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

This edited volume is the first book to bring together academic

specialists writing on the multi-media operatic form from the
disciplines of musicology, comparative literature, history, sociology,
and philosophy. The presence in the volumes title of Pierre Bourdieu,
the leading cultural sociologist of the late twentieth century, signals
the editors intention to synthesize recent advances in social science
with recent advances in musicological and other scholarship on opera.
Through a focus on opera in Italy and France, the contributors to the
volume draw on their respective disciplines both to expand our
knowledge of operas history and to demonstrate the kinds of
contributions that stand to be made by different disciplines to the
study of opera. The volume is divided into three sections, each of
which is preceded by a concise and informative introduction
explaining how the chapters in that section contribute to our
understanding of opera.

v i c to r i a j o h n s on is Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies

at the University of Michigan.
ja n e f. f u lc h e r is Professor of Music (Musicology) at Indiana
University.
t h o m a s e rt m a n is Associate Professor of Sociology at New York
University.
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN OPERA
Series editor: Arthur Groos, Cornell University

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

Published titles
Opera Buffa in Mozarts 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 Kings Theatre,
Garrick and the Business of Performance
Ian Woodfield
Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France: The
Politics of Halevys La Juive
Diana R. Hallman
Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Regime, 16471785
Downing A. Thomas
Three Modes of Perception in Mozart: The Philosophical, Pastoral, and
Comic in Cos 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, 18151930
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, So Paulo

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521856751

Cambridge University Press 2007

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of

relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place
without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published in print format 2007

ISBN-13 978-0-511-27940-9 eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN-10 0-511-27940-X eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN-13 978-0-521-85675-1 hardback

ISBN-10 0-521-85675-2 hardback

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

List of illustrations xi
List of tables xii
List of musical examples xiii
Notes on contributors xv
Foreword xxi
Craig Calhoun
Acknowledgments xxxii

Introduction: Opera and the academic turns 1

Victoria Johnson

I The Representation of Social and Political Relations in

Operatic Works
Introduction to Part I 29
Jane F. Fulcher
1 Venices mythic empires: Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera 34
Wendy Heller
2 Lullys on-stage societies 53
Rebecca Harris-Warrick
3 Representations of le peuple in French opera, 16731764 72
Catherine Kintzler
4 Womens roles in Meyerbeers operas: How Italian heroines are reflected in
French grand opera 87
Naomi Andre
5 The effect of a bomb in the hall: The French opera of ideas
and its cultural role in the 1920s 115
Jane F. Fulcher

ix
x Contents

II The Institutional Bases for the Production and Reception of Opera

Introduction to Part II 135
Thomas Ertman
6 State and market, production and style: An interdisciplinary approach to
eighteenth-century Italian opera history 138
Franco Piperno

7 Opera and the cultural authority of the capital city 160

William Weber

8 Edizioni distrutte and the significance of operatic choruses during the

Risorgimento 181
Philip Gossett
9 Opera in France, 18701914: Between nationalism and
foreign imports 243
Christophe Charle
Translated by Jennifer Boittin

10 Fascism and the operatic unconscious 267

Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg

III Theorizing Opera and the Social

Introduction to Part III 291
Victoria Johnson
11 On opera and society (assuming a relationship) 294
Herbert Lindenberger
12 Symbolic domination and contestation in French music: Shifting the
paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu 312
Jane F. Fulcher

13 Rewriting history from the losers point of view: French Grand Opera
and modernity 330
Antoine Hennion
Translated by Sarah Boittin
14 Conclusion: Towards a new understanding of the history of opera? 351
Thomas Ertman

Bibliography 364
Index 395
 I L LU S T R AT I O N S

7.1 Le supreme Bon Ton, frontispiece, London und Paris, 1800

Source: Library of the University of Gottingen 163
9.1 Revenues of the Opera and the Opera-comique, 18751905
Source: Annuaires statistiques de la ville de Paris 248

xi
 TA B L E S

4.1 Principal roles for women (and castrato) in Meyerbeers

Italian operas 89
4.2 Roles for two leading women in Meyerbeers French grand
operas 107
6.1 Sacred operas for Neapolitan Lent seasons (17851820,
premieres only) 146
6.2 La finta cameriera by Federico-[Barlocci?]/Latilla: productions
17381751 151
6.3 Some opera buffa productions with the Baglionis 154
8.1 Hymns and choruses published by Ricordi in 1848, whose
plates were later destroyed, according to the Ricordi catalogue
of 1857 209
8.2 Some hymns and choruses published by Lucca and Canti in
1848 221
8.3 Poetic meters of the edizioni distrutte 230
9.1 French composers of operas and operas-comiques most
frequently performed abroad 253
9.2 Number of cities outside their home country where the
works of foreign opera composers from the sample were
performed 255

xii
 MUSICAL EXAMPLES

1.1 Giovanni Antonio Boretti, Claudio Cesare, Act i, Scene 9

(I-Vnm It IV, 401[= 9925]), f. 16v17r. 45
2.1 Jean-Baptiste Lully, Atys, Act i, Scene 7: Entree des
Phrygiens (Paris: Baussen, 1709), p. 72. 62
2.2 Jean-Baptiste Lully, Atys, Act i, Scene 7: Second air des
Phrygiens (Paris: Baussen, 1709), p. 73. 63
8.1 Giuseppe Verdi and Goffredo Mameli, Suona la tromba
(1848): the irregular first phrase (five measures plus three
measures) of the first strophe. From the first edition published
by Paolo de Giorgi (Milan, 1865). 192
8.2 Gaetano Donizetti and Salvadore Cammarano, Belisario
(1836), Aria of Alamiro, Trema Bisanzio: the first eight
measures, in which Donizetti ignores the enjambment
between the two verses. From the first edition of the vocal
score published by G. Ricordi (Milan, 1836). 193
8.3 Gioachino Rossini and Luigi Balocchi and Alexandre Soumet,
Le Siege de Corinthe (1826), Scene et Air Hieros avec Chur,
Repondons a ce cri de victoire: the melody subsequently
used by Rossini in his Cantata in onore del Sommo Pontefice Pio
Nono (1846; first performed 1 January 1847). From the first
edition of the vocal score published by Eugene Troupenas
(Paris, 1826). 198
8.4 Gioachino Rossini and Canonico Golfieri, Grido di esultazione
riconoscente al Sommo Pontefice Pio IX, Su, fratelli, letizia si
canti: the melody derived from the Coro dei Bardi in
Rossinis La donna del lago (1819). From the first edition
published by G. Ricordi (Milan, 1847). 206

xiii
xiv List of musical examples

8.5 Albino Abbiati, Il 22 Marzo 1848: Valzer per Pianoforte ossia

Musica allusiva alle cinque giornate: the composition consists of
variations on Rossinis Grido di esultazione riconoscente al
Sommo Pontefice Pio IX. From the first edition published by G.
Ricordi (Milan, 1848). 207
8.6 Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti and Giulio Carcano, Inno
nazionale in occasione delle solenni esequie pei morti nella
rivoluzione di Milano, Per la Patria il sangue han dato:
opening phrase. From the first edition published by G. Ricordi
(Milan, 1848). 225
8.7 Prospero Selli and Carlo Matthey, La partenza per Lombardia:
canto guerriero: syncopated cadential phrase, Oh si voli; chi e
vero italiano / Varchera le bellacque del Po. From the first
edition published by G. Ricordi (Milan, 1848). 227
8.8 Pietro Cornali and David Chiossone, Canto degli italiani,
cadential phrase, Con laurora invocata dai forti, / Italiani
sorgiamo, sorgiamo, / e la terra che disser dei morti / Sia de
prodi la patria e lonor. From the first edition published by F.
Lucca (Milan, 1848). 229
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Victoria Johnson is Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies

at the University of Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology
from Columbia University, where she wrote her dissertation on
state/administrative relations at the Paris Opera from its founding
in 1669 to the French Revolution. A book based on her dissertation
research is forthcoming.
Jane F. Fulcher is Professor of Music (Musicology), Indiana Univer-
sity. In 20032004 she was Edward Cone Member in Music Stud-
ies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. She
has been awarded research fellowships by the American Council of
Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities,
the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the National Humanities Center,
and the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (Paris), and she
was twice a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sci-
ences Sociales, Paris. She is the author of The Nations Image: French
Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (Cambridge, 1987), French
Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World
War (1999), and The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in
France 19141940 (2005). She was also the editor of and a contributor
to Debussy and His World (2001).
Thomas Ertman is Associate Professor of Sociology at New York Uni-
versity. He is the author of Birth of the Leviathan: Building States
and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997),
which was awarded the Barrington Moore Prize for the best book in
historical sociology. He is presently completing a successor volume
tentatively entitled Taming the Leviathan: Liberalization and Democ-
racy in Western Europe from the French Revolution to the Second World

xv
xvi Notes on contributors

War and has just begun a new project on the sociology of opera in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany.

Naomi Andre is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan

and holds a B.A. from Barnard College and an M.A. and a Ph.D.
in Music from Harvard University. Her research focuses on Verdi,
nineteenth-century opera and women in music. Her book, Voicing
Gender: Castrati, Travesti and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-
Century Italian Opera, forthcoming, explores the changing meanings
of womens voices and characterization in nineteenth-century Ital-
ian opera. She has published on Schoenberg and Verdi and has writ-
ten articles for The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, The
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and The International
Dictionary of Black Musicians. Currently she is working on a project
that explores blackness and blackface in opera.

Craig Calhoun is President of the Social Science Research Council

and University Professor of Social Sciences at New York University.
His book Cosmopolitanism and Belonging will be published in 2006.
Also forthcoming are the edited collections Lessons of Empire? Histor-
ical Contexts for Understanding Americas Global Power (with Frederick
Cooper and Kevin Moore, 2005), and Sociology in America: the ASA
Centennial History (2006).

Christophe Charle is Professor of Contemporary History at the Uni-

versite de Paris-I Pantheon-Sorbonne and director of the Institut
dhistoire moderne et contemporaine (CNRS/ENS). Among his
many books are La Naissance des intellectuels 18801900 (1990); A
Social History of France in the Nineteenth-Century (1993); Les Intellectuels
en Europe au XIXe siecle (1996, 2001); Paris fin de siecle, culture et politique
(1998); and La Crise des societes imperiales (19001940), essai dhistoire
sociale comparee de lAllemagne, de la France et de la Grande-Bretagne
(2001). He is presently working on theatre in three European capi-
tals (Paris, Berlin, Vienna) and is leading a comparative project on
the cultural history of European capital cities in the eighteenth,
nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.
 Notes on contributors xvii

Philip Gossett is the Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Pro-

fessor at the University of Chicago. He is general editor of The Works
of Giuseppe Verdi and the Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini.
In 2003 he was elected a Socio Onorario of the Accademia di Santa
Cecilia, Rome.
Rebecca Harris-Warrick is Professor of Music at Cornell University.
Her work focuses on French Baroque music and dance, and opera in
France from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Her publi-
cations have appeared in such journals as Early Music and Cambridge
Opera Journal. She prepared the critical edition of Donizettis opera
La Favorite, in Edizione critica delle opere di Gaetano Donizetti (1997)
and is co-editor, with James R. Anthony, of the critical edition of the
ballet Les Amours deguises in the Oeuvres completes de Jean-Baptiste Lully
(2001). Her most recent book, co-edited with Bruce Alan Brown, is
The Grotesque Dancer on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Gennaro Magri
and His World (2005).
Wendy Heller is Assistant Professor of Music at Princeton University.
She has written extensively on gender, opera, and the classical tra-
dition. She is the author of Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Womens
Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (2003).
Antoine Hennion is Director of Research at the Ecole des Mines
de Paris and the former Director of the Center for the Sociol-
ogy of Innovation (CSI). He has written extensively on the soci-
ology of music and the sociology of media, innovation, and cultural
industries. His recent publications include a book on music-lovers
(Figures de lamateur, La Documentation francaise, 2000, with Sophie
Maisonneuve), a book on the use of J. S. Bach in nineteenth-century
France (La Grandeur de Bach, Fayard, 2000, with J.-M. Fauquet), and
Music as Mediation (forthcoming), the English translation of his 1993
book La Passion musicale.
Catherine Kintzler is Professor of Philosophy at the Universite
Charles de Gaulle Lille-III. She has written extensively on aesthet-
ics and politics in the eighteenth century. Among her books are
xviii Notes on contributors

Condorcet, linstruction publique et la naissance du citoyen (2nd edn.,

1987); Jean-Philippe Rameau, splendeur et naufrage de lesthetique du
plaisir a lage classique (2nd edition, 1988, prix Charles Cros 1983);
and Poetique de lopera francais de Corneille a Rousseau (1991).
Herbert Lindenberger is Avalon Foundation Professor of Humani-
ties, Emeritus, at Stanford University. He is a literary scholar and
cultural historian who has published two books on opera, Opera:
The Extravagant Art (1984) and Opera in History: From Monteverdi to
Cage (1998). His diverse other writings include such books as On
Wordsworths Prelude (1963) and Historical Drama (1975).
Franco Piperno is Professor of Music History at the University of
Florence (Italy), Dipartimento di Storia delle Arti e dello Spettacolo;
he also heads the Faculty (Corso di laurea) of Discipline delle arti,
della musica e dello spettacolo. He has published several studies on
Italian opera of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth cen-
turies, and has also studied musical patronage in Italian Renaissance
courts (with a book on this topic appearing in 2001) and seventeenth-
century Italian instrumental music.
Michael P. Steinberg is Director of the Cogut Center for the Human-
ities and Professor of History and Music at Brown University. He
also serves as Associate Editor of The Musical Quarterly and The
Opera Quarterly. He is the author of Austria as Theatre and Ideology:
The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival (2000), of which the German
edition (Ursprung und Ideologie der Salzburger Festspiele, 2000) won
Austrias Victor Adler Staatspreis in 2001. Listening to Reason: Cul-
ture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music appeared in 2004. A
new book called Judaism Musical and Unmusical is forthcoming.
Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg teaches Italian Studies and Comparative
Literature at Brown University. She is the author of Sublime Surrender:
Male Masochism at the Fin-de-Siecle (1998), as well as of numerous
articles on the constructions of masculinity in the nineteenth cen-
tury, on psychoanalysis and gender, and on Italian literature in the
 Notes on contributors xix

post-unification period. Her The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians is

forthcoming.
William Weber, who teaches history at California State University,
Long Beach, has written Music and the Middle Class: Social Structure
of Concert Life in London, Paris & Vienna, 183048 (1975) and The Rise
of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England (1992), and he co-
edited Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (1984). He has also
taught at the University of York (UK) and was Leverhulme Visiting
Professor at the Royal College of Music.
F O R E WO R D

Opera is delightfully contradictory. I dont mean simply that it is end-

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

xxi
xxii Foreword

for arts sake. Opera is an insiders 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 dont 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 isnt 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 operas 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 dont 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 arts 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

Poetry is contrasted to the work of mere hack librettists; true opera

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

particularly dependent on patronage. Yet it is also successful enough

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

empire or gender. Operas, because they were seen by so many peo-

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

and audiences, and the social impact of music. Social science should
prove helpful. At the same time, many (Im 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 operas 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. Mozarts 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 Beaumarchaiss
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 Mozarts opera endure beyond Beaumar-
chaiss 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 dont 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 Menottis 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
Lees 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

There are many more questions, of course, and undoubtedly many

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

Craig Calhoun
Social Science Research Council

n ot e s
1 See Beth L. Glixon and Jonathan E. Glixon, Inventing the Business of Opera:
The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006) and Victoria Johnson, Founding Culture:
Art, Politics, and Organization at the Paris Opera, 16691792 (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. 2973.
4 Jane Fulchers 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 19141940 (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

The editors would like to acknowledge the generous support of the

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

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

Victoria Johnson

Opera, created in Florence in the 1580s by a group of artistically inclined

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

1
2 Victoria Johnson

disciplines as well as by an increased interdisciplinarity in approaches

to opera. In the wake of the cultural and historical turns that trans-
formed the humanities and social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s,
musicologists in particular have turned in increasing numbers to the
study of opera, and in doing so they have often drawn heavily on the
methods of literary criticism and cultural history. Scholars in a range
of disciplines beyond musicology have also made important contribu-
tions to this wave of new work on opera. Despite this blossoming of
opera studies, however, scholars from the various disciplines concerned
have had few opportunities to juxtapose and compare their differing
approaches to their common object. The present volume aims to cre-
ate just such an opportunity and, at the same time, to extend it to a
broad audience of readers.
The short introductions to each of this volumes three sections dis-
cuss and compare the various approaches taken by the contributors to
the task of re-embedding opera in its social, political, and cultural con-
texts of creation and reception. In the present introduction, however, I
have a different purpose: to situate the current major themes and meth-
ods in opera studies through a brief examination of the recent history of
the academic disciplines involved, including musicology, history, liter-
ature, and sociology. To this end, I offer a series of maps: first, a map of
the current division of academic labor in the study of opera; next, a map
of the recent intellectual developments the so-called turns that
have helped to transform opera studies in highly promising ways; and,
finally, a map of the major paths of inquiry evident in recent work on
opera. Depending on the readers disciplinary home turf, the territory
covered in this introductory essay may at times be quite familiar; more
often, I hope, the reader will find the brief introductions to the concerns
and recent histories of less familiar disciplines useful and informative.

O P E R A A N D T H E D I V I S I O N O F AC A D E M I C L A B O R

For more than a century, musicology has been the natural repository of
opera scholarship, despite the somewhat marginal position accorded
the operatic form in a discipline that has often considered pure music
 Introduction 3

a more legitimate concern.1 Opera has, until relatively recently, been

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

the importance of opera as a site of social, cultural, and political inter-

action in modern European history.
Still other disciplines have been no more proficient or prolific in
the analysis of opera, sometimes for the same reasons that confront
historians, but sometimes for reasons specific to particular disciplinary
trajectories. For example, despite Max Webers early contribution to
the sociology of music and Theodor Adornos extensive mid-century
writings, sociologists have shied away from examining the specifi-
cally musical content of musical works in favor of explaining the
social and economic structures behind their production.6 In this sense,
sociologists have been no more confident than historians about directly
confronting the difficult questions surrounding the relation between
musical content and social context. Despite the textual element of
opera, this sociological reluctance towards the study of music in gen-
eral has done nothing to encourage attention within the discipline to
the operatic form. And there is a further obstacle to the study of opera
facing sociologists, an obstacle that derives from the disciplines own
history. Having once (in the 1960s) taken up the gauntlet thrown down
by the Frankfurt School in its diatribes against the American culture
industry, sociologists of art have for decades been engaged, on the
one hand, in the fruitful work of specifying the precise mechanisms by
which commercial interests shape popular culture, and, on the other,
in documenting the liberating powers of popular culture.7 High
culture forms such as opera have largely remained in the shadows,
except when they have appeared in their modern incarnations in orga-
nizational studies of non-profit institutions.8 European and American
operatic history has therefore received almost no attention at all from
American sociologists since at least World War II.9
Disciplinary divisions of labor, internal disciplinary concerns, and
the apparent impenetrability of musical works have thus served to
hamper the analysis of opera production and consumption by special-
ists in literature, history, and sociology who in principle have much to
contribute to such an analysis and whose own disciplines stand only
to gain thereby. In the last twenty-five years, however, a set of linked
transformations in scholarly concerns and methods throughout the
 Introduction 5

humanities and social sciences has laid the groundwork and provided
the inspiration for a wave of innovative new works on opera, including
musicologist Jane Fulchers The Nations Image: French Grand Opera as
Politics and Politicized Art (1987), musicologist Carolyn Abbates Unsung
Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (1991), and
literary critic Herbert Lindenbergers 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.

THE TURNS IN THE HUMANITIES AND

SOCIAL SCIENCES

These turns, by no means smooth or unilinear processes, are the

unevenly achieved result of a set of loosely linked critiques of tra-
ditional methods and objects of study that cut a swath through a wide
range of disciplines from the 1970s onward. However contradictory
and fitful these developments have been, their end product has been
a massive reorientation of scholarly concerns and methods in history,
sociology, and literature.

History

Historys 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

scholarship: traditional political history and the social history inaugu-

rated by the Annales school in the 1930s and carried on in a more
Marxist vein by a second generation of French historians such as
Albert Soboul and George Rude.10 The success of this reaction is evi-
dent in the broad influence of the school of historical studies known
as the New Cultural History, whose most prominent representatives
are the French historians Roger Chartier and Jacques Revel and the
American historians Natalie Zemon Davis, Robert Darnton, and Lynn
Hunt.
In the 1970s and 1980s, these French and American scholars found
themselves dissatisfied with the huge gaps left in the explanation of his-
torical processes and events by historians dependence on two sources
of historical information: on the one hand, the published, learned
texts of politically and socially prominent figures, and on the other
(with the inception of the Annales school), quantifiable information
about social and economic life. Influenced by E. P. Thompson and
Michel Foucault, among others, the new culturally oriented histori-
ans began to explore alternative ways to capture the experience of the
past by mining unconventional historical sources such as accounts of
popular festivals or visual representations of public and private life.
These sources guided scholars toward new answers to old questions
particularly those that have never ceased to surround the causes, tra-
jectory, and effects of the French Revolution and they often raised
utterly new questions as well. A central accomplishment of the New
Cultural History has been to show how cultural practices are embed-
ded in a relation of mutual constitution with social and economic
structures, an approach that stands in stark contrast to traditional
understandings of the historical role of culture once prevalent among
left-leaning and conservative historians alike.11 The cultural turn in his-
tory was accompanied by another kind of turn, this one strange as
it might seem historical. Unhappy with the Annalistes failure to
take seriously the power of actors to alter social structures, histori-
ans such as Pierre Nora and Lynn Hunt made the event and other
processual and temporal categories central to historical analysis and
explanation.12
 Introduction 7

Sociology

Like history, American sociology has also undergone both a cultural

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

to develop convincing critiques of the critics of mass culture.17 Some

sociologists of culture gradually began to revise their own assumptions
about their central concept and to expand the definition of culture
to include practice, discourse, and symbols. From France, the various
poststructuralist critiques of Levi-Straussian and Saussurian structural-
ism, especially those of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, made
their way into American studies of popular culture and also inspired
culturalist studies of social spheres that had previously been considered
outside the purview of cultural sociology, such as banking, railroads,
or the insurance industry. For certain American sociologists, culture
has become as ubiquitous and powerful a tool for explanation as it has
for the founders and the inheritors of the New Cultural History, no
longer viewed as a mere emanation of economic and social structures
nor as a severely circumscribed sphere of artifacts in modern society.
The multiple influences of poststructuralism, Geertzian anthropol-
ogy, feminism, and cultural studies have combined to produce a set of
aligned, if not always compatible, definitions of culture in sociology as
a potential locus of political struggle and as a producer in its own right
of social and economic structures.

Literary criticism

For its part, the discipline of literary criticism, by definition already

a deeply cultural one in the narrower sense, underwent a histori-
cal turn marked by the ascendancy of the New Historicism in the
early 1980s. Literary criticisms historical turn was, in spite of indi-
vidual differences in emphasis and outlook, above all a reaction to
the brand of literary analysis that had dominated since the late 1920s,
the New Criticism.18 American literary scholars working in this tra-
dition, whose foremost representatives were Cleanth Brooks, John
Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren, chose to bracket the histor-
ical context of literary works in favor of attention to the texts alone.
These scholars shared a conviction that literary works held the key
to appropriate understanding between their covers and that criticism
should be deployed for the close analysis of texts without recourse to
 Introduction 9

extra-textual information. Attention to historical context was largely

eschewed in the quest to understand the work on its own terms, an
approach which often served to identify innovation or creativity as
emanating from the author alone.
The New Historicism marked one current of reaction to this sort
of autonomous understanding of the text. Scholars working in this
vein began to explore the historical contexts in which literary works
were created to examine how their authors were beholden to con-
temporary modes of discourse and other collective social phenomena
for the structure and content of their supposedly autonomous literary
creations.19 Meanwhile, another strain of reaction to the New Crit-
icism was triggered by the influential reinterpretation of Saussurian
semiotics by Roland Barthes, which opened up a whole new range of
texts to be read by critics, including pictures, social practices, and
the objects of daily life.20 To this expansion of subject matter, British
Cultural Studies and the many varieties of French poststructuralism
contributed a revised understanding of the individual text as permitting
multiple and equally valid readings and as thus exhibiting multivo-
cality. By the 1980s, the kind of textual interpretation practiced by
the New Criticism had largely been replaced by a new flexibility (or
laxness, depending on ones perspective) of method, a new set of ques-
tions, and a new range of literary sources. As we shall see, it was
these developments in literary theory that were to have the heaviest
impact on the study of opera, contributing to a wave of new works
on the subject in the 1980s and 1990s, both within musicology and
beyond its borders.

Musicology

It has frequently been noted that musicology has been the discipline
most resistant to, and even ignorant of, the dramatic changes in the
humanities and social sciences that began to make themselves felt in
the 1970s.21 The transformations in methods, sources, and concerns
that were profoundly altering the study of literature hardly touched
musicology for at least a decade, as the discipline remained curiously
10 Victoria Johnson

impervious to the kind of cross-pollination that made sociologists and

literary critics alike claim Raymond Williams and Roland Barthes
as their own, or that made Foucault at one and the same time an
anthropologist, a literary theorist, a historian, and a sociologist. One
of the long-standing exceptions to this rule of disciplinary insular-
ity, Leo Treitler, has suggested that musicology, troubled by its lack
of documentary sources before the medieval period compared, for
example, to the ancient documentation available to scholars of liter-
ature and the visual arts has been resistant to the new academic
currents because it has focused most of its energy on securing its own
tradition through the painstaking reconstruction of historical facts
and sources.22 Though these studies have vastly expanded our his-
torical record of musical life, they have usually made only a limited
contribution to questions about the place of music in the history of
human societies. While many musicologists have moved beyond the
traditional internalist study of musical works to the documentation
of extra-musical phenomena such as markets and politics, many of
these same musicologists have continued to treat the musical works
themselves as objectively autonomous entities, rather than examining
the way such autonomy is socially constituted (or blocked). Like non-
musicologists who may romanticize music as a fundamentally difficult
and mysterious art form, musicologists have often implicitly endowed
music with a timeless autonomy that discourages them from posing
questions about the relations between musical form and content and
extra-musical context at all.
Gradually, however, beginning in the mid-1980s, a series of unusual
conferences and the research of a few bold musicologists resulted in
the publication of several pathbreaking volumes that have questioned
the assumptions behind the dominant concerns and methods in Amer-
ican musicology as well as exploring possible approaches to questions
rarely posed by musicologists about music/society relations. These
works include (but are not limited to) Contemplating Music: Challenges
to Musicology ( Joseph Kerman, 1985); Music and Society: The Politics of
Composition, Performance and Reception (edited by Richard Leppert and
Susan McClary, 1987); Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality
 Introduction 11

(Susan McClary, 1991); Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons

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

the production and reinforcement of social structure, social practices,

and systems of meaning. And just as cultural historians have expanded
the repertoire of legitimate archival sources, musicologists have sup-
plemented the common tools for studying music namely, the analysis
of scores and the interpretation of biographical details of composers
lives with such unorthodox sources as pictorial representations of
musical production and consumption.24 In a similar vein, composers
sketches for works in progress, used heretofore in a fashion that has
tended to buttress the notion of the isolated, inspired, creator, have
been recast as evidence for the contingent, even haphazard, nature of
musical composition.25
Musicologists have been more directly influenced by developments
in literary criticism than by those in any other discipline, in part because
the literary concern with a particular form of artistic creation demon-
strates most directly the possible advantages for the study of music
of applying the assumptions and methods of the new culturalist work
in sociology and of the new cultural history. But besides mediating
between musicology and these other disciplines, literary criticism has
itself been the source of a number of promising new approaches to the
study of music. Theories of reception in music have been modeled on
literary reception theory to reveal the multiple meanings available to
listeners and to contest the usefulness and sometimes the possibility
of reconstructing artistic intentions. Feminist scholars have examined
the distribution of gender work in various musical cultures, and some
have argued for the interpretation of musical works as themselves
gendered or as reflecting and reinforcing gender hierarchies in the
extra-musical world.26 Semiotics has made great strides with some
musicologists, who have employed its principles and methods to exam-
ine how linguistic codes tie musical works to their social contexts
through the notes themselves.27
It is important to note that these developments represent a double
movement away from traditional musicology. First, progressive musi-
cologists have firmly embedded what is often known, misleadingly, as
musical culture or the music world into a larger and more complex
set of social structures, thereby paving the way for the historicization
 Introduction 13

of the implicitly claimed autonomy of this sphere. And more daringly,

they have bared the musical work itself to the new ways of thinking
about history and culture, dismantling the ideas that musical works
are inherently autonomous and that they are locked in an eternal and
insulated dialogue among themselves. Such traditional approaches to
the study of music have in some quarters given way to an assessment
of the ways in which even pure music is the carrier of extra-musical
symbols and codes and is the producer of meaning and social structure.

A P P R OAC H I N G O P E R A A F T E R T H E T U R N S

Both directly and indirectly, the turns have helped effect a profound
transformation in opera studies. Opera scholarship within musicology,
for example, has been a major beneficiary of the new movements in that
discipline in part because musicologists specializing in opera, given
their inevitable confrontation with the text of the libretto, have been
more likely to be aware of developments in literary criticism than
have musicologists specializing in instrumental music. Another group
of musicologists working on opera has found in cultural history the
inspiration and models for approaching opera with new methods and
questions. And beyond musicology, the expansion of acceptable subject
matter in both literary criticism and cultural history has freed scholars
in those fields to take opera seriously as a topic of intellectual inquiry.
A review of opera scholarship published in all disciplines in the last
decade and a half reveals three major lines of inquiry, which can be
roughly classified as the critical approach, the systems of 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

line, the material conditions approach, involves the reconstruction

and analysis of the organizational, political, and professional structures
underpinning opera production and consumption in specific historical
contexts.
The critical approach in opera studies traces its roots to a work
that long predates the turns: Joseph Kermans pathbreaking Opera
as Drama, first published in 1956 and reissued in 1988. As the musicol-
ogist Susan McClary has noted, early critical works such as Kermans
remained more or less isolated voices calling for the grafting of criti-
cal projects onto the mainstream of the profession.28 It was not until
the 1980s and the pioneering work of McClary herself that musicolo-
gists began to question traditional musicological approaches to opera,
which privileged close readings of musical passages and excluded con-
siderations of the musics expression of social relationships and mean-
ings. McClarys innovative writings, which deal with both instrumental
and operatic works, have centered on the expression of gender rela-
tions in these works. Musicologists inspired by her critical approach
have often similarly focused on gender and sexuality in opera. Aiding
this double shift toward criticism and gender issues in musicological
studies of opera was a spate of books on opera by literary critics,
among the most influential of which has been Catherine Clements
Opera, or the Undoing of Women, first published in French in 1976 and
published in an English translation, with a foreword by McClary, in
1988. This work draws on anthropology, semiology, and psychoanaly-
sis to analyze the fatal end that awaits the heroines of so many operas.
Arguing that the sumptuous music accompanying their deaths encour-
ages forgetfulness of the true nature of the events unfolding on stage,
Clement focuses her analysis on the frequently morbid plots: What
awarenesses dimmed by beauty and the sublime, she asks, come to
stand in the darkness of the hall and watch the infinitely repetitive
spectacle of a woman who dies, murdered?29
Clements and McClarys studies have inspired a wave of research
on representations of sexuality and gender in opera. And encouraged,
perhaps, by the success of literary critic Wayne Koestenbaums The
Queens Throat, research on sexuality and gender has expanded beyond
 Introduction 15

specifically feminist criticism to include analyses of lesbian and gay

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

By focusing on stylistic codes of meaning as understood within the

period, this study seeks to avoid imputing political meanings on the basis
of our current perceptions of political homologies or metaphors. Such an
16 Victoria Johnson

essentialist approach . . . must be replaced by the historical and

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

Like many cultural historians working today, Fulchers explicit pur-

pose is to reconstruct, as far as possible, past systems of meanings
what sociologists often refer to as cultural schemas in order to
understand the constraints and possibilities shaping musical expres-
sion and reception at particular historical conjunctures. Otherwise,
one runs the risk of reading into musical works what was not there for
the composer, or since the relevance of the composers intentions
have been called into question by so many scholars for both initial and
subsequent historical audiences. In his 1995 study of musical reception
in Paris between 1750 and 1850, Listening in Paris, the historian James
Johnson taking aim at Susan McClary points out the stakes of the
same problem far more polemically:

I cannot doubt McClary when she claims to hear a narrative of rape and
murder in Beethovens 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

Music and Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Italy; and Singers of Italian

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

contributions to the second and third approaches. In order to take

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

n ot e s
1 Joseph Kermans Opera as Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1956), which located operas dramatic power largely in its music, did
much to galvanize and maintain interest in opera despite the genres
 Introduction 19

subordinate status in musicology. Regarding the status of opera vis-a-vis

pure music, see Susan McClary, Foreword: The Undoing of Opera:
Toward a Feminist Criticism of Music, pp. ixxviii in Catherine Clement,
Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. xii; see also
Susan McClary, Turtles All the Way Down (On the Purely Musical),
pp. 131 in McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Carolyn Abbate
and Roger Parker, Introduction: On Analyzing Opera, in Carolyn
Abbate and Roger Parker, eds., Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner
(Berkeley: University, of California Press, 1989), pp. 124; see
pp. 34.
2 See, e.g, Peter Conrad, Romantic Opera and Literary Form (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1977); Ted A. Emery, Goldonis Pamela
from Play to Libretto, Italica 64/4 (1987), 572582; Gary Schmidgall,
Shakespeare and Opera (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Paul
Bauschatz, CEdipus: Stravinsky and Cocteau Recompose Sophocles,
Comparative Literature 43/2 (1991), 150170; and Leonard Rosmarin, When
Literature Becomes Opera: Study of a Transformational Process (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1999).
3 The 1988 volume Reading Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press),
edited by Arthur Groos and Roger Parker, offered an important challenge
to the marginal status of libretti among musicologists.
4 William Weber, Beyond Zeitgeist: Recent Work in Music History,
Journal of Modern History 66 (1994), 321345; pp. 322323. See also Weber,
Toward a Dialogue between Historians and Musicologists, Musica e
Storia 1 (1993), 721.
5 E.g., Paul Robinson, Opera and Ideas from Mozart to Strauss (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985).
6 Max Webers fragment on music was first published as Die rationalen und
soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik, ed. Theodor Kroyer (Munich: Drei
Masken Verlag, 1921); it has been reissued in the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe
as Zur Musiksoziologie 19101920, ed. Christoph Braun and Ludwig
Finscher (Tubingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 2003). The only available English
translation is The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, trans. and ed.
Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel, and Gertrud Neuwirth (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1958). A number of Adornos writings
20 Victoria Johnson

on music have recently been reissued in Adorno on Music, ed. Robert

Witkin (New York: Routledge, 1998).
7 Some key early works in the former tradition, known as the production
of culture approach, include Paul Hirsch, Processing Fads and Fashions:
An Organization-Set Analysis of Cultural Industry Systems, American
Journal of Sociology 77 (1972), 639659; Richard A. Peterson, ed., The
Production of Culture (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976); and Paul DiMaggio,
Market Structure, the Creative Process, and Popular Culture: Toward an
Organizational Reinterpretation of Mass-Culture Theory, Journal of
Popular Culture 11 (1977), 436452. The strongest sociological tradition in
the study of art consumption (as opposed to production) has come from
Marxian cultural sociologists generally grouped under the rubric British
Cultural Studies; key works include Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth,
Leisure, and the Politics of RocknRoll (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Dick
Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Methuen, 1979);
Paul Willis, Profane Culture (London: Routledge, 1978); and Stuart Hall,
Culture, Media, Languages (London: Hutchinson, 1980). Art consumption
studies in the USA have been deeply influenced by British Cultural
Studies; see, for example, Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women,
Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1984); and Elizabeth Long, Book Clubs: Women and the
Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003).
8 Examples of such studies include Richard A. Peterson, From Impresario
to Arts Administrator: Formal Accountability in Nonprofit Cultural
Organizations, in Paul DiMaggio, ed., Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts:
Studies in Mission and Constraint (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986), pp. 161183; Paul DiMaggio, Nonprofit Organizations in the
Production and Distribution of Culture, in Walter W. Powell, ed., The
Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1987), pp. 195220. Important exceptions to the presentist tendency in
sociological work on high-culture production include DiMaggios
two-part study on nineteenth-century Boston (Cultural
Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an
Organizational Base for High Culture in America, Media, Culture and
Society 4 [1982], 3350, and Cultural Entrepreneurship in
Nineteenth-Century Boston, Part II: The Classification and Framing of
 Introduction 21

American Art, Media, Culture and Society 4 [1982], 303322) and Tia
DeNoras study of Beethoven (Beethoven and the Construction of Genius:
Musical Politics in Vienna, 17921803 [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, 19001940, in Michele Lamont and Marcel Fournier (eds.),
Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequalities
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 2157.
10 Lynn Hunt, Introduction, in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History,
pp. 122; 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, Societes, 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. 4481; 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.
Sian Reynolds (London: Collins, 19721973). Albert Sobouls most
influential work is The Parisian Sans-culottes and the French Revolution,
17934 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), while Rude 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 historys cultural turn, see William
H. Sewell, Jr., The Political Unconscious of Social and Cultural History,
or Confessions of a Former Quantitative Historian, pp. 2280 in Logics of
22 Victoria Johnson

History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2005).
12 See, e.g., Pierre Nora, Le retour de levenement, in Jacques Le Goff
and Pierre Nora, eds., Faire de lhistoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1974).
13 See, for example, Charles Tilly, As Sociology Meets History (New York:
Academic Press, 1981); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A
Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1979); and Arthur Stinchcombe, Theoretical Methods in
Social History (New York: Academic Press, 1978).
14 For an overview of major methods and scholars in historical sociology to
the 1980s, see Theda Skocpol, ed., Vision and Method in Historical Sociology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). For an overview of
more recent trends, see Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens and Ann Shola
Orloff, Introduction: Social Theory, Modernity, and the Three Waves of
Historical Sociology, in Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens and Ann
Shola Orloff, eds., Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 172.
15 The term third wave is borrowed from Adams et al., Introduction:
Social Theory, Modernity, and the Three Waves of Historical
Sociology.
16 Craig Calhoun, The Rise and Domestication of Historical Sociology, in
Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 305337; p. 328. On the
institutional history of American historical sociology, see also Andrew
Abbott, History and Sociology: The Lost Synthesis, Social Science
History 15/2 (1991), 201238.
17 On British Cultural Studies, see above, note 7. By far the most influential
work by Geertz is his Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight, first
published in 1972 and reprinted in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected
Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
18 For some foundational documents as well as more recent reflections on
the New Criticism, see William J. Spurlin and Michael Fischer, eds., The
New Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory: Connections and
Continuities (New York: Garland, 1995).
19 For an introduction to the concerns of the New Historicism, see H.
Aram Veeser, The New Historicism, in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New
Historicism Reader (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 132. See also Steven
 Introduction 23

Mullaney, Discursive Forums, Cultural Practices: History and

Anthropology in Literary Studies, in Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The
Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1996), pp. 161189.
20 Barthess most influential work was Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957).
21 See, e.g., Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, Introduction, in Richard
Leppert and Susan McClary, eds., Music and Society: The Politics of
Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), pp. xixix; p. xii; and Ann E. Moyer, Art Music
and European High Culture, Comparative Studies in Society and History
39/3 (1997), 635643; p. 635.
22 Leo Treitler, The Power of Positivist Thinking, Journal of the American
Musicological Society 42/2 (1989), 375402; p. 378.
23 See, for example, the Prelude to Catherine Clements Opera, or the
Undoing of Women, pp. 323; and Bruno Nettl, Mozart and the
Ethnomusicological Study of Western Culture, in Katharine Bergeron
and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 137155. On relations
between musicology and ethnomusicology in the 1980s, see Joseph
Kerman, Ethnomusicology and Cultural Musicology, chapter 5 in his
Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1985). For a more recent discussion of related issues, see
Philip V. Bohlman, Ethnomusicologys Challenge to the Canon; the
Canons Challenge to Ethnomusicology, in Bergeron and Bohlman,
eds., Disciplining Music, pp. 116136.
24 See especially Richard Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and
Socio-cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988); Richard Leppert, Music, Domestic
Life and Cultural Chauvinism: Images of British Subjects at Home in
India, in Leppert and McClary, eds., Music and Society; and Richard
Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the
Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 63104. Roger
Parker makes novel use of visual representations in Falstaff and Verdis
Final Narratives, in his Leonoras Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 100125. See also
Carolyn Abbates discussion of The Magic Flute in her In Search of Opera
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 55106.
24 Victoria Johnson

25 See, e.g., Roger Parkers analysis of La forza del destino in Leonoras Last
Act, pp. 6199.
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. 1534; 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), 364369, and Paradigm Dissonances: Music Theory,
Cultural Studies, Feminist Criticism, Perspectives of New Music 32/1
(1994), 6885; for a critique of McClary, see Leo Treitler, Gender and
Other Dualities of Music History, in Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference,
pp. 2345; see esp. pp. 3545.
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 Monteverdis Dramatic Music, in her
Feminine Endings, pp. 3552; 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. 138160; and Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
28 McClary, Feminine Endings, p. xiii.
29 Clement, 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

Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith, eds., En Travesti: Women, Gender,

Subversion, Opera (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp.
306348; Patricia Juliana Smith, Gli Enigmi Sono Tre: The [D]evolution
of Turandot, Lesbian Monster, in ibid., pp. 242284; Elizabeth Wood,
Lesbian Fugue: Ethel Smyths Contrapuntal Arts, in Solie, ed.,
Musicology and Difference, pp. 164183; Mitchell Morris, Reading as an
Opera Queen, in ibid., pp. 184200; Philip Brett, Brittens Dream, in
ibid., pp. 259280; and Philip Brett, Grimes Is at His Exercise: Sex,
Politics, and Violence in the Librettos of Peter Grimes, in Mary Ann
Smart, ed., Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 237249.
31 For a recent critique of these writings, see David J. Levin, Is There a Text
in This Libido? Diva and the Rhetoric of Contemporary Opera
Criticism, in Joe Jeongwon and Rose Theresa, eds., Between Opera and
Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 121132.
32 Writings by Said that have been especially influential in musicology
include his seminal Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978) and his
analysis of Verdis Ada in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage,
1994), pp. 111132. For musicological responses to Said, see, e.g., Thomas
Betzwieser, Exoticism and Politics: Beaumarchais and Salieris Le
Couronnement de Tarare (1790), Cambridge Opera Journal 6/2 (1994),
91112; Mark Everist, Meyerbeers Il crociato in Egitto: Melodrame, Opera,
Orientalism, Cambridge Opera Journal 8/3, (1996), 215250; Steven
Huebner, O patria mia: Patriotism, Dream, Death, Cambridge Opera
Journal 14 (1 & 2) (2002), 161175; and Ralph P. Locke, Constructing the
Oriental Other: Saint-Saenss Samson et Dalila, Cambridge Opera Journal
3/3 (1991), 261302 and Reflections on Orientalism in Opera and
Musical Theater, Opera Quarterly 10/1 (1993), 4864.
33 Though he is a literary scholar by discipline, Herbert Lindenbergers
work on opera, particularly his Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), investigates the political and
cultural meanings and contexts of opera in a manner that aligns him
more closely with historians working on opera than with many literary
critics. See also his Opera: The Extravagant Art (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1984).
34 Jane F. Fulcher, The Nations Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and
Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 910.
26 Victoria Johnson

35 Jane F., Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dreyfus Affair to
the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 8. The
earlier French orientation of much work in this vein has given way to an
increasing number of Italian studies; see, for example, Wendy Hellers
Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Womens Voices in Seventeenth-Century
Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) and Emanuele
Senicis 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. 287288.
37 William Weber, La musique ancienne in the Waning of the Ancien
Regime, Journal of Modern History 56 (March 1984), 5888.
38 M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, Revolutionschanson und Hymne im Repertoire
der Pariser Opera 17931794, in Reinhart Koselleck and Rolf Reichardt,
eds., Die Franzosische Revolution als Bruch des gesellschaftlichen Bewutseins
(Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1988), pp. 479510; The New
Repertory at the Opera 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. 107156; and Etienne-Nicolas Mehul and Opera: Source and Archival
Studies of Lyric Theatre during the French Revolution, Consulate and Empire
(Heilbronn: Musik-Edition Lucie Galland, 1999).
39 See, for example, Smart, ed., Siren Songs, and Blackmer and Smith, eds.,
En Travesti.
PA RT I
The Representation of Social and Political Relations in
Operatic Works
 Introduction to Part I
Jane F. Fulcher

As the historian (and contributor to this volume) Michael Steinberg has

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

29
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 operas 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 tragedie 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. Bartlets 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 Opera and the
Terror (17931794): La Reunion du 18 aout, ou linauguration de la
Republique francaise 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 fete and the Opera intersected in works
such as La Reunion du 18 aout (dedicated Au Peuple souverain), which
represented the real Fete de lUnite within its dramatic context. With
costumes modeled after the stations of the fete 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 Andres chapter on Womens Roles in Meyerbeers 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. Andre
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 womens 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

ideas or ideologies can emerge, transformed, from this semiotically

unstable and emotionally compelling art.
Opera, in sum, with its unique power to represent in an inim-
itably charged register that combines several arts, is capable not only
of reinforcing social hierarchies, but of destabilizing and even of con-
testing them. The social transgressions that can occur on its stage have
often entered into complex counterpoint with social realities that lie
outside it, serving to stimulate not only new reflections, but in some
cases political and social change.

n ot e s
1 Michael P. Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and
Nineteenth-Century Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005),
p. 51.
2 Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices,
trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1997), p. 90.
3 Louis Marin, Des pouvoirs de limage: Gloses (Paris: Seuil, 1993), pp. 1819, as
cited in Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff, pp. 9091.
4 Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff, p. 91.
5 See M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, The New Repertory at the Opera 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. 107156; and M. Elizabeth C.
Bartlet, Gossec, LOffrande a la Liberte et lhistoire de la Marseillaise, in
Jean-Remy Julien and Jean Mongredien, eds., Le Tambour et la harpe:
oeuvres, pratiques et manifestations musicales sous la Revolution, 17881800
(Paris: Du May, 1991), pp. 123146.
1 Venices 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 Lincoronazione di Poppea (1643), in
which Busenellos poetic fancy and Monteverdis incomparable music
create an ambivalent moral frame. For example, we still cant 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 Monteverdis
unmatched ability to trip us up on our search for meaning.1
The types of complexities apparent in a work such as Lincoronazione
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

only as spectators but also as collaborators in the formation of the

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

of Venetian opera conventions.7 Nevertheless, given the idiosyncratic

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

T RU T H A N D V E R I S I M I L I T U D E

Some of the most important clues to understanding Venetian opera are

to be found in the printed libretto. While the scores for Venetian opera
were never published and provided only minimal information about
the production, libretti, as Ellen Rosand has amply demonstrated, are
a treasure trove of information.8 In addition to providing some version
 Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera 37

of the operas 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 Lincoronazione di Poppea,
for example, Giovanni Francesco Busenello mentions only one inci-
dent from the writings of the historian Cornelius Tacitus Neros
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 Aeneass 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 Didos 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 (16301710) and Nicolo 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 librettists 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 dellinventioni
supposti jokes of presumed invention.14 In the argomento to
LAntigona 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 Neros 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

The language used by all of these librettists is suggestive as it

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

drawn towards patently unrealistic myths, particularly those involv-

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

MONARCHY AND VENETIAN IDENTITY

Of the many alternative realities constructed for the operatic stage, 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 Busenellos
La prosperita infelice di Giulio Cesare dittatore or Nicolo Minatos Pom-
peo Magno, for example, dealt quite eloquently with ancient Romes
 Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera 41

vulnerability to imperial ambitions during the final years of the

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

SantAngelo. Giulio Cesare Corradis Il Nerone (1679), presented at the

luxurious Teatro S. Grisostomo, features even more elaborate settings:
a Roman piazza with triumphal arches, an illuminated ballroom with a
high rotunda used for the imperial dance, the royal baths, and even
a music room for Neros academies (sala di stromenti musicali per
laccademie di Nerone). Bussanis Antonino e Pompeiano (1677), set by
Antonio Sartorio, describes Roman vistas with extraordinary detail:
a Roman street with two towers and triumphal arches illuminated at
night, the Aventine hill on the Tiber, and an imperial hall with statues
of the great emperors.25 Aurelis Alessandro Magno in Sidonia (1679)
includes not only lakes, gardens, and bowers, but even an amphithe-
atre for gladiatorial combat complete with wild animals as well
as a fresco that descends from the ceiling and comes to life, revealing
Apollo and his muses playing instruments.26
Monarchy not only provided better spectacle; it also opened up the
possibility of presenting a highly diverse society on the stage. The pop-
ulation that inhabited these royal settings differed profoundly from the
ostensible homogeneity of the male oligarchy, which was at the core of
Venices political identity. The royal apartments, banquet halls and gal-
leries accommodated characters of varied occupations, social classes,
nationalities, and personalities: benevolent or tyrannical monarchs,
loyal or scheming servants, a rebellious or patriotic populace, as well
as women of power who necessarily had no role in Venetian public life.
The lush gardens, lakes, fountains, and bowers also conjured up fan-
tasies of romantic interludes, erotic acts, and political machinations for
an imaginary society in which public virtues were always vulnerable
to private vices.
Such conflicts, in fact, were at the heart of the accidenti verisimili,
and a primary source of the tension between truth and poetic fantasy.
This is particularly evident in operas based on history. In Monteverdis
Lincoronazione di Poppea, as we recall, Busenellos different repre-
sentation of the facts altered the historical record in suggestive ways.
History may tell us that Nero banished Otho to Lusitania so that he
might enjoy Poppea. In the world of opera, however, we are asked to
imagine a series of more or less plausible private events that this single
 Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera 43

action would have set into motion. We might recall how Mascardi had
described Didos 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
Bussanis Antonino e Pompeiano historical truth provides inspiration for
one of Venetian operas more shocking occurrences the murder of
the tyrant Antoninus Caracalla (ad 118217) on stage in the final act.
Bussanis libretto does revise some of the more indelicate aspects of
Antoninuss life. Rather than presenting the lurid details of Antoninuss
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 operas 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 Caracallas 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 Lincoronazione di Poppea and Antonino e Pompeiano, Giovanni
Boretti and Aurelio Aurelis Claudio Cesare (1672) also uses games with
truth and verisimilitude as a means of touting Venices political supe-
riority and mythical link to ancient Rome.28 The first portion of the
44 Wendy Heller

argomento includes numerous historical details borrowed directly from

Book 12 of Tacituss Annals concerning events from the years ad 49
50. These include Agrippinas marriage to her uncle Claudius (Tacitus,
Annals, 12.1.32.3), her affair with the freedman and imperial advisor
Pallas (Tacitus, Annals, 12.25.1), a series of evil portents and natural
disasters (Tacitus, Annals, 12.4), Claudiuss eventual subjugation of the
rebellious King Mithridates of Bosporus (Tacitus, Annals, 12.1520),
and the momentous event with which the opera concludes Claudiuss
adoption of Nero as his successor (Tacitus, Annals, 12.25.1). The second
half of the argomento presents those events and characters ostensibly
invented by Aureli, such as a banished Roman consul who returns to
Rome in disguise in order to see a beloved daughter who had been
raised by an old nurse.
What is particularly intriguing, however, is the way in which Aureli
uses these carefully culled historical facts to create a verisimilar version
of Roman history that accorded with the norms and political concerns
of Venetian opera. Aurelis opera opens in the Temple of Diana with
the arrival of Mithridates in Rome, where he contritely signs a peace
treaty with Claudius. This provides the occasion for both Claudius
and Mithridates to become enamored of Julia, the daughter of the
aforementioned Roman consul, thus undercutting the sincerity of the
ceremonies in honor of the chaste Diana. The conquered Mithridates,
however, is actually depicted with greater dignity and heroism than
the bumbling and immoral Roman emperor. In this alternative reality
Aureli thus not only distances Venice from her corrupt and decadent
imperial ancestor in the name of republicanism but also uses the sub-
jugation of the rebellious Eastern monarch to confirm notions about
Western hegemony that were no doubt of relevance to the Venetian
Republic, locked in perennial conflicts with the Turks.29
Moreover, Aurelis imaginative use of historical detail is particu-
larly evident in one of the operas most strikingly original gestures: an
earthquake, reported by Tacitus as having occurred in the year ad 49
(Tacitus, Annals, 12.43). The earthquake takes place in the opera pre-
cisely at the moment when Agrippina declares her intention to control
destiny and put her son Nero on the imperial throne. Fierce destiny,
 Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera 45

1.1 Giovanni Antonio Boretti, Claudio Cesare, Act i, Scene 9

she sings, I do not fear your blows; if I am Empress of the Tiber, if in my

scepter every power is joined, I will nail down the wheel of Fortune.30
Borettis musical setting leaves little doubt as to Agrippinas belief in
her power to change history. The simple recitative suddenly breaks
into florid arioso for the final line, which she sings twice, moving from
C minor to a cadence on B flat, and then abruptly turning toward
G minor for the final show of power (see Example 1.1). Although the
earthquake is, of course, part of the historical record, the circumstances
surrounding it here are mere conjecture. Where else but in Republican
Venice would audiences have been so entertained by a natural disas-
ter precipitated by Agrippinas misplaced ambition? What better way
46 Wendy Heller

to join operatic spectacle with a profound statement on the dubious

politics of empire?
The examples discussed above show how the historical record could
be altered verisimilarly to accommodate Venetian social or political
interests. In other instances, the sense of plausibility is created not by
the use of the past of historical events but rather with the present
that is, the insistent presence of events or situations belonging to
seventeenth-century Venice. Notably, these excursions from fantasy
into reality are rarely indicated in the argomento. Rather, it is as if there
is something unrelenting about Venice that managed to penetrate the
distant realm presented on the stage. This is the case, for example, in the
opera Amore inamorato (1642), which deals with the tale of Psyche and
Cupid, best known from Apuleiuss Metamorphoses.31 When Psyche is
ordered by a jealous Venus to descend to the Underworld, Psyche is
accosted by a well-known figure in Venetian life, literature, and art:
a Ruffian woman or procuress who attempts to persuade Psyche to
forgo Hades for the life of the prostitute.32 In this version of operatic
verisimilitude, even those destined to become immortal are vulnerable
to the same temptations of worldly pleasures that were so much a part
of Venetian Carnival life.
A similar approach can be found in Aureli and Marco Zianis Alessan-
dro Magno in Sidonia (1679), whose exotic settings were cited above.
In this opera, there is no attempt to juxtapose Eastern and Western
values. In fact, Alexander the Great is represented in an almost entirely
positive light: he is the good prince, able to resist the allure of decadent
women and the intrigues of his courtiers thus possessing, ironically,
all of the qualities of a good republican. On the other hand, the early
modern courtesan was likely the model for the beautiful Thais desir-
able, immoral, fascinating, greedy, and ruthless in matters of the heart.
Like several other operas produced in the late 1670s, Alessandro Magno
in Sidonia also includes the signs and symptoms of Carnival. For exam-
ple, following the extraordinary descent of the frescoed ceiling with
Apollo and the muses at the opening of Act II, the players provide
the music for a ballo danced by courtiers disguised as Germans and
Spaniards. This creates the ideal occasion for Thais to don a mask and
further her own ambitions and desires, all in accordance with Carnival
 Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera 47

sensibilities. In this instance, an Eastern monarchical story and set-

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

the boundary between fantasy and reality between historical truth

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

n ot e s
1 For differing views on Senecas characterization, see Ellen Rosand,
Seneca and the Interpretation of Lincoronazione di Poppea, Journal of the
American Musicological Society 38 (1985), 3471; Tim Carter, Re-Reading
Poppea: Some Thoughts on Music and Meaning in Monteverdis Last
Opera, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 122 (1997), 173204; Robert
C. Ketterer, Neoplatonic Light and Dramatic Genre in Busenellos
 Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera 49

Lincoronazione di Poppea and Noriss Il ripudio dOttavia, Music & Letters

80 (1999), 122; Iain Fenlon and Peter Miller, The Song of the Soul:
Understanding Poppea (London: Royal Musical Association, 1992); Wendy
Heller, Tacitus Incognito: Opera as History in Lincoronazione di
Poppea, Journal of the American Musicological Society 52 (1999), 3996.
2 Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991); Beth L. Glixon and Jonathan E. Glixon, Inventing
the Business of Opera, American Musicological Society Studies in Music
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
3 Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1997); Wendy Heller, Emblems of Eloquence:
Opera and Womens Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), esp. pp. 69.
4 William Bouwsma, Venice and the Political Education of Europe, in A
Usable Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 279280;
Heller, Tacitus Incognito.
5 David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
6 Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama, revised edition (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988), p. 41.
7 On the relationships between the Incogniti and the Venetian opera
industry, see Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, pp. 3740,
88109; Lorenzo Bianconi and Thomas Walker, Dalla Finta pazza alla
Veremonda: Storie di Febiarmonici, Rivista italiana di musicologia 10
(1975), 379454, particularly pp. 410424. See also Heller, Emblems of
Eloquence, pp. 4881.
8 Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, pp. 2528, 4059.
9 The pseudonyms and anagrams are traced in Irene Alm, Catalog of
Venetian Opera Librettos at the University of California (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993), pp. 775883.
10 Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, pp. 4046. For a
transcription of numerous prefaces from libretti, see Rosands
Appendix I, pp. 407421. Rosand provides a valuable discussion of the
ways in which the librettists self-consciously (and often apologetically)
flaunted the dramatic rules set forth by Aristotle.
11 Busenello, Lincoronazione di Poppea (1643) in Delle hore ociose (Venice:
Giuliani, 1656), sig. a3r: Ma qui si rappresenta il fatto diverso.
50 Wendy Heller

12 Busenello, La Didone (1641) in Delle hore ociose (Venice: Giuliani, 1656);

translated by Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, pp. 6061:
Che scrive sodisfa al genio, e per schiffare il fine tragico della morte di
Didone si e introdotto laccasamento predetto con Iarba. Qui non
occorre rammemorare agluomini intendenti come i poeti migliori
abbiano rappresentate le cose a modo loro, sono aperti i libri, e non e
forestiera in questo mondo la erudizione. On the argomento to La Didone
and Busenellos idiosyncratic treatment of this material, see Heller,
Emblems of Eloquence, pp. 82135.
13 Il Tolomeo (Venice: Valvasense, 1658), p. 10. The entire passage reads:
Sopra la storia predetta stanno appoggiati tutti glavvenimenti di questo
drama; laonde fingesi verisimilmente.
14 Camillo Badovero, Sesto Tarquino (Venice: Nicolini, 1679), p. 5.
15 Aurelio Aureli, LAntigona delusa da Alceste (Venice: Batti, 1660), p. 5.
16 Giulio Cesare Corradi, Il Nerone (Venice: Nicolini, 1679), p. 5. Questa
funzione, che sfolgoro nel Cielo Latino con tutti i numeri della
magnificenza, unita ad altri accidenti, parte veri parte verisimili,
minnvogliarono a scrivere il presente drama, a cui imposi il titolo
Nerone.
17 Agostino Mascardi, Dellarte istorica (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1859;
reprint, Modena: Mucchi Editore, 1994), pp. 112113.
18 On the Virgilian and pre-Virgilian Dido, see Richard C. Monti, The Dido
Episode and The Aeneid: Roman Social and Political Values in the Epic
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981).
19 This episode was also a popular subject for painting by artists such as
Giovanni Bellini, Pompeo Battoni, and Niccolo DellAbatte.
20 Nino Pirrotta, Early Opera and Aria, in Music and Theatre from Poliziano
to Monteverdi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),
pp. 275280. See also Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice,
pp. 4445.
21 Mascardi, Dellarte istorica, p. 23.
22 Giovanni Francesco Busenello, La prosperita infelice di Giulio Cesare
dittatore in Delle hore ociose (Venice: Giuliani, 1656); Nicolo Minato,
Pompeo Magno (Venice: Nicolini, 1666).
23 For an index of the various dedicatees for Venetian opera, see Alm,
Catalog, pp. 956972. A number of operas dealing with Roman emperors
were, perhaps coincidently, dedicated to the Hannoverian dukes. See, for
 Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera 51

example, Domenic Gisberti, Caligula delirante (Venice: Nicolini, 1672),

presented at the Teatro SS. Giovanni e Paolo, dedicated to both Johann
Friedrich and Ernst August, and Aurelio Aureli; Claudio Cesare (Venice:
Nicolini, 1672), presented at the Teatro S. Salvatore, dedicated to Johann
Friedrich; Giacomo Francesco Bussani, Antonino e Pompeiano (Venice:
Nicolini, 1677), presented at the Teatro S. Salvatore, was dedicated to
both Johann Friedrich and his wife the Duchess Benedicta Henrietta. On
the relationship of the Hannoverian dukes to Venetian opera, see Vassilis
Vavoulis, A Venetian World in Letters: The Massi Correspondence at the
Haupstaatsarchiv in Hannover, Notes 59 (2003), 556609; also Wendy
Heller, The Beloveds Image: Handels Admeto and the Statue of
Alcestis, Journal of the American Musicological Society 58/3 (2005), 559637.
24 On the presentation of Venice on the stage in Bellerofonte, see Ellen
Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, pp. 104106.
25 Bussani, Antonino e Pompeiano.
26 Aurelio Aureli, Alessandro Magno in Sidone (Venice: Nicolini, 1679).
27 Scriptores Historiae Augustae is our most authorative source on the lives of
the Roman emperors from the time of Hadrian to Numerianus (ad
117284), and was evidently a source of inspiration for a number of
Venetian operas. On Caracalla, see Scriptores Historiae Augustae, trans. D.
Magie, vol. ii, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1924).
28 For a detailed consideration of the uses of Tacitus in Claudio Cesare, see
Wendy Heller, Poppeas Legacy: The Julio-Claudians on the Venetian
Stage, Journal of the History of Ideas 36/3 (2006), 379399.
29 See, for example, Paolo Preto, Venezia e i turchi (Florence: Sansoni, 1975).
30 Aureli, Claudio Cesare, Act I, scene 9: Fiero destin i colpi tuoi non temo /
Che se del Tebro Imperatrice io sono, / Se nel mio scettro ogni poter
saduna, / La rota inchio daro della fortuna.
31 Giovanni Battista Fusconi, Amore inamorato (Venice: Surian, 1642).
According to the preface, the plot was presumably suggested by the
Incogniti leader and founder, Giovanni Francesco Busenello; the actual
poetry was written by the poet Pietro Michiele, and was revised by
Giovanni Battista Fusconi.
32 The procuress figure would have been well known from the Roman
comedies of Plautus, the commedia dellarte and the spoken plays as well
as the commedia erudita. She is also an instrument of social satire, as
52 Wendy Heller

brilliantly demonstrated by Pietro Aretino in the Ragionamenti. See

Aretino, Dialogues, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Stein and Day,
1971). See also Paula Findlen, Humanism, Politics and Pornography in
Renaissance Italy, in Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography:
Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 15001800 (New York: Zone Books,
1996), p. 75.
33 See Heller, Tacitus Incognito. This interpretation is suggested in Tim
Carter, Re-Reading Poppea.
34 On phenomenal music, see Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and
Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996).
2 Lullys on-stage societies
Rebecca Harris-Warrick

Aside from their numerous and well-discussed musical differences,

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

53
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 Lullys lifetime, recogni-
tion for his contribution, even though its precise nature is harder to
recover. (A number of choreographies made for the Opera 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 Kintzlers 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 Verdis 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
 Lullys 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 Admete, and, later in the
act, sailors under the orders of Licomede, 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, Cybele, 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 Cybele;
Act II: the larger world, peuples differents, who include among
the dancers Indiens and Egyptiens, honoring Cybeles choice
of Atys as chief priest of her cult;
Act III: dreams both sweet dreams and nightmares sent by
Cybele 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 Celenus, King of
Phrygia;
Act V: demi-gods, followers of Cybele, 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

was generally referred to as the divertissement, a term that is useful

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

A LC E S T E

In the case of Alceste, all the group characters are loyal subjects of a
king or a god; as in the hierarchical society that gave birth to this type
of opera, their socially defined role is to support their leaders. As Act I
opens, Alceste is about to marry Admete, 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 Licomede, King
of the island of Scyros and the brother of the marine divinity Thetis.
Alcide, who is struggling to control his feelings for Alceste in order not
to betray his friend Admete, 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 Licomede, on the other hand, commands
a group of sailors, who first offer a fete 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 Admete comes to the res-
cue of his bride, and with the help of Alcide lays siege to Scyros. The
 Lullys 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 Admete is mortally wounded. Apollo announces
that the only way to save Admetes 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 Plutons 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 Admete love each other, he conquers his baser instincts
(the operas subtitle is Le Triomphe dAlcide). Act V concludes with cel-
ebrations of the double victory: Alcestes 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, genereux Alcide,
sings one group, while the other responds, Vivez en paix, heureux
epoux. 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 XIVs subjects
were assigned in the ritualized world of his court. Celebrations marked
important milestones in the French monarchy Louis XIVs 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 fete Licomede 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 lle enchantee) and 1668 (La Fete
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 chateau, as part of the celebrations
marking Frances second conquest of Franche-Comte.10 Similarly, the
pomp with which Alcestes 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 Lullys operas, also designed the decors for a number of
court funerals, including the queens 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 Celenus, King of
Phrygia Atyss friend as well as his sovereign. As the opera opens Atys
is preparing for the imminent arrival of the goddess Cybele, whose visit
 Lullys on-stage societies 59

to Phrygia is a sign of her favor to this land and who is expected to

name Celenus as her grand sacrificateur. Atyss first words show him in
his public role as organizer of the rites in her honor, notwithstanding
the fact that he is alone on stage.
Atys: Allons, allons, accourez tous,
Cybele va descendre.
Trop heureux Phrygiens, venez icy lattendre.
Mille Peuples seront jaloux
Des faveurs que sur nous
Sa bonte va repandre.

(Come, hasten, Cybele is about to descend. Fortunate Phrygians, come

wait for her here. A thousand nations will be jealous of the favors her
goodness will bestow upon us. Atys, Act I, scene 1.)

The Phrygians he calls do not appear in fact, they do not arrive

until towards the end of the act but they are repeatedly invoked by
the refrain (the first two lines of text), which from a solo utterance
becomes a duet, then a duet for different characters, and finally a
quartet, as more and more of the main characters enter the stage.12
Although in this part of the act the protagonists operate in private, their
public selves impinge on their conversations; we learn, for instance, that
Sangaride shares responsibility for the honors to be shown Cybele. (I/6,
Atys: Sangaride, ce jour est un grand jour pour vous. Sangaride: Nous
ordonnons tous deux la feste de Cybele, / Lhonneur est egal entre
nous.) Finally, with the Phrygians reported to be in sight, Atys and
Sangaride find themselves alone together; their self-imposed silence
breaks down and each confesses to loving the other. But just as they are
reveling in the discovery of their love, their private moment is shattered
by the arrival of the crowds. Instantly Atys and Sangaride must assume
their social duties, as they lead the invocation urging Cybele to favor
them with her presence. The larger society is no longer something
merely invoked, but now becomes palpably real.
The libretti for the court performances of Lullys operas give the
names of all the performers, including the dancers and the members
of the chorus, so it is possible to get a sense of how this society was
60 Rebecca Harris-Warrick

represented. In the court premiere of 1676, there were twenty-six per-

formers on stage in this scene.
Atys, Sangaride, Doris, Idas
10 hommes Phyrigiens chantans conduits par Atys
10 femmes Phrygiennes chantantes conduites par Sangaride
6 Phrygiens dancans
6 Nimphes Phrygiennes dancantes13
Here we see the standard division of labor among the group characters
to which I have already alluded: some of the Phrygians are identified
as singers, others as dancers. This is a practical solution to the prob-
lem of assuring high-quality performances in both arts, but it also
has certain implications for the structure of such scenes. As a general
rule, the activities of singing and dancing were done not simultane-
ously, but consecutively. What the spectators perceived was an alterna-
tion between instrumental music supporting physical movement and
vocal music accompanying stasis. This alternation could occur either
between movements or, in the case of choruses, within them.14 In this
case, the chorus leads off.
Scene 7 (in C major)
An extended chorus. In the first section, Commencons nos jeux et
nos chansons, the voices alternate with brief instrumental pas-
sages that may have been danced. The second section, Venez,
Reine des Dieux, alternates invocations by Atys and/or San-
garide with choral passages; there are no purely instrumental
passages.
Entree des Phrygiens. A binary dance in duple meter. (See
Example 2.1.)
Second Air des Phrygiens. A dance in rondeau form in 6/4 time.
(See Example 2.2.)
Scene 8 (in A minor)
An instrumental prelude that serves to bring in Cybele on her flying
chariot.
Cybele invites everyone into her temple to hear her choice of grand
sacrificateur.
 Lullys on-stage societies 61

The chorus honors Cybele, 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 choruss 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 Entree 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 entree 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 Lullys
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 Cybele were performed by
62 Rebecca Harris-Warrick

2.1 Jean-Baptiste Lully, Atys, Act i, Scene 7: Entree des Phrygiens

separate male and female groups, it is worth asking what the effect of
that choreographic choice is at this point in the opera. It would seem
that, coming on the heels of Atyss and Sangarides 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
 Lullys on-stage societies 63

2.2 Jean-Baptiste Lully, Atys, Act i, Scene 7: Second air des Phrygiens

to realize, go contrary to their individual happiness. Even though they

themselves do not dance, they have been clearly identified with the
collective singing and dancing characters, whose movements present
a visual image not of togetherness, but of separation.
In looking at the group scenes in French opera, it becomes impor-
tant to see not only what is happening within them, but who or what
is controlling them. More often than not, this kind of opera being the
64 Rebecca Harris-Warrick

product of a highly centralized and hierarchical society, the groups are

operating at the bidding of a powerful person who takes it for granted
that the followers will obey. At other times, as in the act just discussed,
no single person is issuing orders, but the groups are engaged in social
practices that uphold the values and structures of the society. In Atys,
with the exception of the dream sequence in Act III, all the on-stage
groups participate in time-honored rituals: sacred rites, wedding cel-
ebrations, or mourning. The fact that no single individual governs all
these scenes illustrates for the audience how broadly distributed are
the social forces with which Atys finds himself in conflict. In Act II,
Cybele surprises everyone by naming not Celenus, but Atys, as her
grand sacrificateur; Atys is then obliged to accept the homage of the
people honoring him for a role he does not want. In the following
act he learns, through the medium of dreams sent by Cybele, that the
goddess is in love with him and will punish him if he fails to recip-
rocate. The jolly divertissement in Act IV extends the worlds to which
we have been given access to the realm of Sangarides father, he being
completely unaware that his daughter is miserable in the face of her
impending wedding. The celebrations by his subjects, which go on at
great length, provide needed relief for the audience from the tensions
mounting within the opera, but they bring home to us how impossi-
ble it is for Sangaride to escape her societally defined roles.15 In Act V,
the knot tightens: Cybele reveals to Celenus that Atys and Sangaride
have betrayed them both. In a jealous rage, while surrounded by her
priestesses and a chorus of Phyrgians, she makes Atys think Sangaride
is a monster; he kills Sangaride, then returning to his senses, turns
the knife on himself. The remorseful Cybele transforms the dead Atys
into a tree sacred to her cult. Any sense of resolution is undermined
by the opposing words of the double chorus in the concluding diver-
tissement, which go back and forth between pain and rage (Quelle
douleur! sing the woodland gods, while the Corybantes reply, Ah,
quelle rage!) and by the remarkable set of three dances that follow
the chorus and make visible this emotional division.16 In this opera
the social fabric has been torn asunder; the thunder and earthquakes
that accompany the concluding chorus tell us that the tragedy is not
 Lullys on-stage societies 65

individual but universal, and the key word in the choruss last utterance
is horror.17

ARMIDE

The strictures of society so vividly illustrated by the group scenes in

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

Already in Act I, the only place where an actual human society is

represented, the chorus focuses our attention on Armides powers,
which have just won her a major victory over Godefroys knights.
66 Rebecca Harris-Warrick

Hidraot & le Choeur: Armide est encor plus aimable

Quelle nest redoutable.
Que son triomphe est glorieux!
Ses charmes les plus forts sont ceux de ses beaux
yeux.
Phenice & le Choeur: Suivons Armide et chantons sa victoire.
Tout lunivers retentit de sa gloire. (Armide, I/3)

(Hidraot and Chorus: Armide is even more beloved than she is fearsome.
How glorious is her triumph! Her strongest charms are those of her
beautiful eyes. Phenice and Chorus: Let us follow Armide and sing of her
victory. The entire universe resounds with her glory.)

In the subsequent four acts the key word of this passage, charm,
moves from the figurative to the literal. These lengthy and musically
rich scenes all arise from Armides 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 Lullys works, Armides 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 Lullys 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 Armides conjurations
 Lullys on-stage societies 67

ultimately serve to make palpable the struggles going on in her own

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

n ot e s
1 It may seem dubious to compare a tragedie 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 Lullys 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

entertainment between the acts; see, for instance, Antonio Sartorios

LOrfeo (1673), facsimile in Drammaturgia musicale veneta, vol. vi (Milan:
Ricordi, 1983), recorded in 1998 by Teatro Lirico, Stephen Stubbs, director
(Vanguard Classics, 99194), which has no choral music whatsoever and
only a handful of entracte dances. Exceptions to this general tendency,
most notably some of the Venetian operas of the 1690s by Carlo
Francesco Pollarolo, may exhibit French influence. See Irene Alm,
Winged Feet and Mute Eloquence: Dance in Seventeenth-Century
Venetian Opera, Cambridge Opera Journal 15/3 (2003), 216280, especially
pp. 263264, and Kathleen Kuzmick Hansell, Theatrical Ballet and Italian
Opera, in Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, eds., Opera on Stage
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 117308, especially
pp. 178182, Ballet during the Age of Venetian Opera, 16401720.
2 In 1679, with his opera Bellerophon, Lully began accompanying some of
the dramatically important vocal utterances, recitatives and airs both,
with the orchestra; nonetheless, even in his last tragedie, Armide, the vast
majority of the singing outside the divertissements is accompanied by
continuo only. In fact, the most famous part of the opera, the dramatic
monologue in which Armide stands poised over the sleeping Renaud,
dagger in hand, is a case in point.
3 The historiography of French Baroque opera, particularly that written in
English, has tended either to talk around the dancing or to treat it with
formalist tools counting the number of menuets or gavottes used by
Lully, for instance. This article draws upon my work in progress regarding
how dance functioned inside of French opera from Lully to Rameau.
4 Of the approximately 350 choreographies from this period that survive in
Feuillet notation, 47 state in their titles that they were performed at the
Opera. For example, the Entree pour un homme et une femme, dancee
par Mr Balon et Mlle Subligny a lOpera de Persee was created for the
1703 revival of Lullys Persee; see my Contexts for Choreographies:
Notated Dances Set to the Music of J. B. Lully, in Jerome de La Gorce and
Herbert Schneider, eds., Jean-Baptiste Lully (16321687). Actes du
Colloque/Kongrebericht, Saint-Germain-en-Laye/Heidelberg 1987 (Laaber:
Laaber-Verlag, 1990), pp. 233255.
5 Regarding the mechanics of the divertissement, see my article Recovering
the Lullian Divertissement, in Sarah McCleave, ed., Dance and Music in
French Baroque Theatre: Sources and Interpretations. Study Texts No. 3
 Lullys on-stage societies 69

(London: Institute of Advanced Musical Studies, Kings College London,

1998), pp. 5580.
6 Synopses of these operas, along with contextual information about each,
may be found in articles written by Lois Rosow for the New Grove
Dictionary of Opera (London: Macmillan, 1992). All are available on CD:
the most recent recording (1994) of Alceste is by La Grande Ecurie et la
Chambre du Roy, conducted by Jean-Claude Malgloire (Astree/Audivis E
8527). Atys may be heard in a 1987 recording by Les Arts Florissants,
conducted by William Christie (Harmonia Mundi HMC 90125759); the
one available complete recording of Armide was directed by Philippe
Herreweghe and recorded in 1993 (Harmonia Mundi HMC 90145657).
7 In regard to the relationship between opera and spoken tragedy in this
period, see Catherine Kintzler, Poetique de lopera francais de Corneille a
Rousseau (Paris: Minerve, 1991).
8 Alceste premiered at the Paris Opera in 1674, before women started
dancing there, which helps explain why the dancers in the Act I
divertissement consisted originally only of male sailors. In later
productions the dancing roles also included sea nymphs and female
sailors. (Male professional dancers were trained to dance female as well
as male roles, but the number of female dancing roles in Lully operas
increased after 1681, when women joined the dance troupe.) Women
appeared on stage as singers, both as soloists and in the chorus, right
from the start of French opera, and in this divertissement the singing
chorus is mixed.
9 Alceste excited a series of polemics about which much has been written.
For a perspective that takes into consideration the work of other
scholars, see Manuel Couvreur, Jean-Baptiste Lully: Musique et dramaturgie
au service du prince (Brussels: Marc Vokar, 1992), pp. 292302.
10 Regarding the deliberate construction of Louis XIVs image during his
lifetime, see Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1992); for descriptions and illustrations of
the festivities held at court over the course of the reign, see Marie-
Christine Moine, Les Fetes a la cour du Roi Soleil (Paris: Editions F. Lanore
& F. Sorlot, 1984).
11 Reproductions of some of Berains funeral designs may be seen in
Jerome de La Gorce, Berain: Dessinateur du roi soleil (Paris: Herscher,
1986), p. 104 and pp. 128135; Les pompes funebres, il est vrai,
70 Rebecca Harris-Warrick

empruntaient beaucoup a lunivers theatral (p. 132). Philippe Beaussant,

in Lully, ou le musicien du Soleil (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), pp. 537540 and
773784, draws provocative analogies between the funeral ceremonies
for Chancellor Seguier in 1672, at which a Miserere by Lully was
performed, and the funeral rites depicted in Alceste.
12 Atys is joined first by his confidant, Idas, then by his beloved, Sangaride,
and her confidante, Doris. Lully set each iteration of the text to a slightly
varied repeat of the musical refrain to which Atys had entered the stage.
13 The information regarding casting comes from the libretto published for
the premiere of the opera at the royal chateau of Saint-Germain-en-Laye
(Paris: Ballard, 1676), p. 14. Libretti published for public performances at
the Paris Opera did not start including the performers names until 1699.
Given the paucity of markings in the scores, particularly in regard to who
performs during the various dance pieces, such hints about casting can
be very helpful.
14 For a more extended discussion of the staging of operatic divertissements,
see my Recovering the Lullian Divertissement and Toute danse
doit exprimer, peindre . . .: Finding the Drama in the Operatic
Divertissement, in Peter Reidemeister, ed., Basler Jahrbuch fur historische
Musikpraxis 23 (1999) (Winterthur, Switzerland: Amadeus Verlag, 2000),
pp. 187210.
15 This particular divertissement belongs to the category identified by
Catherine Kintzler elsewhere in this volume as suspensive.
16 The first of the three dances, the Entree des Nymphes, is in a slow
triple meter and a minor mode, with many chromatic inflections. The
douleur it expresses is opposed by the vigorous Premiere entree des
Corybantes, in a major mode with both triadic figures and pounding
repeated notes, a piece that clearly maps onto the singing Corybantes
rage. The third dance goes back and forth approximately every three
measures between these two emotional poles (C+, duple meter,
aggressive repeated notes vs. a tender and chromatically inflected slow
triple meter) that must have been choreographed for two opposing
groups of dancers; in this remarkable piece, rage has the last word.
17 The opera ends with the words Que tout sente, icy bas, / Lhorreur
dun si cruel trepas (May everyone on earth feel the horror of such a
cruel death.)
 Lullys on-stage societies 71

18 The warrior princess Armide, leader of the forces fighting the Crusaders,
has no interest in love, despite her uncles 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. Renauds 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 Pecour,
Beauchamps 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, Phaeton, Persee, Roland, and Acis et
Galatee 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 Prunieres, 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. Jerome de La Gorce and
Herbert Schneider, 2006).
3 Representations of le peuple in French opera,
16731764
Catherine Kintzler

I would like at the outset to call into question a widespread idea.

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

72
 Le peuple in French opera, 16731764 73

THE PROBLEM OF LE PEUPLE IN

S E V E N T E E N T H - C E N T U RY F R E N C H O P E R A

That everyday subject matter would be present at all in French opera in

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

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, 16731764 75

Hence many different reasons can be found as to why le peuple should

be absent from opera, or at least as to why its role should be secondary.
And yet ordinary people are consistently present in opera, and often
heavily so.6 How, then, are ordinary people introduced into opera, and
how is their presence justified? It is not necessary, in order to answer
these questions, to deny or modify the fundamental assumptions out-
lined above. On the contrary, the assumptions that I have just outlined
make it possible to explain how ordinary people are present in opera,
and why. They are in fact present in two ways, both of which result
from the morphology of opera in relation to the spoken theatre. First,
ordinary people are initially present as they are in the theatre, but they
are subsequently transformed in conformity with the requirements of
the lyric stage. Second, they are present in a way that is contrary to
the norms of non-musical theatre. In other words, the way the people
are represented in early ancien regime opera confirms the hypothesis
outlined above: namely, that the opera of this period is both replica
and reverse of spoken drama.

M O D I F Y I N G R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S O F L E P E U P L E F O R
T H E LY R I C S TAG E

In this first incarnation, in which opera appears to be a replica of spo-

ken drama, le peuple occupies a poetic dimension which was labelled
in this period the dimension bourgeoise as opposed, of course, to the
heroic dimension. This opposition between the heroic (or noble) and
the bourgeois (or ordinary and middle-class) was inherited from Aristo-
tles Poetics and was used mainly to distinguish tragedy from comedy.
However, in opera just as in the spoken theatre the heroic dimension
did not stand alone. Right from the start there were non-heroic genres,
even if the dominant one was still the lyric tragedy. And even within
the heroic genre, ordinary figures appear, offering a strong contrast to
the more heroic characters.

Genres

The pastorale and pastorale heroque 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 comedie-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 heroque.9 Although the pastorale heroque
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, 16731764 77

situation in these works is the following: a god or a goddess is in love

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

Le peuple in the lyric tragedy

Scenes of comedy. While comedies themselves are rare, comic scenes

are indeed present in heroic works. One means by which they are
sometimes introduced is through a parallel plot concerning servants
and minor characters. Such scenes, treated in a comic way, are probably
78 Catherine Kintzler

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 youre told, negotiate, dissemble, save what can be
saved, be careful, and the like. Their narrow world is not heroic: it
is a world of compromise, renunciation, and small gains.16 They aspire
to security and peace, which they value above honor and glory. The
contrast between the two visions of the world is often amusing, and
sometimes comic.

T H E O P E R AT I C P R E S E N C E O F L E P E U P L E : O P P O S I T I O N
A N D A N A LO G Y T O T H E S P O K E N T H E AT R E

My assumption of a reverse parallelism makes it possible to understand

two modes of insertion and representation of the people: (1) a mode
based on the concept of poetic dimension, and (2) a morphological
mode, or one based on the fundamental structure which governs the
relationship between spoken theatre and opera. According to the first
mode, which we have just examined, ordinary people are present as
they are in theatre but transformed by the requirements of the lyric
genre. According to the second mode, the people are present in a
manner opposite to that found in the theatre; nevertheless, this very
contrariety obeys a general rule of analogy between spoken theatre
and opera.
 Le peuple in French opera, 16731764 79

The concept of spectacle: Opposite functions of spectacle

and drama

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 Phedre 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

the people. By definition, opera is a populated and rather crowded

form of theatre: there are a lot of people on stage.20 But the collective
presence, while visible, does not act as an agent; it is an object, an
indirect part of the drama.21
The people, embodied on stage by the chorus and by the troupe of
dancers, function as a kind of extension of the monarch to whom they
are subject, fulfilling the function of the classical chorus through their
commentary, lamentations, and expressions of opinion and approval.
They are sometimes caught in the middle of a conflict between a tyrant
and a good ruler who serves as their protector. The people may also
represent the source of a monarchs legitimacy, calling upon him to rule
through acclamation and providing seemingly spontaneous though
possibly fickle signs of support. This collectivity is, however, never
the direct agent, but rather the object, tool, or pretext of the actions
of others, namely the main characters. These main characters the
heroes are the ones who truly deliberate and act. The highly visible
and audible presence of the community assumes indirect functions
which were traditionally those of the chorus in ancient tragedy. I now
turn to the examination of some of these functions in order to show
how they are related to a spectacular presence.22

Functions of the collective presence (chorus and dancers)

Commentary. This is a very traditional and stereotyped function: the

chorus comments on the situation and reflects common opinions, or
simply describes emotions related to the situation. This commentary
can assume different emotional coloring such as of joy, complaint,
or panic. Expressions of celebration and joy of course occur very fre-
quently in opera: for example, celebration of a victory, a hero, a prince,
or a god.23 Lamentations highlight an important difference between
theatre and opera, for the spoken theatre avoids collective manifesta-
tions of this emotion whereas opera does not. Compare, for example,
the lyric tragedy Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) by Rameau and Pellegrin,
Act IV, scene 4, with Racines Phedre, Act IV, scene 6, in which it is
announced that Hippolyte has been killed by a monster. The lyric
 Le peuple in French opera, 16731764 81

version gives a spectacular part to the chorus ( Hippolyte nest plus),

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

(a ballet of 1697 by La Motte and Campra), the author underscores the

following principles:

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

Suspensive function. I would like to close with the most interesting

function, because in this case the spectacle in itself becomes dramatic.
The presence of the people (chorus and dancers) embodying popular
opinion often offers a strong contrast with the situation of the heroes,
who find themselves in extraordinary situations that require them
to take actions which are problematic or even prohibited. In short,
whereas the people are quiescent and reconciled and firmly anchored
in the social order, the heroes are in conflict with this order and with
themselves. Given such contradictions, elements of spectacle can be
used in order to heighten the tension. This is what I call the suspensive
function. The choruses and the danced episodes serve in this case to
slow down or suspend the action and to place the hero (or the audience)
in an emotional situation of extreme and almost unbearable tension.
This is particularly true of danced divertissements, which always occur
at the worst moment and introduce an uncomfortable contrast. I can
provide two examples of this suspensive function of a popular ballet
within a lyric tragedy.
First, in Hippolyte et Aricie, when Thesee returns from Hades he
discovers that serious crimes have been committed within his family
circle. While he is worrying about this, however, his people come to
celebrate his return with (of course) a ballet. This entertainment lasts
a very long time, during which the hero has to put on a brave face.
Second, in Act II, scene 6 of Jephte, by Pellegrin and Monteclair, Jephte
has promised to offer in sacrifice the first person he sees when leaving
 Le peuple in French opera, 16731764 83

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 Jephtes 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. 3335, who points out the limits of an ideological reading
of the tragedie 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
tragedie 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 dopera, intro. and notes by Buford Norman,
vol. ii. (Toulouse: Societe de Litteratures classiques, 1999); Jerome de La
Gorce, LOpera a Paris au temps de Louis XIV: Histoire dun theatre (Paris:
Desjonqueres, 1992); and Pierre Fortassier, Musique et peuple au XVIIIe
siecle, in Images du peuple au dix-huitieme siecle, Centre Aixois dEtudes et
de Recherches sur le Dix-Huitieme Siecle (Paris: A. Colin, 1973),
pp. 327337; all show the popular success of tragedies lyriques in the
eighteenth century.
3 See Catherine Kintzler, Poetique de lopera francais de Corneille a Rousseau
(Paris: Minerve, 1991); La France classique et lopera (Arles: Harmonia
Mundi, collection Passerelles, 1998); and Theatre et opera a lage classique:
Une familiere etrangete (Paris: Fayard, 2004).
84 Catherine Kintzler

4 On this point I disagree with Cuthbert Girdlestone (La Tragedie lyrique

consideree comme genre litteraire [Geneva: Droz, 1972]), who supposes a
simple opposition, whereas I think that the tragedie lyrique belongs to the
same poetic system as spoken tragedy.
5 For my detailed treatments of this topic elsewhere, see Kintzler, Poetique
de lopera francais; La France classique et lopera; and Theatre et opera a lage
classique.
6 In fact, ordinary characters are commonplace (as shepherds, confidants,
sailors, hunters, farmers). We find a massive and spectacular collective
presence not only in the choruses, but also in the many crowds and
gatherings that take place particularly in ballets, which occupy the entire
stage. The operatic stage is often overcrowded.
7 A few landmarks of the genre: Alexandre Hardy, Alphee (1606), Corine
(1614); Racan, Les Bergeries (c. 1618); Honore dUrfe, Silvanire (1627); Jean
de Mairet, Sylvie (1628), La Silvanire (1631); Rotrou, La Celimene (1636)
(adapted for the theatre by Tristan LHermite under the title Amarillis
[1653]). The first French operas are pastorales: Pomone (1671) by Perrin and
Cambert; Les Peines et les plaisirs de lAmour (1672) by Gilbert and
Cambert; Les Fetes de lAmour et de Bacchus (1672) by Quinault and Lully.
8 For an example of a pastoral scene in a tragedie lyrique, see Scylla et
Glaucus (1746) by Leclair and dAlbaret, Act I, scene 3.
9 Acis et Galatee (1686) by Campistron and Lully; Isse (1697) by Lamotte
and Destouches.
10 For examples, see Acis et Galatee (1686) by Campistron and Lully, Act I,
scene 2 (the shepherd Acis is complaining); and Isse (1697) by La Motte
and Destouches, Act I, scene 1 (Apollo pretends to be a shepherd and
wants to be loved by Isse; he explains the situation to Pan).
11 See Francois Regnault, La Doctrine inoue. Dix lecons sur le theatre classique
francais (Paris: Hatier, 1996), pp. 258261; Kintzler, Theatre et opera a lage
classique, pp. 103123. Apart from some rare examples (e.g., Molieres
Amphitryon), comedy employs ordinary characters. It is well known that
many stage works of this period are greatly indebted to comedie-ballet,
particularly the works by Moliere and Lully (Les Facheux, Le Bourgeois
gentilhomme) and by Moliere and Charpentier (Le Malade imaginaire), but
these are not exactly operas, but rather musical theatre.
12 Examples include the ballet Le Carnaval de Venise (ballet, 1699) by Renard
and Campra; Fragments de M. de Lully (1702) by Danchet and Campra, 5e
Entree; Divertissement comique. La Serenade venitienne, 2e nouvelle Entree;
 Le peuple in French opera, 16731764 85

Le Bal interrompu, 3e nouvelle Entree; La Venitienne (comedie-ballet, 1704)

by La Motte and de La Barre; Les Fetes venitiennes (ballet, 1710) by
Danchet and Campra.
13 Voila je crois le premier opera ou lon ait vu des femmes habillees a la
francaise, et des confidentes du ton des soubrettes de la comedie; cest
aussi la premiere fois que lon a hasarde de certaines expressions
convenables au comique, mais nouvelles jusqualors et meme inconnues
sur la scene lyrique. Le public en fut dabord alarme, cependant le
theatre qui regne du commencement jusqua la fin de ce ballet se trouva
si amusant et si enjoue quon y venait en foule presque a contre-cur. Je
me fis conscience de divertir le public presque malgre lui, et pour rendre
son plaisir pur et tranquille, je me depechai de faire moi-meme la
critique de mon ouvrage ou je donnai tout le merite du succes a la
musique et a la danse. Le public me sut bon gre davoir eu cette attention
pour lui, et devint si fort de mes amis que pendant quatre vingt
representations il ne pouvait se resoudre a me quitter, et meme encore
aujourdhui il parle de ce ballet avec plaisir.
14 Dubos mentions this purification of the tragic genre in his Reflexions
critiques sur la poesie et sur la peinture (Paris: ENSB, 1993 [1719]), Part I,
section 21. On the mixture of serious and comic, see Norman, Touched by
the Graces, p. 88.
15 For an example of a residual comic scene in a tragedie lyrique, see Alceste
(1674) by Quinault and Lully, Act II, scene 1, between Cephise and
Straton.
16 For example, in Act I, scene 8 of Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) by Pellegrin and
Rameau, when Thesee is reported to be dead, Oenone tells Phaedra to
offer the crown to Hippolyte.
17 See Corneilles Discours de lutilite et des parties du poeme dramatique: Sa
dignite demande quelque grand interet dEtat, ou quelque passion plus
noble et plus meme que lamour, telles que sont lambition ou la
vengeance, et veut donner a craindre des malheurs plus grands que la
perte dune matresse (Pierre Corneille, Trois discours sur le poeme
dramatique, ed., intro., and notes by B. Louvat and M. Escola [Paris: GF,
[1999], p. 72).
18 See Kintzler, Theatre et opera a lage classique, pp. 726.
19 See Jean-Marie Goulemot, Presence et role du peuple dans la tragedie
francaise de 1683 a 1715. Essai danalyse quantitative, in Images du peuple
au dix-huitieme siecle, pp. 231244.
86 Catherine Kintzler

20 See Fortassier, Musique et peuple au XVIIIe siecle, pp. 327337.

21 See Thesee (1675) by Quinault and Lully, Act II, scenes 3, 6 and 7; for the
eighteenth century, the Avis preceding Isse (1697) by La Motte and
Destouches; and the Argument preceding Callirhoe (1712) by Roy and
Destouches.
22 The objection could be made that the chorus is often invisible (chur de
peuples quon ne voit point) as is the case, for example, in Medee, Act V,
scene 2; and in Venus et Adonis by Rousseau and Desmarest, Act V, scene
1. But the chorus is always audible, and its invisibility announces an
appearance (either its own appearance or that of another character); in
this sense, it is a part of the spectacular aspect.
23 For an example, see Idomenee (1712) by Danchet and Campra, Act I, scene
3, in which Idamante sets the Trojan prisoners free.
24 The Boreades princes are furious because the Princess Alphise has
refused to marry one of their number. They ask the god Boree to take
revenge; he responds by unleashing dangerous winds.
25 On a choisi des Nations de lEurope celles dont les caracteres se
contrastent davantage, et promettent plus de jeu pour le theatre: la
France, lEspagne, lItalie et la Turquie. On a suivi les idees ordinaires
quon a du genie de leurs peuples: le Francais est paint volage, indiscret
et coquet; LEspagnol fidele et romanesque; lItalien jaloux, fin et
violent; enfin lon a exprime, autant que le theatre la pu permettre, la
hauteur et la souverainete des sultans, et lemportement des sultanes.
4 Womens roles in Meyerbeers operas: How Italian
heroines are reflected in French grand opera
Naomi Andre

In a sophisticated web of sound, the embodiment of masculinity and

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

87
88 Naomi Andre

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 (17911864).2
In a telling, yet seemingly unlikely, place, Meyerbeers 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 Prophete [1849],
and LAfricaine [1865]) which have maintained their importance, if not
their popularity, through performance. Nonetheless, Meyerbeers 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 Meyerbeers 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 womens
roles Meyerbeer wrote in Italy and in his best-known operas for Paris.
 Womens roles in Meyerbeers operas 89

Table 4.1 Principal roles for women (and castrato) in Meyerbeers

Italian operas

1817 Romilda e Costanza (Gaetano Rossi, Padua, Teatro Nuovo)

Romilda [disguised as a page] Rosamunda Pisaroni
Costanza Caterina Lipparini
1819 Semiramide Riconosciuta (Gaetano Rossi, Turin, Teatro Regio)
Semiramide [disguised as King Nino] Carolina Bassi
Tamiri Teresa Cantarelli
Scitalce [travesti], Prince of India and former Adelina Dalman-Naldi
lover of Semiramide
1819 Emma di Resburgo (Gaetano Rossi, Venice, Teatro San Benedetto)
Emma di Resburgo [disguised as minstrel] Rosa Morandi
Edemondo [travesti], exiled Earl of Lanark and Carolina Cortesi
husband to Emma
Etelia, Olfredos daughter Cecilia Gaddi
1820 Margherita dAnjou (Felice Romani, Milan, La Scala)
Margherita dAnjou [disguised as peasant wife], Carolina Pellegrini
widow of Henry VI of England
Isaura, wife of Duke of Lavarenne [disguised as a Rosa Mariani
page]
1822 Lesule di Granata (Felice Romani, Milan, La Scala)
Almanzor, King of Granada [travesti] Rosamunda Pisaroni
Azema, daughter of King Sulemano, exiled King Adelaide Tosi
of Granada
1824 Il crociato in Egitto (Gaetano Rossi, Venice, La Fenice)
Palmide, daughter of Aladino Henriette Meric-Lalande
Felicia, fiancee of Armando [dressed as knight] Brigida Lorenzani
Armando dOrville [disguised as Elmireno] Giambattista Velluti
For most of the revivals of this opera Armando was performed by a female
singer.
90 Naomi Andre

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

As a German composer born at the end of the eighteenth century

and who came of age at a time when Germany was still developing
its own national style of opera, Jakob Meyer Beer went to Italy on
a self-imposed apprenticeship to learn how to write opera. The first
decades of the nineteenth century saw few successful attempts at artic-
ulating a German national style of opera.3 Chief among these efforts,
at least in terms of what has survived today, are Beethovens Leonore
(1805), Leonore (1806), and Fidelio (1814): a trio of operas that rework the
same story and musical material three times. In the 1810s when Meyer-
beer was young and wishing to make a name for himself, Carl Maria
von Weber (17861826) his close contemporary and friend (they got
to know each other during their early training with the Abbe Georg
Joseph Vogler in Darmstadt) was involved in a similar quest.4 Though
Webers compositional output was more diverse in genre than Meyer-
beers and includes more non-operatic instrumental works, chamber
pieces, songs, and solo piano pieces, Weber was also searching for an
operatic stylistic voice that did not manifest itself until the early 1820s
with his opera Der Freischutz (first performed in 1821), a few years after
Meyerbeer was already established in Italy and writing operas. At best,
Webers operas had only a limited influence on Meyerbeer, given the
latters travels outside of Germany and Webers untimely death in Eng-
land in 1826.5 Moreover, by the mid-1820s Meyerbeers interests were
less invested in finding a German national style of writing opera
than in a desire to forge a more international style that would gain
popularity on the Parisian stage.
In Italy, during his eight-year stay (18161824), he Italianized his
name to Giacomo Meyerbeer and, in a letter to his father who
demanded that he return to Berlin, wrote adamantly, I believe this
[his visit to Italy and later Paris] to be of the utmost importance to my
musical training and would not let anything in this world prevent me
from going, even if I had to set out on foot and wage battle against
the raging elements.6 In his often repeated statement about being
bewitched in a magic garden in Italy, Meyerbeer indicates that he
 Womens roles in Meyerbeers operas 91

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
Meyerbeers 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
Bellinis operas would later have; this fact, combined with Rossinis 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 Rossinis 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 Rossinis
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,
Meyerbeers 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 Rossinis 1813 Tancredi and Enrico in Simon Mayrs
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., Rossinis Elisabetta dInghilterra, 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 Rossinis Aureliano in Palmira
was written for Giambattista Velluti in 1813). Though the voice type of
92 Naomi Andre

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 Meyerbeers Italian
operas contain at least two principal roles for women.
As a foreigner who went to Italy specifically to learn how to
write opera, Meyerbeers 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 (17741855), who had collaborated with Rossini on Tancredi,
and Felice Romani (17881865), 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, Meyerbeers operas include classical
subjects that were popular in the eighteenth century (e.g., Semiramide
riconosciuta) as did many of Rossinis 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, Meyerbeers 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 Lesule), 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

Primo ottocento opera audiences were quite comfortable with

womens voices singing across gender. In terms of the interactions
 Womens roles in Meyerbeers operas 93

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 Andre

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 womans role is written
in a higher range and tessitura than that of the second woman. For the
purpose of discussing Meyerbeers 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 womans
voice straddled sound and character: it was a voice that could, and up
through the 1820s regularly did, cross-dress aurally.

CENTRAL THEMES IN MEYERBEERS

S I X I TA L I A N O P E R A S

Romilda e Costanza12

Briefly summarized, Teobaldo as a youth growing up in Provence fell

in love with Costanza, the daughter of the Count of Sisteron. While
fighting a war overseas in Brittany, he falls in love with Romilda, the
daughter of the Duke of Brittany. Upon his return, Teobaldo is impris-
oned by his twin brother Retello who, after the death of their father,
read the will which stated that Teobaldo is to become the Count of
 Womens roles in Meyerbeers operas 95

Provence and marry Romilda as a political alliance. Romilda, who

returns Teobaldos love, follows him from Brittany to Provence dis-
guised as a page. Everything works out at the end (thanks, in part,
to the help of another character, Pierotto); Teobaldo is released from
prison, is paired with Romilda, and becomes the benevolent Count of
Provence, ultimately pardoning his brother Retello.
In his first opera for Italy, Meyerbeer used the tenor voice as the
hero (Teobaldo, first premiered by Luigi Capitelli) and the two titular
women vie for the tenors affections. Though the character of Romilda
(written for Rosamunda Pisaroni) is the primary female heroine she
is listed first in the title and she ends up with the hero at moments
within the opera her role assumes a localized masculinity. Contrasted
to the voice of Caterina Lipparini as Costanza, Pisaronis voice (which
later went on to become associated with many other travesti roles13 ), as
Romilda, embodies several traditions simultaneously. Her dressing as
a pageboy quotes enough of the travesti convention to give a knowing
wink to the primo ottocento tradition, in which cross-dressed women
were heard as acceptable substitutes for boys voices before reaching
puberty. Her mission to save her husband from prison, and reclaim
his love from another woman and from the treachery of Retello, also
references the rescue opera tradition (with noticeable similarities in
the story to Beethovens Fidelio, 1814). The voice of Pisaroni bringing
to life the character of Romilda illustrates that a woman could put on
a male persona to accomplish things she could not otherwise do and
still be a viable leading female character in opera.

Semiramide reconosciuta14 (Semiramide Recognized)

Not surprising given its eighteenth-century origins, the design of

Meyerbeers Semiramide involves many characters and sub-plots.15 In
the pre-history to the action of the opera, Idreno (now named Scitalce
at the beginning of the opera), the Prince of India and former lover
of Semiramide, had been convinced by Sibari (Semiramides treacher-
ous advisor who was in love with her) that she had been unfaithful to
him. In a fit of jealousy, Scitalce stabbed Semiramide and threw her
96 Naomi Andre

in the Nile to drown. Fortuitously, Semiramide survived this ordeal

and later married King Nino of Assyria. When the opera begins, King
Nino is dead and Semiramide is in disguise impersonating her own
son (also named Nino) so that she can reign as the King of Assyria.
The Princess Tamiri, another leading female character, is searching for
a husband; among her many suitors are Scitalce (a travesti role) and
Mirteo Semiramides brother. By the end of the opera Semiramide
is unmasked and reunited with Scitalce after she pardons him for his
earlier deeds against her. The Princess Tamiri marries Mirteo.
In terms of vocal type and gendered character, the secondary
couple Princess Tamiri and Mirteo is rather straightforward for
this time; neither undergoes a disguise and the soprano (Tamiri) is
paired with a male singer a bass. A good part of Tamiris dramaturgi-
cal function is to provide the stimulus for bringing Scitalce to Babylon
so that he can ultimately be reunited with Semiramide.
In contrast to Tamiri and Mirteo, the leading couple of Semiramide
and Scitalce present a very different scenario concerning voice pairings
and the intrigue of shifting identities. The choice to cast Carolina Bassis
voice as the title character reflects the pattern seen in Meyerbeers first
opera with Rosamunda Pisaroni as Romilda. Like Pisaroni, Carolina
Bassi was also associated with travesti roles, though to a lesser extent.
Several months after the premiere of Meyerbeers Semiramide, Bassi
premiered the travesti role of Falliero in Rossinis two-act melodramma
Bianca e Falliero at La Scala in Milan, and she figures prominently as a
travesti voice in two of Meyerbeers later operas.16 Yet Semiramides
role is higher than that of Tamiri and the true nature of Bassis
voice has been alternatively described as soprano, mezzo-soprano,
and contralto.17
The page as an adolescent boy reflects a differently circumscribed
articulation of the travesti role as hero: the heroism of the page is
limited. When Romilda (in Meyerbeers first opera) disguises herself
as a page, she is citing the heroic travesti in her bold action to go
undercover and follow the man she loves. As a page, she is allotted
some power: disguised as a man (albeit a young one), she is able to
travel on her own. In contrast, Semiramides disguise is the primary
 Womens roles in Meyerbeers operas 97

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 characters 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 Semiramides 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 SemiramideScitalce 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 Semiramides 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 Andre

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 womens travesti roles combining
with the device of disguise to create new levels of artifice. A subtle fric-
tion resonates as Scitalces voice (the female heroic travesti) is layered
on top of Semiramides voice (who is disguised as King Nino): two
similar womens voices accepted as, and pretending to sound, male.
Seen and heard in this context, a womans 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 womans voice represents
an open realm of possibility for embodying either the male or female
leading role, or as the element of disguise when Semiramide assumes
the identity of King Nino so aptly illustrates both simultaneously.

Emma di Resburgo19

Gaetano Rossi based his libretto on a text by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly (the

French writer who had provided the original source for Beethovens
Leonore/Fidelio operas) and, like Beethovens opera subject, Emma has
elements of the rescue drama. Having been falsely accused of patricide,
Edemondo, the son of the Scottish Earl of Lanark, fled his wife (Emma)
and young son Elvino. Intent upon finding him, and disguised as a
 Womens roles in Meyerbeers operas 99

traveling minstrel, Emma searches for her exiled husband. Through

various turns in the plot, Edemondo returns as a shepherd, and they
both end up in prison and sentenced to death. At the eleventh hour,
the real murderer of Edemondos father is revealed and Edemondo
becomes the rightful Earl of Lanark.
The two leading roles, Emma the title character and her husband
Edemondo, are both assumed by women. The voice of Rosa Morandi
(the first Emma) has been described as a mezzo-soprano; her reper-
tory included the title roles in Rossinis Italiana in Algeri and Tancredi.
Nonetheless, Morandi also sang roles that were more traditionally in
the soprano repertory, including Rossinis Desdemona and Mathilde
di Shabran.20 Edemondo, a travesti role, was written for the trav-
esti singer Carolina Cortesi. For their audiences, Morandi and Cortesi
were an established pair. The night before Emmas premiere, these two
women had just completed a set of performances in Rossinis new pas-
ticcio opera Eduardo e Cristina at the same theatre where, as in Emma,
Cortesi sang en travesti (as Eduardo) opposite Morandi as Cristina.21 As
in Semiramide riconosciuta, the multiple layering of disguise and shifting
gender identity for womens voices are worked into the plot: Cortesi
as the travesti and Morandi as Emma pretending to be the minstrel (a
male role) in order to look for Edemondo. This disguise situation, in
which a woman disguises herself as a man to find her beloved, is in the
same vein as Meyerbeers first Italian opera when Romilda becomes a
page to find Teobaldo.

Margherita dAnjou22

In fifteenth-century Scotland during the Wars of the Roses, Queen

Margherita dAnjou (widow of Henry VI) has fallen in love with the
Duke of Lavarenne, who is married to Isaura. Having been usurped
from the throne by Riccardo, Duke of Gloucester, Margherita attempts
to regain the throne and, en route to achieving this goal, pretends
to be the peasant wife of Michele Gamautte, her surgeon. How-
ever, Riccardo sees through Margheritas disguise and takes her son
Edoardo, the Prince of Wales, hostage. Meanwhile, though Isaura fears
100 Naomi Andre

(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,
Isauras 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, Margheritas 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
Nicola Bassi). Unlike the other cases of disguise seen in Meyerbeers
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 Margheritas 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
husbands 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.

Lesule di Granata23 (The Exile from Granada)

The setting of the opera takes place in the Moorish kingdom of Granada
during the fifteenth century. Before his death, King Almanzors father,
a Zegridi (Zegris) warrior, defeated and then exiled the former king,
 Womens roles in Meyerbeers operas 101

Sulemano, the leader of the rival Abenseragi (Abencerrages).24 At the

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

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 Lesule di Granata further enriches our understand-
ing of King Almanzor as a travesti role. Whereas the ancient Babylo-
nian queen, Semiramide, in Meyerbeers 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 womans 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

Meyerbeers final opera for Italy became his entree 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
 Womens roles in Meyerbeers operas 103

exoticized disguise. Though he was part of the delegation of the Knights

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

in church settings), the timbre and sound of the voice evoked an older
and otherworldly association for a generation that was accustomed to
the female travesti and emerging Romantic tenor heroes.

VO I C E A N D C H A R AC T E R I Z AT I O N I N M E Y E R B E E R S
I TA L I A N O P E R A S : T R AV E S T I A N D D I S G U I S E

Within the constellation of womens voices he employed, Meyerbeers

Italian operas differentiate between the two female singers through
their function in the plot and the tessitura of their music. The second
woman is given the lower tessitura and the other soprano role is gen-
erally higher in range; when the two female singers perform together,
the second womans music is almost always on the bottom part. The
singer who performed the second woman was a soprano, but was the
same type of voice (written in a lower tessitura) that sang the heroic
travesti roles. In fact, those who premiered Meyerbeers second women
were additionally known as heroic travesti singers; hence, the second
woman and heroic travesti roles were not only performed by the same
type of voice, but also were frequently the same singers in different
performances.
The role the second woman singer performed maintained a constant
feature: within the course of the opera, she always spent time cross-
dressed as a male character. In some operas this was because she was
the heroic travesti role. In the other operas, the female character this
singer performed was always required to cross-dress and assume the
feigned identity of a male character for a while. As a direct foil to the
second woman, Meyerbeers higher soprano never sings cross-dressed
as a male character. Thus, in all of Meyerbeers Italian operas, one
woman consistently sings as a female character and the other female
singer always spends some time cross-dressed as a man.
The temporarily cross-dressed second woman in Meyerbeers
operas complicates the codes relegated to womens voices. Instead of
having a full travesti role where a female singer portrays a male charac-
ter throughout the entire opera, the disguise provides the opportunity
for a female singers voice to do two things at once: to sound as a
 Womens roles in Meyerbeers operas 105

female characters voice and to sound as a pretend male voice. Yet

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

aestheticized aural ecstasy in its own right. In the primo ottocento,

the definitions of masculinity and femininity in terms of sound
were becoming less flexible. During this time the heroic tradition was
opening up a place for the tenor voice. In those roles where the female
characters pretended to be men, a space was carved out for womens
voices that allowed them to retain their association with a culturally
gendered masculine sound. In all of Meyerbeers operas for Italy, at
least during some point, one womans voice is always heard as a man.
Hence, Meyerbeers use of disguise consistently marked the voice of
the second female singer as a voice that could sound as a man, not only
when she sang heroic travesti roles, but even within the larger context
of portraying a female character.
On one level, Meyerbeers use of disguise with the second woman
could be seen and heard as overlapping with the heroic travesti tradi-
tion and seeming to produce the same effect; in both cases womens
voices stand in for male characters. However, the situation is made
more complex given the surrounding contexts. As each woman sang
her respective character, the audience heard the gender of the two
characters (and their voices) differently. In the heroic tradition, the
travesti voice was marked by the gender of the character the opera
role she portrayed: the hero. While listening to the cross-dressed
female singer as the hero, the audience heard an evocation of the cas-
trato voice. Hence, the heroic travesti singers voice became the sound
of heroism; her voice was the idealized voice of the castrato hero.
Meyerbeers second woman reminded the audience of the dual pos-
sibilities in this voice with the male disguise. His operas provide a step-
ping stone for revealing what could be wrapped inside a characters
voice: here is a woman, but she can also easily cross over into a man.
Such distinctions are subtle, yet instructive for how they illustrate the
different simultaneous meanings womens voices generated. Depend-
ing upon the context, audiences were accustomed to deciphering these
simultaneous codes concerning gender and character.
The presence of two principal roles for female singers in the primo
ottocento gives way to the singular Romantic heroine of the secondo
ottocento. While Bellinis Norma shares the spotlight with Adalgisa,
 Womens roles in Meyerbeers operas 107

Table 4.2 Roles for two leading women in Meyerbeers French grand operas

1831 Robert le diable Isabelle, Princess of Sicily Alice

1836 Les Huguenots Marguerite de Valois Valentine
1849 Le Prophete Berthe Fides
1865 LAfricaine Ines Selika

this type of construction is much less common once the Romantic

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

Meyerbeers Italian heroines reflected in his French grand operas

When Meyerbeer took his talents to Paris, he kept the dual female
model in his four French grand operas (see Table 4.2).
108 Naomi Andre

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, Halevys 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 Verdis two late operas with direct connections to Paris
the Operas commissioned Don Carlos in 1867 (with Elisabeth and the
Princess Eboli) and the French-styled Ada that was written for Cairo
in 1871 (with the characters of Ada and Amneris).
The enormous popularity of Meyerbeers 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 womans 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 Eugene Scribe (17911861), the prolific librettist who
wrote the text for all four of Meyerbeers 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-
beers six Italian operas reflect primo ottocento aesthetics by employing
two female voices in leading roles. In less than a decade after Meyer-
beers final Italian opera, the conventions for Italian opera shifted and
the Romantic heroine became a singular role that combined elements
 Womens roles in Meyerbeers operas 109

from the earlier two-woman model. In Paris, the situation developed

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

n ot e s
1 John Rosselli writes about the rise of the tenor in the beginning of the
nineteenth century in chapter 8, The Age of the Tenor, in his Singers of
Italian Opera: The History of a Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992) esp. pp. 176178. 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,
18101835 in Jane A. Bernstein, ed., Womens 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 Meyerbeers 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 dAnjou (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, 181722, Series: Italian Opera 18101840, Printed
110 Naomi Andre

Editions of Complete Operas and excerpts by the contemporaries of

Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, edited with Introductions by Philip
Gossett, vol. 23 (New York: Garland, 1991).
5 Though Webers next operatic project (Die Drei Puntos) after Der
Freischutz was not performed in his lifetime, his last two operas were
Euryanthe (Vienna, 1823) and Oberon (London); the latter was performed
in April 1826, just months before Webers death in June.
6 Giacomo Meyerbeer to Jacob Herz Beer in Berlin; Vienna, November
1814 (Giacomo Meyerbeer: A Life in Letters, ed. Heinz and Gudrun Becker,
trans. Mark Violette [Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1989] p. 32).
7 Andrew Everett, Bewitched in a Magic Garden: Giacomo Meyerbeer
in Italy, The Donizetti Society Journal vol. 6 (1988), 162192.
8 Rossinis first opera for the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, Elisabetta, regina
dInghilterra, was written in 1815. Between 1816 and 1823 (the time that
overlaps with Meyerbeers stay in Italy) Rossini wrote eighteen operas.
Beginning in 1816, his nine other operas for Naples were La gazzetta (a
comic opera for the Teatro dei Fiorentini, 1816), Otello (for the Teatro
Fondo during the San Carlos renovation in 1816), Armida (1817) and
seven operas for the San Carlo: Mose in Egitto (1818), Riccardo e Zoraide
(1818), Ermione (1819), La donna del lago (1819), Maometto II (1820), and
Zelmira (1822). Rossinis four operas for Roman theatres during this time
were two for the Teatro Argentina (Il barbiere di Siviglia, 1816 and Adelaide
di Borgogna, 1817), Cenerentola for the Teatro Valle in 1817 and Matilde di
Shabran for the Teatro Apollo in 1821. His four operas for northern
theatres were La gazza ladra (1817) and Bianca e Falliero (1819) for La Scala
in Milan and Eduardo e Cristina (1819) and Semiramide (1823) for La Fenice
in Venice. The one-act farsa, Adina, was composed in 1818, yet premiered
at the Teatro de San Carlos in Lisbon, Portugal in 1826.
9 Felice Romani was also the librettist of Simon Mayrs La rosa bianca e la
rosa rossa and Medea in Corinto both from 1812, at the beginning of
Romanis career. In his study of the primo ottocento librettist
Cammarano, John Black cites Romani and Rossi, along with
Cammarano, as leading librettists of their time (The Italian Romantic
Libretto: A Study of Salvadore Cammarano [Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1984], pp. 292295).
10 Rescue operas of the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the
nineteenth centuries involved dramas where an unjustly imprisoned
 Womens roles in Meyerbeers operas 111

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. 12931294.
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 Meyerbeers 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 Meyerbeers 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 Rossinis La donna del
lago (1819) and King Almanzor in Meyerbeers Lesule di Granata (1822).
She was well known in Rossinis Semiramide (as Arsace) and the title role
in Tancredi.
14 Meyerbeers 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 Metastasios popular libretto,
Meyerbeers opera preceded Rossinis 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 Gossetts Introduction,
Giacomo Meyerbeer and Andrew Everett, Bewitched in a Magic
Garden, pp. 172173.
16 The premiere of Rossinis Bianca e Falliero took place on December 26,
1819. Bassi was considered for the title role, King Almanzore, in
Meyerbeers unrealized Almanzore project (libretto by Rossi) of 1821.
112 Naomi Andre

Rosamunda Pisaroni ended up singing King Almanzor in what became

Lesule di Granata at La Scala in Milan in 1822 when Romani reworked
the libretto. Bassi was also one of the early interpreters of Vellutis role of
Armando in Meyerbeers last Italian opera, Il crociato di Egitto (1824).
17 Stendhal refers to Carolina Bassi as an Italian soprano whose voice was
already going by the time of Bianca e Falliero (Stendhal, The Life of Rossini,
trans. Richard N. Coe, second edition [London: John Calder, 1985],
p. 511). In his Garland introduction, Gossett refers to her as a
mezzo-soprano; Everett calls her a contralto (Bewitched in a Magic
Garden, p. 172). Gossett writes about Bassi: Her range was more that
of a mezzo-soprano than of a soprano, but Semiramide is the higher of
the two leading womens roles in Meyerbeers opera. Gossett,
Introduction, Giacomo Meyerbeer, note 11 (unnumbered pages).
18 The duet Al folgor di que bei rai is one of the two excerpts of this
opera that was published by Ricordi in 1821. It was written for the
Bologna revival of Semiramide riconosciuta in June 1820 at the Teatro
Comunale and replaced the original Turin duet Ella e la fiamma mia
(Gossett, Introduction, Giacomo Meyerbeer).
19 Meyerbeers third collaboration with Rossi (a two-act melodramma eroico)
was premiered at the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice on June 26, 1819.
The opera was quite successful and had performances in other Italian
cities as well as in Germany (Dresden, Munich, and Frankfurt) and
Vienna. Though outside Italy it was criticized by some for its Italianate
style and imitation of Rossini, several excerpts from the opera were
released by a small publisher in Munich as well as by Ricordi. For more
on the criticism of Emma by Carl Maria von Weber and others, see
Gossett, Introduction, Giacomo Meyerbeer.
20 Rosa Morandi (17821824) sang roles that can be seen as soprano and
mezzo-soprano. She sang premieres of Fanny in Rossinis La cambiale di
matrimonio (1810) and Serafina in Donizettis Chiara e Serafina (1822).
Elizabeth Forbes, Rosa Morandi, New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed.
Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1992), vol. iii, p. 464 and Everett,
Bewitched in a Magic Garden, p. 174; both Forbes and Everett call
Morandi a mezzo-soprano.
21 Rossinis Eduardo e Cristina ran at the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice
from April 24, 1819 and finished on June 25, 1819 (Gossett,
Introduction, Giacomo Meyerbeer, note 14).
 Womens roles in Meyerbeers operas 113

22 Meyerbeers fourth opera (a two-act melodramma semiserio) was his first

collaboration with librettist Felice Romani and premiered at La Scala in
Milan on November 14, 1820. Following in the trend of his earlier Italian
works, Margherita dAnjou continued to increase Meyerbeers success and
popularity as an opera composer. It was performed in Venice, Bologna,
Turin, Florence, and Trieste as well as in Munich and Dresden. In 1826 it
was given a major revival when it was performed in Paris at the Odeon
theatre. Due to its popularity, Ricordi printed six excerpts of the opera
after its first season in 1821. Following its success in Paris in 1826, this
work became Meyerbeers first opera published in a full piano-vocal
score; Margherita dAnjou was issued in Paris by Schlesinger. See Gossett,
Introduction, Giacomo Meyerbeer, note 22 (also mentioned in Everett,
Bewitched in a Magic Garden, p. 177).
23 Meyerbeers penultimate Italian opera started out as Almanzore for the
Teatro Argentina in Rome with a libretto by Gaetano Rossi. Meyerbeer
received the commission from Giovanni Paterni, the impresario of the
Argentina, a few weeks after the premiere of Margherita and the new
opera was to be performed a few months later at the end of February
1821. Due to various circumstances sickness and problems with the
theatre the opera was eventually transferred to La Scala in Milan where
it was first performed as Lesule di Granata (The Exile from Granada) on
March 12, 1822 with a reworked libretto by Felice Romani. Though this
opera did not enjoy the same popularity as his earlier operas, Ricordi
published five excerpts from it.
24 Romanis plot of Lesule di Granata is loosely based on the historical
rivalry between two ruling families (factions) in Moorish Spain: the
Abencerrages and the Zegris ( Jeremy Commons, liner notes for 100 years
of Italian opera: 18201830, Opera Rara, ORCH 104, David Parry
conductor, Philharmonia Orchestra, London, 1994, p. 54).
25 Bassi had since gone on to establish herself as a singer of travesti roles;
she created Falliero in Rossinis 1819 Bianca e Falliero.
26 Adelaide Tosi premiered the following Donizetti roles: Argelia in Lesule
di Roma, 1828; Neala in Il paria, 1829; Elisabetta in Il castello di Kenilworth,
1829. She also sang the premier of Bianca in Bellinis revised Bianca e
Fernando, 1828.
27 Negroponte is modern-day Euboea, the largest of the Greek islands in
the Aegean. The plot of Maometto II is about the war between the
114 Naomi Andre

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. 101104).
28 Mark Everist has written about the theme of exoticism (Meyerbeers Il
crociato in Egitto: Melodrame, Opera, Orientalism, Cambridge Opera
Journal 8/3 (1996), 215250) 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 Rossinis 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 Rossinis La donna
del lago. Bassi premiered the title role in Meyerbeers 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 Rossinis Bianca e
Falliero at La Scala in Milan.
30 In Handels Alcina, Bradamante spends most of the opera disguised as
Ricciardo so she can find her betrothed (Ruggiero) in Alcinas lair. In
Serse, Amastre, betrothed to Serse, is disguised as a man when she arrives
at Serses 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

When considering the great epochs of French operatic history one

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

115
116 Jane F. Fulcher

of the latter, even in a period of financial hardship, as in the early 1920s,

Rouche succeeded in obtaining at least his prewar subvention.1
The integrity of the state opera was a serious matter, for just as
in the Weimar Republic it was to serve an educational role, although
here it was not progressive, but rather politically conservative and
nationalist.2 Drawing on his experience during the war, Rouche knew
just what to stage, selecting those works from the older and newer
repertoire that would fulfill this pedagogical function. As soon as the
war was over, he turned to the ardently patriotic Camille Saint-Saens,
producing his historical opera Henry VIII in December 1918. Two years
later Rouche presented the work of Saint-Saenss notorious antagonist,
Vincent dIndy, a composer who was equally venerable, and unim-
peachably nationalist. Appropriately, it was during the government of
the conservative Bloc National that dIndys opera, La Legende de Saint
Christophe (which he had begun in 1903 and referred to as his drame
anti-Juif), finally had its premiere.3
One of the rationales for this choice on the part of Rouche was evi-
dently his belief that the work would reinforce the ideology of the rul-
ing coalition and engage with current intellectual interests. As he was
undoubtedly aware, this was the moment of a marked revival not only
of neo-Medievalism but of neo-scholasticism among prominent
Catholic circles in France. Hence it was also the period of revival of the
medieval miracle play, promoted by fervent Catholics like Henri Gheon
and the Sorbonne professor Gustave Cohen.4 A return to the Middle
Ages was similarly characteristic of French philosophers, including
Etienne Gilson, and of theologians like Jacques Maritain, who pub-
lished his Art et scholastique in 1920. And finally, the twenties was a
decade of neo-Medievalism not only in French Catholic architecture,
but also in sculpture, as well as in the war and funeral monuments
now being raised throughout France.
But other themes in dIndys opera could be interpreted as relating
to current interests and issues in the intellectual and religious or the
political and social realms. This was the period when not only the
Right, but also ecclesiastical authorities, were condemning political
liberalism, together with equally threatening naturalism, socialism,
 The French opera of ideas 117

and communism. DIndy had combined related concerns in his opera,

along with the similarly compelling themes of traitors and race as
resonant now as during the Dreyfus Affair, when he conceived the
work. Although I have discussed this opera in considerable detail in
a previous study, it is important here to review those elements that
together shaped its ideological enunciation and its influence in the
twenties.5
The opera was based upon a thirteenth-century collection of the
lives of saints, the Legende doree (Legenda aurea), the product of a Domini-
can monk known in France as Jacques de Voragine. In the wake of the
Dreyfus Affair, the ardently anti-Dreyfusard dIndy had attempted to
adapt the legend to the service of the nationalists ideological cause.
Here the saints nemesis becomes a Jew, who is both avaricious and a
traitor, yet has succeeded in corrupting the bourgeoisie and head of
state, and is vengefully killed in the end.
Stylistically, the most symbolic and didactic element in this drame
mystere lies in the choice and manipulation of Gregorian chant, which
dIndy carried to unprecedented extremes. Of the operas twenty-four
themes, seven are taken literally from the Gregorian repertoire, and
probably intended (idealistically) to be recognized by the audience. But
dIndy deploys other stylistic resources beyond melodies in the interest
of exegesis, including allusions to the masters admired (and as inter-
preted) at the Schola Cantorum, in particular Bach and Beethoven.
These references, like the Renaissance motet style that dIndy (and
others) associated with les primitifs, appear when the text refers to
sincerity, spiritual probity, and the certitudes of faith.6 The Jew is char-
acterized by borrowings from Wagners depiction of Alberich in The
Ring, as well as by the so-called Italo-Judaic style which dIndy asso-
ciated with Meyerbeer and French grand opera.
What, then, was the message that dIndy originally intended in
his adaptation of the legend? Anti-materialistic, it indicted a world
motivated by profit, and based on a corrupt structure of authority.
Against such greed and corruption he contraposed Christophes duty,
sacrifice, and heroism, the purity of race and nation, and the primacy
of collective values and of social hierarchy. The latter themes were
118 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 Legende 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 Schmitts La Tragedie de Salome and Mariottes Salome.
DIndys 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 capitals 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
Rouche 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 dIndys description in the score. As
opposed to the composers explicit and lavish nineteenth-century con-
ception, Denis brought out the sacred and abstract components of the
drama, thus diverting attention from dIndys topical and controver-
sial references. For example, his scenery for the palace of the Reine
de Volupte disregards dIndys 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 dIndys explicit
and realistic detail.
 The French opera of ideas 119

The conservative critic Adolphe Boschot was clearly influenced by

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

nationalists. Not surprisingly, it was now that one of Barress most

controversial novels, Un Jardin sur lOronte, was made into an opera by
Alfred Bachelet, selected by Barres as the most appropriate composer
for the work.12 But Barres died before he could construct a libretto from
the novel as he had planned, although, being an admirer of Wagner, he
claimed to have projected a Wagnerian conception onto the work. The
novel, Barress last, published in 1922, concerns the love of a Christian
and a Saracen, an episode drawn from a long epic of the crusades in
the Middle Ages.
The storys topicality lay in the fact that it dealt with the still highly
charged theme of the conflict between the orient and the occident,
and concomitantly with the clash of races and purported modes of
feeling. Yet despite Barress conservativism, the novel, in fact, created
a scandal, particularly in the Catholic press, which perceived its overt
sensuality as an outrage to religious morality.13 It was perhaps this
media attention that initially attracted Bachelet to the project, for
he employed stylistic elements that heightened the conflict music
evocative of the Christian Middle Ages as opposed to sinuous oriental
vocalises.14 But he also included conventional forms that are related
both to serious opera and to opera-comique, such as recitatives, airs,
chants, proverbes (evoking folk culture), and religious processions.
The scandal over the novel undoubtedly delayed the works pre-
miere, and, now ambiguous as to its political implications, it was finally
presented on November 7, 1932, the year that a leftist government
gained power. Predictably, conservative journals seized the occasion
to laud the opera, which despite its condemnation by the church still
represented the prestige and nationalist values of Barres. Rene Dumes-
nil, in the Mercure de France, reported an etonnante reussite (aston-
ishing success), in terms of both the librettos adaptation of the novel
and Bachelets ability to capture its nuances. Yet he feels compelled to
begin by addressing the continuing controversy over the novel, partic-
ularly among Catholic circles, by citing Barres himself on the work:
Dans ce Jardin sur lOronte je ne pretend plus mener le bon combat
Catholique et Chretien que Racine dans ses tragedies, Fenelon dans
son Telemaque, ou le Tasse dans sa Jerusalem. (In this Jardin sur lOronte
 The French opera of ideas 121

I dont claim to fight the good Christian and Catholic fight, any more
than Racine does in his tragedies, Fenelon in his Telemaque, or Tasso
in his Jerusalem.)15
The goal, Dumesnil explains, is art, and he then cites a quote
by the abbe Bremond who characterizes it as a fantaisie in order
to justify Barress provocation. Dumesnil also notes the operas 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 dIndyste) 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 Bachelets conservative archasme
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 Bachelets 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 Hues politically
conservative Dans lombre de la cathedrale of 1922, which centers on
the opposition between lideal religieux and lideal 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 defense
de lOccident, supporting Mussolinis aggression in Ethiopia.19 How-
ever, like dIndys, this didactic work was only a succes destime, yet
122 Jane F. Fulcher

considered appropriate to the postwar function of the Opera, which

would persist in selecting such works.
This continued throughout the twenties, and when the Cartel des
Gauches came to power in 1924 it used the Opera to project the film
Le Miracle des loups, with music by the Conservatoires director, Henri
Rabaud. The Left, despite its claims to modernity, still had to imprint
this pillar of French culture with its political values (as it had since the
French Revolution), and thus turned to history and the heroic. The
film, based on a novel by Dupuy-Mazuel, concerns a key episode from
early French history the story of Louis XI and Charles the Bold, or
the siege of Beauvais, crowned by the heroism of Jeanne Hachette.20
Because of its historical resonance and its associations with both French
heroism and patriotism, the film was presented before the head of state
and members of the new Left government on November 13, 1924.
Although the Left here attempted to marshall French history and the
major monument of French culture, the Paris Opera, to its cause, it
also inscribed more musically progressive, if controversial, values on
the nations Opera-comique.
It was undoubtedly during the Cartel des Gauches that the theatre
accepted Marcel Delannoys Le Poirier de misere, which, however, was
not performed until the Right had returned to power. Premiered at the
Opera-comique on February 21, 1927, it had, according to reports, the
effect of a bomb being detonated in the hall.21 Several important critics
were explicit about their reasons for condemning the work, accusing
the author of vulgarity and having been influenced by increasingly
threatening bolshevist tendencies. This was probably a reference
to continuing agitation on the French Left, which had been battling
vitriolically with the Right over finances in the chamber throughout
the previous year.22
The works text, by Andre Tourrasse and Jean Limousin, in the tradi-
tion of the more popular culture of the Left, is allegorical, described
alternately as based on a Flemish folk tale or on the ancient myth of
Sisyphus. The characters include such abstract, yet in the context polit-
ically charged, figures as Misere, Le Peuple, Le Saint, and La
Mort. The political charge, and specifically the works association
 The French opera of ideas 123

with the Communist Left, was heightened by the effect of the stark,
austere decor, which anticipated the innovations of Weimars 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 dIndy,
it is boldly entitled a Mystere en 3 actes, with one of the existing
copies of the controversial opera inscribed to Maurice Ravel.23 The
tumult at the works 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 Ravels 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 Lalos pious recommendation that the author follow Ravels
example.24 But as we shall see, this was not Ravels 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
Canteloubes 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 dIndy (and
was to become a functionary during the Vichy Regime) had selected
a theme that once again recalls Maurice Barres. 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 meridionale, 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 19111913), 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

conservatives; in fact, one contemporary described it by employing a

rhetoric that echoes Barress theme of rootedness in Les Deracines:
Cest la theme des ancetres qui, plus fort que lattrait des villes, recon-
quiert un jeune deracine et le fixe definitivement au pays natal. (It
is the theme of ancestors which, stronger than the attraction of cities,
reconquers an uprooted young man and fixes him definitively in his
native land.)28 Others stressed its roots in classical culture, charac-
terizing it as a commentary on the fortunes of the ancient geor-
gics from Virgil, and again ignoring the stylistic innovations in the
work.
As we have seen, in some cases it was the theme that determined the
ideological interpretation, but in others it was the style employed, as
construed within the current context. Yet perhaps because of this ambi-
guity, and the concomitant engagement that it triggered among the
public, the Opera persisted in the presentation of operas with ideologi-
cal or political themes. On June 23, 1933, for example, during the period
of a government to the Left, the Opera performed Canteloubes Verc-
ingetorix, despite the composers conservative orientation. For, once
more, the theme was one with which the Left now wished to identify,
especially in light of fascism French patriotism, yet its stress being
not on blood and soil but on nobility and sacrifice. With no regional
elements here implied, this history of the ancient Gauls (to a libretto
of Etienne Clement) led Canteloube to further innovations, such as
the first use of the ondes Martinot in an opera orchestra.29 Hence the
utterance was once more ambiguous, as had been the case in previous
works we have seen, which did not dissuade the Opera from persever-
ing in its attempt to foster the genre. For again, the Operas function
as it had been re-established during the war was to diffuse ideas in the
national interest, which even if contested, would engage.
If dIndy was the most prominent French composer to espouse
politically conservative ideas through opera, then Ravel, as we have
noted, was the most outspoken critic of this endeavor. Like dIndy
during the period of the Dreyfus Affair, Ravel after the war sought
ideological expression for the cultural position that he had gradually
 The French opera of ideas 125

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. Ravels 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
Leon Blum and Paul Painleve, is widely known.31 Moreover, Manuel
Rosenthal points out explicitly in his memoirs about Ravel, il etait ce
quon appellerait aujourdhui un homme de gauche (he was what
one would call today a man of the Left).32 Indeed, Ravels 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 LEnfant et les sortileges.
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 loperette americaine.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

negroes singing a ragtime at our National Academy of Music fills me

with great joy.35 This, moreover, was in the midst of a virulent current
of anti-Americanism on the part of the nationalists and the conservative
center, which were both economically and culturally protectionist.36
But Ravels playfully provocative marshalling of styles in the work is
not limited to jazz: at a time of stress on French purity, he invokes the
oriental, but in a manner that mocks traditional colonialist oriental-
ism. The solo aria of the Chinese cup, for example, facetiously employs
the typical parallel fourths and pentatonicism of the conventional
references to the oriental. In addition, at the beginning of the work
Ravel consciously invokes oriental cliches to create an atmosphere of
fantasy, especially through the color of the oboe, the pentatonic pitch
material, and the sonorities of the open fourth and fifth.37 But perhaps
most clever and incisive is Ravels biting ridicule, through trivialization,
of those styles still associated with dIndy and his Schola Cantorum,
the reactionary stance of which he loathed.38 Here it is important
to recall that dIndys nationalist and pedantic opera, La Legende de
Saint Christophe, premiered at the time that Ravel was composing
his work. As we may also recall, dIndy here didactically deployed
those styles that the Schola associated with its conservative philos-
ophy, especially medieval organum and Renaissance sacred choral
music.
These are precisely the styles that Ravel employs to connote the
naive, but absurdly so in the context, as in the final a cappella fugue
of the animals. In dIndys opera such a style is marshalled when
the chorus sings of the power of the cross to prevent sinners from
damnation: Ravel employs it when the animals praise the good child.
As Jankelevitch noted, the final chorus with its canon-like imitations
and its seething superimposed voices reveals a polyphonist worthy
of the masters of the Renaissance.39 But Ravel goes even further in
subverting the pedantic meaning of the Scholas sacred styles, employ-
ing medieval organum and making reference to the august French
Baroque.40 In the former case Ravel refers to early organum together
with oriental cliches to suggest the fairy-world of the child, thus defi-
antly conflating, not opposing, East and West.
 The French opera of ideas 127

Just as perversely, for conservatives, he also combines medieval

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

for La Liberte, Robert Dezarnaud, was clearly not amused, and was
indeed indignant about Ravels 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 Ravels case between French operas future and its
past.

n ot e s
1 Rouche 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. 136138. Also see Louis Laloy, Louis Laloy (18741944) 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
Republique de Weimar (Paris: Fayard, 1998), pp. 258261, and Susan Cook,
Opera for a New Republic: the Zeitopern of Krenek, Weill, and Hindemith (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988).
3 Dlndy referred to his opera as such in a letter of September 17, 1903, to
Pierre de Breville. As cited by Leon Vallas, Vincent dIndy, vol. ii (Paris:
Albin Michel, 1950), p. 327.
4 Dorothy Knowles, French Drama of the Inter-War Years. 19181939 (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. 6672, and Jane F. Fulcher,
DIndys Drame anti-Juif and Its Meaning in Paris, 1920, Cambridge
Opera Journal 2/3 (November 1990), 285319.
6 As Vallas, among others, notes, Vincent dIndy, p. 335, dIndy makes
musical reference to Bachs Passions and to Beethovens Missa Solemnis.
7 June 6 was actually the date of the open dress rehearsal, the repetition
generale, 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 theories sur
lart moderne. Sur lart sacree (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 idees et des livres
(associated with the Action Francaise), July 1920, 105108. For more
details on the decor, see Fulcher, DIndys Drame anti-Juif and Its
Meaning in Paris, 1920.
10 Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la Patrie: Les
intellectuels et la premiere guerre mondiale (19101919) (Paris: Editions de la
Decouverte, 1996), p. 155.
11 Susan Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary
Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 2122. Also see
Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (New York: Avon, 1957), pp. 2022.
12 Alfred Bachelet, an admirer of both Wagner and Debussy, was the chef du
chant and then the conductor at the Opera-comique under Messager and
Broussan, and in 1919 became the director of the Conservatoire at
Nancy. In 1929 he was elected to the Academie des Beaux-Arts.
13 Michel Winock, Le Siecle des intellectuels (Paris: Seuil, 1997), p. 195.
14 See Rene Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres: 19191939
(Paris: Editions du Milieu du Monde, 1946), p. 131.
15 Review of Bachelets Un Jardin sur lOronte by Rene Dumesnil, Mercure de
France (November 15, 1932), 444445.
16 Ibid., pp. 446450. As Dumesnil points out, p. 450, this includes the use
of ancient Arab modes. It is significant to note here that extracts from
Bachelets Un Jardin sur lOronte were recorded during the Vichy regime,
in 19421943, under the sponsorship of the Secretariat general des
130 Jane F. Fulcher

Beaux-Arts at the Association francaise dAction Artistique. See Philippe

Morin, Une Nouvelle Discographie pour la France, in Myriam
Chimenes, ed., La Vie musicale sous Vichy (Brussels: Editions Complexe,
2001), p. 265.
17 Dumesnil, Mercure de France (November 15, 1932), p. 451. He ends, p. 453,
by praising Rouche for having honored French art in presenting this
work, and then expresses his dismay that the Operas subvention had just
been reduced to 400,000 francs, undoubtedly because of the effects of
the Depression, now being felt in France.
18 Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, p. 134. The score at
the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Musique, published in 1922,
indicates cuts for performance at the Opera-comique.
19 Winock, Le Siecle des intellectuels, pp. 625627.
20 Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, p. 134, and Francois
Porcile, La Belle Epoque de la musique francaise: Le temps de Maurice Ravel.
18711940 (Paris: Fayard, 1999), p. 341.
21 Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, p. 199. The review in
Telerama of August 1, 1927, also notes the polemics that the work
provoked at its premiere. It goes on to point out that the music is
severe and powerful, and influenced by folklore.
22 Maurice Agulhon, La Republique 1880 a nos jours (Paris: Hachette, 1990),
vol. i, p. 434. And on the works reception see Leslie Sprout, Music for a
New Era: Composers and National Identity in France, 19361946
(Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2000), p. 59.
23 The review in Telerama of August 1, 1927, recounts the legend on which
the work is based: Misery, an old woman, has nothing but a cabin and a
pear tree. She welcomes and comforts a vagabond, who turns out to be
Saint Denis. He allows her a wish, and she asks that her pear tree
imprison the thieves who have appeared, but she thus traps Death.
Humanity is happy until the sick, weak, and desperate come to implore
her to release Death. Then all returns to order. The fact that the story
could be read as an allegory of the present and that it uses religious
references, including a saint, relates it to dIndys La Legende de Saint
Christophe, which may have been a further provocation. On the possible
sources for the libretto see Sprout, Music for a New Era, p. 59.
24 Significantly, the copy of the score at the Bibliotheque Nationale de
France, Musique, published in Paris by Heugel in 1926, is dedicated to
Maurice Ravel.
 The French opera of ideas 131

25 Paul Bertrand, Le Monde de la musique (Geneva: La Palatine, 1947), p. 199.

26 See the score, Le Mas. Piece lyrique en trois actes (Paris: Au Menestrel,
Heugel, 1927).
27 I am grateful to Andrea Musk for discussing the work with me. See her
analysis of it in her Aspects of Regionalism in French Music during the
Third Republic: The Schola Cantorum, dIndy, Severac, and
Canteloube, D.Phil. dissertation, Oxford University, 1999.
28 Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, p. 103. A review by
Dominique Sordet, in Action francaise on April 5, 1929, notes the
regionalism in the work, and specifically the use of themes from the
Auvergne, the composers home region, though he criticizes the music
and the staging. Another review, by Roland-Manuel, in Le Menestrel on
April 5, 1929, also notes its use of regional melodies, which here, he
argues, accord well with the harmonic advances of the beginning of the
century. And so, despite the conservative message of the libretto, Sordet
is not enthusiastic about the work because of the Wagnerian harmonic
language, and Roland-Manuel, politically to the Left, defends it on the
basis of its harmonic innovations for its period.
29 Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, p. 104.
30 See Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers
during the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996),
p. 9.
31 Arbie Orenstein, ed., A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 113. As Orenstein points
out, p. 29, Ravel had known Leon Blum since the turn of the century, in
the circle of the Revue blanche. Ravel continued to admire Blum and Paul
Painleve, who had been Minister of Finance during the war. Also see
Manuel Rosenthal, Ravel. Souvenirs (Paris: Hazan, 1995), pp. 15 and 127,
on Ravels dedication to Le Populaire and his ties to Leon Blum. As
Rosenthal perceived it, an inherent sympathy for the poor helped
determine Ravels political choices.
32 Rosenthal, Ravel, p. 127.
33 Ravel, Esquisse autobiographique, as published in the Revue musicale
(1938), 214215. The original manuscript is in the Bibliotheque Nationale
de France, Musique, Reserve.
34 Ravel displayed a unique temerity among French composers in the
twenties by being the only one to employ jazz on the operatic stage. On
Ravels enthusiasm for Billy Arnolds jazz orchestra, see Geoffrey J.
132 Jane F. Fulcher

Haydon, A Study of the Exchange between the Music of Early

Twentieth-Century Parisian Composers and Ragtime, Blues, and Early
Jazz, DMA document, University of Texas at Austin, 1992, p. 58.
35 Orenstein, ed., A Ravel Reader, p. 188. I am indebted to Gary Laycock,
who brought many of the observations that follow concerning Ravels
stylistic references and manipulations to my attention in an excellent
seminar paper. As he and others have noted, a trombone sneer
announces the entrance of the English teapot and Chinese cup, followed
by a bass clarinet playing a blues motive. The brassy orchestration and
the rhythm further suggest both the foxtrot and ragtime.
36 See Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York:
Norton, 1994), pp. 9495.
37 See Glenn Watkins discussion of the work in his Soundings: Music in the
Twentieth Century (New York: Schirmer, 1988), pp. 279283.
38 On Ravels aversion to the Schola, see Fulcher, French Cultural Politics,
pp. 209210.
39 For a discussion of the styles used in the work, see Vladimir Jankelevitch,
Ravel, trans. Margaret Crosland (New York: Grove Press, 1959), pp. 78ff.
40 Laycock notes the specific similarity with Act I, scene 3, of dIndys opera.
41 See Jankelevitch, Ravel, pp. 127128.
42 Carolyn Abbate, Outside Ravels Tomb, Journal of the American
Musicological Society 52/3 (Fall 1999), pp. 468, 473, 494, 507, and 520.
43 Orenstein, ed., A Ravel Reader, p. 204.
44 Ibid.
PA RT I I
The Institutional Bases for the Production and
Reception of Opera
 Introduction to Part II
Thomas Ertman

The authors in this section on the whole take a different approach

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

135
136 Thomas Ertman

If Piperno is concerned mainly with the impact of production condi-

tions (government policy, the labor market for artistic personal) within
a single cultural space (Italy), historians William Weber and Christophe
Charle take as their starting point the deeply international and cos-
mopolitan character of the operatic enterprise. John Rosselli under-
lined this fact in his 1992 study Singers of Italian Opera, where he demon-
strated that as early as the seventeenth century both the demand for
and the supply of such singers already extended well beyond the Italian
peninsula and by the nineteenth century had become truly global in its
reach.3 Both Weber and Charle examine the nature and consequences
of operas globalism from a somewhat different perspective, namely
that of the competition among leading world cities for cultural capital.
In the decades around 1800, as Weber shows, the presence of a flourish-
ing opera season was the marker of a truly cosmopolitan metropolis,
identified as such a season was with world cities like Venice, Paris, and
London. This was a crucial factor in the spread of this new Italian art
form around the world since no city with any pretensions to cultural
standing could afford to be without an opera house. During the half
century before World War I, Paris remained the single most influen-
tial node within the world opera network, as Charles quantitatively
based study reveals. The prestige still conferred by a Parisian premiere
permitted the French to export large numbers of new works to all five
continents and even to supposedly hostile nations like Germany at
a time when the countrys musical culture was becoming increasingly
parochial in its response to innovations from abroad.
In addition to government policy and to pressure from markets of
various kinds, a third factor that can shape the character of operatic
output is the general political atmosphere. This connection has been
the subject of a voluminous literature in the case of Giuseppe Verdi, and
Philip Gossetts chapter below represents a major new contribution to
this literature. In it, he details how Verdi responded to the Revolution
of 1848, returning to Italy from Paris, composing a patriotic hymn
(Suona la tromba) commissioned by Mazzini, and writing a new
opera (La battaglia de Legnano) with an explicitly nationalist subject.
He also explores the links between the texts and the musical language
 Introduction to Part II 137

of Verdis pre-1848 works, his two 1848 pieces, and other patriotic
choruses composed at the time and concludes that Verdis 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-Steinbergs
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 Puccinis 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. 179.
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 Verdis works during this period, see Peter Stamatov,
Interpretive Activism and the Political Uses of Verdis Operas in the
1840s, American Sociological Review 67 (June 2002), 345366.
 6 State and market, production and style: An
interdisciplinary approach to eighteenth-century
Italian opera history
Franco Piperno

The complexity of opera is self-evident, but it also represents a great

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

138
 Eighteenth-century Italian opera history 139

ideal opera scholar is a chimera, this perspective nevertheless holds

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

stone of older wooden theatres or the building of new ones, consented

to the lengthening of theatres seasons, supported citizens initiatives
to produce operas, and often favored the establishment of operatic tra-
ditions in the peripheral cities of their states. This supportive attitude
was not, however, merely a consequence of the genres popularity.
Additional social, financial, and political factors also came into play.
First, operatic productions could be an economic resource since they
attracted a paying audience to theatre centers and, due to the elabo-
rate stage requirements of such productions, stimulated many ancillary
craft industries. Second, by favoring the expansion of operatic activ-
ities, governments were also attempting to keep their subjects more
easily under control by attracting them on a regular basis to public
places like the theatre and thus reducing their involvement in uncon-
trolled private activities which could give rise to seditious initiatives.
Both these reasons, as we shall see, explain why the operatic tradition
could spread to and also take root in very peripheral cities, and why
particular operatic repertories seem to have arisen not as a result of
any artistic development per se, but as a consequence of a particular
government initiative.

G OV E R N M E N T P O L I C Y A N D T H E S P R E A D O F O P E R A
T O T H E P E R I P H E RY

It is an oversimplification to say that opera spread simply due to its

success and popularity. Certainly, without a favorable reception from
audiences this art form would not have circulated in the way it did,
but sometimes the first impetus came from government policy, not
from local interest. Livorno in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany is a good
example of a peripheral town in which operatic activity developed after
central government intervention. Livorno was a commercial harbor
of increasing European importance which the Medici dynasty and
their successors from the House of Lorraine tried to make into the
second important commercial center of their state after Florence.5 To
do this, in addition to undertaking other socioeconomic initiatives,
they enlarged the local theatre and financed regular opera seasons,
 Eighteenth-century Italian opera history 141

thereby imposing upon the local inhabitants mostly members of the

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

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 communita 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

Another less exclusively commercial setting that benefited from

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

OPERA AS A MEANS OF SOCIAL CONTROL AND

A RT I S T I C I N N OVAT I O N

Government use of opera as a means of keeping subjects under control

increased during the last decades of the century, especially before and
during the revolutionary years 17961799. This strategy is particularly
evident in Naples, where the conflict between the cultivated and mod-
ern Neapolitan society and the conservative politics of King Ferdinand
IV and his wife Maria Carolina was the most acute. Beginning in 1785,
Neapolitan theatres began to remain open during Lent. This repre-
sented a sensational departure from the tradition common in states
where the church played an influential role in permitting theatrical
performances only during the Carnival season (from December 26
to Mardi Gras) and after Easter, with a pause during Lent devoted to
religious music. The above-mentioned conflict between the Neapoli-
tan government and society encouraged this exceptional expansion of
operatic activity into Lent, after which Neapolitan theatres practically
never closed during the year. This substantial extension of the theatri-
cal season in turn had important consequences for operatic repertory
and style.16
In fact, it was not possible to present normal operas centered on
political intrigue and love affairs during the Lenten opera season. A new
genre had to be invented: the sacrodramma. Sacrodrammi (sacred operas)
featured libretti drawn exclusively from the Old Testament. The Old
Testament was on the one hand a classic source no less classic than the
works of the Greek and Roman authors who inspired Metastasio for
well-known stories with romantic and passionate characters (Deborah,
Judith, Moses, David, Jonathan), but a source that, on the other hand,
could guarantee the suitability of its stories for the spiritual atmosphere
of Lent. Though these sacred operas were forced to do without ballet
scenes, they could make use of large choruses and complicated stage
machinery for battle or miracle scenes.
While the staging of opera in the form of sacrodrammi was the
exception in Italy rather than the rule,17 this practice had been common
in England since Handels time and it is actually possible to see a sort
 Eighteenth-century Italian opera history 145

of English influence on the sacred dramas of Naples. During the 1780s,

the Neapolitan polity abandoned its traditional connections with Spain
and moved closer to the Habsburgs of Vienna and to England. This shift
resulted from the facts that Queen Maria Carolina was the daughter
of the Austrian Empress Maria Teresa and that her personal counselor
was the Englishman John Acton. Moreover, during the last decades
of the eighteenth century, Naples was strongly influenced by the anti-
clericalism of the philosopher Pietro Giannone and moved resolutely
to limit the power and the influence of the church while at the same
time permitting the free expansion of Freemasonry, also an English
and Viennese import.
This governmental initiative had unexpected artistic consequences,
since the Lent opera season based on sacrodrammi spread all over Italy
and became a true operatic tradition. Though this kind of season began
in Naples as a consequence of the local political situation, it soon spread
far and wide and gave birth to important works such as Debora e Sisara
by Pietro Alessandro Guglielmi (1788; the best sacrodramma from the
early period), Saulle by Gaetano Andreozzi (1794; a drama soaked in
Masonic ideology), Rossinis Mose in Egitto (1818; the masterpiece of
the genre), Mayrs Atalia (1822), Donizettis Il diluvio universale (1830)
and finally Verdis Nabucco (1842). (A list of Neapolitan sacrodrammi of
1785 to 1820 appears in Table 6.1).18
Apart from the biblical setting, sacred operas apparently had all
the dramatic and musical ingredients (except for the ballet) of a nor-
mal opera based on a historical, mythological, or epic subject. Johann
Wolfgang Goethe, who had the opportunity to attend the first perfor-
mances of Giordanis La distruzione di Gerusalemme in Naples in 1787
(the first sacred opera staged at the San Carlo theatre), could not iden-
tify any differences between this sacred opera and a normal opera:
they sich in gar nichts unterscheiden [do not differ from one another
in any way], he wrote in his Italienische Reise (March 9, 1787). But
Goethe was neither expert nor knowledgeable enough when it came
to Italian opera to allow him to notice the peculiarities of this new
genre. Upon deeper investigation, the sacrodrammi appear to be char-
acterized by at least five elements that distinguish them from ordinary
Table 6.1 Sacred operas for Neapolitan Lent seasons (17851820, premieres only)

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, 1519
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, 813
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, 2831 1796, 1802, 1804
1798 S. Carlo Gionata maccabeo Sografi Guglielmi P. A. 1 Maccabees, 1113
1800 Nuovo Abramo De Santis Various Genesis, 2122
1802 Nuovo Trionfo della religione Botturini Federici Voltaire, Zare 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 CimarosaZingarelli Esdras, 9, Nehemiah, 16
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. 67
1818 S. Carlo Mose 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

serious operas: an imposing priestly character played by a bass (basses

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

CONDITIONS OF PRODUCTION AND MUSICAL STYLE

My last point concerns the influence of social aspects of opera produc-

tion on musical style. Of the two principal eighteenth-century Italian
operatic genres, opera seria and opera buffa, the former (often also
called tragedia or dramma per musica) was socially and aesthetically
more prestigious. From a market perspective, however, the outstand-
ing genre and the true novelty of the century was opera buffa (more
properly commedia per musica). These genres were in fact complemen-
tary. In addition to dramatic subject and style, they differed in so many
other significant aspects (audiences, costs, mechanisms and seasons of
 Eighteenth-century Italian opera history 149

production, circulation) that they were able to avoid competing directly

with one another. If opera seria was the most important and presti-
gious genre because it was unique and expensive and hence a luxury
good for upper-class consumers, opera buffa was the most success-
ful financially since it was both popular with the public and relatively
easy to produce and disseminate. With the profits from opera buffa,
an impresario could even offset financial failures resulting from an
unsuccessful opera seria season.
The fact that the upper classes formed the core audience for opera
seria affected its conditions of production in a variety of ways. The
most important of these stemmed from the insistence on the part of
the audience that they see something new every season. Thus although
Metastasio wrote only twenty-seven opera seria libretti, they were set
to music hundreds of times. In part this was of course due to the
great esteem in which these libretti were held throughout the whole
century (thus his dramas from the 1720s were still being produced in
the 1820s). Yet the other reason for this was the necessity of offering
new musical works, even if set to the same text, during every opera
seria season. Singers could perform in different productions of the same
drama, but if the score was new they had to learn new music. This is a
principal reason why opera seria singers were incredibly expensive and
could earn anywhere from ten to fifty times more than the composer
himself. If the music changed from production to production, there
was no reason to organize travelling troupes of opera seria singers:
after a season the company dissolved and every singer looked for a
new contract elsewhere.19
The situation was totally different as far as the opera buffa repertory
was concerned.20 Opera buffa began during the 1740s as a structural
extension of the comic intermezzo tradition of the preceding decades.
From the comic intermezzo the opera buffa incorporated at least three
important and interrelated elements: production system, musical style,
and bourgeois subject matter and characters. The bourgeois nature
of opera buffa implied both that the genre was destined for a broader
audience and that it was less valued socially. Hence buffo singers earned
much less per engagement than castrati or prime donne, but their total
150 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 (Orlandinis Serpilla e Bacocco
circulated from 1719 to 1767 21 and Pergolesis 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, Latillas 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 (BaglioniRistoriniBoselliniRosignoli; GaggiottiQuerzoli
Laschi; PerticiBrogiBaglioniRosignoli) 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 Sartoris 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 LArcadia 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 Sartoris catalogue, including the six (!)
Table 6.2 La finta cameriera by Federico-[Barlocci?]/Latilla: productions 17381751

Season/Theatre Pancrazio Erosmina Giocondo Betta Calascione Filindo Dorina Moschino

1738, carnevale Roma, Valle Fratesanti Jozzi Ricciarelli Barcaroli Baglioni Maiolini Magioni Bargagna
1741, primavera Modena, Rangone Negri Fabiani G. Bassi Fabiani F Baglioni Querzoli Bosellini
1741, autunno Faenza, Remoti Cattani Bovini Mellini Castelli Baglioni Ronchetti Bosellini
1742, carnevale Siena, Grande Fratesanti Landi A. Donadei Faini Landi F Rigacci Cherubini
1742, primavera Firenze, Coletti ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
1743, carnevale Bologna, Ristorini G Rosignoli Mellini Paganini Baglioni Ristorini L. Bosellini
Formagliari
1743, primavera Livorno, S. Ristorini G. Rosignoli Ronchetti Magagnoli Baglioni Ristorini L. Bosellini
Sebastiano
1743, ascensione Venezia, S. Angelo Ristorini G. Rosignoli Ronchetti Magagnoli Baglioni Ristorini L. Bosellini
1743?, Vicenza, Grazie Ristorini G. Rosignoli Mellini Cavalli Baglioni Ristorini L Saiz
1744, carnevale Venezia, S. Moise Gaggiotti Querzoli Paganini Mellini Laschi Castelli Peruzzi
1745, carnevale Venezia, S. Cassiano Pertici Querzoli Mellini Isola Baglioni Catterini Bosellini Laschi
1745, carnevale Graz, Tummel Platz Gaggiotti Narici Pendesichi Becheroni Cherubini Dundini
1745, primavera Milano, Ducale Pertici Tonelli Castelli Brogi Baglioni Ristorini L. Rosignoli
(cont.)
Table 6.2 (cont.)
Season/Theatre Pancrazio Erosmina Giocondo Betta Calascione Filindo Dorina Moschino
1745?, Hamburg,? Gaggiotti Dundini Pendesichi Becheroni Cherubini Pereni Becheroni
1746, carnevale Alessandria, Solerio Ristorini G. DUcedo Mellini Tonelli Baglioni Ristorini L. Rosignoli
1746, estate Milano, Ducale Pertici Tagliabo Mellini Brogi Baglioni Tonelli Rosignoli
1746, autunno Prato, Cattani Landi M. Paganini M. Serafini Paganini C. Landi A.
1747, carnevale Torino, Carignano Pertici Tonelli Mellini Brogi Baglioni Cornaggia Rosignoli
1747, primavera Mantova, Ducale Pertici Cavalli Mellini Brogi Baglioni N. N. Rosignoli
1747, autunno Verona, Filarmonico Giardini Mondini Bassi Tonelli Baglioni Guerrieri Rosignoli
1749?, Parma, Ducale Pertici Fascitelli Castelli Setaro Belvedere Brogi
1750?, Barcelona? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
1751, estate Salzdahl ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
1751, autunno Firenze, Cocomero Petri Boddi Castelli Brogi Pertici Cecchi Scaramchi
1752?, Lucca? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
1754, autunno Trieste, S. Pietro ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
1760, primavera Livorno, S. Cherubini Sabatini Tedeschi Ristorini Laschi Vagnoni Micheli
Sebastiano (Wolfenbuttel)
 Eighteenth-century Italian opera history 153

daughters of Francesco: Giovanna, Clementina, Vincenza, Anna Maria,

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

Arcifanfano re de matti Mad. Mad. Mad.

(GoldoniGaluppi) Arcifanfano Gloriosa Garbata Simplicina Malgoverno Sordidone Furibondo
Parma, 1752 Francesco Segalini Buini Giovanna Fascitelli Carattoli Tibaldi
Bologna, 1754 Francesco Giovanna Zanini Clementina Masi Carattoli Caldinelli
Venezia, 1755 Francesco Giovanna Zanini Clementina Conti Leopardi Carattoli Caldinelli
Firenze, 1759 Francesco Vincenza Giovanna Clementina Savoj Carattoli Boscoli

La buona figliuola March. della March. Cav. Cecchina Paoluccia Sandrina Tagliaferro Mengotto
(GoldoniDuni) 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
(PalombaPiccinni) 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
(GoldoniMazzoni) 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
(GaluppiGaluppi) Oronte
Firenze, 1762 Giovanna Vincenza Costanza Bosi Laschi Caldinelli De Angelis

Il matrimonio in Dorina March. di Lena don Pascasio Flavia Conte Serpino

maschera (?Rutini) Belpoggio Roberto
Trieste, 1764 Vincenza Fiorini Giovanna Poggi Rosina Roselli Arcari

Francesco = Francesco Baglioni (father; fl. 17291761) Anna Maria = Anna Maria Baglioni (fl. 17601766)
Giovanna = Giovanna Baglioni (fl. 17521771) Costanza = Costanza Baglioni (fl. 17601782)
Clementina = Clementina Baglioni (fl. 17531782) Rosina = Rosina Baglioni (fl. 17641781)
Vincenza = Vincenza Baglioni (fl. 17571771)
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. 622;
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. 179; see also my Lopera in Italia nel secolo
XVIII, in Alberto Basso, ed., Musica in scena. Storia dello spettacolo musicale
(Turin: Utet, 1996), vol. ii, pp. 96199.
4 For a survey on the geography of eighteenth-century Italian opera and on
the dissemination of opera in Italian peripheries, see my Lopera in Italia
nel secolo XVIII, pp. 99102 and pp. 170171.
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 16451857 (Reggio Emilia: Edizioni del Teatro
Municipale Valli, 1987).
7 On Senigallia operatic activity, see my Lopera in Italia nel secolo XVIII,
pp. 104105, and Alfio Albani, Marinella Bonvini Mazzanti, and Gabriele
Moroni, Il Teatro a Senigallia (Milan: Electa, 1996).
 Eighteenth-century Italian opera history 157

8 Stiamo ora [luglio 1745] godendo in questa citta la solita bellissima

fiera . . . Ora riesce abbondatissima al solito di gran concorso di mercanti
con quantita di mercanzie dogni genere, concorrendovi numerosissimo
popolo, altres gran nobilita, che oltre lessere venuta alla fiera, si porta in
Fano allopera in musicha, che vi si recita da scielti virtuosi in quel gran
teatro (Giovanni Maria Mastai, Memorie, ms., Senigallia, Archivio storico
comunale, edited by Sergio Anselmi, vol. i, Soldati, epidemie, edilizia nella
Senigallia del Settecento, 17391746 [Senigallia: Comune di Senigallia, 1987],
pp. 99100).
9 Gazzetta universale 64, August 12, 1777.
10 Tutte le apparenze dimostrano che la nostra immenente Fiera debba
essere in quest anno una delle piu brillanti, attesi i preparativi che si
fanno per divertimento di molti personaggi che si attendono . . . Lo
spettacolo Teatrale, che limpresario senza risparmio di spese porra sulla
scena, contribuira piu dogni altra cosa al trattenimento dei forestieri: il
Dramma scelto e lOlimpiade posto in musica da celebre Sig. Battista
Borghi che verra eseguito nelle prime parti dai rinomati Sig. Domenico
Bedini e Sigg. Anna Davia e Giovanni Bernucci ambidue al servizio
dellImperatrice delle Russie. I balli saranno del Sig. Pietro Angiolini
(Gazzetta universale 50, June 23, 1787).
11 See Paolo Camerini, Piazzola nella sua storia e nellarte musicale del secolo
XVII (Milan: Hoepli, 1929).
12 See Claudio Toscani, Due secoli di vita musicale nel teatro di
Casalmaggiore: Organizzazione, spettacoli, artisti (17371957), in Il
teatro di Casalmaggiore. Storia e restauro (Cremona: Turris, 1990).
13 See Paolo Fabbri, Teatri settecenteschi della Romagna estense: Lugo,
Romagna arte e storia 8 (1983), 5376.
14 Carlo Goldoni and Baldassarre Galuppi satirize this fashion in their
successful comic opera LArcadia in Brenta of 1749. In it, a rich
countryman invites some Venetian nobles to spend a holiday in his villa
and offers them, as entertainment, the opportunity to play in a comedy
with music. The case shows that the fashion of holiday opera seasons
was common enough already by mid-century that it could become the
subject matter for a stage work; it could present in comic guise a
situation with which the audience was well acquainted.
15 Di gia abbiamo dei forestieri venuti per godere, e molti se ne
aspetanno in occasione delle feste alla meta di agosto, che saranno
piu del solito decorate . . . I giorni delle recite del presente mese sono i
158 Franco Piperno

sequenti. DellOpera lAlessandro [nellIndia of Metastasio?], primo

soprano Sig. Consoli, il d 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17. DellOpera il
Medonte [di De Gamerra/Sarti] prima recita del primo soprano Sig.
Toschi 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 30, 31 (Gazzetta Toscana 32, August 8,
1778).
16 On the political background of Neapolitan opera during the last decades
of eighteenth century and on the establishment of the Lent operatic
season in Naples see my Stellati sogli e immagini portentose: Opere
bibliche e stagioni quaresimali a Napoli prima del Mose, in Bianca
Antolini and Wolfgang Witzenmann, eds., Napoli e il teatro musicale in
Europa fra Sette e Ottocento. Scritti in onore di Friedrich Lippmann (Florence:
Olschki, 1993), pp. 267298, esp. pp. 272275.
17 Performing oratorios or sacred operas in Italian public theatres began in
1776 in Florence, where there was a large English community in
residence; the first attempts (Mozarts Betulia liberata at the Teatro della
Pergola and Mysliveceks Isacco at the Casino di S. Trinita) were almost
certainly promoted by Lord George Nassau Clawering Cowper
(17381789, living in Florence since 1760), who first organized a
performance of Handels Messiah in Italy (1768, palazzo Pitti). See my
Drammi sacri in teatro (17501820), in Paolo Pinamonti, ed., Mozart,
Padova e La Betulia liberata. Committenza, interpretazione e fortuna delle
azioni sacre metastasiane nel 700 (Florence: Olschki, 1991), pp. 289316,
esp. pp. 289291.
18 There is more on the sacrodrammi tradition in my articles Stellati sogli e
immagini portentose; Il Mose in Egitto e la tradizione napoletana di
opere quaresimali, in Paolo Fabbri, ed., Gioachino Rossini 17921992. Il
testo e la scena (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1994), pp. 255271; Effetto
Mose: Fortuna e recezione del Mose in Egitto a Napoli e in Italia
(18181830), in La recezione di Rossini ieri e oggi. Atti dei convegni lincei
(Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1994), pp. 165194; and
. . . dividere il genere di musica profano dal sacro: Donizetti vs Rossini?
Su Il Diluvio universale e la tradizione napoletana di opere quaresimali,
in Franco Carmelo Greco and Renato Di Benedetto, eds., Donizetti,
Napoli, lEuropa (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2000),
pp. 201230.
19 On opera seria productions and the dissemination of Metastasios plays
see my Opera Production to 1780, esp. pp. 4960.
 Eighteenth-century Italian opera history 159

20 On opera buffa productions and dissemination, see my Opera

Production to 1780, pp. 6073. For a comparison between opera seria
and opera buffa, see my Lopera in Italia nel secolo XVIII, pp. 170176.
21 See Charles E. Troy, The Comic Intermezzo (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1979),
pp. 150151.
22 See my Gli interpreti buffi di Pergolesi. Note sulla diffusione de La serva
padrona, Studi Pergolesiani/Pergolesi Studies 1 (1986), 166177.
23 See Troy, The Comic Intermezzo, pp. 5051.
24 See Claudio Sartori, I libretti italiani a stampa dalle origini al 1800, catalogo
analitico con 16 indici, Indici vol. ii (Cuneo: Bertola & Locatelli, 1994),
pp. 560563.
25 Ibid., pp. 3540.
 7 Opera and the cultural authority of the capital city
William Weber

In 1798 there appeared in Weimar an elegantly produced magazine,

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

160
 The cultural authority of the capital city 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 Freischutz
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 Zauberflote 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 anyones experience, especially when
the Prince Talleyrand and the Emperors 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 supreme bon ton
shows three men and one woman engaging in garish display, acting in
a manner paralleled by the dogs on the right (see Figure 7.1). A poem
called Modish Novelties, published in the Journal des Luxus und der
Moden during its second year, Novelty: A Fable, came to grips with
the ambivalence of attitudes toward fashion:

In the world of mother folly

Does novelty unexpectedly appear.
Suddenly comes the mob to impose
The ways of this land upon us all,
Waving its beautiful, streaming hair,
Forcing people to wonder, and to adore her.5
 The cultural authority of the capital city 163

Figure 7.1 Le supreme Bon Ton, frontispiece, London und Paris, 1800

Moreover, the most important trope critical of fashion-worship at

the opera stated that listeners would arrive fashionably late and not
listen. In 1794 a report on opera in the Journal des Luxus und der Moden
illustrated how the dichotomy of adulation and criticism could be
manipulated:

The Opera has recently gotten some new rules and regulations. Formerly
you didnt 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
whats 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

argue that landowners moved in great numbers to the capital just as

the old metropolitan city-states declined as their main families shifted
to country estates.7 The arrival of so many people of wealth created
commercial and professional markets with little parallel in other kinds
of cities. In 1735, Richard Cantillon stated in an Essai sur la Nature du
commerce en general that:

[I]f a prince or lord . . . fixes his residence in some pleasant spot and
several other noblemen come to live there to be within reach of seeing
each other frequently and enjoying agreeable society, this place will
become a city . . . For the service of these noblemen, bakers, butchers,
brewers, wine merchants, manufacturers of all kinds will be needed . . . A
capital is formed in the same way as a provincial town, with this
difference: that the largest landowners in all the state reside in the capital;
that the king or supreme government is fixed in it and spends there the
government revenues . . . that it is the center of the fashions which all the
provinces take as a model; that the landowners who reside in the
provinces do not fail to come occasionally to pass some time in the
capital and to send their children thither to be polished.8

Still, Clark and Lepetit warn that there was no single 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 magazines 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 Hauptstadte; 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

cosmopolitan order, they were fundamentally transformed by the rise

of national capitals and all that meant in terms of authority, influ-
ence, and prominence. Authority became vested much more narrowly
within capital cities, London and Paris most of all.
The new order of cosmopolitanism came as part of the public life
that took root in key cities during the early and middle decades of the
eighteenth century. It was founded in part upon the authority of the
state, which by around 1730 had taken on a far firmer uncontested basis
in both France and Britain than it had ever had. Monarchs no longer
looked warily at dukes as potential usurpers of their sovereignty. Civil
servants now governed for monarchs, in some ways independent of
them. In fact, the new order of public life grew from the declining
centrality of personal control by monarchs in the large kingdoms, in
France and England most of all. Louis XIV lost interest in the opera
by 1685, and Louis XV rarely went; the Hanoverian monarchs were in
effect forbidden to sponsor it. Since aristocratic houses had never even
attempted opera on their estates in these two countries, the field was
free for the public, such as it was, to take authority over opera in the
two countries.
Did this happen by default or by demand? In England it was caused
directly by the Civil War and the post-revolutionary situation that it
left behind. By the end of the reign of Charles II, one can see the theatre
public seizing leadership within the discourse upon both drama and
politics. In France, however, it occurred more by default. The wars of
the 1680s and 1690s stunted royal cultural leadership: Versailles ceased
to exist as the center of elite life that it had been, and the Opera moved
to the rue de Richelieu. One can see something of the same thing
happening in Prussia after the end of the Seven Years War: not having
the funds or the will to mount new operas, the Berlin Opera kept
productions of the 1740s on stage, similarly to what had happened in
Paris with Jean-Baptiste Lullys works, in the process giving a boost to
the leadership of the emerging public.13
Nonetheless, in both London and Paris the departure of royal lead-
ership left a vacuum in the world of opera that was filled, willy-nilly,
by musicians, theatrical entrepreneurs, energetic amateurs, publicists,
 The cultural authority of the capital city 167

and on a broader plane the public as a whole. The rhetorical sensi-

bility emerged that there was a public whose tastes would rule, and
which the opera had to serve. Thus we see that the authority of the
new kind of capital city was founded upon the empowerment of the
public. Within musical life this authority was overt and articulated,
despite the fact that the exact social perimeters of the public were not
entirely clear. We see an early example of the notion of the public in
the declaration by Charles Dufresny in 1698, speaking of the arts as a
whole, that The public is a sovereign, to which all must account who
strive toward high reputation, or indeed for financial gain.14 Likewise,
in 1791, the Theatrical Guardian stated that The Public is the only Jury
before whom the merits of an actor or actress are to be tried.15
Opera was the central institution within the cosmopolitan public,
since if members of the elite met anywhere, it was there. The leading
dramatic theatres, the Comedie-Francaise in Paris and Covent Garden
and Drury Lane in London, had considerably less prestigious publics;
the nobility and gentry attended their performances in significantly
less concentrated form.16 Opera became considerably more of an obli-
gation than the spoken theatre, since it was linked to international
elites and in London was run directly by members of the aristocracy.
The London Weekly Journal said in 1725:

Musick is so generally approvd of in England, that it is lookd upon as a

want of Breeding not to be affected by it, insomuch that every Member of
the Beau-monde at this Time either do, or, at least, think it necessary to
appear as if they understand it; and, in order to carry on this Deceit it is
requisite every one, who has the Pleasure of thinking himself a fine
Gentleman, should, being first laden with a Competency of Powder and
Essence make his personal Appearance every Opera Night at the
Haymarket . . .17

I speak here of public life rather than public sphere. By this

point in time historians have in effect gone beyond the seminal work of
Jurgen Habermas in building models for analyzing dynamics of public
life.18 Strictly speaking, public sphere ought to be defined as the
granting of an implicit responsibility to notions of public opinion within
168 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 Niccolo 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

Paris had the longest history of being a major center of population

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

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 Kings Theatre (or indeed at the Opera 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
Kings Theatre, wrote to her sister in Paris complaining that people
172 William Weber

werent visiting her at her house in Notting Hill just outside London:
Ive been unfortunate, & those who are so, are generally shund by
the World . . . all the merit & great qualities in the World woud 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 theatres licence due to serious irregularities in payment
of its creditors and the managers reluctance to accept an independent
auditor. Gallini noted that:

My ambition for the Entertainment of the Public, as well as fulfilling my

Engagements with the Performers for the Honor of this Country, is equal
to every wish expressed by your Lordship . . . The time for opening the
Theatre is now so near at Hand that unless the Business is brought to an
immediate decision, the Public will be disappointed of their operas, the
Performers already engaged lose the Benefit of their Contracts, and every
person interested in the Opera House prejudiced to a very great degree,
for which let the Censure fall where it may.33

Thus did Gallini invoke the authority of the public. Salisbury got the
point and issued the licence shortly thereafter; the auditor was never
appointed.
The milieux denoted by the terms beau monde and bon ton that
were central to the opera public were much smaller and more directly
empowered in public life than what was termed public opinion.
In a satirical work of 1785 the fermier general and litterateur Gaspard
Grimod de la Reyniere (who had previously subscribed to part of a
box at the opera) showed how le monde stood apart from lopinion
publique, indeed how its members flouted the moral strictures of
 The cultural authority of the capital city 173

larger opinion, especially in manifesting its authority in the major

theatres:

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

As this suggests, direct engagement with actors or singers served as a

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

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 Bellerophon 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

origins in a musical symposium, between those acknowledged

conoscenti [sic], Lord Fitzwilliam, Sir William Watkins Wynn, and Mr
[Joah] Bates. In the accounts of the particulars of the several performers
in the commemoration of Handel, there are continual instances of
musical knowledge, and elegant taste, which afford much instruction &
entertainment; from which, however, the conoscenti will be more
profited & delighted than the common reader, who will not always be so
readily transported, with the warm glow of all the fire & vehemence of
Handels genius for polyphonic combinations & contrivance.

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

instance of how authority of different orders were linked: social class,

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

Third, cultural life as a whole was expanding and in the process

undergoing increasing subdivision, with each region controlled by its
own professionals. Samuel Taylor Coleridge analyzed this change per-
ceptively in 1832. He spoke of intellectual revolutions modern style,
arguing that There have been three silent revolutions in England: first
when the professions fell off from the Church; secondly, when litera-
ture fell off from the professions; and, thirdly, when the press fell off
from literature.42 Something of the same kind of thing happened in
musical life, as areas formerly linked moved off in their own direc-
tions. Christophe Charle has analyzed a crucial stage in such develop-
ment in his analysis of the birth of the intellectual at the end of the
century.43 The rise of professionally defined intellectuals conceived as a
community unto themselves fundamentally changed the relationships
between artists of all kinds and their supporters.
We can understand better what went on in opera life specifically,
and in late eighteenth-century cities generally, if we recognize that
London and Paris had taken on a cultural authority that no cities had
possessed before. What went on in these two places had become the
arbiters of taste and social practice for the West as a whole. The change
had deep political origins, the consolidation of the state most of all, and
it grew as well from the massive expansion of printed media during
the 1700s. Opera the Kings Theatre and the Academie Royale de
Musique stood at the center of the new cultural authority of the two
premier capital cities. Vienna was beginning to follow in their path,
and in some respects so were Madrid, St. Petersburg, and Berlin. The
German periodicals we have discussed tell the tale most clearly of all:
by 1800, you couldnt think of being connected unless you knew what
was going on in London and Paris.

n ot e s
1 London und Paris was published in Weimar between 1798 and 1810. The
Leipziger allgemeine Moden-Zeitung was later called the Allgemeine
Moden-Zeitung: Eine Zeitschrift fur die gebildete Welt, Bilder-Magazin fur 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,
16801800 (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
Merciers Tableau de Paris of 1782 and Nouveau Tableau de Paris of 1790; for
an introduction to the magazine, see Plan und Ankundigung, 1798,
vol. 1, p. 4. For rich detail on the profits sometimes made from concerts
featuring opera excerpts, see 1799, vol. 2, pp. 5859, Paris: Grosse
Concert im Hause Longueville.
4 Paris, London und Paris, 1800, vol. 1, pp. 5970, 12335.
5 Ibid., 2 (1787), 23.
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), 678691.
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. 253254. The passage cites the
character of Lady Isleworth in Gunnings 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, 17501875, 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, LInstitution et son public: Lopera a Paris et a Londres
au XVIIIe siecle, Annales E.S.C., 48/6 (1993), 15191540 (special issue,
Mondes de lArt). See also Mentalite, tradition, et origines du canon
musical en France et en Angleterre au XVIIIe siecle, Annales E.S.C., 42
(1989), 849875; Learned and General Musical Taste in Eighteenth-
178 William Weber

Century France, Past and Present 89 (1980), 5885; 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
dune capitale: Lepoque du beau monde a Londres, 17001800, Revue
dhistoire moderne et contemporaine 49 (2002), 119139.
12 Peter Miller, Peirescs 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, 17401806, Ph.D.
dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2002.
14 Charles Dufresny, Amusements serieux et comiques, Paris, 1699, p. 126.
15 Theatrical Guardian, March 5, 1791, p. 6.
16 Henri Lagrave, Le Theatre et le public a Paris de 1715 a 1750, Paris,
Klincksieck, 1972; Martine de Rougement, La Vie theatrale au XVIIIe siecle
(Paris, Honore, Champion, 1988).
17 Weekly Journal; or, Saturdays Post, December 18, 1825, quoted in Elizabeth
Gibson, The Royal Academy of Music, 17191728: 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. 340), Keith
Baker, Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France
(pp. 181211), and Geoff Eley, Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures:
Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century (pp. 299339).
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
Regime, Journal of Modern History 56 (March 1984), 5888.
21 Among pioneers in this study, see E. H. Wrigley, A Simple Model of
Londons Importance in Changing English Society and Economics,
16501750, Past and Present 37 (1967), 4470; 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. 167214; 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. 413428; 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 (17401840) (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. 16881830, Ph.D. thesis,
Royal Holloway College, University of London, 2001.
29 Weber, The Rise of Musical Classics, Conclusion, pp. 243247.
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, 183048 (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, 18891896).
33 Papers of the Lord Chamberlains 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), 122129.
34 [Gaspard Grimod de la Reyniere], Lorgnette philosophique, trouvee par un
R. P. Capucin sous les Arcades du Palais-Royal, & presentee au Public par un
Celibataire (London: chez lauteur, 1785), vol. ii, p. 13.
35 Jeffrey Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theatre and French Political
Culture, 16801791 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).
180 William Weber

36 Penelope Corfield, Power and the Professions in Britain, 17001850 (London:

Routledge, 1995).
37 Charles Burney, A General History of Music, From the Earliest Ages to the
Present Period, ed. Frank Mercer (London: G. T. Foulis & Co., 1935), vol. 2,
p. 744.
38 W. Weber, From Miscellany to Homogeneity in Concert Programming
in the Nineteenth Century, Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on
Culture, the Media and the Arts 29 (2001), 125134.
39 Lenard R. Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve: A Cultural History of French Theatre
Women from the Old Regime to the fin de siecle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001).
40 Jennifer Hall-Witt, Reforming the Aristocracy: Opera and Elite Culture,
17801860, in Joanna Innes and Arthur Burns, eds., Rethinking the Age of
Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 220237.
41 Jane F. Fulcher, The Nations Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and
Politicized Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
42 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Table Talk and Omniana, with a note on
Coleridge by Coventry Patmore (London: Oxford University Press, 1917),
April 10, 1832, p. 175. I am indebted to Penelope Corfield for this
reference.
43 Christophe Charle, La Naissance des intellectuals: 18801900 (Paris:
Editions de Minuit, 1990).
8 Edizioni distrutte and the significance of operatic
choruses during the Risorgimento
Philip Gossett

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 Verdis 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 1822, 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 Verdis 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 Verdis 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 Puccinis popularity blossomed at the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury. Yet nothing in Puccinis life or art suggested that he could be
assigned a moral or spiritual role in Italian unification.2 Not only did
Verdis 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

[Your presence] will contribute to the prestige of the Parliament within

and outside Italy, it will bring credit to the great national purpose that
wishes to construct the nation on the solid bases of liberty and order, and
it will win over our imaginative colleagues from the southern part of
Italy, who are more susceptible to the influence of artistic genius than we
inhabitants of the cold valley of the Po.3

The famous acrostic Viva V.E.R.D.I. [Viva Vittorio Emanuele, Re

DItalia], which dates from the end of 1858, with its explicit link-
age of the composers name and the future king, had its effect.4
And a series of biographical studies with a pronounced tendency
to invent historical incidents for which all evidence is lacking com-
pleted the job.5 These led in turn to musicological studies that sim-
ply accepted Verdis role without striving to examine the evidence
critically.6 Even before the current round of iconoclasts began their
work, however, there were serious historians who called many of these
anecdotes into question, foremost among them Frank Walker and John
Rosselli.7
Still, the privileged role Verdi was to be assigned was not entirely
a product of post-1860 thinking. Recall that Giuseppe Mazzini, in his
Filosofia della musica of 1836, had already considered and rejected the
possible candidacy of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti as a cultural icon,
while auguring the arrival of a new musical world.8 How should
Italian musicians prepare for such an eventuality? Let young artists,
through the study of national songs, narratives of the history of the
patria, the mysteries of poetry, the mysteries of nature, raise them-
selves to vaster horizons than those provided by the rule books and
by old canons of art (186). Mazzini had quite specific musical and
dramaturgical matters in mind:
r a greater effort to individualize the setting of an opera and its prin-
cipal characters: the individuality of history, the individuality of
the period of the drama, the individuality of the characters, each of
which still represents an idea (163);
r an expansion and deepening of the role of the chorus, which, fulfilling
the role of the people, of which it is the born interpreter, would be
 Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 183

granted a collective individuality and its own, independent, and

spontaneous life (169);
r a renewal of musical forms, with the suppression of cavatinas and
the inevitable da capos, as well as the monotony of omnipresent
and vulgar cadences (171);
r a purging of a vocal style that had come to depend on arbitrary
florid runs, ornamentation, and embellishment whose end result
was to destroy emotion, changing it into cold and importunate
admiration (172).

That each of these elements in Mazzinis vision can be coordinated

with tendencies in Verdis art as it existed in the period before 1860 is
hardly an insight that developed only after 1860.
If many assertions about the political significance of Verdis operas
in the period before the revolutionary actions of 1848 turn out to have
been overstated or even invented by post-unification commentators,
as they certainly were, how can we gauge what importance if any
the works may have had in their actual political milieu, either for
the composer himself or for contemporary audiences? If there is no
evidence that the Milanese audience for the opening night of Nabucco
in 1842 demanded a repetition of the chorus of the Hebrews, Va
pensiero sullali dorate, for example, does that mean that the chorus
had no political importance? If Verdis operas were given no particular
prominence in Milan during the temporary Austrian absence in the
aftermath of the Cinque giornate, should we conclude that neither the
composer nor his music were politically significant to patriotic eyes?
Roger Parkers call for a thorough (and long overdue) revaluation
of Verdis political status and influence during his early career (98)
depends largely on the discussion of a single chorus, Va pensiero.
Instead of investigating what significance the chorus might actually
have had to a contemporary Italian audience, however, he attempts to
deflate its reputation by invoking generic issues and reception history.9
Parker recognizes that Verdi and his librettists were cognizant by 1844
of a genre of choruses, a successful style with which Verdi was
already identified and, perhaps, which he might be encouraged to
184 Philip Gossett

exploit again (48). The verses of Va pensiero (1842), O Signore,

dal tetto natio from I lombardi alla prima crociata (1843), and Si ridesti
il leon di Castiglia from Ernani (1844) are all constructed of four
quatrains of decasillabi. Later, when writing Macbeth (18461847), Verdi
asked his librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, to write a chorus with four
quatrains of ottonari verse, with which he hoped to make a chorus of
the importance of that of Nabucco, but without adopting the same
meter.10 Seeing Va pensiero in this generic context, however, while
lessening the historical weight it must bear alone, does not compel a
revaluation of its possible significance to contemporary audiences.
Parker also gives short shrift to examples of censorship or self-
censorship of Verdian choruses, of which there are examples in both
Nabucco (although not Va pensiero) and Ernani,11 preferring to exam-
ine the journalistic reactions to operatic events during intense political
crisis, during the 1848 revolutions themselves (87). What he discov-
ers is that Verdis operas were rarely the subject of attention during
this period. Ricordis Gazzetta musicale di Milano is more concerned
with the patriotic hymns and choruses that began to pour from his
presses, whose poetic and musical style, according to Parker, is
strikingly uniform (89).12 There are some interesting reports from
theatres, including a performance of Il giuramento by Mercadante in
which the audience applauded for every phrase in which was found
some allusion to the present situation (91), but Parker finds few ref-
erences to Verdis operas. When opera resumed in Milan at the Teatro
Carcano on April 24, 1848, it did so with La muta di Portici, the Italian
translation of Aubers 1828 opera, which had even at this early stage
in its career become known as the opera that had signalled a popu-
lar revolt in Brussels when it was staged there during the revolutions
of 1830 (93). And, finally, Parker calls attention to the next seasons,
after the return of the Austrians with their censors, when La Scala
undertook many Verdian revivals, including Ernani, Macbeth, Attila,
and Nabucco, adding, It seems inconceivable in the circumstances
that any of these operas had been actively associated with the failed
revolution (97).
The information Parker brings together is invaluable, but one may
question his conclusions. He quotes from an article in the Bolognese
 Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 185

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 dItalia.

V E R D I S 1 8 4 8 AC T I V I T I E S : L A BAT TAG L I A D I L E G NA N O

Having been in Paris at the beginning of the Cinque giornate, Verdi

wrote to Ricordi on the 25th: I hear great news from Milan, but
nothing certain, nobody has letters directly . . . I am in a state of great
anxiety, and most annoyed that I am here.15 He did not remain in Paris
for long. Already on April 5 his arrival in Milan is mentioned in Ricordis
Gazzetta musicale di Milano. Verdis correspondence from Milan with
his librettists Salvadore Cammarano and Francesco Maria Piave make
clear that he is enthusiastic about the new political situation.
His most famous letter from this period is to Piave, written in Milan
on April 21, 1848.16 It begins:

You can imagine whether I wanted to remain in Paris, after hearing there
was a revolution in Milan. I left the moment I heard the news; but I could
see nothing but these stupendous barricades. Honor to these heroes!
Honor to all Italy, which in this moment is truly great!
186 Philip Gossett

The hour of her liberation has sounded, you may be convinced of

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

Soon after, though, Verdi who had returned to Paris early in June
was corresponding with Piave about a possible operatic project, and
he urged the librettist to find a subject that is Italian and free. Indeed,
the composers 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 Mery, 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!
(2021).
 Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 187

On June 15, Cammarano sent his selva to the composer in Paris.19

In the poetry of the first act, which followed on June 26, the opening
words are assigned to the chorus (30).20

Viva Italia! un sacro patto

Tutti stringe i figli suoi:
Esso alfin di tanti ha fatto
Un sol popolo dEroi!
Le bandiere in campo spiega,
O Lombarda invitta Lega,
E discorra un gel per lossa
Al feroce Barbarossa.
Viva Italia forte ed una
Colla spada e col pensier!
Questo suol che a noi fu cuna,
Tomba sia dello stranier!

[Long live Italy! a sacred pact binds together all your children. It has
finally made from the many a single people of heroes. Show your
standards in the field, oh proud league of Lombards, and let a cold fear
course through the bones of the fierce Barbarossa. Long live Italy, strong
and united in the sword and in thought. Let this earth, which was our
cradle, be a tomb to the foreigner!]

In his setting Verdi adopted the words with only one minor change:
he substituted Sacro un patto for un sacro patto. Otherwise he
apparently welcomed Cammaranos 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 Rossinis Guillaume Tell.21

Giuriam dItalia por fine ai danni,

Cacciando oltrAlpe i suoi tiranni.
Pria che ritrarci, pria chesser vinti,
Cader fra larmi giuriamo estinti.
188 Philip Gossett

Se alcun fra noi, codardo in guerra,

Mostrarsi al voto potra rubello,
Al mancatore nieghi la terra
Vivo un asilo, spento un avello:
Siccome gli uomini Dio labbandoni,
Quando lestremo suo d verra:
Il vil suo nome infamia suoni
Ad ogni gente, ad ogni eta.
[Let us swear to put an end to Italys suffering by chasing the tyrants back
over the Alps. Rather than withdraw, rather than be vanquished, we
swear to fall dead in battle. If any of us, a coward in war, fails to live up
to this oath, may the earth refuse to the traitor a refuge in life, a tomb in
death. At the end of his life, may God abandon him, as men have done:
let his vile name be heard with infamy to every people, in every age.]

Verdi responded to Cammaranos libretto of Act III in a letter of Octo-

ber 24 (63): I received only this morning your letter of the 9th. Lovely
this third Act, stupendous, and be assured that I will set it with all my
love. The only change he requested was the introduction of a short
scene for Lida and Rolando, so as to give the prima donna an expanded
presence.22 Cammarano obliged the composer (8687) with the scene
that includes this strophe, in which Rolando tells his wife what to say
to their son should he die in battle:
Digli che sangue italico,
Digli che sangue mio,
Che dei mortali e giudice
La terra, no, ma Dio!
E dopo Dio la Patria
Gli apprenda a rispettar.

[Tell him that he is of Italian blood, tell him that he is of my blood, that
God judges men, not the earth! And after God teach him to respect the
patria.]

As of January 1849, of course, these texts were still possible in Rome,

where Papal forces had not yet returned, but were no longer acceptable
in Milan, where the Austrians were again firmly in control. Although
 Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 189

Ricordi published La battaglia di Legnano in its original form (plate

numbers 2154121559), it was described in the 1857 general catalogue
of the firm as edizione estera, distrutta: an edition prepared almost
surely outside Milan, in Florence, but destroyed.23 Instead, Verdi and
Cammaranos opera became Lassedio dArlem (plate numbers 20956
20967), with changes in the text to make it acceptable to the Austrian
rulers. That both of them were aware such changes might prove neces-
sary is clear in their correspondence, beginning as early as September
1848.24 Yet the willingness of both Verdi and Cammarano to yield to
political necessity in order to permit their opera to circulate can hardly
negate the enthusiasm and conviction with which they conceived and
wrote La battaglia di Legnano.

V E R D I S 1 8 4 8 AC T I V I T I E S : S U O N A L A T R O M B A

Verdis other musical commitment of 1848 was at the request of

Giuseppe Mazzini himself, whom the composer had met the previous
summer in London, when he supervised the premiere of I masnadieri
at Her Majestys Theatre. Apparently during Verdis sojourn in Milan
in May 1848, Mazzini who had also returned to Milan when word had
reached him of the Cinque giornate persuaded Verdi to set to music a
patriotic hymn. On June 6 Mazzini requested from Goffredo Mameli
a text that will become the Italian Marseillaise, a hymn that to use
Verdis phrase will make the people forget both the poet and the
composer.25 Mamelis text, dated August 26, 1848 in the first edition
of Verdis musical setting of the hymn (see below),26 was promptly
forwarded to the composer.
On October 18, 1848, from Paris, Verdi sent Mazzini a musical setting
for unaccompanied male chorus, with the following letter.27

I send you the hymn, and though it is a little late, I hope it will reach you
in time. I have tried to be as popular and easy as is possible for me. Make
whatever use of it you like; burn it even, if you do not believe it worthy. If,
however, you make it public, have the poet change some words at the
beginning of the second and third strophes, where it would be well to
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 Ricordis,
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, Verdis 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 Mamelis five strophes, as printed by De Giorgi, followed
by the five-verse refrain, reads:

Suona la tromba, ondeggiano

Le insegne gialle e nere;
Fuoco! per Dio, sui barbari,
Sulle vendute schiere.
Gia ferve la battaglia,
Al Dio de forti osanna,
Le bajonette in canna,
E lora del pugnar.
Ne deporrem la spada
Finche sia schiavo un angolo
DellItala contrada,
Finche non sia lItalia
Una dallalpi al mar.

[The trumpet sounds, the yellow and black flags are waving; fire! by God,
on the barbarians, on the mercenary ranks. The battle has begun, praise
to the God of the strong, with bayonets fixed it is the hour of battle. Nor
will we put down the sword as long as an inch of Italian soil is enslaved,
until Italy is one from the Alps to the sea.]

The other four strophes (each with eight verses, followed by the same
five-verse refrain) continue with references to Italys 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).
Verdis setting of Suona la tromba is much less regular. Much of
the fault, of course, is in Mamelis 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,
LItalia e alfin risorta.
3. Viva lItalia or vendica
La gloria sua primiera . . .
4. Sara lItalia 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

with a sdrucciolo [a dactyl]. He is perfectly correct that in the first and

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

8.1 Giuseppe Verdi and Goffredo Mameli, Suona la tromba

 Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 193

It is not an unattractive effect, but it is certainly not popular and

easy.
The peculiar thing is that Verdi knew perfectly well that he was
choosing a risky path, for it was a path he had urged the inexperienced
Antonio Somma not to take. When Somma was preparing the libretto
for Re Lear, Verdi suggested on November 19, 1853 that during the
course of their work together it might prove necessary to ask him to
change some verses.31

It may be that at one place or another, in order to make a cantabile or a

musical motif, I might need some modification, but it would not harm
the interests of the drama in any way. Besides, it would not be for my own
artistic needs, but rather for a necessity of the art itself. You remember
the aria from Belisario? Trema Bisanzio!? Donizetti had no scruple
about attaching sterminatrice to Bisanzio, a horrible absurdity, but
the musical rhythm absolutely demanded it. It would have been
impossible to make a motif by following the meaning of those verses.
Wouldnt it have been better to ask the poet to adjust some stanzas?

The verses (by Cammarano) to which Verdi refers are from the
cabaletta of the Aria for Alamiro at the beginning of Act II of Belisario
(Venice, Teatro La Fenice, February 4, 1836): Trema Bisanzio! Ster-
minatrice / Su te la guerra discendera [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.

8.2 Gaetano Donizetti and Salvadore Cammarano, Belisario, Aria of Alamiro

194 Philip Gossett

This is precisely the kind of poetry that Mameli (or someone else)
produced in the revision. Verdi doesnt 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, Ne deporrem
la spada / Finche sia schiavo un angolo / DellItala 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, Verdis 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

Although in the years preceding 1848 direct statements were impossible

in most parts of Italy, interpretation does not need to be paralyzed by
the absence of such statements. As Alberto Banti has demonstrated
in his important study of the nation of the Risorgimento, a careful
reading of the Risorgimental canon of texts (including operatic texts)
provides a clear and convincing vocabulary with which to gauge the
morphology of national discourse and to understand the way such
discourse was received.32 For each assertion he provides citations from
the canon that traverse the period from the development of resistance
 Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 195

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 Manzonis 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 Verdis 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 Mazzinis 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, Niccolo
de Lapi, etc.). They acquire meaning as anticipations of an event that
remains to realize itself, the ransom of the nation, of whose story they
nonetheless offer testimony (76). In various ways, all of them return
to four recurring configurations:

a) the oppression of the Italian nation by foreign peoples or tyrants;

b) the internal division among the Italians, which favors this oppression;
c) the menace to the most profound center of national honor, which this
oppression allows, whether directly or indirectly;
d) the heroic efforts, even if unsuccessful, for redemption (77).

One hardly needs to stress the extent to which these configurations

are present throughout Verdis operas of the 1840s.
Even before the neo-Guelph movement put Pope Pius IX at the cen-
ter of the drive for national independence and unification, the canonic
texts speak of the coming effort as a crusade: the war in defense of the
countrys honor transformed itself into a holy war, desired by God
(107). In trying to establish how these ideas gained force and currency,
Banti invokes Michel Foucault by referring to the archeology of the
national discourse. He investigates in some detail how contempo-
raries believed that elements of this national discourse could be used
to awaken the Italians to awareness of their own Italianness (110).
For Banti, the power of the Risorgimental discourse lies in the fact that
the images and narrative forms . . . derive from preexistent models,
opportunely manipulated and reassembled (111). He emphasizes that
these models invoked a common religious belief as one of the most
certain elements of national cohesion, a consideration that is tied to
a positive evaluation of the role that religious institutions had in the
past and could have in the future in the history of Italy (120). Thus,
Banti directs us to the use of biblical narratives to justify the ethics
of actions of revenge or war (120), and through a rich web of res-
onances to consider the positive relationship between the Italian
nation and Catholic tradition. All of this is familiar Verdian territory.
With the revolutionary movements of 1848, of course, the war
for independence was seen across all these symbolic references,
 Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 197

emphasizing its sacred character, an element that, in those days, seemed

to be sealed with the explicit blessing of Pius IX to the national move-
ment (186). With Piuss subsequent betrayal of the national cause after
April 29, 1848, however, religious discourse tended to be thrown into
the shade by discourse that stressed warlike heroes, whether kings (first
Carlo Alberto, then Victor Emanuel II) or popular warriors (Garibaldi)
(188). These elements of the reception of the national discourse, how-
ever, continue the story beyond the chronological period under con-
sideration here.

H Y M N S T O P I U S I X A N D C A R LO A L B E RT O B E F O R E
T H E C I N QU E G I O R NAT E ; R O S S I N I , N ATA LU C C I , A N D
M AG A Z Z A R I

In the years preceding 1848, the preparation of patriotic hymns and

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

of Christ shine again], the Cantata concludes with a movement for

soloists and chorus:

O Voi sante reliquie fraterne

Mal campate al Pagano furor,
La nellampie funeree caverne
Esultate al novello Signor.
Dallo zelo che il petto glincende
Piu riprende la Pianta vigor,
Che cresciuta dal vostro gran sangue
Mai non langue, non sfronda, non muor.

[O holy remains of our brothers, who did not survive the wrath of the
pagans, there in the vast, funereal caves, you exult before the new Lord
[the new Pope]. By the zeal that fires its breast, the plant grows stronger,
and nourished by your great blood it never wilts, nor loses its leaves, nor
dies.]

The music of this finale of the Cantata is derived from a very popular
chorus from Le Siege 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 Siege de
Corinthe, Scene et Air Hieros avec Chur
 Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 199

seer, Hieros, 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.

Repondons a ce cri de victoire, Questo nome che suona vittoria

Meritons un trepas immortel;
Nous verrons dans les champs
de la gloire
Le tombeau se changer en autel.
Scuote ognalma e la guida a
pugnar
E vedrassi sul campo di gloria
Il sepolcro cangiarsi in altar.

[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.]

Although the actual words sung could hardly be considered inflamma-

tory, there could not have been a single listener in the Roman audience
on New Years Day 1847 unaware of the dramatic context for which
the chorus was written.36
Rossini was by no means alone in supplying choruses and hymns in
praise of the new Pope.37 Often the texts of these early hymns are quite
generic. Tiberio Natalucci, for example, published two Inni popolari ad
onore dellimmortale Pio IX with Ricordi in Milan in 1847 (Pl. No. 19216),
but not even the Austrian censors could find much to complain about
with a text of this kind.
Come uniri lalmo Iddio
Agli afflitti te mostro
E di gioja, sommo Pio,
Ogni core palpito.
A quel sommo che vuno
Date plausi, lode e onor,
Ne abbia pace quel che Pio
Non ha sculto nel suo cor.
200 Philip Gossett

[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,
Nataluccis 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 dellanno (Del nuovanno gia lalba
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 Rossinis Cantata).
Its final stanza (of four) is characteristic:

Benedetto chi mai non dispera

Dellaita suprema di Dio,
Benedetta la santa bandiera
Che il Vicario di Cristo inalzo.

[May he be blessed who never abandons hope in the supreme assistance

of God, blessed be the sacred standard that the Vicar of Christ raises
aloft.]

These images of God providing help to those who do not abandon

hope and of the sacred standard being in the hands of Pius IX might
seem innocent enough, but as Banti has made clear in the political
context of 1847 they were not.39 Magazzaris hymn for the amnesty,
Lamnistia data dal sommo Pio IX (Viva, viva, cantiamo festosi), with
words by Gaetano Ronetti, announced as having been performed in
Rome in the presence of the great Pontiff (presumably during the
summer of 1847), offers similar sentiments. The four strophes are in
praise of the clemency of a Pope who blesses his people with pardon
and peace. Here is the third stanza (of four):
 Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 201

A lui fede, concordi giuriamo;

E perenne di figli laffetto,
Piu che Prence, a noi Padre diletto
Sol per farci felici sara.

[Let us swear together fidelity to him; the affection of his children is

perennial, more than a Prince, to us he is a beloved Father who will seek
only to make us happy.]

For liberals, swearing fidelity to this Pope in the summer of 1847 meant
swearing allegiance to a prospective leader who had just freed political
prisoners throughout the Papal States, the legacy of his reactionary
predecessor, Gregory XVI.
On November 3 and 4, 1847, we find Magazzari in Turin, at the
Teatro Carignano, where his Inno subalpino (Carlo Alberto, lamato
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 Guidis
text went further than calling Carlo Alberto a beloved ruler; it assigned
him a prominent role in the nurturing of Italian hopes.

Ei comprese qual viva speranza

Nutre Italia ne Prenci possenti;
Ei col senno di provvida mente
Or le aggiunge novello splendor.

[He understood the lively hope that Italy nourishes in its powerful
Princes; now, with the wisdom of a provident intelligence, he adds to it
new splendor.]

With this kind of rhetoric in the air, it is little wonder that a still 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 doesnt prohibit what does
202 Philip Gossett

not exist: the increasingly provocative way in which audiences were

behaving on the eve of 1848 is manifest.
The early months of 1848 completed the transformation from an
implicit national discourse to an explicit call to arms. On February 3,
1848, an Inno siciliano by Magazzari (Viva, viva linvitta Palermo),
to a text by Pietro Sterbini, was sung for the first time by the people
in Rome at the celebration organized by the Roman municipality for
the happy conclusion of events in the Reign of the Two Sicilies. The
reference, of course, is to the revolt that began in Palermo on January
12, 1848, which soon spread to the mainland around Naples, leading to
the granting of a constitution by King Ferdinando II of the Two Sicilies
on January 29. In the Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea of
Rome (26 3.h.8), there are two broadsides associated with the event.
One publicizes it (and advertises that a reduction for voice and piano
is available at a Roman music store (Scipione de Rossi on the Via del
Corso, N. 139):

SICILIAN HYMN / DEDICATED TO THE / CIVIC GUARD / OF

ROME / SET TO MUSIC BY MAESTRO / GAETANO MAGAZZARI
OF BOLOGNA / POETRY BY PIETRO STERBINI / SUNG BY THE
PEOPLE THE EVENING OF 3 FEBRUARY 1848 DURING THE
SOLEMN OCCASION OF THE FESTIVAL PROCLAIMED / BY THE
ROMAN MUNICIPALITY / FOR THE HAPPY RESULT OF THE
LATEST EVENTS IN THE REALM / OF THE TWO SICILIES /
ARRANGED BY THE AUTHOR FOR PIANO AND VOICE / IT CAN
BE PURCHASED AT SCIPIONE DE ROSSI MUSIC DEALER IN VIA
DEL CORSO N. 139

The other, much smaller, contains the words: it was presumably meant
to be passed out that very evening so that the public could indeed join
in the singing.
It is worth citing this entire text, which makes absolutely clear
how much the situation had changed in the course of a year. Pius IX
and Carlo Alberto (he is the Regnante being addressed) remain 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

Viva, viva linvitta Palermo,

Viva, viva Partenope bella
Viva, viva dItalia la stella,
Che a risplendere in cielo torno.
Dalla terra dei Procida venne
La virtu che a combattere invita,
Che calpesta i tesori e la vita
Quando allarmi la Patria chiamo.
Guerra, guerra risuona ogni terra,
Dio ci chiama la Patria a salvar;
Ai Regnanti dei popoli amanti
Fede eterna possiamo giurar.
O fratelli, fratelli beati,
Dalle Sicule tombe sorgete,
E neglItali petti accendete
La scintilla del vostro valor.
Dal Sebeto alla cima dellAlpi
Sotto il Segno da Pio benedetto
Sara santo di Patria laffetto
Sara salvo dItalia lonor.

[Viva, viva, unvanquished Palermo, Viva, viva beautiful Naples, Viva,

viva the star of Italy, which returns to shine again in the firmament. From
the land of Procida42 came the virtue that invites us to battle, that
tramples on treasures and life when our Patria called us to arms. Let war
resound through the land, God calls us to save our Patria. To those
sovereigns who love their people, we can swear eternal faith. O blessed
brothers, rise again from the Sicilian tombs, and light the spark of your
valor in Italian breasts. From the Sebeto [a Neapolitan river] to the peak
of the Alps, under the standard blessed by Pius, love for our Patria will be
blessed, the honor of Italy will be safe.]

A month later, Magazzari composed an Inno guerriero italiano to a text

in doppi senari by Filippo Meucci (the same poet responsible for the
new years text heard on January 1, 1847), a hymn performed for the
first time in Rome on the evenings of March 4 and 5, 1848 in the Apollo
Theatre.43 This is now a call to action, even to arms, as in the following
strophe:
204 Philip Gossett

Allarmi, fratelli, destate il coraggio,

Linsania punite dellavido strano;
Dio sveglia e rinnova lonor di Legnano,
Lardir di Balilla, di Procida il cor.

[To arms, brothers, rouse your courage, punish the folly of the greedy
foreigner; Let God wake and renew the honor of Legnano, the daring of
Balilla, the heart of Procida.44 ]

The long poem continues with statements about how God struck
down the armies of Egypt and Assyria, calls for the death and 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 Magazzaris 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

Although Ricordi had published various hymns in honor of Pius IX

during the time between his election as Pope in 1846 and the begin-
ning of the revolt against the Austrians in March 1848, their texts were
not ostensibly provocative. Yet no one in Italy could have failed to
 Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 205

understand the implicit message of these hymns: finally there was

a Pope sympathetic to the cause of Italian independence and unity.
Rossinis Grido di esultazione riconoscente al Sommo Pontefice Pio IX, first
performed on July 23, 1846 to celebrate the amnesty for political prison-
ers proclaimed by Pius IX, has a text as anodyne as that of the hymns of
Natalucci or the very first hymns, chronologically, of Magazzari. Here
are the first and last strophes:45

Su, fratelli, letizia si canti

Al magnanimo core di Pio,
Che alla santa favilla di Dio
Sinfiammo del piu dolce pensier.
. . .
O fratelli, esultiamo, esultiamo,
Grazie, grazie risponda ogni cor.
Ecco il giorno ed il giorno aspettato,
Ecco il giorno di pace e damor.

[Arise, brothers, let us sing joyfully of the magnanimous heart of Pius,

who at the holy spark of God was roused to the sweetest thought . . . O
brothers, let us exult, let us exult, thank you, thank you each heart
responds. This is the day, the long-awaited day, this is the day of peace and
love.]

As with the concluding chorus for the Cantata in onore del Sommo 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 dEroi [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

8.4 Gioachino Rossini and Canonico Golfieri, Grido di esultazione riconoscente

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 Abbiatis 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

8.5 Albino Abbiati, Il 22 Marzo 1848

King Carlo Alberto, did much to sap the strength of the revolution.
The decision of Pius IX on April 29 to dissociate himself from the
war with Austria was a serious blow. Soon the Austrians were ready
to counterattack with massive force, and by August the revolt was
over.
It is possible to learn about Ricordis publications during these
months of independence thanks to an invaluable source, the Catalogo
(in ordine numerico) delle opere publicate dallI. 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 firms 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

patriotic in origin. Only one opera is among these destroyed editions,

Verdis La battaglia di Legnano. Ricordi first published this score in 1849
(apparently in Florence, not in Milan); nonetheless, in the numerical
catalogue it is marked as edizione estera, distrutta [foreign edition,
destroyed].
The term edizione distrutta presumably means that the plates
from which this music was printed (and at this point most of Ricordis
publications were printed from engraved copper plates) were melted
down so that no additional copies could be struck off. Where possible
the returning Austrians may also have tried to control the distribu-
tion of copies previously printed, but most of these publications (with
some important exceptions) can be found in Italian libraries. Table 8.1
provides a list by plate number of all Ricordi publications marked
as edizioni distrutte in the 1857 numerical catalogue. It gives infor-
mation about the composer, poet, title and first line of the text, the
location of one or more copies (where such copies have been iden-
tified), and some identifying characteristics: poetic meter, key, and
musical meter. Table 8.2 offers information about a similar group of
publications issued during this same period by the Milanese firms of
Francesco Lucca and Giovanni Canti.47
Almost all the early Ricordi prints in this group (from Pl. No. 20297
through Pl. No. 20901 in Table 8.1) have been located.48 For most
of the publications in a chronologically later group (from Pl. No. 20902
through Pl. No. 21097), however, no copy of the Ricordi edition has
been found, not in Milan nor in other libraries. It is possible that the
Austrians returned to Milan before the latter had been generally circu-
lated, so that both the copper plates and previously printed copies were
destroyed, but a search for copies continues. In one case, for example,
an apparently unique copy of the Alessandro Marotta chorus (Pl. No.
20909), Ai volontarj Romani, has been identified in the Conservatory of
Bergamo although it lacks pp. 56 of a ten-page edition. Perhaps the
hymns of Ruggero Manna, A. E. Bianchi, Costantino Quaranta, etc.,
will yet emerge.
What gives these Milanese publications such importance is
that they were issued at a moment when there was no censorship.
Table 8.1 Hymns and choruses published by Ricordi in 1848, whose plates were later destroyed, according to the Ricordi catalogue of
1857

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 allanima taspetta) (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 deroi) 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 duna 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) (Allarmi allarmi 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 LItaliana. Grido di guerra I-Mc doppi quinari
(20791) allunisono (Allarmi, allarmi, 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 DAlberti Achille Gallarati Canzone nazionale ai prodi Lombardi I-VImr2 decasillabi
(Viva Pio sullItalico 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
E finito il servaggio!) NB: from Le c
Siege de Corinthe
20746 Giovanni Toja Achille Balsamo Canto pei poveri giovinetti raccolti da I-Pu, I-Vnm ottonari
Pio IX nellIstituto 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 allAustria. 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, lamato A-flat major
Sovrano) c
20763 Gaetano Magazzari Pietro Sterbini Album di inni popolari: N. 2. Inno I-Rsmc decasillabi
(20887) siciliano (Viva, viva linvitta 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 sullerta E-flat major
dellEtna tonante) c
20765 Gaetano Magazzari Gaetano Ronetti Album di inni popolari: N. 4. I-Rsmc decasillabi
(20889) LAmnistia 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 dellanno. Inno I-Rsmc decasillabi
(19995) popolare allunisono (Del E-flat major
nuovanno gia lalba 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, collaggiunta 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 GlItaliani redenti. Inno popolare I-Mc, I-Vnm ottonari
Falcocchio (Sulla sponda tiberina) C major
c
20823 Pietro Cornali Poesia di un Canto degli Italiani (Finche 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
duomini (Su figli dItalia! 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 (LItalia 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 (Allirata vendetta 2
di Dio)
20849 Giovanni Toja Achille Balsamo Omaggio delle Guardie nazionali I-Mc, I-Vnm settenari
Lombarde allimmortale 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 Lindipendenza. 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; gia 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 (Morra, morra 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. 56 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 dellAutore Described 12 July
21094 nel mese di Giugno 18484
A Carlo Alberto. Inni popolari
nazionali allunisono e a due voci,
servibili anche pel solo Pfte:
Ippolito dAste N. 1. Allinvitto e magnanimo Re Carlo
Alberto. Inno Nazionale popolare.
Giuseppe Peragallo N. 2. LOtto 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, sullItalia.
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 allItalia. Inno
dallOngaro Nazionale.
Enrico Bixio N. 8. Requie ai Martiri
dellIndipendenza 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 dellArmata 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 LAssedio dArlem (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 DAlbertis 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. 180181) the text
was published in Ricordis 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 Verdis 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. 6972. 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, Lanima musicale della patria.
Table 8.2 Some hymns and choruses published by Lucca and Canti in 1848

Plate number Composer Poet Edition Copy Meter, Key

6992 Jacopo Foroni A. Zoncada Ai Lombardi. Canto di guerra (Su, I-Mc; S decasillabi
Lombardi, allarmi allarmi) C major
2/4
6998 Giuseppe Devasini Salvatore Mazza La liberta. Inno Lombardo (Two I-Mc doppi senari
sections: Siam liberi alfine di giubilo E major
il grido Fra gli evviva delle schiere) 3/4;
decasillabi
A major
c
7000 Rouget De Lisle Rouget De Lisle La Marseillaise (Allons enfans de la I-Mc
patrie)
7001 Luigi Gambale Samuele Biava Il cantico del milite Lombardo (Dissi I-Mc ottonari
allanima taspetta: same text as B-flat major
Boucheron, Ricordi, #20299) c
7003 Fernando Baroni A. Zoncada Milano libera. Inno nazionale (Vittoria I-Mc senari
fratelli: same text as Croff, Lucca, G major
#7022) 2/4
7005 Antonio Mussi Giuseppe Cantico nazionale (Su cingete o I-Mc ottonari
Sangregorio valorosi) G major
c
7006 Antonio Cristofani S.T. Ai valorosi Lombardi: Inno di guerra I-Mc decasillabi
(Guerra! guerra! per lItala terra) B-flat major
2/4
(cont.)
Table 8.2 (cont.)

Plate number Composer Poet Edition Copy Meter, Key

7018 Pietro Cornali David Chiossone Canto degli Italiani. Inno nazionale e I-Mc decasillabi
patriotico (Con laurora invocata dai (refrain in ottonari)
forti) E major
c
7021 Gio. Batt. Croff A. Tornaghi Il 22 Marzo 1848. Inno di vittoria I-Mc settenari
(Giorni felici sorsero) E major
c
7022 Gio. Batt. Croff A. Zoncada Milano libera. Inno di vittoria (Vittoria I-Mc senari
fratelli: same text as Baroni, Lucca, G major
#7003) 2/4
7023 Costantino Quaranta Teobaldo Ciconi Ronda della guardia nazionale I-Mc, I-Pu
None G. Luraschi XXX Il ritorno dei militi vitoriosi. Coro (Two I-Mc decasillabi
sections: Questo giorno sia giorno di B-flat major
festa; Un giorno piu sereno) An c;
oblong broadside. settenari
B-flat major
6/8
Canti 1486 Gianfrancesco Rossi A. Vigo-Pellizzari Alle gloriose vittime della liberta Lombarda: I-Mc quinari
Requiem. Melodia Italiana (Leterna G minor
requie) 3/4
 Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 223

There was nothing to stop poets or composers from producing pre-

cisely the poetry and music they wished. During the previous months
and years, everything issuing from Ricordis presses had to meet crite-
ria imposed by the Austrian rulers of Milan. In these hymns from 1848,
published in the period immediately after the Cinque giornate, however,
we have an ideal point of reference: freed from restrictions, what did
poets and composers do? What metaphors did they employ? What
kind of music did they write? What use did they make of the past? And
in what way can their practice give us insight into the meaning of the
art that flourished in the previous years, during which governmental
censors in Milan decided what could be performed and printed?
Among the edizioni distrutte there is one piece attributed to
Gioachino Rossini (Pl. No. 20720), an Inno nazionale dedicato alla Legione
civica romana mobilizzata to a text by Francesco Ilaria (Italiani! e finito
il servaggio!). This piece does not figure among the works listed by
Radiciotti, nor by Weinstock, nor have I ever included it in lists I have
prepared of Rossinis works.49 Yet Monterosso not only accepts the
piece as having been expressly written by Rossini, but asserts that it
is a new composition, without having recourse to adaptations of
previously-written works.50 In fact, I know of no documentary evi-
dence to demonstrate that Rossini himself prepared this hymn. More
to the point, it is certainly not a new composition: it is based on the
chorus from Le Siege de Corinthe that the composer had already adopted
as the Finale of his Cantata in onore del Sommo Pontefice Pio Nono. Rossini
wrote the hymn in 1826 to a text making a strong revolutionary state-
ment, but applied to an operatic situation both removed from and anal-
ogous to the Italian condition under Austrian rule. He then adapted
the music as the conclusion of his 1847 Cantata, using a flowery text
in praise of Pius IX that disguised the original meaning, but which
when supported by Rossinis music could easily have been read as
a statement of Italian hopes for Pius IXs leadership. Now, in 1848,
the same music (adapted by Rossini or more likely by another
contemporary musician) could again present a text with revolutionary
sentiments, but one that made explicit its relationship to the Italian
situation.
224 Philip Gossett

Italiani! e finito il servaggio!

Dio ci chiama la patria a salvar!
S, nel sangue il lunghissimo oltraggio,
Lonta nostra corriamo a lavar.
Si risvegli lantico valore
Di moschetti e cannoni al tonar.
Per punir lo straniero oppressore
Siamo pronti la morte a sfidar.
DellItalia gli orribili affani
Chi potrebbe alle genti narrar?
Viva Italia! i superbi Alemanni
Oltre lAlpi dovranno tornar.

[Italians! Your servitude is over! God calls us to save our Patria. Yes, let
us hurry to wash away in blood our long abuse and shame. Let our old
valor reawaken to the booming of muskets and cannons. We are ready to
brave death in order to punish the foreign oppressor. Who could tell the
people of the horrible sufferings of Italy? Long live Italy! the proud
Germans will be forced to return to the other side of the Alps.]

No more Greeks, no more Turks, no more religious transpositions: in

1848 Rossinis hymn could speak in a language that left no uncertainty
as to its contemporary meaning.
And so it is with all the hymns written explicitly to reflect the
events of the Cinque giornate and the days and months immediately
following, all the Ricordi hymns that were destined to become edizioni
distrutte with the return of the Austrians. Some of those hymns are
tied to specific incidents in the battle. Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti, for
example, was called upon by the provisional government to provide
a hymn to poetry by Giulio Carcano, for the solemn funeral rites at the
Duomo of Milan on April 5, 1848 in honor of those who died during
the Cinque giornate.51 This solemn hymn, a Maestoso, in four strophes
of ottonari, begins with the following strophe:

Per la Patria il sangue han dato,

Esclamando: Italia e Pio!
Lalme pure han rese a Dio,
Benedetti nel morir:
 Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 225

Hanno vinto, e consumato

Il santissimo martir.
Di quei forti, per noi morti,
Santo e il grido e non morra.

[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.

8.6 Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti and Giulio Carcano, Inno nazionale

Ronchetti is no Verdi, to be sure, but his vocal style, with its use
of simple chordal arpeggiations, repeated rhythmic patterns, and clear
harmonic motion, is reminiscent of many operatic choruses of the
period (though not, as we have seen, of Verdis 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:

Su voliamo; gia canto di guerra

Eccheggio per le belle contrade;
Si riscosse de forti la terra
Al baleno di libere spade:
Gia quel Sol che rifulse in Legnano,
Gia le nordiche nebbie spezzo;
Oh si voli; chi e vero Italiano
Varchera le bellacque del Po.

[Arise, let us fly; a song of war already echoes through the beautiful
fields; the strong of the earth are already are aroused by the lightning of
free swords: Already that sun that shone in Legnano is breaking apart
northerly fogs; Oh fly, let he who is a true Italian cross the lovely waters
of the Po.]

While hardly a major figure, Selli was not inconsequential. He wrote at

least three operas, including a Medea in Corinto (Rome, Teatro Apollo,
February 4, 1839) and a Ricciarda (Naples, Teatro San Carlo, June 17,
1839). Furthermore, an incomplete manuscript survives in the library
of the Bologna Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale of the first scene
from a Battaglia di Legnano. He was involved in the revolutionary move-
ments of 1848 and 1849, participating with a group of patriots from
Viterbo in battles to preserve the Roman republic during the summer
of 1849.53 Sellis setting of Su voliamo; gia canto di guerra, in C major,
is intended almost everywhere for unison performance. The tune is
reminiscent of Verdis Si ridesti il Leon di Castiglia from Ernani, in
a much simplified vein. Its cadential phrase exploits the highly typical
syncopated pattern that Verdi often favored for similar passages, as
in Nabuccos fourth-act aria, at di mi-a corona, coro-na al sol: see
Example 8.7.
Some pieces, such as the Canto degli italiani by Pietro Cornali, to a
text by David Chiossone, are considerably more complex.54 The piece
is particularly interesting because Chiossones poetry is not all in a
 Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 227

8.7 Prospero Selli and Carlo Matthey, La partenza per Lombardia

single meter: each strophe begins in decasillabi but after the words
Giuriam, giuriamo! the refrain is in ottonari:

Con laurora invocata dai forti

Italiani sorgiamo, sorgiamo,
E la terra che disser dei morti
Sia de prodi la patria e lonor.
Giuriam, giuriamo!
Sara Italia indipendente
Od estinti si cadra.
Questo sacro vessillo innalziamo
Come segno foriero di gloria;
Ecco un brando, sorgiamo, sorgiamo,
Al suo lampo il Tiranno cadra.
Giuriam, giuriamo!
Sara Italia indipendente
Od estinti si cadra.
Da lunghanni ci grida vendetta
Il martirio sublime dItalia,
Or la nobile sposa reietta
Vuole il serto che il Cielo le die.
Italiani il Signore ci desta,
Italiani sorgiamo, sorgiamo,
DellItalia incominci la festa
Sulle tombe dellempio stranier.
Giuriam, giuriamo!
[Sara Italia indipendente]
Od estinti si cadra.
228 Philip Gossett

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

The image of the stranier is fundamental in Bantis morphology of

national discourse, and he cites examples from throughout the cen-
tury (61ff.). In 1842 Zaccaria in Nabucco could incite the Hebrews to
battle with the phrase che sia morte allo stranier [may the foreigners
die], a phrase the Austrian censorship was rational enough not to
challenge in the context of a biblical story. In 1848 the reference could
finally be made explicit: the stranier Italians truly hoped to remove
from their soil was indeed the Austrian tyrant. After 1848, in the wake
of the revolutionary movements, the renewed and strengthened cen-
sorship cracked down even on phrases it had permitted earlier in the
decade, and so various theatres modified the final phrase from Zac-
carias text to che ci additi il tuo voler [may you show us your will],
contro il barbaro guerrier [against the barbarian warrior], or che
dia morte alloppressor [may the oppressor be killed].56
It behoves musicologists to study matters such as censorship as
they have been investigated in other realms, other disciplines, other
periods. Let me cite what I take to be a fully analogous situation from
the early modern period. At the beginning of his path-breaking study
of censorship in England, Richard Dutton writes:57
It is a central contention in my arguments about the censorship of the
period that early modern readers (and by this I mean to comprehend
theatre audiences) read plays and other texts analogically, often
applying quite exotic fictions to contemporary persons and events. And
that censors were quite aware of the fact, but usually chose to ignore it
unless they deemed the application to be too transparent or
provocative.
 Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 229

That statement tallies with the argument I have been making in this
chapter and explains precisely how Austrian censors treated Verdis
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
Verdis Simon Boccanegra and Donizettis 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.

8.8 Pietro Cornali and David Chiossone, Canto degli italiani

The refrain in ottonari, on the other hand, is freer both rhythmically

and harmonically.60 After a long, rhythmically simple and attractive
contrasting section, the main theme returns for a reprise of the strophe
beginning with Questo sacro vessillo innalziamo. Cadences harp
particularly on the tombe dellempio stranier and on the refrain
Giuriam . . . od estinti si cadra.
230 Philip Gossett

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 Verdis 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

Table 8.3 Poetic meters of the edizioni distrutte

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 Bantis 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. Verdis 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 composers
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 Verdis 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 dItalia
(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 Verdis prominence and reputation at that moment as a composer
of the Risorgimento.
Verdis 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 Verdis 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 Proze der Nationenbildung (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 1996), and Roger Parker, Arpa dor dei fatidici vati: The
Verdian patriotic chorus in the 1840s (Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi
Verdiani, 1997). Further references to Parkers 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 Leonoras Last Act:
Essays in Verdian Discourse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997),
pp. 2041. In Verdi, Italian Romanticism, and the Risorgimento, in Scott
L. Balthazar, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Verdi (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 2945, Mary Ann Smart adopts
Parkers 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 lopera internazionale (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1912).
 Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 233

3 Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro Luzio, eds., I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi

(Milan, 1913), pp. 588589.
4 The history of the acrostic has been investigated and clarified by Michael
Sawall, Viva V.E.R.D.I.: Origine e ricezione di un simbolo nazionale
nellanno 1859, in Fabrizio Della Seta, Roberta Montemorra Marvin, and
Marco Marica, eds., Verdi 2001: Proceedings of the International Conference
Parma New York New Haven 24 January 1 February 2001 (Florence:
Olschki, 2003), vol. i, pp. 123131.
5 A significant role in this myth-making has been assigned by Pauls, Parker,
and Sawall to the Italian translation of a series of articles by Arthur
Pougin: Giuseppe Verdi. Vita aneddotica di Arturo Pougin con note ed aggiunte
di Folchetto (Milan: Ricordi, 1881). There is a modern facsimile edition,
with a preface by Marcello Conati (Florence: Passigli, 1989). Several years
later Pougin brought out his articles in French as a book, Verdi: Histoire
anecdotique de sa vie et de ses uvres (Paris: Calman Levy, 1886). Probably the
most important source for the Verdi myth, however, was G. Bragagnolo
and E. Bettazzi, La vita di Giuseppe Verdi narrata al popolo (Milan: Ricordi,
1906), sponsored in part by the secondary schools of Milan.
6 This is the case, for example, with Raffaello Monterosso, La musica nel
Risorgimento (Milan: Francesco Vallardi, 1948), vol. 12 in the series Problemi
del Risorgimento, a book that nonetheless offers many important insights.
7 Frank Walker, The Man Verdi (London: J. M. Dent, 1962). Parker (21n)
mentions this assertion by Walker (pp. 150151, erroneously rendered in
Parker as pp. 5051): one wonders whether the effect of these things has
not been exaggerated by the biographers, whether the portrait of Verdi as
Bard of the Risorgimento, composer of agitators music, has not been
overpainted. Parker (22n) also cites John Rosselli, The Opera Industry in
Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 165, where he asserts that even
Verdi was not quite the full-time nationalist he was once made out
to be.
8 All quotations from Mazzinis treatise are taken from the edition
prepared, with an introduction, by Adriano Lualdi (Rome and Milan:
Fratelli Bocca, 1954), p. 185. The translations are my own. Further
references to this edition are given in the text.
9 In the Italian version of this essay, Edizioni distrutte e il significato dei
cori dopera durante il Risorgimento, to be published in Il saggiatore
234 Philip Gossett

musicale, I analyze these arguments (as well as those deriving from

musical analysis) in greater detail.
10 Verdis letter to Piave of December 22, 1846 is given in David Rosen and
Andrew Porter, eds., Verdis Macbeth: A Sourcebook (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1984), p. 26. Parker draws on the indispensable compendium by
Friedrich Lippmann, Versificazione italiana e ritmo musicale: I rapporti tra
verso e musica nellopera italiana dellOttocento (Naples: Liguori, 1986), the
Italian translation by Lorenzo Bianconi, revised by the author, of a series
of articles that appeared originally in German in Analecta Musicologica, 12
(1973), 253369, 14 (1974), 324410, and 15 (1975), 298333.
11 As Parker notes, I have discussed the Nabucco example (from the chorus
Immenso Jeovah), though with conclusions that differ from mine
(86n), in Censorship and Self-Censorship: Problems in Editing the
Operas of Giuseppe Verdi, in Lewis Lockwood and Edward Roesner,
eds., Essays in Musicology: A Tribute to Alvin Johnson (Philadelphia:
American Musicological Society, 1990), pp. 247257. While Parker
expresses surprise that other verses were not censored, there is ample
evidence from all times and places that censorship, like most oppressive
governmental bureaucracies, works in unpredictable ways.
12 See below for an extended discussion of patriotic hymns published by
Ricordi during this period. An important modern collection of Italian
patriotic music, including a number of these pieces, is Achille Schinelli,
ed., Lanima musicale della patria: il Risorgimento italiano nella sua
espressione musicale (17961922), 2 vols. (Milan: Ricordi, 1928).
13 Parkers almost exclusive dependence on the Milanese scene, however,
where Verdis operas had been extensively performed throughout the
1840s, hides from his readers repertory considerations from elsewhere
on the peninsula. I have traced the Neapolitan situation in my essay La
fine delleta borbonica, 18381860, in Il Teatro di San Carlo (Naples:
Guida, 1987), vol. i, pp. 167204 (see, in particular, pp. 177182). See also
the documentation in Alberto Cametti, Il teatro di Tordinona poi di Apollo
(Tivoli: Arti grafiche A. Chicca, 1938), vol. ii, pp. 472474, where the
Carnival season of 1848 consisted exclusively of Verdis operas, Attila
(new for Rome), Nabucco, I masnadieri (new for Rome), and I lombardi alla
prima crociata, with patriotic demonstrations taking place in the theatre
during or after many of the performances. So, according to Cametti,
who is quoting from contemporary diaries, on January 31, during a
 Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 235

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: Lopera lirica nei teatri del 1848, in Alberto Mario Banti and
Roberto Bizzocchi, eds., Immagini della nazione nellItalia del Risorgimento
(Rome: Carocci, 2002), pp. 133156.
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 Sothebys 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 (Abbiatis 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. 2829. For
information about the projected Ferruccio, which would have been
derived from Lassedio di Firenze by Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, see
Alessandro Luzio, Il Ferruccio di Verdi, in Carteggi verdiani (Rome:
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 19351948), vol. iv, pp. 217220. The
later history of the project is discussed in Carlo Matteo Mossa, A Monk
and At Least Some New Things: Verdi, Cammarano, and Lassedio di
Firenze, in Martin Chusid, ed., Verdis Middle Period 18491859: Source
Studies, Analysis, and Performance Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997), pp. 99126.
18 Cammaranos letter is published, with extensive annotations, in Carteggio
VerdiCammarano (18431852), ed. Carlo Matteo Mossa (Parma: Istituto
Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 2001), pp. 1923. 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. 227253, and Paolo Trovato, Preistoria delle selve
verdiane, Il saggiatore musicale 4 (1997), 137148.
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
Verdis 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), 4164 (see, in
particular, pp. 5860). 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. 3942.
23 The significance of the phrase edizione estera, distrutta will be
discussed further below.
24 The first hint is given in Cammaranos 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

26 According to Francesco Luigi Mannucci in G. Mameli, Poesie (Turin, etc.:

G. B. Paravia, 1927), 98n, the poetry was first published in Pensiero
italiano of Genoa on August 18, 1848, with the title Canto di guerra. In
Mannuccis edition the poetry is on pp. 98100; see also his Introduction,
lviiilix.
27 The composer surely sent a setting for unaccompanied chorus of the first
strophe alone; that was the standard way of handling such strophic
poems. The assumption was that the other strophes would be sung to
the same music. The letter is printed in full in Copialettere, pp. 469470. I
cite it after the English translation of Weaver, Verdi, p. 175. It seems to
have been published for the first time by Fanny Manis in Giuseppe Verdi
e lInno di Goffredo Mameli, Bullettino bibliografico sardo, 1/4 (1904),
7881. Let me thank Fabrizio Della Seta for having brought this
important article to my attention and Daniela Macchione for having
provided me with a photocopy.
28 Cecil Hopkinson, in his Bibliography of Giuseppe Verdi 18131901 (New
York: Broude Brothers, 1973, 1978), vol. i, pp. 35, incorrectly assigned a
publication date of 1848. Others have made a similar error. For the later
history, including Verdis efforts to block publication of the hymn, see
Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, vol. iii, pp. 5155. The history of Paolo De Giorgis
publishing house is outlined in Bianca Maria Antolini, ed., Dizionario degli
editori musicali italiani 17501930 (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2000), pp. 139141.
My subsequent analysis is based on the De Giorgi edition, although
several aspects of the textual history of the chorus remain obscure.
According to the edition, the piano accompaniment, presumably with
the piano prelude and postlude, was the work of Angelo Graffigna.
29 Mamelis original text, from an 1850 edition of his poetry (the poet died
in 1849), is reproduced in Manis, Giuseppe Verdi, pp. 7980. In
collections of Mamelis writings, which continued to print the text in this
earlier form, the poem is known as Inno militare. In all these editions,
including the 1927 edition by Mannucci cited above, furthermore, the
opening stanza begins: Allarmi, allarmi ondeggiano. It does not
seem that Verdi was ever sent the text in that form.
30 The text means: The songs of war echo; / Italy has finally arisen again.
The situation is less clear in the revision of the third strophe, where the
first part of the first verse (Viva lItalia) functions well as a separate
entity, but in which lItalia is also the subject of or vendica (the verses
translate literally as Long live Italy now vindicates its former glory).
238 Philip Gossett

31 The letter is included in Carteggio VerdiSomma, ed. Simonetta Ricciardi

(Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 2004), p. 101.
32 Alberto M. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento: Parentela, santita e onore alle
origini dellItalia unita (Turin: G. Einaudi, 2000). References are given
directly in the text.
33 This is the same amnesty referred to by Verdis student and secretary,
Emanuele Muzio, in a letter to the composers father-in-law, Antonio
Barezzi, of August 13, 1846: In Bologna, on the occasion of the
proclamation of the amnesty, the finale of Ernani (O sommo Carlo!)
was performed in the theatre, with the name of Carlo changed into that
of Pius and there was so much enthusiasm that it was repeated three
times; when they arrived at the words Perdono a tutti . . . [Pardon for
all], shouts of approval arose from everywhere. See Luigi Agostino
Garibaldi, ed., Giuseppe Verdi nelle lettere di Emanuele Muzio ad Antonio
Barezzi (Milan: Treves, 1931), p. 259. The same change was introduced in
Rome at the Teatro Argentina in October 1847 and at the Teatro Apollo
(during a vocal and instrumental academy) on March 12, 1848, as
described by Cametti, Il teatro di Tordinona, vol. ii, p. 474, according to
whom the original A Carlo Magno sia gloria ed onor became Al Nono
Pio sia gloria ed onor.
34 The piece, which will be treated further below, was an arrangement of
Rossinis Coro dei Bardi from La donna del lago. Rossinis compositions
for Pope Pius IX are described in the introduction to Gioachino Rossini,
Cantata in onore del Sommo Pontefice Pio Nono, ed. Mauro Bucarelli, in the
Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini, Series ii, vol. 6 (Pesaro:
Fondazione Rossini, 1996), from which I have derived some of this
information. There is a lovely recording of the cantata, directed by
Riccardo Chailly (Decca 458 8432).
35 I give the original French text and the standard Italian translation used in
Italy during the nineteenth century.
36 This music would serve again for a much more explicitly revolutionary
hymn in 1848, as we shall see, but it is unlikely that Rossini was directly
responsible for the arrangement.
37 Many hymns preceding the Cinque giornate, especially those associated
with Pius IX and Carlo Alberto, are discussed in Monterosso, La musica
nel Risorgimento, pp. 128169.
38 That many texts set by Magazzari are in decasillabi should not be taken to
be representative of this entire corpus, as we shall see. Ricordi published
 Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 239

eleven hymns by Magazzari during 1848, of which I have traced copies of

nine. Of these nine, seven, or 78 percent, use poetry in decasillabi. (A
tenth, for which I have seen poetry, but not music, is in doppi senari.) As
we shall see, the number of hymns using texts in decasillabi among all the
edizioni distrutte (see below) that I have identified thus far (excluding the
nine hymns of Magazzari) is about 30 percent. The difference is notable
and must reflect a personal preference on the part of the composer.
39 In his discussion of the hymns of Magazzari, Monterosso speaks of
Austrian efforts to ban them already in 1847: see La musica del
Risorgimento, pp. 131132. He cites a note from Piacenza in a Florentine
newspaper, La patria, of December 10, 1847, in which the correspondent
writes: It isnt true that the jails are filled with persons arrested for
having sung the Inno a Pio IX (he is speaking of the work of Magazzari).
Whether they were or not, of course, is not the issue: it is sufficient that
the idea crossed someones mind.
40 For a discussion of the political situation in Turin in the autumn of 1847
and its implications for the theatre, see Alberto Basso, Storia del Teatro
Regio di Torino (Turin: Cassa di Risparmio di Torino, 1976), vol. ii,
pp. 259262.
41 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 259.
42 Procida was a patriotic Sicilian leader, whose role in the revolt against
the French rulers of Sicily in 1282 Verdi would celebrate in Les Vepres
siciliennes.
43 See also Cametti, Il teatro di Tordinona, vol. ii, p. 474, where the
performance of the hymn on March 4 is mentioned.
44 Two of these subjects are the basis of Verdian operas; he never did write
one about the legendary youth who cast a stone at an Austrian soldier to
begin an uprising in Genoa against Austrian troupes at the end of 1746.
45 I quote the text from Antonio Zanolini, Biografia di Gioachino Rossini
(Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1875), pp. 223224, where eight strophes are
given, the first in precisely the form Rossini set to music. According to
Giuseppe Radiciotti, Gioacchino Rossini: Vita documentata, opere ed
influenza su larte (Tivoli: Arti grafiche Majella di A. Chicca, 19271929),
vol. ii, p. 293, an earlier form of the poem by the canon Golfieri, in
twelve strophes, was printed the same day in the Bolognese theatrical
journal, Teatri, arti e letteratura, edited by Gaetano Fiori. Luigi Verdi, in
Rossini a Bologna: Note documentarie in occasione della mostra Rossini a
240 Philip Gossett

Bologna (Bologna: Patron, 2000), p. 115, identifies Golfieri as the

direttore ecclesiastico of the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna.
46 Agostina Zecca Laterza began to issue an invaluable facsimile edition of
this catalogue (Rome, 1984), with added dates of publication and indices.
Only the first of the projected two volumes was issued, however,
through p. 615 (incorporating Ricordi publications from 1808 through
the beginning of 1846). The publisher of the facsimile (the Nuovo istituto
editoriale italiano) went out of business soon after and the second
volume was never issued. The rest of Zecca Laterzas work can be
consulted at the Library of the Conservatory G. Verdi of Milan. As a
result of these difficulties, the pages pertaining to Ricordi publications
from 1846 through 1857, including those of 1847 and 1848, are not readily
available for consultation outside of Milan. In a preface to this first
volume, I called attention to the phenomenon of the edizioni distrutte
(see p. xii), but made no effort to explore its ramifications.
47 I have not attempted to investigate fully the bibliographical issues
pertaining to the catalogues of these other publishers; Table 8.2 mostly
lists items I have studied in the Library of the Conservatory G. Verdi of
Milan, whose librarian, Agostina Zecca Laterza, was an invaluable
partner in my research on this project. I wish also to thank Daniela
Macchione, who located several publications lacking in the library of the
Milan Conservatory.
48 Only 20706, Eugenia DAlbertis Canzone nazionale ai prodi Lombardi, is
lacking, although Daniela Macchione located a manuscript copy of the
piece in the Museo del Risorgimento di Vicenza (Parte ii / Canti p. 143,
17 / Coll. inni patriottici 1848).
49 See Radiciotti, Gioacchino Rossini, vol. iii, pp. 247249, Herbert
Weinstock, Rossini: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), or,
for example, my Catalogo delle opere in Luigi Rognoni, Gioacchino
Rossini (Turin: ERI, 1977), pp. 465466. Neither is it listed in Eduardo
Rescigno, Dizionario rossiniano (Milan: Biblioteca universale Rizzoli,
2002), pp. 246247.
50 Monterosso, La musica nel Risorgimento, p. 184.
51 See ibid., pp. 169171. As Monterosso points out, Ronchetti-Monteviti
was a serious composer, who served as director of the Conservatory of
Milan from 1877 through 1881. For an extensive study of the works of
Ronchetti-Moteviti, see Attilio Rossi, La base dati musica del Servizio
 Operatic choruses during the Risorgimento 241

bibliotecario nazionale: Un esempio di ricerca. Stefano Ronchetti-

Monteviti (18141882): La vita, le opere e il lascito alla Biblioteca del
Conservatorio di Musica Giuseppe Verdi di Milano (Pavia, tesi di laurea,
19971998).
52 Velite is an ancient Latin term for lightly armed infantrymen. This
particular contingent of soldiers came from Viterbo.
53 See Provincia di Viterbo, Tuscia. Archaeologia, arte e storia: Il Risorgimento
(c. 1996, last updated April 1997), http://www.isa.it/tuscia/storia/
oggi2.htm.
54 I refer here to the Canto degli italiani published by Lucca (Pl. No. 7018),
which is entirely different from the Canto degli italiani published by
Ricordi (Pl. No. 20823), reproduced in Parker, Arpa dor dei fatidici vati,
pp. 111126.
55 Anyone even vaguely cognizant of the operatic literature would have
associated this text with the phrase that opens the Coro dei Bardi in
Rossinis La donna del lago, Gia un raggio forier dimmenso splendor
addita il sentier di gloria e donor! [Already a ray of light, harbinger of
immense splendor, shows the path to glory and honor!].
56 See Parker, Arpa dor dei fatidici vati, p. 86n for these examples.
57 Richard Dutton, Licensing, Censorship, and Authorship in Early Modern
England (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2000), p. xi.
58 I obtained this information from Gaspare Nello Vetro, Dizionario della
musica e dei musicisti dei territori del Ducato di Parma e Piacenza dalle origini
al 1950, published in http://biblioteche2.comune.parma.it/dm/
ind fram.asp, alla voce Pietro Cornali.
59 Among Rossinian examples is the Coro di guerrieri within the Coro
(N. 6) of Tancredi, at the text Alla gloria, al trionfo, agli allori.
60 Its harmonic shift from E major to the flatted sixth degree, C major, is
the same shift that Rossini exploits in the oath-taking chorus (Jurons,
jurons or, in the Italian translation by Calisto Bassi, Giuriam, giuriam)
that concludes Act ii of Guillaume Tell, the oath at Rutli, specifically at the
point where the Swiss augur that traitors be denied access to Heaven
and, on earth, a tomb. Again, the reference seems to me to go beyond
the morphology of national discourse of Banti to a direct reference to
Rossinis musical setting.
61 A few pieces figure twice: 20343 (Giovanni Zerbis Il cantico di battaglia),
20828 (Stefano Ronchetti-Montevitis Il grido della Crociata), 20848 (Luigi
242 Philip Gossett

Pantaleonis adaptation of the Marseillaise, which figures three times).

Thus, although only 42 of these compositions have been found, the table
shows 46 entries. The setting of the Marseillaise has been excluded: it
utilizes French stanzas in octosyllabes.
62 See his doctoral dissertation, Laughter Between Two Revolutions:
Opera Buffa in Italy, 18311848 (New York University, 2003), as well as
his Comedy Between Two Revolutions: Opera Buffa and the
Risorgimento, 18311848, Journal of Musicology 21 (2004), 127174.
63 The story is retold in Monterosso, La musica nel Risorgimento, pp. 140142.
64 Riccardo Carnesecchi, Venezia sorgesti dal duro servaggio: La musica
patriotica negli anni della repubblica di Manin (Venice: il Cardo, 1994).
Carnesecchi offers also important bibliographical references, including a
list of the holdings of Musiche patriottiche in Armadio vi, 9 of the
Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice.
9 Opera in France, 18701914: Between nationalism
and foreign imports
Christophe Charle
Translated by Jennifer Boittin

The high culture of late nineteenth-century France, which was for the
most part Parisian, was marked by two contradictory trends. On the
one hand, Paris was a global metropolis that attracted artistic elites
from the entire civilized world and served as a stepping stone to fame
for many of them. On the other hand, France itself was traumatized
by the defeat of 1871 and felt outdistanced by more dynamic economic
powers. In certain artistic fields, the country was now challenged by
fledgling nations such as Germany or Italy that repudiated the former
French cultural hegemony which dated back to the Enlightenment as
well as the universalist ideals of the French Revolution. As a result,
a type of cultural nationalism emerged which gradually spread into
many fields, including literature, music, and of course the fine and 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 Tannhauser,
premiered at the Opera 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 (Opera, Opera-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

abroad in order to determine whether the defensive posture of the

French musical world, often underscored by commentators and spe-
cialists, was justified or not. Once we have noted these facts and figures,
we will analyze both the reasons for the success or failure of attempts to
introduce new foreign works and the listening habitus of the Parisian
musical milieu.3
In order to establish the quantitative parameters for this study, we
have compiled two data sets by using Alfred Loewenbergs work Annals
of Opera supplemented by several French performance history refer-
ence works.4 The first data set includes all the grand and comic operas
performed in Paris between 1870 and 1900, whatever their nationality,
and traces their parallel dissemination across the cities of Europe and
beyond. It thereby allows us to establish a distribution map of the most
international works, and to situate Paris and provincial French the-
atres within the distribution network in chronological and geographic
terms relative to the various competing linguistic spaces. As a result,
we will be able to determine whether Paris and the French-speaking
area formed a pocket of resistance to foreign imports, as well as the
varying degrees of resistance according to the country of origin of
a work, its style, and the language in which it was performed. The
second data set contains a list of operatic works (French and foreign)
premiered or performed in Paris during the same time period. It will
allow us to determine to what degree Paris remained a space open
to the performance or creation of new works and, by comparing it
with the information in the other table, to what extent Paris was a
launching pad for the international dissemination of works first played
in the capital. The comparison in this respect with the role of other
large cities in Europe, made possible by the first table, will also enable
us to judge whether Paris, which saw itself earlier in the century as a
major center for the reception of European operatic works (as both
Wagner and Verdi readily acknowledged in their youth), remained just
that or whether, on the contrary, the French theatre was now merely a
space for the production of new works limited to a more modest cul-
tural empire. We will successively examine the following three issues:
(1) Parisian creativity and its limits; (2) export capacity; and (3) the
listening habitus.
 Opera in France, 18701914 245

PA R I S I A N C R E AT I V I T Y A N D I T S L I M I T S

From the 1870s onward, contemporaries both critics and musicians

began complaining that the Parisian operatic stages were dominated
by a never-ending series of revivals of the same repertory works and
by indefinitely prolonged runs of new works which met with initial
success. These two tendencies had a detrimental effect on the chances
of young and foreign composers whose works had not previously been
performed to gain a hearing for themselves. These complaints were
not novel, if one recalls the difficulties Berlioz encountered when he
attempted to have his own works performed in France, difficulties
which forced him to try his luck in German theatres, where he was
better received. Yet there was no lack of talent at the time, as the
composer Victorin Joncieres stressed in his preface to the 1880 edition
of the Annales du theatre et de la musique:

One can say without flattery that the French School has never known
such a considerable number of distinguished composers; but one must
quickly add that never before has access to the theatre been more difficult
for them. I will not go far to find evidence. Honor to whom honor is due:
let us first take the Opera. 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 Academie de
musique, M. Vaucorbeil has staged two operas, Verdis Ada, which the
Theatre 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 Opera.5

However, one should not extrapolate too quickly from the situation
of the late 1870s. It is indeed true that the Opera, 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 Frederique Patureau, the proportion of new
and foreign works increased progressively during the 1890s.6 Like-
wise, the Opera-comique and the private theatres increasingly opened
their stages to new artists soon after this pessimistic report. Summary
246 Christophe Charle

statistics, which can be established on the basis of the table of new

works mentioned above, place Paris in a rather good position among
the European countries. Out of 142 operatic works (all genres included)
which were performed in Paris between 1870 and 1900, 82 (or 57.7 per-
cent) were world premieres; of the rest, six had received their premieres
in Milan, six in Saint Petersburg, four in Bayreuth, two in London and
one in Berlin (and paradoxically it was a French work).
This preponderance of Paris as a launching pad, notably for operas
and comic operas, is not the result of a bias linked to what was being
defined as an opera. Most of the works first created in Paris went on
to have international careers. Only 17 percent of the works created in
Paris failed to be performed outside of France. In this respect, indeed,
it is interesting to note that the symbolic value attached to a works
Parisian origins produced effects which were even more substantial
when that work did not belong to the historical genre of grand opera.
Thus of the sixteen grand operas that received their first performance
in Paris during this period, five failed to enjoy an international career
because of their initial lack of success at the Palais Garnier. It seemed as
though the opinion of the elite Parisian public was a definitive and final
judgment for the more ambitious works, preventing their circulation
abroad if they failed in the French capital. Such a fate was suffered by
only two out of thirty-five comic operas premiered at the Salle Favart
between 1870 and 1900 and by none of the lighter works (operetta,
comic operas, etc.) launched from less renowned theatres. A successful
first production in Paris among the secondary genres was a guarantee
of dissemination beyond the French borders. One sees here the residual
effects of the myth of imperial splendor and of la vie parisienne which
continued to fire the imagination of the rest of Europe.
This power to make or break the reputation of a theatrical work,
especially those that were more commercially oriented, was the contin-
uation of an older phenomenon illustrated, for example, by the massive
export to foreign theatres of French vaudeville and melodrama in the
first half of the nineteenth century.7 This explains the desire of many
playwrights and composers to wait their turn rather than be performed
outside Paris. Some composers, however, including some important
 Opera in France, 18701914 247

ones, tired of waiting for a sympathetic manager of a Parisian theatre

and took their works elsewhere. Thus Saint-Saens had Etienne Marcel
performed at the Opera of Lyon on February 8, 1879, and Massenet
launched La Navarraise at Covent Garden on June 20, 1894. In 1880
Victorin Joncieres noted: Another Academician, M. Massenet, who
is considered one of the most popular composers of these times, not
finding a slot for his Herodiade in Paris, will stage its premiere next
winter in Italy.8
These are, however, exceptions that confirm the rule inasmuch as
the operas just mentioned never did establish themselves in the reper-
tory. The significance of Paris is also underlined by the fate of operas
premiered in other major cities. Thus most of the works created in
London did not reach beyond the English-speaking world, with the
exception of works performed in a language other than English. Like-
wise, with the exception of the sacred cows of German or Italian
opera, composers from these countries rarely saw their works per-
formed outside their countries of origin. The true exception here is
represented by the remarkable breakthrough during this period of Rus-
sian composers, whose operas were first staged in their home country
before, after a certain delay, being admitted to all the opera houses of
Europe.
However, this first measure of Parisian creativity must be quali-
fied with another consideration: these eighty-two works with Parisian
premieres mentioned above amount in all to fewer than three new
works a year, and even fewer if we exclude the lighter genres. Yet the
opera-loving public had at its permanent disposal two opera houses, to
which could be added intermittent opera seasons at the Theatre Ital-
ien, the Theatre Lyrique, the Opera National Populaire, and, towards
the end of our time period, the Chatelet and the Theatre des Champs-
Elysees.
Paris also enjoyed at this time an extraordinary influx of new audi-
ences as a result of its strategic position within the French and European
rail networks. In addition, a select audience also traveled to the city
for grand occasions such as the Universal Expositions and official visits
by sovereigns, which were in theory favorable moments during which
248 Christophe Charle

Figure 9.1 Revenues of the Opera and the Opera-comique, 18751905

to broaden the range of operatic programs. The third asset of Parisian

opera stages was the generous aid given them by the state in the name
of patriotic or educational goals, aid which was matched only in a few
large German cities where the cultured audiences were much smaller.9
Finally, the French capital enjoyed a general and specialized press with
unmatched freedom to write at length about the every move of theatre
managers, performers and composers, thereby fostering the publics
interest in the small world of opera.
These advantages (and their effects as set forth above in the dis-
cussion of the attraction of Paris) explain Pariss central role in the
careers of opera musicians in France and Europe. Yet, as we have seen,
these attractions alone did not guarantee a high level of output of
new works. This issue brings us to more general handicaps specific to
Frances fin-de-siecle theatrical system which I have defined, following
others, as a crisis of the theatre.10 This crisis possessed paradoxical
features, as shown by the above table comparing the revenues of the
Opera and the Opera-comique between 1875 and 1905. The income of
the former fluctuated between three and four million francs, with three
peaks of prosperity during the Universal Expositions of 1878, 1889, and
1900. However, these atypical years aside, there was no clearly ascend-
ing curve even after 1900, although operating costs had a tendency
 Opera in France, 18701914 249

to increase. Thus Vaucorbeils management ended with a deficit of

380,000 francs in 1884. His successors, Jean Eugene Ritt and Pierre dit
Pedro Gailhard, made a profit as a result of the Universal Exposition
of 1889, while Eugene Bertrand, who took over in 1891, lost 500,000
francs in 18921893.11 The Opera-comique replicates the same cycles
of prosperity and decline: recurring crises endangered the previous
financial balance and forced changes in management, as happened in
1876,12 in 1887 following a fire, and again in 1898.
Thus, despite subsidies and the artificial stimulus of the Exposi-
tions, the two great opera theatres suffered from very large deficits
linked to historical accidents (political crises, economic crises, catas-
trophes such as fires) and to artistic failures. This financial fragility
largely explains the relative timidity in the selection of works per-
formed (especially those by new composers or controversial foreign
composers) and hence of the preference for careful strategies: man-
agers, when confronted with failure, revived successful works from
the repertory, refurbished productions of operas which had already
proven successful or commissioned new pieces from well-established
composers and librettists, even if this meant betraying one of the mis-
sions of these subsidized stages: fostering new talent.
Some critics go further in taking Parisian operatic theatres to task
for insufficient creativity by underscoring that private theatres, which
enjoyed less state aid or none at all, did better than the official theatres
in this regard: thus Vizentinis Theatre Lyrique staged twelve new
works in eighteen months (18781879); however, it eventually went
bankrupt.13 It must be admitted, then, that when managers did try to
break from routine and give new or foreign works a chance, they were
rarely followed by the public, and the experiments inevitably resulted
in deficits. Albert Carre, manager of the Opera-comique beginning in
1898, summed up the constraints under which management operated
in this way:

In order to survive, any theatre, especially an opera house, needs to earn

maximum takings as often as possible. Consequently, for a new work
once the movement due to curiosity has passed to supplant, in the
250 Christophe Charle

limited number of annual performances, a work from the repertory

which would be sacrificed to it, it must prove that it will bring in, like the
latter, maximum takings. A manager can help a work in its early stages,
and he should. But he is not a patron, and he must think of the financial
interests which he is managing.14

This vicious circle suggests structural causes rather than a simple

explanation based upon the managers personalities, a lack of signifi-
cant new works or the limited range of the publics taste. When we
consider which new works were most successful and brought in the
most money, it is clear that they correspond to a relatively simple
pattern. On the one hand, they stirred old memories for much of
the audience, which attenuated their novelty, always unsettling for a
snobbish public which attended as much because of a sense of social
obligation as because of aesthetic interest. On the other hand, with-
out admitting it, they watered down certain foreign innovations which
were still being rejected because they were foreign, by adapting them
to the canons of French opera and of the structure of well-constructed
French plays and their very distinctive character.15 The importance of
dramatic structure in French opera came from the conventions of clas-
sical theatre and the comedy of intrigue, which at the time dominated
the Comedie-francaise and the theatres of the Paris boulevards. Thus in
1878 Zola observed: The well-constructed theatre piece, I mean one
constructed according to a certain balanced and symmetrical pattern,
has become a curious, entertaining plaything which has amused the
whole of Europe along with us. It is from this that one can date the
popularity of our repertory abroad, where it is accepted like a fad, just
like our luxury goods.16
It is not coincidental that the most frequently performed playwrights
were also often the librettists of serious and comic operas.17 At a sym-
bolic level, theatrical conventions were identified with the French spirit
and its literary heritage, which the state, since the time of the monarchy,
was responsible for perpetuating through secondary school education
and the subsidized stage. Furthermore, the growing cult of male and
female singers, as witnessed in the competition among international
 Opera in France, 18701914 251

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 cafe-
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

literature, the birth of new literary movements disseminated through

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

E X P O RT C A PAC I T Y

We have already seen that the works first produced in Paris had a rather
high probability of being performed abroad, while the opposite was
not true. We must now define more precisely the geographic reach
of the most renowned French works in comparison to their foreign
counterparts.
Table 9.1 confirms previous remarks about the international 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, 18701914 253

Table 9.1 French composers of operas and operas-comiques most frequently

performed abroad

Number of foreign opera houses where their

Composers name works were premiered (1870 and later)
Massenet (18421912) 64 including: Germany: 6; Great Britain: 2; Italy: 4;
North America: 4; South America: 5
Bizet (18381875) 50 including: Germany: 2; Great Britain: 2; Italy: 2;
North America: 3; South America: 3
Offenbach (18191880) 48 including: Germany: 5; Great Britain: 3; Italy: 3;
North America: 1; South America: 2
Saint-Saens (18351921) 47 including: Germany: 4; Great Britain: 1; Italy: 2;
North America: 3; South America: 2
Delibes (18361891) 37 including: Germany: 3; Great Britain: 2; Italy: 1;
North America: 2; South America: 2
Charpentier 34 including: Germany: 4; Great Britain: 2; Italy: 1;
(18601956) North America: 2; South America: 2
Berlioz (18031869) 22 including: Germany: 5; Great Britain: 3; Italy: 1;
North America: 2; South America: 2
Gounod (18181893) 15 including: Germany: 1; Great Britain: 2; Italy: 2;
North America: 0; South America: 0
Bruneau (18571934) 14 including: Germany: 3; Great Britain: 2; Italy: 1;
North America: 2; South America: 0
Masse (18221884) 13 including: Germany: 1; Great Britain: 1; Italy: 1;
North America: 2; South America: 2
Chabrier (18411894) 11 including: Germany: 5; Great Britain: 1; Italy: 0;
North America: 2; South America: 0
Lalo (18231892) 11 including: Germany: 0; Great Britain: 1; Italy: 1;
North America: 2; South America: 0
Paladilhe (18441926) 11 including: Germany: 2; Great Britain: 0; Italy: 1;
North America: 0; South America: 0
Guiraud (18371892) 10
Reyer (18231909) 9
Joncieres (18391903) 9
254 Christophe Charle

Saint-Saens 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-Saenss 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
Leo Delibes, who wrote only one exported opera, Lakme, 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 countrys 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 Theatre 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
Theatre 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 Ada, five years
(at the Theatre Italien it would not arrive at the Opera until four
years later) and, in that of Otello, seven years (Opera) after their world
premieres. While Falstaff was put on after a wait of only one year, it was
 Opera in France, 18701914 255

Table 9.2 Number of cities outside their home

country where the works of foreign opera
composers from the sample were performed

Composers name Number of cities

German
Wagner 63
Humperdinck 37
Italian
Verdi 72
Puccini 65
Leoncavallo 49
Mascagni 48
Giordano 46
Russian
Mussorgsky 42
Tchakovsky 41
Borodin 28
Rimsky-Korsakov 27
Rubinstein 24

performed in French as opposed to the original language, probably in

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

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, Hansel and Gretel, which
was performed in thirty-seven cities outside Germany. Leo 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 Mascagnis 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 (Opera-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, 18701914 257

of the international publics taste, and not just Frances, 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 Puccinis
La Boheme and Manon Lescaut and Giordanos Andre Chenier 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 works 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 Opera. The foremost Russian
works were first performed between 1908 and 1911. In 1911, for exam-
ple, the Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt put on Rimsky-Korsakovs The Tsars
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 Tchakovskys 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

characterized a substantial portion of the subject matter of opera and

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

THE LISTENING HABITUS

This listening habitus was influenced not only by political factors and
musical taste but, more broadly, by representations of identity and
strategies for social distinction relevant to the various listening publics
that could be mobilized. One hears again and again the same 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 theatre et de la musique: It was said in advance that M.
Saint-Saens was Wagners 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-Saens, found no other praise than to
exonerate him from inaccurate accusations of Wagnerianism, a word
which at the time had negative connotations for the Operas 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, 18701914 259

In the aftermath of defeat in 1871, not only was Wagner banned

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

(Dimitri, 1876), not to mention India (Lakme, 1883 and Le Roi de Lahore,
1877), Japan (Saint-Saenss La Princesse jaune, 1872), and even the imagi-
nary space of the great German rival: Offenbachs Les Contes dHoffmann
(1881); Reyers Sigurd (1884) and Massenets 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 Frances 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 18701871.
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 dArc 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 Andre Chenier,
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 dYs
(1888), and Debussy in Pelleas et Melisande (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, 18701914 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 Boheme probably worked in favor of
the international audiences 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 publics 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 countrys 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 Pelleas
et Melisande, which is still viewed from todays 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 Pariss 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, LArt nouveau en France, politique, psychologie
et style fin de siecle (French translation, Paris, Flammarion, 1994);
Christophe Charle, Paris fin de siecle, culture et politique (Paris: Seuil,
1998).
2 Alfred Loewenberg, Annals of Opera 15971940 (Cambridge: Heffer & Sons,
1943), p. 432.
 Opera in France, 18701914 263

3 The habitus concept comes from Pierre Bourdieu (e.g., Distinction: A

Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1984). By listening habitus, I mean the way people
behave and pay attention in a situation of collective listening. Such a
situation requires the reconciliation of (a) the style of social interaction of
a given milieu and its accepted norms (internal hierarchies, roles,
horizontal relations) with (b) the intrusion constituted by the execution of
a work and by the artists engaged in this execution. This interaction
provokes implicit and explicit tensions (depending on the degree of
novelty of a work) that the conventions of the habitus in question aim to
manage and resolve but which may sometimes result in scandals,
misunderstandings, or fiascos if a smooth compromise between the artists
and the listening milieu is not achieved. The Parisian musical milieu that
was centered on the Opera and on musical salons put in place a particular
mode of listening to musical works that was characterized by shifting
attention and fleeting enthusiasm for bravura passages; this was a mode of
listening that was at odds with the new, quasi-religious, style of listening
that innovators such as Liszt and Wagner hoped to impose.
4 Edouard Noel and Edmond Stoullig, Les Annales du theatre et de la musique
(Paris: Charpentier, 1875 and subsequent years); Albert Soubies and
Charles Malherbe, Histoire de lOpera Comique: La seconde salle Favart (Paris:
E. Flammarion, 18921893, new edition Geneva: Minkoff, 1978). I would
like to thank P. Boudrot for helping with the data collection and
suggesting ways in which it could be used.
5 Victorin Joncieres in Noel et Stoullig, Les Annales du theatre et de la musique
(1880), p. iii.
6 Frederique Patureau, Le Palais Garnier dans la societe parisienne 18751914
(Liege: Mardaga, 1991), pp. 244ff.
7 See the cases of Scribe and of Offenbach examined by Jean-Claude Yon,
Eugene Scribe la fortune et la liberte (St. Genouph: Nizet, 2000); and Jacques
Offenbach (Paris: Gallimard, 2000). On the impact of the French theatre in
England during the first half of the nineteenth century, see Allardyce
Nicoll, A History of Early Nineteenth Century Drama 18001850, second
edition (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 80.
8 Joncieres in Noel and Stoullig, Les Annales du theatre et de la musique (1880),
p. v.
264 Christophe Charle

9 See the table furnished by Eugene dHarcourt, Mission du gouvernement

francais. II. La Musique actuelle en Allemagne et Autriche-Hongrie,
Conservatoires, Concerts, Theatres (Paris, 1908): the majority of opera
houses in the large German cities were running deficits and were
dependent on government subsidies.
10 See Jean Dubois, La Crise theatrale (Paris: Imprimerie de lArt, 1894);
Dominique Leroy, Histoire des arts du spectacle en France (Paris,
LHarmattan, 1990); Christophe Charle, La Crise litteraire a lepoque du
naturalisme (Paris: PENS, 1979), Part ii, chapter 3.
11 Patureau, Le Palais Garnier dans la societe parisienne, pp. 99100.
12 Soubies and Malherbe, Histoire de lOpera Comique, pp. 214215.
13 Joncieres cites the following reasons for the failure of this experiment:
the high rent charged for the theatre; the unfortunate timing of the
launch at the end of the theatre season; and above all the absence of
financial support from either the central government or the
municipality at a time when both the Opera and the Opera-comique
received subsidies even when they were badly managed ( Joncieres in
Noel and Stoullig, Les Annales du theatre et de la musique [1880],
pp. xixvi).
14 Albert Carre, Souvenirs de theatre, new edition (Plan de la Tour: Editions
daujourdhui, 1976), p. 310.
15 See, for example, Herve Lacombe, Les Voies de lopera francais au XIXe
siecle (Paris: Fayard, 1997), pp. 277ff.
16 Zola, preface to Noel and Stoullig, Les Annales du theatre et de la musique
(1880), p. xxviii.
17 Thus Patrie (1886) of Paladilhe had as librettists Gallet and Sardou,
Piccolino (1876) of Guiraud is based on a play by the same Sardou, the
libretto of Carmen (1875) was written by Meilhac and Halevy based on a
work of Merimee; and that of Massenets Manon (1884) was written by
Meilhac and Gille. All three operas of Delibes had as their librettist the
dramatist Edmond Gondinet.
18 DHarcourt, Mission du gouvernement francais. II. La Musique actuelle en
Allemagne et Autriche-Hongrie, pp. 143150.
19 Myriam Chimenes, Elites sociales et pratiques wagneriennes: De la
propagande au snobisme, in Anegret Fauser and Manuela Schwartz,
eds., Wagner zum Wagnerisme. Musik, Literatur, Kunst, Politik (Leipzig:
Leipziger Universitatsverlag, 1999), pp. 155197.
 Opera in France, 18701914 265

20 See Charle, La Crise litteraire a lepoque du naturalisme.

21 See Pierre Bourdieu, Les Regles de lart. Genese et structure du champ
litteraire (Paris: Seuil, 1992); Cynthia and Harrison White, La Carriere des
peintres au XIXeme siecle, trans. Antoine Jaccottet (Paris: Flammarion,
1991; American edition, New York: Wiley, 1965).
22 An avant-garde composer like Debussy, whose one completed opera was
staged at the Opera-comique, derived an income from these
performances substantially greater than from concerts or the publication
of his works. Thus the total gross box-office receipts for the
performances of Pelleas et Melisande in 1902 totalled 113,627 francs, and if
one uses the usual rate of 6 percent of these gross receipts to calculate
the composers royalties these add up to 6,817 francs. (The figures for the
box-office receipts at the Opera-comique are derived from Jann Pasler,
Opera et pouvoir: Forces a loeuvre derriere le scandale du Pelleas de
Debussy, in Hugues Dufourt and Joel-Marie Fauquet, eds., La Musique et
le pouvoir [Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1987], pp. 173174).
23 See, for example, Carlotta Sorba, Teatri: LItalia del melodramma nelleta
del Risorgimento (Bologna, Il Mulino, 2000), pp. 248ff.; Eugene
dHarcourt, La Musique actuelle en Italie (Paris: F. Durdilly, Fischbacher,
1906); D. Francfort, Rome et lOpera, in C. Charle and D. Roche, eds.,
Capitales culturelles, capitales symboliques: Paris et les experiences europeennes
XVIIIeXXe siecles (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2002),
pp. 381402.
24 See, for example, Eugene-Melchior de Vogue, Le Roman russe (Paris:
Plon-Nourrit, 1886) and C. Charle, Champ litteraire francais et
importations etrangeres: De la vogue du roman russe a lemergence dun
nationalisme litteraire (18861902), in Michel Espagne and Michael
Werner, eds., Philologiques III (Paris: Ed. de la MSH, 1994), pp. 249263.
25 See, for example, Lacombe, Les Voies de lopera francais au XIXe siecle,
p. 191.
26 Noel and Stoullig, Les Annales du theatre et de la musique (1883), pp. 34.
27 Noel and Stoullig, Les Annales du theatre et de la musique (1885), pp. 3233
(The works subject matter is drawn from the Nibelungen sources.)
28 The rare exceptions are operas of Charpentier (Louise) or of Bruneau
based on works of Zola (Le Reve, LAttaque du moulin).
29 Jane F. Fulcher, The Nations Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and
Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
266 Christophe Charle

30 Fulcher, French Cultural Politics, pp. 77ff.

31 Of the 21 new Italian works performed in Paris, only 3 were staged
before 1890, 10 between 1890 and 1900 and 8 after 1900; of 9 German
works, 1 was staged before 1900, 4 between 1900 and 1910 and 4 after
1910. All 18 new Russian operas seen in Paris appeared after 1908.
32 Charle and Roche, eds., Capitales culturelles, capitales symboliques.
10 Fascism and the operatic unconscious
Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg

This essay unfolds from an initial working hypothesis about the absence
of a discursive unconscious from pre-unification Italian cultural history
in general, and from its operatic history in particular. The sense of an
Italian national culture evolves with the energies of the Risorgimento:
the resurgence of Italy as a modern nation, which achieved political
success with unification in the decade of the 1860s. In this light, the
Risorgimento might be understood as a discourse of the ego. Its 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 Verdis 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 (18601870), 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

the canonic historian of Italian national culture, he found in de Sanctis

at once a symptom and a diagnosis of a national anxiety. Italy, Gramsci
asserted, had experienced its revolution passively. The Risorgimento
ego-of-desire had provided no viable economy; it was at once exces-
sive and insufficient. It thereby ceded to a national ego-of-anxiety the
eventual breeding ground for fascism.1
After 1870, opera remained the privileged genre and Verdi the
emblematic figure of the Risorgimento and of the Italian nation. Verdis
mythic status as a founding father of the nation held and continues
to hold, notwithstanding the questionable evidence of his political
involvement or intentions. Between the premieres of Otello in 1887
and Falstaff in 1893, the elderly Verdi witnessed in silence the final
passing of the Risorgimento generation and its displacement by a new
generation of bureaucrats and technocrats lacking national ideals. This
passage has been consistently described as the replacement of poetry
by prose, of the poetry of national liberation with the prose of daily life.
Verdis Risorgimento style was displaced in the 1890s by verismo: the
style claiming the stageworthiness of the everyday. The early Puccini
is clearly marked by such claims, at least until the turn of the cen-
tury, when Tosca and Butterfly restored the grandiose and the exotic to
operatic stage and style. These restorations culminated in Turandot.
Puccini remains the emblem of this national anxiety. It has become
a cliche to assert that the crown prince Puccini produced no heirs
and that his final, unfinished opera Turandot reigns as a final, barren
sovereign in a line that goes back not only to Verdi but indeed to
Monteverdi. But this judgment remains restricted to the circumstance
of Puccinis death in 1924. To cite and inflate Toscaninis legendary
words at Turandots premiere in April 1926: Qui finisce lopera, perche a
questo punto il Maestro e morto. This necromantic narrative shuts out
history in general, and, most importantly, fascism in particular. Worse,
it may in fact reproduce those very structures that fascism relied on
for its own aestheticized politics.
We want to argue, first, that Turandot delivers opera to fascism and,
second, that fascism cannot, through opera, deliver on its own cultural
claims. The fascist aesthetic is spectacular, not operatic. This is, in the
 Fascism and the operatic unconscious 269

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

We begin with a speech of Mussolinis from April 1933 to the Italian

Society of Authors and Publishers:

I have heard reference made to a crisis of the theater. This crisis is real,
but it cannot be attributed to the cinemas 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

this day! The full range of triangular configurations is by now long

exhausted. Find a dramatic expression for the collectives passions and
you will see the theaters packed.2

Where opera ends, fascism begins. Mussolinis address supports this

formulation, a fairly standard one in the history of opera. Compatible
with the production of fascist doctrine, it is compatible as well with the
standard history of the Italian operatic canon. It follows the well-known
claim that Puccinis Turandot unfinished at his death in 1924 and pre-
miered at La Scala, with Franco Alfanos ending, in 1926 arrives at the
end of the Italian operatic tradition, and arrives just as fascism triumphs.
It allows for the empirical reality of the fascist regimes support of
opera, including the regimes wish to disseminate theatre and opera
into the provinces and to the people. This initiative produced traveling
companies known as the carri di tespi [theatermobiles]. The first carro
teatrale was inaugurated in 1929; the first carro lirico [operamobile], in
1930. Operamobiles toured Italy with works of Verdi, Puccini, Rossini,
Mascagni, and Bellini, and proved much more successful than the the-
atermobile. Moreover, between 1933 and 1943 Pietro Mascagni was the
largest beneficiary of funds administered by the Ministry of Popular
Culture. During the Italian Musical Summer of 1938, 392 operas were
performed, compared to 52 theatrical performances.3
Fascisms commitment to opera and theatre also produced a
renewed and vigorous investment in the so-called teatri allaperto
throughout the Italian peninsula and even in the colonies. Though
the history of performing in ancient Greek and Roman theatres pre-
dated fascism and indeed continues today, it is undeniable that the
practice lent itself well to fascist Romanism. As Jeffrey Schnapp has
argued, the regime developed, over the years, a cohesive politics of
spectacle that sought to provide hygienic outdoor alternatives to the
sickly interiors of the bourgeois theatre, to popularize elite forms of
culture . . . and to forge a new sense of nationhood both by promoting
interregional tourism and by placing the Italian masses face to face
with the past, present, and future Mediterranean solar genius of their
race (23). Such teatri allaperto delivered canonic repertories to those
 Fascism and the operatic unconscious 271

crowds of 15,000 to 20,000 spectators that Mussolini had called for.

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

scenes, to a vastness of spaces and horizons that the theatre cannot

provide. Here [with 18BL] it is a matter of creating a theatre that
can offer those sensations to the public (Schnapp 77). In its cele-
bration of the immediacy of the body, fascist modernist theatre felt
compelled to imitate film, a representation thus twice removed, pro-
ducing a kind of body-machine most tellingly revealed by the fact that
the heroine of Blasettis spectacle was 18BL: a Fiat-model truck. Like
Brunnhilde, 18BL immolated in a single evening, in Jeffrey Schnapps
apt image (82); unlike Brunnhilde, however, this vehicle only sang
once.
What the hell do we care about a truck? was the reaction reported
by one critic (Schnapp 83). The failure of the truck has much to say
about the structure and limits of fascist aesthetics. Loving the truck
may have been one challenge; seeing it (in a crowd of 20,000) was
equally a problem. Blasetti wanted both theatre and film, auratic pres-
ence and infinite mechanical reproducibility. The conversion of the
body of desire into the body-machine failed, at least on so grandiose a
scale. In this respect, operatic tradition and the culture of the carro lirico
stood in direct contradiction. The first lodged in the body of desire;
the second made such bodies, and indeed the actual operatic perfor-
mances themselves, secondary to the technology of performance as a
portable, reproducible spectacle. The medium of the carro teatrale was
the message, as Jeffrey Schnapp argues. That medium resided more in
the pre-performance spectacle than in the performance itself. On the
day of the performance, trucks rolled into the citys public square,
whereupon an army of assembly technicians (assisted by hundreds of
hired hands) would set about the task of erecting the canvas and steel
armature; positioning lights, curtains, and sets; and filling out the seat-
ing areas. Always well attended, this pre-performance show was meant
to display the efficiency achieved through corporate organization (21).

T U R A N D O T. C O M

William Weavers Golden Century of Italian Opera concludes with those

now famous remarks that William Ashbrook and Harold Powers cite
 Fascism and the operatic unconscious 273

at the opening of their study Puccinis Turandot: The End of the Great
Tradition:

. . . as he reached the conclusion of Lius death scene, Toscanini laid down

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

Ashbrook and Powers catalogue the Princes of Persia who might have
succeeded the Crown Prince Puccini: Mascagni and Giordano in his
own generation; Zandonai, Pizzetti, Dallapiccola, Bussotti in the two
generations following him (34). 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. Puccinis
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. Forzanos film
experience, they suggest, informed both the handling of crowds and
the acting style (45). Forzanos instructions for Act i, for example,
read: Let me say once and for all that during this episode the move-
ments both of the Executioners 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 Turandots 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 Florences Maggio Musicale at
the gate of the Forbidden City in Beijing in 1999. Below that threshold
is the gilded extravaganza of Franco Zeffirellis 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 works 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 Turandots longue
duree Toscanini has been perhaps less influential than Forzano.6
Turandots 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 composers 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

What seems to us most interesting here is the parallel of melody and

Mussolini as objects of desire. To be clear, the remark provides no
smoking gun about Puccinis fascism or about his politics in general.
The biographical record doesnt provide much clarity either. Puccini
was conferred honorary membership in the Fascist Party in early
1924. He was made Senator of the Kingdom two months before his
death. His death (in Brussels on November 29, 1924) was announced
to the Chamber of Deputies by Mussolini, who added: Some months
ago, this eminent musician asked to become a member of the National
Fascist Party. By this gesture he wished to show his solidarity with a
 Fascism and the operatic unconscious 275

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.
Turandots internal relation to fascism combines melody and
Mussolini in the figure of the unknown prince whose entrance gener-
ates the operas 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. Puccinis reference conscious or not to this Germanic
trope is in keeping with his pro-German stance in matters of both art
and politics during the years of the Great War. The Unknown Prince is
here identified as Calaf, son of Timur, the dethroned King of the Tatars.
Sonically, however, he is identified a la Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton,
i.e., as a bearer of Western Music, his diatonic idiom opposing the
pentatonic texture of the local scene. Puccinis orientalism does not
absorb the expressive world of the prince.
Calafs 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 Liu. 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 Liu is irresolvable. This
is Puccinis problem; there is no imaginable way whereby his survival to
the operas 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 Lius 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.
Puccinis 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 Alfanos 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 Calafs honor by
insisting that he never loved Liu and had never claimed otherwise.
Ceding that at first blush the closing passages of the opera seem
unmotivated, perhaps even shocking, as though Butterflys suicide
had been vulgarly and anticlimactically followed by a final love duet for
Pinkerton and Kate, they soon reclaim the operas honor by insisting
that Calaf is shocked and moved when she [Liu] falls lifeless at his
feet; but his heart is, as it has been, wholly engaged elsewhere.9 This
defense misses the point that Calafs recovery from Lius 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 cliche, signify
Turandots first orgasm. Alfanos contribution only helps this process.
His string of quotations of Puccinis 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 (Turandots regime, newly partnered with Calafs charismatic
leadership). In the works 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 SPIDERS STRATAGEM ( B E RT O LU C C I , 1 9 7 0 )

Verdi corresponds for me . . . with a mythical dimension, and that works

very well with the mythical structure of the father. Mythic music for a
mythical personage.10

These words of Bernardo Bertolucci do much to organize the historical

as well as symbolic stakes of postwar Italian film, in which the myth of
Verdi as founding father of the Italian nation carries central importance.
This importance prevails not only despite the mostly subterranean
quality of Verdi as referent, but because of it.
Freuds last major work Moses and Monotheism centers on the dif-
ficult relationship between individual psychology and collective psy-
chology, or, as he puts it, on the birth of great men and of a national
tradition.11 Freuds narrative is that of the family romance and of mur-
der. Moses, the hero or great man, is he who manfully stands up against
and overcomes adversity, yet is himself condemned to die. A national
tradition is born from the fact that the hero is the source of the tradition
at the very moment as he is successfully removed from it. Thus Freud
writes: In the long run it did not matter that the people . . . renounced
the teaching of Moses and removed the man himself. The tradition
itself remained and its influence reached the aim that was denied to
Moses himself.12 What remains after the death of the author/father
is a text, a text that nevertheless always tells us enough about its
own history. Two opposing forces leave their traces in the shape of
transformations worked upon it: falsification, in accord with secret
tendencies, that turn the text into its opposite; and an indulgent piety
anxious to keep everything as it has stood, even at the expense of logical
consistency. And Freud continues in a now famous passage:

The distortion of a text is not unlike a murder. The difficulty lies not in
the execution of the deed but in doing away with the traces. One could
wish to give the word distortion [Verstellung] the double meaning to
which it has a right; . . . It should mean not only to change the
appearance of, but also to wrench apart, to put in another place.
278 Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg

That is why in so many textual distortions we may count on finding the

suppressed and abnegated material hidden away somewhere, though in
an altered shape and torn out of its original meaning.13

Let us assume for present purposes that the Moses in question here
is Giuseppe Verdi, and that the text is that of his operatic output as it is
put into play as a national tradition. This is then an argument about the
role of (Verdian) opera as cultural tradition predicated on the death or
removal of its author(s), a use of this tradition that depends for its 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 Viscontis 1954 Risorgimento
film Senso and Bernardo Bertoluccis 1970 film about the fascist legacy
in postwar Italy, The Spiders 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

The reaction to Viscontis Senso immediately upon its release was

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

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 Viscontis
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.

Verdis music, or rather the libretti and plots of plays set to music by
him, are responsible for the artificial poses in the life of the people, for
ways of thinking, for a style. . . . To many common people the baroque
and the operatic appear as an extraordinarily fascinating way of feeling
and acting, as a means of escaping what they consider low, mean and
contemptible in their lives and education in order to enter a more select
sphere of great feelings and noble passions . . . Opera is the most
pestiferous because words set to music are more easily recalled, and
become matrices in which thought takes shape out of flux.14

More indirectly, of course, Visconti is also referring to the second

revolution, that of the Resistance, a revolution that from the perspective
of the conservative Catholic and Christian Democratic climate of 1954
Visconti was bound to have interpreted as another failure. Visconti
was also directly engaging a cultural style that had been born along
with the Resistance: neorealism. As Angela Dalle Vacche has remarked,
while Rossellini is anti-operatic and Crocean, while he seeks to create a
form of Italian national consciousness from, so to speak, the ground up
through the employment of the commedia dellarte tradition, Viscontis
 Fascism and the operatic unconscious 281

style is both operatic, high-cultural, and Gramscian. He thus creates

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

Livia may desire to be Leonora, a desire that should propel her

incestuously into the arms of her cousin Ussoni/Manrico. Instead, a
degraded melodrama takes place, a displacement of opera. Leonora
becomes Livia, the LiviaFranz plot takes over the LiviaUssoni plot,
not just because of the cynicism of modern, fragmented, life, but
because opera creates a desire for exceptionality that cannot be man-
aged or controlled by political institutions and rules. Viscontis use of
opera is not strategic; it is not a ploy to show up the impossibility
of opera in the modern age. Its use, instead, drives a wedge between
spectacle and opera, producing simultaneously a Gramscian reading
of the dangers of politics as spectacle, and an Eros, or a senso whose
stagings must remain there, but in displaced form, in disguise, in the
form of an insistence on and by the subject. What returns in Senso is
precisely senso: the demand for sensuality and happiness that had
been banished from fascism. Viscontis obsession with uniforms and
veils in Senso points simultaneously to the masks that disguise the true
self and to that element that constitutes the subject in its very essence.
The subject, for Visconti, is an operatic subject, but one that is dis-
placed, always somewhere else. Opera exists in Viscontis film as that
auratic element that both defies and submits to the dictates of filmic
reproduction.
While for Visconti opera still can be staged or made visible, for
Bernardo Bertolucci such a visibility seems to have become impossi-
ble. In The Spiders Stratagem, opera dominates the plot of the film,
though we never actually come to see it. Nor does it function as mere
background music or soundtrack. There is something derailing and
derailed about operas presence or absence in the film. And since Spider
is about the continuing legacy of fascism in postwar Italy, opera comes
to stand for what has been devoured by fascism, in ways similar to a
spiders incorporation of its prey. Rigoletto in the film is a text within,
or a satellite of, the main text.19 Loosely based on Borgess short story
Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, The Spiders Stratagem tells the
story of Athos Magnani (Giulio Brogi) and his return to his native Tara,
a place he had left at his birth in 1936, following the murder of his father
at the hands of fascists.20 Some thirty years later, he is summoned back
 Fascism and the operatic unconscious 283

to Tara by his fathers official mistress Draifa (named by her father for
Alfred Dreyfus) in order to investigate his fathers death. On his arrival,
Athos Jr. discovers his martyred fathers 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 sons investigation into his
fathers and the towns shared past. Narrative flashbacks provided by
Draifa and by his fathers 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 Mussolinis 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 spiders
web from the theatre. The music leads him back into a repetition of
the story of his fathers 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 fathers 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 acts rehearsed quality. Caught in his fathers
web of lies, Athos Jr. unable to betray his fathers 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 Spiders 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 Spiders Stratagem and this is thematized and given
emphasis by Bertoluccis use of Gildas 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 plotters 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 Bertoluccis aesthetic and it operates at
the two levels that reflect Freuds distinction between melancholia and
mourning. First and problematically since it depends on the removal
of woman from the scene displacement depends on the melancholy
creation of distance through introjection. Here pleasure depends on
distance. Draifa is a spider woman, the architect of the labyrinth in
which Athos Jr. is entrapped, and his guide out of that same labyrinth.
Thus Bertolucci:

In nature it is usually the female that devours. Genetically, over the

centuries, some males have understood her mechanism, have understood
the danger. Some spiders just approach the female, but stay within a safe
distance. Exciting themselves with her smell, they masturbate, collect
their sperm in their mouth and wait to regain strength after orgasm.
Because that is how they get devoured, when they are weak after
ejaculation. Later, they inseminate the female with a minimal approach
and thus she cannot attack them in the moment of their weakness . . .
What can develop between [a man and a woman] is only
possessiveness . . . the destruction of the loved object.25

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

produces a narrative of false community, a lie which nevertheless is

condemned to betray its own secret. Tara refuses to mourn the past
and repeats through its operatic gestures a continuous return of the
past. As Robert Kolker writes, Athos would have killed Mussolini
during an opera. Instead he makes an opera out of history in which
everyone acts a role and sings the same arias again and again.26
Yet we never actually see the spectacle. And here Bertolucci has
effected a second displacement, one closer to Freudian mourning. As
Robert Kolker has remarked, opera as fascist spectacle is cooled
in its contact with filmic narrative, while at the same time it is by
virtue of this same contact that the film is able to own up to its
own suppressed melodramatic elements.27 Bertolucci creates through
this allusionary mode a kind of prohibition of representation, sup-
ported by frequent allusion to Magritte, above all to the painting
La Reproduction interdite. This allusionary practice ultimately makes
possible the recognition or transmission of the historical truth, the
truth of the fathers murder. To this end the key scene takes place in
the theatre, at the repeat performance of Rigoletto. Athos Jr. restages
the scene of his fathers death, taking his fathers box seat, which is
placed before a mirror. By his restaging, he learns that his father had
in fact staged his own murder. Athos Sr.s absorption into fascism is
clinched by his participation in the very spectacle of his own death.
To what extent Athos Jr. is caught in a repetition of the same remains
open.
In another invocation of an absent father, Bertolucci introduces a
Verdian operatic practice without reproducing or representing either
Verdi or opera. Opera, specifically the opera Rigoletto, shadows this
scene on stage but off-camera, thereby remaining unrepresented.
Opera is obscene, literally, as it is non-specular and non-spectacular.
Bertolucci proposes not the elimination or murder of opera, which
would amount to another form of denial and thus to a misreading
of the operatic element within the cultural tradition. Bertolucci does
not repeat the fascist spectacularization and repression of opera.
Rather, he guarantees its survival by proposing a new way of seeing, a
symptomatic one perhaps, that is avowedly mythical, but only insofar
 Fascism and the operatic unconscious 287

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, 18601930,
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
Mussolinis 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, Puccinis 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. 210211.
6 Toscaninis most enduring mark on the work is his role in selecting Franco
Alfano to compose the finale from Puccinis sketches. Toscanini rejected
Alfanos first attempt. In May 2002 Luciano Berios 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
Dorrie and conducted by Kent Nagano. The effect on the operas
conclusion is substantial, judging from our own hearing in Berlin in
October 2003. Berios 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 AlfanoBerio war,
whose outcome will also determine the longevity of Toscaninis 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

8 Quoted in Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy, p. 105.

9 Ashbrook and Powers, Puccinis Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition,
pp. 34.
10 Fabien Gerard, T. Jefferson Kline, and Bruce Sklarew, eds., Bernardo
Bertolucci: Interviews ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000),
p. 64.
11 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New
York: Vintage Books, 1939).
12 Ibid., p. 62.
13 Ibid., p. 52.
14 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs
and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. William Boelhower (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 377.
15 Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian
Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 156.
16 Ibid., p. 121.
17 Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 187.
18 Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror, p. 134.
19 Robert P. Kolker, Bertolucci (London: British Film Institute, 1985), p. 61.
Rigoletto is by no means the only reference to Verdi in the film. References
are made to Macbeth, Un ballo in maschera, Trovatore, Ernani, and Attila.
20 See Jorge Luis Borges, Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, in
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Direction
Books, 1964), pp. 7275.
21 Cited in T. Jefferson Kline, Bertoluccis Dream Loom: A Psychoanalytical
Study of Cinema (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), p. 76.
22 Deborah Crisp and Roger Hillman, Verdi and Schoenberg in Bertoluccis
The Spiders Stratagem, Music and Letters 82/2 (2001), 251267; p. 258.
23 Ibid., p. 256.
24 Kolker, Bertolucci, p. 119.
25 Kline, Bertoluccis Dream Loom, p. 74.
26 Kolker, Bertolucci, pp. 123124; see also Eric L. Santner on melancholy in
Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1990).
27 Kolker, Bertolucci, p. 123.
PA RT I I I
Theorizing Opera and the Social
 Introduction to Part III
Victoria Johnson

In examining specific historical instances of operatic production and

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

291
292 Victoria Johnson

almost no impact on opera studies, particularly in comparison with the

influence enjoyed, directly or indirectly, by Adorno, Foucault, and Ray-
mond Williams. Lindenberger sketches three different ways in which
Bourdieus work could prove useful for opera scholars: (1) through
the model offered in The Rules of Art for exhaustive analysis of the his-
torical contexts of art production and consumption; (2) through the
model offered in Distinction for analyzing the role played by opera in
the production and reproduction of social structure; and (3) through
the model offered in Homo Academicus for analyzing the social produc-
tion and reproduction of academic disciplines and of discipline-based
knowledge (a process that has been of great importance in the produc-
tion of knowledge about opera).
Bourdieus potential utility for opera scholars is the central focus
of musicologist Jane Fulchers chapter in this section of our volume.
Fulcher one of the few opera scholars to have seriously engaged
with and drawn on Bourdieus framework explains some of his key
contributions to the analysis of social phenomena and sheds new light
on the social dimensions of opera by deploying his framework to per-
form an exemplary analysis of the musical world of interwar France.
She shows precisely how Bourdieus insights into the political power
of cultural objects and symbols can be harnessed by musicologists
to develop more thorough and more nuanced analyses of the social
arenas the fields, in Bourdieus terminology in which opera has
historically been produced and consumed. Beginning, a la Bourdieu,
with an overview of the French political and musical terrain following
World War I, Fulcher moves to an analysis of the multiple and opposing
uses to which operatic composers put neoclassical themes and devices.
Some composers, she shows, deployed these themes and devices in a
manner aligned with and supportive of state cultural policies and sym-
pathies, while others found in these themes and devices means to mock
or criticize dominant musical culture. Through this empirical analysis,
Fulcher makes the case that musicologists have much to gain by mov-
ing beyond Adornos paradigm fruitful as it has undeniably proven
for musicologists over the past few decades to a fuller exploration of
Bourdieus challenging but rewarding work.
 Introduction to Part III 293

If Fulcher offers substantial support for Lindenbergers claim that

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

Why should we even speak of opera and society in the same breath? Is
there, for instance, a special affinity between these two terms, and if
so, is it different from or more intense than the relationships we seek
to establish between other artistic forms and society between, for
instance, painting and society, comedy and society, or, to cite the title
of a famous essay by Theodor Adorno, lyric and society?1
As we listen to these various combinations, the phrase opera and
society seems particularly amenable to discussion. With painting, for
example, one is faced with a multitude of forms each rooted in
a particular social context from the animals depicted on the caves
of Lascaux to the political messages drawn by muralists on barrio
walls.
Opera, by contrast, seems comfortably circumscribed. It 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 Lullys mythological operas as attempts to flatter the
absolute monarch who sponsored them or when we tie Schoenbergs
Moses und Aron to a context that includes matters such as the composers
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 operas or a styles origins but include the whole history
of interpretation and reception of this work or style. One might ask,
for example, how Berliozs rewriting of Glucks Orfeo, or Wagners
of Iphigenie 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 Gounods 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
artists 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 Mozarts Entfuhrung 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 composers
later operas are. To start with, lets look at the circumstances surround-
ing its composition.
Die Entfuhrung 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 Entfuhrung 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 Entfuhrungs
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 Mozarts 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 Josephs theatre flourished.
It displays in fact an uncommon mixture of styles, from, on the one
hand, Pedrillos 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 composers major works. But Mozarts 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 Mozarts operas, saw as a sign of the operas relative failure.3 And
how do we interpret the Emperors 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 Entfuhrung. 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
Andre, but Mozarts 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 Mozarts 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

Beyond these issues our interest today is inevitably drawn to the

large role played by Turkish music in this opera. To be sure, what
passed for Turkish music percussive sounds from cymbal, triangle,
and loud drums, squealing sounds from the piccolo, a two-four rhythm,
and a sharpened fourth degree had long been familiar to audiences,
both in street music and in opera (not to speak of such non-operatic
examples as the finale of Mozarts A major sonata, K. 331). In Die
Entfuhrung, we have not only the overtly Turkish Janissary choruses
but Turkish moments at numerous other points, even at the opening
of Martern aller Arten, in which the Western heroine shows herself
infected, as it were, by the Eastern world that she defies in this aria.
Turkish music appears not only in the many operas about European
maidens captured by Turks in various Mediterranean sites but even in
so pre-Turkish a setting such as Glucks Iphigenie en Tauride, in which
it is used to characterize the primitive Scythians. (I might add that the
last-named opera, in German translation, was chosen to be performed
at the National Singspiel for the Russian Grand Duke when it turned
out that Mozarts work could not make it in time.) As Matthew Head
has shown in his full-length study of Mozarts orientalism, Turkish
music, including Hungarian tunes with which it was often conflated,
had a considerable history in the West for at least a generation before
Mozart.6
Are we to hear these sounds as a code for that newly fashionable
notion of the primitive? Or perhaps we should hear them simply as
an entertaining popular alternative to the formality of the prevailing
classical style,7 a means of aesthetic liberation analogous to the craze
for chinoiserie somewhat earlier throughout Europe. And what politi-
cal meanings can we read into what we hear? Since Mozarts opera was
finished a year short of the century that had elapsed since the Turk-
ish siege of Vienna, it would be difficult to argue that Die Entfuhrung
and other works containing Turkish music were responding to a living
threat though a few years after Die Entfuhrung Austria joined Russia in
a brief war against the Turks to which Mozart responded with several
compositions.8 But one recent commentator on the opera, Nicholas
Till, has described European anti-Turkish policy at the time as a
 Opera and Society 299

cold-war stratagem of maintaining their subjects in a state of per-

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

although one could speculate that the presence of considerable spoken

dialogue might have inhibited its currency in non-German-speaking
lands, the Singspiel form of Mozarts final opera has not prevented its
continued popular acclaim. It is possible that the plot and the issues
with which Die Entfuhrung was concerned came to seem trivial during
the earnest-minded nineteenth century.
Reception theory has proposed the term fusion of horizons to
depict the absorption of a works effect at its inception by the experi-
ences it offers at a later time. However well we historically reconstruct
the works earlier context, the preoccupations, biases, and expectations
of the later observer color the manner in which we perceive it in its
later embodiments. Take, for instance, the way that the publication
in 1978 of Edward Saids Orientalism altered our perceptions of works
in all the arts that depicted the non-Western world. Studies of Die
Entfuhrung since that time invariably focus on matters such as the role
of the Turkish music or the difference between the musical oriental-
ism of the eighteenth century, centered as it is on the conflict between
European and Muslim values, and that of the later nineteenth century,
in which the East is portrayed as at once seductive and sinister.
Productions are more likely than scholarly studies to respond
quickly to the possibilities offered by current events. Thus, a 1980
Munich production referred to the recent Iran hostage crisis by offering
a Pasha clad like the Ayatollah Khomeini while threatening Constanze
with tortures.12 In the light of 9/11, one dreads speculating what new
forms of terrorism an inventive director may come up with.
I have lingered on a single example, Mozarts Die Entfuhrung, not to
provide new facts for the observations I draw upon are well known
to specialists but to portray the interchanges between an operatic
work and the external world that, though they may vary in character
in different settings, can still be considered typical. My discussion has
stressed the kinds of questions we ask ourselves in approaching specific
operatic works questions about the circumstances surrounding the
making of a work, about the pressures upon the various agents engaged
in this task, and about what happens to an opera once its original
context has become remote. Above all, it should be clear that what we
 Opera and Society 301

see as matters of aesthetics and literary or musical style cannot easily

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

latter have sought assiduously to overcome. For until relatively recently

musicological study was tied to a positivistic model that goes back to
the fields origins during the late nineteenth century when the various
humanistic disciplines justified their squatting rights within the mod-
ern university by emulating the methods of the natural sciences. As
a result, the study of opera, for example, was limited to formal musi-
cal analysis and to researching historical data whose factuality could
conceivably be proved in court.
One might cite Siegmund Levaries exhaustive analysis of tonal and
rhythmic matters in Le nozze di Figaro, published half a century ago, as
an example of a book that rigorously kept within the methodological
bounds set by the field. Although Levarie links the musical to the
dramatic action within the opera, his method does not allow him to step
beyond the formal parameters of his text. Or one could cite a multitude
of historical studies that have researched the factual circumstances
surrounding particular operas and composers yet by and large these
studies, like those in other humanistic fields when they were tied to
the positivistic model, shied away from theorizing and questioning the
methods they were employing. Indeed, since the decline of positivism
we have learned that the historical facts upon which we long relied
to demonstrate our scientific credentials were themselves historically
contingent, as, moreover, was the way we selected facts to ground our
arguments.
There was one influential and now-classic study of opera that, in
its attempt to look at the whole operatic tradition and its refusal to be
bound by the positivistic model, anticipated the studies in what I call
the recent boom. This was of course Joseph Kermans Opera as Drama,
now itself a full half-century old. I still remember the excitement that
this book generated as its chapters appeared well before they were
brought together in a volume in literary journals. What seemed
remarkable to me at least, for I was then a graduate student in
comparative literature was that this project seemed unlike anything
in musicology; indeed, its method was quite familiar to me, for, with
its attempt to project a closed canon of great works for which its
author provided an easily applied system for evaluation, this approach
 Opera and Society 303

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, Tomlinsons 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 Peris
LEuridice and Monteverdis Orfeo, through their faith that music can
closely match the meaning of words, fit Foucaults 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 Tomlinsons 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 Queens 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 operas 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 Abbates 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

ways, are concerned with social phenomena. To be sure, the particular

phenomena one may choose to observe and to analyze are by no means
the same in the various thinkers such as Foucault, Adorno, Bakhtin,
and Raymond Williams whose work has helped make these moves in
literary study possible.
Yet there is a way of thinking about society that has not been nearly
as well represented in humanistic work as that of the thinkers I have
just mentioned. I refer to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, whose concept
of symbolic domination Jane Fulcher, in her essay in this collection,
applies fruitfully to the conflicts within the French musical world of the
1920s. If I may return once more to Mozarts Entfuhrung, let us imagine
a Bourdieu-inspired reading something on the order of his approach
to Flauberts LEducation sentimentale and its social context.13 Such a
reading would demand an understanding of the cultural landscape of
Vienna during the later eighteenth century the clash between national
and foreign musical traditions, between native-oriented Emperor and
cosmopolitan public, with this clash embedded within the uneasy mix-
ture of styles that Mozarts opera displays. It would also demand an
immersion into a particular social milieu, with its class biases and
its institutional conflicts, that those of us who have attempted global
approaches to opera have not hitherto performed. And it would also
demand an understanding of the differences in the historical situation
of the arts in the eighteenth-century German states and nineteenth-
century France. Bourdieus analysis of the artistic and literary fields in
Flauberts time can take for granted the conflict between a difficult,
avant-garde form of art and a more easily consumable, commercially
oriented mode. This conflict was still central to the period that Fulcher
has analyzed. But neither side of this conflict is easily applicable to Die
Entfuhrung, within which neither the native German nor the opera
seria component could be labeled avant-garde.
But there are other aspects of Bourdieus work relevant to under-
standing the social foundations of opera. One might note, for example,
that the 1963 questionnaire whose results form the basic argument of
Distinction, his study of how differing social classes in France value
and consume art, includes the names of three operas, La traviata,
 Opera and Society 305

Gotterdammerung, and LEnfant et les sortileges,14 each of which appeals

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

could bring to bear on opera approaches that had become prestigious

in their own fields. And once the positivistic model had lost its once-
exclusive hold on music departments, musicologists could call on these
same approaches to gain the advancement and security necessary for
survival within the university system.
Let me move beyond these perspectives suggested by Bourdieus
work to suggest some areas that those engaged in the study of opera
and society might profitably pursue. I pose here the question of what
constitutes the social experience of opera, both in the course of the
forms history and in the present day. We might ask, for example, what
is unique about this experience, above all when one compares opera
with other representational arts, indeed even with other audience-
centered events that we do not necessarily classify within the aesthetic
field.
One thing that characterizes the social experience of opera is the
extreme diversity of opera audiences, both in the course of history and
in the present day. To take only the latter, as I developed in another
context,18 opera invites a wide variety of spectators ranging from the
passive viewer motivated chiefly by social ambition (and who might
well spend the middle act of the opera at the bar) to the avid fan with
eye and ear intent upon every gesture and sound. Moving back in time,
one notes sharp distinctions in the distance that audiences maintain
between themselves and the action within an opera at one extreme,
the participation of the courtly audience in the age of Louis XIV, and, at
the other extreme, the large gap between the audience and the heroic,
larger-than-life action going on behind the proscenium in the public
opera houses that have flourished since the first ones in Venice early
in the seventeenth century.
Comparisons among musical genres have tended to stress formal
attributes rather than different audience experiences. To cite the work
of a single composer, one might note the ways one customarily dis-
tinguishes between Handels operas and oratorios: thus, we cite the
fact that whereas the former are in Italian, the latter are in English;
the former on historical and literary themes, the latter on religion and
occasionally myth; the former staged, the latter unstaged; the former
 Opera and Society 307

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 Handels 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 Handels 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, operas 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 forms 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 publics 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 Napless San Carlo that allowed both the musical and
visual extravagance of Rossinis 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

The emotional hold of opera upon its spectators is also related to

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

There is still another form of representation with which opera

intersects, namely the religious service. Indeed, in the present day
the boundaries between rite and operatic performance have become
fluid. Verdis Requiem is often dubbed operatic in character. Such
comparatively chaste religious works as the Bach Passions, composed
as they were for church performance, are now sometimes mounted
in the opera house. And Handels oratorios, though never part of
a service as were the Bach Passions, are also entering the operatic
repertory.
Yet my concern here goes considerably beyond crossovers of this
sort. In the course of the past century many spectators have come to
treat the communal opera experience as something akin to a rite, some-
times as a supplement to, even as a substitute for, what the traditional
religions have offered. One could view the Bayreuth experience, and
above all the particular experience that Wagner intended his audience
to undergo in Parsifal, as modeled after religious practice.
But the religious analogy is not limited to the earnest and often
somber world of Wagnerian music drama. Most any good opera can
serve the contemporary spectator as a mode of religious experience.
The length of a performance is comparable to that of many religious
services. Like a church, the opera house works to isolate those who
attend from the everyday world they have temporarily left behind. And
like a rite, opera employs both visual and audial resources to draw its
spectators into the new world it has created.
To return to an earlier example, Mozarts Entfuhrung aus dem Serail,
worldly though it may seem, is as likely as any opera to render this sort
of experience. As it moves through its diverse and seemingly incompat-
ible styles the contemplative music of its two principals, the simple
tunes of its servant characters, Osmins intrusive eruptions, the bois-
terous a-la-turque choral passages the audience undergoes a cycle of
shifting feelings and moods whose magnitude one could never predict
from a reading of the libretto alone. When realized to its fullest in the
opera house, Die Entfuhrung, like all the best operas, gives its specta-
tors cause to believe that something miraculous has happened in an
otherwise secular world.
 Opera and Society 311

n ot e s
1 Theodor Adorno, Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1958), vol. i,
pp. 73104.
2 Stephen Rumph, Mozarts Archaic Endings: A Linguistic Critique,
Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 130/2 (2005), p. 195.
3 Edward J. Dent, Mozarts Operas: A Critical Study (New York: McBride,
Nast, 1913), p. 138.
4 Thomas Bauman, W. A. Mozart: Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 89.
5 Ibid., pp. 1819.
6 Matthew Head, Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozarts Turkish Music
(London: Royal Musical Association, 2000), pp. 6789.
7 Ibid., pp. 8889.
8 Ibid., p. 56.
9 Nicholas Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth,Virtue and Beauty in
Mozarts Operas (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 104.
10 Bauman, W. A. Mozart, pp. 3334.
11 Ibid., pp. 108109.
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. 1140.
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. 84127.
18 Herbert Lindenberger, Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 265282.
19 Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton
(New York: Continuum, 1988), p. 80.
20 Ibid., pp. 71103.
12 Symbolic domination and contestation in
French music: Shifting the paradigm from
Adorno to Bourdieu
Jane F. Fulcher

Few today would dispute Michel Foucaults intellectually seismic asser-

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

312
 Shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu 313

Geertzian symbolic anthropology to history.3 His admonitions cen-

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

It also occurs politically, for groups in power impose representations

which provoke a wide range of responses across a broad spectrum from
domination, or acquiescence, to contestation. Dissension erupts when
there is inescapable misadaptation, or a disjunction between dominant
systems of classification and experience in the social world.11 While,
for the most part, our field is still locked in either a narrow and literal
or a philosophical conception of the political, Bourdieu identifies it (as
does Foucault) in systems of representation and in challenges to them.
For Bourdieu, then, our perception of the symbols that authority
has inculcated for political ends in many possible styles is a pre-
requisite for interpreting culture and deciphering politics. Culture is
thus not extraneous to politics, nor devoid of authentic political con-
tent, but is rather a fundamental symbolic expression or articulation
of the political. In a country like France, where the state has tra-
ditionally made a substantial political investment in culture, we must
unlock the language of symbolic domination and the idioms through
which social actors respond. From this dialogic perspective, styles or
symbols we have previously considered apolitical must necessarily be
reconsidered, and the structure of symbolic opposition revealed.12
Nowhere, perhaps, is this more true than in the case of French
music, and especially French opera in the twenties, which Bourdieu has
provoked me to re-examine in light of his theories of symbolic violence
and contestation. For, as I shall argue, the pervasive neoclassicism,
which we have largely construed as a monolithic, shared meaning,
was not only politically insinuated but, given the experience of war,
contested and re-invested. Modernist neoclassicism, which Adorno
equates with Stravinsky and dismisses as infantile, affirmative, and
devoid of content, from Bourdieus perspective becomes a critical
response to official symbolic domination.13 But to perceive this we
must first observe the subtle ways in which the state oriented French
taste, and to do so there is no better means than a Geertzian thick
description, however inflected a la Bourdieu.14
As a socially emblematic event in an advanced Western culture we
might choose a state ceremony, and in this case a funeral, which carried
multiple levels of resonance after World War I. That of Gabriel Faure
 Shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu 315

is here particularly apt, for he died at a delicate moment politically

in 1924, several months after the victory of the Left, following a center-
Right coalition. Not having had time to define its policies on all cul-
tural issues, the new government ceded to the pressures of the experi-
enced, conservative functionary of the arts, Paul Leon.15 Having known
the composer for years, and being a great advocate of Faures music,
Leon insisted that he receive the full panoply of a grandiose obseques
nationales. This, after all, had been the case with Faures former teacher
and mentor, Camille Saint-Saens, for whom Leon had arranged a sim-
ilar ceremony only three years before.16
But now it was a difficult, transitional, moment to decide what to
consecrate nationally, and concomitantly to define what or who should
become a national symbol, or a lieu de memoire.17 The political con-
juncture was especially unfortunate since the nature of the ceremony
being planned would enunciate the message about music and the
national that was sedulously ensconced by the preceding regime.
Through it, however, we may glean much about those meanings, sym-
bols, and dominant attitudes toward music that would characterize
French musical institutions, including the Opera, during most of the
twenties. For not only had such attitudes dictated official policies in
music up to this point, with the defeat of the Left two years later they
would resurge and again dominate the decade.18 Faures funeral, then,
can lead us into the musical values of the hegemonic culture and its
sophisticated manipulations, to which the avant garde, particularly in
opera, responded with equal artifice.
Traditionally, Republican funerals in France were freighted with
ideological significance: carefully orchestrated, they provided the
regime with an occasion both to celebrate and to propagate its values.19
As part of the culte des grands morts, the lives being consecrated were to
become illustrations of Republican virtues, their meaning fixed, to
provide an image for all future generations. Such funerals, however,
not only contained communicative and cognitive elements, but car-
ried a socially unifying and affective dimension that was particularly
crucial now.20 Five years after the Versailles Treaty, the atmosphere of
mourning and commemoration persisted, especially among the older
316 Jane F. Fulcher

generation, which had witnessed the slaughter of its most able-bodied

youth. And so, in Faures case, those religious elements that were gen-
erally avoided in traditional Republican funerals could be incorporated
as part of the mourning that hovered after the war.21 Faures funeral,
then, was both a religious and an artistic national ceremony, intended
to thwart further symbolic collapse and to shore up existing symbols.22
His funeral, like that of Saint-Saens before, took place at the
Madeleine, the prestigious church in central Paris, where both had
long served as its principal organist. But Faures ceremony included a
performance of his own great Requiem Mass, which could still be inter-
preted as, or conflated with, a requiem for the dead of the war. The new
government was thus present in force, represented by an impressively
large official contingent that included the presidents of the Republic,
the Senate, and the Chamber of Deputies, in addition to the Arch-
bishop of Paris.23 The presence of the latter, unusual in a Republican
ceremony, was undoubtedly related both to Faures position at the
Madeleine and to the greater Republican tolerance of religion after
the war. However, as Faures editor, Jacques Durand, who attended
the ceremony, observed, none of the new officials present appeared to
be fully aware of Faures artistic importance.24 But Leon had been free
to arrange the kind of ritual that would enunciate the way in which
he and others of centrist or conservative leanings construed Faures
music and its cultural significance.
Although Faure, if always evolving, was no longer considered artis-
tically progressive by the postwar period, he had continued to pro-
mote the nascent avant garde and remained a member (even serving
as President) of both the conservative Societe Nationale de Musique
and the more innovative Societe Musicale Independante. However,
the work performed, on the basis of its aptness, did not represent
Faures more recent style: begun in 1877, it had been revised in the
late 1880s, and then orchestrated at the turn of the century. Yet such a
work, characteristic of the composers later nineteenth-century style,
was reassuring in 1924, spanning as it did late Romantic and early
twentieth-century innovations.25 Faure was by no means mired in the
past, and yet through this ceremony conservative factions began to
 Shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu 317

construct him in their image of a classical and traditionalist French

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

successor at the Academie des Beaux-Arts. In this prestigious site of cul-

tural conservativism the composer Alfred Bruneau, elected to Faures
chair, paid the traditional tribute to his predecessor in his inaugural
speech.30 Bruneau here characterized Faures music as simple, solid,
severe, and strong, thus construing it as reflecting true French classi-
cism, as understood since the time of the war. Such classicism remained
synonymous with the French, although now, as we shall see, in the
context of the postwar polarization, the Left perceived the dominant
definition of the classic as symbolic violence. It accordingly developed
its own conception of the French and the classic, thus inflecting or
contesting this symbol of true national culture, as did the liberal Right,
through spokesmen like Cocteau. Within this contestatory context,
Bruneau (a former Dreyfusard but now a centrist) proceeds, after laud-
ing the true classicism of Faure, to attack the pseudo destructors
of this great edifice. Misrepresenting both Faures cosmopolitan style
and his openness to the innovations of youth, Bruneau argues, after
quoting the composer out of context, that he had consistently pleaded
the cause of classicism.31
All of Bruneaus themes were already ensconced in the dominant
musical and operatic discourse, which was marked by an obsessive fear
of anarchy or disorder, as well as of eclecticism or pollution from
outside. This was closely related to the sense of Frances enfeeble-
ment after the war, and particularly its devastating problems in the
realms of both manpower and public finance. And in dissonant coun-
terpoint with the projected myth of continuing French leadership in
Europe was the harsh reality of Frances unquestionably weakened
postwar position.
Moreover, this was also the moment of internal political and social
problems, particularly the questioning and discontent on the part of
French workers and youth. The conventional classic discourse, then,
was one aspect of the resultant defensive trend in French culture, to
which Maurice Agulhon has referred as le systeme politique et men-
tale dapres-guerre.32 Within this mentality, dangerous currents, both
externally and internally, were to be combated through an inculca-
tion of conservative, exclusionary, classic values, considered essential
 Shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu 319

to the spiritual unity of the nation. Such classical particularism (as

opposed to the universal) found expression in other French cultural
fields, as during the war, and continued to dominate the French uni-
versity system.33
This was the very situation that Julien Benda decried in La Trahison
des clercs (of 1927) the invasion of the intellectual realm by the polit-
ical, and especially by nationalist values. In music his indictment was
particularly apt, as we may see when closely examining the musical and
operatic world in France, or that central sector of it that was dominated
by official institutions. Concern with the national informed not only
its reclassification of French composers, but equally their canoniza-
tion, as we may witness in the case of Faure. Attacks on radical young
composers were frequent, as was condemnation of German influence
and the modern, which included not only foreign music, but also
its dangerous artistic impact in France. The popular, the foreign, and
the modern were all therefore relegated to alterity in this discourse,
or defined against the national and thus emphatically excluded as the
menacing other.
This we may observe in the so-called opera of ideas and in the com-
mentary concerning these ideologically and stylistically conservative,
didactic works that I explore in my other contribution to this volume.
The themes of protection against foreign influence, against anarchy
or internal dissension, and the promotion of tradition, spirituality, and
an exclusionary classicism appear in and around all of these operas.
As I point out in my chapter concerning this genre, perhaps the most
prominent examples include dIndys La Legende de Saint Christophe,
Barres and Bachelets Un Jardin sur lOronte, Hues Dans lombre de la
cathedrale, and Canteloubes Le Mas.
However, as I also noted in the case of Marcel Delannoys Le Poirier
de misere, the Left did respond, and within the same genre, but con-
frontationally in terms of style. For the Left, far from accepting such
symbolic violence, confronted it aggressively, taking up the volatile
stylistic symbol of classicism and redefining it in accordance with its
inclusive, universalist, creed. Theirs was a classicism founded upon
the critical spirit, as differentiated from nationalist classicism, based
320 Jane F. Fulcher

upon models which in music, ironically, derived from the Viennese

classics. The so-called revolutionary classicism of the Left was one
of renewal, and not of order, and one of revolt, progress, and the
universal: as they put it, le vrai classicisme.34
Space here does not allow an extensive consideration of how those
composers of the now mature generation with ideological orientations
to the Left creatively interpreted these classic values. But it is impor-
tant to be aware that these older figures, who had experienced the
projects born of wartime propaganda, knew the sophisticated man-
ner in which music could be mediated to further nationalist sym-
bolic domination. For some, the experience of politics through culture
was the politicizing experience itself, compelling them to join par-
ties, make symbolic public gestures, and even to modify their styles.
The latter they were to do cleverly, through meaningful inflections
within the dominant neoclassicism, employing those elements, and
rejecting or mocking those values and styles inscribed with ideological
significance.35
Among those of the older generation who contested the exclusive
dominant conception of the classic and the political connotations it car-
ried were Ravel, Satie, Roussel, and Koechlin. Ravel, as I argued in my
previous chapter, intrepidly confronted the dominant or conventional
models, which were devoid of irony and of borrowing from lower
cultural levels or dangerous foreign cultures. The latter included not
only the Germanic (of recent date), but those styles associated with
races or nationalities from which France was to be protected cul-
turally, such as African-American jazz. As I demonstrated, Ravel not
only ignored these proscriptions, as well as current models (in particu-
lar, the conservative, didactic opera of ideas), he mocked them, and
nowhere more incisively than in LEnfant et les sortileges.
While the younger generation of Les Six (Milhaud, Auric, Honeg-
ger, Poulenc, Durey, and Tailleferre), viewed apart from this context,
are often dismissed as frivolous pranksters, when placed within it, we
may see that they too confronted symbolic domination. For they expe-
rienced an even sharper disjunction between the French classic iden-
tity that was being imposed by the hegemonic culture and their own
 Shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu 321

experience in the new postwar world. Responding to the exclusions

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

Employing both satire and innovative techniques, Milhaud ridicules

the dominant classicism and conventions in a spirit that cuts far
deeper than simple parody, as we may perceive within the context. To
focus, then, as we have, on the playful eclecticism of this avant garde
in isolation is to miss its inherently contestatory elements, its methods
of confronting symbolic domination. For in a period when ideological
meaning was invested in style, such a response to then-dominant mod-
els, as Bourdieu makes us aware, carried political implications implicit
criticism if not clear alignment.38 Les Six were indeed repulsed by
attempts to control the production of meaning in music, as in Faures
funeral, or the conservative opera of ideas, as well as by the exclusive
official conception of the classic. The conventions they inverted or ren-
dered absurd were those associated with the aesthetic strictures and
models established since the war, and the narrow sense of symbolic
legitimacy that they embodied.
They rather sought a semiotic structure that was open and multi-
valent, as opposed to finite, or a Derridian destabilization of meaning
through incongruities and eclectic juxtaposition of styles. Here they
were palpably influenced by Saties strategic play with established
stylistic meanings in Parade, or his facetious brand of classicism that
so artfully evaded authority. Their classicism embraced reality, inno-
vation, and inclusion, as well as simplicity, as opposed to the idealistic,
archaic, socially instrumental classicism of official France.39 Although
they admired Stravinsky, their aim was not objectivity like his, but
rather to engage in a contestatory dialogue with the static, anachro-
nistic French culture around them.
This tendency, of course, was not exclusive to France other coun-
tries simultaneously experienced both a resurgence of conservative
models as well as different modernist interpretations of classic values.
But neoclassicism was a highly ramified tendency, assuming diver-
gent social meanings and stylistic traits not only in the various Euro-
pean countries but, again, within a nation itself. In Germany, a soci-
ety with no choice but to project a new future, despite conservative
currents, one model stressed a sober, constructive New Objectivity
 Shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu 323

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 Adornos 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
Adornos 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 artists 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 Adornos 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 Bourdieus 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

which can be challenged by strategies that open or disrupt the lan-

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

n ot e s
1 Foucault has developed this idea in several works, but perhaps most fully
in his LOrdre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) and in Les Mots et les
choses: Une archeologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). In the
latter source, see especially pp. 170176.
2 Derrida, Foucault, and Bourdieu are grouped together under this rubric in
Niilo Kauppi, The Politics of Embodiment: Habits, Power, and Pierre Bourdieus
Theory (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), p. 115.
3 Roger Chartier, Texts, Symbols, and Frenchness, The Journal of Modern
History 57/4 (December 1985), 682695.
4 Ibid., pp. 683684.
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

Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore:

The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
6 The application of Geertzs concept of a web of culture to musicology
has been discussed at length by Gary Tomlinson in The Web of Culture:
A Context for Musicology, Nineteenth-Century Music 7/3 (1984), 350362.
7 Chartier, Texts, Symbols, and Frenchness, p. 691.
8 This theme emerges in all Bourdieus work, but it is developed most
incisively, perhaps, in his theory of linguistic exchanges, which focuses on
interactive and mobile elements, as opposed to a stable structure. See
his Ce que parler veut dire: LEconomie des echanges linguistiques (Paris:
Fayard, 1982). On Foucaults conception of power as multiple, mobile,
and inherent in culture, including knowledge, see Daniel J. Sherman, The
Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999), p. 6.
9 Certainly, other aspects of Bourdieus sociology are relevant to
musicology, including his concepts of the field of cultural
reproduction, and the role of the intellectual in the production of
culture, but I shall here concentrate on his semiotic theories. For a
detailed discussion of symbolic violence, see Kauppi, The Politics of
Embodiment, pp. 6 ff., and Jeremy F. Lane, Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical
Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 126n.
10 La Domination masculine is an extension of Bourdieus earlier work on
Algeria, which introduced the conception of how domination is
interiorized.
11 Here Bourdieu is indebted to Durkheim and his theories of social strife as
essentially struggles over systems of classification. See Kauppi, The
Politics of Embodiment, p. 66.
12 See Pierre Bourdieu, Penser la politique, Actes de la recherche en sciences
sociales (March 1988), 23. Also see David Swartz, Culture and Power: The
Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995),
p. 7.
13 Theodor Adorno, The Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell
and Wesley V. Bloomster (London: Sheed and Ward, 1973), pp. 204, 206,
212, and 215.
14 Bourdieu discusses how the state subtly orients taste by such means as
honorific awards, prizes, etc., in The Market of Symbolic Goods,
Poetics 14 (1985), 1344. Geertz develops the concept of thick
326 Jane F. Fulcher

description at length in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New

York: Basic Books, 1973).
15 Faure died on November 4, 1924. The preceding conservative Bloc
National had been voted into power in 1919, bringing the Radicals and
the Right together to create a new centrist majority. On the Bloc National
and the Cartel des Gauches see Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times
(New York: Rand McNally, 1974), pp. 335337. Paul Leon, a specialist in
historical monuments, had been a Dreyfusard, although he was no
longer politically to the Left. He would finally lose his position under the
next coalition of the Left, in 1932.
16 On Saint-Saenss funeral, and how Leon managed to arrange it while the
Chamber and Finance Commission were on vacation, see Paul Leon, Du
Palais-Royal au Palais-Bourbon (Paris: Albin-Michel, 1947), pp. 2224.
17 The term lieu de memoire was made famous and current by Pierre
Nora in the collection that he edited for Gallimard, beginning in 1986,
Les Lieux de memoire, 3 vols.
18 On the reactionary cultural politics of the retour a lordre under
Poincare, following the Cartel des Gauches, see Romy Golan, Modernity
and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995), pp. viiiff.
19 Avner Ben-Amos, Les funerailles de gauche sous la IIIe Republique:
deuil et contestation, in Alain Corbin, Noelle Gerome, and Danielle
Tartakowsky, eds., Les Usages politiques des fetes aux XIXXXe siecles (Paris:
Publications de la Sorbonne, 1994), p. 200.
20 Ibid., p. 199.
21 The Versailles Treaty was signed on June 28, 1919. On the continuing
emotional responses to the war, see Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The
Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Toronto: Lester and Orpen
Dinnys, 1989), pp. 261265.
22 Ben-Amos, Les funerailles de gauche, p. 202.
23 Jacques Durand, Quelques souvenirs dun editeur de musique, 2eme serie
(19101924) (Paris: A. Durand et Fils, 1925), p. 156.
24 Ibid.
25 On the evolution of Faures style, see Jean-Michel Nectoux, Gabriel Faure:
Le voix du clair-obscur (Paris: Flammarion, 1992). On his role as mediator
between the two hostile musical societies while Director of the
Conservatoire, see Jane F. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music from
 Shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu 327

the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999), pp. 143147.
26 Durand, Quelques souvenirs, p. 156.
27 On the continuing primacy of patrie, see Maurice Agulhon, La
Republique: 1880 a nos jours (Paris: Hachette, 1990), vol. i, p. 350.
28 On Victor Turners 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), 197230.
30 Alfred Bruneau, La Vie et les oeuvres de Gabriel Faure. Notice lue par lauteur
a lAcademie des Beaux-Arts (Paris: Charpentier, 1925), p. 30.
31 Ibid., p. 31.
32 Agulhon, La Republique,vol. I, pp. 350.
33 See Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la Patrie: Les
intellectuels et la premiere guerre mondiale (19101919) (Paris: Editions de la
Decouverte, 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. 1618.
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 Republique,
vol. i, p. 270. And see Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual,
pp. 197200.
36 See Inez Hedges, Languages of Revolt: Dada and Surrealist Literature and
Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983), pp. xixviii, 3436, and
41.
37 The other two operas were LAbandon dAriane and La Delivrance de
Thesee. See Jeremy Drake, The Operas of Darius Milhaud (New York:
Garland, 1989) on both these works and on Milhauds 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 Faure, Du neoclassicisme dans la France du premier
328 Jane F. Fulcher

XXe siecle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1997), pp. 160162, 240, 252, 259, 265, and
337. Also see Marie-Claire Mussat, La Reception de Schoenberg en
France avant la Second Guerre Mondiale, Revue de musicologie 87/1
(2001), p. 180.
39 On Saties strategic play with meanings before the war (which
continued in Parade) see Fulcher, French Cultural Politics, pp. 144204. On
Parade see Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual, pp. 2028.
40 On the different neoclassicisms and the responses of German and French
youth to the postwar situation through them, see Jane F. Fulcher,
Trajectoires opposees: La culture musicale a Berlin et a Paris dans
lentre-deux-guerres, in Christophe Charle and Daniel Roche, eds.,
Capitales culturelles, capitales symboliques (XVIIIXXe siecles): Paris et les
experiences europeennes (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2002),
pp. 421434.
41 On Bourdieus 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. 113. Also see the special issue of Sciences humaines
dedicated to LOeuvre de Pierre Bourdieu, which appeared shortly
after his death in January 2002.
42 On Adornos self-definition against Hegel and the tradition that he
established, see Hauke Brunkhorst, Irreconcilable Modernity: Adornos
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. 4748.
And see Eric L. Krakauer, The Disposition of the Subiect: Reading Adornos
Dialectic of Technology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1998), pp. 139 and 143. On Bourdieus 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: Adornos French Model for the Criticism of
Nineteenth-Century Music, Journal of the American Musicological Society
(1978), 3940.
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. 165167.
 Shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu 329

47 On Bourdieus own view of his work as a sociological critique of

philosophy and a philosophical critique of sociology, see Kauppi, The
Politics of Embodiment, p. 116 and Pierre Bourdieu, Meditations pascaliennes
(Paris: Seuil, 1997), especially pp. 1012.
48 See Kauppi, The Politics of Embodiment, p. 66 and Lane, Pierre Bourdieu,
p. 50, as well as Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement
(Paris: Minuit, 1979), pp. 362364.
13 Rewriting history from the losers point of view:
French Grand Opera and modernity
Antoine Hennion
Translated by Sarah Boittin

Theoretical and methodological issues are questions whose least clear

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

MUSIC DOES NOT EXIST . . .

So how can we approach the relation between opera and society?1 Or

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

330
 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 Garfinkels 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. Blackings 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 arts sake) or rejected (by the advocates of social
332 Antoine Hennion

determination) but should instead be analyzed. This is not an ideo-

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

T H E G R E AT D I V I D E 5

How can one move beyond the two-part construction that results in
the separation of the musical and social aspects of music into two
increasingly autonomous objects of analysis? Chanting the mantra
of pluridisciplinism tends to beg the question rather than answer it:
the juxtaposition of various kinds of analytical elements (aesthetics,
 French Grand Opera and modernity 333

musical analysis, musical environment, social context) encourages the

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

genres and aesthetic values, establishment of a canon, rationalized

musical instruction, and lastly, for a century now, recordings that are
more and more hi fidelity but faithful to what?
This progressive musicalization forces us to write music history
backwards, on pain of continually projecting onto the past a mod-
ern conception of what music itself is. One of the many paradoxes
it has led to as Victoria Johnson points out in her introduction to
this volume is that disciplines tend to submit to this purification
rather than integrating it into their own analyses: depending on who
studies it, music is either musical or social. Music theory and musi-
cology owe it to themselves to regard as a given the very existence
of music and to study it musically; they are disciplines of the object
but do not possess any tools to study the production of music as
music.10 Thus they underestimate their own influence, for they are
participants in a decisive way in this musicalization that is, in the
transformation of music into a collective, recognized, and stabilized
object. Scores are the object, in more than one sense, of music scholars:
scholars work on scores, but they also make them, for, in a circular pro-
cess, scholars assist informed listeners and critics to mistake scores for
music.
On the other side of the Great Divide, the social history of music,
the sociology of culture, and the new critic-inspired music studies are
no less flawed from the point of view that concerns us. Relying on
excluded or dominated musical genres (rock, popular music, ethnic
music, female artists) which they rightly defend from discrediting by
classical musicology,11 they conceive of their work as an unveiling,
aimed at revealing the true nature of music, which they claim is not
musical but social (and sexual):12 removed from music, the power
of music is immediately returned to the social domain. Instead of
demonstrating the performing effectiveness of the social production
of an autonomous reality such as music, they denounce the deceptive
character of this autonomy, reducing music to the status of a simple
fetish whose reality derives, like that of Durkheims cultural objects,
from the collective which projects its shared faith and its relations of
force on the totems representing it.13 According to this hypothesis,
 French Grand Opera and modernity 335

which has become the common postulate of sociological analysis, any

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

A C H O I C E A L LY : T H E H I S T O RY O F A RT

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

OPERA, OR MUSIC AS AN EVENT

Opera seems a propitious ground for testing this re-examination and

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

of the genre continually return to the theme of total entertainment,

from its origins with the inventors in the Camerata dei Bardi in Florence
or French opera at the time of Louis XIV to historical grand opera,
Wagner, and contemporary composers. This is true, furthermore, to
such an extent that for contemporary composers the tension between
this ideal and the ideal of autonomy once modernism declared the
latter victorious, a point to which I shall return is probably the source
of their discomfort, forcing them more than in the case of any other
classical form to balance scorn or the proclamation of the death of the
genre, and acrobatic attempts at synthesis or compromise.
Opera is no less heterogeneous when observed in context or seen
from the exterior. From the outset it was a social event, charged with
passions, and this characteristic too was not experienced as a flaw or
proof of immaturity; it lies, on the contrary, at the heart of operas
aesthetic project. It is no accident that the aesthetic goal regularly
flirted with its political counterpart; opera was born of the desire of
the powerful in Italy, and of the kings of France and England. For
many years it was extremely popular in many countries; during the
course of history it was constantly used for various political or national
surgical operations.20 Opera is both above and apart from music: it is
less pure, (the Bach never wrote an opera syndrome); it typically
comes from Italy or France, the two eternal rival lovers, when everyone
knows that only German music is serious . . . Yet the Germans could
not rest easy until they had invented their own form of opera, the
Wagnerian monster. Modernism itself, defined far from the realm of
opera, was not complete until it invaded opera too or vanquished it.
Closer to its audience than pure music, opera is also a mixed genre
by virtue of the variety of feelings, emotions, pleasures, and the forms
of attachment it arouses. A fan of lyrical music is never quite sure what
is at stake in his love of opera: what is the precise nature of the pleasure
derived from a high C? The answer is so obscure that psychoanalysts
have approached the field of music almost exclusively through these
gaps in musical desire that lead into some sort of lost paradise.
It seems extremely relevant to try and deploy here, with regard to
the instructive fate of French nineteenth-century opera, a problematic
 French Grand Opera and modernity 339

analogous to that we defined to analyze Bach.21 For opera is a genre

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

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

Let us turn now to consider what authors of general works writing in

the first half of the twentieth century say about the main representatives
of French Grand Opera. In 1946, Dufourcqs La musique des origines a
nos jours devotes two pages to Grand Opera, assessing its principal
representatives as follows:

However, this pleasant conversationalist [Auber] speaks only rarely to

our emotions. An artist of limited scope, with a horizon extending no
farther than the Boulevard, he incarnates the fashionable Paris mood of
his day, with all that this expression implies in terms of both brilliance
and extreme superficiality . . . Meyerbeers art seems very dated to us
today . . . Meyerbeer possesses to the highest degree a feeling for scenic
effect, and employs means that, while they may not be subtle, are
effective. However, his uneven and motley style, along with the bombast
disguising often empty and vulgar concepts, make performances of his
operas hard to take today . . . This decorative music no longer moves us,
and shows signs of incurable wrinkles . . . The publics taste for this trite
lyrical tragedy (Halevys La Juive, 1835) surprises us a bit today; Scribes
dramatic tricks seem juvenile, and the music conventional.24

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 Halevy (that is, Levy, known as Halevy) 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 Felix Clement, 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

defender of religious music waxes enthusiastic about masterpieces,

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

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

repressed in order to catch a glimpse of the slightly dated patterns

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

MODERNISM

This brings us back to our initial theme: the distinct separation between
the social and the musical bequeathed to us by modernism, which social
criticism reinforces while claiming to abolish it through reflection, is
exactly what French opera has always fought, but by acts, not 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 publics 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

happens. Everything counts. Everything must be weighed, to unleash

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

n ot e s
1 Blackings 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 Joel-Marie
Fauquet and Antoine Hennion, La Grandeur de Bach (Paris: Fayard, 2000).
4 The ground-breaking essays by Siegfried Kracauer on Offenbachs 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: Kings Crown Press, 1948])
had to await, for their heritage to be acknowledged, the pioneering work
of Jane Fulcher, The Nations Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and
Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), on the
346 Antoine Hennion

political status of Grand Opera, now followed by works of researchers like

Anselm Gerhard (The Urbanization of Opera [Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998]) on Meyerbeers Paris, and Steven Huebner (French
Opera at the fin de siecle: Wagnerism, Nationalism and Style [New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999]).
5 This phrase is one Bruno Latour has employed in speaking of science and
society (Latour, We Have Never Been Modern [New York and London:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993]). Latour underscores the parallelism with
another Great Divide, this one social, between us and them; it is easy
to transpose this other divide to the musical case. We have developed a
rational and autonomous art world; they, primitive or popular and far
removed either in time or on the social scale, are supposed to remain in a
state where music and social rites are impossible to separate from one
another.
6 I have attempted to rethink this music/society duality in Antoine
Hennion, La Passion musicale: Une sociologie de la mediation (Paris: Metailie,
1993).
7 Pierre Bourdieu, in response to the accusation brought against him of
neglecting artistic production or holding it to be illusory, raises this
problem concerning Flaubert in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the
Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1996). The paradoxical solution he suggests is to consider Flaubert as the
precursor of Bourdieu himself: an author whose principal work is to
reveal the structure of the literary field of his time, and to assert his
autonomy by making artists the sole judges of art, in opposition to the
bourgeoisie and the mass market.
8 This line was first explored by Max Weber, The Rational and Social
Foundations of Music, trans. and ed. Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel, and
Gertrud Neuwirth (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958).
9 After being notably absent from music history, the historical appearance of
a specifically musical ability to listen to music has been the object of recent
work, of various orientations: Mary Sue Morrow, Concert Life in Haydns
Vienna (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1989); James H. Johnson,
Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995); William Weber, Did People Listen in the Eighteenth
Century?, Early Music 25 (November 1997), 678691; Antoine Hennion,
Lecoute a la question, Revue de musicologie 88/1 (2002), 95149.
 French Grand Opera and modernity 347

10 Concerning the formation of the musical canon, an issue whose crucial

character was clearly demonstrated by William Weber (The Rise of
Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual and
Ideology [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992]), this type of reflexive
interrogation of musicology regarding its own role has been the starting
point for the renewal of music studies: e.g., Alan Durant, Conditions of
Music (London: Macmillan, 1984); Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music:
Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1985); Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Disciplining Music:
Musicology and Its Canons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
11 For example, Pieter C. Van den Toorn, Politics, Feminism, and
Contemporary Music Theory, Journal of Musicology 9 (1991), 275299.
12 Or political, e.g., Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, eds., Music and
Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987).
13 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Karen
E. Fields (New York: The Free Press, 1995 [1912]). His analyses have
provided the model for many others, from ethnology to interactionism
to Bourdieu. Critical theories spread the most rapidly. Ask someone
about his tastes and he will make excuses my parents were very
highbrow and encouraged my older sister to play the violin . . .
Music-lovers know better than anyone else that their tastes are
determined, relative, linked to their origins, arbitrary. Paradoxically, we
are so conditioned by sociological readings of our tastes that now a
sociologist has to use all his talent to convince a music-lover to say what
he likes, what he is attached to, in other words, to desociologize him!
See Antoine Hennion, Music Lovers: Taste as Performance, Theory,
Culture and Society 18/5 (October 2001), 122.
14 This is a limitation of Pierre Bourdieus critical approach (Distinction: A
Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice [Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1984]). The emphasis he places on the
necessary denegation by the believers of the constructed character of the
object in which they believe (which object he terms the illusio, or enjeu in
French: the stake ludere = Jouer = to gamble) prevents us from taking
that object seriously in and of itself, for to take it seriously would be to
mimic the social actors in their belief.
15 To adopt another of Blackings formulas (see above, note 2).
348 Antoine Hennion

16 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in
Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France
(Oxford: Phaidon, 1976); Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and
the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 15001900 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1981).
17 Notwithstanding their crucial contribution, this is a limit of reception
theories by Hans R. Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1982), and Wolfgang Iser, The Act of
Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1978).
18 Fauquet and Hennion, La Grandeur de Bach.
19 Joel-Marie Fauquet, Les Societes de musique de chambre a Paris de la
Restauration a 1870 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1986).
20 See Fulcher, The Nations Image, and Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera.
Before that, in France, the struggles between the French and the Italians,
which were referred back to the king or the queen, had always traced
political borders, while elsewhere in Europe (Germany, Spain, Slavic
countries, etc.), in particular because of the importance placed on
language, reappropriation of national repertoire always worked in favor
of opera.
21 As it is not completed yet, I can only mention this work, also undertaken
with musicologist Joel-Marie Fauquet.
22 See the fascinating correspondence between Eugene Scribe and
Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber published by Herbert Schneider
(Correspondance dEugene Scribe and Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber [Liege:
Mardaga, 1998]).
23 The same, meticulously disassembled and borrowed, also contributed
most of the technical means and savoir-faire to composers of film music.
24 Norbert Dufourcq, ed., La Musique des origines a nos jours (Paris: Larousse,
revised and corrected edition, 1946), pp. 306307.
25 On this question, see also Steven Huebner, French Opera at the fin de siecle.
26 Dufourcq, La Musique des origines a nos jours, p. 307.
27 Emile Vuillermoz, Histoire de la musique (Paris: Le Livre de poche, 1973),
p. 285.
28 See Felix Clement and Pierre Larousse, Dictionnaire des Operas (Paris:
Larousse, 18631880).
 French Grand Opera and modernity 349

29 Andre Coeuroy, Dictionnaire critique de la musique ancienne et moderne

(Paris: Payot, 1956), pp. 276277.
30 Ibid., p. 346.
31 B. R. Hanning, ed., Concise History of Western Music, second edition (New
York: Norton, 2002). Another example can be found in Herve Lacombe,
Les Voies de lopera francais au XIXe siecle (Paris: Fayard, 1997), who cannot
begin his defense of the genre without saying that French opera only
rarely seeks the sublime, or intenseness, profoundness in expression,
density in writing; rather, it favors whatever is entertaining, pleasant,
nuanced, light, and also everything that astonishes and impresses
(p. 9, written five lines after the author has complained that nineteenth-
century French opera suffers overall from a poor reputation).
32 Especially in France, it is true: the source country is the most sensitive
to the social connotations of a genre, easily seen as relative or exotic
elsewhere; today Massenet is performed more readily in Italy, Saint-
Saens in New York, and Fra Diavolo in Germany than is a
nineteenth-century French opera in Paris.
33 On the opposition between social and artist criticism of capitalism,
see Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Le Nouvel Esprit du capitalisme
(Paris: Gallimard, 1999).
34 Thus the recent Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, edited by David
Charlton (2003), a very well-informed work, focuses most of its entries
on Wagnerism, Verdi, and the question of nationalism, as does the latest
book by Steven Huebner, French Opera at the fin de siecle: Wagnerism,
Nationalism and Style. This characteristic can be compared with the
venomous note already added by Harewood to the entry on Meyerbeer
in the Kobbe, the Bible of all opera fans: It can be said that the best
example of French Grand Opera is to be found not in Meyerbeer, but in
Verdi, with Don Carlos (n. 1, p. 438 of the French edition of the edition
revised by the Earl of Harewood of Gustave Kobbes Tout lopera, 1982.
The work itself is imbued with the enormous affection of a lover of all
these works.)
35 This point was made masterfully by Fulcher, The Nations Image. But it is
not enough to restore the political importance of French opera in its time
(as Baxandall did, to repeat my argument); one must also understand, as
Haskell did, its subsequent musical devaluation.
350 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 operas writers and composers, than with the solitary gesture of a
creative genius such as Beethoven.
37 I am thereby inverting an ironic comparison often made between
Hollywood and French opera, even by those who love French opera,
such as the stage director David Pountney, who doubts that one can
resuscitate a genre that inspires the same kind of ironic affection that we
commonly reserve for those magnificent edifices of Hollywood high
camp (Cambridge Companion to Opera, p. 146).
C O N C LU S I O N : T OWA R D S A N E W U N D E R S TA N D I N G
O F T H E H I S T O RY O F O P E R A ?

Thomas Ertman

As this collection has demonstrated, an exciting process of convergence

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

351
352 Thomas Ertman

tremendous multiplicity of meanings embedded within works that

have often been interpreted as straightforward glorifications of abso-
lute monarchy.
In the space remaining in this conclusion, I wish to sketch out briefly
another way that Bourdieus work can be employed within opera stud-
ies, one that builds upon and further encourages the comparative
dimension also found in this volume. As has often been remarked,
including by Herbert Lindenberger above, one of the unique features
of opera is the genres clearly defined historical parameters (general
agreement on what constitutes an opera, the genres four-hundred-
year history, limited number of principal centers). These characteris-
tics suggest that we might arrive at a new understanding of operas
rich past if we apply to it some of the methods pioneered in recent
decades by historically oriented social scientists. As Victoria Johnson
has noted in her introduction, such social scientists began in the 1960s
and 1970s to seek answers to questions such as why some European
polities developed in an absolutist direction prior to the French Revo-
lution while others did not; or why some fell into dictatorship during
the interwar years while others remained democracies. Their models
were contested and revised over the coming decades and form part of
the historical turn within political science and sociology.1
Opera history presents us with a series of broad questions that,
like those concerning European political development, would bene-
fit if addressed in an explicitly comparative manner. Why is it, we
might ask, that at certain times and places (Italy from the seventeenth
through the early twentieth century, early nineteenth-century France)
new native works filled the opera stages while at other times and places
(eighteenth-century France, nineteenth-century Germany) a repertory
system built around older or imported pieces predominated? Why does
opera seem largely to have died out as a living art form since the Second
World War? And finally, why has so-called directors theatre (Regiethe-
ater) come to dominate opera stagings in Germany and, increasingly,
in Britain and France but not in Italy or the United States?
One way to go about answering such questions is to begin with
a general model of how the arts developed during the early modern
 Conclusion 353

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 arts 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 Bourdieus 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 Bourdieus 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

against it of the kind instigated, according to Bourdieu, by progressive

French writers and painters of the mid-nineteenth century. In other
words, there never was an avant garde within the world of the classical
Italian opera industry. Given the lack of alternative, non-commercial,
sources of financial support capable of underwriting the tremendous
costs of opera productions, it is difficult to see how there could have
been. The displacement of the impresario by the publisher as the key
figure in the Italian system during the last third of the nineteenth cen-
tury brought no major change in this respect since the motives of the
latter were equally dominated by commercial concerns. It is notewor-
thy that the most significant revolt that did take place within the
world of the Italian lyric stage that of Gluck and his reform operas
reached its culmination under the very different production system of
the Viennese court.
In France, the founding of the Royal Academy of Music (the Opera)
and the parallel creation by Quinault and Lully of the tragedie lyrique
as both an alternative to Italian opera and, as Catherine Kintzler has
argued, a rival to the spoken theatre long prevented the breakthrough
of a commercially oriented opera business. The Opera was a lead-
ing institution of state and the latter long decreed that only tragedies
lyriques and opera-ballets should be performed there. As William Weber
has elsewhere shown, this restriction, combined with the length of the
season (most often 120160 performances per annum) and the bureau-
cratic process for commissioning new works, transformed the Opera
after the death of Lully in 1687 into a repertory house built around his
works and, in the eighteenth century, those of Rameau as well.6 Thus,
as Weber has remarked, programming did not necessarily reflect pub-
lic taste7 but rather served other, primarily ideological, purposes.
Under these conditions, the opposition to the operatic mainstream
was represented by the forbidden: Italian opera and opera-comique.
The visit of an Italian troupe to the Opera during the 1752/1753 and
1753/1754 seasons proved popular, but the backlash against them (the
Querelle des Bouffons) put an end to this experiment. With the arrival of
Marie-Antoinette, acquainted from her native Vienna with a different
theatrical regime, on the throne in 1774, the old restrictions were soon
356 Thomas Ertman

loosened and German and Italian composers (Gluck, Piccinni, Salieri,

Cherubini, Sacchini) flocked to the French capital to compose new
works albeit in French for the Opera.8
At least a partial victory, in Bourdieus terms, of the commercial
theatre over the Academy did occur, however, in 1831 when the man-
agement of the Opera was turned over to a directeur-entrepreneur,
a businessman who, with the help of a sizeable subsidy from the
state, sought to turn the theatre into a profitable enterprise. As
Jane Fulcher has shown, this subsidy was purchased at the price of
continuous, interventionist, government oversight.9 Aside from the
years 1854 to 1866, when direct state administration was restored,
director-entrepreneurs were to run the Opera for the rest of the cen-
tury, attempting to earn back their initial investment (or that of their
backers) while meeting their contractual obligation to produce grand
operas and ballets in sumptuous stagings worthy of Frances leading
theatre.
As Christophe Charle emphasizes in his contribution to this volume,
by the last third of the nineteenth century this system had led to
artistic stagnation, with only sixteen new works premiered at the Opera
between 1870 and 1900. A principal reason behind this, as he states,
was the houses fragile budgetary position, caused in good measure by
the immense costs associated with mounting Grand Opera, combined
with the conservatism of its core public. For the Operas financial
health depended heavily on the good will of conservative subscribers
from the haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy who, during the last third
of the century, purchased about 40 percent of the tickets accounting
for 60 percent of total revenue.10 Because subscribers, many of them
box holders, expected to visit the house regularly and see a varied
program, the management was obliged, as in the eighteenth century,
to offer a large number (160180) of performances each year. Given the
financial and artistic risks of new productions, this was only possible
as a repertory house built around the grand operas of Meyerbeer,
Halevy and Rossini and the works of Gounod (Faust, Romeo et Juliette),
Thomas (Hamlet), Mozart (Don Giovanni) and Verdi (Rigoletto, Ada,
later Otello).11
 Conclusion 357

When the Operas 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 Opera-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 Tannhauser in 1861 at the Opera, it
is significant that his most prominent supporter was Baudelaire, a key
figure in Bourdieus account of the emergence of a modern art world
in France structured around the opposition between market-driven
cultural production and the art for arts 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,
dIndy 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
Wagners 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 Pelleas
et Melisande, certainly the most avant-garde score theretofore heard
at the Opera-comique. On the other hand, as Fulcher emphasizes in
her contributions here, some extreme French nationalists like dIndy
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 Wagners 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 Verdis 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 Massenets lyrical setting of dialogue and from Wag-
nerian harmonies and orchestration, all in the service of the greatest
 Conclusion 359

possible emotional impact, the political valence of which, as the Stein-

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

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 Bourdieus 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 Bourdieus 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 Colon 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. 128, and Democracy and Dictatorship in Interwar
Western Europe Revisited, World Politics (April 1998).
2 Pierre Bourdieu, Les Regles de lart: Genese et structure du champ litteraire
(Paris: Seuil, 1992), p. 228.
3 Ibid., pp. 107115, 121, 154155.
4 Ibid., pp. 221228.
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, 17801880, in Lorenzo Bianconi and
Giorgio Pestelli, eds., Opera Production and Its Resources, trans. Lydia G.
Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 81164; Franco
Piperno, Opera Production to 1780, in ibid., pp. 179; 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

2006); William C. Holmes, Opera Observed: Views of a Florentine Impresario

in the Early Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993).
6 William Weber, La musique ancienne in the Waning of the Ancien
Regime, Journal of Modern History 56 (March 1984), 5888.
7 Ibid., p. 69.
8 Ibid., pp. 8485.
9 Jane Fulcher, The Nations Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and
Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
10 Steven Huebner, French Opera at the fin de siecle: Wagnerism, Nationalism
and Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 7.
11 Ibid., p. 2; Michael Walter, Die Oper ist ein Irrenhaus (Stuttgart/Weimar:
Metzler, 1997), p. 47.
12 Quoted in Martin Geck, Richard Wagner (Reinbek bei Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 2004), p. 28. See also Fulcher, The Nations Image, pp. 183200.
13 Huebner, French Opera at the fin de siecle, pp. 164165.
14 Ibid., pp. 6972.
15 Huebner, French Opera at the fin de siecle; Jane F. Fulcher, French Cultural
Politics and Music from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999); Jane F. Fulcher, ed., Debussy and His World
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jane F. Fulcher, The
Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 19141940 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005).
16 Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson,
1987), pp. 57, 8991.
17 Ibid., p. 64.
18 Elisabeth Schirmer, Kleine Geschichte der Oper (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003),
p. 251.
19 In the United States, where such risks remain substantial, many more
opera composers have distanced themselves over the past two decades
from modernist strictures and attempted to write new works that are
more immediately accessible, some of which, especially the
minimalist operas of Philip Glass and John Adams, have enjoyed a
measure of success.
20 A preliminary report is available in Claudio Benzecry, Beauty at the
Gallery: Operatic Community and Sentimental Education in
Contemporary Buenos Aires, in Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett,
 Conclusion 363

eds., The Practice of Culture (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2006).

Final results will be available in Benzecrys Ph.D. dissertation,
Department of Sociology, New York University, tentatively entitled A
Night at the Opera: High Culture, Moral Engagement, Middle Class
Ethos and Popular Practice in the Opera Houses of Buenos Aires.
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INDEX

Abbate, Carolyn, 52, 127, 303 Fra Diavolo, 349

In Search of Opera, 301, 303 La Muette de Portici, 184, 340
Unsung Voices, 5, 303 Aureli, Aurelio, 38
Abbiati, Albino, 206 Alessandro Magno in Sidonia, 42, 4647
Abbott, Andrew, 7 LAntigona delusa da Alceste, 38
Academie Royale de Musique, see also Claudio Cesare, 41, 4346, 51
Opera, 72, 73, 77, 176, 355 Auric, Georges, 320
Accademia degli Imperturbabili, librettist
Il Tolomeo, 38 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 117, 310, 337, 338,
Accademia degli Incogniti, 35, 51 339, 341, 345
Action Francaise, 317 Bachelet, Alfred, 129
Acton, John, 145 Un Jardin sur lOronte, 120121, 129,
Adami, Giuseppe, 274, 276 319
Adams, John, 362 Badovero, Camillo
Adorno, Theodor, 4, 292, 294, 304, 307, 312, Sesto Tarquinio, 38
314, 323324 Baglioni family, 150153
Aeschylus Bakhtin, Mikhail, 304
Oresteia, 321 Ballet, see also comedie-ballet, dance, 77,
Agulhon, Maurice, 318 8182, 8485, 144, 145, 344, 355
Albaret, le comte d Banti, Alberto, 194197, 200, 228, 231,
Scylla et Glaucus, 84 241
Alexander the Great, 46 Baritone voice, 93
Alfano, Franco, 270, 275, 276, 287 Barres, Maurice, 123
Andre, Johann, 297 Les Deracines, 124
Andre, Naomi, 3132 Un Jardin sur lOronte, 119121, 319
Andreozzi, Gaetano Barthes, Roland, 9, 10
Saulle, 145 Bartlet, Elizabeth, 17, 3031
Annales School, 6, 7 Bass voice, 96, 100
Anne, Queen of England, 169 Bassi, Carolina, 89, 96, 97, 101, 111, 112, 113,
Anthropology, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 312, 114
313 Bassi, Nicola, 100
Apuleius Battoni, Pompeo, 50
Metamorphoses, 46 Baudelaire, Charles, 353, 357
Aretino, Pietro Baxandall, Michael, 336337, 349
Ragionamenti, 52 Bayreuth Festival, 251, 271, 310
Aristophanes, 77 Beau monde, 170173, 175176
Aristotle, 49, 83 Beauchamp, Pierre, 54, 71
Poetics, 74 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 117, 337, 341, 344,
Ashbrook, William, 272273, 275, 276 350
Auber, Daniel Francois, 339, 340, 341, 348 Fidelio, 90, 95, 98

395
396 Index

Beethoven, Ludwig van (cont.) Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 11, 263, 291, 304306,
Leonore (1805), 90, 98 312, 313314, 322, 323324, 325, 346, 347,
Leonore (1806), 90, 98 351, 352, 353354, 356, 357, 359, 360
Bellini, Giovanni, 50 Distinction, 11, 292, 304, 360361
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, 353354
Norma, 106 Braudel, Fernand, 139
Benda, Julien Brecht, Bertolt
La Trahison des clers, 319 Mahagonny Songspiel, 321
Benzecry, Claudio, 362363 Bretzner, C.F., 297, 299
Berchet, Giovanni, 195 Brooks, Cleanth, 8
Berg, Alban, 359 Bruneau, Alfred, 253, 265, 318
Lulu, 359 LAttaque du Moulin, 265
Wozzeck, 359, 360 Le Reve, 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 Lincoronazione di Poppea, 34, 37, 4243
Berlioz, Hector, 245, 253, 295 La prosperita infelice di Giulio Cesare
Bertolucci, Bernardo, 282287 dittatore, 40
The Spiders Strategem, 277, 278, 282287 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 dIssy, 73
Carmen, 259, 264, 339 Les Peines et les plaisirs de lAmour, 84
Blacking, John, 330, 331, 345, 347 Pomone, 84
Blasetti, Alessandro, 271272 Cambridge Opera Journal, 5
Bloc National, 116, 118, 317, 326 Cammarano, Salvadore, 110, 185, 186189,
Blum, Leon, 125 193, 236
Boito, Camillo Campistron, Jean Galbert de
Senso, 279 Acis et Galatee, 84
Bokina, John Campra, Andre
Opera and Politics: From Monteverdi to Le Carnaval de Venise, 84
Henze, 301 LEurope galante, 82
Boretti, Giovanni Les Fetes venitiennes, 85
Claudio Cesare, 41, 43 Fragments de M. de Lully, 84
Borghi, Giovanni Battista Idomenee, 86
Olimpiade, 142 Canteloube, Joseph
Borodin, Alexander, 255 Le Mas, 123, 319
Boschot, Adolphe, 119 Vercingetorix, 124
Bossuet, Jacques-Benigne, 83 Cantillon, Richard, 164
Bouilly, Jean-Nicolas, 98 Capitelli, Luigi, 95
Boulez, Pierre, 339, 359 Caracalla, Antoninus, 43
 Index 397

Carcano, Giulio, 224 Commedia dellarte, 51

Carlo Alberto, King of Sardinia, 197, Contralto voice, 96
201202, 207, 238 Cornali, Pietro, 229, 231
Carnesecchi, Riccardo, 232 Canto degli italiani, 226228
Carre, Albert, 249250 Corneille, Pierre
Carreras, Jose, xxii Cinna, 299
Cartel des Gauches, 122, 127 Discours de lutilite et des parties du poeme
Casella, Alfredo, 359 dramatique, 85
Castrati, 32, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 97, 98, Corradi, Giulio Cesare
102, 103104, 106, 108, 109, 149, 153, Il Nerone, 38, 42, 46, 4748
308 Cortesi, Carolina, 89, 99
Cavour, Count Camillo Benso di, 181 Cowper, Lord George, 158
Celletti, Rodolfo, 109 Croce, Benedetto, 280
Censorship, 181, 184, 199200, 228229 Crosten, William, 345
Chabrier, Emmanuel, 253, 357
Gwendoline, 260 Dadaism, 321
Chailly, Riccardo, 238 Dallapiccola, Luigi, 273
Charle, Christophe, 136, 176, 356, 357, 358 Dalle Vacche, Angela, 280, 281
Charles II, King of England, 166 Dalman-Naldi, Adelina, 9798
Charpentier, Gustave, 253, 265 Dance, see also ballet, comedie-ballet, 37,
Louise, 1516, 261 5354, 5758, 60, 6163, 65, 66, 68, 69,
Charpentier, Marc-Antoine 70, 71, 74, 80, 82, 85
Le Malade imaginaire, 84 Danchet, Antoine
Medee, 86 Fragments de M. de Lully, 84
Chartier, Roger, 6, 312313 Idomenee, 86
Chatelet, Theatre du (Paris), 247 Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 299
Chausson, Ernst, 357 Darnton, Robert, 6
Cherubini, Luigi, 161, 356 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 6
Chiossone Debord, Guy, 83
Canto degli italiani, 226228 Debussy, Claude, 129, 262, 339, 342, 358
Cinque giornate (Milan 1848), 181, 183, 204, Pelleas et Melisande, 260, 261, 265, 358
206207, 223, 238 Delannoy, Marcel
Clement, Catherine Le Poirier de misere, 122123, 319
Opera, or the Undoing of Women, 14 De Laurentiis, Dino, 273
Clement, Etienne Delibes, Leo, 253, 254, 264
Vercingetorix, 124 Jean de Nivelle, 260
Clement, Felix, 340341 Lakme, 254, 260
Coccia, Carlo, 231 DellAbatte, Niccolo, 50
Cocteau, Jean, 318 DeMille, Cecil B., 273
Coeuroy, Andre Denis, Maurice, 118
Dictionnaire critique de la musique ancienne Dent, Edward J., 297
et moderne, 341 Derrida, Jacques, 312, 322, 324
Cohen, Gustave, 116 De Sanctis, Francesco, 267
Coke, Lady Mary, 171 Desmarest, Henry
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 176 Venus et Adonis, 86
Colette, 125, 127 Destouches, Andre Cardinal
Comedie-ballet, 76, 84, 85 Callirhoe, 86
Comedie Francaise, 250 Isse, 84, 86
398 Index

Destouches, Philippe Nericault Film/Cinema, 269, 271272, 273, 278, 281,

Les Amours de Ragonde, 77 296, 309, 348, 359
Dezarnaud, Robert, 128 Flaubert, Gustave, 304, 346, 353
DIndy, Vincent, 121, 123, 124, 126127, 357, LEducation sentimentale, 304
358 Florence, 158
La Legende de Saint Christophe, 116119, Forzano, Giovacchino, 273274, 276
121, 126, 130, 319 Foucault, Michel, 6, 8, 10, 196, 292, 303,
Dio Cassius, 41 304, 312, 313, 314, 324, 325
Divertissement, 54, 5556, 57, 64, 65, 66, 67, The Order of Things, 303
68, 69, 70, 76, 82, 351 Francesco Lucca, publishers, 206, 208
Dorrie, Doris, 287 Frankfurt School, 4
Domingo, Placido, xxii Freemasonry, 145
Donizetti, Gaetano, 88, 91, 101, 148, 161, French Revolution, 6, 17, 3031, 41, 87, 92,
182, 231, 273, 358 144, 243, 260
Belisario, 193194 Freud, Sigmund, 285, 286
Il castello di Kenilworth, 113 Moses and Monotheism, 277278
Chiara e Serafina, 112 Fulcher, Jane, 1516, 3233, 175, 260,
Il diluvio universale, 145 292293, 304, 345, 349, 351, 356, 358
Lesule di Roma, 113 French Cultural Politics, 15
Il paria, 113 French Grand Opera, 5
Poliuto, 229, 230 Fusconi, Giovanni Battista
Dreyfus Affair, 117, 119, 124, 260, 261, 318, Amore inamorata, 46, 51
326
Dufourcq, Norbert Gallet, Louis
La Musique des origines a nos jours, 340 Patrie, 264
Dufresny, Charles, 167 Gallini, Sir Andrew, 172
Dumesnil, Rene, 120 Galuppi, Baldassarre, composer, 150
Durey, Louis, 320 LArcadia in Brenta, 150, 157
Durkheim, Emile, 325, 334, 347 Arcifanfano re dematti, 150
18BL, theatrical spectacle, 271272, Il filosofo di campagna, 150
276 Gard, Roger Martin du, 119
Garfinkel, Harold, 331
English Civil War, 166 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 197
Ernst August, Duke of Hannover, 41, 51 Gazzaniga, Giuseppe
Ethnomusicology, 11 Don Giovanni, 150, 153
Euripides Geertz, Clifford, 7, 8, 312, 314
Alcestis, 38, 55 Georg Ludwig, Duke of Hannover, 41
Gerhard, Anselm, 346
Fano, 142 Gheon, Henri, 116
Fascism, Italian, 137, 268269, 270272, Giannone, Pietro, 145
273, 274275, 276, 278, 281, 282283, Gilbert, Gabriel
286, 359 Les Peines et les plaisirs de lAmour, 84
Fauquet, Joel-Marie, 348 Gilbert, W.S., 251
Faure, Gabriel, 314315, 316319, 322 Gille, Philippe
Requiem, 316, 317 Manon, 264
Feminism, 12 Gilson, Etienne, 116
Ferdinand II, King of the Two Sicilies, 202 Giordano, Umberto, 255, 260, 273
Ferdinand IV, King of Naples, 144148 Andrea Chenier, 257
 Index 399

Fedora, 257 Messiah, 158

Giovanni Canti, publishers, 208 Serse, 105, 114
Gisberti, Domenic Hanning, B.R.
Caligula delirante, 51 Concise History of Western Music, 341
Glass, Philip, 362 Harewood, Lord, 349
Glixon, Beth and Jonathan, 354 Harris-Warrick, Rebecca, 30, 351
Inventing the Business of Opera, 17 Haskell, Francis, 336337, 339, 349
Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 168, 299, 355, Hedges, Inez, 321
356 Hegel, G.W.F., 323
Iphigenie en Aulide, 295 Heller, Wendy, 31, 354
Iphigenie en Tauride, 298 Hennion, Antoine, 293, 359
Orfeo ed Euridice, 295 Henze, Hans Werner, 359
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 145 Herodotus, 41
Goldoni, Carlo, 150 Hindemith, Paul, 321
LArcadia in Brenta, 150, 157 Hin und Zuruck, 321
Arcifanfano re de matti, 150 History/Historians, 2, 34, 56, 10, 11, 12, 13,
Il filosofo di campagna, 150 1516, 17, 138, 139, 302, 312313, 339, 351
Gondinet, Edmond, 264 Hitler, Adolf, 271
Gossett, Philip, 112, 136137 Holmes, William, 354
Gozzi, Carlo Honegger, Arthur, 320
Turandot, 275 Hue, Georges
Gounod, Charles, 253, 339, 341 Dans lombre de la cathedrale, 121122, 319
Cinq-Mars, 260 Huebner, Steven, 346, 358
Faust, 295, 339, 356 Hugo, Victor, 87
Polyeucte, 260 Humperdinck, Engelbert, 255, 256
Romeo et Juliette, 356 Hansel und Gretel, 256
Gramsci, Antonio, 267268, 278, 280, 281, Hunt, Lynn, 6
282 Hutcheon, Linda and Michael
Gregorian chant, 117 Opera: Desire, Disease, Death, 301
Gregory XVI, 201
Griffiths, D.W., 273 Ilaria, Francesco
Guglielmi, Pietro Alessandro Inno nazionale dedicato alla Legione civica
Debora e Sisara, 145 romana mobilizzata, 223
Guidi, Francesco Impresarios, 135, 138
Inno subalpino, 201 Intermezzo, 139, 149, 150
Guiraud, Ernest, 253 Izzo, Francesco, 231
Piccolino, 264
Jauss, Hans, 348
Habermas, Jurgen, 167 Jazz, 125, 126, 131, 343
Habitus, 263 Johann Friedrich, Duke of Hannover, 41, 51
Hadlock, Heather, 109 Johnson, James
Halevy, Jacques Fromental, 340, 341, 356 Listening in Paris, 16
La Juive, 108, 340 Johnson, Victoria, 334, 351, 352
Halevy, Ludovic Joncieres, Victorin, 245, 247, 253, 258, 263
Carmen, 264 Dmitri, 258, 260
Handel, George Frideric, 53, 144, 174175, Joseph II, Emperor of Austria, 296, 297
306307, 309, 310 Journal des Luxus und der Mode, 160, 162163
Alcina, 105, 114 Justin, 41
400 Index

Kerman, Joseph, 35, 305 Opera in History, 5, 25

Contemplating Music, 10 Lipparini, Caterina, 89, 95
Opera as Drama, 14, 18, 302303 Lippmann, Friedrich, 234
Kings Theatre (London), 171, 176 Literary Criticism/Studies, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10,
Kintzler, Catherine, 2930, 351, 355 11, 12, 13, 14, 25, 138, 291, 303, 351
Koechlin, Charles, 320 Livorno, 140141
Koestenbaum, Wayne, 303 Livy
The Queens Throat, 14, 303 Roman Histories, 39
Kolker, Robert, 285, 286 Loewenberg, Alfred, 244
Korngold, Erich Wolfgang, 359 London, 160162, 164165, 166176
Kracauer, Siegfried, 345 London und Paris, 160, 161162, 165
Kramer, Lawrence Louis XIV, 5758, 60, 69, 166, 169, 299, 306,
Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 338, 343
11 Louis XV, 166
Kroll Opera (Berlin), 123 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 54, 67, 68, 71, 73, 78,
166, 295, 351, 355
La Barre, Michel de Acis et Galatee, 71, 84
La Venitienne, 85 Alceste, 30, 54, 55, 5657, 67, 69, 70, 71, 81
Lacombe, Herve, 349 Armide, 30, 54, 6567, 68, 69, 71
La Fenice (Venice), 89, 91, 110, 193, 279 Atys, 30, 54, 55, 5863, 64, 67, 69, 71
Lafont, Joseph de Bellerophon, 68, 174
Les Fetes de Thalie, 77 Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, 84, 299
Lalo, Edouard, 253 Cadmus et Hermione, 73
Le Roy dYs, 260 Les Facheux, 84
Lalo, Pierre, 123 Les Fetes de lAmour et de Bacchus, 84
La Motte, Antoine Houdar de Persee, 68, 71
LEurope galante, 82 Phaeton, 71
Isse, 84, 86 Roland, 71
La Venitienne, 85 Thesee, 86
La Scala (Milan), 89, 91, 96, 110, 112, 113,
114, 184, 251, 257, 269, 270, 273, 274 Magazzari, Gaetano, 197, 200204, 205,
Latilla, Gaetano 229, 230, 231, 238239
La finta cameriera, 150 Lamnistia data dal sommo Pio IX, 200201
Latour, Bruno, 346 Inno guerriero italiano, 203204
Leclair, Jean-Marie Inno siciliano, 202203
Scylla et Glaucus, 84 Inno subalpino, 201202
Lee, Sung Sook, xxviii Il primo giorno dellanno, 200
Leon, Paul, 315, 316, 326 Magritte, Rene, 286
Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 255 Mahler, Gustav, 343
Leppert, Richard and Susan McClary Malherbe, Henry, 127
Music and Society, 10 Malpiero, Gian Francesco, 359
Levarie, Siegmund, 302 Mameli, Goffredo, 185, 237
Les Six, 320321, 322 Fratelli dItalia, 231
Limousin, Jean Suona la tromba, 189194
Le Poirier de misere, 122 Manet, Edouard, 353
Lindenberger, Herbert, 25, 291292, 293, Manna, Ruggero, 208
351, 352 Manzoni, Alessandro
Opera: The Extravagant Art, 25 Marzo 1821, 195
 Index 401

Marcus, Millicent, 281 Merimee, Prosper, 264

Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples, 144, 145 Mermet, Auguste
Maria Teresa, Empress of Austria, 145 Jeanne dArc, 260
Marin, Louis, 29 Messager, Andre, 129
Mariotte, Antoine Messiaen, Olivier
Salome, 118 Saint Francois dAssise, 309
Maritain, Jacques Metastasio, Pietro, 92, 111, 138, 144, 149
Art et scholastique, 116 Alessandro nellIndia, 143
Marotta, Alessandro Metropolitan Opera (New York), 256,
Ai voluntarj Romani, 208 274
Marxism, 6, 7, 20, 324, 335 Meucci, Filippo
Mascagni, Pietro, 255, 270, 273 Inno guerriero italiano, 203
Cavalleria rusticana, 256 Il primo giorno dellanno, 200
Mascardi, Agostino, 40 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 8892, 94109, 117,
Dellarte istorica, 39, 43 339, 340, 341, 342, 349, 356, 357, 358
Masse, Victor, 253 LAfricaine, 88, 107
Massenet, Jules, 127, 247, 252, 253, 254, 339, Il crociato in Egitto, 89, 92, 101, 102, 112
341, 342, 349, 358 Emma di Resburgo, 89, 92, 9899, 112
Le Cid, 260 Lesule di Granata, 89, 92, 100102, 111,
Herodiade, 247 112, 113
Manon, 260, 264, 358 Les Huguenots, 88, 107, 340
La Navarraise, 247 Margherita dAnjou, 89, 92, 99100, 113
Le Roi de Lahore, 260 Le Prophete, 88, 107
Werther, 260 Robert le diable, 88, 107
Matthey, Carlo Romilda e Costanza, 89, 92, 9495, 96, 99,
La partenza per Lombardia: canto guerriero, 101, 111
225 Semiramide riconosciuta, 89, 92, 9598, 99,
Mayr, Giovanni Simone 101, 102, 111, 112, 114
Atalia, 145 Mezzo-soprano voice, 96, 99, 112
Medea in Corinto, 110 Michiele, Pietro
La rosa bianca e la rosa rossa, 91, 110 Amore inamorato, 51
Mazarin, Cardinal, 73 Milhaud, Darius, 320, 321322
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 136, 189190, 191192, LAbandon dAriane, 327
231 La Delivrance de Thesee, 327
Filosofia della musica, 182183 LEnlevement dEurope, 321322
Istruzione generale per gli affratellati nella Minato, Nicolo, 38
Giovine Italia, 195 Pompeo Magno, 40
McClary, Susan, 14, 16 Modena, Duchy of, 141
Feminine Endings, 10 Modernism, 332, 333, 338, 339, 342, 343,
Medici Family, 140 359
Meilhac, Henri Moliere
Carmen, 264 Amphitryon, 84
Manon, 264 Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, 84
Menander, 77 Les Facheux, 84
Menotti, Gian Carlo, 269 Le Malade imaginaire, 84
Tamu-Tamu, xxvii, xxviii Monteclair, Michel Pignolet de
Mercadante, Saverio, 231 Jephte, 82
Il giuramento, 184 Monterosso, Raffaello, 223, 233
402 Index
Monteverdi, Claudio, 268
Lincoronazione di Poppea, 34, 37, 4243, 47
LOrfeo, 303
Morandi, Rosa, 89, 99, 112
Mouret, Jean
Les Amours de Ragonde, 77
Les Fetes de Thalie, 77
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 139, 153, 161,
341
Betulia liberata, 158
La clemenza di Tito, 299
Don Giovanni, 150, 153, 295, 356
Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, 296301,
304, 310
La finta semplice, 153
Idomeneo, 296
Le nozze di Figaro, 161
Sonata in A major K., 298
Die Zauberflote, 161, 299
Musicalization, 333334, 345
Musicology/Musicologists, 23, 5, 913, 14,
15, 17, 138, 139, 156, 292, 293, 301302,
305306, 312, 325, 330, 334, 335, 348, 351
Mussolini, Benito, 121, 269270, 271,
274275, 283, 284, 286
Mussorgsky, Modest, 255
Myslivecek, Josef
Isacco, 158
Nagano, Kent, 287
Naples, 144148
Natalucci, Tiberio, 197, 205
Inni populari ad onore dellimmortale Pio IX,
199200
Nero, 47
New Criticism, 89, 303
New Cultural History, 6, 8, 1112, 13, 1516
New Historicism, 8, 11, 291, 303
Nicole, Pierre, 83
Nora, Pierre, 6, 326
Novaro, Michele
Fratelli dItalia, 232
Offenbach, Jacques, 127, 253, 263, 358
Les Contes dHoffmann, 260
Opera (Paris), see also Academie royale de la
musique, 17, 31, 54, 69, 70, 108, 115116,
122, 123, 124, 130, 162, 166, 169, 171,
175, 198, 243, 245, 246, 248249, 254,
257, 258, 263, 264, 315, 355357
Opera buffa, 135, 139, 148156, 231
Opera-Comique (Paris), 122, 127, 129, 243,
245, 246, 248, 249, 255, 256, 264, 265,
357, 358
Opera National Populaire, 247
Opera semiseria, 94
Opera seria, 93, 94, 148149, 150, 296, 297,
303, 308
Orlandini, Giuseppe Maria
Serpilla e Bacocco, 150
Pacini, Giovanni, 231
Painleve, Paul, 125
Paisiello, Giovanni, 139
Paladilhe, Emile, 253
Patrie, 264
Papal States, 141142, 201
Paris, 160162, 164165, 166176
Parker, Roger, 183185, 232, 233, 234
Pastorale, 7577, 78, 84
Pauls, Birgit, 232, 233
Pavarotti, Luciano
Pecour, Guillaume-Louis, 71
Pellegrin, Simon-Joseph
Hippolyte et Aricie, 80
Jepthe, 82
Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 139, 153
La serva padrona, 150, 153
Peri, Jacobo
LEuridice, 303
Perrin, Pierre
La Pastorale dIssy, 73
Pomone, 84
Pestelli, Giorgio, 17, 135
Piave, Francesco Maria, 184, 185, 186, 236
Piccinni, Niccolo, 168, 356
Piperno, Franco, 135, 354
Pirrotta, Nino, 39
Pisaroni, Rosamunda, 89, 95, 96, 101, 111,
112, 114
Pius IX, 196, 197201, 202, 204205,
206207, 223, 238
Pizzetti, Ildebrando, 273, 359
Plautus, 51, 77
Political Science, 352
Pollarolo, Carlo Francesco, 68
 Index 403

Pougin, Arthur, 233 Sigurd, 258, 260

Poulenc, Francis, 320 Ricci, Federico, 231
Pountney, David, 350 Ricci, Luigi, 231
Powers, Harold, 272273, 275, 276 Ricordi, publishers, 111, 112, 113, 184, 185,
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 357 189, 190, 199, 200, 204, 205, 207223,
Prussia, 166 229, 230, 234, 238, 240
Public Sphere, 167168 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 255
Puccini, Giacomo, 127, 137, 181, 232, 255, The Tsars Bride, 257
268, 270, 273, 274275, 276, 287, Ristorini family, 150
358359 Robinson, Paul, 303
La Boheme, 257, 261 Opera and Ideas, 301, 303
Madama Butterfly, 268 Romani, Felice, 89, 92, 110, 112, 113
Manon Lescaut, 257 Romanticism, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 106, 109
Tosca, 268 Ronchetti-Monteviti, Stefano, 224225, 240
Turandot, 137, 268, 270, 272276 Ronetti, Gaetano
Lamnistia data dal sommo Pio IX, 200
Quaranta, Costantino, 208 Rosand, Ellen, 36, 37
Queer theory, 98 Rosand, David, 35
Querelle des Bouffons, 168, 339, 355 Rosenthal, Manuel, 125
Quinault, Philippe, 54, 57, 67, 73, 355 Rosselli, John, 109, 135, 136, 138, 182, 233, 354
Armide, 65 Music and Musicians in Nineteenth-Century
Bellerophon, 174 Italy, 17
Cadmus et Hermione, 73 The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to
Les Fetes de lAmour et de Bacchus, 84 Verdi, 16, 135
Thesee, 86 Singers of Italian Opera, 17, 136
Rossellini, Roberto, 280
Rabaud, Henri Rossi, Gaetano, 89, 92, 98, 110, 111, 112
Le Miracle des loups, 122 Rossini, Gioachino, 88, 91, 112, 139, 153, 161,
Racine, Jean 182, 197, 231, 273, 356, 358
Phedre, 79, 80 Adelaide di Borgogna, 110
Radiciotti, Giuseppe, 223 Adina, 110
Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 68, 351, 355 Armida, 92, 110
Les Boreades, 81 Aureliano in Palmira, 91
Hippolyte et Aricie, 80, 81, 82 Il barbiere di Siviglia, 110
Ransom, John Crowe, 8 Bianca e Falliero, 96, 101, 110, 111, 112, 113,
Ravel, Maurice, 123, 124, 320, 321 114
LEnfant et les sortileges, 115, 125128, 305, La cambiale di matrimonio, 112
320 Cantata in onore del Sommo Pontefice Pio
Le Tombeau de Couperin, 127 Nono, 197199, 200, 223
Regietheater, 352, 360 La cenerentola, 110, 153
Reggio Emilia, 141 Le Comte Ory, 245
Renard, Jean-Francois La donna del lago, 101, 110, 111, 114, 205,
Le Carnaval de Venise, 84 206, 238, 241
Republic of Letters, 165 Eduardo e Cristina, 99, 110, 112
Rescue operas, 95, 110111 Elisabetta regina dInghilterra, 91, 110
Respighi, Ottorino, 359 Ermione, 101, 110, 114
Revel, Jacques, 6 La gazza ladra, 110
Reyer, Ernest, 253, 258 La gazzetta, 110
404 Index

Rossini, Gioachino (cont.) Satie, Erik, 320, 321, 322

Grido di esultazione riconoscente al Sommo Parade, 322
Pontefice Pio IX, 197, 205, 206 Sawall, Michael, 233
Guillaume Tell, 187, 241 Scarlatti, Alessandro, 139
Inno nazionale dedicato alla Legione civica Schiller, Friedrich, 258
romana mobilizzata, 223224 Schmitt, Florent
Litaliana in Algeri, 99 La Tragedie de Salome, 118
Maometto II, 101, 110, 113114 Schnapp, Jeffrey, 270272
Matilde di Shabran, 99, 110 Schoenberg, Arnold, 307, 323, 359
Mose in Egitto, 101, 110, 145, 148 Erwartung, 359
Otello, 99, 110 Moses und Aron, 295, 359
Ricciardo e Zoraide, 101, 110 Schola Cantorum, 117, 118, 126127
Semiramide, 92, 101, 102, 110, 111 Schreker, Franz, 359
Le Siege de Corinthe, 198, 223 Scott, Sir Walter, 87
Tancredi, 91, 92, 99, 101, 111, 241 Scribe, Eugene, 108, 263, 340, 348
Zelmira, 110 Selli, Prospero, 229, 231
Rouche, Jacques, 115116, 118, 119, 130 Medea in Corinto, 226
Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste La partenza per Lombardia: canto guerriero,
Venus et Adonis, 86 226
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 83 Ricciarda, 226
Roussel, Albert, 320 Senigallia, 141
Roy, Pierre-Charles Shakespeare, William, 3
Callirhoe, 86 Sibelius, Jan, 343
Rubinstein, Nikolai, 255 Siena, 143
Rude, Georges, 6 Simoni, Renato
Turandot, 276
Sacchini, Antonio, 356 Singspiel, 296, 297, 298, 300
Sacrati, Francesco Skocpol, Theda, 7
Bellerofonte, 41 Smart, Mary Ann, 232
Sacred opera, 135, 139, 144148 Soboul, Albert, 6
Said, Edward, 15, 25 Sociology/Sociologists, 2, 4, 5, 78, 10, 11,
Culture and Imperialism, 25 12, 16, 20, 138, 293, 312, 331, 332, 334,
Orientalism, 25, 300 335, 344, 345, 347, 351, 352
Saint-Saens, Camille, 253, 254, 258, 315, 316, Solie, Ruth
339, 341, 349 Musicology and Difference, 11
Etienne Marcel, 247 Somma, Antonio, 193, 236
Henry, 116, 258 Re Lear, 193
La Princesse jaune, 260 Soprano voice, 94, 96, 104, 109, 111, 112
Saint-Simon, Henri de, 357 Spectacle, 79, 268, 269, 273, 276, 286
Salieri, Antonio, 356 Stamatov, Peter, 137
Sardou, Victorien, 257, 264 Steinberg, Michael, 29, 137, 359
Patrie, 264 Stephanie, Gottlob, 297, 299
Sarti, Giuseppe Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne, 137, 359
Medonte, 143 Stendhal, 112, 350
Sartorio, Antonio Sterbini, Pietro
Antonino e Pompeiano, 42 Inno siciliano, 202
LOrfeo, 68 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 359
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 323 Strauss, Richard
 Index 405

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 Ada, 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, 186189,
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
Theatre des Champs Elysees, 247 Nabucco, 145, 181, 183, 184, 185, 195, 229,
Theatre Italien (Paris), 247, 254 231, 234, 235
Theatre 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, 189194
Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera, 301, La traviata, 304305
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, Andre Vichy Regime, 123, 129
Le Poirier de misere, 122 Victor Emanuel II, King of Sardinia and of
Tragedie lyrique, 17, 30, 7375, 7778, 7980, Italy, 197
82, 83, 84, 355 Vienna, 171, 176
Travesti roles/singers, 32, 87, 89, 91, 92, 93, Vienna State Opera, 251, 257
94, 9698, 99, 100, 101, 102103, 109, Virgil
113, 114 Aeneid, 39
Treitler, Leo, 10 Georgics, 124
Turns, Cultural and Historical, 2, 5, 13, Visconti, Luchino, 280282
14, 15, 17, 351, 352, 361 Senso, 277, 278282
Tuscany, Grand Duchy of, 140 Vogler, Abbe Georg Joseph, 90
Vuillermoz, Emile, 340
Ungarelli, Rosa, 150
Wagner, Richard, 120, 121, 131, 243, 244,
Valli, Alida, 278 251, 255, 255, 257, 258259, 261, 262,
Velluti, Giambattista, 89, 91, 102, 112 271, 295, 308, 310, 338, 339, 341, 342,
Verdi, Giuseppe, 136, 148, 229, 230, 231232, 344, 349, 357, 358, 359
234, 236, 237, 238, 239, 244, 254, 255, Der fliegende Hollander, 357
406 Index
Wagner, Richard (cont.)
Gotterdammerung, 305
Parsifal, 310
Der Ring des Nibelungen, 117
Tannhauser, 243
Walker, Frank, 182, 233
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 165
Warren, Robert Penn, 8
Weaver, William, 272
Weber, Carl Maria von, 90110, 112, 161
Die Drei Pintos, 110
Euryanthe, 110
Der Freischutz, 90, 91, 110, 161
Oberon, 110
Weber, Max, 4, 346
Weber, William, 3, 17, 136, 355
Weill, Kurt
Mahagonny Songspiel, 321
Weimar, 160
Weinstock, Herbert, 223
Williams, Raymond, 10, 292, 304
Zandonai, Riccardo, 273
Zeffirelli, Franco, 273, 274
Ziani, Marco
Alessandro Magno in Sidonia, 4647
Zimmermann, Bernd Alois, 359
Zola, Emile, 250, 261, 265