Networking Operatic Italy

By Francesca Vella

A study of the networks of opera production and critical discourse that shaped Italian cultural identity during and after Unification.

Opera’s role in shaping Italian identity has long fascinated both critics and scholars. Whereas the romance of the Risorgimento once spurred analyses of how individual works and styles grew out of and fostered specifically “Italian” sensibilities and modes of address, more recently scholars have discovered the ways in which opera has animated Italians’ social and cultural life in myriad different local contexts.

In Networking Operatic Italy, Francesca Vella reexamines this much-debated topic by exploring how, where, and why opera traveled on the mid-nineteenth-century peninsula, and what this mobility meant for opera, Italian cities, and Italy alike. Focusing on the 1850s to the 1870s, Vella attends to opera’s encounters with new technologies of transportation and communication, as well as its continued dissemination through newspapers, wind bands, and singing human bodies. Ultimately, this book sheds light on the vibrancy and complexity of nineteenth-century Italian operatic cultures, challenging many of our assumptions about an often exoticized country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jan 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9780226815718

Book preview

Cover Page for Networking Operatic Italy

Networking Operatic Italy

Explorations in History, Technology, and Performance

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

Advisory Board

Carolyn AbbateGundula KreuzerEmanuele SeniciBenjamin WaltonEmily Wilbourne

Also published in the series:

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

Emanuele Senici

Singing Sappho: Improvisation and Authority in Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera

Melina Esse

Don Giovanni Captured: Performance, Recording, Myth

Richard Will

Networking Operatic Italy

Francesca Vella

The University of Chicago Press    CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 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 2021

Printed in the United States of America

This book has been supported by the AMS 75 PAYS Fund of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81570-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81571-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226815718.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Vella, Francesca, author.

Title: Networking operatic Italy / Francesca Vella.

Other titles: Opera lab.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Series: Opera lab: explorations in history, technology, and performance | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021021046 | ISBN 9780226815701 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226815718 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Opera—Italy—19th century.

Classification: LCC ML1733.4 .V45 2021 | DDC 782.10945/09034—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021046

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

per roger

As I once said to Baker—my mystical friend with the crowded poetry—the trouble about God is that he is like a person who never acknowledges one’s letters and so, in time, one comes to the conclusion either that he does not exist or that you have got the address wrong. I admitted that it was of great moment: but what was the use of going on despatching fervent messages—say to Edinburgh—if they all came back through the dead letter office: nay more, if you couldn’t even find Edinburgh on the map. His cryptic reply was that it would be almost worth going to Edinburgh to find out.

—C. S. Lewis, 1921

Contents

A Note of Thanks

List of Figures

List of Musical Examples

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE   Stagecrafting the City

Florence, Opera, and Technological Modernity

CHAPTER TWO   Funeral Entrainments

Errico Petrella’s Jone and the Band

CHAPTER THREE   Global Voices

Adelina Patti, Multilingualism, and Bel Canto (as) Listening

CHAPTER FOUR   Ito per Ferrovia

Opera Productions on the Tracks

CHAPTER FIVE   Aida, Media, and Temporal Politics circa 1871–72

Author’s Note

Notes

Bibliography

Index

A Note of Thanks

My deepest gratitude to those who have supported me and this project with kindness, honesty, and loyalty over the years. Their love has helped me through many difficult moments. May their lives and wisdom keep showing me the way.

Cambridge, November 2020

Figures

1.1   Rivista musicale di Firenze, February 1, 1841

3.1   La Patti a Torino. Variazioni su tema obbligato. Lithograph from Il fischietto, April 5, 1879.

3.2   Francesco Gazzetti, Insegnamento contemporaneo di lettura e scrittura col metodo fonico (Venice: Antonelli, 1858)

3.3   Insegnamento teoretico e pratico del metodo di lettura fonico (Cremona: Montaldi, 1870)

3.4   Francesco Lamperti, L’arte del canto in ordine alle tradizioni classiche ed a particolare esperienza: Norme tecniche e consigli agli allievi ed agli artisti (Milan: Ricordi, 1883)

4.1   Panorama della Strada-Ferrata delli Appennini Bologna, Pistoja, Firenze (Bologna: Litografia Giulio Wenk, 1864), front cover

4.2   Augusto Grossi, "Caravana del Lohengrin." Lithograph from John Grand-Carteret, Richard Wagner en caricatures: 130 reproductions de caricatures françaises, allemandes, italiennes, portraits, autographes (Paris: Larousse, 1892).

4.3   "Andata . . . e ritorno di una Stella . . . cadente, a Firenze." Lithograph from Cosmorama pittorico, July 3, 1880.

5.1   Disposizione scenica per l’opera Aida, versi di A. Ghislanzoni, musica di G. Verdi, compilata e regolata secondo la messa in scena del Teatro alla Scala da Giulio Ricordi (Milan: Ricordi, [1873])

5.2   Aida. Mise en scène pour le Théâtre-Italien de Paris par Antoine Vanhamme.

5.3   Disposizione scenica per l’opera Aida

5.4   Supplement to the Gazzetta musicale di Milano [December 25, 1871]

5.5   Casimiro Teja, Gli italiani in Egitto. Lithograph from Il Pasquino, January 14, 1872.

5.6   Differenza di tempo in Italia riferita al meridiano del Campidoglio. Lithograph from Il giornale illustrato, June 3–9, 1865.

Musical Examples

2.1   Errico Petrella, Jone, act 4, preludio, coro e marcia funebre, mm. 60–114

2.2   Errico Petrella, Jone, act 1, sinfonia, mm. 1–18

2.3   Errico Petrella, Jone, act 4, scena e duetto (Jone, Arbace), mm. 168–88

5.1   Giuseppe Verdi, Aida, act 1, scene 1, mm. 1–5

5.2   Giuseppe Verdi, Aida, act 1, scene 1, mm. 368–87

5.3   Giuseppe Verdi, Simon Boccanegra (1857), act 1, scena e sestetto nel finale, mm. 56–60

• INTRODUCTION •

Opera (Italian and Other). Bologna—Milan. Northern Italy. 1858/59 . . . A sheet of scribbled notes records the circumstances in which this book began to take shape. Written in 2013, the notes captured a precise disciplinary moment: a moment when, inspired by the larger local turn in cultural studies, musicologists and historians were remapping the terrain of nineteenth-century opera’s historiography. Approaches that had long prioritized the nation as a category of historical analysis were giving way to frameworks centered on individual local milieus.¹ Originally this book was to comprise six urban case studies of key episodes in late-nineteenth-century Italian operatic history. Its purpose then was to challenge monolithic understandings of opera’s formative role in the young Italian nation-state by presenting a series of local perspectives on operatic debates and developments that characterized the period. Over the seven years it has taken me to shape it into its final form, however, this study has shed much of its initial, rigorously local focus and gained a more interconnected nature. Networking Operatic Italy, as this book is now called, explores how networks of opera production and critical discourse articulated Italian cultural identities during the years that immediately preceded and followed the country’s unification in 1861. Each chapter examines a different type of operatic interaction between cities: locations, Italian and foreign, that constantly communicated with each other, at both material and discursive levels.

Before I explain what prompted this reorientation, let me say straight away that questions of locality are still central to this book. For a long time, opera in nineteenth-century Italy was studied almost exclusively as a national phenomenon. The romance of the Risorgimento—the struggles for independence and unification fought by two or three generations of Italians—spurred analyses of how individual works and styles grew out of and fostered specifically Italian sensibilities and modes of address. During a period when successive waves of patriotic enthusiasm swept the peninsula, political energies, it has been argued, were picked up and translated into operatic forms and attitudes that in turn fueled broader behaviors and states of mind.² Only in the last two decades has work by Carlotta Sorba, Jutta Toelle, Axel Körner, Laura Protano-Biggs, and Emanuele Senici, among others, revealed how opera animated Italians’ social and cultural life in a range of distinctive local forms and local contexts.³ This work has had a huge influence on my approach in this book. Particularly in chapters 1 and 4, where I address the dyad opera and the city most explicitly, I show how idiosyncratic notions of place were simultaneously the driving forces and the by-products of operatic trends that differed from city to city. Even where my work does not drill deeply into any single urban setting, the stakes of approaching the past through local viewpoints rather than through the spread-out morphology of national discourse are, I hope, always clear.⁴ Known as the land of a hundred cities owing to its multiple and persistent localisms, Italy might even be said to provide the ideal testing ground for gauging the pitfalls of nation-centered approaches. There is no way of circumventing questions of geography for the historian of the peninsula; Italy’s body, at once a physical and an imagined formation, resists any standard or even centralist narrative.⁵

And yet, precisely because of its political and cultural pluricentrism, Italy also challenges the scholar to take a holistic approach to the subject. As I started to dig into municipal and theatrical archives and to scan the pages of nineteenth-century periodicals, unexpected interconnections between cities that have often been treated as discrete operatic milieus indeed bounced to the fore. During the mid-1850s, electric arc lamps of supposedly Florentine creation lit up, I discovered, opera productions on multiple stages and infused them with a shared modern outlook. Beginning in the 1870s, trains moved full-blown operatic stagings across the Apennines just as telegraphy gave impetus to the coordination of local times in ways that intersected with operatic aesthetics. The growing traffic of opera singers across the Atlantic from midcentury on meant that their voices were reimagined as vehicles of linguistic ideologies that raised pronunciation to be a newly pivotal parameter for evaluation in what I call bel canto (as) listening. And with increasing frequency in the post-Unification years, wind bands served up operatic marches at funeral corteges that established physical and emotional bonds within and among distinct Italian communities. In short, the historical materials themselves suggested to me that a strictly local framework is also limiting. To see anew the role that opera played in Italian experience between the 1850s and the 1870s as the peninsula’s inhabitants coalesced into a single political body, we need to look not only down the avenues of nationalist discourse, not simply in the directions indexed by campanilismo, but also along the pathways—sometimes physical, sometimes imaginary—on which different urban actors and urban agendas came into contact with each other.

Networking Operatic Italy pursues this goal through five case studies. Each one adopts a different approach to the circulation of operatic works, performers, and productions on the midcentury peninsula, as well as offering insights into the travels of less mainstream operatic objects and actors, and into locations outside Italy. The Risorgimento and the so-called Liberal Era (1861–1914) saw a steady rise in Italian mobilities, not only in the form of émigrés leaving their local and national homeland for political and economic reasons, but also of centralized attempts to promote Italy’s colonial projects and its natural and cultural riches among domestic and foreign tourists.⁶ According to scholars of globalization, the period was also one of "increased mobility in wider geographical terms: an age when new technologies and infrastructures accelerated movement and cultural communication the world over.⁷ The historian Jürgen Osterhammel has offered a detailed account of the subject, positioning opera as an early comer to and paramount aesthetic agent of these shifts. In his view, not only was opera Europe’s most characteristic art form, but it also underwent globalization early on," starting circa 1830.⁸ At the turn of the following century, the growing economic and cultural importance of the Americas and the emergence of the music recording industry in between the Old World and the New sped up the flows of operatic people and commodities that constantly traversed the globe.⁹ The scholarship on these fin de siècle developments has informed my thinking in multiple ways, yet my analysis focuses on an earlier historical moment and prevents us from believing that only vast, fast, and spectacular movements matter: that they alone produce historical ruptures and transform cultural meanings.¹⁰

The journeys I examine can be as short as a fifty-mile trip of an opera production from Bologna to Florence, or as inconspicuous as the relocation of an electric arc lamp from one theatrical stage to another. My wind bands typically marched from churches to cemeteries, and singular soprano voices moved effortlessly among the sounds of different languages. As I retrace the material and politico-cultural conditions that enabled operatic people and their equipment to travel, I ask what these movements meant for Italy, Italian cities, and opera alike. I show how an ideology of interconnectedness evidenced by Florence’s material and symbolic fabric informed local operatic criticism in the 1850s, with the critical discourses in turn strengthening the capital of the late Tuscan grand duchy as an embodiment, however problematic, of Europeanness and Italianness. I reveal how transmunicipal identity politics after Unification was negotiated through opera not only via journalistic networks but also via the earliest travels of full opera productions on railroad tracks. Whether by exploring Adelina Patti’s Italian voice within an emerging transatlantic awareness of the stakes of correct diction, or by investigating the media ecology that underpinned early stagings of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida in Cairo and Milan, I clarify how key aspects of an Italian macro-identity were articulated through opera, both Italian and foreign, in between distinct locations: liminal spaces that in turn transformed operatic ideas and aesthetics.

One of my aims is to reconsider standard views of late-nineteenth-century Italy as a backward and culturally isolated country, nostalgically absorbed in its traditions. The idea goes back to the period and constitutes one of those thorny tropes that often ensnare scholars in a double bind: while seeking to reveal its historicity, modern analyses can reassert the values they meant to undermine. Much informative scholarship has advanced an image of the young Italian nation-state as struggling to modernize and rushing to catch up with northern Europe, a view this book complements by uncovering an alternative, parallel set of cultural preoccupations that defined the period.¹¹ These preoccupations emerge most clearly from the trajectories opened up for opera by new technologies of transportation and communication—the railway, the telegraph, and other modern apparatuses—whose networking potential (on which more later) can nevertheless also be explored through a number of preelectric devices. By paying attention to the operatic interplays that both old and new media encouraged on a transnational as well as national level, we may lay to rest (or at least substantially dismantle) hidebound notions of late-nineteenth-century Italian cultural life as parochial, aesthetically conservative, and balkanized into many isolated pockets of local dialect, aesthetic taste, and culture. On the contrary, opera at midcentury articulated a connective sense of Italian experience, taking impetus from and reorienting the burgeoning global and technological consciousness of the period. I would argue, in fact, that this new sense of interconnection was not just a result of the period’s teleological sense of time. The Risorgimento’s drive to move history forward, the heroic thrust that underlies its political and cultural narratives—these certainly produced and sustained, as their enabling condition, that antithetical sluggishness that European thought more broadly situated unfailingly in Italy, particularly its South.¹² Nevertheless, Italian exceptionalism and the craving for progress are not the sole or even main protagonists of the chapters that follow. As I tangentially reexamine familiar ideas about opera’s contribution to the process of Italian unification, I also hope to debunk a popular and scholarly myth of Italian distinctiveness by bringing the country and its midcentury operatic cultures into dialogue with broader international experiences.

This book’s time period includes the years before and after the crucial moment from 1859 to 1861, when Italy—then divided into seven states under foreign domination—became a single kingdom under the House of Savoy, which ruled Piedmont-Sardinia. Rome did not join the new nation-state until 1870, after which it became its third political capital following Turin (1861–65) and Florence (1865–71). Linguistic and administrative differences also haunted the country for decades to come. In chapters 1 and 2, both of which focus in full or in part on the pre-Unification years, I therefore use the words Italy and Italian not as expressions of an existing political reality but as references to shared cultural markers: as the terms were, in fact, used in contemporary discourse.¹³ Except for the first chapter, a deep dive into the Florentine scene, all of my case studies tackle multiple cities from the North, Center, and South of the peninsula. I pay special attention to Bologna and Milan, two major centers of operatic activity; but I also consider Naples, Turin, Rome, Venice, and Piacenza, in addition to towns and villages from the Marche and Sicily. Foreign locations feature prominently in almost every chapter and are essential to the fluid geographies this book attempts to recreate. If Networking Operatic Italy offers an interconnected account of opera in the midcentury Italian nation and paints a picture of perhaps increasing, if complex, national integration, it makes no claim, however, to be a comprehensive history of the period, or to dismiss other geographical dimensions of the phenomena it describes.

To write an operatic history of Italy that crisscrosses 1859–61 is also an opportunity to pay both more and less attention than previous scholarship has to the cultural effects of Unification. Standard accounts of the period take 1861, or sometimes 1870, to have marked a sharp discontinuity—a view stemming from efforts to identify areas of overlapping political and operatic activity. Inasmuch as musicologists and historians have searched for evidence of opera’s centrality to the Risorgimento project in libretti and musical works, Verdi’s early- and middle-period operas have turned up the strongest discursive and emotional affinities with contemporary political ideologies. In 1851 the composer took up residence in his country villa at Sant’Agata, where he would increasingly hide away from the bustle of both city life and celebrity. A few years later, in 1859, he began his temporary retreat from the Italian operatic scene, expanding his commitments with foreign theaters. His reduced presence and activity during a period when feasible operatic successors were failing to emerge has led modern commentators to understand the 1860s and 1870s as a time when opera, on the largely unified peninsula, came to a standstill. Those were decades, we have been told, that coincided with a national operatic crisis fueled by financial difficulties and a paucity of new works entering the canon: years of transition devoid of noteworthy compositional activity and lacking signs of broader operatic innovation.¹⁴

The notion that the political turning point of Unification can be mapped smoothly onto narratives of Italian operatic history is problematic for several reasons. For one thing, our scholarly parameters for assessing the cultural significance of operatic works and developments in their time have been heavily shaped by hindsight, as scholarly emphasis on canon formation and the rhetoric of transition suggest.¹⁵ For another, they are rooted in decades of musicological interest in works and composers as the primary drivers of Western musical cultures. The operatic energies that failed to match—or to sustain—post-Unification efforts at political and cultural integration in the field of composition were nevertheless alive and well in other areas of Italian operatic life, particularly production and performance. Rather than simply reflecting, or else feeding, the revolutionary drives and the nostalgic outlook of the age, opera at midcentury contributed to Italian nation building in ways subtler than nationalist discourse and performance statistics imply. To take a flexible approach to the years 1859 to 1861 is to allow ourselves to contemplate both changes and continuities that characterized the period. It is to treat every single political and even technological occurrence, however momentous, with the same circumspection that we (or at least I) would reckon it wise to use when approaching any turning point in our lives. Such occurrences may, at times, cause real historical ruptures, redirecting the course of events in unforeseen ways; but equally significant are longer chronologies and hidden genealogies that do not align with the epoch-making impulses that often drive scholarly and biographical narratives.

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The chapters of Networking Operatic Italy are arranged loosely in chronological order. Each takes on a specific medium through which opera was sent out on the Italian peninsula between the 1850s and the 1870s, and simultaneously hints at previous or subsequent decades and simultaneous goings-on in other countries. By opera I mean different operatic objects and actors: not just works, singers, and stagings, but also single musical numbers, technical craftsmen and appliances, and ideas crystallized in press criticism. By media I understand transportation and communication technologies—railways and telegraphy—that arrived in Italy around midcentury, and older reproductive devices—newspapers, wind bands, and the human voice—whose medial qualities I spell out case-by-case.

Mobility, one of this book’s central concerns, has been a subject of much debate across the social sciences and the humanities. In the last fifteen years two leading figures, the human geographer Tim Cresswell and the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, have alerted us to the challenges that the experience of movement poses to historical and critical investigation. In his account of some of the ways in which mobility has been conceptualized in modern Western societies, Cresswell points out its apparently intangible nature, which makes it an elusive object of study.¹⁶ The sphere of representation—the generation of meanings at the intersection of politics, ideology, and social power—is central to his exploratory endeavor. Just as important, though, are embodied practices of movement, mobility being a thoroughly social experience coproduced at the intersection of individual volition, objects, technologies, societal and cultural expectations, spaces traversed, and so forth. Greenblatt expresses a similar commitment to understanding the working and agency of movement when he calls for microhistories of cultural mobility attentive to the tension between permanence and change, fixity and motion. What we should really be concerned with as scholars, Greenblatt advises, are the mechanisms through which movement challenges, or at times brings into play, forms of resistance and structural constraints.¹⁷ The shift from mobility to mobilities in the latest scholarship reveals an awareness that, by treating movement as a single, unified phenomenon, we may end up reproducing its ideological baggage. Rather than use mobility as a tool for empowering otherwise passively displaced historical actors, as a heuristic, even, that can help validate our own historiographical moves, we may do well to investigate its subjects, its valence in different local and historical contexts, and the techniques and unpredictable effects that any movement always involves.¹⁸

My first chapter explores some of these issues in relation to Florence, a city that in the mid-nineteenth century was a crossroads of various mobilities. This chapter sets the scene for the book’s gradual opening up of the urban perspective by reconsidering historical and scholarly discourses on grand opéra as refracted through this Tuscan locale. Within just over a decade, between 1840 and 1852, Florence staged all the Italian premieres of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s French operas: Roberto il diavolo (Robert le diable), Gli anglicani (Les Huguenots), and Il profeta (Le Prophète). The appearance of these works spurred heated discussions about their eclectic style—the synthesis of national musical idioms that the composer had come to embody in the European imagination—while also causing his cosmopolitanism to resonate with features of the local urban environment.¹⁹ As a hub of Italian exiles and foreign tourists and a musical center that was internationalizing its image, Florence offers an extraordinary vantage point for attending to how movement, both physical and imaginary, shaped perceptions of opera, Meyerbeer, and the Italian Athens.

Focusing on the mechanisms that governed the circulation of people, music, and ideas across national borders allows me to foreground media, from newspapers to exportable theater technologies such as electric arc lamps, that played a key role in Florentine attempts at urban self-fashioning. I try to explain what made Florence a unique looking glass of European modernity circa 1850: how a preindustrial city still seamlessly amalgamated with its country environs could aspire to a leading position in a globalizing world. To answer these questions, I discuss two aspects of the staging of Il profeta at the Teatro della Pergola in 1852: the act 3 electric sunrise and the act 4 coronation scene. I read these moments, both of which involved problematic replicas of the Parisian originals, alongside literary texts and networks of theatrical craftsmanship that illuminate Florence’s complex relationship with other cities. Ultimately I argue that perceptions of Florence’s urban environment and local attitudes to progress were driven by impulses to emulate—and simultaneously resist—the model of urban modernity set forth by northern European metropolises.

This urban perspective, serving as a prism of both Italy and Europe, gives way in chapter 2 to a much more dispersed geography. This chapter contributes to the ongoing rebalancing of musicological attention away from canonic works and figures and toward music that was representative of a given era. It explores wind band cultures on the late-nineteenth-century peninsula, and the role that operatic funeral marches played in funeral rituals. The migration of music from the elite space of the theater to the cross-class space of the street has long attracted opera scholars, particularly Italianists enthusing over their art form’s capacity to reinvent and adapt itself through popular culture.²⁰ Here I am interested in charting the physical and discursive peregrinations of a single operatic number: the marcia funebre from Errico Petrella’s Jone, premiered at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1858. Originally from Sicily, Petrella was—after his exact contemporary, Verdi—the most-performed living composer in Italy during the 1850s and 1860s. Jone may be virtually unknown today, but in its time it was staged in both major and minor theaters, and single pieces circulated widely in musical arrangements of various nature.

Indeed, by the time Petrella died in 1877, Jone’s funeral march—which in the opera is played by a stage band accompanying a Greek convict to the scaffold—had become a signifier of death and mourning throughout Italy and Spanish-speaking countries. On the peninsula, the piece was played by wind bands that accompanied increasingly common funeral corteges, and it set the pace of Holy Week processions in various areas of the Center and the South. An instrument for contemplating loss in contexts that varied geographically, politically, and religiously, it facilitated cultural entrainment between distinct communities. From the 1860s, Italian civic bands were on the rise and their performances extended on an affective level the techniques of muscular bonding developed, in an earlier period, within the context of military marching.²¹ Jone’s marcia funebre provided an emotional arena in and through which different social groups could imagine themselves as parts of the same national body, even as they articulated independent responses to human mortality.²²

If chapter 2 foregrounds repetition and physical labor as tools that fostered community bonding in wind band cultures, chapter 3 addresses similar concerns in relation to voice, another bodily technology famously implicated in producing Italianness.²³ The voice I investigate is that of Adelina Patti, the late-nineteenth-century soprano who was among the first star performers to become a truly global figure. Born in Spain to Italian parents in 1843, she grew up in the United States—specifically, New York—where she debuted in 1859 and lived until she moved to Europe two years later. Her professional trajectory baffled critics from the Old World, accustomed as they were to singers bred and trained in their own continent. Likewise, her fluency in multiple languages, which she reportedly spoke with an unmarked native accent, stood in tension with the linguistic continuity of her operatic voice: a living and unmistakable embodiment, throughout her career, of old Italian bel canto.

Drawing on her status as a transoceanic diva and on recent scholarly work on nineteenth-century vocal cultures, I probe Patti’s voice as an instrument that channeled attitudes to language that informed contemporary discussions of both speech and singing. The history I retrace is at once Italian and transatlantic: I situate critical responses to Patti’s performances in Italy during the 1860s and ’70s in the fabric of vocal developments that traversed the ocean. One such development was the decades-long effort to standardize national speech, a phenomenon that has been associated with the introduction of state education in various countries, and with the growing circulation of voices that the late nineteenth century produced. My contention is that, in keeping with the preoccupations of the era, Patti’s vocal organs were imagined as a proto-recording device: a machine capturing and reproducing impeccably the sounds of different tongues. If she helped to reinvent aspects of Italian vocality at a time when bel canto was held to be in crisis, it was because her polyglotism tuned people’s ears to matters of diction and pronunciation. As a historical concept, bel canto cannot be separated from the beginnings of globalization, nor can it be understood apart from post-Unification debates on the Italian language—an area in which Patti showed how sound and meaning, beauty and sense, could bolster each other.

My first three chapters, then, summon a somewhat curious mix of media: print technologies that enacted local, national, and supranational reading communities (newspapers); human bodies that in performance communicated through the sensorium (marching bands and the virtuoso singer); and technical appliances that lit up single scenes in given opera productions (electric arc lamps). The last two chapters turn to transport and communication technologies that revolutionized nineteenth-century spatial and temporal experiences. Railways and telegraphy,