Music in the Present Tense: Rossini’s Italian Operas in Their Time 9780226663685, 022666368X

Table of contents :
Cover
Frontmatter
Contents
Abbreviations
Musical Examples
Introduction
Part I
1. Imitation
2. Repetition
3. Borrowing
4. Style
5. Genre
6. Dramaturgy
7. Noise
Part II
8. Modernity
9. Theatricality
10. Repertory
11. “Di tanti palpiti”
12. Memory
13. Pleasure
14. Movement
15. Belief
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Music in the Present Tense

Opera Lab: Explorations in History, Technology, and Performance A series edited by David J. Levin and Mary Ann Smart

MUSIC IN THE PRESENT TENSE Rossini’s Italian Operas in Their Time

Emanuele Senici

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2019 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2019 Printed in the United States of America 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19  1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­66354-­8 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­66368-­5 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226663685.001.0001 This book has been supported by the Joseph Kerman Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Senici, Emanuele, author. Title: Music in the present tense : Rossini’s Italian operas in their time / Emanuele Senici. Other titles: Opera lab. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Series: Opera lab : explorations in history, technology, and performance | Introduction — Part I. Imitation ; Repetition ; Borrowing ; Style ; Genre ; Dramaturgy ; Noise — Part II. Modernity ; Theatricality ; Repertory ; “Di tanti palpiti” ; Memory ; Pleasure ; Movement ; Belief — Epilogue. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019009192 | ISBN 9780226663548 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226663685 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Rossini, Gioacchino, 1792–1868. Operas. | Opera—Italy—19th century. | Rossini, Gioacchino, 1792–1868—Appreciation. Classification: LCC ML410.R835 S24 2019 | DDC 782.1092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009192 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

E come il vento odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello infinito silenzio a questa voce vo comparando: e mi sovvien l’eterno, e le morte stagioni, e la presente e viva, e il suon di lei. And when I hear the wind stir in these branches, I begin comparing that endless stillness with this voice: and the eternal comes to mind, and the dead seasons, and the present living one, and how it sounds. —Giacomo Leopardi, “L’infinito,” 1819 (my emphasis)

Io detestavo con tutte le mie forze, senza quasi saperlo, la cosiddetta realtà: il meccanismo delle cose che sorgono nel tempo, e dal tempo sono distrutte. Questa realtà era per me incomprensibile e allucinante. . . . Aggiungo che l’esperienza personale della guerra (terrore dovunque e fuga per quattro anni) aveva portato al colmo la mia irritazione contro il reale. Almost without noticing it, I hated so-­called reality with all my might: the mechanism of things that arise with time, and are destroyed by time. This reality was unintelligible and awful to me. . . . I add that my personal experience of the war (terror everywhere and flight for four years) had pushed my vexation against the real to breaking point. —Anna Maria Ortese, Il mare non bagna Napoli, 1953/1994 (original emphasis)

Contents

List of Abbreviations ix List of Musical Examples xi Introduction 1 PART   I



1 Imitation 23



2 Repetition 31



3 Borrowing 55



4 Style 71



5 Genre 83



6 Dramaturgy 103



7 Noise 117

PART   I I



8 Modernity 127



9 Theatricality 141



10 Repertory 161

vii



11



12 Memory 203



13 Pleasure 215



14 Movement 231



15 Belief 247

“Di tanti palpiti” 179

Epilogue 275 Acknowledgments 283 Notes 287 Works Cited 327 Index 345

Abbreviations

BCRS

Bollettino del centro rossiniano di studi (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1955–­)

GREC

Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini, 26 vols. of operas to date, plus 12 others of nonoperatic works (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1979–­)

GRL

I libretti di Rossini, 21 vols. to date (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1994–­)

GRLD

Gioachino Rossini: Lettere e documenti, 5 vols. to date (1, 2, 3, 3bis, and 4), all edited by Bruno Cagli and Sergio Ragni except vol. 4, edited by Sergio Ragni (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1992–­)

ix

Musical Examples

All examples by Rossini are based on GREC, including Maometto II and Matilde di Shabran, at present available in preliminary versions for rental only. The sources for examples 2.5a, 11.4, and 11.5 are explained in the notes to chapters 2 and 11. 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 11.1 11.2

Il barbiere di Siviglia, Overture, Crescendo, piano reduction Tancredi, Act 1 finale, Stretta “Quale infausto orrendo giorno”: (a) mm. 3–18; (b) mm. 47–54; (c) mm. 63–67 Bianca e Falliero, Quartet, Andantino “Cielo, il mio labbro ispira,” mm. 9–56 (voices only) Maometto II, Terzettone, Andantino “Conquisa l’anima” (voices only) Opening movement of Isabella’s cavatina “Cruda sorte” in L’Italiana in Algeri by (a) Luigi Mosca (1808); (b) Rossini (1813) La gazza ladra, Duet Ninetta-­Giannetto, Stretta “O cielo rendimi”: (a) mm. 1–9; (b) mm. 18–25 La gazza ladra, Duet Ninetta-­Pippo, Andantino pastoso “E ben, per mia memoria”: (a) mm. 1–6; (b) mm. 28–43 La gazza ladra, “Sinfonia campestre” before Giannetto’s cavatina La gazza ladra, Duet Ninetta-­Pippo, Stretta “L’ultimo istante è questo,” mm. 1–24 Tancredi, Cavatina Tancredi, Allegro moderato “Di tanti palpiti” Tancredi, Aria Amenaide, Andante “Giusto Dio, che umile adoro” xi



xii

11.3 11.4 11.5 15.1 15.2

List of Musical Examples

L’Italiana in Algeri, Cavatina Lindoro, Cabaletta “Contenta quest’alma” Giovanni Simone Mayr or Giovanni Battista Perucchini, “La biondina in gondoleta” Giovanni Paisiello, L’amor contrastato, ossia La molinara, “Nel cor più non mi sento” Semiramide, Trio Semiramide-­Arsace-­Assur, Andantino “L’usato ardir” Matilde di Shabran, Sextet Contessa-­Corradino-­Matilde-­Aliprando-­ Isidoro-­Ginardo, Maestoso “Passaggier che si confonde”

Introduction

The premise of Music in the Present Tense, and the observation that first suggested that it might be worth writing, is the wide gap between the popularity of Rossini’s Italian operas when they first appeared on the stage and the scholarly and critical attention they have received over the past century. “No composer in the first half of the nineteenth century enjoyed the measure of prestige, wealth, popular acclaim or artistic influence that belonged to Rossini,” according to Philip Gossett.1 In fact, no composer in the history of Western music had ever enjoyed such a combination of prestige, wealth, popular acclaim, and artistic influence. Rossini’s music was the first to reach such a large number of listeners, whether in opera houses or concert halls, or played in countless arrangements for all sorts of performing forces in spaces both public and private, or simply whistled in the streets. It is all the more surprising, then, that with few, mostly Italian exceptions Rossini’s works have played a decidedly secondary role in twentieth- and twenty-­first-­century accounts of nineteenth-­century music. One reason for such neglect might have been that the popularity of these operas diminished dramatically during the course of the nineteenth century, and was only partially revived in the second half of the twentieth. Limited popular success cannot be invoked as the sole cause of relatively scant scholarly interest, however, as the cases of many other composers prove: Claudio Monteverdi, to mention only one, is not exactly a household name nowadays, yet his music continues to be at the center of musicological investigation. In fact, in the context 1



2 Introduction

of a music historiography that was long influenced by modernist misgivings against success, Rossini’s waning popular fortunes might have worked in his favor, had it not been for that pesky early fame, much too great to be blithely sidelined. At the same time, to point to this fame as the main reason for Rossini’s historiographical misfortunes seems largely unwarranted, in the face of the significantly closer attention that international musicology has paid to, say, Giuseppe Verdi’s operas for over half a century now: at least some of these works were initially no less successful than Rossini’s and, unlike them, have remained so ever since. No doubt Rossini’s enormous early fame has contributed to his relative musicological neglect. But several other factors are as least as important. One, I suggest, is that the causes of the instantaneous, enormous success with which Rossini’s operas were greeted at their first appearance in the second and third decade of the nineteenth century have not been examined in sufficient depth. In other words, the call of history has not been answered— at least not as loudly as it was issued—precisely because, by and large, Rossini’s operas have been kept out of history. The first aim of Music in the Present Tense, therefore, is to think afresh about the motives behind the Rossinian furore by putting his works back into history, which is to say, into the culture and society within which they were conceived, performed, seen, and discussed, and to which they made self-­evidently important contributions—self-­evident at least on account of the enormous amount of effort, money, thought, and words that went into performing, seeing, and discussing these operas. This study focuses on Rossini’s Italian operas and their discourse in Italy between their first appearance in 1810 and about 1825, when Rossini stopped composing them. These works were written by an Italian and, first and foremost, for Italians. I believe that the reasons for Rossini’s initial success are intimately connected to the social practices, cultural formations, ideological currents, and political events of early nineteenth-­century Italy, and therefore with the beliefs, fantasies, hopes, and desires of its inhabitants, those Italians who were not yet fully Italians. Many of these beliefs were shared by the inhabitants of many other European countries, of course; hence the quick spread of Rossini’s success. My contention, however, is that in Italy these beliefs were inflected in specific and idiosyncratic ways, and that these inflections not only constitute a crucial factor behind the success of his operas but also shape their dramaturgy in fundamental ways. Although these operas were extremely suc-

Introduction 3

cessful wherever they were performed, in Italy their arrival was truly epoch-­ making. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that between the early 1810s and the early 1830s Italians moved according to the rhythms of these works—at least middle- and upper-­class Italians, as I explain in chapters 8 and 10. My investigation, then, purposefully avoids a transnational perspective. Such a perspective would be most apt for these internationally successful works, but I am convinced it needs to be preceded by a specifically Italian one, which, as I have said, is still largely missing. No greater compliment could be paid to this study than if it contributed to a properly transnational inquiry into the profound reasons for the enormous success of Rossini’s Italian operas within and without Europe. I decided to stop around 1825 not only because Rossini ceased to write Italian operas then but also because the Italian Rossini discourse stopped developing around that time: by then its main themes and rhetorical tropes were firmly in place, and did not evolve significantly over the following years. In fact, my impression from reading materials from the late 1820s and the 1830s is that the incessant repetition of such themes and tropes in the absence of fresh composerly input made them harden into increasingly stiff and empty clichés, feeding solely off themselves. I will briefly survey the discursive landscape after 1825 in the final chapter of the book. Music in the Present Tense contains at least twice as many chapters as is common in publications of similar length. Each chapter, significantly shorter than in the average musicological monograph in English, focuses on a specific aspect of the book’s central theme, but functions as a distinct step in an overall argument. The book’s internal organization, then, can be described as a constellation of points of view on a central theme, but the placement of these points forms a line of sorts. I should make clear from the outset, however, that the line of the argument is neither continuous nor straight. A theme explored in one chapter from a certain standpoint is often revisited from a different perspective in another chapter, sometimes more than once: self-­borrowing and memory are two such themes. What is more, issues such as listening, the material sources of Rossini’s operas, the composition of theatrical audiences, and gender are not given chapters of their own, but make various appearances at different points of the book. And I keep returning to the overall concern of reality versus its operatic representation. This makes for a certain amount of repetition—not surprisingly, perhaps, since repetition is the most fundamen-



4 Introduction

tal of the book’s concerns. I can only hope that this is not the symptom of an obsessive, posttraumatic repetition compulsion—a repetition without difference—but rather a necessary return to the past from a different standpoint.

  The book is in two parts. Part I focuses on a set of related themes characteristic of the Rossinian discourse in early nineteenth-­century Italy, which I put in dialogue with recent interpretations of Rossini’s Italian operas. My ultimate concern in discussing such different issues as imitation, repetition, self-­ borrowing, style, and genre, however, is the relationship between representation and reality posited in Rossini’s dramaturgy, about which I advance some original hypotheses. In part II, I then concentrate on the ideology behind this dramaturgy, placing it into the sociocultural context in which the operas were conceived, performed, seen, heard, discussed, and which they substantially helped shape. Such contextualizing allows for an interpretation of Rossini’s dramaturgy as a radically new and specifically Italian reaction to the epoch-­ making changes in all spheres of human activity witnessed in Europe between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, a period usually considered the beginning of modernity proper. I begin chapter 1 (“Imitation”) with a summary of the main themes emerging from a detailed examination of the Rossinian discourse in Italy before about 1825. Among the most prominent is the issue of the relationship between words and music, which fell under the rubrics of “imitation” or “expression.” Rossini’s works were heard as radically innovative in this respect, critics most often voicing their concern over a perceived lack of connection between text and music. If Rossini’s music could not be heard as imitative, however, how should it be heard? If it did not attempt to represent the emotions depicted by the words, what was its function? In the context of early nineteenth-­ century Italian operatic aesthetics, the supposed inability to relate music to text in Rossini’s works made it considerably harder to connect representation to reality. The issue of imitation becomes an issue of representation, then— and thus ultimately of dramaturgy in the broad sense of the term, including not only the techniques, procedures, and conventions that characterize Rossini’s operas, but also the relationship between reality and representation promoted by such techniques, procedures, and conventions. As a way to begin investigating this relationship in detail, in chapter 2 (“Repetition”) I turn to recent interpretations of Rossini’s style. Analytical

Introduction 5

findings suggest that in his first masterpieces, especially Tancredi and L’Italiana in Algeri, Rossini swiftly accomplished a process of focalization on a restricted number of stylistic and formal conventions. Many agree that the repetition of a limited number of musical ideas was the most distinctive feature of Rossini’s scores when compared with those of his predecessors. I suggest, however, that repetition plays a significantly larger role in Rossini’s musical language than has been recognized thus far. But did Rossini’s contemporaries also perceive repetition as a distinguishing feature of his style? They most certainly did. But, I argue in chapter 3 (“Borrowing”), they located it in somewhat different parameters from those of twentieth- and twenty-­first-­century commentators, focusing instead on his self-­borrowing of themes, melodies, movements, and even entire numbers. Many explicitly linked self-­borrowing to Rossini’s cavalier attitude toward the verbal text— a carelessness that, according to them, made possible the use of the same music for different words. An exploration of the Milanese press of the first fifteen years of the century suggests that the critics’ attacks on self-­borrowing (as distinct from plagiarism) emerged only in the early 1810s, more or less at the same time as Rossini’s works took the city by storm. What’s more, such attacks were also directed against contemporary composer Stefano Pavesi. Why were these two composers linked in this way? And what does the Milanese case tell us about the discourse of self-­borrowing and therefore of repetition in Rossini’s operas more in general? In chapter 4 (“Style”) I attempt to answer such questions by observing that the coupling of Rossini and Pavesi as inveterate self-­borrowers points to repetition as the key characteristic that critics and at least part of the public heard in their music, since hearing self-­borrowing ultimately means hearing repetition. Attention was focused not so much on repetition within works, though, but on repetition across them. This discourse raises two crucial issues: the identity of a piece of music, and the tension between individual style and common compositional idiom, or, better, the perceptual and discursive challenges thrown up by distinguishing between the two. How could one separate stylistic consistency from copying in works that resorted to repetition with literally unheard insistence? How should one handle music that seemed to take stylistic individuation to such an extreme that it was impossible to distinguish between different pieces within it? Such questions posed by the Rossinian discourse were part and parcel of the epoch-­making shift in the conceptualization of aesthetic style from normativity to originality that took place around 1800.



6 Introduction

The matter of style raises other aesthetic and ultimately dramaturgical issues; first among them that of genre, which I address in chapter 5 (“Genre”) through a close look at a few moments of La gazza ladra. Critics berated Rossini for making some of this opera’s supposedly comic moments too serious while doing the opposite to some of its supposedly serious ones, and thus narrowing its range to a middle-­of-­the-­road band. Rossini’s unprecedented stylistic consistency, his supposed addiction to self-­borrowing, and the perceived emotional and psychological uniformity of his music, then, were considered not only characteristics of his works irrespective of genre but also thought to contribute to the flattening of genre differentiations. The result was a further removal of operatic representation from reality than was already generally the case. Moving once again from early responses to more recent views, chapter 6 (“Dramaturgy”) discusses current interpretations of Rossini’s dramaturgy. They have tended to focus on Rossini’s comic works, characterizing them primarily in terms of distance and objectification; a related critical theme is metatheatricality, even if this term seldom appears explicitly. I argue that a metatheatrical dimension pervades all Rossini’s opere buffe to an extent largely unrecognized thus far, and that the dramaturgical implications of Rossini’s comic style in terms of distance and objectification are different manifestations of the heightened sense of self-­referentiality generated by the music’s reliance on repetition. Largely analogous deductions can be drawn from the scores of opere serie or semiserie as well, since the stylistic traits on which analytical investigations have focused are mostly common to all genres. The salient traits that Rossini’s contemporaries perceived in his operas regardless of genre, such as their nonimitative setting of the text, their crucial reliance on repetition, and therefore the looser connection that they establish between reality and representation, also recently highlighted by those who have analyzed Rossini’s style, promote these interpretative categories as both historically and analytically grounded. But why did Rossini put this style at the service of a dramaturgy that promoted distance, objectification, and self-­ referentiality, and that blurred the distinction among operatic genres? One path toward an answer, I suggest in chapter 7, might be by exploring a theme that emerges frequently in the early discourse: “Noise.” The charge of excessive loudness and exaggerated orchestration, often supposed to be a consequence of Rossini’s attempts to follow “German music,” was a recurring

Introduction 7

criticism against his operas, regardless of genre. Some connected it with the Napoleonic wars, linking operatic representation and reality in terms of the psychological and emotional conditions of Rossini’s first audiences. Far from arguing that a noisy orchestration was meant to reproduce a noisy reality on stage, these writers suggest that Rossini attempted to drown out this reality and to create an alternative world which, by force of sheer volume, could replace the real one for at least a moment in the minds and hearts of spectators. What, then, could occupy these minds and hearts that required drowning out with such loud music? Chapter 8 (“Modernity”), which opens part II of the book, moves away from Rossini’s operas and toward the world in which they first appeared. Historians agree on the cataclysmic impact that the arrival of Napoleon’s armies had on all spheres of human activity in the Italian peninsula: it meant nothing less than the arrival of modernity. The result was confusion, bewilderment, shock. The Italy in which Rossini’s operas emerged can be best described with the word “trauma.” I explore the nature and consequences of this trauma through the writings of two uncompromising interpreters of Italy’s first collision with modernity, Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi. For Fo­scolo and Leo­pardi reality had ceased to make sense for modern Italians: time and space, history and geography had become undecipherable, unknowable dimensions for a subject who had lost all notions of itself as a separate and unified entity. One of the consequences of this loss was the sense that one’s life was restricted to the present. According to Leopardi, Italians lacked the tools to which other peoples turned to deal with this situation—the novel, for example. They instead embraced spectacle: promenading in public, religious ceremonies, and theatrical entertainments. Theatricality became the defining feature of modern Italian society, and one of the clearest symptoms of its failure to work through the trauma of its encounter with modernity. In chapter 9 (“Theatricality”) the argument then connects with recent theories that understand modern theatricality as a way of turning away from a reality that has ceased to make sense. In my interpretation, the heightened theatricality of Rossini’s operas becomes a response to the psycho-­cultural context in which these works were composed and first performed: a world that could no longer be fully known, in which human subjects had lost any sense of spatial and especially temporal dimensions, and felt stuck in the present. Rossini’s dramaturgy, both comic and serious, was characterized by distance,



8 Introduction

objectification, and self-­referentiality because meaning could not be found off the stage. Rather, the stage was the only site where the illusion of meaning could be entertained. Chapter 10 (“Repertory”) turns to some wider implications of this interpretation, with specific reference to the concept and practice of repetition. Not only did the modern operatic repertory appear first in connection with repeated revivals of Rossini’s operas in the same theater; those works also dominated over those of other composers in early nineteenth-­century Italian theaters. Looking at theaters, however, gives only a partial view of the situation, since Rossini’s music was also sung and played in countless arrangements for all sorts of performing forces in spaces both public and private. I explore the widespread dissemination of this music in all spheres of society, presenting some surprising discoveries in the repertory of dialect popular songs that bring home with full force the level of popularity (and therefore of repetition) reached by at least some of Rossini’s music in Italy in the first half of the nineteenth century. In chapter 11 (“Di tanti palpiti”) I pursue this line of enquiry by delving into the special case of “Di tanti palpiti,” a tune for the title character in Tancredi and Rossini’s most famous single piece in early nineteenth-­century Italy (and beyond). Following its travels outside the urban sphere and into the countryside in the form of folk songs, I ask why this particular melody might have been singled out by its extraordinary success, comparing it both with other tunes by Rossini and with other melodies with literate origins that became “popular” songs. This comparative exercise brings to the fore the crucial function of memory in the diffusion of Rossini’s music, at different social levels and therefore at different degrees of familiarity with his operas. Broadening the scope of this observation, chapter 12 (“Memory”) asks what it might have meant to “know” Rossini’s music in early nineteenth-­ century Italy. I connect the relationship between Rossini’s repetitive style, the continuous repeat performances of his operas, and the increasing availability of his music in a myriad of arrangements, to the debate on memory in early nineteenth-­century European culture at large. I conclude that Rossini’s music became memorable as it was heard and remembered, but was also heard as repetitive because it was repeated so often, ever increasing familiarity bringing an ever increasing focus on sameness rather than difference, making an increasing number of listeners hear this music as ever more similar to itself, as ever more memorable, and as—for most of them—ever more pleasurable.

Introduction 9

Pleasure and memory are the themes of chapter 13 (“Pleasure”), in which I link pleasure with conventionality and repetition and discuss the multiple ways in which repetition lies at the core of modernity. The focus then shifts to the concept of posttraumatic repetition first articulated by Freud, expanded in subsequent psychoanalytic theories, and recently taken up by historians in connection with twentieth-­century historical traumas. I understand the Napoleonic invasions as an historical trauma for many early nineteenth-­century Italians and suggest that the repetition characteristic of Rossini’s operas as well as their repeated performance can be understood in such broadly psychoanalytic terms. I focus on one specific instance of repetition that seems to call for an explanation of this sort: the obsessive return of one basic situation consisting in a prolonged moment of utter confusion, stunned disbelief, complete disorientation on the part of the characters following a traumatic event. Precisely at these moments Rossini reached for the whole battery of repetitive musical patterns discussed in previous chapters. My argument: Rossini’s operas staged over and over again the Napoleonic trauma and the compulsion to repeat in which Italians found themselves trapped. More radically, these operas constituted a form of literal “acting out” and were therefore a symptom of what Freud would have termed “melancholia.” Chapter 14 (“Movement”) takes my argument beyond this psychoanalytical understanding of Rossini’s repetition. Although, psychoanalytically speaking, repetition seems to be the main tool through which operatic representation keeps messy reality at bay, it is possible to reconceptualize this relationship. Through repetition, operatic representation distances itself from any suggestion that its function is somehow to reproduce or imitate reality: repetition allows operatic representation to free itself from an aesthetic of mimesis. In this sense, repetition promotes precisely the essentially modern theatricality that commentators have long considered a defining characteristic of Rossini’s dramaturgy. Taking my clue from the music aesthetics of two philosophers who were also great fans of Rossini, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer, and then turning to Søren Kierkegaard’s and Gilles Deleuze’s ideas on movement and theatricality, I argue that Rossini’s repetition worked as an opportunity to go beyond representation altogether, finding instead a movement “capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation” and of “making movement itself a work” (Deleuze’s words). Grounding Deleuze’s theories historically in the early nineteenth-­century aesthetic of the sublime, I suggest that, in its most philosophical understanding, the sublime



10 Introduction

constitutes a valid interpretive category for Rossinian dramaturgy’s rapturous embrace of the impossibility of representation. Chapter 15 (“Belief”) returns to history, asking what happened after about 1830, when Rossini’s popularity diminished rather sharply. I read contemporary critical discourse in light of the continuing popularity of a selected number of Rossini’s titles, especially Italian versions of operas originally conceived for Parisian stages between 1826 and 1829. I argue that the differences between the dramaturgies of Rossini’s Italian and French works can be understood in terms of different stances toward reality and the possibility of its operatic representation. Rossini’s French works seem to believe in this possibility, and therefore were better suited to a new culture of belief in the comprehension of reality that emerged in Italy toward the end of the 1820s and flourished in the 1830s and 1840s, and that found its initial operatic expression in Bellini’s and Donizetti’s works of the late 1820s and early 1830s. An epilogue asks what this historically grounded interpretation of Rossini’s Italian operas may mean for their present-­day reception. While keeping a skeptical stance toward the notion that operas carry with them a set of defined meanings as they travel through history, I gesture toward possible connections between my conclusions about the meanings of Rossini’s Italian operas at the time of their initial appearance and the renewed popularity of several of these works in the last few decades, focusing especially on some common trends in the ways they are staged.

  Before I attempt to place the outline offered above into the immediate context of Rossini studies and a broader intellectual compass, I should like to explain some of the study’s specific features, beginning with my partiality to the term “discourse.” In what follows I rarely talk about “reception.” I avoid the term because it can risk implying a binary opposition that I believe is no longer tenable: on the one hand stands the operatic work, “come scoglio immoto” (still like a rock) amid the ravages of history like Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte; on the other hand swirls its reception, which interprets it but somehow never touches its essence, as if this essence stood outside history, and thus not only outside the actual changes often made to any work in performance, but also outside changes to its interpretation, to the meanings different generations have found within it. The term “discourse” points to a more flexible interpretive model. Works in all their components (textual, musical, visual) and

Introduction 11

manifestations (from actual performances to the multifarious sources that enable them), as well as the words said about and around them (no matter who utters them, or when), can all be considered aspects of a specific discourse, defined as a field of human exchange in continuous and complex movement. Therefore, I tend to prefer locutions such as “Rossinian/Rossini discourse” or even “discourse of” (as in, for example, “the discourse of style”), rather than the more usual “Rossini reception” or “discourse about,” regarding them as more helpful in bridging the gap between works and words, and in moving away from the somewhat passive and more static implications of the latter formulations. I should make clear that I have no desire to obliterate the very different ways in which a canon or a coloratura run signify when compared with a newspaper review of a performance that contains them. Indeed, in the first half of the book this difference is, in a sense, reified by the separate treatments I often reserve for works on one side and words about them on the other. At the same time, though, I do not want to overdetermine this separation: in several cases works and words are mixed, or an issue is discussed from a shifting variety of perspectives (self-­borrowing is a good example). It is also the case that the more historical and interpretive second part of the book tends to leave such separation behind, coming closer to the model of discursive criticism I have just outlined. The question of discourse brings to the fore a broader matter still, that of reality. As the book summary makes clear, the relationship between reality and representation is at the center of my attention, especially in part II. This relationship is of course a fraught and fiercely debated issue, especially when it comes to reflections on modernity.2 I engage with some of these debates in the chapter on theatricality, to which they are particularly relevant. In the context of the book as a whole, however, I believe that there is no need for extended philosophical digressions: “representation” almost always refers to theatrical representation, that is, a story acted—and here sung—on a stage by characters in front of an audience. But reality does need a few additional words of clarification. By reality I mean not only what happens outside theatrical representation, but also what takes place outside human subjects, in their interactions with the world and especially with each other, as opposed to their internal thoughts and feelings. Reality here is external events, objects, images, and words. It is battles, laws, taxes, newspapers, conversations, clothes, gestures, food: in sum, everything outside ourselves, in contrast to what goes



12 Introduction

on inside, what we think and feel. Of course, this distinction is fraught with contradictions to say the least. For one, in this sense theatrical representation is no less part of external reality than battles or food. For another, in chapter 9 I claim that Rossini’s operas issue “an invitation to a different reality,” thus implying that theatrical representation can, for a moment, construct a world for its audience that can feel no less real that battles or food. For most of the book, however, this double distinction between, on the one hand, reality and theatrical representation, and, on the other, external reality and internal thoughts and feelings is essential to a historically and geographically located understanding of specific forms of representation consumed by specific audiences immersed in specific discursive practices—no matter how philosophically untenable such distinctions might be considered.

  There are other, more concrete and circumscribed features of Music in the Present Tense that need to be mentioned here. First, the one discursive component almost never addressed in the book—with the minor exception of the epilogue—is the performative one. Although generally I regret this absence, especially of singers and stage designers, the nature of this project rendered their presence superfluous: neither category contributed substantially to making Rossini’s Italian operas different from those of his predecessors and contemporaries, and therefore to their unprecedented success. What changed was the music and the drama, not the singing or the staging, at least initially. If the latter did—and there is some indication that at least singing might have, although more research is needed on the matter—it happened as a reaction to the novelties of Rossini’s musical language, not as a cause of these novelties.3 The sources for Rossinian discourse in early nineteenth-­century Italy also require some preliminary clarification. They need to be addressed from two different but mutually influential perspectives. First, without insisting too much on the old Dahlhausian binary between the event as the central object of operatic culture in nineteenth-­century Italy and the musical text characterizing contemporary “German” musical culture instead, there is no doubt that talk of opera in Italy between about 1810 and 1825 was based mainly on performances and printed librettos, and only rarely on scores. Printed piano-­ vocal scores began to circulate in a significant way only toward the end of this period, although overtures and the most famous arias and duets were gener-

Introduction 13

ally available in editions for voice and piano, or piano solo, or other combinations of instruments (as I discuss in chap. 12). The second perspective is provided by the kinds of texts with which we are dealing. These texts consist essentially of reviews of performances published in generalist periodicals, especially newspapers, and in pamphlets. In Italy, periodicals dedicated to opera that included reviews (as opposed to lists of performances and data on performers, composers and companies, such as the Indice de’ teatrali spettacoli) began to appear only in the second half of the 1820s. Music periodicals—that is, periodicals devoted to instrumental and nontheatrical music as well as opera—came even later. More private documents, such as letters and diaries, are rarely available, and the ones that are remain largely unpublished. I have consulted a number of the few accessible in print, especially Rossini’s own letters of course, which I have read in detail, but which, unsurprisingly, are mostly silent on the matters explored in Music in the Present Tense—with one notable exception, as we shall see. As already noted, these two perspectives overlap. In early nineteenth-­ century Italy the Rossinian discourse was founded not only on live performances and librettos but also—perhaps especially—on reviews, which created a thick textual network of observations, reflections, and opinions. The implied readers of a review sometimes seem not to be the primary readers of the periodical in question, but other reviewers and journalists, to which this particular review is responding, often to advance a different interpretation and evaluation of the performance being discussed. What is more, the vast majority of reviewers appear to have no technical knowledge of music, but were instead littérateurs with an amateur interest in opera. Nothing is either new or problematic in this: for the first two centuries of its existence, opera was conceived as a play coated in music, that is to say, first and foremost as a literary and theatrical object, and only secondarily a musical one. As a consequence, those writing about it were usually literary and theater critics rather than music critics in the modern sense of the term. This was basically still the case in early nineteenth-­century Italy. This state of affairs means that the general musical competence of critics was comparable to that of the vast majority of the public—that is to say, very limited. However, the habit of going to several performances of the same opera in the same season probably helped fix in memory a not insignificant repertory of musical objects (melodic gestures, harmonic progressions, tonal trajecto-



14 Introduction

ries, formal arrangements, and so on) that in the following decades would be acquired mainly through the consultation of piano-­vocal scores (and, starting in the next century, through audio and then video recordings). In other words, critics and the general public in an early nineteenth-­century Italian city might well retain in their memory at the end of an opera season much more music than a present-­day spectator would—without referring to scores and recordings. The precise compass of this musical memory is difficult to ascertain, but the issue is addressed directly in a number of the texts I consider in chapter 12. This situation is of course very different from our own. This said, my approach to Rossini’s music in the following pages is often closer to that of his contemporaries than is normally the case in musicological literature on Rossini and early nineteenth-­century music in general. Despite several instances of the kind of close reading that must rely on the analysis of scores, I often discuss Rossini’s music in rather general terms, paying special attention to surface and large-­scale phenomena that are mostly recognizable by repeated listening without turning to scores. Obviously, many details are lost when talking about the overall style of Rossini’s Italian operas: the landscape must be photographed with a wide-­angle lens in order to see its broad outline and overall profile. Much the same could be said about considering Italy a viable interpretive parameter at a time when the Italian nation did not yet exist, and when all sorts of theatrical, cultural, social, and political differences separated, say, Milan from Naples and Venice from Florence. A partial justification for discussing the Italian discourse of these works is that Italians did it all the time back then: a significant number of these operas circulated widely up and down the peninsula and were regularly reviewed, discussed, and evaluated in a common Italian idiom as components of Rossini’s oeuvre—then a still open-­ ended collection. Historical distance and a wide-­angle lens, while undoubtedly obscuring much, may thus help us to see some of these features with greater clarity, especially if we acknowledge their multifarious and sometime contrasting effects on our vision. Another consequence of my focus on the Italian Rossini discourse is the exclusion of far more familiar Rossinian voices, first among them Stendhal’s. This was a difficult decision, since his Life of Rossini was initially shaped by the author’s experiences in Italy, as acknowledged by Stendhal himself, who at some point even claims that the “personal pronoun I is simply a conventional device” implying a polyphony of voices heard in Italian theaters, salons, and cafés, and that “the author here confesses that . . . he has borrowed his judg-

Introduction 15

ments . . . from all manner of sources, and amongst others, from countless German and Italian periodicals.”4 Occasionally I could not resist pointing the reader to a passage of the Life that seems particularly relevant for the topic being discussed, more often than not because Stendhal explicitly debates Italian opinions or behaviors. What is more, in chapter 4 I consider in some detail Stendhal’s one text published in Italy before the late 1820s. In general, though, I have tried to close my ears to the Stendhalian siren, fearing it would drown out the much less familiar Italian voices that I strive to hear in this book.

  My decision to concentrate on Italy at the time of Rossini’s career there has also more contingent reasons, linked to this book’s immediate scholarly background. The other national context to which Rossini made crucial operatic contributions was the French, which has already been studied by, among others, Benjamin Walton in his Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (2007).5 Walton also focuses on a limited period: Rossini’s active years as an opera composer in France. His decision constitutes an important precedent for my focus on the equivalent period in Italy. In more ways than one, Music in the Present Tense could be conceived as the Italian counterpart of Walton’s path-­breaking monograph—from which I have indeed borrowed the expression “music in the present tense” in my title. Walton is also the coeditor, with Nicholas Mathew, of a more recent volume—The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography, Analysis, Criticism (2013)—that constitutes an exception in Rossini scholarship in its attempt to attend to the broad concerns of Music in the Present Tense, and some initial results of my research are published there.6 I first addressed these concerns in embryonic form in the introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Rossini (2004), which I e­ dited—I should mention that in light of the research for the present volume I have changed my mind on several issues since then, as I make clear in the epilogue.7 Although a number of important contributions about the composer have since appeared in print, especially in Italian and German—including probably the most comprehensive general volume currently available, Arnold Jacobshagen’s Gioachino Rossini und seine Zeit (2015)—they have generally steered clear of history as meant here.8 I take advantage of their considerable insights into many things Rossinian in the following chapters, together with those offered by earlier literature. As is clear from the book’s outline as well as from the specific features



16 Introduction

I have discussed above, the book’s wider perspectives include both psychoanalysis and Deleuze’s philosophy of repetition as a counterbalance to some of the more pathologizing claims of psychoanalytic discourse. Turning to these general theories of the human experience that address directly and fruitfully the specific historical experiences most intimately connected with a particular kind of music should not require further justification. Yet some critics of such perspectives challenge their application to music history on the grounds that scholars who adopt these interpretive frameworks wind up telling us more about ourselves than about the works being interpreted. My hope is to say something meaningful about both the works and ourselves. To me, these works tell us something about certain experiences lived by early nineteenth-­century Italians that contributed crucially to the overall condition of modernity, and that are still defining factors of this ongoing condition. What I strive for is a combination of close textual and musical readings; philological, stylistic, and dramaturgical concerns; and cultural, social, and political interpretation. This combination hopefully allows me to mediate between specific authorial positions, specific historical circumstances, and larger theoretical frames, trying to generate dialogue between different historical perspectives, methodologies, and kinds of evidence. It is my intention, then, that dialogue should indeed be a prominent feature of Music in the Present Tense, especially in the way that themes and suggestions emerging from a critical reading of the early Rossini discourse are considered from the point of view of recent analytical findings and dramaturgical interpretations, and vice versa. Such a multifocal perspective makes it possible to formulate questions never previously asked. More broadly still, I want to argue that this kind of dialogic approach is crucial for a history of music interested in building bridges between the past and the present, invested as much in people as in music. It seems to me that much recent musicology is about musical works, theoretical positions, or social and political spheres, but still too rarely about their interaction. Music in the Present Tense tries hard to open lines of communication between these objects. It is thus as much about early nineteenth-­century Italians as it is about Rossini’s works—and therefore might interest cultural historians as well as musicologists. That said, and much as I might have wished otherwise, my book is essentially and self-­consciously a music-­historical one and only tangentially about present-­day Italians or present-­day audiences for Rossini’s operas. I believe that any serious attempt to write about the encounter between any kind of

Introduction 17

music and today’s fellow human beings requires a solid grounding in disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and psychology, which I do not possess. The dialogic history characteristic of Music in the Present Tense, however, allows me to address certain themes that I consider as relevant to “us” as much as they were to “them.” Moreover, my hypotheses about the functions and meanings of musical repetition at the dawn of modernity can have significant implications for the understanding of repetition in music by other composers, either from Rossini’s time—Schubert, for example, who learned so much from him—or later, when Bruckner comes immediately to mind. Traditional music historiography has cast both of these composers as “the other” of a perceived mainstream (Beethoven and Brahms), much like Rossini. In fact, Music in the Present Tense contributes to recent efforts to deconstruct a number of compositional and aesthetic assumptions central to the project of musical modernity, especially in its nineteenth-­century manifestations, and specifically regarding its privileging of “development.” I argue instead that repetition can function as an equally modern compositional technique and aesthetic category, even in the nineteenth century. At this point, one final broad conceptual issue requires reflection, that of modernity. Who is not “modern” these days? There seems no more common way of promoting past artists and their words than claiming that they are modern, or more modern than we really thought, thus implying continuity between them and us, and therefore their continued—and hitherto only partially realized—relevance. Petrarch, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Monteverdi, Bach, Rousseau, Goethe, Mozart, and Beethoven, among others, have all been the object of such treatment. Saying that their poems, paintings, sculptures, novels, plays, operas, symphonies, or sonatas are “modern” implies that they somehow belong to “us” as well as to “them.” I cannot deny that this strategy is at work in Music in the Present Tense, otherwise I would not be writing the book in the first place. There are other, more compelling reasons why the cate‑ gory of modernity is central to my interpretation of Rossini’s operatic dramaturgy—and indeed why the word “modern” also features in the subtitle of Walton’s monograph on Rossini’s operas in Restoration Paris, The Sound of Modern Life. First, as mentioned above, Rossini’s Italian operas coincide with that very specific moment in Italian history that has been widely identified with the beginning of modernity proper (as opposed to early modernity)—even if that



18 Introduction

“country” did not yet formally exist. Legions of political, social, cultural, intellectual, visual, and literary historians have so identified the epoch—far more than those who may have claimed the modifier “modern” for, say, the age of Petrarch or Shakespeare or Monteverdi or Bach or Mozart. Second, unlike some other authors out to modernize their objects of study, I am aware of the historiographical implications of invoking modernity, and explicitly reflect on the rationale and meanings behind its use, especially in chapters 8 and 9. In this sense, my project shares significant premises with a few musicological volumes published in the past decade or so that have explored the relationship between music and modernity, notably Karol Berger’s Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (2007), John Butt’s Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions (2010), and Julian Johnson’s Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity (2015). Our ideas of modernity differ in some fundamental respects, but our projects also share significant features. Berger focuses mainly on eighteenth-­century music and its evolving conceptions of time, from circular to linear, arguing that this transformation was, “with the onset of modernity, part of a larger transformation in the way educated Europeans began to conceive of time.”9 His concluding chapter includes reflections on Beethoven’s handling of musical time that illuminate by contrast Rossini’s as I discuss it in chapter 14. Moreover, Berger’s description of the time of Schubert’s Winterreise as neither cyclical nor linear, but as “time that gradually freezes over,” suggests that it might be in Schubert, who belonged to Rossini’s generation and had learned so much from him, that we may find Rossini’s true companion in exploring the musical consequences of what I see as the traumatic arrival of modernity proper in the early nineteenth century.10 Johnson’s modernity is much longer, beginning around the late sixteenth century and stretching to the late twentieth, and his volume discusses a set of attitudes (or rather, in his words, “modalities of experience”) characteristic of this long modernity and explored by some of its most representative musics.11 In a sense, my project resembles Butt’s most of all in its focus on the works of a single composer and a single genre at a very specific geographical and chronological location. Moreover, according to Butt, “Bach, and much of the environment to which he belongs, are of specific interest because of the way modern and pre-­modern elements interact within them,” something that I could also say of Rossini and early nineteenth-­century Italy. I part ways with Butt, however, in his understanding of modernity as “not primarily a historical category”: on the contrary, I insist on the precise historical

Introduction 19

(and geographical) locatedness of the specific kind of modernity at play in this book.12 Music in the Present Tense shares with these three books the common aim of teasing out the intersections between particular kinds of music and that “bundle of attitudes and mindsets” (Butt) generally called modernity. Yet the present volume nevertheless stands apart in two main respects: first, its concentration not only on opera, but on precisely the theatrical mode that many have argued is crucial to modernity; and second, its focus on music from the South, as opposed to their partiality to the northern, and mostly German, musical tradition.13 In the latter sense, Music in the Present Tense contributes a musical perspective to that epistemology of the South that, according to Roberto M. Dainotto in his influential Europe (in Theory), has the potential to challenge established understandings of European modernity.14 More significantly, and unlike most of my predecessors who investigated the intersections of music and modernity, I take great pains to emphasize the many ways in which Rossini’s modernity remains radically at odds with common present-­day understandings of musical and operatic modernity. While conceived in response to events, situations, ideas, and emotions that are usually taken to herald the beginning of “our” era, Rossini’s Italian operas pre­ sent us with ways of conceiving the relationship between representation and reality that are significantly different from those we consider “ours,” at least in today’s world of opera and art music. This is proven by the ongoing difficulties of integrating Rossini’s works into histories of music and opera, and by the skeptical stance toward Rossini on the part of many among today’s card-­ carrying opera lovers. Twentieth- and twenty-­first-­century popular music may function as a closer correlate to his operas: in the later chapters of the book I suggest how the interpretations found in some writings on repetition in popular music chime with my own conclusions about Rossini. In a sense, the music of Rossini’s Italian operas is music in the present tense. It is not only a music without memory, as I suggest in chapter 14, but also a music conceived of and for a very specific historical moment, and so closely connected with that moment that, once the moment itself passed, most of the music also quickly fell out of fashion, to an extent not experienced by the musics discussed in the volumes mentioned above. Bach’s would be the obvious exception if it were not for the immense canonical and historiographical prominence that it has acquired over the past two centuries, a prominence to which Rossini’s music cannot even remotely come close. The connection between Rossini’s music and modernity is therefore particularly unusual. Ros-



20 Introduction

sini’s music constitutes an unprecedentedly successful response to the advent of modernity in a country where that advent was particularly traumatic. At the same, its very topicality—its very modernity, in a sense—was the cause for its progressive decline in the public consciousness once that particular moment became the past. Unlike some other music composed at the time and in response to a very similar moment of modernity—Beethoven’s, for instance— this music was not conceived for the future as well as the present, and did not make any meaningful gesture of recognition toward its past. Rossini’s operas thus retrospectively failed to conform to some defining characteristics of the music of modernity as discussed by Berger and Johnson among others. This means that trying to understand the peculiar ways in which the music of Rossini’s Italian operas is also the music of modernity requires thorough archaeological work, which aims to reconstruct as carefully as possible the discursive conditions of listening to this music and attending performances of these operas at their initial appearance on Italian stages. Further, it attempts to understand—as thoughtfully and perceptively as possible at such historical distance—the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of audiences at a specific historical juncture in a relatively circumscribed place. Thus I hope to avoid the common fallacy of a history that ascribes directly to historical audiences the thoughts, feelings, and emotions that a certain music seems to contain to us now. I see Music in the Present Tense as a sustained attempt to handle sensitively a multiplicity of intersecting discourses that avoids giving any one of them undue prominence and interprets them from differing theoretical frameworks that seem to do particular justice to their more characteristic features. In the end, this dialogue with history tries to keep in mind both Benedetto Croce’s aphorism that all history is contemporary history, and that the human beings who made that history are long dead—even if we still have their music.

PA R T   I

1

Imitation In preparation for the imminent premiere of Rossini’s Semiramide at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice in February 1823, the Gazzetta privilegiata di Venezia published an extended discussion of Rossini’s oeuvre to date. This article is a fruitful point of departure for my investigation into Rossinian discourse for two reasons. First, Semiramide would turn out to be the last work composed by Rossini for an Italian theater, followed only by Il viaggio a Reims, an occasional piece performed at Paris’s Théâtre Italien in 1825 to celebrate the coronation of Charles X. The Venetian reviewer’s comments, coming at a crucial turn in the composer’s career, function as a retrospective overview of Rossini’s prior operatic output. Second, this text not only discusses Rossini’s operas but also summarizes some of the most prominent themes of the critics who wrote about them. Especially noteworthy are recurring objections to the composer’s style: For a while Rossini has been the one who annoys to the highest degree if not all, at least the most serious and severe among our journalists. For these critics, he is a dangerous innovator who corrupts music and taste; a plagiarist who is so busy stealing that he even steals from his own and constantly repeats himself; a trickster who deafens the ears, so that the bewildered spectators are unable to boo him; a reckless operator who puts cannons in churches and bells in theaters in order to get the public’s attention; and, finally, a frenzied gatherer of sounds, always deafening, sometimes brilliant, and never suited to the sentiment that they should express.1 23



24

Chapter One

Although the critic was evidently a supporter of the composer, his summary of objections is an accurate list of the themes that had dominated Rossinian discourse in Italy since the early 1810s. These themes concerned the corruption of musical taste as commonly conceived at the time, plagiarism and self-­borrowing, repetition, noisiness and its benumbing effect on audiences, and the fit between words and music. More abstractly, they could be formulated as questions of aesthetic novelty or tradition, of stylistic repetition or invention, of dynamics and the impact of sound on human bodies and minds, and of the musical setting of the Italian language.2 I will come back time and again to these themes, exploring their formulations and ramifications, as well as their imbrication with larger issues debated at the time. In fact, they will act as the backbone for my overall investigation into the Rossinian discourse in early nineteenth-­century Italy. It makes sense to begin this investigation with the last of these themes—the connection between words and music—since it was probably the most fiercely debated question at the time, and it opens up a particularly wide spectrum of concerns and positions. In the general context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-­century aesthetic of vocal music, the relationship between words and music fell under the rubrics of “imitation” or “expression.” According to this aesthetic, the sentiments conveyed by a text should be expressed by appropriately imitative, and therefore expressive, musical gestures: only by following this principle could a composer achieve what was considered the ultimate goal of music, the emotional involvement of listeners. It should be noted that expression was conceived as a necessary correlative of imitation: only music that stood in a properly imitative relationship with the words it set could be considered properly expressive, and therefore conducive to emotional involvement. This general aesthetic principle did not, however, stipulate which kinds of musical gestures could be deemed appropriate to particular words, images and concepts: such specifics could and did change over time, and within the context of different national musical traditions. Whatever the general agreement on this front in the world of Italian opera around 1810, even a superficial reading of critical reactions to Rossini’s works in the following decade demonstrates that, when it came to imitation and expression, these works were heard as radically innovative: they did something profoundly different from what had been done until then. The Venetian journalist’s lapidary statement that hostile critics heard Rossini’s sounds as “never

Imitation 25

suited to the sentiments they are supposed to express” may be extreme, but no doubt the issue of imitation was critical to all evaluations of Rossini’s operas.3 Here are a few sample opinions, both pro and contra, from Milan, Venice, and Florence between 1816 and 1826: In a situation where, in order not to be discovered, the characters say, “Hush hush, softly softly” [“Zitti zitti, piano piano,” Il barbiere di Siviglia, Act 2], our composer explodes with music to be heard a thousand miles away. (Milan, 1816)4 Original ideas, heartfelt images, reasoned and word-­sensitive harmony: these are the features that made us acknowledge this score [Torvaldo e Dorliska] as one of the happy productions of Rossini’s genius. (Milan, 1818)5 Music must be suited to the passions that one wants to awaken. Didn’t you hear how [in La gazza ladra] at times jollity spreads where words invite weeping, and at other times a character sings calmly where desperate accents should be heard? My heart remains arid, and my ears are pitilessly tortured. (Florence, 1818)6 The opera [Mosè in Egitto] begins with an introduction that admirably prepares the soul for the deep, touching, profound harmony, well suited to the subject, that reigns in all that follows. . . . The best answer to those who pretend that Rossini’s genius is limited to sparkling and light things is his Mosè. (Florence, 1821)7 In general this score [Ricciardo e Zoraide] has met with favor, which it deserves, because it contains beautiful melodies, albeit not always suited to the situation and the nature of the characters, and despite the fact that orchestral sound often overwhelms voices rather than accompanies them. . . . The music of our times, although highly honorable, does not enact the same wonders [that it did in ancient Greece], and this is because of the lack of coordination between sounds and words, so that ideas and feelings are not awakened. (Milan, 1823)8 [The problems with Torvaldo e Dorliska are] vocal parts chopped up and instrumental-­like, excessive richness of the accompaniments, ideas that



26

Chapter One

sometimes do not correspond with the words, and motives repeated from other scores. (Venice, 1824)9 It was eventually acknowledged that Semiramide abounds in the sublime and the pathetic, and that here more than in other operas by Rossini notes and words mutually answer each other, as if they were two languages expressing the same concept. (Florence, 1826)10

Each new opera by Rossini was evaluated in terms of its musical setting of the text. Critics either praised it as suited to the words or, more insistently, voiced their concern over a perceived lack of connection between text and music. Moreover, commentators often noticed, as the last two quotes suggest, that the serious operas from the latter years of Rossini’s Italian career seemed to make an effort toward what was perceived as a tighter, more direct relationship between words and their musical setting, framing this observation in terms of a change from the composer’s standard practice in his previous works, both serious and comic. These earlier operas were of course those that had contributed most to the general perception that Rossini maintained a cavalier attitude toward the images, emotions, and situations in the libretto. Rossini’s practice was often cast in opposition to that of his predecessors, especially those “Neapolitan” masters of the recent past already well on their way to mythologization such as Giovanni Paisiello, Domenico Cimarosa, and Nicola Zingarelli. In their music these composers supposedly never forgot the text and were always imitative and expressive, and thus able to move listeners to tears. Whether for or against, everybody seemed to agree that Rossini did something remarkably different not only from these earlier masters but also from many of his more conservative contemporaries. In 1818 a Neapolitan critic, for example, praised Francesco Morlacchi for composing expressive music along the lines of his teacher Zingarelli—unlike Rossini, who should learn from this colleague something about the true nature of dramatic music.11 The question of imitation again emerges as the central bone of contention when we move from newspaper criticism to the numerous pamphlets, treatises, and polemical tracts on Rossini’s operas published at the time. Among the various authors who contributed to the debate before 1830—Adriano Lorenzoni, Andrea Maier, Michele Leoni, H. Franceschini, Geltrude Righetti Giorgi (the first Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia and the first Cenerentola), “Eleuterio Pantologo” (a pseudonym), Ferdinando Giorgetti, Marco San-

Imitation 27

tucci, and Pietro Brighenti—the most explicit is Giuseppe Carpani, perhaps Rossini’s staunchest defender, and certainly the most articulate.12 Far from denying the critics’ accusations about Rossini’s music’s lack of proper imitation, Carpani defends the composer in terms of music’s duty to follow its own logic rather than that of the text: Expression is not rarely very appropriate both in the comic and in the serious genre; and when it is not exactly so, this is due precisely to the wisdom of the composer, who, forced at times to sacrifice either expression or cantilena [“beautiful melody” or “proper melody”], abandons the former rather than losing the latter; this is because in music the first to be rescued must be music, since where cantilena ends, there is no longer a thread to the musical discourse, there is no thought. Music disappears, and noise takes over.13

To this idea Carpani devoted a long appendix to his collection of writings on Rossini, the well-­known Le Rossiniane, ossia Lettere musico-­teatrali (1824), entitled “Sulle differenze e caratteri morali degli stili, e sul linguaggio musicale” (On the differences and moral characters of styles, and on musical language).14 Carpani synthesized his view in the famous formulation that Rossini’s music had such enormous success because it was full of “cantilena, and eternal cantilena, and beautiful cantilena, and new cantilena, and magic cantilena, and rare cantilena.”15 Carpani’s position is particularly noteworthy because of its clever rhetorical maneuver. Whereas Rossini’s defenders generally subscribed to the principle of imitation, arguing that, after all was said and done, his music was suited to the words it set, Carpani proclaimed instead that “unsuited” music could be a good thing, since it rightfully placed music at the helm, where it should always be. What is more, the writer constructed a historical pedigree for this stance, with Rossini as the modern follower of a tradition whose older representatives included Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Antonio Sacchini, and Domenico Cimarosa. This constitutes a rather tendentious interpretation of the discourse of this tradition, which usually revolved around not only the primacy of melody but also its simplicity and its imitative relationship with the text it set. I will return to Le Rossiniane and Carpani’s discursive strategies in other chapters. For the moment, having placed imitation at the center of the Rossinian discourse in early nineteenth-­century Italy, and having observed the rhetoric of such discourse, we might well ask whether the composer ever con-



28

Chapter One

tributed to it not only in deeds but also in words. I have found only two references from the years of his Italian career, both from the early months of 1816, which suggest that he was aware how, in this aesthetic climate, calling operatic music “imitative” meant saying it was good. Shortly after the premiere of Il barbiere di Siviglia Rossini wrote to his mother that the opera “is a masterpiece and I am sure that, if your heard it, you would like it, since this is a most spontaneous and imitative music.”16 The coupling of spontaneity and imitation sounds rather odd in the context of contemporary discourse, and it must have done so back then as well, at least to somebody. Rossini’s mother was evidently asked by a person to whom she had read her son’s letter what these words meant exactly, and passed the question on to him. He replied, evidently joking, that “spontaneous means Polish, and imitative whore” (“Spuntanea Vuol dir Polacca e imittativa Puttana”).17 The least it can be said about this sentence is that the composer must have not been particularly attached to the precise meaning of the words “spontaneous” and “imitative.” This conclusion is confirmed by the second occurrence of “imitative,” used (also in a letter to his mother) to characterize the music of the cantata Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo, which is filled with pieces from earlier works adapted to new words, and for which, therefore, “imitative” seems a strange choice of adjective to say the least.18 Rossini would address rather more coherently the issue of imitation many years later, long after he had given up operatic composition and in a different aesthetic climate, as we will see in another chapter. For the moment, I think it is fair to conclude that Rossini’s few recoverable words on the matter when he was active as an opera composer in Italy, while far from conveying a recognizable aesthetic stance (as it is only to be expected), confirm the central place held by the notion of imitation within the contemporary discourse of his operas. In Rossini’s operas, then, the music related to the text in new, previously unheard ways, and even the composer’s staunchest supporters agreed that this relationship was perceived as looser than in the works of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, the music tending to follow its own logic and keeping a certain distance from the words. Few failed to notice that this feature placed Rossini’s operas outside the terms not only of contemporary compositional practice but also of widely accepted music-­aesthetic principles. If these operas’ musical ideas could not be heard as appropriately imitative, how should they be heard? If Rossini’s music did not attempt to represent the emo-

Imitation 29

tions depicted by the words, at least not in the way such representation was normally conceived, what was its function, what its concern? The critic of the Gazzetta privilegiata di Venezia quoted above had some interesting suggestions to this question. Following his summary of the themes dominating Rossini’s reception, he insisted that the enormous success of these operas was a fact that simply could not be ignored, one that rather demanded its own aesthetic theorization: Should we then say that Rossini’s operas are masterpieces?—Yes, in their own genre.—And which is this genre?—Not the imitative genre, but simply the harmonic one.—How so? Can there exist a beautiful music that imitates nothing?—There is modern music. This is the point on which musical connoisseurs and the general public have not quite understood each other so far.19

He continued that, when listening to “modern music,” the public could not understand whether this music tried to be imitative but failed, or did not try at all. In Rossini’s operas, the epitome of modern music, it was quite difficult to understand the words—also on account of the “modern school of singing.” Since it was difficult to understand the text properly, how could imitation be detected, even if it were present? If we cannot quite catch what the characters are saying, how can we judge whether the music suits the words or not? And where does this state of affairs leave librettos? Would it not be possible to sing nothing but vowels? No, it would not, argues our critic, since this would prevent spectators from entertaining the illusion that something is being represented on the stage, and “this is the only real illusion entertained in theaters, and the only one necessary in order to feel pleasure.”20 Whatever we may think of this reviewer’s argument, his effort to take seriously the aesthetic consequences of what he and others perceived as Rossini’s innovative stance on musical imitation—including the attempt to discuss its implications in terms of representation—is remarkable. In the context of early nineteenth-­century Italian operatic discourse, the supposed inability to relate music to text in Rossini’s operas signaled a potential representational impasse. One crucial consequence of maintaining that, to recall Carpani’s words, “in music the priority goes to the music,” is the trouble such a credo provokes for any attempt to connect operatic representation to reality—whatever we may



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mean by this most problematic of terms. In Rossini’s operas, then, the link between reality and its musical representation on the stage is looser than in the works of his predecessors and contemporaries. The issue of imitation becomes an issue of representation, and therefore ultimately of dramaturgy: not only of the techniques, procedures, and conventions that characterize Rossini’s operas and make it possible for audiences to recognize them as different from those by other composers, but also of the relationship between reality and representation promoted by such techniques, procedures, and conventions. The dramaturgy of Rossini’s operas was often discussed by his contemporaries in terms of the degree to which music imitated the words. But these were by no means the only terms through which they approached dramaturgy. The question of imitation is part of a larger discourse which also includes the issues of genre differentiation and self-­borrowing, and more generally the extent to which Rossini’s music is characterized by repetition—recall the list of themes by the Venetian reviewer I quoted at the outset. In the following chapters I will examine how these issues are framed and which role they play in early assessments of Rossini’s dramaturgy. At the same time, I will discuss more recent interpretations of Rossini’s operas, so that the themes and suggestions emerging from a critical reading of their early discourse can be put in dialogue with present-­day analytical findings.

2

Repetition The progressive return of many of Rossini’s Italian operas to the lyric stage in recent decades, their availability in critical editions, and the impressive amount of information newly brought to light on their composition, early performances, and reception have encouraged analytical investigations that, while not as widespread as philological and contextual enquiries, now form a fairly substantial body of literature. Many of these studies consider Rossini’s Italian style either on its own terms or from the point of view of his successors’ innovations, especially Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and the young Giuseppe Verdi.1 These standpoints, while producing very valuable insights, cannot address what exactly differentiates Rossini’s style from that of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, and therefore ultimately why his works were so successful. Comparative investigations of this sort do exist, however, and have contrasted the wide spectrum of stylistic and formal possibilities encountered in the likes of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Giovanni Paisiello, Domenico Cimarosa, Nicola Zingarelli, Ferdinando Paer, and Giovanni Simone Mayr with Rossini’s reliance on fewer options. In the final decades of the eighteenth century, Italian opera evolved to include a startlingly wide array of forms and styles at all compositional levels, from details of melodic construction to the types of numbers included in each act. Although the first fifteen years of the new century saw some options fall by the wayside and others emerge with in31



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creased frequency, it was Rossini who significantly accelerated this process of concentration on fewer stylistic and formal conventions. This development has been convincingly demonstrated with reference to larger formal matters, especially the main structure of arias and duets.2 Unfortunately, terminology has evolved from a perspective that, from Rossini’s viewpoint, has been backward- rather than forward-­looking, so that, to describe the basic arrangement of these numbers, we seem to be stuck with an expression derived from Verdi’s midcentury practice, “la solita forma” (the usual form)—I will return to the locution “solita forma” below. This form at its most expansive consists of two so-­called kinetic movements—the “tempo d’attacco” (or “primo tempo”) and the “tempo di mezzo”—alternating with two “static” ones, the “cantabile” and the “cabaletta” or “stretta.”3 According to Marco Beghelli, this formal principle is “typical of a good seventy percent of Rossini numbers (duet or finale, in seria or buffa, Italian or French opera).”4 Available evidence suggests that such a degree of formal consistency cannot be invoked for any of Rossini’s immediate predecessors. What is more, if we take into account only arias and duets in the Italian operas, this percentage goes up considerably, for two reasons. First, in his French works Rossini conformed to French formal traditions, which partly differ from the Italian ones. Second, introduzioni and especially finales of the Italian operas are less standardized than arias and other types of ensembles. These complex numbers can be understood with the analytical tools provided by the solita forma only with difficulty; indeed, it is especially in relation to them that the retrospective application of the solita forma perspective seems particularly unhelpful. According to Scott Balthazar, “Rossini neither established a single convention for the finale, nor did he even significantly narrow its range of possible forms.”5 At the same time, the impact that introduzioni and finales can have on the overall sense of a narrowing of the formal spectrum is limited, since there are generally no more than three such numbers in an opera, and in many cases only two: the introduzione at the beginning and one internal finale—the concluding number of an opera is often an aria; if this is not the case, the one-­movement finaletto found in such operas as L’Italiana in Algeri and Il barbiere di Siviglia has rather limited formal weight. By contrast, arias and duets together constitute the vast majority of Rossini’s Italian operas, and therefore their higher degree of formal consistency has a stronger impact on the perception of overall structural standardization in an entire opera as well as in the whole Rossinian corpus.

Repetition 33

The idea of repetition has rarely been invoked explicitly in discussions of Rossini’s practice at larger formal levels. Yet it seems obvious that his reduction of the manifold formal options previously available for each number to a more limited range of solutions necessarily entails the repetition of the same structure for several numbers in the same opera. In other words, it is with Rossini that the solita forma first becomes solita: this form is usual because it is the one repeated over and over again, notwithstanding many important local variations. This observation can be extended to an even larger structural level. Rossini’s five early one-­act farse, all premiered at Venice’s Teatro San Moisè between 1810 and 1813, are structured according to a single plan repeated almost without alteration. This arrangement consists of an overture, an introduzione, a duet, an aria, an ensemble, another aria, another duet, another aria, and a finale. As Paolo Fabbri has noted, such structure characterizes few of the farse composed by others in the first decade of the century.6 What is more, Rossini’s two-­act opere buffe clearly look to be an expansion of this basic structure— opinions differ on whether the farse constituted a model for the opere buffe, or whether the former were a compression of the latter, in this case obviously not of Rossini’s full-­length works, but of those by previous composers.7 There is no doubt that, in the second part of his Italian career, and especially in the opere serie written for Naples, Rossini worked hard to expand the formal patterns that he had established in earlier years. This expansion happened from within these patterns, however, and to comprehend and appreciate deviations from them it was necessary to accept the implicit presence of this normative role.

  Rossini’s focalization on fewer options emerges even more forcefully when considering how movements within a number are constructed. Those who have studied the matter agree that, in comparison with Paisiello, Cimarosa, Mayr, and so on, the most distinctive feature of Rossini’s scores is their more limited number of musical ideas. Scott Balthazar’s research on the development of the duet in opera seria, for example, has led him to conclude that “Mayr’s tendency toward dissimilar statements [in the so-­called tempo d’attacco] differs from Rossini’s usual practice of giving the characters almost exactly the same material.” Similarly, Paolo Fabbri’s detailed comparison of equivalent numbers in Luigi Mosca’s and Rossini’s settings of the same libretto, L’Italiana in



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Algeri, repeatedly leads him to contrast Mosca’s tendency to come up with a new musical idea at every change in the text (a new stanza or some other kind of metrical articulation, a new affect, a new character) with Rossini’s more economical expansion of fewer ideas.8 For obvious reasons, Paisiello’s Il barbiere di Siviglia has held pride of place in this kind of comparative study. Stylistically, this score must have been perceived as decidedly old-­fashioned by 1816, the year of Rossini’s own Il barbiere, and it seems doubtful whether it constituted a viable reference point for the composer, or even for early audiences of his Barbiere.9 Its study, however, brings home with remarkable clarity the degree to which Rossini’s music relies on the repetition of a relatively small number of ideas, often varied through harmony or orchestration, whereas Paisiello’s employs a proliferation of themes.10 These comparative studies of Rossini’s compositional practice tend not to address repetition directly, focusing instead on the narrowing of compositional options. Conversely, the few studies that do emphasize directly repetition’s crucial role in such practice seem largely uninterested in discussing it in comparative terms. Most prominent among them are perhaps those on the crescendo, considered the hallmark of Rossini’s style by his contemporaries. The crescendo is a quintessentially repetitive device, relying as it does on the progressively louder reiteration of the same phrases; the types of phrases may vary, but all are repeated at least three times, and sometimes more. This brief description brings to the fore some elements of repetition, but sidelines two further characteristics of the crescendo crucial to an investigation of repetition but seldom addressed by scholars in this context.11 The first is the degree of motivic economy that emerges both within phrases and across them. Let us take the most famous of Rossini’s crescendos, featured in the overture that was first appended to Aureliano in Palmira and then migrated, partly reorchestrated, to Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra and Il barbiere di Siviglia—the crescendo itself was probably first conceived for the stretta of Aureliano’s Act 1 finale, and returned in the equivalent formal slot in Elisabetta. Robert Fink has discussed in illuminating detail the various strategies with which Rossini handles the long-­term implications of its melodic content in the contexts in which this crescendo is placed (a statement and a repetition in the Aureliano finale, a statement in the overture exposition, and a statement in the Elisabetta finale).12 What I would like to emphasize are the rather tight motivic connections between its three phrases (see ex. 2.1).

Example 2.1 Il barbiere di Siviglia, Overture, Crescendo, piano reduction



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The stepwise ascent of a third, repeated in the first two measures of phrase a, is spread out over the first three measures of phrase b, while the concluding descent of a fifth is differently ornamented but nonetheless obvious in both phrases. Phrase c compresses and smooths out both ascent and descent into a one-­measure figuration immediately repeated. A second characteristic of the Rossinian crescendo that proves central to the matter of repetition is the technique with which its phrases are linked. The final beat of each phrase—be it of four, two, or one measure—corresponds to the initial beat of the following one, so that phrases are not separate, discrete units, but systematically overlap, as can be clearly observed in the preceding example. This phrase overlapping, characteristic of the Rossinian crescendo, emerges in many other Rossinian formal contexts as one of the devices that allow the continuous reiteration of the same musical idea, as Lorenzo Bianconi has shown.13 While the crescendo is but one section of a movement, Rossini can construct entire movements out of the repetition of one or two phrases, with forward momentum supplied by phrase overlapping—and, often, modulation. It seems significant that two of the most extended and effective instances of this type of repetitive movement are found in L’Italiana in Algeri and Tancredi, which were premiered in 1813 and catapulted Rossini to fame: the concertato “Confusi e stupidi” within the Act 1 finale of L’Italiana and the stretta “Quale infausto orrendo giorno” of the Act 1 finale of Tancredi. By Bianconi’s count, the former is but one of at least three dozen instances of structural phrase overlapping in L’Italiana.14 The latter contains a crescendo, but the whole movement resorts to prolongation, phrase overlapping, and modulation to build a massive 187-­measure block of “brute, unadorned vehemence” (Bianconi).15 I want to suggest that, besides tempo and dynamics, this vehemence is caused by a phrase structure characterized by the endless repetition of two ideas, each constructed out of one extremely simple motif: a rising major third (initially a dotted half note followed by a quarter) and a repeated pitch (a quarter note alternating with a quarter note rest; see ex. 2.2). But relentless phrase overlapping and stark motivic economy are not only the two most important repetitive features of this movement: they are also closely connected. In the context of the syntax of early nineteenth-­century operatic music, it is the incessant movement generated by constantly overlapping phrases that makes such motivic economy viable melodically without threatening the coherence and comprehensibility of the movement.

Example 2.2a Tancredi, Act 1 finale, Stretta “Quale infausto orrendo giorno”: (a) mm. 3–18; (b) mm. 47–54; (c) mm. 63–67

Example 2.2a cont.

Repetition 39

Example 2.2b

  A rather different, indeed perhaps opposite scenario emerges if we consider other specific compositional procedures based on repetition already employed by others but brought by Rossini literally to unheard-­of prominence. One of the most important is the canon, for Rossini one of the primary compositional principles for slow movements of internal finales or midact ensembles, especially in the operas premiered from 1815 onward.16 All three such numbers of La Cenerentola, for example, feature a canon: the Andante “Nel volto estatico di questo e quello” within the Act 1 quintet “Signor, una parola”; the Andante maestoso “Parlar, pensar vorrei” within the Act 1 finale; and the section begin-



40

Chapter Two

Example 2.2c

ning “Questo è un nodo avviluppato” within the Maestoso of the Act 2 sextet “Siete voi? Voi Prence siete?”17 Among the many other examples of the canon that could be observed, perhaps the most arresting is the slow movement of the quartet “Cielo, il mio labbro ispira,” initially composed for Bianca e Falliero (Milan, 1819) and immediately considered the most successful number in the opera (see ex. 2.3). Rossini evidently thought highly of it too, since in 1822 he reworked it into three other compositions: the new version of Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra (Naples, 1815) prepared for Vienna in the spring, the cantata Il vero omaggio, performed in Verona in early December, and Maometto II (Naples, 1820), revised for its Venetian premiere later that month—where “Cielo, il mio labbro ispira” replaced part of the Act 1 terzettone, which is perhaps the most experimental musical number in Rossini’s entire Italian operatic output.18 This movement is noteworthy not only because Rossini bestowed favor on it but also because of the long span of its theme: while such themes generally comprise between four and eight measures, this includes twelve, bringing the number of canonic measures to forty-­eight. These are followed by twenty measures of coda, making a grand total of sixty-­seven (sixty-­seven rather than sixty-­eight be-

Example 2.3 Bianca e Falliero, Quartet, Andantino “Cielo, il mio labbro ispira,” mm. 9–56 (voices only)



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Example 2.3 cont.

cause the final measure of the canon and the first of the coda are elided). What is more, and unlike most of the other canons by Rossini, “Cielo, il mio labbro ispira” never modulates, remaining stubbornly in E major throughout—thus forcing the bass to cope at length with an uncomfortably high tessitura. The movement of the terzettone in Act 1 of Maometto II that “Cielo, al mio labbro ispira” replaced begins with a few measures of exclamations from the three characters on stage (“Ohimé! qual fulmine”) and then evolves into a canon, “Conquisa l’anima,” whose subject is probably the longest that Rossini

Example 2.3 cont.



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ever composed, comprising as it does sixteen measures (see ex. 2.4).19 This three-­voice canon is almost as long as “Cielo! Il mi labbro ispira,” then—here the statements overlap by one measure, while in the quartet they do not, resulting in forty-­five versus forty-­eight measures. Since “Conquisa l’anima” is for three rather than four voices, however, it features a lower degree of repetition than the piece by which it was replaced in Venice; notably, neither ­modulates.20

  This observation invites us to consider the issue of internal repetition within a theme, or, more neutrally, a given melodic idea. We have already seen how certain formal slots and compositional principles—for example, the crescendo— often entail a remarkable degree of motivic economy and straightforward repetition of ideas. If, however, we look specifically at the assemblage of what are arguably the most prominent melodic statements, that is, the beginnings of slow movements of arias, duets, and ensembles, we find a very wide spectrum of possibilities. Scholars have distinguished two basic types of “melodic textures” in Rossini as “open” and “closed.” The former, declamatory and often much ornamented, is found at the very beginning of slow movements of arias and duets; in Damien Colas’s words, the vocal phrases of an open melodic texture “are short, separated by multiple pauses, but widely differentiated, with a large range and complex rhythms. They succeed one another without any link immediately apparent to the listener.” In a closed texture, on the other hand, there is a higher degree of repetition, and the orchestral accompaniment no longer punctuates the vocal phrases, but supports them through a regular rhythmic-­harmonic pattern. Nonetheless, the succession of vocal phrases in both textures follows no archetypal prototype. Colas concludes that “Rossini’s arias are distinguished by their diversity.”21 Diversity in comparison to what? In most accounts, including Colas’s, the compositional practice of Rossini is being compared to that of his successors, in this case the so-­called lyric prototype or “lyric form” that emerged in Bellini’s operas as the basic principle of melodic construction.22 Considered from the point of view of the lyric form of the 1830s and 1840s, Rossini’s melodies strike analysts by their diversity. But what if we look at them instead with our feet planted chronologically on the other side of Rossini, at the point he arrived on the scene? Isabella’s cavatina in Angelo Anelli’s libretto of L’Italiana

Example 2.4 Maometto II, Terzettone, Andantino “Conquisa l’anima” (voices only)

Example 2.4 cont.

Repetition 47

Example 2.4 cont.

in Algeri can function as a particularly apt case study in this respect, since it was set by Luigi Mosca in 1808 and by Rossini five years later. If we compare the first section of this cavatina, Rossini’s melody certainly does not emerge as more diverse than Mosca’s (see ex. 2.5).23 On the contrary, Rossini’s is both more concise and more clearly articulated; what is more, it features a clear return of the initial idea at “Per te solo, o mio Lindoro,” when the closed melodic texture kicks in. It is difficult to find anything similar in terms of structural return in Mosca’s piece, which seems to work instead through progressive statements of only vaguely related ideas. Finally, Rossini’s melody features a functional separation between the opening open texture and the section of closed texture, beginning at “Per te solo,” as I just pointed out. Considered in this light, Mosca’s piece sounds more fluidly conceived: while the initial phrases obviously display an open texture, the following ones never switch clearly and definitely to a closed one. Prominent melodic statements, especially at the beginning of static movements, in particular slow ones, remain the Rossinian sites where repetition is probably at its lowest, if we consider them from within his oeuvre. What is more, it is likely that Rossini’s impact on this aspect of operatic composition was less keenly felt than in the others discussed above—at least at first: Scott

Example 2.5a Opening movement of Isabella’s cavatina “Cruda sorte” in L’Italiana in Algeri by (a) Luigi Mosca (1808); (b) Rossini (1813)

Repetition 49

Example 2.5a cont.

Balthazar has noted an increasing presence of melodies approaching the lyric prototype in the later Italian operas.24 However, Rossini’s more immediately perceivable division into sections, as well as his stronger articulation through different kinds of melodic utterance and orchestral accompaniment, contribute to a sense of heightened structural clarity. Such clarity, I argue, constitutes an important precondition for the crucial role that repetition will play later

Example 2.5b

Repetition 51

Example 2.5b cont.

on in the movement. In a sense, canons can be so long because their statements, though varied, are clearly structured. In another sense, if “a Rossinian melodic phrase . . . often lacks the character of a theme” (Colas), and is therefore relatively unmemorable, it leaves room for more work on memory later on through repetition.25 Marco Beghelli concludes a survey of the dramaturgy of Rossini’s operas with the statement that “everything, or almost everything, gets repeated, from macro-­structures to micro-­phrase-­constituents.”26 At the end of a thorough investigation of the central finale in a large sample of opere serie between 1800 and 1813, Daniele Carnini suggests that Rossini’s way of doing things became



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so prominent so quickly thanks to its “economical” features, from symmetrical solo statements in duets and larger ensembles to crescendos, and from the systematic repetition of cabalettas to the standardization of macroformal arrangements (i.e., the solita forma).27 The two observations are closely related of course: Rossini’s economical approach to most of the parameters of operatic composition rests on a systematic recourse to the repetition of the constituent elements of each parameter. The difference between Beghelli and Carnini is that the latter’s conclusions are founded on a comparative outlook, and are therefore especially significant for my purposes, even if the scope of their sample is limited. I believe it is fair to conclude, then, that the presence of repetition in the music of Rossini’s Italian operas is more extensive and structurally relevant than in that of his predecessors and contemporaries, and constitutes a distinctive compositional and stylistic trait, perhaps the distinctive trait, of these works.

  I started this chapter by suggesting that one of the factors encouraging analytical investigations on the compositional features of Rossini’s operas has been their increasing availability in critical editions. This availability contrasts with the relative difficulty in locating and obtaining scores of operas by his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, partly because the vast majority are in manuscript rather than printed form. Close readings of scores are necessary for the kinds of analytical studies that might establish the crucial importance of repetition for the emergence of Rossini’s particular style. We should not be surprised, then, by the relative paucity of studies of Rossini’s predecessors. Close readings are not just made possible, but actively encouraged by the emphatic textualization of early nineteenth-­century operatic scores that has taken place over the past few decades, especially in the form of critical editions. The composers whose scores have been emphatically textualized other than Rossini are his followers rather than his predecessors, and therefore analytical activity has focused on the former rather than the latter. Indeed, textualization can be seen as a function of the need for reliable texts for analysis, since the analytical methods developed by musicology in the second half of the twentieth century rely significantly on the observation of details that only a critical text can reliably supply. (Textualization is not solely a response to analytical needs, of course: a new performance ethos as well as a late-­modernist emphasis on authoriality have probably played a more prominent role.)

Repetition 53

I do not wish to unduly essentialize the oft-­mentioned “event” nature of early Italian opera. Nevertheless it is true that, in the historical and geographical context of early nineteenth-­century Italy, operatic discourse was based mostly on actual performances and the reading of librettos, with perusal of scores playing a decidedly secondary role. This is hardly surprising, since, in the years immediately following their premieres, only pezzi staccati (literally “detached pieces”) of Rossini’s operas were usually published in piano-­vocal score. These observations open up a number of important questions: What happens if we address the issue of repetition from the point of view of Rossini’s contemporaries? Did they perceive repetition as a characteristic feature of his style? Is there a connection between present-­day analytical findings and the early reception of Rossini’s operas? The following chapter will try to answer these questions.

3

Borrowing In chapter 1 I briefly commented on Giuseppe Carpani’s remarkable rhetorical maneuver in defense of Rossini’s unique approach to imitation. I would like to return to this text now not because it is exceptional, but because it elaborates for the first time a full-­fledged aesthetics of Rossinian music theater. In Le Rossiniane Carpani developed a complex argument in favor of Rossini’s art by responding in a detailed and direct fashion to the various threads of negative criticism directed against it over the previous decade. With its publication roughly coinciding with the end of Rossini’s Italian theatrical career and its strategy of systematically countering all unfavorable observations made against the composer, the book stands as a repertory of the main strands of the early Italian Rossini discourse—albeit a strongly opinionated one.1 The issue of repetition emerges a number of times in Le Rossiniane, but not as a specific compositional strategy on Rossini’s part, or at least not in the way I have discussed it in the previous chapter. Repetition for Carpani means primarily what modern scholars have called “self-­borrowing,” that is, Rossini’s insertion into new operas of themes, phrases, movements, and occasionally entire numbers already found in his previous works, often modifying them somewhat, but at times leaving them untouched. Carpani tackles this topic directly and extensively in two different passages of his “Letter to the Editor of the Biblioteca Italiana concerning Zelmira,” written from Vienna, where Carpani was based, and originally published in 1822. 55



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In the first passage he sets out to counter a charge that he claims was circulating well before the opera’s performance at the Kärntnertortheater in April: I will tell you that many, apparently not without reason, were whispering that in his new creation Rossini would have us hear again several of his oft-­ heard ideas—pretty, sparkling, and welcome to be sure, but no longer new to us—and that by mixing them with some new thoughts he would pre­sent us with an opera neither entirely new nor entirely old. Everybody was saying that in all his operas except for Tancredi, his first, Rossini repeats and copies himself. This charge was brought only against Rossini, and with unusual severity, though spared to all valid composers before him; what had been forgiven so many others was not forgiven him, almost as if, having shown himself superior, he should not be allowed to share in any of their sins.2

Carpani returns to the topic a few pages later, where he finds a few faults with Rossini, as if to show that he is not completely blinded by his love for the ­composer: Finally let me say to Rossini that even if everybody is master of what he owns I would nonetheless prefer that he repeat some of his favorite bits somewhat less, since once offered to the public, he has no right to repossess them with intent to offer them yet elsewhere. This is acknowledged even among lovers of “Sentirlo replicar troppo mi piace” [“I really love to hear it repeated”]. At the beginning of this letter I mentioned that I regarded as a form of praise the fact that Rossini was reprimanded for repeating himself. Thinking harder about it, I find additional reasons for this distinction: first, that other composers repeated themselves a bit less; and, second, that their repetitions rarely involved moments so noticeable for their beauty that they impressed themselves indelibly in the mind, as those repeated by Rossini do.3

These two excerpts from Le Rossiniane pre­sent us with a few useful starting points: first, repetition in Rossini’s operas was addressed especially in the context of debates about self-­borrowing; second, common opinion was that Rossini often resorted to self-­borrowing; third, self-­borrowing was practiced by other composers as well, but Rossini was thought to do so more frequently; fourth and final, this practice was generally considered in a negative light. These points need to be verified and substantiated by thoroughly ex-

Borrowing 57

amining the critical debate of the 1810s and early 1820s, by asking such questions as: Who exactly were those who lambasted Rossini for his habit of self-­borrowing? Note that Carpani says simply “everybody,” then resorts to impersonal syntactic constructions. What can we say more precisely about those supporters of “I really love to hear it repeated,” a famous line from Metastasio’s Demofoonte? Is the censure or approval expressed in the same terms for Rossini as for his predecessors? Before setting out to answer these questions, I should warn readers that, in several of the excerpts from reviews and debates quoted below, mentions of self-­borrowing are mixed with those of plagiarism from works by other composers. I will explore the distinction between the two later in the chapter.

  No doubt Rossini’s contemporaries considered repetition a characteristic feature of his style. Occasional remarks about repetition are found at the level of a single movement, such as those of a Milanese critic after the local premiere of La Cenerentola in 1817: “We have an example of a different kind of repetition . . . at the beginning of the sextet, where the maestro, struck by two lines about a web tangled and then untangled, has the six singers repeating them in turn a hundred times.”4 This critic was clearly wary of repetition and thus surprised by the success of both this piece and the whole work. He continued: “The piece is applauded nonetheless, as is the entire opera; this fact can be interpreted in Rossini’s favor by saying that the difficult thing is to choose beauty, but that once you have chosen it, you can repeat it indefinitely without fear of tiring [the audience’s] patience.” Repetition is addressed much more frequently, however, in the context of the composer’s self-­borrowing. In fact this is the first type of repetition mentioned by this same critic: [Rossini’s] melodies are beautiful, sweet, well-­structured, I can’t deny it; but I have heard them so often in his previous scores, that from now on, the announcement of a new opera by this maestro will mean to me the revival of an old one. Furthermore, in this Cenerentola the stretta of three ensembles, besides being more or less the same, derives from the crescendo of the so-­called waltz by Mosca, which was imitated from a crescendo by Generali, who copied it from the crescendo of a Florentine song, which was probably taken from another crescendo that from crescendo to crescendo has ended



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up played on all the barrel organs doing the rounds of the city, whose number increases [va crescendo] in proportion to our boredom hearing them.5

The critic’s puzzlement at the success of Rossini’s music derived from both its compositional reliance on repetition and the frequency with which bits of this music supposedly traveled from opera to opera. Occasionally, remarks about self-­borrowing seem connected with the success of a work, as in the following sentence from another review of the very same Milanese premiere of La Cenerentola: “The public repeatedly cheered many pieces of this beautiful and spirited music, and recognized in it several melodies that had emigrated from other operas of the same celebrated maestro.”6 This sentence, though, may well have been spoken with a raised highbrow and suffused with irony. I will address the potential connections between repetition, self-­borrowing, and success in a later chapter; for the moment note that the perception of self-­borrowing, real or imagined, was cause for censure much more frequently than it was for praise.7 This censorious stance emerged in the very first years of Rossini’s operatic career, as a review of the premiere of Sigismondo, in Venice in December 1814, suggests: “Amid many beauties one can also notice, here and there, various instances of carelessness, such as several motives—always Rossini’s, sure, and always beautiful, but already heard in different guises; this encourages the general view that he likes to repeat himself, as he’d rather not tire himself out.”8 By December 1814 Rossini’s operas had been performed in Venice more frequently than in any other city, and the Venetians knew them like no others: we should not be surprised, then, that one of the first references to self-­borrowing comes from a Venetian publication. Was there a geographical dimension to the discourse of self-­borrowing? My impression from reading hundreds of reviews published in several different locations is that initially the topic was raised most often in the local press of those cities with a higher number of Rossini opera performances. Within a few years, however, the quick spread of these works to the whole of Italy meant an equally quick expansion of the discourse of self-­borrowing. By 1820 the subject was discussed in all cities with regular opera seasons. The premiere of Il Turco in Italia that took place at La Scala in August 1814 is a particularly interesting case in this respect. The two local reviews available to us make clear that the Milanese considered the opera a reheating of L’Italiana in Algeri (which had been a huge success in Milan a few months

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earlier), and gave it a frosty reception, showing outrage at a plot that ridiculed some morally dubious traits supposedly typical of Italians. The Corriere mila­ nese drew a satirical vignette: I listen to the introduzione, Pacini’s aria, Festa’s cavatina, Galli’s entrance piece, a duet, a trio, a quintet. . . . I examine, I reflect, I recognize, and I whisper to the ear of my neighbor (a very discreet man): “C’est du vin de son cru” [“It’s wine of his own vineyards”]; “New uncorrected edition,” he replied, a bit louder; a third person, who heard him, started shouting: “Potpourri, potpourri” . . . “Shut up!,” I replied angrily; but this stubborn type was already singing in his box: “I love Plato, I love Maro [i.e., Virgil], I love Naso [i.e., Ovid], but above all I love truth.” 9

For its part, the Corriere delle dame went for a rather bold metaphor: The music of this comic opera is as great as the fame of the maestro, since he gathered in it the scattered beauties and metrical jewels dispersed in L’Italiana in Algeri, in La pietra del paragone, and in other works the skilled young composer has written. While doing so, perhaps Mr. Rossini kept in mind that the text of this opera is a rancid old libretto written in Dresden in order to ridicule the mores of Italian lovers and husbands, and so decided to flirt with himself, behaving like a crazy lover with the beauties of his previous compositions. The Italian Girl in Algiers needed a husband, and so the fertile minds of poet and composer played best man and maid of honor at her wedding with The Turk in Italy. Will the marriage generate offspring? . . . The public wishes the nuptial bed remain sterile. How dare the Corriere delle dame spout such words? . . . No complaints please: these are the words of all those who admire Rossini’s masterpieces and want noble, extraordinary, new things from him, so that his reputation remains as high as when he started, and does not decrease like the speed of those luxury horses that are good only for showing off at parades.10

No doubt then that the disapproval that accompanied the perception of self-­ borrowing was explicit and strong. But this perception was false: in fact, Il Turco in Italia is an almost entirely new score. This is by no means the only instance when Rossini was falsely accused of having recycled music already heard elsewhere in his operas, even if references



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are often so generic that it is impossible to tell which specific pieces are in question, as in the following review of a Barbiere di Siviglia given in Bologna in 1816: “It is true that some voices are heard accusing the author of having copied from himself especially in this score, but it has also been pointed out that those who busy themselves the most in spreading such rumors are very coarse plagiarists devoured by envy for his glory.”11 We know that the self-­borrowing in Il barbiere is by no means widespread, and it is certainly false that Rossini copied himself “especially in this score.” Why, then, was self-­borrowing perceived where none existed? I will address this question below. For now I want to focus on another reason why it is worth discussing the case of Il Turco. When calling attention to self-­borrowing, both reviews explicitly invoke the authority of at least part of the audience. Especially noteworthy is the way in which the spreading of the awareness of supposed self-­borrowing is depicted by the Corriere milanese in its comic sketch. Only a few months earlier the Corriere delle dame had the following to say about Stefano Pavesi’s Fingallo e Comala, performed at the Teatro Re: The duet that then turns into a trio is a piece of self-­plagiarism by the famous and remorseless maestro Rossini. I and several others easily realized that the duet is almost entirely similar to the one that enticed such a crowd at the Teatro Carcano last autumn, when the two Mombelli sisters sang “Questo cor ti giura amore, Mia speranza, mio tesoro, etc. etc.” in Demetrio e Polibio.12

The reviewer not only corroborates his opinion by stating that others share it but also wants to give the impression that it was easy for everybody to detect this instance of self-­borrowing. This rhetorical strategy of involving the audience, or a portion of it, in the perception of self-­borrowing is quite common in reviews and other critical writings, and seems to provide certainty where none could be found, given that neither critics nor public could verify their perceptions by examining scores. In fact the debate concerning self-­borrowing reveals a significant dose of anxiety on the part of critics and at least a section of the public—an anxiety caused precisely by the uncertain foundations on which the discourse was founded. The chances of misfiring were very real, as the case of Il Turco in Milan proves. Another possible reason for this anxiety may have been that those who criticized self-­borrowing were often only a minority. A serial reading of reviews leaves the impression that the majority did not care whether Rossini re-

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cycled, and probably did not even realize any such recycling was taking place. If so—and if Il Turco’s lack of success was due more to the perception of musical self-­borrowing than to its generic similarity to the plot and situations of L’Italiana in Algeri and outrage at the lampooning of Italian husbands and lovers—then Il Turco in Milan may have been the exception that proves the rule. Critics who blamed self-­borrowing, then, were invoking the support of part of the public to prop up their own reactions, in opposition to those of the rest of the audience. A frequent rhetorical maneuver of such critics was a show of (often mock) compassion for the majority as the hapless victims of Rossini’s compositional strategy to benumb his listeners by bombarding them with meaningless sounds, reducing their critical faculties and short-­ circuiting their ability to recognize the frequent instances of self-­borrowing in his operas. This initial survey of the discourse of Rossini’s self-­borrowing in early nineteenth-­century Italy not only confirms the usefulness of Carpani’s Rossiniane as a summary of its main points, but also reveals some specific features: the fairly frequent misidentification of self-­borrowing; the critics’ enlistment of the audience on behalf of its perceptions; and the anxiety revealed by these efforts. Before exploring the wider implications of these aspects, I want to widen the scope to include criticism regarding Rossini’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries: Did the terms used in discussing their self-­ borrowing differ from those employed for Rossini? And, if so, how?

  The topic of self-­borrowing by opera composers who worked in Italy between around 1800 and 1825 has been addressed only minimally, so it is hard to draw any meaningful conclusions.13 In the first passage from Le Rossiniane quoted above, Carpani wrote that “this charge was brought only against Rossini, and with unusual severity, though spared to all valid composers before him; what had been forgiven so many others was not forgiven him, almost as if, having shown himself superior, he should not be allowed to share in any of their sins.” Perhaps then Rossini did not resort to self-­borrowing significantly more than others, but was only censored for it more openly. Yet even Carpani was not quite sure. A few pages later he changed tack, maintaining that not only “other composers repeated themselves a bit less” but also “their repetitions rarely involved moments so noticeable for their beauty that they impressed themselves indelibly in the mind, as those repeated by Rossini do.”



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To reach a reasoned assessment of Carpani’s statements on self-­borrowing by Rossini’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries, I embarked on a systematic reading of opera reviews published in Milanese newspapers in the first fifteen years of the century. Limiting the research to a single location means adopting a partial viewpoint, of course. The choice of Milan mitigates somewhat this drawback, given the city’s centrality to the world of Italian opera during this period, and especially the availability of three newspapers that paid significant attention to opera for at least some of these years: the Corriere milanese, the Giornale italiano, and the Corriere delle dame. Such richness of sources cannot be found for any other Italian city until at least the second quarter of the century. Indeed, modern opera criticism—that is, criticism that discusses works as well as performances—first emerged in Milan precisely at this time, with 1804 functioning as a crucial turning point, thanks to the founding that year of both the Giornale italiano and the Corriere delle dame, and a marked change in the reviews published by the older Corriere milanese.14 These papers do mention self-­borrowing by some of Rossini’s immediate predecessors, almost always disapprovingly. The rhetorical strategy of supporting such censure by invoking the reactions of part of the public can also be found there—not surprisingly, since the reasons I have proposed for it are not exclusive to Rossini’s music. More interestingly, self-­borrowing is addressed with any meaningful frequency only in the second decade of the century, whereas only isolated cases are seen for the earlier years. More common are accusations of actual plagiarism. The first detailed discussion of plagiarism I have found appears in a Corriere delle dame review of Ferdinando Orlandi’s I raggiri amorosi (La Scala, 30 May 1806): We fail to understand why maestro Orlandi, who has given us solid proof of his original talent, decided to borrow entire sections from other composers and operas. Isn’t Mr. Pellegrini’s aria in Act 2, scene 5, “Il mio nome a chiaro suono,” copied note for note from Act 2, scene 5, of the opera entitled Il servo furbo, performed at the Teatro de’ Fiorentini in Naples in 1803? And who doesn’t recognize in a few ensembles the melody of the priests in Gli Orazi e i Curiazi? See Act 2, scene 9. The duet in the final scene, “Il tuo destin crudele”—a foreigner sitting next to me said—is the same (bar the words) sung by Mr. Tramezzani with Mrs. Banti in Venice. Another spectator added that Mr. Orlandi should be absolved, since, aware that pleasing some singers

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would help considerably toward making the present cast more tolerable, he adapted for them whatever of value they possessed in their voice and musical talent.15

This text is worth citing because it verbalizes three different levels of experience: direct knowledge of the music or at least the libretto of Giovanni Prota’s Il servo furbo (actually premiered at the Fiorentini in 1803) on the part of the reviewer or another trustworthy person close to her; a collective aural memory of Cimarosa’s Gli Orazi e i Curiazi (1796), a very famous work at the time (published in Paris in 1802, it circulated even in full score), and, more importantly, performed at La Scala less than three months earlier (3 March); and the opinion of an audience member supposedly unknown to the critic. The trajectory is, then, from “it is so” to “everybody says so” to “somebody says so.” In future years, the second and third rhetorical constructions would be decidedly more common than the first.16 In general, accusations of plagiarism were formulated in more sharply censorious tones than those of self-­borrowing. A revival of Giuseppe Mosca’s Gli amori e l’armi at the Teatro Santa Radegonda in March 1813, for example, received the following, accommodating note: One could call the music a collection of the best pieces that maestro Mosca stole from himself and then assembled in this libretto. Can maestro Mosca be properly called a thief? . . . I think so; but his thieving nature can be compared to that of oxen, who ruminate and chew over the food they have already taken in order to obtain a subtler cud, which gives strength to the whole body.17

A few months later Pietro Carlo Guglielmi’s Ernesto e Palmira (La Scala, 18 September 1813) was criticized by the Corriere milanese in no less accommodating terms than Mosca’s opera: “The music of this new opera contains a bit of everything. The so-­called waltz by Mosca, the aria ‘Pria che spunti in ciel l’aurora’ [from Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto], a few motives from [Paisiello’s] La molinara, several others from [Guglielmi’s own] La scelta dello sposo, etc. are marshalled into service; but this doesn’t really matter.”18 Only a few days later, though, the Corriere delle dame questioned with revelatory irony the weak bases on which the accusations of (self-­)borrowing had been formulated:



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Last Sunday the Corriere milanese, running [correndo] faster than the ­Corriere delle dame, hastened to give his opinion of this opera. How strong and tenacious is the memory of this running paper! . . . It immediately discovers that in Mr Guglielmi’s music there is a bit of everything. It recognized Mosca’s waltz, the aria “Pria che spunti in ciel l’aurora,” a few motives from La molinara, several others from La scelta dello sposo, etc. . . . Amid the jumble of so many memories, the Corriere milanese failed to remember that La scelta dello sposo is Guglielmi’s own work; why impute to him what belongs to him, then?19

Even more revelatory is a letter by the composer to the editor of the Corriere milanese, published by the Corriere delle dame immediately after the review just quoted: In the review published by your paper on the nineteenth regarding my opera entitled Ernesto e Palmira, performed at the Royal Theatre of La Scala and so kindly welcomed by its respectable public, you say I have been born under a lucky star: alas, it’s true. . . . What saddens me deeply is that you find music by other composers in my opera, and therefore I would like you to tell me where exactly I sinned. You mention a waltz, and in my opera there is no piece in triple time (waltz time), except for a tiny parlante passage in the Act 1 finale. You accuse me of having had recourse to the aria “Pria che spunti in ciel l’aurora” and to various ideas from La molinara, things that I just cannot find. If I stumbled on a few of these things, either because they are in the same key, or they begin on the same note, or they sound alike on account of the orchestral accompaniment, or perhaps at cadences, I would not feel sorry, because those familiar with music know that these things are mostly the same. As for there being something similar to La scelta dello sposo, given that its music is mine, and although I cannot see it, it indeed could be: it is not difficult that a composer who has forged a style will repeat himself in some small things without realizing it.20

The final remark about style is perhaps the juiciest bit of this letter, and I will turn to it below. Worth mentioning here is that precisely the lack of differentiation between plagiarism and self-­borrowing on the part of the Corriere mila­ nese prompted both the Corriere delle dame and Guglielmi to point out what

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must have been generally understood as the aesthetic and moral differences between the two practices. As I have already mentioned, Milanese reviewers focused mostly on plagiarism in the first fifteen years of the century, openly censuring supposed cases of self-­borrowing only within more general tirades against plagiarism. Self-­borrowing as a practice clearly distinct from plain borrowing seems to have acquired a specific discursive identity only in the years when Rossini was already active. The first composer persistently charged with self-­borrowing was Stefano Pavesi. His earliest work to come under critical fire was Tancredi (La Scala, 18 January 1812). The Corriere milanese had the following to say about the opera: Pavesi, who perhaps could not imagine that after several years many would still retain the memory of the triumph he had obtained on the Venetian stage with his applauded work Fingallo e Comala, believed it would be appropriate to draw new profit from that old capital, sticking an entire piece, the finale, into Tancredi, from first to final note. Hearing it, over two hundred people had no trouble in finding themselves in a familiar spot [en pays de connaissance], and greeted the resuscitated composition with unanimous cries. But this kind of plagiarism must not be considered a grave crime: in sum, this is just reselling one’s own merchandise; and, even if Pavesi seems to have a penchant for this exercise, he is more excusable than the many among his confrères who steal from the works of others. The fact that so many spectators discovered the imitation of that famous finale is proof of the merits of the piece, which was not deleted from anyone’s memory; this gives credit to this able composer.21

As in the case of Guglielmi’s Ernesto e Palmira, the Corriere delle dame did not waste time in rapping the rival paper on the knuckles: Correct and careful criticism of theatrical shows is not as easy as some think. One must first know the theme and plot of the libretto, and then not be a stranger to musical taste, nor judge precipitously after an initial performance. It seems as if the author of the review published in no. 17 of the Corriere milanese did not heed these rules. As a consequence, Maestro Pavesi would be right in telling him that either he is deceived or he wants to deceive others when he states that the whole finale, from first to final note,



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is a repetition of that in Fingallo e Comala. He should have rather singled out the quartet with unaccompanied voices, which is only part of this finale, while the rest is entirely new and excellently suited to the forceful and novel words.22

Only a couple of weeks later it was the turn of Il trionfo delle belle, staged at the Santa Radegonda: My memory, which seldom fails me, found an absolute affinity between this piece [a trio] and an older one of the same kind and by the same composer; so I think it’s useless to applaud now what was already lauded several years ago. If I am not mistaken, Pavesi staged his first work at the S. Moisè in Venice: this was a farsa entitled, if I remember correctly, Il geloso corretto; its music was praised to the skies; the name of Pavesi, so far unknown, went from mouth to mouth in clubs, cafes, ridotti, theaters, everywhere; Il geloso corretto features a trio which, if not precisely the same as the one in Il trionfo delle belle, is at least its very close relative.23

This is one of the most explicit among the many such texts from which an almost obsessive attention to the power, reliability, and workings of memory emerges: I will address this major theme fully later on. More relevant to my concerns in this chapter is the observation that Pavesi joins Rossini as the composer whose self-­borrowing was most overtly and repeatedly noted by the Milanese press in the early 1810s.24 Indeed, Rossini and Pavesi were explicitly coupled as inveterate (self-­) borrowers. I have cited above a March 1814 review of the latter’s Fingallo e Comala in the Corriere delle dame that mentions “a piece of self-­plagiarism by the famous and remorseless maestro Rossini”: it was clear, then, that the piece was by Rossini (from Demetrio e Polibio) and had been inserted in Pavesi’s opera by him. The Corriere milanese had a somewhat different take on the issue: General applause turned even stronger when the above-­mentioned prima donna, together with Ms. Bassi, launched into a duet little different from that sung with inimitable gracefulness by the two Mombelli sisters last summer: “Questo cor ti giura amore.” As soon as I heard the main idea of this piece, I thought that Rossini had had a hand in Fingallo e Comala. I told my

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friends, and was derided. I proposed a bet, which was agreed. But soon the bet doubled: the duet turned into a trio, and I thought I recognized not only Rossini’s style but also the same ideas and procedures of a few passages from his Tancredi, so I asked if anybody wanted to take another risk.25

Demetrio e Polibio had been performed in Milan in July 1813, while Tancredi (Rossini’s, of course) had inaugurated the city’s new Teatro Re the following December, only a few months before Pavesi’s Fingallo e Comala. It remains unclear, however, why the Corriere delle dame talked about self-­borrowing on Rossini’s part. In any case, what matters here is that Pavesi and Rossini were joined not only by being the firsts to be systematically accused of self-­borrowing but also by their implication in an exchange of pieces, at least in the perception of some of their Milanese contemporaries. Why was this? What did they have in common that led to such similar reactions and explicit association? These questions revolve around the crucial issue of style, an issue already emerged implicitly—or explicitly, in the case of Guglielmi’s letter—in several of the many texts I have cited in this chapter. Other issues that these texts have brought up, which are closely linked with that of style, concern the workings of musical memory and the role that repeated listenings of operas by the same composer had both on the perception of his style and on the capacity of the audience’s memory to retain bits of his music. These are fundamental themes of the early nineteenth-­century Rossinian discourse, and therefore of this book, and I will take them up in the following chapters. Here I want to conclude with a further reflection on sources that goes back to the concluding paragraphs of the preceding chapter.

  In 1864 Rossini wrote to Tito Ricordi to thank him for having sent a few volumes of the Nuova compiuta edizione di tutte le opere teatrali edite ed inedite, ridotte per canto e piano, del celebre Maestro Gioachino Rossini (New piano-­vocal score edition of all the operas, published and unpublished, by the famous maestro Gioachino Rossini) on which the Milanese publisher had embarked a few years previously. But the composer also added: The edition that you have started will cause a lot of (well-­founded) criticism, since the same pieces of music will be found in several operas: the time and



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money I was given to compose were so homeopathic that I barely had the time to read the so-­called poetry to be set to music: my only thought was for the support I owed to my beloved parents and poor relatives.26

A few years earlier, in 1856, French architect Charles Doussault published an account of his conversations with Rossini during a visit to Florence, where the composer had lived until the previous year. According to Doussault, when Rossini saw him leafing through the vocal score of La cambiale di matrimonio in the Ricordi edition, he could not contain himself: I am still furious, . . . my dear friend, about this publication, which thrusts all my operas into the public eye at the same time. The same pieces will be found several times over, since I thought I had the right to retain those that seemed the best ones from the operas that had been booed, and to save them from shipwreck by inserting them into new works. A booed opera seemed well and truly dead to me, and here they resuscitate everything!27

Even if Doussault invented or at least altered Rossini’s actual words, the sentiment they convey corresponds to that of the letter to Ricordi, albeit expressed in a different tone. The composer was worried that the possibility to prove beyond doubt the presence of the same pieces in different operas would open him up to criticism—a fear that in the end did not materialize, it seems. The issue was clearly the “public” textualization of the music brought about by the spreading of complete piano-­vocal scores of operas that had been composed in a context in which the only “public” text of an opera was the libretto. As I have mentioned in the previous chapter, during Rossini’s Italian career the public could access the music of his operas mostly only through piano-­ vocal scores of pezzi staccati. Complete piano-­vocal scores started to appear only in the 1820s, and initially mostly in France and the German-­speaking regions rather than in Italy—only Ricordi published a significant number over the course of this decade: Maometto II and Otello in 1823–24, Semiramide in 1825, La Cenerentola in 1826, Il barbiere di Siviglia in 1827, and Tancredi and L’Italiana in Algeri in 1829–30.28 In light of this observation, and recalling those of the previous chapter, it should not surprise us that recent musicological research on Rossini’s recycling has developed together with another crucial phase in the textualization of his music—that of the critical edition, whose first volume was pub-

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lished in 1979. Philip Gossett’s studies, which started to appear in the late 1960s, encouraged other scholars to investigate the matter further.29 It was in this context that the term “self-­borrowing” (autoimprestito in Italian) became standard. Scholars have mapped this practice in detailed fashion, pointing out that it tended to affect works that either failed to circulate (from which Rossini could borrow) or were not expected to circulate (into which he could insert borrowed material), or both, and usually involved comparable formal slots and dramatic and affective situations. They have also remarked that more often than not Rossini changed details of the orchestration and vocal line as he was copying his own music into a new score: in the words of Gossett describing the composer at work on La gazzetta, “he was both borrowing and recomposing.”30 Still, there is no denying that Rossini’s self-­borrowing sits uneasily in the rhetoric of originality (if not always its practice) that dominates our culture, musical and otherwise. Even more embarrassingly from our point of view, Rossini was self-­borrowing while the Romantic cult of originality was spreading all across Europe. Music was taking a central role in this cultural and ideological process—a role that it has maintained to this day, even if the tones of its rhetoric have changed significantly. In this sense, it may seem surprising that thus far scholarly attention has focused almost exclusively on Rossini’s compositional practice and paid scant attention to the debate around his self-­ borrowing. As a result of my own research into this discourse, I now realize that the terms of the question as we tend to treat it today were already in place back then. The types of sources on which the discourse relied, however, were radically different, and had a profound impact on the perception of music and musical style.

4

Style In the previous chapter I argued that in early nineteenth-­century Italy repetition in Rossini’s music was discussed mostly in terms of his supposedly inveterate habit of self-­borrowing, and that this discourse established itself very early on in his career. In addition, an exploration of the Milanese press of the first fifteen years of the century suggests that discussion about self-­borrowing as a practice distinct from plagiarism emerged only in the early 1810s, more or less at the same time as Rossini’s works took the city by storm. What is more, it seems that another composer was prominently involved in this discourse, Stefano Pavesi, who on one occasion was explicitly implicated with Rossini in a curious case of (self-­)borrowing. How were these two composers linked by this discourse? And what can the Milanese case tell us about the discourse of self-­borrowing, and therefore of repetition, in Rossini’s operas in general? Pavesi, born in 1779, was older than Rossini and had been active as an opera composer for almost a decade before the latter appeared on the scene. They met for the first time possibly in Bologna in 1810, but became good friends in Venice in autumn 1812. In fact, among elder composers Pavesi was probably the one closest to him, both personally and stylistically. Rossini clearly admired Pavesi’s works, since no less than five of them functioned as sources for his own: beside the already mentioned Tancredi and Il trionfo delle belle (for Matilde di Shabran), they include Elisabetta d’Inghilterra (1810, for Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra), Agatina, o La virtù premiata (1814, for La Cenerentola) and Odoardo e Cristina (1810, for Eduardo e Cristina).1 At the same time, Pavesi 71



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and Rossini repeatedly came to each other’s rescue. In 1813 Rossini “lent” Pavesi a few pieces originally composed for Ciro in Babilonia for his Aspasia e Cleomene—a loan that then caused trouble when Ciro was performed in Florence, where Aspasia e Cleomene had been premiered.2 Six years later the exchange went the other way, with Rossini taking an aria from Pavesi’s Odoardo e Cristina for his Eduardo e Cristina.3 Pavesi and Rossini, then, are alike not only in being the first composers, at least in Milan, to be systematically accused of self-­borrowing, but in their willingness to exchange pieces or ideas, both in reality (as in the cases of Ciro in Babilonia and Odoardo/Eduardo e Cristina) and in the perception of some contemporaries (who believed, for example, that Rossini had been actively involved in Pavesi’s Fingallo e Comala at the Teatro Re).4 These different strands of evidence suggest that their compositional idioms must have been understood as similar, or at least closer than those of other composers of the period. Pavesi and Rossini themselves clearly thought so, otherwise they would not have risked mixing their pieces in operas advertised as being composed by one or the other. A few recent analytical investigations have indeed supported this perception, numbering Pavesi among the more “advanced” composers active in the early 1810s—a group whose style was closer to Rossini’s than that of other, compositionally “older” composers such as Mayr or Paer, and that included Pietro Generali (1773–1832), Giuseppe Nicolini (1762–1842), and the already mentioned Pietro Carlo Gu­glielmi (1772–1817).5 Indeed, at the time Generali was often identified as the inventor of the crescendo, which Rossini then adopted and brought to unheard prominence.6 As I argued in chapter 2, Rossini’s style relied substantially more on repetition at several different compositional levels than did that of most of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries. Whether correctly or not, critics in early 1810s Milan coupled Rossini and Pavesi as composers who more than others resorted to the practice of self-­borrowing.7 The key characteristic that they and at least part of the public heard in these composers’ music was repetition, then, since of course hearing self-­borrowing means hearing repetition. Attention was focused not so much on repetition within works—the kind most closely analyzed in chapter 2—but on repetition across them, even if the level at which it was presumably detected varied greatly, from a few measures to an entire number. Still, some among those involved in this discussion did understand that repetition within works was as relevant as that across them.

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One of these was Guglielmi, as his letter published in 1813 in the Corriere delle dame and quoted at length in the previous chapter indicates. He defended himself from charges of plagiarism by admitting that he might have inadvertently taken a few generic features—such as accompanimental patterns and cadential figures—from scores by other composers, but “those familiar with music know that these things are mostly the same.” According to Guglielmi, then, critics and spectators out to spot presumed instances of plagiarism could not distinguish between the shared compositional language of the time and the salient, identifying traits of a single piece of music, those that should differentiate it from all others. What is more, when shouting “self-­borrowing!” they could not separate individual stylistic consistency from actual copying. If the markers of one’s own style were repeated across operas, it was no great deal: “[I]t is not difficult that a composer who has forged a style will repeat himself in some small things without realizing it.” Leaving aside the question of intent, two crucial issues are at play here: the first centers on the identity of a piece of music, and the second concerns the tension between individual style and common compositional idiom, or, better, the perceptual and discursive challenges generated by the distinction between the two. But both these issues ultimately spotlight repetition. In the first place, individual style and common idiom are conceptually based on repetition. Indeed, the very concept of style revolves around repetition: that is, the idea that, thanks to their systematic repetition, certain procedures have emerged from the background and then are promoted to the status of salient, characterizing traits. At the same time, an individual piece of music owes its identity to an absence of repetition in at least some of its parameters— not internally, of course, but with respect to other pieces. In the case of Rossini (and some of his contemporaries, at least in the perception of critics and audiences), though, repetition is perhaps the fundamental trait of his style, one that is both based on repetition (since it is a style), then, and characterized by repetition: in other words, a style “at the second degree.” It was this novelty that proved particularly difficult to handle in early nineteenth-­century Italy, not least because it seemed to threaten the identity of an individual piece, or at least its perception as a separate, self-­contained item. The main problem seems to have been how to distinguish between repetition that generated style and repetition engendered by self-­borrowing. This difficulty emerges most clearly if we take into consideration how often self-­ borrowing was perceived where in reality there was none, as I discussed in the



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previous chapter. I would argue that the new stylistic traits displayed by Rossini’s operas wrong-­footed traditional listening habits. This music seemed to care significantly less about individuation and specificity than earlier works— to such an extent that, to an alarming degree, it sounded all the same. Reviewers who could not understand this kind of music with the then-­available perceptual tools and aesthetic categories often reacted by crying out confusedly along with Mozart’s Leporello, “questa poi la conosco pur troppo!” (I know this one rather too well!). How were they supposed to separate stylistic consistency from copy in works that resorted to repetition with literally unheard-­ of insistence? How to handle a kind of music that seemed to take stylistic individuation to such an extreme that it was impossible to distinguish between different pieces within it? No wonder, then, that Rossini was the first Italian opera composer to be extensively discussed in terms of a personal style. In fact, Carpani’s Le Rossiniane, and more specifically the long “Letter on Zelmira,” represents both the summation of over a decade of intensive discursive engagement with the question of Rossini’s style, and the first significant critical study ever to be devoted to an opera composer—a composer, that is, identified solely or mostly by his contribution to this genre, and therefore unlike, say, Bach or Mozart. Indeed, in Italy no composer had been the object of such intensive critical scrutiny, especially concerning his style. This critical activity, located initially in newspaper reviews, had by the 1820s produced longer studies, of which Carpani’s is by far the most remarkable.8 Another text, by H. Franceschini, published in the same year of Carpani’s “Letter on Zelmira” (1822), alleged that the first to introduce many of the new procedures that would then be taken up by Rossini was in fact Generali; Rossini, however, had brought them to an unprecedented, and far higher, level. Indeed, his style was unique: “All those who criticize Rossini do not know—or pretend not to know—that he writes, if not in a completely new style, at least in one all his own, and not shared with any other composer.”9 This close attention to a composer’s individual style was not exclusive to Rossini at this time. The decades around 1800 were a crucial period in the history of the concept of style in music. During the early modern period the notion of style had been primarily connected to different genres of musical compositions associated with different locations (theater, church, and chamber), while over the course of the eighteenth century it had also come to be associated with different national “tastes” or “schools”—initially French

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and Italian, and then German. Only toward the end of the eighteenth century and at the start of the nineteenth did the notion of a personal, individual style begin to gain general currency. This phenomenon has been investigated mostly in connection with Austro-­German composers such as Beethoven, and contextualized in terms of the German intellectual tradition represented by such figures as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Goethe, and Friedrich Schlegel.10 In this respect, music produced by other cultures, including Italian, has been rather less assiduously studied. As Guglielmi’s letter shows, at least a glimmer of the idea of a personal, individual style was already present in Italy when Rossini appeared on the scene. Not surprising as it might first seem: we must keep in mind that one of the earliest proponents of style as an original stance against accepted rules had been Cesare Beccaria, one the protagonists of the so-­called Lombard Enlightenment, in his Ricerche intorno alla natura dello stile (Inquiry into the Nature of Style; first published in Milan in 1770). Another important Italian text of the time was Luigi Lanzi’s Storia pittorica della Italia (Pictorial History of Italy, or, perhaps better, History of Painting in Italy; 1795–96, rev. 1809), the first such publication to pay closer attention to an artist’s style rather than his life. These writings may well have influenced the emergence of the notion of an individual style in operatic composition. Only in the operatic discourse of the age, however, did the concept of a personal style emerge in the context of a defense against charges of plagiarism and self-­ borrowing. It is precisely this context that casts the appearance of the concept of a personal compositional style in a new light. This process was characterized by a shift in the relationship between normativity and originality: whereas previously style was understood mostly in regulative terms, it now began to be conceived as the manifestation of an individual creative personality, and even as an expression of the artist’s subjectivity. This meant that praise went above all to the new, original contribution that a composer made to the common idiom. In other words, the notion of individual style was predicated on the spotlighting of difference at the expense of sameness. At the same time, of course, the perception of difference could take place only if the characterizing traits of this difference were repeated over and over again: it is the repetition of difference that makes an individual style perceptible. In other words, a composer must be repetitive in an original way in order to put across a personal style. In Rossini’s case, one of the stronger markers of his originality was repetition itself: hence, the paradox of his style “at the second degree,” as characterized above.



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On the one hand, then, Rossini emerges anew as a central personality in the emergence of the concept of a personal, individual compositional style in Europe in the early nineteenth century. On the other, his specific brand of originality-­as-­repetition challenges common accounts of this process, since it throws a decidedly ambiguous light onto the imperative of originality that both caused and accompanied this process. It should come as no surprise, then, that in the last half-­century, ever since Rossini became respectable for international musicology, the matter of his style has been repeatedly and directly discussed by scholars, in a way that, for example, Mozart’s or Bellini’s or Donizetti’s or Verdi’s have not—even if the issue of repetition as one of his style’s most individual features has seldom been addressed with the attention it demands from an early nineteenth-­century perspective.11 I would argue that the principal generator of such repeated attempts to crack the nut of the “secret” of his style—the present one not excepted—is this tension between Rossini’s centrality and his eccentricity. In this sense, the last fifty years have simply seen a renewal of an earlier effort: the question of Rossini’s style exercised his contemporaries to an even greater degree than it does us. Rossini’s style evidently challenged common understandings of the relationship between normativity and originality, sameness and singularity, repetition and difference in operatic composition. Hence, the many, many words spent discussing it back then. As Luca Zoppelli has demonstrated, from all these words—and doubtlessly in no small part thanks to them—it emerges how it was with Rossini that, for the first time in Italy, the composer was indisputably considered the author of an opera, “the sole or in any case the foremost individual aesthetically responsible for a text, for an autonomously determined opus.” Simultaneously, the librettist was demoted to a mere supplier of words—indeed, it was in the early nineteenth century the word “librettist,” originally derogatory, began to substitute for the eighteenth-­century “poet.”12 Among the various reasons for this shift in status, I would argue, was the perception that Rossini’s works were characterized by a style more starkly individual than that of any composer before him, and that this stark individuality was due to its equally stark consistency—which is to say, the unprecedented prominence of repetition both within and across his works. This peculiar situation helps to explain what might otherwise appear as a contradiction within the early nineteenth-­century Rossinian discourse: that accusations of self-­borrowing are no less frequent than acclamations of

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novelty as a prominent feature of Rossini’s style, and one of the main reasons for the overwhelming success of his works. As he did for other aspects of Rossini’s music, Carpani summarized a decade-­long discourse when he stated that he considered novelty, “unequalled and divine,” as the first among the main qualities of Rossini’s music.13 This “novelty” comes across as deeply ambiguous, however, since it is seldom clear whether what is new is Rossini’s style as a whole, or individual ideas, movements, or numbers within his oeuvre. This lack of differentiation between two kinds of novelty is most likely a symptom of the epistemological challenges posed by Rossini’s music, which could sound at once both boldly new and always the same.14 Most texts documenting this discourse, especially newspaper reviews, exhibit tropes of either novelty or sameness, without any apparent awareness of their simultaneous circulation and potential contradiction. Here are two almost contemporary reactions to Matilde di Shabran (1821), the first from Milan (August 1822) and the second from Venice (January 1823): Wanting to give a historical account of the music, it would be necessary in the first place to understand with certainty when and where the composer’s wit was sharpened and his rich and always new imagination took flight in order to give birth to such a portentous offspring; but since it is too difficult to establish the date of birth of potpourris, I do not think it possible to ascertain when this hodgepodge of his old passages, of already-­heard melodies, and of boring and eternal codas to each number was magically conceived. Inexhaustible richness of sublime and ever new accompaniments, profusion of the best harmony full of the choicest, varied, and well-­contrasted motives, luxuriating with all the surprises of this art, facility of expression joined with those enchanting masterful touches, comic flavor alternating with the softest accents of feeling, these and a thousand other merits are admired in differing degrees in the works of the versatile Rossini; but almost all—let me say it— shine at their most brilliant in his sublime opera entitled Matilde di Shabran o Bellezza e cuor di ferro.15

Finding different opinions among reviews of the same piece is common, but reading such radically opposite takes on the same issue is less frequent—the language of novelty in the second passage is pervasive, even if novelty itself is not as explicitly and directly thematized as sameness and repetition are in the



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first. And yet these two excerpts are representative of the schizophrenic alternation between newness and sameness in the Rossinian discourse of the time. The tension between these two poles did not escape a few more alert commentators. One of them was Stendhal, whose first text on Rossini, an article originally published in English, appeared in a shortened Italian translation in 1822 and thus also belongs to the Italian Rossini discourse.16 Stendhal believed that the main feature of Rossini’s music was its “extraordinary speed,” which prevented listeners from feeling “profound impressions.” This speed was accompanied by “a boldness always new, which awaken[ed] a kind of enchantment”; but, Stendhal continued, “this continuous brightness is the main reason why Rossini’s compositions leave no permanent impressions.”17 The opposition between novelty and repetition emerges here as a lack of internal differentiation caused—paradoxically, yet precisely—by the relentless, continuous search for difference. The paradox is vividly encapsulated by the expression “sempre nuova franchezza”: Rossini’s audacity is “always new,” but the “continuous brightness” that it causes has the result of flattening the emotional landscape—no matter how high above sea level this plateau is located. This article by Stendhal spurred the famous pamphlet Cenni di una donna già cantante sopra il maestro Rossini (1823) by Geltrude Righetti Giorgi, the first Rosina in Il barbiere and the first Cenerentola, whose explicit aim was to counter, or at least to comment on, Stendhal’s assertions one by one. Interestingly, when Righetti Giorgi comes to deal with the passage I just summarized, she does not really address Stendhal’s specific interpretation of Rossini’s style, but chooses instead to focus on his mention of Don Giovanni as an opera that exhibits the depth of feeling absent from Rossini’s works, tapping into the opposition between Germany and Italy as one of harmony versus melody, and chanting the praises of singing as “the absolute monarch of music, and one that must be obeyed.”18 Carpani’s Le Rossiniane reveals a similarly evasive stance toward the tension between newness and sameness. As I mentioned above, Carpani celebrates novelty as the foremost feature of Rossini’s music; what is more, he does so several times and at great length.19 In fact, he seems almost obsessed with repeating that novità is what Rossini is really all about. What he is never clear about, however, is where to find the precise location of this novelty, and the specific level at which it operates. Is it that Rossini’s general style is new in comparison with that of his predecessors? Or is it rather that Rossini’s volcanic imagination repeatedly finds new ways of composing? Is his music new

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as a whole, in broad stylistic terms, or is it new in its parts, as measured against itself? And if the latter is true, are the terms of comparison newer operas against older ones, or rather different numbers, movements, melodies, harmonies, rhythms, or colors within the same work? At times it seems as if Carpani leans toward the latter option, that of difference within the same work—I say “seems” because he never goes into specific musical detail, as is to be expected from a text written by an intellectual and former librettist passionate about opera rather than by a musician.20 But favoring variety within a work is a potentially dangerous route to take in the context of his general aesthetics of Rossini’s music, since it may eventually lead to the kind of fragmented, abstruse, “gothic” style he obsessively berates in pieces by “German” composers. This stance is evidenced most forcefully in the letter “To the Anonymous Author of the Article on Rossini’s Tancredi published in the Berlinische Zeitung, no. 7, 1818,” where Tancredi is favorably compared to, among other operas, Beethoven’s Fidelio. According to Carpani, “the desire to find new paths” in that piece “lead [the composer] to hyper-­learned musical absurdities, condemned by nature and rejected by common sense.”21 No less explicit is his furiously nationalistic rhetoric in another letter in Le Rossiniane, “On Weber’s Freischütz,” in which Weber’s music is scorched for its “servile imitation of the meaning of every single word, which produces an inconsistent mosaic of pieces of different colors, absolutely not meant to be together.”22 Too much novelty and therefore too much difference, in the excessive quantities Carpani hears in a lot of “German” opera, are to be avoided, then, since they supposedly leave “nature” and “common sense” behind. But these appeals to nature and common sense belie the shaky aesthetic grounds on which Carpani’s argument is constructed—“shaky” not in an absolute sense, of course, but because they contradict the general rhetorical thrust of Le Rossiniane, which locates the ultimate justification for Rossini’s stylistic choices in the astonishing and unprecedented Pan-­European success of his operas, and therefore in the great pleasure that they evidently give to so many people from different classes in different countries, rather than in anything “natural.” Carpani could not criticize Weber from the same aesthetic stance from which he praised Rossini, since he had just witnessed the very warm welcome the Viennese had given Der Freischütz in 1821, a positive reception that according to his own declaration left him baffled.23 And yet, Carpani had no choice but to trumpet novelty as the foremost feature of Rossini’s music, not only in general stylistic terms but also, and perhaps especially, in both his oeuvre and



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even individual works if he was to counter the accusations of sameness that constituted an endlessly recurring theme in Italian Rossini discourse. In Carpani’s text, as in so many others of that period, repetition as a prominent stylistic trait goes mostly unmentioned—other than in the recurring trope of self-­borrowing. Carpani’s obsessive rhetoric of novelty within as well as without Rossini’s oeuvre, however, seems conceived to counter charges of repetition as a component of the composer’s style as much to rebut accusations of self-­borrowing. The writer eventually comes clean, as it were, in the appendix to the “Letter on Zelmira,” entitled “On the Differences and Moral Characters of Styles and on Musical Language.” After one introductory sentence, this text declares the terms of the challenge to which Carpani is setting out to respond: Rossini is accused of not having variety of styles and melodies, and of being always the same in his accompaniments, which are similar in both the serious and the comic genre; he makes indistinct use of the same colors, of the same phrases, and of exactly identical moves and steps and modes in every manner of composition, confusing genres and styles.24

The prominent position of this statement at the very beginning of this substantial “Appendix,” its framing as both the point of departure and the reason for the argument to follow, and the rhetoric of this argument as a “philosophical” tract on musical language, all suggest that such charges stand behind the whole of Carpani’s promotion of novelty as the most prominent feature of Rossini’s style, not only in the “Appendix,” but in the whole of Le Rossiniane. Given Carpani’s antagonistic rhetoric and the general aesthetic orientation of the time, the one suggestion he cannot make is that the novelty of Rossini’s style is to be found to a considerable degree in its reliance on repetition. He chooses two different but equally revelatory strategies instead. One the one hand, he repeatedly celebrates Rossinian novità, as we have seen, without ever clarifying what actually constitutes such novità. On the other, he questions the aesthetic premises on which those anti-­Rossinian charges rest, with their emphasis on specificity and individuation of musical utterances. Indeed, he challenges the very idea of stylistic appropriateness; he declares instead that it is impossible to go beyond a very general division into sublime, middle, and low (“sublime,” “medio,” and “infimo”). Therefore, according to Carpani, accusations that Rossini fails to match specific words and situations with sty-

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listically correct music ignore the simple fact that it is ultimately impossible to police the boundaries between what is stylistically apposite from what is not.25 Whether one agrees with Carpani, acknowledging the fearlessness and originality of his rhetorical strategy, especially within the context of early nineteenth-­century Italian discourse, is not difficult. More important, however, is how clearly and explicitly he recognizes the implications and consequences of Rossini’s unique stylistic orientation—even if his analysis of this orientation is at best evasive. What is ultimately at stake is not only style—how music operates—but the aesthetics of operatic representation—what music does in opera, and why. As we saw in a previous chapter, Carpani promotes an aesthetics in which cantilena has primacy over “expression”—in which “in music the priority goes to the music,” to recall one of his graphic formulations. Besides clarifying the discursive context in which matters of style were debated and explored, Carpani’s text also highlights other aesthetic and dramaturgical issues raised by that discourse; first among them, that of genre, to which the next chapter is devoted.

5

Genre While summarizing the criticism directed at Rossini’s operas in the essay he appended to Le Rossiniane, “On the Differences and Moral Characters of Styles and on Musical Language,” Giuseppe Carpani explicitly links matters of style to questions of genre. Many charged Rossini with “not having variety of styles and melodies, and of being always the same in his accompaniments, which are similar in both the serious and the comic genre,” he observes, then points out that criticism of such similarity is not confined to accompaniments: Rossini is also seen to make “indistinct use of the same colors, of the same phrases, and of exactly identical moves and steps and modes in every manner of composition, confusing genres and styles.”1 As we have seen, Carpani counters such accusations by emphasizing music’s inability to express precise concepts and ideas, and reducing the very notion of stylistic correctness to a matter of mere convention. The relationship between style and genre constituted a central theme of the Rossinian discourse of early nineteenth-­century Italy. Even Carpani, in his “Letter on Zelmira,” concedes that Rossini “sometimes confuses genres.”2 In 1821, shortly before this letter was published, another commentator, Andrea Majer, had placed “the confusion of different genres” first in his list of “the most notable extravagances of contemporary music.”3 In that same year Michele Leoni echoed Majer’s charges from the pages of the prestigious Florentine periodical Antologia: “Rossini’s music belongs to no genre.”4 83



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The issue of genre emerged quite early in newspaper reviews of Rossini’s work: an evaluation of the 1812 premiere of La pietra del paragone published in the Corriere delle dame, for example, already alleged that “close observers find that this work contains a few pieces that exhibit too much gravity, passion, and seriousness; which, they say, is unsuitable for a comic opera.”5 As the Milanese reviewer sensibly continued, however, “if the play is a comedy, and if in a comedy it is not inappropriate to insert pathetic and heartfelt expressions and sublime language in between humorous scenes, it should not be out of place for a librettist to do the same in a comic opera: therefore, the composer will have to try and match his music to the spirit of the words.”6 The stylistic spectrum of opera buffa had indeed included the language of opera seria from the beginning of the comic genre. In the early nineteenth century, however, the distinction of the characters of an opera buffa into parti serie, parti buffe and parti di mezzo carattere—well-­known to us from Mozart’s comedies, for example—seemed to have lost at least some of its currency. Therefore, the protagonists of Rossini’s comedies tended to have access to a wider stylistic spectrum of musical idioms than characters in works from previous decades, especially those who would have been parti serie earlier on. In other words, the problem was not that Marchioness Clarice, “the honest, faithful and steadfast friend of Count Asdrubale” (Il corriere delle dame again) in La pietra del paragone, “sings a rondò in male garb and in the soprano range” toward the end of the opera: Mozart’s Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte, say, had done exactly the same. The disturbing feature was that, earlier on in the opera, the Marchioness had taken part in some rather ridiculous business expressed in rather silly language—sillier than anything Fiordiligi does and says in Così fan tutte—and therefore the high-­flown language and the very challenging coloratura of her rondò “Se per voi le care io torno” came across as—to paraphrase our critic—too grave, passionate, and serious.7 The issue that would dominate the debate later on, however, was less the intrusion of the serious into the comic than the more burning, opposite problem: that is, Rossini’s perceived buffaization of opera seria. After declaring that “Rossini’s music belongs to no genre,” Leoni added: “Or is always merry.” According to “Eleuterio Pantologo” (a pseudonym) writing in 1823, “in the Act 1 finale of Semiramide, after Nino’s ghost has left one and all utterly flabbergasted . . . everybody erupts into universal jubilation, into a chorus of such merry and cheerful harmony as to beat the finale of an opera buffa, or as if Nino had come back from the dead to embrace his wife once more.”8

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  A particularly interesting case of a Rossini opera that came in for sustained criticism in this respect—and at first sight a puzzling one—was La gazza ladra. Puzzling, since the genre of opera semiseria to which this work belongs constitutionally allowed for a wider stylistic range than either opera seria or opera buffa.9 Yet, according to a local journalist, the opera, when it was first performed in Florence in 1818 (one year after its premiere in Milan), was disliked by some of the audience because “music must be suited to the passions that one wants to provoke. Didn’t you hear how at times jollity erupts where words invite sorrow, and at other times characters sing calmly where desperate accents should be heard?”10 For Leoni, the music of this opera “makes you dance an allemande while the character is crying with pain, or turns into a minuet at the apex of desperation, thus transforming a kind of tragedy into bacchanalia, and the house of sorrow into a tournament.”11 Pantologo singled out two specific numbers for special condemnation: In the first duet in Act 2 of La gazza ladra, a poor girl about to be condemned to a vile execution bids a last farewell to her distraught beloved, while, in their utter desperation, they beg heaven to strike them down with lightning. But this lightning is invoked by a little melody full of jollity, happily accompanied by a most graceful waltz. In another duet from the same opera, that between Pippo and Ninetta, tears fall to the accompaniment of a minuet, so that figuring out whether this crying is genuine or a joke is hard.12

I propose we turn to the numbers criticized by Pantologo and try to understand what he meant. The Act 2 duet between Ninetta, the soprano protagonist, and her tenor fiancé Giannetto, “Forse un dì conoscerete,” begins with an Andante grazioso which is indeed quite graceful, possibly too much for the distressing situation in which the two characters find themselves. But the offending passage is surely the stretta, the fast concluding movement, where, at the words, “Oh cielo rendimi al / il caro ben, o scaglia un fulmine che m’arda il sen” (O heaven, restore me to my love / restore my love to me, or strike me down with lightning), Rossini gives the two characters a tune that does indeed sound quite jolly (although it is certainly not a waltz; see ex. 5.1a). This movement becomes even lighter in tone when Ninetta and Giannetto take up a motive first intro-



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Example 5.1a La gazza ladra, Duet Ninetta-­Giannetto, Stretta “O cielo rendimi”: (a) mm. 1–9; (b) mm. 18–25

duced by the orchestra at the moment when a third character, Antonio, enters, crying that the evil mayor is about to arrive and therefore Giannetto should run away and Ninetta go back to the prison cell from which she had been surreptitiously released for a moment (see ex. 5.1b). The other duet that so exercised Pantologo—“E ben, per mia memoria,” between Ninetta and her young friend Pippo—is notable not so much for the rolling triplet accompaniment of the initial statement of the slow movement (unusually notated in 12/16, with the no less unusual tempo indication of “Andantino pastoso”), the feature the writer presumably had in mind when he mentioned a minuet (which is otherwise nowhere within earshot), but probably the very florid setting of the couplet “mi cadono le lacrime; m’opprime il suo dolor” (“My tears are falling; his/her grief torments me”). Here it sounds as if these two women—since it is obviously Pippo’s female voice that comes to the fore—are comforting each other by keeping close vocal company, and thus are indeed singing music that does not set the feeling mentioned in the text—torment—substituting for it an emotion we might call compassion,

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Example 5.1b

or sympathy (see ex. 5.2). Though today we might hesitate to claim that this constitutes a breach of stylistic decorum, that it makes us doubt whether we should take the characters’ predicament less seriously, evidently this passage was judged as not sufficiently serious according to the dominant representational aesthetics of emotional individuation by which Rossini’s innovations



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Example 5.2a La gazza ladra, Duet Ninetta-­Pippo, Andantino pastoso “E ben, per mia memoria”: (a) mm. 1–6; (b) mm. 28–43

were then critiqued.13 What is more, we should not fail to notice that both Leoni and Pantologo repeatedly mention dances (allemande, minuet, and waltz) when excoriating Rossini’s music for its dramatic impropriety. As such, they implicitly tie it to the sphere of the body, denigrating it as superficial, facile, and “popular”—a strategy frequently encountered in the Rossinian discourse, albeit not often linked to genre confusion. La gazza ladra has more surprises in store. If we turn to a review of its very first performance (La Scala, 31 May 1817) published in the Gazzetta di Milano, we encounter a critique wider than that just discussed. The critic does write that “the composer not rarely sacrifices appropriateness to his desire to shine; and situations and a character’s words aren’t always given suitable musical colors.” He criticizes particularly the strette of a duet (perhaps “Forse un dì conoscerete”), a trio (evidently “Respiro. / Mia cara!” in Act 1), and a quintet (“Ahi qual colpo! . . . Già d’intorno” in Act 2), because they are not in the least “dramatic,” even if “extremely dramatic are the situations and the emotions

Example 5.2b



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Example 5.2b cont.

which trouble the characters’ souls.” Should somebody suggest that depicting distress requires strong and vivid [vivaci] colors, the reviewer continues, he would counter that there is a world of difference between “passionate vividness” and “comic vividness” (the Italian vivacità means “vividness” when referring to colors, but more generally it signifies “vivaciousness, liveliness”).

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Example 5.2b cont.

The critique does not substantially differ from what we have already heard from others. The Milanese critic, however, also suggests that “in a few passages Mr Rossini, forgetting that the action takes place in a village, and that the characters are peasants, colors his music with epic solemnity, as if they were Caesar and Trajan instead of Pippo and Ninetta; similarly, he announces the arrival of the soldier Giannetto, son of the farm tenant and chastely in love with the housemaid, as if he were announcing the triumph of Alexander or Marc Anthony.”14 The reviewer apparently refers to the “rustic symphony” (“sinfonia campe­ stre”) heard “from behind the hill” before Giannetto appears on stage to sing his cavatina “Vieni fra queste braccia” (see ex. 5.3). Although this music is not particularly rustic, anything heroic or triumphant about it is difficult to hear, or in any case anything that evokes the style of opera seria: in the context of the musical semantics of the time, it seems hard to ascribe to this tune anything more specific than generalized excitement. The case of the Pippo-­Ninetta duet is quite different. If the slow movement might have been heard as not sufficiently serious, as we have seen, the stretta “L’ultimo istante è questo” might instead have sounded too serious: both too elevated in style and too technically challenging for the singers (see ex. 5.4). This is the case not so much for Ninetta, who, after all, is the protagonist and thus has access to a wide spectrum of stylistic possibilities in her music, but for Pippo, a teenage boy whose other notable contribution to the musical dramaturgy of La gazza ladra, the drinking song “Tocchiamo, beviamo” in Act 1, definitely belongs to the realm of the “characteristic” (as Victor Hugo would



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Example 5.3 La gazza ladra, “Sinfonia campestre” before Giannetto’s cavatina

have called it), helping as it does to set the rustic scene. Even the slow movement, with all that coloratura, possibly came across as too elevated in tone for Pippo: not as deficiently serious—as it was for Pantologo—but as too serious, like the stretta. We are back to the problem that another Milanese journalist had heard in La pietra del paragone, but with a notable difference: whereas

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Example 5.3 cont.

there it was the protagonist Clarice, a Marchioness, whose rondò might have veered too much toward opera seria, in La gazza ladra it is a secondary character, a peasant boy who has access to an idiom apparently associated with the serious genre. Another, more important difference between La pietra del paragone and La gazza ladra is that the former is an opera buffa, while the latter is a semiseria. As I have said, this genre admitted, perhaps even required, a wider spectrum of colors and modes in comparison with buffa, or especially seria. This observation might help explain why critics berated the opera for being at times too comic and at others too serious for the situations or characters involved: if opera semiseria was expected to offer a broad range of appropriately diverse stylistic attitudes, making some of its supposedly comic moments too serious or some of its supposedly serious ones too comic was seen, paradoxically, as narrowing the range into an indistinct, middle-­of-­the-­road band.15 This was a rather capacious band, to be sure, since this was an opera semiseria, after all. Still, the discourse of La gazza ladra questions the supposed sidelining of the category of genre caused by Rossini’s perceived flattening of the stylistic landscape. It is certainly all very vivid, but—to go back to the terms evoked by the first Milanese critic of the opera—is it seriously vivid or comically so? Is Pippo a village boy or Julius Caesar? Are Ninetta and Giannetto desperate or merely excited? For the critics of Carpani’s day it was hard to tell, since, according to him, Rossini “makes indistinct use of the same colors, of the same phrases, and of exactly identical moves and steps and modes in every manner of composi-

Example 5.4 La gazza ladra, Duet Ninetta-­Pippo, Stretta “L’ultimo istante è questo,” mm. 1–24

Example 5.4 cont.



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tion, confusing genres and styles.” Of course we already heard these charges in the context of self-­borrowing, a theme to which I now briefly return.

  In the chapter on self-­borrowing I avoided addressing the impact that this practice was felt to have on the question of imitation—of the fit between words and music—but this issue was frequently and vehemently discussed. Perhaps the most widely known example of Rossini’s self-­borrowing is the insertion into the final duet of Otello of an idea originally found in Don Basilio’s aria “La calunnia è un venticello” from Il barbiere di Siviglia. Here is a Milanese critic reporting on the premiere of Otello at La Scala in 1823: I only ask to be allowed to mention, among others, a new example in Otello’s music of that practice [licenza] abused by this most famous composer, who uses with no distinction phrases and modes for situations which are utterly different. Everybody will easily understand that I am referring to those measures from Don Basilio’s “calumny” aria in Il barbiere di Siviglia, which were inserted identically at the most tragic point of the present work, when the ferocious African, oblivious to unhappy Desdemona’s supplications, is about to stab her fatally. This case would find a prime spot in a history of ­analogies.16

Whether the Barbiere-­into-­Otello instance is typical of Rossini’s self-­borrowing practice is beside the point here. What counts is the explicit connection the reviewer makes between self-­borrowing, the breaking of boundaries between genres, and music’s perceived distance from the dramatic situation.17 By no means did Italian reviewers of Rossini’s operas establish unequivocally this triangular relationship. In most cases, it was merely hinted at. When Bianca e Falliero, a serious work, was premiered in Milan in 1819, a journalist wrote that some accused Rossini of “little originality, boring repetitions, some absurdities, and of using at times a comic style rather than a dignified one.”18 Another Milanese critic, reviewing the very same performances, found three faults with the piece: the third consisted in “the excessive repetitions contained in the musical phrases, and the frequent use of motives with a comic character in a serious genre.”19 Although not stated in explicitly causal terms, Rossini’s unprecedented stylistic consistency, his supposed addiction to self-­

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borrowing, and the perceived emotional and psychological uniformity of his music, contributed to the flattening of genre differentiations. In his rebuttal to such criticism, Carpani questions the very notion that there are kinds of music appropriate for each genre: accusing Rossini of failing to compose stylistically correct music assumes that distinguishing between serious and comic is always possible. But is it really? “Sonorous, distinct and emphatic [spiegate] phrases, well-­rounded periods, a sustained movement, learned and robust chords, all this makes us think of the heroic style; but . . . who hasn’t encountered such qualities a thousand times in widely praised pieces from comic operas, with no harm done to sense and expression?”20 From here Carpani proceeds to expound his theory of music’s first obligation being toward itself, and only then to the text it sets and to the genre it serves.21 A similar connection between style, expression, and genre also had been made by that critic of the Gazzetta privilegiata di Venezia, whose long article on Semiramide I discussed in chapter 1, but here genre (genere) was meant in a partially different sense. According to this reviewer, Rossini’s operas were masterpieces in their own genre, which was “not imitative, but simply harmonic”: “Can there exist a beautiful music that imitates nothing?—There is modern music.”22 Modern music, that is, the stylistic and representational orientation identified with Rossini, belongs to its own genre that goes beyond all genres—that, in fact, obliterates their difference—precisely because it is not “imitative,” expressive, or devoted to the aesthetic of mimesis that had supposedly dominated until what for the Venetian reviewer was the recent past. At the time, the rhetoric about breaking the traditional boundaries of genre was not limited to operas and Italy, but was becoming more common internationally and in the literary and visual arts. A broad comparative perspective throws an interesting and unusual light on the Rossinian discourse of genre.

  After a slow but steady process of genrification in the seventeenth century, opera splintered into subgenres over the course of the following one—in Italy the most important among them were opera buffa and opera seria. The category of genre itself, however, was never seriously questioned, even by reform-­ minded intellectuals. This does not mean that novelty was not praised, nor that the more deleterious consequences of convention were not bemoaned—such



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as the lowering of creative and performative standards into routine. Nevertheless, the relationship between individual works and their genre was not generally construed in oppositional terms. The closing decades of the eighteenth century and the initial ones of the nineteenth brought about a fundamental shift in the idea of genre as theorized and practiced in European opera. This attitude was part of a much larger shift in attitudes toward the notion of genre, most frequently explored in connection with literary Romanticism. Romantic aesthetic theory introduced a historicist view of literary genres, promoting as a goal of contemporary literature the creation of works beyond traditional genres, often by means of some sort of fusion among them.23 The literature of the past was reconceived in terms of the new aesthetic, promoting writers whose works seemed to correspond to its tenets, such as Cervantes, Calderón, Corneille, and, above all Shakespeare, while demoting those who appeared to obey blindingly what were increasingly considered the shackles of literary genres. Individuality and uniqueness were what made a literary text worthy of aesthetic appreciation and critical attention. In the words of Friedrich Schlegel, writing around 1800: “Every work is its own genre.”24 The resistance to genre that emerged with Romantic literary theory intersected with a number of interrelated discourses that gathered force or underwent profound changes at around the same time, among them awareness of the continuous expansion of literary and artistic markets. The eighteenth century saw the rise of what Jürgen Habermas famously called “the public sphere,” the site where, among other things, the middle classes acquired their generalized aesthetic tastes. This sociocultural entity was an important factor in the formation of the Romantic anti-­generic stance, which reacted precisely against such generalized, widely shared, and therefore supposedly devalued tastes. Within this context the adjective “generic” acquired the negative connotations that it still retains in several European languages. The Romantic aesthetics of genre, although primarily elaborated in the field of literature, had a significant impact on opera. Indeed, opera contributed to it in important ways. But this encounter rests on an essential contradiction: as is often emphasized, in the world of opera convention reigns supreme; at the same time, convention lies at the very core of the idea of genre. How could an anti-­generic aesthetic like that of Romantic literature be applied to an arch-­generic art form such as opera? What is more, the discourse of opera had become highly composite and multivoiced, certainly much more so than

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had been the case in the eighteenth century. Perhaps the main change is to be located in the rise of the periodical press, which brought about the figure of the professional critic. On the one hand, journalists crucially contributed to the formation of those generalized, widely shared aesthetic tastes mentioned above, against which the Romantics reacted. On the other, many critical voices worked hard to propagate the Romantic idea of genre, or at least a watered-­ down version. The paradoxical character of this situation should not go unnoticed, especially because it generated its own share of problems, among them its uneasy interaction with the nation-­building work to which all the arts, including opera, were supposed to contribute. The work of art was not only unique but also a challenge to the generalized tastes of that most nation-­building of classes, the bourgeoisie. While the resulting tension emerged in all national debates about opera, it was particularly acute in the case of the German-­speaking lands, for several reasons that I have explored elsewhere.25 One of the ways in which German critics tried to come to terms with such tension was by emphasizing the virtues of generic mixture. Fusing current genres, especially those of Italian and French opera, into a higher synthesis that would leave convention behind and at the same time be not too new— since it took from the Italians and the French what was supposed to suit best the “German spirit”—became the most widely acknowledged way in which operas in German could become true “German operas.”26 Such ideas were not limited to operas in German, but emerged also in connection with Italian works by “German” composers: no single work whose critical tradition exemplifies this nexus of tropes is better than Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The generic discourse surrounding this opera in the last two centuries constitutes a striking example of promoting a work perceived as a masterpiece in terms of its supposed stance beyond generic conventions. The trend started very early: according to the critic Friedrich Rochlitz, writing in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1799, Don Giovanni was the example to follow for German operas in its innovative mixture of comic and serious, since this mixture brought it closer to reality.27 Of interest here is not whether Don Giovanni does indeed go beyond its genre, but the critical commonplace that considers it an operatic masterpiece because it does so. This maneuver emerges most obviously in the debate about its generic definition. The libretto’s generic descriptor, “dramma giocoso per musica,” has often been taken as an indication of the



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unusually “dramatic,” that is to say, serious, character of the plot. Exceptional status has been granted to a term that is simply one of the “official” names of comic opera, a paratextual indicator for the object that was commonly known as opera buffa. Perhaps paradoxically, this critical claim can be related to the uninterrupted presence of Don Giovanni in the repertory of opera houses since its premiere. The generic definition became a problem in the first half of the nineteenth century, once the original generic context had been lost. Witness the standard term for Don Giovanni in early nineteenth-­century Italy, opera semiseria: this term evidently tried to account for what may have seemed an unusual degree of “seriousness” from a nineteenth-­century point of view, one which “dramma giocoso” no longer covered.28 With Don Giovanni as opera semiseria, we have made our way back to Rossiniland and can now compare its peculiar landscape with the European panorama outlined above. The differences are rather striking.

  Did genre mixture play an essential role in the emergence of late eighteenth-­ century “sentimental” opera and early nineteenth-­century opera semiseria, both closely tied to developments in French spoken theater and mélodrame?29 Did this “third genre” emerge from an attempt to fuse together the serious and the comic? Or did a convergence of genres play only a minor role in this process? What matters here is that the process itself was one of genrification: at least in the early nineteenth century, the talk was of semiseria as a genre, regardless of its contested boundaries and features. In light of my exploration of the Rossinian landscape earlier in this chapter, I believe we can justifiably take the case of semiseria as symptomatic of the Italian discourse of operatic genres at the time and conclude that it offers little evidence of a Romantic resistance to genre. On the contrary, the category of genre remained normative in this discourse, so much so that innovations, whether the recent arrival of semiseria or Rossini’s apparently extravagant practice, were conceived in terms of the emergence of new genres—witness the rhetoric of the Venetian reviewer quoted above. At the same time, it is hard to see any trace of the promotion of genre mixture as a way to move beyond genre, or at least as a way to create a new national genre, as was the case in Germany. Rather, genre mixture was regularly decried in the Rossinian discourse, and the terms of such condemnation were opposite to those used by Rochlitz

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for Don Giovanni. For Rochlitz the opera’s mixing of genres promoted its representational aesthetics as “realistic” (quotation marks are necessary, given the loaded historical resonances of this term), but for Rossini’s critics the composer was doing nothing more that flattening the representational landscape—turning Pippo into Julius Caesar, making Semiramide sound excited rather than terrified, using the same idea for both Don Basilio and Otello, and so on. The result was a further removal of operatic representation from reality than was already generally the case. Carpani’s ingenious rebuttal of the common critique of Rossini’s practice might at first seem consonant with at least some aspects of the Romantic resistance to genre. On closer inspection, a wide gulf emerges between his argument and the most common inflections of Romantic doctrine. The Romantic opposition to genre was predicated on a search for deeper dramatic “truth”— for the breaking of the supposedly artificial boundaries felt to prevent spoken theater and opera from adequately representing the multiplicity of human experiences and emotions. Carpani doubted instead the primacy given to specificity and individuation of musical utterances in opera, as we have seen in the previous chapter, and therefore questioned any operatic aesthetics that gave pride of place to a mimetic relationship between representation and reality. In Carpani’s defense of Rossini’s stance toward genre, as well as in the Venetian reviewer’s definition of the genre of the composer’s work as “not imitative, but simply harmonic,” going beyond genre did not mean moving closer to reality, but rather away from it, into a purely musical universe where the boundaries among opera seria, buffa, and semiseria mattered less than music’s obligation toward itself. “Every work” is not “its own genre” then, to recall Schlegel’s famous formulation; rather, “every work is all genres.” Both Carpani’s vision and the Romantic idea tend to weaken the importance of the category of genre, but they do so in profoundly different ways, then, predicated as they are on diverging conceptions of the relationship between representation and reality, and therefore of operatic dramaturgy. To conclude, investigating the discourse of genre supports the hypothesis that Rossini’s dramaturgy was understood to promote a new kind of connection between words and music, between operatic representation and ­reality—a looser one than the connection found in operas by other composers performed at the time. After devoting three chapters to some aspects of the early nineteenth-­century Rossinian discourse, now I would like to move to



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recent views of Rossini’s dramaturgy, and more specifically of his representational aesthetics. My hope is that this dialogue between discourses located at different chronological moments—Rossini’s time versus our own, or at least the recent past—will reveal new angles to ponder the characteristic features of this dramaturgy and suggest avenues for exploring the reasons for its origins and success.

6

Dramaturgy Twentieth- and twenty-­first-­century interpretations of the dramaturgy of Rossini’s Italian operas have tended to focus on the comic works—surely a reflection of their more substantial presence compared to the serious ones in the operatic repertory. Common to several of these interpretations is the concept of metatheatricality, even if this term seldom appears explicitly. According to Paolo Gallarati, for example, the characters in L’Italiana in Algeri, Il barbiere di Siviglia, and La Cenerentola always wear masks, self-­consciously staging their actions in a theatrical fashion. They seem constantly aware that they are operatic characters, rather than real human beings. They have no past and no future, no memory of who they have been and no anticipation of who they may become; they live exclusively in the theatrical present.1 The theater posited in these operas is one that puts itself on stage, whose goal is the representation of theater, rather than life outside it. Rossini wrote at least two operas, La pietra del paragone and Il Turco in Italia, in which a metatheatrical dimension is made explicit through characters who repeatedly invoke it: the poet Pacuvio and the journalist Macrobio in La pietra del paragone, and the librettist Prosdocimo in Il Turco in Italia. But I would argue that metatheatricality inhabits his other opere buffe to a greater extent than usually recognized. I will focus first on Il barbiere di Siviglia. In a detailed discussion of Il barbiere, Janet Johnson has proposed an interpretation in terms of carnivalesque spectacle and Romantic grotesque, concentrating especially on the character of Figaro. In her view, Figaro is the 103



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opera’s “machinist,” “the one who weaves the intrigues and leads the theatrical action.” He is presented as such in his cavatina, where he not only introduces himself as a supreme dramatist and singer but also declares himself “bravo, bravissimo” for his musical performance. Johnson suggests that Figaro identifies himself with the crescendo “as a kind of avatar of laughter,” and traces the uses of the crescendo in the opera as both the representation of, and the invitation to, laughter. After discussing Rosina’s astonishing capacity to wear different masks, both emotional and musical, Johnson concludes with a convincing reading of the trio “Ah, qual colpo inaspettato!” as an ironic love duet for Rosina and the Count “‘composed,’ with critical commentary, by Figaro.”2 Saverio Lamacchia has tempered this Figaro-­centered interpretation with cogent observations on the central role played by the Count.3 In any case, both scholars emphasize the metatheatrical dimension of the opera, whether scripted by Figaro or the Count. I would like to pursue this interpretation, focusing especially on the hints in the libretto that point toward Il barbiere as the staging of an operatic performance, meant to engage its audience in a dialogue. Let us consider the beginning of the opera. The very first words sung on stage are Fiorello’s invitation to play “piano, pianissimo” to the musicians who are about to accompany the Count’s serenade; a little later Fiorello comments, “All is silent; there is no one here who can disturb our singing” (Tutto è silenzio, nessun qui sta / che i nostri canti possa turbar). This moment ostensibly stages the preparations for the performance of a serenade, but it can also be heard as the staging of the beginning of an opera, specifically Il barbiere. Rossini, sitting at the keyboard during the rehearsals of his opera, would have asked the orchestra and the chorus to pay attention to the dynamics indicated in the score for the first scene, which is indeed “piano”—exactly what Fiorello does on stage at the same moment. The comment that follows—“There is no one here who can disturb our singing”—takes on an ironic twist if we think about the usual behavior of Italian opera audiences of this era: chatting, card playing, eating, drinking, and walking to and fro—everything but paying silent attention. As Lamacchia has shown, the opposition between silence and noise is thematized in both libretto and music throughout this introduzione. What is more, the introduzione is the first of several moments in the opera where the nature of operatic singing and the differences between diegetic and “operatic” music are foregrounded, again not only in the libretto but also, prominently,

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in Rossini’s music. The Count’s cavatina embedded in the number consists of a slow movement, “Ecco ridente in cielo,” which is unquestionably a stage song (it is marked as such by both orchestration and melodic writing). But what about the cabaletta “Tacete! già veggo”? Does the Count stop “singing” when addressing the orchestra accompanying him, or is the address still part of the serenade? The evidence of both libretto and music is inconclusive on this point, as Lamacchia has discussed. Although he eventually decides in favor of operatic music, I would suggest that ambiguity is precisely the point: it is as if Rossini were calling the audience’s attention to questions of singing, voice, and performance, alerting us that these matters will constitute a central theme of the opera.4 Benjamin Walton has pointed out how Il barbiere is “based on a plot that is constructed from, commented on, and undermined by operatic conventions,” and how performance is at the dramatic and musical core of the work. In particular, he interprets the end of the introduzione, where the clash between the convention to end a number with a loud stretta and the dramatic situation, which demands silence (as the Count keeps reminding the others on stage), generates the musical action, as a commentary from the composer to the frequent criticism of his failures at imitation. Rossini, according to Walton, was making a point about his compositional choices by highlighting this artificiality.5 Indeed, we might recall the reviewer of the Milanese premiere of Il barbiere in 1816 who chastised Rossini because, “in a situation where, in order not to be discovered, the characters say ‘Hush hush, softly softly,’ our composer explodes with music to be heard a thousand miles away.”6 The reviewer, who was referring to the trio for Rosina, the Count, and Figaro in Act 2 of the opera, both proves Walton’s suggestion and his (the reviewer’s) own blindness—or rather deafness—regarding Rossini’s intent. The staging of an opera performance, or at least that of a song, continues with Figaro’s entrance. Before we see him, we hear him sing in the wings. Before the body comes the voice; before learning that he is a barber, we may take him for a singer. Once he enters with his guitar, he does not start his cavatina with meaningful words, but with two nonsense lines, “La ran la lera, la ran la là,” just like a singer warming up before going on stage—just like Luigi Zamboni, the first Figaro, doing in the wings precisely what his character might do in a street in Seville, immediately before arriving in the square where the action takes place.7 The operatic voice itself becomes the explicit object of both text and music



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in Rosina’s cavatina, “Una voce poco fa.” In fact, Rosina first “finds” her own voice when she hears the voice of Lindoro (the Count in disguise). Between the stanzas of Lindoro’s canzone “Se il mio nome saper voi bramate,” Rosina’s voice is heard answering “Segui, o caro, deh segui così” (Rossini’s addition, originally not part of the libretto) and “L’amorosa, sincera Rosina il suo core a Lindo. . . .” In both cases Rosina takes on the melody initially presented by Lindoro. The next time we hear Rosina’s voice is in her cavatina, which thus constitutes the continuation of the dialogue interrupted by the sudden closing of the window—the reason she cannot utter the name of her lover in its entirety. In “Una voce poco fa” the character, as in any self-­respecting cavatina, pre­ sents both his or her salient traits along with artistic and especially vocal credentials. Here there is more, though: Rosina introduces extended coloratura and explores the highest and lowest reaches of her range while uttering a sentence that ends with the words “la vincerò!” (“I shall win!” or “I shall conquer it!”). The specific connection of the words with the music invites an interpretation of this moment not only in a literal sense—“I shall succeed in marrying Lindoro”—but also in a metavocal one: “I shall conquer this virtuosic music; hear from the start what I can do.”8 Rosina’s first number is “Una voce poco fa” and the first time we hear her sing, or at least begin, a melody within a musical number is in between the stanzas of Lindoro’s song. However, the very first time Rosina actually appears on stage is in the third scene of the opera—a scene set entirely in recitative. She comes out on the balcony and tries to deliver a message to the Count/ Lindoro, who is standing underneath the balcony with Figaro; before she can let the message fall from her hands, however, Bartolo arrives. Here is the exchange that follows: BARTOLO Cos’è quella carta? . . . ROSINA Niente, niente, signor: son le parole Dell’aria dell’Inutil precauzione. CONTE (a Figaro) Ma brava! Dell’Inutil precauzione!

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FIGARO (al Conte) Che furba! BARTOLO Cosa è questa Inutil precauzione? . . . ROSINA Oh bella! È il titolo Del nuovo Dramma in musica. BARTOLO Un Dramma? . . . bella cosa! Sarà al solito un Dramma semiserio; Un lungo malinconico noioso Poetico strambotto; Barbaro gusto! Secolo corrotto! ROSINA (si lascia cadere la carta in strada) Ah me meschina! l’aria m’è caduta! . . . BARTOLO: What’s that piece of paper? ROSINA: Nothing, nothing, Sir: it’s the text of the aria from The Useless Precaution. COUNT (to Figaro): Brava! From The Useless Precaution! FIGARO (to the Count): How shrewd she is! BARTOLO: What is this Useless Precaution? ROSINA: You don’t know? It’s the title of the new opera. BARTOLO: An opera! . . . great! I bet it’s a semiserious opera: a long, melancholic, boring poetic hodgepodge; what barbarous taste! What corrupt times we live in! ROSINA (letting the paper fall down on the street): Pity me! The aria has slipped from my hand!

Rosina likes to sing, then, since she has got hold of an aria’s text from the opera L’inutil precauzione. Il barbiere di Siviglia was initially presented as Almaviva, o sia L’inutile precauzione. Rosina, then, holds in her hand the aria’s text from



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Il barbiere itself. Which aria? “L’aria,” “the aria.” To which aria from Il barbiere can a female singer refer to as “the aria”? The most likely possibility is Rosina’s cavatina, “Una voce poco fa,” the only entirely solo number for the character (the piece that she sings in the Act 2 lesson scene involves the Count’s intervention). Therefore, Rosina the character holds in her hand what the singer who interprets Rosina should hold in her hand at that precise moment, perhaps for a last-­minute glance at the words. In the opera, however, Rosina does not hold in her hand the text of “Una voce poco fa”: she just says she does. What she actually holds is the message for Lindoro. And L’inutil precauzione is not a semiserious opera, but a comic one. An opera semiseria is instead Torvaldo e Dorliska, words by Cesare Sterbini and music by Gioachino Rossini—that is, the authors of Il barbiere. Torvaldo e Dorliska was premiered at the Teatro Valle, the other opera house in Rome and rival of the Teatro Argentina (where Il barbiere was first performed), on 26 December 1815, less than two months before the premiere of Il barbiere. Torvaldo e Dorliska had little success, but the character who rubbishes semiserious opera in Il barbiere is Bartolo, already called by the Count “a pedantic doctor” (“un medico barbogio”), and described by Figaro a little later as “a mad old man, a suspicious miser, a whiner . . . he must be one hundred years old” (“Un vecchio indemoniato, / avaro sospettoso, brontolone . . . / avrà cent’anni indosso”). Could it be that Sterbini and Rossini are taking their little revenge on the Roman audience? Or that they are depicting in Bartolo the audience of the Teatro Valle, who did not appreciate Torvaldo e Dorliska—and thus indirectly flattering the audience of the Teatro Argentina who are watching Il barbiere? I have discussed only a few of the many ways in which Il barbiere stages itself as an opera; several others have been explored by the writers mentioned above. Taken together, they support the suggestion that a metatheatrical dimension is central to the dramaturgy of Il barbiere. This dimension emerges even more clearly in Act 2 of the opera, especially in the singing lesson scene. In this scene the fact that Rosina is not only a singer, but a very accomplished one, is proven beyond doubt. Moreover, Rossini puts on stage a dramatization of musical styles: Bartolo, who is not only old and old-­fashioned, but also the “villain” of the plot, sings a little aria that mimics the music of Paisiello’s times. Keeping in mind that Paisiello was the author of a very successful Barbiere di Siviglia of his own, and that Rossini was apprehensive about the public reaction to his treading on what could be perceived as someone else’s ground, the metaphor and the message to the audience seem clear: “Forget the

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old Barbiere, now hopelessly old-­fashioned, and, as you side with the young Rosina and Lindoro against the old Bartolo, side with the new Barbiere, the one you are seeing now, Rossini’s.”

  I should emphasize that metatheatrical interpretations such as the one I have sketched for Il barbiere were not common until fairly recently, commentators highlighting instead the characters’ “vitality,” or the infectious excitement of Rossini’s rhythms. Once we start looking at his opere buffe from the perspective of metatheater, however, we realize we can extend to these works conclusions not much different from those reached about Il barbiere, even to operas that do not wear their metatheatricality on their sleeves, as do La pietra del paragone and Il Turco in Italia. First among these are the most famous: L’Italiana in Algeri, with its protagonist repeatedly commenting on the uses and meanings of performance and pretense, and La Cenerentola, with Alidoro (the equivalent of Perrault’s fairy godmother) shown to control the action like a puppeteer, and, more generally, the frequent interrogations of disguise and make-­ believe, as well as the very act of singing. Metatheatricality even infiltrates an opera semiseria such as Matilde di Shabran (1821). I have chosen to focus on Il barbiere on account of some recent critical work about it, but also because of its iconic status as the most famous and frequently performed opera by Rossini, one that has long become representative of the composer’s entire comic oeuvre. If we can take Il barbiere to stand in metonymically for this oeuvre, then we can conclude that, to a significant extent, the subject of Rossini’s comic operas is comic opera itself. In other words, Rossini’s opere buffe display a remarkable ability to reflect on what it means to be an opera buffa. This kind of “playing at theater” is of course a recurring characteristic of the genre of comedy in Western theater, and “playing at opera” had been a frequent feature of opera buffa from its inception. What is more, some of the librettos of Rossini’s comic works were originally written for other composers, most notably Il Turco in Italia (Caterino Mazzolà for Franz Seydelmann; 1788), but also L’Italiana in Algeri (Angelo Anelli for Luigi Mosca; 1808), or were based on eighteenth-­century comic plays, such as La gazzetta (Giuseppe Palomba after Carlo Goldoni’s Il matrimonio per concorso; 1763). In Rossini’s case, however, the verbal discourse of metatheatricality in the librettos is thoroughly supported and enhanced by the music, as we have seen in Il barbiere. More specifically, the musical discourse of metatheatricality rests on a few



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characteristic traits of Rossini’s style: for example, as Walton has suggested, the introduzione of Il barbiere parodies some recurring features of this style as a way of ridiculing its critics. Might it be, then, that Rossini’s specific brand of comic metatheater is related to some key features of his style? Most writers who have discussed the dramaturgy of Rossini’s comic works have not explored in depth its connections to his musical style. Conversely, analysis of his musical style has seldom been brought to bear on issues of dramaturgy. A few scholars, however, have made some relevant suggestions on the possible links between dramaturgy and style. Friedrich Lippmann was perhaps the first to hint at a connection between the gap between words and music in Rossini’s comic operas and the sense that we are witnessing “the marionette-­like comings and goings of figures on the stage.”9 Alessandro Baricco has also evoked the marionette in connection with Rossini’s comic operas, emphasizing how what he calls the Rossinian “objectivization”—the lack of a subjective dimension in his comic characters—rests on the crucial role coloratura plays in Rossini’s vocal and dramatic aesthetics. According to Baricco, Rossini uses coloratura to “sabotage . . . the signifying function of words,” thus distancing the characters and their actions and feelings from the direct comprehension and therefore emotional sympathy of audiences.10 If I were to allow myself a brief glance at a moment of the Rossinian discourse outside the self-­imposed chronological boundaries of my investigation, I would point out how Giuseppe Verdi may have had in mind something similar to Baricco’s point when he wrote to a friend in 1871 that “melodies are not to be made with scales, trills or turns. . . . Mind you, the chorus of bards [in La donna del lago], the prayer in Mosè, etc., for example, are melodies, but the cavatine of Il barbiere, La gazza ladra, Semiramide, etc. etc. are not melodies. What are they? You shall ask. . . . Anything you want, but certainly not melodies, nor good music.”11 Going back to more recent texts, a further contribution in this direction has been made by Gianni Ruffin, who has suggested that the distancing effect posited by Baricco is achieved through a conflict between the diachronic dimension inherent in the staged performance of a story—of human actions and passions—and what he calls the “synchronic” dimension of Rossini’s music. Through an analysis of several moments in L’Italiana in Algeri and Il barbiere, including the latter’s final trio, Ruffin concludes that the main cause of this “synchronicity” is repetition: the music’s repetitive mechanisms make it impossible to understand the musical action unfolding on the stage as “real,”

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as connected with the unfolding of human actions and passions offstage. Ruffin maintains that this clash between different temporal dimensions generates the laughter at the core of Rossini’s comic art.12 I suggest that the metatheatrical interpretations of Rossini’s comic style and their dramaturgical implications—distance and objectivization—are different manifestations of the heightened sense of self-­referentiality generated by the composer’s reliance on repetition. The prominent role assigned by some scholars to coloratura in this process is certainly justified—after all, we have seen how Rossini’s contemporaries often felt that it was the composer’s supposed overreliance on ornamentation that compromised his imitative credentials. But I would point out that Rossini’s handling of coloratura relies on his fundamentally repetitive structures—what Damien Colas has called “the exaltation of symmetry and reiteration on which Rossinian melodic language rests,” as we saw in chapter 2.13 As Colas has shown, the various techniques employed by Rossini for the ornamentation of any given melody are made possible by what he considers the most important principle of melodic construction in Rossini, that of “similarity and derivation.” The result is a gradual metamorphosis of the melodic line generated by ornamentation.14

  Where does all this leaves us with respect to the serious works? On the one hand, it seems rather difficult to invoke for them any significant metatheatrical dimension. On the other, interpretations of Rossini’s comic dramaturgy have generally been made on the basis of analytical deductions drawn from the scores of opere buffe. Largely analogous deductions could have been drawn from the scores of opere serie or semiserie as well, however, since the stylistic traits on which analytical investigations have focused are mostly common to both genres. Indeed, if we reconsider the present-­day investigations of Rossini’s style in terms of the repetition discussed in chapter 2, we realize that genre differentiation has played virtually no part in them. Not all present-­day scholars have ignored the implications of the characteristic traits of Rossini’s style for genre differentiation. Charles Brauner in particular has discussed Rossini’s adoption within his serious works (as well as the more serious moments of La gazza ladra) of a few musical gestures formerly specific to opera buffa. Viewing them against the frequent charges of genre confusion expressed by contemporary critics, he concludes that “Rossini has created a style, a brilliant style of melody, that is neither comic nor



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tragic, but is beyond these categories; it is rather purely, essentially musical.”15 Others, while less explicit than Brauner about the implications of Rossini’s style for genre differentiation, have nonetheless pointed out how many of its salient traits are common to all the operatic genres he tackled.16 And let us not forget that Verdi, while mentioning two of Rossini’s Neapolitan opere serie as containing “true” melodies, censored using coloratura in the cavatinas of an opera buffa (Il barbiere), an opera semiseria (La gazza ladra), and an opera seria (Semiramide). Here emphasizing how the librettos of Rossini’s comic operas differ in several crucial aspects from those of the serious ones is necessary. Language historian Fabio Rossi has discussed in detail how the former are characterized by a set of linguistic, grammatical, and syntactic features that he calls “realistic”—features never to be found in the latter and only rarely in the semiserious ones. Crucially, this “realism” is, in Rossi’s words, “the copy of a copy”: “The imitation of spoken language is in the end not a realistic trait, but a metaliterary one”; and its models are not so much the language commonly spoken in early nineteenth-­century Italy, but rather the stylization of spoken Italian found in literary texts from the previous centuries.17 While in the end supporting the antirealistic reading of Rossini’s comic dramaturgy advanced above, Rossi’s analysis indicates how the composer’s musical weakening of genre differentiation went against the grain of the language of the texts he set. What is more, other linguists have pointed out how the verbal language of Italian serious opera became ever more difficult, intricate, and highly poetic between the eighteenth century and the final decades of the nineteenth. The harmonious “simplicity” of Metastasio’s librettos, with their clear syntax and rather limited vocabulary, slowly gave way to the abstruse words and twisted sentences of, say, Arrigo Boito’s texts.18 A crucial step in this longue durée transformation was the imitation on the part of librettists writing in the 1790s and 1800s of the complex language of Vittorio Alfieri’s tragedies (published mostly in the 1780s).19 This means that the divergence between the comic and serious librettos Rossini set to music was greater than it had been the case in the immediately preceding decades. The music of Rossini’s operas moved in the opposite direction from their words, bringing genres closer at the same time that words were moving them further apart. Similar conclusions about genre differentiation can be drawn if we now shift our attention from recent studies of the style and language of librettos to the early nineteenth-­century discourse examined in previous chapters. There,

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discussions of imitation, self-­borrowing, and style mostly ignored the parameter of genre: commentators addressed these aspects of Rossini’s operas largely irrespective of genre differentiation. Moreover, Rossini was often explicitly accused of blurring the boundaries between the serious and the comic. But there is more. In my earlier chapters I purposefully avoided addressing Rossini’s compositional practice of self-­borrowing in relation to genre. I will now do so, though I mention only a few telling cases. I begin with Il barbiere, since this opera has been at the center of attention in this chapter.

  There are three well-­known instances of self-­borrowing in Il barbiere, two of them involving operas belonging to different genres. The first is the overture, originally composed for an opera seria, Aureliano in Palmira, and then reused, partially reorchestrated, for another serious work, Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra, before ending up in Il barbiere. The second is the beginning of the second section of Rosina’s cavatina, “Io sono docile, son rispettosa,” which first appeared in a separate aria for bass, “Alle voci della gloria” (words from Gaetano Sertor’s libretto Tarara, ossia La virtù premiata, a dramma per musica dating from 1792), then migrated to Aureliano and then Elisabetta, before ending up, modified, in Il barbiere. In the third case, Il barbiere was the originator rather than the receiver of previous music: the cabaletta of the Count’s rondò, “Ah, il più lieto, il più felice,” famously became the final section of Angelina’s own rondò in La Cenerentola and was used as well in Cerere’s aria from Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo, an “azione coreo-­drammatica.” This instance, however, is not particularly meaningful in terms of genre, since it involves two comic operas and a work whose generic profile is rather hazily defined in terms of music. A few other cases of self-­borrowing also involve Il barbiere, less familiar than the previous ones but more relevant from the point of view of genre. The first two movements of the Count’s rondò filled the equivalent formal slots of yet another rondò, that of the title role of Adelaide di Borgogna, a serious work. Another serious work, Sigismondo, supplied Il barbiere with both the initial section of the chorus opening the introduzione, “Piano, pianissimo” (it comes from the chorus opening Sigismondo’s second act, “In segreto a che ci chiama?”), and with the prominent orchestral figure in Basilio’s “La calunnia è un venticello” already mentioned in the previous chapter—the very same that will end up in the Otello-­Desdemona duet in Act 3 of Otello (this music originated in the Aldimira-­Ladislao duet in Act 1 of Sigismondo). The latter



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case is particularly interesting because the borrowed music travels from opera seria to buffa and then back to seria—and from duet to aria and back to duet.20 The presence of self-­borrowing in Il barbiere is fairly limited compared with other operas, some of which, both serious (Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra and Eduardo e Cristina) and comic (La gazzetta and Adina o Il califfo di Bagdad), rely heavily on this practice.21 Among these works, the opere serie borrow mostly from other serie, while the buffe seem less genre specific in their helpings. In both, Rossini tends to turn to recent works for his borrowing. In general, though, finding any systematic consistency of genre in self-­borrowing is hazardous. Witness the case of the cabaletta “Voce, che tenera,” originally composed for Tancredi and then reused, in its entirety or in part, and with or without interventions, in L’Italiana in Algeri (buffa), Sigismondo (seria), Torvaldo e Dorliska (semiseria), La gazzetta (buffa), Adelaide di Borgogna (seria), and Eduardo e Cristina (seria).22 Quite apart from this doubtlessly exceptional case, cabalette and strette seem to emerge as a frequent site of cross-­genre self-­ borrowing. There are cases, however, when this happens with slow movements as well. Perhaps the most startling is that of “Ah che il cor non m’ingannava,” the largo concertato of the central finale of Il Turco in Italia, which ended up in its entirety and only lightly retouched in the equivalent formal slot of the central finale of Sigismondo.23 On the basis of these instances (and several others I have not discussed here), I believe it is fair to conclude that self-­borrowing across genres is decidedly frequent, even if probably not the norm. Rossini’s practice, then, concurs with the contemporary Italian discourse, which did not differentiate between genres when addressing self-­borrowing. This, in turn, supports my contention that the interpretation by several present-­day commentators of Rossini’s comic dramaturgy as objectivizing and self-­referential—one that posits as its central principle the distance between operatic representation and reality—can be extended, at least in part, to the opere serie, since the parameters on which this interpretation rests are by and large not differentiated either in Rossini’s compositional practice or in early nineteenth-­century critical discourse. Distance, objectivization, and self-­referentiality, invoked by many for the opere buffe, are also valid interpretative categories for the opere serie and semiserie. The salient traits that Rossini’s contemporaries perceived in his operas—their nonimitative setting of text, their crucial reliance on repetition, and a looser connection between reality and representation—make no dis-

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tinction between comic and other kinds of opera, and so promote these interpretative categories as both historically and analytically grounded.

  I have reached a crucial turning point in my argument. Thus far I have focused on a number of issues that I believe are central to Rossini’s Italian operas, investigating their discourse in early nineteenth-­century Italy and establishing a dialogue between this discourse on one side and, on the other, Rossini’s compositional practices and their dramaturgical outcomes, particularly as analyzed and interpreted in recent musicological research. In other words, I have been mostly concerned about the “how.” From now on my attention will move progressively toward a different set of questions, probably best summarized as the “why.” Why did Rossini put his style at the service of a dramaturgy that promoted abstraction, objectivization, and self-­referentiality, blurring the distinction between operatic genres? Why did he invent a “genre” that was “not imitative, but simply musical,” to go back to our anonymous Venetian reviewer of 1823? This move toward causes will also turn out to be a move toward contexts, since I will attempt to interpret Rossini’s practices and their discourses, so far considered only in themselves or in connection with other musical and operatic phenomena, from the perspective of what was happening in Italy at the time when these practices and discourses were taking shape. In the process, my argument will largely abandon a mode of reasoning tied mostly to texts and musical notes—although they will make a few prominent reappearances—in favor of a more speculative one particularly concerned with history, culture, and society. The following, brief chapter, which concludes part I of the book, will function as a bridge between these two types of approaches and concerns.

7

Noise According to the Venetian reviewer of 1823 whose words I have repeatedly cited, Rossini was often accused of being “a dangerous innovator who corrupts music and taste; a plagiarist who is so busy stealing that he even steals from his own and constantly repeats himself; a trickster who deafens the ears, so that the bewildered spectators are unable to boo him; a reckless operator who, in order to get the public’s attention, puts cannons in churches and bells in theaters; and, finally, a frenzied gatherer of sounds, always deafening, sometimes brilliant, and never suited to the sentiment that they should express.”1 Of all the themes listed here, only one has not been addressed directly: noisiness. I have reserved it for this point in the argument because it turns out to be especially well suited to lead us out of the theater and away from strictly Rossinian discourse. The charge of excessive loudness and inflated orchestration was indeed a frequent criticism against Rossini’s operas and was sometimes supposed to be a consequence of the composer’s attempts to follow “German” musical mores. These accusations occasionally surfaced in the initial years of the composer’s career, but seem to have coalesced into a recurring trope around 1817–18, with La gazza ladra (1817) a frequent early target—its first ever review, in the Gazzetta di Milano, begins with the words “this opera makes a lot of noise.”2 For example, in 1814 Tancredi was welcomed in Florence for its style, “beautiful, sublime yet not recherché, and not too noisy,” and for “the simplicity and naturalness of its accompaniments.”3 Four years later, the same critic, supposedly 117



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reporting what he had heard from spectators, wrote instead that La gazza ladra tortured the ears: “Where’s the need to have timpani, cymbals, trumpets, trombones, et omnia genera musicorum? Good for us that the impresario had the precaution and the consideration to do without the drums that are in the score, especially the military bass drum! Otherwise this music would have been right for the hospital for the deaf and dumb. We are neither deaf nor lethargic, and do not need such racket to be awakened.”4 Rossini’s noisy orchestration was regularly berated for drowning out singers’ voices. If this was usually framed in negative terms, there were instances when it was considered an advantage: in 1827 tenor Nicola Tacchinardi wrote to impresario Alessandro Lanari that, given the weak company assembled in Florence that season, the decision to perform Ferdinando Paer’s Griselda had been a mistake, since this work “requires very skilled actors-­ singers. If we had done instead the usual Cenerentola or Barbiere di Siviglia, they would have supported themselves a little better thanks to the noise of the orchestra.”5 Paer’s Griselda was an “old” work, first performed in 1798: in 1827, at the apex of Rossini fever in Italy, it must have sounded as if coming from a different era altogether. One of the consequences of Rossini’s orchestral din, then, was that the singing voice lost some of the prominence it once had. A corollary of the diminished standing of the singing voice was that words had also become less audible. A satirical piece published in 1820 in the Mila­ nese Corriere delle dame entitled “Rules for Composing Fashionable Music” formulated this by-­then recurring trope in a particularly emphatic way: It is recommended that the orchestra be always given the main part. . . . As a general rule, winds and brass should never be given rests for an intake of breath, and trumpets, trombones, drums, and pipes [ flautini] should always obliterate any chance the audience might have to understand the words of the singers, who in any case must not do much, since they are accessories to the opera.6

Two years later, our Venetian critic opened the first of his series of articles on the Rossini season of 1823 (Maometto II in addition to Semiramide) by asking why and how vocal music had recently become “a sort of instrumental music, in which everybody can appreciate the melody, but nobody can hear the words.” In the space of a few weeks, he would go on to elaborate the theory of Rossini’s music discussed above as a “nonimitative, but simply harmonic”

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music that cannot be judged according to its mimetic credentials, since it would be impossible to detect mimesis even if it were present. For many, then, Rossini’s ear-­damaging orchestration was another reason his music was not imitative, another factor widening the gap between reality and its operatic representation. Yet, on closer scrutiny a strand of the discourse of noisiness turns out to narrow this gap in unexpected ways.

  Writing in 1823, pamphleteer “Eleuterio Pantologo” attempted a reasoned explanation for Rossini’s noisy orchestration. According to him, the most important activity that took place in modern theaters was conversation, and therefore the only way for music to be heard amid the din of constant chatter was to be very loud. Conversation was practiced especially by women, who were also the arbiters of taste, and, since they were always prey to the latest fashion, they could only adore this most fashionable kind of music, not least because it actually succeeded in making itself heard by them, overpowering their wall of noise. Women’s male suitors obviously agreed, as did “those ancient warriors who, used to the roar of the cannon at Austerlitz, at Wagram, and on the Moskva river, cannot possibly have ears suitable for soft, delicate melodies.”7 The reference to the Napoleonic wars as an explanation for Rossini’s noisy orchestra was elaborated in a curious text published in the Gazzetta di Firenze in 1826, which was purportedly derived from a written report left by Lord Byron of a conversation he had supposedly had with Rossini. This fictional “Rossini” explained his approach to orchestration in words worth quoting at some length: [Some say that] I introduce in my music too many French horns, too many trumpets, drums, and so on; but they don’t know that, had war continued in Europe, I would have put a cannon in each finale, and assigned music to gunshots. What other means are there to make an impact these days? How otherwise to move people who over the years have been spectators to so many massacres, so many arbitrary acts, so many magnificent deeds? People who have been actors in great political convulsions and, tossed around amid great calamities, great fortunes, and great events, have almost no feeling for simple pleasures. I admire and venerate more than anybody a beautiful opera by one of last century’s great masters. For a while I observed and studied the audiences in several cities whenever one of them was performed. Well, I saw



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that all listeners were snoozing. I therefore deduced that simple and natural melodies were not suited to distract those who were sad because they had to go to war; or whose mind was occupied by dreams of glory; or who were afraid of persecutions; or who were threatened with exile; or a certain number who were probably absorbed by great ideas of change and reform. Thus I convinced myself that it was impossible to compose in the same way as when people in public [in società] cultivated only calm and quiet thoughts, looked only for peaceful recreation, and discussed only love and pleasure. Consequently, I decided to master the roar of the various instruments, and have put them to use to make my music more dramatic. The public has led me to believe that I have succeeded.8

This document is peculiar both for its explanatory effort, quite rare in Italian newspaper articles on music at the time, and for its rhetorical force by having Rossini himself, however fictional, make this effort. But its main interest for us is its rejection of a primarily imitative line of argument. The first sentence seems to suggest that Rossini’s noisiness is an attempt to reproduce onstage the acoustic pollution of the contemporary world, thus echoing the implicit assumption behind many previous remarks on the matter. The remaining text goes on to establish a rather close connection between operatic representation and reality, but without reference to a mimetic model. The connection is founded instead on the supposed psychological and emotional conditions of Rossini’s Italian audiences, and on the ways in which these conditions shaped the composer’s musical style and dramaturgy. In other words, this “Rossini” seems to suggest that he is not attempting to reproduce noisy reality on stage, but drown out this reality by creating an alternative world that, by force of sheer volume, can replace the real one in the minds and hearts of spectators—at least for a moment.

  As the few passages I have quoted at the beginning of this chapter suggest, and as many more which it would be too long to cite corroborate, references to Rossini’s noisy orchestration almost always mentioned instruments associated with the military sphere, with a particular emphasis on drums. Music’s effect was also often compared to that of cannons.9 Among these writers, only Pantologo and the anonymous Florentine critic made explicit mention of the Napoleonic wars, but I would suggest that it seems clear that the world outside

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the theater was constructed as particularly noisy mostly because of the continuous wars it had witnessed. In most cases when the trope of warlike orchestration emerged in the Rossinian discourse, this world was assumed to be that of the present: with the partial exception of the more elaborate texts, such as Pantologo’s pamphlet and the fictional Byron-­Rossini exchange, it might seem as if audiences had just left the infernal uproar of war just outside the theater and would return to it at the end of the performance. But this was generally not the case, of course. As I have suggested above, this trope did not become common until approximately 1817–18, after a long period of actual wars had come to an end with the Battle of Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The only time when warlike episodes took place in Italy after the so-­called Austro-­Neapolitan conflict of early 1815 was between the summer of 1820 and the following spring, when the Austrian army smothered uprisings in Naples, Palermo, and Turin. A similar pattern of chronological dislocation emerges if we focus on another way in which the Napoleonic wars feature in the Rossinian discourse. When Pantologo mentioned Austerlitz, Wagram, and the Russian campaign in 1823, his words hinted at the rhetorical association between Rossini and Bonaparte, a linking that would find great fortune in the space of a few years. The earliest instance of this association is probably in Carpani’s “Letter on Zelmira,” dated 5 May 1822, one year to the day after Napoleon’s death.10 The locus classicus of this parallel, however, is the very beginning of Stendhal’s Life of Rossini, published in 1824 (the same year when the “Letter on Zelmira” reappeared in print as part of Le Rossiniane): “Since the death of Napoleon, another man has appeared who is talked about every day in Moscow as in Naples, in London as in Vienna, in Paris as in Calcutta. The fame of this man knows no bounds save those of civilization itself; and he is not yet thirty-­two!”11 The Rossini-­Napoleon comparison, then, emerged once Bonaparte himself was safely dead and buried, and his immense political, social, cultural, and ideological legacy became a contentious topic for debate not only in France but also, prominently, in Italy. Carpani’s and Stendhal’s versions of the parallel merit attention. It may well be that Stendhal borrowed the comparison from Carpani, as he did much else: in any case he returned to it several times in his Life of Rossini. Carpani devoted only a couple of pages to it, but, interestingly, he construed Rossini’s victory in discursive and acoustical terms as much as in geographical ones: not only did the composer conquer all the important operatic centers outside



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Italy, eventually taking over even Paris, which had tried to keep him out; he also won audiences despite his hostile critics, who were repeatedly silenced by his successes: “Those few who still shout themselves hoarse bring harm only on themselves rather than to Rossini.”12 For Carpani, then, the Rossinian war was one of noise against noise, with the noise of music overwhelming that of critics. Furthermore, while Stendhal’s words seem to posit a sort of succession, with Rossini taking over the conquering enterprise only after Bonaparte died (after first being deposed and exiled), Carpani emphasizes their simultaneity, thanks to explicit references to the present as well as the use of the present tense: “I cannot get out of my head a rather curious observation, that is, that two general conquests have been attempted in our times. An extraordinary man . . . abandons his native island and aims to make the entire world his. . . . At the same time, another no less extraordinary young man appears in a corner of Romagna.”13

  Within the Italian discourse of Rossinian noise, then, the relationship between reality and operatic representation was inflected in different ways and from different points of view. The composer’s loud orchestration was often linked to the sounds of warfare, more specifically those of Napoleon’s campaigns. Those sounds increased the general level of noise in the world, to which Rossini responded by increasing the sound of his orchestra. Noise was also a defining feature of the contemporary world beyond the military sphere, however, since the political, social, and psychological upheavals brought about by Napoleon profoundly impacted people’s emotions, making them, in a sense, less responsive to more gentle musical sounds. Accordingly, Rossini’s increased noisiness served to conquer not only the ears of his audiences but also their souls. What is more, this noisiness reduced hostile critical voices to silence. That this was supposedly taking place in the present tense implied that the effects of the Napoleonic wars on people’s lives had not waned with their end or with Bonaparte’s death, but continued to make themselves felt with undiminished force. A first conclusion to be drawn from this summary might be that the Rossinian discourse of noise was part of larger debates about Napoleon, debates that, in Italy no less than in other European countries, took center stage after Bonaparte’s final downfall in 1815, gathering further force after his death in 1821. In this sense, La gazza ladra became a focal point of this discourse not only because it was an opera semiseria that put on stage the noises of reality with spe-

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cial intensity—including a march to the scaffold accompanied by drums—but also because it did so soon after the Congress of Vienna. (It is entirely possible that Rossini and his librettist Giovanni Gherardini chose to write an opera on the subject precisely because it allowed them to add their voices to the debate about Napoleon at a time when it was particularly ­powerful.) At the same time, a thoroughly discursive approach to this subject weakens a periodization based exclusively on political events, suggesting instead a continuity of sorts between actual wars being fought and their noise resonating long after they had ended. I would not want to suggest that no differences exist between the reality of war and its discourse. I would argue, though, from a discursive point of view, that war was still present in the minds and hearts of people who had witnessed it. Furthermore, this presence was mainly an acoustical one. In other words, the reality of war continued to make itself felt through its noise, it continued to reverberate, in a literal rather than the more usual metaphorical sense.14 From the point of view of the Rossinian discourse, the noise of war was perceived through the impact it had on Rossini’s orchestral noise, engendering a reverberation that affected both operatic representation on the stage and the emotional conditions of the operagoers in the audience. These echoes of reality intersected and overlapped, producing new and unexpected noises that might in turn inflect the perception of reality offstage. Exploring the Rossinian discourse in early nineteenth-­century Italy from the point of view of noise, then, promotes new ways of configuring the relationship between reality and its operatic representation—ways remarkably different from those brought to the fore by considering other issues such as imitation, self-­borrowing, or genre. What is more, this exploration foregrounds the basic category of sound as a crucial channel through which reality and representation interact, in emotional and psychological as well as mimetic terms. It is time, then, to follow the reverberations of Rossini’s mighty sounds out of theaters and into the hearts and minds of his audiences in order to listen more carefully to the noises and silences we might encounter there.

PA R T   I I

8

Modernity The protagonist of Ugo Foscolo’s epistolary novel Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis) was particularly fond of a prose fragment, which—his friend Lorenzo informs the reader after Ortis’s death—he had transcribed several times: I do not know why I was born, nor how, nor what the world is, nor what I am myself. If I try to figure it out, I am confused by an ever more frightening ignorance. I do not know what my body is, my senses, my soul; and this very part of myself that thinks what I write, and that reflects upon everything and upon itself, can never know itself. I find myself as if attached to a little corner in an incomprehensible space, without knowing why I am placed here rather than anywhere else; and why the short span of my existence is assigned to this moment of eternity rather than to those that have preceded it or will follow it. I cannot see all around myself anything other than infinities that absorb me like an atom.1

In his fondness for this passage as in so many other respects, Ortis is a rather transparent alter ego of Foscolo. Indeed, Foscolo repeatedly inserted it into his writings between 1809 and 1816, when it ended up in the third version of the novel (the first two had been published in 1798 and 1802). This is not an entirely original text, but rather a riff on one of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, which Fo­scolo knew and loved.2 Whereas in Pascal’s philosophical reflections it por127



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trays a soul in search of a spiritual and religious dimension that can give meaningful answers to such radical existential dépaysement, however, in Foscolo’s novel it gives voice to the complete and utter absence of meaning in the life of the protagonist following devastating political and personal blows. Although the personal and the political are closely intertwined for Ortis and Foscolo alike, Ortis’s identity and his destiny are framed in overtly political terms, as the initial sentences of the novel make clear: “The sacrifice of our fatherland has been consummated: everything is lost; and life, if it be granted to us, will be taken up with lamenting our misfortunes and our infamy.”3 The “fatherland,” for Ortis, is the Republic of Venice, and its “sacrifice” its final demise: in 1797 the Treaty of Campoformio between France and Austria that followed the French invasion assigned Venice to the Habsburg Empire. Ortis, a patriot, is forced to abandon his native city for the hills near Padua. Here he falls in love with a woman, but her family is firmly against their match. Pursued by the police, he flees to other Italian cities before returning to the Veneto, where, after bidding farewell to his mother and his fatherland, he commits suicide. After his death, Lorenzo finds the fragment just quoted among his papers. Literary critic Edoardo Sanguineti has called Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis “the first great text of the desperation of living after the Revolution.”4 The fall of the Venetian Republic was just one of the epoch-­making upheavals set in motion by the French Revolution, but certainly not the least portentous. This event brought to an abrupt end a political, social, cultural, and, I would say, psychological entity that seemed literally timeless, as the origins of the republic in the early middle ages were shrouded in myth. The sudden disappearance of this entity was all the more traumatic in that it seemed inexplicable: no sooner had the French conquered Venice that they made it over to their enemies, the Austrians. Most of the book constitutes a protracted meditation on the consequences and meanings of this trauma and culminates, in the 1816 edition, in the extraordinary passage I have quoted above. Literary historian Massimo Riva argues that, in Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis as in several other literary and critical works by Foscolo, this “illness of the Revolution” reveals itself as a deep-­seated melancholy caused by the loss of faith in the revolutionary utopias and the illusions—not only political and social but also especially psychological and emotional—that had accompanied them. In the novel, Ortis undergoes a radical crisis, “one that reduces his historical vision to nothing more than an optical illusion” (Riva). He is over-

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whelmed by an irrational but all-­encompassing sense of impotence: utterly unprecedented historical circumstances have led to a crisis that is existential, above and beyond all history. Images and tropes of death and mourning proliferate in Ortis, and in many other texts by Foscolo. In fact Foscolo attempted to build a religion of the dead—a religion of memory that might counteract the acute sense that present reality made no sense. Riva has no hesitation in calling Ortis’s and Foscolo’s illness “an authentic illness of the Modern,” rehistoricizing this melancholic malaise in the context of the political, social, and cultural circumstances that characterized the Italian territories between the final years of the eighteenth century and the initial ones of the nineteenth. Of course this period is generally identified as the beginning of modernity proper—as opposed to early modernity—for many parts of Europe, including Italy. In Riva’s proposal, then—as in many other commentaries on Foscolo’s texts—eminently modern emotions are linked to the historical juncture that saw the onset of modernity.5

  It seems more appropriate to speak of a historical rupture rather than juncture. The arrival of Napoleon’s armies in 1796 and the two decades of continuous political upheavals and social tensions that followed had an unprecedented impact on most spheres of human activity in many regions of the Italian peninsula, especially the northern and central ones. During this period such regions experienced the most radical, swift, and continuous political, social, and cultural changes that had been witnessed at the very least since the so-­ called Italian wars of the early sixteenth century, and probably ever. According to historians Derek Beales and Eugenio F. Biagini, “by 1815 Italy had passed through a social, political and constitutional revolution.”6 Lucy Riall has similarly written that the arrival of Napoleon’s armies “threw Italy into a period of radical change, as extraordinary as it was complex,” and that this experience “represented a profound break with the past and a powerful harbinger of future hopes and conflicts.” Riall has methodically listed all the areas revolutionized over the course of these years, from the perception of political authority and legitimacy to the functioning of public administration, from the regulation of commercial markets to the organization of communications, from the impact of the periodical press to the meaning of the concepts of Italy and Italianness, and so on.7 Of course the Napoleonic invasions had a similar impact on several if not



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all the European nations affected by them. Italy, however, presented a special situation: unlike Spain, for example, it was not a nation-­state but a collection of separate states, some under foreign domination. And, unlike the Netherlands and at least some of the German-­speaking lands, its society was in several ways more closely tied to premodern modes of human interaction. Modernity proper, then, hit a place that in more ways than one, and despite many important local variants, was not even early modern.8 What effect did the arrival of modernity in the particularly violent form I have just described have on the Italian people at the time? How did it affect their conception of this extraordinary new world in which they found themselves immersed? Which emotions did it stir within them? Which thoughts? These are difficult questions to answer, and thus not surprising that they have been less directly and systematically addressed than their importance might suggest. This is probably a consequence of the end-­oriented nature of most comprehensive historical accounts of this period in Italy, intent as they are on understanding the influences that what are frequently called the “French years” might have had on the protracted and fraught process leading to the founding of the Italian nation in 1861—the famous “Risorgimento.” Thus, for example, much has been written on the so-­called patriots, those who welcomed the arrival of the French, often collaborated with them, and worked to promote the idea of a united Italy, but less on the urban middle and upper classes as a whole. One of the possible ways to address the questions I have just asked is to turn to literature and the arts, in order to investigate thoughts, emotions, and feelings explored with particular attention by texts and artefacts. We could do worse than begin with Foscolo’s Ortis, especially given its widespread success and the cultural prestige it soon acquired, beginning at least from the 1802 edition. For its protagonist, as we have seen, the emotional consequences of the arrival of the French and the demise of the Venetian Republic were confusion, bewilderment, shock, and an overwhelming sense of impotence that led to a radical existential crisis. Ortis’s—and Foscolo’s—­ melancholic malaise was the perhaps inevitable consequence of a series of events characterized in the novel as deeply traumatic. So traumatic that time and space had become undecipherable, unknowable dimensions for a subject that had lost his very sense of selfhood, of all notion of himself as a separate and unified entity. In the novel as in many other texts by Foscolo, first among them the long poem Dei sepolcri (On Sepulchres; 1807), death is the inevitable but no less incomprehensible outcome of a life governed by blind nature,

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whose perpetual becoming swallows everything and everyone. Time destroys all, and the immense fatigue of living has no meaning. Ortis—and indeed the whole of Foscolo’s oeuvre—seems to suggest that the arrival of Napoleon’s armies and the two decades of upheavals that followed constituted for a number of Italians a profoundly traumatic experience.9

  The nature and consequences of this trauma are single-­mindedly explored in the writings of the most astute and uncompromising interpreter of Italy’s first impact with modernity, poet and intellectual Giacomo Leopardi. Leopardi was roughly Rossini’s contemporary and came from the same region, the Marche, long part of the papal states: he was born in the small town of Recanati in 1798, six years after the composer. I could cite many texts in both verse and prose to pre­sent Leopardi’s theories, but I will focus my attention on one that addresses the impact and consequences of modernity head on, the Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’italiani (Discourse on the Present State of the Mores of Italians) of 1824. In this essay Leopardi casts a uniquely acute and dispassionate gaze upon his contemporaries: what he sees is “death.” In Leopardi’s thought death means absence of meaning and purpose, of hope and fantasy, of true emotion and feeling. Another word frequently used by him to indicate this state is il nulla, “nothingness.” For Leopardi the cause of this spiritual and moral “death,” of this meaningless nothingness, is Italy’s particular reaction to the trauma of modernity.10 To summarize briefly Leopardi’s thought: The present times have witnessed the extinction of the ideals on which morality was founded. What public morality truly civilized nations still manage to preserve is due exclusively to what Leopardi calls “società stretta” (“narrow society”), that is to say, the upper classes and the intellectuals, who agree on some foundational principles. Belief in these principles, however, is sustained only by the power of public opinion: this “narrow society” can survive only thanks to the desire on the part of each of its members to be kept in high consideration by others. The only guarantor of morality in modern society is the wish to be considered moral by others. In Italy, however, even this feeble principle no longer works. For Leopardi, with the advent of modernity Italians have understood the inanity of all moral principles, and lost all illusions and ideals. Italians totally lack moral foundations, even the only one left to other civilized people, that is, public opinion.



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This is because, according to Leopardi, Italy has no true “narrow society.” In Italy there is no true domestic life, no true conversation, no true exchange of ideas—and therefore no ideals. The only activities Italians care about are religious ceremonies, theatrical entertainments, and promenading in public. The only places Italians want to go are the church, the theater, and the pubblico passeggio (the avenue where promenaders gather every day). At these sites visuality reigns supreme, what counts is seeing and being seen, to the detriment of language and the exchange of ideas. As a consequence, Leopardi says, in Italy philosophy and literature have ceased to flourish. Especially revealing is the minimal role played in Italian literature by the novel, the genre through which other nations have confronted and somehow come to terms with modernity. Given these premises, Leopardi proclaims, we should not be surprised that Italians are prey to the worst possible conviction, that of the utter vanity of all things. Like all people who despise life, Italians are characterized by indifference, cynicism, contempt for everybody and everything, and scorn for themselves and others. They constantly laugh at life because they are dead inside; modern Italy is the land of nothingness, of meaninglessness, of death. One of the most important consequences of this situation is a new perception of time and space: for Leopardi, it feels as if life is restricted to the present, as if the present is the only temporal dimension available to human subjects. This reflection brings us back to the fragment of with which I began. However, in Foscolo this sense of being stuck in a meaningless present was framed as the “heroic” realization of the novel’s protagonist, Jacopo Ortis, whereas in Leopardi this condition was common to all Italians of his time, whether they were aware of it or not. According to Leopardi, Italians lacked the tools to which other peoples turned to in order to deal with this situation. First, they lacked the novel, the modern literary genre that promoted self-­knowledge and self-­consciousness—Foscolo’s Ortis was very much the exception that proved the rule, as countless literary historians have noted, and as Foscolo himself was well aware.11 Italians reacted instead with an ever stronger and all-­consuming passion for spectacle: ceremony and theater, as well as promenading in public. In short, theatricality was a defining feature of early nineteenth-­century Italian society, and one of the most evident symptoms of its failure to work through its traumatic encounter with modernity. What interpretive value can we assign to Leopardi’s analysis of the psychology and emotions of his contemporaries? His analysis is certainly extreme, and we may disagree with the author about the reasons he advances for

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the state of Italy. Yet, in recent decades his Discorso has become an important point of departure for wide-­ranging reflections not only on early nineteenth-­ century Italy, but modern Italy tout court.12 Its all-­encompassing perspective and its uncompromising radicalism, certainly unprecedented for the time, remain rare after almost two centuries.13 What is more, many important aspects of Italy’s impact with modernity that were only touched on in the Discorso were later recognized as fundamental. Some were developed more at length in Leopardi’s other writings; others were further explored by different artists and intellectuals of the time; others still emerged fully only in the following decades, through the perspective afforded by historical distance. To help further contextualize Leopardi’s analysis I will now briefly address, first, other critical assessments of the discourse of Italianness circulating in the early nineteenth century; and, second, comprehensive appraisals of the cultural, psychological, and emotional impact of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic years in Europe.

  As several commentators have pointed out, the most influential intertextual presence in Leopardi’s Discorso is probably Madame De Staël’s Corinne, ou L’Italie (1807), a successful and influential novel about the complex and difficult love between the half-­Italian Corinne, a poetic improviser, and an Englishman, Lord Nelvil.14 Centered on the encounter between the cultures of the North and of the South, this text contains extensive discussions of the temperament of Italians, depicted as indolent and even effeminate, and of Italian society, characterized primarily as lacking proper forms of sociability—the sixth “book” of Corinne is entitled “Les moeurs et le caractère des Italiens.”15 Leopardi might also have been acquainted with Staël’s earlier De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (On Literature Considered in Its Relationship with Social Institutions; 1800), which also contains a largely negative discussion of Italian character. He certainly knew her later and, in Italy, influential article “Dell’utilità delle traduzioni” (“On the Usefulness of Translations”; 1816), which constructs Italian literature as fossilized in its reverence for a glorious past, and therefore lacking the means properly to address the present. The writings of Staël influenced not only Leopardi, however: generally successful and widely read as they were, both in Italy and elsewhere, they had a remarkable impact on the perception and construction of Italy and its inhabitants by both Italians and foreigners alike—not least among



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them Stendhal. He described Italian society in distinctly Staëlian terms (albeit with a generally positive slant) in the chapter devoted to Rossini’s early years in the Life of Rossini, written at about the same time as Leopardi’s Discorso.16 Historian Silvana Patriarca has shown how Staël’s voice was but one among the many that contributed to the largely negative early nineteenth-­ century discourse of Italian national character. Although her analysis focuses mainly on the contributions to this discourse by the “patriots” in the years from the arrival of the French to the unification (and thus represents another instance of the end-­oriented viewpoint that frequently characterizes such investigations), she shows the wide reach and manifold ramifications of this discourse of what she insightfully calls “self-­othering,” that is to say, “an absorption and redeployment of negative stereotypes relating to the Italian people as a whole . . . and coexisting with the patriotic denunciation of the foreigners’ misrepresentations of Italy.”17 Another historian, Michael Broers, has investigated what he terms the “cultural imperialism” of the French toward Italy between 1796 and 1814.18 While Patriarca has based her research on published texts by politicians, historians, sociologists, and other various commentators (excluding novels and poetry), Broers’s sources are mostly official reports sent to Paris by French army officers and administrators stationed in Italy and their private correspondence, as well as that of their families. The portrait of Italians emerging from these different kinds of sources overlap to a significant degree. No less striking are the echoes between Broers’s French voices and Leopardi’s analysis of Italian theatricality. Yet, an important difference exists between Patriarca and Broers. While the former emphasizes the continuities between the negative image of Italians that emerged in the early nineteenth century and the equally negative stereotypes circulating during the previous century, especially in northern European texts related to the “grand tour,” the latter insists rather on the radically different political, social, and cultural context of the French years within which these stereotypes thrived. Given the unprecedented, indeed epoch-­making disruptions I have described above, the impact of this negative typecasting might have had on Italians became potentially stronger and deeper after 1796. In fact Patriarca herself has helpfully highlighted the crucial roles played by both the internalization on the part of the patriots of certain stereotypes of Italy’s inhabitants, and “the way in which the discourse of national character figured the current state of Italy and the Italians.”19

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Although I agree with these observations, I want to expand their remit to all those Italians who read at least some of the constitutive texts of this discourse—who made Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis into a bestseller, for example—all the while living through a reality in constant, bewildering, and shocking change, and being treated by the French in ways that could only reinforce the discourse itself. Indeed, as Patriarca reports, in his Platone in Italia (Plato in Italy; 1804–6) historian and intellectual Vincenzo Cuoco “explicitly invited the Italians to have a better opinion of themselves and to abandon the habit of self-­denigration: ‘A moderate and reasonable opinion of oneself is the true principle of national energy.’”20 This habit of self-­denigration, I suggest, derived precisely from the internalization of the negative discourse of Italian national character in the face of political, social, and cultural contexts in which, in very different ways, this discourse seemed to be supported—in which it seemed to “tell the truth” about Italians. Broadening the typologies of texts beyond those discussed by both Patriarca and Broers, then, suggests a wider scope for their interpretation, and at the same time a radicalization of the remit and effects of this negative discourse—a radicalization nowhere better exemplified than in Leopardi’s Discorso. Considering another, rather different historiographical contribution will push this radicalization further.

  The French armies brought modernity to other European territories besides the Italian. The impact of this radical historical rupture on the people who lived through it has been intensely scrutinized in several of the historical disciplines touched by it—though not until quite recently in music history. Historian Frank Ankersmit has made a particularly remarkable addition to this ongoing historiographical concern with his book Sublime Historical Experience, a notable contribution to the theory and philosophy of history. The main reasons Ankersmit’s book is relevant to my argument lie in its claims about the consequences that the arrival of modernity had on the consciousness of some who witnessed it. After stating that “the Western world changed out of all recognition in the years between 1789 and 1815, and it did so in a way wholly unparalleled in all the history of mankind up to then (and, arguably, even since then),” Ankersmit, building on insights by Reinhard Koselleck, argues: “[T]hat historical fate truly resounded in the collective consciousness of a whole generation, that all the intelligent individuals of a period were intensely aware of the cata-



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clysms of hope and despair of collective fate—in this the years between the Revolution of 1789 and the Restoration of 1815 were—and still are—without precedent.”21 As a result, “a yawning abyss had come into being between the past and the present—and insofar as this abyss is the natural biotope of historical experience, the past had become a no less conspicuous object of potential experience than a table or a house,” and therefore “an ineluctable object of investigation.”22 Modern Western historical consciousness was born precisely from the necessity—all-­consuming and almost desperate—to confront this suddenly overwhelming past. So far, so relatively uncontroversial. Ankersmit, however, makes even more radical claims for the impact of the experience of the Revolution and all that followed on this collective consciousness. What he calls—no doubt controversially—“Western man” “entered into a wholly new world and, above all, could do so only on the condition of forgetting a previous world and of shedding a former identity. Entering such a new world is, automatically, the abandonment of a previous world. . . . And the latter (forgetting) here always is a condition of the former (the acquisition of a new identity).” Ankersmit is keen to differentiate between this kind of collective experience, in which trauma remains a constant and permanent presence, from another kind of forgetting in which closure of the trauma is instead possible. In the latter case, “[t]rauma may shake identity to its very foundations, but it will not result in the abandonment of a former identity for a wholly new one.” This abandonment is what happens instead in the type of forgetting he associates with the rupture between the ancien régime and modernity. It is worth quoting Ankersmit at some length on this point: The historical transformations occasioning this variant of forgetfulness are always accompanied by feelings of a profound and irreparable loss, of cultural despair, and of hopeless disorientation. In this sense such historical experiences are traumatic too. But the stake of the traumatic experience is far more dramatic in such cases—for here one really loses oneself, here a former identity is irrevocably lost forever and superseded by a new historical and cultural identity. . . . [N]o room is left for a mechanism that might give us redemption from trauma. . . . The new identity is mainly constituted by the trauma of the loss of a former identity—precisely this is its main content, and that this is the ineluctable truth announces itself in the realization (agonizing, resigned, or otherwise) that this loss is permanent and can

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never be undone. And then trauma is just as permanent as the loss of the former identity is. . . . [H]ere the whole of a previous identity (conscious and unconscious all taken together) is at stake; and then there is no place where we could temporarily shelve a traumatic experience until the moment has come that we can summon up the force to face it. Between identities there is a ­vacuum—so not even a substrate for the unconscious. . . . Here the traumatic loss truly is the loss of one’s (former) self. And what loss could possibly be greater—for is this not as close to death as one may come?23

Ankersmit explores further the difference between these two kinds of trauma, extending his frame of reference from historiography to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and associating the more radical and dramatic trauma—that caused by the historical rupture of the Revolution—with the sphere of the sublime. I will return later to this distinction, and more generally to the sublime. Here I want to conclude by bringing together the different texts and discourses I have explored in this chapter.

  Perhaps it is not surprising that, although Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini feature prominently in Ankersmit’s account of the historiographical reaction to the “Italian wars” of the early sixteenth century, no references to modern Italian authors are in his Sublime Historical Experience. After the riches of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, the international popularity of Italian literature widely meant—including not only poetry and fiction, but also philosophy, historiography, and criticism—entered a long period of decline, arguably reaching its nadir precisely between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century—a slump from which it truly recovered only a century later. As a consequence, eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century Italian authors have remained largely marginal to the Western literary canon to this day. Yet, the parallels between the fragment from Foscolo’s Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis and Ankersmit’s account of the impact of the arrival of modernity on the Western collective consciousness are striking. No less striking are the points in common between this account and Leopardi’s diagnosis of the psychological and emotional state of the Italians of his time. The picture that emerges from this comparative viewpoint goes from the very particular of Foscolo’s solitary individual to Ankersmit’s very general



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concept of Western collective consciousness, with Leopardi’s Italians situated more or less halfway between these two extremes. The discourses investigated by Patriarca and Broers help further to historicize this psychological and emotional predicament, locating its subjects more precisely in middleand upper-­class Italians: those Italians whose lives were more dramatically touched by radical changes in political and social reality; those Italians who read poetry and fiction (including Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, as I have mentioned above); and—crucially for us—those Italians who regularly went to the opera and regularly read about it in periodicals. (I will address the composition of the opera-­going public more specifically in chapter 10, but in early nineteenth-­century Italy it consisted almost exclusively of members of the middle and upper classes.) In fact, when Beales and Biagini claimed that “by 1815 Italy had passed through a social, political and constitutional revolution,” they also added that “nowhere else outside France and the Low Countries had the Revolution and Napoleon effected such changes in both the political reality and the culture of the upper classes.”24 In sum, drawing from a wide spectrum of texts and discourses, both from the early nineteenth century and more recent times, I want to argue for a particular psychological and emotional position or orientation on the part of many middle- and upper-­class Italians who experienced the upheavals of the French years. The feelings and emotions characterizing this position or orientation might be described with the terms repeatedly encountered in this chapter: confusion, bewilderment, shock, trauma, impotence, melancholia, self-­othering, and indolence. I want to emphasize that I am not saying that all middle- and upper-­class Italians were traumatized by the arrival of modernity. Rather, I am claiming that the set of feelings and emotions just described constituted a particularly prominent psycho-­emotional “position,” a location of the heart and the mind recognized by many among them, more or less consciously, as especially suited to their time and place. Another helpful way of describing the subject of such emotions is to turn to Ankersmit’s notion of collective consciousness, which does not imply that every individual partook of this consciousness with equal awareness and intensity; rather, that a particular psycho-­emotional position illustrated this consciousness in an especially accurate way. In a completely different context that can, however, resonate with the case of early nineteenth-­century Italy, sociologist Ron Eyerman has also discussed the notion of an African American collective identity

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built on cultural trauma transmitted by collective memory.25 An identity, or at least a position, based on such premises and comprised of such sentiments could not fail to have all kinds of consequences on the beliefs and behaviors of many individual subjects. One such consequence is the subject of the following chapter.

9

Theatricality In the previous chapter I argued that Leopardi saw a penchant for theatricality as a defining trait of early nineteenth-­century Italian society, whose members generally preferred the different forms of public spectacle that took place at the pubblico passeggio and in churches and theaters to other activities more conducive to moral, intellectual, and psychological development, such as conversing in salons, debating in cafés and other public or semipublic spaces, and reading novels. The relevance of theatricality for Rossini’s Italian operas should be self-­evident given the interpretation of their dramaturgy I advanced above. Before returning to Rossini, though, I will investigate further the historical dimensions of theatricality in early nineteenth-­century Italy. Michael Broers’s study of French “cultural imperialism” in Italy between 1796 and 1814 highlighted the importance of theatricality for Italians. Dubois (first name unknown), a French administrator stationed in Florence, wrote in 1812 that “in Italy the sense of ‘society’ and the circle is barely in its infancy. The habit of going to the theater every night is a barrier to it, and scarcely allows for even a snatched conversation, with no great point. . . . It is every night to the theater; the rest of the time, one is inaccessible to everyone, unless one is in one’s lodge, or gives a brief audience on Saturday. . . . The best people do not go to the café.”1 For this administrator, the dominance of the theater as the main site of sociability prevented Italians from developing forms of social interaction more conducive to cultural and intellectual development. Similarly, Hugues Nardon, prefect of Parma, wrote that in this city “one 141



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goes to a spectacle as in France one goes to the salon.” The difference between the two, however, could not be greater: “The theaters in Italy today are horrible, and serve only to propagate indecency, corrupt morality, encourage bad taste, and harbor notions of violent thoughts and crude passions.”2 “Theater” and “spectacle” covered a wide spectrum of forms and genres of performance, but opera often came to stand for all of them, since it was considered a quintessentially Italian manifestation. Interestingly, some French officials thought that their own opéra comique might help to refine and elevate the operatic taste of Italians, and a few even went so far as to take active part in performances of opéras comiques in translation as a way to show Italians what properly moral music theater was like.3 Specific French opinions of Italian opera are less significant, however, than the scope assigned to theatricality in French views of Italian society. The documents cited by Broers include one by Camille de Tournon, prefect of Rome, who regarded Italy as “a country where all men judge and respect themselves according to how much they spend, and by external show . . . there must be no other country, anywhere, where the taste for reading is so little apparent.” Another French official stationed in the same city, a certain Degerando (first name unknown), went on to diagnose “the Roman” as “drawn to the visual— he is more interested in ceremony than in power; work is sacrificed for pleasantries; politeness and manners make more of an impression than deeds. . . . Forms are what count for [the Romans].” Juliette Récamier, the future hostess of a famous Parisian intellectual salon, wrote to a friend from Turin: “I don’t think there is a country where outward show is of such importance.”4 In the view of these French writers, the Italian proclivity toward exhibition, their penchant for the visual, went well beyond a passion for theatricals, but characterized the entire field of sociability, and even, according to Broers, “betokened a trivialized political culture . . . [the French] did not believe Italians made mature, rational distinctions between the sensual and the intellectual, between aesthetic taste and public business.”5 In the eyes of the French stationed in Italy no less than in Leopardi’s interpretation, theatricality prevented Italians—at least upper-­class ones—from developing what the French considered a deeper understanding of themselves and each other, a more rational attitude toward the political sphere, a more realistic assessment of their position within society and of their powers to alter this position if necessary, and keener and more durable insights into the world that surrounded

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them. But what did this talk of “theater,” “spectacle,” and “the visual” actually mean back then? To which discursive spaces did it belong?

  Theatricality as a concept has resisted repeated attempts at a general definition by several eminent intellectuals. In the introduction to a collection of essays devoted to the topic, Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait explicitly refuse to provide a clear set of features for the term, arguing instead that it signifies different things in different historical, geographical, social, and cultural contexts. In an earlier text even a scholar as normatively inclined as Erika Fischer-­Lichte conceded that “[i]n order to comprehend and define theatricality as a mode of behavior and expression, it must be described and analyzed in terms of a particular epoch in a given culture. For, obviously, no mode of behavior and expression can be defined as theatrical per se.”6 Surveying the history of the meanings and uses attendant to this concept, Davis and Postlewait highlight an ongoing tension between practice and theory: theatricality “is a mode of representation or a style of behavior characterized by histrionic actions, manners, and devices, and hence a practice,” but also “an interpretative model for describing psychological identity, social ceremonies, communal festivities, and public spectacles, and hence a theoretical concept.”7 This polarity mirrors that between a narrower understanding of the term, usually promoted by theater historians and theorists, to refer to the theater as a performative practice and a social institution, and a more general idea of theatricality advanced mostly by sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists as a mode of perception and behavior characterizing an entire society or culture.8 Such tensions inherent in theatricality as understood and theorized in the last few decades have obvious resonances for my attempt to connect Rossini’s Italian operas with the historical moment in which they appeared, and therefore to establish a link between a specific kind of dramaturgy and a specific sociocultural field. These tensions are not restricted to recent theoretical elaborations, but span the entire history of the concept of theatricality, even if the term was not explicitly used for most of this history. In fact, they feature prominently at the historical moment when theatricality as presently intended was first explored and discussed—at the beginning of modernity, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when Rossini’s operas first appeared.



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It might be useful, then, to give some thought to the meanings of theatricality at the moment of modernity.

  The concept of theatricality (if not the word) emerged distinct from the older idea of the theatrum mundi over the course of the eighteenth century. That older idea that “all the world’s a stage” implied that it was nothing but a stage, that the meaning of human life was not to be found in this world but in the next, the transcendental dimension provided by religious belief. The visual regime of the baroque relied on this implication at the same time that it promoted seeing (and hearing) as an embodied, sensual experience. In any case, baroque art was oriented vertically and promoted the relationship between the world and God as the only truly meaningful one. In this sense it was the perfect aesthetic for the ancien régime, since it directed the gaze upward, where it would encounter not only God, but also the absolute sovereign as his embodiment on earth—nowhere else more explicitly and insistently than in Rome, cradle of the baroque and center of Catholicism, where the absolute sovereign embodying God on earth was none other than the pope. Eighteenth-­century theatricality worked horizontally instead, concerned as it was with modes of perception shared among human beings as social actors. In The Fall of Public Man, Richard Sennett focuses on the systemic changes in the spheres of economy, society, politics, and culture witnessed in Britain (and especially London) over the course of the century. The early stirrings of modernity there—in a country already at the vanguard—created a context in which public life became eminently theatrical. If older social conventions and rituals no longer made sense, participating successfully in this public life now required a significant degree of flexibility and adaptability that found its most compelling inspiration in the theater. What kind of person inhabited the public realm in the eighteenth century? An actor, a performer. It was not yet a matter of the external representation of an inner self, however, claims Sennett, but rather “the presentation to other people of feelings which signify in and of themselves”; in other words, it was not a question of symbols—of expressing outside what is felt inside—but the sharing of signs that made public interaction possible. This conception of theatricality rests on an understanding of theater not as a representation of an external reality, but rather as a creation of reality using convention. According to Sennett, “playacting in the form of manners,

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conventions and ritual gestures is the very stuff out of which public relations are formed.” He calls the eighteenth century the age of civility: “Civility is treating others as though they were strangers and forging a social bond upon that social distance . . . it is the activity that protects them from each other and yet allows them to enjoy each other’s company. Wearing a mask is the essence of civility. Masks permit pure sociability, detached from the circumstance of power, malaise, and private feeling of those who wear them.”9 Sennet, therefore, considers theatricality as a key feature of what Jürgen Habermas famously conceptualized as the public sphere, the new space of sociability that emerged during the eighteenth century in the form of cafes, debating societies, salons, and circles of various kinds, and prominently included the periodical press.10 Sennett’s interpretation of eighteenth-­century theatricality pre­sents itself mainly as a work of social history, but it also echoes some crucial philosophical texts such as the Earl of Shaftesbury’s Characteristiks (1711) and especially Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), with their emphasis on the idea of spectatorship and on the all-­encompassing reach of the theatrical condition in both public life and the arts.11 These texts, however, pre­sent a more ambivalent notion of theatricality than the positive take promoted by Sennett. In fact, the eighteenth century also saw a prominent negative discourse of theatricality, by which to deem something theatrical meant associating it with a set of negative connotations, including lack of sincerity, duplicity, fakery, deception, artificiality, affectation, and dishonesty—a discourse still very much part of present-­day usage. The most representative text of this more negative discourse is probably Jean-­Jacques Rousseau’s Letter to D’Alembert (1758), in which the author argues that the city of Geneva should not have a theater because theater is but a representation of reality rather than reality itself. Passing itself off as reality, theater dangerously compromises our capacity to distinguish between the real and the illusory. This confusion, according to Rousseau, leads to a treacherous conflation of manners and morals, surface and depth. Evidently, Rousseau’s antitheatrical stance is no less political than the “civil” theatricality discussed by Sennett, but it is rooted in an opposite understanding of the relationship between self and society, one expounded most explicitly in Rousseau’s so-­ called Second Discourse, On the Origins of Inequality among Men (1754), according to which human beings’ modern dependence on others has the undesirable effect that persons turn themselves into the characters they hope



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others will find attractive. In Rousseau’s opposition between nature and culture, our true inner self is thwarted by this constant anxiety about others’ opinion of ourselves, which leads to inequality and oppression. Thus, we suppress our natural feelings as we are forced to socialize and end up isolating ourselves instead. The most critical moment in the relationship among theater, society, and politics arrived in 1789 with the collective drama of unprecedented proportions and import known as the French Revolution. Indeed, as Tracy C. Davis has emphasized, the word “theatricality” was coined by Thomas Carlyle when trying to make sense of this epoch-­making event in his The French Revolution: A History (1837).12 It is not simply that the public rituals of revolutionary France were staged in a particularly theatrical manner. More important, the very notions of actor, character, and spectator were questioned anew in the light of the profound reconfiguration of the public sphere and of the spaces and scopes for political action that took place first in France and then, albeit to a lesser extent, in the regions dominated by the French—Italy prominently included. No longer subjects but citizens, and thus no longer spectators but potential political actors, people had to face the moral implications of their positions and actions in this new theater of politics, a theater crucially different from the social one conceptualized by the likes of Smith and Rousseau and discussed by Sennett and others—whatever their significant differences.13 Thus modern theatricality had partially different causes, functioned in partially different ways, carried partially different meanings, and produced partially different consequences than theatricality did in the early modern era and especially the eighteenth century. Generally speaking, theatricality has had rather bad press in the last two hundred years. The artificiality of theater prevents the kind of complex, critical self-­knowledge promoted instead by, for example, the novel. A classic instance of this opposition between theater and novel as one of artificiality and sincerity, surface and depth, and immorality and morality is found in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. The protagonist Fanny’s refusal to join in the staging of a play aligns her with the sound moral world of the novel and against the problematic morality of those characters who most enthusiastically support the theater, exploiting it as an opportunity to pre­sent themselves under false pretenses, and thus betraying their lack of true self-­knowledge and self-­ awareness. Mansfield Park was written in 1811–13, and therefore a decade before Leo-

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pardi’s Discorso and its triangular connection among the theatricality of modern Italians, their minimal interest for the genre of the novel, and their failure to develop modes of social interaction that would promote not only self-­ knowledge and self-­awareness, but also the capacity to understand an external reality in bewildering and constant evolution. The opposition explored so richly in Mansfield Park emerged repeatedly and explicitly, however, in the writings about Italians by French officials and diarists, among others, in those very same years—which also saw the arrival of Rossini’s operas in Italian theaters. Bringing the insights gained by observing theatricality at the moment of modernity to bear on the Italian context, then, may afford new and interesting perspectives on the particular Italian inflections of theatricality, ones that might prove especially relevant for an interpretation of Rossini’s Italian operas and their relationship to history.

  Theatricality has long been considered a dimension particularly suited to the Italian character—whatever is meant when referring to such a monolithic and almost ontological category as “the Italian character.” Early modern perceptions of Italy often focused on commedia dell’arte and opera, as well as street fairs and religious festivals—the distinction between the latter two often more notional than real, if made at all—as somehow quintessential manifestations of the Italian conception of life. If modern—including early modern—­ theatricality has been understood as a response to a reality in which traditional beliefs, relations, behaviors, and rituals no longer conveyed an easily decodable meaning, the enhanced theatricality of early modern Italy may be linked to a reality somehow perceived as particularly hard to decode. This hypothesis resonates with a view of early modern Italy as profoundly troubled by its loss of political, economic, and cultural relevance on the world stage—by its irreversible slide from center to periphery. Interestingly, during the early modern era music may have been the only cultural activity in which Italy moved from periphery to center instead, going from importing composers and singers from the North during the fifteenth and sixteenth century to exporting them to the North over the following two hundred years—a move that Donald Burrows has linked in suggestive ways with political and economic decline.14 There are several reasons, then, why opera can be understood as perhaps the most important manifestation of early modern Italian theatricality. But which kind of theatricality is implied by this brief historical sketch?



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Obviously not the one discussed by Sennett, which functions as a connection between the theater and the street, and where “civility” becomes the kind of theatricalized interaction that makes public life possible. Here we are in Rousseauian territory, where the theater stands for reality, pretends to pass itself off as reality, and obscures any distinction between the real and the make-­believe, leading to a deceitful confusion between the two. What is more, by moving from the eighteenth to the early nineteenth century through the crucible of the French Revolution, this confusion becomes much more dangerous, since it compromises not only the psychological, moral, and social spheres but also the political one. The tensions inherent in the different understandings of eighteenth-­ century theatricality, and therefore the profound psychological, emotional, and political consequences of such tensions for the people who found themselves at their center, emerge with particular force in early nineteenth-­century Italy. If we reconsider the terms of the French discourse of the Italian national character from the point of view of the discourse of theatricality at the moment of modernity, we see that it is not simply a matter of different conceptions of theatricality, but rather of an explicit opposition between theatricalized forms of sociability that bring civility into public life and thus make possible meaningful social interaction in the new arena of the public sphere, and a predilection for the visual dimension broadly meant, for outward show, for pure appearances—a dimension that finds its most evident and most concrete manifestation in an obsession with going to the theater. What is more, this opposition is configured in terms of mutual exclusion: one form of theatricality—obsessively going to the theater—prevents the other—socializing in cafes and debating in salons. This opposition implies a chronological dimension as well. Italians had maintained an allegiance to an earlier conception of theatricality, one indebted to the all-­encompassing visual regime of the baroque—Leopardi would say, one that finds its most representative manifestations in the closely connected spheres of the theater, the church, and the pubblico passeggio. This allegiance had prevented them from developing more modern kinds of theatricality, ones better suited to responding successfully to the new demands on sociability advanced by a changing society. The implication is that society had not changed in Italy as much as it had north of the Alps, and thus that Italians had lacked the incentive to develop the tools required to adapt to such changes successfully. In addition to the chronological dimension, a geographi-

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cal one emerged: an opposition between northern, more “modern” and more “advanced” societies, and southern, more “primitive,” less “developed” ones. This opposition can be aligned only partially with the religious one of Protestant versus Catholic, since of course both the French and the Italians were Catholic, even if the forms of Catholicism they practiced were rather different. (Rousseau’s antitheatrical stance, though, can surely be characterized as Protestant, steeped as it was in the milieu of Calvinist Geneva.)15 It wasn’t until the political regimes that were profoundly imbricated with this baroque, southern theatricality had collapsed that its hopeless inadequacy to deal with the new social and political situation emerged. As Broers has emphasized, the French believed that this specifically Italian brand of theatricality prevented Italian men and women from distinguishing between the sensual and the intellectual, between aesthetics and politics—and, Rousseau would have added, between representation and reality, artificiality and authenticity. If the essential forms of Italian theatricality had not changed, then, this was precisely the problem: in the context of the radically altered circumstances following the arrival of the French, the meanings and consequences of these forms changed even as the forms themselves remained broadly the same. Specifically, they proved inadequate for dealing with the profound reconfiguration of the public sphere, and for providing the skills now required of citizen-­actors by the new theater of politics. Thus far my concrete point of reference has been the French discourse of Italian theatricality after 1796. As has probably already become clear, I will now argue that, over the course of the French years, this discourse was internalized by the Italians in closest contact with the French—that is to say, the upper classes, the intellectuals, and part of the middle classes, or what could pass as middle classes in Italian urban centers of the time, especially in the northern and central regions. In other words, the French discourse functioned as a sort of mirror in which Italians saw themselves as characterized by forms of theatricality particularly problematic in the postrevolutionary context. This discourse figured Italian theatricality in terms similar to the general discourse of Italian national character discussed in the previous chapter. A crucial difference, however, exists. In looking into the mirror provided by the French, the Italians saw the theatrical becoming metatheatrical, since they saw themselves being watched watching. They were both subjects and objects of a particularly theatrical gaze: as the French denounced a single-­ minded devotion to the visual on the part of Italians, they were themselves



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subjecting these same Italians to a single-­minded visual regime, turning them into actors while casting themselves as spectators. The enhanced theatricality of revolutionary and postrevolutionary Paris has been extensively discussed, especially the intermingling of politics and theater.16 Not surprising, then, is that the French exported their theatricalizing attitude when they conquered most of the rest of Europe during the Napoleonic years. The crucial difference between French and Italian theatricality resides precisely in the hierarchy created by this encounter between conqueror and conquered, which becomes one between viewer and viewed, spectator and actor. Quite aside from the many other important differences between France and Italy—the mention of Paris a few lines above already speaks volumes in this respect, evoking a nation-­state with one undisputed center vis-­à-­vis a collection of independent states—it is one thing to figure yourself as eminently theatrical, as did the French, and quite another to be figured as such by invaders, as were the Italians. Broers has described the Napoleonic Empire in Italy as a form of “cultural imperialism,” and others have also invoked an expanded notion of orientalism as a framework for understanding the cultural dynamics of the French years.17 I would want to be particularly careful before claiming subaltern status for Italians, who were never subjected to the kinds of treatments commonly meted out to non-­European colonial subjects. They were, however, subjected to a kind of theatricalized gaze not dissimilar from that characteristic of actual colonial encounters.18 But there is more. If, given their exclusive passion for the theater, Italians acted—in front of the French—as peculiarly focused spectators, in a more general social sense they were always already actors and spectators at the same time, since their social life was uniquely predicated on vision and display, on (mis)taking appearances as essences and surfaces as depths. I am not talking about absolutes here, about supposedly ontological characteristics of the social life of Italians in the early nineteenth century; in other words, I am not trying to answer questions about the “actual” degree of theatricality of Italian social life compared to, say, that of France, Britain, or Germany—as if such a thing were possible. I am rather referring to discursive formations generated by a process of internalizing representations staged in the mirror of an external, dominating gaze. In this sense the discourse of noise explored previously can be integrated in the broader discourse of theatricality. Readers will recall Eleuterio Pantologo’s statement that the most important activity that took place in modern Italian

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theaters was conversation—and thus the only way for music to be heard amid the din of constant chatter was to be very loud. The idea that Italian theaters were noisy places, where spectators constantly talked, is a recurring theme in travelogues and letters by foreign visitors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.19 Ample evidence suggests that Italians thought the same, except that they did not generally consider it a problem. A manual of theatrical etiquette published in 1836 explicitly approved of talking to neighbors during the performance, even if no previous introduction had taken place. Carlotta Sorba has called attention to the fact that, by contrast, a comparable French manual dating from 1822 stigmatized such talking as a woeful lack of politesse and a hindrance to other spectators’ enjoyment of the performance. But— Italians would have countered—if the theater is first and foremost a place for social interaction, what is the point of being silent? What you should instead never do is obstruct another spectator’s view, as several sources cited by Sorba emphatically state. In this connection, she has pointed out how light in Italian theaters progressively increased until after midcentury, while the opposite process, that of gradual darkening, began later than in northern countries. In fact, in 1830 historian Giulio Ferrario stated that “everybody prefers to see a fully lit theater, because people are merrier this way, and less bored when the show is not appreciated or endlessly repeated.”20 I will address the kind of listening implied by this kind of discourse in chapter 12, devoted to memory. Here I want to emphasize how Italian theatricality was constructed in opposition to listening, or at least to the kind of so-­called attentive listening that was beginning to be promoted north of the Alps at around this time. In other words, Italians were watched watching, not listening; or, rather, they were watched—and heard—while they failed to listen “attentively.” When it comes to the world of sound in general (not only in theaters), beside chatting and generally being noisy, they might have been watched and heard singing instead. I have in mind not only singers on the operatic stage here but also all kinds of people in all sorts of public places: Italians happily singing in the streets had made repeated appearances in foreigners’ accounts of their time in the peninsula since at least the eighteenth century. Such singing, however, was constructed not as a window onto their interiority, onto the depths of their individual souls, but rather as the result of a “naturally” performative impulse, linked more often than not to such natural phenomena as the warm climate or the beauty of the landscape. Watching and hearing Italians singing, then, participated in the same power relation



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that I have explored in connection with theatricality. This means that Italians were also the object of foreigners’ fascinated, othering gaze when it came to sound: in this case a sort of “aural” gaze that tended to objectify them as naturally musical, regardless of social class. In sum, whether it concerned sight or sound, the discourse of Italian national character was a discourse of theatricality, of performance, and, in the end, of exteriority.

  Italians, then, were figured as a particularly theatrical people by the gaze of foreigners, especially the French; they discovered themselves as uniquely theatrical through this gaze. To say that they did not like what they saw would be to understate the case. According to Broers, one enduring effect of the French years in Italy was that “[t]he imposition of alien norms, state-­driven social control, secularization, to say nothing of the more tangible traumas of conscription and centralization, fostered the abyss between the ‘real’ and the ‘civil’ countries that so preoccupies contemporary thinkers.” He is referring to the dichotomy between paese reale and paese civile, one of the most troubling aspects of the history of modern Italy, a profound schism between the “real country” on one side and its official, public vision on the other. This schism is born of a radical distrust of the state on the part of its citizens, who see it as a world of empty gestures and surfaces, of artificiality and make-­believe always potentially hiding oppression and coercion—a world, in sum, of theater, but of a dangerous kind. Among the most lasting legacies of the French years was, in Broers’s words, “not the creation of the new public sphere, but the destruction of that of the ancien régime, and the subsequent response of Italians of all classes—but of the elites in particular—to the void before them. Whereas the ancien régime had often been characterized by the capacity of the public and private to interweave and interact, the new order drove a wedge between them.” As a consequence, “[p]arallel to the arrival of the modern state came the withdrawal of Italians into a new private world, more clearly delineated from, and often shaped in defiance of, officialdom.” The reactive impact of French imperialism “taught Italians to hate the state as never before. This trauma . . . arrested the development of Italian political culture, whatever its contributions in terms of institutions and structures.”21 Broers’s point is mainly political, but, on the basis of the arguments advanced in this chapter as well as the previous one, I want to expand it to include

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society, culture, and, more in general, Italians’ conception of the relationship between reality and representation, especially theatrical representation. The traumatic loss of faith in public life described by Broers—Sennett would call it a loss of faith in civility—turned theatricality into a self-­sufficient and self-­ referential attitude, no longer permitting, but rather opposing or at least ignoring a meaningful connection with reality. Anyway, how were Italians supposed to gain access to this reality if they were nothing but actors and spectators caught in a circular exchange of gazes? The very notion of connection implied that reality was somehow decipherable, while for these Italians, caught at their theatricals by the theatrical gaze of the French, this was no longer possible—if it had ever been. Let me recall Foscolo’s and Leopardi’s suggestions: reality was meaningless, il nulla; space and time were incomprehensible; human subjects were stuck in an eternal present; they had lost any sense of their selfhood. Faced with such reality, theatricality ceased to be a way of understanding and constructing the world—as it had been in a certain version of eighteenth-­ century society, no matter how complex and fraught with risks this was—and became a way of turning away from it.

  I have clearly arrived at a crucial point of the overall argument of this book. In order to find particularly strong support in making it, I will allow myself one of the very few breaches of my self-­imposed rule to stick to the sources of the Italian Rossini discourse at the time of the composer’s Italian operatic career, turning instead for a moment to England and the 1830s. In 1835 novelist and critic Thomas Peacock defended Rossini from the charge that his operas contained too many pezzi concertati with the following words: There has been an increase of excitement in the world of reality, and that of imagination has kept it company. . . . The public taste has changed, and the supply of the market has followed the demand. There can be no question that Rossini’s music is more spirit-­stirring than Paësiello’s [sic], and more essentially theatrical: more suited to the theater by its infinite variety of contrast and combination, and more dependent on the theater for the develop­ ment of its perfect effect. We were present at the first performance of an opera of Rossini’s in England: Il barbiere di Siviglia, in March, 1818. We saw at once that there was a great revolution in dramatic music.22



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According to Peacock, Rossini’s operas were successful because they were “essentially theatrical,” their music both better suited to an idea of theater as “contrast and combination” and more dependent on it. His notion of a Rossinian essential theatricality seems not far removed from the idea advanced by the anonymous Venetian reviewer I have already quoted several times, that of a peculiarly modern—that is, Rossinian—genre that is “not imitative, but simply musical”: the connection between reality and representation is looser, the gap between the world and the stage wider. Peacock’s suggestion is particularly useful at this point because it establishes a link between the world and the stage that escapes the (anti)mimetic terms discussed to date. This link is not a matter of representation, not in a narrow sense anyway; rather, Rossini’s theatricality is connected with “an increase of excitement in the world of reality,” of which it is a direct consequence. Peacock does not elaborate on the forms of and reasons for this increased excitement, but considers Rossini’s increased theatricality “a great revolution.” If we move back our viewpoint from mid-­1830s Britain to Italy during the French years, while keeping in mind the theatricality of early nineteenth-­ century Italians discussed above, Peacock’s metaphoric use of the term “revolution” acquires more literal connotations, since, as I have argued above, in Italy modern theatricality was closely linked to the impact of the French Revolution there. In Leopardian terms, this traumatic impact reduced reality ultimately to nothingness, and the human subject to an empty notion. What was left except the theater? What else could one be but “essentially theatrical”? Where else could one go except to those eminently theatrical sites, the pubblico passeggio, the church, and especially, of course, the theater? Seen from this viewpoint, the theatricality of Rossini’s operas becomes a response as well as a contribution to the world in which these works were composed and first performed, that is, to an Italian society whose own theatricality was a response to a sense of meaninglessness induced by its traumatic encounter with the turmoil of the Napoleonic years. The vivid metatheatrical dimension of Rossini’s comic works, their emphasis on the theatrical present, and the sense that the only reality known to these works is operatic, can be understood in connection with a world that could no longer be known, in which human subjects had lost any sense of spatial or especially temporal dimensions, and felt stuck in the present. Rossini’s dramaturgy, both comic and serious, was characterized by distance, objectivization, and self-­ referentiality—it was “not imitative, but simply musical”—because meaning

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could not be found off the stage. Rather, the stage was the only site where the illusion of meaningfulness could be entertained. Worth recalling here is the Venetian reviewer’s comments on the necessity for spectators of attributing meaning to sounds even if they do not possess it: according to him, what counted was the “illusion that something is being represented on the stage,” and “this is the only real illusion entertained in theaters, and the only one necessary in order to feel pleasure.”23 Pleasure derived from an illusionary attribution of meaning. When the fictionalized Rossini by the Gazzetta di Firenze in 1826—quoted at some length in the chapter on noise—explained to Lord Byron that his aim was to make his music more “dramatic,” he promoted it as much more than just the result of a decibel contest, of a “louder-­than-­thou” attitude: its unprecedented power was to be the main promoter of an “essential” theatricality—an illusion of representation that was the only source of pleasure left to spectators who had lost any sense of meaning in reality. The rhetoric of this text acquires particular resonance when interpreted in the light of the discourse of theatricality explored above: “Which other means are there to make an impact these days? How otherwise to move people who, along the years, have been spectators of so many massacres, of so many arbitrary acts, of so many magnificent deeds? People who, having been actors in great political convulsions, tossed around amidst great calamities, great fortunes and great events, have almost no feeling for simple pleasures?”24 According to this “Rossini,” then, the identities or positions that best characterized Italians who had lived through the French years were those of spectators and actors. In other words, these Italians were characterized by their theatricality: Rossini’s own uniquely theatrical style and dramaturgy were crucially shaped by the psychological and emotional condition of Italians, to which they contributed in turn.

  My linking of Rossini’s theatricality to the theatricality of Italian society at the moment of modernity diverges substantially from recent theories regarding Rossini’s dramaturgy that address more or less explicitly the relationship between reality and representation. Briefly surveying these theories is useful, as a way both to contextualize and differentiate my hypothesis from what has come before. In a seminal 1968 essay already cited, Friedrich Lippmann proposed the category of “play” (gioco) as essential to Rossini’s dramaturgy, and com-



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mended him for preserving into the nineteenth century the supposedly eighteenth-­century idea of “lightness.”25 Writing in the 1970s and early 1980s, Fedele D’Amico spoke of a “collective vertigo” and invoked the “Dionysian” category of “delirium,” emphasizing, contrary to Lippmann, how this dimension was the polar opposite of what he saw as “the measured and realistic Settecento.”26 More recently, both Alessandro Baricco and Gianni Ruffin, albeit with somewhat different emphasis, have stressed the distinctness of Rossini’s dramaturgy both from what preceded and followed, viewing it as somehow in opposition to the culture and society of the time. Ruffin talks of “antihistoricism,” and Baricco of the Kantian “transcendental,” of “ritual” and “hypnosis,” and of a radical, almost metaphysical notion of “happiness” that he sees as a somehow premodern element of Rossini’s dramaturgy.27 Several other scholars have posited more direct connections between Rossini’s dramaturgy and his world. While sharing many of the analytical premises and conclusions of the authors just mentioned, and contributing important insights into the workings and meanings of the comic works, Paolo Gallarati has made the surprising suggestion that the characters of the opere buffe are “the protagonists of a comic epos whose aim is the sublimation of the most typical attributes of the bourgeois individual who, after the Napoleonic wars, proudly pre­sents himself to the new century with the joyful consciousness of possessing the tools to realize his and other people’s happiness.”28 Not far from Gallarati, though with a rather different emphasis, Robert Fink, at the conclusion of his analytical study of Rossini’s crescendo in both comic and serious works, invokes the idea of “energy” as characteristic of the Napoleonic years and the sounds of the power-­driven machines of the Industrial Revolution as meaningful concepts for the interpretation of this compositional technique, which for him becomes “a musical representation of ‘pure’ energy.”29 Carl Dahlhaus interpreted the overlap between Rossini’s comic and serious genres in terms that are both historical and psychological: “The extremes meet: the farcical takes on catastrophic proportions in the frenzy of the music; the tragic, in its moments of greatest despair, exposes the marionette strings from which the characters are dangling. For a skeptic like Rossini, whose cheerfulness is simply the obverse of a melancholy that affected not just himself but his entire age, these extremes prove to be complementary.”30 This suggestion, inspired by ideas first advanced in Heinrich Heine’s 1837 On the French Stage, squarely locates Rossini in the historical and ideological context of post-­Napoleonic Restoration, an epoch characterized, according to Dahl-

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haus, by a resigned “detachment of cheerful skepticism or melancholic self-­ absorption.”31 Fabrizio Della Seta has implicitly responded to Dahlhaus’s rather narrow interpretation, doubting that Rossini’s music, especially the serious operas, can be conceptualized as representing specifically the spirit of the Restoration—firstly for simple chronological reasons: Tancredi, say, premiered in 1813. He has linked them instead with the new “aristocratic and individualistic myth” that, according to him, is peculiar to the final years of the Napoleonic adventure. For Della Seta the comic operas testify to a loss of the faith in dialogue and exchange typical of Mozart’s mature buffe, without reflecting an incipient Romantic belief in the expression of individual interiority.32 Perhaps the most intriguing suggestion has come from Marco Emanuele, who, in examining Rossini’s repetitive techniques within single movements, has invoked the notion of a therapy against alienation, of an escape from a reality that has ceased to make sense. The reality to which Emanuele refers is not the early nineteenth century, however, but the final decades of the twentieth and the so-­called Rossini renaissance. Emanuele’s case highlights how, while many of these interpretations of Rossini’s dramaturgy rely on analyses of various aspects of the composer’s style, none takes into serious and sustained consideration the early nineteenth-­ century Rossinian discourse, especially the way it figured the relationship between reality and representation, nor the cultural, social, and political circumstances in which these operas were initially conceived, performed, seen, and heard. As a consequence, nobody has linked their theatricality with the theatricality of Italians, generated by their traumatic initial encounter with modernity—a historical and conceptual category that, while remaining profoundly connected to specific historical events, in this context goes beyond any localized and largely untenable separation between the Napoleonic years and the Restoration.

  As an envoi to this chapter, I make a brief gesture toward other manifestations of theatricality at the moment of modernity that could profitably be compared with Rossini’s operas. The first that comes to mind is the genre of mélodrame, probably the most important and certainly the most durable theatrical legacy of the French Revolution. Mélodrame presented on the physical stage those moral certainties conspicuously lacking from—or at least endlessly debated



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on—the metaphorical stage of public politics. A crucial aspect of mélodrame was its obsessive use of repetition—structural, narrative, rhetorical, linguistic, and performative. Such structural hammering was instrumental in conveying its politically redemptive and socially reconciliatory message. Repetition is what makes both commentators of the era and present-­day scholars consider the genre of mélodrame an eminent example of theatricality.33 Generally speaking, Rossini’s operas are not mélodramatiques (although at least La gazza ladra is based on a mélodrame and exhibits several traits of the French genre), but their fundamental allegiance to repetition makes the comparison with the mélodrame meaningful in cultural and psychological terms, if not necessarily in theatrical or musical ones.34 Two other manifestations of theatricality as a reaction to the trauma of modernity are worth mentioning. They come not from Italy or France, but from Germany, another place where this trauma was felt with particular force. While theatricality was not a crucial constituent of the discourse of German national character, as it was of the Italian one, it did characterize some specific artistic responses to this trauma that originated in the German-­speaking regions. One is a short text, Über das Marionettentheater (The Puppet Theater; 1811) by Heinrich von Kleist, and the other the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. Kleist’s short but complex and paradoxical text—ostensibly the first-­ person narrative of the author’s encounter and conversation with Mr. C., a prominent ballet dancer—argues that marionettes are superior to real dancers, since human beings, once they lost their original innocence, are in the grips of self-­knowledge and self-­consciousness, while marionettes are not only free of the law of gravity, but have no sense of a past and no consciousness, and thus can move with a freedom and grace no longer attainable by human beings.35 The figure of the marionette has been evoked by several critics in connection with the characters of Rossini’s comic operas. Considered from the point of view of Kleist’s story, Rossini’s theatricality can indeed be seen as an attempt to construct a world in which there is neither knowledge nor memory of the fall: that is, the trauma of modernity. In this sense, the relationship between this theatricality and the theatricality of Italians is by no means a simple transposition on stage of a specific take on reality characteristic of early nineteenth-­ century Italy. On the contrary, Rossini uses theatricality as a way to counter the reasons for and causes of this peculiarly Italian take on reality—ignore, forget, go beyond, obliterate. In other words, he issues an invitation to a dif-

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ferent reality. One reason for his success may be that he chose a means that Italians recognized as peculiarly theirs. The other example of German theatricality worth a brief mention in this context is the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. In the painter’s own words, “any kind of illusion has a repugnant effect, like any kind of deception. A painting must stand as a painting, made by human hand; not seek to disguise itself as Nature.”36 Following this code, Friedrich constructed his canvases to radically disrupt the relationship between nature and painting. By means of various technical and iconographical choices, Friedrich emphasized the distance between painted landscapes and real ones, most famously by including a figure looking at the landscape and therefore away from the viewer, thus emphasizing the landscape’s own artificiality to this viewer, its essence as a doubly mediated take on reality, while simultaneously thematizing the act of watching somebody watching.37 Friedrich and Rossini have in common not only the insistence on the disconnection between reality and representation (pictorial or operatic) but also the explicit and recurring thematization of the means by which this disconnection is achieved in their works. Both have adopted a radically skeptical stance toward the possibility of making sense of modern reality, emphasizing instead the virtues of an “essentially theatrical” vision that does “not seek to disguise itself as Nature.” Combining Friedrich’s words with those of the Venetian critic of 1823, the only value worth striving for in modern art is the idea that a painting or an opera have a presence and a meaning all their own. The artwork is not dependent on a connection with reality that is beyond human reach, but is “made by human hand.” In other words, the only illusion available to modern viewers or operagoers is that something meaningful is being presented (rather than represented)—that is, the illusion that paintings and operas make better sense than reality.

10

Repertory The critic of the Corriere milanese was less than thrilled about having to review a performance of L’Italiana in Algeri that took place at La Scala in August 1815: This gentle pilgrim [i.e., L’Italiana], after having traveled over half of the musical globe, has come to look for fortune in Milan’s foremost theater, to which the title of Hospitium caritatis ac providentiae [hospice of charity and providence: i.e., a care home for the elderly] is well suited. She will be followed by others, more or less past their prime, as the fashion for such early produce strengthens itself on our stages thanks to the public’s endless goodwill. Beautiful! Truly beautiful, and also moral, this new system of picking up here and there works repeated a hundred times in a year! I say moral because it opens a road through which the productions at La Scala will give way to those at the minor theaters—something called not opera seria or giocosa, but a charitable deed [opera pia]. Anyway, for a few more days L’Italiana in Algeri can be comfortable anywhere and at any time, as the applause with which it has been welcome this time proves. Talking about the beauties of this composition would be repeating what is already well-­known. . . . Forecasting the point that will be reached by the indifference of those who love variety is a bit difficult, since this is the first case when such indifference has been tested (but it won’t be the last).1

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The reason behind such uncharitable sarcasm is that L’Italiana had been produced in Milan twice already, and both times at theaters decidedly less prestigious than La Scala: the Teatro Re, in April 1814, and the Teatro Carcano, exactly a year later and only four months before the La Scala performances. Part of the reviewer’s unease, then, was certainly connected to a perceived breach of the conventions traditionally governing the Milanese theatrical hierarchy. The larger issue exercising him, however, concerned a crucial new development in the world of Italian opera in the early nineteenth century: the rise of the repertory. The reasons why repertory is crucial to a study of the early nineteenth-­ century Rossinian discourse go well beyond chronological contiguity: Rossini’s operas are at the dead center of this phenomenon. What is more, thinking about the repertory raises complex questions about repetition and difference, sameness and variety (as the Milanese critic was evidently well aware), questions that contribute new insights to the exploration of these central themes of the book. In the present chapter I investigate some aspects of the encounter between repertory and Rossinian discourse in early nineteenth-­century Italy, progressively broadening the perspective from theaters to other sites of music consumption, and eventually ending up in the countryside.

  It is no exaggeration to say that the concept of a modern operatic repertory appeared first in connection with repeated revivals of Rossini’s operas, particularly, if by no means exclusively, in Italy. The only significant precedent consisted in the recurrence of a few old tragédies lyriques at the Paris Opéra over the course of the eighteenth century, a geographically and institutionally unique practice that had all but disappeared by the early nineteenth century. Italian operatic scores had increasingly traveled as the eighteenth century progressed, but these operas were very seldom performed in the same city in more than one season. Some operas by Mozart, especially Le nozze di Figaro, La clemenza di Tito, and above all Don Giovanni, became repertory pieces in the German-­speaking lands and in London in the early nineteenth century.2 But Rossini’s works were the first to be revived repeatedly throughout Europe in the first half of the century, so for the first time in the history of opera spectators in Milan, Paris, London, or Madrid—as well as in many provincial cities—could attend performances of the same work at more or less regular intervals during the course of their lives.

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Let us start with a broad, nineteenth-­century overview of a single theater, Milan’s La Scala. Otello was frequently performed there until 1870; Mosè (an Italian version of Moïse et Pharaon rather than the original Mosè in Egitto) survived until 1869, but Semiramide was performed as late as 1881, and Guillaume Tell (as Guglielmo Tell, of course) even later, 1899. Among the comic operas only Il barbiere di Siviglia remained in the repertory after the 1860s, but it did so in an astonishingly healthy manner: the longest period that La Scala audiences have gone without a Barbiere is only fifteen years, between 1890 and 1905. Since its house premiere in 1820, the opera was performed in eighteen years of the nineteenth century and was revived at more or less regular intervals over the course of the twentieth. This observation tallies with the general notion that Il barbiere is the first opera to have been constantly revived ever since its premiere, especially if not exclusively in Italy. La Scala was but one of several theaters where opera could be performed in Milan during the nineteenth century, as the review with which I began testifies. What is more, the most meaningful point of view from which to consider the establishment of the repertory in the case of particularly rich operatic centers such as Milan is not the single theater, but the whole city, since in several cases there was significant overlap among the patrons of different theaters—if not, why would the critic of the Corriere milanese complain about L’Italiana at La Scala? Let us both broaden our focus spatially to include all Milanese theaters, then, and at the same time narrow it down chronologically to the decade following the first arrival of a Rossini opera in the Lombard capital, La pietra del paragone, which scored a memorable success at La Scala in September 1812 (see table 10.1).3 As this table clearly shows, the turning point in terms of the repertory came in 1815. The previous November had already seen the first revival of an opera by Rossini, with the Teatro Re repeating Demetrio e Polibio less than a year and a half after its premiere at the Carcano. Over the course of 1815 the audience of the Teatro Re saw this work twice more, in March and October, while La pietra del paragone, L’inganno felice, and L’Italiana in Algeri also came back to Milanese stages—the latter twice, as we have seen. In fact, all Rossini operas performed in Milan in 1815 had already been staged in the city over the course of the previous two and a half years. This state of affairs was not only utterly unprecedented, but would have been simply unthinkable only five years earlier, when the overwhelming majority of operas performed in Milan or any other Italian city were new to the place.

Table 10.1 Rossini’s operas in Milan, 1812–21

Year and month

Title

Theater

1812 September 1813

La pietra del paragone

Scala

L’inganno felice Demetrio e Polibio Tancredi Aureliano in Palmira

Santa Radegonda Carcano Re Scala

L’Italiana in Algeri Il Turco in Italia Demetrio e Polibio

Re Scala Re

La pietra del paragone Demetrio e Polibio L’Italiana in Algeri L’inganno felice L’Italiana in Algeri Demetrio e Polibio

Re Re Carcano Re Scala Re

L’inganno felice Il barbiere di Siviglia Tancredi Tancredi

Scala Re Carcano Re

L’inganno felice La gazza ladra Il barbiere di Siviglia Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra La Cenerentola

Scala Scala Re Carcano Scala

Ciro in Babilonia Il barbiere di Siviglia Tancredi Otello

Scala Carcano Carcano Re

July December 1814 April August November 1815 January March April July August October 1816 May June July 1817 April May June August 1818 January March June July

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Table 10.1 Continued

Year and month

Title

Theater

1818 (continued) August December

Torvaldo e Dorliska La pietra del paragone

Scala Re

La Cenerentola L’Italiana in Algeri Il barbiere di Siviglia Tancredi La Cenerentola La pietra del paragone Bianca e Falliero

Scala Re Carcano Carcano Re Re Scala

L’occasione fa il ladro La gazza ladra Il barbiere di Siviglia Tancredi Il barbiere di Siviglia

Carcano Scala Carcano Carcano Scala

La donna del lago Il Turco in Italia Il Turco in Italia L’Italiana in Algeri Il barbiere di Siviglia Eduardo e Cristina Aureliano in Palmira La Cenerentola Tancredi

Scala Carcano Lentasio Carcano Carcano Re Carcano Scala Carcano

1819 January March July December

1820 April

May September 1821 February April May June July August December

The following years saw a consolidation of this phenomenon, with Il barbiere di Siviglia, a relatively late arrival (June 1816), already established by the end of the decade (1812–21) as the most frequently revived title, together with Tancredi—which, however, had been around longer (since December 1813). During the 1820s Il barbiere’s popularity continued to increase, with the opera eventually implanting itself into the consciousness of Milanese operagoers



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with such fierceness that, as we have just seen, they would never again be able to do without it entirely—they still cannot. In fact, they probably continued to get their Il barbiere fix even when the opera was not performed at La Scala between 1890 and 1905, since comic works were being produced ever more frequently on secondary stages as the nineteenth century progressed. A word of clarification about my choice to focus on Milan. It was hardly the most Rossinian among the main Italian operatic centers in the second decade of the nineteenth century. In fact, Rossini’s operas were revived more frequently over the same decade in Venice than in Milan, both in absolute terms and in relative ones, if we take into account the higher number of active theaters in Venice for at least part of this period. What is more, Rossini’s works began to be repeated with comparable frequency at more or less the same time in other important places such as Bologna, Florence, Rome, and, eventually, Naples. My focus on Milan is justified by the fact that a similar focus characterizes the chapters on style and self-­borrowing. By doing the same here, I add a new perspective on an already partially known territory, while at the same time offering a reasonably clear vista over operatically active Italy in the initial decades of the nineteenth century. Let us now look at what happened in a provincial city such as Cremona, historically part of Lombardy and located about one hundred kilometers southeast of Milan. Here opera was performed in only one theater, the Teatro della Concordia, and the number of yearly productions oscillated on average between two and seven (see table 10.2).4 The first Rossini opera ever to be performed in Cremona, L’Italiana in Algeri in 1817, was also the first to be revived—which means the first opera ever to be revived in Cremona—two years later and again in 1824. The only other opera to return to the city twice by 1830 was La Cenerentola (1819, 1821, and 1826), but several others came back at least once: in order of first local performance, Il barbiere di Siviglia, L’inganno felice, Aureliano in Palmira, Eduardo e Cristina, Otello, La pietra del paragone, La gazza ladra, and Matilde di Shabran. In fact, works performed only once over this period are a minority (six compared to eight staged twice and two staged three times). After 1830 the trend would continue, with further revivals of La Cenerentola, Il Turco in Italia, L’inganno felice, Otello, Mosè, and Semiramide. Over the course of the nineteenth century the ever popular Barbiere would be performed again in 1831, 1836, 1842, 1856, 1865, and 1878, leaving all other operas well behind. As we can see, then, the history of the establishment of

Table 10.2 Rossini’s operas in Cremona, 1817–30

Year and season

Title

1817 Carnival 1818 Carnival Autumn

L’Italiana in Algeri Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra Demetrio e Polibio Il barbiere di Siviglia L’inganno felice

1819 Carnival Spring Autumn

Sigismondo La Cenerentola L’Italiana in Algeri

1820 Carnival Summer

Aureliano in Palmira Eduardo e Cristina

1821 Summer Autumn

La Cenerentola Il Turco in Italia Otello

1822 Carnival

La pietra del paragone

1823 Carnival

La gazza ladra

1824 Carnival Autumn

L’Italiana in Algeri La pietra del paragone La donna del lago

1825 Carnival

Spring Autumn

Matilde di Shabran Il barbiere di Siviglia L’inganno felice La pietra del paragone Aureliano in Palmira

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Table 10.2 Continued

Year and season

Title

1826 Carnival

La Cenerentola

1827 Autumn

Mosè in Egitto Otello

1828 Carnival Autumn

Semiramide Eduardo e Cristina

1829 Carnival

La gazza ladra

1830 Carnival

Matilde di Shabran

a Rossinian repertory in provincial Cremona is similar to that of metropolitan Milan, although the chronological frame shifts about a decade (hence my decision to include productions up to 1830 in the table): if in Milan Rossini’s works began to be consistently repeated in the mid-­1810s, in Cremona this did not happen until the mid-­1820s. Here I have traced the emergence of a Rossinian repertory in two northern Italian cities, one among the most prominent operatic centers, the other a provincial outpost with a regular opera season. The landscape would be similar in central Italy, especially Tuscany and the central and eastern portions of the Papal States (Umbria and the Marche), while it would look quite different in the South. Here opera was far less regularly performed except in Naples and Palermo, and a repertory would establish itself considerably later, thus involving Rossini’s works only partially. Talking about the operatic repertory in Italy during Rossini’s active career means talking mostly about the North and Center, then, since there was—and still is—more opera there. Adopting a “national” perspective (quotes are de rigueur), therefore, means by necessity focusing more on certain regions. While I believe that there is no deeper conclusion to be drawn from this observation, at least in the present context, it

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seems nonetheless necessary to remind ourselves of this state of affairs, unless repetitions of “Italy” and “Italian” lead us to believe otherwise. But who were exactly these Italian spectators who in the space of a few years developed such a strong taste for seeing the same operas repeatedly? The composition of audiences in early nineteenth-­century Italian theaters remains an underresearched topic, and those who have addressed it have unfailingly mentioned the historiographical and methodological difficulties it entails. In chapter 8 I briefly mentioned middle- and upper-­class Italians in this respect, which is roughly right but perhaps too restrictive. According to historian Carlotta Sorba, audiences varied to some extent in different cities, but their broad composition was similar. Italian theaters constituted a particularly explicit instance of a hierarchical organization of society: aristocratic families rented, mostly on a yearly basis, first- and second-­row boxes—the latter the most sought after because farther removed from the parterre while still affording an excellent view of the stage. Some upper-­middle class families—rich merchants, lawyers, and doctors, and above all particularly prominent yet untitled civil servants—might occupy some of these lower boxes, but this demographic was normally relegated to the third and, if it existed, fourth row. The parterre was an almost exclusively male space—a woman seen there would see her reputation immediately compromised—where military officers, midlevel civil servants, lawyers, and doctors, as well as the wealthier shop owners, rentiers, and finally tourists mingled rather freely, angling for the better seats (which were normally not assigned) when not walking around, especially at the back. The uppermost level, the gallery or loggione, was occupied by the servants of the aristocrats seated below, as well as by artisans, less well-­off shopkeepers, lower-­level civil servants, and, in university towns, students.5 As this list suggests, while members of the nobility and the upper-­middle class dominated audiences—not only in numerical terms, but also because the annual fees they paid for their boxes constituted the main income for theaters—members of the lower-­middle class and even servants could and would attend performances with some degree of regularity. Sorba points out how government subsidies as well as box rentals made it possible to keep prices for the parterre and the gallery quite low, thus guaranteeing access to a wider representation of society.6 Only members of the working classes were excluded from theaters (with the partial exception of servants, as we have seen): an exclusion that reflected a wider social marginalization that saw them kept out of



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many public spaces and activities, in the later Napoleonic years no less than in the early Restoration ones.

  So far I have focused on the repetition of Rossini operas in the same theater or city in different years or seasons. Yet, another related aspect also deserves attention: the increasing dominance of these works over those of other composers in early nineteenth-­century Italian theaters. This aspect is not strictly a matter of repertory, which usually refers to the repetition of individual works rather than the preponderance of works by a particular composer. However, its relevance for an investigation of repertorial issues seems rather evident, especially in light of my earlier conclusions about self-­borrowing and style, as well as the permeable boundaries between individual Rossini operas. In any case, as for the repertory narrowly conceived, we find ourselves in front of an utterly unprecedented and since unrepeated phenomenon in the history of opera anywhere in the world: the overwhelming dominance of a single composer, Rossini. Statistically significant data for the 1820s and the 1830s gathered by Marcello Conati shows the extent of this phenomenon.7 Of all the operas performed in Italian theaters during the 1820s, over forty percent were by Rossini. In 1822, 1823, 1827, and 1828 this increased to over forty-­five percent, an astounding figure. No less astounding is the number of productions of Rossini’s works when compared to those of other composers. Conati has counted a total of 373 opera productions in Italian theaters in the year 1820: 150 were of works by Rossini; 21 by Pietro Generali; 17 by Giovanni Simone Mayr; 15 by Stefano Pavesi; and 13 by Giovanni Pacini, as well as a few others by Carlo Coccia, Luigi Mosca, and the young Saverio Mercadante. Looking at how often individual works were performed during this year, we discover that La Cenerentola came first (29 productions), followed by Il barbiere (25), L’inganno felice (16), La gazza ladra (13), and Il Turco in Italia (11). In 1823, of 335 productions, 152 were of Rossini’s operas, 26 of Pacini, 19 of Mercadante, 14 each of Generali and Francesco Morlacchi. That year Il barbiere reached the top spot (19 productions), with La Cenerentola and Matilde di Shabran right behind it (18 each), and La gazza ladra in fourth position (16). Two years later, Rossini’s works were mounted 159 times out of a total of 394 productions, with Mercadante now in second place with 31, followed by Pacini (29), Generali (20), and Domenico Cimarosa (13). Mercadante’s surge was boasted by his recent

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Elisa e Claudio, the most frequently produced opera of the year, but Rossini followed with La Cenerentola, Il barbiere, Matilde di Shabran, and Semiramide. In 1827 Rossini’s operas counted for 176 of 390 productions, Pacini’s for 29, Mercadante’s for 22, Gaetano Donizetti’s for 16, and Generali’s for 15. This year the most performed works were Semiramide and, again, Il barbiere (19 productions), followed again by La Cenerentola (18) and Matilde di Shabran (17). Finally, in 1830 Rossini’s works were mounted 227 times out of a total of 532, Pacini’s 46, Donizetti’s 29, Mercadante’s 28, Vincenzo Bellini’s 22, and Nicola Vaccaj’s 18. This was the year that saw the definitive triumph of Il barbiere with 32 productions, while other operas lagged several lengths behind: Semiramide with 21, La Cenerentola with 20, Tancredi with 18, and La gazza ladra with 17. These data point to a vast gap between Rossini and all other composers. No wonder that Conati has echoed Stendhal in calling Rossini’s command of the operatic world “a field victory, which can rightly be termed ‘Napoleonic.’”8 What is more, only a few titles account for the bulk of performances, almost all of them opere buffe or semiserie. This is not surprising, given that both genres prevailed over opere serie in the repertory of smaller Italian theaters, both provincial and metropolitan, and that these venues were far more numerous than prestigious stages where the serious genre was more assiduously cultivated.9 If we go back to the data about performances in Milan and Cremona presented earlier, we see that they confirm the broader perspective, in terms not only of the genres most frequently revived but also of specific operas. Furthermore, the percentages of performances throughout Italy tally with those of a single provincial but operatically active city like Cremona, with peaks of over half the operas performed in a single year being by Rossini (as in 1825). Nothing of the sort had ever been witnessed anywhere, and has yet to be seen again. In chapter 4 I mentioned that Rossini was the first composer to be considered, in the words of Luca Zoppelli, “the sole or in any case the foremost individual aesthetically responsible for a text, for an autonomously determined opus.” I also pointed to Rossini’s starkly individual and consistent style as one of the main reasons for this unprecedented aesthetic and cultural prominence.10 The notion of repertory is based on repetition no less than the idea of a composer’s individual style, of course, but the connections between repertory and style go beyond mere logical contiguity. I want to suggest that the principal reason for the strong authoriality granted to Rossini in contemporary discourse was the emergence of the repertory in Italian opera houses of the 1810s and 1820s as a phenomenon centered on both Rossini’s individual



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works as well as his whole opus. The speed with which Rossini’s operas spread and with which some of them became staples of the repertory—the formation of which they in fact initiated—encouraged a discursive engagement with them in which the composer occupied an unprecedentedly central position. No longer was the author of an opera, or at least of an Italian opera, considered the author of its words—which could be set to music by different composers and heard even in the same theater repeatedly if always in new settings—as in the eighteenth century. Now it was the composer who was considered the author ultimately responsible for a given work, with such work being seen as a manifestation of a more or less coherent, unified style. This seems to have been Carpani’s position as well. Immediately after trying to explain why charges of self-­borrowing were leveled at Rossini with particularly strong emphasis in a passage I quoted at length earlier, he continues: I want to say a couple of words to defend him [Rossini]. Do you know why these repetitions become more perceptible to the general public? Because Rossini’s adventurous music simply won’t let the world be. Twisted and turned in a hundred different ways, adapted to all instruments, this poor little thing on its rounds is available for each and every use; and these lovely melodies are so docile and discrete that they offer themselves up to whatever comes, and let themselves be travestied, truncated, changed around at will.11

Carpani goes on to list the myriad forms in which Rossini’s music spread throughout Italy and the many different nonoperatic situations in which it featured: military marches, Tafelmusik, church organs, orchestral accompaniment to theatrical dance, the tavern, the street, the salon, pianos, and so on: “We still haven’t heard this music only from church bells or repeated by the plumed inhabitants of wood trees.”12 Obviously, looking at theaters affords only a partial view of the Rossinian sonic landscape of early nineteenth-­ century Italy. Let us then broaden the perspective beyond them.

  As I have already mentioned in previous chapters, printed complete piano-­ vocal scores of operas—that is, the foremost “public” form in which the music of a whole opera was available in the early nineteenth century—began to circulate regularly in Italy over the course of the 1820s. Once again, the phenomenon especially involved Rossini’s works, which were issued in this format be-

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fore those of any other composer. The publisher who promoted them first and most consistently was Ricordi, who began with Maometto II and Otello (1823–24), followed by Semiramide (1825), La Cenerentola (1826), Il barbiere (1827), La gazza ladra (1828), Tancredi, and L’Italiana in Algeri (1829–30).13 These editions consisted of collections of pezzi staccati that had been previously published—usually overtures, arias and duets, and occasionally larger ensembles—now interspersed with whatever was missing, engraved for the occasion. Thus the music of Rossini’s operas had circulated first as selected highlights or morceaux favoris—or that a publisher hoped would become truly favoris. Ricordi had led the other publishers in this instance as well: in 1812 the firm issued what is, to the best of my knowledge, the first ever piece by Rossini to be printed in Italy, the duet “Questo cor ti giura amore” from Demetrio e Polibio—an early Milanese favorite, as we have seen.14 Piano-­vocal scores, though, constitute only a portion, albeit significant, of the sources through which Rossini’s music spread. In fact, complete or nearly complete operas were available in arrangements for solo piano before they were issued in piano-­vocal score. Ricordi put on the market piano arrangements of Il barbiere and La Cenerentola in late 1820 or early 1821, La donna del lago in 1821, and then, in the next two years, La pietra del paragone, L’Italiana in Algeri, L’inganno felice, and Armida—all before they published the first piano-­ vocal score of an opera by Rossini in 1823.15 Again, piano arrangements of morceaux favoris predated those of entire works. But music from these works was also available in several arrangements for various performing forces. Some famous pieces were disseminated in several different piano-­vocal reductions; but equally or perhaps even more important were their instrumental arrangements, not only for solo piano but also for a plethora of other combinations, from solo flute to two guitars, and from string quartet to violin and cello.16 Let us take as a typical example La gazza ladra—a successful work but by no means the most famous. In 1817, the year of its premiere at La Scala, Ricordi put on the market, in order of publication: the duet “Ebben, per mia memoria” in piano-­vocal score; this same duet, the trio “O nume benefico,” the aria “Di piacer mi balza il cor,” and the coro e preghiera “Deh tu reggi in tal momento” in full score; the overture for piano duet; “Di piacer mi balza il cor” and “O nume benefico” for piano solo; and “Di piacer mi balza il cor” for voice and guitar. The following year saw the appearance of the aria “Il mio piano è preparato,” the duet “Come frenar il pianto,” and the aria “Vieni fra queste braccia” in piano-­vocal score, and a guitar arrangement of the overture. The year 1820 was



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particularly rich: “Di piacer mi balza il cor” for solo flute; the overture, “Di piacer mi balza il cor,” “O nume benefico,” and “Ebben per mia memoria” for two violins and cello; “Di piacer mi balza il cor” and “Ebben per mia memoria” for two cellos; “Ebben per mia memoria” for violin and flute; and almost all the pieces not yet published for solo piano in this particular arrangement. The complete opera for string quartet arrived in 1823, as did “O nume benefico” for piano duet. The overture for violin, flute, and guitar is difficult to date precisely but certainly appeared in the early 1820s. As already mentioned, the piano-­ vocal score of the whole opera eventually arrived in 1828. A popular piece like the duet “Ebben per mia memoria,” then, could be performed outside the theater by voice and piano, piano solo, two violins and cello, two cellos, violin and flute, string quartet, and even orchestra (publication of pezzi staccati in full score was actually quite rare and died down rather quickly). Ricordi as well as other Italian music publishers also put on the market instrumental compositions based on the most popular melodies from famous operas. In the case of La gazza ladra, Ricordi’s catalogue featured, among others, a Tema con variazioni per pianoforte on “O nume benefico” by Bartolomeo Grassi (1817), a Fantasia per pianoforte sopra diversi motivi della “Gazza ladra” by Francesco Pollini (1818), Sei variazioni per chitarra sopra un motivo della “Gazza ladra” by Carlo Gherardini (1818), and a Capriccio per pianoforte e arpa on “Di piacer mi balza il cor” by Benedetto Negri (1819). La gazza ladra is also featured in two of the Tre pot-­pourri per pianoforte sopra temi delle opere di Rossini e altri compositori by “autori diversi” (1823), while “Vieni fra queste braccia” is the second of the Six airs italiens pour flûte avec accomp. de piano by Jean-­Louis Tulou (1827). Finally, a few motives from La gazza ladra might have also ended, for example, in the Pot-­pourri per arpa, flauto d’amore e corno inglese estratto dalle opere di Rossini by Michele Campiani (1822). Rossini’s music was far more popular in print than that of any other contemporary composer. As Carlida Steffan has documented, if successful pieces from operas by the likes of Luigi Mosca and Morlacchi first printed by Ricordi in the first decade of the century were issued in a little more than a hundred copies by the time their plates were destroyed in the early 1820s, some among Rossini’s pieces reached several hundred. The duet “Questo cor ti giura amore” mentioned above, for example, totaled 661 copies, while Rosina’s cavatina in Il barbiere, “Una voce poco fa,” first issued in 1818, reached 426.17 If these figures look rather small to us in absolute terms, we should keep in mind, first, that

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Ricordi was only one among several publishers in different Italian cities that put on the market the same pieces, and, second, that, as we have seen, the combination of voice and piano was only one of the many possible arrangements in which a piece was issued in print. More research on print runs is needed for a clearer picture of the matter, but one partial conclusion at this point is that, outside the theater, Rossini’s melodies might have been played on all kinds of instruments much more frequently than they were sung—­although this observation is limited to their “literate” consumption, by people who could read music. As we shall see below and in the next chapter, the landscape changes once we move beyond this sphere. In any case, whatever way we look at it, from the viewpoint of single theaters, or cities, or the whole of Italy, or single works, or print runs, Rossini’s music emerges as by far the most frequently repeated in the initial decades of the nineteenth century. More importantly, such repetition sits at a crucial early point in the development of an operatic repertory in Italy, a phenomenon that is historically unthinkable without Rossini. But adopting a wide perspective beyond the theaters as such suggests an important question: when speaking of a repertory in connection with Rossini’s music in early nineteenth-­century Italy, what exactly are we speaking of? Historical investigations into the development of an operatic repertory generally focus on individual works, just as I have done in the initial pages of the present chapter. As soon as we start to take into consideration the production and circulation of manuscript and especially printed music, however, we realize that the whole opera is only one kind of object involved in the formation of this repertory. Another is the multimovement number. To take the two pieces just mentioned: “Questo cor ti giura amore” is in one movement (Andantino), but Ricordi’s print edition included the preceding accompanied recitative, thus making it into a multimovement number of sorts; and “Una voce poco fa” is very clearly articulated in an Andante followed by a Moderato. Yet another kind of object is the single movement, which I explore in the next chapter’s case study of Tancredi’s “Di tanti palpiti.” These different objects point toward different typologies of consumption in different circumstances and settings, and for different purposes. These issues have been explored by musicologists Thomas Christensen, Carlida Steffan, and Hilary Poriss, among others.18 Here, I would like to expand on Poriss’s suggestion that, at the same time as a repertory of whole



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works was being established, a “steady constellation” of inserted arias also appeared as an important feature of Italian opera in the first half of the nineteenth century. As she makes clear, this near-­repertorial status of substitute pieces relied on the new modes of consumption made possible by the ever increasing spread of the piano in bourgeois homes throughout Europe—­ although this happened to a lesser extent in Italy compared with north of the Alps, since the Italian bourgeoisie was less numerous. Her observation can be neatly extended to include potentially all pezzi staccati, not only insertion ones, as long as a sufficiently large mass of sources exists—or can be proven to have existed—to justify granting repertorial status to individual pieces. If, in other words, Tancredi was an important component of the operatic repertory in early nineteenth-­century Italy, the second movement of its title character’s cavatina, “Di tanti palpiti,” was an incommensurably more important component. Moreover, given the strongly unified stylistic features that characterize Rossini’s entire Italian oeuvre and the self-­borrowing made possible by such a style, we might go as far as to grant a sort of repertorial status to gestures that quickly became associated with this oeuvre, such as the crescendo or the canonic exposition. Although exploring further such hypotheses about gestures may prove difficult, certainly more can be said about individual tunes that might shed some further light on repertorial issues broadly meant.

  Surprisingly, when Carpani lists the variety of occasions, situations, and shapes in which Rossini music spread outside theaters, he fails to mention singing, either the more or less formal performance of a favorite aria with piano accompaniment in a bourgeois salon, or the casual humming of a tune while walking in the street. Perhaps it was so obvious that it need not even be mentioned. Evidence of the former is supplied by the circulation of pezzi staccati in piano-­vocal score, of course, while the latter is rather harder to substantiate. Yet some support exists for the hypothesis that at least some of Rossini’s melodies were sung not so much in the street, but on the canal and in the fields. By mentioning the canal I am referring to Stendhal’s well-­known anecdote of Venetian gondoliers singing Tancredi’s “Di tanti palpiti” immediately after the opera’s premiere in 1813. I will discuss this special case in the following chapter. Here I would like to conclude by mentioning some evidence that takes us outside the urban sphere and into the countryside. In doing so we leave behind us issues of authorship and authoriality.

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A scene in Antonio Fogazzaro’s 1895 novel Piccolo mondo antico, set in the 1850s, describes an elderly man singing to a child “the song ‘Ombretta sde­ gnosa del Missipipì,’ mangling the exotic name a bit.”19 Fogazzaro gives no indication that either he or his characters are aware that this is in fact Pacuvio’s song from Act 1 of La pietra del paragone: indeed, by saying that the “exotic name” is mangled by the singer, he proves not to know that the mangling could be found already in Luigi Romanelli’s libretto of the opera. As Marcello Conati has pointed out, Pietra had completely disappeared from the theaters by the 1840s: since Fogazzaro was born in 1842, it is not surprising that he could not trace the melody back to Rossini.20 In other words, by some point in the mid-­nineteenth century, “Ombretta sdegnosa” must have become a kind of folk song. “Ombretta sdegnosa” bears evident markers of its identity as a stage song, especially in the simplicity and memorability of the initial phrase, but evidence of a Rossinian genealogy for folk songs is not limited to stage music. Conati has demonstrated that a few lines from the Act 1 quartet “Siete turchi: non vi credo” of Il Turco in Italia appear in bowdlerized form in several versions of a folk song from the northern Italian provinces of Verona and Trento, known since the mid-­nineteenth century and recorded by Conati himself in the 1970s. The incipit of the folk song varies, but its most common form is “I scalini de la scala.” I would point out that some versions may include echoes of verses from L’Italiana in Algeri and possibly Il barbiere. Compare the following excerpt from “I scalini de la scala” with four lines from L’Italiana’s Act 1 duet between Isabella and Taddeo, and the final two lines of the same excerpt with three much-­repeated ones from Il barbiere’s Act 2 quintet: “I scalini de la scala” Va al diaolo, va in malora che con te non ho da dire. Buona notte miei signori, vado a letto a riposar. L’Italiana in Algeri, Duet Isabella-­Taddeo “Ai capricci della sorte” ISABELLA Vanne al diavolo, in malora! Più non vo con te garrir.



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TADDEO Buona notte: sì . . . signora, ho finito d’impazzir. Il barbiere di Siviglia, Quintet “Don Basilio! . . . (Cosa veggo!)” Presto, presto, andate a letto. Presto andate a riposar. Buona sera, mio signore.

The echoes seem rather obvious, even if words belonging to a high linguistic register such as garrire (generally “to chatter,” but in this context “to argue”) are turned into much more common ones, in this case dire (to say), in the process wreaking havoc with the poetic meter—whose consistency is hardly a prominent concern of folk songs. According to Conati, musical connections between “I scalini de la scala” and Il Turco in Italia are possible, although these seem to me to point more to a generalized influence of typically operatic turns of phrase rather than to specific musical derivation from Il Turco’s quartet. Note that Il Turco was by no means among such popular Rossini titles as L’Italiana and Il barbiere.21 Rare as they are, these cases of migration into the northern Italian countryside of Rossini’s music, or at least of some texts he had set, bring home with full force the wide geographical and social scope and absolutely unprecedented level of popularity and therefore of repetition reached by at least some of this music in nineteenth-­century Italy. This phenomenon goes well beyond the usual parameters, institutions, and locations taken into account when investigating the rise of the repertory in nineteenth-­century opera. To return to the review with which I began this chapter: “those who love variety” had become either indifferent to it, or had turned into those who valued repetition over variety. The formation of a multilayered and broadly articulated repertory centered on Rossini’s music bears witness to crucial transformations in the social consumption, aesthetic conception, and psychological functions of this music.

11

“Di tanti palpiti” A special case can help us understand better the dissemination of Rossini’s music in early nineteenth-­century Italy, that of “Di tanti palpiti,” the final movement of the title role’s entrance aria in Tancredi. This was by all accounts Rossini’s most famous piece in the 1810s and 1820s. When it comes to it, hardly a commentator of the past century has failed to mention Stendhal’s account of the Venetian premiere (February 1813) in his Life of Rossini—in which he mentions the tune by one of its internal lines: Everyone, from the gondolier all the way up to the grandest lord, repeated “Ti rivedrò, mi rivedrai”; and in the courts of law the judges were obliged to impose silence upon the spectators, who sang “Ti rivedrò!.” This is a sure fact, of which I have found hundreds of witnesses in the salon of Madame Benzoni.1

If we turn to newspaper reviews and reports from 1813 Venice, however, we find nothing suggesting that “Di tanti palpiti” was instantly famous and adopted by both gondoliers and aristocrats.2 In fact, Tancredi itself was not an immediate hit: it took a few years for it to spread to several northern and central Italian cities, with 1816–17 emerging as a turning point in this respect—its near-­contemporary L’Italiana in Algeri, which also premiered in Venice in 1813 (May), traveled much faster.3 Nor were the opera, Tancredi’s cavatina, or its final movement an instant commercial success on the printed music market, 179



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at least as compared with other operas and some of their component numbers or tunes. It took a few years for “Di tanti palpiti” to emerge as a morceau favori. The evidence from print runs is telling. As far as Ricordi is concerned, it took until 1829 for the piano-­vocal score to appear, and of the whole cavatina rather than its final movement alone. Other arrangements came well before, but by no means immediately.4 A Scherzo di fantasia Op. 37 sopra la cavatina “Tu che accendi questo core” nell’opera Il Tancredi del Sig.r M. Gioachino Rossini for piano by Francesco Pollini, which totaled a high print run of 455 copies, was published in 1817, whereas the Variazioni per arpa o piano-­forte sopra la cavatina “Di tanti palpiti” nell’opera Tancredi del Sig.r M. Rossini by one Benedetto Negri was printed 333 times starting in 1820. Note how in 1817 the whole cavatina was indicated by its incipit, “Tu che accendi,” whereas three years later only its second and final movement—that is, “Di tanti palpiti”—needed to be mentioned. In sum, the evidence that “Di tanti palpiti” was an exceptional case on the printed music market in 1810s Italy is rather inconclusive. It was a very successful piece, but no more than, say, Rosina’s cavatina from Il barbiere di Siviglia, whose Ricordi piano-­vocal score would eventually total 426 copies.5 If we go beyond arrangements and transcriptions to include testimony about the spread of this piece beyond the stage and salon, new and intriguing elements emerge. Stendhal’s Life of Rossini, with its mention of gondoliers, was published in late 1823. Richard Taruskin has called attention to a novella by the Russian writer Vladimir Odoyevsky, Vexing Days, from earlier that year, in which a character points out that “Di tanti palpiti” “is so good that every gondolier in Italy is singing it!”6 In fact, as early as 1819 Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley had written in two separate letters to different recipients that, while staying in the Tuscan countryside, they had heard farm laborers sing “Mi rivedrai, ti rivedrò” “not very melodiously, but very loud” (Mary) and “by no means in an operatic style” (Percy).7 That same year, another English traveler, William Stewart Rose, describing in a letter to a friend written from Venice “the street music of Italy,” added that “the present favourite air, ‘which carmen whistle,’ is the ‘Di tanti palpiti’ in Tancredi; which is warbled with as much passion as the most tolderollol [sic] tunes are bawled about in England.”8 Except for two further intriguing cases that I will consider below, these are the first sources to mention the dissemination of this tune as well as, more generally, Rossini’s music in Italy not only outside the theater, but also outside



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the social classes who might have had a direct connection to opera—either because they actually went to the theater or because they played or heard operatic music in private or semiprivate spaces through transcriptions, adaptations, and so on, as I discussed in the previous chapter. Investigating “Di tanti palpiti,” therefore, can function as a privileged case study of the paths taken by Rossini’s music as it spread to sites apparently not reached by opera until then. At the same time, it is worth reminding ourselves that the conclusions we reach by investigating it cannot automatically be granted representative status.

  As readers will have already realized, three of the writers I have quoted above, Stendhal and the Shelleys, cite the movement not by its incipit, “Di tanti palpiti,” but by two of its internal lines, “Mi rivedrai, ti rivedrò.” Here is the text of “Di tanti palpiti” by librettist Gaetano Rossi: Di tanti palpiti, di tante pene, da te mio bene, spero mercè. Mi rivedrai . . . ti rivedrò . . . Ne’ tuoi bei rai mi pascerò. Deliri, sospiri . . . accenti, contenti! . . . Sarà felice, il cor mel dice, il mio destino, vicino a te. For so many alarms, for so many sorrows, from thee, my love, I hope for a recompense! You will behold me again . . . I will behold you again . . . In the light of thy smiles I shall taste joy again! O transports . . . Sighs . . . Sweet accents . . . Delights. . . . My heart whispers me that my destiny will be happy when near to thee.9



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And here is a text that appears in a collection of Italian “Volkslieder” published in Leipzig in 1829 and edited by Wilhelm Müller, the very same whose poems Franz Schubert set in Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise: Rosina amabile, Dolce mio bene, Partir conviene, Pace non ho. Se sei costante, Fido sarò, Il tuo sembiante Nel cuore avrò. Mio ben, ricordati, Se avvien che io mora, Di chi ti adora, Fedel ti amò. Mi rivedrai Ti rivedrò, Tu penerai, Sospirerò. Io sarò privo Del ben che adoro, Del mio tesoro, Finché vivrò. Mi rivedrai, Ti rivedrò, De’ tuoi bei rai Mi pascerò. Tu sei la speme, L’unico oggetto



“Di taniti palpiti”

Di questo petto; Lo sai, lo so. Come farai? Come farò? Mi scriverai, Ti scriverò. Destino barbaro, Fiero, crudele, Le mie querele Al ciel farò. Tu penerai, Io piangerò; Mi scriverai, Ti scriverò. Vederò Napoli Con dispiacere; Con il pensiero In Roma sto. Ritornerai? Ritornerò. Ma tarderai? Dir non si può. Sarà contento Mio padre un giorno; A te ritorno, Bella, farò. Mi sposerai, Ti sposerò; Tu goderai, Io goderò.

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Con la speranza Mi dai piacere, Ché alfin godere Davver dovrò. Ma sarà presto? Questo non so. A dirti resto: Quando il ciel vo’. Farem le nozze Con più strumenti, E varie genti Inviterò. Tu ballerai, lo ballerò, A’ nostri guai Fine darò.

In a collection of letters ostensibly written from Rome in 1818 and published in 1820, Müller informed a German friend that “Rossini’s light and bouncy operatic music supplies new melodies. ‘Di tanti palpiti,’ the cavatina from Tancredi, followed me in vaudeville form from Vienna to Naples, with the most diverse texts, lamenting and joking, on guitars and barrel organs.”10 Even without this clue, and even without a translation, it should be immediately obvious that this “Rosina amabile” is a long riff on “Di tanti palpiti”: it not only quotes directly “Mi rivedrai, ti rivedrò” (twice) and “de’ tuoi bei rai mi pascerò,” but also mostly builds around the locution “You will do this, I will do this,” a very obvious echo of “You will behold me again, I will behold you again” in ­Tancredi. Müller’s “Rosina amabile” is the earliest-­dated instance of a “song” based on “Di tanti palpiti” that I have been able to trace. It is clearly not a folk song, however, and was never sung by gondoliers or farm laborers. For one, it is much too long, and its language much too literary for a country where only a tiny percentage of the population spoke Italian. It might not even be a song in the sense that it was actually sung, despite being labeled “canzonetta” (a term



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that does not necessarily entail actual music in Italian poetic nomenclature). Müller prefaces it by saying (in Italian) that this is the “passionate speech” that “the young son of a merchant about to leave Rome for Naples in order to obey his father’s orders . . . gives to his beautiful and beloved Rosa about their bitter separation.” Furthermore, the text that follows it in the collection is another long poem, in the same meter and with many similar turns of phrase, about the young man’s return to Rome, which is called “Canzonetta nuova di Domenico Müller.” We might think of Müller’s “Rosina amabile,” then, as the poetic memory of all those songs based on Rossini’s tune that he heard on his way from Vienna to Naples. In any case, the precise relationship between this “Rosina amabile” and what was sung in canals, streets, and fields in Italy in the late 1810s and early 1820s remains unclear. A few other, much later cases, however, bring us considerably closer to these sites. A set of folk songs from the Veneto region collected in the early 1860s by Georg Widter, a German amateur ethnographer, and published in Vienna in 1864 contains the text of a song, “Alla Rosina,” that may well have been sung to the melody of “Di tanti palpiti.” Its initial quatrain reads: “Rosina amabile! / Sei la più bela / Più d’una stela / Risplendi amor” (Lovely Rosina, you are the most beautiful; you shine more than a star, my love).11 My hypothesis is based not only on strong similarities in content—even if this text never quotes Rossi’s directly or goes as near it as Müller’s canzonetta—but also especially on the song’s quinari, the same poetic meter of “Di tanti palpiti,” normally found only in “art” poetry, and therefore also in opera librettos, but never in folk songs, which are overwhelmingly in even-­numbered lines such as ottonari. While this evidence is circumstantial, a slightly later publication (1874– 75), this time of songs from Piedmont collected by ethnographer Giuseppe Ferraro (a native speaker not only of Italian but also of the regional dialect), includes a text very similar to that from the Veneto region, “Rosina amabili”: Rosina amabili T’ei ra pi bela Fiur d’ina steira Risplendi ar cor. Bucca pirfetta Ch’a mi cunsula



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D’ina vus sula Ar vostr’ amor. Quei occhi belli O chi mi piaci Dunar la paci A questo cuor. Tu mi vedrai Mi ti vidrò Li toi bei occhi Mi piaciran. Sarai cuntentu Sarai filici Ir cor mi dici Appress’ a te.12

The two concluding quatrains, missing from the Veneto version, are particularly interesting, since they mean, “You will see me, I will see you, I will like your beautiful eyes. I will be content, I will be happy—my heart tells me— near you.” These lines are very similar to the following lines from “Di tanti palpiti”: “You will see me again . . . I will see you again . . . I will graze in your beautiful eyes. My heart tells me that my fate will be happy near you.” And the poetic meter is again quinari. If my hypothesis that these texts were sung to a variant of the melody of “Di tanti palpiti” is correct, we are presented with the unique case of a northern Italian folk song in quinari: if the melody were not that of “Di tanti palpiti,” there would be no reason for this otherwise unprecedented meter, so out of place in the context of northern Italian folk music. But what happened to the text as it traveled so far from its initial context? If we compare Rossi’s words with Müller’s “Rosina amabile” and the Piedmontese folk song, it becomes clear that the latter two have greatly simplified the vocabulary and especially the syntax of the original. Rossi’s initial quatrain is particularly complex because of the forward placement of “di tanti palpiti,” “di tante pene,” and “da te, mio bene”; a normal word order would be: “Spero da te, mio bene, mercé di tanti palpiti, di tante pene.” No wonder there is no



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trace of this initial quatrain in any version of “Rosina amabile.” The next difficult bit of “Di tanti palpiti” comes with the couplet “Deliri, sospiri . . . accenti, contenti! . . .” This time it is not an issue of syntax, but of meter. In a context of quinari, these two lines are senari, lines whose main accent falls on the fifth syllable. Different poetic meters within the text of an individual movement of an aria or duet in Italian opera librettos of the eighteenth or early nineteenth century are rare, and, to the best of my knowledge, almost unprecedented in Rossini’s entire Italian output.13 On the contrary, they can appear, although not often, in northern Italian folk songs—they do, for example, in the collection featuring the Piedmontese song. And yet, the couplet “Deliri, sospiri . . . accenti, contenti! . . .” is nowhere to be found in any version of “Rosina amabile.” What to conclude? It is remarkable to say the least that, of all movements by Rossini that could have been turned into folk songs, one of the very few in two different meters was picked, only to do away with the meter that, on the face of it, would fit better in the new context. What is left of “Di tanti palpiti,” in any case, is two quatrains of regular quinari characterized by simple syntax and regular meter. What we witness as we observe the transformation of the words of “Di tanti palpiti” into those of a folk song, or at least a “folk song,” then, is a process of systematic simplification. A relatively complex poetic text has become much more straightforward, both syntactically and metrically. William Stewart Rose, the English traveler who in 1819 heard “Di tanti palpiti” “warbled with as much passion as the most tolderollol tunes are bawled about in England,” goes on to observe: “It is curious to watch the progress of refinement. The music is not too delicate for the merest mountaineer; but he often embodies it in words which are more within his reach.” This is precisely what we have observed textwise with “Rosina amabile.” But what of the music being “not too delicate for the merest mountaineer”?

  Regarding the music of “Di tanti palpiti,” Richard Taruskin has asked the crucial question: “What made this particular cabaletta such a favorite?” In a compelling description, he focuses on “the surprising modulation to the flat mediant just where the first stanza seemed about to make its cadence,” a “little jolt” that gives the audience “a pleasurable frisson.” He then points to the team work of harmonic structure and vocal virtuosity “to increase the satisfaction”



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Example 11.1 Tancredi, Cavatina Tancredi, Allegro moderato “Di tanti palpiti”

of the return of the main idea for the final quatrain “Sarà felice, il cor mel dice” (ex. 11.1).14 I wholeheartedly agree that these and other features mentioned by Taruskin might account for the remarkable spread of “Di tanti palpiti” as an operatic aria, to be consumed in all the ways common for such morceaux favoris in the early nineteenth century. But why the craze for this of all Rossini’s



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Example 11.1 cont.

pieces? And why, with time, sung by gondoliers, farm laborers, and mountaineers? Because of that modulation to the flat mediant? Let us take a step back and put “Di tanti palpiti” in context by recalling the discussion of Rossini’s melodic language in chapter 2, especially Damien Colas’s conclusions that “Rossini’s arias are distinguished by their diversity,” and that “a Rossinian melodic phrase . . . often lacks the character of a theme”:



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Example 11.1 cont.

“even when presented for the first time it does not have that quality of instant recognizability typical of themes as such.” I have countered these statements by observing that Rossini’s melodies are generally both more concise and more clearly articulated than those of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries. His more immediately perceivable division into sections, as well as his stronger articulation through different kinds of melodic utterance and orchestral accompaniment, contribute to a sense of heightened structural clarity. A certain number of Rossini’s melodies were thus simpler than most of those found in operas by his immediate predecessors or contemporaries, at least in terms of their rhythmic regularity, which made them sound more clearly structured and therefore gave them an increased sense of predictability. Colas is right when he says that they tend to lack “instant recognizability,” but here I immediately want to add “for us.” I suggest that, back then, they might have been more instantly recognizable than what the public had been used to hearing. But where does “Di tanti palpiti” stand in comparison to other tunes by Rossini? It seems sensible to turn to other melodies in Tancredi, or its near-­ contemporary and, as we have seen, even more successful opera, L’Italiana in Algeri. I am afraid that such comparisons do not yield any conclusive insights. Both operas feature a few other melodies—not many—that, although constructed in rather different ways, might sound to us no less recognizable or



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memorable than “Di tanti palpiti,” especially if we strip them of some of their coloratura. I will pick two likely candidates, one in each opera: “Giusto Dio, che umile adoro,” the slow movement of Amenaide’s aria from Act 2 of Tancredi (ex. 11.2), and “Contenta quest’alma,” the cabaletta of Lindoro’s cavatina from Act 1 of L’Italiana (ex. 11.3). Is the initial pair of phrases of “Di tanti palpiti” perhaps simpler than in both these cases? Is the return of this initial pair more emphatically stated? And what of that move to the flat mediant? In sum, is “Di tanti palpiti” any easier than other comparable melodies by Rossini? Or more difficult? And for whom? I doubt that stronger analytical pressure would yield sufficiently convincing reasons for the unique fate of our tune. Contemporary or near-­ contemporary sources providing us the music of “Rosina amabile” might point us to the fates of “Di tanti palpiti” as it traveled outside theaters and settled more or less comfortably into folk culture, but they are, alas, nowhere to be found. Carpani tells us that Rossini’s melodies “let themselves be travestied, truncated, changed around at will,” but the precise nature of these changes is hard to guess. Did the phrase in the flat mediant survive, for example? We might note that the words it sets, “Ne’ tuoi bei rai mi pascerò,” do appear in some guise or other in the song texts discussed above, but I would not want to grant this detail more explanatory power than it deserves. It is precisely these song texts, however, that might help us formulate a hypothesis, since all their stanzas consist of quatrains of quinari that fit the first eight measures of “Di tanti palpiti.” This feature encourages us to answer one of the questions I have just asked in the positive, although tentatively: the initial pair of phrases of Rossini’s tune might indeed have been heard as simpler than in other cases, more economical and therefore more memorable. My suggestion, then, is that what was left of “Di tanti palpiti” as it became a folk song were its first eight measures—which, it should be noted, goes rather against Rose’s declaration that the music was “not too delicate for the merest mountaineer”: the more complex phrases evidently were, if my hypothesis is correct. We must bid farewell, then, to our beloved modulation to the flat mediant, although the emphatic return of the initial phrase pair at the end of Rossini’s tune will have likely contributed to the transformation of these eight measures into a folk song.

Example 11.2 Tancredi, Aria Amenaide, Andante “Giusto Dio, che umile adoro”

Example 11.3 L’Italiana in Algeri, Cavatina Lindoro, Cabaletta “Contenta quest’alma”

Example 11.3 cont.



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Example 11.3 cont.

  A further text helps locate a final viewpoint from which to consider the extraordinary spread of “Di tanti palpiti.” German botanist and travel writer Georg von Martens had the following to say about Italians’ love of music in his book Reise nach Venedig (1824): The immense love of Italians for music is intimately connected with their melodious language, and it is not without reason when they accuse ultramontane [i.e., Northern/German] music of seriousness and lugubriousness, all acknowledgement of its value notwithstanding. You only have to compare any German folk song with a Venetian one to have this claim confirmed. How famous have become the gentle boating song, “La biondina in gondoletta,” and Paisiello’s “Nel cor più non mi sento” in past years, and more recently Rossini’s incomparable aria “Di tanti palpiti” all over Europe. As is the case with French vaudevilles, successful [Italian] operatic arias return to being folk songs, usually with a changed text, such as the just mentioned “Rosina amabile,” and within a short time span they resound from every alleyway of the city. Street vendors sell the text on printed sheets, they call out “nova bellissima Canzonetta,” and on request they sing the melody until it is learned, which happens very quickly even with the most common boy. Thus the sense for a simple, beautiful expression of feeling in music is retained at least among the people, whereas—lamented by the better musicians—in the products of higher art a great many dissonances, transitions, runs, trills, and daring leaps bury the melody under a torrent of disruptive ornaments or are even intended to replace the shortcomings [of the melody].15



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Example 11.4 Giovanni Simone Mayr or Giovanni Battista Perucchini, “La biondina in gondoleta”

Martens’s text constitutes the most explicit proof I have been able to trace that “Rosina amabile” was indeed based on “Di tanti palpiti.” It also suggests another musical context in which to place “Di tanti palpiti,” that of two other Italian melodies that had managed to conquer Europe not long before Rossini’s tune. “La biondina in gondoletta” (or “gondoleta” or “gondoeta”) is a song in Venetian dialect from the 1780s; the text is by local poet Anton Maria Lamberti, and the music usually attributed either to Giovanni Simone Mayr or to amateur composer Giovanni Battista Perucchini (ex. 11.4).16 “Nel cor più non mi sento” comes instead from an opera, Giovanni Paisiello’s 1788 L’amor contrastato, ossia La molinara (ex. 11.5), and is now well-­known thanks to its inclusion in Alessandro Parisotti’s late nineteenth-­century collection of Arie antiche and because, following this work’s Viennese premiere in 1795, Beethoven composed a set of piano variations on it. Early nineteenth-­century sources for Paisiello’s tune abound, even without taking into account complete or partial scores of the opera; Beethoven was by no means the only one to compose a set of variations on it. The same is true for “La biondina in gondoletta,” which should come as no surprise, given its literate origins, even if its tradition was evidently also oral: Beethoven (again) arranged it for voice accompanied by piano trio in 1816. In fact, I wonder whether Beethoven’s shadow might not lurk behind Martens’s mention of these two tunes as foremost representatives

Example 11.5 Giovanni Paisiello, L’amor contrastato, ossia La molinara, “Nel cor più non mi sento”



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Example 11.5 cont.

of ultimate Italian melodiousness. In light of this possibility, and more generally for uniformity’s sake, I reproduce both melodies as given by Beethoven, adding the text to “Nel cor più non mi sento.”17 Comparing these two tunes to “Di tanti palpiti” is rather problematic, since, as I have said, we do not know exactly what happened to Rossini’s melody as it reached the streets and canals. It is obvious, however, that “La biondina in gondoletta” and “Nel cor più non mi sento”—which share the 6/8 meter and a general rhythmic profile—are both significantly simpler than “Di tanti palpiti” as Rossini composed it. Not only is their degree of repetition higher, but everything happens more quickly, in a shorter space, than in Rossini; thus, the repetition of the same elements, be they melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic, is more immediately and prominently felt. Neither modulates, of course, let alone to as distant a key as the flat mediant. At the same time, Rossini’s wider spectrum of gestures is harnessed toward a more emphatic return of the initial phrase: having moved further away, he makes the arrival back home very clear indeed. Besides the difference in tonal motion—the parameter with the highest degree of difference between “Di tanti palpiti” and the other two tunes—rhythmically both “La biondina in gondoletta” and “Nel cor più non mi sento” are much more internally consistent. A comparative look, then, leaves us with ambiguous evidence as to why Rossini’s melody became so popular as a folk song. It is, on the one hand, longer and more complex than the two other, slightly older Italian “folk songs” with literate origins. On the other, it is more clearly and emphatically articulated. Martens’s 1824 testimony is particularly valuable not just for drawing attention to these other famous tunes but also for at least three additional reasons. The first is that it confirms the relevance of Venice not only for the spread of “Di tanti palpiti” beyond the operatic sphere widely meant but also, more generally, for the relationship between “art” and “popular” music in early



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nineteenth-­century Italy. The Venetian tradition of the so-­called canzone da battello (boating song), to which “La biondina in gondoletta” belongs, dated back at least to the early eighteenth century and had known a moment of booming European fame in the 1740s.18 It occupied a unique space between opera and folk song, since it was literate in origin and its music was systematically written down, but it also circulated orally to a significant extent. The singing gondolier, so crucial to the myth of “Di tanti palpiti,” was already a well-­ established figure in the European imagination thanks to this genre. In this sense, the fact that Tancredi premiered in Venice might have proved particularly convenient for the rise of this myth, since the city provided a ready-­made context for a narrative about the “popular” spread of art music. At the same time, this popularity needs to be put firmly in scare quotes, lest we forget that Venice’s canzoni da battello are far removed from popular or folk music in the present meaning of these terms. It was foreign travelers who liked to imagine they were listening to the spontaneous outpouring of the gondoliers’ music-­ filled souls when they listened to their boating songs. The experience of the Shelleys in the countryside near Leghorn or the singing of “Rosina amabile” in Piedmont in the 1870s point to a different tradition, one for which the term folk can be used without scare quotes, since the literate origins of the tune had been left entirely behind. Martens’s text is also helpful in this context for its explanation of the mechanics of fame. Given what we know not only of eighteenth-­century French vaudevilles (explicitly mentioned by Martens, without forgetting that Müller also uses the term vaudeville in his letter cited above) or of revolutionary and postrevolutionary patriotic songs in both France and Italy, but also of the spread of Neapolitan songs a few decades later, it is no surprise to hear that loose sheets bearing the lyrics to these songs were sold by street vendors. Decidedly less familiar is to read that the same sometimes happened with Italian opera arias of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, turning at least some of these arias into real folk songs. This phenomenon casts the Ricordi print runs cited earlier in a rather different light, with these more elite publications reflecting popularity at one remove, rather than driving it. Probably more relevant in this context are instead the guitars and barrel organs on which Müller said he had heard “Di tanti palpiti” on his journey from Vienna to Naples. These instruments might have acted as a bridge between the opera house and the countryside, making possible a form of consumption that was no longer “high” but was not yet entirely “low”: the literate origins of a melody



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might not have been entirely left behind, but at the same time the ability to read music was no longer necessary. The simple chords underpinning the first eight measures of “Di tanti palpiti” could easily be learned by imitation on a guitar, or even improvised, though that blessed modulation to the flat mediant, if indeed it had made it that far, might have required quite a bit of tentative finger twisting before landing on the right chord. Finally, and most interesting for my argument, is Martens’s explicit connection between repetition and musical memory: street vendors would sing the melody again and again until listeners had learned it. Memory features prominently also in the first Italian text I have found that discusses explicitly the reasons—beyond the usual tropes of “sweetness” and “beauty”—for the fame of “Di tanti palpiti.” This text, which comes from an anonymous Turinese journalist and was published as late as 1838, insists precisely on the mechanics of fame: [At its premiere in Venice] Tancredi was repeatedly applauded, and, when the crowd drawn by that enchanting music left the theater, still palpitating with the evening’s sensations, and spread out on the canals of that enchanting city, in the night’s silence a thousand enthusiastic voices could be heard mixing the tunes of Tancredi with the murmuring of the waves, and even the gondoliers would forget their ancient popular songs in favor of “Di tanti palpiti”: those notes so easy to remember, and composed with such ease, that, when sung by Malanotte or Pasta, they touched the heart with delight!19

Leaving aside for a moment that this account is obviously inspired by Stendhal and thus false or at least unsupported by the sources at our disposal, I would like to call attention to its suggested connections among easiness, repetition, and memory: Rossini composed “Di tanti palpiti” with ease; it was repeatedly applauded; it made gondoliers forget their previous songs; and it was easy to remember. The evidence I have been able to find about “Di tanti palpiti” in early nineteenth-­century Italy suggests, then, that Tancredi’s melody was sufficiently memorable at its first appearance for street vendors to pick it up, but became much more memorable after it began to be repeated (probably in a shorter, simplified version), and therefore implanted itself in the memory of an ever increasing number of people. “Di tanti palpiti” became truly memorable as it was heard and remembered. It was repeated so often and for so long



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that it shed not only its original operatic identity, but much of its language, and became a folk song in dialect. The reasons for the transformation of this specific melody in lieu of others by Rossini remain less than clear. Delving into the extraordinary case of this tune, however, points once more to the crucial role that memory played in the early nineteenth-­century Italian spread of Rossini’s music. It is therefore to memory that the next chapter is devoted.

12

Memory In September 1820 Rossini promised a correspondent with whom he was negotiating the composition of a new opera for the theater in Lucca, then capital of a small duchy, that he would deliver “an original score (I say original because the music is all new, since this time I could not turn to old pieces for help, given that the sovereign has too fine an ear and knows a lot of my music).”1 The sovereign in question was Maria Luisa of Bourbon, Duchess of Lucca, and apparently a fan of Rossini’s music. By praising her fine ear and extensive acquaintance with his music, the composer was flattering both the duchess and himself. This letter is among the very few known statements about self-­ borrowing made by Rossini during his operatic career in Italy. I have kept it in reserve until now because it helps introduce a set of questions that have been repeatedly raised in previous chapters but never properly addressed: what might it have meant to “know” Rossini’s music in early nineteenth-­century Italy? How was such knowledge discussed in the Rossinian discourse? And what role did memory play in such knowledge? The question of memory surfaces not only when discussing self-­borrowing, but other topics such as style, repertory, and the case of “Di tanti palpiti.” Indeed, memory is perhaps the most prominent connection among these diverse discursive strands. Take the theme of Rossini’s authoriality. I have argued that the astonishingly quick spread of Rossini’s operas and their transformation into repertory pieces encouraged critics to consider the composer’s output in strongly authorial terms, seeing in it the manifestation of a more or less 203



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coherent style. But at the beginning of this process, when its coordinates were still partially nebulous, it was evidently hard to decide if and when repetition became so pervasive as to move beyond stylistic consistency and become self-­ borrowing. To answer that question adequately we need to take into account the unheard frequency with which these works were repeated. Was Rossini, then, found guilty of self-­borrowing not only because his style was based so much on repetition, but because his operas were performed in the same city or theater far more often than those by other composers, thus carving certain moments in the audience’s memory far more than theirs? To understand the precise workings of musical memory in the early nineteenth century is difficult, a context of listening occasions and situations obviously far removed from ours. Moreover, musical memory must have varied greatly according to the degree of music education, habits of opera consumption, and other cultural and social disparities. The capacity to remember a bit of music on the part of an upper-­middle-­class Milanese lady who regularly attended opera performances and enjoyed playing transcriptions of morceaux favoris on the keyboard at home was certainly different from that of the lower-­ middle-­class Milanese wife of an office worker or shopkeeper who went to the opera only occasionally (mostly in minor venues like the Teatro Re or the Teatro Carcano, where tickets were cheaper), and who could not read music. This much clarified, it stands to reason that the common habit of attending several performances of the same opera in the same season must have helped to engrave in the listeners’ memory a repertory of musical objects—melodic gestures, harmonic progressions, instrumental combinations, and so on.2 Giovanni Ricordi—or at least his lawyer—said more or less as much in 1823. To defend Ricordi from the charge of having published a few pieces from Rossini’s Semiramide in piano-­vocal score shortly after its Venetian premiere, even though the Teatro La Fenice had promised the publishing rights to the rival firm of Artaria, the lawyer argued, The owner of the rights to this music knew, or should have known, that, since a particularly vivid [ felice] memory might remember a heard speech in whole or in part (as several examples prove), even more easily [than one may think] on account of the usual repetitions, it was possible for either Ricordi himself or somebody else connected with him to write down with precision the motives and notes of the score that had lodged themselves firmly in their memory and were precisely remembered. We will not discuss whether,

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since nobody had printed Semiramide before Ricordi, he may or may not do it himself as the owner of something that he or anybody else might have retained in their minds and repeated to themselves.3

Shortly before, La Fenice had already tried to answer Artaria’s complaints suggesting that “the published pieces might have been retained by the memory of an intelligent music lover, somebody who avidly gathers together successful new pieces.”4 These explanations were highly likely concocted in order to avoid having to admit to a misdemeanor, and that Ricordi had relied on a manuscript copy of Semiramide rather than on human memory. Nevertheless, it seems significant that, within a few weeks, two unconnected parties had constructed their defense on the possibility that somebody might have remembered a few pieces from Semiramide simply by hearing repeated performances of a repetitive piece of music. No less significant is the justification advanced for these explanations, namely, the need to print and sell some of the opera’s pezzi staccati for private or semiprivate consumption. Doing so allowed a repertory of remembered bits from an opera that was lodged in the memory of at least some listeners at the end of a run of performances to be shored up by domestic performances of these bits, or by hearing them played by military bands, church or barrel organs, or guitars—or even, as we have learned, sung by farm laborers. It seems entirely plausible that, at the end of an operatic season in an early nineteenth-­century Italian city, critics and audiences had become familiar with far more music than a present-­day spectator would without turning to complete scores or recordings, and that this familiarity was reinforced both during and after the season by more or less frequent returns to the morceaux favoris published in all sorts of arrangements and played in different ways in a variety of sites. In any case, at this time, the role of memory in the appreciation and critical evaluation of opera had become a burning issue. Recall, for example, Carpani’s hypothesis that self-­borrowing by composers other than Rossini “did not normally involve passages so notable for their beauty that they carved themselves into one’s memory, as are those that Rossini repeats.” Or the ironic praise accorded by the Corriere delle dame to the “strong and tenacious memory” of its competitor critic on the Corriere milanese, out to catch every possible instance of plagiarism in Pietro Carlo Guglielmi’s Ernesto e Palmira, forgetting that many of the offending passages were “plagiarized” from the same com-



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poser’s own work. Or this same critic’s need to highlight that his memory seldom failed him before going on to explain an instance of self-­borrowing on the part of Stefano Pavesi in Il trionfo delle belle. Moreover, as I suggested earlier, reviewers often cited spectators’ negative reactions to self-­borrowing as a way of collectively validating their own perceptions and thus relieving whatever anxieties they had about the reliability of memory. The uncertainty over the function of memory in listening to and evaluating an opera is connected to two other phenomena discussed in previous chapters: the fast growth of operatic criticism in periodicals, including increased attention devoted to specific musical features of the works under discussion; and the dissemination from around 1820 on of complete scores— both piano-­vocal and for solo piano and other instrumental combinations.5 I am not saying a causal link exists among these three phenomena: for one thing, sorting out causes from effects would be both very difficult and inane; and for another, work-­centered criticism and complete scores became widespread in geographical areas where Rossini’s operas did not have the same dazzling impact as in Italy. I suggest rather that printed reviews and scores made it easier to believe that it was possible to get ahold of what was perceived as the continuous, slippery flow of Rossini’s style, in which the unusual degree of repetition made it especially hard to distinguish one passage (melodic idea, crescendo, instrumental figure, movement, or even an entire number) from another. This hypothesis is supported by a particularly interesting case of supposed plagiarism involving Rossini. The critic of the Venice-­based Giornale dipartimentale dell’Adriatico, reviewing the premiere of L’Italiana in Algeri (May 1813), commented on the music in the following terms: Rossini’s music joins the several other examples we have of his prolific imagination: having started a most brilliant career, he is fast following in the footsteps of the most sublime masters of his art. If we did not notice everywhere his characteristic colors [tinte], it would be difficult to believe that it took him only twenty-­seven days to complete this excellent work, which was met with the most lively enthusiasm by an intelligent, discerning public. He has metamorphosed into this work a few ideas that had first appeared in operas by others and then had somewhat lost their former prestige: he has given them a new lease on life.6

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After praising the final rondò for Isabella, the eponymous Italiana, the critic continued: “A few know-­it-­alls said that they had found in it ideas from the rondò of another singer, performed elsewhere. Even if this were the case, these individuals had to agree that those were just the sketches of such ideas, while here we have the finished product.”7 I need to mention first the interesting use of the word tinta to indicate Rossini’s style, as if he were a painter, since, as I discussed in an earlier chapter, the notion of individual style was emerging at the time especially in the criticism of the visual arts. More relevant here is that rumors about the presence of “metamorphosed” ideas in Isabella’s rondò circulated from the very beginning; other contemporary reviews alleged that their source was Luigi Mosca’s own L’Italiana in Algeri from 1808, with which Rossini’s opera shares the libretto, albeit modified. About a month after the premiere of Rossini’s opera, Maria Marcolini, the first Isabella, who had sung several of Mosca’s operas in the preceding years but not, as far as we know, his L’Italiana in Algeri, performed the rondò of this opera’s protagonist in a concert in Venice. Her objective was, precisely, to counter the rumors just mentioned, at least according to the critic of the Giornale dipartimentale dell’Adriatico: The performance of [Mosca’s rondò] was meant to silence those vicious voices asserting that this rondò had something in common with that other one by Rossini which is currently being performed in his opera by the same title. It was sung last night, therefore, and this slander was unmasked for what it is, since it became clear that there are no ideas in common with the other piece; at the same time, the distance between the two was noticed with admiration, since there is nothing that can equal Rossini’s beauty, expressivity, and rich accompaniments.8

The relevant issue here is not whether Rossini took inspiration from Mosca for the concluding rondò of his L’Italiana.9 What counts is that Marcolini considered it necessary to perform Mosca’s piece in order to demonstrate that Rossini had not taken inspiration from it. This decision proves, first, that the issue of (self-­)borrowing was becoming ever more prominent, so much so that “proofs” were sought to bolster the manifestly problematic claims made on the sole basis of listening memory when it was not yet possible to anchor memory to texts (Mosca’s rondò was



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never published, or, if it was, no copy seems to have survived). The crucial importance of words in activating a kind of listening attitude particularly alert to the work of memory, a listening that this specific performance seems to presuppose or at least invite, should not be overlooked: word must have been out that Marcolini had decided to perform Mosca’s rondò in order to counter the rumors of plagiarism. And even those listeners who had not been privy to her intention must have been aware of the debate over Rossini’s alleged plagiarism, at the very least because the Giornale dipartimentale dell’Adriatico gave it such prominence.10 In any case, Marcolini’s intention was immediately textualized in a review published by the most widespread Venetian periodical, where its motives were presented and discussed, and where the occasion was seized upon in order to settle the matter of plagiarism one way or another. Within a few years this kind of textualization would be complemented by that of complete printed scores, evidently considered as necessary as criticism in a new context for musical style, listening, consumption, and general discourse—a context that interrogates with particular insistence the role of memory precisely in the workings of such style, listening, consumption, and discourse.

  There is an Italian text coeval with Rossini’s Italian career that probes this set of issues with particular insight, focusing as it does on the nature of listening and on the possible meanings of “knowing” music, and specifically Rossini’s music, in early nineteenth-­century Italy. I am referring to an extended reflection on the nature of melody penned in 1823 by none other than Giacomo Leopardi, and included in his Zibaldone (“Hodgepodge”), a private collection of observations and reflections on all sorts of topics, never meant for public consumption and published only several decades after the author’s death. According to Leopardi, Musical melodies do not delight the unknowledgeable [i non intendenti] unless the succession, the successive arrangement, of tones in them is such that our ears become used to them, that is, that such melodies are either entirely popular, in that the people, in hearing the opening sequence, is able to guess the middle, the end, and the entire development, or resemble the popular, or have some popular part or one which resembles the popular. Nor

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is the popular in musical melody anything other than a succession of tones to which the ears of the people, or the listeners generally, have in some way become accustomed.

For Leopardi, then, the crucial factor is assuefazione—habituation, as the recent English translation of the Zibaldone has it. He goes on to say, The music of Rossini is universally appreciated for no other reason than because his melodies are either entirely popular, and lifted, so to speak, from the mouths of the people; or resemble those successions of tones which the people are generally familiar with and have become accustomed to, that is, popular ones, more than those of other composers do; or have more popular parts, or parts which are similar to the popular, or more similar than is generally the case with other composers.

Novelty is certainly important, Leopardi explains, but the true art of music consists in a blend of habituation and novelty specifically tailored to a listening community that has certain levels of familiarity with both specific kinds of music and music in general: The main, indeed true art of the inventors of music, and the true, properly musical, and great effect of their inventions, is only manifest and takes place when their melodies are such that the people and generally all listeners are struck and amazed by them as new, and at the same time, because they have become habituated to these successions of tones, they are able to identify immediately as melody.

At the same time, By dint of listening to music and tunes [cantilene] composed by art (which happens to everyone to a greater or lesser degree), even the unknowledgeable, indeed those who are completely ignorant of musical science, habituate their ears to those successions of tones that they would neither know nor judge naturally to be harmonious (whether they are invented out of nothing by men of art, or constructed by them on the basis of popular melodies, and originating from the latter). By virtue of this habituation they gradu-



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ally reach the point, without being aware of their progress, of finding such successions harmonious, of being able to distinguish melody in them, and hence of experiencing increasing delight.11

Leopardi, then, is proposing that pleasure and therefore popularity in music are due mainly to the concerted workings of repetition and memory, citing Rossini as the master of their combination. More importantly, Leopardi invites us to reflect on the circular and yet progressive ways in which memory works when it comes to music. His perspective allows us both to refine and extend to Rossini’s music in general the conclusion reached in the previous chapter about “Di tanti palpiti.” In itself this music was only partially memorable—the power of its internal repetition was only partially responsible for its memorability. But it became increasingly so after it began to be repeated, and therefore progressively implanted in the memory of an ever higher number of people. Rossini’s music became memorable as it was heard and remembered, fueled in this trajectory by its internal repetitions, which evidently invited repetition in their turn. This repetition, as Leopardi argues, was never a matter of exact sameness, since the power of habituation made sure that each act of listening acted as a step in a circular motion resembling a spiral, each turn both a retracing of the same ground and a moving forward. At the same time, however, we might also say that Rossini’s music was heard as repetitive because it was repeated. Ever increasing familiarity brought ever increasing focus on sameness rather than difference, making an increasing number of listeners hear this music as ever more similar to itself and thus as ever more memorable—for most of them, as ever more pleasurable. A few suggestions might be relevant beyond Rossini’s music in early nineteenth-­century Italy. When we discuss music and memory, we might want to talk about music that can become memorable by way of continuous and complex negotiations with a set of interconnected factors characterizing layered sociocultural contexts, rather than is memorable or is heard as such. I am not just saying, banally, that the memorability of a piece of music depends on the different sociocultural contexts from which it emerges, in which it is consumed, and which it helps to construct. Rather, such memorability is a possibility, a potential that such music might develop within a given sociocultural context, depending on both some of the music’s internal features

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and some characteristics of the context in which it finds itself—from, say, the media through which this music is distributed and consumed, to the discourse of music within this society. Besides being a process rather than a product, therefore, memorability is also always partial: this potential can never be fully realized, since the parameters and conditions on which it depends are too many and too complex. A music can become more memorable, as Leopardi insists, but never absolutely so, not only because its memorability is being continuously negotiated, but also because the conditions and meanings of memorability are changing continuously. All the more reason, then, to be as historically, culturally, and socially specific as possible when discussing music and memory. This is precisely what I tried to do in the previous chapter by investigating the case of “Di tanti palpiti” as folk music in nineteenth-­century Italy.

  Historical specificity seems especially necessary in Rossini’s case, since in the early nineteenth century memory was a burning issue not only in opera or music but also in European culture at large. The arrival of modernity proper had a very strong impact on the conception and perception of time; or, rather, the discourse of modernity emerged with particular force in this new concept of time, as several cultural, intellectual, and literary historians have argued, from Eric Auerbach to Reinhard Koselleck and beyond. In the 1940s Auerbach wrote that, after the French Revolution, For Europe there began that process of temporal concentration, both of historical events themselves and of everyone’s knowledge of them, which has since made tremendous progress and which not only permits us to prophesy a unification of human life throughout the world but has in a certain sense already achieved it. Such a development abrogates or renders powerless the entire social structure of orders and categories previously held valid; the tempo of the changes demands a perpetual and extremely difficult effort toward inner adaptation and produces intense concomitant crises.12

In 1809 Goethe famously complained that “our ancestors stuck to the lessons they received in the their youth; we, however, have to relearn things every five years if we don’t want to fall out of fashion completely.”13 According to Koselleck, this process had started well before the Revolution, with the grad-



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ual emergence of what he calls “historical time,” a peculiarly modern, future-­ oriented form of temporality that is no longer natural, but rather essentially human. This long transformation entailed a new conception of the temporalization of events, and therefore of historiography: starting around 1800, writing history meant charting development, giving temporal shape to change, plotting progress.14 Memory now came to the fore as a newly crucial component of human experience, a faculty that determined nothing less than subjectivity, and whose workings were endlessly, almost obsessively explored. Historian Richard Terdiman has written of a “memory crisis,” locating it specifically in the postrevolutionary period: In this period people experienced the insecurity of their culture’s involvement with its past, the perturbation of the link to their own inheritance, as what I want to term a “memory crisis”: a sense that their past had somehow evaded memory, that recollection had ceased to integrate with consciousness. In this memory crisis the very coherence of time and of subjectivity seemed disarticulated. 15

From William Wordsworth to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and from Novalis to René de Chateaubriand, Romantic literature’s obsession with the purpose and meaning of memory is well-­known. But the same was true of many other writers of the period who are not usually labeled Romantics. I have already mentioned Ugo Foscolo’s “religion of memory,” a desperate attempt to counter the meaningless devastation brought about by the acceleration of modern time. Less dramatically but no less tellingly, in Mansfield Park (1814) Jane Austen has her heroine Fanny Price voice wonder at the power of memory: If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems to be something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient—at others, so bewildered and so weak— and at others again, so tyrannical, so beyond control!—We are to be sure a miracle every way—but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.16

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This passage is particularly indicative of the importance of memory for early nineteenth century European culture in its emphasis both on the impossibility of understanding how memory works, and on its crucial function in defining human identity and experience. Speaking of memory at the time meant nothing less than speaking of who we are. Over the last two decades musicologists have extensively considered how memory and this new concept of time acquired a fundamental role in the narrative and affective economy of some of the works of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Mendelssohn, especially symphonies, instrumental chamber music, and songs.17 However, these connections have not yet been sufficiently addressed regarding opera, and especially the Italian tradition. I believe that Rossini’s Italian operas may function as a fruitful starting point for such an endeavor.18 In any case, the question of memory doubtless emerged especially strongly in the discourse of these works. In such discourse, talking of memory often meant talking of listening. Anxieties about the role and function of musical memory that emerge from the Rossinian discourse reveal a gap between “attentive” or “active” listening—to use terms recently favored by scholars of Classical-­Romantic instrumental music—and a musical style that instead presupposes listeners who abandon themselves “passively” to the indistinct flux generated by the high degree of repetition characteristic of Rossini’s music.19 The majority of Italians was quite happy to be seduced by such music, an eminently “modern” music that seemed to move in synch with the new historical and psychological time of modernity. A minority, well represented among critics, tried to resist it in the name of an operatic aesthetic of dramatic and expressive individuation. Calling attention to a passage that might have been already heard, for example, was an attempt to control with the mind an experience that was primarily a bodily one; a way of resisting the subjugating effect of Rossini’s music through the assertion of attention as a privileged mode of listening.20 Not surprising, then, is that this attempt might be characterized, albeit ironically, with adjectives that imply a moral dimension such as “strong and tenacious”—to recall the formulation of the Corriere delle dame discussed in the chapter on self-­borrowing. This is connected to the crucial early moment of modernity’s encounter with musical repetition that brought with it the twin forms of textualization represented by operatic criticism in the periodical press and the new availability of complete scores. The potentially endless reproducibility of these



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texts, perhaps printing’s most revolutionary feature, delivered them to people who could never have dreamed of them. But reproducibility and “publicity” are precisely what made possible the discourse of memory, especially when it emerged in discussions of self-­borrowing. An attempt to control a form of repetition discursively, then, was linked to, and in part relied on, other forms of repetition. I suggest that this somewhat paradoxical situation is typical of the condition and function of repetition in the context of modernity, at least when it comes to music—as Leopardi had intuited. The modern emphasis on originality, of course, is directly connected to the modern reality of endless repetition. More than this, though, the discourse of originality is in fact enabled by some forms of modern repetition: it thus relies for its very existence precisely on the very feature that it attempts to control.21 Considering this statement from the point of view of memory brings to the fore the wholly modern flavor of the situation it describes. If, on the one hand, the forms of textualization that accompanied Rossinian discourse might have provided solid ground for “attentive” listening, on the other they also fanned the flames of the anxieties of memory, since the nature of such memory demanded that these texts in turn be known, consulted, discussed, and especially of course remembered. Once you have given in to the demands of modern memory, you realize, perhaps with a tinge of horror, that its hunger for texts is insatiable: memory voraciously feeds on texts, ever more detailed, ever more precise, ever more complete. Hence, at some point, sound recording, I would suggest. And hence musicology, a thoroughly modern endeavor, with its critical editions, its journal articles, its conferences, and its monographs— the present one included, of course. No less than Rossini’s contemporaries, we seem to want more of the same of whatever allows us to reassure ourselves that what we are getting is not exactly the same.

13

Pleasure Leopardi takes the case of Rossini as emblematic of the causal connection between repetition and therefore memorability in music, and pleasure and therefore popularity. To repeat in more emphatic and expansive terms a hypothesis that I have already adumbrated more than once: Rossini’s music was so popular because of its newest and most striking stylistic trait, repetition. Such repetition engendered an unprecedented sense of familiarity in listeners; familiarity was a powerful source of pleasure, which called in turn for further repetition. In short, this music was repeated because it was repetitive. The key concept here is pleasure, almost a buzzword in the early nineteenth-­ century Rossinian discourse. According to this discourse, the composer’s music provided a previously unknown kind of pleasure, both in its intensity and its physical, bodily dimension. Recurring images of the modus operandi of this music and its effects include drunkenness, obfuscation of or assault on the senses, seduction, electric charge, disease, delirium, and so on. Rossini’s music seems to behave in turn like a strong liqueur, a drug, a prostitute, an electric battery, or a virus. This pleasure was obviously considered with suspicion by many commentators, who distrusted its effect on virtually everyone regardless of their musical and literary education, gender, or class. According to such critics Rossini’s music—like rock ’n’ roll one hundred fifty years later—excited the ear, not the mind, and therefore failed to touch its listeners deeply, its effect remaining instead on a superficial, mindless level.1 The recurring negative shadow cast on the pleasure afforded by Rossini’s 215



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music from such criticism need not color our own understanding of it now. More recent commentators have frequently cast this kind of pleasure mostly in positive terms, often linking it to matters of rhythm.2 Leopardi’s, however, is the only voice, either then or now, to connect this pleasure explicitly and profoundly with repetition.3 Following his lead, this chapter explores the connection between repetition and pleasure before returning to Rossini’s operas in order to address one final occurrence of repetition so far unmentioned, which I then consider from a particular viewpoint that, in my opinion, makes particular historical and interpretive sense.

  Repetition in music as a source of pleasure has not received a great deal of attention in musicological literature. This is not surprising, if we consider that the discipline of musicology is not only a thoroughly modern endeavor but also until quite recently inflected by a modernist aesthetic and cultural outlook. And modernism has been kind neither to repetition nor to pleasure. The imperative of originality, the obligation to “Make it New!”—to cite Ezra Pound’s famous injunction from the 1920s—has been the driving force behind modernist art.4 Pound’s slogan is usually taken to refer to modernism proper, the aesthetic movement that, by most accounts, emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and flourished especially in the first half of the twentieth. As many have argued, however, modernism is just the most explicit manifestation of an orientation typical of high-­cultural production during the last two centuries. To summarize in doubtlessly simplistic terms a complex and multilayered discourse: in the context of the increasing levels of repetition that came to characterize most aspects of modern life, art took upon itself the imperative of offering something different, something, in fact, to be measured precisely in terms of its difference, not only from everyday life but also from within itself. Change, novelty, and originality were the yardstick by which new artistic contributions were measured. Modernism took this aesthetic imperative to a point where, at least ostensibly, public success mattered less than innovation and uniqueness; indeed, success (at least in public discourse) became highly suspect, since it could be taken as a sign that an artist had not been sufficiently innovative, had not “made it new” enough.5 Thus far I have used the past tense, but much of what I have said still holds true for several present-­day artistic expressions, including “art music.” No

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wonder, then, that repetition has suffered in an aesthetic, cultural, and disciplinary context dominated by notions of progress, advance, and development—in a word, of difference. And no wonder pleasure has been treated with suspicion, given the decidedly ambivalent role of success in the aesthetics of modern(ist) art. Popular music studies have been less hesitant to address repetition and pleasure than “art” musicology, since popular success is an unavoidable component of their object of study—indeed, and quite tellingly in the present context, “popularity,” and therefore pleasure, seemingly define this disciplinary subfield. In a wide-­ranging essay on electronic dance music that critiques previous theoretical models of repetition in music, for example, Luis-­ Manuel Garcia has suggested that the pleasure of repetition can be most productively conceived as deriving from processes of active perception that “optimize opportunities to exercise mastery of listening.”6 Richard Middleton has addressed twentieth-­century philosophical and epistemological theories of repetition from the point of view of various popular music genres and pieces to illuminate how popular music constructs subjectivity.7 While these and several other contributions from popular music studies and ethnomusicology productively discuss the many possible different interactions between theories of repetition and pleasure on one hand, and musical repertories, genres, or styles characterized by repetition on the other, they tend to do so from a mostly ahistorical position, or at least one strongly rooted in the present but not explicitly thematized as such. Robert Fink’s book Repeating Ourselves stands out among musicological discussions of repetition and pleasure because it views its object of study, American minimal music, as “both a sonic analogue and, at times, a sonorous constituent of a characteristic experience of self in mass-­media consumer society.”8 Fink connects this music with American mass consumer society from the 1950s onward, a context characterized by a “culture of repetition” that emerges most clearly, and most productively from his viewpoint, in some of its most distinctive expressions, such as advertising and television. Similarly, even if on a more modest scale, Julie E. Cumming has connected the introduction of repetition in sacred polyphonic music of the late fifteenth century to the influence of genres such as the French chanson that are customarily placed on the lower reaches of widespread aesthetic and cultural hierarchies. Cumming suggests that this “dumbing down” of sacred polyphony responded to the need for this music to be appreciated by the wider audience for which its



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political work was intended in the new, more “popular” context of the Italian courts, where pleasure and “popularity” were crucial tools for the construction of a new ideology of princely power.9 Following these examples, I want to consider the Rossinian pleasure of repetition as a “characteristic experience of self,” to use Fink’s words, peculiar to the culture for which Rossini’s music was created, and of which it was both “a sonic analogue and . . . a sonorous constituent.” Before doing so, however, I must highlight that repetition lies at the core of modernity. The statement that most aspects of modern life have come to be characterized by increasing levels of repetition, especially mechanical repetition, as the consequence of industrialization and urbanization, as well as the increasing hold of technology over human activity, is endlessly repeated—­ including earlier in the present chapter. The historical accuracy of this statement, however, is not its most prominent claim to relevance here. What really counts is precisely its constant repetition. In other words, whether modern life is more repetitive than its early modern or medieval or ancient versions, it has been certainly felt and conceptualized as such. Not a surprise, then, is that theories of repetition or at least reflections on its workings and meanings feature prominently in the writings of many of the most prominent interpreters of modernity. The list is potentially so long as to become almost meaningless: Vico, Rousseau, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Horkheimer and Adorno, Lacan, Deleuze, Barthes, and Derrida. Some of these thinkers, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno foremost among them, have also explicitly connected repetition with modernity, considering it one of modernity’s most characteristic features.10 What is more, the ostensibly ahistorical notions of repetition proposed by these philosophers, historians, psychoanalysts, and theorists are in most cases based on the observation of and reflection on specifically modern aspects of the human condition. In other words repetition, while not an exclusive characteristic of modernity, took on new forms and meanings with its advent. Such forms and meanings are manifold and diverse to say the least; it could hardly be otherwise, given that repetition is a very broad concept, and that we are considering a time span of two hundred years. Obviously, some of these theories of modern repetition enter into a more direct and productive dialogue with the early nineteenth-­century Italian Rossini discourse than others. For example, Fink’s evocation of the repetitive movements and sounds

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of the power-­driven machines of the Industrial Revolution for Rossini’s crescendo, which I have already discussed in the chapter on theatricality, fits well with a notion of modern repetition centered on mechanization and industrialization, but unfortunately ignores the limited relevance of such processes for Italy in the 1810s and 1820s—it is generally agreed that the Industrial Revolution did not really begin in Italy until unification, and even then was limited to a few restricted areas.11 In the rest of this chapter and in the following one I attempt to establish a dialogue between the Rossinian discourse and conceptions of modern repetition that seem to address more directly than others the central themes of this discourse as I have explored them in this book.

  The arrival of Napoleon’s armies and the two decades of upheavals that followed, I suggested above, constituted a profoundly traumatic experience for upper-­class Italians, resulting in a kind of melancholic malaise. According to Frank Ankersmit, the forced abandonment of a former identity provoked by the rupture between the ancien régime and modernity caused a radical kind of trauma. This trauma was so radical because it constituted the very essence— the “content,” as he calls it—of the new identity. Memory is therefore a constitutive if profoundly ambiguous element of this identity. The capacity to remember the trauma rests on memory; yet the “vacuum” (Ankersmit) between the former identity and the new one makes the act of remembering fraught with almost insurmountable difficulties. No wonder that memory became so fundamental for the definition of identity, and its workings so thoroughly explored. Memory was in crisis because, in the words of Richard Terdiman already quoted, “recollection had ceased to integrate with consciousness” and therefore “the very coherence of time and of subjectivity seemed disarticulated.” It makes sense, then, that the manifestations of the melancholic malaise of early nineteenth-­century Italians included the sense that life was restricted to the here and now, that the present was the only temporal dimension available to human subjects, as Leopardi argued. The theory of repetition that seems best to illuminate this encounter between its pleasures and a sense of identity predicated on trauma, melancholia, and a radical interrogation of memory is that first advanced by Freud, expanded in subsequent psychoanalytic explorations, and taken up more recently by historians in connection with twentieth-­century historical traumas. The particular coupling of repetition and pleasure characterizing the early



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nineteenth-­century Italian Rossini discourse, specifically located at the beginning of modernity, then, acquires depth of meaning when viewed from the vantage point of a modern theory of repetition that is at the same time a theory of modern repetition—even if classic psychoanalytic discourse would more readily agree to the former definition than to the latter. Rather than attempt to summarize Freud’s thoughts on repetition and their later adaptations, which would likely end up drowning poor Rossini under a hermeneutic onslaught, I want first to go back to the operas, and then proceed from there to some theoretical aspects that the operas themselves seem to invoke.

  Here I need to call attention to one specific instance of Rossinian repetition that, perhaps surprisingly, I have not yet mentioned. It involves one basic situation that often recurs in the serious, comic, and semiserious operas alike, typically in the slow movements and the strettas of internal finales or large midact ensembles such as quartets, quintets, or sextets. This situation consists in a prolonged moment of utter confusion, stunned disbelief, and complete disorientation that follows a traumatic event, usually the revelation of some kind of shocking fact, such as a character’s true identity, for example, or some supposed misdeed. At these moments Rossini often reached for the whole battery of repetitive musical patterns discussed in previous chapters—­ especially the canon, the crescendo, and the continuous repetition of the same phrase in successive statements that overlap hypermetrically and modulate. For example, the three slow movements of internal finales and midact ensembles of La Cenerentola already mentioned in the chapter on repetition are constructed according to a canonic principle (applied with varying degrees of strictness), and display other highly repetitive traits. These movements are: the Andante “Nel volto estatico di questo e quello” within the Act 1 quintet “Signor, una parola”; the Andante maestoso “Parlar, pensar vorrei” within the Act 1 finale; and the section beginning “Questo è un nodo avviluppato” within the Maestoso of the Act 2 sextet “Siete voi? Voi Prence siete?” In the first and third of these movements, all the characters sing exactly the same text, expressing their inability to comprehend what has just happened: Act 1 quintet Nel volto estatico Di questo, e quello

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Si legge il vortice Del lor cervello Che ondeggia, e dubita E incerto sta. By the fascinated faces of one and the other, one can see the turmoil in their minds, which waver and doubt, remaining uncertain. Act 2 sextet Questo è un nodo avviluppato, Questo è un gruppo rintrecciato. Chi sviluppa più inviluppa, Chi più sgruppa, più raggruppa; Ed intanto la mia testa Vola, vola e poi s’arresta; Vo tenton per l’aria oscura, E comincio a delirar. This is a snarled knot, this is a tangled web. He who tries to unravel it tangles it all the more; he who tries to unpick it pulls it tighter still: and meanwhile my brain spins, spins, and then stalls; I go groping about in the dark and am beginning to rave.

In the slow movement of the Act 1 finale, Alidoro says something partially different from the other six characters; while they express their utter confusion, he is the only one who is not completely bewildered, the only one who, in fact, knows exactly what is going on: CLORINDA, TISBE, CENERENTOLA, RAMIRO, DANDINI, AND DON MAGNIFICO Parlar, pensar vorrei. Parlar, pensar non so. Quest’è un inganno/incanto, oh dei! Quel volto m’atterrò. I would speak, I would think. I am unable to speak, to think. This is some trick/dream, o gods! I am struck by that face.



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ALIDORO Parlar, pensar vorrebbe Parlar, pensar non può. Amar già la dovrebbe: Il colpo non sbagliò. He would speak, he would think. He is unable to speak, to think. He must surely be in love with her already; my ruse hasn’t failed.12

Rossini takes no notice of this difference, however, and has Alidoro sing exactly the same musical material as the other six voices, and in a way that makes understanding his words virtually impossible. This has the effect of depriving the situation of a viewpoint from which to consider and comprehend it: instead we get a prolonged moment of complete loss of meaning expressed through musical repetition that generates a sense of circularity, of endless return to the same spot, and, at the same time, of complete lack of movement, of stunned immobility. Much the same could be said not only of the other two movements from La Cenerentola but also of most of the slow movements of Rossini’s internal finales, regardless of genre and whether all the characters sing exactly the same text (in general they do not). The only notable exception is Il barbiere di Siviglia, where Figaro comments on Don Bartolo’s confusion with completely different music.13 Strettas of midact ensembles and finales are the other formal slot where Rossini’s operas stage a moment of universal confusion. In those of midact ensembles, more common in comic works than in serious ones, the characters usually express different emotions, but Rossini tends to give these characters the same music, generating a sense of excited bewilderment, especially given that the rapid tempo makes it exceptionally hard to understand any words. During the strettas of the comic finales, on the contrary, all characters sing the same words. The onomatopoeic Allegro vivace of the Act 1 finale of L’Italiana in Algeri, “Va sossopra il mio cervello,” is among the most frequently mentioned movements by Rossini (usually with a nod to Stendhal’s definition of it as “organized and utter lunacy”), but all his other comic works feature a similar moment. The case of Il barbiere is particularly interesting, since Figaro, who in the slow movement had commented on rather than shared in the general confusion, joins all the other characters a few moments later in the renewed and evidently all-­consuming confusion of the stretta. Neither the librettist

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Cesare Sterbini nor Rossini was evidently bothered by the lack of any dramatic reason for this change in behavior on the part of the barber, who should instead continue to know exactly what is going on.14 The librettos of several serious works pre­sent the same basic situation at this crucial formal moment of the drama, even if they are usually less explicit and certainly less verbally inventive than the comic ones in their depiction of complete confusion on the part of the characters. Here is the text of Tancredi’s stretta, whose repetitive musical devices I discussed in chapter 2: Quale infausto orrendo giorno Di sciagure e di terrore! Cupa voce suona intorno . . . Suon di morte gela il core . . . Fremo . . . smanio . . . avvampo . . . tremo . . . Ah, qual fin tal giorno avrà? What an unlucky, awful day of sorrows and terror! A hollow voice resounds. . . . The sound of death freezes the heart . . . I shudder . . . I rave . . . I burn . . . I tremble . . . Ah, when will such a day come to an end?15

The four main characters (Amenaide, Tancredi, Argirio, and Orbazzano) have just sung a heartfelt phrase that has made them sound, in Lorenzo Bianconi’s memorable words, like “living human beings, individuals of flesh and blood who . . . give voice to their unspeakable pain ‘with the greatest expression,’ as per the stage direction in the libretto.” In the stretta, though, they suddenly become “nothing but wrecks, empty shells tossed around by the fury of the billows, deprived of all song and of all human compassion that may console them amidst the ruinous violence of those waves of sound chasing each other in phrases of 4 + 1 measures.”16 The strettas of the internal finales of Otello and Mosè in Egitto (in both Act 1 of three), as well as Ricciardo e Zoraide, Bianca e Falliero, Zelmira, and Semiramide (all Act  1 of two) feature comparable texts set to comparable music. The other serious operas reach their point of maximum dramatic tension with the stretta of their internal finale (even if they are in three acts, they generally include only one such number), as is customary, but such tension does not necessarily mean confusion; what is more, their characters often express contrasting emotions (usually variations on despair or anger). Rossini’s



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setting of these generally long, and often very long, movements to the same kind of intensely repetitive fast music, however, generates a similar dramatic effect: we see characters at the mercy of their emotions, unable to get a grip on themselves, locked into repeating over and over the same words, the same notes, the same feelings. As with other instances of Rossinian repetition, these kinds of situations and the musical devices to which they are set were not unprecedented, far from it. But his operas featured them more often than those of his predecessors and contemporaries, and their distinctive features were explored with more single-­ minded consistency: canonic slow movements unifying all the characters in expressing their confusion were far more frequent, as were strettas engulfing them in waves upon waves of overwhelming sounds. Most readers who are familiar with Mozart’s operas, especially the comic ones, will quickly realize the gulf that separates them from Rossini’s in this respect. What is more, in Rossini these movements are more emphatically separated by their surroundings than was the case earlier, enhancing the sense that the characters are suddenly overcome by their confusion and completely engulfed by it, rather than gradually entering its sphere.17 As Bianconi says of the four protagonists of Tancredi, at this moment the characters lose their sense of self, overwhelmed instead by a dehumanizing impulse to repeat that deprives them not only of any emotional depth but also of any individuality.

  In the chapter on self-­borrowing I quoted one of the few instances in which an early nineteenth-­century Italian critic mentioned repetition at the level of a single movement—this was in the context of a discussion of La Cenerentola’s Act 2 sextet. He disapproved of it, and therefore was surprised by the evident pleasure it gave the audience: “This fact can be interpreted in Rossini’s favor by saying that the difficult thing is to choose beauty, but that, once you have chosen it, you can repeat it indefinitely without fear of tiring [the audience’s] patience.” In his essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Freud observed the “insistent talkativeness” of the melancholic, who evidently draws “satisfaction from self-­exposure,” and whose “self-­torment” is “indubitably pleasurable.”18 Although it might seem perverse to bring in Freud on repetition from the angle of pleasure, I do so for two reasons. First, because it addresses directly a constitutional aspect of Rossinian repetition clearly identified by the most acute of its interpreters, Leopardi first among them. Second, because it

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might help counterbalance at least to some extent the pathologizing tendencies that a psychoanalytic account of such repetition necessarily introduces.19 At least in the context of the present chapter, however, there is no avoiding the rhetoric of disease, or at least unease, in Freud’s early twentieth century no less than Rossini’s early nineteenth, or our own early twenty-­first. The singularly repetitive patterns on which Rossini’s ensembles rely, and these moments’ staging of a complete inability to make sense of reality, point toward an understanding of the functions and meanings of repetition in Rossini’s operas as the kind of posttraumatic compulsion to repeat first conceptualized by Freud. Using his terms, we could say that Rossini’s operas staged over and over again the historical trauma of the postrevolutionary and Napoleonic years and the compulsion to repeat in which Italians found themselves trapped. Or, more radically, that these operas were themselves shaped by this compulsion to repeat: they constituted a form of literal “acting out,” and were therefore a symptom of melancholia (Leopardi’s description of the behavior of his fellow Italians would fall under the rubric of melancholia if considered psychoanalytically, or at least from a Freudian viewpoint). The concept of “acting out” is first discussed by Freud in another essay that has quite a bit to say about the Rossinian discourse, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” published in 1914, three years before “Mourning and Melancholia.” In Freud’s theory, acting out is a compulsive, unconscious repetition of the past caused by a failure to remember this past—a failure, or better a refusal, of memory. In fact, acting out is a form of defense against a past that is too traumatic to be contemplated and dealt with directly through memory. The two actions stand in an inversely proportional relationship: the more “acting out,” the less remembering, and vice versa. In other words, there is no past in acting out. In this sense, it seems only apposite that, when expressing their radical confusion, their complete loss of orientation and understanding, Rossini’s characters always speak in the present tense: there is no indication that they understand the process that got them to this state, or even that they remember it. In light of this observation, it makes sense to think of Rossini’s music for these moments as music in the present tense, an eternal present that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere—thus the stark separation of these movements from what precedes them.20 In fact, the content of this acting out is precisely loss of orientation, purpose, and meaning: “my head is upside down”; “I would like to think but cannot do it”; “I am beginning to rave”; and so on. The memory of the trauma



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and its origins, and therefore the possibility of facing it—that is, to begin the work of mourning, as Freud would say—are foreclosed to these characters. Instead they repeat compulsively the simple fact of their present condition. Like Freud’s melancholiacs, they keep saying over and over again how hopeless they are at coping with a reality that no longer makes sense to them; like these melancholiacs, they take evident pleasure in this activity. In this sense, these Rossinian moments can be conceived as in some way mimetic: they represent the psychological and emotional condition of Italians after the trauma of the postrevolutionary years who, in Leopardian terms, could only keep going through the moves of their public rituals. In this sense, we might think of these ensembles as putting on stage the ceremonies and rituals of the obsessional neurotic in the grips of repetition compulsion. Following this mimetic angle brings to the fore another characteristic feature of several Rossinian operas: a recurring scene in which the orchestra imitates the sounds of a storm. Rossini’s first storm is found not in an opera, in fact, but in an instrumental piece, the last of the six Sonate a quattro for two violins, cello, and double bass, composed in 1804, when he was twelve years old. The concluding Allegro of the Sonata no. 6 is labeled “tempest” and already contains some of the features that would characterize the operatic storms to follow (except the crescendo). Rossini was obviously not the first to depict storms in opera: Gluck and Mozart among others had already done so, notably in Iphigénie en Tauride and Idomeneo. But there is no doubt that in Rossini’s Italian works they are heard with unprecedented frequency, from Ciro in Babilonia (1812) to La Cenerentola (1817) through La pietra del paragone (1812), L’occasione fa il ladro (1812), Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816), and Otello (1816)— as well as in Le Comte Ory (1828) and Guillaume Tell (1829). Such orchestral pieces, while clearly signaled in the libretto as imitating storms taking place within the stage action, are usually taken to give sound also to the raging of contrasting and confusing emotions to which the characters are prey. In light of my suggestions above, the scope of this interpretation can be widened to include the storms raging not only on another stage, that of postrevolutionary politics and society, but also within the hearts and minds of the spectators. We could follow this hermeneutic line quite far, in the direction of these storms as nightmares, for example. Rossini’s storms could contribute to a mimetic understanding of the dramaturgy of his operas, just like his ensembles of confusion, if in different ways. But such an understanding seemingly runs

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counter to both the antimimetic thrust of early nineteenth-­century Rossinian discourse and the interpretive framework I have constructed around it. An approach to repetition based on Freud’s writings published in the 1910s, then, while throwing a revealing light on several constitutive elements of this discourse, tends to sideline some of its other, equally fundamental components. Help in addressing this problem comes from an only marginally later Freud, that of one of his most fundamental texts, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920, in which he further explores the notion of repetition compulsion (first introduced in “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through”). Observing what has become known as the fort-­da game of his infant grandson, Freud speculates that the continuous reenactment of what must have been an unpleasant experience for the little boy—his mother leaving him on his own—might have been an attempt somehow to master it: “At the outset he was in a passive situation—he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took an active part.”21 We need not follow Freud in his postulation of the death drive later in the text—perhaps his most controversial theory. The useful idea here is that the complexity of reality is reconfigured into relatively simple patterns, which then are repeated over and over again; this repetition brings pleasure because it gives the illusion of mastery over such patterns, and therefore, ultimately, over a traumatic reality.22 In this sense, then, the pleasure of Rossini’s repetition is not primarily mimetic. Rather, it gives an illusion of mimesis while actually establishing a considerable distance between a traumatic reality and its theatrical reconfiguration, while in fact digging a trench intended to keep them psychologically and emotionally apart. Thanks to such distancing, to such separation between reality and theatrical representation, this repetition gives pleasure to spectators who, more than merely witnessing it, seem to take an active part in it, sharing in its refusal of reality and of memory while enjoying being overwhelmed by wave upon wave of sound. Hence, I would suggest, the kinds of metaphors chosen by Rossini’s contemporaries—and many others later on— to describe the effects of his music, which repeatedly return to the sphere of the body—alcohol, sex, illness, inebriation, and so on. This particular body is constructed discursively as in stark opposition to the mind, to reflection, to understanding. The pleasure of Rossini’s music is unthinking. In fact, this music is pleasurable precisely because it prevents rational thought. Rossini’s



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is the music best suited to the complete and utter lack of any belief that characterized the composer’s Italian contemporaries, as Leopardi would say. This, it would seem, is the music of deeply damaged people.23 While such a psychoanalytically inspired conclusion goes a considerable way toward constructing an interpretive framework that brings fruitfully together several strands of the early nineteenth-­century Italian Rossini discourse, I believe that there is room for further, rather different explorations. Such explorations, however, require different interpretive frameworks, ones that I will address in the following chapter.

  Before doing so, however, I would like to pause for a moment on an issue that has already made several unmarked appearances in this book: gender. I have kept it for this late stage in my argument because it seemed particularly apposite finally to bring it up in a chapter devoted to pleasure. At the same time, gender throws a new light on themes of the Rossinian discourse that I have already mentioned but that a psychoanalytic viewpoint has sidelined here. It would be difficult to claim that in early nineteenth-­century Italy Rossini’s music was generally considered especially suited to, or even particularly liked by, women. When trying to explain Rossini’s noisy orchestration in 1823, Eleuterio Pantologo stated that women, being always prey to the latest fashion, could only adore this most fashionable kind of music. But such reasoning hardly establishes a direct link between unique features of Rossini’s music and the female sex, and in any case this is not a recurring theme in reviews, pamphlets, and such other texts. Nor was the theater gendered feminine in early nineteenth-­century Italian discourse—in a sense, it was too important a social space for it to be left to women, even if only discursively. This said, Rossini’s music aligned with the “other,” “weaker,” and therefore “female” term in a long list of binaries that have emerged in past chapters, mostly implicitly. A surely incomplete and rather random list would include theatricality (with the set of negative connotations already discussed, such as lack of sincerity, duplicity, fakery, deception, artificiality, affectation, and dishonesty) versus interiority; watching versus listening; “passive” versus “attentive” listening; opera versus novel; exteriority versus interiority; surface versus depth; representation versus reality; body versus mind; young versus old; South versus North; Italy versus France; easy versus difficult; repetition versus difference; modern versus older; fashionable versus traditional; and so

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on. As I have indicated above, the bodily dimension was perhaps the most strongly gendered: the effects of Rossini’s music are often described in terms of drunkenness, assault on the senses, seduction, electric charge, disease, delirium, and addiction. Even pleasure seems to take on “female” connotations if framed in the terms discussed thus far—including psychoanalysis. At times it seems almost as if Rossini is some sort of 1950s rock ’n’ roll star, out to corrupt young, impressionable, and, yes, mostly female minds with his “physical” music. Rossini as Elvis strikes me as an entirely apt coupling. The specifically gendered nature of some of these oppositions emerges only in a context precisely located in geographical, historical, cultural, and social terms. In a different context, the novel might be gendered feminine— as opposed to nonfiction texts, for example. Also, other implicitly gendered binaries were not yet part of the early nineteenth-­century Italian discourse, but emerged only later or somewhere else: let us think, for example, of Rossini versus Beethoven, or repetition versus development, or comic versus serious opera.24 Finally, Rossini’s music might occasionally be aligned to the “primary,” “stronger,” and therefore “male” element of the binary: the electric charge supplied by its rhythmic energy, for example, if positively compared to the “softer,” “gentler” effects that older music had on the body. Meanwhile, Rossini himself became a conqueror no less valiant and victorious than Napoleon, as we have seen. Still, there is no doubt that Rossini’s operas were enmeshed in a gendered discourse that, in most cases, cast them as “female.” In the following chapter, this discourse will serve, perhaps surprisingly, as the point of departure for rather more philosophical yet still pleasure-­led—and, I hope, pleasurable—explorations.

14

Movement I begin by drawing together two threads of my argument. First, in Rossini’s Italian operas representation distances itself from any suggestion that its function is somehow to reproduce or imitate reality thanks mostly to repetition. As the main tool through which messy reality is kept at bay, repetition allows representation to free itself from an aesthetics of mimesis. Second, Italians’ traumatic encounter with modernity engendered a specific kind of theatricality—a self-­sufficient and self-­referential attitude, opposing or at least ignoring a meaningful connection with reality—deeply connected with the “essential theatricality” (as Thomas Peacock called it) of Rossini’s operas. Here I want to suggest that it is precisely repetition that promotes this essential—and essentially modern—theatricality, a feature that commentators have long considered characteristic of Rossini’s dramaturgy without being quite able to say what makes it possible. This hypothesis needs to be considered alongside some prominent aspects of the early nineteenth-­century Italian Rossini discourse, especially its emphasis on the bodily dimension. In particular, the Rossinian discourse is not only of the body, as I have suggested in the previous chapter, but also of a moving body. Bodies that listen to Rossini’s music move to its rhythm—or, perhaps better, are “moved,” made to move, by this rhythm. The images of drunkenness, assault on the senses, seduction, electric charge, disease, and delirium regularly invoked to describe the effects of Rossini’s music imply a progressive intensification of its effects on its listeners. Furthermore, some of these 231



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images suggest a transfer of energy that generates movement—for example, electricity, delirium, and even, metaphorically, seduction. My aim in the present chapter, then, is to explore further the relationship between reality and representation posited by Rossini’s Italian operas in directions that try to do justice to their theatricality and to their discourse of movement—their theatricality in and of motion, so to speak. In order to do so I will pro­gress from the early nineteenth century to the more recent past; unlike before, however, I will focus almost exclusively on theoretical and philosophical texts of a general nature.

  It is difficult to imagine two philosophers who have influenced music aesthetics in the so-­called West over the last two centuries more than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer. Both have received sustained attention from historians of philosophy and music, their texts the object of detailed scrutiny ever since publication in the early to mid-­nineteenth century. Yet such scrutiny has almost always neglected any discussion of the favorite contemporary composer of both men: Rossini. This circumstance would count for little beyond the biographical level—and therefore its disregard would be justified—if their partiality had not influenced their philosophical views on music and opera to a significant degree. This, however, is a problem for scholars of Hegel and Schopenhauer to address. More relevant here is the helping hand that Hegel and Schopenhauer offer to a historically grounded understanding of Rossini’s Italian dramaturgy and its representational aesthetics—their lack of Italian credentials compensated for, I hope, by the unique explanatory force of their theories, not to mention their enormous influence on Western thought. Hegel’s most explicit pronouncement on Rossini is found in the second part of his Aesthetics (published posthumously in 1835): Rousseau for his part has given preference to the richly melodic music of the Italians over the older French music with its absence of melody. Finally, people have disputed in a similar way for or against Rossini and the newer Italian school. Rossini’s opponents decry his music as a mere empty tickling of the ear; but when we become more accustomed to its melodies, we find that, on the contrary, this music is full of feeling and genius, piercing the mind and heart, even if it does not deal with the kind of specific char-

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acterization [die Art der Charakteristik] beloved of our strict German musical intellect. For it is true that all too often Rossini is unfaithful to his text and with his free melodies soars over all the heights, with the result that our only choice is to stick to the subject matter and grumble at the music that no longer harmonizes with it, or to abandon the subject matter and take unhindered delight in the free inspirations of the composer and enjoy with fullness of soul the soul that they contain.1

Readers will immediately hear echoes of the Italian Rossini discourse, and specifically of Carpani’s Le Rossiniane. As far as I am aware, no one has postulated, let alone proven Hegel’s knowledge of Carpani’s text. Still, worth noting is that both Carpani’s and Hegel’s most sustained and revelatory encounter with Rossini’s Italian operas took place in the same place at about the same time: Vienna in the early 1820s. Carpani, who lived there, wrote his most extended discussion of Rossini’s style, the “Letter on Zelmira,” on the occasion of the Viennese premiere of the opera in 1822. Hegel traveled to the Habsburg capital in autumn 1824 (the year Le Rossiniane was published) and attended several performances of Rossini’s works, sung by some of the most celebrated operatic stars of the time (Joséphine Fodor, Girolama Dardanelli, Giovanni Battista Rubini, Domenico Donzelli, and Luigi Lablache).2 Hegel differs from Carpani, however, in emphasizing the freedom of Rossini’s music, and in the kind of philosophical and psychological work that this music is able to do, thanks to such freedom. While Carpani’s is—to put it bluntly—an aesthetics of pleasure, Hegel’s is one of subjectivity: for him, music is the expression in sound of the inner self. In the words of philosopher Stephen Houlgate, “through rhythm, harmony and melody music allows the soul to hear its own inner movement and to be moved in turn by what it hears. . . . Music expresses, and allows us to hear and enjoy, the movement of the soul in time through difference and dissonance back into its unity within itself.”3 It is not only a matter of arousing feelings, then, but of making us perceive our inner subjectivity, our “soul,” through the “soul” of music. Crucially, this work is accomplished best by vocal music, since instrumental music runs the risk of leaving expression too far behind, thus becoming empty and superficial. A transcript of Hegel’s lecture course of 1829 contains a passing but revealing reference to La gazza ladra in terms of the melody breaking free from the dramatic situation: “In the trial scene of Rossini’s La gazza ladra, the judge



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sings the freest of melodies [das freie Ergehen im Singen].” According to philosopher Alain Patrick Olivier, in the context of Hegel’s thought, Rossini’s detachment of the music from the situation can be interpreted not only as an aesthetic necessity: We can equally see it as the expression of an idealization of passion, of the freedom on the part of the character from the affection of which he is victim, of an affirmation of the ethical identity of the self and its steadiness vis-­à-­vis the alterity of the real. It is less a matter of freedom from the text than of freedom from passion. In this light, the aesthetic ideal is nothing less than the ethical ideal of the identity of the self across a split. The scene in La gazza ladra could be interpreted as another example of the musical ideal of the being-­by-­itself that Hegel has already found in Palestrina’s sacred music. . . . Happiness must not be absent even in the moments of deepest heartbreak.4

For the music historian, Olivier’s bracketing of Rossini with Palestrina brings home with startling clarity the defamiliarizing force of Hegel’s interpretation of Rossini’s operatic dramaturgy. We are well beyond not only Carpani’s aesthetics of pleasure but also the realm of the bello ideale so frequently invoked in Italy at the time. For Hegel, Rossini’s music is nothing less than the sound of the soul, free to move away from passion, free to leave reality behind in order to be by itself, to resonate by itself, to hear its own movement. The potential of Hegel’s position to subvert long-­dominant aesthetic hierarchies that have relegated Rossini’s operas to the lowly role of superficial, once-­fashionable entertainment should be self-­evident. Nor should we miss the irony of this potential, given that Hegel’s philosophy sits at the center of the intellectual and cultural tradition in which such hierarchies have flourished. Schopenhauer’s philosophy stands in opposition to Hegel’s in most respects, but their divergence is less stark when it comes to music, especially Rossini’s.5 According to Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation (1818; rev. 1844 and 1859), music “never expresses the phenomenal appearance, but the inner essence alone, the idea behind the phenomenon”; it follows that music “does not express this or that particular joy, but anxiety, pain, horror, jubilation, happiness, contentment in themselves.” When it comes to vocal music, therefore, words “should never abandon their subordinate roles and assume the principal one, turning music into a mere vehicle for their expres-

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sion—a gross blunder and an arrant perversion.” Music “expresses only the quintessence of life and its happenings, not those happenings themselves.” It ensues that if music allies itself too closely with the words and seeks to portray events, it is engaged in speaking a language that is not its own. No one has held more aloof from this error than Rossini; thus his music speaks so purely and clearly its own language that it has no need at all of words and it thus creates its own effect even when performed only by instruments.6

Elsewhere Schopenhauer applauded “the scornful disdain with which the great Rossini sometimes has treated the text,” an attitude that was “if not exactly praiseworthy, nevertheless truly musical.”7 Schopenhauer and Hegel agree even more clearly on the primacy of melody in Rossini’s music, and specifically on that of vocal melody above all other parameters. Hegel’s passion for melody is not only obvious in the excerpt quoted above, but is explicitly theorized elsewhere in his Aesthetics, for example, in the following terms: The poetic element in music, the language of the soul that pours into the notes the inner joy and sorrow of the heart, and in this outpouring mitigates and overcomes the natural force of feeling by turning the inner life’s present transports into an apprehension of or a free tarrying with itself, thus liberating the heart from the pressure of joys and sorrows—this free sounding of the soul in music, this is alone melody. This final domain is the higher poetic element in music, the sphere of its properly artistic inventions in the use of the elements considered hitherto.8

Schopenhauer is no less passionate about melody: In the melody, in the high, singing, principal voice, leading the whole in progressing with unrestrained freedom . . . I recognize the highest grade of the will’s objectification . . . melody alone has significant and intentional connection from beginning to end . . . [and] relates the most secret history of the intellectually enlightened will, portrays every agitation, every effort, every movement of the will, everything which the faculty of reason summarizes under the wide and negative concept of feeling.9



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It is impossible to resist pointing out that the tune lampooned by Wagner in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (in the Tailors’ chorus in Act 3), “Di tanti palpiti,” was actually, as Yael Braunschweig has noted, the single melody most frequently praised by Schopenhauer—the thinker who had the most profound influence on the composer. We might want to take the estrangement effect caused by reading the passage I have just quoted while thinking of “Di tanti palpiti” as an encouragement to reconsider both the music-­historical work that Schopenhauer’s philosophy has been made to do over the past two centuries, and Rossini’s marginal position in this history. More important here, though, is the link established by both Hegel and Schopenhauer among melody, freedom, and movement. Hegel explicitly praises Rossini’s melodies for soaring “over all the heights.” But if melody is the most important element of music, and music expresses and allows the soul to hear its own inner movement—to repeat Houlgate’s formulations—music’s freedom, its movement, are the freedom and movement of melody, above all Rossini’s melodies. Much the same can be said of Schopenhauer’s theory that melody “portrays every agitation, every effort, every movement of the will”— despite the notable differences between Hegel’s “soul” and Schopenhauer’s “will,” and between the former’s positive notion of “feeling” and the latter’s disdainful rejection of it. As we have seen, movement is also a crucial aspect of the early nineteenth-­ century Rossinian discourse, even if the terms in which it is couched are mostly negative. Hegel and Schopenhauer, on the other hand, promote a positive view of Rossinian movement. The enslaving, infantilizing, almost animalistic movement of Rossini’s contemporary critics becomes the “free sounding of the soul” (Hegel) and the “most secret history of the intellectually enlightened will” (Schopenhauer). Freedom here is not simply freedom from external reality, but also freedom of the inner life to apprehend itself (Hegel) and freedom of the will to express itself directly (Schopenhauer). Rossini’s refusal of mimesis is reconceptualized as the embrace of a reality somewhere beyond—either above or below—the external world: Hegel’s and Schopenhauer’s texts abound in images evoking both height and depth, the sky and the innermost recesses of the self. Rather than movement away from something, this is ultimately movement of and for something. My reading of Hegel’s and Schopenhauer’s aesthetics has suggested ways in which Rossini’s refusal of mimesis was co-­opted by philosophies keen to

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promote music as an art of freedom and movement, operating beyond the tangible reality of the external world. At the same time, the metaphysics of music of both philosophers, however much they may have been partial to vocal music and to Rossini’s melodies, steered clear of the theater. Not only are the theatrical origins of Rossini’s music never properly acknowledged or thematized, but the very idea of the theater contradicts the function of music in Hegel’s and Schopenhauer’s theories as discussed above. Neither recognizes repetition as the main tool of Rossini’s antimimetic stance. We must turn to a different philosophical tradition to find suggestions for integrating these crucial aspects into a general interpretation of Rossini’s dramaturgy.

  Unlike Hegel and Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard is not known to have harbored a love of Rossini—instead he was famously a Mozartian. His Repetition (1843), however, constitutes the starting point of a theory of repetition that can matter for Rossini, especially for its crucial distinction between recollection and repetition: “Repetition and recollection are the same motion, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward.” According to Kierkegaard, recollection was typical of the ancients but has been replaced by repetition, the more modern activity. The difference is one of temporalities: “When the Greeks said that all knowing is recollecting, they said that all existence, which is, has been; when one says that life is a repetition, one says: actually, that which has been, now comes into existence.”10 In Arne Melberg’s dense but useful summary: Repetition is here a movement in time: re-­take, re-­peat, re-­turn, re-­verse means going back in time to what “has been.” But still, in spite of this movement backward, “repetition” makes it new and is therefore a movement forward: it is “the new.” The reason this movement backward is actually a movement forward is temporal: you cannot re-­peat/re-­take what has been, since what has been has been. The now of “repetition” is always an after. But not only: since the movement of “repetition” also makes it new, makes “the new”—simultaneously with being a repeating re-­duplication—“repetition” suspends the temporal order of before-­after in or by that now previously called “the instant.” The temporal dialectics of “repetition” suspends tempo-



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ral sequence: the now that is always an after comes actually before—it is the now of “the instant,” the sudden intervention in sequential time, the caesura that defines what has been and prepares what is to become.11

If recollection is a form of knowledge, repetition is a form of movement. The suspension of temporal sequence achieved by repetition is, paradoxically, a movement that creates a present without past or future: an intervention in sequential time that cuts through it to make space for the now, the instant. Repetition promises nothing less than the overcoming of the passage of time; it brings back what time has taken away. Even such a brief—and surely simplistic—summary reveals the relevance of Kierkegaard’s theory of repetition for Rossini. Let us think, for example, of the ensembles in which the characters express the utter confusion, stunned disbelief, and complete disorientation that follow a traumatic event. In these ensembles, complete loss of meaning is expressed through musical repetition that generates a sense of circularity, of endless return to the same spot, and, at the same time, of complete lack of movement, of stunned immobility. I have repeatedly called these ensembles “prolonged moments”: now I would like to call attention to the paradox, or at least the internal tension, in this formulation. How can a moment actually be prolonged? I would argue that what we witness here is precisely repetition as theorized by Kierkegaard: movement that suspends the temporal order and creates a present without past or future, making space for the now, the instant. Moreover, the opposition found by Kierkegaard between recollection and repetition can be aligned onto the Freudian one between remembering and repeating, between working through and acting out. But here the hierarchy is reversed. For Freud remembering makes room for working through, freeing the subject from endless acting out, but for Kierkegaard recollection condemns human beings to the unceasingly forward flow of time, and therefore to knowledge. Repetition frees us from the curse of temporality and of knowledge instead, making life possible: “which has been, now comes into existence,” to repeat the philosopher’s words. Philosopher Samuel Weber has explored the theatrical dimension of Kierkegaard’s theory of repetition, discussing the relevance and function of theater going in Kierkegaard’s unconventional text—not a standard philosophical tract, but a story of sorts, with characters—and suggesting ways in which repetition can only be found in the theater. Not any sort of theater, however, but a specific kind of farce that provokes a certain type of childlike laugh-

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ter from the audience. In Weber’s words, such laughter engages this audience “in a movement that epitomizes the way in which repetition, taken seriously, alters the very notion of movement itself.” According to Weber, Laughter is a movement that disrupts the stasis of the body, destabilizes its situation, but not in order to change it for another place. Laughter is a repetitive movement of the body that . . . is going nowhere and yet changing everything. Laughter goes to extremes, and as such it cannot always be subordinated to conscious volition: its onset requires a certain uncertainty, a certain lack of knowledge or relaxation of control.12

We are far from the idea of laughter that commentators have evoked in connection with Rossini’s comic operas.13 In Weber’s interpretation, Kierkegaard’s laughter exemplifies what repetition does to movement, and, at the same time, the kind of movement invoked by this idea of repetition. Lack of knowledge, for Kierkegaard, means lack of recollection, lack of memory, lack of control. And such lack of knowledge, such “going nowhere and yet changing everything,” can only be attained in the theater. Kierkegaard’s theory of repetition, then, not only encourages an interpretation of Rossinian dramaturgy in terms of breaking free from the curse of temporality but also promotes theatricality as the privileged dimension for such liberation.

  The other prominent nineteenth-­century thinker on repetition and theatricality beside Kierkegaard is Friedrich Nietzsche, but since his position on theatricality is rather more ambivalent than Kierkegaard’s and his writings do not offer a substantially novel perspective on Rossini’s dramaturgy, I will not dwell on them here.14 Instead, I turn directly to a twentieth-­century philosopher who has offered a uniquely compelling interpretation of both Kierkegaard’s and Nietzsche’s theories of repetition in theatrical terms, Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze’s insights are important because they bring together repetition and theatricality in a richly suggestive manner for Rossini’s Italian operas. Furthermore, Deleuze’s philosophy has played a decidedly minor role in recent thinking about opera, which is surprising, since his take on theatricality seems to cry out for attention in this respect; relatedly, musical interpretations of Deleuze’s writings have tended to steer clear of the theater.15 A Rossinian perspective might prove helpful in beginning to redress this situation.



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Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968) reads Kierkegaard’s and Nietzsche’s theories of repetition not only in theatrical terms, but, more specifically, as promoting a theatricality in and of motion that shuns the representational imperative—indeed, openly opposes it. Deleuze starts from the premise that “the primacy of identity, however conceived, defines the world of representation. But modern thought is born of the failure of representation, of the loss of identities.”16 In Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, however, “movement is at issue”; for them, it is not enough “to propose a new representation of movement” because “representation is already mediation.” It is rather a question of producing within the work a movement capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation; it is a question of making movement itself a work, without interposition; of substituting direct signs for mediate representations; of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind.

This ambition, for Deleuze, “is the idea of a man of the theater, the idea of a director before his time.” Kierkegaard’s statement “I look only at movements” (in his Fear and Trembling) is, according to Deleuze, “the language of a director who poses the highest theatrical problem, the problem of a movement which would directly touch the soul, which would be that of the soul.”17 Nietzsche’s theatricality in particular is specifically founded on repetition: “Theater is real movement, and it extracts real movement from all the arts it employs”; “this movement, the essence and interiority of movement, is not opposition, not mediation, but repetition.” The theater of repetition is opposed to the theater of representation, just as movement is opposed to the concept and to representation which refers it back to the concept. In the theater of repetition, we experience pure forces, dynamic lines in space which act without intermediary upon the spirit, and link it directly with nature and history, with a language that speaks before words, with gestures which develop before organized bodies, with masks before faces, with specters and phantoms before characters.18

The extent to which the terms employed by Deleuze overlap with those encountered repeatedly in the early nineteenth-­century Italian Rossini discourse, as well as in more recent takes on his operatic dramaturgy, is striking.

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But Deleuze reflecting on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche provides a new context for their interpretation, a context in which the distance between repetition and representation is reconceptualized beyond the traditional understanding of these concepts in Western philosophy and aesthetics (including music aesthetics); a context in which repetition makes room for a radical form of theatrical authenticity—indeed, in which theatricality and authenticity are no longer opposed terms. Deleuze’s subsequent move from Nietzsche to Freud not only offers a further perspective from which to consider Rossini but also helps to continue the dialogue begun in the previous chapter with Freud’s theory of repetition. Specifically, Deleuze reads Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle in a way that promotes a positive understanding of the thorny Freudian concept of the death instinct in terms of repetition: “The death instinct is discovered, not in connection with the destructive tendencies, not in connection with aggressivity, but as a result of a direct consideration of repetition phenomena . . . the death instinct serves as a positive, originary principle for repetition.” According to Deleuze, “Freud interprets the death instinct as a tendency to return to the state of inanimate matter, one which upholds the model of a wholly physical or material repetition.”19 Most relevant for a Rossinian perspective are Deleuze’s conclusions on the therapeutic impact of this take on the death instinct. Repetition, rather than a kind of trap for the subject in which healing is impossible, constitutes instead the basic mechanism through which healing becomes ­possible: Becoming conscious counts for little. The more theatrical and dramatic operation by which healing takes place—or does not take place—has a name: transference. Now transference is still repetition: above all it is repetition. If repetition makes us ill, it also heals us; if it enchains and destroys us, it also frees us, testifying in both cases to its “demonic” power. All cure is a voyage to the bottom of repetition.20

Far from the suggestion of escapism that a Leopardian, Hegelian, or Schopenhauerian perspective may bring to an interpretation of Rossini’s dramaturgy, or the pathological resonances of a traditional psychoanalytical approach, Deleuze makes space for this dramaturgy as the object of transference on the part of the audience; or, perhaps better, as the offer of transference, a sort of transference-­in-­action truly demonic in its capacity both to enchain and to



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free. A description of Rossini’s dramaturgy as a voyage to the bottom of repetition strikes me as the closest we can come to capturing this dramaturgy’s apparently paradoxical ability both to mesmerize its audiences in a kind of hypnotic immobility, while suggesting an almost metaphysical sense of freedom, of having moved beyond reality and its petty representational imperatives. Indeed, an understanding of those classic Rossinian moments of complete loss of meaning, set by the composer to quintessentially repetitive music, as a representation of the meaninglessness of modern reality fails to do full justice to their revolutionary aesthetic and ultimately philosophical stance. Though in a sense an enactment of Italy’s posttraumatic inability to mourn, they are also more than just a refusal. Their triumph lies in turning repetition into an opportunity to go beyond representation altogether, finding instead a movement “capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation,” “making movement itself a work,” “inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind,” to return to Deleuze’s reading of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Thanks to these moments, and by metonymy to the operas of which they were often considered the most representative parts, audiences were able to experience “pure forces, dynamic lines in space which act without intermediary upon the spirit, and link it directly with nature and history, with a language that speaks before words, with gestures which develop before organized bodies, with masks before faces, with specters and phantoms before characters.”

  As a coda to this chapter, I would like to return to the early nineteenth century for a few brief gestures toward a historical anchoring of the largely theoretical arguments pursued thus far. First, I want to call attention to the language used by Deleuze to describe repetition and its effects: they are “demonic,” while “the whole apparatus of repetition” is granted a “terrible power.”21 Adjectives such as “demonic” and “terrible” recall the vocabulary of the sublime, a philosophical and aesthetic category that developed in the mid- to late eighteenth century and entered the discourse of music at the turn of the nineteenth. In 1805 the philosopher Christian Friedrich Michaelis, working within a Kantian perspective, suggested that one of the ways in which the musical sublime could be activated was “by uniformity so great that it almost excludes variety: by the constant repetition of the same note or chord, for instance.” I would suggest that, in its most philosophical understanding, the sublime may indeed

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constitute a valid interpretive category for Rossinian dramaturgy’s rapturous embrace of the impossibility of representation, through which, to cite Michaelis once more, “the imagination is elevated to the plane of the limitless, the immeasurable, the unconquerable.”22 As Sarah Hibberd and Nicholas Mathew have recently argued, the discourse of the sublime constitutes a particularly valuable viewpoint for a sociopolitical reading of musical works composed by Luigi Cherubini and Ludwig van Beethoven at the turn of the nineteenth century, as well as of the listening—and, in the case of Cherubini’s operas, viewing—practices elicited by these works.23 At the same time, as I have discussed in the chapter on modernity, Frank Ankersmit has associated the radical and dramatic trauma caused by the historical rupture of the French Revolution with the sphere of the sublime. The act of forgetting that Ankersmit deems foundational for the new identity emerging from such trauma is akin to the act of dissociation that characterizes the experience of the sublime, which “places us at a standpoint objectifying all experience as such. In sum, trauma can be seen as the psychological counterpart of the sublime, and the sublime can be seen as the philosophical counterpart of trauma.”24 Sublime experience requires us to create a “shield of representation between a former self and the later self that we have become after and because of our having had a sublime experience.”25 I want to conclude, then, by suggesting that Rossini’s Italian operas built a shield of representation that, far from representing historical reality, managed momentarily to separate Italians from such reality, making possible a sublime aesthetic experience, in the sense described above by Deleuze, itself engendered by the sublime historical experience of the time. In chapter 9 I evoked the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich as a visual correlative of Rossini’s Italian operas in terms of theatricality. I argued that Friedrich’s frequent inclusion of a figure looking at the landscape and therefore away from the viewer emphasizes the landscape’s own artificiality to this viewer, its essence as a doubly mediated take on reality, while at the same time thematizing the act of watching somebody watching. Friedrich’s paintings have long been closely associated with the sublime, mostly on account of the immense, infinite, oppressing natural landscapes he depicted, contemplated by the solitary viewer with the feeling of awe famously described by Immanuel Kant in his discussion of the sublime. Here I would like to bring these two perspectives together by suggesting that in Friedrich’s paintings we see the kind of objectifying sublime experience described by Ankersmit—an experi-



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ence that, both Friedrich and Rossini seem to tell us, relies on presentation—­ instead of representation—for its fullest realization. There is another contemporary painter, though, whose peculiar vision can be fruitfully compared with Rossini’s no less peculiar dramaturgy in ways rather different from Friedrich’s. I am thinking of Jean-­Auguste-­Dominique Ingres—who, incidentally, spent the years of Rossini’s Italian career living in Rome (1806–20) and Florence (1820–24). Art historian Mechthild Fend has investigated Ingres’s depiction of human anatomy, and skin in particular, in terms of a refusal of realism: “In a quite radical manner, he privileged the contour and the formal exigencies of a beautiful outline at the expense of an anatomically correct rendering of the body.”26 According to Fend, Ingres’s renunciation of what she terms “the physiological and morphological real” and his extreme idealization often resulted in “bizarre anatomical distortion”: his “serpentine line could in its sensuality please and trouble at the same time.”27 This pleasing yet troubling line characterizes in particular Ingres’s female nudes such as The Valpinçon Bather (1808), whose ultimate effect, according to Robert Rosenblum, is “a magical suspension of time and movement, even of the laws of gravity,” and La Grande Odalisque (1814), of which a French critic wrote in 1819 that it had “neither bones nor muscle, neither blood, nor life, nor relief, indeed nothing that constitutes imitation.”28 But his portraits of clothed women—such as, among those dating from the Italian years, Antonia Duvauçey de Nittis (1807) or Marie-­Geneviève-­Marguerite de Senonnes (1814)— display a no less cavalier attitude toward anatomy, promoting instead, in Fend’s words, a “painted world” where “there is neither exterior world nor interior body.” In his female portraits especially, Ingres, “insisting upon the body’s limits and stressing the surface quality of skin, . . . denied entirely its communicative aspect.” Ingres’s “refusal of the communicative function of the skin . . . fosters a reflection on the self-­referential nature of the painting. It is thus precisely that quality of what might be called pure surfaceness that makes the skin a metaphor for the surface of the painting.”29 Just like Friedrich, then, even if with completely different means, Ingres has in common with Rossini an insistence on the chasm between reality and its supposed representation, and an exploration of the self-­referential nature of the artwork, be it pictorial or operatic. Unlike Friedrich, however, Ingres is not particularly interested in the sublime, not even in his historical scenes (which he considered the apex of his art, well above portraits). His mythical paintings, such as Oedipus and the Sphynx (1808), might evoke the sublime,

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but more on account of their content than because of any formal feature. It is rather Ingres’s serpentine line, with its ability to please and trouble at the same time, that recalls Rossini, and especially Rossini’s melody as heard by Hegel and Schopenhauer: something that “mitigates and rises above the natural force of feeling by turning the inner life’s present transports into an apprehension of or a free tarrying with itself, thus liberating the heart from the pressure of joys and sorrows” (Hegel); something that “has significant and intentional connection from beginning to end,” that “relates the most secret history of the intellectually enlightened will, portrays every agitation, every effort, every movement of the will” (Schopenhauer). The time and movement that Rosenblum sees as suspended in The Valpinçon Bather are the time and movement of the external world, substituted here, as in Rossini, by the kind of movement described by Deleuze as “capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation.” Ingres’s serpentine line, especially when contouring perfectly smooth and impenetrable skin, “makes movement itself a work, without interposition,” “substitutes direct signs for mediate representations,” “inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind.” Ingres’s subjects, like Rossini’s characters, might give viewers and spectators the illusion of interiority, of depth. But look a little closer, watch a little longer, listen a little more, and you notice that the proportions are off, that the arms are too long, that there are no muscles or bones, that the texture is the same, that motives, themes, gestures, movements keep coming back—that, as in La Grande Odalisque, there is “nothing that constitutes imitation.” Rather, you see “pure forces, dynamic lines in space which act without intermediary upon the spirit,” “gestures which develop before organized bodies,” “masks before faces,” and “specters and phantoms before characters.”

15

Belief As this book approaches its conclusion, I would like to return one final time to the opinions of the Venetian journalist from 1823. His view that Rossini’s works belong not to the imitative genre, but to the “harmonic one,” and that this new genre constitutes the epitome of “modern music,” resonates with the philosophical interpretation I pursued in the previous chapter. His critical stance on this “modern music” is at best ambiguous, however, as demonstrated by his long and detailed review of Semiramide, published in several installments in the Gazzetta privilegiata di Venezia shortly after the general assessment of Rossini referred to above. At the end of an exhaustive traversal of the score number by number, in which he praises Rossini for his imitative music more than once (but without ever explaining why this music is supposedly imitative), he arrives at the trio “L’usato ardir,” the final important movement of the opera, which is followed only by a short if dramatically crucial dialogue and a celebratory tutti. In “L’usato ardir,” Semiramide, Arsace, and Assur give voice to the confusion and fear to which they are prey as they grope in the darkness of Nino’s mausoleum, immediately before Arsace, believing he is striking Assur, kills his mother Semiramide instead. According to our critic, The trio “L’usato ardir” leaves no other desire than to hear it again. . . . Those who still doubt that Rossini can write imitative music should come and listen to Semiramide with us: if we fail to convince them by the second perfor247



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mance, we will have to renounce our faith in the talents of this genius. Few listen to the noisy chorus that brings the opera to a close. . . . After the trio the senses cannot be touched by other pleasurable impressions: sadness has taken over our soul, we all unintentionally repeat with Colbran [Semiramide], with Mariani [Arsace], or with Galli [Assur]: “What will become of me? O god, I do not know! Where is my usual courage, my valor?,” and we leave the theater anxious for the day to return when we will hear these angelic melodies once more.1

According to this critic, then, in “L’usato ardir” Rossini succeeded for once in imitating with his music the utter and complete confusion by which the three characters are overcome. Two things should be noted in this passage. First, the main effect of this trio is to generate a desire for repetition, mentioned no less than three times in the space of a few lines: “no other desire than to hear it again,” “we all unintentionally repeat,” and “anxious for the day to return” and so on; seldom had Rossinian repetition in its multiple facets and effects been so explicitly invoked in early nineteenth-­century Italy. Second, sadness may have overtaken the listeners’ souls, but the music that causes such sadness is called “angelic” (angeliche melodie)—not an adjective usually encountered in connection with sadness. Is there something specific in the music of this trio that may have caused such intense yet potentially contradictory reactions in our critic? Asking this question is a useful way to approach the central concern of this final chapter: what happened after Rossini’s Italian career came to an end that same year of 1823? What was the fate of imitation and repetition? Before turning to these questions, let me note that they signal a return to history and to early nineteenth-­century Italy, and thus to the framework that characterized the earlier, more historical parts of this book, enriched, I hope, by the insights gained in the more hermeneutically oriented later chapters.

  The text of “L’usato ardir” is unusual in the context of the corpus of librettos set by Rossini. I transcribe it here as it was first printed in Venice in 1823: L’usato ardir . . . Il mio valor dov’è?—

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Dov’è il mio cor? . . . Ah! il sento languir In tanto orror.— Che mai sarà di me?— Che far dovrò? Misera/o! oh Dio! nol so! . . . L’usato ardir.— My usual courage . . . My valor, where is it? . . . Where is my heart? . . . Ah! I feel it disappearing amid such horror. . . . What will become of me? . . . What shall I do? . . . Poor me, oh God! I don’t know! . . . My usual courage . . .

Librettist Gaetano Rossi attempted to convey the three characters’ confusion through several notable devices. Not only are no less than five lines of eight composed of questions, but the first line reappears at the end, giving an impression of inescapable circularity—and confusing the printer, who placed it flush right, a position normally reserved for words that metrically complete the previous line but are uttered by a different character. The highly unusual meter of alternate five- and seven-­syllable lines, all tronchi—that is, with the accent falling on the last syllable—suggests anxious breathlessness. Finally, Rossi—or perhaps the printer—added suspension points and dashes to indicate hesitance.2 For his part, Rossini makes the characters wander from key to key as if they have lost any sense of proper tonal conduct or direction, as if they are groping in the dark, unsure where to settle (ex. 15.1). No pseudocanon here, no endless repetition, but directionless wandering in the tonal darkness of Nino’s mausoleum. To begin with, the piece is set up in the preceding recitative as though it would be in F minor, but instead it is in F major. The first phrase moves from F major to A minor, while, after a quick turn back to F major, the second lands on G minor—yet both A minor and G minor are unusual goals in F major. The singers then leap in a half-­measure earlier than expected, and the harmony sets up an extended dominant preparation for a return to the home key. It should be noted that in this piece dominant preparations, at least before the final return, tend to be colored by hints of the minor mode, as though the goal might be F minor. And indeed the return to F major is thwarted by a deceptive cadence to D-flat, a key belonging to the realm of F minor, not F major. This

Example 15.1 Semiramide, Trio Semiramide-­Arsace-­Assur, Andantino “L’usato ardir”

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Example 15.1 cont.

moves back to another dominant preparation, again with suggestions that the goal might be F minor. This dominant preparation, though, is also interrupted by a sudden suggestion of a move to D minor before the music flips back to F major and remains there, eventually unchallenged. Such frequent ambiguity of mode is another factor contributing to a sense of instability, then, beside tonal motion. To anybody who was used to the slow movements of ensembles



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Example 15.1 cont.

in L’Italiana, Tancredi, Il barbiere, La Cenerentola, and so on, “L’usato ardir” may have had the effect of a large glass of whiskey after months of sobriety. For the critic of the Gazzetta privilegiata di Venezia, “L’usato ardir” proved that Rossini could successfully abide by the operatic aesthetics of mimesis, that he could successfully represent reality. He was right, at least according to the then-­current conception of musical mimesis. It seems significant, though,

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Example 15.1 cont.

that, while the musical style changes, the situation does not. When eventually going for mimesis, Rossini imitates a reality of complete and utter confusion, of aimless groping in the dark, of directionless wandering: in effect, the posttraumatic reality of early nineteenth-­century Italian modernity, as explored in previous chapters. This time, however, he represents this reality mimetically: directionless wandering in the dark mausoleum and in the recesses of



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Example 15.1 cont.

the characters’ souls is translated into a directionless wandering in tonal space. The action on stage, the drama—or perhaps I should say the trauma—does not change; what changes, rather, is the representational principle through which this drama/trauma is realized in music. The Venetian critic, sensing he was back on known aesthetic ground, could breathe a sigh of relief. In the context of Semiramide, however, such relief is rather doubtful. De-

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Example 15.1 cont.

spite the best efforts on the part of the reviewer to make “L’usato ardir” the summation of the score in stylistic and formal terms, this trio is anything but. Not only is its directionless wandering in tonal space unique; this wandering is followed by an extended coda that, with its saturation of lengthy and absolutely standard cadential figurations, seems intent on neutralizing the effect of the piece’s first part. This kind of coda is by no means uncommon in Rossini’s



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Example 15.1 cont.

Italian operas, but it usually follows a much longer treatment of the main material of a movement—let us think, for example, of the canons from Bianca e Falliero and Maometto II discussed in chapter 2. As has been often noted, Semiramide is very long indeed—“monumental” is a recurring descriptor. Less assiduously noted is how this monumentality is

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Example 15.1 cont.

achieved through systematic repetition of phrases, sections, and movements. Already in 1824 the critic of the Corriere delle dame considered it “a shame that this most laudable work by Rossini is encumbered by so many superfluous repetitions and longueurs that even the most passionate music lover is worn out.”3 In Semiramide musical numbers are expanded from within rather than multiplied: not only are there no more numbers than in previous operas, but



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the proportion of arias—that is, normally shorter numbers—is higher than in most immediately preceding works. Yet Semiramide is longer.4 Against the background of this monument to repetition, the continuous change found in “L’usato ardir” sounds remarkably out of place, its exceptional status making the Venetian critic’s sigh of relief seem quite shallow. Other instances can be found of Rossini going at full steam for old-­ fashioned imitation in the late 1810s and early 1820s, in a way unheard of in the operas from the first part of his Italian career. The slow movement of the Act 1 sextet in Matilde di Shabran (1821), “Passaggier che si confonde,” is perhaps the most notable of these (ex. 15.2). It begins with each one of the six characters describing a different image: in turn, a confused, stumbling traveler, a boat in a stormy sea, a flickering torch in the distance, an attack of fever that causes shivering, an indebted, penniless poet, and a ruined castle about to collapse. Rossini paints each of these images as vividly as possible: an irregular accompaniment pattern, cellos going up and down two octaves, ever softer and downward violin tremolos, trembling strings, a rudderless minor-­ mode melody, a martial but unstable forte. In the following tutti, each image is compared to the usual “dubious, irresolute, troubled, hesitant mind” (dubbioso, irresoluto, sconcertato, combattuto). Marco Beghelli, who has analyzed this movement in detail, has suggested convincingly that the result (and probably also the intention) of such slavish imitation is parodic. In other words, this passage seems to be shouting “Look: Imitation at Work Here!,” establishing a direct connection between composer and audience that bypasses the drama and its characters—a wink implying that we know better than these silly people, so utterly lost in the their obsessions they do not see that the solution to their troubles is staring them in the eye.5 Finally, as with “L’usato ardir” in Semiramide, “Passaggier che si confonde” also sticks out as an exception within the context of Matilde di Shabran, a massive score characterized by repetition similar to that in Semiramide—the kinds of numbers are different, with ensembles far outnumbering arias in Matilde, but the internal expansion of their movements is comparable. The tension between imitation and repetition that has repeatedly emerged in this book, which also underpins “L’usato ardir” and “Passaggier che si confonde” in the context of their respective operas, characterizes the second part of Rossini’s Italian career in ways that help us understand some features of the landscape in the 1820s and 1830s. The years 1815–22, when Rossini was

Example 15.2 Matilde di Shabran, Sextet Contessa-­Corradino-­Matilde-­ Aliprando-­Isidoro-­Ginardo, Maestoso “Passaggier che si confonde”



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Example 15.2 cont.

based in Naples, have been mostly discussed in terms of experimentation, even reform.6 More specifically, the serious operas written for the Neapolitan royal theaters, with which Rossini was closely associated, have been praised for breaking away from the conventions governing the composer’s previous works. In this narrative, it is almost as if Rossini, feeling hampered by the style and dramaturgy that he had himself forged and that had met with astounding success, was trying to break away in search of novelty—which is to say, toward difference. This move away from repetition and toward difference has often been described as a move toward a better fit between words and music, toward imitation, and therefore toward “dramatic truth” and a realism of sorts. In this historiographical context, Semiramide has been interpreted as a return to the style and dramaturgy of the operas composed before the move to

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Naples, here monumentalized in a sort of valedictory gesture, as if Rossini wanted to show one final time just how much could be done with the “harmonic genre” at its purest. The reasons for this return are variously attributed to personal, musical, dramatic, or geographical matters, such as the supposedly more “conservative” taste of the Venetian public.7 Why, then, “L’usato ardir” and its single-­minded allegiance to difference and therefore, in this context, to imitation? May its very single-­mindedness, as well as its location just before the end of the opera, be a way to illuminate by contrast the nature of what has come before it? Rather than trying to answer one way or another, I suggest it is more productive to pause first on some historiographical issues brought to the fore by this question.

  So far, in discussing the overall style of Rossini’s Italian operas, I have used a wide-­angle lens that allows us to see the broad outline and overall profile. In the process, many details have been partly obscured, in particular some of the more specific features of the Neapolitan operas. At the same time, I should note that up to the mid-­1820s the overall circulation of the Neapolitan works, outside the two theaters where they were first performed (Teatro di San Carlo and Teatro del Fondo) and for whose specific performing forces they were conceived (signally a tenor-­heavy roster of soloists), was significantly more limited than in the case of works premiered in other cities, most prominently Tancredi, L’Italiana in Algeri, and Semiramide (Venice), La pietra del paragone, Il Turco in Italia, and La gazza ladra (Milan), and Il barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola (Rome).8 Given the lower circulation of the Neapolitan works, they inevitably contributed less to the Rossinian discourse in early nineteenth-­century Italy. Another issue I have seldom addressed in this book are authorial intentions. Surely Rossini had an astounding ability to gauge the sort of operatic dramaturgy that Italians would welcome with unprecedented excitement, and to do it in a very short time span (1810–13). On a basic level, then, Rossini must have aimed for a specific type of drama made by a specific kind of music, even if his aim might not have been entirely conscious. When attributing a plan to Rossini, I do nothing more than follow his Italian contemporaries, first among them some of his librettists, who conceived texts that made spacious room for his kind of music—surely helped by the composer himself, who in most cases worked closely with his poets.9 Actually, though, the composer’s inten-



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tions are of limited consequence for the kinds of arguments I have pursued, and his “verbal” voice is just one among many in this book—even if his musical one resonates very loudly. In fact Rossini did not say much at all about the matters that concern us here, at least not much that has come down to us in letters or reported conversations. It is tempting to suggest, though, that in the second part of his Italian career—as well as in his French one, which I address below—Rossini attempted to engage prevailing topics of the discourse of his operas through his compositional choices, seeking both to goad and to placate his critics. In this sense, the opinions notably missing from his letters of the period can perhaps be sought in his music, while the transformation of his style becomes in this light as much a matter of compromise as a creative evolution. In any case, Rossini did say some rather interesting things on these matters, but long after he had left operatic composition behind. These few later declarations of poetics measure the distance between his aesthetics and a new conception of opera that emerged after his retirement. As Paolo Fabbri has argued, the central issue is that of imitation. According to the older Rossini, “music is not an imitative art, but is at root entirely abstract; its purpose is to arouse and express.”10 The musical parameter on which this abstractedly expressive function mainly falls is melody, especially the cantilena that Carpani had called “eternal,” “beautiful,” “magic,” and so on.11 For the composer, this cantilena must express general and idealized emotions, never descending to the aesthetic lowliness of giving prominence to single words, since this would spoil its “beautiful,” eminently “musical” flow. This, the older Rossini felt, was the ruinous direction taken by modern opera, a direction he was proud never to have considered himself.12 This fundamental aesthetic shift was linked to profound changes in the performance of opera, especially its vocal style. Hence the aging Rossini’s frequent and loud complaints about the decline of vocal standards and the prevalence of “shouting” among singers who had lost the true art of executing beautifully his dear old cantilena.13 Such general aesthetic pronouncements by the retired Rossini are accompanied by other, more specific declarations. One particularly interesting case is that about Ermione (1819), the least successful of his Neapolitan operas, never revived after a short and coolly received initial run at the Teatro di San Carlo. A reported conversation from 1855 published that same year contains the following exchange:

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“Once you told me that you had made this opera too dramatic and that it was a fiasco.” “And rightly so,” Rossini said calmly. “It was very boring.” “But did it not feature any aria, any finale, nothing of that by which you usually knew how to intoxicate the public?” “You are very kind,” the maestro mocked me, “but there was really nothing, it was all recitative and declamation. . . .” 14

This is an outlandish statement, of course, and, although Ermione does contain some unusual features, they do not justify its reputation as Rossini’s most innovative Neapolitan opera, a reputation that predates the composer’s statement and still survives today in some quarters.15 These assertions on the part of Rossini throw a decidedly ambiguous light on some of the more experimental features of his Neapolitan operas, works that seem to go in the direction of a more precise connection between words and music—that is, of imitation. The question is less whether the older composer stood by these features or not but more about the relationship between his opinions and the performative and discursive patterns of his operas after the end of his Italian career.

  The only one of Rossini’s Neapolitan operas that continued to be frequently performed for decades was Otello. This work also featured prominently in the critical discourse as exemplary of Rossini’s imitative credentials, especially its third act, with the offstage song of the gondolier (“Nessun maggior dolore,” taken from Dante’s Divine Comedy), Desdemona’s Willow Song interrupted by her overwhelming emotion, the long orchestral passage accompanying Otello’s entrance, their tense, concise duet, and the sudden, almost abrupt ending. The critic of the Gazzetta privilegiata di Venezia, when out to promote Rossini the imitator in his review of Semiramide, held up “Otello’s fury and Desdemona’s sighs” as self-­evident proof.16 Giacomo Meyerbeer anticipated the common opinion of future decades when, after seeing the opera in Venice in 1818, he singled out Act 3 for its “outstanding, declaimed, even passionate recitative, mysterious accompaniments, lots of couleur locale, and the antique style of the romance in its highest perfection.” (Compare Philip Gossett’s assertion in the most recent edition of Grove that “in Act 3 of Otello Rossini came of age as a musical dramatist.” 17) Most interestingly, Meyerbeer pro-



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claimed himself surprised, since the “beauties” of which this third act was full were, according to him, “completely un-­Rossinian”—yet another sign that, at least in 1818, saying “Rossinian” implied a certain lack of concern for the drama.18 While Meyerbeer approved of Rossini the most when he was at his most un-­Rossinian, then, others were less impressed. First among them was Stendhal, whose Life of Rossini—published in late 1823 and thus neatly corresponding with the end of the composer’s Italian career—has been described by Benjamin Walton as “a narrative of decline.”19 Stendhal proudly called himself a “Rossiniste de 1815,” already nostalgic for such beloved old classics as Tancredi and L’Italiana in Algeri, and decidedly ambivalent about the novelties of the Neapolitan operas. Especially in German-­speaking contexts, the innovations in at least some of Rossini’s works from the second half of his Italian career were attributed to his supposed intention to imitate the “German school.” Walton has recently discussed this notion from the viewpoint of the Viennese reception of Zelmira in 1822.20 From a different perspective, Emily Dolan and Federico Gon have examined in detail the compositional connections between the composer and the so-­called Viennese classics, especially Haydn—there is no doubt that Rossini was familiar with Haydn’s music, starting from his school days in Bologna.21 It seems important to underline, though, that such connections are infrequently mentioned in the Italian Rossini discourse during his career there, and even in the mid- and late-­1820s they tend to surface in German, French, and English texts much more frequently than in Italian ones. The so-­often-­ cited Italian nickname for the composer, il tedeschino (the little German), cannot be traced any earlier than Alexis Azevedo’s 1864 French biography.22 The foreign national tradition that mattered the most for Rossini in Italy after the end of the composer’s career there was not the German but the French. The list of most frequently performed Rossini’s operas starting from the late 1820s and continuing into the 1830s and 1840s includes Italian translations of three works the composer had written for Paris, L’assedio di Corinto (from Le siège de Corinthe, 1826), Mosè e Faraone (or simply Mosè, from Moïse et Pharaon, ou Le passage de la Mer Rouge, 1827) and Guglielmo Tell (or other, censored titles, from Guillaume Tell, 1829). Le siège de Corinthe and Moïse et Pharaon are in turn based on Maometto II (1820) and Mosè in Egitto (1818), respectively, both of which premiered in Naples. As several commentators have noted, it is indicative that, for his first two French operas, Rossini turned to Neapolitan works. But others before him had already realized that these

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operas came closer to the French style than those composed for other cities: Ferdinand Hérold had stated as early as 1821 that “Mosè is the only serious work by Rossini whose libretto and genre can be adapted to French opera.”23 This observation helps point toward the reasons for the success of L’assedio di Corinto, Mosè e Faraone, and Guglielmo Tell in 1830s and 1840s Italy. From a peninsular point of view, works composed or at any case reconceived for the French stage were heard as, in Meyerbeer’s word, “un-­Rossinian,” just like Act 3 of Otello, which had been composed for Naples. The terms used by Meyerbeer to describe Act 3 of Otello, especially the emphasis on recitative, were similar to those used for French opera in early nineteenth-­century Italy.24 Moreover, as Philip Gossett has pointed out, the melodic language of Rossini’s French operas differed from that of his Italian ones, and not only them: “The melodies frequently avoid the regularity of phrase structure that characterizes much Italian melos during the first sixty years of the nineteenth century, from Rossini’s ‘Di tanti palpiti’ of 1813 to Verdi’s ‘Sempre libera’ of 1853.”25 No wonder, then, that Rossini, having apparently claimed in 1855 that Ermione was made up entirely of recitatives, should be made to call the opera “mon petit ‘Guillaume Tell’ italien” in a French biography published the previous year. In sum, the serious works by Rossini that kept being performed in Italy long after the Rossini craze had passed were those where “imitative music” could be found most easily. The only exception is Semiramide, which stayed in the repertory past midcentury, occasionally reappearing later on as a kind of grand old dame trotted out for special occasions—such as the opening of the new main opera house in Rome, the Teatro Costanzi, in 1880. We should note, however, that the score was systematically shortened, beginning with its very first run in 1823.26 Apart from this special case, the opere serie that kept going were those where gestures toward “dramatic truth” could be heard, where imitation was more easily detected, and where repetition was less systematically employed. This pattern fits well with the stylistic and dramatic evolution of Italian opera after the mid-­1820s, since this evolution has been often and fittingly described as a gradual move away from Rossinian symmetries and toward a closer match between words and music. The strong impression that Bellini’s formal experiments in Il pirata made on the opera’s first audience at La Scala in 1827 makes sense if we consider it from the viewpoint of the strict Rossinian diet on which this audience had been kept for the previous fifteen years, with only a relatively minor contribution from the Neapolitan operas to enrich



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the menu.27 The same can be said, and indeed has often been said, about Bellini’s canto declamato in La straniera two years later. And similar considerations have been advanced for Donizetti’s operas of the 1830s, starting especially with Anna Bolena (1830). I will not repeat here a story that has been already told several times from various viewpoints, from compositional process to the relationship between opera and literary culture.28 I will simply point out how Bellini’s, Donizetti’s, and other composers’ innovations entailed a move away from repetition and toward dissimilarity, from the less pervasive presence of coloratura to the insertion of parlante or lyrical sections in recitative contexts, and from dissimilar statements on the part of the two characters in a duet to the diversification of individual contributions to the largo concertato of an internal finale. It did not take long for this new style to displace Rossini from his position of absolute dominance in the repertory. The last year of his reign was 1833, with 157 productions of his operas in Italy out of a total of 577; however, the gap between him and the others was not as wide as in the 1820s: Bellini came second with 84 productions, Donizetti third with 82, and Luigi Ricci fourth with 71. The following year both Donizetti and Bellini overtook Rossini, with 148, 114, and 105 productions, respectively, out of a total 624. Bellini was on top in 1835 and 1836, followed by Donizetti as a close second and Rossini as an increasingly distant third, while 1837 signals the beginning of Donizetti’s reign as the most performed composer, a dominance that continued until the end of the 1840s.29 The Bellinian and then Donizettian novelties of the late 1820s and early 1830s generated heated and lengthy debates in print. Reading such debates confirms that at least a few contemporary commentators pointed to repetition as a pivotal parameter in this transformation. More in general, these discussions are frequently constructed around a binary opposition between Rossini and the new generation, especially Bellini, and this opposition is almost invariably defined in terms of “artificial” fioritura versus “natural” declamation, theatricality versus psychological “truth,” pleasure versus emotional involvement; in sum, music versus drama, and therefore, broadly speaking, the unthinking body versus the conscious mind.30 Readers will recognize several recurring themes of the Rossinian discourse from previous years, hardened here into clichés not only by the lack of fresh composerly output, as I have suggested in the introduction, but also by their role as one pole in an increasingly rigid set of binaries.

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In light of the fate of Rossini’s works in Italy after his retirement from operatic composition, both performative and discursive, the older composer’s opinions seem even more ambiguous. Was he dismissing the “un-­Rossinian” beauties of the Neapolitan operas—and also, form an Italian viewpoint, of the Italianized French ones—while reaffirming the value of his prima prattica, so to speak, in a discursive context that by and large favored his successors’ seconda prattica? But, if so, what of the fact that it was thanks to these works’ intimations of this very seconda prattica that they had managed to secure a stronger foothold in the repertory and that they were regularly praised? The best we can do, I believe, is to point out how the older Rossini seems preoccupied with defining his place in the history of opera, and how this preoccupation results in partially contradictory statements that construct his image, however obliquely, as either an astute anticipator of trends to come or as an old-­fashioned supporter of principles that might be no longer widely shared but, actually, should be. More relevant to this context is to note how this preoccupation with historiography was not only Rossini’s, but it features rather prominently in contemporary Italian discourse as well.

  The Rossini versus Bellini debates of the late 1820s and 1830s often promote the latter’s music as harking back to the glory days of those composers who had been trained in Naples over the course of the eighteenth century, and whose operas were supposedly characterized by careful declamation, attention to the meaning of words, a close fit between music and dramatic situation, and so on. Even more interesting is the link established between this “Neapolitan school” and the tradition of French serious opera as aspiring to similar kinds of operatic dramaturgy. Responding to an article on La straniera published by François-­Joseph Fétis in the Revue musicale (in which, incidentally, the third act of Otello was deemed “d’une confection toute française” [of an entirely French cut]), a reviewer for the Milanese periodical I teatri proclaimed that he agreed with his French colleague that “the school of musical declamation that pays attention first and foremost to words, sentences, and situations,” and which Bellini seemed bent on reviving, had a prominent French history, from Christoph W. Gluck to André Gretry and Étienne Nicolas Méhul. But of course several Italians had contributed to this history as well, including Niccolò Piccinni, Antonio Sacchini, Giuseppe Sarti, Antonio Salieri, and, more recently, Luigi Cherubini and Gaspare Spontini. More significant still, this



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school had an imposing contemporaneous Italian branch as well, whose more recent representatives included Paisiello, Mayr (“who can be considered Italian”), Paer, and Zingarelli, Bellini’s own teacher. And even if for a little while Italians seemed inclined to forget this “school of truth” (scuola di verità) thanks to “a genius” who “found room for the beautiful” amid his compatriots’ “thirst for novelty and volubility,” this same genius eventually went back to “more severe considerations” with the operas mentioned by Fétis (Mosè, Semiramide, La donna del lago, and La gazza ladra, plus the French works), as well as with Zelmira.31 I have summarized this text since it brings together several critical strands already touched on in this chapter, but also since it is symptomatic of a widespread tendency in Italian discourse to construct a history of Italian opera in which the Rossinian Rossini, so to speak, was but a parenthesis, almost an aberration, in a narrative of progress toward ever greater imitation, ever greater dramatic truth. No wonder the retired Rossini was rather anxious: he was witnessing his Italian operas, or at least most of them, being written out of history. Here indeed can be located the roots of that gap between the popularity of Rossini’s operas in the early nineteenth century and their relative historiographical neglect in twenty- and twenty-­first-­century histories of nineteenth-­ century opera with which I began this book. The considerable historiographical fortune of the concept of a “Neapolitan school” was due in no small part, I suggest, to its role in bracketing Rossini and constructing a genealogy for nineteenth-­century Italian composers’ more “advanced” and “dramatic” traits, beginning with Bellini.32 Another symptom of this historiographical orientation are a number of recent important studies of opera or Italian theatrical music that have managed to circle around Rossini with relative ease while featuring Bellini and his generation much more prominently.33 Far from casting a judgment on such studies, I mean here only to take stock of the long genealogy of a historiographical climate whose viewpoint on opera or Italian music relegates Rossini to the margins and can be traced all the way back to the 1820s and 1830s. Of course this was also Rossini’s own “fault”: the composer contributed to writing himself out of history by giving up writing operas for Italy in 1823 (Semiramide), Italian operas in 1825 (Il viaggio a Reims), and operatic works altogether in 1829 (Guillaume Tell). The reasons for his renunciation have usually been ascribed to personal and psychological matters—a form of de-

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pression—as well as to aesthetic ones: Rossini, after having first shown the way toward increased imitation and “dramatic truth” with at least some passages of his Neapolitan operas, and then with the French ones, decided he could follow this path no further. His later declarations of poetics, however ambiguous, can be understood in terms of an effort, perhaps unconscious, to justify the reasons for his early retirement. In such declarations he sometimes explained his decision to retire in explicitly sociopolitical terms, as in the following letter to Giovanni Pacini from 1866: This art [music], which is based only on the Ideal [Ideale] and on Feeling [Sentimento], cannot escape the influence of the time in which we live. Present-­day ideal and feeling are exclusively turned toward steam, theft, and barricades. . . . Keep in mind my philosophical determination to abandon my Italian career in 1822 [sic], the French one in 1829; this foresight is not given to everyone; God granted it to me and I still bless Him for it.34

We could do worse than follow Rossini’s lead in finally addressing the most pressing questions that my survey of the landscape after the mid-­1820s has brought up: why did Italian opera evolve toward what was perceived at the time as a tighter fit between words and music, which in turn entailed a sense of increased “dramatic truth”? Why the drive toward imitation, which meant a move away from repetition?

  In order to suggest an answer I need to enlist Giacomo Leopardi once more. His writings of the 1830s are often characterized by a bitter, aggressive irony against i nuovi credenti (the new believers), to cite the title of one of his satirical poems. Leopardi railed against the ever increasing number of believers in the capacity of scientific progress and political action to improve the fate of human beings, to make us happier. According to Leopardi, the belief in “the magnificent destiny of progress” (le magnifiche sorti e progressive, which has become proverbial in Italian) on the part of this “arrogant, foolish century” (secol superbo e sciocco)—to cite two famously sarcastic lines from the poem La ginestra of 1836—is ultimately a belief in the possibility of making sense out of reality—something he considered a pernicious delusion. This belief took several different forms in 1820s and 1830s Italy, from lit-



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erary Romanticism to ever stronger pressure for political change, which eventually gave rise to the so-­called Risorgimento. Such events as the failed revolutionary attempts in Modena, Parma, Bologna, and several other cities of present-­day Emilia-­Romagna and Marche in early 1831, the founding by Giuseppe Mazzini of the revolutionary organization called Giovine Italia (Young Italy) in the same year, or, in a different domain, the instant and enormous success of Alessandro Manzoni’s historical novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) in 1827 and, in 1832, of Silvio Pellico’s Le mie prigioni (My Prisons), the chronicle of his time as a political prisoner of the Austrians, are but a few among many significant symptoms of a changing culture and society. The years around 1830 saw similar changes in several other European lands, of course, from the revolution of July 1830 in France to Belgian independence from the Netherlands in the same year and the Great Reform Act of 1832 in England, and from the contentious arrival of Romantic drama on the Parisian stages with the famous “Battle of Hernani” at the first performance of Victor Hugo’s play in 1830 to the exhibition of Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People at the Parisian Salon of the following year. For musicologists, 1830 is a long-­familiar watershed, or at least a widely recognized pivotal point in the periodization of nineteenth-­century music, usually discussed in terms of composers such as Hector Berlioz, Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Giacomo Meyerbeer, and Robert Schumann coming of age with works ranging from the Fantastic Symphony (1830) to Robert le Diable (1831), and from Chopin’s two Piano Concertos (1829–30) or his Etudes op. 10 (1829–32) to Schumann’s Carnaval (1834–35). Il pirata, La straniera, and Anna Bolena, together with other operas by Bellini and Donizetti, especially Norma (1830), Lucrezia Borgia (1833), and Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), have often featured in this context, as indeed has Guillaume Tell, if less prominently. These disparate objects and events have in common a belief in the possibility of making some sense out of reality— psychological, emotional, social, political, literary, visual, and musical. What matters most to my argument here is that such belief is ultimately a belief in the possibility of representation. Keeping to Italian opera for a moment, I will consider the endings of serious works to help clarify my point. Rossini famously tried to change Tancredi’s finale from happy to tragic only to revert to the original and for a production of Otello in Rome in 1819 apparently had no qualms in having Otello and Desdemona clear all their misunderstandings at the last minute in order to appease the censors. The majority of the other opere serie end happily: Ciro in Babi-

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lonia, Aureliano in Palmira, Sigismondo, Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra, Adelaide di Borgogna, Ricciardo e Zoraide, Eduardo e Cristina, La donna del lago, Bianca e Falliero, and Zelmira. The conclusions of Armida, Mosè in Egitto, and Semiramide are more shaded—in the last case, for example, Arsace kills his mother Semiramide by mistake, thus unknowingly avenging her assassination of Nino, her husband and Arsace’s father, and also, in a sense, the incestuous love she had developed for Arsace himself when she did not yet know he was her son. In addition to the second Tancredi and the original Otello, only Ermione and Maometto II end tragically. In the space of a few years after Rossini’s retirement, however, the tragic ending became the norm, and the vast majority of Bellini’s and Donizetti’s operas end tragically (Bellini’s I Puritani is the only notable exception). Women go mad, crushed by social structures and psychological pressures of unprecedented violence that place them in unsustainable emotional positions. Men are either killed or kill themselves, defeated by life or by their inability to understand the world in which they live. It would seem entirely justified to conclude that Italian serious operas of the post-­Rossinian generation betray a pessimistic worldview, whereas Rossini’s works exhibit a positive notion of the human lot, the eighteenth-­century ideal still promoted by revolutionary and Napoleonic ideology and cast aside only once the deadening effects of the Restoration were felt with full force in the 1820s and 1830s. If we consider the ways in which these views of the world and of human life become musical drama, however, this conclusion must be turned on its head. Rossini’s antimimetic stance sabotages the emotional impact of both happy and tragic endings alike—hence, I suggest, his cavalier attitude toward the finales of Tancredi and Otello. Bellini’s, Donizetti’s, and their contemporaries’ search for “dramatic truth” enhances the emotional impact instead, so that after a tragic ending we leave the theater in tears rather than “electrified,” as with Rossini. Although many of the plots set by Rossini leave some hope for us even when we are confronted with difficult situations, the way in which he set them to music suggests a lack of faith in the ability of music to make us feel the characters’ emotions. Bellini’s and Donizetti’s librettos, on the contrary, put on stage a desperate outlook on life and love, but these composers show instead a deep belief in music’s capacity to penetrate our soul and move us. When, in the final scene of Lucia di Lammermoor, Edgardo learns that Lucia is dead, after “a long silence” (as per the stage direction) he begins the cabaletta of his final aria, “Tu che a Dio spiegasti l’ali.” After singing the melody the first time, he “draws his dagger and plunges it into his heart”; he is then able to utter



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only fragments of the customary repetition of the tune, while a cello comes to his aid, completing the melodic phrases on his behalf, so to speak. The effect, attained in significant part thanks to the breaking down of the usual symmetry, is emotionally devastating to the audience. Italians of the late 1820s and 1830s might have despaired of life and love, but they believed in opera’s ability to represent such desperation and to affect its public. To a new aesthetic of belief in the possibility of representing reality, pain may be distressing, but it is unbearable only for the character, not the audience, as the case of Edgardo’s cabaletta so eloquently illustrates. But what of Rossini’s comic operas? Their presence in the repertory after the 1830s is notoriously much greater than that of the serious or semiserious works: Il barbiere di Siviglia is the earliest opera that has maintained a continuous and substantial presence on Italian stages (and those of many other countries) from its first appearance to the present. Rossini’s reputation and image have been mostly shaped by this situation, beginning with Beethoven’s alleged encouragement to write more Barbieri as an envoi to their supposed meeting in 1822, and including Rossini’s own declaration, on the autograph of the Petite Messe Solennelle (1863), that “I was born for opera buffa.”35 The reasons for the repertorial resilience of the comic works are various and complex, but I believe that the issue of representation is prominent among them. The quintessential situation of Bellini’s and Donizetti’s works is no longer utter confusion, stunned disbelief, and complete disorientation on the part of the characters, as it was of Rossini’s. In their operas, when reality threatens to become meaningless, it is at least possible to mourn this loss of meaning, and to feel its pain. This includes Donizetti’s opere buffe, whose rich sentimental vein has been often noted, from Nemorino’s repeated emotional pleas in L’elisir d’amore (1832) to Pasquale’s desperation after being slapped by his new wife in Don Pasquale (1843). I suggest that Rossini’s comic works were recuperated into an operatic aesthetics of mimesis by emphasizing the one situation that is represented in them, meaninglessness. Already in 1818, after encountering Il barbiere for the first time, English critic Leigh Hunt said that he had never met a composer “who gave us such an harmonious sense of discord.”36 Thus, the nonrepresentability of a reality that changes too quickly for us to make sense of it could be domesticated as the representation of a reality that changes so quickly that the only way to represent it is to represent the confusion and trauma it causes. This subtle yet radical shift in interpretive perspective could be accommo-

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dated by the comic titles, Il barbiere first among them, thanks not only to the basic features of the comic genre in Western culture, but also by the absence of the sentimental in Rossini’s opera buffe, which sets them apart not only from later works in the genre such as Donizetti’s, but also from those of earlier generations. The only character exhibiting larmoyant traits, Cenerentola, begins with a sentimental stage song, “Una volta c’era un re,” but celebrates her “triumph” at the end of the opera with a quintessentially Rossinian display of coloratura fireworks: finding her rightful place in society means leaving behind all trace of sentimentality. What is more, La Cenerentola seems almost obsessed with staging the total confusion of its characters, the utter inability to understand their predicament that repeatedly sends them into canonic flat spins and crazy crescendos. Rossini’s music became “funny” in the context of the new culture of representation and the Rossini crescendo “an avatar of laughter,” in Janet Johnson’s suggestive words. As she has argued, Henri Bergson’s influential theory of laughter, elaborated at the very end of the nineteenth century, shows remarkable points of contact with Rossini’s “machinist,” mechanical music, even explicitly invoking the crescendo at one point.37 His serious works on the other hand, with their canons and their crescendos, stood no chance.

  One final question demands to be addressed: why this new belief? Why did Italians want to leave the opera house in tears? Why did they want to feel pain? This new culture of belief in representation, in a reality that could be represented—and on some level understood—belongs to a generation that had come of age since the Restoration, too young to have experienced fully the trauma of the Napoleonic years and all that it brought about in psychological, emotional, and cultural terms. The very idea of generations took hold precisely then, as a consequence of the unprecedented discontinuity in historical development caused by the revolutionary upheavals and the Napoleonic wars. Having experienced certain historical events rather than others, especially in one’s youth, became a marker of belonging, binding together people who might otherwise be geographically, socially, and even politically distant.38 This “generational thinking,” as historian Robert Wohl has called it, was particularly in evidence around 1830, with the youth of many of the participants in historical events becoming a marker of identity—as in “Young Italy.” Whereas Alfred de Musset, born in 1810, created the figure of l’enfant du siècle (the child of the new century; the title of his 1836 novel), René de Chateaubriand, born in



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1768, entitled his autobiography, written mostly in the 1830s, Mémoires d’outre tombe not only because its publication was supposed to happen only after his death but also because he felt as if he were already dead, buried by the passing of time and unable to come to terms with an incomprehensible new world. The older Rossini sounded a little like Chateaubriand when, in 1866, he declared his baffled disdain for the “steam, theft, and barricades” of the present. Indeed, he had already been relegated to the past by none other than Giuseppe Mazzini himself, who argued in 1836 that Rossini’s music was unable to meet the emotional, psychological, and political demands of the younger generation: “He may have glimpsed the future, but he did not embrace it.”39 Rossini’s music, which had met with such extraordinary success as the soundtrack of the present, was succumbing precisely because of its success, a victim of the new temporal regime that turned present into past with surprising speed. This music became old and boring, or, better, boring because old.40 In the 1830s, then, Rossini’s music became a victim of its own specific brand of modernity. Back in 1823, the three protagonists of Semiramide had indeed glimpsed the future, or, better, realized that the matter of the future would be crucial to their fate, when they anxiously asked “What will become of me? . . . What shall I do?” Rather than simply describing their present, unfathomable condition, as their predecessors had done in all those canonic larghi concertati, they asked themselves questions about their condition and its consequences. Since they were the characters of a Rossini opera, their only answer could be “I don’t know.” But the question matters, as well as the tense in which it is uttered. At the end of the last opera composed by Rossini for an Italian theater, the perennial present of his previous music is discarded for a moment in favor of a future full of nothing but crippling anxiety. No wonder Rossini did not embrace this kind of future. Rather than give up the present tense, he preferred to give up opera.

Epilogue

“Rossini after Rossini” is a topic for another book, one that would fill an evident gap in scholarship despite a growing number of contributions focusing on individual episodes in the performative, critical, historiographical, and editorial lives of Rossini’s operas from the 1830s onward. Significant attention would have to be devoted to the interest in Rossini’s music that flourished in the context of the various neoclassicisms of the 1920s and 1930s.1 No less intriguing would be the survival of some of Rossini’s overtures in the orchestral repertory (mostly as appetizers to weightier and supposedly more serious symphonic pieces) and their remarkable presence in film and television, from Disney’s 1935 Mickey Mouse: The Band Concert (Guillaume Tell) to Warner Bros.’s 1950 Bugs Bunny: The Rabbit of Seville (Il barbiere), from several Italian film comedies from the 1950s and 1960s starring Totò to Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 A Clockwork Orange (La gazza ladra and Guillaume Tell), and from ABC’s 1950s television series The Lone Ranger (Guillaume Tell) to Linea verde, a TV magazine on agricultural matters broadcast by RAI (Italian state television) in the 2000s and 2010s (Il viaggio a Reims, an overture probably not by Rossini but long believed to be by him). The truly crucial phenomenon, however, is the so-­called Rossini renaissance, the progressive return of many of his works to the stage in the past seventy years or so.2 As a result, Rossini’s operas are now more popular and frequently performed than at any time since the mid-­ nineteenth century. The gap between their relative historiographical neglect 275



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and their enormous early popularity that prodded the idea of this book is thus even more surprising. The differences between then and now are numerous and significant, but two stand out in the context of this book. First, the Rossini renaissance is a truly transnational phenomenon, and therefore investigating it from an exclusively Italian—or German, or French, or American, or British—viewpoint would make no sense, despite some national differences in scope and early chronology. Second, such an investigation would have to devote sustained attention to performance, particularly mise en scène. Verbal discourse would surely reveal much, especially the initial reactions of critics confronted for the first time with freshly unearthed works. But, in a predominantly visual age like ours, when staging has taken on a pivotal dramaturgical function in opera, the primary key to the potential meanings of Rossini’s works today is surely the ways in which they have been visually reimagined for late twentieth- and early twenty-­first-­century audiences. A comprehensive appraisal of Rossini stagings of the last few decades is well beyond the scope of this book. Even a cursory survey of the topic, however, brings to the fore some evident trends. Perhaps the most revealing is the tendency to stage Rossini’s operas, especially the Italian ones, through distancing devices that pre­sent the onstage action in ways that highlight its separation from the world of external reality. This effect is often achieved by filtering the drama through the lens of another performative medium or genre, whether theatrical, filmic, or televisual. References to other media are a very common strategy for opera directors nowadays, regardless of the kind of dramaturgy employed. Such references are used as a form of mediation between the stage and the world of the audience. The countless “Nazi” stagings of Wagner’s works, for example, enlist the audience’s image of Nazi Germany— perforce a primarily filmic and televisual one—to narrow the gap between, say, the Nordic mythology of the Ring and the presumed cultural compass of today’s spectators. With Rossini’s Italian operas this approach tends instead to work the other way around. The comedies have naturally lent themselves most easily to such a treatment. Their characters have been turned into puppets, marionettes, automata, or stock figures out of comics or “genre” films. Early and enormously influential instances of this tendency were Jean-­Pierre Ponnelle’s epoch-­making productions of Il barbiere di Siviglia (Salzburg Festival, 1968, restaged for La Scala the following year), La Cenerentola (San Francisco Opera, 1969, restaged for

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the Maggio Musicale, Florence, 1971), and L’Italiana in Algeri (La Scala, 1973), revived many times to this day by several front-­ranking companies worldwide, and repeatedly video recorded—including, for Il barbiere and La Cenerentola, in the form of opera films directed by Ponnelle himself (1972 and 1981, respectively).3 Ponnelle’s Rossinian puppets, swaying left and right in tight formation and perfect synch with the music of the slow movements and strettas of ensemble numbers, could not be more different from the “human” characters of his stagings of Le nozze di Figaro or Così fan tutte, for example, feeling “real” emotions and experiencing “real” confusion and pain.4 Ponnelle was not the first to approach Rossini’s comedies thus, and has certainly not been the last, as anybody who has spent a couple of hours watching excerpts from the hundreds of videos of live performances available on YouTube can attest. As I am writing this epilogue in November 2017, a production of La Cenerentola by Stefan Herheim in which Rossini himself appears on stage as a sort of puppet master is being performed at the Opéra de Lyon.5 More remarkable, however, is that Rossini’s serious works have also often been the object of distancing strategies on the part of directors, significantly more than their equivalents by Bellini and Donizetti, for example. Pierluigi Pizzi’s famous Semiramide for the 1980 Aix-­en-­Provence Festival was set in a world modeled on Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s fantastical designs for fireplaces (Delle diverse maniere d’adornare i camini, published in 1769), while the characters were encased in stiff costumes inspired by the equally fanciful inventions in Mascarade [sic] à la grecque (1771), a collection of drawings by French architect Ennemond Alexandre Petitot. According to Christophe Deshoulières, these characters “carry their homes on their backs . . . the singing actor turned into a tortoise by its hulking costume makes the link between the baroque machine and the modern über-­marionette explicit.” As Cristina Barbato has explained, Deshoulières’s reference to Edward Gordon Craig’s theorization of the actor as a kind of puppet suits well the antirealist acting style of this Semiramide, in which faces are covered by a thick white layer—elements that prevent any identification with the characters’ actions and emotions on the part of both actors and spectators.6 Several later stagings of Semiramide would follow this kind of approach, including Hugo de Ana’s for Pesaro’s Rossini Opera Festival in 1992—a vaguely kabuki-­like version of Pizzi’s, from which it borrowed the white faces among other details—and the production that replaced it in Pesaro, Dieter Kaegi’s in 2003—an operatic version of Stanley Kubrick’s grotesque filmic satire Dr. Strangelove.



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Other serious works have also been treated in a similar distancing fashion by directors. Marionettes, for example, and more specifically their large Sicilian version known as pupi, performed a crucial dramaturgical role in Yannis Kokkos’s 2007 Tancredi for the Teatro Réal, Madrid, and Luca Ronconi’s 2014 Armida for Pesaro. Ronconi’s previous Armida, also for Pesaro in 1993, took German films from the early 1930s such as Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930) and Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Atlantis (1932) as its visual reference point—but with a bit of George Lucas’s Indiana Jones thrown in for good measure. Cinema also underpins Davide Livermore’s 2012 Ciro in Babilonia for Pesaro, staged as the projection of a silent film from the early twentieth century, and acted with the emphatic motions we now associate with it. Another Armida, Mary Zimmermann’s for New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2010, displays several metatheatrical devices, including at one point turning the title character into a baton-­wielding orchestral conductor. In fact, Barbato has recently discussed several contemporary stagings of Rossini’s serious operas under the rubric of metatheatricality, emphasizing how this stance has often the effect of putting the onstage action within quotation marks, thus reducing the potential for emotional investment on the part of audiences.7 To be sure, not every director of the last few decades has followed this general trend when presented with the task of staging an Italian opera by Rossini. Graham Vick is a notable exception: his Ermione for Glyndebourne (1995) was partially set in a nineteenth-­century theater, but this metatheatrical set was progressively abandoned, resulting in a gradual rapprochement between action and audience. His Mosè in Egitto for Pesaro (2011) was relocated to the present-­day Middle East, evoking the Israeli-­Palestinian conflict to explosive effect: at the premiere, the police had to intervene to restore quiet among agitated spectators, and Vick was greeted by a chorus of boos. At the end of all subsequent performances, vigorously negative reactions were also witnessed, despite the fact that, as is customary, the director did not appear for a bow (I attended the fourth and final one); and prominent members of both the Jewish community and the Catholic establishment in Italy (who obviously had not seen the production) voiced strong criticism.8 But this uncompromisingly “realist” approach was reserved for an opera that had been considered particularly “advanced” already in the nineteenth century, and precisely for this reason had survived longer than almost any other serious work by Rossini. In this sense, it should come as no surprise that the Rossini operas that

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have been staged more “realistically” in recent decades are the French ones, especially Guillaume Tell, for example again by Vick at Pesaro in 2013—a thoroughly politicized, “communist” take that was met by the audience with violent boos but also shouts of approval (including mine)—and by Damiano Michieletto at London’s Covent Garden in 2015—to similar reactions, mainly on account of its sexualized staging of oppression. These considerations seem to point toward some sort of continuity between then and now, between the meanings of Rossini’s Italian operas for early nineteenth-­century Italians and their meanings for present-­day audiences. As I mentioned in chapter 9, musicologist Marco Emanuele, after discussing some of Rossini’s repetitive techniques, has invoked the notion of a therapy against alienation, of an escape from a reality that has ceased to make sense, not in the early nineteenth century, but in the final decades of the twentieth. In a similar vein, citing Herbert Lindenberger’s suggestion that “excess and repetition display themselves as Rossini’s guiding principles,” fifteen years ago I speculated that a culture such as the present one that takes excess and repetition as some of its most salient characteristics may hear Rossini’s operas with some degree of sympathy, perhaps even recognition. “The fact that the only reality known to Rossini’s operas is operatic,” I concluded, “may chime with our skepticism toward any form of representation that claims a more or less direct link with reality.”9 I want to be rather more cautious now, not only because I am no longer sure I can make such sweeping statements about “our” culture and “our” stance, but also because, as I have suggested above, recent trends in operatic mise en scène tend to bridge the gap between representation and reality rather than question it: the case of Rossini constitutes an exception in this context. More important, such easy equations between then and now run counter to one of the fundamental tenets of this book, namely, that meaning in art, or at least in opera, is not intrinsic to the work, not something that carries across centuries more or less unchanged, but is the ever provisional result of an ongoing dialogue between certain features of the work and certain groups of human beings located at precise times and places—hence my unease with the term “reception,” as I explain in the introduction. Yet there is no denying that, at least when considering mise en scène, “our” Rossini exhibits some significant points in common with the Rossini of early nineteenth-­century Italy. Should we conclude that there is a fixed core of meaning to his dramaturgy



280 Epilogue

after all? Maybe, but then again maybe not. Rather than decide one way or the other, I find it more interesting to reflect on the historiographical issues raised by the question. The reasons for the Rossini renaissance are multiple and multifarious, but the ever increasing historicism of the culture of opera and of “art” music in general is probably the main one. In the twentieth and early twenty-­first century, revivals of old works are taking the place of premieres of new ones, which usually fail to enter the repertory.10 Rossini is one of several composers whose operas have been exhumed after decades or centuries of disregard, with Handel probably the closest case in terms of both past neglect and present prominence in the repertory. In this sense, the Rossini renaissance is predicated on a fundamental discontinuity between past and present, a chasm so wide as to throw a decidedly skeptical light on any claim of continuity based on similarities between the early nineteenth-­century Italian Rossini and his late twentieth- and early twenty-­first-­century equivalent. A music that back then was the epitome of the present is now heard as a voice from a distant past that fascinates and intrigues, but remains from the past. This situation might best be described in grammatical terms: Rossini’s Italian operas today sound as if they were uttered in the historical present— perhaps not entirely by chance a verbal tense that is more characteristic of the Italian language, at least as currently practiced, than of English. We might write about these works in the present, we might stage them in the present, but we know perfectly well that they are from the past and of the past. Does this imply that they are for the past? Obviously not exclusively so, since they are frequently performed today. But can they be understood only in relation to this past? This is a predicament faced by all past works performed today. Rossini’s Italian operas, however, bring this situation’s inherent tensions powerfully to the fore, since their music is in the present tense, as I have argued in this book. Is it in the present tense, though? Or rather was it heard as being in the present tense back then? These questions were irrelevant for early nineteenth-­century Italy, and therefore for this book, since the internal tense of this music corresponded with the external one of those who heard it. It is only with the Rossini renaissance that such questions have become pertinent. They highlight from a specific, idiosyncratic viewpoint the contrasting forces of continuity and discontinuity at the core of modernity, the tensions between past and present that exploded with brutal force between the late eighteenth and the early nine-

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teenth century, and that have continued to characterize modernity ever since, albeit in very different ways. Rossini’s Italian operas speak to us now in the historical present, a tense that implies a vision of the past as present, but, crucially, they do so from a perspective that does not contemplate the past as a possibility. These works allow us for a moment to immerse ourselves in a temporal dimension coming to us from the past but in which the past does not exist, in which indeed the concept of tenses is absent, and yet we are fully aware that this past-­less dimension is located in the past, and a distant one at that. This singular entanglement between past-­as-­present and present-­as-­past that Rossini’s Italian operas ask us to consider—this distinctive, perhaps unique voice from the past speaking in the present with which they greet us—might not be the least among the causes for their appeal today. It might not be the least among the reasons why we seem to want to hear them again. And again.

Acknowledgments

Writing a research monograph while attempting to perform all the other tasks thrown at academics at an ever increasing rate by their institutions, especially sabbatical-­shy continental European universities, feels like quite an achievement these days. In my case, moreover, complex professional and personal circumstances have meant that this book has taken a particularly long time to complete. I am therefore deeply grateful to all the colleagues and friends who have helped and supported me along the way, not least for keeping faith that the book would one day indeed be finished. It is a great pleasure finally to be able to say thank you in print. I began thinking about some of the ideas at the center of Music in the Present Tense—even if I had no idea that there might be a book lurking somewhere behind them—over a decade ago during a semester I spent at Princeton as Edward T. Cone Member in Music Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study while on sabbatical leave from Oxford University. I have also received financial provision for this project from my current home institution, the University of Rome La Sapienza, and intellectual and practical support from colleagues there, including Andrea Chegai, Giovanni Giuriati, Franco Piperno, and Antonio Rostagno, as well as several doctoral students, including Alessandro Avallone, Francesco Bertini, Alèxandros Hatzikiriakos, and especially Eleonora Di Cintio, who helped with preparing the final manuscript. Further generous institutional backing has come from King’s College London, with which I have been affiliated for several years as a visiting professor in the 283



284 Acknowledgments

Music Department. The Fondazione Rossini, Pesaro, gave permission to use their critical editions as sources for the music examples and supported my engagement with its titular composer in several other ways. The editorial process was a pleasure throughout, thanks in particular to Paul De Angelis, whose firm yet graceful hand made my English infinitely better, and, at the University of Chicago Press, to Marta Tonegutti, who looked after the manuscript with care and sensitivity; to the two anonymous readers, whose observations improved the final version immeasurably, and from whose reports I have pilfered entire sentences; and to Tristan Bates, Susannah Engstrom, Elissa Park, and everybody else who shepherded the book through production expertly and expeditiously. I am thrilled that Music in the Present Tense is the inaugural volume of the new series Opera Lab: Explorations in History, Technology, and Performance, and deeply grateful to its editors, David J. Levin and Mary Ann Smart, for making this possible. Portions of this book appear in earlier versions in the following publications: “‘Ferrea e tenace memoria’: La pratica rossiniana dell’autoimprestito nel discorso dei contemporanei,” Philomusica Online 9/1 (2010): 69–99; “‘An Atrocious Indifference’: Rossini’s Operas and the Politics of Musical Representation in Early-­Nineteenth-­Century Italy,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 17 (2012): 414–26; “Rossinian Repetitions,” in The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography, Analysis, Criticism, edited by Nicholas Mathew and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 236– 62; and “Music and Memory in Rossini’s Italy: ‘Di tanti palpiti’ as Folk Song,” in Gioachino Rossini, 1868–2018: La musica e il mondo, edited by Ilaria Narici, Emilio Sala, Emanuele Senici, and Benjamin Walton (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, forthcoming). The writing was completed in 2017; therefore, I have not been able to take into consideration texts published since then. I particularly regret not engaging with the initial two chapters (“Risorgimento Fantasies” and “Accidental Affinities: Gioachino Rossini and Salvatore Viganò”) of Mary Ann Smart, Waiting for Verdi: Opera and Political Opinion in Nineteenth-­ Century Italy, 1815–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), and with several contributions to Gioachino Rossini, 1868–2018: La musica e il mondo, mentioned above. I am grateful to the colleagues who invited me to pre­sent portions of my research at their institutions or at conferences organized by them. I want to list them all because the book has been immensely enriched by the questions, suggestions, and ideas I was generously offered on these occasions: Suzanne

Acknowledgments 285

Aspden at Oxford University (after I left); Mauro Fosco Bertola and Inga Mai Groote at Heidelberg University; Michele Calella at the University of Vienna; Alessandra Campana and Anne Shreffler at Harvard University; Caryl Clark and Linda Hutcheon at the University of Toronto; Eleanor Cloutier, Melanie Gudesblatt, and Mary Ann Smart at the University of California, Berkeley; David Code at Glasgow University; Emma Dillon at the University of Pennsylvania; Katherine Hambridge and Benjamin Walton at Cambridge University; Sarah Hibberd at Nottingham University; Roger Parker at King’s College London; Laura Tunbridge at Manchester University; and James Webster and Neal Zaslaw at Cornell University. My warmest thanks also go to all the colleagues who commented on early drafts, answered queries, provided unpublished or otherwise unavailable materials, and offered advice, including Marco Beghelli, Fabrizio Della Seta, Barbara Eichner, Mary Francis, Hedda Høgåsen-­Hallesby, Elizabeth Hudson, Axel Körner, Nicholas Mathew, and Carlida Steffan. I am extremely fortunate in counting as my friends numerous scholars who contributed to this book with advice, suggestions, critiques, and encouragement, mixing the professional and the personal in generous, enriching, and imaginative ways, for which I am profoundly grateful: Suzanne Aspden, Alessandra Campana, Daniele Carnini, Suzie Clark, Sean Curran, Emma Dillon, Arthur Groos, Karen Henson, Gundula Kreuzer, Annette Richards, Ditlev Rindom, David Rosen, Susan Rutherford, Emilio Sala, Arman Schwartz, Mary Ann Smart, Suzanne Stewart-­Steinberg, Claudio Vellutini, and David Yearsley. Roger Parker, Benjamin Walton, and Flora Willson deserve a very special mention here, since they have done more than anybody else for this volume, with sharp insight, extraordinary patience, inexhaustible energy, and endless good humor. I would like to extend my warmest thanks to those who have helped me during the long work on the book in largely nonscholarly but no less important ways, including Francesca Bazoli and Gregorio Gitti, Romana Caruso, Davide Daolmi, Monica De Micheli, Marco Emanuele, Francesca Paola Rampinelli Rota, Angela Romagnoli, Enrique Sacau, Anya Suschitzky, Gaia Varon, and my brother Paolo. Jacqueline Ferguson and Sabba Orefice occupy a very special place among their number, as does the late Pierluigi Petrobelli. Barbara Diana is not only the dearest of friends but also a scholar and a musician and therefore has contributed to this book in several different ways, but my indebtedness to her far surpasses the sum of these contributions. In her final,



286 Acknowledgments

very difficult years, my mother Maria Clotilde listened to me talk about this book—and much else—with a light in her eyes that I shall never forget, and for which I am forever grateful. This book is dedicated to my spouse, Vincenzo Borghetti, with love and thanks, not least for bearing with my prohibition against playing Rossini on the car stereo—it just felt too much like work. Now that the book is finished and the ban lifted, I raise a glass to many years ahead of listening to all kinds of music, including Rossini’s, as we drive together.

Notes

Introduction 1. Philip Gossett, s.v. “Rossini, Gioachino (Antonio),” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, rev. ed., ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, 29 vols. (London: Macmillan, 2001), 21:​​734. 2. For a discussion of representation and modernity that I have found particularly useful, see Christopher Prendergast, The Triangle of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 3. The most significant recent addition to the growing body of work on Rossinian singers is Sergio Ragni’s monumental two-­volume biography of Isabella Colbran, which includes a wealth of primary sources: Isabella Colbran Isabella Rossini (Varese: Zecchini, 2012). For an attempt to bring together performance (from the mid-­twentieth century rather than the early nineteenth), history, and historiography in a Rossinian context, see Mary Ann Smart, “The Queen and the Flirt,” Representations 104 (2008): 126–36. 4. Stendhal, The Life of Rossini, trans. Richard N. Coe, 2nd ed. (London: John Calder; New York: Riverrun, 1985), 67–68 (translation modified). On this aspect of Stendhal’s Life, see Benjamin Walton, Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 29. 5. See Walton, Rossini in Restoration Paris. 6. See The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography, Analysis, Criticism, ed. Nicholas Mathew and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), which includes Emanuele Senici, “Rossinian Repetitions,” 236–62, and several other chapters mentioned throughout the present book. 7. See Emanuele Senici, “Introduction: Rossini’s Operatic Operas,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rossini, ed. Emanuele Senici (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–8. 287



288

Notes to Pages 15–25

8. Arnold Jacobshagen, Gioachino Rossini und seine Zeit (Laaber, Germany: Laaber, 2015). Warren Roberts’s Rossini and Post-­Napoleonic Europe (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2015) sets out to place Rossini’s operas (essentially the comic ones) in the political context of their time, interpreting them as promoting an ironic, subversive, or, at the very least, ambivalent attitude toward the Restoration regimes. This worthwhile project is unfortunately let down, however, by confused methodological premises and an only partial awareness of previous scholarly literature on the topic, as I discuss in my review in the Journal of Modern Italian Studies 22 (2017): 111–13. 9. Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 9. 10. Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow, 350. 11. Julian Johnson, Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 9. Johnson’s introduction (“Mapping Musical Modernity,” 1–12) contains a wide-­ranging discussion of different conceptions of modernity in Western thought since the mid-­twentieth century. 12. John Butt, Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 9, 12. 13. In both respects, Johnson’s is the wider perspective: he explicitly discusses Rossini and theatricality both in his volume (at 228 and 268) and in his “Beethoven, Rossini, and the Historiography of Modernity,” in Mathew and Walton, The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini, 265–82. 14. See Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

Chapter 1 1. Gazzetta privilegiata di Venezia, 30 January 1823; the entire article is reprinted in Marco Emanuele, L’ultima stagione italiana: Le forme dell’opera seria di Rossini da Napoli a Venezia (Florence: Passigli; Turin: De Sono, 1997), 266–67. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated; original-­language citations are included only where the source is not easily available in published literature or online. For music criticism in the Gazzetta privilegiata di Venezia around this time, with further Rossinian quotes, see Francesco Cesari, “Le cronache musicali della Gazzetta privilegiata di Venezia,” in Musiche e musicisti nell’Italia dell’Ottocento attraverso i quotidiani, ed. Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol, Ignazio Macchiarella, and Fiamma Nicolodi (Rome: Aracne, 2017), 225–44. 2. For a general overview of the early Italian reception of Rossini’s operas, see Marcello Conati, “Una certa malattia, la quale può denominarsi contagio fantastico,” in La recezione di Rossini ieri e oggi (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1994), 101–19, accompanied by a substantial anthology of reviews, “Gioachino Rossini nella stampa periodica italiana (1812–1825): Antologia,” 251–84. 3. Conati is of the same opinion: see “Una certa malattia,” 107. 4. Corriere delle dame, 19 October 1816, in Conati, “Una certa malattia,” 107, and Conati, “Gioachino Rossini,” 255. Conati also emphasizes that this is a recurrent sticky point for critics.



Notes to Pages 25–29

289

5. Corriere delle dame, 22 August 1818, in Conati, “Gioachino Rossini,” 256. 6. Gazzetta di Firenze, 13 October 1818, in Marcello De Angelis, “Presenza di Rossini a Firenze e in Toscana durante l’epoca granducale,” BCRS 17 (1977): 43. 7. Gazzetta di Firenze, 3 April 1821, in De Angelis, “Presenza di Rossini,” 44. 8. Review of a performance at Milan’s La Scala published in the Paduan (or possibly Venetian) journal Giornaletto ragionato teatrale, no. 86 ( July 1823): 577–79, in Conati, “Una certa malattia,” 108. 9. Varietà teatrali, September (?) 1824: 89–90, in Conati, “Una certa malattia,” 107. 10. Gazzetta di Firenze, 11 March 1826, in De Angelis, “Presenza di Rossini,” 49. 11. Review of Morlacchi’s Boadicea, in Giornale del Regno delle Due Sicilie, 13 February 1818, in GRLD, vol. 3bis, 204. 12. Excerpts from the texts by most of these authors are included in the anthology Rossiniana: Antologia della critica nella prima metà dell’Ottocento, ed. Carlida Steffan (Pordenone, Italy: Studio Tesi, 1992): for discussions of the issues surrounding imitation, see 10 (Lorenzoni, 1817), 27 (Maier, 1821), 41–46 (Leoni, 1821), 60 (Franceschini, 1822), 128–29 (Pantologo, 1828), 138–39 (Giorgetti, 1828), 160 (Santucci, 1828), 184 (Brighenti, 1830). For Geltrude Righetti Giorgi’s Cenni di una donna già cantante sopra il maestro Rossini (1823), see the modern edition included in Luigi Rognoni, Gioacchino Rossini (Turin: ERI, 1968), 341–72, at 369–70. For critical interpretations of these texts, see Carlida Steffan, “Presenza e persistenza di Rossini nella riflessione estetico-­musicale del primo Ottocento,” in Gioachino Rossini, 1792–1992: Il testo e la scena, ed. Paolo Fabbri (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1994), 79–91; Paolo Gallarati, “Le Rossiniane di Carpani,” in his L’Europa del melodramma: Da Calzabigi a Rossini (Alessandria, Italy: Dell’Orso, 1999), 261–79; Andrea Luppi, “Bello ideale e bello musicale nella polemica tra Majer e Carpani,” in L’aere è fosco, il ciel s’imbruna: Arti e musica a Venezia dalla fine della repubblica al congresso di Vienna, ed. Francesco Passadore and Franco Rossi (Venice: Fondazione Levi, 2000), 19–42. 13. Giuseppe Carpani, Le Rossiniane, ossia Lettere musico-­teatrali (Padua: Minerva, 1824; repr., Bologna: Forni, 1969), 133; see also 161–74. 14. Carpani, Le Rossiniane, 167–74, 178–84. 15. Carpani, Le Rossiniane, 74. This quote comes from the letter “All’anonimo autore dell’articolo sul Tancredi di Rossini inserito nella Gazzetta di Berlino no. 7, 1818,” first published in 1818 in the journal Biblioteca italiana. 16. Rossini to his mother from Rome, 27 February 1816, in GRLD, vol. 3bis, 121. 17. Rossini to his mother from Naples, 19 March 1816, in GRLD, vol. 3bis, 127 (original spelling). 18. Rossini to his mother from Naples, 16 April 1816, in GRLD, vol. 3bis, 131. 19. Gazzetta privilegiata di Venezia, 30 January 1823, in Emanuele, L’ultima stagione ­italiana, 267. 20. Emanuele, L’ultima stagione italiana, 268.



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Notes to Pages 31–32

Chapter 2 1. Of particular importance are Philip Gossett’s pioneering studies, esp. “The candeur virginale of Tancredi,” The Musical Times 112 (1971): 326–29; “Gioachino Rossini and the Conventions of Composition,” Acta Musicologica 42 (1970): 48–58; “Verdi, Ghislanzoni, and Aida: The Uses of Convention,” Critical Inquiry 1 (1974–75): 291–334; “Le sinfonie di Rossini,” BCRS 19 (1979): 5–123, excerpted in English as “The Overtures of Rossini,” 19th-­Century Music 3 (1979–80): 3–31. See also the studies of Scott L. Balthazar, specifically “Evolving Conventions of Italian Serious Opera: Scene Structure in the Works of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi, 1810–1850” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1985); “Rossini and the Development of the Mid-­Century Lyric Form,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 41 (1988): 102–25; “Ritorni’s Ammaestramenti and the Conventions of Rossinian Opera,” Journal of Musicological Research 8 (1988–89): 281–311; and “The Primo Ottocento Duet and the Transformation of the Rossinian Code,” Journal of Musicology 7 (1989): 471–97; William Rothstein, “Common-­Tone Tonality in Italian Romantic Opera: An Introduction,” Music Theory Online 14, no. 1 (March 2008): para. 16–27, http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.08.14.1/mto.08.14.1.rothstein.html. For a representative title in Italian, see Daniela Tortora, Drammaturgia del Rossini serio: Le opere della maturità da “Tancredi” a “Semiramide” (Rome: Torre d’Orfeo, 1996). For a semiotic perspective from which Rossini emerges as the crucial turning point between the old and the new, see Marco Beghelli, La retorica del rituale nel melodramma ottocentesco (Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 2003), esp. 455–71, partially anticipated in Beghelli, “La retorica del melodramma: Rossini, chiave di volta,” in Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992: Il testo e la scena, ed. Paolo Fabbri (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1994), 49–77. 2. For arias, see, among other studies, Sieghart Döhring, “Formgeschichte der Opern­arie vom Ausgang des achtzehnten bis zur Mitte des neuenzehnten Jahrhunderts” (PhD diss., University of Marburg, 1969); Friedrich Lippmann, “Vincenzo Bellini e l’opera seria del suo tempo: Studi sul libretto, la forma delle arie e la melodia,” in Maria Rosaria Adamo and Friedrich Lippmann, Vincenzo Bellini (Turin: ERI, 1981), 363–91; Scott L. Balthazar, “Mayr and the Development of the Two-­Movement Aria,” in Giovanni Simone Mayr, l’opera teatrale e la musica sacra: Atti del convegno internazionale di studio 1995, ed. Francesco Bellotto (Bergamo: Comune di Bergamo, 1997), 229–51. For duets, see especially Balthazar, “Mayr, Rossini, and the Development of the Opera Seria Duet: Some Preliminary Conclusions,” in I vicini di Mozart I: Il teatro musicale tra Sette e Ottocento, ed. Maria Teresa Muraro (Florence: Olschki, 1989), 377–98. A few interesting general suggestions are also found in Fedele D’Amico, “A proposito d’un Tancredi: Dioniso in Apollo” (1982), in his Un ragazzino all’Augusteo: Scritti musicali, ed. Franco Serpa (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), 28–40, and in Alberto Zedda, “Rossini a Napoli,” in Il teatro di San Carlo 1737–1987, ed. Bruno Cagli and Agostino Ziino, vol. 1 (Naples: Electa, 1987), 125. For a useful terminological perspective on the quick changes that affected aria forms at this time, see Marco Beghelli, “Tre slittamenti semantici: Cavatina, romanza, rondò,” in Le parole della musica, vol. 3, Studi di lessicologia musicale, ed. Fiamma Nicolodi and Paolo Trovato (Florence: Olschki, 2000), 185–217.



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3. For a concise but insightful discussion of the solita forma in Rossini’s operas, see Marco Beghelli, “The Dramaturgy of the Operas,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rossini, ed. Emanuele Senici (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 85–103, esp. 93–98. As is well known, arias often lack the initial movement: that it was a distinct pos‑ sibility even for them, however, has been clarified by Saverio Lamacchia, “‘Solita forma’ del duetto o del numero? L’aria in quattro tempi nel melodramma del primo Ottocento,” Il saggiatore musicale 6 (1999): 119–44. 4. Beghelli, “Dramaturgy,” 93. Among the growing analytical literature on works by Rossini’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries that, although not addressing their relationship with his operas directly, is nonetheless useful in a comparative perspective, see esp. Uta Schaumberg, Die Opere serie Giovanni Simone Mayrs, 2 vols. (Munich and Salzburg: Katzbichler, 2001), and Wolfram Ensslin, Die italienischen Opern Ferdinando Paërs: Studien zur Introduktion und zur rondò-­Arie (Hildesheim: Olms, 2003). Giuliano Castellani, Ferdinando Paer: Biografia, opere e documenti degli anni parigini (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), concludes extensive analytical explorations with a consideration of the impact of Rossini on the older Paer (448–61). 5. Scott. L. Balthazar, “Mayr, Rossini and the Development of the Early ‘Concertato’ Finale,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 116 (1991): 236–66, esp. 265. This conclusion is borne out by more recent and detailed studies, esp. Daniele Carnini, “L’opera italiana prima di Rossini (1800–1813): Il finale centrale” (PhD diss., University of Pavia, 2007). Less interesting for my argument is Marcus Christian Lippe, Rossinis opere serie: Zur musikalisch-­dramatischen Konzeption (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2005), since its references to Rossini’s predecessors and contemporaries are rather limited: the most substantial, to the internal finales of Mayr’s Medea in Corinto (1813) and Manfroce’s Ecuba (1812), amount to no more than ten pages (204–14). Nonetheless, this volume contains valuable analyses of the introduzioni and internal finales of the serious operas (137–77 and 178–272, respectively), which highlight their formal complexity. For an earlier overview of these kinds of numbers, see Tortora, Drammaturgia del Rossini serio, 61–134. For a thorough discussion of the introduzioni of a prominent contemporary of Rossini’s, see Ensslin, Die italienischen Opern Ferdinando Paërs (28–193), which also emphasizes the wide array of structural arrangements. 6. See Paolo Fabbri, Metro e canto nell’opera italiana (Turin: EDT, 2007), 102, with references to earlier literature. 7. Stefano Castelvecchi and Paolo Fabbri lean toward the “farsa as shrunk opera buffa” scenario, while Stefan Kunze, Bruno Cagli, and Richard Osborne favor the opposite trajectory. See Castelvecchi, “Alcune considerazioni sulla struttura drammaturgico-­ musicale della farsa”; Kunze, “Su alcune farse di Giuseppe Foppa musicate da Francesco Gardi”; Cagli, “Le farse di Rossini,” all in I vicini di Mozart II: La farsa musicale veneziana (1750–1810), ed. David Bryant (Florence: Olschki, 1989), 625–31, 479–88, and 633–40, respectively; Fabbri, “Librettos and Librettists,” in Senici, Cambridge Companion to Rossini, 57; Osborne, Rossini, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 173–74. 8. Balthazar, “Mayr, Rossini, and the Development of the Opera Seria Duet,” 188; Paolo Fabbri, “Due Italiane in Algeri: Da Mosca a Rossini,” in Convegno italo-­tedesco



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Notes to Pages 34–39

“Mozart, Paisiello, Rossini e l’opera buffa,” ed. Markus Engelhardt and Wolfgang Witzenmann (Laaber, Germany; Laaber, 1998), 349–85; a slightly different version was published as “Due boccon per Mustafà,” in L’Italiana in Algeri, ed. Paolo Fabbri and Maria Chiara Bertieri, GRL (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1997), 9–47. Recently Federico Gon has supported these findings with a comparative analysis of numbers from the two Italianas not discussed in detail by Fabbri: see Gon, Scolaro sembra dell’Haydn: Il problema dell’influenza di Haydn su Rossini (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 2014), 261–77. See also Friedrich Lippmann, “Per un’esegesi dello stile rossiniano,” Nuova rivista musicale italiana 2 (1968): 819. 9. See Saverio Lamacchia, Il vero Figaro o sia il falso factotum: Riesame del “Barbiere” di Rossini (Turin: EDT, 2008), 32–39. 10. See Sabine Henze-­Döhring, “La tecnica del concertato in Paisiello e Rossini,” Nuova rivista musicale italiana 22 (1988): 1–23; Friedrich Lippmann, “Il ‘grande finale’ nell’opera buffa e nell’opera seria: Paisiello e Rossini,” Rivista italiana di musicologia 27 (1992): 225–55; and esp. Claudio Casini, “Iterazione, circolarità e metacronia nel Barbiere di Siviglia,” BCRS 14 (1974): 37–100, the most detailed comparison and the one that most clearly brings to the fore the crucial role of repetition in Rossini’s score, despite its unwieldy terminology and contorted prose. See also Richard Taruskin, The Nineteenth Century, vol. 3 of The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 15–24. 11. The first detailed analytical description of the crescendo in Rossini’s operas is found in Gossett, “Le sinfonie di Rossini,” 23–25, 39–40; Gossett, “The Overtures of Rossini,” 10–11. Further relevant observations are found in Giuliano Castellani, “Due aspetti del concertato rossiniano: Caratteristiche della sezione in ‘canone’ e tipologia della stretta concertata,” Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, new series, 19 (1999): 247–72, esp. 266–69. For a recent and extensive analytical overview, see Gon, Scolaro sembra dell’Haydn, 79–102. For a particularly insightful analysis of the crescendo in Rossini’s overtures, see Steven Vande Moortele, The Romantic Overture and Musical Form from Rossini to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 56–62. 12. See chap. 3 (“The ‘Rossini Crescendo’ as Musical Mechanism”) of Robert Wallace Fink, ‘“Arrows of Desire’: Long-­Range Linear Structure and the Transformation of Musical Energy” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1994), 55–87, esp. 70–77. 13. See Lorenzo Bianconi, “‘Confusi e stupidi’: Di uno stupefacente (e banalissimo) dispositivo metrico,” in Fabbri, Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992, 129–61, which contains a detailed analysis of the section “Confusi e stupidi” within the Act 1 finale of L’Italiana in Algeri, together with some fundamental theoretical and dramaturgical clarifications. 14. See Bianconi, “Confusi e stupidi,” 149. 15. Bianconi, “Confusi e stupidi,” 152. The crescendos are actually two, given that the movement is constructed as an AA structure, as is customary, with the reprise beginning in the “wrong” key of C major in a D-­major context. 16. According to Castellani, at least half of the larghi concertati in Rossini’s operas between 1815 and 1823 are canonically conceived; see Castellani, “Due aspetti del concertato rossiniano,” 247.



Notes to Pages 40–56

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17. The second and third entries in “Parlar, pensar vorrei” are substantially decorated versions of the first. 18. For the case of Il vero omaggio, for which the evidence is circumstantial, see La riconoscenza and Il vero omaggio, ed. Patricia B. Brauner (GREC, 2003), xxxix, lix. Two years later Rossini would insert the quartet in La donna del lago when it revised the opera for performances in Paris: see La donna del lago, ed. Colin H. Slim (GREC, 1990), xxviii. 19. See Castellani, “Due aspetti del concertato rossiniano,” 251, who points out that the only other sixteen-­measure subject is found in the Act 1 finale of Semiramide, “Qual mesto gemito,” analyzed in detail at 254–60. 20. Castellani (“Due aspetti del concertato rossiniano,” 251) highlights the length of the canon within the Act 1 finale of Maometto II (left unchanged for Venice), “Ritrovo l’amante,” whose subject is also notated as if it were comprised of sixteen measures in 2/4; but its effect is that of eight 4/4 measures, with the first measure of each two-­ measure unit functioning as the upbeat to the following one. What is more, the canonic exposition modulates from the home key of A-­flat major to its dominant, unlike in both “Cielo! il mio labbro ispira” and “Conquisa l’anima.” 21. Damien Colas, “Melody and Ornamentation,” in Senici, Cambridge Companion to Rossini, 109, 111. The first to analyze Rossini’s melodies in terms of open and closed textures was Friedrich Lippmann, “Per un’esegesi,” esp. 820–27. See also Balthazar, “Rossini and the Development of the Mid-­Century Lyric Form.” 22. For a summary description of the lyric form from the point of view of Verdi’s works, see Senici, “Words and Music,” in The Cambridge Companion to Verdi, ed. Scott L. Balthazar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 89–98. 23. Example 2.5a is taken from Fabbri, ““Due Italiane in Algeri,” 355–59. 24. See Balthazar, “Rossini and the Development of the Mid-­Century Lyric Form,” where almost all the instances of “proto-­Bellinian” melodies are found in the later Italian operas, esp. Maometto II, Zelmira, and Semiramide. 25. Colas, “Melody and Ornamentation,” 112. For a different perspective on the relationship between “thematicity” and repetition in Rossini, see Marco Emanuele, L’ultima stagione italiana: Le forme dell’opera seria di Rossini da Napoli a Venezia (Florence: Passigli; Turin: De Sono, 1997), 41, who cites rather confusing earlier statements by Alberto Zedda and Fedele D’Amico. Emanuele’s chap. 2, “Il congegno iterativo e le sue funzioni” (41–78), however, constitutes a valuable analysis of Rossini’s style in terms of the crucial role played by repetition in the construction of single movements. 26. Beghelli, “Dramaturgy,” 103. 27. See Carnini, “L’opera italiana prima di Rossini,” 171–73 and 177–78.

Chapter 3 1. For an introduction to Le Rossiniane, see Paolo Gallarati, “Le Rossiniane di Carpani,” in his L’Europa del melodramma: Da Calzabigi a Rossini (Alessandria, Italy: Dell’Orso, 1999), 261–79. 2. Giuseppe Carpani, Le Rossiniane, ossia Lettere musico-­teatrali (Padua: Minerva,



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Notes to Pages 56–62

1824; repr., Bologna: Forni, 1969), 123–24; also in Rossiniana: Antologia della critica nella prima metà dell’Ottocento, ed. Carlida Steffan (Pordenone, Italy: Studio Tesi, 1992), 72–73. 3. Carpani, Le Rossiniane, 156; also in Rossiniana, 92–93. 4. Gazzetta di Milano, 23 August 1817, cited in GRLD, vol. 3, 185–86. The reference is to the slow movement, “Questo è un nodo avviluppato,” of the sextet “Siete voi!” in Act 2 of the opera, which begins with a canonic exposition and continues with a crescendo. 5. Gazzetta di Milano, 23 August 1817. 6. Corriere delle dame, 30 August 1817, cited in Marcello Conati, “Gioachino Rossini nella stampa periodica italiana (1812–1825): Antologia,” in La recezione di Rossini ieri e oggi, 256. 7. Stendhal devotes a short chapter of the Life of Rossini to answering the question: “Does Rossini repeat himself more than other composers?,” which stands as the chapter title. Typically, though, he starts from an observation based on his knowledge of the Italian discourse (the incessantly repeated accusations that Rossini repeats himself) but soon veers off into a reprimand of the public of Paris’s Théâtre Italien, whose “greatest error” is that “they want to hear and understand [entendre] everything”—unlike the Italian public’s supposedly more relaxed attitude—which then evolves into a discussion of written vs. improvised fioriture. The Life of Rossini, trans. Richard N. Coe, 2nd ed. (London: John Calder; New York: Riverrun, 1985), 347 (translation modified). 8. Nuovo osservatore, 27 December 1814, cited in GRLD, vol. 3, 78. 9. Corriere milanese, 16 August 1814, cited in Il Turco in Italia, ed. Margaret Bent (GREC, 1998), xxiv–­xxv. 10. Corriere delle dame, 20 August 1814, cited in Il Turco in Italia, xxv. 11. Gazzetta di Bologna, August 1816, cited in GRLD, vol. 3, 140. 12. Corriere delle dame, 5 March 1814, cited in Giuseppina Mascari, “Il Corriere delle dame: Spoglio e indici delle notizie musicali (1804–1818),” Fonti musicali italiane 7 (2002): 65. I will address below the reasons why a supposed self-­borrowing by Rossini was discussed in a review of an opera by another composer. 13. To the best of my knowledge, the only one to address this issue specifically and systematically is Uta Schaumberg, “‘Hier und da schreibt sich aber dieser beliebte Compositeur ganz ab . . .’: Parodie und Reminiszenz in Mayrs opere serie,” in Werk und Leben Johann Simon Mayrs im Spiegel der Zeit, ed. Franz Hauk and Iris Winkler (Munich and Salzburg: Katzblichler, 1998), 49–68. The cases of more distant predecessors such as Handel are well-­known, of course; on Handel’s self-­borrowing see at least John H. Roberts, “Why did Handel Borrow?,” in Handel Tercentenary Collection, ed. Stanley Sadie and Anthony Hicks (London: Macmillan, 1987), 83–92; John T. Winemiller, “Recontextualizing Handel’s Borrowing,” Journal of Musicology 15 (1997): 444–70. Specifically on the social and discursive context of Handel’s (self-­)borrowing, see Panja Mücke, “Transferwege und Blockaden: Zu Händels Borrowings im frühneuzeitlichen Kommunikationssystem,” Händel Jahrbuch 58 (2012): 185–203. 14. I have discussed opera criticism in Milanese newspapers at the beginning of the nineteenth century in my “Delirious Hopes: Napoleonic Milan and the Rise of Modern Italian Operatic Criticism,” Cambridge Opera Journal 27 (2015): 97–127.



Notes to Pages 63–66

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15. Corriere delle dame, 8 June 1806, cited in Mascari, “Il Corriere delle dame,” 45. 16. It is worth pointing out that, in the chapter of the Life of Rossini devoted to Eduardo e Cristina (a score that includes substantial self-­borrowings), Stendhal paints a little scene in which, at the premiere of the opera (Venice, 1819), “a solitary Neapolitan businessman . . . provoked great consternation among his neighbors by singing the theme of every piece before the performers on the stage had reached it. . . . ‘What you are hearing,’ he told them, ‘is Ricciardo e Zoraide and Ermione, which we applauded in Naples six months ago’” (Life of Rossini, 399–400, translation modified). Here, as in several other cases, the Italian Rossini discourse evidently supplied the raw material for Stendhal’s writerly elaborations. 17. “[L]a musica può chiamarsi un centone de’ migliori pezzi che il bravo maestro Mosca ha rubati a se medesimo, e raccozzati poi in questo libretto. Queritur se il maestro Mosca può propriamente dirsi ladro? . . . A me pare che sì; ma della natura di que’ ladri, che come i bovi rumano e rimasticano il cibo già preso, per cavarne un chilo più sottile ed animatore di tutto il corpo”; Corriere delle dame, 20 March 1813. 18. “Nella musica della nuova opera ci ha un po’ di tutto e di tutti. Il così detto waltz di Mosca, l’aria Pria che spunti in ciel l’aurora, qualche motivo della Molinara, parecchi altri nella Scelta dello sposo, ec. sono messi a contribuzione: ma ciò poco importa”; Corriere milanese, 19 September 1813. 19. Corriere delle dame, 25 September 1813, cited in Mascari, “Il Corriere delle dame,” 63. 20. Corriere delle dame, 25 September 1813, cited in Mascari, “Il Corriere delle dame,” 63. 21. “Pavesi, il quale forse non immaginavasi, che dopo parecchi anni mantener si dovesse viva nella mente di molti la rimembranza di que’ trionfi ch’ei colse sulle venete scene colla sua applaudita composizione di Fingallo e Comala, credette ora opportuno di trar nuovi frutti da quel antico capitale, appicicandone [sic] al Tancredi un intero pezzo, dalla prima all’ultima nota, che forma appunto l’anzidetto finale. Più di duecento persone udendolo, non hanno durato fatica a trovarsi en pays de connaissance, ed hanno con unanime grido risalutato il redivivo componimento. Del resto non si deve imputare a grave delitto tal sorta di plagio; questo non è in fine che rivendere la propria merce; e comunque Pavesi sembri prediliggere [sic] sì fatto esercizio, ei sarà più scusabile dei molti suoi confratelli che fanno man bassa sui lavori altrui. L’essersi poi da sì gran numero di spettatori discoperta la imitazione del famoso finale ell’è una prova del merito del pezzo medesimo, il quale non si scancellò dalla memoria d’alcuno, ciò che fa molto onore a questo perito maestro”; Corriere milanese, 20 January 1812. 22. Corriere delle dame, 25 January 1812, cited in Mascari, “Il Corriere delle dame,” 59. 23. “[M]a la memoria, che di rado mi tradisce, facendomi trovare una certa assoluta affinità fra questo pezzo ed un altro un po’ antico dello stesso genere e del medesimo maestro, penso inutile d’applaudire ora, ciò che già fu encomiato molti anni sono. Se non isbaglio, Pavesi ha fatto cantare il primo suo componimento sulle scene di S. Moisè in Venezia: era questo appunto una farsa intitolata, se ben mi ricordo, il geloso corretto; la sua musica fu lodata a cielo; il nome di Pavesi, fin’ allora sconosciuto, passò di bocca in bocca nei circoli, nei caffè, ai ridotti, ai teatri, da per tutto: nel geloso corretto appunto trovasi un



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Notes to Pages 66–69

terzetto che se non è interamente simile a quello di cui parlo nel trionfo delle belle, è per lo meno strettissimo suo parente”; Corriere milanese, 6 February 1812. 24. Whether Pavesi did indeed turn to self-­borrowing more than other composers is a different matter, on which research is still lacking. For a preliminary discussion of self-­borrowing by Pavesi, see Aldo Salvagno, La vita e l’opera di Stefano Pavesi (1779–1850) (Lucca: LIM, 2016), 213–17. 25. “Un grido generale di plauso . . . si replicò, e con maggior forza, allorché la suddetta primadonna, unitamente alla Bassi, sciolse la voce in un duetto, poco dissimile da quello che nella scorsa estate cantarono la due Mombelli con una grazia inimitabile: Questo cor ti giura amore. Appena udii il pensiero dominante di questo pezzo, mi corse al pensiero che Rossini avesse posto mano nel Fingallo e Comala. Il dissi alla brigata, e n’ebbi le beffe. Proposi di scommettere e la scommessa fu accolta; anzi si duplicò, giacché il duetto cangiandosi all’improvviso in terzetto, e parendomi d’aver conosciuto manifestamente non solo lo stile di Rossini, ma eziandio gli identici pensieri e la condotta di qualche squarcio musicale del Tancredi, dissi se ci aveva alcuno che bramasse correr novello rischio”; Corriere milanese, 4 March 1814. 26. Gioachino Rossini, Lettere, ed. Giuseppe Mazzatinti, Fanny Manis, and Giovanni Manis (Florence: Barbera, 1902; repr., Bologna, Forni, 1975), 284–85. 27. “Je suis toujours furieux, . . . mon cher ami, de cette publication qui met sous les yeux du public tous mes opéras réunis. On y trouvera plusieurs foix les mêmes morceaux, car j’ai cru avoir le droit de retirer des mes opéras sifflés ceux qui me paraissaient les meilleurs, et de les sauver du naufrage en les remplaçants dans les nouvelles oeuvres que je faisais. Un opéra sifflé me paraissait bien mort, et voilà qu’on a tout ressuscité! . . .”; Charles Doussault, “Rossini: Notes de voyage d’un artiste,” Revue de Paris, 1 March 1856:​​ 458. This report was cited in Alexis Azevedo, G. Rossini: Sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: Heugel, 1864), 98–99, from where more recent texts usually quote it. 28. See Agostina Zecca Laterza, Il catalogo numerico Ricordi 1857 con date e indici (Rome: Nuovo Istituto Editoriale Italiano, 1984). For more on editions of complete piano-­vocal scores, see chap. 10. 29. See Philip Gossett, “Rossini in Naples: Some Major Works Recovered,” Musical Quarterly 54 (1968): 316–40; Gossett, “Gioachino Rossini and the Conventions of Composition,” Acta Musicologica 42 (1970): 48–58; Gossett, “Le sinfonie di Rossini,” BCRS 19 (1979): 5–123, excerpted in English as “The Overtures of Rossini,” 19th-­Century Music 3 (1979–80): 3–31; Gossett, “Compositional Methods,” in Senici, Cambridge Companion to Rossini, 68–84; Marco Spada, “Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra di Gioachino Rossini: Fonti letterarie e autoimprestito musicale,” Nuova rivista musicale italiana 24 (1990): 147–82; Marco Mauceri, “La gazzetta di Gioachino Rossini: Fonti del libretto e autoimprestito musicale,” in Ottocento e oltre: Scritti in onore di Raoul Meloncelli, ed. Francesco Izzo and Johannes Streicher (Rome: Pantheon, 1993), 115–49; Mauceri, “‘Voce, che tenera’: una cabaletta per tutte le stagioni,” and Arrigo Quattrocchi, “La logica degli autoimprestiti: Eduardo e Cristina,” in Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992: Il testo e la scena, ed. Paolo Fabbri (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1994), 333–63 and 365–82, respectively; Marco Beghelli, “Die (scheinbare) Unlogik des Eigenplagiats,” in Rossinis “Eduardo e Cristina”: Beiträge



Notes to Pages 69–72

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zur Jahrhundert-­Erstaufführung, ed. Reto Müller and Bernd-­Rüdiger Kern (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1997), 101–22. The introductions to critical editions of works that contain self-­borrowings generally include detailed discussions of them: for a particularly relevant example, see La gazzetta, ed. Philip Gossett and Fabrizio Scipioni (GREC, 2002), xxviii–­xxxi; for another recent case, see Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra, ed. Vincenzo Borghetti (GREC, 2016), xlii–­xlvi . For the details of heavy borrowings from an Italian work, Il viaggio a Reims, into a French one, Le Comte Ory, see the introduction to Il viaggio a Reims, ed. Janet L. Johnson (GREC, 1990). This case is different from the other two French operas explicitly based on Italian antecedents, Mosè-­Moïse e Maometto II–­Le siège de Corinthe, since there the relationship between Italian and French works was explicitly acknowledged by their discourses. For a study rich in critical perspectives, even if on Bellini rather than Rossini, see Mary Ann Smart, “In Praise of Convention: Formula and Experiment in Bellini’s Self-­Borrowing,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53 (2000): 25–68. (Self-­)borrowing is usually considered an eminently authorial matter, and therefore its discourse does not include the vast phenomenon of arias inserted by singers into revivals of works, usually without their composers’ permission or knowledge. On this phenomenon in the early nineteenth century, see Hilary Poriss, Changing the Score: Arias, Prima Donnas, and the Authority of Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 30. Gossett, “Compositional Methods,” 82; for a similar assessment regarding the relationship of the materials borrowed from Aureliano in Palmira for Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra, see Robert Wallace Fink, ‘“Arrows of Desire’: Long-­Range Linear Structure and the Transformation of Musical Energy” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1994), 77.

Chapter 4 1. For the case of Agatina/La Cenerentola, see Paolo Fabbri, “Da Agatina ad Angelina: Cendrillon tra Pavesi e Rossini,” in Festschrift Leopold M. Kantner zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Michael Jahn and Angela Pachovsky (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2002), 107–14. 2. See Daniele Carnini, “‘Diventando savio’: La vertigine delle convenienze teatrali e Ciro in Babilonia,” BCRS 48 (2008): 85–113, which explores in depth not only the case of Ciro/Aspasia but also more generally the connections between Rossini and Pavesi. 3. See Marina Marino, “Rossini e Pavesi: A proposito di un’aria dell’Eduardo e Cri‑ stina,” BCRS 26 (1986): 5–14. 4. For a recent summary of the exchanges between Rossini and Pavesi, see Aldo Salvagno, La vita e l’opera di Stefano Pavesi (1779–1850) (Lucca: LIM, 2016), 209–13. 5. See esp. Daniele Carnini, “L’opera italiana prima di Rossini (1800–1813): Il finale centrale” (PhD diss., University of Pavia, 2007), in particular 33–38 (on Pavesi), 152–54 (on Generali), 162–167 (on Nicolini). For Guglielmi, see Friedrich Lippmann, “Vincenzo Bellini e l’opera seria del suo tempo: Studi sul libretto, la forma delle arie e la melodia,” in Maria Rosaria Adamo and Friedrich Lippmann, Vincenzo Bellini (Turin: ERI, 1981), 368–69. Radiciotti had already pointed to Pavesi and Generali as the closest to Rossini in terms of style among his contemporaries: see Giuseppe Radiciotti, Gioacchino Rossini:



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Notes to Pages 72–76

Vita documentata, opere ed influenza su l’arte, 3 vols. (Tivoli: Majella, 1927–1929), 3:70. Further studies are cited in chap. 2. 6. See Marcello Conati, “Una certa malattia, la quale può denominarsi contagio fantastico,” in La recezione di Rossini ieri e oggi (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1994), 101–19, 104–5, with a few quotes. Conati, “L’amante statua ovvero La magia di un flauto (A proposito di due opere di Farinelli e di Generali),” in Napoli e il teatro musicale in Europa tra Sette e Ottocento: Studi in onore di Friedrich Lippmann, ed. Bianca Maria Antolini and Wolfgang Witzenmann (Florence: Olschki, 1993), 383–405, discusses a crescendo by Generali from as early as 1808. For more on the crescendo, see chap. 2. 7. Not only them: In the already-­mentioned chapter of the Life of Rossini on Eduardo e Cristina, Stendhal claims that his Neapolitan friends maintained that “it was the easiest thing in all the world to resurrect fifty masterpieces by Paisiello or Cimarosa.” All it took was to enlist the services of “some maestro . . . who is taking a rest and is forbidden to work by doctor’s orders, Signor Pavesi, for instance,” who could easily do a quick updating job on these scores and make them newly appealing; The Life of Rossini, trans. Richard N. Coe, 2nd ed. (London: John Calder; New York: Riverrun, 1985), 402 (translation modified). 8. See Carlida Steffan, “Presenza e persistenza di Rossini nella riflessione estetico-­ musicale del primo Ottocento,” in Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992: Il testo e la scena, ed. Paolo Fabbri (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1994), 79–91, as well as her introduction (xvii–­xxxii) to Rossiniana: Antologia della critica nella prima metà dell’Ottocento (Pordenone, Italy: Studio Tesi, 1992). 9. Cited in Rossiniana, 56. 10. See, e.g., Wilhelm Seidel, “Stil,” in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd ed., ed. Ludwig Finscher, Sachteil, vol. 8 (Kassel: Bärenreiter; Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998), 1752–53; the following chapters in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-­Century Music, ed. Jim Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): “Music and the Rise of Aesthetics” (Andrew Bowie, 29–54), “The Construction of Beethoven” (K. M. Knittel, 118–50), and “The Great Composer” ( Jim Samson, 259–84); Angela Carone, “Un concetto ‘versatile’: Lo stile tra classificazioni settecentesche ed estetica romantica,” in Melodia, stile, suono, ed. Gianmario Borio, vol. 3 of the Storia dei concetti musicali (Rome: Carocci, 2009), 161–84. 11. The first text to tackle explicitly the issue of Rossini’s style was Friedrich Lippmann’s seminal article “Per un’esegesi dello stile rossiniano,” Nuova rivista musicale italiana 2 (1968): 813–56. Notable later discussions include Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-­ Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 57–64; Fabrizio Della Seta, Italia e Francia nell’Ottocento (Turin: EDT, 1993), 75–88; Sieghart Döhring and Sabine Henze-­Döhring, Oper und Musikdrama im 19. Jahrhundert (Laaber, Germany: Laaber, 1997), 17–28; Roger Parker, “The Opera Industry,” in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-­Century Music, ed. Jim Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 98–104; Philip Gossett, s.v. “Rossini, Gioachino (Antonio),” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, rev. ed., ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, 29 vols. (Lon-



Notes to Pages 76–81

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don: Macmillan, 2001), 21:​​734–68; Richard Taruskin, The Nineteenth Century, vol. 3 of The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 14–35. 12. Luca Zoppelli, “Intorno a Rossini: Sondaggi sulla percezione della centralità del compositore,” Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992, 13. Generally speaking, in the eighteenth century the author of an opera, or at least of an Italian opera, was the author of its words, which could be set to music by different composers and be heard even in the same theater repeatedly, but always in new settings. 13. Giuseppe Carpani, Le Rossiniane, ossia Lettere musico-­teatrali (Padua: Minerva, 1824; repr., Bologna: Forni, 1969), 131–33. 14. Steven Vande Moortele has written eloquently about the “expected surprise” of the crescendo in Rossini’s overtures; see his The Romantic Overture and Musical Form from Rossini to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 62. 15. Corriere delle dame, 31 August 1822 (original emphasis), and Giornaletto ragionato teatrale, no. 45 ( January 1823), both quoted in Marcello Conati, “Gioachino Rossini nella stampa periodica italiana (1812–1825): Antologia,” in La recezione di Rossini ieri e oggi (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1994), 267–68. 16. The article, signed with the pseudonym “Alceste” and simply entitled “Rossini,” was published in Paris Monthly Review, January 1822, 90–105, and translated in Gazzetta di Milano, 1 June 1822, 859–62. For the complex publication history of this text, see Suzel Esquier, Vie de Rossini par Monsieur de Stendhal, Chronique parisienne, 1821–1823 (Turin: CIRVI, 1997), 21–65, which corrects erroneous dates and titles of periodicals often repeated in previous literature. 17. “Straordinaria rapidità . . . profonde impressioni . . . una sempre nuova franchezza, che desta una specie d’incanto . . . quel continuo splendore è la cagione principale perché le composizioni di Rossini non lasciano un’impressione permanente.” Gazzetta di Milano, 1 June 1822, 862. These ideas are repeated throughout Stendhal’s later volume, but its chap. 40, entitled “Concerning Rossini’s Style,” runs esp. close to the article: see The Life of Rossini, 404–7. 18. Geltrude Righetti Giorgi, Cenni di una donna già cantante sopra il maestro Rossini (1823), in Luigi Rognoni, Gioacchino Rossini (Turin: ERI, 1968), 371. 19. Beside the passage cited above, see also Carpani, Le Rossiniane, 82–83, 124–25 (specifically on Zelmira), 138–39, 142, 152, 199. 20. On Carpani, see esp. Helmut C. Jacobs, Literatur, Musik und Gesellschaft in Italien und Österreich in der Epoche Napoleons und der Restauration: Studien zu Giuseppe Carpani (1751–1825) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1988). 21. Carpani, Le Rossiniane, 79. 22. Carpani, Le Rossiniane, 101–2. 23. Carpani, Le Rossiniane, 101. 24. Carpani, Le Rossiniane, 167. 25. See esp. Carpani, Le Rossiniane, 175–81; the categorization of the three styles is at 175.



300

Notes to Pages 83–96

Chapter 5 1. Giuseppe Carpani, Le Rossiniane, ossia Lettere musico-­teatrali (Padua: Minerva, 1824; repr., Bologna: Forni, 1969), 167. 2. Carpani, Le Rossiniane, 154. 3. Andrea Majer, Discorso sulla origine, pro­gressi e stato attuale della musica italiana (Padua: Minerva, 1821), cited in Rossiniana: Antologia della critica nella prima metà dell’Ottocento, ed. Carlida Steffan (Pordenone, Italy: Studio Tesi, 1992), 22. Further on in his text Majer declares that he cannot talk about the present state of opera buffa, since this genre no longer exists: “It has been several years that opera buffa has disappeared from our theaters, and cheerfulness with it. A malignant sentimental fever has invaded all souls. . . . As a consequence, the distinction between serious and comic music has completely disappeared, and one should be a great alchemist to be able to find even a minimal difference between the music of a serious work and that of a comic one” (24). 4. Michele Leoni, “Opinioni intorno la musica di Gioacchino Rossini di Pesaro,” Antologia, October 1821, 40–58, cited in Rossiniana, 42. The context makes clear that Leoni is chastising Rossini for flattening genre distinctions. 5. Il corriere delle dame, 5 October 1812, cited in Marcello Conati, “Gioachino Rossini nella stampa periodica italiana (1812–1825): Antologia,” in La recezione di Rossini ieri e oggi (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1994), 252. 6. Il corriere delle dame, 5 October 1812. 7. On Clarice’s language in La pietra del paragone, see Fabio Rossi, “Quel ch’è padre, non è padre . . .”: Lingua e stile dei libretti rossiniani (Rome: Bonacci, 2005), 328. 8. Eleuterio Pantologo, La musica italiana nel secolo XIX: Ricerche filosofico-­critiche (Florence: Coen, 1823), cited in Rossiniana, 129. 9. On La gazza ladra as opera semiseria, see esp. Arnold Jacobshagen, Opera semiseria: Gattungskovergenz und Kulturtransfer im Musiktheater (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2005), 219–42. 10. Gazzetta di Firenze, 13 October 1818; cited in Marcello De Angelis, “Presenza di Rossini a Firenze e in Toscana durante l’epoca granducale,” BCRS 17 (1977): 43. 11. Leoni, “Opinioni,” cited in Rossiniana, 44. 12. Pantologo, La musica italiana, cited in Rossiniana, 128. 13. For an insightful reading of this duet from the point of view of its tension between sentimentality and mechanicity—an interpretation that chimes with mine from a different viewpoint—see Melina Esse, “Rossini’s Noisy Bodies,” Cambridge Opera Journal 21 (2009): 27–64, esp. 51–56. 14. Gazzetta di Milano, 2 June 1817, cited in GRLD, vol. 3bis, 173. 15. In this context it seems relevant that, from a linguistic point of view, the libretto of La gazza ladra stands out, according to Fabio Rossi, “for its realism, for its language so unlike libretto-­speak (both serious and comic)”; as Rossi emphasizes, in this sense this opera is unusual even for a semiseria, at least when compared with Rossini’s two other such works, Torvaldo e Dorliska and Matilde di Shabran; Rossi, “Quel ch’è padre,” 328–37. 16. Giornaletto ragionato teatrale, September 1823, cited in Conati, “Gioachino Rossini,” 271.



Notes to Pages 96–100

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17. See also the review in the Corriere delle dame, 6 September 1823, cited in Conati, “Gioachino Rossini,” 270–71. 18. Giornaletto ragionato teatrale, January 1820, 17–20, cited in Conati, “Gioachino Rossini,” 257. 19. Gazzetta di Milano, 29 December 1819, cited in Bianca e Falliero, ed. Gabriele Dotto (GREC, 1996), xxxi. 20. Carpani, Le Rossiniane, 171. 21. See also the letter “To the Anonymous Author of the Article on Rossini’s Tancredi published in the Berlinische Zeitung, no. 7, 1818,” in Carpani, Le Rossiniane, 75–76. 22. Gazzetta privilegiata di Venezia, 30 January 1823, cited in Marco Emanuele, L’ultima stagione italiana: Le forme dell’opera seria di Rossini da Napoli a Venezia (Florence: Passigli; Turin: De Sono, 1997), 267. 23. Among the champions of this conception were the brothers Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel (esp. in August Wilhelm’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature; 1809–11, translated into French in 1813, English in 1815, and Italian in 1817), Friedrich Schiller (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry; 1800), Stendhal (Racine and Shakespeare; 1823), Victor Hugo (preface to Cromwell; 1827; preface to Odes et Ballades; 1828), the Milanese intellectuals gathered around the journal Il conciliatore, and Alessandro Manzoni (Letter to M. Chauvet; 1823). 24. Fredrich Schlegel, Literary Notebooks 1797–1801, ed. Hans Eichner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press: 1957), 116, cited in John Frow, Genre (London: Routledge, 2006), 26. 25. See Emanuele Senici, “Genre,” in The Oxford Handbook of Opera, ed. Helen Greenwald (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 33–52, on which this section of the chapter is based. 26. For the various aspects of the German discourse of opera as genre and genres in opera at the turn of the nineteenth century, see the essays in Oper im Aufbruch: Gattungskonzepte des deutschsprachigen Musiktheaters um 1800, ed. Marcus Christian Lippe (Kassel: Bosse, 2007). 27. See the contextual discussion in Thomas Betzwieser, “Spielarten der deutschen Opernästhetik um 1800: Denkfiguren im Spannungsfeld von Gattungsreflexion und Bühnenkonvention,” in Lippe, Oper im Aufbruch, 27–43; for an earlier perspective, specifically about Don Giovanni, see Sabine Henze-­Döhring, Opera seria, opera buffa und Mozarts “Don Giovanni”: Zur Gattungskonvergenz in der italienischen Oper des 18. Jahrhunderts (Laaber, Germany: Laaber, 1986). 28. See Pierluigi Petrobelli, “Don Giovanni in Italia: La fortuna dell’opera e il suo influsso,” Analecta Musicologica 18 (1978): 30–51. 29. For two complementary perspectives, see Jacobshagen, Opera semiseria, and Stefano Castelvecchi, Sentimental Opera: Questions of Genre in the Age of Bourgeois Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).



302

Notes to Pages 103–110

Chapter 6 1. See Paolo Gallarati, “Per un’interpretazione del comico rossiniano,” Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992: Il testo e la scena, ed. Paolo Fabbri (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1994), 3–12; here Gallarati revisits and revises concepts he had first exposed in his “Dramma e ludus dall’Italiana al Barbiere,” in Il melodramma italiano dell’Ottocento: Studi e ricerche per Massimo Mila, ed. Giorgio Pestelli (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), 237–80. Both texts have since been collected in Gallarati, L’Europa del melodramma: Da Calzabigi a Rossini (Alessandria, Italy: Dell’Orso, 1999), 281–346. For a recent comparative perspective, see Gallarati, “Metamorfosi dell’opera buffa: Paisiello, Mozart, Cimarosa, Rossini,” in Alle più care immagini: Atti delle due giornate di studi rossiniani in memoria di Arrigo Quattrocchi, Università di Roma La Sapienza, 27–28 maggio 2011, ed. Daniela Macchione and Philip Gossett ([Italy]: n.p., [2016]), 17–41. 2. Janet Johnson, “Il barbiere di Siviglia,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rossini, ed. Emanuele Senici (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 167, 169, 173. Friedrich Lippmann made important observations on Rossini’s parody of some salient traits of his own style in this trio in his seminal “Per un’esegesi dello stile rossiniano,” Nuova rivista musicale italiana 2 (1968): 849–50. 3. Saverio Lamacchia, Il vero Figaro o sia il falso factotum: Riesame del “Barbiere” di Rossini (Turin: EDT, 2008). 4. See Lamacchia, Il vero Figaro, 112–13 and esp.185–91. 5. Benjamin Walton, “The Rossini Effect,” in Il barbiere di Siviglia, program book, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 2005, 36. 6. Corriere delle dame, 19 October 1816, cited in Marcello Conati, “Gioachino Rossini nella stampa periodica italiana (1812–1825): Antologia,” in La recezione di Rossini ieri e oggi (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1994), 255. 7. Lamacchia analyzes in detail Figaro’s cavatina (Il vero Figaro, 144–57), but insists too much on this number’s nature as an aria and not a stage song. Again, it seems less interesting to decide between the two than to point out how both words and music thematize their opposition, or, perhaps better, their coexistence. 8. Paul Robinson goes further: “It might appear from the text that ‘Una voce poco fa’ is an aria about love. . . . But . . . the music tells us quite otherwise: love is not the subject, merely the occasion. It would make no difference—indeed, it would make a good deal more sense—if Rosina were singing about her resolve to become a coloratura soprano”; Opera and Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 35. I am not sure one needs to come out in favor of singing over love rather than keeping them in play at the same time. In general, Robinson’s comparison between Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and Rossini’s Il barbiere, although containing a wealth of imaginative suggestions, seems unhelpfully bent on casting Il barbiere as the lesser work. 9. Lippmann, “Per un’esegesi,” 815. Some suggestions are also found in the two texts by Gallarati mentioned above, although I disagree with his emphasis on the differences between L’Italiana and Il barbiere, and with his puzzling repudiation of caricature as a meaningful element of Rossini’s comic art.



Notes to Pages 110–112

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10. Alessandro Baricco, Il genio in fuga: Due saggi sul teatro musicale di Gioachino Rossini, 2nd ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 27–48. Lippmann also made similar suggestions on the role of coloratura in his “Per un’esegesi.” 11. “Le melodie non si fanno né colle scale, né coi trilli, né coi gruppetti. . . . Bada bene che melodie sono, per esempio, il Coro dei Bardi, la preghiera del Mosè, ecc., e non sono melodie le cavatine del Barbiere, della Gazza ladra, della Semiramide, ecc. ecc. Cosa sono, dirai tu? . . . Tutto quello che vuoi, ma certamente melodie no, e nemmeno buona musica.” The letter continues: “Non andare in collera se ti maltratto un po’ Rossini, ma Rossini non ha paura di essere maltrattato e l’arte guadagnerà moltissimo quando i critici sapranno dire, ed avranno il coraggio di dire tutta la verità sul suo conto.” Letter to Opprandino Arrivabene, in I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, ed. Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro Luzio (Milan: Commissione Esecutiva per le Onoranze a Giuseppe Verdi, 1913), 620. 12. Gianni Ruffin, “Drammaturgia come auto-­confutazione teatrale: Aspetti metalinguistici alle origini della comicità nelle opere di Rossini,” Recercare 4 (1992): 125–63. 13. Damien Colas, “Melody and Ornamentation,” in Senici, Cambridge Companion to Rossini, 105. 14. I should point out that melody and ornamentation are by no means separate and successive elements, nor is ornamentation in any way an “addition” to a “basic” melody, from which it could supposedly be removed. Coloratura is absolutely integral to Rossini’s melodic thinking and effect. 15. Charles S. Brauner, “‘No, no, Ninetta’: Observations on Rossini and the Eighteenth-­Century Vocabulary of Opera Buffa,” in Fabbri, Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992, 25–47. Brauner quotes German critics and Stendhal, but, as we have seen, similar objections were made by Italian critics as well. 16. See Sabine Henze-­Döhring, “La tecnica del concertato in Paisiello e Rossini,” Nuova rivista musicale italiana 22 (1988): 15–16; Lorenzo Bianconi, “‘Confusi e stupidi’: Di uno stupefacente (e banalissimo) dispositivo metrico,” in Fabbri, Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992, 129–61; Marco Emanuele, L’ultima stagione italiana: Le forme dell’opera seria di Rossini da Napoli a Venezia (Florence: Passigli; Turin: De Sono, 1997), 69–70; Marco Beghelli, “La retorica del melodramma: Rossini, chiave di volta,” in Fabbri, Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992, 49–77. Here I mention texts that address style directly and go into at least some analytical detail; similar observations are also made in other, more general treatments of Rossini’s dramaturgy, several of which I have mentioned in previous chapters. 17. Fabio Rossi, “Quel ch’è padre, non è padre . . .”: Lingua e stile dei libretti rossiniani (Rome: Bonacci, 2005), 306–7. Rossi’s conclusions are based in part on a detailed comparative analysis of two librettos by the same author, Giuseppe Foppa, written within two years of each other, and which feature numerous similarities plotwise: L’inganno felice and Sigismondo. 18. On this transformation, see Vittorio Coletti, Da Monteverdi a Puccini: Introduzione all’opera italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 137–47; Ilaria Bonomi and Edoardo Buroni, La lingua dell’opera lirica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2017), 91–93, followed by a useful linguistic overview of Rossini’s librettos, 93–101.



304

Notes to Pages 112–119

19. See Angelo Fabrizi, “Riflessi del teatro tragico alfieriano nei libretti d’opera ottocenteschi,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale 12 (1976): 135–55. 20. For the details of all these self-­borrowings, as well as for interesting thoughts on their reasons and consequences, see Lamacchia, Il vero Figaro, 186–87, 213–14, 218–19, 264–68. 21. For details about these works, and more in general on Rossini’s self-­borrowings, see the studies cited in chap. 3. 22. See Marco Mauceri, “‘Voce, che tenera’: Una cabaletta per tutte le stagioni,” in Fabbri, Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992, 363–82. 23. See Giuliano Castellani’s review of Marcus Christian Lippe, Rossinis “opere serie”: Zur musikalisch-­dramatischen Konzeption (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2005), Il saggiatore musicale 15 (2008): 317.

Chapter 7 1. Gazzetta privilegiata di Venezia, 30 January 1823, cited in Marco Emanuele, L’ultima stagione italiana: Le forme dell’opera seria di Rossini da Napoli a Venezia (Florence: Passigli; Turin: De Sono, 1997), 266–67. 2. Gazzetta di Milano, 2 June 1817, quoted in GRLD, vol. 3, 173. The focus on La gazza ladra has also been noted by Melina Esse, “Rossini’s Noisy Bodies,” Cambridge Opera Journal 21 (2009): 50. Esse’s article is a rich and insightful study of the nexus of noise, body, and sentiment in Rossini’s Italian works and their discourse, observed from the point of view of Stendhal’s Life of Rossini. While my sources are partly different and I concentrate on partly different issues, my discussion of Rossini’s noisiness is indebted to Esse’s in several ways. More recently, Emily I. Dolan, The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), has discussed Rossini’s noisy orchestration as the point of arrival of the timbric revolution started by Haydn: see esp. 233–42. 3. Gazzetta di Firenze, 28 July 1814, cited in Marcello De Angelis, “Presenza di Rossini a Firenze e in Toscana durante l’epoca granducale,” BCRS 17 (1977): 40. 4. Gazzetta di Firenze, 13 October 1818, cited in De Angelis, “Presenza di Rossini,” 43. 5. Letter from Tacchinardi to Lanari, 12 July 1827, cited in Paolo Mechelli, I fili della scena: Alessandro Lanari, il carteggio con impresari e delegati (1820–1830) (Lucca: LIM, 2009), 111. The first sentence reads, “vuol vedere in faccia attori e cantanti” (literally “wants to see actors and singers in the face”), which I take to mean something like “is unforgiving to actors and singers.” 6. Corriere delle dame, 4 March 1820, cited in Giuseppe Radiciotti, Gioacchino Rossini: Vita documentata, opere ed influenza su l’arte, 3 vols. (Tivoli: Majella, 1927–29), 3:173. 7. “Eleuterio Pantologo,” La musica italiana del secolo XIX: Ricerche filosofico-­critiche (Florence: Coen, 1823), cited in Rossiniana: Antologia della critica nella prima metà dell’ottocento, ed. Carlida Steffan (Pordenone, Italy: Studio Tesi, 1992), 131. I have translated “educati al” as “used to,” but the Italian also implies “brought up with,” “schooled by.” Esse (“Rossini’s Noisy Bodies,” 47–48) also discusses this passage, albeit with a different emphasis.



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8. “Musica del Rossini,” Gazzetta di Firenze, 7 September 1826, cited in De Angelis, “Presenza di Rossini,” 50. While the conversation and its report are fictional, a real connection existed between composer and poet: they had probably met in Venice in 1819, and Rossini, who was in London when Byron died in 1824, composed a cantata in his memory, Il pianto delle muse in morte di Lord Byron. 9. The Venetian reviewer’s mention of “cannons in churches and bells in theaters” is obviously an instance of this trope, but its specific meaning is less than plain. While it clearly berates a kind of orchestration that apparently confuses different types of performance spaces and the sounds usually associated with them, its unusual reference to the religious sphere is confusing in the context of Rossini’s operatic oeuvre. For other critiques of Rossini’s orchestration, see Steffan, Rossiniana, 7 (Adriano Lorenzoni), 23 (Andrea Majer), 44 (Michele Leoni), 61 (H. Franceschini, a lone positive voice), 168 (Marco Santucci). Carpani also admits that one of Rossini’s faults is “the terrible racket of the instruments, which at times deafen the listeners”; Le Rossiniane, ossia Lettere musico-­teatrali (Padua: Minerva, 1824; repr., Bologna: Forni, 1969), 155. 10. See Steffan, Rossiniana, 145–46. 11. Stendhal, Life of Rossini, 2nd ed., trans. Richard N. Coe (London: John Calder; New York: Riverrun, 1970), 3 (translation modified). For a compelling reading of Stendhal’s biography in the context of the French reception of Rossini and of Parisian musical life in the 1820s, see Benjamin Walton, “Deciphering Hyperbole: Stendhal and Tancredi,” in his Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 24–67. 12. Carpani, Le Rossiniane, 146. 13. Carpani, Le Rossiniane, 145. 14. In a book on the connections among war, noise, and music at the turn of the nineteenth century that contains insightful reflections on Rossini (mostly considered from a Stendhalian and more generally French viewpoint), Martin Kaltenecker points to a passage of Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre tombe (bk. 23, chap. 16), in which the writer, walking outside Gand on 18 June 1815, hears the noise of battle: “That great battle, as yet nameless, whose echoes I heard . . . was the battle of Waterloo. Silent and solitary listener to the mighty judgment of fates, I would have been less moved if I had been in the fray.” La rumeur des batailles: La musique au tournant des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 56–57; for Rossini, see 189–224.

Chapter 8 1. Ugo Foscolo, Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, ed. Maria Antonietta Terzoli, in Opere, ed. Franco Gavazzeni, vol. 2, Prose e saggi (Turin: Einaudi-­Gallimard, 1995), 126–27. 2. For the details, see Foscolo, Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 836–37. 3. Foscolo, Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 11. This strong political dimension is the most evident feature that sets Ortis apart from its obvious model, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. 4. Edoardo Sanguineti, “Introduzione,” in Ugo Foscolo, Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Milan: Bompiani, 1990), v.



306

Notes to Pages 129–133

5. I summarize, paraphrase, and quote Massimo Riva, “Ugo Foscolo e la funerea zolla,” in his Malinconie del moderno: Critica dell’incivilimento e disagio della nazionalità nella letteratura italiana del XIX secolo (Ravenna: Longo, 2001), 37–67 (the quotes are at 37 and 39). 6. Derek Beales and Eugenio F. Biagini, The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy, 2nd ed. (London: Pearson, 2002), 30. 7. Lucy Riall, Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation State (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 4–5. For another recent general account of this period in English, see Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796 (London: Allen Lane, 2008), chaps. 1–3. For an Italian perspective, one could usefully turn to Storia d’Italia, vol. 1, Le premesse dell’unità: Dalla fine del Settecento al 1861, ed. Giovanni Sabbatucci and Vittorio Vidotto (Bari: Laterza, 1994): in their introduction the editors state that “the French domination . . . destroyed the foundations of ancien-­régime society and started a process that was traumatic as it was irreversible” (xiii). 8. According to Beales and Biagini, the impact of the Revolution and Napoleon in Italy was second only to that in France and the Low Countries (Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy, 30). For Alexander Grab, the most meaningful term of comparison is Germany: “‘In the beginning was Napoleon. His influence upon the history of the German people, their lives and experiences was overwhelming.’ This statement by Thomas Nipperdey on Germany applies also to Italy. . . . No other country except Germany was so affected by Napoleonic rule”; Grab, “From the French Revolution to Napoleon,” Italy in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John A. Davis, vol. 5 of The Short Oxford History of Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 25; the original cited quotation by Nipperdey is in Thomas Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 1800–1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 1. 9. See Foscolo, Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 745–48. 10. I have relied on the following annotated edition: Giacomo Leopardi, Discorso sopra lo stato pre­sente dei costumi degl’italiani, ed. Augusto Placanica (Venice: Marsilio, 1989). Beside the substantial introduction to this edition, and among several recent studies of Leopardi’s text, I have found particularly suggestive Ezio Raimondi, “Un poeta e la società,” in his Letteratura e identità nazionale (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 1998), 30–66; Massimo Riva’s “Il testamento di Tristano” (in Malinconie del moderno, 71–92) relies on the Discorso, among other texts, to investigate Leopardi’s melancholic and deeply ambivalent relationship with modernity. 11. In a review published in 1803, Foscolo anticipated Leopardi’s reflections by lamenting that Italy lacked good novels, “of which many useful and excellent examples are read in England, several in France, in Germany and in learned Europe. . . . All that we, alone among many nations, can offer in response [to the modern European novel] are novellas: a meagre glory”; Foscolo, “Saggio di novelle di Luigi Sanvitale parmigiano” (1803), cited and discussed in Gino Tellini, Il romanzo italiano dell’Ottocento e del Novecento (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 1998), 15. 12. For a very influential early instance, see Giulio Bollati, L’Italiano: Il carattere nazionale come storia e come invenzione (Turin: Einaudi, 1983); for a more recent and



Notes to Pages 133–142

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rather different case, see Suzanne Stewart-­Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 14–15. 13. See the editor’s introduction in Leopardi, Discorso, esp. 75–89; Raimondi, “Un poeta e la società,” and Riva, “Il testamento di Tristano.” 14. Corinne is indeed mentioned at the beginning of Leopardi, Discorso, 122. 15. See Madame de Staël, Corinne, ou L’Italie, ed. Simone Balayé (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 143–73. 16. See Stendhal, The Life of Rossini, trans. Richard N. Coe, 2nd ed. (London: John Calder; New York: Riverrun, 1985), 44–47. Similar if shorter comments are scattered throughout the Life. 17. Silvana Patriarca, “Indolence and Regeneration: Tropes and Tensions of Risorgimento Patriotism,” American Historical Review 110 (2005): 383. See also the introduction and chap. 1 of her more recent monograph Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). The foreign discourse of Italy and Italians between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century is the theme of an epoch-­making and still fascinating essay by Franco Venturi, “L’Italia fuori d’Italia,” Storia d’Italia, ed. Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti, vol. 3, Dal primo Settecento all’Unità (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), 945–1481 (for the French years, see 1120–87). For a recent general perspective, see Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall, “Introduction: Revisiting the Risorgimento,” in The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-­Century Italy, ed. Patriarca and Riall (London: Palgrave-­Macmillan, 2012), 1–17. 18. See Michael Broers, The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796–1814: Cultural Imperial­ ism in a European Context? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), esp. pt. 3, “Assimilation.” 19. Patriarca, “Indolence and Regeneration,” 384. 20. Patriarca, “Indolence and Regeneration,” 388. 21. Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 143, building specifically on Reinhard Koselleck, “Erfahrungswandel und Methodenwechsel: Eine historisch-­anthropologische Skizze” (1988), in his Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 27–77. 22. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 144, 143. 23. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 323–25. 24. Beales and Biagini, Risorgimento, 30. For the authors, the “upper classes” meant not only the aristocracy but also the bourgeoisie. 25. See Ron Eyerman, “The Past in the Present: Culture and the Transmission of Memory,” Acta Sociologica 47 (2004): 159–69.

Chapter 9 1. Report by Dubois to the French Ministry of Police, 21 March 1812, cited in Michael Broers, The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796–1814: Cultural Imperialism in a European Context? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 248. 2. Report by Nardon to the French Ministry of Interior, 10 September 1806, cited in Broers, Napoleonic Empire, 248–49.



308

Notes to Pages 142–151

3. See Broers, Napoleonic Empire, 249, 259. Although I have not read the documents in the original French, it seems clear that Broers has mistranslated “opéra comique” as “opera buffa”: only by replacing his “opera buffa” with “opéra comique” do the documents he cites make sense. 4. The quote by Tournon combines two different reports, one undated and the other from 1810; the report by Degerando is from 1810 and the letter by Récamier from 1813; they are all cited in Broers, Napoleonic Empire, 249, 250, 254. 5. Broers, Napoleonic Empire, 249. 6. Erika Fischer-­Lichte, “Theatricality: A Key Concept in Theater and Cultural Studies,” Theater Research International 20 (1995): 87. 7. Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait, “Theatricality: An Introduction,” in Theatricality, ed. Davis and Postlewait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1. 8. For a useful brief survey, see Marvin Carlson, “The Resistance to Theatricality,” SubStance 31 (2002): 238–50. 9. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London: Faber, 1986), 39, 29, 264. 10. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 11. See the classic analysis of these and other crucial texts by David Marshall, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 12. See Tracy C. Davis, “Theatricality and Civil Society,” in Davis and Postlewait, Theatricality, 127–55. 13. Among the many studies of the theatricality of the French Revolution, see esp. Paul Friedland, Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 14. See Donald Burrows, “Music and the ‘nausea delle cose cotidiane,’” Musical Quarterly 57 (1971): 230–40. 15. For insightful observations on Catholic versus Protestant conceptions of theatricality, with specific reference to both Rousseau and music theater, see Michael P. Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-­Century Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), esp. 52–58. 16. See esp. Friedland, Political Actors. 17. For a discussion of the use of colonialist and orientalist discourse in this context, see Silvana Patriarca, “Indolence and Regeneration: Tropes and Tensions of Risorgimento Patriotism,” The American Historical Review 110 (2005): 383, with reference to previous literature. 18. For a discussion of theatricality as a mode of perception characteristic of colonial encounters, see Christopher Balme, “Metaphors of Spectacle: Theatricality, Perception and Performative Encounters in the Pacific,” in Wahrnehmung und Medialität, ed. Erika Fischer-­Lichte, Christian Horn, Sandra Umathum, and Matthias Warstat (Tübingen: Francke, 2001), 215–31. 19. See, e.g., John Rosselli, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 10.



Notes to Pages 151–156

309

20. Giulio Ferrario, Storia e descrizione de’ principali teatri antichi e moderni (Milan: Ferrario, 1830), 275, cited in Carlotta Sorba, Teatri: L’Italia del melodramma nell’età del Risorgimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), 149, which also contains references to Gaetano Savonarola’s suggestion that you should talk to your neighbor in his Galateo dei teatri (Milan: Truffi, 1836), 17; and to Abel Goujon’s injunction that you should never do that in his Manuel de l’homme de bon ton, ou cérémonial de la bonne société (Paris: Andin, 1822), 110, cited in James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 232. 21. Broers, Napoleonic Empire, 275, 278–79, 298. 22. “Lord Mount Edgcumbe’s Musical Reminiscences” (1835), in Critical and Other Essays, vol. 9 of The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. H. F. B. Brett-­Smith and C. E. Jones (London: Constable, 1926), 244. 23. See chap. 1. 24. “Musica del Rossini,” Gazzetta di Firenze, 7 September 1826, cited in Marcello De Angelis, “Presenza di Rossini a Firenze e in Toscana durante l’epoca granducale,” BCRS 17 (1977): 50. 25. Friedrich Lippmann, “Per un’esegesi dello stile rossiniano,” Nuova rivista musicale italiana 2 (1968): 855–56. Lippmann followed suggestions advanced by Massimo Mila and Luigi Rognoni in reaction to the post-­Wagnerian aesthetics still evident in Giuseppe Radiciotti’s 1927 monumental biography of Rossini; see Mila, “Rossini, tutto musica” (1933), in his Cent’anni di musica moderna (Turin: EDT, 1981), 17–28; Rognoni, Gioacchino Rossini (Turin: ERI, 1968). 26. Fedele D’Amico, “A proposito d’un Tancredi: Dioniso in Apollo” (1982), in his Un ragazzino all’Augusteo: Scritti musicali, ed. Franco Serpa (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), 38–40; D’Amico, Il teatro di Rossini (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992), 107 (this book was first conceived and drafted as a year-­long lecture course to be delivered at the University of Rome La Sapienza in the academic year 1973–74; see Giorgio Pestelli’s “Presentazione,” 9–16). 27. See Gianni Ruffin, “Drammaturgia come auto-­confutazione teatrale: Aspetti metalinguistici alle origini della comicità nelle opere di Rossini,” Recercare 4 (1992): 158–59; Alessandro Baricco, Il genio in fuga: Due saggi sul teatro musicale di Gioachino Rossini, 2nd ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 45, 138, 141, 147–48. 28. See Paolo Gallarati, “Per un’interpretazione del comico rossiniano,” in Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992: Il testo e la scena, ed. Paolo Fabbri (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1994), 11. 29. Robert Wallace Fink, “‘Arrows of Desire’: Long-­Range Linear Structure and the Transformation of Musical Energy” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1994), 62. His point of departure is French composer Henri-­Montan Berton’s anti-­Rossinian pamphlet De la musique mécanique et de la musique philosophique, first published in 1821, on which see Benjamin Walton, “Rossini and France,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rossini, ed. Emanuele Senici (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 28–29; Walton, Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 52–54, 99, 169. 30. Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-­Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 64.



310

Notes to Pages 157–162

31. Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-­Century Music, 59. Heine’s remarks on Rossini’s operas as the epitome of the Restoration are found in his Über die französische Bühne (1837), in Historisch-­kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 12, ed. Jean-­René Derré and Christiane Giesen (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1980), 275. 32. See Fabrizio Della Seta, Italia e Francia nell’Ottocento (Turin: EDT, 1993), 85–88. 33. I have discussed these aspects of mélodrame from an operatic perspective in chap. 4 (“The Politics of Genre in Luisa Miller”) of my Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to Puccini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See also Arnold Jacobshagen, Opera semiseria: Gattungskovergenz und Kulturtransfer im Musiktheater (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2005). 34. For the connection between La gazza ladra and mélodrame, see Emilio Sala’s introduction to La gazza ladra, GRL (1995), ix–­li. 35. See Heinrich von Kleist, Selected Writings, ed. David Constantine (London: Dent, 1997), 411–16. 36. Quoted in Johannes Grave, Caspar David Friedrich (Munich: Prestel, 2012), 1. 37. For a discussion of the figure looking at the landscape—the Rückenfigur—in Friedrich’s paintings, see Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 2nd ed. (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), esp. pt. III, “The Halted Traveller,” 179–289.

Chapter 10 1. “Questa gentil pellegrina, dopo aver percorso la metà dell’orbe musicale, è venuta a cercar ventura nel gran teatro di Milano, a cui sta bene il titolo d’Hospitium caritatis ac providentiae. Ad essa ne succederanno ben altre, più o meno sfiorite, secondo che la moda di tali primizie si andrà corroborando su le nostre scene mercè dell’infinita benignità del pubblico. Bello! veramente bello, ed anche morale si è il nuovo sistema di raccogliere qua e là gli spartiti cento volte ripetuti in un anno! Dico morale, perché agevola mirabilmente le vie onde gli spettacoli della Scala cedano il passo a quelli de’ teatri minori; ciò che si chiama, non già opera seria o giocosa, ma opera pia. Del resto, L’Italiana in Algeri può ancora per qualche giorno star ben da per tutto, e in qualunque tempo, siccome lo provano gli applausi con che è stata accolta pur ora. Il parlare dei pregi di questa composizione sarebbe un ripetere ciò ch’è già noto; . . . il preveder poi dove sarà per giugnere [sic] l’indifferenza di chi ama le [sic] varietà, è un po’ difficile, giacchè questo è forse il primo caso (né sarà l’ultimo) in cui è stata messa alla prova.” Corriere milanese, 11 August 1815. 2. The encounter between London and Mozart’s operas is particularly interesting (and extensively studied); see my “‘Adapted to the Modern Stage’: La clemenza di Tito in London,” Cambridge Opera Journal 7 (1995): 1–22; Rachel Cowgill, “‘Wise Men from the East’: Mozart’s Operas and Their Advocates in Early Nineteenth-­Century London,” in Music and British Culture, 1785–1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich, ed. Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 39–64; Cowgill, “Mozart Productions and the Emergence of Werktreue at London’s Italian Opera House, 1780–1830,” in Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries,



Notes to Pages 163–173

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ed. Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Downing Thomas (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 145–86. 3. This list is based on Marcello Conati, “Contributo per una cronologia delle rappresentazioni di opere di Gioachino Rossini avvenute in teatri italiani dal 1810 all’anno teatrale 1823,” in La recezione di Rossini ieri e oggi (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1994), 231–50. The number of performances may vary significantly, from one to twenty and even more, stretching well over a month in some cases. The data come from diverse sources, not all of them equally reliable, and a few questions about places and dates remain, but they do not affect the bigger picture, which is what matters here. 4. Elia Santoro, L’Ottocento, 1801–1850, vol. 2 of Santoro, Il teatro di Cremona, 4 vols. (Cremona: Pizzorni, 1970), 282–97. 5. See Carlotta Sorba, Teatri: L’Italia del melodramma nell’età del Risorgimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), 93–153 (chap. 2, “Andare all’opera”). For a shorter, older survey in English, see John Rosselli, “Opera Production, 1780–1880,” in Opera Production and Its Resources, vol. 4 of The History of Italian Opera, ed. Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 81–164, esp. 82–89. 6. See Sorba, Teatri, 127. 7. Marcello Conati, “La novella scuola musicale,” Studi musicali 21 (1992): 191–208. 8. Conati, “La novella scuola musicale,” 192. 9. See Conati, “La novella scuola musicale,” 194. 10. Luca Zoppelli, “Intorno a Rossini: Sondaggi sulla percezione della centralità del compositore,” in Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992: Il testo e la scena, ed. Paolo Fabbri (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1994), 13. 11. Giuseppe Carpani, Le Rossiniane, ossia Lettere musico-­teatrali (Padua: Minerva, 1824; repr., Bologna: Forni, 1969), 157. 12. Carpani, Le Rossiniane, 157–58. Among such forms and situations especially important yet difficult to understand in detail is the orchestral accompaniment to ballets, which, as reviews amply testify, were followed by audiences with as much interest as operas. See Di sì felice innesto: Rossini, la danza, e il ballo teatrale in Italia, ed. Paolo Fabbri (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1996). 13. See Agostina Zecca Laterza, Il catalogo numerico Ricordi 1857 con date e indici (Rome: Nuovo Istituto Editoriale Italiano, 1984). I have also consulted the commentaries to the critical editions of these operas where available. 14. Uncharacteristically in view of later practice, this piece was published in full score with piano reduction underneath as part of Ricordi’s Giornale di musica vocale italiana, in all likelihood in autumn 1812. I am grateful to Daniele Carnini, critical editor of Demetrio e Polibio, for this information. 15. See Zecca Laterza, Il catalogo numerico Ricordi. In my article “‘Ferrea e tenace memoria’: La pratica rossiniana dell’autoimprestito nel discorso dei contemporanei” (Philomusica Online 9/1 [2010]: 69–99), I made the unfortunate mistake of confusing these scores for solo piano with piano-­vocal scores, thus erroneously stating that the first complete piano-­vocal scores of Rossini’s operas published in Italy were Il barbiere and La Cenerentola in late 1820.



312

Notes to Pages 173–180

16. See Daniela Tortora, “Fortuna dei ‘palpiti’ rossiniani nella musica strumentale a stampa dell’Ottocento,” BCRS 28 (1988): 5–25. 17. See Carlida Steffan, “Amatori, curiosi, professori: La riduzione per canto e pianoforte nel primo Ottocento italiano: Considerazioni in margine al Catalogo Editoriale Girard 1847,” Musica e Storia 12 (2004): 357. 18. See Thomas Christensen, “Public Music in Private Spaces: Piano-­Vocal Scores and the Domestication of Opera,” in Music and the Cultures of Print, ed. Kate van Orden (New York: Garland, 2000), 67–93; Christensen, “Four-­Hand Piano Transcription and Geographies of Nineteenth-­Century Musical Reception,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52 (1999): 255–98; Hilary Poriss, Changing the Score: Arias, Prima Donnas, and the Authority of Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 97–99. 19. Antonio Fogazzaro, Piccolo mondo antico (1895), ed. Anna Maria Moroni (Milan: Mondadori, 1986), 142. 20. See Marcello Conati, “Il turco in . . . osteria: Fonti rossiniane nei canti popolari del Nord Italia,” Nuova rivista musicale italiana 41 (2007): 105–6. 21. Conati, “Il turco,” 106–14.

Chapter 11 1. See Stendhal, The Life of Rossini, trans. Richard N. Coe, 2nd ed. (London: John Calder; New York: Riverrun, 1985), 50. “Madame Benzoni” was Marina Querini Benzoni (or Benzone), a Venetian noblewoman who hosted a famous salon. 2. See Philip Gossett’s historical introduction to his critical edition of Tancredi (GRED, 1984), xxvi. 3. See Danieal Tortora, “Fortuna dei ‘palpiti’ rossiniani nella musica strumentale a stampa dell’Ottocento,” BCRS 28 (1988): 7, for 1816–17 as the turning point in the popularity of both Tancredi and “Di tanti palpiti.” 4. Tortora, “Fortuna dei ‘palpiti’ rossiniani.” 5. I have consulted Catalogo Numerico Ricordi (http://www.archivioricordi.com/it /catalog), together with Agostina Zecca Laterza, Il catalogo numerico Ricordi 1857 con date e indici (Rome: Nuovo Istituto Editoriale Italiano, 1984). 6. Richard Taruskin, The Nineteenth Century, vol. 3 of The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 34–35. 7. See Percy Bysshe Shelley to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, 25 July 1819: “The vine-­ dressers are singing all day mi rivedrai, ti revedrò, but by no means in an operatic style”; The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 2:105. Mary Shelley to Marianne Hunt, 28 August 1819: “They sing, not very melodiously, but very loud, Rossini’s music, ‘Mi rivedrai, ti rivedrò,’ and they are accompanied by the cicala, a kind of little beetle, that makes a noise with its tail as loud as Johnny can sing”; Florence A. Thomas Marshall, The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 2 vols. (New York: Haskell, 1970; first pub. 1889), 1:251. I have already mentioned these two letters in my “Rossinian Repetitions,” in The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography, Analysis, Criticism, ed. Nicholas Mathew and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 236–62.



Notes to Pages 180–195

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8. William Stuart Rose, Letters from the North of Italy, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1819), 2:123–24; the letter including these sentences is ostensibly dated “Venice, December 1817.” “Tolderollol” evidently derives from “tolderol” or “folderol,” which is a nonsense refrain from popular songs, like “tralala.” 9. Translation modified from Il Tancredi–­Tancred: An Heroic Opera in Two Acts as Performed at the New York Theater (New York: Murden, 1825), 17. 10. “Neue melodien geben die leichten, hüpfenden Opernmusiken des Rossini. Die Cavatine aus den Tancredi, Di tanti palpiti etc. verfolgte mich aus Vaudeville, mit dem verschiedenartigsten Texten, klagend uns scherzen, von Wien bis Neapel, auf Guitarren und Leierkaste.” Wilhelm Müller, Rom, Römer und Römerinnen: Eine Sammlung vertrauter Briefe aus Rom und Albano mit einigen späteren Zusätzen und Belegen, 2 vols. (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1820), 1:80. 11. See Georg Widter, Volkslieder aus Venetien, ed. Adolf Wolf (Vienna: K. K. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1864), 16–17. 12. Giuseppe Ferraro, Canti popolari piemontesi ed emiliani, ed. Roberto Leydi and Franco Castelli (Milan: Rizzoli, 1977), 204. This volume brings together various collections first published by Ferraro in the 1870s and 1880s: “Rosina amabili” is part of the “Nuova raccolta di canti popolari monferrini,” Rivista europea 5–6 (1874–75). In Ferraro’s words, doubtlessly very suspicious of those quinari, “the origins of this song are certainly not popular, and I would not have included it if it had not been included by Wolf,” the editor of Widter’s Volkslieder aus Venetien cited in the previous footnote. This is the only song for which Ferraro makes this kind of comment. 13. The only exception is the final line of a quatrain, which can occasionally be shorter than the preceding ones. 14. Taruskin, Nineteenth Century, 30–32. William Rothstein also writes: “What made the cabaletta ‘Di tanti palpiti’ from Tancredi (1813) wildly popular for half a century was only partly its jaunty melody; it was also the quietly thrilling move from a C-­major chord (representing a half cadence in F major) to a new phrase in A-­flat major”; “Common-­ tone Tonality in Italian Romantic Opera: An Introduction,” Music Theory Online 14/1 (March 2008): para. 16, http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.08.14.1/mto.08.14.1.roth stein.html. 15. “Die ungemeine Liebe des Italieners zur Musik steht mit seiner melodischen Sprache im innigen Zusammenhange, und es ist nicht ungegründet, wenn er der ultramontanischen Musik bei aller Anerkenntnis ihres Werthes den Vorwurf des Ernstes und der Schwermüthigkeit macht. Man darf nur das nächste, beste, deutsche Volkslied mit einem venezianischen vergleichen, um die Bestätigung dieser Behauptung zu erhalten. Wie viel Aufsehen haben nicht in frühern Jahren das sanfte Schifferliedchen, la Biondina in Gondoletta und Paisiellos Nel cor più non mi sento, in den neuern Rossinis unvergleichliche Arie, Di tanti palpiti, in ganz Europa gemacht. Wie die französischen Vaudevilles treten auch hier gelungene Opern-­Arien, gewöhnlich mit verändertem Texte, so die letzterwahnte als Rosina amabile, in die Reihe der Volkslieder und ertönen in kurzer Zeit von allen Gassen der Stadt. Die Colporteurs tragen den Text auf gedruckten Blättchen feil, rufen die nova bellissima Canzonetta aus, und singen einem auf Verlangen die



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Notes to Pages 196–204

Melodie so lange vor, bis sie aufgefasst wird, was auch vom gemeinsten Knaben sehr schnell geschieht. So erhält sich wenigstens im Volke der Sinn für einfachen schönen Ausdruck des Gefühls in der Musik, während leider zum Jammer der bessern Musiker in den höhern Kunstprodukten die Menge von Dissonanzen, Uebergängen, Läufen, Trillern und gewagten Sprüngen die Melodie unter einem Schwalle störender Verzierungen begräbt oder gar ihren Mangel ersetzen soll.” Georg von Martens, Reise nach Venedig, 2 vols. (Ulm, Germany: Stettin, 1824), 1:6–7. 16. See Paolo Da Col, “La presunta ‘Biondina in gondoletta’ di Mayr: Furti, imprestiti e fortuna,” in Attorno al palcoscenico: La musica a Trieste fra Sette e Ottocento e l’inaugurazione del Teatro Nuovo (1801), ed. Maria Girardi and Paolo Da Col (Bologna: Forni, 2001), 125–63. 17. In example 11.4 the text is in italics to indicate the addition. Da Col, “La presunta ‘Biondina in gondoletta,’” prints several versions of the melody found in late eighteenthand nineteenth-­century sources. Although they exhibit several slight differences, the general melodic profile is always the same; in fact, Beethoven’s is among the closest to the earliest sources. Likewise, his “Nel cor più non mi sento” is practically the same (bar the odd appoggiatura) as in Paisiello’s autograph score (I-­Nc, 16.8.3–4, olim Rari 3.1.3–4, vol. 2, fol. 8r). 18. See Canzoni da battello (1740–1750), ed. Sergio Barcellona and Galliano Titton, 2 vols. (Venice: Regione Veneto, 1990); Barcarola: Il canto del gondoliere nella vita quotidiana e nell’immaginazione artistica, ed. Sabine Meine and Henrike Rost (Rome: Viella, 2016), esp. Paola Barzan, “La canzone da battello veneziana dai salotti europei ai repertori dei gondolieri: Uno sguardo etnomusicologico,” 139–55. 19. “Il Tancredi venne ripetutamente applaudito, e quando la folla attratta da quella musica incantevole lasciava il teatro, ancor palpitante delle sensazioni della sera, per diffondersi sui canali di quella città tanto poetica, si udivano fra ’l silenzio della notte mille voci d’entusiasmo frammezzare al mormorio delle onde i canti del Tancredi, e gli stessi gondolieri obliavano le antiche loro canzoni popolari per quella ‘Di tanti palpiti’; quelle note sì facili a ritenersi, e composte con tanta facilità, che quand’erano cantate dalla Malanotte o dalla Pasta toccavano sì deliziosamente il cuore!” Iconografia musicale, ovvero ritratti e biografie di varj dei più celebrati maestri, professori e cantanti moderni (Turin: Reycend, 1838), 8.

Chapter 12 1. Letter to Francesco Guicciardini, 12 September 1820, in GRLD, 1:430. The negotiations came to nothing. 2. Worth mentioning here is a much earlier reference to self-­borrowing, by the impresario Luca Casimiro degli Albizzi in a letter dated 23 September 1735 to Vivaldi about his opera Griselda, shortly to be performed in Florence: “[I] would not check to see how many old arias you have included in the score, because that is up to you. But if they are recognized, you know that it will reflect badly on you, and perhaps the singers who are to perform them will be forced to change them, with harm to my purse.” William C. Holmes, Opera Observed: Views of a Florentine Impresario in the Early Eigh-



Notes to Pages 205–212

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teenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 42. The mention of “recognition” seems to establish a link between this case and the early nineteenth century, as the texts discussed in chap. 3 suggest. But the context is rather different, relying as it does essentially on aural memory, without the aid of printed excerpts and the very limited one of manuscript ones. What is more, in 1735 the only unit of music considered in this respect was the aria, whereas eighty years later this was no longer the case. 3. Letter from Ricordi to Milan’s “Delegazione Provinciale,” 14 July 1823, in GRLD, 2:172–74, and discussed in Philip Gossett, “Piracy in Venice: The Selling of Semiramide,” in Words on Music: Essays in Honor of Andrew Porter on the Occasion of his 75th Birthday, ed. David Rosen and Claire Brook (New York: Pendragon, 2003), 126; Carlida Steffan, “Amatori, curiosi, professori: La riduzione per canto e pianoforte nel primo Ottocento italiano: Considerazioni in margine al Catalogo Editoriale Girard 1847,” Musica e Storia 12 (2004): 342–43. 4. Letter from the presidenza of La Fenice to Artaria, 22 April 1823, in GRLD, 2:163, and discussed in Gossett, “Piracy in Venice,” 126, and Steffan, “Amatori, curiosi, professori,” 342. 5. I have discussed the transformations of operatic criticism in my “Delirious Hopes: Napoleonic Milan and the Rise of Modern Italian Operatic Criticism,” Cambridge Opera Journal 27 (2015): 97–127. 6. Giornale dipartimentale dell’Adriatico, 24 May 1813, quoted in Azio Corghi’s historical introduction to his critical edition of L’Italiana in Algeri (GREC, 1981), xxiv. 7. Giornale dipartimentale dell’Adriatico, 24 May 1813. 8. Giornale dipartimentale dell’Adriatico, 21 June 1813, quoted in Corghi’s historical introduction in his L’Italiana in Algeri (GREC, 1981), xxvi. 9. A comparison of the two pieces demonstrates that, even if a few melodic ideas (esp. the first one) might be considered similar, their treatment is rather different. Mosca’s L’Italiana is extensively discussed in L’Italiana in Algeri, ed. Paolo Fabbri and Maria Chiara Bertieri (GRL, 1997). 10. As I have argued elsewhere, the opera- and concert-­going public overlapped extensively with the newspaper-­reading one in early nineteenth-­century Italy, or at least in some of its more modern cities; see Senici, “Delirious Hopes,” esp. 103–4. 11. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, ed. Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013), 1317–18, 1322, 1325. 12. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 459. 13. Goethe’s sentence, from chap. 4 of his novel Elective Affinities, is cited in Reinhart Koselleck, “Time and History,” in his The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 113. 14. See esp. Reinhart Koselleck, “Modernity and the Planes of Historicity,” in his Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 9–25. 15. Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 3–4.



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Notes to Pages 212–213

16. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (London: Penguin, 1985), 222. 17. See, among others, Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 166–236; Reinhold Brinkmann, “In the Time(s) of the Eroica,” in Beethoven and His World, ed. Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 1–26; Elaine Sisman, “Memory and Invention at the Threshold of Beethoven’s Late Style,” in Beethoven and His World, 51–87; Michael P. Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-­Century Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), esp. chap. 3; Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 293–352; Kristina Muxfeldt, “Music Recollected in Tranquility: Postures of Memory in Beethoven,” in her Vanishing Sensibilities: Schubert, Beethoven, Schumann (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 118–47; Benedict Taylor, Mendelssohn, Time and Memory: The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). The composer who has elicited the most sustained interest in this respect is Schubert: see, among several other contributions, articles by Walter Frisch, John Daverio, John M. Gingerich, Charles Fisk, and Scott Burham included in a special issue of The Musical Quarterly 84 (2000), entitled “Memory and Schubert’s Instrumental Music,” 581–663; Benedict Taylor, “Schubert and the Construction of Memory: The String Quartet in A minor, D.804 (‘Rosamunde’),” Journal of the Royal Musica Association 139 (2014): 41–88; Jürgen Thym, “Invocations of Memory in Schubert’s Last Songs,” in Schubert’s Late Style: History, Theory, Style, ed. Lorraine Byrne Bodley and Julian Horton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 383–403. 18. Interesting observations on this topic relating to Rossini’s French operas are found in Benjamin Walton, Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 19. See, among the most relevant contributions, James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 543–64, to be read together with Mary Ann Smart’s review in Nineteenth-­Century Music 20 (1996–97): 291–97; William Weber, “Did People Listen in the Eighteenth Century?,” Early Music 25 (1997): 678–91; Mathew Riley, Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and Astonishment (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004); James Robert Currie, “Impossible Reconciliations (Barely Heard),” Music and Letters 88 (2006): 121–33; Jennifer Hall-­Witt, Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–1880 (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007), esp. chap. 6. Listening has been extensively discussed in a special issue of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135/1 (2010): John Butt, “Do Musical Works Contain an Implied Listener? Towards a Theory of Musical Listening” (5–18), is particularly relevant for the early nineteenth century, while Georgina Born, “Listening, Mediation, Event: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives” (79–89), offers a useful methodological perspective. 20. For an explicit connection between a printed piano-­vocal score of a Rossini opera (Tancredi in Carli’s Parisian edition of 1821) and “attentive” forms of listening, see Thomas Christensen, “Public Music in Private Spaces: Piano-­Vocal Scores and the



Notes to Pages 214–217

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Domestication of Opera,” in Music and the Cultures of Print, ed. Kate van Orden (New York: Garland, 2000), 87. 21. For an interesting exploration of the connections between memory and printing in early nineteenth-­century English poetry, see Ashley Miller, “‘Striking Passages’: Memory and the Romantic Imprint,” Studies in Romanticism 50 (2011): 29–53.

Chapter 13 1. For a summary of the discourse of bodily pleasure provoked by Rossini, see Marcello Conati, “Una certa malattia, la quale può denominarsi contagio fantastico,” in La recezione di Rossini ieri e oggi (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1994), 117. For examples of voices against the pleasures afforded by Rossini’s music, see the excerpts from texts by Michele Leoni and Marco Santucci collected in Rossiniana: Antologia della critica nella prima metà dell’Ottocento, ed. Carlida Steffan (Pordenone, Italy: Studio Tesi, 1992), 43–46, 153–55, 164–67. Benjamin Walton discusses the issue from the point of view of France in his Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. 154–64. 2. For an influential early instance, see Friedrich Lippmann, “Per un’esegesi dello stile rossiniano,” Nuova rivista musicale italiana 2 (1968): 840–41. Geltrude Righetti Giorgi, in her response to Stendhal, agreed with him that “rapidity” was a quintessential dimension of “modern music,” which meant primarily Rossini’s music of course; see Righetti Giorgi, Cenni di una donna già cantante sopra il maestro Rossini (1823), in Luigi Rognoni, Gioacchino Rossini (Turin: ERI, 1968), 368–70. 3. Giuseppe Carpani offers intriguing but rather oblique and ambivalent observations on the pleasure of repetition in Rossini; see Carpani, Le Rossiniane, ossia Lettere musico-­ teatrali (Padua: Minerva, 1824; repr., Bologna: Forni, 1969), esp. 81–83, 92. 4. Pound’s slogan eventually became the title of a collection of his essays: see Pound, Make It New: Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1934). 5. Here I summarize an argument I have made more at length in Senici, “Introduction: Puccini, His World, and Ours,” in Giacomo Puccini and His World, ed. Arman Schwartz and Emanuele Senici (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 1–25, esp. 3–5. 6. Luis-­Manuel Garcia, “On and On: Repetition as Process and Pleasure in Electronic Dance Music,” Music Theory Online 11/4 (October 2005), para. 3.6, http://www .mtosmt.org/issues/mto.05.11.4/mto.05.11.4.garcia.html. Scott Burnham has written perceptively about the pleasures of repeated musical experiences in the context of a discussion of early nineteenth-­century music in the concluding pages of his Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 163–65. 7. See Richard Middleton, “Memories are Made of This: On the Subjects of Repetition,” chap. 4 of his Voicing the Popular: On the Subjects of Popular Music (New York: Routledge, 2006), 137–97. Both this text and Garcia’s one cited in the previous note contain useful references to previous literature on both repetition in general and musical repetition in particular.



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Notes to Pages 217–224

8. Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 3–4. 9. “Dumbing down” are Cumming’s words; see Julie E. Cumming, “From Variety to Repetition: The Birth of Imitative Polyphony,” Yearbook of the Alamire Foundation 6 (2008): 43–44. 10. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 8, 12, 20–21, 108, 132–35. My understanding of repetition and modernity is especially indebted to Shlomith Rimmon-­Kenan, “The Paradoxical Status of Repetition,” Poetics Today 1/4 (Summer 1980): 151–59 (although modernity is not specifically mentioned here); J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), chap. 1, “Two Forms of Repetition,” 1–21; Eric Downing, Double Exposures: Repetition and Realism in Nineteenth-­Century German Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), chap. 1, “Theoretical Introduction: Repetition and Realism in Narratology, Critical Theory, and Psychoanalysis,” 1–23. 11. Robert Wallace Fink, “‘Arrows of Desire’: Long-­Range Linear Structure and the Transformation of Musical Energy” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1994), 62. 12. Translation taken, with several changes, from the one by Gwyn Morris appended to the recording of La Cenerentola issued by Decca in 1993, CD 436 902–2. I translate Alidoro’s initial two lines as referring to the Prince, since the following two clearly mention him, but the Italian is not gender specific, and therefore Alidoro is potentially referring, in the singular, to all the other characters on stage. 13. It seems strange that the Count comments only on Don Bartolo’s confusion, since they all, in Figaro’s words, “look like statues,” just like him (the Count, like Alidoro in La Cenerentola, has partially different words but the same music as the others). 14. The case of the Act 1 finale of Il Turco in Italia is partly similar, but Prosdocimo’s music in the slow movement is much closer to what the other characters sing than Figaro’s. 15. I have translated this text anew rather than use the 1825 bilingual libretto, as I have done in previous chapters, because a precise sense of what the words mean is vital here. The 1825 libretto offers: “Did earth ere witness such a day, so fraught with anguish and dismay? What hollow voices load the breeze! What sounds of dread the spirit freeze! ‘Mid fears, and anguish, and dismay, ah, how shall end th’ eventful day?”; Il Tancredi— Tancred: An Heroic Opera in Two Acts as Performed at the New York Theater (New York: Murden, 1825), 29. 16. Lorenzo Bianconi, “‘Confusi e stupidi’: Di uno stupefacente (e banalissimo) dispositivo metrico,” in Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992: Il testo e la scena, ed. Paolo Fabbri (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1994), 151–52. 17. See Scott. L. Balthazar, “Mayr, Rossini and the Development of the Early ‘Concertato’ Finale,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 116 (1991): 238, 265; Daniele Carnini, “L’opera italiana prima di Rossini (1800–1813): Il finale centrale” (PhD diss., University of Pavia, 2007), 58, 95–96, 100–102, 139, 161–62 (specifically on Tancredi’s stretta,



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emphasizing its radical novelty). Several such movements are acutely analyzed in Giuliano Castellani, “Due aspetti del concertato rossiniano: Caratteristiche della sezione in ‘canone’ e tipologia della stretta concertata,” Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, new series, 19 (1999): 247–72. 18. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. Shaun Whiteside, The New Penguin Freud, ed. Adam Phillips (London: Penguin, 2005), 207, 211. 19. My understanding of Freud on repetition and trauma has been particularly shaped by the nuanced contributions of historian Dominick LaCapra, who has returned repeatedly to the topic in his books, starting at least from Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). I have found the chapter “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” in LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 43–85, particularly useful. Michael S. Roth has also persuasively argued for the continued relevance of Freud’s ideas to our understanding of memory and trauma, with special emphasis on the nineteenth century, in his Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 20. As I mentioned in the introduction, the expression “music in the present tense” has already been used for Rossini in a partially different sense by Walton, Rossini in Restoration Paris, 1. 21. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in Freud, The Essentials of Psychoanalysis (London: Vintage, 2005), 226. 22. For a previous, comparable reference to Beyond the Pleasure Principle in operatic historiography, see Mary Hunter’s discussion of “the pleasures of pervasive conventionality” in connection with the production and consumption of opera buffa in Vienna between about 1770 and 1790, in her The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 31. Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859) contains a short but arresting conversation between two characters, Mr. Lorry and Dr. Manette, about the healing power of repetition, and at the same time its perils; see A Tale of Two Cities, ed. Andrew Sanders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 196–97. 23. Without attaching to it more explanatory power than it can offer, I would nonetheless like to mention here Oliver Sacks’s (very carefully worded) suggestion that, when writing Bolero, “a work characterized by the relentless repetition of a single musical phrase dozens of times, waxing in loudness and orchestration but with no development,” Ravel might have been “on the cusp of a dementia”; Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Knopf, 2007), 314. 24. For discussions of Rossini versus Beethoven, see The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography, Analysis, Criticism, ed. Nicholas Mathew and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. the editors’ “Introduction: Pleasure in History,” 1–12, and the chapters by James Hepokoski (“Dahlhaus’s Beethoven-­Rossini Stildualismus: Lingering Legacies of the Text-­Event Dichotomy,” 15–48), James Webster (“Beethoven, Rossini—and Others,” 49–65), and Benjamin Walton (“‘More German



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Notes to Pages 233–235

than Beethoven’: Rossini’s Zelmira and Italian Style,” 159–77); I have discussed repetition versus development in “Rossinian Repetitions,” which is part of this collection.

Chapter 14 1. Translation modified from G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 2:949. 2. See Alessandra Lazzerini Belli, “Hegel e Rossini: ‘Il cantar che nell’anima si sente,’” Revue belge de musicologie 49 (1995): 211–30. It should be noted that Hegel’s lecture courses on aesthetics (on which his Aesthetics is based) were delivered between the late 1810s and the late 1820s; thus, 1824 falls precisely at a time when the philosopher was actively elaborating his theory of art. 3. Stephen Houlgate, “Hegel’s Aesthetics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2009; revised spring 2016), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016 /entries/hegel-­aesthetics/. 4. Alain Patrick Olivier, Hegel et la musique: De l’expérience esthétique à la spéculation philosophique (Paris: Champion, 2003), 192. Olivier’s book makes a point of being the first extended discussion of Hegel’s aesthetics of music to take Rossini seriously, which has been particularly helpful to me. Neither Lazzerini Belli (in the essay mentioned above) nor Olivier, however, note that both Carpani and Hegel cast Weber’s Der Freischütz as the opposite of Rossini—Hegel’s reference to the German “Art der Charakteristik” is surely a dig at Weber’s opera, among other works. 5. This has already been noted by Mario Ruggenini, “La musica e le parole: Smarrimenti filosofici in ascolto di Rossini,” in La recezione di Rossini ieri e oggi (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1994), 59. 6. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, excerpts translated in Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Peter le Huray and James Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 222–33. This passage is discussed from a Rossinian perspective in Charles S. Brauner, “‘No, no, Ninetta’: Observations on Rossini and the Eighteenth-­Century Vocabulary of Opera Buffa,” in Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992: Il testo e la scena, ed. Paolo Fabbri (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1994), 45–46; Yael Braunschweig, “Schopenhauer and Rossinian Universality: On the Italianate in Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics of Music,” in The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography, Analysis, Criticism, ed. Nicholas Mathew and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 291. Braunschweig’s insightful text is particularly useful because it dates each excerpt it discusses; this one was added to the 1859 edition, but, as she points out, the 1844 edition already included a similar passage that, however, does not include Rossini’s name. 7. Parerga and Paralipomena (1850), translated in Brauner, “No, no, Ninetta,” 46, and discussed in Braunschweig, “Schopenhauer and Rossinian Universality,” 288. 8. Translation modified from Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:932, discussed in Olivier, Hegel et la musique, 166–72. 9. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, translated and discussed in Braunschweig, “Schopenhauer and Rossinian Universality,” 285.



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10. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 131, 149. 11. Arne Melberg, “Repetition (In the Kierkegaardian Sense of the Term),” Diacritics 20/3 (Autumn 1990): 74. 12. Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 220. Weber’s interpretation of Kierkegaard’s theory of repetition differs from the general understanding of this theory in musicological writings, which tend to eschew theatricality altogether; see, e.g., Leon Botstein, “The Search for Meaning in Beethoven: Popularity, Intimacy, and Politics in Historical Perspective,” in Beethoven and His World, ed. Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 344–47; Tim Howell, “Brahms, Kierkegaard and Repetition: Three Intermezzi,” Nineteenth-­Century Music Review 10 (2013): 101–17. 13. See, e.g., Paolo Gallarati, “Per un’interpretazione del comico rossiniano,” and “Dramma e ludus dall’Italiana al Barbiere,” in his L’Europa del melodramma: Da Calzabigi a Rossini (Alessandria, Italy: Dell’Orso, 1999), 281–346; Janet Johnson, “Il barbiere di Siviglia,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rossini, ed. Emanuele Senici (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 159–74. I discuss both these positions in chap. 6. 14. For a compelling discussion of Nietzsche’s theatricality (although not explicitly named as such) from an operatic perspective, see Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), chap. 5, “Nietzsche: Overcoming Operatic Metaphysics,” 109–26. 15. See, e.g., Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (New York: Routledge, 2003); Deleuze and Music, ed. Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music, ed. Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010); Edward Campbell, Music after Deleuze (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 16. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2004), xvii. My reading of this difficult text has been helped by consulting James Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s “Difference and Repetition”: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). 17. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 9–10. 18. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 11–12. 19. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 18–19. 20. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 21. The adjective “demonic” (about which more below) is surely a reference to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he states that “the manifestations of a compulsion to repeat . . . exhibit to a high degree an instinctual character and, when they act in opposition to the pleasure principle, give the appearance of some ‘daemonic’ force at work”; Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in his The Essentials of Psychoanalysis (London: Vintage, 2005), 243. 21. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 12. 22. Christian Friedrich Michaelis, “Einige Bemerkungen über das Erhabene in der Musik,” Berlinische musikalische Zeitung 1 (1805): 179; partial translation in le Huray and Day, Music and Aesthetics, 203. On Michaelis’s theories of the musical sublime, see



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Notes to Pages 243–260

Michela Garda, Musica sublime: Metamorfosi di un’idea nel Settecento musicale (Milan and Lucca: Ricordi-­LIM, 1995), 200–18; James Webster, “The Creation, Haydn’s Late Vocal Music, and the Musical Sublime,” in Haydn and His World, ed. Elaine Sisman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 61–64. 23. See Sarah Hibberd, “Cherubini and the Revolutionary Sublime,” Cambridge Opera Journal 24 (2012): 293–318; Nicholas Mathew, Political Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chap. 3, “The Sounds of Power and the Power of Sounds,” 102–35. 24. Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 337–38. 25. Ankersmit, Sublime, 347. 26. Mechthild Fend, “Bodily and Pictorial Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1790–1860,” Art History 28 (2005): 322. 27. Fend, “Bodily and Pictorial Surfaces,” 329–30. 28. Robert Rosenblum, Ingres (New York: Abrams, 1990), 66; Charles Landon, Annales du Musée et de l’École Moderne des Beaux-­Arts: Salon de 1819 (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1819), 29: “On voit qu’il n’y a dans cette figure, ni os, ni muscle, ni sang, ni vie, ni relief, rien enfin de ce qui constitue l’imitation.” 29. Fend, “Bodily and Pictorial Surfaces,” 334–35.

Chapter 15 1. Gazzetta privilegiata di Venezia, 1 March 1823, cited in Marco Emanuele, L’ultima stagione italiana: Le forme dell’opera seria di Rossini da Napoli a Venezia (Florence: Passigli; Turin: De Sono, 1997), 276–77 (original emphasis). 2. Semiramide, melo-­dramma tragico da rappresentarsi nel Gran Teatro La Fenice nel Carnovale 1823 (Venice: Casali, 1823), 60, where the text is printed exactly as above. The quinari and settenari can be joined together to form regular endecasillabi, but only by leaving out the repetition of the first line at the end; in any case, visually separating quinari from settenari emphasizes the tronchi endings. 3. Corriere delle dame, 24 April 1824, cited in Emanuele, L’ultima stagione italiana, 289. 4. For a discussion of Semiramide particularly alert to repetition, see Emanuele, L’ultima stagione italiana, 219–62. 5. See Marco Beghelli, La retorica del rituale nel melodramma ottocentesco (Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 2003), 585–87. In an unpublished talk on Matilde di Shabran at the Fondazione Rossini, Pesaro, in 2012, Beghelli appositely contrasted this movement with Rossini’s pronouncement in 1836 that “if composers follow closely the meaning of words, they end up composing music that is not expressive by itself, poor, vulgar, mosaic-­like, nonsensical, and ridiculous”; Antonio Zanolini, Una passeggiata in compagnia di Rossini (1836), reprinted in his Biografia di Gioachino Rossini (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1875), 291. 6. For eloquent and influential examples of this historiographical trend, see Philip Gossett, “History and Works That Have No History: Reviving Rossini’s Neapolitan Operas,” in Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons, ed. Katherine Bergeron and



Notes to Pages 261–264

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Philip V. Bohlmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 95–115; Gossett, s.v. “Rossini, Gioachino (Antonio),” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, rev. ed., ed. Stanley Sadie and J. Tyrrell, 29 vols. (London: Macmillan, 2001), 21:​​734–68. 7. For a summary of various opinions, see Emanuele, L’ultima stagione italiana, 252–58. For more recent pronouncements, see, among others, Giovanni Carli Ballola, Rossini: L’uomo, la musica (Milan: Bompiani, 2009), 287–94. 8. See the tables in chap. 10 and, for a more comprehensive picture, Marcello Conati, “Contributo per una cronologia delle rappresentazioni di opere di Gioachino Rossini avvenute nei teatri italiani dal 1810 all’anno teatrale 1823,” in La recezione di Rossini ieri e oggi (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1994), 231–49. 9. On Rossini’s dealings with his librettists, see Paolo Fabbri, “Librettos and Librettists,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rossini, ed. Emanuele Senici (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 51–67. 10. As reported in Zanolini, Una passeggiata in compagnia di Rossini, cited and translated in Paolo Fabbri, “Rossini the Aesthetician,” Cambridge Opera Journal 6 (1994): 20. I have already discussed Rossini’s pronouncements in “Introduction: Rossini’s Operatic Operas,” in Senici, Cambridge Companion to Rossini, 5–6, on which the rest of this paragraph is based. 11. See chap. 1. 12. See Fabbri, “Rossini the Aesthetician,” 28–29. 13. See esp. Edmond Michotte, Richard Wagner’s Visit to Rossini (Paris 1860) and An Evening at Rossini’s in Beau-­Sejour (Passy 1858), ed. and trans. Herbert Weinstock (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 73–74, 105–21. 14. Ferdinand Hiller, Plaudereien mit Rossini (1855; rev. 1868), modern edition with Italian translation in Guido Johannes Joerg, “Gli scritti rossiniani di Ferdinand Hiller,” BCRS 32 (1992): 94–95. 15. See, e.g., Carli Ballola, Rossini, 250–59. For a recent discussion of Ermione’s frosty initial reception that downplays untenable claims of musical and dramatic exceptionality, highlighting instead the opera’s concluding regicide in the context of Neapolitan politics, see Saverio Lamacchia, “Il mistero di Ermione e il tabù del regicidio,” in Alle più care immagini: Atti delle due giornate di studi rossiniani in memoria di Arrigo Quattrocchi, Università di Roma La Sapienza, 27–28 maggio 2011, ed. Daniela Macchione and Philip Gossett ([Italy]: n.p., [2016]), 61–80. 16. Gazzetta privilegiata di Venezia, 1 March 1823, cited in Emanuele, L’ultima stagione italiana, 276. 17. Gossett, s.v. “Rossini, Gioachino (Antonio),” 747. 18. Letter from Venice dated 11–17 September 1818, in The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer, vol. 1, 1791–1839, trans. and ed. Robert Ignatius Letellier (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Press, 1999), 348. For a summary of the nineteenth-­century fortune of Otello, esp. its third act, see the historical introduction to the critical edition of the opera, ed. Michael Collins (GREC, 1994), xxxix. 19. Benjamin Walton, Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 66.



324

Notes to Pages 264–266

20. See Benjamin Walton, “‘More German than Beethoven’: Rossini’s Zelmira and Italian Style,” in The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography, Analysis, Criticism, ed. Nicholas Mathew and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 159–77. 21. See Emily I. Dolan, The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 233–56; Federico Gon, Scolaro sembra dell’Haydn: Il problema dell’influenza di Haydn su Rossini (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 2014). 22. See the list of sources quoted in Gon, Scolaro sembra dell’Haydn, 24–33; Alexis Azevedo, G. Rossini, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: Heugel, 1864), 43. 23. Ferdinand Hérold to Giovanni Battista Viotti, 13 April 1821, in GRLD, 1:495. 24. Les frères Escudier, Rossini, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1854), 123, cited in the historical introduction to Ermione, ed. Patricia B. Brauner and Philip Gossett (GREC, 1995), xxxii. Not by chance did Stendhal, ever alert to the Italian Rossini discourse, justify the neglect of Ermione on account of its supposed experimental nature, where Rossini, “having been tempted by the genre of French opera,” “decided to try his hand at the declamatory style, brought to France by Gluck”; Stendhal, Life of Rossini, trans. Richard N. Coe (London: John Calder; New York: Riverrun, 1970), 173, 394 (translation modified). For more on the nineteenth-­century opinion of Ermione as influenced by French operatic aesthetics, see Arrigo Quattrocchi, “Ermione, un insuccesso,” in Ermione, program book for the 2008 Rossini Opera Festival, 35–45. 25. Philip Gossett, “The ‘Late Styles’ of Gioachino Rossini,” in Late Style and Its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature, and Music, ed. Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 111. 26. See the historical introduction to Semiramide, ed. Philip Gossett and Alberto Zedda (GREC, 2001), xliv–­xlvi, lix–­lx. 27. See Carlo Gatti, Il Teatro alla Scala nella storia e nell’arte (1778–1963), vol. 2, Cronologia complete degli spettacoli e dei concerti, ed. Giampiero Tintori (Milan: Ricordi, 1964). 28. Among many studies I could mention, a few that deserve singling out include Philip Gossett, “Anna Bolena” and the Artistic Maturity of Gaetano Donizetti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Gary Tomlinson, “Italian Romanticism and Italian Opera: An Essay in Their Affinities,” 19th-­Century Music 10 (1986–1987): 43–60; Mary Ann Smart, s.v. “Bellini, Vincenzo” and “Donizetti, Gaetano,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), 3:194– 212 and 7:471–97, respectively; Melina Esse, “Speaking and Sighing: Bellini’s canto declamato and the Poetics of Restraint,” Current Musicology 87 (Spring 2009): 7–45. 29. See Marcello Conati, “La novella scuola musicale,” Studi musicali 21 (1992): 194–95. 30. See the various texts quoted and discussed in Agostino Ziino, “Luigi Romanelli e il mito del classicismo nell’opera italiana del primo Ottocento,” Chigiana 36 (1985): 173–215; Conati, “La novella scuola musicale”; Paolo Fabbri, “Rossini e Bellini a paragone,” in Musica Franca: Essays in Honor of Frank A. D’Accone, ed. Irene Alm, Alyson McLamore, and Colleen Reardon (Stuyvesant: Pendragon, 1996), 283–94.



Notes to Pages 268–274

325

31. I teatri, 19 March 1829, 840–41, published also in Vincenzo Bellini, Epistolario, ed. Luisa Cambi ([Milan]: Mondadori, 1943), 205–6. 32. See Francesco Degrada, “‘Scuola napoletana’ e ‘opera napoletana’: Nascita, sviluppo e prospettive di un concetto storiografico,” in Il teatro di San Carlo 1737–1987, ed. Bruno Cagli and Agostino Ziino, vol. 1 (Naples: Electa, 1987), 9–20. For a recent contribution to the debate that takes previous scholarship into account, see the edition and English translation of Giuseppe Sigismondo, Apoteosi della musica del Regno di Napoli (Apotheosis of Music in the Kingdom of Naples) (ms., about 1820), ed. Claudio Bacciagaluppi, Giulia Giovani, and Raffaele Mellace, introduction by Rosa Cafiero (Rome: Società Editrice di Musicologia, 2016). 33. See, e.g., for the general, Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); for the particular, Ellen Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770–1830 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). 34. Letter to Giovanni Pacini, 27 January 1866, in Gioachino Rossini, Lettere, ed. Giuseppe Mazzatinti, Fanny Manis and Giovanni Manis (Florence: Barbera, 1902; repr., Bologna: Forni, 1975), 295. 35. See Davide Daolmi’s critical edition (GREC, 2013), 149. Beethoven’s dictum also probably originated from the old Rossini, as discussed in Nicholas Mathew and Benjamin Walton, “Introduction: Pleasure in History,” in Mathew and Walton, The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini, 1–2. 36. Leigh Hunt, review of Il barbiere di Siviglia at London’s King’s Theatre, The Examiner (22 March 1818), in Leigh Hunt’s Dramatic Criticism, ed. Lawrence Huston Houtchens and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 189. 37. Janet Johnson, “Il barbiere di Siviglia,” in Senici, Cambridge Companion to Rossini, 167–69. 38. For a classic historical account of generational thinking, see Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), esp. 203–7. 39. Giuseppe Mazzini, “Filosofia della musica” (1836), in Scritti letterari di un italiano vivente, 2 vols. (Lugano: Tipografia della Svizzera Italiana, 1847), 1:291. 40. Writing in 1833, Nicola Tacchinardi, a prominent tenor famous esp. as Rossini’s Otello, lamented that contemporary operas were all the same, and therefore “monotonous”; Nicola Tacchinardi, Dell’opera in musica sul teatro italiano e de’ suoi difetti (1833), in Paola Ciarlantini, “Una testimonianza sul teatro musicale degli inizi dell’Ottocento: Il saggio Dell’opera in musica di Nicola Tacchinardi,” BCRS 29 (1989): 109. Complaints of boredom engendered by sameness in the works of Rossini and his followers run through the operatic writings of Carlo Ritorni, culminating in his Ammaestramenti alla composizione d’ogni poema e d’ogni opera appartenente alla musica (Milan: Pirola, 1841), on which see Paolo Fabbri, “Le memorie teatrali di Carlo Ritorni, ‘rossiniste de 1815,’” BCRS 21 (1981): 87–128.



326

Notes to Pages 275–280

Epilogue 1. See, among other contributions, Emilio Sala, “Di alcune rossiniane novecen­ tesche,” and Adriana Guarneri Corazzol, “La recezione dell’ultimo Rossini e le avanguar­ die novecentesche,” both in La recezione di Rossini ieri e oggi (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1994), 88–99 and 195–214, respectively; Bruno Cagli, “Proposte rossiniane tra le due guerre,” Nuova rivista musicale italiana 34 (2000): 311–22. 2. For an introduction, see Charles Brauner, “The Rossini Renaissance,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rossini, ed. Emanuele Senici (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 37–47. 3. For a detailed study, see Marco Stacca, “Gioachino Rossini e Jean Pierre Ponnelle: Un sodalizio e un’eredità” (PhD diss., University of Rome La Sapienza, 2015). 4. See Kristina Bendikas, The Opera Theater of Jean-­Pierre Ponnelle (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004); Marcia J. Citron, “Subjectivity in the Opera-­Films of Jean-­Pierre Ponnelle,” chap. 3 of her When Opera Meets Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 97–135. 5. Mary Ann Smart has discussed several productions of Rossini’s comic operas, esp. Il barbiere and L’Italiana, from the 1950s onward from which to consider recent trends in both operatic mise en scène and its interpretation; see “Resisting Rossini, or, Marlon Brando Plays Figaro,” Opera Quarterly 27 (2011): 153–78. Her general assessment of Rossinian mise en scène of the last half century broadly agrees with mine, even if we differ in some more specific respects, such as the degree of “realism” of Ponnelle’s stagings. 6. See Cristina Barbato, “Rossini serio et la regia critica en Italie: Ronconi, Pizzi et Pier’Alli” (PhD diss., Université Paris 8–­Università degli Studi di Milano, 2013), 174–75, which also contains the quotation from Christophe Deshoulières, L’opéra baroque et la scène moderne: Essai de synthèse dramaturgique (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 429–30. 7. See Cristina Barbato, “Rossini au miroir: La métathéâtralité dans la mise en scène d’opéra contemporaine,” in La scène en miroir: Métathéâtres italiens (XVIe–­XXIe siècle), ed. Céline Frigau Manning (Paris: Garnier, 2016), 371–81. This essay is based on Barbato’s doctoral thesis, mentioned in the previous note, which discusses in some detail several of the productions I have mentioned here. 8. See Barbato, “Rossini serio,” 376–81. 9. Emanuele Senici, “Introduction: Rossini’s Operatic Operas,” in Senici, Cambridge Companion to Rossini, 8, citing Herbert Lindenberger, Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 100. 10. See Senici, “Introduction,” 7.

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Index

References to figures and tables are denoted by an “f” or “t” in italics following the page number. accompaniments, richness of, 25–26 Adelaide di Borgogna (Rossini), self-­ borrowing in, 113, 114 Adorno, Theodor W., 218 Aesthetics (Hegel), 232–35 Agatina, o La virtù premiata (Pavesi), 71 “Ah, qual colpo inaspettato!,” Il barbiere di Siviglia, 104 Alfieri, Vittorio, 112 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung on Don Giovanni, 99–101 Almaviva, o sia L’inutile precauzione (Rossini), 107. See also barbiere di Sivi­ glia, Il amor contrastato ossia La molinara, L’ (Paisiello), 196 Ana, Hugo de, 277 Anelli, Angelo, 44–45 Ankersmit, Frank, 243–44; on the impact of the French Revolution, 135–37; Sublime Historical Experience, 135–37 Anna Bolena (Donizetti), 266

Antologia, on Rossini’s genre, 83–84 arias: Colas on, 44; concluding, 33 Arie antiche (Parisotti), 196 Armida (Rossini): piano arrangements of, 173; staging of, 278 Artaria publishing house, 204–5 Aspasia e Cleomene (Pavesi), 72 assedio di Corinto, L’ (Rossini), 264 audiences, 85; characteristics of, 7; composition of, 3–4; conversation in, 119, 150–51; culture of repetition and, 217–18; emotional conditions of, 120; Milanese, 58–59; musical memory of, 67; musical taste and, 24, 60; Roman, 105; seating for, 169–70; for Semiramide, 260–61; spectators and actors, 150; Venetian, 58 Aureliano in Palmira (Rossini), 34; Il barbiere overture and, 113 Austen, Jane, Mansfield Park, 146–47, 212 autoimprestito. See self-­borrowing Azevedo, Alexis, 264 345



346 Index

Barbato, Cristina, 277 Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow (Berger), 18 Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity (Butt), 18, 19 Balthazar, Scott, 32, 33, 47, 49 barbiere di Sivi­glia, Il (Paisiello), 34, 105 barbiere di Sivi­glia, Il (Rossini): characters in, 103, 105–9; crescendo, 34; debates over, 26; final duet in Otello and, 96; finaletto, 32; introduzione, 104–5, 110; “I scalini de la scala” and, 177–78; Janet Johnson on, 103–4; metatheatricality of, 109–10; overture, crescendo, piano reduction, 35f; piano-­vocal score, publication of, 68; performance in England, 153–54; performances of, 163; piano arrangements of, 173; popularity of, 165–66; premiere of, 28, 105, 261; productions of, 170–71; self-­ borrowing in, 113–14; staging of, 105; storm in, 226; theatricality in, 103 Baricco, Alessandro, 110, 156 “Battle of Hernani,” 270 Beales, Derek, 129, 138 Beccaria, Cesare, Ricerche intorno alla natura dello stile, 75 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 75, 243; arrangements of “La biondina in gondoleta,” 195–98; arrangements of “Nel cor più non mi sento,” 195–98; on Il barbiere di Sivi­glia, 272 Beghelli, Marco, 32, 51–52, 258 Bellini, Vincenzo, 31, 270; Il pirata, 265–66; lyric forms, 44; productions in 1830, 171; Rossini vs., 267–69 Berger, Karol, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow, 18 Bergson, Henri, 273 Berlinische Zeitung, on Tancredi, 79 Berlioz, Hector, 270 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 227, 241

Biagini, Eugenio, 129, 138 Bianca e Falliero (Rossini), 40, 41f; canon in, 256; critique of, 96; premiere of, 96; stretta in, 223–24 Bianconi, Lorenzo, 36 “biondina in gondoleta, La” (Mayr or Perucchini), 195–97, 196f; comparison to “Di tanti palpiti,” 198 body, movement and, 231–45 Boito, Arrigo, 112 Bonaparte, Napoleon, death of, 121. See also Napoleonic wars Bourbon, Maria Luisa of, 203 Brauner, Charles, 111 Braunschweig, Yael, 236 Brighenti, Pietro, 27 Broers, Michael: on French cultural imperialism, 134, 141, 150, 152; on Italian theatricality, 149; on taste and public business, 142; views of, 138 Bugs Bunny: The Rabbit of Seville (Warner Bros), 275 Burrows, Donald, 147 Butt, John, Bach’s Dialogue with ­Modernity, 18, 19 cabaletta, 32 Cambridge Companion to Rossini, The (Senici), 15 Campiani, Michele, 174 Campoformio, Treaty of, 128 cantabile, 32 cantilena, 27; Carpani on, 81 canzone da battello, 199 Carcano, Teatro, Milan, 60; Demetrio e Polibio at, 60, 163; L’Italiana in Algeri at, 162; Rossini’s operas at, 162, 164t– 165t, 204 Carlyle, Thomas, The French Revolution: A History, 146 Carnini, Daniele, 51–52 Carpani, Giuseppe: defense of Rossini’s

Index 347

approach, 55–57; on genre and music, 97, 101; Le Rossiniane, 27, 55–57, 61, 74, 78–81, 233; “Letter on Zelmira,” 83, 121–22, 233; “On the Differences and Moral Characters of Styles and on Musical Language,” 83; on phrasing by Rossini, 97; on repetition, 205; on self-­borrowing by Rossini, 172; on the spread of Rossini’s music, 176; support for Rossini, 27, 29–30 Catholicism, 149 Cenerentola, La (Rossini), 39; borrowing from Il barbiere in, 113; characters in, 103; confusion of its characters, 273; metatheatricality of, 109; piano arrangements of, 173; piano-­vocal score, publication of, 68; premiere of, 57, 58, 261; productions of, 170–71; repetitive movements in, 220–22; reviews of, 224–25; storm in, 226; stretta in, 57 Cenni di una donna già cantante sopra il maestro Rossini (Righetti Giorgi), 78 Characteristiks (Earl of Shaftesbury), 145 Charles X, coronation of, 23 Chateaubriand, René de, Mémoires d’outre tombe, 273–74 Cherubini, Luigi, 243, 267 Chopin, Frédéric, 270 Christensen, Thomas, 175 “Cielo, il mio labbro ispira,” Bianca e Falliero, 40, 41f–43f Cimarosa, Domenico, 26, 27; Gli Orazi e i Curiazi, 63; performances in 1825, 170– 71 Ciro in Babilonia (Pavesi), Rossini’s contributions to, 72 Ciro in Babilonia (Rossini), 72; ending of, 271; modern staging of, 278; storm in, 226 civility, 145 clemenza di Tito, La (Mozart), 162 Clockwork Orange, A (Kubrick), 275

Coccia, Carlo, productions in 1820, 170 Colas, Damien, 44, 111, 189–90 collective consciousness, Italian, 138 comic moments, criticism of, 6 comic operas, 59, 84, 97, 100, 109–10, 112, 157–58, 160, 239, 272. See also opera buffa Comte Ory, Le (Rossini), storm in, 226 Conati, Marcello, 170, 171, 177, 178 “Conquisa l’anima,” Maometto II, 36, 44, 45f–47f consumer society, repetition and, 217–18 “Contenta quest’alma,” L’Italiana in Algeri, 191, 193f–195f Corinne, ou L’Italie (De Staël), 133 Corriere delle dame, 62; critique by, 59; critique of La pietra del paragone in, 84; critique of the Corriere milanese in, 65–66; defense of Stefano Pavesi in, 65–66; discussion of plagiarism in, 62–63; Guglielmi letter to Corriere milanese, 64–65; on loudness, 118; on Marchioness Clarice, 84; on repetitions, 205, 257 Corriere milanese, 62; critique by Corriere delle dame, 65–66; critique of Ernesto e Palmira, 63–64; on repetitions, 205; review of Il Turco in Italia, 59, 60; review of L’Italiana in Algeri, 161–62; on self-­borrowing, 63–64 Così fan tutte (Mozart), 10, 84, 277 Craig, Edward Gordon, 277 Cremona, 1817–1830, Rossini’s operas in, 167t–168t, 168, 171 crescendo: characteristics of, 36; Fink on, 156; melodic content and, 34; phrasing, 36; in Rossini’s style, 34 critics, musical competence of, 13–14. See also specific operas; specific publications Croce, Benedetto, 20 cultural trauma, modernity and, 127–39



348 Index

Cumming, Julie E., 217–18 Cuoco, Vincenzo, Platone in Italia, 135 Dahlhaus, Carl, 12, 156–57 Dainotto, Roberto M., Europe (in Theory), 19 D’Amico, Fedele, 156 Davis, Tracy C., 143, 146 Degerando (first name unknown), 142 Dei sepolcri (Foscolo), 130–31 Delacroix, Eugène, Liberty Leading the People, 270 De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (De Staël), 133 Deleuze, Gilles, 9, 16, 245; Difference and Repetition, 239–40 Della Seta, Fabrizio, 157 “Dell’utilità delle traduzioni” (De Staël), 133–34 Demetrio e Polibio (Rossini), 67; “Questo cor ti giura amore,” 173; revival of, 163 Demofoonte (Metastasio), 57 Deshoulières, Christophe, 277 De Staël, Madame: Corinne, ou L’Italie, 133; De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, 133; “Dell’utilità delle traduzioni,” 133–34; views of, 133–34 Difference and Repetition (Deleuze), 239– 40 Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’italiani (Leopardi), 131, 133 discourse, terminology of, 10–12 distance: comic moments and, 6; theatricality and, 7–8 “Di tanti palpiti,” Tancredi, 8, 179–201; memory and, 203; print editions of, 175, 176, 180; sung by gondoliers, 176, 184 Dolan, Emily, 264 Don Giovanni (Mozart), 78, 99–100, 162 Donizetti, Gaetano, 31, 270; Anna Bolena,

266; operatic endings, 271; opere buffe, 272; productions in 1827 and 1830, 171 donna del lago, La (Rossini), piano arrangement of, 173 Don Pasquale (Donizetti), 272 Doussault, Charles, conversations with Rossini, 68 dramaturgy, 30, 103–15; Baricco on, 156; Beghelli on, 51–52; characteristics in Rossini’s works, 154–55; comic moments and, 6; genre and, 101–2; interpretations of, 6; play and, 155–56; psychoanalytical approach to, 241–42; representational aesthetics and, 232– 33; style and, 115; theatricality and, 9 Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick), 277 Duvauçey de Nittis, Antonia, 244 “E ben, per mia memoria,” La gazza ladra, 86–87, 88f–91f “Ecco ridente in cielo,” Il barbiere di Sivi­ glia, 105 Eduardo e Cristina (Rossini), 114; ending of, 271; Odoardo e Cristina (Paves) and, 71, 72 “Eleuterio Pantologo” (pseudonym). See Pantologo, Eleuterio Elisabetta d’Inghilterra (Pavesi), 71 Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra (Rossini), 40; crescendos, 34; Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra (Pavesi) and, 71; ending of, 271; Il barbiere overture and, 113; self-­borrowing in, 34 Elisa e Claudio (Mercadante), 170–71 elisir d’amore, L’ (Donizetti), 272 Emanuele, Marco, 157, 279 emotions, music representing, 28–29 Ermione (Rossini), 265, 271; modern staging of, 278; Rossini on, 262–63; Stendhal on, 324n224 Ernesto e Palmira (Guglielmi): critique of, 63–64; plagiarism in, 205–6 escapism, issue of, 241–42

Index 349

Europe (in Theory) (Dainotto), 19 Eyerman, Ron, 138–39 Fabbri, Paolo, 33, 262 Fall of Public Man, The (Sennett), 144 farce, repetition in, 238–39 farse, Rossini’s one-­act, 33 Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard), 240 Fend, Mechthild, 244 Fenice, Teatro La, Venice, 23, 204, 205 Fétis, François-­Joseph, 267 Fidelio (Beethoven), Tancredi compared to, 79 Figaro, character in Il barbiere di Sivi­glia, 103–4, 106–7 films, Rossini’s presence in, 275 finaletto, 32 Fingallo e Comala (Pavesi), 60, 65 Fink, Robert, 34, 156, 218–19; Repeating Ourselves, 217 Fischer-­Lichte, Erika, 143 Fogazzaro, Antonio, Piccolo mondo antico, 177 Fondo, Teatro del, Naples, 261 forgetting, trauma and, 243 “Forse un dì conoscerete,” La gazza ladra, 85 Foscolo, Ugo, 7, 153, 212; Dei sepolcri, 130– 31; Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 127–39 Franceschini, H., 26, 74 Freischütz, Der (Weber): critique of, 79; Viennese welcome of, 79 French cultural imperialism, 134, 135–36; arrested Italian political culture and, 152–53; Broers on, 141; discourse of Italian theatricality, 149; dynamics of, 150; views of Italian theater, 141–43 French Revolution: impacts of, 135–37, 154; trauma caused by, 243; upheavals after, 128 French Revolution: A History (Carlyle), 146

Freud, Sigmund: on “acting out,” 225; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 227, 241; “Mourning and Melancholia,” 224–26; on remembering, 238; “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” 225; on trauma and repetition, 319n19 Friedrich, Caspar David, 158–59, 243–44 Gallarati, Paolo, 103, 156 Garcia, Luis-­Manuel, 217 gazza ladra, La (Rossini): “Come frenar il pianto,” 173; “Deh tu reggi in tal momento,” 173; “Di piacer mi balza il cor,” 173–74; “E ben, per mia memoria,” 173–74; Hegel on, 233–34; “Il mio piano è preparato,” 173; La pietra del paragone and, 93; loudness of, 117–18; “L’ultimo istante è questo,” 93f–94f; as mélodrame, 158; music and words in, 25, 85–86; noisiness of, 122–23; “O cielo rendimi,” 86f–91f; “O nume benefico,” 173–74; premiere of, 261; productions of, 170–71; “Sinfonia campestre,” 92f–93f; “Vieni fra queste braccia,” 173 gazzetta, La (Rossini), self-­borrowing in, 114 Gazzetta di Firenze, 155; on orchestral noise, 119–20 Gazzetta di Milano, critique of La gazza ladra, 88–89 Gazzetta privilegiata di Venezia, 23; critic of, 29; critique on genre and music, 97; on “L’usato ardir,” 252–55; on Otello, 263–64; Semiramide reviewed in, 247 gender, Rossinian discourse and, 228–29 Generali, Pietro, 72; productions in 1820, 1823, 1825, and 1827, 170–71 genre, 83–102; historicist view of, 98; mélodrame and, 157–58; Romantic literary theory of, 98–99; Rossini’s music and, 83–84



350 Index

genrification, process of, 97–98 Gherardini, Carlo, 174 Gherardini, Giovanni, 123 Gioachino Rossini und seine Zeit ( Jacobshagen), 15 Giorgetti, Ferdinando, 26 Giornale dipartimentale dell’Adriatico, on L’Italiana in Algeri, 206–8 Giornale italiano, 62 Giovine Italia, 270 “Giusto Dio che umile adoro,” Tancredi, 191, 193f Gli amori e l’armi (Giuseppe Mosca), 63 Gli Orazi e i Curiazi (Cimarosa), 63 Gluck, Christoph W., 226, 267 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, on memory, 211–12 Gon, Federico, 264 Gossett, Philip, 1, 69, 263, 265 Grande Odalisque, La (Ingres), 244, 245 Grassi, Bartolomeo, 174 Gretry, André, 267 Griselda (Paer), 118 Guglielmi, Pietro Carlo: charges of plagiarism against, 73, 205; crescendo and, 72; Ernesto e Palmira, 63; letter to Corriere milanese, 64–65; on self-­ borrowing, 64–65 Guicciardini, Francesco, 137 Guillaume Tell (Rossini), 264, 265; modern staging of, 279; performances of, 163; storm in, 226 guitar, arrangements of music for, 173–74 Habermas, Jürgen, 98 Haydn, Joseph, Rossini and, 264 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 9, 232– 34, 245; Aesthetics, 232–35; on La gazza ladra, 233–34; on melody in Rossini’s music, 235–37 Heine, Heinrich, On the French Stage, 156– 57

Herheim, Stefan, 277 Hérold, Ferdinand, 265 Hibberd, Sarah, 243 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 75 Horkheimer, Max, 218 Houlgate, Stephen, 233, 236 Hugo, Victor, 270 Hunt, Leigh, 272 identity, representation and, 240 idiomatic Italian, Rossini’s use of, 14–15 Idomeneo (Mozart), 226 imitation, 23–30; defense of, 27; Fabbri on, 262; representation and, 4; Rossini on, 28; self-­borrowing and, 96 Industrial Revolution, 218–19 inganno felice, L’ (Rossini): performances in 1820, 170; piano arrangements of, 173; revivals of, 163 Ingres, Jean-­Auguste-­Dominique, 244; La Grande Odalisque, 244, 245; Oedipus and the Sphynx, 244–45; portrait of Antonia Duvauçey de Nittis, 244; portrait of Marie-­Geneviève-­Marguerite de Senonnes, 244; The Valpinçon Bather, 244, 245 introduzioni, 32 Invention of Beethoven and Rossini, The (Matthew and Walton), 15 Iphigénie en Tauride (Gluck), 226 Italiana in Algeri, L’ (Mosca), 207–8 Italiana in Algeri, L’ (Rossini): characters in, 103; “Contenta quest’alma,” 191, 193f–195f; Corriere milanese’s review of, 161–62; “Cruda sorte,” 48f–51f; finaletto, 32; Isabella’s cavatina in, 45f–47f, 48f–51f; libretto of, 33–34, 109; melodic statements in, 47–48; metatheatricality of, 109; piano arrangements of, 173; piano-­vocal score, publication of, 68; premiere of, 261; repetition in, 5, 36; reviews of, 206–8;

Index 351

revivals of, 163; self-­borrowing in, 114; success in Milan, 58–59; “Va sossopra il mio cervello,” 222 Italian society: characterization of, 130, 132, 134–35, 147, 151–52; distrust of the state by, 152; dominance of the theater in, 141; importance of “show” to, 142– 43; private worlds of, 152; theatricality and, 147, 150, 155–56; upheavals, 138–39 Italian theaters: conditions in, 142; dominance of, in Italy, 141–42 Jacobshagen, Arnold, Gioachino Rossini und seine Zeit, 15 Johnson, Janet, 273; on Il barbiere di Sivi­ glia, 103–4 Johnson, Julian, Out of Time, 18 Kaegi, Dieter, 277 Kant, Immanuel, 243–44 Kärntnertortheater, Vienna, 56 Kierkegaard, Søren, 9; Repetition, 237–42 Kleist, Heinrich von, Über das Mario­ nettentheater, 158 Kokkos, Yannis, 278 Koselleck, Reinhard, 135–36, 211 Kubrick, Stanley: A Clockwork Orange, 275; Dr. Strangelove, 277 Lamacchia, Saverio, 104–5 Lamberti, Anton Maria, 196 Lanari, Alessandro, 118 Lanzi, Luigi, Storia pittorica della Italia, 75 laughter, 239 Leoni, Michele, 26; critique of Rossini by, 88 Leopardi, Giacomo, 7, 131, 153; Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’italiani, 131, 133; on repetition, 215–16; on the theater, 148; views of, 131–33; writings of, 269; Zibaldone, 208–10

“Letter on Zelmira” (Carpani), 80, 83, 233; on Napoleon’s death, 121–22 Letter to D’Alembert (Rousseau), 145 Liberty Leading the People (Delacroix), 270 librettists, authorship and, 76 librettos: metatheatricality of Rossini’s, 109–10; perceived mismatch between music and, 85–102; relationship between music and, 4–5; Rossini’s attitude toward, 26 Life of Rossini (Stendhal), 14–15, 121, 179, 180, 264 Lindenberger, Herbert, 279 Linea verde (Italian television program), 275 Lippmann, Friedrich, 110, 155–56 listening: attentive, 212, 213; memory and, 212; passive, 212; repetition and, 212 Livermore, Davide, 278 Lombard Enlightenment, 75 Lone Ranger, The, 275 Lorenzoni, Adriano, 26 loudness, orchestration and, 319n23 Lucas, George, 278 Lucia di Lammermoor (Donizetti), final scene of, 271–72 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 137 Macrobio, character in Il Turco in Italia, 103 Majer, Andrea, 26, 83, 300n3 Mansfield Park (Austen), 146–47, 212 Manzoni, Alessandro, I promessi sposi, 270 Maometto II (Rossini), 40, 264; canon in, 256; “Conquisa l’anima,” 44, 45f–47f; ending of, 271; piano-­vocal score, publication of, 68 Marcolini, Maria, 207–8 Martens, Georg von, 196, 198–200; Reise nach Venedig, 195, 314n15–315n15 masks, civility and, 145



352 Index

Mathew, Nicholas, 243; The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini, 15 Matilde di Shabran (Rossini): contemporary reactions to, 77; Il trionfo delle belle and, 71; metatheatricality of, 109; “Passaggier che si confonde,” 258, 259f–260f; productions of, in 1823, 1825, and 1827, 170–71; Tancredi and, 71 Mayr, Giovanni Simone, 170, 196, 268 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 270, 274 Méhul, Étienne Nicolas, 267 Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Die (Wagner), 236 melancholia, repetition and, 9, 138, 219, 224–26 Melberg, Arne, 237–38 mélodrame, 100; genre of, 157–58 Mémoires d’outre tombe (Chateaubriand), 273–74 memory, 203–14; familiarity and, 205; human experience and, 212–13; identity and, 219; listening and, 206, 212; musical, 204; pleasure and, 215; recollection and, 219; repetition and, 8–9; of trauma, 225–26 Mercadante, Saverio, productions in 1820, 1823, 1825, and 1827, 170–71 metatheatricality: contemporary staging and, 278; dramaturgy and, 103–15; Il barbiere di Sivi­glia and, 109–10; theatricality and, 149–50 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 263–64, 265, 270 Michaelis, Christian Friedrich, 242–43 Michieletto, Damiano, 279 Mickey Mouse: The Band Concert (Disney), 275 Middleton, Richard, 217 mie prigioni, Le (Pellico), 270 Milan, 1812–1821: Rossini’s operas in, 164f–165t, 171 “modern,” definition of, 17 modernism, repetition and, 216 modernity: arrival of, 135–36; beginning of,

129; concept of, 127–39; musical repetition and, 212–13; music and, 19–20; originality and, 213; perception of time and, 211; repetition and, 217–18 Moïse et Pharaon, ou Le passage de la Mer Rouge (Rossini), 264 Monteverdi, Claudio, scholarly interest in, 1 Morlacchi, Francesco, 26, 170, 174 Mosca, Giuseppe: Gli amori e l’armi, 63; self-­borrowing by, 63–64 Mosca, Luigi, 33, 47, 174; crescendo, 57; L’Italiana in Algeri and, 109, 207–8; musical ideas, 34; productions in 1820, 170 Mosè in Egitto (Rossini), 163, 168t, 264; conclusion of, 271; modern staging of, 278; music and words in, 25; stretta in, 223–24; success of, 265 motivic economy: phrasing and, 36; Rossini’s crescendo and, 34 “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud), 224–26 movement, 231–45; freedom and, 236–37; repetition and, 238 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 226; comedies of, 84; Così fan tutte, 10, 84, 277; Don Giovanni, 162; La clemenza di Tito, 162; Le nozze di Figaro, 162 Müller, Wilhelm, 181, 184–85, 199 musicology, 212–13; on repetition and pleasure, 217 music periodicals, 13 Musset, Alfred de, 273 Napoleonic wars: impact on Rossini’s music, 7; noise of, 119–23; trauma and, 9, 219; turmoil of, 154; upheavals in Italy, 129–31 Nardon, Hugues, 141–42 Neapolitan operas, Rossini’s, 260–66 Negri, Benedetto, 174, 180 “Nel cor più non mi sento” (Paisiello), 195,

Index 353

197f–198f; comparison to “Di tanti palpiti,” 198 “Nel volto estatico di questo e quello,” La Cenerentola, 39 newspapers, reviews in, 13 Nicolini, Giuseppe, 72 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 239–42 noise, 117–23; critique of, 6–7; effect on audiences, 24; frenzy of music and, 155–56; reality and, 121–22; in theaters, conversations and, 150–51 novelty: Carpani on, 79–81; originality, change, and, 216 nozze di Figaro, Le (Mozart), 162 nozze di Teti e di Peleo, Le (Rossini), 28 objectification: comic moments and, 6; theatricality and, 7–8 occasione fa il ladro, L’ (Rossini), storm in, 226 “O cielo rendimi,” La gazza ladra, 86f–87f Odoardo e Cristina (Pavesi), 71–72 Odoyevsky, Vladimir, Vexing Days, 180 Oedipus and the Sphynx (Ingres), 244–45 Olivier, Alain Patrick, 234 “Ombretta sdegnosa,” La pietra del paragone, 177 On the French Stage (Heine), 156–57 On the Origins of Inequality among Men (Rousseau), 145–46 opera buffa: blurred boundaries with opera seria, 112; Gallarati on, 156; Majer on the disappearance of, 300n3; musical gestures in, 111; perspective of metatheater in, 109; popularity of, 171; Rossini’s, 272; Rossini’s dramaturgy and, 110; scores in, 111; the sentimental in, 272–73; style of, 84; two-­act, 33 opéra comique, 142 opera semiseria, 111; genre of, 100–101; La gazza ladra as, 85, 93; popularity of, 171 opera seria, 33; blurred boundaries with opera buffa, 112; buffaization by Ros-

sini, 84; duet in, 33; endings of, 270– 71; scores in, 111; style of, 84, 91 orchestration: loudness of, 6–7, 117–23; performance spaces and, 305n9 originality: novelty, change and, 216; repetition and, 75–76 Orlandi, Ferdinando, I raggiri amorosi, 62–63 Otello (Rossini): critical discourse on, 263–64; final duet in, 96; finale of, 271; performances of, 163; piano-­ vocal score, publication of, 68; self-­ borrowing in, 113; storm in, 226; stretta in, 223–24 Out of Time ( Johnson), 18 overtures, crescendo and, 34, 275 Pabst, Georg Wilhelm, 278 Pacini, Giovanni: productions in 1820, 1823, 1825 and 1827, 170–71; Rossini’s letter to, 269 Paer, Ferdinando, 118, 268 Paisiello, Giovanni, 26, 268; Il barbiere di Sivi­glia, 34, 108; L’amor contrastato, ossia La molinara, 196; “Nel cor più non mi sento,” 195, 197f–198f Pantologo, Eleuterio (pseudonym): critiques by, 26, 84–88, 118; mention of the Napoleonic wars, 120–21; on noisy orchestration, 119; on theaters, 150–51; on women, 228 Parisotti, Alessandro, Arie antiche, 196 “Parlar, pensar vorrei,” La Cenerentola, 39 Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, 127–28 “Passaggier che si confonde,” Matilde di Shabran, 258, 259f–260f Patriarca, Silvana, 134, 138 Pavesi, Stefano, 206; attacks against, 5; Fingallo e Comala, 60, 65; productions in 1820, 170; Rossini and, 71–72; self-­ borrowing charges against, 65 Peacock, Thomas Love, 153–54 Pellico, Silvio, Le mie prigioni, 270



354 Index

Pensées (Pascal), 127–28 Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 27 Perucchini, Giovanni Battista, 196 Petite Messe Solennelle (Rossini), 272 Petitot, Ennemond Alexandre, 277 pezzi staccati (detached pieces), 53 piano solo, publication of music for, 173 piano-­vocal scores: circulation of, 176; consultation of, 14; impact of publication of, 68–69; printed, 12–13, 172–73 Piccinni, Nicolò, 267 Piccolo mondo antico (Fogazzaro), 177 pietra del paragone, La (Rossini): characters in, 103; Corriere delle dame’s critique of, 84; La gazza ladra and, 93; Marchioness Clarice in, 84; metatheatricality of, 109; performances of, 163; piano arrangements of, 173; premiere of, 261; revivals of, 163; songs from, 177; storms in, 226 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 277 pirata, Il (Bellini), 265–66 Pizzi, Pierluigi, 277 plagiarism: Corriere delle dame’s discussion of, 62–63; effect on audiences, 24; printed scores and, 208; self-­ borrowing vs., 64–65 Platone in Italia (Cuoco), 134 pleasure, 215–29; concept of, 215; memory and, 9; rational thought and, 227–28 Pollini, Francesco, 174, 180 Ponnelle, Jean-­Pierre, 276–77 popularity: of Il barbiere di Sivi­glia, 2–3; initial reactions and, 2–3; memorability and, 210–11; modern critical attention and, 1; of opera buffa, 171; of opera semiseria, 171; repetition and, 215; of Tancredi, 8 popular music, 217 Poriss, Hilary, 175–76 Postlewait, Thomas, 143 Pound, Ezra, 216 presentation, representation vs., 243–44

printed music: circulation of, 173–75; instrumental arrangements, 173–75; piano-­vocal scores, 12–13, 172–73; plagiarism issues and, 208; reproducibility and, 213 promessi sposi, I (Manzoni), 270 Prota, Giovanni, Il servo furbo, 63 psychoanalysis: concept of pleasure and, 215–29; dramaturgy and, 241–42; philosophy of repetition and, 16 (see also Freud, Sigmund) public lives: civility and, 148; theatricality of, 144 Puritani, I (Bellini), ending of, 271 “Quale infausto orrendo giorno,” Tancredi, 37f–40f “Questo cor ti giura amore,” La gazza ladra, 175 “Questo è un nodo avviluppato,” La Cenerentola, 40, 220–21 raggiri amorosi, I (Orlandi), 62–63 Re, Teatro, Milan: Demetrio e Polibio at, 163; Fingallo e Comala at, 60, 72; revivals at, 163; Rossini’s operas at, 164t–165t; Tancredi at, 67 reality: complexity of, 227; noise and alternative worlds, 120; representation and, 11–12, 158–59; Rossini’s repetition and, 9; spectators and actors and, 155; theater vs., 145 Récamier, Juliette, 142 Reise nach Venedig (von Martens), 195 “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” (Freud), 225 Repeating Ourselves (Fink), 217 repertory, 161–78; memory and, 203; repetition and, 217 repetition, 31–53; in Bianca e Falliero, 96; comments in Le Rossiniane, 55–57; concept of, 8; crescendo and, 34; demonic forces and, 321n20; effect on

Index 355

audiences, 24; Freud on trauma and, 319n19; habituation and, 209; listening and, 212; mèlodrame and, 158; melody and, 36, 37f–40f; memorability and, 215; memory and, 8–9, 209–11; movement and, 238, 240–41; move toward dissimilarity vs., 266; originality and, 75–76; pleasure and, 216–19; power of, 242–43; practice of, 8; repertory and, 171; self-­borrowing and, 72–73; self-­referentiality and, 111; style and, 73–74, 204; theory of, 219–20 Repetition (Kierkegaard), 237–42 Republic of Venice, Treaty of Campoformio and, 128 Riall, Lucy, 129 Ricciardo e Zoraide (Rossini): music vs. words, 25; stretta in, 223–24 Ricerche intorno alla natura dello stile (Beccaria), 75 Ricordi, Giovanni, 204–5 Ricordi, Tito: publication of Rossini scores, 68–69, 173–75; Rossini’s letter to, 67–68 Righetti Giorgi, Geltrude, 26; Cenni di una donna già cantante sopra il maestro Rossini, 77 Risorgimento, 130 Riva, Massimo, on Le ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 128–29 Rochlitz, Friedrich, on Don Giovanni, 99– 100 Romantic literary theory on genre, 98–99, 101 Ronconi, Luca, 278 Rose, William Stewart, 180, 186 Rosenblum, Robert, 244 “Rosina amabile” (Müller), 184–86, 191, 195 Rossi, Fabio, 112 Rossi, Gaetano, 181, 249 Rossini, Gioachino: adoption of crescendo, 72; Bellini vs., 267–69; conversations with Doussault, 68; Gaz-

zetta privilegiata di Venezia, 23; letter to Tito Ricordi, 67–68; Neapolitan operas of, 260–67; nonoperatic music, 172; Pavesi and, 66–67; popularity of, 8, 10, 170–71, 180–81, 265–69; productions in 1823, 1825, 1827, and 1830, 170–71. See also specific operas Rossiniane, ossia Lettere musico-­teatrali, Le (Carpani), 27, 233; on newness vs. sameness, 78–81; on Rossini’s art, 55–57, 61; on Rossini’s style, 74 Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (Walton), 15, 17 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques: Letter to D’Alembert, 145; On the Origins of Inequality Among Men, 145–46 Ruffin, Gianni, 110–11, 156 Sacchini, Antonio, 27, 267 Salieri, Antonio, 267 San Carlo, Teatro di, Naples, 261, 262 Sanguineti, Edoardo, on Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 128 San Moisè, Teatro, Venice, 33, 66 Santa Radegonda, Teatro, Milan: Gli Orazi e i Curiazi at, 63; Il trionfo delle belle at, 66; Rossini’s operas at, 63, 66, 164t– 165t Santucci, Marco, 26–27 Sarti, Giuseppe, 267 Scala, Teatro alla, Milan: Ernesto e Palmira at, 63, 64; Gli Orazi e i Curiazi at, 63; Il barbiere di Sivi­glia at, 163, 166, 276; Il pirata at, 265; Il Turco in Italia at, 58; I raggiri amorosi at, 62; La gazza ladra at, 88, 173; L’Italiana in Algeri at, 161–62, 277; Otello at, 96; repertory of, 163; Rossini’s operas at, 164t–165t, 164t–165t; Tancredi at, 65 Schlegel, Friedrich, 75; on genre, 98, 101 schöne Müllerin, Die (Schubert), 181–84 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 9, 232, 245; on melody in Rossini’s music, 235–37;



356 Index

Schopenhauer, Arthur (continued) The World as Will and Representation, 234–35 Schubert, Franz, 18, 181–84; Rossini and, 17 Schumann, Robert, 270 self-­borrowing: audience detection of, 60; Carpani on, 55–57; commentators on, 4; concept of style and, 75; effect on audiences, 24; fashion of, 69; geographical dimension in discussion of, 58–61; in Il barbiere di Sivi­glia, 113–14; imitation and, 96; memory and, 203; perspectives on, 3; plagiarism vs., 64–65; recomposing and, 69; repetition and, 72–73; style questions and, 67; stylistic consistency vs. copying, 73 self-­referentiality, theatricality and, 8 Semiramide (Rossini), 23; finale of, 84; historiographical context, 260–61; length of, 256–58; “L’usato ardir,” 247–49, 250f–257f, 251–52; memory of performances of, 205; modern staging of, 277; music vs. words in, 26; performances of, 163; piano-­vocal score, publication of, 68, 204; premiere of, 261; productions of, 171; protagonists of, 274; review of, 247; shortened score of, 265; stretta in, 223–24 Sennett, Richard, 144–45; on civility, 148; The Fall of Public Man, 144 Senonnes, Marie-­Geneviève-­Marguerite de, 244 “Se per voi le care io torno,” La pietra del paragone, 84 servo furbo, Il (Prota), 63 Shelley, Mary, 180 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 180 siège de Corinthe, Le (Rossini), 264 Sigismondo (Rossini): premiere of, 58; self-­ borrowing in, 113–14

“Sinfonia campestre,” La gazza ladra, 92f– 93f singers, 12, 151–52; loudness of the orchestra and, 118 singing in Italian society, 151–52 Smith, Adam, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 145 social classes, 138–39; Rossini’s popularity and, 180–81; theater seating and, 169– 70 Sorba, Carlotta, 155, 169 spectacle, Italian passion for, 132 spectators, actors and, 155 Spontini, Gaspare, 267 Steffan, Carlida, 174, 175 Stendhal, 171; on Ermione, 324n224; on gondoliers singing “Di tanti palpiti,” 176; on Italian society, 134; Life of Rossini, 14–15, 121, 179, 180, 264; on Rossini’s style, 77 Sterbini, Cesare, 222–23; Torvaldo e Dorliska and Il barbiere di Sivi­glia, 107 Sternberg, Josef von, 278 Storia pittorica della Italia (Lanzi), 75 storms/tempests, depiction of, 226–27 strettas, 32. See also specific works style, 71–81; compositional idiom and, 72– 73; dramaturgy and, 115; genre and, 83–84; habituation and, 209; memory and, 203; national tastes and, 74–75; novelty and, 209; personal, 75; repertory and, 171; repetition and, 73–74, 204; self-­borrowing questions and, 67; tinta and, 206–7 Sublime Historical Experience (Ankersmit), 135–37 Tacchinardi, Nicola, 118 Tancredi (Pavesi), critique of, 65 Tancredi (Rossini): Berlinische Zeitung on, 79; changes to the finale of, 270; “Di tanti palpiti,” 179–201, 188f–190f;

Index 357

finale of, 271; “Giusto Dio che umile adoro,” 191, 192f; Matilde di Shabran and, 71; performances of, 165; piano-­ vocal score, publication of, 68; popularity of, 8; premiere of, 261; productions in 1830, 171; “Quale infausto orrendo giorno,” 37f–40f; repetition in, 5, 36, 223; review in Florence, 117; self-­borrowing in, 114; at Teatro Re Milan, 67 Taruskin, Richard, 180; on “Di tanti palpiti,” 187–88 television, Rossini’s presence in, 275 tempests/storms, depiction of, 226–27 tempo d’attacco, 32; dissimilar statements in, 33 tempo di mezzo, 32 Terdiman, Richard, 212, 219 theater: Italian passion for, 150; reality vs., 145; repetition in, 238–39 theaters: box seats, 169; conversations in, 150–51; gallery, 169; layout of, 169–70; Milanese, 163; parterre, 169; prices for seating, 169–70 Théâtre Italien, Paris, 23 theatricality, 141–59; concept of, 143–52; definition of, 143; eighteenth-­century, 144; German, 158–59; melodrama and, 158; metatheatricality and, 149–50; movement and, 231–45; negative connotations of, 145; Nietzsche on, 239– 42; psycho-­cultural contexts and, 7–8; reality and, 11–12, 154; sociability and, 148; tensions in, 143–44, 148 theatrum mundi, idea of, 144 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 145 “Tocchiamo beviamo,” La gazza ladra, 91– 93 Torvaldo e Dorliska (Rossini), 25–26; self-­ borrowing in, 114; success of, 107 Tournon, Camille de, 142 trauma: cultural, 127–39; forgetting and,

243; French Revolution and, 137; Freud on repetition and, 319n19; memory of, 225–26; mourning and, 242; Napoleonic years, 273; reality and, 227 trionfo delle belle, Il (Pavesi), 205–6; charges of self-­borrowing in, 66; Matilde di Shabran and, 71 Turco in Italia, Il (Rossini): characters in, 103; libretto, 109; metatheatricality of, 109; performances in 1820, 170; premiere of, 58–59, 261; self-­borrowing from, 114; self-­borrowing in, 60–61; “Siete turchi: non vi credo,” 177–78 Über das Marionettentheater (von Kleist), 158 ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, Le (Foscolo), 127–39 “ultimo istante è questo, L’,” La gazza ladra, 94f–95f, 258; style of, 91 “Una voce poco fa,” Il barbiere di Sivi­glia, 106, 107 “usato ardir, L’,” Semiramide, 247–49, 250f– 57f, 251–52 Vaccaj, Nicola, productions in 1830, 171 Valpinçon Bather (Ingres), 244, 245 “Va sossopra il mio cervello,” L’Italiana in Algeri, 222 Venetians, Rossini’s reception by, 58 Venice: canzone da battello, 199; Hapsburg Empire and, 128; Republic of, 128 Verdi, Giuseppe, 31, 110, 112 vero omaggio, Il (Rossini), 40 Vexing Days (Odoyevsky), 180 viaggio a Reims, Il (Rossini), 23 Vick, Graham, 278, 279 vividness, passionate vs. comic, 90–91 “Voce, che tenera,” Tancredi and other works, 114 “Volkslieder” (Müller), 181



358 Index

Wagner, Richard: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 236 Walton, Benjamin, 264; on Il barbiere, 105; Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life, 15, 17 warfare, noise of, 120–22 Weber, Samuel, 238–39 Western collective consciousness, 138 Widter, Georg, 185 Winterreise (Schubert), 18, 181–84 Wohl, Robert, 273

World as Will and Representation, The (Schopenhauer), 234–35 Zamboni, Luigi, 105 Zelmira (Rossini): Carpani’s letter on, 55– 56; critical scrutiny of, 74; stretta in, 223–24; Viennese reception of, 264 Zibaldone (Leopardi), 208–10 Zimmermann, Mary, 278 Zingarelli, Nicola, 26, 268 Zoppelli, Luca, 76, 171