Not without Madness: Perspectives on Opera by Fabrizio Della Seta (review)

Abstract

OPERA, MEDICINE Not without Madness: Perspectives on Opera. By Fabrizio Della Seta. Translated by Mark Weir. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. [xiv, 303 p. ISBN 9780226749143 (hardcover), $55; ISBN 9780226749167 (e-book), $44.] Music examples, illustrations, appen- dices, bibliography, index.This is a challenging collection of care- fully researched case that now stands to make the greatest possible impact among Anglophone scholars of nineteenth- century opera. Fabrizio Della Seta's book comprises essays originally published in Italian and English-many with translations by other musicologists-in the 1980s and 1990s. Each of the twelve chapters in the present volume appears with new revisions by Della Seta. Each essay appears in a new translation by Mark Weir, who strikes an ad- mirable balance between English render- ings of Italian prose and an existing analyti- cal lexicon for bel canto opera, including the standard terms cavatina, scena, tempo di mezzo, cabaletta, versi sciolti, and ver si lirici, as well as a more sophisticated vocabulary for concepts as diverse as color {tinta), dra- matic tableaux {quadri), and texted stage action {parola scenica).Because the chapters in this volume roam through topics including Giuseppe Verdi's lyricism (p. 96), the creative process (p. 24), Giacomo Meyerbeer's Italian re- ception (p. 158), the structural analysis of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro (p. 52), and ques- tions of historiography and opera studies, readers might perceive no unifying themes throughout, save perhaps for Della Seta's incisive discussions of existing scholarship. These are no more apparent than in the appendix (p. 203) to Parola scenica in Verdi and his Critics, which presents a survey of critical texts on Verdi's approach to textual- ism and melody. Della Seta discusses the composer's misgivings and musical recon- siderations as voiced in letters to Giulio Ricordi and Arrigo Boito, and then repro- duces excerpts from the published research of the musicologists Andrea Della Corte, Massimo Mila, Pierluigi Petrobelli, Julian Budden, Carl Dahlhaus, Harold Powers, and Lorenzo Bianconi. On display among these citations are the most prominent twentieth-century specialists in reception history, whether operatic or symphonic, Verdian or Beethovenian, German, French, or Italian. This chapter appendix stands out for drawing into sharper focus several of the most challenging arguments set forth by opera scholars and students be- tween the ages of a 1960s Dahlhaus and a 1990s Powers. Della Seta never explicitly asks: 'What is it that we do when we place scholarly work alongside or in opposition to that of our forebears? Instead he sur- rounds this question-which is one of the cornerstones of Not without Madness-with meditations on how musicology has strained to articulate its aims in the wake of postmodernism, deconstructionism, and cultural studies (p. 8). The present collec- tion presents its analytical goals up front. Not without Madness places Theory and Analysis (Part I) first in a series of discus- sions and defenses of musical form and op- eratic analysis. Only in Historiography and Criticism (Part II) do chapters turn to methodology and surveys of literature on composers, audiences, and editing prac- tices. There is every sense that Della Seta hastens to prioritize music analysis because of his personal stake in the conditions of his own scholarly training in 1970s Naples. These and other disciplinary legacies be- come clear in the preface and acknowledg- ments of Not without Madness (especially p. viii).Della Seta's chapters delight in the joys and sorrows of opera as ongoing cultural practice and as evolving field of study. (The contemporaneous publication of The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies, ed. Nicholas Till [Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2012] gives a good sense of other perspectives on musicology, cultural critique, and cultural anthropology at the time of Not without Madness's production. …