La Carta Canta, Page 1

Opera’s “Tragic Moment”

The L-shaped Plot in the Age of Rossini

Part One: “La carta canta”

Ma che paese è questo! Anche i padre che sforzano le figlie!

(Slook, merchant from Canada)

Rossini’s first opera production was a one-act farsa entitle La cambiale di matrimonio

that premiered on 3 November 1810 at the Teatro San Moisè in Venice. The basic plot was as

standard as standard could be: a father wishes to arrange a marriage for his daughter but she

loves another, less acceptable, suitor. The distinctive feature of this version of is G. Rossi’s witty

libretto that satirically views the proposed marriage strictly in mercantile terms: the bride is

treated as a bale of goods that a prospective purchaser finds is already “mortgaged” (because she

already loves someone else). If Karl Marx had known of this libretto, he certainly would have

quoted it alongside Balzac and Timon of Athens as a devastating critique of the alienating power

of money.1

The well-worn standard plot that we find in La cambiale has a notable structural feature

that comes into relief when we focus on the position of the daughter. The tension underlying the

plot arises from the fact that the daughter must negotiate between a vertical relationship (her

1
Rossi’s libretto is based on the one provided by Camillo Federici and Giuseppe Checcherini for Carlo
Coccia in 1807. Marx’s use of literary texts to denounce the power of money occurs in the 1844 Manuscripts.
 La Carta Canta, Page 2

hierarchical subordination to the father) and a horizontal relationship (her autonomous and

mutual commitment to her lover). This standard plot can therefore be described as L-shaped.

When Rossini began his operatic career in 1810, the L-shaped plot was pretty much the

property of the buffa genre. By the end of his operatic career in 1829, largely owing to Rossini

himself, it had become the canonical form of serious opera. This great shift was a response to the

spirit of the times. The L-shaped plot came to be opera’s way of exploring the transition from a

traditional society held together primarily by vertical hierarchy to a modern society based

primarily on horizontal contract. The eighteenth century explored this transition in comic terms,

but the early nineteenth century experienced it as a tragic conflict between two opposing but

equally valid claims on the individual. Thus the L-shaped plot came more and more to be seen as

no laughing matter.

In this essay, our focus will be on the L-shaped plot in its original buffa incarnation,

especially as found in Rossini’s farsa La cambiale di matrimonio.2 The L-shaped plot expressed

the principle of the bourgeois world but also some of its inner tensions and contradictions.

Raising these contradictions from buffa to the status of high tragedy required stubborn

determination by Rossini and his librettists. This process was part and parcel of the new

“bourgeois dignity” that Deirdre McCloskey tells us was the real innovation of precisely this

historical period.3

2
The farsa was an operatic genre popular around 1800; its main distinguishing feature was its one-act
length. Its plot could be either comic or sentimental, and its structure was modelled on the two-act dramma giocoso,
with a central ensemble in the place of a first-act finale.
3
Closkey, Deirdre N. 2010. Bourgeois dignity: why economics can't explain the modern world. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
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Buffa and the Bourgeois World

The features of the L-shaped plot that made it suitable for the exploration of this tragic

conflict are already latent in its original buffa incarnation. La cambiale provides a suitable focus

for bringing this out, both because of its standard plot and because Rossi’s libretto points up

some of the larger issues concealed within the entertaining intrigue. The merchant Mill, living (it

seems) in London, has made a long-distance bargain with Slook, a Canadian merchant. Slook

wants a wife and Mill thinks his own daughter Fanny would fill the bill (literally). Fanny,

however, is in love with Edward, who has disguised himself as Mill’s new bookkeeper, since he

feels he is too poor to aspire to Fanny’s hand as yet. When Slook arrives on the scene, the two

lovers seek to discourage him by threatening to slit his wrists and scratch his eyes out—without,

however, revealing their relationship. Slook is naturally taken somewhat aback.

Slook, giving no reasons, tells the father he no longer wants to marry. Mill feels that

Slook is welshing on a business deal (although, as an honorable merchant, Slook has offered

compensation for not picking up his option) and challenges him to a duel. This very un-

bourgeois project naturally peters out in farcical threats (bourgeois attempts at dueling were an

unfailing source of humor in this period). The happy ending is made possible by the good-

hearted Canadian Slook, who continues the mercantile metaphor by assigning the “bill of

marriage” to young Edward and even adopting him, thus removing the obstacle of poverty.

The only obstacle is Mill’s disappointment, but, after the usual paternal tantrum, he

relents. The farsa ends with a happy and community-affirming ensemble. The Mill household

also features two servants, Norton and Clarina, who comment on the action and do what they can

to help the lovers.

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In his first entrance, Mill is shown struggling with a mappamundo in order to find out

where Canada is. The map that upsets Mill provides a picture not only of the New World tied to

Europe by mercantile paper chains but also of the new world created by the bourgeoisie as they

moved out of their allotted corner in the ancien regime. Mill finally gives up: “oh, mi confondo

col mappamundo!” (Oh, I’m getting all mixed up with this world map!) (43).4 Rossini gives

musical emphasis to this expression of both unease and exhilaration of a brave new bourgeois

world.

Even though Mill himself is an apt symbol of the mercantile new world, he himself is

ambivalent about its newness, praising Slook as a relic of the age of gold in the present age of

iron, and almost rejecting the new bookkeeper (his daughter’s suitor in disguise) because he is

troppo moderno. Other characters are similarly ambivalent. Even as the servant Norton laughs at

Slook’s “simplicity” in thinking that brides are treated like merchandise in Europe, he also has to

admit that Slook “in parte non s’inganno” (he is not entirely mistaken) (71). The deal between

Slook and Mill shows the new bourgeois world its own offspring (or rather, how it treats its own

offspring) and this new world is far from entirely pleased at the sight.5

Buffa and Social Mobility

The new world is unstable for another reason: class lines are being subverted by class

mobility. Rossini’s farsa presents the impecunious suitor not as a greedy careerist aiming at an

advantageous marriage, but as someone who should be able to marry the boss’s daughter, if they

truly love each other. As Edward explains to Slook (86):

4
Page references are to the libretto included in the CD performance directed by Donato Renzetti.
5
The libretto does not give a clear answer to the following question: is Slook perceived as barbaro because
he represents the unadorned bourgeois world in its pure state, or because he is associated with the “savage” and
backward?
 La Carta Canta, Page 5

La mia fortuna è troppo disuguale Al ricco stato suo.

(I am too poor to marry such a rich man’s daughter.)

Edward’s fortune is “unequal” in a relatively superficial sense, but “equal” in a deeper sense that

spells instability for external class boundaries.

Although there is no aristocratic character in La cambiale, the duel scene points to the

class barrier between the bourgeois and aristocratic world. As Slook announces: “In più nobile

manier Io vi vengo ad ammazzar” (I have come to kill you in the most noble way) (92). This

farcical duel is played entirely for laughs, as Millis tries to cover up his lack of courage, in good

stage-bourgeois style, by outrageous bluffs, while his Canadian visitor scornfully uses his pipe (a

peace pipe?) instead of a sword. The sight of the merchants aping their aristocratic betters is

always good for a laugh, but perhaps the laughter is a bit uneasy.

From its very beginnings in the early eighteenth century, opera buffa was centrally

concerned with the instability of class relations in a bourgeois world. Early comic opera

contemplated with horrified fascination “the serving-girl as boss” (La serva padrona) or the rich

old Pimpinone who marries his servant and lives to regret it.6 The challenge of social mobility is

distanced by making it happen through senile foolishness, but the underlying fascination with the

topic cannot be completely disguised.

Buffa could also take also take a more positive attitude toward at least male careerism. In

Leonardo Leo’s L’Alidoro (1740), the hero is (as so often) a suitor disguising himself as an

employee of the targeted father-in-law. Even before the audience is told that the suitor is not the

servant that he appears to be, he is given what is almost a parody of a rage aria in opera seria,
6
The full title of Telemann’s 1725 opera identifies the theme of class mobility: Pimpinone, oder Die
ungleiche Heirath, oder das herrsch-süchtige Cammer-Mädgen.
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during which he rails against fate’s cruelty in thwarting his career goals. But, as he sings to

appropriately strong music, he refuses to yield: “But, Oh God! I thought that my malevolent fate

was appeased, but I was wrong. I see that fate is an implacable enemy and fights against me to

see me lost. But what? Will you yield? Will you be outdone? No, this will never be!”7 Leo’s

dramatic aria transforms mundane social mobility into an exalted sense of self, and appropriates

the aristocratic self-assertion of the rage aria in order to express the defiance of the bourgeois

individualist who, like Balzac’s Rastignac, cries “A nous deux!” to the world that would doom

him to obscurity.

The suitor in L’Alidoro has three different names. In disguise as a servant, he is called

Ascanio (an allusion to a celebrated hero of the ancient world). His real name is Luigi, a true

gentleman. At the end, he is revealed to be Alidoro, the long-lost brother to his upper-class rival,

thus making him even more acceptable as a suitor. All these names problematize social identity

(not to mention that the role is sung by a woman), even though their overt aim is to tone down

the scandal of social mobility by providing the hero with a suitable background. What had to be

muffled in an early buffa such as L’Alidoro could be stated much more explicitly in a post-

revolutionary farsa such as La cambiale di matrimonio.

The horizontal principle

The conflicts between the characters in an L-shaped plot gain resonance because they

embody the clash between two principles of social relations: the vertical principle and the

horizontal principle. The vertical principle represents the ideal of traditional society and the

ancien régime: status hierarchies in which ideally everyone finds their place. In particular, father

7
In connection with the excellent Dynamic DVD of L’Alidoro, a libretto with English translation can be
found at http://www.dynamiclassic.it/area_pubblica/booklets/CDS588-%20Alidoro%20Libretto.pdf.
 La Carta Canta, Page 7

figures—God, king, paterfamilias—are all to be obeyed without question, because they gave us

life and because society would fall apart if they were not obeyed.

The horizontal principle puts forth a fundamentally different picture of the creation and

legitimacy of social bonds. In this view of society, the only obligatory bond is created by the free

and autonomous decision of two individuals—a contract, or, to use a more operatic term, a

giuramento, a vow of mutual loyalty. One’s social identity is not determined by birth but by

one’s ability to win the free consent of others. The affirmation of the horizontal principle

constituted a direct and deadly challenge to the ancien régime.

While far from overtly revolutionary, Rossini’s first opera stands foursquare for what

might be called the horizontal principle: the creation of social bonds through free individual

choice. La cambiale propagates the horizontal principle through explicit declarations of the

libretto, through plot features and through musical features.

The duet between the two lovers (one of the score’s most popular items) states the basic

thesis, with the music seconding the sense of “corresponding love” (51):

Quel delizioso incanto

È un corrisposto amor!

Propizio accolga amore

Il nostro giuramento!

What a magical feeling

Requited passion is! (or, more literally, “a corresponding love”)

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May love look favorably

On our oath.

As we shall see, “giuramento” and other “giur-” words are key to L-shaped librettos,

since they affirm the principle of mutual obligations, freely entered into. Edward’s first reaction,

when he hears of possible trouble from Fanny’s father, is complain that this happens “e quando

noi Siamo d’accordo!” (And when we agree!) (52). He instinctively feels that their mutual

contract outweighs other pressures—that their love is their business, not Mill’s. All the greater is

the shock when he is handed “il contratto nuzial,” filled out and signed—by Mill, without even

the knowledge of Fanny (53).

This affirmation of reciprocal affection as the highest good is supported by the aria given

to Clarina the servant girl (71-2). Clarina tells us that when a heart truly loves, it will only be

satisfied by its oggetto (which could perhaps be translated “object of interest,” an example of

sentimental phraseology that nonetheless implies the importance of individual choice). Both the

middle-class lovers and the servants explicitly affirm the horizontal principle in their musings,

and in this way they at least mitigate class lines.

The ideological edge of romantic love comes out when Fanny is told (52) that “Voi siete

fatto sposa”—you are going to be made a married women. Fanny’s instant reaction (54): “Non

posso ancora Credere che mio padre arrivi a questo Segno a sacrifarmi” (“I still can’t believe that

my father would sacrifice me like this”). In her later duet with Slook, Fanny pleas with him: “In

libertà lasciatemi” (65). This plea is given strong musical emphasis by Rossini.

La cambiale isn’t the only Rossini farsa to affirm libertà as a virtue. For example,

L’occasione fa il ladro has a character state that “Pera, chi vuol costringere d'un cor la libertà”
 La Carta Canta, Page 9

(“Perish anyone who wishes to constrain the freedom of the heart”). The heroine of this farsa

states the ideology of the horizontal principle more explicitly than the characters of La cambiale:

“Let my heart take charge of its own fate and surrender only to mutual love.”8

The horizontal principle is also expressed more indirectly by the plot mechanics of La

cambiale. The essential conflict is between two contracts: the one between the two older male

merchants Mill and Slook, and the one between the young lovers Fanny and Edward. The plot is

arranged so that both contracts end up being honored. The libretto gives the impression that the

conflict is within the bourgeois world; the heartless extension of mercantile dealings to marriage

is corrected by the higher principle of the bourgeois world, namely, respect for individual

autonomy and dignity. Any such impression is undercut by the fact that the conflict stems even

more fundamentally from Mill’s non-contractual, vertical power over his daughter. The libretto

takes this power for granted, as we shall discuss later.

Finally, the affirmation of the horizontal principle is also given strong reinforcement by

the most striking musical features of Rossini’s buffa style. The ensembles, from duets up to full

cast sextets and more, allows a combination of individual assertion and social structure that no

other musical style makes possible.9 Characters are in conflict, but also firmly implanted in a

mutual structure. The aesthetic effect of social structure allowing but containing individual

diversity is heightened when the participants sing in different styles: patter along with legato

along with soaring sopranos.

8
Slook reacts to the stiff manners of the Europeans by exclaiming “Benedetta sia la nostra Innocente
libertà!” (Blessed be our innocent liberty!) (58).
9
The “web of ensembles” is treated in more detail in the section on Rossini’s city-state trilogy. Any
reference to “Rossini’s style” is not meant to imply that features of this style are unique to Rossini, only that they
became identified with his work.
 La Carta Canta, Page 10

This underlying feature of the ensembles also arises from our perception of the actual

performers of the Rossini style. The audience realizes the technical skill and thus the individual

dedication required for rapid-fire patter delivery, for instance. This effect is squared and cubed

by patter ensembles because individual virtuosity is presented side-by-side with incredible

teamwork—an effect not possible with most other forms of individual vocal display. The Rossini

ensemble is in effect of virtuoso display of cooperation.

Part of the Rossini aesthetic is the direct competition between performers, as described by

Marco Beghelli: “A duet, for example, is not only the meeting of two heroes, but above all a duel

between two heroic voices pitted against each other.”10 The effect of individualist competitive

assertion is nonetheless counterbalanced by the enforced teamwork that stands in striking

contrast to the much more hierarchical star system of most earlier and later forms of opera.

The impact of the Rossini crescendo derives in part from the interplay of our perception

of an out-of-control force sweeping us and the characters up in its wake with our knowledge of

the super-control needed if the performers are to carry off the crescendo. As a signifier for an

out-of-control force in the fictive world of the opera, the crescendo also points to possible

sources of alienation and individual disappointment than could be brought out further in a non-

buffa treatment.

The vertical principle

In contrast to the horizontal principle of freely chosen ties, the vertical principle asserts

the primacy of traditional, family-based authority that places the individual into an automatic,

non-chosen subordination to (almost always) paternal authority. In the world of the Rossini

10
Marco Beghelli, “The dramaturgy of the operas,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rossini” (2004).
 La Carta Canta, Page 11

farsa, in contrast to the explicit and implicit affirmation of the horizontal principle, the vertical

principle is simply taken for granted. In La cambiale, the father’s authority over the daughter, his

right to dispose of her in marriage, is not even talked about, much less challenged: it just is.

Paternal authority is one of the features of the bourgeois world of buffa that connects this world

to the ancien regime out of which it emerges. This connection is key to the expansion of the L-

shaped plot from comic clashes to tragic social conflict. For the moment, though, the vertical

principal of paternal authority appears only in its bourgeois form of a father hoping to marry off

his daughter for advantage.

Even in this world, there are intimations of irreconcilable social conflict. Jean-Jacques

Rousseau had a sense of this when he criticized comedy for teaching servants and children to

disrespect their betters. His keen eye saw here, in the seemingly innocuous comic plot, how the

spirit of individual autonomy was acting as a subversive solvent to the rigid world of traditional

familial authority.

As a consequence, even in this comic world, the happy ending can only be achieved by a

deus ex machina—often in its bourgeois form as the sudden intervention of a benevolent man of

wealth. Slook—and his obvious model, Count Robinson from Cimarosa’s 1792 buffa classic La

matrimonia segreta—are like fairy godfathers who make the impossible possible. Just for this

reason, Rossini did not include an actual fairy godmother or godfather in La Cenerentola.

Rossini could present Alidoro (the Prince’s tutor who outfits Cenerentola for the ball) as a flesh

and blood human instead of a fairy godmother because the buffa tradition had already turned

humans into benevolent fairies ex machina.

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In La cambiale¸ Slook not only bows out of any romantic rivalry, but provides Edward

with enough wealth to remove the obstacle of paternal opposition, thus papering over the

problem of reconciling autonomy with authority. Since Mill is (at the last minute) willing to give

his blessing to Fanny’s caro oggetto, there is no need for a wrenching choice between rebellion

and romantic frustration.

The Characters of the L-shaped plot: The suitor (R)

The operatic version of the L-shaped plot is incarnated by four archetypes, who

interrelations are shown in the following diagram:

Father (C)

Approved Suitor (P)

Daughter (J) Lover (R)

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet presents these archetypal characters and sets them in

motion with such clarity that we have identified the positions in this diagram with initials taken

from the play: Juliet, Romeo, Capulet and Paris. The use of these letters allows us to see the

scheme in an abstract manner that will aid us in our comparative analyses—for example, the J

position is sometimes filled by a son, and so on. (A later section will present a full analysis of

Shakespeare’s play from the operatic point of view.)

For now, we will look at the four main characters of La cambiale as well as Rossini’s

later farsi and comic operas in order to gain a sense of how these archetypal characters from

Neapolitan buffa could be used to explore some of the tensions of a changing world. The R

figure is a suitor who is unacceptable to the father for some reason. In the case of Edward in La
 La Carta Canta, Page 13

cambiale, poverty reduces his eligibility. For Florville of Il signor Bruschino, the difficulty is

that his father is engaged in a feud with his girlfriend’s father. Although the Prince in

Cenerentola is prime marriage material, Cenerentola’s father wants him for his other daughters.

Barriers such as these not only start the plot ticking, but, more fundamentally, they activate the

conflict between the horizontal principle of free choice and the vertical principle of submission

to paternal authority. The more unacceptable the prospective suitor, the more dramatic and the

more subversive is the daughter’s assertion of individual autonomy.

The young people in buffa often resort to deception and disguise. Edward pretends to be a

bookkeeper. The more unsettling male protagonists of Signor Bruschino and L’occasione fa il

ladro are identity thieves, boldly outfacing those who know the facts. All these disguises are

made possible because of the modern necessity of making deals with strangers and perforce

trusting them (which is not to deny that the disguises are often absurdly implausible for reasons

of comedy). Appropriately enough, Rossini also examines the new institution of the press, the

new mass media that spawns systematic deception (La pietra del paragone) but allows

connection between strangers (La Gazzetta).11 Like the many disguises of farsa, unreliable mass

media point to the risks of living in a world of strangers.

In La cambiale, Edward and Fanny work together as a team, as shown with particular

effectiveness when they terrorize Slook. There is no conflict or tension between the two lovers,

no sense the Edward is putting pressure on Fanny. Only if the father seems to be permanently

implacable—and this is the hallmark of tragic L-shaped plots—does the lover become motivated

to put serious and heart-rending pressure on the soprano heroine. He now demands that she

disobey her father and, consequently, abandon her family.

11
To these examinations of the new mass media can be added the comic bard of Matilde di Shabran, who
systematically inflates the heroic dimension of the battles fought in the opera—a telling look at the Napoleonic era.
 La Carta Canta, Page 14

The father (C)

Besides fulfilling the essential job of providing a barrier between the two lovers, Mill in

La cambiale reveals some features that turn out to be typical of the father’s role in Rossini’s

serious operas. Mill is benevolently inclined toward his daughter and he is convinced that he is

working for her welfare. “Oh che raro consorte Faccia a mia figlia … La tua fortuna è fatta”

(What a wonderful husband I’m making for my daughter … Your fortune is made) (50, 52). But

he has more authority over her than knowledge of her, and he is over-confident in his claims to

know her mind. The servant Norton challenges Mill’s plan by invoking Fanny’s autonomy: “and

what if she doesn’t like him?” (49). Mill waves away the question:

Mill: Deve piacerle: oh sì! (She has to like him: oh yes.)

Norton: Ma, s’ella avesse? (But what if she had …)

Mill: Cosa ha d’aver? (Had what?)

Norton: Ma … (But … )

Mill: Ma—voi mi seccate: Sempre in contraddizioni! (But—you’re annoying me: always

contradicting me!)

Norton: Ma … (But …)

Mill: Basta, andate. (That’s enough, you can go.)

This exchange is the first appearance of the ma running gag that continues through the

farsa all the way to the end. Underlying the joke are the clogged lines of communication in this
 La Carta Canta, Page 15

patriarchal household—a key theme, as we shall see, in Romeo and Juliet and the tragic L-

shaped plot.12

When confronted with evidence that he does not control the situation and that

arrangements have been made without him, Mill has a tantrum in the normal way of a buffa

father and angrily denounces everybody (97):

Che vedo! Che sento! quest’è tradimento.

Sì: tutti a tradirmi uniti vi siete:

Presto in ritiro: mi vo’ vendicar.

What do I see! What do I hear! This is a betrayal.

Yes: you have all joined together to betray me:

Get out at once: I am going to take revenge.

All other characters now plead with the father to relent: the fact that the father figure is

socially isolated makes somewhat more plausible the change of heart necessary for the happy

ending. In a more tragic conflict, the balance of power is massively reversed: social consensus

supports paternal authority and indeed makes it almost impossible for him to make concessions.

In some of Rossini’s later farsi, the father figure, while still present, dwindles into

insignificance, leaving the younger characters to sort out their problems (for example,

L'occasione and La scala di seta). Although unnecessary for the detailed plot dynamics, the

12
A much more famous Rossinian “ma”—in Rosina’s aria from Il barbiere, Una voce poco fa—also points
to the contrast between the real person versus the surface shown to family authority.
 La Carta Canta, Page 16

father figure cannot be dispensed with entirely, because his claim to authority underlies the

tensions of the plot.

Approved Suitor (P)

The operatic father does not just prohibit marriage between his daughter and her chosen

oggetto; he also wants to force her to marry another man who can be called the approved suitor.

Usually the father deludes himself that the approved suitor is acceptable to the daughter or

represents her best interests. Nevertheless, the approved suitor is an emanation of paternal

authority, the embodiment of his will to control his daughter. For this reason, I have connected

him with a broken line to the father in order to indicate his ambivalent position as someone

without an independent relation with either father or daughter.

In terms of plot dynamics, the character of the approved fiancé—for instance, Slook—is

something of a wild card.13 The other three characters—the father, the daughter, the lover—are

strictly defined by the requirements of the L-shaped plot. In contrast, the approved fiancé can be

wise or foolish, sympathetic or unsympathetic to the heroine, available or not to fall in love with

other young ladies, ready or not to act as a fairy godfather. As an extreme example, Buralicchio

of L’equivoco stravagante relinquishes his claim to the heroine because he is tricked into

thinking she is actually a man!

The P figure in La cambiale is Slook, the merchant from Canada. As a sympathetic and

humane man —and as representative of Canada’s innocente libertà—he renounces his position

as an approved suitor as soon as he sees that he is unacceptable to Fanny. He later provides the

material wherewithal to persuade Fanny’s father to relent.

13
In this respect, he is like the “second woman,” as analyzed by Naomi André in Voicing gender: castrati, travesti,
and the second woman in early-nineteenth-century Italian opera (Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 2004).
 La Carta Canta, Page 17

The daughter (J) as hinge position

The association of the L-shaped plot with theatrical representations of the bourgeois

world goes back to its classical origins in the New Comedy of Menander and Terence.14 New

Comedy is set in an urban world of merchants and other entrepreneurs such as independent-

minded call girls, and their plots typically revolve around the efforts of rich fathers to control the

love affairs of their romantic sons. In this world, a female claim to autonomy was so unthinkable

that the L-shaped plot had to be built around sons rather than daughters.

In the modern L-shaped plot, the daughter occupies the crucial corner or hinge position.

No one is more firmly locked into place by the vertical principle as the unmarried daughter.

Therefore, no one’s claim to autonomy is more scandalous or subversive to traditional principles.

Even when the daughter is beaten down or driven mad, as in later tragic versions of the L-shaped

plot, her claim not only to happiness but to her right to choose her own social loyalties by free

choice is a modern, subversive and even revolutionary one.

The daughter thus has the potential to become the key character, the one who is

connected to everybody else, the one who is in the best position to grasp the situation as a whole.

In La cambiale, this potential is not fully realized. Although Fanny is unable to openly assert her

right to autonomy in front of her father (she resorts to repeating the evasive “ma”), she certainly

shows spunk when she terrorizes Slook by threatening to scratch out his eyes.

Fanny has no aria comparable to Perdonate signor mio, sung by Carolina in Il

matrimonio segreto, in which she expresses a real sense of the pathos of her situation. Fanny

does have is given an aria of happiness and relief when Slook resolves her dilemma—an aria that
14
The outstanding figures of New Comedy were the Greek playwright Menander, writing around 300 BC,
and the Roman playwright Terence (d. 150 BC), who often adapted Menander’s plays. As opposed to older, more
raucous, forms of comedy, New Comedy concentrated on family problems in an urban environment.
 La Carta Canta, Page 18

is the acorn that eventually leads to the magnificent exultation arias of Rossini’s later comic

operas. Fanny’s aria, Vorrei spiegarvi il giubilo (88), has always remained in the repertory of the

operatic soprano.

The elaboration of the L-shaped plot follows two contrasting trajectories in Rossini’s

later operas, depending on whether they are serious or comic. These trajectories are defined by

the opportunities open to the soprano who incarnates the J figure. If the situation can be saved, if

there is a way out of the tensions inspired by the L-shaped plot, this is entirely due to the

soprano’s energy, wit and benevolence. If the situation cannot be saved and there is no way out,

the soprano in the hinge position is the first to be destroyed—and with her, the surrounding

social world. In other words, society’s salvation in Rossini’s oeuvre depends entirely on the

opportunities open to the soprano.

Thus the inner meaning of Rossini’s two principal genres can only be grasped in their

relation to one another. Since the later sections of the present investigation focus on the tragic L-

shaped plot, a few words on Rossini’s dramma giocoso will not be amiss. These comic operas

celebrate the triumph of the soprano. The highpoints of this development is Il barbiere di Siviglia

and the three operas named after their soprano heroines: L'italiana in Algeri, La Cenerentola,

and Matilde di Shabran.

The only one of these four operas to rely completely on the paradigmatic L-shaped plot is

Cenerentola: a father who rejects the autonomy of his daughter and the suitor who relies on it.

Barbieri is close, with a guardian who acts as the father figure and who is therefore able to play

the role of the approved fiancé himself. The other two operas have at least a family resemblance
 La Carta Canta, Page 19

to the L-shaped plot because they revolve around the soprano’s conflict with exaggerated,

indeed, caricatured male authority.

These four soprano heroines show some basic common traits. They are all agents actively

working out their own destiny. Even the gentle Cenerentola has been described as follows:

She does not have a dull bar in the whole piece: her theme song is simple and genuinely

affecting, she pleads to be allowed to go the ball in a phrase so poignant as to live in the

ear, she gains dignity and self-confidence as the mysterious stranger, she deals with the

Prince as an equal and the finale comes right out of the closet and shows herself to be

adorable, compassionate and quite capable of managing relations with her family,

organizing the Prince and probably ruling the kingdom too.15

The other heroines more openly flaunt their wiliness and their sexual power. Yet all the

heroines use their power to ensure the victory of the civilized values of equality and mutual

respect. Matilde is the most ideologically explicit of these characters. Sometimes her campaign

to civilize Corradino, who is both barbaric and misogynistic (practically the same thing in

Rossini), seems to be an almost disinterested fight for the triumph of civilized values. When the

victory of “la donna” is celebrated in her final aria, it is a victory of art and love over the

militarized values of war and power.

All the heroines show that they have a more lucid grasp of the situation as a whole than

any of the other characters, partly as a result of their hinge position. They all triumph on their

own terms, so that they barely need the services of a deus ex machina. This female agency is

made more plausible and acceptable by a consistent buffoonization of male authority. Perhaps

15
Denis Forman, A Night at the Opera, p. 106.
 La Carta Canta, Page 20

also contributing is a consistent fairy-tale-ization in comparison to the more hard-bitten realism

of the farsi.

We see that at least one source of the happy ending in an L-shaped plot is the agency of

the soprano in the hinge position who can deal with both paternal authority and romantic partner.

This suggests that a tragic ending might be incompatible with a soprano character who controls

her fate too actively.

Looking Ahead: From Comic Realism to Tragedy

At one point in the dispute between Slook and Mill, the latter says in exasperation: La

carta canta. In plot terms, this means “the document speaks for itself.”16 The phrase is thus

redolent of a new world of contractual commitments, signed documents, and forging bonds with

strangers—the horizontal principle that is the warp and weft of this world.

But the phrase can also serve as the motto for buffa opera itself: the document sings, the

realistic world of modern bourgeois relationships is turned into musical art. The social realism of

buffa is tightly connected to its comic effect. If the tragic potential of the L-shaped plot was to be

realized, it had to be distanced from the busy bourgeois world and played out on a larger social

screen. One way to accomplish this was to go back to the setting of the original Romeo and

Juliet: the medieval and Renaissance Italian city-state. As we shall see in the following sections,

this is exactly what Rossini did in his city-state trilogy: Tancredi (1913), Otello (1816) and

Bianca e Falliero (1819).

16
Documents are personalized elsewhere in the libretto when a character announces “la cambiale parla
chiaro” (the bill of exchange speaks loud and clear) (69).