies, once introduced, interact with the protagonists. A LC E S T E

In the case of Alceste, all the group characters are loyal subjects of a king or a god; as in the hierarchical society that gave birth to this type of opera, their socially defined role is to support their leaders. As Act I opens, Alceste is about to marry Adm`ete, King of Thessaly, and the populace is rejoicing with repeated cries of “Long live the happy couple” (“Vivez, vivez, heureux Epoux”). In fact, the very first utterance of the opera comes not from an individual, but from the chorus – a dramaturgical choice that emphasizes the Thessalians’ collective interest in the marriage and orderly succession of their rulers. But this state of collective joy soon gives way to private concerns. Alceste has two disappointed suitors: Hercules (here called Alcide) and Licom`ede, King of the island of Scyros and the brother of the marine divinity Th´etis. Alcide, who is struggling to control his feelings for Alceste in order not to betray his friend Adm`ete, does not have so much as a confidant, let alone an entourage; at this point in the opera, he functions strictly as an individual. The duplicitous Licom`ede, on the other hand, commands a group of sailors, who first offer a fˆete in celebration of the wedding, then kidnap the unsuspecting Alceste.8 The loyal Thessalians attempt to come to her aid, but in vain. In Act II Adm`ete comes to the rescue of his bride, and with the help of Alcide lays siege to Scyros. The

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battle between the two opposing groups of soldiers and their respective leaders takes place on stage, complete with battering rams; the besiegers win, but Adm`ete is mortally wounded. Apollo announces that the only way to save Adm`ete’s life is if someone offers to die in his place; Alceste alone is willing to sacrifice her life, and in Act III weeping men and women mourn her untimely death, rending their clothes and breaking ornaments that had belonged to their queen. In Act IV Alcide braves Pluton’s demons in the Underworld and, when Proserpine intercedes with her husband, is allowed to bring Alceste back to earth. His motivation, however, is selfish, as he plans to keep Alceste for himself. But upon returning to earth, where he witnesses how much Alceste and Adm`ete love each other, he conquers his baser instincts (the opera’s subtitle is Le Triomphe d’Alcide). Act V concludes with celebrations of the double victory: Alceste’s return from the dead to her new husband, and the victory of Alcide over himself. The words of the chorus make this doubleness explicit: “Triomphez, g´en´ereux Alcide,” sings one group, while the other responds, “Vivez en paix, heureux e´ poux.” The opera ends in a celebration carried out in singing and dancing that expands from the population of Thessaly to include people from all over Greece, shepherds and shepherdesses, plus Apollo and the Muses. As a visible and audible sign of his triumph, Alcide, the former loner, has acquired the adulation of the heavens and the earth alike. As the brief synopsis suggests, group characters play a particularly prominent role in this opera, appearing not only in the divertissements, but also in other portions of all five of the acts. (This emphasis may be due to the use of a Greek tragedy, with its own prominent chorus, as the model, even if Quinault did not refrain from using it in ways very different from what Euripides had done. Quinault was both attacked and defended for the liberties he took with Euripides; he seems to have taken the criticism to heart, as he never again used a classical tragedy as the basis for a libretto.9 ) The roles the various groups in the opera take on seem very much of a piece with the ones Louis XIV’s subjects were assigned in the ritualized world of his court. Celebrations marked important milestones in the French monarchy – Louis XIV’s wedding

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in 1660, for example, or the birth of the Dauphin the following year, in which the public was invited to participate via processions, firework displays and fountains of wine. The outdoor fˆete Licom`ede stages at the end of Act I to honor the newlyweds is reminiscent of the pageantry that marked the multi-day spectaculars the king hosted in the gardens of Versailles in 1664 (Les Plaisirs de l’ˆıle enchant´ee) and 1668 (La Fˆete de Versailles); in fact, Alceste itself participated in yet another series of elaborate festivities in 1674, when it was performed before the king in the Marble Courtyard of the royal chˆateau, as part of the celebrations marking France’s second conquest of Franche-Comt´e.10 Similarly, the pomp with which Alceste’s death in Act III is memorialized reflects the theatricalized mourning rituals that marked the passing of court notables; in fact, Jean Berain, who designed most of the sets and costumes for Lully’s operas, also designed the decors for a number of court funerals, including the queen’s in 1683.11 Even the demons who surround Pluton seem more like well-behaved courtiers than fearsome creatures. All of the groups depicted in Alceste, notwithstanding their occasional moments of spontaneity (as in the choral refrains that open Act I or in the expressions of mourning in Act III), act in obedience to powerful beings in activities that uphold the established order. It is no wonder that Alceste seemed an appropriate choice for festivities held to honor a king so set on exhibiting his own powers to his country and the world. AT YS

The varied groups put on stage in Atys are also good at obeying orders, but in this opera the worlds in which they function are more oppressive than benign. The central conflict within Atys – both the opera and the hero alike – concerns the dissonance between his private desires and his public duties. Atys feigns indifference to love, but the real explanation for his reticence is that he is in love with someone unattainable: Sangaride is, on that very day, about to marry C´el´enus, King of Phrygia – Atys’s friend as well as his sovereign. As the opera opens Atys is preparing for the imminent arrival of the goddess Cyb`ele, whose visit

Lully’s on-stage societies

to Phrygia is a sign of her favor to this land and who is expected to name C´el´enus as her grand sacrificateur. Atys’s first words show him in his public role as organizer of the rites in her honor, notwithstanding the fact that he is alone on stage. Atys:

Allons, allons, accourez tous, Cybele va descendre. Trop heureux Phrygiens, venez icy l’attendre. Mille Peuples seront jaloux Des faveurs que sur nous Sa bont´e va r´epandre.

(“Come, hasten, Cybele is about to descend. Fortunate Phrygians, come wait for her here. A thousand nations will be jealous of the favors her goodness will bestow upon us.” Atys, Act I, scene 1.)

The Phrygians he calls do not appear – in fact, they do not arrive until towards the end of the act – but they are repeatedly invoked by the refrain (the first two lines of text), which from a solo utterance becomes a duet, then a duet for different characters, and finally a quartet, as more and more of the main characters enter the stage.12 Although in this part of the act the protagonists operate in private, their public selves impinge on their conversations; we learn, for instance, that Sangaride shares responsibility for the honors to be shown Cyb`ele. (I/6, “Atys: Sangaride, ce jour est un grand jour pour vous. Sangaride: Nous ordonnons tous deux la feste de Cybele, / L’honneur est e´ gal entre nous.”) Finally, with the Phrygians reported to be in sight, Atys and Sangaride find themselves alone together; their self-imposed silence breaks down and each confesses to loving the other. But just as they are reveling in the discovery of their love, their private moment is shattered by the arrival of the crowds. Instantly Atys and Sangaride must assume their social duties, as they lead the invocation urging Cyb`ele to favor them with her presence. The larger society is no longer something merely invoked, but now becomes palpably real. The libretti for the court performances of Lully’s operas give the names of all the performers, including the dancers and the members of the chorus, so it is possible to get a sense of how this society was

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represented. In the court premiere of 1676, there were twenty-six performers on stage in this scene. Atys, Sangaride, Doris, Idas 10 hommes Phyrigiens chantans conduits par Atys 10 femmes Phrygiennes chantantes conduites par Sangaride 6 Phrygiens danc¸ans 6 Nimphes Phrygiennes danc¸antes13 Here we see the standard division of labor among the group characters to which I have already alluded: some of the Phrygians are identified as singers, others as dancers. This is a practical solution to the problem of assuring high-quality performances in both arts, but it also has certain implications for the structure of such scenes. As a general rule, the activities of singing and dancing were done not simultaneously, but consecutively. What the spectators perceived was an alternation between instrumental music supporting physical movement and vocal music accompanying stasis. This alternation could occur either between movements or, in the case of choruses, within them.14 In this case, the chorus leads off. Scene 7 (in C major) An extended chorus. In the first section, “Commenc¸ons nos jeux et nos chansons,” the voices alternate with brief instrumental passages that may have been danced. The second section, “Venez, Reine des Dieux,” alternates invocations by Atys and/or Sangaride with choral passages; there are no purely instrumental passages. “Entr´ee des Phrygiens.” A binary dance in duple meter. (See Example 2.1.) “Second Air des Phrygiens.” A dance in rondeau form in 6/4 time. (See Example 2.2.) Scene 8 (in A minor) An instrumental prelude that serves to bring in Cyb`ele on her flying chariot. Cyb`ele invites everyone into her temple to hear her choice of grand sacrificateur.

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The chorus honors Cyb`ele, repeating her final words, to end the act. The walking bass passages that punctuate their phrases may have been intended to accompany their steps as they move toward the temple. The cast list tells us that Atys and Sangaride lead the group, and in the opening chorus they do, in fact, always sing first, seconded by the Phrygian populace, who have no independent utterances of their own but simply repeat what Atys and Sangaride have already said. In a ritual context, the chorus’s passive role seems perfectly normal; any independence on its part would have been startling. Notice, however, that the cast list makes a point of saying that Atys leads the men, Sangaride the women. The distinction in the list between male and female roles follows the normal practice in French libretti, which scrupulously present both masculine and feminine word endings, such as the Phrygiens and Phrygiennes of this act, rather than lumping the entire crowd into a single group identity. However, assigning each gender a separate leader occurs rarely enough in libretti to raise the question of what such insistence means. The distinction does not play out aurally, as this chorus does not alternate sections for men and sections for women – a treatment Lully uses often enough in his choruses to have made it an option. But here the chorus always sings in four parts, so the distinction must have been visual. The two dance pieces that follow the chorus are unhelpfully labeled “Entr´ee des Phrygiens” and “Second Air des Phrygiens” (headings in the scores rarely observe the gender distinctions found in cast lists), so here I enter the realm of speculation as to who danced what. It is striking that the musical language of the first entr´ee seems to draw upon tropes of dances for men, the second for women. (Compare the assertive dotted rhythms of Example 2.1 to the lilting triple meter of Example 2.2 – a instance of sexual dimorphism common in Lully’s musical vocabulary.) Moreover, there is no obvious place for the two groups to dance together, except possibly during the instrumental passages within the big chorus that opened the scene. If, in fact, the two dances that follow the invocation to Cyb`ele were performed by

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Rebecca Harris-Warrick 2.1 Jean-Baptiste Lully, Atys, Act i, Scene 7: “Entr´ee des Phrygiens”

separate male and female groups, it is worth asking what the effect of that choreographic choice is at this point in the opera. It would seem that, coming on the heels of Atys’s and Sangaride’s private declaration of love, such a visual image would underscore the social forces that are pushing the two of them apart. Rather than being told in a solo aria or dramatic recitative by one of them that their love faces immense obstacles, as might have happened in an Italian opera, we are shown the rituals of the society whose strictures, Atys and Sangaride are beginning

Lully’s on-stage societies 2.2 Jean-Baptiste Lully, Atys, Act i, Scene 7: “Second air des Phrygiens”

to realize, go contrary to their individual happiness. Even though they themselves do not dance, they have been clearly identified with the collective singing and dancing characters, whose movements present a visual image not of togetherness, but of separation. In looking at the group scenes in French opera, it becomes important to see not only what is happening within them, but who or what is controlling them. More often than not, this kind of opera being the

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product of a highly centralized and hierarchical society, the groups are operating at the bidding of a powerful person who takes it for granted that the followers will obey. At other times, as in the act just discussed, no single person is issuing orders, but the groups are engaged in social practices that uphold the values and structures of the society. In Atys, with the exception of the dream sequence in Act III, all the on-stage groups participate in time-honored rituals: sacred rites, wedding celebrations, or mourning. The fact that no single individual governs all these scenes illustrates for the audience how broadly distributed are the social forces with which Atys finds himself in conflict. In Act II, Cyb`ele surprises everyone by naming not C´el´enus, but Atys, as her grand sacrificateur; Atys is then obliged to accept the homage of the people honoring him for a role he does not want. In the following act he learns, through the medium of dreams sent by Cyb`ele, that the goddess is in love with him and will punish him if he fails to reciprocate. The jolly divertissement in Act IV extends the worlds to which we have been given access to the realm of Sangaride’s father, he being completely unaware that his daughter is miserable in the face of her impending wedding. The celebrations by his subjects, which go on at great length, provide needed relief for the audience from the tensions mounting within the opera, but they bring home to us how impossible it is for Sangaride to escape her societally defined roles.15 In Act V, the knot tightens: Cyb`ele reveals to C´el´enus that Atys and Sangaride have betrayed them both. In a jealous rage, while surrounded by her priestesses and a chorus of Phyrgians, she makes Atys think Sangaride is a monster; he kills Sangaride, then returning to his senses, turns the knife on himself. The remorseful Cyb`ele transforms the dead Atys into a tree sacred to her cult. Any sense of resolution is undermined by the opposing words of the double chorus in the concluding divertissement, which go back and forth between pain and rage (“Quelle douleur!” sing the woodland gods, while the Corybantes reply, “Ah, quelle rage!”) and by the remarkable set of three dances that follow the chorus and make visible this emotional division.16 In this opera the social fabric has been torn asunder; the thunder and earthquakes that accompany the concluding chorus tell us that the tragedy is not

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individual but universal, and the key word in the chorus’s last utterance is “horror.”17

ARMIDE

The strictures of society so vividly illustrated by the group scenes in Atys are completely lacking in Armide (1686). In this opera, also set to a libretto by Quinault (who drew the story from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata), the central conflict takes place entirely inside the heroine; outside society may be relevant for the hero, Renaud, who returns to the pursuit of military glory at the opera’s end, but it means nothing to her and it just barely figures inside the world of the opera.18 In what might seem like a paradox, the divertissements become one of the most effective means of focusing attention on the heroine’s struggles with herself. Here are the group characters who sing and dance in Armide: Act I: the populace of the kingdom of Damascus, celebrating the success Armide’s beauty has had in defeating the Christian knights; Act II: demons conjured by Armide, disguised as shepherds and shepherdesses, who enchant Renaud (Armide’s attempt to kill the sleeping Renaud follows this scene); Act III: Hatred accompanied by the Furies and the Passions, whom Armide has called up in a vain attempt to drive the love for Renaud from her heart; Act IV: demons transformed by Armide into rustic inhabitants of the island where Armide is holding Renaud captive – here they try to distract the two knights coming to rescue Renaud; Act V: demons disguised as Fortunate Lovers and Pleasures, who entertain Renaud while Armide is away. Already in Act I, the only place where an actual human society is represented, the chorus focuses our attention on Armide’s powers, which have just won her a major victory over Godefroy’s knights.

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Rebecca Harris-Warrick Hidraot & le Choeur: Armide est encor plus aimable Qu’elle n’est redoutable. Que son triomphe est glorieux! Ses charmes les plus forts sont ceux de ses beaux yeux. Phenice & le Choeur: Suivons Armide et chantons sa victoire. Tout l’univers retentit de sa gloire. (Armide, I/3) (Hidraot and Chorus: Armide is even more beloved than she is fearsome. How glorious is her triumph! Her strongest charms are those of her beautiful eyes. Phenice and Chorus: Let us follow Armide and sing of her victory. The entire universe resounds with her glory.)

In the subsequent four acts the key word of this passage, “charm,” moves from the figurative to the literal. These lengthy and musically rich scenes all arise from Armide’s magical powers; within her realm no one else – least of all the putative hero Renaud – has any control over other beings. Armide, on the other hand, has an apparently infinite supply of demons ready to assume any human form at her slightest command. Moreover, via the mechanisms of displacement that operate in Lully’s works, Armide’s seductiveness gets activated more through the singing and dancing bodies of her followers than it does through her own utterances. If it were not for the divertissements that Armide conjures up, we would have a very different understanding of both her person and her powers. This is most overt in the last act, the only time in the entire opera when the two lovers have a scene together. (In Act II they were on stage at the same time, but Renaud was asleep.) Their love duet lasts all of seven minutes, whereas the famous passacaille that follows, sung and danced by Fortunate Lovers vaunting the pleasures of Love, goes on for over twice as long and warms up the emotional temperature considerably – this despite the fact that Armide herself leaves before it starts. Dance, then as now, was a powerful vehicle for evoking erotic love, even if the movement vocabulary of Lully’s day does not look very sexualized to our twenty-first-century eyes; it is presumably no accident that the three surviving Baroque choreographies set to this passacaille are all for women.19 Yet Armide’s conjurations

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ultimately serve to make palpable the struggles going on in her own heart. She succeeds in gaining power over her enemy Renaud, but, much to her shame, falls in love with him. She summons Hatred only to drive it away, when she cannot face the consequences of her action. After that fatal moment, she uses her charms to try to keep Renaud in her thrall, knowing full well that his supposed love for her is merely a product of magic. The creatures she conjures up have nothing to do with the social worlds of Atys, even if on the level of the mechanics of the divertissements they may behave according to similar conventions. No matter how crowded the stage, everywhere we see only Armide. This opera, Lully’s last trag´edie en musique, is undoubtedly a masterpiece, but in its obsessive concentration on a single character it is also an exception. The varied societies in Alceste and Atys are more representative of Lully’s works in general, even though they do not begin to exhaust all the possible social dynamics within this very rich operatic repertoire. Quinault’s carefully crafted libretti alone grant the group characters a significant role in every act, but their presence is enormously magnified by the music Lully wrote for them and the dancing in which they engage. Now that several of Lully’s works have moved from the shelves of research libraries to the modern stage and recording studio,20 they can enter our ears and eyes and help us realize more fully how central collective characters are to the world of French opera. Moreover, granting the on-stage societies their due could help us move away from simplistic clich´es about French opera as nothing more than royal propaganda. Lully’s operas insist that all people, even operatic characters, function within a social universe, but they do not impose a single vision of how those individuals and societies interact.

n ot e s 1 It may seem dubious to compare a trag´edie en musique from the 1670s or 1680s with an opera seria written in the next century by a German-English composer, but the comparison holds for Lully’s Italian contemporaries as well. By 1672, when Lully began composing opera, Venetian opera had almost eliminated the chorus and relegated group dancing to serving as

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entertainment between the acts; see, for instance, Antonio Sartorio’s L’Orfeo (1673), facsimile in Drammaturgia musicale veneta, vol. vi (Milan: Ricordi, 1983), recorded in 1998 by Teatro Lirico, Stephen Stubbs, director (Vanguard Classics, 99194), which has no choral music whatsoever and only a handful of entr’acte dances. Exceptions to this general tendency, most notably some of the Venetian operas of the 1690s by Carlo Francesco Pollarolo, may exhibit French influence. See Irene Alm, “Winged Feet and Mute Eloquence: Dance in Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera,” Cambridge Opera Journal 15/3 (2003), 216–280, especially pp. 263–264, and Kathleen Kuzmick Hansell, “Theatrical Ballet and Italian Opera,” in Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, eds., Opera on Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 117–308, especially pp. 178–182, “Ballet during the Age of Venetian Opera, 1640–1720.” In 1679, with his opera Bell´erophon, Lully began accompanying some of the dramatically important vocal utterances, recitatives and airs both, with the orchestra; nonetheless, even in his last trag´edie, Armide, the vast majority of the singing outside the divertissements is accompanied by continuo only. In fact, the most famous part of the opera, the dramatic monologue in which Armide stands poised over the sleeping Renaud, dagger in hand, is a case in point. The historiography of French Baroque opera, particularly that written in English, has tended either to talk around the dancing or to treat it with formalist tools – counting the number of menuets or gavottes used by Lully, for instance. This article draws upon my work in progress regarding how dance functioned inside of French opera from Lully to Rameau. Of the approximately 350 choreographies from this period that survive in Feuillet notation, 47 state in their titles that they were performed at the Op´era. For example, the “Entr´ee pour un homme et une femme, danc´ee par Mr Balon et Mlle Subligny a` l’Op´era de Pers´ee” was created for the 1703 revival of Lully’s Pers´ee; see my “Contexts for Choreographies: Notated Dances Set to the Music of J. B. Lully,” in J´erˆome de La Gorce and Herbert Schneider, eds., Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687). Actes du Colloque/Kongreßbericht, Saint-Germain-en-Laye/Heidelberg 1987 (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1990), pp. 233–255. Regarding the mechanics of the divertissement, see my article “Recovering the Lullian Divertissement,” in Sarah McCleave, ed., Dance and Music in French Baroque Theatre: Sources and Interpretations. Study Texts No. 3

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(London: Institute of Advanced Musical Studies, King’s College London, 1998), pp. 55–80. Synopses of these operas, along with contextual information about each, may be found in articles written by Lois Rosow for the New Grove Dictionary of Opera (London: Macmillan, 1992). All are available on CD: the most recent recording (1994) of Alceste is by La Grande Ecurie et la Chambre du Roy, conducted by Jean-Claude Malgloire (Astr´ee/Audivis E 8527). Atys may be heard in a 1987 recording by Les Arts Florissants, conducted by William Christie (Harmonia Mundi HMC 901257–59); the one available complete recording of Armide was directed by Philippe Herreweghe and recorded in 1993 (Harmonia Mundi HMC 901456–57). In regard to the relationship between opera and spoken tragedy in this period, see Catherine Kintzler, Po´etique de l’op´era franc¸ais de Corneille a` Rousseau (Paris: Minerve, 1991). Alceste premiered at the Paris Opera in 1674, before women started dancing there, which helps explain why the dancers in the Act I divertissement consisted originally only of male sailors. In later productions the dancing roles also included sea nymphs and female sailors. (Male professional dancers were trained to dance female as well as male roles, but the number of female dancing roles in Lully operas increased after 1681, when women joined the dance troupe.) Women appeared on stage as singers, both as soloists and in the chorus, right from the start of French opera, and in this divertissement the singing chorus is mixed. Alceste excited a series of polemics about which much has been written. For a perspective that takes into consideration the work of other scholars, see Manuel Couvreur, Jean-Baptiste Lully: Musique et dramaturgie au service du prince (Brussels: Marc Vokar, 1992), pp. 292–302. Regarding the deliberate construction of Louis XIV’s image during his lifetime, see Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992); for descriptions and illustrations of the festivities held at court over the course of the reign, see MarieChristine Moine, Les Fˆetes a` la cour du Roi Soleil (Paris: Editions F. Lanore & F. Sorlot, 1984). Reproductions of some of Berain’s funeral designs may be seen in J´erˆome de La Gorce, Berain: Dessinateur du roi soleil (Paris: Herscher, 1986), p. 104 and pp. 128–135; “Les pompes fun`ebres, il est vrai,

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empruntaient beaucoup a` l’univers th´eaˆ tral” (p. 132). Philippe Beaussant, in Lully, ou le musicien du Soleil (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), pp. 537–540 and 773–784, draws provocative analogies between the funeral ceremonies for Chancellor S´eguier in 1672, at which a Miserere by Lully was performed, and the funeral rites depicted in Alceste. Atys is joined first by his confidant, Idas, then by his beloved, Sangaride, and her confidante, Doris. Lully set each iteration of the text to a slightly varied repeat of the musical refrain to which Atys had entered the stage. The information regarding casting comes from the libretto published for the premiere of the opera at the royal chˆateau of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (Paris: Ballard, 1676), p. 14. Libretti published for public performances at the Paris Opera did not start including the performers’ names until 1699. Given the paucity of markings in the scores, particularly in regard to who performs during the various dance pieces, such hints about casting can be very helpful. For a more extended discussion of the staging of operatic divertissements, see my “Recovering the Lullian Divertissement” and “‘Toute danse doit exprimer, peindre . . .’: Finding the Drama in the Operatic Divertissement,” in Peter Reidemeister, ed., Basler Jahrbuch f¨ur historische Musikpraxis 23 (1999) (Winterthur, Switzerland: Amadeus Verlag, 2000), pp. 187–210. This particular divertissement belongs to the category identified by Catherine Kintzler elsewhere in this volume as “suspensive.” The first of the three dances, the “Entr´ee des Nymphes,” is in a slow triple meter and a minor mode, with many chromatic inflections. The douleur it expresses is opposed by the vigorous “Premiere entr´ee des Corybantes,” in a major mode with both triadic figures and pounding repeated notes, a piece that clearly maps onto the singing Corybantes’ rage. The third dance goes back and forth approximately every three measures between these two emotional poles (C+, duple meter, aggressive repeated notes vs. a tender and chromatically inflected slow triple meter) that must have been choreographed for two opposing groups of dancers; in this remarkable piece, rage has the last word. The opera ends with the words “Que tout sente, icy bas, / L’horreur d’un si cruel tr´epas” (“May everyone on earth feel the horror of such a cruel death.”)

Lully’s on-stage societies 18 The warrior princess Armide, leader of the forces fighting the Crusaders, has no interest in love, despite her uncle’s urging that she marry. She lays a trap for her bitterest enemy, Renaud, but when she stands over his sleeping figure, knife upraised, is unable to bring herself to kill him. Instead she whisks him off to her magic realm, where she alternately tries to drive the love she feels for him from her heart and uses magic to renew the power she has over him. Renaud’s commander sends two knights to rescue him; they succeed in breaking the charm, although Renaud leaves Armide with reluctance. In a rage of despair, Armide destroys her enchanted palace and departs on a flying chariot. 19 Two of the three choreographies come from early eighteenth-century English sources. The third, choreographed by Guillaume-Louis P´ecour, Beauchamp’s successor at the Paris Opera, was not designed for that stage, but was nonetheless performed by Mlle Subligny, who had been one of the dancers in Act V of Armide during the revival of 1703. 20 In addition to Alceste, Atys, and Armide, Pha´eton, Pers´ee, Roland, and Acis et Galat´ee have been released on CD. A new edition of the complete works of Jean-Baptiste Lully is now under way (the old edition, published during the 1930s under the direction of Henry Pruni`eres, is far from complete); a volume of three court ballets was published in 2001 (ed. James Cassaro, Albert Cohen, and Rebecca Harris-Warrick; Hildesheim: Olms Verlag), now followed by the first opera volume, Armide (ed. Lois Rosow, 2003) and a volume containing the comedy-ballets Monsieur de Pourceaugnac and Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (ed. J´erˆome de La Gorce and Herbert Schneider, 2006).

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Representations of le peuple in French opera, 1673–1764 Catherine Kintzler

I would like at the outset to call into question a widespread idea. It is generally believed that French opera embodied the aristocratic ideology of the court, and that this ideology was challenged in the last third of the eighteenth century. This is not completely accurate. A purely ideological approach has difficulty accounting for many operatic details, and it is particularly unsuited to explaining the way in which le peuple (by which I mean “ordinary people”) are shown on the stage in French ancien r´egime opera.1 This is the topic I will address here – representations of the people on the stage of the Acad´emie Royale de Musique between 1673 and 1764 – and I will do so using a strictly literary framework. The topic itself presents a paradox: due to the specific aesthetic and literary nature of French opera in the classical period, it is difficult to imagine how le peuple would have a role to play within it. Indeed, the operas of this period are grounded in an aesthetic of exemplarity and heroic themes. Moreover, in these works, the problems of the city and politics more generally play a secondary role. However, as I will show, the populace is nonetheless consistently present. Furthermore, I will argue that this presence is introduced for specific poetic reasons that arise from a general rule which, at one and the same time, links and opposes theatre and opera in this period. On the one hand, the people are present just as they appear in the spoken theatre, but with adjustments specific to the operatic stage; on the other hand, they are present in a manner opposite to that which occurs in theatre, but still analogously to theatre.

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Le peuple in French opera, 1673–1764 THE PROBLEM OF LE PEUPLE IN S E V E N T E E N T H - C E N T U RY F R E N C H O P E R A

That everyday subject matter would be present at all in French opera in this period is far from obvious. Opera was certainly a popular genre, but it was not particularly concerned with everyday subjects.2 Indeed, the trag´edies lyriques or trag´edies en musique that dominated at the Acad´emie Royale de Musique were noble and heroic. Let us examine the problem in greater detail. In previous writings, I have tried to show that French opera, from the point of view of its literary construction, is closely related to the spoken, traditional, theatre.3 The relationship between theatre and opera can be characterized as competitive, but also as isomorphic: theatre initially constituted an obstacle for opera, before becoming one of its sources. French opera appeared on the scene relatively late, despite Mazarin’s attempt to introduce Italian opera into the country in 1647. One has to wait until 1659 for the first French opera – La Pastorale d’Issy of Perrin and Cambert – and the new form did not really take off until the founding of the Acad´emie Royale de Musique in 1671 and the subsequent invention of the trag´edie lyrique by Lully and Quinault with their Cadmus et Hermione of 1673. My hypothesis is that this late breakthrough can be explained by the presence of a highly developed spoken theatre which obstructed the horizon, so to speak. In order to achieve a breakthrough, opera had to prove that it could be as prestigious as spoken theatre. The two art forms were rivals; contemporary commentators return incessantly to the comparison between opera and theatre. Quinault and Lully’s stroke of genius in responding to this challenge was to transform the obstacle into an advantage, inventing a musical tragedy parallel to theatrical tragedy, comparable but still fundamentally different. It was necessary to create an art form that was just as good as, and analogous to, the products of the existing theatre, but that was, at the same time, clearly distinguished from them. As a result, the trag´edie lyrique is analogous to spoken drama, and yet not at all the same. A structural relationship exists between the two kinds of drama, and more particularly between the two types of tragedy: both varieties of

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drama are subject to a common set of laws, but at the same time the opposition between the two is also an effect of these common laws.4 This relationship can be summarized by the concept of reverse symmetry, the idea of which is that one begins with traditional tragedy, applying to it a series of transformations in a certain order (first opposition and reversals, then translations); the result is musical tragedy. Thus musical tragedy shows things that spoken tragedy does not (magical action and agents, violence, dreams, hallucinations, and insanity), and it does so by means not available to, or at least not acceptable in, spoken theatre (through music and dance and through changes of location). Musical tragedy produces a different kind of effect from spoken theatre, an effect of enchantment and poetized horror. It is important to note that these differences do not result from the absence of rules, but are themselves rule-bound. Once the inversions have been put into effect, musical tragedy observes the same general laws as traditional theatre, mutatis mutandis. The librettists of musical tragedy use the same keyboard, so to speak, as do stage dramatists, but they push a kind of “shift” key which introduces another world, a world of marvels. I will not elaborate further on this idea in this context, but ask instead that it be accepted as a given.5 In summary, opera does not follow exactly the same rules as spoken theatre, but is structured after the manner of the theatre. One consequence of this is that the representation of le peuple in opera is problematic, for two reasons. First, like the spoken theatre, opera during this period was overwhelmingly tragic. Both genres place characters on stage who are far from ordinary: kings, princes and princesses, warriors and heroes, and, in opera, gods, demons, fairies, and magicians as well. Not only are such characters of heroic stature, they frequently do extraordinary, even magical, things. The ordinary world of the people is not touched upon directly, nor do the people play a central role in musical tragedy or opera more generally. From this point of view, opera is similar to theatre. Second, another problem arises which places opera in opposition to the theatre. At the heart of opera, one almost always finds a love story; politics, by contrast, is mainly secondary. Collective topics, even if they are addressed, never loom as large in opera as they do in spoken drama.

Le peuple in French opera, 1673–1764

Hence many different reasons can be found as to why le peuple should be absent from opera, or at least as to why its role should be secondary. And yet ordinary people are consistently present in opera, and often heavily so.6 How, then, are ordinary people introduced into opera, and how is their presence justified? It is not necessary, in order to answer these questions, to deny or modify the fundamental assumptions outlined above. On the contrary, the assumptions that I have just outlined make it possible to explain how ordinary people are present in opera, and why. They are in fact present in two ways, both of which result from the morphology of opera in relation to the spoken theatre. First, ordinary people are initially present as they are in the theatre, but they are subsequently transformed in conformity with the requirements of the lyric stage. Second, they are present in a way that is contrary to the norms of non-musical theatre. In other words, the way the people are represented in early ancien r´egime opera confirms the hypothesis outlined above: namely, that the opera of this period is both replica and reverse of spoken drama. M O D I F Y I N G R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S O F L E P E U P L E F O R T H E LY R I C S TAG E

In this first incarnation, in which opera appears to be a replica of spoken drama, le peuple occupies a poetic dimension which was labelled in this period the dimension bourgeoise – as opposed, of course, to the heroic dimension. This opposition between the heroic (or noble) and the bourgeois (or ordinary and middle-class) was inherited from Aristotle’s Poetics and was used mainly to distinguish tragedy from comedy. However, in opera – just as in the spoken theatre – the heroic dimension did not stand alone. Right from the start there were non-heroic genres, even if the dominant one was still the lyric tragedy. And even within the heroic genre, ordinary figures appear, offering a strong contrast to the more heroic characters. Genres The pastorale and pastorale h´ero¨ıque genres. Though the lyric tragedy was the dominant operatic genre in the seventeenth and eighteenth

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centuries, it was not the only one and was also not necessarily superior in quality to the others. It was not even the first kind of opera, which remains the pastorale. The pastorale and the com´edie-ballet served during this period as a kind of field of experimentation for opera. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the spoken pastorale was very commonplace, and it was easy to transform it into a musical form. The pastorale was structurally complex and combined amorous intrigues with scenes of mistaken identity, assignations, recognition scenes, lovelorn lamentations, poetic declamation, sleep and dream scenes, hallucinations, and magic. Its characters belonged to the middle ranks of humanity: shepherds and shepherdesses idealized along the lines of the great novels of the seventeenth century.7 The spoken pastorale disappeared around the mid-1600s and was replaced by the operatic version of the genre. This operatic version retains from its spoken predecessor the gallant character of the intrigues, the plaintive outbursts, the poetic recitations (also a feature of the secular cantata), the scenes of mistaken identity, the sleep and dream sequences, and the spells, as well as several burlesque scenes featuring fauns and satyrs. Set in the countryside, it also includes peasant dances. However, in keeping with its own specific nature, the operatic pastorale effects a number of transformations. Thus the magical, hallucinatory, and dream scenes are not simply suggested, but are treated as real: the spectator sees actual hallucinations on stage, and he or she experiences the characters’ dreams. The pastoral motif is found in almost all lyrical tragedies, usually in the form of scenes of mistaken identity between lovers or in the form of what I would call “the enchanted pastoral”: magical divertissements involving shepherds and shepherdesses, fauns, and satyrs which take place during the early acts of an opera, before things take a turn for the worse and those tragic powers come into play that will eventually lead to violence.8 At the end of the seventeenth century, a new genre appeared, one that would enjoy great success during the eighteenth century, especially in ballet: the pastorale h´ero¨ıque.9 Although the pastorale h´ero¨ıque involves aristocratic characters and gods, it often places them in ordinary situations or in close relation with ordinary characters. The typical

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situation in these works is the following: a god or a goddess is in love with a mortal, but since the former wants to be loved for him-or herself, he or she therefore disguises his or her identity by assuming that of an ordinary character such as a shepherd. Eventually the divine character reveals his or her true nature. Alternatively, a mortal is in love with a god or goddess and ends up obtaining some kind of social advancement thanks to a supernatural intervention.10 Comedy and the comic genre. By definition, comedy is non-heroic, and marriage is its main topic.11 At the Acad´emie Royale de Musique, the comic genre was scarcely present. However, it is crucial to note that the word “comic” can have two different meanings: it can refer to a particular kind of poetic dimension (e.g., a comic character); or it can refer to the means to a final result, i.e., that which makes an audience laugh. Here we are only interested in the first meaning. From this point of view, the comic is rare in opera. The few comedies presented at the Acad´emie Royale were generally ballets that were inspired by Italian or ancient comedy (Plautus, Menander, Aristophanes). The plot is always a conventional one: an old (or disabled) rich man wants to marry a young girl, who is in turn loved by a young man (and whom, of course, she loves). Eventually the lovers triumph and make fun of the rich old man. The setting is usually Venice.12 Something new happens with Les Fˆetes de Thalie, a ballet of 1714 by La Font and Mouret: in an Avertissement preceding the play, the poet claims that this is the very first comedy “`a la franc¸aise” to be presented on the stage of the Acad´emie Royale.13 In the same year, a true comedy (in both meanings of the word) was performed at Sceaux (and later in 1742 at the Acad´emie Royale): Les Amours de Ragonde by N´ericault-Destouches and Mouret, who set their piece in a village. Le peuple in the lyric tragedy Scenes of comedy. While comedies themselves are rare, comic scenes are indeed present in heroic works. One means by which they are sometimes introduced is through a parallel plot concerning servants and minor characters. Such scenes, treated in a comic way, are probably

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inherited from Italian opera and from the French pastorale, in which the various genres are mixed. But this mixture, very frequent in early lyric tragedies by Lully, tends to disappear toward the end of seventeenth century.14 I think we can speak of “residual” scenes: comic scenes are present to the same extent that they are in theatrical tragedies.15 Confidants. Another means of introducing le peuple into tragedy is through confidants who represent, both through their modest social position and their attitudes and manner of speaking, the ordinary mass of humanity. In musical tragedy they play the same role as in spoken tragedy: committed to a vulgar point of view that contrasts with that of their masters, they do not understand heroism and thereby call attention to it. Thus they supply their masters with advice that stresses prudence, moderation, even duplicity – advice that is completely opposed to aristocratic ideals. They offer exhortations such as “Do as you’re told,” “negotiate,” “dissemble,” “save what can be saved,” “be careful,” and the like. Their narrow world is not heroic: it is a world of compromise, renunciation, and small gains.16 They aspire to security and peace, which they value above honor and glory. The contrast between the two visions of the world is often amusing, and sometimes comic. T H E O P E R AT I C P R E S E N C E O F L E P E U P L E : O P P O S I T I O N A N D A N A LO G Y T O T H E S P O K E N T H E AT R E

My assumption of a reverse parallelism makes it possible to understand two modes of insertion and representation of the people: (1) a mode based on the concept of poetic dimension, and (2) a morphological mode, or one based on the fundamental structure which governs the relationship between spoken theatre and opera. According to the first mode, which we have just examined, ordinary people are present as they are in theatre but transformed by the requirements of the lyric genre. According to the second mode, the people are present in a manner opposite to that found in the theatre; nevertheless, this very contrariety obeys a general rule of analogy between spoken theatre and opera.

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The concept of spectacle: Opposite functions of spectacle and drama The question that now arises no longer concerns the nature of characters but rather the presence of a community, a collective presence. Such a presence then brings with it questions that are political in the broadest sense: questions of opinion, habit and custom, law, power, war. Such issues are traditionally linked to the city and are central to classical tragedy.17 While it is true that some tragedies do not revolve around “higher interests of state,” all raise in one way or another questions that are political in nature. It is in this sense that Ph`edre is a political work because it raises issues of incest within the royal family and of the royal succession. The basic laws of the collectivity are called into question by the possible misconduct of the queen. This aspect of the spoken tragedy moves to the background in musical dramas. However, although the existence of the community is fundamental in spoken tragedy, the community itself never appears on the stage. Neither crowd, battle, nor riot is visible: they all have been banished from the stage. The concept of “off stage” is constituent: what is not seen (or said) has as much importance as what is seen (and said), precisely because it is not seen. In other words: traditional spoken theatre avoids spectacle. This is evident in the case of violence: it is not shown, but it is necessary. The relegation of something to the off-stage area does not suppress it, but on the contrary lends to it an essential and often a more worrisome and problematic aspect – it becomes an enigma.18 Thus crowds are not visible, yet they haunt spoken tragedy.19 On all of these points, musical tragedy is strongly opposed to spoken tragedy: not only does it reduce the political plot to secondary importance, but it is also a kind of tragedy without an “outside”: it possesses no exteriority, so to speak. This is so because it incorporates its own outside: all that can be shown is shown. Opera is based on an aesthetic of exhibition, an aesthetic of spectacle. This results in a perfect symmetry that takes on the appearance of a double paradox. Thus spoken tragedy, which is essentially political, does not show the collectivity, whereas musical tragedy, which is not political, frequently features crowds and

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the people. By definition, opera is a “populated” and rather crowded form of theatre: there are a lot of people on stage.20 But the collective presence, while visible, does not act as an agent; it is an object, an indirect part of the drama.21 The people, embodied on stage by the chorus and by the troupe of dancers, function as a kind of extension of the monarch to whom they are subject, fulfilling the function of the classical chorus through their commentary, lamentations, and expressions of opinion and approval. They are sometimes caught in the middle of a conflict between a tyrant and a good ruler who serves as their protector. The people may also represent the source of a monarch’s legitimacy, calling upon him to rule through acclamation and providing seemingly spontaneous though possibly fickle signs of support. This collectivity is, however, never the direct agent, but rather the object, tool, or pretext of the actions of others, namely the main characters. These main characters – the heroes – are the ones who truly deliberate and act. The highly visible and audible presence of the community assumes indirect functions which were traditionally those of the chorus in ancient tragedy. I now turn to the examination of some of these functions in order to show how they are related to a spectacular presence.22 Functions of the collective presence (chorus and dancers) Commentary. This is a very traditional and stereotyped function: the chorus comments on the situation and reflects common opinions, or simply describes emotions related to the situation. This commentary can assume different emotional coloring such as of joy, complaint, or panic. Expressions of celebration and joy of course occur very frequently in opera: for example, celebration of a victory, a hero, a prince, or a god.23 Lamentations highlight an important difference between theatre and opera, for the spoken theatre avoids collective manifestations of this emotion whereas opera does not. Compare, for example, the lyric tragedy Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) by Rameau and Pellegrin, Act IV, scene 4, with Racine’s Ph`edre, Act IV, scene 6, in which it is announced that Hippolyte has been killed by a monster. The lyric

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version gives a spectacular part to the chorus (“ Hippolyte n’est plus”), in which Rameau is probably recalling a scene from Lully’s Alceste, Act III, scene 4 (“Alceste est morte”). Racine’s version, by contrast, alludes to Phaedra’s guilt. The example illustrates the extent to which the emotional emphasis differs in a non-spectacular vis-`a-vis a spectacular version. As for panic scenes, they are very numerous: almost every lyric tragedy offers several. To cite but one example among many, such a panic scene is occasioned at the end of Act III of Les Bor´eades (1764), Rameau’s last opera, by a very long and spectacular storm accompanied by an earthquake and tidal wave.24 The voice of suitability and propriety. In ancient theatre, the chorus traditionally expresses widely held views. It articulates the limits of what may be done and said if social stability is be maintained, thereby reflecting the established social order. In opera this function is pleasantly transferred to the fantastical world. In fact, this world has its own rules and its own verisimilitude based on a preexisting “fabulous” literature, so that a poet cannot simply imagine what he pleases. He must obey these general laws of verisimilitude and the particular rules of appropriateness. For example, he is not permitted to employ a god in a task other than the one traditionally assigned to him. Thus in the second act of Hippolyte et Aricie, Th´es´ee is in Hell, and asks his father Neptune to help him escape. We then hear the demons’ chorus answer that it is impossible: “On peut ais´ement y descendre, mais on ne peut en revenir” (“It is easy to go down here, but it is impossible to go back”). Fortunately, Mercury subsequently intervenes and negotiates with Pluto to gain Th´es´ee’s release. Picturesque and entertainment function. This function appears in those ballets that provide local color and lend the work a picturesque aspect. Such ballets of course feature the inevitable shepherds and sailors, but also hunters and representatives of different nations. People fulfilling this “decorative” function and thereby contributing to the stage spectacle thus appear quite frequently, though such appearances are always subject to the constraints of plausibility (or propriety) and often dictated by the rules of contrast internal to the work. In the note to the reader (“Avis”) that precedes the text of L’Europe galante

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(a ballet of 1697 by La Motte and Campra), the author underscores the following principles: We have chosen from among the nations of Europe those which stand in greatest contrast to one another and hence will produce the liveliest interaction in the theatre: France, Spain, Italy and Turkey. We follow the usual ideas concerning the particular natures of these peoples: the French are depicted as fickle, indiscreet, and stylish, the Spanish as faithful and romantic, the Italians as jealous, refined, and violent. Lastly, we have presented, to the extent that the theatre permits this, the arrogance and sovereignty of the sultans and the anger of their consorts.25

Suspensive function. I would like to close with the most interesting function, because in this case the spectacle in itself becomes dramatic. The presence of the people (chorus and dancers) embodying popular opinion often offers a strong contrast with the situation of the heroes, who find themselves in “extraordinary” situations that require them to take actions which are problematic or even prohibited. In short, whereas the people are quiescent and reconciled and firmly anchored in the social order, the heroes are in conflict with this order and with themselves. Given such contradictions, elements of spectacle can be used in order to heighten the tension. This is what I call the “suspensive function”. The choruses and the danced episodes serve in this case to slow down or suspend the action and to place the hero (or the audience) in an emotional situation of extreme and almost unbearable tension. This is particularly true of danced divertissements, which always occur at the worst moment and introduce an uncomfortable contrast. I can provide two examples of this “suspensive” function of a popular ballet within a lyric tragedy. First, in Hippolyte et Aricie, when Th´es´ee returns from Hades he discovers that serious crimes have been committed within his family circle. While he is worrying about this, however, his people come to celebrate his return with (of course) a ballet. This entertainment lasts a very long time, during which the hero has to put on a brave face. Second, in Act II, scene 6 of Jepht´e, by Pellegrin and Mont´eclair, Jepht´e has promised to offer in sacrifice the first person he sees when leaving

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his town of Maspha after returning from the army. The people, who are not aware of this, come out of the town dancing and singing, led by Jepht´e’s own daughter. In this chapter, I have tried to show how a strictly literary and morphological point of view can open innovative avenues for interpreting operatic works. It is almost too easy and too obvious to show social and political elements in such works. But contrasting the way in which opera is constructed as a literary work in relation to the spoken theatre allows those social and political elements to appear in a new and unexpected light, and it raises the more general issues concerning spectacle, a topic passionately discussed by authors ranging from Nicole and Bossuet to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and, in a more general sense, from Aristotle to Guy Debord.

n ot e s 1 See Buford Norman, Touched by the Graces: The Libretti of Philippe Quinault in the Context of French Classicism (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications Inc., 2001), pp. 33–35, who points out the limits of an ideological reading of the trag´edie lyrique, and “the dangers of interpreting [it] as simple royal propaganda.” 2 The popularity of the genre can be seen in the performance figures: a new trag´edie lyrique could have up to 150 performances (by comparison a tragedy by Racine had about 40). See Norman, Touched by the Graces; Philippe Quinault, Livrets d’op´era, intro. and notes by Buford Norman, vol. ii. (Toulouse: Soci´et´e de Litt´eratures classiques, 1999); J´erˆome de La Gorce, L’Op´era a` Paris au temps de Louis XIV: Histoire d’un th´eaˆ tre (Paris: Desjonqu`eres, 1992); and Pierre Fortassier, “Musique et peuple au XVIIIe si`ecle,” in Images du peuple au dix-huiti`eme si`ecle, Centre Aixois d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Dix-Huiti`eme Si`ecle (Paris: A. Colin, 1973), pp. 327–337; all show the popular success of trag´edies lyriques in the eighteenth century. 3 See Catherine Kintzler, Po´etique de l’op´era franc¸ais de Corneille a` Rousseau (Paris: Minerve, 1991); La France classique et l’op´era (Arles: Harmonia Mundi, collection Passerelles, 1998); and Th´eaˆ tre et op´era a` l’ˆage classique: Une famili`ere e´tranget´e (Paris: Fayard, 2004).

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Catherine Kintzler 4 On this point I disagree with Cuthbert Girdlestone (La Trag´edie lyrique consid´er´ee comme genre litt´eraire [Geneva: Droz, 1972]), who supposes a simple opposition, whereas I think that the trag´edie lyrique belongs to the same poetic system as spoken tragedy. 5 For my detailed treatments of this topic elsewhere, see Kintzler, Po´etique de l’op´era franc¸ais; La France classique et l’op´era; and Th´eaˆ tre et op´era a` l’ˆage classique. 6 In fact, ordinary characters are commonplace (as shepherds, confidants, sailors, hunters, farmers). We find a massive and spectacular collective presence not only in the choruses, but also in the many crowds and gatherings that take place particularly in ballets, which occupy the entire stage. The operatic stage is often overcrowded. 7 A few landmarks of the genre: Alexandre Hardy, Alph´ee (1606), Corine (1614); Racan, Les Bergeries (c. 1618); Honor´e d’Urf´e, Silvanire (1627); Jean de Mairet, Sylvie (1628), La Silvanire (1631); Rotrou, La C´elim`ene (1636) (adapted for the theatre by Tristan L’Hermite under the title Amarillis [1653]). The first French operas are pastorales: Pomone (1671) by Perrin and Cambert; Les Peines et les plaisirs de l’Amour (1672) by Gilbert and Cambert; Les Fˆetes de l’Amour et de Bacchus (1672) by Quinault and Lully. 8 For an example of a pastoral scene in a trag´edie lyrique, see Scylla et Glaucus (1746) by Leclair and d’Albaret, Act I, scene 3. 9 Acis et Galat´ee (1686) by Campistron and Lully; Iss´e (1697) by Lamotte and Destouches. 10 For examples, see Acis et Galat´ee (1686) by Campistron and Lully, Act I, scene 2 (the shepherd Acis is complaining); and Iss´e (1697) by La Motte and Destouches, Act I, scene 1 (Apollo pretends to be a shepherd and wants to be loved by Iss´e; he explains the situation to Pan). 11 See Franc¸ois Regnault, La Doctrine inou¨ıe. Dix lec¸ons sur le th´eaˆ tre classique franc¸ais (Paris: Hatier, 1996), pp. 258–261; Kintzler, Th´eaˆ tre et op´era a` l’ˆage classique, pp. 103–123. Apart from some rare examples (e.g., Moli`ere’s Amphitryon), comedy employs ordinary characters. It is well known that many stage works of this period are greatly indebted to com´edie-ballet, particularly the works by Moli`ere and Lully (Les Fˆacheux, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme) and by Moli`ere and Charpentier (Le Malade imaginaire), but these are not exactly operas, but rather “musical theatre”. 12 Examples include the ballet Le Carnaval de Venise (ballet, 1699) by Renard and Campra; Fragments de M. de Lully (1702) by Danchet and Campra, 5e Entr´ee; Divertissement comique. La S´er´enade v´enitienne, 2e nouvelle Entr´ee;

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Le Bal interrompu, 3e nouvelle Entr´ee; La V´enitienne (com´edie-ballet, 1704) by La Motte and de La Barre; Les Fˆetes v´enitiennes (ballet, 1710) by Danchet and Campra. “Voil`a je crois le premier op´era o`u l’on ait vu des femmes habill´ees a` la franc¸aise, et des confidentes du ton des soubrettes de la com´edie; c’est aussi la premi`ere fois que l’on a hasard´e de certaines expressions convenables au comique, mais nouvelles jusqu’alors et mˆeme inconnues sur la sc`ene lyrique. Le public en fut d’abord alarm´e, cependant le th´eaˆ tre qui r`egne du commencement jusqu’`a la fin de ce ballet se trouva si amusant et si enjou´e qu’on y venait en foule presque a` contre-cœur. Je me fis conscience de divertir le public presque malgr´e lui, et pour rendre son plaisir pur et tranquille, je me d´epˆechai de faire moi-mˆeme la critique de mon ouvrage o`u je donnai tout le m´erite du succ`es a` la musique et a` la danse. Le public me sut bon gr´e d’avoir eu cette attention pour lui, et devint si fort de mes amis que pendant quatre vingt repr´esentations il ne pouvait se r´esoudre a` me quitter, et mˆeme encore aujourd’hui il parle de ce ballet avec plaisir.” Dubos mentions this “purification” of the tragic genre in his R´eflexions critiques sur la po´esie et sur la peinture (Paris: ENSB, 1993 [1719]), Part I, section 21. On the mixture of serious and comic, see Norman, Touched by the Graces, p. 88. For an example of a residual comic scene in a trag´edie lyrique, see Alceste (1674) by Quinault and Lully, Act II, scene 1, between C´ephise and Straton. For example, in Act I, scene 8 of Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) by Pellegrin and Rameau, when Th´es´ee is reported to be dead, Oenone tells Phaedra to offer the crown to Hippolyte. See Corneille’s Discours de l’utilit´e et des parties du po`eme dramatique: “Sa dignit´e demande quelque grand int´erˆet d’Etat, ou quelque passion plus noble et plus mˆeme que l’amour, telles que sont l’ambition ou la vengeance, et veut donner a` craindre des malheurs plus grands que la perte d’une maˆıtresse” (Pierre Corneille, Trois discours sur le po`eme dramatique, ed., intro., and notes by B. Louvat and M. Escola [Paris: GF, [1999], p. 72). See Kintzler, Th´eaˆ tre et op´era a` l’ˆage classique, pp. 7–26. See Jean-Marie Goulemot, “Pr´esence et rˆole du peuple dans la trag´edie franc¸aise de 1683 a` 1715. Essai d’analyse quantitative”, in Images du peuple au dix-huiti`eme si`ecle, pp. 231–244.

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Catherine Kintzler 20 See Fortassier, “Musique et peuple au XVIIIe si`ecle,” pp. 327–337. 21 See Th´es´ee (1675) by Quinault and Lully, Act II, scenes 3, 6 and 7; for the eighteenth century, the “Avis” preceding Iss´e (1697) by La Motte and Destouches; and the “Argument” preceding Callirho´e (1712) by Roy and Destouches. 22 The objection could be made that the chorus is often invisible (“chœur de peuples qu’on ne voit point”) as is the case, for example, in M´ed´ee, Act V, scene 2; and in V´enus et Adonis by Rousseau and Desmarest, Act V, scene 1. But the chorus is always audible, and its invisibility announces an appearance (either its own appearance or that of another character); in this sense, it is a part of the spectacular aspect. 23 For an example, see Idom´en´ee (1712) by Danchet and Campra, Act I, scene 3, in which Idamante sets the Trojan prisoners free. 24 The Bor´eades princes are furious because the Princess Alphise has refused to marry one of their number. They ask the god Bor´ee to take revenge; he responds by unleashing dangerous winds. 25 “On a choisi des Nations de l’Europe celles dont les caract`eres se contrastent davantage, et promettent plus de jeu pour le th´eaˆ tre: la France, l’Espagne, l’Italie et la Turquie. On a suivi les id´ees ordinaires qu’on a du g´enie de leurs peuples: le Franc¸ais est paint volage, indiscret et coquet; L’Espagnol fid`ele et romanesque; l’Italien jaloux, fin et violent; enfin l’on a exprim´e, autant que le th´eaˆ tre l’a pu permettre, la hauteur et la souverainet´e des sultans, et l’emportement des sultanes.”

4

Women’s roles in Meyerbeer’s operas: How Italian heroines are reflected in French grand opera Naomi Andr´e

In a sophisticated web of sound, the embodiment of masculinity and femininity in Italian opera underwent a substantive transformation during the first decades of the nineteenth century. What was deemed “masculine,” virile, and heroic made a marked shift away from the castrato-infused legacy of the eighteenth century. No longer were the castrati and their faithful proxy, the cross-dressed female travesti singers, seen and heard as acceptable leading “men” in opera. Instead, the Romanticism of Byron, Victor Hugo, Sir Walter Scott, and other emerging leaders in literature provided a new set of topics for plots and heroic situations. The classical symmetry and rational aesthetics of the Enlightenment gave way to a new form of realism that relied on the power of genius now fueled by the subjectivity of emotion. In the period following the French Revolution the idealized power of the monarchy was replaced with the articulation of strength and courage through individual acts of bravery. Within this world, the Romantic male protagonist also redefined heroism vocally. As a tenor, he sang with a differently articulated virtuosity from that of the castrato bel canto aesthetics and he offered the sound of an unaltered and unmistakably male voice. As the conventions surrounding masculinity and femininity in opera were realigned to the principles of Romanticism, the typical operatic roles for male and female singers changed.1 Across the two halves of the nineteenth century, women’s roles in opera underwent a substantive change. While no one can deny that the most famous heroines of the nineteenth century – such as Norma, Lucia, Violetta, Mim`ı, and several others – all expire by the opera’s conclusion, what is more relevant for understanding how women in Italian opera from this time are configured can be learned by examining the

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interaction of the voice and character of these roles and their unexpected ancestry. With the legacy of the castrato voice from the eighteenth century and the newly emergent tenor, who became the standard voice of the male hero by 1830, the first decades of primo ottocento (early nineteenth-century) Italian opera saw a different construction of women in opera. Rather than one solitary heroine, which becomes the norm in opera in the second half of the nineteenth century, there are typically two leading roles for female singers in primo ottocento opera. In this essay, I examine the paths to the Romantic heroine of secondo ottocento (second half of the nineteenth-century) Italian opera by looking at models from northern Italy written between 1817 and 1824. My case studies are taken from the little-known, and often-neglected, Italian operas of one of the leading international opera composers of the time: Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864).2 In a telling, yet seemingly unlikely, place, Meyerbeer’s Italian operas occupy a critical position in the historical operatic canon today as we look back at nineteenth-century opera. Though his six Italian operas are unfamiliar today (listed in Table 4.1), all but one was commercially successful in their own time; indeed, several were revived in subsequent productions. Today Meyerbeer is best known for his four French grand operas (Robert le diable [1831], Les Huguenots [1836], Le Proph`ete [1849], and L’Africaine [1865]) which have maintained their importance, if not their popularity, through performance. Nonetheless, Meyerbeer’s Italian operas demonstrate his nimble facility at bringing together the orchestral dominance of his German roots with the vocal lyricism and conventions of the nineteenth-century bel canto style now best remembered in the works of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini. This essay is divided into four sections: the first presents Meyerbeer’s career in Italy and the conventions during his arrival, the second part briefly outlines the plots and central themes in the six Italian operas, and the third part analyzes the interactions between the voice and character of the roles for women. The final section juxtaposes the types of women’s roles Meyerbeer wrote in Italy and in his best-known operas for Paris.

Women’s roles in Meyerbeer’s operas

Table 4.1 Principal roles for women (and castrato) in Meyerbeer’s Italian operas 1817 Romilda e Costanza (Gaetano Rossi, Padua, Teatro Nuovo) Romilda [disguised as a page] Rosamunda Pisaroni Costanza Caterina Lipparini 1819 Semiramide Riconosciuta (Gaetano Rossi, Turin, Teatro Regio) Semiramide [disguised as King Nino] Carolina Bassi Tamiri Teresa Cantarelli Scitalce [travesti], Prince of India and former Adelina Dalman-Naldi lover of Semiramide 1819 Emma di Resburgo (Gaetano Rossi, Venice, Teatro San Benedetto) Emma di Resburgo [disguised as minstrel] Rosa Morandi Edemondo [travesti], exiled Earl of Lanark and Carolina Cortesi husband to Emma Etelia, Olfredo’s daughter Cecilia Gaddi 1820 Margherita d’Anjou (Felice Romani, Milan, La Scala) Margherita d’Anjou [disguised as peasant wife], Carolina Pellegrini widow of Henry VI of England Isaura, wife of Duke of Lavarenne [disguised as a Rosa Mariani page] 1822 L’esule di Granata (Felice Romani, Milan, La Scala) Almanzor, King of Granada [travesti] Rosamunda Pisaroni Azema, daughter of King Sulemano, exiled King Adelaide Tosi of Granada 1824 Il crociato in Egitto (Gaetano Rossi, Venice, La Fenice) Palmide, daughter of Aladino Henriette M´eric-Lalande Felicia, fianc´ee of Armando [dressed as knight] Brigida Lorenzani Armando d’Orville [disguised as “Elmireno”] Giambattista Velluti For most of the revivals of this opera Armando was performed by a female singer.

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JA K O B M E Y E R B E E R G O E S T O I TA LY

As a German composer born at the end of the eighteenth century and who came of age at a time when Germany was still developing its own national style of opera, Jakob Meyer Beer went to Italy on a self-imposed apprenticeship to learn how to write opera. The first decades of the nineteenth century saw few successful attempts at articulating a German national style of opera.3 Chief among these efforts, at least in terms of what has survived today, are Beethoven’s Leonore (1805), Leonore (1806), and Fidelio (1814): a trio of operas that rework the same story and musical material three times. In the 1810s when Meyerbeer was young and wishing to make a name for himself, Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826) – his close contemporary and friend (they got to know each other during their early training with the Abb´e Georg Joseph Vogler in Darmstadt) – was involved in a similar quest.4 Though Weber’s compositional output was more diverse in genre than Meyerbeer’s and includes more non-operatic instrumental works, chamber pieces, songs, and solo piano pieces, Weber was also searching for an operatic stylistic voice that did not manifest itself until the early 1820s with his opera Der Freisch¨utz (first performed in 1821), a few years after Meyerbeer was already established in Italy and writing operas. At best, Weber’s operas had only a limited influence on Meyerbeer, given the latter’s travels outside of Germany and Weber’s untimely death in England in 1826.5 Moreover, by the mid-1820s Meyerbeer’s interests were less invested in finding a “German” national style of writing opera than in a desire to forge a more international style that would gain popularity on the Parisian stage. In Italy, during his eight-year stay (1816–1824), he Italianized his name to Giacomo Meyerbeer and, in a letter to his father who demanded that he return to Berlin, wrote adamantly, “I believe this [his visit to Italy and later Paris] to be of the utmost importance to my musical training and would not let anything in this world prevent me from going, even if I had to set out on foot and wage battle against the raging elements.”6 In his often repeated statement about being “bewitched in a magic garden” in Italy, Meyerbeer indicates that he

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was enchanted by all things Italian – the style and conventions of the primo ottocento and, as I will show, in the ways of writing for female voices.7 Meyerbeer’s six operas for Italy written between 1817 and 1824 made him one of the leading opera composers in northern Italy at that time. The late 1810s and early 1820s predate the influence that Donizetti and Bellini’s operas would later have; this fact, combined with Rossini’s relocation to the south in 1815 as the new leading composer at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, meant there was an opening in the northern Italian opera scene. Though Rossini’s Neapolitan contract did not preclude his writing for other theatres, his primary compositional activities, his serious large-scale operas, focused on the San Carlo. The period of 1816 to 1823 was a very prolific time in Rossini’s output: he composed eighteen operas.8 With the emphasis on the nine Neapolitan operas, Rossini wrote four operas for northern theatres while Meyerbeer was in Italy, two each for La Scala in Milan and La Fenice in Venice. (Four of the other five operas were written for Roman theatres and one that was eventually performed in Lisbon, Portugal.) While Meyerbeer was in Italy specifically to learn how to write opera, his talents – and the absence of the dominant opera composer in the north – gave him the opportunity to quickly become a leading figure in Italian opera during his stay. Like the operas of Rossini and his other contemporaries in Italy, Meyerbeer’s Italian operas illustrate the instability between character and vocal type in his reliance on both old-fashioned eighteenth-century conventions as well as the newly emerging Romantic practices. The norms for operas in Italy when Meyerbeer arrived included operas that engaged female voices in the heroic travesti tradition (e.g., the title character in Rossini’s 1813 Tancredi and Enrico in Simon Mayr’s La rosa bianca e la rosa rossa from the same year) and operas with two female characters that vied for the attentions of the principal tenor hero (e.g., Rossini’s Elisabetta d’Inghilterra, 1815). Very occasionally, a role would still be written for one of the few castrati working on the opera circuit (e.g., the role of Arsace in Rossini’s Aureliano in Palmira was written for Giambattista Velluti in 1813). Though the voice type of

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the hero could vary between a castrato (very rarely), a female singer en travesti or a tenor, operas routinely employed two female singers in principal roles. As Table 4.1 demonstrates, all six of Meyerbeer’s Italian operas contain at least two principal roles for women. As a foreigner who went to Italy specifically to learn how to write opera, Meyerbeer’s Italian operas illustrate his handling of the resources available and employment of the artistic norms of the time. During these self-designed apprenticeship years, he was fortunate to work exclusively with two of the leading librettists of this time: Gaetano Rossi (1774–1855), who had collaborated with Rossini on Tancredi, and Felice Romani (1788–1865), who went on to become the primary librettist of Bellini. As Meyerbeer was learning how to write Italian opera, he was working with the men who would be remembered as the principal designers of the primo ottocento libretto.9 In terms of plot conventions, Meyerbeer’s operas include classical subjects that were popular in the eighteenth century (e.g., Semiramide riconosciuta) – as did many of Rossini’s serious operas (e.g., Tancredi, Armida, and Semiramide) – yet his operas also include more contemporary topics that resemble the rescue dramas in France and Germany (e.g., Emma di Resburgo).10 As in his mixed use of plots, which both looked back to the Metastasian eighteenth-century dramas and embraced post-French Revolution subjects, Meyerbeer’s Italian operas also engaged a range of vocal types for the hero. He used the oldfashioned sound of the castrato (for Crociato), the current vogue for the heroic travesti (in Semiramide, Emma, and L’esule), and the forwardlooking voice of the Romantic tenor (in Romilda, Margherita, and Crociato). C O N V E N T I O N S F O R T H E C H A R AC T E R I Z AT I O N S WO M E N ’ S VO I C E S P O RT R AY E D I N I TA L I A N O P E R A DURING THE PRIMO OTTOCENTO

Primo ottocento opera audiences were quite comfortable with women’s voices singing across gender. In terms of the interactions

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among (1) vocal sound, (2) the gender of the character, and (3) the gender of the singer, these early decades of the nineteenth century were a transitional time. The heroic voice was in the process of migrating between the castrato bel canto aesthetics that required a high flexible treble hero (performed by the eighteenth-century castrati and the primo ottocento heroic travesti female singers) and the Romantic tenor, now considered more “realistic”. One of the logistical issues with the replacement of the female heroic travesti role by the tenor was what to do with these travesti singers, who were accustomed to having a principal role. The solution was to employ these female singers in roles where they depicted female characters; hence, there were operas with the new tenor and two principal female characters. In a compromise between privileging treble timbres and adhering to a deeper masculine heroic sound, the new challenge became how to differentiate between the two female characters. This situation would hardly have been a problem if the Baroque practice of having plots with several romantic couples who ended up happily paired had continued into the nineteenth century. However, along with the newer preferences for vocal sound, the Romantic topics from which primo ottocento libretti were drawn were winnowing down the number of leading characters and focusing the main action of the drama on the plight of the central heroic couple. The presence of a secondary romantic couple was on the wane, and the three central personae were typically roles sung by the two women and the tenor. Occasionally a baritone would be added, yet he was rarely a serious contender for being a desirable romantic match. As the two women were frequently in competition for the affections of the tenor, the obstacles that got in the way were almost always insurmountable. The eighteenth-century opera seria plot with the benevolence of a deus ex machina figure from the era of the Enlightenment became a less frequent feature in primo ottocento operas after the first few decades. Such conclusions were exchanged for the nineteenthcentury Romantic expression of courage and acts of bravery that the individual fought on his, and her, own. Unless the operatic genre was

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a mixed semiseria, where things eventually did work out with the lieto fine (happy ending), Italian serious opera after 1830 routinely took on tragic endings. The female heroic travesti singer sang female characters in the presence of the heroic tenor. With two female characters in the opera, the higher soprano role inherited the characterization of the central female heroine. Elsewhere, I have introduced the terms “first woman” and “second woman” to differentiate between these two female characters.11 Rather than denoting a hierarchy in their individual importance, the second woman refers to the female character (and the singer who interpreted this role) who would normally have sung the heroic travesti role if the opera did not have the heroic tenor. The first woman is the female character who has the best chance of ending up paired with the hero – whether this is the travesti hero or the newer Romantic tenor; hence, it is unusual for the second woman to end up with the hero (after 1830, the second woman almost never gets the hero). In practically all cases, the first woman’s role is written in a higher range and tessitura than that of the second woman. For the purpose of discussing Meyerbeer’s Italian operas, the important point to stress is that the second woman became the new visual presence for the female travesti voice. As a female character, the second woman’s voice straddled sound and character: it was a voice that could, and up through the 1820s regularly did, cross-dress aurally.

CENTRAL THEMES IN MEYERBEER’S S I X I TA L I A N O P E R A S

Romilda e Costanza12 Briefly summarized, Teobaldo as a youth growing up in Provence fell in love with Costanza, the daughter of the Count of Sisteron. While fighting a war overseas in Brittany, he falls in love with Romilda, the daughter of the Duke of Brittany. Upon his return, Teobaldo is imprisoned by his twin brother Retello who, after the death of their father, read the will which stated that Teobaldo is to become the Count of

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Provence and marry Romilda as a political alliance. Romilda, who returns Teobaldo’s love, follows him from Brittany to Provence disguised as a page. Everything works out at the end (thanks, in part, to the help of another character, Pierotto); Teobaldo is released from prison, is paired with Romilda, and becomes the benevolent Count of Provence, ultimately pardoning his brother Retello. In his first opera for Italy, Meyerbeer used the tenor voice as the hero (Teobaldo, first premiered by Luigi Capitelli) and the two titular women vie for the tenor’s affections. Though the character of Romilda (written for Rosamunda Pisaroni) is the primary female heroine – she is listed first in the title and she ends up with the hero – at moments within the opera her role assumes a localized masculinity. Contrasted to the voice of Caterina Lipparini as Costanza, Pisaroni’s voice (which later went on to become associated with many other travesti roles13 ), as Romilda, embodies several traditions simultaneously. Her dressing as a pageboy quotes enough of the travesti convention to give a knowing wink to the primo ottocento tradition, in which cross-dressed women were heard as acceptable substitutes for boys’ voices before reaching puberty. Her mission to save her husband from prison, and reclaim his love from another woman and from the treachery of Retello, also references the rescue opera tradition (with noticeable similarities in the story to Beethoven’s Fidelio, 1814). The voice of Pisaroni bringing to life the character of Romilda illustrates that a woman could put on a male persona to accomplish things she could not otherwise do and still be a viable leading female character in opera. Semiramide reconosciuta14 (Semiramide Recognized) Not surprising given its eighteenth-century origins, the design of Meyerbeer’s Semiramide involves many characters and sub-plots.15 In the pre-history to the action of the opera, Idreno (now named Scitalce at the beginning of the opera), the Prince of India and former lover of Semiramide, had been convinced by Sibari (Semiramide’s treacherous advisor who was in love with her) that she had been unfaithful to him. In a fit of jealousy, Scitalce stabbed Semiramide and threw her

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in the Nile to drown. Fortuitously, Semiramide survived this ordeal and later married King Nino of Assyria. When the opera begins, King Nino is dead and Semiramide is in disguise impersonating her own son (also named Nino) so that she can reign as the King of Assyria. The Princess Tamiri, another leading female character, is searching for a husband; among her many suitors are Scitalce (a travesti role) and Mirteo – Semiramide’s brother. By the end of the opera Semiramide is unmasked and reunited with Scitalce after she pardons him for his earlier deeds against her. The Princess Tamiri marries Mirteo. In terms of vocal type and gendered character, the secondary couple – Princess Tamiri and Mirteo – is rather straightforward for this time; neither undergoes a disguise and the soprano (Tamiri) is paired with a male singer – a bass. A good part of Tamiri’s dramaturgical function is to provide the stimulus for bringing Scitalce to Babylon so that he can ultimately be reunited with Semiramide. In contrast to Tamiri and Mirteo, the leading couple of Semiramide and Scitalce present a very different scenario concerning voice pairings and the intrigue of shifting identities. The choice to cast Carolina Bassi’s voice as the title character reflects the pattern seen in Meyerbeer’s first opera with Rosamunda Pisaroni as Romilda. Like Pisaroni, Carolina Bassi was also associated with travesti roles, though to a lesser extent. Several months after the premiere of Meyerbeer’s Semiramide, Bassi premiered the travesti role of Falliero in Rossini’s two-act melodramma Bianca e Falliero at La Scala in Milan, and she figures prominently as a travesti voice in two of Meyerbeer’s later operas.16 Yet Semiramide’s role is higher than that of Tamiri and the “true” nature of Bassi’s voice has been alternatively described as soprano, mezzo-soprano, and contralto.17 The page as an adolescent boy reflects a differently circumscribed articulation of the travesti role as hero: the heroism of the page is limited. When Romilda (in Meyerbeer’s first opera) disguises herself as a page, she is citing the heroic travesti in her bold action to go undercover and follow the man she loves. As a page, she is allotted some power: disguised as a man (albeit a young one), she is able to travel on her own. In contrast, Semiramide’s disguise is the primary

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source of her power and authority; she is the queen who rules through most of the opera disguised as the king. As king, she directly invokes the codes of the castrato: were she not portraying a female character, her voice could be accepted as the hero in this travesti role. However, her disguise unveils her character’s real identity, a woman whose voice can imperceptibly cross back and forth between gender to the ears of the primo ottocento audience. The plot device to have Semiramide in disguise as a male character for a significant part of the opera leads to many exciting possibilities of which Meyerbeer takes full advantage. To cast Semiramide’s love interest as a travesti role is a masterful stroke, for within the opera the two women portray two men – the travesti role of Scitalce and Semiramide masquerading as King Nino – and one woman (Semiramide as herself ). The place where the twisting of identity and the interaction of vocal type and character takes on its most sophisticated and complex rendering is in the Semiramide–Scitalce duet, “Al folgor di que’ bei rai.”18 In this duet, the question of identity is obscured on several levels. At this point in the drama, neither character truly knows who the other really is though both suspect the truth (which is that they are long-lost lovers). This angle of their hidden identity from each other is achieved through Semiramide’s disguise as King Nino and the name “Scitalce” for the lover Semiramide knew as Idreno. Both sing of love for the absent beloved. Scitalce sings of Tamiri and Semiramide (as Nino) sings of love for a “woman” (to keep up appearances for Scitalce, Semiramide has King Nino pine for a woman now long lost), who really turns out to be Idreno (Scitalce), a woman singing a travesti role. In this complex scene, nothing is as it appears. On one level, the duet can be seen and heard as two women on stage singing of their love for two other people who really turn out to be each other. In terms of the gender twists in the plot, a female singer (Adelina DalmanNaldi) playing the part of a male character (Scitalce) sings of his love for another woman (Tamiri). The other female singer (Carolina Bassi) plays a woman (Semiramide), disguised as a man (King Nino), singing about “his” love for another woman (the twist to keep Scitalce believing

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that “Nino” is singing) who really turns out to be the man (Scitalce) a woman (Adelina Dalman-Naldi) is singing en travesti. As if that were not tricky enough, yet another way to view this duet is as two women who, for various reasons, are pretending to be men who are singing about women. Hence, without understanding the artifice engaged, this duet could look (and sound) like two women singing of their love for each other. Ironically, this last explanation is the one closest to the truth. Without minimizing the implications this situation could have for a queer theoretical reading, I would like to emphasize the very intricate historical codes it reveals about the interactions of vocal and character pairings at this point in the primo ottocento. Here we have worlds colliding; the transition between the eighteenth-century aesthetic for flexible treble timbres and the early nineteenth-century primo ottocento invocation of the disappearing castrati voices in women’s travesti roles combining with the device of disguise to create new levels of artifice. A subtle friction resonates as Scitalce’s voice (the female heroic travesti) is layered on top of Semiramide’s voice (who is disguised as King Nino): two similar women’s voices accepted as, and pretending to sound, “male.” Seen and heard in this context, a woman’s lower voice is able to do it all: it can be the leading soprano heroine (Semiramide) and it can be the heroic travesti (Scitalce) at the same time in the same opera. More than any other type of voice in this period, the woman’s voice represents an open realm of possibility for embodying either the male or female leading role, or – as the element of disguise when Semiramide assumes the identity of King Nino so aptly illustrates – both simultaneously. Emma di Resburgo19 Gaetano Rossi based his libretto on a text by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly (the French writer who had provided the original source for Beethoven’s Leonore/Fidelio operas) and, like Beethoven’s opera subject, Emma has elements of the rescue drama. Having been falsely accused of patricide, Edemondo, the son of the Scottish Earl of Lanark, fled his wife (Emma) and young son Elvino. Intent upon finding him, and disguised as a

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traveling minstrel, Emma searches for her exiled husband. Through various turns in the plot, Edemondo returns as a shepherd, and they both end up in prison and sentenced to death. At the eleventh hour, the real murderer of Edemondo’s father is revealed and Edemondo becomes the rightful Earl of Lanark. The two leading roles, Emma – the title character – and her husband Edemondo, are both assumed by women. The voice of Rosa Morandi (the first Emma) has been described as a mezzo-soprano; her repertory included the title roles in Rossini’s Italiana in Algeri and Tancredi. Nonetheless, Morandi also sang roles that were more traditionally in the soprano repertory, including Rossini’s Desdemona and Mathilde di Shabran.20 Edemondo, a travesti role, was written for the travesti singer Carolina Cortesi. For their audiences, Morandi and Cortesi were an established pair. The night before Emma’s premiere, these two women had just completed a set of performances in Rossini’s new pasticcio opera Eduardo e Cristina at the same theatre where, as in Emma, Cortesi sang en travesti (as Eduardo) opposite Morandi as Cristina.21 As in Semiramide riconosciuta, the multiple layering of disguise and shifting gender identity for women’s voices are worked into the plot: Cortesi as the travesti and Morandi as Emma pretending to be the minstrel (a male role) in order to look for Edemondo. This disguise situation, in which a woman disguises herself as a man to find her beloved, is in the same vein as Meyerbeer’s first Italian opera when Romilda becomes a page to find Teobaldo. Margherita d’Anjou22 In fifteenth-century Scotland during the Wars of the Roses, Queen Margherita d’Anjou (widow of Henry VI) has fallen in love with the Duke of Lavarenne, who is married to Isaura. Having been usurped from the throne by Riccardo, Duke of Gloucester, Margherita attempts to regain the throne and, en route to achieving this goal, pretends to be the peasant wife of Michele Gamautte, her surgeon. However, Riccardo sees through Margherita’s disguise and takes her son Edoardo, the Prince of Wales, hostage. Meanwhile, though Isaura fears

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(correctly) that her husband has fallen in love with the deposed queen, she disguises herself as a page who is accompanying Gamautte. When Margherita successfully overthrows Riccardo and regains the throne, Isaura’s courageous actions have won the admiration of the queen; Isaura is subsequently allowed to reconcile with her husband. Through both of their disguises, Margherita and Isaura both gain access to what they want, even though they accomplish it in very different ways. A highlighted feature is the way gender is interwoven with social power. As the deposed queen, Margherita’s efforts to regain her usurped position involve her assuming the role of the peasant wife to her French physician, Michele (a basso buffo role first performed by Nicol`a Bassi). Unlike the other cases of disguise seen in Meyerbeer’s operas thus far, this one does not involve a gender twist; here we have a female character assuming another female persona. The persona of the peasant wife comments directly on Margherita’s character and vocal type. As the peasant wife of her French surgeon, the change in her social status is emphasized; stripped of the throne, her social position is compromised when she no longer has the power of being the queen. As she is surrounded by only a few allies in the midst of her enemies, she pretends to be someone else; hence, when her usual position of power jeopardizes her life, she is domesticated by portraying a simple peasant wife. Isaura, on the other hand, gains power with her disguise. Though as a married woman she had a respectable position as a wife, her husband’s absence leaves her single. She allies herself with Gamautte (as his attendant) and travels with him to find her husband. Her courage is acknowledged by the queen and Isaura is eventually reunited with her husband. L’esule di Granata23 (The Exile from Granada) The setting of the opera takes place in the Moorish kingdom of Granada during the fifteenth century. Before his death, King Almanzor’s father, a Zegridi (Zegris) warrior, defeated and then exiled the former king,

Women’s roles in Meyerbeer’s operas

Sulemano, the leader of the rival Abenseragi (Abencerrages).24 At the beginning of the opera, Sulemano has returned to Granada in search of his daughter, Azema, and seeks to overthrow Almanzor, the new Zegridi king. Meanwhile, Azema and Almanzor have fallen in love. When Sulemano’s Abencerrages uprising fails Almanzor benevolently pardons him and allows him to leave Granada with his daughter. The opera ends happily when Sulemano accepts peace with Almanzor and agrees to let the Zegridi king marry his daughter. In the original plans for Almanzore in Rome in 1821 the title role was intended for Carolina Bassi, Meyerbeer’s first Semiramide.25 However, after a few delays and the opera’s title change to L’esule di Granata, the part of King Almanzor was entrusted to Rosamunda Pisaroni. Having already worked with Meyerbeer in his first Italian opera (she had premiered Romilda), by 1822 Pisaroni had created three roles by Rossini: Zomira (Ricciardo e Zoraide, 1818), Andromache (Ermione, 1819) and the travesti role of Malcolm (La donna del lago, 1819). Her repertory included a specialization in other travesti roles by Rossini – Falliero, Tancredi, and, later on, Arsace from his 1823 Semiramide. The role of Azema, Almanzor’s love interest, was first performed by the young soprano Adelaide Tosi. At the beginning of her career in 1822 (she had made her operatic debut the year before), Tosi went on to become one of the most successful singers of her time, establishing herself in the primo ottocento repertory and premiering several of Donizetti’s heroines.26 The location of Moor-influenced fifteenth-century southern Spain provided an exoticized setting for Meyerbeer. L’esule di Granata and the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian settings of Semiramide riconosciuta are Meyerbeer’s two “oriental” settings thus far and will be joined by his last Italian opera, Il crociato in Egitto, placed in another Egyptian locale. The exoticism evoked by using settings outside of the Westernized European norm fits into the vogue for opera plots of the time. Rossini’s Mos`e in Egitto from 1818 (set in Egypt around 1230 bc), Ermione from 1819 (set in Epirum, Greece around 430 bc), Maometto II from 1820 (set in 1470 in Negroponte, a Greek island in the Aegean), and his own

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very admired Semiramide from 1823 (set in ancient Babylon) all provide contemporaneous examples that illustrate the popularity of operas set in exotic locales.27 The exoticism of L’esule di Granata further enriches our understanding of King Almanzor as a travesti role. Whereas the ancient Babylonian queen, Semiramide, in Meyerbeer’s earlier opera spends most of the plot masquerading as king, her voice is ultimately unmasked at the end as her real female character. With Almanzor as a Moorish king in medieval Spanish Granada, the southern part of the Iberian peninsula, the suspicious “Other” of gypsies and the dark continent of Africa invoke additional associations. Side by side sit two systems of signification: the castrato legacy for the heroic female travesti roles and the “Otherness” of an orientalized Granada. The character and voice of King Almanzor embodies an interaction of East meets West. As an exoticized character, the travesti aspect could present Almanzor as a feminized king. Yet simultaneously, as with the other heroic travesti roles from this time, Almanzor gives this type of woman’s voice a vehicle for masculine power. The fifteenth-century King of Granada expands the associations of the travesti character; this timbre of voice can now represent the figurehead of the idealized Other. Il crociato in Egitto Meyerbeer’s final opera for Italy became his entr´ee into Paris and the larger international operatic scene. It is the only opera in which Meyerbeer wrote for a castrato: the role of Armando for Giambattista Velluti is generally considered the last great castrato role written by a major composer. In this opera, Meyerbeer presents a compendium of heroic voices and situations. He uses all three types of voices that could be associated with the hero: the castrato, the cross-dressed female singer, and the emerging tenor. Il crociato takes the use of disguise and crossdressing to a new level. The heroic character of Armando, premiered by Velluti, and repeated by him and then several women in the numerous revivals of the opera throughout the late 1820s, undertakes an

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exoticized disguise. Though he was part of the delegation of the Knights of Rhodes from Provence in a crusade to convert Egypt, Armando ends up being the only survivor of his brigade. To stay alive in enemy territory, he dresses like the Egyptians and has become “Elmireno,” a Saracen. Consequently, he has fallen in love with Palmide (the Sultan’s daughter) and, after they surreptitiously married, they are secretly raising their son. The opera begins with a delegation of the Knights of Rhodes arriving in Egypt to pay respect to their dead and foster peace. Traveling with the Knights, and dressed like them, is Felicia – Armando’s betrothed from Provence. The opera eventually ends happily when order is restored as Armando returns to his true identity (and stops pretending to be Elmireno) and Felicia relinquishes her claim on Armando and gives her blessing to Armando, Palmide, and their son. To complete the peaceful resolution, the Sultan does not disavow his daughter even though she secretly converted to Christianity and decides to return to Provence with Armando. The role of Felicia carries multiple codes. She spends the opera crossdressed as a Knight of Rhodes; however, she is not a heroic travesti role because she is a female character. Additionally, she is not the earlier type of character seen in Romilda, Emma, or Isaura of women who need to don a disguise to accomplish some type of business (e.g., travel alone and rescue the spouse). Unlike these other disguised female characters, Felicia is never unmasked (she retains her male attire) and reunited with the man she loves. Though she was on this trajectory, when she realizes that Armando has fallen in love with Palmire and has a child, Felicia nobly concedes her connections to Armando in light of his current commitments. The theme of exoticism is taken to a new level with the presence of the Knights of Rhodes (from Provence) in Egypt.28 The exoticism of Armando’s role is two-fold. First, Armando takes on the identity of Elmireno; through disguise, he impersonates a Saracen. Second, Armando was written for a castrato; though this voice was not entirely unheard-of in 1824 (the castrati were still singing, in limited numbers,

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in church settings), the timbre and sound of the voice evoked an older and otherworldly association for a generation that was accustomed to the female travesti and emerging Romantic tenor heroes. VO I C E A N D C H A R AC T E R I Z AT I O N I N M E Y E R B E E R ’ S I TA L I A N O P E R A S : T R AV E S T I A N D D I S G U I S E

Within the constellation of women’s voices he employed, Meyerbeer’s Italian operas differentiate between the two female singers through their function in the plot and the tessitura of their music. The second woman is given the lower tessitura and the other soprano role is generally higher in range; when the two female singers perform together, the second woman’s music is almost always on the bottom part. The singer who performed the second woman was a soprano, but was the same type of voice (written in a lower tessitura) that sang the heroic travesti roles. In fact, those who premiered Meyerbeer’s second women were additionally known as heroic travesti singers; hence, the second woman and heroic travesti roles were not only performed by the same type of voice, but also were frequently the same singers in different performances. The role the second woman singer performed maintained a constant feature: within the course of the opera, she always spent time crossdressed as a male character. In some operas this was because she was the heroic travesti role. In the other operas, the female character this singer performed was always required to cross-dress and assume the feigned identity of a male character for a while. As a direct foil to the second woman, Meyerbeer’s higher soprano never sings cross-dressed as a male character. Thus, in all of Meyerbeer’s Italian operas, one woman consistently sings as a female character and the other female singer always spends some time cross-dressed as a man. The temporarily cross-dressed second woman in Meyerbeer’s operas complicates the codes relegated to women’s voices. Instead of having a full travesti role where a female singer portrays a male character throughout the entire opera, the disguise provides the opportunity for a female singer’s voice to do two things at once: to sound as a

Women’s roles in Meyerbeer’s operas

female character’s voice and to sound as a “pretend” male voice. Yet the aural codes become very sophisticated as the reality on stage and off stage intersect. The “pretend” male voice of the female character disguised within the world of the opera has the same sound as the aesthetic convention that accepted and heard women’s voices as en travesti heroes. This construction allows audiences to hear the same sound – the second woman’s voice – to resonate as a “real” man (when she sings a heroic travesti role) or as a “pretend” man (when she sings a female character disguised as a male character), depending on the construction of the plot. In both cases, it is the context and configuration of the second woman’s voice in the opera that provides its meaning. Consequently, it was not a large leap for early nineteenth-century audiences to accept a female opera character pretending to be a man. These audiences were accustomed to performing the same suspension of disbelief for the duration of the opera when women sang heroic travesti roles. Hence, the cross-gender disguise was a microcosm of what the audiences were already doing – accepting a woman’s voice to sound as a male character. Moreover, in terms of the particular voices in these roles, it was quite possible that audiences heard the same women sing a heroic travesti role one night and the second woman – who also pretended to be a man in a cross-gender disguise – the next night.29 In each instance, regardless of the role’s gender, the female singer who portrayed travesti and second woman roles would be heard singing as a man; either for the full duration of the opera (as the heroic travesti) or for several scenes (as the second woman disguised as a male character). Along with the usual excitement produced by women in trousers on stage and the thrill of seeing various social and sumptuary codes askew, these moments of cross-gender disguise provided something additional to early nineteenth-century audiences than that which was experienced by their eighteenth-century predecessors. Though the cross-disguise aspect was seen earlier (for example, both Handel’s Alcina [1735] and Serse [1738] have roles written for a female character who spends some of the time dressed as a man), the context of such cases of disguise is quite different.30 In the eighteenth century, the fluidity between the singer’s voice and the gender of a character was celebrated as an

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aestheticized aural ecstasy in its own right. In the primo ottocento, the definitions of masculinity and femininity – in terms of sound – were becoming less flexible. During this time the heroic tradition was opening up a place for the tenor voice. In those roles where the female characters pretended to be men, a space was carved out for women’s voices that allowed them to retain their association with a culturally gendered masculine sound. In all of Meyerbeer’s operas for Italy, at least during some point, one woman’s voice is always heard as a man. Hence, Meyerbeer’s use of disguise consistently marked the voice of the second female singer as a voice that could sound as a man, not only when she sang heroic travesti roles, but even within the larger context of portraying a female character. On one level, Meyerbeer’s use of disguise with the second woman could be seen and heard as overlapping with the heroic travesti tradition and seeming to produce the same effect; in both cases women’s voices stand in for male characters. However, the situation is made more complex given the surrounding contexts. As each woman sang her respective character, the audience “heard” the gender of the two characters (and their voices) differently. In the heroic tradition, the travesti voice was marked by the gender of the character – the opera role – she portrayed: the hero. While listening to the cross-dressed female singer as the hero, the audience heard an evocation of the castrato voice. Hence, the heroic travesti singer’s voice became the sound of heroism; her voice was the idealized voice of the castrato hero. Meyerbeer’s second woman reminded the audience of the dual possibilities in this voice with the male disguise. His operas provide a stepping stone for revealing what could be wrapped inside a character’s voice: here is a woman, but she can also easily cross over into a man. Such distinctions are subtle, yet instructive for how they illustrate the different simultaneous meanings women’s voices generated. Depending upon the context, audiences were accustomed to deciphering these simultaneous codes concerning gender and character. The presence of two principal roles for female singers in the primo ottocento gives way to the singular Romantic heroine of the secondo ottocento. While Bellini’s Norma shares the spotlight with Adalgisa,

Women’s roles in Meyerbeer’s operas

Table 4.2 Roles for two leading women in Meyerbeer’s French grand operas 1831 1836 1849 1865

Robert le diable Les Huguenots Le Proph`ete L’Africaine

Isabelle, Princess of Sicily Marguerite de Valois Berthe In`es

Alice Valentine Fid`es S´elika

this type of construction is much less common once the Romantic tropes of Italian opera (e.g., the tenor hero, the tragic ending, the death of the Romantic heroine by the final curtain) become common after 1830 and the norm after 1850. Though this essay has focused on a relatively obscure collection of early operas by Meyerbeer before he went on to become the well-known opera composer of French grand opera, his Italian operas present important lessons. Seen together, they provide an instructive grouping for what they have in common. They were written when Meyerbeer was less interested in developing a maverick innovative style of opera and more intent on learning how to handle the basic conventions of the genre from its source: a time when Italian opera was still the leading international style of opera. Meyerbeer’s six Italian operas might not have had a lasting influence on other composers, but they act as an important vortex for understanding how women’s voices were configured in the first and second halves of nineteenth-century opera. Inserting these operas into our narrative of opera history allows us to have a vantage point that looks (and listens) back to the castrato-influenced timbral aesthetics of the eighteenth century that supported the primo ottocento heroic female travesti roles. As the heroic travesti practice diminished, these operas also point forward to the middle of the century and beyond with the use of two female characters along with a tenor hero.

Meyerbeer’s Italian heroines reflected in his French grand operas When Meyerbeer took his talents to Paris, he kept the dual female model in his four French grand operas (see Table 4.2).

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This is not to imply that the practice of having two principal female character roles was something that Meyerbeer was the first to use in Paris, or that he was the only one writing operas in the French grand style that incorporated two leading female roles. A central opera in this genre, Hal´evy’s La Juive (1835), employs the roles of Rachel, the Jewess referred to in the title, and the Princess Eudoxie. And one cannot but think of Verdi’s two late operas with direct connections to Paris – the Op´era’s commissioned Don Carlos in 1867 (with Elisabeth and the Princess Eboli) and the French-styled A¨ıda that was written for Cairo in 1871 (with the characters of A¨ıda and Amneris). The enormous popularity of Meyerbeer’s French grand operas in the nineteenth century can easily outshine the memory of his Italian operas, which may be seen as juvenile efforts as he was mastering his own voice. Yet originality frequently comes out of reworking older, more established, conventions. Though Meyerbeer might have relied on the plot device of cross-gender disguise to wean the Italian primo ottocento audience off of the association of the second woman’s voice with the heroic travesti role, he seemed to favor the use of two female voices in opera enough to make it a standard feature in his grand operas for Paris. Since the French were never fond of the castrato tradition, the use of two women in his Parisian operas did not invoke the same association of the heroic travesti that it did for the Italians. Instead, while Meyerbeer was central in defining the sound of French grand opera with thicker contrapuntal orchestral textures and the high florid vocal lines that needed the weight to soar over these larger orchestras, one of the primary figures in defining the configuration of the characters in the plot was Eug`ene Scribe (1791–1861), the prolific librettist who wrote the text for all four of Meyerbeer’s French grand operas as well as those for many other composers. Through the ubiquitous device of cross-dressing (whether as a heroic travesti role or the second woman disguised as a man), Meyerbeer’s six Italian operas reflect primo ottocento aesthetics by employing two female voices in leading roles. In less than a decade after Meyerbeer’s final Italian opera, the conventions for Italian opera shifted and the Romantic heroine became a singular role that combined elements

Women’s roles in Meyerbeer’s operas

from the earlier two-woman model. In Paris, the situation developed along different lines. Without trying to conflate the interests and expectations of the French and Italian audiences, it can be argued that Meyerbeer’s career in Paris presented him with the opportunity to continue writing operas with leading roles for two female voices. His move to Paris facilitated something for which his talents had been skillfully prepared. After he had spent those Italian years in the northern cradle of the travesti tradition, the international influence in French grand opera is well reflected in the career of its greatest proponent: a German composer, trained in Italy, who imported the Italian two-woman model and expanded its meaning within the context of Parisian Romanticism on the French grand opera stage.

n ot e s 1 John Rosselli writes about the rise of the tenor in the beginning of the nineteenth century in chapter 8, “The Age of the Tenor,” in his Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) esp. pp. 176–178. Rodolfo Celletti has written about the bel canto period of the castrati and the evolution of this term into the nineteenth century (A History of Bel Canto [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996]). Heather Hadlock has written about the roles for women singing en travesti as the hero in “Women Playing Men in Italian Opera, 1810–1835” in Jane A. Bernstein, ed., Women’s Voices across Musical Worlds (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2004). I have elsewhere discussed this phenomenon in Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 2 Meyerbeer’s Italian operas are beginning to become less obscure largely due to the efforts of the Opera Rara foundation and their lovely recordings of two of these operas: Il crociato in Egitto (ORC 11, 1991) and Margherita d’Anjou (ORC 25, 2003). 3 Stephen C. Meyer, Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). 4 Philip Gossett, “Introduction,” in Giacomo Meyerbeer: Excerpts from the Early Italian Operas, 1817–22, Series: Italian Opera 1810–1840, Printed

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Editions of Complete Operas and excerpts by the contemporaries of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, edited with Introductions by Philip Gossett, vol. 23 (New York: Garland, 1991). Though Weber’s next operatic project (Die Drei Puntos) after Der Freisch¨utz was not performed in his lifetime, his last two operas were Euryanthe (Vienna, 1823) and Oberon (London); the latter was performed in April 1826, just months before Weber’s death in June. Giacomo Meyerbeer to Jacob Herz Beer in Berlin; Vienna, November 1814 (Giacomo Meyerbeer: A Life in Letters, ed. Heinz and Gudrun Becker, trans. Mark Violette [Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1989] p. 32). Andrew Everett, “‘Bewitched in a Magic Garden’: Giacomo Meyerbeer in Italy,” The Donizetti Society Journal vol. 6 (1988), 162–192. Rossini’s first opera for the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, was written in 1815. Between 1816 and 1823 (the time that overlaps with Meyerbeer’s stay in Italy) Rossini wrote eighteen operas. Beginning in 1816, his nine other operas for Naples were La gazzetta (a comic opera for the Teatro dei Fiorentini, 1816), Otello (for the Teatro Fondo during the San Carlo’s renovation in 1816), Armida (1817) and seven operas for the San Carlo: Mos`e in Egitto (1818), Riccardo e Zoraide (1818), Ermione (1819), La donna del lago (1819), Maometto II (1820), and Zelmira (1822). Rossini’s four operas for Roman theatres during this time were two for the Teatro Argentina (Il barbiere di Siviglia, 1816 and Adelaide di Borgogna, 1817), Cenerentola for the Teatro Valle in 1817 and Matilde di Shabran for the Teatro Apollo in 1821. His four operas for northern theatres were La gazza ladra (1817) and Bianca e Falliero (1819) for La Scala in Milan and Eduardo e Cristina (1819) and Semiramide (1823) for La Fenice in Venice. The one-act farsa, Adina, was composed in 1818, yet premiered at the Teatro de San Carlos in Lisbon, Portugal in 1826. Felice Romani was also the librettist of Simon Mayr’s La rosa bianca e la rosa rossa and Medea in Corinto – both from 1812, at the beginning of Romani’s career. In his study of the primo ottocento librettist Cammarano, John Black cites Romani and Rossi, along with Cammarano, as leading librettists of their time (The Italian Romantic Libretto: A Study of Salvadore Cammarano [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984], pp. 292–295). “Rescue operas” of the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries involved dramas where an unjustly imprisoned

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victim is ultimately rescued at the eleventh hour by the valiant acts of the hero. See David Charlton, “Rescue Opera,” New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1992), vol. iii, pp. 1293–1294. The “second woman” is a term I explain in more depth in Voicing Gender. Several primo ottocento singers performed male and female characters; hence, there is not a specific type of voice or vocal range that was only associated with female characters or male characters. Generally, in the primo ottocento, the vocal range and tessitura of the heroic travesti/second woman singer was lower than the other soprano (“first woman”) role. Meyerbeer’s first Italian opera, Romilda e Costanza (a melodramma semiserio in two acts) was premiered at the Teatro Nuovo in Padua on July 19, 1817. It was successful and subsequently performed in Venice and Munich. In 1818 Ricordi published four excerpts; the Florentine publisher, Cipriani, later issued a fifth number. I have gleaned the background information for Meyerbeer’s opera (including compositional genesis, performance history and plot synopses) from essays by Andrew Everett (“‘Bewitched in a Magic Garden’”) and Philip Gossett (“Introduction,” Giacomo Meyerbeer). Rosamunda Pisaroni created the role of Malcolm in Rossini’s La donna del lago (1819) and King Almanzor in Meyerbeer’s L’esule di Granata (1822). She was well known in Rossini’s Semiramide (as Arsace) and the title role in Tancredi. Meyerbeer’s second opera for Italy, Semiramide riconosciuta (a dramma per musica in two acts) was premiered at the Teatro Regio, Turin in March 1819. Working once again with Rossi, who adapted this well-known eighteenth-century subject from Metastasio’s popular libretto, Meyerbeer’s opera preceded Rossini’s Semiramide (also to a libretto by Rossi) by four years. After its initial run it was revived at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna during June 1820 and two excerpts were printed by Ricordi: one in 1821 and the other in 1823. The plot and sub-plots are outlined in Philip Gossett’s “Introduction,” Giacomo Meyerbeer and Andrew Everett, “‘Bewitched in a Magic Garden,’” pp. 172–173. The premiere of Rossini’s Bianca e Falliero took place on December 26, 1819. Bassi was considered for the title role, King Almanzore, in Meyerbeer’s unrealized Almanzore project (libretto by Rossi) of 1821.

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Rosamunda Pisaroni ended up singing King Almanzor in what became L’esule di Granata at La Scala in Milan in 1822 when Romani reworked the libretto. Bassi was also one of the early interpreters of Velluti’s role of Armando in Meyerbeer’s last Italian opera, Il crociato di Egitto (1824). Stendhal refers to Carolina Bassi as an “Italian soprano” whose voice was already going by the time of Bianca e Falliero (Stendhal, The Life of Rossini, trans. Richard N. Coe, second edition [London: John Calder, 1985], p. 511). In his Garland introduction, Gossett refers to her as a mezzo-soprano; Everett calls her a contralto (“‘Bewitched in a Magic Garden,’” p. 172). Gossett writes about Bassi: “Her range was more that of a mezzo-soprano than of a soprano, but Semiramide is the higher of the two leading women’s roles in Meyerbeer’s opera.” Gossett, “Introduction,” Giacomo Meyerbeer, note 11 (unnumbered pages). The duet “Al folgor di que’ bei rai” is one of the two excerpts of this opera that was published by Ricordi in 1821. It was written for the Bologna revival of Semiramide riconosciuta in June 1820 at the Teatro Comunale and replaced the original Turin duet “Ella e` la fiamma mia” (Gossett, “Introduction,” Giacomo Meyerbeer). Meyerbeer’s third collaboration with Rossi (a two-act melodramma eroico) was premiered at the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice on June 26, 1819. The opera was quite successful and had performances in other Italian cities as well as in Germany (Dresden, Munich, and Frankfurt) and Vienna. Though outside Italy it was criticized by some for its “Italianate” style and imitation of Rossini, several excerpts from the opera were released by a small publisher in Munich as well as by Ricordi. For more on the criticism of Emma by Carl Maria von Weber and others, see Gossett, “Introduction,” Giacomo Meyerbeer. Rosa Morandi (1782–1824) sang roles that can be seen as soprano and mezzo-soprano. She sang premieres of Fanny in Rossini’s La cambiale di matrimonio (1810) and Serafina in Donizetti’s Chiara e Serafina (1822). Elizabeth Forbes, “Rosa Morandi,” New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1992), vol. iii, p. 464 and Everett, “‘Bewitched in a Magic Garden,’” p. 174; both Forbes and Everett call Morandi a “mezzo-soprano.” Rossini’s Eduardo e Cristina ran at the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice from April 24, 1819 and finished on June 25, 1819 (Gossett, “Introduction,” Giacomo Meyerbeer, note 14).

Women’s roles in Meyerbeer’s operas 22 Meyerbeer’s fourth opera (a two-act melodramma semiserio) was his first collaboration with librettist Felice Romani and premiered at La Scala in Milan on November 14, 1820. Following in the trend of his earlier Italian works, Margherita d’Anjou continued to increase Meyerbeer’s success and popularity as an opera composer. It was performed in Venice, Bologna, Turin, Florence, and Trieste as well as in Munich and Dresden. In 1826 it was given a major revival when it was performed in Paris at the Od´eon theatre. Due to its popularity, Ricordi printed six excerpts of the opera after its first season in 1821. Following its success in Paris in 1826, this work became Meyerbeer’s first opera published in a full piano-vocal score; Margherita d’Anjou was issued in Paris by Schlesinger. See Gossett, “Introduction,” Giacomo Meyerbeer, note 22 (also mentioned in Everett, “‘Bewitched in a Magic Garden,’” p. 177). 23 Meyerbeer’s penultimate Italian opera started out as Almanzore for the Teatro Argentina in Rome with a libretto by Gaetano Rossi. Meyerbeer received the commission from Giovanni Paterni, the impresario of the Argentina, a few weeks after the premiere of Margherita and the new opera was to be performed a few months later at the end of February 1821. Due to various circumstances – sickness and problems with the theatre – the opera was eventually transferred to La Scala in Milan where it was first performed as L’esule di Granata (The Exile from Granada) on March 12, 1822 with a reworked libretto by Felice Romani. Though this opera did not enjoy the same popularity as his earlier operas, Ricordi published five excerpts from it. 24 Romani’s plot of L’esule di Granata is loosely based on the historical rivalry between two ruling families (factions) in Moorish Spain: the Abencerrages and the Zegris ( Jeremy Commons, liner notes for 100 years of Italian opera: 1820–1830, Opera Rara, ORCH 104, David Parry conductor, Philharmonia Orchestra, London, 1994, p. 54). 25 Bassi had since gone on to establish herself as a singer of travesti roles; she created Falliero in Rossini’s 1819 Bianca e Falliero. 26 Adelaide Tosi premiered the following Donizetti roles: Argelia in L’esule di Roma, 1828; Neala in Il paria, 1829; Elisabetta in Il castello di Kenilworth, 1829. She also sang the premier of Bianca in Bellini’s revised Bianca e Fernando, 1828. 27 Negroponte is modern-day Euboea, the largest of the Greek islands in the Aegean. The plot of Maometto II is about the war between the

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Naomi Andr´e Venetians and the Turks in which the Turks were victorious. Maometto is Mohammed the Conqueror (Charles Osborne, The Bel Canto Operas, Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1994, pp. 101–104). 28 Mark Everist has written about the theme of exoticism (“Meyerbeer’s Il crociato in Egitto: M´elodrame, Opera, Orientalism,” Cambridge Opera Journal 8/3 (1996), 215–250) and I have discussed the roles for women in this opera in more depth in Voicing Gender; nonetheless, I will present the themes that connect this opera to my argument here. 29 Though not examples of two consecutive nights, two cases that illustrate the fluidity between “second women” and travesti roles are with the Meyerbeer singers Rosamunda Pisaroni and Carolina Bassi. Pisaroni created the second woman role of Andromaca in Rossini’s Ermione at the San Carlo in Naples in March 1819; at the same theatre later that year in September she created the travesti role of Malcolm in Rossini’s La donna del lago. Bassi premiered the title role in Meyerbeer’s Semiramide riconosciuta in March 1819 at the Teatro Regio in Turin. In September of the same year she sang the travesti role of Falliero in Rossini’s Bianca e Falliero at La Scala in Milan. 30 In Handel’s Alcina, Bradamante spends most of the opera disguised as “Ricciardo” so she can find her betrothed (Ruggiero) in Alcina’s lair. In Serse, Amastre, betrothed to Serse, is disguised as a man when she arrives at Serse’s court to see if he has been faithful to her. Thanks to Gillian Rodger for reminding me of the plot of Serse and talking with relish about cross-dressing.

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The effect of a bomb in the hall: The French “opera of ideas” and its cultural role in the 1920s Jane F. Fulcher

When considering the great epochs of French operatic history one would scarcely even entertain the notion of including the decade of the 1920s, which pales in comparison with the febrility of Weimar. In fact, our dismissal of the French operas of this decade only appears to reinforce the common dictum of the genre’s decline in much of Europe – its ineluctable marginality both in modern culture and in musical life. However, as I shall argue, this apparently insignificant decade in French opera is indeed seminal in terms of the genre’s changing function, its evolving intellectual and political role. For opera in France in the twenties became an arena for a new kind of exchange: as a nexus for attempts to enunciate ideology, it led rather to an intriguing effacement of older ideological lines. This, I maintain, was the result of the inherent contradictions of the sub-genre involved, which sought to communicate abstract ideas in a semiotically unstable and emotionally compelling art. The “opera of ideas,” as I shall call it, emerged from and yet transformed German precedents, fostered by governments of both the Right and the Left in the polarized atmosphere that followed World War I. When articulate ideologically, however, it failed to convince artistically; conversely, the most successful examples led not to reinforcement of certainties but to intellectual ferment. And ironically for a genre that sought simple truths, it engendered its own avant-garde subversions, or a new form of commentary in opera, as I shall show in the case of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortil`eges. Both during the First World War and in the twenties the Op´era’s savvy director, Jacques Rouch´e, was well aware of the artistic, commercial, and political interests that he was called upon to balance. For after, as during, the war, Rouch´e knew that the opera should not only appeal to the broader audience it now sought to attract, but must serve current political and national interests. Because of the centrality 115

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of the latter, even in a period of financial hardship, as in the early 1920s, Rouch´e succeeded in obtaining at least his prewar subvention.1 The integrity of the state opera was a serious matter, for just as in the Weimar Republic it was to serve an educational role, although here it was not progressive, but rather politically conservative and nationalist.2 Drawing on his experience during the war, Rouch´e knew just what to stage, selecting those works from the older and newer repertoire that would fulfill this pedagogical function. As soon as the war was over, he turned to the ardently patriotic Camille Saint-Sa¨ens, producing his historical opera Henry VIII in December 1918. Two years later Rouch´e presented the work of Saint-Saens’s notorious antagonist, Vincent d’Indy, a composer who was equally venerable, and unimpeachably nationalist. Appropriately, it was during the government of the conservative Bloc National that d’Indy’s opera, La L´egende de Saint Christophe (which he had begun in 1903 and referred to as his “drame anti-Juif”), finally had its premiere.3 One of the rationales for this choice on the part of Rouch´e was evidently his belief that the work would reinforce the ideology of the ruling coalition and engage with current intellectual interests. As he was undoubtedly aware, this was the moment of a marked revival not only of “neo-Medievalism” but of “neo-scholasticism” among prominent Catholic circles in France. Hence it was also the period of revival of the medieval miracle play, promoted by fervent Catholics like Henri Gheon and the Sorbonne professor Gustave Cohen.4 A return to the Middle Ages was similarly characteristic of French philosophers, including Etienne Gilson, and of theologians like Jacques Maritain, who published his Art et scholastique in 1920. And finally, the twenties was a decade of neo-Medievalism not only in French Catholic architecture, but also in sculpture, as well as in the war and funeral monuments now being raised throughout France. But other themes in d’Indy’s opera could be interpreted as relating to current interests and issues in the intellectual and religious or the political and social realms. This was the period when not only the Right, but also ecclesiastical authorities, were condemning political liberalism, together with equally threatening “naturalism,” socialism,

The French “opera of ideas”

and communism. D’Indy had combined related concerns in his opera, along with the similarly compelling themes of traitors and race – as resonant now as during the Dreyfus Affair, when he conceived the work. Although I have discussed this opera in considerable detail in a previous study, it is important here to review those elements that together shaped its ideological enunciation and its influence in the twenties.5 The opera was based upon a thirteenth-century collection of the lives of saints, the L´egende dor´ee (Legenda aurea), the product of a Dominican monk known in France as Jacques de Voragine. In the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, the ardently anti-Dreyfusard d’Indy had attempted to adapt the legend to the service of the nationalists’ ideological cause. Here the saint’s nemesis becomes a Jew, who is both avaricious and a traitor, yet has succeeded in corrupting the bourgeoisie and head of state, and is vengefully killed in the end. Stylistically, the most symbolic and didactic element in this drame myst`ere lies in the choice and manipulation of Gregorian chant, which d’Indy carried to unprecedented extremes. Of the opera’s twenty-four themes, seven are taken literally from the Gregorian repertoire, and probably intended (idealistically) to be recognized by the audience. But d’Indy deploys other stylistic resources beyond melodies in the interest of exegesis, including allusions to the masters admired (and as interpreted) at the Schola Cantorum, in particular Bach and Beethoven. These references, like the Renaissance motet style that d’Indy (and others) associated with les primitifs, appear when the text refers to sincerity, spiritual probity, and the certitudes of faith.6 The Jew is characterized by borrowings from Wagner’s depiction of Alberich in The Ring, as well as by the so-called “Italo-Judaic” style which d’Indy associated with Meyerbeer and French grand opera. What, then, was the message that d’Indy originally intended in his adaptation of the legend? Anti-materialistic, it indicted a world motivated by profit, and based on a corrupt structure of authority. Against such greed and corruption he contraposed Christophe’s duty, sacrifice, and heroism, the purity of race and nation, and the primacy of collective values and of social hierarchy. The latter themes were

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particularly resonant now, in the wake of the First World War, and with the advent of the Bloc National and the current turn to spirituality, community, and religion. La L´egende de Saint Christophe premiered on June 6, 1920, and was clearly meant to be the highlight of a less than triumphant operatic season.7 The other works performed in 1920, which met with a less than enthusiastic response, included two other operas on biblical themes – Florent Schmitt’s La Trag´edie de Salom´e and Mariotte’s Salom´e. D’Indy’s apparently religious opera not only promised to comfort good Catholics, but premiered in the midst of pervasive social anxiety, which even included the moderate Left. For together with political polarization there was a rapidly mounting fear of Bolshevism, which worked to the advantage of the political Right in the defensive postwar climate. Moreover, in 1919 Paris was crippled by a series of strikes, and in 1920 they extended to the capital’s prestigious lyric theatres. All this, together with the continuing postwar intellectual and emotional trauma, now made the work appear singularly appropriate not only as theatre but as public ritual.8 The symbolic function of the opera as Rouch´e had defined it during the war – to help achieve national unity and ideological consensus – was still palpably in place. Surprisingly, despite its clearly partisan intent, the work won wide approbation, and less on the basis of its musical qualities than because of the ideas it represented for different groups, within the political conjuncture. This was abetted not only by the increased prestige of the Schola during and after the war, but by the decors by Maurice Denis, which differed substantially from d’Indy’s description in the score. As opposed to the composer’s explicit and lavish nineteenth-century conception, Denis brought out the sacred and abstract components of the drama, thus diverting attention from d’Indy’s topical and controversial references. For example, his scenery for the palace of the “Reine de Volupt´e” disregards d’Indy’s specification of Byzantine mosaics, intended to suggest the dangerous, sybaritic, orient, as opposed to the occident. Instead, he created the appropriate mood by means of sensuous forms or shapes, but, again, at the expense of d’Indy’s explicit and realistic detail.

The French “opera of ideas”

The conservative critic Adolphe Boschot was clearly influenced by this more generalized treatment, admiring the way in which d’Indy employed a legendary subject in order to incorporate his personal social and religious convictions. Yet the message of the opera was so multivalent in the context that even the Socialist Populaire de Paris was highly laudatory of the opera, ostensibly on the basis of its condemnation of the bourgeoisie.9 The postwar social crisis, then, had created a situation in which both the Right and the Left could project their political enemies onto d’Indy’s villains. As Rouch´e foresaw, interpretation of the opera was closely linked to the political context which, in large part, accounted for its broad appeal and ability to engage the audience. What had originally begun as a conservative, hostile, reaction in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair was now, in the postwar period, interpreted rather as a statement of French defensiveness or an appeal to social justice. Yet in spite of the multiple interpretations that the opera, as staged, could accommodate, it was not an artistic success but a mere succ`es d’estime, which lasted for only three performances. D’Indy’s was an “opera of ideas,” and the ideological element patently held a strong appeal, although this had made it inimical to a nuanced and thus satisfying artistic treatment. But this was an era of concern with ideologies on the part of both the Left and the Right, reflected in a number of artistic genres, among which the opera was only one. Another was the novel of ideas, or roman a` th`ese, which had developed since the nineteenth century, and was now flourishing once more among writers such as Roger Martin du Gard.10 Here we encounter the same tensions as in its operatic cognate in France – between the hortatory and poetic elements, or between ideological certainty and real human complexity. As Susan Suleiman has aptly expressed it, this is a genre inherently “divided against itself,” activated by the opposing tendencies of schematicization and concrete human experience.11 But the genre persisted, and Maurice Barr`es, who had practiced it since the nineteenth century, and who was acclaimed through a national funeral in 1923, was at the height of his popularity among

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nationalists. Not surprisingly, it was now that one of Barr`es’s most controversial novels, Un Jardin sur l’Oronte, was made into an opera by Alfred Bachelet, selected by Barr`es as the most appropriate composer for the work.12 But Barr`es died before he could construct a libretto from the novel as he had planned, although, being an admirer of Wagner, he claimed to have projected a Wagnerian conception onto the work. The novel, Barr`es’s last, published in 1922, concerns the love of a Christian and a Saracen, an episode drawn from a long epic of the crusades in the Middle Ages. The story’s topicality lay in the fact that it dealt with the still highly charged theme of the conflict between the orient and the occident, and concomitantly with the clash of races and purported “modes of feeling.” Yet despite Barr`es’s conservativism, the novel, in fact, created a scandal, particularly in the Catholic press, which perceived its overt sensuality as an outrage to religious morality.13 It was perhaps this media attention that initially attracted Bachelet to the project, for he employed stylistic elements that heightened the conflict – music evocative of the Christian Middle Ages as opposed to sinuous “oriental” vocalises.14 But he also included conventional forms that are related both to serious opera and to op´era-comique, such as recitatives, airs, chants, proverbes (evoking folk culture), and religious processions. The scandal over the novel undoubtedly delayed the work’s premiere, and, now ambiguous as to its political implications, it was finally presented on November 7, 1932, the year that a leftist government gained power. Predictably, conservative journals seized the occasion to laud the opera, which despite its condemnation by the church still represented the prestige and nationalist values of Barr`es. Ren´e Dumesnil, in the Mercure de France, reported an “´etonnante r´eussite” (astonishing success), in terms of both the libretto’s adaptation of the novel and Bachelet’s ability to capture its nuances. Yet he feels compelled to begin by addressing the continuing controversy over the novel, particularly among Catholic circles, by citing Barr`es himself on the work: “Dans ce Jardin sur l’Oronte je ne pr´etend plus mˆener le bon combat Catholique et Chr´etien que Racine dans ses trag´edies, F´en´elon dans son Tel´emaque, ou le Tasse dans sa J´erusalem.” (“In this Jardin sur l’Oronte

The French “opera of ideas”

I don’t claim to fight the good Christian and Catholic fight, any more than Racine does in his tragedies, F´en´elon in his Tel´emaque, or Tasso in his Jerusalem.”)15 The goal, Dumesnil explains, is “art,” and he then cites a quote by the abb´e Br´emond who characterizes it as a “fantaisie” in order to justify Barr`es’s provocation. Dumesnil also notes the opera’s apt adaptation of Wagnerian stylistic traits, for him consisting of the leitmotifs, the solid construction, and the well-developed plan. In short, it is characterized by an (implicitly d’Indyste) “natural nobility” and erudition, as evidenced in its use of “oriental folklore,” as well as of music from the Middle Ages.16 Here, however, the conservative goal of separating the two cultures of orient and occident is undermined or ignored in his discussion of the effective aesthetic results of their fusion. Predictably, Dumesnil also lauds Bachelet’s conservative “archa¨ısme charmante,” or his use of old French dances such as a “pastourelle compagnard,” a “carole gracieuse,” an “estompie,” and a “gigue.”17 The work, then, transcended ideological lines, containing elements that appealed to both Right and Left, becoming for some an embodiment of conservative values and for others a bold defiance of the church. Each position was therefore forced to accept those factors, ideological or aesthetic, that it would otherwise have considered inimical if priority were given either to its content or to its style. The presentation of Bachelet’s ambiguous work, even at a delicate moment, is not surprising in light of precedents of operas that concerned social-philosophic ideas. One was Georges Hue’s politically conservative Dans l’ombre de la cath´edrale of 1922, which centers on the opposition between “l’id´eal religieux” and “l’id´eal libertaire.”18 In light of the volatility of the issue in France, the action is judiciously set in the Cathedral of Toledo in Spain (traditionally associated by the French with fervent religiosity), and drawn from a Spanish novel. Hue clearly considered himself to be a conservative French intellectual, and in 1935 signed the “Manifeste pour la paix en Europe et la d´efense de l’Occident,” supporting Mussolini’s aggression in Ethiopia.19 However, like d’Indy’s, this didactic work was only a succ`es d’estime, yet

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considered appropriate to the postwar function of the Op´era, which would persist in selecting such works. This continued throughout the twenties, and when the Cartel des Gauches came to power in 1924 it used the Op´era to project the film Le Miracle des loups, with music by the Conservatoire’s director, Henri Rabaud. The Left, despite its claims to modernity, still had to imprint this pillar of French culture with its political values (as it had since the French Revolution), and thus turned to history and the heroic. The film, based on a novel by Dupuy-Mazuel, concerns a key episode from early French history – the story of Louis XI and Charles the Bold, or the siege of Beauvais, crowned by the heroism of Jeanne Hachette.20 Because of its historical resonance and its associations with both French heroism and patriotism, the film was presented before the head of state and members of the new Left government on November 13, 1924. Although the Left here attempted to marshall French history and the major monument of French culture, the Paris Opera, to its cause, it also inscribed more musically progressive, if controversial, values on the nation’s Op´era-comique. It was undoubtedly during the Cartel des Gauches that the theatre accepted Marcel Delannoy’s Le Poirier de mis`ere, which, however, was not performed until the Right had returned to power. Premiered at the Op´era-comique on February 21, 1927, it had, according to reports, the effect of a bomb being detonated in the hall.21 Several important critics were explicit about their reasons for condemning the work, accusing the author of vulgarity and having been influenced by increasingly threatening “bolshevist tendencies.” This was probably a reference to continuing agitation on the French Left, which had been battling vitriolically with the Right over finances in the chamber throughout the previous year.22 The work’s text, by Andr´e Tourrasse and Jean Limousin, in the tradition of the more “popular” culture of the Left, is allegorical, described alternately as based on a Flemish folk tale or on the ancient myth of Sisyphus. The characters include such abstract, yet in the context politically charged, figures as “Mis`ere,” “Le Peuple,” “Le Saint,” and “La Mort.” The political “charge,” and specifically the work’s association

The French “opera of ideas”

with the Communist Left, was heightened by the effect of the stark, austere decor, which anticipated the innovations of Weimar’s Kroll Opera. Moreover, the opera is cast in a genre that provocatively crosses established ideological lines, for it attempts to appropriate the popular mystery play, but in the political interests of the Left. Recalling d’Indy, it is boldly entitled a “Myst`ere en 3 actes,” with one of the existing copies of the controversial opera inscribed to Maurice Ravel.23 The tumult at the work’s premiere was provoked, in part, by this daring effacement of ideological-generic divisions, which did engage, if indeed enrage, the public. Not surprisingly, both Jean Marnold and his friend, Maurice Ravel, came to the defense of the opera when Ravel’s old nemesis in the press, Pierre Lalo, condemned it. Recalling the time when Lalo had attacked his own work, Ravel now indignantly took issue with Lalo’s pious recommendation that the author “follow Ravel’s example.”24 But as we shall see, this was not Ravel’s only response to the ideological conservativism being enunciated through French opera – it was a tendency that he would cleverly combat on several fronts. Far more acceptable to conservatives in the twenties was Joseph Canteloube’s Le Mas, which was premiered at the Opera on April 3, 1929, at the urging of the reactionary critic of Le Menestrel, Paul Bertrand.25 Canteloube, a biographer and supporter of d’Indy (and was to become a functionary during the Vichy Regime) had selected a theme that once again recalls Maurice Barr`es. For the title of the work, Le Mas, refers to the traditional name of the family farm in southern France, thus, within the context, evoking both regionalist and nationalist associations. The action, as described in the score, takes place specifically in Quercy, in the region of the “Auvergne m´eridionale,” “dans une famille de vielle souch terrien” (“in a family of the old stock of the earth”).26 The work was begun before the First World War (the dates given in the score are 1911–1913), and like so many operas of this period employs leitmotifs (although not systematically or symphonically) yet boldly introduces some bitonal passages for specific dramatic reasons.27 However, it was the theme of the opera that was so compelling for political

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conservatives; in fact, one contemporary described it by employing a rhetoric that echoes Barr`es’s theme of “rootedness” in Les D´eracin´es: “C’est la th`eme des ancˆetres qui, plus fort que l’attrait des villes, reconquiert un jeune d´eracin´e et le fixe d´efinitivement au pays natal.” (“It is the theme of ancestors which, stronger than the attraction of cities, reconquers an uprooted young man and fixes him definitively in his native land.”)28 Others stressed its roots in classical culture, characterizing it as a commentary on the fortunes of the ancient “georgics” from Virgil, and again ignoring the stylistic innovations in the work. As we have seen, in some cases it was the theme that determined the ideological interpretation, but in others it was the style employed, as construed within the current context. Yet perhaps because of this ambiguity, and the concomitant engagement that it triggered among the public, the Opera persisted in the presentation of operas with ideological or political themes. On June 23, 1933, for example, during the period of a government to the Left, the Opera performed Canteloube’s Vercing´etorix, despite the composer’s conservative orientation. For, once more, the theme was one with which the Left now wished to identify, especially in light of fascism – French patriotism, yet its stress being not on blood and soil but on nobility and sacrifice. With no regional elements here implied, this history of the ancient Gauls (to a libretto of Etienne Cl´ement) led Canteloube to further innovations, such as the first use of the ondes Martinot in an opera orchestra.29 Hence the utterance was once more ambiguous, as had been the case in previous works we have seen, which did not dissuade the Op´era from persevering in its attempt to foster the genre. For again, the Op´era’s function as it had been re-established during the war was to diffuse ideas in the national interest, which even if contested, would “engage.” If d’Indy was the most prominent French composer to espouse politically conservative ideas through opera, then Ravel, as we have noted, was the most outspoken critic of this endeavor. Like d’Indy during the period of the Dreyfus Affair, Ravel after the war sought ideological expression for the cultural position that he had gradually

The French “opera of ideas”

defined for himself in the course of the conflict. This was one that implacably rejected uncritical nationalism, as well as the narrow official dogma concerning French culture and all that it must inherently exclude. Ravel’s ideal of French patriotism was firmly rooted in the traditional Republican, and ultimately revolutionary, conception of individual responsibility, founded unequivocally upon human reason.30 And so his response to the postwar climate and to the conservative nationalism that we have seen was to assume the intellectually critical role that was associated with the French Left. But Ravel characteristically became engaged with ideological issues obliquely, or on a symbolic level, and through gestures we can only understand fully within the context that we have examined. The fact that Ravel espoused Socialist sympathies, subscribing only to the Socialist Populaire de Paris, and frequented Socialist politicians like L´eon Blum and Paul Painlev´e, is widely known.31 Moreover, Manuel Rosenthal points out explicitly in his memoirs about Ravel, “il e´ tait ce qu’on appellerait aujourd’hui un homme de gauche” (“he was what one would call today a man of the Left”).32 Indeed, Ravel’s cultural gestures, choices, and stylistic proclivities in the postwar period are as telling as his reading and associations, and are consonant with the ideals of the contemporary French Left. This includes his response to the nationalist interdiction on foreign cultural and racial influences, to colonialism, or imperialism, and to conservative conceptions of proper stylistic models. All of these themes, in addition to his clever response to the inherently unsuccessful yet culturally central French “opera of ideas,” we may perceive in L’Enfant et les sortil`eges. This “fantaisie lyrique en deux actes,” as Ravel referred to the work, to a text of Colette, was completed in 1924 and, he explained, was in the spirit of “l’op´erette am´ericaine.”33 It was provocative for a French composer to manifest not only the influence of American popular culture, but specifically jazz, and on the official stage, here playfully associated with a black teapot.34 As Ravel himself put it in a letter to Colette, “What do you think of a cup and a teapot, in old black Wedgwood, singing a ragtime? I confess that the idea of having two

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negroes singing a ragtime at our National Academy of Music fills me with great joy.”35 This, moreover, was in the midst of a virulent current of anti-Americanism on the part of the nationalists and the conservative center, which were both economically and culturally “protectionist.”36 But Ravel’s playfully provocative marshalling of styles in the work is not limited to jazz: at a time of stress on French “purity,” he invokes the oriental, but in a manner that mocks traditional colonialist orientalism. The solo aria of the Chinese cup, for example, facetiously employs the typical parallel fourths and pentatonicism of the conventional references to “the oriental.” In addition, at the beginning of the work Ravel consciously invokes oriental clich´es to create an atmosphere of fantasy, especially through the color of the oboe, the pentatonic pitch material, and the sonorities of the open fourth and fifth.37 But perhaps most clever and incisive is Ravel’s biting ridicule, through trivialization, of those styles still associated with d’Indy and his Schola Cantorum, the reactionary stance of which he loathed.38 Here it is important to recall that d’Indy’s nationalist and pedantic opera, La L´egende de Saint Christophe, premiered at the time that Ravel was composing his work. As we may also recall, d’Indy here didactically deployed those styles that the Schola associated with its conservative philosophy, especially medieval organum and Renaissance sacred choral music. These are precisely the styles that Ravel employs to connote the naive, but absurdly so in the context, as in the final a cappella fugue of the animals. In d’Indy’s opera such a style is marshalled when the chorus sings of the power of the cross to prevent sinners from damnation: Ravel employs it when the animals praise the good child. As Jankel´evitch noted, the final chorus “with its canon-like imitations and its seething superimposed voices reveals a polyphonist worthy of the masters of the Renaissance.”39 But Ravel goes even further in subverting the pedantic meaning of the Schola’s sacred styles, employing medieval organum and making reference to the august French Baroque.40 In the former case Ravel refers to early organum together with oriental clich´es to suggest the fairy-world of the child, thus defiantly conflating, not opposing, East and West.

The French “opera of ideas”

Just as perversely, for conservatives, he also combines medieval organum with modernist techniques condemned at the Schola, including Stravinskian changing meters and Schoenbergian vocal glissandi. Ravel’s confrontational symbolism, or syncretism, extends to his use of French Baroque elements which, as in Le Tombeau de Couperin, he combines with stylistic suggestions of the non-French Scarlatti.41 Other stylistic references include composers ideologically condemned at the Schola, such as Offenbach, Puccini, and Massenet, who for d’Indy were products of pernicious Jewish influences, even though the latter two were not Jewish. In short, Ravel made an authentic, uncompromised statement on the national stage by inverting and thus mocking those languages associated with chauvinistic or extreme nationalist ideology. While Carolyn Abbate has read this work in terms of a French modernist obsession with animation of the “lifeless,” or sound reproduction, making this work a “tombeau,” we may proceed even further. The trope, within this cultural context, extends to empty reproduction of styles – to styles that were culturally dead, yet artificially reanimated in the conservative climate.42 If politics may encompass attempts to expose the very premises and conventions that underlie a dominant social position, then Ravel, here, was indeed “engaged.” But this we can see only if we perceive the dialogue, or dialogic exchange, between Ravel’s avant-garde manipulations and the “opera of ideas” in postwar France. Ravel, in fact, acknowledged his subversive, if amusing, stylistic intentions in the opera in a candid letter to his close friend Roland-Manuel: “I can assure you that this work, in two parts, will be distinguished by a mixture of styles which will be severely criticized, which leaves Colette indifferent, and me not caring a damn.”43 Ravel was indeed correct: when the work premiered at the Op´era-comique on February 1, 1926 (toward the end of the Cartel des Gauches), disruptions by those offended predictably broke out. Although some critics in more conservative journals (such as Henry Malherbe in Le Temps) did praise it, perceiving only classicism and “spirited sensuality,” others were far less sanguine. The critic

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for La Libert´e, Robert Dezarnaud, was clearly not amused, and was indeed indignant about Ravel’s ironic deployment of styles in the opera.44 For French opera was taken seriously as a medium of ideas and ideology throughout the twenties, and that which was presented at a statesubventioned theatre was scrutinized within this light. The “opera of ideas,” then, was both a necessity and condemned to failure: while meeting expectations for a hortatory, edifying art, if musically successful it thus defeated its goal. But it did achieve cultural centrality, fusing different sectors and employing those themes that engaged the audience, and it forced established creeds to re-examine their ideologicalaesthetic stances. Not dead, but transitional, this operatic genre did provoke and thus lead to further dialogue, not only between political antagonists, but in Ravel’s case between French opera’s future and its past.

n ot e s 1 Rouch´e continued to employ Louis Laloy, who was always in touch with the latest intellectual and political developments, as his secretary. On Laloy, see Jane F. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 136–138. Also see Louis Laloy, Louis Laloy (1874–1944) on Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky, trans. and annotated by Deborah Priest (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). 2 On opera in the Weimar Republic, see Pascal Huynh, La Musique sous la R´epublique de Weimar (Paris: Fayard, 1998), pp. 258–261, and Susan Cook, Opera for a New Republic: the Zeitopern of Krenek, Weill, and Hindemith (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988). 3 D’lndy referred to his opera as such in a letter of September 17, 1903, to Pierre de Br´eville. As cited by L´eon Vallas, Vincent d’Indy, vol. ii (Paris: Albin Michel, 1950), p. 327. 4 Dorothy Knowles, French Drama of the Inter-War Years. 1918–1939 (London: George G. Harrap, 1967), p. 299, and Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 30.

The French “opera of ideas” 5 See Fulcher, French Cultural Politics, pp. 66–72, and Jane F. Fulcher, “D’Indy’s ‘Drame anti-Juif’ and Its Meaning in Paris, 1920,” Cambridge Opera Journal 2/3 (November 1990), 285–319. 6 As Vallas, among others, notes, Vincent d’Indy, p. 335, d’Indy makes musical reference to Bach’s Passions and to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. 7 June 6 was actually the date of the open dress rehearsal, the rep´etition g´en´erale, to which the press was invited, and thus was treated as the premiere. The printed score gives the date of June 9, which indicates that it had to be changed, since the press reports appeared on the 8th. Because of the series of strikes, the first commercial performance, or “creation,” did not take place until December 8. 8 On the trauma of the period, see Maurice Denis, Nouvelles th´eories sur l’art moderne. Sur l’art sacr´ee (Paris: Rouart et Watelin, 1921), p. 194. 9 Adolphe Boschot, Chez les musiciens (Paris: Plon, 1922), p. 214, Le Populaire de Paris, June 8, 1920, and La Revue critique des id´ees et des livres (associated with the Action Franc¸aise), July 1920, 105–108. For more details on the decor, see Fulcher, “D’Indy’s ‘Drame anti-Juif’ and Its Meaning in Paris, 1920.” 10 Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la Patrie: Les intellectuels et la premi`ere guerre mondiale (1910–1919) (Paris: Editions de la D´ecouverte, 1996), p. 155. 11 Susan Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 21–22. Also see Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (New York: Avon, 1957), pp. 20–22. 12 Alfred Bachelet, an admirer of both Wagner and Debussy, was the chef du chant and then the conductor at the Op´era-comique under Messager and Broussan, and in 1919 became the director of the Conservatoire at Nancy. In 1929 he was elected to the Acad´emie des Beaux-Arts. 13 Michel Winock, Le Si`ecle des intellectuels (Paris: Seuil, 1997), p. 195. 14 See Ren´e Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres: 1919–1939 (Paris: Editions du Milieu du Monde, 1946), p. 131. 15 Review of Bachelet’s Un Jardin sur l’Oronte by Ren´e Dumesnil, Mercure de France (November 15, 1932), 444–445. 16 Ibid., pp. 446–450. As Dumesnil points out, p. 450, this includes the use of ancient Arab modes. It is significant to note here that extracts from Bachelet’s Un Jardin sur l’Oronte were recorded during the Vichy regime, in 1942–1943, under the sponsorship of the S´ecretariat g´en´eral des

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18

19 20

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Beaux-Arts at the Association franc¸aise d’Action Artistique. See Philippe Morin, “Une Nouvelle Discographie pour la France,” in Myriam Chim`enes, ed., La Vie musicale sous Vichy (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 2001), p. 265. Dumesnil, Mercure de France (November 15, 1932), p. 451. He ends, p. 453, by praising Rouch´e for having “honored French art” in presenting this work, and then expresses his dismay that the Opera’s subvention had just been reduced to 400,000 francs, undoubtedly because of the effects of the Depression, now being felt in France. Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, p. 134. The score at the Biblioth`eque Nationale de France, Musique, published in 1922, indicates cuts for performance at the Op´era-comique. Winock, Le Si`ecle des intellectuels, pp. 625–627. Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, p. 134, and Franc¸ois ´ Porcile, La Belle Epoque de la musique franc¸aise: Le temps de Maurice Ravel. 1871–1940 (Paris: Fayard, 1999), p. 341. Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, p. 199. The review in T´el´erama of August 1, 1927, also notes the polemics that the work provoked at its premiere. It goes on to point out that the music is “severe” and powerful, and influenced by folklore. Maurice Agulhon, La R´epublique 1880 a` nos jours (Paris: Hachette, 1990), vol. i, p. 434. And on the work’s reception see Leslie Sprout, “Music for a ‘New Era’: Composers and National Identity in France, 1936–1946” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2000), p. 59. The review in T´el´erama of August 1, 1927, recounts the legend on which the work is based: “Misery,” an old woman, has nothing but a cabin and a pear tree. She welcomes and comforts a vagabond, who turns out to be Saint Denis. He allows her a wish, and she asks that her pear tree imprison the thieves who have appeared, but she thus traps Death. Humanity is happy until the sick, weak, and desperate come to implore her to release Death. Then all returns to order. The fact that the story could be read as an allegory of the present and that it uses religious references, including a saint, relates it to d’Indy’s La L´egende de Saint Christophe, which may have been a further provocation. On the possible sources for the libretto see Sprout, “Music for a ‘New Era’,” p. 59. Significantly, the copy of the score at the Biblioth`eque Nationale de France, Musique, published in Paris by Heugel in 1926, is dedicated to Maurice Ravel.

The French “opera of ideas” 25 Paul Bertrand, Le Monde de la musique (Geneva: La Palatine, 1947), p. 199. 26 See the score, Le Mas. Pi`ece lyrique en trois actes (Paris: Au Menestrel, Heugel, 1927). 27 I am grateful to Andrea Musk for discussing the work with me. See her analysis of it in her “Aspects of Regionalism in French Music during the Third Republic: The Schola Cantorum, d’Indy, Sev´erac, and Canteloube,” D.Phil. dissertation, Oxford University, 1999. 28 Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, p. 103. A review by Dominique Sordet, in Action franc¸aise on April 5, 1929, notes the regionalism in the work, and specifically the use of themes from the Auvergne, the composer’s home region, though he criticizes the music and the staging. Another review, by Roland-Manuel, in Le M´enestrel on April 5, 1929, also notes its use of regional melodies, which here, he argues, accord well with the harmonic advances of the beginning of the century. And so, despite the conservative message of the libretto, Sordet is not enthusiastic about the work because of the Wagnerian harmonic language, and Roland-Manuel, politically to the Left, defends it on the basis of its harmonic innovations for its period. 29 Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, p. 104. 30 See Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers during the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 9. 31 Arbie Orenstein, ed., A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 113. As Orenstein points out, p. 29, Ravel had known L´eon Blum since the turn of the century, in the circle of the Revue blanche. Ravel continued to admire Blum and Paul Painlev´e, who had been Minister of Finance during the war. Also see Manuel Rosenthal, Ravel. Souvenirs (Paris: Hazan, 1995), pp. 15 and 127, on Ravel’s dedication to Le Populaire and his ties to L´eon Blum. As Rosenthal perceived it, an inherent sympathy for the poor helped determine Ravel’s political choices. 32 Rosenthal, Ravel, p. 127. 33 Ravel, “Esquisse autobiographique,” as published in the Revue musicale (1938), 214–215. The original manuscript is in the Biblioth`eque Nationale de France, Musique, Reserve. 34 Ravel displayed a unique temerity among French composers in the twenties by being the only one to employ jazz on the operatic stage. On Ravel’s enthusiasm for Billy Arnold’s jazz orchestra, see Geoffrey J.

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35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Haydon, “A Study of the Exchange between the Music of Early Twentieth-Century Parisian Composers and Ragtime, Blues, and Early Jazz,” DMA document, University of Texas at Austin, 1992, p. 58. Orenstein, ed., A Ravel Reader, p. 188. I am indebted to Gary Laycock, who brought many of the observations that follow concerning Ravel’s stylistic references and manipulations to my attention in an excellent seminar paper. As he and others have noted, a trombone “sneer” announces the entrance of the English teapot and Chinese cup, followed by a bass clarinet playing a blues motive. The brassy orchestration and the rhythm further suggest both the foxtrot and ragtime. See Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York: Norton, 1994), pp. 94–95. See Glenn Watkin’s discussion of the work in his Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century (New York: Schirmer, 1988), pp. 279–283. On Ravel’s aversion to the Schola, see Fulcher, French Cultural Politics, pp. 209–210. For a discussion of the styles used in the work, see Vladimir Jankel´evitch, Ravel, trans. Margaret Crosland (New York: Grove Press, 1959), pp. 78ff. Laycock notes the specific similarity with Act I, scene 3, of d’Indy’s opera. See Jankel´evitch, Ravel, pp. 127–128. Carolyn Abbate, “Outside Ravel’s Tomb,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52/3 (Fall 1999), pp. 468, 473, 494, 507, and 520. Orenstein, ed., A Ravel Reader, p. 204. Ibid.

PA RT I I

The Institutional Bases for the Production and Reception of Opera

Introduction to Part II Thomas Ertman

The authors in this section on the whole take a different approach to those in Part I. In general terms, they are less concerned with how operas represent existing social realities than in how those realities themselves constrain the production and reproduction, and hence shape the character, of operatic works and the reception of those works by the public. Musicologist Franco Piperno does this in a way that builds upon the pioneering research of the Anglo-Italian historian John Rosselli and of the contributors (himself included) to the History of Italian Opera project edited by Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli. In 1984, Rosselli published his pioneering The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi, in which he showed how independent businessmen (the impresarios), acting at the behest and under the supervision of theatre owners and municipal authorities, staged regular opera seasons built around new works in cities and towns across Italy from the 1780s through the 1850s.1 In his chapter “Opera Production to 1780” in volume iv of The History of Italian Opera, which appeared in Italian in 1987 and in English in 1998, Franco Piperno uncovered how the impresario-based system captured at its height by Rosselli had first emerged in the seventeenth century and how it operated during the eighteenth century.2 In his contribution here, Piperno takes this research further and shows that, despite the supposedly free-market character of the Italian opera industry, the peninsula’s state governments played a central role both in the diffusion of musical theatre to the provinces and in the emergence of innovative sub-genres such as the sacred opera during the course of the 1700s. He also illustrates how an understanding of the often familial nature of opera buffa troupes is essential to explaining the tremendous continuity in the musical style of this sub-genre from the early eighteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. 135

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If Piperno is concerned mainly with the impact of production conditions (government policy, the labor market for artistic personal) within a single cultural space (Italy), historians William Weber and Christophe Charle take as their starting point the deeply international and cosmopolitan character of the operatic enterprise. John Rosselli underlined this fact in his 1992 study Singers of Italian Opera, where he demonstrated that as early as the seventeenth century both the demand for and the supply of such singers already extended well beyond the Italian peninsula and by the nineteenth century had become truly global in its reach.3 Both Weber and Charle examine the nature and consequences of opera’s globalism from a somewhat different perspective, namely that of the competition among leading world cities for cultural capital. In the decades around 1800, as Weber shows, the presence of a flourishing opera season was the marker of a truly cosmopolitan metropolis, identified as such a season was with world cities like Venice, Paris, and London. This was a crucial factor in the spread of this new Italian art form around the world since no city with any pretensions to cultural standing could afford to be without an opera house. During the half century before World War I, Paris remained the single most influential node within the world opera network, as Charle’s quantitatively based study reveals. The prestige still conferred by a Parisian premiere permitted the French to export large numbers of new works to all five continents – and even to supposedly hostile nations like Germany – at a time when the country’s musical culture was becoming increasingly parochial in its response to innovations from abroad. In addition to government policy and to pressure from markets of various kinds, a third factor that can shape the character of operatic output is the general political atmosphere. This connection has been the subject of a voluminous literature in the case of Giuseppe Verdi, and Philip Gossett’s chapter below represents a major new contribution to this literature. In it, he details how Verdi responded to the Revolution of 1848, returning to Italy from Paris, composing a patriotic hymn (“Suona la tromba”) commissioned by Mazzini, and writing a new opera (La battaglia de Legnano) with an explicitly nationalist subject. He also explores the links between the texts and the musical language

Introduction to Part II

of Verdi’s pre-1848 works, his two 1848 pieces, and other patriotic choruses composed at the time and concludes that “Verdi’s operas . . . fully participated in [the] national discourse.” In so doing, Gossett renews his challenge to the revisionist view of Verdi that seeks to downplay the central role assigned to him in the process of Italian unification by an older historiography.4 The subject of Michael Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg’s piece is also the influence of a given political situation on operatic works, though in this case the composer in question is Giacomo Puccini. They demonstrate that the aesthetic of spectacle promoted by Fascism, itself the result of a national anxiety engendered by the failures of the unification project, profoundly influenced Puccini’s last, unfinished, opera Turandot. As they provocatively claim, “Turandot delivers opera to spectacle . . . [T]he delivery of opera to spectacle is also its delivery to fascism . . . In this sense . . . the opera Turandot emerges as a fascist work.” They then go on to argue that the postfascist political reality of postwar Italy has left its traces not so much in contemporary Italian opera, since in a certain sense this genre died as a popular art form with Turandot, but in the uses and depiction of opera – and more generally the operatic sensibility – in postwar Italian film.

n ot e s 1 John Rosselli, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 2 Franco Piperno, “Opera Production to 1780,” in Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (eds.), Opera Production and Its Resources, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 1–79. 3 John Rosselli, Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 4 For a recent attempt by a social scientist to analyze the political role played by Verdi’s works during this period, see Peter Stamatov, “Interpretive Activism and the Political Uses of Verdi’s Operas in the 1840s,” American Sociological Review 67 (June 2002), 345–366.

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6

State and market, production and style: An interdisciplinary approach to eighteenth-century Italian opera history Franco Piperno

The complexity of opera is self-evident, but it also represents a great challenge. The genre’s multi-media nature requires an interdisciplinary approach. Thus the richness of opera makes it an appropriate object of study for different research fields, disciplines, and methodologies. Often opera has been considered a matter for musicologists only (opera as a composer’s work), or for literary studies (opera as a libretto: see the numerous works on Metastasio’s texts that have appeared since 1982). More recently, opera has come to be recognized as a complex social phenomenon, and sociology aims to take the initiative in studying it. Sociological approaches to opera could well produce very interesting results, just as musicological, literary, or historical approaches (see John Rosselli’s studies on the nineteenth-century impresario1 ) have already done. But though the object of study is the same (or is at least identified by the same term, “opera”), what these approaches aim to explain is totally different: for musicologists, opera as a work of art in its historical as well as cultural context; for sociologists, opera as a product and a means of expression of social relations. And though it is possible that sociologists, because they possess theories through which they can reinterpret the data of extant opera research, may find the results of musicological as well as literary or historical studies useful for their work, it seems less likely that sociological approaches to opera will help a musicologist find answers to his or her questions. I believe that between these two extremes there exists a promising middle way: because opera is, as mentioned, a complex phenomenon, a discipline I would call “opera history” might be one way to investigate it. The ideal “opera historian” would then have to be at the same time a musicologist, a literary historian, and a historian tout court (with a particular sensitivity for social history); this is the real challenge. If this 138

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“ideal opera scholar” is a chimera, this perspective nevertheless holds out the possibility of deep and fruitful collaboration among different disciplines. It is now evident that social as well as financial aspects of opera history may contribute to clarifying some stylistic problems of the repertory and, conversely, that the results of a musicological study can provide confirmation for a literary or social analysis or a case study in opera history. I find particularly appropriate to the history of opera what Fernand Braudel had to say half a century ago about such sub-disciplines as marine history: “[It] is not a self-contained history. It must be put back into the context of the other kinds of history which surround and support it.”2 As a musicologist convinced of the necessity of a broad historical perspective in my discipline’s approach to opera,3 I will touch here on three aspects of eighteenth-century Italian opera history that, in my opinion, could be better explained if non-musical factors were taken into account: (1) repertory dissemination from Italian operatic centers to the periphery; (2) the birth of new operatic genres; and (3) the relations between opera production and musical style. These are all central issues in a musicological approach to opera, and they represent core questions in eighteenth-century Italian opera history, questions to which musicology is expected to provide an answer: why and how did opera (that is: subjects, texts, scores, composers, singers, players, styles) come to be disseminated so widely and to be so deeply appreciated in the periphery?4 How can we explain the sudden birth of certain well-defined new operatic genres (the intermezzo around 1710, the opera buffa in 1738, the ballo pantomimo about 1770, the sacred opera during the 1780s)? Why, in a century of deep changes and numerous novelties, did musical and vocal styles remain so stable (at least in the buffo genre) from the decades of Alessandro Scarlatti or Giambattista Pergolesi to the years of Mozart, Paisiello, or Rossini? Both my points (1) and (2) deal with the relation between government policy and the opera market. Because opera enjoyed great popularity – it was Italian society’s preferred form of entertainment – there was an increasing demand for opera productions. In response, eighteenth-century Italian governments financed the reconstruction in

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stone of older wooden theatres or the building of new ones, consented to the lengthening of theatres’ seasons, supported citizens’ initiatives to produce operas, and often favored the establishment of operatic traditions in the peripheral cities of their states. This supportive attitude was not, however, merely a consequence of the genre’s popularity. Additional social, financial, and political factors also came into play. First, operatic productions could be an economic resource since they attracted a paying audience to theatre centers and, due to the elaborate stage requirements of such productions, stimulated many ancillary craft industries. Second, by favoring the expansion of operatic activities, governments were also attempting to keep their subjects more easily under control by attracting them on a regular basis to public places like the theatre and thus reducing their involvement in uncontrolled private activities which could give rise to seditious initiatives. Both these reasons, as we shall see, explain why the operatic tradition could spread to and also take root in very peripheral cities, and why particular operatic repertories seem to have arisen not as a result of any artistic development per se, but as a consequence of a particular government initiative. G OV E R N M E N T P O L I C Y A N D T H E S P R E A D O F O P E R A T O T H E P E R I P H E RY

It is an oversimplification to say that opera spread simply due to its success and popularity. Certainly, without a favorable reception from audiences this art form would not have circulated in the way it did, but sometimes the first impetus came from government policy, not from local interest. Livorno in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany is a good example of a peripheral town in which operatic activity developed after central government intervention. Livorno was a commercial harbor of increasing European importance which the Medici dynasty and their successors from the House of Lorraine tried to make into the second important commercial center of their state after Florence.5 To do this, in addition to undertaking other socioeconomic initiatives, they enlarged the local theatre and financed regular opera seasons,

Eighteenth-century Italian opera history

thereby imposing upon the local inhabitants – mostly members of the commercial classes – a form of social entertainment (opera) typical of urban society with which they were not previously acquainted and in which they were not particularly interested. However, in order to lend to a peripheral commercial town the allure of a wealthy and advanced urban center, an opera house and regular opera seasons were an absolute necessity. We see a similar pattern, on a reduced scale, in smaller commercial cities in connection with local trade fairs: the annual trade fair was the climax of the year’s commercial and social activity, and the opera season connected with the fair was a complementary form of entertainment designed both to increase the town’s importance in the eyes of the resident population and to attract visitors from “abroad.” Such a pattern fits almost exactly the cases of Reggio Emilia, the commercial city of the Duchy of Modena, and Senigallia in the Papal States. Dukes Rinaldo and Francesco III d’Este financed operatic activity in Reggio Emilia during the first half of the eighteenth century in order to increase the town’s attractiveness during the spring trade fair. They permitted ducal singers and instrumentalists to perform there, thereby providing the municipality with the patronage and financial support necessary to organize an opera season for the fair. During other periods of the year, operatic activity in Reggio Emilia was not supported by the central government. It was initially organized on an irregular basis by modest impresarios with traveling troupes and was doubtless of secondary significance. However, the regularity of the important fair opera seasons contributed greatly to making opera a form of entertainment increasingly demanded by local society outside of the fair period. As a result, by 1741 Reggio Emilia possessed a new permanent theatre, and by the 1760s regular opera seasons during several times of the year.6 Senigallia was a flourishing commercial center on the Adriatic coast belonging to the Papal States – a theocratic polity clearly not interested, due to its particular ideology, in favoring operatic or other theatrical activities. Since the mid-seventeenth century, however, the papal government was perfectly aware of the importance of operatic

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entertainment for its subjects, and while it did not directly finance such entertainment, the government normally permitted the municipalities to allow it and sometimes even support it financially. Permission for the temporary use of state buildings for opera productions was normally granted on demand, as was permission to open private theatres for public use or to build a new theatre at community expense (teatro di communit`a or teatro civico or condominale).7 Senigallia was renowned for its large and ancient trade fair, which took place every July and attracted merchants and customers not only from the nearby regions but also from eastern Europe and the Orient. Even before having its own stable teatro condominale (1750), the Senigallia community supplemented the local summer fair with an opera season which took place in the nearby city of Fano (twenty kilometres north of Senigallia). That this was an important additional attraction for people who attended the trade fair for business reasons is clearly indicated by a local chronicler, who in 1745 reported: “We are now enjoying our usual wonderful fair. There is a great participation of merchants with every kind of wares together with many ordinary people and nobles who, besides coming to the fair, like to go to the opera in the big theatre of Fano where excellent virtuosi are performing”.8 During the following decades, after the construction of the Teatro condominale, the connection between fair and opera became even stronger. Newspapers reported in 1777 that “our trade fair had an extraordinary success this year and the theatre provided amusement during the evening with two comic operas.”9 If this was a comment after the event, in 1787 this relationship was presented in the form of an advertisement: All the evidence points to the prediction that our next fair this year will be one of the most successful due to the entertainment in preparation for the many people expected to come. The theatrical spectacle which the impresario will put on stage sparing no expense will be the best contribution to the guests’ amusement: it will be the opera Olimpiade set to music by the celebrated Mr. Gio. Battista Borghi with the famous Mr. Domenico Bedini together with Mrs. Anna Davia and Mr. Giovanni Bernucci, both in the service of the Russian Empress, singing the principal roles.10

Eighteenth-century Italian opera history

Another less exclusively commercial setting that benefited from government interest in encouraging and supporting operatic activities in the periphery was the holiday town. These were small localities in the country or by the sea, near the villas where the urban aristocracy used to spend their villeggiatura. Summer opera seasons were increasingly established there during the second half of the eighteenth century. This was an example of the importation from larger municipalities of a kind of public service for people who did not wish to give up, when on holiday, the type of entertainment they were used to enjoying during the winter months while at home in the city. In this case, too, governments allowed operatic seasons in holiday towns in order to discourage their subjects from spending time on less controllable activities. This explains why one finds almost regular operatic seasons (and sometimes very good seasons) in small places like S. Giovanni in Persiceto near Bologna, Piazzola near Padua,11 Carpi near Modena, Casalmaggiore near Milan,12 Lugo near Ravenna,13 Fojano in Valdichiana near Florence, and so on.14 Like the fair opera seasons, the summer holiday seasons also sometimes had consequences for local society and urban planning. They could lead to both the establishment of a regular operatic tradition outside of the holiday period and to the construction of a permanent theatre. Such a theatre was typically a stone building, often situated in the town center and contending with the cathedral and the town hall for the role of principal municipal edifice. Holiday opera seasons could also provide a boost to the local economy by attracting additional visitors. Thus in August 1778 the Gazzetta toscana advertised for the forthcoming summer opera season in Siena as follows: Tourists have already arrived in order to have a good time and many more are expected for the mid-August holidays. Here follows the opera schedule for the present month. Performances of Alessandro [nell’India by Metastasio?] with [the castrato] Sig. Consoli in the soprano lead on the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 9th, 10th, 12th, 13th, 16th, 17th; performances of Medonte [by De Gamerra/Sarti] with the debut of [the castrato] Sig. Toschi in the soprano lead on the 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st, 23rd, 24th, 26th, 27th, 30th, 31st.15

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OPERA AS A MEANS OF SOCIAL CONTROL AND A RT I S T I C I N N OVAT I O N

Government use of opera as a means of keeping subjects under control increased during the last decades of the century, especially before and during the revolutionary years 1796–1799. This strategy is particularly evident in Naples, where the conflict between the cultivated and modern Neapolitan society and the conservative politics of King Ferdinand IV and his wife Maria Carolina was the most acute. Beginning in 1785, Neapolitan theatres began to remain open during Lent. This represented a sensational departure from the tradition common in states where the church played an influential role in permitting theatrical performances only during the Carnival season (from December 26 to Mardi Gras) and after Easter, with a pause during Lent devoted to religious music. The above-mentioned conflict between the Neapolitan government and society encouraged this exceptional expansion of operatic activity into Lent, after which Neapolitan theatres practically never closed during the year. This substantial extension of the theatrical season in turn had important consequences for operatic repertory and style.16 In fact, it was not possible to present “normal” operas centered on political intrigue and love affairs during the Lenten opera season. A new genre had to be invented: the sacrodramma. Sacrodrammi (sacred operas) featured libretti drawn exclusively from the Old Testament. The Old Testament was on the one hand a classic source – no less classic than the works of the Greek and Roman authors who inspired Metastasio – for well-known stories with romantic and passionate characters (Deborah, Judith, Moses, David, Jonathan), but a source that, on the other hand, could guarantee the suitability of its stories for the spiritual atmosphere of Lent. Though these sacred operas were forced to do without ballet scenes, they could make use of large choruses and complicated stage machinery for battle or miracle scenes. While the staging of opera in the form of sacrodrammi was the exception in Italy rather than the rule,17 this practice had been common in England since Handel’s time and it is actually possible to see a sort

Eighteenth-century Italian opera history

of English influence on the sacred dramas of Naples. During the 1780s, the Neapolitan polity abandoned its traditional connections with Spain and moved closer to the Habsburgs of Vienna and to England. This shift resulted from the facts that Queen Maria Carolina was the daughter of the Austrian Empress Maria Teresa and that her personal counselor was the Englishman John Acton. Moreover, during the last decades of the eighteenth century, Naples was strongly influenced by the anticlericalism of the philosopher Pietro Giannone and moved resolutely to limit the power and the influence of the church while at the same time permitting the free expansion of Freemasonry, also an English and Viennese import. This governmental initiative had unexpected artistic consequences, since the Lent opera season based on sacrodrammi spread all over Italy and became a true operatic tradition. Though this kind of season began in Naples as a consequence of the local political situation, it soon spread far and wide and gave birth to important works such as Debora e Sisara by Pietro Alessandro Guglielmi (1788; the best sacrodramma from the early period), Saulle by Gaetano Andreozzi (1794; a drama soaked in Masonic ideology), Rossini’s Mos`e in Egitto (1818; the masterpiece of the genre), Mayr’s Atalia (1822), Donizetti’s Il diluvio universale (1830) and finally Verdi’s Nabucco (1842). (A list of Neapolitan sacrodrammi of 1785 to 1820 appears in Table 6.1).18 Apart from the biblical setting, sacred operas apparently had all the dramatic and musical ingredients (except for the ballet) of a normal opera based on a historical, mythological, or epic subject. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who had the opportunity to attend the first performances of Giordani’s La distruzione di Gerusalemme in Naples in 1787 (the first sacred opera staged at the San Carlo theatre), could not identify any differences between this sacred opera and a normal opera: they “sich in gar nichts unterscheiden [do not differ from one another in any way],” he wrote in his Italienische Reise (March 9, 1787). But Goethe was neither expert nor knowledgeable enough when it came to Italian opera to allow him to notice the peculiarities of this new genre. Upon deeper investigation, the sacrodrammi appear to be characterized by at least five elements that distinguish them from ordinary

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Title

Figlia di Gefte

Convito di Baldassarre Davide e Assalonne Sacrificio di Abramo Distruzione di Gerusalemme Trionfo di Davide Debora e Sisara Morte di Oloferne Gionata Baldassarre punito Sofronia e Olindo1

Saulle

Theatre

Fondo

Nuovo Fiorentini Fondo S. Carlo Fondo S. Carlo Fondo S. Carlo Fondo S. Carlo

S. Carlo

Year

1785

1786 1786 1786 1787 1787 1788 1791 1792 1792 1793

1794

Composer

Salfi

Lorenzi Sanges Metastasio Sernicola [Lucchesi Palli] Sernicola Fiori Sernicola Lorenzi Sernicola Andreozzi

Various ? Cimarosa and others Giordani Rispoli Guglielmi P. A. Guglielmi P. A. Piccinni Marinelli Andreozzi

[Lucchesi Palli] Cipolla

Poet

Table 6.1 Sacred operas for Neapolitan Lent seasons (1785–1820, premieres only)

Daniel, 5 2 Samuel, 15–19 Genesis, 22 2 Kings, 24 1 Samuel, 17 Judges, 4 Judith, 8–13 1 Samuel, 14 Daniel, 5 Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, 2; Mercier, Olinde et Sophronie 1 Samuel, 28–31

Judges, 11

Biblical or literary source

1796, 1802, 1804

1797, 1798 1793 1795

1789, 1795

1790

1786, 1788, 1790, 1800, 1801 1791

Revivals in Neapolitan Lent seasons

Distruzione di Gerusalemme Sografi Mos`e in Egitto Tottola Ciro in Babilonia Bordese

Fondo S. Carlo

Fondo S. Carlo S. Carlo

1805 1807

1811 1818 1820

1 Maccabees, 11–13 Genesis, 21–22 Voltaire, Za¨ıre

1

In this case the source is not the Bible, but the subject taken from Tasso and Mercier gives birth to a “Christian tragedy” which glorifies the heroism of some Christians who, taken prisoner by the Ottomans, remain faithful to their religion. 2 Another “Christian tragedy” taken from a literary source: the Christian Zaira refuses to marry the Muslim Orosmane in order to remain faithful to her religion.

Zingarelli Rossini Raimondi

1811

1 Samuel, 17 Esdras, 1; Herodotus, Histories, 1 Iosephus Flavius, Bell. Iud. 6–7 Exodus, 14; Ringhieri, Osiride 1819, 1820 Esdras, 1; Herodotus, Histories, 1

Guglielmi P. C. 2 Kings, 24 Haydn Genesis Cimarosa–Zingarelli Esdras, 9, Nehemiah, 1–6

Guglielmi P. A. Various Federici

[Lucchesi Palli] Zingarelli Cammarano Andreozzi

? ? Tottola

Fondo Fondo Nuovo

1803 1804 1804

Sografi De Santis Botturini

Gionata maccabeo Abramo Trionfo della religione (Zaira)2 Distruzione di Gerusalemme Creazione del mondo Riedificazione di Gerusalemme Trionfo di Davide Trionfo di Tomiri

S. Carlo Nuovo Nuovo

1798 1800 1802

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serious operas: an imposing priestly character played by a bass (basses in Italian opera normally had secondary roles); a solemn prayer scene (frequently with harp accompaniment); several battle or miracle scenes with large numbers of extras and impressive use of stage machinery; great choral scenes resulting from the central dramatic importance of the people (normally the Israelites) in these works; and a strong interaction between the private lives of two or three characters and an episode from the history of the Chosen People. These peculiarities are evident in the best-known of Neapolitan sacrodrammi, Rossini’s Mos`e in Egitto, which displays the tremendous bass part of the title role, the famous prayer Dal tuo stellato soglio, two great miracle scenes (the return of the sun in Act I and the parting of the Red Sea near the end of the score including 115 bars of solo orchestral music that bring the opera to an unusual conclusion), several choral passages of great impact, and the dramatic interaction between the love story of the Hebrew Elcia and the Pharaoh’s son Osiride and the destiny of the People of Israel. But they are already present in the first sacrodrammi of the series and recur in the above-mentioned scores of Donizetti and Verdi as well. This fact allows us to speak of a new and specific tradition of sacred operas, a tradition launched thanks to a governmental initiative (the opening of the theatres during Lent as a means of social control) rather than to an independent artistic development within the operatic genre. CONDITIONS OF PRODUCTION AND MUSICAL STYLE

My last point concerns the influence of social aspects of opera production on musical style. Of the two principal eighteenth-century Italian operatic genres, opera seria and opera buffa, the former (often also called tragedia or dramma per musica) was socially and aesthetically more prestigious. From a market perspective, however, the outstanding genre and the true novelty of the century was opera buffa (more properly commedia per musica). These genres were in fact complementary. In addition to dramatic subject and style, they differed in so many other significant aspects (audiences, costs, mechanisms and seasons of

Eighteenth-century Italian opera history

production, circulation) that they were able to avoid competing directly with one another. If opera seria was the most important and prestigious genre because it was unique and expensive and hence a luxury good for upper-class consumers, opera buffa was the most successful financially since it was both popular with the public and relatively easy to produce and disseminate. With the profits from opera buffa, an impresario could even offset financial failures resulting from an unsuccessful opera seria season. The fact that the upper classes formed the core audience for opera seria affected its conditions of production in a variety of ways. The most important of these stemmed from the insistence on the part of the audience that they see something new every season. Thus although Metastasio wrote only twenty-seven opera seria libretti, they were set to music hundreds of times. In part this was of course due to the great esteem in which these libretti were held throughout the whole century (thus his dramas from the 1720s were still being produced in the 1820s). Yet the other reason for this was the necessity of offering new musical works, even if set to the same text, during every opera seria season. Singers could perform in different productions of the same drama, but if the score was new they had to learn new music. This is a principal reason why opera seria singers were incredibly expensive and could earn anywhere from ten to fifty times more than the composer himself. If the music changed from production to production, there was no reason to organize travelling troupes of opera seria singers: after a season the company dissolved and every singer looked for a new contract elsewhere.19 The situation was totally different as far as the opera buffa repertory was concerned.20 Opera buffa began during the 1740s as a structural extension of the comic intermezzo tradition of the preceding decades. From the comic intermezzo the opera buffa incorporated at least three important and interrelated elements: production system, musical style, and bourgeois subject matter and characters. The bourgeois nature of opera buffa implied both that the genre was destined for a broader audience and that it was less valued socially. Hence buffo singers earned much less per engagement than castrati or prime donne, but their total

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income might be roughly the same since they could rely on both the greater popularity and the wider dissemination of the genre. Above all they could count on the fact that, unlike seria scores, a single opera buffa score normally had a much longer “shelf life.” This was a legacy of the comic intermezzo (Orlandini’s Serpilla e Bacocco circulated from 1719 to 1767 21 and Pergolesi’s La serva padrona of 1733 was still being staged at the beginning of the nineteenth century22 ) and was related to another production of the same provenance: a score normally circulated with the same troupe (or at least with the same core group of two or three principal singers) who were both responsible for and beneficiaries of its success. This is already evident in the case of the first opera buffa to achieve international success, Latilla’s La finta cameriera (1738; see Table 6.2). A key role in the dissemination of this work was in fact played by several groups of singers (Baglioni–Ristorini–Bosellini–Rosignoli; Gaggiotti–Querzoli– Laschi; Pertici–Brogi–Baglioni–Rosignoli) who had performed in intermezzi during the preceding decades. The constitution of enduring opera buffa troupes had both social and musical consequences. People who worked and traveled together for many years quite naturally formed personal as well as professional relationships: male and female singers often married and their children sometimes later joined their parents’ company. Thus Rosa Ungarelli and Antonio Ristorini were a renowned pair of buffo singers who specialized in comic intermezzi during the 1710s and 1720s.23 They married, and their children, nieces and nephews all performed in opera buffa up to the last decades of the century. Claudio Sartori’s catalogue of opera libretti includes no less than eight different Ristorini singers. One of them, Caterina, married the renowned opera buffa composer Giuseppe Gazzaniga, the author of the best Don Giovanni before that of Mozart.24 Francesco Baglioni was the most famous buffo bass of the 1740s and 1750s. Goldoni and Galuppi created extraordinary buffo roles for him like Don Fabrizio in L’Arcadia in Brenta, the title role of Arcifanfano re de’ matti (1750) and Nardo of Il filosofo di campagna (1754). Eleven more Baglionis are listed in Sartori’s catalogue, including the six (!)

Barcaroli Fabiani F Castelli Faini ? Paganini

Rosignoli Rosignoli Querzoli Querzoli Narici Tonelli

Ronchetti Mellini Paganini Mellini Pendesichi Castelli

Magagnoli Cavalli Mellini Isola Becheroni Brogi

Ricciarelli Bassi Mellini Donadei ? Mellini

Ristorini G. Ristorini G. Gaggiotti Pertici Gaggiotti Pertici

Jozzi Fabiani G. Bovini Landi A. ? Rosignoli

Betta

Magagnoli

Fratesanti Negri Cattani Fratesanti ? Ristorini G

1738, carnevale Roma, Valle 1741, primavera Modena, Rangone 1741, autunno Faenza, Remoti 1742, carnevale Siena, Grande 1742, primavera Firenze, Coletti 1743, carnevale Bologna, Formagliari 1743, primavera Livorno, S. Sebastiano 1743, ascensione Venezia, S. Angelo 1743?, Vicenza, Grazie 1744, carnevale Venezia, S. Mois`e 1745, carnevale Venezia, S. Cassiano 1745, carnevale Graz, Tummel Platz 1745, primavera Milano, Ducale

Erosmina Giocondo

Ristorini G. Rosignoli Ronchetti

Pancrazio

Season/Theatre

Table 6.2 La finta cameriera by Federico-[Barlocci?]/Latilla: productions 1738–1751

Baglioni Baglioni Laschi Baglioni Cherubini Baglioni

Baglioni

Baglioni Baglioni Baglioni Landi F ? Baglioni

? Bosellini

Magioni Bosellini Bosellini

Dorina

Cherubini ?

Bargagna

Moschino

Bosellini Saiz Peruzzi Bosellini Laschi Dundini Ristorini L. Rosignoli (cont.)

Ristorini L. Ristorini L Castelli Catterini

Ristorini L. Bosellini

Maiolini Querzoli Ronchetti Rigacci ? Ristorini L.

Calascione Filindo

Pancrazio Gaggiotti Ristorini G. Pertici Cattani Pertici Pertici Giardini Pertici ? ? Petri ? ? Cherubini

Season/Theatre

1745?, Hamburg,? 1746, carnevale Alessandria, Solerio 1746, estate Milano, Ducale 1746, autunno Prato, 1747, carnevale Torino, Carignano 1747, primavera Mantova, Ducale 1747, autunno Verona, Filarmonico 1749?, Parma, Ducale 1750?, Barcelona? 1751, estate Salzdahl 1751, autunno Firenze, Cocomero 1752?, Lucca? 1754, autunno Trieste, S. Pietro 1760, primavera Livorno, S. Sebastiano

Table 6.2 (cont.)

Dundini D’Ucedo Tagliab`o Landi M. Tonelli Cavalli Mondini Fascitelli ? ? Boddi ? ? Sabatini

Pendesichi Mellini Mellini Paganini M. Mellini Mellini Bassi Castelli ? ? Castelli ? ? Tedeschi

Erosmina Giocondo

? ? Brogi ? ? Ristorini (Wolfenb¨uttel)

Becheroni Tonelli Brogi Serafini Brogi Brogi Tonelli

Betta Cherubini Baglioni Baglioni Paganini C. Baglioni Baglioni Baglioni Setaro ? ? Pertici ? ? Laschi

Pereni Ristorini L. Tonelli Landi A. Cornaggia N. N. Guerrieri Belvedere ? ? Cecchi ? ? Vagnoni

Calascione Filindo

Rosignoli Rosignoli Rosignoli Brogi ? ? Scaramchi ? ?

Becheroni Rosignoli Rosignoli

Dorina

? ? Micheli

? ?

Moschino

Eighteenth-century Italian opera history

daughters of Francesco: Giovanna, Clementina, Vincenza, Anna Maria, Costanza and Rosina.25 They often sang in the same production (as is documented in Table 6.3). Mozart met two of them in Vienna in 1765– 1768 and he wrote the role of Rosina in La finta semplice K. 51 (1768) for Clementina. Another member of the family was the tenor Antonio Baglioni, who sang the role of Don Ottavio in both Gazzaniga’s and Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787). This extraordinary network of familial relations among buffo singers, a relevant social aspect of opera buffa production and circulation, had important musical consequences, since singing and acting styles were passed down from parents to children from the era of Pergolesi to that of Mozart and beyond. This is a peculiarity of the buffo repertory alone since, for evident reasons, castrati and prime donne hardly possessed the same opportunity to transmit their art to their heirs. And this explains why, if we compare three excerpts from buffo scores by, say, Pergolesi, Mozart, and Rossini, we can find almost the same stylistic resources and solutions, while the comparison between pieces taken from serious operas of the same authors shows enormous differences. It is possible to prove this by listening to the opening bars of Pergolesi’s intermezzo La serva padrona (1733; Uberto: “Aspettare, e non venire”), Leporello’s music in the first scene of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787; “Notte e giorno faticar”), and Don Magnifico’s cavatina “Miei rampolli femminini” from the first act of Rossini’s Cenerentola (1817). What renders these three excerpts similar and comparable? In all three examples we have a buffo bass playing the role of a grumbling and disappointed character; in all three the character expresses his disappointment by repeating a musical phrase several times at different points on the scale (a step higher in the case of Uberto and Leporello, a third lower in that of Don Magnifico) and by employing substantial intervals (octave jumps in the cases of Uberto and Don Magnifico). Thus the musical resources used to express similar moods are the same in 1733, 1787, and 1817, and this was possible thanks to the transmission by singers and their troupes of styles and conventions across many generations.

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Francesco Francesco Francesco Francesco

March. della Conchiglia

Carattoli Ciaranfi Carattoli Lovatini

Isabella

Anna Maria Patrassi

Parma, 1752 Bologna, 1754 Venezia, 1755 Firenze, 1759

La buona figliuola (Goldoni–Duni)

Torino, 1758 Modena, 1759 Firenze, 1759 Bologna, 1760 (music by Piccinni)

La scaltra spiritosa (Palomba–Piccinni)

Bologna, 1760

Flaminio

Picinelli Giorni Clementina Clementina

March. Lucinda

Segalini Giovanna Giovanna Vincenza

Arcifanfano

Mad. Gloriosa

Arcifanfano re de’ matti (Goldoni–Galuppi)

Nicolini

Giulia

Santi Jori Savoj Savoj

Cav. Armidoro

Buini Zanini Zanini Giovanna

Mad. Garbata

Ferretti

Lesbina

Giovanna Giovanna Giovanna Giovanna

Cecchina

Giovanna Clementina Clementina Clementina

Mad. Simplicina

Costanza

Dorimene

Vincenza Vincenza Vincenza Giorgi

Paoluccia

Fascitelli Masi Conti Leopardi Savoj

Malgoverno

Del Zanca

Mommo Patacca

Clementina Clementina Blondi Vincenza

Sandrina

Carattoli Carattoli Carattoli Carattoli

Sordidone

Morigi

don Pippo del Gallo

Francesco Francesco Francesco Carattoli

Goresi

Camillo

Potenza Ronchetti Secchioni Caldinelli

Tagliaferro Mengotto

Tibaldi Caldinelli Caldinelli Boscoli

Furibondo

Table 6.3 Some opera buffa productions with the Baglionis (in bold the first names of singers of the Baglioni family)

Anna Maria Nicolini

Stella

Giovanna

Dorina

Vincenza

Bologna, 1760

Li tre amanti ridicoli (Galuppi–Galuppi)

Firenze, 1762

Il matrimonio in maschera (?–Rutini)

Trieste, 1764

Francesco = Francesco Baglioni (father; fl. 1729–1761) Giovanna = Giovanna Baglioni (fl. 1752–1771) Clementina = Clementina Baglioni (fl. 1753–1782) Vincenza = Vincenza Baglioni (fl. 1757–1771)

Fiorini

March. di Belpoggio

Vincenza

Giulietta

Donna Emilia Conte degli Anselmii

Il viaggiatore ridicolo (Goldoni–Mazzoni)

March. Oronte

Ferretti

don Pascasio Rosina

Flavia

Roselli

Conte Roberto

Caldinelli

Onofrio

Del Zanca

Cav. Astolfo

Arcari

Serpino

De Angelis

Rombo

Goresi

Giacinto

Anna Maria = Anna Maria Baglioni (fl. 1760–1766) Costanza = Costanza Baglioni (fl. 1760–1782) Rosina = Rosina Baglioni (fl. 1764–1781)

Giovanna Poggi

Lena

Laschi

Ridolfo

Clementina

Contessa degli Livietta Anselmi

Costanza Bosi

Rosina

Patrassi

March. Foriera

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It goes without saying that the three aspects of opera history touched upon here (repertory dissemination, birth of a new operatic genre, stylistic stability of opera buffa) are of great importance to the field of musicology. They cannot be explained, however, by examining the music alone. Rather, accounting for them in a satisfactory way requires a knowledge and investigation of the non-musical side of opera production. Opera remains a subject for musicological research, but concrete results will be achieved only if musicologists open themselves to other disciplines (historical, social, artistic) and to their specific methodologies and perspectives.

n ot e s 1 John Rosselli, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 2 Fernand Braudel, “The Situation of History in 1950,” in On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 6–22; p. 15. 3 For a first attempt to outline a history of eighteenth-century Italian opera from a perspective that is not strictly musicological, see my “Opera Production to 1780,” in Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, eds., Opera Production and Its Resources, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 1–79; see also my “L’opera in Italia nel secolo XVIII,” in Alberto Basso, ed., Musica in scena. Storia dello spettacolo musicale (Turin: Utet, 1996), vol. ii, pp. 96–199. 4 For a survey on the geography of eighteenth-century Italian opera and on the dissemination of opera in Italian peripheries, see my “L’opera in Italia nel secolo XVIII,” pp. 99–102 and pp. 170–171. 5 See my “Opera Production to 1780,” p. 19, and the sources cited in notes 44 and 45. 6 On Reggio Emilia operatic activity, see my “Opera Production to 1780,” p. 37, and the sources cited in note 92. See also Paolo Fabbri and Roberto Verti, Due secoli di teatro per musica a Reggio Emilia. Repertorio cronologico delle opere e dei balli 1645–1857 (Reggio Emilia: Edizioni del Teatro Municipale Valli, 1987). 7 On Senigallia operatic activity, see my “L’opera in Italia nel secolo XVIII,” pp. 104–105, and Alfio Albani, Marinella Bonvini Mazzanti, and Gabriele Moroni, Il Teatro a Senigallia (Milan: Electa, 1996).

Eighteenth-century Italian opera history 8 “Stiamo ora [luglio 1745] godendo in questa citt`a la solita bellissima fiera . . . Ora riesce abbondatissima al solito di gran concorso di mercanti con quantit`a di mercanzie d’ogni genere, concorrendovi numerosissimo popolo, altres`ı gran nobilit`a, che oltre l’essere venuta alla fiera, si porta in Fano all’opera in musicha, che vi si recita da scielti virtuosi in quel gran teatro” (Giovanni Maria Mastai, Memorie, ms., Senigallia, Archivio storico comunale, edited by Sergio Anselmi, vol. i, Soldati, epidemie, edilizia nella Senigallia del Settecento, 1739–1746 [Senigallia: Comune di Senigallia, 1987], pp. 99–100). 9 Gazzetta universale 64, August 12, 1777. 10 “Tutte le apparenze dimostrano che la nostra immenente Fiera debba essere in quest anno una delle pi`u brillanti, attesi i preparativi che si fanno per divertimento di molti personaggi che si attendono . . . Lo spettacolo Teatrale, che l’impresario senza risparmio di spese porr`a sulla scena, contribuir`a pi`u d’ogni altra cosa al trattenimento dei forestieri: il Dramma scelto e` l’Olimpiade posto in musica da celebre Sig. Battista Borghi che verr`a eseguito nelle prime parti dai rinomati Sig. Domenico Bedini e Sigg. Anna Davia e Giovanni Bernucci ambidue al servizio dell’Imperatrice delle Russie. I balli saranno del Sig. Pietro Angiolini” (Gazzetta universale 50, June 23, 1787). 11 See Paolo Camerini, Piazzola nella sua storia e nell’arte musicale del secolo XVII (Milan: Hoepli, 1929). 12 See Claudio Toscani, “Due secoli di vita musicale nel teatro di Casalmaggiore: Organizzazione, spettacoli, artisti (1737–1957),” in Il teatro di Casalmaggiore. Storia e restauro (Cremona: Turris, 1990). 13 See Paolo Fabbri, “Teatri settecenteschi della Romagna estense: Lugo,” Romagna arte e storia 8 (1983), 53–76. 14 Carlo Goldoni and Baldassarre Galuppi satirize this fashion in their successful comic opera L’Arcadia in Brenta of 1749. In it, a rich countryman invites some Venetian nobles to spend a holiday in his villa and offers them, as entertainment, the opportunity to play in a comedy with music. The case shows that the fashion of holiday opera seasons was common enough already by mid-century that it could become the subject matter for a stage work; it could present in comic guise a situation with which the audience was well acquainted. 15 “Di gi`a abbiamo dei forestieri venuti per godere, e molti se ne aspetanno in occasione delle feste alla met`a di agosto, che saranno pi`u del solito decorate . . . I giorni delle recite del presente mese sono i

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158

16

17

18

19

sequenti. Dell’Opera l’Alessandro [nell’India of Metastasio?], primo soprano Sig. Consoli, il d`ı 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17. Dell’Opera il Medonte [di De Gamerra/Sarti] prima recita del primo soprano Sig. Toschi 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 30, 31” (Gazzetta Toscana 32, August 8, 1778). On the political background of Neapolitan opera during the last decades of eighteenth century and on the establishment of the Lent operatic season in Naples see my “Stellati sogli e immagini portentose: Opere bibliche e stagioni quaresimali a Napoli prima del Mos`e,” in Bianca Antolini and Wolfgang Witzenmann, eds., Napoli e il teatro musicale in Europa fra Sette e Ottocento. Scritti in onore di Friedrich Lippmann (Florence: Olschki, 1993), pp. 267–298, esp. pp. 272–275. Performing oratorios or sacred operas in Italian public theatres began in 1776 in Florence, where there was a large English community in residence; the first attempts (Mozart’s Betulia liberata at the Teatro della Pergola and Myslivecek’s Isacco at the Casino di S. Trinit`a) were almost certainly promoted by Lord George Nassau Clawering Cowper (1738–1789, living in Florence since 1760), who first organized a performance of Handel’s Messiah in Italy (1768, palazzo Pitti). See my “Drammi sacri in teatro (1750–1820),” in Paolo Pinamonti, ed., Mozart, Padova e La Betulia liberata. Committenza, interpretazione e fortuna delle azioni sacre metastasiane nel ’700 (Florence: Olschki, 1991), pp. 289–316, esp. pp. 289–291. There is more on the sacrodrammi tradition in my articles “Stellati sogli e immagini portentose”; “Il Mos`e in Egitto e la tradizione napoletana di opere quaresimali,” in Paolo Fabbri, ed., Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992. Il testo e la scena (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1994), pp. 255–271; “Effetto Mos`e: Fortuna e recezione del Mos`e in Egitto a Napoli e in Italia (1818–1830),” in La recezione di Rossini ieri e oggi. Atti dei convegni lincei (Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1994), pp. 165–194; and “. . . dividere il genere di musica profano dal sacro: Donizetti vs Rossini? Su Il Diluvio universale e la tradizione napoletana di opere quaresimali,” in Franco Carmelo Greco and Renato Di Benedetto, eds., Donizetti, Napoli, l’Europa (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2000), pp. 201–230. On opera seria productions and the dissemination of Metastasio’s plays see my “Opera Production to 1780,” esp. pp. 49–60.

Eighteenth-century Italian opera history 20 On opera buffa productions and dissemination, see my “Opera Production to 1780,” pp. 60–73. For a comparison between opera seria and opera buffa, see my “L’opera in Italia nel secolo XVIII,” pp. 170–176. 21 See Charles E. Troy, The Comic Intermezzo (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1979), pp. 150–151. 22 See my “Gli interpreti buffi di Pergolesi. Note sulla diffusione de La serva padrona,” Studi Pergolesiani/Pergolesi Studies 1 (1986), 166–177. 23 See Troy, The Comic Intermezzo, pp. 50–51. 24 See Claudio Sartori, I libretti italiani a stampa dalle origini al 1800, catalogo analitico con 16 indici, Indici vol. ii (Cuneo: Bertola & Locatelli, 1994), pp. 560–563. 25 Ibid., pp. 35–40.

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Opera and the cultural authority of the capital city William Weber

In 1798 there appeared in Weimar an elegantly produced magazine, eight issues a year, entitled London und Paris. Its title tells the story: it offered reports about social, cultural, and political trends in the capital cities of England and France. The magazine was rather like a Sunday magazine in a high-tone newspaper today, offering engaging color pictures alongside smoothly written stories about what life was like there among the rich and powerful, the beau monde or the bon ton. This was fantasy and jealousy time, one might say. Through its columns readers were able to keep informed about the fashions and the pleasures in the two key cities – dress, promenading, horse equipage, prostitutes, politics, theatre, and of course opera. A whole host of similar periodicals of fashion, culture, and politics, most notably the Journal des Luxus und der Moden, sprang up in this period, linking opera intimately with London and Paris, the capital cities that had come to define cosmopolitan taste and social practices.1 Attitudes of those culturally subordinate to empowered groups or institutions tell us the most about what is going on in a social context. German commentary shows us how central the two capitals, and their operas specifically, had become to cultural and social life in Europe and America. Historians tend to take the roles played by the two cities for granted; they have not inquired into when and how London and Paris took on an authority they had not held in the seventeenth century. Opera leads us into this subject with particular vividness, displaying the new kind of cosmopolitanism that arose in relationship to the new order of regional patriotism – statist nationalism – that was beginning to appear at that time.2 Aggressive promotion of the state evolved together with aggressive assertion of elite cosmopolitanism. Central to all this was the assumption of high authority for the small world of the rich and powerful cosmopolitan world usually 160

The cultural authority of the capital city

referred to as the beau monde that spent part of the year in London and Paris. This essay will explore this interpretation on a broad plane. After looking into German comments on the two capitals, we will look back at the political aspects of their history, the group that set the tone of cosmopolitan taste (called the beau monde), and finally the framework of intellectual authority that emerged within musical life of the two cities. Starting with the German states puts the problem in a helpfully broad perspective. German culture, music particularly, held a problematic relationship with the cultural centers to the west as London and Paris assumed a new authority as capital cities. What was going on was not a nationalistic movement, but rather competition for cultural preeminence, over placement in a newly arising hierarchy of cosmopolitan influence. What German writers and musicians began to demand toward the end of the eighteenth century was essentially recognition of high status within the international community of politics, publishing, fashion, and culture generally. Music was one of the most important areas through which Germans demanded admission to that world. The operas of W. A. Mozart and C. M. von Weber served as vehicles for such recognition because they were linked so closely with musical practices within the Franco-Italian world that dominated opera houses. Le nozze di Figaro and Der Freisch¨utz were perceived as important components within the world dominated by Luigi Cherubini and Gioachino Rossini, then Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini. The cosmopolitanism by which these operas were perceived can be seen in the endless repetition of excerpts from them in concerts of the highest fashion in Paris and London during the first half of the nineteenth century. The Mozart operas especially knew no national boundaries; in London Die Zauberfl¨ote was produced with an Italian text in the 1840s (Il flauto magico), and excerpts of that order cropped up until the end of the century. The first articles on opera in the two capitals, both of which appeared in 1800, present the halls as the most flagrant manifestations of wealth and prestige in all of Europe. “A Glance at the London Opera” said that:

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William Weber the most lavish temple of fashion, . . . the opera, is the most fashionable place of resort, even though neither the King nor the Queen goes there. In one evening you can see more of the highest-ranking men, the most aristocratic-looking women, the most beautiful people, the most up-to-date modes, in one word comme il faut, high Tone, than you can see anywhere else.3

The first article about the Paris Opera defined wealth and prestige from a dichotomous direction, defining influence by virtue of the economic problems that serving the elite had long posed. Saying that nobody had been able to run the hall without making huge debts or creating big public issues served as an alternate means by which to say that opera was devoted to entertaining the rich and the powerful more than any other institution. Three musicians who directed the opera had just been forced to step down, having upset the public for firing three popular performers. The story goes on at great length to show how much the opera cost, how much the singers were paid, and how amazing were the balls that the opera put on in carnival time – the best and the brightest candles in anyone’s experience, especially when the Prince Talleyrand and the Emperor’s sister showed up.4 By the same token, tropes about opera balanced adulation of its public with criticism of social practices there. London und Paris, despite its focus upon the hottest fashions, also engaged with the serious reservations that its readers clearly held about opera and its modes. An engraving published there in 1800 under the title of suprˆeme bon ton shows three men and one woman engaging in garish display, acting in a manner paralleled by the dogs on the right (see Figure 7.1). A poem called “Modish Novelties,” published in the Journal des Luxus und der Moden during its second year, “Novelty: A Fable,” came to grips with the ambivalence of attitudes toward fashion: In the world of mother folly Does novelty unexpectedly appear. Suddenly comes the mob to impose The ways of this land upon us all, Waving its beautiful, streaming hair, Forcing people to wonder, and to adore her.5

The cultural authority of the capital city

Figure 7.1 “Le suprˆeme Bon Ton,” frontispiece, London und Paris, 1800

Moreover, the most important trope critical of fashion-worship at the opera stated that listeners would arrive fashionably late and not listen. In 1794 a report on opera in the Journal des Luxus und der Moden illustrated how the dichotomy of adulation and criticism could be manipulated: The Opera has recently gotten some new rules and regulations. Formerly you didn’t see more than a few people getting there before the performance to chat and promenade; now . . . people of fashion or taste have to get there on time and act as if they only want to listen. Before all women had to come looking as dazzling and entrancing as they could; now women of Ton have to seem as if they are interested in nothing but what’s happening on stage.6

Now, a recent volume on the capital city and its “hinterlands” has demonstrated broadly that such a city basically evolved during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Peter Clark and Bernard Lepetit

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argue that landowners moved in great numbers to the capital just as the old metropolitan city-states declined as their main families shifted to country estates.7 The arrival of so many people of wealth created commercial and professional markets with little parallel in other kinds of cities. In 1735, Richard Cantillon stated in an Essai sur la Nature du commerce en g´en´eral that: [I]f a prince or lord . . . fixes his residence in some pleasant spot and several other noblemen come to live there to be within reach of seeing each other frequently and enjoying agreeable society, this place will become a city . . . For the service of these noblemen, bakers, butchers, brewers, wine merchants, manufacturers of all kinds will be needed . . . A capital is formed in the same way as a provincial town, with this difference: that the largest landowners in all the state reside in the capital; that the king or supreme government is fixed in it and spends there the government revenues . . . that it is the center of the fashions which all the provinces take as a model; that the landowners who reside in the provinces do not fail to come occasionally to pass some time in the capital and to send their children thither to be polished.8

Still, Clark and Lepetit warn that there was “no single metropolitan genus” for the capital city. While cities such as Paris and London had existed in something of such a capacity since the Middle Ages, others were new creations or played such roles in discontinuous fashion (Madrid, Vienna, and Berlin), and others served as colonial capitals (Budapest, Lima, and Edinburgh after 1707). By the same token, I would argue that the capital city did not take on its modern authority as a cosmopolitan center until the eighteenth century. In 1700, neither London nor Paris was a cultural center anything the like of what it had become by 1800. While elite populations had become firmly focused upon part-time residence in the two cities, what they did there exerted more of a national, or indeed regional, influence than a cosmopolitan one. The civil wars of the seventeenth century inhibited the definition of any national culture as a determining force in international terms – even though one can argue that the disorder of that period led eventually to create just such a cultural order. Cantillon wrote

The cultural authority of the capital city

at the very moment when Paris and London were about to take on a cosmopolitan rather than a regional or national role: note that he speaks of relations between the capital and the provinces rather than the larger international community. Much the same was true for opera. In 1700 opera life was diffused widely among a large number of courts and cities. By 1800 the editors of London und Paris were able to define a hierarchy of cosmopolitanism among major cities, making London by far the most luxurious, Paris the next, followed by Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Berlin.9 Changes made to the magazine’s title suggest both such an order and ways in which the wars were affecting such publications. In 1811, it was reconstituted, published in Halle, as Paris, Wien und London: Ein fortgehendes Panorama dieser drei Hauptst¨adte; in 1812, the height of the war, it became simply Paris und Wien, but in 1815, its last year, it appeared as London, Paris und Wien. One could indeed speak of how the cultural “center” controlled the “periphery,” if I might borrow terms from Immanuel Wallerstein.10 Just mentioning him and his well-known terms indicates the larger theoretical issues potentially involved in this subject. In 1993 I published an article in Annales comparing the operas in Paris and London as to their institutional dynamics and their publics. I emphasized differences between the two institutions, especially in regard to the ways by which the nobility involved itself, using opera as an arrogant means of political dominance in London but with a remarkably insecure alliance with the state in Paris.11 Here I wish instead to focus upon similarities born of the role that national capitals were coming to play in European culture and society. During the eighteenth century there developed a new kind of social and cultural cosmopolitanism, one fundamentally different from the courtly order of the previous century. Authority within the old order had been spread among a wide array of courts and cities, linked by networks of dynasties, learned men and women, touring musicians, and merchants of fine goods. Peter Miller has shown us in fascinating terms how the idea of the “republic of letters” emerged in the sixteenth century, based upon principles of friendship and cosmopolitan relationship.12 While these networks persisted into the new

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cosmopolitan order, they were fundamentally transformed by the rise of national capitals and all that meant in terms of authority, influence, and prominence. Authority became vested much more narrowly within capital cities, London and Paris most of all. The new order of cosmopolitanism came as part of the public life that took root in key cities during the early and middle decades of the eighteenth century. It was founded in part upon the authority of the state, which by around 1730 had taken on a far firmer uncontested basis in both France and Britain than it had ever had. Monarchs no longer looked warily at dukes as potential usurpers of their sovereignty. Civil servants now governed for monarchs, in some ways independent of them. In fact, the new order of public life grew from the declining centrality of personal control by monarchs in the large kingdoms, in France and England most of all. Louis XIV lost interest in the opera by 1685, and Louis XV rarely went; the Hanoverian monarchs were in effect forbidden to sponsor it. Since aristocratic houses had never even attempted opera on their estates in these two countries, the field was free for the public, such as it was, to take authority over opera in the two countries. Did this happen by default or by demand? In England it was caused directly by the Civil War and the post-revolutionary situation that it left behind. By the end of the reign of Charles II, one can see the theatre public seizing leadership within the discourse upon both drama and politics. In France, however, it occurred more by default. The wars of the 1680s and 1690s stunted royal cultural leadership: Versailles ceased to exist as the center of elite life that it had been, and the Op´era moved to the rue de Richelieu. One can see something of the same thing happening in Prussia after the end of the Seven Years War: not having the funds or the will to mount new operas, the Berlin Opera kept productions of the 1740s on stage, similarly to what had happened in Paris with Jean-Baptiste Lully’s works, in the process giving a boost to the leadership of the emerging public.13 Nonetheless, in both London and Paris the departure of royal leadership left a vacuum in the world of opera that was filled, willy-nilly, by musicians, theatrical entrepreneurs, energetic amateurs, publicists,

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and on a broader plane the public as a whole. The rhetorical sensibility emerged that there was a public whose tastes would rule, and which the opera had to serve. Thus we see that the authority of the new kind of capital city was founded upon the empowerment of the public. Within musical life this authority was overt and articulated, despite the fact that the exact social perimeters of the public were not entirely clear. We see an early example of the notion of the public in the declaration by Charles Dufresny in 1698, speaking of the arts as a whole, that “The public is a sovereign, to which all must account who strive toward high reputation, or indeed for financial gain.”14 Likewise, in 1791, the Theatrical Guardian stated that “The Public is the only Jury before whom the merits of an actor or actress are to be tried.”15 Opera was the central institution within the cosmopolitan public, since if members of the elite met anywhere, it was there. The leading dramatic theatres, the Com´edie-Franc¸aise in Paris and Covent Garden and Drury Lane in London, had considerably less prestigious publics; the nobility and gentry attended their performances in significantly less concentrated form.16 Opera became considerably more of an obligation than the spoken theatre, since it was linked to international elites and in London was run directly by members of the aristocracy. The London Weekly Journal said in 1725: Musick is so generally approv’d of in England, that it is look’d upon as a want of Breeding not to be affected by it, insomuch that every Member of the Beau-monde at this Time either do, or, at least, think it necessary to appear as if they understand it; and, in order to carry on this Deceit it is requisite every one, who has the Pleasure of thinking himself a fine Gentleman, should, being first laden with a Competency of Powder and Essence make his personal Appearance every Opera Night at the Haymarket . . .17

I speak here of “public life” rather than “public sphere.” By this point in time historians have in effect gone beyond the seminal work of J¨urgen Habermas in building models for analyzing dynamics of public life.18 Strictly speaking, “public sphere” ought to be defined as the granting of an implicit responsibility to notions of public opinion within

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issues over state authority, parallel to the privileges of the monarch and legislative or judicial bodies. “Public life,” on the other hand, involved a wider range of social and cultural spheres, the theatre and the opera prominently, that contributed significantly to the formation of notions of the public sphere itself. If anything, in the late eighteenth century most people had much clearer, more concrete ideas of the public when they interacted with the worlds of music and the theatre than in politics proper. As the quote we just read suggests, one could see nightly manifestations of it and could participate in exercising its authority. Members of the elites who did not play active roles in political affairs often became deeply engaged in musical, theatrical, or literary politics. That is where they learned partisan activity, in effect what politics is all about. In the 1700s and 1720s London had musico-politico-literary querelles over Italian opera much like the famous Parisian episodes over the Bouffons in the 1750s and C.-W. Gluck versus Niccol`o Piccinni in the 1770s. For all that, however, it is almost impossible to draw a sharp line between musical politics as such. Texts published during these legendary disputes mingled discourses of many kinds in ways that can be extremely difficult to disentangle. The key condition from which the new authority of London and Paris stemmed was the concentration of elite population within their bounds. French and English theatres took on special roles by their close relationship to the Crown and to the bureaucratic state; they became more metropolitan, as the focus of national culture and politics, than cosmopolitan, as the gathering-point of elites from a variety of sovereign countries, as was still true in Venice. The concentration of members of the elites into one city for so much of the year created a society all of its own, indeed one that did not have to relate to lesser groups as much as provincial notables were accustomed to doing. The presence of so many people of wealth and significance in one place affected the larger aspects of the two cities profoundly, stimulating much more specialized service industries and cultural worlds. While the court theatres in Vienna and Berlin became urban centers by the middle of the eighteenth century, the cities had only begun to emerge along metropolitan lines by that time.

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Paris had the longest history of being a major center of population and political authority, significantly earlier than London.19 It would seem that by the eighteenth century elite families remained in Paris significantly longer during any one year than in London. The Op´era remained open all year save for two weeks after Easter, which was true of no other such hall in all of Europe.20 But the wars of Louis XIV isolated Paris and French cities in general significantly from cosmopolitan cultural life well into the new century. Not until the 1770s were productions of Italian opera allowed regularly in the city, and only then did the hall become truly cosmopolitan. While that was much later than what happened in the world of letters, when it did occur the Op´era became the most important force in opera until the 1850s. The movement of elite families into London was in large part accomplished by 1700.21 The rise of self-conscious elite publics awaited the weakening of monarchical rule. That began to occur in London upon the Restoration of the House of Stuart, and by 1700 the life of the elite had shifted out of the court to public life in London.22 Cultural life was central to the process by which this new group was formed; in some respects it evolved more in the theatres than in Parliament. Yearround residence did not develop as extensively among elite groups in London as in Paris during the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the post-revolutionary political context in Britain produced a public world of the new sort about a half century earlier than in France. The number of noble, bourgeois, and professional families living at least part of the year in London increased in the course of the seventeenth century, bringing about the construction of the West End, their principal place of residence at the turn of the next century.23 As Robert Bucholz has shown, the shift of elite social and political life out of the court to the town took place quickly and decisively under the reign of Queen Anne, as clubs, coffee-shops and public houses burgeoned in the wake of the 1689 constitutional settlement.24 Similar changes in elite habits occurred in Paris under the Regency, though with less immediate or fundamental political consequences, and with residence patterns more widely dispersed, from the Boulevard Saint-Germain across the river to the rue de Rivoli and down to the Marais.25 In both cities a large

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part of the elite began spending more of the year in the capitals; some in effect became Londoners and Parisians. What grew up among them was a distinct milieu usually called the World or the beau monde such as could not be found numerously in any other city. Essential to the elite sociability within the two capital cities was the culture of consumption that developed from the extreme concentration of elites and the competitive tendencies that produced. The presence of so many people of wealth and significance in one place affected the larger aspects of the two cities profoundly, stimulating much more specialized service industries and cultural worlds. London and Paris went farther faster in these regards than any of the other European cities. While Amsterdam rivaled the two cities in its style of living even though it was not a capital, it was too small, too far from the court in The Hague, and too lacking in centralized political authority for it to develop a comparable new elite world.26 Some historians in fact see a redistribution of wealth going on from the country to the capital cities, enabled by the state and consumed by the cosmopolitan elites.27 The centrality of these cities within their societies made consumption a much more visible, public, phenomenon than it had been before, and from that came the economic power that made the dynamism of eighteenth-century musical life possible. In both Paris and London the members of the cosmopolitan elites, and people directly connected with them, were most often denoted as the beau monde. This was a social grouping basic to elite life during the intermediate epoch of modernity we are discussing here.28 It constituted a milieu significantly larger, more diversified, and less intimate than that of a court but at the same time one much smaller and more distinct than the upper classes of the mass metropolis such as developed in London and Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century. Members of the beau monde at least knew of each other, by engaging in a closely linked set of social, cultural, and political contexts. That was different from a court, where one did know everyone, and from the amorphous, highly segmented, elite worlds that emerged with the growth of the capital cities and the rise of mass politics and mass

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culture. During the early eighteenth century the terms beau monde and “the World” emerged in both London and Paris, serving as handy ways to refer to an elite, cosmopolitan public that could be fairly easily identified in terms of individuals and families. It is important to see that the beau monde was by no means coextensive with the nobility. It included not only the knights and barons and wealthy, close relations of titled families who resided at least part of the year in the capital city, but also both men and women whose professional roles led them into the World – doctors, financial agents, high-level artists and musicians, cultural entrepreneurs, high-tone prostitutes, and so on. This is not to minimize the centrality and the ultimate authority of the nobility in eighteenth-century England in musical life as much as in society at large, as I have suggested elsewhere.29 What it does mean is that, despite the resurgence of aristocratic authority toward the end of the century, the social life of this elite avoided overtly caste-like conventions and favored a fairly loose sense of social levels. Thus there was no strict separation between nobles and commoners in the seating at the King’s Theatre (or indeed at the Op´era in Paris); only in the top level of boxes did one find no titled people. By comparison, in Vienna the seats at the Burgtheater placed a wooden barrier between the two classes throughout the eighteenth century.30 In London and Paris modernity meant fluid relations between elites such as did not evolve in Vienna until the 1830s and 1840s.31 While the court theatres in Vienna and Berlin became urban centers by the middle of the eighteenth century, the cities had only begun to emerge along metropolitan lines by that time. By the same token, the Austro-Hungarian emperors exerted far more direct control over the theatre than monarchs in France or Britain. The orders Joseph II laid down to limit ballet at the Vienna Opera would have caused major disturbances in the theatres; one cannot imagine any monarch trying to do something like that. Members of the cosmopolitan elite that met at the opera spoke in clear, definite terms about their milieu. In June 1779, Lady Mary Coke, the daughter of the Duke of Argyll and a long-time boxholder at the King’s Theatre, wrote to her sister in Paris complaining that people

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weren’t visiting her at her house in Notting Hill just outside London: “I’ve been unfortunate, & those who are so, are generally shun’d by the World . . . all the merit & great qualities in the World wou’d not procure them the least society; of this I have seen many examples.” She often cited the World as the authority by which she interpreted social behavior. Once while gossiping about who sat with whom at the opera she stated that “Mr Fawkener & Sir Harry Featherstone at first sat in the Pitt over against the Box & then went in to it each has his particular reasons, as the World says.”32 We find a similar denotation of social authority in a comment made in 1785 by Sir Andrew Gallini, a prominent dancer who sported a title acquired under dubious circumstances in Italy, to the Lord Chamberlain, the Marquess of Salisbury. The latter was holding back approval of the theatre’s licence due to serious irregularities in payment of its creditors and the manager’s reluctance to accept an independent auditor. Gallini noted that: My ambition for the Entertainment of the Public, as well as fulfilling my Engagements with the Performers for the Honor of this Country, is equal to every wish expressed by your Lordship . . . The time for opening the Theatre is now so near at Hand that unless the Business is brought to an immediate decision, the Public will be disappointed of their operas, the Performers already engaged lose the Benefit of their Contracts, and every person interested in the Opera House prejudiced to a very great degree, for which let the Censure fall where it may.33

Thus did Gallini invoke the authority of the public. Salisbury got the point and issued the licence shortly thereafter; the auditor was never appointed. The milieux denoted by the terms beau monde and bon ton that were central to the opera public were much smaller and more directly empowered in public life than what was termed “public opinion.” In a satirical work of 1785 the fermier g´en´eral and litt´erateur Gaspard Grimod de la Reyni`ere (who had previously subscribed to part of a box at the opera) showed how le monde stood apart from l’opinion publique, indeed how its members flouted the moral strictures of

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larger opinion, especially in manifesting its authority in the major theatres: The people of the World of whom I speak exert a wide range of influence within their society and enjoy the pleasures of their status very much. They tell public opinion what to say and how to get back at it when necessary. The rest of us endure their scorn, pay for their foolishness, but . . . when any such farce is badly played, we can pay to boo their acting.34

As this suggests, direct engagement with actors or singers served as a form of discourse within which groups far beyond the cosmopolitan elite could engage in the theatres. Jeffrey Ravel has shown how in late eighteenth-century Paris groups of men put on skits in the pit that commented upon what was being done on the stage or in public life more broadly.35 A crucial aspect of the cosmopolitan elite was that it kept hierarchical structures within it to a minimum. To define higher versus lower areas of cultural taste, or greater or lesser extents of cultural authority, would work against the whole nature of the beau monde. That is an important reason why we cannot speak of any empowered intelligentsia in that time. Fundamental to understanding musical life and the authority of the beau monde within it was that there existed only a weak group of cultural authorities. It is true that men (not women, it would seem) called “connoisseurs” served as judges of voices and new works, but they had a quite limited authority. Concert-goers today take for granted an elaborate framework of authority held by critics, musicologists, conservatory professors, radio commentators, not to speak of a variety of related musical trades empowered by virtue of special knowledge and training. The classical repertories that came to dominate concert life in the middle of the nineteenth century and opera shortly thereafter brought these professions to the top of a hierarchy of musical knowledge. It is vital to see how foreign these professions were to the musical culture of the eighteenth century, and how different they were from the traditional professions generally. In her book on the professions in Britain between 1700 and

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1850, Penelope Corfield has shown how doctors, lawyers, and clergymen expanded their influence or their wealth during that period but did not fundamentally change their status within society.36 By contrast, the music critic and the music historian had no significant precedents before the 1770s, and empowerment of such authority did not develop until the 1830s or later. Reports on musical events in the eighteenth century often distinguished the opinions of “the connoisseurs” from those of the public but suggested a natural hegemony to lie with the connoisseurs. A report on an Italian aria published in 1751 in the Mercure de France stated that “this aria was greatly appreciated by connoisseurs, and seemed to make a very agreeable impression upon the public.” In 1728, a contributor to the same periodical suggested a disagreement over twists given to the plot in the Bell´erophon by Lully and Philippe Quinault: “A few connoisseurs thought that having Neptune interrogated by Jobate would have been the best way to introduce the sailors’ dance, but we leave to the reader the liberty to judge whether that would have been better.” This rhetorical convention was less common in England, perhaps because that country had a more vigorous learned musical tradition, as can be seen in the movement of a taste for “ancient music.” But the same kind of subordination of the learned to the general public can be seen in a comment made about the Handel commemoration of 1784, that it had had origins in a musical symposium, between those acknowledged conoscenti [sic], Lord Fitzwilliam, Sir William Watkins Wynn, and Mr [Joah] Bates. In the accounts of the particulars of the several performers in the commemoration of Handel, there are continual instances of musical knowledge, and elegant taste, which afford much instruction & entertainment; from which, however, the conoscenti will be more profited & delighted than the common reader, who will not always be so readily transported, with the warm glow of all the fire & vehemence of Handel’s genius for polyphonic combinations & contrivance.

Note here how social class and specialized knowledge reinforced one another. The Handel Commemoration is perhaps the most formidable

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instance of how authority of different orders were linked: social class, learning, and the culture of the two hegemonic capital cities. Charles Burney suggested the same distinction when in his history of music he stated that Handel was ingenious in his ability to make minor operatic roles “interesting to the judges of music.”37 By the same token, concerts were not seen in hierarchical fashion in that period. Programs included a variety of different genres: symphony, opera and oratorio excerpts, instrumental solo, theatre song, and folk song. In Britain such events were actually called “miscellaneous,” meaning that they were meant to serve different tastes from a diverse set of people within the beau monde and its hangers-on. While the “judges of music” might object to particular genres or programs, they could do it only with an assumed tolerance of the principle that a program would serve different tastes and expectations.38 When, then, did this constellation of social and cultural authorities come to an end? While capital cities have remained the focal-points of elite social and cultural life to our day, a fundamental change occurred beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, derived from three principal forces. First, the growth of the urban metropolis affected elite demography – a little-studied subject – just as much as that of the masses. It dissolved the social framework that people of standing had called the beau monde or “the World.” There simply became too many people one ought to know and gossip about, and by the 1890s women of high birth were writing about how much the world within which they had grown up had become fragmented and in effect ended. Lenard Berlanstein has argued recently that, even though a group similar to the beau monde still existed in 1900, it no longer had the political and cultural identity by which it had exerted such wideranging authority.39 Second, the opening up of politics to new groups that began in the 1830s undermined one of the principal underpinnings of this social world. As Jennifer Hall-Witt has shown in her dissertation on the London opera, the oligarchic world had established Italian opera in the early eighteenth century.40 And Jane Fulcher has shown how fundamentally the insecurities of the July Monarchy changed the Paris Opera dramatically and ideologically.41

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Third, cultural life as a whole was expanding and in the process undergoing increasing subdivision, with each region controlled by its own professionals. Samuel Taylor Coleridge analyzed this change perceptively in 1832. He spoke of “intellectual revolutions – modern style,” arguing that “There have been three silent revolutions in England: first when the professions fell off from the Church; secondly, when literature fell off from the professions; and, thirdly, when the press fell off from literature.”42 Something of the same kind of thing happened in musical life, as areas formerly linked moved off in their own directions. Christophe Charle has analyzed a crucial stage in such development in his analysis of the “birth of the intellectual” at the end of the century.43 The rise of professionally defined intellectuals conceived as a community unto themselves fundamentally changed the relationships between artists of all kinds and their supporters. We can understand better what went on in opera life specifically, and in late eighteenth-century cities generally, if we recognize that London and Paris had taken on a cultural authority that no cities had possessed before. What went on in these two places had become the arbiters of taste and social practice for the West as a whole. The change had deep political origins, the consolidation of the state most of all, and it grew as well from the massive expansion of printed media during the 1700s. Opera – the King’s Theatre and the Acad´emie Royale de Musique – stood at the center of the new cultural authority of the two premier capital cities. Vienna was beginning to follow in their path, and in some respects so were Madrid, St. Petersburg, and Berlin. The German periodicals we have discussed tell the tale most clearly of all: by 1800, you couldn’t think of being connected unless you knew what was going on in London and Paris.

n ot e s 1 London und Paris was published in Weimar between 1798 and 1810. The Leipziger allgemeine Moden-Zeitung was later called the Allgemeine Moden-Zeitung: Eine Zeitschrift f¨ur die gebildete Welt, Bilder-Magazin f¨ur die elegante Welt. In 1838 the latter magazine described its purpose (p. iii),

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2 3

4 5 6

7

8 9

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11

saying that it would always deliver “the newest news from Paris, London, Vienna, and other great cities about present modes, not only in regard to dress, but also diverse matters of glamour and comfort. All new fashions and furnishings, whether for public use or the home, are given wholly reliable reporting in this magazine.” David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). London und Paris, 1800, vol. 2, p. 221, “Blicke auf die Londner Oper.” It is thought that the magazine was modeled in large part upon Sebastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris of 1782 and Nouveau Tableau de Paris of 1790; for an introduction to the magazine, see “Plan und Ank¨undigung,” 1798, vol. 1, p. 4. For rich detail on the profits sometimes made from concerts featuring opera excerpts, see 1799, vol. 2, pp. 58–59, “Paris: Grosse Concert im Hause Longueville.” “Paris,” London und Paris, 1800, vol. 1, pp. 59–70, 123–35. Ibid., 2 (1787), 2–3. Journal des Luxus und der Moden, April 1794, p. 183, “Moden-Neuigkeiten, Berlin 12 March.” For discussion of this issue, see William Weber, “Did People Listen in the Eighteenth Century?”, Early Music 25 (November 1997), 678–691. Peter Clark and Bernard Lepetit, “Introduction,” in Bernard Lepetit and Peter Clark, eds., Capital Cities and Their Hinterlands in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996). Quoted in ibid., p. 2. London und Paris, 1800, vol. 1, pp. 253–254. The passage cites the character of Lady Isleworth in Gunning’s novel Fashionable Involvements as a particularly good way by which to see the new world of capital-city cosmopolitanism. W. Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programmes, 1750–1875, forthcoming. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1976). William Weber, “L’Institution et son public: L’op´era a` Paris et a` Londres au XVIIIe si`ecle,” Annales E.S.C., 48/6 (1993), 1519–1540 (special issue, “Mondes de l’Art”). See also “Mentalit´e, tradition, et origines du canon musical en France et en Angleterre au XVIIIe si`ecle,” Annales E.S.C., 42 (1989), 849–875; “Learned and General Musical Taste in Eighteenth-

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12 13

14 15 16

17

18

19

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21

Century France,” Past and Present 89 (1980), 58–85; The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual and Ideology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992; and “La culture musicale d’une capitale: L’´epoque du beau monde a` Londres, 1700–1800,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 49 (2002), 119–139. Peter Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). See John Mangum, “Apollo and the German Muses: Opera and the Articulation of Class, Politics, and Society in Prussia, 1740–1806,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2002. Charles Dufresny, Amusements s´erieux et comiques, Paris, 1699, p. 126. Theatrical Guardian, March 5, 1791, p. 6. Henri Lagrave, Le Th´eaˆ tre et le public a` Paris de 1715 a` 1750, Paris, Klincksieck, 1972; Martine de Rougement, La Vie th´eaˆ trale au XVIIIe si`ecle (Paris, Honor´e, Champion, 1988). Weekly Journal; or, Saturday’s Post, December 18, 1825, quoted in Elizabeth Gibson, The Royal Academy of Music, 1719–1728: The Institution and its Directors (New York: Garland, 1989), p. 388. Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), especially C. Calhoun, “Introduction” (pp. 3–40), Keith Baker, “Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France” (pp. 181–211), and Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century” (pp. 299–339). Jean Jacquart, “Paris: First Metropolis of the Early Modern Period,” in Lepetit and Clark, Capital Cities and Their Hinterlands, pp. 105– 118. That created a far older repertory of works than was found anywhere else; see W. Weber, “La musique ancienne in the Waning of the Ancien R´egime,” Journal of Modern History 56 (March 1984), 58–88. Among pioneers in this study, see E. H. Wrigley, “A Simple Model of London’s Importance in Changing English Society and Economics, 1650–1750,” Past and Present 37 (1967), 44–70; Lawrence Stone, “The Residential Development of the West End of London in the Seventeenth Century,” in Barbara C. Malament, ed., After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), pp. 167–214; H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, eds., The Victorian City: Images and Realities (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), especially

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22 23 24 25

26 27

28

29 30 31

32

33

34

35

Lynn Lees, “Metropolitan Types,” vol. i, pp. 413–428; and Lepetit and Clark, Capital Cities and Their Hinterlands. R. O. Bucholz, The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). Stone, “The Residential Development of the West End of London.” Bucholz, The Augustan Court. Orest Ranum, Paris in the Age of Absolutism (New York: John Wiley, 1968); Bernard Lepetit, Les Villes dans la France moderne (1740–1840) (Paris: A. Michel, 1988). John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993). See David Ringrose, “Capital Cities and Urban Networks in the Early Modern Period,” in Lepetit and Clark, Capital Cities and Their Hinterlands. See Hannah Greig, “Gender, Conduct and the Ton: A Study of the Elite Culture and the Beau Monde in London, c. 1688–1830,” Ph.D. thesis, Royal Holloway College, University of London, 2001. Weber, The Rise of Musical Classics, Conclusion, pp. 243–247. Otto G. Schindler, Das Burgtheater und sein Publikum (Vienna: Verlag der Oesterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1976). W. Weber, Music and the Middle Class: Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna, 1830–48 (London: Croom Helm, 1975; London: Ashgate, 2003). Letters of Lady Mary Coke, June 25, 1768; January 2, 1779. I am indebted to the Hon. Caroline Douglas-Hume for access to the letters. For her earlier letters, see The Letters and Journals of Lady Mary Coke, ed. J. A. Home (Edinburgh: private printing, 1889–1896). Papers of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, Public Record Office, London, Gallini to Salisbury, October 23, 1785, LC 7/3, fol. 263. I am greatly indebted to J. Milhous and R. D. Hume for their help; see their article, “An Annotated Guide to the Theatrical Documents in PRO LC 7/1, 7/2, and 7/3,” Theatre Notebook 35 (1981), 122–129. [Gaspard Grimod de la Reyni`ere], Lorgnette philosophique, trouv´ee par un R. P. Capucin sous les Arcades du Palais-Royal, & present´ee au Public par un C´elibataire (London: “chez l’auteur,” 1785), vol. ii, p. 13. Jeffrey Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theatre and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

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William Weber 36 Penelope Corfield, Power and the Professions in Britain, 1700–1850 (London: Routledge, 1995). 37 Charles Burney, A General History of Music, From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, ed. Frank Mercer (London: G. T. Foulis & Co., 1935), vol. 2, p. 744. 38 W. Weber, “From Miscellany to Homogeneity in Concert Programming in the Nineteenth Century,” Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts 29 (2001), 125–134. 39 Lenard R. Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve: A Cultural History of French Theatre Women from the Old Regime to the fin de si`ecle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 40 Jennifer Hall-Witt, “Reforming the Aristocracy: Opera and Elite Culture, 1780–1860,” in Joanna Innes and Arthur Burns, eds., Rethinking the Age of Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 220–237. 41 Jane F. Fulcher, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 42 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Table Talk and Omniana, with a note on Coleridge by Coventry Patmore (London: Oxford University Press, 1917), April 10, 1832, p. 175. I am indebted to Penelope Corfield for this reference. 43 Christophe Charle, La Naissance des “intellectuals”: 1880–1900 (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1990).

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“Edizioni distrutte” and the significance of operatic choruses during the Risorgimento Philip Gossett

This article seeks to develop new tools for understanding the importance during the 1840s of operatic choruses to the formation of an Italian national identity. It does so by focusing on Verdi’s activities during 1848 and by drawing a parallel between those activities and the repertory of patriotic choruses and hymns written and published in Milan in the wake of the Cinque giornate (March 18–22, 1848). By tracing the conceptual path in this repertory of patriotic hymns and choruses from metaphor during the pre-1848 years through explicit political statement during the revolutionary period in which Milan was temporarily freed from Austrian censorship, it suggests a model for reading the similar path from metaphor in works such as Verdi’s Nabucco (1842) to explicit patriotic sentiments in his La battaglia di Legnano (1848). In recent years there has been an effort to question the extent to which post-unification idealization of Verdi’s pre-unification role has falsified the historical record.1 It seems to me that this effort, while worthy, has gone too far and, in its own way, has begun to falsify the historical record. There was, of course, ample reason for the postunification generation to single Verdi out as the principal musical vate of the Risorgimento. By 1860 his works held a unique position in Italian culture and they maintained that position until his death in 1901 and beyond, with no Italian composer emerging as a serious challenger until Puccini’s popularity blossomed at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet nothing in Puccini’s life or art suggested that he could be assigned a moral or spiritual role in Italian unification.2 Not only did Verdi’s art dominate the Italian landscape from the mid-1840s through the remainder of the century, he also participated in the first Italian Parliament, at the personal invitation of Cavour, who sought to bring into the government artists as well as politicians. As he wrote to Verdi on January 10, 1860: 181

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The famous acrostic “Viva V.E.R.D.I. [Viva Vittorio Emanuele, Re D’Italia],” which dates from the end of 1858, with its explicit linkage of the composer’s name and the future king, had its effect.4 And a series of biographical studies with a pronounced tendency to invent historical incidents for which all evidence is lacking completed the job.5 These led in turn to musicological studies that simply accepted Verdi’s role without striving to examine the evidence critically.6 Even before the current round of iconoclasts began their work, however, there were serious historians who called many of these anecdotes into question, foremost among them Frank Walker and John Rosselli.7 Still, the privileged role Verdi was to be assigned was not entirely a product of post-1860 thinking. Recall that Giuseppe Mazzini, in his Filosofia della musica of 1836, had already considered and rejected the possible candidacy of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti as a cultural icon, while auguring the arrival of a “new musical world.”8 How should Italian musicians prepare for such an eventuality? “Let young artists, through the study of national songs, narratives of the history of the patria, the mysteries of poetry, the mysteries of nature, raise themselves to vaster horizons than those provided by the rule books and by old canons of art” (186). Mazzini had quite specific musical and dramaturgical matters in mind: r a greater effort to individualize the setting of an opera and its prin-

cipal characters: “the individuality of history, the individuality of the period of the drama, the individuality of the characters, each of which still represents an idea” (163); r an expansion and deepening of the role of the chorus, which, fulfilling the role of “the people, of which it is the born interpreter,” would be

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granted a “collective individuality” and its “own, independent, and spontaneous life” (169); r a renewal of musical forms, with the suppression of “cavatinas and the inevitable da capos,” as well as the “monotony of omnipresent and vulgar cadences” (171); r a purging of a vocal style that had come to depend on arbitrary “florid runs, ornamentation, and embellishment” whose end result was to “destroy emotion, changing it into cold and importunate admiration” (172). That each of these elements in Mazzini’s vision can be coordinated with tendencies in Verdi’s art as it existed in the period before 1860 is hardly an insight that developed only after 1860. If many assertions about the political significance of Verdi’s operas in the period before the revolutionary actions of 1848 turn out to have been overstated or even invented by post-unification commentators, as they certainly were, how can we gauge what importance – if any – the works may have had in their actual political milieu, either for the composer himself or for contemporary audiences? If there is no evidence that the Milanese audience for the opening night of Nabucco in 1842 demanded a repetition of the chorus of the Hebrews, “Va pensiero sull’ali dorate,” for example, does that mean that the chorus had no political importance? If Verdi’s operas were given no particular prominence in Milan during the temporary Austrian absence in the aftermath of the Cinque giornate, should we conclude that neither the composer nor his music were politically significant to patriotic eyes? Roger Parker’s call for a “thorough (and long overdue) revaluation of Verdi’s ‘political’ status and influence during his early career” (98) depends largely on the discussion of a single chorus, “Va pensiero.” Instead of investigating what significance the chorus might actually have had to a contemporary Italian audience, however, he attempts to deflate its reputation by invoking generic issues and reception history.9 Parker recognizes that Verdi and his librettists were cognizant by 1844 “of a ‘genre’ of choruses, a successful style with which Verdi was already identified and, perhaps, which he might be encouraged to

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exploit again” (48). The verses of “Va pensiero” (1842), “O Signore, dal tetto natio” from I lombardi alla prima crociata (1843), and “Si ridesti il leon di Castiglia” from Ernani (1844) are all constructed of four quatrains of decasillabi. Later, when writing Macbeth (1846–1847), Verdi asked his librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, to write a chorus with four quatrains of ottonari verse, with which he hoped to “make a chorus of the importance of that of Nabucco,” but without “adopting the same meter.”10 Seeing “Va pensiero” in this generic context, however, while lessening the historical weight it must bear alone, does not compel a revaluation of its possible significance to contemporary audiences. Parker also gives short shrift to examples of censorship or selfcensorship of Verdian choruses, of which there are examples in both Nabucco (although not “Va pensiero”) and Ernani,11 preferring to examine “the journalistic reactions to operatic events during intense political crisis, during the 1848 revolutions themselves” (87). What he discovers is that Verdi’s operas were rarely the subject of attention during this period. Ricordi’s Gazzetta musicale di Milano is more concerned with the patriotic hymns and choruses that began to pour from his presses, whose “poetic and musical style,” according to Parker, “is strikingly uniform” (89).12 There are some interesting reports from theatres, including a performance of Il giuramento by Mercadante in which the audience applauded “for every phrase in which was found some allusion to the present situation” (91), but Parker finds few references to Verdi’s operas. When opera resumed in Milan at the Teatro Carcano on April 24, 1848, it did so with La muta di Portici, the Italian translation of Auber’s 1828 opera, which “had even at this early stage in its career become known as the opera that had signalled a popular revolt in Brussels when it was staged there during the revolutions of 1830” (93). And, finally, Parker calls attention to the next seasons, after the return of the Austrians with their censors, when La Scala undertook many Verdian revivals, including Ernani, Macbeth, Attila, and Nabucco, adding, “It seems inconceivable in the circumstances that any of these operas had been actively associated with the failed revolution” (97). The information Parker brings together is invaluable, but one may question his conclusions. He quotes from an article in the Bolognese

Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento

Teatri, arti e letteratura of May 1848: “In Italy, if there is song, it is mostly patriotic. In Bologna I lombardi are abandoned so as to sing national choruses around the city. In Naples Nabucco was poorly received, because the public wants from Verdi the traditions of Italy, not those of the ancient Orient . . .” (95).13 The report about a staging that same May of Attila in Ferrara comes to a similar conclusion: “. . . but it is difficult to see Attila in the theatre now that there are so many Attilas on the battlefields around us. Why not choose another opera, more appropriate to the current times? To remember a period that was so humiliating for Italy, now that we need to remind our country only of glorious actions, is contrary to common sense and to that love we cherish together for our national independence” (96).14 Verdi, of course, could not have agreed more, as we know from his 1848 letters and compositions, which (after the completion of Il corsaro in February) consist exclusively of an explicitly patriotic opera, La battaglia di Legnano, and a patriotic Inno popolare to a text (“Suona la tromba”) by Goffredo Mameli, author also of the text of what was to become the Italian national anthem, “Fratelli d’Italia.”

V E R D I ’ S 1 8 4 8 AC T I V I T I E S : L A BAT TAG L I A D I L E G NA N O

Having been in Paris at the beginning of the Cinque giornate, Verdi wrote to Ricordi on the 25th: “I hear great news from Milan, but nothing certain, nobody has letters directly . . . I am in a state of great anxiety, and most annoyed that I am here.”15 He did not remain in Paris for long. Already on April 5 his arrival in Milan is mentioned in Ricordi’s Gazzetta musicale di Milano. Verdi’s correspondence from Milan with his librettists Salvadore Cammarano and Francesco Maria Piave make clear that he is enthusiastic about the new political situation. His most famous letter from this period is to Piave, written in Milan on April 21, 1848.16 It begins: You can imagine whether I wanted to remain in Paris, after hearing there was a revolution in Milan. I left the moment I heard the news; but I could see nothing but these stupendous barricades. Honor to these heroes! Honor to all Italy, which in this moment is truly great!

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Philip Gossett The hour of her liberation has sounded, you may be convinced of that. It is the people who want it: and when the people want something there is no absolute power that can resist them. They can agitate, intrigue as much as they like, those who want to be necessary perforce, but they won’t succeed in defrauding the people of their rights. Yes, another few months and Italy will be free, united, republican. What else should it be? You speak to me of music!! What’s got into you? . . . Do you believe I want to concern myself now with notes, with sounds? . . . There is and must be only one music welcome to the ears of the Italians in 1848. The music of the cannon! . . . I would not write a note for all the gold in the world: I would feel immense remorse in using music-paper, which is good for making cartridges.

Soon after, though, Verdi – who had returned to Paris early in June – was corresponding with Piave about a possible operatic project, and he urged the librettist to find a subject that is “Italian and free.” Indeed, the composer’s first suggestion was the story of Ferruccio, “a gigantic personality, one of the greatest martyrs for Italian freedom.”17 That Verdi soon wished to celebrate the new political situation through his music became clear in his correspondence with the librettist Salvadore Cammarano. In a letter of April 20 to Verdi, Cammarano excused his previous silence because “in this era of political confusion, anxiety, and hopes, civic thoughts took precedence in me over artistic thoughts” (19).18 Now that Cammarano is seeking a subject for his projected new opera with Verdi, however, the changed political situation has “opened up an ample terrain for our choice” (20), and he suggests several subjects that would have previously been impossible (including The Sicilian Vespers), before turning to the subject he really wishes to develop: “And if within you burns, as it does within me, the desire to treat the most glorious epoch of Italian history, let us bring ourselves back to that of the Lombard League” (20). After summarizing the subject of La battaglia di Legnano, as developed from the drama by Joseph M´ery, La Bataille de Toulouse, he concludes: “By God, a subject of this kind must stir every man who has an Italian soul in his heart!” (20–21).

Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento

On June 15, Cammarano sent his selva to the composer in Paris.19 In the poetry of the first act, which followed on June 26, the opening words are assigned to the chorus (30).20 Viva Italia! un sacro patto Tutti stringe i figli suoi: Esso alfin di tanti ha fatto Un sol popolo d’Eroi! Le bandiere in campo spiega, O Lombarda invitta Lega, E discorra un gel per l’ossa Al feroce Barbarossa. Viva Italia forte ed una Colla spada e col pensier! Questo suol che a noi fu cuna, Tomba sia dello stranier! [Long live Italy! a sacred pact binds together all your children. It has finally made from the many a single people of heroes. Show your standards in the field, oh proud league of Lombards, and let a cold fear course through the bones of the fierce Barbarossa. Long live Italy, strong and united in the sword and in thought. Let this earth, which was our cradle, be a tomb to the foreigner!]

In his setting Verdi adopted the words with only one minor change: he substituted “Sacro un patto” for “un sacro patto.” Otherwise he apparently welcomed Cammarano’s text. The same is true of the other significant patriotic chorus in La battaglia di Legnano, near the beginning of Act III, which Cammarano sent the composer together with the entire third act on October 9, 1848. In this chorus, the Knights of Death swear their faith and determination to fight to the death for Italy (55). The text (three quatrains in doppio quinario) is in part a paraphrase of the famous oath of Rutli in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell.21 Giuriam d’Italia por fine ai danni, Cacciando oltr’Alpe i suoi tiranni. Pria che ritrarci, pria ch’esser vinti, Cader fra l’armi giuriamo estinti.

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Philip Gossett Se alcun fra noi, codardo in guerra, Mostrarsi al voto potr`a rubello, Al mancatore nieghi la terra Vivo un asilo, spento un avello: Siccome gli uomini Dio l’abbandoni, Quando l’estremo suo d`ı verr`a: Il vil suo nome infamia suoni Ad ogni gente, ad ogni et`a. [Let us swear to put an end to Italy’s suffering by chasing the tyrants back over the Alps. Rather than withdraw, rather than be vanquished, we swear to fall dead in battle. If any of us, a coward in war, fails to live up to this oath, may the earth refuse to the traitor a refuge in life, a tomb in death. At the end of his life, may God abandon him, as men have done: let his vile name be heard with infamy to every people, in every age.]

Verdi responded to Cammarano’s libretto of Act III in a letter of October 24 (63): “I received only this morning your letter of the 9th. Lovely this third Act, stupendous, and be assured that I will set it with all my love.” The only change he requested was the introduction of a short scene for Lida and Rolando, so as to give the prima donna an expanded presence.22 Cammarano obliged the composer (86–87) with the scene that includes this strophe, in which Rolando tells his wife what to say to their son should he die in battle: Digli ch’`e sangue italico, Digli ch’`e sangue mio, Che dei mortali e` giudice La terra, no, ma Dio! E dopo Dio la Patria Gli apprenda a rispettar. [Tell him that he is of Italian blood, tell him that he is of my blood, that God judges men, not the earth! And after God teach him to respect the patria.]

As of January 1849, of course, these texts were still possible in Rome, where Papal forces had not yet returned, but were no longer acceptable in Milan, where the Austrians were again firmly in control. Although

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Ricordi published La battaglia di Legnano in its original form (plate numbers 21541–21559), it was described in the 1857 general catalogue of the firm as “edizione estera, distrutta”: an edition prepared almost surely outside Milan, in Florence, but destroyed.23 Instead, Verdi and Cammarano’s opera became L’assedio d’Arlem (plate numbers 20956– 20967), with changes in the text to make it acceptable to the Austrian rulers. That both of them were aware such changes might prove necessary is clear in their correspondence, beginning as early as September 1848.24 Yet the willingness of both Verdi and Cammarano to yield to political necessity in order to permit their opera to circulate can hardly negate the enthusiasm and conviction with which they conceived and wrote La battaglia di Legnano.

V E R D I ’ S 1 8 4 8 AC T I V I T I E S : “ S U O N A L A T R O M B A ”

Verdi’s other musical commitment of 1848 was at the request of Giuseppe Mazzini himself, whom the composer had met the previous summer in London, when he supervised the premiere of I masnadieri at Her Majesty’s Theatre. Apparently during Verdi’s sojourn in Milan in May 1848, Mazzini – who had also returned to Milan when word had reached him of the Cinque giornate – persuaded Verdi to set to music a patriotic hymn. On June 6 Mazzini requested from Goffredo Mameli a text “that will become the Italian Marseillaise, a hymn that – to use Verdi’s phrase – will make the people forget both the poet and the composer.”25 Mameli’s text, dated August 26, 1848 in the first edition of Verdi’s musical setting of the hymn (see below),26 was promptly forwarded to the composer. On October 18, 1848, from Paris, Verdi sent Mazzini a musical setting for unaccompanied male chorus, with the following letter.27 I send you the hymn, and though it is a little late, I hope it will reach you in time. I have tried to be as popular and easy as is possible for me. Make whatever use of it you like; burn it even, if you do not believe it worthy. If, however, you make it public, have the poet change some words at the beginning of the second and third strophes, where it would be well to

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Philip Gossett have a phrase of five syllables with a meaning of its own, like all the other strophes: Noi lo giuriamo . . . Suona la tromba, etc. etc., then, obviously, finish the verse with a sdrucciolo [a dactyl] . . . May this Hymn amid the music of the Cannon soon be sung in the Lombard plains!

Verdi recommended to Mazzini that “If you decide to print it, you can turn to Carlo Pozzi, Mendrisio, who is a correspondent of Ricordi’s,” but it was too late: by October 1848 the period for patriotic hymns in Milan was past. Although not everything in the later history of “Suona la tromba” is clear, Verdi’s hymn seems not to have been published until 1865, when Mazzini offered it to a Milanese firm, Paolo De Giorgi, which issued it with the plate number of 144.28 The first of Mameli’s five strophes, as printed by De Giorgi, followed by the five-verse refrain, reads: Suona la tromba, ondeggiano Le insegne gialle e nere; Fuoco! per Dio, sui barbari, Sulle vendute schiere. Gi`a ferve la battaglia, Al Dio de’ forti osanna, Le bajonette in canna, E` l’ora del pugnar. N´e deporrem la spada Finch´e sia schiavo un angolo Dell’Itala contrada, Finch´e non sia l’Italia Una dall’alpi al mar. [The trumpet sounds, the yellow and black flags are waving; fire! by God, on the barbarians, on the mercenary ranks. The battle has begun, praise to the God of the strong, with bayonets fixed it is the hour of battle. Nor will we put down the sword as long as an inch of Italian soil is enslaved, until Italy is one from the Alps to the sea.]

The other four strophes (each with eight verses, followed by the same five-verse refrain) continue with references to Italy’s arising, to its

Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento

oppressors, to God, who will fight alongside his people, to the “new Rome,” to martyrs and tyrants, and, finally, to “the blood of the heroes.” Despite his efforts “to be as popular and easy as is possible for me,” Verdi was not altogether successful. Indeed, one could argue that the composer wrote a more “popular” hymn for the opening of La battaglia di Legnano than “Suona la tromba.” The three quatrains of the Battaglia di Legnano poetry are absolutely regular, and the first twentyfour measures of the setting are for male chorus alone. Verdi set the first quatrain to an eight-measure phrase, divided in two similar halves. The second quatrain is a contrasting eight-measure phrase, with louder and softer sections. The third and final quatrain is set to music identical to the first quatrain, with the last four measures repeated (adding a part for the women). Verdi’s setting of “Suona la tromba” is much less regular. Much of the fault, of course, is in Mameli’s poem, in which each of the five strophes contains thirteen verses of settenari. But Verdi made several decisions whose effect was to make his hymn difficult to sing. The first has to do with the structure of the first two verses of each strophe, which are here reproduced as they are found in the De Giorgi print: 1. Suona la tromba, ondeggiano Le insegne gialle e nere; 2. Di guerra i canti echeggiano, L’Italia e` alfin risorta. 3. Viva l’Italia or vendica La gloria sua primiera . . . 4. Sar`a l’Italia – e tremino Gli ignavi e gli oppressori . . . 5. Noi lo giuriam pei Martiri Uccisi dai tiranni . . . Remember that in his letter to Mazzini of October 18, 1848, Verdi wrote: “have the poet change some words at the beginning of the second and third strophes, where it would be well to have a phrase of five syllables with a meaning of its own, like all the other strophes: Noi lo giuriamo . . . Suona la tromba, etc. etc., then, obviously, finish the verse

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with a sdrucciolo [a dactyl].” He is perfectly correct that in the first and fourth strophes the meaning and structure of the verse isolates the first five syllables from the rest with a caesura; the second part of the first verse must then be enjambed with the second verse. Hence, “Suona la tromba” and “ondeggiano le insegne gialle e nere” or “Sar`a l’Italia” and “e tremino gli ignavi e gli oppressori . . .” In the fifth strophe, Verdi suggested that the poetry must be sung by adding a letter at the end of “giuriam” (hence “giuriamo”) in order to achieve the same effect: “Noi lo giuriamo” and “pei Martiri uccisi dai tiranni.” He specifically asked Mazzini to have Mameli alter the beginning of the second and third strophes to create the same effect. Now, in fact, the text Mameli originally sent to Verdi could not have been sung to Verdi’s music at these points. The second strophe originally began: “Avanti – Viva Italia, / Viva la gran Risorta”; the third began “Finch´e rimanga un braccio / Dispiegherassi altera.”29 Mameli (or someone else) must have made the changes in these verses that Verdi requested, as printed in the De Giorgi edition, but the result remains unsatisfactory. The problem is absolutely clear in the second strophe, where there is no enjambment, and so it is impossible to separate “Di guerra i canti” from “echeggiano.”30 From the point of view of being “popular and easy,” however, Verdi made the wrong decision. He should have requested that Mameli alter the first, fourth, and fifth strophes. By dividing the first two verses irregularly, with an enjambment, he made it difficult to set them in a regular fashion. As a result, the first phrase of the hymn is five measures long, two for “Suona la tromba” and three for “ondeggiano le insegne gialle e nere”: see Example 8.1.

8.1 Giuseppe Verdi and Goffredo Mameli, “Suona la tromba”

Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento

It is not an unattractive effect, but it is certainly not “popular and easy.” The peculiar thing is that Verdi knew perfectly well that he was choosing a risky path, for it was a path he had urged the inexperienced Antonio Somma not to take. When Somma was preparing the libretto for Re Lear, Verdi suggested on November 19, 1853 that during the course of their work together it might prove necessary to ask him to change some verses.31 It may be that at one place or another, in order to make a cantabile or a musical motif, I might need some modification, but it would not harm the interests of the drama in any way. Besides, it would not be for my own artistic needs, but rather for a necessity of the art itself. You remember the aria from Belisario? “Trema Bisanzio!?” Donizetti had no scruple about attaching “sterminatrice” to “Bisanzio,” a horrible absurdity, but the musical rhythm absolutely demanded it. It would have been impossible to make a motif by following the meaning of those verses. Wouldn’t it have been better to ask the poet to adjust some stanzas?

The verses (by Cammarano) to which Verdi refers are from the cabaletta of the Aria for Alamiro at the beginning of Act II of Belisario (Venice, Teatro La Fenice, February 4, 1836): “Trema Bisanzio! Sterminatrice / Su te la guerra discender`a” [Tremble Byzantium! Exterminating / War will descend on you]. Donizetti set the text as two parallel sub-phrases of four measures each. As Verdi rightly notes, the result is that it sounds as if Bisanzio itself is “sterminatrice,” whereas the adjective actually modifies “la guerra”: see Example 8.2. 8.2 Gaetano Donizetti and Salvadore Cammarano, Belisario, Aria of Alamiro

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This is precisely the kind of poetry that Mameli (or someone else) produced in the revision. Verdi doesn’t make the Donizetti mistake, but the result is that he failed to “make a motif,” a deadly mistake in a piece that is intended to be popular. Nor do the problems with “Suona la tromba” end there. After the opening five-measure phrase, Verdi falls into a series of four-measure phrases, until he reaches the beginning of the refrain, “N´e deporrem la spada / Finch´e sia schiavo un angolo / Dell’Itala contrada.” At that point he feels compelled to extend what could have been a more userfriendly four-measure phrase to six measures, thanks to the unusual five-verse refrain in the poetry. Little wonder that “Suona la tromba” has never garnered any votes as a candidate for a national hymn. Whether the composer was successful at his effort or not, however, Verdi’s own reaction to the Cinque giornate and its aftermath was the same as that of contemporary critics, who invited artists to write patriotic hymns and to compose operas that directly reflected the new political reality. It was no longer a time for metaphorical references, for operas about Hebrew slaves in Babylon or Scottish refugees weeping over their oppressed homeland or Attila and the Huns at the outskirts of Rome, even if audiences were prepared to understand such references (as several reviewers make clear). It was a time for direct statement. A L B E RT O B A N T I A N D T H E “ M O R P H O LO G Y O F N AT I O N A L D I S C O U R S E ”

Although in the years preceding 1848 direct statements were impossible in most parts of Italy, interpretation does not need to be paralyzed by the absence of such statements. As Alberto Banti has demonstrated in his important study of the “nation of the Risorgimento,” a careful reading of the “Risorgimental canon” of texts (including operatic texts) provides a clear and convincing vocabulary with which to gauge the “morphology of national discourse” and to understand the way such discourse was received.32 For each assertion he provides citations from the canon that traverse the period from the development of resistance

Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento

to the Restoration in the 1810s and 1820s (and sometimes earlier, from the Napoleonic era) through unification. Banti begins by citing texts that describe a “community of heroic warriors fighting for the ransom of their homeland” (57). Opening with Alessandro Manzoni’s Marzo 1821 and an 1821 poem by Giovanni Berchet, both “situated in the rarified realm of history” (56), he concludes with the opening chorus from Verdi’s La battaglia di Legnano, “situated in a contemporary political chronicle, an urgent, pressing, rapturous chronicle” (56). These communities are linked by sworn oaths, “the fruit of free and courageous will” (57). Banti convincingly relates these ideas to aspects of Mazzini’s 1831 Istruzione generale per gli affratellati nella Giovine Italia (59). The founding oath is “to break foreign oppression, to restore to the motherland the lands that belong to it; to create from the nation a state” (61). The nation is conceived as already existing, “a common tradition, a common language, the constitutive elements of a common nationality” (62), links established “by nature, according to some, or by a metaphysical will, by God himself, according to others” (63). Italy is presented “as a woman and mother, sorrowing or wounded in chains” (67n), and her sons are therefore brothers (68). Banti emphasizes the “dense net of family ties that joins together a long chain of generations” (69), generations occupying a particular geographical space and land. That land, that homeland, is characterized by “smells, panoramas, colors, elements that structure memory and accompany the life of those who have lived there” (70). This is the context in which Banti cites the Nabucco chorus, “Va pensiero,” with its emphasis on the physical characteristics of an absent homeland: “affliction from slavery is rendered almost insupportable not so much because of the memory of institutions of the homeland, but from present feeling, a people without a homeland, far from the physical frame that nourishes memory and identity” (72). That identity is in part determined by “historical memory” (73), and Banti lists “the principal symbolic events that belong to Risorgimento mythology” (75). Anyone who knows the Verdi operas, as well as the operatic projects he seriously considered undertaking during the

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1840s and 1850s, will recognize them all, from Attila to the crusades, to Venetian figures (Carmagnola) and Florentine ones (Ferruccio, Niccol`o de’ Lapi, etc.). They acquire meaning as “anticipations of an event that remains to realize itself, the ransom of the nation, of whose story they nonetheless offer testimony” (76). In various ways, all of them return to four recurring configurations: “a) the oppression of the Italian nation by foreign peoples or tyrants; b) the internal division among the Italians, which favors this oppression; c) the menace to the most profound center of national honor, which this oppression allows, whether directly or indirectly; d) the heroic efforts, even if unsuccessful, for redemption” (77).

One hardly needs to stress the extent to which these configurations are present throughout Verdi’s operas of the 1840s. Even before the neo-Guelph movement put Pope Pius IX at the center of the drive for national independence and unification, the canonic texts speak of the coming effort as a crusade: “the war in defense of the country’s honor transformed itself into a holy war, desired by God” (107). In trying to establish how these ideas gained force and currency, Banti invokes Michel Foucault by referring to the “archeology of the national discourse.” He investigates in some detail how contemporaries believed that elements of this national discourse could be used “to awaken the Italians to awareness of their own Italianness” (110). For Banti, the power of the Risorgimental discourse lies in the fact that “the images and narrative forms . . . derive from preexistent models, opportunely manipulated and reassembled” (111). He emphasizes that these models invoked “a common religious belief as one of the most certain elements of national cohesion, a consideration that is tied to a positive evaluation of the role that religious institutions had in the past and could have in the future in the history of Italy” (120). Thus, Banti directs us to the use of biblical narratives to “justify the ethics of actions of revenge or war” (120), and – through a rich web of resonances – to “consider the positive relationship between the Italian nation and Catholic tradition.” All of this is familiar Verdian territory. With the revolutionary movements of 1848, of course, the war for independence “was seen across all these symbolic references,

Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento

emphasizing its sacred character, an element that, in those days, seemed to be sealed with the explicit blessing of Pius IX to the national movement” (186). With Pius’s subsequent betrayal of the national cause after April 29, 1848, however, religious discourse tended to be thrown into the shade by discourse that stressed warlike heroes, whether kings (first Carlo Alberto, then Victor Emanuel II) or popular warriors (Garibaldi) (188). These elements of the reception of the national discourse, however, continue the story beyond the chronological period under consideration here. H Y M N S T O P I U S I X A N D C A R LO A L B E RT O B E F O R E T H E C I N QU E G I O R NAT E ; R O S S I N I , N ATA LU C C I , A N D M AG A Z Z A R I

In the years preceding 1848, the preparation of patriotic hymns and choruses began to develop extensively on the Italian peninsula, particularly associated with the excitement surrounding the new Pope in Rome, Pius IX, and the growing hope that King Carlo Alberto of Savoy would prove to be a leader in helping to free northern Italy from the Austrian yoke. In Rome the election of Archbishop Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti to the papal throne as Pius IX on June 16, 1846 created great expectations among liberals and reformers. Some of his early gestures suggested a neo-Guelph ideology, with the Pope a national leader in the movement toward a united Italy, joining in his own persona both Catholic and liberal values. A month after his election, on July 16, 1846, Pius IX declared an amnesty for political prisoners.33 The occasion was celebrated musically by none other than Gioachino Rossini, who prepared a hymn, a Grido di esultazione riconoscente al Sommo Pontefice Pio IX, for performance in Bologna on the steps of the Cathedral of San Petronio on July 23, 1846, the day in which the Pope’s edict was to be applied in Bologna.34 Then, for performance the evening of January 1, 1847 in the Aula Massima of the Palazzo Senatorio on the Campidoglio, Rossini developed a Cantata in onore del Sommo Pontefice Pio Nono, arranging some older music and composing a few new passages. After the text “L’alto vessil di Cristo rifolgorar vedrem” [We will see the lofty banner

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of Christ shine again], the Cantata concludes with a movement for soloists and chorus: O Voi sante reliquie fraterne Mal campate al Pagano furor, L`a nell’ampie funeree caverne Esultate al novello Signor. Dallo zelo che il petto gl’incende Pi`u riprende la Pianta vigor, Che cresciuta dal vostro gran sangue Mai non langue, non sfronda, non muor. [O holy remains of our brothers, who did not survive the wrath of the pagans, there in the vast, funereal caves, you exult before the new Lord [the new Pope]. By the zeal that fires its breast, the plant grows stronger, and nourished by your great blood it never wilts, nor loses its leaves, nor dies.]

The music of this finale of the Cantata is derived from a very popular chorus from Le Si`ege de Corinthe, written in 1826 and bringing to the stage of the Paris Opera the widespread European sympathy for the Greeks in their battle for freedom against the Turks. In the chorus, the Greeks defending Corinth against the Turks (we are in 1459) vow to go to their deaths, if necessary, fighting for their homeland. The 8.3 Gioachino Rossini and Luigi Balocchi and Alexandre Soumet, Le Si`ege de Corinthe, Sc`ene et Air Hi´eros avec Chœur

Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento

seer, Hi´eros, predicts that they will indeed die, but that the Greeks will rise again. To the names of Leonidas, a great Spartan warrior, and Thermopylae, the site of his final battle against the Persians, in which his entire army was massacred, the Greeks of Corinth sing the following stanza.35 For the music, see Example 8.3. R´epondons a` ce cri de victoire, M´eritons un tr´epas immortel; Nous verrons dans les champs de la gloire Le tombeau se changer en autel. [Let us respond to this cry of victory, let us deserve an immortal death; on the field of glory we will see the tomb become an altar.]

Questo nome che suona vittoria Scuote ogn’alma e la guida a pugnar E vedrassi sul campo di gloria Il sepolcro cangiarsi in altar. [Let this name that stands for victory move every soul and guide it to fight, and on the field of glory, the tomb will become an altar.]

Although the actual words sung could hardly be considered inflammatory, there could not have been a single listener in the Roman audience on New Year’s Day 1847 unaware of the dramatic context for which the chorus was written.36 Rossini was by no means alone in supplying choruses and hymns in praise of the new Pope.37 Often the texts of these early hymns are quite generic. Tiberio Natalucci, for example, published two Inni popolari ad onore dell’immortale Pio IX with Ricordi in Milan in 1847 (Pl. No. 19216), but not even the Austrian censors could find much to complain about with a text of this kind. Come un’iri l’almo Iddio Agli afflitti te mostr`o E di gioja, sommo Pio, Ogni core palpit`o. A quel sommo che v’un`ıo Date plausi, lode e onor, N´e abbia pace quel che Pio Non ha sculto nel suo cor.

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As in the case of Italian operatic choruses from the early 1840s, these are texts that do not on the surface seem offensive. Indeed, when the Austrians returned to Milan in 1848, after the defeat of the patriots, Natalucci’s hymns were allowed to circulate freely. That was not the case with several hymns composed by Gaetano Magazzari in 1847 and early 1848, published by Ricordi during the heady days following the Cinque giornate. One can actually trace the evolution of popular feeling through the hymn texts Magazzari set to music.38 His Il primo giorno dell’anno (“Del nuov’anno gi`a l’alba primiera”), to a text by Filippo Meucci, was “sung for the first time in Rome by the people on January 1, 1847 in the presence of the Pontiff Pius IX” (i.e., the same day as the performance of Rossini’s Cantata). Its final stanza (of four) is characteristic: Benedetto chi mai non dispera Dell’aita suprema di Dio, Benedetta la santa bandiera Che il Vicario di Cristo inalz`o. [May he be blessed who never abandons hope in the supreme assistance of God, blessed be the sacred standard that the Vicar of Christ raises aloft.]

These images of God providing help to those who do not abandon hope and of the sacred standard being in the hands of Pius IX might seem innocent enough, but – as Banti has made clear – in the political context of 1847 they were not.39 Magazzari’s hymn for the amnesty, L’amnistia data dal sommo Pio IX (“Viva, viva, cantiamo festosi”), with words by Gaetano Ronetti, announced as having been “performed in Rome in the presence of the great Pontiff” (presumably during the summer of 1847), offers similar sentiments. The four strophes are in praise of the clemency of a Pope who blesses his people with “pardon and peace.” Here is the third stanza (of four):

Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento A lui fede, concordi giuriamo; E` perenne di figli l’affetto, Pi`u che Prence, a noi Padre diletto Sol per farci felici sar`a. [Let us swear together fidelity to him; the affection of his children is perennial, more than a Prince, to us he is a beloved Father who will seek only to make us happy.]

For liberals, swearing fidelity to this Pope in the summer of 1847 meant swearing allegiance to a prospective leader who had just freed political prisoners throughout the Papal States, the legacy of his reactionary predecessor, Gregory XVI. On November 3 and 4, 1847, we find Magazzari in Turin, at the Teatro Carignano, where his Inno subalpino (“Carlo Alberto, l’amato Sovrano”), to words by Francesco Guidi, was performed. Just a few days earlier (on October 30, 1847) Carlo Alberto had granted several reforms, including greater freedom of the press, and it seems likely that the new hymn spoke at least in part to that situation.40 Guidi’s text went further than calling Carlo Alberto a beloved ruler; it assigned him a prominent role in the nurturing of Italian hopes. Ei comprese qual viva speranza Nutre Italia ne’ Prenci possenti; Ei col senno di provvida mente Or le aggiunge novello splendor. [He understood the lively hope that Italy nourishes in its powerful Princes; now, with the wisdom of a provident intelligence, he adds to it new splendor.]

With this kind of rhetoric in the air, it is little wonder that a still somewhat nervous government, in a decree concerning the Teatro Regio of December 24, 1847, two days before the opening of the Carnival season of 1848, wrote: “In the interest that calm, order, and dignity be maintained at the Teatro Regio, the Public is advised that all noisy demonstrations are absolutely prohibited, as is the singing of hymns, introducing flags, whistling or prolonging applause in a way that interrupts the flow of the performances.”41 One doesn’t prohibit what does

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not exist: the increasingly provocative way in which audiences were behaving on the eve of 1848 is manifest. The early months of 1848 completed the transformation from an implicit national discourse to an explicit call to arms. On February 3, 1848, an Inno siciliano by Magazzari (“Viva, viva l’invitta Palermo”), to a text by Pietro Sterbini, was “sung for the first time by the people in Rome at the celebration organized by the Roman municipality for the happy conclusion of events in the Reign of the Two Sicilies.” The reference, of course, is to the revolt that began in Palermo on January 12, 1848, which soon spread to the mainland around Naples, leading to the granting of a constitution by King Ferdinando II of the Two Sicilies on January 29. In the Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea of Rome (26 3.h.8), there are two broadsides associated with the event. One publicizes it (and advertises that a reduction for voice and piano is available at a Roman music store (Scipione de Rossi on the Via del Corso, N. 139): SICILIAN HYMN / DEDICATED TO THE / CIVIC GUARD / OF ROME / SET TO MUSIC BY MAESTRO / GAETANO MAGAZZARI OF BOLOGNA / POETRY BY PIETRO STERBINI / SUNG BY THE PEOPLE THE EVENING OF 3 FEBRUARY 1848 DURING THE SOLEMN OCCASION OF THE FESTIVAL PROCLAIMED / BY THE ROMAN MUNICIPALITY / FOR THE HAPPY RESULT OF THE LATEST EVENTS IN THE REALM / OF THE TWO SICILIES / ARRANGED BY THE AUTHOR FOR PIANO AND VOICE / IT CAN BE PURCHASED AT SCIPIONE DE ROSSI MUSIC DEALER IN VIA DEL CORSO N. 139

The other, much smaller, contains the words: it was presumably meant to be passed out that very evening so that the public could indeed join in the singing. It is worth citing this entire text, which makes absolutely clear how much the situation had changed in the course of a year. Pius IX and Carlo Alberto (he is the “Regnante” being addressed) remain protagonists, but now they are being invoked to lead the Italian people into battle, following the lead of the Sicilians:

Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento Viva, viva l’invitta Palermo, Viva, viva Partenope bella Viva, viva d’Italia la stella, Che a risplendere in cielo torn`o. Dalla terra dei Procida venne La virt`u che a combattere invita, Che calpesta i tesori e la vita Quando all’armi la Patria chiam`o. Guerra, guerra risuona ogni terra, Dio ci chiama la Patria a salvar; Ai Regnanti dei popoli amanti Fede eterna possiamo giurar. O fratelli, fratelli beati, Dalle Sicule tombe sorgete, E negl’Itali petti accendete La scintilla del vostro valor. Dal Sebeto alla cima dell’Alpi Sotto il Segno da Pio benedetto Sar`a santo di Patria l’affetto Sar`a salvo d’Italia l’onor. [Viva, viva, unvanquished Palermo, Viva, viva beautiful Naples, Viva, viva the star of Italy, which returns to shine again in the firmament. From the land of Procida42 came the virtue that invites us to battle, that tramples on treasures and life when our Patria called us to arms. Let war resound through the land, God calls us to save our Patria. To those sovereigns who love their people, we can swear eternal faith. O blessed brothers, rise again from the Sicilian tombs, and light the spark of your valor in Italian breasts. From the Sebeto [a Neapolitan river] to the peak of the Alps, under the standard blessed by Pius, love for our Patria will be blessed, the honor of Italy will be safe.]

A month later, Magazzari composed an Inno guerriero italiano to a text in doppi senari by Filippo Meucci (the same poet responsible for the new year’s text heard on January 1, 1847), a hymn “performed for the first time in Rome on the evenings of March 4 and 5, 1848 in the Apollo Theatre.”43 This is now a call to action, even to arms, as in the following strophe:

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Philip Gossett All’armi, fratelli, destate il coraggio, L’insania punite dell’avido strano; Dio sveglia e rinnova l’onor di Legnano, L’ardir di Balilla, di Procida il cor. [To arms, brothers, rouse your courage, punish the folly of the greedy foreigner; Let God wake and renew the honor of Legnano, the daring of Balilla, the heart of Procida.44 ]

The long poem continues with statements about how God struck down the armies of Egypt and Assyria, calls for the “death and extermination of our invaders,” refers to Attila, and so on. The Cinque giornate were less than two weeks in the future. Although he continued publishing hymns, pieces for piano, and songs over a twenty-five-year period, Magazzari was not a memorable composer, not even in the context of a minor genre such as patriotic hymns and choruses. Nonetheless, his active role in the musical scene in Rome, Bologna, and Turin between 1847 and 1848 and his evident commitment to the nationalist cause made his settings a proving ground for shifts in attitude within the musical and poetic community during the year preceding the Cinque giornate. That during the period between March and August 1848 Ricordi printed eleven of Magazzari’s settings of patriotic hymns, the highest number by far of any composer, is evidence of the influential role he was felt to have played in developing this genre. That the returning Austrians included all of them among the editions whose plates they compelled the publisher to destroy is no surprise. “ E D I Z I O N I D I S T RU T T E ” I N T H E A F T E R M AT H O F T H E C I N QU E G I O R NAT E

Although Ricordi had published various hymns in honor of Pius IX during the time between his election as Pope in 1846 and the beginning of the revolt against the Austrians in March 1848, their texts were not ostensibly provocative. Yet no one in Italy could have failed to

Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento

understand the implicit message of these hymns: finally there was a Pope sympathetic to the cause of Italian independence and unity. Rossini’s Grido di esultazione riconoscente al Sommo Pontefice Pio IX, first performed on July 23, 1846 to celebrate the amnesty for political prisoners proclaimed by Pius IX, has a text as anodyne as that of the hymns of Natalucci or the very first hymns, chronologically, of Magazzari. Here are the first and last strophes:45 Su, fratelli, letizia si canti Al magnanimo core di Pio, Che alla santa favilla di Dio S’infiamm`o del pi`u dolce pensier. . . . O fratelli, esultiamo, esultiamo, Grazie, grazie risponda ogni cor. Ecco il giorno ed il giorno aspettato, Ecco il giorno di pace e d’amor. [Arise, brothers, let us sing joyfully of the magnanimous heart of Pius, who at the holy spark of God was roused to the sweetest thought . . . O brothers, let us exult, let us exult, thank you, thank you each heart responds. This is the day, the long-awaited day, this is the day of peace and love.]

As with the concluding chorus for the Cantata in onore del Sommo Pontefice Pio Nono, this is not newly composed music. Rossini underlaid the text to another of his most famous choral movements, the so-called Coro dei Bardi, part of the first-act finale of La donna del lago, a hymn that addresses the Scottish rebels as “figli d’Eroi [sons of heroes]” and urges them to battle (“correte, struggete quel pugno di schiavi [run, destroy that handful of slaves]”) and to victory (“su su! fate scempio del vostro oppressor! [Arise! wreak havoc on your oppressor!]”). For the music, see Example 8.4. The words may have been tame, but the message was not. Still, the chorus was published by Ricordi during 1847, without incident.

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Philip Gossett 8.4 Gioachino Rossini and Canonico Golfieri, Grido di esultazione riconoscente

After the rebellion in Milan broke out on March 17, 1848, the situation changed radically. By the end of the Cinque giornate, Austrian troops had been driven from the city. Freedom of expression was possible, and the Milanese music publishers (not only Ricordi, but also Francesco Lucca) were able to issue hymns, choruses, even “characteristic” pieces for piano with revolutionary-sounding titles (“March 22, 1848 Waltz, or Music alluding to the magnanimous hearts of the Milanese during the Five Glorious Days” by Albino Abbiati), without fear of censorship. But Abbiati’s composition was not just another instrumental piece. Each of its constituent sections is marked by an explanatory phrase. During the course of its introduction, for example, one reads: “Pius IX to the people”; “Snare drums sounding the alarm for the Austrian infantry”; “The proud Milanese who come together to fight”; “Trumpet sounding the alarm for the Austrian cavalry.” Later, when the first “Waltz” begins, “Pius IX who inspires his people” and “Joy and courage of the people.” The music consists of a series of variations on a theme that is never named, but in 1848 was well known as the Grido di esultazione riconoscente al Sommo Pontefice Pio IX of Rossini, that is, the Coro dei Bardi from La donna del lago: see Example 8.5. At that moment, in short, the Rossinian melody alone was sufficient to establish an association between Pius IX and the Cinque giornate. But the revolutionary movements in Milan (and Piedmont more generally) held sway for only a few months. Internal struggles, particularly between those who sought a republican form of government and those who wished to be annexed by the House of Savoy under

Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 8.5 Albino Abbiati, Il 22 Marzo 1848

King Carlo Alberto, did much to sap the strength of the revolution. The decision of Pius IX on April 29 to dissociate himself from the war with Austria was a serious blow. Soon the Austrians were ready to counterattack with massive force, and by August the revolt was over. It is possible to learn about Ricordi’s publications during these months of independence thanks to an invaluable source, the Catalogo (in ordine numerico) delle opere publicate dall’I. R. Stabilimento Nazionale Privilegiato di Calcografia, Copisteria e Tipografia Musicali di Tito di Gio. Ricordi (Milan, 1857).46 In this catalogue, Ricordi included every publication of the firm from its foundation in 1808 through 1857, listing them in the numerical order of their plate numbers. It is a historical document, not a practical catalogue, for the firm did not restrict itself to those publications still available in 1857. Indeed, it is extremely unlikely that Ricordi was stocking more than a handful of publications from earlier in the century. Only in the case of the firm’s publications for 1848, however, does the catalogue provide specific information about availability. Associated with about 55 publications we find the stark words “edizione distrutta.” All were issued from the months in which there was no governmental censorship, and all are specifically

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patriotic in origin. Only one opera is among these “destroyed editions,” Verdi’s La battaglia di Legnano. Ricordi first published this score in 1849 (apparently in Florence, not in Milan); nonetheless, in the numerical catalogue it is marked as “edizione estera, distrutta [foreign edition, destroyed]”. The term “edizione distrutta” presumably means that the plates from which this music was printed (and at this point most of Ricordi’s publications were printed from engraved copper plates) were melted down so that no additional copies could be struck off. Where possible the returning Austrians may also have tried to control the distribution of copies previously printed, but most of these publications (with some important exceptions) can be found in Italian libraries. Table 8.1 provides a list – by plate number – of all Ricordi publications marked as “edizioni distrutte” in the 1857 numerical catalogue. It gives information about the composer, poet, title and first line of the text, the location of one or more copies (where such copies have been identified), and some identifying characteristics: poetic meter, key, and musical meter. Table 8.2 offers information about a similar group of publications issued during this same period by the Milanese firms of Francesco Lucca and Giovanni Canti.47 Almost all the early Ricordi prints in this group (from Pl. No. 20297 through Pl. No. 20901 in Table 8.1) have been located.48 For most of the publications in a chronologically later group (from Pl. No. 20902 through Pl. No. 21097), however, no copy of the Ricordi edition has been found, not in Milan nor in other libraries. It is possible that the Austrians returned to Milan before the latter had been generally circulated, so that both the copper plates and previously printed copies were destroyed, but a search for copies continues. In one case, for example, an apparently unique copy of the Alessandro Marotta chorus (Pl. No. 20909), Ai volontarj Romani, has been identified in the Conservatory of Bergamo – although it lacks pp. 5–6 of a ten-page edition. Perhaps the hymns of Ruggero Manna, A. E. Bianchi, Costantino Quaranta, etc., will yet emerge. What gives these Milanese publications such importance is that they were issued at a moment when there was no censorship.

I-Mc, I-Vnm Il cantico di battaglia dei Milanesi nelle cinque giornate del mese di marzo 1848 (“Il duodecimo secolo d’eroi”)

Samuele Biava

Giovanni Zerbi

20343

stanzas of endecasillabi and ottonari E-flat major c (cont.)

ottonari E-flat major c

I-Mc, I-Vnm

Il cantico del Milite Lombardo (“Dissi all’anima t’aspetta”) (same text as Gambale, Lucca, #7001 in Table 8.2)

Raimondo Boucheron Samuele Biava

decasillabi D-flat major c

I-Mc

20299 (20776)

Canto popolare dei Milanesi. Dedicato agli Eroi delle cinque Giornate (“Son scontati i delitti degli avi”)

Luigi Malvezzi

N.N.

decasillabi G major 2/4

I-Mc, I-Vnm

20298 (20883)

Il canto di guerra degli Italiani (“Sorgi, Italia! . . . il tuo grido di guerra”)

Meter, Key

Copies

Dottor Giani

Destroyed edition

Giovanni Lucantoni

Poet

20297

Plate Number1 Composer

Table 8.1 Hymns and choruses published by Ricordi in 1848, whose plates were later destroyed, according to the Ricordi catalogue of 1857

Carolina Cadorna Urani-Visconti XXX

Instrumental

XXX

Tommaso Grossi

Giacomo Panizza

Giacomo Panizza

Albino Abbiati

Jacopo Foroni

Carlo Boniforti

20345 (20780)

20570

20595 (20791)

20643 (20775)

Poet

20344 (20779)

Plate Number1 Composer

Table 8.1 (cont.)

Instrumental

doppi quinari F major c

I-Pu, I-Vnm

I-Mc

ottonari D major 2/4

settenari E-flat major 6/8

ottonari C major c

Meter, Key

I-Mc, I-Vnm; S

I-Mc, I-Vnm

Copies

Milano liberata. Cantico (“Cantiam I-Mc, I-Vnm lieti Osanna! Osanna!”)

L’Italiana. Grido di guerra all’unisono (“All’armi, all’armi, Itale genti”)

Il 22 Marzo 1848. Valzer per Pfte ossia Musica allusiva alle cinque giornate

Canto guerriero per gli Italiani (“All’armi all’armi Italia”)

Il voto d’una donna italiana (“O Fratelli udite, udite”)

Destroyed edition

Canto pei poveri giovinetti raccolti da Pio IX nell’Istituto Agrario di Roma (“Come il padre del Vangelo”) Inno nazionale in occasione delle solenni esequie pei morti nella rivoluzione di Milano (“Per la Patria il sangue han dato”)

Achille Balsamo

Giulio Carcano

Giovanni Toja

Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti

20746

20747 (20794)

ottonari F major c ottonari D major c

I-Pu, I-Vnm

I-Mc; S

decasillabi F major c

Inno nazionale, dedicato alla Legione I-Mc, I-Vnm; S civica romana mobilizzata (“Italiani! E` finito il servaggio!”) NB: from Le Si`ege de Corinthe

Francesco Ilaria

Gioachino Rossini

20720

decasillabi F major C decasillabi F major c

Achille Gallarati

Eugenia D’Alberti

20706

I-Mc, I-Vnm

doppi quinari E-flat major c

Canzone nazionale ai prodi Lombardi I-VImr2 (“Viva Pio sull’Italico trono”)

Antonio Buccelleni Il vessillo Lombardo. Inno popolare (“Su Lombardi al vessillo di guerra”)

Antonio Bazzini

20645 (20793)

Canto di vittoria per le cinque giornate I-Pu, I-Vnm di Milano nel Marzo 1848 (“Romba il cannone suona a martello”)

A.C.

Placido Mandanici

20644 (20795)

(cont.)

E. L. Scolari

Stenore Capocci

XXX

Francesco Guidi

Pietro Sterbini

Filippo Meucci

Adolfo Fumagalli

Michele Ruta

Luigi Rieschi

Gaetano Magazzari

Gaetano Magazzari

Gaetano Magazzari

20749 (20778)

20750

20762 (20885)

20763 (20887)

20764 (20888)

Poet

20748 (20792)

Plate Number1 Composer

Table 8.1 (cont.)

Copies

decasillabi C major/G major c decasillabi A-flat major c decasillabi E-flat major c doppi senari E-flat major c

I-Mc, I-Vnm

I-Rsmc

I-Rsmc

I-Rsmc Album di inni popolari: N. 3. Inno guerriero italiano (“Si leva sull’erta – dell’Etna tonante”)

Album di inni popolari: N. 2. Inno siciliano (“Viva, viva l’invitta Palermo”)

Album di inni popolari: N. 1. Inno subalpino (“Carlo Alberto, l’amato Sovrano”)

Il 22 Marzo: Anatema all’Austria. Canto popolare (“Va, crudele vandalica setta”)

Ai fratelli Lombardi: I volontari Napolitani (“Su corriamo in Lombardia”)

ottonari E-flat major 2/4

senari F major 3/4

Meter, Key

I-Mc, I-Pu, I-Vnm

Il canto della vittoria. Inno popolare I-Mc, I-Vnm; S a voci sole (“Vittoria! Vittoria!”)

Destroyed edition

Gaetano Ronetti

Gaetano Ronetti

Filippo Meucci

Filippo Meucci

Pietro Sterbini

Pietro Sterbini

Gaetano Magazzari

Gaetano Magazzari

Gaetano Magazzari

Gaetano Magazzari

Gaetano Magazzari

Gaetano Magazzari

20765 (20889)

20766 (20890)

20767 (20891)

20768 (19995)

20769 (20992)

20770 (20993)

decasillabi B-flat major c decasillabi E-flat major c

I-Rsmc

I-Rsmc

I-Rsmc; S Il vessillo offerto dai Bolognesi ai Romani. Inno, coll’aggiunta delle parole allusive al Vessillo Lombardo (“Scuoti, Italia, i tuoi ceppi servili”)

Il Natale di Roma. Inno popolare (“Eri seduta, levati)

Il primo giorno dell’anno. Inno popolare all’unisono (“Del nuov’anno gi`a l’alba primiera”)

Album di inni popolari: N. 6. Inno della Guardia nazionale di Roma (“Viva il Grande che al nostro coraggio”)

decasillabi B-flat major c

settenari E-flat major c

decasillabi B-flat major c

Album di inni popolari: N. 5. Il canto I-Rsmc degli amnistiati (“Leviam canto di gioja, o fratelli”)

I-Rsmc, I-Vnm

decasillabi E-flat major c

I-Rsmc

Album di inni popolari: N. 4. L’Amnistia data da Pio IX. Inno (“Viva, viva, cantiamo festosi”)

(cont.)

XXX

Pio Giuseppe Falcocchio “Poesia di un Toscano” Rouget de Lisle Achille Balsamo

Giovanni Berchet

N.N.

Achille Galli

Pietro Cornali

Rouget de Lisle

P. A. Frigerio

Ferdinando Sieber

20773

20823 (20884)

20824 (20777)

20826

20827

Poet

20772

Plate Number1 Composer

Table 8.1 (cont.)

I-Rsc

I-Mc, I-Vnm

I-Mc, I-Vnm; S

Copies

Canto di guerra del Berchet per Coro d’uomini (“Su figli d’Italia! su in armi, coraggio!”)

I-Mc, I-Vnm; S

I-Pu, I-Vnm Inno popolare a Pio IX (“Osanna, osanna, o Pio”) (same text set by Giovanni Toja for Ricordi, #20849)

La Marseillaise (see Lucca #7000 in I-Pu Table 8.2)

Canto degli Italiani (“Finch´e Italia non sia nostra”

Gl’Italiani redenti. Inno popolare (“Sulla sponda tiberina”)

O giovani ardenti. Inno del popolo (“O giovani ardenti”)

Destroyed edition

doppi senari G major 6/8

settenari A-flat major c

ottonari E-flat major C

ottonari C major c

senari F major 2/4

Meter, Key

XXX

Antonio Gallenga

Luigi Pantaleoni

Achille Balsamo

Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti

Fernando Baroni

Rouget de Lisle

Giovanni Toja

20828

20830

20848

20849

(cont.)

settenari C major c

I-Mc, I-Vnm Omaggio delle Guardie nazionali Lombarde all’immortale Pio IX (“Osanna, osanna, o Pio”) (same text set by P. A. Frigerio for Ricordi, #20826)

senari E major 2/4 strophes in decasillabi, ottonari, settenari G major “2”

I-Mc, I-Vnm

decasillabi G major c ottonari E minor/G major 6/8

I-Mc, I-Vnm Agli Italiani. Canto popolare di Guerra adattato alla musica della Marsigliese da Luigi Pantaleoni emigrato del 31. Eseguito dagli Italiani a Parigi (“All’irata vendetta di Dio”)

La Milanese. Inno popolare della Guerra Santa (“L’Italia dispiega”)

Il grido della Crociata (Two sections: I-Mc, I-Vnm “Dio lo vuole: su Italia, su tutta” and “Sgombra la terra de’ fiori”)

XXX

XXX

XXX

Carlo Matthey

C. Fighiera

Francilla Pixis-Del Castillo

Giovanni Pacini

Giacomo Panizza

Prospero Selli

Pietro Perny

Zifra

20896 (20894)

20897

20901

20902

20903

Poet

20872

Plate Number1 Composer

Table 8.1 (cont.)

Meter, Key ottonari C major c ottonari A-flat major 2/4 settenari F major 3/4 decasillabi C major 2/4

Copies I-Mc, I-Vnm

I-Mc, I-Vnm (pf solo) I-Mc, I-Vnm

I-Mc; S

La partenza dei Veneti crociati. Inno popolare

Adv. 14 June

Inno nazionale al Re Carlo Alberto Adv. 14 June3 (other decasillabi (“Splende il sole, rivive il pensiero”) edition found) G major c

La partenza per Lombardia. Canto guerriero dei Veliti Viterbesi (“Su voliamo; gi`a canto di guerra”)

Preghiera da una madre Lombarda. Notturnino a voce sole per il popolo (“O tu, Signor, che Italia”)

La ronda della Guardia civica Veneziana. Inno (“O fratelli alfin si posa”

L’indipendenza. Inno per S., dedicato agli Eroi della Sicilia (“Di Sicilia invitti figli”)

Destroyed edition

Cantilena militare a voci unisone con I-Pc, I-Vnm accomp. di Tamburo per gli studenti componenti la crociata Lombarda, che coraggiosa marcia al campo, contro il barbaro Radetzky (“Morr`a, morr`a la scure”) Inno popolare, dedicato alla Guardia nazionale Ai volontarj Romani. Canto guerriero (“Salve, o bellica falange”)

Alla bandiera Italiana. Inno per T e B Adv. 19 July Inalberandosi il vessillo nazionale. Inno popolare per T e B

Il giuramento nazionale. Inno a S con Not advertised Cori

Felice Ronconi

A. E. Bianchi

Alessandro Marotta

Costantino Quaranta

Costantino Quaranta

Tito Baruzzi

20906

20908

20909

20910

20911

20912

Ottavio Tasca

XXX

Inno a Carlo Alberto

Ruggero Manna

20905

settenari A major c

Adv. 19 July

I-BGc (lacks pp. 5–6 ottonari of 10) E-flat major 2/4

Adv. 12 July

Adv. 14 June

Dieu le veut! Hommage au peuple Adv. 14 June Italien, pour Chant avec accomp. de Piano e de Cloche sonnant le orsin

Carlo Soliva

20904

(cont.)

Antonio Cagnoni

Giuseppe Novella

20913

21087– 21094

Plate Number1 Composer

Table 8.1 (cont.)

Meter, Key decasillabi D-flat major c

Copies Adv. 12 July; S

N. 1. All’invitto e magnanimo Re Carlo Alberto. Inno Nazionale popolare.

A Carlo Alberto. Inni popolari nazionali all’unisono e a due voci, servibili anche pel solo Pfte:

“Edizioni fatte per conto dell’Autore Described 12 July nel mese di Giugno 1848”4

Inno popolare nazionale (cantato in Genova la sera del 10 dicembre 1847) (“Cittadini, accorrete, accorrete”)

Destroyed edition

N. 3. Al prode e valoroso esercito italiano. Inno di guerra. N. 4. I fanciulli a Dio, sull’Italia. Canto popolare. N. 5. Viva Italia! Canto popolare nazionale. Ai Principi riformatori italiani.

G. Checchetelli Enrico Bixio David Chiossone

Giuseppe Peragallo N. 2. L’Otto settembre in Genova, a Pio IX. Inno popolare.

Ippolito d’Aste

Giulio Guerrieri

Poet

Gaetano Magazzari

21097

Giuseppe Verdi 21571, 21542– 21559

Gaetano Magazzari

21096

N. 8. Requie ai Martiri dell’Indipendenza italiana. Canto funebre

Enrico Bixio

Carlo Matthey

N. 7. Pio IX all’Italia. Inno Nazionale.

Francesco dall’Ongaro

La battaglia di Legnano. Opera per Canto (“Edizione estera, distrutta”)6

Il giuramento Lombardo. Canto popolare

Adv. 19 July

Guerra e vittoria. Canto dell’Armata Adv. 19 July Italiana (“Sgombrate, sgombrate, col gregge verduto”)5

(not destroyed, but perhaps not circulated: only non-Ricordi prints of items from this collection have been located)

N. 6. La Costituzione Italiana del Re Carlo Alberto. Canto Nazionale.

David Chiossone

doppi senari

(cont.)

Poet L’Assedio d’Arlem (not destroyed)

Destroyed edition

Copies

Meter, Key

1

The plate numbers in parentheses are reductions for piano solo, also marked as “edizione distrutta” in the 1857 catalogue. These have been consulted only when a vocal score could not be located. 2 This is a manuscript of Eugenia D’Alberti’s “Canzone Nazionale,” but it is incomplete. 3 These indications specify advertisements in the Gazzetta Musicale di Milano in the issues of June 14, July 12, and July 19, 1848. 4 The alternative titles and the names of the poets are taken from the list published in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano on July 12, 1848. 5 While I have been unable to identify a copy of this hymn, according to Monterosso (La musica nel Risorgimento, pp. 180–181) the text was published in Ricordi’s Gazzetta musicale di Milano during June 1848. I quote the opening verse after Monterosso, who adds: “About the music it is not necessary to say anything” (181). If this means he actually saw a copy of the music, he provides no reference to permit me to trace his steps. 6 According to its title page, the first edition of Verdi’s La battaglia di Legnano was published in Florence “presso G. Ricordi e S. Jouhaud,” not in Milan. Given the political situation in Milan by 1849 that comes as no surprise. Ricordi of Milan is simply listed as an agent. For further information on these editions, see Hopkinson, Bibliography of Giuseppe Verdi, vol. ii, pp. 69–72. Many uncertainties, however, remain to be worked out. Sigla I-BGc: Bergamo, Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica “G. Donizetti” I-Mc: Milan, Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica “G. Verdi” I-Rsmc: Rome, Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea I-Vnm: Venice, Biblioteca Nationale Marciana S: Schinelli, L’anima musicale della patria.

Giuseppe Verdi 21571, 21642– 21659

Plate Number1 Composer

Table 8.1 (cont.)

A. Zoncada

Salvatore Mazza

Rouget De Lisle Samuele Biava

A. Zoncada

Giuseppe Sangregorio S.T.

Jacopo Foroni

Giuseppe Devasini

Rouget De Lisle

Luigi Gambale

Fernando Baroni

Antonio Mussi

Antonio Cristofani

6998

7000

7001

7003

7005

7006

Poet

6992

Plate number Composer I-Mc; S

Copy

Ai valorosi Lombardi: Inno di guerra (“Guerra! guerra! per l’Itala terra”)

La Marseillaise (“Allons enfans de la patrie”) Il cantico del milite Lombardo (“Dissi all’anima t’aspetta”: same text as Boucheron, Ricordi, #20299) Milano libera. Inno nazionale (“Vittoria fratelli”: same text as Croff, Lucca, #7022) Cantico nazionale (“Su cingete o valorosi”)

I-Mc

I-Mc

I-Mc

I-Mc

I-Mc

I-Mc La libert`a. Inno Lombardo (Two sections: “Siam liberi alfine – di giubilo il grido” “Fra gli evviva delle schiere”)

Ai Lombardi. Canto di guerra (“Su, Lombardi, all’armi all’armi”)

Edition

Table 8.2 Some hymns and choruses published by Lucca and Canti in 1848

ottonari B-flat major c senari G major 2/4 ottonari G major c decasillabi B-flat major 2/4

decasillabi C major 2/4 doppi senari E major 3/4; decasillabi A major c

Meter, Key

(cont.)

A. Tornaghi

A. Zoncada

Teobaldo Ciconi XXX

Gio. Batt. Croff

Gio. Batt. Croff

Costantino Quaranta G. Luraschi

Gianfrancesco Rossi

7021

7022

7023 None

Canti 1486

A. Vigo-Pellizzari

David Chiossone

Poet

Pietro Cornali

7018

Plate number Composer

Table 8.2 (cont.)

I-Mc, I-Pu I-Mc

I-Mc

decasillabi B-flat major c; settenari B-flat major 6/8 quinari G minor 3/4

decasillabi (refrain in ottonari) E major c settenari E major c senari G major 2/4

I-Mc

I-Mc

Meter, Key

Copy

Alle gloriose vittime della libert`a Lombarda: I-Mc Requiem. Melodia Italiana (“L’eterna requie”)

Milano libera. Inno di vittoria (“Vittoria fratelli”: same text as Baroni, Lucca, #7003) Ronda della guardia nazionale Il ritorno dei militi vitoriosi. Coro (Two sections: “Questo giorno sia giorno di festa”; “Un giorno pi`u sereno”) An oblong broadside.

Il 22 Marzo 1848. Inno di vittoria (“Giorni felici sorsero”)

Canto degli Italiani. Inno nazionale e patriotico (“Con l’aurora invocata dai forti”)

Edition

Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento

There was nothing to stop poets or composers from producing precisely the poetry and music they wished. During the previous months and years, everything issuing from Ricordi’s presses had to meet criteria imposed by the Austrian rulers of Milan. In these hymns from 1848, published in the period immediately after the Cinque giornate, however, we have an ideal point of reference: freed from restrictions, what did poets and composers do? What metaphors did they employ? What kind of music did they write? What use did they make of the past? And in what way can their practice give us insight into the meaning of the art that flourished in the previous years, during which governmental censors in Milan decided what could be performed and printed? Among the “edizioni distrutte” there is one piece attributed to Gioachino Rossini (Pl. No. 20720), an Inno nazionale dedicato alla Legione civica romana mobilizzata to a text by Francesco Ilaria (“Italiani! e` finito il servaggio!”). This piece does not figure among the works listed by Radiciotti, nor by Weinstock, nor have I ever included it in lists I have prepared of Rossini’s works.49 Yet Monterosso not only accepts the piece as having been expressly written by Rossini, but asserts that it is a “new composition,” “without having recourse to adaptations of previously-written works.”50 In fact, I know of no documentary evidence to demonstrate that Rossini himself prepared this hymn. More to the point, it is certainly not a new composition: it is based on the chorus from Le Si`ege de Corinthe that the composer had already adopted as the Finale of his Cantata in onore del Sommo Pontefice Pio Nono. Rossini wrote the hymn in 1826 to a text making a strong revolutionary statement, but applied to an operatic situation both removed from and analogous to the Italian condition under Austrian rule. He then adapted the music as the conclusion of his 1847 Cantata, using a flowery text in praise of Pius IX that disguised the original meaning, but which – when supported by Rossini’s music – could easily have been read as a statement of Italian hopes for Pius IX’s leadership. Now, in 1848, the same music (adapted by Rossini or – more likely – by another contemporary musician) could again present a text with revolutionary sentiments, but one that made explicit its relationship to the Italian situation.

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224

Philip Gossett Italiani! e` finito il servaggio! Dio ci chiama la patria a salvar! S`ı, nel sangue il lunghissimo oltraggio, L’onta nostra corriamo a lavar. Si risvegli l’antico valore Di moschetti e cannoni al tonar. Per punir lo straniero oppressore Siamo pronti la morte a sfidar. Dell’Italia gli orribili affani Chi potrebbe alle genti narrar? Viva Italia! i superbi Alemanni Oltre l’Alpi dovranno tornar. [Italians! Your servitude is over! God calls us to save our Patria. Yes, let us hurry to wash away in blood our long abuse and shame. Let our old valor reawaken to the booming of muskets and cannons. We are ready to brave death in order to punish the foreign oppressor. Who could tell the people of the horrible sufferings of Italy? Long live Italy! the proud Germans will be forced to return to the other side of the Alps.]

No more Greeks, no more Turks, no more religious transpositions: in 1848 Rossini’s hymn could speak in a language that left no uncertainty as to its contemporary meaning. And so it is with all the hymns written explicitly to reflect the events of the Cinque giornate and the days and months immediately following, all the Ricordi hymns that were destined to become “edizioni distrutte” with the return of the Austrians. Some of those hymns are tied to specific incidents in the battle. Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti, for example, was called upon by the “provisional government” to provide a hymn to poetry by Giulio Carcano, for the solemn funeral rites at the Duomo of Milan on April 5, 1848 in honor of those who died during the Cinque giornate.51 This solemn hymn, a Maestoso, in four strophes of ottonari, begins with the following strophe: Per la Patria il sangue han dato, Esclamando: Italia e Pio! L’alme pure han rese a Dio, Benedetti nel morir:

Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento Hanno vinto, e consumato Il santissimo martir. Di quei forti, per noi morti, Santo e` il grido e non morr`a. [They have given their blood for the Patria, exclaiming: Italy and Pius! They have given their pure hearts to God, blessed in their death: they have vanquished and accomplished a blessed martyrdom. The cry of those heroes, dead for us, is sacred and will not die.]

Each strophe is set to the same stately period. It is a strong, not unattractive, tune in D major. Much is sung in unison, as befits the occasion, although the music occasionally breaks into simple two-part harmony: see Example 8.6. 8.6 Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti and Giulio Carcano, Inno nazionale

Ronchetti is no Verdi, to be sure, but his vocal style, with its use of simple chordal arpeggiations, repeated rhythmic patterns, and clear harmonic motion, is reminiscent of many operatic choruses of the period (though not, as we have seen, of Verdi’s own 1848 hymn). Other hymns are associated with broader historical events. Various groups of patriots from central Italy headed north to fight alongside the Milanese. For one such group, the “Veliti Viterbesi,”52 a piece entitled La partenza per Lombardia: canto guerriero was prepared, with text by

225

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Philip Gossett

Carlo Matthey and music by Prospero Selli. The first of three strophes in decasillabi gives the flavor: Su voliamo; gi`a canto di guerra Eccheggi`o per le belle contrade; Si riscosse de’ forti la terra Al baleno di libere spade: Gi`a quel Sol che rifulse in Legnano, Gi`a le nordiche nebbie spezz`o; Oh si voli; chi e` vero Italiano Varcher`a le bell’acque del Po. [Arise, let us fly; a song of war already echoes through the beautiful fields; the strong of the earth are already are aroused by the lightning of free swords: Already that sun that shone in Legnano is breaking apart northerly fogs; Oh fly, let he who is a true Italian cross the lovely waters of the Po.]

While hardly a major figure, Selli was not inconsequential. He wrote at least three operas, including a Medea in Corinto (Rome, Teatro Apollo, February 4, 1839) and a Ricciarda (Naples, Teatro San Carlo, June 17, 1839). Furthermore, an incomplete manuscript survives in the library of the Bologna Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale of the first scene from a Battaglia di Legnano. He was involved in the revolutionary movements of 1848 and 1849, participating with a group of patriots from Viterbo in battles to preserve the Roman republic during the summer of 1849.53 Selli’s setting of “Su voliamo; gi`a canto di guerra,” in C major, is intended almost everywhere for unison performance. The tune is reminiscent of Verdi’s “Si ridesti il Leon di Castiglia” from Ernani, in a much simplified vein. Its cadential phrase exploits the highly typical syncopated pattern that Verdi often favored for similar passages, as in Nabucco’s fourth-act aria, at “di mi-a corona, coro-na al sol”: see Example 8.7. Some pieces, such as the Canto degli italiani by Pietro Cornali, to a text by David Chiossone, are considerably more complex.54 The piece is particularly interesting because Chiossone’s poetry is not all in a

Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 8.7 Prospero Selli and Carlo Matthey, La partenza per Lombardia

single meter: each strophe begins in decasillabi but after the words “Giuriam, giuriamo!” the refrain is in ottonari: Con l’aurora invocata dai forti Italiani sorgiamo, sorgiamo, E la terra che disser dei morti Sia de’ prodi la patria e l’onor. Giuriam, giuriamo! Sar`a Italia indipendente Od estinti si cadr`a. Questo sacro vessillo innalziamo Come segno foriero di gloria; Ecco un brando, sorgiamo, sorgiamo, Al suo lampo il Tiranno cadr`a. Giuriam, giuriamo! Sar`a Italia indipendente Od estinti si cadr`a. Da lungh’anni ci grida vendetta Il martirio sublime d’Italia, Or la nobile sposa reietta Vuole il serto che il Cielo le di`e. Italiani il Signore ci desta, Italiani sorgiamo, sorgiamo, Dell’Italia incominci la festa Sulle tombe dell’empio stranier. Giuriam, giuriamo! [Sar`a Italia indipendente] Od estinti si cadr`a.

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Philip Gossett [With the dawn invoked by the strong, rise up Italians, let the earth that they say is of the dead be the patria and the honor of heroes. Let us swear. Italy will be free, or we will die fighting. Let us raise this sacred banner as a harbinger of glory;55 here is a sword, let us arise; before its brilliance the tyrant will fall. Let us swear, etc. For many years the sublime martyrdom of Italy called to us for revenge, now the noble, rejected spouse wants the wreath that Heaven gives her. Italians, God wakes us, Italians arise, let the celebrations begin from Italy on the tombs of the wicked foreigner. Let us swear, etc.]

The image of the “stranier” is fundamental in Banti’s “morphology of national discourse,” and he cites examples from throughout the century (61ff.). In 1842 Zaccaria in Nabucco could incite the Hebrews to battle with the phrase “che sia morte allo stranier [may the foreigners die]”, a phrase the Austrian censorship was rational enough not to challenge in the context of a biblical story. In 1848 the reference could finally be made explicit: the “stranier” Italians truly hoped to remove from their soil was indeed the Austrian tyrant. After 1848, in the wake of the revolutionary movements, the renewed and strengthened censorship cracked down even on phrases it had permitted earlier in the decade, and so various theatres modified the final phrase from Zaccaria’s text to “che ci additi il tuo voler [may you show us your will]”, “contro il barbaro guerrier [against the barbarian warrior]”, or “che dia morte all’oppressor [may the oppressor be killed]”.56 It behoves musicologists to study matters such as censorship as they have been investigated in other realms, other disciplines, other periods. Let me cite what I take to be a fully analogous situation from the early modern period. At the beginning of his path-breaking study of censorship in England, Richard Dutton writes:57 It is a central contention in my arguments about the censorship of the period that early modern readers (and by this I mean to comprehend theatre audiences) read plays and other texts analogically, often “applying” quite exotic fictions to contemporary persons and events. And that censors were quite aware of the fact, but usually chose to ignore it unless they deemed the “application” to be too transparent or provocative.

Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento

That statement tallies with the argument I have been making in this chapter and explains precisely how Austrian censors treated Verdi’s operas during the 1840s and how Italian audiences received them, before the revolutionary movements of 1848 significantly raised the ante. Pietro Cornali was no dilettante. He published numerous songs, hymns, and pieces for piano (including transcriptions of music from Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra and Donizetti’s Poliuto). From 1843 he was in charge of instruction in choral singing at the Community free school for vocal music in Piacenza (an organization first established in 1841), where among his responsibilities was that of preparing choristers for the municipal theatre, a position he maintained until his retirement in 1867 at the age of 63.58 His hymn is a more complicated, throughcomposed piece. The melody has the regularity of shape and square rhythmic quality of operatic choruses from earlier in the century,59 but it also exploits the typical syncopated cadential pattern that we observed in Selli and Verdi: see Example 8.8. 8.8 Pietro Cornali and David Chiossone, Canto degli italiani

The refrain in ottonari, on the other hand, is freer both rhythmically and harmonically.60 After a long, rhythmically simple and attractive contrasting section, the main theme returns for a reprise of the strophe beginning with “Questo sacro vessillo innalziamo.” Cadences harp particularly on the “tombe dell’empio stranier” and on the refrain “Giuriam . . . od estinti si cadr`a.”

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This is not the place for a prolonged analysis of the “edizioni distrutte,” but such an analysis would be extremely useful in a number of ways. We need to examine the poetic imagery adopted in these hymns. At a moment when poets could write whatever they wished, it is no accident that they returned again and again to the images and metaphors found throughout Verdi’s operas of the early 1840s. Now, however, their meaning is explicitly extended to the Italian political situation, whereas earlier they did their work in the world of metaphor and analogy. We need to examine the use of poetic structure, meter, rhyme, diction. Table 8.3, for example, provides a tally of poetic meters as employed in the Ricordi “edizioni distrutte”.61 Table 8.3 Poetic meters of the “edizioni distrutte”

Poetic meter

“Edizioni distrutte” (except Magazzari)

Magazzari

Total

doppi quinari senari doppi senari settenari ottonari decasillabi endecasillabi

2 3 1 5 14 11 1

0 0 2 1 0 7 0

2 3 3 6 14 18 1

The table makes clear, for example, that if we exclude the hymns of Magazzari (see note 38), verses in ottonari exceed those in decasillabi as favored meters for this poetry. I cannot gauge what significance to draw from this data, but any discussion of decasillabi as the “verse type so often associated with Risorgimento poets” (Parker, 51) needs to be re-examined. Musical patterns need to be thought about. What would allow an audience (who in the audience? professionals? dilettantes?) to draw an analogy with a previously known melody? Would musical devices be sufficient? What if the musical devices were seconded by a poetic

Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento

reference? Verdi clearly thought that his big decasillabi choral movements in Nabucco, I lombardi, and Ernani were in danger of resembling each other too much. Did that mean that audiences heard these recurring patterns from one opera to another and recognized their parentage when they reappeared in the 1848 choruses? And when will we get away from analyses that focus exclusively on operas by Verdi, Donizetti, Bellini, and Rossini to recognize that the issues involved need to incorporate composers such as Mercadante and Pacini, Coccia and the Ricci brothers, not to mention the Sellis, Cornalis, and Magazarris of the Risorgimento? Francesco Izzo is demonstrating the role that the often-neglected opera buffa played in this same history.62 Italians did not suddenly discover this musical and poetic language in 1848 or even 1847: it was, in Banti’s words, the “morphology of the national discourse.” Its details changed over time and from one composer or poet to another, to be sure, but its elements remained remarkably consistent over the first half of the nineteenth century, from the hopes pinned on the Napoleonic wars, then dashed, to the Revolution of 1848. Verdi’s operas – both in their texts and in their musical language – participated fully in that national discourse, but they did more than participate. From Nabucco onwards the composer’s genius was widely recognized. His operas quickly began to dominate operatic stages around the peninsula. There was no reason for them to be singled out in 1848 (although in Naples and Rome, at least, they were given much greater prominence in the theatres than ever before), certainly not in cities like Milan or Venice where they already formed the backbone of the repertory. But Verdi’s own sentiments were akin to those of the journalists who felt that the heady days of revolution were days to write new works (like La battaglia di Legnano) or patriotic hymns (like “Suona la tromba”), not to revive older works that spoke in the veiled language of Hebrews, Greeks, Spaniards, and Crusaders. That in 1848 Mazzini specifically wanted a hymn from Verdi, and that he asked Mameli – already famous as the author of “Fratelli d’Italia” (written on September 10, 1847 and set to music on November 24 of

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the same year by Michele Novaro63 ) – to provide that text, tells us much of Verdi’s prominence and reputation at that moment as a composer of the Risorgimento. Verdi’s image as the vate of the Risorgimento was further inflated after 1880, often with piquant details invented or blown out of proportion. This myth-making, however, had a solid basis in history. I have tried to provide one way of approaching the problem from a specifically Milanese perspective. Riccardo Carnesecchi has provided an analogous perspective, by emphasizing performances of patriotic music in Venetian theatres during 1848 and 1849.64 Historians and musicologists working together will ultimately be able to do much more. Greater knowledge will surely mean that Verdi’s role in the history of Risorgimental music in the 1840s and 1850s will seem less unique than in accounts of the late nineteenth century. Instead, it will prove to be one of the most prominent strands in a richer, deeper account of how music contributed to the national discourse that ultimately led to the unification of Italy.

n ot e s 1 The two most radical efforts are those of Birgit Pauls, Giuseppe Verdi und das Risorgimento: Ein politischer Mythos in Prozeß der Nationenbildung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996), and Roger Parker, “Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati”: The Verdian patriotic chorus in the 1840s (Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 1997). Further references to Parker’s essay will be given in the text. For an abbreviated version of his study, see the second chapter, “‘Va pensiero’ and the Insidious Mastery of Song,” in his Leonora’s Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 20–41. In “Verdi, Italian Romanticism, and the Risorgimento,” in Scott L. Balthazar, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Verdi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 29–45, Mary Ann Smart adopts Parker’s position uncritically. 2 Indeed much contemporary criticism of Puccini sought to tar him with the “internationalism” brush; see, in particular, Fausto Torrefranca, Giacomo Puccini e l’opera internazionale (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1912).

Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 3 Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro Luzio, eds., I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1913), pp. 588–589. 4 The history of the acrostic has been investigated and clarified by Michael Sawall, “‘Viva V.E.R.D.I.’: Origine e ricezione di un simbolo nazionale nell’anno 1859,” in Fabrizio Della Seta, Roberta Montemorra Marvin, and Marco Marica, eds., Verdi 2001: Proceedings of the International Conference Parma – New York – New Haven 24 January – 1 February 2001 (Florence: Olschki, 2003), vol. i, pp. 123–131. 5 A significant role in this myth-making has been assigned by Pauls, Parker, and Sawall to the Italian translation of a series of articles by Arthur Pougin: Giuseppe Verdi. Vita aneddotica di Arturo Pougin con note ed aggiunte di Folchetto (Milan: Ricordi, 1881). There is a modern facsimile edition, with a preface by Marcello Conati (Florence: Passigli, 1989). Several years later Pougin brought out his articles in French as a book, Verdi: Histoire anecdotique de sa vie et de ses œuvres (Paris: Calman L´evy, 1886). Probably the most important source for the Verdi myth, however, was G. Bragagnolo and E. Bettazzi, La vita di Giuseppe Verdi narrata al popolo (Milan: Ricordi, 1906), sponsored in part by the secondary schools of Milan. 6 This is the case, for example, with Raffaello Monterosso, La musica nel Risorgimento (Milan: Francesco Vallardi, 1948), vol. 12 in the series Problemi del Risorgimento, a book that nonetheless offers many important insights. 7 Frank Walker, The Man Verdi (London: J. M. Dent, 1962). Parker (21n) mentions this assertion by Walker (pp. 150–151, erroneously rendered in Parker as pp. 50–51): “one wonders whether the effect of these things has not been exaggerated by the biographers, whether the portrait of Verdi as Bard of the Risorgimento, composer of ‘agitator’s music’, has not been overpainted.” Parker (22n) also cites John Rosselli, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 165, where he asserts that “even Verdi was not quite the full-time nationalist he was once made out to be.” 8 All quotations from Mazzini’s treatise are taken from the edition prepared, with an introduction, by Adriano Lualdi (Rome and Milan: Fratelli Bocca, 1954), p. 185. The translations are my own. Further references to this edition are given in the text. 9 In the Italian version of this essay, “‘Edizioni distrutte’ e il significato dei cori d’opera durante il Risorgimento,” to be published in Il saggiatore

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musicale, I analyze these arguments (as well as those deriving from musical analysis) in greater detail. Verdi’s letter to Piave of December 22, 1846 is given in David Rosen and Andrew Porter, eds., Verdi’s ‘Macbeth’: A Sourcebook (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 26. Parker draws on the indispensable compendium by Friedrich Lippmann, Versificazione italiana e ritmo musicale: I rapporti tra verso e musica nell’opera italiana dell’Ottocento (Naples: Liguori, 1986), the Italian translation by Lorenzo Bianconi, revised by the author, of a series of articles that appeared originally in German in Analecta Musicologica, 12 (1973), 253–369, 14 (1974), 324–410, and 15 (1975), 298–333. As Parker notes, I have discussed the Nabucco example (from the chorus “Immenso Jeovah”), “though with conclusions that differ from mine” (86n), in “Censorship and Self-Censorship: Problems in Editing the Operas of Giuseppe Verdi,” in Lewis Lockwood and Edward Roesner, eds., Essays in Musicology: A Tribute to Alvin Johnson (Philadelphia: American Musicological Society, 1990), pp. 247–257. While Parker expresses surprise that other verses were not censored, there is ample evidence from all times and places that censorship, like most oppressive governmental bureaucracies, works in unpredictable ways. See below for an extended discussion of patriotic hymns published by Ricordi during this period. An important modern collection of Italian patriotic music, including a number of these pieces, is Achille Schinelli, ed., L’anima musicale della patria: il Risorgimento italiano nella sua espressione musicale (1796–1922), 2 vols. (Milan: Ricordi, 1928). Parker’s almost exclusive dependence on the Milanese scene, however, where Verdi’s operas had been extensively performed throughout the 1840s, hides from his readers repertory considerations from elsewhere on the peninsula. I have traced the Neapolitan situation in my essay “La fine dell’et`a borbonica, 1838–1860,” in Il Teatro di San Carlo (Naples: Guida, 1987), vol. i, pp. 167–204 (see, in particular, pp. 177–182). See also the documentation in Alberto Cametti, Il teatro di Tordinona poi di Apollo (Tivoli: Arti grafiche A. Chicca, 1938), vol. ii, pp. 472–474, where the Carnival season of 1848 consisted exclusively of Verdi’s operas, Attila (new for Rome), Nabucco, I masnadieri (new for Rome), and I lombardi alla prima crociata, with patriotic demonstrations taking place in the theatre during or after many of the performances. So, according to Cametti, who is quoting from contemporary diaries, on January 31, during a

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14

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16

17

18

performance of Nabucco, it was learned that the King of Naples had made concessions to the rebels, as a result of which members of the audience “raised their voices in praise of Pius IX, the Two Sicilies, and Italy” (473). It would be interesting to learn whether the same critic was responsible for both reports. For a broader consideration of performances of opera in Italian theatres during 1848, see Carlotta Sorba, “Il Risorgimento in musica: L’opera lirica nei teatri del 1848,” in Alberto Mario Banti and Roberto Bizzocchi, eds., Immagini della nazione nell’Italia del Risorgimento (Rome: Carocci, 2002), pp. 133–156. In 1988 the letter was in the possession of George Martin, who published it in his Aspects of Verdi (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1988), p. 241, with several lacunae. It had been sold at auction by Sotheby’s in London on October 28, 1974 (item 194); see the relevant catalogue for a description of its physical condition and contents. It was first published by Arnaldo Bonaventura, Una lettera di Giuseppe Verdi finora non pubblicata (Florence: Gonnelli, 1948). A facsimile of the first page is more conveniently available in Franco Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi (Milan: Ricordi, 1958), vol. i, facing p. 752 (Abbiati’s transcription is on p. 745). I quote the letter from the translation of William Weaver, Verdi: A Documentary Study (London: Thames and Hudson, [1977]), p. 174. The letter, dated 22 July 1848, is transcribed in Giuseppe Morazzoni, Lettere inedite di G. Verdi (Milan: a cura della rivista “La Scala e il Museo Teatrale” e della Libreria Editrice Milanese, 1929), pp. 28–29. For information about the projected Ferruccio, which would have been derived from L’assedio di Firenze by Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, see Alessandro Luzio, “Il ‘Ferruccio’ di Verdi,” in Carteggi verdiani (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1935–1948), vol. iv, pp. 217–220. The later history of the project is discussed in Carlo Matteo Mossa, “A Monk and At Least Some New Things: Verdi, Cammarano, and L’assedio di Firenze,” in Martin Chusid, ed., Verdi’s Middle Period 1849–1859: Source Studies, Analysis, and Performance Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 99–126. Cammarano’s letter is published, with extensive annotations, in Carteggio Verdi–Cammarano (1843–1852), ed. Carlo Matteo Mossa (Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 2001), pp. 19–23. All translations are my own. Page references are given in the text.

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Philip Gossett 19 By a selva Verdi and his librettists meant an elaborate prose outline for the libretto of an opera, scene by scene, often with explicit suggestions for the organization of the drama into musical numbers. With a highly competent librettist such as Cammarano (author, among many other libretti, of Lucia di Lammermoor for Donizetti and Luisa Miller and Il trovatore for Verdi), Verdi had the librettist prepare the selva; with less experienced librettists, such as Francesco Maria Piave or Antonio Somma, it was often the composer himself who worked out the selva for the librettist. For a discussion of the linguistic origins of the term, see Daniela Goldin Folena, “Lessico melodrammatico verdiano,” in Maria Teresa Muraro, ed., Le parole della musica, ii: Studi sul lessico della letteratura critica del teatro musicale in onore di Gianfranco Folena (Florence: Olschki, 1995), pp. 227–253, and Paolo Trovato, “Preistoria delle ‘selve’ verdiane,” Il saggiatore musicale 4 (1997), 137–148. 20 I have adjusted the punctuation and capitalization as in the original printed libretto (Rome, Teatro Argentina, January 27, 1849). Despite the peculiar organization of the text on the page, Cammarano has written three quatrains of ottonari. The first and last have the same rhyme scheme (abab); the second has a different one (ccdd). The basic form of Verdi’s setting is ABA (with a cadential expansion of the final A). 21 I mentioned this in my article, “Becoming a Citizen: The chorus in Risorgimento opera,” Cambridge Opera Journal 2 (1990), 41–64 (see, in particular, pp. 58–60). As above, I have adjusted the punctuation and capitalization as in the original printed libretto (Rome, Teatro Argentina, January 27, 1849). Verdi set the text with no emendations. When he sent Verdi another copy of Act III, together with Act IV, on October 29, Cammarano changed the fourth verse to “Cader giuriamo nel campo estinti” (69), but Verdi maintained the original text. 22 On the significance of this scene, see Smart, “Verdi, Italian Romanticism, and the Risorgimento,” pp. 39–42. 23 The significance of the phrase “edizione estera, distrutta” will be discussed further below. 24 The first hint is given in Cammarano’s letter to Verdi of September 11, 1848 (42). 25 Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. i, p. 758. My translation is after Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, Verdi: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 237.

Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 26 According to Francesco Luigi Mannucci in G. Mameli, Poesie (Turin, etc.: G. B. Paravia, 1927), 98n, the poetry was first published in Pensiero italiano of Genoa on August 18, 1848, with the title “Canto di guerra.” In Mannucci’s edition the poetry is on pp. 98–100; see also his Introduction, lviii–lix. 27 The composer surely sent a setting for unaccompanied chorus of the first strophe alone; that was the standard way of handling such strophic poems. The assumption was that the other strophes would be sung to the same music. The letter is printed in full in Copialettere, pp. 469–470. I cite it after the English translation of Weaver, Verdi, p. 175. It seems to have been published for the first time by Fanny Manis in “Giuseppe Verdi e l’Inno di Goffredo Mameli,” Bullettino bibliografico sardo, 1/4 (1904), 78–81. Let me thank Fabrizio Della Seta for having brought this important article to my attention and Daniela Macchione for having provided me with a photocopy. 28 Cecil Hopkinson, in his Bibliography of Giuseppe Verdi 1813–1901 (New York: Broude Brothers, 1973, 1978), vol. i, pp. 3–5, incorrectly assigned a publication date of 1848. Others have made a similar error. For the later history, including Verdi’s efforts to block publication of the hymn, see Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. iii, pp. 51–55. The history of Paolo De Giorgi’s publishing house is outlined in Bianca Maria Antolini, ed., Dizionario degli editori musicali italiani 1750–1930 (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2000), pp. 139–141. My subsequent analysis is based on the De Giorgi edition, although several aspects of the textual history of the chorus remain obscure. According to the edition, the piano accompaniment, presumably with the piano prelude and postlude, was the work of Angelo Graffigna. 29 Mameli’s original text, from an 1850 edition of his poetry (the poet died in 1849), is reproduced in Manis, “Giuseppe Verdi,” pp. 79–80. In collections of Mameli’s writings, which continued to print the text in this earlier form, the poem is known as “Inno militare.” In all these editions, including the 1927 edition by Mannucci cited above, furthermore, the opening stanza begins: “All’armi, all’armi – ondeggiano.” It does not seem that Verdi was ever sent the text in that form. 30 The text means: “The songs of war echo; / Italy has finally arisen again.” The situation is less clear in the revision of the third strophe, where the first part of the first verse (“Viva l’Italia”) functions well as a separate entity, but in which “l’Italia” is also the subject of “or vendica” (the verses translate literally as “Long live Italy now vindicates its former glory”).

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Philip Gossett 31 The letter is included in Carteggio Verdi–Somma, ed. Simonetta Ricciardi (Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 2004), p. 101. 32 Alberto M. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento: Parentela, santit`a e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Turin: G. Einaudi, 2000). References are given directly in the text. 33 This is the same amnesty referred to by Verdi’s student and secretary, Emanuele Muzio, in a letter to the composer’s father-in-law, Antonio Barezzi, of August 13, 1846: “In Bologna, on the occasion of the proclamation of the amnesty, the finale of Ernani (‘O sommo Carlo!’) was performed in the theatre, with the name of Carlo changed into that of Pius – and there was so much enthusiasm that it was repeated three times; when they arrived at the words ‘Perdono a tutti . . . [Pardon for all]’, shouts of approval arose from everywhere.” See Luigi Agostino Garibaldi, ed., Giuseppe Verdi nelle lettere di Emanuele Muzio ad Antonio Barezzi (Milan: Treves, 1931), p. 259. The same change was introduced in Rome at the Teatro Argentina in October 1847 and at the Teatro Apollo (during a “vocal and instrumental academy”) on March 12, 1848, as described by Cametti, Il teatro di Tordinona, vol. ii, p. 474, according to whom the original “A Carlo Magno sia gloria ed onor” became “Al Nono Pio sia gloria ed onor.” 34 The piece, which will be treated further below, was an arrangement of Rossini’s “Coro dei Bardi” from La donna del lago. Rossini’s compositions for Pope Pius IX are described in the introduction to Gioachino Rossini, Cantata in onore del Sommo Pontefice Pio Nono, ed. Mauro Bucarelli, in the Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini, Series ii, vol. 6 (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1996), from which I have derived some of this information. There is a lovely recording of the cantata, directed by Riccardo Chailly (Decca 458 843–2). 35 I give the original French text and the standard Italian translation used in Italy during the nineteenth century. 36 This music would serve again for a much more explicitly revolutionary hymn in 1848, as we shall see, but it is unlikely that Rossini was directly responsible for the arrangement. 37 Many hymns preceding the Cinque giornate, especially those associated with Pius IX and Carlo Alberto, are discussed in Monterosso, La musica nel Risorgimento, pp. 128–169. 38 That many texts set by Magazzari are in decasillabi should not be taken to be representative of this entire corpus, as we shall see. Ricordi published

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39

40

41 42

43 44

45

eleven hymns by Magazzari during 1848, of which I have traced copies of nine. Of these nine, seven, or 78 percent, use poetry in decasillabi. (A tenth, for which I have seen poetry, but not music, is in doppi senari.) As we shall see, the number of hymns using texts in decasillabi among all the edizioni distrutte (see below) that I have identified thus far (excluding the nine hymns of Magazzari) is about 30 percent. The difference is notable and must reflect a personal preference on the part of the composer. In his discussion of the hymns of Magazzari, Monterosso speaks of Austrian efforts to ban them already in 1847: see La musica del Risorgimento, pp. 131–132. He cites a note from Piacenza in a Florentine newspaper, La patria, of December 10, 1847, in which the correspondent writes: “It isn’t true that the jails are filled with persons arrested for having sung the Inno a Pio IX” (he is speaking of the work of Magazzari). Whether they were or not, of course, is not the issue: it is sufficient that the idea crossed someone’s mind. For a discussion of the political situation in Turin in the autumn of 1847 and its implications for the theatre, see Alberto Basso, Storia del Teatro Regio di Torino (Turin: Cassa di Risparmio di Torino, 1976), vol. ii, pp. 259–262. Ibid., vol. ii, p. 259. Procida was a patriotic Sicilian leader, whose role in the revolt against the French rulers of Sicily in 1282 Verdi would celebrate in Les Vˆepres siciliennes. See also Cametti, Il teatro di Tordinona, vol. ii, p. 474, where the performance of the hymn on March 4 is mentioned. Two of these subjects are the basis of Verdian operas; he never did write one about the legendary youth who cast a stone at an Austrian soldier to begin an uprising in Genoa against Austrian troupes at the end of 1746. I quote the text from Antonio Zanolini, Biografia di Gioachino Rossini (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1875), pp. 223–224, where eight strophes are given, the first in precisely the form Rossini set to music. According to Giuseppe Radiciotti, Gioacchino Rossini: Vita documentata, opere ed influenza su l’arte (Tivoli: Arti grafiche Majella di A. Chicca, 1927–1929), vol. ii, p. 293, an earlier form of the poem by the canon Golfieri, in twelve strophes, was printed the same day in the Bolognese theatrical journal, Teatri, arti e letteratura, edited by Gaetano Fiori. Luigi Verdi, in Rossini a Bologna: Note documentarie in occasione della mostra “Rossini a

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50 51

Bologna” (Bologna: Patron, 2000), p. 115, identifies Golfieri as the “direttore ecclesiastico” of the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna. Agostina Zecca Laterza began to issue an invaluable facsimile edition of this catalogue (Rome, 1984), with added dates of publication and indices. Only the first of the projected two volumes was issued, however, through p. 615 (incorporating Ricordi publications from 1808 through the beginning of 1846). The publisher of the facsimile (the Nuovo istituto editoriale italiano) went out of business soon after and the second volume was never issued. The rest of Zecca Laterza’s work can be consulted at the Library of the Conservatory “G. Verdi” of Milan. As a result of these difficulties, the pages pertaining to Ricordi publications from 1846 through 1857, including those of 1847 and 1848, are not readily available for consultation outside of Milan. In a preface to this first volume, I called attention to the phenomenon of the “edizioni distrutte” (see p. xii), but made no effort to explore its ramifications. I have not attempted to investigate fully the bibliographical issues pertaining to the catalogues of these other publishers; Table 8.2 mostly lists items I have studied in the Library of the Conservatory “G. Verdi” of Milan, whose librarian, Agostina Zecca Laterza, was an invaluable partner in my research on this project. I wish also to thank Daniela Macchione, who located several publications lacking in the library of the Milan Conservatory. Only 20706, Eugenia D’Alberti’s Canzone nazionale ai prodi Lombardi, is lacking, although Daniela Macchione located a manuscript copy of the piece in the Museo del Risorgimento di Vicenza (Parte ii / Canti p. 143, 17 / Coll. inni patriottici 1848). See Radiciotti, Gioacchino Rossini, vol. iii, pp. 247–249, Herbert Weinstock, Rossini: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), or, for example, my “Catalogo delle opere” in Luigi Rognoni, Gioacchino Rossini (Turin: ERI, 1977), pp. 465–466. Neither is it listed in Eduardo Rescigno, Dizionario rossiniano (Milan: Biblioteca universale Rizzoli, 2002), pp. 246–247. Monterosso, La musica nel Risorgimento, p. 184. See ibid., pp. 169–171. As Monterosso points out, Ronchetti-Monteviti was a serious composer, who served as director of the Conservatory of Milan from 1877 through 1881. For an extensive study of the works of Ronchetti-Moteviti, see Attilio Rossi, “La base dati musica del Servizio

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52 53

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55

56 57 58

59 60

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bibliotecario nazionale: Un esempio di ricerca. Stefano RonchettiMonteviti (1814–1882): La vita, le opere e il lascito alla Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica Giuseppe Verdi di Milano” (Pavia, tesi di laurea, 1997–1998). “Velite” is an ancient Latin term for lightly armed infantrymen. This particular contingent of soldiers came from Viterbo. See Provincia di Viterbo, Tuscia. Archaeologia, arte e storia: Il Risorgimento (c. 1996, last updated April 1997), http://www.isa.it/tuscia/storia/ oggi2.htm. I refer here to the Canto degli italiani published by Lucca (Pl. No. 7018), which is entirely different from the Canto degli italiani published by Ricordi (Pl. No. 20823), reproduced in Parker, “Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati,” pp. 111–126. Anyone even vaguely cognizant of the operatic literature would have associated this text with the phrase that opens the Coro dei Bardi in Rossini’s La donna del lago, “Gi`a un raggio forier d’immenso splendor addita il sentier di gloria e d’onor!” [Already a ray of light, harbinger of immense splendor, shows the path to glory and honor!]. See Parker, “Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati,” p. 86n for these examples. Richard Dutton, Licensing, Censorship, and Authorship in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2000), p. xi. I obtained this information from Gaspare Nello Vetro, Dizionario della musica e dei musicisti dei territori del Ducato di Parma e Piacenza dalle origini al 1950, published in http://biblioteche2.comune.parma.it/dm/ ind fram.asp, alla voce Pietro Cornali. Among Rossinian examples is the Coro di guerrieri within the Coro (N. 6) of Tancredi, at the text “Alla gloria, al trionfo, agli allori.” Its harmonic shift from E major to the flatted sixth degree, C major, is the same shift that Rossini exploits in the oath-taking chorus (“Jurons, jurons” or, in the Italian translation by Calisto Bassi, “Giuriam, giuriam”) that concludes Act ii of Guillaume Tell, the oath at Rutli, specifically at the point where the Swiss augur that traitors be denied access to Heaven and, on earth, a tomb. Again, the reference seems to me to go beyond the “morphology of national discourse” of Banti to a direct reference to Rossini’s musical setting. A few pieces figure twice: 20343 (Giovanni Zerbi’s Il cantico di battaglia), 20828 (Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti’s Il grido della Crociata), 20848 (Luigi

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Philip Gossett Pantaleoni’s adaptation of the Marseillaise, which figures three times). Thus, although only 42 of these compositions have been found, the table shows 46 entries. The setting of the “Marseillaise” has been excluded: it utilizes French stanzas in octosyllabes. 62 See his doctoral dissertation, “Laughter Between Two Revolutions: Opera Buffa in Italy, 1831–1848” (New York University, 2003), as well as his “Comedy Between Two Revolutions: Opera Buffa and the Risorgimento, 1831–1848,” Journal of Musicology 21 (2004), 127–174. 63 The story is retold in Monterosso, La musica nel Risorgimento, pp. 140–142. 64 Riccardo Carnesecchi, “Venezia sorgesti dal duro servaggio”: La musica patriotica negli anni della repubblica di Manin (Venice: il Cardo, 1994). Carnesecchi offers also important bibliographical references, including a list of the holdings of “Musiche patriottiche” in Armadio vi, 9 of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice.

9

Opera in France, 1870–1914: Between nationalism and foreign imports Christophe Charle Translated by Jennifer Boittin

The high culture of late nineteenth-century France, which was for the most part Parisian, was marked by two contradictory trends. On the one hand, Paris was a global metropolis that attracted artistic elites from the entire civilized world and served as a stepping stone to fame for many of them. On the other hand, France itself was traumatized by the defeat of 1871 and felt outdistanced by more dynamic economic powers. In certain artistic fields, the country was now challenged by fledgling nations such as Germany or Italy that repudiated the former French cultural hegemony which dated back to the Enlightenment as well as the universalist ideals of the French Revolution. As a result, a type of cultural nationalism emerged which gradually spread into many fields, including literature, music, and of course the fine and decorative arts.1 One prominent victim of this heightened awareness of a national culture was Richard Wagner, whose works met with a difficult reception in Paris following the unfortunate first run of Tannh¨auser, premiered at the Op´era on March 13, 1861, and dropped after just three performances.2 While private facilities and patrons compensated to some extent for the official institutions’ lack of goodwill and for the conservatism of the general public when it came to welcoming foreign instrumental music, things were different for the opera. In France, this genre depended mainly upon theatres, which were in the hands of, or received subsidies from, the state. In order to assess the tension between cultural openness and defensive nationalism in the operatic domain, we will attempt here to review how foreign works were received on various Parisian stages, whether devoted entirely (Op´era, Op´era-comique) or partially (some private theatres) to this form of musical theatre. Conversely, we will examine French creativity and the potential for French works to be performed 243

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abroad in order to determine whether the defensive posture of the French musical world, often underscored by commentators and specialists, was justified or not. Once we have noted these facts and figures, we will analyze both the reasons for the success or failure of attempts to introduce new foreign works and the listening habitus of the Parisian musical milieu.3 In order to establish the quantitative parameters for this study, we have compiled two data sets by using Alfred Loewenberg’s work Annals of Opera supplemented by several French performance history reference works.4 The first data set includes all the grand and comic operas performed in Paris between 1870 and 1900, whatever their nationality, and traces their parallel dissemination across the cities of Europe and beyond. It thereby allows us to establish a distribution map of the most international works, and to situate Paris and provincial French theatres within the distribution network in chronological and geographic terms relative to the various competing linguistic spaces. As a result, we will be able to determine whether Paris and the French-speaking area formed a pocket of resistance to foreign imports, as well as the varying degrees of resistance according to the country of origin of a work, its style, and the language in which it was performed. The second data set contains a list of operatic works (French and foreign) premiered or performed in Paris during the same time period. It will allow us to determine to what degree Paris remained a space open to the performance or creation of new works and, by comparing it with the information in the other table, to what extent Paris was a launching pad for the international dissemination of works first played in the capital. The comparison in this respect with the role of other large cities in Europe, made possible by the first table, will also enable us to judge whether Paris, which saw itself earlier in the century as a major center for the reception of European operatic works (as both Wagner and Verdi readily acknowledged in their youth), remained just that or whether, on the contrary, the French theatre was now merely a space for the production of new works limited to a more modest cultural empire. We will successively examine the following three issues: (1) Parisian creativity and its limits; (2) export capacity; and (3) the listening habitus.

Opera in France, 1870–1914 PA R I S I A N C R E AT I V I T Y A N D I T S L I M I T S

From the 1870s onward, contemporaries – both critics and musicians – began complaining that the Parisian operatic stages were dominated by a never-ending series of revivals of the same repertory works and by indefinitely prolonged runs of new works which met with initial success. These two tendencies had a detrimental effect on the chances of young and foreign composers whose works had not previously been performed to gain a hearing for themselves. These complaints were not novel, if one recalls the difficulties Berlioz encountered when he attempted to have his own works performed in France, difficulties which forced him to try his luck in German theatres, where he was better received. Yet there was no lack of talent at the time, as the composer Victorin Jonci`eres stressed in his preface to the 1880 edition of the Annales du th´eaˆ tre et de la musique: One can say without flattery that the French School has never known such a considerable number of distinguished composers; but one must quickly add that never before has access to the theatre been more difficult for them. I will not go far to find evidence. Honor to whom honor is due: let us first take the Op´era. During the course of the past year, what great new work, signed by a French name, has it performed? Not a single one. During the eighteen months that he has been directing the Acad´emie de musique, M. Vaucorbeil has staged two operas, Verdi’s A¨ıda, which the Th´eaˆ tre Ventadour had already introduced to the Parisian public four years ago, and Comte Ory by Rossini, which was first performed in 1828. These are the novelties of our national Op´era.5

However, one should not extrapolate too quickly from the situation of the late 1870s. It is indeed true that the Op´era, which had just inaugurated its new house in 1875, was following a particularly timid policy and taking the easy way out since it possessed a large audience interested in coming to the opera primarily to admire the sumptuous architecture of the Palais Garnier rather than to hear new music. Nonetheless, as shown by Fr´ed´erique Patureau, the proportion of new and foreign works increased progressively during the 1890s.6 Likewise, the Op´era-comique and the private theatres increasingly opened their stages to new artists soon after this pessimistic report. Summary

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statistics, which can be established on the basis of the table of new works mentioned above, place Paris in a rather good position among the European countries. Out of 142 operatic works (all genres included) which were performed in Paris between 1870 and 1900, 82 (or 57.7 percent) were world premieres; of the rest, six had received their premieres in Milan, six in Saint Petersburg, four in Bayreuth, two in London and one in Berlin (and paradoxically it was a French work). This preponderance of Paris as a launching pad, notably for operas and comic operas, is not the result of a bias linked to what was being defined as an “opera.” Most of the works first created in Paris went on to have international careers. Only 17 percent of the works created in Paris failed to be performed outside of France. In this respect, indeed, it is interesting to note that the symbolic value attached to a work’s Parisian origins produced effects which were even more substantial when that work did not belong to the historical genre of grand opera. Thus of the sixteen grand operas that received their first performance in Paris during this period, five failed to enjoy an international career because of their initial lack of success at the Palais Garnier. It seemed as though the opinion of the elite Parisian public was a definitive and final judgment for the more ambitious works, preventing their circulation abroad if they failed in the French capital. Such a fate was suffered by only two out of thirty-five comic operas premiered at the Salle Favart between 1870 and 1900 and by none of the “lighter” works (operetta, comic operas, etc.) launched from less renowned theatres. A successful first production in Paris among the secondary genres was a guarantee of dissemination beyond the French borders. One sees here the residual effects of the myth of imperial splendor and of “la vie parisienne” which continued to fire the imagination of the rest of Europe. This power to make or break the reputation of a theatrical work, especially those that were more commercially oriented, was the continuation of an older phenomenon illustrated, for example, by the massive export to foreign theatres of French vaudeville and melodrama in the first half of the nineteenth century.7 This explains the desire of many playwrights and composers to wait their turn rather than be performed outside Paris. Some composers, however, including some important

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ones, tired of waiting for a sympathetic manager of a Parisian theatre and took their works elsewhere. Thus Saint-Sa¨ens had Etienne Marcel performed at the Op´era of Lyon on February 8, 1879, and Massenet launched La Navarraise at Covent Garden on June 20, 1894. In 1880 Victorin Jonci`eres noted: “Another Academician, M. Massenet, who is considered one of the most popular composers of these times, not finding a slot for his H´erodiade in Paris, will stage its premiere next winter in Italy.”8 These are, however, exceptions that confirm the rule inasmuch as the operas just mentioned never did establish themselves in the repertory. The significance of Paris is also underlined by the fate of operas premiered in other major cities. Thus most of the works created in London did not reach beyond the English-speaking world, with the exception of works performed in a language other than English. Likewise, with the exception of the sacred cows of German or Italian opera, composers from these countries rarely saw their works performed outside their countries of origin. The true exception here is represented by the remarkable breakthrough during this period of Russian composers, whose operas were first staged in their home country before, after a certain delay, being admitted to all the opera houses of Europe. However, this first measure of Parisian creativity must be qualified with another consideration: these eighty-two works with Parisian premieres mentioned above amount in all to fewer than three new works a year, and even fewer if we exclude the lighter genres. Yet the opera-loving public had at its permanent disposal two opera houses, to which could be added intermittent opera seasons at the Th´eaˆ tre Italien, the Th´eaˆ tre Lyrique, the Op´era National Populaire, and, towards the end of our time period, the Chˆatelet and the Th´eaˆ tre des ChampsElys´ees. Paris also enjoyed at this time an extraordinary influx of new audiences as a result of its strategic position within the French and European rail networks. In addition, a select audience also traveled to the city for grand occasions such as the Universal Expositions and official visits by sovereigns, which were in theory favorable moments during which

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Figure 9.1 Revenues of the Op´era and the Op´era-comique, 1875–1905

to broaden the range of operatic programs. The third asset of Parisian opera stages was the generous aid given them by the state in the name of patriotic or educational goals, aid which was matched only in a few large German cities where the cultured audiences were much smaller.9 Finally, the French capital enjoyed a general and specialized press with unmatched freedom to write at length about the every move of theatre managers, performers and composers, thereby fostering the public’s interest in the small world of opera. These advantages (and their effects as set forth above in the discussion of the attraction of Paris) explain Paris’s central role in the careers of opera musicians in France and Europe. Yet, as we have seen, these attractions alone did not guarantee a high level of output of new works. This issue brings us to more general handicaps specific to France’s fin-de-si`ecle theatrical system which I have defined, following others, as a crisis of the theatre.10 This crisis possessed paradoxical features, as shown by the above table comparing the revenues of the Op´era and the Op´era-comique between 1875 and 1905. The income of the former fluctuated between three and four million francs, with three peaks of prosperity during the Universal Expositions of 1878, 1889, and 1900. However, these atypical years aside, there was no clearly ascending curve even after 1900, although operating costs had a tendency

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to increase. Thus Vaucorbeil’s management ended with a deficit of 380,000 francs in 1884. His successors, Jean Eug`ene Ritt and Pierre dit Pedro Gailhard, made a profit as a result of the Universal Exposition of 1889, while Eug`ene Bertrand, who took over in 1891, lost 500,000 francs in 1892–1893.11 The Op´era-comique replicates the same cycles of prosperity and decline: recurring crises endangered the previous financial balance and forced changes in management, as happened in 1876,12 in 1887 following a fire, and again in 1898. Thus, despite subsidies and the artificial stimulus of the Expositions, the two great opera theatres suffered from very large deficits linked to historical accidents (political crises, economic crises, catastrophes such as fires) and to artistic failures. This financial fragility largely explains the relative timidity in the selection of works performed (especially those by new composers or controversial foreign composers) and hence of the preference for careful strategies: managers, when confronted with failure, revived successful works from the repertory, refurbished productions of operas which had already proven successful or commissioned new pieces from well-established composers and librettists, even if this meant betraying one of the missions of these subsidized stages: fostering new talent. Some critics go further in taking Parisian operatic theatres to task for insufficient creativity by underscoring that private theatres, which enjoyed less state aid or none at all, did better than the official theatres in this regard: thus Vizentini’s Th´eaˆ tre Lyrique staged twelve new works in eighteen months (1878–1879); however, it eventually went bankrupt.13 It must be admitted, then, that when managers did try to break from routine and give new or foreign works a chance, they were rarely followed by the public, and the experiments inevitably resulted in deficits. Albert Carr´e, manager of the Op´era-comique beginning in 1898, summed up the constraints under which management operated in this way: In order to survive, any theatre, especially an opera house, needs to earn maximum takings as often as possible. Consequently, for a new work – once the movement due to curiosity has passed – to supplant, in the

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This vicious circle suggests structural causes rather than a simple explanation based upon the managers’ personalities, a lack of significant new works or the limited range of the public’s taste. When we consider which new works were most successful and brought in the most money, it is clear that they correspond to a relatively simple pattern. On the one hand, they stirred old memories for much of the audience, which attenuated their novelty, always unsettling for a snobbish public which attended as much because of a sense of social obligation as because of aesthetic interest. On the other hand, without admitting it, they watered down certain foreign innovations which were still being rejected because they were foreign, by adapting them to the canons of French opera and of the structure of well-constructed French plays and their very distinctive character.15 The importance of dramatic structure in French opera came from the conventions of classical theatre and the comedy of intrigue, which at the time dominated the Com´edie-franc¸aise and the theatres of the Paris boulevards. Thus in 1878 Zola observed: “The well-constructed theatre piece, I mean one constructed according to a certain balanced and symmetrical pattern, has become a curious, entertaining plaything which has amused the whole of Europe along with us. It is from this that one can date the popularity of our repertory abroad, where it is accepted like a fad, just like our luxury goods.”16 It is not coincidental that the most frequently performed playwrights were also often the librettists of serious and comic operas.17 At a symbolic level, theatrical conventions were identified with the French spirit and its literary heritage, which the state, since the time of the monarchy, was responsible for perpetuating through secondary school education and the subsidized stage. Furthermore, the growing cult of male and female singers, as witnessed in the competition among international

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theatres for their services and the resulting rise in fees, forced composers and librettists to tailor characters and the scenes to the presumed performers who to a great extent guaranteed the success of a new work, so much so that an opera stopped attracting an audience if the creator of a part did not perform it during revivals. This ensemble of symbolic and human constraints thus greatly limited the composers’ and directors’ margin for maneuver and the possibilities for renewing the repertory. They weighed more heavily in France than abroad because of the lack of competing cities within the French cultural space and internationally. In particular, the musical season was much shorter at La Scala in Milan and in London, and the British capital had no official theatre or native repertory to defend, apart from the new Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, while the Vienna State Opera was dominated by Wagner and Italian operas.18 One could object that these facts are not specific to the Paris of this time. Nonetheless, during this period they probably weighed more heavily than previously for three reasons of varying importance: (1) The competition from new genres, mixed and light, exacerbated by the deregulation of the theatres in 1864, limited the possibility of a rejuvenation of the audience for opera and comic opera. Most of the opera-going public was increasingly attracted to operetta and the caf´econcert. The result was an aging audience for serious genres, a factor in the growing conservatism in audience tastes. (2) In contrast, the increase in the volume of elite musical offerings, as concerts and amateur music associations grew in number, drew away music-lovers who did not find what they were looking for in the official theatres, especially with regard to new foreign music. Thus some operas (in particular those of Wagner) were performed in concert versions before they reached the stage.19 (3) The crisis of the official theatres, which gave rise to both the experiments of the naturalist and symbolist movements and the attempt to create a new musical theatre launched in Bayreuth, set off a conflict within the Parisian musical world between defenders of academic orthodoxy and their avant-garde opponents.20 This conflict was similar to those that were occurring at the time in other artistic domains, with the crisis of the Salon in the visual arts and, in

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literature, the birth of new literary movements disseminated through small journals and independent theatres.21 Yet, despite these tensions and this crisis, it must be said – and we have seen why this was so – that younger composers continued to conform as well as they could to the inherited rules and to wait for their time to come without inventing, as their painter and writer colleagues did, alternative structures outside the official framework. Part of the explanation for this lies in the conservatism of a milieu trained for the most part in the educational mold of the conservatoire and, unlike painters or authors, very heavily dependent upon the state for its survival. But the explanation also lies in the symbolic and financial rewards accruing to opera composers performed on Parisian stages,22 reinforced by an unequaled capacity for worldwide export, as we shall now see in greater detail. E X P O RT C A PAC I T Y

We have already seen that the works first produced in Paris had a rather high probability of being performed abroad, while the opposite was not true. We must now define more precisely the geographic reach of the most renowned French works in comparison to their foreign counterparts. Table 9.1 confirms previous remarks about the international influence of the French school of opera during the period under consideration. No fewer than sixteen French composers succeeded in having their works premiered in at least nine different foreign cities and ten had performances in thirteen or more. The numbers pertaining to large geographic areas demonstrate that we are not simply speaking of exports to the traditional zone of French influence (Switzerland, Belgium, colonies, Russia), but that the two other principal opera-composing countries (Germany and Italy) as well as the two great opera-consuming zones (the English-speaking world and South America) were also affected. The presence of the most prolific and most frequently performed composers was not restricted to this central bloc of the opera world. The works of Massenet, Bizet, and

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Table 9.1 French composers of operas and op´eras-comiques most frequently performed abroad

Composer’s name Massenet (1842–1912) Bizet (1838–1875) Offenbach (1819–1880) Saint-Sa¨ens (1835–1921) Delibes (1836–1891) Charpentier (1860–1956) Berlioz (1803–1869) Gounod (1818–1893) Bruneau (1857–1934) Mass´e (1822–1884) Chabrier (1841–1894) Lalo (1823–1892) Paladilhe (1844–1926) Guiraud (1837–1892) Reyer (1823–1909) Jonci`eres (1839–1903)

Number of foreign opera houses where their works were premiered (1870 and later) 64 including: Germany: 6; Great Britain: 2; Italy: 4; North America: 4; South America: 5 50 including: Germany: 2; Great Britain: 2; Italy: 2; North America: 3; South America: 3 48 including: Germany: 5; Great Britain: 3; Italy: 3; North America: 1; South America: 2 47 including: Germany: 4; Great Britain: 1; Italy: 2; North America: 3; South America: 2 37 including: Germany: 3; Great Britain: 2; Italy: 1; North America: 2; South America: 2 34 including: Germany: 4; Great Britain: 2; Italy: 1; North America: 2; South America: 2 22 including: Germany: 5; Great Britain: 3; Italy: 1; North America: 2; South America: 2 15 including: Germany: 1; Great Britain: 2; Italy: 2; North America: 0; South America: 0 14 including: Germany: 3; Great Britain: 2; Italy: 1; North America: 2; South America: 0 13 including: Germany: 1; Great Britain: 1; Italy: 1; North America: 2; South America: 2 11 including: Germany: 5; Great Britain: 1; Italy: 0; North America: 2; South America: 0 11 including: Germany: 0; Great Britain: 1; Italy: 1; North America: 2; South America: 0 11 including: Germany: 2; Great Britain: 0; Italy: 1; North America: 0; South America: 0 10 9 9

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Saint-Sa¨ens were also presented in many other foreign cities until quite a late date. Thus Massenet was performed on the Iberian peninsula, in north Africa (Casablanca, Algiers, Tunis, Alexandria, and Cairo), in the Baltic region and throughout central and eastern Europe, but also in more exotic areas: Batavia, Saigon, Santiago (Chile), Corfu, and Bogota. Saint-Sa¨ens’s empire included all of Europe, both Americas, and northern and southern Africa. Even composers with brief careers and a limited number of works to their name saw these works spread far beyond the traditional centers of gravity of operatic creativity. Hence L´eo Delibes, who wrote only one exported opera, Lakm´e, met with a truly worldwide success, from Helsinki in the north to Buenos Aires in the south, and from Yokohama in the east to New Orleans in the west. Another remarkable characteristic of this distribution was the favorable reception of French works in both Germany and England. The cradle of opera, Italy, turned out to be the least open, as a result of the dynamism of its own school of opera and the relatively brief seasons of its many theatres. Furthermore, the latter were experiencing a financial crisis following the country’s unification which led to a lowering of public subsidies in cities that were no longer capitals.23 It is understandable that they lacked the means to introduce foreign works with the expensive production costs characteristic of French operas. Added to this problem was a certain rivalry born of a less favorable theatrical and political context: France welcomed Italian works from the eighteenth century thanks to the Th´eaˆ tre Italien in Paris, and was also Italophile during the struggle for independence in the midnineteenth century, but became less hospitable after the closing of the Th´eaˆ tre Italien on August 8, 1878, and the diplomatic rapprochement between Italy and Germany during the same period. Although Verdi was very well known in France and had long been appreciated, his last works were not performed in Paris until, in the case of A¨ıda, five years (at the Th´eaˆ tre Italien – it would not arrive at the Op´era until four years later) and, in that of Otello, seven years (Op´era) after their world premieres. While Falstaff was put on after a wait of only one year, it was

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Table 9.2 Number of cities outside their home country where the works of foreign opera composers from the sample were performed Composer’s name

Number of cities

German Wagner Humperdinck

63 37

Italian Verdi Puccini Leoncavallo Mascagni Giordano

72 65 49 48 46

Russian Mussorgsky Tcha¨ıkovsky Borodin Rimsky-Korsakov Rubinstein

42 41 28 27 24

performed in French as opposed to the original language, probably in order to render it more accessible to the less cultured audience of the Op´era-comique. The works of the most-performed foreign opera composers during this time had distribution patterns similar to those of the French composers examined earlier (see Table 9.2). But in the end fewer of them reached this enviable status than did French composers, in proportion to the musical activity of their countries of origin. We are victims here of the skewed perspective born of a re-evaluation of value scales according to the tastes of our time, when the reputations of these foreign composers have held up better than those of many of their French contemporaries cited above. Without doubt, Wagner already dominated the stages in German-speaking countries and most

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of Europe but, apart from him, there was practically no other German opera composer with an international reputation. The sole exception is Humperdinck, known for only one work, H¨ansel and Gretel, which was performed in thirty-seven cities outside Germany. L´eo Delibes, who also composed only one famous work, enjoyed the same level of success. The Italian school was much more present internationally with the works of five major composers exported. Furthermore, they did not have to wait nearly as long as German composers at the doors of foreign stages: thus Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (1890) was performed that same year in Stockholm, Madrid and Budapest, a year later in Barcelona, Hamburg, Dresden, Munich, Prague, Buenos Aires, Moscow, Vienna (in German), Berlin (at the Opera and the Lessing Theatre in German), Bucharest, Riga, Laibach (Ljubljana), Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Rio de Janeiro, Basel (in German), Copenhagen (in Danish), New York (at the Metropolitan Opera in Italian and at the Lenox Lyceum or Casino in English), Amsterdam (in German), London (Shaftesbury Theatre), Mexico, Lisbon and, less than two years after its premiere, in Paris (Op´era-comique, in French), Brussels (in French), Liverpool (in English), Warsaw (in Polish), New Orleans (in English), Vienna (in Italian), Amsterdam (in Dutch), London (Covent Garden), Malta, Moscow (in Russian) and Reval (in German). The speed of this dissemination shows the ongoing prestige of Italian opera even when oriented in the direction of verismo. There was also a significant tendency in certain areas to want to naturalize the work through early translations into the national tongue. The French theatrical space (Paris and Brussels) and northern Europe (Stockholm, Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Copenhagen) opted for translation while a portion of central Europe (Vienna, Bucharest) and Mediterranean Europe (Barcelona, Lisbon, Madrid), London and South America respected the original language during the first distribution phase of the work in question. The lasting success of Italian composers and their French counterparts, along with this policy of translation, underscores the resistance

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of the international public’s taste, and not just France’s, to the innovations identified with Wagner. The fact that many of the successful Italian works were based upon a storyline originating in France also exemplifies the persistence of the dramatic model of French grand opera, which was itself the heir to classical literature: thus Puccini’s La Boh`eme and Manon Lescaut and Giordano’s Andr´e Ch´enier and Fedora (based on Sardou) were inspired by French literary works, whether novelistic or theatrical. The only school whose success demonstrated a true opening of the international opera public was the Russian school. It made a noticeable breakthrough on all stages, including in France. With six composers present on over twenty foreign stages, its record was identical to that of French opera composers. Nonetheless, this Russophilia suffered from a waiting period which was much longer than for the traditional European schools. Out of the 262 performances by Russian composers inventoried, 252 took place over ten years after the work’s initial creation. French Russophilia, which focused upon literature during the 1880s,24 had to wait until the 1900s before manifesting itself in opera, and then only on unofficial stages and at a time when Wagner had finally been completely accepted at the Op´era. The foremost Russian works were first performed between 1908 and 1911. In 1911, for example, the Th´eaˆ tre Sarah-Bernhardt put on Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride twelve years after its world premiere. This mistrust of works from the East was not specific to France, although – despite the favorable diplomatic context of the FrancoRussian Alliance – France was more resistant: the Berlin Opera only opened its doors to Tcha¨ıkovsky’s first work after seventeen years, the Vienna Opera after twelve years, La Scala (1906) after sixteen years and New York after twenty years. This interval allowed Russian operas, which portrayed a little-known national history, to be tackled after the public had already absorbed much greater innovations by native composers and those of nearby countries. Furthermore, some western European composers had already used Russian themes in their own works in response to the growing vogue for exoticism which

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characterized a substantial portion of the subject matter of opera and comic opera.25 Thus in 1876 a comic opera by Victorin Jonci`eres based on Russian history was performed at the Op´era National Lyrique. It was taken from Schiller and entitled Dimitri. It was performed forty-six times the first year, which at the time was by no means an insignificant success for a new work. This last example brings us to the question of the role of Paris in this game of circulation and to the true listening habitus of its opera audience.

THE LISTENING HABITUS

This listening habitus was influenced not only by political factors and musical taste but, more broadly, by representations of identity and strategies for social distinction relevant to the various listening publics that could be mobilized. One hears again and again the same complaints from musicians and critics. Throughout this period everything found disturbing, even within French music, was called Wagnerian, and hence unpatriotic and dangerous. Thus one could read the following in the Annales du th´eaˆ tre et de la musique: “It was said in advance that M. Saint-Sa¨ens was Wagner’s disciple and that his score was written in the Wagnerian style. This is a serious error. Everything is clear, everything is proper, everything is melodious in this score of Henry VIII, certainly more Italian than Wagnerian.”26 The author, favoring Saint-Sa¨ens, found no other praise than to exonerate him from inaccurate accusations of “Wagnerianism,” a word which at the time had negative connotations for the Op´era’s audience. The same tactic was also used for another quasi-official composer, Reyer, who derived inspiration from mythological Germanic themes in his opera Sigurd, which inevitably led to comparisons with the themes of the Ring cycle. The critic used the same exoneration tactic: “It is a work which, although finding some inspiration from across the Rhine, nonetheless belongs to the French school which should by rights openly lay claim to it.”27

Opera in France, 1870–1914

In the aftermath of defeat in 1871, not only was Wagner banned from French stages, but no French composer could allow himself to be suspected of importing elements of Wagner’s work under a native guise. The listening habitus of the critics as well as of the audience thus seems very limited. These limitations were reinforced by the predominance of the French language, regardless of a work’s national origin. Out of 82 works premiered in Paris during this period, only one was not sung in French. Of 62 works of foreign origin performed on Paris stages, 36 were sung in French, 4 in German, 12 in Russian and 10 in Italian, but this linguistic opening took place mainly after 1900. Paris, a European and even world capital, and the predominant space for the creation and distribution of operatic works, was anything but a Tower of Babel as far as language or aesthetic conventions were concerned. As such, it clearly differentiated itself from a capital such as London, where only 55 percent of inventoried works were sung in Shakespeare’s language, versus 17.7 percent in French, 6.6 percent in Russian, 14.8 percent in Italian and 4.4 percent in German. The resistance in Paris to languages other than French allowed a veritable naturalization of the foreign repertory – when it was finally accepted – if only through the choice of performers who were more comfortable in the French vocal style. This resistance encouraged the maintenance of French theatrical preeminence, which was simultaneously reinforced by the previously mentioned success abroad of French operas, comic operas and operettas. The analysis of this interplay across borders in the service of French cultural universalism needs to be extended through a study of the topics of operas and comic operas themselves. While we saw Italian works rewritten on the basis of plots with French influences, conversely French composers favored themes drawn from foreign history or literature, or situated in a foreign or exotic setting. This adherence to tradition at a time when the spoken theatre, like contemporary Italian opera,28 was turning towards realism and contemporary topics symbolizes the permanence of the French style. Despite foreign influences, French style was capable of appropriating (like the translators and directors who naturalized foreign operas) any time or place: from Spain (Carmen, 1875) to Russia

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(Dimitri, 1876), not to mention India (Lakm´e, 1883 and Le Roi de Lahore, 1877), Japan (Saint-Sa¨ens’s La Princesse jaune, 1872), and even the imaginary space of the great German rival: Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann (1881); Reyer’s Sigurd (1884) and Massenet’s Werther (1892). Of course, some French operas were still being inspired by classical works of French origin (such as Manon, Le Cid, and Polyeucte) or from historic episodes of France’s national history (Jean de Nivelle, Cinq Mars), but they seem to have made less of an impact and enjoyed more short-lived success than did the historically themed grand operas studied by Jane Fulcher.29 During the first half of the nineteenth century, opera allowed both composers and the public to reclaim a tumultuous and traumatic revolutionary past by using a game of correspondences with other historic episodes that also found their way to the stage. At the end of the century, after the Franco-Prussian war and the defeat of the Commune, people distrusted history and feared German influence. Exploring the remote past created a neutral space for the imagination and compensated for a fear of confinement and isolation born of the trauma of 1870–1871. Reclaiming other nations’ mythologies compensated for the lack of a consensual French mythology, since many French mythical or historic heroes were still at the center of contemporary political conflicts, and thus threatened national unity and the consensus of a public made up of members of the elite belonging to a variety of political tendencies. The failure of an opera on Jeanne d’Arc by Mermet, performed only fifteen times in 1876, is one example. Paradoxically, it was Giordano who put the French Revolution on stage with his opera about Andr´e Ch´enier, performed in Paris only in 1905. Another possible course was the use of Celtic mythology as a substitute for exotic or Nordic mythology: three examples were Chabrier in Gwendoline (1886), Lalo in Le Roi d’Ys (1888), and Debussy in Pell´eas et M´elisande (1902). The only works to escape these tropisms were the few that attempted to invent a naturalist opera that, as Jane Fulcher has demonstrated in great detail, corresponded to a very specific set of political circumstances: the Dreyfus Affair.30 Contrary to what one might expect of operas linked to national and political stakes specific to France,

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these works spread beyond France just like the exotic and mythological operas that dominated the rest of the French operatic output. With respect to Bruneau, who had Zola as his librettist, it seems probable that his success abroad resulted in great part from the international reputation of the librettist, a novelist famous throughout Europe. For Charpentier, the initial success of Louise in Paris and a certain similarity of some of its themes to those of La Boh`eme probably worked in favor of the international audience’s interest. However, compared with most French works, these were atypical examples which combined political elements, Wagnerian influences, and a critical historic moment: the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair. C O N C LU S I O N

As we reach the end of this study, which has far from exhausted its subject, we return to the questions we asked in the introduction. Composers’ complaints regarding the paucity of new operas and the limited opening of official stages to foreign works were not unjustified, but these problems were a result above all of global constraints which lessen the specific responsibility of opera directors. These constraints include the public’s conservative musical tastes; the financial constraints which were specific to the operatic genre; pressure by established composers and the authorities; the failure and mediocrity of many new works; and the invention of alternative circuits of creation. These various factors prevent us from interpreting the peculiarities of Parisian operatic programming as merely an expression of the Malthusianism and nationalism of those who determined it. The remarkable success of French works beyond the country’s borders also demonstrates that, by the yardstick of international taste, these works were extremely fashionable. This achievement could only reinforce the established habits of the French opera authorities while feeding a complex of cultural superiority which was widespread amongst hommes de lettres and other artists. Hence a work like Pell´eas et M´elisande, which is still viewed from today’s perspective as pathbreaking, not only enjoyed considerable success in Paris soon after it

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was composed, but also, thanks to the prestige gained from a launch in an official Parisian theatre, was as popular abroad as works that were much more accessible or consensus-building. Before 1914, this opera was premiered in sixteen different cities of the Old and New Worlds. The tension within French national culture was thus essentially a reaction to Germany and Wagner. This tension affected much of the audience and conformist or chauvinistic critics rather than the elite public and those composers who, whatever their own musical leanings, were obliged to situate themselves with respect to Wagner, even when challenging or attempting to surpass him, like Debussy. Furthermore, the degree of openness during this period of French theatres to works from other schools is roughly comparable to what it was in other epochs, even if such openness only manifested itself for the most part beginning in the 1890s.31 However, the most significant finding of our study is the existence of an international empire of French works, encompassing the most ambitious and the most accessible, the most traditional and the most innovative of operas. This empire equaled that of Italian opera and was perhaps even greater than the one over which French opera reigned before 1870, thanks to Paris’s unrivaled importance among the European cultural capitals,32 and thanks to the attraction the composition of operas exerted, for both symbolic and financial reasons, upon many French musicians.

n ot e s 1 See, for example, Jane F. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Deborah L. Silverman, L’Art nouveau en France, politique, psychologie et style fin de si`ecle (French translation, Paris, Flammarion, 1994); Christophe Charle, Paris fin de si`ecle, culture et politique (Paris: Seuil, 1998). 2 Alfred Loewenberg, Annals of Opera 1597–1940 (Cambridge: Heffer & Sons, 1943), p. 432.

Opera in France, 1870–1914 3 The “habitus” concept comes from Pierre Bourdieu (e.g., Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). By listening habitus, I mean the way people behave and pay attention in a situation of collective listening. Such a situation requires the reconciliation of (a) the style of social interaction of a given milieu and its accepted norms (internal hierarchies, roles, horizontal relations) with (b) the intrusion constituted by the execution of a work and by the artists engaged in this execution. This interaction provokes implicit and explicit tensions (depending on the degree of novelty of a work) that the conventions of the habitus in question aim to manage and resolve but which may sometimes result in scandals, misunderstandings, or fiascos if a smooth compromise between the artists and the listening milieu is not achieved. The Parisian musical milieu that was centered on the Op´era and on musical salons put in place a particular mode of listening to musical works that was characterized by shifting attention and fleeting enthusiasm for bravura passages; this was a mode of listening that was at odds with the new, quasi-religious, style of listening that innovators such as Liszt and Wagner hoped to impose. 4 Edouard No¨el and Edmond Stoullig, Les Annales du th´eaˆ tre et de la musique (Paris: Charpentier, 1875 and subsequent years); Albert Soubies and Charles Malherbe, Histoire de l’Op´era Comique: La seconde salle Favart (Paris: E. Flammarion, 1892–1893, new edition Geneva: Minkoff, 1978). I would like to thank P. Boudrot for helping with the data collection and suggesting ways in which it could be used. 5 Victorin Jonci`eres in No¨el et Stoullig, Les Annales du th´eaˆ tre et de la musique (1880), p. iii. 6 Fr´ed´erique Patureau, Le Palais Garnier dans la soci´et´e parisienne 1875–1914 (Li`ege: Mardaga, 1991), pp. 244ff. 7 See the cases of Scribe and of Offenbach examined by Jean-Claude Yon, Eug`ene Scribe la fortune et la libert´e (St. Genouph: Nizet, 2000); and Jacques Offenbach (Paris: Gallimard, 2000). On the impact of the French theatre in England during the first half of the nineteenth century, see Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Early Nineteenth Century Drama 1800–1850, second edition (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 80. 8 Jonci`eres in No¨el and Stoullig, Les Annales du th´eaˆ tre et de la musique (1880), p. v.

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Christophe Charle 9 See the table furnished by Eug`ene d’Harcourt, Mission du gouvernement franc¸ais. II. La Musique actuelle en Allemagne et Autriche-Hongrie, Conservatoires, Concerts, Th´eaˆ tres (Paris, 1908): the majority of opera houses in the large German cities were running deficits and were dependent on government subsidies. 10 See Jean Dubois, La Crise th´eaˆ trale (Paris: Imprimerie de l’Art, 1894); Dominique Leroy, Histoire des arts du spectacle en France (Paris, L’Harmattan, 1990); Christophe Charle, La Crise litt´eraire a` l’´epoque du naturalisme (Paris: PENS, 1979), Part ii, chapter 3. 11 Patureau, Le Palais Garnier dans la soci´et´e parisienne, pp. 99–100. 12 Soubies and Malherbe, Histoire de l’Op´era Comique, pp. 214–215. 13 Jonci`eres cites the following reasons for the failure of this experiment: the high rent charged for the theatre; the unfortunate timing of the launch at the end of the theatre season; and above all the absence of financial support from either the central government or the municipality at a time when both the Op´era and the Op´era-comique received subsidies even when they were badly managed ( Jonci`eres in No¨el and Stoullig, Les Annales du th´eaˆ tre et de la musique [1880], pp. xi–xvi). 14 Albert Carr´e, Souvenirs de th´eaˆ tre, new edition (Plan de la Tour: Editions d’aujourd’hui, 1976), p. 310. 15 See, for example, Herv´e Lacombe, Les Voies de l’op´era franc¸ais au XIXe si`ecle (Paris: Fayard, 1997), pp. 277ff. 16 Zola, preface to No¨el and Stoullig, Les Annales du th´eaˆ tre et de la musique (1880), p. xxviii. 17 Thus Patrie (1886) of Paladilhe had as librettists Gallet and Sardou, Piccolino (1876) of Guiraud is based on a play by the same Sardou, the libretto of Carmen (1875) was written by Meilhac and Hal´evy based on a work of M´erim´ee; and that of Massenet’s Manon (1884) was written by Meilhac and Gille. All three operas of Delibes had as their librettist the dramatist Edmond Gondinet. 18 D’Harcourt, Mission du gouvernement franc¸ais. II. La Musique actuelle en Allemagne et Autriche-Hongrie, pp. 143–150. 19 Myriam Chim`enes, “Elites sociales et pratiques wagn´eriennes: De la propagande au snobisme,” in Anegret Fauser and Manuela Schwartz, eds., Wagner zum Wagn´erisme. Musik, Literatur, Kunst, Politik (Leipzig: Leipziger Universit¨atsverlag, 1999), pp. 155–197.

Opera in France, 1870–1914 20 See Charle, La Crise litt´eraire a` l’´epoque du naturalisme. 21 See Pierre Bourdieu, Les R`egles de l’art. Gen`ese et structure du champ litt´eraire (Paris: Seuil, 1992); Cynthia and Harrison White, La Carri`ere des peintres au XIX`eme si`ecle, trans. Antoine Jaccottet (Paris: Flammarion, 1991; American edition, New York: Wiley, 1965). 22 An avant-garde composer like Debussy, whose one completed opera was staged at the Op´era-comique, derived an income from these performances substantially greater than from concerts or the publication of his works. Thus the total gross box-office receipts for the performances of Pell´eas et Melisande in 1902 totalled 113,627 francs, and if one uses the usual rate of 6 percent of these gross receipts to calculate the composer’s royalties these add up to 6,817 francs. (The figures for the box-office receipts at the Op´era-comique are derived from Jann Pasler, “Op´era et pouvoir: Forces a` l’oeuvre derri`ere le scandale du Pell´eas de Debussy,” in Hugues Dufourt and Jo¨el-Marie Fauquet, eds., La Musique et le pouvoir [Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1987], pp. 173–174). 23 See, for example, Carlotta Sorba, Teatri: L’Italia del melodramma nell’et`a del Risorgimento (Bologna, Il Mulino, 2000), pp. 248ff.; Eug`ene d’Harcourt, La Musique actuelle en Italie (Paris: F. Durdilly, Fischbacher, 1906); D. Francfort, “Rome et l’Op´era,” in C. Charle and D. Roche, eds., Capitales culturelles, capitales symboliques: Paris et les exp´eriences europ´eennes XVIIIe–XXe si`ecles (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2002), pp. 381–402. 24 See, for example, Eug`ene-Melchior de Vogu¨e, Le Roman russe (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1886) and C. Charle, “Champ litt´eraire franc¸ais et importations e´ trang`eres: De la vogue du roman russe a` l’´emergence d’un nationalisme litt´eraire (1886–1902),” in Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, eds., Philologiques III (Paris: Ed. de la MSH, 1994), pp. 249–263. 25 See, for example, Lacombe, Les Voies de l’op´era franc¸ais au XIXe si`ecle, p. 191. 26 No¨el and Stoullig, Les Annales du th´eaˆ tre et de la musique (1883), pp. 3–4. 27 No¨el and Stoullig, Les Annales du th´eaˆ tre et de la musique (1885), pp. 32–33 (The work’s subject matter is drawn from the Nibelungen sources.) 28 The rare exceptions are operas of Charpentier (Louise) or of Bruneau based on works of Zola (Le Rˆeve, L’Attaque du moulin). 29 Jane F. Fulcher, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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Christophe Charle 30 Fulcher, French Cultural Politics, pp. 77ff. 31 Of the 21 new Italian works performed in Paris, only 3 were staged before 1890, 10 between 1890 and 1900 and 8 after 1900; of 9 German works, 1 was staged before 1900, 4 between 1900 and 1910 and 4 after 1910. All 18 new Russian operas seen in Paris appeared after 1908. 32 Charle and Roche, eds., Capitales culturelles, capitales symboliques.

10

Fascism and the operatic unconscious Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg

This essay unfolds from an initial working hypothesis about the absence of a discursive unconscious from pre-unification Italian cultural history in general, and from its operatic history in particular. The sense of an Italian national culture evolves with the energies of the Risorgimento: the resurgence of Italy as a modern nation, which achieved political success with unification in the decade of the 1860s. In this light, the Risorgimento might be understood as a discourse of the ego. Its equation of subjectivity with desire, emotional excess, and cultural-political subversion found conscious articulation and representation in the operatic tradition. This energy encountered its most convincing voice in Verdi’s operas and operatic style. No matter what his personal politics and commitments may have been, his operatic style fused with the Risorgimento as assertions of the ego, where inner desire and social conflict appeared as realities fully understood, inhabited, and expressed. This fusion occurred at the level of the works themselves, their musical texture, and the psychological and musical texture of their characters. Individual and collective identities – embattled lovers, outsiders, and heroes – pursue their causes against outside, foreign, or superannuated antagonists. Through the decade of the two unifications (1860–1870), however, this cluster began to break apart. As a result, the Risorgimento, the invention of national culture, and its project of “making Italians” opened a space of anxiety about the freedom and enslavement of the national ego. Italian thinkers now found their national project to be belated and ill prepared, without adequate traditions of liberalism and romanticism. They worried that Italy had been born to an anxiety of its own hollowness, and they themselves were incapable of finding a way out of it. When, in the 1930s, Gramsci read Francesco de Sanctis, 267

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the canonic historian of Italian national culture, he found in de Sanctis at once a symptom and a diagnosis of a national anxiety. Italy, Gramsci asserted, had experienced its revolution passively. The Risorgimento ego-of-desire had provided no viable economy; it was at once excessive and insufficient. It thereby ceded to a national ego-of-anxiety – the eventual breeding ground for fascism.1 After 1870, opera remained the privileged genre and Verdi the emblematic figure of the Risorgimento and of the Italian nation. Verdi’s mythic status as a founding father of the nation held and continues to hold, notwithstanding the questionable evidence of his political involvement or intentions. Between the premieres of Otello in 1887 and Falstaff in 1893, the elderly Verdi witnessed in silence the final passing of the Risorgimento generation and its displacement by a new generation of bureaucrats and technocrats lacking national ideals. This passage has been consistently described as the replacement of poetry by prose, of the poetry of national liberation with the prose of daily life. Verdi’s Risorgimento style was displaced in the 1890s by verismo: the style claiming the stageworthiness of the everyday. The early Puccini is clearly marked by such claims, at least until the turn of the century, when Tosca and Butterfly restored the grandiose and the exotic to operatic stage and style. These restorations culminated in Turandot. Puccini remains the emblem of this national anxiety. It has become a clich´e to assert that the crown prince Puccini produced no heirs and that his final, unfinished opera Turandot reigns as a final, barren sovereign in a line that goes back not only to Verdi but indeed to Monteverdi. But this judgment remains restricted to the circumstance of Puccini’s death in 1924. To cite and inflate Toscanini’s legendary words at Turandot’s premiere in April 1926: Qui finisce l’opera, perch`e a questo punto il Maestro e` morto. This necromantic narrative shuts out history in general, and, most importantly, fascism in particular. Worse, it may in fact reproduce those very structures that fascism relied on for its own aestheticized politics. We want to argue, first, that Turandot delivers opera to fascism and, second, that fascism cannot, through opera, deliver on its own cultural claims. The fascist aesthetic is spectacular, not operatic. This is, in the

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end, the key point. Here we take issue with a standard error in Italian film studies, namely the conflation of the spectacular and the operatic. Fascism, we argue, tries to enclose opera within its aesthetic of spectacle, but fails. Opera retains its central position in Italian national culture. The result is clearly not an operatic renaissance at the level of new work or a significant postwar production style. (The successes of Berio, Menotti and others are not of an adequately significant scale, and no Italian Regieoper takes hold.) Rather, the result is the re-emergence of an operatic subjectivity – the return of the repressed – in displaced form – namely, in film. Moreover, this operatic subjectivity emerges now at the level of the unconscious. Paradoxically, the articulation of operatic subjectivity as cultural unconscious lives up to the old Risorgimento project. Opera, or more precisely the operatic unconscious, traverses and survives fascism to become an important site of a post-fascist national unconscious.

O P E R A A N D S P E C TAC L E

We begin with a speech of Mussolini’s from April 1933 to the Italian Society of Authors and Publishers: I have heard reference made to a crisis of the theater. This crisis is real, but it cannot be attributed to the cinema’s success. It must be considered from a dual perspective, at once spiritual and material. The spiritual aspect concerns authors; the material aspect the number of seats. It is necessary to prepare a theater of masses, a theater able to accommodate 15,000 or 20,000 persons. La Scala was adequate a century ago, when the population of Milan totaled 180,000 inhabitants. It is not today, when the population has reached a million. The scarcity of seats creates the need for high prices, which keeps the crowds away. But theaters, which, in my view, possess greater educational efficacy than do cinemas, must be designed for the people, just as dramatic works must have the breadth the people demand. They must stir up the great collective passions, be inspired by a sense of intense and deep humanity, and bring to the stage that which truly counts in the life of the spirit and in human affairs. Enough with the notorious romantic “triangle” that has so obsessed us to

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Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg this day! The full range of triangular configurations is by now long exhausted. Find a dramatic expression for the collective’s passions and you will see the theaters packed.2

Where opera ends, fascism begins. Mussolini’s address supports this formulation, a fairly standard one in the history of opera. Compatible with the production of fascist doctrine, it is compatible as well with the standard history of the Italian operatic canon. It follows the well-known claim that Puccini’s Turandot – unfinished at his death in 1924 and premiered at La Scala, with Franco Alfano’s ending, in 1926 – arrives at the end of the Italian operatic tradition, and arrives just as fascism triumphs. It allows for the empirical reality of the fascist regime’s support of opera, including the regime’s wish to disseminate theatre and opera into the provinces and to the people. This initiative produced traveling companies known as the carri di tespi [“theatermobiles”]. The first carro teatrale was inaugurated in 1929; the first carro lirico [“operamobile”], in 1930. Operamobiles toured Italy with works of Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, Mascagni, and Bellini, and proved much more successful than the theatermobile. Moreover, between 1933 and 1943 Pietro Mascagni was the largest beneficiary of funds administered by the Ministry of Popular Culture. During the Italian Musical Summer of 1938, 392 operas were performed, compared to 52 theatrical performances.3 Fascism’s commitment to opera and theatre also produced a renewed and vigorous investment in the so-called teatri all’aperto throughout the Italian peninsula and even in the colonies. Though the history of performing in ancient Greek and Roman theatres predated fascism and indeed continues today, it is undeniable that the practice lent itself well to “fascist Romanism.” As Jeffrey Schnapp has argued, the regime developed, over the years, a “cohesive politics of spectacle that sought to provide ‘hygienic’ outdoor alternatives to the ‘sickly’ interiors of the bourgeois theatre, to popularize elite forms of culture . . . and to forge a new sense of nationhood both by promoting interregional tourism and by placing the Italian masses face to face with the past, present, and future ‘Mediterranean solar genius of their race’” (23). Such teatri all’aperto delivered canonic repertories to those

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crowds of 15,000 to 20,000 spectators that Mussolini had called for. The Arena di Verona offered nineteenth-century opera, with the occasional swerve to Wagner, one of these in honor of Hitler’s visit there in 1937. For the regime, however, the popularity of traveling opera companies, the reclamation of ancient sites for mass spectacles, and the building or planning of stadia designed for such spectacles as well as mass sport events and political rallies only filled a vacuum, one opened by the “colossal failure” (Schnapp 9) of the 1934 mass spectacle of war, revolution, and reconstruction entitled 18BL. Staged outside Florence by the filmmaker Alessandro Blasetti for an audience of 20,000 as a form of theatre by and for the masses, the event aimed to create “a place of mass communion where, bathed in the wartime smells of gunpowder and burnt magnesium, [the different classes of Italian society] rubbed shoulders and merged into a single charismatic community; a healthful Italian Bayreuth where the national body politic could be reconstituted in harmony with the values of fascist ruralism” (Schnapp 66). 18BL tried to combine elements from cinema and theatre. Thus, it sought to reject nineteenth-century theatrical values with its use “layered soundtracks, cinematic lighting ticks, and editing techniques such as montage and the rapid cross-cutting of scenes” (Schnapp 77). At the same time, it sought to create a version of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, “to embody,” in the words of one of its authors, “the real and the symbolic simultaneously, creating a kind of actualized mystical experience” (Schnapp 77). 18BL bespoke a profound ambiguity toward cinema on the part of fascist culture. Cinema, in the view a number of fascist theories, was a decadent art, attenuating the relationship between body and performance. The theatre, and the theatre of the masses in particular, restored to the body the power to forge a new relationship between art and life. Theatrical values were, as Schnapp insists, at the center of fascist politics. At the same time, Blasetti and other fascist theorists insisted that theatre be reconceived cinematically. “Movies,” Blasetti stated, “have accustomed spectators to seeing things on a grand scale; they habituated them to a sense of realism, to rapid shifts between

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scenes, to a vastness of spaces and horizons that the theatre cannot provide. Here [with 18BL] it is a matter of creating a theatre that can offer those sensations to the public” (Schnapp 77). In its celebration of the immediacy of the body, fascist modernist theatre felt compelled to imitate film, a representation thus twice removed, producing a kind of body-machine most tellingly revealed by the fact that the heroine of Blasetti’s spectacle was 18BL: a Fiat-model truck. Like Brunnhilde, 18BL “immolated in a single evening,” in Jeffrey Schnapp’s apt image (82); unlike Brunnhilde, however, this vehicle only sang once. “What the hell do we care about a truck?” was the reaction reported by one critic (Schnapp 83). The failure of the truck has much to say about the structure and limits of fascist aesthetics. Loving the truck may have been one challenge; seeing it (in a crowd of 20,000) was equally a problem. Blasetti wanted both theatre and film, auratic presence and infinite mechanical reproducibility. The conversion of the body of desire into the body-machine failed, at least on so grandiose a scale. In this respect, operatic tradition and the culture of the carro lirico stood in direct contradiction. The first lodged in the body of desire; the second made such bodies, and indeed the actual operatic performances themselves, secondary to the technology of performance as a portable, reproducible spectacle. The medium of the carro teatrale was the message, as Jeffrey Schnapp argues. That medium resided more in the pre-performance spectacle than in the performance itself. On the day of the performance, “trucks rolled into the city’s public square, whereupon an army of assembly technicians (assisted by hundreds of hired hands) would set about the task of erecting the canvas and steel armature; positioning lights, curtains, and sets; and filling out the seating areas. Always well attended, this pre-performance show was meant to display the efficiency achieved through corporate organization” (21). T U R A N D O T. C O M

William Weaver’s Golden Century of Italian Opera concludes with those now famous remarks that William Ashbrook and Harold Powers cite

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at the opening of their study Puccini’s Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition: . . . as he reached the conclusion of Li`u’s death scene, Toscanini laid down his baton and said, in effect (he has been quoted variously): ‘The opera ends here, because at this point the Maestro died. Death was stronger than art.’ The opera ends here. Toscanini might have been speaking not just of Puccini’s last work but of Italian opera in general. Of course, other new Italian operas were composed and performed in the decades that followed, and some of them enjoyed a certain success, a certain theatrical life. But Puccini left no Crown Prince. With him, the glorious line, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, came to a glorious conclusion.4

Ashbrook and Powers catalogue the Princes of Persia who might have succeeded the Crown Prince Puccini: Mascagni and Giordano in his own generation; Zandonai, Pizzetti, Dallapiccola, Bussotti in the two generations following him (3–4). More centrally, however, they suggest that the socio-cultural role of the Great Tradition was absorbed by the new vehicle of popular melodrama, namely, film. “Puccini’s heirs, then, were D. W. Griffiths and Cecil B. DeMille – or in our day, Dino De Laurentiis and Franco Zeffirelli” (5). Most centrally of all, however, they note that the stage director of the prima assoluta of Turandot and the author of its production book (disposizione scenica) was Giovacchino Forzano, the superintendent of staging at La Scala between 1922 and 1930 and a director of silent film. Forzano’s film experience, they suggest, informed “both the handling of crowds and the acting style” (4–5). Forzano’s instructions for Act i, for example, read: “Let me say once and for all that during this episode the movements both of the Executioner’s servants and of the crowd, should be violent, full of ferocious anticipation, often vulgar, interspersed with bursts of laughter, grimaces, and exaggerated gestures” (145). Ashbrook and Powers (18) ignore the essential fact that Forzano was also an active and committed fascist, and one of the key developers of the theatermobiles (carri teatrali). Forzano established the visual style that has remained the norm in Turandot’s subsequent stagings. Turandot is spectacular, and indeed

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becomes more so all the time. The ultimate coup in recent years has perhaps been the staging – produced by Florence’s Maggio Musicale – at the gate of the Forbidden City in Beijing in 1999. Below that threshold is the gilded extravaganza of Franco Zeffirelli’s that has occupied the stage of the Metropolitan Opera since 1987. There is thus a substantial tension between the fascist career and fascist aesthetic of Giovacchino Forzano and the decidedly anti-fascist politics and persona of Arturo Toscanini, who conducted the work’s premiere and has become closely identified with the work, although perhaps symbolically more than empirically. Toscanini controlled its La Scala premiere as he controlled La Scala itself, in this case driving Mussolini himself from the premiere by sticking to his refusal to conduct the fascist hymn Giovinezza, as per custom, when Mussolini entered the hall.5 But in Turandot’s longue dur´ee Toscanini has been perhaps less influential than Forzano.6 Turandot’s famously and uniquely tortuous compositional process has been exhaustively recounted, from the completion of the first sketch for Act i in January 1921 to the composer’s death in November 1924 while completing the composition of Act iii. Puccini wrote often of his creative difficulties, perhaps most tellingly in a letter to his colibrettist Giuseppe Adami in October 1922: Let us hope that the melody which you rightly demand will come to me, fresh and poignant. Without this, there is no music . . . What do you think of Mussolini? I hope he will prove to be the man we need. Good luck to him if he will cleanse and give a little peace to our country.7

What seems to us most interesting here is the parallel of melody and Mussolini as objects of desire. To be clear, the remark provides no smoking gun about Puccini’s fascism or about his politics in general. The biographical record doesn’t provide much clarity either. Puccini was conferred “honorary membership” in the Fascist Party in early 1924. He was made Senator of the Kingdom two months before his death. His death (in Brussels on November 29, 1924) was announced to the Chamber of Deputies by Mussolini, who added: “Some months ago, this eminent musician asked to become a member of the National Fascist Party. By this gesture he wished to show his solidarity with a

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movement that is much argued about and arguable, but that is also the only living thing in Italy today.”8 At the same time, the parallel of melody and Mussolini finds a prominent correlative in the musicaldramatic logic of Turandot. Turandot’s internal relation to fascism combines melody and Mussolini in the figure of the unknown prince whose entrance generates the opera’s action. The figure of the unknown mysterious outsider who enters a decayed world only to take it over as the consummate insider is well known in operatic history, though much more so in the German canon than in the Italian one: Tamino, Walther von Stolzing, Parsifal. Puccini’s reference – conscious or not – to this Germanic trope is in keeping with his pro-German stance in matters of both art and politics during the years of the Great War. The Unknown Prince is here identified as Calaf, son of Timur, the dethroned King of the Tatars. Sonically, however, he is identified a` la Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, i.e., as a bearer of Western Music, his diatonic idiom opposing the pentatonic texture of the local scene. Puccini’s “orientalism” does not absorb the expressive world of the prince. Calaf’s consuming desire for Turandot is, of course, overwhelming. It produces two triangles. It stands not only in betrayal of his father – the Verdian triangle – but of another woman as well, the slave girl Li`u. This character was added by Puccini to the characters and sources derived from earlier Turandots, notably that of Carlo Gozzi. The Puccinian triangle of Calaf caught between Turandot and Li`u is irresolvable. This is Puccini’s problem; there is no imaginable way whereby his survival to the opera’s completion might have solved it. Notwithstanding the selfavowed sycophantic tone of their study, Ashbrook and Powers confess as much with the judgment that the scene of Li`u’s torture and suicide in Act iii produces a “fatal shift of focus” away from the character of Turandot, whose transformation must nonetheless retain center stage. Puccini’s notes for the conclusion of Act iii, which he did not live to write, contain the indication “Poi Tristano.” Clearly he intended to bring the royal couple into musical and emotional high relief. That potential remains unknown. Franco Alfano’s ending, it is fair to assert, does not successfully humanize Turandot. Turandot remains a sound machine,

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a close relative of none other than 18BL. If, in her case, audiences do indeed come to care about a truck, that is because they have come to be overwhelmed and overjoyed by the vocal machinery that can keep her lines audible and loud above the competition of chorus, orchestra, and spectacle. Ashbrook and Powers strive to retain the callous Calaf’s honor by insisting that he never loved Li`u and had never claimed otherwise. Ceding that “at first blush the closing passages of the opera seem unmotivated, perhaps even shocking, as though Butterfly’s suicide had been vulgarly and anticlimactically followed by a final love duet for Pinkerton and Kate,” they soon reclaim the opera’s honor by insisting that Calaf “is shocked and moved when she [Li`u] falls lifeless at his feet; but his heart is, as it has been, wholly engaged elsewhere.”9 This defense misses the point that Calaf’s recovery from Li`u’s death is wholly without emotional or ethical conflict. Neither can the affair of his heart be cited to justify his new abandonment of his blind father. The abandonment of any sense of justice to a rush of emotion is the mark of fanaticism, a tool well used by fascism. Turandot delivers opera to spectacle. The power of spectacle obliterates the moral conflict that the surviving characters would have exhibited in a Verdian universe. The lust that drives Calaf also drives the spectacle; the audience is sonically beaten into submission by the very same blasts that, according to the reception-history clich´e, signify Turandot’s first orgasm. Alfano’s contribution only helps this process. His string of quotations of Puccini’s material conjoins musical ideas to spectacle, as if the musical themes were taking their curtain calls as the stage action comes to its conclusion. More importantly, the delivery of opera to spectacle is also its delivery to fascism, to its aesthetic of power through spectacle. In this sense, the opera Turandot, as distinct from the intentions of its creators (Puccini, librettists Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni) and its producers (Toscanini vs. Forzano) emerges as a fascist work. Its brutal “happy end” folds the opera (Calaf ) into fascism (Turandot’s regime, newly partnered with Calaf’s charismatic leadership). In the work’s desire for incorporation into fascist spectacle, it accepts the bargain that demands the end of opera.

Fascism and the operatic unconscious T H E O P E R AT I C U N C O N S C I O U S : SENSO ( V I S C O N T I , 1 9 5 4 ) , THE SPIDER’S STRATAGEM ( B E RT O LU C C I , 1 9 7 0 )

Verdi corresponds for me . . . with a mythical dimension, and that works very well with the mythical structure of the father. Mythic music for a mythical personage.10

These words of Bernardo Bertolucci do much to organize the historical as well as symbolic stakes of postwar Italian film, in which the myth of Verdi as founding father of the Italian nation carries central importance. This importance prevails not only despite the mostly subterranean quality of Verdi as referent, but because of it. Freud’s last major work Moses and Monotheism centers on the difficult relationship between individual psychology and collective psychology, or, as he puts it, on the birth of “great men” and of a “national tradition.”11 Freud’s narrative is that of the family romance and of murder. Moses, the hero or great man, is he who manfully stands up against and overcomes adversity, yet is himself condemned to die. A national tradition is born from the fact that the hero is the source of the tradition at the very moment as he is successfully removed from it. Thus Freud writes: “In the long run it did not matter that the people . . . renounced the teaching of Moses and removed the man himself. The tradition itself remained and its influence reached the aim that was denied to Moses himself.”12 What remains after the death of the author/father is a text, a text that nevertheless always “tells us enough about its own history.” Two opposing forces leave their traces in the shape of transformations worked upon it: falsification, “in accord with secret tendencies,” that turn the text into its opposite; and an indulgent piety anxious to keep everything as it has stood, even at the expense of logical consistency. And Freud continues in a now famous passage: The distortion of a text is not unlike a murder. The difficulty lies not in the execution of the deed but in doing away with the traces. One could wish to give the word “distortion” [Verstellung] the double meaning to which it has a right; . . . It should mean not only “to change the appearance of,” but also “to wrench apart,” “to put in another place.”

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Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg That is why in so many textual distortions we may count on finding the suppressed and abnegated material hidden away somewhere, though in an altered shape and torn out of its original meaning.13

Let us assume for present purposes that the Moses in question here is Giuseppe Verdi, and that the text is that of his operatic output as it is put into play as a national tradition. This is then an argument about the role of (Verdian) opera as cultural tradition predicated on the death or removal of its author(s), a use of this tradition that depends for its existence as tradition to be wrenched apart, torn from its original meaning, put into another place. This is also an argument about the autonomy of cultural products which thus become subject to a working-over or working-through in another place – to wit, that of the unconscious – in the form of a distortion or displacement. It is such an autonomy that gives rise to a national culture. In the Italian context as we are thinking about it here, the national operatic tradition returns as the repressed of fascism, and it makes this return through and in film. We would like to illustrate this proposition with a discussion of two films, Luchino Visconti’s 1954 Risorgimento film Senso and Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 film about the fascist legacy in postwar Italy, The Spider’s Stratagem. The two films share a number of themes. They treat key revolutionary events in Italian history (the struggle for national independence during the 1860s and the resistance to fascism respectively); they explicitly thematize the problem of murder and betrayal; they place their female protagonists (both played by Alida Valli!) in the Turandotian role of threat to male integrity; they both allocate to opera a central, if paradoxical, function. In both films, opera simultaneously distances viewers from and draws them closer to a recognizable cultural tradition. In both films opera is marked neither as authentic nor as inauthentic national culture, but instead as a site of negotiation and memory, a via regia – and not, as Gramsci would argue, a conquista regia – to the cultural unconscious. Opera marks the uncanny, the unheimlich, the homely and unhomely, the familiar and the strange.

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The reaction to Visconti’s Senso immediately upon its release was violent, a fact that is symptomatically telling, since clearly it struck a nerve. Indeed, what Senso faced head-on was the question of the relationship between opera and a fascist aesthetic founded in spectacle. Based on Camillo Boito’s novella of the same name, Senso takes place in 1866 Venice during Italy’s War of Independence against Habsburg occupation. The heroine Countess Livia Serpieri, who is married to the pro-Austrian but open-to-other-suggestions Count Serpieri, supports the nationalist cause, largely under the influence of her idealist cousin Ussoni. Nevertheless, Livia becomes romantically involved with the Austrian officer Franz Mahler, and her sordid love affair eventually leads to her moral undoing and Franz’s execution before an Austrian firing-squad. Livia betrays the nationalist cause, as well as her fickle Austrian lover, while the Italian army is routed at Custoza and yet gains the Veneto as a result of political dealings between the dominant European powers. The opening scene of the film remains the most famous, a performance of Il trovatore at the Fenice. We are at the end of Act III: Manrico’s decision to chose filial love over his “casto amore” for Leonora, his aria “Di quella pira,” and the subsequent call to arms produce a shift of the plot from stage to audience, as Italian nationalists in the audience call the people to arms against Austrian occupation. Ussoni reacts violently to the remark made by an Austrian officer (we will soon know that this is Franz Mahler) that this is how Italians make revolution: as theatre and to the music of mandolins. Ussoni is arrested and eventually exiled, while Livia meets Franz in order to intercede for her cousin. Franz and Livia meet in her opera box during the last act of the opera, as Leonora begs the Count Luna for Manrico’s life. But while Leonora promises only her cold and spent body to Luna, Livia, in an explicit statement of refused identification with melodramatic heroines – “I love opera,” she tells Franz, “but not when it occurs off stage” – quickly abandons nationalist politics for a personal melodrama of sleeping with the enemy. At the level of the film’s operatic Doppelg¨anger, namely Il trovatore, Livia’s romance proceeds as if her operatic analogue Leonora

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had begun an affair with the Count di Luna rather than with Manrico. Livia thus obeys her own principle of not letting opera define life; she might have done better to learn from Leonora. The center of the debate about Senso revolved around Visconti’s relationship to opera, though here a conceptual ambiguity complicates the matter, since in Italian melodramma refers to both melodrama and opera. Thus, is opera always melodramatic? Does opera always refuse, like melodrama, the interiority of the subject? Is it inevitably condemned to spectacle? It is certain that with Senso Visconti wanted to provide a Gramscian reading of the Risorgimento, that is, an interpretation of national unification as one that lacked real popular participation and was founded on the political machinations of European elites. Italian unification was a class affair, not a national one. In Gramscian terms, melodrama is the false consciousness of the Risorgimento; opera is a mechanism of false identification whereby reality in its mediocrity and sordidness cannot live up to operatic gesture. Verdi’s music, or rather the libretti and plots of plays set to music by him, are responsible for the “artificial” poses in the life of the people, for ways of thinking, for a “style.” . . . To many common people the baroque and the operatic appear as an extraordinarily fascinating way of feeling and acting, as a means of escaping what they consider low, mean and contemptible in their lives and education in order to enter a more select sphere of great feelings and noble passions . . . Opera is the most pestiferous because words set to music are more easily recalled, and become matrices in which thought takes shape out of flux.14

More indirectly, of course, Visconti is also referring to the “second” revolution, that of the Resistance, a revolution that from the perspective of the conservative Catholic and Christian Democratic climate of 1954 Visconti was bound to have interpreted as another failure. Visconti was also directly engaging a cultural style that had been born along with the Resistance: neorealism. As Angela Dalle Vacche has remarked, while Rossellini is anti-operatic and Crocean, while he seeks to create a form of Italian national consciousness from, so to speak, the ground up through the employment of the commedia dell’arte tradition, Visconti’s

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style is both operatic, “high-cultural,” and Gramscian. He thus creates a composite style that will come to characterize Italian cinema in the years to come.15 While the Right understood Visconti’s Gramscian reading of Italy’s “heroic age” as blasphemy, the Left was decidedly uncomfortable with Visconti’s use of opera. Senso bore the message that the national past looked like a melodrama, but it did this in a style that made viewers uneasy. Left critics attacked Visconti for having betrayed neorealism along with the latter’s commitment to setting its films in the present and shooting them in documentary style. Visconti’s film, on the other hand, exhibited a kind of excess, an operatic quality of its own, that in these critics’ opinion had been the mainstay of fascist culture. It was the presence of the past as opera that made so many critics uncomfortable with Senso. As Dalle Vacche tellingly remarks, Visconti had “conducted a dialogue with the operatic culture of his aristocratic background the way a son speaks to his own father, with that mixture of respect and rebellion referred to as anxiety of influence.”16 For Millicent Marcus, as well, what troubles Senso is its spectacular or operatic element. The film itself strikes the viewer as a costume drama founded in (melo) dramatic gesture and excess, a drama whose relationship to the past is unclear: is it ironic, or is it excessively indulgent?17 Clearly, there is something in opera, in the operatic tradition, that when invoked defies mastery. “By emphasizing music over word,” writes Dalle Vacche, “melodrama charges with pressure the elements of its mise-ensc`ene to express something hovering over the inexpressible. This ineffable dimension, in turn, is symptomatic of an originary fullness of meaning, which the fragmentation of modern life cannot quite live up to.”18 For Dalle Vacche, Visconti’s operatic style evokes both the legacy of fascism and also an excess, a sexual passion that destabilizes identity, both of the subject and of politics. Alternatively, for Marcus, the presence of opera in Senso points to a Golden Age of perfect reciprocity between public and private, between culture and history. Nevertheless, for her as well, the story cannot continue in this harmonious way, since otherwise Visconti would have simply rewritten Il trovatore.

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Livia may desire to be Leonora, a desire that should propel her incestuously into the arms of her cousin Ussoni/Manrico. Instead, a “degraded” melodrama takes place, a displacement of opera. Leonora becomes Livia, the Livia–Franz plot takes over the Livia–Ussoni plot, not just because of the cynicism of modern, fragmented, life, but because opera creates a desire for exceptionality that cannot be managed or controlled by political institutions and rules. Visconti’s use of opera is not strategic; it is not a ploy to show up the impossibility of opera in the modern age. Its use, instead, drives a wedge between spectacle and opera, producing simultaneously a Gramscian reading of the dangers of politics as spectacle, and an Eros, or a senso whose stagings must remain there, but in displaced form, in disguise, in the form of an insistence on and by the subject. What returns in Senso is precisely “senso”: the demand for sensuality and happiness that had been banished from fascism. Visconti’s obsession with uniforms and veils in Senso points simultaneously to the masks that disguise the true self and to that element that constitutes the subject in its very essence. The subject, for Visconti, is an operatic subject, but one that is displaced, always somewhere else. Opera exists in Visconti’s film as that auratic element that both defies and submits to the dictates of filmic reproduction. While for Visconti opera still can be staged or made visible, for Bernardo Bertolucci such a visibility seems to have become impossible. In The Spider’s Stratagem, opera dominates the plot of the film, though we never actually come to see it. Nor does it function as mere background music or “soundtrack.” There is something derailing and derailed about opera’s presence or absence in the film. And since Spider is about the continuing legacy of fascism in postwar Italy, opera comes to stand for what has been devoured by fascism, in ways similar to a spider’s incorporation of its prey. Rigoletto in the film is “a text within, or a satellite of, the main text.”19 Loosely based on Borges’s short story “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” The Spider’s Stratagem tells the story of Athos Magnani (Giulio Brogi) and his return to his native Tara, a place he had left at his birth in 1936, following the murder of his father at the hands of fascists.20 Some thirty years later, he is summoned back

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to Tara by his father’s “official” mistress Draifa (named by her father for Alfred Dreyfus) in order to investigate his father’s death. On his arrival, Athos Jr. discovers his martyred father’s name emblazoned across the town, on streets, statues, and clubs, as the local anti-fascist hero. His murder – in the local theatre during a performance of Rigoletto – has never been solved. The film follows the son’s investigation into his father’s and the town’s shared past. Narrative flashbacks provided by Draifa and by his father’s three surviving best friends indicate that things are not as straightforward as they seem. Tara is a strange place, made up almost entirely of old men and of people whose genders and ages are unclear and whose memories of the past are at best imperfect but nevertheless recited as if by rote. Athos Jr. learns of a plot planned by his father (also acted by Giulio Brogi) and his three friends – all anti-fascist in a theatrical kind of way, one of the friends remarks, just like Samuel and Tom in Un ballo in maschera – to kill Mussolini upon his arrival in Tara for the inauguration of the new theatre. The plot is discovered, Mussolini cancels his visit, the three friends narrowly escape arrest, and Athos Sr. dies in Mussolini’s place at a performance of Rigoletto at the end of the second act, while Rigoletto sings “Ah, la maledizione!” Athos Jr. tries to leave Tara but is drawn back from the train station as he hears the music of Rigoletto emerge like a spider’s web from the theatre. The music leads him back into a repetition of the story of his father’s murder, a story by now as familiar as the plot of the opera. Though we never the see the stage, the plots of Rigoletto and Athos are carefully entwined, and it is in and through the performance that we finally learn the truth of the father’s murder. As Gilda calls “Soccorso, padre mio,” and as we see Athos Jr. seeing himself in a mirror (a visual reference to Senso is quite deliberate here), the son realizes that the three friends had killed Athos. As they then explain, Athos had betrayed his own plot to kill the Duce, and he had asked the three friends to kill him “dramatically” in order to give Tara a hero. A flashback in which Athos lays out his plan for a staged murder appears twice, as if to highlight the act’s rehearsed quality. Caught in his father’s web of lies, Athos Jr. – unable to betray his father’s betrayal lest he be like him – endorses the lie, and when he tries again to leave Tara by

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train, he finds that the tracks are covered in grass and that no train has stopped at Tara in years. Bertolucci has spoken of The Spider’s Stratagem as a film that is both about the ambiguity of history and about the manufacturing of myth, a myth whose Italian articulation depends on Verdian opera: “Verdi corresponds for me – and thus for the son of Athos Magnani – with a mythical dimension, and that works very well with the mythical structure of the father. Mythic music for a mythical personage.”21 Tara is the home of this myth, the synecdoche of Italian self-representation, and it immediately evokes, as Kline has pointed out, the seat of mythical Irish kings (the family romance), the lost plantation of Gone With the Wind (nostalgia or melancholy loss), and the first syllables of the dreaded spider (danger, contamination, entrapment), as well, of course, as the word “blemish” or “mark” as evoked by the Italian tara. Verdi as a means of unambiguous national self-representation or identity and symbol of resistance is thus immediately questioned. Verdi may be part of a myth but, as Deborah Crisp and Roger Hillman correctly remark, his use in the film is not mood-making. Bertolucci refuses false parallels.22 Initially we may be rather blinded by the parallel between Rigoletto and The Spider’s Stratagem – and this is thematized and given emphasis by Bertolucci’s use of Gilda’s abduction scene, where the blindfolded Rigoletto participates unwittingly in the crime. Bertolucci links the opera and his own film through their themes of blindness, filial devotion, and backfired murder plot. The intended objects of “just vengeance” are the Duke in the opera and the Duce in the film; they are finally replaced by the plotter’s daughter in the opera, and by the principal plotter himself in the film. Rigoletto and Athos Sr. are both known to be jesters,23 creating a situation wherein the two conspirators are unable to make an informed judgment about the nature and consequences of their own actions. Rigoletto unwittingly participates in the abduction and murder of his own daughter. The conspirators in the film, on the other hand, in their plan to have Mussolini assassinated by the Rigoletto on stage, are unable to distinguish between real life and performance. The key to the film lies perhaps in this knowing substitution, in the capacity, that is, of the subject (viewer and protagonist) to read the

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difference between acting out a part (in a play) and a form of working through that is not condemned to the theatrical or mechanical repetition of the past. As a traitor, Kolker writes, Athos Sr. “in effect joins the fascists, and by raising the fascist concept of spectacle to a universal proposition he ‘poisons the universe’ for everyone.”24 (“Poisoning the universe” comes from Un ballo in maschera, from the aria “Eri tu,” as cited and sung by one of the conspirators in the film: “It was you who besmirched that soul / The delight of my soul . . . / You who trust me and suddenly loathsome / Poison the universe for me . . .”) Athos Sr., like Rigoletto, misreads or misuses opera, precisely because he understands it as spectacle. In this act, he (like Rigoletto) destroys what he should have saved. Displacement is central to Bertolucci’s aesthetic and it operates at the two levels that reflect Freud’s distinction between melancholia and mourning. First – and problematically since it depends on the removal of woman from the scene – displacement depends on the melancholy creation of distance through introjection. Here pleasure depends on distance. Draifa is a spider woman, the architect of the labyrinth in which Athos Jr. is entrapped, and his guide out of that same labyrinth. Thus Bertolucci: In nature it is usually the female that devours. Genetically, over the centuries, some males have understood her mechanism, have understood the danger. Some spiders just approach the female, but stay within a safe distance. Exciting themselves with her smell, they masturbate, collect their sperm in their mouth and wait to regain strength after orgasm. Because that is how they get devoured, when they are weak after ejaculation. Later, they inseminate the female with a minimal approach and thus she cannot attack them in the moment of their weakness . . . What can develop between [a man and a woman] is only possessiveness . . . the destruction of the loved object.25

One might say that what is true for woman here is also true for opera. Opera becomes an allure that leads to death when approached too closely. Women, like opera, must be incorporated and sequestered in the homoerotic community of Tara where, as everyone keeps insisting, “qui siamo tutti amici.” Melancholy displacement as incorporation

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produces a narrative of false community, a lie which nevertheless is condemned to betray its own secret. Tara refuses to mourn the past and repeats through its operatic gestures a continuous return of the past. As Robert Kolker writes, “Athos would have killed Mussolini during an opera. Instead he makes an opera out of history in which everyone acts a role and sings the same arias again and again.”26 Yet we never actually see the spectacle. And here Bertolucci has effected a second displacement, one closer to Freudian mourning. As Robert Kolker has remarked, opera as fascist spectacle is “cooled” in its contact with filmic narrative, while at the same time it is by virtue of this same contact that the film is able to own up to its own suppressed melodramatic elements.27 Bertolucci creates through this allusionary mode a kind of prohibition of representation, supported by frequent allusion to Magritte, above all to the painting La Reproduction interdite. This allusionary practice ultimately makes possible the recognition or transmission of the historical truth, the truth of the father’s murder. To this end the key scene takes place in the theatre, at the repeat performance of Rigoletto. Athos Jr. restages the scene of his father’s death, taking his father’s box seat, which is placed before a mirror. By his restaging, he learns that his father had in fact staged his own murder. Athos Sr.’s absorption into fascism is clinched by his participation in the very spectacle of his own death. To what extent Athos Jr. is caught in a repetition of the same remains open. In another invocation of an absent father, Bertolucci introduces a Verdian operatic practice without reproducing or representing either Verdi or opera. Opera, specifically the opera Rigoletto, shadows this scene on stage but off-camera, thereby remaining unrepresented. Opera is “obscene,” literally, as it is non-specular and non-spectacular. Bertolucci proposes not the elimination or murder of opera, which would amount to another form of denial and thus to a misreading of the operatic element within the cultural tradition. Bertolucci does not repeat the fascist spectacularization and repression of opera. Rather, he guarantees its survival by proposing a new way of seeing, a symptomatic one perhaps, that is avowedly mythical, but only insofar

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as it acknowledges the traces – the tare – of its loss. In his own critique of spectacle, Bertolucci invents operatic seeing as he invents filmic listening.

n ot e s 1 This larger trajectory forms the subject and argument of Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1930, forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press. 2 Cited in Jeffrey Schnapp, Staging Fascism: 18BL and the Theatre of Masses for Masses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 33. Subsequent references to this work are in the text. 3 Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 4 William Weaver, The Golden Century of Italian Opera: From Rossini to Puccini (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1980), p. 242. Cited in William Ashbrook and Harold Powers, Puccini’s Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 3. Subsequent references to this latter work are in the text. 5 See Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1987), pp. 210–211. 6 Toscanini’s most enduring mark on the work is his role in selecting Franco Alfano to compose the finale from Puccini’s sketches. Toscanini rejected Alfano’s first attempt. In May 2002 Luciano Berio’s new ending received its staged world premiere at the Los Angeles Opera. It has been used since in several venues, including the Salzburg Festival and the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin, the latter in a new production directed by Doris D¨orrie and conducted by Kent Nagano. The effect on the opera’s conclusion is substantial, judging from our own hearing in Berlin in October 2003. Berio’s music seems to want to demonumentalize the ending, reducing both the fanfare and the claim of a total conclusion to the vexed drama that has unfolded. But the dramatic and political issues at stake in the opera as a whole remain unchanged. The Alfano–Berio war, whose outcome will also determine the longevity of Toscanini’s control over the opera, will be fought (or not) in the years to come. 7 Cited in Charles Osborne, The Complete Operas of Puccini (New York: Athenaeum, 1982), p. 245.

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Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg 8 Quoted in Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy, p. 105. 9 Ashbrook and Powers, Puccini’s Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition, pp. 3–4. 10 Fabien Gerard, T. Jefferson Kline, and Bruce Sklarew, eds., Bernardo Bertolucci: Interviews ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), p. 64. 11 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage Books, 1939). 12 Ibid., p. 62. 13 Ibid., p. 52. 14 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. William Boelhower (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 377. 15 Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 156. 16 Ibid., p. 121. 17 Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 187. 18 Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror, p. 134. 19 Robert P. Kolker, Bertolucci (London: British Film Institute, 1985), p. 61. Rigoletto is by no means the only reference to Verdi in the film. References are made to Macbeth, Un ballo in maschera, Trovatore, Ernani, and Attila. 20 See Jorge Luis Borges, “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Direction Books, 1964), pp. 72–75. 21 Cited in T. Jefferson Kline, Bertolucci’s Dream Loom: A Psychoanalytical Study of Cinema (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), p. 76. 22 Deborah Crisp and Roger Hillman, “Verdi and Schoenberg in Bertolucci’s ‘The Spider’s Stratagem’,” Music and Letters 82/2 (2001), 251–267; p. 258. 23 Ibid., p. 256. 24 Kolker, Bertolucci, p. 119. 25 Kline, Bertolucci’s Dream Loom, p. 74. 26 Kolker, Bertolucci, pp. 123–124; see also Eric L. Santner on melancholy in Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 27 Kolker, Bertolucci, p. 123.

PA RT I I I

Theorizing Opera and the Social

Introduction to Part III Victoria Johnson

In examining specific historical instances of operatic production and consumption, each of the ten essays comprising Part I and Part II of this volume has taken a stand, sometimes explicitly, but more often implicitly, on the matter of how opera scholars can most fruitfully theorize, grasp, and analyze opera’s relation to what is conventionally termed “society.” In the third and final section of this volume, three authors based in three different academic disciplines reflect on how opera scholars might push further still in their efforts to understand the changing social constellations from which opera emerges and on which it exercises its own transformative power. In the first of these three chapters, entitled “On opera and society (assuming a relationship),” the comparative literature scholar Herbert Lindenberger considers “what happens . . . when we allow the terms ‘opera’ and ‘society’ to jostle against one another.” The “social” appears, he notes, at every turn: for example, in the political, economic, and cultural conditions under which an opera is commissioned and/or composed; in the literary and musical style of its libretto and its music; in the context in which it is first heard and seen; and in the influence of its reception history on its subsequent interpretation. Given the challenges posed to scholars by these and other social dimensions of opera, Lindenberger applauds the dramatic growth in and diversification of opera studies in all disciplines. Under the fruitful influence of the socially oriented New Historicism and British Cultural Studies, he notes, opera scholarship of the last few decades has pushed far beyond formal studies of single works or individual composers to wide-ranging studies that pose questions about the operatic form as a whole. As Lindenberger points out, however, one of the towering figures of late twentieth-century social science – Pierre Bourdieu – has had 291

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almost no impact on opera studies, particularly in comparison with the influence enjoyed, directly or indirectly, by Adorno, Foucault, and Raymond Williams. Lindenberger sketches three different ways in which Bourdieu’s work could prove useful for opera scholars: (1) through the model offered in The Rules of Art for exhaustive analysis of the historical contexts of art production and consumption; (2) through the model offered in Distinction for analyzing the role played by opera in the production and reproduction of social structure; and (3) through the model offered in Homo Academicus for analyzing the social production and reproduction of academic disciplines and of discipline-based knowledge (a process that has been of great importance in the production of knowledge about opera). Bourdieu’s potential utility for opera scholars is the central focus of musicologist Jane Fulcher’s chapter in this section of our volume. Fulcher – one of the few opera scholars to have seriously engaged with and drawn on Bourdieu’s framework – explains some of his key contributions to the analysis of social phenomena and sheds new light on the social dimensions of opera by deploying his framework to perform an exemplary analysis of the musical world of interwar France. She shows precisely how Bourdieu’s insights into the political power of cultural objects and symbols can be harnessed by musicologists to develop more thorough and more nuanced analyses of the social arenas – the “fields,” in Bourdieu’s terminology – in which opera has historically been produced and consumed. Beginning, a` la Bourdieu, with an overview of the French political and musical terrain following World War I, Fulcher moves to an analysis of the multiple and opposing uses to which operatic composers put neoclassical themes and devices. Some composers, she shows, deployed these themes and devices in a manner aligned with and supportive of state cultural policies and sympathies, while others found in these themes and devices means to mock or criticize dominant musical culture. Through this empirical analysis, Fulcher makes the case that musicologists have much to gain by moving beyond Adorno’s paradigm – fruitful as it has undeniably proven for musicologists over the past few decades – to a fuller exploration of Bourdieu’s challenging but rewarding work.

Introduction to Part III

If Fulcher offers substantial support for Lindenberger’s claim that Bourdieu has a great deal to offer opera scholars, sociologist Antoine Hennion does the same, in his contribution to this section, for Lindenberger’s suggestion that a focus on “the social experience of opera” would stand to deepen our understanding of opera itself. Hennion focuses here on the role of what he terms “music-lovers” – a grouping in which he includes audiences, musicians, critics, and scholars – in the very constitution of opera as an object. Beginning his reflections on the question of “opera and society” with the provocative claim that “music does not exist,” he argues that certain of the most fundamental assumptions we bring to the study of the history of music in general and opera in particular are themselves products of the history of our experience of music. Thus, for example, to assume that there is something called “music” that is inherently autonomous from “society” (and vice versa) as we reflect on the history of music is to evaluate, as Hennion puts it, “musical reality retrospectively using the very criteria that music history has created” – criteria such as the notion, created in large part by music scholars themselves, of the musical work as a bounded, self-contained unit. Beginning from this unusual position allows Hennion to bring into sharp focus a causal relation generally overlooked by musicologists and sociologists alike, namely the mutual and reciprocally influential relation between, on the one hand, our basic human ability to take pleasure in music and, on the other, the particular kinds of music that are available to us at any given historical moment. Using the example of nineteenth-century French opera, he sketches the implications for opera scholarship of thinking more deeply about the powerful influence of “music-lovers” on widely accepted contemporary accounts of the trajectories of operatic history. In the process, Hennion does not merely challenge the idea of any easy distinction between “opera” and the “social”; he also offers a thoughtful alternative .

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On opera and society (assuming a relationship) Herbert Lindenberger

Why should we even speak of opera and society in the same breath? Is there, for instance, a special affinity between these two terms, and if so, is it different from or more intense than the relationships we seek to establish between other artistic forms and society – between, for instance, painting and society, comedy and society, or, to cite the title of a famous essay by Theodor Adorno, lyric and society?1 As we listen to these various combinations, the phrase “opera and society” seems particularly amenable to discussion. With painting, for example, one is faced with a multitude of forms – each rooted in a particular social context – from the animals depicted on the caves of Lascaux to the political messages drawn by muralists on barrio walls. Opera, by contrast, seems comfortably circumscribed. It encompasses an easily definable history extending back four hundred years in Europe and the Americas. It has flourished continuously within a discernible institution, the opera house, though also, at least in its earlier years, within aristocratic courts. And despite the substantial differences in national traditions of opera, the particular roles assigned to those who create and sustain it – impresario, singers, librettist, composer – have maintained a degree of constancy over these four centuries rarely to be found in other art forms. The second noun in the phrase “opera and society” obviously presents a more fluid situation than the first. If one glances at the other essays in this collection, it quickly becomes evident that the term “society” encompasses a wide variety of often disparate objects – for example, the social context within which an opera is written; an idealized (or even demonized) image of a society that an opera projects; the operatic audiences for which an opera was created as well as those that experience this opera in later revivals; and even, as 294

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one essay argues, the “on-stage societies” represented from one act to another. My own concern in this paper is not to enforce a single definition of society but to note what happens – has happened, might yet happen – when we allow the terms “opera” and “society” to jostle against one another. The most obvious questions to be raised regarding opera and society have to do with the social contexts within which individual operas, or operas constituting a particular period of operatic history, have been created. We establish a link between opera and society, for example, when we analyze Lully’s mythological operas as attempts to flatter the absolute monarch who sponsored them or when we tie Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron to a context that includes matters such as the composer’s commitment to Zionism, his reaction to the dangers of Nazism around 1930, and the hermeticism that defined the role of the artist in his generation. The questions relevant to linking opera and society are by no means limited to an opera’s or a style’s origins but include the whole history of interpretation and reception of this work or style. One might ask, for example, how Berlioz’s rewriting of Gluck’s Orfeo, or Wagner’s of Iphig´enie en Aulide, nearly a century after its composition, answers the needs of a new social, not to speak of musical, context. Or what the interpretive history of frequently performed pieces such as Don Giovanni and Gounod’s Faust tells us about changing social biases. Indeed, what do we make of the apparent fall from grace of this latter work, now performed only sporadically but a century ago among the most popular of all operas? And then of course there are questions that go beyond the framework of individual works and styles. How, for instance, do we account for the rise of repertory opera somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century? Before that, after all, audiences customarily demanded new works each season. And how might we account for the quite recent increase in demand for new works – this after it had become common wisdom that audiences refused to attend operas with which they were not familiar? And what do we make of the rise of directorial opera after World War II?

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And beyond these there are the larger theoretical questions. How do we speak of authorship in a form as collaborative as opera – yet also one that is dependent upon the musical distinction that only the composer can bestow? To explore this issue, we might draw analogies from other collaborative art forms – from film, for example, perhaps also from the methods of the Elizabethan theatre. Or even from painting during, say, the late Middle Ages or the early Renaissance before the individual artist’s authority and autonomy had become established. Perhaps we can best suggest some relevant questions at this point by looking at a particular opera. I choose Mozart’s Entf¨uhrung aus dem Serail, a work with which most opera-goers have a passing familiarity but that is not a revered classic to the degree that the same composer’s later operas are. To start with, let’s look at the circumstances surrounding its composition. Die Entf¨uhrung was originally commissioned in 1781 for the National Singspiel, an institution founded by the enlightened Emperor Joseph II only three years before to promote a taste for German-style comic opera as an alternative to the Italian comic works that had long enjoyed favor among the Viennese public – and which, I might add, would return to imperial favor by 1783. Although the National Singspiel was dependent to some degree on French and Italian works that were for the most part translated into German, its mission during its brief existence was to cultivate a relatively simple, often folklike, musical style with spoken interludes between numbers. Moreover, the production of Die Entf¨uhrung was originally planned as part of an official visit by the Russian Grand Duke Paul. Although the opera was not finished in time for this occasion, which was intended to impress the visitors with a display of Austrian power, Die Entf¨uhrung’s participation in a nationalist political program, both in the circumstances of its commission and in the musical style that reigned in the National Singspiel, remains part of the significance it would have had in its own time. It might be remembered that Mozart’s major operatic achievement up to this point had been Idomeneo, a thoroughly Italian opera seria composed for Munich earlier during the same year that he received the Viennese commission.

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But the resulting work was not quite the simple sort of Singspiel that reigned for the brief period during which Joseph’s theatre flourished. It displays in fact an uncommon mixture of styles, from, on the one hand, Pedrillo’s folklike Romance as the lovers await their escape or the so-called vaudeville near the end, in which the major characters all repeat the same simple tune, to, on the other hand, the enormously complex music characteristic of several arias assigned to Belmonte and Constanze – above all, the second-act “Martern aller Arten,” which in my own opera-going experience has proved the most precarious aria within any of the composer’s major works. But Mozart’s mixture of musical forms, as Stephen Rumph has shown in a recent essay, can also be viewed as dramatizing what Rumph calls “the irreducible contradictions” within the thought structures of the Enlightenment.2 One wonders what to make of this strange stylistic mixture, which some critics, notably Edward J. Dent, in his long-influential 1913 book on Mozart’s operas, saw as a sign of the opera’s relative failure.3 And how do we interpret the Emperor’s alleged remark to the composer that the opera contained “monstrous many notes”?4 It is likely that this statement, which might have referred to the complex runs of “Martern aller Arten,” expressed the disdain that Joseph II held for the vocal complexities of opera seria in favor of the Germanic simplicity characterizing other parts of Die Entf¨uhrung. And one might ask as well what role Mozart himself played in driving the opera toward this more complex style, especially after the middle of the second act. The libretto he was using was by a well-known north-German librettist, C. F. Bretzner, and had already been set by a German composer, Johann Andr´e, but Mozart’s Viennese friend Gottlob Stephanie then made extensive revisions to this libretto – with “Martern aller Arten” being not only wholly new but also radically changing the image of the heroine that had prevailed in the original. To what extent did these revisions result from Mozart’s desire to assert the autonomy of music – as he himself hinted in a letter to his father during the process of composition5 – and to what extent from his need to satisfy the desires and needs of the Italian-style singers assigned to perform Belmonte and Constanze?

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Beyond these issues our interest today is inevitably drawn to the large role played by Turkish music in this opera. To be sure, what passed for Turkish music – percussive sounds from cymbal, triangle, and loud drums, squealing sounds from the piccolo, a two-four rhythm, and a sharpened fourth degree – had long been familiar to audiences, both in street music and in opera (not to speak of such non-operatic examples as the finale of Mozart’s A major sonata, K. 331). In Die Entf¨uhrung, we have not only the overtly Turkish Janissary choruses but Turkish moments at numerous other points, even at the opening of “Martern aller Arten,” in which the Western heroine shows herself infected, as it were, by the Eastern world that she defies in this aria. Turkish music appears not only in the many operas about European maidens captured by Turks in various Mediterranean sites but even in so pre-Turkish a setting such as Gluck’s Iphig´enie en Tauride, in which it is used to characterize the primitive Scythians. (I might add that the last-named opera, in German translation, was chosen to be performed at the National Singspiel for the Russian Grand Duke when it turned out that Mozart’s work could not make it in time.) As Matthew Head has shown in his full-length study of Mozart’s orientalism, Turkish music, including Hungarian tunes with which it was often conflated, had a considerable history in the West for at least a generation before Mozart.6 Are we to hear these sounds as a code for that newly fashionable notion of the “primitive”? Or perhaps we should hear them simply as an entertaining popular alternative to the formality of the prevailing classical style,7 a means of aesthetic liberation analogous to the craze for chinoiserie somewhat earlier throughout Europe. And what political meanings can we read into what we hear? Since Mozart’s opera was finished a year short of the century that had elapsed since the Turkish siege of Vienna, it would be difficult to argue that Die Entf¨uhrung and other works containing Turkish music were responding to a living threat – though a few years after Die Entf¨uhrung Austria joined Russia in a brief war against the Turks to which Mozart responded with several compositions.8 But one recent commentator on the opera, Nicholas Till, has described European anti-Turkish policy at the time as a

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“cold-war stratagem of maintaining their subjects in a state of perpetual vigilance against the imagined enemy at the gates.”9 Indeed, the idea of staging this opera – or Gluck’s, as it turned out – to celebrate a Russian state visit can also be seen as a means of reinforcing the central and eastern European policy of seeking to reconquer Turkish territories in the Balkans. It is significant, moreover, that the embedding of Turkish music within a Western piece goes back over a century to a time that the Turks really were a threat, namely to Lully’s Turkish march in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, composed in 1669 when a Turkish delegation was visiting the court of Louis XIV. And what do we make of the ending of Die Entf¨uhrung aus dem Serail, in which the barbaric ruler decides to let the Westerners escape in style in order to display his powers of forgiveness of his old enemy who had banished him and who, we have just learned, was Belmonte’s own father? The refrain of the vaudeville at the end keeps reminding us that anybody who is not grateful for Pasha Selim’s generosity deserves contempt. The display of a monarch’s magnanimity was of course an established convention for a good century and a half in the endings of both dramas and operas from Corneille’s Cinna to Mozart’s own La clemenza di Tito. But it is also significant that in Die Entf¨uhrung this display stems from the libretto’s reviser, Stephanie, and was not present in Bretzner’s original, in which Pasha Selim allows the lovers to escape only after he discovers that Belmonte is his own long-lost son. Can it be that Bretzner, writing in Leipzig for a theatre in Berlin, felt no need to flatter the ruler sponsoring his work? An early reviewer of Mozart’s opera, in fact, objected to the new magnanimous resolution as something that was already out of fashion everywhere except in Vienna.10 I have limited myself thus far to the context surrounding the origins of Die Entf¨uhrung aus dem Serail. The social and political implications we locate in a work include not only this context but also the experience of directors, audiences, and critics in the course of its interpretive history. After being one of Mozart’s most popular operas until the end of the eighteenth century, Die Entf¨uhrung gave way in frequency of performance to two of the Da Ponte operas and to Die Zauberfl¨ote;11

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although one could speculate that the presence of considerable spoken dialogue might have inhibited its currency in non-German-speaking lands, the Singspiel form of Mozart’s final opera has not prevented its continued popular acclaim. It is possible that the plot and the issues with which Die Entf¨uhrung was concerned came to seem trivial during the earnest-minded nineteenth century. Reception theory has proposed the term “fusion of horizons” to depict the absorption of a work’s effect at its inception by the experiences it offers at a later time. However well we historically reconstruct the work’s earlier context, the preoccupations, biases, and expectations of the later observer color the manner in which we perceive it in its later embodiments. Take, for instance, the way that the publication in 1978 of Edward Said’s Orientalism altered our perceptions of works in all the arts that depicted the non-Western world. Studies of Die Entf¨uhrung since that time invariably focus on matters such as the role of the Turkish music or the difference between the musical orientalism of the eighteenth century, centered as it is on the conflict between European and Muslim values, and that of the later nineteenth century, in which the East is portrayed as at once seductive and sinister. Productions are more likely than scholarly studies to respond quickly to the possibilities offered by current events. Thus, a 1980 Munich production referred to the recent Iran hostage crisis by offering a Pasha clad like the Ayatollah Khomeini while threatening Constanze with tortures.12 In the light of 9/11, one dreads speculating what new forms of terrorism an inventive director may come up with. I have lingered on a single example, Mozart’s Die Entf¨uhrung, not to provide new facts – for the observations I draw upon are well known to specialists – but to portray the interchanges between an operatic work and the external world that, though they may vary in character in different settings, can still be considered typical. My discussion has stressed the kinds of questions we ask ourselves in approaching specific operatic works – questions about the circumstances surrounding the making of a work, about the pressures upon the various agents engaged in this task, and about what happens to an opera once its original context has become remote. Above all, it should be clear that what we

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see as matters of aesthetics and literary or musical style cannot easily be separated from what has customarily been viewed as outside the realm of art. Thus, the stylistic choices that Mozart made in composing Die Entf¨uhrung involved such issues as the Emperor’s preference for a simple and Germanic manner, the Viennese public’s preference for complex Italian vocal forms, Austrian political ambitions in eastern Europe, and Mozart’s need at this still early point in his career to establish himself in the capital, in which he had recently arrived from Salzburg. To what extent has the study of opera met the challenges of the questions I have raised? Certainly the last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented boom – within the Anglophone world above all – in the understanding of opera as a unique phenomenon within the history of the arts. It is significant, for example, that a number of serious books have been published in recent years with the word “opera” in the title or subtitle. I say “serious” since these books are distinct in the readership for which they are designed from the popular guidebooks to opera that have flourished since at least the late nineteenth century. I refer to such products of the boom as Paul Robinson’s Opera and Ideas; Linda and Michael Hutcheon’s Opera: Desire, Disease, Death; John Bokina’s Opera and Politics: From Monteverdi to Henze; Gary Tomlinson’s MetaphysicalSong:AnEssayonOpera; Carolyn Abbate’s InSearchofOpera. What distinguishes books such as these is their attempt to focus not simply on a single opera, composer, or period, as most earlier serious studies of opera had done, but to attempt a definition of, an approach to, the form as a whole. Yet they are also distinguished by another fact, namely that they do not emanate from a single discipline but from a number of disciplines within the humanities and even the social sciences. Until this boom began, opera was pretty much the property of academic music departments, and certainly some of the best of these recent books have come from scholars trained within these departments. Yet if one compares earlier musicological studies with the books of the boom, one notes a narrowness of focus in the former that the

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latter have sought assiduously to overcome. For until relatively recently musicological study was tied to a positivistic model that goes back to the field’s origins during the late nineteenth century when the various humanistic disciplines justified their squatting rights within the modern university by emulating the methods of the natural sciences. As a result, the study of opera, for example, was limited to formal musical analysis and to researching historical data whose factuality could conceivably be proved in court. One might cite Siegmund Levarie’s exhaustive analysis of tonal and rhythmic matters in Le nozze di Figaro, published half a century ago, as an example of a book that rigorously kept within the methodological bounds set by the field. Although Levarie links the musical to the dramatic action within the opera, his method does not allow him to step beyond the formal parameters of his text. Or one could cite a multitude of historical studies that have researched the factual circumstances surrounding particular operas and composers – yet by and large these studies, like those in other humanistic fields when they were tied to the positivistic model, shied away from theorizing and questioning the methods they were employing. Indeed, since the decline of positivism we have learned that the historical facts upon which we long relied to demonstrate our scientific credentials were themselves historically contingent, as, moreover, was the way we selected facts to ground our arguments. There was one influential and now-classic study of opera that, in its attempt to look at the whole operatic tradition and its refusal to be bound by the positivistic model, anticipated the studies in what I call the recent boom. This was of course Joseph Kerman’s Opera as Drama, now itself a full half-century old. I still remember the excitement that this book generated as its chapters appeared – well before they were brought together in a volume – in literary journals. What seemed remarkable – to me at least, for I was then a graduate student in comparative literature – was that this project seemed unlike anything in musicology; indeed, its method was quite familiar to me, for, with its attempt to project a closed canon of great works for which its author provided an easily applied system for evaluation, this approach

Opera and Society

was borrowed from what was then the reigning paradigm in AngloAmerican literary study, the so-called New Criticism. Although it was rare during the 1950s for scholars to adopt the methods of disciplines outside their own, the books on opera of the last two decades are notable for their interdisciplinary borrowings. Not only do their authors come from a variety of disciplines, as I have indicated, but they have picked up their theoretical frameworks from a multitude of sources. Take, for example, Tomlinson’s Metaphysical Song, which rethinks the whole history of opera by way of a philosophical system, namely that of Michel Foucault, and in particular the Foucault of The Order of Things. Thus, for Tomlinson early operas such as Peri’s L’Euridice and Monteverdi’s Orfeo, through their faith that music can closely match the meaning of words, fit Foucault’s model of the Renaissance world of analogy and resemblance, while opera seria, with its highly conventionalized forms of representation in which music goes its own way whatever the words it is setting, demonstrates what Foucault called the episteme of the classical age. Although Tomlinson’s book is notable for its attempt to apply a single paradigm to opera, all the recent books on the topic display the variety of tools available in recent years within the intellectual marketplace. Robinson made use of his background as an intellectual historian in Opera and Ideas; Wayne Koestenbaum, of his commitment to the emerging field of gay and lesbian studies in The Queen’s Throat; Abbate, of her knowledge of deconstruction and, in particular, of Lacanian theory in Unsung Voices and In Search of Opera. To what extent, one may ask, have these approaches, drawn as they are from a number of disciplines, brought us closer to an understanding of opera’s relationship to society? The answer must remain mixed, for the various strands of critical theory available within humanistic study during recent decades range from the formalist to the socially oriented. Whereas Abbate’s admirable work is near the formal end of the spectrum, much recent work on opera displays a strong social focus. The boom in opera studies coincides in time, moreover, with two powerful strains within literary study – the New Historicism in the United States and Cultural Studies in Britain – that, in their varying

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ways, are concerned with social phenomena. To be sure, the particular phenomena one may choose to observe and to analyze are by no means the same in the various thinkers such as Foucault, Adorno, Bakhtin, and Raymond Williams whose work has helped make these moves in literary study possible. Yet there is a way of thinking about society that has not been nearly as well represented in humanistic work as that of the thinkers I have just mentioned. I refer to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, whose concept of symbolic domination Jane Fulcher, in her essay in this collection, applies fruitfully to the conflicts within the French musical world of the 1920s. If I may return once more to Mozart’s Entf¨uhrung, let us imagine a Bourdieu-inspired reading something on the order of his approach to Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale and its social context.13 Such a reading would demand an understanding of the cultural landscape of Vienna during the later eighteenth century – the clash between national and foreign musical traditions, between native-oriented Emperor and cosmopolitan public, with this clash embedded within the uneasy mixture of styles that Mozart’s opera displays. It would also demand an immersion into a particular social milieu, with its class biases and its institutional conflicts, that those of us who have attempted global approaches to opera have not hitherto performed. And it would also demand an understanding of the differences in the historical situation of the arts in the eighteenth-century German states and nineteenthcentury France. Bourdieu’s analysis of the artistic and literary fields in Flaubert’s time can take for granted the conflict between a difficult, avant-garde form of art and a more easily consumable, commercially oriented mode. This conflict was still central to the period that Fulcher has analyzed. But neither side of this conflict is easily applicable to Die Entf¨uhrung, within which neither the “native German” nor the opera seria component could be labeled avant-garde. But there are other aspects of Bourdieu’s work relevant to understanding the social foundations of opera. One might note, for example, that the 1963 questionnaire whose results form the basic argument of Distinction, his study of how differing social classes in France value and consume art, includes the names of three operas, La traviata,

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G¨otterd¨ammerung, and L’Enfant et les sortil`eges,14 each of which appeals to differing class tastes. For example, La traviata is listed with Rhapsody in Blue and Buffet’s paintings among the “moyen” and “d´eclass´e” works favored by the petite bourgeoisie,15 while L’Enfant et les sortil`eges joins The Firebird and Kandinsky’s paintings as pleasing to what he calls the “new petite bourgeoisie” who originated in the upper classes and who seek to hold on to their legacy through their avant-garde tastes.16 Although these three operas constitute only a small number of art works in many genres that fill the charts and analyses of Distinction, Bourdieu’s book suggests that a study of the use of opera by various group formations – not simply in recent years but throughout the history of the form – to ground their identity and to claim distinction would shed light from an angle that has not received the attention it deserves. But Bourdieu can also be used to tell us something not only about opera but about the problems we encounter in the study of opera. Take, for instance, his analysis, in Homo Academicus, of the power relationships in the French university system. Bourdieu presents graphic descriptions of the dependency that researchers experience toward the senior professors who sponsor their careers – with the result that the system encourages them to conform to established norms in a particular field.17 I earlier noted that departments of music, at least in the United States and Great Britain, ascribed to a positivistic research model long after this model had become outdated in English departments. As a result, the study of opera, at least until the 1980s, seemed retrograde compared to the study of literature. (Although Kerman was trained as a musicologist, it is significant that his book of 1956 was published by a commercial publisher, with several chapters having earlier appeared in literary, not musicological, journals; and one might mention as well that his study of opera was followed early in his career with a musicologically orthodox study of the Elizabethan madrigal.) Although musicologists writing about opera in recent years have adopted paradigms from other fields, one might add that many of the books constituting what I have called the boom in opera study emanated from scholars who were not only outside music but who

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could bring to bear on opera approaches that had become prestigious in their own fields. And once the positivistic model had lost its onceexclusive hold on music departments, musicologists could call on these same approaches to gain the advancement and security necessary for survival within the university system. Let me move beyond these perspectives suggested by Bourdieu’s work to suggest some areas that those engaged in the study of opera and society might profitably pursue. I pose here the question of what constitutes the social experience of opera, both in the course of the form’s history and in the present day. We might ask, for example, what is unique about this experience, above all when one compares opera with other representational arts, indeed even with other audiencecentered events that we do not necessarily classify within the aesthetic field. One thing that characterizes the social experience of opera is the extreme diversity of opera audiences, both in the course of history and in the present day. To take only the latter, as I developed in another context,18 opera invites a wide variety of spectators ranging from the passive viewer motivated chiefly by social ambition (and who might well spend the middle act of the opera at the bar) to the avid fan with eye and ear intent upon every gesture and sound. Moving back in time, one notes sharp distinctions in the distance that audiences maintain between themselves and the action within an opera – at one extreme, the participation of the courtly audience in the age of Louis XIV, and, at the other extreme, the large gap between the audience and the heroic, larger-than-life action going on behind the proscenium in the public opera houses that have flourished since the first ones in Venice early in the seventeenth century. Comparisons among musical genres have tended to stress formal attributes rather than different audience experiences. To cite the work of a single composer, one might note the ways one customarily distinguishes between Handel’s operas and oratorios: thus, we cite the fact that whereas the former are in Italian, the latter are in English; the former on historical and literary themes, the latter on religion and occasionally myth; the former staged, the latter unstaged; the former

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with only rare choruses, the latter with considerable choral music. On only one point of comparison does the difference in audience experience enter the picture, namely, the fact that Handel’s operas were sponsored and frequented by the aristocracy, the latter by a bourgeois public. Yet this last-named point is the most important single factor that distinguishes Handel’s oratorios from his operas, for the changes in language, subject matter, and musical style were all occasioned by, indeed derive from, the change of audience. Once we make the social experience of opera central to an investigation, opera’s role among the arts looks different from what a more formal analysis would reveal. We ordinarily think of opera as a blend of two other forms, the spoken theatre and music. But if we stress audience experience, other relationships emerge. Adorno, in his sociology of music, describes the audiences of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury opera moving to the cinema in the twentieth century.19 For Adorno, with the exception of a few “high-art” works such as the operas produced by Schoenberg and his school, opera is essentially a popular form, one that he, in fact, treats with a certain disparagement. When he juxtaposes chapters on opera and chamber music,20 the reader wonders if the category “music” in the title of his book can really apply to both genres. A study of audiences would reveal certain affinities between opera, on the one hand, and film and sports events, on the other. When opera fans send pirated tapes of performances to distant fellow fans, or when they recite statistics about individual singers, they display a form of passion that, except for the adulation granted an occasional instrumental star, does not ordinarily manifest itself among other types of classical music. The passion for opera sometimes verges on fanaticism – with fans willing to travel half way around the world to attend some much-vaunted production or hear a favorite singer, or, for those with less ample resources, to camp out in front of the opera house the night before to assure themselves a standing-room place. The social experience of opera throughout the form’s history has been entangled in complex ways with the economic realities that make operatic performance possible. Since opera has traditionally counted

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as the most costly of all the performing arts, the public’s role has varied according to the type and degree of subsidy offered an opera company. These state subsidies have played a major role in making possible – as with the German companies of the late twentieth century – a high degree of innovation, both in repertory and production style, regardless of what the public has demanded; to put it another way, a high-subsidy system enables a company to view its role as enlightening, and not simply entertaining, its audience about the possibilities of operatic art. By contrast, North American companies, subsidized as they are not by the state but by a combination of ticket sales and private donations, have been forced to a more conservative repertory and type of production in order to cater to the tastes of their audiences and donors. The history of opera financing reveals a none-too-subtle relationship between money and art: one could cite examples such as the craze for spectacle in seventeenth-century Venice that necessitated keeping instrumental accompaniment to a minimum; or the presence of a gambling casino in Naples’s San Carlo that allowed both the musical and visual extravagance of Rossini’s opere serie. Yet there is another aspect of the social experience of opera that does not lend itself as easily to precise and concrete description as the matters I have discussed above. I refer to the peculiar hold that opera has exercised on the emotions of its audiences. Despite sharp differences in period and national styles, opera has maintained an identity and a staying power over the centuries that is rare among aesthetic forms. Indeed, the means by which particular styles take hold of their audiences can be related to the social contexts within which these styles flourished. At one extreme, one might point to the relative lack of musical continuity in opera seria, catering as it did to a public whose boxes were the center of its social activities and that allowed itself to be interrupted only for momentary thrills from the seemingly superhuman voice of some star castrato. At the other extreme one notes the seamless musical web of music drama, designed as it was for an audience sitting passively in darkness and submitting itself to the high emotions of the Wagnerian sublime.

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The emotional hold of opera upon its spectators is also related to the fact that opera offers a communal experience to diverse persons who, even if they do not overtly communicate with one another, establish a bond within the opera house with others who they assume are experiencing similar reactions. This bond is not unlike those formed in other representational forms such as the spoken theatre, film, sports events, and rock concerts. What separates opera from spoken theatre and film is the intensity of opera, by means of which the audience often comes to feel it is participating in emotions and passions distinct from those it allows itself to engage with in its everyday world. The forms that this intensity takes, and the audience’s expectations of the way it may react, of course change from period to period, from composer to composer. The intensity of a Handel aria, especially in the da capo section, differs from the sustained frenzy of, say, Il trovatore, which differs from the slow hypnotic spell exercised by Saint Franc¸ois d’Assise. One might argue, to be sure, that certain films, for instance those that cultivate advanced modes of visual and audial simulation, have come to rival opera in intensity. And one can speak as well of the communal experience in sports events, in which intensity is achieved through the suspense about a game’s outcome and through the bonds created in the stadium by means of the enmity exercised toward the rival team. But the rock concert may well provide the closest analogy to the communal experience of opera. In both of these the audience senses a strong separation between the world of daily routine and the largerthan-life beings who perform before them. Both invite the traditional discourse of the sublime when spectators seek to account for their experiences. And both manage to retain something of the communal experience even when their music is simulated by electronic means by the listener alone with a CD or DVD, for the presence of others somewhere sharing this experience (whether in a live performance or in solitary contemplation) remains at the edge of the listener’s awareness.

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There is still another form of representation with which opera intersects, namely the religious service. Indeed, in the present day the boundaries between rite and operatic performance have become fluid. Verdi’s Requiem is often dubbed “operatic” in character. Such comparatively chaste religious works as the Bach Passions, composed as they were for church performance, are now sometimes mounted in the opera house. And Handel’s oratorios, though never part of a service as were the Bach Passions, are also entering the operatic repertory. Yet my concern here goes considerably beyond “crossovers” of this sort. In the course of the past century many spectators have come to treat the communal opera experience as something akin to a rite, sometimes as a supplement to, even as a substitute for, what the traditional religions have offered. One could view the Bayreuth experience, and above all the particular experience that Wagner intended his audience to undergo in Parsifal, as modeled after religious practice. But the religious analogy is not limited to the earnest and often somber world of Wagnerian music drama. Most any good opera can serve the contemporary spectator as a mode of religious experience. The length of a performance is comparable to that of many religious services. Like a church, the opera house works to isolate those who attend from the everyday world they have temporarily left behind. And like a rite, opera employs both visual and audial resources to draw its spectators into the new world it has created. To return to an earlier example, Mozart’s Entf¨uhrung aus dem Serail, worldly though it may seem, is as likely as any opera to render this sort of experience. As it moves through its diverse and seemingly incompatible styles – the contemplative music of its two principals, the simple tunes of its servant characters, Osmin’s intrusive eruptions, the boisterous a` -la-turque choral passages – the audience undergoes a cycle of shifting feelings and moods whose magnitude one could never predict from a reading of the libretto alone. When realized to its fullest in the opera house, Die Entf¨uhrung, like all the best operas, gives its spectators cause to believe that something miraculous has happened in an otherwise secular world.

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n ot e s 1 Theodor Adorno, Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1958), vol. i, pp. 73–104. 2 Stephen Rumph, “Mozart’s Archaic Endings: A Linguistic Critique,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 130/2 (2005), p. 195. 3 Edward J. Dent, Mozart’s Operas: A Critical Study (New York: McBride, Nast, 1913), p. 138. 4 Thomas Bauman, W. A. Mozart: ‘Die Entf¨uhrung aus dem Serail’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 89. 5 Ibid., pp. 18–19. 6 Matthew Head, Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart’s Turkish Music (London: Royal Musical Association, 2000), pp. 67–89. 7 Ibid., pp. 88–89. 8 Ibid., p. 56. 9 Nicholas Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth,Virtue and Beauty in Mozart’s Operas (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 104. 10 Bauman, W. A. Mozart, pp. 33–34. 11 Ibid., pp. 108–109. 12 Ibid., p. 117. 13 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 1–140. 14 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 516. 15 Ibid., p. 327. 16 Ibid., p. 362. 17 Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 84–127. 18 Herbert Lindenberger, Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 265–282. 19 Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1988), p. 80. 20 Ibid., pp. 71–103.

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Symbolic domination and contestation in French music: Shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu Jane F. Fulcher

Few today would dispute Michel Foucault’s intellectually seismic assertion that discourse defines or “authorizes” knowledge: it renders visible, it “produces” what we see. As he so incisively demonstrated, discourse not only furnishes those conceptual categories through which we conceive reality within a period, but shapes or articulates all our subsequent discoveries.1 An outstanding feature of the humanities and social sciences in the past several decades has been the entry of those new discourses developed originally by the French Left in the sixties.2 Within the humanities, figures like Jacques Derrida have had an unquestionable impact, while in anthropology, sociology, and history the cynosures have been Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. Yet musicology has neglected Bourdieu – we have slighted his insights into power and its deployment of symbols in favor of the social, symbolic analyses of Adorno and Geertz. Among my aims, then, is to raise the question of why those symbolic exchanges that Bourdieu has made “visible,” stimulating insights in so many other fields, still have not done so in ours. For the issue of why we have skirted his political and social grounding of symbols compels us to recognize premises that persist in our field and have buttressed the predominance of other paradigms. However, my focus shall be on how Bourdieu’s semiotic analysis of power relations reveals contestation within French music, and particularly opera, of the 1920s, which is obscured by the now prevalent models. Musicology has by no means ignored culture or its symbols, and indeed one paradigm of the social analysis of meaning in music is that of Clifford Geertz, who has been equally influential in historical studies. Significantly, however, in a seminal essay the French cultural historian Roger Chartier attacked the uncritical application of the concepts of 312

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Geertzian symbolic anthropology to history.3 His admonitions center on two points: first, the fact that the historian must rely not on empirical observation but on texts, and here in the literal as opposed to the broader metaphorical sense. We must then, he adjures, consider a source’s “textuality,” as well as perceiving those larger patterns of meaning that are intertwined with the encompassing “social world of significance.”4 For these meanings are necessarily manipulated and refracted in the rhetorical or aesthetic act of enunciation inherent in each mode, each “register” of cultural or artistic communication.5 Second, Chartier then asks, how stable are symbols, particularly in the context of advanced Western cultures – are they “shared like the air we breathe,” or are they rather mobile, polysemous, and equivocal? Is there a common symbolic universe of replicated meanings interacting within a “web” in a developed modern culture, or are symbols more characteristically diverted, subverted, and contested?6 Semantic investment in symbols is unquestionably central to all cultures, but in the modern world so too is subsequent “disinvestment” and multiple reinvestment of meaning.7 In sum, the assumption of a shared symbolic idiom effaces the different manners in which individuals and groups make use of these symbols within the larger field of social power and contestation. It is here, perhaps, that the most forceful vector of Bourdieu’s semiotic system or method emerges: his perception of how social power is insinuated in symbols and the symbolic responses this elicits. For Bourdieu, as for his former colleague at the Coll`ege de France Michel Foucault, relations of power are thus immanent, or embodied, in all symbolic exchange.8 Most pertinent to the case I shall examine is Bourdieu’s concept of “symbolic domination” – the attempt to constitute or reproduce social hierarchies through the definition of symbolic “legitimacy” and thus “symbolic capital.” Bourdieu’s concomitant concept of “symbolic violence” refers to the invisibility of this imposition, which reproduces the existing social order, but without physical violence.9 It occurs not only within a colonial context, but in class relations, as well as in the relations between the sexes, as Bourdieu demonstrated so tellingly in La Domination masculine.10

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It also occurs politically, for groups in power impose representations which provoke a wide range of responses across a broad spectrum from domination, or acquiescence, to contestation. Dissension erupts when there is inescapable misadaptation, or a disjunction between dominant systems of classification and experience in the social world.11 While, for the most part, our field is still locked in either a narrow and literal or a philosophical conception of the political, Bourdieu identifies it (as does Foucault) in systems of representation and in challenges to them. For Bourdieu, then, our perception of the symbols that “authority” has inculcated for political ends – in many possible styles – is a prerequisite for interpreting culture and deciphering politics. Culture is thus not extraneous to politics, nor devoid of authentic political content, but is rather a fundamental symbolic expression or articulation of “the political.” In a country like France, where the state has traditionally made a substantial political investment in culture, we must unlock the “language” of symbolic domination and the idioms through which social actors respond. From this dialogic perspective, styles or symbols we have previously considered apolitical must necessarily be reconsidered, and the structure of symbolic opposition revealed.12 Nowhere, perhaps, is this more true than in the case of French music, and especially French opera in the twenties, which Bourdieu has provoked me to re-examine in light of his theories of symbolic violence and contestation. For, as I shall argue, the pervasive neoclassicism, which we have largely construed as a monolithic, shared meaning, was not only politically insinuated but, given the experience of war, contested and re-invested. Modernist neoclassicism, which Adorno equates with Stravinsky and dismisses as “infantile,” “affirmative,” and “devoid of content,” from Bourdieu’s perspective becomes a critical response to official symbolic domination.13 But to perceive this we must first observe the subtle ways in which the state “oriented” French taste, and to do so there is no better means than a Geertzian “thick description,” however inflected “`a la Bourdieu.”14 As a socially emblematic event in an advanced Western culture we might choose a state ceremony, and in this case a funeral, which carried multiple levels of resonance after World War I. That of Gabriel Faur´e

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is here particularly apt, for he died at a delicate moment politically – in 1924, several months after the victory of the Left, following a centerRight coalition. Not having had time to define its policies on all cultural issues, the new government ceded to the pressures of the experienced, conservative functionary of the arts, Paul L´eon.15 Having known the composer for years, and being a great advocate of Faur´e’s music, L´eon insisted that he receive the full panoply of a grandiose obs`eques nationales. This, after all, had been the case with Faur´e’s former teacher and mentor, Camille Saint-Sa¨ens, for whom L´eon had arranged a similar ceremony only three years before.16 But now it was a difficult, transitional, moment to decide what to consecrate nationally, and concomitantly to define what or who should become a national symbol, or a “lieu de m´emoire.”17 The political conjuncture was especially unfortunate since the nature of the ceremony being planned would enunciate the message about music and “the national” that was sedulously ensconced by the preceding regime. Through it, however, we may glean much about those meanings, symbols, and “dominant” attitudes toward music that would characterize French musical institutions, including the Op´era, during most of the twenties. For not only had such attitudes dictated official policies in music up to this point, with the defeat of the Left two years later they would resurge and again dominate the decade.18 Faur´e’s funeral, then, can lead us into the musical values of the hegemonic culture and its sophisticated manipulations, to which the avant garde, particularly in opera, responded with equal artifice. Traditionally, Republican funerals in France were freighted with ideological significance: carefully “orchestrated,” they provided the regime with an occasion both to celebrate and to propagate its values.19 As part of the culte des grands morts, the lives being consecrated were to become illustrations of Republican virtues, their meaning “fixed,” to provide an image for all future generations. Such funerals, however, not only contained communicative and cognitive elements, but carried a socially unifying and affective dimension that was particularly crucial now.20 Five years after the Versailles Treaty, the atmosphere of mourning and commemoration persisted, especially among the older

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generation, which had witnessed the slaughter of its most able-bodied youth. And so, in Faur´e’s case, those religious elements that were generally avoided in traditional Republican funerals could be incorporated as part of the mourning that hovered after the war.21 Faur´e’s funeral, then, was both a religious and an artistic “national ceremony,” intended to thwart further symbolic collapse and to shore up existing symbols.22 His funeral, like that of Saint-Sa¨ens before, took place at the Madeleine, the prestigious church in central Paris, where both had long served as its principal organist. But Faur´e’s ceremony included a performance of his own great Requiem Mass, which could still be interpreted as, or conflated with, a requiem for the dead of the war. The new government was thus present in force, represented by an impressively large official contingent that included the presidents of the Republic, the Senate, and the Chamber of Deputies, in addition to the Archbishop of Paris.23 The presence of the latter, unusual in a Republican ceremony, was undoubtedly related both to Faur´e’s position at the Madeleine and to the greater Republican tolerance of religion after the war. However, as Faur´e’s editor, Jacques Durand, who attended the ceremony, observed, none of the new officials present appeared to be fully aware of Faur´e’s artistic importance.24 But L´eon had been free to arrange the kind of ritual that would enunciate the way in which he and others of centrist or conservative leanings construed Faur´e’s music and its cultural significance. Although Faur´e, if always evolving, was no longer considered artistically “progressive” by the postwar period, he had continued to promote the nascent avant garde and remained a member (even serving as President) of both the conservative Soci´et´e Nationale de Musique and the more innovative Soci´et´e Musicale Ind´ependante. However, the work performed, on the basis of its aptness, did not represent Faur´e’s more recent style: begun in 1877, it had been revised in the late 1880s, and then orchestrated at the turn of the century. Yet such a work, characteristic of the composer’s later nineteenth-century style, was reassuring in 1924, spanning as it did late Romantic and early twentieth-century innovations.25 Faur´e was by no means mired in the past, and yet through this ceremony conservative factions began to

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“construct” him in their image of a classical and traditionalist French composer. Indeed, the funeral was eloquent for nationalists, still prominent even after their recent defeat, for the pacific composer’s body (as a member of the Acad´emie) was carried past rows of bayonets, sabers, and cannons. Durand, himself conservative, could not help but remark on the chauvinistic overtones of such “militarism,” observing that for many the prestige of Faur´e’s music and the victory over the Germans appeared to be linked.26 For even after the war, the ideal of national “defense” through culture, and of the continuing threat of Germany, particularly in music, remained virulent in France. The idea of “defending” French culture had been stressed by the preceding Bloc National, the conservative coalition of the center and Right that had responded to postwar trauma and fears. These included the fears of “invasion” and plots to undermine France politically and culturally, giving rise to the theme of “protecting” French culture through the continuing exclusion of anything “un-French.” For many, still ardently xenophobic, it continued to be a vitriolic “war of cultures,” and, with the exception of those on the Left, art and patrie remained irrefragably bound. The symbols mobilized in Faur´e’s funeral were intended to reinforce the ideal of French nationalism, as well as the orthodoxy that talent, like true “intelligence,” was national, as opposed to universal.27 “L’Esprit national,” for the Right-wing Action Franc¸aise, had subsumed both artistic and intellectual endeavor, which remained, for conservatives, expressions of the French community and its endemic traditions. Faur´e’s funeral was therefore intended not to be socially “liminal,” or ritually transformative, but rather, as in ceremony and celebration, to restrict and codify current meanings.28 Specifically, the sense of Faur´e’s music was to be established as inherently “national” and classical, classicism having been reasserted as the quintessential French style through propaganda in wartime. Even Faur´e’s Requiem, carefully framed by the performative context, with all its symbolic supports, assumed a distinctive aura of national spirituality.29 The meaning of Faur´e’s life and music, as symbolically defined in the ceremony, was soon thereafter cast into terms of discourse by his

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successor at the Acad´emie des Beaux-Arts. In this prestigious site of cultural conservativism the composer Alfred Bruneau, elected to Faur´e’s chair, paid the traditional tribute to his predecessor in his inaugural speech.30 Bruneau here characterized Faur´e’s music as “simple, solid, severe, and strong,” thus construing it as reflecting “true” French classicism, as understood since the time of the war. Such classicism remained synonymous with “the French,” although now, as we shall see, in the context of the postwar polarization, the Left perceived the dominant definition of the classic as symbolic violence. It accordingly developed its own conception of the French and the classic, thus inflecting or contesting this symbol of true national culture, as did the liberal Right, through spokesmen like Cocteau. Within this contestatory context, Bruneau (a former Dreyfusard but now a centrist) proceeds, after lauding the “true” classicism of Faur´e, to attack the “pseudo destructors” of this great edifice. Misrepresenting both Faur´e’s cosmopolitan style and his openness to the innovations of youth, Bruneau argues, after quoting the composer out of context, that he had consistently pleaded “the cause of classicism.”31 All of Bruneau’s themes were already ensconced in the dominant musical and operatic discourse, which was marked by an obsessive fear of “anarchy” or disorder, as well as of eclecticism or pollution from “outside.” This was closely related to the sense of France’s enfeeblement after the war, and particularly its devastating problems in the realms of both manpower and public finance. And in dissonant counterpoint with the projected myth of continuing French leadership in Europe was the harsh reality of France’s unquestionably weakened postwar position. Moreover, this was also the moment of internal political and social problems, particularly the questioning and discontent on the part of French workers and youth. The conventional classic discourse, then, was one aspect of the resultant defensive trend in French culture, to which Maurice Agulhon has referred as “le syst`eme politique et mentale d’apr`es-guerre.”32 Within this mentality, dangerous currents, both externally and internally, were to be combated through an inculcation of conservative, exclusionary, classic values, considered essential

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to the spiritual unity of the nation. Such classical “particularism” (as opposed to the universal) found expression in other French cultural fields, as during the war, and continued to dominate the French university system.33 This was the very situation that Julien Benda decried in La Trahison des clercs (of 1927) – the invasion of the intellectual realm by the political, and especially by nationalist values. In music his indictment was particularly apt, as we may see when closely examining the musical and operatic world in France, or that central sector of it that was dominated by official institutions. Concern with “the national” informed not only its “reclassification” of French composers, but equally their canonization, as we may witness in the case of Faur´e. Attacks on “radical” young composers were frequent, as was condemnation of German influence and “the modern,” which included not only foreign music, but also its dangerous artistic impact in France. The popular, the foreign, and the modern were all therefore relegated to alterity in this discourse, or defined against the national and thus emphatically excluded as the menacing “other.” This we may observe in the so-called “opera of ideas” and in the commentary concerning these ideologically and stylistically conservative, didactic works that I explore in my other contribution to this volume. The themes of protection against foreign influence, against “anarchy” or internal dissension, and the promotion of tradition, spirituality, and an exclusionary classicism appear in and around all of these operas. As I point out in my chapter concerning this genre, perhaps the most prominent examples include d’Indy’s La L´egende de Saint Christophe, Barr`es and Bachelet’s Un Jardin sur l’Oronte, Hue’s Dans l’ombre de la cath´edrale, and Canteloube’s Le Mas. However, as I also noted in the case of Marcel Delannoy’s Le Poirier de mis`ere, the Left did respond, and within the same genre, but confrontationally in terms of style. For the Left, far from accepting such symbolic violence, confronted it aggressively, taking up the volatile stylistic symbol of classicism and redefining it in accordance with its inclusive, universalist, creed. Theirs was a classicism founded upon the “critical spirit,” as differentiated from nationalist classicism, based

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upon models which in music, ironically, derived from the Viennese classics. The so-called “revolutionary classicism” of the Left was one of renewal, and not of “order,” and one of “revolt,” progress, and the universal: as they put it, “le vrai classicisme.”34 Space here does not allow an extensive consideration of how those composers of the now mature generation with ideological orientations to the Left creatively interpreted these classic values. But it is important to be aware that these older figures, who had experienced the projects born of wartime propaganda, knew the sophisticated manner in which music could be “mediated” to further nationalist symbolic domination. For some, the experience of politics through culture was “the” politicizing experience itself, compelling them to join parties, make symbolic public gestures, and even to modify their styles. The latter they were to do cleverly, through meaningful inflections within the dominant neoclassicism, employing those elements, and rejecting or mocking those values and styles inscribed with ideological significance.35 Among those of the older generation who contested the “exclusive” dominant conception of the classic and the political connotations it carried were Ravel, Satie, Roussel, and Koechlin. Ravel, as I argued in my previous chapter, intrepidly confronted the dominant or conventional models, which were devoid of irony and of borrowing from “lower” cultural levels or “dangerous” foreign cultures. The latter included not only the Germanic (of recent date), but those styles associated with races or nationalities from which France was to be “protected” culturally, such as African-American jazz. As I demonstrated, Ravel not only ignored these proscriptions, as well as current models (in particular, the conservative, didactic “opera of ideas”), he mocked them, and nowhere more incisively than in L’Enfant et les sortil`eges. While the younger generation of “Les Six” (Milhaud, Auric, Honegger, Poulenc, Durey, and Tailleferre), viewed apart from this context, are often dismissed as frivolous pranksters, when placed within it, we may see that they too confronted symbolic domination. For they experienced an even sharper disjunction between the French classic identity that was being imposed by the hegemonic culture and their own

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experience in the new postwar world. Responding to the exclusions in the dominant culture, like Ravel, they integrated precisely these elements and demystified predominant stylistic models, but through their own unique means, making their classicism “critical” within the context. Their frequently “Dadaist” use of past styles, following the example of one of their idols, Satie, was indeed a gesture not only of rejection and satire, but more significantly of “revolt.” As Inez Hedges has convincingly argued, one of the goals of Dada was to break conceptual frames, or schemata of interpretation – to create conventional expectations and then to thwart them. In its attempt to transform all dominant techniques of producing meaning, to question the content of that which can be expressed in established styles or genres, it becomes a language of revolt. True renovation, for its practitioners, could occur only after older languages were destroyed, together with those cultural institutions that sustained them, and the false rationality upon which they were based.36 There is perhaps no better example of “frame breaking” intended to demonstrate the absurdity of both conventions and genres than Milhaud’s nine-minute opera of 1927, his L’Enl`evement d’Europe. Written for performance at the Deutsche Kammermusik Festival in BadenBaden, during the period when such exchanges with Germany were discouraged, Milhaud was happy to comply with Paul Hindemith’s request. In the mocking, anti-Wagnerian spirit of Weimar, Hindemith wanted a series of short operas for the festival, writing his own Hin und Zur¨uck, and staging Brecht and Weill’s Mahagonny Songspiel. Milhaud, a lover of ancient Greek culture, and capable of treating it seriously, as in his highly innovative setting of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, here uses it to mock current operatic convention. Just as in traditional French opera, the work both begins and ends with a chorus; however, here it makes humorous and mocking comments, in addition to narrating the action and participating in it. The opera, which employs Stravinsky-like rhythms as well as Milhaud’s beloved polytonality, so impressed the director of Universal Editions in Vienna that he requested two more, to make a facetious “trilogy.”37

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Employing both satire and innovative techniques, Milhaud ridicules the dominant classicism and conventions in a spirit that cuts far deeper than simple parody, as we may perceive within the context. To focus, then, as we have, on the playful eclecticism of this avant garde in isolation is to miss its inherently contestatory elements, its methods of confronting symbolic domination. For in a period when ideological meaning was invested in style, such a response to then-dominant models, as Bourdieu makes us aware, carried political implications – implicit criticism if not clear alignment.38 “Les Six” were indeed repulsed by attempts to control the production of meaning in music, as in Faur´e’s funeral, or the conservative “opera of ideas,” as well as by the exclusive official conception of the classic. The conventions they inverted or rendered absurd were those associated with the aesthetic strictures and models established since the war, and the narrow sense of symbolic legitimacy that they embodied. They rather sought a semiotic structure that was “open” and multivalent, as opposed to finite, or a Derridian “destabilization” of meaning through incongruities and eclectic juxtaposition of styles. Here they were palpably influenced by Satie’s strategic “play” with established stylistic meanings in Parade, or his facetious brand of classicism that so artfully evaded authority. Their classicism embraced reality, innovation, and inclusion, as well as simplicity, as opposed to the idealistic, archaic, socially instrumental classicism of official France.39 Although they admired Stravinsky, their aim was not objectivity like his, but rather to engage in a contestatory dialogue with the static, anachronistic French culture around them. This tendency, of course, was not exclusive to France – other countries simultaneously experienced both a resurgence of conservative models as well as different modernist interpretations of classic values. But neoclassicism was a highly ramified tendency, assuming divergent social meanings and stylistic traits not only in the various European countries but, again, within a nation itself. In Germany, a society with no choice but to project a new future, despite conservative currents, one model stressed a sober, constructive “New Objectivity”

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and another the realistic and eclectic.40 In France (apart from Stravinsky) there was no such dichotomy within the modern, for all these traits were defined against the nostalgic and retrogressive neoclassicism imposed by a victorious but now weakened state. Given these insights, let us return to paradigms: from Adorno’s perspective, neoclassicism is monolithic, a crystallized social formation, and like all tradition inimical to the critical spirit. Within this essentialist manner of associating ideological orientations with aesthetic values and styles, contestation within neoclassicism is “invisible” – a theoretical impossibility. His framework for the perception of contestation in music, or resistance to domination, as he construes it, is not empirical, relational, or contextual, as it is in Bourdieu.41 For Adorno, unlike Bourdieu, is not refuting structuralism or Sartrean existentialism, but rather Hegel and the tradition of glorifying the “sublation of the individual . . . in the comprehensive other.”42 And so although, like Bourdieu, he associates domination with a closed, repressive, social structure, and as perpetuated by a reified tradition, his answer is cast philosophically, or metaphysically.43 Adorno’s discourse, then, does not recognize semiotic strategies within a social field of power, but focuses on the way in which the individual seeks “freedom,” is able to preserve an unfixed identity.44 Within this “negative dialectic,” repressive classic forms and the rational reconciliation that they embody must be dissolved through innovation in processes, which oppose authority, totality, or “structure.” His paradigm, then, is the artist’s new organization and working through of the material itself: this, as in Schoenberg, is what he identifies with the advanced, autonomous art work.45 Given Adorno’s focus on the dialectic of technique and material, the destruction of “fixed meaning,” or emancipation from false resolution, cannot occur within a formal tradition.46 And yet we have identified a quest for freedom, for contestation of domination and repression, within postwar neoclassicism from the perspective of Bourdieu’s theoretical insights. They allow us to perceive that, historically, contestation can occur through traditional genres, forms, and styles, the logic of

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which can be challenged by strategies that “open” or disrupt the language. Without doubt, there is great value in both of these theorists who have sought to critique conventional Marxism, along with other traditions, and who have attempted to bring sociology and philosophy together.47 However, we have seemed to “fix” on Adorno and his template, which may, in part, be explained through Bourdieu’s conception of “distinction” – the use of transcendental symbols to claim legitimacy. Adorno’s enshrinement of autonomous aesthetic values, for Bourdieu, is a mystification, arising from material security and a belief in intellectual superiority.48 This is not to disqualify Adorno, or to claim the priority of Bourdieu’s approach, but to urge reflection about the paradigms we choose, the agendas they embody, what they reveal and obscure. The ideal is perhaps flexibility in selecting our paradigms, based upon the particular case at hand, and to critique our choice by examining the reading that emerges from a paradigm shift. It is not, then, a question of who “miscasts” the relation between music and ideology or social meaning, but of our awareness of the different perspectives from which to view their enticing imbrication.

n ot e s 1 Foucault has developed this idea in several works, but perhaps most fully in his L’Ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) and in Les Mots et les choses: Une arch´eologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). In the latter source, see especially pp. 170–176. 2 Derrida, Foucault, and Bourdieu are grouped together under this rubric in Niilo Kauppi, The Politics of Embodiment: Habits, Power, and Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), p. 115. 3 Roger Chartier, “Texts, Symbols, and Frenchness,” The Journal of Modern History 57/4 (December 1985), 682–695. 4 Ibid., pp. 683–684. 5 Chartier develops the idea of different “registers” of communication, and particularly the difference between those of the verbal and the visual, in his essay on the work of Louis Marin, in Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the

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6

7 8

9

10

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Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). The application of Geertz’s concept of a “web of culture” to musicology has been discussed at length by Gary Tomlinson in “The Web of Culture: A Context for Musicology,” Nineteenth-Century Music 7/3 (1984), 350–362. Chartier, “Texts, Symbols, and Frenchness,” p. 691. This theme emerges in all Bourdieu’s work, but it is developed most incisively, perhaps, in his theory of linguistic exchanges, which focuses on interactive and mobile elements, as opposed to a stable “structure.” See his Ce que parler veut dire: L’Economie des e´changes linguistiques (Paris: Fayard, 1982). On Foucault’s conception of power as multiple, mobile, and inherent in culture, including knowledge, see Daniel J. Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 6. Certainly, other aspects of Bourdieu’s sociology are relevant to musicology, including his concepts of “the field” of cultural reproduction, and the role of the intellectual in the production of culture, but I shall here concentrate on his semiotic theories. For a detailed discussion of symbolic violence, see Kauppi, The Politics of Embodiment, pp. 6 ff., and Jeremy F. Lane, Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 126n. La Domination masculine is an extension of Bourdieu’s earlier work on Algeria, which introduced the conception of how domination is “interiorized.” Here Bourdieu is indebted to Durkheim and his theories of social strife as essentially struggles over systems of classification. See Kauppi, The Politics of Embodiment, p. 66. See Pierre Bourdieu, “Penser la politique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (March 1988), 2–3. Also see David Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 7. Theodor Adorno, The Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Bloomster (London: Sheed and Ward, 1973), pp. 204, 206, 212, and 215. Bourdieu discusses how the state subtly “orients” taste by such means as honorific awards, prizes, etc., in “The Market of Symbolic Goods,” Poetics 14 (1985), 13–44. Geertz develops the concept of “thick

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16

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20 21

22 23 24 25

description” at length in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Faur´e died on November 4, 1924. The preceding conservative Bloc National had been voted into power in 1919, bringing the Radicals and the Right together to create a new centrist majority. On the Bloc National and the Cartel des Gauches see Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times (New York: Rand McNally, 1974), pp. 335–337. Paul L´eon, a specialist in historical monuments, had been a Dreyfusard, although he was no longer politically to the Left. He would finally lose his position under the next coalition of the Left, in 1932. On Saint-Sa¨ens’s funeral, and how L´eon managed to arrange it while the Chamber and Finance Commission were on vacation, see Paul L´eon, Du Palais-Royal au Palais-Bourbon (Paris: Albin-Michel, 1947), pp. 22–24. The term “lieu de m´emoire” was made famous and current by Pierre Nora in the collection that he edited for Gallimard, beginning in 1986, Les Lieux de m´emoire, 3 vols. On the reactionary cultural politics of the “retour a` l’ordre” under Poincar´e, following the Cartel des Gauches, see Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. viiiff. Avner Ben-Amos, “Les fun´erailles de gauche sous la IIIe R´epublique: deuil et contestation,” in Alain Corbin, No¨elle G´erˆome, and Danielle Tartakowsky, eds., Les Usages politiques des fˆetes aux XIX–XXe si`ecles (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1994), p. 200. Ibid., p. 199. The Versailles Treaty was signed on June 28, 1919. On the continuing emotional responses to the war, see Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dinnys, 1989), pp. 261–265. Ben-Amos, “Les fun´erailles de gauche,” p. 202. Jacques Durand, Quelques souvenirs d’un e´diteur de musique, 2`eme s´erie (1910–1924) (Paris: A. Durand et Fils, 1925), p. 156. Ibid. On the evolution of Faur´e’s style, see Jean-Michel Nectoux, Gabriel Faur´e: Le voix du clair-obscur (Paris: Flammarion, 1992). On his role as mediator between the two hostile musical societies while Director of the Conservatoire, see Jane F. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music from

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26 27 28

29

30 31 32 33

34 35

36

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the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 143–147. Durand, Quelques souvenirs, p. 156. On the continuing primacy of “patrie,” see Maurice Agulhon, La R´epublique: 1880 a` nos jours (Paris: Hachette, 1990), vol. i, p. 350. On Victor Turner’s concept of ritual and social liminality, see Bobby C. Alexander, Victor Turner Revisited: Ritual as Social Change (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991) and Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986). On the establishment of neoclassicism as the national style in wartime, see Jane F. Fulcher, “The Composer as Intellectual: Ideological Inscriptions in French Interwar Neoclassicism,” The Journal of Musicology 17/2 (Spring 1999), 197–230. Alfred Bruneau, La Vie et les oeuvres de Gabriel Faur´e. Notice lue par l’auteur a` l’Acad´emie des Beaux-Arts (Paris: Charpentier, 1925), p. 30. Ibid., p. 31. Agulhon, La R´epublique,vol. I, pp. 350. See Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la Patrie: Les intellectuels et la premi`ere guerre mondiale (1910–1919) (Paris: Editions de la D´ecouverte, 1996), pp. 212. Also see Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers during the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 16–18. Prochasson and Rasmussen, Au nom de la Patrie, p. 270. On the larger context for the political-intellectual trends of the period and their impact on French cultural life, see Agulhon, La R´epublique, vol. i, p. 270. And see Fulcher, “The Composer as Intellectual,” pp. 197–200. See Inez Hedges, Languages of Revolt: Dada and Surrealist Literature and Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983), pp. xi–xviii, 34–36, and 41. The other two operas were L’Abandon d’Ariane and La D´elivrance de Th´es´ee. See Jeremy Drake, The Operas of Darius Milhaud (New York: Garland, 1989) on both these works and on Milhaud’s dramatic oeuvre as a whole. For typical dismissals of Milhaud and “Les Six” as “bourgeois” composers, interested only in pleasure and thus “lightweight” aesthetically, see Michel Faur´e, Du n´eoclassicisme dans la France du premier

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40

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43 44 45

46

XXe si`ecle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1997), pp. 160–162, 240, 252, 259, 265, and 337. Also see Marie-Claire Mussat, “La R´eception de Schoenberg en France avant la Second Guerre Mondiale,” Revue de musicologie 87/1 (2001), p. 180. On Satie’s strategic “play” with meanings before the war (which continued in Parade) see Fulcher, French Cultural Politics, pp. 144–204. On Parade see Fulcher, “The Composer as Intellectual,” pp. 20–28. On the different neoclassicisms and the responses of German and French youth to the postwar situation through them, see Jane F. Fulcher, “Trajectoires oppos´ees: La culture musicale a` Berlin et a` Paris dans l’entre-deux-guerres,” in Christophe Charle and Daniel Roche, eds., Capitales culturelles, capitales symboliques (XVIII–XXe si`ecles): Paris et les exp´eriences europ´eennes (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2002), pp. 421–434. On Bourdieu’s criticism of the Frankfurt School for having no relation to the empirical, see Kauppi, The Politics of Embodiment, p. 117. On his theories of symbolic or cultural dominance and contestation see Swartz, Culture and Power, pp. 1–13. Also see the special issue of Sciences humaines dedicated to “L’Oeuvre de Pierre Bourdieu,” which appeared shortly after his death in January 2002. On Adorno’s self-definition against Hegel and the tradition that he established, see Hauke Brunkhorst, “Irreconcilable Modernity: Adorno’s Aesthetic Experimentalism and the Transgression Theorem,” in Max Pensky, ed., The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 47–48. And see Eric L. Krakauer, The Disposition of the Subiect: Reading Adorno’s Dialectic of Technology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp. 139 and 143. On Bourdieu’s criticism of structuralism and existentialism, see Lane, Pierre Bourdieu, p. 48. Brunkhorst, “Irreconcilable Modernity,” p. 97. Ibid., p. 49. Ibid., pp. 43, 45, and 47. And see Rose Rosengard Subotnik, “The Historical Structure: Adorno’s ‘French’ Model for the Criticism of Nineteenth-Century Music,” Journal of the American Musicological Society (1978), 39–40. See Peter U. Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 200. Also see Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, pp. 165–167.

Shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu 47 On Bourdieu’s own view of his work as a sociological critique of philosophy and a philosophical critique of sociology, see Kauppi, The Politics of Embodiment, p. 116 and Pierre Bourdieu, M´editations pascaliennes (Paris: Seuil, 1997), especially pp. 10–12. 48 See Kauppi, The Politics of Embodiment, p. 66 and Lane, Pierre Bourdieu, p. 50, as well as Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Minuit, 1979), pp. 362–364.

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Rewriting history from the losers’ point of view: French Grand Opera and modernity Antoine Hennion Translated by Sarah Boittin

Theoretical and methodological issues are questions whose least clear feature is sometimes the outcome that is to issue from them. Nonetheless I would like to tackle one of these issues and use the emblematic case of nineteenth-century French opera as a starting point for considering some of the problems raised by the divide between music and society. The very title of the present book applies this divide to the domain of opera: Opera and Society – is there any other way to approach the subject? Yet any study of this topic inevitably raises a more or less explicit and assumed challenge to such a distinct division between two realities which should be considered as a relationship – as if they were not mutually dependent as a result of their very makeup. MUSIC DOES NOT EXIST . . .

So how can we approach the relation between opera and society?1 Or how can we consider opera in social terms, and our collective bodies in lyric terms, to adopt Blacking’s way of putting it? One option would be to focus on the complexity and variety of situations in order to nuance our analyses and modulate the way they are expressed. This is not the option I shall adopt. Rather, I support a simple and radical hypothesis: music does not exist. It seems to me that in the current state of music studies, expressing things in these exaggerated terms will clarify the debate. Far from losing anything along the way, everyone will gain, if we start by making three comments. First, this does not mean that music does not “matter”; the idea is that, on the contrary, we will have a much better understanding of what it can do and cause to be done, what it transmits, why it is or is not important for the public or for specialists, if we do not start from the 330

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hypothesis that music has a power of its own, that it is “already there.” In other words, the point is not to reduce musical reality to its social determinants (or, inversely, in opposition to sociological reductionism, to argue in favor of the existence of musical autonomy per se), but to show how unprecedented pleasure, the love of music, and the object of this love gradually shaped one another. If music is music, it only remains to endow it with autonomous capabilities (internal analyses) or to relate its use and its effects to social, cultural, or psychological determinations (external analyses). But if, on the contrary, we advance the hypothesis that we do not know what music is, and if we adopt as objects of study the variable mechanisms through which it appears at different times, giving rise both to the increasingly emphatic reality of an autonomous domain and to an increasingly self-confident individual and collective competence on the part of the music-loving public, it becomes clear that the previous position is an anachronism, for it evaluates musical reality retrospectively using the very criteria that music history has created. In Garfinkel’s words, music and taste should not be the resources of our analysis, but its topics.2 They have written the history which is our source for claiming to write theirs.3 Next, saying that music does not exist is of interest only if, symmetrically, we also assert that society does not exist. It too is not “already there” as a reservoir of factors and determinisms waiting to explain musical reality in sociological terms. Society is not a setting in which music takes its place; it is, instead, music that contributes the materiality of its sounds to support social representation and to form the sensitivities we share. Blacking’s formulas have the merit of emphasizing this reciprocal characteristic: that music makes its society is as true as the reverse. There is an African-drumming society, a harpsichord society, a disc society, an MP3 society, just as there is a concert society, an opera society,4 and today a free party and techno society. The central theme that scholarly music has become autonomous (listening to music as music is in no way self-evident) can then be considered as fundamental, instead of using this idea in its own attack or defense. The autonomy of music should not be accepted (by the partisans of art for art’s sake) or rejected (by the advocates of social

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determination) but should instead be analyzed. This is not an ideological theme, but the result of history, and it has important effects. Autonomous music can exist only in a society that has built itself on the “autonomization” of distinct orders of reality. The slow emergence of music as an increasingly autonomous reality plays a role in the continuous redistribution of our subjectivities, our identities, our institutions, and our bodies. In other words, music is social by means of its autonomy, not in opposition to it. And for this reason we can transform it into a sociologically interesting subject, which in addition informs us about social issues, and not settle for reducing music to a given social realm. Not postulating a priori that music exists means above all apprehending it as an event, an uncertain eruption, a production dependent on time and circumstances, a collective effort and desire, and not a stationary object. It becomes a performance, a happening, not to be confused with scores, or (today) recordings, which solidify it into a material object like a statue. What genre can rival opera in claiming to enlighten us, to develop this self-definition of music as a collective event which must be “co-constructed” by its various participants? After returning to the division between music and society, and following a brief detour into the world of art historians to take advantage of the solutions they have found concerning paintings and statues, I shall use the emblematic case of nineteenth-century French opera to develop in greater detail the questions and methodological points thus raised: the fact that this genre is looked down upon today, after having been adulated throughout Europe for a century, is an interesting development in the history of musical taste, especially as it raises the question of modernism in music. T H E G R E AT D I V I D E 5

How can one move beyond the two-part construction that results in the separation of the musical and social aspects of music into two increasingly autonomous objects of analysis? Chanting the mantra of pluridisciplinism tends to beg the question rather than answer it: the juxtaposition of various kinds of analytical elements (aesthetics,

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musical analysis, musical environment, social context) encourages the artificial preservation of the categories in question (on the one hand music, on the other, society) rather than demonstrating their progressive separation and emphasizing the extent to which the meaning of music itself has changed over the course of its slow emergence as a more and more autonomous reality.6 The point is not to graft a social appendage onto opera, for example, by discoursing about its political meaning and statutory function, but to understand how it has been transformed in history, evolving from the status of a manifestation with intertwined ritual, theatrical, worldly, political, and musical elements to a lyrical repertory of musical works catalogued, appreciated, and consumed in the weighty modern system of lyrical institutions and a worldwide market of recordings and musical tastes. For the invitation, widely shared today, to study music within society rather than outside its borders is often taken for something it should not be: a call to oppose this divide between music and society, as if it were a false ideology. That is not my position. Rather, my goal is to reflect on this divide and its role in our modern definition of music – a definition which as a result is not only modern, but also “modernist.” The argument is precisely to suggest that the separation between music and society is at the heart of the ever-greater “musicalization” affecting our musical universe.7 With this collective process, whose earliest signs date back many centuries but which became especially intense in the nineteenth century, things become increasingly clear: on the one hand, we have music, with forms, instruments, techniques, a language, professionals, institutions, a repertory, schools;8 on the other hand, we have music-lovers, provided with clearly defined means of listening and appreciating what music is (and what good music is) – and, even before this, “listeners” aware that they are listening to music9 and not simply participating in some sort of ritual, religious, political, or social event; finally, between the two, a designated organization and “dedicated” technical means adapted to the new function of diffusing to a targeted public music conceived as music-for-a-public: inexpensive scores, well thought-out programs and appropriate concert halls, industrial pianos and standard pitch, standardized quality criteria, clearer distribution of

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genres and aesthetic values, establishment of a “canon,” rationalized musical instruction, and lastly, for a century now, recordings that are more and more “hi fidelity” – but “faithful” to what? This progressive musicalization forces us to write music history backwards, on pain of continually projecting onto the past a modern conception of what “music itself” is. One of the many paradoxes it has led to – as Victoria Johnson points out in her introduction to this volume – is that disciplines tend to submit to this “purification” rather than integrating it into their own analyses: depending on who studies it, music is either musical or social. Music theory and musicology owe it to themselves to regard as a given the very existence of music and to study it musically; they are disciplines of the object but do not possess any tools to study the production of music as music.10 Thus they underestimate their own influence, for they are participants in a decisive way in this musicalization – that is, in the transformation of music into a collective, recognized, and stabilized object. Scores are the object, in more than one sense, of music scholars: scholars work on scores, but they also make them, for, in a circular process, scholars assist informed listeners and critics to mistake scores for music. On the other side of the Great Divide, the social history of music, the sociology of culture, and the new critic-inspired music studies are no less flawed from the point of view that concerns us. Relying on excluded or dominated musical genres (rock, popular music, ethnic music, female artists) which they rightly defend from discrediting by classical musicology,11 they conceive of their work as an unveiling, aimed at revealing the true nature of music, which they claim is not musical but social (and sexual):12 removed from music, the power of music is immediately returned to the social domain. Instead of demonstrating the performing effectiveness of the social production of an autonomous reality such as music, they denounce the deceptive character of this autonomy, reducing music to the status of a simple fetish whose reality derives, like that of Durkheim’s “cultural objects,” from the collective which projects its shared faith and its relations of force on the totems representing it.13 According to this hypothesis,

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which has become the common postulate of sociological analysis, any social object is a result of belief. Although this conception has enabled art history to emerge from the smug contemplation of masterpieces, paradoxically it makes it impossible to regard music in social terms: either “music itself” is only music, or it is only social. The problematic of belief leaves us with one alternative, modeled on the old opposition between internal and external analyses of art: implementing various sorts of musicologies, if we “believe” in music; or demonstrating on the contrary that music is belief, and conducting our analyses of musical reality based on other realities supposedly underlying it: rites, powers, institutions, interaction of social identity and difference. Under these conditions, the simple fact of taking into consideration musical realities, the beauty and grandeur of the works, the affects and effects of performance, the emotions and abilities of the listener – in other words, the very real results of a totally social production, the “autonomization” of music – is perceived as regression, a way of being “taken in” by the beliefs of the actors or of becoming accomplices to their domination.14 Is there a place for a sociology which would not need to be in this way actively indifferent to the musical nature of music?15 Which, in contrast, could demonstrate how music becomes in fact musical – unequally, and with different meanings? Such a perspective in no way implies a return to the positivist acknowledgment of an essential reality, but it does ask us to take seriously this strange historical production of our societies: a collective and specific ability to produce and appreciate music in itself. Nor is it opposed to political and social analysis of music – from its production to its effects, from its forms and sounds to its bodies and the subjectivities that adopt all these factors. But these analyses must transit through music rather than trying to bypass it. A C H O I C E A L LY : T H E H I S T O RY O F A RT

To this end, we can draw fruitfully on the history of art. Once most scholars had agreed on the poverty and randomness of Marxist-inspired analyses conducted in terms of reflections and superstructures, authors

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like Francis Haskell and Michael Baxandall found paths, from opposite perspectives, enabling them to move their discipline away from the oscillation between the infinite exegesis of works and their futile replacement in a social and political context desperately unable to talk about them or to make them talk.16 By studying the gaze, uses, collections, gestures, and the history of a given work, as well as the formation of taste for the work, these authors have already accomplished the switch described above, for similar reasons and with similar analytical, theoretical, and methodological effects. Their work shows that the famous “works themselves,” those absolutes of beauty, have constantly changed meaning, shape, place, and direction throughout history, along with the judgments on them. Above all, they have shown that these works, through their media and restorations, and the way they have been gathered together, presented, commented on, and reproduced, have continuously reconfigured the frame of their own evaluation. The lesson is powerful. It tells us that the history of taste is not something separate from that of works, no more than the principles of reception are opposed to those of creation.17 It is not possible to distinguish between the two. Works “make” the gaze that beholds them, and the gaze makes the works. Hence, this entangled history does not lead to a theory of the arbitrary, in the sense of the infinite variety of situations and appreciations casting doubt on the very possibility of establishing any kind of link between works and the taste associated with them. On the contrary, by putting the accent on the co-formation of a set of objects and the frame of their appreciation, this model requires ever more ties, attachments, and mediations. Gradually every step influences both future perceptions and past catalogues of works, in reconfigurations that constantly rewrite their own history to develop their future. Haskell and Baxandall show us art gradually tracing the frame in which we “comprehend” it, in all senses of the word, i.e., all the work that was needed to identify systems of circulation, valorization, judgment and appreciation, and, reciprocally, everything that the establishment of these networks, neatly linking up works and art lovers, has changed in the works themselves – including works from

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the past, right down to their most concrete features. We tried to apply this lesson to analyze the “use” – not the reception! – of Bach in France in the nineteenth century.18 Here we are better equipped, thanks to historians of art, to understand a more fundamental meaning of the turn to which I referred: not only a change of object (from works themselves to taste), nor even a change of method (from head-on analysis and abstraction of various dimensions, to the meticulous study of mediations really used), but a change of status of the interpretation itself: a pragmatist turn. The explained becomes the explainer. The variables serving as benchmarks are in fact the product of the history written by the works to which we apply them. Causes do not come from above, from the disciplines that focus on their object of study, but from below, from the gradual process that produced the reality under study. OPERA, OR MUSIC AS AN EVENT

Opera seems a propitious ground for testing this re-examination and evaluating the “returns” of this kind of analysis. No other genre corresponds better to the program we have outlined: do not separate the history of taste from the history of music, do not attempt at one and the same time the dual and incompatible analysis of musical scores on the one hand and social practices on the other, but study historically how a specific repertory was formed jointly with the collective and individual faculty to appreciate it and use it to produce shared subjectivities. For opera is, in fact, a mongrel genre by nature. Unlike the ideal incarnated a little later by nineteenth-century chamber music,19 with its characteristic “autonomous music” orientation (the “Beethoven late quartets” syndrome), opera is deeply heterogeneous, both internally and externally. Internally, it is a universe filled with libretti and words, voices and bodies, costumes and scenic machinery, games of love and war – not just notes, scores, and instruments. It is total performance, and this characteristic is in no way archaic or residual. On the contrary, it underlies the explicit definition of another musical ideal, distinct from the ideal of autonomy. In varying forms, the creators and supporters

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of the genre continually return to the theme of “total entertainment,” from its origins with the inventors in the Camerata dei Bardi in Florence or French opera at the time of Louis XIV to historical grand opera, Wagner, and contemporary composers. This is true, furthermore, to such an extent that for contemporary composers the tension between this ideal and the ideal of autonomy – once modernism declared the latter victorious, a point to which I shall return – is probably the source of their discomfort, forcing them more than in the case of any other classical form to balance scorn or the proclamation of the death of the genre, and acrobatic attempts at synthesis or compromise. Opera is no less heterogeneous when observed in context or seen from the exterior. From the outset it was a social event, charged with passions, and this characteristic too was not experienced as a flaw or proof of immaturity; it lies, on the contrary, at the heart of opera’s aesthetic project. It is no accident that the aesthetic goal regularly flirted with its political counterpart; opera was born of the desire of the powerful in Italy, and of the kings of France and England. For many years it was extremely popular in many countries; during the course of history it was constantly used for various political or national surgical operations.20 Opera is both above and apart from music: it is less “pure,” (the “Bach never wrote an opera” syndrome); it typically comes from Italy or France, the two eternal rival lovers, when everyone knows that only German music is serious . . . Yet the Germans could not rest easy until they had invented their own form of opera, the Wagnerian monster. Modernism itself, defined far from the realm of opera, was not complete until it invaded opera too – or vanquished it. Closer to its audience than “pure music,” opera is also a mixed genre by virtue of the variety of feelings, emotions, pleasures, and the forms of attachment it arouses. A fan of lyrical music is never quite sure what is at stake in his love of opera: what is the precise nature of the pleasure derived from a high C? The answer is so obscure that psychoanalysts have approached the field of music almost exclusively through these gaps in musical desire that lead into some sort of lost paradise. It seems extremely relevant to try and deploy here, with regard to the instructive fate of French nineteenth-century opera, a problematic

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analogous to that we defined to analyze Bach.21 For opera is a genre where the musicians (the term includes critics, commentators, analysts, and active music-lovers) are constantly rewriting the works of the past. Often passionately debated as soon as they are composed (from the querelle des Bouffons to the Wagnerian religious war), operas are continually re-formed through successive reruns, returns, rediscoveries, and revivals. Opera is an excellent case study for the historian: its history is extremely reflexive, regularly turns to old works to feed its modern taste, and uses aesthetic quarrels to reform styles, form the ear of its time and, more generally, redefine musical taste. The interest of French classical opera lies in its strange destiny, which in some ways recalls that of Roman statues as portrayed by Haskell and Penny. But it is telescoped into little more than a century and a half, from the origins of op´era-comique, Auber’s immense success in Europe and the birth of Meyerbeer’s historical opera, to the worldwide triumph of grand opera, from Gounod and Bizet to Saint-Sa¨ens and Massenet, and finally to the very rapid decline of the whole of this repertoire in the second half of the twentieth century, when few works other than Faust and Carmen managed to survive. Like Italian and especially German and Slavic opera later, this genre opened a broad forum for the political, religious, and national debates of the nineteenth century. But the point concerning us is different: not only the political meaning of this repertoire in its own time, but also the later development of its appreciation and the open question of its musical and aesthetic value, outside its original context. Through careful attention to the balance of words and music,22 along with refined orchestration and the meticulous care lavished by composers on the effect on the public, French opera in fact constantly incarnated, for better and for worse, sensuality, pleasure, and emotion. For these very reasons it was the constant target of modernists of all varieties, from Wagner and Debussy through Boulez to France’s classical radio. Bourgeois opera, sentimentalism, affectation, easy melodies, saccharine orchestration: the very qualities which ensured its original success were subsequently turned against the genre to discredit it.23

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Let us turn now to consider what authors of general works writing in the first half of the twentieth century say about the main representatives of French Grand Opera. In 1946, Dufourcq’s La musique des origines a` nos jours devotes two pages to Grand Opera, assessing its principal representatives as follows: However, this pleasant conversationalist [Auber] speaks only rarely to our emotions. An artist of limited scope, with a horizon extending no farther than the Boulevard, he incarnates the fashionable Paris mood of his day, with all that this expression implies in terms of both brilliance and extreme superficiality . . . Meyerbeer’s art seems very dated to us today . . . Meyerbeer possesses to the highest degree a feeling for scenic effect, and employs means that, while they may not be subtle, are effective. However, his uneven and motley style, along with the bombast disguising often empty and vulgar concepts, make performances of his operas hard to take today . . . This decorative music no longer moves us, and shows signs of incurable wrinkles . . . The public’s taste for this trite lyrical tragedy (Hal´evy’s La Juive, 1835) surprises us a bit today; Scribe’s dramatic tricks seem juvenile, and the music conventional.24

In reading the articles of the day one must be alert to clearly antiSemitic undercurrents,25 obvious to readers of the time, as in this comment on Meyerbeer: “An excellent businessman, but as an artist lacking grand ideals . . .”26 or, more pointed yet, Emile Vuillermoz, who, in a piece from his well-known Histoire de la musique that is studded with words like “opportunism,” “calculation,” “attention to his interest,” denounces “the hidden prosaic style of this overly commercialized art which, in order to pander successfully to the timid taste of the general public, foregoes the regard of his peers and the approbation of the elite,” while Hal´evy (that is, “L´evy, known as Hal´evy”) “trod submissively in the footsteps of his co-religionary.”27 To appreciate the change, one must compare this tone, customary in the twentieth century, with the enthusiastic descriptions penned by F´elix Cl´ement, for example, eighty years earlier of La Juive, La Muette or Les Huguenots – to take the works most popular until the end of the nineteenth century: this stern

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defender of religious music waxes enthusiastic about masterpieces, extreme richness, striking verity, and magnificent works.28 In works for the general public, it is possible to follow the downfall of a succession of French operas, the trapdoor opening first beneath the feet of Auber, Meyerbeer, and Hal´evy, described as “Italianizers” the better to be compared and contrasted with their successors whose talent was authentically French, until the latter in turn were condemned as well: Gounod stood at the junction with the generation of SaintSaens, Massenet, and Bizet, who alone was spared by all. In 1956, in his celebrated Dictionnaire critique, Andr´e Coeuroy, for example, describes Massenet as a “clever workman,” who “never attempted to move beyond the level of a carefully executed second-rate painting”; “demi tones and insinuating and gentle melody, left to fend for itself with an insufficient orchestra” bog the opera down.29 Saint-Saens fares no better; he “digested everything – Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner – and excreted it in elegant droppings.”30 The tone is ferocious. The main theme is the servile opportunism of composers catering to a bourgeois audience. In works for the general public throughout the twentieth century we repeatedly encounter the same kinds of variations – mitigated, euphemized – on the bourgeois, facile, and self-interested character of the genre. Just one recent example of these “obvious” characteristics: the one-line commentary on French opera by B. R. Hanning in the 2002 Concise History of Western Music: “Melodies are attractive and expressive, within the boundaries of good taste” (my emphasis).31 Since the point is to show a collective process among taste-makers by noting the traces of the commonplace observations and shared norms which form the taste of a period, and their evolution since the end of the nineteenth century, my references are based less on recent work by academics than on accepted formulas and ready-made judgments pronounced as if all agreed upon them, or even on meaningful absences – all easier to discern in the work of critics, popularizers, general histories, prefaces, etc., which are the source of most of my quotations. Today scholars no longer permit themselves to use the condescending tone they adopted in the twentieth century – but of

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course even the best among them are not immune to involuntarily falling back on these platitudes of taste.32 Such success, followed by such a rout, raises questions. Several histories of the subject can be written. One, classic, consists in adopting in various forms the modernist critical judgment, either by endorsing it from the standpoint of musical authority on taste and good music, which elected Wagner and Debussy over Meyerbeer and Massenet – time has done its work; or in criticizing this progressionist vision globally to reinterpret it by demonstrating the constant action of differentiation on the part of the elites and, more specifically, the tension between the more conservative bourgeois taste and the more modern taste of the artist. These two versions diverge on the meaning (either aesthetic or social) of artistic taste and modernism but they are in complete agreement on the shared object of their scorn, “bourgeois” opera.33 Another angle of attack, apparently more neutral but fundamentally just as reductive and historically “anachronistic,” consists in viewing French opera only through the influence it had, essentially on Verdi and Wagner, and sometimes also on Russian or Slavic opera. Acknowledging the debt then serves to bury it.34 This is the history of the winners, written from the perspective of the universe they imposed on the losers and with the words and categories they forged. Such a history has a meaning, it has a direction and a signification, and it does not look back. But do we have to endorse it? Are there no others? Less unequivocal histories, which would toy with possible scenarios which did not take place, with a future that might return? Arbitrary histories, then, as well: where would they derive their certainties, these histories that would not really know what music is, or politics or society? They cannot be written from on high, like the two mentioned above, which are firmly grounded in their autonomous aesthetic or social definition. No, without knowing which is correct, these other potential histories would include in contrast more than one definition of music, interacting, inventing themselves and our musical world. The point is obviously not for us to “rewrite history” ourselves, to campaign for French opera or against modernism. Rather, it is to reconsider the history that has been written, and liberate what it has

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repressed in order to catch a glimpse of the slightly dated patterns within which, at other times and for other people, a genre had deep enough meaning to move people throughout Europe – but these patterns are so dated that we no longer respond to them. The difficulty brings us to a question that goes beyond modernism and French opera, namely, the question of anachronism and archeology: as I noted in my introduction, we are permanently rewriting the past within the categories and the space it has carved out for us. Without wishing to bring back this past, the idea would be for us to use it to better see what our present prevents us from seeing – in particular when it studies the past. To put it another way, instead of rereading French opera ex post facto with the modern spectacles of emancipated art and seeing only a series of facile works, written for a public (horror of horrors, a bourgeois public!), this history would accompany bodies, collectives, voices, and spaces of expression that are in the process of developing. The point is not to place ourselves within the space of modernism in order to criticize it with its own categories by “rescuing” its castoffs (as was done for operetta, for light art, for photography), nor to integrate yesterday’s rejects (which modernism does itself, for example in the case of jazz, Mahler, Sibelius, the music of Louis XIV’s time, etc.); the point is rather to redesign the space where the genres destined to be gradually discredited and disdained are in contrast honored by all, including the elites. Of course, a history such as this – closely associated with its actors – would not focus solely on the collected works of a history of music leaping ceaselessly from emancipation to emancipation toward one goal, and thus such a history would be less sure what music is. MODERNISM

This brings us back to our initial theme: the distinct separation between the social and the musical bequeathed to us by modernism, which social criticism reinforces while claiming to abolish it through reflection, is exactly what French opera has always fought, but by acts, not reflection. Its anti-Italian leitmotif, “words before everything,” introduces

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confusion where bel canto brings order: is it music, song, text, theatre? A pure and abstract work, released from the constraints which the public, always lagging behind the times, would impose? French composers adopted a model of mixed writing and collective production exactly the reverse of what would become dogma in the twentieth century. But what they then discovered, apart from the bourgeois success which would damn them in the eyes of history, was the opportunity to convey and express, and perhaps sometimes produce, the subjectivities of a moment in time and the passions of collectivities in the process of forging themselves. For this submission to its own effects, this ear attuned to the public’s ear, is also what made opera a genre that is social, active, open to the anxieties and desires of its time.35 I am speaking of what is collective and what is musical, because they bring us directly back to the Great Divide between music and society. But opera consists of a myriad of other aspects, which lined the path opened by the Divide, or retreated into the shadows: the pleasure of sound, the role of the bodies (of the singer, the dancer, the spectator), the place of the text, the dramaturgy and the ballets, the sets, the crowds on stage, the very dynamics of a hall, of an audience seeking its voices, the instrumentation of the orchestra and language in the service of effects – in sum, the exact opposite of the aesthetics of autonomy, of the ideal represented by a Beethoven quartet, as it became the model of rigorous art, which Wagnerianism (more than Wagner himself ) finally imposed on opera too. All this leads to the methodological wager I am making, behind the idea of using the life and death of French opera to write fictional, open, plural histories where opera would be the starting point,36 rather than the convenient dumping ground from which modernity emancipates itself: not to rehabilitate opera, but to transform it into the paradoxical spokesman for another sociology of music, pragmatist (should I say Hollywoodian?), and not critical.37 French opera can be read as a machine for composing unstable terms whose effects can only be discovered by playing them in situ. Only performance, always open and uncertain (and for this reason constantly being rewritten), supported by its actors but also its apparatus and its audience, can determine what

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happens. Everything counts. Everything must be weighed, to unleash the effect – and afterwards, no one who was not present will ever be able to know if this collective effort of an instant was more musical, more convivial, more political, or more sentimental: the divide itself no longer has meaning, and the debates about what took place become part of what took place. Such a fictional history, in which French opera becomes the involuntary model for a pragmatist sociology, also rewrites a music of the past with present-day tools. Clearly, it is no less anachronistic than the official history of modern art was when it reduced bourgeois opera to its own negative. At least it will be a tale produced while it reveals itself to be what it is, in a more playful, less serious mode, better informed of the effect of its own writing. I hope that, far from saying less, it will say more.

n ot e s 1 Blacking’s famous formula – “music as society”/“society as music” – has the advantage of expressing the relationship in more symmetrical and active terms, but does not answer the question of the social production of these realities and of the division between them ( John Blacking, How Musical Is Man? [London/Seattle: Faber & Faber/University of Washington Press, 1973]). 2 Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967). 3 Using the exemplary case of Bach, a powerful force for this “musicalization of music,” we raised this problem in the case of the development of the taste for classical music in France in the nineteenth century. See Jo¨el-Marie Fauquet and Antoine Hennion, La Grandeur de Bach (Paris: Fayard, 2000). 4 The ground-breaking essays by Siegfried Kracauer on Offenbach’s Paris (Orpheus in Paris [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938, new edition New York: Vienna House, 1972]) or by William L. Crosten on Grand Opera (French Grand Opera: An Art and a Business [New York: King’s Crown Press, 1948]) had to await, for their heritage to be acknowledged, the pioneering work of Jane Fulcher, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), on the

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6

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9

political status of Grand Opera, now followed by works of researchers like Anselm Gerhard (The Urbanization of Opera [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998]) on Meyerbeer’s Paris, and Steven Huebner (French Opera at the fin de si`ecle: Wagnerism, Nationalism and Style [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999]). This phrase is one Bruno Latour has employed in speaking of science and society (Latour, We Have Never Been Modern [New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993]). Latour underscores the parallelism with another Great Divide, this one social, between “us” and “them”; it is easy to transpose this other divide to the musical case. “We” have developed a rational and autonomous art world; “they,” “primitive” or popular and far removed either in time or on the social scale, are supposed to remain in a state where music and social rites are impossible to separate from one another. I have attempted to rethink this music/society duality in Antoine Hennion, La Passion musicale: Une sociologie de la m´ediation (Paris: M´etaili´e, 1993). Pierre Bourdieu, in response to the accusation brought against him of neglecting artistic production or holding it to be illusory, raises this problem concerning Flaubert in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). The paradoxical solution he suggests is to consider Flaubert as the precursor of Bourdieu himself: an author whose principal work is to reveal the structure of the literary field of his time, and to assert his autonomy by making artists the sole judges of art, in opposition to the bourgeoisie and the mass market. This line was first explored by Max Weber, The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, trans. and ed. Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel, and Gertrud Neuwirth (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958). After being notably absent from music history, the historical appearance of a specifically musical ability to listen to music has been the object of recent work, of various orientations: Mary Sue Morrow, Concert Life in Haydn’s Vienna (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1989); James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); William Weber, “Did People Listen in the Eighteenth Century?,” Early Music 25 (November 1997), 678–691; Antoine Hennion, “L’´ecoute a` la question,” Revue de musicologie 88/1 (2002), 95–149.

French Grand Opera and modernity 10 Concerning the formation of the musical “canon,” an issue whose crucial character was clearly demonstrated by William Weber (The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual and Ideology [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992]), this type of reflexive interrogation of musicology regarding its own role has been the starting point for the renewal of music studies: e.g., Alan Durant, Conditions of Music (London: Macmillan, 1984); Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 11 For example, Pieter C. Van den Toorn, “Politics, Feminism, and Contemporary Music Theory,” Journal of Musicology 9 (1991), 275–299. 12 Or political, e.g., Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, eds., Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 13 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: The Free Press, 1995 [1912]). His analyses have provided the model for many others, from ethnology to interactionism to Bourdieu. Critical theories spread the most rapidly. Ask someone about his tastes and he will make excuses – my parents were very highbrow and encouraged my older sister to play the violin . . . Music-lovers know better than anyone else that their tastes are determined, relative, linked to their origins, arbitrary. Paradoxically, we are so conditioned by sociological readings of our tastes that now a sociologist has to use all his talent to convince a music-lover to say what he likes, what he is attached to, in other words, to “desociologize” him! See Antoine Hennion, “Music Lovers: Taste as Performance,” Theory, Culture and Society 18/5 (October 2001), 1–22. 14 This is a limitation of Pierre Bourdieu’s critical approach (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984]). The emphasis he places on the necessary denegation by the believers of the constructed character of the object in which they believe (which object he terms the illusio, or enjeu in French: the “stake” – ludere = Jouer = to gamble) prevents us from taking that object seriously in and of itself, for to take it seriously would be to mimic the social actors in their belief. 15 To adopt another of Blacking’s formulas (see above, note 2).

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Antoine Hennion 16 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (Oxford: Phaidon, 1976); Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). 17 Notwithstanding their crucial contribution, this is a limit of reception theories by Hans R. Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), and Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 18 Fauquet and Hennion, La Grandeur de Bach. 19 Jo¨el-Marie Fauquet, Les Soci´et´es de musique de chambre a` Paris de la Restauration a` 1870 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1986). 20 See Fulcher, The Nation’s Image, and Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera. Before that, in France, the struggles between the French and the Italians, which were referred back to the king or the queen, had always traced political borders, while elsewhere in Europe (Germany, Spain, Slavic countries, etc.), in particular because of the importance placed on language, reappropriation of national repertoire always worked in favor of opera. 21 As it is not completed yet, I can only mention this work, also undertaken with musicologist Jo¨el-Marie Fauquet. 22 See the fascinating correspondence between Eug`ene Scribe and Daniel-Franc¸ois-Esprit Auber published by Herbert Schneider (Correspondance d’Eug`ene Scribe and Daniel-Franc¸ois-Esprit Auber [Li`ege: Mardaga, 1998]). 23 The same, meticulously disassembled and borrowed, also contributed most of the technical means and savoir-faire to composers of film music. 24 Norbert Dufourcq, ed., La Musique des origines a` nos jours (Paris: Larousse, revised and corrected edition, 1946), pp. 306–307. 25 On this question, see also Steven Huebner, French Opera at the fin de si`ecle. 26 Dufourcq, La Musique des origines a` nos jours, p. 307. 27 Emile Vuillermoz, Histoire de la musique (Paris: Le Livre de poche, 1973), p. 285. 28 See F´elix Cl´ement and Pierre Larousse, Dictionnaire des Op´eras (Paris: Larousse, 1863–1880).

French Grand Opera and modernity 29 Andr´e Coeuroy, Dictionnaire critique de la musique ancienne et moderne (Paris: Payot, 1956), pp. 276–277. 30 Ibid., p. 346. 31 B. R. Hanning, ed., Concise History of Western Music, second edition (New York: Norton, 2002). Another example can be found in Herv´e Lacombe, Les Voies de l’op´era franc¸ais au XIXe si`ecle (Paris: Fayard, 1997), who cannot begin his defense of the genre without saying that “French opera only rarely seeks the sublime, or intenseness, profoundness in expression, density in writing; rather, it favors whatever is entertaining, pleasant, nuanced, light, and also everything that astonishes and impresses” (p. 9, written five lines after the author has complained that “nineteenthcentury French opera suffers overall from a poor reputation”). 32 Especially in France, it is true: the source country is the most sensitive to the social connotations of a genre, easily seen as relative or “exotic” elsewhere; today Massenet is performed more readily in Italy, SaintSaens in New York, and Fra Diavolo in Germany than is a nineteenth-century French opera in Paris. 33 On the opposition between “social” and “artist” criticism of capitalism, see Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Le Nouvel Esprit du capitalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1999). 34 Thus the recent Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, edited by David Charlton (2003), a very well-informed work, focuses most of its entries on Wagnerism, Verdi, and the question of nationalism, as does the latest book by Steven Huebner, French Opera at the fin de si`ecle: Wagnerism, Nationalism and Style. This characteristic can be compared with the venomous note already added by Harewood to the entry on Meyerbeer in “the” Kobb´e, the Bible of all opera fans: “It can be said that the best example of French Grand Opera is to be found not in Meyerbeer, but in Verdi, with Don Carlos” (n. 1, p. 438 of the French edition of the edition revised by the Earl of Harewood of Gustave Kobb´e’s Tout l’op´era, 1982. The work itself is imbued with the enormous affection of a lover of all these works.) 35 This point was made masterfully by Fulcher, The Nation’s Image. But it is not enough to restore the political importance of French opera in its time (as Baxandall did, to repeat my argument); one must also understand, as Haskell did, its subsequent musical devaluation.

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Antoine Hennion 36 Or the end point: when Stendhal describes the Italian opera he adored in his Vie de Rossini (Paris: Auguste Boulland et Cie, 1823; new edition ed. Pierre Brunel, Gallimard-Folio, 1992), he never mentions “works.” He paints the effects, writes about circumstances, contrasts towns, opera houses, or singers, speaks of the Latin or Saxon fashion of appreciating singing, of humor, of the beauty of the women . . . There is not a phrase in his text that is not perpendicular to the line which should lead from the work to society. It is more common to find such stories in the area of popular music, or 1950s Hollywood movies, production modes that rebel against the modernist divide between art and society, which are better illuminated by a comparison with the techniques invented by French opera’s writers and composers, than with the solitary gesture of a creative genius such as Beethoven. 37 I am thereby inverting an ironic comparison often made between Hollywood and French opera, even by those who love French opera, such as the stage director David Pountney, who doubts that one can resuscitate a genre that inspires “the same kind of ironic affection that we commonly reserve for those magnificent edifices of Hollywood high camp” (Cambridge Companion to Opera, p. 146).

C O N C LU S I O N : T OWA R D S A N E W U N D E R S TA N D I N G O F T H E H I S T O RY O F O P E R A ?

Thomas Ertman

As this collection has demonstrated, an exciting process of convergence is under way in the world of opera studies. The attention generated by the “critical” approach to opera, with its desire to read contemporary meanings into canonical works, has obscured the fact that many opera scholars who stand outside of this paradigm, be they musicologists, literary theorists, historians, or sociologists, are currently engaged in a common project: namely the reconstruction – based often on painstaking archival research – of the conditions of operatic production, reception, and social instrumentalization during different periods of the genre’s four centuries of existence. It is this project that represents the common denominator between those following a “systems of meaning” and those employing a “conditions of production” approach and one that, as Victoria Johnson has shown in her introduction, was made possible by the historical “turn” within the humanities and social sciences over the last two decades. As Craig Calhoun, Herbert Lindenberger, and Jane Fulcher have all argued in this volume, a close elective affinity exists between this recent research within opera studies and the theories of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In her contributions here, Fulcher has illustrated one way in which this often difficult body of writings can be put to use in understanding opera. She argues that Bourdieu’s idea of a struggle among elites as well as between elites and non-elites over symbolic legitimacy and domination allows for a more complex understanding of the relationship between state power and ideology and art works produced under various forms of state sponsorship. That such an understanding is necessary is underlined by the pieces of Rebecca Harris-Warrick and Catherine Kintzler. By analyzing, respectively, the structure of divertissements and the presentation of popular groups in French opera during the age of Lully and Rameau, they uncover the 351

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tremendous multiplicity of meanings embedded within works that have often been interpreted as straightforward glorifications of absolute monarchy. In the space remaining in this conclusion, I wish to sketch out briefly another way that Bourdieu’s work can be employed within opera studies, one that builds upon and further encourages the comparative dimension also found in this volume. As has often been remarked, including by Herbert Lindenberger above, one of the unique features of opera is the genre’s clearly defined historical parameters (general agreement on what constitutes an opera, the genre’s four-hundredyear history, limited number of principal centers). These characteristics suggest that we might arrive at a new understanding of opera’s rich past if we apply to it some of the methods pioneered in recent decades by historically oriented social scientists. As Victoria Johnson has noted in her introduction, such social scientists began in the 1960s and 1970s to seek answers to questions such as why some European polities developed in an absolutist direction prior to the French Revolution while others did not; or why some fell into dictatorship during the interwar years while others remained democracies. Their models were contested and revised over the coming decades and form part of the “historical turn” within political science and sociology.1 Opera history presents us with a series of broad questions that, like those concerning European political development, would benefit if addressed in an explicitly comparative manner. Why is it, we might ask, that at certain times and places (Italy from the seventeenth through the early twentieth century, early nineteenth-century France) new native works filled the opera stages while at other times and places (eighteenth-century France, nineteenth-century Germany) a repertory system built around older or imported pieces predominated? Why does opera seem largely to have died out as a living art form since the Second World War? And finally, why has so-called “directors’ theatre” (Regietheater) come to dominate opera stagings in Germany and, increasingly, in Britain and France but not in Italy or the United States? One way to go about answering such questions is to begin with a general model of how the arts developed during the early modern

Conclusion

and modern periods, and then identify the ways in which the path followed by opera in various countries conformed to or deviated from this model. Pierre Bourdieu provides us with such a model in his book The Rules of Art. In this book, Bourdieu outlines what he sees as a common developmental trajectory within the history of French literature and painting. He further implies that this trajectory is one followed by all art forms, though with some differences in timing, on their way to the art world of today which is characterized, he claims, by homologous structures across the fields of literature, the theatre, painting, music, and other genres.2 This common pathway to the modern art world began during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when writers and painters in France were dependent on royal and aristocratic favor and subject to the authority of the royal academies. Writers first liberated themselves from this position of dependence with the rise of the more impersonal market for cultural goods that emerged and expanded in the wake of the economic transformations of the first half of the nineteenth century. However, beginning in the 1840s and 1850s, many writers began to rebel against the new tyranny of bourgeois taste and the commercial market driven by it. This rebellion, headed by writers like Baudelaire and Flaubert, took two forms: one directed against commercial culture in favor of socially engaged art; and a second that rejected both the former and the latter in the name of art for art’s sake. These same writers then helped painters like Manet and the Impressionists in their own battle to free themselves from the tutelage of the Academy, something the writing profession in general had accomplished much earlier.3 In the wake of these struggles, stable and homologous structures emerged in both the literary and artistic worlds that, according to Bourdieu, continue to characterize these fields right down to the present. On one side there stands the large body of commercially oriented writers and painters and the agents, publishing houses, and galleries that support them, the aim of whom is to appeal to a mass audience and thereby achieve immediate financial success. Arrayed against them is the self-declared avant garde, for whom popular appeal is incompatible with a commitment to higher artistic values. Avant-garde writers and

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artists aim for approbation from their peers, from progressive critics, and from a small, select – and often highly educated – audience, hoping that over the long term they will gain widespread recognition (and the accompanying material rewards) as a broader public comes to accept their work. The avant garde is not, however, a homogeneous movement but is rather itself divided into an older group of more established figures – the classical or “consecrated” avant garde in Bourdieu’s terminology – and a younger generation forced to fight a two-front war against both the mass market and their peers who have “made it.” Such struggles for distinction and prestige both within each of these groups of cultural producers (mass market oriented, established avant garde, radical avant garde) and among the groups shape the internal dynamics in all artistic fields, according to Bourdieu.4 To what extent does this schema, derived as it is from the history of French literature and painting, apply to the developmental trajectory of opera? It is only possible to sketch out a brief answer here. If we focus first on the two countries treated in this volume, we discover in both significant deviations from Bourdieu’s model. In Italy, the opening of the first commercial opera house in Venice in 1637 less than four decades after the birth of the genre meant that composers there were able to free themselves very quickly from dependence on the court and aristocratic patronage of Florence, Mantua, and Rome. As Wendy Heller has noted above, opera in Venice was an industry, and, thanks to the impresarios whose activities Franco Piperno, John Rosselli, William Holmes, and the Glixons have so vividly reconstructed, this industry soon spread to all corners of the peninsula.5 While, as Piperno shows in this volume, both central and local governments may have helped to create favorable conditions for opera, the fortunes of composers depended entirely on the response of audiences consisting largely of local elites who, accustomed as they were to attending most performances during a given season, were extremely knowledgeable – if not always fully attentive – listeners. What is striking here is that, despite the tremendous pressures and often meager rewards offered by this market-based system to composers and librettists, they never organized an intellectual movement

Conclusion

against it of the kind instigated, according to Bourdieu, by progressive French writers and painters of the mid-nineteenth century. In other words, there never was an avant garde within the world of the classical Italian opera industry. Given the lack of alternative, non-commercial, sources of financial support capable of underwriting the tremendous costs of opera productions, it is difficult to see how there could have been. The displacement of the impresario by the publisher as the key figure in the Italian system during the last third of the nineteenth century brought no major change in this respect since the motives of the latter were equally dominated by commercial concerns. It is noteworthy that the most significant “revolt” that did take place within the world of the Italian lyric stage – that of Gluck and his reform operas – reached its culmination under the very different production system of the Viennese court. In France, the founding of the Royal Academy of Music (the Op´era) and the parallel creation by Quinault and Lully of the trag´edie lyrique as both an alternative to Italian opera and, as Catherine Kintzler has argued, a rival to the spoken theatre long prevented the breakthrough of a commercially oriented opera business. The Op´era was a leading institution of state and the latter long decreed that only trag´edies lyriques and op´era-ballets should be performed there. As William Weber has elsewhere shown, this restriction, combined with the length of the season (most often 120–160 performances per annum) and the bureaucratic process for commissioning new works, transformed the Op´era after the death of Lully in 1687 into a repertory house built around his works and, in the eighteenth century, those of Rameau as well.6 Thus, as Weber has remarked, “programming did not necessarily reflect public taste”7 but rather served other, primarily ideological, purposes. Under these conditions, the opposition to the operatic mainstream was represented by the forbidden: Italian opera and op´era-comique. The visit of an Italian troupe to the Op´era during the 1752/1753 and 1753/1754 seasons proved popular, but the backlash against them (the Querelle des Bouffons) put an end to this experiment. With the arrival of Marie-Antoinette, acquainted from her native Vienna with a different theatrical regime, on the throne in 1774, the old restrictions were soon

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loosened and German and Italian composers (Gluck, Piccinni, Salieri, Cherubini, Sacchini) flocked to the French capital to compose new works – albeit in French – for the Op´era.8 At least a partial victory, in Bourdieu’s terms, of the commercial theatre over the Academy did occur, however, in 1831 when the management of the Op´era was turned over to a directeur-entrepreneur, a businessman who, with the help of a sizeable subsidy from the state, sought to turn the theatre into a profitable enterprise. As Jane Fulcher has shown, this subsidy was purchased at the price of continuous, interventionist, government oversight.9 Aside from the years 1854 to 1866, when direct state administration was restored, director-entrepreneurs were to run the Op´era for the rest of the century, attempting to earn back their initial investment (or that of their backers) while meeting their contractual obligation to produce grand operas and ballets in sumptuous stagings worthy of France’s leading theatre. As Christophe Charle emphasizes in his contribution to this volume, by the last third of the nineteenth century this system had led to artistic stagnation, with only sixteen new works premiered at the Op´era between 1870 and 1900. A principal reason behind this, as he states, was the house’s fragile budgetary position, caused in good measure by the immense costs associated with mounting Grand Opera, combined with the conservatism of its core public. For the Op´era’s financial health depended heavily on the good will of conservative subscribers from the haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy who, during the last third of the century, purchased about 40 percent of the tickets accounting for 60 percent of total revenue.10 Because subscribers, many of them box holders, expected to visit the house regularly and see a varied program, the management was obliged, as in the eighteenth century, to offer a large number (160–180) of performances each year. Given the financial and artistic risks of new productions, this was only possible as a repertory house built around the grand operas of Meyerbeer, Hal´evy and Rossini and the works of Gounod (Faust, Rom´eo et Juliette), Thomas (Hamlet), Mozart (Don Giovanni) and Verdi (Rigoletto, A¨ıda, later Otello).11

Conclusion

When the Op´era’s management did commission new operas, its aim was of course to bring works to the stage that would find immediate acceptance among its core public and hence could be added to the permanent repertory. The same was true of the director-entrepreneurs in charge of the Op´era-comique who, less burdened with the cost of lavish productions and less dependent on subscribers, could organize – as Charle shows – thirty-five world premieres at the Salle Favert during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. While this rate of creation of market-oriented new works was lower than that of the Italian opera industry, France – unlike Italy – did see a major intellectual reaction against commercial opera during this period. Ironically, it was inspired principally (though not exclusively) by a man who, in 1849, wrote that he wished to see Paris “burned to rubble,” Richard Wagner.12 Viewed in another way, however, this is not very surprising. Wagner had spent formative years between 1839 and 1841 and again in 1849 in the French capital, where he composed The Flying Dutchman, read the works of Saint-Simon and Proudhon, and became acquainted with the highly successful works of his compatriot Meyerbeer. The latter came to embody for Wagner the spirit of commercialized opera, centered around audience-pleasing effects in the interest of material success, against which his own “music of the future” was directed. When Wagner returned to Paris in 1859 and attempted to win over the French capital with concerts featuring excerpts from his operas and with the (famously disastrous) premiere of Tannh¨auser in 1861 at the Op´era, it is significant that his most prominent supporter was Baudelaire, a key figure in Bourdieu’s account of the emergence of a modern art world in France structured around the opposition between market-driven cultural production and the “art for art’s sake” of the avant garde. As Christophe Charle has remarked above, Wagner the theoretician and composer proved to be a polarizing figure in the world of French music after 1860, leading to a reproduction of the academic/avant garde dichotomy already present in literary and visual arts fields. He attracted supporters among composers like Chabrier, d’Indy and Chausson and among critics who directed their ire against,

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for example, Massenet, whose music was condemned for its supposed commercialism.13 In fact, Massenet readily admitted the significance of Wagner, and in operas like Manon sought to wed some of his innovations, including the leitmotif, to more traditional French forms in the interest of dramatic effectiveness.14 Yet, as Steven Huebner and above all Jane Fulcher have shown, an extra-musical factor, namely Wagner’s political views, prevented a simple division of French musicians into progressive supporters and conservative opponents of the composer.15 A progressive artist like Debussy felt obliged to distance himself from the “musician of the future” due to his German chauvinism, but he did this by going beyond Wagner to create his own, identifiably French, variant of modern music, most notably in Pell´eas et M´elisande, certainly the most avant-garde score theretofore heard at the Op´era-comique. On the other hand, as Fulcher emphasizes in her contributions here, some extreme French nationalists like d’Indy were attracted to Wagner because of his anti-Semitic attacks on musical commercialism (embodied by Meyerbeer and Offenbach) and on “Judified” mass culture more generally. During the interwar period, as Fulcher demonstrates, the battle lines were redrawn again as both progressive and conservative composers turned towards neoclassicism. Henceforth, the division between the avant garde and its opponents was determined as much by the ideas or ideological positions incorporated within stage works as by internal stylistic differences. In Italy, the home of commercial opera, no similar avant-garde opposition arose to the tradition of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi in the wake of Wagner’s international breakthrough. Rather, that tradition, supplemented, as Christophe Charle has noted, with a small number of imports from France, formed the basis of an opera business that was moving towards a repertory system. The new works composed by Verdi’s successors had to compete with that repertory as well as with newly popular forms of “light” music for the attention of a larger, less socially exclusive, strata of cultural consumers. The composer most successful at doing so, Giacomo Puccini, drew inspiration both from Massenet’s lyrical setting of dialogue and from Wagnerian harmonies and orchestration, all in the service of the greatest

Conclusion

possible emotional impact, the political valence of which, as the Steinbergs argue, is open to question. After 1914, a kind of avant garde did emerge around the “generation of 1880” (Casella, Pizzetti, Resphighi) and among Futurist-inspired composers like Malpiero, but this took the form less of a radical reform of opera than of a greater interest in instrumental and chamber music. Many of these artists held official positions under the fascist regime, a period when, perhaps surprisingly, Italy became better acquainted with progressive tendencies elsewhere through the new Venice music festival.16 By 1936, opera had clearly lost its place as the most popular form of entertainment, with Italians spending more than seventeen times as much on cinema as on opera tickets.17 It was in German-speaking Europe, the homeland of Wagner, that the trajectory of opera after 1870 most closely followed the path sketched out by Bourdieu. On the one hand, composers like Strauss in Elektra and of course Berg in Wozzeck and Lulu and Schoenberg in Erwartung and Moses und Aron carried forward Wagner’s radical example that the music of opera should keep pace with and make use of the most advanced techniques of instrumental and chamber music regardless of the reaction of the mass public. On the other hand, Strauss himself from Rosenkavalier onwards as well as other successful opera composers like Schreker and Korngold employed through composition and advanced harmonies, combined with often titillating subject matter, in the interest of commercial success. After 1945, as Antoine Hennion points out, cultural modernists across the West, but especially in France, initially attacked opera as a less pure, and hence somehow second-rate, form of music. This attitude was captured most vividly by Pierre Boulez’s statement, later disavowed, that he wished to blow up all opera houses. Nonetheless, the model provided by the works of Berg and Schoenberg permitted other avant-garde composers like Henze, Zimmermann, Stockhausen, and Berio to turn to opera composition with something like a clear conscience. Indeed, the 1990s saw the premieres of over 500 operas worldwide.18 The material precondition for this flourishing during the postwar period of (most often modernist) opera was undoubtedly the shift towards substantial

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subsidies for public theatres and classical radio, above all in western Europe, which removed much of the financial risk associated in the past with mounting difficult new works.19 Yet, in keeping with Bourdieu’s predictions, few of the avant-garde operas produced over the past century have found favor with the broader (opera-going) public, as the many empty seats at performances of even Wozzeck attest. That public is, however, no longer being served with a regular stream of new commercially oriented creations, as is still the case in the fields of theatre and film. It is content instead to attend performances from the standard repertory, albeit a repertory that has expanded in recent decades through a new openness towards Baroque music, towards Russian and Czech opera, and towards previously neglected works of otherwise famous composers and of composers persecuted during the twentieth century (entartete Musik). Meanwhile, between these two poles of new modernist works of limited appeal and routine, through popular repertory performances another kind of avant-garde phenomenon has entered the opera house: the radical reinterpretation, through the use of unconventional sets, costumes, and acting style, of works belonging to the classical canon. Such productions, with their combination of unaltered, familiar music and radically unfamiliar stage design, represent to many a more acceptable face of the avant garde than entirely new compositions written in a difficult musical language. Yet the degree to which this Regietheater has been able to establish itself and gain acceptance from regular opera-goers has varied substantially between Germany and France on the one hand and the more conservative Austria and Italy on the other, despite roughly similar degrees of public subsidization (and hence independence from immediate market pressures). To explain these differences, it is necessary to look beyond production conditions to the significance attached to opera attendance among different social groups in these countries – precisely the kind of investigation carried out by Bourdieu in Distinction. This subject, which can be approached using both survey and ethnographic (participant observation) methods, has received far too little attention since Bourdieu’s pioneering work, though an important research project on the social meaning of opera in Argentina is

Conclusion

currently under way at the Teatro Col´on and other theatres in Buenos Aires led by Claudio Benzecry.20 In this brief concluding discussion, I have sought to illustrate how a social science theory that addresses the dynamics of long-term historical change within the arts – in this case one provided by Bourdieu – can be used to bring together the rich research results of the systems of meaning and conditions of production approaches that have been inspired by the historical turns within the humanities and social sciences. The great advantage of such a theoretical framework, whether it be one inspired by Bourdieu or one drawn from a different methodological tradition, is that it encourages systematic comparisons among the traditional centers of opera production and reception. While our volume has focused only on France and Italy, the suggestive nature of this juxtaposition will, we hope, encourage more explicitly comparativehistorical work within the developing interdisciplinary field of opera studies.

n ot e s 1 For a fuller discussion of this comparative-historical literature, see Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 1–28, and “Democracy and Dictatorship in Interwar Western Europe Revisited,” World Politics (April 1998). 2 Pierre Bourdieu, Les R`egles de l’art: Gen`ese et structure du champ litt´eraire (Paris: Seuil, 1992), p. 228. 3 Ibid., pp. 107–115, 121, 154–155. 4 Ibid., pp. 221–228. 5 John Rosselli, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); John Rosselli, “Opera Production, 1780–1880,” in Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, eds., Opera Production and Its Resources, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 81–164; Franco Piperno, “Opera Production to 1780,” in ibid., pp. 1–79; Beth L. Glixon and Jonathan E. Glixon, Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice (New York: Oxford University Press,

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6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19

20

2006); William C. Holmes, Opera Observed: Views of a Florentine Impresario in the Early Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). William Weber, “La musique ancienne in the Waning of the Ancien R´egime,” Journal of Modern History 56 (March 1984), 58–88. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., pp. 84–85. Jane Fulcher, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Steven Huebner, French Opera at the fin de si`ecle: Wagnerism, Nationalism and Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 7. Ibid., p. 2; Michael Walter, Die Oper ist ein Irrenhaus (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1997), p. 47. Quoted in Martin Geck, Richard Wagner (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2004), p. 28. See also Fulcher, The Nation’s Image, pp. 183–200. Huebner, French Opera at the fin de si`ecle, pp. 164–165. Ibid., pp. 69–72. Huebner, French Opera at the fin de si`ecle; Jane F. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Jane F. Fulcher, ed., Debussy and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jane F. Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1987), pp. 5–7, 89–91. Ibid., p. 64. Elisabeth Schirmer, Kleine Geschichte der Oper (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), p. 251. In the United States, where such risks remain substantial, many more opera composers have distanced themselves over the past two decades from modernist strictures and attempted to write new works that are more immediately “accessible,” some of which, especially the “minimalist” operas of Philip Glass and John Adams, have enjoyed a measure of success. A preliminary report is available in Claudio Benzecry, “Beauty at the Gallery: Operatic Community and Sentimental Education in Contemporary Buenos Aires,” in Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett,

Conclusion eds., The Practice of Culture (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2006). Final results will be available in Benzecry’s Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, New York University, tentatively entitled “A Night at the Opera: High Culture, Moral Engagement, Middle Class Ethos and Popular Practice in the Opera Houses of Buenos Aires.”

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INDEX

Abbate, Carolyn, 52, 127, 303 In Search of Opera, 301, 303 Unsung Voices, 5, 303 Abbiati, Albino, 206 Abbott, Andrew, 7 Acad´emie Royale de Musique, see also Op´era, 72, 73, 77, 176, 355 Accademia degli Imperturbabili, librettist Il Tolomeo, 38 Accademia degli Incogniti, 35, 51 Action Franc¸aise, 317 Acton, John, 145 Adami, Giuseppe, 274, 276 Adams, John, 362 Adorno, Theodor, 4, 292, 294, 304, 307, 312, 314, 323–324 Aeschylus Oresteia, 321 Agulhon, Maurice, 318 Albaret, le comte d’ Scylla et Glaucus, 84 Alexander the Great, 46 Alfano, Franco, 270, 275, 276, 287 Andr´e, Johann, 297 Andr´e, Naomi, 31–32 Andreozzi, Gaetano Saulle, 145 Annales School, 6, 7 Anne, Queen of England, 169 Anthropology, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 312, 313 Apuleius Metamorphoses, 46 Aretino, Pietro Ragionamenti, 52 Aristophanes, 77 Aristotle, 49, 83 Poetics, 74 Ashbrook, William, 272–273, 275, 276 Auber, Daniel Franc¸ois, 339, 340, 341, 348

Fra Diavolo, 349 La Muette de Portici, 184, 340 Aureli, Aurelio, 38 Alessandro Magno in Sidonia, 42, 46–47 L’Antigona delusa da Alceste, 38 Claudio Cesare, 41, 43–46, 51 Auric, Georges, 320 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 117, 310, 337, 338, 339, 341, 345 Bachelet, Alfred, 129 Un Jardin sur l’Oronte, 120–121, 129, 319 Badovero, Camillo Sesto Tarquinio, 38 Baglioni family, 150–153 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 304 Ballet, see also com´edie-ballet, dance, 77, 81–82, 84–85, 144, 145, 344, 355 Banti, Alberto, 194–197, 200, 228, 231, 241 Baritone voice, 93 Barr`es, Maurice, 123 Les D´eracin´es, 124 Un Jardin sur l’Oronte, 119–121, 319 Barthes, Roland, 9, 10 Bartlet, Elizabeth, 17, 30–31 Bass voice, 96, 100 Bassi, Carolina, 89, 96, 97, 101, 111, 112, 113, 114 Bassi, Nicol`a, 100 Battoni, Pompeo, 50 Baudelaire, Charles, 353, 357 Baxandall, Michael, 336–337, 349 Bayreuth Festival, 251, 271, 310 Beau monde, 170–173, 175–176 Beauchamp, Pierre, 54, 71 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 117, 337, 341, 344, 350 Fidelio, 90, 95, 98

395

396

Index Beethoven, Ludwig van (cont.) Leonore (1805), 90, 98 Leonore (1806), 90, 98 Bellini, Giovanni, 50 Bellini, Vincenzo, 88, 91, 92, 161, 182, 231, 270, 273, 358 Bianca e Fernando, 113 Norma, 106 Benda, Julien La Trahison des clers, 319 Benzecry, Claudio, 362–363 Berchet, Giovanni, 195 Berg, Alban, 359 Lulu, 359 Wozzeck, 359, 360 Bergeron, Katherine and Philip Bohlman Disciplining Music, 11 Berio, Luciano, 269, 287, 359 Berlin, 166, 176 Berlioz, Hector, 245, 253, 295 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 282–287 The Spider’s Strategem, 277, 278, 282–287 Bertrand, Paul, 123 Bianchi, A.E., 208 Bianconi, Lorenzo, 17, 135 Bianconi, Lorenzo and Giorgio Pestelli Opera Production and its Resources, 17 Bizet, Georges, 252, 253, 339, 341 Carmen, 259, 264, 339 Blacking, John, 330, 331, 345, 347 Blasetti, Alessandro, 271–272 Bloc National, 116, 118, 317, 326 Blum, L´eon, 125 Boito, Camillo Senso, 279 Bokina, John Opera and Politics: From Monteverdi to Henze, 301 Boretti, Giovanni Claudio Cesare, 41, 43 Borghi, Giovanni Battista Olimpiade, 142 Borodin, Alexander, 255 Boschot, Adolphe, 119 Bossuet, Jacques-Benigne, 83 Bouilly, Jean-Nicolas, 98 Boulez, Pierre, 339, 359

Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 11, 263, 291, 304–306, 312, 313–314, 322, 323–324, 325, 346, 347, 351, 352, 353–354, 356, 357, 359, 360 Distinction, 11, 292, 304, 360–361 La Domination masculine, 313 Homo Academicus, 292, 305 The Rules of Art, 292, 353–354 Braudel, Fernand, 139 Brecht, Bertolt Mahagonny Songspiel, 321 Bretzner, C.F., 297, 299 Brooks, Cleanth, 8 Bruneau, Alfred, 253, 265, 318 L’Attaque du Moulin, 265 Le Rˆeve, 265 Busenello, Giovanni Francesco Amore inamorato, 51 Didone, 38 L’incoronazione di Poppea, 34, 37, 42–43 La prosperit`a infelice di Giulio Cesare dittatore, 40 Bussani, Francesco Antonino e Pompeiano, 42, 43, 51 Bussotti, Sylvano, 273 Byron, Lord, 87 Calhoun, Craig, 7, 351 Cambert, Robert La Pastorale d’Issy, 73 Les Peines et les plaisirs de l’Amour, 84 Pomone, 84 Cambridge Opera Journal, 5 Cammarano, Salvadore, 110, 185, 186–189, 193, 236 Campistron, Jean Galbert de Acis et Galat´ee, 84 Campra, Andr´e Le Carnaval de Venise, 84 L’Europe galante, 82 Les Fˆetes v´enitiennes, 85 Fragments de M. de Lully, 84 Idom´en´ee, 86 Canteloube, Joseph Le Mas, 123, 319 Vercing´etorix, 124 Cantillon, Richard, 164 Capitelli, Luigi, 95 Caracalla, Antoninus, 43

Index Carcano, Giulio, 224 Carlo Alberto, King of Sardinia, 197, 201–202, 207, 238 Carnesecchi, Riccardo, 232 Carr´e, Albert, 249–250 Carreras, Jos´e, xxii Cartel des Gauches, 122, 127 Casella, Alfredo, 359 Castrati, 32, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 97, 98, 102, 103–104, 106, 108, 109, 149, 153, 308 Cavour, Count Camillo Benso di, 181 Celletti, Rodolfo, 109 Censorship, 181, 184, 199–200, 228–229 Chabrier, Emmanuel, 253, 357 Gwendoline, 260 Chailly, Riccardo, 238 Charle, Christophe, 136, 176, 356, 357, 358 Charles II, King of England, 166 Charpentier, Gustave, 253, 265 Louise, 15–16, 261 Charpentier, Marc-Antoine Le Malade imaginaire, 84 M´ed´ee, 86 Chartier, Roger, 6, 312–313 Chˆatelet, Th´eaˆ tre du (Paris), 247 Chausson, Ernst, 357 Cherubini, Luigi, 161, 356 Chiossone Canto degli italiani, 226–228 Cinque giornate (Milan 1848), 181, 183, 204, 206–207, 223, 238 Cl´ement, Catherine Opera, or the Undoing of Women, 14 Cl´ement, Etienne Vercing´etorix, 124 Cl´ement, F´elix, 340–341 Coccia, Carlo, 231 Cocteau, Jean, 318 Coeuroy, Andr´e Dictionnaire critique de la musique ancienne et moderne, 341 Cohen, Gustave, 116 Coke, Lady Mary, 171 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 176 Colette, 125, 127 Com´edie-ballet, 76, 84, 85 Com´edie Franc¸aise, 250

Commedia dell’arte, 51 Contralto voice, 96 Cornali, Pietro, 229, 231 Canto degli italiani, 226–228 Corneille, Pierre Cinna, 299 Discours de l’utilit´e et des parties du po`eme dramatique, 85 Corradi, Giulio Cesare Il Nerone, 38, 42, 46, 47–48 Cortesi, Carolina, 89, 99 Cowper, Lord George, 158 Croce, Benedetto, 280 Crosten, William, 345 Dadaism, 321 Dallapiccola, Luigi, 273 Dalle Vacche, Angela, 280, 281 Dalman-Naldi, Adelina, 97–98 Dance, see also ballet, com´edie-ballet, 37, 53–54, 57–58, 60, 61–63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 80, 82, 85 Danchet, Antoine Fragments de M. de Lully, 84 Idom´en´ee, 86 Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 299 Darnton, Robert, 6 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 6 Debord, Guy, 83 Debussy, Claude, 129, 262, 339, 342, 358 Pell´eas et M´elisande, 260, 261, 265, 358 Delannoy, Marcel Le Poirier de mis`ere, 122–123, 319 De Laurentiis, Dino, 273 Delibes, L´eo, 253, 254, 264 Jean de Nivelle, 260 Lakm´e, 254, 260 Dell’Abatte, Niccol`o, 50 DeMille, Cecil B., 273 Denis, Maurice, 118 Dent, Edward J., 297 Derrida, Jacques, 312, 322, 324 De Sanctis, Francesco, 267 Desmarest, Henry V´enus et Adonis, 86 Destouches, Andr´e Cardinal Callirho´e, 86 Iss´e, 84, 86

397

398

Index Destouches, Philippe N´ericault Les Amours de Ragonde, 77 Dezarnaud, Robert, 128 D’Indy, Vincent, 121, 123, 124, 126–127, 357, 358 La L´egende de Saint Christophe, 116–119, 121, 126, 130, 319 Dio Cassius, 41 Divertissement, 54, 55–56, 57, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 76, 82, 351 D¨orrie, Doris, 287 Domingo, Placido, xxii Donizetti, Gaetano, 88, 91, 101, 148, 161, 182, 231, 273, 358 Belisario, 193–194 Il castello di Kenilworth, 113 Chiara e Serafina, 112 Il diluvio universale, 145 L’esule di Roma, 113 Il paria, 113 Poliuto, 229, 230 Dreyfus Affair, 117, 119, 124, 260, 261, 318, 326 Dufourcq, Norbert La Musique des origines a` nos jours, 340 Dufresny, Charles, 167 Dumesnil, Ren´e, 120 Durey, Louis, 320 Durkheim, Emile, 325, 334, 347 18BL, theatrical spectacle, 271–272, 276 English Civil War, 166 Ernst August, Duke of Hannover, 41, 51 Ethnomusicology, 11 Euripides Alcestis, 38, 55 Fano, 142 Fascism, Italian, 137, 268–269, 270–272, 273, 274–275, 276, 278, 281, 282–283, 286, 359 Fauquet, Jo¨el-Marie, 348 Faur´e, Gabriel, 314–315, 316–319, 322 Requiem, 316, 317 Feminism, 12 Ferdinand II, King of the Two Sicilies, 202 Ferdinand IV, King of Naples, 144–148

Film/Cinema, 269, 271–272, 273, 278, 281, 296, 309, 348, 359 Flaubert, Gustave, 304, 346, 353 L’Education sentimentale, 304 Florence, 158 Forzano, Giovacchino, 273–274, 276 Foucault, Michel, 6, 8, 10, 196, 292, 303, 304, 312, 313, 314, 324, 325 The Order of Things, 303 Francesco Lucca, publishers, 206, 208 Frankfurt School, 4 Freemasonry, 145 French Revolution, 6, 17, 30–31, 41, 87, 92, 144, 243, 260 Freud, Sigmund, 285, 286 Moses and Monotheism, 277–278 Fulcher, Jane, 15–16, 32–33, 175, 260, 292–293, 304, 345, 349, 351, 356, 358 French Cultural Politics, 15 French Grand Opera, 5 Fusconi, Giovanni Battista Amore inamorata, 46, 51 Gallet, Louis Patrie, 264 Gallini, Sir Andrew, 172 Galuppi, Baldassarre, composer, 150 L’Arcadia in Brenta, 150, 157 Arcifanfano re de’matti, 150 Il filosofo di campagna, 150 Gard, Roger Martin du, 119 Garfinkel, Harold, 331 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 197 Gazzaniga, Giuseppe Don Giovanni, 150, 153 Geertz, Clifford, 7, 8, 312, 314 Georg Ludwig, Duke of Hannover, 41 Gerhard, Anselm, 346 Gheon, Henri, 116 Giannone, Pietro, 145 Gilbert, Gabriel Les Peines et les plaisirs de l’Amour, 84 Gilbert, W.S., 251 Gille, Philippe Manon, 264 Gilson, Etienne, 116 Giordano, Umberto, 255, 260, 273 Andrea Chenier, 257

Index Fedora, 257 Giovanni Canti, publishers, 208 Gisberti, Domenic Caligula delirante, 51 Glass, Philip, 362 Glixon, Beth and Jonathan, 354 Inventing the Business of Opera, 17 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 168, 299, 355, 356 Iphig´enie en Aulide, 295 Iphig´enie en Tauride, 298 Orfeo ed Euridice, 295 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 145 Goldoni, Carlo, 150 L’Arcadia in Brenta, 150, 157 Arcifanfano re de’ matti, 150 Il filosofo di campagna, 150 Gondinet, Edmond, 264 Gossett, Philip, 112, 136–137 Gozzi, Carlo Turandot, 275 Gounod, Charles, 253, 339, 341 Cinq-Mars, 260 Faust, 295, 339, 356 Polyeucte, 260 Rom´eo et Juliette, 356 Gramsci, Antonio, 267–268, 278, 280, 281, 282 Gregorian chant, 117 Gregory XVI, 201 Griffiths, D.W., 273 Guglielmi, Pietro Alessandro Debora e Sisara, 145 Guidi, Francesco Inno subalpino, 201 Guiraud, Ernest, 253 Piccolino, 264 Habermas, J¨urgen, 167 “Habitus”, 263 Hadlock, Heather, 109 Hal´evy, Jacques Fromental, 340, 341, 356 La Juive, 108, 340 Hal´evy, Ludovic Carmen, 264 Handel, George Frideric, 53, 144, 174–175, 306–307, 309, 310 Alcina, 105, 114

Messiah, 158 Serse, 105, 114 Hanning, B.R. Concise History of Western Music, 341 Harewood, Lord, 349 Harris-Warrick, Rebecca, 30, 351 Haskell, Francis, 336–337, 339, 349 Hedges, Inez, 321 Hegel, G.W.F., 323 Heller, Wendy, 31, 354 Hennion, Antoine, 293, 359 Henze, Hans Werner, 359 Herodotus, 41 Hindemith, Paul, 321 Hin und Zur¨uck, 321 History/Historians, 2, 3–4, 5–6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15–16, 17, 138, 139, 302, 312–313, 339, 351 Hitler, Adolf, 271 Holmes, William, 354 Honegger, Arthur, 320 Hue, Georges Dans l’ombre de la cath´edrale, 121–122, 319 Huebner, Steven, 346, 358 Hugo, Victor, 87 Humperdinck, Engelbert, 255, 256 H¨ansel und Gretel, 256 Hunt, Lynn, 6 Hutcheon, Linda and Michael Opera: Desire, Disease, Death, 301 Ilaria, Francesco Inno nazionale dedicato alla Legione civica romana mobilizzata, 223 Impresarios, 135, 138 Intermezzo, 139, 149, 150 Izzo, Francesco, 231 Jauss, Hans, 348 Jazz, 125, 126, 131, 343 Johann Friedrich, Duke of Hannover, 41, 51 Johnson, James Listening in Paris, 16 Johnson, Victoria, 334, 351, 352 Jonci`eres, Victorin, 245, 247, 253, 258, 263 Dmitri, 258, 260 Joseph II, Emperor of Austria, 296, 297 Journal des Luxus und der Mode, 160, 162–163 Justin, 41

399

400

Index Kerman, Joseph, 35, 305 Contemplating Music, 10 Opera as Drama, 14, 18, 302–303 King’s Theatre (London), 171, 176 Kintzler, Catherine, 29–30, 351, 355 Koechlin, Charles, 320 Koestenbaum, Wayne, 303 The Queen’s Throat, 14, 303 Kolker, Robert, 285, 286 Korngold, Erich Wolfgang, 359 Kracauer, Siegfried, 345 Kramer, Lawrence Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 11 Kroll Opera (Berlin), 123 La Barre, Michel de La V´enitienne, 85 Lacombe, Herv´e, 349 La Fenice (Venice), 89, 91, 110, 193, 279 Lafont, Joseph de Les Fˆetes de Thalie, 77 Lalo, Edouard, 253 Le Roy d’Ys, 260 Lalo, Pierre, 123 La Motte, Antoine Houdar de L’Europe galante, 82 Iss´e, 84, 86 La V´enitienne, 85 La Scala (Milan), 89, 91, 96, 110, 112, 113, 114, 184, 251, 257, 269, 270, 273, 274 Latilla, Gaetano La finta cameriera, 150 Latour, Bruno, 346 Leclair, Jean-Marie Scylla et Glaucus, 84 Lee, Sung Sook, xxviii L´eon, Paul, 315, 316, 326 Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 255 Leppert, Richard and Susan McClary Music and Society, 10 Levarie, Siegmund, 302 “Les Six,” 320–321, 322 Limousin, Jean Le Poirier de mis`ere, 122 Lindenberger, Herbert, 25, 291–292, 293, 351, 352 Opera: The Extravagant Art, 25

Opera in History, 5, 25 Lipparini, Caterina, 89, 95 Lippmann, Friedrich, 234 Literary Criticism/Studies, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 25, 138, 291, 303, 351 Livorno, 140–141 Livy Roman Histories, 39 Loewenberg, Alfred, 244 London, 160–162, 164–165, 166–176 London und Paris, 160, 161–162, 165 Louis XIV, 57–58, 60, 69, 166, 169, 299, 306, 338, 343 Louis XV, 166 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 54, 67, 68, 71, 73, 78, 166, 295, 351, 355 Acis et Galat´ee, 71, 84 Alceste, 30, 54, 55, 56–57, 67, 69, 70, 71, 81 Armide, 30, 54, 65–67, 68, 69, 71 Atys, 30, 54, 55, 58–63, 64, 67, 69, 71 Bell´erophon, 68, 174 Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, 84, 299 Cadmus et Hermione, 73 Les Fˆacheux, 84 Les Fˆetes de l’Amour et de Bacchus, 84 Pers´ee, 68, 71 Pha¨eton, 71 Roland, 71 Th´es´ee, 86 Magazzari, Gaetano, 197, 200–204, 205, 229, 230, 231, 238–239 L’amnistia data dal sommo Pio IX, 200–201 Inno guerriero italiano, 203–204 Inno siciliano, 202–203 Inno subalpino, 201–202 Il primo giorno dell’anno, 200 Magritte, Ren´e, 286 Mahler, Gustav, 343 Malherbe, Henry, 127 Malpiero, Gian Francesco, 359 Mameli, Goffredo, 185, 237 “Fratelli d’Italia,” 231 “Suona la tromba,” 189–194 Manet, Edouard, 353 Manna, Ruggero, 208 Manzoni, Alessandro Marzo 1821, 195

Index Marcus, Millicent, 281 Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples, 144, 145 Maria Teresa, Empress of Austria, 145 Marin, Louis, 29 Mariotte, Antoine Salom´e, 118 Maritain, Jacques Art et scholastique, 116 Marotta, Alessandro Ai voluntarj Romani, 208 Marxism, 6, 7, 20, 324, 335 Mascagni, Pietro, 255, 270, 273 Cavalleria rusticana, 256 Mascardi, Agostino, 40 Dell’arte istorica, 39, 43 Mass´e, Victor, 253 Massenet, Jules, 127, 247, 252, 253, 254, 339, 341, 342, 349, 358 Le Cid, 260 H´erodiade, 247 Manon, 260, 264, 358 La Navarraise, 247 Le Roi de Lahore, 260 Werther, 260 Matthey, Carlo La partenza per Lombardia: canto guerriero, 225 Mayr, Giovanni Simone Atalia, 145 Medea in Corinto, 110 La rosa bianca e la rosa rossa, 91, 110 Mazarin, Cardinal, 73 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 136, 189–190, 191–192, 231 Filosofia della musica, 182–183 Istruzione generale per gli affratellati nella Giovine Italia, 195 McClary, Susan, 14, 16 Feminine Endings, 10 Medici Family, 140 Meilhac, Henri Carmen, 264 Manon, 264 Menander, 77 Menotti, Gian Carlo, 269 Tamu-Tamu, xxvii, xxviii Mercadante, Saverio, 231 Il giuramento, 184

M´erim´ee, Prosper, 264 Mermet, Auguste Jeanne d’Arc, 260 Messager, Andr´e, 129 Messiaen, Olivier Saint Franc¸ois d’Assise, 309 Metastasio, Pietro, 92, 111, 138, 144, 149 Alessandro nell’India, 143 Metropolitan Opera (New York), 256, 274 Meucci, Filippo Inno guerriero italiano, 203 Il primo giorno dell’anno, 200 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 88–92, 94–109, 117, 339, 340, 341, 342, 349, 356, 357, 358 L’Africaine, 88, 107 Il crociato in Egitto, 89, 92, 101, 102, 112 Emma di Resburgo, 89, 92, 98–99, 112 L’esule di Granata, 89, 92, 100–102, 111, 112, 113 Les Huguenots, 88, 107, 340 Margherita d’Anjou, 89, 92, 99–100, 113 Le Proph`ete, 88, 107 Robert le diable, 88, 107 Romilda e Costanza, 89, 92, 94–95, 96, 99, 101, 111 Semiramide riconosciuta, 89, 92, 95–98, 99, 101, 102, 111, 112, 114 Mezzo-soprano voice, 96, 99, 112 Michiele, Pietro Amore inamorato, 51 Milhaud, Darius, 320, 321–322 L’Abandon d’Ariane, 327 La D´elivrance de Th´es´ee, 327 L’Enl`evement d’Europe, 321–322 Minato, Nicol`o, 38 Pompeo Magno, 40 Modena, Duchy of, 141 Modernism, 332, 333, 338, 339, 342, 343, 359 Moli`ere Amphitryon, 84 Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, 84 Les Fˆacheux, 84 Le Malade imaginaire, 84 Mont´eclair, Michel Pignolet de Jepht´e, 82 Monterosso, Raffaello, 223, 233

401

402

Index Monteverdi, Claudio, 268 L’incoronazione di Poppea, 34, 37, 42–43, 47 L’Orfeo, 303 Morandi, Rosa, 89, 99, 112 Mouret, Jean Les Amours de Ragonde, 77 Les Fˆetes de Thalie, 77 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 139, 153, 161, 341 Betulia liberata, 158 La clemenza di Tito, 299 Don Giovanni, 150, 153, 295, 356 Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, 296–301, 304, 310 La finta semplice, 153 Idomeneo, 296 Le nozze di Figaro, 161 Sonata in A major K., 298 Die Zauberfl¨ote, 161, 299 “Musicalization,” 333–334, 345 Musicology/Musicologists, 2–3, 5, 9–13, 14, 15, 17, 138, 139, 156, 292, 293, 301–302, 305–306, 312, 325, 330, 334, 335, 348, 351 Mussolini, Benito, 121, 269–270, 271, 274–275, 283, 284, 286 Mussorgsky, Modest, 255 Myslivecek, Josef Isacco, 158 Nagano, Kent, 287 Naples, 144–148 Natalucci, Tiberio, 197, 205 Inni populari ad onore dell’immortale Pio IX, 199–200 Nero, 47 New Criticism, 8–9, 303 New Cultural History, 6, 8, 11–12, 13, 15–16 New Historicism, 8, 11, 291, 303 Nicole, Pierre, 83 Nora, Pierre, 6, 326 Novaro, Michele “Fratelli d’Italia,” 232 Offenbach, Jacques, 127, 253, 263, 358 Les Contes d’Hoffmann, 260 Op´era (Paris), see also Acad´emie royale de la musique, 17, 31, 54, 69, 70, 108, 115–116, 122, 123, 124, 130, 162, 166, 169, 171,

175, 198, 243, 245, 246, 248–249, 254, 257, 258, 263, 264, 315, 355–357 Opera buffa, 135, 139, 148–156, 231 Op´era-Comique (Paris), 122, 127, 129, 243, 245, 246, 248, 249, 255, 256, 264, 265, 357, 358 Op´era National Populaire, 247 Opera semiseria, 94 Opera seria, 93, 94, 148–149, 150, 296, 297, 303, 308 Orlandini, Giuseppe Maria Serpilla e Bacocco, 150 Pacini, Giovanni, 231 Painlev´e, Paul, 125 Paisiello, Giovanni, 139 Paladilhe, Emile, 253 Patrie, 264 Papal States, 141–142, 201 Paris, 160–162, 164–165, 166–176 Parker, Roger, 183–185, 232, 233, 234 Pastorale, 75–77, 78, 84 Pauls, Birgit, 232, 233 Pavarotti, Luciano P´ecour, Guillaume-Louis, 71 Pellegrin, Simon-Joseph Hippolyte et Aricie, 80 Jepth´e, 82 Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 139, 153 La serva padrona, 150, 153 Peri, Jacobo L’Euridice, 303 Perrin, Pierre La Pastorale d’Issy, 73 Pomone, 84 Pestelli, Giorgio, 17, 135 Piave, Francesco Maria, 184, 185, 186, 236 Piccinni, Niccol`o, 168, 356 Piperno, Franco, 135, 354 Pirrotta, Nino, 39 Pisaroni, Rosamunda, 89, 95, 96, 101, 111, 112, 114 Pius IX, 196, 197–201, 202, 204–205, 206–207, 223, 238 Pizzetti, Ildebrando, 273, 359 Plautus, 51, 77 Political Science, 352 Pollarolo, Carlo Francesco, 68

Index Pougin, Arthur, 233 Poulenc, Francis, 320 Pountney, David, 350 Powers, Harold, 272–273, 275, 276 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 357 Prussia, 166 Public Sphere, 167–168 Puccini, Giacomo, 127, 137, 181, 232, 255, 268, 270, 273, 274–275, 276, 287, 358–359 La Boh`eme, 257, 261 Madama Butterfly, 268 Manon Lescaut, 257 Tosca, 268 Turandot, 137, 268, 270, 272–276 Quaranta, Costantino, 208 Queer theory, 98 Querelle des Bouffons, 168, 339, 355 Quinault, Philippe, 54, 57, 67, 73, 355 Armide, 65 Bell´erophon, 174 Cadmus et Hermione, 73 Les Fˆetes de l’Amour et de Bacchus, 84 Th´es´ee, 86 Rabaud, Henri Le Miracle des loups, 122 Racine, Jean Ph`edre, 79, 80 Radiciotti, Giuseppe, 223 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 68, 351, 355 Les Bor´eades, 81 Hippolyte et Aricie, 80, 81, 82 Ransom, John Crowe, 8 Ravel, Maurice, 123, 124, 320, 321 L’Enfant et les sortil`eges, 115, 125–128, 305, 320 Le Tombeau de Couperin, 127 Regietheater, 352, 360 Reggio Emilia, 141 Renard, Jean-Franc¸ois Le Carnaval de Venise, 84 “Republic of Letters,” 165 Rescue operas, 95, 110–111 Respighi, Ottorino, 359 Revel, Jacques, 6 Reyer, Ernest, 253, 258

Sigurd, 258, 260 Ricci, Federico, 231 Ricci, Luigi, 231 Ricordi, publishers, 111, 112, 113, 184, 185, 189, 190, 199, 200, 204, 205, 207–223, 229, 230, 234, 238, 240 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 255 The Tsar’s Bride, 257 Ristorini family, 150 Robinson, Paul, 303 Opera and Ideas, 301, 303 Romani, Felice, 89, 92, 110, 112, 113 Romanticism, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 106, 109 Ronchetti-Monteviti, Stefano, 224–225, 240 Ronetti, Gaetano L’amnistia data dal sommo Pio IX, 200 Rosand, Ellen, 36, 37 Rosand, David, 35 Rosenthal, Manuel, 125 Rosselli, John, 109, 135, 136, 138, 182, 233, 354 Music and Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Italy, 17 The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi, 16, 135 Singers of Italian Opera, 17, 136 Rossellini, Roberto, 280 Rossi, Gaetano, 89, 92, 98, 110, 111, 112 Rossini, Gioachino, 88, 91, 112, 139, 153, 161, 182, 197, 231, 273, 356, 358 Adelaide di Borgogna, 110 Adina, 110 Armida, 92, 110 Aureliano in Palmira, 91 Il barbiere di Siviglia, 110 Bianca e Falliero, 96, 101, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114 La cambiale di matrimonio, 112 Cantata in onore del Sommo Pontefice Pio Nono, 197–199, 200, 223 La cenerentola, 110, 153 Le Comte Ory, 245 La donna del lago, 101, 110, 111, 114, 205, 206, 238, 241 Eduardo e Cristina, 99, 110, 112 Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra, 91, 110 Ermione, 101, 110, 114 La gazza ladra, 110 La gazzetta, 110

403

404

Index Rossini, Gioachino (cont.) Grido di esultazione riconoscente al Sommo Pontefice Pio IX, 197, 205, 206 Guillaume Tell, 187, 241 Inno nazionale dedicato alla Legione civica romana mobilizzata, 223–224 L’italiana in Algeri, 99 Maometto II, 101, 110, 113–114 Matilde di Shabran, 99, 110 Mos`e in Egitto, 101, 110, 145, 148 Otello, 99, 110 Ricciardo e Zoraide, 101, 110 Semiramide, 92, 101, 102, 110, 111 Le Si`ege de Corinthe, 198, 223 Tancredi, 91, 92, 99, 101, 111, 241 Zelmira, 110 Rouch´e, Jacques, 115–116, 118, 119, 130 Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste V´enus et Adonis, 86 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 83 Roussel, Albert, 320 Roy, Pierre-Charles Callirho´e, 86 Rubinstein, Nikolai, 255 Rud´e, Georges, 6 Sacchini, Antonio, 356 Sacrati, Francesco Bellerofonte, 41 Sacred opera, 135, 139, 144–148 Said, Edward, 15, 25 Culture and Imperialism, 25 Orientalism, 25, 300 Saint-Sa¨ens, Camille, 253, 254, 258, 315, 316, 339, 341, 349 Etienne Marcel, 247 Henry, 116, 258 La Princesse jaune, 260 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 357 Salieri, Antonio, 356 Sardou, Victorien, 257, 264 Patrie, 264 Sarti, Giuseppe Medonte, 143 Sartorio, Antonio Antonino e Pompeiano, 42 L’Orfeo, 68 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 323

Satie, Erik, 320, 321, 322 Parade, 322 Sawall, Michael, 233 Scarlatti, Alessandro, 139 Schiller, Friedrich, 258 Schmitt, Florent La Trag´edie de Salom´e, 118 Schnapp, Jeffrey, 270–272 Schoenberg, Arnold, 307, 323, 359 Erwartung, 359 Moses und Aron, 295, 359 Schola Cantorum, 117, 118, 126–127 Schreker, Franz, 359 Scott, Sir Walter, 87 Scribe, Eug`ene, 108, 263, 340, 348 Selli, Prospero, 229, 231 Medea in Corinto, 226 La partenza per Lombardia: canto guerriero, 226 Ricciarda, 226 Senigallia, 141 Shakespeare, William, 3 Sibelius, Jan, 343 Siena, 143 Simoni, Renato Turandot, 276 Singspiel, 296, 297, 298, 300 Skocpol, Theda, 7 Smart, Mary Ann, 232 Soboul, Albert, 6 Sociology/Sociologists, 2, 4, 5, 7–8, 10, 11, 12, 16, 20, 138, 293, 312, 331, 332, 334, 335, 344, 345, 347, 351, 352 Solie, Ruth Musicology and Difference, 11 Somma, Antonio, 193, 236 Re Lear, 193 Soprano voice, 94, 96, 104, 109, 111, 112 Spectacle, 79, 268, 269, 273, 276, 286 Stamatov, Peter, 137 Steinberg, Michael, 29, 137, 359 Stephanie, Gottlob, 297, 299 Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne, 137, 359 Stendhal, 112, 350 Sterbini, Pietro Inno siciliano, 202 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 359 Strauss, Richard

Index Elektra, 359 Der Rosenkavalier, 359 Stravinsky, Igor, 314, 321, 322, 323 Suetonius, 41 Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 251 Tacitus, Cornelius, 37, 41, 51 Annals, 44 Tailleferre, Germaine, 320 Tasso, Torquato Gerusalemme liberate, 65 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 255, 257 Teatro San Carlo (Naples), 91, 110, 114, 145, 226, 308 Tenor voice, 32, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 102, 104, 106, 107 Th´eaˆ tre des Champs Elys´ees, 247 Th´eaˆ tre Italien (Paris), 247, 254 Th´eaˆ tre Lyrique (Paris), 247, 249 Thomas, Ambroise Hamlet, 356 Thompson, E.P., 6 Till, Nicholas, 298 Tilly, Charles, 7 Tomlinson, Gary, 325 Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera, 301, 303 Toscanini, Arturo, 268, 273, 274, 276, 287 Tosi, Adelaide, 101, 113 Tourrasse, Andr´e Le Poirier de mis`ere, 122 Trag´edie lyrique, 17, 30, 73–75, 77–78, 79–80, 82, 83, 84, 355 Travesti roles/singers, 32, 87, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96–98, 99, 100, 101, 102–103, 109, 113, 114 Treitler, Leo, 10 “Turns,” Cultural and Historical, 2, 5, 13, 14, 15, 17, 351, 352, 361 Tuscany, Grand Duchy of, 140

268, 270, 273, 275, 276, 277, 278, 280, 284, 286, 288, 342, 349, 358 A¨ıda, 108, 245, 254, 356 Attila, 184, 185, 196, 234, 288 Un ballo in maschera, 283, 285, 288 La battaglia di Legnano, 181, 185, 186–189, 191, 195, 208, 226, 231 Il corsaro, 185 Don Carlos, 108, 349 Ernani, 184, 226, 231, 238, 288 Falstaff, 254, 268 I lombardi alla prima crociata, 184, 185, 231, 234 Luisa Miller, 236 I masnadieri, 189, 234 Macbeth, 184, 288 Nabucco, 145, 181, 183, 184, 185, 195, 229, 231, 234, 235 Otello, 254, 268, 356 Re Lear, 193 Requiem, 310 Rigoletto, 54, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 288, 356 Simon Boccanegra, 229 “Suona la tromba,” 189–194 La traviata, 304–305 Il trovatore, 236, 279, 281, 288, 309 I vespri siciliani, 186, 239 Verismo, 256, 268 Versailles Treaty, 315 Vichy Regime, 123, 129 Victor Emanuel II, King of Sardinia and of Italy, 197 Vienna, 171, 176 Vienna State Opera, 251, 257 Virgil Aeneid, 39 Georgics, 124 Visconti, Luchino, 280–282 Senso, 277, 278–282 Vogler, Abb´e Georg Joseph, 90 Vuillermoz, Emile, 340

Ungarelli, Rosa, 150 Valli, Alida, 278 Velluti, Giambattista, 89, 91, 102, 112 Verdi, Giuseppe, 136, 148, 229, 230, 231–232, 234, 236, 237, 238, 239, 244, 254, 255,

Wagner, Richard, 120, 121, 131, 243, 244, 251, 255, 255, 257, 258–259, 261, 262, 271, 295, 308, 310, 338, 339, 341, 342, 344, 349, 357, 358, 359 Der fliegende Holl¨ander, 357

405

406

Index Wagner, Richard (cont.) G¨otterd¨ammerung, 305 Parsifal, 310 Der Ring des Nibelungen, 117 Tannh¨auser, 243 Walker, Frank, 182, 233 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 165 Warren, Robert Penn, 8 Weaver, William, 272 Weber, Carl Maria von, 90–110, 112, 161 Die Drei Pintos, 110 Euryanthe, 110 Der Freisch¨utz, 90, 91, 110, 161 Oberon, 110

Weber, Max, 4, 346 Weber, William, 3, 17, 136, 355 Weill, Kurt Mahagonny Songspiel, 321 Weimar, 160 Weinstock, Herbert, 223 Williams, Raymond, 10, 292, 304 Zandonai, Riccardo, 273 Zeffirelli, Franco, 273, 274 Ziani, Marco Alessandro Magno in Sidonia, 46–47 Zimmermann, Bernd Alois, 359 Zola, Emile, 250, 261, 265