Music and Italian National Identity: Mme de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie

Abstract

Mme De Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie (1807) offered the most influential statement on Italy and the Italians by a foreign writer in 19th-century Europe. It gives a fruitful opportunity to investigate what a 19th-century foreign writer thought both of Italian music and of music as a symbol of the Italian national identity. The overview of the Italian operatic repertoire and opera productions leads to the conclusion that Italy as a nation was substantially absent from the operatic scene while, on the contrary, the Italian society made of opera the most typical entertainment and of the ‘palchetto’ an unavoidable status symbol. A similar picture of Italian society and opera is already outlined in De Staël’s novel, which created a ‘Romantic’ myth of Italy and a portrait of Italian ‘musicality’ as a typical and essential element of Italy’s cultural identity and as a substitute of a still lacking political identity of that nation. The paper investigates the cultural and philosophical origin of this view of Italian musical culture and its impact on the European perception of Italy as a nation during the 19th century.