Music in the Present Tense: Rossini’s Italian Operas in Their Time

By Emanuele Senici

In the early 1800s, Rossini’s operas permeated Italy, from the opera house to myriad arrangements heard in public and private. But after Rossini stopped composing, a sharp decline in popularity drove most of his works out of the repertory. In the past half century, they have made a spectacular return to operatic stages worldwide, but this recent fame has not been accompanied by a comparable critical reevaluation.

Emanuele Senici’s new book provides a fresh look at the motives behind the Rossinian furore and its aftermath by examining the composer’s works in the historical context in which they were conceived, performed, seen, heard, and discussed. Situating the operas firmly within the social practices, cultural formations, ideological currents, and political events of early nineteenth-century Italy, Senici reveals Rossini’s dramaturgy as a radically new and specifically Italian reaction to the epoch-making changes witnessed in Europe at the time. The first book-length study of Rossini’s Italian operas to appear in English, Music in the Present Tense exposes new ways to explore nineteenth-century music and addresses crucial issues in the history of modernity, such as trauma, repetition, and the healing power of theatricality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9780226663685

Book preview

Music in the Present Tense

Opera Lab: Explorations in History, Technology, and Performance

A series edited by David J. Levin and Mary Ann Smart

MUSIC IN THE PRESENT TENSE

Rossini’s Italian Operas in Their Time

Emanuele Senici

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-66354-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-66368-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226663685.001.0001

This book has been supported by the Joseph Kerman Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Senici, Emanuele, author.

Title: Music in the present tense : Rossini’s Italian operas in their time / Emanuele Senici.

Other titles: Opera lab.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Series: Opera lab : explorations in history, technology, and performance | Introduction — Part I. Imitation ; Repetition ; Borrowing ; Style ; Genre ; Dramaturgy ; Noise — Part II. Modernity ; Theatricality ; Repertory ; Di tanti palpiti ; Memory ; Pleasure ; Movement ; Belief — Epilogue. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019009192 | ISBN 9780226663548 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226663685 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Rossini, Gioacchino, 1792–1868. Operas. | Opera—Italy—19th century. | Rossini, Gioacchino, 1792–1868—Appreciation.

Classification: LCC ML410.R835 S24 2019 | DDC 782.1092—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009192

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

E come il vento

odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello

infinito silenzio a questa voce

vo comparando: e mi sovvien l’eterno,

e le morte stagioni, e la presente

e viva, e il suon di lei.

And when I hear

the wind stir in these branches, I begin

comparing that endless stillness

with this voice:

and the eternal comes to mind,

and the dead seasons, and the present

living one, and how it sounds.

—Giacomo Leopardi, L’infinito, 1819 (my emphasis)

Io detestavo con tutte le mie forze, senza quasi saperlo, la cosiddetta realtà: il meccanismo delle cose che sorgono nel tempo, e dal tempo sono distrutte. Questa realtà era per me incomprensibile e allucinante. . . . Aggiungo che l’esperienza personale della guerra (terrore dovunque e fuga per quattro anni) aveva portato al colmo la mia irritazione contro il reale.

Almost without noticing it, I hated so-called reality with all my might: the mechanism of things that arise with time, and are destroyed by time. This reality was unintelligible and awful to me. . . . I add that my personal experience of the war (terror everywhere and flight for four years) had pushed my vexation against the real to breaking point.

—Anna Maria Ortese, Il mare non bagna Napoli, 1953/1994 (original emphasis)

Contents

List of Abbreviations

List of Musical Examples

Introduction

PART I

1   Imitation

2   Repetition

3   Borrowing

4   Style

5   Genre

6   Dramaturgy

7   Noise

PART II

8   Modernity

9   Theatricality

10   Repertory

11 Di tanti palpiti

12   Memory

13   Pleasure

14   Movement

15   Belief

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Abbreviations

Musical Examples

All examples by Rossini are based on GREC, including Maometto II and Matilde di Shabran, at present available in preliminary versions for rental only. The sources for examples 2.5a, 11.4, and 11.5 are explained in the notes to chapters 2 and 11.

2.1   Il barbiere di Siviglia, Overture, Crescendo, piano reduction

2.2   Tancredi, Act 1 finale, Stretta Quale infausto orrendo giorno: (a) mm. 3–18; (b) mm. 47–54; (c) mm. 63–67

2.3   Bianca e Falliero, Quartet, Andantino Cielo, il mio labbro ispira, mm. 9–56 (voices only)

2.4   Maometto II, Terzettone, Andantino Conquisa l’anima (voices only)

2.5   Opening movement of Isabella’s cavatina Cruda sorte in L’Italiana in Algeri by (a) Luigi Mosca (1808); (b) Rossini (1813)

5.1   La gazza ladra, Duet Ninetta-Giannetto, Stretta O cielo rendimi: (a) mm. 1–9; (b) mm. 18–25

5.2   La gazza ladra, Duet Ninetta-Pippo, Andantino pastoso E ben, per mia memoria: (a) mm. 1–6; (b) mm. 28–43

5.3   La gazza ladra, Sinfonia campestre before Giannetto’s cavatina

5.4   La gazza ladra, Duet Ninetta-Pippo, Stretta L’ultimo istante è questo, mm. 1–24

11.1   Tancredi, Cavatina Tancredi, Allegro moderato Di tanti palpiti

11.2   Tancredi, Aria Amenaide, Andante Giusto Dio, che umile adoro

11.3   L’Italiana in Algeri, Cavatina Lindoro, Cabaletta Contenta quest’alma

11.4   Giovanni Simone Mayr or Giovanni Battista Perucchini, La biondina in gondoleta

11.5   Giovanni Paisiello, L’amor contrastato, ossia La molinara, Nel cor più non mi sento

15.1   Semiramide, Trio Semiramide-Arsace-Assur, Andantino L’usato ardir

15.2   Matilde di Shabran, Sextet Contessa-Corradino-Matilde-Aliprando-Isidoro-Ginardo, Maestoso Passaggier che si confonde

Introduction

The premise of Music in the Present Tense, and the observation that first suggested that it might be worth writing, is the wide gap between the popularity of Rossini’s Italian operas when they first appeared on the stage and the scholarly and critical attention they have received over the past century. No composer in the first half of the nineteenth century enjoyed the measure of prestige, wealth, popular acclaim or artistic influence that belonged to Rossini, according to Philip Gossett.¹ In fact, no composer in the history of Western music had ever enjoyed such a combination of prestige, wealth, popular acclaim, and artistic influence. Rossini’s music was the first to reach such a large number of listeners, whether in opera houses or concert halls, or played in countless arrangements for all sorts of performing forces in spaces both public and private, or simply whistled in the streets.

It is all the more surprising, then, that with few, mostly Italian exceptions Rossini’s works have played a decidedly secondary role in twentieth- and twenty-first-century accounts of nineteenth-century music. One reason for such neglect might have been that the popularity of these operas diminished dramatically during the course of the nineteenth century, and was only partially revived in the second half of the twentieth. Limited popular success cannot be invoked as the sole cause of relatively scant scholarly interest, however, as the cases of many other composers prove: Claudio Monteverdi, to mention only one, is not exactly a household name nowadays, yet his music continues to be at the center of musicological investigation. In fact, in the context of a music historiography that was long influenced by modernist misgivings against success, Rossini’s waning popular fortunes might have worked in his favor, had it not been for that pesky early fame, much too great to be blithely sidelined. At the same time, to point to this fame as the main reason for Rossini’s historiographical misfortunes seems largely unwarranted, in the face of the significantly closer attention that international musicology has paid to, say, Giuseppe Verdi’s operas for over half a century now: at least some of these works were initially no less successful than Rossini’s and, unlike them, have remained so ever since. No doubt Rossini’s enormous early fame has contributed to his relative musicological neglect. But several other factors are as least as important.

One, I suggest, is that the causes of the instantaneous, enormous success with which Rossini’s operas were greeted at their first appearance in the second and third decade of the nineteenth century have not been examined in sufficient depth. In other words, the call of history has not been answered—at least not as loudly as it was issued—precisely because, by and large, Rossini’s operas have been kept out of history. The first aim of Music in the Present Tense, therefore, is to think afresh about the motives behind the Rossinian furore by putting his works back into history, which is to say, into the culture and society within which they were conceived, performed, seen, and discussed, and to which they made self-evidently important contributions—self-evident at least on account of the enormous amount of effort, money, thought, and words that went into performing, seeing, and discussing these operas.

This study focuses on Rossini’s Italian operas and their discourse in Italy between their first appearance in 1810 and about 1825, when Rossini stopped composing them. These works were written by an Italian and, first and foremost, for Italians. I believe that the reasons for Rossini’s initial success are intimately connected to the social practices, cultural formations, ideological currents, and political events of early nineteenth-century Italy, and therefore with the beliefs, fantasies, hopes, and desires of its inhabitants, those Italians who were not yet fully Italians. Many of these beliefs were shared by the inhabitants of many other European countries, of course; hence the quick spread of Rossini’s success. My contention, however, is that in Italy these beliefs were inflected in specific and idiosyncratic ways, and that these inflections not only constitute a crucial factor behind the success of his operas but also shape their dramaturgy in fundamental ways. Although these operas were extremely successful wherever they were performed, in Italy their arrival was truly epoch-making. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that between the early 1810s and the early 1830s Italians moved according to the rhythms of these works—at least middle- and upper-class Italians, as I explain in chapters 8 and 10. My investigation, then, purposefully avoids a transnational perspective. Such a perspective would be most apt for these internationally successful works, but I am convinced it needs to be preceded by a specifically Italian one, which, as I have said, is still largely missing. No greater compliment could be paid to this study than if it contributed to a properly transnational inquiry into the profound reasons for the enormous success of Rossini’s Italian operas within and without Europe.

I decided to stop around 1825 not only because Rossini ceased to write Italian operas then but also because the Italian Rossini discourse stopped developing around that time: by then its main themes and rhetorical tropes were firmly in place, and did not evolve significantly over the following years. In fact, my impression from reading materials from the late 1820s and the 1830s is that the incessant repetition of such themes and tropes in the absence of fresh composerly input made them harden into increasingly stiff and empty clichés, feeding solely off themselves. I will briefly survey the discursive landscape after 1825 in the final chapter of the book.

Music in the Present Tense contains at least twice as many chapters as is common in publications of similar length. Each chapter, significantly shorter than in the average musicological monograph in English, focuses on a specific aspect of the book’s central theme, but functions as a distinct step in an overall argument. The book’s internal organization, then, can be described as a constellation of points of view on a central theme, but the placement of these points forms a line of sorts. I should make clear from the outset, however, that the line of the argument is neither continuous nor straight. A theme explored in one chapter from a certain standpoint is often revisited from a different perspective in another chapter, sometimes more than once: self-borrowing and memory are two such themes. What is more, issues such as listening, the material sources of Rossini’s operas, the composition of theatrical audiences, and gender are not given chapters of their own, but make various appearances at different points of the book. And I keep returning to the overall concern of reality versus its operatic representation. This makes for a certain amount of repetition—not surprisingly, perhaps, since repetition is the most fundamental of the book’s concerns. I can only hope that this is not the symptom of an obsessive, posttraumatic repetition compulsion—a repetition without difference—but rather a necessary return to the past from a different standpoint.

• • •

The book is in two parts. Part I focuses on a set of related themes characteristic of the Rossinian discourse in early nineteenth-century Italy, which I put in dialogue with recent interpretations of Rossini’s Italian operas. My ultimate concern in discussing such different issues as imitation, repetition, self-borrowing, style, and genre, however, is the relationship between representation and reality posited in Rossini’s dramaturgy, about which I advance some original hypotheses. In part II, I then concentrate on the ideology behind this dramaturgy, placing it into the sociocultural context in which the operas were conceived, performed, seen, heard, discussed, and which they substantially helped shape. Such contextualizing allows for an interpretation of Rossini’s dramaturgy as a radically new and specifically Italian reaction to the epoch-making changes in all spheres of human activity witnessed in Europe between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, a period usually considered the beginning of modernity proper.

I begin chapter 1 (Imitation) with a summary of the main themes emerging from a detailed examination of the Rossinian discourse in Italy before about 1825. Among the most prominent is the issue of the relationship between words and music, which fell under the rubrics of imitation or expression. Rossini’s works were heard as radically innovative in this respect, critics most often voicing their concern over a perceived lack of connection between text and music. If Rossini’s music could not be heard as imitative, however, how should it be heard? If it did not attempt to represent the emotions depicted by the words, what was its function? In the context of early nineteenth-century Italian operatic aesthetics, the supposed inability to relate music to text in Rossini’s works made it considerably harder to connect representation to reality. The issue of imitation becomes an issue of representation, then—and thus ultimately of dramaturgy in the broad sense of the term, including not only the techniques, procedures, and conventions that characterize Rossini’s operas, but also the relationship between reality and representation promoted by such techniques, procedures, and conventions.

As a way to begin investigating this relationship in detail, in chapter 2 (Repetition) I turn to recent interpretations of Rossini’s style. Analytical findings suggest that in his first masterpieces, especially Tancredi and L’Italiana in Algeri, Rossini swiftly accomplished a process of focalization on a restricted number of stylistic and formal conventions. Many agree that the repetition of a limited number of musical ideas was the most distinctive feature of Rossini’s scores when compared with those of his predecessors. I suggest, however, that repetition plays a significantly larger role in Rossini’s musical language than has been recognized thus far. But did Rossini’s contemporaries also perceive repetition as a distinguishing feature of his style?

They most certainly did. But, I argue in chapter 3 (Borrowing), they located it in somewhat different parameters from those of twentieth- and twenty-first-century commentators, focusing instead on his self-borrowing of themes, melodies, movements, and even entire numbers. Many explicitly linked self-borrowing to Rossini’s cavalier attitude toward the verbal text—a carelessness that, according to them, made possible the use of the same music for different words. An exploration of the Milanese press of the first fifteen years of the century suggests that the critics’ attacks on self-borrowing (as distinct from plagiarism) emerged only in the early 1810s, more or less at the same time as Rossini’s works took the city by storm. What’s more, such attacks were also directed against contemporary composer Stefano Pavesi. Why were these two composers linked in this way? And what does the Milanese case tell us about the discourse of self-borrowing and therefore of repetition in Rossini’s operas more in general?

In chapter 4 (Style) I attempt to answer such questions by observing that the coupling of Rossini and Pavesi as inveterate self-borrowers points to repetition as the key characteristic that critics and at least part of the public heard in their music, since hearing self-borrowing ultimately means hearing repetition. Attention was focused not so much on repetition within works, though, but on repetition across them. This discourse raises two crucial issues: the identity of a piece of music, and the tension between individual style and common compositional idiom, or, better, the perceptual and discursive challenges thrown up by distinguishing between the two. How could one separate stylistic consistency from copying in works that resorted to repetition with literally unheard insistence? How should one handle music that seemed to take stylistic individuation to such an extreme that it was impossible to distinguish between different pieces within it? Such questions posed by the Rossinian discourse were part and parcel of the epoch-making shift in the conceptualization of aesthetic style from normativity to originality that took place around 1800.

The matter of style raises other aesthetic and ultimately dramaturgical issues; first among them that of genre, which I address in chapter 5 (Genre) through a close look at a few moments of La gazza ladra. Critics berated Rossini for making some of this opera’s supposedly comic moments too serious while doing the opposite to some of its supposedly serious ones, and thus narrowing its range to a middle-of-the-road band. Rossini’s unprecedented stylistic consistency, his supposed addiction to self-borrowing, and the perceived emotional and psychological uniformity of his music, then, were considered not only characteristics of his works irrespective of genre but also thought to contribute to the flattening of genre differentiations. The result was a further removal of operatic representation from reality than was already generally the case.

Moving once again from early responses to more recent views, chapter 6 (Dramaturgy) discusses current interpretations of Rossini’s dramaturgy. They have tended to focus on Rossini’s comic works, characterizing them primarily in terms of distance and objectification; a related critical theme is metatheatricality, even if this term seldom appears explicitly. I argue that a metatheatrical dimension pervades all Rossini’s opere buffe to an extent largely unrecognized thus far, and that the dramaturgical implications of Rossini’s comic style in terms of distance and objectification are different manifestations of the heightened sense of self-referentiality generated by the music’s reliance on repetition. Largely analogous deductions can be drawn from the scores of opere serie or semiserie as well, since the stylistic traits on which analytical investigations have focused are mostly common to all genres. The salient traits that Rossini’s contemporaries perceived in his operas regardless of genre, such as their nonimitative setting of the text, their crucial reliance on repetition, and therefore the looser connection that they establish between reality and representation, also recently highlighted by those who have analyzed Rossini’s style, promote these interpretative categories as both historically and analytically grounded. But why did Rossini put this style at the service of a dramaturgy that promoted distance, objectification, and self-referentiality, and that blurred the distinction among operatic genres?

One path toward an answer, I suggest in chapter 7, might be by exploring a theme that emerges frequently in the early discourse: Noise. The charge of excessive loudness and exaggerated orchestration, often supposed to be a consequence of Rossini’s attempts to follow German music, was a recurring criticism against his operas, regardless of genre. Some connected it with the Napoleonic wars, linking operatic representation and reality in terms of the psychological and emotional conditions of Rossini’s first audiences. Far from arguing that a noisy orchestration was meant to reproduce a noisy reality on stage, these writers suggest that Rossini attempted to drown out this reality and to create an alternative world which, by force of sheer volume, could replace the real one for at least a moment in the minds and hearts of spectators. What, then, could occupy these minds and hearts that required drowning out with such loud music?

Chapter 8 (Modernity), which opens part II of the book, moves away from Rossini’s operas and toward the world in which they first appeared. Historians agree on the cataclysmic impact that the arrival of Napoleon’s armies had on all spheres of human activity in the Italian peninsula: it meant nothing less than the arrival of modernity. The result was confusion, bewilderment, shock. The Italy in which Rossini’s operas emerged can be best described with the word trauma. I explore the nature and consequences of this trauma through the writings of two uncompromising interpreters of Italy’s first collision with modernity, Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi. For Foscolo and Leopardi reality had ceased to make sense for modern Italians: time and space, history and geography had become undecipherable, unknowable dimensions for a subject who had lost all notions of itself as a separate and unified entity. One of the consequences of this loss was the sense that one’s life was restricted to the present. According to Leopardi, Italians lacked the tools to which other peoples turned to deal with this situation—the novel, for example. They instead embraced spectacle: promenading in public, religious ceremonies, and theatrical entertainments. Theatricality became the defining feature of modern Italian society, and one of the clearest symptoms of its failure to work through the trauma of its encounter with modernity.

In chapter 9 (Theatricality) the argument then connects with recent theories that understand modern theatricality as a way of turning away from a reality that has ceased to make sense. In my interpretation, the heightened theatricality of Rossini’s operas becomes a response to the psycho-cultural context in which these works were composed and first performed: a world that could no longer be fully known, in which human subjects had lost any sense of spatial and especially temporal dimensions, and felt stuck in the present. Rossini’s dramaturgy, both comic and serious, was characterized by distance, objectification, and self-referentiality because meaning could not be found off the stage. Rather, the stage was the only site where the illusion of meaning could be entertained.

Chapter 10 (Repertory) turns to some wider implications of this interpretation, with specific reference to the concept and practice of repetition. Not only did the modern operatic repertory appear first in connection with repeated revivals of Rossini’s operas in the same theater; those works also dominated over those of other composers in early nineteenth-century Italian theaters. Looking at theaters, however, gives only a partial view of the situation, since Rossini’s music was also sung and played in countless arrangements for all sorts of performing forces in spaces both public and private. I explore the widespread dissemination of this music in all spheres of society, presenting some surprising discoveries in the repertory of dialect popular songs that bring home with full force the level of popularity (and therefore of repetition) reached by at least some of Rossini’s music in Italy in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In chapter 11 (Di tanti palpiti) I pursue this line of enquiry by delving into the special case of Di tanti palpiti, a tune for the title character in Tancredi and Rossini’s most famous single piece in early nineteenth-century Italy (and beyond). Following its travels outside the urban sphere and into the countryside in the form of folk songs, I ask why this particular melody might have been singled out by its extraordinary success, comparing it both with other tunes by Rossini and with other melodies with literate origins that became popular songs. This comparative exercise brings to the fore the crucial function of memory in the diffusion of Rossini’s music, at different social levels and therefore at different degrees of familiarity with his operas.

Broadening the scope of this observation, chapter 12 (Memory) asks what it might have meant to know Rossini’s music in early nineteenth-century Italy. I connect the relationship between Rossini’s repetitive style, the continuous repeat performances of his operas, and the increasing availability of his music in a myriad of arrangements, to the debate on memory in early nineteenth-century European culture at large. I conclude that Rossini’s music became memorable as it was heard and remembered, but was also heard as repetitive because it was repeated so often, ever increasing familiarity bringing an ever increasing focus on sameness rather than difference, making an increasing number of listeners hear this music as ever more similar to itself, as ever more memorable, and as—for most of them—ever more pleasurable.

Pleasure and memory are the themes of chapter 13 (Pleasure), in which I link pleasure with conventionality and repetition and discuss the multiple ways in which repetition lies at the core of modernity. The focus then shifts to the concept of posttraumatic repetition first articulated by Freud, expanded in subsequent psychoanalytic theories, and recently taken up by historians in connection with twentieth-century historical traumas. I understand the Napoleonic invasions as an historical trauma for many early nineteenth-century Italians and suggest that the repetition characteristic of Rossini’s operas as well as their repeated performance can be understood in such broadly psychoanalytic terms. I focus on one specific instance of repetition that seems to call for an explanation of this sort: the obsessive return of one basic situation consisting in a prolonged moment of utter confusion, stunned disbelief, complete disorientation on the part of the characters following a traumatic event. Precisely at these moments Rossini reached for the whole battery of repetitive musical patterns discussed in previous chapters. My argument: Rossini’s operas staged over and over again the Napoleonic trauma and the compulsion to repeat in which Italians found themselves trapped. More radically, these operas constituted a form of literal acting out and were therefore a symptom of what Freud would have termed melancholia.

Chapter 14 (Movement) takes my argument beyond this psychoanalytical understanding of Rossini’s repetition. Although, psychoanalytically speaking, repetition seems to be the main tool through which operatic representation keeps messy reality at bay, it is possible to reconceptualize this relationship. Through repetition, operatic representation distances itself from any suggestion that its function is somehow to reproduce or imitate reality: repetition allows operatic representation to free itself from an aesthetic of mimesis. In this sense, repetition promotes precisely the essentially modern theatricality that commentators have long considered a defining characteristic of Rossini’s dramaturgy. Taking my clue from the music aesthetics of two philosophers who were also great fans of Rossini, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer, and then turning to Søren Kierkegaard’s and Gilles Deleuze’s ideas on movement and theatricality, I argue that Rossini’s repetition worked as an opportunity to go beyond representation altogether, finding instead a movement capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation and of making movement itself a work (Deleuze’s words). Grounding Deleuze’s theories historically in the early nineteenth-century aesthetic of the sublime, I suggest that, in its most philosophical understanding, the sublime constitutes a valid interpretive category for Rossinian dramaturgy’s rapturous embrace of the impossibility of representation.

Chapter 15 (Belief) returns to history, asking what happened after about 1830, when Rossini’s popularity diminished rather sharply. I read contemporary critical discourse in light of the continuing popularity of a selected number of Rossini’s titles, especially Italian versions of operas originally conceived for Parisian stages between 1826 and 1829. I argue that the differences between the dramaturgies of Rossini’s Italian and French works can be understood in terms of different stances toward reality and the possibility of its operatic representation. Rossini’s French works seem to believe in this possibility, and therefore were better suited to a new culture of belief in the comprehension of reality that emerged in Italy toward the end of the 1820s and flourished in the 1830s and 1840s, and that found its initial operatic expression in Bellini’s and Donizetti’s works of the late 1820s and early 1830s.

An epilogue asks what this historically grounded interpretation of Rossini’s Italian operas may mean for their present-day reception. While keeping a skeptical stance toward the notion that operas carry with them a set of defined meanings as they travel through history, I gesture toward possible connections between my conclusions about the meanings of Rossini’s Italian operas at the time of their initial appearance and the renewed popularity of several of these works in the last few decades, focusing especially on some common trends in the ways they are staged.

• • •

Before I attempt to place the outline offered above into the immediate context of Rossini studies and a broader intellectual compass, I should like to explain some of the study’s specific features, beginning with my partiality to the term discourse. In what follows I rarely talk about reception. I avoid the term because it can risk implying a binary opposition that I believe is no longer tenable: on the one hand stands the operatic work, come scoglio immoto (still like a rock) amid the ravages of history like Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte; on the other hand swirls its reception, which interprets it but somehow never touches its essence, as if this essence stood outside history, and thus not only outside the actual changes often made to any work in performance, but also outside changes to its interpretation, to the meanings different generations have found within it. The term discourse points to a more flexible interpretive model. Works in all their components (textual, musical, visual) and manifestations (from actual performances to the multifarious sources that enable them), as well as the words said about and around them (no matter who utters them, or when), can all be considered aspects of a specific discourse, defined as a field of human exchange in continuous and complex movement. Therefore, I tend to prefer locutions such as Rossinian/Rossini discourse or even discourse of (as in, for example, the discourse of style), rather than the more usual Rossini reception or discourse about, regarding them as more helpful in bridging the gap between works and words, and in moving away from the somewhat passive and more static implications of the latter formulations.

I should make clear that I have no desire to obliterate the very different ways in which a canon or a coloratura run signify when compared with a newspaper review of a performance that contains them. Indeed, in the first half of the book this difference is, in a sense, reified by the separate treatments I often reserve for works on one side and words about them on the other. At the same time, though, I do not want to overdetermine this separation: in several cases works and words are mixed, or an issue is discussed from a shifting variety of perspectives (self-borrowing is a good example). It is also the case that the more historical and interpretive second part of the book tends to leave such separation behind, coming closer to the model of discursive criticism I have just outlined.

The question of discourse brings to the fore a broader matter still, that of reality. As the book summary makes clear, the relationship between reality and representation is at the center of my attention, especially in part II. This relationship is of course a fraught and fiercely debated issue, especially when it comes to reflections on modernity.² I engage with some of these debates in the chapter on theatricality, to which they are particularly relevant. In the context of the book as a whole, however, I believe that there is no need for extended philosophical digressions: representation almost always refers to theatrical representation, that is, a story acted—and here sung—on a stage by characters in front of an audience. But reality does need a few additional words of clarification. By reality I mean not only what happens outside theatrical representation, but also what takes place outside human subjects, in their interactions with the world and especially with each other, as opposed to their internal thoughts and feelings. Reality here is external events, objects, images, and words. It is battles, laws, taxes, newspapers, conversations, clothes, gestures, food: in sum, everything outside ourselves, in contrast to what goes on inside, what we think and feel. Of course, this distinction is fraught with contradictions to say the least. For one, in this sense theatrical representation is no less part of external reality than battles or food. For another, in chapter 9 I claim that Rossini’s operas issue an invitation to a different reality, thus implying that theatrical representation can, for a moment, construct a world for its audience that can feel no less real that battles or food. For most of the book, however, this double distinction between, on the one hand, reality and theatrical representation, and, on the other, external reality and internal thoughts and feelings is essential to a historically and geographically located understanding of specific forms of representation consumed by specific audiences immersed in specific discursive practices—no matter how philosophically untenable such distinctions might be considered.

• • •

There are other, more concrete and circumscribed features of Music in the Present Tense that need to be mentioned here. First, the one discursive component almost never addressed in the book—with the minor exception of the epilogue—is the performative one. Although generally I regret this absence, especially of singers and stage designers, the nature of this project rendered their presence superfluous: neither category contributed substantially to making Rossini’s Italian operas different from those of his predecessors and contemporaries, and therefore to their unprecedented success. What changed was the music and the drama, not the singing or the staging, at least initially. If the latter did—and there is some indication that at least singing might have, although more research is needed on the matter—it happened as a reaction to the novelties of Rossini’s musical language, not as a cause of these novelties.³

The sources for Rossinian discourse in early nineteenth-century Italy also require some preliminary clarification. They need to be addressed from two different but mutually influential perspectives. First, without insisting too much on the old Dahlhausian binary between the event as the central object of operatic culture in nineteenth-century Italy and the musical text characterizing contemporary German musical culture instead, there is no doubt that talk of opera in Italy between about 1810 and 1825 was based mainly on performances and printed librettos, and only rarely on scores. Printed piano-vocal scores began to circulate in a significant way only toward the end of this period, although overtures and the most famous arias and duets were generally available in editions for voice and piano, or piano solo, or other combinations of instruments (as I discuss in chap. 12).

The second perspective is provided by the kinds of texts with which we are dealing. These texts consist essentially of reviews of performances published in generalist periodicals, especially newspapers, and in pamphlets. In Italy, periodicals dedicated to opera that included reviews (as opposed to lists of performances and data on performers, composers and companies, such as the Indice de’ teatrali spettacoli) began to appear only in the second half of the 1820s. Music periodicals—that is, periodicals devoted to instrumental and nontheatrical music as well as opera—came even later. More private documents, such as letters and diaries, are rarely available, and the ones that are remain largely unpublished. I have consulted a number of the few accessible in print, especially Rossini’s own letters of course, which I have read in detail, but which, unsurprisingly, are mostly silent on the matters explored in Music in the Present Tense—with one notable exception, as we shall see.

As already noted, these two perspectives overlap. In early nineteenth-century Italy the Rossinian discourse was founded not only on live performances and librettos but also—perhaps especially—on reviews, which created a thick textual network of observations, reflections, and opinions. The implied readers of a review sometimes seem not to be the primary readers of the periodical in question, but other reviewers and journalists, to which this particular review is responding, often to advance a different interpretation and evaluation of the performance being discussed. What is more, the vast majority of reviewers appear to have no technical knowledge of music, but were instead littérateurs with an amateur interest in opera. Nothing is either new or problematic in this: for the first two centuries of its existence, opera was conceived as a play coated in music, that