1.1 A Eulogy for Italian Opera
On November 29, 1924, Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924)—composer of world-renowned operas and heir to a long tradition of Italian masters—died, leaving his final work incomplete. This opera, Turandot, portrays the turbulent romance between a reluctant Chinese princess and her suitor, Prince Calaf, who must solve three riddles to win her hand. Upon Puccini’s death, another composer, Franco Alfano (1875–1954), completed the score, but when Arturo Toscanini (1867–1957) conducted the première of Turandot he decided to remain faithful to the original, ignoring the posthumous modifications and stopping abruptly at the point where Puccini had ceased to write. This performance, at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala (April 25, 1926), acquired a secondary significance in light of the composer’s death. William Weaver, renowned critic and translator of dozens of Italian masterpieces, vividly described that evening and underscored what Toscanini’s gesture came to symbolize for the history of Italian opera:
Toscanini , that is, presided over the funeral of what Weaver defined as the “Golden Age” of Italian opera, a period that spans from Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868) to Puccini himself, in which opera had become nearly synonymous throughout the world with Italian culture. As the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) put it, to Russian ears the sound of the Italian language was indistinguishable from the sounds of opera.2On that opening night at La Scala , Alfano’s careful patchwork was not heard. Before the glittering audience . . . as he reached the conclusion of Liù’s death scene, Toscanini laid down his baton and said, in effect . . . ‘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.1
The association is not undeserved. The beginnings of opera are rooted in the experimentations of a group of Italian scholars, artists, and scientists—the Camerata de’ Bardi (or the Florentine Camerata)—who in late sixteenth-century Florence endeavored to create a new art form that would unite others (music, poetry, theater, and dance) in an attempt to revive ancient Greek tragedy.3 A few decades on, opera had become a popular form of entertainment in Venice, where the first theaters were built and the genre began to evolve from private court performances into an ever larger commercial enterprise, accessible to ever wider audiences.4 In the centuries that followed, opera’s connection to Italy became solidified as it grew into the peninsula’s most recognizable genre, one that synthesized both the region’s genius and its many contradictions. Musicologist Aldo Nicastro has argued that even before Italy’s political unification, opera and the cultural currency it carried anticipated the idea of an Italian nation.5 Music critic Bruno Barilli has added to this thesis by focusing on Giuseppe Verdi and his hometown Parma, highlighting the extent to which opera was embedded in the city’s social fabric. In Barilli’s book, Il paese del melodramma, the word “paese” initially denotes the “town” of Parma, but the word can also mean “country,” and indeed comes to signify the Italian nation itself, whose iconic sound was the music of its operas.6
William Ashbrook and Harold Powers, in reflecting on Weaver’s account of Turandot’s premiere, concur that Puccini’s death marked the endpoint of the most successful period of Italian opera, but disagree that this meant the death of the genre itself.7 Many other composers, of course, were active after Puccini, and operas continue to this day to be written and performed across the world. But what vanished with Puccini’s death was opera’s cultural supremacy, the art form’s power to faithfully embody the character of a whole country. From that moment on, the prominence of opera as a major form of popular entertainment began to fade. Italian opera became an elitist genre in the works of new composers, while at the same time regressing into nostalgic re-enactments of past masterpieces for the enjoyment of connoisseurs and tourists. In sum, the high drama that surrounded Turandot’s premiere was eminently appropriate in hindsight.
The “death” of Italian opera was, however, a long process that in truth had begun years before. Scholars have debated the details of this decline. In Barilli’s view, it began with the death of Verdi and the de-popularization of the genre.8 David Kimbell, on the other hand, points to the effects of cosmopolitanism on Italian music in the early twentieth century.9 Kimbell, too, underscores the national character of the genre, but argues that it in turn succumbed under the pressure of other national traditions, resulting in a general desire for experimentation by new composers, eager to look abroad for inspiration.10 Mindful of Kimbell’s analysis, Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol reflects on the role played by the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century.11 The Italian Futurists, in their fervor to revolutionize all art, played a crucial role in casting doubt on the dignity and the intellectual value of Italian opera. In their first “Manifesto del Futurismo” (1909), they outlined their program for the destruction of museums, libraries, and academies.12 They cast these institutions as empty vestiges of a past that Italy had to leave behind in order to progress artistically and (in their view) morally. From such a viewpoint, Italian opera was an obvious target, thought of as a collection of “museum pieces” that ought to be done away with.13
Although the Futurists generally attacked all forms of convention in music,14 what they disliked about opera in particular was the cheap appeal to emotion: using triteness and cliché for popular appeal, using recycled themes and tropes to wring out formulaic emotional responses. The best-known Futurist, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), famously attacked the sentimentalism he felt had saturated Italian lyric poetry. In his early essay “Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna” (“Kill the Moonlight,” 1909), Marinetti urges his fellow “incendiary” poets to replace the worn-out conventions of contemporary poetry with accounts and commemorations of acts of fearless heroism. Composer and musicologist Francesco Balilla Pratella (1880–1955), in his “Manifesto dei musicisti futuristi” (“Manifesto of Futurist Musicians,” 1910), referred to opera librettos as “fetid cakes” and called Italian “melodramma” a “pesante e soffocante gozzo della nazione” (“heavy and suffocating crop of our country”). He derided the lack of innovation of contemporary Italian opera, in particular the “base, rickety, and vulgar operas of Giacomo Puccini.”15
The Futurist assault on Italian opera did not come only in the form of loud outcries in their manifestos—it also found its way into Fu...