Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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
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 Halévy’s La Juive
Diana R. Hallman
Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647–1785
Downing A. Thomas
Three Modes of Perception in Mozart: The Philosophical, Pastoral, and
Comic in Cosı̀ 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 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
ix
x Contents
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? 351
Thomas Ertman
Bibliography 364
Index 395
I L LU S T R AT I O N S
7.1 “Le suprême Bon Ton,” frontispiece, London und Paris, 1800
Source: Library of the University of Göttingen 163
9.1 Revenues of the Opéra and the Opéra-comique, 1875–1905
Source: Annuaires statistiques de la ville de Paris 248
xi
TA B L E S
xii
MUSICAL EXAMPLES
xiii
xiv List of musical examples
xv
xvi Notes on contributors
War and has just begun a new project on the sociology of opera in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany.
xxi
xxii Foreword
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 patron-
age 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 xxiii
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 com-
monly credited with genius. But the notion of field goes further to
posit a determinate relationship to a larger field of power and contes-
tation – as opera is related to money and politics and social prestige.
It posits an internal organization in terms of specific struggles for dis-
tinction (and possibly other “stakes”). And it is this which organizes
ideals of purity, of art for art’s sake, and denigrations of mere journal-
ists in relation to literature, mere decorators in relation to painting,
popular music in relation to serious music (and more narrowly instru-
mental purity in relation to singing). Opera is at once a challenge to
these ideals of aesthetic purity and a terrain of struggle over them:
xxiv Foreword
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 old-
fashioned 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 signifi-
cance. Obviously scholars have also studied riots outside opera houses
and social pressures influencing taste in operas. But too few stud-
ies 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 expres-
sion 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,
xxviii Foreword
the famous Paris staging of The Marriage of Figaro. Mozart’s music was
not only more beautiful and interesting (forgive the gratuitous eval-
uation) 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 Beaumar-
chais’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 work-
ing 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. Tamu-
Tamu gave her a big break and she went on to a distinguished interna-
tional 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 dif-
ferent axis from that usually used to distinguish popular from high art,
Foreword xxix
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 care-
ful considerations of just what we mean by Italian, French, or German
at different points in history or from the different perspectives of per-
formers, 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 partici-
pants 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?
xxx Foreword
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 xxxi
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.
5 This theme is developed especially in Part III of the current book.
6 See chapter 3 below by Catherine Kintzler.
7 See Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education,
Culture, and Society (London: Sage, second edition, 1990).
8 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.
9 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.
AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S
xxxii
INTRODUCTION: OPERA AND THE
AC A D E M I C T U R N S
Victoria Johnson
1
2 Victoria Johnson
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 3
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 dis-
ciplines in the study of opera – before examining the major lines of
inquiry that have emerged in opera studies with the help of the turns.
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
6 Victoria Johnson
Sociology
Literary criticism
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
10 Victoria Johnson
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 mean-
ing” 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 pri-
marily 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
14 Victoria Johnson
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 17
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
Introduction 19
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 Michèle 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, Sociétés, 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.
Siân 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 Rudé 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
22 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 Clément, 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.
Introduction 25
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
Régime,” 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 Französische Revolution als Bruch des gesellschaftlichen Bewußtseins
(Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1988), pp. 479–510; “The New
Repertory at the Opéra 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 Méhul and Opéra: 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
29
30 Jane F. Fulcher
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,” repre-
senting the established social order in a manner recalling the ancient
chorus.
Rebecca Harris-Warrick further examines the collectivities or “soci-
eties” that are represented on the French Baroque lyric stage, the man-
ner in which they are constructed in the drama, and the specific means
of communication that they employ. Her focus is on the different man-
ners 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 com-
municated 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 tragédie 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 31
The study that she planned for the volume, “The Opéra and the
Terror (1793–1794): La Réunion du 18 août, ou l’inauguration de la
République française 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 Repub-
lic. Her particular interest was in the manner in which the consciously
pedagogical Revolutionary fête and the Opéra intersected in works
such as La Réunion du 18 août (dedicated “Au Peuple souverain”), which
represented the real “Fête de l’Unité” within its dramatic context. With
costumes modeled after the “stations” of the fête and extensive “diver-
tissements” replete with Revolutionary airs and hymns, it blended
different realities in a new theatrical whole.
The question of verisimilitude which Bartlet explored in Revolution-
ary 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 Repub-
lic.” 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 cen-
tralized control, responded by projecting a “more fractured” – perhaps
realistic – sense of identity. The Venetian population could here envi-
sion itself differently, and in some cases in a manner that was diamet-
rically 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 André’s chapter on “Women’s Roles in Meyerbeer’s Operas.”
32 Jane F. Fulcher
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. André
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 protag-
onist 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 rela-
tion between it and the cultural or political world that surrounds it.
In the specific case of opera in France between the wars, one encoun-
ters 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 through-
out the twenties in France, is thus an example, once again, of how
Introduction to Part I 33
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 Opéra 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 à la Liberté et l’histoire de la Marseillaise,” in
Jean-Rémy Julien and Jean Mongrédien, eds., Le Tambour et la harpe:
oeuvres, pratiques et manifestations musicales sous la Révolution, 1788–1800
(Paris: Du May, 1991), pp. 123–146.
1 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, how-
ever, is untangling the numerous threads that link these cultural prod-
ucts 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 magnifi-
cence. Ostentation can sometimes be imbued with simple, yet effec-
tive, 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 con-
tradictory 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 pre-
sented 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
Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera 35
T RU T H A N D V E R I S I M I L I T U D E
of the opera’s poetic text, this most tangible souvenir of a given opera
production typically featured such information as the lists of charac-
ters, 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 usu-
ally 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 collab-
orators 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 ges-
tures. 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 descrip-
tion 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 inci-
dent 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 par-
ticular opera. Busenello provided somewhat more information in the
38 Wendy Heller
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 differ-
entiating 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 Nicolò Minato (1630–
1698), for example, the argomento was actually divided into two sepa-
rate sections. The first would include a description of the basic mate-
rial 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 Imperturba-
bili, begins his digressions with the phrase “Laonde fingesi verisim-
ilamente” (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 real-
istic 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 39
Of the many alternative realities constructed for the operatic stage, rep-
resentations of monarchy and empire were perhaps the most appealing
and enduring. This is not to say that Venetians were not occasion-
ally attracted to overtly republican topics. Libretti such as Busenello’s
La prosperità infelice di Giulio Cesare dittatore or Nicolò Minato’s Pom-
peo Magno, for example, dealt quite eloquently with ancient Rome’s
Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera 41
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 Pop-
pea 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 gen-
tle Octavia might have become ruthless and ambitious, because power-
ful 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 mur-
der), 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 Histo-
riae 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 His-
toriae 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 supe-
riority and mythical link to ancient Rome.28 The first portion of the
44 Wendy Heller
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
Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera 49
53
54 Rebecca Harris-Warrick
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, recogni-
tion for his contribution, even though its precise nature is harder to
recover. (A number of choreographies made for the Opéra during the
generation after Lully do survive, although these represent only indi-
vidual 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. Nonethe-
less, 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 vol-
ume), 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 55
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 Admète, and, later in the
act, sailors under the orders of Licomède, 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, Cybèle, 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 Cybèle;
Act II: the larger world, “peuples différents,” who include among
the dancers Indiens and Egyptiens, honoring Cybèle’s choice
of Atys as chief priest of her cult;
Act III: dreams – both sweet dreams and nightmares – sent by
Cybèle 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 Célénus, King of
Phrygia;
Act V: demi-gods, followers of Cybèle, 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
56 Rebecca Harris-Warrick
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 Admète, King of Thessaly, and the
populace is rejoicing with repeated cries of “Long live the happy cou-
ple” (“Vivez, vivez, heureux Epoux”). In fact, the very first utterance of
the opera comes not from an individual, but from the chorus – a dra-
maturgical 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 dis-
appointed suitors: Hercules (here called Alcide) and Licomède, King
of the island of Scyros and the brother of the marine divinity Thétis.
Alcide, who is struggling to control his feelings for Alceste in order not
to betray his friend Admète, 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 Licomède, on the other hand, commands
a group of sailors, who first offer a fête 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 Admète comes to the res-
cue of his bride, and with the help of Alcide lays siege to Scyros. The
Lully’s on-stage societies 57
battle between the two opposing groups of soldiers and their respec-
tive leaders takes place on stage, complete with battering rams; the
besiegers win, but Admète is mortally wounded. Apollo announces
that the only way to save Admète’s life is if someone offers to die in his
place; Alceste alone is willing to sacrifice her life, and in Act III weep-
ing 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 Proser-
pine 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 Admète love each other, he conquers his baser instincts
(the opera’s subtitle is Le Triomphe d’Alcide). Act V concludes with cel-
ebrations 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, généreux Alcide,”
sings one group, while the other responds, “Vivez en paix, heureux
époux.” The opera ends in a celebration carried out in singing and
dancing that expands from the population of Thessaly to include peo-
ple 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
58 Rebecca Harris-Warrick
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 fête Licomède 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’ı̂le enchantée) and 1668 (La Fête
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 château, as part of the celebrations
marking France’s second conquest of Franche-Comté.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 cos-
tumes 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 explana-
tion for his reticence is that he is in love with someone unattainable:
Sangaride is, on that very day, about to marry Célénus, 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 Cybèle, whose visit
Lully’s on-stage societies 59
The chorus honors Cybèle, 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, San-
garide 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 Phry-
giens 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 dis-
tinction must have been visual. The two dance pieces that follow the
chorus are unhelpfully labeled “Entrée 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 entrée 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 Cybèle were performed by
62 Rebecca Harris-Warrick
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 63
2.2 Jean-Baptiste Lully, Atys, Act i, Scene 7: “Second air des Phrygiens”
individual but universal, and the key word in the chorus’s last utterance
is “horror.”17
ARMIDE
(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 pre-
sumably no accident that the three surviving Baroque choreographies
set to this passacaille are all for women.19 Yet Armide’s conjurations
Lully’s on-stage societies 67
n ot e s
1 It may seem dubious to compare a tragédie 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
68 Rebecca Harris-Warrick
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 Pécour,
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, Phaéton, Persée, Roland, and Acis et
Galatée 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 Prunières, 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. Jérôme de La Gorce and
Herbert Schneider, 2006).
3 Representations of le peuple in French opera,
1673–1764
Catherine Kintzler
72
Le peuple in French opera, 1673–1764 73
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 sym-
metry, the idea of which is that one begins with traditional tragedy,
applying to it a series of transformations in a certain order (first opposi-
tion 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 the-
atre, 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 conse-
quence of this is that the representation of le peuple in opera is prob-
lematic, 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, war-
riors 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 75
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
Genres
The pastorale and pastorale héroı̈que genres. Though the lyric tragedy
was the dominant operatic genre in the seventeenth and eighteenth
76 Catherine Kintzler
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 comédie-ballet served dur-
ing 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 mid-
dle 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, espe-
cially in ballet: the pastorale héroı̈que.9 Although the pastorale héroı̈que
involves aristocratic characters and gods, it often places them in ordi-
nary situations or in close relation with ordinary characters. The typical
Le peuple in French opera, 1673–1764 77
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 spo-
ken 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 com-
pletely 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
The question that now arises no longer concerns the nature of char-
acters 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 ques-
tions that are political in nature. It is in this sense that Phèdre 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 impor-
tance, 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
80 Catherine Kintzler
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
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 Jephté’s own daughter.
In this chapter, I have tried to show how a strictly literary and mor-
phological 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 the-
atre allows those social and political elements to appear in a new and
unexpected light, and it raises the more general issues concerning spec-
tacle, 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 tragédie 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
tragédie 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’opéra, intro. and notes by Buford Norman,
vol. ii. (Toulouse: Société de Littératures classiques, 1999); Jérôme de La
Gorce, L’Opéra à Paris au temps de Louis XIV: Histoire d’un théâtre (Paris:
Desjonquères, 1992); and Pierre Fortassier, “Musique et peuple au XVIIIe
siècle,” in Images du peuple au dix-huitième siècle, Centre Aixois d’Etudes et
de Recherches sur le Dix-Huitième Siècle (Paris: A. Colin, 1973),
pp. 327–337; all show the popular success of tragédies lyriques in the
eighteenth century.
3 See Catherine Kintzler, Poétique de l’opéra français de Corneille à Rousseau
(Paris: Minerve, 1991); La France classique et l’opéra (Arles: Harmonia
Mundi, collection Passerelles, 1998); and Théâtre et opéra à l’âge classique:
Une familière étrangeté (Paris: Fayard, 2004).
84 Catherine Kintzler
87
88 Naomi André
interaction of the voice and character of these roles and their unex-
pected ancestry.
With the legacy of the castrato voice from the eighteenth cen-
tury 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 sec-
ondo 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 Prophète [1849],
and L’Africaine [1865]) which have maintained their importance, if not
their popularity, through performance. Nonetheless, Meyerbeer’s Ital-
ian 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 89
JA K O B M E Y E R B E E R G O E S T O I TA LY
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 relo-
cation 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
92 Naomi André
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: Gae-
tano 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 contem-
porary topics that resemble the rescue dramas in France and Ger-
many (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 old-
fashioned sound of the castrato (for Crociato), the current vogue for
the heroic travesti (in Semiramide, Emma, and L’esule), and the forward-
looking 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
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 flex-
ible 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 prin-
cipal 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 char-
acters. 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 top-
ics 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 insur-
mountable. The eighteenth-century opera seria plot with the benev-
olence 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 nineteenth-
century Romantic expression of courage and acts of bravery that the
individual fought on his, and her, own. Unless the operatic genre was
94 Naomi André
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 pres-
ence of the heroic tenor. With two female characters in the opera,
the higher soprano role inherited the characterization of the cen-
tral 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 indi-
vidual 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.
Romilda e Costanza12
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 Semi-
ramide masquerading as King Nino – and one woman (Semiramide
as herself ). The place where the twisting of identity and the interac-
tion 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 Dalman-
Naldi) 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
98 Naomi André
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. With-
out minimizing the implications this situation could have for a queer
theoretical reading, I would like to emphasize the very intricate histori-
cal 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 fric-
tion 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
Margherita d’Anjou22
(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
Nicolà 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.
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 101
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 understand-
ing of King Almanzor as a travesti role. Whereas the ancient Babylo-
nian 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 trav-
esti 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 entrée into Paris and the
larger international operatic scene. It is the only opera in which Meyer-
beer 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 cross-
dressing to a new level. The heroic character of Armando, premiered
by Velluti, and repeated by him and then several women in the numer-
ous revivals of the opera throughout the late 1820s, undertakes an
Women’s roles in Meyerbeer’s operas 103
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
Table 4.2 Roles for two leading women in Meyerbeer’s 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).
108 Naomi André
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, Halévy’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 Opéra’s commissioned Don Carlos in 1867 (with Elisabeth and the
Princess Eboli) and the French-styled Aı̈da that was written for Cairo
in 1871 (with the characters of Aı̈da 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 Eugène 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), Meyer-
beer’s six Italian operas reflect primo ottocento aesthetics by employing
two female voices in leading roles. In less than a decade after Meyer-
beer’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 109
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
110 Naomi André
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.
11 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.
12 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).
13 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.
14 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.
15 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.
16 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.
112 Naomi André
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: Mélodrame, 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.
5 The effect of a bomb in the hall: The French “opera of
ideas” and its cultural role in the 1920s
Jane F. Fulcher
115
116 Jane F. Fulcher
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 Légende de Saint Christophe premiered on June 6, 1920, and was
clearly meant to be the highlight of a less than triumphant oper-
atic 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 Tragédie de Salomé and Mariotte’s Salomé.
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 polariza-
tion there was a rapidly mounting fear of Bolshevism, which worked
to the advantage of the political Right in the defensive postwar cli-
mate. 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
Rouché 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 con-
juncture. 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 con-
ception, Denis brought out the sacred and abstract components of the
drama, thus diverting attention from d’Indy’s topical and controver-
sial references. For example, his scenery for the palace of the “Reine
de Volupté” 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 sen-
suous forms or shapes, but, again, at the expense of d’Indy’s explicit
and realistic detail.
The French “opera of ideas” 119
I don’t claim to fight the good Christian and Catholic fight, any more
than Racine does in his tragedies, Fénélon in his Telémaque, or Tasso
in his Jerusalem.”)15
The goal, Dumesnil explains, is “art,” and he then cites a quote
by the abbé Brémond who characterizes it as a “fantaisie” in order
to justify Barrès’s provocation. Dumesnil also notes the opera’s apt
adaptation of Wagnerian stylistic traits, for him consisting of the leit-
motifs, 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 “archaı̈sme
charmante,” or his use of old French dances such as a “pastourelle com-
pagnard,” 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, ideolog-
ical 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 con-
cerned social-philosophic ideas. One was Georges Hue’s politically
conservative Dans l’ombre de la cathédrale of 1922, which centers on
the opposition between “l’idéal religieux” and “l’idéal 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 défense
de l’Occident,” supporting Mussolini’s aggression in Ethiopia.19 How-
ever, like d’Indy’s, this didactic work was only a succès d’estime, yet
122 Jane F. Fulcher
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 “Mystère 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 Barrès. 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 méridionale,” “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 How-
ever, it was the theme of the opera that was so compelling for political
124 Jane F. Fulcher
defined for himself in the course of the conflict. This was one that
implacably rejected uncritical nationalism, as well as the narrow offi-
cial dogma concerning French culture and all that it must inherently
exclude. Ravel’s ideal of French patriotism was firmly rooted in the tra-
ditional Republican, and ultimately revolutionary, conception of indi-
vidual 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 character-
istically 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
Léon Blum and Paul Painlevé, is widely known.31 Moreover, Manuel
Rosenthal points out explicitly in his memoirs about Ravel, “il était 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 sortilèges.
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’opérette américaine.”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
126 Jane F. Fulcher
for La Liberté, 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 ide-
ology throughout the twenties, and that which was presented at a state-
subventioned 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 success-
ful it thus defeated its goal. But it did achieve cultural centrality, fusing
different sectors and employing those themes that engaged the audi-
ence, and it forced established creeds to re-examine their ideological-
aesthetic 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 Rouché 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
République 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 Bréville. As cited by Léon 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” 129
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 repétition
générale, 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 théories sur
l’art moderne. Sur l’art sacrée (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 idées et des livres
(associated with the Action Française), 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 première guerre mondiale (1910–1919) (Paris: Editions de la
Découverte, 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 Opéra-comique under Messager and
Broussan, and in 1919 became the director of the Conservatoire at
Nancy. In 1929 he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts.
13 Michel Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels (Paris: Seuil, 1997), p. 195.
14 See René 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 René 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 Sécretariat général des
130 Jane F. Fulcher
135
136 Thomas Ertman
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 Puc-
cini. They demonstrate that the aesthetic of spectacle promoted by
Fascism, itself the result of a national anxiety engendered by the fail-
ures 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 post-
fascist 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.
6 State and market, production and style: An
interdisciplinary approach to eighteenth-century
Italian opera history
Franco Piperno
138
Eighteenth-century Italian opera history 139
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
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 nor-
mally granted on demand, as was permission to open private theatres
for public use or to build a new theatre at community expense (teatro
di communità 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 Ori-
ent. 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 peo-
ple 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 con-
dominale, the connection between fair and opera became even stronger.
Newspapers reported in 1777 that “our trade fair had an extraordi-
nary 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 143
Revivals in
Biblical or literary Neapolitan Lent
Year Theatre Title Poet Composer source seasons
1785 Fondo Figlia di Gefte [Lucchesi Palli] Cipolla Judges, 11 1786, 1788, 1790,
1800, 1801
1786 Nuovo Convito di Baldassarre Lorenzi Various Daniel, 5 1791
1786 Fiorentini Davide e Assalonne Sanges ? 2 Samuel, 15–19
1786 Fondo Sacrificio di Abramo Metastasio Cimarosa and others Genesis, 22
1787 S. Carlo Distruzione di Gerusalemme Sernicola Giordani 2 Kings, 24 1790
1787 Fondo Trionfo di Davide [Lucchesi Palli] Rispoli 1 Samuel, 17
1788 S. Carlo Debora e Sisara Sernicola Guglielmi P. A. Judges, 4 1789, 1795
1791 Fondo Morte di Oloferne Fiori Guglielmi P. A. Judith, 8–13
1792 S. Carlo Gionata Sernicola Piccinni 1 Samuel, 14 1797, 1798
1792 Fondo Baldassarre punito Lorenzi Marinelli Daniel, 5 1793
1793 S. Carlo Sofronia e Olindo1 Sernicola Andreozzi Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, 2; 1795
Mercier, Olinde et Sophronie
1794 S. Carlo Saulle Salfi Andreozzi 1 Samuel, 28–31 1796, 1802, 1804
1798 S. Carlo Gionata maccabeo Sografi Guglielmi P. A. 1 Maccabees, 11–13
1800 Nuovo Abramo De Santis Various Genesis, 21–22
1802 Nuovo Trionfo della religione Botturini Federici Voltaire, Zaı̈re 1811
(Zaira)2
1803 Fondo Distruzione di Gerusalemme ? Guglielmi P. C. 2 Kings, 24
1804 Fondo Creazione del mondo ? Haydn Genesis
1804 Nuovo Riedificazione di Tottola Cimarosa–Zingarelli Esdras, 9, Nehemiah, 1–6
Gerusalemme
1805 Fondo Trionfo di Davide [Lucchesi Palli] Zingarelli 1 Samuel, 17
1807 S. Carlo Trionfo di Tomiri Cammarano Andreozzi Esdras, 1; Herodotus,
Histories, 1
1811 Fondo Distruzione di Gerusalemme Sografi Zingarelli Iosephus Flavius, Bell. Iud. 6–7
1818 S. Carlo Mosè in Egitto Tottola Rossini Exodus, 14; Ringhieri, Osiride 1819, 1820
1820 S. Carlo Ciro in Babilonia Bordese Raimondi Esdras, 1; Herodotus,
Histories, 1
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.
148 Franco Piperno
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 evi-
dent in the case of the first opera buffa to achieve international suc-
cess, 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 inter-
mezzi 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 (!)
Table 6.2 La finta cameriera by Federico-[Barlocci?]/Latilla: productions 1738–1751
La buona figliuola March. della March. Cav. Cecchina Paoluccia Sandrina Tagliaferro Mengotto
(Goldoni–Duni) Conchiglia Lucinda Armidoro
Torino, 1758 Carattoli Picinelli Santi Giovanna Vincenza Clementina Francesco Potenza
Modena, 1759 Ciaranfi Giorni Jori Giovanna Vincenza Clementina Francesco Ronchetti
Firenze, 1759 Carattoli Clementina Savoj Giovanna Vincenza Blondi Francesco Secchioni
Bologna, 1760 Lovatini Clementina Savoj Giovanna Giorgi Vincenza Carattoli Caldinelli
(music by Piccinni)
La scaltra spiritosa Isabella Flaminio Giulia Lesbina Dorimene Mommo don Pippo Camillo
(Palomba–Piccinni) Patacca del Gallo
Bologna, 1760 Anna Maria Patrassi Nicolini Ferretti Costanza Del Zanca Morigi Goresi
Il viaggiatore ridicolo Donna Emilia Conte degli March. Contessa degli Livietta Cav. Astolfo Giacinto
(Goldoni–Mazzoni) Anselmii Foriera Anselmi
Bologna, 1760 Anna Maria Nicolini Patrassi Ferretti Clementina Del Zanca Goresi
Li tre amanti ridicoli Stella Giulietta Rosina March. Ridolfo Onofrio Rombo
(Galuppi–Galuppi) Oronte
Firenze, 1762 Giovanna Vincenza Costanza Bosi Laschi Caldinelli De Angelis
Francesco = Francesco Baglioni (father; fl. 1729–1761) Anna Maria = Anna Maria Baglioni (fl. 1760–1766)
Giovanna = Giovanna Baglioni (fl. 1752–1771) Costanza = Costanza Baglioni (fl. 1760–1782)
Clementina = Clementina Baglioni (fl. 1753–1782) Rosina = Rosina Baglioni (fl. 1764–1781)
Vincenza = Vincenza Baglioni (fl. 1757–1771)
156 Franco Piperno
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 produc-
tion. 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 methodolo-
gies 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 157
160
The cultural authority of the capital city 161
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 prob-
lematic 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 cul-
tural 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 pol-
itics, 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 Freischütz
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 Zauberflöte 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:
162 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 pub-
lic with criticism of social practices there. London und Paris, despite its
focus upon the hottest fashions, also engaged with the serious reser-
vations that its readers clearly held about opera and its modes. An
engraving published there in 1800 under the title of suprême 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:
Figure 7.1 “Le suprême Bon Ton,” frontispiece, London und Paris, 1800
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
164 William Weber
[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 metropoli-
tan 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 fash-
ion (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 defini-
tion 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 165
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 Hauptstädte; 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 fasci-
nating terms how the idea of the “republic of letters” emerged in
the sixteenth century, based upon principles of friendship and cos-
mopolitan relationship.12 While these networks persisted into the new
166 William Weber
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 Niccolò 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.
The cultural authority of the capital city 169
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 concen-
tration 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. Lon-
don 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, phe-
nomenon 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 consti-
tuted 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 devel-
oped 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
The cultural authority of the capital city 171
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 coex-
tensive 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 pros-
titutes, 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 Opéra 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 eigh-
teenth 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 con-
trol 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
172 William Weber
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:
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 général and littérateur Gaspard
Grimod de la Reynière (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
The cultural authority of the capital city 173
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
1850, Penelope Corfield has shown how doctors, lawyers, and clergy-
men 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 distin-
guished 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 Bellérophon by Lully and Philippe Quinault: “A few connois-
seurs 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
Note here how social class and specialized knowledge reinforced one
another. The Handel Commemoration is perhaps the most formidable
The cultural authority of the capital city 175
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 für die gebildete Welt, Bilder-Magazin für die
elegante Welt. In 1838 the latter magazine described its purpose (p. iii),
The cultural authority of the capital city 177
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.”
2 David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism,
1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
3 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 Ankündigung,” 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.”
4 “Paris,” London und Paris, 1800, vol. 1, pp. 59–70, 123–35.
5 Ibid., 2 (1787), 2–3.
6 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.
7 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).
8 Quoted in ibid., p. 2.
9 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.
10 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).
11 William Weber, “L’Institution et son public: L’opéra à Paris et à Londres
au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales E.S.C., 48/6 (1993), 1519–1540 (special issue,
“Mondes de l’Art”). See also “Mentalité, tradition, et origines du canon
musical en France et en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales E.S.C., 42
(1989), 849–875; “Learned and General Musical Taste in Eighteenth-
178 William Weber
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’époque du beau monde à Londres, 1700–1800,” Revue
d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 49 (2002), 119–139.
12 Peter Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
13 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.
14 Charles Dufresny, Amusements sérieux et comiques, Paris, 1699, p. 126.
15 Theatrical Guardian, March 5, 1791, p. 6.
16 Henri Lagrave, Le Théâtre et le public à Paris de 1715 à 1750, Paris,
Klincksieck, 1972; Martine de Rougement, La Vie théâtrale au XVIIIe siècle
(Paris, Honoré, Champion, 1988).
17 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.
18 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).
19 Jean Jacquart, “Paris: First Metropolis of the Early Modern Period,”
in Lepetit and Clark, Capital Cities and Their Hinterlands, pp. 105–
118.
20 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
Régime,” Journal of Modern History 56 (March 1984), 58–88.
21 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
The cultural authority of the capital city 179
Lynn Lees, “Metropolitan Types,” vol. i, pp. 413–428; and Lepetit and
Clark, Capital Cities and Their Hinterlands.
22 R. O. Bucholz, The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court
Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
23 Stone, “The Residential Development of the West End of London.”
24 Bucholz, The Augustan Court.
25 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).
26 John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods
(London: Routledge, 1993).
27 See David Ringrose, “Capital Cities and Urban Networks in the Early
Modern Period,” in Lepetit and Clark, Capital Cities and Their
Hinterlands.
28 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.
29 Weber, The Rise of Musical Classics, Conclusion, pp. 243–247.
30 Otto G. Schindler, Das Burgtheater und sein Publikum (Vienna: Verlag der
Oesterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1976).
31 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).
32 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).
33 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.
34 [Gaspard Grimod de la Reynière], Lorgnette philosophique, trouvée par un
R. P. Capucin sous les Arcades du Palais-Royal, & presentée au Public par un
Célibataire (London: “chez l’auteur,” 1785), vol. ii, p. 13.
35 Jeffrey Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theatre and French Political
Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).
180 William Weber
This article seeks to develop new tools for understanding the impor-
tance during the 1840s of operatic choruses to the formation of an
Italian national identity. It does so by focusing on Verdi’s activities dur-
ing 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 tem-
porarily 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 post-
unification 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 cen-
tury. 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
182 Philip Gossett
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 cho-
ruses 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 dif-
ficult 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 cher-
ish 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 Leg-
nano, 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
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!
186 Philip Gossett
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 libret-
tist 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 situ-
ation 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 summariz-
ing the subject of La battaglia di Legnano, as developed from the drama
by Joseph Méry, 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 187
[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
[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.]
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 ”
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
190 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:
[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 191
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 twenty-
four 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 è alfin risorta.
3. Viva l’Italia or vendica
La gloria sua primiera . . .
4. Sarà 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
192 Philip Gossett
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! Ster-
minatrice / Su te la guerra discenderà” [Tremble Byzantium! Exter-
minating / 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.
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, “Né deporrem
la spada / Finché sia schiavo un angolo / Dell’Itala contrada.” At that
point he feels compelled to extend what could have been a more user-
friendly 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, how-
ever, 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 out-
skirts 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 ”
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 con-
cludes 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 con-
stitutive 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 empha-
sizes 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
196 Philip Gossett
1840s and 1850s, will recognize them all, from Attila to the crusades, to
Venetian figures (Carmagnola) and Florentine ones (Ferruccio, Niccolò
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:
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
[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 Siège 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 Siège de
Corinthe, Scène et Air Hiéros avec Chœur
Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 199
seer, Hiéros, 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.
[Let us respond to this cry of [Let this name that stands for
victory, let us deserve an immortal victory move every soul and guide
death; on the field of glory we will it to fight, and on the field of glory,
see the tomb become an altar.] the tomb will become an altar.]
[As a rainbow the divine God showed you to the sorrowful, and with joy,
great Pius, every heart beat. To that great soul who unites you, offer
applause, praise, and honor, and give peace only to that which Pius has
carved in his heart.]
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 già 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:
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.
[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 some-
what 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 inter-
rupts the flow of the performances.”41 One doesn’t prohibit what does
202 Philip Gossett
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 pro-
tagonists, but now they are being invoked to lead the Italian people
into battle, following the lead of the Sicilians:
Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 203
[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 exter-
mination 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 com-
mitment 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 evi-
dence 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
As with the concluding chorus for the Cantata in onore del Sommo Pon-
tefice 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.
206 Philip Gossett
After the rebellion in Milan broke out on March 17, 1848, the situ-
ation 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 “char-
acteristic” 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), with-
out 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 exam-
ple, 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 cav-
alry.” 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, partic-
ularly 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 207
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 pub-
lication of the firm from its foundation in 1808 through 1857, listing
them in the numerical order of their plate numbers. It is a histori-
cal 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
208 Philip Gossett
Plate
Number1 Composer Poet Destroyed edition Copies Meter, Key
20297 Giovanni Lucantoni Dottor Giani Il canto di guerra degli Italiani I-Mc, I-Vnm decasillabi
(“Sorgi, Italia! . . . il tuo grido di G major
guerra”) 2/4
20298 N.N. Luigi Malvezzi Canto popolare dei Milanesi. I-Mc decasillabi
(20883) Dedicato agli Eroi delle cinque D-flat major
Giornate (“Son scontati i delitti c
degli avi”)
20299 Raimondo Boucheron Samuele Biava Il cantico del Milite Lombardo I-Mc, I-Vnm ottonari
(20776) (“Dissi all’anima t’aspetta”) (same E-flat major
text as Gambale, Lucca, #7001 in c
Table 8.2)
20343 Giovanni Zerbi Samuele Biava Il cantico di battaglia dei Milanesi I-Mc, I-Vnm stanzas of endecasillabi
nelle cinque giornate del mese di marzo and ottonari
1848 (“Il duodecimo secolo d’eroi”) E-flat major
c
(cont.)
Table 8.1 (cont.)
Plate
Number1 Composer Poet Destroyed edition Copies Meter, Key
20344 Giacomo Panizza Carolina Cadorna Il voto d’una donna italiana I-Mc, I-Vnm ottonari
(20779) Urani-Visconti (“O Fratelli udite, udite”) C major
c
20345 Giacomo Panizza XXX Canto guerriero per gli Italiani I-Mc, I-Vnm; S settenari
(20780) (“All’armi all’armi Italia”) E-flat major
6/8
20570 Albino Abbiati Instrumental Il 22 Marzo 1848. Valzer per Pfte I-Pu, I-Vnm Instrumental
ossia Musica allusiva alle cinque
giornate
20595 Jacopo Foroni XXX L’Italiana. Grido di guerra I-Mc doppi quinari
(20791) all’unisono (“All’armi, all’armi, F major
Itale genti”) c
20643 Carlo Boniforti Tommaso Grossi Milano liberata. Cantico (“Cantiam I-Mc, I-Vnm ottonari
(20775) lieti Osanna! Osanna!”) D major
2/4
20644 Placido Mandanici A.C. Canto di vittoria per le cinque giornate I-Pu, I-Vnm doppi quinari
(20795) di Milano nel Marzo 1848 (“Romba il E-flat major
cannone suona a martello”) c
20645 Antonio Bazzini Antonio Buccelleni Il vessillo Lombardo. Inno popolare I-Mc, I-Vnm decasillabi
(20793) (“Su Lombardi al vessillo di F major
guerra”) C
20706 Eugenia D’Alberti Achille Gallarati Canzone nazionale ai prodi Lombardi I-VImr2 decasillabi
(“Viva Pio sull’Italico trono”) F major
c
20720 Gioachino Rossini Francesco Ilaria Inno nazionale, dedicato alla Legione I-Mc, I-Vnm; S decasillabi
civica romana mobilizzata (“Italiani! F major
È finito il servaggio!”) NB: from Le c
Siège de Corinthe
20746 Giovanni Toja Achille Balsamo Canto pei poveri giovinetti raccolti da I-Pu, I-Vnm ottonari
Pio IX nell’Istituto Agrario di Roma F major
(“Come il padre del Vangelo”) c
20747 Stefano Giulio Carcano Inno nazionale in occasione delle I-Mc; S ottonari
(20794) Ronchetti-Monteviti solenni esequie pei morti nella D major
rivoluzione di Milano (“Per la Patria c
il sangue han dato”)
(cont.)
Table 8.1 (cont.)
Plate
Number1 Composer Poet Destroyed edition Copies Meter, Key
20748 Adolfo Fumagalli E. L. Scolari Il canto della vittoria. Inno popolare I-Mc, I-Vnm; S senari
(20792) a voci sole (“Vittoria! Vittoria!”) F major
3/4
20749 Michele Ruta Stenore Capocci Ai fratelli Lombardi: I volontari I-Mc, I-Pu, I-Vnm ottonari
(20778) Napolitani (“Su corriamo in E-flat major
Lombardia”) 2/4
20750 Luigi Rieschi XXX Il 22 Marzo: Anatema all’Austria. I-Mc, I-Vnm decasillabi
Canto popolare (“Va, crudele C major/G major
vandalica setta”) c
20762 Gaetano Magazzari Francesco Guidi Album di inni popolari: N. 1. Inno I-Rsmc decasillabi
(20885) subalpino (“Carlo Alberto, l’amato A-flat major
Sovrano”) c
20763 Gaetano Magazzari Pietro Sterbini Album di inni popolari: N. 2. Inno I-Rsmc decasillabi
(20887) siciliano (“Viva, viva l’invitta E-flat major
Palermo”) c
20764 Gaetano Magazzari Filippo Meucci Album di inni popolari: N. 3. Inno I-Rsmc doppi senari
(20888) guerriero italiano (“Si leva sull’erta E-flat major
– dell’Etna tonante”) c
20765 Gaetano Magazzari Gaetano Ronetti Album di inni popolari: N. 4. I-Rsmc decasillabi
(20889) L’Amnistia data da Pio IX. Inno E-flat major
(“Viva, viva, cantiamo festosi”) c
20766 Gaetano Magazzari Gaetano Ronetti Album di inni popolari: N. 5. Il canto I-Rsmc decasillabi
(20890) degli amnistiati (“Leviam canto di B-flat major
gioja, o fratelli”) c
20767 Gaetano Magazzari Filippo Meucci Album di inni popolari: N. 6. Inno I-Rsmc decasillabi
(20891) della Guardia nazionale di Roma B-flat major
(“Viva il Grande che al nostro c
coraggio”)
20768 Gaetano Magazzari Filippo Meucci Il primo giorno dell’anno. Inno I-Rsmc decasillabi
(19995) popolare all’unisono (“Del E-flat major
nuov’anno già l’alba primiera”) c
20769 Gaetano Magazzari Pietro Sterbini Il Natale di Roma. Inno popolare I-Rsmc, I-Vnm settenari
(20992) (“Eri seduta, levati) E-flat major
c
20770 Gaetano Magazzari Pietro Sterbini Il vessillo offerto dai Bolognesi ai I-Rsmc; S decasillabi
(20993) Romani. Inno, coll’aggiunta delle B-flat major
parole allusive al Vessillo Lombardo c
(“Scuoti, Italia, i tuoi ceppi servili”)
(cont.)
Table 8.1 (cont.)
Plate
Number1 Composer Poet Destroyed edition Copies Meter, Key
20772 N.N. XXX O giovani ardenti. Inno del popolo I-Mc, I-Vnm; S senari
(“O giovani ardenti”) F major
2/4
20773 Achille Galli Pio Giuseppe Gl’Italiani redenti. Inno popolare I-Mc, I-Vnm ottonari
Falcocchio (“Sulla sponda tiberina”) C major
c
20823 Pietro Cornali “Poesia di un Canto degli Italiani (“Finché Italia I-Rsc ottonari
(20884) Toscano” non sia nostra” E-flat major
C
20824 Rouget de Lisle Rouget de Lisle La Marseillaise (see Lucca #7000 in I-Pu
(20777) Table 8.2)
20826 P. A. Frigerio Achille Balsamo Inno popolare a Pio IX (“Osanna, I-Pu, I-Vnm settenari
osanna, o Pio”) (same text set by A-flat major
Giovanni Toja for Ricordi, #20849) c
20827 Ferdinando Sieber Giovanni Berchet Canto di guerra del Berchet per Coro I-Mc, I-Vnm; S doppi senari
d’uomini (“Su figli d’Italia! su in G major
armi, coraggio!”) 6/8
20828 Stefano XXX Il grido della Crociata (Two sections: I-Mc, I-Vnm decasillabi
Ronchetti-Monteviti “Dio lo vuole: su Italia, su tutta” G major
and “Sgombra la terra de’ fiori”) c
ottonari
E minor/G major
6/8
20830 Fernando Baroni Antonio Gallenga La Milanese. Inno popolare della I-Mc, I-Vnm senari
Guerra Santa (“L’Italia dispiega”) E major
2/4
20848 Rouget de Lisle Luigi Pantaleoni Agli Italiani. Canto popolare di I-Mc, I-Vnm strophes in decasillabi,
Guerra adattato alla musica della ottonari,
Marsigliese da Luigi Pantaleoni settenari
emigrato del 31. Eseguito dagli G major
Italiani a Parigi (“All’irata vendetta “2”
di Dio”)
20849 Giovanni Toja Achille Balsamo Omaggio delle Guardie nazionali I-Mc, I-Vnm settenari
Lombarde all’immortale Pio IX C major
(“Osanna, osanna, o Pio”) (same c
text set by P. A. Frigerio for Ricordi,
#20826)
(cont.)
Table 8.1 (cont.)
Plate
Number1 Composer Poet Destroyed edition Copies Meter, Key
20872 Francilla Pixis-Del XXX L’indipendenza. Inno per S., I-Mc, I-Vnm ottonari
Castillo dedicato agli Eroi della Sicilia C major
(“Di Sicilia invitti figli”) c
20896 Giovanni Pacini XXX La ronda della Guardia civica I-Mc, I-Vnm (pf ottonari
(20894) Veneziana. Inno (“O fratelli alfin si solo) A-flat major
posa” 2/4
20897 Giacomo Panizza XXX Preghiera da una madre Lombarda. I-Mc, I-Vnm settenari
Notturnino a voce sole per il F major
popolo (“O tu, Signor, che Italia”) 3/4
20901 Prospero Selli Carlo Matthey La partenza per Lombardia. Canto I-Mc; S decasillabi
guerriero dei Veliti Viterbesi (“Su C major
voliamo; già canto di guerra”) 2/4
20902 Pietro Perny C. Fighiera Inno nazionale al Re Carlo Alberto Adv. 14 June3 (other decasillabi
(“Splende il sole, rivive il pensiero”) edition found) G major
c
20903 Zifra La partenza dei Veneti crociati. Inno Adv. 14 June
popolare
20904 Carlo Soliva Dieu le veut! Hommage au peuple Adv. 14 June
Italien, pour Chant avec accomp. de
Piano e de Cloche sonnant le orsin
20905 Ruggero Manna Inno a Carlo Alberto Adv. 14 June
20906 Felice Ronconi XXX Cantilena militare a voci unisone con I-Pc, I-Vnm settenari
accomp. di Tamburo per gli studenti A major
componenti la crociata Lombarda, che c
coraggiosa marcia al campo, contro il
barbaro Radetzky (“Morrà, morrà la
scure”)
20908 A. E. Bianchi Inno popolare, dedicato alla Guardia Adv. 12 July
nazionale
20909 Alessandro Marotta Ottavio Tasca Ai volontarj Romani. Canto I-BGc (lacks pp. 5–6 ottonari
guerriero (“Salve, o bellica of 10) E-flat major
falange”) 2/4
20910 Costantino Quaranta Alla bandiera Italiana. Inno per T e B Adv. 19 July
20911 Costantino Quaranta Inalberandosi il vessillo nazionale. Adv. 19 July
Inno popolare per T e B
20912 Tito Baruzzi Il giuramento nazionale. Inno a S con Not advertised
Cori
(cont.)
Table 8.1 (cont.)
Plate
Number1 Composer Poet Destroyed edition Copies Meter, Key
20913 Antonio Cagnoni Giulio Guerrieri Inno popolare nazionale (cantato in Adv. 12 July; S decasillabi
Genova la sera del 10 dicembre D-flat major
1847) (“Cittadini, accorrete, c
accorrete”)
21087– Giuseppe Novella “Edizioni fatte per conto dell’Autore Described 12 July
21094 nel mese di Giugno 1848”4
A Carlo Alberto. Inni popolari
nazionali all’unisono e a due voci,
servibili anche pel solo Pfte:
Ippolito d’Aste N. 1. All’invitto e magnanimo Re Carlo
Alberto. Inno Nazionale popolare.
Giuseppe Peragallo N. 2. L’Otto settembre in Genova, a
Pio IX. Inno popolare.
G. Checchetelli N. 3. Al prode e valoroso esercito
italiano. Inno di guerra.
Enrico Bixio N. 4. I fanciulli a Dio, sull’Italia.
Canto popolare.
David Chiossone N. 5. Viva Italia! Canto popolare
nazionale. Ai Principi riformatori
italiani.
David Chiossone N. 6. La Costituzione Italiana del Re
Carlo Alberto. Canto Nazionale.
Francesco N. 7. Pio IX all’Italia. Inno
dall’Ongaro Nazionale.
Enrico Bixio N. 8. Requie ai Martiri
dell’Indipendenza italiana. Canto
funebre
(not destroyed, but perhaps not
circulated: only non-Ricordi prints
of items from this collection have
been located)
21096 Gaetano Magazzari Carlo Matthey Guerra e vittoria. Canto dell’Armata Adv. 19 July doppi senari
Italiana (“Sgombrate, sgombrate,
col gregge verduto”)5
21097 Gaetano Magazzari Il giuramento Lombardo. Canto Adv. 19 July
popolare
21571, Giuseppe Verdi La battaglia di Legnano. Opera per
21542– Canto (“Edizione estera,
21559 distrutta”)6
(cont.)
Table 8.1 (cont.)
Plate
Number1 Composer Poet Destroyed edition Copies Meter, Key
21571, Giuseppe Verdi L’Assedio d’Arlem (not destroyed)
21642–
21659
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.
Table 8.2 Some hymns and choruses published by Lucca and Canti in 1848
[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.]
[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 unattrac-
tive, 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.
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
226 Philip Gossett
Carlo Matthey and music by Prospero Selli. The first of three strophes
in decasillabi gives the flavor:
[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.]
single meter: each strophe begins in decasillabi but after the words
“Giuriam, giuriamo!” the refrain is in ottonari:
[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.]
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, through-
composed 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.
This is not the place for a prolonged analysis of the “edizioni dis-
trutte,” 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 sit-
uation, 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
“Edizioni
distrutte” (except
Poetic meter Magazzari) Magazzari Total
doppi quinari 2 0 2
senari 3 0 3
doppi senari 1 2 3
settenari 5 1 6
ottonari 14 0 14
decasillabi 11 7 18
endecasillabi 1 0 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 231
reference? Verdi clearly thought that his big decasillabi choral move-
ments in Nabucco, I lombardi, and Ernani were in danger of resem-
bling 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, Coc-
cia 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
232 Philip Gossett
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 pro-
portion. 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 musi-
cologists 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 233
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).
14 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.
15 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.
16 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.
17 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.
18 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.
236 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 237
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 dec-
orative 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 Tannhäuser,
premiered at the Opéra 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 defen-
sive nationalism in the operatic domain, we will attempt here to review
how foreign works were received on various Parisian stages, whether
devoted entirely (Opéra, Opéra-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
244 Christophe Charle
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
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 Opéra. 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 Académie de
musique, M. Vaucorbeil has staged two operas, Verdi’s Aı̈da, which the
Théâtre 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 Opéra.5
However, one should not extrapolate too quickly from the situation
of the late 1870s. It is indeed true that the Opéra, 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 sumptu-
ous architecture of the Palais Garnier rather than to hear new music.
Nonetheless, as shown by Frédérique Patureau, the proportion of new
and foreign works increased progressively during the 1890s.6 Like-
wise, the Opéra-comique and the private theatres increasingly opened
their stages to new artists soon after this pessimistic report. Summary
246 Christophe Charle
theatres for their services and the resulting rise in fees, forced com-
posers 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 lim-
ited the composers’ and directors’ margin for maneuver and the pos-
sibilities 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 café-
concert. 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 ama-
teur music associations grew in number, drew away music-lovers who
did not find what they were looking for in the official theatres, espe-
cially with regard to new foreign music. Thus some operas (in partic-
ular 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 defend-
ers 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
252 Christophe Charle
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 influ-
ence of the French school of opera during the period under con-
sideration. 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 per-
taining to large geographic areas demonstrate that we are not sim-
ply speaking of exports to the traditional zone of French influence
(Switzerland, Belgium, colonies, Russia), but that the two other prin-
cipal 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
Opera in France, 1870–1914 253
Saint-Saëns 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-Saëns’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
Léo Delibes, who wrote only one exported opera, Lakmé, 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 favor-
able 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 finan-
cial crisis following the country’s unification which led to a lowering
of public subsidies in cities that were no longer capitals.23 It is under-
standable 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 favor-
able theatrical and political context: France welcomed Italian works
from the eighteenth century thanks to the Théâtre Italien in Paris, and
was also Italophile during the struggle for independence in the mid-
nineteenth century, but became less hospitable after the closing of the
Théâtre 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 Aı̈da, five years
(at the Théâtre Italien – it would not arrive at the Opéra until four
years later) and, in that of Otello, seven years (Opéra) after their world
premieres. While Falstaff was put on after a wait of only one year, it was
Opera in France, 1870–1914 255
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, Hänsel and Gretel, which
was performed in thirty-seven cities outside Germany. Léo 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 per-
formed 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 (Opéra-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 Ital-
ian 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 theatri-
cal space (Paris and Brussels) and northern Europe (Stockholm, Berlin,
Hamburg, Dresden, Copenhagen) opted for translation while a por-
tion 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 counter-
parts, along with this policy of translation, underscores the resistance
Opera in France, 1870–1914 257
of the international public’s taste, and not just France’s, to the inno-
vations 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 Bohème and Manon Lescaut and Giordano’s André Chénier 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 Euro-
pean schools. Out of the 262 performances by Russian composers
inventoried, 252 took place over ten years after the work’s initial cre-
ation. 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 Opéra. The foremost Russian
works were first performed between 1908 and 1911. In 1911, for exam-
ple, the Théâtre 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 Franco-
Russian Alliance – France was more resistant: the Berlin Opera only
opened its doors to Tchaı̈kovsky’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 west-
ern European composers had already used Russian themes in their
own works in response to the growing vogue for exoticism which
258 Christophe Charle
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 com-
plaints 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 théâtre et de la musique: “It was said in advance that M.
Saint-Saëns 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-Saëns, found no other praise than to
exonerate him from inaccurate accusations of “Wagnerianism,” a word
which at the time had negative connotations for the Opéra’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 259
(Dimitri, 1876), not to mention India (Lakmé, 1883 and Le Roi de Lahore,
1877), Japan (Saint-Saëns’s La Princesse jaune, 1872), and even the imagi-
nary 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 revo-
lutionary 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 André Chénier,
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 Pelléas et Mélisande (1902).
The only works to escape these tropisms were the few that
attempted to invent a naturalist opera that, as Jane Fulcher has demon-
strated 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,
Opera in France, 1870–1914 261
these works spread beyond France just like the exotic and mythologi-
cal 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 Bohème 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. Com-
posers’ 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 oper-
atic 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 bor-
ders 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 Pelléas
et Mélisande, which is still viewed from today’s perspective as path-
breaking, not only enjoyed considerable success in Paris soon after it
262 Christophe Charle
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 Euro-
pean 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 siècle (French translation, Paris, Flammarion, 1994);
Christophe Charle, Paris fin de siècle, 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 263
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 equa-
tion of subjectivity with desire, emotional excess, and cultural-political
subversion found conscious articulation and representation in the oper-
atic tradition.
This energy encountered its most convincing voice in Verdi’s operas
and operatic style. No matter what his personal politics and commit-
ments 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. Individ-
ual and collective identities – embattled lovers, outsiders, and heroes –
pursue their causes against outside, foreign, or superannuated antag-
onists.
Through the decade of the two unifications (1860–1870), how-
ever, 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
268 Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
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 spec-
tacle, but fails. Opera retains its central position in Italian national cul-
ture. 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
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
270 Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
T U R A N D O T. C O M
at the opening of their study Puccini’s Turandot: The End of the Great
Tradition:
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 sug-
gest 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 move-
ments 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
274 Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
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
durée 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 co-
librettist 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
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 musical-
dramatic logic of Turandot.
Turandot’s internal relation to fascism combines melody and
Mussolini in the figure of the unknown prince whose entrance gener-
ates 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 Stolz-
ing, 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 à 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 Liù. 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 Liù 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 self-
avowed sycophantic tone of their study, Ashbrook and Powers confess
as much with the judgment that the scene of Liù’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,
276 Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
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 Liù 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 [Liù] 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 Liù’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 oblit-
erates 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 cliché, 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 277
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 )
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.”
278 Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
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 exis-
tence 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 mur-
der 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.
Fascism and the operatic unconscious 279
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 compli-
cates 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 interpre-
tation of national unification as one that lacked real popular participa-
tion 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 medi-
ocrity 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
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 perfor-
mance 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
284 Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
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 struc-
ture 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 conspira-
tors 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
Fascism and the operatic unconscious 285
difference between acting out a part (in a play) and a form of working
through that is not condemned to the theatrical or mechanical repe-
tition 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 univer-
sal 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:
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
286 Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
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
Dörrie 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.
288 Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
291
292 Victoria Johnson
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 encom-
passes an easily definable history extending back four hundred years in
Europe and the Americas. It has flourished continuously within a dis-
cernible 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
Opera and Society 295
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 Iphigénie 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 frame-
work of individual works and styles. How, for instance, do we account
for the rise of repertory opera somewhere in the middle of the nine-
teenth 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?
296 Herbert Lindenberger
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 Entführung 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 surround-
ing its composition.
Die Entführung 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 Entführung 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 Entführung’s
participation in a nationalist political program, both in the circum-
stances 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.
Opera and Society 297
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 Entführung. 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
André, 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?
298 Herbert Lindenberger
was borrowed from what was then the reigning paradigm in Anglo-
American literary study, the so-called New Criticism.
Although it was rare during the 1950s for scholars to adopt the meth-
ods 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 sys-
tem, 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 Renais-
sance 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 Fou-
cault 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 Laca-
nian 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
304 Herbert Lindenberger
with only rare choruses, the latter with considerable choral music. On
only one point of comparison does the difference in audience expe-
rience 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 investi-
gation, 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 soci-
ology of music, describes the audiences of eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century 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 disparage-
ment. 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 instru-
mental 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
308 Herbert Lindenberger
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 pro-
duction 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 gam-
bling 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 differ-
ences 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 super-
human 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.
Opera and Society 309
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 Entführung 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.
12 Symbolic domination and contestation in
French music: Shifting the paradigm from
Adorno to Bourdieu
Jane F. Fulcher
312
Shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu 313
and another the realistic and eclectic.40 In France (apart from Stravin-
sky) there was no such dichotomy within the modern, for all these
traits were defined against the nostalgic and retrogressive neoclassi-
cism imposed by a victorious but now weakened state.
Given these insights, let us return to paradigms: from Adorno’s per-
spective, neoclassicism is monolithic, a crystallized social formation,
and like all tradition inimical to the critical spirit. Within this essen-
tialist manner of associating ideological orientations with aesthetic
values and styles, contestation within neoclassicism is “invisible” – a
theoretical impossibility. His framework for the perception of contes-
tation 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 existential-
ism, 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 ratio-
nal reconciliation that they embody must be dissolved through innova-
tion 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 theo-
retical insights. They allow us to perceive that, historically, contestation
can occur through traditional genres, forms, and styles, the logic of
324 Jane F. Fulcher
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 archéologie 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
Shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu 325
the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999), pp. 143–147.
26 Durand, Quelques souvenirs, p. 156.
27 On the continuing primacy of “patrie,” see Maurice Agulhon, La
République: 1880 à nos jours (Paris: Hachette, 1990), vol. i, p. 350.
28 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).
29 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.
30 Alfred Bruneau, La Vie et les oeuvres de Gabriel Fauré. Notice lue par l’auteur
à l’Académie des Beaux-Arts (Paris: Charpentier, 1925), p. 30.
31 Ibid., p. 31.
32 Agulhon, La République,vol. I, pp. 350.
33 See Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la Patrie: Les
intellectuels et la première guerre mondiale (1910–1919) (Paris: Editions de la
Découverte, 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.
34 Prochasson and Rasmussen, Au nom de la Patrie, p. 270.
35 On the larger context for the political-intellectual trends of the period
and their impact on French cultural life, see Agulhon, La République,
vol. i, p. 270. And see Fulcher, “The Composer as Intellectual,”
pp. 197–200.
36 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.
37 The other two operas were L’Abandon d’Ariane and La Délivrance de
Thésée. 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.
38 For typical dismissals of Milhaud and “Les Six” as “bourgeois”
composers, interested only in pleasure and thus “lightweight”
aesthetically, see Michel Fauré, Du néoclassicisme dans la France du premier
328 Jane F. Fulcher
XXe siècle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1997), pp. 160–162, 240, 252, 259, 265, and
337. Also see Marie-Claire Mussat, “La Réception de Schoenberg en
France avant la Second Guerre Mondiale,” Revue de musicologie 87/1
(2001), p. 180.
39 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.
40 On the different neoclassicisms and the responses of German and French
youth to the postwar situation through them, see Jane F. Fulcher,
“Trajectoires opposées: La culture musicale à Berlin et à Paris dans
l’entre-deux-guerres,” in Christophe Charle and Daniel Roche, eds.,
Capitales culturelles, capitales symboliques (XVIII–XXe siècles): Paris et les
expériences européennes (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2002),
pp. 421–434.
41 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.
42 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.
43 Brunkhorst, “Irreconcilable Modernity,” p. 97.
44 Ibid., p. 49.
45 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.
46 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 329
330
French Grand Opera and modernity 331
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, symmet-
rically, 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 mate-
riality of its sounds to support social representation and to form the
sensitivities we share. Blacking’s formulas have the merit of emphasiz-
ing 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
332 Antoine Hennion
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,
French Grand Opera and modernity 333
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
336 Antoine Hennion
like Francis Haskell and Michael Baxandall found paths, from oppo-
site 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 accom-
plished 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 pos-
sibility 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 trac-
ing 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
French Grand Opera and modernity 337
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 under-
stand 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.
T H E R I S E A N D FA L L O F A R E P E RT O I R E
In reading the articles of the day one must be alert to clearly anti-
Semitic undercurrents,25 obvious to readers of the time, as in this com-
ment 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 Halévy (that is, “Lévy, known as Halévy”) “trod submis-
sively 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 Félix Clément, 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
French Grand Opera and modernity 341
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 his-
tories 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 glob-
ally to reinterpret it by demonstrating the constant action of differ-
entiation 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 funda-
mentally 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 cate-
gories 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
French Grand Opera and modernity 343
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 reflec-
tion. Its anti-Italian leitmotif, “words before everything,” introduces
344 Antoine Hennion
confusion where bel canto brings order: is it music, song, text, theatre?
A pure and abstract work, released from the constraints which the pub-
lic, 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 con-
vey 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 paradox-
ical 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 dis-
covered 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
French Grand Opera and modernity 345
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 Joël-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
346 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
351
352 Thomas Ertman
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 com-
mon 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 homol-
ogous 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 bour-
geois 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 Bour-
dieu, continue to characterize these fields right down to the present.
On one side there stands the large body of commercially oriented writ-
ers 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
354 Thomas Ertman
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 move-
ment but is rather itself divided into an older group of more established
figures – the classical or “consecrated” avant garde in Bourdieu’s ter-
minology – 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 open-
ing 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 perfor-
mances 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 com-
posers and librettists, they never organized an intellectual movement
Conclusion 355
When the Opéra’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 Opéra-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 Wag-
ner 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 Tannhäuser in 1861 at the Opéra, 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 theoreti-
cian and composer proved to be a polarizing figure in the world
of French music after 1860, leading to a reproduction of the aca-
demic/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,
358 Thomas Ertman
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 inno-
vations, 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 musi-
cians 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 chau-
vinism, but he did this by going beyond Wagner to create his own,
identifiably French, variant of modern music, most notably in Pelléas
et Mélisande, certainly the most avant-garde score theretofore heard
at the Opéra-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 musi-
cal 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 incor-
porated within stage works as by internal stylistic differences.
In Italy, the home of commercial opera, no similar avant-garde oppo-
sition arose to the tradition of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi in
the wake of Wagner’s international breakthrough. Rather, that tra-
dition, supplemented, as Christophe Charle has noted, with a small
number of imports from France, formed the basis of an opera busi-
ness 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 inspi-
ration both from Massenet’s lyrical setting of dialogue and from Wag-
nerian harmonies and orchestration, all in the service of the greatest
Conclusion 359
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 rein-
terpretation, through the use of unconventional sets, costumes, and
acting style, of works belonging to the classical canon. Such produc-
tions, 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 neces-
sary 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 Dis-
tinction. 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 impor-
tant research project on the social meaning of opera in Argentina is
Conclusion 361
currently under way at the Teatro Colón 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 histor-
ical 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 sci-
ences. The great advantage of such a theoretical framework, whether it
be one inspired by Bourdieu or one drawn from a different methodolog-
ical tradition, is that it encourages systematic comparisons among the
traditional centers of opera production and reception. While our vol-
ume has focused only on France and Italy, the suggestive nature of this
juxtaposition will, we hope, encourage more explicitly comparative-
historical 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 Règles de l’art: Genèse et structure du champ littéraire
(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,
362 Thomas Ertman
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395
396 Index
Beethoven, Ludwig van (cont.) Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 11, 263, 291, 304–306,
Leonore (1805), 90, 98 312, 313–314, 322, 323–324, 325, 346, 347,
Leonore (1806), 90, 98 351, 352, 353–354, 356, 357, 359, 360
Bellini, Giovanni, 50 Distinction, 11, 292, 304, 360–361
Bellini, Vincenzo, 88, 91, 92, 161, 182, 231, La Domination masculine, 313
270, 273, 358 Homo Academicus, 292, 305
Bianca e Fernando, 113 The Rules of Art, 292, 353–354
Norma, 106 Braudel, Fernand, 139
Benda, Julien Brecht, Bertolt
La Trahison des clers, 319 Mahagonny Songspiel, 321
Benzecry, Claudio, 362–363 Bretzner, C.F., 297, 299
Berchet, Giovanni, 195 Brooks, Cleanth, 8
Berg, Alban, 359 Bruneau, Alfred, 253, 265, 318
Lulu, 359 L’Attaque du Moulin, 265
Wozzeck, 359, 360 Le Rêve, 265
Bergeron, Katherine and Philip Bohlman Busenello, Giovanni Francesco
Disciplining Music, 11 Amore inamorato, 51
Berio, Luciano, 269, 287, 359 Didone, 38
Berlin, 166, 176 L’incoronazione di Poppea, 34, 37, 42–43
Berlioz, Hector, 245, 253, 295 La prosperità infelice di Giulio Cesare
Bertolucci, Bernardo, 282–287 dittatore, 40
The Spider’s Strategem, 277, 278, 282–287 Bussani, Francesco
Bertrand, Paul, 123 Antonino e Pompeiano, 42, 43, 51
Bianchi, A.E., 208 Bussotti, Sylvano, 273
Bianconi, Lorenzo, 17, 135 Byron, Lord, 87
Bianconi, Lorenzo and Giorgio Pestelli
Opera Production and its Resources, 17 Calhoun, Craig, 7, 351
Bizet, Georges, 252, 253, 339, Cambert, Robert
341 La Pastorale d’Issy, 73
Carmen, 259, 264, 339 Les Peines et les plaisirs de l’Amour, 84
Blacking, John, 330, 331, 345, 347 Pomone, 84
Blasetti, Alessandro, 271–272 Cambridge Opera Journal, 5
Bloc National, 116, 118, 317, 326 Cammarano, Salvadore, 110, 185, 186–189,
Blum, Léon, 125 193, 236
Boito, Camillo Campistron, Jean Galbert de
Senso, 279 Acis et Galatée, 84
Bokina, John Campra, André
Opera and Politics: From Monteverdi to Le Carnaval de Venise, 84
Henze, 301 L’Europe galante, 82
Boretti, Giovanni Les Fêtes vénitiennes, 85
Claudio Cesare, 41, 43 Fragments de M. de Lully, 84
Borghi, Giovanni Battista Idoménée, 86
Olimpiade, 142 Canteloube, Joseph
Borodin, Alexander, 255 Le Mas, 123, 319
Boschot, Adolphe, 119 Vercingétorix, 124
Bossuet, Jacques-Benigne, 83 Cantillon, Richard, 164
Bouilly, Jean-Nicolas, 98 Capitelli, Luigi, 95
Boulez, Pierre, 339, 359 Caracalla, Antoninus, 43
Index 397
Monteverdi, Claudio, 268 175, 198, 243, 245, 246, 248–249, 254,
L’incoronazione di Poppea, 34, 37, 42–43, 47 257, 258, 263, 264, 315, 355–357
L’Orfeo, 303 Opera buffa, 135, 139, 148–156, 231
Morandi, Rosa, 89, 99, 112 Opéra-Comique (Paris), 122, 127, 129, 243,
Mouret, Jean 245, 246, 248, 249, 255, 256, 264, 265,
Les Amours de Ragonde, 77 357, 358
Les Fêtes de Thalie, 77 Opéra National Populaire, 247
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 139, 153, 161, Opera semiseria, 94
341 Opera seria, 93, 94, 148–149, 150, 296, 297,
Betulia liberata, 158 303, 308
La clemenza di Tito, 299 Orlandini, Giuseppe Maria
Don Giovanni, 150, 153, 295, 356 Serpilla e Bacocco, 150
Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, 296–301,
304, 310 Pacini, Giovanni, 231
La finta semplice, 153 Painlevé, Paul, 125
Idomeneo, 296 Paisiello, Giovanni, 139
Le nozze di Figaro, 161 Paladilhe, Emile, 253
Sonata in A major K., 298 Patrie, 264
Die Zauberflöte, 161, 299 Papal States, 141–142, 201
“Musicalization,” 333–334, 345 Paris, 160–162, 164–165, 166–176
Musicology/Musicologists, 2–3, 5, 9–13, 14, Parker, Roger, 183–185, 232, 233, 234
15, 17, 138, 139, 156, 292, 293, 301–302, Pastorale, 75–77, 78, 84
305–306, 312, 325, 330, 334, 335, 348, 351 Pauls, Birgit, 232, 233
Mussolini, Benito, 121, 269–270, 271, Pavarotti, Luciano
274–275, 283, 284, 286 Pécour, Guillaume-Louis, 71
Mussorgsky, Modest, 255 Pellegrin, Simon-Joseph
Myslivecek, Josef Hippolyte et Aricie, 80
Isacco, 158 Jepthé, 82
Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 139, 153
Nagano, Kent, 287 La serva padrona, 150, 153
Naples, 144–148 Peri, Jacobo
Natalucci, Tiberio, 197, 205 L’Euridice, 303
Inni populari ad onore dell’immortale Pio IX, Perrin, Pierre
199–200 La Pastorale d’Issy, 73
Nero, 47 Pomone, 84
New Criticism, 8–9, 303 Pestelli, Giorgio, 17, 135
New Cultural History, 6, 8, 11–12, 13, 15–16 Piave, Francesco Maria, 184, 185, 186, 236
New Historicism, 8, 11, 291, 303 Piccinni, Niccolò, 168, 356
Nicole, Pierre, 83 Piperno, Franco, 135, 354
Nora, Pierre, 6, 326 Pirrotta, Nino, 39
Novaro, Michele Pisaroni, Rosamunda, 89, 95, 96, 101, 111,
“Fratelli d’Italia,” 232 112, 114
Pius IX, 196, 197–201, 202, 204–205,
Offenbach, Jacques, 127, 253, 263, 358 206–207, 223, 238
Les Contes d’Hoffmann, 260 Pizzetti, Ildebrando, 273, 359
Opéra (Paris), see also Académie royale de la Plautus, 51, 77
musique, 17, 31, 54, 69, 70, 108, 115–116, Political Science, 352
122, 123, 124, 130, 162, 166, 169, 171, Pollarolo, Carlo Francesco, 68
Index 403
Elektra, 359 268, 270, 273, 275, 276, 277, 278, 280,
Der Rosenkavalier, 359 284, 286, 288, 342, 349, 358
Stravinsky, Igor, 314, 321, 322, 323 Aı̈da, 108, 245, 254, 356
Suetonius, 41 Attila, 184, 185, 196, 234, 288
Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 251 Un ballo in maschera, 283, 285, 288
La battaglia di Legnano, 181, 185, 186–189,
Tacitus, Cornelius, 37, 41, 51 191, 195, 208, 226, 231
Annals, 44 Il corsaro, 185
Tailleferre, Germaine, 320 Don Carlos, 108, 349
Tasso, Torquato Ernani, 184, 226, 231, 238, 288
Gerusalemme liberate, 65 Falstaff, 254, 268
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 255, 257 I lombardi alla prima crociata, 184, 185, 231,
Teatro San Carlo (Naples), 91, 110, 114, 145, 234
226, 308 Luisa Miller, 236
Tenor voice, 32, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, I masnadieri, 189, 234
102, 104, 106, 107 Macbeth, 184, 288
Théâtre des Champs Elysées, 247 Nabucco, 145, 181, 183, 184, 185, 195, 229,
Théâtre Italien (Paris), 247, 254 231, 234, 235
Théâtre Lyrique (Paris), 247, 249 Otello, 254, 268, 356
Thomas, Ambroise Re Lear, 193
Hamlet, 356 Requiem, 310
Thompson, E.P., 6 Rigoletto, 54, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 288,
Till, Nicholas, 298 356
Tilly, Charles, 7 Simon Boccanegra, 229
Tomlinson, Gary, 325 “Suona la tromba,” 189–194
Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera, 301, La traviata, 304–305
303 Il trovatore, 236, 279, 281, 288, 309
Toscanini, Arturo, 268, 273, 274, 276, I vespri siciliani, 186, 239
287 Verismo, 256, 268
Tosi, Adelaide, 101, 113 Versailles Treaty, 315
Tourrasse, André Vichy Regime, 123, 129
Le Poirier de misère, 122 Victor Emanuel II, King of Sardinia and of
Tragédie lyrique, 17, 30, 73–75, 77–78, 79–80, Italy, 197
82, 83, 84, 355 Vienna, 171, 176
Travesti roles/singers, 32, 87, 89, 91, 92, 93, Vienna State Opera, 251, 257
94, 96–98, 99, 100, 101, 102–103, 109, Virgil
113, 114 Aeneid, 39
Treitler, Leo, 10 Georgics, 124
“Turns,” Cultural and Historical, 2, 5, 13, Visconti, Luchino, 280–282
14, 15, 17, 351, 352, 361 Senso, 277, 278–282
Tuscany, Grand Duchy of, 140 Vogler, Abbé Georg Joseph, 90
Vuillermoz, Emile, 340
Ungarelli, Rosa, 150
Wagner, Richard, 120, 121, 131, 243, 244,
Valli, Alida, 278 251, 255, 255, 257, 258–259, 261, 262,
Velluti, Giambattista, 89, 91, 102, 112 271, 295, 308, 310, 338, 339, 341, 342,
Verdi, Giuseppe, 136, 148, 229, 230, 231–232, 344, 349, 357, 358, 359
234, 236, 237, 238, 239, 244, 254, 255, Der fliegende Holländer, 357
406 Index