Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770-1830 9780520960060

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Simpson Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770–1830

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770–1830

Ellen Lockhart

university of california press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lockhart, Ellen, author. Title: Animation, plasticity, and music in Italy, 1770–1830 / Ellen Lockhart. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2017017413| isbn 9780520284432 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520960060 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Dramatic music—Italy—18th century. | Dramatic music—Italy—19th century. | Operas— Literary themes, motives. | Enlightenment—Italy— Influence. Classification: lcc ml1733.3 .l63 2017 | ddc 782.10945/09033—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017017413 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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To Roger Parker, and to my students, for giving me something to do that I love

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Introduction Attentive Statues Pimmalione Defining Italy in Haunted Rome Partial Animacy and Blind Listening in Napoleonic Italy Giuditta Pasta and the History of Musical Electrification Conclusion

Notes Bibliography List of Illustrations Index

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Acknowledgments

When I began this project, a beloved advisor suggested that dedication—a willingness to keep reading, writing, and listening late into the night and through the weekends—was what separated those doctoral students who secured tenure-track jobs from those who did not. That was in 2006. As anyone who has experienced the academic job market more recently can attest, this is surely no longer the case. The junior scholar today may hold nothing back in terms of intelligence or passion but still find himself confronting a relentless stream of rejections, not to mention patrolling embittered postings on job wikis, losing dream opportunities to inside candidates, and perhaps eventually undertaking the courses of therapy recommended by Karen Kelsky (author of The Professor Is In) to set in motion a move out of academia. I knew those desolate vistas for a long while and find them not easily forgotten. That I face them no longer is thanks to each one of the people listed here, and the experience of this uncertainty has lent my gratitude a permanent force, however formulaically it is expressed. I thank my advisor at Cornell University, Annette Richards, who inspired me by her magnificent example and oversaw the doctoral version of this book, and the other members of my dissertation committee, David Rosen, James Webster, and Rebecca Harris-Warrick. Emily Dolan let me move into her apartment; the other members of my cohort, Mark Ferraguto, Damien Mahiet, and Martin Küster, were faithful and generous interlocutors at all times. My gratitude also goes to the many dear ix

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friends I made in Ithaca—Gary Moulsdale, Monica Roundy, Emily Green, Catherine Mayes, Evan Cortens, Mathieu Langlois, Amanda Lalonde, Francesca Brittan, and others—who make even the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society feel like a kind of home. Above all there is Sezi Seskir, first a classmate, later a confidante, and now the most permanent of friends. Many have taken chances on me. Nicholas Mathew has been far kinder, and more persistently supportive, than almost anyone; he invited me to critique his book manuscript when I had none of my own (I am a little humbler now). James Davies constrained his cosmic imagination to linger in London for two more years so that we could make a book together. My gratitude also goes to Mary Ann Smart at UC Berkeley, who was equally kind in person and as an anonymous reviewer; to Emily Dolan, whose generous hand I have bitten any number of times; and to Arman Schwartz, Emanuele Senici, David Trippett, and Benjamin Walton. A grateful line to each of you, for choosing to work with me rather than with any number of scholars who may have been cleverer and prompter, would have turned this page into an unreadable catalog of inside jokes; but know that those quips are in my heart. My thanks to the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University, which was my home for three years; and to Susan Stewart, Mary Harper, Wendy Heller, and Scott Burnham. I am grateful for having met Saraswathi Shukla and Micaela Baranello, my colleagues in musicology, and above all Hannah Freed-Thall, a marvelous violinist and scholar of comparative literature. I encountered Hannah first as an intimidating fellow interviewee, but she later became a friend who always ran slowly enough so that I could keep up, lent me her car, and sat steadfastly with me during the early birth of my daughter. And then there is Anna Zayaruznaya, my woman of a Balzacian age (minus two or three years), who began at Princeton at the same time as me, and whose departure for Yale rendered my final year there a much bleaker one. At the University of Toronto, Dean Don MacLean was good enough to pretend that I had backed him into a corner, even though we both knew I had not; I will be the best, cheapest thing you ever did for the Faculty of Music. I look forward to going rapidly grey among my new colleagues and friends, including Sarah Gutsche-Miller, Sherry Lee, Ken MacLeod, Caryl Clark, Greg Johnson, Robin Elliott, Ryan McClelland, Steven Vande Moortele, Joshua Pilzer, Jeff Packman, and Farzaneh Hemmasi. It is a pleasure to work with you. I am also exceedingly grateful to my always-patient editors at the University of California Press,

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Mary Francis and Raina Polivka, as well as to Zuha Khan; to my copyeditor, Genevieve Thurston; and to the generous readers of this manuscript, for their comments and suggestions and for abandoning their anonymity, which made the final stage of revisions feel infinitely more humane. The characters in this book lived in perhaps the most temperate and lovely place in the world. By contrast, most of my life has been spent in Calgary, one of the world’s coldest cities, a stretch of suburban sprawl, big box stores, and strip malls on the Canadian prairie, and it is difficult to imagine that anywhere else will ever feel as much like home. My parents live there still, and none of this would have been possible without them; nor without my older sister, Julia, whose performances of Chopin, Mozart, and Beethoven gave me my first profound musical experiences (intensified as they were with jealousy) and whose effortless superiority as a musician led me to make music my vocation. My thanks also to my sisters Emily and Jessica, particularly for finding other things to do with their lives and for doing those things nearby me in Toronto. My thanks to Norbert, for marrying me, for supporting the writing of this book, and for composing new music of such compelling and austere beauty as to make me feel that the traditions whose history I study are alive still and must remain so. And finally, thanks to my toddler, Susanna, and to my newborn son Max: you have not made the process of writing this book any easier. I imagine you pulling it off the shelf decades in the future, when it is otherwise dustily discolored and forgotten, and thumbing to this familiar page. Do not read any further, my loves. Call me.

Introduction

There is little the sleuthing historian likes better than a trail of breadcrumbs. And since you are probably just such a historian, my book starts with just such a trail. In fairy tales, the device allows one to lead one’s pursuers from a familiar point of departure into unfamiliar terrain. In this case, the point of departure is German and symphonic, while the unfamiliar terrain is Italian, balletic, and theatrical: a stretch of abandoned ground that was once at the center of musical practice and aesthetic thought in the decades around 1800. Thus my first breadcrumb may be found at what is now one of musicology’s best-tended landmarks: the last movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 3 (“Eroica”). The movement is an Allegro molto in E-flat. It opens, though, with a very loud burst of frantic motion in the wrong key: the strings, playing fortissimo in unison or at the octave, trace a jagged course of sixteenth notes down a G-minor scale. This music gives the impression that we are about to hear a perpetuum mobile finale for a very different symphony— say, a more frenetic last movement for Mozart’s Symphony no. 40. But soon a new key asserts itself—this time the right one—as the winds and timpani join in for an assault on its dominant. The music simultaneously slows down and gets louder: sixteenth notes give way to quarters, and when we reach a half note for full orchestra in measure 12—with added fermata—the initial burst of energy is already spent. Then, in the thirteenth measure, something different begins to emerge. Plucked strings sound a slow, shuddering theme, which soon gains exponentially in 1

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momentum: there is just one pizzicato per measure at first, then two, and then four, then another hurried flourish—and then silence. The cycle begins again. The beats of rest outnumber the pitches (Roger Scruton has described this theme as a music of silence).1 Fluctuating thus between frenzy and near petrification, the music brings into question what I will call its animacy: it is a system in a state of unstable energy. This language might seem jarring now, as it would have in Beethoven’s own day. After all, if theorists of the fine arts agreed on anything during this era, it was that music was always already animated, by virtue of the fact that it transformed within time. The very term “energy” is anachronistic in this context, evoking as it does later nineteenth-century notions of a material-systemic power to “work” by being in motion. Perhaps, then, this analysis (like the movement itself) has begun with a false start. But there are yet more clues along the trail to justify venturing out in this direction. For one, the rhythmic jerkiness is matched in the melody, which leaps between E-flat and B-flat in distinctly unmelodic fashion; having begun by neglecting its proper key, the movement now seems almost too disposed to cling to its tonic and dominant poles. This theme becomes the ground for variations of increasing rhythmic activity and textural complexity. Suddenly, a new melody emerges in oboe, clarinet, and bassoon, playing dolce and sustained. This melody serves retroactively to make sense (at least musical sense) of what we heard at measure 13: it was a bass line all along. This bass-line feint is well known. More important for our purposes— because it serves to lead us further toward the core terrain of this book— is the fact that Beethoven composed the melody that enters at the third variation not for this symphony but rather for one of his much less beloved pieces. It was first heard in Salvatore Viganò’s pantomime dance Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (1801). Today Viganò’s name scarcely registers next to Beethoven’s, but in 1801 Vienna the positions were reversed. The Italian choreographer—the latest in an illustrious family of dancers—was a celebrity, and his troupe was brought specially to the Burgtheater to entertain the Viennese court. At that time Beethoven was merely a well-liked concert pianist with some chamber music publications and a single symphony under his belt. Similarly, although today the German symphony is among the most respected of musical genres, at the turn of the nineteenth century the Italian-style pantomime dance was preeminent in Vienna, just as it was on the Italian peninsula; reports attest that audiences attended the dances much more avidly even than the opera. The “Eroica” vanished after its premiere (as, indeed, was typ-

Introduction | 3

ical for symphonies), to resurface in the symphonic canon only much later on. In contrast, Viganò’s Prometheus was performed in Vienna a full twenty-eight times and revived to enormous acclaim at Milan’s La Scala in 1813. In this book, I will suggest that this ballet, and several others with similar features, modeled a conspicuously aesthetic engagement that drew on the radical-empiricist tradition of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac. It was—I will argue—a strand of very late Enlightenment cultural activity that flourished in the vibrant capitals of the Italian peninsula, and particularly in Milan. Such modeling in fine-arts practice was recognized as important in the years around 1800 (I emphasize this importance again at the risk of repeating myself); we are the ones who have forgotten. Back, then, to the trail of breadcrumbs. Beethoven scholars have welcomed this Prometheus reference as a signpost along the usual well-trodden path. What could be a more fitting conclusion to a “heroic” work than a nod to that suffering Titan, whose entrails were torn from him daily by an eagle’s beak? What is more, this turn toward mythological heroism serves to overwrite that more historically local object and erstwhile dedicatee Napoleon in favor of a more “universal” message. A. Peter Brown wrote, for instance, that the symphony’s “heroic content derives from Beethoven’s ballet,” and the structure as a whole “wells up from a common unifying concept of the heroic being, Prometheus transformed first into Bonaparte and then into a more abstract hero.”2 William Kinderman suggested that “Prometheus’s agony comes to parallel the plight of the misunderstood artist.” Brown, Kinderman, and Constantin Floros (along with countless teachers of music survey courses) have taken the quotation in the final movement of the symphony as encouragement to read the entire work as a retelling of the Prometheus myth—which Kinderman sums up as “struggle, rebirth, death, apotheosis”—and a tribute to “universal aspects of heroism.”3 But there is a problem. Viganò’s pantomime is not principally concerned with a hero in the familiar sense.4 Prometheus figures in the title but not much in the drama; Viganò dispensed with the deity’s famous punishment altogether. Rather, the drama begins with Prometheus bringing to life two human-shaped statues that he has made from clay. Viganò himself performed one of the statues, and the other was performed by his prima donna, Maria Casentini, while the role of Prometheus was given to a far less prestigious dancer (Filippo Cesari, who would have been familiar only to those spectators who habitually looked beyond the first row of the corpo di ballo). In what follows, the animated statues are

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progressively rendered human as they pay attention to demonstrations from the various gods and muses. The quality of heroism figures, but only as one in a list of qualities and attributes taught to the statues over the course of the ballet through what Viganò’s nineteenth-century biographer called “special music” and “special dance.”5 What the ballet is about, then, is not the suffering of a hero but rather the way that a statue, or person-shaped tabula rasa, becomes human by means of a sensory or aesthetic education—an education that makes heroism possible but also results in reason, reflection, emotion, and a love of beauty. In quoting the music for this ballet, could the last movement of the “Eroica” be invoking such a process? It is not impossible: after all, the jerky opening theme of the symphony’s finale is uncannily similar to the Poco Adagio in the ballet’s first movement, which depicts the bringing to life of the two clay humans. Indeed, on the basis of these similarities, a few recent scholars have suggested that the fourth movement of the “Eroica” might actually represent something quite strange indeed: the animation of statues.6 Our trail of breadcrumbs has brought us into the clearing around a mighty ruin. Living sculptures now inhabit farce, campy science fiction and the streets around tourist attractions (domains that are, it hardly bears adding, seldom named alongside the symphonic absolute). I will suggest, though, that the animated statue was the representative image of those enormously influential projects in aesthetic thought and operatic and balletic practice, to which I alluded above. Viganò’s Prometheus was the latest in an illustrious line of Italian pantomimes about the animated statue. Our trail of breadcrumbs can be followed from the Burgtheater of 1801 to La Scala in the 1790s, where Gasparo Angiolini’s pro-French propaganda ballet Deucalione e Pirra premiered. The work was a prototype for Viganò’s dance, as it also portrayed the birth of a race of humans made from rocks and their instruction by the gods and muses. From there, the trail stretches through Angiolini’s “philosophical ballet” La vendetta ingegnosa, o La statua di Condilliac [sic] (in which dancers ostensibly perform Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s famous Traité des sensations) and through the multiple versions of Ovid’s Pygmalion myth in melodrama, pantomime, and opera. Throughout the period from about 1770 to 1830, the statue on the limn of consciousness and movement—traversing that limn or hesitating just behind it— was perceived by many as fundamentally an Italian trope. As a technique in the repertoire of the Italian dancer, the animated statue can be traced back to Gregorio Lambranzi’s 1716 manual on a “new and curi-

Introduction | 5

ous” style of dance, and even further, to early Venetian opera.7 But in the decades just before and after 1800, the figure gained a new prominence, not only in opera and dance but also in a variety of other cultural spheres. During the Napoleonic years, the image of the animated statue was even marshaled to represent a renascent Italy. My goal is not simply to provide a chronicle of this phenomenon. Rather, I aim to demonstrate how musicians, choreographers, and performers engaged with a trope that also concerned scientists, philosophers, and aestheticians. This book considers how these diverse projects informed one another over the decades and wonders what may be learned about the places where these engagements took place; it asks what survived of these projects after the animated statue disappeared from stages and what traces remain with us now, if we can be brought to recognize them. Let us look back over our shoulders at how far we have come. The development from angular foundation to smooth surface in the final Allegro molto of the “Eroica” aligns easily with that in the Prometheus ballet—both works begin with raw, jerking matter and end up with something recognizably human. But a story for the “Eroica” about the animation of matter seems, well, cartoonish—a point of reference that is surprisingly apt. In the Italian style of pantomime dance, bodily motions were precisely timed to music, and the musical gesture was coordinated to match the bodily gesture—it’s a style we now call Mickey Mousing. The “Eroica” is supposed to throw down the gauntlet, marking a new, definitive phase in Beethoven’s output and the beginning of his mythology. What do Italian dancers or rhythmically shuddering statues have to do with Beethovenian heroics? Perhaps not much, if we consider these heroics in their now-familiar form, with historical specifics forcibly cancelled out and elements of non-Germanic heritage redacted from the family tree.8 If we revolt at the prospect of statues shuddering to life during the symphony’s fourth movement, it only shows that we have forgotten how significant such figures could be—and, by extension, how much of the aesthetic terrain of the years around 1800 still remains obscured. How, you may ask, could a major strand running between musical practice, science, philosophy, and aesthetic thought around 1800 be breaking news now? The answer is almost too simple to be believed. Italian culture between 1770 and 1830 has been the victim of a manifold blindness. Take music: in practice, Italian opera and dance remained preeminent across European capitals—from London and Lisbon through Vienna and all the way to St. Petersburg—throughout this period. This is

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true at the beginning of the sixty years under consideration here, and it became even more so as time passed. Charles Burney found Italian opera everywhere except Paris when he made his famous musical tours in the early 1770s. Napoleon wanted to make sure that Paris did not remain the embarrassing holdout that Burney had found it, and as he traveled through foreign capitals, he made a point of poaching their best Italian musicians for his own court. The stakes are evident from the pressure Napoleon applied to Cherubini to compose for his court in the Italian style, like the preferred-but-absent Paisiello and the deceased Piccinni might have done if Napoleon had been able to employ them instead; not by coincidence did Cherubini offer up a conciliatory (and by then decidedly old-fashioned) Pimmalione opera in 1809. These composers are hardly household names now—but they were among the most famous and successful composers of their day. Of composers in the current canon only Haydn came close, and the genres for which he was known still lacked the prestige of the dramma per musica. (Rarely were Christoph Willibald Gluck or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ranked above Galuppi, Jommelli, or Paisiello during their own lifetimes.) With theatrical dance the situation is similar: the continued fame of Georges Noverre’s Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets (1760) has led many historians to overestimate his importance in practice. Note, for instance, the eagerness to identify Salvatore Viganò as a disciple of Noverre rather than as a dancer and choreographer in the Italian style, which he certainly was.9 As Kathleen Hansell has so usefully shown, Noverre was but one of several choreographers involved in the rise of freestanding pantomime ballet during the 1760s and through to the 1780s. And by 1800, the Italian style of theatrical dance had bested those of other nations almost entirely.10 The music of this operatic and pantomimic tradition long eluded study altogether; even now, it has mostly eluded the kind of contextual study that has so enriched our understanding of other traditions, as well as of Italian performers abroad and of Italian musical cultures of an earlier era (following the recent groundbreaking works of Elizabeth Le Guin and Martha Feldman).11 Why is this? For one, very little of this music is well loved now. To admire it—especially in the absence of a rich repertoire of recordings—requires a leap of the imagination and a willingness to entertain very different ideals about what a composer does, what singers do, and how bodily gestures contribute to the meanings of a staged musical artwork. Italian operas composed between (say) 1790 and 1815 often require a style of singing that is closer to speech in its rhythms and melodic contours; it does not reward the kind

Introduction | 7

of enraptured, voice-focused listening that attends Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s Serse, or Maria Callas’s Norma. What is more, this repertoire often sought a close coordination of music and onstage movement, with the musical contours mimicking—or Mickey-Mousing—physical gestures in a fashion that has come to seem hackneyed and may even provoke spontaneous laughter. These stylistic developments within opera will be a primary focus of this book; as we will see, they were intimately connected with the rise of melodrama and the search for alternate, nonverbal sign systems. I will argue that the influence of these projects can be heard in very well-known music from a later period. For instance, in Gualtiero’s stark declamation in Bellini’s Il Pirata, we hear traces of the voice of Louis Bursay, an itinerant actor and translator who moved in the Vienna-Naples corridor during the early 1770s; and fragments of what Angiolini called his “language” of gestural music may be found in most of Donizetti’s mature operas. One barrier to the kind of contextual study I pursue here is political: What does “Italy” mean before 1861? The Italy of my title had neither a political existence nor (as we will see) much of a linguistic coherence. This poses obvious dangers to this project of slipping into teleology— that is, of assuming that the Italy that now sits on the map of Europe was simply waiting to be born—or of defaulting toward essentialist notions of nationality in which Italian words and names tacitly and retrogressively speak for themselves. My response is straightforward: the terms “Italy” and “Italian” were used during the period examined in this book, and they were used because they were taken to mean something. Some writers even specified what this something was: Italy was the geographical area stretching from Calabria to the Alps, and an Italian was native to this area. This is not to say that there were no regional identities or that the political fragmentation and multiplicity of what we now wrongly call dialects posed no challenge to the notion of a unified Italy. Indeed, as we will see in chapter 1, these things were of the utmost importance. This book generally focuses on particular regions or cities, and the category of “Italy” is useful here only when it was of interest to the protagonists of this book. However, and despite the dangers of teleology, it would be misleading not to state that many Italians did seek the unification of Italy, and the French invaders in the 1790s were welcomed for precisely that reason. Another barrier is implied by the belief that the Italian peninsula was a cultural backwater at this time, undisturbed by the important currents in European thought. As much as the terms “Enlightenment” and

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Introduction

“Romanticism” have been complicated in recent decades, any localized study of the period 1770 to 1830 that engages with neither has circumscribed its own relevance. In this book, “Enlightenment” means something very specific, while “Romanticism” is allowed to remain relatively elusive. The Italian peninsula had rich and distinct Enlightenment cultures—the term illuminismo was frequently used by its proponents— and many of the key figures in the Italian Enlightenment wrote extensively on music and the theater.12 Identifying an Italian Romanticism is less straightforward, as others have asserted. To begin, it is worth noting that the terms romanticismo and romantici—unlike illuminismo and illuministi—do not appear in any of the primary objects of my study. Many scholars suggest that Romanticism as a literary movement came later to Italy than to Germany or France; Italian Romanticism is often said to have begun with the debates on translation in the late 1810s and early 1820s (which do not feature here). Some say an Italian Romanticism never happened at all.13 Certainly most of the music discussed in this book has nothing to do with musical Romanticism, and most of the writers espoused the kind of impulse toward classical revival that much mainstream Romanticism defined itself against. In part for these reasons, the term is useful principally in chapter 3, which considers the role of Rome and its statues within auspiciously Romantic novels about Italian nationhood. I am hesitant to apply it in any broader sense, even when we arrive at the 1820s and 1830s; this is a matter of historiography to which this book will return in its final pages. But there are still other reasons to call these schemes of periodization into question. In the years around 1800, great art became transcendent (or so the familiar narrative holds). This is Romantic historiography’s first front. It claims ground for the musical absolute: those symphonies and string quartets still resting at the center of the canon, which turn toward the infinite by turning away from the phenomenal. In this progressive “disciplining” of music as an aesthetic object, musicologists have sought support from other disciplines, particularly philosophy, and traced parallel changes in the treatment of visual art, particularly its preservation and display in museums.14 Jacques Rancière has recently suggested that modern aesthetics began with Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s 1764 description, in his History of Ancient Art, of the Belvedere Torso—precisely with his celebration of the object’s expressive incompleteness, its mode of turning away and doing something other than

Introduction | 9

what its claims to representation would require. But what about a statue, possessed of all its parts, that—brought to life by music of mysterious origin—stepped off its pedestal into the admiring beholder’s arms? Does it tell a different story about aesthetic thought in these foundational decades? In the decades after Winckelmann described the torso, the plays, ballets, melodramas, and operas featuring animated (and often promiscuous) objets d’art numbered in the hundreds. These too had a philosophical pedigree. Many were modeled more or less explicitly on the central figure in Condillac’s famous thought experiment of 1754, the Traité des sensations.15 Put simply, I want to ask how our understanding of this period, still considered a cradle of modern aesthetics, can be complicated by the fact that the moving statue was one of its emblematic figures. This question is a provocative one. In the heyday of New Historicist musicology, when this project was begun, the value of bringing forgotten historical objects and milieus to life again seemed self-evident—and it was all the more enhanced when such objects could shed new light on canonic repertoires and “destabilize standard narratives,” as the saying inevitably went. Yet this impulse has recently been called into question, even among those who have been practicing cultural-contextual study in just this fashion. Scholars (including the present author, it bears admitting) have come to note the ease with which the curious forgotten objects of European cultural history—what have recently come to be called “quirk” objects—can seem to generate transformations in perspective. Mary Ann Smart and Nicholas Mathew recently lamented the tendency of historians to accumulate these objects within “a narrative that overwhelms and even supplants any larger critical goals.”16 James Davies has taken this critique further, comparing such historical methods—once ostensibly belonging to iconoclasts and scholarly enfants terribles—to “the anemic experience of shopping at Whole Foods” and finding the project of disrupting orthodoxies to be, ultimately, “the most orthodox, ubiquitous, and mundane form of scholarly reasoning there is.”17 Two questions that emerge from this recent conversation bear most directly on my project. The first is whether there should be an imperative to relate what Smart and Mathew call “historical micro-narratives” to some kind of macro-narrative, whatever that might be. The second concern queries the speaking power of such odd and forgotten objects— which it has become the fashion to call “things,” as a means of conjuring up a desirable resistance on the part of the object, its refusal despite all evidence to the contrary to comply with the historian’s self-serving aims.18

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Can such objects be thought to “tell” anything about history that does not sound identical to the “ingenuity and persuasive gifts of the writer”?19 The culturally minded historian of music seems to confront two equally repellant methodologies. One such methodology instrumentalizes the historical object, coldly assimilating it into the scholar’s self-aggrandizing project of rewriting history. The other, gentler, one—which can serve similar aims with identical efficiency—confers defiance or opacity on the object, often directing toward it quantities of that least compelling and most endlessly disclosed of covetous impulses: scholarly “desire.” (Such rhetoric has an amusing precedent in these pages. The original Pygmalion, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, took his inanimate creation to bed with him, bedecked in beads and a brassiere. But his dignity, at least, was later restored by a godly intervention.) By this light, one must ask: why tell the history of forgotten music at all, or indeed that of any music? This project is a paean to the occasional explanatory powers of forgotten music and forgotten ways of thinking about music, a paean to the ability of history recovered to shed new light on what have been central categories within musicology of the last twenty years: voice, language, gesture, body, nation, performance, and the musical work in its scope and status. I argue that from 1770 to 1830, the animated statue was not only a figure of spectatorial engagement—as an object shaped like a human body, inviting aesthetic attention from the human body, and cuing a corresponding animation within the human body—but also a means of understanding the relation of human senses to the self and to the very matters and materials of the fine arts. To grasp the significance of this figure we must acknowledge the interconnectedness of aesthetic thought with theatrical practice and fiction, and of these fields with domains, like medicine and biology, that were also concerned with perception and feeling. After all, “the body”—however much I have avoided this now-outdated formulation of nominative singular with definite article—is ultimately the subject of this book. My own study could not have been possible without the pioneering work of scholars such as LeGuin and Bruce Holsinger, who reminded musicologists that their object was an embodied activity, its meanings contingent on historical modes of embodiment.20 Similarly, if formalists have long spoken of “gesture” as something that music does, Mary Ann Smart reminded us that staged genres such as opera, pantomime, and melodrama may grant insight into historical ways of understanding musical gesture as dramatically or narratively meaningful. Where Smart’s

Introduction | 11

Mimomania notes a partial dissociation of music and onstage bodily movement following 1830, the present study traces the gradual, complex, and unstable fusion of these elements in the preceding decades.21 My project follows the recent turn within musicology toward sharing concerns with the history of science. This book attempts to continue in the vein of John Tresch’s The Romantic Machine, which approaches Parisian scientific culture in the first half of the nineteenth century with a felicitous alertness to sympathies across fields.22 I have gained from Davies a sense that bodies and anatomy are themselves formations of a discursive history, and from Emily Dolan a conviction that a history of sense-percepts is already in itself both an aesthetic and a scientific history.23 My project is particularly indebted to two recent articles that appeared while it was underway: Stephen Rumph’s virtuosic reading of tactile themes within Mozart’s Don Giovanni; and Celine Frigau-Manning’s study of electrification imagery within opera criticism, which forms part of a broad-ranging appraisal of mechanistic analogies applied to singers in the first half of the nineteenth century.24 Chapter 1 examines the Milanese pantomimes of Gasparo Angiolini, in particular his ballet on the theme of Condillac’s statue, La vendetta spiritosa (Milan, 1781; revived as La vendetta ingegnosa, o la Statua di Condilliac, Venice, 1791), and his project of creating a language of musical gestures that could be understood without training or acculturation. Inspired by Rousseau, Condillac, and Milanese writers such as the Verri brothers and Cesare Beccaria, Angiolini hoped that this “sign language” could overcome linguistic and even political boundaries. The chapter situates this project within a new Lombard preoccupation with sensibility, aesthetic attention, and immediacy. This preoccupation resulted, at least in part, from the perceived failure of the traditional, literary Tuscan language: a failure represented by Lombard essayists with images of human paralysis, sensory congealment, and simulacra. These writers, publishing under the aegis of the Accademia dei Pugni (Academy of Fists), developed notions of “natural” syntax and a preference for the continual variation of prose over the predictable rhythms and armonia of poetry. I examine how this sound-based linguistics was ultimately extended into music theory, and thence into musical practice, by the members of the Academy of Fists and by Angiolini himself. One result was a new kind of through-composed or “miming” melody within scores for pantomime. Another was the increased sensitivity of pantomime music to dramatic unfolding. Though he had collaborated with C. W. Gluck earlier in his

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Introduction

career, Angiolini came to believe that suitable music for a pantomime dance could only come from the choreographer. Having established these contexts, the chapter moves on to focus on Angiolini’s “philosophical ballet,” for which he choreographed the steps, designed the set, and composed the music. In Angiolini’s ballets on the subject of Condillac’s statue, the theme of bodily quickening came to represent wholesale Italian cultural and political reawakening, for which sensory stimuli such as music held the key. But according to Angiolini, a true animation could only be effected if the music and choreography were the work of one and the same composer. Through an examination of Angiolini’s ballet scores and writings, I argue that this Italian choreographer introduced the principle of sustained gestural mimesis into Italian theatrical music. In chapter 2, I demonstrate that this principle and its musical techniques were imported into vocal music and eventually opera through the Italian reception of Rousseau’s Pygmalion (Lyon, 1770, with music by Rousseau and Horace Coignet). With this work, Rousseau invented the scène lyrique, later known as melodrama: a new genre of musical theater for actors and orchestra that alternated between declaimed prose and gestural interludes accompanied by descriptive music.25 In recent years, important studies by Jacqueline Waeber, Thomas Bauman, and Matthew Head have brought to light the early reception of melodrama in France and Germany and the genre’s influence on authors like Goethe and on composers such as W. A. Mozart, Beethoven, and Carl Maria von Weber.26 Almost entirely unknown to Anglo-American musicology and its French and German cousins, though long familiar to musicologists in Italy, is the fact that Rousseauian melodrama had a vibrant life on the Italian peninsula during the last decades of the eighteenth century. During the 1770s and 1780s, Pygmalion accumulated at least thirty editions and an even higher number of performances.27 What is more, though these editions usually featured Italian translations alongside the French original, Pygmalion was performed during these decades exclusively in its original language. I note that melodrama in Italy was, at least at first, considered to require the tones of spoken French—a position consistent with Rousseau’s own notions of musical and unmusical languages.28 Chapter 2 argues that these decades also saw a renewed impetus for a revival of the ancient Greek and Roman speech-song—an impetus that can be found within Rousseau’s musical writings and within the invention and reception of melodrama itself, though later exegetes of that genre have, by and large, resisted its neoclassical strain. The chapter situ-

Introduction | 13

ates melodrama within the context of related projects which attempted to revive or evoke the voice of the ancient bard: these include Joshua Steele’s Prosodia rationalis and, in Italy, treatises on opera by Antonio Eximeno (Dell’origine e delle regole della musica, 1773) and Stefano Arteaga (Rivoluzioni nel teatro musicale italiano, 1785). All of these treatises described a kind of song that was built from the rhythms of the spoken word—and for the latter two, this speech-like song was the key to a reformed music theory (Eximeno) and operatic practice (Arteaga). Pygmalion, as the first melodrama, was of crucial importance in this project of opera reform; not only did it showcase the idiosyncrasies of its genre, but it also served as a means of thinking about the materials of the fine arts and their effectiveness. Indeed, Arteaga even used the Pygmalion myth to sketch out an entire theory of the fine arts as media. He suggested (as we will see) that of all the arts, only song contained the most perfect representations, because it itself was animated. The “melodramatized” opera imagined by these reformers finally came into being in the 1790s. Adaptations of Pygmalion into a modified operatic language, by composers such as Giovanni Battista Cimador, Bonifazio Asioli, and Francesco Gnecco, drew on the theories of musical speech and gesture expounded by Rousseau and his Italian disciples. These composers used a single libretto, created by the Venetian playwright Antonio Sografi, which was exceptionally faithful to the form, lexicon, and even the syntax of the original while providing some opportunities for lyricism. The Pimmalione scenes shared a common set of “reform” characteristics: sustained musical mimicking of actors’ motions; exclusive use of recitativo accompagnato rather than secco; an aversion to vocal display and, as a consequence, brief cavatinas rather than extended arias; syllabic declamation, and a radically restricted vocal range. The opera composers active in Venice in the 1790s—most notably Simon Mayr—were instrumental in importing the techniques of melodrama into opera proper. Ultimately, this chapter suggests that both Donizetti’s techniques of gestural mirroring and the canto filosofico of Bellini’s early operas are consequences of this melodramatization of Italian opera. Chapter 3 takes us into the first years of the nineteenth century and south to Rome to consider the construction of an “Italy” within the emergent Romantic discourse of nations. By this time most of the peninsula was under Napoleon’s rule, with north and south divided into two large kingdoms. An initial French invasion in 1798 had briefly made a Republic of Rome from the Papal States, and another one in 1808 would annex them to France. I begin the chapter by considering two novels—

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Alessandro Verri’s Le notti romane (1804), and Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807)—that were centrally concerned with defining Italy and weighing its claims to nationhood. Taken together, these novels can be seen to develop a new and distinct model of the “Italian,” building on the older principle of the spirit of languages, metastasizing this principle from mouths into bodies, and diffusing it onto the Italian landscape. Both novelists construct a single, complex archetype to represent the nation itself: the orator who looks like an animated statue and speaks with a melodious voice about the history and fate of Italy. Rome was a fitting locus for these fantasies, as it was often said to be populated by statues, and the musical voices of these orators resound against the city’s famous cacophony of bells, the racket made by its carriages, and the braying of its wild dogs. What is more, Rome had recently become the seat of the Pio-Clementine Collection, the first great public museum of sculpture. Both novels feature scenes set in this museum, with characters moving along rows of statues that seem poised on the brink of life, and in both these contemplations provoke characters to describe Italy itself as a plastic being, awaiting its own animation. In these works, then, the Pygmalion motive (broadly conceived) is displaced to the realm of persistent metaphor. And here we encounter the “plasticity” of my title. The term designates a double existence that is simultaneously marmoreal and fleshly, ancient and present. The chapter concludes by moving outward in two seemingly divergent directions: first toward idealist philosophy and second toward historical record. I argue that the notion of plasticity developed by these novels prefigured that espoused by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and in the lectures on aesthetics he gave between 1818 and 1829. Then I note that the kind of musical speech described in Le notti romane and Corinne was the subject of a first ethnomusicological study of “native” Italian song, and I consider an early attempt to manufacture a political anthem from these records. Diverse as they may seem, both of these directions attest nonetheless to the debts of “hard” and teleological models of history toward the speculative and the aesthetic. Chapter 4 continues these considerations of the animated statue’s political resonance during the Napoleonic years, but with a particular focus on the ways in which this model was deployed to represent socialization on the stage. First, the chapter will mark the final flourishing of the Pygmalion theme on Italian stages in the first years of the nineteenth century. During this period, the animated statue woman, the Galatea figure, waned in popularity and was eclipsed by the spectacle of an ani-

Introduction | 15

mated statue population. In this category, I consider Angiolini’s Deucalione e Pirra and Viganò’s two Prometheus ballets, mentioned above, as well as an 1814 adaptation by Troilo Malipiero of Viganò’s Milan Prometeo into a spoken play with music. The libretti for these works carefully specified their allegorical nature, instructing the audience to understand the statues to represent the spectators themselves. What is more, in each case the creators made evident the continued influence of Condillac’s Traité des sensations on their projects, either in footnotes or by implication—with the inclusion of animation scenes that meticulously adhere to the sequence of stimuli described in the treatise. Together, these ballets suggest a longer reach for Condillac’s influence on aesthetic thought than has previously been assumed. I suggest that we take this late-game resurgence of empiricist philosophy within theatrical practice as an incitement to consider different forms of aesthetic value, even ones that are opposite to the familiar values of individuality and autonomy that have come to be associated with this period. The first section of this chapter concludes by interpreting Rossini’s ensemble “Freddo ed immobile come una statua,” at the end of act 1 of Il barbiere di Siviglia, as a parody of the harmonious statue population. In the chapter’s second section, in keeping with the theme of socialization, I trace the ways in which these fantasies of a plastic-human threshold were relocated to the biological body. Pygmalion narratives came to be applied not only to statues but also to living humans with nonfunctioning senses. (The material considered in this chapter constitutes something of a midpoint between eighteenth-century Pygmalion dramas and the allegorical version of George Bernard Shaw, first performed in 1913.) While deafness, muteness, and paralysis were popular topics within music-theatrical genres in the years around 1800, this section focuses primarily on blindness—a state for which Italian audiences seem to have developed a particular taste. I consider a number of dramas—in particular Camillo Federici’s Lo scultore ed il cieco (1791) and La cieca nata (1799) and a forgotten opera by Spontini (1804) on the life of John Milton—that construe blindness as a state of inanimateness and culminate in animation scenes in which the missing sense is either substituted or restored. Furthermore, as we will see, these narratives gave rise to something like a theory of fine arts as compensatory media: those who lacked full access to the phenomenal world were able to communicate through these barriers by means of fine arts. In late eighteenth-century Italian optical science (which also followed Condillac), the blind were described as having “mind’s hands” rather than a mind’s eye; they were considered

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Introduction

to excel in the tactile domains of sculpture and musical-instrument playing and were even thought to understand music in terms of shapes, colors and textures. Our interest in sensory absence thus leads away from opera and pantomime toward art forms like instrumental music that were considered to traffic in unseen images, half-meanings, and incomplete signs. I consider the question of what alternate listening experiences might be inspired by these Italian projects, suggesting how one could listen to a piece of canonic instrumental music with a “mind’s hands” rather than a mind’s eye. Finally this chapter identifies these late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discourses of sensory substitution and plastic organs as ancestors of the modern field of plasticity studies. Chapter 5 traces the theme of human plasticity into Italian aesthetic discourse and opera of the 1820s and 1830s. The echoes of the musical statues of the late Enlightenment can be heard in the reception of performers of Ottocento opera, especially the women: figures like Maria Malibran and particularly Giuditta Pasta were construed as living statues or artificially animated interlopers from an ancient past. This quality of animatedness was described with a very new kind of imagery within music criticism, one that drew on well-known developments in the nascent scientific field later known as electrobiology. Northern Italy became the site of a scientific revolution after Luigi Galvani discovered that frogs’ legs could be set into motion by means of electrical current. His experiments in “animal electricity,” which he first described in print in 1791, were reproduced in salons and on stages across Europe, often enhanced with lighting effects and musical accompaniment. Music itself came to be described as an electrical force that could transmit charge from one body to another or redistribute the electrical currents within an individual without the need for metal conductors. One result of this analogy was an early form of music therapy: in his 1816 medical treatise, Angelo Colò suggested that epileptic seizures could be cured by means of musical accompaniment that would direct the patient’s electrical current rhythmically away from the brain and into the limbs. Another consequence was a new lexicon and theoretical apparatus for describing music’s effects on the listener. Writers drew most frequently on metaphors of electrification in describing Italian operatic performance—and in particular the performance of women. This had some basis in the electric science of the time: women were believed to carry a negative charge, and thus the female singer could act as a lightning rod, drawing the positive charge in the atmosphere into her body (which would display the symptoms of shock) and transmitting it to

Introduction | 17

spectators through song. The earliest performer to be described consistently in such terms was Pasta, in writings by Stendhal, Carlo Ritorni, Cesare Cantù, and many others. This chapter traces the complex intersections of electric animation, plastic acting, and archeology. Pasta’s ability to electrify her audience was said to derive both from her mercurial voice and from her distinctive acting style: she was known for suddenly stiffening her body into poses that lasted two to three seconds, directly in time with musical events. François-Joseph Talma, one of her teachers, reportedly taught her that an action should precede its music in a flash, the way lightning precedes thunder. I argue that this rhetoric of electrification was cultivated in the operas of Simon Mayr and Bellini and in performances of them through a recycling of older Pygmalion tropes: these include the all-important pronouncement of io or “I” as an index of a statuary self, and a distorted, jerky version of the earlier plastic acting. •

•

•

These chapters have been a decade in the making. The project was begun ten years ago, in the aftermath of the New Musicology, when the best thing a junior historical musicologist could do was to locate a dark corner of history and devote herself to bringing it to light. Such was the promise of historical musicology’s particular brand of New Historicism: that within the quiet archive of overlooked music and musical practices, one might avoid the earlier movement’s heated rhetoric, the prominent subject positions and brazen hermeneutic turns of its celebrities. By comparison, one might have believed, there was a generosity in “doing history,” and doing so with a new interdisciplinarity, unencumbered—thanks to the work of the most recent generations—by concerns of canonicity and facing vistas upon vistas of attractive forgotten repertoires. This generosity inhered, at least partly, in the usefulness of such discoveries for future scholars, in the sense that the historical data we unearthed could be adapted to other uses even after the fashion for making novel connections between neighboring fields of activity within a delimited culture had experienced its inevitable decline. Also attractive, it must be conceded, was the notion that in telling such histories, the junior scholar was being gently political, giving voice to the losing parties in the race for aesthetic empire. While it has become increasingly impossible to ignore the fugitive and self-serving traits of musicology’s New Historicist moment, and if (as noted above) such hitherto-unheard voices turn out to be none other than the scholar’s own, thrown backward in elaborate acts

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of ventriloquism, we should not assume that the history of European art music holds no more surprises. And while one may trace through this book my own increasing dissatisfaction with unadulterated historicism, there remain at its core a handful of beliefs that I have not set aside—that I do not find to be easily dismissed—about the value of even the strangest and most promiscuous of forgotten historical objects: that important insights about how culture worked may be gained from such beginnings; that an epistemology of the senses can multiply the uses we find for our own hands, eyes and ears and, in the process, furnish new ways of experiencing music that is familiar and beloved; and that some noncanonical music may be found to be interesting, beautiful, important, or revelatory.

chapter 1

Attentive Statues I have seen a medicine That’s able to breathe life into a stone, Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary With spritely fire and motion. Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well

Like Italy itself as imagined by later generations, Gasparo Angiolini’s theater was populated by statues: simulacral humans who dwelt among the living, arousing longing, wreaking vengeance, or assisting in colonization. Yet unlike, say, the marble goddess in Heine’s Florentinische Nächte (1837) or the sculptures in Madame de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie, which aroused or unsettled in their very stillness, Angiolini’s statues came to life to interact with the living, their newly animated limbs moving rhythmically in time to music. Angiolini was the foremost Italian choreographer of the second half of the eighteenth century. He is best known today for his Don Juan (Vienna, 1761, with music by C. W. Gluck), which featured the return of the sepulchral “stone guest.”1 In 1767, he choreographed a ballet on the subject of Ovid’s Pygmalion myth. In his late propaganda ballet Deucalione e Pirra (Milan, 1797), the hero and heroine create humans from rocks to repopulate the world. Yet surely the most peculiar of Angiolini’s animated statues is found in La vendetta spiritosa, which had its premiere in May 1781 at Milan’s new opera house, the Teatro alla Scala. For La vendetta spiritosa, Angiolini wrote the story, choreographed the dance steps and gestures, and even composed his own musical accompaniment, each medium carefully designed so as to correspond to the others. Yet as we will see, if La vendetta spiritosa was brought into being by an ideal of the complete artwork—which would later be called a Gesamtkunstwerk—it was a version of this ideal that was organized around the aesthetic force of the 19

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mute, muscular body. In the ballet, Arcadian shepherds and shepherdesses enact a portion of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s philosophical tract, the Traité des sensations, bringing a statue to life by stimulating its sensing organs. Angiolini’s aim, as we will see, was to communicate “ideas, even the abstract ones of philosophy,” through bodily motion and music.2 Despite the challenges that La vendetta spiritosa must have posed to its audience, it was deemed a success and revived a decade later for Venice as La vendetta ingegnosa, o la Statua di Condilliac. Gathering strands from performance traditions, literature, and highEnlightenment philosophy, the coming pages will show how the animated statue became a figure of aesthetic engagement and in the process granted new status to untexted music as an animating force. This figure emerged in Angiolini’s writings and pantomimes alongside a host of new notions about how symbols were perceived and understood and what changes they might effect in their perceivers. Angiolini had argued since the 1760s that gesture could function as a language, provided it had an appropriate musical accompaniment. As we will see, his three well-known Viennese pamphlets—the prefaces to Don Juan (1761) and La Citera assediata (1762) and the “Dissertation sur les ballets pantomimes” that accompanied his Sémiramis (1765)—drew on recent French theories of language.3 But his “philosophical” ballet on the statue theme—which will serve as the crux of this first chapter—must be understood as a monument to Milan, that ancient, sprawling capital of Austrian Lombardy, where Angiolini lived for the last three decades of his life and which was home to one of Europe’s most distinctive projects of mass enlightenment. Among his colleagues, there were Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria, figures now remembered as legal and political theorists but who were also energetic participants in debates on music, theater, and the Italian language. As we will see, Angiolini and his Lombard compatriots created something like an antique semiotics that spanned language and the fine arts. They sought a reformed relationship between meaning and its avatars, and new uses for representative sound. Their goal was nothing less than a revitalized Italian culture, and through it an Italy reborn.

who do you think you are? We can begin with a genealogy, dwelling on two immediate ancestors of La vendetta spiritosa. Animated statues have, of course, featured in Western imaginations since classical times. Prometheus was said to have

Attentive Statues | 21

created humans from clay; Pindar lauded a race of stone men; the story of Pygmalion is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Of these, the last had the most vibrant afterlife, transmitted within early modern romance, didactic literature, and art criticism.4 Wendy Heller has found troupes of dancing statues in seventeenth-century Venetian opera.5 Less well documented is the tradition of improvisatory performance that existed alongside this literary tradition, which informed it and was changed by it. The moving statue was a staple of commedia dell’arte players. It can be found in innumerable lazzi set in ruins or sculptors’ ateliers and in improvised versions of plays and stories featuring such characters. For instance Don Juan, with its famous stone guest, entered the repertoire of the commedia dell’arte on its arrival in Naples in the early 1630s and remained there for the next two hundred years; the half-dozen comic operas on that text that appeared between 1777 and 1787 bore the marks of this tradition.6 After all, metamorphosis had always been a favorite inspiration for Harlequins and Pulcinellas. With one important exception, statues within improvised theater left few traces. The exception is Gregorio Lambranzi’s Neue und curieuse theatralische Tantz-Schul (1716), the most important iconographic source for Italian dance before the nineteenth century.7 Like Angiolini a half-century later, Lambranzi was both a choreographer and a dancer, performing his creations in Italian theaters between the acts of operas.8 Unlike Angiolini, however, he was interested above all in the comic genre of Italian dance, which combined the steps of French belle danse with commedia characters, plots, and slapstick humor.9 His treatise aimed not to provide a complete record of his work but rather to encourage other dancers to improvise in a similar style. For each dance, he provided no more than a melody, a picture, and the briefest of plots. In a preface he reminded his readers to use only the traditional steps (cabrioles, coupés, jetés, chassés, pas graves, contretemps and the pas de chaconne, courante, gavotte, and so on); even the Harlequins, Scaramouches, and other stock characters in the comic dances should use no step, figure, or costume other than those usually employed in Italian theaters. He also noted that these characters have their own “absurd and burlesque” (ridiculi e burleschi) versions of the traditional steps.10 Most relevant for our purposes is Scaramouche, the bad-tempered gentleman from Naples, who moves with “long, unformed, and heavy steps” (grandi, lunghi, e spropositati passi).11 The Neue und curieuse theatralische Tantz-Schul contains no fewer than three dances for moving statues. The second and third, which

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appear in volume 2, are comic sketches featuring multiple dancers: plates 12 to 17 show the animation and wrestling of two stone servants in a palace, while plate 24 shows sculptors carving a statue (that is, freeing another dancer) from a large block of marble.12 The first of Lambranzi’s statue dances is more mysterious. It is on plate 24 in volume 1’s collection of “national dances,” reproduced here as figure 1. As the curtain rises, a single dancer is frozen on a decrepit stone podium amid overgrown ruins. He stays motionless until the first half of the dance has been played once; when it repeats, he leaps from the pedestal and dances around the stage, performing “Scaramouche’s steps, cabrioles, and pirouettes.” The music given at the top of the figure—a two-part loure—is to be played three times. When it comes to an end, the dancer departs.13 Lambranzi supplies no clue as to instrumentation or harmonies, but custom would suggest nothing more exotic than violin-dominated string textures and the most basic harmonic progressions. This dance is a puzzle. Is the figure stone or flesh? The pedestal and ruins suggest that he is very old, even classical. And yet the costume and attitude place him firmly within the commedia dell’arte. The verbal indications are vague; caption and preface describe him first as “a lovely, motionless statue” and then, following the animation, by the name of Scaramuzza. Is Scaramouche himself therefore an animated statue, his awkward gait the result of stiff legs? Or was he merely hiding among the ruins for his own amusement, waiting to leap out and frighten the tourist? The music provides no further clues. While the tunes associated with statues in volume 2 are full of tone paintings, this loure seems oblivious to the action. Its lilting melody, dotted rhythms, and repetition schemes belong to the domain of French courtly dance. The animation itself occurs in the limn between musical events: after the end of the first statement and before its literal repetition. Also ambiguous is the relation of this dance to the treatise as a whole. Lambranzi claims to supply “fifty dances from different nations”; but what nation may be inferred from this combination of a French courtly artifact and a commedia lazzo within a setting of classical ruins? The presence of the Neapolitan Scaramouche suggests that this is an Italian dance; indeed, the commedia characters, with their acrobatic and often distorted motions, were emblematic throughout Europe of “Italy,” just as clogs were indices of Holland and eunuchs were markers of the East (such “national” signifiers are deployed throughout Lambranzi’s treatise).14 Of course, in 1716, “Italy” existed only as historical memory and as a contested literary and linguistic terrain (more about this below).

figure 1. Plate 24 from Gregorio Lambranzi, Neue und curieuse theatralische Tantz-Schule, vol. 1 (Nuremburg: Johan Jacob Wolrab, 1716).

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When Lambranzi published his treatise, Italian comedians were perhaps the peninsula’s most successful export; they could be found in fairgrounds and theaters across Europe.15 Italian literature, on the other hand, was at the time seldom noticed beyond the Alps (or, indeed, by any but a few thousand on the peninsula). In the eighteenth century, travelers visited Italy ostensibly to meet the past in quiet, motionless material forms, from Roman ruins to Renaissance art.16 Italy’s former hegemony now belonged to France, whose language, like the steps of its belle danse, was in use from Moscow to Gibraltar. Lambranzi has his audience witness something come to life in this ruined landscape: something aggressive, strange, and ultimately fugitive (as this Scaramouche runs away at the end of the dance). Though it seems unlikely that he imagined a pointedly nationalist allegory, Lambranzi does imply that the features of this curious little cipher are central to his project. On the title page, Athena holds a scroll containing a loure with French steps in Feuillet notation; below, Lambranzi-as-Scaramouche strikes his characteristic pose among a gallery of statues. Lambranzi’s moving statues were denizens of a strange wonderland that was also home to dwarfs, hunchbacks, the blind, three-legged men, Turks, Dutchmen, and gypsies. His treatise provides a vivid glimpse into the repertoire of the Italian comic dancer in the first part of the eighteenth century. He took on alternate physical identities, playing with the borders of humanness (not by accident was this known as the stile grottesco). His scenes are brief, entertaining, and opaque; they neither adapt preexisting verbal texts nor lend themselves to comprehensive transcriptions (as we have seen). Yet these dances and the popular Italian theater they represent were the source of later developments in pantomime ballet. There are traces of them even in Angiolini’s self-consciously high-minded “reforms,” which dismissed the Lambranzian style in the strongest terms.17 Marie Sallé, who was admired by David Garrick, Noverre, and Angiolini, was trained by the famous Harlequin John Rich during the 1720s and became perhaps the most famous early performer of “action ballet.”18 Sallé’s international career was launched by a Pygmalion: she danced the role of the statue to great acclaim in London in 1734. In her version, the newly animated statue is brought to maturity in a series of courtly dances, their diverse steps and meters supplying her with a gamut of enticing affects. The Mercure de France rapturously recalled how Sallé descended from her pedestal and “learned” the steps of the belle danse.19 Sallé was said to have composed her own music for this dance. If she did, it is now lost, but a score survives for the Parisian

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revival done the following year.20 Her ballet—which has been called “the first modern dramatic ballet”—is thought to have inspired the most important mid-eighteenth-century versions of Pygmalion: Rameau’s opera-ballet and the pantomime by Angiolini’s Viennese predecessor and teacher, Franz Hilverding.21 From the 1730s to the 1750s, arguably through the gradual acceptance of such pantomime within French theater, the animated statue moved from the margins of theatrical practice to the center. Sallé’s and Rameau’s ballets featured lengthy scenes of statues “becoming human” through listening and moving, the statues learning to move gracefully in a variety of ways as the orchestra sounded a series of dance movements.22 Such an emphasis on self-formation was absent from the Ovidian tradition of Pygmalion fables. I would suggest, then, that when Étienne Bonnot de Condillac based his Traité des sensations around the figure of the animated statue, he was influenced in part by this performance tradition.23 While later historiography saw Condillac overshadowed by Rousseau and the Encyclopédistes, during the eighteenth century he ranked in the first tier of Enlightenment thinkers. The influence of his Traité des sensations will be felt for the remainder of this book, and so we will consider it at some length here. The treatise was a thought experiment designed to illustrate how a human may acquire all the higher mental faculties purely through the use of his senses. Condillac starts by asking his audience to imagine a statue; he then activates a single one of its organs, the nose. From the scents detected by its nostrils, the statue experiences pleasure and pain, and these sensations create the faculty of attention. The next faculty was that of memory, which is developed via the simple procedure of placing a sequence of objects beneath the statue’s nose. By comparing these various stimuli, the statue acquires the faculty of judgment—and so on. In subsequent chapters, Condillac describes the statue in other states of extreme sensory deprivation: after “limited to the sense of smell” comes “limited to the sense of hearing,” “limited to the sense of taste,” and “limited to the sense of sight.” Once he establishes the various effects of each sense in isolation, Condillac begins to investigate various combinations: “with sight and smell combined,” and so forth. The culmination comes with the final sense: touch. For Condillac, touch signified consciousness of one’s body and the ability to move it. Touch was the “lowest level of feeling” or “the fundamental feeling.” He wrote, “It is at this play of the machine that animal life begins. It depends uniquely upon it.”24 From touch came what Condillac called the

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“I.” Touch allows the statue to draw its hand along itself and discover that the various parts of its body are connected and have extension through space. Condillac believed that movement was motivated by pleasure and pain: pleasure prolonged repose, but pain triggered a muscle contraction, causing the affected body part to move away. The statue’s first motions were free of intention and learned behaviors: “It moves, naturally, mechanically, by instinct, and without knowing that it does it.” The statue’s discovery of the “I” naturally leads it to locate other bodies, which it identifies as “not I” because in touching those things “the ‘I’ does not reply.”25 (As we will see in the next chapter, Rousseau later recycled this elemental monologue for the animation scene in his melodrama Pygmalion.) Condillac’s treatise is organized around a single basic impetus: to isolate and compartmentalize the effects of each individual sense and trace these effects over time. As such, it took on a central preoccupation within contemporary medical research, which had recently begun to consider the senses in isolation from one another and to conduct experiments on their precise functions.26 Individual sensory impulses were considered to precede language; they were the “natural” forebears of modern systems of communication. Condillac followed the Abbé Dubos in distinguishing between “natural” and “artificial” signs.27 While the latter were human-made and had to be learned, the former were imitative of their objects and thus required only an animate sensorium for their meanings to be perceived. For Condillac and many of his contemporaries, natural signs represented an earlier stage in human development; both infants and infant civilizations communicated via icons.28 In this respect, Condillac’s Traité continued the work of his Essai sur l’origine des connoissances humaines (1746), which traced the development of modern systems of communication from what he called the “langage d’action”: the gestures and cries of the first humans.29 Why, then, did Condillac use a statue to demonstrate the subcutaneous processes that precede language? Why not a wild man, an inanimate human body, or an infant?30 He did not provide even basic facts about his statue. Were its nostrils cut through stone? Did its thoughts simply striate cold marble? Was its memory the engraved memory of the tablet? It appears to be an odd move for a philosopher otherwise so wedded to tangible existence and would seem to distance the project from human history, medical research, and the constraints of organic matter. And yet perhaps it was not so strange. By using a statue, Condillac located the experiment within the domain of the aesthetic. Indeed, considered thus, the treatise

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begins to resemble the extended contemplation of a work of art. It created, purposefully and unmistakably, a blank presence—a rhetorical figure of emergent sensibility—onto which readers could project themselves to feel the statue’s tinglings in their own eyes, noses, and fingertips.31 Condillac opened his Traité with a call for precisely this kind of reading, asking the members of his audience to imagine themselves as the statue in question so that they could not only observe but also participate in the gradual awakening: I wish the reader to notice particularly that it is most important for him to put himself in imagination exactly in the place of the statue we are going to observe. He must enter into its life, begin where it begins, have but one single sense when it only has one, acquire only the ideas which it acquires, contract only the habits which it contracts: in a word he must fancy himself to become just what the statue is.32

In this formulation, therefore, the statue becomes a foundation for aesthetic engagement, permitting the reader to uncover a prelinguistic self through progressively attending to sensations.

a procession of statues If improvisatory comic dance supplied the new “reform” pantomime with some of its techniques and themes, Condillac’s Essai and his Traité provided its theoretical apparatus. Like Georges Noverre’s Lettres sur la danse (1760), Angiolini’s three Viennese prefaces drew heavily on Condillac’s account of a pre-lapsarian langage d’action.33 The revivalist nature of Noverre’s and Angiolini’s pantomime was twofold: both choreographers ostensibly drew on the Edenic language of gestures and spontaneous cries in order to recreate Greek and Roman mimic theater. As one would expect from writings influenced by Condillac’s Traité, Angiolini’s Viennese prefaces display a heightened awareness of the independence of the senses, emphasizing that pantomime “spoke” to multiple senses at once and querying the means by which each individual sense perceives pantomime’s effects. According to Angiolini, some ancient dramas put the independence of the senses into curious practice by employing two persons per role: one offstage to voice a text and another onstage to act it out, bodily but silently. His own pantomime preserved this principle, but a “speaking” orchestra replaced the invisible actor: “Music is essential to pantomimes. It’s the music that speaks; we only make the gestures” (La musique est essentielle aux pantomimes: c’est elle qui parle, nous ne faisons que les gestes).34

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Informed by a Condillacian understanding of language and the natural sign, Angiolini began to think in new ways about the expressive potential of textless music, enriching the older rhetoric of affect by focusing on characteristics such as phrase rhythm, instrumental timbre, and melodic style as meaningful in themselves. If dance music was to function like the auditory component of a “language,” Angiolini asserted in the preface to his ballet La Citera assediata (1762), its behaviors needed to change. It must not only move in time with the dancers but also change rapidly along with the story. This principle had implications for dance melodies—which would need to be simple, devoid of excessive diminutions, and “uncorrupted by regional prejudice”—and also for the larger musical forms within dance scores (more about this later in the chapter). There were implications for timbre as well. Angiolini wrote that “it is the instrument, and not the note, that produces the effect.” While “melody, harmony and tempo must concur,” a composer could not hope to create a particular effect “without the correct and varied application of instruments” (La Melodia, la Modulazzione, ed i variati moti devon concorrervi, ma senza la giusta, e variata applicazione degl’Istrumenti mai non si speri un particolare effetto). In vain did composers use high-pitched or sweet-toned instruments to communicate terror or courage (Per isvegliar terrore, o pur coraggio in vano adopransi i Flauti, i Violini, i Violoncelli).35 Furthermore, dance orchestras needed to increase in size to accommodate a wider range of effects. As we will see, the consequences of Angiolini’s distinctive musical ideas would be fully realized only in the 1770s, following his relocation to Milan. The political stakes of this interest in “natural” signs “uncorrupted by regional prejudice”—whether within words or outside them—were not lost on Angiolini’s contemporaries. Many believed that the capacity of French literary objects to traverse international borders could be attributed to the fact that French words contained natural signs within them, manifest in what one might call their onomatopoeic or mimophonic qualities: the extent to which their sounds imitated their objects.36 A few writers attempted to demonstrate the innate symbolism of certain phonemes by tracing them back to Condillac’s langage d’action. Charles de Brosses, for example, imagined that modern verbal language had “primitive roots” derived from the original monosyllables that Condillac had incorporated into his Grammaire of 1775. For instance, “fl-” indicated fluidity, “st-” expressed fixity, and “tr-” evoked a body slipping between two others.37 French’s direct subject-verbobject syntax was justified by native linguists as more rational and more

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natural than Italian, which also permitted subject-verb-object, objectverb-subject, and verb-subject-object constructions.38 Furthermore, French was held to be the language with the most efficient correspondence of words to things; Condillac himself noted proudly that French was the only language without any synonyms.39 Notwithstanding the contributions of Rousseau, these arguments for the superiority of French continued through the 1770s and 1780s; works such as Rivarol’s De l’universalité de la langue française argued presciently for policies of francisation throughout the civilized world.40 By contrast, many French and Italian writers considered the Italian language to be “sick from an excess of literariness,” an illness whose symptoms were a tolerance of inversions, an abundance of synonyms, and an unnatural veneration of the syntax and lexicon of very old poetry.41 Such was the position advanced in the Milanese magazine Il Caffè, published under the direction of Pietro Verri during the years 1764–66. Verri, along with his brother Alessandro, his friend Cesare Beccaria, and a handful of other progressive-minded individuals, had broken away from the mainstream Accademia dei Trasformati. Calling themselves the Accademia de’ Pugni (Academy of Fists), they sought to replicate the Encyclopédistes’ well-organized publishing culture and mass-education explicitly for the benefit of Italians. During the early 1760s, while Angiolini was working in Vienna, the Verris, Beccaria, and their entourage made the Lombard capital, fleetingly, a center of Enlightenment activity. I will recount this instance of Italian Enlightenment in some detail here, for it brought about the intellectual conditions that would ultimately make possible Angiolini’s ideal of art, its practice and purposes. What is more, it is doubtless owing to the (short-lived) success of Il Caffè that Angiolini published his “Dissertation sur les ballets pantomimes” simultaneously in Vienna and Milan in 1765 and eventually established himself permanently in Milan to begin his own conspicuously “Italian” projects.42 While we should be wary of subsuming such projects within a Risorgimento teleology, we may nonetheless observe that the goal of the Pugni was indeed an Italy of sorts, if not the Italy that came into being in the nineteenth century. The group aimed at a national audience (“L’Italia”) that was defined by geographical area: “from the Kingdom of Calabria to the Alps.”43 The Italy they claimed to seek would be unified by language and by an enlightened “universal culture” (although it would still be divided politically). In their view, the prevailing climate of superstition and ignorance prevented Italians from benefiting from innovations both at home and abroad—something that

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put them at the mercy of those foreigners who wished to gain advantage over them.44 The Lombard illuministi were impaired by one critical factor: the extraordinary limitations of all available verbal media. Put simply, their intended audience did not share a language. In their view, literary Italian was archaic and artificial from its inception and had been protected from modernization in the intervening centuries by the increasingly conservative Accademia della Crusca.45 In theory, this obliged writers like the Verris, Beccaria, and their contemporaries to participate in Enlightenment debates on matters of economics, politics, and the fine arts equipped only with terminology several centuries old; those who sought to modernize the language were met with censorship.46 So many vernaculars were in use on the peninsula that, to use Pietro Verri’s immortal metaphor, a traveler in Italy changed nations as often as he changed horses.47 Austrian officials monitored both the published prose of the Lombards and their private communication. Faced with such a situation, the Pugni held up the French language as an example of what Italian might be: a medium whose flexibility made it adaptable for various kinds of modern use. By comparison, literary Italian was a dead language in a state of rigor mortis, a reputation perhaps aggravated by the continuing pseudoarchaeological attempts, in such works as Scipione Maffei’s Degli itali primitivi (1727) and Mario Guarnacci’s Origini italiche (1767), to trace its roots through Etruscan to ancient Hebrew.48 The attacks on literary Italian in Il Caffè are often identified as a watershed in the history of the language. These writers sought to proclaim the arrival of a new era for Italy, with Milan as its cultural and literary capital. This would open the door to Gallicisms and other modernizing influences, providing Italians with a new freedom to align expressive sounds with “things.” Most important for our purposes here, however, is the extent to which the Pugni marshaled anatomical imagery and the metaphor of the human simulacrum in the service of this semiotic revolution. The war began in the fourth issue of Il Caffè, with Alessandro Verri’s famous article “Rinunzia avanti notaio degli autori del presente foglio al vocabolario della Crusca” (1764), which claimed that the Accademia della Crusca brought about the intellectual enslavement of Italians by constraining them to sterile play with old and empty signs. If Petrarch, Dante, Boccaccio, and Casa had been able to invent new words, then the Caffetisti should have the freedom to do likewise. Like the old masters, they were human, possessed of an anatomical quotient: “two arms, two legs, a body and a head between two shoulders” (due braccia, due

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gambe, un corpo ed una testa fra due spalle).49 Were those long-deceased masters to return from their graves, they would be amazed by the voluntary servitude given them by mediocre minds. Alessandro construed traditional Italian as a choir of dead men, their voices channeled through “oracles” by the empty-headed wordsmiths of la Crusca. Crucially for the eventual development of animation imagery that we are tracing here, the Caffetisti argued that the very wordiness of Italian had the effect of reducing vital mobility. In a later article in Il Caffè, Alessandro Verri suggested that the Tuscan language with its ancient resonance was resistant to direct reference to “things” and prohibited rapid motion between ideas: “With our resonant sentences [rotondi periodi], it is impossible for the mind to deal in things [cose], to develop its thoughts by fleeing rapidly from one thing to the next”.50 Beccaria’s sarcastic response to “Rinunzia,” which he wrote in the adopted voice of a pedant, “B,” parodied the Crusca’s vacant signs by invoking a series of representations of humans at progressive levels of remove from the living. He opened by informing Alessandro that, as the latter was a living author, “all the force of truth annihilated itself in his mouth.”51 Only after his death might anyone suspect that he had been correct; indeed, Alessandro might be better advised to record his thoughts in scriptis than in a “pathetic little newspaper.” Who, asked B, was the author of “Rinunzia” to deny the “sacred majesty of the Dizionario della Crusca” and invent new words? He had never made the glorious sacrifice of thoughts for the sake of words, as had the venerated fathers of the language. He had never molded an ordinary thought into a gigantic entity of many constituent parts, whose bloated “head,” “limbs,” and “body” were stitched together (like Frankenstein’s monster would later be) by “tiny threads.”52 And was it not a glorious thing, rhapsodized B, that an Italian oration should resemble a procession of gigantic, hollow, papier-mâché statues all aquiver? He went on to describe such a procession in glowing terms. These statues were posed in traditional attitudes representing their rhetorical affects. Exordium was on his knees, with one hand imploring charity and the other making a “grand gesture” of weakness. The centerpiece was a particularly eerie statue with parchment skin composed of indices of signs, such as footnotes and book indexes; a torso made up of pages from Cicero; and the thighs of a Holy Father. Other, similar, figures had eyes formed from Juvenal’s verses and noses of Petrarch’s poetry. All these statues emitted a narcotic odor that put the common people to sleep. The final statue carried a placard providing one final

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layer of representation: on it were drawn in miniature all the preceding figures.53 Beccaria’s figures are, in a sense, the dark antitheses of Condillac’s human statue animated by sense percepts. They are not animated but rather seem to float by, already frozen in their characteristic poses, their only motion the tremor of paper in the wind. Similar imagery may also be found in Pietro Verri’s “Pensieri sullo spirito della letteratura d’Italia,” which appeared in Il Caffè the following year.54 He compared the Italian traditionalists (which he referred to as “tenacious word lovers”) to people who observe only the imprint of a coin and not the value of the metal or who form a library based only on the elegance of book covers rather than what is inside the books. He blamed the Cinquecento Bembists for having given the language such “immobile confines” that Italian writing took on the “rigidity of a dead language” rather than the “suppleness” befitting a living one. The “relentless wordsmiths” and “frigid pedants,” maintained Pietro Verri, were the primary obstacle to intellectual growth in Italy. They were occupied only with musty arcana: the archaeological study of medals and coins, chronicles, ancient parchments and inscriptions, sepulchral lanterns, pedestals, and paterae. As should now be evident, the statues and other simulacra populating the Caffetisti’s writings on language represented the cultural burden exerted by a now-defunct Renaissance: the oppressive presence of Italy’s glorious past personified in empty, man-shaped shells. Those who kept these statues among the living were, however, paradoxically loquacious; Pietro Verri called them parolai—wordsmiths. They were recognizable by their privileging of the sonority of words over their content. They dealt in freddurai (literally “coldnesses”): puns, acrostics, anagrams, and other sign play. They arranged their thoughts according to sonic associations, as in the following Cinquecento verse, quoted by Pietro: Mi sferza e sforza ognor lo amaro amore A servire, a servare a infida fede; Miei danni donna cruda non mi crede, Mi fere e fura, e di cure empie il core.55 (Bitter love lashes and constrains me ever To serve, to slave for false faith; Merciless woman does not believe my injuries, She wounds and enrages me and fills my heart with troubles.)

Pietro contended that such fetishization of repeated sounds merely created the effect of armonia (harmony). In turn, this claim carried a wealth

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of further implications, for sound arranged according to repetition and meter was understood as music. With this, we come full circle: to the ways in which music could have meanings and to the ways in which music-as-sound related to words-assound. Pietro Verri sketched a few general principles of musical and linguistic expression in an Il Caffè article entitled “Musica.”56 The lowest level of sonic phenomena was that of “simple sound” (il semplice suono): the “mere fabric” of music and words, devoid of ideas.57 The next level of expression was harmony; in music, as in language, this was an undesirable quality. Indeed, Pietro noted elsewhere, armonia was more likely to congeal than to move: “The harmonious arrangement of words and sonorous periods has frozen the souls of many” (l’armoniosa disposizione delle voci e de’ rotondi periodi hanno gelata l’anima di molti).58 The frequent repetition of sonic events prohibited that most germane indicator of vitality: rapid motion from one object to another. According to Pietro, true eloquence consisted of a “succession of sounds” that moved the soul to “tenderness, ardor, compassion, shame, and so on.”59 To paraphrase: the expression of real thoughts would sound less repetitive, less predictable—in a word, less metrical. Like Angiolini, Pietro Verri believed that sonic phenomena were imprinted on the hearer through sympathetic vibration: music created its effect by transferring the vibrations of different vocal or instrumental sounds directly onto the “internal sensibility .  .  . the muscles of one’s physiognomy.” As a result, listeners would relinquish control of their physiognomy, experiencing “bodily disquiet and involuntary applause.”60 Specific instrumental sounds “seize the soul, shake it from inaction, and transmit to it the sweet motions of the music”; he named the oboe as particularly passionate.61 If this seems familiar, it is because Pietro’s theories of language, sound, and sensibility greatly resembled those of Angiolini. After Angiolini returned to Italy in 1773, the two men would begin a collaboration of sorts, each benefiting from the other’s work. As is reflected by both authors’ writings of the 1770s and 1780s, Angiolini’s pantomime and its music came to be understood in terms of the particular nature of Italians. One of the first orders of business in Angiolini’s two letters to his French rival, the Lettere a Monsieur Noverre (1773), begun following his arrival in Milan, was to indicate his continued aversion for commedia-style acrobatics.62 But this time, he explained the national styles of dance in terms of the sensibility—and even the temperature—of the human body. He dismissed Italian comic dance as “barbarous, indecent,

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unnatural” and the dancers as “shameful and indecent mimes.” Their lack of sensibility and cultivation made them mere automatons, and the gentle souls in the audience were made physically uncomfortable when observing them.63 While French courtly dance was the highest form of “material dance,” it was also cold (“fredda”) and inexpressive (“non dice nulla”). To generate heat (“calore”), these steps must be wedded to pantomime.64 The heat-giving effects of Angiolini’s pantomime depended on a narrative that imparted continuous change and development over time. Pantomime permitted a “gradated series of ideas that render [it] so alive, so varied, so interesting.” This linearity was what animated the spectator: “The impression made by these continuous and successive ideas excites the soul gradually and leads it always to a greater interest.”65 Angiolini had earlier suggested that pantomime functioned much like the “living portraits” of Titian and Van Dyck or the “animated composition of a great tableau by Raphael or Rubens.”66 Now he disavowed such comparisons and even criticized Noverre for making them. Painting was rendered a “dead” art by its lack of temporality: “As concerns the analogy you [Noverre] make between dance and painting, my ideas are a little different. These two arts will be comparable only when painting has gained that gradated series of ideas that render pantomime so alive, so varied, so interesting, compared to which painting remains so dead, so weak, so monotonous.”67 This illusion depended on one crucial factor: a synchronization of media. Recalling Condillac, Angiolini called this element the art of “combination.” Because pantomime was a multimedia art, Angiolini theorized, the choreographer’s task was to create and align the various streams of sensory information into particles (“particelli”). By means of “all these tiny particles, [pantomime] is able to touch our hearts.”68 The total absorption of the spectator demanded a unified illusion, and this was achieved through the perfect combination of its elements. “Any tiny dissonance would destroy the effect” (ogni minima disonanza guasta l’armonia), causing the spectator’s heart to “halt and return to indifference.”69 Angiolini had a term for this total effect: “L’Una.”70 Small wonder, then, that although he had collaborated to great acclaim with Gluck in the 1760s, Angiolini now came to believe that dual authorship was likely to produce spoiled “particles.” The choreographer must compose the music himself. Angiolini noted that Hilverding had made small steps toward the comprehensive ideal of L’Una: Hilverding often painted and wrote little tunes, which Angiolini claimed to have in his possession. While originally a mere choreographer of steps, Hilverding eventually learned to

Attentive Statues | 35 example 1. No. 19, Allegro from Gasparo Angiolini, La partenza d’Enea (Venice: Canobbio/ Marescalchi, 1773), violin 1, measures 13–22. New York Public Library, Performing Arts collection, JMB 87–44.


 







 
                                 





       



   

   

   

“conceive, combine, and produce a complete stage work” (concepire, combinare e produrre un’azione completa).71 With this ideal in mind, Angiolini had been composing the music for his pantomimes since he left Vienna in 1765. He ensured that this was well known and always displayed prominently within the libretti—a fact notable in itself, given that these programs tended to credit the composer only infrequently. Indeed, his insistence on this new rubric occasionally took a surprisingly literal form. Kathleen Kuzmick Hansell has uncovered a libretto for one of his first Milan choreographies with the attribution pasted in.72 In the Lettere a Monsieur Noverre, Angiolini mentioned in particular his recent production of Telemaco nell’Isola di Calisso (St. Petersburg, 1770), in which he was particularly touched by the character of Mentore. The great effect was because this dancer made “no step, nor gesture, nor glance that did not correspond to the rigid tempo of the various musical ideas with exact precision.”73 He warned that until other choreographers learned to compose their own music and couple it perfectly to gesture, they would remain in servitude to their collaborators. The result of this emphasis on the coordination of music and action was a technique of musical onomatopoeia or miming, readily in evidence within Angiolini’s own compositions. Though only a small fraction of his oeuvre survives, we are informed by one particularly rich source: in 1773 the Venetian firm of Canobbio/Marescalchi printed his music for La partenza d’Enea, complete with annotations in the first violin part for the mime. Angiolini based his pantomime on Metastasio’s libretto on the topic. Example 1 reproduces a few measures of the first violin part, from near the end of the work. Dido has discovered Aeneas’s departure and fainted on a rock. The villain, Jarba, has entered the stage with torch in

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hand, intent on razing Carthage. Seeing Dido alone, he decides to give her one final chance to accept his romantic advances. The letters written above the staff refer to alphabetized directions given below each individual movement. This movement begins in D minor as Jarba and Mori “dance with lit torches.” The consistent rhythms and repetition schemes and the verb ballare in the annotations suggest that the dance here is diegetic—that is, it is perceived as dance by the characters. In the ensuing exchange between Jarba and Dido, though, the music follows different principles and regularity is disrupted. At (g), Jarba sees Dido lying unconscious; Angiolini provides dominant harmonies and a new, questioning melody. During the rapid descending scale at (h), Jarba kneels to embrace her prone body. Dido initially believes he is Aeneas; when she discovers her error, she pushes him away with an ascending figure that inverts the melody of the initial embrace. Yet more new music arrives at (l), as Jarba pleads with her. Such “narrative” music can tolerate no literal repetition; the movement is through-composed. These, then, are Angiolini’s particelle: analogous pairs of sights and sounds arranged in series, at least somewhat to the detriment of musical regularity. Ever practical, Angiolini did not think that his brand of unified pantomime could replace verbal language. He expressed support for any system of notation that might be useful, provided it did not “disgust the spirit, confound the memory, and fill the mind more with signs than with things.”74 He contradicted Noverre’s assertion that dance notation was useless and claimed to have transcribed the statue’s awakening in Hilverding’s Pigmalion. He did, however, come to believe that verbal language had no place in pantomime, either as narrative explication or within the bounds of the drama; verbal language and “gestural language” (la lingua de’ cenni) were mutually exclusive.75 Paraphrasing Condillac’s description of the langage d’action, Angiolini wrote that “pantomime as an imitative art has its own means, and these means are the gestures that nature has given to man; and with which man explains naturally his needs, passions, emotions. These gestures cannot radically enhance or diminish with education.” When gestures operated together with words, the result was “uselessness, corruption, and monstrous absurdity.”76 The language of gestures could only be enhanced or diminished by means of “combination” with streams of natural signs for other senses. Any mediated or otherwise compound ideas were to be banned, including allegories, past and future tenses, self-identification, and the supernatural. Furthermore, knowing details of the plot in

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advance disturbed the crucial animating effects of linear unfolding: “The reading of programs . . . weakens or removes the surprise of the situations, which is one of the principal vehicles for the fine arts, and especially pantomime.”77 His belief was that such programs tricked the ignorant multitudes into believing that they perceived something not communicated by the dancers. Angiolini’s public exchange of letters with Noverre captured the attention of the Milanese as no other aesthetic quarrel had during that period. Supporters of each party published polemical pamphlets and the Gazzetta letteraria reported in 1774 that the battle played out in “the theater, the café, and the salon.”78 Indeed, the controversy surrounding these two choreographers gives the lie to any assertion that, if an Italian Enlightenment had existed, it was a demarcated intellectual phenomenon as opposed to a cultural and social one. After Noverre’s brief and failed tenure at the Regio Ducal Teatro in 1774, Pietro Verri gave his own public endorsement to Angiolini, agreeing that Noverre’s pantomime was poorly equipped to harness the sensibility of the audience and taking the opportunity to offer a few cautiously worded expressions of national pride. He had seen Noverre in Vienna in 1770 and had been a regular attendee of Angiolini’s ballets since the latter’s arrival in Milan.79 Verri perceived immediately that the Angiolini-Noverre rivalry could inform— and lend currency to—his recent writings on the sensibility of the human mechanism and the basic physical impetuses underlying advanced culture.80 In his Lettre à Monsieur Noverre of 1776, Verri claimed that Noverre had appeared before Milanese audiences with “the air of a genius who came to enlighten a barbarous country.”81 He accused Noverre of considering Lombardy a cultural backwater by virtue of its status as a political satellite: “Ultimately you perceive Lombardy as a little province detached from the monarchy, or as an American colony.”82 Noverre had failed to win over Italian audiences because he had underestimated them. Verri noted in particular the jeers directed by the Milanese at Noverre’s Agamemnon vengé, which had met with resounding success in Vienna only months previously. The reception was, he claimed, due to more acute Italian sensibilities. As Pietro wrote to his brother Alessandro, “one needs a hammer to move a stupid nation,” but Italians were mortified by the brutality of Noverre’s dramas, and (he noted a little more defensively), “so as to not to feel their souls being torn apart, a more sensitive people will distract themselves by looking for something to laugh at” (per non sentirsi squarciare l’anima appunto una nazione troppo sensibile si distrae e cerca avidamente se v’è un canto sul quale ridere).83

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Verri praised Angiolini’s model of progressive animation as superior to Noverre’s preference for sudden shocks: “One must manage the attention of the spectator; one begins by making him curious; then one captures his interest, develops it, augments it, heats it, and thus one can push his sensibility to the brink.”84 From the moment of Angiolini’s arrival in Milan, Verri informed Noverre, the Italian choreographer had moved the audiences there, training them in attention through the new genre of pantomime: We came to admire, to taste this new dramatic genre with the same attentiveness, the same sensibility that that vast parterre must have felt on the occasion that the incomparable Du Fresne and his troupe staged the most beautiful pieces in your Theatre François. I saw, Sir, the room regularly full of spectators, and from the first representation I noticed a silence and an interest that one could not have predicted in a nation whose theater is ordinarily given over to comic actors; I saw the spectators in tears, I saw them moved, and it is no small credit to the sensibility and natural taste of a nation that, despite the misfortune of having its theater defiled, has seized and felt the true and the beautiful from one day to the next.85

Compared to his earlier writings, Verri’s Lettre à Monsieur Noverre displays a palpable optimism. No longer were the Milanese frozen into artifice by a morbid, unnatural culture; no longer were philosophers separated from the multitude by an intractable barrier of language. Angiolini transformed them into sensitive, weeping, silent, ardent people. He seized the spectators’ bodies and made them feel the vivid impression of thoughts; he animated them. Crucially, Verri believed that Angiolini was able to do this “because he composed the music for his own ballets” and thus “better combined gestures to sounds.”86 In the last of his letters to mention dance, written to his brother Alessandro in 1781, Pietro recounted a story: “They say that Angiolini improvises on his violin when he is given a topic [for a ballet] and that this process functions as a charm for the new ideas that arise from him.”87 This anecdote grants music a preeminence that was unprecedented within pantomime. But more importantly (and this is an idea that will be revisited in chapter 4), it also accords music the power to animate ideas, setting persons into motion within the mind and thereby bringing mimesis into being.

la statua di condilliac Tellingly, Pietro Verri intended the Lettre à Monsieur Noverre to be a supplement to his Osservazioni sulla tortura, which spoke eloquently

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on behalf of the injustices suffered by the “poor unfortunate and uncultured souls who were only able to speak the plebeian Lombard language” (poveri sgraziati e incolti che non sapevano parlare che il Lombardo plebeo).88 The people of this class were identified by their linguistic limitations; their dialect separated them from the enlightenment that Verri wished were theirs. The potential of Angiolinian “sign language” to fill in the gaps in popular education had already been noted ironically by its critics: Ange Goudar suggested in 1773, “If I had to put an inscription on the door of the theater, I would write, Public school, in which everyone must instruct himself with his own money.”89 A decade later, the Milanese critic Matteo Borsa scorned minuets with, as he put it, pretensions to be encyclopedias.90 For Angiolini, though, the didactic powers of his sign language were no laughing matter. To this end, he began a new project in 1782, using mime to communicate “ideas, even the more abstract ones of philosophy” (le idee anche più astratte della filosofia) to Milanese audiences.91 Because what he called the Art of Signs required no mediation—or so he boasted—it could render these complex philosophical ideas more vividly than verbal language and thus was capable of effecting the mass enlightenment that had eluded the Milan illuministi: “Moving the spirit and the heart with a more unmediated effect, the Art of Signs may one day forge a closer link between philosophy and imagination, reason and sentiment” (Attaccando con un effetto più immediato lo spirito, ed il cuore, potrà l’Arte de’ cenni pervenire un giorno ad unire con un più stretto legame la filosofia e l’immaginazione, il raziocinio ed il sentimento).92 The project had its debut with La vendetta spiritosa. Angiolini had created the plot, choreographed the dance steps and the pantomime, composed the music, and subjected all components to the rigorous art of careful “combination.” As one might expect, given the choreographer’s opposition to verbal programs during these years, Angiolini provided no description of the plot. The later revival for Venice reveals La vendetta to have been a curious amalgam of high-flown philosophy with generic characteristics of the pastoral.93 Following “various encounters and incidents” of an amorous nature, the magical shepherdess Amarilli animates the statue of a Naiad by means of sensory stimulation in order to cause discord between Tirsi and Clori: Various encounters and incidents result from unrequited love in a group of Arcadian shepherds and shepherdesses. One of the shepherdesses, who is unpaired and possesses magic, resolves to take her revenge; she does it

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ingeniously following a magical operation in the company of her followers. Her vendetta consists in animating the statue of a Naiad celebrated by the shepherds in Arcadia, and which acquires ideas through her senses, in imitation of Condillac’s ingenious statue. As the statue always prefers whatever object is just then receiving her attentions, she declares herself in love with the shepherd Tirsi, who had angered Amarilli in his love for Clori. This new and strange love causes discord between Clori and Tirsi, as was the goal of the vengeful shepherdess. Finally, after various conflicts and situations, the magic shepherdess reconverts the statue into cold marble, Clori and Tirsi remain apart, and the story ends in confusion caused by the different sentiments of the shepherds.94

Like Lambranzi’s statue ballet examined above, La vendetta effects a marriage of Italian elements with French ones. The characters are taken from Renaissance poetry, where they featured in works like Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Il pastor fido; they may be familiar to musicologists from the sixteenth-century Italian madrigal settings of Guarini’s text. Also like Lambranzi, Angiolini set his ballet within a landscape of deteriorating classical artifacts; its second act takes place among ancient ruins. Indeed, it would seem that the “ingenious revenge” of the title— Amarilli’s animation of the Naiad through stimulation of its senses—is possible only after she conducts something of a magical incantation among these ruins.95 Despite this rather incongruous dramatic context, Condillac’s treatise appears to have been used with surprising philosophical fidelity. For Milanese audiences, the choreographer/composer provided this brief, evocative statement of intent: I attempt in this work to advance my art by a degree in conveying to you a new series of ideas, explaining merely with the help of gestures not only the sensations that external objects may arouse in a new soul, and the comparisons that the soul can make with them, but also making sensible the path from the first impressions of the most indifferent objects up to sentiment itself and from foolish curiosity to the most delicate motions of the heart.96

What Angiolini attempted, in other words, was to make spectators feel the reawakening of the statue tingling in their own bodies, to make them feel the onset of human sensibility (“I attempt to . . . mak[e] sensible the path from the first impressions of the most indifferent objects up to sentiment itself”). Like the readers of Condillac’s treatise, Angiolini’s spectators were thus searching for their own prelinguistic selves, a process designed to help them rediscover their most natural bodily impulses and sensing mechanisms. In order to assist in this self-discovery, Angio-

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lini called for a sustained imaginative engagement: “The only favour that I request is a slight effort of continuous attention” (la sola grazia, che io domando, si è un leggiero sforzo d’attenzione continuata). Thus, La vendetta made use of a rhetoric of becoming sensible, in much the same fashion as the treatise it professed to contain, with the statue serving similarly as a figure of aesthetic attention. As should be clear by now, the animation of the statue through sensory stimulation mirrored the very same animation that Angiolini professed to create in his audience through his music-mime. In the passage quoted above, Angiolini drew an unmistakable parallel between the effect of sensory impressions on the statue’s “new soul” and the effect of La vendetta’s own “new series of ideas” on the spectator, as conveyed through the eyes and ears: both are transformative, moving the object(s) from immobility to sensibility through stimulation. His unanimated statue—the Naiad situated in a grotto-temple, leaning gracefully on an urn—thus assumes a symbolic function, much like Beccaria’s gigantic papier-mâché monsters of rhetoric. These figures represent frozen humans, who in turn represent a frozen humanity whose congealment has resulted from ancient artifice. The quickening of the “statua di Condilliac” in La vendetta was a representation that contained—and created—its own truth. It may have been Angiolini’s most perfect sign. The animative powers of pantomime were broadly acknowledged, if not universally welcomed. Opera theorist Esteban de Arteaga agreed that such dance was derived from the original language of gestures and cries, and he attributed its effects to the combination of its visual appeal with its extension through time: “Mime has all the advantages of painting and sculpture in the variety, choice, and strength of its attitudes and furthermore the incomparable advantage of putting its images in succession, giving them motion.”97 But the resultant stimulation of the spectators could have unforeseen and troubling consequences. These effects were stronger because mime was not to be reflected on but only felt: “It seizes the soul with a cluster [folla] of compound sensations which hold the sensibility in a state of perpetual stimulation. It unites with the energy of gesture the vague yet vivid and voluptuous impression of sounds.”98 Noting that the arrival of mimes heralded the fall of Roman culture, Arteaga suggested a ban on such dance in Italian theaters, and he invited the “prophetic spirits” among his readers to tell him what would come of this “dangerous influence.”99 Arteaga thus implicitly warned of an incipient revolution: crowds of lower-class Italians whipped into a bacchanalian frenzy by entr’acte

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pantomime. He remarked on the tendency of the “plebeian multitudes” to dominate Italian theaters, though they were servile elsewhere. It is impossible to deny that Angiolini and many of his supporters sought to animate the Milanese crowds for political ends. The choreographer’s desire for a political union to match the cultural rebirth of Italy became unequivocal a decade later, when he welcomed the French invaders openly.100 Both Angiolini and Pietro Verri hoped that the French unification of Italy could have been the triumphant result of decades of passionate Gallicism. Free from Austrian and Spanish domination, and with the help of its beneficent Gallic occupiers, Italy could take its place as the equal of France. The latent political imagery in La vendetta spiritosa returned with a more explicit function in Deucalione e Pirra (July 12, 1797).101 Here, the symbolism of quickened stones representing politically awakened Italians was unmistakable: the libretto referred to the story as an “Allegorico programma” and included a preface from the “Inventore” that instructed the audience of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan to interpret the drama in political terms. It tells the story of a shipwrecked couple, Deucalion and Pyrrha, who, after a deluge, arrive in a land populated only by abandoned temples and rocks. The heroes learn from an animated statue of “Peace” how to create companions from the rocks. The stones miraculously come to life, but they are ignorant and crass. Accompanied by an enchanting music that calms the rioting stone people, the gods descend from the heavens to teach them how to be both cultivated and free. As the libretto’s introduction makes clear, these stones represent Italians, made rough and inhuman by centuries of Austrian and Spanish rule. Teachers rather than tyrants, their French occupiers—represented in the ballet by Deucalion and Pyrrha— bring about the requisite “regeneration.” The “new beings” (nuovi create) are taught sensibility by watching the “noble and voluptuous dance” of Pyrrha, Deucalion, and the Muses, including Terpsichore herself. At the close, a statue of Liberty emerges from the ground, carrying the tricolore, and is surrounded by little spirits representing Italian cities, united at last.102 What musical medicine did Angiolini use to breathe life into these stones? Alas, regarding those most vital of sounds, we remain unstirred: the music for La vendetta is lost, buried under the sediments of more than two and a quarter centuries. It is a sad irony that this most loquacious of men should have been made mute in this, his most germane interest. Of Angiolini’s many animated statues, only that in Don Juan has left any auditory traces, and that music, as we know, is Gluck’s. In assessing Angiolini’s talents as a composer, we must make do with those

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few works, like La partenza d’Enea, that have resisted the depredations of time. Modern musicologists have seen little in these scores to excite their sentiments. Brown and Hansell have noted awkward doublings and parallel fifths; regular processions of two-, four-, and eight-bar phrases; and a near-total reliance on tonic and dominant harmonies.103 There is certainly nothing to be found that approaches the rapid fluctuation of that most speech-like music, operatic recitative. In much of Angiolini’s music, the rigorous meter and high degree of repetition recalls poetry like “Mi sferza e sforza,” condemned by Verri as cold and immobile. Movements such as those from La partenza d’Enea examined above are reserved for periods of rapid dramatic flux; elsewhere, on-stage events continue to occur in the musical interstices. Even the most through-composed of Angiolini’s pieces retain a near-inexorable rhythmic regularity. And though Angiolini might have theorized about ever-unfolding change, both musically and onstage, and dance steps always integrated within pantomime, his scores contain an abundance of two-part minuets, chaconnes, and gigues; even later scenarios such as Deucalione e Pirra display a significant quantity of diegetic dance. As its preface attests, this last of Angiolini’s pantomimes ends with “everyone coming together in happy, varied, noble dances, which denote general contentment and perfect democratic harmony.”104 Beneath the new politics, the old meanings of poetic feet in divertissement remain intact. But it is unfair to fault Angiolini for these characteristics. The notion of a constantly changing stream of musical events, flowing around the supple and real bodies onstage, is the relic of that other, later, more famous idea of Gesamtkunstwerk. The choreographer’s description of his Teseo containing “no step, nor gesture, nor glance that did not correspond to the rigid tempo of the varied music with exact precision” might encourage us to imagine a different kind of staged corporeality— one that is much more rhythmical and more mechanized, with every motion enchained to the music. It was through these pantomime scores that the motivating principle of sustained iconicity, or perfect alignment between music and gesture, was introduced to Italian theatrical music. As we will see in chapter 2, this was the province of melodrama, which bore the influence of Angiolini’s project in its inclusion of mimed passages with representative music.

chapter 2

Pimmalione

Musicologists tend to disagree about watershed moments in late eighteenth-century Italian opera. In general histories, the period from about 1760 to 1800 encompasses what Reinhard Strohm has called the gradual “‘musicalisation’ of drama.”1 It sees the decline of a collection of related elements, such as the Metastasian libretto, recitativo semplice, and the da capo aria, its repetition schemes, and its coloratura; and the ascent of others, such as syllabic declamation within arias, a semiserious or “bourgeois” genre, dynamic and thematically dense series of linked movements, and orchestral mimicking of onstage bodily gestures. However, the operas that have featured most prominently in this historiography—operas such as Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice and Mozart’s Don Giovanni—were satellites of a larger Italian practice that is now largely forgotten. What is more, the temptation to trace a story of Vienna-based innovation against the “dazzling artifices” of vacuous Italian convention has been compounded by that era’s self-styled reformers: figures such as Ranieri de’ Calzabigi and Lorenzo da Ponte, whose poetic talents were equaled by an ability to claim territory within a nascent discipline.2 In practice, Gluck had few followers. The conventions of opera seria (Italian serious opera) remained intransigent for almost the entire eighteenth century, and Mozart was not the one to undo them.3 The locus of their dismantling was not Vienna but Venice.4 Nonetheless these two composers are still presented as the alpha and omega of the period, the later beauties following the earlier reform, their prominence in direct 44

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proportion to the width of the historical lens.5 Conspicuously absent in such histories are alternative moments within Italian opera: moments whose musical beauties did not resist decay and in whose “representations of humanity” modern audiences have not seen themselves reflected (moments which were not, in other words, the object of nineteenthcentury mythologizing), but which initiated important shifts by repositioning the outer limits of the genre.6 In this chapter, I will argue that one such shift—a particularly fundamental one—occurred when Italian operatic practice was transformed by its confrontation with melodrama. The repositioning began with the Italian reception of the first melodrama, Pygmalion, a humble little play that issued from the pen of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1770. (He called it a scène lyrique; the term “melodrama” came into use later.7) This version of the Pygmalion myth was much more chaste than the original telling, the Song of Orpheus in Book 10 of the Metamorphoses: Rousseau had no use for Ovid’s Golden Venus, his man-on-statue bedroom scenes, or the happy arrival “before the ninth moon had come to its crescent.”8 Rousseau’s Pygmalion calls for just two actors and a small orchestra, and it stages only the moments surrounding the animation of the statue, which Rousseau names Galatea.9 It consists almost entirely of the sculptor’s monologue—ostensibly spoken, not sung—interspersed with mimed segments that are accompanied by descriptive music. I will consider a few moments from the work in some detail below, so a brief summary will suffice here. When the curtain opens, Pygmalion has lost his inspiration, believing his most perfect work, the statue Galatea, to be complete. He admits that his obsession with this female form is an erotic one and prays that she should become animate. She suddenly comes to life and (in what came to be the play’s most famous moment) identifies herself as human by means of the first-person pronoun: moi and n’est plus moi. Pygmalion embraces her, and the drama ends. Rousseau’s most immediate inspiration was neither classical narrative verse nor the opera libretto but rather Diderot’s bourgeois theater. This parentage is evident in Pygmalion’s indeterminacy of mood (the drama is neither explicitly serious nor comic), as well as its gestural notation and the disjointed utterance.10 Indeed, despite his Grecian garb, Rousseau’s sculptor could not dwell within a Metastasian drama—or a Calzabigian one. To start with, serious Italian opera libretti only rarely included expressive gestures, and never in the way that Rousseau did in Pygmalion; the few actions that were specified in opera seria were crucial to the plot, and critics of the form held that performers remained all but

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immobile as they sang. Though some singers were praised for acting with their bodies as well as their voices,11 their gestures were not usually textual—that is, they were not dictated by the libretto and there were no lengthy segments of music given over to describing them.12 What is more, the characters of opera seria are eloquent, and Rousseau’s language is both overblown and resolutely mundane by comparison. Distressed by sexual embarrassment, Pygmalion speaks in broken strings of banalities—“je ne puis . . . je n’ose . . .”—addressed to no one in particular. Yet it became one of the most successful dramas to play on Italian stages in the last decades of the eighteenth century. I am not the first to suggest that Rousseau’s Pygmalion—the first sui generis musical drama to arrive in Italy in a very long time—was well loved by Italian audiences.13 My purpose, however, is to situate this reception in the context of contemporary Italian practices of translation and adaptation, and theories of expressive sound, all of which signaled a crucial re-evaluation of the means of theatrical expression during the final decades of the eighteenth century. Since this is the longest of my chapters, a succinct roadmap will be useful at this juncture. I begin by taking seriously the oft-dismissed claim, made by the composer of most of its music, that Pygmalion was a project of classical revival—a claim that serves here less to clarify the intentions of Rousseau as auteur than it does to illuminate various strands of the text’s reception in Italy and elsewhere (and, by extension, to throw light on the curious preoccupations and imageries of late classicism). There follows a history of Pygmalion in Italy during the 1770s and 1780s, when the work was taken up by actors and translators who sought to import certain strains of French thought. Like the Florentine inventors of opera, Pygmalion’s first Italian proponents sought a rebirth of classical theater, but this was a twilight revival, bearing signs of historical decay. Of key importance were the work’s myriad estrangements: between modern languages; between language itself and other media (such as music and bodily gesture); and between plastic arts and “animated” ones. As we will see, a few Italians imitated Rousseau by creating other new genres, pointing up similar schisms of register and idiom. Like Pygmalion—a drama about a sculpture—such works often featured what we might call “nested media”: that is, within the boundaries of one artwork there is another one, which is often different in its materials and behaves according to its own expressive principles. The third section of this chapter concerns theorizations of the sounds of speech—and speech in different languages—that were contemporary with these practices.

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There emerged from within both the practical and the theoretical traditions loud calls for a new kind of opera based on the spoken word—calls that were answered finally in 1790 when Pygmalion was adapted into something like (and also not quite like) an Italian opera. This new kind of opera featured a new kind of song, complete with its own label, filosofico: a song that was built on the textures of the spoken word and that resisted distinctions of lyric register and aria form. Initially, these innovations inhabited the intervals and off-nights of opera proper, but, I will argue, they ultimately became transformative for mainstream operatic practices. Could the junctures between words, music, and the plastic arts be perceptible to the senses? This was a matter for which the story of Pygmalion, with its perfect nested sculpture, was wholly relevant. The operas made in melodrama’s likeness bore the traces of Pygmalion’s heterogeneity and shared its preoccupation with the perfect sign.

translators and the performance of language In the two decades after its premiere, Pygmalion was staged at least twenty times on the Italian peninsula—but exclusively in its original French. During these years, it accumulated about seventeen editions and no fewer than five Italian translations, and yet the text as performed was resistant to the usual domestication. In German cities, by contrast, the work was given in that language.14 Eventually Rousseau—or perhaps an editor confronting Rousseau’s unfinished text—suggested that Pygmalion was designed to accommodate the very unmusicality of its host tongue: whereas opera suited the sonorous Italian language, and was perhaps even the result of it, French had no fixed prosody and therefore could not generate melodious song.15 But even before this authorial exegesis became known, there was little room for the work within the categories of Italian opera. Pygmalion is a chimera, with parts from different genres—but unlike the dramma per musica, which already boasted a certain hybridity, its unmatched parts were arranged diachronically, in jarring alternation. When Pygmalion made its Italian debut in Naples in 1772, the local man of letters Ferdinando Galiani dismissed the work as “half prose, half music, the monster offspring of Rousseau’s imagination” (despite the efforts of censors, Rousseau was well known by Italians even when he was not loved).16 Like many monsters, Pygmalion was imagined to have its generic origins in the ancient past, an amorphous prehistory in which elements

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had not settled into their familiar places. Rousseau had been one of many to suggest that language, music, and dance shared ancestors in an ancient system of gestures and onomatopoeic cries.17 In ancient Greece these had been fused into pleasing forms, like sung poetry and musical drama.18 Modern historians have perhaps been too eager to dismiss the claim of Rousseau’s musical collaborator, Horace Coignet, that in Pygmalion, “M. Rousseau wished . . . to give an idea of Greek Melopoeia, [the] ancient theatrical declamation.”19 I believe it is quite possible that Rousseau had some kind of revivalist impulse in mind, albeit a complicated one. But while a Hellenic musical theater—such as opera was also imagined to be—could re-emerge in Renaissance Florence without bearing the signs of its age, it could not do so in France nearly two centuries later. After all, Rousseau’s contemporaries were interested in the ruinedness of old matter: the way that stone corners eroded, colors faded, statue limbs dropped off, and the earth below seemed to be swallowing—ever so slowly—all monuments of human achievement.20 The music of Rousseau’s Pygmalion was made to show its supposed old age much as did Piranesian ruins and the artifacts that archaeologists uncovered in their digs—and even (if Rousseau was to be believed) as did the French language itself. Coignet’s ritornellos replicate the vanishing edges of French words—their silent endings and e muets—with broken melodies and incomplete cadences. Even the final ritornello (example 2) fails to supply closure. It begins as a gigue for muted strings and horns. But the tendency toward discrete phrases and repetition gradually disintegrates, and the harmonies become ever more strange, ending with a half-cadence in E minor—a key that is implied but never heard. As the lovers embrace, the modal shift and chromatic descending bass evoke the chill winds of time and death. In keeping with Coignet’s assertion of Pygmalion’s classical pedigree, the play’s earliest reception is rife with archaeological fantasies. For instance, the libretto for a 1772 production in Vienna depicted three cherubs, or putti, playing with masks and lyres, which they excavated from a ditch (figure 2). A shovel lies in the bottom left-hand corner of the image. What is interesting here is not the putti—the publisher, Josef Kurzböck, used them in most of its designs—but rather the fact that they are shown in an archaeological attitude, uncovering their theatrical toys from below ground. The tablet held aloft by the figure on the right augurs the tabula design used within: Kurzböck’s libretto organized Pygmalion’s script into three parallel tracks, separated by vertical lines (figure 3).21 On the left are descriptions of the musical interludes, which are

Pimmalione | 49 example 2. No. 26, Allegro con sordini, from Horace Coignet and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pygmalion, ed. Waeber (Lyon, 1770); my reduction. Allegro con sordini a2

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not Coignet’s but rather a new version by Franz Asplmayr. These musical descriptions were probably written for this production, without Rousseau’s involvement, but they circulated widely. The middle column of the libretto records the length of the interludes (again, not traceable to Rousseau), while the column on the right alternates between passages of gesture, which are prescribed in italics, and the monologue, which appears in regular typeface. This table form made the text seem unfamiliar by supplementing and classifying its uses. Though Rousseau’s register within Pygmalion had been, in the end, bourgeois and mundane, this Viennese design recalled transcriptions of ancient or distant languages.22 Yet as Kurzböck’s putti showed, even very old objects could occasion new practice. To that end the publisher printed anonymous Italian and German translations alongside the original French, also in the three-column design. Taken as a whole, the libretto asked the spectator to observe a variety of forms of translation: between languages as well as between words and other media. Audiences were invited to

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figure 2. Title design from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pygmalion (Vienna: Kurzböck, 1772). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

read (as it were) the gesture that translates language and the music that translates gesture. The first Pigmalione published on Italian soil, by Francesco Saverio de’ Rogati, made a similar invitation to its readers.23 De’ Rogati was a Neapolitan classicist and had attended the Naples premiere of Rousseau’s Pygmalion in 1772.24 Though Galiani had suggested that the only amusement on offer that evening was Galatea’s “very interesting body,” de’ Rogati had admired both the main actor’s declamation and Asplmayr’s expressive musical interludes.25 His 1773 Pigmalione appeared in the same dual-language format—original on the left page,

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figure 3. Three-column libretto from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pygmalion (Vienna: Kurzböck, 1772). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Italian translation on the right—that had graced his editions of Sapphic and Anacreontic poems.26 Here again, the work is presented as debris. The title of de’ Rogati’s Pigmalione appears on a stone tablet with degraded edges, half buried (figure 4); in the background sit three columns of a temple ruin. Finicky and expensive, the dual-language format was common in Italian publication at this time only when the age or distance of the original seemed to require it. Here, though, de’ Rogati did not offer a translation of a remote language but rather an adaptation from one language to another closely related one with a different esprit or genio.27 Rousseau’s fractured prose is fashioned into the shape of an operatic libretto, with versi sciolti for recitatives and versi lirici for arias. De’ Rogati promised his readers that he “endeavored to supply the public with an exact poetic translation . . . never moving far from the original,” granting only those concessions that were required to render prose into poetry.28 These, however, were substantial. For instance, the French prose: Vanité . . . faiblesse humaine . . . je ne puis me lasser d’admirer mon ouvrage . . . je m’enivre d’amour propre . . . je m’adore en ce que j’ai fait . . .29

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figure 4. Title design from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pigmalione, trans. Francesco Saverio de’ Rogati (Naples, 1773). Ulderico Rolandi Collection, Fondazione Cini, Venice.

became, in Italian poetry: La vanità, la debolezza è degna Per un opra sì bella. Io di mirarla Cessar non posso. Ebro [sic] del proprio amore In ciò, che ho fatto amo me stesso.

As this passage makes clear, de’ Rogati did not preserve the original disjointed style. Ellipses are gone, and fragments are woven into coherent thoughts. For instance, “vanity” and “human weakness”—merely named in Rousseau’s French—are explained in the Italian as reactions “appropriate for such a beautiful work.” However, and despite inversions in the destination language, most of Rousseau’s words are present in something like their original order (in this excerpt we may note vanité to vanità, puis to posso, ouvrage to opera, enivre to ebro, and amour propre to proprio amore). They exist as kernels of the original within a more prolix unfolding. De’ Rogati made his purpose clear in the preface: Pigmalione was to be the prototype for a new kind of Italian opera. He alluded briefly to the faults of opera seria but cited his friend Saverio Mattei, who had famously described them at greater length.30 Their critiques were very much like those of Francesco Algarotti, Cesare Baretti, and Calzabigi from the 1750s and 1760s; the conventions of opera seria were, after all, still robust in the mid-1770s despite the appearance of all of Gluck’s Italian reform operas

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in the preceding decade.31 To start, in the list of conventional operatic faults there was the endless series of solo numbers: Metastasian libretti usually featured only two or three duets or larger ensembles among more than a dozen exit arias. Then there was the much lamented da capo, which called for the first verse to be repeated after the second, even when it was nonsensical to do so. The inertia of the musical form was made more apparent by the habit of most singers to remain stationary as they sang. What was more, the standard two verses of an aria were too short to accommodate the appropriate amount of music, which encouraged composers to write long orchestral introductions and repeat words and phrases ad nauseam. But most pernicious of all was the coloratura: the rapid scales and arpeggios that showed off voices at the expense of prosody. Such text setting within arias created a stark contrast with the intervening passages of recitative, which had a more natural pace of declamation but were musically uninteresting. Indeed, accounts suggest that Italian audiences paid little attention to these portions of an opera, and composers often assigned the task of setting simple recitatives to a pupil.32 This is not to say that the Neapolitan critics cared for melodrama per se. Indeed, de’ Rogati shared Galiani’s low opinion of it, declaring, “One cannot imagine a greater lack of verisimilitude than accompanying or preparing with an instrumental ritornello the declamation of an actor who does not sing but speaks.”33 And yet the actor who played the hero—Louis Bursay, who had also starred in the 1772 Viennese production of Rousseau’s Pygmalion—seemed to capture the audience’s attention in a way that Italian opera only rarely did: “The precision, the vivacity, the passion of the very able actor, the appropriateness of the few musical notes of Mr. Aspelmayer [sic], played with sensibility in tempo, awakened in the audience a greater delight than the recherché, long, and ever dull music of today’s Italian theatres.”34 De’ Rogati asked composers who set his Pigmalione to preserve something of Bursay’s manner of speaking so that “the song itself is not much different from French declamation.”35 In other words, de’ Rogati wished Italian song to sound more like French speech, and it could be modeled in the first instance on his own translation of a French text. His Pigmalione is not quite one of those “monsters of language” (mostri linguistici) abhorred by purists. The style of the Italian still remained a safe distance from the French; in this matter at least, de’ Rogati was a conservative. Rousseau had admired the prosody of Italian: not least because, within the realm of opera, whatever the faults of its practice, the Italian language was as imperialist as

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Napoleon would later be. But he could also have mentioned, as many did, that centuries had passed since that language had thrived outside of the opera house.36 As we have seen in chapter 1, calls for a reform of Italian via the reception of French thought sounded with increasing urgency as the century progressed. These literary debates are now familiar; what is not as well known is that they played out on stages as well—within theatrical performances and the adaptation of melodrama in particular. De’ Rogati’s libretto was never set to music; as we will see, though, his principle of an Italian melody that sounded like speech—even foreign speech—had gained traction by the time Pimmalione finally arrived on the operatic stage in 1790. In the interim, Italian actors followed the model of Bursay by performing Pygmalion in French. It was, of course, not uncommon that French dramas should be presented in the original language in Italy. It was strange, though, that Rousseau’s scène lyrique was performed in French by Italian actors, who equipped their audiences with libretti that featured eminently performable translations and proclaimed the mutual foreignness of text and actor. At the center of this practice was the actor and playwright Tommaso Grandi, a lightning rod for French influences within Italian theater during the 1770s and 1780s. Touring Italy performing Rousseau’s little drama in French between 1773 and 1781, Grandi had occasion to commission at least four editions of Pygmalion and two translations. Each of these libretti advertised the production in the same way, emphasizing the foreign-ness of Pygmalion’s words within the performers’ mouths: “Pimmalione, by Mr. J. J. Rousseau . . . presented in the French tongue in the theater of this city, by Tommaso Grandi and Teresa Monti, Italian actors.”37 Others followed his lead. In 1778 Neapolitans could observe Pigmalione “represented in the French language, in prose, by Giacomo Ceolini, Italian actor.”38 Meanwhile, Pygmalion was being performed by “Bonifazio Welenfeldt and Annette Paganini, Italian actors” during the middle of the decade. Indeed, Welenfeldt, who hailed from Parma, seems to have had a talent for performing across this language divide: within improvisatory theater, he was known for the character of the “Italianised Frenchman.”39 The reference within such libretti to unspecified local theaters suggests—despite the vaunted philosophical provenance of the original—a measure of itinerancy reminiscent of the commedia dell’arte; and indeed, the careers of Monti, Grandi, and Welenfeldt had their origins there.40 Such performances required new types of supplementary printed text. Bursay, following his successful performances of Pygmalion in Vienna

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and Naples, was probably responsible for a 1773 performance of the work at the Teatro San Samuele, done in French and probably with Asplmayr’s music. The title page of the libretto printed for this occasion boasts a “New Translation, to which is added the Original by the Author”; in other words, the text is presented in both French and Italian, arranged in parallel columns.41 Bursay himself may have translated the text, or he may have commissioned it from the Venice-based translator Elisabetta Caminer Turra, who also collaborated with Grandi.42 The libretto included a few prefatory remarks on the difficulty of the task and a humble admission that this Italian Pimmalione contained “only a trace of what was brilliant in the original.”43 Modern observers might be inclined to disagree on both counts, as the drama has merely been given a faintly Italian patina. For example, the opening line, “Il n’ya point là d’ame ni de vie . . .” becomes “La non v’ha nè anima, nè vita . . .”; “ce n’est que de la pierre” becomes “essa non è pura che pietra”; and the translation continues word for word to the end, with few surprises. The idea of a French original was so essential to the practice of this new genre that one had to be invented for the first new melodrama created in Italy. Orphée, which had its premiere in Venice in 1774, had a French prose libretto by “L. B., pastore arcade”—perhaps Louis Bursay again—and music by an unnamed composer.44 It was performed by its author/translator, who explained that this new scène lyrique was made in Pygmalion’s model: “You desired another scene of this genre; I present to you this Orphée. . . . Between the immortal work of the celebrated Rousseau and this feeble imitation there is no similarity other than that of genre.”45 Yet there is an abundance of resemblances between the two works, and the author did not specify which in particular were generic. Both plays stage neighboring passages within the Metamorphoses; both contain artist-heroes and revived heroines; and both are spoken in French, with parallel Italian for reading only. What is more, Orphée prescribed gestures and actions as well as spoken text, with “music [that was] analogous to the pantomimic expression of the actors.”46 This principle of a music-gestural analog came to the earliest melodrama from pantomime dance, both rhetorically and in practice.47 As noted in chapter 1, within pantomime, bodily gesture and musical gesture were construed as two parts of a composite sign system that could be more expressive and accurate than verbal language—if, that is, the two streams were calibrated to be perfectly simultaneous. Pantomime dance and melodrama also shared performers and musicians. Franz Asplmayr, whose Viennese Pygmalion score was most often

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example 3. No. 2, Allegro, from Franz Asplmayr, Pygmalion (Vienna, 1772).

used in Italy, also wrote music for the ballets d’action of Georges Noverre.48 Many of Asplmayr’s interludes suggest an obvious correspondence between on-stage event and musical event, and there is little doubt that the two media were designed to coincide exactly. (This is particularly evident in the shorter interludes, which match a single onstage movement to a single musical event.) Elsewhere, though, his score for Pygmalion suggests a more complex relationship between motion and music than is usually attributed to early melodrama, particularly when vestigial dance tropes create a fleeting rhythmic momentum. For instance, Asplmayr’s second interlude (example 3) must analogize a series of actions and gestures: the sculptor “tosses away his tools with disdain, becomes restless, walks, stops, reluctantly turns his gaze toward the bottom of his atelier where the pavilion hides a statue, turns away, and falls into a deep reverie.”49 The throwing of the tools probably coincided with the first chord, which is made more prominent than the subsequent chords by a low bass note. Here, the left-most column of the Viennese libretto, devoted to musical descriptions, is helpful: it tells us that “the music expresses with rapidity the first few of these movements.” The footsteps of the actor’s promenade thus probably coincided with the crotchets, while the syncopated treble notes conveyed agitation and perhaps, as in some French pantomime dance, affective upper-body movement.50 But the syncopations soon give way to a six-bar sequence, colored rather prettily with dissonant passing tones; the schematic chords and arpeggios are replaced by a music that is driven by its own tension and resolution, as the crux of the hero’s inner conflict is suggested by a glance toward the statue Galatea. Per-

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haps paradoxically (at least for the modern listener), as Pygmalion “falls into deep reverie,” the orchestra shudders into silence. This is, after all, the music of audible motion, not inwardness. These music-gestural interludes provided further opportunity to observe translation quite literally in action, and Rousseau’s Italian disciples made the most of Pygmalion’s ties to the language of pantomime. In July 1775, for instance, Grandi and Monti’s performance of the melodrama Pygmalion was followed by a complete rendition of the same, entirely in pantomime dance.51 This translation was the work of choreographer Antoine Pitrot. The double Pygmalion functioned as a single entr’acte for Domenico Poggi and Antonio Salieri’s comic opera La locandiera. It would seem that no libretto or music survives from the dance half of this entr’acte. However, as Pitrot was a disciple of Noverre, there would have been three main components to his adaptation: excising Rousseau’s spoken words in favor of yet more gestures, choreographing the appropriate footwork, and commissioning a composer to supply a continuous, danceable score. The evening’s entertainment supplied yet another form of analog: sign systems were placed side-by-side, and audiences were invited to judge the distance between them. This time, of course, the translation was “read” not over a page margin but through a comparison of consecutive performances. Similarly, in Naples in 1785, when Domenico LeFevre choreographed another pantomime Pygmalion, he designated it a scène lyrique (following Rousseau) despite the absence of words altogether. Summarizing his ballet within the libretto, he marked the animation passage with a footnote describing the care he took to “translate” Galatea’s first words of self-identification (the celebrated moi and n’est plus moi) directly into the appropriate gestures.52 A model translator of these details, LeFevre allowed himself some liberty with a few others: for instance, he supplied a vigorous thunderbolt to animate the statue and appended a long divertissement for a cast of dozens. But surely the strangest of these entertainments came from Count Alessandro Pepoli, an aristocrat who performed the title role in a French-language production of Pygmalion at the Accademia de’ Rinnovati in 1788.53 His “favola odecoreutica” Ati e Cibele featured a speaking heroine and a hero who could only mime.54 The music was contributed by another aristocratic amateur, Giambattista Cimador, who is a major character in the final section of this chapter. The year 1792 saw the premiere of Pepoli’s Piramo e Tisbe, in which a singing hero is divided from a speaking heroine.55 Both of these works replicated

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Pygmalion’s chimeric nature with similar (and similarly jarring) alternations of theatrical means; in both, characters who seem to have wandered in from different genres must attempt to understand one another across an idiom divide. Pepoli’s interest in translation went beyond the stage. Seeking to import French thought into Italian culture, he devoted his own publishing house, the Tipografia Pepoliana, largely to providing Italian readers with an annotated Biblioteca teatrale della nazione francese: twenty-seven volumes of plays by Voltaire, Molière, and even Quinault, translated by Pepoli, Melchiorre Cesarotti, and others.56 Rousseau’s Pygmalion provided a consistent center to Pepoli’s various activities during the last ten years of his life, 1787 to 1796; he even wrote one of the first original Italian melodramas, Pandora.57 As we will see, Pepoli—like de’ Rogati—sought to revitalize opera itself by means of a new kind of song modeled on the pitches and rhythms of speech.

mimophones and phonographs But what did speech actually sound like, and why did it sound the way it did? These questions were asked during the 1770s and 1780s in Italy and elsewhere, and Italian opera reformers who were interested in the sounds of utterance could draw on a variety of sources. Rousseau himself forcefully affirmed that words exist first and most meaningfully in sound; a language hemorrhages truth and sentiment when it is written in alphabetic characters.58 In trying to imagine how words were spoken (or sung) more than two hundred years ago, today’s historians are little better off than Rousseau had been in confronting the ancients. The sounds themselves are long vanished and their notation ever incomplete. (We will revisit this matter in chapter 3.) If absolute answers are few, some relative ones may still emerge from the comparisons that were made at the time between idioms and languages. For instance, when one of Pygmalion’s anonymous Italian translators claimed to have captured only “a trace of what is marvelous” in Rousseau’s text, he indulged in a peculiarly modern fantasy about the value of the original: the admission of failure is particularly notable since these remarks prefaced a word-forword conversion of French into Italian.59 Such fantasies were rare within Italian culture of the late eighteenth century—even Cesarotti’s celebrated translations now seem to take too many liberties—but they were unheard of in Italian opera and pantomime, which usually operated with the most liberal principles of adaptation. The translator’s professing of failure is rendered even stranger by the proximity of the French and Italian

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languages. If “Tire, ville opulente et superbe” had significance that was not preserved in “Tiro, opulente e superba Città,” then meaning must have been heard in minute gradations of verbal sound. What is more, the categories of speech and music are slippery within the original melodrama. Pygmalion declines to specify pitch and rhythm for the actor’s voice. Did this mean that the actor simply uttered the text, as he might do today in spoken theater? Not necessarily. The melodramatic voice has been musical in more recent memory, and I would suggest that it was this way from its inception.60 Even Rousseau (or, again, his editor) suggested in the “Fragmens d’Observations sur l’Alceste italien de M. Gluck” that the sculptor’s declamation should have a musical component, but an improvised one: “A sensitive and intelligent actor, by bringing together the tone of his voice and the accent of his declamation with what the musical line expresses, mixes these foreign colors.”61 A listener who was unmusical might not hear the difference between such sonorous declamation and true recitative. The sensitive listener would notice merely a slight, persistent dissonance between the vocal pitches and the orchestral.62 The difference between speech and song is one of degree rather than kind. Speech, like song, has pitch and unfolds in time; it has, in other words, a melody and a rhythm. The “speech-likeness” of the spoken word comes largely from the fact that its pitches are not gradated but continuous, and they are determined spontaneously, usually without regard for the musical logic of motives or patterns. These elements varied (as Rousseau and his contemporaries were vividly aware) with the idiom and register of the utterance. Poetry was more melodic than prose, as the patterns generated by rhyme and meter created something like a musical structure. Vowels could be open or muffled; some languages had fixed long and short syllables, making their “feet” tidier; some languages’ diacritical marks indicated the raising and lowering of pitch. The various melodies of language coexist uneasily with the idea of music as a literate practice. Ancient Greek, for instance, had an abundance of musical qualities; this very fact may have discouraged the Greeks from developing more thorough notation, which could have preserved their music for posterity. So, at least, believed Joshua Steele, an Englishman whose Prosodia rationalis (1775) is among the oddest eighteenthcentury treatises on music. Steele maintained that the imperfect notation of the ancients had resulted in centuries of quarrels about the precise sounds of their language.63 In order to “treat the modulation of speech as a genus of music,” he invented a new system to record all aspects of the

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figure 5. “Oh, happiness!” from Joshua Steele, Prosodia rationalis; or, An Essay towards Establishing the Melody and the Measure of Speech, to be Expressed and Perpetuated by Peculiar Symbols (London: W. Bowyer and J. Nichols, 1775), 38. Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

spoken word.64 Steele insisted that his speech notation could be “read off as easily as a song tune.” It used time signatures, staves, and Italian expressive terms (staccato, piano, forte, and so on). However, by dispensing with noteheads, he was able to mark the tiny gradations of pitch heard in speech. In figure 5, the lines attached to the bottom of the stems represent pitch variation, while the symbols at the top indicate rhythm; the squiggles trace dynamic swells, while the commas signify a piano dynamic. His treatise includes a “score” for the opening of the Iliad, as well as Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” monologue, with annotations permitting readers to pronounce it as had the actor David Garrick.65 The influence of Garrick’s characteristically broken declamation is evident throughout the treatise: in all of his figures, Steele provided ample rests for breathing, which he called “stops of expression,” because “a pause or silence, fitly employed, makes a significant impression on an auditor.”66 The sustained cello tones in figure 5 are unique to this particular score. According to his experiments, the bass drone “animates the reader or speaker,” causing him to stay closer to the initial pitch of a syllable—as suggested in “end” and “aim”—rather than sliding directly away, as shown at the syllables of “happiness.”67 Here, as in Pygmalion’s early reception, the rapprochement of speech and music occasioned archeological fantasies. Were this system to be widely adopted, Steele boasted, “the overwhelmed ruins of a Herculaneum should be retrieved from rubbish, and restored to their former splendours.”68 Unlike most, he believed that the English were the truest heirs to the Greeks—a conviction that was assisted by his unusual ability to detect perfect metrical feet within his own language. His argument distilled into a single maxim: “Every sentence in our language,

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figure 6. “General Precept and Example” from Joshua Steele, Prosodia rationalis; or, An Essay towards Establishing the Melody and the Measure of Speech, to be Expressed and Perpetuated by Peculiar Symbols (London: W. Bowyer and J. Nichols, 1775), 28. Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

whether prose or verse, has a rhythmus peculiar to itself; that is, in the language of modern musicians, it is either in common time or triple time; videlicet, minuet time, or jigg time, or mixed.” The dictum was designed to supply its own proof in his notation (see figure 6). The utterance begins in duple meter and then settles into triple; note the puns at “minuet time” and “jigg time.”69 Steele’s notation could also preserve moments of great eloquence for posterity. No less a figure than Lord Monboddo—author of The Origin and Progress of Language—praised him for having “fallen upon a way to make Garrick live as long as his Shakespear [sic].”70 This aspect of the project did not escape notice by another of Steele’s contemporaries, James Boswell. In the Life of Johnson, Boswell wrote that Samuel Johnson’s “mode of speaking was indeed very impressive; and I wish it could be preserved as music is written, according to the very ingenious method of Mr Steele, who has shewn how the recitation of Mr Garrick, and other eminent speakers, might be transmitted to posterity in score.”71 If Steele’s system had been employed in a timely fashion, Boswell noted, it could have been used to discredit those amateur impressionists who imitated

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only imperfectly what Boswell called Johnson’s “deliberate and strong utterance” and others less flatteringly dubbed his “bow-wow way.”72 As Steele’s “general precept” demonstrated, heightened or aphoristic speech has its own nested medium of icons: that is, its pitches and rhythms contain representations that are analogous rather than arbitrary. This idea formed the basis of one of the most influential works of Italian music theory to appear during the second half of the eighteenth century, Antonio Eximeno’s Dell’origine e delle regole della musica (1774). Eximeno was not a musician but rather an ex-Jesuit mathematician who had been displaced to Italy following the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain. Like many fraters, he was living out his exile in Rome, where he could attend services at St. Peter’s. As the papal choir sang the Mass, he covertly spoke it along with them “with the same energy that [he] would have used to move the congregation to devotion.” One Pentecost, Eximeno noticed that his recitation of “Veni, Creator Spiritus” was identical in rhythm and melody to the version by Niccolò Jommelli that the choir sang. Thus came a realization that was pivotal to Eximeno (though hardly novel in music theory): “Music is but a prosody to give language grace and expression.” Therefore, he argued, music should be derived neither mathematically nor contrapuntally but rather from the pitch variation and rhythm of common speech (il commun parlare).73 The difference between speech and song lay in the pronunciation of vowels, and particularly the most sonorous: O. This letter also had a pleasingly pictorial notation: “O is a drawing of the position of the mouth required to pronounce it, i.e., concave and open.”74 In the cave of the mouth’s O, breath vibrated and echoed rather than exiting immediately as it did with the other letters; it thus seemed to be sung, even within the context of speech. Eximeno thought that languages usually aged much like stones and stone structures: they eroded around the edges and tumbled downward. He claimed that most people in his day had collapsed mouth caves, which rendered their voices unmelodious and muffled. However, Eximeno believed that he had found in his adopted homeland a magical site of semipreservation, something like a living fossil in sound. Italian, he proclaimed, was second only to ancient Greek in being naturally melodious because Italians retained open caverns in their mouths. Cicero had suggested that Roman women pronounced Latin the most sweetly, and Eximeno was happy to announce that the practice persisted, “the influence of the climate on their language more durable than the stones of Campidoglio.”75 Thus, while in Italy, one could hear music in the

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streets. “Without exaggeration,” he stated, “it can be said that the Italian speaks as he sings. Even the most colloquial speech is never without its distinctive cadence.”76 To Eximeno, the diatribe of an angry Roman woman was an operatic aria. The song within Italian speech supplemented verbal meanings with mimetic sound. Eximeno repeated the truism that the first humans communicated by imitating objects directly with their voices: “In the first instance (if other circumstances permitted), instinct caused the inflections of the voice to express the qualities of the object.”77 Phonic mimesis, like gesture, declined with the development of modern languages—unless, that is, the decline could be staved off by means of an exquisite natural sensitivity. Because “his soul is extremely receptive to the most delicate sensory impressions,” the Italian retained mimetic systems alongside the verbal. For example, the word ferro resounds sharply, while aria causes breath to rush softly between the lips.78 Each vowel had a distinct character. Furthermore, the Italian “spoke” in movement, reinforcing verbal meanings with gestures of the face, hands, and arms.79 These movements formed the basis for Italian pantomime dance, but they could also be observed in the most colloquial utterance. For instance, Eximeno reported having “the pleasure of observing, in a cafe in Rome, the loveliest sight in the world: a natural mute, sitting in a circle and conducting a long conversation, he and everyone else speaking only with gestures.”80 Eximeno’s treatise is contemplative, but others directed his conclusions toward musical practice. Esteban de’ Arteaga—the most prominent opera critic of the day, whom we encountered in chapter 1 as he warned of riot-causing pantomime—cited Eximeno when suggesting a new basis for operatic reform: “A dramatic system . . . built on the exact relation of the movements of the soul with the accents of the word and of language, and [the exact relation] of those accents with musical melody.”81 Arteaga’s complaints about the opera of 1785 were very similar to de’ Rogati’s and Mattei’s in the early 1770s (not to mention Calzabigi’s in the 1760s and Algarotti’s in the 1750s), as standard practice had changed little during those decades. He decried the harsh divisions between recitative and aria, the long ritornellos, the fragmentation and repetition of words, and the excessive coloratura. According to Arteaga, song should be assembled from the composer’s memory of passionate utterances, theatrical or real, while preserving within the notated music those “inflections and accents” originally given to each word as pronounced by the speaker. The fragments of remembered sounds should be woven together according to the rules of melody. In this sense,

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Arteaga suggested, the principle of imitation belonging to melody was no different from that of sculpture, for instance, which fashioned a single fictional human out of parts recalled from many different real ones.82 Italian was suitable for song because of “the correspondence between the sounds of its words with the nature of the object they express.” Operatic prosody, according to Arteaga, should be deduced from a continual observation of “the inflections made by man in his ordinary voice.” On this matter, he referred his readers to Eximeno’s treatise. From common speech comes “the origin and force of [song’s] imitation.” Yet for both Arteaga and Eximeno, Italian “familiar discourse” promised an even grander union of the arts, as native speakers reinforced verbal meanings with the face, hands, and the rest of the body.83 While such calls for the reform of serious opera commonly demanded that music return to its place of subservience within the mimetic scheme, Arteaga, by contrast, claimed that musical representation could even be superior to that of the plastic arts, provided it used the voice in the proper way: “Song is the most complete and most interesting imitation that the fine arts can achieve. . . . Painting and sculpture can only imitate, as one says, the skin of man; song can penetrate right into his soul, awakening its movement and depicting its most intimate changes.”84 Such preeminence was due to the twin nature of song’s imitation, preserving the iconic within the verbal: “Imitating directly the tones of human language, the very elements of song that name the represented object also function as a means of representation.”85 In other words, the operatic voice could be both plastic and animated—as Arteaga then illustrated with the imagery of a familiar fable: “The former [i.e., painting and sculpture] are as the mythic Pygmalion who created the statue of Galatea from marble; the latter [i.e., song] is similar to the gracious spirit who animated that lovely statue, which placed before the lovelorn creator’s senses those sweet tremblings, subsequent palpitations, tremulous glances, seductive sighs, ingenuous smiles, and enchanting words: signs of life suddenly transfused in the infertile marble.”86 Here, then, the Pygmalion story has become nothing less than a means of theorizing the fine arts, privileging song by association with the animated statue. Such attempts to theorize in new ways about opera’s expressive materials point (I would argue) to a crucial transference of authority from poetry and ancient tragedy toward philosophy, which had only in the previous two or three decades consolidated an “aesthetic” purview encompassing sense perception and the fine arts. Arteaga was explicit on this point, claiming to derive “the nature of opera” from “the hidden wellsprings

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of philosophy,” and he blamed the genre’s current decadence on a lack of philosophy among composers.87 In this at least he found an ally in Alessandro Pepoli, whose open letter to Calzabigi in 1788 announced the need for “a music controlled by philosophy” (una musica diretta dalla filosofia) and lamented the same set of offences—long ritornellos, coloratura, simple recitative, harsh divisions, and so on, which were still offending, it would seem, as late as this—within opera’s practice.88 But Pepoli decried Arteaga’s conservative taste in poetry, asserting that no new opera could be born of the old Metastasian librettos. Instead, composers required new dramas in flexible forms that dispensed with the old alternations of poetic and speech-like registers in favor of a continuous unfolding. Composers should be guided by the “force, truth, and necessity of imitative music”; the song itself should be “controlled by a philosophical economy” while requiring the actor to engage also in “the science of mime” (la scienza mimica).89 After their experiments with translation and hybridity in the late 1780s, Pepoli and those in his circle at the Rinnovati turned to the problem of transforming Pygmalion into an Italian performance text, finally (nearly two decades after de’ Rogati’s first call for melodrama-inspired reform) turning its French speech into something like Italian song. As melodrama was finally adapted into a sung idiom, the rhetoric of Greek revival flourished around Italian opera one final time, reborn as a phoenix from the ashes.

pimmalione The diverse strands of history traced thus far intersected when Rousseau’s Pygmalion arrived on the operatic stage in Venice, at the Teatro San Samuele, on the evening of January 26, 1790.90 It featured two of the era’s foremost stars: the title role was given to the opera seria tenor Matteo Babini, while Galatea was played by the ballerina Carolina Pitrot. (Pitrot’s father, Antoine, had choreographed the pantomime for Florence’s double Pygmalion in 1775.) The libretto included a letter to the audience signed by Babini and Pitrot outlining the terms of the adaptation: this Pimmalione had been tailored for Venetians, and “only the principal idea of its celebrated author” had been preserved.91 This preface does not signal that the scène lyrique had become an ordinary opera, as some have suggested.92 Rather, it echoes conspicuously the rhetoric of failed adaptation that prefaced the dual-language Venetian libretto of 1773 on which this later adaptation was based. The 1790 libretto was actually quite faithful to Rousseau’s original. In both cases, the translators’ fidelity occasioned a

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series of departures from standard practice. While the 1773 libretto contained a mostro linguistico of Gallic deformities, the later adaptation was a hybrid opera fashioned from a host of foreign elements (not to mention performers from different idioms). The new genre received a new name, scena drammatica, which (like Pygmalion’s earlier genre designations) did not specify whether the work was comic or serious—a notable omission even within this period of genre multiplicity. The 1790 libretto was the work of Antonio Sografi, a friend of Pepoli’s and a student of Cesarotti’s. While Sografi based his libretto on the 1773 edition, which had also been created for the San Samuele, he followed the form of the original Pygmalion and preserved a good deal of its language. Most of the prose became blank verse, denoting recitative, while the stage directions (which remain in prose in the Italian as well) were translated wholesale. For instance, in the beginning of the scene, gestures are rendered verbatim, and almost every distinctive feature of the French prose has been delicately modified into Italian poetry: sografi, Pimmalione (venice, 1790) Pimmalione seduto, ed appoggiato sopra il gomito si và atteggiando a guise d’Uomo inquieto, e melanconico. Si alza risoluto, prende i suoi Strumenti, e tratto tratto con lo Scalpello ritocca gli Abbozzi. Si allontana da essi, e li garda con afflizione, ed avvilimento. A che spirto, nè vita Più darvi non poss’io. Dove sei genio mio! Che mai sei divenuto Misero mio talento! In te tutto è già spento Quel foco animator, ch’opre immortali Facea sortir un dì . . . Itene al suolo Voi strumenti non più della mia Gloria, Ma del mio disonor. Lascia tu pure Avvilito Scalpello Questa mano volgar; non sei più quello. Getta con dispregio i suoi Strumenti. rousseau, Pygmalion (vienna edition, 1772) Pygmalion assis & accoudé rêve dans l’attitude d’un home inquiet & triste: puis se levant tout à coup, il prend sur sa table les outils de son art, va donner, par intervalles, quelques coups de ciseau sur quelqu’une de ses ébauches, se recule et regarde d’un air mécontent & découragé. Il n’ya point là d’ame ni de vie . . . ce n’est que de la pierre . . . je ne ferai rien de tout cela –

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O mon genie, où es-tu? . . . mon talent qu’es tu devenu? . . . tout mon feu s’est éteint . . . mon imagination s’est glacée . . . le marbre sort froid de mes mains . . . Pygmalion, tu ne sais plus des Dieux . . . tu n’es plus qu’un vulgaire artiste – Vils instrumens qui n’ètes plus ceux de ma gloire, allez . . . ne deshonorez plus mes mains. Il jette avec dédain ses outils.

The translation is nearly word for word in many places: Rousseau’s line “O mon genie, où es-tu?” is rendered by Sografi as “Dove sei genio mio!”; “mon talent / qu’es tu devenu?” similarly received only a delicate Italian patina, becoming “Che mai sei divenuto / Misero mio talento!”; the line “Vils instrumens qui n’ètes plus ceux de ma gloire” is rendered as “Voi strumenti non più della mia Gloria”; and so on. In its very form, Pygmalion is inhospitable to the most common sort of lyricism: the exit aria. No character in this drama ever exits the stage. Instead, Sografi distributed five cavatinas among the recitatives. To get a sense of the style, we will consider the first and longest cavatina, “Voi che interno a me vi state,” which has two stanzas of four ottonari and a concluding stanza of two ottonari, each preceded by mime: Siede guardando le Statue, e i Gruppi, che gli stanno d’intorno Voi che intorno a me vi state Cari oggetti lusinghieri Deh voi fate i miei pensieri Un’istante tranquillar. S’alza con impeto aggirandosi per la Scena smanioso Ah che in vano al mio tormento Spero in voi trovar conforto: Dall’affanno più mi sento Dall’ardore trasportar. Si ferma, e si rivolge con grande entusiasmo al Padiglione Sol colei quest’occhi miei Può quest’alma consolar.93

These lines are necessarily further from Rousseau’s than is the blank verse. This aria encompasses roughly the text between the direction “Il s’assied, & contemple” and the line, addressed to Galatea, “je serai consolé.” Except for the first two stage directions, the hero’s basic emotional trajectory, and a few prominent terms—ardeur translated to ardore, impétueusement to impeto, tourment to tormento, consolé to

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consolar—the two passages have few similarities. Yet Sografi maintained dramatic momentum even within the lyric register; there is, in other words, no stopped time or “aria time” that is distinct from “recitative time.”94 The poem spans three states of mind: first Pygmalion’s sculptures calm him, then he becomes agitated, and finally he admits that he longs only for Galatea’s statue. Thus this progress through Pygmalion’s thoughts resists the return of a first verse or musical A-section, a principle followed by all of Sografi ’s cavatinas, with one important exception: he concluded the work with a duet. While Rousseau’s Galatea did little more than utter her famous moi, Sografi ’s statue coquettishly requests a lesson in love. The task of setting Sografi’s Pimmalione fell to Giambattista Cimador, who had composed the music for Pepoli’s Ati e Cibele the previous year. Cimador’s main credential was a familiarity with the dramatic principles of the Rinnovati; he had no particular facility with the materials of opera, as voice-leading errors and awkward modulations in Pimmalione attest. In other words, his composition is a clear instance of what Pepoli called “music directed by philosophy,” and here philosophy prescribed continuity above all. Whereas the melodramatic versions of Pygmalion were collections of musical fragments, riven by speech and silence, Cimador’s Pimmalione is preternaturally free of fissures: the entire work is one single movement, without discrete numbers, coloratura, recitativo semplice, or, for the most part, strong points of cadence. The terseness of the music is evident from the opening measures, as is its tendency to favor brief transitions over points of closure. Like the libretto, the score labels particular gestural segments, from Scena I to Scena XXI. The vocal line contributes to this sense of an overarching smoothness. Cimador set all the versi sciolti as accompanied recitative: sometimes the voice sounds amid sustained string chords, while elsewhere the orchestra supplies a more active texture of harmonic support and interjection. This alone is sufficient to merit the work a place in music history as perhaps the first Italian opera to forego simple recitative altogether since the reform of Gluck and Calzabigi. Except for the continuous presence of orchestral sound, Cimador’s recitative resembles most Italian recitative of that century, complete with the old Handelian cadence formulas—a point worth underlining lest the notion of “numberless opera” might prompt imaginings of more recent musical idioms. But this recitativo accompagnato permitted Cimador to interweave the song with instrumental passages for the mime. Take, for instance, the end

Pimmalione | 69 example 4. End of Scena I, Scena II, from Antonio Sografi and Giambattista Cimador, Pimmalione (Venice, 1790).

of the opening monologue (Scena I), which is followed by the first gestural interlude and then the hero’s resumption of speech (see example 4). The last words of Scena I—“non sei più quello”—describe a typical recitative cadence, with a falling leap of a fourth in the voice followed by a dominant chord. The resolution doubles as the opening of the next section: a passage of mime. Here, the hero “throws down his tools with disdain; walks agitatedly, stops, and turns as if by force toward the bottom of the stage, immediately withdraws his gaze, and falls into deep meditation.”95 It is, in other words, the stage direction whose corresponding musical number by Asplmayr we examined as example 3. Here, again, the miming devices are easily spotted. The G-minor chord in measure 1 of Scena II coincides with the throwing of the tools; a bass line that moves on every quarter note illustrates the “walking,” while the faster-moving upper parts supply “agitation.” In the seventh

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measure of Scena II, syncopations become a questioning arc of quarters, and the walking bass is replaced by the first of several B-flat wholenotes; this must indicate the moment when Pygmalion ceases his steps and turns toward the veiled statue of Galatea. The last five measures provide this short mime with a final dominant-seventh chord built on B flat, briefly suggesting a key of E-flat minor that ultimately never arrives. The hero “falls into meditation” with a slowly descending melody; his inner unrest is made audible with a half-step oscillation in the bass as the accompanied recitative begins once more. In other words, Cimador employed the usual techniques of gestural mirroring. Indeed, he may have modeled these portions on the parallel moments within Asplmayr’s score, which Pepoli had almost certainly used for his 1788 rendition of Pygmalion in French at the Rinnovati. The similarities between examples 3 and 4 are striking: the Allegro tempo and C-minor harmony; the “walking” quarter notes in the bass offset by syncopations in the upper parts; a second texture with melodic motion on the beat and one bass note per measure once the walking stops; falling melodic motion to indicate “falling into meditation”; and finally the prolonged dominant, inflected by an augmented sixth chord, in the concluding measures. Most of Cimador’s Pimmalione sounds much like the music in example 4, alternating between accompanied recitative and mime. Some of the gestural segments are given discrete sections of music enclosed by double bars while others coincide with briefer interludes, even just cadences. What, though, of the cavatinas—how could they be made to sound like speech? Lyricism poses the most obvious threat to the project of an Italian opera built on French prose. After all, Rousseau’s hero had no recourse to messe di voce or roulades, and his speech did not alternate between irregular patterns and regular ones. To avoid jarring shifts of register, Cimador set each lyric verse in a continuous iteration, with no fragmentation or repetition. (There is one exception: the last two lines of verse are sometimes repeated with new music to supply a fleeting sense of closure, as had been a common French practice since Lully’s early operas.) What is more, this Pimmalione declaims his poetry syllabically, moving between adjacent pitches within a narrow ambit; the rôle spans no more than a seventh from beginning to end. The musical meter unfolds in lockstep with the poetry—verbal accents invariably land on the first beat of each measure—and thus the lyric form generates the musical form. The opening of the first cavatina is reproduced here as example 5. In these measures, the poetry unfolds at a pace that

example 5. Beginning of Scena III, from Sografi and Cimador, Pimmalione.

 










  



 

        

   






       

        
  

 









 










     

   



      



   

      






      









    

    

   

      













    



    



  









 

      

             













  

 











 














   



   



      












        

  












 



 







       



  

   



  

 

    



 

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is almost mathematically regular. Note values are confined within a narrow rhythmic range; most are quarter notes or eighths, with the occasional sixteenth or dotted quarter. For each of the remaining two stanzas, Cimador supplied a new musical character, complete with new key and time signatures, all the while following the same principles. The result is a through-composed form of three very small linked sections, with the small bridges between verses mirroring the actor’s gestures. Like the speech melodies within Steele’s Prosodia rationalis, Cimador’s music is essentially amotivic: because this music is, in principle, determined at every moment by the text, whether gestural or “spoken,” every event is isolated and unrepeated. The listener is hard pressed to find a single reprise, and even sequences are rare. Where Rousseau’s hero is unable to complete sentences, Cimador’s has a profound suspicion of points of arrival: in the broadest of terms, sentimental ellipses translate to open cadences. “Voi che intorno a me” is exemplary in this regard: it contains only one point of musical arrival, marking the last syllable of the cavatina’s last word, and even this repose is undermined right away by yet more accompanied recitative. Although unlikely to feature in a history of musical beauties, Sografi and Cimador’s Pimmalione was the first attempt to introduce the text and techniques of Rousseauian melodrama into something like an operatic genre. What is more, it was both influential and extraordinarily popular, remaining in the repertory for nearly thirty years. Matteo Babini toured with Pimmalione throughout the 1790s, performing it “to astonishing effect” (his biographer claimed) in Venice, Bologna, London, Vienna, Florence, Genoa, Paris, and even further abroad.96 Several more composers set Pimmalione in Cimador’s model. There were new versions by Francesco Sirotti (Livorno/Milan, 1792), Francesco Gnecco (Genova, 1794), Bonifazio Asioli (Turin, 1796), and Francesco Moro Lin (Venice, 1797) in the 1790s alone. These scenes use the same stylistic palette: syllabic declamation, recitativo accompagnato throughout, cavatinas, discrete miming segments, minimal points of musical arrival, and an everpresent impulse toward through-composition. But the influence of melodrama extended beyond settings of Sografi’s libretto, to other stories with related tropes and themes. At first, Pimmalione’s musical techniques remained bound to the themes of nested media and monologic indecision. The influence of this scena drammatica is evident in the mime-interspersed operatic soliloquy of the 1790s, in which singers performed prescribed, audible gestures as they confronted statues, pictures, or letters. A comic instance can be found within La

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statua per puntiglio (The stubborn statue, Venice, 1792), which parodied Rousseau’s drama within a stock commedia plot.97 The Dottore figure, Tolomeo, is an antiquarian who has been swindled by his adversaries into buying a variety of false animated figures. Near the end of act 2, he awakens in front of a statue that supposedly comes to life later in the opera (when it conceals a woman who is trying to swindle him). There follows an extended segment of mime, granting Tolomeo his own animation scene: “At the sound of a soft instrumental interlude, [Tolomeo] slowly awakes and expresses with attitudes appropriate to his circumstance the surprise that he feels at seeing the objects before him.”98 In Camilla (1799), by Giuseppe Carpani and Ferdinando Paer, the object that provokes recourse to gesture is not a statue but a letter: “The duke orders his writing desk to be brought. He begins to write. He tears up what he has written. He takes the portrait out of the desk and gazes at it. He kisses it. He holds it to his heart. He sighs. He slams shut the writing desk and rushes off.”99 In Sografi’s La Morte di Cleopatra (Venice, 1794), Cleopatra finds a small vessel containing the fatal asp, and she subsequently enacts parallel deaths in mime and speech.100 In these moments, the object seems to confer its mode of being (though perhaps briefly) onto the protagonist, making him into a cypher. This reflexivity of substance is evident in the most canonic of animation scenes: after all, did not Don Giovanni have a “cuore di pietra,” like his emissary from the beyond, and was not Rousseau’s sculptor himself “animated” by desire? Of course, such Pygmalionesque monologues within opera had no extended moments of orchestral silence, nor did they feature the dissonant slides of vocal pitch that indexed historical age for the original melodrama. In other words, these Venetian fusions of singing voice, acting, and music did not seek to represent ruins. Instead, they were promoted by a rhetoric of classical rebirth, perhaps the last resurgence of an Arcadian impulse in opera. In 1792 Venice gained a new opera house, La Fenice (the phoenix)—whose very name bears the traces of this near-forgotten impulse. La Fenice’s inaugural opera seria, Paisiello’s I giuochi d’Agrigento, had a libretto by none other than Pepoli himself. One of the most distinctive features of this reform movement was that its singers were described as bards, who made music spontaneously as they declaimed. In Platonic terms, they were purveyors not just of mimesis but also of diegesis. A portrait of the tenor Matteo Babini—who created the title role in the 1790 Pimmalione, and who also appeared in the central role in I giuochi d’Agrigento—is inscribed with the words, in Greek script, “A complete bard, the first in an age.”101 Although Babini was hardly the composer-

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musician that this praise implied, his admirers could at least assert that other composers were obliged to write for him in a style befitting his talents. For instance, his biographer insisted that Babini had asked Cimador and Sografi to write Pimmalione in “precisely” the way that they did.102 The other serious roles written for him lend some weight to this assertion. For instance, Brutus in La morte di Cesare (by Gaetano Sertor and Antonio Bianchi, 1789; revised 1797) and Orazio in Gli Orazi e i Curiazi (by Sografi and Marco Antonio Portogallo, 1798) sing plain melodies within shorter forms.103 The opening of Brutus’s second-act cavatina, “Voi che il cor a me vedete,” is strikingly similar to Cimador’s “Voi che intorno a me,” beginning with a lyrical woodwind solo and proceeding from there with a syllabic rendition of the first few lines. Yet Bianchi did not sustain such extreme declamation for long: a repetition of the text contains four opportunities for cadenzas and concludes with a flourish of coloratura for voice and English horn a due. This bardic imagery implies that the singer-actors composed their own roles. Few did, of course, but Pepoli was again an exception. In 1793, Venetian audiences were given the opportunity to admire yet another setting of Sografi’s Pimmalione, this one with orchestral music by Giuseppe Rossi but with vocal melodies written and performed by Count Alessandro Pepoli himself. These melodies have not survived, but we can be confident that they were “generated by a philosophical economy” like that observable in Cimador’s score—a foundational principle for Pepoli’s reformed opera.104 In a dedicatory letter to his 1793 libretto Pietro il Grande, Sografi summarized Pepoli’s ideal of “musical declamation,” claiming that he had written the title role for Pepoli in order to “demonstrate the use that could be made of his example by many of our so-called star singers, both through song and through dramatic declamation, too often overlooked.”105 By this time, Sografi was Venice’s premiere librettist, and he was sought after in the other Italian capitals.106 His libretti after Pimmalione had a similar disregard for the formal procedures that had regulated lyric numbers and set pieces up to that point. With a willing composer, the results could be striking—sometimes to the displeasure of audiences. For instance, his 1793 collaboration with Niccolò Piccinni, Ercole al Termodonte, alternated parlante lyricism, gestural music, and long portions of accompanied recitative. The score wedded Italianized melodrama with Italianized tragédie lyrique. This was apparently not a wedding that anyone wished to attend: the opera was pulled from the stage of the San Carlo after four performances. Sografi had more success with the dra-

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mas he wrote for Venice, which could usually rely on Babini, and whose composers were more selective in their stylistic transgressions. For example, in Portogallo’s setting of Gli Orazi e i Curiazi, Orazio’s “Se alla patria ognor donai” provided a mostly syllabic text setting, but the vocal melodies are showier than in Pimmalione, their rhythms martial rather than prosodic. “Se alla patria” alternates between accompanied recitative, choral interjections (a requisite of larger dramas in the Pepolian model), and brief cavatinas for Babini. Portogallo’s most striking innovation here was to set versi lirici as a new kind of accompanied recitative, marked “ad libitum” and “come a recitativo,” with the orchestra playing “colla parte.”107 This did not imply vocal embellishment, as “ad libitum” often did—for instance, when it was marked at a cadence. Rather—and this is a striking intervention indeed—Portogallo was telling his principal singers to improvise their own melodies for lyric verse and asking that these should be made to sound like recitative.108 But melodramatic ideals of gesture and declamation could prove still more disruptive to operatic conventions, particularly when librettists liberally interspersed their lyric stanzas with gestural motions requiring musical analogs. A prime example may be found within L’amor coniugale (1805), a one-act “sentimental farce” with a libretto by Gaetano Rossi and music by Simon Mayr.109 Like Pimmalione, it adapted a French play, in this case Léonore, ou l’Amour conjugal (1798), by JeanNicolas Bouilly; here, again, sentimental prose is rendered mostly as syllabic Italian song. Mayr had given some attention to the Italian offshoots of melodrama. He was in Venice when Cimador’s version of Pimmalione had its premiere, and he later assembled a nice collection of Pimmalione libretti and scores.110 One of L’amor coniugale’s chief attractions is the monologue “Sì, ne profitterò .  .  . Rendi il consorte amato,” in which the heroine Zeliska resolves to liberate her husband from prison, hears the bell toll four (as counted on her fingers), and then rushes offstage to make the rescue. Rossi supplied a few lines for recitative, followed by a long stretch of settenari. These twenty-two lines of versi lirici are interrupted more often by ellipses and prescribed actions than the preceding recitative—and unlike in Sografi’s Pimmalione, such interruptions do not respect regular patterns. Indeed, when the opera was revived in Venice in 1808, the engravers mistook most of the passage for recitative.111 This monologue received some of Mayr’s most Cimadorian music.112 The opening recitative is all accompagnato, with one brief orchestral interlude noting the instant at which the heroine “turns to the heavens

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with great passion” (volgendosi al Cielo con maggior fervore). At the beginning of the recitative, a three-note motive repeats periodically, and then a two-note motive appears, but even this technique soon dissolves. The lyric section begins with a restrained cavatina, marked “Larghetto cantabile,” metrically regular but through-composed. No portion of melody is repeated, and there is only one complete cadence. Most notable for our purposes is the final movement, a perpetually failing cabaletta. Its texture shifts continuously, it has no ritornello, no opening melody or recurring motive, little repetition, and a text setting that is syllabic until the final lines, often sounding more like an accompanied recitative than an aria. The density of gestural portions poses the greatest strain on form because the orchestra is made to act during these moments as a descriptive medium.113 Even as the rhythmic momentum grows, the orchestra continues to shift from one gesture to the next, eschewing those devices—like repetition or cadential closure—that might signal a design larger than the local requirements of text. Its materials are the increasingly familiar devices of musical mimophony: rising scales, sighs, palpitations, and sudden shifts between loud and soft. By the end, Jeliska’s hysterical melodic leaps and decisive phrases strain against a motiveless music and near-meterless text. The dream of an opera written by singer-actors did not outlast the eighteenth century. However, through Babini’s influence, these Venetian experiments created a new kind of tenor hero, one whose song amplified an (imaginary) utterance within spoken theater and for whom acting included a substantial amount of mime. Giacomo David performed Cimador’s scene during the 1790s and later. The role of the sculptor was taken up by soprano Marianna Sessi, who performed the work in London, Paris, Berlin, and Prague during the 1810s. Although Babini’s most famous student, Gioacchino Rossini, decisively rejected Italian declamatory song in the 1810s and 1820s, many bel canto singers continued to cultivate the earlier style, using the earlier music, to demonstrate their acting talents. Giacomo’s son Giovanni David sang Cimador’s scene in a concert at Naples’s Teatro nel Fondo in 1818. Also featuring on the program was the third act of Rossini’s Otello, in which David had created the role of Rodrigo two years earlier. Such practices kept declamatory opera in the active repertoire after audiences had lost their taste for it. The Rossini tenor Nicola Tacchinardi created his own scena lirica— so he labeled it—by excerpting a monologue from Mayr’s opera I misterj Eleusini.114 The Pimmalione by Asioli was revived as late as 1831, its statue played by none other than Maria Malibran.

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Sografi’s Pimmalione libretto was set to music a final time in 1816 by Gaetano Donizetti at the prompting of Mayr, his teacher. This scene follows the model of the earlier versions, featuring a declamatory text setting, alternating between accompanied recitative, mimed passages, and short lyric portions. Donizetti discovered Rossini’s music soon after completing Il Pigmalione, and he never again composed in this style, nor on another ancient topic. Yet he had an enduring interest in the musical depiction of onstage movement, which preceded and no doubt assisted his engagement with the related repertoire of Parisian boulevard melodrama.115 Here it will suffice to name a few miming passages in one of his mature operas, Maria Stuarda (1835).116 The act 1 duet between Leicester and Talbot begins with an orchestral section representing the departure of Elisabetta, Leicester’s approach to Talbot, and a handshake between the two men. Donizetti depicted the promenade much as Asplmayr had sixty years earlier, with “walking” quarter notes and syncopations; the passage is given a certain coherence with a sixteenth-note motive, one of Mayr’s techniques.117 Similarly, in the act 1 finale Maria kneels before Elisabetta, and a repeated three-note figure descends from the upper strings to the violas and cellos.118 In act 2, fittingly, the most conspicuous miming music sounds when the queen hesitates over Maria’s execution order: as she takes up her pen to sign, the orchestra descends regally down the E-flat major triad; as she halts, the tutti chord ceases and the strings sound a series of quiet tremolos down the chromatic scale; finally, as she leaps to her feet, the winds rejoin the strings for a surprise forte.119 These techniques were resilient in their plainness—and perhaps for this reason Donizetti confined them to recitative and to connective tissue between scenes. They do not, in other words, decimate his cabalettas. It is in the music of Vincenzo Bellini that we may hear the speech-like song advocated by de’ Rogati and Pepoli in its purest form. This declamation is most evident in Bellini’s early operas and was identified immediately by startled spectators, who (for reasons that should now be clear) called the style “philosophical.”120 His operas for La Scala bear a number of strong family resemblances to the first essays in melodramatic opera. Through large portions of Il pirata (1827) and La straniera (1829), Bellini employed vocal lines that were so austere and so resolutely speech-like that one contemporary critic wondered whether they should be called canto declamato (spoken song) or declamazione cantata (sung speech).121 An emphasis on “the rhythms of the spoken word” resulted in brief lyric portions that eschewed ornamentation and

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repetition, taking their melodic forms directly from the verse, precisely as had Cimador’s. Perhaps more striking, though, are the fluid musical forms that play host to this song. Bellinian “numbers” like Gualtiero’s aria in act 1 of Il pirata feature a continuous texture, devoid of extended ritornelli but defined instead by a constant interchange between accompanied recitative, arioso, and orchestral gesture; a single number might encompass dozens of tiny shifts of character, tempo, and key, and a few larger ones. (John Rosselli called this music “startlingly Wagnerian.”122) We may now understand that when Bellini’s contemporaries called his style “philosophical” opera, they were casting it as the heir to that Pepolian operatic revival, born in the academy, that proclaimed the historical importance of Calzabigi and Gluck but found more tangible inspiration in Pygmalion.

orpheus diffused There is one final musical consequence of these projects that is worthy of notice, another thread that can be traced between the first all-sung Pimmalione and the annals of nineteenth-century music. We may catch a first glimpse of it near the end of Cimador’s scene, when the otherwise steadfast principles of adaptation are briefly suspended. In Sografi ’s libretto, just before the animation, in a moment that has no parallel within Rousseau’s text, the sculptor extends his hands upward and prays: Ciel pietoso, Ciel clemente A lei dona i giorni miei; Se morir degg’io per lei Non mi lagno di morir . . .123

With his plea the music changes. The strings suddenly go silent in medias res, and there sounds a “soave Armonia” of solo oboe, bassoon, and harp that seemingly emanates from the statue (example 6 reproduces the final measures of this interlude and the entry of the voice). This music is heard not only by the audience but also by the sculptor himself—that is, in the terms of contemporary musicological parlance, it becomes diegetic. Viene interrotto da una soave Armonia, che si ode all’intorno della Statua di Galatea Qual divino concento! Qual soave armonia

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Rapisce l’alma mia! . . . Sì, sì, t’intendo, Bella Madre d’Amor, tu sei, tu sei, Che pietosa ti mostri ai pianti miei. Il suono suddetto precede, ed accompagna le seguenti parole A un dolce riposo Alfine pietoso Invitami . . . Amor. Che pace! . . . Che calma! . . . Mi scende nell’alma . . . Mi sento nel cor.124

Pygmalion’s song is suddenly no longer isolated musically from the orchestra. Sometimes the voice takes its motives from the solo oboe and bassoon, sometimes it is repeated by them, and occasionally the parts move in unison or thirds with one or another. Each line is incomplete, but together they form a single, diffused melody. These moments bring a third character just within audible range of Pimmalione’s diegesis. It is not Venus—Rousseau’s fable and its adaptations had little use for her. Rather, it is the original bard, Orpheus himself. The coaxing harp arpeggios overheard by Cimador’s hero seem a direct reference to those played by Gluck’s Orpheus as he calmed the furies at the beginning of act 2 of Orfeo ed Euridice (or the parallel scene within Bertoni’s adaptation of the same libretto). Orpheus is a submerged presence within Book 10 of the Metamorphoses: he narrates the fable of Pygmalion alongside the partner tale of his own Eurydice. Who is the Orpheus made audible in Cimador’s version? Several participants had claim to the laurels. One was the storyteller, Rousseau, who had confessed to having taken up music in order to become a “modern Orpheus.”125 Another was Cimador, who had written the music. Still another was Babini, whose proponents cast him as the ancient Greek bard returned in the flesh. This proliferation of Orpheus figures brings to light the thorny question of agency within these projects of early melodrama. Goethe himself considered this problem in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. In the passage in question, the hero, Wilhelm, is traveling with the actor Laertes and his troupe when they encounter a mysterious old harpist, who entertains them with a song. Wilhelm is provoked into an ecstatic meditation on the representative powers of this kind of music as compared to live theater. He suggests that there was “more live presence in [the harpist’s] singing than in our stiff stage personages” and proposes that such musical narratives might even replace actors. Laertes puts forward that acting is easier when music is

example 6. Excerpt from Scena XVI, from Sografi and Cimador, Pimmalione.


 




  

 



        



      























   






 







   

  

 





























 





  






 

  
























                                        
   

   


  





        

        





         

  
          
  

 



 































 

   


   











 






















 



     

 

  













 
                        

      



 

  





 

                       

 

























 





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involved. Normally the actor must control his own declamation, timing, and gestures and resist being disturbed by the other performers; in a music-theatrical work, though, he “becomes another person,” giving over his agency to the music and allowing it to “animate” and “control” him: it determines his movements, the “manner of delivery,” and the expression.126 In the landmark study by Mary Ann Smart, this passage provides a point of departure for a progressive loosening of the bonds between music and gesture, which occurred over the course of the nineteenth century.127 So let us conclude by reconsidering the passage as a point of arrival, an articulation of the concerns of those late eighteenth-century projects that subsumed speech and movement within the domain of music. Goethe knew Rousseau’s Pygmalion and had written a small piece, Proserpina, in emulation. During the 1770s, itinerant actors in the German territories—much like the fictional Laertes—had performed the original melodrama much as performers like Tommaso Grandi had on the Italian peninsula. When Laertes claimed to surrender his agency within musical theater, he almost certainly spoke of melodrama and its offshoots. In practice, musical miming figures such as Asplmayr’s “walking” quarters were indeed agents of external control, setting the footfalls into rhythm like a flat-footed vestigial dance, the limbs translating gestures scripted for them. The actor moved when the music moved; he stopped when it stopped. He was set into motion from outside, animated by musical sound. Thus, while the passage ostensibly contrasts music-theatrical mimesis and sung diegesis, ultimately it considers both to follow a single model. In both, a narrative agency manifest in music controls subordinate images or characters. In melodrama and its offshoots, the actors were manipulated by a narrative agency that is simultaneously omniscient and legible: Rousseau’s Italian admirers circulated Pygmalion’s libretto as a grid-like apparatus in order to bear witness to this very ideal. Conversely, the ancient or revived musical voice contained its own “presences” or actors in its icons and onomatopoeia. Thus Arteaga could boast of song’s animated statues, the “most perfect imitation there is.” If melodramatic projects destabilize the agency of the performer, they invite a parallel reconsideration of the composer’s role. As we have seen, such musical icons were often antagonistic to autonomous musical forms: How, for instance, does one admire Simon Mayr’s skill in turning out a gestural passage? It requires a leap of imagination at the least—or, better yet, a performance. Melodramatic music becomes

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mundane in the absence of visual counterparts, and this very mundaneness has militated against an appreciation of the genre’s historical significance and the myriad threads that run between Rousseau’s project and the nineteenth-century operatic stage. After all, melodrama is ever inert on the page, like the torn fragment of an enchanted cloak that becomes, as it falls to the ground, a piece of the dreamer’s pajamas. A link may also be made between the bardic song that emerges at Pimmalione’s prayer—with its syllabic, folk-like melodies and plucked arpeggiated accompaniment—and the other national musics that emerged during these decades, in particular the early Lieder, as published by figures such as C. P. E. Bach and Friedrich Reichardt. There, the project was to forge a purportedly “natural,” or artless, music from the materials of an artful one and to do so in the service of expressing a national character. As noted in chapter 1, for some late eighteenth-century Italians (though by no means all), the veneration of French philosophy, language, and literary and theatrical objects went hand in hand with a favorable disposition toward the French occupiers under Napoleon. Likewise, Cimador and Sografi ’s Pimmalione accumulated political and even nationalist significance during the revolutionary years. It was reported that during the 1800 Siege of Genoa, Babini performed the work “with the sole aim of aiding the so-called patriot refugees” who fought on the side of the French.128 Sografi himself was a Jacobin, as was his fellow Venetian playwright Camillo Federici, whom we will encounter soon. Predictably, then, the demise of these Pygmalion projects on Italian stages coincided more or less exactly with the final defeat of the French, a structural cadence (if you will) that will be sounded in chapter 4. First, though, we will shift our focus from the theatrical stage to the world of the Romantic novel, and to two works in particular that took up the notion that the spontaneous musical utterance, preferably emanating from a statue-like form and accompanied by a plucked, lyre-like music, could be made to define Italy in the burgeoning science of nations.

chapter 3

Defining Italy in Haunted Rome

A few years into the nineteenth century, Alessandro Verri, one of Italy’s most famous authors, sketched out a few sentences on how humans experienced time. Our minds, he suggested, are embroiled in a claustrophobic struggle against the now: The human intellect, never satisfied by the narrow confines of the present, throws itself toward these two extremes [past and future], and aspires to a greater dominion, and tries ever to spread its faculties and extend itself in sweeping meditations.  .  .  . By different means the spirit pulls in different directions, but all confirm the innate longing to extend oneself through the discernible world and stretch oneself out within time.1

Of course, this desire exists precisely because we can do no such “stretching.” Time is not a plane to lie down in; the present cannot be pushed wider. However, Verri suggests that there are thought-games or meditations that help to address this longing, to make the straightjacket of the now more comfortable. Some “turn their heads toward the skies” to contemplate the eternal and divine; others, perhaps less metaphysically inclined, seek consolation through the senses, sequestering themselves with the “sweet harmonies” of the Muses. But there is also a third possibility, namely, to “contemplate, with sweet sadness, the majestic ruins of fallen empires and nourish [oneself] with speculations about shadowy antiquity.”2 It is this last route that Verri has chosen for himself. These meditations are buried about two thirds of the way through Le notti romane (Roman 85

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Nights), a novel on Italo-Roman history and the contemplation of ruins. Verri, whom we met in chapter 1, was the dashing young intellectual responsible for the “Rinunzia . . . al Vocabolario della Crusca” (1764) in Milan’s radical journal Il Caffè. By the time he published the second volume of Notti romane in 1804, he had long since left behind Milan, his older brother Pietro, and their shared disdain for the twin fantasies of linguistic purity and worshipping the past. Verri had settled in Rome in 1767 because he was pursuing a woman there, and his departure is often listed among the pivotal losses of the Lombard Enlightenment. (Pietro wrote to him, bitterly: “If it weren’t for the Marchioness, you would agree with Voltaire as much as I do, and you would have left [Rome] after a few months’ time.”) Soon after quitting Milan, the younger Verri began to relax his opposition to antique literary Tuscan, the idiom curated by La Crusca since 1583 under the banner of la lingua italiana. He also found that antiquarianism held some appeal: his first novel, written in the decade after he arrived in Rome, was about the life of Sappho.3 But Verri’s growing interest in “shadowy antiquity” is even more pronounced in Le notti romane, his second novel, which secured his reputation for the ensuing century. (It went through more than one hundred editions and was translated into all the major European languages.4) In the first volume, which appeared in 1792, an amateur historian travels to the newly excavated Tomb of the Scipios to meditate on the Roman past. When his torch is blown out by the wind, the ancient Romans themselves suddenly appear, in spirit form. For the next three nights, Caesar, Brutus, Antony, Cato, and other worthies debate on points of history, government, and morality while the narrator—a permanently indefinite character who identifies himself only as Italo, “Italian”—merely listens. The only ghost to address him directly is Cicero, who guides the narrator much like Virgil does in Dante’s Inferno; indeed, the similarities between the two works prompted one admirer, Benedetto Sanguineti, to publish an arrangement of the novel’s first volume in terze rime.5 However—and this is important—in the second volume, written for a new century and published in 1804, Verri took a different tack. On the fourth, fifth, and sixth nights, the narrator invites the ancient spirits out into modern Rome. In an inversion of the Inferno conceit, he acts as their guide through the city, showing them the remains of their civilization and telling them about the Italy that was built from the rubble of Rome. What Verri was getting at with all of this was nationhood, but a version of the concept that his brother Pietro would not entirely have recognized, dying as he did just before the turn of the nineteenth century. This

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is why the narrator of Le notti romane meditates on historical time and the material traces of its passing, as well as modes of thinking that enable one to traverse it. After all, a history is the sine qua non of a nation. It is also why Alessandro Verri became newly interested in music—Italian music—and in the melodiousness of the Tuscan language, reversing his earlier stance against a cultivation of this native “music.” For in addition to a coherent history, a nation must have its national melodies, built from the sounds of its language, and the character of this language is subsequently reflected in its art music.6 In this emergent Romantic conception, the Italian peninsula was a distressing anomaly: it had an opera (indeed, a popular and imperialist one) but no political existence, no self-determination. Did it, then, have a people—and did its people have a spirit? In addressing these questions, Le notti romane prefigures the most famous Romantic novel set in Rome, Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie, in several important ways. These ways are worth noting in some detail, as Corinne is traditionally credited with defining Italy within a burgeoning “science of nations.”7 I will begin by considering Le notti alongside Corinne here, for their shared concerns place them securely at the center of this book. Both were concerned with an “Italy” of historical weight and extension but uncertain future, whose claims to nationhood were sounded through the forceful utterance of a newly politicized individual voice. What was more, both queried the relationship of that individual utterance to the “voice” of multitudes, seeking to determine whether a melodious language—a language that behaved as music— could reshape a lost nation. In both, Rome’s ruins provide the setting for these meditations on nationality, historicized being, and vocal and ambient sound. If Germaine de Staël and Alessandro Verri defined an Italy for the Romantic science of nations, I will argue, it was because they were able to draw on the older, closely related principle of the spirit of languages (il genio delle lingue) that we saw in chapters 1 and 2, metastasizing it from mouths into bodies and thence onto the Italian landscape. Even more importantly for our purposes, both novels center on orators who resemble living statues: Cicero, an ancient man, and Corinne, a modern young woman. Both of these figures are “animated,” which here means, as we will see, that there is something permanently, resiliently statue-like about them. Cicero and Corinne are both described as the most melodious speakers of their nations. Cicero, the most compelling orator of ancient Rome, speaks the “consonant and majestic” tones of Latin (Notti romane, 1:11). Corinne, who has “the most moving voice in Italy” (Corinne, 22), is an improvvisatrice: she improvises

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poems in Tuscan, forming her “intellectual melody” (27) out of what Staël called the “pronounced resonance of its sounds” (44).8 (Tuscan was, of course, considered the preeminent heir of Latin’s musical beauties.) The novels thus represent a post-Rousseauian chapter in the history of the voice.9 If, for Rousseau, the primal melodious utterance existed merely in the distant past, Verri and particularly Staël have it sounding again, in search of political agency in the present. As this chapter takes us away from the performed genres of opera and melodrama to focus on novels set in late eighteenth-century Rome, we leave behind Ovidian fictions of material metamorphosis; from here onward in this book, we will deal little with earnest performances of sculptural animation but rather with “animated” men and women of natural origin and biological substance who have something of the statue about them. This chapter, in other words, traces the emergence of the plastic as an organizing concept, denoting a family of personal traits: a propensity to evoke the sculpted or the made within intensely nervous biological matter; an affinity for the accumulation and study of sculpture; a tendency to appear “animated” at times and peculiarly cold and lifeless at others; a melodious voice prone to onomatopoeic pronunciation and enhanced by expressive gestures; an appearance that seems perfectly or even intentionally matched to internal qualities; and, finally, the ability to appear simultaneously individual and archetypal. As we will see, this new rhetoric of animation—new, that is, in the early nineteenth century— implied a dual existence, split both in substance (between biological and malleable matter) and in time (being both ancient and present). On this basis, I will suggest that a thread of influence runs from Staël and Verri to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose category of plasticity owes much to the earlier writers’ Romantic fusion of “living” sculpture with oration and historicized thinking.10 From here, we will return to Rome. A final section forces these speculative strains into collision with the archive: a historical-ethnographic account of the improvvisatori, as well as two operas from this period that depict scenes of improvisation. I will ask whether it is possible to know how the Italian singing poet actually sounded and what role was played by this supposedly native art form when Italy was suddenly returned to the political map of Europe.

defining italy historically Cicero in Le notti romane is at once a ghost and an animated statue. As the narrator tries to embrace him, his arms pass through Cicero and

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close on themselves. Yet he also describes Cicero as “similar to the Consular statues” (1:8); when the narrator invites him out into vespertine Rome, Cicero becomes like an “animated statue,” shedding the “pallor of death” and seeming almost to breathe.11 His, then, is a curiously material form of immateriality: one that depends on the fact that (as we will see in the coming pages) at the time of the novel’s writing, the quality of being statue-like entailed attributes in addition to material origin. The analogy hinged on Verri’s reliance on the term immagine to signify both statue and idea, a curious but consistent usage acknowledged in Francesco Milizia’s Dictionary of the Fine Arts (1797), which followed Petrarch in naming Pygmalion’s statue as the archetypal immagine.12 Of course, Verri’s Cicero is not like Galatea, who existed first as sculpture and then as a human; rather, this is the common version of the trope suited to masculine characters, in which a notable dead man returns in the form of a statue to haunt the living. The best known of these is the avenging “stone guest” in Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan, who formed the basis for that most iconic of supernatural opera characters, the Commendatore in da Ponte and Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Like the Commendatore, Verri’s Cicero is deliberate and weighty in his speech. He speaks always “with a grave and authoritative slowness” (Notti romane, 1:9), and his words have an otherworldly force, for he has returned from the beyond. These two characters also share a certain theatrical charisma. Integral to Cicero’s oratory excellence are his uses of pitch and bodily motion to reinforce verbal meanings—thus creating a perfect union (or what would later, more pejoratively, be called a melodramatic redundancy) between sights, sounds, and words. He modulates his voice, sounding “subdued,” then “strong, then slow, then excited, then calm, then menacing, always corresponding to the type of thought” (1:11). He supplies analogous gestures as well, in the manner of the great tragedians. Not for nothing did a later commentator complain that “the shadowy dramatis personae of the ‘Notti’ remind us of spectres of the stage.”13 In other words, he is too verbose to be imagined as corporeally absent and too stagey to be genuinely menacing. Also like the Commendatore, Verri’s Cicero sleeps in a graveyard but does his business in the city. The Rome he encounters in 1804 is not the one he left in the fifth decade BCE, yet much of the ancient city remains. In its aspect, Verri’s Rome resembles that of the eighteenth-century engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi: it is replete with monuments and statues eroding amid natural beauty. Indeed, many of the scenes described in Le notti romane had been represented by Piranesi in his

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figure 7. Plate 2 from Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Le antichità romane; Opera di Giambatista Piranesi, vol. 2 (Rome: A. Rotilj, 1756). Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Roman series, a collection of more than a thousand etchings completed in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Like Verri, Piranesi was interested both in ruins and in how Rome might have looked in the glory days of its empire, a time when the city was even more abundantly populated with stone beings. Take, for instance, the innumerable statues in Piranesi’s view of the Appian Way in ancient times (see figure 7): outnumbering the living by about a hundred to one, the simulacra gaze out on the street amid a nature that is already poised to overwhelm them. Many are crumbling, and some are obviously looted from elsewhere. Was Rome ever unhaunted? When Verri’s ghosts are led through the Appian Way, they moan and beat their chests at the remainders of their monuments. Crumbling stone attests mutely to the lapse of eons, but the ghosts request a chronicle too: a history of Rome, which connects them to the Italians of the present day. At this prompting, the narrator orates the history of the peninsula from the early days of the Roman Empire to the present. As he leads the ghosts through the city, he details the corruption of the emperors, the eventual crumbling of the empire (“like a vast mountain shattered by earthquake”), and the ascent of the Roman

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Catholic Church. He shows the ancients their statues, preserved in museums, and observes ghostly faces gazing on their own stone portraits. He even describes the republic itself as a vast human body felled by corruption. “Now you see,” he tells the shades, “how when your [republic] tumbled like a sick giant, Italy itself lay oppressed” (2: 126).14 In Le notti romane, animation stands for political agency—as one might expect in a land where ghosts and statues outnumber the living— and the gigantic recumbent human form represents a lost statehood. The narrator promises his ghosts, “The example of your republic remains as a vivid animating idea [una viva immagine stimolatrice] in our thoughts” (Notti romane, 2:126; note again Verri’s use of the term immagine). As we will explore in detail below, this idea was further developed in Corinne, when the heroine extols Dante in her own oration on Italian history: “Animated by the spirit of the Republic, a warrior as well as a poet, he fans the flames of action amongst the dead, and his shades are more vibrantly alive than those living today” (Corinne, 29). Such meditations are timely, of course. When Corinne and the second volume of Le notti romane appeared, most of Italy was under Napoleon’s rule, with north and south divided into two large kingdoms; a first French invasion in 1798 had briefly made a Republic of Rome from the Papal States, and another one in 1808 would annex them to France. Neither of the two novels acknowledged Italy’s changing political circumstances; conveniently, both are set a few years before the times of their publication (Le notti romane around 1780, and Corinne mostly in the final years of the eighteenth century), and both suggest that Italians of their day were unfit for self-government. Yet nationhood was different from government, and it is in their subtle attempts to establish an Italian nation and define its characteristics that both novels pursue a political agenda. Le notti romane accomplishes this in large part through its rich texture of described sounds—its voices, urban noises, and music. At the core of its politics is the distinction it draws between the sounds of individual and collective utterance. While Cicero’s oration is a lesson in the meaningful and intentional use of vocal sound, the spectral Roman populace chatters like a flock of nocturnal birds, murmurs like waves lapping on the shore, and whispers like leaves rustled by the wind. And then there is the ambient city noise, which Verri cataloged in such detail as to make the novel an important document regarding the historical soundscape of Rome. Dogs near the Baths of Caracalla bay at every falling leaf (Notti romane, 2:159), cattle moo on the plain between the Palatine and Capitoline Hills

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(2:57), “nocturnal hymns of peace” echo from the temples near the Baths of Diocletian (2:140), frogs and crickets chatter outside the Ninfeo d’Egeria (2:159). Throughout Rome, voices are raised—the novel suggests—yet the braying of animals and the tones of Agnus Dei alike echo into nothing. They are the sounds that signify a lack of presence. The narrator tries to argue differently. He tells his audience that Rome transformed from the seat of a military empire to the capital of a religious and aesthetic one, where language and music replaced spears and shields. After all, the narrator asserts, harmonious sound spreads of its own accord. If Verri himself hated Italian opera, his Italo feels differently: he shows the spirits Rome’s modern pantheon, noting especially its busts of Paisiello—“rediscoverer of beautiful sounds on the modern lyre”—and Metastasio. On Capitoline Hill, the Muses now reign; poets go there for inspiration because the location provides a “rare and sweet charm for improvising fluid verse” (2:86). Measured sound makes its own, much sweeter, conquests: “If you [ancient Romans] spread your language by force of arms, our language penetrates hearts through the enchantments of meter” (Notti romane, 2:188). These enchantments had given Italy an operatic empire that extended from London to St. Petersburg. This encomium is a world away from Alessandro Verri’s earlier position, espoused in the pages of Il Caffè in the mid-1760s. Of course, as we saw in chapter 1, Verri was not the first to describe Italian as inherently musical and disposed to behave according to the laws of meter and harmony—this had long been the characteristic genio or “spirit” of the lingua toscana. As the twenty-three-year-old enfant terrible of the circle responsible for Il Caffè, Verri had most famously denounced that tongue, declaring its antique periods and pretty words to be the enemies of things and ideas. Of course, one must always beware of facile elisions of author and narrator. And the documentary trail of Le notti romane makes determining Verri’s position vis-à-vis his first-person pronoun more than unusually complicated. A 1963 critical edition of the work included a rejected early introduction entitled “L’antiquario fanatico.”15 This draft essay suggests that Verri undertook Le notti romane as a parody of precisely the past-worship that it ultimately celebrated, condemning, in the process, the papal authority that assembled and preserved collections of ancient statues while Roman citizens suffered from biological wasting. The Capitoline Museum visited by the characters in Le notti romane opened to the public in the 1730s, the first of its kind. The Pio-Clementine Museum at the Vatican, which features in both Le notti romane and Corinne, was built in the years between Verri’s arrival

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in Rome and the publication of the novel’s first volume; it doubled in size following the ascension of Pope Pius VI, for reasons relating both to personal vanity and tourist economics.16 In his letters to his brother from this period, Alessandro Verri attested that he lived in perpetual fear of starvation and noted, cynically, the fortunes made in Rome by foreign dealers of antiques.17 The city must preserve its “beautiful statues,” he wrote, or else “it would not attract a single foreigner”—and certainly Rome had “no other sources of income.”18 Perhaps for these very reasons, Verri eventually claimed that he had “erred gravely” in making “L’antiquario fanatico” a parody, and he began the project again, this time writing in earnest. The consolations of historical engagement were significant, after all, against the shallowness of life and the wasting tendencies of biological being. Yet Verri found that he could not sustain an unambiguously positive account of the antiquarian’s Rome either; this version’s Italo is also revealed to be a dupe. In its climactic scene, Le notti romane conspicuously undermines its narrator’s fantasy of a euphonious Rome as the capital of an Italy reborn. On the sixth night, when the group reaches the Vatican—a destination saved for last because it was expected to impress the most—a “stern ghost” steps forward to offer a dissent. It is Vitruvius, the architect. The Rome that the narrator has described to them, Vitruvius asserts, is a lie. He has seen and, more importantly, heard the truth: the narrator’s Rome is an ugly, frivolous, dissonant site of what we have since come to call modernity. Do not tell us that all Romans live well in the present, he contends, for only a few do. The indolent rich drive their carriages, “rattling with the clang of iron,” noisily through the streets. This din continues at all hours: “When night calls to repose, there is no cessation of these noisy hurryings to and fro.” Servants forcibly push the riffraff back from the paths of the wealthy. This clang of metal on metal on the streets is matched by a similar racket emanating from above the rooftops, from instruments the spirit does not recognize, namely, church bells: “In character with this are those instruments of sounding brass placed in high towers; their hollow bronze struck in a peculiar manner, jars the whole air and makes the streets re-echo with the repercussion” (Notti romane, 2:208–213). The narrator cannot answer these charges, and Verri leaves them unresolved. Vitruvius’s critique destabilizes the fictional universe of Le notti romane: it would seem that the ghosts watch and listen to Rome’s living even in the daytime. However—and this is important—it does not change the terms of the debate. Vitruvius equates social disorder with

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ugly and discordant noise: in Rome’s air as on its streets, all is jangling, frantic dissipation. With this association, the novel reinforces its own elisions of social harmony with sonic harmony and the harmonies of language, of social agency with vocal agency. When the ghosts return to the tomb for the last time, they leave modern Rome awaiting a Cicero of its own.

defining italy poetically The clamor of Rome’s bells introduces Corinne to Staël’s novel. Her first appearance is at her coronation on Capitoline Hill, one of the very ceremonies of Italy’s aesthetic dominion that Verri’s narrator described to his Roman ghosts. In Corinne, this ritual is one of the diversions of a society that is every bit as frivolous and enfeebled as Verri’s novel implied. The hero—Lord Oswald, a Scot, newly arrived in Rome—awakens to the pealing of those same church bells, which announce the procession of the improvvisatrice toward the hill. Throngs of Romans are gathered to catch a glimpse of Italy’s most famous woman. Whereas Verri’s great orator was a revenant from the ancient past, Staël’s merely looked a lot like one. Corinne rides to her coronation in a chariot “built in the style of ancient Rome” (Corinne, 22), and she is garbed as the Cumaean Sibyl, an ancient prophetess who dwelled in a cave near Vesuvius. Yet while the Sibyl told of the future with a hundred voices echoing down a hundred tunnels (or so Virgil famously had it), Corinne sings of the past with “the most moving voice in all of Italy”—and, as we will see, she has the appearance of an ancient statue come to life. In Corinne, the most important cultural work of the improvvisatrice is to naturalize the language she speaks by obscuring its regional differences. Indeed, at the beginning of the novel, Corinne is asked, quite literally, by the crowd, to become the nation’s mouthpiece. For her performance at Capitoline Hill, the audience proclaims, seemingly with one voice, that she must improvise on a topic of national interest: “the glory and happiness of Italy.” As we have seen already, the matter of who could speak for Italy, and in what dialect, was nothing if not contentious. Corinne is able to stand for a fragmented nation precisely because she lacks markers of regional identity: no one knows what part of Italy she is from (22). In fact the novel informs readers that she was raised in the British Isles and speaks a literary Tuscan that she learned in part from extensive reading. Thus she is able to be “l’Italie” (as the title of the novel implies) precisely because she was raised elsewhere.

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Corrine’s ability to improvise in Italian is elided in multiple ways with her talents as a musician. As she “declaimed [her improvisations] in a variety of tones” (33), she was able to accompany herself on the lyre. Her friend, Prince Castel-Forte, boasts, “Corinne’s poetry was an intellectual melody” (26); Corinne suggests that Italian itself has a “sparkling melody” (109) all its own. Indeed, her defense of the “musical charm” of the language resembles one of the main strands of its earlier critique, namely, that this charm is mindless: “There is pleasure in the sounds of the words almost independent of the ideas” (44). However—and this is also significant—Corinne identifies in those sounds what we would call a paralinguistic meaning. This is something like onomatopoeia, but with a sound-to-image correspondence: Italian words evoke appropriate mental pictures, immediately and consistently, in their very sounds. “These words have nearly always something picturesque about them,” she remarks. “Their sound reflects their meaning.” These images, Corinne suggests, were imprinted on the language by the music, dance, statues, and paintings that surrounded its first speakers: “You can feel that this melodious, richly colored language was formed with the fine arts around it.” Her special talent lies in her ability to make this representative music heard again. Corinne’s semantically rich (or melodramatically redundant) utterances are set apart from a kind of pronounced droning that the novel describes as cantilena. A few scholars have commented on Staël’s seemingly counterintuitive use of this musical term to denote a specifically nonmusical mode of speech (cantilena is usually understood to denote a particularly smooth and lyrical melody, even a lullaby); but Alessandro Verri uses the term too, and in much the same fashion as Staël. In Le notti romane, a cantilena can be heard in the “murmur of inarticulate sounds” issuing from the depths of the Tomb of the Scipios; the narrator compares it to the wind that howls in the valleys.19 Similarly, Corinne notes that, while improvisation was an art native to Italy and the “national” language was already melodic, most Italians read poetry in a “monotonous song called cantilena.”20 For Staël, the crucial distinction between Corinne’s musical utterances and the unpleasant cantilena is established by the verb lire: the drone that flattens meaning is reserved for Italians reading poetry (“en lisant le vers”). Likewise, Corinne makes clear that literary deskwork does not suit the Italians because of a national disposition she casts tellingly in terms of their animacy: “Even their eloquence, which is so lively when they speak, is very artificial when they write; it is as if they become cold as they work” (Corinne, 111). Improvisation, by contrast, replaces the

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labor of reading and writing with a display of nervous excitement—a blast of biological energy. Improvisers were said to become flushed, sweat copiously, gesture extravagantly, flash at the eyes, and drink large amounts of water as they performed. Indeed, the Milanese doctor Giuseppe Giannini included a section on the symptoms of improvisers in his 1805 treatise “On the Nature of Fevers.”21 Corinne collapses in exhaustion after the novel’s second improvisation scene, at Cape Miseno; by the end of the novel, she is too weak to perform at all. This corporealization of the spontaneous poem—locating its source among the nerves, blood vessels, and sweat glands rather than in the library—was central to the Romantic reinterpretation of the improvvisatrice. What’s more, it was a decisive stage in making improvisation a popular and “Italian” art rather than a cultivated and academic one, as it had once been. (As early as 1906, Eugène Bouvy noted that Italian poetic improvisation, a practice that had been professionalized in the eighteenth century, had then been “politicized” in the nineteenth.22) Not by coincidence does Corinne pick up her lyre and strum “national melodies” when poetic inspiration strikes: these simple tunes serve to connect her to a broader national consciousness, what the Germans called a Volksgeist.

defining italy plastically But there is a second trait that allows Corinne to stand for an Italian nation: her own animated-ness. Staël’s Rome is very much like Verri’s: a haunted city peopled with statues and ghosts, in which the living are “foreign . . . like pilgrims resting alongside the ruins.” Corinne asks, “Is Rome not now the land of tombs?” And perhaps recalling Le notti romane—whose author Corinne names as one of Italy’s great living prose writers—she claims that those who dwell in Rome are prone to imagine that “a host of shades awaits us” (Corinne, 32); later, the narration suggests that “during the silence of the night . . . [Rome] seems inhabited only by its illustrious ghosts” (Corinne, 74). Living in Rome prepares one for one’s own death: “From our lonely city to the city of the underworld, the passage seems quite smooth” (Corinne, 32). Oswald and Corinne gaze at the same ancient statues in the Vatican museum that Verri’s Italo showed to his shades. Like Verri’s museum-goers, Staël’s hero and heroine meditate on the particular features of these famous stone heads, wishing for beautiful language to match, in sound and in time, what the sculptures accomplish as frozen moments, as matter in space: “What poetry lies in those faces where the most sublime expression is fixed forever”

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(Corinne, 139). The novel itself seems to have an impulse to collect statues: to these Vatican collections Staël adds the replicas of the Laocoön, Niobe, and the Medici Venus that Corinne places in her own home, alongside her musical instruments; and the many more statues in the private museum the improvvisatrice designed at Tivoli. Yet Staël made her theme even more explicit: the narrator remarks that there is a mutilated statue preserved on Capitoline Hill that acts as “a symbol of Rome itself”; it is a human form minus a head and feet, possessed nonetheless of a striking, ancient beauty. This must be the Belvedere Torso, which now rests in the Pio-Clementine Museum, and whose exegesis by Winckelmann we encountered at the beginning of this book as inaugurating Rancière’s aesthetic regime. (Staël’s notion of a single statue symbolizing a land of statues was later taken up by Byron, whose Childe Harold describes Rome as a “marble wilderness” embodied by petrified Niobe.23) When Staël identifies the Belvedere Torso as a symbol of ancient Rome, she does so in service of the novel’s central analogy—that between Corinne and the Italian nation, which she embodies as statue-like living flesh. Corinne, ou l’Italie makes explicit this analogy (as many have remarked), in the process securing Staël’s reputation as inventor of “the science of nations”; it is not by coincidence that Corinne contains the first use of the French term nationalité.24 Staël has a central character remark of Corinne, “We say to foreigners: ‘Look at her, she is the image of our beautiful Italy’” (Corinne, 27). At her coronation, Corinne is described as having a figure “in the style of a Greek statue” and as resembling “a priestess of Apollo”—an appearance which, puzzlingly, also “gave a keen impression of youth and happiness” (Corinne, 23). Later, when she dances a tarantella, she imitates the poses of ancient statues and paintings so vividly that she appears to be one of the “dancing girls of Herculaneum” (Corinne, 91).25 Animée is one of the adjectives most frequently applied to her, and in turn she animates others. Prince Castel-Forte describes her as “the motive, the force, that animates our lives”; there remains “a spark of her life” in anything she touches (Corinne, 26–27). Her dance—in which she appears “animated by an enthusiasm for life, youth, and beauty”—rouses the musicians toward “greater efforts” and “stimulates all her spectators” (Corinne, 91). Her destruction following Oswald’s betrayal is not due to illness but rather (as appropriate for an “animated” being) to a gradual encroaching paralysis. Eventually she spends “whole days motionless, or at least without any visible movement”; her face takes on a “deathly pallor” (Corinne, 313). As she petrifies, she also loses her melodious voice: her utterances are “devoid of the

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richness and animation that people used to admire in her way of speaking” (Corinne, 361), and sometimes several minutes pass before she answers a question. The nation for which she stands is similarly volatile in its animacy. This means, first and foremost, a precariousness of emotional temperature: “Southern peoples often go from great excitement to complete repose” (Corinne, 93). In a section of the novel labeled “Italian Manners and Customs,” Oswald observes with scorn “the pointless and groundless animation which is to be found at most gatherings” in Rome (Corinne, 166). Among the Romans, as with Corinne, violent passions (at least the unpleasant ones) lead to immobility, while milder or happier ones result in “the liveliest expressions and the most animated gestures” (Corinne, 93). The Neapolitan spectators for the improvisation at Cape Miseno express attention “through their animated expressions” (Corinne, 233). Oswald, who does not animate, observes these people from across the Protestant-Catholic divide; for him, the Italians’ dynamic nature is of a piece with their dangerous susceptibility to graven images. Even as a “heavenly inspiration animated Corinne’s countenance” during a visit to Saint Peter’s Basilica, Oswald reprimands her that such “poetic enthusiasm” is an unhealthy mode of devotion (Corinne, 180). Here, then, “animated” has become a loaded, even paradoxical term; it seldom attaches itself to a woman without its partner, “like a statue,” somewhere nearby. In other words, the term praises her liveliness while simultaneously, obliquely, assigning her a nature that is marmoreal—or sometimes cold, foreign, or unfleshy. Inevitably, the “animated” person also has a lively musical voice. This archetype, epitomized by Corinne— what we might call the archetype of the female plastic—survived long afterward in other national fictions. Even George Eliot’s lovely Dorothea Brooke, later Mrs. Casaubon, in Middlemarch is alternately “animated” when she is ardent and “like a statue” or “turned to marble” when thwarted—the artist Naumann describes her as an “antique form animated by Christian sentiment.” When impassioned, Dorothea speaks with a “musical intonation” that makes her speech resound “like a fine bit of recitative.”26 Men are less frequently described in this way; when they are, it is usually because they are foreigners (as the Italians are to Oswald). Paradoxically, the analogy denotes both a kinship to rigid sculpture and a susceptibility to being molded—in short, a predisposition for substantial change. The animacy of the Italian people is dependent on Italy’s “institutions,” by which is meant government. Staël wrote, “The peoples of the

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South are more easily moulded by their institutions than are the peoples of the North” (Corinne, 99). Flexible institutions allow for political selfdetermination, marshaling popular energy and movement toward ends that are also of the people. The “pointless and groundless animation” that Oswald observes among the Romans stems from the absence of these institutions: Romans are bound to a frivolous life because they are stripped of political power. The message here is essentially similar to that of Le notti romane. Corinne herself explains that the Roman nobility is “ignorant and lazy” because it has “nothing to do either militarily or politically” (Corinne, 100). Yet this very lack of male self-determination creates possibilities for female proficiency and independence that did not exist outside of the Italian peninsula. Corinne suggests that she and other intelligent women are able to thrive in Italian cities because (unlike in countries like France and, especially, England) these places lack a social apparatus to confine them to domestic duties.27 And, even more importantly, women thrive in Italy because they are able to acquire Classical knowledge and transmit it through public speech (Corinne, 100–101); Corinne most obviously refers to herself and the other improvvisatrici here, but she also notes the dottoresse who lecture in the academies. This is why Italian women had inherited the orator’s mantle from ancient men. Thus Corinne has little in common with Galatea and does not come from a sculptor’s atelier. Rather, the tropes of metamorphosis are diffused in self-reflexive analogy. When Corinne is “animated,” inspiration is her animating force, and it also gives a quickening power to the words she utters, which subsequently animate her inert countrymen. The temporal doubleness that her statuary nature accords—she is present but seems ancient—allows her the understanding of historicized being that Verri’s narrator craved. It also grants her the ability to sing a modern language with the melody of an ur-tongue. Indeed, one could argue that she represents both statue and sculptor. Like Pygmalion, she is a crafter of perfect signs, though hers exist in sound and not in stone.

defining history plastically Hegel was surely writing under the influence of these discourses when he defined what he called “plastic individuals”: figures like Pericles, Demosthenes, Plato, Sophocles, Socrates, and Thucydides, who lived in an age of “perfect plasticity” and so are only to be understood, Hegel wrote, if we apply “an insight into the ideals of sculpture.”28 These men were plastic in part because they had the “universal character” of their

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people; evidently, for Hegel, marble signified this quality better than flesh, perhaps because it is inwardly homogenous. But along with universality was the equally important quality of being exemplary, a quality obtained after and through the universal. The “plastic individuals” of ancient history gained these qualities through their own making, and this self-made-ness allowed them to guide the formation of others. The result is an understanding of ancient men that is curiously identical to the medium of their commemoration. The figures Hegel invites his readers to understand as statues were, in some cases, the same encountered as statues by the narrator and his ghostly entourage in Le notti romane and by Corinne and Oswald in the Pio-Clementine Museum in Corinne, ou L’Italie. Indeed, Hegel shared with both Alessandro Verri and Germaine de Staël an interest in the special kind of thinking that happened amid collections of ancient artifacts. This attention to what Hegel called a sculptural balance of the universal and particular was modeled in Le notti romane, in which the collective is figured as eminently homogenous but individual features of face and form could be matched to word, deed, and character. When the ancient spirits in Verri’s novel make a nighttime visit to the Capitoline Museums, the wrinkled face of Seneca is made to occasion thoughts on the “vile customs” that obtained in his day; at Socrates’s bust, the narrator exposits on the virtuous doctrines that came from “these very lips,” lips that also drank hemlock; the clement face of Marcus Aurelius provokes ecstasies on the magnanimity of his reign, and so on (Notti romane, 2:62–87). Similarly, narrating Corinne and Oswald’s tour of the Roman statues, Staël suggested that “among the ancients, . . . there seems to have been a more intimate union between physical and moral qualities” (Corinne, 142). In Corinne, as we have noted, the statues’ “sublime” faces paradoxically suggest a latent poetry. Thus, both novelists suggested that the iconicity of the Vatican’s statues allowed the viewer to fuse an art form that is material and extends spatially with one that extends in sound and through time. Hegel lists four types of individuals that could be understood via sculpture: poets, orators, historians, and philosophers. In other words, only those who were proficient in performing the verbal arts could be understood as “plastic” through sculpture. For Hegel, these self-made “plastic individuals” connect two key ideals. One is sculpture, “the plastic art par excéllence.” The other is a philosophical posture or attitude, which Catherine Malabou has dubbed “philosophical plasticity.”29 Like the epithet “animated,” philosophical plasticity encompasses a paradox. Above all, it signifies the ability to assume a new ideal

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form, permanently. But it first required a stiffening of thought to forcibly exclude the mundane thoughts that might otherwise be skittering along the cerebral nerves. Hegel wrote that the thinker must “rigidly exclud[e] the usual way of relating the parts of a problem,” thus (as Malabou has paraphrased) “purifying the form of all that is arbitrary and personal, all that is immediate and particular.”30 Only then may the philosopher achieve “perfect plasticity” and so embody a new, particular form of the universal. In recent years, Malabou has persuasively argued that the category of plasticity is central to Hegel’s thought—and also a useful means of connecting Romantic philosophy and aesthetics to current trends in neurobiology (this will be discussed further in chapter 4). Of course, the notion that one can learn about thinking by imagining oneself a statue is at least as old as Condillac’s Treatise. But Hegel’s move is different— not least because his plastic thinker stiffens and reshapes in ideal form, via self-conscious thought, rather than sense-percepts alone, as Condillac had it. And the goal of “philosophical plasticity” is ultimately not that the human imagined as a statue becomes (or re-becomes) a sensing human but rather that the sensing human acquires a latent second nature that is marmoreal. If we consider Condillac to be the representative philosopher for a late classicism preoccupied with the Pygmalion fable, Hegel reflects a historical moment in which great humans were imagined to hover on the border of the statuary. As should be clear, such notions were developed by Staël and Verri before Hegel had them. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which puts forth the idea of a “plastic discourse,” appeared in 1807, two years after the first German edition of Le notti romane and around the same time as Corinne. And the bulk of Hegel’s ideas on plasticity were developed in his lectures on aesthetics during the following decade and a half. Now, these writings are understood almost solely in terms of the German canon: Hegel was continuer of the tradition of Winkelmann, Kant, and Schiller. We could call this familiar version “First Hegel,” adapting a terminology from Alain Badiou.31 My reading of Hegelian plasticity allows us to imagine a “Second Hegel,” one who read fantastic novels and was a conduit for high Romantic invention. These novels prefigured his notion of history as a “museum of images” (eine Gallerie von Bildern), a model in which details of the past appeared to be “solid” and have a “form.” (Hegel himself admitted that he shared the Romantics’ interest in recapturing “that sense of solidity and substantiality of existence” that has been lost.32) If, for First Hegel, historical time unfolded in

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dialectic process, Second Hegel allowed for a different kind of thinking about time, wherein history is construed as a sequence of images, and the stimulus they provided allowed the contemplator to toggle back and forth between historically distant modes of being. Joshua Dienstag similarly observed: “For all the dynamism we normally associate with Hegel’s history, in his later lectures on the subject, what we largely receive is a series of static portraits.” In Verri’s and Staël’s novels, we find models for Dienstag’s notion of a Hegelian Temple of Memory, wherein the past could be navigated spatially. Enshrined in this temple are those “plastic individuals” that mediate (as we have seen) between the verbal and the sculptural-spatial. Like Staël, Hegel also proposed understanding social organizations in this same way—namely, as “motionless shapes” or artworks, to be contemplated aesthetically.33 Here, of course, we may recall the Belvedere Torso, which, lacking a head or legs, stood for Rome; and Corinne herself, who was “a figure for the entire nation” precisely because of her own latent statuary nature.

defining italy musically? “We build worlds around voices, worlds at once cultural-technological and natural-biological,” James Q. Davies wrote recently, tracing this world-building impetus to the notion, which emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century, that each one of us has a single, inevitable, politically charged “voice” issuing from the dark biological-material depths within.34 In this model, the human voice becomes what Nina Sun Eidsheim has called a “technology of selfhood,” a discloser of essential natures and biological kinds.35 It is not difficult to see how we could trace to the constellation of texts under consideration here the notion that political worlds could be and in fact were built around voices: voices possessed of material inevitability, voices which sounded forth as politicized carriers of essence. Italy figured prominently in the nascent Romantic fantasies of political-aesthetic voicing, no doubt in part because it had, as of that point, made nothing of itself and because it was already understood in aesthetic terms. According to widespread belief, the Italians’ musical voices, like their hyper-refinement of the fine arts more broadly, stemmed from an essential predilection for sensory pleasure. This was certainly the position of the art critic and archeologist Karl Ludwig Fernow, who provided the Romantics with a definitive historical account of Italian poetic improvisation. Fernow was a friend of both Staël and Hegel. His

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“Über die Improvisatoren” appeared first in serial form in 1801 and later in his three-volume Römische Studien (1806), alongside essays on such topics as the sculptor Canova, beauty in art, and inspiration. As Angela Esterhammer has shown, Fernow reverted to hoary stereotypes in his attempt to explain why the Italians excelled at improvisation.36 Core elements of his argument came directly out of Rousseauian linguistic geography. He claimed that because Italians lived in a warm climate, they had a naturally heightened sensibility—which he distinctively called a “sensory energy”—and their language was innately musical. But Esterhammer noted that Fernow’s third, sociopolitical explanation was not characteristic of the older veins of thought.37 Italians excelled at creating spontaneous poetry, Fernow suggested, because of the repressive conditions under which they lived. These conditions forcibly redirected the sensory energies of Italians in harmless directions— poetic improvisations, after all, were not the same as political speeches. Or were they? Corinne’s improvisations certainly were; at her coronation, she sang about Italian independence, Italy’s national glory, and the grief of the country’s people, who lived among ruins and were outnumbered by ghosts. In Le notti romane, poetic improvisations on Capitoline Hill were among the constituent rituals of Italy’s new aesthetic empire. Yet those examples are from fiction. And ultimately, for all Staël, Verri, and even Hegel concerned themselves with being within historical time, it remains to be determined whether their writings were more than peripherally concerned with lived history. Fortunately, where nation-fantasies are made, ethnographers are sure to follow—and Napoleonic Italy was no exception. Fernow’s account “Über die Improvisatoren” is rich in historical detail and includes the first biography of a woman who is generally thought to have been a model for Corinne. This woman is Maria Maddalena Morelli, better known by her Arcadian name, Corilla Olimpica.38 She was the woman who won the mantle of poetic inspiration once given to Tasso and Petrarch; she was the poet whose coronation, on Capitoline Hill, Verri’s narrator described to his ghostly tourists. A commemorative medal of Corilla Olimpica was even stamped in 1776 by the Florentine numismatist Giovanni Zenobio Weber. When Römische Studien appeared, she had just recently died at the age of seventy-three (or sixty, according to some early historians; she may have lied about her age). During the nineteenth century, she was celebrated as one of the most significant figures in the Italian literary tradition; this admiration was shared by Italians, at least for a time.39

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Even more significant in Fernow’s volume is the little fold-out appendix nestled at the back. It consists of a series of transcriptions of the harmonies and melodies used by improvvisatori, in musical notation. This is—to be clear—probably the first “ethnomusicological” study conducted on the Italian peninsula, and it is devoted to the music of poetic improvisation. Fernow’s songbook thus constitutes a doubly welcome entry in the literature on Italian extemporaneous poetry: while both fictional and eyewitness accounts almost invariably attest that poetic improvisation was a musical practice, with the improviser singing her poetry to instrumental accompaniment, most are frustratingly ungenerous with details. One of Fernow’s tunes is labeled “Corilla” (example 7), and, while some of his transcriptions consist of notes alone, for this one he supplied a text as well. As might be expected, historians interested in Corilla Olimpica have welcomed this transcription enthusiastically; they have performed it in historical reenactments, and they even discovered that its melody was used in Italy for an anthem during the Napoleonic wars.40 What, exactly, can this song tell us about Corilla’s improvisations? First of all, it is no ode to the history and glories of Italy, and while we know that Corilla—who must have been extraordinarily erudite— improvised on topics ranging from the properties of light and sound to religion to the death of Cicero and that her final performance at her crowning on Capitoline Hill concerned the glories of ancient Rome, there is no record of an “Italy” in this poetic register; there is no “history,” only the past. The text recorded by Fernow consists of a mere eight elegant lines of seven syllables (settenari) with a rhyme scheme of A–B–B–C–A–D–D–C: Sogno, ma te non miro Sempre nei sogni miei, Mi desto, e tu non sei Il primo mio pensier. Lungi da te m’aggiro Senza bramarti mai, Son teco e non mi fai Nè pena nè piacer.

The speaker is a rejected lover taking shelter in irony, addressing the kind of nameless second-person love-object (“you”) now familiar from pop songs. She begins with a self-undermining claim: “I dream, and you are not / always in my dreams.” Each subsequent couplet supplies another elegant variation on this opening: “I wake, and you are not /

example 7. “Corilla,” from Römische Studien 3: appendix.




             
      

  




     



 

        

     
   

 





 

   

   





 





      



  

 



       

 



         





    

  













  



 

       

  

    

     







   



  

  



  
    




















 

 







   

 

 

  



 



 



   



 



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my first thought. / I go far away / without missing you, / I am with you and I feel / neither pain nor pleasure.” If the text is worlds away from Corinne’s inflammatory history, the music is also a little disappointing—at least when it is approached with what Davies would call “Romantic-modern” expectations about what the inspired mind produces spontaneously. In the present day, improvisatory genius usually favors irregularity and abundance, like the dazzling scales and syncopations of a tango violinist or a rapper’s breakneck polyrhythms. “Corilla,” on the other hand, is a simple tune, indeed folk-like, as Melina Esse has noted.41 Its declamation is syllabic, and its musical form takes on the periodic character of the poetry; there are no ornaments, no interludes. This kind of periodic structure is to be expected when the melody was supposed to be generated by the poetry. For example, the sequential repetition of the opening phrase in measures 5–8 is well suited to the text, given that the poetic couplets are identically structured. Yet the melody of “Corilla” is not unusually sensitive to its text— indeed, rather the opposite is true at times. Note the awkward emphasis of “te” in the first measure and the inappropriately long “Mi” in measure 5, at the expense of the metrical accent on the first syllable of “desto.” And if the melody followed the sounds of the words—those uniquely musical Italian words that were believed to make this whole practice possible—what can explain the vast difference between, for instance, “mai” and “fai” in the second half? It must be allowed that the performance would not necessarily have resembled the transcription. For instance, the performer may have ornamented the melody with trills, diminutions, and a liberal amount of tempo rubato, much as opera singers did. Yet a transcription would normally be expected to record a performed version, not a notated ground. And ultimately the music for “Corilla” resembles nothing so much as an instrumental minuet. Intriguingly, Fernow also mentioned a second, less familiar way in which the performance might have departed from the notation: he suggested that an Italian improviser of poetry would “half sing, half recite” (halbt singt, halbt rezitirt) her words in performance. This might simply have meant that some poems were improvised in the speech-like idiom of recitative, while others were performed in the lyrical style of “Corilla”—a stylistic division born out in Römische Studien’s appendix as a whole. But Fernow seems to imply that the improviser’s declamation wavered between a song-idiom in which pitches were discrete and

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diatonic and a speech-idiom of ungradated slides (such as Joshua Steele’s notation, examined in chapter 2, was designed to capture). If poetry that bears an inborn song was understood to be an art of the ancients, then this treatment would quite literally subject it to “ruin”; the enharmonic curves of the half-sung pitch would attest to a historical age in much the same way that the eroded edges of the Piranesian monument do. And if the performance began as speech and gradually acquired the contours of song, then it could be understood to represent the very political-historic reanimation with which the voice had come to be freighted. Poised thus between song and speech, the improviser’s voice evoked the kind of temporal doubleness that has haunted this entire chapter and that unites its museums, animated (or petrifying) women, and thoughts of “plastic” being. Not for nothing did the improvvisatrice occasion fantasies of oracles and ventriloquism, of ancient gods and collective spirits who speak through women’s mouths.42 And if this melody was taken up as a popular hymn at a moment of national resurgence, am I not justified in rhapsodizing (in Staëlian terms) about the reanimation of Italy itself? This interpretation makes Corilla’s tune a kind of “Va pensiero” for the Italian nation as made by Napoleon and makes the improvvisatrice herself a Verdi avant la lettre. But there is still an impediment or two to be confessed before these rhapsodies can begin. The first is that while “Corilla” was indeed made into a political anthem during these years, published as Inno . . . sull’aria detta Corilla, it was in service of the wrong side: it celebrated the return of the Austrian army and the departure of the French.43 We do not know if it was ever sung in this published form. Indeed, perhaps this Inno was simply the invention of a propagandist, who used Fernow’s study to manufacture a phony Italian anthem. Another impediment to the version of events that sees the improvvisatrice’s song become an opportunity for collective nationalist singing—an impediment that seems to have escaped notice until now—is that the text is not by Corilla Olimpica at all. Rather, its author is none other than Pietro Metastasio. The lines given by Fernow as “Sogno, ma te non miro” constitute the third verse of Metastasio’s “La libertà, a Nice,” an ode to erotic, not political, freedom.44 This oversight must lead us to wonder whether what Fernow transcribed (or, indeed, composed) was indeed the melody of an improvisation at all and whether Corilla had anything to do with it. Thus the trail Fernow followed through what he believed was

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untrammeled Italian nature was, in fact, left by Metastasio’s bejeweled slippers. Thus, as seems so often to be the case, what has passed for historians as a “folk” artifact was actually reverse-engineered from the artful. Fernow’s “transcription” is every bit as entangled in operatic traditions as the scenes of poetic improvisation in Giuseppe Mosca’s La poetessa errante (Naples, 1822, to a libretto by Giuseppe Palomba), an opera buffa about two improvisatory poets; or Giacchino Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims (Paris, 1825, to a libretto by Luigi Balocchi), which depicts a group of strangers of diverse nationalities gathering at a hotel to witness Charles X’s coronation. Both of these works feature the improvvisatrice Corinne as a character. In Rossini’s opera, as is well known, this role was performed by none other than Giuditta Pasta, the foremost soprano of the time (whose own “plastic” qualities will be the subject of chapter 5). In Mosca’s opera, which has been entirely overlooked by historians of opera and improvisation alike, Corinna was sung by Giacinta Canonici, a sweetvoiced soprano who had been a mainstay of Naples’s comic theaters since the first decade of the century. The Milan-based music-publishing house Ricordi commissioned an engraving of Canonici from Giovanni Antonio Sasso, whose caption praises her “grace and beauty” and suggests (with a rather damning redundancy) that she “always pleased those who sought pleasure in music.”45 Early in La poetessa errante, it is revealed that this buffo version of Corinne is in fact named Madame Florida; she has adopted the Staëlian pseudonym for the benefit of a foolish English nobleman who “acquired” her from Rome to “put all of Scotland and England in a frenzy.” (La poetessa errante attests to a degree of amusement among Italians at the international celebrity that their improvisers had attained following the success of Staël’s novel.) If both of these are comic operas, La poetessa errante sits firmly within the commedia dell’arte tradition, while Il viaggio a Reims is a dramma giocoso in the Goldonian model, with some of its characters—Corinna included— singing with elevated diction in a more coloratura-laden style. At first listen, it would appear that these two operas bring us no closer to the improvvisatrice as historical figure—not least because their respective Corinnas are so different. The Corinna in Il viaggio a Reims is surely among the most inert of operatic heroines: she forms no romantic attachments and avoids all intrigue. She is possessed of the double nature that we have identified in Staël’s heroine, belonging both to the political present and the distant past: in Esse’s words, this Corinna is

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“identified as a child not just of Italy, but of ancient Italy.”46 Her two arias are both diegetic, with harp accompaniment and ostensibly improvised poetic text. The first is a veritable catalog of soporific clichés about improvisation itself (Corinna praises her “gentle harp,” “sweet calm,” and “happy days”); far from taking advantage of Pasta’s renowned acting talents, this “entrance aria” is delivered from behind the door of her hotel room. The other is, even worse, an ode to the king’s charms (“Della corona / Sostegno e onor, / Carlo le dona / Novel splendor”). A dreamy harp solo cues Corinna’s entrances—and her songs are vastly slower, more ornamented, and more periodic in phrase structure than the other numbers in the opera. (Not for nothing did the other characters find them “soothing”—indeed, Corinna is able to resolve conflicts merely by improvising nearby.) By contrast, the heroine’s improvisations in La poetessa errante seem positively to gallop past, gathering speed as they go. And if these occasionally settle into a kind of fleeting lyricism, they are too volatile to remain there for long: the musical idiom of this improvisation is something closer to operatic recitative. This setting is appropriate for the meter of the poetry, but diegetic recitative is the rarest of utterances— and this is marked as strange by fortissimo guitar chords that sound intermittently on the first and third beats of the measures but never on the second or fourth, as one would expect in recitative. What is more, Corinna’s song in La poetessa errante is entirely syllabic and her melody moves only by step; the vocal range is constricted, and she usually hovers on each pitch, chant-like, for several words. In the style of declamation and in the poetry (a series of allusion-laden insults to her former lover), this improvisation is a world away from that depicted by Rossini. But the scenes of improvisation in La poetessa errante and Il viaggio a Reims do share a small handful of details—and these may serve to bring the present narrative to a conclusion. To begin, both are delimited in the accompaniment: the orchestra ceases and is replaced by a plucked instrument (guitar in Mosca’s opera, harp in Rossini’s) sounding chords and arpeggios. These instruments were clearly meant to imitate the lyre played by Staël’s heroine (and which inevitably features prominently in visual depictions of her), and in the present context they may also recall the harp-accompanied preghiera in Cimador’s Pimmalione. Here again, the historical Corilla Olimpica, whose musical encouragement was supplied, improbably, by one or two violins, fades a little further from recollection. Such accompaniments may bring to mind those of the early German songbooks, which similarly relied on simple chords and

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arpeggios to evoke a folk practice; many of these allowed for the voice to be accompanied on fortepiano or guitar. Indeed, in many senses the improvised poem can be understood as the Italian equivalent of the Lied, despite the inevitable absence of a comparable written corpus. The sharp delineation of these two operas’ improvisation scenes by means of their accompaniment is belied in both cases by vocal styles that are preeminently continuous with their host operatic contexts. This continuity between operatic singing and supposedly improvised poetic declamation naturalizes operatic singing, and the practice of opera more broadly, making it sound as if it were the product of feverish inspiration. This point recalls Melina Esse’s notion that in encompassing both creation and performance, these discourses of the improvvisatrice in the early nineteenth century provided a model for understanding the composition of Italian opera more broadly. Yet in these scenes of conspicuously framed improvisation, both Rossini and Mosca allowed for the performer to extemporise liberally. This is particularly true with La poetessa errante’s improvisation scenes, for which Mosca instructed the soprano to “improvise in the style of recitative” (we have seen this rare indication once before, in the Venetian reform opera of chapter 2). Yet even in Corinna’s songs in Il viaggio, the slow tempo and high-flown diction would imply a generous quantity of coloraturic embellishments; those provided by Rossini himself were merely a guide for Pasta to supply her own. Thus, while it has become a truism within historical scholarship of the recent materialist bent to concede that singers’ voices of past eras are lost to us, we must allow that the sounds of Italian poetic improvisation are especially elusive. This fact is ironic because of the very claims of substance and historical permanence made on their behalf—because of the way that in their very tunefulness, these voices seemed to attest to a marmoreal heaviness inside the bodies from which they sounded forth and to a longevity far greater than the normal human life span. In tracing them now through Romantic novels, historical records, philosophical tracts, single-copy manuscript scores, foldout appendices, engraved portraits, and commemorative medals, I cast my lot with the narrator of Le notti romane, for whom antiquities awarded relief from the shallowness of the now, and with Hegel, who likewise craved a history possessed of form, weight, and spatial extension and, through such a history, that comforting “sense of solidity and substantiality of existence” that was once obtained but has since also been lost.47 At issue here is not whether these “plastic” voices are gone—of course they are—or whether the latter-day historians who wish long-gone voices and old material

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objects to reanimate and confide again are actually victims of an oddly sterile Pygmalionism (sterile however frequently we confess to “desire” just such voices and bodies). What is perhaps surprising is to find, as Alessandro Verri did, that a single tale can serve simultaneously as a record of the historian’s bizarre covetousness and as an earnest account of the consolations and insights of listening to history.

chapter 4

Partial Animacy and Blind Listening in Napoleonic Italy

Since the middle of the eighteenth century, fables of animation had been a means of thinking in empirical terms about human sociability: the body’s aptitude for becoming a sociable being through sense-percepts and being malleable in the hands of authority. Condillac imagined his famous statue at least partially in response to Diderot’s accounts of the strange, violent, isolated, and atheistic lives of the deaf mute and the blind.1 In the Napoleonic years, as Italian audiences began to lose their taste for Pygmalion and Galatea on the stage and as the imagery of animation was put in the service of nation-building, the issue of perception-based sociability came again to the fore. This chapter has two interrelated aims, both of which hinge on the idea of a correspondence or affinity that was understood to exist between statuary being and states of sensory loss: paralysis, obviously, but also blindness, deafness, and muteness. First, I will discuss the final flourishing of the living statue on Italian stages in the first years of the nineteenth century. During this period, the animated statue-woman, or Galatea figure, waned in popularity and was eclipsed by the spectacle of an animated statue-population. Second, I will trace the ways in which the notion of a plastichuman threshold became useful in constructions of the biological body, in the realms of both aesthetics and anatomical science. In other words, Pygmalion narratives of plasticity and animation came to be applied not merely to statues but also to living humans with inert body parts, particularly inert sensing organs. 112

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These narratives gave rise to an understanding of the fine arts as compensatory media, making up for missing senses: those who lacked a full access to the phenomenal world were able to communicate by means of fine-art materials. In a metaphorical turn that is not entirely beside the point, we might say that blindness, deafness, muteness, and muscular paralysis became the white marble of the aesthetician’s atelier. And herein was another crucial stage in the reevaluation of untexted music that occurred during this period. This interest in sensory absence will necessarily take us away from opera and pantomime—which were essentially understood as mimesis in which music participated—toward art forms like instrumental music that were considered to traffic in partial signifiers and incompletely perceived mimesis. Finally, this chapter will reintersect with mainstream musicological history to consider how the picture of music’s role within the aesthetic regime around 1800 has been complicated and how these complications might make available new kinds of listening experiences, allowing us to identify surprising adjacencies over disciplinary borders. Although the language of animation and plasticity has receded from view within music-aesthetic historiography, I will suggest that it has survived, meanings intact, in a very different sphere.

plastic populations First, though, we must look back into mid-eighteenth-century thought, and particularly Condillac’s treatise, which continued to be read by Italians in the early nineteenth century as the foremost authority on matters of perception. Condillac is often described as a radical empiricist: he is Locke’s more brutal henchman, fencing with the Cartesians, who asserted that humans had a priori cognition independent of sense-experience. As we saw in chapter 1, Condillac’s Traité suggested that humans needed only the senses to achieve all the higher faculties. To demonstrate this, Condillac meticulously described the thoughts of a statue gradually granted its sense organs in ascending order of importance: first smell, then taste, hearing, sight, and finally touch.2 Many of the faculties could be gained through an encounter with a series of objects perceived by only one sense, even the weakest: the treatise famously began with the scent series of rose, carnation, jasmine, and violet, which taught attention, enjoyment, memory, and imagination to a statue with only an active nose. But Condillac was clear that, ultimately, one did need all five senses. Thus, we might imagine him more productively (if a little fancifully) as fencing with two foils extended in opposite directions: one pointed

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toward the rationalists and the other turned against any empiricist who might suggest that one could get by just as well with fewer than five senses. Condillac devoted a large part of his Traité to considering what could be learned from each individual sense, as well as various combinations of two, three, and four. The statue that lacked one or more of the five senses was unable to differentiate between stimulus and self. For instance, the statue with only a functioning nose believed that it was the rose it smelled, and the statue that had use of only its ears found it impossible to mediate music. Condillac wrote, “We can transform our statue at will into a noise, a sound, a symphony.”3 To identify any outside phenomenon as existing outside of itself—to distinguish between the moi and the ne plus moi—the statue needed touch, and this was just as true for things that could not be touched, like the symphony, as for things that could, like the violet. Condillac’s ranking of touch above sight and hearing was one of the most distinctive elements of his argument, as touch was much more commonly grouped with the so-called lower or animal senses of taste and smell. While the treatise describes a complete metamorphosis from cold material to fully formed human, its statue was carved within (rather than without) by its own percepts—and, as a thought experiment, it did its own carving or molding in the imagination of the reader. As noted in chapter 1, Condillac’s preface made explicit his didactic aims: the reader should imagine herself as the statue, quickened by sympathetic stirrings.4 His design was taken up within music-theatrical genres that relied on collaborations between the senses to the exclusion of verbal language. We have already seen how Condillac’s statue became central to eighteenth-century Italian narrative pantomime and melodrama, but the model worked just as well for scenes of animation en masse. For instance, the propaganda ballet Deucalione e Pirra (considered briefly in chapter 1) is about a postdiluvian repopulation in the model of Noah’s ark, except instead of preserving animals in pairs, the main characters must create a new human race from a supply of rocks. The nuovi creati, or “new beings,” appear one by one as Deucalion and Pyrrha (representing the French occupiers) toss rocks backward over their shoulders; the male beings emerge from Deucalion’s rocks, and the female ones from Pyrrha’s.5 In other words, they begin as coarse material in accidental flight—the outcomes of a process of reproduction by copy rather than, as in the Pygmalion myth, objects of desire. The animating love of their makers is parental, not erotic. In a preface, the audience at La Scala was asked to understand this stone race to represent their Italian selves.

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Deucalione e Pirra’s opening gambit is to forge the human body (in multiple) as a plastic medium: it is sculpted material, both resistant to further change and unable to revert back to its prior state. These stone characters cannot immediately forget their materiality in favor of sophisticated human concerns. After animation, they are “strong and robust” but also “graceless, devoid of spirit, idiotic, and unintelligent” (forti, e robusti, ma senza grazia, senza spirito, insulsi, e privi d’intelligenza), not to mention as naked as decency permits. They become sociable through a series of distinct, characteristic “dances” performed as the pantomime’s narrative and its materials converge. Discipline comes first through Mars’s “martial movements, tactics, and military dances.” The stone race learns “humanity, tolerance, civility, and respect” from Apollo and the Muses. At the end, a statue representing Liberty emerges from the ground, bedecked with French and Italian banners, and the new race joins in yet more “noble dances” that denote “perfect democratic harmony.”6 One may wonder how democracy could be a referent for these noble dances, this antique dramaturgy. What is more, such schematic display seems terribly retrograde within a genre that had recently favored “speaking” bodily motions and through-composed, gestural music. In this sense, the closest cousin of Deucalione e Pirra might be those versions of Pygmalion by Sallé (1734) and Rameau (1748), which likewise acculturated their animated statues through series of dances and their appropriate music.7 When aesthetic stimuli are given to the task of molding perception—when they are conscripted toward self-formation and acculturation—the contrasting series of types is to be preferred. The elements within a sequence of march, minuet, gigue, and contredanse must be emblematic of the dances’ distinct types—like Condillac’s rose, carnation, jasmine, and violet—and not, in other words, hold undivided typicality in contempt, as we may usually be inclined to do. These dances must be discrete, perceived and then removed, if they are to facilitate smooth connections between the outer borders of the body and the mind—or, in other words, if they are to mold the stone race and the spectators who were analogous to it. The preface to Deucalione e Pirra described the ballet’s allegory in precisely cognitive terms: the French occupiers are credited with teaching every type of “thinking” (cognizione) and setting into motion a “regeneration formed in our ideas” (rigenerazione formata nelle nostre idee). But if its apparatus was old, the emphasis on mass socialization in Deucalione e Pirra was new. Angiolini’s final ballet was the first instance of this Napoleonic variant of Pygmalion, in which a demigod sculpted,

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animated, and civilized an entire population. Likewise, the pantomime Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (Vienna, 1801), by Salvatore Viganò, portrays the first humans as clay statues rendered civil by a display of the Muses’ arts, particularly those Muses who had a stake in pantomime as a genre: Terpsichore (dance), Euterpe (music), Thalia (comedy), and Melpomene (tragedy).8 As I noted in the introduction, Viganò’s first version of the pantomime is now remembered as the occasion for Beethoven’s only ballet score, which later lent a theme to the fourth movement of the composer’s “Eroica” symphony. Viganò revived the ballet at La Scala in 1813, expanding it to a full five acts; movements from Beethoven’s Prometheus music were integrated into a pastiche score so enjoyed by the Milanese that they reportedly wished to observe the ballet with their box-curtains closed. The libretto for the revival makes Condillac’s influence even more explicit: after Prometheus steals the “ethereal animating spark” from Zeus, there follows an extended scene in which the statues, Eone and Lino, compare the beautiful smells of a series of flowers. And lest the reference to Condillac, or the significance of this kind of aesthetic comparison, be overlooked, Viganò supplied a footnote here within his synopsis: “This is the source of human ideas: the comparison of objects” (Ecco la sorgente delle idee dell’uomo: il paragone degli oggetti). And after the sequence of flowers came, of course, the sequence of “dances.”9 The Venetian playwright Troilo Malipiero admired Viganò’s Prometheus so much that he adapted it almost wholesale into a spoken play in 1814. He also added a portentous subtitle, “The Prodigious Civilizing of Peoples” (La prodigiosa civilizzazione delle genti). Malipiero’s version changed one important detail. He got rid of the statues, showing instead what he thought the statues had stood for all along: uncultivated or rough humans. Like the ballets (and, of course, Condillac’s treatise), Malipiero’s Prometeo begins self-formation with the smelling of flowers. The first woman, Eone, plucks a rose and brings it to her nostrils. She then invites the others to join her. Looking on proudly, Minerva pronounces the exegesis that Viganò had to put in a footnote: “Sensation, perception, ideas, comparisons, attention, [and] knowledge are thus brought into harmony” (Sensazïon, Percezïon, Idee, / Confronti, attenzïon, conoscimento, / Si armonizzaron già). A later scene in Vulcan’s forge provides the ugly opposite to the free play of like objects in series: the Cyclops hammer relentlessly on their anvils in strict time. The resulting “noisy music” (musica romorosa) strongly recalls the relentless metallic clamor in Verri’s Le notti romane, which attested to

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Rome’s dissipate and malformed society, and foreshadows a similar clamor in a famous Rossinian opera that is discussed below. Malipiero explained in a preface that he changed the statues into savages because the transition from brutality to sophistication was “more interesting” than that from inert material to living flesh. What is more, he suggested, his version was more effective in educating its audiences, making for easier “connections between metaphysical truths and fixed moral and social principles.”10 However—and this is crucial—he did not forsake moving statues entirely: the play’s action is often interrupted by “tablò,” in which the performers pause their motions to delineate key moments. In other words, the conceit of animation is displaced from plot to medium; it remains visible to the audience, but the characters are seemingly unaware of their semiplastic natures. Each of these three dramas thus had storylines that converged (albeit obliquely in Malipiero’s case) on the very materials of their art forms. We might compare it to a white marble sculpture of a man holding a piece of white marble. The Prometheus dramas also supply a useful alternative to Dorinda Outram’s description of the ideal revolutionary body as “controlled, insulated, impermeable”: a notion recently put to musicological use when Daniel Chua argued for a similar impermeability of Beethovenian absolute music.11 The operative notion here is not “the autonomous body” but rather bodies, only semidifferentiated, plastic and rendered soft and compliant by the immortal beings who stand in for the political leader, who generously supplied aesthetic objects in instructive series.12 After the Napoleonic wars ended, few could take such pointed allegories seriously. Suddenly the endless Pigmalione adaptations were gone, along with Prometeo and the other variations on this theme. If the statuepeople had been symbols of the harmonious and malleable nation, then it is small wonder that their death knell should resound at one of Italian opera’s most famous moments of social chaos: the act 1 finale of Rossini’s comedy Il barbiere di Siviglia (Rome, 1816). Parodies of the moving statue had been around for a while by the time Il barbiere premiered (as attested by works like Marcello di Capua’s comic opera La statua per puntiglio, of 1792), but by 1816 the winds had changed. The francophilic nationalism that had fueled reformers such as Gasparo Angiolini was now dead; and then there was the popularity of the young Rossini, who had already decimated the careers of Giuseppe Farinelli and Ferdinando Paer and sent Simon Mayr into devout obsolescence and pedagogy. When we hear “Freddo ed immobile come una statua,” Il barbiere has accrued a convolution by increments. Count Almaviva has been

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posing as a drunken soldier in order to claim lodging at Don Bartolo’s house and pursue Bartolo’s ward, Rosina. Meanwhile, Bartolo (who wants to marry Rosina himself) seeks to have Almaviva thrown out. When an actual regiment arrives on the scene, the scheme almost fails. But the commanding officer suddenly learns of Almaviva’s noble status; he bows and retreats, to the astonishment of all but Figaro. At this point, both words and music take a strange turn; the concerns of the plot suddenly recede from view to make room for something altogether different. Rosina, Bartolo, the tutor Don Basilio, and a servant, Berta, petrify into a “tableau of stupor” (un quadro di stupore) that is, in effect, the end of the act. Motionless, they enter the ensemble successively to proclaim that their shock has turned them into stone: “Freddo ed immobile / come una statua / Fiato non restami / di respirar.” The music retreats toward simple materials: unadorned arpeggios and descending scales are played above a steady rotation of tonic and dominant. The melody unfolds in fits and starts, broken by the shallow breaths of paralyzed singers—not unlike the animation music in Beethoven’s Prometheus. Most obviously, the scene parodies the tendency of works like Malipiero’s Prometeo (as well as much serious opera) to conclude acts with attitudes, the diegesis freezing into a huge, life-sized “flesh-sculpture” en route to the final chords.13 Here, though, the characters narrate this process as they enact it. This lifting of what we might call opera’s second curtain actually begins in the preceding number: when what must surely be a love letter turns out to be a laundry list, Bartolo and then Berta claim to be di stucco (literally “of plaster”; or, colloquially, “dumbfounded”). What is more, this petrification occurs exactly alongside the naming of musical materials: Don Basilio starts to sing his part in solfège.14 In other words, Il barbiere’s strange turn makes its characters suddenly alert to the materials of their medium and thus transplants them into a Prometheus narrative that is hilarious because it runs backward. This estrangement continues into the Vivace movement, “Mi par d’esser con la testa,” which concludes the act. This music is unable to revive the characters despite tracing repeated crescendi from pianissimo to fortissimo, with thumping downbeats and ricocheting orchestration: it attempts an animation but fails point for point. Instead of the sweet harmony that sounds as Pygmalion’s statue comes to life, the statuecharacters hear a “barbarous” one (barbara armonia): rhythmic strikes on a bass drum and sistrum represent the sounds of “a very heavy hammer” (un pesantissimo martello). They beg ineffectually for quiet, and

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the racket grants each of them not a pristine adult mind with all its higher faculties but rather a “poor brain” that is “stunned and stupefied” (il cervello, poverello, / stordito, sbalordito). A brain such as this “does not reason” but instead “becomes confused and descends into madness” (non ragiona, si confonde, / si riduce ad impazzar). The curtain falls—and act 2 resumes with nary a hint of what has just occurred. Rossini and his librettists are seldom invited to ventriloquize on matters of metaphysics. Yet the questions we will consider now are the very ones cued by this bizarre, backward metamorphosis: Why do some bodies resist animacy—and what happens within them when they do? If quickening entails the alignment of the senses, then resistance may entail their divergence, fissure, or failure. This is the case in Il barbiere: as characters lose mobility, they begin to hear things from which they otherwise remain aloof and separate (there is no orrida fucina within view). Mimesis splinters into two estranged realms: one, the diegesis, is of the artwork; the other, perceptible to the ears alone, is of the medium and thus plot dystonic. And so, with conspicuous displays of metaconsciousness and irony, Italy’s animated statues exited stage left. Or did they? From here on, I will argue that the concerns that were germane to animation fables—the concerns that had kept statues moving on Italian music-theatrical stages for more than forty years—endured within narratives about the “inanimacy” of single sense-organs: in other words, within fictions of the blind, deaf, and mute. These states were understood to represent a latency—a receptiveness to animation, whether through enlivenment, artistic inspiration, or even surgical cures. In the following pages, we will shift our focus from opera and ballet to Italian medical writings on missing senses and then to a cluster of bourgeois dramas about blind sculptors, poets, and musicians. Both of these discursive genres sought to define the inner lives of people who lack a sense and to make these states of being available to the curious as an array of dense interior veils or stops to be manipulated for aesthetic enjoyment. Feigned blindness, deafness, and paralysis were thought to supply uncommon aesthetic experiences, and these states of deprivation stimulated affinities to those art forms that did not rely on total sensory union. There even emerged what we might call a rhetoric of the cleft work, a valuation of the partial experience of a work. When Milanese spectators reportedly wished to experience Viganò’s Prometeo with the curtains drawn across their boxes, they were indicating not an incipient desire for a concert hall experience but rather a readiness to experience fleeting blindness, to suspend their ability to see an object that others saw.15

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the plastic prosthetic How do humans perceive the world when a sense organ or two are lacking? During the Napoleonic years, Italian audiences delighted in the perceptual accidents of the blind, deaf, and mute—a matter in which they were (again) influenced by Condillac and Diderot. Condillac got particular praise for his insights regarding the primacy of touch from the renowned Padua physician Cristofano Sarti. Sarti’s L’ottica della natura e dell’educazione of 1792 transferred the insights of Condillac’s Traité from statuary to organic existence.16 His biological equivalent to Condillac’s animacy was a state of “maximum energy” (sommo grado di energia) that ensued when all five senses functioned in concert.17 In L’ottica, Sarti aimed to establish precisely how this energy was created and felt. He meditated at length on the excitement of sense collaborations: the way the ears direct the eyes to look for the source of a sound; the way the eyes read musical notation to create a song for the ears; the way scents determine taste. Yet even while asserting the mutual interreliance of the senses, Sarti suggested that one could learn about vision by assuming a posture of blindness. Just as Diderot had designed his account of the blind “for the usage of those who see” (as his title proclaimed) and Condillac had asked his readers to pretend they were statues, Sarti instructed that “one must take out one’s eyes and blind oneself” to understand vision.18 Were different kinds of percepts equivalent once they entered the mind, or did the senses each “think” in different ways? For Sarti (as for his contemporaries), this question was represented by the famous Molyneux problem: Would a blind man, given sight for the first time, be able to distinguish between a cube and a sphere that he had previously identified through touch alone? Although many earlier thinkers had answered with a qualified yes, Sarti forcefully demurred, asserting that the eye and the hand created different “primary ideas” (prime idee); there was, in other words, no sensorium commune of pure abstractions detached from specific sensed qualities.19 Like Condillac, Sarti believed that touch was the dominant sense, as it taught the mind to mediate percepts from the other senses.20 The Molyneux problem inspired the frontispiece for Sarti’s treatise (see figure 8), and the subtitle of the work promised finally to resolve it. But if there were no pure abstractions, there were what we might call low-grade or partial abstractions, created when phenomena were perceived via the “wrong” senses. When a sense was missing, another could

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figure 8. Frontispiece from Cristofano Sarti, L’Ottica della natura e dell’educazione indirizzata a risolvere il famoso problema di Molineux, opera del D. Cristofano Sarti, Pubblico Professore nell’Università di Pisa (Lucca: Bonsignori, 1792). Courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

function as a proxy; Sarti named a number of artificial eyes, that is, other organs which had been converted to supply optical information. Perhaps the most interesting of these are the “seeing nostrils” of Massimiliano, Count of Lamberg, which Sarti warned were acquired only through a painful and risky operation (50). The nonsurgical equivalents to Lamberg’s

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nostril eyes included the ear that “sees” a room on the basis of how sound travels within it and the forehead that “sees” the vistas before it through minute impressions of the air. Yet although such proxies were useful for the incurably blind, Sarti argued, the world they knew was different from the world: it was estranged by the different nature of its percepts. As the Abate Domenico Testa (Sarti’s successor at the University of Padua) had recently argued, tactile and visual shapes have “nothing in common” (100). Where the eye was comprehensive, touch was diachronic; as Condillac wrote, “Sight . . . embraces in a moment objects which touch only passes slowly over and never grasps as a whole!”21 This difference was inscribed in the most basic of concepts. For the sighted, a straight line meant this:

For the blind, a straight line was the memory of a finger drawn along a taut thread. The blind man had no understanding of permanence and was prone to believe that objects existed only when he touched them. His imagination was tactile; he had no “mind’s eye” but rather “mind’s hands,” conjuring every idea via imagined sensations in his fingertips. A blind nation, Diderot had written, would cultivate a particular enjoyment of sculpture, and the fantasy of animation would work more potently on them when conjured via the haptic brain.22 Not content with hypotheticals, Sarti supplied an example from history: the blind sculptor Giovanni Gonnelli had made “extremely beautiful statues from marble, which almost speak and are lifelike in all their parts,” not to mention his series of portraits in relief that captured the smallest lineaments of any face.23 The implications of this cognitive difference for aesthetic thought were significant. After all, the fine arts had traditionally been divided into timebound media, like music and poetry, and spatial media, such as painting and sculpture. If shape, too, could be perceived diachronically, as only the memory of sensation through time, could there not be a spatial or plastic mode of perceiving music itself? These ideas were soon taken up by others. Sarti’s treatise came at the beginning of a fad for blind characters within Italian theater; several of these came from the pen of a fellow Paduan, the playwright Camillo Federici. Federici’s Lo scultore ed il cieco was one of the most popular Italian comedies of the Napoleonic period, and (like Sarti’s L’ottica) it suggested that the blind had an affinity for three-dimensional art.24 In the play, Ferdinando, a scholar who has lost

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his vision only recently, designs a sculpture that represents the victory of truth over philosophy. Federici gambled (it would seem successfully) that his audience had a taste for the peculiar suffering of his blind hero. Ferdinando is weak of body and threadbare of raiment; he is introduced with an extended monologue in which he explores his surroundings manually: “He puts his hands in one pocket and then in another, and, not finding what he is shown to be seeking, goes on to pat this way and that on the table, bumping into the lamp, which falls over” (Mette le mani or nell’una, or nell’altra scarsella, e non trovando ciò che mostra di cercare, va palpitando qua e là sul tavolino, e urta colla mano nella lucerna, che cade).25 The sculpture he designs does not come to life; Ferdinando distains the sculture di carne (attitudes; literally, “flesh sculptures,” discussed further in chapter 5) then in fashion among philosophers. Eventually the work brings him attention and succor from the wise emperor, who is visiting the town in disguise. The politics of this drama are nothing if not complex. Ferdinando’s blindness discourages polite sociability—he is the outcast of a snobbish town—in favor of intense familial bonds. Ferdinando designs the sculptures, his brother supplies the sculpting hands, and his daughter cares for Ferdinando’s ailing body. The family is rewarded by the emperor, who has visited in disguise and is moved both by the sculpture and by the familial devotion. Likewise, the blind hero of Gaspare Spontini’s opéra-comique Milton (to a libretto by Étienne de Jouy and Armand-Michel Dieulafoy) is also supported by strong family bonds and a nobleman in disguise. Virtually forgotten now, Milton had a brief run in Paris in 1804 and was published shortly thereafter in a single volume presenting the opera in both French and Italian (the Italian translation was by Luigi Balocchi).26 In the opera, epic poetry is the only thing that can distract the central character, who is none other than John Milton, from the endless night of his blindness; yet a depressive exhaustion threatens to prevent him from finishing Paradise Lost. Milton went blind during adulthood and so had visual memories, which (in this imagining) could be activated by reminders from his other senses. His daughter Emma discovers that her father may be made “animated” and “enthusiastic” by a stimulation of his remaining senses. As Milton tells his daughter, “The loss of one sense makes the others more acute.” So Emma keeps her harp nearby and stocks the room with vases filled with bouquets because, as Milton’s scribe Arturo says, “You know how much he loves, upon entering this room, to encounter the odor of flowers at the same time as a sweet melody” (Sapete quanto grato gli sia ponendo il piede in questo

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gabinetto, di godere del profumo de’ fior, e al tempo stesso d’una soave melodia). The climactic scene of the opera is little short of Condillac’s animation transposed to seventeenth-century England: Milton is stimulated by “the freshness of a scented air, the song of the birds, the sweet warmth of the sun”; he shouts, “take your harp, my daughter, and sustain the animating fire that spreads within my breast.”27 In the ensuing quintet, he composes his description of the Garden of Eden. What emerges in these writings is nothing less than a new connection between sensory absence and artistic medium. Indeed, if there was such a thing as an Italian theory of media in this period, it was largely concerned with sense compensation rather than extension.28 Special attention was paid to the ways in which the sense deprived were able to communicate despite an alienation that was likely social as well as perceptual. The fine arts were then theorized backward to these primary states. The deaf and mute, for instance, were considered to have rare knowledge of a long-gone language of bodily gestures; muteness became central to theories of Italian narrative pantomime with formulae like “mute eloquence” and “speaking dance.” These ideas were reinforced in dramas about person-to-medium pairs, which were often advertised with paradoxical titles such as Il quadro parlante (the speaking painting); Il cieco che vede chiaro (the blind man who sees clearly); Il quadro parlante e la muta orfanella (the speaking painting and the mute orphan girl)—not to mention the cottage industry of satires, which included Il finto muto (the man who pretends to be mute) and Pulcinella cieco e muto (Pulcinella blind and mute). In shifting our focus from statues to the blind and mute characters of these plays, we move from a model of the human body as medium to a model that involves the fusion of the biological body with a medium that replaces one of its missing parts. Yet the narrative and social structures of the earlier model remain more or less intact. As mythical landscapes are replaced with urban ones, the family bond (co-biology) replaces the co-materiality of the statue population. Another prosthesis for the blind was instrumental music, and here we come to what is perhaps these texts’ most important intervention on the historiography of musical meaning. Federici’s second play about blindness, La cieca nata (the girl born blind, 1799), featured an amateur harpsichordist granted sight for the first time. The blind girl of the title, Adelinda Gray, lives under the care of her widowed mother and has accidentally fallen in love with a servant (her cataracts apparently also blinded her to class distinction). Many details of La cieca nata seem to

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have come directly from Sarti’s L’ottica. Like many of Sarti’s blind men, Adelinda has such sensitive hands that she can even detect colors in her fingertips—or rather, her hands recognize colors that she originally discovered from playing her harpsichord. She explains to her maid: “I compare the color black to the elafa of my harpsichord, which is a sad and lugubrious tone; white to the sweetness of an elami; violet to the rare sound of a bimmolle; and red to the magnificent and maestoso sound of lasolre.”29 Sarti had interviewed a blind organist, Luigi Secchioni, who similarly knew colors by analogy to notes on the keyboard: “If he had to compare red to a musical tone, he would suggest lasolre because it is the most energetic.”30 Such passages suggest a kind of synaesthesia avant la lettre, and they may have brought to the minds of Sarti’s readers and Federici’s spectators such instruments as Castel’s Ocular Harpsichord.31 Yet I am wary of eliding these two discourses entirely: synaesthesia suggests an abundance or even a promiscuity of equivalences, while the writers considered here were concerned with a lack of equivalences and the possibilities of perceiving by proxy. Another source for La cieca nata was certainly the late postscript to Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveugles, written in the early 1770s, which describes a young blind woman who played the harpsichord.32 Unlike Diderot’s original subjects, who were antisocial, atheist, and aesthetically moribund, the musician described in the postscript was docile and empathetic. Her sociability owed partly to a knack for commuting between modes of knowing: she could recognize noses from outlines drawn on her hand (Diderot observed, “My hand would become a sensitive mirror”), and she learned music from raised notation.33 These details prompted Diderot to wonder whether her “brain [had] become, as it were, a hand within which substances were realized.”34 The prominence of instrumental music in these texts is notable in itself. After all, the genre barely registered in Italian music-historiography and criticism of the period, which was overwhelmingly concerned with opera and pantomime and offered purely instrumental music only the theoretical dismissal represented by Fontenelle’s adage, “Sonate, que me veux-tu?” Sarti’s treatise is full of accounts of musicians; after all, the blind were often taught to play as a trade. Sarti considered being able to play an instrument with great facility to be one of the preternatural talents of the blind; it was not categorically different from the ability to read playing cards with the fingertips or leap across rooftops in the dead of night (which were other, perhaps more unlikely, talents that Sarti accorded to the blind). But for Federici’s Adelinda, the

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keyboard is a means of exploring what one of Sarti’s reviewers called “the boundaries of modern metaphysics,”35 that is, the matter of whether the hands and ears together might generate visual knowledge— might conjure, between them, inner eyes. Adelinda claimed to have her “eyes at the ends of her fingers” (Non lo sai ch’io ho i miei occhi sulla punta delle dita?).36 Like Ferdinando in Lo scultore ed il cieco, she is often given manual monologues, in which she simply feels her way around the stage, recognizing objects by touching them with her hands. Indeed, she has such a strong tendency to connect musical sounds to the physical properties of shape and color that when given sight, Adelinda is surprised not to be able to see physical objects issuing from her harpsichord as she plays: “Now I see my harpsichord: but the sound I cannot see. . . . How is this? Sound is not a body?” (Ora veggo il gravicembalo; ma il suono io non lo veggo. . . . Come? Il suono non è un corpo?).37 Federici’s La cieca nata imported the narrative of plastic metamorphosis to a deficient organ; in this sense it may be understood as something of a midpoint between Rousseau’s Pygmalion and that of Shaw. Adelinda is held to be “imperfect” only by virtue of her “inanimate” eyes: her mother suggests that “to perfect her, there lacks only a ray of light that shines on those eyes and animates her beauty” (per renderla perfetta non le manca che un raggio di luce che brilli su quegli occhi e ne anima la bellezza).38 And an animation scene we get: the removal of Adelinda’s bandages in act 2 provokes in the girl first immobility and then wave after wave of uncontrollable energy, leading eventually to a full refashioning of self. As she learns gradually to add color and light to the objects she knew only through touch and sound, Adelinda repeatedly exclaims the pronoun, io—that famous first word of both Condillac’s statue and Rousseau’s Galatea: “A secret fire lights my veins . . . I . . .” (Un segreto fuoco accende le mie vene [ . . . ] io . . .); “I . . . I am no longer me” (Io . . . non son più io); “I am desperate, impatient . . . I . . .” (Io sono smaniosa, impaziente . . . io . . .).39 What is more, Federici borrows for his medical-social parable not only Galatea but the other characters from the Ovidian story as well: if Adelinda is the animated statue, the erudite cataract surgeon Dr. Grant is her Pygmalion, while the benevolent Princess of Wales, who secretly funds the operation, is the invisible Venus. For both Federici’s and Diderot’s young blind women, blindness granted a special access to the meanings of textless music, a medium that had usually ranked dead last within the nascent discipline of eight-

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eenth-century aesthetics. Even in the projects of dramatic reform examined earlier in this book, which offered new expressive means to musical sound, music functioned adjunctly but not independently, supplying half-signifiers at most; the ear conjured only a stream of partial meanings without the eye, or language, to assist it. But the blind, for whom no auditory recognition could ever be confirmed or completed by sight, found such musical universes to be eminently navigable (like, again, those nighttime rooftops). It might be tempting to superimpose the two main types of blindness onto a distinction within instrumental music that became vitally important during this period. There was, on the one hand, what came to be called “program music”: pieces that were meant to conjure imaginary scenes from visual memories of real ones.40 This might correspond to the supposed musical experience of a person who became blind midlife. Emma’s prelude, for instance, allows Milton to sustain the “sweet images that I must now express” (soavi immagini ch’or voglio esprimer).41 On the other hand, purely instrumental pieces without explicit referents, which came to be known as “absolute,” could be understood by individuals who were sightless from birth.42 Although even Diderot himself had repeated Fontenelle’s question, “Sonate, que me veux-tu?” he put this claim into the mouth of his blind girl: “I can understand the music without the words sung.”43 Indeed, even E. T. A Hoffmann’s famous panegyric to absolute music described, under the heading of the infinite, the visionary experience of near-total blindness. In listening to Beethoven’s music, Hoffmann wrote, “We become aware of giant shadows swaying back and forth, moving ever closer around us.”44 Yet the history examined here might more productively suggest modes of musical listening outside these categories altogether: ones that emphasize tactility and a less fixed relation between musical representation and its abstracts. In this, we may follow Adelinda, who imagined that her harpsichord actually sent shapes and colors into the world, much like our three-dimensional printers; such profound misconceptions served to remind audiences that entirely sightless humans were thought to be blind also to the permanence of matter.

a statue limited to the senses of hearing and touch The writings we have considered so far in this chapter have allowed us to identify a historical constellation of ideas within Italian aesthetic

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thought during the Napoleonic years. Let us summarize it briefly in order to leave it behind. Missing-sense narratives extended the model of the animated statue to biological existence in a variety of ways: in the fantasy of the animation cure; in parables about sense-based sociability; and in the fusions of a missing sense with a sympathetic or compensatory art form. One such pair was conceived between blindness and textless music. Instrumental skill was perceived to be one of the adaptations of the blind, the result of a combination of acute hearing and heightened haptic awareness. Both the world experienced without vision and the medium of instrumental music were incomplete, pervaded with endless points of nonrecognition; it was believed that a blind man could navigate the unrecognizable signifiers of instrumental music with the same ease that he might walk the edge of a rooftop in the dark. This medium was thought to also enable the formation of social bonds around bodies that might otherwise resist them. Thus the Nuovo giornale dei letterati asserted in 1804 that a blind man, finding himself deprived of the sight of nature, and thus isolated and withdrawn, ought to devote himself to instrumental music; in this fashion he could be put in “pleasant contact” with others and become “happily natured, animated, and content.”45 These ideas point forward to the prominent role of instrumental music within the many Italian institutes for the blind that were founded later in the century, several of which maintained professional orchestras that toured foreign capitals. By 1845, a correspondent for the Giornale euganeo di scienze, lettere ed arti boasted of having observed, on the stage of Milan’s foremost opera house, the “moving spectacle” of “several instrumental pieces” played by the blind boys from the local orphanage.46 But to conclude, let us invent our own array of inner stops and block an avenue or two of our own perception. How might one hear music with a blind, tactile imagination? To listen with a hand in the mind is to wonder what objects might be disguised underneath musical contours. As we noted, there is a diachronic nature to tactile perception (as opposed to vision) that maps readily onto music. For instance, while the eye can see a hair comb in its entirety in an indivisible instant and the mind can recognize the comb in the same instant, the hand discovers the comb only by accident, when the comb is at arm’s length. It must then measure, weigh, and run a finger along the tines to ascertain that they are multiple, equally thin, and pointed. The musical analog of the comb’s straight spine can be rendered as a long, sustained note, while a finger run along the tines might sound like a series of quick staccati.

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example 8. Beethoven, String Quartet No. 12, op. 127, no. 2: Adagio non troppo e molto cantabile, measures 1–2.


    

  



 
    





     





   





   








 
  

   












 

  
         



There is a long-standing analogy between musical shapes and object shapes, music gestures and physical movement: a musical “up” is a spatial “up,” and a musical “down” is a spatial “down,” and musical repetition signifies more movement of the same kind. This was ever the gambit of word painting, and the late eighteenth-century genres of melodrama and narrative pantomime ballet assumed it to be true. Such an analogy inspired a recent auditory-visual substitution device called the vOICe (wherein the capital letters signify “Oh, I see!”), which converts scenes into pitch for the use of the blind. Though greeted with general skepticism, it has garnered a “small community of enthusiastic users.”47 What if we pretend that this had always been the function of music—that scores of string quartets and symphonies are early “image-to-sound maps” for a vOICe prototype that did not yet exist? To hear music with a tactile mind can be to hear the familiar anew. It allows us perhaps to hear example 8 as a gradual sliding of the hand around a solid, heavy object—a slow grasping and holding. In example 9, is it possible to hear one hand touching a round shape and the other feeling a shape with corners? The surprise drop in elevation of a path may be heard in example 10. Listening in tactile fashion means to search not for the imperceptible divine but rather the half-perceived mundane. Yet to impose object identification on the musical experience runs counter to the ideal of semirecognition that absolute blindness and absolute music could be thought to share. More productive is to keep the tactile imagination

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example 9. Beethoven, String Quartet No. 12, op. 127, no. 2: Adagio non troppo e molto cantabile, measures 12–13.








 






       

 
                    





  






 
 

                  




 

 


       











example 10. Beethoven, String Quartet No. 12, op. 27, no. 2: Adagio non troppo e molto cantabile, measures 80–81.










   


             

    








 
       

 





   


 

  
         

 





active as a possibility for listening—and, simultaneously, to suspend those comprehensive visual modes of knowing as music crosses the perceptual threshold. Pretending blindness, we abjure the comprehensive “vision” of structure that is inevitably conceived through a study of the score and even (like Adelinda) assume an ignorance of preexisting hierarchies. This history has focused on Italian writers, and French thought filtered through them, but their ideas should not be circumscribed as the mundane or corporeal antithesis to German idealism. Many of the best-

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known writings of the nineteenth century are shot through with an imagery of plasticity, animation, and sense proxies that has not yet been adequately brought to light. Kierkegaard’s speculative ear, which he conjures to “hear things together” in opera rather than spread out over time, may be considered a cousin of Lamberg’s seeing nostrils.48 Wagner liked to imagine Beethoven as blind rather than deaf, his eyes having petrified into a “fixed stare” by the time of his maturity. What is more, in Wagner’s ideal, listening to instrumental music temporarily paralyzed the listener’s eyes, blinding her to what he called the “highly trivial aspect of the audience itself, the mechanical movements of the band, the whole peculiar working apparatus of an orchestral production.”49 Few remember that this preeminent maker of the “total work of art” showed an interest in the cleft or partial work as well. Wagner published and even performed purely instrumental versions of his operas, with all the voices left out, as a means of testing the Gesamtkunstwerk’s individual strands. (Would scenes of Klingsor’s magic palace play out behind the eyelids, prompted merely by their musical analogs?) Then there is the inner tactility implied by Adorno’s notion of Formgefühl: a “form feeling,” or a “feeling of form,” that supersedes the auditory imagination as one composes. These stalwarts of nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury aesthetic autonomy can be considered afresh if we understand them in the light of earlier discourses of compensatory sensing and the illusory organs and avenues of perception they conjure as the descendants of those forehead canvases and fingertip eyes excavated here. Although these ideas have suffered in later histories of aesthetic thought, their influence has endured in unexpected quarters. The field of plasticity studies is devoted in part to examining the neurological effects of sense deprivation, and what is called “cross-modal perception”: the ways in which the human mind is remade and reshaped when an avenue of its perception is inactive. Much neurology construes the brain in terms of that most modern ideal, the computer—wherein thinking becomes “processing” or “computation,” the activity of neural “circuits” and “modules.” It is an analogy that has much in common with the rationalist notion of a priori cognition.50 But the language of sensory loss and substitution derives from the very model that we have been considering in this chapter. The field of plasticity studies considers the brain as animate material that is molded by its own percepts; in other words, it considers how different routes of perception create different brains. Recent research within this field suggests that the occipital cortex (that region of the brain usually devoted to thinking about vision)

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of blind individuals is appropriated by the ears and hands. A subfield of plasticity studies is devoted to searching for sensory prosthesis and substitution. Researchers at the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine have recently given us another substitution device, the Brainport, which converts visual imagery so that it can be perceived by the tongue. And in January 2013, plasticity researchers at Tufts University heralded a breakthrough when a tadpole was able to “see” through eyes surgically implanted on its hind end.51 Yet on the Molyneux question, neurobiologists are inclined to conclude, as Sarti did, that a blind man given sight would not be able to quickly recognize a cube and a sphere; in isolation, the hands “know” a different world with a different brain.52 Even a very brief disturbance of vision—such as letting the eyelids flutter down while listening to music—can provoke the brain to assume attributes of blindness. This notion may bring to mind that common injunction of music teachers to their students to close their eyes while playing. It is not coincidental that neurobiological findings are cited by music pedagogues, who, Prometheus-like, teach refinement of the ears, dances of the hands, and docile comportment.53 By these means, the instrumentalist gains what is still one of sociability’s finest prosthetics, and those analogies invented by teacher and student to give shape to performance continue to practice an unlauded, practical metaphysics of the mediated ordinary. Ultimately, then, the prosthetic relation within aesthesis—like all prosthetic relations—grants new affordances to both object and human. In this case, “the music itself” gains access to materiality, while the musician or listener experiences a new wholeness through sensory transformation. From this vantage point, the question to ask of instrumental music is not “What mythological being gazes back at me from this animated object?” but rather “What plastic and semianimate being am I to feel akin to it?”

chapter 5

Giuditta Pasta and the History of Musical Electrification

The electric shock is unlike any other experience. This was known even before anyone knew what electricity was. One usually observes her surroundings by means of her senses and nerves, but electric current forbids this kind of mediation, breaching the exteroceptive layer and trespassing within, stiffening and heating tissues in its wake. As long as an individual is part of an external circuit, she is a thing possessed: her brain loses control of muscles and nerves; her breathing and the rhythms of her heart can be disrupted. Of course, few now have visceral experience of such matters, even though modern life takes place, for all intents and purposes, within an electric bubble; current is ever-present but latent, hidden behind walls, below ground, and overhead. Visceral electrification is the domain of quaint metaphors within musical discourse— that is, we might describe a performance as “electrifying” or its effects as administering electric shocks, but perhaps for no better reason than that this is a ready-made language of superlative. My project in this chapter is to describe the history of this language and examine its indebtedness both to the incautious and utterly sociable modes of experiment pursued by electrical science in the years around 1800 and to early notions of a pseudomedical sympathy between electricity and music. To begin, we may note that such imagery was entirely absent from music criticism before then. For instance, Charles Burney opened his first travelogue of 1770 by comparing music and electricity, but merely to note that both “universal” sources of amusement were little 133

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understood and had “never yet, with much certainty, been applied . . . to any useful purpose.”1 By the 1820s, such language was ubiquitous in accounts of female opera stars, particularly the most famous soprano of the day, Giuditta Pasta. Given that electricity in the atmosphere could be perceptible to eyes and ears, metaphors of musical electrification were useful in accounting for both the sights and the sounds of Pasta on stage. What is more, this imagery also posited visceral modes of musical performance and its reception, drawing singer and spectator into analogies of circuitry and invasion. Thus the history of this language may shed light on that evanescent object, the operatic performance before the age of mechanical reproduction—and, moreover, on the imperfect equivalences of performance, mimesis, and animation on opera stages in the age of Bellini. Burney’s London did in fact contain a performer who could be understood as an ancestor of the electrifying Pasta. She performed not in an opera house but in a house of medicine, the notorious Temple of Health, which opened in 1780 under the direction of Dr. James Graham. The Temple was a fertility clinic, where wealthy couples sought to conceive offspring inside a vast machine called the “celestial bed.”2 Graham taught that humans were electrically charged. Men carried a positive charge, and women a negative, and conception involved the discharge of electricity: “The venereal act itself, at all times, and under every circumstance, is in fact, no other than an electrical operation.”3 His treatments used electric shocks and magnetic attraction to encourage the “balmy fire of life” to pass from “the plus male into the minus female.”4 The doctor supplied stimuli for each of the individual senses: beams of light flashed through the Celestial Bed, odors wafted, and a large mechanical organ decorated with automata playing musical instruments sounded “stimulating” airs.5 The musical component was designed by the automaton-builder Thomas Denton.6 Graham maintained that music and electricity were both “materia medica”—that is, sympathetic animatory forces; both were, in his words, “great primary-elementary vital principles, which are the universal Pabulum, or vivifying soul of the universe.”7 Put simply, in Graham’s Temple music and electricity did the same work; this is demonstrated in figure 9 by the musical mortar that runs parallel to Graham’s Prime Conductor (the “Largest in the World”).8 The sources of this “celestial music” were hidden throughout the Temple. Couples were encouraged to time their movements precisely to the rhythms of the mechanical organ as they prepared the electric event (regrettably, this

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figure 9. The Quacks (London, 1783). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

music is now lost). This concealment of the musical and other animatory apparatuses made the Temple into a phantasmagoria—its real agents obscured by a mythic force, its visitors suspended in anticipation of their “electric” metamorphosis. One consequence of this mythology was a corporeal indeterminacy peculiar to women, wherein the “minus female” body was able to take on the qualities of a medium. While Graham ran the Temple in modern garb under his own name, his female assistants wore Grecian robes and took on the names and identities of characters from classical myth. One of their principal tasks was to illustrate the poses described in the doctor’s sexology lectures, their frozen bodies evoking the pornographic frescos recently discovered at Pompeii, giving Graham’s lectures the character of an explicit live book. The only musician in the Temple that could be both seen and heard was a young woman—that ancestor to Giuditta Pasta alluded to above—who performed under the pseudonym of Hebe Vestina. The Vestina sang at the beginning of the lecture, inviting electricity to the proceedings. An offstage “medical band”—made up of organ, flute, glass harmonica, and harpsichord—accompanied the singing. Her disjointed incantation is addressed to the “fire electric,”

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which was given partial embodiment by means of a single, rigid upper limb: Hail! Vital Air—Aethereal!—Magnetic Magic—Hail! Thine Iron Arm—thy bracing sinewy Arm! is everlasting Strength! Hail! Harmony!—Music Divine!!! thrice Hail!—Thy Soul is Love—Joy—Peace—and Health! And thou, celestial fire!—Thou, FIRE ELECTRIC!—GREAT RENOVATOR!— THE LIFE OF ALL THINGS! Hail!9

Electrification quite literally followed this performance, as spectators were given shocks through the seats of their chairs. According to Graham’s elaborate fictions, the Vestina was able to bring electricity into the Temple because she could channel it through her own body: as a woman, she carried a negative charge and thus could be something like a conductor or lightning rod for the electricity within the atmosphere. Her incantation had, of course, no scientific purpose; the few elements within Graham’s Temple that relied on current were powered by Leyden jars. Rather, it did a different kind of work, fusing the female singing voice and statuary body with a fictive electric flow. Graham’s clinic attests both to electricity’s newfound scientific preeminence and to its early mutability as cultural signifier. Thanks in large part to the experiments of Graham’s erstwhile teacher, Benjamin Franklin, electricity was now understood to be all around, operating on a massive scale; the lightning bolt was recognized as the sudden, unpredictable sight of electricity, and thunder as its sublime and ever-changing sound.10 Through the Leyden jar, the electric fire was newly available for the laboratory and the medical clinic—and even the drawing room, with the electric tableaux magiques, or “magic pictures,” whose images literally shocked any spectator who could be persuaded to touch them. This parlor trick—which one account praised as being “better calculated to give surprise than any other experiment in electricity”— created a single electric discharge from a pane of glass that was gilded with a circuit and pasted over with an image.11 One popular variation used a portrait of the king, supposedly to test the loyalty of its spectators.12 The unsuspecting viewer was persuaded to hold the frame at a particular end, and then his attempt to touch the king’s crown would result in a sudden jolt through his arm. Such accounts attest to a pleasure of the instrumentalized politic, wherein the technologies of the energized or animated toy are elided with social forces and mechanisms. In this sense, the punishment the electrified crown meted out to the republican foreshadows an anonymous account of John Ayrton Paris’s Thau-

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matrope in the London Mechanics’ Register. This invention creates the illusion of a unified image by rapidly spinning a card with pictures on both sides. A famous version of the toy placed a regular man on one side and a crown and regalia on the other; when the card was spun, the regular man would appear to be wearing the apparel of a king.13 Thus the Mechanics’ Register’s account cited the epigram “NAPOLEON like, I undertake, of nobody a king to make” and warned playfully of the toy’s latent “revolutionary” principles. These projects were part of a broader concern with the question of what separates the animated body from the inert or materially made one, or the still image from the representation that moves. The category of animation was, I have argued here, centrally important to fine arts discourse in the decades around 1800; as we have seen in previous chapters, this category was defined by a continuous exchange between theory, music-theatrical fictions, and electrical and anatomical science. One of the aims of this chapter is to show that its ideas did not simply migrate from what are sometimes called hard disciplines to soft ones, from science to the aesthetic and analogistic, or from written text to performance, as we may be tempted to suppose. For instance, George Hersey suggested that it was electricity that gave life to the statues in Condillac’s Traité des sensations and Rousseau’s Pygmalion, but these works preceded the science that might have underpinned them.14 And as we have seen in chapters 1 and 2, both of these works of philosophical parentage had less illustrious ancestors in theatrical and itinerant performance genres. Dr. Graham certainly recalled the animation of a statue within Condillac’s Traité when he sought to create electrified life through layers of sensory stimuli; and the performances in his medical clinic drew on the fashion for animated statues and magic pictures within pantomime dance and opera. As in Graham’s Temple of Health, such works featured the performer’s body—usually female—in the act of becoming: a medium-shifter on the cusp of consciousness, speaking in fragments or not at all. The index of the animated woman was the first-person accusative pronoun: the first word of Rousseau’s Galatea, like Condillac’s statue, was moi (me);15 in Italian adaptations, she said io (I); and in German versions of Pygmalion, her first word was always Ich (I).16 This utterance, a sign of her shift from representation to original, from stone to flesh, was preserved across translations and adaptations. As noted in chapter 2, the choreographer Domenico LeFevre boasted that his Pygmalion (Naples, 1785) “translated” Galatea’s moi and n’est plus moi into the gestural language of pantomime: at that

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moment in his synopsis, he wrote, “Here I imitated J. J. Rousseau, as I did whenever Galatea repeats this word positively or negatively. This expression is so simple, so natural, and depicts Galatea’s situation with such truth that I believe the effect it creates to be infallible, whether rendered in words or in gestures.”17 To conceive of the self in terms of its animation was to acknowledge a latent material stillness, which was receptive to external quickening agency. This was why the women in the Temple of Health were cast as Galateas. Quack scientists like Graham were the first to embrace the quickening power of the electric jolt, but more serious scientists followed—at least for a time. In 1790 the physicist Luigi Galvani announced that living bodies were powered by a fluid that he dubbed “animal electricity.”18 According to his formulation, the nerves transmitted electrical stimuli to the brain, and the brain contracted the muscles by sending electric shocks through the nerves. When this fluid ceased to circulate, the body died. More important for our study, though, is the fact that unlike other supposedly vivifying forces—like the earlier “animal spirits”—electricity was not unique to living bodies; it existed both within and outside them. Outside sources could influence the current within a living body and thus its movement. A regular current of animal electricity within living bodies occasioned smooth, natural motion, but a current originating outside the body would produce movement that was sudden, localized, and rudimentary: a limb that was touched with a live wire would be raised as the muscles stiffened and then lowered when the charge was removed. Galvani wrote of one experiment with severed frogs’ legs: “At the very moment the foot touched a [charged] surface, all the leg muscles contracted, lifting the leg; immediately after, though, the foot fell back onto the surface then rose again; the phenomenon persisted for some time, with the leg alternately dropping to the surface and rising again as if ‘hopping.’ ”19 A continuous external current would cause a body to freeze in an extended position. This discovery received immediate fame. Animal electricity became “a fashionable matter,” and the animation of frogs’ legs was reportedly “repeated in ladies salons” in Milan, “furnish[ing] a good spectacle to all.”20 Northern Italy became the international center of electrical medicine, and the practitioners of this science were among the most famous Italians in Europe during the 1790s and early 1800s. Galvani’s nephew Giovanni Aldini toured with the family discoveries, conducting a series of demonstrations in Europe’s capitals that used current to set animal parts and decapitated criminals to motion (see figure 10).21 As these demonstrations made clear, electric

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figure 10. Plate 4, showing a demonstration of animal electricity in Paris ca. 1800, from Giovanni Aldini, Essai théorique et expérimentale sur le Galvanisme (Paris, 1804). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

animation had a distinctive set of indices: it was jerky, impermanent, and timed to external rhythms. While Galvani’s nephew was setting inert bodies in motion in London and Paris, an emissary from Graham’s electric clinic was entertaining Naples and its tourists with another new kind of performance, that of the moving statue, also known as the tableau vivant. This genre existed outside of traditional theater spaces and storylines. Like the Temple of Health and Aldini’s public electrifications, the tableau vivant invited its spectators to consider animation and alternate kinds of embodiment that were achieved by means of segmented motion and sudden rigor. The genre was pioneered by none other than the Temple of Health’s first Hebe Vestina, Emma Lyons, who had come to Naples to live under the protection of the British ambassador and amateur archaeologist Sir William Hamilton, whom she married. Her attitudes have been described as inhabiting “the borderline between pictorial art and theater.”22 Dressed in Grecian robes, just as she had been at the Temple, Emma—at that point known by her married name, Hamilton—performed series of poses within a large black box surrounded by a gilt frame. Within this

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frame, she became what her contemporaries called “a gallery of statues” of Medea, Niobe, Isis, Cassandra, Cleopatra, and so on. She summoned these ancient women not by acting out their stories but by stiffening her body into frozen versions of theirs—by becoming, in other words, their statues.23 She continued to perform her living statues throughout the 1790s, to great acclaim. Some of the first imitators of this transmedial art could be found within another mute performance genre, theatrical ballet. One can trace a direct lineage from Emma Hamilton to Giuditta Pasta through two prima ballerinas for the Viganò company who imitated her attitudes: Maria Medina and her successor, Antonietta Pallerini, one of Pasta’s teachers.24 Pantomime ballet was a narrative genre, while Emma Hamilton’s evocation of a collection of statuary was nonnarrative, evoking instead iconic moments from a variety of familiar classical tales. But to conceive of Hamilton’s attitudes in terms of diegesis is surely beside the point. Rather, they were the quasi-archaeological revelation of statue-interlopers in a living host.25 While Sir William oversaw the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii, he accumulated a very nice secret collection of the best vases and statues, and it was through a direct confrontation with these artifacts that Emma Hamilton developed her iconic poses.26 But Pompeii did not merely contain artifacts; because the city had been buried almost instantaneously in ash, the people themselves were found, caught in the act of flight and—if one ecstatic account is to be believed— with even the pinkness of the skin preserved.27 Such discoveries gave rise to a conviction that Vesuvius was, as Sir William put it, nature’s “great channel”: a site of cosmic rupture, a breach in time.28 The volcano’s powers were marked by what has been called the natural sublime: eruptions, earthquakes, and—most importantly—constant jolts of atmospheric electricity. One observer of the cloud above Vesuvius suggested that it was much like the “sparkling magic picture exhibited in electrical experiments,” except that this magic picture was “several miles in extend.”29 While the magic picture of the parlor game had to be touched to produce its effects, Vesuvius could occasion involuntary contractions through mere proximity. Skin was a fragile and eminently permeable boundary between the animal current and an atmospheric one. Sir William studied the electric storms above Vesuvius during its active periods and asserted that shocks could travel suddenly from the volcano into the feet of those who dared to walk nearby. He also gathered accounts of stiffened bodies around Vesuvius that seemed suddenly to have undergone electric shock although no lightning bolt had been

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seen.30 In other words, Sir William believed that a powerful atmospheric disturbance could override the spontaneous kinetic agency of living matter; Galvani agreed with him on this point. The Italian scientist discovered that the symptoms of electrification would also occur during a storm, even without conductors attached; all that was required was a sudden discharge of atmospheric electricity—a lightning bolt. His frogs’ limbs would suddenly contract when lightning struck, as many times as it struck, and in its precise rhythm. Indeed, the contractions of the frogs’ legs could fill the same function as lightning, providing a visual index of electric discharge. Galvani wrote: “As often as the lightning broke out, at the same moment of time all the muscles fell into violent and multiple contractions, so that, just as the splendor and flash of the lightning are want, so the muscular motions and contractions of those animals preceded the thunders, and, as it were, warned of them.”31 Rhythmic musical events, if administered with care, could provide the same immediate “electric shock” to the limbs. In 1816 the Bolognese doctor Angelo Colò suggested that mineral magnetism, electricity, galvanism, and mesmerism were “but modifications of a single, universal fluid . . . which, traveling through the nerves of animals, renders them animate [sensibili].”32 He believed that this fluid obeyed the laws of science; in general it was controlled by the brain, but it could be modified by outside forces, including music, acting at a distance. Because the nervous system and the brain were understood to function in opposition to one another, outside sources of current simultaneously vivified the nerves and limbs and deactivated the brain. Colò’s treatise, entitled Prodromo sull’azione salutare del magnetismo animale e della musica, tells the “strange and singular” story of one Signora Cavazzani, a vulgar, badtempered young woman who suffered from terrifying nightly seizures. These seizures seemed to isolate and segment her body parts, subjecting them to involuntary rhythmic motion. First, she experienced spasmodic contractions of the diaphragm; then, a brief tremor in one big toe, which ceased after a few seconds and then moved to the other big toe; next, in rhythm, a tremor of each entire foot; following that, at regular intervals, spasms of the legs up to the knee; and so on.33 The animated body is ever segmentable; Cavazzani’s self-governing limbs recall the severed heads and frogs’ legs of Galvani and Aldini—as well as the floating hands that manipulate them—and point forward to fictions of anarchic electrified limbs and technologies of the cel within the medium of animation.34 All the standard remedies failed to cure Cavazzani. But because her symptoms were attributed to an innate electrical imbalance—and

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because the spasms occurred in units of precisely segmented time—there was some hope that they could be cured by music.35 The doctor described in Colò’s Prodromo grouped together as many dilettante musicians as he could find. Under his musical direction, the medical orchestra was able to circumvent the electric rhythms of the seizure and limit motion to the limb of the doctor’s choice. Colò observed, “It was beautiful to see that playing at the onset of the diaphragm contractions, we could observe a flash, an electric shock, through the [patient’s] entire body, thus soothing the contractions.  .  .  . The tightening [of the diaphragm] continued to occur, but the music cured it with a flash, an electric shock.”36 As is clear from Colò’s account, by 1816 the electric shock had entered the lexicon of spectatorship. This early imagery of electrification gathered a set of familiar indices into a loose bundle. For instance, in 1820 the English travel writer Henry Matthews said that the French tragic actor François-Joseph Talma “deals in electric shocks, which come flashing through the sublimity of the storm.”37 Spectators’ accounts attest to what we might call “electric” acting, in which sudden gesture served as a visual index for lightning, and the voice as its thunder-like sound. This manifested itself as jerky motion followed by paralysis and as a voice that was changeful, hypnotic, and liquescent. Talma himself counseled his fellow actors to evoke electric shock first with their own muscles and then with their voices: “The gesture, the attitude, the look ought to precede the words, as the flash of lightning precedes the thunder.”38 Indeed, the lightning storm, with its coordination of flashes and rumbles, became so central to the Talma legend that an odd story circulated shortly after his death: “Just when a storm of thunder or lightning burst forth, [Talma] went over to a piano-forte . . . and, looking up into the heaven as the thunder crashed, struck up an extempore and blasphemous song, roaring out with every flash of lightning, as a chorus, ‘Flash, you b[astar]d, flash!’ ”39 In this model, the electric or “thunderous” voice was capable of sudden bursts of volume, but like thunder itself, it also needed a vast palette of tones and colors, a fact that made it perhaps even better suited to opera than spoken theater. Such a loud, changeable voice—and such a freezeframe style of performance—belonged to the attrice-cantante Giuditta Pasta, certainly one of the foremost performers in Europe during the 1820s and early 1830s. The imagery of electrification appears with astonishing consistency in spectator accounts of Pasta from London to Paris to Milan—a testament to the diffusion of electrical science and its indices across European capitals. Perhaps the best known and most detailed of

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these accounts may be found in Stendhal’s accounts of Pasta in Life of Rossini and Souvenirs d’égotisme. Stendhal evoked electric shock as a conspicuous substitute for qualitative description. Pasta’s voice was, he suggested, “as fascinating to the listener’s ear as it [was] electrifying to his soul,” yet it was so vast and changeable as to defy verbal representation. Also “electrifying to the entire theatre” was what he called the “scorching energy” of Pasta’s acting.40 This type of shock—which Stendhal attributed especially to the low notes of her register—was sudden, “immediate,” and “hypnotic,” acting by means of “some still unexplained combination of physical phenomena.”41 But if its effects were visceral, they were also collective, linking spectator to spectator in a large, circuit-like audience, traveling nearly instantaneously from each viscus to the ones next to it. Martin Archer Shee’s novel Harry Calverley contains an extended scene in which spectators watch Pasta perform the title role in Rossini’s Semiramide: “Survey the house,” the narrator invites, to observe “the electric impulse spread around,” overcoming the ennui of fashion to culminate in a “rapturous burst of momentary enthusiasm.”42 Not isolable to voice or movement, this “extraordinary force” relied on the total effect of the performance and needed to be both heard and seen—or, more precisely, seen and then heard. Stendhal sought to provide a more precise account of Pasta’s acting in Souvenirs d’égotisme, only to wind up enumerating isolated sensing organs and time intervals and puzzling over an inventory of parts that did not quite add up: “The ear completes the emotion begun through the eyes, and Mme Pasta remained a long time, for instance two or three seconds, in the same position.”43 Of course, Stendhal rarely met a failure of representation that he did not like. But the details he provided—namely, that Pasta had a predilection for sudden, large motions or poses that were struck “in time” with musical events and sustained by momentary muscle rigor as the song continued—are amply confirmed by other accounts. These movements were often neither in the lexicon of classic rhetorical gestures nor readily explicable in their meanings. The remainder of this chapter will focus on one iconic moment of Pasta’s “electrifying” acting. Music critic Carlo Ritorni capped a list of the most important moments in opera with what he called the “io prepotente della Pasta Medea”: the all-powerful io (I) of Giuditta Pasta as she sang the title role in Simon Mayr’s 1813 opera Medea in Corinto, which she revived in London and Paris in 1823.44 The performance quickly became legendary—in her own lifetime, Pasta was better known for Medea than for roles like Bellini’s Norma and Sonnambula and Donizetti’s Anna

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Example 11. Pasta’s “io,” from Mayr, Medea in Corinto (Naples, 1813, lib. Felice Romani), act 1, scene 9, as excerpted in the Quarterly Musical Magazine 8 (1826), 366.




                        

 
        

     

    
  

Bolena, which were actually written for her. Many reviewers compared Pasta’s Medea favorably to roles played by the Shakespearean actors Garrick and Kean and to Talma’s Cinna and Nero.45 These comparisons may seem complimentary until one recalls that the executed murderer Clydesdale, whose body was electrified before a queasy audience of “scientific gentlemen,” was made to express “rage, horror, despair, anguish, and ghastly smiles . . . surpassing far the wildest representations of a Fuseli or a Kean”; such performances, in other words, could occur unwilled.46 It was widely agreed that the apex of that performance of Medea was indeed Pasta’s io. This word sounds at the end of an act 1 recitative, before Medea’s duet with Giasone. Medea has just learned that she is about to be exiled, and Giasone, who was her husband and the father of her children, is about to contract a second marriage. She pronounces the word in response to a question from Giasone: “What can I hope for, what remains for me?” “I.” (Di che sperar posso, che mi resta? / Io.) As commenters remarked, the io was itself something of a trespasser from much earlier versions of the story: it corresponded to the phrase “Medea superest” in Seneca’s Medea and to the “moi” in Corneille’s Medée.47 This word io, as Pasta pronounced it, had a singular ability to set itself apart from what were perceived to be mundane musical surroundings. A correspondent for London’s Quarterly Musical Magazine even supplied a musical notation (see example 11), although—perhaps struck by the unprepossessing appearance of those two notes—he asserted that the effect of the io “can only be understood when seen.” Playwright John Poole’s article “A Discourse of Bores” may give a sense of both the extent to which listeners anticipated Pasta’s io and the utterance’s extreme brevity. The author went to the opera with a high-society type, “the indicating bore,” whom he dubbed “Harry Index”: Madame Pasta was acting Medea. “The great point in the performance,” said Index, “is her exclamation Io! I’ll give you notice when that is coming, but never mind the rest.” At length the moment for the celebrated exclama-

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tion approached. “Now it is coming,” cried Index; “stop—not yet—wait— now for it!” These last words he accompanied with a sharp dig of his elbow in my side, which shook me from head to foot; and by the time I had recovered from the shock, the long-expected Io was numbered among the things that had been.48

Many contemporaries identified this brief and sudden moment as among the most “electrifying” of their experiences. A reporter for the Morning Herald wrote, “she gave the word ‘io’ with an accompaniment of gesture and expression that absolutely electrified the audience.”49 Augustus Bozzi Granville recalled “the single ‘Io!’ which thrills the audience, and actually makes the theatre vibrate.”50 Even in 1880, a critic boasted at having been “in the theatre when Madame Pasta electrified her auditors by her ‘Io,’ in her splendid performance of ‘Medea,’ and it was the grandest effect of declamation he ever listened to.”51 Why, exactly, was Pasta’s io held to be shocking? After all, the moment seemed to have had little effect when the opera was first performed in 1813, and Mayr even eliminated it when he revised the opera for Milan in 1823. The Quarterly Musical Magazine provided one important clue: “Pasta sang those two notes . . . with the whole power of her voice, [and] at the same instant flung wide her arms above her head.”52 In other words, she seemed to employ the model of electric acting described by Talma, in which the sudden gesture is held rigid for the length of the words it inflects. We might even imagine that the raising of the arms transformed Pasta’s body into a lightning rod and that the rigor denoted a period of shock. She brought electricity to the spectators much as the Hebe Vestina had channeled it into the seats at the Temple of Health. After all, the Io was, as we have seen, a preeminent index of (female) being: the person who names is the person who is named. As such, this “electric” declamation announced the intrusion into the narrative of something foreign and intertextual, something outside the central mimetic scheme: a story of animation. The musical setting would certainly have recalled the all-sung adaptations of Rousseau’s Pygmalion, where Galatea’s long-anticipated first word, “io,” was always declaimed a cappella. Example 12 reproduces this moment from the three most famous versions of Pimmalione by Giambattista Cimador, Bonifazio Asioli, and Luigi Cherubini. Similarly, the heroine’s climactic “Son io” in Bellini’s Norma (example 13) was seen as an attempt to replicate the famous moment in Mayr’s Medea.53 Pasta’s io attitude became her most common pose. As Susan Rutherford has noted, she eventually came to be criticized for flinging her arms

example 12. Animation scenes from Antonio Sografi, Pimmalione, after Rousseau: (a) Cimador (Venice, 1790). Andante

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example 13. Bellini, Norma (Milan, 1831, lib. Felice Romani).




















 





 









  



 

   












  

  

    



 


  













 

 





 





   

 



 



 

 

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up and standing rigid at every cadenza and trill, the posture struck in time with the tutti chord before her vocalise.54 Indeed, it quickly becomes evident that there is a distinct pattern in the moments identified as “electric”: they are usually, though not always, buried within recitative, and they consist of isolated tutti chords followed by the voice singing a cappella. Such textures are scarcely difficult to find within bel canto opera, and Pasta was readily able to adapt older operas and operas not written for her voice to her own purposes. For instance, La fama praised Pasta’s “thunderous outbursts of voice” in the Gran Cavatina of Rossini’s Semiramide, claiming that they were “were virtually an electric shock, and instilled in the spectators a vivid and unexpected confusion.”55 In a review of Pasta’s Desdemona, the Milan-based periodical I teatri noted, “Her exclamation, sono innocente, was an electric shock to the whole audience,” adding that the actress preceded the utterance with a sudden leap to her feet (doubtless timed to the preceding chord).56 Might those canonic roles composed for Pasta have been marked by this imagery? In other words, did this performance style bring into being an electrifying topos perceptible within music as written? The history outlined above might lead us to go searching for shocks within those roles written for Pasta: brief moments, usually buried within recitative, with tutti chords sounding on the strong beats and the solo voice heard alone in the gaps. Notable in this context, then, is the heroine’s promise to the Druids in act 1 of Norma that when the hour comes for war, “my voice will thunder” (la mia voce tuonerà). When, in act 2, the time does come, she utters the climactic pronouncement reproduced in example 14: “Sound the song of war, oh soldiers” (Il cantico di guerra alzate o forti). Bellini’s music supplies the requisite “electrifying” texture, with accented fortissimo chords on downbeats—spaced to accommodate two- to three-second poses—and Pasta’s famously changeable voice resonating alone to make the electrification audible. Yet such an exercise surely misses the point—and not just because these textures are only too readily available throughout the operas of Rossini, Bellini, and their contemporaries. As accounts suggested, electric animation defied identification with verbal meanings and mimetic schemes; it creates a kind of bodily representation that is other, a living picture that is not of the diegesis, perceived via shocks. It invites a kind of spectatorial awareness, a kind of reading, that is simultaneous to but forcibly estranged from the opera’s primary unfolding. Hence Carlo Ritorni wrote that in Pasta’s brief petrifications or sudden moments of “physical immobility,” she created a second stream of meaning along-

The History of Musical Electrification | 149 example 14. Bellini, Norma, act 2, scene 6, final measures.




 




 



 









 





 






  



 










 



























 
















 














 
















 

 



















 





 






 





  





 





 











 






 








  





 













 



  





 



 









 





  
     

  





 



 

 



                 

       



       



       



















side the primary role: “Not with pantomimic gestures [i.e., representative bodily motions] but with the action of an animated picture, Pasta composes into the opera a second role of mute representation.”57 One fictional admirer in Laetitia Elizabeth Landon’s novel Romance and Reality asserted that Pasta onstage was “a Greek statue stepped from its pedestal, and animated by the Promethean fire of genius!”58 For others, though, she was less a Galatea figure than she was a revivified artifact from Vesuvian digs: a correspondent for Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine suggested that Pasta’s “classical or mythological heroine is, in fact, an animated antique statue; a vision of the olden time given as a vision; awful, mysterious, unfleshly!”59 One critic even traveled to Herculaneum to search for Pasta’s image among the ruins.60 Analogies to imaginary museums seem almost to make themselves at this point, and they have been made by Ritorni’s modern readers. But as I hope I have



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shown, if it is possible to speak of such a museum here, its key categories were neither high art nor the “natural aura,” its artifacts were not musical scores, and the awareness asked of its attendees was emphatically not that posture of worship usually attributed to the “imaginary museum of musical works.”61 To marshal the imagery of plastic animation and the electric shock was to identify a force that was specifically aesthetic; and, indeed, such language was prominent in a handful of Italian treatises on aesthetics published during the 1810s and 1820s, the first of their kind in that language.62 Yet the features wherein such claims to aesthesis were perceived within the musical object—its second, plastic narratives, which rewarded the most organized sensory engagement—were precisely not of the work but of the performance.

Conclusion

Music is often heard when a statue comes to life. This is a truth borne out by countless stories, plays, operas, melodramas, and films over the past two thousand years or more. There is Paulina’s “Music, awake her!” in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. There is the sculptor’s collection of musical instruments depicted in the illustrated versions of the thirteenth-century Roman de la rose. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the fable of Pygmalion is sung by Orpheus shortly after he tells his own tragic history. In the film Mannequin (1987) Kim Cattrall is brought to life by an ac0usmatic midi chorus. The list goes on. The historical scope of these examples and the variety of uses they find for what is mostly untexted music must constitute a challenge to the explanatory power of local context. In another era of scholarship, I might have offered an explanation relating to psychology, positing that some gloomy facet of the human subconscious makes “us” likely to fall in love with beautiful simulacra and imagine musical sounds, whether of mysterious or visible origin, as we do. Indeed, such an explanation might draw on the diagnostic category of Pygmalionism, coined in 1927 by no less a figure than the psychiatrist Havelock Ellis, though he linked it to the eyes, not the ears. “Pygmalionism, or falling in love with statues” Ellis wrote, “is a rare form of erotomania founded on the sense of vision and closely related to the allurement of beauty.” Ellis applied the term both to those young men who masturbated in front of statues and to those who asked prostitutes to “assume the part of a statue which gradually comes to 151

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life.”1 But even if such psychological causation were not out of fashion in the humanities, the category of Pygmalionism would still be passé, having been expurgated from psychology in the 1970s after a few enterprising researchers noticed that Ellis’s examples were either impossible to retrieve or drawn explicitly from works of fiction.2 (He mentions Heine’s Florentinische Nächte, as well as the writings of Lucian and Athenaeus.) There has never been any properly documented case of a human falling in love with a statue. What has interested us here is that Italians created, consumed, and reflected on such fables with unprecedented frequency and enthusiasm during the decades between about 1770 and 1830. This phenomenon first gathered force, as we saw in chapter 1, in the Milanese pantomimes and writings of Gasparo Angiolini, who put many such statues in his pantomimes and correspondingly made audience “animation” a focus and aim of his theoretical writings. Angiolini spent the final Italian decades of his career in search of the perfect natural sign language and the most effective symbol of aesthetic engagement. The search culminated in what is, in retrospect, one of the oddest of premodern pantomime ballets, La vendetta spiritosa—a staging of Condillac’s treatise of a statue brought to life through the activation of its senses—for which Angiolini wrote the scenario, designed the dancing, and composed the music. My project here has been to account for this seemingly bizarre cultural artifact by positioning it within a world of related projects and concerns in late eighteenth-century Milan. I undertook this by interweaving historical strands between French and Italian aesthetic thought, music-theatrical versions of Pygmalion, and a rich tradition of itinerant performance—this last was an aspect of Angiolini’s professional pedigree that he vigorously and disingenuously denied. The musical consequences of these projects were considerable, reconfiguring music’s value not only in relation to verbal language and the other fine arts but also within the history of its styles and genres. As we have amply seen, Angiolini sought to write pantomime scores that were perfectly matched to what was happening onstage, in the process conferring new significance on timbre, melody, and techniques of throughcomposition. In chapter 2, I suggested that the reception of Rousseau’s melodrama Pygmalion led to the appearance of such extended gestural segments within Italian opera of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But while the projects of pantomime and melodrama offered a novel way of thinking about the expressive or animating power of untexted music, I do not mean to suggest that they were a hitherto-

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unidentified ancestor of the Beethovenian absolute; quite the opposite. Angiolini construed musical contours as meaningful only insofar as they were paired with motions of dancers’ bodies, and what came from this fusion of musical gesture with bodily gesture was a repertoire of what we would call Mickey-Mousing techniques, or musical mimophones. When composers borrowed from theorists of language the principle that music should behave as a series of natural signs or onomatopoeia—and, in melodrama, when music was given the task of representing gestures prescribed textually—the result was a degree of through-composition that seems unstable or even bafflingly ugly in the absence of its visual counterparts. A similar claim might be made about the emerging emphasis on speech-like rhythms and contours in vocal melodies described in chapter 2. The result of this emphasis was a new austerity of the operatic voice, a new prominence of recitative and syllabic song styles that were devoid of the roulades and messe di voce that critics had long decried but also of the very kinds of repetition and return that enable listeners to make sense of musical form. This book spans the divide between high-classical Enlightenment and early Romanticism, at least as far as musicologists’ usual schemes of periodization are concerned. In some ways, and by some measures, the material brought to light here bears out these schemes. The first two chapters concern ancient Greek stories and pastoral settings and themes. The innumerable Pygmalions and Galateas seen on stages between 1770 and about 1815 are among the last such “classical” characters to inhabit opera, melodrama, and pantomime, and the scenes of statuary animation were among these genres’ last miraculous events. Yet when these projects failed, we cannot say that Romanticism came immediately to replace them, like a new weather system pushing out the old. If a few of the projects considered here are conspicuously “of their eras,” as traditionally understood—Angiolini’s La vendetta spiritosa, for instance, was a characteristic Enlightenment work in that it carried out its creator’s design of educating his fellow Italians—most of them are more difficult to characterize under the familiar period banners, reflecting instead more diverse and unique imbrications of local and distant concerns. When the Pygmalion myth disappeared from music-theatrical stages, it persisted as an imagery in theories of the arts, within novels, and in criticism, where it provided an apparatus for understanding musical performance and its effects and accounted for aesthetic engagement itself as entailing a mode of self-making through sense percepts. This book has provided much evidence for this claim. Chapter 2 pointed out that Stefano

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Arteaga categorized the fine arts as being either cold like Pygmalion’s original statue or animated like Galatea brought to life; only melody was so animated, a fact that made it “the most complete and most interesting imitation the fine arts can achieve.” Chapter 3 noted Germaine de Staël’s characterization of Corinne, singer of improvised poetry, as “animated,” “like a Greek statue,” and thus “the image of our beautiful Italy.” Chapter 4 examined Pygmalion imagery in narratives about sense-deprived characters, as, for instance, in La cieca nata, in which Camillo Federici made his Galatea figure a near-perfect, beautiful, young, blind harpsichordist; “To perfect her,” another character claimed, “there lacks only a ray of light that shines on those eyes and animates her beauty.”3 And chapter 5 noted that Ritorni accounted for the extraordinary effect of Giuditta Pasta’s acting by evoking a kind of submerged Galatea narrative performed simultaneously with the diegetically appropriate character: “Not with pantomimic gestures but with the action of an animated picture, Pasta composes into the opera a second role of mute representation.”4 I have chosen these examples from among hundreds that might have made my case. Once the language of plasticity and animation is understood to reflect a delimited and relatively coherent set of notions, we begin to notice it everywhere. And we may recognize the extent to which such imagery pervaded not only criticism of acting and musical performance but also theories of aesthetics and understandings of music, sculpture, and the other fine arts as media—that is, as diverse materials endowed with communicative powers and a degree of mysterious charisma that are in intimate relation with the bodies around them. This kind of relation of person to thing was new in the late eighteenth century; though Barbara Johnson was not concerned with tracing its emergence, she was characteristically astute to suggest that the person-tothing dyad she followed from Marx through to Toy Story remained “a legacy of the Enlightenment in the twenty-first century.”5 The deep history of this relation trembles and shifts in Das Kapital, where Marx laments the “fetishism of the commodity” by means of its animation— what Johnson describes as “the misguided transference of humanness from the maker to the product” of capitalist labor and the subsequent “tendency to feel a human relation with the product.”6 Likewise, Johnson notes that this person-to-thing relation defines our modern category of prosthesis—bodily, as in the wooden leg, and figuratively, as in writing. “The relation between the natural and the artificial,” she notes, is “the first problem a prosthesis must solve—a first, seemingly insurmountable opposition between the organic and the inor-

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ganic.”7 In chapter 4 of the present book, it was my project to show that the Pygmalion fable, fused as it was to Condillacian notions of becoming-through-sensing, provided a solution to this problem of prosthetic relation in the years around 1800. In these discourses, the fine arts were understood to compensate for missing senses, and the sense-deprived themselves were understood to be partially inanimate. Music was figured as being a prosthesis for the blind, for whom it had haptic or tactile significance (the sense of touch having uncontested dominion over abstractions within the sightless mind). This chapter, which examined notions shared by medical writings, philosophy, and stage works, considered untexted music as an object of significance within the history and epistemology of sensing; my hope was that this history might yield to the reader a mode of historically informed haptic listening, much as, for the subjects in my history, the imagined loss of a sense could intensify the experience of a pantomime, for instance, or a symphony, by entailing a fleeting experience of one’s own plastic nature. After all, as Condillac had suggested, the statue with functioning ears but no other senses became the symphony it heard rather than identifying the music as an external object to be perceived. It is not a coincidence that this fascination with the fable of a sculptor in love with a statue that animates and returns his embrace emerged in the period of aesthetics’ emergence as a discipline. At the outset of this study, I asked what could be learned about the period 1770 to 1830 when we acknowledge that the animated statue was one of its central figures. The ultimate gambit of this book is that the Pygmalion myth became a foundational theme for modern aesthetics, offering as it did a means of thinking about the way that the perceiving human related to the art object, and what the object, in return, did to its perceiver. Such an intervention regarding the history of modern aesthesis tackles its central questions by looking in places that have traditionally been ignored and at kinds of texts that are usually overlooked. I have chosen to focus primarily on the Italian peninsula, despite the fact that this fascination with living statues was shared by the French, the German, and the English (among others). After all, the land that stretched from Calabria to the Alps not only was the center of musical Europe at this time and the source of its most valuable exports but also was a home to vibrant intellectual communities and a locus of groundbreaking experiments in electrical science. Furthermore, as we have seen, these different cultural domains overlapped in myriad productive ways. The neglect of this period of Italian culture within all historiography but its own continues

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the chauvinistic projects of those such as Voltaire, who, during this very period, sought to deflect attention from rivals. But thinking about aesthetics here has also entailed consideration of a variety of attempts to define sense perception and of the relation of the senses to the materials of the fine arts. This book has considered the history of aesthetics by taking into account not only theories of the arts but also the rich fabric of practices relating to the world of performing bodies onstage and the music that sounded alongside them and was made by them—the works of art, music, and theater that were conspicuously about art-objecthood. Accordingly, the reform manifestos and treatises that have long been our principal sources for music’s changing status during this period rub shoulders here with medical treatises, ballet synopses, theories of language, novels about people who speak with melodious voices, plays about musicians and sculptors, and a variety of musical scores. Ultimately, and inevitably, this textually diffuse history complicates our understanding of the historical moment at which the different art forms are supposed to gain a new kind of autonomy. The statue’s miraculous attainment of independent selfhood—its becoming an “I”—would seem to confirm the autonomy of the art object. Yet the texts examined in this book have confirmed again and again that, even at such moments of supposed emancipation, the materials of art acted together, partaking of one another’s essences through analogy and cooperation. Music was accorded a new value in these early schemes of aesthetic perception: it was the giver of animacy to the statue and to its perceivers. This new value was not the function of an overturning of mimesis, wherein music careened toward the realm of the absolute—rather, it resulted from an understanding of music as one material within an array of mutually imbricated media, conceived in complex relation to the eyes, ears, hands, and viscera, and existing in instrumental relation to things in the world. If a single insight remains after the concerns and methodology of this book have fallen out of fashion, then let it be this one: the scheme whereby music was freed to “be itself” (and only itself) was only one of a number of schemes of representation and material relation afforded it within the new aesthetic regime.

Notes

introduction Unless otherwise noted, all translations and piano reductions in this book are my own. 1. Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 48–49. 2. A. Peter Brown, The Symphonic Repertoire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 460 3. William Kinderman, Beethoven (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 89. See also Constantin Floros, Beethovens Eroica und PrometheusMusik (Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen, 2008). 4. See Carlo Ritorni’s description of the ballet, which appears as an appendix in Thomas Sipe, Beethoven: Eroica Symphony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 117–118. 5. Ibid. 6. See Barry Cooper, Beethoven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 141–143; and Mary Ann Smart, “Beethoven Dances: Prometheus and his Creatures in Vienna and Milan,” in The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography, Analysis, Criticism, edited by Nicholas Mathew and Benjamin Walton, 210–235 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 7. Wendy Heller, “Dancing Statues and the Myth of Venice: Ancient Sculpture on the Opera Stage,” Art History 33, no. 2 (2010): 304–319. 8. On the redaction of historical specifics in the Beethoven mythology see Nicholas Mathew, Political Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. 17–58. 9. See, for instance, Mary Clarke and Clement Crisp, The History of Dance (New York: Crown, 1981), 142–143.

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10. Kathleen Kuzmick Hansell, “Theatrical Ballet and Italian Opera,” in The History of Italian Opera, part 2, Systems, vol. 5, Opera on Stage, ed. Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 177–301, esp. 198–272. 11. For the period under consideration here, my models are the spate of books on Vienna and Paris, including Nicholas Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart’s Operas (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992); Elaine Sisman, “Haydn’s Theater Symphonies,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 43, no. 2 (1990), 292–352; Daniel Heartz, Haydn, Mozart, and the Viennese School, 1740–1780 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994); Heartz, Mozart, Haydn, and Early Beethoven, 1781–1802 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009); Mary Hunter, The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Hunter and James Webster, eds., Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Stefano Castelvecchi, “From Nina to Nina: Psychodrama, Absorption, and Sentiment in the 1780s,” Cambridge Opera Journal 8, no. 2 (1997): 91–112; Castelvecchi, “Sentimental and Anti-Sentimental in Le nozze di Figaro,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 1–24; David Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Charlton, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Contextual studies of music within north German culture include Thomas Bauman, North German Opera in the Age of Goethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Annette Richards, The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Important monographs that have engaged with aspects of eighteenth-century musical culture on the Italian peninsula include Daniel Heartz, Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003); Elizabeth LeGuin, Boccherini’s Body: A Study in Carnal Musicology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Pierpaolo Polzonetti, Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Martha Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Feldman, The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 12. My study has benefited enormously from Italian-language histories of the Italian Enlightenment, especially Franco Venturi’s exhaustive Settecento riformatore (Turin: Einaudi, 1969–90), and Gianmarco Gaspari’s Letteratura delle riforme: Da Beccaria a Manzoni (Palermo: Sallerio, 1990). 13. See, for instance, Margaret Brose, “Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi: Italy’s Classical Romantics,” in A Companion to European Romanticism, ed. Michael Ferber (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 256–275. In music historiography, the Italian composers most persistently labeled Romantics are Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Giuseppe Verdi. See, for example, the section on “Romantic Opera” in David Kimbell’s Italian Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 391–532; and, for a more cautious consideration of what the designation could have meant to these composers, see Mary Ann

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Smart, “Verdi, Italian Romanticism, and the Risorgimento,” in The Cambridge Companion to Giuseppe Verdi, ed. Scott L. Balthazar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29–45. 14. Here, of course, I refer to Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). See also Victor Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, trans. Alison Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 15. Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Traité des sensations, à Madame la Comtesse de Vassé (Paris: Bure, 1754). 16. Mary Ann Smart and Nicholas Mathew, “Elephants in the Music Room: The Future of Quirk Historicism,” Representations 132, no. 1 (2015): 62. 17. James Q. Davies, “On Being Moved/Against Objectivity,” Representations 132, no. 1 (2015): 79–87. 18. Here I am referring to the turn toward “thing theory” within the humanities, as summarized in Simon Schaffer’s memorable formulation: “A thing is an object that objects.” Schaffer, “Understanding (through) Things,” YouTube video, 47:21, from a lecture at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, March 8, 2013, posted March 19, 2013, www.youtube. com/watch?v=9BAZO9AWCwk. 19. Smart and Mathew, “Elephants,” 62. 20. LeGuin, Boccherini’s Body; Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 21. Mary Ann Smart, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 22. John Tresch, The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 23. Emily Dolan, The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); James Q. Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 24. Stephen Rumph, “The Sense of Touch in Mozart’s Don Giovanni,” Music and Letters 88, no. 4 (2007): 561–588; Celine Frigau-Manning, “SingerMachines: Describing Italian Singers, 1800–1850,” Opera Quarterly 28, nos. 3–4 (Summer/Fall 2012): 230–258. 25. Long considered something of an orphan within the history of vocal music, melodrama has benefited from a recent, exhaustive study by Jacqueline Waeber: En musique dans le texte: Le mélodrame de Rousseau à Schoenberg (Paris: Van Dieren, 2005). Waeber traces the genre from its conspicuous “invention” and first flourishing in France and Germany through to the early twentieth century. 26. Georg Benda’s composition of Ariadne and Medea for the troupe of traveling actors led by Abel and Sophie Seyler is known to modern musicology through the work of Thomas Bauman and others. Bauman, North German Opera in the Age of Goethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). See also A. Dwight Culler, “Monodrama and the Dramatic Monologue,” PMLA 90, no. 3 (1975): 366–385; and Matthew Head, “Cultural Meaning for Women Composers: Charlotte ‘Minna’ Brandes and the Beautiful Dead in the

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German Enlightenment,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 57, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 231–284. 27. The Italian success of Pygmalion as a printed text was documented in Silvia Rota Ghibaudi’s La fortuna di Rousseau in Italia (1750–1815) (Turin: Giappichelli, 1961), which catalogued twenty-seven editions of the melodrama published in Italy between 1771 and 1815 but did not comment on the history of its performance. 28. In recent years, the Italian musicologist Lucio Tufano has illuminated a handful of original Italian melodramas created in Naples during the 1780s, though he does not discuss any version of Pygmalion except Rousseau’s. Tufano, “La ricezione italiana del melologo à la Rousseau e la Pandora di Alessandro Pepoli,” in D’une scène à l’autre: L’opéra italien en Europe, vol. 2, La musique à l’épreuve du théâtre, ed. Damien Colas and Alessandro di Profio (Wavre: Mardaga, 2009), 125–140. Much work remains to be done on this music, but I do not examine it in detail in the present study.

chapter 1 A version of this chapter appeared as “Alignment, Absorption, Animation: Pantomime Ballet in the Lombard Illuminismo,” Eighteenth-Century Music 8, no. 2 (2011): 239–259. 1. See especially Bruce Alan Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 313–326. 2. Gasparo Angiolini, L’amore al cimento, ossia Il Sofì generoso (Milan: Bianchi, 1782), preface. 3. All of these were staged originally with music by Gluck. See ibid., 282– 357. Although these prefaces bore Angiolini’s name only, Calzabigi later claimed to have had an uncredited role in writing both the Don Juan preface and the “Dissertation sur les ballets pantomimes”—an assertion that dance historians have taken seriously, not least because those essays are far more concise and elegant than writings that are indisputably by Angiolini. Of the three prefaces, only that to La Citera assediata is in Italian; the other two are in French. Nonetheless, we will consider this early series of prefaces to be a legitimate reflection of Angiolini’s aims during his tenure in Vienna. The preface to Don Juan is reprinted in facsimile in Christoph Willibald Gluck, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, Don Juan, Sémiramis: Ballets pantomimes von Gasparo Angiolini, ed. Richard Engländer (Kassel: Barenreiter, 1966), xxv–xxvi. The preface to La Citera assediata, long thought lost, has been reprinted by Gerhard Croll in “Traditionen—Neuansätze”: Festschrift für Anna Amalie Abert (Tutzing: Schneider, 1997), 137–144. The preface to Sémiramis was published simultaneously in Milan and Vienna in January 1765; the Milan edition was issued in reprint by Walter Toscanini (Milan: Dalle Nogare e Armenti, 1956). 4. A handful of studies have traced this theme from its origins to the present day. These include Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); Stoichita, Pygmalion Effect; George L. Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues: Artificial Humans from Pygmalion to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

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5. Heller, “Dancing Statues.” 6. See Nino Pirrotta, “The Traditions of Don Juan Plays and Comic Operas,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 107 (1980): 60–70; and Charles C. Russell, The History of the Don Juan Legend before Mozart (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). 7. This work was originally published in two volumes. Volume 1 has Lambranzi’s preface and instructions in both German and Italian, while volume 2 contains no text other than the instructions for the individual dances, in German. Lambranzi, Neue und curieuse theatralische Tantz-Schul, 2 vols. (Nuremburg: Johan Jacob Wolrab, 1716; facsimile edition, Leipzig: Peters, 1975), translated by Derra de Moroda as New and Curious School of Theatrical Dancing, ed. Cyril W. Beaumont (London, 1928; reprint, New York: Dance Horizons, 1966). 8. On the tradition of entr’acte dancing within Italian theaters, see Kathleen Kuzmick Hansell, “Opera and Ballet at the Regio Ducal Teatro of Milan, 1771– 1776: A Musical and Social History” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1980); and Kuzmick Hansell “Theatrical Ballet and Italian Opera.” 9. The steps of the belle danse were developed at the French court in the second half of the seventeenth century and codified in the dance-notation system of Raoul Auger Feuillet. See Feuillet, Choréographie, ou l’art de décrire la danse par caractères, figures et signes démonstratifs (Paris, 1700). 10. Lambranzi concluded by assuring his audience, “I have myself performed these dances in the most distinguished theaters of Germany, Italy and France, and they are nearly all are my own compositions” (Questi Balli io stesso li ho rapresentati sopra li principali Theatri in Germania, in Italia, e Francia e sono magior Parte di mia propria Inventione). Neue und curieuse theatralische TantzSchul, 1:1. One can read in detail about commedia-inflected steps in a treatise by one of the century’s most prominent grotteschi, Gennaro Magri: Trattato teorico-prattico di ballo (Naples, 1779). This treatise is the subject of Bruce Alan Brown and Rebecca Harris-Warrick, eds., The Grotesque Dancer on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Gennaro Magri and His World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). 11. Lambranzi, Neue und curieuse theatralische Tantz-Schul, 1:1. 12. Both of these are reproduced in Heller, “Dancing Statues,” 306–307. For both of these numbers, Lambranzi supplied what dance historians describe as “character pieces”: tunes in binary form that lack traditional dance indices but supply pictorial or characteristic figures instead. The tune accompanying plates 12–17 in volume 2 of Neue und curieuse theatralische Tantz-Schul is notable for its rhythmic irregularity and for the closeness with which its musical events can be matched to the animation of the statues. 13. The preface supplies instructions in Italian: “All’aperto del Theatro si rappresenta questa bella statua immobile infino che la prima parte d’Aria sarà suonata e con la repetitione salta il Scaramuzza dal Piedistale, e fà li suoi belli passi alla Scaramuzza, Caprioli, e Piroletti, sin che l’Aria si suona 2 ò 3 volte alla ora si ritirá” (At the opening of the stage, the dancer represents this beautiful, motionless statue until the first half of the air is sounded, and as it repeats, Scaramouche jumps from the pedestal and makes his lovely Scaramouche’s

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steps, cabrioles, and pirouettes until the air has been played two or three times, at which point he departs). Lambranzi, Neue und curieuse theatralische TantzSchul, 1:2. The instructions given in German at the bottom of plate 26 differ from the Italian preface in a few details relating to the end of the dance: “Nach 3. mahl gespielter Aria hat der tantz ein ende” (After the air has been played three times, the dance comes to an end). 14. On the nations represented within Lambranzi’s treatise, see Daniel Heartz, “A Venetian Dancing Master Teaches the Forlana: Lambranzi’s Balli Teatrali,” Journal of Musicology 17, no. 1 (1999): 136–151. 15. Marian Hannah Winter, The Pre-Romantic Ballet (London: Pittman, 1974), 13. 16. See, for instance, Clare Hornsby, ed., The Impact of Italy: The Grand Tour and Beyond (London: British School of Rome, 2000). 17. Winter wrote that “the improvised Italian Comedy provided the background for action ballet in whatever tentative forms it is manifest, and in whichever country it occurs.” Pre-Romantic Ballet, 23. 18. Sallé was the daughter of itinerant acrobats, and she began her career as a performer in fairground theaters. Her teacher in England, John Rich, was one of the century’s most famous Harlequins, and he also performed snippets from the Metamorphoses. See Émile Dacier, Une danseuse de l’Opéra sous Louis XV: Mlle Sallé (1707–1756) d’après des documents inédits (Paris: Plon, 1909); and Sarah McCleave, “Marie Sallé, a Wise Professional Woman of Influence,” in Women’s Work: Making Dance in Europe before 1800, ed. Lynn Matluck Brooks (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 160–182, esp. 173–174. 19. Quoted in Lincoln Kirstein, Four Centuries of Ballet: Fifty Masterworks (New York: Dover, 1984), 106–107. 20. The music is by Jean-Joseph Mouret and has been reconstructed from the reduced score by Rebecca Harris-Warrick; its modern premiere, performed by the New York Baroque Dance Company under the direction of Catherine Turocy, took place at Cornell University in November 2007. 21. Quotation is from Lillian Moore, Artists of the Dance (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1938), 30–31. 22. This scene of becoming through a series of dances was no doubt influenced by “Les caractères de la danse,” one of the first freestanding pantomime ballets, which was created in the 1710s by Françoise Prévost, and which Prévost taught to both Sallé and Marie Camargo. See Rebecca Harris-Warrick, Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 390–391. 23. Condillac, Traité des sensations. Translated into English by Geraldine Carr as Condillac’s Treatise on the Sensations (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1930). Quotations are from this translation. 24. Condillac, Treatise on the Sensations, 75. 25. Ibid., 89. 26. See, for instance, Robert Jütte, A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace, trans. James Lynn (Cambridge: Polity, 2005); and Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

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27. Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (Paris: Mariette, 1719). Sophia Rosenfeld has traced eighteenth-century French theories of language to John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). See Rosenfeld, A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 17–27. 28. Condillac and Diderot were greatly influenced by the experiments of English surgeon William Cheselden (1688–1752) on a blind man whose sight Cheselden restored through cataract surgery. See Jütte, History of the Senses, 133. 29. Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connoissances humaines: Ouvrage où l’on réduit à un seul principe tout ce qui concerne l’entendement humain (Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier, 1746). This work made similar use of a thought experiment, demonstrating the gradual formation of the “langage d’action” between a wild boy and girl. 30. Condillac briefly interrupted his discussion of the statue toward the end of the Traité des sensations, when he described a wild boy recently discovered in the forests of Lithuania; the reader was encouraged to understand the boy’s behavior with the animated statue as a frame of reference. Condillac, Treatise on the Sensations, 224. 31. On the influence of Condillac’s Traité des sensations on early nineteenthcentury literary and musical discourses, see Leslie David Blasius, “The Mechanics of Sensation and the Construction of the Romantic Musical Experience,” in Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism, ed. Ian Bent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3–24. The Traité is also discussed in Stephen Rumph, “The Sense of Touch in Mozart’s Don Giovanni,” Music and Letters 88, no. 4 (2007): 561–588. 32. Condillac, Treatise on the Sensations, xxxvii. 33. Rosenfeld, Revolution in Language, 57–85. 34. Angiolini, preface to Don Juan, [14–15]. 35. All quotations in this paragraph are from Angiolini, preface to La Citera assediata, 141–142. 36. See, for instance, Gérard Genette, Mimologics, trans. Thaïs E. Morgan (University of Nebraska Press, 1995; originally published as Mimologiques: Voyage en Cratylie, Paris: Seuil, 1976), 65–90. 37. Claudio Marazzini, “Le teorie,” in Storia della lingua italiana, vol. 1, I luoghi della codificazione, ed. Luca Serianni and Pietro Trifone (Turin: Einaudi, 1993), 291–299. 38. The terms of this debate were established at the beginning of the eighteenth century in the polemic between Dominique Bouhours and Giovan Giuseppe Orsi. See Antonio Viscardi, “Il problema della costruzione nelle polemiche linguistiche del Settecento,” Paideia 2 (1947): 193–214. 39. Condillac, L’art d’écrire (Geneva: Dufart, 1789), quoted in Alfredo Schiaffini, “Aspetti della crisi linguistica italiana del Settecento,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 57, nos. 2–4 (1937): 275–295. 40. Schiaffini, “Aspetti della crisi linguistica,” 276. 41. Marazzini, “Le teorie,” 294.

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42. In 1766, while Angiolini was working in St. Petersburg, he wrote to Beccaria of his admiration for the latter’s anti-torture tract, Dei delitti e delle pene, which achieved immediate and lasting fame throughout Europe. He wrote, “It has been sixty years since anything has had such an effect. Thanks to philosophy and to those illuminated spirits who, in the face of prejudice, fanaticism, despotism, and barbarous laws, know and have the courage to teach the road of justice, of sweetness, of humanity.” Quoted in Lorenzo Tozzi’s biography of Angiolini, Il balletto pantomimo del settecento: Gaspare Angiolini (L’Aquila: Japadre, 1972), 129–130 (my translation). 43. Alessandro Verri, “Rinunzia avanti il notaio degli autori del presente foglio periodico al vocabolario della Crusca,” Il Caffè 1, no. 4 (1764): 47–50. The entirety of Il Caffè has been reissued recently in modern edition as “Il Caffè,” 1764–1766, edited by Gianni Francioni and Sergio Romagnoli (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993). In this volume, Verri’s “Rinunzia” article can be found on pages 47–50. 44. The activities of the Accademia de’ Pugni have received their most thorough documentation in Franco Venturi’s six-volume history of eighteenth-century Italy, Settecento riformatore. See, in particular, “Gli uomini delle riforme: La Lombardia,” in vol. 5, L’Italia dei lumi (1764–1790), 425–834. 45. The six-volume fourth edition of the Vocabolario della Crusca (1729– 1738) reversed the mild modernization in matters technical and extraliterary of the third edition (1691). Valeria Della Valle, “La lessicografia” in Storia della lingua italiana, vol. 1, I luoghi della codificazione, edited by Luca Serianni and Pietro Tritone, 55–63. 46. In an oft-quoted letter to a publisher, Pietro Verri lamented the suppression of one of his Gallic coinages: “Out of fear of the new verb regrettare, you wanted to substitute compiangere; you thus denied an idea because there is no corresponding word in our language, instead of giving citizenship to a French word that renders the idea perfectly.” Quoted in Tina Matarrese, Storia della lingua italiana: Il Settecento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993), 52 (my translation). 47. Quoted in Venturi, Settecento riformatore, 5:438. 48. See, for instance, Marazzini, “Le teorie,” 298. 49. Francioni and Romagnoli, eds., “Il Caffè,” 48. 50. Ibid., 540. 51. Ibid., 104. 52. Ibid., 105. 53. Ibid., 105–106. 54. Ibid., 211–222. 55. Ibid., 214. The verse is the first quatrain of a famous sonnet by the sixteenth-century poet Luigi Groto (1541–1585). 56. Ibid., 487–494. 57. Ibid., 489. 58. Pietro Verri, Estratto della letteratura europea (1767), 1:15, quoted in Venturi, Settecento riformatore, 5:437. 59. Francioni and Romagnoli, eds., “Il Caffè,” 488–489. 60. Ibid., 490. 61. Ibid., 491–492.

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62. Gasparo Angiolini, Lettere a Monsieur Noverre (1773), reprinted in Il ballo pantomimo: Lettere, saggi e libelli sulla danza (1773–1785), ed. Carmela Lombardi (Turin: Paravia, 1998), 49–88. The letters attacked Noverre on several points and contested his claim of having invented modern pantomime. They were followed by his Riflessioni sopra l’uso dei programmi nei balli pantomimi (1775), reprinted in Lombardi, Il ballo pantomimo, 117–123. The quarrel is too well known to merit rehashing here. For the most thorough recent account, and a discussion of the subsequent Milanese pamphlet war debating the relative merits of Angiolini and Noverre, see Hansell, “Opera and Ballet,” 766–920. 63. Angiolini, Lettere a Monsieur Noverre, 51–52. 64. Ibid., 70, 75. 65. Ibid., 61. 66. Angiolini, preface to Don Juan, [10]. 67. Angiolini, Lettere a Monsieur Noverre, 61. 68. Ibid., 83. 69. Ibid., 83. 70. Angiolini, Riflessioni, 121. 71. Angiolini, Lettere a Monsieur Noverre, 53. 72. Hansell, “Opera and Ballet,” 793. 73. Angiolini, Lettere a Monsieur Noverre, 84. 74. Ibid., 71. 75. This reiterates a notion advanced in Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique (Paris: Duchesne, 1768), 37–38. 76. Angiolini, Riflessioni, 118. 77. Ibid., 122. 78. Gazzetta letteraria 7 (February 16, 1774): 4, quoted in Hansell, “Theatrical Ballet and Italian Opera,” 234. 79. See Sara Rosini, “Scritti sul balletto: Nota introduttiva,” in the Edizione nazionale delle opere di Pietro Verri, vol. 3, I “Discorsi” e altri scritti degli anni settanti, ed. Giorgio Panizza (Rome: Edizione di Storia e Letteratura, 2004), 597–621. This essay includes lengthy quotations from Pietro Verri’s letters, in which he both prefigured and elaborated on his “Lettre à Monsieur Noverre.” See Pietro Verri, “Lettre à Monsieur Noverre,” in Panizza, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Pietro Verri, vol. 3, I “Discorsi” e altri scritti, 623–653. 80. This new turn in Pietro Verri’s thought, announced in the Idee sull’indole del piacere of 1773, occurred simultaneously with Angiolini’s arrival in Milan. 81. Pietro Verri, “Lettre à Monsieur Noverre,” 627. 82. Ibid. 83. Quoted in Rosini, “Nota introduttiva,” 614. 84. Pietro Verri, “Lettre à Monsieur Noverre,” 634. 85. Ibid., 626. 86. Ibid., 628. 87. Quoted in Rosini, “Nota introduttiva,” 621. 88. Pietro Verri completed Osservazioni sulla tortura in 1777, but it was not published until seven years after his death, when it appeared as a supplement to his Memorie storiche sulla economia pubblica dello Stato di Milano (Milan: Destefanis, 1804), 191–312. Its account of the failure of Milan’s judicial

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apparatus during the plague of 1630 was an important source for the Storia della colonna infame (1840), by Verri’s illegitimate nephew (and Beccaria’s grandson), Alessandro Manzoni. 89. Ange Goudar, “Sopra il ballo,” in Osservazioni sopra la musica ed il ballo (Venice: Palese, 1773). Reprinted in Lombardi, Il ballo pantomimo, 37. The original is as follows: “Se io dovessi mettere un’inscrizione sulla porta del teatro, vi metterei Scuola pubblica, nella quale ciascuno deve instruirsi per mezzo del suo denaro.” 90. Matteo Borsa, “Saggio filosofico sui balli pantomimi seri dell’opera a Milano,” in Opuscoli scelti sulle scienze e sulle arti (Milan: Marelli, 1782), reprinted in Lombardi, Il ballo pantomimo, 209–234. 91. Though the project itself began with La vendetta ingegnosa, Angiolini only made his aims explicit in the preface to his subsequent ballet, L’amore al cimento, ossia Il Sofì generoso, a ballo eroicomico nazionale, which had its premiere at La Scala in the autumn of 1782. 92. Gasparo Angiolini, preface to L’amore al cimento. 93. Angiolini’s Condillac ballet was previously considered a very late work, as it was staged in Venice in 1791. However, rare libretti at the New York Public Library indicate that it began its life in Milan almost a decade earlier. That La vendetta spiritosa (Milan, 1782) and La vendetta ingegnosa, o La statua di Condilliac (Venice, 1791) are in fact one and the same is confirmed by the dramatis personae provided for both ballets in their respective libretti, and by Angiolini’s claims in the preface to L’amore al cimento (Milan, 1781) of the “philosophical” content of La vendetta spiritosa. 94. “Dagli amori male assortiti fra un numero di Pastorelle, e Pastorelli d’Arcadia ne risultano varj incontri, varj incidenti. Una delle Pastorelle più delle altre mal corrisposta, che possiede la Magia risolve di volersi vendicare; il che fa ingegnosamente, dopo d’aver compiuta una Magica operazione in compagnia delle sue seguaci. Consiste questa sua vendetta nell’animare una Statua, che rappresenta una Najade dai Pastorelli festeggiata in Arcadia, la quale acquista le idee per la via dei sensi, a imitazione dell’ingegnosa Statua di Condillac, e d’oggetto in oggetto preferendo sempre quello che più le piate fissa la sua attenzione, e si dichiara amante del Pastorello Tirsi, che per l’amor di Clori, ha male corrisposto a quello, che per lui risente la Pastorella Maga. Per questo nuovo, e singolare amore nasce la disunione fra Clori, e Tirsi, che è lo scopo della Pastorella vendicativa. Finalmente dopo varj contrasti, e varie situazioni la Pastorella Maga riconverte la Statua in duro marmo, Clori, e Tirsi restano disuniti, e un’ordinata confusione, cagionata dai diversi sentimenti de’ Pastorelli, termina la Favola pantomima.” Gasparo Angiolini, “Preciso del ballo,” in La vendetta ingegnosa, o La statua di Condilliac (Venice, 1791). 95. The “magical operation” probably occurred in act 2, which is set during the nighttime “in the midst of an ancient, ruined building, partly consumed by flames” (Luogo ristretto nel mezzo d’una antica fabbrica diroccata, in parte confumata dalle fiamme. Una quercia antica s’erge in mezzo delle ruine. Notte con Luna). Ibid. 96. “Io tento in questo lavoro d’avvanzare d’un grado l’Arte mia, col trasportarvi una nuova serie d’idee, spiegando col solo ajuto de’ gesti non solo

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le sensazioni, che gli oggetti esterni risvegliano in un anima nuova, ed i paragoni, ch’ella ne può formare, ma rendendo anche sensibile la traccia, che dalla prima impressione degli oggetti i più indifferenti conduce fino al sentimento, e dalla stupida curiosità ai più delicati moti del cuore.” Gasparo Angiolini, La vendetta spiritosa (Milan, 1782). 97. Stefano [Esteban de] Arteaga, Rivoluzioni nel teatro musicale italiano: Dalla sua origine fino al presente, 2nd ed. (Venice: Palese, 1785), 3:210. 98. Ibid., 231. 99. Ibid., 233. 100. Tozzi, Gaspare Angiolini, 146. 101. According to Bruce Alan Brown, Deucalione e Pirra was Angiolini’s final choreography. See Grove Music Online, s.v. “Angiolini, Gasparo,” by Bruce Alan Brown, accessed May 13, 2016, www.oxfordmusiconline.com. It was staged under the direction of Giuseppe Paracca. 102. Angiolini’s allegory displays what in retrospect seems like a touching literalism in the deployment of its images. In a similar vein, the choreographer erected a “Liberty Pole” on his property following the entry of the French forces into Milan, which ultimately earned him two years of painful exile at the end of his life. These events are detailed in Tozzi, Gaspare Angiolini, 145–151. 103. Hansell, “Opera and Ballet,” 797; Hansell, “Theatrical Ballet and Italian Opera,” 224; Grove Music Online, s.v. “Angiolini, Gasparo,” by Bruce Alan Brown. 104. Giuseppe Paracca, “Deucalione e Pirra,” entr’acte pantomime for Axur re d’Ormus: Dramma tragicomico, by Antonio Salieri (Milan: Bianchi, 1797), 69–70.

chapter 2 A version of this chapter was published as “Pimmalione: Rousseau and the Melodramatization of Italian Opera,” Cambridge Opera Journal 26, no. 1 (2014): 1–39. 1. Reinhard Strohm, Dramma per musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 27. 2. The period between approximately 1760 and 1800 saw the birth of musicology in something like its present form with the creation of several large-scale narratives of music history by figures such as Charles Burney, John Hawkins, Nikolaus Forkel, and Padre Martini. The reference to opera seria’s “dazzling artifices” can be found in Richard Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2:452. 3. Raymond Monelle, “Gluck and the ‘Festa teatrale,’ ” Music and Letters 54, no. 3 (1973): 308–325; Monelle, review of Musica e cultura nel Settecento europeo, ed. Enrico Fubini, Music and Letters 69, no. 3 (1988): 381–382. 4. Marita P. McClymonds was the first to suggest that opera seria was ultimately transformed by Venetian innovators during the 1790s. See McClymonds, “The Venetian Role in the Transformation of Italian Opera Seria during the 1790s,” in I vicini di Mozart, ed. Maria Teresa Muraro and David Bryant (Florence: Olschki, 1989), 1:221–240.

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5. A few recent studies have filled in some gaps within our knowledge of Italian opera of this period, though they have hardly succeeded in influencing the standard narrative. For scholarship on Italian opera of the period that does not center on Vienna, see Mary Hunter, “The Fusion and Juxtaposition of Genres in Opera Buffa, 1770–1800: Anelli and Piccinni’s Griselda,” Music and Letters 67, no. 4 (1986): 363–380; McClymonds, “Transforming Opera Seria: Verazi’s Innovations and Their Impact on Opera in Italy,” in Opera and the Enlightenment, ed. McClymonds and Thomas Baumann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 119–132; Stefano Castelvecchi, “Sentimental Opera: The Emergence of a Genre, 1760–1790” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1996); Castelvecchi, Sentimental Opera: Questions of Genre in the Age of Bourgeois Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Pierpaolo Polzonetti, “Opera Buffa and the American Revolution” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2003); and Polzonetti, Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 6. Richard Taruskin accounts for this period by tracing a direct line from Orfeo ed Euridice (with obligatory quotations from the preface to Alceste), through Idomeneo and Kantian Enlightenment, to the “sympathetic ‘representation of humanity’ ” within Mozart’s late operas. Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music, 2:452–496. “Representation of humanity” is Wye Allanbrook’s phrase. See Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 16. 7. The work exists in a critical edition: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pygmalion, scène lyrique, ed. Jacqueline Waeber (Geneva: Editions Université-Conservatoire de musique, 1997). The term “melodrama” has, of course, a variety of meanings. In a musicological context it designates a genre (or, later, a technique) in which speech alternates with or is simultaneous to a musical accompaniment. This is the sense in which I use it here. However, the term was not used in this form in the late eighteenth century, nor was its present-day Italian correlate, melologo. As the present study makes clear, and as others have shown in different contexts, a variety of understandings of Pygmalion’s genre coexisted in the late eighteenth century, and the work occasioned a variety of imitations. For these reasons, I will refer to individual works by the generic designations assigned to them by their authors, while considering the broader phenomenon of Pygmalion’s Italian reception under the rubric of melodrama. For a thorough history of the term, see Emilio Sala, “Mélodrame: Définitions et métamorphoses d’un genre quasi-opératique,” Revue de musicologie 84, no. 2 (1998): 235–246. 8. Quotations are from Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 351–352. 9. The genesis of Pygmalion is well known enough not to merit repeating here. Similarly, I will leave aside any exploration of what the play may be about, adding my own layer to what Paul De Man once called the work’s “distinguished tradition of misreading.” Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 176. Important sources not cited elsewhere in this chapter include Horace Coignet, “Particularités sur J. J. Rousseau pendant le séjour qu’il fit à Lyon en 1770,” in Oeuvres inédites de Rousseau, vol. 1, ed. V. D. de Musset-

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Pathay (Paris: Dupont, 1825), 461–472; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, ed. K. D. Mutter (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker, 1986), 533–534, 942; François Henri Joseph Castil-Blaze, Molière musicien. . . (Paris: Castil-Blaze, 1852), 423–426; J. L. Carr, “Pygmalion and the Philosophes: The Animated Statue in Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23, nos. 3/4 (1960): 239–255; S. M. Weber, “The Aesthetics of Rousseau’s ‘Pygmalion,’ ” MLN 83 (1968): 900–918; and Henriette Beese, “Galathée à l’origine des langues: Comments on Rousseau’s Pygmalion as a Lyric Drama,” MLN 93, no. 5 (1978): 839–851. 10. For a cogent analysis of Pygmalion‘s “style entrecoupé,” see Waeber, En musique dans le texte, 37–39. 11. One of these singers was the castrato Gaetano Guadagni, who studied with David Garrick and created the role of Orpheus in Calzabigi and Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. See Daniel Heartz, “From Garrick to Gluck: The Reform of Theatre and Opera in the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 94 (1967–68): 111–127. 12. During the 1760s and 1770s Pietro Metastasio often professed a growing interest in gestural acting. Jacques Joly, “Le didascalie per la recitazione nei drammi metastasiani,” in Dagli elisi all’inferno: Il melodramma tra Italia e Francia dal 1730 al 1850 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1990), 95–111. It is worth noting that the texts of opere serie can imply specific gestures: we may assume, for instance, that a character who refers to “this heart” (questo seno) will move a hand to his breast, while a character who claims to lack something might show her palms. See Strohm, Dramma per musica, 17, 224–226; and Dene Barnett and Jeanette Massy-Westropp, The Art of Gesture: The Practices and Principles of Eighteenth-Century Acting (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1987). 13. The first scholar to address the topic was Georges Becker, in Le Pygmalion de J.-J. Rousseau en Italie (Geneva: Zoellner, 1912). Several Italian studies of the past three decades have gone largely unnoticed by English- and Frenchlanguage musicologists. These include Giovanni Morelli and Elvidio Surian, “Pigmalione a Venezia,” in Venezia e il melodramma del Settecento, ed. Maria Teresa Muraro (Florence: Olschki, 1981), 147–168; Emilio Sala, “La carriera di Pigmalione: Ovvero, Nascita e prime metamorfosi del mélodrame,” in Pygmalion (1774)/Pimmalione (1790), Drammaturgia musicale veneta 22, ed. Sala, (Milan: Ricordi, 1996), ix–lxxvii; and, most recently, Lucio Tufano, “Teatro musicale e massoneria: Appunti sulla diffusione del melologo a Napoli (1773– 1792),” in Napoli 1799 fra storia e storiografia: Atti del convegno internazionale, Napoli, 21–24 gennaio 1999, ed. Anna Maria Rao (Naples: Vivarium, 2002), 597–631; and Tufano, “La ricezione italiana del melologo à la Rousseau e la Pandora di Alessandro Pepoli,” 125–140. 14. Bauman, North German Opera, 91–131. 15. Historians often quote the following portion of the “Lettre a M. Burney sur la musique, avec fragments d’observations sur l’Alceste italien de M. le Chevalier Gluck,” in which Rousseau ostensibly explained why he had written Pygmalion: “Persuaded that the French language, destitute of all accent, is not at all appropriate for Music, and principally for recitative, I have devised a genre of Drama in which the words and the music, instead of proceeding

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together, are made to be heard in succession, and in which the spoken phrase is in a way announced and prepared by the musical phrase” (Persuadé que la langue Françoise, destituée de tout accent, n’est nullement propre à la Musique et principalement au récitatif, j’ai imaginé un genre de Drame, dans lequel les paroles et la musique, au lieu de marcher ensemble, se font entendre successivement, et où la phrase parlée est en quelque sorte annoncée et préparée par la phrase musicale). “Lettre a M. Burney sur la musique, avec fragments d’observations sur l’Alceste italien de M. le Chevalier Gluck,” in Collection complète des œuvres de J. J. Rousseau (London [Geneva], 1782), 10:541–542. Translation is from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, trans. and ed. John T. Scott (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998), 497. However, the autograph extends only to “un genre de drame,” after which a copyist has written, “L’auteur allait parler de Pigmalion.” Thus, the passage presented in italics is of uncertain authorship. Waeber, En musique dans le texte, 36. 16. Ferdinando Galiani, Correspondance inédite de l’abbé Ferdinando Galiani (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1818), 2:15. 17. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Amsterdam: Rey, 1755); Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues où il est parlé de la mélodie et de l’imitation musicale (Geneva, 1781). In these works Rousseau was influenced first and foremost by Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connoissances humaines but perhaps also Giambattista Vico’s Principi di una scienza nuova intorno alla natura delle nazioni.  .  . . (Naples: Felice Mosca, 1725). The corpus of eighteenth-century theories of the origins of language also included important works in English by Bernard Mandeville (The Fable of the Bees [London, 1729]), John Brown (A Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions, of Poetry and Music [London, 1763]), and Lord James Burnett Monboddo (Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 6 vols. [Edinburgh, 1773–92]). 18. The influence of these ideas on musical debates beginning in the mid-1750s and the revival of the langage d’action within pantomime dance shortly thereafter are well known. See especially Rosenfeld, Revolution in Language, 57–85. 19. Horace Coignet, “Lettre sur le Pygmalion de M. J. J. Rousseau,” Mercure de France 2 (January 1771): 198–200, reprinted in Waeber, Pygmalion, 81–82. The letter was published in the Mercure de France alongside a complete edition of Pygmalion’s text. This version of the play formed the basis for all subsequent editions in the eighteenth century. Rousseau’s autograph of Pygmalion (currently housed in the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Neuchâtel) differs in many details from the text published in the Mercure de France. Scholars resistant to Coignet’s explanation of the work include Albert Jansen (Jean-Jacques Rousseau als Musiker [Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1884], 302), Jan van der Veen (Le mélodrame musical de Rousseau au romantisme: Ses aspects historiques et stylistiques [The Hague: M. Nihjoff, 1955], 26–7), Sala (“La carriera di Pigmalione,” xix–xx), and Waeber (En musique dans le texte, 26–7). 20. See, for instance, Daniel Brewer, The Enlightenment Past: Reconstructing Eighteenth-Century French Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 179–198.

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21. Kurzböck’s edition is reengraved, along with a brief historical introduction, in Georges Becker, ed., Pygmalion, par M. J.-J. Rousseau, publié d’après l’édition rarissime de Kurzböck, Vienne, 1772 (Geneva, 1872). The first pages of the French, German, and Italian editions are reproduced in facsimile in Sala, “La carriera di Pigmalione,” xxvii–xxxv. 22. On columnar and interlinear texts in early modern translation, see Timothy Billings, “Jesuit Fish in Chinese Nets: Athanasius Kircher and the Translation of the Nestorian Tablet,” Representations 87, no. 1 (2004): 1–42. 23. A French Pygmalion had appeared in Milan in 1771. For details on this, and a list of other Italian editions that is regrettably incomplete, Rota Ghibaudi, La fortuna di Rousseau in Italia, 320–323. 24. See also Lucio Tufano, “Francesco Saverio de’ Rogati (1745–1827): Poeta per musica,” Annali dell’Istituto italiano per gli studi storici 14 (1997): 345–93. 25. Quoted in Tufano, “Teatro musicale e massoneria,” 601. 26. In this classical design, de’ Rogati may have been influenced by Coignet’s account of Rousseau’s revivalist intent in the Mercure de France or Francesco Milizia’s plagiarized version of this account in Del teatro (Venice: Giambatista Pasquali, 1773), 48. 27. On conceptions of the “spirits” of French and Italian in the eighteenth century, see Paola Gambarota, Irresistible Signs: The Genius of Language and Italian National Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), esp. 59–98. 28. “Io mi sono studiato da mio parte di darne al pubblico un’esatta poetica traduzione . . . non mai allontanandomi dall’originale.” Francesco Saverio de’ Rogati, Pimmalione, cantata per musica del Signor Gio: Giacomo Rousseau, trasportata dal francese nell’idioma italiana (Naples, 1773), [2]. 29. “Vanity . . . human weakness . . . I cannot tire of admiring my work . . . I become intoxicated with self-love . . . I love myself through what I made . . . ” 30. Saverio Mattei, “La filosofia della musica o sia la riforma del teatro,” in Opere del Signor Abate Pietro Metastasio, vol. 3 (Naples, 1781), iii–xlvii. See also Michael F. Robinson, “The Aria in Opera Seria, 1725–1780,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 88 (1961–62): 31–43. 31. In addition to the famous preface to Gluck’s opera Alceste, see Francesco Algarotti, Saggio sopra l’opera in musica (n.p., 1755; rev. ed., Livorno: Coltellini, 1763); Cesare Baretti, “Opere drammatiche dell’abate Pietro Metastasio poeta cesareo,” La frusta letteraria 3 (November 1, 1763): 305–315; and Alessandro Pepoli, “Lettera ad un uomo ragionevole sul melodramma detto serio,” in Meleagro, tragedia per musica, preceduta da una lettera del medesimo sul melodramma detto serio (Venice: Curti, 1789), 3–52. These critiques and others of the period are summarized in Renato di Benedetto, “Poetics and Polemics,” in The History of Italian Opera, part 2, Systems, vol. 6, Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth, ed. Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, trans. Kate Singleton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 38–49. 32. Pepoli, “Lettera ad un uomo ragionevole,” ii. 33. “Non potrebbe figurarsi maggiore inverisimilitudine, che accompagnare, o preparare con un ritornello di stromenti, una declamazione dell’attore, che non canta, ma parla.” Rogati, Pigmalione, [2].

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34. “L’esattezza della comica, la vivacità, la passione del valentissimo attore, l’opportunità delle poche note musiche del signor Aspelmayer, a tempo con saviezza disposte, destavan negli ascoltanti un maggior diletto, che le ricercate, lunghe, e spesso noiose musiche de’ teatri presenti italiani.” Ibid. 35. “Il canto, presso a poco, non sia più lungo della declamazione Francese.” Ibid. 36. Charles Burney noted, after traveling throughout Western and Central Europe in the early 1770s, that Italian opera prevailed in all countries save France and that, even there, the Italianate music of composers such as A. E. M. Grétry had made substantial inroads in Paris. The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces (London: Becket, 1773), 1:54. Voltaire claimed that Metastasio’s libretti, benefiting from the supreme musicality of the Italian language, had impeded the development of an Italian tragedy. This assessment was repeated approvingly and often. See Andrea Chegai, L’esilio di Metastasio: Forme e riforme dello spettacolo d’opera fra sette e ottocento (Florence: Le lettere, 1998), 14. Voltaire’s remark was of a piece with his marginalizing support of Italian writers more broadly. See Gaspari, “L’Italia di Voltaire,” in Letteratura delle riforme, 21–34. 37. A facsimile of a libretto of Pygmalion printed for Grandi in Pisa in 1774 is included in the online collection of the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in Milan. At the time of writing, the catalog is accessible at www.urfm.braidense. it/cataloghi/searchrd.php. The collection lists Grandi’s 1774 libretto as Raccolta Drammatica 4742. Henceforth, libretti in this collection will be cited as Raccolta Drammatica plus their classification number. 38. The libretto’s front page reads, “Il Pigmalione del signor Gio. Giacomo Rousseau: scena lirica dedicata all’eccellentissima nobilità di Napoli da rappresentarsi in lingua francese in prosa nel Teatro de Fiorentini da Giacomo Ceolini, comico italiano.” 39. See Luigi Rasi, “Welenfeldt, Bonifazio,” in I comici italiani: Biografia, bibliografia, iconografia, vol. 2 (Florence: Bocca, 1905), 698. 40. On the improvisatory careers of Monti and Grandi, see Adolfo Bartoli, ed., Scenari inediti della commedia dell’arte: Contributo alla storia del teatro popolare italiano (Florence: Sansoni, 1880). 41. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Il Pimmalione . . . scena lirica da rappresentarsi in lingua francese nel Teatro di S. Samuele in Venezia (Venice: Graziosi, 1773), Raccolta Drammatica 4098. The libretto names no actors, and scholars have suggested that Grandi was its star. See Saverio Franchi and Orietta Sartori, Le impressioni sceniche: Dizionario bio-bibliografico degli editori e stampatori romani e laziali, di testi drammatici e libretti per musica dal 1579 al 1800, vol. 2, Integrazioni, aggiunte, tavole, indici (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2002), 117–118. 42. In 1771 Grandi had played the lead in an Italian production of Mercier’s Le déserteur, translated by Elisabetta Caminer Turra. A letter to Caminer Turra from Francesco Albergati records that Grandi had requested translations of plays by Voltaire (L’indiscret, 1725) and Boissy (Le françois à Londre, 1727), apparently for performances in Italian. Francesco Blanchetti, “ ‘Alto, alto, si sospenda/La sentenza è rivocata’: Parodia del dramma borghese nel Militare

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bizzarro di Giuseppe Sarti,” Nuova rivista musicale italiana 41, no. 1 (2007): 85–96. On the business of translation in late eighteenth-century Venice, see Caminer Turra, Selected Writings of an Eighteenth-Century Venetian Woman of Letters, ed. Catherine Sama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Caminer Turra’s friend Giulio Perini produced a verse translation of Rousseau’s Pygmalion for Grandi in 1777; this was published again nearly a decade later (Raccolta Drammatica 5938) and was given a musical setting in the late 1810s by Giuseppe Verdi’s teacher, Ferdinando Provesi. 43. The preface reads, “A different kind of genius is required to translate sublime matter from one language to another. To enter into the analysis of ideas, passions, sentiments, the concepts of a great man, and render all of this natural and clear in a different idiom is not a vulgar undertaking, as unfortunate custom would have us believe. Owing to incompetence, I am one of the many imperfect translators; but M. Rousseau may be certain at least that I understood the full merit in his work and that I put into the endeavor all the effort of which I was capable, as well as the desire to honour him and myself” (Vuolsi un ingegno ben altro per tradurre da una Lingua all’altra le cose sublime. Entrare nell’analisi delle idee, delle passioni, de’ sentimenti, de’ concetti d’un uomo grande, e ridurre tutto ciò naturale e chiaro in Idioma diverso, è impresa non tanto vulgare, come un infelice pratica l’ha fatto credere. Io sono per incapacità del numero degl’imperfetti Traduttori; ma può essere ben certo il Sig. Rousseau, che almeno ho conosciuto tutto il merito dell’Opera sua, e che vi ho messo tutto quello studio, che mi è stato possibile, accompagnato dal desiderio di onorare lui, e me stesso). Rousseau, Il Pimmalione, [i]. 44. L. B., Orfeo, scena lirica/Orphée, scène lyrique (Venice, 1774). The play is mentioned in Tufano, “La ricezione italiana del melologo,” 130, 137. See also Franchi and Sartori, Le impressioni sceniche, 117–118. 45. Taddeo Wiel, I teatri musicali veneziani del Settecento (Venice, 1897; reprinted in Leipzig by Peters, 1979), 303. Citations refer to the Peters edition. 46. Ibid. The French text reads, “Les silences sont remplis par une musique analogue à l’expression pantomime des acteurs.” 47. By pantomime dance I mean the Noverrian ballet d’action and the genres, such as the Italian danza parlante, that developed simultaneously in other theatrical traditions. On the rise of narrative theatrical dance see Hansell, “Theatrical Ballet and Italian Opera,” 198–252; and Edward Nye, Mime, Music and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: The Ballet d’Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 48. This score was misattributed to Rousseau by Edgar Istel and transcribed in Istel’s Studien zur Geschichte des Melodramas I: Jean-Jacques Rousseau als Komponist seiner Lyrischen Scene “Pygmalion” (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1901). I follow Sala in assuming this to be Asplmayr’s score for the Viennese Pygmalion of 1772 (the score is partially reproduced in Sala, “La carriera di Pigmalione,” lix–lxvi). 49. “Il jette avec dédain ses outils, s’agite, se promene, s’arrête, porte, malgré lui, ses regards vers le fond de son attelier, où le pavillon lui cache une statue, en detourne les yeux, et tombe dans une rêverie profonde.” Rousseau, Pygmalion, scène lyrique, 2.

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50. The ballet d’action reportedly divided the body in two, with the legs performing the steps and the upper body expressing sentiment. Rosenfeld, Revolution in Language, 64–65. 51. Robert Lamar Weaver and Norma Wright Weaver, A Chronology of Music in the Florentine Theatre, 1751–1800: Operas, Prologues, Farces, Intermezzos, Concerts, and Plays with Incidental Music (Detroit: Harmonie, 1993), 504. 52. LeFèvre’s pantomime on this theme was performed in 1785 at the San Carlo between the acts of Giovanni Paisiello’s Antigono. 53. Tufano, “La ricezione italiana del melologo,” 134. 54. Alessandro Pepoli, Ati e Cibele, favola odecoreutica (Venice: Curti, 1789), Raccolta Drammatica 5337. 55. Wiel, I teatri musicali veneziani, 437. Pepoli is also remembered for having declared himself the rival of the foremost Italian dramatist of the age, Vittorio Alfieri. For an informative, if fanciful, comparison of the two figures, see John Cam Hobhouse Broughton, Italy: Remarks Made in Several Visits from the Year 1816 to 1854 (London: Murray, 1861), 2:331–332. 56. Luigi Ferrari, ed., Le traduzioni italiane del teatro tragico francese nei secoli XVIIo e XVIIIo (Paris: É. Champion, 1925), esp. 279–280. 57. Pandora, favola lirica, was published in Alessandro Pepoli, Teatro del Conte Alessandro Pepoli (Venice: Palese, 1787), 2:227–256; both text and music are given in Raccolta Drammatica 5742. See also Tufano, “La ricezione italiana del melologo,” 134–139. 58. Rousseau, “De l’écriture,” in Œuvres Posthumes, vol. 3, Essai sur l’origine des langues (Geneva, 1781), 231–241. 59. “Intanto ecco, o Lettore, uno squarcio, che nell’Originale è mirabile.” Rousseau, Il Pimmalione, [2]. 60. See David Trippett, “Bayreuth in Miniature: Wagner and the Melodramatic Voice,” Musical Quarterly 95, no. 1 (2012): 71–138. 61. Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, trans. and ed. John T. Scott (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England), 497. 62. Rousseau admitted that his Pygmalion might offend sensitive listeners: “This union of the declamatory art with the musical art will produce all the effects of the true recitative only imperfectly, and delicate ears will always notice with displeasure the contrast that reigns between the language of the Actor and that of the Orchestra.” Ibid. 63. Joshua Steele, Prosodia Rationalis; or, An Essay towards Establishing the Melody and the Measure of Speech, to be Expressed and Perpetuated by Peculiar Symbols, 2nd ed. (London: Nichols, 1779). 64. Italics in original. Conveniently, Steele suggested that the “Attic plant” had been tended best by his own compatriots: “I had long entertained opinions concerning the melody and rhythmus of modern languages, and particularly of the English, which made me think that our theatrical recitals were capable of being accompanied with a bass, as those of the antient [sic] Greeks and Romans were.” Prosodia Rationalis, 1. 65. “To be or not to be” received another famous musical treatment at the hands of Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg, who overlaid a German transla-

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tion of Hamlet’s monologue to C. P. E. Bach’s Fantasia in C Minor, purportedly to demonstrate the compatibility of instrumental and verbal meanings. Tobias Plebuch, “Dark Fantasies and the Dawn of the Self: Gerstenberg’s Monologues for C. P. E. Bach’s C Minor Fantasia,” in C. P. E. Bach Studies, ed. Annette Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 25–66. 66. Steele, Prosodia Rationalis, 81. 67. Ibid., 38. 68. Ibid., xvi. 69. The triangles and double and triple dots beneath the syllables identify them as strong, weak, and weakest, respectively. 70. Quoted in Steele, Prosodia Rationalis, 91. The 1779 republication of Prosodia Rationalis was made timely by the death of Garrick that year. 71. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 599–600 (italics in original). 72. “Bow-wow” as used here was a colloquial term for onomatopoeic pronunciation; Friedrich Max Müller later used it to stand for all theories of language in the Rousseauian model. Lectures on the Science of Language (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861), 344–351. 73. Antonio Eximeno, Dell’origine e delle regole della musica, colla storia del suo progresso, decadenza, e rinnovazione (Rome, 1774; facsimile ed., Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1983), quotations from 1–16. This work is virtually unknown to modern musicologists; however, as it is readily available in facsimile, I do not supply the original language. 74. Ibid., 150. 75. Ibid., 409. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., 135. 78. Ibid. 79. “These gestures .  .  . proceeding naturally and without reflection from instinct, are extremely beautiful, and apt for pantomime dance, in which Italians have excelled over all nations since the Caesarian age.” Ibid., 411. As with the earliest human communications, these visual signs were specific enough that words could be omitted entirely. 80. Ibid., 411. 81. Arteaga, Rivoluzioni nel teatro musicale italiano, 1:xli. 82. Ibid., 3:196–197. 83. Ibid., 2:33–34. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid., 1:94. 87. Ibid., 2:251. 88. Pepoli, “Lettera ad un uomo ragionevole,” 22. 89. Ibid., viii, x, vi. 90. Antonio Sografi, Pimmalione, scena drammatica tratta dalla scena lirica di monsieur J. J. Rousseau per li signori Matteo Babini, e Carolina Pitrot . . . e posta in musica dal signor Gianbattista Cimador; Da rappresentarsi la sera di 16. Gennaro 1790 nel nobilissimo teatro di San Samuele (Venice, 1790),

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Raccolta Drammatica 4234. The libretto is reproduced in its entirety and the music is reproduced in facsimile in Emilio Sala, ed. Pygmalion (1774)/Pimmalione (1790), Drammaturgia musicale veneta 22 (Milan: Ricordi, 1996). The work’s peculiarities are noted in the thorough introductory essay to that volume: Sala, “La carriera di Pigmalione,” ix–lxxvii. 91. “In essa è ritenuta soltanto l’idea principale del celebre autore.” Sografi, Pimmalione, 3. 92. Guglielmo Barblan, “Un Cimador che divenne Cimarosa,” in Testimonianze, studi e ricerche in onore di Guido M. Gatti, ed. Giuseppe Vecchi (Bologna: Antiquae Musicae Italicae Studiosi, 1973), 202. 93. Sografi, Pimmalione, 6–7. [Pygmalion] sits, observing the statues and statue groups that surround him. You who surround me, Dear, enticing objects, Ah, you bring my thoughts Momentarily to calm.

He suddenly rises, walking around the scene agitatedly, Ah, in vain do I hope to find in you A comfort for my torment: I feel myself carried From fervor to fear.

He stops, and turns with great enthusiasm toward the [i.e., Galatea’s] pavilion. Only with you can my eyes Bring consolation to my soul.

94. For a succinct description of Italian opera’s two “times,” see Taruskin, Oxford History, 2:154. 95. “Getta con dispregio i suoi Strumenti; passeggia agitato, si ferma, e come a forza si rivolge verso il fondo, da cui tosto ritira lo sguardo, cadendo in una profonda meditazione.” Sografi, Pimmalione, 6. 96. “Per conoscere il sorprendente effetto di questo periglioso cimento, al quale esponevasi Babini eseguendo ne’ teatri il suo Pigmalione (cantata da lui voluta espressamente in quella forma), basterà chiederne chiunque lo ha udito da Lui a Venezia, a Bologna, a Londra, a Vienna, a Firenze, a Genova, a Parigi, ec. ec.” Pietro Brighenti, Elogio di Matteo Babini (Bologna: Annesio Nobili, 1822), 20. A full score was published in Vienna in 1791, and a later Viennese score published four arias. In 1797, the London firm of Corri, Dussek and Co. published Five Airs with Recitatives, and a Duett, Selected from the Opera of Pygmalion, by Cimador and Sografi; and Giuseppe Viganoni performed it that year at the King’s Theatre in London. 97. Raccolta Drammatica 4672. The libretto is anonymous, but Marcello di Capua is credited with writing the music. 98. “Al suono d’una dolce sinfonìa và lentamente svegliandosi, e spiega con attitudini proprie della sua circostanza la sorpresa, che gli cagiona la vista dei nuovi oggetti, che se gli presentano.”

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99. Giorgio Pestelli noted this passage as an example of “humble actions without words that are completely new to the courtly and literary tradition of Italian opera.” The Age of Mozart and Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 200–201. 100. Raccolta Drammatica 4744. 101. The portrait is reproduced as a frontispiece in Piero Weiss, ed., Francesco Bianchi, La morte di Cesare (1789), 2 vols., Drammaturgia musicale veneta 25 (Milan: Ricordi, 1999). 102. Brighenti, Elogio di Matteo Babini, 20. 103. We should not assume that this preference was the result of a lack of ease with more difficult singing. Given the regularity with which Babini took over roles written for the flashier tenor Giacomo David—including the central part in Pepoli and Paisiello’s I giuochi d’Agrigento—he must have been fully capable of singing longer arias and more demanding coloratura. On Sertor and Bianchi’s La morte di Cesare, see Martha Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 431–434. 104. “Canto . . . diretto da una filosifica economia.” Pepoli, “Lettera ad un uomo ragionevole,” 43. 105. Raccolta Drammatica 4601. The music for Pietro il Grande was again by Rossi. 106. McClymonds, “The Venetian Role in the Transformation of Italian Opera Seria during the 1790s,” 389–434. 107. “Se alla patria ognor donai” (Gli orazi, act 1, scene 6) is scored for tenor, chorus, and orchestra. It is reproduced in facsimile in Maria Giovanna Miggiani, ed., Marco Portogallo, Gli Orazi e i Curiazi, 2 vols., Drammaturgia musicale veneta 29 (Milan: Ricordi, 2003). 108. See, for instance, “Germe d’illustre eroi” in act 1, scene 5. 109. Giovanni Simone Mayr, L’amor coniugale di Gaetano Rossi, da un drama di Jean Nicholas Bouilly, reconstruction and revision by Arrigo Gazzaniga (Bergamo: Monumenta Bergomensia, 1968). Beethoven’s Fidelio (1805) used Joseph von Sonnleithner’s adaptation of Bouilly’s play. 110. Cimador’s first opera, Saffo, ossia i riti d’Apollo Leucadio, had a libretto by Sografi. It premiered at La Fenice in February 1794; Babini sang one of the principal roles. 111. Raccolta Drammatica 4923. 112. Mayr, L’amor coniugale, 223–273. 113. During the lyric portion, Zeliska’s stage directions are as follows: “Alterandosi nel trasporto della passione, e del timore .  .  . delira .  .  . come vedessi trucidare lo sposo . . . toccandosi il cuore . . . resta muta, concentrata, desolatissima. Si scuota poi con tutta forza . . . si sente suonare le 4 ore. Essa le numera colle dita . . . colla maggiore, e più viva espressione d’ansietà, d’amore, di speranza, di piacere . . . con trasporto.” 114. In this scene, Antinoo, king of Thebes, discovers from the Sibylline oracle that Adrasto is his son. When the opera had its premiere at La Scala in 1801, the roles of father and son were created by Giacomo David and Babini, respectively. Tacchinardi’s performance took place in November 1818 at the San Benedetto in Venice.

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115. See, for instance, Emanuele Senici, Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to Puccini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 153–161. 116. The libretto is by Giuseppe Bardari after Friedrich Schiller’s Maria Stuart. Gaetano Donizetti, Maria Stuarda: Tragedia lirica in due atti, critical edition ed. Anders Wiklund (Milan: Ricordi, 1991). 117. Ibid., 67–68. 118. Ibid., 288. 119. Ibid., 381–382. 120. Bellini probably knew Cimador’s scene either from Giovanni David, whose revival occurred the year Bellini arrived in Naples, or from the multiple manuscript copies of Pimmalione housed in the library of that city’s conservatory. 121. See Melina Esse, “Speaking and Sighing: Bellini’s canto declamato and the Poetics of Restraint,” Current Musicology 87 (Spring 2009): 7–45. 122. John Rosselli, The Life of Bellini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 48. 123. After a brief pause he extends his hands to the sky, and says, Merciful heavens, lenient heavens Give to her my own days; If I may die for her I do not fear to die . . .

124. He is interrupted by a sweet harmony, which is heard around the statue of Galatea. What heavenly sounds! What sweet harmony Enchants my soul! . . . Yes, yes, I hear you, Beautiful Goddess of Love, it is you, it is you, Who takes pity on me. The sound precedes and accompanies the following words. To a sweet repose, At last merciful, Love invites me. What peace! . . . What calm! . . . Descends to my soul . . . I feel it in my heart.

125. “Malheureusement jettant mes projets du côté de mes goûts, je m’obstinois à chercher follement ma fortune dans la musique, & sentant naître des idées & des chants dans ma tête, je crus qu’aussi-tôt que je serois en état d’en tirer parti j’allois devenir un homme célèbre, un Orphée moderne dont les sons devoient attirer tout l’argent du Pérou.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres posthumes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. 9, Les confessions (Neuchatel: Samuel Fauche, 1782), 57–58. 126. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, ed. and trans. Eric A. Blackall, vol. 9 of Goethe: The Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989; originally published as Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [Berlin: Unger, 1795–96]), 72–74.

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127. Smart, Mimomania, 1. 128. Brighenti, Elogio di Matteo Babini, 20–23.

chapter 3 1. Alessandro Verri, Le notti romane, 2 vols. (Paris: LeFevre, 1820; first published in Rome, 1804), 2:88–89. Citations refer to the LeFevre edition. Translations are my own, sometimes in consultation with Henry Hilliard’s translation of the book (Alessandro Verri, Roman Nights; or, the Tomb of the Scipios, translated with notes and an introduction by Henry W. Hilliard, 2 vols. [Philadelphia: Ball, 1850]). 2. Verri, Le notti romane, 2:88–89. Page numbers henceforth given in main text. 3. For a recent reconsideration of Verri’s Le avventure di Saffo poetessa di Mitilene (1782), see Clorinda Donato, “Unqueering Sappho and Effeminizing the Author in Early Modern Italy: Alessandro Verri’s Le Avventure di Saffo, Poetessa di Mitelene and the Defense of Woman Poets in Arcadia,” in Developments in the Histories of Sexualities: In Search of the Normal, 1600–1800, ed. Chris Mounsey (Lewisberg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 91–124. Letter from Pietro to Alessandro quoted on p. 115. 4. James T. S. Wheelock, “Verri’s Notti romane: A New Edition and Some Old Translations,” Italica 46, no. 1 (1969): 58–68. 5. Benedetto Sanguineti, Le notti romane al sepolcro de’ Scipioni, recata in rima (Chiavari: Pila, 1803). 6. For recent musicological considerations of this nexus of nationhood and folk music, see Philip V. Bohlman, The Music of European Nationalism: Cultural Identity and Modern History (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2004), esp. 35–39; Gundula Kreuzer, Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 14–29; and John Deathridge, “The Invention of German Music, c. 1800,” in Unity and Diversity in European Culture c. 1800, ed. Tim Blanning and Hagen Schulze (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 35–60. 7. Madame de Staël, Corinne, ou L’Italie (Paris, 1807), translated by Sylvia Raphael as Corinne, or Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Citations refer to the Oxford University Press edition. Page numbers henceforth given in main text. On Staël’s science of nations, see, for instance, John Claiborne Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Staël’s “De l’Allemagne” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For recent considerations of her importance in shaping perceptions of Italy, see Robert Casillo, The Empire of Stereotypes: Germaine de Staël and the Idea of Italy (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006); and Maria Schoina, Romantic “Anglo-Italians”: Configurations of Identity in Byron, the Shelleys, and the Pisan Circle (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 50–55. The similarities between Corrine and Le notti romane are striking—yet although the two novels are often mentioned in the same breath, scholars have not pursued a more detailed comparison. After all, while Corinne’s reputation has suffered in recent decades—Staël’s biographer, J. Christopher Herold, famously called it the “worst great novel ever written”—Le notti

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romane has virtually disappeared from view, and even the publication of a lost third volume in the 1960s did little to improve matters. See Herold, Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Stael [sic] (New York: Grove, 1958), 312. A complete edition of Verri, Le notti romane, including a rejected introduction and the unpublished volume 3, was prepared by Renzo Negri (Bari: G. Laterza, 1967). See also Negri, “La terza parte delle Notti romane di Alessandro Verri,” Aevum 37, nos. 3/4 (May–August 1963): 298–334. 8. This character was recently the point of departure for Melina Esse’s study on operatic authorship in the mid-nineteenth century. See Esse, “Encountering the Improvvisatrice in Italian Opera,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 709–770. 9. On Rousseau’s and other philosophers’ influence on Staël’s novel, see Franco Piperno, “Corinne ou la musique d’Italie (mito, realtà, invenzione letteraria),” in Corinne e l’Italia di Mme de Staël: Atti del convegno internazionale, Roma, 13–15 novembre 2008, ed. Beatrice Alfonzetti and Novella Bellucci (Roma: Bulzoni, 2010), 141–164. 10. Hegelian plasticity has been the subject of an important series of recent studies by Catherine Malabou. See Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, trans. Carolyn Shread (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 11. The original reads: “Divenne lieto a queste parole M. Tullio, nè più in lui appariva squallore di morte, ma fatto immagine viva, mi guardò così vicino, che quasi io sentiva l’alito delle sue parole.” 12. Verri’s use of immagine to mean “statue” is unusual but consistent, Hilliard noted. This usage is cataloged in Francesco Milizia’s Dizionario delle belle arti: “Immagine was said by Petrarch to mean that which was made by Pygmalion” (Immagine vien detta dal Petrarca quella fabbricata da Pimmalione). Opere complete di Francesco Milizia risguardanti le belle arti, vol. 3 (Bologna: Cardinali e Frulli, 1828), 101. 13. Charles Isidore Hemans, Historic and Monumental Rome: A Handbook for the Students of Classical and Christian Antiquity in the Italian Capital (London: Williams and Norgate, 1874), 30–31. 14. The Italian reads: “Or vi sia noto che quando cadde la vostra come gigante infermo, giacque l’Italia oppressa.” 15. Wheelock characterized this 120-page work as a “bizarre false start” and “an exhaustive parody of the very ideals—both literary and historical— presented by the final trilogy of the Notti. He described its style as “a painfully distended aberration of ‘erudite’ prose, bristling with inflated connectives, Parinian circumlocutions .  .  . and antiqued spellings .  .  . often framed in an inverted syntax that is a caricature of Latin constructions.” Wheelock, “Verri’s Notti romane,” 61–62. 16. On archeology and the papacy during these decades, see Carolyn Springer, The Marble Wilderness: Ruins and Representation in Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), esp. 21–38, where Springer elucidates the local ideological and literary contexts for Le notti romane, though she does not consider the novel at length. The present book does not engage

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with the novel’s stance on the Catholic Church, and I refer interested readers to Springer’s study. However, while there is ample evidence for Springer’s suggestion that the novel “evolved into a genuine panegyric of Pius VI” (5), I would suggest that while the narrator does supply such a panegyric, the novel’s position vis-à-vis the narrator’s arguments is ambivalent, and (as argued in the main text) the Italian empire he describes is not coextensive with that of the Church. 17. Alessandro Verri wrote in 1767: “This beautiful land of the Scipios is in constant dread of dying from hunger.” Hanns Gross, Rome in the Age of Enlightenment: The Post-Tridentine Syndrome and the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 175, see also 184. For Verri’s account of the English servant-turned-antiques-dealer Thomas Jenkins, see pp. 312–313. 18. Ibid., 312–313. 19. “Udii un flebile mormorio uscire dal profondo, composto di suoni inarticolati con lenta cantilena. Parea vento che frema nelle valli.” Verri, Le notti romane, 1: 11. 20. This passage is given a detailed consideration in Esse, “Encountering the improvvisatrice,” 751. 21. Giuseppe Giannini, Della natura delle febbri e del miglior metodo di curarle (Milan: Pirotta e Maspero, 1805–9), 2:111–113. 22. Angela Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 10–12. 23. “The Niobe of nations! There she stands, / Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe; . . . The Scipios’ tomb contains no ashes now / The very sepulchres lie tenantless / Of their heroic dwellers; dost thou flow, / Old Tiber! through a marble wilderness?” Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 4, stanza 79. As discussed in the introduction to the present volume, Jacques Rancière recently made a compelling argument for the centrality of the Belvedere Torso—and, more particularly, Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s admiration thereof—to the evolution of modern aesthetic thought. See Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Régime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London: Verso, 2013), 1–20. 24. Isbell, European Romanticism, esp. 1–9. 25. Tili Boon Cuillé has argued that Corinne’s extended musical performances function as tableaux, a narrative genre she traces backward to Diderot. Uniting this interpretation with the concerns of the present study, we might imagine that just as Corinne’s musical voice seems to bring her plastic nature into focus, her extended musical performances temporarily lend the novel the qualities of a picture or series of pictures. See Cuillé, Narrative Interludes: Musical Tableaux in Eighteenth-Century French Texts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 173–203. 26. George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Penguin Classics, 1994; first published 1871–72). The following citations are from the Penguin Classics edition. Dorothea is described by Naumann on p. 190. She seems to be “turned to marble” on p. 219, and she is “like a statue” on p. 634. Her musical voice is noted on p. 47. 27. “When all public authorities are so disorganized, it is quite natural that women should acquire a great ascendency over men.” Staël, Corinne, 101.

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28. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 2:709, 719. These lectures were delivered in Heidelberg and Berlin in the late 1810s and the 1820s. They were first compiled and published in 1835 as Vorlesung über die Aesthetik. 29. Malabou, Future of Hegel, 10–11. 30. Ibid. 31. Badiou identifies a “Second Wagner” in Five Lessons on Wagner, trans. Susan Spitzer (Verso, 2010), 83. 32. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Bamberg and Würzburg: Joseph Anton Goebhardt, 1807); I have consulted the translation entitled Phenomenology of Mind, trans. with an introduction and notes by J. B. Baillie (Mineola, NY: Dover Philosophical Classics, 2003), 4. Page numbers refer to the translation. 33. See Joshua Foa Dienstag, “Building the Temple of Memory: Hegel’s Aesthetic Narrative of History,” Review of Politics 56, no. 4 (1994): 697–726; and Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), xx. 34. James Davies, “Voice Belongs,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 68 no. 3 (Fall 2015): 681. 35. Nina Sun Eidsheim, “Voice as a Technology of Selfhood: Towards an Analysis of Racialized Timbre and Vocal Performance” (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2008). 36. Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 46–47. 37. Ibid. 38. In a note, Staël asserted that “the name of Corinne should not be confused with that of Corilla, an Italian improviser, of whom everyone has heard” (Corinne, 408). Esterhammer writes convincingly on the disingenuousness of this attempted disentanglement, which served to bring Corilla to the attention of Staël’s readers. See Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 83. 39. A substantial literature on Corilla Olimpica has appeared in the past decade and a half. In addition to the literature cited above and below, see Luciana Morelli, ed., Il carteggio tra Amaduzzi e Corilla Olimpica, 1775–1792, with a preface by Enza Biagini and Simonetta Merendoni (Florence: Olschki, 2000); and Moreno Fabbri, ed., Corilla Olimpica e la poesia del Settecento europeo (Pistoia: Maschietto, 2002). Among the Italian celebrations of Corilla is a biography by Alessandro Ademollo: Corilla Olimpica (Florence: Ademollo, 1888). 40. Fabbri, Corilla Olimpica, 96–97. 41. Esse, “Encountering the Improvvisatrice,” 751–754. 42. On this point, see also Orianne Smith, Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786–1826 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 81–88. 43. The full title reads: Inno in occasione della venuta delle vittoriose truppe austriache da cantarsi in Toscana sull’aria detta della Corilla. See Fabbri, Corilla Olimpica, 96–97. 44. Burney gives Metastasio’s own music for this poem, along with an English translation, in Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Abate Metastasio (London: Robinson, 1796), 1:128–132.

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45. Giovanni Antonio Sasso, “Giacinta Canonici,” ink print (Milan: Ricordi, ca. 1815). 46. Esse, “Encountering the Improvvisatrice,” 719. 47. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 72.

chapter 4 1. Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles, à l’usage de ceux qui voient (London [Paris]: 1749); Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et les muets, à l’usage de ceux qui entendent et qui parlent (n.p., 1751). 2. Condillac followed a long tradition in distinguishing smell and taste as the weakest senses. In most hierarchies, touch was third and was often even grouped with smell and taste as one of the lower or “animal” senses. See Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), especially 17–38. 3. A broad and sincere disclaimer is required here, and I ask the readers to hold it in mind for the remainder of this chapter. The views described on the conditions and qualities of the blind, deaf, and mute are emphatically not my own or those of my publisher. My research largely concerns these states of being as they were imagined, often ungenerously, by past thinkers within the context of a history of aesthetic thought. This chapter deals little with the conditions of the historical blind and deaf and even less with the concerns of the field of disability studies. A seminal work at the intersection of disability studies and music is the excellent monograph by Joseph Straus, Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). For a thoughtful consideration of blindness as a social phenomenon, see the work of Rod Michalko, especially The Two-in-One: Walking with Smokie, Walking with Blindness (Philadelphia: Temple, 1999). 4. See Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “Pompadour’s Touch: Differences in Representation,” Representations 73, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 54–88. 5. The scene is from Apollodorus, who explains that Deucalion was Prometheus’s son. He writes: “That was how people came to be called laoi, by metaphor from the word laas, a stone.” Apollodorus, The Library of Greek Mythology, trans. Robin Hard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 36–37. 6. Giuseppe Paracca, “Deucalione e Pirra,” entr’acte pantomime for Axur re d’Ormus: Dramma tragicomico, by Antonio Salieri (Milan: Bianchi, 1797), 59–70. 7. In Rameau’s one-act opera, with a libretto by Ballot de Savot after Antoine Houdar de Lamotte (1700), the statue is led by the Graces through the steps of two gavottes, a minuet, a chaconne, a loure, a passepied, a rigaudon, a sarabande, and finally a tambourin. Lamotte’s Pygmalion was part of the five-act Triomphe des Arts, with music originally by Michel de la Barre. 8. Prometheus was, of course, an important figure in German and English Romantic literature. See especially David Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 287–345. While Wellbery’s interpretation of Goethe’s Prometheus as a figure for the artist is of obvious relevance here, he

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(like Shelley’s Prometheus) was, above all, a rebel suffering punishment; these Romantics placed little emphasis on Prometheus as sculptor. 9. Salvatore Viganò, Prometeo: Ballo mitologico (Milan: Classici italiani, 1813), 18. 10. Troilo Malipiero, Prometeo, ossia la prodigiosa civilizzazione delle genti (Venice: Vitarelli, 1814), 8. The preface claims that this “azione mitologica” was performed twelve times between late January and early February 1814 but gives no details regarding venue or performers. A footnote indicates that the “analogous music” for this play was by one Maestro Bolaffi and that it was well received (24). I have not been able to find this score, but the composer was probably the Florentine Michele Bolaffi (1768–1842), a translator and musician who was active in northern Italy during this time. On his career, see Vivian Beth Mann, ed., Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 238–239. 11. Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class, and Political Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), esp. 68–89; Daniel K. L. Chua, “Beethoven’s Other Humanism,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 62, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 571–645. 12. The plastic body in my narrative has something in common with Foucault’s notion of the docile body; particularly relevant for my study is Foucault’s model of the hierarchies that oversee and promote this docility. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1975), 135–69. Yet there are key differences in this model, most important of which are the materiality of the statue-brethren, the images of animacy, and the aesthetic formulas for social refinement. 13. On the phenomenon of the “shock tutti,” see John Platoff, “Musical and Dramatic Structure in the Opera Buffa Finale,” Journal of Musicology 7, no. 2 (1989): 191–230. 14. This indexing of medium decimates any fourth wall, which had become a precondition for spectatorial engagement in opera, as in other fine arts, during the second half of the eighteenth century. See, for instance, Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). For theories of absorption within French-influenced Italian opera, see Castelvecchi, “From Nina to Nina.” 15. [Pietro Lichtenthal,] “Nachrichten—Mailand,” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 15, August 4, 1813: 514–519. Mary Ann Smart draws on Lichtenthal’s account in her consideration of Viganò’s two Prometheus ballets: “Beethoven Dances: Prometheus and his Creatures in Vienna and Milan,” in The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography, Analysis, Criticism, edited by Nicholas Mathew and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 210–235. 16. Christofano Sarti, L’ottica della natura e dell’educazione indirizzata a risolvere il famoso problema di Molineux, opera del D. Cristofano Sarti, Pubblico Professore nell’Università di Pisa (Lucca: Bonsignori, 1792). 17. Ibid., 9. 18. Ibid., xvi.

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19. William Molyneux originally posed the question to John Locke, who reproduced it in the second edition of his Essay on Human Understanding (1694). Though Condillac was his primary influence, Sarti drew heavily on George Berkeley’s theory of vision and on William Cheselden’s 1728 account of a blind man given sight through cataract surgery. 20. On the interrelatedness of touch, sight, and creativity, see Juhani Pallasmaa, The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture (Chichester: Wiley, 2009). 21. Quotation is from Condillac, Treatise on the Sensations, 60. 22. Diderot, “Lettre sur les aveugles,” 102–104. 23. Sarti, L’Ottica, 153. 24. Camillo Federici was the pseudonym of the Piedmontese actor and playwright Giovanni Battista Viassolo (1749–1802), one of the most famous Italian dramatists of the end of the eighteenth century. Active in and around Venice during the 1790s, he is often described as a Jacobin and named in the same breath as Antonio Sografi (who is perhaps better deserving of the title). He also wrote one of the first Italian-language melodramas in the Rousseauian model, Il Meleagro, melo-dramma in tre atti di Cammillo Federici torinese (Turin: Giuseppe Davico, 1788). Federici published a collection of eight plays, including Lo scultore ed il cieco and La cieca nata, both of which can be found in his Opere teatrali edite e inedite di Camillo Federici (Padua: Penada, 1802). References are to act and scene of this edition. Lo scultore ed il cieco was republished in 1818 and 1831. A biography and assessment of Federici may be found in Camillo Ugoni, Della letteratura italiana nella seconda metà del secolo XVIII, vol. 2 (Milano: Tip. di G. Bernardoni, 1856–57), 437–495. 25. Federici, Lo scultore ed il cieco, act 4, scene 2. 26. Gaspard Spontini, Milton (opera in one act), libretto by Étienne de Jouy and Michel Dieulafoy, Italian trans. Luigi Balocchi (Paris: Erard, ca. 1805). Spontini’s librettists took considerable liberties with Milton’s life story. He had three daughters assisting him in his illness; none of them married, and their relationship with their father was less harmonious than the opera suggests. 27. “Il fresco aer spirante ambrati odori, il canto degl’augelli, ed il soave ardor del sol hanno nella mia mente sublimi idee destato; amata figlia, vivo coll’arpe armonico sostiene l’animatore foco che divampar mi sento in core.” Spontini, Milton, 155. 28. See, for instance, Gasparo Angiolini’s prefaces to the Viennese ballets Don Juan (1761), Citera assediata (1762), and Semiramide (1765). The notion of media as extensions of human senses or faculties comes originally from Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). For a reformulation of the concept in light of more recent work, see W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, introduction to Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), vii-xxii. 29. Federici, Le cieca nata, act 1, scene 2. 30. Sarti, L’Ottica, 102. 31. Jörg Jewanski has dated the first reported case of synesthesia to Georg Tobias Ludwig Sachs in 1812; the term itself was coined in the 1890s by the American psychologist Mary Whiton Calkins. See Jewanski, “Synaesthesia in

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the Nineteenth Century: Scientific Origins,” in The Oxford Handbook of Synaesthesia, ed. Julia Simner and Edward Hubbard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 369–398. On the ocular harpsichord and “visual music,” see Cretien van Campen, “Visual Music and Musical Paintings: The Quest for Synaesthesia in the Arts,” in Art and the Senses, ed. Francesca Bacchi, David Melcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 495–513; and Thomas Leroy Hankins and Robert Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 72–85. 32. The 1772 “Addition” to the Lettre sur les aveugles may be found in English translation in Denis Diderot, Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works, translated by Margaret Jourdain with an introduction by Jules P. Seigel (New York: AMS, 1973). 33. Ibid., 155. 34. Ibid., 153. 35. This phrase (in the original: “i limitari della metafisica moderna”) is from an unsigned review of Giulio Mancini’s “optic-metaphysical book,” which was written in response to Sarti, L’Ottica della natura. “Apologia dell’occhio diretta al sig. dott. Cristofano Sarti . . . Opera ottica-metafisica,” Memorie per servire alla storia letteraria e civile, January 1796, 64–65. 36. Federici, La cieca nata, act 1, scene 2. 37. Ibid., act 2, scene 2. 38. Ibid., act 1, scene 1. 39. Ibid., act 1, scene 10; act 2, scene 10; act 5, scene 2. 40. See Richard Will, The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 41. Spontini, Milton, 155. 42. On the category of the musical absolute, see Roger Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture (New York: Methuen, 1983), 43–55. 43. Diderot, Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works, 148–149. 44. E. T. A. Hoffmann, review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, in ETA Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: “Kreisleriana,” “The Poet and the Composer”; Music Criticism, ed. David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 238. Also of note in this review are the terms Hoffmann used to dismiss program music, which condemn “sculptural” uses of music and Dittersdorf’s metamorphic symphonies as being amongst the greatest offenses to the purity of the art: “How dimly was this peculiar nature of music perceived by those instrumental composers who tried to represent such circumscribed sensations or even events, and thus to treat sculpturally the art most utterly opposed to sculpture!” (237). 45. Antonio Catellacci, review of Astley Cooper, “Observations on the Effects, which Follow Destruction of the Membra Tympani,” Nuovo giornale dei letterati 9 (1804), 62–63. 46. “Notizie milanesi,” Giornale euganeo di scienze, lettere ed arti 6 (1846): 569–571. 47. The vOICe (“Oh I see!”) was designed by Peter Meijer in 1983. It consists of a digital camera, which scans from left to right, and stereo speakers,

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which preserve the left-to-right orientation. Images are “translated” into sound via a computer. See, for instance, J. Kevin O’Regan, Why Red Doesn’t Sound Like a Bell: Understanding the Feel of Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 141–142. Meijer’s website may be found at www.seeingwithsound.com. 48. The work that Kierkegaard seeks to hear “visually” or synchronically is Mozart’s Don Giovanni. See Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 121. 49. Richard Wagner, “Beethoven,” in Actors and Singers, translated W. Ashton Ellis (Bison, 1995; reprint of Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, vol. 5, London, 1896), 74–75. 50. Though the computational model of the brain was first proposed in the 1940s, its definitive statement may be found in Zenon W. Pylyshyn’s Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation of Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984). For a recent example, see, for instance, David Sterratt, Bruce Graham, Andrew Gillies, and David Willshaw, eds., Principles of Computational Modelling in Neuroscience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). For a history of neurological models, see John G. Daugman, “Brain Metaphor and Brain Theory,” in Computational Neuroscience, ed. Eric L. Schwartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 9–18. 51. Aimee Arnoldussen and Donald C. Fletcher, “Visual Perception for the Blind: the BrainPort Vision Device,” Retinal Physician 9 (January 2012), 32–34; Douglas Blackiston and Michael Levin, “Ectopic Eyes outside the Head in Xenopus Tadpoles Provide Sensory Data for Light-Mediated Learning,” Journal of Experimental Biology 216 (February 2013): 1031–1040. 52. John J. Reiser, Daniel H. Ashmead, Ford Ebner, and Anne L. Corn, eds., Blindness and Brain Plasticity in Navigation and Object Perception (New York: Taylor and Frances, 2008). 53. See, for instance, Ruth Herbert, Everyday Music Listening: Absorption, Dissociation, and Trancing (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), esp. 71–72; and Susan Hallam, “Music Education: The Role of Affect,” in Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications, ed. Patrick N. Juslin and John Sloboda (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

chapter 5 1. Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy (London: Becket, 1771), 3–4. 2. The most comprehensive book on James Graham and the Temple of Health is Lydia Syson’s Doctor of Love: James Graham and His Celestial Bed (Richmond, VA: Alma, 2008). See also Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978), 82–83; Roy Porter, Health for Sale: Quackery in England, 1660–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 161–162. 3. Quoted in Syson, Doctor of Love, 6. 4. Ibid.

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5. In the second location, opened in 1782, “harmonious strains of wind instruments” were wafted through hidden openings, and the electrical apparatus gave off sparks that were reflected by mirrors and chandeliers. Graham lectured, with musical preludes and postludes delivered by reigning Hebe (Altick, Shows of London, 83). 6. Denton’s mechanical ingenuity led him from musical automata and medical quackery into counterfeiting; he was executed in front of Newgate prison on July 1, 1789. An account of his life and death may be found in a sensational pamphlet by the lawyers William Baldwin and Andrew Knapp, whose colorful title merits full quotation: The Newgate Calendar; Comprising Interesting Memoirs of the Most Notorious Characters Who Have Been Convicted of Outrages on the Laws of England since the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, with Occasional Anecdotes and Observations, Speeches, Confessions, and Last Exclamations of Sufferers (London: Robins, 1825) 3:150–151. 7. Graham provided a succinct summary of his methods in a pamphlet entitled The Guardian Goddess of Health; or, The Whole Art of Preventing and Curing Diseases and of Enjoying Peace and Happiness of Body and of Mind to the Longest Possible Period of Human Existence; With Precepts for the Preservation and Exaltation of Personal Beauty and Loveliness; To Which Is Added, an Account of the Composition, Preparation, and Properties of the Three Great Medicines Prepared and Dispensed at the Temple of Health, Adelphi, and at the Temple of Hymen, Pall-Mall, London (London, 1780). The “universal Pabulum” is described on p. 31. 8. In this image, Graham—positioned on a gaming table—faces off with an opponent in electric medicine, the Prussian Katerfelto. Graham says, “That round Vigour! that full-toned juvenile Virility which Speaks so cordially and so Effectually home to the Female Heart, Conciliating its Favour & Friendship, and rivetting its Intensest Affections away thou German Maggot killer, thy Fame is not to be Compar’d to mine.” Katerfelto replies, “Dare you was see de Vonders of the Varld, which make de hair Stand on tiptoe, Dare you was see mine Tumb and mine findgar, Fire from mine findger and Feaders on mine Tumb—dare you was see de Gun Fire viddout Ball or powder, dare you was see de Devil at mine A—e—O Vonders! Vonders! Vonderfull Vonders!” 9. The entertainment is described in full in Graham, Guardian Goddess of Health, 39. 10. For a succinct introduction to eighteenth-century advances in electrical science, see Patricia Fara, An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); and James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 11. Encyclopædia Perthensis; or, Universal Dictionary of the Arts, Sciences, Literature, &c, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: J. Brown, 1816), 8:226–227. 12. Ibid. 13. “The Thaumatrope,” London Mechanics’ Register 25 (April 16, 1825): 397. This kind of play was frequently ambivalent toward what we would consider progressive politics, a fact that is worth remembering when we are tempted

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to identify nascent electric and animative technologies consistently with political “progress” and encroaching modernity. 14. Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues, 100–101. 15. Rousseau called simply for “calm flutes” followed by tentative movements from the statue and a few brief but telling first words: “Me . . . / (touches herself) / This is me . . . / ( . . . touches another statue) This is not me. / . . . (Galatea puts her hand on [Pygmalion]) . . . Ah! Me again.” The reference here is clear: the dea ex machina is supplanted by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, the radical empiricist from Grenoble, with Galatea his ventriloquist. In the relevant passage from Condillac’s Traité, when a statue is brought to life it begins to speak thus: “This is me . . . [the statue] continues to touch itself . . . This is me; this is also me.” Condillac’s statue extends its hand and touches bodies other than its own, realizing their otherness when the “me” in its hand does not encounter a “me” in its object: “If the hand says me, it doesn’t receive the same response.” Condillac, Traité des sensations, 241–246. 16. German translation used by Georg Anton Benda, reproduced in the liner notes of Naxos recording of J. A. Benda: Ariadne auf Naxos/Pygmalion, Naxos 8.553345, recorded 1994, p. 23. 17. “Ho imitato qui G.  G. Rousseau come in tutte le azioni in cui ella [Galatea] ripete questa parola affermativamente e negativamente. Questa espressione è sì semplice, sì naturale e dipinge con tante verità la situazione di Galatea, che ne credo infallibile l’effetto tanto nella pantomima quanto nel discorso.” Quoted in Lucio Tufano, “Un melologo inedito di Francesco Saverio Salfi: Medea,” in Salfi librettista, ed. Francesco Paolo Russo (Vibo Valentia: Monteleone, 2001), 104. 18. Galvani’s experiments and his rivalry with Alessandro Volta were the subjects of a classic study in the history of science: Marcello Pera, The Ambiguous Frog: The Galvani-Volta Controversy on Animal Electricity, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). See also Vincenzo Ferrone, I profeti dell’illuminismo: Le metamorfosi della ragione nel tardo Settecento italiano (Rome: Laterza, 1989); and Walter Bernardi, “The Controversy on Animal Electricity in Eighteenth-Century Italy: Galvani, Volta, and Others,” in Nova Voltiana: Studies on Voltaire and His Times, ed. Fabio Bevilacqua and Lucio Fregonese (Milan: Hoepli, 2000), 101–114. 19. Quoted in Pera, Ambiguous Frog, 67. 20. Letter from Bernardino Ferrari to Sebastiano Canterzani, dated September 14, 1792, quoted in Bernardi, “Animal Electricity,” 102. 21. Aldini published his findings in Essai théorique et expérimentale sur le Galvanisme (Paris, 1804). 22. The turn of phrase is Goethe’s (“Zwitterwesen zwischen der Mahlerey und dem Theater”), from a letter to Heinrich Meyer dated 1813, quoted in Birgit Jooss, Lebende Bilder: Körperliche Nachahmung von Kunstwerken in der Goethezeit (Berlin: Reimer, 1999), 319. 23. “A gallery of statues” is Horace Walpole’s image, quoted in Gail Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 41.

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24. On Emma Hamilton’s influence on the Viganò company, see Winter, PreRomantic Ballet, 199; and Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (New York: Random House, 2010), 211–213. 25. Quoted in Iwan Rhys Morus, Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 3. 26. John Thackray, “ ‘The Modern Pliny’: Hamilton and Vesuvius,” in Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and His Collection, ed. Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan (London: British Museum Press, 1996), 65–74. 27. Eugene J. Dwyer, Pompeii’s Living Statues: Ancient Roman Lives Stolen from Death (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). 28. See, for instance, Martin J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), esp. 28–44, 189–193. William Hamilton published several works on the volcanic activity around Naples, including Campi Phlegraei: Observations on the Volcanoes of the Two Sicilies (Naples, 1776), which is illustrated with hand-colored plates, and Observations on Mount Vesuvius, Mount Etna, and Other Volcanoes (London: T. Cadell, 1774). 29. From a letter titled “Late Eruption of Mount Vesuvius,” written in Naples and dated November 5, 1822, published in Manchester Iris: A Literary and Scientific Miscellany 2 (1823): 41. 30. Hamilton, Observations on Mount Vesuvius, 162–165. 31. Luigi Galvani, De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari Commentarius (Bologna, 1792), trans. by Margaret Glover Foley as Commentary on the Effects of Electricity on Muscular Motion, with notes and a critical biography by I. Bernard Cohen (Norwalk, CT: Burndy, 1953), 36. 32. Angelo Colò, Prodromo sull’azione salutare del magnetismo animale e della musica, ossia Ragguaglio di tre interessanti guarigioni ultimamente ottenute col mezzo del magnetismo animale, e della musica (Bologna: Lucchesini, 1815), 19. Colò’s principal aim was to rescue Mesmerism or animal magnetism from its former excesses, in the light of recent electrical discoveries. It is worth noting that his identification of electricity with magnetism preceded the hardscientific discoveries of “electro-magnetism” by Hans Christian Oersted and Michael Faraday. 33. Colò, Prodromo, 82–91. 34. Such experiments in electric segmentation gave rise to fictions locating both animated objects and their observers within a single human body. In Gérard de Nerval’s short story “La main de gloire,” for instance, the hero forfeits agency of his hand to a gypsy alchemist in exchange for victory in a duel. Nerval meticulously notes the “electric thrill,” followed by unwilled clenching and unclenching of the musculature, which obtains when he applies the mixture the gypsy has given him. The story ends as the hand—now severed—scuttles away from the scene of the hero’s execution. See chapter 6 in Davies, Romantic Anatomies. Sianne Ngai has compared the technology of cel animation, developed by Earl Hurd and John Bray in 1915, to the practice of enumerating individual body parts within descriptions of “animated” bodies in nineteenth-cen-

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tury literature; see the chapter on “animatedness” in Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 89–125. 35. Colò, Prodromo, 82–91. 36. “Era bello il vedere, che suonando all’avviso dello stringimento agl’ipocondrj, si osservava solo un guizzo, qual scossa elettrica, di tutto il corpo dell’inferma, e con questa sopito il parossismo. . . . Convien però notare che lo stringimento sempre compariva, ma che la musica lo faceva risolversi in un guizzo, o scossa elettrica.” Ibid., 86–87. 37. Henry Matthews, Diary of an Invalid: Being the Journal of a Tour in Pursuit of Health in Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, and France in the Years 1817, 1818 and 1819 (London: J. Murray, 1820), 461. 38. François-Joseph Talma, On the Actor’s Art, trans. Sir Henry Irving (New York: Roorbach, 1883; originally published as Réflexions sur Lekain et sur l’art théâtral [Paris: L. Tenré, 1825]), 17. 39. “Talma,” Examiner 979 (November 5, 1826), 706–707. 40. Stendhal, Life of Rossini, trans. Richard N. Coe (London: Calder, 1956), 377. 41. Ibid. 42. Martin Archer Shee, Harry Calverley, A Novel by the Author of Cecil Hyde, vol. 1 (London: Saunders and Otley, 1835), 72. 43. Stendhal, Souvenirs d’égotisme (Paris: Le Divan, 1927), 130–131, quoted in Susan Rutherford’s wonderful study “ ‘La cantante delle passioni’: Giuditta Pasta and the Idea of Operatic Performance,” Cambridge Opera Journal 19, no. 2 (2007): 107–138. 44. Carlo Ritorni, Ammaestramenti alla composizione d’ogni poema e d’ogni opera appartenente alla musica (Milan: L. di G. Pirola, 1841), 14. The moment is also listed by Charles Dickens, alongside Pauline Viardot’s Orpheus, Gilbert-Louis Duprez’s “Suivez moi” in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, and H. W. Ernst’s leading of the Razumovsky quartets, in “A Freak on the Violin,” All the Year Round 15 (April 28, 1866): 378. 45. For a detailed account of the reception of some of Pasta’s principle roles, see Ellen Creathorne Crayton, Queens of Song: Being Memoirs of Some Celebrated Female Vocalists. . . . (London: Smith, Elder, 1863), 2:246–266. 46. Andrew Ure, “Galvanism,” in A Dictionary of Chemistry and Mineralogy, with Their Applications, 4th ed. (London: Tegg, 1835), 481. The demonstration is described in detail in Morus, Frankenstein’s Children, 129. 47. For a nineteenth-century account of the libretto and its precedents, see “Medea in Corinto,” Harmonicon 4, no. 43 (July 1826): 134–140. The author notes, “It is impossible not to remark here the sublime energy which Madame Pasta imparts to this striking passage” (135). A correspondent for L’Eco similarly cited the forerunners of Pasta’s io (“Teatri,” L’Eco: Giornale di scienze, lettere, arti, commercio, e teatri 2, no. 75 [June 24, 1829]: 299), as did the brothers Julius Charles Hare and Augustus William Hare (Guesses at Truth [London, 1827], 115–117). 48. John Poole, “A Discourse of Bores,” New Monthly Magazine 52 (1838): 396–403, 551–561, quote on 401.

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49. Quoted in Kenneth A. Stern, “A Documentary History of Giuditta Pasta on the Opera Stage” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1983), 234. 50. A. B. Granville, St. Petersburg: A Journal of Travels to and from that Capital (London: Colburn, 1829), 1:287. 51. See Cecil G. Saunders, “Discussion,” in “The Construction of Buildings Considered with Reference to Sound,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 5 (1878–79): 111. 52. “Medea in Corinto: Opera seria in due atti, musica del Sig. S. Mayer,” Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review 8 (1826): 366. 53. See, for instance, “Music,” Athenæum 296 (June 29, 1833): 420. 54. Rutherford, “La cantante delle passioni,” 126. 55. “Certi scoppi improvvisi e tuonanti di voce che sono quasi una scossa elettrica, e portano negli uditori una viva e inopinata commozione.” Z., “Estetica musicale,” La fama: Giornale di scienze, lettere, arti, industria e teatri 5 (1840): 195. 56. “Quella esclamazione: Sono innocente, profferita da lei, fu una scossa elettrica alla intera platea.” “Notizie straniere, Londra,” I teatri: Giornale drammatico musicale e coregrafico 2 (1827): 821. 57. “La Pasta, non co’ gesti ed atti di pantomimo, ma con azione di viva pittura, a sè compon nel melodramma una seconda parte di muta rappresentazione, qualche volta migliore di quella che il poeta ed il musicografo le hanno scritta a declamare; poi ricavando un giojello d’arte dal vizio del genere, assume quell’immobilità, che un largo, un canone, un a parte richiede, e ciò inquanto alle membra; e trasporta intanto tutta la drammatica situazione sulla sua faccia, della quale la mobilità degli ampii tratti, concessale per singolar favore della natura, tutta rivolge, con istantanei cambiamenti all’espressione de’ piu’ minuti passaggi e graduazioni delle passioni.” Ritorni, Ammaestramenti, 176. 58. These words were uttered by the character Lord E. in a novel by L. E. L. [Laetitia Elizabeth Landon], Romance and Reality (New York: J. J. Harper, 1832), 1:31. 59. “Lyrical Drama,” Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 19 (October 1833): 85. 60. “A story is told of a distinguished critic that he persuaded himself that with such power of portraying Medea’s emotions Pasta must possess Medea’s features. Having been told that the features of the Colchian sorceress had been found in the ruins of Herculaneum cut on an antique gem his fantastic enthusiasm so overcame his judgment that he took a journey to Italy to inspect this visionary cameo, which, it need not be said, existed only in the imagination of a practical joker.” George Titus Ferris, Great Singers (New York: D. Appleton, 1881), 1:182–183. 61. Rutherford has interpreted Pasta’s living artwork in light of Lydia Goehr’s seminal study on the emergence of the work concept, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. See Rutherford, “Cantante delle passioni,” esp. 122. 62. I consider these first Italian treatises in a chapter entitled “The Aesthetic Electric,” in The Theatre and the Lab: Operatic Voices and Scientific Minds in the Nineteenth Century, ed. David Trippett and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

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conclusion 1. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 4, Sexual Selection in Man (Philadelphia: Davis, 1905), 188. 2. A. Scobie and A. J. W. Taylor, “Perversions Ancient and Modern: I. Agalmatophilia, the Statue Syndrome,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 11 (1975): 49–54; Murray J. White, “The Statue Syndrome: Perversion? Fantasy? Anecdote?” Journal of Sex Research 14, no. 4 (November 1978): 246–249. 3. Federici, La cieca nata, act 1, scene 1. 4. Ritorni, Ammaestramenti, 14. 5. Barbara Johnson, Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 3. 6. Ibid., 20. 7. Ibid., 88.

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Illustrations

1. Plate 24 from Lambranzi, Neue und curieuse theatralische Tantz-Schule / 23 2. Title design from Rousseau’s Pygmalion / 50 3. Libretto from Rousseau, Pygmalion / 51 4. Title design from Rousseau, Pigmalione / 52 5. “Oh, happiness!” from Steele, Prosodia rationalis / 60 6. “General Precept and Example” from Steele, Prosodia rationalis / 61 7. Plate 2 from Piranesi, Le antichità romane / 90 8. Frontispiece from Sarti, L’Ottica / 121 9. The Quacks / 135 10. Plate 4 from Aldini, Essai théorique et expérimentale sur le Galvanisme / 139

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Index

Accademia dei Pugni, 11, 29–32 Accademia della Crusca, 30–31, 86 Adorno, Theodor, 131 aesthetic education, 3–5, 15, 19–10, 26–27, 40–42, 112–117 Aldini, Giovanni, 138–141 Algarotti, Francesco, 52, 63 L’amor coniugale (Rossi—Mayr), 75–76 Angiolini, Gasparo, 4, 7, 11–12, 15, 19–43, 115–117, 152–153, 160n3, 164n42; Deucalione e Pirra, 4, 19, 42–43, 114–116, 167n101, 183n5; “Dissertation sur les ballets pantomimes” (Sémiramis), 20, 29, 160n3; Lettere a Monsieur Noverre, 33–35; La partenza d’Enea, 35–36, 43; Don Juan, 19, 20, 42; Preface to Don Juan, 27–28; Preface to La Citera assediata, 20, 28, 160n3; Telemaco nell’Isola di Calisso, 35; La vendetta spiritosa (Milan, 1781; revived as La vendetta ingegnosa, o la Statua di Condilliac, Venice, 1791), 11, 19–20, 39–42, 152–153, 166–167 antiquity and antiquarianism, 30–32, 73, 85–111, 149 archeology, 48, 60, 102, 139–141 Arteaga, Stefano (Esteban de), 13, 41–42, 63–65, 83, 153–154 Asplmayr, Franz, 49–50, 55–56, 69–70, 77, 83

attention, 3–4, 10–11, 38–41, 98, 113–116 attitudes, 31, 41, 73, 118, 123, 139–145 Babini, Matteo, 65, 72–76, 79, 84 Badiou, Alain, 101 Balocchi, Luigi, 108, 123 Baretti, Cesare, 52–53 beauty, 4, 18, 38, 52, 89, 92–93, 96–97, 103, 122, 126, 154 Beccaria, Cesare, 11, 20, 29–32, 41 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1–5, 12, 116–118, 127, 129–131; Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (1801), 2–3, 116; Symphony no. 3, “Eroica,” 1–5, 116 Bellini, Vincenzo, 7, 13, 17, 77–78, 134, 145, 147–149; Norma, 7, 143, 145, 147–149 Belvedere Torso, 8, 97, 102 blindness. See senses Boswell, James, 61–62 Brown, A. Peter, 3 Brown, Bruce Alan, 43 Burney, Charles, 6, 133–134, 172n36 Bursay, Louis, 7, 53–55 Calzabigi, Ranieri de’, 44–45, 52–53, 63, 65, 68, 78 Camilla (Carpani—Paer), 73 Canonici, Giacinta, 108 Canova, Antonio, 103 Casentini, Maria, 3

215

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Index

Cesari, Filippo, 3 Cesarotti, Melchiorre, 58, 66 La cieca nata. See Federici, Camillo Cimador, Giovanni Battista (Giambattista), 13, 57, 68–84, 109, 145–146 Cherubini, Luigi, 6, 145–146 Chua, Daniel, 117 Coignet, Horace, 12, 48–49 Colò, Angelo, 16, 141–142 commedia dell’arte, 21–22, 54, 73, 108 comparison, 34, 46, 57–58, 116, 125 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 3–4, 9, 11–12, 15, 20, 25–29, 34, 36, 39–42, 101, 112–116, 120–124, 152, 155; Essai sur l’origine des connoissances humaines, 26–28; Traité des sensations, 4, 9, 11, 15, 20, 25–27, 113–115, 120–124, 152, 155 Corilla Olimpica, 103–110, 182n38 La Crusca. See Accademia della Crusca David, Giacomo, 76, 177n103 David, Giovanni, 76, 178n120 Davies, James Q., 9, 11, 102, 106 Deucalione e Pirra (Angiolini/Paracca), 4, 19, 42–43, 114–116, 167n101, 183n5 Diderot, Denis, 45, 112, 120, 122, 125–127 Dienstag, Joshua, 102 Donizetti, Gaetano, 7, 13, 77 Don Giovanni (da Ponte—Mozart), 11, 44, 73, 89 Don Juan (Angiolini—Gluck). See Angiolini, Gasparo Eidsheim, Nina Sun, 102 Eliot, George. See Middlemarch Ellis, Havelock, 151–152 energy, 1–2, 41, 62, 96, 99, 103, 120, 126, 143 Ercole al Termodonte (Sografi—Piccinni), 74 Esse, Melina, 106, 108, 110 Eximeno, Antonio, 13, 62–64 Farinelli, Giuseppe, 117 Federici, Camillo, 15, 84, 123–127, 185n24 Feldman, Martha, 6 Fernow, Karl Ludwig, 102–107 Florentinische Nächte (Heine), 19, 152 Floros, Constantin, 3 Franklin, Benjamin, 136 Galiani, Ferdinando, 47, 50, 53 Galuppi, Baldassare, 6

Galvani, Luigi, 16, 138–141 Garrick, David, 24, 60–61, 144, 169n11, 175n70 gesture, 5–7, 10–13, 19–20, 26–27, 31, 35–43, 44–50, 55–57, 63, 65–78, 83–84, 88–89, 96, 98, 115, 124, 129, 137–138, 142, 145, 149, 152–154 Giannini, Giuseppe, 96 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 6, 11, 19, 34, 42, 44, 52, 68, 78–79 Graham, Dr. James, 134–139 Grandi, Tommaso, 54, 57, 83, 172 Hamilton, Emma (née Lyons), 134–136, 139–140 Hamilton, Sir William, 139–141 Hansell, Kathleen Kuzmick, 6, 35, 43 Harlequin, 21, 24 hearing. See senses and sensing Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 14, 88, 99–103, 110 Heine, Heinrich. See Florentinische Nächte Heller, Wendy, 21 Herculaneum, 60, 97, 140, 149, 192n60 Hersey, George, 137 Hilverding, Franz, 25, 34, 36 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus, 127 imagination, 27, 39, 47, 67, 113–114, 128–131 improvisatory theatre, 21, 54 improvised dance, 27, improvised melody, 38, 59, 75, 106–107 improvised poetry and improvvisatrici, 87–88, 92, 94–99, 102–111, 154 Johnson, Barbara, 154–155 Johnson, Samuel, 61–62 Jommelli, Niccolò, 6, 62 Kinderman, William, 3 Lambranzi, Gregorio, 4–5, 21–24, 40 Landon, Laetitia Elizabeth, 149 laziness, 99 Le Guin, Elizabeth, 6 Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets (Noverre), 6, 27 Locke, John, 113 Lyons, Emma. See Hamilton, Emma Malabou, Catherine, 100–101, 180 Malibran, Maria, 16, 76 Malipiero, Troilo, 15, 116–118

Index Mathew, Nicholas, 9 Mattei, Saverio, 52–53, 63 Matthews, Henry, 142 Mayr, Simon, 13, 17, 75–76, 117, 143–145 Medea in Corinto (Romani—Mayr), 143–148 memory, 22, 25–26, 36, 63, 102, 113, 122 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 10, 21, 45, 79, 151 Metastasio, 35, 44–45, 53, 65, 92, 107–108 Mickey-Mousing, 5, 7, 153 Middlemarch (George Eliot), 98 Milan, 3, 11, 15, 19–43, 72, 86, 116–119, 138, 152; Regio Ducal Teatro, 37; Teatro alla Scala, 3–4, 42, 77, 114, 116, 128 Milton (de Jouy/Dieulafoy—Spontini), 123–124, 127 Molyneux problem, 120–122, 132, 185n19 Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord, 61, 170n17 Morelli, Maria Maddalena. See Corilla Olimpica La morte di Cesare (Sertor—Bianchi), 74 Mosca, Giuseppe. See La poetessa errante Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 6, 11, 12, 44, 89 museums, 8, 14, 91–93, 96–97, 100–101, 107, 149–150 Naples, 7, 21, 47, 50, 55, 76, 108, 139–141 Napoleon, 3, 6, 13, 137 Neue und curieuse theatralische Tantz-Schul (Lambranzi), 21–24, 161n10 Niobe, 109, 152 noise, 91–94, 114, 116, 118–119 Noverre, Georges, 6, 24, 27, 33–38, 56–57 onomatopeia and mimophony, 28, 35, 48, 58, 62, 76, 83, 88, 95, 153, 175n72 Gli Orazi e i Curiazi (Sografi—Portogallo), 74–75 Orphée, scène lyrique (Venice, 1774), 55–56 Orpheus, 45, 78–79, 151 Outram, Dorinda, 117 Paer, Ferdinando, 73, 117 Paisiello, Giovanni, 6, 73, 92 Pallerini, Antonietta, 140 paralysis, 11, 15, 97, 112–113, 119 Pasta, Giuditta, 16–17, 108–110, 133–150, 154 Pepoli, Alessandro, 57–58, 65, 68–78 Petrarch, 30–31, 89, 103, 180n12

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petrification, 2, 97, 107, 118–119, 131, 140, 148 Piccinni, Niccolò, 6, 74 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 89–90, 107 Pitrot, Antoine, 57, 65 Pitrot, Carolina, 65 La poetessa errante (Palomba—Mosca), 108–110 poetic improvisation. See improvised poetry and improvvisatrici Pompeii, 135, 140 Prosodia rationalis. See Steele, Joshua Pygmalion (Rameau, 1748), 25, 115 Pygmalion, scène lyrique (Rousseau—Coignet, 1770), 44–49, 58–59; Pygmalion (Rousseau—Asplmayr: Vienna, 1772; Naples, 1772; Venice, 1773), 48–51, 55–56, 70, 77, 83; Pigmalione (Rousseau/de’ Rogati, 1773), 50–54; Pimmalione (Rousseau/Grandi, 1770s), 54–57; Pygmalion (Rousseau/Pitrot, 1775), 57; Pygmalion (Rousseau/ LeFevre, 1785), 57, 137; Pygmalion (Rousseau/Pepoli, 1788), 57, 70; Pimmalione (Rousseau/Sografi—Cimador, 1790), 68–84, 109, 145–146; Pimmalione (Rousseau/Sografi—Rossi/ Pepoli, 1793), 74; Pimmalione (Rousseau/Sografi—Gnecco, 1794), 72; Pimmalione (Rousseau/Sografi—Asioli, 1796), 72, 76, 145–146; Pimmalione (Rousseau/Sografi/Vestris—Cherubini, 1809), 6, 145–146; Il Pigmalione (Rousseau/Sografi—Donizetti, 1816), 77 Pygmalionism, 151–152 Quirk Historicism, 9–10 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 25, 115 Rancière, Jacques, 8, 97 recitative, 43, 51–53, 59, 63, 65–78, 98, 106, 109–110, 144, 148, 153 rhythmic movement, 2, 5, 19, 43, 56–57, 83, 134–135, 141–143, 148 Rich, John, 24, 162n18 Ritorni, Carlo, 17, 143, 148–149, 154, 157n4 de’ Rogati, Francesco Saverio, 50–58, 63, 65, 77 Rome, 8, 13–14, 62–63, 85–111 Rossini, Gioacchino, 15, 76–77, 108–110, 117–119; Il barbiere di Siviglia, 117–119; Il viaggio a Reims, 108–110

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Index

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 11–13, 25–26, 29, 45–84, 88, 103, 126, 137–138, 152–153. See also Pygmalion, scène lyrique ruins, 21–24, 40, 48, 60, 85–90, 96, 103 Sallé, Marie, 24–25, 115, 162n18 Sappho, 86 Sarti, Cristofano, 120–126 Scaramouche, 21–24 Lo scultore ed il cieco. See Federici, Camillo senses and sensing, 4, 9–12, 15–20, 25–27, 38–41, 85, 112–116, 119–132, 133–134, 143–144, 151–156; hearing, 25, 34, 41, 113–114, 117–120, 126–134, 155; smell, 25, 31, 113–116, 123, 134; touch, 16, 25–27, 113–114, 120–122, 126–131, 136, 155; vision and blindness, 25, 41, 36, 112–114, 119–132 Sessi, Marianna, 76 series, 24–25, 34, 36, 40–41, 113–117, 139–140 Smart, Mary Ann, 9–10, 83 smell. See senses and sensing speech, 6, 12–14, 45–47, 53–65, 68–73, 77, 83, 89, 95, 98–99, 174, Sografi, Antonio Simeon, 13, 66–84, 146 Staël, Germaine de, 13–14, 19, 87–109, 154 La statua per puntiglio (anon.—Marcello di Capua), 72–73, 117 Steele, Joshua, 13, 59–62, 72, 107 Stendhal, 17, 142–143 stiffness, 17, 22, 79, 101, 133, 138, 140 Strohm, Reinhard, 44

tableaus, 117–118, 138–139, 181n25 Tacchinardi, Nicola, 76 Talma, François-Joseph, 17, 142, 144–145 Temple of Health, 133–139, 145 Testa, Domenico, 122 time, 2, 41, 49, 85–87, 96, 102–103, 122, 131, 140–143 thaumatrope, 136–137 touch. See senses and sensing Traité des sensations. See Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de translation, 8, 12, 46–84, 137–138 La vendetta spiritosa (Milan, 1781; revived as La vendetta ingegnosa, o La statua di Condilliac, Venice, 1791), 11, 19–20, 39–42, 152–153, 166–167 Verri, Alessandro, 11, 14, 29–31, 38, 85–103, 111, 116–117 Verri, Pietro, 13–14, 20, 29–42, 86 Vesuvius, 94, 140, 149 Il viaggio a Reims (Balocchi—Rossini), 108–110 Vienna, 2–3, 5, 7, 29, 35, 37, 44, 48–51, 54; Burgtheater, 2–4 Viganò, Maria Medina, 140 Viganò, Salvatore, 2–4, 6, 15, 116, 119, 140 vision. See senses and sensing voice, 7, 10, 13–14, 17, 53, 59–64, 83, 86–99, 102, 107–111, 136, 142–150, 153, 156 Voltaire, 58, 86, 156 Wagner, Richard, 131 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 8–9, 97