Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution (review)

Abstract

Italian Opera in Age of American Revolution. By Pierpaolo Polzonetti. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge: Cambridge Uni - versity Press, 2011. [xix, 376 p. ISBN 9780521897082. $125.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Italian opera was one of dramatic genres that most directly responded to epoch-changing social, political, and cultural events in American Colonies during second half of eighteenth century. News from overseas flooded into European gazettes and newspapers, arousing as much enthusiasm as harsh criticism. They carried along ideas of freedom, equality, and democracy, as well as new types of characters that found their way onto operatic stages: good-hearted Native, peaceful Quaker, emancipated woman. This had far-reaching effects on ways operas challenged established social structures and institutions, even when America was not directly evoked in subject of librettos. Given pervasive impact that American events had on European culture of time, it is surprising that music historians have paid such scant attention to ramifications for opera. Pierpaolo Polzonetti's monograph fills this lacuna and provides a welcome contribution to our understanding of genre. Through an impressive array of philosophical texts, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and memoirs, all tied to close readings of musical sources, his study analyzes burgeoning influence of American subjects in eighteenth-century Italian opera and relationship to development of several different strands of thought in Enlighten - ment culture. The book covers several geographical areas inside and outside of Italy, and it focuses on a period of forty years: from 1750, when Carlo Goldoni and Baldassarre Galuppi's Il mondo della luna received its premiere in Venice, to 1790, year Lorenzo Da Ponte turned Giuseppe Palomba and Pietro Guglielmi's La quakera spiritosa into a pasticcio for Vienna. The first of these, in fact, antedates earliest entry in Polzonetti's core repertory (p. 4), I napoletani in America (libretto by Francesco Cerlone, music by Niccolo Piccinni), by eighteen years. Il mondo della luna introduces profound impact of contemporary American events on Euro - pean culture at large. In Haydn's 1777 version of opera for relatively conservative court of Eszterhaza, Moon, a topsy-turvy counterpart of Earth, becomes a metaphor for America, serving court's attempt to align itself with enlightened reformism promoted in Vienna. The terminus post quem non of Polzonetti's work shows that European fascination with America as the land of hope and opportunity (p. 15) gradually came to an end when French Revolution violently shook political foundations of Europe. As censorship became stricter, characters like Vertunna, independent, gun-toting female protagonist of La quakera spiritosa, were looked upon with increasing discomfort, and subjects dealing with revolutionary topics were considered subversive. As Polzonetti argues (pp. 298-307), when Da Ponte made a pasticcio out of Palomba's libretto for Vienna, he toned down stereotypical features of main character and tempered gender role inversion that dominated original work. While Polzonetti's forty-year time-span coincides with golden age of opera buffa, his discussion of works on American subjects begins with an opera seria-Carl Heinrich Graun's Montezuma on a libretto by Frederick Great, King of Prussia (Berlin, 1755). Although Montezuma does not concern itself specifically with North America, it serves as an introduction to web of discourses that joined European interest in New World with growing cultural influence of Enlightenment. If opera seria provided a platform for ideological agenda of Frederick's enlightened absolutism in Prussia, opera buffa became principal vehicle for disseminating view of America as a place of political utopias in Italy. …