Waiting for Verdi: Opera and Political Opinion in Nineteenth-Century Italy, 1815–1848 by Mary Ann Smart

Abstract

Reviewed by: Waiting for Verdi: Opera and Political Opinion in Nineteenth-Century Italy, 1815–1848 by Mary Ann Smart Jaime Carini Waiting for Verdi: Opera and Political Opinion in Nineteenth-Century Italy, 1815–1848. By Mary Ann Smart. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. [xiv, 236 p. ISBN 9780520276253 (hardcover), $60.00; ISBN 9780520966574 (e-book), price varies.] Music examples, illustrations, tables, index. It is always a delight to engage with a new volume of scholarship on Giuseppe Verdi that expands our knowledge of his legacy, such as Mary Ann Smart's latest book, Waiting for Verdi. Smart describes how the political discourse surrounding Italian opera, in cluding opera's cultural and historical context, evolved throughout the early to mid-nineteenth century by addressing several supposed myths about opera's function as a conveyor of political discourse. The volume is symmetrically structured, starting and ending with discussions and analyses of two Verdi operas written for La Scala in Milan, Nabucco (1842) and I Lombardi alla prima crociata (1843). Four inner chapters—two devoted to Gioacchino Rossini and two to Italian exiles living in Paris—contain analyses of early nineteenth-century music by Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, Vincenzo Bellini, and Saverio Mercadante, which Smart uses to demonstrate new modes of historical listening. She weaves these compositions together with historical context, contemporary aesthetic theory, and musicological topoi into a compelling story that updates our knowledge about the nineteenth-century reception of Italian opera. Smart reveals her indebtedness to Roger Parker ("Arpa d'or dei fatidici vati": The Verdian Patriotic Chorus in the 1840s [Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 1997]) for significantly influencing her project. Parker previously addressed choruses from Nabucco and I Lombardi, using working methods that Smart adopts in Waiting for Verdi, specifically, his reliance on contemporaneous reviews produced by journalists and critics. John Rosselli explains that from the 1820s until 1848, there was "an explosion of musical journals" in Italy, "most of them taken up almost wholly with opera," which remained a politically neutral topic, at least in print (John Rosselli, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], 144). In the present work, Smart considers critical reviews representative of audience reception, analyzing them with literary theories, including Franco Moretti's [End Page 291] "distance reading," "thin description" as utilized by Heather Love, and the "surface reading" of Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus (p. 16). Smart thus uses mixed methods (1) to understand opera reception from 1815 to 1848, the years preceding an era of extensive myth-making; (2) to revise the history of Verdi reception by eliminating historical and musicological myths; and, having stripped away layers of myths, (3) to reiterate that Verdi and his music, by 1859, were marshalled as symbols of the Risorgimento. Waiting for Verdi is a multifaceted endeavor. The book commences "with the moment when historians acknowledged that listeners from the 1840s did not experience Verdi's operas in terms of analogies between the slaves in Nabucco—or the crusaders in I Lombardi, or the Aquileians in Attila—and northern Italians under Austrian control, nor turn to them at all for messages about politics or everyday life" (p. 7). This moment, Smart posits, occurred in 1988, when Parker traced the origins of the mythological power of "Va pensiero" (from Nabucco) back to Franco Abbiati's 1959 biography of Verdi (p. 8; Parker, Verdian Patriotic Chorus, 23; Franco Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi [Milan: Ricordi, 1959]). "Va pensiero" functions as a container for several important musicological tropes—including choruses, marginalized people groups (communities), foreign aggressors, and displacement—that allude to a greater myth in which Italy is imagined as a national community. Myths take hold because they contain an element of truth around which stories are constructed. Many historians, including Benedict Anderson and Alberto Banti, have aimed to peel away the layers of myth used to construct nineteenth-century Italian nationalism. Anderson proposed that the nation be defined as "an imagined political community" to explain how citizens of a nation feel a sense of kinship with those compatriots whom they have never met (Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed...