Uncle Tom on the Ballet Stage: Italy's Barbarous America, 1850–1900

Abstract

Giacomo Puccini’s Fanciulla del West (1908), which featured the Californian gold fever of 1849, and Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera (1859), set in seventeenth-century Boston, are today probably the most famous Italian representations of America on stage. Although very different in character, both operas present American life as a mixture of exoticism, vice, and violence, far from the idea of a society founded on the high principles of the European Enlightenment.1 But it is another stage work that arguably had a more lasting effect on how Italians discussed life in the United States. In 1853 Milan’s Teatro alla Scala staged what was to become one of the greatest success stories in the history of Italian ballet: Bianchi e Neri, Giuseppe Rota’s adaptation of Stowe’s epochal novel of 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.2 Although