Not without Madness

Perspectives on Opera

Fabrizio Della Seta, Mark Weir

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780226749143
• eBook ISBN: 9780226749167
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: European History

Opera often seems to arouse either irrational enthusiasm or visceral dislike. Such madness, as Goethe wrote, is indispensable in all theater, and yet in practice, sentiment and passion must be balanced by sense and reason. Exploring this tension between madness and reason, Not without Madness presents new analytical approaches to thinking about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera through the lenses of its historical and cultural contexts.

 

In these twelve essays, Fabrizio Della Seta explores the concept of opera as a dramatic event and an essential moment in the history of theater. Examining the meaning of opera and the devices that produce and transmit this meaning, he looks at the complex verbal, musical, and scenic mechanisms in parts of La sonnambula, Ernani, Aida, Le nozze di Figaro, Macbeth, and Il trovatore. He argues that approaches to the study of opera must address performance, interpretation, composition, reception, and cultural ramifications. Purely musical analysis does not make sense unless we take into account music's dramatic function. Containing many essays available for the first time in English, Not without Madness bridges recent divisions in opera studies and will attract musicologists, musicians, and opera lovers alike.

PART II

History & Criticism

7

Some Difficulties in the Historiography of Italian Opera

The historiography of Italian opera is particularly well suited to illustrating general problems in the field of music history and musicology. On the one hand, there is little doubt that Italian opera belongs fully in the canon, or one might say “museum,” of Western classical music; indeed, today’s opera houses surpass the concert hall in betraying that character of “museum piece” that some attribute to the tradition of classical music.¹ But it is also true that international musicology has only recently accepted Italian opera as unquestionably deserving of attention. Two reasons for this delay are clear enough and have been easily overcome, being linked to the history of musicology itself: the fact that the musical language of Italian opera diverged from the Austro-German tradition just when the latter was being taken as the paradigm for the nascent discipline of musicology; and the difficulty of grasping the dramaturgy of Italian opera in a cultural context molded by Wagnerian theory and practice (and in part by Shakespeare, Schiller, and so on).

Other reasons, however, are more deeply embedded and continue to operate even in an intellectual climate that is very different from that of traditional musicology. These include

1. the fact that opera is conditioned by extra-artistic factors

2. the multiple creative competencies involved in operatic production

3. the importance accorded to the moment of performance as opposed to the moment of composition, particularly as this involves the prominence given to singers

4. the possibility of moving an opera’s component parts around within the work itself, from one work to another, and indeed from an opera by one composer to that of another

5. the fact that in the history of Italian opera, conventions, shared codes, and repetitive formulas have often prevailed over the pursuit of innovation

These features were generally felt to clash with the classical-romantic idea of artistic creation, being scarcely compatible with such deep-rooted concepts as authorship, uniqueness of inspiration, and the organicity and architectonic character of the oeuvre. In addition an implicit idea of the “morality of art” may have played its part, for it is difficult to identify an overt morality in Italian opera. I hardly need recall how these presuppositions affected the mainstream musical historiography of the past, from Hermann Abert to Alfred Einstein and from Edward J. Dent to Donald J. Grout, nor do I need to stress their continued currency in recent general music histories, however valid these may be in other respects.² But it is important to observe the current attitude in the higher echelons of musicology.

Carl Dahlhaus is perhaps unique in German musicology for attempting to understand Italian opera within the frame of the broader European musical tradition. In the first pages of his Nineteenth-Century Music we read: “Italian opera of the nineteenth century represents a musical culture in its own aesthetic right and should not be measured against a concept of music drawn from Beethoven’s symphonies or Wagner’s music dramas.” This does not imply a value judgment, least of all a negative one. Indeed, we are immediately warned against concluding that “Rossini’s music is a product of genius ‘in its fashion’” with “the caveat that the ‘fashion’ it represents merits an inferior rung in the musical hierarchy.”³ It is nonetheless true that Dahlhaus’s discussions of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, and Meyerbeer all start from a comparison with the German tradition, especially with Wagner and Beethoven,⁴ and that this has led others to make the ungenerous but not entirely unjustified charge of “Germano-centrism.”⁵ However, it is not unusual to find distinguished Anglo-Saxon scholars also affirming the identity (and value) of Italian opera starting from the premise that it should not be judged according to the criteria used for “classical” music.⁶ In a fine book on Falstaff we read that as late as 1893, Verdi’s

criteria for determining success or failure were deeply rooted in the operatic culture in which he had matured. The chief standard, quite simply, was instant success at the box office. . . . The hope of creating masterpieces for posterity and the increasing suspicion of widespread public success (characteristic of the greatest German and Austrian composers throughout the century . . .) were alien ideas. . . . No evidence suggests that he actively sought a new form for Italian opera or aimed for philosophical truth or formal profundity. Instead, he wanted to produce a work whose musical and dramatic qualities would lead to a genuine, ongoing success in the practical theatre—not so much for the sake of his own pocket-book but for the sake of his reputation and that of the music of his country, ever more under attack by northern styles.⁷

We are not concerned here with the veracity or otherwise of these statements. What is important is to note that affirming the identity and value of an artistic phenomenon by saying what it is not means in some way defining it as diverging from a “core” culture. In other words, music historians tend to view Italian opera rather as ethnomusicologists and musical anthropologists approach other, non-Western musical cultures. We find surprising confirmation for this in the fact that the four criteria Harold Powers proposes for “ascribing canonical status to a musical practice without linking it to a work-concept”—skilled practitioners who have undergone lengthy training; a relationship with a tradition of music theory; the collocation of music making in a wider context of social and cultural practices; and a patron class that professes connoisseurship⁸—are all perfectly matched to the historical development of Italian opera.

Powers has made significant contributions to our understanding of the formal mechanisms governing nineteenth-century Italian opera, seen as sets of conventions shared by author and public⁹ in which variation on what is familiar counted for much more than the discovery of any new phenomenon, while the pace of change was extremely slow. It is well known that such features are typical of cultures in which nonwritten transmission prevails,¹⁰ and it has rightly been said that Powers looks at his object “with the estranging, and therefore perspicacious, glance of the ethnomusicologist.”¹¹ More recently, Martha Feldman has suggested an “anthropological” reading of eighteenth-century opera seria, centered on the spectator’s active participation in the “ritual” of operatic performance as a factor able to explain the compositional structure of the work.¹²

Even a scholar like Dahlhaus, who for all his wide-ranging interests never showed any particular interest in ethnomusicological issues, set up an opposition between text and event that is typical of multicultural thinking:

Beethoven’s symphonies represent inviolable musical “texts” whose meaning is to be deciphered with “exegetical” interpretations; a Rossini score, on the other hand, is a mere recipe for a performance, and it is the performance which forms the crucial aesthetic arbiter as the realization of a draft rather than an exegesis of a text. Rossini’s musical thought hinged on the performance as an event, not on the work as a text passed down and from time to time given acoustical “explication”; . . . Thus, Rossini’s docile attitude towards his singers was not evidence of aesthetic spinelessness, of a willingness to sacrifice the “authenticity” of his “text” to the “effect” of a performance, but rather a direct consequence of the view that the reality of music resides in its performance.¹³

Each of the positions I have referred to is valuable in enabling new perspectives on the object of enquiry and highlighting aspects that had not previously been considered, just as the confrontation between different disciplines always results in reciprocal enrichment. But there are drawbacks.

1. Viewing opera seria through an anthropological lens certainly exemplifies “finding musical documents to illustrate social structures and processes.” But such a reading disregards the problem of “establishing a relation between the aesthetic and the historical substance of works of music.”¹⁴ That is, the reading can tell us much about eighteenth-century society and mentality but little about why some operas were judged better than others and today are likely to be performed, recorded, enshrined in a critical edition—in short, why they continue to live through time. In his masterful synthesis of eighteenth-century Italian opera, Reinhard Strohm started from the premise that “we have to accept once and for all that eighteenth century opera is an artistic phenomenon that has become entirely alien to us.”¹⁵ Yet when he comes to discuss Pergolesi’s Olimpiade he maintains that we cannot pretend to respond to works of the past as if we did not know what has come since (for example, Gluck and Wagner); that it is a mistake to adopt a blanket approach to eighteenth-century operas, regarding them all as “equally good or bad;” and that it is “perhaps not impossible to retrieve something of the real fascination that true art must have exerted on artists and audiences of the day.”¹⁶ Strohm is perfectly right: the fact that we apply to works of the past judgments based on concepts dating from much later and relating to other types of music is neither a conceptual error nor a sign of cultural imperialism; it is the essence of our interest in the past and of the existence of a practice like musical historiography.

2. The dialectic between convention and innovation is fundamental to every artistic culture; Beethoven’s symphonies also presuppose and “make use of” conventions.¹⁷ But conversely, too much insistence on the pervasiveness of formal conventions in Italian opera risks obscuring those elements of originality that were attributed to certain composers not just a posteriori but also in their day.

3. The opposition between Beethoven’s symphonies as a work fixed in a written text and Rossini’s operas as a “possible model for performance,” the event constituting the musical reality, involves a historical simplification. On the one hand it obscures the importance of performance in the Austro-German tradition (how otherwise could one account for the solo concerto in the canon of “classical” music?), and on the other it ignores the fact that Rossini’s operas inaugurated a shift in the conception of Italian opera that by the end of the century involved the “monumentalization” of the repertory, with the text established by the composer coming to be considered as untouchable.¹⁸ It is surely significant that as early as the mid-1820s Ricordi planned to bring out a complete edition of Rossini’s operas in orchestral score. It did not materialize, and in the 1850s, with Rossini still alive and without obtaining his permission, Ricordi published the complete edition in vocal score. This was the first such series for an Italian composer, appearing in the same years that work began on the great editions of Bach and Handel. And to go back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a one-sided interpretation of opera as “event” or “non-opus” would overlook the centrality of the literary text, a core that existed in written form and was perfectly familiar to all the audience, each staging of which constituted a new realization.¹⁹

4. Denying the possibility of comparing works belonging to different musical cultures reveals the wish to establish a hierarchy among the cultures themselves and actually reinforces such a hierarchy.

5. The opposition between Italian opera and the German tradition as different cultures, each to be valued on its own merits, is dangerous because it casts doubt on the possibility of recognizing, in addition to the many and obvious differences, the resemblances, connections, and tradeoffs between them. The inevitable consequence is the concept of the noncontemporaneousness of the contemporary to which Dahlhaus returned more than once:

there is no inner coherence to be detected in the music of the 1850s and 1860s. . . . key musical phenomena of the time diverge so sharply that any history that wishes to rise above the level of mythology is forced to abandon its search for a formula expressing the i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Terminology
• Introduction
• I. Theory and Analysis
• II. History and Criticism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index