Forza emozionale? National discourse and La Battaglia di Legnano

Conor Broughton

doi:10.1177/00145858211053009

Abstract

This article will suggest how the audience interpreted the music and messages held within Verdi's La Battaglia di Legnano and suggest how far the sentiment within the opera was understood, in turn asking how effective a canone of nationalist images within culture would have been. The use of musical psychological and philosophical studies – such as those by Peter Kivy and Anthony Storr, among others – will offer an insight into the effect of music on the mind, and suggest how music affects the audience.

Highlights

The power of culture, and Verdi’s opera as part of a radicalising canone risorgimentale, has been suggested and supported by several historians – such as Alberto Mario Banti – but how far can one suggest it is effective when one analyses La Battaglia di Legnano (Osborne, 1985: 198)? This article will suggest how the audience interpreted the music and messages that the opera held and suggest how far the sentiment within the opera was understood, in turn asking how effective a canone would have been
With its decidedly nationalist story, could La Battaglia di Legnano be a powerfully nationalist piece? In his magnum opus, La Nazione del Risorgimento: Parentela, Santità e Onore alle Origini dell’Italia Unita, Banti suggests that culture could transform young good families into dangerous terrorists, for why else would they risk ‘premature death, or prison, or exile ... if there had not been an ideal horizon capable of triggering emotional storms in the mind and heart’ (Banti, 2011: 33)
I have seen all classes of citizens’, displaying the unity of the city and the widespread fervour (Daily News, 1849: 2). This speaks for the popularity of the opera within its showings in the Roman Republic; the populace were inundated with true experiences of nationalism from their lives and, with the music of the opera bringing ‘about similar physical responses in different people at the same time’, this feeling would have been amplified within the Teatro Argentina (Storr, 1997: 24)

Summary

Introduction

The power of culture, and Verdi’s opera as part of a radicalising canone risorgimentale, has been suggested and supported by several historians – such as Alberto Mario Banti – but how far can one suggest it is effective when one analyses La Battaglia di Legnano (an opera which should be part of any canone, as the Risorgimento’s ‘own opera’) (Osborne, 1985: 198)? This article will suggest how the audience interpreted the music and messages that the opera held and suggest how far the sentiment within the opera was understood, in turn asking how effective a canone would have been. How one feels emotions when one listens to music, and how these emotions are transferred, is of key importance in understanding both La Battaglia di Legnano, and the way in which music could be interpreted to have been nationalist in the Risorgimento.

Results

Conclusion