Waiting for Verdi: Opera and Political Opinion in Nineteenth-Century Italy, 1815-1848

By Mary Ann Smart

The name Giuseppe Verdi conjures images of Italians singing opera in the streets and bursting into song at political protests or when facing the firing squad. While many of the accompanying stories were exaggerated, or even invented, by later generations, Verdi's operas—along with those by Rossini, Donizetti, and Mercadante—did inspire Italians to imagine Italy as an independent and unified nation. Capturing what it was like to attend the opera or to join in the music at an aristocratic salon, Waiting for Verdi shows that the moral dilemmas, emotional reactions, and journalistic polemics sparked by these performances set new horizons for what Italians could think, feel, say, and write. Among the lessons taught by this music were that rules enforced by artistic tradition could be broken, that opera could jolt spectators into intense feeling even as it educated them, and that Italy could be in the vanguard of stylistic and technical innovation rather than clinging to the glories of centuries past. More practically, theatrical performances showed audiences that political change really was possible, making the newly engaged spectator in the opera house into an actor on the political stage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Jun 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9780520966574

Mary Ann Smart

Mary Ann Smart is Gladyce Arata Terrill Professor in the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. She is author of Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera and editor of Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera. 

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Waiting for Verdi

IMPRINT IN HUMANITIES

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by Sharon Hanley Simpson and

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MURIEL CARTER HANLEY

whose intellect and sensitivity

have enriched the many lives

that she has touched.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Simpson Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

Waiting for Verdi

ITALIAN OPERA AND POLITICAL OPINION, 1815–1848

Mary Ann Smart

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University of California Press

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© 2018 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Smart, Mary Ann, author.

Title: Waiting for Verdi : Italian opera and political opinion, 1815–1848 / Mary Ann Smart.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017055321 (print) | LCCN 2017056879 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520966574 (eBook) | ISBN 9780520276253 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Opera—Political aspects—Italy—19th century. | Verdi, Giuseppe, 1813–1901—Influence. | Verdi, Giuseppe, 1813–1901—Criticism and interpretation. | Opera—Political aspects—France—Paris—19th century.

Classification: LCC ML3918.O64 (ebook) | LCC ML3918.O64 S63 2018 (print) | DDC 782.10945/09034--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055321

Manufactured in the United States of America

25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

For Pat and John

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

1 • Risorgimento Fantasies

2 • Accidental Affinities: Gioachino Rossini and Salvatore Viganò

3 • Elizabeth I, Mary Stuart, and the Limits of Allegory

4 • Reading Mazzini’s Filosofia della musica with Byron and Donizetti

5 • Parlor Games

6 • Progress, Piety, and Plagiarism: Verdi’s I Lombardi at La Scala

Conclusion

Notes

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

1. Giuseppe Cammarano, Portrait of Ferdinand I, 1815, Palazzo Reale, Caserta

2. Cammarano, Portrait of Family of Francesco I of Two Sicilies, 1820, Museo di Capodimonte

EXAMPLES

1. Viganò, Otello, No. 23 (Andante)

2. Rossini, Otello, Act 3, Preghiera

3. Rossini, La gazza ladra, Act 2, Aria (Podestà)

4a. Rossini, Tancredi, Act 1, Recitativo e Cavatina (Tancredi)

4b. Rossini, Tancredi, Act 2, Scena e Cavatina (Amenaide)

5. Bellini, Il pirata, Act 2, Scena ed Aria finale (Imogene)

6. Rossini, Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, Act 1, Coro e Cavatina (Elisabetta)

7. Donizetti, Elisabetta al castello di Kenilworth, Act 1, Coro, Cavatina, e Finale

8. Rossini, Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, Act 1, Coro e Cavatina (Elisabetta)

9. Rossini, Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, Act 2, Finale secondo

10. Donizetti, Maria Stuarda, Act 2, Scena e Terzetto

11. Donizetti, Maria Stuarda, Act 2, Scena e Terzetto

12. Donizetti, Maria Stuarda, Act 2, Scena e Terzetto

13. Donizetti, Maria Stuarda, Act 2, Scena e Terzetto

14. Donizetti, Marino Faliero, Duetto (Israële, Faliero), Act 1, mm.73–88

15. Donizetti, Marino Faliero, Aria (Israële), Act 3

16. Rossini and Pepoli, La pastorella dell’Alpi, from Soirées musicales, mm.1–32

17. Mercadante, Serenata del marinaro, from Soirées italiennes, mm.18–45

18. Mercadante, Il zeffiro, from Soirées italiennes, mm.17–39

19. Mercadante, Lamento del moribondo, mm.1–28

20. Mercadante, Lamento del moribondo, mm.61–79

21. Verdi, I Lombardi, Act 2, Rondò-finale (Giselda)

22. Verdi, I Lombardi, Act 2, Coro di Ambiascatori, mm.17–21

23. Verdi, I Lombardi, Act 2, Coro di Ambiascatori, mm.48–60

24. Verdi, I Lombardi, Act 2, Duettino ed Inno dei Crociati, mm.54–58

25. Verdi, I Lombardi, Act 2, Duettino ed Inno dei Crociati, mm.67–74

TABLES

1. Works on Tudor subjects read and performed in Italy, 1809–1845

2. Contents of Rossini’s Soirées musicales (1835) and Mercadante’s Soirées italiennes (1836)

3. Allusions to Elvira in the Soirées musicales and Soirées italiennes

4. Themes in Song Collections, c. 1835–1845

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I began thinking about some of the personalities, issues, and events at the center of Waiting for Verdi during a sabbatical year spent in Bologna, the same year my daughter Clara was born in that city’s welcoming Villa Erbosa. That has meant that almost every page of this book bears some mark of a memorable experience, and many of its ideas were first sketched during satisfying (and often also challenging) family sojourns, that year in Bologna, and later on summer research trips to Naples and Genoa, on the trail of Rossini and Donizetti, and of Giovanni and Agostino Ruffini. During those times in Italy, I benefited hugely from conversations and meals with friends old and new. Susan Rutherford shared coffee and conversation and her vast knowledge of the nineteenth-century press. Scrolling through microfilms became a pleasure when she was sitting at the next machine. Fabrizio della Seta saw something in this project at an early stage and invited me to teach his wonderful students at the Facoltà di musica in Cremona (University of Pavia), where many of these ideas were tried out for the first time. Anselm Gerhard attended some of those meetings and offered more brilliant ideas than I was able to incorporate in these pages. I am grateful to Carlotta Sorba for her boundless hospitality, and for the intellectual openness that made her eager to spend time talking through our views of opera and politics. I hope these pages show that we agree far more than not. Marco Capra shared his incomparable knowledge of the nineteenth-century press and introduced me to the wonderful collection of the Centro internazionali di ricerca sui periodici musicale (CIRPeM). Always and everywhere, Emanuele Senici has been a dear friend, an encouraging and exigent reader, and an inspiring example. His own publications have been points of reference throughout, reminding me of the pleasures and insights that flow from that magical combination of engagement with historical sources and imaginative, informed speculation.

While those brief and intense periods of living in Italy may have given these pages a special texture, Berkeley is home, and this book would not exist without the precious influence of my brilliant and generous colleagues and students at Berkeley. For several years I had the privilege of occupying the office next door to Katherine Bergeron, whose intense and original engagement with documents and other traces of the past shaped the way I approached this project. The late Wendy Allanbrook sometimes seemed to understand better what I was writing than I did myself. I continue to ponder some of the questions she asked about early drafts of these chapters, and I have not stopped missing her presence among us. Richard Taruskin’s indelible injunction to write the history of what works have meant, rather than what they mean, has been energizing, if occasionally paralyzing. At many Friday night dinners and, more recently, on walks at Point Isabel, we have exchanged ideas about articles we’ve read and talks we’ve heard. Those energetic conversations about the state of our field have left many traces in these pages.

Berkeley has also been a place for enjoyable and mind-expanding collaborations on writing and teaching. I would not have enjoyed work on the last stages of the book half as much without the friendship of Nicholas Mathew, always ready with a new idea for an event, a considered opinion on something he has read or heard, discerning comments on chapter drafts, and a clear vision of the ethical stakes of writing about music, history, and politics. I learned much from teaching with Hannah Ginsborg, and her kind and persistent interest in the progress of the manuscript is the reason that it was completed when it was. I first encountered many of the texts central to chapters 1 and 2 during a graduate seminar cotaught with Albert Ascoli, and our conversations about writing and about literature have continued to energize and inform my work. The chance to share ideas and exchange work with James Davies has, several times over, changed the way I think and write about music; I would be pleased if even a little of his passion, and his tireless quest for ideas about music that are new and true and not trivial, had rubbed off on me. I am also grateful to Bonnie Wade for her steadfast support, consistently good advice, and for her example as a productive, inventive, and endlessly curious scholar and writer. I have derived a deep pleasure from my work with the editorial board of Representations over the past several years; the book would be much less were it not for the valuable comments and ideas of several board members who read an early version of chapter 6. I also gained much in motivation and in substance from the writing group convened by Deirdre Loughridge, and Deirdre’s own discerning readings contributed enormously to the clarity of the first few chapters.

I have been fortunate to teach and make friends with many remarkable graduate students at Berkeley, and there is not a page in this book that does not bear the mark of conversations with them. I cannot adequately mark the contributions to my thinking made by former and current students. Melina Esse, Adeline Mueller, Laura Protano-Biggs, Emily Richmond-Pollock, Arman Schwartz, and Benjamin Walton may have begun as Berkeley graduate students, but they quickly became valued colleagues whose own work and reactions to mine have sustained and defined this project in enjoyable and mind-expanding ways. Melanie Gudesblatt, Edward Jacobson, and Alessandra Jones all read parts of the manuscript and offered valuable feedback.

The ideas contained in these pages are the product of innumerable conversations and e-mail exchanges with friends and colleagues, old and new. Roger Parker read every word and prompted me to strengthen arguments and rethink details, all the while proclaiming his utter lack of interest in the subject. This project could not have existed without the example of his work and of his way of working; but his contributions go further that. I could try to enumerate the moments when Roger’s curiosity or skepticism or belief in the project made a difference; but what I would be describing is quite simply friendship, of the kind that can make scholarly work so satisfying. Among the many people whose reactions to written or spoken versions of these chapters changed the way they have emerged, I remember especially stimulating questions and ideas from Nicholas Baragwanath, Gregory Bloch, Majel Connery, John Davis, Philip Gossett, Rebecca Harris-Warwick, Sarah Hibberd, Francesco Izzo, Axel Körner, David Levin, Adrian Lyttelton, Roger Moseley, David Rosen, Susan Rutherford, Gary Tomlinson, Francesca Vella, Claudio Vellutini, and Flora Willson; but no doubt I have overlooked some who shared their thoughts and knowledge with me. I owe the book’s title to a chance remark made by Alex Rehding over lunch in Harvard Square; he may be appalled that his quick joke became so central to this project.

Research on the book was supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for Humanities, the Townsend Center for the Humanities at Berkeley, and by several other sources at Berkeley. Among the many libraries and archives I consulted during my research, I am especially grateful for the help of librarians and archivists at Bologna’s Biblioteca civica del Archiginnasio and Conservatorio di Musica Gioachino Rossini, the library of the Conservatorio San Pietro a Majella in Naples, and of John Roberts, former head music librarian at the Jean Gray Hargrove Library at Berkeley. Chapter 5 first appeared in 19th-Century Music 34/1 (2010): 39–60, and a portion of chapter 6 was published in the Journal of Modern Italian Studies 18/2 (2013): 190–204. I am grateful to the editors and readers of those journals for their comments.

I have thoroughly enjoyed working with Raina Polivka, Mary Francis, and Cindy Fulton at the University of California Press. I’m thankful for their belief in this project and their swift and gracious responses to questions along the way. Copy editor Jeffrey Wyneken improved the manuscript immeasurably with his sharp eye and his great ear for style. Susan Storch prepared the index. David Coll and Scott Rubin engraved the music examples, often working at short notice, and Mark Mueller and Jim Coates cheerfully provided all manner of practical support throughout the research and writing. Thanks also to Edward Jacobson, Peter Mondelli, and Francesca Vella for excellent historical detective work and the choice documentary morsels they threw to me at crucial moments.

My parents, John and Patricia Smart, provided such a loving and intellectually vibrant environment when I was growing up that it has been easy to take their influence for granted at times. But in this project, which draws from both of their fields—literature and history—and which tries to hash out the relations between political change and emotional life, their contributions are very present. As a professor herself and a brilliant reader and writer, my mother modeled commitment to ideas and to finding a strong expressive voice in scholarly writing. Equally embedded in my approach to this material are the bedrock commitments to fairness and to working for social and political change that my parents share. I am also blessed with the best in-laws ever, Rachel and Shale Brownstein, who have over the years joined me at performances and listened to me work through ideas. Rachel, whose own writing has long been an inspiration to me, also commented on drafts of several chapters.

It remains only to thank the two people who have accompanied this project from inception to completion, and without whom the work on it would have been so much less fulfilling. Daniel Brownstein knows far more about Italy than I do, and his curiosity and sense of adventure and hunger for ideas have delighted and emboldened me in travels near and far. Clara Katherine Brownstein long regarded this book—as she did opera—with impatience. But a writer herself now, she has become my favorite companion in marathon writing sessions, a trusted consultant on all manner of questions about style and process, and a model for how to listen to and participate in musical cultures.

ONE

Risorgimento Fantasies

THE SOCIETY OF TRANSCENDENTAL-ROMANTICS

In 1816 and 1817 two competitions were announced in Milan within a little more than a year of each other. One was a serious and official undertaking: the royal theaters of Milan sponsored a contest for a new libretto, promising that the winning entry would be set to music by a composer chosen by theater officials, and given a première at the Teatro alla Scala. No record survives of the winner—it is likely that none was ever declared—but one of the contenders was Giovanni Gherardini’s Avviso ai giudici, a drama of legal persecution and social injustice set after the French Revolution that eventually became the basis for Rossini’s La gazza ladra. The competition does not seem to have had the desired rejuvenating effect. On reading the submissions, judge Vincenzo Monti came to the realization that Italian dramatic poetry was in crisis. In a letter to one of his fellow judges, Monti declared that it would take a miracle to overcome the illogical libretti and the musical pretensions that had reduced opera to nothing more than a monstrous coagulation of words without meaning.¹

A little over a year later, the Milan-based journal of fashion and culture, the Corriere delle dame, announced a competition of its own. Held under the auspices of the impressive-sounding but entirely imaginary Accademia de’ Romantici Transcendentali, this contest advertised that it would identify and reward the best romantic tragedy of the moment.² The guidelines for prospective applicants fill more than a page of dense type and amount to a virtual catalogue of romantic affectations. The winning tragedy must denigrate Italy and Italians as much as possible, the list begins, and therefore all the villains of the piece must be Italian. Competing playwrights are advised to have thirty or forty characters die in full view on the stage, to extend the action over no less than five years, no more than fifty, and to place one scene in Italy and the next in Babylon, or perhaps to divide the action between Mecca and Siberia.

The tongue-in-cheek recommendations go on and on, but all of them engage in this jesting way with the classical unities and with related aesthetic conventions that had long governed the narrative modes of both spoken drama and opera libretti. In a light-hearted vein, the editors of the Corriere were fighting back against the encroachment of romantic aesthetics that was beginning to infiltrate Italy from the north, a movement whose new currency was trumpeted most loudly by Madame de Staël’s article On the Manner and the Usefulness of Translations, which had appeared in Italian translation in the first issue of the Biblioteca italiana in 1816. In the midst of a generally disparaging evaluation of the current state of Italian literary production, she called for the translation of Shakespeare, Schiller, and other northern authors as the best antidote for Italian backwardness.³ The sentence about denigrating Italians in the Corriere’s contest is a clear swipe at Mme. de Staël, and the sarcastic calls for multiple deaths and action that veers wildly across time and space were indirect responses to the dramatic values promoted in her article and represented by the authors she championed.

Mme. de Staël felt no more positive than Monti about the operatic dimension of Italian culture and even went so far as to blame opera for the sad state of the nation’s literary tradition. Advocating the translation of a drama by Chateaubriand into Italian, she paused to make a distinction between the sheer quality of Italian music and the frivolity of the social settings in which it is heard:

I do not doubt that Athalie would be appreciated in Milanese theaters, especially if the choruses were accompanied by wonderful Italian music. But they say that in Italy people go to the theater not to listen but to meet and chat with their dearest friends in the boxes. And I will conclude from this that sitting for five hours every evening listening to what passes for words in Italian opera must dull the intellect of the nation, for want of exercise.⁴

With this dismissal of operagoing as both tranquilizing and distracting, Mme. de Staël anticipated—and perhaps also provided the script for—the poet Giacomo Leopardi, who a few years later in 1824 would offer his own scathing evaluation of opera and its effects on Italian society. Leopardi lamented that Italians knew little of the free exchange of opinion or of close interpersonal bonds beyond the family, compared to other European nations:

Many reasons conspire to deprive Italy of society, not all of which I can enumerate here. The climate, which predisposes Italians to spend most of each day in the open air, and encourages long walks and things like that, the vivacity of the Italian character, which causes citizens to prefer the pleasures of live performance [spettacoli] and other delights of the senses to those of the spirit, and that pushes them to pure entertainment divorced from any effort of the soul, as well as to negligence and indolence. . . . There can be no doubt that the passeggio [the public evening walk], the spettacoli, and the rituals of the church have nothing at all to do with that type of society that other nations possess. Today the passeggio, the theater, and the church are the principal venues for what little society Italy does possess, and indeed they constitute its entirety . . . since Italians do not like domestic life, nor do they take pleasure in or excel at conversation. So instead they stroll, they go to the theater and other entertainments, to Mass and to sermons, and to sacred and secular feasts.⁵

Whereas Mme. de Staël imagined Italian audiences lulled into a stupor by five-hour stretches of pretty music, Leopardi characterizes operagoing as a herd activity like promenading through the piazza before dinner or gawking at a religious procession, all activities that militate against independent thought and debate.

Reading Monti, Mme. de Staël, or Leopardi, one might conclude that opera was an entirely negative force in early-nineteenth-century Italy. All agree on the low literary quality of the libretti, and the last two resoundingly blame operatic culture for the deficiencies they observe in civil society and public engagement. Around 1816 this was no trivial matter: the cities and regions of Italy were grappling with the upheavals wrought by the decade-long occupation of much of the peninsula by Napoleonic forces and the political reorganizations imposed by the Congress of Vienna. After 1815 Milan and Venice were subsumed into the Habsburg Kingdom of Lombardy-Veneto, ruled by viceroys appointed by Vienna; Naples and Sicily were returned to the control of the Bourbon king Ferdinand who had governed the city for a turbulent half century before the advent of French rule in 1806; Bologna and its environs became part of the Papal States with Rome; and cities such as Florence reclaimed their status as autonomous duchies. Linguistically, the peninsula remained at least as diverse—a mosaic of regional dialects—so that the language sung on the opera stage would have been one of the few occasions on which audiences scattered across the peninsula enjoyed the same spectacle in the same standard Italian. Enmeshed in such tumultuous change, some among the literati saw an opportunity to reposition Italy in relation to Europe and to restore Italian letters to the widespread renown of the age of Dante or Michelangelo. A scant few among those were also wondering what steps they might take to gain independence from foreign rule or to knit the peninsula’s regions into a single entity; but for most the idea of a unified and independent Italy was no more than a shadow, if even that.

From this perspective, the institution of opera would not seem a promising place to begin inquiry into the process of making Italy that stretched from 1815 through the unification of the Italian peninsula in 1861. Opera figured in these polemical essays because it was both the central form of entertainment for educated Italians and an important trope in the lively and anxious discourse about the place of Italian culture in a European context. Long before Verdi and the tales of spontaneous patriotic outpouring that rose up around some of his works, opera was heralded as something that Italians did better than anyone else in Europe, and therefore as a medium for projecting Italian character into the world. The primacy of Italian operatic style was rooted in the delivery of cantilena, the smooth, unbroken singing of a melodic line; and such melodies were thought to arise naturally from the inherent musicality of the language: remarkable for its smoothness and the facility with which it enters into musical composition, as Italian was described in one eighteenth-century geographical compendium.⁶ Rossini champion Giuseppe Carpani recast this conviction in more oppositional and more nationalistic terms in the pages of the Biblioteca italiana in 1818: We see two genres of music emerge and contend on the battlefield: the ancient and regular Italian style based on song and melody, and the Romantic German style, poor in cantilena and rich in harmony, full, erudite, capricious.⁷ As we shall see in chapter 2, such discourse could be just as debilitating as the conversation about how opera encouraged passivity and dullness of mind. The association between pure, vocally conceived melody and italianità could become a prison, with writers on opera circling endlessly around the same narrow lexicon of approved notions, each new work evaluated in relation to a mythical ideal of pure Neapolitan melody.

Yet going to the opera could also feel like the very opposite of imprisonment. In his pseudodiary from 1817, Rome, Naples, and Florence, the always effervescent Stendhal tells of being a frequent guest in the box of Ludovico di Breme at La Scala, amid a distinguished company that included Mme. de Staël’s Italian translator Pietro Borsieri, philosopher Ermes Visconti, politician and patriot Federico Confalonieri, and revolutionary poet Silvio Pellico. One never saw women, Stendhal admits; but for female company one could escape to the loge of Nina Viganò, singer and daughter of the choreographer Salvatore. Stendhal’s description of the people he met in di Breme’s box at La Scala is both energetic and intellectually intense: the fragments of conversation he relays, in fact, mostly concern Mme. de Staël’s controversial article on translation, forming a sort of viva voce counterpart to the many weighty responses to that essay that were published in the pages of the Biblioteca italiana, Il conciliatore, and in freestanding pamphlets. It is a commonplace that the most important function of opera in the early nineteenth century was as a place of assembly, one of the few venues where large groups could freely gather, mingle, and react to what they saw and heard. But reading Stendhal against Leopardi, one could add that opera houses and the nearby cafés in which performances were dissected the next day were a crucial component of Italy’s emerging public sphere, one that was invisible to the reclusive Leopardi.

A striking absence in Stendhal’s bright picture of operatic sociability is any mention of music or musicians. He tells us that di Breme was generous enough to welcome Stendhal into his loge as a guest almost every night except Fridays, when the theater was dark; but he never mentions what operas they saw, and they never seem to encounter Rossini or any other musician. When Rossini does make an appearance a few pages earlier in Stendhal’s idiosyncratic diary, it is almost in the guise of a jester, or perhaps a caricature of Italian charm and desire: at the Caffè dell’Accademia across from La Scala, the composer is overheard boasting about his conquest of a (married?) countess.⁸ The format of Rome, Naples, and Florence as combination diary and travelogue makes the juxtaposition seem accidental; but the strict separation of the actual, practical business of making music from matters of the mind is also typical of the book, perhaps even integral to its conception.

IN SEARCH OF POLITICAL MUSIC

Two contests—one genuine, the other satirical, devised entirely to amuse the readership of a fashionable journal. Two manifestos—one penned by a woman of letters of impeccable cosmopolitan credentials, the other by a sheltered Italian from Le Marche. And then the exuberant testimony of Stendhal, an essential voice in operatic history, despite his chronic fallibility. This eclectic sampling puts before us some of the possible contemporary stances about how opera might connect to the public