Networking Operatic Italy Francesca Vella

Abstract

Enrico Petrella’s funeral march in Jone (1858) might at first seem indistinguishable from other nineteenth-century musical ephemera. Performed by an on-stage banda in Act IV of the once widely performed opera, the ‘lugubrious’ march—as it was named in the autograph score—accompanies the dramatic walk of a wrongly accused lover to his execution. However, the performance history of the march on opera stages—and Jone toured the world extensively in its first decades of performances—would fail to hear its growing presence on Italian city streets. Shortly after the opera’s La Scala premiere, the signature march became a standard in Italian wind-band repertory, where it found new life (and death) in secular funerals across the peninsula and during Holy Week processions in parts of southern Italy. The march grew to function in the Italian cultural consciousness as ‘an inward cipher of death and mourning’ (p. 67). Stories like this, which unspool how an operatic artefact became entangled in Italian culture, pepper Francesca Vella’s recent book, Networking Operatic Italy. In this enticing monograph, artists and operas travel the globe, technologies evolve and malfunction, and literary, archival, and musical sources are put in dialogue in innovative ways. One of the book’s core arguments is that ‘opera has always had a special networking capacity’ (p. 14) Vella ‘networks’—and use of the verb is deliberate—nineteenth-century Italian opera with its supporting media, wider infrastructure of mobility, and surrounding cultural discourses. Her concept of the network is, in part, indebted to Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory and Bill Brown’s thing theory, as the objects central to her narrative are not passive components of opera’s history. Instead, objects, technologies, and ideas shape and condition opera through their affordances or limitations. Across five case studies of interconnected webs of people, ideas, and—of course—operas, Vella addresses transportation and communications media (railroads, wind-bands, voices, newspapers, and the telegraph) in the increasingly mobilized environment of Risorgimento and Liberal-era Italy. Her study of Italian opera journeys to various theatres across Italy, and the reader encounters works by Meyerbeer, Wagner, and Verdi, as well as those of the lesser-known Petrella. The five chapters examine scores of operatic works—most chapters contain hermeneutic readings of specific scenes—and intersect with the many participants and components of opera productions, as uncovered through painstaking archival efforts (the forty pages of endnotes are a treasure trove for any reader).