Opera and society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu 9780511321931, 9780521856751

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
List of illustrations (page xi)
List of tables (page xii)
List of musical examples (page xiii)
Notes on contributors (page xv)
Foreword (Craig Calhoun, page xxi)
Acknowledgments (page xxxii)
Introduction: Opera and the academic turns (Victoria Johnson, page 1)
I The Representation of Social and Political Relations in Operatic Works
Introduction to Part I (Jane F. Fulcher, page 29)
1 Venice's mythic empires: Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera (Wendy Heller, page 34)
2 Lully's on-stage societies (Rebecca Harris-Warrick, page 53)
3 Representations of le peuple in French opera, 1673-1764 (Catherine Kintzler, page 72)
4 Women's roles in Meyerbeer's operas: How Italian heroines are reflected in French grand opera (Naomi André, page 87)
5 The effect of a bomb in the hall: The French "opera of ideas" and its cultural role in the 1920s (Jane F. Fulcher, page 115)
II The Institutional Bases for the Production and Reception of Opera
Introduction to Part II (Thomas Ertman, page 135)
6 State and market, production and style: An interdisciplinary approach to eighteenth-century Italian opera history (Franco Piperno, page 138)
7 Opera and the cultural authority of the capital city (William Weber, page 160)
8 "Edizioni distrutte" and the significance of operatic choruses during the Risorgimento (Philip Gossett, page 181)
9 Opera in France, 1870-1914: Between nationalism and foreign imports (Christophe Charle. Translated by Jennifer Boittin, page 243)
10 Fascism and the operatic unconscious (Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, page 267)
III Theorizing Opera and the Social
Introduction to Part III (Victoria Johnson, page 291)
11 On opera and society (assuming a relationship) (Herbert Lindenberger, page 294)
12 Symbolic domination and contestation in French music: Shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu (Jane F. Fulcher, page 312)
13 Rewriting history from the losers' point of view: French Grand Opera and modernity (Antoine Hennion. Translated by Sarah Boittin, page 330)
14 Conclusion: Towards a new understanding of the history of opera? (Thomas Ertman, page 351)
Bibliography (page 364)
Index (page 395)

Citation preview

| OPERA AND SOCIETY IN ITALY AND FRANCE FROM MONTEVERDI TO BOURDIEU

This edited volume is the first book to bring together academic specialists writing on the multi-media operatic form from the disciplines of musicology, comparative literature, history, sociology, and philosophy. The presence in the volume’s title of Pierre Bourdieu, the leading cultural sociologist of the late twentieth century, signals the editors’ intention to synthesize recent advances in social science with recent advances in musicological and other scholarship on opera. Through a focus on opera in Italy and France, the contributors to the ~ volume draw on their respective disciplines both to expand our knowledge of opera’s history and to demonstrate the kinds of contributions that stand to be made by different disciplines to the study of opera. The volume is divided into three sections, each of which is preceded by a concise and informative introduction explaining how the chapters in that section contribute to our understanding of opera. VICTORIA JOHNSON is Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies at the University of Michigan. JANE F. FULCHER is Professor of Music (Musicology) at Indiana University. THOMAS ERTMAN is Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University.

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| CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN OPERA Series editor: Arthur Groos, Cornell University

Volumes for Cambridge Studies in Opera explore the cultural, political and social influences of the genre. As a cultural art form, opera is not produced in a vacuum. Rather, it is influenced, whether directly or in more subtle ways, by its social and political environment. In turn, opera leaves its mark on society and contributes to shaping the cultural climate. Studies to be included in the series will look at these various relationships including the politics and economics of opera, the operatic representation of women or the singers who portrayed them, the history of opera as theatre, and the evolution of the opera house. Published titles

Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna Edited by Mary Hunter and James Webster

Johann Strauss and Vienna: Operetta and the Politics of Popular Culture Camille Crittenden

German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner

John Warrack Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London: The King’s Theatre, Garrick and the Business of Performance Ian Woodfield

Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France: The Politics of Halévy’s La Juive Diana R. Hallman

Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647-1785 Downing A. Thomas

Three Modes of Perception in Mozart: The Philosophical, Pastoral, and Comic in Cosi fan tutte Edmund J. Goehring

Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to Puccini Emanuele Senici

The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815-1930 Susan Rutherford

Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu Edited by Victoria Johnson, Jane F. Fulcher, and Thomas Ertman

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Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu Edited by Victoria Johnson, Jane FE. Fulcher, and Thomas Ertman

CAMBRIDGE |

ley UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge ca2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521856751 © Cambridge University Press 2007 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2007

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-521-85675-1 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To the memory of Pierre Bourdieu, in gratitude

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CONTENTS

List of illustrations | xi List of tables | xii List of musical examples | xiii Notes on contributors | Xv Foreword | xxi Craig Calhoun Acknowledgments | Xxxil

Introduction: Opera and the academic turns | I Victoria Johnson

I The Representation of Social and Political Relations in Operatic Works

Introduction to PartI | 29 Jane F. Fulcher

Wendy Heller ,

1 Venice’s mythic empires: Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera | 34 2 Lully’s on-stage societies | 53 Rebecca Harris-Warrick

3 Representations of le peuple in French opera, 1673-1764 | 72 Catherine Kintzler

4 Women’s roles in Meyerbeer’s operas: How Italian heroines are reflected in French grand opera | 87 Naomi André

5 The effect of a bomb in the hall: The French “opera of ideas” and its cultural role in the 1920s | I15

Jane F. Fulcher :

| ix

X | Contents II The Institutional Bases for the Production and Reception of Opera

Introduction to Part II | 135 Thomas Ertman

6 State and market, production and style: An interdisciplinary approach to eighteenth-century Italian opera history | 138 Franco Piperno

7 Opera and the cultural authority of the capital city | 160 William Weber

8 “Edizioni distrutte” and the significance of operatic choruses during the Risorgimento | 181 Philip Gossett

9 Opera in France, 1870-1914: Between nationalism and foreign imports | 243 Christophe Charle Translated by Jennifer Boittin

10 Fascism and the operatic unconscious | 267 Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg

Il Theorizing Opera and the Social Introduction to Part III | 291 Victoria Johnson

11 On opera and society (assuming a relationship) | 294 Herbert Lindenberger

12 Symbolic domination and contestation in French music: Shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu | 312 Jane F. Fulcher

13 Rewriting history from the losers’ point of view: French Grand Opera and modernity | 330 Antoine Hennion Translated by Sarah Boittin

14 Conclusion: Towards a new understanding of the history of opera? | 351 Thomas Ertman

Bibliography | 364 Index | 395

ILLUSTRATIONS

7.1 “Le supréme Bon Ton,” frontispiece, London und Paris, 1800 Source: Library of the University of Gottingen | 163

9.1 Revenues of the Opéra and the Opéra-comique, 1875-1905 Source: Annudires statistiques de la ville de Paris | 248

| xl

TABLES

4.1 Principal roles for women (and castrato) in Meyerbeer’s Italian operas | 89 4.2 Roles for two leading women in Meyerbeer’s French grand operas | 107 6.1 Sacred operas for Neapolitan Lent seasons (1785-1820, premieres only) | 146 6.2 La finta cameriera by Federico-[Barlocci?]/Latilla: productions 1738-1751 | I51

6.3. Some opera buffa productions with the Baglionis | 154 8.1 Hymns and choruses published by Ricordi in 1848, whose plates were later destroyed, according to the Ricordi catalogue of 1857 | 209 8.2 Some hymns and choruses published by Lucca and Canti in 1848 | 221

8.3. Poetic meters of the “edizioni distrutte” | 230 9.1 French composers of operas and opéras-comiques most frequently performed abroad | 253 9.2 Number of cities outside their home country where the works of foreign opera composers from the sample were performed | 255

xii |

MUSICAL EXAMPLES

1.1. Giovanni Antonio Boretti, Claudio Cesare, Act 1, Scene 9 (I-Vnm It IV, 401[= 9925]), f. 16v—-17r. | 45

2.1 Jean-Baptiste Lully, Atys, Act 1, Scene 7: “Entrée des Phrygiens” (Paris: Baussen, 1709), p. 72. | 62 2.2 Jean-Baptiste Lully, Atys, Act 1, Scene 7: “Second air des Phrygiens” (Paris: Baussen, 1709), p. 73. | 63

8.1 Giuseppe Verdi and Goffredo Mameli, “Suona la tromba” (1848): the irregular first phrase (five measures plus three measures) of the first strophe. From the first edition published by Paolo de Giorgi (Milan, 1865). | 192 8.2 Gaetano Donizetti and Salvadore Cammarano, Belisario (1836), Aria of Alamiro, “Trema Bisanzio”: the first eight

measures, in which Donizetti ignores the enjambment between the two verses. From the first edition of the vocal score published by G. Ricordi (Milan, 1836). | 193 8.3. Gioachino Rossini and Luigi Balocchi and Alexandre Soumet, Le Siége de Corinthe (1826), Scéne et Air Hiéros avec Choeur,

“Répondons 4 ce cri de victoire”: the melody subsequently used by Rossini in his Cantata in onore del Sommo Pontefice Pio Nono (1846; first performed 1 January 1847). From the first

edition of the vocal score published by Eugéne Troupenas (Paris, 1826). | 198 8.4 Gioachino Rossini and Canonico Golfieri, Grido di esultazione riconoscente al Sommo Pontefice Pio IX, “Su, fratelli, letizia si

canti”: the melody derived from the Coro dei Bardi in Rossini’s La donna del lago (1819). From the first edition published by G. Ricordi (Milan, 1847). | 206

| xiii

XiV | List of musical examples 8.5 Albino Abbiati, Jl 22 Marzo 1848: Valzer per Pianoforte ossia Musica allusiva alle cinque giornate: the composition consists of variations on Rossini's Grido di esultazione riconoscente al Sommo Pontefice Pio IX. From the first edition published by G. Ricordi (Milan, 1848). | 207

8.6 Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti and Giulio Carcano, Inno nazionale in occasione delle solenni esequie pei morti nella

rivoluzione di Milano, “Per la Patria il sangue han dato”: opening phrase. From the first edition published by G. Ricordi (Milan, 1848). | 225

8.7. Prospero Selli and Carlo Matthey, La partenza per Lombardia: canto guerriero: syncopated cadential phrase, “Oh si voli; chi é vero italiano / Varchera le bell’acque del Po.” From the first edition published by G. Ricordi (Milan, 1848). | 227

8.8 Pietro Cornali and David Chiossone, Canto degli italiani, cadential phrase, “Con I’aurora invocata dai forti, / Italiani sorgiamo, sorgiamo, / e la terra che disser dei morti / Sia de’ prodi la patria e l’onor.” From the first edition published by FE Lucca (Milan, 1848). | 229

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Victoria Johnson is Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies at the University of Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University, where she wrote her dissertation on state /administrative relations at the Paris Opera from its founding in 1669 to the French Revolution. A book based on her dissertation research is forthcoming.

Jane F. Fulcher is Professor of Music (Musicology), Indiana University. In 2003-2004 she was “Edward Cone Member in Music Studies” at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. She has been awarded research fellowships by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the National Humanities Center, and the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (Paris), and she was twice a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. She is the author of The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (Cambridge, 1987), French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (1999), and The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914-1940 (2005). She was also the editor of and a contributor to Debussy and His World (2001). Thomas Ertman_ is Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University. He is the author of Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), which was awarded the Barrington Moore Prize for the best book in historical sociology. He is presently completing a successor volume tentatively entitled Taming the Leviathan: Liberalization and Democracy in Western Europe from the French Revolution to the Second World

| XV

Xvi | Notes on contributors War and has just begun a new project on the sociology of opera in

nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany. . Naomi André is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan and holds a B.A. from Barnard College and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Music from Harvard University. Her research focuses on Verdi, nineteenth-century opera and women in music. Her book, Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti and the Second Woman in Early NineteenthCentury Italian Opera, forthcoming, explores the changing meanings

of women’s voices and characterization in nineteenth-century Italian opera. She has published on Schoenberg and Verdi and has written articles for The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and The International Dictionary of Black Musicians. Currently she is working on a project that explores “blackness” and “blackface” in opera.

Craig Calhoun is President of the Social Science Research Council and University Professor of Social Sciences at New York University. His book Cosmopolitanism and Belonging will be published in 2006. Also forthcoming are the edited collections Lessons of Empire? Historical Contexts for Understanding America’s Global Power (with Frederick

Cooper and Kevin Moore, 2005), and Sociology in America: the ASA Centennial History (2006).

Christophe Charle is Professor of Contemporary History at the Université de Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne and director of the Institut d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (CNRS/ENS). Among his many books are La Naissance des “intellectuels” 1880-1900 (1990); A Social History of France in the Nineteenth-Century (1993); Les Intellectuels en Europe au XIXe siecle (1996, 2001); Paris fin de siécle, culture et politique

(1998); and La Crise des sociétés impériales (1900-1940), essai d’histoire

sociale comparée de l’Allemagne, de la France et de la Grande-Bretagne

(2001). He is presently working on theatre in three European capitals (Paris, Berlin, Vienna) and is leading a comparative project on

the cultural history of European capital cities in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

Notes on contributors | XVii

Philip Gossett is the Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He is general editor of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi and the Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini.

In 2003 he was elected a Socio Onorario of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Rome.

Rebecca Harris-Warrick is Professor of Music at Cornell University. Her work focuses on French Baroque music and dance, and opera in France from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Her publications have appeared in such journals as Early Music and Cambridge Opera Journal. She prepared the critical edition of Donizetti's opera La Favorite, in Edizione critica delle opere di Gaetano Donizetti (1997) and is co-editor, with James R. Anthony, of the critical edition of the ballet Les Amours déguisés in the Oeuvres completes de Jean-Baptiste Lully

(2001). Her most recent book, co-edited with Bruce Alan Brown, is The Grotesque Dancer on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Gennaro Magri and His World (2005).

Wendy Heller is Assistant Professor of Music at Princeton University. She has written extensively on gender, opera, and the classical tradition. She is the author of Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (2003).

Antoine Hennion is Director of Research at the Ecole des Mines de Paris and the former Director of the Center for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI). He has written extensively on the sociology of music and the sociology of media, innovation, and cultural industries. His recent publications include a book on music-lovers (Figures del’amateur, La Documentation francaise, 2000, with Sophie Maisonneuve), a book on the use of J. S. Bach in nineteenth-century France (La Grandeur de Bach, Fayard, 2000, with J.-M. Fauquet), and Music as Mediation (forthcoming), the English translation of his 1993 book La Passion musicale.

Catherine Kintzler is Professor of Philosophy at the Université Charles de Gaulle Lille-III. She has written extensively on aesthet-

ics and politics in the eighteenth century. Among her books are

XViii | Notes on contributors Condorcet, l’instruction publique et la naissance du citoyen (2nd edn., 1987); Jean-Philippe Rameau, splendeur et naufrage de Vesthétique du plaisir a Vdge classique (2nd edition, 1988, prix Charles Cros 1983); and Poétique de V’opéra francais de Corneille a Rousseau (1991).

Herbert Lindenberger is Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Stanford University. He is a literary scholar and cultural historian who has published two books on opera, Opera: The Extravagant Art (1984) and Opera in History: From Monteverdi to

Cage (1998). His diverse other writings include such books as On Wordsworth’s Prelude (1963) and Historical Drama (1975).

Franco Piperno is Professor of Music History at the University of Florence (Italy), Dipartimento di Storia delle Arti e dello Spettacolo; he also heads the Faculty (“Corso di laurea”) of Discipline delle arti, della musica e dello spettacolo. He has published several studies on

Italian opera of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and has also studied musical patronage in Italian Renaissance courts (with a book on this topic appearing in 2001) and seventeenthcentury Italian instrumental music.

Michael P. Steinberg is Director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities and Professor of History and Music at Brown University. He also serves as Associate Editor of The Musical Quarterly and The Opera Quarterly. He is the author of Austria as Theatre and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival (2000), of which the German edition (Ursprung und Ideologie der Salzburger Festspiele, 2000) won Austria’s Victor Adler Staatspreis in 2001. Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music appeared in 2004. A new book called Judaism Musical and Unmusical is forthcoming.

Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg teaches Italian Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. She is the author of Sublime Surrender: Male Masochism at the Fin-de-Siécle (1998), as well as of numerous

articles on the constructions of masculinity in the nineteenth century, on psychoanalysis and gender, and on Italian literature in the

Notes on contributors | Xix post-unification period. Her The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians is

forthcoming.

William Weber, who teaches history at California State University, Long Beach, has written Music and the Middle Class: Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris é Vienna, 18 30-48 (1975) and The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England (1992), and he coedited Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (1984). He has also taught at the University of York (UK) and was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Music.

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FOREWORD

Opera is delightfully contradictory. I don’t mean simply that it is endlessly productive of arguments, though that is true. Opera fans debate favorite performances, praise or decry new productions in extravagant terms, and ally themselves passionately with Mozart or Verdi. Opera companies are equally ripe with controversy, dubious over conductors who seek too much authority, contentious about roles and repertory. Opera critics delight in provoking clashes over whether celebrity singers are past their prime, whether theatrical spectacle has triumphed

regrettably over music, and whether restaging old favorites is driving out innovation. All these and other arguments are simply evidence that opera commands the passions of its varied participants. In the language of Pierre Bourdieu, it is a field of serious play to which they are committed. The controversies reflect artistic taste, but also relationships of art to audience, to money, and to social organization. And herein lie some contradictions that shape the field of opera asa field of careers and companies, not only compositions and performances; anda field embedded

in several changing contexts as far beyond the opera hall as nationalist politics and globalization, changing media and class structure, and shifting structures of patronage. This book reflects the interest of opera as a social phenomenon. This is an interest that extends beyond aesthetic evaluations and the engagements of fans, critics, or perform-

ers. But social studies of culture need not ignore aesthetics and can contribute to the understanding of fans, critics, and performers. The chapters in this book are informed by serious understanding of opera as music and theatre even while they enrich such understanding by considering other dimensions and contexts of opera. The opera field, for example, is simultaneously structured by art and commerce: opera is expensive and yet ostensibly an art produced

| Xx

xxii | Foreword for art's sake. Opera is an insider's art yet closely attentive to box-office receipts. Its fans master mountains of detail, like baseball fans with their statistics, cricket fans with their histories. They volunteer as docents to be close to stars and opera houses. They listen to broadcasts preceded

by pedantic prefaces. Yet its musical leaders and business managers alike curry contacts among patrons, hire publicists to reach beyond the cognoscenti, market their wares widely, and worry anxiously if single ticket sales don’t make up for any slip in pricey subscriptions. Carreras, Domingo, and Pavarotti are all wonderful tenors who have sung difficult roles with distinction, and that isn’t why they went on

tour and recorded as the Three Tenors. |

In fact, opera companies and houses have long been business institutions.’ This is not an innovation in itself, though the forms of business organization have changed over opera’s history. The patronage of the Doge or the Medici has unsurprisingly given way to that of capitalist corporations. The rise of the middle class changed the pattern of ticket sales (and also the meaning of being an opera fan). Recordings now rival performance in the economy of opera. And of course these changes affect even the aesthetic content and experience of opera. The experience of listening, for example, is transformed by the availability of recordings; so too even the performers’ sense of pitch. And films of opera add still another dimension to this (and this hardly exhausts the range of interesting ways in which opera appears in film and has influenced the development of film and other genres).* Art is sometimes seen (and artists sometimes portray their world) as the inverse of economic life. As Pierre Bourdieu famously wrote, however, the idea that the world of art is the economic world reversed reveals not the absence of strategic, even economic, interests in art but a systematic opposition between capacities to mobilize cultural and economic capital.’ It is not, in other words, that those with cultural

distinction do not want more of it and thus deploy their resources strategically to secure it. Nor is it even that they don’t want cash. Neither is it the case that the rich have no need of strategies to secure cultural prestige or to pass their wealth on to their children by making

Foreword | Xxiii sure they gain intellectual credentials and the patina of artistic taste. Itis the case, however, that cultural and economic capitals are distinct and are accumulated by contrasting strategies, even though ultimately it is crucial that each can be converted into the other. Moreover, for this to

work it is also important that the nature of values be misrecognized — as though there is no culture in the economy and no material interest in culture. It is no accident that I have cited Pierre Bourdieu twice in just a few

paragraphs. He was an important inspiration to the present project. Indeed, before his fatal illness intervened, Bourdieu planned to attend the conference on which the book is based and offer introductory remarks. He was and is much missed. His work has been influential nonetheless.* Not least, it is important for elaborating an approach to the different “fields” of social life that stresses their differentiation from

and relations to each other (and thus often boundary struggles); the importance of emotional commitment of participants to social fields and their capacities for practical action within them; the importance of struggle over resources and prestige within fields; and the organization of fields by the way they relate to the accumulation of capital (including not only on an axis of greater or lesser capital but also in terms of the differentiation of forms of capital). The idea of field is not simply a corrective to individualistic accounts of production. We should agree that “art worlds” require many more

collaborators and participants than only the frontstage figures commonly credited with genius. But the notion of field goes further to posit a determinate relationship to a larger field of power and contestation — as opera is related to money and politics and social prestige. It posits an internal organization in terms of specific struggles for distinction (and possibly other “stakes”). And it is this which organizes ideals of purity, of art for art’s sake, and denigrations of mere journal-

ists in relation to literature, mere decorators in relation to painting, popular music in relation to serious music (and more narrowly instrumental purity in relation to singing). Opera is at once a challenge to these ideals of aesthetic purity and a terrain of struggle over them:

Xxiv | Foreword Poetry is contrasted to the work of mere hack librettists; “true opera” is contrasted to operetta and musical drama; performers and scholars both take pains to distinguish themselves from fans (even while they rely on them). And the oppositions are reproduced in fractal images on a smaller scale: proper musicologists distinguish themselves from literary scholars poaching on operatic turf, and both sometimes from sociologists. These ideals, moreover, reflect not simply timeless truth but an organization of knowledge in the modern era through the practical struggles that form fields and construct their specific species of capital.

Bourdieu stressed, in other words, the extent to which all of us in practical action shape trajectories through contradictory social pressures and opportunities. Like the innumerable operatic heroes and heroines (and sometimes comedic minor characters) who navigate seemingly improbable plots to conclusions that appear almost inevitable, we derive our identities and biographies from the ways in which both our origins and our actions — and those of others — situate us in relation to basic social contradictions. And so too opera itself has a history and social identity shaped by its often contradictory relations to its social context and organization conditions. It is “delightfully contradictory as I said at the outset because it illuminates a great deal.

Consider, for example, opera’s locations in relation to the class structure (or in Bourdieusian terms to the accumulation of different quantities of capital). Operais impossible to place —or rather, it occupies multiple places at the same time and shifting ones through history and

in different contexts. In the contemporary United States opera is often - seen as the epitome of “high art” — a special taste requiring significant cultivation and economic as well as cultural capital (and indeed it has been among the last of the major performance arts to surrender the notion that audiences should dress formally). But it does not look so in Italy or Argentina. And in many settings seating — and (more often in earlier years) standing — arrangements offer striking indices of class relations. Opera is popular and high art at once, and a source of insight into the way the distinction itselfis deployed both by social analysts and by aesthetes and consumers. Notoriously expensive to stage, opera is

Foreword | XXV particularly dependent on patronage. Yet it is also successful enough at securing both patronage and paying customers to be less dependent on state subsidies than most forms of “classical” music.

Opera is also interestingly contradictory in geopolitical terms. It is among the art forms with the strongest national traditions. These include aesthetic traditions, such as preferences in composers, differences in singing styles, greater or lesser emphases on spectacle, and patterns in popular plots and settings. Opera also figures in national political traditions in extra-aesthetic ways, however, as crowds at opera houses have reveled in a populist response to The Marriage of Figaro,

found occasions to express contempt for unpopular ministers, and sparked influential riots. Yet at the same time, opera was a pioneer in globalization. Singers learned multiple languages and along with conductors and instrumentalists often moved from one nation to another. There is today a global operatic circuit traveled in different forms (and with different privileges) by stars, less famous performers, and indeed fans.

I won't go on. The point is simply that while there are virtues to social studies of all genres and fields of art, there are some sources of distinctive interest to opera.’ Just as internally the tensions among music, theatre, and poetry shape opera, so various other contradictions shape its relations to social contexts. As articles in this book reveal, the relation of opera to politics is rich and instructive. So are opera's relations to economics and business, to transcultural relations, and to the social organization of cultural life more generally.

At the same time, culture is communication and creativity and important for the ways in which it represents the rest of society. Opera

: is of interest not only for its institutional organization and its relation to other social fields but for its portrayal of social and political relationships. Operas variously evoke and comment on social life in specific cities and countries and in entire eras. As essays in the first part of this book detail, they reveal much about themes from empire to gender. But the role of operatic representations is not merely to represent; opera is not only a tool for historians looking for indices as to how eighteenth-century French or Italian people thought about

XXVi | Foreword empire or gender. Operas, because they were seen by so many people and because they offered “schemas” for grasping social relations, played a constitutive as well as a reflective role. The way “the people”

| were portrayed on the operatic stage in ancien régime France was part of the way in which what we might call the “social imaginary” of a monarchical society was reproduced.° As Bourdieu stressed, it would be a mistake to think that because much cultural work is creative, its function is all the production ofnew social relations. On the contrary, creative work is usually harnessed by the operatic field — as by the literary and other fields — in the service of social reproduction.’ Once again, we see the relevance of Bourdieu’s work. I cannot take the place of Pierre Bourdieu, or say what he might have said. But I do

want to pay brief homage to him and suggest the importance of his work for projects such as understanding not only the relationship of opera to society but opera as a social phenomenon. Bourdieu was a remarkable scholar — deeply educated in theory but always in pursuit of empirical knowledge, passionate about the impor-

tance of both art and science yet reasoned in his approach to them, a thinker who transcended disciplines without giving up intellectual discipline. He was trained initially in philosophy but gave up the “caste

profits” available to philosophers for the more mundane but empirically informed approach of sociology. His sociology was never simply contained by academic boundaries, though, and he made fundamental contributions to anthropology, education, and literary studies, as well as to intellectual life broadly understood. Bourdieu wrote more extensively on literature and painting than on music, more on museums than theatres, but his analyses of the development of the ideal of the pure aesthetic and of the relationship between cultural and economic capital are of potentially great importance in music scholarship as well.

The time seems ripe for this undertaking. Musicologists have questioned ideologies of the pure aesthetic — without abandoning aesthetic concerns — and begun to ask increasingly interesting questions about the nature of listening, the social organization of both performances

Foreword | XXVii and audiences, and the social impact of music. Social science should prove helpful. At the same time, many (I’m afraid not enough) social

scientists have tried to throw off the common allergy to aesthetics that has impeded the integration of cultural and social analysis. Too often they may have embraced approaches to aesthetics that seem oldfashioned to scholars of music or art, but not always, and in any case there is an important revolution simply in bringing aesthetic concerns — and thus concerns for experience, meaning, and judgment — into the heart of social science. This offers the potential for social analyses of

cultural productions that are not simply reductions to social causes and effects. Equally, arich study of opera’s involvements in social contexts means going beyond the reading of libretti for an exploration of social significance. Obviously scholars have also studied riots outside opera houses

and social pressures influencing taste in operas. But too few studies work adequately on music and staging as well as verbal content (just as too much music scholarship treats libretti and theatre as poor cousins).® I think of some of this as the Tamu-Tamu effect.

It happened that I was at the 1973 premiere of this late Menotti opera, since it was commissioned by the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. The opera concerns the displacement of Southeast Asian refugees into an American suburb to disturb the serene obliviousness of its residents and comment on global conflicts (this was the era of the Vietnam War). Its politically correct libretto and dramatic action are perhaps no more absurd than those of many operas. But note that the way in which Menotti sought to have relevance to the time, to politics, and to social science was overwhelmingly contained within libretto and dramatic action; the music had a supporting role. Menotti also chose a staging that made a minimal break between audience and action. He did not find in opera a specific form of expression that gave him any more license to explore controversial themes than did the form of academic paper, welcoming address, or ordinary theatre (and this may be less a matter of his choices than of the times). In this, the premiere of Tamu-Tamu was significantly different from, say,

XxViii | Foreword the famous Paris staging of The Marriage of Figaro. Mozart’s music was

not only more beautiful and interesting (forgive the gratuitous evaluation) but played a more important role. Right from the overture, it opened up a space in which the radical content of Beaumarchais’s play could be presented without similar repression. The opera created a liminal space, more distant from political critique than the spoken word theatre, more outside of everyday life, and yet able to engage its categories.” Of course music did far more than that; it served also as more than just an aid to memory, more than an added aspect of entertainment. It was and is also part of the meaning of the opera, and certainly part of what makes Mozart’s opera endure beyond Beaumarchais’s play. Conversely, the libretto is less than meets the eye. In the obvious sense, potentially controversial parts of the play were dropped from the opera. But it is crucial to recognize both that audiences knew this and were able to supply some of the missing content, and that the very omissions signaled the significance of the unstageable actions. This is a relatively commonplace bit of opera history; I don’t claim to adduce new facts. I want merely to illustrate the importance of working beyond the confines of a conception of social significance or impact which focuses on manifest content — of either operas or responses to

them. I would note also, finally, a minor bit of the Tamu-Tamu story that suggests the renewed relevance of an old issue in a changed context. The soprano Menotti chose to sing the lead was Sung Sook Lee. TamuTamu gave her a big break and she went on to a distinguished international career. At the height of it, however, she converted to evangelical Christianity (reversing some of Menotti’s East comes West imagery) and announced she could no longer sing opera, which she regarded as inherently profane, but only sacred music. Of course opera had run afoul of clerical disapproval before. Indeed, it is a musical tradition that has proved interestingly refractory to religious appropriation (though a genre of sacred opera was created to provide for performances during Lent). One of the senses in which opera has generally been “popular” rather than high art is precisely that it has been profane. This is a different axis from that usually used to distinguish popular from high art,

Foreword | Xxix but the history which it calls to our attention is in fact very relevant, even if forgotten by most sociologists thinking about the categories. This reminds us again that the operatic tradition is not just internal, not something that can be grasped only by attending to opera. Attention is also required to operas intertwining with other cultural traditions, including in such oppositions as profane or secular to sacred. And as Lee’s example suggests, this is not just textual but a matter of the lives and careers of artists. The very notion of tradition needs interrogation. When we speak about the development of the Italian opera tradition (or later the French or German) and on this basis also make claims about what constitutes “real” opera, we need not only good and plentiful facts, and also care-

ful considerations of just what we mean by Italian, French, or German at different points in history or from the different perspectives of performers, patrons, and audiences. We need also care in considering just how tradition — literally, passing on or handing over — is accomplished. What are the different roles of explicit teaching and of imitation? What is the relationship of tradition over time to integration at one time — as among the many different crafts involved in producing an opera? How

are the parts of tradition that result in or depend on written records to be related to those that do not? How do elite and popular participants in tradition influence it (and each other)? Is it always innovation

that is in need of explanation or should analysis focus as much on the | recuperative, reproductive capacity of tradition? My point is not, alas, that social science has the perfect theory of tradition and musicologists need only to import it. Rather, the point is that opera is a terrific site

for the interrogation of what tradition means and how its different dimensions interrelate.

Conversely, of course, there is the curse of becoming “classical” and all the debates about the relationship of old to new in operatic repertoires. What does it mean for so much of the core repertory to have been composed by the nineteenth century, and for that composed later to fare so much better with conservatories and critics than broader publics? What are the implications of the aging of opera audiences in many countries?

XXX | Foreword There are many more questions, of course, and undoubtedly many will be stimulated that neither I nor the contributors to this volume

have imagined. This is just one of the many reasons that I am very pleased that the Social Science Research Council was able to organize

the conference from which this book developed. I would also thank NYU for the use of its magnificent Villa La Pietra, allowing us to meet in the vicinity of Florence during the opera festival. I would like to thank

the editors for helping to establish the link between the ephemeral event and enduring scholarship. In Pierre Bourdieu’s memory I am pleased to note their passion for their intellectual undertaking, their openness to perspectives from numerous fields, and their willingness ; to see how claims to disciplinary boundaries and professional expertise are also claims to specific forms of capital and can sometimes be blinkers as well as aids in the pursuit of knowledge. They and the contributors have used disciplinary expertise but also transcended its limits.

Craig Calhoun Social Science Research Council

NOTES 1 See Beth L. Glixon and Jonathan E. Glixon, Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Victoria Johnson, “Founding Culture: Art, Politics, and Organization at the Paris Opera, 1669-1792 (Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 2002). 2 See chapter 10 below by Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg. 3 See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) and “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed,” in The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 29-73. 4 Jane Fulcher’s recent work is both indicative of the growing influence of Bourdieu among musicologists and an influence on expanding that. See

Foreword | XXXi French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World

War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), and more substantially The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914-1940 (New

York: Oxford University Press, 2005); also chapter 12 in this volume. 5 This theme is developed especially in Part III of the current book. 6 See chapter 3 below by Catherine Kintzler. 7 See Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Culture, and Society (London: Sage, second edition, 1990). 8 It is helpful, thus, that in this book several of the studies that address the representation of society on the operatic stage directly consider not only the libretti, but the music and indeed the use of dance, sets, and specificities of staging. 9 See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (New York: Aldina, 1969) on

liminality. The term simply refers to a threshold; operas use a variety of devices to mark a distinction from the quotidian, including not only music but the very pomp of the opera as event and the style of the opera hall.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Office of Global Education, New York University, and the Social Science Research Council. Doug Guthrie (NYU) and Craig Calhoun (SSRC and NYU) were crucial in helping this project to fruition. We are also grate-

ful to the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Michigan and the Dean’s Office of the School of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan for their additional financial support. Justin Bischof, Neil Brenner, Francoise Escal, Priscilla

Ferguson, Paul Johnson, John Merriman, David Stark, Charles Tilly, Duncan Watts, and Harrison White offered ideas and assistance along the way. We would like to extend a special thanks to David Chaillou, without whom this project would never have happened. Pierre Bourdieu provided moral support and intellectual inspiration from the very beginning, and it is to his memory that we dedicate this volume.

xxxii |

INTRODUCTION: OPERA AND THE ACADEMIC TURNS Victoria Johnson

Opera, created in Florence in the 1580s by a group of artistically inclined

noblemen and other city notables, has been in continuous production for more than four centuries in Europe, and three in the Americas. Throughout its history, creators and audiences alike have understood opera as a multi-media art form, one that includes music, text, visual elements, and (often) dance. Because of the great expense of opera performance, local political and economic elites have wielded considerable power over its creators, with the strength of these ties depending on the demands of artistic and institutional conventions. Though the distribution and differentiation of labor in opera performance has

varied somewhat according to the historical moment, it has nearly always included — even at its sparest — singers, a stage with a set, instru-

mentalists, and an audience. And even in the context of quite modest production values, opera has required an enormous variety of material and human resources. The complexity entailed by opera’s combination of multiple artistic media — a complexity which arguably surpasses that of any other art form — means that the study of operatic history demands the analytical tools of a variety of academic disciplines. Nevertheless, until recently,

scholars for decades pried opera apart into the discrete fragments most susceptible to their preferred methods of analysis: music, words, singers, theatres, directors, audiences. The operatic unity thereby lost is not the unity of words and music, nor is it the sense of dramatic unity sometimes invoked by critics in favorable reviews of individual opera performances. It is, rather, the original historical unity of the specific

practices comprising the production and consumption of something conventionally labeled “opera.” Over the last decade and a half, however, the terrain of opera studies has been dramatically altered by an explosion of interest in opera across

|1

2 | Victoria Johnson disciplines as well as by an increased interdisciplinarity in approaches to opera. In the wake of the cultural and historical “turns” that trans-

formed the humanities and social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s, musicologists in particular have turned in increasing numbers to the study of opera, and in doing so they have often drawn heavily on the methods of literary criticism and cultural history. Scholars in a range of disciplines beyond musicology have also made important contributions to this wave of new work on opera. Despite this blossoming of opera studies, however, scholars from the various disciplines concerned

have had few opportunities to juxtapose and compare their differing approaches to their common object. The present volume aims to create just such an opportunity and, at the same time, to extend it to a broad audience of readers. The short introductions to each of this volume’s three sections discuss and compare the various approaches taken by the contributors to the task of re-embedding opera in its social, political, and cultural contexts of creation and reception. In the present introduction, however, I have a different purpose: to situate the current major themes and methods in opera studies through a brief examination of the recent history of the academic disciplines involved, including musicology, history, literature, and sociology. To this end, I offer a series of maps: first, a map of the current division of academic labor in the study of opera; next, a map of the recent intellectual developments — the so-called “turns” — that have helped to transform opera studies in highly promising ways; and, finally, a map of the major paths of inquiry evident in recent work on opera. Depending on the reader’s disciplinary home turf, the territory covered in this introductory essay may at times be quite familiar; more often, Ihope, the reader will find the brief introductions to the concerns and recent histories of less familiar disciplines useful and informative.

OPERA AND THE DIVISION OF ACADEMIC LABOR For more than a century, musicology has been the natural repository of opera scholarship, despite the somewhat marginal position accorded the operatic form in a discipline that has often considered “pure” music

Introduction | 3 a more legitimate concern.’ Opera has, until relatively recently, been thought of by many musicologists as a poor relation in the musical family, in large part because of its commingling of music and text. It is precisely this textual element, of course, that has sometimes made opera seem more accessible to non-musicologists than purely instrumental music. For example, literary scholars concerned with drama have occasionally opened libretti to ponder such questions as how Shakespeare’s plays were altered when they were wedded to music or how the dominant literary conventions of a given historical epoch were translated into the libretto form.” But, in a parallel to the somewhat marginal status of opera among musicologists, the libretto has long occupied a marginal position among the genres studied by scholars of literature, in part because of a perceived subordination of text to music and the concomitant decrease in the libretto’s value as “pure” literature. Other academic specialists who might fruitfully contribute to the study of opera have been even less attentive than musicologists and literary critics to the history of opera. The most important reason for this inattention is the timidity with which non-musicologists approach musical works. The apparent non-representational nature of music (itself the subject of centuries of heated debate) and the technical difficulty of learning to read music have combined forcefully to discourage scholars not fluent in the language of music from putting their analytical tools to work in this area. And a further obstacle to the production of rigorous non-musicological work on opera, as the historian William Weber has pointed out regarding his own discipline, is the long-standing habit among humanities scholars of examining artistic movements from within a narrow “history of ideas” paradigm.* This paradigm has limited the ability of historians to examine thoroughly the relations between the political and the philosophical ideas of a historical era and the translation of these ideas into artistic movements, including those that have structured the world of opera over the centuries. Where opera has seemed to bear explicit political messages, or where its composers were themselves directly implicated in national politics, historians have indeed ventured to comment on opera.’ But they have largely remained unable or unwilling to come to terms with

4 | Victoria Johnson the importance of opera as a site of social, cultural, and political interaction in modern European history.

Still other disciplines have been no more proficient or prolific in the analysis of opera, sometimes for the same reasons that confront historians, but sometimes for reasons specific to particular disciplinary trajectories. For example, despite Max Weber's early contribution to the sociology of music and Theodor Adorno’s extensive mid-century

writings, sociologists have shied away from examining the specifically musical content of musical works in favor of explaining the social and economic structures behind their production.° In this sense, sociologists have been no more confident than historians about directly confronting the difficult questions surrounding the relation between

musical content and social context. Despite the textual element of opera, this sociological reluctance towards the study of music in general has done nothing to encourage attention within the discipline to the operatic form. And there is a further obstacle to the study of opera facing sociologists, an obstacle that derives from the discipline’s own history. Having once (in the 1960s) taken up the gauntlet thrown down by the Frankfurt School in its diatribes against the American “culture industry,” sociologists of art have for decades been engaged, on the one hand, in the fruitful work of specifying the precise mechanisms by which commercial interests shape popular culture, and, on the other,

in documenting the liberating powers of popular culture.” “High” culture forms such as opera have largely remained in the shadows, except when they have appeared in their modern incarnations in organizational studies of non-profit institutions.* European and American operatic history has therefore received almost no attention at all from American sociologists since at least World War II.? Disciplinary divisions of labor, internal disciplinary concerns, and

the apparent impenetrability of musical works have thus served to hamper the analysis of opera production and consumption by specialists in literature, history, and sociology who in principle have much to contribute to such an analysis and whose own disciplines stand only to gain thereby. In the last twenty-five years, however, a set of linked transformations in scholarly concerns and methods throughout the

Introduction | 5 humanities and social sciences has laid the groundwork and provided the inspiration for a wave of innovative new works on opera, including musicologist Jane Fulcher’s The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (1987), musicologist Carolyn Abbate’s Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (1991), and

literary critic Herbert Lindenberger’s Opera in History (1998). The Cambridge Opera Journal, launched in 1989 with an inaugural issue featuring contributors from the disciplines of philosophy, musicology, literary criticism, and history, heralded — and has since nurtured — the new spirit of opera scholarship. These scholarly undertakings, and others like them, bear witness to the interest within many disciplines in new kinds of cultural and historical analysis as well as to a new degree of disciplinary cross-fertilization. The intellectual developments that

made these and other similarly innovative works possible are often referred to today as the cultural and historical “turns.” In the following section, I briefly trace the origins and effects of these developments in history, sociology, literary criticism, and musicology — all key disciplines in the study of opera — before examining the major lines of inquiry that have emerged in opera studies with the help of the turns.

THE TURNS IN THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

These turns, by no means smooth or unilinear processes, are the unevenly achieved result of a set of loosely linked critiques of traditional methods and objects of study that cut a swath through a wide range of disciplines from the 1970s onward. However contradictory and fitful these developments have been, their end product has been a massive reorientation of scholarly concerns and methods in history, sociology, and literature.

History

History’s “cultural turn” took place in the 1970s and 1980s and had its origins in a reaction to two important currents of historical

6 | Victoria Johnson scholarship: traditional political history and the social history inaugu-

rated by the Annales school in the 1930s and carried on in a more Marxist vein by a second generation of French historians such as Albert Soboul and George Rudé.*° The success of this reaction is evident in the broad influence of the school of historical studies known

as the New Cultural History, whose most prominent representatives are the French historians Roger Chartier and Jacques Revel and the American historians Natalie Zemon Davis, Robert Darnton, and Lynn Hunt. In the 1970s and 1980s, these French and American scholars found themselves dissatisfied with the huge gaps left in the explanation of historical processes and events by historians’ dependence on two sources

of historical information: on the one hand, the published, learned texts of politically and socially prominent figures, and on the other (with the inception of the Annales school), quantifiable information about social and economic life. Influenced by E. P. Thompson and Michel Foucault, among others, the new culturally oriented historians began to explore alternative ways to capture the experience of the past by mining unconventional historical sources such as accounts of popular festivals or visual representations of public and private life. These sources guided scholars toward new answers to old questions — particularly those that have never ceased to surround the causes, trajectory, and effects of the French Revolution — and they often raised utterly new questions as well. A central accomplishment of the New Cultural History has been to show how cultural practices are embed-

ded in a relation of mutual constitution with social and economic structures, an approach that stands in stark contrast to traditional understandings of the historical role of “culture” once prevalent among left-leaning and conservative historians alike.” The cultural turn in history was accompanied by another kind of turn, this one — strange as it might seem — historical. Unhappy with the Annalistes’ failure to

take seriously the power of actors to alter social structures, historians such as Pierre Nora and Lynn Hunt made the event and other processual and temporal categories central to historical analysis and explanation.”*

Introduction | 7 Sociology

Like history, American sociology has also undergone both a cultural and a historical turn, though these were initially separate lines of influence which have only in the past decade begun to join into a single current of sociological inquiry. Sociology, deeply historical in the hands of its founding fathers, had by the 1960s become focused on contemporary American social structure and social problems. However, a new school of sociology, initiated in large part by the historian and sociol-

ogist Charles Tilly, imported some of the concerns and methods of the Annales school (itself deeply sociological in its methods) into the study of perennial sociological questions such as the origins of revolutions and the nature of modernization.” Tilly, along with Theda Skocpol and other influential historical sociologists, has since trained several generations of students to think about sociological questions from a historical perspective.“* However, some of these students (and in fact some of the teachers) came to believe that historical sociology as practiced in the 1970s was not “historical” enough. A major complaint of this “third wave” of historical sociologists was the ahistoricity of the quantitative and comparative methods initially developed in order to help legitimize historical sociology as a sociological subfield.” In the 1990s, historical sociologists such as Andrew Abbott and William

Sewell, Jr., argued that historical sociology had not yet taken time and temporality seriously, while Craig Calhoun suggested that historical sociology had allowed itself to be “domesticated” instead of using

its tools to analyze the “historical constitution of basic theoretical categories.”” This historical turn in American sociology was accompanied by a cultural turn. By the time Tilly began trying to acquaint sociologists with historical methods and concerns, American sociology had already experienced a small revolution against the dominant sociological paradigm of the mid-twentieth century, American structuralfunctionalism. Sociologists of culture were appropriating the revision of Marxism generated from within British Cultural Studies, along with the work of anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, as they attempted

8 | Victoria Johnson to develop convincing critiques of the critics of mass culture.” Some sociologists of culture gradually began to revise their own assumptions about their central concept and to expand the definition of culture to include practice, discourse, and symbols. From France, the various poststructuralist critiques of Levi-Straussian and Saussurian structuralism, especially those of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, made their way into American studies of popular culture and also inspired culturalist studies of social spheres that had previously been considered outside the purview of cultural sociology, such as banking, railroads, or the insurance industry. For certain American sociologists, “culture” has become as ubiquitous and powerful a tool for explanation as it has

for the founders and the inheritors of the New Cultural History, no longer viewed as a mere emanation of economic and social structures nor as a severely circumscribed sphere of artifacts in modern society. The multiple influences of poststructuralism, Geertzian anthropology, feminism, and cultural studies have combined to produce a set of aligned, if not always compatible, definitions of culture in sociology as a potential locus of political struggle and as a producer in its own right of social and economic structures.

Literary criticism For its part, the discipline of literary criticism, by definition already a deeply “cultural” one in the narrower sense, underwent a historical turn marked by the ascendancy of the “New Historicism” in the early 1980s. Literary criticism’s historical turn was, in spite of individual differences in emphasis and outlook, above all a reaction to the brand of literary analysis that had dominated since the late 1920s, the “New Criticism.”'® American literary scholars working in this tradition, whose foremost representatives were Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren, chose to bracket the historical context of literary works in favor of attention to the texts alone. These scholars shared a conviction that literary works held the key to appropriate understanding between their covers and that criticism should be deployed for the close analysis of texts without recourse to

Introduction | 9 extra-textual information. Attention to historical context was largely eschewed in the quest to understand the work on its own terms, an approach which often served to identify innovation or creativity as emanating from the author alone. The “New Historicism” marked one current of reaction to this sort

of autonomous understanding of the text. Scholars working in this vein began to explore the historical contexts in which literary works were created to examine how their authors were beholden to contemporary modes of discourse and other collective social phenomena for the structure and content of their supposedly autonomous literary creations.*? Meanwhile, another strain of reaction to the New Criticism was triggered by the influential reinterpretation of Saussurian semiotics by Roland Barthes, which opened up a whole new range of “texts” to be “read” by critics, including pictures, social practices, and the objects of daily life.*° To this expansion of subject matter, British Cultural Studies and the many varieties of French poststructuralism contributed a revised understanding of the individual text as permitting multiple and equally valid readings and as thus exhibiting “multivocality.” By the 1980s, the kind of textual interpretation practiced by the New Criticism had largely been replaced by a new flexibility (or laxness, depending on one’s perspective) of method, a new set of ques-

tions, and a new range of literary “sources.” As we shall see, it was these developments in literary theory that were to have the heaviest impact on the study of opera, contributing to a wave of new works * on the subject in the 1980s and 1990s, both within musicology and beyond its borders. Musicology

It has frequently been noted that musicology has been the discipline most resistant to, and even ignorant of, the dramatic changes in the humanities and social sciences that began to make themselves felt in the 1970s.”" The transformations in methods, sources, and concerns that were profoundly altering the study of literature hardly touched musicology for at least a decade, as the discipline remained curiously

IO | Victoria Johnson impervious to the kind of cross-pollination that made sociologists and literary critics alike claim Raymond Williams and Roland Barthes

as their own, or that made Foucault at one and the same time an anthropologist, a literary theorist, a historian, and a sociologist. One of the long-standing exceptions to this rule of disciplinary insularity, Leo Treitler, has suggested that musicology, troubled by its lack of documentary sources before the medieval period — compared, for example, to the ancient documentation available to scholars of literature and the visual arts — has been resistant to the new academic currents because it has focused most of its energy on securing its own

tradition through the painstaking reconstruction of historical facts and sources.** Though these studies have vastly expanded our historical record of musical life, they have usually made only a limited contribution to questions about the place of music in the history of human societies. While many musicologists have moved beyond the traditional “internalist” study of musical works to the documentation of extra-musical phenomena such as markets and politics, many of these same musicologists have continued to treat the musical works themselves as objectively autonomous entities, rather than examining the way such autonomy is socially constituted (or blocked). Like nonmusicologists who may romanticize music as a fundamentally difficult and mysterious art form, musicologists have often implicitly endowed music with a timeless autonomy that discourages them from posing questions about the relations between musical form and content and extra-musical context at all. Gradually, however, beginning in the mid-1980s, a series of unusual

conferences and the research of a few bold musicologists resulted in the publication of several pathbreaking volumes that have questioned the assumptions behind the dominant concerns and methods in American musicology as well as exploring possible approaches to questions rarely posed by musicologists about music/society relations. These works include (but are not limited to) Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Joseph Kerman, 1985); Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (edited by Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, 1987); Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality

Introduction | II (Susan McClary, 1991); Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons

(edited by Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman, 1992); Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (edited

by Ruth A. Solie, 1993), and Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Lawrence Kramer, 1995).

The titles of these books clearly signal that musicology itself has undergone a turn of sorts in the last fifteen years. And while musicology might appear to be a discipline that is cultural and historical by definition, it has acquired a new historicism and culturalism that have transformed research methods and concerns. Many musicologists have become more truly “historical” in their methods and conclusions by building contingency, path dependence, and links to non-musical features of given historical conjunctures into the analysis of the musical work itself. Whereas they had previously been (and many still are) more comfortable identifying the historicity in a work as a question of strictly musical influence, a handful of musicologists are now working to re-embed musical life and musical works in their specific extra-musical historical conjunctures. This re-evaluation of the social processes shaping the history of musical works has also led to a revision of musicological assumptions about the nature of “culture” by encouraging the analysis of music as social practice and discourse rather than as a set of largely self-contained artifacts.

These currents in musicology, which have touched methodology and subject matter alike, parallel and draw on the developments of the last three decades in sociology, history, and literary criticism. Musi-

cologists have found inspiration in sociology and cultural history for analyses of canon construction, for studies of the economic, political, social, and cultural structures in which musical life is embedded, and for investigations into the social functions of classical music. In a move reminiscent of Pierre Bourdieu’s French application in Distinction (1979) of anthropological methods usually reserved for “primitive” cultures, some scholars of Western classical music have begun to take their cues from the subfield of ethnomusicology.” Following the lead of the New Cultural Historians, musicologists have explored the ways in which music not only mirrors, but also contributes to,

12 | Victoria Johnson the production and reinforcement of social structure, social practices, and systems of meaning. And just as cultural historians have expanded the repertoire of legitimate archival sources, musicologists have supplemented the common tools for studying music — namely, the analysis of scores and the interpretation of biographical details of composers’ lives — with such unorthodox sources as pictorial representations of musical production and consumption.” In a similar vein, composers’ sketches for works in progress, used heretofore in a fashion that has tended to buttress the notion of the isolated, inspired, creator, have been recast as evidence for the contingent, even haphazard, nature of musical composition.” Musicologists have been more directly influenced by developments in literary criticism than by those in any other discipline, in part because the literary concern with a particular form of artistic creation demonstrates most directly the possible advantages for the study of music of applying the assumptions and methods of the new culturalist work in sociology and of the new cultural history. But besides mediating between musicology and these other disciplines, literary criticism has itself been the source of a number of promising new approaches to the study of music. Theories of reception in music have been modeled on literary reception theory to reveal the multiple meanings available to listeners and to contest the usefulness — and sometimes the possibility —

of reconstructing artistic intentions. Feminist scholars have examined the distribution of gender work in various musical cultures, and some

have argued for the interpretation of musical works as themselves “gendered” or as reflecting and reinforcing gender hierarchies in the extra-musical world.”® Semiotics has made great strides with some musicologists, who have employed its principles and methods to exam-

ine how “linguistic” codes tie musical works to their social contexts through the notes themselves.*” It is important to note that these developments represent a double movement away from traditional musicology. First, progressive musicologists have firmly embedded what is often known, misleadingly, as “musical culture” or “the music world” into a larger and more complex set of social structures, thereby paving the way for the historicization

Introduction | 13 of the implicitly claimed autonomy of this sphere. And more daringly, they have bared the musical work itself to the new ways of thinking

about history and culture, dismantling the ideas that musical works

are inherently autonomous and that they are locked in an eternal and , insulated dialogue among themselves. Such traditional approaches to the study of music have in some quarters given way to an assessment of the ways in which even “pure” music is the carrier of extra-musical symbols and codes and is the producer of meaning and social structure.

APPROACHING OPERA AFTER THE TURNS Both directly and indirectly, the turns have helped effect a profound transformation in opera studies. Opera scholarship within musicology, for example, has been a major beneficiary of the new movements in that

discipline in part because musicologists specializing in opera, given

| their inevitable confrontation with the text of the libretto, have been more likely to be aware of developments in literary criticism than have musicologists specializing in instrumental music. Another group of musicologists working on opera has found in cultural history the inspiration and models for approaching opera with new methods and questions. And beyond musicology, the expansion of acceptable subject matter in both literary criticism and cultural history has freed scholars in those fields to take opera seriously as a topic of intellectual inquiry. A review of opera scholarship published in all disciplines in the last decade and a half reveals three major lines of inquiry, which can be roughly classified as the “critical” approach, the “systems of meaning” approach, and the “material conditions” approach. The “critical” approach, pursued mainly by musicologists and literary critics, involves a search for present meanings, either social or personal, in operatic

works. The “systems of meanings” approach, practiced mainly by musicologists and historians, betrays the influence of the New Cultural Historians in its concern with the historical meanings available to the creators and consumers of operatic works. Practitioners who are pri-

marily engaged in the second line of inquiry often also take up the third line of inquiry (although the opposite is not as likely). This third

14 | Victoria Johnson line, the “material conditions” approach, involves the reconstruction and analysis of the organizational, political, and professional structures underpinning opera production and consumption in specific historical contexts.

The “critical” approach in opera studies traces its roots to a work that long predates the “turns”: Joseph Kerman’s pathbreaking Opera as Drama, first published in 1956 and reissued in 1988. As the musicologist Susan McClary has noted, early critical works such as Kerman’s “remained more or less isolated voices calling for the grafting of critical projects onto the mainstream of the profession.””® It was not until the 1980s and the pioneering work of McClary herself that musicologists began to question traditional musicological approaches to opera, which privileged close readings of musical passages and excluded considerations of the music’s expression of social relationships and meanings. McClary’s innovative writings, which deal with both instrumental

and operatic works, have centered on the expression of gender relations in these works. Musicologists inspired by her critical approach have often similarly focused on gender and sexuality in opera. Aiding this double shift toward criticism and gender issues in musicological studies of opera was a spate of books on opera by literary critics, among the most influential of which has been Catherine Clément’s Opera, or the Undoing of Women, first published in French in 1976 and

published in an English translation, with a foreword by McClary, in 1988. This work draws on anthropology, semiology, and psychoanalysis to analyze the fatal end that awaits the heroines of so many operas. Arguing that the sumptuous music accompanying their deaths encourages forgetfulness of the true nature of the events unfolding on stage, Clément focuses her analysis on the frequently morbid plots: “What awarenesses dimmed by beauty and the sublime,” she asks, “come to stand in the darkness of the hall and watch the infinitely repetitive spectacle of a woman who dies, murdered?’’® Clément’s and McClary’s studies have inspired a wave of research on representations of sexuality and gender in opera. And encouraged, perhaps, by the success of literary critic Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat, research on sexuality and gender has expanded beyond

Introduction | 15 specifically feminist criticism to include analyses of lesbian and gay musical experiences and musical meanings.?° By searching for such unorthodox meanings, this work on gender and sexuality goes beyond traditional musicological readings of musical scores and libretti. But it is not the subject matter — gender and sexuality — that distinguishes

these studies from other scholarship on opera, both past and present. More significant for our purposes here is their treatment of operatic works not as historical artifacts but as texts that invite contemporary and often avowedly personal readings.**

The second line of inquiry evident in recent opera scholarship — one that is quite distinct from the “critical” approach — is largely the product of the transformation of political and cultural historiography

in the last three decades, although it also owes a good deal to the comparativist Edward Said’s work on orientalism and opera.** Studies in this vein, which have come primarily from musicologists and historians, focus on reconstructing the “systems of meaning” (musical as well as extra-musical) that have shaped the production and reception of operatic works in specific historical contexts.® It is no accident that some of the musicologists most attentive to the turns in cultural and political history are scholars of French opera, since it is historians of France (British and American as well as French) who have been the

prime catalysts for this set of turns. The musicologist Jane Fulcher, for example, states at the outset of her 1987 study of French grand opera that she is offering “not narrowly a ‘reception history’ but... a cultural history. For what interests me,” she writes, “is how grand opera was implicated in a social and cultural context — how it arose within these larger structures and in turn reacted back finally upon them.”34 Similarly, in her book French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War, Fulcher offers an analysis of

Gustave Charpentier’s opera Louise that again shows deep affinities with the defining concerns of the New Cultural History: By focusing on stylistic codes of meaning as understood within the period, this study seeks to avoid imputing political meanings on the basis of our current perceptions of political homologies or metaphors. Such an

16 | Victoria Johnson “essentialist” approach . .. must be replaced by the historical and anthropological study of meaning. We must attempt to excavate the systems of meaning in which specific works were both conceived by composers and then understood by audiences of the time — which were not necessarily identical. In the case of Louise, we shall find that the two were indeed substantially different; moreover, the context of performance played a central role in determining how the contemporary public and critics “read” the work . . . [A]lthough politics was not always present in the messages or modes of communication of the music, it affected conditions of both presentation and reception.”

Like many cultural historians working today, Fulcher’s explicit purpose is to reconstruct, as far as possible, past “systems of meanings” — what sociologists often refer to as “cultural schemas” — in order to understand the constraints and possibilities shaping musical expres-

sion and reception at particular historical conjunctures. Otherwise, one runs the risk of reading into musical works what was not there for the composer, or — since the relevance of the composer's intentions have been called into question by so many scholars — for both initial and subsequent historical audiences. In his 1995 study of musical reception in Paris between 1750 and 1850, Listening in Paris, the historian James Johnson — taking aim at Susan McClary — points out the stakes of the same problem far more polemically: I cannot doubt McClary when she claims to hear a narrative of rape and murder in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony .. . [bJut such a view of musical meaning, which I think neglects the actual musical features that frame our perceptions and delimit possible musical content, is arguably as one-sided as its opposite extreme, which dismisses listeners’ own aesthetic and ideological expectations as irrelevant in deriving some supposedly fixed musical meaning.*°

At least in part, the third major line of workin opera studies sidesteps such contentious debates by turning from the works themselves to the material conditions of operatic production and reception. Among the most prominent research in this line is a series of institutional studies of Italian operatic history by the historian John Rosselli, including The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario;

Introduction | 17 Music and Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Italy; and Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession. A1998 volume on Opera Production and

Its Resources (part of a series entitled History of Italian Opera), edited by the musicologists Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, similarly aims

to document the organizational and professional contexts in which operatic works have historically been created and consumed. A major and quite recent contribution to the institutional approach is Beth and Jonathan Glixon’s 2006 study Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice.

Although a great deal of such work has centered on Italian opera, a handful of historians and musicologists have posed the same questions in studies of French operatic history. In an early article on the eighteenth-century Paris Opera (one that can itselfbe considered a contribution to the cultural turn in French history), the historian William Weber, for example, argues that the unusually dated repertoire on offer to the Parisian public up until the mid-1770s was the result of a combination of institutional factors, including royal cultural policy, the geographical concentration of the French aristocracy in and around Paris, French musicians’ educational and career trajectories, and the relative expense of the dominant French operatic genre (tragédie lyrique).?’ And the musicologist Elizabeth Bartlet employs painstaking archival research to uncover the precise institutional processes by which the repertoire of the Paris Opera was altered during the French Revolution.*®

Since scholars concerned with the reconstruction of systems of meaning often ground this project in the reconstruction of the organizational and professional structures shaping production and reception, these second and third approaches — the “systems of meaning” approach and the “material conditions” approach — are more closely

linked with each other than is either with the “critical” approach. Nevertheless, while practitioners of the first approach have already seen

their efforts brought together in several interdisciplinary edited volumes, no similar volume has jointly presented the efforts of opera scholars working in multiple disciplines who are committed to reinscribing

opera in its historical circumstances of production and reception.’ It is for this reason that we have chosen to focus here on interdisciplinary

18 | Victoria Johnson contributions to the second and third approaches. In order to take advantage of the potential for cross-national comparisons offered by the history of opera, we have brought together scholars of Italy and France, yet for the purpose of maintaining focus we have limited the countries represented to these two. The first section of the volume (“The Representation of Social and Political Relations in Operatic Works”) presents readings of French

and Italian operas that firmly ground these works in their specific historical contexts, while the second section (“The Institutional Bases

for the Production and Reception of Opera’) is devoted to studies primarily concerned with understanding the conditions shaping the production and reception of operatic works in France and Italy. The third section of the volume (“Theorizing Opera and the Social”) brings together three essays explicitly addressing the question of how best to approach the analysis of the social dimensions of operatic works and practices. The questions addressed by the contributors to this volume include

some of the most central in opera studies today. By what methods should we analyze and interpret operatic works and operatic practices? Is meaning in opera fixed or malleable? Do composers’ intentions matter, and if so, can we know them? Where does the operatic “work” to be analyzed actually reside — in the score and libretto, in operatic performances, or perhaps nowhere? And how, if at all, are social relations

represented in operatic works? An edited volume cannot pretend to offer tidy solutions to such complex puzzles. But by juxtaposing a vari-

ety of disciplinary approaches to a wide historical range of operatic works and practices, we hope to introduce readers to some innovative ways of thinking about these pressing questions. We also hope to provoke new questions entirely.

NOTES

1 Joseph Kerman’s Opera as Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), which located opera’s dramatic power largely in its music, did much to galvanize and maintain interest in opera despite the genre’s

Introduction | 19 subordinate status in musicology. Regarding the status of opera vis-a-vis “pure” music, see Susan McClary, “Foreword: The Undoing of Opera: Toward a Feminist Criticism of Music,” pp. ix—xviii in Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. xii; see also

Susan McClary, “Turtles All the Way Down (On the ‘Purely Musical’),” pp. 1-31 in McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, “Introduction: On Analyzing Opera,” in Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, eds., Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner (Berkeley: University, of California Press, 1989), pp. 1-24; see PP: 3-4. 2 See, e.g, Peter Conrad, Romantic Opera and Literary Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Ted A. Emery, “Goldoni’s Pamela from Play to Libretto,” Italica 64/4 (1987), 572-582; Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and Opera (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Paul Bauschatz, “Cidipus: Stravinsky and Cocteau Recompose Sophocles,” Comparative Literature 43/2 (1991), 150-170; and Léonard Rosmarin, When Literature Becomes Opera: Study of a Transformational Process (Amsterdam:

Rodopi, 1999). 3 The 1988 volume Reading Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press), edited by Arthur Groos and Roger Parker, offered an important challenge to the marginal status of libretti among musicologists. 4 William Weber, “Beyond Zeitgeist: Recent Work in Music History,” Journal of Modern History 66 (1994), 321-345; pp. 322-323. See also Weber, “Toward a Dialogue between Historians and Musicologists,” Musica e Storia 1 (1993), 7-21. 5 E.g., Paul Robinson, Opera and Ideas from Mozart to Strauss (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 6 Max Weber's fragment on music was first published as Die rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik, ed. Theodor Kroyer (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1921); it has been reissued in the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe as Zur Musiksoziologie 1910-1920, ed. Christoph Braun and Ludwig Finscher (Ttibingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 2003). The only available English translation is The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, trans. and ed.

Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel, and Gertrud Neuwirth (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958). A number of Adorno’s writings

20 | Victoria Johnson on music have recently been reissued in Adorno on Music, ed. Robert Witkin (New York: Routledge, 1998). 7 Some key early works in the former tradition, known as the “production of culture” approach, include Paul Hirsch, “Processing Fads and Fashions: An Organization-Set Analysis of Cultural Industry Systems,” American Journal of Sociology 77 (1972), 639-659; Richard A. Peterson, ed., The Production of Culture (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976); and Paul DiMaggio, “Market Structure, the Creative Process, and Popular Culture: Toward an Organizational Reinterpretation of Mass-Culture Theory,’ Journal of Popular Culture 11 (1977), 436-452. The strongest sociological tradition in the study of art consumption (as opposed to production) has come from Marxian cultural sociologists generally grouped under the rubric British Cultural Studies; key works include Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock’n’Roll (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Methuen, 1979); Paul Willis, Profane Culture (London: Routledge, 1978); and Stuart Hall, Culture, Media, Languages (London: Hutchinson, 1980). Art consumption studies in the USA have been deeply influenced by British Cultural Studies; see, for example, Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); and Elizabeth Long, Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

8 Examples of such studies include Richard A. Peterson, “From Impresario to Arts Administrator: Formal Accountability in Nonprofit Cultural Organizations,” in Paul DiMaggio, ed., Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts: Studies in Mission and Constraint (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 161-183; Paul DiMaggio, “Nonprofit Organizations in the Production and Distribution of Culture,” in Walter W. Powell, ed., The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1987), pp. 195-220. Important exceptions to the presentist tendency in sociological work on high-culture production include DiMaggio’s two-part study on nineteenth-century Boston (“Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” Media, Culture and Society 4 [1982], 33-50, and “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston, Part II: The Classification and Framing of

Introduction | 21 American Art,” Media, Culture and Society 4 [1982], 303-322) and Tia DeNora’s study of Beethoven (Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792-1803 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995]). 9 See, however, Rosanne Martorella, The Sociology of Opera (New York: Praeger, 1982) and Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Boundaries and Structural

Change: The Extension of the High Cultural Model to Theater, Opera, and Dance, 1900-1940, in Michéle Lamont and Marcel Fournier (eds.), Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequalities

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1992), pp. 21-57. 10 Lynn Hunt, “Introduction,” in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History, pp. I-22; p. 2. As Hunt notes, the journal founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre is still published today, since 1946 under the name Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations. Key works in the Annales tradition include Marc Bloch, “A Contribution towards a Comparative History of European Societies,” in Land and Work in Medieval Europe: Selected Papers by Marc Bloch, trans. J. E. Anderson (New York: Harper and Row, 1967 [1928]), pp. 44-81; Fernand Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), and The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynolds (London: Collins, 1972-1973). Albert Soboul’s most influential work is The Parisian Sans-culottes and the French Revolution, 1793-4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), while Rudé is best known for his The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).

11 Prominent work in the New Cultural History includes, e.g., Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975); William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and Roger Chartier, Cultural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). For an excellent critical discussion of history’s cultural turn, see William H. Sewell, Jr., “The Political Unconscious of Social and Cultural History, or Confessions of a Former Quantitative Historian,” pp. 22-80 in Logics of

22 | Victoria Johnson History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

12 See, e.g., Pierre Nora, “Le retour de l’événement,” in Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, eds., Faire de V’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). 13 See, for example, Charles Tilly, As Sociology Meets History (New York: Academic Press, 1981); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and Arthur Stinchcombe, Theoretical Methods in Social History (New York: Academic Press, 1978).

14 For an overview of major methods and scholars in historical sociology to the 1980s, see Theda Skocpol, ed., Vision and Method in Historical Sociology

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). For an overview of more recent trends, see Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens and Ann Shola Orloff, “Introduction: Social Theory, Modernity, and the Three Waves of Historical Sociology,” in Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens and Ann Shola Orloff, eds., Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 1-72. 15 The term “third wave” is borrowed from Adams et al., “Introduction:

Social Theory, Modernity, and the Three Waves of Historical Sociology.”

16 Craig Calhoun, “The Rise and Domestication of Historical Sociology,” in Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 305-337; p. 328. On the institutional history of American historical sociology, see also Andrew Abbott, “History and Sociology: The Lost Synthesis,” Social Science History 15/2 (1991), 201-238. 17 On British Cultural Studies, see above, note 7. By far the most influential work by Geertz is his “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” first | published in 1972 and reprinted in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

18 For some foundational documents as well as more recent reflections on the New Criticism, see William J. Spurlin and Michael Fischer, eds., The New Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory: Connections and Continuities (New York: Garland, 1995).

19 For an introduction to the concerns of the New Historicism, see H. Aram Veeser, “The New Historicism,” in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism Reader (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 1-32. See also Steven

Introduction | 23 Mullaney, “Discursive Forums, Cultural Practices: History and Anthropology in Literary Studies,” in Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 161-189. 20 Barthes’s most influential work was Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957). 21 See, e.g., Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, “Introduction,” in Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, eds., Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. xi—xix; p. xii; and Ann E. Moyer, “Art Music

and European High Culture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 39/3 (1997), 635-643; P. 635. 22 Leo Treitler, “The Power of Positivist Thinking,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 42/2 (1989), 375-402; p. 378. 23 See, for example, the “Prelude” to Catherine Clément’s Opera, or the Undoing of Women, pp. 3-23; and Bruno Nettl, “Mozart and the Ethnomusicological Study of Western Culture,” in Katharine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 137-155. On relations between musicology and ethnomusicology in the 1980s, see Joseph Kerman, “Ethnomusicology and ‘Cultural Musicology’,” chapter 5 in his Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). For a more recent discussion of related issues, see Philip V. Bohlman, “Ethnomusicology’s Challenge to the Canon; the Canon’s Challenge to Ethnomusicology,” in Bergeron and Bohlman, eds., Disciplining Music, pp. 116-136. 24 See especially Richard Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Richard Leppert, “Music, Domestic Life and Cultural Chauvinism: Images of British Subjects at Home in India,” in Leppert and McClary, eds., Music and Society; and Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 63-104. Roger Parker makes novel use of visual representations in “Falstaff and Verdi's Final Narratives,” in his Leonora’s Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 100-125. See also Carolyn Abbate’s discussion of The Magic Flute in her In Search of Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 55-106.

24 | Victoria Johnson 25 See, e.g., Roger Parker’s analysis of La forza del destino in Leonora’s Last

Act, pp. 61-99. 26 Key studies and collections on music and gender by musicologists include Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Ruth A. Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and “Feminist Approaches to Musicology,” in Susan C. Cook and Judy S. Tsou, eds., Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 15-34; and Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York: Routledge, 1994). A rare look at male (hetero)sexuality is offered by Richard Leppert in chapter 2 (“Music, Socio-politics, Ideologies of Male Sexuality and Power’) of his Music and Image. For reflections on feminist work by one of its most vocal champions, see, Susan McClary, “Of Patriarchs and Matriarchs, Too: Feminist Musicology, Its Contributions and Challenges,” Musical Times 135/1816 (1994), 364-369, and “Paradigm Dissonances: Music Theory, Cultural Studies, Feminist Criticism,” Perspectives of New Music 32/1 (1994), 68-85; for a critique of McClary, see Leo Treitler, “Gender and Other Dualities of Music History,” in Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference, Pp. 23-45; see esp. pp. 35-45. 27 Musicological work drawing on semiotic analysis includes Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Susan McClary, “Constructions of Gender in Monteverdi’s Dramatic Music,” in her Feminine Endings, pp. 35-52; V. Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic

Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) and “The Challenge of Semiotics,” in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, eds., Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 138-160; and Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 28 McClary, Feminine Endings, p. xiii. 29 Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, p. 47. 30 See, e.g., Corinne E. Blackmer, “The Ecstasies of Saint Teresa: The Saint as Queer Diva from Crashaw to Four Saints in Three Acts,” in Corinne E.

Introduction | 25 Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith, eds., En Travesti: Women, Gender,

Subversion, Opera (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 306-348; Patricia Juliana Smith, “Gli Enigmi Sono Tre: The [D]evolution of Turandot, Lesbian Monster,” in ibid., pp. 242-284; Elizabeth Wood, “Lesbian Fugue: Ethel Smyth’s Contrapuntal Arts,” in Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference, pp. 164-183; Mitchell Morris, “Reading as an Opera Queen,” in ibid., pp. 184-200; Philip Brett, “Britten’s Dream,” in ibid., pp. 259-280; and Philip Brett, ““Grimes Is at His Exercise’: Sex, Politics, and Violence in the Librettos of Peter Grimes,” in Mary Ann Smart, ed., Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), Pp. 237-249.

31 Fora recent critique of these writings, see David J. Levin, “Is There a Text in This Libido? Diva and the Rhetoric of Contemporary Opera Criticism,” in Joe Jeongwon and Rose Theresa, eds., Between Opera and Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 121-132. 32 Writings by Said that have been especially influential in musicology include his seminal Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978) and his analysis of Verdi’s Aida in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. I1I-132. For musicological responses to Said, see, e.g., Thomas Betzwieser, “Exoticism and Politics: Beaumarchais’ and Salieri’s Le Couronnement de Tarare (1790), Cambridge Opera Journal 6/2 (1994), 91-112; Mark Everist, “Meyerbeer’s II crociato in Egitto: Mélodrame, Opera, Orientalism,” Cambridge Opera Journal 8/3, (1996), 215-250; Steven Huebner, “‘O patria mia’: Patriotism, Dream, Death,” Cambridge Opera

Journal 14 (1 & 2) (2002), 161-175; and Ralph P. Locke, “Constructing the Oriental ‘Other’: Saint-Saéns’s Samson et Dalila,” Cambridge Opera Journal 3/3 (1991), 261-302 and “Reflections on Orientalism in Opera and Musical Theater,” Opera Quarterly 10/1 (1993), 48-64. 33 Though he is a literary scholar by discipline, Herbert Lindenberger’s work on opera, particularly his Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), investigates the political and cultural meanings and contexts of opera in a manner that aligns him more closely with historians working on opera than with many literary critics. See also his Opera: The Extravagant Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). 34 Jane F Fulcher, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 9-10.

2.6 | Victoria Johnson 35 Jane F, Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dreyfus Affair to

the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 8. The earlier French orientation of much work in this vein has given way to an increasing number of Italian studies; see, for example, Wendy Heller’s Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century

Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) and Emanuele Senici’s Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to Puccini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 36 Johnson, Listening in Paris, note 4, pp. 287-288. 37 William Weber, “La musique ancienne in the Waning of the Ancien Régime, Journal of Modern History 56 (March 1984), 58-88.

38 M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, “Revolutionschanson und Hymne im Repertoire der Pariser Opera 1793-1794,” in Reinhart Koselleck and Rolf Reichardt, eds., Die Franzdsische Revolution als Bruch des gesellschafilichen Bewufstseins

(Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1988), pp. 479-510; “The New Repertory at the Opéra during the Reign of Terror: Revolutionary Rhetoric and Operatic Consequences,” in Malcolm Boyd, ed., Music and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 107-156; and Etienne-Nicolas Méhul and Opéra: Source and Archival Studies of Lyric Theatre during the French Revolution, Consulate and Empire

(Heilbronn: Musik-Edition Lucie Galland, 1999). 39 See, for example, Smart, ed., Siren Songs, and Blackmer and Smith, eds., En Travesti.

PART I

The Representation of Social and Political Relations in Operatic Works

oe BLANK PAGE

Introduction to Part I Jane F, Fulcher

As the historian (and contributor to this volume) Michael Steinberg has astutely noted with specific reference to the Catholic “Baroque” world,

“the theater represents the world, but more than that it reflects the authority to represent and thus to order the world.”* This observation, of course, is just as valid in other cases in which power employs the theatre, and in particular opera, to represent either the authority and social order that sustains it or that which it aspires eventually to ensconce.

Theatre, however, and particularly opera, is neither transparent in its agenda nor entirely instrumental: it is a form of representation — “unique and irreducible, and in a constant, complex dialogue with the world of discourse that surrounds it.”” We must, then, be aware of what Louis Marin has described (with reference to painting) as “the gap between the visible — what is shown, figured, represented, staged—and the legible — what can be said, enunciated, declared.”? Each mode of communication, including those of the

arts, embodies a different “register” of representation, and although

they “intersect, connect, and respond to one another” they never merge, which makes opera a uniquely complex enunciation.‘

Several of the chapters in this section concern attempts to use this inherently semiotically unstable genre to implement a world of symbolic domination — both social and political — and the distinctive articulation that results. Catherine Kintzler explores how “the people” are represented in different manners in French classic theatre and in opera as a result of the inherent logic of the different media; her interest here is in the message that could emerge through each mode and their revealing, dialogic, interaction. As she observes, French Baroque tragedy is inherently political, and hence “the existence of the community is fundamental”; yet despite the fact that it is a constituent part of the drama, it never appears on the stage. In musical tragedy crowds are

| 29

30 | Jane EF Fulcher rather visible, but the political element here is only secondary, for there is essentially no “outside” to the drama — “all that can be shown is” — the genre rests upon an aesthetic of spectacle. The collective presence is thus visible but not as an agent in the lyric tragedy: it functions “as a kind of extension of the monarch to whom they are subject,” repre-

senting the established social order in a manner recalling the ancient chorus. Rebecca Harris-Warrick further examines the collectivities or “societies” that are represented on the French Baroque lyric stage, the manner in which they are constructed in the drama, and the specific means of communication that they employ. Her focus is on the different man-

ners in which the social groupings interact with the protagonists, or how the operatic characters function within a social universe, either in an unproblematic manner (asin the case of Alceste), or more complexly (as in Atys and Armide). As she argues, both the choral numbers and the divertissements are here fundamental dramatic components, and the latter, she observes, is related, intertextually, to the real celebrations that were held at court. Just as in these celebrations, spectacle scenes in French opera represent groups that “are engaged in social practices that uphold the values and structure of society,” but this is here communicated through opera’s distinctive register, or “magnified” through the stage dancing and music. It is important at this point to observe that while the two chapters on French tragédie lyrique analyze how social bodies were represented

in opera in the interests of established political power, the work of the late M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet focused rather on how new social possibilities were envisioned on the stage. We were all greatly saddened

by her untimely death, which prevented her from completing her projected chapter for this volume; it is of central importance to point out the implications of her work for the theoretical premise of this section. Bartlet’s research illuminated how the French operatic stage throughout the Revolutionary period served to mediate between old and new social orders — to shape social perception, imagination, or possibilities — as a result of its inherent liminality, or its complex relation to the real social world outside it.?

Introduction to Part I | 31 The study that she planned for the volume, “The Opéra and the Terror (1793-1794): La Réunion du 18 aot, ou Vinauguration de la République francaise and its context,” sought to illuminate (as did her

other work) how the Revolutionary government attempted to use opera to instill patriotism and a sense of citizenship in the new Republic. Her particular interest was in the manner in which the consciously

pedagogical Revolutionary féte and the Opéra intersected in works such as La Réunion du 18 aoiit (dedicated “Au Peuple souverain”), which represented the real “Féte de l’Unité” within its dramatic context. With costumes modeled after the “stations” of the féte and extensive “diver-

tissements” replete with Revolutionary airs and hymns, it blended different realities in a new theatrical whole. The question of verisimilitude which Bartlet explored in Revolution-

ary opera also figures prominently in the chapter by Wendy Heller, which examines the role of opera in seventeenth-century Venetian society. Heller underlines the “unique kind of relationship between Venetian opera and the society that produced it,” and specifically how

opera here was “shaped by a variety of forces unique to the Republic.” One might add that, although Venice was a strictly limited (or oligarchic) republic, its opera still had to attract a paying public from a broader social stratum, as well as foreign visitors, which fostered a distinctive kind of social representation.

The questions that Heller thus explores concern the topics and settings of these works, most of which take place in ancient realms, mythic empires, or even monarchies, as opposed to a republic like Venice. As she notes, while the other arts represented and celebrated the Republic, opera, which was not subject to the same kind of centralized control, responded by projecting a “more fractured” — perhaps realistic — sense of identity. The Venetian population could here envision itself differently, and in some cases in a manner that was diametrically opposed to “the well-regulated social structure of the Venetian Republic.”

The question of how social ambiguities or anxieties concerning identity are addressed on the operatic stage is similarly at the core of Naomi André’s chapter on “Women’s Roles in Meyerbeer’s Operas.”

32 | Jane FE. Fulcher Her concern is with the way in which both social conventions as well as transgressions with regard to established gender roles were addressed

on the nineteenth-century Italian operatic stage as it slowly evolved. She thus traces shifting systems of signification with regard to gender as articulated through this specific mode, and how the operatic stage in particular could mediate a fundamental change in gender roles. André explores not only shifting embodiments of masculinity and femininity in early nineteenth-century Italian opera, but their complex dialogue with social expectations and with new paradigms of the male protagonist in Romantic literature. Her focus is on how “the conventions surrounding masculinity and femininity in opera were now realigned,” together with definitions of the masculine and feminine, in terms of sound, as women’s voices were reconfigured in accordance with new “aural codes.” Hence she analyzes changing constructions of women in opera — in texts as well as in vocal types — as the male hero underwent an inevitable change from the paradigm of the castrato to the female “travesti” singer, and finally to the modern tenor.

My own chapter, “The effect of a bomb in the hall: The French ‘opera of ideas’ and its cultural role in the 1920s,” similarly concerns social transgression as represented on the stage, and the complex relation between it and the cultural or political world that surrounds it. In the specific case of opera in France between the wars, one encounters confrontation between representations of the political and social world, but also a unique kind of dialogue as conflicting ideologies were articulated or mediated through operatic means. The “opera of ideas,” as I argue, was fostered by French governments of both the Left and the Right in the politically polarized postwar period; however, when articulate ideologically it failed to convince artistically. My interest, then, is in the changing function of French operainthe twenties, or its evolving intellectual and political role as it became an arena for anew kind of exchange — for an attempt to enunciate ideology which, when aesthetically successful, led to an effacement of former ideological lines. The so-called “opera of ideas,” a sub-genre through-

out the twenties in France, is thus an example, once again, of how

Introduction to Part I | 33 ideas or ideologies can emerge, transformed, from this semiotically unstable and emotionally compelling art. Opera, in sum, with its unique power to “represent” in an inimitably charged register that combines several arts, is capable not only of reinforcing social hierarchies, but of destabilizing and even of contesting them. The social transgressions that can occur on its stage have often entered into complex counterpoint with social realities that lie outside it, serving to stimulate not only new reflections, but in some cases political and social change. NOTES 1 Michael P. Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and

Nineteenth-Century Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 51.

2 Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices,

trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 90. 3 Louis Marin, Des pouvoirs de Vimage: Gloses (Paris: Seuil, 1993), pp. 18-19, as

cited in Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff, pp.90-91. 4 Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff, p. 91.

5 See M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, “The New Repertory at the Opéra during the Reign of Terror: Revolutionary Rhetoric and Operatic Consequences,” in Malcolm Boyd, ed., Music and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 107-156; and M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, “Gossec, L’Offrande a la Liberté et histoire de la Marseillaise,” in

Jean-Rémy Julien and Jean Mongrédien, eds., Le Tambour et la harpe: oeuvres, pratiques et manifestations musicales sous la Révolution, 1788-1800

(Paris: Du May, 1991), pp. 123-146.

1 | Venice’s mythic empires: Truth and verisimilitude in

Venetian opera , Wendy Heller

The notion that works of art have some sort of relationship to the society that creates them is perhaps axiomatic. The difficulty, however, is untangling the numerous threads that link these cultural products to the people and institutions that produce and consume them. Inevitably, this task is made simpler when a work seems to express the ideology of a single patron or a centralized power base. Wealth and prestige, for example, might be demonstrated simply by opulence, grandeur, and spectacle — only the magnificent can produce magnificence. Ostentation can sometimes be imbued with simple, yet effective, messages: “benevolence and wisdom are noble attributes’; “duty is more important than physical love”; “reason and restraint are better than desire” — or any number of precepts that might exemplify the virtues of whichever ruler is at the helm. Occasionally, seemingly contradictory ideals are melded together in ways that resist easy analysis. This is the case, for example, with L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643), in which Busenello’s poetic fancy and Monteverdi's incomparable music create an ambivalent moral frame. For example, we still can’t decide whether Seneca is a pretentious buffoon (Act I) or a worthy citizen and martyr to the Stoic cause (Act II), or whether the ambivalence is simply part of the game — as well as a demonstration of Monteverdi's unmatched ability to trip us up on our search for meaning.’ The types of complexities apparent in a work such as L’incoronazione

di Poppea highlight the unique relationship between Venetian opera and the society that produced it. Unlike the sung entertainments presented sporadically at the various courts in northern Italy, Venetian opera — for better or worse — was an industry, shaped by a variety of forces unique to the Republic. Foremost among these were the absence of centralized control (e.g., a monarch), a more or less regular schedule of productions, and a paying audience that functioned not

34 |

Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera | 35

only as spectators but also as collaborators in the formation of the new genre.* Most importantly, this was a repertoire in which success depended upon an appropriate balance of variation and repetition, in which the “audience whims” so decried by librettists in their prefaces were of fundamental importance in the establishment of the aesthetic principles of the genre. What resulted was a surprisingly flexible art form, stabilized by a rich vocabulary of shifting literary, dramatic, and musical conventions or habits, which could be used to represent Venice not only to her own citizens, but also to the numerous visiting nobles, dignitaries, and foreigners who flocked to the Most Serene Republic during Carnival.’ There is, however, an implicit contradiction here. The topics chosen by the first librettists are marked by their apparent temporal, physical, and even political distance from the Republic of Venice. Most of the dramatic action takes place in realms far removed from normal daily existence along the canals — that is, in such distant, ancient realms as Arcadia, Troy, Ithaca, Rome, Carthage, or Alexandria. Moreover, these mythic empires were not governed by a sober body of Venetian senators and a duly elected Doge. Rather, the favored political model in so many operas was, in fact, monarchy. On the surface, this is certainly counterintuitive. Venice was a republic; she prided herself on (and was lauded for) her longevity, her political wisdom, and her supposed immunity to the ills that had befallen all other republics.‘ It would seem reasonable to assume that she would want to express this unique sense of identity with whatever art forms were available. This is certainly apparent in painting, sculpture, and particularly archi-

tecture, as can be seen in the spaces that came to represent Venice for the rest of Europe — the Piazza San Marco and Palazzo Ducale —

where, as David Rosand has shown, the arts took on the noble and serious task of political allegorizing.’ But, as discussed above, Venetian opera was not subject to the same degree of centralized control and — as Joseph Kerman infamously reminded us years ago — rarely aspired to dignity and nobility.° Patriotism was certainly a factor, particularly among those works created under the influence of the Accademia degli

Incogniti, whose ideological concerns became an integral element

36 | Wendy Heller of Venetian opera conventions.’ Nevertheless, given the idiosyncratic nature of opera production in Venice, Venetian opera arguably projected a more fractured sense of identity than those operas produced within a court system. So why these distant, mythic empires — why stage the virtues and vices of a host of ancient kings, queens, courtiers, and their servants who seemingly had so little to do with Venetian sensibilities? Or, to put it another way, how could such overtly foreign social and political models, freely adapted from numerous ancient sources, so easily express a sense of Venetian identity? As this essay suggests, the answer may well lie in the capricious manner in which opera dealt with myth and history. Much of the cultural work, as we shall see, occurred in the apparent space between the respected ancient sources and the operatic reality adapted to the stage. Night after night, year after year, Venetians and their visitors witnessed an unrealistic world in which people sang rather than spoke, and which bore only a superficial resemblance to their own.

In this essay, I will explore some of the ways in which librettists and composers used notions of verisimilitude and truth — a sense of what was plausible and what was actually true — to create alternative realities or mythic empires in which they could try on new identities. Emboldened by the license of Carnival, Venetians could be victorious

in wars fought centuries ago by distant ancestors; they could envision themselves as kings, queens, and slaves in a society in which the hierarchies associated with monarchy had been replaced by the wellregulated social structure of the Venetian Republic. In so doing, they could come to a better understanding of their own world. TRUTH AND VERISIMILITUDE Some of the most important clues to understanding Venetian opera are to be found in the printed libretto. While the scores for Venetian opera were never published and provided only minimal information about the production, libretti, as Ellen Rosand has amply demonstrated, are a treasure trove of information.® In addition to providing some version

Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera | 37

of the opera’s poetic text, this most tangible souvenir of a given opera production typically featured such information as the lists of characters, scene changes, choruses, and balli. The libretto would also include a dedication to one or another person of importance — who could be

either Venetian or foreign — as well as some sort of “letter to the reader,” most often penned by the librettist (whose name was usually listed on the title page), but occasionally signed by the publisher or someone else connected with the production. Indeed, the power accorded the librettist and the potentially subversive nature of these documents is apparent in the fact that a number of Venetian authors used pseudonyms and anagrams to sign their libretti.? Other collaborators were often named, including the composer, choreographer, set designers, and occasionally singers and even dancers. The front matter of most libretti contained the usual effusive language for the dedications and inevitable apologies from the librettist or printer for succumbing to audience tastes, and other similar conventional gestures. But, as Ellen Rosand has discussed extensively, these statements of intent in the form of letters to the reader have also provided us with some of the most explicit statements about the aesthetic premises of Venetian opera.*®

For our purposes, one of the most important elements of the libretto is the argomento or “argument” of the opera. This was no mere description of the plot; in fact, many argomenti omitted some of the salient details of the story, but nonetheless often acknowledged the historical or mythological sources upon which the opera was based, and alluded to the ways in which the librettist might have altered those sources. Librettists had a variety of different ways to account for their playful variations of myth and history. During the first decades of Venetian opera, such references were quite casual. In L’incoronazione di Poppea, for example, Giovanni Francesco Busenello mentions only one inci-

dent from the writings of the historian Cornelius Tacitus — Nero’s decision to banish Otho to Lusitania — and then proceeds to tell the reader: “But here fact is represented differently.” He then goes on to describe some (but not all!) of the well-known idiosyncrasies of that par-

ticular opera. Busenello provided somewhat more information in the

38 | Wendy Heller argomento to Didone (1641). His “apology” for having his Dido marry the

suitor Iarbas rather than commit suicide after Aeneas’s departure takes

special account of the liberties granted to the poet: “He who writes satisfies his own fancy, and it is in order to avoid the tragic ending of Dido’s death that the aforementioned marriage to Iarbas has been introduced. It is not necessary here to remind men of understanding how the best poets represented things in their own way; books are open, and learning is not a stranger in this world.” By the second half of the seventeenth century, the custom of differentiating the historical or mythological sources from the act of operatic fantasy became integrated into the structure of the argomento. In the libretti of both Aurelio Aureli (1630-1710) and Nicol6 Minato (16301698), for example, the argomento was actually divided into two separate sections. The first would include a description of the basic material plucked from the ancient sources — often somewhat capriciously. The second section would explain the librettist’s act of fancy, such as invented characters, plot twists, and other poetic liberties. Librettists used suggestive language to refer to their dramatic licenses. Sometimes these second sections would simply be set off with the phrase “si finge” —

one pretends. Indeed, notions of verisimilitude or supposition were often a feature of the argomento. For example, the librettist for the opera Il Tolomeo (1658), attributed only to the Accademia degli Imperturba-

bili, begins his digressions with the phrase “Laonde fingesi verisimilamente” (therefore one pretends realistically or verisimilarly). For the argomento in his libretto Sesto Tarquinio (1679), Camillo Badovero refers to the second part of the argomento as “scherzi dell’ inventioni

supposti’ — jokes of presumed invention.“4 In the argomento to L’Antigona delusa da Alceste, an opera inspired by Euripides’ Alcestis, Aurelio Aureli refers to his variations as “accidenti verisimili” or realistic incidents.” Giulio Cesare Corradi concludes his brief discussion of Nero’s vices in the argomento to Il Nerone (1679) with the following:

“This activity, which blazed forth under the Roman heavens, with all sorts of magnificence, united with other incidents, in part true, in part verisimilar [parte veri, parte verisimili] inspired me to write the present

drama...”7° ,

Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera | 39

The language used by all of these librettists is suggestive as it invokes a notion of verisimilitude that was in circulation in seicento Italy in an unexpected context: early modern historiography. One of the most explicit discussions of poetic verisimilitude can be found in Agostino Mascardi’s well-known treatise, Dell’arte istorica (1636). Mas-

cardi presents an intriguing discussion of the poet and the historian, and their differing attitudes towards truth (il vero) and verisimilitude (il verisimile).'"? Mascardi observes that there are in fact two categories of verisimilitude. False verisimilitude is exemplified by Virgil’s invention of the anachronistic meeting between Dido and Aeneas in The Aeneid. Queen Dido of Carthage, as we know, never actually met Aeneas and therefore could not have killed herself after he abandoned her.'* However, since — according to Mascardi— women frequently commit suicide for love, Virgil’s poetic conceit could be considered verisimilar, albeit

false. True verisimilitude, on the other hand, can be seen in Livy’s discussion of Scipio’s generosity towards a beautiful Spanish woman who was his prisoner. After the defeat of Carthage, Scipio’s soldiers had brought him a young maiden of exceptional beauty. Scipio, however, learned that she was betrothed, and proved his generosity and continence by returning her to her parents and intended husband with virtue intact (Livy, Roman Histories, 36.50).’? This account, Mascardi tells us, is not only plausible (given Scipio’s worthy character), but —in his view — is based on an actual event. Mascardi’s juxtaposition of Virgil and Livy illustrates the differing

tasks of the poet and the historian. The poet, Mascardi tells us, has the privilege of availing himself of both types of verisimilitude — that which is true, and that which is false, but at least plausible or realistic.

The historian, on the other hand, must seek the truth, il vero, and is in fact obligated to reject the verisimilar in those instances in which it has little to do with the pursuit of truth. In other words, truth may not always be realistic, and realism is not always truthful.

Notions about verisimilitude, of course, have long been invoked in discussions of early opera. Nino Pirrotta was among the first to explore the idea that the earliest librettists and composers were concerned about the apparent lack of realism of sung drama, and were

40 | Wendy Heller drawn towards patently unrealistic myths, particularly those involving gods and goddesses, in order to justify the use of song.*° By this reasoning, Orpheus was the ideal opera hero, because as a musician he was justified in singing rather than speaking. By the middle of the century, however, concerns about the dramatic viability of song were necessarily replaced by a certain acceptance of and even delight in opera’s special incongruities. Once song became an acceptable expressive medium for all operatic characters — the sane as well as the insane, mortal or immortal, Roman emperors as well as servants or children — a different notion of verisimilitude necessarily develops. The task for

the creators of opera — as both composers and librettists intuitively recognized — was to develop a new set of rules or so-called conventions that, while no less implausible, might be deemed verisimilar within the

closed universe of the operatic stage. What we see again and again in the Venetian libretto of the mid seicento — and which is made explicit in the argomento — is an almost ostentatious demonstration of the tension

between the responsibilities of the poet and the historian, between historical truths and operatic verisimilitude. This is something that Mascardi might well have appreciated, since he readily acknowledged the importance of other forms — sculpture, painting, poetry — for the recounting of history." He therefore anticipated the dilemma faced by librettists and composers drawn to ancient sources several years before the establishment of public opera, while at the time unwittingly providing them with a solution — a way of illuminating the paths that linked early modern Venice to both the ancient world and the alternate reality of the operatic stage.

MONARCHY AND VENETIAN IDENTITY Ofthe many alternative realities constructed for the operatic stage, representations of monarchy and empire were perhaps the most appealing

and enduring. This is not to say that Venetians were not occasionally attracted to overtly republican topics. Libretti such as Busenello’s La prosperita infelice di Giulio Cesare dittatore or NicolO Minato’s Pompeo Magno, for example, dealt quite eloquently with ancient Rome's

Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera | AI

vulnerability to imperial ambitions during the final years of the Republic.** Nevertheless, there were a number of practical advantages to using a monarchy as the focus for an opera. Model republics were relatively difficult to find, particularly among the ancient historians favored by mid-seicento librettists, including Tacitus, Herodotus, Dio Cassius, Plutarch, Justin, and Suetonius. Arguably, the sometimes loving, sometimes disparaging portrayal of kings and queens gave Vene-

tian opera a certain cosmopolitan appeal, rendering it a satisfactory form of entertainment not only for those committed to republican values, but for the numerous visiting dignitaries and members of royal families to whom many libretti were dedicated. The fact that a given opera might feature a ruler whose vices were greater than his virtues

seems to have been of little concern either to the dedicatee or the author of the libretto. Some of the most disparaging characterizations of Roman emperors, for example, can be found in several libretti dedicated to the Hannoverian Dukes, Georg Ludwig, Johann Friedrich, and Ernst August, who were passionate devotees of Venetian opera.” Moreover, restraint, lack of private ambition, concern with the good ofthe state, anda properly functioning government -—all attributes associated with republican virtues — did not necessarily inspire good drama or spectacle. We have only to think about the propaganda-laden operas produced in the aftermath of the French Revolution to see that republicanism is not necessarily the ideal ingredient for a compelling operatic experience. Venice and San Marco might be a wonderful advertisement for the Most Serene Republic, but short of presenting Venice herself on the stage (as was the case for example, in Bellerofonte),”4 it was empire that provided the rich and exotic backdrops that would prove to be so popular — and, in practical terms, eminently recyclable from one season to another. Consider, for example, some of the Roman settings used in Aureli’s Claudio Cesare (1672), set by Giovanni Boretti. In addi-

tion to numerous indoor stage sets associated with imperial rule — the Emperor Claudius’s palace, royal galleries, and salons — there are also stunning outdoor panoramas, such as Agrippina’s garden on the

Roman hill of Montecelio (a “loco deliziosa”) and a royal prison in a castle on the shores of the Tiber — surely a reference to the Castel

42 | Wendy Heller Sant Angelo. Giulio Cesare Corradi’s Il Nerone (1679), presented at the luxurious Teatro S. Grisostomo, features even more elaborate settings: a Roman piazza with triumphal arches, an illuminated ballroom witha

high rotunda used for the imperial dance, the royal baths, and even a music room for Nero’s academies (“sala di stromenti musicali per l’'accademie di Nerone”). Bussani’s Antonino e Pompeiano (1677), set by

Antonio Sartorio, describes Roman vistas with extraordinary detail: a Roman street with two towers and triumphal arches illuminated at night, the Aventine hill on the Tiber, and an imperial hall with statues of the great emperors.” Aureli’s Alessandro Magno in Sidonia (1679) includes not only lakes, gardens, and bowers, but even an amphitheatre for gladiatorial combat — complete with wild animals — as well as a fresco that descends from the ceiling and comes to life, revealing Apollo and his muses playing instruments.”° Monarchy not only provided better spectacle; it also opened up the possibility of presenting a highly diverse society on the stage. The population that inhabited these royal settings differed profoundly from the ostensible homogeneity of the male oligarchy, which was at the core of Venice’s political identity. The royal apartments, banquet halls and galleries accommodated characters of varied occupations, social classes,

nationalities, and personalities: benevolent or tyrannical monarchs, loyal or scheming servants, a rebellious or patriotic populace, as well as women of power who necessarily had no role in Venetian public life.

The lush gardens, lakes, fountains, and bowers also conjured up fantasies of romantic interludes, erotic acts, and political machinations for an imaginary society in which public virtues were always vulnerable to private vices. Such conflicts, in fact, were at the heart of the “accidenti verisimili,”

and a primary source of the tension between truth and poetic fantasy. This is particularly evident in operas based on history. In Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, as we recall, Busenello’s “different” representation of the facts altered the historical record in suggestive ways. History may tell us that Nero banished Otho to Lusitania so that he might enjoy Poppea. In the world of opera, however, we are asked to imagine a series of more or less plausible private events that this single

Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera | 43 action would have set into motion. We might recall how Mascardi had described Dido’s death as a false verisimilitude because women were, in his view, likely to kill themselves over love. Many of the events in Poppea could be understood in the same context. Otho certainly might have

been driven to madness and desperation over the loss of Poppea, since men often lose their heads over beautiful women; the innocent and gentle Octavia might have become ruthless and ambitious, because powerful women rejected in love are often vengeful. Both suppositions —

masculine vulnerability and female ruthlessness — would certainly have been regarded as verisimilar in Venetian circles. Arguably, the most shocking events in Poppea are those that Mascardi would have described as historical truths: the death of Seneca (albeit several years too early), the banishment of Octavia (alluding to her eventual mur-

der), and the crowning of Poppea as empress, events precipitated by amoral behaviors that demonstrated the liabilities of empire. In Bussani’s Antonino e Pompeiano historical truth provides inspiration for one of Venetian opera’s more shocking occurrences — the murder of the tyrant Antoninus Caracalla (ap 118-217) on stage in the final act.

Bussani’s libretto does revise some of the more indelicate aspects of Antoninus’s life. Rather than presenting the lurid details of Antoninus’s incestuous marriage to his stepmother Julia, as reported in chapter 10 of the book on Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (Caracalla) in Scriptores Historiae Augustae (SHA M. Ant. 10), for example, Bussani contrives for her to actually be the wife of the consul Pompeianus, the opera’s hero.”’

But the appearance of Antoninus disguised as Hercules, brandishing a bow and arrow (Act II, scene 12) and a club (Act II, scene 17) is in fact inspired by the historical record: it is noted in the Scriptores Historiae Augustae that Caracalla’s soldiers sometimes referred to him as Hercules because he had killed many wild beasts (SHA M. Ant. 5.4), and the emperor himself boasted that he was as strong as Hercules (SHA M. Ant. 5.9).

Like L’incoronazione di Poppea and Antonino e Pompeiano, Giovanni Boretti and Aurelio Aureli’s Claudio Cesare (1672) also uses games with

truth and verisimilitude as a means of touting Venice’s political superiority and mythical link to ancient Rome.”® The first portion of the

44 | Wendy Heller argomento includes numerous historical details borrowed directly from Book 12 of Tacitus’s Annals concerning events from the years ap 4950. These include Agrippina’s marriage to her uncle Claudius (Tacitus, Annals, 12.1.3-2.3), her affair with the freedman and imperial advisor Pallas (Tacitus, Annals, 12.25.1), a series of evil portents and natural disasters (Tacitus, Annals, 12.4), Claudius’s eventual subjugation of the rebellious King Mithridates of Bosporus (Tacitus, Annals, 12.15-20), and the momentous event with which the opera concludes — Claudius’s adoption of Nero as his successor (Tacitus, Annals, 12.25.1). The second half of the argomento presents those events and characters ostensibly invented by Aureli, such as a banished Roman consul who returns to

Rome in disguise in order to see a beloved daughter who had been raised by an old nurse. What is particularly intriguing, however, is the way in which Aureli uses these carefully culled historical facts to create a verisimilar version of Roman history that accorded with the norms and political concerns of Venetian opera. Aureli’s opera opens in the Temple of Diana with the arrival of Mithridates in Rome, where he contritely signs a peace

treaty with Claudius. This provides the occasion for both Claudius and Mithridates to become enamored of Julia, the daughter of the aforementioned Roman consul, thus undercutting the sincerity of the ceremonies in honor of the chaste Diana. The conquered Mithridates, however, is actually depicted with greater dignity and heroism than the bumbling and immoral Roman emperor. In this alternative reality Aureli thus not only distances Venice from her corrupt and decadent imperial ancestor in the name of republicanism but also uses the subjugation of the rebellious Eastern monarch to confirm notions about Western hegemony that were no doubt of relevance to the Venetian Republic, locked in perennial conflicts with the Turks.*? Moreover, Aureli’s imaginative use of historical detail is particularly evident in one of the opera’s most strikingly original gestures: an earthquake, reported by Tacitus as having occurred in the year ap 49 (Tacitus, Annals, 12.43). The earthquake takes place in the opera precisely at the moment when Agrippina declares her intention to control destiny and put her son Nero on the imperial throne. “Fierce destiny,”

: Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera | 45

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she sings, “I do not fear your blows; iffam Empress of the Tiber, ifin my scepter every power is joined, I will nail down the wheel of Fortune.”*° Boretti’s musical setting leaves little doubt as to Agrippina’s belief in

her power to change history. The simple recitative suddenly breaks into florid arioso for the final line, which she sings twice, moving from

C minor to a cadence on B flat, and then abruptly turning toward G minor for the final show of power (see Example 1.1). Although the earthquake is, of course, part of the historical record, the circumstances surrounding it here are mere conjecture. Where else but in Republican Venice would audiences have been so entertained by a natural disaster precipitated by Agrippina’s misplaced ambition? What better way

46 | Wendy Heller to join operatic spectacle with a profound statement on the dubious politics of empire? The examples discussed above show how the historical record could

be altered verisimilarly to accommodate Venetian social or political interests. In other instances, the sense of plausibility is created not by the use of the past — of historical events — but rather with the present —

that is, the insistent presence of events or situations belonging to seventeenth-century Venice. Notably, these excursions from fantasy into reality are rarely indicated in the argomento. Rather, it is as if there is something unrelenting about Venice that managed to penetrate the distant realm presented on the stage. This is the case, for example, in the opera Amore inamorato (1642), which deals with the tale of Psyche and ~ Cupid, best known from Apuleius’s Metamorphoses.** When Psyche is

ordered by a jealous Venus to descend to the Underworld, Psyche is accosted by a well-known figure in Venetian life, literature, and art: a Ruffian woman or procuress who attempts to persuade Psyche to forgo Hades for the life of the prostitute.** In this version of operatic verisimilitude, even those destined to become immortal are vulnerable to the same temptations of worldly pleasures that were so much a part of Venetian Carnival life. A similar approach can be found in Aureli and Marco Ziani’s Alessandro Magno in Sidonia (1679), whose exotic settings were cited above.

In this opera, there is no attempt to juxtapose Eastern and Western values. In fact, Alexander the Great is represented in an almost entirely positive light: he is the good prince, able to resist the allure of decadent women and the intrigues of his courtiers — thus possessing, ironically, all of the qualities of a good republican. On the other hand, the early modern courtesan was likely the model for the beautiful Thais — desirable, immoral, fascinating, greedy, and ruthless in matters of the heart. Like several other operas produced in the late 1670s, Alessandro Magno in Sidonia also includes the signs and symptoms of Carnival. For example, following the extraordinary descent of the frescoed ceiling with

Apollo and the muses at the opening of Act II, the players provide the music for a ballo danced by courtiers disguised as Germans and Spaniards. This creates the ideal occasion for Thais to don a mask and further her own ambitions and desires, all in accordance with Carnival

Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera | A7

sensibilities. In this instance, an Eastern monarchical story and setting becomes a vehicle for affirming republican values — the triumph of male virtue and self-restraint over female vice, in the midst of the same sort of carnival activity with which Venetians (and their visitors) could readily identify. A final example shows how even the very act of making music might become verisimilar within the context of a historical opera. As noted above, Corradi’s Il Nerone includes a scene that actually takes place in the music room designation for Nero’s academies. On the one hand, this is certainly a verisimilar truth: Nero, as all the historical sources tell us, was an enthusiastic, if not accomplished, musician, and spent a good deal of time producing both music and poetry — much to the

detriment of the Roman Empire. That he would have had such an academy is not surprising; in fact, it may be this sort of event that is depicted in the duet between Nero and Lucan in Act II, scene 6 of Monteverdi's L’incoronazione di Poppea.® In Act II, scene to of II Nerone,

musical performance has an important dramatic function — it gives the three protagonists — Nero, the Armenian King Tiridat, and his wife Gilda — an opportunity to express their hidden emotions through music. Nero, sitting at the keyboard, gazes at the beautiful Gilda and sings an aria about his passion; Gilda, in turn, performs her own aria about pain and suffering — with Nero at the keyboard. Finally, the jealous Tiridat accompanies himself at the keyboard and presents an aria in which he condemns lies and betrayal. In this case, the verisimilar truth — the fact that Nero was actually a musician — provided the inspiration for the staging of an event that would have been familiar throughout the Italian peninsula: the performance of cantatas and arias in an academic setting. In the subsequent scene (Act II, scene 11), however, Corradi also invokes the art of opera itself. Nero’s “favorite” Lepidus arrives to distribute the parts for a comedy entitled “The Loves of Venus, Mars, Cynthia, and Endymion.”

The protagonists choose their roles for the ensuing dramatic performance in which their love triangle can be played out in the context ofa familiar myth involving adultery: Nero proposes to play Mars, Tiridat chooses Vulcan, and Gilda, of course, becomes Venus. This mixture of ancient history and modern musical and dramatic styles thus blurs

48 | Wendy Heller the boundary between fantasy and reality — between historical truth and verisimilitude — rendering this verisimilar incident from the life of Nero surprisingly relevant in early modern Venice. At the same time, the fact that the operatic characters are actually singing — what is often referred to as phenomenal song — playfully draws attention not only to the role that music can play in real life by expressing the passions, but also the genre’s inherent lack of verisimilitude — which had once been so troubling to the creators of opera.*4

Opera, of course, is a patently unrealistic genre. It asks spectators to accept a universe in which our most fundamental mode of communication is eradicated in favor of something much grander and more elaborate — music and song. Indeed, opera’s inherently fantastic nature may have allowed for such playful engagements with notions of truth and verisimilitude. Once song became a valid substitute for speech and

the laws of music were permitted to control the natural flow of time, the possibilities for manipulating truth and appearances may well have seemed unlimited. Venetian opera was no simple mirror of society;

rather, in establishing an art form that presented the Most Serene Republic both to itself and to the world, the creators of opera seem to have discovered not only how the past could inform the present, but also how the present could inform the past: how the transformative power of poetic license could render even the most outlandish social and political models instructive and pleasurable to modern eyes and ears. This, perhaps, was Venice’s most important legacy to the opera of subsequent generations — the creation of mythic empires in which truths were best expressed through an unfettered imagination. NOTES

1 For differing views on Seneca’s characterization, see Ellen Rosand, “Seneca and the Interpretation of L’incoronazione di Poppea,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 38 (1985), 34-71; Tim Carter, “Re-Reading Poppea: Some Thoughts on Music and Meaning in Monteverdi's Last Opera,’ Journal of the Royal Musical Association 122 (1997), 173-204; Robert C. Ketterer, “Neoplatonic Light and Dramatic Genre in Busenello’s

Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera | 49 L’incoronazione di Poppea and Noris’s Il ripudio d’Ottavia,” Music e& Letters

80 (1999), 1-22; Iain Fenlon and Peter Miller, The Song of the Soul: Understanding Poppea (London: Royal Musical Association, 1992); Wendy Heller, “Tacitus Incognito: Opera as History in L’incoronazione di Poppea,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52 (1999), 39-96. 2 Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Beth L. Glixon and Jonathan E. Glixon, Inventing the Business of Opera, American Musicological Society Studies in Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 3 Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Wendy Heller, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2003), esp. pp. 6-9. 4 William Bouwsma, “Venice and the Political Education of Europe,” in A Usable Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 279-280; Heller, “Tacitus Incognito.” 5 David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 6 Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama, revised edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 41. 7 On the relationships between the Incogniti and the Venetian opera industry, see Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, pp. 37-40, 88-109; Lorenzo Bianconi and Thomas Walker, “Dalla “Finta pazza’ alla “Veremonda’: Storie di Febiarmonici,” Rivista italiana di musicologia 10 (1975), 379-454, particularly pp. 410-424. See also Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, pp. 48-81. 8 Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, pp. 25-28, 40-59. 9 The pseudonyms and anagrams are traced in Irene Alm, Catalog of Venetian Opera Librettos at the University of California (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1993), pp. 775-883. 10 Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, pp. 40-46. For a transcription of numerous prefaces from libretti, see Rosand’s Appendix I, pp. 407-421. Rosand provides a valuable discussion of the ways in which the librettists self-consciously (and often apologetically) flaunted the dramatic rules set forth by Aristotle. 11 Busenello, L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643) in Delle hore ociose (Venice: Giuliani, 1656), sig. a3r: “Ma qui si rappresenta il fatto diverso.”

50 | Wendy Heller 12 Busenello, La Didone (1641) in Delle hore ociose (Venice: Giuliani, 1656); translated by Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, pp. 60-61: “Che scrive sodisfa al genio, e per schiffare il fine tragico della morte di

Didone si e introdotto l’accasamento predetto con Iarba. Qui non occorre rammemorare agl uomini intendenti come i poeti migliori abbiano rappresentate le cose a modo loro, sono aperti i libri, e non é€ forestiera in questo mondo la erudizione.” On the argomento to La Didone and Busenello’s idiosyncratic treatment of this material, see Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, pp. 82-135.

13 Il Tolomeo (Venice: Valvasense, 1658), p. 10. The entire passage reads: “Sopra la storia predetta stanno appoggiati tutti gl’avvenimenti di questo drama; laonde fingesi verisimilmente.” 14 Camillo Badovero, Sesto Tarquino (Venice: Nicolini, 1679), p. 5. 15 Aurelio Aureli, L’Antigona delusa da Alceste (Venice: Batti, 1660), p. 5. 16 Giulio Cesare Corradi, Il Nerone (Venice: Nicolini, 1679), p. 5. “Questa funzione, che sfolgoro nel Cielo Latino con tutti i numeri della magnificenza, unita ad altri accidenti, parte veri parte verisimili, m’innvogliarono a scrivere il presente drama, a cui imposi il titolo Nerone.” 17 Agostino Mascardi, Dell’arte istorica (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1859; reprint, Modena: Mucchi Editore, 1994), pp. 112-113. 18 On the Virgilian and pre-Virgilian Dido, see Richard C. Monti, The Dido Episode and The Aeneid: Roman Social and Political Values in the Epic

(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981).

19 This episode was also a popular subject for painting by artists such as Giovanni Bellini, Pompeo Battoni, and Niccold Dell’ Abatte. 20 Nino Pirrotta, “Early Opera and Aria,” in Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 275-280. See also Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice,

PP. 44-45. 21 Mascardi, Dell’arte istorica, p. 23. 22 Giovanni Francesco Busenello, La prosperita infelice di Giulio Cesare dittatore in Delle hore ociose (Venice: Giuliani, 1656); Nicolo Minato, Pompeo Magno (Venice: Nicolini, 1666).

23 For an index of the various dedicatees for Venetian opera, see Alm, Catalog, pp. 956-972. A number of operas dealing with Roman emperors were, perhaps coincidently, dedicated to the Hannoverian dukes. See, for

Truth and verisimilitude in Venetian opera | 51 example, Domenic Gisberti, Caligula delirante (Venice: Nicolini, 1672), presented at the Teatro SS. Giovanni e Paolo, dedicated to both Johann Friedrich and Ernst August, and Aurelio Aureli; Claudio Cesare (Venice: Nicolini, 1672), presented at the Teatro S. Salvatore, dedicated to Johann Friedrich; Giacomo Francesco Bussani, Antonino e Pompeiano (Venice: Nicolini, 1677), presented at the Teatro S. Salvatore, was dedicated to both Johann Friedrich and his wife the Duchess Benedicta Henrietta. On the relationship of the Hannoverian dukes to Venetian opera, see Vassilis Vavoulis, “A Venetian World in Letters: The Massi Correspondence at the Haupstaatsarchiv in Hannover,” Notes 59 (2003), 556-609; also Wendy Heller, “The Beloved’s Image: Handel’s Admeto and the Statue of Alcestis,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 58/3 (2005), 559-637. 24 On the presentation of Venice on the stage in Bellerofonte, see Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, pp. 104-106. 25 Bussani, Antonino e Pompeiano. 26 Aurelio Aureli, Alessandro Magno in Sidone (Venice: Nicolini, 1679). 27 Scriptores Historiae Augustae is our most authorative source on the lives of

the Roman emperors from the time of Hadrian to Numerianus (ap 117-284), and was evidently a source of inspiration for a number of Venetian operas. On Caracalla, see Scriptores Historiae Augustae, trans. D. Magie, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924). 28 Fora detailed consideration of the uses of Tacitus in Claudio Cesare, see

Wendy Heller, “Poppea’s Legacy: The Julio-Claudians on the Venetian Stage,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36/3 (2006), 379-399. 29 See, for example, Paolo Preto, Venezia e i turchi (Florence: Sansoni, 1975). 30 Aureli, Claudio Cesare, Act I, scene 9: “Fiero destin i colpi tuoi non temo / Che se del Tebro Imperatrice io sono, / Se nel mio scettro ogni poter saduna, / La rota inchio daro della fortuna.” 31 Giovanni Battista Fusconi, Amore inamorato (Venice: Surian, 1642). According to the preface, the plot was presumably suggested by the Incogniti leader and founder, Giovanni Francesco Busenello; the actual poetry was written by the poet Pietro Michiele, and was revised by Giovanni Battista Fusconi.

32 The procuress figure would have been well known from the Roman comedies of Plautus, the commedia dell’arte and the spoken plays as well as the commedia erudita. She is also an instrument of social satire, as

52 | Wendy Heller brilliantly demonstrated by Pietro Aretino in the Ragionamenti. See Aretino, Dialogues, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Stein and Day, 1971). See also Paula Findlen, “Humanism, Politics and Pornography in Renaissance Italy,” in Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: _ Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 (New York: Zone Books, 1996), p. 75.

33 See Heller, “Tacitus Incognito.” This interpretation is suggested in Tim Carter, “Re-Reading Poppea.” 34 On phenomenal music, see Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

2 | Lully’s on-stage societies Rebecca Harris- Warrick

Aside from their numerous and well-discussed musical differences, French and Italian Baroque operas depart radically from each other in their construction of on-stage societies. As a general rule, Italian operas present a small group of individuals who find themselves in unstable situations to which they seek individual resolutions. They may be rulers or generals, and the fate of thousands may depend on their actions, but their subjects or soldiers have no role within the musical world of the opera. French operas, on the other hand, bring crowds of people on stage at least once an act — singing and dancing in the most extended and musically sumptuous passages of the entire work. The protagonists function not as isolated individuals, but within societies that are visible and audible for as much as a third of each opera.

I had this difference brought forcefully to my notice recently when I saw a production of a Handel opera in which the director seemed to chafe at its restricted social world and used two methods to modify visually the string of solo utterances that composed the musical fabric of the work: introducing supernumeraries from time to time; or having any other singers who happened to be on stage engage in actions that

put them into relationships with the soloist that created, however briefly, a sense of a community. But I remained struck by how different

an occasional visual sign of togetherness is from the world of the crowded French stage.’ In contrast to a visible but mute community that may be imposed by a modern director, the societies in French opera were constructed into the drama. Moreover, they get the richest music. The group characters have three means of communication — words, music, and dance — and their sound-world involves not only their own joined voices, but the full resources of the orchestra, in the most musically extended pieces of the opera. This distinguishes them from the protagonists, who have

| 53

54 | Rebecca Harris-Warrick only two modalities available — they lack the medium of dance — and

whose words, closely wedded to the rhythmic patterns of poeticized speech, are usually accompanied only by the continuo.* On musical grounds alone, then, the group scenes command attention, and the dance that they virtually always include provides a kinetic medium of communication that begs to be taken into consideration in any serious account of this style of opera.’ For the sake of convenience, the title of this article mentions Lully alone, but his librettist, Philippe Quinault, was the one responsible for laying out the story, and it is also important to give Pierre Beauchamp, the choreographer at the Paris Opera during Lully’s lifetime, recognition for his contribution, even though its precise nature is harder to recover. (A number of choreographies made for the Opéra during the generation after Lully do survive, although these represent only individual dances — nothing approaching an entire divertissement, let alone

an entire opera.*) The system the three collaborators used was built around performers who specialized; libretto after libretto tells us that some ofthe members of groups sing and some of them dance. Nonethe-

less, the group functioned as a collective entity (“the population of Athens”) and as such had access to both modes of communication.’ In this essay I will not attempt any kind of comprehensive overview of

the societies that operate within these operas (for a broader view of le peuple in French opera, see Catherine Kintzler’s chapter in this volume), but will look instead at three of them — Alceste, Atys, and Armide—

where the relationships between the protagonists and the societies that surround them are radically different.° Whereas Alceste plays to our preconceptions about court-derived opera by presenting social worlds that unproblematically uphold a monarchical hierarchy, the other two operas offer more complex perspectives on how operatic protagonists interact with the societies that surround them. The key word-—societies—is plural, because in French Baroque opera

the social world invoked is rarely the same from one act to another. These operas are not like Verdi's Rigoletto, where the members of the chorus are always the male courtiers of the Duke of Mantua. Instead, since unity of place was not held to be necessary to opera, inhabitants

Lully’s on-stage societies | 55

of many different realms could figure within the same work.’ Here, for example, are the group characters who appear in Alceste (1674).

Act I: Thessalians, the subjects of King Adméte, and, later in the act, sailors under the orders of Licoméde, King of Scyros;

Act II: two groups of soldiers: Thessalians besieging the city of Scyros versus the defenders;

Act III: mourners bewailing the death of Alceste; ActIV: shades and demons, the followers of Pluto, god of the Underworld; ActV: “amiultitude of the different peoples of Greece,” plus, later in the act, various pastoral followers of Apollo, all celebrating the return of order.

In Alceste only one of the groups cannot be found here on earth (the scene in the Underworld has no equivalent in Euripides’ tragedy, on which the opera was based), whereas in Atys, where one of the main characters, Cybele, is a goddess, the groups have more recourse to the realm of the supernatural — what the French called le merveilleux.

Acti: Phrygians (the local populace), invoking and then celebrating the arrival of the goddess Cybéle; Act II: the larger world, “peuples différents,” who include among the dancers Indiens and Egyptiens, honoring Cybéle’s choice of Atys as chief priest of her cult; Act III: dreams — both sweet dreams and nightmares — sent by Cybéle to Atys to tell him of her love for him and to warn him what will happen if he does not reciprocate; ActIV: demi-gods, followers of the river god Sangar, celebrating the wedding of his daughter Sangaride to Célénus, King of Phrygia; ActV: demi-gods, followers of Cybéle, mourning the deaths of Atys and Sangaride. Thus in Atys there are five different social groups: two of them human, two that involve different kinds of demi-gods, and one from the realm of the fantastic. The part of the act dominated by the group characters

56 | Rebecca Harris- Warrick was generally referred to as the divertissement, a term that is useful as a shorthand reference, but whose name carries the unfortunate implication that this type of scene represents a diversion from the main business of the opera, whereas, as we shall see, it is a fundamental and often very dramatic component. Moreover, mechanistic lists of the type given above run the risk of falsifying the operas by making it seem as if an extrinsic demand for variety was the main criterion for including group characters at all, and thus feeding all too easily into a long historiographic tendency to dismiss the divertissements in French opera as serving only decorative purposes. So let us quickly leave lists behind and look instead at how these societies, once introduced, interact with the protagonists. ALCESTE

In the case of Alceste, all the group characters are loyal subjects of a king or a god; as in the hierarchical society that gave birth to this type of opera, their socially defined role is to support their leaders. As Act I opens, Alceste is about to marry Adméte, King of Thessaly, and the populace is rejoicing with repeated cries of “Long live the happy couple” (“Vivez, vivez, heureux Epoux’). In fact, the very first utterance of the opera comes not from an individual, but from the chorus ~ a dramaturgical choice that emphasizes the Thessalians’ collective interest in the marriage and orderly succession of their rulers. But this state of collective joy soon gives way to private concerns. Alceste has two disappointed suitors: Hercules (here called Alcide) and Licoméde, King of the island of Scyros and the brother of the marine divinity Thétis. Alcide, who is struggling to control his feelings for Alceste in order not to betray his friend Adméte, does not have so much as a confidant, let alone an entourage; at this point in the opera, he functions strictly as an

individual. The duplicitous Licoméde, on the other hand, commands a group of sailors, who first offer a féte in celebration of the wedding, then kidnap the unsuspecting Alceste.*® The loyal Thessalians attempt

to come to her aid, but in vain. In Act II Adméte comes to the rescue of his bride, and with the help of Alcide lays siege to Scyros. The

Lully’s on-stage societies | 57

battle between the two opposing groups of soldiers and their respective leaders takes place on stage, complete with battering rams; the besiegers win, but Adméte is mortally wounded. Apollo announces that the only way to save Adméte’s life is if someone offers to die in his place; Alceste alone is willing to sacrifice her life, and in Act III weeping men and women mourn her untimely death, rending their clothes

and breaking ornaments that had belonged to their queen. In Act IV Alcide braves Pluton’s demons in the Underworld and, when Proserpine intercedes with her husband, is allowed to bring Alceste back to earth. His motivation, however, is selfish, as he plans to keep Alceste for

himself. But upon returning to earth, where he witnesses how much Alceste and Adméte love each other, he conquers his baser instincts (the opera’s subtitle is Le Triomphe d’Alcide). Act V concludes with cel-

ebrations of the double victory: Alceste’s return from the dead to her new husband, and the victory of Alcide over himself. The words of the chorus make this doubleness explicit: “Triomphez, généreux Alcide,” sings one group, while the other responds, “Vivez en paix, heureux

, époux.” The opera ends in a celebration carried out in singing and dancing that expands from the population of Thessaly to include people from all over Greece, shepherds and shepherdesses, plus Apollo and the Muses. As a visible and audible sign of his triumph, Alcide, the former loner, has acquired the adulation of the heavens and the earth alike.

As the brief synopsis suggests, group characters play a particularly prominent role in this opera, appearing not only in the divertissements, but also in other portions of all five of the acts. (This emphasis may be due to the use of a Greek tragedy, with its own prominent chorus, as the model, even if Quinault did not refrain from using it in ways very different from what Euripides had done. Quinault was both attacked and defended for the liberties he took with Euripides; he seems to have taken the criticism to heart, as he never again used a classical tragedy as the basis for a libretto.?) The roles the various groups in the opera take on seem very much of a piece with the ones Louis XIV’s subjects were assigned in the ritualized world of his court. Celebrations marked important milestones in the French monarchy — Louis XIV’s wedding

58 | Rebecca Harris-Warrick in 1660, for example, or the birth of the Dauphin the following year, in which the public was invited to participate via processions, firework displays and fountains of wine. The outdoor féte Licoméde stages at the end of Act I to honor the newlyweds is reminiscent of the pageantry that marked the multi-day spectaculars the king hosted in the gardens of Versailles in 1664 (Les Plaisirs de Vile enchantée) and 1668 (La Féte de Versailles); in fact, Alceste itself participated in yet another series of elaborate festivities in 1674, when it was performed before the king in the Marble Courtyard of the royal chateau, as part of the celebrations marking France’s second conquest of Franche-Comté.*° Similarly, the

pomp with which Alceste’s death in Act III is memorialized reflects

, the theatricalized mourning rituals that marked the passing of court notables; in fact, Jean Berain, who designed most of the sets and costumes for Lully’s operas, also designed the decors for a number of court funerals, including the queen’s in 1683." Even the demons who surround Pluton seem more like well-behaved courtiers than fearsome creatures. All of the groups depicted in Alceste, notwithstanding their occasional moments of spontaneity (as in the choral refrains that open Act I or in the expressions of mourning in Act III), act in obedience to powerful beings in activities that uphold the established order. It is no wonder that Alceste seemed an appropriate choice for festivities held to honor a king so set on exhibiting his own powers to his country and the world.

ATYS

The varied groups put on stage in Atys are also good at obeying orders, but in this opera the worlds in which they function are more oppressive than benign. The central conflict within Atys — both the opera and the hero alike — concerns the dissonance between his private desires and his public duties. Atys feigns indifference to love, but the real explana-

tion for his reticence is that he is in love with someone unattainable:

Sangaride is, on that very day, about to marry Célénus, King of Phrygia — Atys’s friend as well as his sovereign. As the opera opens Atys is preparing for the imminent arrival of the goddess Cybéle, whose visit

Lully’s on-stage societies | 59

to Phrygia is a sign of her favor to this land and who is expected to name Célénus as her grand sacrificateur. Atys’s first words show him in

his public role as organizer of the rites in her honor, notwithstanding the fact that he is alone on stage. Atys: — Allons, allons, accourez tous, Cybele va descendre. Trop heureux Phrygiens, venez icy l’attendre. Mille Peuples seront jaloux Des faveurs que sur nous Sa bonté va répandre.

(“Come, hasten, Cybele is about to descend. Fortunate Phrygians, come wait for her here. A thousand nations will be jealous of the favors her goodness will bestow upon us.” Atys, Act I, scene 1.)

The Phrygians he calls do not appear — in fact, they do not arrive until towards the end of the act — but they are repeatedly invoked by the refrain (the first two lines of text), which from a solo utterance

becomes a duet, then a duet for different characters, and finally a quartet, as more and more of the main characters enter the stage.” Although in this part of the act the protagonists operate in private, their public selvesimpinge on their conversations; we learn, forinstance, that Sangaride shares responsibility for the honors to be shown Cybele. (1/6, “Atys: Sangaride, ce jour est un grand jour pour vous. Sangaride: Nous

ordonnons tous deux la feste de Cybele, / L’honneur est égal entre nous.) Finally, with the Phrygians reported to be in sight, Atys and Sangaride find themselves alone together; their self-imposed silence breaks down and each confesses to loving the other. But just as they are reveling in the discovery of their love, their private moment is shattered by the arrival of the crowds. Instantly Atys and Sangaride must assume their social duties, as they lead the invocation urging Cybéle to favor

them with her presence. The larger society is no longer something merely invoked, but now becomes palpably real. The libretti for the court performances of Lully’s operas give the names of all the performers, including the dancers and the members of the chorus, so it is possible to get a sense of how this society was

60 | Rebecca Harris- Warrick represented. In the court premiere of 1676, there were twenty-six performers on stage in this scene. Atys, Sangaride, Doris, Idas 10 hommes Phyrigiens chantans conduits par Atys 10 femmes Phrygiennes chantantes conduites par Sangaride 6 Phrygiens dancans 6 Nimphes Phrygiennes dancantes” Here we see the standard division of labor among the group characters to which I have already alluded: some of the Phrygians are identified as singers, others as dancers. This is a practical solution to the prob-

lem of assuring high-quality performances in both arts, but it also has certain implications for the structure of such scenes. As a general rule, the activities of singing and dancing were done not simultaneously, but consecutively. What the spectators perceived was an alternation between instrumental music supporting physical movement and vocal music accompanying stasis. This alternation could occur either between movements or, in the case of choruses, within them.” In this case, the chorus leads off. Scene 7 (in C major)

An extended chorus. In the first section, “Commencons nos jeux et nos chansons,” the voices alternate with brief instrumental passages that may have been danced. The second section, “Venez, Reine des Dieux,” alternates invocations by Atys and/or Sangaride with choral passages; there are no purely instrumental passages.

“Entrée des Phrygiens.” A binary dance in duple meter. (See Example 2.1.)

“Second Air des Phrygiens.” A dance in rondeau form in 6/4 time. (See Example 2.2.) Scene 8 (in A minor)

An instrumental prelude that serves to bring in Cybele on her flying chariot. Cybéle invites everyone into her temple to hear her choice of grand sacrificateur.

Lully’s on-stage societies | 61 The chorus honors Cybéle, repeating her final words, to end the act. The walking bass passages that punctuate their phrases may have been intended to accompany their steps as they move toward the temple.

The cast list tells us that Atys and Sangaride lead the group, and in the opening chorus they do, in fact, always sing first, seconded by the Phrygian populace, who have no independent utterances of their own but simply repeat what Atys and Sangaride have already said. In a ritual context, the chorus’s passive role seems perfectly normal; any independence on its part would have been startling. Notice, however, that the cast list makes a point of saying that Atys leads the men, Sangaride the women. The distinction in the list between male and female roles follows the normal practice in French libretti, which scrupulously present both masculine and feminine word endings, such as the Phrygiens and Phrygiennes of this act, rather than lumping the entire crowd into a single group identity. However, assigning each gender a separate

leader occurs rarely enough in libretti to raise the question of what such insistence means. The distinction does not play out aurally, as this chorus does not alternate sections for men and sections for women —

a treatment Lully uses often enough in his choruses to have made it an option. But here the chorus always sings in four parts, so the distinction must have been visual. The two dance pieces that follow the chorus are unhelpfully labeled “Entrée des Phrygiens” and “Second Air des Phrygiens” (headings in the scores rarely observe the gender distinctions found in cast lists), so here I enter the realm of speculation

as to who danced what.

It is striking that the musical language of the first entrée seems to draw upon tropes of dances for men, the second for women. (Compare the assertive dotted rhythms of Example 2.1 to the lilting triple meter of Example 2.2 — a instance of sexual dimorphism common in Lully’s musical vocabulary.) Moreover, there is no obvious place for the two groups to dance together, except possibly during the instrumental passages within the big chorus that opened the scene. If, in fact, the two dances that follow the invocation to Cybéle were performed by

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62 | Rebecca Harris- Warrick

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separate male and female groups, it is worth asking what the effect of that choreographic choice is at this point in the opera. It would seem that, coming on the heels of Atys’s and Sangaride’s private declaration of love, such a visual image would underscore the social forces that are pushing the two of them apart. Rather than being told in a solo aria or dramatic recitative by one of them that their love faces immense obstacles, as might have happened in an Italian opera, we are shown the rituals of the society whose strictures, Atys and Sangaride are beginning

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Lully’s on-stage societies | 63

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to realize, go contrary to their individual happiness. Even though they themselves do not dance, they have been clearly identified with the collective singing and dancing characters, whose movements present a visual image not of togetherness, but of separation. In looking at the group scenes in French opera, it becomes important to see not only what is happening within them, but who or what is controlling them. More often than not, this kind of opera being the

64 | Rebecca Harris- Warrick product of a highly centralized and hierarchical society, the groups are operating at the bidding of a powerful person who takes it for granted that the followers will obey. At other times, as in the act just discussed, no single person is issuing orders, but the groups are engaged in social practices that uphold the values and structures of the society. In Atys, with the exception of the dream sequence in Act III, all the on-stage groups participate in time-honored rituals: sacred rites, wedding celebrations, or mourning. The fact that no single individual governs all these scenes illustrates for the audience how broadly distributed are the social forces with which Atys finds himself in conflict. In Act I,

Cybele surprises everyone by naming not Célénus, but Atys, as her grand sacrificateur; Atys is then obliged to accept the homage of the people honoring him for a role he does not want. In the following act he learns, through the medium of dreams sent by Cybéle, that the goddess is in love with him and will punish him if he fails to reciprocate. The jolly divertissement in Act IV extends the worlds to which we have been given access to the realm of Sangaride’s father, he being completely unaware that his daughter is miserable in the face of her impending wedding. The celebrations by his subjects, which go on at great length, provide needed relief for the audience from the tensions mounting within the opera, but they bring home to us how impossible it is for Sangaride to escape her societally defined roles.” In Act V, the knot tightens: Cybéle reveals to Célénus that Atys and Sangaride have betrayed them both. In a jealous rage, while surrounded by her priestesses and a chorus of Phyrgians, she makes Atys think Sangaride

is a monster; he kills Sangaride, then returning to his senses, turns the knife on himself. The remorseful Cybéle transforms the dead Atys into a tree sacred to her cult. Any sense of resolution is undermined by the opposing words of the double chorus in the concluding divertissement, which go back and forth between pain and rage (“Quelle douleur!” sing the woodland gods, while the Corybantes reply, “Ah,

quelle rage!) and by the remarkable set of three dances that follow the chorus and make visible this emotional division.’® In this opera the social fabric has been torn asunder; the thunder and earthquakes that accompany the concluding chorus tell us that the tragedy is not

Lully’s on-stage societies | 65 individual but universal, and the key word in the chorus’s last utterance is “horror.”*”

ARMIDE

The strictures of society so vividly illustrated by the group scenes in Atys are completely lacking in Armide (1686). In this opera, also set to a libretto by Quinault (who drew the story from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata), the central conflict takes place entirely inside the heroine; outside society may be relevant for the hero, Renaud, who returns to the pursuit of military glory at the opera’s end, but it means nothing to her and it just barely figures inside the world of the opera.’® In what might seem like a paradox, the divertissements become one of the most effective means of focusing attention on the heroine’s struggles

with herself. Here are the group characters who sing and dance in Armide:

ActI: the populace of the kingdom of Damascus, celebrating the success Armide’s beauty has had in defeating the Christian knights; Act II: | demons conjured by Armide, disguised as shepherds and

shepherdesses, who enchant Renaud (Armide’s attempt to | kill the sleeping Renaud follows this scene);

Act III: Hatred accompanied by the Furies and the Passions, whom Armide has called up in a vain attempt to drive the love for Renaud from her heart; ActIV: demons transformed by Armide into rustic inhabitants of the island where Armide is holding Renaud captive — here they try to distract the two knights coming to rescue Renaud;

Act V: demons disguised as Fortunate Lovers and Pleasures, who entertain Renaud while Armide is away.

Already in Act I, the only place where an actual human society is represented, the chorus focuses our attention on Armide’s powers, which have just won her a major victory over Godefroy’s knights.

66 | Rebecca Harris- Warrick Hidraot ¢ le Choeur: Armide est encor plus aimable Qu elle n’est redoutable. Que son triomphe est glorieux! Ses charmes les plus forts sont ceux de ses beaux yeux.

Phenice é le Choeur: Suivons Armide et chantons sa victoire.

Tout univers retentit de sa gloire. (Armide, I/3) (Hidraot and Chorus: Armide is even more beloved than she is fearsome. How glorious is her triumph! Her strongest charms are those of her beautiful eyes. Phenice and Chorus: Let us follow Armide and sing of her victory. The entire universe resounds with her glory.)

In the subsequent four acts the key word of this passage, “charm, ” moves from the figurative to the literal. These lengthy and musically rich scenes all arise from Armide’s magical powers; within her realm no one else — least of all the putative hero Renaud — has any control over other beings. Armide, on the other hand, has an apparently infinite supply of demons ready to assume any human form at her slightest command. Moreover, via the mechanisms of displacement that operate in Lully’s works, Armide’s seductiveness gets activated more through the singing and dancing bodies of her followers than it does through her own utterances. If it were not for the divertissements that Armide conjures up, we would have a very different understanding of both her person and her powers. This is most overt in the last act, the only time in the entire opera when the two lovers have a scene together. (In Act II they were on stage at the same time, but Renaud was asleep.) Their love duet lasts all of seven minutes, whereas the famous passacaille that follows, sung and danced by Fortunate Lovers vaunting the pleasures of Love, goes on for over twice as long and warms up the emotional temperature considerably — this despite the fact that Armide herself leaves before it starts. Dance, then as now, was a powerful vehicle for evoking erotic love, even if the movement vocabulary of Lully’s day does not look very sexualized to our twenty-first-century eyes; it is presumably no accident that the three surviving Baroque choreographies set to this passacaille are all for women.”? Yet Armide’s conjurations

Lully’s on-stage societies | 67

ultimately serve to make palpable the struggles going on in her own heart. She succeeds in gaining power over her enemy Renaud, but, much to her shame, falls in love with him. She summons Hatred only to drive it away, when she cannot face the consequences of her action. After that fatal moment, she uses her charms to try to keep Renaud in her thrall, knowing full well that his supposed love for her is merely a product of magic. The creatures she conjures up have nothing to do with the social worlds of Atys, even if on the level of the mechanics of the divertissements they may behave according to similar conventions. No matter how crowded the stage, everywhere we see only Armide. This opera, Lully’s last tragédie en musique, is undoubtedly a masterpiece, but in its obsessive concentration on a single character it is also an exception. The varied societies in Alceste and Atys are more representative of Lully’s works in general, even though they do not begin to exhaust all the possible social dynamics within this very rich operatic repertoire. Quinault’s carefully crafted libretti alone grant the group characters a significant role in every act, but their presence is enormously magnified by the music Lully wrote for them and the dancing in which they engage. Now that several of Lully’s works have moved from the shelves of research libraries to the modern stage and recording studio,”° they can enter our ears and eyes and help us realize more fully how central collective characters are to the world of French opera. Moreover, granting the on-stage societies their due could help us move away from simplistic clichés about French opera as nothing more than royal propaganda. Lully’s operas insist that all people, even operatic characters, function within a social universe, but they do not impose a single vision of how those individuals and societies interact. NOTES

1 It may seem dubious to compare a tragédie en musique from the 1670s or 1680s with an opera seria written in the next century by a German-English composer, but the comparison holds for Lully’s Italian contemporaries as well. By 1672, when Lully began composing opera, Venetian opera had almost eliminated the chorus and relegated group dancing to serving as

68 | Rebecca Harris- Warrick entertainment between the acts; see, for instance, Antonio Sartorio’s L’Orfeo (1673), facsimile in Drammaturgia musicale veneta, vol. v1 (Milan:

Ricordi, 1983), recorded in 1998 by Teatro Lirico, Stephen Stubbs, director (Vanguard Classics, 99194), which has no choral music whatsoever and only a handful of entr’acte dances. Exceptions to this general tendency, most notably some of the Venetian operas of the 1690s by Carlo Francesco Pollarolo, may exhibit French influence. See Irene Alm, “Winged Feet and Mute Eloquence: Dance in Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera,” Cambridge Opera Journal 15/3 (2003), 216-280, especially pp. 263-264, and Kathleen Kuzmick Hansell, “Theatrical Ballet and Italian Opera,” in Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, eds., Opera on Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 117-308, especially pp. 178-182, “Ballet during the Age of Venetian Opera, 1640-1720.” 2 In 1679, with his opera Bellérophon, Lully began accompanying some of the dramatically important vocal utterances, recitatives and airs both, with the orchestra; nonetheless, even in his last tragédie, Armide, the vast majority of the singing outside the divertissements is accompanied by continuo only. In fact, the most famous part of the opera, the dramatic monologue in which Armide stands poised over the sleeping Renaud, dagger in hand, is a case in point. 3 The historiography of French Baroque opera, particularly that written in English, has tended either to talk around the dancing or to treat it with formalist tools — counting the number of menuets or gavottes used by Lully, for instance. This article draws upon my work in progress regarding how dance functioned inside of French opera from-Lully to Rameau. 4 Of the approximately 350 choreographies from this period that survive in Feuillet notation, 47 state in their titles that they were performed at the Opéra. For example, the “Entrée pour un homme et une femme, dancée par Mr Balon et Mlle Subligny a !Opéra de Persée” was created for the 1703 revival of Lully’s Persée; see my “Contexts for Choreographies: Notated Dances Set to the Music of J. B. Lully,” in Jér6me de La Gorce and Herbert Schneider, eds., Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687). Actes du Colloque/Kongrefbericht, Saint-Germain-en-Laye/ Heidelberg 1987 (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1990), Pp. 233-255.

5 Regarding the mechanics of the divertissement, see my article “Recovering the Lullian Divertissement,” in Sarah McCleave, ed., Dance and Music in French Baroque Theatre: Sources and Interpretations. Study Texts No. 3

Lully’s on-stage societies | 69 (London: Institute of Advanced Musical Studies, King’s College London, 1998), pp. 55-80. 6 Synopses of these operas, along with contextual information about each, may be found in articles written by Lois Rosow for the New Grove Dictionary of Opera (London: Macmillan, 1992). All are available on CD: the most recent recording (1994) of Alceste is by La Grande Ecurie et la Chambre du Roy, conducted by Jean-Claude Malgloire (Astrée/ Audivis E 8527). Atys may be heard in a 1987 recording by Les Arts Florissants, conducted by William Christie (Harmonia Mundi HMC 901257-59); the one available complete recording of Armide was directed by Philippe Herreweghe and recorded in 1993 (Harmonia Mundi HMC 901456-57). 7 In regard to the relationship between opera and spoken tragedy in this period, see Catherine Kintzler, Poétique de V’opéra francais de Corneille a Rousseau (Paris: Minerve, 1991). 8 Alceste premiered at the Paris Opera in 1674, before women started dancing there, which helps explain why the dancers in the Act I divertissement consisted originally only of male sailors. In later productions the dancing roles also included sea nymphs and female sailors. (Male professional dancers were trained to dance female as well as male roles, but the number of female dancing roles in Lully operas increased after 1681, when women joined the dance troupe.) Women appeared on stage as singers, both as soloists and in the chorus, right from the start of French opera, and in this divertissement the singing chorus is mixed.

| 9 Alceste excited a series of polemics about which much has been written. For a perspective that takes into consideration the work of other scholars, see Manuel Couvreur, Jean-Baptiste Lully: Musique et dramaturgie au service du prince (Brussels: Marc Vokar, 1992), pp. 292-302.

10 Regarding the deliberate construction of Louis XIV’s image during his lifetime, see Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992); for descriptions and illustrations of the festivities held at court over the course of the reign, see MarieChristine Moine, Les Fétes a la cour du Roi Soleil (Paris: Editions EF Lanore

& F Sorlot, 1984). 11 Reproductions of some of Berain’s funeral designs may be seen in Jérdme de La Gorce, Berain: Dessinateur du roi soleil (Paris: Herscher, 1986), p. 104 and pp. 128-135; “Les pompes funébres, il est vrai,

70 | Rebecca Harris-Warrick empruntaient beaucoup a l’univers théatral” (p. 132). Philippe Beaussant, in Lully, ou le musicien du Soleil (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), pp. 537-540 and

773-784, draws provocative analogies between the funeral ceremonies for Chancellor Séguier in 1672, at which a Miserere by Lully was performed, and the funeral rites depicted in Alceste. 12 Atys is joined first by his confidant, Idas, then by his beloved, Sangaride, and her confidante, Doris. Lully set each iteration of the text to a slightly varied repeat of the musical refrain to which Atys had entered the stage. 13 The information regarding casting comes from the libretto published for the premiere of the opera at the royal chateau of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (Paris: Ballard, 1676), p. 14. Libretti published for public performances at the Paris Opera did not start including the performers’ names until 1699. Given the paucity of markings in the scores, particularly in regard to who performs during the various dance pieces, such hints about casting can be very helpful. 14 For a more extended discussion of the staging of operatic divertissements, see my “Recovering the Lullian Divertissement” and ““Toute danse doit exprimer, peindre . . .: Finding the Drama in the Operatic Divertissement,” in Peter Reidemeister, ed., Basler Jahrbuch fiir historische Musikpraxis 23 (1999) (Winterthur, Switzerland: Amadeus Verlag, 2000), pp. 187-210. 15 This particular divertissement belongs to the category identified by Catherine Kintzler elsewhere in this volume as “suspensive.” 16 The first of the three dances, the “Entrée des Nymphes,” is in a slow triple meter and a minor mode, with many chromatic inflections. The douleur it expresses is opposed by the vigorous “Premiere entrée des Corybantes,” in a major mode with both triadic figures and pounding repeated notes, a piece that clearly maps onto the singing Corybantes’ rage. The third dance goes back and forth approximately every three measures between these two emotional poles (C+, duple meter, ageressive repeated notes vs. a tender and chromatically inflected slow triple meter) that must have been choreographed for two opposing groups of dancers; in this remarkable piece, rage has the last word. 17 The opera ends with the words “Que tout sente, icy bas, / L’horreur d’un si cruel trépas” (“May everyone on earth feel the horror of such a cruel death.”)

Lully’s on-stage societies | 7I 18 The warrior princess Armide, leader of the forces fighting the Crusaders, has no interest in love, despite her uncle’s urging that she marry. She lays a trap for her bitterest enemy, Renaud, but when she stands over his sleeping figure, knife upraised, is unable to bring herself to kill him. Instead she whisks him off to her magic realm, where she alternately tries to drive the love she feels for him from her heart and uses magic to renew the power she has over him. Renaud’s commander sends two knights to rescue him; they succeed in breaking the charm, although Renaud leaves Armide with reluctance. In a rage of despair, Armide destroys her enchanted palace and departs on a flying chariot. 19 Two of the three choreographies come from early eighteenth-century English sources. The third, choreographed by Guillaume-Louis Pécour, Beauchamp’s successor at the Paris Opera, was not designed for that stage, but was nonetheless performed by Mlle Subligny, who had been one of the dancers in Act V of Armide during the revival of 1703. 20 In addition to Alceste, Atys, and Armide, Phaéton, Persée, Roland, and Acis et

Galatée have been released on CD. A new edition of the complete works of Jean-Baptiste Lully is now under way (the old edition, published during the 1930s under the direction of Henry Pruniéres, is far from complete); a volume of three court ballets was published in 2001 (ed. James Cassaro, Albert Cohen, and Rebecca Harris-Warrick; Hildesheim: Olms Verlag), now followed by the first opera volume, Armide (ed. Lois Rosow, 2003) and a volume containing the comedy-ballets Monsieur de Pourceaugnac and Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (ed. JérGme de La Gorce and

Herbert Schneider, 2006).

3 | Representations of le peuple in French opera, 1673-1764 Catherine Kintzler

I would like at the outset to call into question a widespread idea. It is generally believed that French opera embodied the aristocratic ideology of the court, and that this ideology was challenged in the last third of the eighteenth century. This is not completely accurate. A purely ideological approach has difficulty accounting for many operatic details, and it is particularly unsuited to explaining the way in which le peuple (by which I mean “ordinary people”) are shown on the stage in French ancien régime opera." This is the topic I will address here —_ representations of the people on the stage of the Académie Royale de Musique between 1673 and 1764 — and I will do so using a strictly literary framework. The topic itself presents a paradox: due to the specific aesthetic and literary nature of French opera in the classical period, it is difficult to imagine how le peuple would have a role to play within it. Indeed, the operas of this period are grounded in an aesthetic of exemplarity and heroic themes. Moreover, in these works, the problems of the city and politics more generally play a secondary role. However, as I will show, the populace is nonetheless consistently present. Furthermore, I will argue that this presence is introduced for specific poetic reasons that arise from a general rule which, at one and the same time, links

and opposes theatre and opera in this period. On the one hand, the people are present just as they appear in the spoken theatre, but with adjustments specific to the operatic stage; on the other hand, they are present in a manner opposite to that which occurs in theatre, but still analogously to theatre.

72 |

Le peuple in French opera, 1673-1764 | 73

THE PROBLEM OF LE PEUPLE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH OPERA That everyday subject matter would be present at all in French opera in this period is far from obvious. Opera was certainly a popular genre, but it was not particularly concerned with everyday subjects.* Indeed, the tragedies lyriques or tragedies en musique that dominated at the Académie Royale de Musique were noble and heroic. Let us examine the problem

in greater detail. In previous writings, I have tried to show that French

opera, from the point of view of its literary construction, is closely related to the spoken, traditional, theatre.? The relationship between theatre and opera can be characterized as competitive, but also as isomorphic: theatre initially constituted an obstacle for opera, before becoming one of its sources. French opera appeared on the scene relatively late, despite Mazarin’s

attempt to introduce Italian opera into the country in 1647. One has to wait until 1659 for the first French opera — La Pastorale d’Issy of Perrin and Cambert — and the new form did not really take off until the founding of the Académie Royale de Musique in 1671 and the subsequent invention of the trageédie lyrique by Lully and Quinault with their Cadmus et Hermione of 1673. My hypothesis is that this late breakthrough can be explained by the presence of a highly developed spoken

theatre which obstructed the horizon, so to speak. In order to achieve a breakthrough, opera had to prove that it could be as prestigious as spoken theatre. The two art forms were rivals; contemporary com-

mentators return incessantly to the comparison between opera and theatre. Quinault and Lully’s stroke of genius in responding to this challenge was to transform the obstacle into an advantage, inventing a musical tragedy parallel to theatrical tragedy, comparable but still fundamentally different. It was necessary to create an art form that was just as good as, and analogous to, the products of the existing theatre, but that was, at the same time, clearly distinguished from them. As a result, the tragédie lyrique is analogous to spoken drama, and yet not at all the same. A structural relationship exists between the two kinds of drama, and more particularly between the two types of tragedy: both varieties of

74 | Catherine Kintzler drama are subject to a common set of laws, but at the same time the opposition between the two is also an effect of these common laws.* This relationship can be summarized by the concept of reverse symmetry, the idea of which is that one begins with traditional tragedy, applying to it a series of transformations in a certain order (first opposition and reversals, then translations); the result is musical tragedy. Thus

musical tragedy shows things that spoken tragedy does not (magical action and agents, violence, dreams, hallucinations, and insanity), and it does so by means not available to, or at least not acceptable in, spoken

theatre (through music and dance and through changes of location). Musical tragedy produces a different kind of effect from spoken theatre, an effect of enchantment and poetized horror. It is important to note that these differences do not result from the absence of rules, but are themselves rule-bound. Once the inversions have been put into effect, musical tragedy observes the same general laws as traditional theatre, mutatis mutandis. The librettists of musical tragedy use the same keyboard, so to speak, as do stage dramatists, but they push a kind of “shift” key which introduces another world, a world of marvels. I will not elaborate further on this idea in this context, but ask instead that it be accepted as a given.’ In summary, opera does not follow exactly the same rules as spoken

theatre, but is structured after the manner of the theatre. One consequence of this is that the representation of le peuple in opera is problematic, for two reasons. First, like the spoken theatre, opera during this period was overwhelmingly tragic. Both genres place characters on stage who are far from ordinary: kings, princes and princesses, warriors and heroes, and, in opera, gods, demons, fairies, and magicians as well. Not only are such characters of heroic stature, they frequently do extraordinary, even magical, things. The ordinary world of the people is not touched upon directly, nor do the people play a central role in musical tragedy or opera more generally. From this point of view, opera is similar to theatre. Second, another problem arises which places opera

in opposition to the theatre. At the heart of opera, one almost always finds a love story; politics, by contrast, is mainly secondary. Collective topics, even if they are addressed, never loom as large in opera as they do in spoken drama.

Le peuple in French opera, 1673-1764 | 75 Hence many different reasons can be found as to why le peuple should be absent from opera, or at least as to why its role should be secondary.

And yet ordinary people are consistently present in opera, and often heavily so.° How, then, are ordinary people introduced into opera, and how is their presence justified? It is not necessary, in order to answer these questions, to deny or modify the fundamental assumptions outlined above. On the contrary, the assumptions that I have just outlined make it possible to explain how ordinary people are present in opera, and why. They are in fact present in two ways, both of which result from the morphology of opera in relation to the spoken theatre. First, ordinary people are initially present as they are in the theatre, but they are subsequently transformed in conformity with the requirements of the lyric stage. Second, they are present in a way that is contrary to the norms of non-musical theatre. In other words, the way the people are represented in early ancien régime opera confirms the hypothesis outlined above: namely, that the opera of this period is both replica and reverse of spoken drama. MODIFYING REPRESENTATIONS OF LE PEUPLE FOR THE LYRIC STAGE In this first incarnation, in which opera appears to be a replica of spoken drama, le peuple occupies a poetic dimension which was labelled in this period the dimension bourgeoise — as opposed, of course, to the heroic dimension. This opposition between the heroic (or noble) and the bourgeois (or ordinary and middle-class) was inherited from Aristotle’s Poetics and was used mainly to distinguish tragedy from comedy. However, in opera —just as in the spoken theatre — the heroic dimension did not stand alone. Right from the start there were non-heroic genres,

even if the dominant one was still the lyric tragedy. And even within the heroic genre, ordinary figures appear, offering a strong contrast to the more heroic characters.

Genres The pastorale and pastorale héroique genres. Though the lyric tragedy

was the dominant operatic genre in the seventeenth and eighteenth

76 | Catherine Kintzler centuries, it was not the only one and was also not necessarily superior in quality to the others. It was not even the first kind of opera, which remains the pastorale. The pastorale and the comédie-ballet served dur-

ing this period as a kind of field of experimentation for opera. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the spoken pastorale was very commonplace, and it was easy to transform it into a musical form. The pastorale was structurally complex and combined amorous intrigues with scenes of mistaken identity, assignations, recognition scenes, lovelorn lamentations, poetic declamation, sleep and dream scenes, hallucinations, and magic. Its characters belonged to the middle ranks of humanity: shepherds and shepherdesses idealized along the lines of the great novels of the seventeenth century.’ The spoken pastorale disappeared around the mid-1600s and was replaced by the operatic version of the genre. This operatic version retains from its spoken predecessor the gallant character of the intrigues, the plaintive outbursts, the poetic recitations (also a feature ofthe secular cantata), the scenes of mistaken identity, the sleep and dream sequences, and the spells, as well as several burlesque scenes featuring fauns and satyrs. Set in the countryside, it also includes

peasant dances. However, in keeping with its own specific nature, the operatic pastorale effects a number of transformations. Thus the magical, hallucinatory, and dream scenes are not simply suggested, but

are treated as real: the spectator sees actual hallucinations on stage, and he or she experiences the characters’ dreams. The pastoral motif is found in almost all lyrical tragedies, usually in the form of scenes of mistaken identity between lovers or in the form of what I would call “the enchanted pastoral”: magical divertissements involving shepherds and shepherdesses, fauns, and satyrs which take place during the early

acts of an opera, before things take a turn for the worse and those tragic powers come into play that will eventually lead to violence.* At the end of the seventeenth century, a new genre appeared, one that would enjoy great success during the eighteenth century, especially in ballet: the pastorale héroique.? Although the pastorale héroique involves aristocratic characters and gods, it often places them in ordinary situations or in close relation with ordinary characters. The typical

Le peuple in French opera, 1673-1764 | 77 situation in these works is the following: a god or a goddess is in love with a mortal, but since the former wants to be loved for him-or herself, he or she therefore disguises his or her identity by assuming that

of an ordinary character such as a shepherd. Eventually the divine character reveals his or her true nature. Alternatively, a mortal is in love with a god or goddess and ends up obtaining some kind of social advancement thanks to a supernatural intervention.*© Comedy and the comic genre. By definition, comedy is non-heroic, and

matriage is its main topic." At the Académie Royale de Musique, the comic genre was scarcely present. However, it is crucial to note that the word “comic” can have two different meanings: it can refer to a particular kind of poetic dimension (e.g., a comic character); or it can refer to the means to a final result, i.e., that which makes an audience

laugh. Here we are only interested in the first meaning. From this point of view, the comic is rare in opera. The few comedies presented at the Académie Royale were generally ballets that were inspired by Italian or ancient comedy (Plautus, Menander, Aristophanes). The plot is always a conventional one: an old (or disabled) rich man wants to marry a young girl, who is in turn loved by a young man (and whom, of course, she loves). Eventually the lovers triumph and make fun of the rich old man. The setting is usually Venice.** Something new happens with Les Fétes de Thalie, a ballet of 1714 by La Font and Mouret: in an Avertissement preceding the play, the poet claims that this is the very first

comedy “a la francaise” to be presented on the stage of the Académie Royale.” In the same year, a true comedy (in both meanings of the word) was performed at Sceaux (and later in 1742 at the Académie Royale): Les Amours de Ragonde by Néricault-Destouches and Mouret, who set their piece in a village. Le peuple in the lyric tragedy Scenes of comedy. While comedies themselves are rare, comic scenes

are indeed present in heroic works. One means by which they are sometimes introduced is through a parallel plot concerning servants and minor characters. Such scenes, treated in a comic way, are probably

78 | Catherine Kintzler inherited from Italian opera and from the French pastorale, in which the various genres are mixed. But this mixture, very frequent in early lyric

tragedies by Lully, tends to disappear toward the end of seventeenth century. I think we can speak of “residual” scenes: comic scenes are present to the same extent that they are in theatrical tragedies.” Confidants. Another means of introducing le peuple into tragedy is through confidants who represent, both through their modest social

position and their attitudes and manner of speaking, the ordinary mass of humanity. In musical tragedy they play the same role as in spo-

ken tragedy: committed to a vulgar point of view that contrasts with that of their masters, they do not understand heroism and thereby call attention to it. Thus they supply their masters with advice that stresses prudence, moderation, even duplicity — advice that is completely opposed to aristocratic ideals. They offer exhortations such as “Do as you're told,” “negotiate,” “dissemble,” “save what can be saved,” “be careful,” and the like. Their narrow world is not heroic: it is a world of compromise, renunciation, and small gains.’® They aspire

to security and peace, which they value above honor and glory. The contrast between the two visions of the world is often amusing, and sometimes comic.

THE OPERATIC PRESENCE OF LE PEUPLE: OPPOSITION AND ANALOGY TO THE SPOKEN THEATRE My assumption ofa reverse parallelism makes it possible to understand two modes of insertion and representation of the people: (1) a mode

based on the concept of poetic dimension, and (2) a morphological mode, or one based on the fundamental structure which governs the relationship between spoken theatre and opera. According to the first mode, which we have just examined, ordinary people are present as they are in theatre but transformed by the requirements of the lyric genre. According to the second mode, the people are present in a manner opposite to that found in the theatre; nevertheless, this very contrariety obeys a general rule of analogy between spoken theatre and opera.

Le peuple in French opera, 1673-1764 | 79

The concept of spectacle: Opposite functions of spectacle and drama The question that now arises no longer concerns the nature of characters but rather the presence of a community, a collective presence. Such a presence then brings with it questions that are political in the broadest sense: questions of opinion, habit and custom, law, power, war. Such issues are traditionally linked to the city and are central to classical tragedy.’” While it is true that some tragedies do not revolve around “higher interests of state,” all raise in one way or another questions that are political in nature. It is in this sense that Phédre is a political

work because it raises issues of incest within the royal family and of the royal succession. The basic laws of the collectivity are called into question by the possible misconduct of the queen. This aspect of the spoken tragedy moves to the background in musical dramas. However, although the existence of the community is fundamental in spoken tragedy, the community itself never appears on the stage. Neither crowd, battle, nor riot is visible: they all have been banished from the stage. The concept of “off stage” is constituent: what is not seen (or said) has as muchimportance as what is seen (and said), precisely because it is not seen. In other words: traditional spoken theatre avoids

spectacle. This is evident in the case of violence: it is not shown, but it is necessary. The relegation of something to the off-stage area does not suppress it, but on the contrary lends to it an essential and often a more worrisome and problematic aspect — it becomes an enigma.” Thus crowds are not visible, yet they haunt spoken tragedy.’ On all of these points, musical tragedy is strongly opposed to spoken tragedy: not only does it reduce the political plot to secondary importance, but it is also a kind of tragedy without an “outside”: it possesses no exteriority, so to speak. This is so because it incorporates its own outside: all that can be shown is shown. Opera is based on an aesthetic of exhibition, an aesthetic of spectacle. This results in a perfect symmetry that takes on the appearance of a double paradox. Thus spoken tragedy,

which is essentially political, does not show the collectivity, whereas musical tragedy, which is not political, frequently features crowds and

80 | Catherine Kintzler the people. By definition, opera is a “populated” and rather crowded form of theatre: there are a lot of people on stage.*° But the collective presence, while visible, does not act as an agent; it is an object, an indirect part of the drama.” The people, embodied on stage by the chorus and by the troupe of dancers, function as a kind of extension of the monarch to whom they are subject, fulfilling the function of the classical chorus through their commentary, lamentations, and expressions of opinion and approval. They are sometimes caught in the middle ofa conflict between a tyrant and a good ruler who serves as their protector. The people may also represent the source ofa monarch’s legitimacy, calling upon him to rule

through acclamation and providing seemingly spontaneous though possibly fickle signs of support. This collectivity is, however, never the direct agent, but rather the object, tool, or pretext of the actions of others, namely the main characters. These main characters — the heroes — are the ones who truly deliberate and act. The highly visible

and audible presence of the community assumes indirect functions which were traditionally those of the chorus in ancient tragedy. I now turn to the examination of some of these functions in order to show how they are related to a spectacular presence.**

Functions of the collective presence (chorus and dancers) Commentary. This is a very traditional and stereotyped function: the chorus comments on the situation and reflects common opinions, or simply describes emotions related to the situation. This commentary can assume different emotional coloring such as of joy, complaint, or panic. Expressions of celebration and joy of course occur very frequently in opera: for example, celebration of a victory, a hero, a prince,

or a god.” Lamentations highlight an important difference between theatre and opera, for the spoken theatre avoids collective manifestations of this emotion whereas opera does not. Compare, for example, the lyric tragedy Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) by Rameau and Pellegrin, Act IV, scene 4, with Racine’s Phédre, Act IV, scene 6, in which it is

announced that Hippolyte has been killed by a monster. The lyric

Le peuple in French opera, 1673-1764 | 81 version gives a spectacular part to the chorus (“ Hippolyte n’est plus”), in which Rameau is probably recalling a scene from Lully’s Alceste, Act III, scene 4 (“Alceste est morte”). Racine’s version, by contrast, alludes

to Phaedra’s guilt. The example illustrates the extent to which the emotional emphasis differs in a non-spectacular vis-a-vis a spectacular version. As for panic scenes, they are very numerous: almost every lyric tragedy offers several. To cite but one example among many, such a panic scene is occasioned at the end of Act III of Les Boréades (1764), Rameau’s last opera, by a very long and spectacular storm accompanied by an earthquake and tidal wave.** The voice of suitability and propriety. In ancient theatre, the chorus traditionally expresses widely held views. It articulates the limits of what may be done and said if social stability is be maintained, thereby reflecting the established social order. In opera this function is pleas-

antly transferred to the fantastical world. In fact, this world has its own rules and its own verisimilitude based on a preexisting “fabulous” literature, so that a poet cannot simply imagine what he pleases. He must obey these general laws of verisimilitude and the particular rules of appropriateness. For example, he is not permitted to employ a god in a task other than the one traditionally assigned to him. Thus in the second act of Hippolyte et Aricie, Thésée is in Hell, and asks his father Neptune to help him escape. We then hear the demons’ chorus answer that it is impossible: “On peut aisément y descendre, mais on ne peut

en revenir’ (“It is easy to go down here, but it is impossible to go back”). Fortunately, Mercury subsequently intervenes and negotiates with Pluto to gain Thésée’s release. Picturesque and entertainment function. This function appears in those ballets that provide local color and lend the work a picturesque aspect.

Such ballets of course feature the inevitable shepherds and sailors, but also hunters and representatives of different nations. People fulfilling this “decorative” function and thereby contributing to the stage spectacle thus appear quite frequently, though such appearances are always subject to the constraints of plausibility (or propriety) and often dictated by the rules of contrast internal to the work. In the note to the reader (“Avis”) that precedes the text of L’Europe galante

82 | Catherine Kintzler (a ballet of 1697 by La Motte and Campra), the author underscores the following principles: We have chosen from among the nations of Europe those which stand in greatest contrast to one another and hence will produce the liveliest interaction in the theatre: France, Spain, Italy and Turkey. We follow the usual ideas concerning the particular natures of these peoples: the French are depicted as fickle, indiscreet, and stylish, the Spanish as faithful and romantic, the Italians as jealous, refined, and violent. Lastly, we have presented, to the extent that the theatre permits this, the arrogance and sovereignty of the sultans and the anger of their consorts.”

Suspensive function. 1 would like to close with the most interesting function, because in this case the spectacle in itself becomes dramatic. The presence of the people (chorus and dancers) embodying popular opinion often offers a strong contrast with the situation of the heroes, who find themselves in “extraordinary” situations that require them

to take actions which are problematic or even prohibited. In short, whereas the people are quiescent and reconciled and firmly anchored in the social order, the heroes are in conflict with this order and with themselves. Given such contradictions, elements of spectacle can be used in order to heighten the tension. This is what I call the “suspensive function”. The choruses and the danced episodes serve in this case to slow down or suspend the action and to place the hero (or the audience)

in an emotional situation of extreme and almost unbearable tension. This is particularly true of danced divertissements, which always occur at the worst moment and introduce an uncomfortable contrast. I can provide two examples of this “suspensive” function of a popular ballet within a lyric tragedy. First, in Hippolyte et Aricie, when Thésée returns from Hades he discovers that serious crimes have been committed within his family circle. While he is worrying about this, however, his people come to celebrate his return with (of course) a ballet. This entertainment lasts a very long time, during which the hero has to put on a brave face. Second, in Act Il, scene 6 of Jephté, by Pellegrin and Montéclair, Jephté has promised to offer in sacrifice the first person he sees when leaving

Le peuple in French opera, 1673-1764 | 83

his town of Maspha after returning from the army. The people, who are not aware of this, come out of the town dancing and singing, led by Jephté’s own daughter. In this chapter, I have tried to show how a strictly literary and morphological point of view can open innovative avenues for interpreting operatic works. It is almost too easy and too obvious to show social and political elements in such works. But contrasting the way in which opera is constructed as a literary work in relation to the spoken theatre allows those social and political elements to appear in a new and unexpected light, and it raises the more general issues concerning spec- -

tacle, a topic passionately discussed by authors ranging from Nicole and Bossuet to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and, in a more general sense, from Aristotle to Guy Debord. NOTES 1 See Buford Norman, Touched by the Graces: The Libretti of Philippe Quinault in the Context of French Classicism (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications

Inc., 2001), pp. 33-35, who points out the limits of an ideological reading of the tragédie lyrique, and “the dangers of interpreting [it] as simple royal propaganda.” 2 The popularity of the genre can be seen in the performance figures: a new tragédie lyrique could have up to 150 performances (by comparison a tragedy by Racine had about 40). See Norman, Touched by the Graces; Philippe Quinault, Livrets d’opéra, intro. and notes by Buford Norman,

. vol. 1. (Toulouse: Société de Littératures classiques, 1999); Jérome de La Gorce, L’Opéra a Paris au temps de Louis XIV: Histoire d’un thédtre (Paris:

Desjonquéres, 1992); and Pierre Fortassier, “Musique et peuple au XVIIle siécle,” in Images du peuple au dix-huitiéme siécle, Centre Aixois d'Etudes et de Recherches sur le Dix-Huitiéme Siécle (Paris: A. Colin, 1973),

pp. 327-337; all show the popular success of tragédies lyriques in the eighteenth century. 3 See Catherine Kintzler, Poétique de lV’opéra francais de Corneille a Rousseau (Paris: Minerve, 1991); La France classique et lV opéra (Arles: Harmonia Mundi, collection Passerelles, 1998); and Thédtre et opéra a Vdge classique: Une familiére étrangeté (Paris: Fayard, 2004).

84 | Catherine Kintzler 4 On this point I disagree with Cuthbert Girdlestone (La Tragédie lyrique considérée comme genre littéraire [Geneva: Droz, 1972]), who supposes a simple opposition, whereas I think that the tragédie lyrique belongs to the same poetic system as spoken tragedy. 5 For my detailed treatments of this topic elsewhere, see Kintzler, Poétique de Vopéra francais; La France classique et Vopéra; and Théatre et opéra a age classique.

6 In fact, ordinary characters are commonplace (as shepherds, confidants, sailors, hunters, farmers). We find a massive and spectacular collective presence not only in the choruses, but also in the many crowds and gatherings that take place particularly in ballets, which occupy the entire stage. The operatic stage is often overcrowded. 7 A few landmarks of the genre: Alexandre Hardy, Alphée (1606), Corine (1614); Racan, Les Bergeries (c. 1618); Honoré d’Urfeé, Silvanire (1627); Jean de Mairet, Sylvie (1628), La Silvanire (1631); Rotrou, La Célimeéne (1636)

(adapted for the theatre by Tristan L’Hermite under the title Amarillis [1653]). The first French operas are pastorales: Pomone (1671) by Perrin and Cambert; Les Peines et les plaisirs de ’ Amour (1672) by Gilbert and Cambert; Les Fétes de l’Amour et de Bacchus (1672) by Quinault and Lully.

8 For an example of a pastoral scene in a tragédie lyrique, see Scylla et Glaucus (1746) by Leclair and d’Albaret, Act I, scene 3. 9 Acis et Galatée (1686) by Campistron and Lully; Issé (1697) by Lamotte and Destouches. 10 For examples, see Acis et Galatée (1686) by Campistron and Lully, Act I, scene 2 (the shepherd Acis is complaining); and Issé (1697) by La Motte and Destouches, Act I, scene 1 (Apollo pretends to be a shepherd and wants to be loved by Issé; he explains the situation to Pan). 11 See Francois Regnault, La Doctrine inouie. Dix lecons sur le thédtre classique francais (Paris: Hatier, 1996), pp. 258-261; Kintzler, Thédtre et opéra a Vdge classique, pp. 103-123. Apart from some rare examples (e.g., Moliére’s Amphitryon), comedy employs ordinary characters. It is well known that many stage works of this period are greatly indebted to comédie-ballet, particularly the works by Moliére and Lully (Les Facheux, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme) and by Moliére and Charpentier (Le Malade imaginaire), but these are not exactly operas, but rather “musical theatre”. 12 Examples include the ballet Le Carnaval de Venise (ballet, 1699) by Renard and Campra; Fragments de M. de Lully (1702) by Danchet and Campra, 5e Entrée; Divertissement comique. La Sérénade vénitienne, 2e nouvelle Entrée;

Le peuple in French opera, 1673-1764 | 85 Le Bal interrompu, 3e nouvelle Entrée; La Vénitienne (comédie-ballet, 1704)

by La Motte and de La Barre; Les Fétes vénitiennes (ballet, 1710) by

Danchet and Campra. 13 “Voila je crois le premier opéra ot I’on ait vu des femmes habillées a la francaise, et des confidentes du ton des soubrettes de la comédie; c’est aussi la premiére fois que l’on a hasardé de certaines expressions convenables au comique, mais nouvelles jusqu’alors et méme inconnues sur la scéne lyrique. Le public en fut d’abord alarmé, cependant le théatre qui régne du commencement jusqu’a la fin de ce ballet se trouva si amusant et si enjoué qu’on y venait en foule presque a contre-cceur. Je me fis conscience de divertir le public presque malgré lui, et pour rendre son plaisir pur et tranquille, je me dépéchai de faire moi-méme la critique de mon ouvrage oti je donnai tout le mérite du succés a la musique et a la danse. Le public me sut bon gré d’avoir eu cette attention pour lui, et devint si fort de mes amis que pendant quatre vingt représentations il ne pouvait se resoudre a me quitter, et méme encore aujourd’hui il parle de ce ballet avec plaisir.” 14 Dubos mentions this “purification” of the tragic genre in his Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (Paris: ENSB, 1993 [1719]), Part I,

section 21. On the mixture of serious and comic, see Norman, Touched by the Graces, p. 88.

15 For an example of a residual comic scene in a tragédie lyrique, see Alceste (1674) by Quinault and Lully, Act II, scene 1, between Céphise and Straton. 16 For example, in Act I, scene 8 of Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) by Pellegrin and

Rameau, when Thésée is reported to be dead, Oenone tells Phaedra to offer the crown to Hippolyte. 17 See Corneille’s Discours de Vutilité et des parties du poéme dramatique: “Sa

dignité demande quelque grand intérét d’Etat, ou quelque passion plus noble et plus méme que l'amour, telles que sont ambition ou la vengeance, et veut donner a craindre des malheurs plus grands que la perte d’une maitresse” (Pierre Corneille, Trois discours sur le poéme dramatique, ed., intro., and notes by B. Louvat and M. Escola [Paris: GF, [1999], p. 72). 18 See Kintzler, Thédtre et opéra a Vdge classique, pp. 7-26. 19 See Jean-Marie Goulemot, “Présence et role du peuple dans la tragédie francaise de 1683 41715. Essai d’analyse quantitative”, in Images du peuple au dix-huitiéme siécle, pp. 231-244.

86 | Catherine Kintzler 20 See Fortassier, “Musique et peuple au XVIlle siécle,” pp. 327-337. 21 See Thésée (1675) by Quinault and Lully, Act II, scenes 3, 6 and 7; for the eighteenth century, the “Avis” preceding Issé (1697) by La Motte and Destouches; and the “Argument” preceding Callirhoé (1712) by Roy and Destouches.

22 The objection could be made that the chorus is often invisible (“choeur de peuples qu’on ne voit point’) as is the case, for example, in Médée, Act V, scene 2; and in Vénus et Adonis by Rousseau and Desmarest, Act V, scene 1. But the chorus is always audible, and its invisibility announces an appearance (either its own appearance or that of another character); in this sense, it is a part of the spectacular aspect. 23 For an example, see Idoménée (1712) by Danchet and Campra, Act I, scene 3, in which Idamante sets the Trojan prisoners free. 24 The Boréades princes are furious because the Princess Alphise has refused to marry one of their number. They ask the god Borée to take revenge; he responds by unleashing dangerous winds. 25 “Ona choisi des Nations de l'Europe celles dont les caractéres se contrastent davantage, et promettent plus de jeu pour le théatre: la France, l’Espagne, I’Italie et la Turquie. On a suivi les idées ordinaires qu'on a du génie de leurs peuples: le Francais est paint volage, indiscret et coquet; L’Espagnol fidéle et romanesque; I’Italien jaloux, fin et violent; enfin l’on a exprimé, autant que le théatre I’a pu permettre, la hauteur et la souveraineté des sultans, et l’emportement des sultanes.”

4 | Women’s roles in Meyerbeer’s operas: How Italian heroines are reflected in French grand opera Naomi André

In a sophisticated web of sound, the embodiment of masculinity and femininity in Italian opera underwent a substantive transformation during the first decades of the nineteenth century. What was deemed “masculine,” virile, and heroic made a marked shift away from the castrato-infused legacy of the eighteenth century. No longer were the castrati and their faithful proxy, the cross-dressed female travesti singers, seen and heard as acceptable leading “men” in opera. Instead, the Romanticism of Byron, Victor Hugo, Sir Walter Scott, and other emerging leaders in literature provided a new set of topics for plots and heroic situations. The classical symmetry and rational aesthetics of the Enlightenment gave way to a new form of realism that relied on the power of genius now fueled by the subjectivity of emotion. In the period following the French Revolution the idealized power of the monarchy was replaced with the articulation of strength and courage through individual acts of bravery. Within this world, the Romantic male protagonist also redefined heroism vocally. As a tenor, he sang with a differently articulated virtuosity from that of the castrato bel canto aesthetics and he offered the sound of an unaltered and unmistakably male voice.

As the conventions surrounding masculinity and femininity in opera were realigned to the principles of Romanticism, the typical operatic roles for male and female singers changed.* Across the two halves of the nineteenth century, women’s roles in opera underwent a substantive change. While no one can deny that the most famous heroines of the nineteenth century — such as Norma, Lucia, Violetta, Mimi, and several others — all expire by the opera’s conclusion, what is more relevant for understanding how women in Italian opera from this time are configured can be learned by examining the

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88 | Naomi André interaction of the voice and character of these roles and their unexpected ancestry.

With the legacy of the castrato voice from the eighteenth century and the newly emergent tenor, who became the standard voice of the male hero by 1830, the first decades of primo ottocento (early nineteenth-century) Italian opera saw a different construction of women in opera. Rather than one solitary heroine, which becomes the norm in opera in the second half of the nineteenth century, there are typically two leading roles for female singers in primo ottocento opera. In this essay, I examine the paths to the Romantic heroine of secondo ottocento (second half of the nineteenth-century) Italian opera by looking at models from northern Italy written between 1817 and 1824. My case studies are taken from the little-known, and often-neglected,

Italian operas of one of the leading international opera composers of the time: Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791—1864).” In a telling, yet seemingly unlikely, place, Meyerbeer’s Italian operas

occupy a critical position in the historical operatic canon today as we look back at nineteenth-century opera. Though his six Italian operas are unfamiliar today (listed in Table 4.1), all but one was commercially successful in their own time; indeed, several were revived in subsequent productions. Today Meyerbeer is best known for his four French grand operas (Robert le diable [1831], Les Huguenots [1836], Le Prophete [1849],

and L’Africaine [1865]) which have maintained their importance, if not their popularity, through performance. Nonetheless, Meyerbeer’s Ital-

ian operas demonstrate his nimble facility at bringing together the orchestral dominance of his German roots with the vocal lyricism and conventions of the nineteenth-century bel canto style now best remembered in the works of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini. This essay is divided into four sections: the first presents Meyerbeer’s career in

Italy and the conventions during his arrival, the second part briefly outlines the plots and central themes in the six Italian operas, and the third part analyzes the interactions between the voice and character of the roles for women. The final section juxtaposes the types of women’s roles Meyerbeer wrote in Italy and in his best-known operas for Paris.

Women’s roles in Meyerbeer’s operas | 89 Table 4.1 Principal roles for women (and castrato) in Meyerbeer’s

Italian operas

1817. Romilda e Costanza (Gaetano Rossi, Padua, Teatro Nuovo)

Romilda [disguised as a page] Rosamunda Pisaroni —

Costanza Caterina Lipparini

1819 Semiramide Riconosciuta (Gaetano Rossi, Turin, Teatro Regio)

Semiramide [disguised as King Nino] Carolina Bassi

Tamiri Teresa Cantarelli Scitalce [travesti], Prince of India and former Adelina Dalman-Naldi lover of Semiramide

1819 Emma di Resburgo (Gaetano Rossi, Venice, Teatro San Benedetto)

Emma di Resburgo [disguised as minstrel] Rosa Morandi Edemondo [travesti], exiled Earl of Lanark and Carolina Cortesi husband to Emma

Etelia, Olfredo’s daughter Cecilia Gaddi 1820 Margherita d’Anjou (Felice Romani, Milan, La Scala) Margherita d’Anjou [disguised as peasant wife], Carolina Pellegrini widow of Henry VI of England Isaura, wife of Duke of Lavarenne [disguised asa Rosa Mariani page]

1822 L’esule di Granata (Felice Romani, Milan, La Scala)

Almanzor, King of Granada [travesti] Rosamunda Pisaroni Azema, daughter of King Sulemano, exiled King Adelaide Tosi of Granada

1824 Il crociato in Egitto (Gaetano Rossi, Venice, La Fenice)

Palmide, daughter of Aladino Henriette Méric-Lalande Felicia, fiancée of Armando [dressed as knight] Brigida Lorenzani Armando d’Orville [disguised as “Elmireno”] Giambattista Velluti For most of the revivals of this opera Armando was performed by a female singer.

90 | Naomi Andre JAKOB MEYER BEER GOES TO ITALY

As a German composer born at the end of the eighteenth century and who came of age at a time when Germany was still developing its own national style of opera, Jakob Meyer Beer went to Italy on a self-imposed apprenticeship to learn how to write opera. The first decades of the nineteenth century saw few successful attempts at articulating a German national style of opera.* Chief among these efforts, at least in terms of what has survived today, are Beethoven’s Leonore (1805), Leonore (1806), and Fidelio (1814): a trio of operas that rework the same story and musical material three times. In the 1810s when Meyer-

beer was young and wishing to make a name for himself, Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) — his close contemporary and friend (they got to know each other during their early training with the Abbé Georg Joseph Vogler in Darmstadt) — was involved in a similar quest.4’ Though

Weber's compositional output was more diverse in genre than Meyerbeer’s and includes more non-operatic instrumental works, chamber pieces, songs, and solo piano pieces, Weber was also searching for an operatic stylistic voice that did not manifest itself until the early 1820s with his opera Der Freischiitz (first performed in 1821), a few years after Meyerbeer was already established in Italy and writing operas. At best,

Weber's operas had only a limited influence on Meyerbeer, given the latter’s travels outside of Germany and Weber’s untimely death in England in 1826. Moreover, by the mid-1820s Meyerbeer’s interests were less invested in finding a “German” national style of writing opera

than in a desire to forge a more international style that would gain popularity on the Parisian stage. In Italy, during his eight-year stay (1816-1824), he Italianized his

name to Giacomo Meyerbeer and, in a letter to his father who demanded that he return to Berlin, wrote adamantly, “I believe this [his visit to Italy and later Paris] to be of the utmost importance to my musical training and would not let anything in this world prevent me from going, even if I had to set out on foot and wage battle against the raging elements.”° In his often repeated statement about being “bewitched in a magic garden” in Italy, Meyerbeer indicates that he

Women’s roles in Meyerbeer’s operas | 91 | was enchanted by all things Italian — the style and conventions of the primo ottocento and, as I will show, in the ways of writing for female voices.”

Meyerbeer’s six operas for Italy written between 1817 and1824 made

him one of the leading opera composers in northern Italy at that time. The late 1810s and early 1820s predate the influence that Donizetti and Bellini’s operas would later have; this fact, combined with Rossini’s relo-

cation to the south in 1815 as the new leading composer at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, meant there was an opening in the northern Italian opera scene. Though Rossini’s Neapolitan contract did not preclude his writing for other theatres, his primary compositional activities, his serious large-scale operas, focused on the San Carlo. The period of 1816 to 1823 was a very prolific time in Rossini’s output: he composed eighteen operas.* With the emphasis on the nine Neapolitan operas, Rossini wrote four operas for northern theatres while Meyerbeer was in Italy, two each for La Scala in Milan and La Fenice in Venice. (Four of the other five operas were written for Roman theatres and one that was eventually performed in Lisbon, Portugal.) While Meyerbeer was in Italy specifically to learn how to write opera, his talents — and the absence of the dominant opera composer in the north — gave him the opportunity to quickly become a leading figure in Italian opera during his stay. Like the operas of Rossini and his other contemporaries in Italy, Meyerbeer’s Italian operas illustrate the instability between character and vocal type in his reliance on both old-fashioned eighteenth-century conventions as well as the newly emerging Romantic practices. The norms for operas in Italy when Meyerbeer arrived included operas that engaged female voices in the heroic travesti tradition (e.g., the title character in Rossini’s 1813 Tancredi and Enrico in Simon Mayr’s La rosa bianca e la rosa rossa from the same year) and operas with two female characters that vied for the attentions of the principal tenor hero (e.g., Rossini’s Elisabetta d’Inghilterra, 1815). Very occasionally, a role would still be written for one of the few castrati working on the opera circuit (e.g., the role of Arsace in Rossini’s Aureliano in Palmira was written for Giambattista Velluti in 1813). Though the voice type of

92 | Naomi Andre the hero could vary between a castrato (very rarely), a female singer en travesti or a tenor, operas routinely employed two female singers in principal roles. As Table 4.1 demonstrates, all six of Meyerbeer’s Italian operas contain at least two principal roles for women.

As a foreigner who went to Italy specifically to learn how to write opera, Meyerbeer’s Italian operas illustrate his handling of the resources available and employment of the artistic norms of the time. During these self-designed apprenticeship years, he was fortunate to work exclusively with two of the leading librettists of this time: Gaetano Rossi (1774-1855), who had collaborated with Rossini on Tancredi,

and Felice Romani (1788-1865), who went on to become the primary librettist of Bellini. As Meyerbeer was learning how to write Italian opera, he was working with the men who would be remembered as the principal designers of the primo ottocento libretto.’ In terms of plot conventions, Meyerbeer’s operas include classical subjects that were popular in the eighteenth century (e.g., Semiramide riconosciuta) — as did many of Rossini’s serious operas (e.g., Tancredi, Armida, and Semiramide) — yet his operas also include more contem-

porary topics that resemble the rescue dramas in France and Germany (e.g., Emma di Resburgo)."° As in his mixed use of plots, which both looked back to the Metastasian eighteenth-century dramas and embraced post-French Revolution subjects, Meyerbeer’s Italian operas

also engaged a range of vocal types for the hero. He used the oldfashioned sound of the castrato (for Crociato), the current vogue for the heroic travesti (in Semiramide, Emma, and L’esule), and the forward-

looking voice of the Romantic tenor (in Romilda, Margherita, and Crociato).

CONVENTIONS FOR THE CHARACTERIZATIONS WOMEN’S VOICES PORTRAYED IN ITALIAN OPERA DURING THE PRIMO OTTOCENTO

Primo ottocento opera audiences were quite comfortable with women’s voices singing across gender. In terms of the interactions

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among (1) vocal sound, (2) the gender of the character, and (3) the gender of the singer, these early decades of the nineteenth century were

a transitional time. The heroic voice was in the process of migrating between the castrato bel canto aesthetics that required a high flexible treble hero (performed by the eighteenth-century castrati and the primo ottocento heroic travesti female singers) and the Romantic tenor, now considered more “realistic”. One of the logistical issues with the replacement of the female heroic

travesti role by the tenor was what to do with these travesti singers, who were accustomed to having a principal role. The solution was to employ these female singers in roles where they depicted female characters; hence, there were operas with the new tenor and two principal female characters. In a compromise between privileging treble timbres and adhering to a deeper masculine heroic sound, the new challenge became how to differentiate between the two female characters. This situation would hardly have been a problem if the Baroque practice of having plots with several romantic couples who ended up happily paired had continued into the nineteenth century. However, along with the newer preferences for vocal sound, the Romantic topics from which primo ottocento libretti were drawn were winnowing down the number of leading characters and focusing the main action of the drama on the plight of the central heroic couple. The presence of a secondary romantic couple was on the wane, and the three central personae were typically roles sung by the two women and the tenor. Occasionally a baritone would be added, yet he was rarely a serious contender for being a desirable romantic match. As the two women were frequently in competition for the affections of the tenor, the obstacles that got in the way were almost always insur-

mountable. The eighteenth-century opera seria plot with the benevolence of a deus ex machina figure from the era of the Enlightenment became a less frequent feature in primo ottocento operas after the first few decades. Such conclusions were exchanged for the nineteenthcentury Romantic expression of courage and acts of bravery that the individual fought on his, and her, own. Unless the operatic genre was

94 | Naomi André a mixed semiseria, where things eventually did work out with the lieto fine (happy ending), Italian serious opera after 1830 routinely took on tragic endings. The female heroic travesti singer sang female characters in the pres-

ence of the heroic tenor. With two female characters in the opera, the higher soprano role inherited the characterization of the central female heroine. Elsewhere, I have introduced the terms “first woman” and “second woman” to differentiate between these two female characters.” Rather than denoting a hierarchy in their individual importance, the second woman refers to the female character (and the singer who interpreted this role) who would normally have sung the heroic travesti role if the opera did not have the heroic tenor. The first woman is the female character who has the best chance of

ending up paired with the hero — whether this is the travesti hero or the newer Romantic tenor; hence, it is unusual for the second woman to end up with the hero (after 1830, the second woman almost never gets the hero). In practically all cases, the first woman’s role is written in a higher range and tessitura than that of the second woman. For the purpose of discussing Meyerbeer’s Italian operas, the important point to stress is that the second woman became the new visual presence for the female travesti voice. As a female character, the second woman’s voice straddled sound and character: it was a voice that could, and up through the 1820s regularly did, cross-dress aurally.

CENTRAL THEMES IN MEYERBEER’S SIX ITALIAN OPERAS Romilda e Costanza**

Briefly summarized, Teobaldo as a youth growing up in Provence fell in love with Costanza, the daughter of the Count of Sisteron. While fighting a war overseas in Brittany, he falls in love with Romilda, the daughter of the Duke of Brittany. Upon his return, Teobaldo is imprisoned by his twin brother Retello who, after the death of their father,

read the will which stated that Teobaldo is to become the Count of

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Provence and marry Romilda as a political alliance. Romilda, who returns Teobaldo’s love, follows him from Brittany to Provence disguised as a page. Everything works out at the end (thanks, in part, to the help of another character, Pierotto); Teobaldo is released from prison, is paired with Romilda, and becomes the benevolent Count of Provence, ultimately pardoning his brother Retello. In his first opera for Italy, Meyerbeer used the tenor voice as the hero (Teobaldo, first premiered by Luigi Capitelli) and the two titular women vie for the tenor’s affections. Though the character of Romilda (written for Rosamunda Pisaroni) is the primary female heroine — she is listed first in the title and she ends up with the hero — at moments within the opera her role assumes a localized masculinity. Contrasted to the voice of Caterina Lipparini as Costanza, Pisaroni’s voice (which later went on to become associated with many other travesti roles’), as Romilda, embodies several traditions simultaneously. Her dressing as a pageboy quotes enough of the travesti convention to give a knowing wink to the primo ottocento tradition, in which cross-dressed women were heard as acceptable substitutes for boys’ voices before reaching

puberty. Her mission to save her husband from prison, and reclaim his love from another woman and from the treachery of Retello, also references the rescue opera tradition (with noticeable similarities in the story to Beethoven’s Fidelio, 1814). The voice of Pisaroni bringing to life the character of Romilda illustrates that a woman could put on a male persona to accomplish things she could not otherwise do and still be a viable leading female character in opera.

Semiramide reconosciuta’* (Semiramide Recognized)

Not surprising given its eighteenth-century origins, the design of Meyerbeer’s Semiramide involves many characters and sub-plots.” In the pre-history to the action of the opera, Idreno (now named Scitalce at the beginning of the opera), the Prince of India and former lover of Semiramide, had been convinced by Sibari (Semiramide’s treacherous advisor who was in love with her) that she had been unfaithful to him. In a fit of jealousy, Scitalce stabbed Semiramide and threw her

96 | Naomi Andre in the Nile to drown. Fortuitously, Semiramide survived this ordeal and later married King Nino of Assyria. When the opera begins, King Nino is dead and Semiramide is in disguise impersonating her own son (also named Nino) so that she can reign as the King of Assyria. The Princess Tamiri, another leading female character, is searching for a husband; among her many suitors are Scitalce (a travesti role) and Mirteo — Semiramide’s brother. By the end of the opera Semiramide is unmasked and reunited with Scitalce after she pardons him for his earlier deeds against her. The Princess Tamiri marries Mirteo.

In terms of vocal type and gendered character, the secondary couple — Princess Tamiri and Mirteo — is rather straightforward for this time; neither undergoes a disguise and the soprano (Tamiri) is paired with a male singer — a bass. A good part of Tamiri’s dramaturgical function is to provide the stimulus for bringing Scitalce to Babylon so that he can ultimately be reunited with Semiramide. In contrast to Tamiri and Mirteo, the leading couple of Semiramide and Scitalce present a very different scenario concerning voice pairings and the intrigue of shifting identities. The choice to cast Carolina Bassi’s voice as the title character reflects the pattern seen in Meyerbeer’s first

opera with Rosamunda Pisaroni as Romilda. Like Pisaroni, Carolina Bassi was also associated with travesti roles, though to a lesser extent. Several months after the premiere of Meyerbeer’s Semiramide, Bassi premiered the travesti role of Falliero in Rossini’s two-act melodramma Bianca e Falliero at La Scala in Milan, and she figures prominently as a travesti voice in two of Meyerbeer’s later operas.’® Yet Semiramide’s

role is higher than that of Tamiri and the “true” nature of Bassi’s voice has been alternatively described as soprano, mezzo-soprano, and contralto.””

The page as an adolescent boy reflects a differently circumscribed

articulation of the travesti role as hero: the heroism of the page is limited. When Romilda (in Meyerbeer’s first opera) disguises herself

as a page, she is citing the heroic travesti in her bold action to go undercover and follow the man she loves. As a page, she is allotted some power: disguised as a man (albeit a young one), she is able to travel on her own. In contrast, Semiramide’s disguise is the primary

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source of her power and authority; she is the queen who rules through most of the opera disguised as the king. As king, she directly invokes the codes of the castrato: were she not portraying a female character, her voice could be accepted as the hero in this travesti role. However, her disguise unveils her character’s real identity, a woman whose voice can imperceptibly cross back and forth between gender to the ears of the primo ottocento audience. The plot device to have Semiramide in disguise as a male character for a significant part of the opera leads to many exciting possibilities of which Meyerbeer takes full advantage. To cast Semiramide’s love interest as a travesti role is a masterful stroke, for within the opera the two women portray two men — the travesti role of Scitalce and Semiramide masquerading as King Nino — and one woman (Semiramide as herself). The place where the twisting of identity and the interaction of vocal type and character takes on its most sophisticated and complex rendering is in the Semiramide-—Scitalce duet, “Al folgor di que’ bei rai.”’® In this duet, the question of identity is obscured on several levels. At this point in the drama, neither character truly knows who the other really is though both suspect the truth (which is that they are long-lost lovers). This angle of their hidden identity from each other is achieved through Semiramide’s disguise as King Nino and the name “Scitalce” for the lover Semiramide knew as Idreno. Both sing of love for the absent beloved. Scitalce sings of Tamiri and Semiramide (as Nino) sings of love for a “woman” (to keep up appearances for Scitalce, Semiramide has King Nino pine for a woman now long lost), who really turns out to be Idreno (Scitalce), a woman singing a travesti role.

In this complex scene, nothing is as it appears. On one level, the duet can be seen and heard as two women on stage singing of their love

for two other people who really turn out to be each other. In terms of the gender twists in the plot, a female singer (Adelina DalmanNaldi) playing the part of a male character (Scitalce) sings of his love for another woman (Tamiri). The other female singer (Carolina Bassi) plays a woman (Semiramide), disguised as a man (King Nino), singing about “his” love for another woman (the twist to keep Scitalce believing

98 | Naomi André that “Nino” is singing) who really turns out to be the man (Scitalce) a woman (Adelina Dalman-Naldi) is singing en travesti. As if that were not tricky enough, yet another way to view this duet is as two women who, for various reasons, are pretending to be men who are singing

about women. Hence, without understanding the artifice engaged, this duet could look (and sound) like two women singing of their love for each other. Ironically, this last explanation is the one closest to the truth. Without minimizing the implications this situation could have for a queer theoretical reading, I would like to emphasize the very intricate historical codes it reveals about the interactions of vocal and character pairings at this point in the primo ottocento. Here we have worlds colliding; the transition between the eighteenth-century aesthetic for flexible treble timbres and the early nineteenth-century primo ottocento invocation of the disappearing castrati voices in women’s travesti roles combining with the device of disguise to create new levels of artifice. A subtle friction resonates as Scitalce’s voice (the female heroic travesti) is layered on top of Semiramide’s voice (who is disguised as King Nino): two similar women’s voices accepted as, and pretending to sound, “male.” Seen and heard in this context, a woman’s lower voice is able to do it all: it can be the leading soprano heroine (Semiramide) and it can be the heroic travesti (Scitalce) at the same time in the same opera. More than any other type of voice in this period, the woman’s voice represents an open realm of possibility for embodying either the male or female leading role, or—as the element of disguise when Semiramide assumes the identity of King Nino so aptly illustrates — both simultaneously.

Emma di Resburgo*?

Gaetano Rossi based his libretto on a text by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly (the French writer who had provided the original source for Beethoven’s Leonore/ Fidelio operas) and, like Beethoven’s opera subject, Emma has elements of the rescue drama. Having been falsely accused of patricide, Edemondo, the son of the Scottish Earl of Lanark, fled his wife (Emma)

and young son Elvino. Intent upon finding him, and disguised as a

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traveling minstrel, Emma searches for her exiled husband. Through various turns in the plot, Edemondo returns as a shepherd, and they both end up in prison and sentenced to death. At the eleventh hour, the real murderer of Edemondo’s father is revealed and Edemondo becomes the rightful Earl of Lanark. The two leading roles, Emma -—the title character —and her husband

Edemondo, are both assumed by women. The voice of Rosa Morandi (the first Emma) has been described as a mezzo-soprano; her repertory included the title roles in Rossini’s Italiana in Algeri and Tancredi. Nonetheless, Morandi also sang roles that were more traditionally in the soprano repertory, including Rossini’s Desdemona and Mathilde

di Shabran.*° Edemondo, a travesti role, was written for the travesti singer Carolina Cortesi. For their audiences, Morandi and Cortesi were an established pair. The night before Emma’s premiere, these two women had just completed a set of performances in Rossini’s new pasticcio opera Eduardo e Cristina at the same theatre where, as in Emma, Cortesi sang en travesti (as Eduardo) opposite Morandi as Cristina.** As in Semiramide riconosciuta, the multiple layering of disguise and shifting

gender identity for women’s voices are worked into the plot: Cortesi as the travesti and Morandi as Emma pretending to be the minstrel (a male role) in order to look for Edemondo. This disguise situation, in which a woman disguises herself as a man to find her beloved, is in the same vein as Meyerbeer’s first Italian opera when Romilda becomes a page to find Teobaldo. Margherita d’Anjou**

In fifteenth-century Scotland during the Wars of the Roses, Queen Margherita d’Anjou (widow of Henry VJ) has fallen in love with the Duke of Lavarenne, who is married to Isaura. Having been usurped from the throne by Riccardo, Duke of Gloucester, Margherita attempts

to regain the throne and, en route to achieving this goal, pretends to be the peasant wife of Michele Gamautte, her surgeon. However, Riccardo sees through Margherita’s disguise and takes her son Edoardo, the Prince of Wales, hostage. Meanwhile, though Isaura fears

100 | Naomi André (correctly) that her husband has fallen in love with the deposed queen, she disguises herself as a page who is accompanying Gamautte. When Margherita successfully overthrows Riccardo and regains the throne,

Isaura’s courageous actions have won the admiration of the queen; Isaura is subsequently allowed to reconcile with her husband. Through both of their disguises, Margherita and Isaura both gain access to what they want, even though they accomplish it in very different ways. A highlighted feature is the way gender is interwoven with social power. As the deposed queen, Margherita’s efforts to regain her usurped position involve her assuming the role of the peasant wife to her French physician, Michele (a basso buffo role first performed by Nicola Bassi). Unlike the other cases of disguise seen in Meyerbeer’s operas thus far, this one does not involve a gender twist; here we have a female character assuming another female persona. The persona of the

peasant wife comments directly on Margherita’s character and vocal type. As the peasant wife of her French surgeon, the change in her social status is emphasized; stripped of the throne, her social position is compromised when she no longer has the power of being the queen. As she is surrounded by only a few allies in the midst of her enemies, she pretends to be someone else; hence, when her usual position of power jeopardizes her life, she is domesticated by portraying a simple peasant wife. Isaura, on the other hand, gains power with her disguise. Though

as a married woman she had a respectable position as a wife, her husband’s absence leaves her single. She allies herself with Gamautte (as his attendant) and travels with him to find her husband. Her courage is acknowledged by the queen and Isaura is eventually reunited with her husband.

L’esule di Granata® (The Exile from Granada)

The setting of the opera takes place in the Moorish kingdom of Granada during the fifteenth century. Before his death, King Almanzor’s father,

a Zegridi (Zegris) warrior, defeated and then exiled the former king,

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Sulemano, the leader of the rival Abenseragi (Abencerrages).”* At the beginning of the opera, Sulemano has returned to Granada in search of his daughter, Azema, and seeks to overthrow Almanzor, the new Zegridi king. Meanwhile, Azema and Almanzor have fallen in love. When Sulemano’s Abencerrages uprising fails Almanzor benevolently pardons him and allows him to leave Granada with his daughter. The opera ends happily when Sulemano accepts peace with Almanzor and agrees to let the Zegridi king marry his daughter. In the original plans for Almanzore in Rome in 1821 the title role was intended for Carolina Bassi, Meyerbeer’s first Semiramide.” However, after a few delays and the opera's title change to L’esule di Granata,

the part of King Almanzor was entrusted to Rosamunda Pisaroni. Having already worked with Meyerbeer in his first Italian opera (she

had premiered Romilda), by 1822 Pisaroni had created three roles by Rossini: Zomira (Ricciardo e Zoraide, 1818), Andromache (Ermione, 1819) and the travesti role of Malcolm (La donna del lago, 1819). Her repertory included a specialization in other travesti roles by Rossini — Falliero, Tancredi, and, later on, Arsace from his 1823 Semiramide. The

role of Azema, Almanzor’s love interest, was first performed by the young soprano Adelaide Tosi. At the beginning of her career in 1822 (she had made her operatic debut the year before), Tosi went on to become one of the most successful singers of her time, establishing herself in the primo ottocento repertory and premiering several of Donizetti’s heroines.”° The location of Moor-influenced fifteenth-century southern Spain provided an exoticized setting for Meyerbeer. L’esule di Granata and the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian settings of Semiramide riconosciuta are

Meyerbeer’s two “oriental” settings thus far and will be joined by his last Italian opera, Il crociato in Egitto, placed in another Egyptian locale.

The exoticism evoked by using settings outside of the Westernized European norm fits into the vogue for opera plots of the time. Rossini’s Mose in Egitto from 1818 (set in Egypt around 1230 Bc), Ermione from 1819 (set in Epirum, Greece around 430 Bc), Maometto II from 1820 (set in 1470 in Negroponte, a Greek island in the Aegean), and his own

102 | Naomi Andre very admired Semiramide from 1823 (set in ancient Babylon) all provide

contemporaneous examples that illustrate the popularity of operas set in exotic locales.*” The exoticism of L’esule di Granata further enriches our understand-

ing of King Almanzor as a travesti role. Whereas the ancient Babylonian queen, Semiramide, in Meyerbeer’s earlier opera spends most of the plot masquerading as king, her voice is ultimately unmasked at the end as her real female character. With Almanzor as a Moorish

king in medieval Spanish Granada, the southern part of the Iberian peninsula, the suspicious “Other” of gypsies and the dark continent of Africa invoke additional associations. Side by side sit two systems of signification: the castrato legacy for the heroic female travesti roles

and the “Otherness” of an orientalized Granada. The character and voice of King Almanzor embodies an interaction of East meets West. As an exoticized character, the travesti aspect could present Almanzor as a feminized king. Yet simultaneously, as with the other heroic travesti roles from this time, Almanzor gives this type of woman’s voice a vehicle for masculine power. The fifteenth-century King of Granada expands the associations of the travesti character; this timbre of voice can now represent the figurehead of the idealized Other.

Il crociato in Egitto Meyerbeer’s final opera for Italy became his entrée into Paris and the larger international operatic scene. It is the only opera in which Meyerbeer wrote for a castrato: the role of Armando for Giambattista Velluti

is generally considered the last great castrato role written by a major composer. In this opera, Meyerbeer presents a compendium of heroic voices and situations. He uses all three types of voices that could be associated with the hero: the castrato, the cross-dressed female singer, and the emerging tenor. Il crociato takes the use of disguise and crossdressing to a new level. The heroic character of Armando, premiered by Velluti, and repeated by him and then several women in the numerous revivals of the opera throughout the late 1820s, undertakes an

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exoticized disguise. Though he was part of the delegation of the Knights of Rhodes from Provence ina crusade to convert Egypt, Armando ends up being the only survivor of his brigade. To stay alive in enemy ter-

ritory, he dresses like the Egyptians and has become “Elmireno,” a Saracen. Consequently, he has fallen in love with Palmide (the Sultan’s

daughter) and, after they surreptitiously married, they are secretly raising their son. The opera begins with a delegation of the Knights of Rhodes arriving in Egypt to pay respect to their dead and foster peace. Traveling with the Knights, and dressed like them, is Felicia — Armando’s betrothed from Provence. The opera eventually ends happily when order is restored as Armando returns to his true identity (and stops pretending to be Elmireno) and Felicia relinquishes her claim on Armando and gives her blessing to Armando, Palmide, and their son. To complete the peaceful resolution, the Sultan does not disavow his daughter even though she secretly converted to Christianity and decides to return to Provence

with Armando. |

The role of Felicia carries multiple codes. She spends the opera crossdressed as a Knight of Rhodes; however, she is not a heroic travesti role because she is a female character. Additionally, she is not the earlier type of character seen in Romilda, Emma, or Isaura of women who need to

don a disguise to accomplish some type of business (e.g., travel alone and rescue the spouse). Unlike these other disguised female characters, Felicia is never unmasked (she retains her male attire) and reunited with the man she loves. Though she was on this trajectory, when she realizes that Armando has fallen in love with Palmire and has a child, Felicia

nobly concedes her connections to Armando in light of his current _ commitments. The theme of exoticism is taken to a new level with the presence of the Knights of Rhodes (from Provence) in Egypt.”® The exoticism of

Armando’s role is two-fold. First, Armando takes on the identity of Elmireno; through disguise, he impersonates a Saracen. Second, Armando was written for a castrato; though this voice was not entirely unheard-of in 1824 (the castrati were still singing, in limited numbers,

104 | Naomi André in church settings), the timbre and sound of the voice evoked an older and otherworldly association for a generation that was accustomed to the female travesti and emerging Romantic tenor heroes.

VOICE AND CHARACTERIZATION IN MEYERBEER’S ITALIAN OPERAS: TRAVESTI AND DISGUISE Within the constellation of women’s voices he employed, Meyerbeer’s

Italian operas differentiate between the two female singers through their function in the plot and the tessitura of their music. The second woman is given the lower tessitura and the other soprano role is generally higher in range; when the two female singers perform together, the second woman’s music is almost always on the bottom part. The : singer who performed the second woman was a soprano, but was the same type of voice (written in a lower tessitura) that sang the heroic travesti roles. In fact, those who premiered Meyerbeer’s second women were additionally known as heroic travesti singers; hence, the second woman and heroic travesti roles were not only performed by the same

type of voice, but also were frequently the same singers in. different performances. The role the second woman singer performed maintained a constant feature: within the course of the opera, she always spent time crossdressed as a male character. In some operas this was because she was the heroic travesti role. In the other operas, the female character this singer performed was always required to cross-dress and assume the feigned identity of a male character for a while. As a direct foil to the second woman, Meyerbeer’s higher soprano never sings cross-dressed as a male character. Thus, in all of Meyerbeer’s Italian operas, one woman consistently sings as a female character and the other female singer always spends some time cross-dressed as a man.

The temporarily cross-dressed second woman in Meyerbeer’s operas complicates the codes relegated to women’s voices. Instead of having a full travesti role where a female singer portrays a male character throughout the entire opera, the disguise provides the opportunity

for a female singer’s voice to do two things at once: to sound as a

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female character’s voice and to sound as a “pretend” male voice. Yet the aural codes become very sophisticated as the reality on stage and off stage intersect. The “pretend” male voice of the female charac-

ter disguised within the world of the opera has the same sound as the aesthetic convention that accepted and heard women’s voices as en travesti heroes. This construction allows audiences to hear the same sound — the second woman’s voice — to resonate as a “real” man (when she sings a heroic travesti role) or as a “pretend” man (when she sings a female character disguised as a male character), depending on the construction of the plot. In both cases, it is the context and configuration of the second woman’s voice in the opera that provides its meaning. Consequently, it was not a large leap for early nineteenth-century audiences to accept a female opera character pretending to be a man. These audiences were accustomed to performing the same suspension

of disbelief for the duration of the opera when women sang heroic travesti roles. Hence, the cross-gender disguise was a microcosm of what the audiences were already doing — accepting a woman’s voice to sound as a male character. Moreover, in terms of the particular voices in these roles, it was quite possible that audiences heard the same women sing a heroic travesti role one night and the second woman — who also pretended to be a man in a cross-gender disguise — the next night.*? In

each instance, regardless of the role’s gender, the female singer who portrayed travesti and second woman roles would be heard singing as a man; either for the full duration of the opera (as the heroic travesti) or for several scenes (as the second woman disguised as a male character). Along with the usual excitement produced by women in trousers on stage and the thrill of seeing various social and sumptuary codes askew, these moments of cross-gender disguise provided something additional to early nineteenth-century audiences than that which was experienced

by their eighteenth-century predecessors. Though the cross-disguise aspect was seen earlier (for example, both Handel’s Alcina [1735] and Serse [1738 ] have roles written for a female character who spends some

of the time dressed as a man), the context of such cases of disguise is quite different.2° In the eighteenth century, the fluidity between the singer’s voice and the gender of a character was celebrated as an

106 | Naomi André aestheticized aural ecstasy in its own right. In the primo ottocento, the definitions of masculinity and femininity — in terms of sound — were becoming less flexible. During this time the heroic tradition was opening up a place for the tenor voice. In those roles where the female characters pretended to be men, a space was carved out for women’s voices that allowed them to retain their association with a culturally gendered masculine sound. In all of Meyerbeer’s operas for Italy, at least during some point, one woman’s voice is always heard as a man. Hence, Meyerbeer’s use of disguise consistently marked the voice of the second female singer as a voice that could sound as a man, not only when she sang heroic travesti roles, but even within the larger context of portraying a female character. On one level, Meyerbeer’s use of disguise with the second woman could be seen and heard as overlapping with the heroic travesti tradition and seeming to produce the same effect; in both cases women’s

voices stand in for male characters. However, the situation is made more complex given the surrounding contexts. As each woman sang her respective character, the audience “heard” the gender of the two characters (and their voices) differently. In the heroic tradition, the travesti voice was marked by the gender of the character — the opera role — she portrayed: the hero. While listening to the cross-dressed female singer as the hero, the audience heard an evocation of the castrato voice. Hence, the heroic travesti singer’s voice became the sound of heroism; her voice was the idealized voice of the castrato hero. Meyerbeer’s second woman reminded the audience of the dual possibilities in this voice with the male disguise. His operas provide a step-

ping stone for revealing what could be wrapped inside a character's voice: here is a woman, but she can also easily cross over into a man. Such distinctions are subtle, yet instructive for how they illustrate the different simultaneous meanings women’s voices generated. Depending upon the context, audiences were accustomed to deciphering these simultaneous codes concerning gender and character. The presence of two principal roles for female singers in the primo ottocento gives way to the singular Romantic heroine of the secondo ottocento. While Bellini’s Norma shares the spotlight with Adalgisa,

Women’s roles in Meyerbeer’s operas | 107 Table 4.2 Roles for two leading women in Meyerbeer’s French grand operas

1831 Robert le diable Isabelle, Princess of Sicily Alice

1836 Les Huguenots Marguerite de Valois Valentine

1849 Le Prophete Berthe Fidés

1865 L’Africaine Inés Sélika this type of construction is much less common once the Romantic tropes of Italian opera (e.g., the tenor hero, the tragic ending, the death of the Romantic heroine by the final curtain) become common after 1830 and the norm after 1850. Though this essay has focused on a relatively obscure collection of early operas by Meyerbeer before he went on to become the well-known opera composer of French grand

opera, his Italian operas present important lessons. Seen together, they provide an instructive grouping for what they have in common. They were written when Meyerbeer was less interested in developing a maverick innovative style of opera and more intent on learning how to handle the basic conventions of the genre from its source: a time when Italian opera was still the leading international style of opera. Meyerbeer’s six Italian operas might not have had a lasting influence on other composers, but they act as an important vortex for understanding how women’s voices were configured in the first and second halves of nineteenth-century opera. Inserting these operas into our narrative of opera history allows us to have a vantage point that looks (and listens) back to the castrato-influenced timbral aesthetics of the eighteenth century that supported the primo ottocento heroic female travesti roles. As the heroic travesti practice diminished, these operas also point forward to the middle of the century and beyond with the use of two female characters along with a tenor hero.

Meyerbeer’s Italian heroines reflected in his French grand operas

When Meyerbeer took his talents to Paris, he kept the dual female model in his four French grand operas (see Table 4.2).

108 | Naomi Andre This is not to imply that the practice of having two principal female character roles was something that Meyerbeer was the first to use in Paris, or that he was the only one writing operas in the French grand

style that incorporated two leading female roles. A central opera in this genre, Halévy’s La Juive (1835), employs the roles of Rachel, the Jewess referred to in the title, and the Princess Eudoxie. And one cannot but think of Verdi’s two late operas with direct connections to Paris — the Opéra’s commissioned Don Carlos in 1867 (with Elisabeth and the Princess Eboli) and the French-styled Aida that was written for Cairo in 1871 (with the characters of Aida and Amneris). The enormous popularity of Meyerbeer’s French grand operas in the nineteenth century can easily outshine the memory of his Italian operas, which may be seen as juvenile efforts as he was mastering his own voice. Yet originality frequently comes out of reworking older, more established, conventions. Though Meyerbeer might have relied on the plot device of cross-gender disguise to wean the Italian primo ottocento audience off of the association of the second woman’s voice with the heroic travesti role, he seemed to favor the use of two female voices in opera enough to make it a standard feature in his grand operas for Paris. Since the French were never fond of the castrato tradition, the use of two women in his Parisian operas did not invoke the same association of the heroic travesti that it did for the Italians. Instead, while Meyerbeer was central in defining the sound of French grand opera with thicker contrapuntal orchestral textures and the high florid vocal lines that needed the weight to soar over these larger orchestras, one of the primary figures in defining the configuration of the characters in the plot was Eugéne Scribe (1791-1861), the prolific librettist who wrote the text for all four of Meyerbeer’s French grand operas as well as those for many other composers.

Through the ubiquitous device of cross-dressing (whether as a heroic travesti role or the second woman disguised as a man), Meyerbeer’s six Italian operas reflect primo ottocento aesthetics by employing two female voices in leading roles. In less than a decade after Meyerbeer’s final Italian opera, the conventions for Italian opera shifted and the Romantic heroine became a singular role that combined elements

Women’s roles in Meyerbeer’s operas | 109

from the earlier two-woman model. In Paris, the situation developed along different lines. Without trying to conflate the interests and expectations of the French and Italian audiences, it can be argued that Meyerbeer’s career in Paris presented him with the opportunity to continue writing operas with leading roles for two female voices. His move to Paris facilitated something for which his talents had been skillfully pre-

pared. After he had spent those Italian years in the northern cradle of the travesti tradition, the international influence in French grand opera is well reflected in the career of its greatest proponent: a German composer, trained in Italy, who imported the Italian two-woman model and expanded its meaning within the context of Parisian Romanticism on the French grand opera stage.

NOTES

1 John Rosselli writes about the rise of the tenor in the beginning of the nineteenth century in chapter 8, “The Age of the Tenor,” in his Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) esp. pp. 176-178. Rodolfo Celletti has written about the bel canto period of the castrati and the evolution of this term into the nineteenth century (A History of Bel Canto [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996]). Heather Hadlock has written about the roles for women singing en travesti as the hero in “Women Playing Men in Italian Opera, 1810-1835 in Jane A. Bernstein, ed., Women’s Voices across Musical Worlds (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2004). I have elsewhere discussed this phenomenon in Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 2 Meyerbeer’s Italian operas are beginning to become less obscure largely due to the efforts of the Opera Rara foundation and their lovely recordings of two of these operas: Il crociato in Egitto (ORC 11, 1991) and Margherita d’Anjou (ORC 25, 2003). 3 Stephen C. Meyer, Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). 4 Philip Gossett, “Introduction,” in Giacomo Meyerbeer: Excerpts from the Early Italian Operas, 1817-22, Series: Italian Opera 1810-1840, Printed

110 | Naomi André Editions of Complete Operas and excerpts by the contemporaries of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, edited with Introductions by Philip Gossett, vol. 23 (New York: Garland, 1991).

5 Though Weber’s next operatic project (Die Drei Puntos) after Der Freischiitz was not performed in his lifetime, his last two operas were Euryanthe (Vienna, 1823) and Oberon (London); the latter was performed in April 1826, just months before Weber’s death in June. 6 Giacomo Meyerbeer to Jacob Herz Beer in Berlin; Vienna, November 1814 (Giacomo Meyerbeer: A Life in Letters, ed. Heinz and Gudrun Becker, trans. Mark Violette [Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1989] p. 32). 7 Andrew Everett, ““Bewitched in a Magic Garden’: Giacomo Meyerbeer in Italy,” The Donizetti Society Journal vol. 6 (1988), 162-192. 8 Rossini’s first opera for the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, was written in 1815. Between 1816 and 1823 (the time that overlaps with Meyerbeer’s stay in Italy) Rossini wrote eighteen operas. Beginning in 1816, his nine other operas for Naples were La gazzetta (a comic opera for the Teatro dei Fiorentini, 1816), Otello (for the Teatro Fondo during the San Carlo’s renovation in 1816), Armida (1817) and seven operas for the San Carlo: Mose in Egitto (1818), Riccardo e Zoraide (1818), Ermione (1819), La donna del lago (1819), Maometto II (1820), and

Zelmira (1822). Rossini’s four operas for Roman theatres during this time were two for the Teatro Argentina (Il barbiere di Siviglia, 1816 and Adelaide di Borgogna, 1817), Cenerentola for the Teatro Valle in 1817 and Matilde di Shabran for the Teatro Apollo in 1821. His four operas for northern theatres were La gazza ladra (1817) and Bianca e Falliero (1819) for La Scala in Milan and Eduardo e Cristina (1819) and Semiramide (1823) for La Fenice in Venice. The one-act farsa, Adina, was composed in 1818, yet premiered at the Teatro de San Carlos in Lisbon, Portugal in 1826. 9 Felice Romani was also the librettist of Simon Mayr’s La rosa bianca e la rosa rossa and Medea in Corinto — both from 1812, at the beginning of Romani’s career. In his study of the primo ottocento librettist Cammarano, John Black cites Romani and Rossi, along with Cammarano, as leading librettists of their time (The Italian Romantic Libretto: A Study of Salvadore Cammarano [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984], pp. 292-295). to “Rescue operas” of the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries involved dramas where an unjustly imprisoned

Women’s roles in Meyerbeer’s operas | III victim is ultimately rescued at the eleventh hour by the valiant acts of the hero. See David Charlton, “Rescue Opera,” New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1992), vol. m1, pp. 1293-1294. 11 The “second woman” is a term J explain in more depth in Voicing Gender. Several primo ottocento singers performed male and female characters; hence, there is not a specific type of voice or vocal range that was only associated with female characters or male characters. Generally, in the primo ottocento, the vocal range and tessitura of the heroic travesti/second woman singer was lower than the other soprano (“first woman’) role. 12 Meyerbeer’s first Italian opera, Romilda e Costanza (a melodramma semiserio in two acts) was premiered at the Teatro Nuovo in Padua on July 19, 1817. It was successful and subsequently performed in Venice and Munich. In 1818 Ricordi published four excerpts; the Florentine publisher, Cipriani, later issued a fifth number. I have gleaned the background information for Meyerbeer’s opera (including compositional genesis, performance history and plot synopses) from essays by Andrew Everett (““Bewitched in a Magic Garden”) and Philip Gossett (“Introduction,” Giacomo Meyerbeer). 13 Rosamunda Pisaroni created the role of Malcolm in Rossini’s La donna del lago (1819) and King Almanzor in Meyerbeer’s L’esule di Granata (1822). She was well known in Rossini’s Semiramide (as Arsace) and the title role in Tancredi.

14 Meyerbeer’s second opera for Italy, Semiramide riconosciuta (a dramma per musica in two acts) was premiered at the Teatro Regio, Turin in March 1819. Working once again with Rossi, who adapted this well-known eighteenth-century subject from Metastasio’s popular libretto, Meyerbeer’s opera preceded Rossini’s Semiramide (also to a libretto by Rossi) by four years. After its initial run it was revived at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna during June 1820 and two excerpts were printed by Ricordi: one in 1821 and the other in 1823. 15 The plot and sub-plots are outlined in Philip Gossett’s “Introduction,” Giacomo Meyerbeer and Andrew Everett, “Bewitched in a Magic Garden,” pp. 172-173. 16 The premiere of Rossini’s Bianca e Falliero took place on December 26, 1819. Bassi was considered for the title role, King Almanzore, in Meyerbeer’s unrealized Almanzore project (libretto by Rossi) of 1821.

112 | Naomi André Rosamunda Pisaroni ended up singing King Almanzor in what became L’esule di Granata at La Scala in Milan in 1822 when Romani reworked the libretto. Bassi was also one of the early interpreters of Velluti’s role of Armando in Meyerbeer’s last Italian opera, Il crociato di Egitto (1824). 17 Stendhal refers to Carolina Bassi as an “Italian soprano” whose voice was already going by the time of Bianca e Falliero (Stendhal, The Life of Rossini,

trans. Richard N. Coe, second edition [London: John Calder, 1985], p. 511). In his Garland introduction, Gossett refers to her as a mezzo-soprano; Everett calls her a contralto (““Bewitched in a Magic Garden,” p. 172). Gossett writes about Bassi: “Her range was more that of a mezzo-soprano than of a soprano, but Semiramide is the higher of the two leading women’s roles in Meyerbeer’s opera.” Gossett, “Introduction,” Giacomo Meyerbeer, note 11 (unnumbered pages). 18 The duet “Al folgor di que’ bei rai” is one of the two excerpts of this opera that was published by Ricordi in 1821. It was written for the Bologna revival of Semiramide riconosciuta in June 1820 at the Teatro Comunale and replaced the original Turin duet “Ella é la fiamma mia” (Gossett, “Introduction,” Giacomo Meyerbeer). 19 Meyerbeer’s third collaboration with Rossi (a two-act melodramma eroico) was premiered at the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice on June 26, 1819. The opera was quite successful and had performances in other Italian cities as well as in Germany (Dresden, Munich, and Frankfurt) and Vienna. Though outside Italy it was criticized by some for its “Italianate” style and imitation of Rossini, several excerpts from the opera were released by a small publisher in Munich as well as by Ricordi. For more on the criticism of Emma by Carl Maria von Weber and others, see Gossett, “Introduction,” Giacomo Meyerbeer. 20 Rosa Morandi (1782-1824) sang roles that can be seen as soprano and mezzo-soprano. She sang premieres of Fanny in Rossini’s La cambiale di matrimonio (1810) and Serafina in Donizetti’s Chiara e Serafina (1822). Elizabeth Forbes, “Rosa Morandi,” New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1992), vol. m, p. 464 and Everett, “Bewitched in a Magic Garden,” p. 174; both Forbes and Everett call Morandi a “mezzo-soprano.” 21 Rossini’s Eduardo e Cristina ran at the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice from April 24, 1819 and finished on June 25, 1819 (Gossett, “Introduction,” Giacomo Meyerbeer, note 14).

Women’s roles in Meyerbeer’s operas | 113 22 Meyerbeer’s fourth opera (a two-act melodramma semiserio) was his first collaboration with librettist Felice Romani and premiered at La Scala in Milan on November 14, 1820. Following in the trend of his earlier Italian works, Margherita d’Anjou continued to increase Meyerbeer’s success and popularity as an opera composer. It was performed in Venice, Bologna, Turin, Florence, and Trieste as well as in Munich and Dresden. In 1826 it

was given a major revival when it was performed in Paris at the Odéon theatre. Due to its popularity, Ricordi printed six excerpts of the opera after its first season in 1821. Following its success in Paris in 1826, this work became Meyerbeer’s first opera published in a full piano-vocal score; Margherita d’Anjou was issued in Paris by Schlesinger. See Gossett, “Introduction,” Giacomo Meyerbeer, note 22 (also mentioned in Everett, “Bewitched in a Magic Garden,” p. 177). 23 Meyerbeer’s penultimate Italian opera started out as Almanzore for the Teatro Argentina in Rome with a libretto by Gaetano Rossi. Meyerbeer received the commission from Giovanni Paterni, the impresario of the Argentina, a few weeks after the premiere of Margherita and the new opera was to be performed a few months later at the end of February 1821. Due to various circumstances — sickness and problems with the theatre — the opera was eventually transferred to La Scala in Milan where it was first performed as L’esule di Granata (The Exile from Granada) on March 12, 1822 with a reworked libretto by Felice Romani. Though this opera did not enjoy the same popularity as his earlier operas, Ricordi published five excerpts from it. 24 Romani’s plot of L’esule di Granata is loosely based on the historical rivalry between two ruling families (factions) in Moorish Spain: the Abencerrages and the Zegris (Jeremy Commons, liner notes for 100 years of Italian opera: 1820-1830, Opera Rara, ORCH 104, David Parry conductor, Philharmonia Orchestra, London, 1994, p. 54). 25 Bassi had since gone on to establish herself as a singer of travesti roles; , she created Falliero in Rossini’s 1819 Bianca e Falliero. 26 Adelaide Tosi premiered the following Donizetti roles: Argelia in L’esule di Roma, 1828; Neala in II paria, 1829; Elisabetta in II castello di Kenilworth, 1829. She also sang the premier of Bianca in Bellini’s revised Bianca e Fernando, 1828.

27 Negroponte is modern-day Euboea, the largest of the Greek islands in the Aegean. The plot of Maometto II is about the war between the

114 | Naomi André Venetians and the Turks in which the Turks were victorious. Maometto is Mohammed the Conqueror (Charles Osborne, The Bel Canto Operas, Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1994, pp. I0I-104). 28 Mark Everist has written about the theme of exoticism (“Meyerbeer’s Il crociato in Egitto: Mélodrame, Opera, Orientalism,” Cambridge Opera Journal 8/3 (1996), 215-250) and I have discussed the roles for women in this opera in more depth in Voicing Gender; nonetheless, I will present the themes that connect this opera to my argument here. 29 Though not examples of two consecutive nights, two cases that illustrate the fluidity between “second women” and travesti roles are with the Meyerbeer singers Rosamunda Pisaroni and Carolina Bassi. Pisaroni created the second woman role of Andromaca in Rossini’s Ermione at the

San Carlo in Naples in March 1819; at the same theatre later that year in September she created the travesti role of Malcolm in Rossini’s La donna del lago. Bassi premiered the title role in Meyerbeer’s Semiramide riconosciuta in March 1819 at the Teatro Regio in Turin. In September of the same year she sang the travesti role of Falliero in Rossini’s Bianca e Falliero at La Scala in Milan.

30 In Handel’s Alcina, Bradamante spends most of the opera disguised as “Ricciardo” so she can find her betrothed (Ruggiero) in Alcina’s lair. In Serse, Amastre, betrothed to Serse, is disguised as a man when she arrives at Serse’s court to see if he has been faithful to her. Thanks to Gillian Rodger for reminding me of the plot of Serse and talking with relish about cross-dressing.

5 | The effect of a bomb in the hall: The French “opera of ideas” and its cultural role in the 1920s Jane FE Fulcher

When considering the great epochs of French operatic history one ~ would scarcely even entertain the notion of including the decade of the 19208, which pales in comparison with the febrility of Weimar. In fact, our dismissal of the French operas of this decade only appears to reinforce the common dictum of the genre’s decline in much of Europe — its ineluctable marginality both in modern culture and in musical life. However, as I shall argue, this apparently insignificant decade in French opera is indeed seminal in terms of the genre’s changing function, its evolving intellectual and political role. For opera in France in the twenties became an arena fora new kind of exchange: as a nexus for attempts to enunciate ideology, it led rather to an intriguing effacement of older ideological lines. This, Imaintain, was the result of the inherent contradictions of the sub-genre involved, which sought to communicate abstract ideas in a semiotically unstable and emotionally compelling art. The “opera of ideas,” as I shall call it, emerged from and yet transformed German precedents, fostered by governments of both the Right and the Left in the polarized atmosphere that followed World War I. When articulate ideologically, however, it failed to convince artistically; conversely, the most successful examples led not to reinforcement of certainties but to intellectual ferment. And ironically for a genre that sought simple truths, it engendered its own avant-garde subversions, or a new form of commentary in opera, as I shall show in the case of

Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortiléges. Both during the First World War and in the twenties the Opéra’s savvy director, Jacques Rouché, was well aware of the artistic, commercial, and political interests that he was called upon to balance. For after, as during, the war, Rouché knew that the opera should not only

appeal to the broader audience it now sought to attract, but must serve current political and national interests. Because of the centrality

| 115

116 | Jane F. Fulcher of the latter, even in a period of financial hardship, as in the early 1920s, Rouché succeeded in obtaining at least his prewar subvention.’

The integrity of the state opera was a serious matter, for just as in the Weimar Republic it was to serve an educational role, although

here it was not progressive, but rather politically conservative and nationalist. Drawing on his experience during the war, Rouché knew

just what to stage, selecting those works from the older and newer repertoire that would fulfill this pedagogical function. As soon as the war was over, he turned to the ardently patriotic Camille Saint-Saéns, producing his historical opera Henry VIII in December 1918. Two years later Rouché presented the work of Saint-Saens’s notorious antagonist, Vincent d’Indy, a composer who was equally venerable, and unimpeachably nationalist. Appropriately, it was during the government of the conservative Bloc National that d’Indy’s opera, La Légende de Saint Christophe (which he had begun in 1903 and referred to as his “drame anti-Juif”), finally had its premiere.’ One of the rationales for this choice on the part of Rouché was evidently his belief that the work would reinforce the ideology of the ruling coalition and engage with current intellectual interests. As he was undoubtedly aware, this was the moment of a marked revival not only of “neo-Medievalism” but of “neo-scholasticism” among prominent Catholic circles in France. Hence it was also the period of revival of the medieval miracle play, promoted by fervent Catholics like Henri Gheon and the Sorbonne professor Gustave Cohen.‘ A return to the Middle Ages was similarly characteristic of French philosophers, including Etienne Gilson, and of theologians like Jacques Maritain, who published his Art et scholastique in 1920. And finally, the twenties was a decade of neo-Medievalism not only in French Catholic architecture,

but also in sculpture, as well as in the war and funeral monuments now being raised throughout France. But other themes in d’Indy’s opera could be interpreted as relating to current interests and issues in the intellectual and religious or the

political and social realms. This was the period when not only the Right, but also ecclesiastical authorities, were condemning political liberalism, together with equally threatening “naturalism,” socialism,

The French “opera of ideas” | 117 and communism. D’Indy had combined related concerns in his opera, along with the similarly compelling themes of traitors and race — as resonant now as during the Dreyfus Affair, when he conceived the work. Although I have discussed this opera in considerable detail in a previous study, it is important here to review those elements that together shaped its ideological enunciation and its influence in the twenties.’

The opera was based upon a thirteenth-century collection of the lives of saints, the Légende dorée (Legenda aurea), the product ofa Domini-

can monk known in France as Jacques de Voragine. In the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, the ardently anti-Dreyfusard d’Indy had attempted to adapt the legend to the service of the nationalists’ ideological cause. Here the saint’s nemesis becomes a Jew, who is both avaricious and a

traitor, yet has succeeded in corrupting the bourgeoisie and head of state, and is vengefully killed in the end. Stylistically, the most symbolic and didactic element in this drame mysteére lies in the choice and manipulation of Gregorian chant, which d'Indy carried to unprecedented extremes. Of the opera’s twenty-four

themes, seven are taken literally from the Gregorian repertoire, and probably intended (idealistically) to be recognized by the audience. But d’Indy deploys other stylistic resources beyond melodies in the interest of exegesis, including allusions to the masters admired (and as inter-

preted) at the Schola Cantorum, in particular Bach and Beethoven. These references, like the Renaissance motet style that d’Indy (and others) associated with les primitifs, appear when the text refers to sincerity, spiritual probity, and the certitudes of faith.° The Jew is characterized by borrowings from Wagner's depiction of Alberich in The Ring, as well as by the so-called “Italo-Judaic” style which d’Indy associated with Meyerbeer and French grand opera.

What, then, was the message that d’Indy originally intended in his adaptation of the legend? Anti-materialistic, it indicted a world motivated by profit, and based on a corrupt structure of authority. Against such greed and corruption he contraposed Christophe’s duty, sacrifice, and heroism, the purity of race and nation, and the primacy of collective values and of social hierarchy. The latter themes were

118 | Jane F. Fulcher particularly resonant now, in the wake of the First World War, and with the advent of the Bloc National and the current turn to spirituality, community, and religion. La Legende de Saint Christophe premiered on June 6, 1920, and was

clearly meant to be the highlight of a less than triumphant operatic season.’ The other works performed in 1920, which met with a less than enthusiastic response, included two other operas on biblical themes — Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé and Mariotte’s Salome.

D’Indy’s apparently religious opera not only promised to comfort good Catholics, but premiered in the midst of pervasive social anxiety, which even included the moderate Left. For together with political polarization there was a rapidly mounting fear of Bolshevism, which worked

to the advantage of the political Right in the defensive postwar climate. Moreover, in 1919 Paris was crippled by a series of strikes, and in 1920 they extended to the capital’s prestigious lyric theatres. All this, together with the continuing postwar intellectual and emotional trauma, now made the work appear singularly appropriate not only as theatre but as public ritual.* The symbolic function of the opera as Rouché had defined it during the war — to help achieve national unity and ideological consensus — was still palpably in place. Surprisingly, despite its clearly partisan intent, the work won wide approbation, and less on the basis of its musical qualities than because of the ideas it represented for different groups, within the political con-

juncture. This was abetted not only by the increased prestige of the Schola during and after the war, but by the decors by Maurice Denis, which differed substantially from d’Indy’s description in the score. As opposed to the composer’s explicit and lavish nineteenth-century conception, Denis brought out the sacred and abstract components of the drama, thus diverting attention from d'Indy’s topical and controversial references. For example, his scenery for the palace of the “Reine de Volupte” disregards d’Indy’s specification of Byzantine mosaics, intended to suggest the dangerous, sybaritic, orient, as opposed to the occident. Instead, he created the appropriate mood by means of sensuous forms or shapes, but, again, at the expense of d’Indy’s explicit and realistic detail.

The French “opera of ideas” | 119 The conservative critic Adolphe Boschot was clearly influenced by

this more generalized treatment, admiring the way in which d'Indy employed a legendary subject in order to incorporate his personal social and religious convictions. Yet the message of the opera was so multivalent in the context that even the Socialist Populaire de Paris was highly laudatory of the opera, ostensibly on the basis of its condemna-

tion of the bourgeoisie.” The postwar social crisis, then, had created a situation in which both the Right and the Left could project their political enemies onto d’Indy’s villains.

As Rouché foresaw, interpretation of the opera was closely linked to the political context which, in large part, accounted for its broad appeal and ability to engage the audience. What had originally begun as a conservative, hostile, reaction in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair was now, in the postwar period, interpreted rather as a statement of French defensiveness or an appeal to social justice. Yet in spite of the multiple

interpretations that the opera, as staged, could accommodate, it was not an artistic success but a mere succés d’estime, which lasted for only three performances.

D’Indy’s was an “opera of ideas,” and the ideological element

patently held a strong appeal, although this had made it inimical to a : nuanced and thus satisfying artistic treatment. But this was an era of concern with ideologies on the part of both the Left and the Right, reflected in a number of artistic genres, among which the opera was only one. Another was the novel of ideas, or roman a these, which had developed since the nineteenth century, and was now flourishing once more among writers such as Roger Martin du Gard.*° Here we encounter the same tensions as in its operatic cognate in France — between the hortatory and poetic elements, or between ideological certainty and real human complexity. As Susan Suleiman has aptly expressed it, this is a genre inherently “divided against itself,” activated

by the opposing tendencies of schematicization and concrete human experience.” But the genre persisted, and Maurice Barrés, who had practiced it since the nineteenth century, and who was acclaimed through a national funeral in 1923, was at the height of his popularity among

120 | Jane F. Fulcher . nationalists. Not surprisingly, it was now that one of Barrés’s most controversial novels, Un Jardin sur ’Oronte, was made into an opera by Alfred Bachelet, selected by Barrés as the most appropriate composer for the work.” But Barrés died before he could construct a libretto from

the novel as he had planned, although, being an admirer of Wagner, he claimed to have projected a Wagnerian conception onto the work. The novel, Barrés’s last, published in 1922, concerns the love of a Christian and a Saracen, an episode drawn from a long epic of the crusades in the Middle Ages. The story's topicality lay in the fact that it dealt with the still highly

charged theme of the conflict between the orient and the occident, and concomitantly with the clash of races and purported “modes of feeling.” Yet despite Barrés’s conservativism, the novel, in fact, created a scandal, particularly in the Catholic press, which perceived its overt

sensuality as an outrage to religious morality.’* It was perhaps this media attention that initially attracted Bachelet to the project, for he employed stylistic elements that heightened the conflict — music evocative of the Christian Middle Ages as opposed to sinuous “oriental” vocalises.“4 But he also included conventional forms that are related

both to serious opera and to opéra-comique, such as recitatives, dirs, chants, proverbes (evoking folk culture), and religious processions.

The scandal over the novel undoubtedly delayed the work's premiere, and, now ambiguous as to its political implications, it was finally

presented on November 7, 1932, the year that a leftist government gained power. Predictably, conservative journals seized the occasion to laud the opera, which despite its condemnation by the church still represented the prestige and nationalist values of Barrés. René Dumesnil, in the Mercure de France, reported an “étonnante réussite” (astonishing success), in terms of both the libretto’s adaptation of the novel and Bachelet’s ability to capture its nuances. Yet he feels compelled to begin by addressing the continuing controversy over the novel, particularly among Catholic circles, by citing Barrés himself on the work: “Dans ce Jardin sur l’Oronte je ne prétend plus méner le bon combat Catholique et Chrétien que Racine dans ses tragédies, Fénélon dans son Telémaque, ou le Tasse dans sa Jerusalem.” (“In this Jardin sur l’Oronte

The French “opera of ideas” | 121

I don't claim to fight the good Christian and Catholic fight, any more than Racine does in his tragedies, Fénélon in his Telémaque, or Tasso in his Jerusalem.” )?

The goal, Dumesnil explains, is “art,” and he then cites a quote by the abbé Brémond who characterizes it as a “fantaisie” in order to justify Barrés’s provocation. Dumesnil also notes the opera’s apt adaptation of Wagnerian stylistic traits, for him consisting of the leitmotifs, the solid construction, and the well-developed plan. In short, it is characterized by an (implicitly d’Indyste) “natural nobility” and erudition, as evidenced in its use of “oriental folklore,’ as well as of music from the Middle Ages.'® Here, however, the conservative goal of separating the two cultures of orient and occident is undermined or ignored in his discussion of the effective aesthetic results of their fusion. Predictably, Dumesnil also lauds Bachelet’s conservative “archaisme charmante,” or his use of old French dances such asa “pastourelle com-

pagnard,” a “carole gracieuse,” an “estompie,” and a “gigue.”'” The work, then, transcended ideological lines, containing elements that appealed to both Right and Left, becoming for some an embodiment of conservative values and for others a bold defiance of the church. Each position was therefore forced to accept those factors, ideological or aesthetic, that it would otherwise have considered inimical if priority were given either to its content or to its style. The presentation of Bachelet’s ambiguous work, even at a delicate moment, is not surprising in light of precedents of operas that concerned social-philosophic ideas. One was Georges Hue’s politically conservative Dans l’ombre de la cathédrale of 1922, which centers on the opposition between “l’idéal religieux” and “lidéal libertaire.”"® In light of the volatility of the issue in France, the action is judiciously set in the Cathedral of Toledo in Spain (traditionally associated by the French with fervent religiosity), and drawn from a Spanish novel. Hue clearly considered himself to be a conservative French intellectual, and in 1935 signed the “Manifeste pour la paix en Europe et la défense de l’Occident,” supporting Mussolini’s aggression in Ethiopia.*® However, like d’Indy’s, this didactic work was only a succes d’estime, yet

122 | Jane FE. Fulcher

considered appropriate to the postwar function of the Opéra, which would persist in selecting such works.

This continued throughout the twenties, and when the Cartel des Gauches came to power in 1924 it used the Opéra to project the film Le Miracle des loups, with music by the Conservatoire’s director, Henri Rabaud. The Left, despite its claims to modernity, still had to imprint this pillar of French culture with its political values (as it had since the

French Revolution), and thus turned to history and the heroic. The film, based on a novel by Dupuy-Mazuel, concerns a key episode from early French history — the story of Louis XI and Charles the Bold, or the siege of Beauvais, crowned by the heroism of Jeanne Hachette.*° Because ofits historical resonance and its associations with both French heroism and patriotism, the film was presented before the head of state

and members of the new Left government on November 13, 1924. Although the Left here attempted to marshall French history and the major monument of French culture, the Paris Opera, to its cause, it also inscribed more musically progressive, if controversial, values on the nation’s Opéra-comique. It was undoubtedly during the Cartel des Gauches that the theatre accepted Marcel Delannoy’s Le Poirier de misére, which, however, was not performed until the Right had returned to power. Premiered at the Opéra-comique on February 21, 1927, it had, according to reports, the effect of abomb being detonated in the hall.** Several important critics

were explicit about their reasons for condemning the work, accusing the author of vulgarity and having been influenced by increasingly threatening “bolshevist tendencies.” This was probably a reference to continuing agitation on the French Left, which had been battling vitriolically with the Right over finances in the chamber throughout the previous year.**

| The work’s text, by André Tourrasse and Jean Limousin, in the tradition of the more “popular” culture of the Left, is allegorical, described alternately as based on a Flemish folk tale or on the ancient myth of Sisyphus. The characters include such abstract, yet in the context politically charged, figures as “Misére,” “Le Peuple,” “Le Saint,” and “La Mort.” The political “charge,” and specifically the work’s association

The French “opera of ideas” | 123

with the Communist Left, was heightened by the effect of the stark, austere decor, which anticipated the innovations of Weimar’s Kroll Opera. Moreover, the opera is cast in a genre that provocatively crosses established ideological lines, for it attempts to appropriate the popular mystery play, but in the political interests of the Left. Recalling d’Indy,

it is boldly entitled a “Mystére en 3 actes,” with one of the existing copies of the controversial opera inscribed to Maurice Ravel.”? The tumult at the work’s premiere was provoked, in part, by this daring effacement ofideological-generic divisions, which did engage, ifindeed enrage, the public. Not surprisingly, both Jean Marnold and his friend,

Maurice Ravel, came to the defense of the opera when Ravel’s old nemesis in the press, Pierre Lalo, condemned it. Recalling the time when Lalo had attacked his own work, Ravel now indignantly took issue with Lalo’s pious recommendation that the author “follow Ravel’s example.”*4 But as we shall see, this was not Ravel’s only response to the ideological conservativism being enunciated through French opera — it was a tendency that he would cleverly combat on several fronts.

Far more acceptable to conservatives in the twenties was Joseph Canteloube’s Le Mas, which was premiered at the Opera on April 3, 1929, at the urging of the reactionary critic of Le Menestrel, Paul Bertrand.*? Canteloube, a biographer and supporter of d’Indy (and was to become a functionary during the Vichy Regime) had selected a theme that once again recalls Maurice Barrés. For the title of the work, Le Mas, refers to the traditional name of the family farm in southern France, thus, within the context, evoking both regionalist and nationalist associations.

The action, as described in the score, takes place specifically in Quercy, in the region of the “Auvergne méridionale,” “dans une famille de vielle souch terrien” (“in a family of the old stock of the earth”).”° The work was begun before the First World War (the dates given in the score are 1911-1913), and like so many operas of this period employs

leitmotits (although not systematically or symphonically) yet boldly introduces some bitonal passages for specific dramatic reasons.”” However, it was the theme of the opera that was so compelling for political

124 | Jane E Fulcher conservatives; in fact, one contemporary described it by employing a rhetoric that echoes Barrés’s theme of “rootedness” in Les Déracinés: “C'est la théme des ancétres qui, plus fort que l’attrait des villes, recon-

quiert un jeune déraciné et le fixe définitivement au pays natal.” (“It is the theme of ancestors which, stronger than the attraction of cities, reconquers an uprooted young man and fixes him definitively in his native land.”)® Others stressed its roots in classical culture, charac-

terizing it as a commentary on the fortunes of the ancient “georgics” from Virgil, and again ignoring the stylistic innovations in the work. As we have seen, in some cases it was the theme that determined the

ideological interpretation, but in others it was the style employed, as construed within the current context. Yet perhaps because of this ambi-

guity, and the concomitant engagement that it triggered among the public, the Opera persisted in the presentation of operas with ideological or political themes. On June 23, 1933, for example, during the period of a government to the Left, the Opera performed Canteloube’s Vercingétorix, despite the composer’s conservative orientation. For, once more, the theme was one with which the Left now wished to identify, especially in light of fascism — French patriotism, yet its stress being not on blood and soil but on nobility and sacrifice. With no regional elements here implied, this history of the ancient Gauls (to a libretto

of Etienne Clément) led Canteloube to further innovations, such as the first use of the ondes Martinot in an opera orchestra.”? Hence the utterance was once more ambiguous, as had been the case in previous works we have seen, which did not dissuade the Opéra from persevering in its attempt to foster the genre. For again, the Opéra’s function as it had been re-established during the war was to diffuse ideas in the national interest, which even if contested, would “engage.”

If dIndy was the most prominent French composer to espouse politically conservative ideas through opera, then Ravel, as we have noted, was the most outspoken critic of this endeavor. Like d’Indy during the period of the Dreyfus Affair, Ravel after the war sought ideological expression for the cultural position that he had gradually

The French “opera of ideas” | 125

defined for himself in the course of the conflict. This was one that implacably rejected uncritical nationalism, as well as the narrow ofhcial dogma concerning French culture and all that it must inherently exclude. Ravel’s ideal of French patriotism was firmly rooted in the traditional Republican, and ultimately revolutionary, conception of individual responsibility, founded unequivocally upon human reason.*° And so his response to the postwar climate and to the conservative nationalism that we have seen was to assume the intellectually critical role that was associated with the French Left. But Ravel character-

istically became engaged with ideological issues obliquely, or on a symbolic level, and through gestures we can only understand fully within the context that we have examined. The fact that Ravel espoused Socialist sympathies, subscribing only to the Socialist Populaire de Paris, and frequented Socialist politicians like

Léon Blum and Paul Painlevé, is widely known.** Moreover, Manuel Rosenthal points out explicitly in his memoirs about Ravel, “il était ce qu’on appellerait aujourd’hui un homme de gauche” (“he was what one would call today a man of the Left”).** Indeed, Ravel’s cultural gestures, choices, and stylistic proclivities in the postwar period are as telling as his reading and associations, and are consonant with the ideals of the contemporary French Left. This includes his response to the nationalist interdiction on foreign cultural and racial influences, to colonialism, or imperialism, and to conservative conceptions of proper stylistic models. All of these themes, in addition to his clever response to the inherently unsuccessful yet culturally central French “opera of ideas,” we may perceive in L’Enfant et les sortileges. This “fantaisie lyrique en deux actes,” as Ravel referred to the work,

to a text of Colette, was completed in 1924 and, he explained, was in the spirit of “l’opérette américaine.”* It was provocative for a French

composer to manifest not only the influence of American popular culture, but specifically jazz, and on the official stage, here playfully associated with a black teapot.*4 As Ravel himself put it in a letter

to Colette, “What do you think of a cup and a teapot, in old black Wedgwood, singing a ragtime? I confess that the idea of having two

126 | Jane EF. Fulcher negroes singing a ragtime at our National Academy of Music fills me with great joy. * This, moreover, was in the midst ofa virulent current of anti-Americanism on the part of the nationalists and the conservative center, which were both economically and culturally “protectionist.”2° But Ravel’s playfully provocative marshalling of styles in the work is not limited to jazz: at a time of stress on French “purity,” he invokes the oriental, but in a manner that mocks traditional colonialist orientalism. The solo aria of the Chinese cup, for example, facetiously employs

the typical parallel fourths and pentatonicism of the conventional references to “the oriental.” In addition, at the beginning of the work Ravel consciously invokes oriental clichés to create an atmosphere of fantasy, especially through the color of the oboe, the pentatonic pitch material, and the sonorities of the open fourth and fifth.”” But perhaps most clever and incisive is Ravel’s biting ridicule, through trivialization, of those styles still associated with d’Indy and his Schola Cantorum,

the reactionary stance of which he loathed.** Here it is important to recall that d’Indy’s nationalist and pedantic opera, La Légende de Saint Christophe, premiered at the time that Ravel was composing his work. As we may also recall, d’Indy here didactically deployed those styles that the Schola associated with its conservative philosophy, especially medieval organum and Renaissance sacred choral music.

These are precisely the styles that Ravel employs to connote the naive, but absurdly so in the context, as in the final a cappella fugue of the animals. In d’Indy’s opera such a style is marshalled when the chorus sings of the power of the cross to prevent sinners from damnation: Ravel employs it when the animals praise the good child. As Jankelévitch noted, the final chorus “with its canon-like imitations and its seething superimposed voices reveals a polyphonist worthy of the masters of the Renaissance.”’? But Ravel goes even further in subverting the pedantic meaning of the Schola’s sacred styles, employ-

ing medieval organum and making reference to the august French Baroque.*° In the former case Ravel refers to early organum together with oriental clichés to suggest the fairy-world of the child, thus defiantly conflating, not opposing, East and West.

The French “opera of ideas” | 127

Just as perversely, for conservatives, he also combines medieval organum with modernist techniques condemned at the Schola, including Stravinskian changing meters and Schoenbergian vocal glissandi. Ravel’s confrontational symbolism, or syncretism, extends to his use of French Baroque elements which, as in Le Tombeau de Couperin, he combines with stylistic suggestions of the non-French Scarlatti." Other stylistic references include composers ideologically condemned at the Schola, such as Offenbach, Puccini, and Massenet, who for d Indy were products of pernicious Jewish influences, even though the latter two were not Jewish.

In short, Ravel made an authentic, uncompromised statement on the national stage by inverting and thus mocking those languages associated with chauvinistic or extreme nationalist ideology. While Carolyn Abbate has read this work in terms of a French modernist obsession

with animation of the “lifeless,” or sound reproduction, making this work a “tombeau,” we may proceed even further. The trope, within this cultural context, extends to empty reproduction of styles —to styles that were culturally dead, yet artificially reanimated in the conservative climate.**

If politics may encompass attempts to expose the very premises and conventions that underlie a dominant social position, then Ravel, here, was indeed “engaged.” But this we can see only if we perceive the dialogue, or dialogic exchange, between Ravel’s avant-garde manipulations and the “opera ofideas” in postwar France. Ravel, in fact, acknowledged his subversive, if amusing, stylistic intentions in the opera in a candid letter to his close friend Roland-Manuel: “I can assure you that

this work, in two parts, will be distinguished by a mixture of styles which will be severely criticized, which leaves Colette indifferent, and

me not caring a damn.”

Ravel was indeed correct: when the work premiered at the Opéra-comique on February 1, 1926 (toward the end of the Cartel des Gauches), disruptions by those offended predictably broke out. Although some critics in more conservative journals (such as Henry Malherbe in Le Temps) did praise it, perceiving only classicism and “spirited sensuality,” others were far less sanguine. The critic

128 | Jane F. Fulcher for La Liberté, Robert Dezarnaud, was clearly not amused, and was indeed indignant about Ravel’s ironic deployment of styles in the opera.*4

For French opera was taken seriously as a medium of ideas and ideology throughout the twenties, and that which was presented at a statesubventioned theatre was scrutinized within this light. The “opera of

ideas,” then, was both a necessity and condemned to failure: while meeting expectations for a hortatory, edifying art, if musically successful it thus defeated its goal. But it did achieve cultural centrality, fusing different sectors and employing those themes that engaged the audience, and it forced established creeds to re-examine their ideological-

aesthetic stances. Not dead, but transitional, this operatic genre did provoke and thus lead to further dialogue, not only between political antagonists, but in Ravel’s case between French opera’s future and its past.

NOTES

1 Rouché continued to employ Louis Laloy, who was always in touch with the latest intellectual and political developments, as his secretary. On Laloy, see Jane FE. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dreyfus

Affair to the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 136-138. Also see Louis Laloy, Louis Laloy (1874-1944) on Debussy, Ravel,

and Stravinsky, trans. and annotated by Deborah Priest (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). ° 2 On opera in the Weimar Republic, see Pascal Huynh, La Musique sous la République de Weimar (Paris: Fayard, 1998), pp. 258-261, and Susan Cook, } Opera for a New Republic: the Zeitopern of Krenek, Weill, and Hindemith (Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988). 3 D’Indy referred to his opera as such in a letter of September 17, 1903, to Pierre de Bréville. As cited by Léon Vallas, Vincent d’Indy, vol. u (Paris: Albin Michel, 1950), p. 327. 4 Dorothy Knowles, French Drama of the Inter-War Years. 1918-1939 (London: George G. Harrap, 1967), p. 299, and Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 30.

The French “opera of ideas” | 129 5 See Fulcher, French Cultural Politics, pp. 66-72, and Jane F. Fulcher, “D’Indy’s “Drame anti-Juif’ and Its Meaning in Paris, 1920,” Cambridge Opera Journal 2/3 (November 1990), 285-319. 6 As Vallas, among others, notes, Vincent d’Indy, p. 335, d’Indy makes musical reference to Bach’s Passions and to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.

7 June 6 was actually the date of the open dress rehearsal, the repétition générale, to which the press was invited, and thus was treated as the premiere. The printed score gives the date of June 9, which indicates that it had to be changed, since the press reports appeared on the 8th. Because of the series of strikes, the first commercial performance, or “creation, did not take place until December 8. 8 On the trauma of the period, see Maurice Denis, Nouvelles théories sur Vart moderne. Sur Vart sacrée (Paris: Rouart et Watelin, 1921), p. 194.

9 Adolphe Boschot, Chez les musiciens (Paris: Plon, 1922), p. 214, Le Populaire de Paris, June 8, 1920, and La Revue critique des idées et des livres (associated with the Action Frangaise), July 1920, 105-108. For more details on the decor, see Fulcher, “D’Indy’s ‘Drame anti-Juif and Its Meaning in Paris, 1920.” 10 Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la Patrie: Les intellectuels et la premiere guerre mondiale (1910-1919) (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 1996), p. 155. 11 Susan Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 21-22. Also see Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (New York: Avon, 1957), pp. 20-22. 12 Alfred Bachelet, an admirer of both Wagner and Debussy, was the chef du

chant and then the conductor at the Opéra-comique under Messager and Broussan, and in 1919 became the director of the Conservatoire at Nancy. In 1929 he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. 13 Michel Winock, Le Siécle des intellectuels (Paris: Seuil, 1997), p. 195. 14 See René Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres: 1919-1939

(Paris: Editions du Milieu du Monde, 1946), p. 131. 15 Review of Bachelet’s Un Jardin sur l’Oronte by René Dumesnil, Mercure de France (November 15, 1932), 444-445. 16 Ibid., pp. 446-450. As Dumesnil points out, p. 450, this includes the use of ancient Arab modes. It is significant to note here that extracts from Bachelet’s Un Jardin sur l’Oronte were recorded during the Vichy regime, in 1942-1943, under the sponsorship of the Sécretariat général des

, 130 | Jane F Fulcher Beaux-Arts at the Association francaise d’ Action Artistique. See Philippe Morin, “Une Nouvelle Discographie pour la France,” in Myriam Chiménes, ed., La Vie musicale sous Vichy (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 2001), p. 265. 17 Dumesnil, Mercure de France (November 15, 1932), p. 451. He ends, p. 453, by praising Rouché for having “honored French art” in presenting this work, and then expresses his dismay that the Opera’s subvention had just been reduced to 400,000 francs, undoubtedly because of the effects of the Depression, now being felt in France. 18 Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, p. 134. The score at the Bibliothéque Nationale de France, Musique, published in 1922, indicates cuts for performance at the Opéra-comique. 19 Winock, Le Siécle des intellectuels, pp. 625-627. 20 Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, p. 134, and Francois Porcile, La Belle Epoque de la musique francaise: Le temps de Maurice Ravel.

1871-1940 (Paris: Fayard, 1999), p. 341.

21 Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, p. 199. The review in

Télérama of August 1, 1927, also notes the polemics that the work provoked at its premiere. It goes on to point out that the music is “severe” and powerful, and influenced by folklore. 22 Maurice Agulhon, La République 1880 a nos jours (Paris: Hachette, 1990), vol. 1, p. 434. And on the work’s reception see Leslie Sprout, “Music for a ‘New Era’: Composers and National Identity in France, 1936-1946” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2000), p. 59. 23 The review in Télérama of August 1, 1927, recounts the legend on which the work is based: “Misery,” an old woman, has nothing but a cabin and a pear tree. She welcomes and comforts a vagabond, who turns out to be Saint Denis. He allows her a wish, and she asks that her pear tree imprison the thieves who have appeared, but she thus traps Death. Humanity is happy until the sick, weak, and desperate come to implore her to release Death. Then all returns to order. The fact that the story could be read as an allegory of the present and that it uses religious references, including a saint, relates it to d’Indy’s La Légende de Saint Christophe, which may have been a further provocation. On the possible sources for the libretto see Sprout, “Music for a ‘New Era’,” p. 59. 24 Significantly, the copy of the score at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Musique, published in Paris by Heugel in 1926, is dedicated to Maurice Ravel.

The French “opera of ideas” | 131 25 Paul Bertrand, Le Monde de la musique (Geneva: La Palatine, 1947), p. 199. 26 See the score, Le Mas. Piéce lyrique en trois actes (Paris: Au Menestrel, Heugel, 1927).

27 Iam grateful to Andrea Musk for discussing the work with me. See her analysis of it in her “Aspects of Regionalism in French Music during the Third Republic: The Schola Cantorum, d’Indy, Sevérac, and Canteloube,” D.Phil. dissertation, Oxford University, 1999. 28 Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, p. 103. A review by Dominique Sordet, in Action francaise on April 5, 1929, notes the

regionalism in the work, and specifically the use of themes from the Auvergne, the composer’s home region, though he criticizes the music and the staging. Another review, by Roland-Manuel, in Le Ménestrel on April 5, 1929, also notes its use of regional melodies, which here, he argues, accord well with the harmonic advances of the beginning of the century. And so, despite the conservative message of the libretto, Sordet is not enthusiastic about the work because of the Wagnerian harmonic language, and Roland-Manuel, politically to the Left, defends it on the basis of its harmonic innovations for its period. 29 Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, p. 104. 30 See Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers

Pp. 9. ,

during the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996),

31 Arbie Orenstein, ed., A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 113. As Orenstein points out, p. 29, Ravel had known Léon Blum since the turn of the century, in the circle of the Revue blanche. Ravel continued to admire Blum and Paul

Painlevé, who had been Minister of Finance during the war. Also see Manuel Rosenthal, Ravel. Souvenirs (Paris: Hazan, 1995), pp. 15 and 127, on Ravel’s dedication to Le Populaire and his ties to Léon Blum. As Rosenthal perceived it, an inherent sympathy for the poor helped determine Ravel’s political choices. 32 Rosenthal, Ravel, p. 127. 33 Ravel, “Esquisse autobiographique,” as published in the Revue musicale (1938), 214-215. The original manuscript is in the Bibliothéque Nationale de France, Musique, Reserve. 34 Ravel displayed a unique temerity among French composers in the twenties by being the only one to employ jazz on the operatic stage. On Ravel’s enthusiasm for Billy Arnold’s jazz orchestra, see Geoffrey J.

132 | Jane E. Fulcher Haydon, “A Study of the Exchange between the Music of Early Twentieth-Century Parisian Composers and Ragtime, Blues, and Early Jazz,” DMA document, University of Texas at Austin, 1992, p. 58. 35 Orenstein, ed., A Ravel Reader, p. 188. 1 am indebted to Gary Laycock, who brought many of the observations that follow concerning Ravel’s stylistic references and manipulations to my attention in an excellent seminar paper. As he and others have noted, a trombone “sneer” announces the entrance of the English teapot and Chinese cup, followed by a bass clarinet playing a blues motive. The brassy orchestration and the rhythm further suggest both the foxtrot and ragtime. 36 See Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York: Norton, 1994), pp. 94-95. 37 See Glenn Watkin’s discussion of the work in his Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century (New York: Schirmer, 1988), pp. 279-283. 38 On Ravel’s aversion to the Schola, see Fulcher, French Cultural Politics, pp. 209-210. 39 For a discussion of the styles used in the work, see Vladimir Jankelévitch, Ravel, trans. Margaret Crosland (New York: Grove Press, 1959), pp. 78ff. 40 Laycock notes the specific similarity with Act I, scene 3, of d’Indy’s opera. 41 See Jankelévitch, Ravel, pp. 127-128. 42 Carolyn Abbate, “Outside Ravel’s Tomb,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52/3 (Fall 1999), pp. 468, 473, 494, 507, and 520. 43 Orenstein, ed., A Ravel Reader, p. 204.

44 Ibid.

PART II

The Institutional Bases for the Production and Reception of Opera

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Introduction to Part II Thomas Ertman

The authors in this section on the whole take a different approach to those in Part I. In general terms, they are less concerned with how operas represent existing social realities than in how those realities themselves constrain the production and reproduction, and hence shape the character, of operatic works and the reception of those works by the public. Musicologist Franco Piperno does this in a way that builds upon the pioneering research of the Anglo-Italian historian John Rosselli and of the contributors (himself included) to the History of Italian Opera project edited by Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli. In 1984, Rosselli published his pioneering The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi, in which he showed how independent businessmen

(the impresarios), acting at the behest and under the supervision of theatre owners and municipal authorities, staged regular opera seasons built around new works in cities and towns across Italy from the 1780s through the 1850s." In his chapter “Opera Production to 1780” in volume tv of The History of Italian Opera, which appeared in Italian in 1987 and in English in 1998, Franco Piperno uncovered how the impresario-based system captured at its height by Rosselli had first emerged in the seventeenth century and how it operated during

the eighteenth century.” In his contribution here, Piperno takes this research further and shows that, despite the supposedly free-market character of the Italian opera industry, the peninsula’s state governments played a central role both in the diffusion of musical theatre to the provinces and in the emergence of innovative sub-genres such as the sacred opera during the course of the 1700s. He also illustrates how an understanding of the often familial nature of opera buffa troupes

is essential to explaining the tremendous continuity in the musical style of this sub-genre from the early eighteenth through the early nineteenth centuries.

| 135

136 | Thomas Ertman If Piperno is concerned mainly with the impact of production conditions (government policy, the labor market for artistic personal) within a single cultural space (Italy), historians William Weber and Christophe

Charle take as their starting point the deeply international and cosmopolitan character of the operatic enterprise. John Rosselli underlined this fact in his 1992 study Singers of Italian Opera, where he demon-

strated that as early as the seventeenth century both the demand for and the supply of such singers already extended well beyond the Italian peninsula and by the nineteenth century had become truly global in its

reach. Both Weber and Charle examine the nature and consequences of opera’s globalism from a somewhat different perspective, namely that of the competition among leading world cities for cultural capital. In the decades around 1800, as Weber shows, the presence ofa flourish-

ing opera season was the marker of a truly cosmopolitan metropolis, identified as such a season was with world cities like Venice, Paris, and London. This was a crucial factor in the spread of this new Italian art

form around the world since no city with any pretensions to cultural standing could afford to be without an opera house. During the half century before World War I, Paris remained the single most influential node within the world opera network, as Charle’s quantitatively based study reveals. The prestige still conferred by a Parisian premiere permitted the French to export large numbers of new works to all five continents — and even to supposedly hostile nations like Germany — at a time when the country’s musical culture was becoming increasingly parochial in its response to innovations from abroad.

In addition to government policy and to pressure from markets of various kinds, a third factor that can shape the character of operatic output is the general political atmosphere. This connection has been the subject ofa voluminous literature in the case of Giuseppe Verdi, and Philip Gossett’s chapter below represents a major new contribution to this literature. In it, he details how Verdi responded to the Revolution

of 1848, returning to Italy from Paris, composing a patriotic hymn (“Suona la tromba”) commissioned by Mazzini, and writing a new opera (La battaglia de Legnano) with an explicitly nationalist subject. He also explores the links between the texts and the musical language

Introduction to Part II | 137 of Verdi's pre-1848 works, his two 1848 pieces, and other patriotic choruses composed at the time and concludes that “Verdi's operas... fully participated in [the] national discourse.” In so doing, Gossett renews his challenge to the revisionist view of Verdi that seeks to downplay the central role assigned to him in the process of Italian unification by an older historiography.* The subject of Michael Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg’s

piece is also the influence of a given political situation on operatic works, though in this case the composer in question is Giacomo Puccini. They demonstrate that the aesthetic of spectacle promoted by Fascism, itself the result of a national anxiety engendered by the failures of the unification project, profoundly influenced Puccini's last, unfinished, opera Turandot. As they provocatively claim, “Turandot delivers opera to spectacle . . . [T]he delivery of opera to spectacle is also its delivery to fascism . . . In this sense . . . the opera Turandot emerges as a fascist work.” They then go on to argue that the postfascist political reality of postwar Italy has left its traces not so much in contemporary Italian opera, since in a certain sense this genre died as a popular art form with Turandot, but in the uses and depiction of opera — and more generally the operatic sensibility — in postwar Italian film.

NOTES t John Rosselli, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of

the Impresario (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

2 Franco Piperno, “Opera Production to 1780,” in Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (eds.), Opera Production and Its Resources, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. I-79. 3 John Rosselli, Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

4 Fora recent attempt by a social scientist to analyze the political role played by Verdi’s works during this period, see Peter Stamatov, “Interpretive Activism and the Political Uses of Verdi’s Operas in the 1840s, American Sociological Review 67 (June 2.002), 345-366.

6 | State and market, production and style: An interdisciplinary approach to eighteenth-century Italian opera history Franco Piperno

The complexity of opera is self-evident, but it also represents a great challenge. The genre’s multi-media nature requires an interdisciplinary approach. Thus the richness of opera makes it an appropriate object of study for different research fields, disciplines, and methodologies. Often opera has been considered a matter for musicologists only (opera as a composer’s work), or for literary studies (opera as a libretto: see the numerous works on Metastasio’s texts that have appeared since 1982).

More recently, opera has come to be recognized as a complex social phenomenon, and sociology aims to take the initiative in studying it. Sociological approaches to opera could well produce very interesting results, just as musicological, literary, or historical approaches (see John Rosselli’s studies on the nineteenth-century impresario’) have already done. But though the object of study is the same (or is at least identified by the same term, “opera’), what these approaches aim to explain is totally different: for musicologists, opera as a work of art in its historical as well as cultural context; for sociologists, opera as a product and a means of expression of social relations. And though it is possible that sociologists, because they possess theories through which they can reinterpret the data of extant opera research, may find the results of musicological as well as literary or historical studies useful for their work, it seems less likely that sociological approaches to opera will help a musicologist find answers to his or her questions. I believe that between these two extremes there exists a promising middle way: because opera is, as mentioned, a complex phenomenon, a discipline I would call “opera history” might be one way to investigate it. The ideal “opera historian” would then have to be at the same time

a musicologist, a literary historian, and a historian tout court (with a particular sensitivity for social history); this is the real challenge. If this

138 |

Eighteenth-century Italian opera history | 139

“ideal opera scholar” is a chimera, this perspective nevertheless holds out the possibility of deep and fruitful collaboration among different disciplines. It is now evident that social as well as financial aspects of opera history may contribute to clarifying some stylistic problems of the repertory and, conversely, that the results of a musicological study

can provide confirmation for a literary or social analysis or a case study in opera history. I find particularly appropriate to the history of opera what Fernand Braudel had to say half a century ago about such sub-disciplines as marine history: “[It] is not a self-contained history. It must be put back into the context of the other kinds of history which

surround and support it.” As a musicologist convinced of the necessity of a broad historical perspective in my discipline’s approach to opera,’ I will touch here on

three aspects of eighteenth-century Italian opera history that, in my opinion, could be better explained if non-musical factors were taken into account: (1) repertory dissemination from Italian operatic centers to the periphery; (2) the birth of new operatic genres; and (3) the relations between opera production and musical style. These are all central issues in a musicological approach to opera, and they represent core questions in eighteenth-century Italian opera history, questions to which musicology is expected to provide an answer: why and how did opera (that is: subjects, texts, scores, composers, singers, players, styles)

come to be disseminated so widely and to be so deeply appreciated in the periphery?* How can we explain the sudden birth of certain well-defined new operatic genres (the intermezzo around 1710, the opera bufta in 1738, the ballo pantomimo about 1770, the sacred opera during the 1780s)? Why, in a century of deep changes and numerous novelties, did musical and vocal styles remain so stable (at least in the buffo genre) from the decades of Alessandro Scarlatti or Giambattista Pergolesi to the years of Mozart, Paisiello, or Rossini?

Both my points (1) and (2) deal with the relation between government policy and the opera market. Because opera enjoyed great popularity — it was Italian society’s preferred form of entertainment —

there was an increasing demand for opera productions. In response, eighteenth-century Italian governments financed the reconstruction in

140 | Franco Piperno stone of older wooden theatres or the building of new ones, consented to the lengthening of theatres’ seasons, supported citizens’ initiatives to produce operas, and often favored the establishment of operatic traditions in the peripheral cities of their states. This supportive attitude was not, however, merely a consequence of the genre's popularity. Additional social, financial, and political factors also came into play. First, operatic productions could be an economic resource since they attracted a paying audience to theatre centers and, due to the elaborate stage requirements of such productions, stimulated many ancillary craft industries. Second, by favoring the expansion of operatic activities, governments were also attempting to keep their subjects more easily under control by attracting them on a regular basis to public places like the theatre and thus reducing their involvement in uncontrolled private activities which could give rise to seditious initiatives. Both these reasons, as we shall see, explain why the operatic tradition could spread to and also take root in very peripheral cities, and why particular operatic repertories seem to have arisen not as a result of any artistic development per se, but as a consequence of a particular government initiative.

GOVERNMENT POLICY AND THE SPREAD OF OPERA TO THE PERIPHERY It is an oversimplification to say that opera spread simply due to its success and popularity. Certainly, without a favorable reception from audiences this art form would not have circulated in the way it did, but sometimes the first impetus came from government policy, not from local interest. Livorno in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany is a good example ofa peripheral town in which operatic activity developed after

central government intervention. Livorno was a commercial harbor of increasing European importance which the Medici dynasty and their successors from the House of Lorraine tried to make into the second important commercial center of their state after Florence.’ To do this, in addition to undertaking other socioeconomic initiatives, they enlarged the local theatre and financed regular opera seasons,

Eighteenth-century Italian opera history | I4I thereby imposing upon the local inhabitants - mostly members of the commercial classes — a form of social entertainment (opera) typical of urban society with which they were not previously acquainted and in which they were not particularly interested. However, in order to

lend to a peripheral commercial town the allure of a wealthy and advanced urban center, an opera house and regular opera seasons were an absolute necessity. We see a Similar pattern, on a reduced scale, in smaller commercial

cities in connection with local trade fairs: the annual trade fair was the climax of the year’s commercial and social activity, and the opera season connected with the fair was a complementary form of entertainment designed both to increase the town’s importance in the eyes of the resident population and to attract visitors from “abroad.” Such a pattern fits almost exactly the cases of Reggio Emilia, the commercial city of the Duchy of Modena, and Senigallia in the Papal States. Dukes Rinaldo and Francesco III d’Este financed operatic activity in Reggio Emilia during the first half of the eighteenth century in order to increase the town’s attractiveness during the spring trade fair. They permitted ducal singers and instrumentalists to perform there, thereby providing the municipality with the patronage and financial support necessary to organize an opera season for the fair. During other periods of the year, operatic activity in Reggio Emilia was not supported by the central government. It was initially organized on an irregular basis by modest impresarios with traveling troupes and was doubtless of secondary significance. However, the regularity of the

important fair opera seasons contributed greatly to making opera a form of entertainment increasingly demanded by local society outside of the fair period. As a result, by 1741 Reggio Emilia possessed a new

permanent theatre, and by the 1760s regular opera seasons during several times of the year.° Senigallia was a flourishing commercial center on the Adriatic coast belonging to the Papal States — a theocratic polity clearly not inter-

ested, due to its particular ideology, in favoring operatic or other theatrical activities. Since the mid-seventeenth century, however, the papal government was perfectly aware of the importance of operatic

142 | Franco Piperno entertainment for its subjects, and while it did not directly finance such entertainment, the government normally permitted the municipalities to allow it and sometimes even support it financially. Permission for

the temporary use of state buildings for opera productions was normally granted on demand, as was permission to open private theatres for public use or to build a new theatre at community expense (teatro di communita or teatro civico or condominale).’

Senigallia was renowned for its large and ancient trade fair, which took place every July and attracted merchants and customers not only from the nearby regions but also from eastern Europe and the Orient. Even before having its own stable teatro condominale (1750), the Senigallia community supplemented the local summer fair with an

opera season which took place in the nearby city of Fano (twenty kilometres north of Senigallia). That this was an important additional attraction for people who attended the trade fair for business reasons is clearly indicated by a local chronicler, who in 1745 reported: “We are now enjoying our usual wonderful fair. There is a great participation of merchants with every kind of wares together with many ordinary people and nobles who, besides coming to the fair, like to go to the opera in the big theatre of Fano where excellent virtuosi are performing” .* During the following decades, after the construction of the Teatro condominale, the connection between fair and opera became even stronger. Newspapers reported in 1777 that “our trade fair had an extraordinary success this year and the theatre provided amusement during the evening with two comic operas.” If this was a comment after the event, in 1787 this relationship was presented in the form of an advertisement: All the evidence points to the prediction that our next fair this year will be one of the most successful due to the entertainment in preparation for the many people expected to come. The theatrical spectacle which the impresario will put on stage sparing no expense will be the best contribution to the guests’ amusement: it will be the opera Olimpiade set to music by the celebrated Mr. Gio. Battista Borghi with the famous Mr. Domenico Bedini together with Mrs. Anna Davia and Mr. Giovanni Bernucci, both in the service of the Russian Empress, singing the principal roles.*°

Eighteenth-century Italian opera history | 143

Another less exclusively commercial setting that benefited from government interest in encouraging and supporting operatic activities in the periphery was the holiday town. These were small localities in the country or by the sea, near the villas where the urban aristocracy used to spend their villeggiatura. Summer opera seasons were increasingly established there during the second half of the eighteenth century. This was an example of the importation from larger municipalities of a kind of public service for people who did not wish to give up, when on holiday, the type of entertainment they were used to enjoying during the winter months while at home in the city. In this case, too, governments allowed operatic seasons in holiday towns in order to discourage their subjects from spending time on less controllable activities. This

explains why one finds almost regular operatic seasons (and sometimes very good seasons) in small places like S. Giovanni in Persiceto near Bologna, Piazzola near Padua,” Carpi near Modena, Casalmaggiore near Milan,” Lugo near Ravenna,” Fojano in Valdichiana near Florence, and so on.™ Like the fair opera seasons, the summer holiday seasons also some-

times had consequences for local society and urban planning. They could lead to both the establishment of a regular operatic tradition

outside of the holiday period and to the construction of a permanent theatre. Such a theatre was typically a stone building, often situated in the town center and contending with the cathedral and the town hall for the role of principal municipal edifice. Holiday opera seasons could also provide a boost to the local economy by attracting additional visitors. Thus in August 1778 the Gazzetta toscana advertised for the forthcoming summer opera season in Siena as follows: Tourists have already arrived in order to have a good time and many more are expected for the mid-August holidays. Here follows the opera schedule for the present month. Performances of Alessandro [nell’India by Metastasio?] with [the castrato] Sig. Consoli in the soprano lead on the and, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 9th, roth, 12th, 13th, 16th, r7th; performances of Medonte [by De Gamerra/ Sarti] with the debut of [the castrato] Sig. Toschi in the soprano lead on the 18th, roth, 2oth, 21st, 23rd, 24th, 26th, 27th, 30th, 31st.?

144 | Franco Piperno OPERA AS A MEANS OF SOCIAL CONTROL AND ARTISTIC INNOVATION Government use of opera as a means of keeping subjects under control increased during the last decades of the century, especially before and during the revolutionary years 1796-1799. This strategy is particularly evident in Naples, where the conflict between the cultivated and modern Neapolitan society and the conservative politics of King Ferdinand IV and his wife Maria Carolina was the most acute. Beginning in 1785,

Neapolitan theatres began to remain open during Lent. This represented a sensational departure from the tradition common in states where the church played an influential role in permitting theatrical performances only during the Carnival season (from December 26 to Mardi Gras) and after Easter, with a pause during Lent devoted to religious music. The above-mentioned conflict between the Neapolitan government and society encouraged this exceptional expansion of operatic activity into Lent, after which Neapolitan theatres practically never closed during the year. This substantial extension of the theatrical season in turn had important consequences for operatic repertory and style.”®

In fact, it was not possible to present “normal” operas centered on political intrigue and love affairs during the Lenten opera season. Anew genre had to be invented: the sacrodramma. Sacrodrammi (sacred operas)

featured libretti drawn exclusively from the Old Testament. The Old Testament was on the one hand a classic source —no less classic than the

works of the Greek and Roman authors who inspired Metastasio — for well-known stories with romantic and passionate characters (Deborah, Judith, Moses, David, Jonathan), but a source that, on the other hand, could guarantee the suitability ofits stories for the spiritual atmosphere of Lent. Though these sacred operas were forced to do without ballet scenes, they could make use of large choruses and complicated stage machinery for battle or miracle scenes.

While the staging of opera in the form of sacrodrammi was the exception in Italy rather than the rule,” this practice had been common in England since Handel’s time and it is actually possible to see a sort

Eighteenth-century Italian opera history | 145 of English influence on the sacred dramas of Naples. During the 1780s, the Neapolitan polity abandoned its traditional connections with Spain and moved closer to the Habsburgs of Vienna and to England. This shift

resulted from the facts that Queen Maria Carolina was the daughter of the Austrian Empress Maria Teresa and that her personal counselor was the Englishman John Acton. Moreover, during the last decades of the eighteenth century, Naples was strongly influenced by the anticlericalism of the philosopher Pietro Giannone and moved resolutely to limit the power and the influence of the church while at the same

time permitting the free expansion of Freemasonry, also an English and Viennese import. This governmental initiative had unexpected artistic consequences, since the Lent opera season based on sacrodrammi spread all over Italy and became a true operatic tradition. Though this kind of season began in Naples as a consequence of the local political situation, it soon spread far and wide and gave birth to important works such as Debora e Sisara by Pietro Alessandro Guglielmi (1788; the best sacrodramma from the early period), Saulle by Gaetano Andreozzi (1794; a drama soaked in Masonic ideology), Rossini’s Mose in Egitto (4818; the masterpiece of the genre), Mayr’s Atalia (1822), Donizetti's Il diluvio universale (1830) and finally Verdi’s Nabucco (1842). (A list of Neapolitan sacrodrammi of 1785 to 1820 appears in Table 6.1)."®

Apart from the biblical setting, sacred operas apparently had all the dramatic and musical ingredients (except for the ballet) of a normal opera based on a historical, mythological, or epic subject. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who had the opportunity to attend the first performances of Giordani’s La distruzione di Gerusalemme in Naples in 1787 (the first sacred opera staged at the San Carlo theatre), could not iden-

tify any differences between this sacred opera and a normal opera: they “sich in gar nichts unterscheiden [do not differ from one another in any way],” he wrote in his Italienische Reise (March 9, 1787). But Goethe was neither expert nor knowledgeable enough when it came to Italian opera to allow him to notice the peculiarities of this new genre. Upon deeper investigation, the sacrodrammi appear to be characterized by at least five elements that distinguish them from ordinary

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Eighteenth-century Italian opera history | 153 daughters of Francesco: Giovanna, Clementina, Vincenza, Anna Maria, Costanza and Rosina.” They often sang in the same production (as is documented in Table 6.3). Mozart met two of them in Vienna in 1765— 1768 and he wrote the role of Rosina in La finta semplice K. 51 (1768) for Clementina. Another member of the family was the tenor Antonio

Baglioni, who sang the role of Don Ottavio in both Gazzaniga’s and Mozart's Don Giovanni (1787).

This extraordinary network of familial relations among buffo singers, a relevant social aspect of opera buffa production and circulation, had important musical consequences, since singing and acting styles were passed down from parents to children from the era of Pergolesi to that of Mozart and beyond. This is a peculiarity of the buffo repertory alone since, for evident reasons, castrati and prime donne hardly possessed the same opportunity to transmit their art to their heirs. And this explains why, if we compare three excerpts from buffo scores by, say, Pergolesi, Mozart, and Rossini, we can find almost the same stylistic resources and solutions, while the comparison between pieces taken from serious operas of the same authors shows enormous differences.

It is possible to prove this by listening to the opening bars of Pergolesi’s intermezzo La serva padrona (1733; Uberto: “Aspettare, e non venire’), Leporello’s music in the first scene of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787; “Notte e giorno faticar”), and Don Magnifico’s cavatina “Miei rampolli femminini” from the first act of Rossini’s Cenerentola (1817). What renders these three excerpts similar and comparable? In all three

examples we have a buffo bass playing the role of a grumbling and disappointed character; in all three the character expresses his disappointment by repeating a musical phrase several times at different points on the scale (a step higher in the case of Uberto and Leporello, a third lower in that of Don Magnifico) and by employing substantial intervals (octave jumps in the cases of Uberto and Don Magnifico). Thus the musical resources used to express similar moods are the same in 1733, 1787, and 1817, and this was possible thanks to the transmission

by singers and their troupes of styles and conventions across many generations.

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156 | Franco Piperno It goes without saying that the three aspects of opera history touched

upon here (repertory dissemination, birth of a new operatic genre, stylistic stability of opera buffa) are of great importance to the field of musicology. They cannot be explained, however, by examining the music alone. Rather, accounting for them in a satisfactory way requires a knowledge and investigation of the non-musical side of opera production. Opera remains a subject for musicological research, but concrete results will be achieved only if musicologists open themselves to other disciplines (historical, social, artistic) and to their specific methodologies and perspectives. NOTES 1 John Rosselli, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 2, Fernand Braudel, “The Situation of History in 1950,” in On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 6-22; p. 15.

3 For a first attempt to outline a history of eighteenth-century Italian opera from a perspective that is not strictly musicological, see my “Opera Production to 1780,” in Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, eds., Opera Production and Its Resources, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 1-79; see also my “L’opera in Italia nel secolo XVIII,” in Alberto Basso, ed., Musica in scena. Storia dello spettacolo musicale (Turin: Utet, 1996), vol. 11, pp. 96-199.

4 Fora survey on the geography of eighteenth-century Italian opera and on the dissemination of opera in Italian peripheries, see my “L’opera in Italia nel secolo XVIII,” pp. 99-102 and pp. 170-171. 5 See my “Opera Production to 1780,” p. 19, and the sources cited in notes 44 and 45.

6 On Reggio Emilia operatic activity, see my “Opera Production to 1780,” p. 37, and the sources cited in note 92. See also Paolo Fabbri and Roberto Verti, Due secoli di teatro per musica a Reggio Emilia. Repertorio cronologico

delle opere e dei balli 1645-1857 (Reggio Emilia: Edizioni del Teatro Municipale Valli, 1987).

7 On Senigallia operatic activity, see my “L’opera in Italia nel secolo XVIII,” pp. 104-105, and Alfio Albani, Marinella Bonvini Mazzanti, and Gabriele Moroni, Il Teatro a Senigallia (Milan: Electa, 1996).

Eighteenth-century Italian opera history | 157 8 “Stiamo ora [luglio 1745] godendo in questa citta la solita bellissima fiera ... Ora riesce abbondatissima al solito di gran concorso di mercanti con quantita di mercanzie d’ogni genere, concorrendovi numerosissimo popolo, altresi gran nobilita, che oltre l’essere venuta alla fiera, si porta in Fano all’opera in musicha, che vi si recita da scielti virtuosi in quel gran teatro” (Giovanni Maria Mastai, Memorie, ms., Senigallia, Archivio storico comunale, edited by Sergio Anselmi, vol. 1, Soldati, epidemie, edilizia nella Senigallia del Settecento, 1739-1746 [Senigallia: Comune di Senigallia, 1987],

Pp. 99-100). 9 Gazzetta universale 64, August 12, 1777. to “Tutte le apparenze dimostrano che la nostra immenente Fiera debba essere in quest anno una delle pit brillanti, attesi i preparativi che si fanno per divertimento di molti personaggi che si attendono .. . Lo spettacolo Teatrale, che impresario senza risparmio di spese porra sulla scena, contribuira pit d’ogni altra cosa al trattenimento dei forestieri: il Dramma scelto é l’Olimpiade posto in musica da celebre Sig. Battista Borghi che verra eseguito nelle prime parti dai rinomati Sig. Domenico Bedini e Sigg. Anna Davia e Giovanni Bernucci ambidue al servizio dell Imperatrice delle Russie. I balli saranno del Sig. Pietro Angiolini” (Gazzetta universale 50, June 23, 1787). 11 See Paolo Camerini, Piazzola nella sua storia e nell’arte musicale del secolo XVII (Milan: Hoepli, 1929). 12 See Claudio Toscani, “Due secoli di vita musicale nel teatro di

Casalmaggiore: Organizzazione, spettacoli, artisti (1737-1957),” in Il teatro di Casalmaggiore. Storia e restauro (Cremona: Tutris, 1990). 13 See Paolo Fabbri, “Teatri settecenteschi della Romagna estense: Lugo,” Romagna arte e storia 8 (1983), 53-76. 14 Carlo Goldoni and Baldassarre Galuppi satirize this fashion in their successful comic opera L’Arcadia in Brenta of 1749. In it, a rich countryman invites some Venetian nobles to spend a holiday in his villa and offers them, as entertainment, the opportunity to play in a comedy with music. The case shows that the fashion of holiday opera seasons was common enough already by mid-century that it could become the subject matter for a stage work; it could present in comic guise a situation with which the audience was well acquainted. 15 “Di gia abbiamo dei forestieri venuti per godere, e molti se ne aspetanno in occasione delle feste alla meta di agosto, che saranno piu del solito decorate . . . I giorni delle recite del presente mese sono i

158 | Franco Piperno sequenti. Dell’Opera |’Alessandro [nell India of Metastasio?], primo soprano Sig. Consoli, il di 2, 3,5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17. Dell’Opera il Medonte [di De Gamerra/Sarti] prima recita del primo soprano Sig. Toschi 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 30, 31 (Gazzetta Toscana 32, August 8, 1778).

16 On the political background of Neapolitan opera during the last decades of eighteenth century and on the establishment of the Lent operatic season in Naples see my “Stellati sogli e immagini portentose: Opere bibliche e stagioni quaresimali a Napoli prima del Mosé,” in Bianca Antolini and Wolfgang Witzenmann, eds., Napoli e il teatro musicale in Europa fra Sette e Ottocento. Scritti in onore di Friedrich Lippmann (Florence: Olschki, 1993), pp. 267-298, esp. pp. 272-275. 17 Performing oratorios or sacred operas in Italian public theatres began in 1776 in Florence, where there was a large English community in residence; the first attempts (Mozart’s Betulia liberata at the Teatro della Pergola and Myslivecek’s Isacco at the Casino di S. Trinita) were almost certainly promoted by Lord George Nassau Clawering Cowper (1738-1789, living in Florence since 1760), who first organized a performance of Handel’s Messiah in Italy (4768, palazzo Pitti). See my “Drammi sacri in teatro (1750-1820), in Paolo Pinamonti, ed., Mozart, Padova e La Betulia liberata. Committenza, interpretazione e fortuna delle

azioni sacre metastasiane nel ’7oo (Florence: Olschki, 1991), pp. 289-316,

esp. pp. 289-291. 18 There is more on the sacrodrammi tradition in my articles “Stellati sogli e immagini portentose”; “Il Mosé in Egitto e la tradizione napoletana di opere quaresimali,” in Paolo Fabbri, ed., Gioachino Rossini 1792-1992. Il testo e la scena (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1994), pp. 255-271; “Effetto Mose: Fortuna e recezione del Mosé in Egitto a Napoli e in Italia (1818-1830), in La recezione di Rossini ieri e oggi. Atti dei convegni lincei

(Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1994), pp. 165-194; and “,.. dividere il genere di musica profano dal sacro: Donizetti vs Rossini? Su I] Diluvio universale e la tradizione napoletana di opere quaresimaili,” in Franco Carmelo Greco and Renato Di Benedetto, eds., Donizetti, Napoli, ’Europa (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2000), pp. 201-230. 19 On opera seria productions and the dissemination of Metastasio’s plays see my “Opera Production to 1780,” esp. pp. 49-60.

Eighteenth-century Italian opera history | 159 20 On opera buffa productions and dissemination, see my “Opera Production to 1780,” pp. 60-73. For a comparison between opera seria and opera buffa, see my “L’opera in Italia nel secolo XVIII,” pp. 170-176. 21 See Charles E. Troy, The Comic Intermezzo (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1979), pp. 150-151.

22 See my “Gli interpreti buffi di Pergolesi. Note sulla diffusione de La serva padrona,” Studi Pergolesiani/Pergolesi Studies 1 (1986), 166-177. 23 See Troy, The Comic Intermezzo, pp. 50-51. 24 See Claudio Sartori, I libretti italiani a stampa dalle origini al 1800, catalogo analitico con 16 indici, Indici vol. 1 (Cuneo: Bertola & Locatelli, 1994),

pp. 560-563. 25 Ibid., pp. 35-40.

7 | Opera and the cultural authority of the capital city William Weber

In 1798 there appeared in Weimar an elegantly produced magazine, eight issues a year, entitled London und Paris. Its title tells the story: it offered reports about social, cultural, and political trends in the capital cities of England and France. The magazine was rather like a Sunday magazine in a high-tone newspaper today, offering engaging color pictures alongside smoothly written stories about what life was like there among the rich and powerful, the beau monde or the bon ton. This was fantasy and jealousy time, one might say. Through its columns readers were able to keep informed about the fashions and the pleasures in the two key cities — dress, promenading, horse equipage, prostitutes, politics, theatre, and of course opera. A whole host of similar periodicals of fashion, culture, and politics, most notably the Journal des Luxus und der Moden, sprang up in this period, linking opera

intimately with London and Paris, the capital cities that had come to define cosmopolitan taste and social practices." Attitudes of those culturally subordinate to empowered groups or institutions tell us the most about what is going on in a social context. German commentary shows us how central the two capitals, and their operas specifically, had become to cultural and social life in Europe and America. Historians tend to take the roles played by the two cities for granted; they have not inquired into when and how London

and Paris took on an authority they had not held in the seventeenth century. Opera leads us into this subject with particular vividness, dis-

| playing the new kind of cosmopolitanism that arose in relationship to the new order of regional patriotism — statist nationalism — that was beginning to appear at that time.” Aggressive promotion of the state evolved together with aggressive assertion of elite cosmopolitanism. Central to all this was the assumption of high authority for the small world of the rich and powerful cosmopolitan world usually

160 |

The cultural authority of the capital city | 161 referred to as the beau monde that spent part of the year in London and Paris.

This essay will explore this interpretation on a broad plane. After looking into German comments on the two capitals, we will look back at the political aspects of their history, the group that set the tone of cosmopolitan taste (called the beau monde), and finally the framework of intellectual authority that emerged within musical life of the two cities. Starting with the German states puts the problem in a helpfully broad perspective. German culture, music particularly, held a problematic relationship with the cultural centers to the west as London and Paris assumed a new authority as capital cities. What was going on was not a nationalistic movement, but rather competition for cultural preeminence, over placement in a newly arising hierarchy of cosmopolitan influence. What German writers and musicians began to demand toward the end of the eighteenth century was essentially recognition of high status within the international community of politics, publishing, fashion, and culture generally. Music was one of the most important areas through which Germans demanded admission to that world. The operas of W. A. Mozart and C. M. von Weber served as vehicles for such recognition because they were linked so closely with musical practices within the Franco-Italian world that dominated opera houses. Le nozze di Figaro and Der Freischiitz

were perceived as important components within the world dominated by Luigi Cherubini and Gioachino Rossini, then Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini. The cosmopolitanism by which these operas were perceived can be seen in the endless repetition of excerpts from them in concerts of the highest fashion in Paris and London during the first half of the nineteenth century. The Mozart operas especially knew no national boundaries; in London Die Zauberfléte was produced with an Italian text in the 1840s (Il flauto magico), and excerpts of that order cropped up until the end of the century. The first articles on opera in the two capitals, both of which appeared in 1800, present the halls as the most flagrant manifestations of wealth and prestige in all of Europe. “A Glance at the London Opera” said that:

162 | William Weber the most lavish temple of fashion, . . . the opera, is the most fashionable place of resort, even though neither the King nor the Queen goes there. In one evening you can see more of the highest-ranking men, the most aristocratic-looking women, the most beautiful people, the most up-to-date modes, in one word comme il faut, high Tone, than you can see anywhere else.’

The first article about the Paris Opera defined wealth and prestige

from a dichotomous direction, defining influence by virtue of the economic problems that serving the elite had long posed. Saying that nobody had been able to run the hall without making huge debts or creating big public issues served as an alternate means by which to say that opera was devoted to entertaining the rich and the powerful more than any other institution. Three musicians who directed the opera had just been forced to step down, having upset the public for firing three popular performers. The story goes on at great length to show how much the opera cost, how much the singers were paid, and how amazing were the balls that the opera put on in carnival time — the

, best and the brightest candles in anyone’s experience, especially when the Prince Talleyrand and the Emperor’s sister showed up.* By the same token, tropes about opera balanced adulation ofits public with criticism of social practices there. London und Paris, despite its focus upon the hottest fashions, also engaged with the serious reser-

vations that its readers clearly held about opera and its modes. An engraving published there in 1800 under the title of supréme bon ton shows three men and one woman engaging in garish display, acting in a manner paralleled by the dogs on the right (see Figure 7.1). A poem called “Modish Novelties,” published in the Journal des Luxus und der Moden during its second year, “Novelty: A Fable,” came to grips with the ambivalence of attitudes toward fashion: In the world of mother folly Does novelty unexpectedly appear. Suddenly comes the mob to impose The ways of this land upon us all, Waving its beautiful, streaming hair, Forcing people to wonder, and to adore her.’

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et style fin de siecle (French translation, Paris, Flammarion, 1994); Christophe Charle, Paris fin de siécle, culture et politique (Paris: Seuil, 1998). 2 Alfred Loewenberg, Annals of Opera 1597-1940 (Cambridge: Heffer & Sons, 1943), P. 432.

Opera in France, 1870-1914 | 263 3 The “habitus” concept comes from Pierre Bourdieu (e.g., Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1984). By listening habitus, I mean the way people behave and pay attention in a situation of collective listening. Such a situation requires the reconciliation of (a) the style of social interaction of a given milieu and its accepted norms (internal hierarchies, roles, horizontal relations) with (b) the intrusion constituted by the execution of a work and by the artists engaged in this execution. This interaction provokes implicit and explicit tensions (depending on the degree of novelty of a work) that the conventions of the habitus in question aim to manage and resolve but which may sometimes result in scandals, misunderstandings, or fiascos if a smooth compromise between the artists and the listening milieu is not achieved. The Parisian musical milieu that was centered on the Opéra and on musical salons put in place a particular mode of listening to musical works that was characterized by shifting attention and fleeting enthusiasm for bravura passages; this was a mode of listening that was at odds with the new, quasi-religious, style of listening that innovators such as Liszt and Wagner hoped to impose. 4 Edouard Noél and Edmond Stoullig, Les Annales du thédtre et de la musique (Paris: Charpentier, 1875 and subsequent years); Albert Soubies and Charles Malherbe, Histoire de ’ Opéra Comique: La seconde salle Favart (Paris: E. Flammarion, 1892-1893, new edition Geneva: Minkoff, 1978). I would like to thank P. Boudrot for helping with the data collection and suggesting ways in which it could be used. 5 Victorin Jonciéres in Noél et Stoullig, Les Annales du théatre et de la musique (1880), p. iii.

6 Frédérique Patureau, Le Palais Garnier dans la société parisienne 1875-1914 (Liége: Mardaga, 1991), pp. 244ff. 7 See the cases of Scribe and of Offenbach examined by Jean-Claude Yon, Eugene Scribe la fortune et la liberté (St. Genouph: Nizet, 2000); and Jacques Offenbach (Paris: Gallimard, 2000). On the impact of the French theatre in

England during the first half of the nineteenth century, see Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Early Nineteenth Century Drama 1800-1850, second edition (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 80. 8 Jonciéres in Noél and Stoullig, Les Annales du thédtre et de la musique (1880), p. V.

2.64 | Christophe Charle 9 See the table furnished by Eugene d'Harcourt, Mission du gouvernement francais. II. La Musique actuelle en Allemagne et Autriche-Hongrie,

Conservatoires, Concerts, Thédtres (Paris, 1908): the majority of opera houses in the large German cities were running deficits and were dependent on government subsidies. 10 See Jean Dubois, La Crise thédtrale (Paris: Imprimerie de l’ Art, 1894); Dominique Leroy, Histoire des arts du spectacle en France (Paris, L’Harmattan, 1990); Christophe Charle, La Crise littéraire a Vépoque du naturalisme (Paris: PENS, 1979), Part u, chapter 3. 11 Patureau, Le Palais Garnier dans la société parisienne, pp. 99-100. 12 Soubies and Malherbe, Histoire de l’Opéra Comique, pp. 214-215. 13 Jonciéres cites the following reasons for the failure of this experiment:

the high rent charged for the theatre; the unfortunate timing of the launch at the end of the theatre season; and above all the absence of financial support from either the central government or the municipality at a time when both the Opéra and the Opéra-comique received subsidies even when they were badly managed (Jonciéres in _ Noél and Stoullig, Les Annales du thédtre et de la musique [1880], pp. Xi-Xvl).

14 Albert Carré, Souvenirs de thédtre, new edition (Plan de la Tour: Editions d’aujourd hui, 1976), p. 310. 15 See, for example, Hervé Lacombe, Les Voies de V’opéra francais au XIXe siécle (Paris: Fayard, 1997), pp. 2771f.

16 Zola, preface to Noél and Stoullig, Les Annales du théatre et de la musique (1880), p. XXViii.

17 Thus Patrie (1886) of Paladilhe had as librettists Gallet and Sardou, Piccolino (1876) of Guiraud is based on a play by the same Sardou, the libretto of Carmen (1875) was written by Meilhac and Halévy based on a work of Mérimée; and that of Massenet’s Manon (1884) was written by Meilhac and Gille. All three operas of Delibes had as their librettist the dramatist Edmond Gondinet. 18 D’Harcourt, Mission du gouvernement francais. II. La Musique actuelle en Allemagne et Autriche-Hongrie, pp. 143-150.

19 Myriam Chiménes, “Elites sociales et pratiques wagnériennes: De la propagande au snobisme,” in Anegret Fauser and Manuela Schwartz, eds., Wagner zum Wagnerisme. Musik, Literatur, Kunst, Politik (Leipzig:

Leipziger Universitatsverlag, 1999), pp. 155-197.

Opera in France, 1870-1914 | 2.65 20 See Charle, La Crise littéraire a Vépoque du naturalisme. 21 See Pierre Bourdieu, Les Régles de l'art. Genése et structure du champ littéraire (Paris: Seuil, 1992); Cynthia and Harrison White, La Carriere des

peintres au XIXéme siécle, trans. Antoine Jaccottet (Paris: Flammarion, 1991; American edition, New York: Wiley, 1965). 22 An avant-garde composer like Debussy, whose one completed opera was

staged at the Opéra-comique, derived an income from these performances substantially greater than from concerts or the publication of his works. Thus the total gross box-office receipts for the

performances of Pelléas et Melisande in 1902 totalled 113,627 francs, and if one uses the usual rate of 6 percent of these gross receipts to calculate the composer’s royalties these add up to 6,817 francs. (The figures for the box-office receipts at the Opéra-comique are derived from Jann Pasler, “Opéra et pouvoir: Forces 4 l’oeuvre derriére le scandale du Pelléas de Debussy,” in Hugues Dufourt and Joél-Marie Fauquet, eds., La Musique et le pouvoir [Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1987], pp. 173-174). 23 See, for example, Carlotta Sorba, Teatri: L’Italia del melodramma nell’eta del Risorgimento (Bologna, Il Mulino, 2000), pp. 248ff.; Eugéne d’Harcourt, La Musique actuelle en Italie (Paris: F Durdilly, Fischbacher,

1906); D. Francfort, “Rome et l’Opéra,” in C. Charle and D. Roche, eds., Capitales culturelles, capitales symboliques: Paris et les experiences européennes XVIlle—XXe siécles (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2002),

pp. 381-402. 24 See, for example, Eugéne-Melchior de Vogué, Le Roman russe (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1886) and C. Charle, “Champ littéraire francais et

importations étrangéres: De la vogue du roman russe a l’émergence d'un nationalisme littéraire (1886-1902), in Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, eds., Philologiques III (Paris: Ed. de la MSH, 1994), pp. 249-263. 25 See, for example, Lacombe, Les Voies de lV’opéra frangais au XIXe siecle, p. 191. 26 Noél and Stoullig, Les Annales du thédtre et de la musique (1883), pp. 3-4.

27 Noél and Stoullig, Les Annales du thédtre et de la musique (1885), pp. 32-33 (The work’s subject matter is drawn from the Nibelungen sources.)

28 The rare exceptions are operas of Charpentier (Louise) or of Bruneau based on works of Zola (Le Réve, L’Attaque du moulin). 29 Jane F. Fulcher, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and

Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

2.66 | Christophe Charle 30 Fulcher, French Cultural Politics, pp. 77ff.

31 Of the 21 new Italian works performed in Paris, only 3 were staged before 1890, 10 between 1890 and 1900 and 8 after 1900; of 9 German works, 1 was staged before 1900, 4 between 1900 and roto and 4 after r910. All18 new Russian operas seen in Paris appeared after 1908. 32 Charle and Roche, eds., Capitales culturelles, capitales symboliques.

1o | Fascism and the operatic unconscious Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg

This essay unfolds from an initial working hypothesis about the absence ofa discursive unconscious from pre-unification Italian cultural history in general, and from its operatic history in particular. The sense of an Italian national culture evolves with the energies of the Risorgimento:

the resurgence of Italy as a modern nation, which achieved political success with unification in the decade of the 1860s. In this light, the Risorgimento might be understood as a discourse of the ego. Its equation of subjectivity with desire, emotional excess, and cultural-political subversion found conscious articulation and representation in the oper-

| atic tradition. This energy encountered its most convincing voice in Verdi's operas

and operatic style. No matter what his personal politics and commitments may have been, his operatic style fused with the Risorgimento as assertions of the ego, where inner desire and social conflict appeared

as realities fully understood, inhabited, and expressed. This fusion occurred at the level of the works themselves, their musical texture, and the psychological and musical texture of their characters. Individual and collective identities — embattled lovers, outsiders, and heroes — pursue their causes against outside, foreign, or superannuated antagonists.

Through the decade of the two unifications (1860-1870), however, this cluster began to break apart. As a result, the Risorgimento, the invention of national culture, and its project of “making Italians” opened a space of anxiety about the freedom and enslavement of the national ego. Italian thinkers now found their national project to be belated and ill prepared, without adequate traditions of liberalism and romanticism. They worried that Italy had been born to an anxiety of its own hollowness, and they themselves were incapable of finding a way out of it. When, in the 1930s, Gramsci read Francesco de Sanctis,

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the canonic historian of Italian national culture, he found in de Sanctis at once a symptom and a diagnosis of a national anxiety. Italy, Gramsci asserted, had experienced its revolution passively. The Risorgimento ego-of-desire had provided no viable economy; it was at once excessive and insufficient. It thereby ceded to a national ego-of-anxiety — the eventual breeding ground for fascism."

After 1870, opera remained the privileged genre and Verdi the

, emblematic figure of the Risorgimento and of the Italian nation. Verdi's mythic status as a founding father of the nation held and continues to hold, notwithstanding the questionable evidence of his political involvement or intentions. Between the premieres of Otello in 1887 and Falstaff in 1893, the elderly Verdi witnessed in silence the final passing of the Risorgimento generation and its displacement by a new generation of bureaucrats and technocrats lacking national ideals. This passage has been consistently described as the replacement of poetry by prose, of the poetry of national liberation with the prose of daily life. Verdi's Risorgimento style was displaced in the 1890s by verismo: the style claiming the stageworthiness of the everyday. The early Puccini

is clearly marked by such claims, at least until the turn of the century, when Tosca and Butterfly restored the grandiose and the exotic to operatic stage and style. These restorations culminated in Turandot. Puccini remains the emblem of this national anxiety. It has become

a cliché to assert that the crown prince Puccini produced no heirs and that his final, unfinished opera Turandot reigns as a final, barren sovereign in a line that goes back not only to Verdi but indeed to Monteverdi. But this judgment remains restricted to the circumstance of Puccini's death in 1924. To cite and inflate Toscanini’s legendary words at Turandot’s premiere in April 1926: Qui finisce l’opera, perché a

questo punto il Maestro é morto. This necromantic narrative shuts out history in general, and, most importantly, fascism in particular. Worse, it may in fact reproduce those very structures that fascism relied on for its own aestheticized politics. We want to argue, first, that Turandot delivers opera to fascism and, second, that fascism cannot, through opera, deliver on its own cultural claims. The fascist aesthetic is spectacular, not operatic. This is, in the

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end, the key point. Here we take issue with a standard error in Italian film studies, namely the conflation of the spectacular and the operatic. Fascism, we argue, tries to enclose opera within its aesthetic of spectacle, but fails. Opera retains its central position in Italian national culture. The result is clearly not an operatic renaissance at the level of new work or a significant postwar production style. (The successes of Berio, Menotti and others are not of an adequately significant scale, and no Italian Regieoper takes hold.) Rather, the result is the re-emergence of an operatic subjectivity — the return of the repressed — in displaced form —

namely, in film. Moreover, this operatic subjectivity emerges now at the level of the unconscious. Paradoxically, the articulation of operatic subjectivity as cultural unconscious lives up to the old Risorgimento project. Opera, or more precisely the operatic unconscious, traverses and survives fascism to become an important site of a post-fascist national unconscious.

OPERA AND SPECTACLE We begin with a speech of Mussolini’s from April 1933 to the Italian Society of Authors and Publishers: I have heard reference made to a crisis of the theater. This crisis is real, but it cannot be attributed to the cinema’s success. It must be considered

from a dual perspective, at once spiritual and material. The spiritual aspect concerns authors; the material aspect the number of seats. It is necessary to prepare a theater of masses, a theater able to accommodate 15,000 Of 20,000 persons. La Scala was adequate a century ago, when the population of Milan totaled 180,000 inhabitants. It is not today, when the population has reached a million. The scarcity of seats creates the need for high prices, which keeps the crowds away. But theaters, which, in my view, possess greater educational efficacy than do cinemas, must be designed for the people, just as dramatic works must have the breadth the people demand. They must stir up the great collective passions, be inspired by a sense of intense and deep humanity, and bring to the stage that which truly counts in the life of the spirit and in human affairs. Enough with the notorious romantic “triangle” that has so obsessed us to

270 | Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg this day! The full range of triangular configurations is by now long exhausted. Find a dramatic expression for the collective’s passions and you will see the theaters packed.*

Where opera ends, fascism begins. Mussolini’s address supports this formulation, a fairly standard one in the history of opera. Compatible with the production of fascist doctrine, it is compatible as well with the standard history of the Italian operatic canon. It follows the well-known claim that Puccini’s Turandot — unfinished at his death in 1924 and premiered at La Scala, with Franco Alfano’s ending, in 1926 — arrives at the end of the Italian operatic tradition, and arrives just as fascism triumphs.

It allows for the empirical reality of the fascist regime’s support of opera, including the regime’s wish to disseminate theatre and opera into the provinces and to the people. This initiative produced traveling companies known as the carri di tespi [“theatermobiles’]. The first carro teatrale was inaugurated in 1929; the first carro lirico [“operamobile’’], in 1930. Operamobiles toured Italy with works of Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, Mascagni, and Bellini, and proved much more successful than the theatermobile. Moreover, between 1933 and 1943 Pietro Mascagni was the largest beneficiary of funds administered by the Ministry of Popular Culture. During the Italian Musical Summer of 1938, 392 operas were performed, compared to 52 theatrical performances.’

Fascism’s commitment to opera and theatre also produced a renewed and vigorous investment in the so-called teatri all’aperto throughout the Italian peninsula and even in the colonies. Though the history of performing in ancient Greek and Roman theatres predated fascism and indeed continues today, it is undeniable that the practice lent itself well to “fascist Romanism.” As Jeffrey Schnapp has argued, the regime developed, over the years, a “cohesive politics of spectacle that sought to provide ‘hygienic’ outdoor alternatives to the ‘sickly’ interiors of the bourgeois theatre, to popularize elite forms of culture ... and to forge a new sense of nationhood both by promoting interregional tourism and by placing the Italian masses face to face with the past, present, and future ‘Mediterranean solar genius of their race’” (23). Such teatri all’aperto delivered canonic repertories to those

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crowds of 15,000 to 20,000 spectators that Mussolini had called for. The Arena di Verona offered nineteenth-century opera, with the occasional swerve to Wagner, one of these in honor of Hitler’s visit there in 1937.

For the regime, however, the popularity of traveling opera companies, the reclamation of ancient sites for mass spectacles, and the building or planning of stadia designed for such spectacles as well as mass sport events and political rallies only filled a vacuum, one opened by the “colossal failure” (Schnapp 9) of the 1934 mass spectacle of war, rev-

olution, and reconstruction entitled 18BL. Staged outside Florence by

the filmmaker Alessandro Blasetti for an audience of 20,000 as a form , of theatre by and for the masses, the event aimed to create “a place of mass communion where, bathed in the wartime smells of gunpowder and burnt magnesium, [the different classes of Italian society] rubbed shoulders and merged into a single charismatic community; a healthful Italian Bayreuth where the national body politic could be reconstituted in harmony with the values of fascist ruralism” (Schnapp 66). 18BL tried to combine elements from cinema and theatre. Thus, it sought to reject nineteenth-century theatrical values with its use “layered soundtracks, cinematic lighting ticks, and editing techniques such as montage and the rapid cross-cutting of scenes” (Schnapp 77). At the same time, it sought to create a version of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, “to embody,” in the words of one of its authors, “the real and the symbolic simultaneously, creating a kind of actualized mystical experience’ (Schnapp 77). 18BL bespoke a profound ambiguity toward cinema on the part of fascist culture. Cinema, in the view a number of fascist theories, was

a decadent art, attenuating the relationship between body and performance. The theatre, and the theatre of the masses in particular, restored to the body the power to forge a new relationship between art and life. Theatrical values were, as Schnapp insists, at the center of fascist politics. At the same time, Blasetti and other fascist theorists insisted that theatre be reconceived cinematically. “Movies,” Blasetti stated, “have accustomed spectators to seeing things on a grand scale;

they habituated them to a sense of realism, to rapid shifts between

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scenes, to a vastness of spaces and horizons that the theatre cannot provide. Here [with 18BL] it is a matter of creating a theatre that can offer those sensations to the public” (Schnapp 77). In its celebration of the immediacy of the body, fascist modernist theatre felt compelled to imitate film, a representation thus twice removed, producing a kind of body-machine most tellingly revealed by the fact that the heroine of Blasetti’s spectacle was 18BL: a Fiat-model truck. Like Brunnhilde, 18BL “immolated ina single evening,” in Jeffrey Schnapp’s

apt image (82); unlike Brunnhilde, however, this vehicle only sang once.

“What the hell do we care about a truck?” was the reaction reported by one critic (Schnapp 83). The failure of the truck has much to say

about the structure and limits of fascist aesthetics. Loving the truck may have been one challenge; seeing it (in a crowd of 20,000) was equally a problem. Blasetti wanted both theatre and film, auratic presence and infinite mechanical reproducibility. The conversion of the body of desire into the body-machine failed, at least on so grandiose a scale. In this respect, operatic tradition and the culture of the carro lirico stood in direct contradiction. The first lodged in the body of desire; the second made such bodies, and indeed the actual operatic performances themselves, secondary to the technology of performance as a portable, reproducible spectacle. The medium of the carro teatrale was the message, as Jeffrey Schnapp argues. That medium resided more in the pre-performance spectacle than in the performance itself. On the day of the performance, “trucks rolled into the city’s public square, whereupon an army of assembly technicians (assisted by hundreds of hired hands) would set about the task of erecting the canvas and steel armature; positioning lights, curtains, and sets; and filling out the seating areas. Always well attended, this pre-performance show was meant to display the efficiency achieved through corporate organization” (21).

TURANDOT.COM William Weaver's Golden Century of Italian Opera concludes with those now famous remarks that William Ashbrook and Harold Powers cite

Fascism and the operatic unconscious | 2.73

at the opening of their study Puccini’s Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition: ... as he reached the conclusion of Lit’s death scene, Toscanini laid down his baton and said, in effect (he has been quoted variously): “The opera ends here, because at this point the Maestro died. Death was stronger than art.’ The opera ends here. Toscanini might have been speaking not just of Puccini’s last work but of Italian opera in general. Of course, other new Italian operas were composed and performed in the decades that followed, and some of them enjoyed a certain success, a certain theatrical life. But Puccini left no Crown Prince. With him, the glorious line, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, came to a glorious conclusion.‘

Ashbrook and Powers catalogue the Princes of Persia who might have succeeded the Crown Prince Puccini: Mascagni and Giordano in his own generation; Zandonai, Pizzetti, Dallapiccola, Bussotti in the two generations following him (3-4). More centrally, however, they suggest that the socio-cultural role of the Great Tradition was absorbed by the new vehicle of popular melodrama, namely, film. “Puccini’s

heirs, then, were D. W. Griffiths and Cecil B. DeMille — or in our day, Dino De Laurentiis and Franco Zeffrelli” (5). Most centrally of all, however, they note that the stage director of the prima assoluta of Turandot and the author of its production book (disposizione scenica) was Giovacchino Forzano, the superintendent of staging at La Scala between 1922 and 1930 and a director of silent film. Forzano’s film experience, they suggest, informed “both the handling of crowds and the acting style” (4-5). Forzano’s instructions for Act 1, for example, read: “Let me say once and for all that during this episode the movements both of the Executioner’s servants and of the crowd, should be violent, full of ferocious anticipation, often vulgar, interspersed with bursts of laughter, grimaces, and exaggerated gestures” (145). Ashbrook and Powers (18) ignore the essential fact that Forzano was also an active and committed fascist, and one of the key developers of the theatermobiles (carri teatrali).

Forzano established the visual style that has remained the norm in Turandot’s subsequent stagings. Turandot is spectacular, and indeed

274 | Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg

becomes more so all the time. The ultimate coup in recent years has perhaps been the staging — produced by Florence’s Maggio Musicale — at

the gate of the Forbidden City in Beijing in 1999. Below that threshold is the gilded extravaganza of Franco Zeffirelli’s that has occupied the stage of the Metropolitan Opera since 1987. There is thus a substantial tension between the fascist career and fascist aesthetic of Giovacchino

Forzano and the decidedly anti-fascist politics and persona of Arturo Toscanini, who conducted the work’s premiere and has become closely identified with the work, although perhaps symbolically more than empirically. Toscanini controlled its La Scala premiere as he controlled La Scala itself, in this case driving Mussolini himself from the premiere by sticking to his refusal to conduct the fascist hymn Giovinezza, as per custom, when Mussolini entered the hall. But in Turandot’s longue durée Toscanini has been perhaps less influential than Forzano.° Turandot’s famously and uniquely tortuous compositional process

has been exhaustively recounted, from the completion of the first sketch for Act 1in January 1921 to the composer’s death in November 1924 while completing the composition of Act m. Puccini wrote often of his creative difficulties, perhaps most tellingly in a letter to his colibrettist Giuseppe Adami in October 1922: Let us hope that the melody which you rightly demand will come to me, fresh and poignant. Without this, there is no music ... What do you think of Mussolini? I hope he will prove to be the man we need. Good luck to him if he will cleanse and give a little peace to our country.”

What seems to us most interesting here is the parallel of melody and Mussolini as objects of desire. To be clear, the remark provides no smoking gun about Puccini's fascism or about his politics in general. The biographical record doesn’t provide much clarity either. Puccini was conferred “honorary membership” in the Fascist Party in early 1924. He was made Senator of the Kingdom two months before his death. His death (in Brussels on November 29, 1924) was announced to the Chamber of Deputies by Mussolini, who added: “Some months ago, this eminent musician asked to become a member of the National Fascist Party. By this gesture he wished to show his solidarity with a

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movement that is much argued about and arguable, but that is also the only living thing in Italy today.”® At the same time, the parallel of melody and Mussolini finds a prominent correlative in the musicaldramatic logic of Turandot.

Turandot’s internal relation to fascism combines melody and Mussolini in the figure of the unknown prince whose entrance generates the opera’s action. The figure of the unknown mysterious outsider who enters a decayed world only to take it over as the consummate insider is well known in operatic history, though much more so in the German canon than in the Italian one: Tamino, Walther von Stolzing, Parsifal. Puccini’s reference — conscious or not — to this Germanic

trope is in keeping with his pro-German stance in matters of both art and politics during the years of the Great War. The Unknown Prince is here identified as Calaf, son of Timur, the dethroned King of the Tatars. Sonically, however, he is identified 4 la Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton,

i.e., as a bearer of Western Music, his diatonic idiom opposing the pentatonic texture of the local scene. Puccini’s “orientalism” does not absorb the expressive world of the prince. Calaf’s consuming desire for Turandot is, of course, overwhelming. It produces two triangles. It stands not only in betrayal of his father—the Verdian triangle — but of another woman as well, the slave girl Liu. This character was added by Puccini to the characters and sources derived

from earlier Turandots, notably that of Carlo Gozzi. The Puccinian triangle of Calaf caught between Turandot and Lit is irresolvable. This is Puccini’s problem; there isno imaginable way whereby his survival to the opera’s completion might have solved it. Notwithstanding the selfavowed sycophantic tone of their study, Ashbrook and Powers confess as much with the judgment that the scene of Lit’s torture and suicide in Act m1 produces a “fatal shift of focus” away from the character of Turandot, whose transformation must nonetheless retain center stage.

; Puccini’s notes for the conclusion of Act 11, which he did not live to write, contain the indication “Poi Tristano.” Clearly he intended to bring the royal couple into musical and emotional high relief. That potential remains unknown. Franco Alfano’s ending, it is fair to assert, does not successfully humanize Turandot. Turandot remains a sound machine,

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a close relative of none other than 18BL. If, in her case, audiences do indeed come to care about a truck, that is because they have come to be overwhelmed and overjoyed by the vocal machinery that can keep her lines audible and loud above the competition of chorus, orchestra, and spectacle. Ashbrook and Powers strive to retain the callous Calaf’s honor by

insisting that he never loved Lit and had never claimed otherwise. Ceding that “at first blush the closing passages of the opera seem unmotivated, perhaps even shocking, as though Butterfly’s suicide had been vulgarly and anticlimactically followed by a final love duet for Pinkerton and Kate,” they soon reclaim the opera’s honor by insisting

that Calaf “is shocked and moved when she [Lit] falls lifeless at his feet; but his heart is, as it has been, wholly engaged elsewhere.”? This defense misses the point that Calaf’s recovery from Lit’s death is wholly

without emotional or ethical conflict. Neither can the affair of his heart be cited to justify his new abandonment of his blind father. The abandonment of any sense of justice to a rush of emotion is the mark of fanaticism, a tool well used by fascism. Turandot delivers opera to spectacle. The power of spectacle oblit-

erates the moral conflict that the surviving characters would have exhibited in a Verdian universe. The lust that drives Calaf also drives the spectacle; the audience is sonically beaten into submission by the very same blasts that, according to the reception-history cliché, signify Turandot’s first orgasm. Alfano’s contribution only helps this process. His string of quotations of Puccini’s material conjoins musical ideas to spectacle, as if the musical themes were taking their curtain calls as the stage action comes to its conclusion. More importantly, the delivery of opera to spectacle is also its delivery to fascism, to its aesthetic of power through spectacle. In this sense, the opera Turandot, as distinct from the intentions of its creators (Puccini, librettists Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni) and its producers (Toscanini vs. Forzano) emerges as a fascist work. Its brutal “happy end” folds the opera (Calaf) into fascism (Turandot’s regime, newly partnered with Calaf’s charismatic leadership). In the work's desire for incorporation into fascist spectacle, it accepts the bargain that demands the end of opera.

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THE OPERATIC UNCONSCIOUS: SENSO (VISCONTI, 1954), THE SPIDER’S STRATAGEM (BERTOLUCCI, 1970)

Verdi corresponds for me. . . with a mythical dimension, and that works very well with the mythical structure of the father. Mythic music for a mythical personage.*®

These words of Bernardo Bertolucci do much to organize the historical as well as symbolic stakes of postwar Italian film, in which the myth of Verdi as founding father ofthe Italian nation carries centralimportance.

This importance prevails not only despite the mostly subterranean quality of Verdi as referent, but because of it. Freud’s last major work Moses and Monotheism centers on the difficult relationship between individual psychology and collective psychology, or, as he puts it, on the birth of “great men” and ofa “national tradition.”” Freud’s narrative is that of the family romance and of murder. Moses, the hero or great man, is he who manfully stands up against and overcomes adversity, yet is himself condemned to die. A national tradition is born from the fact that the hero is the source of the tradition

at the very moment as he is successfully removed from it. Thus Freud writes: “In the long run it did not matter that the people . .. renounced the teaching of Moses and removed the man himself. The tradition itself remained and its influence reached the aim that was denied to Moses himself.”’? What remains after the death of the author/father

is a text, a text that nevertheless always “tells us enough about its own history.” Two opposing forces leave their traces in the shape of transformations worked upon it: falsification, “in accord with secret tendencies,” that turn the text into its opposite; and an indulgent piety

anxious to keep everything as it has stood, even at the expense of logical : consistency. And Freud continues in a now famous passage: The distortion of a text is not unlike a murder. The difficulty lies not in the execution of the deed but in doing away with the traces. One could wish to give the word “distortion” [Verstellung] the double meaning to which it has a right; . . . It should mean not only “to change the appearance of,” but also “to wrench apart,” “to put in another place.”

278 | Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg That is why in so many textual distortions we may count on finding the suppressed and abnegated material hidden away somewhere, though in an altered shape and torn out of its original meaning.”

Let us assume for present purposes that the Moses in question here is Giuseppe Verdi, and that the text is that of his operatic output as it is put into play as a national tradition. This is then an argument about the role of (Verdian) opera as cultural tradition predicated on the death or . removal ofits author(s), a use of this tradition that depends for its existence as tradition to be wrenched apart, torn from its original meaning, put into another place. This is also an argument about the autonomy of cultural products which thus become subject to a working-over or working-through in another place — to wit, that of the unconscious — in the form of a distortion or displacement. It is such an autonomy that gives rise to a national culture. In the Italian context as we are thinking about it here, the national operatic tradition returns as the repressed of fascism, and it makes this return through and in film. We would like to illustrate this proposition with a discussion of two films, Luchino Visconti’s 1954 Risorgimento film Senso and Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 film about the fascist legacy in postwar Italy, The Spider’s Stratagem. The two films share a number of themes. They treat key revolutionary events in Italian history (the struggle for national independence during the 1860s and the resistance to fascism respectively); they explicitly thematize the problem of murder and betrayal; they place their female protagonists (both played by Alida Valli!) in the Turandotian role of threat to male integrity; they both allocate to opera a central, if paradoxical, function. In both films, opera simultaneously distances viewers from and draws them closer to a recognizable cultural tradition. In both films opera is marked neither as authentic nor as inauthentic national culture, but instead as a site of negotiation and memory, a via regia ~ and not, as Gramsci would argue, a conquista regia — to the cultural unconscious. Opera marks the uncanny, the unheimlich, the homely and unhomely, the familiar and the strange.

Fascism and the operatic unconscious | 279

The reaction to Visconti’s Senso immediately upon its release was violent, a fact that is symptomatically telling, since clearly it struck a nerve. Indeed, what Senso faced head-on was the question of the relationship between opera and a fascist aesthetic founded in spectacle. Based on Camillo Boito’s novella of the same name, Senso takes place in 1866 Venice during Italy’s War of Independence against Habsburg occupation. The heroine Countess Livia Serpieri, who is married to the pro-Austrian but open-to-other-suggestions Count Serpieri, supports the nationalist cause, largely under the influence of her idealist cousin Ussoni. Nevertheless, Livia becomes romantically involved with the Austrian officer Franz Mahler, and her sordid love affair eventually leads to her moral undoing and Franz’s execution before an Austrian firing-squad. Livia betrays the nationalist cause, as well as her fickle

Austrian lover, while the Italian army is routed at Custoza and yet gains the Veneto as a result of political dealings between the dominant European powers. The opening scene of the film remains the most famous, a performance of Il trovatore at the Fenice. We are at the end of Act III: Manrico’s

decision to chose filial love over his “casto amore” for Leonora, his aria “Di quella pira,” and the subsequent call to arms produce a shift of the plot from stage to audience, as Italian nationalists in the audience call the people to arms against Austrian occupation. Ussoni reacts violently

to the remark made by an Austrian officer (we will soon know that this is Franz Mahler) that this is how Italians make revolution: as the° atre and to the music of mandolins. Ussoni is arrested and eventually exiled, while Livia meets Franz in order to intercede for her cousin.

Franz and Livia meet in her opera box during the last act of the opera, , as Leonora begs the Count Luna for Manrico’s life. But while Leonora promises only her cold and spent body to Luna, Livia, in an explicit statement of refused identification with melodramatic heroines — “I love opera,” she tells Franz, “but not when it occurs off stage” — quickly abandons nationalist politics for a personal melodrama of sleeping with the enemy. At the level of the film’s operatic Doppelganger, namely Il trovatore, Livia’s romance proceeds as if her operatic analogue Leonora

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had begun an affair with the Count di Luna rather than with Manrico. Livia thus obeys her own principle of not letting opera define life; she might have done better to learn from Leonora. The center of the debate about Senso revolved around Visconti’s

relationship to opera, though here a conceptual ambiguity complicates the matter, since in Italian melodramma refers to both melodrama

and opera. Thus, is opera always melodramatic? Does opera always refuse, like melodrama, the interiority of the subject? Is it inevitably condemned to spectacle? It is certain that with Senso Visconti wanted to provide a Gramscian reading of the Risorgimento, that is, an interpretation of national unification as one that lacked real popular participation and was founded on the political machinations of European elites. Italian unification was a class affair, not a national one. In Gramscian

terms, melodrama is the false consciousness of the Risorgimento; opera is a mechanism of false identification whereby reality in its mediocrity and sordidness cannot live up to operatic gesture. Verdi’s music, or rather the libretti and plots of plays set to music by him, are responsible for the “artificial” poses in the life of the people, for ways of thinking, for a “style.” ... To many common people the baroque and the operatic appear as an extraordinarily fascinating way of feeling and acting, as a means of escaping what they consider low, mean and contemptible in their lives and education in order to enter a more select sphere of great feelings and noble passions . . . Opera is the most pestiferous because words set to music are more easily recalled, and become matrices in which thought takes shape out of flux.”

More indirectly, of course, Visconti is also referring to the “second” revolution, that of the Resistance, a revolution that from the perspective of the conservative Catholic and Christian Democratic climate of 1954

Visconti was bound to have interpreted as another failure. Visconti was also directly engaging a cultural style that had been born along with the Resistance: neorealism. As Angela Dalle Vacche has remarked, while Rossellini is anti-operatic and Crocean, while he seeks to create a form of Italian national consciousness from, so to speak, the ground up through the employment of the commedia dell’arte tradition, Visconti’s

Fascism and the operatic unconscious | 281 style is both operatic, “high-cultural,” and Gramscian. He thus creates a composite style that will come to characterize Italian cinema in the years to come.” While the Right understood Visconti's Gramscian reading of Italy’s “heroic age” as blasphemy, the Left was decidedly uncomfortable with Visconti’s use of opera. Senso bore the message that the national past looked like a melodrama, but it did this in a style that made viewers uneasy. Left critics attacked Visconti for having betrayed neorealism along with the latter’s commitment to setting its films in the present and shooting them in documentary style. Visconti’s film, on the other hand, exhibited a kind of excess, an operatic quality of its own, that in these critics’ opinion had been the mainstay of fascist culture. It was the presence of the past as opera that made so many critics uncomfortable with Senso. As Dalle Vacche tellingly remarks, Visconti had “conducted a dialogue with the operatic culture of his aristocratic background the way a son speaks to his own father, with that mixture of respect and rebellion referred to as anxiety of influence.”’® For Millicent Marcus, as well, what troubles Senso is its spectacular or operatic element. The

film itself strikes the viewer as a costume drama founded in (melo) dramatic gesture and excess, a drama whose relationship to the past is unclear: is it ironic, or is it excessively indulgent?’” Clearly, there is something in opera, in the operatic tradition, that when invoked defies mastery. “By emphasizing music over word,” writes Dalle Vacche, “melodrama charges with pressure the elements of its mise-enscéne to express something hovering over the inexpressible. This inef-

fable dimension, in turn, is symptomatic of an originary fullness of meaning, which the fragmentation of modern life cannot quite live up to.”*® For Dalle Vacche, Visconti’s operatic style evokes both the legacy of fascism and also an excess, a sexual passion that destabilizes

identity, both of the subject and of politics. Alternatively, for Marcus, the presence of opera in Senso points to a Golden Age of perfect reciprocity between public and private, between culture and history. Nevertheless, for her as well, the story cannot continue in this harmonious way, since otherwise Visconti would have simply rewritten Il trovatore.

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Livia may desire to be Leonora, a desire that should propel her incestuously into the arms of her cousin Ussoni/Manrico. Instead, a “degraded” melodrama takes place, a displacement of opera. Leonora becomes Livia, the Livia—Franz plot takes over the Livia—Ussoni plot,

not just because of the cynicism of modern, fragmented, life, but because opera creates a desire for exceptionality that cannot be managed or controlled by political institutions and rules. Visconti’s use of

opera is not strategic; it is not a ploy to show up the impossibility of opera in the modern age. Its use, instead, drives a wedge between spectacle and opera, producing simultaneously a Gramscian reading of the dangers of politics as spectacle, and an Eros, or a senso whose stagings must remain there, but in displaced form, in disguise, in the form of an insistence on and by the subject. What returns in Senso is precisely “senso”: the demand for sensuality and happiness that had been banished from fascism. Visconti’s obsession with uniforms and veils in Senso points simultaneously to the masks that disguise the true self and to that element that constitutes the subject in its very essence.

The subject, for Visconti, is an operatic subject, but one that is displaced, always somewhere else. Opera exists in Visconti’s film as that auratic element that both defies and submits to the dictates of filmic

reproduction. While for Visconti opera still can be staged or made visible, for Bernardo Bertolucci such a visibility seems to have become impossible. In The Spider’s Stratagem, opera dominates the plot of the film, though we never actually come to see it. Nor does it function as mere background music or “soundtrack.” There is something derailing and derailed about opera’s presence or absence in the film. And since Spider is about the continuing legacy of fascism in postwar Italy, opera comes

to stand for what has been devoured by fascism, in ways similar to a spider’s incorporation of its prey. Rigoletto in the film is “a text within, ora satellite of, the main text.”"? Loosely based on Borges’s short story “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” The Spider’s Stratagem tells the story of Athos Magnani (Giulio Brogi) and his return to his native Tara, a place he had left at his birth in 1936, following the murder of his father at the hands of fascists.*° Some thirty years later, he is summoned back

Fascism and the operatic unconscious | 283 to Tara by his father’s “official” mistress Draifa (named by her father for Alfred Dreyfus) in order to investigate his father’s death. On his arrival,

Athos Jr. discovers his martyred father’s name emblazoned across the town, On streets, statues, and clubs, as the local anti-fascist hero. His murder — in the local theatre during a performance of Rigoletto — has never been solved. The film follows the son’s investigation into his father’s and the town’s shared past. Narrative flashbacks provided by Draifa and by his father’s three surviving best friends indicate that things are not as straightforward as they seem. Tara is a strange place, made up almost entirely of old men and of people whose genders and ages are unclear and whose memories of the past are at best imperfect but nevertheless recited as if by rote. Athos Jr. learns of a plot planned by his father (also acted by Giulio Brogi) and his three friends — all anti-fascist in a theatrical kind of way, one of the friends remarks, just like Samuel and Tom in Un ballo in maschera — to kill Mussolini upon his arrival in Tara for the inauguration of the new theatre. The plot is discovered, Mussolini cancels his visit, the three friends narrowly escape arrest, and Athos Sr. dies in Mussolini’s place at a performance of Rigoletto at the end of the second act, while Rigoletto sings “Ah, la maledizione!” Athos Jr. tries to leave Tara but is drawn back from the train station as he hears the music of Rigoletto emerge like a spider’s web from the theatre. The music leads him back into a repetition of the story of his father’s murder, a story by now as familiar as the plot of the opera. Though we never the see the stage, the plots of Rigoletto and Athos are carefully entwined, and it is in and through the performance that we finally learn the truth of the father’s murder. As Gilda calls “Soccorso, padre mio,” and as we see Athos Jr. seeing himself in a mirror (a visual reference to Senso is quite deliberate here), the son realizes that the three friends had killed Athos. As they then explain, Athos had betrayed his own plot to kill the Duce, and he had asked the three friends to kill him “dramatically” in order to give Tara a hero. A flashback in which Athos lays out his plan for a staged murder appears twice, as ifto highlight the act’s rehearsed quality. Caught in his father’s web of lies, Athos Jr. — unable to betray his father’s betrayal lest he be like him — endorses the lie, and when he tries again to leave Tara by

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train, he finds that the tracks are covered in grass and that no train has stopped at Tara in years. Bertolucci has spoken of The Spider’s Stratagem as a film that is both about the ambiguity of history and about the manufacturing of myth, a myth whose Italian articulation depends on Verdian opera: “Verdi corresponds for me — and thus for the son of Athos Magnani — with a mythical dimension, and that works very well with the mythical structure of the father. Mythic music for a mythical personage.”™ Tara is the home of this myth, the synecdoche of Italian self-representation, and it immediately evokes, as Kline has pointed out, the seat of mythical Irish kings (the family romance), the lost plantation of Gone With the Wind (nostalgia or melancholy loss), and the first syllables of the dreaded spider (danger, contamination, entrapment), as well, of course, as the

word “blemish” or “mark” as evoked by the Italian tara. Verdi as a means of unambiguous national self-representation or identity and symbol of resistance is thus immediately questioned. Verdi may be part of a myth but, as Deborah Crisp and Roger Hillman correctly remark, his use in the film is not mood-making. Bertolucci refuses false

parallels.” Initially we may be rather blinded by the parallel between __ Rigoletto and The Spider’s Stratagem — and this is thematized and given

emphasis by Bertolucci’s use of Gilda’s abduction scene, where the blindfolded Rigoletto participates unwittingly in the crime. Bertolucci links the opera and his own film through their themes of blindness, filial devotion, and backfired murder plot. The intended objects of “just

vengeance’ are the Duke in the opera and the Duce in the film; they are finally replaced by the plotter’s daughter in the opera, and by the principal plotter himself in the film. Rigoletto and Athos Sr. are both known to be jesters,”* creating a situation wherein the two conspirators are unable to make an informed judgment about the nature and consequences of their own actions. Rigoletto unwittingly participates in the abduction and murder of his own daughter. The conspirators in the film, on the other hand, in their plan to have Mussolini assassinated by the Rigoletto on stage, are unable to distinguish between real life and performance. The key to the film lies perhaps in this knowing substitution, in the capacity, that is, of the subject (viewer and protagonist) to read the

Fascism and the operatic unconscious | 2.85

difference between acting out a part (in a play) and a form of working through that is not condemned to the theatrical or mechanical repetition of the past. As a traitor, Kolker writes, Athos Sr. “in effect joins the fascists, and by raising the fascist concept of spectacle to a universal proposition he ‘poisons the universe’ for everyone.”*4 (“Poisoning the universe” comes from Un ballo in maschera, from the aria “Eri tu,” as cited and sung by one of the conspirators in the film: “It was you

who besmirched that soul / The delight of my soul... / You who trust me and suddenly loathsome / Poison the universe for me. . .”) Athos Sr., like Rigoletto, misreads or misuses opera, precisely because he understands it as spectacle. In this act, he (like Rigoletto) destroys what he should have saved.

Displacement is central to Bertolucci’s aesthetic and it operates at the two levels that reflect Freud’s distinction between melancholia and mourning. First — and problematically since it depends on the removal of woman from the scene — displacement depends on the melancholy

creation of distance through introjection. Here pleasure depends on distance. Draifa is a spider woman, the architect of the labyrinth in which Athos Jr. is entrapped, and his guide out of that same labyrinth. Thus Bertolucci: In nature it is usually the female that devours. Genetically, over the centuries, some males have understood her mechanism, have understood the danger. Some spiders just approach the female, but stay within a safe distance. Exciting themselves with her smell, they masturbate, collect their sperm in their mouth and wait to regain strength after orgasm. Because that is how they get devoured, when they are weak after ejaculation. Later, they inseminate the female with a minimal approach and thus she cannot attack them in the moment of their weakness . . . What can develop between [a man and a woman] is only possessiveness . . . the destruction of the loved object.”

One might say that what is true for woman here is also true for opera.

Opera becomes an allure that leads to death when approached too closely. Women, like opera, must be incorporated and sequestered in the homoerotic community of Tara where, as everyone keeps insisting, “qui siamo tutti amici.” Melancholy displacement as incorporation

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produces a narrative of false community, a lie which nevertheless is condemned to betray its own secret. Tara refuses to mourn the past and repeats through its operatic gestures a continuous return of the past. As Robert Kolker writes, “Athos would have killed Mussolini during an opera. Instead he makes an opera out of history in which everyone acts a role and sings the same arias again and again.”° Yet we never actually see the spectacle. And here Bertolucci has effected a second displacement, one closer to Freudian mourning. As Robert Kolker has remarked, opera as fascist spectacle is “cooled” in its contact with filmic narrative, while at the same time it is by

virtue of this same contact that the film is able to own up to its own suppressed melodramatic elements.*” Bertolucci creates through

this allusionary mode a kind of prohibition of representation, supported by frequent allusion to Magritte, above all to the painting La Reproduction interdite. This allusionary practice ultimately makes

possible the recognition or transmission of the historical truth, the truth of the father’s murder. To this end the key scene takes place in the theatre, at the repeat performance of Rigoletto. Athos Jr. restages the scene of his father’s death, taking his father’s box seat, which is placed before a mirror. By his restaging, he learns that his father had in fact staged his own murder. Athos Sr.’s absorption into fascism is clinched by his participation in the very spectacle of his own death. To what extent Athos Jr. is caught in a repetition of the same remains open. In another invocation of an absent father, Bertolucci introduces a Verdian operatic practice without reproducing or representing either Verdi or opera. Opera, specifically the opera Rigoletto, shadows this

scene on stage but off-camera, thereby remaining unrepresented. Opera is “obscene,” literally, as it is non-specular and non-spectacular.

Bertolucci proposes not the elimination or murder of opera, which would amount to another form of denial and thus to a misreading of the operatic element within the cultural tradition. Bertolucci does not repeat the fascist spectacularization and repression of opera. Rather, he guarantees its survival by proposing a new way of seeing, a symptomatic one perhaps, that is avowedly mythical, but only insofar

Fascism and the operatic unconscious | 287 as it acknowledges the traces — the tare — of its loss. In his own critique

of spectacle, Bertolucci invents operatic seeing as he invents filmic listening.

NOTES

1 This larger trajectory forms the subject and argument of Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860-1930,

forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press. 2 Cited in Jeffrey Schnapp, Staging Fascism: 18BL and the Theatre of Masses for

Masses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 33. Subsequent references to this work are in the text. 3 Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 4 William Weaver, The Golden Century of Italian Opera: From Rossini to Puccini

(London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1980), p. 242. Cited in William Ashbrook and Harold Powers, Puccini’s Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 3. Subsequent references to this latter work are in the text. 5 See Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1987), pp. 210-211. 6 Toscanini’s most enduring mark on the work is his role in selecting Franco Alfano to compose the finale from Puccini’s sketches. Toscanini rejected Alfano’s first attempt. In May 2002 Luciano Berio’s new ending received its staged world premiere at the Los Angeles Opera. It has been used since in several venues, including the Salzburg Festival and the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin, the latter in a new production directed by Doris Dorrie and conducted by Kent Nagano. The effect on the opera’s conclusion is substantial, judging from our own hearing in Berlin in October 2003. Berio’s music seems to want to deémonumentalize the ending, reducing both the fanfare and the claim of a total conclusion to the vexed drama that has unfolded. But the dramatic and political issues at stake in the opera as a whole remain unchanged. The Alfano—Berio war, whose outcome will also determine the longevity of Toscanini’s control over the opera, will be fought (or not) in the years to come. 7 Cited in Charles Osborne, The Complete Operas of Puccini (New York: Athenaeum, 1982), p. 245.

288 | Michael P. Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg 8 Quoted in Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy, p. 105. 9 Ashbrook and Powers, Puccini’s Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition, PP: 3-4. 10 Fabien Gerard, T. Jefferson Kline, and Bruce Sklarew, eds., Bernardo

Bertolucci: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), p. 64. 11 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage Books, 1939). 12 Ibid., p. 62.

13 Ibid., p. 52. 14 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. William Boelhower (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 377. 15 Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 156. 16 Ibid., p. 121. 17 Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 187. 18 Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror, p. 134. 19 Robert P. Kolker, Bertolucci (London: British Film Institute, 1985), p. 61. Rigoletto is by no means the only reference to Verdi in the film. References are made to Macbeth, Un ballo in maschera, Trovatore, Ernani, and Attila.

20 See Jorge Luis Borges, “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Direction

Books, 1964), pp. 72-75. 21 Cited in T. Jefferson Kline, Bertolucci’s Dream Loom: A Psychoanalytical Study of Cinema (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), p. 76. 22 Deborah Crisp and Roger Hillman, “Verdi and Schoenberg in Bertolucci’s “The Spider’s Stratagem’,” Music and Letters 82/2 (2001), 251-267; p. 258.

, 23 Ibid., p. 256. 24 Kolker, Bertolucci, p. 119. 25 Kline, Bertolucci’s Dream Loom, p. 74. 26 Kolker, Bertolucci, pp. 123-124; see also Eric L. Santner on melancholy in Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1990). 27 Kolker, Bertolucci, p. 123.

PART III

Theorizing Opera and the Social

Pn

Introduction to Part III Victoria Johnson

In examining specific historical instances of operatic production and consumption, each of the ten essays comprising Part I and Part II of this volume has taken a stand, sometimes explicitly, but more often implicitly, on the matter of how opera scholars can most fruitfully theorize, grasp, and analyze opera’s relation to what is conventionally termed “society.” In the third and final section of this volume, three authors based in three different academic disciplines reflect on how opera scholars might push further still in their efforts to understand the changing social constellations from which opera emerges and on which it exercises its own transformative power. In the first of these three chapters, entitled “On opera and society (assuming a relationship),” the comparative literature scholar Herbert Lindenberger considers “what happens . . . when we allow the terms ‘opera and ‘society’ to jostle against one another.” The “social” appears, he notes, at every turn: for example, in the political, economic, and cultural conditions under which an opera is commissioned and/or composed; in the literary and musical style of its libretto and its music;

in the context in which it is first heard and seen; and in the influence of its reception history on its subsequent interpretation. Given the challenges posed to scholars by these and other social dimensions of opera, Lindenberger applauds the dramatic growth in and diversification of opera studies in all disciplines. Under the fruitful influence of the socially oriented New Historicism and British Cultural Studies, he notes, opera scholarship of the last few decades has pushed far beyond formal studies of single works or individual composers to wide-ranging studies that pose questions about the operatic form as a whole. As Lindenberger points out, however, one of the towering figures of late twentieth-century social science — Pierre Bourdieu — has had

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292 | Victoria Johnson almost no impact on opera studies, particularly in comparison with the influence enjoyed, directly or indirectly, by Adorno, Foucault, and Raymond Williams. Lindenberger sketches three different ways in which

Bourdieu’s work could prove useful for opera scholars: (1) through the model offered in The Rules of Art for exhaustive analysis of the his-

torical contexts of art production and consumption; (2) through the model offered in Distinction for analyzing the role played by opera in the production and reproduction of social structure; and (3) through the model offered in Homo Academicus for analyzing the social production and reproduction of academic disciplines and of discipline-based knowledge (a process that has been of great importance in the produc-

tion of knowledge about opera). | Bourdieu’s potential utility for opera scholars is the central focus of musicologist Jane Fulcher’s chapter in this section of our volume. Fulcher — one of the few opera scholars to have seriously engaged with and drawn on Bourdieu’s framework — explains some of his key contributions to the analysis of social phenomena and sheds new light on the social dimensions of opera by deploying his framework to perform an exemplary analysis of the musical world of interwar France. She shows precisely how Bourdieu’s insights into the political power of cultural objects and symbols can be harnessed by musicologists to develop more thorough and more nuanced analyses of the social arenas — the “fields,” in Bourdieu’s terminology — in which opera has

historically been produced and consumed. Beginning, a la Bourdieu, with an overview of the French political and musical terrain following World War I, Fulcher moves to an analysis of the multiple and opposing uses to which operatic composers put neoclassical themes and devices. Some composers, she shows, deployed these themes and devices in a manner aligned with and supportive of state cultural policies and sympathies, while others found in these themes and devices means to mock or criticize dominant musical culture. Through this empirical analysis, Fulcher makes the case that musicologists have much to gain by moying beyond Adorno’s paradigm — fruitful as it has undeniably proven for musicologists over the past few decades — to a fuller exploration of Bourdieu’s challenging but rewarding work.

Introduction to Part II | 293 If Fulcher offers substantial support for Lindenberger’s claim that Bourdieu has a great deal to offer opera scholars, sociologist Antoine Hennion does the same, in his contribution to this section, for Lindenberger’s suggestion that a focus on “the social experience of opera”

would stand to deepen our understanding of opera itself. Hennion focuses here on the role of what he terms “music-lovers” — a grouping in which he includes audiences, musicians, critics, and scholars — in the very constitution of opera as an object. Beginning his reflections on the question of “opera and society” with the provocative claim that “music does not exist,” he argues that certain of the most fundamental assumptions we bring to the study of the history of music in general and opera in particular are themselves products of the history of our experience of music. Thus, for example, to assume that there is some-

thing called “music” that is inherently autonomous from “society” (and vice versa) as we reflect on the history of music is to evaluate, as Hennion puts it, “musical reality retrospectively using the very criteria that music history has created” — criteria such as the notion, created in large part by music scholars themselves, of the musical work as a bounded, self-contained unit. Beginning from this unusual position allows Hennion to bring into sharp focus a causal relation generally overlooked by musicologists and sociologists alike, namely the mutual and reciprocally influential

relation between, on the one hand, our basic human ability to take pleasure in music and, on the other, the particular kinds of music that are available to us at any given historical moment. Using the example of nineteenth-century French opera, he sketches the implications for opera scholarship of thinking more deeply about the powerful influence of “music-lovers” on widely accepted contemporary accounts of the trajectories of operatic history. In the process, Hennion does not merely challenge the idea of any easy distinction between “opera” and the “social”; he also offers a thoughtful alternative .

11 | On opera and society (assuming a relationship) Herbert Lindenberger

Why should we even speak of opera and society in the same breath? Is there, for instance, a special affinity between these two terms, and if so, is it different from or more intense than the relationships we seek to establish between other artistic forms and society — between, for instance, painting and society, comedy and society, or, to cite the title of a famous essay by Theodor Adorno, lyric and society?’ As we listen to these various combinations, the phrase “opera and society” seems particularly amenable to discussion. With painting, for

example, one is faced with a multitude of forms — each rooted in a particular social context — from the animals depicted on the caves of Lascaux to the political messages drawn by muralists on barrio walls.

Opera, by contrast, seems comfortably circumscribed. It encompasses an easily definable history extending back four hundred years in Europe and the Americas. It has flourished continuously within a discernible institution, the opera house, though also, at least in its earlier years, within aristocratic courts. And despite the substantial differences

in national traditions of opera, the particular roles assigned to those who create and sustain it — impresario, singers, librettist, composer — have maintained a degree of constancy over these four centuries rarely to be found in other art forms.

The second noun in the phrase “opera and society” obviously presents a more fluid situation than the first. If one glances at the other essays in this collection, it quickly becomes evident that the term “society” encompasses a wide variety of often disparate objects — for example, the social context within which an opera is written;

an idealized (or even demonized) image of a society that an opera projects; the operatic audiences for which an opera was created as well as those that experience this opera in later revivals; and even, as

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Opera and Society | 295 one essay argues, the “on-stage societies” represented from one act to another. My own concern in this paper is not to enforce a single definition of society but to note what happens — has happened, might yet happen — when we allow the terms “opera” and “society” to jostle against one another. The most obvious questions to be raised regarding opera and society have to do with the social contexts within which individual operas, or operas constituting a particular period of operatic history, have been created. We establish a link between opera and society, for example, when we analyze Lully’s mythological operas as attempts to flatter the absolute monarch who sponsored them or when we tie Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron to a context that includes matters such as the composer's commitment to Zionism, his reaction to the dangers of Nazism around

1930, and the hermeticism that defined the role of the artist in his generation. The questions relevant to linking opera and society are by no means limited to an opera’s or a style’s origins but include the whole history of interpretation and reception of this work or style. One might ask, for example, how Berlioz’s rewriting of Gluck’s Orfeo, or Wagner’s of Iphigénie en Aulide, nearly a century after its composition, answers the needs of a new social, not to speak of musical, context. Or what

the interpretive history of frequently performed pieces such as Don Giovanni and Gounod’s Faust tells us about changing social biases. Indeed, what do we make of the apparent fall from grace of this latter work, now performed only sporadically but a century ago among the most popular of all operas? And then of course there are questions that go beyond the framework of individual works and styles. How, for instance, do we account for the rise of repertory opera somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century? Before that, after all, audiences customarily demanded new works each season. And how might we account for the quite recent

increase in demand for new works — this after it had become common , wisdom that audiences refused to attend operas with which they were not familiar? And what do we make of the rise of directorial opera after World War II?

296 | Herbert Lindenberger And beyond these there are the larger theoretical questions. How do we speak of authorship in a form as collaborative as opera — yet also one that is dependent upon the musical distinction that only the composer can bestow? To explore this issue, we might draw analogies from other collaborative art forms — from film, for example, perhaps also from the

methods of the Elizabethan theatre. Or even from painting during, say, the late Middle Ages or the early Renaissance before the individual

artist's authority and autonomy had become established. Perhaps we can best suggest some relevant questions at this point by looking at a particular opera. I choose Mozart's Entfiihrung aus dem Serail, a work with which most opera-goers have a passing familiarity but that is not a revered classic to the degree that the same composer's later operas are. To start with, let’s look at the circumstances surrounding its composition. Die Entfiihrung was originally commissioned in 1781 for the National

Singspiel, an institution founded by the enlightened Emperor Joseph II only three years before to promote a taste for German-style comic opera as an alternative to the Italian comic works that had long enjoyed favor among the Viennese public — and which, I might add, would return to imperial favor by 1783. Although the National Singspiel was

dependent to some degree on French and Italian works that were for the most part translated into German, its mission during its brief existence was to cultivate a relatively simple, often folklike, musical style with spoken interludes between numbers. Moreover, the production of Die Entfitihrung was originally planned as part of an official visit by the Russian Grand Duke Paul. Although the opera was not finished in time for this occasion, which was intended to impress the visitors with a display of Austrian power, Die Entfiihrung’s

participation in a nationalist political program, both in the circumstances of its commission and in the musical style that reigned in the National Singspiel, remains part of the significance it would have had in its own time. It might be remembered that Mozart's major operatic achievement up to this point had been Idomeneo, a thoroughly Italian opera seria composed for Munich earlier during the same year that he received the Viennese commission.

Opera and Society | 297 But the resulting work was not quite the simple sort of Singspiel that reigned for the brief period during which Joseph’s theatre flourished.

It displays in fact an uncommon mixture of styles, from, on the one hand, Pedrillo’s folklike Romance as the lovers await their escape or the so-called vaudeville near the end, in which the major characters all repeat the same simple tune, to, on the other hand, the enormously complex music characteristic of several arias assigned to Belmonte and Constanze — above all, the second-act “Martern aller Arten,” which in my Own opera-going experience has proved the most precarious aria within any of the composer’s major works. But Mozart’s mixture of musical forms, as Stephen Rumph has shown in a recent essay, can also be viewed as dramatizing what Rumph calls “the irreducible contradictions’ within the thought structures of the Enlightenment.’ One wonders what to make of this strange stylistic mixture, which some critics, notably Edward J. Dent, in his long-influential 1913 book on Mozart's operas, saw as a sign of the opera’s relative failure.* And how do we interpret the Emperor's alleged remark to the composer that the opera contained “monstrous many notes”?* It is likely that

this statement, which might have referred to the complex runs of “Martern aller Arten,” expressed the disdain that Joseph II held for the vocal complexities of opera seria in favor of the Germanic simplicity characterizing other parts of Die Entfiihrung. And one might ask as well what role Mozart himself played in driving the opera toward this more complex style, especially after the middle of the second act. The libretto he was using was by a well-known north-German librettist, C. F

Bretzner, and had already been set by a German composer, Johann André, but Mozart's Viennese friend Gottlob Stephanie then made , extensive revisions to this libretto — with “Martern aller Arten” being

not only wholly new but also radically changing the image of the heroine that had prevailed in the original. To what extent did these revisions result from Mozart's desire to assert the autonomy of music —

as he himself hinted in a letter to his father during the process of composition’ — and to what extent from his need to satisfy the desires and needs of the Italian-style singers assigned to perform Belmonte and Constanze?

298 | Herbert Lindenberger Beyond these issues our interest today is inevitably drawn to the large role played by Turkish music in this opera. To be sure, what passed for Turkish music — percussive sounds from cymbal, triangle, and loud drums, squealing sounds from the piccolo, atwo-four rhythm, and a sharpened fourth degree — had long been familiar to audiences,

both in street music and in opera (not to speak of such non-operatic examples as the finale of Mozart’s A major sonata, K. 331). In Die Entfiihrung, we have not only the overtly Turkish Janissary choruses but Turkish moments at numerous other points, even at the opening of “Martern aller Arten,” in which the Western heroine shows herself infected, as it were, by the Eastern world that she defies in this aria. Turkish music appears not only in the many operas about European maidens captured by Turks in various Mediterranean sites but even in so pre-Turkish a setting such as Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, in which it is used to characterize the primitive Scythians. (I might add that the last-named opera, in German translation, was chosen to be performed

at the National Singspiel for the Russian Grand Duke when it turned out that Mozart’s work could not make it in time.) As Matthew Head has shown in his full-length study of Mozart’s orientalism, Turkish music, including Hungarian tunes with which it was often conflated, had a considerable history in the West for at least a generation before Mozart.° Are we to hear these sounds as a code for that newly fashionable notion of the “primitive”? Or perhaps we should hear them simply as an entertaining popular alternative to the formality of the prevailing classical style,” a means of aesthetic liberation analogous to the craze for chinoiserie somewhat earlier throughout Europe. And what political meanings can we read into what we hear? Since Mozart’s opera was

finished a year short of the century that had elapsed since the Turkish siege of Vienna, it would be difficult to argue that Die Entfiihrung and other works containing Turkish music were responding to a living threat — though a few years after Die Entfiihrung Austria joined Russia in

a brief war against the Turks to which Mozart responded with several compositions.® But one recent commentator on the opera, Nicholas

Till, has described European anti-Turkish policy at the time as a

Opera and Society | 299 “cold-war stratagem of maintaining their subjects in a state of perpetual vigilance against the imagined enemy at the gates.” Indeed, the idea of staging this opera — or Gluck’s, as it turned out — to celebrate a Russian state visit can also be seen as a means of reinforcing the central and eastern European policy of seeking to reconquer Turkish territories in the Balkans. It is significant, moreover, that the embedding of Turkish music within a Western piece goes back over a century to a time that the Turks really were a threat, namely to Lully’s Turkish march in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, composed in 1669 when a Turkish delegation was visiting the court of Louis XIV. And what do we make of the ending of Die Entftihrung aus dem Serail,

in which the barbaric ruler decides to let the Westerners escape in style in order to display his powers of forgiveness of his old enemy who had

banished him and who, we have just learned, was Belmonte’s own father? The refrain of the vaudeville at the end keeps reminding us that anybody who is not grateful for Pasha Selim’s generosity deserves contempt. The display of a monarch’s magnanimity was of course an

established convention for a good century and a half in the endings of both dramas and operas from Corneille’s Cinna to Mozart’s own La clemenza di Tito. But it is also significant that in Die Entfiihrung this display stems from the libretto’s reviser, Stephanie, and was not present in Bretzner’s original, in which Pasha Selim allows the lovers to escape

only after he discovers that Belmonte is his own long-lost son. Can it be that Bretzner, writing in Leipzig for a theatre in Berlin, felt no need to flatter the ruler sponsoring his work? An early reviewer of Mozart's opera, in fact, objected to the new magnanimous resolution as something that was already out of fashion everywhere except in Vienna."°

[have limited myself thus far to the context surrounding the origins of Die Entfiihrung aus dem Serail. The social and political implications we

locate in a work include not only this context but also the experience

of directors, audiences, and critics in the course of its interpretive history. After being one of Mozart’s most popular operas until the end of the eighteenth century, Die Entfiihrung gave way in frequency of performance to two of the Da Ponte operas and to Die Zauberfléte;™

300 | Herbert Lindenberger although one could speculate that the presence of considerable spoken dialogue might have inhibited its currency in non-German-speaking lands, the Singspiel form of Mozart's final opera has not prevented its continued popular acclaim. It is possible that the plot and the issues with which Die Entfiihrung was concerned came to seem trivial during the earnest-minded nineteenth century.

Reception theory has proposed the term “fusion of horizons” to depict the absorption of a work’s effect at its inception by the experiences it offers at a later time. However well we historically reconstruct the work’s earlier context, the preoccupations, biases, and expectations

of the later observer color the manner in which we perceive it in its later embodiments. Take, for instance, the way that the publication in 1978 of Edward Said’s Orientalism altered our perceptions of works

in all the arts that depicted the non-Western world. Studies of Die Entfiihrung since that time invariably focus on matters such as the role of the Turkish music or the difference between the musical oriental-

ism of the eighteenth century, centered as it is on the conflict between European and Muslim values, and that of the later nineteenth century, in which the East is portrayed as at once seductive and sinister.

Productions are more likely than scholarly studies to respond quickly to the possibilities offered by current events. Thus, a 1980 Munich production referred to the recent Iran hostage crisis by offering a Pasha clad like the Ayatollah Khomeini while threatening Constanze with tortures.” In the light of 9/11, one dreads speculating what new forms of terrorism an inventive director may come up with. I have lingered on a single example, Mozart's Die Entfiihrung, not to provide new facts — for the observations I draw upon are well known to specialists — but to portray the interchanges between an operatic work and the external world that, though they may vary in character in different settings, can still be considered typical. My discussion has stressed the kinds of questions we ask ourselves in approaching specific operatic works — questions about the circumstances surrounding the making ofa work, about the pressures upon the various agents engaged

in this task, and about what happens to an opera once its original context has become remote. Above all, it should be clear that what we

Opera and Society | 301 see as matters of aesthetics and literary or musical style cannot easily be separated from what has customarily been viewed as outside the realm of art. Thus, the stylistic choices that Mozart made in composing Die Entfiihrung involved such issues as the Emperor's preference for a simple and Germanic manner, the Viennese public’s preference for complex Italian vocal forms, Austrian political ambitions in eastern

Europe, and Mozart’s need at this still early point in his career to establish himself in the capital, in which he had recently arrived from Salzburg.

To what extent has the study of opera met the challenges of the questions I have raised? Certainly the last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented boom — within the Anglophone world above all —

in the understanding of opera as a unique phenomenon within the history of the arts. It is significant, for example, that a number of serious books have been published in recent years with the word “opera” in the title or subtitle. I say “serious” since these books are distinct in the readership for which they are designed from the popular guidebooks to opera that have flourished since at least the late nineteenth century. I refer to such products of the boom as Paul Robinson’s Opera and Ideas; Linda and Michael Hutcheon’s Opera: Desire, Disease, Death; John Bokina’s Opera and Politics: From Monteverdi to Henze; Gary Tomlinson’s Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera; Carolyn Abbate’s In Search of Opera.

What distinguishes books such as these is their attempt to focus not simply on a single opera, composer, or period, as most earlier serious studies of opera had done, but to attempt a definition of, an approach to, the form as a whole. Yet they are also distinguished by another fact, namely that they do not emanate from a single discipline but from a number of disciplines within the humanities and even the social sciences.

Until this boom began, opera was pretty much the property of academic music departments, and certainly some of the best of these recent books have come from scholars trained within these departments. Yetifone compares earlier musicological studies with the books of the boom, one notes a narrowness of focus in the former that the

302 | Herbert Lindenberger latter have sought assiduously to overcome. For until relatively recently musicological study was tied to a positivistic model that goes back to the field’s origins during the late nineteenth century when the various humanistic disciplines justified their squatting rights within the mod-

ern university by emulating the methods of the natural sciences. As a result, the study of opera, for example, was limited to formal musical analysis and to researching historical data whose factuality could conceivably be proved in court. One might cite Siegmund Levarie’s exhaustive analysis of tonal and rhythmic matters in Le nozze di Figaro, published half a century ago, as an example of a book that rigorously kept within the methodological

bounds set by the field. Although Levarie links the musical to the dramatic action within the opera, his method does not allow him to step beyond the formal parameters of his text. Or one could cite a multitude

of historical studies that have researched the factual circumstances surrounding particular operas and composers — yet by and large these studies, like those in other humanistic fields when they were tied to the positivistic model, shied away from theorizing and questioning the methods they were employing. Indeed, since the decline of positivism

we have learned that the historical facts upon which we long relied to demonstrate our scientific credentials were themselves historically contingent, as, moreover, was the way we selected facts to ground our arguments. There was one influential and now-classic study of opera that, in its attempt to look at the whole operatic tradition and its refusal to be bound by the positivistic model, anticipated the studies in what I call the recent boom. This was of course Joseph Kerman’s Opera as Drama, now itself a full half-century old. I still remember the excitement that this book generated as its chapters appeared — well before they were

brought together in a volume — in literary journals. What seemed remarkable — to me at least, for I was then a graduate student in comparative literature — was that this project seemed unlike anything in musicology; indeed, its method was quite familiar to me, for, with

its attempt to project a closed canon of great works for which its author provided an easily applied system for evaluation, this approach

Opera and Society | 303 was borrowed from what was then the reigning paradigm in AngloAmerican literary study, the so-called New Criticism. Although it was rare during the 1950s for scholars to adopt the methods of disciplines outside their own, the books on opera of the last two

decades are notable for their interdisciplinary borrowings. Not only do their authors come from a variety of disciplines, as I have indicated, but they have picked up their theoretical frameworks from a multitude of sources. Take, for example, Tomlinson’s Metaphysical Song, which rethinks the whole history of opera by way of a philosophical system, namely that of Michel Foucault, and in particular the Foucault of The Order of Things. Thus, for Tomlinson early operas such as Peri’s L’Euridice and Monteverdi’s Orfeo, through their faith that music can closely match the meaning of words, fit Foucault’s model of the Renais-

sance world of analogy and resemblance, while opera seria, with its highly conventionalized forms of representation in which music goes its own way whatever the words it is setting, demonstrates what Foucault called the episteme of the classical age. Although Tomlinson’s book is notable for its attempt to apply a single paradigm to opera, all the recent books on the topic display the variety of tools available in recent years within the intellectual marketplace. Robinson made use of his background as an intellectual historian in Opera and Ideas; Wayne Koestenbaum, of his commitment to the emerging field of gay and lesbian studies in The Queen’s Throat; Abbate, of her knowledge of deconstruction and, in particular, of Lacanian theory in Unsung Voices and In Search of Opera. To what extent, one may ask, have these approaches, drawn as they are from a number of disciplines, brought us closer to an understanding

of opera’s relationship to society? The answer must remain mixed, for the various strands of critical theory available within humanistic study during recent decades range from the formalist to the socially oriented. Whereas Abbate’s admirable work is near the formal end of the spectrum, much recent work on opera displays a strong social focus. The boom in opera studies coincides in time, moreover, with two powerful strains within literary study — the New Historicism in the United States and Cultural Studies in Britain — that, in their varying

304 | Herbert Lindenberger ways, are concerned with social phenomena. To be sure, the particular phenomena one may choose to observe and to analyze are by no means the same in the various thinkers such as Foucault, Adorno, Bakhtin, and Raymond Williams whose work has helped make these moves in literary study possible. Yet there is a way of thinking about society that has not been nearly as well represented in humanistic work as that of the thinkers I have just mentioned. I refer to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, whose concept of symbolic domination Jane Fulcher, in her essay in this collection, applies fruitfully to the conflicts within the French musical world of the 1920s. IfI may return once more to Mozart’s Entfiihrung, let us imagine a Bourdieu-inspired reading something on the order of his approach to Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale and its social context.% Such a

reading would demand an understanding of the cultural landscape of Vienna during the later eighteenth century — the clash between national and foreign musical traditions, between native-oriented Emperor and cosmopolitan public, with this clash embedded within the uneasy mix-

ture of styles that Mozart’s opera displays. It would also demand an immersion into a particular social milieu, with its class biases and its institutional conflicts, that those of us who have attempted global approaches to opera have not hitherto performed. And it would also demand an understanding of the differences in the historical situation of the arts in the eighteenth-century German states and nineteenthcentury France. Bourdieu’s analysis of the artistic and literary fields in Flaubert’s time can take for granted the conflict between a difficult, avant-garde form of art and a more easily consumable, commercially oriented mode. This conflict was still central to the period that Fulcher has analyzed. But neither side of this conflict is easily applicable to Die

Entfiihrung, within which neither the “native German” nor the opera seria component could be labeled avant-garde. But there are other aspects of Bourdieu’s work relevant to understanding the social foundations of opera. One might note, for example, that the 1963 questionnaire whose results form the basic argument of Distinction, his study of how differing social classes in France value and consume art, includes the names of three operas, La traviata,

Opera and Society | 305 Géotterddmmerung, and L’Enfant et les sortileges,“* each of which appeals

to differing class tastes. For example, La traviata is listed with Rhapsody in Blue and Buffet’s paintings among the “moyen” and “déclassé” works favored by the petite bourgeoisie,” while L’Enfant et les sortiléges joins The Firebird and Kandinsky’s paintings as pleasing to what he calls

the “new petite bourgeoisie” who originated in the upper classes and who seek to hold on to their legacy through their avant-garde tastes."° Although these three operas constitute only a small number of art works in many genres that fill the charts and analyses of Distinction, Bourdieu’s book suggests that a study of the use of opera by various group formations — not simply in recent years but throughout the history of the form — to ground their identity and to claim distinction would shed light from an angle that has not received the attention it deserves.

But Bourdieu can also be used to tell us something not only about

opera but about the problems we encounter in the study of opera. Take, for instance, his analysis, in Homo Academicus, of the power rela-

tionships in the French university system. Bourdieu presents graphic descriptions of the dependency that researchers experience toward the senior professors who sponsor their careers — with the result that the system encourages them to conform to established norms in a particular field.” I earlier noted that departments of music, at least in the United States and Great Britain, ascribed to a positivistic research model long after this model had become outdated in English departments. As a result, the study of opera, at least until the 1980s, seemed retrograde compared to the study of literature. (Although Kerman was trained as a musicologist, it is significant that his book of 1956 was published by a commercial publisher, with several chapters having earlier appeared in literary, not musicological, journals; and one might mention as well that his study of opera was followed early in his career with a musicologically orthodox study of the Elizabethan madrigal.) Although musicologists writing about opera in recent years have adopted paradigms from other fields, one might add that many of the books constituting what I have called the boom in opera study emanated from scholars who were not only outside music but who

306 | Herbert Lindenberger could bring to bear on opera approaches that had become prestigious in their own fields. And once the positivistic model had lost its onceexclusive hold on music departments, musicologists could call on these same approaches to gain the advancement and security necessary for survival within the university system. Let me move beyond these perspectives suggested by Bourdieu’s work to suggest some areas that those engaged in the study of opera and society might profitably pursue. I pose here the question of what constitutes the social experience of opera, both in the course of the form’s history and in the present day. We might ask, for example, what is unique about this experience, above all when one compares opera

with other representational arts, indeed even with other audiencecentered events that we do not necessarily classify within the aesthetic field.

One thing that characterizes the social experience of opera is the extreme diversity of opera audiences, both in the course of history and in the present day. To take only the latter, as I developed in another

context,’® opera invites a wide variety of spectators ranging from the. passive viewer motivated chiefly by social ambition (and who might well spend the middle act of the opera at the bar) to the avid fan with eye and ear intent upon every gesture and sound. Moving back in time,

one notes sharp distinctions in the distance that audiences maintain between themselves and the action within an opera — at one extreme, the participation of the courtly audience in the age of Louis XIV, and, at the other extreme, the large gap between the audience and the heroic, larger-than-life action going on behind the proscenium in the public opera houses that have flourished since the first ones in Venice early in the seventeenth century. Comparisons among musical genres have tended to stress formal attributes rather than different audience experiences. To cite the work of a single composer, one might note the ways one customarily dis-

tinguishes between Handel’s operas and oratorios: thus, we cite the fact that whereas the former are in Italian, the latter are in English; the former on historical and literary themes, the latter on religion and occasionally myth; the former staged, the latter unstaged; the former

Opera and Society | 307 with only rare choruses, the latter with considerable choral music. On only one point of comparison does the difference in audience experience enter the picture, namely, the fact that Handel’s operas were sponsored and frequented by the aristocracy, the latter by a bourgeois public. Yet this last-named point is the most important single factor that distinguishes Handel’s oratorios from his operas, for the changes in language, subject matter, and musical style were all occasioned by, indeed derive from, the change of audience. Once we make the social experience of opera central to an investigation, opera’s role among the arts looks different from what a more formal analysis would reveal. We ordinarily think of opera as a blend

of two other forms, the spoken theatre and music. But if we stress audience experience, other relationships emerge. Adorno, in his sociology of music, describes the audiences of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury opera moving to the cinema in the twentieth century.’? For

Adorno, with the exception of a few “high-art” works such as the operas produced by Schoenberg and his school, opera is essentially a popular form, one that he, in fact, treats with a certain disparagement. When he juxtaposes chapters on opera and chamber music,*° the reader wonders if the category “music” in the title of his book can really apply to both genres. A study of audiences would reveal certain affinities between opera, on the one hand, and film and sports events, on the other. When opera fans send pirated tapes of performances to distant fellow fans, or when they recite statistics about individual singers, they display a form of passion that, except for the adulation granted an occasional instrumental star, does not ordinarily manifest itself among other types of classical music. The passion for opera sometimes verges on fanaticism — with fans willing to travel half way around the world to attend some much-vaunted production or hear a favorite singer, or, for those with less ample resources, to camp out in front of the opera house the night before to assure themselves a standing-room place. The social experience of opera throughout the form’s history has been entangled in complex ways with the economic realities that make operatic performance possible. Since opera has traditionally counted

308 | Herbert Lindenberger as the most costly of all the performing arts, the public’s role has varied according to the type and degree of subsidy offered an opera company. These state subsidies have played a major role in making possible — as with the German companies of the late twentieth century — a high degree ofinnovation, bothin repertory and production style, regardless of what the public has demanded; to put it another way, a high-subsidy

system enables a company to view its role as enlightening, and not simply entertaining, its audience about the possibilities of operatic art. By contrast, North American companies, subsidized as they are not by the state but by a combination of ticket sales and private donations,

have been forced to a more conservative repertory and type of production in order to cater to the tastes of their audiences and donors. The history of opera financing reveals a none-too-subtle relationship between money and art: one could cite examples such as the craze for spectacle in seventeenth-century Venice that necessitated keeping instrumental accompaniment to a minimum; or the presence ofa gambling casino in Naples’s San Carlo that allowed both the musical and visual extravagance of Rossini’s opere serie.

Yet there is another aspect of the social experience of opera that does not lend itself as easily to precise and concrete description as the matters I have discussed above. I refer to the peculiar hold that opera has exercised on the emotions of its audiences. Despite sharp differences in period and national styles, opera has maintained an identity

and a staying power over the centuries that is rare among aesthetic forms. Indeed, the means by which particular styles take hold of their audiences can be related to the social contexts within which these styles flourished. At one extreme, one might point to the relative lack of musical continuity in opera seria, catering as it did to a public whose boxes were the center of its social activities and that allowed itself to

be interrupted only for momentary thrills from the seemingly superhuman voice of some star castrato. At the other extreme one notes the seamless musical web of music drama, designed as it was for an audience sitting passively in darkness and submitting itself to the high emotions of the Wagnerian sublime.

Opera and Society | 309 The emotional hold of opera upon its spectators is also related to the fact that opera offers a communal experience to diverse persons who, even if they do not overtly communicate with one another, establish a bond within the opera house with others who they assume are experiencing similar reactions. This bond is not unlike those formed in other representational forms such as the spoken theatre, film, sports events, and rock concerts. What separates opera from spoken theatre and film is the intensity of opera, by means of which the audience often comes to feel it is participating in emotions and passions distinct from those it allows itself to engage with in its everyday world. The forms that this intensity takes, and the audience’s expectations

of the way it may react, of course change from period to period, from composer to composer. The intensity of a Handel aria, especially in the da capo section, differs from the sustained frenzy of, say, Il trovatore, which differs from the slow hypnotic spell exercised by Saint Francois d’Assise.

One might argue, to be sure, that certain films, for instance those that cultivate advanced modes of visual and audial simulation, have come to rival opera in intensity. And one can speak as well of the communal experience in sports events, in which intensity is achieved through the suspense about a game’s outcome and through the bonds created in the stadium by means of the enmity exercised toward the rival team.

But the rock concert may well provide the closest analogy to the communal experience of opera. In both of these the audience senses a strong separation between the world of daily routine and the largerthan-life beings who perform before them. Both invite the traditional discourse of the sublime when spectators seek to account for their experiences. And both manage to retain something of the communal experience even when their music is simulated by electronic means by the listener alone with a CD or DVD, for the presence of others somewhere sharing this experience (whether in a live performance or in solitary contemplation) remains at the edge of the listener’s awareness.

310 | Herbert Lindenberger

There is still another form of representation with which opera intersects, namely the religious service. Indeed, in the present day the boundaries between rite and operatic performance have become fluid. Verdi's Requiem is often dubbed “operatic” in character. Such comparatively chaste religious works as the Bach Passions, composed as they were for church performance, are now sometimes mounted

in the opera house. And Handel’s oratorios, though never part of a service as were the Bach Passions, are also entering the operatic repertory. Yet my concern here goes considerably beyond “crossovers” of this sort. In the course of the past century many spectators have come to treat the communal opera experience as something akin to a rite, sometimes as a supplement to, even as a substitute for, what the traditional religions have offered. One could view the Bayreuth experience, and above all the particular experience that Wagner intended his audience to undergo in Parsifal, as modeled after religious practice.

But the religious analogy is not limited to the earnest and often somber world of Wagnerian music drama. Most any good opera can serve the contemporary spectator as a mode of religious experience. The length of a performance is comparable to that of many religious services. Like a church, the opera house works to isolate those who attend from the everyday world they have temporarily left behind. And like a rite, opera employs both visual and audial resources to draw its spectators into the new world it has created. To return to an earlier example, Mozart’s Entfiihrung aus dem Serail, worldly though it may seem, is as likely as any opera to render this sort of experience. As it moves through its diverse and seemingly incompatible styles — the contemplative music of its two principals, the simple tunes of its servant characters, Osmin’s intrusive eruptions, the boisterous d-la-turque choral passages — the audience undergoes a cycle of shifting feelings and moods whose magnitude one could never predict from a reading of the libretto alone. When realized to its fullest in the opera house, Die Entfiihrung, like all the best operas, gives its specta-

tors cause to believe that something miraculous has happened in an otherwise secular world.

Opera and Society | 311 NOTES

1 Theodor Adorno, Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1958), vol. 1, Pp. 73-104.

2 Stephen Rumph, “Mozart's Archaic Endings: A Linguistic Critique,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 130/2 (2005), p. 195.

3 Edward J. Dent, Mozart’s Operas: A Critical Study (New York: McBride, Nast, 1913), p. 138. 4 Thomas Bauman, W. A. Mozart: ‘Die Entfiihrung aus dem Serail’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 89. 5 Ibid., pp. 18-19. 6 Matthew Head, Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart’s Turkish Music (London: Royal Musical Association, 2000), pp. 67-89.

7 Ibid., pp. 88-89. 8 Ibid., p. 56. 9 Nicholas Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue and Beauty in

Mozart’s Operas (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 104. 10 Bauman, W. A. Mozart, pp. 33-34. 11 Ibid., pp. 108-109. 12 Ibid., p. 117. 13 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996),

pp. I-140. 14 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p- 516.

15 Ibid., p. 327. 16 Ibid., p. 362. 17 Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 84-127. 18 Herbert Lindenberger, Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 265-282. 19 Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1988), p. 80. 20 Ibid., pp. 71-103.

12 | Symbolic domination and contestation in French music: Shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu Jane FE. Fulcher

Few today would dispute Michel Foucault’s intellectually seismic assertion that discourse defines or “authorizes” knowledge: it renders visible, it “produces” what we see. As he so incisively demonstrated, dis-

course not only furnishes those conceptual categories through which we conceive reality within a period, but shapes or articulates all our subsequent discoveries.’ An outstanding feature of the humanities and social sciences in the past several decades has been the entry of those new discourses developed originally by the French Left in the sixties.” Within the humanities, figures like Jacques Derrida have had an unquestionable impact, while in anthropology, sociology, and history the cynosures have been Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. Yet musicology has neglected Bourdieu — we have slighted his insights into power and its deployment of symbols in favor of the social, symbolic analyses of Adorno and Geertz. Among my aims, then, is to raise the question of why those symbolic exchanges that Bourdieu has made “visible,” stimulating insights in so many other fields, still have not done so in ours. For the issue of why we have skirted his political

and social grounding of symbols compels us to recognize premises that persist in our field and have buttressed the predominance of other paradigms. However, my focus shall be on how Bourdieu’s semiotic analysis of power relations reveals contestation within French music, and particularly opera, of the 1920s, which is obscured by the now prevalent models. Musicology has by no means ignored culture or its symbols, and indeed one paradigm of the social analysis of meaning in music is that of Clifford Geertz, who has been equally influential in historical studies. Significantly, however, in a seminal essay the French cultural historian

Roger Chartier attacked the uncritical application of the concepts of

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Geertzian symbolic anthropology to history.? His admonitions center on two points: first, the fact that the historian must rely not on empirical observation but on texts, and here in the literal as opposed to the broader metaphorical sense. We must then, he adjures, consider a source's “textuality,” as well as perceiving those larger patterns of meaning that are intertwined with the encompassing “social world of significance.”* For these meanings are necessarily manipulated and refracted in the rhetorical or aesthetic act of enunciation inherent in each mode, each “register” of cultural or artistic communication.’ Second, Chartier then asks, how stable are symbols, particularly in the context of advanced Western cultures — are they “shared like the air we breathe,” or are they rather mobile, polysemous, and equivocal? Is there a common symbolic universe of replicated meanings interacting

within a “web” in a developed modern culture, or are symbols more characteristically diverted, subverted, and contested?® Semantic invest-

ment in symbols is unquestionably central to all cultures, but in the modern world so too is subsequent “disinvestment” and multiple reinvestment of meaning.’ In sum, the assumption of a shared symbolic idiom effaces the different manners in which individuals and groups make use of these symbols within the larger field of social power and contestation. It is here, perhaps, that the most forceful vector of Bourdieu’s semiotic system or method emerges: his perception of how social power is insinuated in symbols and the symbolic responses this elicits. For Bourdieu, as for his former colleague at the Collége de France Michel Foucault, relations of power are thus immanent, or embodied, in all symbolic exchange.* Most pertinent to the case I shall examine is Bourdieu’s concept of “symbolic domination” — the attempt to constitute or reproduce social hierarchies through the definition of symbolic “legitimacy and thus “symbolic capital.” Bourdieu’s concomitant concept of “symbolic violence” refers to the invisibility of this imposition, which reproduces the existing social order, but without physical violence.’ It occurs not only within a colonial context, but in class relations, as well as in the relations between the sexes, as Bourdieu demonstrated so tellingly in La Domination masculine.*°

314 | Jane F, Fulcher It also occurs politically, for groups in power impose representations which provoke a wide range of responses across a broad spectrum from domination, or acquiescence, to contestation. Dissension erupts when there is inescapable misadaptation, or a disjunction between dominant

systems of classification and experience in the social world.” While, for the most part, our field is still locked in either a narrow and literal or a philosophical conception of the political, Bourdieu identifies it (as does Foucault) in systems of representation and in challenges to them. For Bourdieu, then, our perception of the symbols that “authority” has inculcated for political ends — in many possible styles — is a prerequisite for interpreting culture and deciphering politics. Culture is thus not extraneous to politics, nor devoid of authentic political content, but is rather a fundamental symbolic expression or articulation of “the political.” In a country like France, where the state has traditionally made a substantial political investment in culture, we must unlock the “language” of symbolic domination and the idioms through which social actors respond. From this dialogic perspective, styles or symbols we have previously considered apolitical must necessarily be reconsidered, and the structure of symbolic opposition revealed.”

Nowhere, perhaps, is this more true than in the case of French music, and especially French opera in the twenties, which Bourdieu has provoked me to re-examine in light of his theories of symbolic violence

and contestation. For, as I shall argue, the pervasive neoclassicism, which we have largely construed as a monolithic, shared meaning, was not only politically insinuated but, given the experience of war, contested and re-invested. Modernist neoclassicism, which Adorno equates with Stravinsky and dismisses as “infantile,” “affirmative,” and

“devoid of content,” from Bourdieu’s perspective becomes a critical response to official symbolic domination.’ But to perceive this we must first observe the subtle ways in which the state “oriented” French taste, and to do so there is no better means than a Geertzian “thick description,” however inflected “a la Bourdieu.” As a socially emblematic event in an advanced Western culture we might choose a state ceremony, and in this case a funeral, which carried multiple levels of resonance after World War I. That of Gabriel Fauré

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is here particularly apt, for he died at a delicate moment politically — in 1924, several months after the victory of the Left, following a centerRight coalition. Not having had time to define its policies on all cultural issues, the new government ceded to the pressures of the experienced, conservative functionary ofthe arts, Paul Léon.” Having known the composer for years, and being a great advocate of Fauré’s music, Léon insisted that he receive the full panoply of a grandiose obséques nationales. This, after all, had been the case with Fauré’s former teacher and mentor, Camille Saint-Saéns, for whom Léon had arranged a similar ceremony only three years before." But now it was a difficult, transitional, moment to decide what to consecrate nationally, and concomitantly to define what or who should become a national symbol, ora “lieu de mémoire.””” The political conjuncture was especially unfortunate since the nature of the ceremony

being planned would enunciate the message about music and “the national” that was sedulously ensconced by the preceding regime. Through it, however, we may glean much about those meanings, symbols, and “dominant” attitudes toward music that would characterize French musical institutions, including the Opéra, during most of the twenties. For not only had such attitudes dictated official policies in music up to this point, with the defeat of the Left two years later they would resurge and again dominate the decade."® Fauré’s funeral, then, can lead us into the musical values of the hegemonic culture and its sophisticated manipulations, to which the avant garde, particularly in opera, responded with equal artifice. Traditionally, Republican funerals in France were freighted with ideological significance: carefully “orchestrated,” they provided the regime with an occasion both to celebrate and to propagate its values.” As part of the culte des grands morts, the lives being consecrated were to become illustrations of Republican virtues, their meaning “fixed,” to provide an image for all future generations. Such funerals, however, not only contained communicative and cognitive elements, but carried a socially unifying and affective dimension that was particularly crucial now.*® Five years after the Versailles Treaty, the atmosphere of mourning and commemoration persisted, especially among the older

316 | Jane EF. Fulcher generation, which had witnessed the slaughter of its most able-bodied youth. And so, in Fauré’s case, those religious elements that were generally avoided in traditional Republican funerals could be incorporated as part of the mourning that hovered after the war.** Fauré’s funeral, then, was botha religious and an artistic “national ceremony,” intended to thwart further symbolic collapse and to shore up existing symbols.**

His funeral, like that of Saint-Saéns before, took place at the Madeleine, the prestigious church in central Paris, where both had long served as its principal organist. But Fauré’s ceremony included a performance ofhis own great Requiem Mass, which could still be interpreted as, or conflated with, a requiem for the dead of the war. The new government was thus present in force, represented by an impressively large official contingent that included the presidents of the Republic,

the Senate, and the Chamber of Deputies, in addition to the Archbishop of Paris.’ The presence of the latter, unusual in a Republican ceremony, was undoubtedly related both to Fauré’s position at the Madeleine and to the greater Republican tolerance of religion after the war. However, as Fauré’s editor, Jacques Durand, who attended the ceremony, observed, none of the new officials present appeared to be fully aware of Fauré’s artistic importance.*4 But Léon had been free

to arrange the kind of ritual that would enunciate the way in which he and others of centrist or conservative leanings construed Fauré’s music and its cultural significance. Although Fauré, if always evolving, was no longer considered artistically “progressive” by the postwar period, he had continued to promote the nascent avant garde and remained a member (even serving as President) of both the conservative Société Nationale de Musique

and the more innovative Société Musicale Indépendante. However, the work performed, on the basis of its aptness, did not represent Fauré’s more recent style: begun in 1877, it had been revised in the late 1880s, and then orchestrated at the turn of the century. Yet such a work, characteristic of the composer’s later nineteenth-century style, was reassuring in 1924, spanning as it did late Romantic and early twentieth-century innovations.”? Fauré was by no means mired in the past, and yet through this ceremony conservative factions began to

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“construct” him in their image of a classical and traditionalist French composer. Indeed, the funeral was eloquent for nationalists, still prominent even after their recent defeat, for the pacific composer’s body (as a ~ member of the Académie) was carried past rows of bayonets, sabers, and cannons. Durand, himself conservative, could not help but remark on the chauvinistic overtones of such “militarism,” observing that for many the prestige of Fauré’s music and the victory over the Germans appeared to be linked.”® For even after the war, the ideal of national “defense” through culture, and of the continuing threat of Germany, particularly in music, remained virulent in France. The idea of “defending” French culture had been stressed by the preceding Bloc National, the conservative coalition of the center and Right that had responded to postwar trauma and fears. These included the fears of “invasion” and plots to undermine France politically and culturally, giving rise to the theme of “protecting” French culture through the continuing exclusion of anything “un-French.” For many, still ardently xenophobic, it continued to be a vitriolic “war of cultures,” and, with the exception of those on the Left, art and patrie remained irrefragably bound. The symbols mobilized in Fauré’s funeral were intended to reinforce the ideal of French nationalism, as well as the orthodoxy that talent, like true “intelligence,” was national, as opposed to universal.” “L’ Esprit national,” for the Right-wing Action Francaise, had subsumed

both artistic and intellectual endeavor, which remained, for conservatives, expressions of the French community and its endemic traditions. Fauré’s funeral was therefore intended not to be socially “liminal,” or ritually transformative, but rather, as in ceremony and celebration, to restrict and codify current meanings.”* Specifically, the sense of Fauré’s music was to be established as inherently “national” and classical, classicism having been reasserted as the quintessential French style through

propaganda in wartime. Even Fauré’s Requiem, carefully framed by the performative context, with all its symbolic supports, assumed a distinctive aura of national spirituality.*? The meaning of Fauré’s life and music, as symbolically defined in the ceremony, was soon thereafter cast into terms of discourse by his

318 | Jane F. Fulcher successor at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In this prestigious site of cul-

tural conservativism the composer Alfred Bruneau, elected to Fauré’s chair, paid the traditional tribute to his predecessor in his inaugural speech.2° Bruneau here characterized Fauré’s music as “simple, solid, severe, and strong,” thus construing it as reflecting “true” French classicism, as understood since the time of the war. Such classicism remained synonymous with “the French,” although now, as we shall see, in the context of the postwar polarization, the Left perceived the dominant definition of the classic as symbolic violence. It accordingly developed its own conception of the French and the classic, thus inflecting or contesting this symbol of true national culture, as did the liberal Right, through spokesmen like Cocteau. Within this contestatory context, Bruneau (a former Dreyfusard but now a centrist) proceeds, after lauding the “true” classicism of Fauré, to attack the “pseudo destructors” of this great edifice. Misrepresenting both Fauré’s cosmopolitan style and his openness to the innovations of youth, Bruneau argues, after quoting the composer out of context, that he had consistently pleaded “the cause of classicism.”>*

All of Bruneau’s themes were already ensconced in the dominant musical and operatic discourse, which was marked by an obsessive fear

of “anarchy” or disorder, as well as of eclecticism or pollution from “outside.” This was closely related to the sense of France’s enfeeblement after the war, and particularly its devastating problems in the realms of both manpower and public finance. And in dissonant counterpoint with the projected myth of continuing French leadership in Europe was the harsh reality of France’s unquestionably weakened

postwar position. :

Moreover, this was also the moment of internal political and social problems, particularly the questioning and discontent on the part of French workers and youth. The conventional classic discourse, then, was one aspect of the resultant defensive trend in French culture, to which Maurice Agulhon has referred as “le systéme politique et mentale d’aprés-guerre.”?* Within this mentality, dangerous currents, both externally and internally, were to be combated through an inculcation of conservative, exclusionary, classic values, considered essential

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to the spiritual unity of the nation. Such classical “particularism” (as opposed to the universal) found expression in other French cultural fields, as during the war, and continued to dominate the French university system.*?

This was the very situation that Julien Benda decried in La Trahison des clercs (of 1927) — the invasion of the intellectual realm by the political, and especially by nationalist values. In music his indictment was particularly apt, as we may see when closely examining the musical and operatic world in France, or that central sector ofit that was dominated by official institutions. Concern with “the national” informed not only its “reclassification” of French composers, but equally their canonization, as we may witness in the case of Fauré. Attacks on “radical” young composers were frequent, as was condemnation of German influence

and “the modern,” which included not only foreign music, but also its dangerous artistic impact in France. The popular, the foreign, and the modern were all therefore relegated to alterity in this discourse, or defined against the national and thus emphatically excluded as the menacing “other.” This we may observe in the so-called “opera ofideas” and in the com-

mentary concerning these ideologically and stylistically conservative, didactic works that I explore in my other contribution to this volume. The themes of protection against foreign influence, against “anarchy” or internal dissension, and the promotion of tradition, spirituality, and an exclusionary classicism appear in and around all of these operas. As I point out in my chapter concerning this genre, perhaps the most prominent examples include d’Indy’s La Légende de Saint Christophe, Barrés and Bachelet’s Un Jardin sur ’'Oronte, Hue’s Dans l’ombre de la cathédrale, and Canteloube’s Le Mas.

However, as I also noted in the case of Marcel Delannoy’s Le Poirier

de misere, the Left did respond, and within the same genre, but confrontationally in terms of style. For the Left, far from accepting such symbolic violence, confronted it aggressively, taking up the volatile stylistic symbol of classicism and redefining it in accordance with its inclusive, universalist, creed. Theirs was a classicism founded upon the “critical spirit,” as differentiated from nationalist classicism, based

320 | Jane F. Fulcher upon models which in music, ironically, derived from the Viennese classics. The so-called “revolutionary classicism” of the Left was one of renewal, and not of “order,” and one of “revolt,” progress, and the universal: as they put it, “le vrai classicisme.”*4 Space here does not allow an extensive consideration of how those composers of the now mature generation with ideological orientations to the Left creatively interpreted these classic values. But it is impor-

tant to be aware that these older figures, who had experienced the projects born of wartime propaganda, knew the sophisticated manner in which music could be “mediated” to further nationalist symbolic domination. For some, the experience of politics through culture was “the” politicizing experience itself, compelling them to join parties, make symbolic public gestures, and even to modify their styles.

The latter they were to do cleverly, through meaningful inflections within the dominant neoclassicism, employing those elements, and rejecting or mocking those values and styles inscribed with ideological significance.” Among those of the older generation who contested the “exclusive” dominant conception of the classic and the political connotations it carried were Ravel, Satie, Roussel, and Koechlin. Ravel, as I argued in my previous chapter, intrepidly confronted the dominant or conventional models, which were devoid of irony and of borrowing from “lower” cultural levels or “dangerous” foreign cultures. The latter included not

only the Germanic (of recent date), but those styles associated with races or nationalities from which France was to be “protected” culturally, such as African-American jazz. As I demonstrated, Ravel not only ignored these proscriptions, as well as current models (in particular, the conservative, didactic “opera of ideas”), he mocked them, and nowhere more incisively than in L’Enfant et les sortiléges. While the younger generation of “Les Six” (Milhaud, Auric, Honegger, Poulenc, Durey, and Tailleferre), viewed apart from this context, are often dismissed as frivolous pranksters, when placed within it, we may see that they too confronted symbolic domination. For they experienced an even sharper disjunction between the French classic identity that was being imposed by the hegemonic culture and their own

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experience in the new postwar world. Responding to the exclusions in the dominant culture, like Ravel, they integrated precisely these elements and demystified predominant stylistic models, but through their own unique means, making their classicism “critical” within the context. Their frequently “Dadaist” use of past styles, following the example of one of their idols, Satie, was indeed a gesture not only of rejection and satire, but more significantly of “revolt.” As Inez Hedges has convincingly argued, one of the goals of Dada was to break conceptual frames, or schemata of interpretation — to create conventional expectations and then to thwart them. In its attempt to transform all dominant techniques of producing meaning, to question the content of that which can be expressed in established styles or genres, it becomes a language of revolt. True renovation, for its practitioners, could occur only after older languages were destroyed, together with those cultural institutions that sustained them, and the false rationality upon which they were based.?°

There is perhaps no better example of “frame breaking” intended to demonstrate the absurdity of both conventions and genres than Milhaud’s nine-minute opera of 1927, his L’Enlevement d’Europe. Written

for performance at the Deutsche Kammermusik Festival in BadenBaden, during the period when such exchanges with Germany were discouraged, Milhaud was happy to comply with Paul Hindemith’s request. In the mocking, anti-Wagnerian spirit of Weimar, Hindemith wanted a series of short operas for the festival, writing his own Hin und Zuriick, and staging Brecht and Weill’s Mahagonny Songspiel. Milhaud,

a lover of ancient Greek culture, and capable of treating it seriously, as in his highly innovative setting of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, here uses it to mock current operatic convention. Just as in traditional French opera, the work both begins and ends with a chorus; however, here it makes humorous and mocking comments, in addition to narrating the action and participating in it. The opera, which employs Stravinsky-like rhythms as well as Milhaud’s beloved polytonality, so impressed the director of Universal Editions in Vienna that he requested two more, to make a facetious “trilogy.”?”

322 | Jane F. Fulcher Employing both satire and innovative techniques, Milhaud ridicules

the dominant classicism and conventions in a spirit that cuts far deeper than simple parody, as we may perceive within the context. To focus, then, as we have, on the playful eclecticism of this avant garde in isolation is to miss its inherently contestatory elements, its methods of confronting symbolic domination. For in a period when ideological meaning was invested in style, such a response to then-dominant models, as Bourdieu makes us aware, carried political implications—implicit criticism if not clear alignment.?* “Les Six” were indeed repulsed by attempts to control the production of meaning in music, as in Fauré’s funeral, or the conservative “opera of ideas,” as well as by the exclusive official conception of the classic. The conventions they inverted or ren-

dered absurd were those associated with the aesthetic strictures and models established since the war, and the narrow sense of symbolic legitimacy that they embodied. They rather sought a semiotic structure that was “open” and multivalent, as opposed to finite, ora Derridian “destabilization” of meaning through incongruities and eclectic juxtaposition of styles. Here they were palpably influenced by Satie’s strategic “play” with established stylistic meanings in Parade, or his facetious brand of classicism that so artfully evaded authority. Their classicism embraced reality, innovation, and inclusion, as well as simplicity, as opposed to the idealistic, archaic, socially instrumental classicism of official France.*? Although

they admired Stravinsky, their aim was not objectivity like his, but rather to engage in a contestatory dialogue with the static, anachronistic French culture around them. This tendency, of course, was not exclusive to France — other coun-

tries simultaneously experienced both a resurgence of conservative models as well as different modernist interpretations of classic values. But neoclassicism was a highly ramified tendency, assuming divergent social meanings and stylistic traits not only in the various European countries but, again, within a nation itself. In Germany, a soci-

ety with no choice but to project a new future, despite conservative currents, one model stressed a sober, constructive “New Objectivity”

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and another the realistic and eclectic.*° In France (apart from Stravin-

sky) there was no such dichotomy within the modern, for all these traits were defined against the nostalgic and retrogressive neoclassicism imposed by a victorious but now weakened state. Given these insights, let us return to paradigms: from Adorno’s perspective, neoclassicism is monolithic, a crystallized social formation, and like all tradition inimical to the critical spirit. Within this essen-

tialist manner of associating ideological orientations with aesthetic values and styles, contestation within neoclassicism is “invisible” — a theoretical impossibility. His framework for the perception of contestation in music, or resistance to domination, as he construes it, is not empirical, relational, or contextual, as it is in Bourdieu.“ For Adorno, unlike Bourdieu, is not refuting structuralism or Sartrean existentialism, but rather Hegel and the tradition of glorifying the “sublation of the individual . . . in the comprehensive other.”4* And so although, like Bourdieu, he associates domination with a closed, repressive, social structure, and as perpetuated by a reified tradition, his answer is cast philosophically, or metaphysically.*

Adorno’s discourse, then, does not recognize semiotic strategies within a social field of power, but focuses on the way in which the individual seeks “freedom,” is able to preserve an unfixed identity.*4 Within this “negative dialectic,” repressive classic forms and the rational reconciliation that they embody must be dissolved through innovation in processes, which oppose authority, totality, or “structure.” His paradigm, then, is the artist’s new organization and working through of the material itself: this, as in Schoenberg, is what he identifies with

the advanced, autonomous art work.” Given Adorno’s focus on the dialectic of technique and material, the destruction of “fixed meaning,” or emancipation from false resolution,

cannot occur within a formal tradition.*° And yet we have identified a quest for freedom, for contestation of domination and repression, within postwar neoclassicism from the perspective of Bourdieu’s theoretical insights. They allow us to perceive that, historically, contestation

can occur through traditional genres, forms, and styles, the logic of

324 | Jane F, Fulcher which can be challenged by strategies that “open” or disrupt the language. Without doubt, there is great value in both of these theorists who have sought to critique conventional Marxism, along with other traditions, and who have attempted to bring sociology and philosophy together.*” However, we have seemed to “fix” on Adorno and his template, which may, in part, be explained through Bourdieu’s conception : of “distinction” — the use of transcendental symbols to claim legitimacy. Adorno’s enshrinement of autonomous aesthetic values, for Bourdieu, is a mystification, arising from material security and a belief in intellectual superiority.**

This is not to disqualify Adorno, or to claim the priority of Bourdieu’s approach, but to urge reflection about the paradigms we choose, the agendas they embody, what they reveal and obscure. The ideal is perhaps flexibility in selecting our paradigms, based upon the particular case at hand, and to critique our choice by examining the reading that emerges from a paradigm shift. It is not, then, a question of who “miscasts” the relation between music and ideology or social meaning, but of our awareness of the different perspectives from which to view their enticing imbrication. NOTES

1 Foucault has developed this idea in several works, but perhaps most fully in his L’Ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) and in Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). In the

latter source, see especially pp. 170-176. 2 Derrida, Foucault, and Bourdieu are grouped together under this rubric in Niilo Kauppi, The Politics of Embodiment: Habits, Power, and Pierre Bourdieu’s

Theory (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), p. 115. 3 Roger Chartier, “Texts, Symbols, and Frenchness,” The Journal of Modern History 57/4 (December 1985), 682-695. 4 Ibid., pp. 683-684. 5 Chartier develops the idea of different “registers” of communication, and particularly the difference between those of the verbal and the visual, in his essay on the work of Louis Marin, in Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the

Shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu | 325 Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore:

The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 6 The application of Geertz’s concept of a “web of culture” to musicology has been discussed at length by Gary Tomlinson in “The Web of Culture: A Context for Musicology,” Nineteenth-Century Music 7/3 (1984), 350-362. 7 Chartier, “Texts, Symbols, and Frenchness,” p. 691. 8 This theme emerges in all Bourdieu’s work, but it is developed most incisively, perhaps, in his theory of linguistic exchanges, which focuses on interactive and mobile elements, as opposed to a stable “structure.” See his Ce que parler veut dire: L’Economie des échanges linguistiques (Paris:

Fayard, 1982). On Foucault’s conception of power as multiple, mobile, and inherent in culture, including knowledge, see Daniel J. Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 6. 9 Certainly, other aspects of Bourdieu’s sociology are relevant to musicology, including his concepts of “the field” of cultural reproduction, and the role of the intellectual in the production of culture, but I shall here concentrate on his semiotic theories. For a detailed discussion of symbolic violence, see Kauppi, The Politics of Embodiment, pp. 6 ff., and Jeremy F. Lane, Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 126n. 10 La Domination masculine is an extension of Bourdieu’s earlier work on

Algeria, which introduced the conception of how domination is “interiorized.” 11 Here Bourdieu is indebted to Durkheim and his theories of social strife as essentially struggles over systems of classification. See Kauppi, The Politics of Embodiment, p. 66.

12 See Pierre Bourdieu, “Penser la politique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (March 1988), 2~3. Also see David Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 7.

13. Theodor Adorno, The Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Bloomster (London: Sheed and Ward, 1973), pp. 204, 206, 212, and 215.

14 Bourdieu discusses how the state subtly “orients” taste by such means as honorific awards, prizes, etc., in “The Market of Symbolic Goods,” Poetics 14 (1985), 13-44. Geertz develops the concept of “thick

326 | Jane F. Fulcher description” at length in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

15 Fauré died on November 4, 1924. The preceding conservative Bloc National had been voted into power in 1919, bringing the Radicals and the Right together to create a new centrist majority. On the Bloc National and the Cartel des Gauches see Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times (New York: Rand McNally, 1974), pp. 335-337. Paul Léon, a specialist in historical monuments, had been a Dreyfusard, although he was no longer politically to the Left. He would finally lose his position under the next coalition of the Left, in 1932. 16 On Saint-Saéns’s funeral, and how Léon managed to arrange it while the Chamber and Finance Commission were on vacation, see Paul Léon, Du Palais-Royal au Palais-Bourbon (Paris: Albin-Michel, 1947), pp. 22-24.

17 The term “lieu de mémoire” was made famous and current by Pierre Nora in the collection that he edited for Gallimard, beginning in 1986, Les Lieux de mémoire, 3 vols.

18 On the reactionary cultural politics of the “retour a l’ordre” under Poincaré, following the Cartel des Gauches, see Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. viiiff. 19 Avner Ben-Amos, “Les funérailles de gauche sous la IIe République: deuil et contestation,” in Alain Corbin, Noélle Géréme, and Danielle Tartakowsky, eds., Les Usages politiques des fetes aux XIX—XXe siécles (Paris:

Publications de la Sorbonne, 1994), p. 200. 20 Ibid., p. 199. 21 The Versailles Treaty was signed on June 28, 1919. On the continuing emotional responses to the war, see Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dinnys, 1989), pp. 261-265. 22 Ben-Amos, “Les funérailles de gauche,” p. 202. 23 Jacques Durand, Quelques souvenirs d’un éditeur de musique, 2@me série (1910-1924) (Paris: A. Durand et Fils, 1925), p. 156. 24 Ibid. 25 On the evolution of Fauré’s style, see Jean-Michel Nectoux, Gabriel Faure: Le voix du clair-obscur (Paris: Flammarion, 1992). On his role as mediator between the two hostile musical societies while Director of the Conservatoire, see Jane F. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music from

Shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu | 327 the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 143-147. 26 Durand, Quelques souvenirs, p. 156.

27 On the continuing primacy of “patrie,” see Maurice Agulhon, La République: 1880 a nos jours (Paris: Hachette, 1990), vol. 1, p. 350.

28 On Victor Turner’s concept of ritual and social liminality, see Bobby C. Alexander, Victor Turner Revisited: Ritual as Social Change (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991) and Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986).

29 On the establishment of neoclassicism as the national style in wartime, see Jane F. Fulcher, “The Composer as Intellectual: Ideological Inscriptions in French Interwar Neoclassicism,” The Journal of Musicology 17/2 (Spring 1999), 197-230. 30 Alfred Bruneau, La Vie et les oeuvres de Gabriel Fauré. Notice lue par l’auteur a Académie des Beaux-Arts (Paris: Charpentier, 1925), p. 30. 31 Ibid., p. 31. 32 Agulhon, La Réepublique,vol. I, pp. 350. 33 See Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la Patrie: Les intellectuels et la premiere guerre mondiale (1910-1919) (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 1996), pp. 212. Also see Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers during the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 16-18. 34 Prochasson and Rasmussen, Au nom de la Patrie, p. 270. 35 On the larger context for the political-intellectual trends of the period and their impact on French cultural life, see Agulhon, La République, vol. 1, p. 270. And see Fulcher, “The Composer as Intellectual,” Pp. 197-200. 36 See Inez Hedges, Languages of Revolt: Dada and Surrealist Literature and Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983), pp. xi-xviii, 34-36, and AI.

37 The other two operas were L’Abandon d’Ariane and La Délivrance de Thésée. See Jeremy Drake, The Operas of Darius Milhaud (New York: Garland, 1989) on both these works and on Milhaud’s dramatic oeuvre as a whole.

38 For typical dismissals of Milhaud and “Les Six” as “bourgeois” composers, interested only in pleasure and thus “lightweight” aesthetically, see Michel Fauré, Du néoclassicisme dans la France du premier

328 | Jane FE. Fulcher XXe siecle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1997), pp. 160-162, 240, 252, 259, 265, and

337. Also see Marie-Claire Mussat, “La Réception de Schoenberg en France avant la Second Guerre Mondiale,” Revue de musicologie 87/1 (2001), p. 180. 39 On Satie’s strategic “play” with meanings before the war (which continued in Parade) see Fulcher, French Cultural Politics, pp. 144-204. On Parade see Fulcher, “The Composer as Intellectual,” pp. 20-28. 40 On the different neoclassicisms and the responses of German and French youth to the postwar situation through them, see Jane F. Fulcher, “Trajectoires opposées: La culture musicale a Berlin et 4 Paris dans l’entre-deux-guerres,” in Christophe Charle and Daniel Roche, eds., Capitales culturelles, capitales symboliques (XVIII-XXe siécles): Paris et les experiences européennes (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2002), PP. 421-434. 41 On Bourdieu’s criticism of the Frankfurt School for having no relation to the empirical, see Kauppi, The Politics of Embodiment, p. 117. On his theories of symbolic or cultural dominance and contestation see Swartz, Culture and Power, pp. 1-13. Also see the special issue of Sciences humaines dedicated to “L’Oeuvre de Pierre Bourdieu,” which appeared shortly after his death in January 2002. 42 On Adorno’s self-definition against Hegel and the tradition that he established, see Hauke Brunkhorst, “Irreconcilable Modernity: Adorno’s Aesthetic Experimentalism and the Transgression Theorem,” in Max Pensky, ed., The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the

Postmodern (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 47-48. And see Eric L. Krakauer, The Disposition of the Subiect: Reading Adorno’s Dialectic of Technology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp. 139 and 143. On Bourdieu’s criticism of structuralism and existentialism, see Lane, Pierre Bourdieu, p. 48. 43 Brunkhorst, “Irreconcilable Modernity,” p. 97. 44 Ibid., p. 49. 45 Ibid., pp. 43, 45, and 47. And see Rose Rosengard Subotnik, “The Historical Structure: Adorno’s ‘French’ Model for the Criticism of Nineteenth-Century Music,” Journal of the American Musicological Society (1978), 39-40.

46 See Peter U. Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 200. Also see Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, pp. 165-167.

Shifting the paradigm from Adorno to Bourdieu | 329 47 On Bourdieu’s own view of his work as a sociological critique of philosophy and a philosophical critique of sociology, see Kauppi, The Politics of Embodiment, p. 116 and Pierre Bourdieu, Meditations pascaliennes

(Paris: Seuil, 1997), especially pp. 10-12. 48 See Kauppi, The Politics of Embodiment, p. 66 and Lane, Pierre Bourdieu, p. 50, as well as Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement

(Paris: Minuit, 1979), pp. 362-364. :

13. | Rewriting history from the losers’ point of view: French Grand Opera and modernity Antoine Hennion Translated by Sarah Boittin

Theoretical and methodological issues are questions whose least clear feature is sometimes the outcome that is to issue from them. Nonetheless I would like to tackle one of these issues and use the emblematic

case of nineteenth-century French opera as a starting point for considering some of the problems raised by the divide between music and society. The very title of the present book applies this divide to the domain of opera: Opera and Society — is there any other way to approach the subject? Yet any study of this topic inevitably raises a more or less explicit and assumed challenge to such a distinct division between two realities which should be considered as a relationship — as if they were not mutually dependent as a result of their very makeup.

MUSIC DOES NOT EXIST... So how can we approach the relation between opera and society?* Or how can we consider opera in social terms, and our collective bodies in lyric terms, to adopt Blacking’s way of putting it? One option would be to focus on the complexity and variety of situations in order to nuance our analyses and modulate the way they are expressed. This is not the option I shall adopt. Rather, I support a simple and radical hypothesis: music does not exist. It seems to me that in the current state of music

studies, expressing things in these exaggerated terms will clarify the debate. Far from losing anything along the way, everyone will gain, if we start by making three comments. First, this does not mean that music does not “matter”; the idea is that, on the contrary, we will have a much better understanding of what it can do and cause to be done, what it transmits, why it is or is not

important for the public or for specialists, if we do not start from the

330 |

French Grand Opera and modernity | 331 hypothesis that music has a power of its own, that it is “already there.” In other words, the point is not to reduce musical reality to its social determinants (or, inversely, in opposition to sociological reductionism, to argue in favor of the existence of musical autonomy per se), but to show how unprecedented pleasure, the love of music, and the object of this love gradually shaped one another. If music is music, it only remains to endow it with autonomous capabilities (internal analyses) or to relate its use and its effects to social, cultural, or psychological determinations (external analyses). But if, on the contrary, we advance the hypothesis that we do not know what music is, and if we adopt as objects of study the variable mechanisms through which it appears at different times, giving rise both to the increasingly emphatic reality of an autonomous domain and to an increasingly self-confident individual and collective competence on the part of the music-loving public, it

becomes clear that the previous position is an anachronism, for it evaluates musical reality retrospectively using the very criteria that music history has created. In Garfinkel’s words, music and taste should not be the resources of our analysis, but its topics.* They have written the history which is our source for claiming to write theirs.’ Next, saying that music does not exist is of interest only if, symmetrically, we also assert that society does not exist. It too is not “already

there” as a reservoir of factors and determinisms waiting to explain musical reality in sociological terms. Society is not a setting in which music takes its place; it is, instead, music that contributes the materiality of its sounds to support social representation and to form the sensitivities we share. Blacking’s formulas have the merit of emphasizing this reciprocal characteristic: that music makes its society is as true

as the reverse. There is an African-drumming society, a harpsichord society, a disc society, an MP3 society, just as there is a concert society, an opera society,’ and today a free party and techno society.

The central theme that scholarly music has become autonomous (listening to music as music is in no way self-evident) can then be considered as fundamental, instead of using this idea in its own attack or defense. The autonomy of music should not be accepted (by the partisans of art for art’s sake) or rejected (by the advocates of social

332 | Antoine Hennion determination) but should instead be analyzed. This is not an ideological theme, but the result of history, and it has important effects. Autonomous music can exist only in a society that has built itself on the “autonomization” of distinct orders of reality. The slow emergence of music as an increasingly autonomous reality plays a role in the continuous redistribution of our subjectivities, our identities, our institutions, and our bodies. In other words, music is social by means of its autonomy,

not in opposition to it. And for this reason we can transform it into a sociologically interesting subject, which in addition informs us about social issues, and not settle for reducing music to a given social realm. Not postulating a priori that music exists means above all apprehending it as an event, an uncertain eruption, a production dependent on time and circumstances, a collective effort and desire, and not a stationary object. It becomes a performance, a happening, not to be confused with scores, or (today) recordings, which solidify it into a material object like a statue. What genre can rival opera in claiming to enlighten us, to develop this self-definition of music as a collective event which must be “co-constructed” by its various participants? After returning to the division between music and society, and following a brief detour into the world of art historians to take advantage of the solutions they have found concerning paintings and statues, I shall use the emblematic case of nineteenth-century French opera to develop in greater detail the questions and methodological points thus raised: the fact that this genre is looked down upon today, after having been adulated throughout Europe for a century, is an interesting development in the history of musical taste, especially as it raises the question of modernism in music.

THE GREAT DIVIDE? How can one move beyond the two-part construction that results in the separation of the musical and social aspects of music into two increasingly autonomous objects of analysis? Chanting the mantra of pluridisciplinism tends to beg the question rather than answer it: the juxtaposition of various kinds of analytical elements (aesthetics,

French Grand Opera and modernity | 333 musical analysis, musical environment, social context) encourages the artificial preservation of the categories in question (on the one hand music, on the other, society) rather than demonstrating their progressive separation and emphasizing the extent to which the meaning of

music itself has changed over the course of its slow emergence as a more and more autonomous reality.° The point is not to graft a social appendage onto opera, for example, by discoursing about its political meaning and statutory function, but to understand how it has been transformed in history, evolving from the status of a manifestation with intertwined ritual, theatrical, worldly, political, and musical elements

to a lyrical repertory of musical works catalogued, appreciated, and consumed in the weighty modern system of lyrical institutions and a worldwide market of recordings and musical tastes. For the invitation, widely shared today, to study music within society rather than outside its borders is often taken for something it should not be: a call to oppose this divide between music and society, as if it

were a false ideology. That is not my position. Rather, my goal is to reflect on this divide and its role in our modern definition of music — a

definition which as a result is not only modern, but also “modernist.” The argument is precisely to suggest that the separation between music and society is at the heart of the ever-greater “musicalization” affecting our musical universe.’ With this collective process, whose earliest signs date back many centuries but which became especially intense in the nineteenth century, things become increasingly clear: on the one hand, we have music, with forms, instruments, techniques, a language, professionals, institutions, a repertory, schools;* on the other hand, we have music-lovers, provided with clearly defined means of listening and appreciating what music is (and what good music is) — and, even before this, “listeners” aware that they are listening to music? and not simply participating in some sort of ritual, religious, political, or social event;

finally, between the two, a designated organization and “dedicated” technical means adapted to the new function of diffusing to a targeted public music conceived as music-for-a-public: inexpensive scores, well thought-out programs and appropriate concert halls, industrial pianos and standard pitch, standardized quality criteria, clearer distribution of

334 | Antoine Hennion genres and aesthetic values, establishment of a “canon,” rationalized musical instruction, and lastly, for a century now, recordings that are more and more “hi fidelity” — but “faithful” to what?

This progressive musicalization forces us to write music history backwards, on pain of continually projecting onto the past a modern conception of what “music itself” is. One of the many paradoxes it has led to — as Victoria Johnson points out in her introduction to this volume — is that disciplines tend to submit to this “purification” rather than integrating it into their own analyses: depending on who studies it, music is either musical or social. Music theory and musicology owe it to themselves to regard as a given the very existence of music and to study it musically; they are disciplines of the object

but do not possess any tools to study the production of music as music."° Thus they underestimate their own influence, for they are participants in a decisive way in this musicalization — that is, in the transformation of music into a collective, recognized, and stabilized object. Scores are the object, in more than one sense, of music scholars: scholars work on scores, but they also make them, for, in a circular process, scholars assist informed listeners and critics to mistake scores for music.

On the other side of the Great Divide, the social history of music, the sociology of culture, and the new critic-inspired music studies are no less flawed from the point of view that concerns us. Relying on excluded or dominated musical genres (rock, popular music, ethnic music, female artists) which they rightly defend from discrediting by classical musicology,” they conceive of their work as an unveiling, aimed at revealing the true nature of music, which they claim is not musical but social (and sexual):’* removed from music, the power

of music is immediately returned to the social domain. Instead of demonstrating the performing effectiveness of the social production of an autonomous reality such as music, they denounce the deceptive character of this autonomy, reducing music to the status of a simple fetish whose reality derives, like that of Durkheim’s “cultural objects,” from the collective which projects its shared faith and its relations of force on the totems representing it.’ According to this hypothesis,

French Grand Opera and modernity | 335 which has become the common postulate of sociological analysis, any social object is a result of belief.

Although this conception has enabled art history to emerge from the smug contemplation of masterpieces, paradoxically it makes it impossible to regard music in social terms: either “music itself” is only music, or it is only social. The problematic of belief leaves us with one alternative, modeled on the old opposition between internal and external analyses of art: implementing various sorts of musicologies, if we “believe” in music; or demonstrating on the contrary that music is belief, and conducting our analyses of musical reality based on other realities supposedly underlying it: rites, powers, institutions, interaction of social identity and difference. Under these conditions, the simple fact of taking into consideration musical realities, the beauty and grandeur of the works, the affects and effects of performance, the

emotions and abilities of the listener — in other words, the very real results of a totally social production, the “autonomization” of music — is perceived as regression, a way of being “taken in” by the beliefs of the actors or of becoming accomplices to their domination.“ Is there a place for a sociology which would not need to be in this way actively indifferent to the musical nature of music??? Which, in contrast, could demonstrate how music becomes in fact musical — unequally, and with different meanings? Such a perspective in no way implies a return to the positivist acknowledgment of an essential reality, but it does ask us to take seriously this strange historical production of our societies: a collective and specific ability to produce and appreciate music in itself.

Nor is it opposed to political and social analysis of music — from its production to its effects, from its forms and sounds to its bodies and the subjectivities that adopt all these factors. But these analyses must transit through music rather than trying to bypass it.

A CHOICE ALLY: THE HISTORY OF ART To this end, we can draw fruitfully on the history of art. Once most scholars had agreed on the poverty and randomness of Marxist-inspired analyses conducted in terms of reflections and superstructures, authors

336 | Antoine Hennion like Francis Haskell and Michael Baxandall found paths, from opposite perspectives, enabling them to move their discipline away from the oscillation between the infinite exegesis of works and their futile

replacement in a social and political context desperately unable to talk about them or to make them talk.’ By studying the gaze, uses, collections, gestures, and the history of a given work, as well as the formation of taste for the work, these authors have already accomplished the switch described above, for similar reasons and with similar analytical, theoretical, and methodological effects. Their work shows

that the famous “works themselves,” those absolutes of beauty, have constantly changed meaning, shape, place, and direction throughout history, along with the judgments on them. Above all, they have shown that these works, through their media and restorations, and the way

they have been gathered together, presented, commented on, and reproduced, have continuously reconfigured the frame of their own evaluation.

The lesson is powerful. It tells us that the history of taste is not something separate from that of works, no more than the principles of reception are opposed to those of creation.” It is not possible to distinguish between the two. Works “make” the gaze that beholds them, and the gaze makes the works. Hence, this entangled history does not lead to a theory of the arbitrary, in the sense of the infinite variety of situations and appreciations casting doubt on the very possibility of establishing any kind of link between works and the taste associated with them. On the contrary, by putting the accent on the co-formation ofa set of objects and the frame of their appreciation, this model requires ever more ties, attachments, and mediations. Gradually every step influences both future perceptions and past catalogues of works, in reconfigurations that constantly rewrite their own history to develop their future. Haskell and Baxandall show us art gradually tracing the frame in which we “comprehend” it, in all senses of the word, i.e., all the work that was needed to identify systems of circulation, valorization, judgment and appreciation, and, reciprocally, everything that the establishment of these networks, neatly linking up works and art lovers, has changed in the works themselves — including works from

French Grand Opera and modernity | 337 the past, right down to their most concrete features. We tried to apply this lesson to analyze the “use” — not the reception! — of Bach in France

in the nineteenth century.” Here we are better equipped, thanks to historians of art, to understand a more fundamental meaning of the turn to which I referred: not only a change of object (from works themselves to taste), nor even a change of method (from head-on analysis and abstraction of various dimensions, to the meticulous study of mediations really used), but a change of status of the interpretation itself: a pragmatist turn. The explained becomes the explainer. The variables serving as benchmarks are in fact the product of the history written by the works to which we apply them. Causes do not come from above, from the disciplines that focus on their object of study, but from below, from the gradual process that produced the reality under study.

OPERA, OR MUSIC AS AN EVENT Opera seems a propitious ground for testing this re-examination and evaluating the “returns” of this kind of analysis. No other genre corresponds better to the program we have outlined: do not separate the history of taste from the history of music, do not attempt at one and the same time the dual and incompatible analysis of musical scores on the one hand and social practices on the other, but study historically how a specific repertory was formed jointly with the collective and individual faculty to appreciate it and use it to produce shared subjectivities. For opera is, in fact, a mongrel genre by nature. Unlike the ideal incarnated a little later by nineteenth-century chamber music,*? with its characteristic “autonomous music” orientation (the “Beethoven late quartets” syndrome), opera is deeply heterogeneous, both internally and externally. Internally, it is a universe filled with libretti and words, voices and bodies, costumes and scenic machinery, games of love and war — not just notes, scores, and instruments. It is total performance, and this characteristic is in no way archaic or residual. On the contrary, it underlies the explicit definition of another musical ideal, distinct from

the ideal of autonomy. In varying forms, the creators and supporters

338 | Antoine Hennion of the genre continually return to the theme of “total entertainment,” from its origins with the inventors in the Camerata dei Bardi in Florence

or French opera at the time of Louis XIV to historical grand opera, Wagner, and contemporary composers. This is true, furthermore, to * such an extent that for contemporary composers the tension between this ideal and the ideal of autonomy — once modernism declared the latter victorious, a point to which I shall return — is probably the source

of their discomfort, forcing them more than in the case of any other classical form to balance scorn or the proclamation of the death of the genre, and acrobatic attempts at synthesis or compromise. Opera is no less heterogeneous when observed in context or seen from the exterior. From the outset it was a social event, charged with passions, and this characteristic too was not experienced as a flaw or proof of immaturity; it lies, on the contrary, at the heart of opera’s aesthetic project. It is no accident that the aesthetic goal regularly flirted with its political counterpart; opera was born of the desire of the powerful in Italy, and of the kings of France and England. For many years it was extremely popular in many countries; during the course of history it was constantly used for various political or national surgical operations.*° Opera is both above and apart from music: it is less “pure,” (the “Bach never wrote an opera” syndrome); it typically comes from Italy or France, the two eternal rival lovers, when everyone knows that only German music is serious . . . Yet the Germans could

not rest easy until they had invented their own form of opera, the Wagnerian monster. Modernism itself, defined far from the realm of opera, was not complete until it invaded opera too — or vanquished it. Closer to its audience than “pure music,” opera is also a mixed genre by virtue of the variety of feelings, emotions, pleasures, and the forms of attachment it arouses. A fan of lyrical music is never quite sure what is at stake in his love of opera: what is the precise nature of the pleasure derived from a high C? The answer is so obscure that psychoanalysts have approached the field of music almost exclusively through these gaps in musical desire that lead into some sort of lost paradise. It seems extremely relevant to try and deploy here, with regard to the instructive fate of French nineteenth-century opera, a problematic

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analogous to that we defined to analyze Bach." For opera is a genre where the musicians (the term includes critics, commentators, analysts, and active music-lovers) are constantly rewriting the works

of the past. Often passionately debated as soon as they are composed (from the querelle des Bouffons to the Wagnerian religious war),

operas are continually re-formed through successive reruns, returns, rediscoveries, and revivals. Opera is an excellent case study for the

historian: its history is extremely reflexive, regularly turns to old works to feed its modern taste, and uses aesthetic quarrels to reform styles, form the ear of its time and, more generally, redefine musical taste. The interest of French classical opera lies in its strange destiny, which

in some ways recalls that of Roman statues as portrayed by Haskell and Penny. But it is telescoped into little more than a century and a half, from the origins of opéra-comique, Auber’s immense success in Europe and the birth of Meyerbeer’s historical opera, to the worldwide triumph of grand opera, from Gounod and Bizet to Saint-Saéns and Massenet, and finally to the very rapid decline of the whole of this repertoire in the second half of the twentieth century, when few works other than Faust and Carmen managed to survive. Like Italian and especially German and Slavic opera later, this genre opened a broad forum for the political, religious, and national debates of the nineteenth cen-

tury. But the point concerning us is different: not only the political meaning of this repertoire in its own time, but also the later development of its appreciation and the open question of its musical and aesthetic value, outside its original context. Through careful attention to the balance of words and music,” along with refined orchestration and the meticulous care lavished by composers on the effect on the public, French opera in fact constantly incarnated, for better and for wotse, sensuality, pleasure, and emotion. For these very reasons it was

the constant target of modernists of all varieties, from Wagner and Debussy through Boulez to France’s classical radio. Bourgeois opera, sentimentalism, affectation, easy melodies, saccharine orchestration: the very qualities which ensured its original success were subsequently turned against the genre to discredit it.”

340 | Antoine Hennion THE RISE AND FALL OF A REPERTOIRE Let us turn now to consider what authors of general works writing in the first half of the twentieth century say about the main representatives of French Grand Opera. In 1946, Dufourcq’s La musique des origines a nos jours devotes two pages to Grand Opera, assessing its principal representatives as follows: However, this pleasant conversationalist [Auber] speaks only rarely to our emotions. An artist of limited scope, with a horizon extending no farther than the Boulevard, he incarnates the fashionable Paris mood of his day, with all that this expression implies in terms of both brilliance and extreme superficiality ... Meyerbeer’s art seems very dated to us today .. . Meyerbeer possesses to the highest degree a feeling for scenic effect, and employs means that, while they may not be subtle, are effective. However, his uneven and motley style, along with the bombast disguising often empty and vulgar concepts, make performances of his operas hard to take today . . . This decorative music no longer moves us, and shows signs of incurable wrinkles . . . The public’s taste for this trite lyrical tragedy (Halévy’s La Juive, 1835) surprises us a bit today; Scribe’s dramatic tricks seem juvenile, and the music conventional.”4

In reading the articles of the day one must be alert to clearly antiSemitic undercurrents,” obvious to readers of the time, as in this comment on Meyerbeer: “An excellent businessman, but as an artist lacking

grand ideals .. .””° or, more pointed yet, Emile Vuillermoz, who, ina piece from his well-known Histoire de la musique that is studded with words like “opportunism,” “calculation,” “attention to his interest,” denounces “the hidden prosaic style of this overly commercialized art which, in order to pander successfully to the timid taste of the general public, foregoes the regard of his peers and the approbation of the elite,” while Halévy (that is, “Lévy, known as Halévy”) “trod submissively in the footsteps of his co-religionary. *” To appreciate the change,

one must compare this tone, customary in the twentieth century, with the enthusiastic descriptions penned by Félix Clément, for example, eighty years earlier of La Juive, La Muette or Les Huguenots — to take the

works most popular until the end of the nineteenth century: this stern

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defender of religious music waxes enthusiastic about masterpieces, extreme richness, striking verity, and magnificent works.”® In works for the general public, it is possible to follow the downfall of a succession of French operas, the trapdoor opening first beneath the feet of Auber, Meyerbeer, and Halévy, described as “Italianizers” the better to be compared and contrasted with their successors whose talent was authentically French, until the latter in turn were condemned

as well: Gounod stood at the junction with the generation of SaintSaens, Massenet, and Bizet, who alone was spared by all. In 1956, in his celebrated Dictionnaire critique, André Coeuroy, for example, describes Massenet as a “clever workman,” who “never attempted to move beyond the level of a carefully executed second-rate painting’ ; “demi tones and insinuating and gentle melody, left to fend for itself with an insufficient orchestra” bog the opera down.” Saint-Saens fares no better; he “digested everything — Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner — and excreted it in elegant droppings.”*° The tone is ferocious.

The main theme is the servile opportunism of composers catering to a bourgeois audience. In works for the general public throughout the twentieth century we repeatedly encounter the same kinds of variations — mitigated, euphemized — on the bourgeois, facile, and self-interested character of the genre. Just one recent example of these “obvious” characteristics: the one-line commentary on French opera by B. R. Hanning in the 2002 Concise History of Western Music: “Melodies

are attractive and expressive, within the boundaries of good taste” (my emphasis).*"

Since the point is to show a collective process among taste-makers

by noting the traces of the commonplace observations and shared norms which form the taste of a period, and their evolution since the end of the nineteenth century, my references are based less on recent work by academics than on accepted formulas and ready-made judgments pronounced as if all agreed upon them, or even on meaningful absences — all easier to discern in the work of critics, popularizers, general histories, prefaces, etc., which are the source of most of my quotations. Today scholars no longer permit themselves to use the condescending tone they adopted in the twentieth century — but of

342 | Antoine Hennion course even the best among them are not immune to involuntarily falling back on these platitudes of taste.*” Such success, followed by such a rout, raises questions. Several histories of the subject can be written. One, classic, consists in adopting in various forms the modernist critical judgment, either by endorsing it from the standpoint of musical authority on taste and good music, which elected Wagner and Debussy over Meyerbeer and Massenet — time has done its work; or in criticizing this progressionist vision glob-

ally to reinterpret it by demonstrating the constant action of differentiation on the part of the elites and, more specifically, the tension between the more conservative bourgeois taste and the more modern taste of the artist. These two versions diverge on the meaning (either aesthetic or social) of artistic taste and modernism but they are in complete agreement on the shared object of their scorn, “bourgeois” opera.?? Another angle of attack, apparently more neutral but fundamentally just as reductive and historically “anachronistic,” consists in viewing French opera only through the influence it had, essentially on Verdi and Wagner, and sometimes also on Russian or Slavic opera. Acknowledging the debt then serves to bury it.*4 This is the history of the winners, written from the perspective of the universe they imposed on the losers and with the words and categories they forged. Such a history has a meaning, it has a direction and a signification, and it does not look back. But do we have to endorse it? Are there no others? Less unequivocal histories, which would toy with possible scenarios which did not take place, with a future that might return? Arbitrary histories, then, as well: where would they derive their certainties, these histories that would not really know what music is, or politics or society? They cannot be written from on high, like the two mentioned above, which are firmly grounded in their autonomous aesthetic or social definition. No, without knowing which is correct, these other potential histories would include in contrast more than one definition of music, interacting, inventing themselves and our musical world. The point is obviously not for us to “rewrite history” ourselves,

to campaign for French opera or against modernism. Rather, it is to reconsider the history that has been written, and liberate what it has

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repressed in order to catch a glimpse of the slightly dated patterns within which, at other times and for other people, a genre had deep enough meaning to move people throughout Europe — but these patterns are so dated that we no longer respond to them. The difficulty brings us to a question that goes beyond modernism and French opera, namely, the question of anachronism and archeology: as I noted in my introduction, we are permanently rewriting the past within the categories and the space it has carved out for us. Without wishing to bring back this past, the idea would be for us

to use it to better see what our present prevents us from seeing — in particular when it studies the past. To put it another way, instead of rereading French opera ex post facto with the modern spectacles of emancipated art and seeing only a series of facile works, written for a public (horror of horrors, a bourgeois public!), this history would accompany bodies, collectives, voices, and spaces of expression that are in the process of developing. The point is not to place ourselves within the space of modernism in order to criticize it with its own categories by “rescuing” its castoffs (as was done for operetta, for light art, for photography), nor to integrate yesterday’s rejects (which modernism does itself, for example in the case of jazz, Mahler, Sibelius, the music

of Louis XIV’s time, etc.); the point is rather to redesign the space where the genres destined to be gradually discredited and disdained are in contrast honored by all, including the elites. Of course, a history such as this — closely associated with its actors — would not focus solely

on the collected works of a history of music leaping ceaselessly from

| emancipation to emancipation toward one goal, and thus sucha history would be less sure what music is.

MODERNISM This brings us back to our initial theme: the distinct separation between the social and the musical bequeathed tous by modernism, which social criticism reinforces while claiming to abolish it through reflection, is exactly what French opera has always fought, but by acts, not reflec-

tion. Its anti-Italian leitmotif, “words before everything,” introduces

344 | Antoine Hennion confusion where bel canto brings order: is it music, song, text, theatre? A pure and abstract work, released from the constraints which the public, always lagging behind the times, would impose? French composers adopted a model of mixed writing and collective production exactly

the reverse of what would become dogma in the twentieth century. But what they then discovered, apart from the bourgeois success which would damn them in the eyes of history, was the opportunity to convey and express, and perhaps sometimes produce, the subjectivities of a moment in time and the passions of collectivities in the process of forging themselves. For this submission to its own effects, this ear

attuned to the public’s ear, is also what made opera a genre that is social, active, open to the anxieties and desires of its time.” I am speaking of what is collective and what is musical, because they bring us directly back to the Great Divide between music and society. But opera consists of a myriad of other aspects, which lined

the path opened by the Divide, or retreated into the shadows: the pleasure of sound, the role of the bodies (of the singer, the dancer, the spectator), the place of the text, the dramaturgy and the ballets, the sets, the crowds on stage, the very dynamics ofa hall, ofan audience

seeking its voices, the instrumentation of the orchestra and language in the service of effects — in sum, the exact opposite of the aesthetics of autonomy, of the ideal represented by a Beethoven quartet, as it became the model of rigorous art, which Wagnerianism (more than Wagner himself) finally imposed on opera too. All this leads to the methodological wager I am making, behind the idea of using the life and death of French opera to write fictional, open, plural histories where opera would be the starting point,** rather than

the convenient dumping ground from which modernity emancipates itself: not to rehabilitate opera, but to transform it into the paradoxical spokesman for another sociology of music, pragmatist (should I say Hollywoodian?), and not critical.” French opera can be read as a machine for composing unstable terms whose effects can only be discovered by playing them in situ. Only performance, always open and uncertain (and for this reason constantly being rewritten), supported by its actors but also its apparatus and its audience, can determine what

French Grand Opera and modernity | 345 happens. Everything counts. Everything must be weighed, to unleash the effect — and afterwards, no one who was not present will ever be able to know if this collective effort of an instant was more musical, more convivial, more political, or more sentimental: the divide itself no longer has meaning, and the debates about what took place become part of what took place. Such a fictional history, in which French opera becomes the involuntary model for a pragmatist sociology, also rewrites a music of the past with present-day tools. Clearly, it is no less anachronistic than the official history of modern art was when it reduced bourgeois opera to its own negative. At least it will be a tale produced while it reveals itself to be what it is, in a more playful, less serious mode, better informed of the effect of its own writing. I hope that, far from saying less, it will say more.

NOTES 1 Blacking’s famous formula — “music as society” / “society as music” — has

the advantage of expressing the relationship in more symmetrical and active terms, but does not answer the question of the social production of these realities and of the division between them (John Blacking, How Musical Is Man? [London/ Seattle: Faber & Faber/ University of Washington Press, 1973]). 2 Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967). 3 Using the exemplary case of Bach, a powerful force for this “musicalization of music,” we raised this problem in the case of the development of the taste for classical music in France in the nineteenth century. See Joél-Marie Fauquet and Antoine Hennion, La Grandeur de Bach (Paris: Fayard, 2000). 4 The ground-breaking essays by Siegfried Kracauer on Offenbach’s Paris (Orpheus in Paris [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938, new edition New York: Vienna House, 1972]) or by William L. Crosten on Grand Opera (French Grand Opera: An Art and a Business [New York: King’s Crown Press, 1948 ])

had to await, for their heritage to be acknowledged, the pioneering work of Jane Fulcher, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and

Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), on the

346 | Antoine Hennion political status of Grand Opera, now followed by works of researchers like Anselm Gerhard (The Urbanization of Opera [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998]) on Meyerbeer’s Paris, and Steven Huebner (French Opera at the fin de siécle: Wagnerism, Nationalism and Style [New York:

Oxford University Press, 1999]). 5 This phrase is one Bruno Latour has employed in speaking of science and society (Latour, We Have Never Been Modern [New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993]). Latour underscores the parallelism with another Great Divide, this one social, between “us” and “them”; it is easy to transpose this other divide to the musical case. “We” have developed a rational and autonomous art world; “they,” “primitive” or popular and far removed either in time or on the social scale, are supposed to remain in a state where music and social rites are impossible to separate from one another.

6 [have attempted to rethink this music/society duality in Antoine Hennion, La Passion musicale: Une sociologie de la médiation (Paris: Métailié, 1993).

7 Pierre Bourdieu, in response to the accusation brought against him of neglecting artistic production or holding it to be illusory, raises this problem concerning Flaubert in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1996). The paradoxical solution he suggests is to consider Flaubert as the precursor of Bourdieu himself: an author whose principal work is to reveal the structure of the literary field of his time, and to assert his autonomy by making artists the sole judges of art, in opposition to the bourgeoisie and the mass market. 8 This line was first explored by Max Weber, The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, trans. and ed. Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel, and Gertrud Neuwirth (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958). 9 After being notably absent from music history, the historical appearance of a specifically musical ability to listen to music has been the object of recent work, of various orientations: Mary Sue Morrow, Concert Life in Haydn’s Vienna (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1989); James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); William Weber, “Did People Listen in the Eighteenth Century?,” Early Music 25 (November 1997), 678-691; Antoine Hennion, “L’écoute a la question,” Revue de musicologie 88/1 (2002), 95-149.

French Grand Opera and modernity | 347 10 Concerning the formation of the musical “canon,” an issue whose crucial character was clearly demonstrated by William Weber (The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual and

Ideology [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), this type of reflexive interrogation of musicology regarding its own role has been the starting point for the renewal of music studies: e.g., Alan Durant, Conditions of Music (London: Macmillan, 1984); Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 11 For example, Pieter C. Van den Toorn, “Politics, Feminism, and Contemporary Music Theory,” Journal of Musicology 9 (1991), 275-299. 12 Or political, e.g., Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, eds., Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1987). 13, Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: The Free Press, 1995 [1912]). His analyses have provided the model for many others, from ethnology to interactionism to Bourdieu. Critical theories spread the most rapidly. Ask someone about his tastes and he will make excuses — my parents were very highbrow and encouraged my older sister to play the violin . . . Music-lovers know better than anyone else that their tastes are determined, relative, linked to their origins, arbitrary. Paradoxically, we are so conditioned by sociological readings of our tastes that now a sociologist has to use all his talent to convince a music-lover to say what he likes, what he is attached to, in other words, to “desociologize” him! See Antoine Hennion, “Music Lovers: Taste as Performance,” Theory, Culture and Society 18/5 (October 2001), I-22. 14 This is a limitation of Pierre Bourdieu’s critical approach (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984]). The emphasis he places on the necessary denegation by the believers of the constructed character of the object in which they believe (which object he terms the illusio, or enjeu in French: the “stake” — ludere = Jouer = to gamble) prevents us from taking that object seriously in and of itself, for to take it seriously would be to mimic the social actors in their belief.

15 To adopt another of Blacking’s formulas (see above, note 2).

348 | Antoine Hennion 16 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (Oxford: Phaidon, 1976); Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500-1900 (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1981).

17 Notwithstanding their crucial contribution, this is a limit of reception theories by Hans R. Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1982), and Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 18 Fauquet and Hennion, La Grandeur de Bach. 19 Joél-Marie Fauquet, Les Sociétés de musique de chambre a Paris de la Restauration a 1870 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1986).

20 See Fulcher, The Nation’s Image, and Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera. Before that, in France, the struggles between the French and the Italians,

which were referred back to the king or the queen, had always traced political borders, while elsewhere in Europe (Germany, Spain, Slavic countries, etc.), in particular because of the importance placed on language, reappropriation of national repertoire always worked in favor of opera. 21 As it is not completed yet, I can only mention this work, also undertaken with musicologist Joél-Marie Fauquet. 22 See the fascinating correspondence between Eugéne Scribe and Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber published by Herbert Schneider (Correspondance d’Eugene Scribe and Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber [Liége:

Mardaga, 1998)).

23 The same, meticulously disassembled and borrowed, also contributed most of the technical means and savoir-faire to composers of film music. 24 Norbert Dufourcg, ed., La Musique des origines a nos jours (Paris: Larousse, revised and corrected edition, 1946), pp. 306-307. 25 On this question, see also Steven Huebner, French Opera at the fin de siecle. 26 Dufourcq, La Musique des origines a nos jours, p. 307. 27 Emile Vuillermoz, Histoire de la musique (Paris: Le Livre de poche, 1973), p. 285.

28 See Félix Clément and Pierre Larousse, Dictionnaire des Operas (Paris: Larousse, 1863-1880).

French Grand Opera and modernity | 349 29 André Coeuroy, Dictionnaire critique de la musique ancienne et moderne

(Paris: Payot, 1956), pp. 276-277. 30 Ibid., p. 346. 31 B. R. Hanning, ed., Concise History of Western Music, second edition (New York: Norton, 2002). Another example can be found in Hervé Lacombe, Les Voies de V’opéra francais au XIXe siecle (Paris: Fayard, 1997), who cannot begin his defense of the genre without saying that “French opera only rarely seeks the sublime, or intenseness, profoundness in expression, density in writing; rather, it favors whatever is entertaining, pleasant, nuanced, light, and also everything that astonishes and impresses” (p. 9, written five lines after the author has complained that “nineteenthcentury French opera suffers overall from a poor reputation”). 32 Especially in France, it is true: the source country is the most sensitive to the social connotations of a genre, easily seen as relative or “exotic” elsewhere; today Massenet is performed more readily in Italy, SaintSaens in New York, and Fra Diavolo in Germany than is a nineteenth-century French opera in Paris. 33 On the opposition between “social” and “artist” criticism of capitalism, see Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Le Nouvel Esprit du capitalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1999). 34 Thus the recent Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, edited by David Charlton (2003), a very well-informed work, focuses most of its entries on Wagnerism, Verdi, and the question of nationalism, as does the latest book by Steven Huebner, French Opera at the fin de siecle: Wagnerism, Nationalism and Style. This characteristic can be compared with the

venomous note already added by Harewood to the entry on Meyerbeer in “the” Kobbé, the Bible of all opera fans: “It can be said that the best example of French Grand Opera is to be found not in Meyerbeer, but in Verdi, with Don Carlos” (n. 1, p. 438 of the French edition of the edition revised by the Earl of Harewood of Gustave Kobbé’s Tout l’opéra, 1982. The work itself is imbued with the enormous affection of a lover of all

these works.) 35 This point was made masterfully by Fulcher, The Nation’s Image. But it is not enough to restore the political importance of French opera in its time (as Baxandall did, to repeat my argument); one must also understand, as Haskell did, its subsequent musical devaluation.

350 | Antoine Hennion 36 Or the end point: when Stendhal describes the Italian opera he adored in his Vie de Rossini (Paris: Auguste Boulland et Cie, 1823; new edition ed. Pierre Brunel, Gallimard-Folio, 1992), he never mentions “works.” He

paints the effects, writes about circumstances, contrasts towns, opera houses, or singers, speaks of the Latin or Saxon fashion of appreciating singing, of humor, of the beauty of the women ... There is not a phrase in his text that is not perpendicular to the line which should lead from the work to society. It is more common to find such stories in the area of popular music, or 1950s Hollywood movies, production modes that rebel against the modernist divide between art and society, which are better illuminated by a comparison with the techniques invented by French opera’s writers and composers, than with the solitary gesture of a creative genius such as Beethoven. 37 1am thereby inverting an ironic comparison often made between Hollywood and French opera, even by those who love French opera, such as the stage director David Pountney, who doubts that one can resuscitate a genre that inspires “the same kind of ironic affection that we commonly reserve for those magnificent edifices of Hollywood high camp” (Cambridge Companion to Opera, p. 146).

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF THE HISTORY OF OPERA? Thomas Ertman

As this collection has demonstrated, an exciting process of convergence

is under way in the world of opera studies. The attention generated by the “critical” approach to opera, with its desire to read contemporary meanings into canonical works, has obscured the fact that many opera scholars who stand outside of this paradigm, be they musicologists, literary theorists, historians, or sociologists, are currently engaged in a common project: namely the reconstruction — based often on painstaking archival research — of the conditions of operatic production, reception, and social instrumentalization during different periods of the genre’s four centuries of existence. It is this project that represents the common denominator between those following a “systems of meaning” and those employing a “conditions of production” approach and one that, as Victoria Johnson has shown in her introduction, was made possible by the historical “turn” within the humanities and social sciences over the last two decades.

As Craig Calhoun, Herbert Lindenberger, and Jane Fulcher have all argued in this volume, a close elective affinity exists between this recent research within opera studies and the theories of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In her contributions here, Fulcher has illustrated one way in which this often difficult body of writings can be put to use in understanding opera. She argues that Bourdieu’s idea of a struggle among elites as well as between elites and non-elites over symbolic legitimacy and domination allows for a more complex understanding of the relationship between state power and ideology and art works produced under various forms of state sponsorship. That such an understanding is necessary is underlined by the pieces of Rebecca Harris-Warrick and Catherine Kintzler. By analyzing, respectively, the structure of divertissements and the presentation of popular groups in French opera during the age of Lully and Rameau, they uncover the

| 351

352 | Thomas Ertman tremendous multiplicity of meanings embedded within works that have often been interpreted as straightforward glorifications of absolute monarchy. In the space remaining in this conclusion, I wish to sketch out briefly another way that Bourdieu’s work can be employed within opera stud-

ies, one that builds upon and further encourages the comparative dimension also found in this volume. As has often been remarked, including by Herbert Lindenberger above, one of the unique features of opera is the genre’s clearly defined historical parameters (general agreement on what constitutes an opera, the genre’s four-hundredyear history, limited number of principal centers). These characteristics suggest that we might arrive at a new understanding of opera’s rich past if we apply to it some of the methods pioneered in recent decades by historically oriented social scientists. As Victoria Johnson has noted in her introduction, such social scientists began in the 1960s and 1970s to seek answers to questions such as why some European polities developed in an absolutist direction prior to the French Revolution while others did not; or why some fell into dictatorship during the interwar years while others remained democracies. Their models were contested and revised over the coming decades and form part of the “historical turn” within political science and sociology.’

Opera history presents us with a series of broad questions that, like those concerning European political development, would benefit if addressed in an explicitly comparative manner. Why is it, we might ask, that at certain times and places (Italy from the seventeenth through the early twentieth century, early nineteenth-century France) new native works filled the opera stages while at other times and places (eighteenth-century France, nineteenth-century Germany) arepertory system built around older or imported pieces predominated? Why does opera seem largely to have died out as a living art form since the Second World War? And finally, why has so-called “directors’ theatre” (Regiethe-

ater) come to dominate opera stagings in Germany and, increasingly, in Britain and France but not in Italy or the United States?

One way to go about answering such questions is to begin with a general model of how the arts developed during the early modern

Conclusion | 353 and modern periods, and then identify the ways in which the path followed by opera in various countries conformed to or deviated from this model. Pierre Bourdieu provides us with such a model in his book The Rules of Art. In this book, Bourdieu outlines what he sees as a com-

mon developmental trajectory within the history of French literature and painting. He further implies that this trajectory is one followed by all art forms, though with some differences in timing, on their way to the art world of today which is characterized, he claims, by homologous structures across the fields of literature, the theatre, painting, music, and other genres.* This common pathway to the modern art world began during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when writers and painters in France were dependent on royal and aristocratic favor and subject to the authority of the royal academies. Writers first liberated themselves from this position of dependence with the rise of the more impersonal market for cultural goods that emerged and expanded in the wake of the economic transformations of the first half of the nineteenth century. However, beginning in the 1840s and 1850s, many writers began to rebel against the new tyranny of bourgeois taste and the commercial market driven by it. This rebellion, headed by writers like Baudelaire and Flaubert, took two forms: one directed against commercial culture in favor of socially engaged art; and a second that rejected both the former and the latter in the name of art for art’s sake. These same writers then helped painters like Manet and the Impressionists in their own battle to free themselves from the tutelage of the Academy, something the writing profession in general had accomplished much earlier.’ In the wake of these struggles, stable and homologous structures emerged in both the literary and artistic worlds that, according to Bour-

dieu, continue to characterize these fields right down to the present. On one side there stands the large body of commercially oriented writers and painters and the agents, publishing houses, and galleries that support them, the aim of whom is to appeal to a mass audience and thereby achieve immediate financial success. Arrayed against them is the self-declared avant garde, for whom popular appeal is incompatible with a commitment to higher artistic values. Avant-garde writers and

354 | Thomas Ertman artists aim for approbation from their peers, from progressive critics, and from a small, select — and often highly educated — audience, hoping

that over the long term they will gain widespread recognition (and the accompanying material rewards) as a broader public comes to accept their work. The avant garde is not, however, a homogeneous movement but is rather itself divided into an older group of more established figures — the classical or “consecrated” avant garde in Bourdieu’s terminology — and a younger generation forced to fight a two-front war

against both the mass market and their peers who have “made it.” Such struggles for distinction and prestige both within each of these groups of cultural producers (mass market oriented, established avant garde, radical avant garde) and among the groups shape the internal dynamics in all artistic fields, according to Bourdieu.* To what extent does this schema, derived as it is from the history of French literature and painting, apply to the developmental trajectory of opera? It is only possible to sketch out a brief answer here. If we focus first on the two countries treated in this volume, we discover in both significant deviations from Bourdieu’s model. In Italy, the opening of the first commercial opera house in Venice in 1637 less than four decades after the birth of the genre meant that composers there were able to free themselves very quickly from dependence on the court and aristocratic patronage of Florence, Mantua, and Rome. As Wendy Heller has noted above, opera in Venice was an industry, and, thanks to the impresarios whose activities Franco Piperno, John Rosselli, William Holmes, and the Glixons have so vividly reconstructed, this industry soon spread to all corners of the peninsula.” While, as Piperno shows in this volume, both central and local governments may have helped to create favorable conditions for opera, the fortunes of composers depended entirely on the response of audiences consisting largely of local elites who, accustomed as they were to attending most performances during a given season, were extremely knowledgeable — if not always fully attentive — listeners.

What is striking here is that, despite the tremendous pressures and

often meager rewards offered by this market-based system to composers and librettists, they never organized an intellectual movement

Conclusion | 355 against it of the kind instigated, according to Bourdieu, by progressive

French writers and painters of the mid-nineteenth century. In other words, there never was an avant garde within the world of the classical Italian opera industry. Given the lack of alternative, non-commercial, sources of financial support capable of underwriting the tremendous costs of opera productions, it is difficult to see how there could have been. The displacement of the impresario by the publisher as the key figure in the Italian system during the last third of the nineteenth century brought no major change in this respect since the motives of the latter were equally dominated by commercial concerns. It is notewor-

thy that the most significant “revolt” that did take place within the world of the Italian lyric stage — that of Gluck and his reform operas — reached its culmination under the very different production system of the Viennese court. In France, the founding of the Royal Academy of Music (the Opéra) and the parallel creation by Quinault and Lully of the tragédie lyrique

as both an alternative to Italian opera and, as Catherine Kintzler has argued, a rival to the spoken theatre long prevented the breakthrough of a commercially oriented opera business. The Opéra was a leading institution of state and the latter long decreed that only tragédies lyriques and opéra-ballets should be performed there. As William Weber

has elsewhere shown, this restriction, combined with the length of the season (most often 120-160 performances per annum) and the bureaucratic process for commissioning new works, transformed the Opéra after the death of Lully in 1687 into a repertory house built around his works and, in the eighteenth century, those of Rameau as well.° Thus, as Weber has remarked, “programming did not necessarily reflect pub-

lic taste’’ but rather served other, primarily ideological, purposes. Under these conditions, the opposition to the operatic mainstream was represented by the forbidden: Italian opera and opéra-comique. The visit of an Italian troupe to the Opéra during the 1752/1753 and 1753/1754 seasons proved popular, but the backlash against them (the Querelle des Bouffons) put an end to this experiment. With the arrival of Marie-Antoinette, acquainted from her native Vienna with a different theatrical regime, on the throne in 1774, the old restrictions were soon

356 | Thomas Ertman loosened and German and Italian composers (Gluck, Piccinni, Salieri, Cherubini, Sacchini) flocked to the French capital to compose new works — albeit in French — for the Opéra.®

At least a partial victory, in Bourdieu’s terms, of the commercial theatre over the Academy did occur, however, in 1831 when the management of the Opéra was turned over to a directeur-entrepreneur,

a businessman who, with the help of a sizeable subsidy from the state, sought to turn the theatre into a profitable enterprise. As Jane Fulcher has shown, this subsidy was purchased at the price of continuous, interventionist, government oversight.? Aside from the years 1854 to 1866, when direct state administration was restored, director-entrepreneurs were to run the Opéra for the rest of the century, attempting to earn back their initial investment (or that of their backers) while meeting their contractual obligation to produce grand operas and ballets in sumptuous stagings worthy of France’s leading theatre. _As Christophe Charle emphasizes in his contribution to this volume,

by the last third of the nineteenth century this system had led to artistic stagnation, with only sixteen new works premiered at the Opéra between 1870 and 1900. A principal reason behind this, as he states, was the house’s fragile budgetary position, caused in good measure by the immense costs associated with mounting Grand Opera, combined

with the conservatism of its core public. For the Opéra’s financial health depended heavily on the good will of conservative subscribers from the haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy who, during the last third of the century, purchased about 4o percent of the tickets accounting for 60 percent of total revenue."° Because subscribers, many of them

box holders, expected to visit the house regularly and see a varied program, the management was obliged, as in the eighteenth century, to offer a large number (160-180) of performances each year. Given the financial and artistic risks of new productions, this was only possible

as a repertory house built around the grand operas of Meyerbeer, Halévy and Rossini and the works of Gounod (Faust, Roméo et Juliette), Thomas (Hamlet), Mozart (Don Giovanni) and Verdi (Rigoletto, Aida, later Otello).™

Conclusion | 357 When the Opéra’s management did commission new operas, its aim was of course to bring works to the stage that would find immediate

acceptance among its core public and hence could be added to the permanent repertory. The same was true of the director-entrepreneurs in charge of the Opéra-comique who, less burdened with the cost of lavish productions and less dependent on subscribers, could organize — as Charle shows — thirty-five world premieres at the Salle Favert during

the last three decades of the nineteenth century. While this rate of creation of market-oriented new works was lower than that of the Italian opera industry, France — unlike Italy — did see a major intellectual

' reaction against commercial opera during this period. Ironically, it was inspired principally (though not exclusively) by a man who, in 1849, wrote that he wished to see Paris “burned to rubble,” Richard Wagner.”*

Viewed in another way, however, this is not very surprising. Wagner had spent formative years between 1839 and 1841 and again in 1849 in the French capital, where he composed The Flying Dutchman, read the works of Saint-Simon and Proudhon, and became acquainted with the highly successful works of his compatriot Meyerbeer. The latter came

to embody for Wagner the spirit of commercialized opera, centered around audience-pleasing effects in the interest of material success, against which his own “music of the future” was directed. When Wag-

ner returned to Paris in 1859 and attempted to win over the French capital with concerts featuring excerpts from his operas and with the (famously disastrous) premiere of Tannhduser in 1861 at the Opéra, it is significant that his most prominent supporter was Baudelaire, a key figure in Bourdieu’s account of the emergence of a modern art world

in France structured around the opposition between market-driven cultural production and the “art for art’s sake” of the avant garde. As Christophe Charle has remarked above, Wagner the theoreti-

cian and composer proved to be a polarizing figure in the world of French music after 1860, leading to a reproduction of the academic/avant garde dichotomy already present in literary and visual arts fields. He attracted supporters among composers like Chabrier, d’Indy and Chausson and among critics who directed their ire against,

358 | Thomas Ertman for example, Massenet, whose music was condemned for its supposed commercialism.” In fact, Massenet readily admitted the significance of Wagner, and in operas like Manon sought to wed some of his inno-

vations, including the leitmotif, to more traditional French forms in the interest of dramatic effectiveness.’* Yet, as Steven Huebner and above all Jane Fulcher have shown, an extra-musical factor, namely Wagner's political views, prevented a simple division of French musicians into progressive supporters and conservative opponents of the composer.” A progressive artist like Debussy felt obliged to distance

himself from the “musician of the future” due to his German chauvinism, but he did this by going beyond Wagner to create his own, identifiably French, variant of modern music, most notably in Pelléas et Mélisande, certainly the most avant-garde score theretofore heard at the Opéra-comique. On the other hand, as Fulcher emphasizes in her contributions here, some extreme French nationalists like d’Indy were attracted to Wagner because of his anti-Semitic attacks on musical commercialism (embodied by Meyerbeer and Offenbach) and on “Judified” mass culture more generally. During the interwar period, as Fulcher demonstrates, the battle lines were redrawn again as both progressive and conservative composers turned towards neoclassicism.

Henceforth, the division between the avant garde and its opponents was determined as much by the ideas or ideological positions incorporated within stage works as by internal stylistic differences. In Italy, the home of commercial opera, no similar avant-garde opposition arose to the tradition of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi in

the wake of Wagner’s international breakthrough. Rather, that tradition, supplemented, as Christophe Charle has noted, with a small number of imports from France, formed the basis of an opera business that was moving towards a repertory system. The new works composed by Verdi’s successors had to compete with that repertory as well as with newly popular forms of “light” music for the attention of a larger, less socially exclusive, strata of cultural consumers. The composer most successful at doing so, Giacomo Puccini, drew inspiration both from Massenet’s lyrical setting of dialogue and from Wagnerian harmonies and orchestration, all in the service of the greatest

Conclusion | 359 possible emotional impact, the political valence of which, as the Steinbergs argue, is open to question. After 1914, a kind of avant garde did emerge around the “generation of 1880” (Casella, Pizzetti, Resphighi) and among Futurist-inspired composers like Malpiero, but this took the form less of a radical reform of opera than of a greater interest in instrumental and chamber music. Many of these artists held official positions under the fascist regime, a period when, perhaps surprisingly, Italy became better acquainted with progressive tendencies elsewhere through the new Venice music festival."® By 1936, opera had clearly

lost its place as the most popular form of entertainment, with Italians spending more than seventeen times as much on cinema as on opera tickets.’”

It was in German-speaking Europe, the homeland of Wagner, that

the trajectory of opera after 1870 most closely followed the path sketched out by Bourdieu. On the one hand, composers like Strauss in Elektra and of course Berg in Wozzeck and Lulu and Schoenberg in Erwartung and Moses und Aron carried forward Wagner's radical example that the music of opera should keep pace with and make use of the most advanced techniques of instrumental and chamber music regardless of the reaction of the mass public. On the other hand, Strauss himself from Rosenkavalier onwards as well as other successful opera composers like Schreker and Korngold employed through composition and advanced harmonies, combined with often titillating subject matter, in the interest of commercial success. After 1945, as Antoine Hennion points out, cultural modernists across the West, but especially in France, initially attacked opera as a less pure, and hence somehow second-rate, form of music. This attitude was captured most vividly by Pierre Boulez’s statement, later disavowed, that he wished

to blow up all opera houses. Nonetheless, the model provided by the works of Berg and Schoenberg permitted other avant-garde composers like Henze, Zimmermann, Stockhausen, and Berio to turn to opera composition with something like a clear conscience. Indeed, the 19908 saw the premieres of over 500 operas worldwide."* The material precondition for this flourishing during the postwar period of (most often modernist) opera was undoubtedly the shift towards substantial

360 | Thomas Ertman subsidies for public theatres and classical radio, above all in western Europe, which removed much of the financial risk associated in the past with mounting difficult new works.” Yet, in keeping with Bourdieu’s predictions, few of the avant-garde

operas produced over the past century have found favor with the broader (opera-going) public, as the many empty seats at performances of even Wozzeck attest. That public is, however, no longer being served with a regular stream of new commercially oriented creations, as is still the case in the fields of theatre and film. It is content instead to attend

performances from the standard repertory, albeit a repertory that has expanded in recent decades through a new openness towards Baroque music, towards Russian and Czech opera, and towards previously neglected works of otherwise famous composers and of composers persecuted during the twentieth century (entartete Musik). Meanwhile, between these two poles of new modernist works of limited appeal and routine, through popular repertory performances another kind of avant-garde phenomenon has entered the opera house: the radical reinterpretation, through the use of unconventional sets, costumes, and acting style, of works belonging to the classical canon. Such productions, with their combination of unaltered, familiar music and radically unfamiliar stage design, represent to many a more acceptable face of the avant garde than entirely new compositions written in a difficult musical language. Yet the degree to which this Regietheater has been able to establish itself and gain acceptance from regular opera-goers has varied substantially between Germany and France on the one hand and the more conservative Austria and Italy on the other, despite roughly similar degrees of public subsidization (and hence independence from immediate market pressures). To explain these differences, it is necessary to look beyond production conditions to the significance attached

to opera attendance among different social groups in these countries — precisely the kind of investigation carried out by Bourdieu in Distinction. This subject, which can be approached using both survey and ethnographic (participant observation) methods, has received far too little attention since Bourdieu’s pioneering work, though an important research project on the social meaning of opera in Argentina is

Conclusion | 361 currently under way at the Teatro Colén and other theatres in Buenos Aires led by Claudio Benzecry.”° In this brief concluding discussion, I have sought to illustrate how a social science theory that addresses the dynamics of long-term historical change within the arts — in this case one provided by Bourdieu — can be used to bring together the rich research results of the systems of meaning and conditions of production approaches that have been inspired by the historical turns within the humanities and social sciences. The great advantage of such a theoretical framework, whether it be one inspired by Bourdieu or one drawn froma different methodological tradition, is that it encourages systematic comparisons among the traditional centers of opera production and reception. While our volume has focused only on France and Italy, the suggestive nature of this juxtaposition will, we hope, encourage more explicitly comparativehistorical work within the developing interdisciplinary field of opera studies.

NOTES

1 Fora fuller discussion of this comparative-historical literature, see Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1997), pp. I-28, and “Democracy and Dictatorship in Interwar Western Europe Revisited,” World Politics (April 1998). 2 Pierre Bourdieu, Les Reégles de art: Genése et structure du champ littéraire (Paris: Seuil, 1992), p. 228. 3 Ibid., pp. 107-115, 121, 154-155.

4 Ibid., pp. 221-228. 5 John Rosselli, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); John

Rosselli, “Opera Production, 1780-1880,” in Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, eds., Opera Production and Its Resources, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 81-164; Franco Piperno, “Opera Production to 1780,” in ibid., pp. 1-79; Beth L. Glixon and Jonathan E. Glixon, Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice (New York: Oxford University Press,

362 | Thomas Ertman 2006); William C. Holmes, Opera Observed: Views of a Florentine Impresario

in the Early Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

6 William Weber, “La musique ancienne in the Waning of the Ancien Régime,” Journal of Modern History 56 (March 1984), 58-88. 7 Ibid., p. 69. 8 Ibid., pp. 84-85. 9 Jane Fulcher, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 10 Steven Huebner, French Opera at the fin de siécle: Wagnerism, Nationalism and Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 7. 11 Ibid., p. 2; Michael Walter, Die Oper ist ein Irrenhaus (Stuttgart / Weimar: Metzler, 1997), p. 47. 12 Quoted in Martin Geck, Richard Wagner (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2004), p. 28. See also Fulcher, The Nation’s Image, pp. 183-200. 13 Huebner, French Opera at the fin de siécle, pp. 164-165. 14 Ibid., pp. 69-72. 15 Huebner, French Opera at the fin de siécle; Jane F. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1999); Jane F. Fulcher, ed., Debussy and His World

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jane EF Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914-1940 (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2005). 16 Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1987), Pp. 5-7, 89-91. 17 Ibid., p. 64. 18 Elisabeth Schirmer, Kleine Geschichte der Oper (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), p. 251.

19 In the United States, where such risks remain substantial, many more opera composers have distanced themselves over the past two decades from modernist strictures and attempted to write new works that are more immediately “accessible,” some of which, especially the “minimalist” operas of Philip Glass and John Adams, have enjoyed a measure of success. 20 A preliminary report is available in Claudio Benzecry, “Beauty at the Gallery: Operatic Community and Sentimental Education in Contemporary Buenos Aires,” in Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett,

Conclusion | 363 eds., The Practice of Culture (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2006). Final results will be available in Benzecry’s Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, New York University, tentatively entitled “A Night at the Opera: High Culture, Moral Engagement, Middle Class Ethos and Popular Practice in the Opera Houses of Buenos Aires.”

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INDEX : Abbate, Carolyn, 52, 127, 303 Fra Diavolo, 349 In Search of Opera, 301, 303 La Muette de Portici, 184, 340

Unsung Voices, 5, 303 Aureli, Aurelio, 38

Abbiati, Albino, 206 Alessandro Magno in Sidonia, 42, 46-47

Abbott, Andrew, 7 L’Antigona delusa da Alceste, 38 Académie Royale de Musique, see also Claudio Cesare, 41, 43-46, 51

Opéra, 72, 73, 77, 176, 355 Auric, Georges, 320 Accademia degli Imperturbabili, librettist

Il Tolomeo, 38 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 117, 310, 337, 338,

Accademia degli Incogniti, 35, 51 339, 341, 345

Action Francaise, 317 Bachelet, Alfred, 129 Acton, John, 145 Un Jardin sur ’Oronte, 120-121, 129,

Adami, Giuseppe, 274, 276 319 Adams, John, 362 Badovero, Camillo

Adorno, Theodor, 4, 292, 294, 304, 307, 312, Sesto Tarquinio, 38

314, 323-324 Baglioni family, 150-153

Aeschylus Bakhtin, Mikhail, 304

Oresteia, 321 Ballet, see also comédie-ballet, dance, 77, Agulhon, Maurice, 318 81-82, 84-85, 144, 145, 344, 355 Albaret, le comte d’ Banti, Alberto, 194-197, 200, 228, 231,

Scylla et Glaucus, 84 241

Alexander the Great, 46 Baritone voice, 93 | Alfano, Franco, 270, 275, 276, 287 Barrés, Maurice, 123 , André, Johann, 297 Les Déracinés, 124

André, Naomi, 31-32 Un Jardin sur ’Oronte, 119-121, 319

Andreozzi, Gaetano Barthes, Roland, 9, 10

Saulle, 145 Bartlet, Elizabeth, 17, 30-31

Annales School, 6, 7 Bass voice, 96, 100

Anne, Queen of England, 169 Bassi, Carolina, 89, 96, 97, IOI, III, I12, 113,

Anthropology, 7, 8, 10, II, 14, 312, 114

313 Bassi, Nicola, 100

Apuleius Battoni, Pompeo, 50

Metamorphoses, 46 Baudelaire, Charles, 353, 357

Aretino, Pietro Baxandall, Michael, 336-337, 349 Ragionamenti, 52 Bayreuth Festival, 251, 271, 310

Aristophanes, 77 Beau monde, 170-173, 175-176

Aristotle, 49, 83 Beauchamp, Pierre, 54, 71

Poetics, 74 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 117, 337, 341, 344,

Ashbrook, William, 272-273, 275, 276 350 Auber, Daniel Francois, 339, 340, 341, 348 Fidelio, 90, 95, 98

| 395

396 | Index Beethoven, Ludwig van (cont.) Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 11, 263, 291, 304-306,

Leonore (1805), 90, 98 312, 313-314, 322, 323-324, 325, 346, 347, Leonore (1806), 90, 98 351, 352, 353-354, 356, 357; 359, 360

Bellini, Giovanni, 50 Distinction, 11, 292, 304, 360-361 Bellini, Vincenzo, 88, 91, 92, 161, 182, 231, La Domination masculine, 313

270, 273, 358 Homo Academicus, 292, 305

Bianca e Fernando, 113 The Rules of Art, 292, 353-354

Norma, 106 Braudel, Fernand, 139

Benda, Julien Brecht, Bertolt

La Trahison des clers, 319 Mahagonny Songspiel, 321

. Benzecry, Claudio, 362-363 Bretzner, C.F, 297, 299 Berchet, Giovanni, 195 Brooks, Cleanth, 8 Berg, Alban, 359 Bruneau, Alfred, 253, 265, 318

Lulu, 359 L’Attaque du Moulin, 265 Wozzeck, 359, 360 Le Réve, 265

Bergeron, Katherine and Philip Bohlman Busenello, Giovanni Francesco

Disciplining Music, 11 Amore inamorato, 51 Berio, Luciano, 269, 287, 359 Didone, 38

Berlin, 166, 176 L’incoronazione di Popped, 34, 37, 42-43

Berlioz, Hector, 245, 253, 295 La prosperita infelice di Giulio Cesare

Bertolucci, Bernardo, 282-287 dittatore, 40

The Spider’s Strategem, 277, 278, 282-287 Bussani, Prancésco

Bertrand, Paul, 123 Antonino e Pompeiano, 42, 43, 51

Bianchi, A.E., 208 Bussotti, Sylvano, 273 Bianconi, Lorenzo, 17, 135 Byron, Lord, 87 Bianconi, Lorenzo and Giorgio Pestelli

Opera Production and its Resources, 17 Calhoun, Craig, 7, 351

Bizet, Georges, 252, 253, 339, Cambert, Robert

341 La Pastorale d’Issy, 73

Carmen, 259, 264, 339 Les Peines et les plaisirs de VAmour, 84 Blacking, John, 330, 331, 345, 347 Pomone, 84 Blasetti, Alessandro, 271-272 Cambridge Opera Journal, 5 Bloc National, 116, 118, 317, 326 Cammarano, Salvadore, 110, 185, 186-189,

Blum, Léon, 125 193, 236

Boito, Camillo Campistron, Jean Galbert de

Senso, 279 Acis et Galatée, 84 Bokina, John Campra, André

Opera and Politics: From Monteverdi to Le Carnaval de Venise, 84

Henze, 301 L’Europe galante, 82

Boretti, Giovanni Les Fétes vénitiennes, 85 Claudio Cesare, 41, 43 Fragments de M. de Lully, 84

Borghi, Giovanni Battista Idoménée, 86

Olimpiade, 142 Canteloube, Joseph

Borodin, Alexander, 255 Le Mas, 123, 319 Boschot, Adolphe, 119 Vercingétorix, 124

Bossuet, Jacques-Benigne, 83 Cantillon, Richard, 164

Bouilly, Jean-Nicolas, 98 Capitelli, Luigi, 95 Boulez, Pierre, 339, 359 Caracalla, Antoninus, 43

Index | 397 Carcano, Giulio, 224 Commedia dell’arte, 51 Carlo Alberto, King of Sardinia, 197, Contralto voice, 96

201-202, 207, 238 Cornali, Pietro, 229, 231

Carnesecchi, Riccardo, 232 Canto degli italiani, 226-228

Carré, Albert, 249-250 Corneille, Pierre

Carreras, José, xxii Cinna, 299

Cartel des Gauches, 122, 127 Discours de Vutilité et des parties du poéme

Casella, Alfredo, 359 dramatique, 85

Castrati, 32, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 97, 98, Corradi, Giulio Cesare 102, 103-104, 106, 108, 109, I49, 153, Il Nerone, 38, 42, 46, 47-48

308 Cortesi, Carolina, 89, 99

Cavour, Count Camillo Benso di, 181 Cowper, Lord George, 158

Celletti, Rodolfo, 109 Croce, Benedetto, 280 Censorship, 181, 184, 199-200, 228-229 Crosten, William, 345 Chabrier, Emmanuel, 253, 357

Gwendoline, 260 Dadaism, 321

Chailly, Riccardo, 238 Dallapiccola, Luigi, 273 Charle, Christophe, 136, 176, 356, 357, 358 Dalle Vacche, Angela, 280, 281

Charles II, King of England, 166 Dalman-Naldi, Adelina, 97~98 Charpentier, Gustave, 253, 265 Dance, see also ballet, comédie-ballet, 37,

Louise, 15-16, 261 53-54, 57-58, 60, 61-63, 65, 66, 68, 69, Charpentier, Marc-Antoine 70, 71, 74, 80, 82, 85 Le Malade imaginaire, 84 Danchet, Antoine

Meédee, 86 Fragments de M. de Lully, 84

Chartier, Roger, 6, 312-313 Idoménée, 86

Chatelet, Théatre du (Paris), 247 Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 299

Chausson, Ernst, 357 Darnton, Robert, 6

Cherubini, Luigi, 161, 356 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 6

Chiossone Debord, Guy, 83

Canto degli italiani, 226-228 Debussy, Claude, 129, 262, 339, 342, 358

Cinque giornate (Milan 1848), 181, 183, 204, Pelléas et Mélisande, 260, 261, 265, 358

206-207, 223, 238 Delannoy, Marcel

Clément, Catherine Le Poirier de misére, 122-123, 319 Opera, or the Undoing of Women, 14 De Laurentiis, Dino, 273

Clément, Etienne Delibes, Léo, 253, 254, 264 Vercingétorix, 124 Jean de Nivelle, 260 Clément, Félix, 340-341 Lakmé, 254, 260 Coccia, Carlo, 231 Dell’Abatte, Niccold, 50 Cocteau, Jean, 318 DeMille, Cecil B., 273

Coeuroy, André Denis, Maurice, 118 Dictionnaire critique de la musique ancienne Dent, Edward J., 297

et moderne, 341 Derrida, Jacques, 312, 322, 324 Cohen, Gustave, 116 De Sanctis, Francesco, 267

Coke, Lady Mary, 171 Desmarest, Henry

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 176 Vénus et Adonis, 86

Colette, 125, 127 Destouches, André Cardinal Comédie-ballet, 76, 84, 85 Callirhoé, 86

Comédie Francaise, 250 Issé, 84, 86

398 | Index Destouches, Philippe Néricault Film/ Cinema, 269, 271-272, 273, 278, 281,

Les Amours de Ragonde, 77 2.96, 309, 348, 359 Dezarnaud, Robert, 128 Flaubert, Gustave, 304, 346, 353

358 Florence, 158

D’Indy, Vincent, 121, 123, 124, 126-127, 357, L’Education sentimentale, 304

La Légende de Saint Christophe, 116-119, Forzano, Giovacchino, 273-274, 276

I2I, 126, 130, 319 Foucault, Michel, 6, 8, 10, 196, 292, 303, 304,

Dio Cassius, 41 312, 313, 314, 324, 325 Divertissement, 54, 55-56, 57, 64, 65, 66, 67, The Order of Things, 303

68, 69, 70, 76, 82, 351 Francesco Lucca, publishers, 206, 208

Dorrie, Doris, 287 Frankfurt School, 4 Domingo, Placido, xxii Freemasonry, 145

Donizetti, Gaetano, 88, 91, 101, 148, 161, French Revolution, 6, 17, 30-31, 41, 87, 92,

182, 231, 273, 358 144, 243, 260

Belisario, 193-194 Freud, Sigmund, 285, 286 Il castello di Kenilworth, 113 Moses and Monotheism, 277-278

Chiara e Serafina, 112 Fulcher, Jane, 15-16, 32-33, 175, 260, Il diluvio universale, 145 292-293, 304, 345, 349, 351, 356, 358

L’esule di Roma, 113 French Cultural Politics, 15

Il paria, 113 French Grand Opera, 5

Poliuto, 229, 230 Fusconi, Giovanni Battista Dreyfus Affair, 117, 119, 124, 260, 261, 318, Amore inamorata, 46, 51 326

Dufourcg, Norbert Gallet, Louis La Musique des origines a nos jours, 340 Patrie, 264

Dufresny, Charles, 167 Gallini, Sir Andrew, 172 Dumesnil, René, 120 Galuppi, Baldassarre, composer, 150

Durey, Louis, 320 L’Arcadia in Brenta, 150, 157 Durkheim, Emile, 325, 334, 347 Arcifanfano re de’matti, 150 18BL, theatrical spectacle, 271-272, Il filosofo di campagna, 150

276 Gard, Roger Martin du, 119 Garfinkel, Harold, 331

English Civil War, 166 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 197 Ernst August, Duke of Hannover, 41, 51 Gazzaniga, Giuseppe

Ethnomusicology, 11 Don Giovanni, 150, 153

Euripides Geertz, Clifford, 7, 8, 312, 314

Alcestis, 38,55 Georg Ludwig, Duke of Hannover, 41 Gerhard, Anselm, 346

Fano, 142 Gheon, Henri, 116

Fascism, Italian, 137, 268-269, 270-272, 273, Giannone, Pietro, 145

274-275, 276, 278, 281, 282-283, 286, Gilbert, Gabriel

359 Les Peines et les plaisirs de ’Amour, 84

Fauquet, Joél-Marie, 348 Gilbert, W'S., 251 Fauré, Gabriel, 314~315, 316-319, 322 Gille, Philippe

Requiem, 316, 317 Manon, 264 Feminism, 12 Gilson, Etienne, 116 Ferdinand II, King of the Two Sicilies, 202 Giordano, Umberto, 255, 260, 273

Ferdinand IV, King of Naples, 144-148 Andrea Chenier, 257

Index | 399

Fedora, 257 Messiah, 158

Giovanni Canti, publishers, 208 Serse, 105, 114

Gisberti, Domenic Hanning, B.R.

Caligula delirante, 51 Concise History of Western Music, 341

Glass, Philip, 362 Harewood, Lord, 349

Glixon, Beth and Jonathan, 354 Harris-Warrick, Rebecca, 30, 351 Inventing the Business of Opera, 17 Haskell, Francis, 336-337, 339, 349 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 168, 299, 355, Hedges, Inez, 321

356 Hegel, G.W.E, 323 Iphigénie en Aulide, 295 Heller, Wendy, 31, 354 Iphigénie en Tauride, 298 Hennion, Antoine, 2.93, 359

Orfeo ed Euridice, 295 Henze, Hans Werner, 359 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 145 Herodotus, 41

Goldoni, Carlo, 150 Hindemith, Paul, 321 L’Arcadia in Brenta, 150, 157 Hin und Zuriick, 321 Arcifanfano re de’ matti, 150 History / Historians, 2, 3-4, 5-6, 10, I1, 12, 13, Il filosofo di campagna, 150 15-16, 17, 138, 139, 302, 312-313, 339, 351

Gondinet, Edmond, 264 Hitler, Adolf, 271

Gossett, Philip, 112, 136-137 Holmes, William, 354 , Gozzi, Carlo Honegger, Arthur, 320 Turandot, 275 Hue, Georges Gounod, Charles, 253, 339, 341 Dans Vombre de la cathédrale, 121-122, 319

Cing-Mars, 260 Huebner, Steven, 346, 358 Faust, 295, 339, 356 Hugo, Victor, 87 Polyeucte, 260 Humperdinck, Engelbert, 255, 256 Roméo et Juliette, 356 Hansel und Gretel, 256

Gramsci, Antonio, 267-268, 278, 280, 281, Hunt, Lynn, 6

282 Hutcheon, Linda and Michael

Gregorian chant, 117 Opera: Desire, Disease, Death, 301 Gregory XVI, 201

Griffiths, D.W., 273 Ilaria, Francesco Guglielmi, Pietro Alessandro Inno nazionale dedicato alla Legione civica

Debora e Sisara, 145 romana mobilizzata, 223

Guidi, Francesco Impresarios, 135, 138

Inno subalpino, 201 Intermezzo, 139, 149, 150 Guiraud, Ernest, 253 Izzo, Francesco, 231 Piccolino, 264

Jauss, Hans, 348

Habermas, Jiirgen, 167 Jazz, 125, 126, 131, 343

“Habitus”, 263 Johann Friedrich, Duke of Hannover, 41, 51

Hadlock, Heather, 109 Johnson, James

Halévy, Jacques Fromental, 340, 341, 356 Listening in Paris, 16

La Juive, 108, 340 Johnson, Victoria, 334, 351, 352 Halévy, Ludovic Jonciéres, Victorin, 245, 247, 253, 258, 263

Carmen, 264 Dmitri, 258, 260

Handel, George Frideric, 53, 144, 174-175, Joseph II, Emperor of Austria, 296, 297

306-307, 309, 310 Journal des Luxus und der Mode, 160, 162-163

Alcina, 105, 114 Justin, 41

400 | Index Kerman, Joseph, 35, 305 Opera in History, 5, 25 Contemplating Music, 10 Lipparini, Caterina, 89, 95 Opera as Drama, 14, 18, 302-303 Lippmann, Friedrich, 234 King’s Theatre (London), 171, 176 Literary Criticism /Studies, 2, 3, 4,5, 8, 10, Kintzler, Catherine, 29-30, 351, 355 II, 12, 13, 14, 25, 138, 291, 303, 351

Koechlin, Charles, 320 Livorno, 140-141 Koestenbaum, Wayne, 303 Livy

The Queen’s Throat, 14, 303 Roman Histories, 39

Kolker, Robert, 285, 286 Loewenberg, Alfred, 244 Korngold, Erich Wolfgang, 359 London, 160-162, 164-165, 166-176

Kracauer, Siegfried, 345 London und Paris, 160, 161-162, 165

Kramer, Lawrence Louis XIV, 57-58, 60, 69, 166, 169, 299, 306,

II Louis XV, 166

Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 338, 3.43

Kroll Opera (Berlin), 123 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 54, 67, 68, 71, 73, 78, 166, 295, 351, 355

La Barre, Michel de Acis et Galatée, 71, 84

La Vénitienne, 85 Alceste, 30, 54, 55, 56-57, 67, 69, 70, 71, 8I Lacombe, Hervé, 349 Armide, 30, 54, 65-67, 68, 69, 71 La Fenice (Venice), 89, 91, I10, 193, 279 AtyS, 30, 54, 55, 58-63, 64, 67, 69, 71

Lafont, Joseph de Bellérophon, 68, 174

Les Fétes de Thalie, 77 Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, 84, 299

Lalo, Edouard, 253 Cadmus et Hermione, 73

Le Roy d’Ys, 260 Les Facheux, 84

Lalo, Pierre, 123 Les Fétes de ’ Amour et de Bacchus, 84 La Motte, Antoine Houdar de Persée, 68, 71

L’Europe galante, 82 Phaéton, 71

Issé, 84, 86 Roland, 71

La Vénitienne, 85 Thésée, 86 La Scala (Milan), 89, 91, 96, 110, 112, 113, 114,

184, 251, 257, 260, 270, 273, 274 Magazzari, Gaetano, 197, 200-204, 205, 229,

Latilla, Gaetano 230, 231, 238-239

La finta cameriera, 150 L’amnistia data dal sommo Pio IX, 200—201

Latour, Bruno, 346 Inno guerriero italiano, 203-204

Leclair, Jean-Marie Inno siciliano, 202-203

Scylla et Glaucus, 84 Inno subalpino, 201-202

Lee, Sung Sook, xxviii Il primo giorno dell’anno, 200 Léon, Paul, 315, 316, 326 Magritte, René, 286 Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 255 Mahler, Gustav; 343 Leppert, Richard and Susan McClary Malherbe, Henry, 127

Music and Society, to Malpiero, Gian Francesco, 359 Levarie, Siegmund, 302 Mameli, Goffredo, 185, 237 “Les Six,” 320-321, 322 “Fratelli d’Italia,” 2.31

Limousin, Jean “Suona la tromba,” 189-194 Le Poirier de misére, 12.2 Manet, Edouard, 353

Lindenberger, Herbert, 25, 291-292, 293, Manna, Ruggero, 208

351, 352 Manzoni, Alessandro

Opera: The Extravagant Art, 25 Marzo 1821, 195

Index | 401 Marcus, Millicent, 281 Mérimée, Prosper, 264 Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples, 144, 145 Mermet, Auguste

Maria Teresa, Empress of Austria, 145 Jeanne d’Arc, 260

Marin, Louis, 29 Messager, André, 129 Mariotte, Antoine Messiaen, Olivier Salomé, 118 Saint Francois d’Assise, 309

Maritain, Jacques Metastasio, Pietro, 92, 111, 138, 144, 149 Art et scholastique, 116 Alessandro nell’India, 143 Marotta, Alessandro Metropolitan Opera (New York), 256,

Ai voluntarj Romani, 208 2.74

Marxism, 6, 7, 20, 324, 335 Meucci, Filippo Mascagni, Pietro, 255, 270, 273 Inno guerriero italiano, 203

Cavalleria rusticana, 256 Il primo giorno dell’anno, 200 Mascardi, Agostino, 40 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 88-92, 94-109, 117, Dell’arte istorica, 39, 43 339, 340, 341, 342, 349, 356, 357, 358

Massé, Victor, 253 L’Africaine, 88, 107

Massenet, Jules, 127, 247, 252, 253, 254, 339, Il crociato in Egitto, 89, 92, 101, 102, 112

341, 342, 349, 358 Emma di Resburgo, 89, 92, 98-99, 112

Le Cid, 260 L’esule di Granata, 89, 92, 100—102, III,

Hérodiade, 247 112, 113

Manon, 260, 264, 358 Les Huguenots, 88, 107, 340 La Navarraise, 247 Margherita d’Anjou, 89, 92, 99-100, 113

Le Roi de Lahore, 260 Le Prophete, 88, 107

Werther, 260 Robert le diable, 88, 107

Matthey, Carlo Romilda e Costanza, 89, 92, 94-95, 96, 99, La partenza per Lombardia: canto guerriero, IOI, 111

225 Semiramide riconosciuta, 89, 92, 95-98, 99,

Mayr, Giovanni Simone IOI, 102, III, 112, 114

Atalia, 145 Mezzo-soprano voice, 96, 99, 112 Medea in Corinto, 110 Michiele, Pietro

La rosa bianca e la rosa rossa, 91, 110 Amore inamorato, 51

Mazarin, Cardinal, 73 Milhaud, Darius, 320, 321-322 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 136, 189-190, 191-192, L’Abandon d’Ariane, 327

231 La Délivrance de Thésée, 327

Filosofia della musica, 182-183 L’Enlevement d’Europe, 321-322 Istruzione generale per gli affratellati nella Minato, Nicol6d, 38

Giovine Italia, 195 Pompeo Magno, 40

McClary, Susan, 14, 16 Modena, Duchy of, 141 Feminine Endings, 10 Modernism, 332, 333, 338, 339, 342, 343,

Medici Family, 140 359 Meilhac, Henri Moliére

Carmen, 264 Amphitryon, 84 Menander, 77 Les Facheux, 84

Manon, 264 Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, 84

Menotti, Gian Carlo, 269 Le Malade imaginaire, 84 Tamu-Tamu, xxvii, xxviii Montéclair, Michel Pignolet de

Mercadante, Saverio, 231 Jephté, 82

Il giuramento, 184 Monterosso, Raffaello, 223, 233

402 | Index Monteverdi, Claudio, 268 175, 198, 243, 245, 246, 248-249, 254, L’incoronazione di Popped, 34, 37, 42-43, 47 2.57, 258, 263, 264, 315, 355-357

L’Orfeo, 303 Opera buffa, 135, 139, 148-156, 231 Morandi, Rosa, 89, 99, I12 Opéra-Comique (Paris), 122, 127, 129, 243,

Mouret, Jean 245, 246, 248, 249, 255, 256, 264, 265, Les Amours de Ragonde, 77 357, 358

Les Fétes de Thalie, 77 Opéra National Populaire, 247 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 139, 153, 161, Opera semiseria, 94

341 Opera seria, 93, 94, 148-149, 150, 296, 297,

Betulia liberata, 158 303, 308

La clemenza di Tito, 299 Orlandini, Giuseppe Maria Don Giovanni, 150, 153, 295, 356 Serpilla e Bacocco, 150 Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, 296-301,

304, 310 Pacini, Giovanni, 231

La finta semplice, 153 Painlevé, Paul, 125

Idomeneo, 296 Paisiello, Giovanni, 139 Le nozze di Figaro, 161 Paladilhe, Emile, 253

Sonata in A major K., 298 Patrie, 264

Die Zauberfléte, 161, 299 Papal States, 141-142, 201 “Musicalization,” 333-334, 345 Paris, 160-162, 164-165, 166—176 Musicology/Musicologists, 2-3, 5, 9-13, 14, Parker, Roger, 183-185, 232, 233, 234 15, 17, 138, 139, 156, 292, 293, 301-302, Pastorale, 75~77, 78, 84 305-306, 312, 325, 330, 334, 335, 348, 351 Pauls, Birgit, 232, 233

Mussolini, Benito, 121, 269-270, 271, Pavarotti, Luciano

274-275, 283, 284, 286 Pécour, Guillaume-Louis, 71

Mussorgsky, Modest, 255 Pellegrin, Simon-Joseph

Myslivecek, Josef Hippolyte et Aricie, 80

Isacco, 158 Jepthé, 82

Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 139, 153

Nagano, Kent, 287 La serva padrona, 150, 153

Naples, 144-148 Peri, Jacobo

Natalucci, Tiberio, 197, 205 L’Euridice, 303 Inni populari ad onore dell’immortale Pio IX, Perrin, Pierre

199-200 La Pastorale d’Issy, 73 Nero, 47 Pomone, 84 New Criticism, 8—9, 303 Pestelli, Giorgio, 17, 135 New Cultural History, 6, 8, 11-12, 13, 15-16 Piave, Francesco Maria, 184, 185, 186, 236

New Historicism, 8, 11, 291, 303 Piccinni, Niccolo, 168, 356

Nicole, Pierre, 83 Piperno, Franco, 135, 354 Nora, Pierre, 6, 326 Pirrotta, Nino, 39

Novaro, Michele Pisaroni, Rosamunda, 89, 95, 96, IOI, III,

“Fratelli d'Italia,” 232 112, 114

Pius IX, 196, 197-201, 202, 204—205,

Offenbach, Jacques, 127, 253, 263, 358 206-207, 223, 238 Les Contes d’Hoffmann, 260 Pizzetti, Ildebrando, 273, 359 Opéra (Paris), see also Académie royale de la Plautus, 51, 77 musique, 17, 31, 54, 69, 70, 108, II5—-116, Political Science, 352

122, 123, 124, 130, 162, 166, 169, I7I, Pollarolo, Carlo Francesco, 68

Index | 403

Pougin, Arthur, 233 Sigurd, 258, 260 Poulenc, Francis, 320 Ricci, Federico, 231 Pountney, David, 350 Ricci, Luigi, 231

Powers, Harold, 272-273, 275, 276 Ricordi, publishers, 111, 112, 113, 184, 185,

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 357 189, I90, 199, 200, 204, 205, 207-223,

Prussia, 166 229, 230, 234, 238, 240

Public Sphere, 167-168 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 255 Puccini, Giacomo, 127, 137, 181, 232, 255, The Tsar’s Bride, 257

268, 270, 273, 274-275, 276, 287, Ristorini family, 150

358-359 Robinson, Paul, 303

La Bohéme, 257, 261 Opera and Ideas, 301, 303 Madama Butterfly, 268 Romani, Felice, 89, 92, 110, I12, 113 Manon Lescaut, 257 Romanticism, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 106, 109

Tosca, 268 Ronchetti-Monteviti, Stefano, 224-225, 240 Turandot, 137, 268, 270, 272-276 Ronetti, Gaetano L’amnistia data dal sommo Pio IX, 200

Quaranta, Costantino, 208 Rosand, Ellen, 36, 37

Queer theory, 98 Rosand, David, 35

Querelle des Bouffons, 168, 339, 355 Rosenthal, Manuel, 125 Quinault, Philippe, 54, 57, 67, 73, 355 Rosselli, John, 109, 135, 136, 138, 182, 233, 354

Armide, 65 Music and Musicians in Nineteenth-Century

Bellérophon, 174 Italy, 17

Cadmus et Hermione, 73 The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to

Les Fétes de ’ Amour et de Bacchus, 84 Verdi, 16, 135

Thésée, 86 Singers of Italian Opera, 17, 136 Rossellini, Roberto, 280

Rabaud, Henri Rossi, Gaetano, 89, 92, 98, IIo, III, 112 Le Miracle des loups, 122 Rossini, Gioachino, 88, 91, 112, 139, 153, 161,

Racine, Jean 182, 197, 231, 273, 356, 358 Phédre, 79, 80 Adelaide di Borgogna, 110 Radiciotti, Giuseppe, 223 Adina, 110 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 68, 351, 355 Armida, 92, I10

Les Boréades, 81 Aureliano in Palmira, 91 Hippolyte et Aricie, 80, 81, 82 Il barbiere di Siviglia, 110

Ransom, John Crowe, 8 Bianca e Falliero, 96, 101, 110, III, I12, 113,

Ravel, Maurice, 123, 124, 320, 321 114 L’Enfant et les sortiléges, 115, 125-128, 305, La cambiale di matrimonio, 112

320 Cantata in onore del Sommo Pontefice Pio

Le Tombeau de Couperin, 127 Nono, 197-199, 200, 223

Regietheater, 352, 360 La cenerentola, 110, 153

Reggio Emilia, 141 Le Comte Ory, 2.45

Renard, Jean-Francois La donna del lago, 101, 110, 111, 114, 205,

Le Carnaval de Venise, 84 206, 238, 241

“Republic of Letters,” 165 Eduardo e Cristina, 99, 110, 112 Rescue operas, 95, IIO—III Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra, 91, 110

Respighi, Ottorino, 359 Ermione, 101, 110, I14

Revel, Jacques, 6 La gazza ladra, 110 Reyer, Ernest, 253, 258 La gazzetta, 110

404 | Index Rossini, Gioachino (cont.) Satie, Erik, 320, 321, 322 Grido di esultazione riconoscente al Sommo Parade, 322

Pontefice Pio IX, 197, 205, 206 Sawall, Michael, 233

Guillaume Tell, 187, 241 Scarlatti, Alessandro, 139 Inno nazionale dedicato alla Legione civica Schiller, Friedrich, 258

romana mobilizzata, 223-224 Schmitt, Florent

L’italiana in Algeri, 99 La Tragédie de Salomé, 118 Maometto II, 101, 110, 113-114 Schnapp, Jeffrey, 270-272 Matilde di Shabran, 99, 110 Schoenberg, Arnold, 307, 323, 359 Mose in Egitto, 101, 110, 145, 148 Erwartung, 359

Otello, 99, 110 Moses und Aron, 295, 359

Ricciardo e Zoraide, 101, I10 Schola Cantorum, 117, 118, I126—127 Semiramide, 92, 101, 102, IIO, III Schreker, Franz, 359

Le Siége de Corinthe, 198, 223 Scott, Sir Walter, 87 Tancredi, 91, 92, 99, IOI, III, 241 Scribe, Eugéne, 108, 263, 340, 348

Zelmira, 110 Selli, Prospero, 229, 231 Rouché, Jacques, 115-116, 118, 119, 130 Medea in Corinto, 226

Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste La partenza per Lombardia: canto guerriero,

Venus et Adonis, 86 226

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 83 Ricciarda, 22.6

Roussel, Albert, 320 Senigallia, 141

Roy, Pierre-Charles Shakespeare, William, 3

Callirhoé, 86 Sibelius, Jan, 3.43 Rudé, Georges, 6 Simoni, Renato Rubinstein, Nikolai, 255 Siena, 143

Turandot, 276

Sacchini, Antonio, 356 Singspiel, 296, 297, 298, 300

Sacrati, Francesco Skocpol, Theda, 7

Bellerofonte, 41 Smart, Mary Ann, 232

Sacred opera, 135, 139, 144-148 Soboul, Albert, 6

Said, Edward, 15, 25 Sociology /Sociologists, 2, 4,5, 7-8, 10, II, Culture and Imperialism, 25 12, 16, 20, 138, 293, 312, 331, 332, 334,

Orientalism, 25, 300 335; 344, 345, 347, 351, 352 Saint-Saéns, Camille, 253, 254, 258, 315, 316, Solie, Ruth

339, 341, 349 Musicology and Difference, 11

Etienne Marcel, 2.47 Somma, Antonio, 193, 236

Henry, 116, 258 Re Lear, 193

La Princesse jaune, 2.60 Soprano voice, 94, 96, 104, 109, III, 112 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 357 Spectacle, 79, 268, 269, 273, 276, 286

Salieri, Antonio, 356 Stamatov, Peter, 137

Sardou, Victorien, 257, 264 Steinberg, Michael, 29, 137, 359

Patrie, 264 Stephanie, Gottlob, 297, 299 Medonte, 143 Stendhal, 112, 350 Sartorio, Antonio Sterbini, Pietro

Sarti, Giuseppe Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne, 137, 359 Antonino e Pompeiano, 42 Inno siciliano, 202

L’ Orfeo, 68 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 359

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 323 Strauss, Richard

Index | 405 Elektra, 359 268, 270, 273, 275, 276, 277, 278, 280,

Der Rosenkavalier, 359 284, 286, 288, 342, 349, 358 , Suetonius, 41 Attila, 184, 185, 196, 234, 288 ; Stravinsky, Igor, 314, 321, 322, 323 Aida, 108, 245, 254, 356

Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 251 Un ballo in maschera, 283, 285, 288

La battaglia di Legnano, 181, 185, 186-189,

Tacitus, Cornelius, 37, 41, 51 I9I, 195, 208, 226, 231

Annals, 44 Il corsaro, 185

Tailleferre, Germaine, 320 Don Carlos, 108, 349

Tasso, Torquato Ernani, 184, 226, 231, 238, 288 Gerusalemme liberate, 65 Falstaff, 254, 268

Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 255, 257 I lombardi alla prima crociata, 184, 185, 231, Teatro San Carlo (Naples), 91, 110, 114, 145, 234

22.6, 308 Luisa Miller, 236

Tenor voice, 32, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, I masnadieri, 189, 234

102, 104, 106, 107 Macbeth, 184, 288

Théatre des Champs Elysées, 247 Nabucco, 145, 181, 183, 184, 185, 195, 229,

Théatre Italien (Paris), 247, 254 231, 234, 235 Théatre Lyrique (Paris), 247, 249 Otello, 254, 268, 356

Thomas, Ambroise Re Lear, 193

Hamlet, 356 Requiem, 310

Thompson, E.P,, 6 Rigoletto, 54, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 288,

Till, Nicholas, 298 356

Tilly, Charles, 7 Simon Boccanegra, 229

Tomlinson, Gary, 325 “Suona la tromba,” 189-194 Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera, 301, La traviata, 304-305

303 Il trovatore, 236, 279, 281, 288, 309

Toscanini, Arturo, 268, 273, 274, 276, I vespri siciliani, 186, 239

2.87 Verismo, 256, 268

Tosi, Adelaide, 1o1, 113 Versailles Treaty, 315

Tourrasse, André Vichy Regime, 123, 129 Le Poirier de misére, 122 Victor Emanuel II, King of Sardinia and of Tragédie lyrique, 17, 30, 73-75, 77-78, 79-80, Italy, 197

82, 83, 84, 355 Vienna, I71, 176

Travesti roles/singers, 32, 87, 89, 91, 92, 93, Vienna State Opera, 251, 257 94, 96-98, 99, 100, IOI, 102—103, 109, Virgil

113, 114 Aeneid, 39

Treitler, Leo, 10 Georgics, 124 “Turns,” Cultural and Historical, 2,5, 13, 14, Visconti, Luchino, 280-282

15, 17, 351, 352, 361 Senso, 277, 278-282 Tuscany, Grand Duchy of, 140 Vogler, Abbé Georg Joseph, 90 Vuillermoz, Emile, 340 Ungarelli, Rosa, 150 Wagener, Richard, 120, 121, 131, 243, 244, 251,

Valli, Alida, 278 255, 255, 257, 258-2590, 261, 262, 271,

Velluti, Giambattista, 89, 91, 102, 112 2.95, 308, 310, 338, 339, 341, 342, 344, Verdi, Giuseppe, 136, 148, 229, 230, 231-232, 349, 357, 358, 359 234, 236, 237, 238, 239, 244, 254, 255, Der fliegende Hollander, 357

406 | Index Wagner, Richard (cont.) Weber, Max, 4, 346 Gotterddmmerung, 305 Weber, William, 3, 17, 136, 355

Parsifal, 310 Weill, Kurt

Der Ring des Nibelungen, 117 Mahagonny Songspiel, 321

Tannhduser, 2.43 Weimar, 160

Walker, Frank, 182, 233 Weinstock, Herbert, 223 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 165 Williams, Raymond, to, 292, 304 Warren, Robert Penn, 8

Weaver, William, 272 Zandonai, Riccardo, 273 Weber, Carl Maria von, 90-110, 112, 161 Zeffirelli, Franco, 273, 274

Die Drei Pintos, 110 Ziani, Marco

Euryanthe, 110 Alessandro Magno in Sidonia, 46-47 Der Freischiitz, 90, 91, I10, 161 Zimmermann, Bernd Alois, 359

Oberon, 110 Zola, Emile, 250, 261, 265