Nineteenth-century Italian Opera Research Articles

Singing Sappho: Improvisation and Authority in Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera by Melina Esse (review)

Singing Sappho: Improvisation and Authority in Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera by Melina Esse (review)

Networking Operatic Italy Francesca Vella

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).

Self-Borrowing in Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera: A Reconsideration

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Fanny Tacchinardi-Persiani, Carlo Balocchino and Italian Opera Business in Vienna, Paris and London (1837–1845)

AbstractThis article addresses several historiographical questions about narratives of nineteenth-century Italian opera by discussing the international career of prima donna Fanny Tacchinardi-Persiani during the 1830s and 1840s. A number of hitherto overlooked letters between the singer and Carlo Balocchino, impresario of the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna, provide important insights into Tacchinardi-Persiani's strategies of self-representation in the context of a dynamic operatic network that included the Italian States, Vienna, Paris and London. By revealing shifting power dynamics between opera impresarios, performers and composers, these letters, read in parallel with reviews and other writings of the time, offer a fresh look at the economic, ideological and artistic factors that contributed to the shifting geography of the European operatic landscape in the first half of the nineteenth century.

I Puritani: Opera seria in tre atti ed. by Fabrizio Della Seta

Reviewed by: I Puritani: Opera seria in tre atti ed. by Fabrizio Della Seta Francesco Izzo Vincenzo Bellini. I Puritani: Opera seria in tre atti. A cura di Fabrizio Della Seta. Part 1: Introductory Materials and Act 1. (Edizione critica delle opere di Vincenzo Bellini, vol. X, tomo 1.) Milan: Ricordi, 2013. [Pref. in Ita., p. vii–viii; principal sources in Ita., p. ix–x; introd. in Ita.,p. xi–xliv; facsims., p. xlv–lvii; libretto, p. lix–lxxii; characters, p. lxxiii; orchestra, p. lxxiv; index of pieces, p. lxxv; score, p. 1–487. ISMN: 979-0-041-39244-8, ISBN: 978-88-7592-923-7, pub. no. 139244. €550 inclusive of all 4 vols.] Vincenzo Bellini. I Puritani: Opera seria in tre atti. A cura di Fabrizio Della Seta. Part 2: Act 2 and Act 3. (Edizione critica delle opere di Vincenzo Bellini, vol. X, tomo 2.) Milan: Ricordi, 2013. [Index of pieces; score, p. 489–908. ISMN: 979-0-041-39244-8, ISBN: 978-88-7592-923-7, pub. no. 139244. €550 inclusive of all 4 vols.] Vincenzo Bellini. I Puritani: Opera seria in tre atti. A cura di Fabrizio Della Seta. Part 3: Appendices. (Edizione critica delle opere di Vincenzo Bellini, vol. X, tomo 3.) Milan: Ricordi, 2013. [Index of pieces; appendices, p. 911–1305. ISMN: 979-0-041-39244-8, ISBN: 978-88-7592-923-7, pub. no. 139244. €550 inclusive of all 4 vols.] Vincenzo Bellini. I Puritani: Opera seria in tre atti. A cura di Fabrizio Della Seta. Commentary. (Edizione critica delle opere di Vincenzo Bellini, vol. X, Apparati.) Milan: Ricordi, 2013. [Abbrevs. in Ita., p. 7–8; sources, p. 9–37; critical commentary, p. 39–288. ISMN: 979-0-041-39244-8, ISBN: 978-88-7592-923-7, pub. no. 139244. €i550 inclusive of all 4 vols.] Critical editions of nineteenth-century Italian opera have been appearing in print with regularity for a few decades. Four series devoted to the principal opera composers in early- and mid-nineteenth-century Italy—Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi—are all rather advanced; of these, three are intended as opera omnia, whereas the Donizetti series is a selective one, and includes only stage works. Scholars and connoisseurs know that the volumes in these series occupy many feet of shelf space in research libraries around the world. The distinctive color of the bindings of each allows us to locate them easily among collected works without using even a call number: Rossini is brown (the edition of the Fondazione Rossini, published by Ricordi) or yellow (the more recent Bärenreiter series); Donizetti is dark green; Bellini is blue; Verdi is red. There is no need here to review in detail the intellectual premises that led to the development of textual criticism as a prominent area of investigation in nineteenth-century opera, leading to the launch of the Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini (Fondazione Rossini and Ricordi) in 1979, and of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (University of Chicago Press and Ricordi) in 1983. Both of these projects were the brainchildren of Philip Gossett, who gave his imprimatur and led them for decades, establishing with clarity that critical editions of the works of these composers were to serve a twofold purpose: a philological one, leading not only to the recovery and restitution of texts reflecting authorial intention, but also to a meticulous reconstruction of the genesis of each work; and a practical one, providing performers with reliable editions, eminently approachable also by "end users" [End Page 139] with minimal interest in philology but keen to draw on the most advanced scholarship and, at the very least, to correct numerous, often significant errors perpetuated in conventional editions and performing materials. Such a twofold purpose is evident in the physical presentation of these editions: a large volume containing the full score and any musical appendices, and a smaller-size but often rather thick volume providing a critical commentary and notes describing source materials, and detailing compositional process, editorial problems, and choices. The Edizione critica delle opere di Gaetano Donizetti (led by Gabriele Dotto and Roger Parker, and known since 2001 as Edizione nazionale) takes an altogether different approach, with a...

Review of Andrew Davis,“Il Trittico,” “Turandot,” and Puccini’s Late Style(Indiana University Press, 2010)

[1] I imagine that most people who enjoy Puccini's operas are familiar with their moments of heightened emotional expression, in which a character sends forth an impassioned release while dramatic time is suspended. Andrew Davis examines how these moments are constructed and how they function within the context of the opera in his book "Il Trittico," "Turandot," and Puccini's Late Style. Davis posits that understanding the dialogue between passages of Romantic lyricism and more dissonant, episodic stretches in these works provides a fruitful path to interpreting drama through the music. He synthesizes a good deal of historical, musical, and dramatic information, showing that what he terms "lyric, Romantic" sections often have specific musical and formal markers, some of which refer to nineteenth-century Italian opera. These sections are especially significant because they shift away from the unmarked, modern style that characterizes much of the rest of each work. It is the withholding of lyric moments that lends them so much interpretive importance and dramatic power. Building upon much analytical and theoretical precedent, Davis makes a compelling case for basing dramatic interpretations on the strategic use of styles in these operas.[2] The introduction and first two chapters of the book establish the theoretical concepts and stylistic attributes that inform Davis's analyses. Chapter one is dedicated to surveying theoretical precedents. Carolyn Abbate's (1989) notion of the "voice-object" is central to Davis's hearings because he posits that the most lyrical, Romantic moments are the ones in which the voice-object is foregrounded and time within the world of the opera is momentarily suspended. Davis is quick to assert that the relationship among Romantic style, foregrounded voice-object, and dramatic expression is complex-there are moments in which the voice-object becomes more important, but the style may not be fully "Romantic." His analyses, though, generally promote the association by identifying passages in which these elements coincide. Further, Davis sees important connections between Abbate's understanding of the availability of "multiple voices" in music and Robert Hatten's (1994) notion of shifting levels of discourse. A principal assertion of Davis's is that an awaited, marked shift to the Romantic style in Puccini's last operas often initiates a shift in the level of discourse, and this shift has interpretive implications for the drama. Also, Hatten's application of markedness theory to musical oppositions is an important foundation for Davis's interpretations.(1) In his analyses, the non-Romantic style is unmarked because it is pervasive while the Romantic style is marked because it is strategically withheld. References to Pucinni's audiences hearing two oppositional styles in Turandot provide historical support for this understanding. Finally, Davis relates the importance of schema theory to his work. The notion that not every attribute associated with a style must be present when a style is evoked is especially important to his assertion that analogues to solita forma models are sometimes in evidence. Although Davis devotes a few pages to describing these typical formal structures from nineteenth-century Italian opera, I imagine that readers unfamiliar with them might need to supplement the information in the book with outside sources.(2) A judicious chart would have gone far in fulfilling that need.[3] The second chapter is devoted solely to defining "Romantic" aspects of musical construction. The term "Romantic" in this context does not necessarily mean "typical nineteenth-century Italian opera style"; musical characteristics perhaps not associated with that genre are included as style elements because they tend to shift the listener's focus to the singing voice.(3) Besides formal and dramatic references to the solita forma,(4) specific techniques in melody, orchestration, harmony and voice leading, and metrical attributes are all considered. …

"Where's my Fool?": Lear Motifs in Rigoletto

Stories are like searchlights and spotlights; they brighten up parts of the stage while leaving the rest in darkness.... Stories aid the seekers of comprehension by separating the relevant from the irrelevant, actions from their settings, the plot from its background, and the heroes or the villains at the centre of the plot from the hosts of supernumeraries and dummies. It is the mission of stories to select, and it is in their nature to include through exclusion and to illuminate through casting shadows. It is a grave misunderstanding, and injustice, to blame stories for favoring one part of the stage while neglecting another. Without selection there would be no story. (1) In a letter to the poet Antonio Somma on 23 April 1853, Giuseppe Verdi described the powerful impact of William Shakespeare's plays and how he had best realized their dramatic conflict and variety of expression in Rigoletto: Per l'istessa ragione preferisco Shakespeare a tutti i drammatici, senza eccettuarne i Greci. A me pare che il miglior soggetto in quanto ad effetto che io m'abbia finora posto in musica (non intendo parlare affatto sul merito letterario e poetico) sia Rigoletto. Vi sono posizioni potentissime, varieta, brio, patetico ... (2) (For the same reason [of variety] I prefer Shakespeare to all other dramatists, not excepting the Greeks. It seems to me that the best subjects I have set to music so far, from the point of view of effect (I don't mean at all to allude to its literary or poetic merit) is Rigoletto. It has very powerful situations, variety, verve, pathos ...) Verdi identified two aspects of Shakespeare's plays as central to his own dramatic vision: first, Shakespeare's variety of mood and location, such as between the interior of the castle and the exterior of the heath, telescoped the action and demanded the audience's active, imaginative participation much more than the classical unities of time, place, and action. Second, counterpointing strongly drawn characters tightened the plot's web of treachery and retribution and propelled the action to its climax. Through such vivid characterization and powerful plots, Verdi developed new techniques within existing conventions of nineteenth-century Italian opera, integrating arias and duets into larger and more cohesive units. In the same letter, Verdi proposed to Somma that they should work together on an opera on King Lear. Far from the first time Verdi had expressed interest in the subject, this was part of a succession of Lear projects that, for a variety of reasons, had either stalled or been allowed to lapse. These forays of engagement and withdrawal from Lear territory raise the question, not so much of what attracted him--that much is evident from his letters--but what prevented him from writing an opera on King Lear. Perhaps it is possible to date the beginning of his involvement with King Lear to a new translation of Shakespeare, published in Milan in January 1843 by Giulio Carcano, which brought into sharp focus the abrasive confrontation about the abuse of power between Lear and his older daughters and the touching reconciliation with Cordelia near the end of the play before her death. Envisioning the same elements of emotional confrontation and dramatic action that had contributed to the outstanding success of Nabucco the previous year, Verdi raised the possibility of a Lear opera with Count Mocenigo, director of operatic productions at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, in a letter dated 6 June 1843. Soon afterwards, though, and even before he had found a librettist and begun work, Verdi started to voice all kinds of concerns, not so much about the plan as about the process. Could he complete the work on time to fulfill his contract to La Fenice? Where would he find suitable singers for the main roles, especially the huge title role, which demanded not only a consummate singer but a powerful actor who could convey the power of kingship and the pathos of Lear's ruined mind? …

Fashions and Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (review)

Reviewed by: Fashions and Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera Richard LeSueur Fashions and Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera. Edited by Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Hilary Poriss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. [xv, 282 p. ISBN 9780521889988. $90.] Music examples, illustrations, tables, index. The collection of essays found in Fashions and Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera offers a look at not only the music and librettos, but also the performing conventions of the nineteenth century and their continued influence on operatic performance today. All of the contributors look to the score (both manuscript and printed), libretto, or disposizioni sceniche. Disposizioni sceniche were staging manuals published by Ricordi to try to control stage directors and scenic designers by preserving the staging as conceived for premiere performances. It is interesting that these directions, which Ricordi tried to impose on all theaters, did not take into account the real-world difficulties caused by the physical limitations of each particular theater. However, they do convey a sense of the effects, both musical and visual, that the composer had in mind. One wonders what Ricordi would have thought of the concept productions found at opera houses around [End Page 577] the world today. At the same time Ricordi was trying to stem the tide of performances of existing works fitted with new librettos or music borrowed from other works. Our concept of copyright did not exist to protect the composer and the publisher, and so Ricordi tried to control the entire production. Each of the essays is a gem, full of useful information on a topic which has not been explored in depth to this writer's knowledge. All of the essays are well documented with copious footnotes. It is interesting that many of the authors cite Philip Gossett's Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), a particularly fine source for information about performance practice and score notation in nineteenth-century Italian opera. Certainly this new volume should be required reading not only for musicologists and performers but also for the management of opera companies. As with all books that deal with music, the reader's knowledge of the composer and the particular works being discussed plays into the understanding of the author's main points. Having printed music examples is helpful, but only true familiarity with the score allows readers to recreate in their own minds the ideas the author is proposing. The essays discussing various aspects of Aida, Otello, and even I Puritani were, for this reviewer, more readily assessable than the fascinating essay by Francesco Izzo, "Comic Sights: Stage Directions in Luigi Ricci's Autograph Scores," as the works were not in my mind's ear as I was reading. This is, of course, not the author's fault. Looking into the past, Ellen T. Harris's "Viardot Sings Handel (with Thanks to George Sand, Chopin, Meyerbeer, Gounod, and Julius Rietz)" looks at the contemporary writings concerning Pauline Viardot's performances of not only Handel but also of Gluck. The discussion includes references to Viardot's source scores and to the reviews of her performances, which give insights into her own performance practices. The thought of applauding during the performance of a Gluck aria due to being overcome with emotion would be anathema today, but audiences still do so regularly after an unwritten high note toward the end of an aria, so perhaps times have not changed that much. The lack of proper copyright protection and its consequences is tackled by Fabrizio Della Seta in "I falsi Puritani: A Case of Espionage." Della Seta compares unauthorized vocal scores of I Puritani from several publishers; these are typically based on excerpts published by Ricordi, with the rest filled in by anonymous hands relying more on operatic conventions than a musical inventiveness of Bellini's caliber. This demonstrates not only the difficulty that publishers had in earning their fair profit, but also the forward-looking nature of Bellini's final opera, as exemplified by passages that do not follow the conventions of the time. In the same vein, Roberta Montemorra Marvin discusses the issue of popular realizations of Verdi arias for home use in England in...

Fashions and legacies of nineteenth-century Italian opera

1. Introduction: Italian opera's fashions and legacies Hilary Poriss 2. Viardot sings Handel (with thanks to George Sand, Chopin, Meyerbeer, Gounod, and Julius Rietz) Ellen T. Harris 3. Partners in rhyme: Alphonse Royer, Gustave Vaez, and foreign opera in Paris during the July Monarchy Mark Everist 4. Verdian opera in the Victorian parlor Roberta Montemorra Marvin 5. I falsi Puritani: the opera's early history in Italy Fabrizio Della Seta 6. To the ear of the amateur: performing Ottocento opera piecemeal Hilary Poriss 7. Peeping at pachyderms: convergences of sex and music in France around 1800 Jeffrey Kallberg 8. Aida and nine readings of 'empire' Ralph P. Locke 9. Comic sights: stage directions in Luigi Ricci's autograph scores Francesco Izzo 10. Staging and form in Giuseppe Verdi's Otello Andreas Giger 11. Stanislavski's La boheme (1927) David B. Rosen 12. What is tradition? Will Crutchfield 13. Epilogue: the art of 'translation' John Mauceri.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Ottocento Opera

In the early 1960s a PhD candidate at Princeton University informed his professors that he wished to write a dissertation on the operas of Gioachino Rossini. He was pointedly discouraged from doing so and told that, if he wished to be taken seriously in musicology, he should focus on worthwhile repertory such as Renaissance music or works by nineteenth-century German composers. The student persisted in his purpose and, with his groundbreaking dissertation, set the study of ottocento opera on a solid trajectory. That student was Philip Gossett. Recently, at a gala event celebrating Philip's ‘retirement’, many of us who have focused our scholarship on this repertory were reminded about the evolution of the study of nineteenth-century Italian opera during the past 50 years.

In Praise of Convention: Formula and Experiment in Bellini's Self-Borrowings

In the 1880s, the realization that Bellini had extensively reused melodies from early or unfinished works in his most famous operas provoked a small aesthetic crisis in Italy. Although today such reuse of material is no longer looked upon as a scandalous breach of compositional integrity, scholars have been slow to examine Bellini's self-borrowings for clues to the evolution of his style or to his attitudes toward the relations between melody and drama. Most of Bellini's self-borrowings show the composer simplifying his melodies, reducing harmonic and melodic variety as if to distance himself from bel canto convention. At the same time, melodic convention is essential to understanding the borrowings, a fact that becomes particularly obvious in those cases where dramatic parallels between the two contexts of a melody are obscure or nonexistent. For example, the recasting of a cheerful cabaletta in Zaira as a lament in I Capuleti e i Montecchi relies on a resemblance between melodic figures conventionally used to imitate tears or laughter-but also critiques those conventions. An allusive relationship between refrains in Il pirata and I puritani similarly derives its logic more from a shared musical evocation of solitude and empty space than from any overt dramatic resemblance between the two scenes. The article argues that for Bellini self-borrowing was entangled with the looser techniques of allusion and reliance on melodic convention. For this reason, study of the self-borrowings provides a model for engaging with the musical language of early nineteenth-century Italian opera, redressing the tendency to dismiss its musical detail as "merely" conventional and thus unworthy of analysis.

Meyerbeer'sIl crociato in Egitto: mélodrame, opera, orientalism

Il crociato in Egittowas the last in a series of Italian operas written by Giacomo Meyerbeer between 1817 and 1824. Although hisEmma di ResburgoandMargherita d'Anjouhad been successful in Venice and Milan, it wasIl crociatothat put Meyerbeer in the first rank of internationally renowned composers of Italian opera. The work's contemporary popularity makes it an important element in the history of early nineteenth-century Italian opera, and the abundant source material that survives for the opera permits a reconstruction of its early history. Furthermore, the publication in facsimile of a copyist's score from the première at La Fenice and the recording of the work by Opera Rara have encouraged a modern revaluation.

Nineteenth-century Italian opera from Rossini to Puccini

Nineteenth-century Italian opera from Rossini to Puccini

Magnificence in motion: Stage musicians in Lully's ballets and operas

Those fortunate enough to have seen the recent production of Jean-Baptiste Lully's Atys mounted by Les Arts Florissants will remember the sumptuously staged realm of sleep in Act III, during which costumed lute and recorder players appeared alongside the singers and dancers. Although conductor William Christie and director Jean-Marie Villégier made no attempt to reproduce the original seventeenth-century staging, they did adhere to Quinault's instructions for this scene to the extent of making musicians prominently visible. Atys is not exceptional in calling for stage musicians: Lully regularly included instrumentalists among the dramatis personae of his tragédies en musique, the genre on which he lavished most of his creative energies after 1672, and the practice is even more evident in the thirty or so ballets he composed for Louis XIV's court during the preceding two decades. The phenomenon of on-stage instrumentalists – much more extensive than the use of the banda in nineteenth-century Italian opera – has been studied only for the information it affords about the development of Lolly's orchestra or the iconography of French Baroque opera. This article is concerned rather with why instrumentalists appeared on stage at all, what they represented, how they functioned as characters, and the impact they had on the visual spectacle.

Vincenzo Bellini and the Aesthetics of Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera

First published in 1989. This study explores Italian attitudes to opera while Vincenzo Bellini was studying and composing. It draws mainly on Italian critical and aesthetic writing dating from the end of an era that was still dominated by the Italian bel canto. Many of the writers considered are unfamiliar today, but they express the accepted views on music, opera, and singing that dominated a particularly insular tradition. This title will be of interest to students of Italian and Music History.

‘Stage music’ in early nineteenth-century Italian opera

It has become commonplace to assume that language and style in Italian opera are not a unified phenomenon, easily comparable with the language and style of a purely musical work. Rather they constitute the various elements of a plurilinguistic interplay in which the opposite pole from ‘the author’ is the characters: those figures whose personality, function and social condition command an individual musical language. Musical expression is determined by an interaction of the author's discourse with the fictive discourse of characters; even when one or the other seems to dominate, there remains an important, implicitly dialogic element, one that can sometimes be inferred solely from a sense of discordant context. In many instances, therefore, operatic discourse suggests analogies with the ‘dialogic’ nature of the modern novel posited by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin.

Words and Music in Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera

Words and Music in Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera