Networking Operatic Italy 9780226815718

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Networking Operatic Italy

Explorations in History, Technology, and Performance A series edited by David J. Levin and Mary Ann Smart Advisory Board Carolyn Abbate Gundula Kreuzer Emanuele Senici Benjamin Walton Emily Wilbourne

Also published in the series: Music in the Present Tense: Rossini’s Italian Operas in Their Time Emanuele Senici Singing Sappho: Improvisation and Authority in Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera Melina Esse “Don Giovanni” Captured: Performance, Recording, Myth Richard Will

Networking Operatic Italy Francesca Vella

The University of Chicago Press

chicago and london

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2021 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2021 Printed in the United States of America This book has been supported by the AMS 75 PAYS Fund of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81570-1 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81571-8 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226815718.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Vella, Francesca, author. Title: Networking operatic Italy / Francesca Vella. Other titles: Opera lab. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Series: Opera lab: explorations in history, technology, and performance | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021021046 | ISBN 9780226815701 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226815718 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Opera—Italy—19th century. Classification: LCC ML1733.4 .V45 2021 | DDC 782.10945/09034—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021046 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

per roger

As I once said to Baker—my mystical friend with the crowded poetry— the trouble about God is that he is like a person who never acknowledges one’s letters and so, in time, one comes to the conclusion either that he does not exist or that you have got the address wrong. I admitted that it was of great moment: but what was the use of going on despatching fervent messages—say to Edinburgh—if they all came back through the dead letter office: nay more, if you couldn’t even find Edinburgh on the map. His cryptic reply was that it would be almost worth going to Edinburgh to find out. —C. S. Lewis, 1921

Contents

A Note of Thanks * ix List of Figures * xi List of Musical Examples * xiii

Introduction * 1

CHA PTER one

Stagecrafting the City * 17 Florence, Opera, and Technological Modernity

CHA PTER t wo

Funeral Entrainments * 45 Errico Petrella’s Jone and the Band

CHA PTER thr ee

Global Voices * 79 Adelina Patti, Multilingualism, and Bel Canto (as) Listening

CHA PTER four

“Ito per Ferrovia” * 109 Opera Productions on the Tracks

CHA PTER five

Aida, Media, and Temporal Politics circa 1871–72 * 133 Author’s Note * 169 Notes * 171 Bibliography * 213 Index * 235

A Note of Thanks

My deepest gratitude to those who have supported me and this project with kindness, honesty, and loyalty over the years. Their love has helped me through many difficult moments. May their lives and wisdom keep showing me the way. Cambridge, November 2020

Figures

1.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

4.1 4.2

4.3 5.1

5.2 5.3 5.4

Rivista musicale di Firenze, February 1, 1841 * 30 “La Patti a Torino. Variazioni su tema obbligato.” Lithograph from Il fischietto, April 5, 1879. * 81 Francesco Gazzetti, Insegnamento contemporaneo di lettura e scrittura col metodo fonico (Venice: Antonelli, 1858) * 101 Insegnamento teoretico e pratico del metodo di lettura fonico (Cremona: Montaldi, 1870) * 102 Francesco Lamperti, L’arte del canto in ordine alle tradizioni classiche ed a particolare esperienza: Norme tecniche e consigli agli allievi ed agli artisti (Milan: Ricordi, 1883) * 105 Panorama della Strada-Ferrata delli Appennini Bologna, Pistoja, Firenze (Bologna: Litografia Giulio Wenk, 1864), front cover * 118

Augusto Grossi, “Caravana del Lohengrin.” Lithograph from John Grand-Carteret, Richard Wagner en caricatures: 130 reproductions de caricatures françaises, allemandes, italiennes, portraits, autographes (Paris: Larousse, 1892). * 122 “Andata . . . e ritorno di una Stella . . . cadente, a Firenze.” Lithograph from Cosmorama pittorico, July 3, 1880. * 124 Disposizione scenica per l’opera Aida, versi di A. Ghislanzoni, musica di G. Verdi, compilata e regolata secondo la messa in scena del Teatro alla Scala da Giulio Ricordi (Milan: Ricordi, [1873]) * 136 Aida. Mise en scène pour le Théâtre-Italien de Paris par Antoine Vanhamme. * 136 Disposizione scenica per l’opera Aida * 140 Supplement to the Gazzetta musicale di Milano [December 25, 1871] * 154

xii

5.5 5.6

F igur e s

Casimiro Teja, “Gli italiani in Egitto.” Lithograph from Il Pasquino, January 14, 1872. * 156 “Differenza di tempo in Italia riferita al meridiano del Campidoglio.” Lithograph from Il giornale illustrato, June 3–9, 1865. * 164

Musical Examples

2.1 2.2 2.3 5.1 5.2 5.3

Errico Petrella, Jone, act 4, preludio, coro e marcia funebre, mm. 60–114 * 55–57 Errico Petrella, Jone, act 1, sinfonia, mm. 1–18 * 60–63 Errico Petrella, Jone, act 4, scena e duetto ( Jone, Arbace), mm. 168–88 * 65–66 Giuseppe Verdi, Aida, act 1, scene 1, mm. 1–5 * 134 Giuseppe Verdi, Aida, act 1, scene 1, mm. 368–87 * 137–39 Giuseppe Verdi, Simon Boccanegra (1857), act 1, scena e sestetto nel finale, mm. 56–60 * 141

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“Opera (Italian and Other). Bologna—Milan. Northern Italy. 1858/59 . . .” A sheet of scribbled notes records the circumstances in which this book began to take shape. Written in 2013, the notes captured a precise disciplinary moment: a moment when, inspired by the larger local “turn” in cultural studies, musicologists and historians were remapping the terrain of nineteenth-century opera’s historiography. Approaches that had long prioritized the nation as a category of historical analysis were giving way to frameworks centered on individual local milieus.1 Originally this book was to comprise six urban case studies of key episodes in latenineteenth-century Italian operatic history. Its purpose then was to challenge monolithic understandings of opera’s formative role in the young Italian nation-state by presenting a series of local perspectives on operatic debates and developments that characterized the period. Over the seven years it has taken me to shape it into its final form, however, this study has shed much of its initial, rigorously local focus and gained a more interconnected nature. Networking Operatic Italy, as this book is now called, explores how networks of opera production and critical discourse articulated Italian cultural identities during the years that immediately preceded and followed the country’s unification in 1861. Each chapter examines a different type of operatic interaction between cities: locations, Italian and foreign, that constantly communicated with each other, at both material and discursive levels. Before I explain what prompted this reorientation, let me say straight away that questions of locality are still central to this book. For a long time, opera in nineteenth-century Italy was studied almost exclusively as a national phenomenon. The romance of the Risorgimento—the struggles for independence and unification fought by two or three generations of Italians—spurred analyses of how individual works and styles grew out of and fostered specifically “Italian” sensibilities and modes of address.

2

Introduction

During a period when successive waves of patriotic enthusiasm swept the peninsula, political energies, it has been argued, were picked up and translated into operatic forms and attitudes that in turn fueled broader behaviors and states of mind.2 Only in the last two decades has work by Carlotta Sorba, Jutta Toelle, Axel Körner, Laura Protano-Biggs, and Emanuele Senici, among others, revealed how opera animated Italians’ social and cultural life in a range of distinctive local forms and local contexts.3 This work has had a huge influence on my approach in this book. Particularly in chapters 1 and 4, where I address the dyad “opera and the city” most explicitly, I show how idiosyncratic notions of place were simultaneously the driving forces and the by-products of operatic trends that differed from city to city. Even where my work does not drill deeply into any single urban setting, the stakes of approaching the past through local viewpoints rather than through the spread-out “morphology of national discourse” are, I hope, always clear.4 Known as the “land of a hundred cities” owing to its multiple and persistent localisms, Italy might even be said to provide the ideal testing ground for gauging the pitfalls of nation-centered approaches. There is no way of circumventing questions of geography for the historian of the peninsula; Italy’s “body,” at once a physical and an imagined formation, resists any “standard” or even centralist narrative.5 And yet, precisely because of its political and cultural pluricentrism, Italy also challenges the scholar to take a holistic approach to the subject. As I started to dig into municipal and theatrical archives and to scan the pages of nineteenth-century periodicals, unexpected interconnections between cities that have often been treated as discrete operatic milieus indeed bounced to the fore. During the mid-1850s, electric arc lamps of supposedly Florentine creation lit up, I discovered, opera productions on multiple stages and infused them with a shared “modern” outlook. Beginning in the 1870s, trains moved full-blown operatic stagings across the Apennines just as telegraphy gave impetus to the coordination of local times in ways that intersected with operatic aesthetics. The growing traffic of opera singers across the Atlantic from midcentury on meant that their voices were reimagined as vehicles of linguistic ideologies that raised pronunciation to be a newly pivotal parameter for evaluation in what I call “bel canto (as) listening.” And with increasing frequency in the postUnification years, wind bands served up operatic marches at funeral corteges that established physical and emotional bonds within and among distinct Italian communities. In short, the historical materials themselves suggested to me that a strictly local framework is also limiting. To see anew the role that opera played in Italian experience between the 1850s and the 1870s as the peninsula’s inhabitants coalesced into a single polit-

Introduction

3

ical body, we need to look not only down the avenues of nationalist discourse, not simply in the directions indexed by campanilismo, but also along the pathways—sometimes physical, sometimes imaginary—on which different urban actors and urban agendas came into contact with each other. Networking Operatic Italy pursues this goal through five case studies. Each one adopts a different approach to the circulation of operatic works, performers, and productions on the midcentury peninsula, as well as offering insights into the travels of less mainstream operatic objects and actors, and into locations outside Italy. The Risorgimento and the so-called Liberal Era (1861–1914) saw a steady rise in Italian mobilities, not only in the form of émigrés leaving their local and national homeland for political and economic reasons, but also of centralized attempts to promote Italy’s colonial projects and its natural and cultural riches among domestic and foreign tourists.6 According to scholars of globalization, the period was also one of “increased mobility” in wider geographical terms: an age when new technologies and infrastructures accelerated movement and cultural communication the world over.7 The historian Jürgen Osterhammel has offered a detailed account of the subject, positioning opera as an early comer to and paramount aesthetic agent of these shifts. In his view, not only was opera Europe’s most characteristic art form, but it also “underwent globalization early on,” starting circa 1830.8 At the turn of the following century, the growing economic and cultural importance of the Americas and the emergence of the music recording industry in between the Old World and the New sped up the flows of operatic people and commodities that constantly traversed the globe.9 The scholarship on these fin de siècle developments has informed my thinking in multiple ways, yet my analysis focuses on an earlier historical moment and prevents us from believing that only vast, fast, and spectacular movements matter: that they alone produce historical ruptures and transform cultural meanings.10 The journeys I examine can be as short as a fifty-mile trip of an opera production from Bologna to Florence, or as inconspicuous as the relocation of an electric arc lamp from one theatrical stage to another. My wind bands typically marched from churches to cemeteries, and singular soprano voices moved effortlessly among the sounds of different languages. As I retrace the material and politico-cultural conditions that enabled operatic people and their equipment to travel, I ask what these movements meant for Italy, Italian cities, and opera alike. I show how an ideology of interconnectedness evidenced by Florence’s material and symbolic fabric informed local operatic criticism in the 1850s, with the critical discourses in turn strengthening the capital of the late Tuscan grand

4

Introduction

duchy as an embodiment, however problematic, of “Europeanness” and “Italianness.” I reveal how transmunicipal identity politics after Unification was negotiated through opera not only via journalistic networks but also via the earliest travels of full opera productions on railroad tracks. Whether by exploring Adelina Patti’s “Italian voice” within an emerging transatlantic awareness of the stakes of correct diction, or by investigating the media ecology that underpinned early stagings of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida in Cairo and Milan, I clarify how key aspects of an Italian macro-identity were articulated through opera, both Italian and foreign, in between distinct locations: liminal spaces that in turn transformed operatic ideas and aesthetics. One of my aims is to reconsider standard views of late-nineteenthcentury Italy as a backward and culturally isolated country, nostalgically absorbed in its traditions. The idea goes back to the period and constitutes one of those thorny tropes that often ensnare scholars in a double bind: while seeking to reveal its historicity, modern analyses can reassert the values they meant to undermine. Much informative scholarship has advanced an image of the young Italian nation-state as struggling to modernize and rushing to catch up with northern Europe, a view this book complements by uncovering an alternative, parallel set of cultural preoccupations that defined the period.11 These preoccupations emerge most clearly from the trajectories opened up for opera by new technologies of transportation and communication—the railway, the telegraph, and other “modern” apparatuses—whose networking potential (on which more later) can nevertheless also be explored through a number of preelectric devices. By paying attention to the operatic interplays that both old and new media encouraged on a transnational as well as national level, we may lay to rest (or at least substantially dismantle) hidebound notions of late-nineteenth-century Italian cultural life as parochial, aesthetically conservative, and balkanized into many isolated pockets of local dialect, aesthetic taste, and culture. On the contrary, opera at midcentury articulated a “connective” sense of Italian experience, taking impetus from and reorienting the burgeoning global and technological consciousness of the period. I would argue, in fact, that this new sense of interconnection was not just a result of the period’s teleological sense of time. The Risorgimento’s drive to move history forward, the heroic thrust that underlies its political and cultural narratives—these certainly produced and sustained, as their enabling condition, that antithetical sluggishness that European thought more broadly situated unfailingly in Italy, particularly its South.12 Nevertheless, Italian exceptionalism and the craving for progress are not the sole or even main protagonists of the chapters that follow. As I tangen-

Introduction

5

tially reexamine familiar ideas about opera’s contribution to the process of Italian unification, I also hope to debunk a popular and scholarly myth of Italian “distinctiveness” by bringing the country and its midcentury operatic cultures into dialogue with broader international experiences. This book’s time period includes the years before and after the crucial “moment” from 1859 to 1861, when Italy—then divided into seven states under foreign domination—became a single kingdom under the House of Savoy, which ruled Piedmont- Sardinia. Rome did not join the new nation-state until 1870, after which it became its third political capital following Turin (1861–65) and Florence (1865–71). Linguistic and administrative differences also haunted the country for decades to come. In chapters 1 and 2, both of which focus in full or in part on the pre-Unification years, I therefore use the words “Italy” and “Italian” not as expressions of an existing political reality but as references to shared cultural markers: as the terms were, in fact, used in contemporary discourse.13 Except for the first chapter, a deep dive into the Florentine scene, all of my case studies tackle multiple cities from the North, Center, and South of the peninsula. I pay special attention to Bologna and Milan, two major centers of operatic activity; but I also consider Naples, Turin, Rome, Venice, and Piacenza, in addition to towns and villages from the Marche and Sicily. Foreign locations feature prominently in almost every chapter and are essential to the fluid geographies this book attempts to recreate. If Networking Operatic Italy offers an interconnected account of opera in the midcentury Italian nation and paints a picture of perhaps increasing, if complex, national integration, it makes no claim, however, to be a comprehensive history of the period, or to dismiss other geographical dimensions of the phenomena it describes. To write an operatic history of Italy that crisscrosses 1859–61 is also an opportunity to pay both more and less attention than previous scholarship has to the cultural effects of Unification. Standard accounts of the period take 1861, or sometimes 1870, to have marked a sharp discontinuity—a view stemming from efforts to identify areas of overlapping political and operatic activity. Inasmuch as musicologists and historians have searched for “evidence” of opera’s centrality to the Risorgimento project in libretti and musical works, Verdi’s early- and middle-period operas have turned up the strongest discursive and emotional affinities with contemporary political ideologies. In 1851 the composer took up residence in his country villa at Sant’Agata, where he would increasingly hide away from the bustle of both city life and celebrity. A few years later, in 1859, he began his temporary retreat from the Italian operatic scene, expanding his commitments with foreign theaters. His reduced presence and activity during

6

Introduction

a period when feasible operatic successors were failing to emerge has led modern commentators to understand the 1860s and 1870s as a time when opera, on the largely unified peninsula, came to a standstill. Those were decades, we have been told, that coincided with a national operatic “crisis” fueled by financial difficulties and a paucity of new works entering the canon: years of “transition” devoid of noteworthy compositional activity and lacking signs of broader operatic innovation.14 The notion that the political turning point of Unification can be mapped smoothly onto narratives of Italian operatic history is problematic for several reasons. For one thing, our scholarly parameters for assessing the cultural significance of operatic works and developments in their time have been heavily shaped by hindsight, as scholarly emphasis on canon formation and the rhetoric of “transition” suggest.15 For another, they are rooted in decades of musicological interest in works and composers as the primary drivers of Western musical cultures. The operatic energies that failed to “match”—or to sustain—post-Unification efforts at political and cultural integration in the field of composition were nevertheless alive and well in other areas of Italian operatic life, particularly production and performance. Rather than simply reflecting, or else feeding, the revolutionary drives and the nostalgic outlook of the age, opera at midcentury contributed to Italian nation building in ways subtler than nationalist discourse and performance statistics imply. To take a flexible approach to the years 1859 to 1861 is to allow ourselves to contemplate both changes and continuities that characterized the period. It is to treat every single political and even technological occurrence, however momentous, with the same circumspection that we (or at least I) would reckon it wise to use when approaching any “turning point” in our lives. Such occurrences may, at times, cause real historical ruptures, redirecting the course of events in unforeseen ways; but equally significant are longer chronologies and hidden genealogies that do not align with the epoch-making impulses that often drive scholarly and biographical narratives. The chapters of Networking Operatic Italy are arranged loosely in chronological order. Each takes on a specific medium through which opera was “sent out” on the Italian peninsula between the 1850s and the 1870s, and simultaneously hints at previous or subsequent decades and simultaneous goings-on in other countries. By “opera” I mean different operatic objects and actors: not just works, singers, and stagings, but also single musical numbers, technical craftsmen and appliances, and ideas crystallized in press criticism. By “media” I understand transportation and communica-

Introduction

7

tion technologies—railways and telegraphy—that arrived in Italy around midcentury, and older reproductive devices—newspapers, wind bands, and the human voice—whose medial qualities I spell out case-by-case. Mobility, one of this book’s central concerns, has been a subject of much debate across the social sciences and the humanities. In the last fifteen years two leading figures, the human geographer Tim Cresswell and the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, have alerted us to the challenges that the experience of movement poses to historical and critical investigation. In his account of some of the ways in which mobility has been conceptualized in modern Western societies, Cresswell points out its apparently “intangible nature,” which “makes it an elusive object of study.”16 The sphere of representation—the generation of meanings at the intersection of politics, ideology, and social power—is central to his exploratory endeavor. Just as important, though, are embodied practices of movement, mobility being a thoroughly social experience coproduced at the intersection of individual volition, objects, technologies, societal and cultural expectations, spaces traversed, and so forth. Greenblatt expresses a similar commitment to understanding the working and agency of movement when he calls for microhistories of cultural mobility attentive to the tension between permanence and change, fixity and motion. What we should really be concerned with as scholars, Greenblatt advises, are the mechanisms through which movement challenges, or at times brings into play, forms of resistance and structural constraints.17 The shift from mobility to mobilities in the latest scholarship reveals an awareness that, by treating movement as a single, unified phenomenon, we may end up reproducing its ideological baggage. Rather than use mobility as a tool for empowering otherwise passively displaced historical actors, as a heuristic, even, that can help validate our own historiographical moves, we may do well to investigate its subjects, its valence in different local and historical contexts, and the techniques and unpredictable effects that any movement always involves.18 My first chapter explores some of these issues in relation to Florence, a city that in the mid-nineteenth century was a crossroads of various mobilities. This chapter sets the scene for the book’s gradual opening up of the urban perspective by reconsidering historical and scholarly discourses on grand opéra as refracted through this Tuscan locale. Within just over a decade, between 1840 and 1852, Florence staged all the Italian premieres of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s French operas: Roberto il diavolo (Robert le diable), Gli anglicani (Les Huguenots), and Il profeta (Le Prophète). The appearance of these works spurred heated discussions about their “eclectic” style—the synthesis of national musical idioms that the composer had

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Introduction

come to embody in the European imagination—while also causing his cosmopolitanism to resonate with features of the local urban environment.19 As a hub of Italian exiles and foreign tourists and a musical center that was internationalizing its image, Florence offers an extraordinary vantage point for attending to how movement, both physical and imaginary, shaped perceptions of opera, Meyerbeer, and the “Italian Athens.” Focusing on the mechanisms that governed the circulation of people, music, and ideas across national borders allows me to foreground media, from newspapers to exportable theater technologies such as electric arc lamps, that played a key role in Florentine attempts at urban selffashioning. I try to explain what made Florence a unique looking glass of European modernity circa 1850: how a preindustrial city still seamlessly amalgamated with its country environs could aspire to a leading position in a globalizing world. To answer these questions, I discuss two aspects of the staging of Il profeta at the Teatro della Pergola in 1852: the act 3 “electric sunrise” and the act 4 coronation scene. I read these moments, both of which involved problematic replicas of the Parisian originals, alongside literary texts and networks of theatrical craftsmanship that illuminate Florence’s complex relationship with other cities. Ultimately I argue that perceptions of Florence’s urban environment and local attitudes to progress were driven by impulses to emulate—and simultaneously resist—the model of urban modernity set forth by northern European metropolises. This urban perspective, serving as a prism of both Italy and Europe, gives way in chapter 2 to a much more dispersed geography. This chapter contributes to the ongoing rebalancing of musicological attention away from canonic works and figures and toward music that was representative of a given era. It explores wind band cultures on the late-nineteenthcentury peninsula, and the role that operatic funeral marches played in funeral rituals. The migration of music from the elite space of the theater to the cross-class space of the street has long attracted opera scholars, particularly Italianists enthusing over their art form’s capacity to reinvent and adapt itself through popular culture.20 Here I am interested in charting the physical and discursive peregrinations of a single operatic number: the marcia funebre from Errico Petrella’s Jone, premiered at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1858. Originally from Sicily, Petrella was—after his exact contemporary, Verdi—the most-performed living composer in Italy during the 1850s and 1860s. Jone may be virtually unknown today, but in its time it was staged in both major and minor theaters, and single pieces circulated widely in musical arrangements of various nature. Indeed, by the time Petrella died in 1877, Jone’s funeral march—which in the opera is played by a stage band accompanying a Greek convict to

Introduction

9

the scaffold—had become a signifier of death and mourning throughout Italy and Spanish-speaking countries. On the peninsula, the piece was played by wind bands that accompanied increasingly common funeral corteges, and it set the pace of Holy Week processions in various areas of the Center and the South. An instrument for contemplating loss in contexts that varied geographically, politically, and religiously, it facilitated cultural entrainment between distinct communities. From the 1860s, Italian civic bands were on the rise and their performances extended on an affective level the techniques of “muscular bonding” developed, in an earlier period, within the context of military marching.21 Jone’s marcia funebre provided an “emotional arena” in and through which different social groups could imagine themselves as parts of the same national body, even as they articulated independent responses to human mortality.22 If chapter 2 foregrounds repetition and physical labor as tools that fostered community bonding in wind band cultures, chapter 3 addresses similar concerns in relation to voice, another bodily technology famously implicated in producing Italianness.23 The voice I investigate is that of Adelina Patti, the late-nineteenth-century soprano who was among the first star performers to become a truly global figure. Born in Spain to Italian parents in 1843, she grew up in the United States—specifically, New York—where she debuted in 1859 and lived until she moved to Europe two years later. Her professional trajectory baffled critics from the Old World, accustomed as they were to singers bred and trained in their own continent. Likewise, her fluency in multiple languages, which she reportedly spoke with an unmarked native accent, stood in tension with the linguistic continuity of her operatic voice: a living and unmistakable embodiment, throughout her career, of old Italian bel canto. Drawing on her status as a transoceanic diva and on recent scholarly work on nineteenth-century vocal cultures, I probe Patti’s voice as an instrument that channeled attitudes to language that informed contemporary discussions of both speech and singing. The history I retrace is at once Italian and transatlantic: I situate critical responses to Patti’s performances in Italy during the 1860s and ’70s in the fabric of vocal developments that traversed the ocean. One such development was the decadeslong effort to standardize national speech, a phenomenon that has been associated with the introduction of state education in various countries, and with the growing circulation of voices that the late nineteenth century produced. My contention is that, in keeping with the preoccupations of the era, Patti’s vocal organs were imagined as a proto-recording device: a machine capturing and reproducing impeccably the sounds of different tongues. If she helped to reinvent aspects of Italian vocality at a time when

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Introduction

bel canto was held to be in crisis, it was because her polyglotism tuned people’s ears to matters of diction and pronunciation. As a historical concept, bel canto cannot be separated from the beginnings of globalization, nor can it be understood apart from post-Unification debates on the Italian language—an area in which Patti showed how sound and meaning, beauty and sense, could bolster each other. My first three chapters, then, summon a somewhat curious mix of media: print technologies that enacted local, national, and supranational reading communities (newspapers); human bodies that in performance communicated through the sensorium (marching bands and the virtuoso singer); and technical appliances that lit up single scenes in given opera productions (electric arc lamps). The last two chapters turn to transport and communication technologies that revolutionized nineteenth-century spatial and temporal experiences. Railways and telegraphy, introduced in Italy in the late 1830s and late 1840s respectively, form two case studies in which I explore operatic encounters with technology in two registers.24 The first, the literal or material level, involves looking at trains and telegraphs as instruments that disseminated operatic stagings. Here I take the verb “to network” (from my title) in its original transitive use, dated by the Oxford English Dictionary to 1845: the gradual covering of Italy’s body in tracks and cables that enabled the circulation, or a particular kind of circulation, of operatic productions and operatic news in the country’s industrialized cultural nervous system.25 My analysis nevertheless centers on the 1870s, a period when both trains and telegraphs had only just developed into a national network and yet were no longer “new.” As chapter 4 shows most explicitly, what was always at stake was the retooling (or repackaging) of former operatic ideas and forms of travel into new conceptions and means of mobile operatic labor. At a metaphorical level, railway and telegraphy also nurtured aesthetic stances and discourses. As I explain more fully in chapter 5, I make no attempt to separate the two planes of examination, nor to establish definitive cause-and-effect relationships between “technologies” and “ideas.” To connect aesthetic features of the operatic works themselves with the technological means of staging, transporting, and publicizing them may seem to assume problematic equivalences between concrete realities and the bodily or mental states that these realities supposedly produced.26 Yet such an analytical mindset, as recent work by media and opera scholars suggests, defined the nineteenth century—a fact that should discourage us from adopting too rigid an approach to the interface between material objects and discursive formations. “What later devolved into dead metaphors,” John Durham Peters explains, referring to the diverse imagery

Introduction

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constituting telegraph cables, were once “living connections”: figures of thought and perception that traversed social, scientific, and artistic areas of experience.27 My last two chapters, therefore, examine trains and telegraphs as objects that existed and operated culturally at once in a physical and in an imaginative realm. Chapter 4 recounts the extraordinary transplantation of the famed first Italian production of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin from Bologna to Florence in 1871, a veritable miracle of logistics that involved the relocation by train of a troupe of between three and four hundred people, in addition to sets, costumes, and stage machinery. The undertaking was, to my knowledge, the first of its kind in Italy and potentially in Europe; it created practical challenges and institutional quagmires whose political and aesthetic implications are all but lost if we examine the Wagnerian staging as a Bolognese event alone. As Axel Körner has demonstrated, by the mid-1860s Bologna had become the most “progressive” musical center of the peninsula, a reputation it shaped through premieres of works by Meyerbeer and Wagner, Lohengrin being the first opera by the latter ever mounted in Italy.28 The exportation of a prized local commodity, at a time when power relationships between urban centers were negotiated in cultural as much as in political terms, was a double-edged move. To retrace the 1871 Lohengrin’s journey is to reassert the well known drive of municipal interests while simultaneously nuancing the view that Italian cities altogether resisted the nation’s unifying impulses after 1861. The Lohengrin transplantation paved the way for further operatic translocations in subsequent years, something that allows us to ponder what this new form of operatic mobility meant for aesthetic discourse on opera. I suggest that railways became not only a medium of operatic dissemination but also a new part of opera’s basic infrastructure. These full-blown operatic transfers encouraged an expanded concept of the “work”: a concept that now included the staging, even as—or precisely because—the transportation required that it be broken down into its various component parts.29 These relocations point to the growing medial status of opera at the fine secolo, a subject that Alessandra Campana has examined in connection with the contemporary industrialization of Italian culture, and which I explore via notions of sound reproduction that were starting to emerge during the period.30 I return to these notions and analyze them in greater detail in the last chapter, which revisits the politics of Verdi’s Aida. My reading of the 1871–72 “Aida moment” takes its cue from some communicationcentered passages in act 1 that are best understood as chains of voices racing around the stage like electric signals over telegraph wires. As an idea,

12

Introduction

telegraphic communication was central to one of Verdi’s most powerful dramatic moments, the “Guerra! Guerra!” scene, whose efficacy depends on a realistic enactment of group bonding in the face of impending war. At the same time, as a technology telegraphy underpinned the composition and early critical history of the opera. I would argue, in fact, that we cannot fully capture Aida’s politics, traditionally understood through the prism of Orientalism, without also attending to the technologies that constituted its production and reception networks. A concern with temporality underlay Aida’s history from inception to performance and beyond: from Verdi’s plans to premiere it nearsimultaneously in Cairo and Milan, to several chronological misplacements that blurred the dates of its premieres, to “instantaneous” telegrams that conjured socio-operatic connectivities both old and new. When in 1873–74 the composer advocated that the opera be produced contemporaneously in multiple theaters, Italians’ temporal experience had been going through a process of gradual standardization, which was making distant simultaneity not only conceivable, in abstract scientific terms, but also perceivable. Where I began by evoking telegraphy as a set of figurative possibilities that might have informed Verdi’s aesthetics, I therefore end by suggesting that operatic stagings fed—or aspired to feed—back into the larger technological and political endeavors of the time. Aida’s media, perhaps more explicitly than any other example in this book, bring into focus the transmission model that has dominated Western understandings of communication ever since telegraphy liberated it from physical transportation in the mid-nineteenth century. Whereas previously “communication” could refer to any physical transfer, sexual intercourse, or partaking in a social body, electric technologies introduced the idea of communication as message delivery from sender to receiver, ideally through a transparent medium.31 Paradoxically, no sooner had the long-distance transferral of ideas become independent of material transportation than it assumed (or dramatized) one of the latter’s most distinctive features: purpose- or destination-oriented mobility. As I have argued elsewhere, reception studies—that mode of historical enquiry that has characterized much opera scholarship since the 1990s—is premised on a similar, dichotomous understanding of “text” and “context,” “producers” and “receivers,” as ultimately independent entities.32 This approach is starting to show signs of wear in today’s scholarly panorama. Reception is no longer the snug, cozy place where opera historians can ensconce themselves to produce intrinsically meaningful analyses. The most compelling

Introduction

13

contributions on Italian opera since the mid-2010s have all, in one form or another, taken issue with the binary oppositions reinforced by classic reception studies.33 Rewinding our approach to operatic communication to a time when, as both a concept and a practice, it was not yet quite so separate from physical movement allows us to explore the interface between mobility and media studies to reveal new facets of historical operatic cultures. It means that we can consider how opera (was) networked across space and time by asking questions that eschew the predominantly twentieth-century notion of media as “message-bearing institutions”— indeed, by interrogating how that very idea emerged and developed in tandem with other forms of long-distance communication.34 In emphasizing the physical labor of marching, speaking, singing, and listening bodies, chapters 2 and 3 show some of the potential of studying these middle decades of the nineteenth century. These chapters adopt what might be called an “electric approach” to a preelectric age—or to nonelectric media—investigating how human bodies (re)created communities as they, with language and music, traversed physical and cultural spaces. Each of these chapters draws attention to the reproductive techniques required and produced by specific mobilities, quite apart from these techniques’ incarnation in “hard” technological realities. Chapters 4 and 5 in turn highlight how that momentous, global extension of consciousness that Marshall McLuhan associated with electric mobilities and communications continued to rely on “soft” skills and infrastructures.35 These chapters’ accounts of trains and telegraphs as technologies-in-use are everywhere marked by the perceived risk of breakdowns and malfunctions, and thus they direct us to the labor involved in the successful dissemination, physical or imaginative, of any given operatic staging.36 Even the tale told in my opening chapter, where newspapers and theater lighting systems fall short of reproducing the desired Parisian grandeur, is fraught with mis-communications. Perhaps the sense that history—and Italian history in particular—is never as teleologically consummated as contemporary commentators would have us believe emerges most clearly when we reach the 1870s, the moment when trains and telegraphs make their appearance in this story. By chapter 4 and chapter 5, these media should seem “old”: not only because in Italy they have been around for about three decades, but because they have been prefigured by several earlier, preelectric devices. Ultimately, the “networking” in my title is intended as both a historical and a historiographical action (or set of actions). I see it as carrying both cultural and conceptual meaning, as having significance in both

14

Introduction

nineteenth- and twenty-first-century terms. Crucially, it is a verb—albeit one dangerously prone to be nominalized. On a historical level it refers as much to the rails and wires that networked Italy as to the contacts and collaborations among members of political, cultural, and scientific institutions, composers, singers, soldiers, mourners, and bandmasters that brought more or less distant places into contact. Some of these collaborations were by no means new, nor am I suggesting that opera had never traveled before. Quite the reverse: one could argue—and it has been argued—that, as a cultural form that requires significant financial input and integrates musical, visual, and literary elements, opera has always had a special networking capacity, and that mobility has been one of its hallmarks from its very beginnings.37 Part of the significance of my collaborations nevertheless lies with objects—newspapers, electric arc lamps, theatrical sets, trains, telegrams—that did more than transmit preexisting ideas and values. Their agency becomes visible when they threaten to break down, when they fail to reproduce the human intentions behind them.38 On a methodological level, my “networking” also serves two aims. For one thing, as hinted above, it helps me navigate mobility and media studies as adjacent fields that can nuance each other, once made to interact in geographically and historically specific contexts. For another, it foregrounds the question of how we can “piece back together” nineteenthcentury operatic Italy after both national and local approaches to the past have shown their limitations. Of course, “operatic Italy”—like “Italy” itself—never was a stable category; it never just meant a single thing. On the contrary, it was (and still is) a shifting configuration of ephemeral geographical and operatic realities. As independent explorations of a core nexus of materials and ideas that pursue different approaches to the same central question, the following chapters share something of the unpredictable yet always generative capacity of the encounters and communications they each try to recapture. In its more audacious moves, this book hopes to encourage scholars of Italian cultures away from a deep-seated concern with how Italy and Italians were represented and represented themselves historically, and toward other interrelated sites and mechanisms that host, produce, and convey cultural meanings.39 Technologiesin-use, bodily techniques, and stage effects enacted in real time: these may not articulate and communicate cultural values in quite the same way that literary, visual, and musical works of art, as representations, do. Yet they too produced and contested Italianness, opening up historical possibilities that might have remained unavailable otherwise, both for our

Introduction

15

nineteenth-century forebears and for us. If the rhetorical legacies of past cultural discussions about Italy, Italian opera, and Italians are still all too firmly with us, the arbitrary, prosaic, and even ineffective quality of many an actual lived encounter can at least shake loose some of their (and our) most self-conscious motives.

•

Ch a p t er o n e

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Stagecrafting the City F l or ence , Oper a , an d T echnol o gi cal M od e rn it y

Ugo Pesci’s Firenze capitale (1865–1870) takes the reader on a long journey before arriving at its destination.1 This early-twentieth-century book, recounting the short spell when the Tuscan city served as Italy’s capital, opens with a series of meditations on the final precapital years. An introductory chapter titled “Un decennio di prefazione” (A Decade of Preface) leads the reader through a gallery of social, political, and cultural moments spanning the 1850s to the early 1860s. A tragic cholera epidemic, revolutionary turmoil, and the glamor of the first Italian National Exhibition all commingle with Pesci’s recollections of his youthful experiences in various urban and rural locales. “The first clear and precise memories of my life,” he begins, “which extend beyond the narrow sphere of the domestic walls, date from 1854; from the beginning, that is, of the Crimean War.” A few years earlier, his grandfather had left his job at Florence’s Biblioteca Magliabechiana and had set up residence in the nearby village of Mercatale in the Val di Pesa. To that hamlet “came, in the summer of 1854, a wandering seller of books, stories, and geographical maps.” The traveler—and here the intersections between Pesci’s seemingly incongruous planes of recollection are revealed—became a conduit linking the community with the wider world. A “large, full-color map of the ‘theater of the Eastern war’” reached the hands of the writer’s elderly relative; it was all “garnished with little views of cities and portraits of warring generals.”2 The flow of memories and the ambulatory energy of Pesci’s chronicle press on. Mercatale received a daily copy of Florence’s Monitore toscano, the official mouthpiece of the Tuscan Habsburg-Lorraine government, which after being perused in the pharmacy by the general public “would go round the houses of the notables.” Adding to the haze and compass of Pesci’s multisite imbrication, news about the war that surfaced in its columns was taken from the Gazzetta di Genova, a paper that, given the

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Ligurian city’s strategic position within the Kingdom of Piedmont and that state’s interventionist agenda, was presumably quicker to pick up reports from the battlefield. “In that thousand-strong village, as in all agglomerations of people,” Pesci sums up, “there moved and quivered a microcosm”—a “small world” in which he then goes on to identify some other key figures.3 The rationale behind Pesci’s dissection of mid-nineteenth-century life in Mercatale becomes clear as the account unfolds. His microhistorical recollections disclose a particular operation of cultural chiseling: an operation through which the idea of Italy is made gradually to emerge from the encounter of distinct cultural-geographical realities. “Certainly no one in Mercatale was thinking of a revolution, let alone the unification of Italy,” Pesci hastens to clarify as he delves into more political subject matter. Neither the landowners’ and shopkeepers’ self-interested economic concerns, nor the physician’s anti-Piedmontese feelings, nor the priest’s deference to the local Habsburg-Lorraine rulers could foresee any real pathway to change in their local society, at once a mirror image of the nation’s and a typical incarnation of midcentury Tuscan moderatism. But it was there and then that the writer “vaguely glimpsed . . . that the word ‘Italy’ was something more than a mere geographical expression.”4 Movement breathed life into this rural location, shaping symbiotic perceptions of local, regional, and national identities. Further elucidations come later in the chapter, when Pesci reflects that, “after 1849, in no other region except Piedmont did Italianness exist to the same extent as in Tuscany.”5 Following the 1848–49 political revolutions, the grand duchy of Leopold II of Lorraine became a melting pot of exiles who had fled from all over the peninsula: men of various political persuasions who sought shelter under the wings of the most liberal of contemporary Italian monarchs.6 The spacious framework of Pesci’s prefatory remarks therefore speaks to the specificities of the political moment. At the same time, the author’s choice of places and times raises questions about Florence’s position in the mid-nineteenth-century Italian, European, and global imagination. The source we are dealing with here and using as a vehicle for historical interpretation is not, of course, completely transparent. One might object that Pesci was writing in a different age, at a time—the early 1900s— when Florence had lost much of its earlier appeal as a place of harmonious communal life and political and industrial tranquility (more on this later). Urban transformations starting during the capital years had significantly altered its material texture, redefining the relationship between city and countryside as the medieval walls were demolished and the hills became more accessible, both visually and physically, from the urban cen-

Stagecrafting the City 19

ter. A spate of industrial expansion hitherto unknown to a society of artisans and merchants had produced an outburst of nostalgia among foreign intellectuals, who no longer recognized timeless, humanistic values in a city rapidly adapting itself to the emerging capitalism.7 The fact that Pesci draws on a fund of images inherited from a previous era only makes his account all the more telling of long-standing cultural dynamics. What does it mean, we might ask, to write a book of memoirs about mid-nineteenthcentury Florence, taking as one’s point of departure a nearby rural village situated (as the crow flies) more than 120 miles from Genoa and more than a thousand miles from Sebastopol? Why summon Mercatale and indirectly invoke those more distant geographical coordinates to introduce Italy’s second political capital after Turin? And how can we explain Pesci’s seemingly trivial recollections of traveling peddlers and copycat journalism from the mid-1850s? This chapter examines Florence’s cultural, musical, and operatic landscape circa 1850 in an attempt to answer these questions. Replicating Pesci’s strategy of starting “far afield,” only revealing his book’s destination by uncovering several interpenetrating geographical realities, I will use his opening remarks as a springboard to contemporary texts that show what was distinctive to Florence as an urban and operatic idea and environment. Part of the city’s identity lay, I will argue, in its spatial fluidity. If one of the key features of Pesci’s geographical poetics is the symbolic capital of Florence’s countryside—a topic I shall discuss later—another is the sense of restless movement that permeates it, resulting in an account in which local, national, and supranational dimensions of experience are brought together at the nexus of Mercatale, Florence, Genoa, Italy, and Crimea. In Pesci’s writing, these dimensions meet through the circulation of ordinary things and individuals: the “books, stories, and geographical maps” in the traveling salesman’s collection; the hordes of exiles welcomed into Tuscany’s post-1848 society; and, crucially, a newspaper— that quintessentially modern, urban cultural form and instrument of identity construction. Early on in Firenze capitale, the Monitore toscano acts as both site of and object in movement, both receptacle of news reprinted from Genoa’s Gazzetta and a physical item itself in circulation.8 Florence’s operatic scene was similarly bound up with the wider world, at both material and symbolic levels. If one Italian city in the run-up to Unification tied its musical and theatrical image to rapidly expanding cultural networks, Florence was certainly it. During the 1840s and ’50s, the city made its connections with “modern” northern Europe the primary impulse behind the strategic reforms in instrumental music and opera that established its prestige as the most advanced musical center of the

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peninsula until Bologna took over in the 1860s. Through new musical editions, Florentine publishers promoted the rediscovery of “old” Italian works and recent German chamber and symphonic compositions— projects in which they were assisted by an emerging class of professional critics who fueled lively debates in the local musical press. What is more, and related to these trends, is that the city’s foremost operatic stage, the Teatro della Pergola, mounted a series of daring productions: most notably the first Italian stagings of all of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s grands opéras prior to L’Africaine (1865). These premieres meant that Florentine journalists could tap into wider European discussions about the burgeoning circulation of people, music, and ideas across national borders, a development (and critical trope) that resonated with features of the local urban environment, as well as with Meyerbeer’s “cosmopolitanism.”9 However much it sought to close the gap with northern European cities, however, Florence’s relationship with modernity was far from straightforward. The outward- and progressoriented narratives proposed time and again by its leading cultural authorities, and by some of their foreign colleagues, do not explain how a preindustrial city with relatively little access to the financial and technological resources of a London or Paris fitted in a rapidly globalizing framework. Nor can they account for how the ideology of interconnectedness that Pesci and his predecessors identified in its cosmopolitan milieu worked as an ambivalent, double-edged instrument to assert its Europeanness and Italianness. From its material fabric to its experiments in musical journalism and the technical know-how encapsulated in its most up-to-date stagings, Florence’s operatic landmarks always lay in that hazy limbo where modernizing, self-promoting efforts could swiftly become, by their own making, self-effacing. This is where Pesci’s starting point in Firenze capitale, a village perched on the Tuscan hills, may help us to understand the city’s specific vocation to modernity. Like him and earlier literary figures, urban theorists made much of the relationship between Florence and the surrounding countryside. In an 1858 essay entitled “La città considerata come principio ideale delle istorie italiane” (The City Considered as Ideal Principle of Italian History), the Milanese philosopher and political thinker Carlo Cattaneo set out to retrace what over the course of centuries has made Italian cities unmistakably different from those of other countries. The essay first appeared in Milan’s weekly Il crepuscolo, founded in 1850 by the patriot and man of letters Carlo Tenca, at whose request some passages of Cattaneo’s text were omitted for being too openly inspired by federalist values.10 After 1848, Cattaneo had resisted the fusionist dream advo-

Stagecrafting the City 21

cated by Piedmontese ruling classes, favoring instead the idea of an Italian confederation of small democratic republics that ought to encourage civic participation through independent administrations and distinct cultural traditions. Cattaneo’s argument in “La città” reflects his belief in the intrinsic telos connecting local, regional, and national polities: his trust in the expansionary force of urban liberties and his dislike of the cleavages produced by eastern and northern European metropolises (which he conflated).11 In a nutshell, his thesis about Italy runs as follows: the Italian city forms a single whole with its environs, it constitutes “an inseparable body” with the countryside, “a political person, an elementary state, permanent and indissoluble.”12 The principle that in Cattaneo’s view ties città and campagna together is a fundamental understanding of all civilized land as a product of human activity. The circularity between urban and rural proceeds from his conviction that art, science, trades, and agriculture are different and interconnected realizations of human creativity. From there to the suggestion that Tuscan and Lombard cities best encapsulate the “completeness” of Italian civic life is only a short leap. As we shall see, and as Cattaneo’s own comments reveal, a key feature of midcentury perceptions of Florence was precisely the idea of an all-encompassing approach to cultural and technological activities.13 When La Pergola staged Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète as Il profeta for the first time in Italy in 1852, a collaboration with the newly established Istituto Tecnico Toscano brought art-science connections to the fore. The opera, which famously features an “electric sunrise” in act 3, required technical expertise from local engineers, which was then exported from the Florentine theater to other opera houses of the peninsula. The 1852 Il profeta, as I will unravel it in this chapter, illuminates networks of theatrical craftsmanship that have traditionally been overlooked by scholars in favor of the circuits of singers and impresarios.14 With the ample dose of preproduction business revealed in the archives, this production also alerts us to the risks of researching theater technologies by drawing exclusively on the experiences of audiences and critics. Whereas previous accounts of Le Prophète and Meyerbeer’s other grands opéras have tended to emphasize the composer’s cosmopolitanism and the role he and the Paris Opéra played in fostering technological innovation,15 the Florentine case directs our attention to historical actors who worked behind the scenes, and to technologies both old and new that worked in tandem with each other. Examining La Pergola’s Profeta alongside broader discourses on contemporary Florence ultimately reveals a city that not only emulated foreign models, but also grappled with the paradoxes of reshaping its image in a global mold.

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Florence, Terre Neutre From occasional tourists to stable residents and foreign correspondents, a lengthy list of French, British, and American commentators, some with eminent literary pedigrees, wove a nineteenth-century image of the capital of the Tuscan grand duchy in which cosmopolitanism played a fundamental role. “Florence is a magnetic city,” declared the Marseillais journalist and playwright Joseph Méry at the outset of a chapter from his travel account Les Nuits italiennes. He followed up his assertion with mythical imagery drawn from classical antiquity: “Foreigners come, stay, live, and die here. . . . Like the ancient Circe, Florence embroils foreigners in her invisible embrace.”16 One reason for this widespread fascination was political. Writing in 1853, Méry was recalling one of several stopovers during his 1834 trip to Italy, a country then, as it still was twenty years later, in a state of political fragmentation and instability that drew a large number of expatriates to Tuscany from other states of the peninsula. Méry’s view of Florence as “the common mother of the suffering,” a city into whose “arms outlaws and exiles throw themselves,” places him in a rich critical tradition that saw liberal and reformist ideas as a distinctive trait of Habsburg-Lorraine rule in the region during the decades following the Restoration.17 Another well-known French literary figure, Alexandre Dumas père, described the government of Leopold II, who led the grand duchy between 1824 and 1859, in similarly enlightened terms: he referred to the sovereign as “the only man of progress” and the source of “all social improvements” in Florence.18 The image of post-1814 Tuscany as an untroubled political milieu—a community of subjects peacefully bound together around their visionary ruler—may, as some scholars have suggested, have been overemphasized or even altogether distorted by writers downplaying the level of activism that pervaded the region.19 Florence’s liberal, cosmopolitan environment was as much a fiction as a political reality, even though the city’s openness to the foreign Other was clear in the realm of culture and sociability. Foreigners wrote reams about their multicultural experiences at local theaters, musical accademie, and masked balls, leaving us descriptions that testify to what Richard Bonfiglio (writing of the Victorians) has termed the “highly textual experience” of nineteenth-century travelers to Italy.20 Some informative comments come from James Fenimore Cooper’s 1838 travel memoir Excursions in Italy, which celebrates the catholic nature of Florence’s social and musical gatherings—an aspect, according to Méry, of the city’s nature as “terre neutre.”21 Drawn by the intensity of crosscultural interactions occurring on the “neutral ground [of] this little cap-

Stagecrafting the City 23

ital,” the American novelist compiled a list of all the nationalities that regularly stood out at different social occasions: a diplomatic event, a soiree, or an opera performance at La Pergola. The “sort of omnium gatherum” his writing attempted to recreate explains his striking remark that “this is the age of cosmopolitism, real or pretended; and Florence, just at this moment, is an epitome both of its spirit and of its representatives.”22 From his vantage point across the Atlantic, Cooper saw a Florence that partly eluded his European colleagues. What he added to the established European picture was a sense that the Tuscan capital and the Old Continent more generally tended to conflate: that they stood in a synecdochic relationship, the city epitomizing in the eyes of the non-European the Old World’s “extraordinary blending of nations.”23 The catalyst of such blending in Cooper’s snapshot is clear: increased travel in modern times has allowed greater cross-cultural interactions, with consequent moral benefits and a general expansion of civilization. If early-nineteenth-century London exemplified the “world-city” and Paris stood as a paradigmatic model of urban life and cultural luxury, by the 1820s or 1830s Florence had also transformed into a complementary looking glass through which the essence of so-called European modernity could be refracted and analyzed.24 Beginning in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the city had witnessed a reinvention of its global image, a process drawing on the contributions of European intellectuals, the Florentine ruling classes, and a sector of the local population. As its medieval and Renaissance history were rediscovered, Florence grew into an urban milieu of wider than national significance: an ideal incarnation of European culture tout court. According to this view, the city’s long-standing political, economic, and artistic vitality, its medieval nexus of art-freedom-democracy, and its smooth integration of urban and rural forms of living all anticipated elements that would or should be distinctive of the modern age, revealing a crucial link between past and present. This is not to say that Florentine civic traditions did not eventually lose their appeal in the eyes of foreign observers. By the time the likes of John Ruskin, Jacob Burckhardt, and Henry James added their voices to the mix in the 1860s and ’70s, the city’s model of benign modernization had turned from utopia to an unrecoverable object of nostalgia—a lost way of life accessible only in the frozen shapes of landscapes and monuments destined for aesthetic contemplation.25 This myth of Florence as a forward-looking, cosmopolitan milieu found one of its key promoters in the Liguria-born merchant and editor (of Swiss-French origins) Giovan Pietro Vieusseux, who lived in the city from 1819 until his death in 1863. Through his activity at the famous

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“Gabinetto Scientifico-Letterario” in Palazzo Buondelmonti and at the journal Antologia (1821–32), he created a network of correspondents based in the main cities of Italy and Europe. With the help of these connections, Vieusseux sought to overcome the material and institutional obstacles that, well into the 1820s, still prevented a swift circulation of books, periodicals, and standard mail both within and across the borders of the peninsula. These impediments clashed with his vision of Florence as carrefour de l’Europe, a node of lively intellectual traffic.26 In later years, Tuscany’s modernized road system and the introduction of the railway enabled faster and expanded communications: the first two train stations in Florence opened in 1848, connecting the city to Pisa and Livorno (Leopolda station) and to Prato and Pistoia (Maria Antonia station). Aside from enhancing deep-seated perceptions of Tuscany’s regional dimension, these developments lent its capital a new, ambivalent association with Livorno. Since the eighteenth century, Livorno had attracted foreign attention to Tuscany, thanks to its thriving port and commercial activities; yet, as the nineteenth century progressed, it was supplanted in the popular imagination by Florence’s increasingly romanticized historical image.27 As a Florentine journalist commented in 1854, the foreigner who “comes to visit our city, which owing to its direct and rapid connection with Livorno can be said to have become a seaport [porto di mare],” ought to be presented with “a grand and pleasant idea of the entrance to the Italian Athens”—the latter a popular epithet of eighteenth-century coinage.28 The number of individuals who crossed Florence’s borders grew steadily through the mid-nineteenth century. In 1818, 3,108 foreigners were registered upon entering the city, a figure that rose to 12,984 in 1847, when their presences constituted about 12 percent of the local population, which then amounted to 106,629.29 These data by themselves offer little ground for speculation about Florentine attitudes to physical and cultural mobility. Some scholars, such as the historian Antonio Chiavistelli, have argued that, Tuscany’s fairly loose censorship notwithstanding, a disciplinary discourse on foreigners and strict measures to control the circulation of both goods and ideas were at work in the region until the mid 1840s.30 Others have unearthed an extraordinarily wide spectrum of responses to the spread of foreign fashions and foreign tourism after the Restoration, drawing attention to the upsurge in hostile reactions to visitors as the politically fraught 1840s progressed.31 Yet these choreographies of encounters, the perceptions of heightened movement and circulation, were a recurrent feature of the rhetoric surrounding the Florentine scene. Florence had come to be a heterotopic place: simulta-

Stagecrafting the City 25

neously homogenous and multifaceted, real and symbolically laden, solipsistic and endlessly producing connections with elsewhere.32

Operatic Urban Politics Parliamo anche del vuoto che lo straniero trova nella nostra città, per la mancanza di un teatro Regio o Comunale. In una città che pel numero e la splendidezza dei Palagi, la maestà dei monumenti, i capo-lavori artistici che vi sono racchiusi, può dirsi, dopo Roma, la prima d’Italia ed anzi di Europa, non esservi tra i suoi pubblici edifici un teatro, come hanno Genova, Parma, Milano, Venezia etc. etc. che le renda ornamento, lustro e decoro, è cosa quasi incredibile e vergognosa. Il forestiero bisogna in Firenze che vada a cercare il teatro col lumicino: nessuna facciata, nessuna statua gli indica dove esista.33 [Let us talk also about the void that the foreigner finds in our city, owing to the absence of a royal or municipal theater. In a city that for the number and magnificence of its palaces, the majesty of its monuments, the artistic masterpieces it contains, can be called, after Rome, the first in Italy and even in Europe, the lack, among its public buildings, of a theater such as Genoa’s, Parma’s, Milan’s, or Venice’s, a theater bestowing on it luster and decorum, is almost unbelievable and shameful. The foreigner in Florence has to go looking for the theater with a taper: no facade, no statue points them to where it stands.]

Foreign visitors may have reveled in social and aesthetic delights during their stay in Florence, but anxiety reigned among its inhabitants over the infrastructural and symbolic status of local theaters. On the one hand stood a city brimming with natural and artistic resources preserved seemingly untouched through the centuries and magnified, as if in a hall of mirrors, by their reflections in the river Arno—Dickens’s architect of that second Florence, “of rich forms and fancies, always lying at our feet.”34 On the other hand, Tuscany’s capital city lacked a convincing theatrical space of self-representation for the urban community. La Pergola, which until the larger and more middle-class Teatro Pagliano was inaugurated in 1854 remained the city’s most fashionable opera house, belonged to the socalled Accademia degli Immobili, a group of aristocrats who had founded it in the distant past (1656) and ran its activity by privately contracting impresarios. The theater was formally under the patronage of the Tuscan grand duke, who subsidized it to varying degrees over the years. Yet the building lacked the communitarian connotations of so-called teatri civici or municipali, managed by local authorities; nor did it have the tight-knit

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associations with political power that characterized opera houses such as Parma’s Teatro Ducale or Naples’s San Carlo, directly or indirectly emanating from the court. Even architecturally it was, from the outside, an inconspicuous object next to its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cousins. Its facade looked out over no piazza; the building stood—indeed, still stands—crammed in narrow streets, stifling all claims to its material and cultural prominence.35 The visibility Florence’s primary opera house lacked in terms of the city’s political and physical fabric, it achieved through a series of ambitious productions that marked its activity throughout the 1840s and early ’50s. As mentioned earlier, Florence was the first city in Italy to mount Meyerbeer’s grands opéras preceding L’Africaine: Robert le diable, Les Huguenots, and Le Prophète premiered at La Pergola (as Roberto il diavolo, Gli anglicani, and Il profeta) in 1840, 1841, and 1852 respectively. The first two were the vision of the preeminent impresario Alessandro Lanari, the last that of his successor Luigi Ronzi. Lanari, whose empire extended over twenty theaters at the apex of his career, was also responsible for the first Italian productions, again at La Pergola, of French and German works by Halévy (La regina di Cipro, 1842) and Weber (Il franco cacciatore, 1843). Pietro Romani, a Roman composer who had settled in Florence and acted as Lanari’s right-hand man, was another key figure in the theater’s machine, serving as maestro concertatore and ante litteram metteur en scène for all these prime. Although he was famous for his loose attitudes to the rendition of modern foreign masterpieces, his steady presence behind these midcentury undertakings lent them the flavor of an integrated and aesthetically groundbreaking cultural project.36 The cumulative effect of these premieres, which for the first time shifted the repertory of an Italian opera house away from the national tradition and toward European works, was long-lasting civic pride. Through these modern productions, it was thought, Florence had finally shed its musical and cultural provincialism, joining the league of the “progressive” northern European nations. The discourse of opera and the discourse of the contemporary Tuscan city—as well as nineteenth-century cities more broadly—therefore intersected at multiple levels. One further locus of interaction lay in features of contemporary journalism. As “signs of dominant discourse selfconfidently bodied forth,” in Richard Terdiman’s evocative definition, nineteenth-century newspapers were central to the articulation of urban identities.37 Their content could range from politics to social and cultural topics from both home and abroad, treated with various degrees of “objectivity”; but it was the logic that governed the arrangement of material on the printed page that best encapsulated contemporary urban experi-

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ence. With discrete news items randomly juxtaposed to one another, the newspaper reflected in its layout the fragmentation of city life: its dispersal across multiple spaces and components, of which opera was one of many.38 The visual form taken by articles could simultaneously serve as a tool of resistance against hegemonic power structures. In Napoleonic Milan, the first modern Italian city, the whirlwind of people, languages, and customs suddenly blown in from various parts of the peninsula created the conditions, as Emanuele Senici has shown, for typographical reforms that redrafted the relationship between politics and aesthetics.39 By the 1850s, Florence had moved to the vanguard of Italian music journalism. The Rivista musicale di Firenze (1840–43), in many ways the precursor to both Giovanni Ricordi’s Gazzetta musicale di Milano (1842– 1902) and Francesco Lucca’s L’Italia musicale (Milan, 1847–59), was the first in a series of journals that subtracted the task of musical commentary from literati and handed it over to an emergent class of professional critics. Among its successors were the Gazzetta musicale di Firenze (1853– 55), L’Armonia (1856–59), and Boccherini (1862–82), all three founded by the Florentine concert promoter and music publisher Giovan Gualberto Guidi. These publications focused less on opera than on chamber and symphonic music, fields in which Florence had been the leading Italian center since the 1830s and which were the basis of its “reformist” cultural image. Contributors included some of the most prominent critical voices of the time, from Abramo Basevi to Luigi Ferdinando Casamorata and Ermanno Picchi.40 In addition to publishing performance reviews and original essays on historical and theoretical subjects, these Florentine publications forged links with the expanding network of European journalism. Pieces of foreign reportage, detailing music making in such musical capitals as London and Paris, often appeared next to reprints and critical analyses of foreign articles. The reach of these surveys of both musical and journalistic life, which almost made tangible the spatial fluidity that constituted Florence, would have been unthinkable only ten or fifteen years earlier, even in the flourishing publishing center of Milan. Shortly after its establishment in January 1842, in an apologetic gloss on its opening manifesto, Ricordi’s Gazzetta dutifully acknowledged what it called the “vast material movement of art”: the growing circulation of works and performers across the globe. Faced with the problem of whether and how to track this activity, the journal decided it would, for the time being, forgo actual reports. In their place, it delivered, for the previous season, a “bare statistic table” summarizing the operatic premieres in the main Italian theaters.41 In contrast, beginning in August 1855, Basevi—an influential

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Florentine critic and composer who in 1859 authored the first analytical study of Verdi’s operas—compiled a regular rassegna di giornali (newspaper review) for Florence’s own Gazzetta musicale, and later for L’Armonia, which he edited. Le Guide musicale, Revue franco-italienne, L’Europe artiste, Orphéon, Gaceta musical de Madrid, The Musical World—these are only some of the foreign titles that regularly featured in his column.42 Marketing interests were central to the attitudes that Guidi and his collaborators adopted toward foreign music criticism, and to the approach they took to Meyerbeer’s grands opéras, a breeding ground for developments in the field. Roberto il diavolo, Gli anglicani, and Il profeta all began to travel Italy precisely at the time that the new venture of a specialized musical press was taking off in the country. Both Guidi and Ricordi were prolific music publishers—among other things, the first initiated a series of handy pocket scores that earned him praise from his European colleagues43—and as such, they were each quick to promote the workconcept and the notion of repertory, both ideas encroaching from France. Meyerbeer’s grands opéras were early arrivals in—indeed, catalysts of— the famous shift from an event-oriented operatic culture, still dominant in Europe in the early 1800s, to an understanding of operas as permanent works amenable to endless reproduction.44 Once on the international circuit, they became emblems of musical mobility almost in spite of the repetitive material-interpretive gestures that their staging, more than that of any previous Italian or French opera, supposedly required. The tension between fixity and movement that the ascending model of industrial musical modernity generated made it possible for Robert, Les Huguenots, and Le Prophète to exist as objects whose authentic aura ought to be at once subdued and relished. For all their circulation in countless musically and technologically abridged forms on nineteenth-century stages on both sides of the Atlantic, their intimate association with the Opéra, the institution in and for which they were created, and (in the case of Le Prophète) the strong authorial imprint on the original mise en scène sanctioned them as distinctively Parisian commodities.45 Fidelity, real or asserted, to Meyerbeer’s “originals” often served to forge imaginary associations between one’s local milieu and Paris, the contemporary capital of opera and culture. Strategies for cultivating this transnational self-fashioning in theatrical matters ranged from the publication of multilingual libretti, with local and original casts listed side by side, to imitation of the rhetoric of Parisian criticism; from the importation of costumes from the French capital to the production of scenery based on original sketches. In former colonial contexts, recreating Meyerbeer’s grand opéras in pseudo-authentic forms helped different lin-

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guistic communities to articulate competing political and cultural agendas.46 At the same time that it established an imaginary link with the model city, emulation of Parisian practices could yield unpredictable results. One wonders what the effects might have been, back in Florence, of the Rivista musicale di Firenze in 1841 when it reprinted an extract from Balzac’s novella Gambara (1837), using it as the first and only “review” of Roberto il diavolo the journal ever published (in three separate installments) in the wake of the opera’s Florentine premiere.47 The excerpt reproduced the argument between the composer and instrument maker Gambara, a fervent Meyerbeer enthusiast and a supporter of wide-ranging sonic innovations, and the Italian exile Count Andrea Marcosini, who adores Beethoven and detests Rossini (figure 1.1). The exchange hinges on the virtues and shortcomings of Robert, a work that Gambara examines in great (if not always reliable) musical detail, and praises for its experimental harmonic and orchestral colors. Balzac’s text, given in Italian translation in the Rivista, is here appended with footnotes clarifying how particular numbers were shortened or altogether dropped at La Pergola: the act 2 Isabelle-Robert duet, for instance, which was omitted after the opening night; or the chorus “Gloire à la Providence!” in act 5, which was never heard by the local audience. Other footnotes include Italian translations of the quotations from Eugène Scribe and Germain Delavigne’s French libretto, and the odd remark on scenic matters, largely to decry La Pergola’s staging. A few comments about the latter also appear in separate columns alongside the Balzac extracts, although none of these short performance-centered paragraphs can in earnest be called a “review.” The multiple levels of commentary woven around Robert/Roberto suggest an attempt by the Rivista’s editors to produce an example (or surrogate) of modern music criticism: to engage with some kind of close reading of musical works, understood as distinct from performances— specifically, works, like Meyerbeer’s, for which Italian critics still lacked appropriate analytical tools. In the hands of these exponents of Tuscan music journalism, the Gambara-Marcosini argument becomes an expedient to introduce Florentine and Italian audiences to a musical and theatrical aesthetic that largely fell outside their own. At the same time, it functions as a “document” of Robert’s Parisian reception, albeit one whose reliability the journal’s editors ultimately refuse to guarantee, as they explain at the end of the last installment. More significant still than this advocacy of northern European musical values by deferring responsibility on their producers is the unintended cultural work performed by the Rivista’s “copy-and-paste” approach to music journalism. Whereas Balzac’s novella, originally conceived as a

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Figur e 1.1. Extract from Rivista musicale di Firenze, February 1, 1841

serial for La Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris, had gained cultural cachet from “the embedding within fiction of commentary on a relatively recent opera,”48 the extracts later reprinted by the Rivista, at a time when no Italian translation of Gambara had yet seen the light, turned that fiction back into an attempt at aesthetic and cultural criticism.49 The roles between reality and fiction were reversed, the primacy of the former apparently restored by the referencing apparatus. In the convergence of distinct registers of urban self-narration, which we shall see reoccur elsewhere in midcentury Florence, a French novella had become the yardstick for

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measuring local achievements in theater. Yet such rhetorical expedients were not without a price. The meticulous annotations in the Rivista that detail the idiosyncrasies of La Pergola’s staging in the margins of Gambara and Marcosini’s French argument about musical “science” remind us that to model one’s worldview after an external paradigm of urban and cultural modernity is to relegate oneself to a footnote in the (hi)story of that modernity’s unfolding. No matter how faithful the emulation, the operation still remains a slippery move.

“La Musica in Viaggio” The Rivista’s approach to Robert/Roberto was one instance of how Florence’s operatic life and identity were fastened to Meyerbeerian discourse and European journalism. As the century progressed, imagery of scores, composers, singers, conductors, critics, and impresarios on the move proliferated in the expanding Italian musical press. Often the sources of such accounts were French, as is the case for a humorous article titled “La musica in viaggio” (Traveling Music), which appeared in the Venetian journal Il vaglio in 1843. The piece offers a gently ironic take on the habit of modern novelists and musicians of working at their compositions while frantically relocating from place to place. Alexandre Dumas père, “a writing pen on the mail coach,” is the prototype of the nineteenth-century on-the-road literary genius; Donizetti, “a maestro with a range of three Bellinis and five Rossinis, locomotively speaking,” wins the title of “the Juif errant of music.”50 If the Italian composer’s fervid creativity when he is on the road is depicted in expansionary, nearly imperialist terms, Meyerbeer’s is bound up with a smaller, more repetitive journey: from Berlin to Paris, and then back from Paris to Berlin, with little variation. His mechanical commuting up and down the coach and (later) train lines is synonymous with the rhythms of modern urban life, the reproductive economy of artistic labor. After all, Meyerbeer is the perfect example of the nineteenth-century “industrialised composer.”51 Born in a stagecoach at the Tasdorf post office (in Rüdersdorf), he made the railway into his natural habitat and composed regularly during his journeys.52 As clusters of performance and journalistic activities, Meyerbeer’s grands opéras extended the composer’s kinetic energy well beyond the scope of his travels. In 1844 the Gazzetta musicale di Milano published an article titled “Viaggi della partizione di Roberto il diavolo prima della sua discesa in Italia” (Travels of the Score of Roberto il diavolo before its Descent into Italy). The essay, which is unsigned but likely of Italian creation, is a performance history of Meyerbeer’s work based on the thousand-

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strong collection of playbills of an anonymous Dutch gentleman. According to the author, the three operas that had traveled most widely around the globe were Weber’s Der Freischütz, Rossini’s Tancredi, and Meyerbeer’s Robert. While the second’s popularity remained difficult to explain, except through the spellbinding quality of Tancredi’s cabaletta “Di tanti palpiti,” the third’s success stemmed from its musical and dramatic heterogeneity: its capacity to appeal “to all eyes and all ears.” Immediately after its French premiere, Robert was eagerly awaited in London, where the conductor-arranger Henry Bishop was “dispatched to Paris” to buy piano-vocal editions of single pieces and commit to memory as much as he could of Meyerbeer’s orchestration.53 A few years later, it was the controversy surrounding Le Prophète that prompted a train vignette (originally from La Musique, but reprinted in L’Italia musicale) of three men traveling to see the latest creation by the composer whose name was “reproduced echo after echo, without interruption,” down into the remotest corners of Europe.54 The culmination of that series of ambitious Italian stagings that started at La Pergola in 1840, the 1852 Il profeta provided an opportunity for sweeping evaluations. The performances were directed by Pietro Romani and overseen, at the composer’s request, by Caroline Unger—a retired contralto present at the 1849 Parisian premiere. For many, they sanctioned Florence’s leading position on the Italian musical scene. “I would have regretted if Florence had not maintained its primacy also on this occasion,” wrote Picchi in an extended examination of the opera’s musical aesthetics, “since it is here that Guglielmo [Tell], Roberto, the Ugonotti, Freyschutz [sic], and the Regina di Cipro were produced for the first time [in Italy].”55 The sense of a direct lineage connecting these events, a coherent plan underlying the realization of Meyerbeer’s “trilogy” in particular, aligned Florence with Paris, the two cities’ main opera houses ranking very similarly (some Florentines opined) as to the lavishness of their productions.56 This “microscopic rival of noisy Paris,” which in matters both artistic and mundane sought to craft for herself a modern urban image, looked directly at foreign stages—London, Paris, Vienna, or Berlin—on its path to operatic leadership.57 As well as taking pride of place in Italy by mounting Il profeta, Florence entered a global fellowship of musical cities joined by the opera’s ubiquity. “Almost everywhere do we find Le Prophète,” noted the Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris at the start of 1854, “first in Florence at the Pergola theater . . . then at Palazzo Pitti. . . . We find it at Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Liège, New Orleans, Turin, Parma, and New York.”58 The extent to which the capital of the Tuscan grand duchy had managed to raise her operatic reputation internationally

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within the course of just over a decade is conveyed even more succinctly by an 1854 playbill for London’s Surrey Theatre: Florence’s name stands next to those of Berlin, Paris, and London itself as the four places symbolically representing the universal success of The Prophet.59 Aside from La Pergola’s staging, and within the space of a mere few weeks, Florentine audiences familiarized themselves with Il profeta’s music and subject matter through band arrangements by the virtuoso pianist and temporary bandmaster Leopold Meyer, performances at the Arena Goldoni (a low-class outdoor theater), concerts organised by the “Società per la esecuzione della musica classica” at the Liceo di Santa Caterina, and a ballo spettacoloso in five acts by the choreographer Giovacchino Coluzzi, to music by Luigi Laschi.60 A concert performance for a select audience took place at Palazzo Pitti, residence of the HabsburgLorraine family, shortly after the opera closed at La Pergola. For the occasion, Il profeta was seemingly performed in integral form, and the French score published by Brandus was directly ordered from Paris, though the parts were translated.61 Henry D’Arcis, a French composer and professor at the Accademia fiorentina di Belle Arti, thought the event a liberal initiative by the grand duke, proof of Florence’s status as “the most musical city” in the country.62 According to Picchi, the work’s variegated visual, dramatic, and musical effects meant that it could appeal to various categories of spectators, even within the elite walls of the opera house.63 If the word “cosmopolitan” was largely absent from the vocabulary of Florentine critics, Meyerbeer’s stylistic eclecticism and the far-reaching dissemination of his grand opéra across different art forms and physical spaces aligned with and even bolstered Florentine notions of spatial fluidity and class harmony.64 This picture of Meyerbeer that is starting to emerge from Florentine accounts ties in with and yet complicates recent interpretations of the composer’s alleged cosmopolitanism. As Dana Gooley has observed, operatic cosmopolitanism was not a trope of European critical discourse until the mid 1830s, when the success of Robert le diable and Les Huguenots drew attention to Meyerbeer’s eclecticism in both French and German circles. The composer’s “synthesis” of national styles was judged an emanation of his international training and career, or even of the egalitarian ethos that characterized the social gatherings of wealthy Jewish families. From a political or ethical point of view, Gooley suggests, Meyerbeer’s cosmopolitan bent was defined by his personal struggle to transcend all cultural and aesthetic hierarchies: to embody a complete sense of worldbelonging.65 I would be tempted to take this interpretive move—from the values supposedly encoded in the works themselves to the attitudes dis-

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played by their composer—a step further, arguing that the cultural work Meyerbeer did in mid-nineteenth-century Florence had little to do with either factor. After all, much of his cosmopolitan valence was the result of the widespread circulation that his grands opéras achieved as material objects, with multiple texts and paratexts consumed as European and even global commodities. The sense of cross-cultural interaction that these objects afforded may recall the experience Pesci had as a young boy in Mercatale: his travel to far-off places with the help of a map, a newspaper, and the imagination; the quivering microcosm he discovered in his countryside locale. Entire urban ideologies could be built on the assumption that, at a time of transportation and communications breakthroughs, isolation is “not only deadly but luckily also impossible,” hence an experiential category quite simply to be banished.66 Attempts to fashion midcentury Florence as a kind of Italian Paris—a stand-in, even, for the world, writ large— failed, however, precisely at the reproductive gestures that these transnational representational strategies required. As hinted earlier, once transplanted into a new urban environment—no longer metropolitan Paris but semirural Florence—Gambara’s French argument for technological innovation reveals the dangers inherent in molding one’s worldview into the perspective of such a different geographical milieu.

Electrifying Florence One area in which such tensions came to the surface was, perhaps predictably, the technical resources La Pergola had at its disposal to depict the act 3 sunrise at the premiere of Il profeta. For the opera’s first production in Paris in April 1849, a carbon arc lamp placed at the focus of a parabolic reflector had been developed by the physicist Léon Foucault (and later adapted by Jules Duboscq) to cast a steady, unwavering beam of light on a silk screen—the solar disk symbolically representing the victory that the innkeeper turned Anabaptist leader Jean de Leyde predicts in his rallying “Hymne triomphal.” The event famously marked the introduction of electricity into the history of operatic theater; celebrated as a feat of technology and a step toward realism, the mechanism was soon replicated at foreign opera houses as Meyerbeer’s work set out on its international path.67 London’s Royal Italian Opera featured a dazzling display of light at the opera’s British premiere a mere three months after its Parisian debut,68 and Parma’s Teatro Regio, for its own first production in December 1853, bought the electric machine directly from its manufacturer—a certain M. Lormier, physicist in Paris.69

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The case of Florence is both more widely documented and more complicated. At the opera’s opening night on December 26, 1852, the artificial sunrise was an utter flop. La Pergola’s electric apparatus belonged to— perhaps had been commissioned from—the Istituto Tecnico Toscano, a school for the teaching of applied science and technology founded by Leopold II in 1850. In 1852 the classes had not yet started, and the Istituto was still reorganizing the model of technical education formerly provided by the Conservatorio delle Arti e Mestieri, established in 1809 as part of the Accademia di Belle Arti. Under the energetic leadership of its first director, the mathematician Filippo Corridi, the school was, however, already shaping its mission as a center for training professionals capable of nurturing the nascent Tuscan engineering industry.70 Heirs to a long Florentine tradition linking scientific and artistic production, some of its craftsmen collaborated with local art institutions. Emilio Bechi, a chemist and mineralogist at the Istituto, was the man initially appointed to operate Il profeta’s sunrise machine at La Pergola. Despite his proven professional track record and several days of rehearsals, he nevertheless fell short of expectations, his whole lighting effect becoming an object of ridicule among critics. His sun was mocked as an “egg yolk,” a “night taper,” a “coach lamp,” and even one “suffering from intermittent fever.”71 The “extraordinarily naive and primitive” disc that rose on the horizon as Jean/ Giovanni led his troops into battle furthermore required that the opera house’s main chandelier—equipped since 1828 with a mechanism allowing it vertical movements72—be raised to avoid outshining that most pale, most flickering of electric lights.73 The overall result was so disappointing that Bechi withdrew from his position, and the “fisico-chimico meccanico” Giovanni Carraresi, a distinguished exhibitor at Tuscan and universal exhibitions in the 1850s, was called to replace him. The “new Phoebus,” as Carraresi was named by the journalist Cesare Bordiga, rapidly made up for the failures of his colleague.74 Using the same electric apparatus—a carbon arc lamp powered by a Bunsen battery, which he modified only by reducing the cells from 100 to 75 and changing the carbon rods’ position from vertical to horizontal—he achieved the brilliance and constancy of luminous emission that Bechi had not.75 In the subsequent months and years, he was engaged to assist with lighting effects at such theaters as Florence’s Leopoldo (for the premiere of Coluzzi-Laschi’s Il profeta), Rome’s Apollo (Emanuele Viotti’s ballet Margherita di Scozia), Ancona’s delle Muse (Giovanni Briol’s ballet Guglielmo di Blankemberga), Livorno’s Leopoldo (Meyerbeer’s Il profeta), and Florence’s Pagliano (Meyerbeer’s Gli anglicani).76 Mariano Pierucci, one of the most prominent nineteenth-century Italian builders of scientific in-

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struments and an engineer in the physics department at the University of Pisa, was also recruited for some of these lighting effects. During the 1854 carnival season we find him at Livorno’s Teatro dei Fulgidi to brighten Laschi’s Il profeta (here choreographed by Ettore Barracani), while in the summer of the following year Venice’s La Fenice hired him for its own first staging of Meyerbeer’s Il profeta.77 Pierucci was closely connected with Florence’s Istituto Tecnico; between the 1850s and 1880s he supplied the school with several scientific instruments, and these collaborations may well have been one of the reasons why he received such theatrical appointments.78 The electric machine that Bechi and Carraresi put together remains, to be sure, a mysterious and somewhat ambiguous object. For one thing, in Florence at least, Meyerbeer’s electric sunrise was enhanced by gas lighting, introduced in the city in 1845 and still used only exceptionally at La Pergola seven years later.79 It is unclear how the two modes of illumination were combined, given that technically they are unrelated to each other; but surviving correspondence between La Pergola’s impresario Luigi Ronzi, the Deputazione degli Spettacoli, Florence’s gas company, and local authorities suggests that an overhead gas batten infused additional brightness into the act 3 sunrise during both the 1852–53 staging and a new production in 1855.80 Old and new technologies simultaneously outshone and drew attention to each other, with the electric arc lamp and gas batten placing unprecedented gymnastic demands, as mentioned, on the opera house’s main chandelier. The combination of different lighting systems revealed the divergent preoccupations of the various constituencies involved. This was not a story merely about the search for new sensational visual effects. Whereas critical authorities expected novelty from Bechi-Carraresi’s “electric” sunrise, those working behind the scenes seemed more concerned with ensuring the cumulative effect resulting from the coordination of gas and electricity. The former’s technological mindset, centered on innovation, ran counter to the latter’s usebased common sense, justified by myriad practicalities.81 Further paradoxes arise when we consider the likely lineage of BechiCarraresi’s electric arc lamp. True to the cosmopolitan ambitions of its founder, the grand duke, and of its first director, Corridi, the Istituto Tecnico Toscano maintained close relationships with other European technical schools and laboratories. While those institutions innovated, the Istituto Tecnico mostly imitated. The most sophisticated electrical instruments in its collections were imported from abroad, with local builders often simply replacing the original inventors’ signatures with their

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own in an attempt to nativize the technical achievements. Other devices were copied in loco from French, British, and (from the end of the century) German models. These trends reflected the local, still backward character of Italian science and engineering, which remained so at least until the 1860s, when technical workshops in various regions began to produce a meager stock of instruments for exportation.82 Given this state of affairs, it is highly likely that the 1852 artificial-sunshine machine used for La Pergola’s Profeta was not a Tuscan creation per se, but was reproduced to the letter from Foucault’s arc voltaïque.83 If so, the aura it created, both literally and metaphorically, emanated from the model of urban and theatrical modernity set forth by the French metropolis. “Provincialism is not so much a matter of difference from the center,” Franco Moretti has observed, “but of enforced similarity.”84 And yet this technological artifact that, night after night in the mid-1850s, lit the stages of several northern and central Italian cities still marked an opera production that cannot simply be deemed a replica of the Parisian model.

Stagecrafting the City The fraught relationship between Florence and the French capital emerges more clearly if we examine another aspect of La Pergola’s Profeta staging: the setting of the famous coronation scene in act 4. After the fogs have lifted at the end of act 3 and the sunrise has let through a glimpse of the city of Münster in the distance, the following act opens in a square outside the city hall. The Anabaptists have taken Münster, and while its people despair over their despotic rule, Fede grieves the loss of her son, whom she believes to be dead—killed by the prophet. She and Berta rush toward the tyrant’s palace, their departure paving the way for the grand procession and dramatic mother-son confrontation that form the climax of Meyerbeer’s opera. For the “Marche du sacre” and the following sections of the coronation scene, the composer prescribed a marvelous changement à vue, transporting the audience from Münster’s square right through the walls of its cathedral.85 It is there that, after a glittering cortege has paraded, Giovanni is crowned prophet-king. The architectural density of this scene can hardly be overestimated. The so-called exorcisme— the melodramatic moment when the newly crowned prophet-king forces Fede to kneel and recant her motherhood by the power of a glance— gains much of its dramatic impact from Meyerbeer’s monumental setting, in which various architectural components intersect to create a dynamic and elusive sense of space.

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Owing most likely to censorship, La Pergola’s 1852 production placed the unfolding of events not inside but outside the cathedral, however. For a start, the libretto indicated that the new scene should take place in the “great hall of Münster,” thus avoiding any reference to the religious setting.86 What is more, in what was a further departure from Meyerbeer’s instructions, after the performances the leading critic Luigi Ferdinando Casamorata described how the coronation scene non avviene come dovrebbe sotto gli occhi dello spettatore, ma bensì fra le quinte, vale a dire all’interno della Cattedrale, poiché lo scenario, anziché l’interno di questa ne rappresenta la piazza; il qual cambiamento (reso necessario dai nostri usi) non può far carico alla direzione, la quale anzi merita lode per aver così operato, facendo che il corteggio passi dalla piazza nell’interno della Cattedrale, dal di dentro della quale si odono gl’inni religiosi della cerimonia, mentre il popolo e Fede restano fuori, ossia sul palco, ed avvenendo l’incontro della madre e del figlio e tutta la magnifica scena che ne succede, quando il corteggio, uscendo dalla cattedrale a cerimonia finita, torna a passar per la scena. Il colorito religioso è in tal modo meglio mantenuto che se tutto ciò avesse luogo all’interno di una sala, come vorrebbe il libretto che è stato stampato.87 [does not take place, as it should, before the eyes of the audience, but rather offstage, inside the Cathedral; and this because the scenery, instead of depicting the latter, depicts the city square. This change, made necessary by our customs, cannot be blamed on the theater’s management, which on the contrary should be praised for this—for making the procession move from the square into the Cathedral. One can hear the religious hymns of the ceremony flowing from its interior, while the people and Fede remain outside, that is, on stage. Following the encounter between mother and son and the wonderful scene that comes next, the ceremony having finished, the procession comes out of the cathedral and crosses the stage again. The religious color is better attained in this way than if the whole scene took place in a hall, as per the printed libretto.]

The audience was presented visually not with the complex threedimensional layering and shading of spatial volumes that Meyerbeer devised for this most spectacular of grand-operatic scenes—captured in numerous contemporary illustrations—but with the plain facade of the church. The procession that, to the blast and blare of combined pit and stage fanfares, leads Giovanni to his crowning marched not under the vaulted Gothic arches and across the shadowy nave and aisles of Münster’s cathedral, but in the open-air spaciousness of its main piazza.88

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The outdoor space of the square, with people crowding from nearby streets to attend the ceremony, exaggerated the invisibility of the moment of Giovanni’s coronation. According to Meyerbeer’s instructions, the prophet is crowned at that high altar, upstage left, whose view must be hidden from the audience.89 At Florence, Giovanni first crossed the stage with his entourage and then walked off it altogether as he entered the cathedral, only to reappear from behind the backdrop once the rite of the coronation was technically over. What in Paris played out as a gradual recession into and reemergence from overlaid spatial levels became at La Pergola a drastic opposition of “inside” and “outside.” A clean, neat surface depicting an open urban view replaced the religious building’s murky, receding inner core. The reversed interior/exterior logic upon which the Florentine staging was premised did not simply dilute but rather dispelled all architectural complexity. It would be simplistic—historically groundless, even—to read La Pergola’s refashioned coronation scene as a direct grafting of contemporary perceptions of Florence’s material fabric onto its main operatic stage. As far as we can tell, censorial and most likely practical impediments—the need to set up the decors for both tableaus of act 4 simultaneously on the same stage—were what led Meyerbeer’s visible scene change to be dropped, and the public-square setting to be retained throughout the act. With the lack of visual evidence as to what La Pergola’s scenery might have looked like, we have no reason to suspect that Florence’s architecture should have influenced its design. We may nevertheless glean something of the currency between real and fictional experiences of the city from a passage in Carlo Lorenzini’s Un romanzo in vapore: Da Firenze a Livorno (1856). Subtitled Guida storico-umoristica, this early experiment in Italian railway literature—published by the future creator of Pinocchio, better known by his pen name Carlo Collodi—offered a tourist guide for passengers traveling on Tuscany’s Leopolda line (1848), mixed with satirical reflections on technological progress and urban life. In chapter 7, Lorenzini imagines setting off on a train journey from Florence to Livorno and engaging in conversation with other travelers in his car. Following a descriptive opening full of wry comparisons between the railway soundscape and modern musical compositions, he reports extracts of his imaginary exchange. “Florence is not a city,” he ventures; “it is a house; a rather spacious house, if you like,” and Florentines form “a very numerous family whose members almost always know each other by name.”90 Two pages later, another passenger shows his approval and adds that “this uninterrupted chain of acquaintances . . . will always be the chief obstacle for the social novel to take root and flourish

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in Florence.” Lorenzini—or this very same passenger, for who is speaking is not clear—then goes on to set forth his full theory. The material and social conditions that have allowed this literary genre to flourish in northern European metropolises are not to be found in the Tuscan capital, whose physical makeup and everyday life could not provide a starker contrast to those of London or Paris. It is only logical that these differences should produce incompatible narrative structures. “Reading this story,” Lorenzini (or his alter ego) explains, referring to Eugène Sue’s popular Les Mystères de Paris (1842–43), 91

voi credete di assistere a dei fatti veri, a degli avvenimenti che sembrano storici, perché il romanziere, all’occorrenza, vi dice il nome della strada, il numero degli usci, il piano della casa, l’insegna della taverna . . . nei grandi centri, come Londra e Parigi, dove un operaio può comodamente morir di fame, o d’asfissia, senza che l’inquilino che abita il piano di sotto o di sopra, ne sappia nulla, tutto diventa probabile, tutto si rende possibile.92 [you have the impression of witnessing facts that are real, events that would seem historical, because the novelist will, if necessary, tell you the name of the street, the house number, the floor, the sign of the tavern. . . . In big cities such as London and Paris, where a workman can easily starve or asphyxiate without the occupant living on the floor below or above realizing it, everything becomes probable, everything becomes possible.]

And a few lines later: Quando voi leggete nei romanzi francesi il nome di una strada o il numero di una porta, quel numero e quel nome per gli stessi abitanti di Parigi rappresentano semplicemente due punti topografici qualunque . . . è verosimile per ogni lettore che a Londra e a Parigi abbiano luogo dei fatti, noti soltanto al romanziere che li racconta.93 [When in French novels you read the name of a street or a door number, that number and that name, for Parisians themselves, constitute simply two arbitrary topographical points. . . . For every reader it is plausible that in London and Paris events might happen that are known only to the novelist who recounts them.]

The labyrinthine spaces and the social anonymity typical of northern European metropolises are what made them the cradles of the social novel as a literary genre. In such urban centers, Lorenzini implies, the relationship between names and objects is loosened:94 referents cease to

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exist in a univocal, self-evident connection with their signifieds, creating what Michel De Certeau would later call the “foggy geography of ‘meanings’” floating over the material text of the city.95 Florence’s layout—its more compact urban structure and its less fragmented social life—means, on the other hand, that its inhabitants always know what happens within its limits, and the verosimile (plausible) is by definition an illusion.96 The bulk of Lorenzini’s imaginary train conversation was incorporated the following year in his pseudo–social novel I misteri di Firenze, a parody of Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris. For our purposes, the key point in the author’s urban comparison comes from a new passage that appears exclusively in I misteri. After explaining that Florence “has no mysteries,” Lorenzini summons aspects of theatrical experience to elaborate his point. “Of the walls of our city,” he observes, si potrebbe dire quello che dicono gli scrittori di tragedie delle mura di Corte, cioè, che hanno degli occhi per vedere e degli orecchi per ascoltare. Qui ogni casa ha il suo eco, e le pareti e i muri maestri, che dividono le stanze e i quartieri, sono di tela rada e bucherellata, come le scene da teatro. Così la cronaca pubblica è informata di tutto e di tutti.97 [one could say what tragedians say of courtly walls, that is, that they have eyes to see and ears to listen. Here every house has it own echo, and both curtain and load-bearing walls that divide rooms and neighborhoods are made of thin, perforated canvas, like theater backdrops. And so it is that public reporting knows about everything and everyone.]

Lorenzini’s experience included intense activity as a theater critic, and this is by no means the only instance in which he drew parallels between the stage and real life to formulate his views on a variety of topics in his nonjournalistic writings.98 Two main types of walls are evoked in this passage: those demarcating the spaces within individual buildings, and those dividing the city into separate neighborhoods. Both are subject to a high volume of auditory traffic, their penetrable qualities implicitly thrown into relief by the impervious solidity of the city’s medieval perimeter. While those external walls, which were still standing in the 1850s, traditionally marked the tangible “beginning” and “end” of the Italian city, its distinct body separated from a constitutive “outside,” the inner walls described by Lorenzini possessed a greater porosity. His understanding of Florence as a house or grand family whose members are in seamless communication with each other rested on the inner and outer walls’ capacity, respectively, to let through and to contain. This combination of permeable and impermeable qualities in the city’s fabric coagulated its urban

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community, ruling out the possibility of the social novel’s acts of unexpected metropolitan revelation. Lorenzini’s account of Florence’s inner cohesion may be historically accurate, but only up to a point. Even before its medieval walls were demolished in the late 1860s to provide for new building space required by the relocation of the capital, the city hardly constituted the neatly packaged urban system that the mythical imagery of a city gem nestled in the embrace of the surrounding countryside has accustomed us to believing. Florence’s borders may symbolically have been set by its stony perimeter, the monumental porte (gates) functioning as channels regulating the objects and people flowing into and out of the municipal body. But both within and beyond that hard ring there existed a mixture of built and green spaces, and Tuscany’s population was among the most dispersed of the states of the Italian peninsula, with a large number residing in the hills, mountains, and plains.99 Florence’s “fringe belt”—the transition zone between city proper and countryside—had for centuries been scattered with villas and farmsteads, almost as if civilization were indifferent to the stern, containing dictum of the walls.100 It was in the fraught balance between aerial views of Florence as a walled city and as a city in seamless continuity with the rural environs that pictorial representations had emphasized its past identity as a city-state, in a topographic tradition dating back to the late fifteenth century.101 When the walls on the north side of the Arno were razed during the capital years, Cattaneo’s “elementary state” was dissolved, if not in the actual, continuing interdependence of urban and rural activities, at least in the dichotomous symbolism of an “inside” and an “outside” that in principle had ceased to exist.102 Lorenzini’s remarks on Florence betray a peculiar strategy of selffashioning: almost an attempt to de-urbanize himself and his city. His theatrical metaphor—his appeal to the realm of artistic, staged representation—furthermore foregrounds notions we have already encountered in this chapter. In a convergence of “fiction” and “reality” recalling the Rivista musicale di Firenze’s approach to Gambara, Lorenzini’s Florence loses out to the modernity of northern European metropolises by presenting itself as a scale model of sorts. Once understood in this light, La Pergola’s inside-out setting for Meyerbeer’s Coronation Scene produces similar effects, intentionally or not. The increased legibility created by the flat view of Münster’s cathedral when compared to its voluminous interior is in line with the semiotic clarity that Collodi identified, and other local observers augured, when they reflected on Florence’s material fabric. Remember the complaint raised by that 1850s Florentine: La Pergola ought to be “readable” from its facade, immediately recogniz-

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able from its external features. Function and status should at once translate into physical reality, and vice versa, leaving no room for ambiguity as to a building’s use and symbolic value. After all, Florence had long existed as a simulacrum, an ideal city to be enjoyed through a static, scopic mode of consumption. Its three-dimensional structure mattered less than its flattened panoramas, even though the latter became a key conceptual category only after the walls were demolished and viewpoints created that enabled distant contemplation of the city from the hills.103 But the distance that separated the Tuscan capital of the 1850s from metropolises such as London and Paris also emerges from the imaginary wall perforations that, Lorenzini contended, created within it intercommunicating, albeit distinct, physical environments. Just as sound in the theater trespasses the barriers of stage sets, so did Florence know no hermetic enclosures, no irreconcilable subsets of life or knowledge. That continuity extended beyond its medieval perimeter, reaching to foreign milieus whose material and symbolic substance Florence absorbed in complex and unpredictable ways. Only a city placed simultaneously at the core and on the fringe of Western modernity could produce a comparison with the flimsiness of theatrical scenery, and still claim for its opera house a leading position in a globalizing world.

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Funeral Entrainments E rr i co Pet r el l a’s Jone and th e B an d

To approach a man’s last earthly utterances with a historical mindset is to engage twice an irreducible otherness. Minutes before Errico Petrella died in Genoa on April 7, 1877, he took leave of this world with a mixture of apparently senseless ravings and half-embodied memories. His son Antonio was there to record—or invent—the opera composer’s final moments: as the suffering man realized that his energies were failing, he asked those present at his bedside to leave him alone. Thinking they had heard his last words, the composer Michele Grimaldi, a certain Maestro Gozzi, and Antonio himself departed to the next room. Not long afterward, however, they caught a few more sentences coming from the deathbed. “So many colors are bad for me; uniformity is what I need,” Petrella murmured in an apparent state of peace. To which, “half nodding the tempo of a funeral march,” he added, “‘Thump! Thump! Thump!’ accompanying his voice with gestures, as if he were conducting an orchestra.”1 A few seconds later, at exactly twelve o’clock, he asked his loved ones to help him up so that he could die—smiling, we’re told—in a sitting position. In retrospect, one may be tempted to brush off these end-of-life filial recollections, reported by Petrella’s biographer Giovanni Carotti, as a calculated forgery: a deliberate tweaking of historical reality devised with posterity in mind. Born in Palermo, Sicily, in 1813, Petrella trained under Nicola Zingarelli (Vincenzo Bellini’s teacher) in Naples, where he debuted in the buffo genre in the late 1820s before turning to serious opera and some Northern Italian stages from the mid-1850s. Throughout this decade and the next, he was the most performed living composer in Italy after Verdi; his operas were featured in both major and minor theaters, and selected numbers were played by wind bands all over the peninsula and abroad. Stricken by diabetes and financial difficulties at the end of his life, he was especially famous for a marcia funebre from his classical

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opera Jone (1858), set in Pompeii at the time of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. The march, played by a wind band, announces the doom of the young Athenian Glauco as he is led to the arena to be devoured by beasts, and had a rapid and extensive circulation outside the theater. As Verdi’s librettist Antonio Ghislanzoni remarked shortly after Petrella’s passing, “in every corner of Italy people sing his tunes, and there is no single person who does not know by heart, note for note, especially the famous mad scene and duet from Jone, its funeral sounds accompanying Glauco to the scaffold, [and] the love duet from La contessa d’Amalfi”—another of Petrella’s greatest successes.2 Such hyperbolic language bears the distinguishing traits of myth: the “popular” flavor of narratives asserting operatic melodies’ ubiquity. One wonders what it might mean to “know by heart, note for note,” a windband funeral march when, in Ghislanzoni’s account, Italians’ familiarity with Petrella’s music stemmed from their propensity for singing it. But keeping at least the march’s wide dissemination in mind, it takes perhaps not too great a leap of faith (or charity) to concede that, at a time when death was less unceremoniously banished from everyday consciousness and more ceremoniously staged in funeral rituals than is today, the piece’s rhythmic beats might have pulsed through the dying composer’s veins and imagination, as per his son’s recollections. The sound of the rullanta, thudding Glauco on to his grisly end, could really have burst in on Petrella’s body by force of onomatopoeic “thumps.” The composer-cumconductor’s musical identities might genuinely have found a place in the final acts of the layman. Whatever stance we choose to take on the subject, Petrella’s marcia funebre did resound through the city of Genoa on April 14, 1877, the day of the composer’s funeral. A warm, crystal-clear afternoon, the streets and balconies of the houses were packed with people yearning to pay homage to the deceased. Since April 7, the composer’s body had been at the local Teatro Anatomico, where it had been embalmed by arrangement of the city council in advance of a grand messa funebre planned to take place in the Nunziata church. Eventually this event was canceled and a more sober commemoration was held at the Staglieno cemetery.3 That afternoon, “the melancholy and solemn harmonies [concerti] of a funeral march” could be heard sprawling from under the sycamores of the Acquasola Park, the central green area where the funeral cortege had congregated.4 The procession included municipal authorities from Genoa, Naples, and Palermo, as well as students, musicians, choristers, and friends of the departed. Their orderly parading across the city was paced by two (or possibly three) musical bands, which opened and closed the proces-

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sion. The hearse, pulled by four horses in black caparisons, was first-class, as befitted solemn occasions. After taking a turn around Piazza De Ferrari, off which stands the Carlo Felice theater, and a turn east into Via Giulia, the cortege headed north, proceeding another couple of miles to Staglieno. Along the way—the journey took nearly two hours—the choristers sang the dirge from act 2 of Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi, while the bands “nearly always” played Jone’s funeral march, instilling an “ineffable sadness” in all present.5 Paraphrasing the speech that one of Petrella’s fellow Palermitans gave in the burial chamber, Carotti recalls how, that day, the composer’s death united Ligurians and Southern Italians in a spirit of “brotherhood” and the same “feeling of Italianness.”6 The biographer goes on to explain: “It was natural that from one end of Italy to the other, bitter grief be felt for the irreparable loss.”7 Petrella’s grand public funeral, which appropriated civic space both visually and sonically, together with the more intimate deathbed moments recorded by Carotti, points to a death culture that in the last third of the nineteenth century was thoroughly transformed under the influence of competing political, social, and religious agendas.8 Funeral processions of the participatory kind described above would have been unlikely prior to Unification, and in fact they remained sporadic well into the 1870s. The democratic leader Giuseppe Mazzini and Italy’s first king, Victor Emmanuel II, received impressive funerals in 1872 and 1878, with the attempts to physically immortalize the two men by embalming their bodies reflecting the political strategies of republican groups and the Savoy monarchy respectively.9 But leaving aside arrangements for distinguished individuals and a paying elite, the typical funeral rite in the new Italian state still ended in the church, leaving little room for community mourning along the way. Band performances understood as media for articulating collective grief on an everyday basis were symptoms of a new age. As civil funerals became more common in the final decades of the century and the state gained control over burial matters that had formerly been the monopoly of the Church, funeral marches stretched their original military functions and became soundtracks for choreographed funeral corteges. Their weighty rhythmic tread, inviting a slow, coordinated gait, and their melancholy tunes, acting as release valves for grief, captured the double impulse of the age: simultaneously toward the socialization and the privatization of death.10 Jone’s funeral march was a milestone in the genre—or, to be more precise, it became a funeral “classic” as it fulfilled a multiplicity of purposes. Originally composed for a banda sul palco, a few months after the opera’s premiere in Milan in 1858 it had already been arranged for military brass

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bands and filarmoniche societies from various parts of Italy. As well as accompanying funeral rituals and serving as an idée fixe in contemporary descriptions of their affective landscapes, it grew into a central feature of the Holy Week processions that took place, as they still do today, in various regions of the Center and the South, and even in Spain and Latin America.11 In what follows, we’ll take leave of the distinctly urban exploration in chapter 1 and immerse ourselves in a more dispersed Italian geography. Retracing the functions and meanings that accrued around Petrella’s march at a time when Italian wind bands were on the rise and their former military roles were being expanded in new civic contexts allows us to recapture some of the shared national experiences that an operatic number detached from its dramatic context and made to circulate outside the theater could generate, even as it was inflected locally in multiple ways.

“Petrella Qua, Petrella Là . . .” The historical life of Petrella’s funeral march begins on January 26, 1858, the date of Jone’s opening night at La Scala. The event was not exactly a success. The second of Petrella’s operas to premiere in Milan’s foremost theater, Jone had been awaited with anticipation after positive response to L’assedio di Leida two years earlier. Based on Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s widely read historical novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), which was adapted into a libretto by Giovanni Peruzzini, Jone was initially slated to debut at Venice’s La Fenice during the 1857 Carnival-Lent season—a plan that went awry when Petrella fell ill and failed to complete his work in time.12 The lukewarm outcome of the premiere largely reflected the poor quality of the singing: as the performers familiarized themselves with their parts during subsequent nights, the reception of the production tipped in the composer’s favor. The cast included soprano Augusta Albertini-Boucardè ( Jone), mezzo-soprano Carmelita Poch (Nidia), baritone Giovanni Guicciardi (Arbace), and, most notably, tenor Carlo Negrini (Glauco), the staunchest promoter of Jone’s popularity in subsequent years. Among the most acclaimed numbers were the act 2 finale, featuring an unusual mad scene for the tenor, and his act 4 romanza “O Jone! O di quest’anima!,” which had a fairly rich gramophone life in the early 1900s.13 Even considering the encouraging reception that La Scala’s first run of performances received from the public overall, Petrella’s opera fared poorly with the press, revealing a tension between critical and audience responses that would haunt the work through its performance history.

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Critical authorities leveled their attacks at multiple elements: the libretto, the staging, and most of all the composer’s technical expertise. Peruzzini’s rereading of Bulwer-Lytton’s love story from classical antiquity, a story so appealing in its merging of archaeological facts and fiction that it had received two Italian translations by 1835, did away with the religious tensions that underpin the novel, in the process dismantling its distinctive cultural-historical atmosphere. Stripped of those features that might have heightened its dramatic substance, the libretto boiled Bulwer-Lytton’s book down to its melodramatic skeleton: in Giuseppe Rovani’s words, “a simple love story with the smell of sulphur and smoke in the distance.”14 The reference is to the eruption of Vesuvius that brings down the curtain in the last act: a theatrical resource that earlier composers had employed in their operas, and which Petrella, “a terribly destructive maestro,” wielded in combination with formidable orchestral earth tremors.15 In both the ordinary and the exceptional aspects of its staged incarnation, however, his Pompeian setting failed to live up to the expectations of realism. La Scala’s sets, critics thought, too closely recalled modern architecture, while the two Bengal lights shining behind a flat against a ridiculously blue sky rendered the volcanic explosion inadequately.16 Petrella’s faults, and those of his librettist and set designers, were exacerbated by his seeming want of basic technical skills as a composer. As a Southerner both by birth and by musical training, he was considered one of the last exponents of the “Neapolitan school”: the operatic tradition of Pergolesi, Paisiello, Cimarosa, and (for some) Rossini, arguably characterized by direct melodic outpouring. Petrella’s reputation as a melodist at a time when the so-called German school was contaminating Italian singing with a new declamatory vocality might have earned him a position of reasonable canonical security, were it not for “errors” that compromised his operas over and over. Commonplace tunes, faulty rhythms, irregular phrases, abuse of octaves and unisons: all of these undermined his status as an accomplished composer, and a rival of Verdi.17 Most execrable of all was his indifference to prosody, evidenced by his habit of “forc[ing] the word to function like a string of gutta-percha” stretched to match the music.18 Jone gathered all these mistakes and also pushed against the beauties of the Italian voice. For the singers’ vocal ranges did not always match their parts’ tessituras, meaning that a series of acoustic “excesses” lacerated listeners’ ears. The problem was especially noticeable with AlbertiniBoucardè, who was forced to shout out some lines that were well beyond her comfortable vocal limits.19 But the sonic extravagances also stemmed from the composer’s relentless use of dynamic contrasts, such as we shall later encounter in the act 4 marcia funebre.

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Damage as they might, these defects did not hamper Jone’s circulation either in Italy or abroad. Petrella’s opera “will tour every theater,” declared an enthusiastic writer for Milan’s Il trovatore mere days after its premiere.20 The work’s good fortunes were foretold in the midst of a Petrella fever that spread from the Lombard capital. The composer’s presence with simultaneous stagings of his operas in no less than three local theaters on the same February night was hailed by Ghislanzoni as “a very singular occurrence in the history of Italian theater.”21 “Petrella’s music is going round all the opera houses of Italy, gaining unanimous applause,” observed a critic from Venice a few months later.22 In 1862, at the height of another Petrella-packed Milanese season, the composer even prompted comparison with the most famous of Rossini’s characters: Petrella “is like Figaro in Il barbiere; tutti lo vogliono, Petrella qua, Petrella là,” noted a journalist wryly.23 To judge from the historical record, the craze was not solely an Italian phenomenon, given that by the early 1860s a taste for selected Petrella operas had extended to other countries. Produced in Valletta, Nice, Havana, New York, Barcelona, Corfu, Costantinople, Philadelphia, Boston, and Buenos Aires by the turn of 1865, Jone could then well justify the remark that it had “toured the globe and been loved everywhere.”24 A first reversal in this expansionary tendency occurred, in Italy at least, sometime during the 1870s. At a time when audiences were becoming increasingly captivated by the spectacular effects of French and Italian-style grand opéra, Jone fell out of favor on the foremost national stages, lacking the potential for comparable visual and orchestral display and comprising too many obsolete dramatic and musical formulas. It retained a place, however, in the repertoire of many second-rate theaters—the so-called teatri minori—where productions of variable quality continued well into the twentieth century.25 An 1885 novella by the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, centering on a performance of La contessa d’Amalfi (1864) in the Abruzzi, captures the atmosphere of cultural provincialism with which Petrella’s works more generally had become associated.26 Not unrelatedly perhaps, the 1870s were also when extracts from Jone, notably its marcia funebre, gained a solid position not just in the repertoire of Italian wind bands but also in literary accounts of their performances, followed by ethnographic work later in the century.27 With its ample dose of straightforward dynamic contrasts, predictable harmonies, tuneful melodies, and numbers composed as band music, Jone lent itself to those operations of arrangement and transcription that took nineteenth-century opera ever more frequently to the streets.28 Judged “a musical jewel” and an “exquisite work” by two of the composer’s early critics, Petrella’s funeral march had by February 1858 already

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appeared alongside other extracts in piano and piano-vocal arrangements signed by Pietro Repetto for Francesco Lucca’s publishing firm.29 In May, the publisher Teodoro Cottrau, author of popular Neapolitan songs, released his own editions of separate pieces from Jone in Naples, where the opera premiered at the San Carlo the following November.30 Presumably it was on the basis of one of these publications that, during the spring and summer months of that same year, the Neapolitan composer Eduardo Buonomo produced arrangements of four Jone numbers for the fanfare of the Battaglioni dei Cacciatori of the army of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.31 The scoring of these pieces—all of which are from act 1 except for the act 4 Jone-Arbace duet—is typical of the Neapolitan brass ensembles of the period. The singing parts and other melodic lines are entrusted to the sopranino (a small trumpet) in E flat, six saxotrombas in A flat, the biucolo (bugle) in B flat, and the terzino (an alto ophicleide) in B flat, with further saxotrombas, saxhorns, trombones, and low brasses providing rhythmic and harmonic support.32 Although the marcia funebre does not feature among the surviving operatic numbers arranged by Buonomo, much of its substance can be gleaned from the aforementioned duet since, as we shall see, its tempo di mezzo integrates excerpts of the march’s motives. Dated July 1858, Buonomo’s arrangement of this piece may be one of the earliest reimaginings of music from Jone for a military, or indeed a civic, wind ensemble. Its funeral march echoes may even have provided a sonic frame of reference for the Neapolitan band’s appearances on the San Carlo stage during the first run of performances in the autumn. Although it is hard to say what wind ensemble the theater used for its first Jone production, military bands regularly provided their services during opera performances, creating a seamless continuity between the soundscape of the theater and that of outdoor urban spaces where they played operatic music.33 Further arrangements of Jone’s funeral music, difficult though they are to locate in the absence of a catalogue encompassing all Italian bandmusic collections, do resurface upon separate searches in various archives: in Crema, Lombardy, for instance, where an unsigned 1864 manuscript score contains the same act 4 duet arranged by Buonomo, here reworked for a larger woodwind-and-brass ensemble;34 or in Fiesole, near Florence, whose filarmonica society has preserved a copy of Petrella’s marcia funebre dating most likely from a slightly later period.35 Friedrich Fahrbach, member of a Viennese family of band musicians and for some years director of the Società Filarmonica di Ala (near Trento), orchestrated Jone’s march for a mix of wind and string instruments in the same year as Buonomo.36 If print editions of the piece scored for band did not emerge in Italy until

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the turn of the twentieth century, in Madrid a journal exclusively devoted to military music published one as early as 1867.37 Indeed, Spain would become the second country after Italy to see wide “popular” uses of Petrella’s marcia funebre as part of Holy Week processions that in the 1850s began to generate their own musical repertoire. Starting no later than 1884, though likely predated by unrecorded uses, the piece was featured among the funeral marches, some original, that Andalusian civic and military bands performed to accompany these religious rites—a subject I will discuss later for Italy.38 How exactly a piece conceived to accompany a Greek convict to the scaffold became a modern military fixture, an instrument of mourning, and even a staple of devotional piety requires that we take a closer look at its musical and wider discursive life.

Sonic Circulations That Petrella’s marcia funebre had, by the time of the composer’s death, come to occupy a central place in the Italian musical imagination is clear from an anecdote, originally published in a Roman periodical in 1877, that Giuseppe Cosenza took pains to reprint in his 1909 biography of the composer. The story concerns the bizarre, hasty birth of the march: Tutti conoscono—scrive il Roma—la commovente e drammatica marcia funebre della Ione, ma pochi sanno come fu composta. La Ione era finita, il tempo stringeva, il maestro si arrovellava cercando un motivo che gli andasse a genio. Una sera, in un salotto, Petrella stava al pianoforte e toccava distratto i tasti. Ad un tratto si alzò, e senza salutare alcuno uscì. Il comm. Garberoglio, amico suo, uscì con lui, piuttosto inquieto. Senza far motto, giunsero a casa sua. Egli accese in fretta le candele del pianoforte, si sedette, e d’un fiato suonò la marcia funebre. C’era da rimanere sbalorditi a quel motivo, che così, in un baleno, gli era venuto in mente; ma quello che più colpiva era il volto dell’artista. Egli era come trasfigurato.39 [Everybody knows—writes the Roma [newspaper]—the moving and dramatic funeral march from Jone, but few know how it was composed. Jone was almost finished, time pressing, and the maestro fretting to find a motive that suited him. One evening, in a salon, Petrella was sitting at the piano and touching the keys absentmindedly. Suddenly he stood up and, without saying goodbye to anyone, he left. His friend the commendatore Garberoglio followed him, rather agitated. Without saying a word to each other, they arrived home. In haste, he [Petrella] lit the candles at the piano, sat down, and all in one breath, played the funeral march. One could not help but be astonished at that motive, which in a flash had come to

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his mind; but most striking of all was the face of the artist. He looked, as it were, transfigured.]

Like Ghislanzoni’s invocation of the supposed ubiquity of Petrella’s melodies, Cosenza’s anecdote has all the air of those suspicious retrospective narratives that the Verdi literature, to cite the richest and best known of such operatic literary fonts, contains aplenty. These stories, almost certainly spurious, aimed to sustain—or even create—a mythical aura around selected works and pieces by way of manipulating their compositional histories. As with Verdi’s chorus “Va pensiero,” whose lyrics, in a long biographical tradition, triggered the composer to conceive Nabucco (1842), in the above account Petrella’s initial dearth of inspiration sets the stage for a sudden, unexpected stroke of genius. In one fell swoop, Petrella finds his much craved musical motive and delivers it from mind to instrument, and presumably to paper. Only the trajectory is, in comparison to Verdi’s, inverted: the march marks the end rather than the beginning of the compositional process.40 A rather ordinary instance of the working of cultural memory, this tale would hardly be worth retelling were it not for elements that shed light on the marcia funebre’s contemporary reception. First, the account opens with Petrella’s search for “un motivo”—that is, a single musical motive— that might spark his imagination, inducing him to devise his piece and thereby complete his opera. His quest for Jone’s “missing link” is initially frustrated by a creative block, but after a change of setting he sits back at the piano and, “d’un fiato” (in one breath), he plays the march. The music flows effortlessly from him; “quel motivo” (that motive) which he had so adamantly been awaiting has now entered his consciousness “in un baleno” (in a flash). The emphasis on the swiftness of the process, the rapidity of the shift, which even becomes projected on the composer’s physical appearance, is directly tied, it would seem, to the marcia’s organic structure. The sudden awakening of Petrella’s genius and its manifestation in a circumscribed, focused piece of musical material can be read not only as a nod to Romantic art ideology, not only as an aestheticized farewell to a recently departed composer, but also as an artful commentary on—in many ways an interpretation of—intrinsic qualities in the music. Before we take this reading of Cosenza’s quoted excerpt any further, it may be useful to consider Petrella’s march in some detail. As mentioned earlier, the piece plays as Glauco—sentenced to death for sacrilege by the high priest of Isis, Arbace, but in reality guilty only of loving the jealous Egyptian’s ward, Jone—is escorted to the arena by soldiers, guards, and lictors, to be devoured by the beasts. We are in scene 1 of act 4, set,

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according to Peruzzini’s libretto, in a grand street in Pompeii, with the view of the amphitheater on one side and sea at some distance on the other.41 Rich citizens with slaves are on their way to the feral spectacle, which will eventually be thwarted by the eruption of Vesuvius. The execution procession scene for which Petrella composed his marcia funebre is, as it happens, absent from Bulwer-Lytton’s novel: all we learn about the Greek lover at this point in the original is that he is taken from his cell to meet his fate.42 Most likely, the composer and his librettist borrowed something of their funeral-march setting from an earlier episode in the book: namely, the “classic funeral” of Jone’s brother Apaecides, for whose murder Glauco is convicted in the novel, a funeral that BulwerLytton recounts in great visual and musical detail. “A slow and dismal music, which accorded sadly with the rite, and floated far along the desolate and breathless streets,” paves the way, in his description, to a funeral dirge sung by a female chorus of preficae. After Apaecides’s corpse has appeared, carried forth “upon a couch, spread with a purple pall,” we meet the full cortege, opened by “musicians, playing a slow march—the solemnity of the lower instruments broken by many a louder and wilder burst of the funeral trumpet.”43 Set at “tempo di marcia lugubre” in Petrella’s autograph score and early piano-vocal editions, Jone’s march is introduced by a slow, dotted sounding of offstage trumpets—immediately commented on by a secondary character, Burbo—which announces the approach of the execution procession (example 2.1).44 The opening theme consists of a soft five-measure phrase that describes a gentle upward-downward curve as the harmonies shift from tonic (D minor) to dominant and back again. It is clear from indications in an early Naples manuscript score, apparently used for the first run of performances at the San Carlo and containing instructions added by or transcribed from the composer, that the banda is meant to start its grim performance behind the scenes, only walking on stage about eight measures into the piece—roughly on the word s’appressa (is approaching).45 The moment coincides with the midpoint of the opening theme’s first iteration, marking a repetition that thus comes to embody a handover between the ear and the eye. In a sensory shift typical of mid-nineteenthcentury stage banda conventions, what has begun as a purely auditory reading of the events foreboded by the ominous offstage music becomes a reckoning of the unfolding scene that is both aural and visual. As the cortege comes into view, Glauco is spotted amid the soldiers, guards, and lictors to a choral exclamation of “È lui!” Then, as a new, mellifluous cantabile theme ensues (mm. 73ff)—in its shape similar to the first, albeit richer in texture and chromatic color—further comments by the crowd

E x a mple 2.1. Petrella, Jone, act 4, preludio, coro e marcia funebre, mm. 60–114

E x a mple 2.1. (continued)

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inform us of the “deadly pallor” of his face, contrasting with the “free and steady” quality that marks his step.46 This theme too is, like the opening one, repeated after its first presentation, its second statement then leading on to the march’s short trio. A mere nine measures in B flat major, packed with sudden dynamic shifts and pivots on off-beat pitches, offer a contrasting, more dogged take on Glauco’s impending execution. Once again, the trio’s theme is played twice, with its second occurrence forming the musical backdrop against which the convict and the rest of the cortege begin to cross the stage and approach the amphitheater. As if to underscore the climax of this moment, the subsequent reprise of the marcia funebre’s second theme starts as a sonically amplified version of it supported by the full orchestra (mm. 97–101). The intrusion from the pit is brief, lasting only four measures and recurring at the end of the march; but in the context of a piece played entirely from either on- or offstage, it introduces a stereophonic effect that momentarily unsettles the diegetic, monaural world woven by the band.47 Furthermore, this orchestral reinforcement delivers one of those acoustic “excesses” that were integral to Jone’s nineteenth-century reception, and that became crucial (as we shall see) to the emotional landscape associated with Petrella’s march outside the theater. What immediately stands out even from such a cursory description of Jone’s marcia funebre is the degree of repetition that characterizes it. Although not quite as monomotivically conceived as the 1877 commentator quoted by Cosenza would have us believe, the piece does function as an independent, self-contained unit, its themes at once sharing rhythmic and melodic similarities and lending themselves to potentially endless repetition. Made up of discrete, harmonically closed musical segments, each twice repeated, the march is infinitely stretchable, infinitely capable of accommodating adjustments to its length and scoring. The band arrangements that proliferated from the late nineteenth century onward must have capitalized on such flexibility. Because it could be cut or extended at will, Petrella’s march suited the necessities of what were, by definition, onthe-move ensembles. Perhaps its repetitive quality, to some extent also typical of the funeral march as a genre, can even go some way to explaining historical accounts of the piece as popolare, with the term used to portray less the character of its melodies, which one critic deemed “original,” and more the number’s general andamento: its “gait.”48 As Emanuele Senici has shown for Rossini’s cabaletta “Di tanti palpiti” from Tancredi (1813), and more generally for the extraordinary spread of Rossini’s music in the early nineteenth century, repetition played a key role in activating musical memory, and vice versa: a reciprocal process facilitating the

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composer’s fame. The easier it was to remember, the more likely an operatic excerpt would be widely disseminated, with the familiarity stemming in turn from its systematic reproduction being perhaps even capable of validating insinuations, like Ghislanzoni’s, that a funeral march could be sung far and wide. Something of this iterative, circular character was to transform Petrella’s marcia funebre into a perfect example of late-nineteenth-century mechanical music—barrel organs and the like. Another implication was for scorings of the piece, which could inflect the repeated material through shifting timbres and textures. As was common among Italian opera composers of the period, Petrella notated his band music on two staves in his autograph score, occasionally employing a third for the rullanta, and left it to individual bandmasters to develop full-fledged orchestrations for performances of Jone in different theaters. The original manuscript scores so produced are difficult to find: band scores and band parts were treated as ephemera, and were not typically preserved in theater or band society archives. At least until Unification, as mentioned earlier, military bands often provided their services during opera performances. The number of instruments varied according to local resources and traditions, as did their types and names, during a period when Italian wind bands had not yet begun to standardize their practices across the peninsula. When Jone premiered at La Scala in January 1858, the band of the Reggimento Reischach performed on stage, most likely dressed in the same costumes as the Roman lictors.50 At Padua, on the other hand, a widely acclaimed performance in July did without the band, the local ensemble being occupied in military operations.51 One of the few indications as to what kind of sound Petrella might have had in mind when he jotted down or rehearsed his march thus comes to us from the opera’s sinfonia, whose opening eighteenth measures offer a distillation of the marcia funebre’s musical motives. Consisting of a bundle of thirty-seven folios that precede the dated frontispiece in the composer’s autograph score, this piece was likely written some time after completion of Jone in June 1857, and replaced a short preludio that originally began it.52 Plans to write a full-scale overture may have emerged just before or even during orchestral rehearsals at La Scala the following winter.53 If so, the sinfonia’s opening section, unsurprisingly scored for full orchestra, might reflect something of the sound of the Milanese theater’s stage band as employed later in the funeral march. The piece begins with a presentation of the march’s first theme, transposed to A minor and interrupted abruptly after three measures by an instance of the heavy, percussive chords that frame the trio (example 2.2). This 49

E x a mple 2.2. Petrella, Jone, act 1, sinfonia, mm. 1–18

E x a mple 2.2. (continued)

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interruption triggers the second half of the second theme, inclusive of its descending chromatic glide and of a newly added dotted march rhythm in the accompaniment. Following a fadeaway effect calling for echoing flutes, oboes, clarinets, and horns (mm. 7–9), the potpourri of march motives is repeated, this time modulating and leading to the next section of the sinfonia. Petrella’s scoring clearly points to a layered conception of sonority: his acoustic fabric is initially spun from a lugubrious spluttering of three trombones, an ophicleide, and a rullanta in unison, and then thickens as further instruments enter in blocks at key moments in the subsequent measures. Only the forte chords at mm. 4 and 13 call for additional support from the strings: all remaining musical material is entrusted to woodwinds, brass, and percussion alone. Petrella’s dynamic effects stem both from dynamic marks and from rapidly shifting orchestral textures and sonorities. Made quicker by the succession of chopped-up motives from the march, the pace with which subsequent musical ideas follow one another reveals a fluid understanding of the sonorous fabric, with instruments employed in changing timbral groups and by no means always en masse.54 The marcia funebre’s motives resurface again in the tempo di mezzo of the Jone-Arbace duet from act 4, shown here in example 2.3 in the pianovocal version, to conserve space. Glauco is awaiting his hour in the circus and, as a sudden blaring of offstage trumpets (supported by the rullanta in the pit) interrupts the soprano and baritone’s altercation outside, we hear again the lugubrious music—now played by the orchestra. No references (but an “Ah!”) to the diegetic aural world of the arena are made in the sung lines:55 the handover of the march from stage to pit casts the amphitheater as a space simultaneously at one remove from and encroaching upon its exterior—the march an emotional accoutrement by now, no longer a perceptible reality. A similar relocation of sonic means has occurred a few minutes earlier in the tenor’s romanza “O Jone! O di quest’anima,” also rounded off by a reprise of the marcia funebre. While this reprise is played mostly by the band as the last of the popolani enter the amphitheater following Glauco and his cortege eight measures before the end, Petrella’s execution procession is brought to a close by the orchestra alone. By stretching the audible reach of the funeral music, which on a diegetic level now issues from the arena, the switch to the pit instruments nearly seals the hero’s doom. These shifts in the source from which Jone’s dismal sounds emanate exemplify Petrella’s dynamic use of the banda throughout the opera, particularly in acts 2 and 4. Employed now in alternation, now in combination with the orchestra, and either as a visible or an invisible

E x a mple 2.3. Petrella, Jone, act 4, scena e duetto ( Jone, Arbace), mm. 168–88

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E x a mple 2.3. (continued)

dramatic agent and source of color, the wind ensemble contributes a sense of realism, even as some of its interventions are summoned by given characters almost “on demand.”56 More significant still than the composer’s imaginative integration of the band in the acoustic fabric of the opera, an area in which Verdi had been leading the way since the 1840s—even after dismissing onstage bands as an anachronistic provincialism—is the trajectory that the passages described above draw for Jone’s march music, more precisely for its signifying mechanisms.57 A sonic index, at the outset, of an actual cortege parading in front of both characters and audience, Petrella’s marcia funebre is then gradually stripped of its denotative function and reassigned a role in evoking a more general grievous at-

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mosphere. The acoustic spatialization enabled by the scenic element of the amphitheater, at whose borders orchestra and band twice swap roles, extends the funeral march’s remit beyond the physical and aural realm: turning the music into an inward cipher of death and mourning. Without wanting to project deterministic historical narratives onto analytically mapped territory, I might still venture that the trajectory Jone’s march establishes on stage foreshadowed, as we shall see after a military excursus, its cultural life outside the theater. 58

Funeral Entrainments An educational essay published by the composer-pedagogue Michele Ruta in his Neapolitan journal La musica in 1877 suggests that the funeral march was far from a transparent musical genre. One in a series of articles titled “Ricordi pe’ giovani compositori” (Recollections for Young Composers), the essay retraces the history of funeral music from classical antiquity to Ruta’s day. It begins with an overview of funeral musical practices in the great pre-Christian civilizations of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, then proceeds through Roman and medieval times to eventually settle on modern funeral marches. Of these, the author illustrates the function with a two-pronged definition that highlights the music’s invitation to labor for both the body and the soul. “Today,” Ruta begins, la marcia funebre è un pezzo strumentale di genere militare destinato ad esprimere il dolore degli uomini nella perdita di un grande individuo ad essi caro per virtù e valore, e a misurare il lento procedere de’ passi di coloro che ne accompagnano le spoglie mortali al sepolcro.59 [the funeral march is an instrumental piece in the military genre aimed at expressing human grief for the loss of a noble and beloved person of great virtue and value, and at pacing the slow tread of those accompanying the mortal remains to the sepulcher.]

The combination of proper, even necessary release of emotion on the one hand, and of measured, disciplined physical motion on the other, is unpacked in a passage with heavily gendered language that casts the seeming contradiction between the march’s two functions into even sharper relief: La marcia funebre non deve esprimere i mesti sentimenti d’imbelli femminette, ma il dolore maschio e rassegnato di nobili soldati; non deve avere la gentile malinconia dell’Elegia, ma la decisione marziale del genere militare. . . . La marcia funebre oltre l’espressione di un nobile dolore, ha

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l’altra qualità di servire a misurare i passi: quindi il suo ritmo deve essere uniformemente misurato a due a due battute; il suo tempo non è libero, ma necessariamente pari, e il suo movimento maestoso e poco mosso.60 [The funeral march must not express the wistful sentiments of feeble little women, but rather the manly and resigned grief of noble soldiers; it must not possess the gentle melancholy of the elegy, but the martial decisiveness of the military genre. . . . Aside from the expression of noble grief, the funeral march has a second quality: it helps to pace one’s steps. Therefore, its rhythm must be uniformly measured in two-bar phrases; its meter is not free but necessarily duple; its tempo maestoso e poco mosso.]

Similarly, Ruta explains, the funeral march’s scoring ought to be “rich but without too much variation,” so as not to detract from the dignified character of the musical lament.61 If these educational cues targeted at budding late-nineteenth-century musicians are anything to go by, Petrella’s end-of-life grumble that hearing “too many colors” in his (remembered) marcia funebre caused him suffering might be interpreted as a belated acknowledgement of, or perhaps even submission to, larger generic conventions. In his instructions, Ruta echoed the advice of midcentury military writers disputing the start of a necessary but complicated reorganization of Italian wind bands, a matter that would take on greater urgency after Unification. In 1846 the Viennese bandmaster Joseph Fahrbach, brother of the aforementioned Friedrich, had issued an account of Austrian military music for Ricordi’s Gazzetta musicale di Milano, then published in Habsburgs-dominated Lombardy-Venetia.62 Fahrbach, who had started his career as a flutist at Vienna’s Court Opera Theater, sketched the most recent developments of Austrian military bands, which ranged from their ever more frequent entanglements with operatic music to the increase in ensemble sizes and technological advances that ushered in new instruments. When it came to defining the funeral march, one of several types of military marches, aside from specifying its meter (4/4), tempo (the same as an ordinary march), and selected instrumental norms (draped drums and the omission of both Turkish cymbals and glockenspiel), Fahrbach dictated little that Ruta would not rehash in his educational guidelines three decades later. Not only must the marcia funebre be “sad and sorrowful”; it must also share the features typical of all marches. The steady, rhythmic beats of these pieces, taking material incarnation in the soldiers’ steps, transmit a virile, energetic power at the same time as the noble character of the marching helps them to alleviate bodily fatigue.63 Military music as a whole, Fahrbach and Ruta seemed to imply, must serve

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as a conduit between body and soul. The feedback loop suggests that the funeral march was not governed solely, or straightforwardly, by a logic of representation. Weighty tread, minor mode, dotted rhythms, and other funeral march figures are not intended only, or even mainly, to signify particular situations. Their function is not primarily to evoke death and grief, or to depict the inner landscape of a mourning heart. Rather, it is to instill particular moral attitudes in and through the marching body. Funeral marches, which by the mid-nineteenth century no longer had military purposes alone, were in this sense less music to be “listened to” in a modern, attentive, bourgeois fashion, and more music to be “acted upon” through repeated physical behaviors.64 It is perhaps no coincidence that Marcel Mauss’s influential essay “Techniques of the Body” (1935) takes its cue from an incident featuring a marching army. During World War I, in an interarmy experiment prompted by a moment of shared military glory, the French anthropologist happened to watch a British infantry regiment attempting again and again to walk to the rhythmic music of French drummers and buglers. Although neither the British soldiers’ gait nor the French performance was inherently wrong, their combined effect was one of things gone awry: of utterly failed entrainment. The British soldiers could not but measure their steps according to the pace and strides ingrained in their bodies by daily routine; their habitus, to use Mauss’s preferred term for internalized bodily patterns, did not match those of their French counterparts.65 At such “revelatory moments of failure,” as the literary scholar Haun Saussy has it, “two bodies, an experienced one and a projected one,” are disclosed to consciousness.66 A gap opens up between the culturally acquired body, shaped by “assembled actions” rooted in social context, and the potential of that same body beyond its current configuration.67 Talking of military marching, one could argue that the primary function of the music is or was to “afford” channels of nondiscursive communication: making basic bodily gestures replicable, and thus susceptible to propagate across space and time.68 A band’s potential to forge collective identities through fleshly routes is similarly captured by what the Canadian historian William H. McNeill has termed “muscular bonding”: the “euphoric fellow feeling that prolonged and rhythmic muscular movement arouses” among people who partake in coordinated physical exercises together. The literal esprit de corps that such activities instigate originates at a subconscious level—in the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, where response to rhythmic movement is located—before translating into darts of conscious pleasure.69 McNeill notes that past military writers were usually

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tacit on the emotional impact of coordinated drill, something that makes their unuttered feelings of community bonding resistant to historical interpretation. To this archival silence we must add another absence: namely, the fact that, until well into the eighteen century, most European armies did not normally march in step. We have no reason to suspect that soldiers in Britain or Germany synchronized their movements with one another.70 Muscular bonding as a tool for molding a societal body in one piece with a supposed underlying (and resulting) unity of spirit is, it would seem, a relatively modern phenomenon. In Italy, a country under the simultaneous influence of French, Austrian, and Bourbon military traditions, nineteenth-century soldiers were likely attuned to a variety of marching practices. Nonetheless, from the 1870s the introduction of gymnastics in primary education, which taught children to coordinate their movements with one another, must have given impetus to this rhythmicized body politics.71 The nature of military marches as bodily instruments of group formation took on new implications after Unification, when civic bands came to the fore as tools of municipal and national association. Wind ensembles’ original military functions, shaped and tested during the Napoleonic period and the Risorgimento, expanded in new public contexts ranging from the political to the educational, the religious to the recreational.72 As bande and fanfare multiplied, Italian military writers began to discuss strategies for standardizing performance practices throughout the peninsula, drawing on ideas sweeping in from France.73 The stakes of a grand band reform were set at multiple levels. For one thing, such a reform seemed necessary to bring harmony into what was becoming an increasingly dissonant national soundscape. Emanuele Krakamp, a Sicilian concert flutist who served as bandmaster during the 1849 Roman Republic and was later appointed professor of wind instruments at Naples’s conservatoire, lamented the cacophony emanating from performances of distinct military bands: un accento diverso, una esecuzione improntata tutta ad un carattere locale . . . fa sembrarti essere la musica di Napoli diversa da quella di Milano, quella di Firenze diversa da quella di Bologna; Torino diverso da Roma, Roma diversa da Napoli, Milano diversa da Venezia ecc.74 [a different inflection, a performance entirely marked by a local character . . . makes the band of Naples sound different from that of Milan, Florence’s different from Bologna’s, Turin different from Rome, Rome from Naples, Milan from Venice, etc.]

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In Krakamp’s view, the lack of shared teaching methods, consistent performance practices, and common guidelines for the number and type of instruments to be used made it impossible for different bands to play together: joint performances could only produce an “infernal bedlam” of sounds that tortured people’s ears.75 In 1867, when ten military bands representing nine European countries converged on Paris for a grand competition, Italy failed to send a representative for this reason. After preliminary discussions at an 1864 conference in Naples, institutional attempts at establishing a nationwide band system followed in 1884, when a commission examined the matter in Milan and the Giornale militare ufficiale released the first set of official regulations. Satisfactory results would nevertheless only be reached in the early twentieth century through the reforms promoted by the eminent bandmaster Alessandro Vessella.76 On one level, this gradual top-down definition—to some minds the “ennoblement”—of the Italian band, which reformers hoped would resemble the increasingly rational organization of the orchestra,77 ran counter to an apparently opposite tendency: the bottom-up project of big and small communities to define and use the band as a means of “popular” self-expression. “Born from the people [popolo] and for the people,” the Italian banda always retained close ties with the territory, counterbalancing the claims of the nation with the requirements of distinct municipal traditions.78 After Unification, bands proliferated in both urban and rural areas, with even the smallest towns and villages boasting one or more ensembles. Formed by peasants, artisans, and other working-class men, plus the most modest bourgeoisie, these “interclass organism[s]” aggregated amateur musicianship to provide a multiplicity of services.79 If bells rang out statically from the church and the municipio, the architectural centers of the community, bands—first and foremost those socalled da giro in the South—took the municipality on tour.80 The banda’s vocation to be a sonorous projection of the city on the move chimes with the touring projects of late-nineteenth-century orchestras, which, as we shall see in chapter 4, began to travel across and beyond the peninsula to promote municipal values in the realm of professional music. Among the functions that civic bands served in their native milieus was that of accompanying funeral processions. As the historian Dino Mengozzi has shown in his study of the morte laica in Liberal Italy, funeral corteges proceeding from the church to the cemetery became established only gradually after Unification. Until the early 1870s, the administration of death fell almost exclusively to the Church: ordinary funerals consisted simply in the procession from the house to the church. Overseen by the clergy and confraternities, these processions were dominated

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by devotional practices, such as the recitation of litanies, aimed at the expiation of the dead person’s sins by the living. The religious function over, the corpse was entrusted by the family to the priest; municipal officers later collected it for interment, usually at dawn. Only after standing mortuaries were created to avert premature burials, and as a new sensibility stripped corpses of their former repugnance, did funeral corteges— largely understood as civil, not religious—extend group mourning to a new arrival point: the cemetery at the outskirts of the city.81 Elite and bourgeois funerals were expected to be quiet, orderly, and dignified: cultural markers that distinguished them from their workingclass counterparts. Sorrowful funeral marches were the main form of musical accompaniment. With the emergence of radical-democratic and socialist movements whose associations occupied administrative territory in funeral matters that had formerly belonged to the Church, bands nevertheless also began to play republican hymns and working-class songs, pieces that gave these corteges a brighter hue.82 The secularization of death that civil funerals of different stripes brought about in the last quarter of the century introduced a liturgy of a different kind: one centered less on somber forms of religious mourning and more on the celebration of exemplary behaviors or the fight against social injustice.83 It is in this expanded landscape of Italian death culture, in which different political, social, and religious attitudes coexisted often in tension with one another, that we can begin to see how a funeral march such as Jone’s could elicit variegated affective responses, and could even become a trademark of “exotic” Southern rituals.

Emotional Arenas The emotions that Petrella’s marcia funebre catalyzed are documented at the crossroads of history and fiction. Beginning in the late 1860s at the latest, and continuing well after its demise from the operatic stage in the 1920s, references to the piece flooded prisoner diaries, military journals, Young Catholics’ bulletins, literary novels, and the work of early regional folklorists. The disparate ideological alliances of the authors of these texts attest to the multiple functions that Jone’s march had come to serve outside the theater. The piece was heard at funerals, civil as well as religious, and at Holy Week processions in Southern and Central Italy; it was played on barrel organs as a light entertainment, or as background music to Gothic conversations about dismembered corpses.84 A common denominator of death and mourning throughout Italy by the end of the century, it refracted a death culture in which the meanings and feelings

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associated with human mortality had become “more fluid, and more contested” than ever before.85 An early trace of the march’s presence in real funeral rites can be found in Ernesto Pozzi’s account of his three-month detention in Genoa’s Carcere di Sant’Andrea in 1869. Originally from Lecco, Lombardy, Pozzi had embraced Giuseppe Garibaldi’s cause for an independent and united Italy from a young age. Having lived in various Northern Italian cities during his studies and fought as a volunteer in the patriot’s military campaigns in the 1860s, he was then arrested in Genoa for his republican activities. One day, during a visit his father and sister paid him in prison, he heard “the famous funeral march from Jone” sound through the streets of the city. The music, his father explained, was escorting to the grave one of young Pozzi’s old friends, an “intrepid garibaldino” struck down by an infectious disease while still recovering from a wound received in the battle of Mentana (1867).86 Pozzi’s reference to Petrella’s march, which gradually invaded his cell and his consciousness, is notable not only because it is dropped somewhat en passant—suggesting that the piece already had a firm place in the wind band funeral repertoire a decade after Jone’s premiere—but also because the music quickly dissolves into ambience. The marcia funebre’s “grave and lugubrious notes,” reflected by the vaulted roof of Pozzi’s cell, are depleted of their steady rhythmic quality and their encoded ambulatory gestures, and start summoning “menacing specters.”87 In a spatialized listening experience that increases the material and emotional force of the music, they almost seem to take on a life of their own. Leaning over his balcony to listen to the dismal sounds after his father and sister have left, Pozzi is induced into a meditative mood—an intense contemplation of life and death—with Jone’s march heightening his physical and metaphysical loneliness. The solemn, solitary atmosphere that Petrella’s music triggers in this prisoner’s account, one most likely glossing an anticlerical funeral in a city that was the “sanctuary of democratic identity,”88 takes on a ceremonial coloring in works of fiction that instead linger on the complex choreographies of late-nineteenth-century funeral processions. In his 1882 serial novel Amore ha cent’occhi, which recounts the story of an aristocratic Sardinian family in decline, Salvatore Farina—an accomplished writer and theater critic, himself born on the island—employs Petrella’s march as soundtrack to a bloated funeral cortege: one for the old countess Veronica Rodriguez De Nardi in her adopted Milan. The chapter narrating this event starts with an ironic remark that sets the tone for the following description: the house in which the elderly lady has died is so close to the church appointed for the service that “the long procession of priests,

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orphan girls, veiled women, liveried servants, poor torchbearers, emblazoned carriages, and smaller hired coaches” becomes ruined in its effect.89 The pomp and piety that ought to characterize the first part of Rodriguez De Nardi’s funeral—an old-style elite religious procession—turns into a farcical parade of a mere hundred steps from one building to the next. Only after the end of the funeral mass, which Farina describes in its stale grandeur and conceit, does the municipal band take up Jone’s march— written, the author explains, “in the grave,” as it were—on its way to the cemetery.90 Far from prompting earnest thinking and emotion, here Petrella’s music magnifies the empty rhetoric of the countess’s funeral. The piece may still bear the signs of “excess,” as in Pozzi’s diary and early critical accounts of the composer’s music, but only to the extent that it signals the affectation of an upper-class, decadent public display of grief and collective mourning. Farina’s novel is less an ethnocentric account of Sardinian customs than a piece of social and political critique. Through it, the author sought to contrast the backwardness of his native island, impoverished by apathetic, wealthy landowners, and to promote new economic growth born of the initiative of an emerging agrarian bourgeoisie.91 Yet one wonders whether his depiction of the countess’s funeral does not also owe some of its showiness to clichéd images of the Italian South, of which Sardinia was considered a part on socioeconomic grounds. By the 1880s, the idea of a primitive, violent, and often superstitious mezzogiorno cut off from the industrial North had started to take root in the public imagination through the work of positivist scholars, verismo writers, and the orientalizing advertising of illustrated magazines. Picturesque scenes of peasant life steeped in atavistic behavior and exotic rituals helped the young nation-state to legitimize its modernizing efforts against the backwardness of its “internal Other.”92 As a Sicilian turned Neapolitan by prolonged residence, Petrella himself was caught up in this discourse: accounts of his idleness, uncouth demeanor, and abundant gesticulation mixed with inarticulate vocalizations pulled no punches on his meridionalità.93 Published serially in the journal Nuova antologia in 1890, and then in book form in Palermo two years later, Luigi Capuana’s Profumo presents us with the most graphic fictional description of Jone’s funeral march being performed in the context of a Southern community ritual. The novel is set in Ispica (renamed “Marzallo” by the author), a small town near Ragusa, Sicily, where the tax collector Patrizio Moro-Lanza, his mother Gertrude, and his wife Eugenia have set up residence in a former Carmelite convent. All three, as well as other characters, are affected by some kind of neurosis, a device that allows Capuana to paint a “patho-

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logical” picture of this Southern locale. Chapter 9 centers on the Good Friday procession of flagellants, a historical reenactment of Christ’s Passion that Marzallo’s mayor has reintroduced after a six-year hiatus imposed by the previous political party. Stale religiosity verging on superstition is what this parade of hooded “savages,” resolved to earn their way into salvation by wearing thorny crowns and whipping their backs with chains, suggests to Eugenia’s lover Ruggero—Capuana’s modern, liberal character.95 Jone’s marcia funebre infiltrates the narration as part of a larger, characteristic, and for the most part percussive soundscape: the traccola, a traditional clapper instrument employed in Holy Week processions, is the main sonic agent throughout the ritual, together with rolling drums and pounding chains. “Wavelike came the plaintive notes of Jone’s funeral march,” Capuana writes, “played by the musical band that followed the cortege, and the psalmody of the priests, who could not yet be seen.”96 The music can at times hardly be heard, so loud are the people’s screams and the flagellants’ flogging, but it stamps the ceremony with a distinctly exotic imprint.97 What Capuana recounts through the distraught eyes and ears of his fictional character was described a few years later in a work of early regional ethnography by Caterina Pigorini Beri, an educator and herself an accomplished writer. Originally from near Parma—she was a friend of Verdi’s— but resident in the Marche during much of her life, Pigorini Beri studied folklore both in her adopted region and in Calabria.98 As popular customs from various parts of the peninsula came to public attention after Unification, anxieties about what seemed their impending decline sparked a wave of “scientific” interest in collecting and examining folk practices and materials. Still at an embryonic stage in the early 1860s, when it was focusing almost exclusively on popular poetry, this body of ethnographic research had expanded its scope by the 1890s, breeding such prestigious scholarly names as those of Angelo De Gubernatis, a Sanskritist, ethnologist, and author of comparative studies of Indo-European cultural traditions, and Giuseppe Pitrè, a physician turned anthropologist who became an authority on Sicily.99 Pigorini Beri’s “Il Venerdì Santo a Pioraco” (Good Friday in Pioraco), published in the illustrated magazine Natura ed arte in 1895–96, sets out to document a centuries-old religious tradition of the kind vividly fictionalized by Capuana. The location, Pioraco, is a small village of paper millers in the Marche, hidden in the mountains not too far from Macerata. After an extended introduction to the geography and history of the place, Pigorini Beri goes on to describe the Holy Week rites that bring together and invigorate the local community every year. The Friday procession 94

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begins at sunset, when long caravans of peasants descend upon the village through the woods, reciting the rosary and lighting their way with candles. The men wear the colorful clothes of the old confraternities, while the women are severely dressed in black. Carrying a statue of Christ on a bier, and another statue of Our Lady of Sorrows, they converge on the village’s main square, followed by hordes of children and the concerto: the musical band. The ensemble, vestito alla militare con cappello da bersagliere e piume bianche e rosse . . . suona le melodie melanconiche del triste passo, fra cui mi pare di riconoscere, portato dall’onda del vento, la Marcia funebre della Jone, la quale non manca mai in nessun luogo, nemmeno nei funerali cosiddetti civili.100 [wearing military-style uniforms and their bersagliere hats, with white and red feathers, . . . plays the melancholy tunes of the sad passage, among which I seem to recognize, brought over by the wind, Jone’s funeral march, which is never missing anywhere, not even in so-called civil funerals.]

As in Pozzi’s and Capuana’s accounts, Petrella’s march reaches Pigorini Beri’s ears from a distance, blown about by the wind. It seems to propagate from an unidentifiable elsewhere, its vanishing quality a sign of its ubiquity. After the priest’s sermon in the square, the music bursts forth a second time—yet now abruptly, as if to foreshadow Glauco’s imminent outpouring of distress at the prospect of losing Jone: “Non è il morir, ma il perderti / Che m’addolora or tanto” (It is not for death that I grieve, but for losing you).101 Later, once the clergy have blessed the dead body of Christ, another march marks the end of the religious function: it is the “noisy and solemn” one from Aida.102 Slipping away from the crowd, Pigorini Beri gets back on the road and returns home in the dark. Were we to identify some common threads running through all these real and fictional accounts, we might begin by noting how, again and again, Jone’s march serves as a channel for heightened emotion, be it earnest, feigned, or grotesque. Whether by redirecting the soul’s ear inward to existential questions, or the mind’s ear outward to a religious and social Other, as “excess” Petrella’s music traverses local, political, and cultural boundaries, offering a space—an “emotional arena,” in Mark Seymour’s terminology—in which death can be staged and pondered in both similar and unique ways across distinct communities.103 In that part physical, part imaginary territory, subjective feelings get inflected through organized public rituals, and bonds are created as grief is articulated as a collective experience on a local and sometimes national scale. In 1913, the centenary year of Petrella’s birth, in a gesture of geographical and emotional expan-

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sion Jone’s march can even become “the great weeping of Italy . . . the most earnest outpouring of tears ever shed.”104 That even “backward,” “exotic” Southern rituals could, almost in spite of themselves, contribute to this shared emotional substratum betrays the challenges that death puts on modernizing narratives.105 By its very nature, the persistent, ineffable, and irrational experience of death and dying defies the notion of progress as an unbroken linear development from the past to the present and the future, simultaneously resisting the idea that such advancement can be located in any one geographical area and excluded from others, such as Italy’s South. There is also the fact that the bodily discipline we earlier encountered in Fahrbach’s and Ruta’s instructions on military marches remains unmentioned in most accounts of Petrella’s funeral march: the music matters less through its repetitive rhythmic figures than through the affective experience it produces as vibrational force. Once again, the body is placed at center stage thanks to the march’s material sway—a reminiscence, perhaps, of the band and orchestra’s stereophonic interplay in the staged opera. Yet the cultural entrainment hinges not so much on simultaneous physical movements as on a tuning of emotions. This peculiarly embodied quality of Petrella’s march is given an eerie twist in one last text I wish to examine: a piece from a somewhat later period that shows the lasting symbolic power of the music, together with its newly desiccated, objectified value. The text is a short story by Gherardo Gherardi, a journalist, playwright, and screenwriter who published it in the women’s magazine Cordelia in 1931. It recounts the adventures of carousel owner Timoteo Bergonzi, in whose life musical performance takes the form of mechanical reproduction of operatic excerpts for his customers. “The most difficult and delicate task involved in this profession, if one wants to do it properly,” Gherardi has his character explain, “is choosing the musical repertoire.”106 Semiramide and Faust are the bread and butter of his barrel organ’s daily provisions, while Bellini and Verdi— the latter again represented by the march from Aida—furnish additional occasions for amusement. In his work, Timoteo is assisted by his old horse Nino, who has spent his entire life pulling the carousel in its continual relocations and spinning it for the pleasure of its customers. The essence of this circular life, both human and animal, is captured at the end of Gherardi’s story in the scene of Timoteo’s death. Forced by his doctor son to abandon the occupation that has been his whole existence, the old man prepares to bid farewell to his carousel, which will soon be demolished. One night, unable to sleep through the pain in his head, he gets up to take one last ride on his giostra and enjoy it in all its splendor— lights, mirrors, and all. After a moment’s hesitation as to what music to

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put on, he serves himself up with Petrella’s marcia funebre, a grim premonition of his death. Reluctantly, Nino resumes his engine-like function, only halting when, “Jone’s cardboard cylinder having reached its end,” like Timoteo’s life, “the organ continued to strike voiceless, violent beats in the void, like an ill heart.”107 Gherardi’s story was not the first text to draw associations between Jone and mechanical music. The opera’s rich dynamic contrasts and somewhat trivial melodies had decades earlier been glossed precisely in this discursive context by some of Petrella’s least charitable critics.108 In the early twentieth century, piano rolls produced by the Fabbrica Italiana Rulli Sonori Traforati, based in Cremona, had further capitalized on its sinfonia—including its opening funeral music—and its act 4 trio.109 Yet, devoid as it is of both religious and geographical connotations, and emphasizing the embodied quality of Petrella’s march, “pumped” by the sonic heart of Timoteo’s giostra, Gherardi’s story aptly brings us back to where we departed: to the composer’s “Thump! Thump! Thump!” acted out all alone on his deathbed. Forgetful of the heightened nineteenthcentury emotional responses to Petrella’s piece, and of its place in choreographed collective rituals, the story turns the march and that whole affective tradition upside down: emptying the music of its metaphysical, devotional, or exotic value and reinventing it as a light, almost spirited entertainment. Timoteo’s final turn on the carousel is no doubt also a grave and meticulously staged self-farewell, Jone’s mechanical reproduction a peculiar accompaniment to death itself, rather than to mourning. The shift from band to organ, other to self, community to solitude, place to placelessness nevertheless also throws into relief the decades-long trajectory trodden by Petrella’s march. Drained of virtually all human presence, the music shrinks into gruff, empty beats, enfolded in silence. Perhaps Timoteo’s organ is pacing a farewell to the marcia funebre itself.

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Global Voices A d el i na Pat t i , Mult i l i ngual ism, and Bel Can to (a s) L i sten in g

If one is to believe an oft-told nineteenth-century story, Adelina Patti’s voice was the product of a loss. The night the singer was born—so the narrative goes—her mother, the Roman soprano Caterina Chiesa BariliPatti, was performing Norma in Madrid. Caterina had already given birth no less than seven times, having had four children with her first husband, the maestro di canto and organist Francesco Barili, and three more, following his death and her remarriage, with the tenor Salvatore Patti. Apparently none of those previous deliveries had affected her vocal organs, for throughout the period she kept singing in theaters across Italy and Europe. Yet the birth of the new and final addition to her family resulted in complications. According to one fanciful account—most likely invented by the man who takes center stage in the episode—Caterina fell ill during the performance and, after being carried to the green room, gave birth to little Adelina under the watchful eye of the principal tenor as he heroically tore up his costume to swaddle the baby. Another version has it that the newborn was not delivered until the following afternoon, by which time Caterina had been relocated to her lodgings. Whether born literally or just nearly onstage, however, Adelina seems to have left a void behind her. As her mother prepared to resume singing, she found that she had lost her voice, almost as if it had been altogether transfused to her daughter.1 This anecdote capturing the arrival into the world of the famous nineteenth-century soprano ties the source of her vocal expression to a peculiar parent-child transmission. An act of more than biological generation is what grants Adelina her soon-to-be-celebrated vocal means, her capacity to both speak and sing springing mysteriously from her mother’s body, which in turn is made silent. Friedrich Kittler’s writings on the “maternal gestation” of language around 1800 might come to mind here, prompting us to consider the link with that historic reinvention of read-

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ing pedagogy that took place in and through the cavities of the Mother’s Mouth—a resonator of the primal voice of Nature.2 To be sure, Caterina’s vocal organs offer Adelina no induction into the symbolic realm of language, no Kittlerian lesson on the distinction between noise and meaning. Her story celebrates not the production of semantics but a handover of “raw” vocal capacities. If we turn to other period accounts of Adelina’s youthful life, however, language does enter the picture obliquely. After as a baby she “gave her first cries in Madrid” on February 19, 1843, her earliest utterances, we learn from an 1865 French article, were of a musical nature.3 The author of an early biography of the soprano, Théodore de Grave, observes more precisely that “the first words her infant lips spelled out were the musical notes. Singing was her first tongue [langue], her first babbling.”4 Patti was hardly the first or only singer whose vocal talents throngs of enthusiasts traced to the earliest stages of her linguistic development. Nineteenth-century prima donnas were frequently noted for their innate vocal facility, a quality (and rhetorical expedient) that counterbalanced a parallel, more ethically minded notion of voice as laboriously crafted technique. Jenny Lind, the Swedish coloratura soprano who spurred an unprecedented celebrity craze across England and the United States in the late 1840s and early ’50s, similarly sent signals in her early life that pointed to her phenomenal musical gifts.5 Yet, for reasons that will become clear as this chapter unfolds, Patti’s “natural,” “original” voice, placed discursively as it was at the intersection of raw, indeterminate sound and those bodily parts and actions associated with speaking, and specifically with learning to speak, suggests a tool ideally suited to modeling different languages and accents: suited to functioning as a conduit for a broader aural consciousness of language that was emerging in various countries at the time. As the Spanish-born daughter of Italian singers and as someone who had grown up and received her musical education across the Atlantic, Patti had a genealogy—as did her voice—that contemporary commentators found not easy to explain. Critics from the Old World puzzled over her unusual career trajectory, which upended established operatic geographies, and they struggled to discern the true national identity of her speaking voice. From the 1860s, when she moved to Europe, her fluency in multiple languages and her status as a transoceanic diva made her a global figure part of whose attraction lay precisely in her loose relationship with place. Avian caricatures published in the pages of contemporary periodicals captured the moment when she fled one location or other for the next stop on her Italian, European, or global tours (figure 3.1). Unmoored from any single fixed milieu by her biography, Patti nevertheless

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F igur e 3.1. “La Patti a Torino. Variazioni su tema obbligato.” Lithograph from Il fischietto, April 5, 1879.

belonged to Italy through her vocal style, which grounded her firmly in the bel canto tradition and even sealed her as the most emblematic embodiment of “Italian singing’s international appeal” during the period.6 Patti’s “naturally musical” Italian voice and the semantic linguistic work underscored by her polyglotism reveal their political implications as soon as we consider them against contemporary ideologies of language. As previous scholars have explained, the period Patti lived through saw efforts to establish normative forms of national vocality. On both sides of the Atlantic, linguists, pedagogues, and politicians combined their energies to identify and disseminate national tongues that could be spoken by the entirety of their countries’ populations. Fueled partly by these larger politico-cultural agendas and partly by developments in physiological acoustics, voice was simultaneously positioned at the center of scientific experiments that emphasized phonetic analysis. As it fell under various forms of observation, it was conceptualized as a property that could be assimilated from the environment, whether through instruments of modern invention that prosthetically extended the human body or, I shall argue, more simply via the ear.7

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The key role that Patti played in voice politics in Italy and elsewhere during the third quarter of the nineteenth century was born of her versatile vocal apparatus. Absorbing and reproducing the sounds of different linguistic environments was the natural inclination of her voice: the very reason why it amplified, and partly answered, one of the dominant concerns of the age, caused by the burgeoning circulation of people and therefore voices across the globe. At the same time that it brought competing linguistic values to public attention, furthermore, Patti’s voice produced riveting aesthetic experiences, explaining why it held such a central place in contemporary discussions of bel canto: a technique, or method, or repertoire (terminology is somewhat inconsistent here) in which she excelled, and which was subject to intense scrutiny in Italy after Unification. During a period when old debates about so-called Italian were taking on new political urgency and the country’s operatic vocal tradition seemed in distressing decline, language—to the extent that it was vocalized—smoothly traversed the boundaries between speech and singing. A vocal machine perpetually on the move, Patti revealed the reproductive potential inherent in our vocal organs, something that can help us grasp how bel canto was (re)conceived in a globalizing age.

Muddled Biographical Geographies When Patti gave her first Italian performances in Florence and Turin in late 1865, she was widely celebrated as the one prima donna who straddled the “due mondi”: a figure drawing together the audiences of “the world both old and new, from one end to the other.”8 At the most obvious level, these remarks are easily explained by her biography. As mentioned earlier, her parents were both Italian and each had fairly successful singing careers. Caterina was the more accomplished of the two: she sang leading roles in operas by Bellini, and in 1836 created the part of Eleonora in the premiere of Donizetti’s L’assedio di Calais at the San Carlo theater in Naples. Salvatore, originally from Catania, was a tenor, and later in life reinvented himself as an impresario. When Adelina was born, the couple were based in Madrid, where Caterina was engaged as principal prima donna for the season at the Teatro del Circo (although, contrary to anecdotal wisdom, she never sang Norma while there). A few months afterward they returned to Italy to attend to professional and family duties. It was not until the end of 1846 that the Patti family made the big leap. Attracted by the possibility of assuming the direction, together with the buffo Antonio Sanquirico and one C. Pogliani, of the recently built Palmo’s Opera House in New York, Salvatore gathered his wife and chil-

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dren and boarded the ship that would take them and a small troupe of vocalists to the New World.9 It was there that Adelina—“the famous Italo-French- SpanishAmerican singer,” as a Viennese critic later called her—grew up and received her musical education.10 Her teachers included a roster of figures trained in the old Italian vocal school: her parents and stepsiblings (particularly Ettore Barili), all of whom pursued musical professions; family friend Elisa Valentini Paravelli; the conductor and maestro di canto Mariano Manzocchi; and Verdi’s pupil Emanuele Muzio. Maurice Strakosch, the Moravian pianist and theater manager who in 1852 married Patti’s eldest sister, Amalia, also contributed to her training.11 As we shall see, his coaching involved the most unlikely lessons, in which he would insist on teaching her correct English pronunciation. It was he, too, who arranged Patti’s early tours in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean after her first appearance on the concert stage at Tripler Hall in New York in 1851. During one of those trips, when she was only nine or ten years old, she allegedly withstood the perils of wild lands with utmost courage and sangfroid. In a series of tragicomic exotic scenes sketched by De Grave, we find her assailed by giant scorpions, stricken by storms and earthquakes, and climbing craggy mountain peaks at full speed on muleback. Throughout the experiences of those early years, she displayed the same “fearless,” “rebellious” nature that would later characterize her mature career.12 Aside from these youthful appearances in gala concerts next to established artists such as the virtuosos Ole Bull and Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Patti did not tread the operatic boards until her debut as Donizetti’s Lucia at New York’s Academy of Music in 1859. After this first success, the following year she took up more than ten new leading roles, including Amina, Zerlina, Rosina, and Elvira from I puritani, singing in various cities of the US East Coast and in New Orleans. Then, once her training was complete and her reputation was firmly established west of the Atlantic, she sailed to London, where a sensational run of performances at Covent Garden in 1861 launched her on the European stage.13 The peculiarity of this trajectory was not lost on contemporary critics. Until the late nineteenth century, the lack of professional training in the United States, where the first conservatoires opened in the 1860s, and the cultural cachet of music education in Europe meant that Americanbred operatic aspirants would typically go to Italy, or sometimes neighboring countries, to establish their careers. Once there, they could study under renowned vocal teachers or, increasingly as the century progressed, benefit from the publicity generated simply by an Italian debut. For their

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part, European singers joined the flow of artistic commodities pouring from the Old to the New World either when they were still young and little-known, and were hence trying their luck in the expanding opera circuits of the Americas, or when their vocal skills, and with them their fortunes, were beginning to wane. The now largely forgotten but then fairly acclaimed baritone Cesare Badiali (1810–65) and the famous soprano Erminia Frezzolini (1818–84) belonged to the earliest generation of vocalists who sought, respectively, to boost their profits and halt their professional decline by fleeing the flooded European operatic market.14 Patti proved that a different operatic economy was possible. As commentators from both sides of the Atlantic observed throughout the 1860s and beyond, rather than follow the traditional route of relocating from Europe to the Americas, she entered the international operatic scene by traveling in the opposite direction. Writing for the Milanese weekly Il mondo artistico in 1871, the anonymous author of a short biography of the soprano remarked: “Contrary to the ordinary course of things, according to which musical celebrities are christened in Europe and confirmed in America, Patti’s fame passed from the Atlantic’s American shores to the European in 1861.”15 A few years earlier, the critic for the New York Herald had similarly charted a new geography. The singular position the singer occupied on the Western operatic scene in his view derived less from a linear movement eastward than from an upbringing that took place somewhere in between the Old and New Worlds. “The Cockneys, the Parisians, the Spaniards and the Germans all hail Patti as an operatic Venus, just risen from the Atlantic,” he declared with an unquestionable air of pride (on which more later). The oceanic dimension that, for him, Patti underscored functioned as a connective tissue that drew America that much closer to Europe, establishing, via a classical mythological image of female and artistic fertility, the critic’s own side of the Atlantic as a fresh new frontier for the cultivation of aesthetic sensibility.16 The multiple and unconventional relocations in Patti’s early career meant that confusion reigned among critics over her origins. Italians summoned her various national affiliations in convoluted attempts to underline her belonging to their own country. A few days after her debut at Florence’s Teatro Pagliano, in one of her signature roles (Bellini’s Amina), the writer for the local periodical Il giornale illustrato started his account of her life with a dismissive appeal. “I hope my readers will not care to know where Adelina Patti comes from, who gave her birth and where she learned her art,” he pleaded, perhaps in a preemptive attempt to disguise gaps in his own knowledge. Such details, he elaborated, may matter for

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politicians but not for the class of individuals who pursue artistic professions.17 His feigned indifference was emulated by the Triestine journalist Leone Fortis a dozen years later, on the occasion of Patti’s first actual tour of the peninsula. Soon after the start of that tournée, which touched the cities of Milan, Venice, Genoa, Florence, Naples, Rome, and Bologna, the eminent critic, founder of the newspaper Il pungolo and author of a regular column in L’illustrazione italiana, emphasized the soprano’s muddled biographical geography all the more. “Where was she born?” he asked. “Is she truly Italian or is she Spanish, or American? Why care to know?” And after assuring his readers that her “artistic blood,” even if not her “physical blood,” was purely Italian, he pressed on: “Whether she was born in Spanish America or elsewhere, what does it matter?”18 Evocations of blood by critics and even poets grappling with Patti’s origins should give us pause.19 The historian Alberto Mario Banti has shown that blood permeated Italy’s “Risorgimento canon”: a group of literary, visual, and operatic works of art hinging on a set of “deep images”—kinship, sacrifice, and love/honor/virtue—that provided the basis for nationalpatriotic discourse between the Risorgimento and Fascism. Within this allegorical system and this constellation of themes communicating the core values of Italian identity, sangue crystallized the idea of a greater Italian family whose members belonged to the same line of descent. Early accounts of Patti’s life must be read bearing in mind this “morphology” of national discourse, even if issues of consanguinity manifested an extra layer of political urgency in the post-Unification years.20 In 1865, Italy’s first national civil code, the so-called Codice Pisanelli, was approved by Parliament after three unsuccessful attempts between 1861 and 1863. Named after Minister of Justice Giuseppe Pisanelli—whose unsuccessful bill, together with the other two, provided the basis for the fourth and final proposal by Giuseppe Vacca—the code set out, among other things, the rules governing Italian citizenship.21 In this as in other respects, the Codice drew heavily on pre-Unification legislation, particularly the Parma and Piedmont- Sardinian civil codes of 1820 and 1837 and the French Napoleonic one of 1804. These codes regulated the transmission of juridical nationality, together with the political and civil rights that accompanied it, according chiefly to bloodlines: a criterion that continued to prevail in Italy after 1865. The national community was envisioned as a community of descent, comprising all those sharing a “common blood” transmitted from father to child according to a strictly patrilineal model. In practice, this meant that the offspring of an Italian male national were automatically granted Italian citizenship at birth, regardless of where they

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were born. On the other hand, for children of a foreign father, birthright citizenship was only possible if their parent had been living in Italy uninterruptedly for at least ten years. The favor that the 1865 civil code accorded to ius sanguinis did not go unchallenged. When Vacca’s bill was presented to Parliament, the deputy and future prime minister Francesco Crispi objected to the low priority given to the territorial principle. For him, citizenship ought to ensue first and foremost from the individual’s country of birth, a position that his colleague Pasquale Stanislao Mancini rejected as a legacy of feudalism—an anachronistic binding of men to soil. Aside from relegating ius soli to a secondary rank, the national legislation left the female sex in a status of “effective statelessness.”22 Until as late as 1983, women in Italy had no right to pass on their citizenship to their children except under exceptional circumstances, and from a juridical point of view they lost their Italian nationality upon marriage with a foreign man. In order to reacquire it in case their husband died, they were forced to establish their residence in Italy and make a special declaration. “If it is true that a child’s homeland is the same as that of their parents, then Patti should be considered Italian, even though she was born in Madrid.”23 Amintore Galli was writing with only partial acquaintance with the law when he stated this in 1877. Under the 1865 legislation, the singer—the daughter of a Sicilian father, and therefore an Italian citizen when Italy became unified—lost her citizenship when she married her first husband, the French Marquis de Caux, in 1868. The fact that the couple later separated and went on to divorce in 1885 did not automatically restore her previous status. Even if she had not wedded another Frenchman, the tenor Ernesto Nicolini (born Ernest Nicolas), the following year, Italian renaturalization would not have been an option due to her protracted absence from the peninsula. Her juridical identity took one more twist in 1898, when she became a British subject after Nicolini’s death. The news was released both in England and on the continent, and it spurred new arguments over her national and artistic identity.24 These tensions were only the latest incarnation of concerns that, as we have seen, had underlain the Patti debates for several decades. In Liberal Italy the concepts of juridical and cultural nationality always remained distinct, with no causal relationship with each other. Italian expatriates who had lost their citizenship retained only their broader italianità, though linguistic, civic, and cultural ties to Italy did influence the outcome of naturalization applications by foreigners. In an age when dual citizenship was unthinkable and women were—paradoxically—more likely than today to transition through several nationalities during their lives, we begin

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to understand the hesitation of critics on the trail of Patti’s multiple biographical detours. Her blood, repeatedly tingeing literary depictions of her transnational persona, was more or less the only substance in which her belonging to Italy’s political community could be grounded. But not even that most hallowed vital fluid was sufficient to ensure that, from a juridical point of view, she would not be stripped of her affiliation with her parents’ homeland.

“Zou Dids’ Blow, Viz-Ze-Vint” If Patti’s eastbound professional trajectory and her ambiguous legal status disoriented contemporary observers, attempts to describe her along unequivocal national lines were further complicated by her mastery of multiple languages. According to her friend and near-official biographer, the English critic and vocal pedagogue Herman Klein, but also according to an earlier nineteenth-century critical tradition, as a child she could already speak with equal fluency English, French, Spanish, and of course Italian, the tongue of her parents and of the operatic tradition in which she was trained. Later in life she added German and Russian, though of the latter she never gained more than a rudimentary knowledge.25 Her multilingual skills were the result of her youthful and artistic peregrinations, and also stemmed from a talent for picking up both speech and musical sounds through her “quick ear.”26 The prominent Milanese critic Filippo Filippi went so far as to compare her to a famed linguist and hyperpolyglot, the early-nineteenth-century cardinal Giuseppe Gasparo Mezzofanti: La signora Patti è un piccolo cardinale Mezzofanti: parla le lingue con una grande facilità e si assimila in modo straordinario tutti gli accenti. Può anche cantare con la stessa facilità le lingue che parla: nel Barbiere, al momento della lezione, si adatta ai gusti dei vari paesi: a Vienna una lieder [sic] di Schubert, a Madrid una canzone spagnuola d’Yriarte, a Parigi un’arietta di Nadaud, a Londra l’Home sweet home che mette in visibilio gli inglesi.27 [Madame Patti is a little Cardinal Mezzofanti: she has a remarkable facility for speaking languages and she absorbs every accent in an impressive way. She also has the same facility for singing the languages she speaks. In Il barbiere [di Siviglia], in the lesson scene, she adapts herself to the tastes of each country: in Vienna [she performs] a Lied by Schubert, in Madrid a Spanish song by Yriarte, in Paris an arietta by Nadaud, in London “Home! Sweet Home!,” which so enraptures English people.]

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Mezzofanti was a priest and university professor from Bologna credited with mastering as many as thirty languages and speaking another forty or so, between languages and dialects from throughout the world. All of these he learned without ever leaving Italy: in his youth, Jesuit missionaries taught him his first few European and indigenous American tongues, while later in life he acquired more, working as a nurse and confessor in hospitals in the Cisalpine Republic and conversing with foreign travelers in Bologna and Rome. Aside from being gifted with an exceptional memory for vocabulary and a capacity to grasp the different sounds and rhythms of speech, he was famous for his ability to converse simultaneously in multiple languages.28 Filippi’s appeal to the Mezzofantian linguistic diversity in Patti’s choices for Rossini’s music lesson is both understandable and striking. The singer’s everyday life, split as it was between multiple countries and multinational family relationships—her parents and siblings were Italian, her first two husbands were French, her third was Swedish (albeit naturalized in Britain), and she lived most of her late life in Wales—must certainly have involved a constant switching between languages, her polyglotism playing out prominently in spoken communication. Yet her singing was a far less multilingual activity. Except for a handful of works by Meyerbeer and Gounod that she sang in the original French, the operatic repertoire she performed throughout her career was nearly all Italian. Her signature roles were in operas by Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, to which she gradually added Verdi and some French works in Italian translation. Concert programs involved a greater variety of musical and linguistic idioms: from Henry Bishop’s “Home! Sweet Home!” to the occasional song in a regional vernacular—“Land of my Fathers” in Welsh, for example.29 The fact that of her twenty-eight recordings, all made in 1905–6 when she was more than sixty years old, half are in English must be taken as a sign of her attempt to appeal to a popular audience on the gramophone market.30 The most interesting record of Patti’s musical engagement with a language other than Italian is probably an anecdote handed down by Klein. According to the biographer, the story was originally narrated by the singer herself. It revolves around a training session with Strakosch, who, having been born in Moravia, grew up in Germany and studied in Vienna and Italy before meeting Salvatore Patti in Vicenza in 1843 and joining him in the United States a few years later. Until 1868, the year of Adelina’s marriage with the Marquis de Caux, he regularly coached his sister-in-law and managed her career. As hinted earlier, one of his most bizarre ambitions was to teach her correct English pronunciation, and more precisely to polish her diction, when she first approached Handel’s oratorios in the 1860s.

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That his delivery of the composer’s biblical texts must have been colored by a heavy German accent is suggested by Patti’s recollection of rehearsals for Israel in Egypt. The two were practicing the soprano aria “Thou didst blow with the wind,” a mix of syllabic declamation and breezy coloratura that, to a fluctuating accompaniment in the orchestra, depicts the winds and waters swallowing up the Egyptians in the Red Sea. In Strakosch’s rendition of the piece, these lines sounded hilarious. “Zou dids’ blow, viz-ze-vint,” he would prompt his pupil; “Dey zank, ass lett in-de-mightyvatters.” If such was Patti’s transcription—or vocalization—of Strakosch’s distorted pronunciation, then her representation to Klein of the aural experience of listening to mispronounced English directly bound her to a community of people who so mastered that tongue as to be able to detect any extraneous inflections. The biographer indeed explains that the effect of Strakosch’s ludicrous exhortations would of course have been null: English was “practically her mother-tongue,” her ear “far too sensitive” to miss her coach’s warped accent. In asserting her aural finesse, Klein meant that Patti was accustomed to the sounds of British speech, her pronunciation having rapidly adjusted to that of local people, save for the odd lingering Americanism, after her move to England in 1861.31 Klein’s description of Patti as a near-to-native English speaker may read as all too smooth and unequivocal in its fast chain of sly equations and conclusions. The seemingly innocent progression from the singer’s experience of listening to somebody else’s voice, to her mimicking of it (orally or in writing) and thereby betraying her supposed mother tongue and even national accent conceals tensions underneath. We may wonder whether a degree of teleological reasoning is not at work in the biographer’s rehearing of Patti’s “excellent English accent,” an accent marked as British following her move to the country.32 By 1920, when Klein was writing, so-called Received Pronunciation had been formulated, though not yet with that name, by the London phonetician Daniel Jones, based on the accent known in Britain as Public School English and promoted in England’s exclusive boarding schools.33 Jones’s definition of this speech norm, which he set forth in his 1917 English Pronouncing Dictionary, was only the latest in a long series of efforts at linguistic reform. In England as elsewhere, attempts to standardize the national language had expanded in the last third of the nineteenth century, largely in connection with the growth of state education, which in England was sanctioned by the Elementary Education Act of 1870. Not coincidentally, it was in 1859—roughly the time when Patti took the international operatic scene by storm—that the phrase “native speaker” made its first appearance in the Anglophone world.34 The concept, it has been suggested, was

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a sort of “conceptual embodiment” of “standard language,” a notion that in its modern meaning gained currency during the same period.35 The two ideals formed a mutually dependent pair akin to the equation of standard English with English as a whole: native speaker–ness was a kind of megaphone without which standard language could not have existed or projected its claims.36 It takes individuals who are vocally the product of their birth communities to substantiate the reality—or the myth—of a certain variety of English, or French, or German (let’s for now skip Italian) that is universally accepted and understood. Voices capable of listening to and cleaning up their “impurities” are, in turn, necessary to sustain the idea of a tongue inherited from nature and nation.37 Klein’s observation that Patti’s voice encapsulated the “true” sounds of British English may not be anachronistic when set against the linguistic ideologies of his time. But what might an unmarked “British voice” have sounded like at the turn of the 1860s, when Patti supposedly refashioned her way of speaking? The biographer’s nonchalant projection of firmly entrenched, early-twentiethcentury values onto the less clear-cut categories that enveloped language in a former age betrays, if not a conscious attempt at historical deception, at least the fraught voice politics of his own day. Perhaps more importantly, all that Patti and Klein’s transcription of Strakosch’s mispronounced English ultimately reveals is that the soprano was familiar with the sounds of that language, no matter her knowledge of syntax, grammar, or vocabulary. And she knew not only the sounds of English but also of German, for the proliferation of “z” and “v” sounds in place of the original “th” and “w” ones in her vocal recollection marks Strakosch’s pronunciation as unmistakably Teutonic. What this passage in Klein’s biography brings to the fore is less the linguistic bond between Patti and Britain than her sonic participation—via the sensitivity of her ear as much as her voice—in multiple national speech communities. Traditional Western concepts of voice as an index or conduit for an “authentic” human essence, be it ethnosocial or subjective, show their limitations here. In the late eighteenth century, the monolingual paradigm of the mother tongue had produced a “reified conception of language” that posited national idioms as clearly separate, discrete entities marking the identity of different groups. As Yasemin Yildiz has explained, having only one language became the norm, while speaking two or more was henceforth judged “a threat to the cohesion of individuals and societies.” Mono- and multilingualism became mutually constitutive, premised on the same ideology that had begotten the mother tongue as a unique familial and national inheritance.38 Ideas of language as an internal, innate pos-

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session received through bloodline did surface in early accounts of Patti’s voice. Competing national agendas ignited the debates over her native speaker–ness, with the stakes of her formidable pronunciation evident as much in Klein’s biography as in a number of nineteenth-century Italian texts that I shall discuss later. But both Klein and that earlier critical tradition also asserted an idea of vocality more flexible, more encompassing than the exclusive national and cultural allegiances commanded by the monolingual paradigm. Patti’s polyglotism points to voice as something that can be “acquired from without,” absorbed from the environment— and not only through contemporary technologies that promised to extend the human body artificially, allowing one to inhale the air of distant lands, for example, but also through the reproductive potential intrinsic to voice itself when combined with the ear.39 Much of Patti’s unique attraction for late-nineteenth-century audiences stemmed from her instrument’s capacity to register and remodel itself according to the sounds of distinct linguistic milieus. To put this another way: the vocal geographies that contemporary observers mapped in their writings hinged on Patti’s voice as a product of circulation. Both because and in spite of her roaming, Patti sounded like a native to more than one linguistic community, her voice a porous entity floating around and reshaping itself in connection with ever-shifting places. Filippi was quick to emphasize the paradox in connection with her Italian. No matter how far and wide she traveled, no matter that she “came to Milan after touring halfway round the world,” to the point that many “firmly believe her to be English, Spanish, American, Tunisian . . . anything but Italian,” the “[Italian] language gushes out of her lips clear and correct.” The critic’s more ecumenical remarks on her lesson scene from Il barbiere are only in seeming contradiction with this assertion.40 The rapturous critical reception of Patti’s perfect accent, whatever the language she spoke and sang in, exposes a societal faith in the powers of diction, the powers of phonetics, to simultaneously reveal and conceal the provenance of an individual. In these narratives, voice functions as what we might call a geocultural “locator,” a tool that helped the listener to acoustically track the singer’s position as she moved around the globe; and this even while matters of tongue, accent, and pronunciation were not and are not infallible tools of auditory mapping. In her analysis of the sonic ideology of bergamasco, a northern Italian dialect, the anthropologist Jillian R. Cavanaugh describes accents as “a particularly rich category of linguistic simultaneity and hybridity.” Their potential for meaning lies in the fact that they “draw on the phonologi-

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cal resources of one language, but the syntactic, morphological and lexical resources of another.”41 The coexistence of multiple linguistic layers in any given vocal utterance becomes audible in the interstices opened up between the sounds we hear issuing from somebody’s mouth and the expectations we have of how given languages ought to sound. As listeners, we can only capture this mismatch if our subject position is one of familiarity with the various speech sounds, even if not with the languages, that are involved. Then and only then will we be able to make sense of acoustic discrepancies. If those stray sonic traces, accents, fail to manifest themselves or to be heard, however, language ceases to function as a geocultural locator. Patti’s polyglot skills, we can speculate, must have had precisely this disorienting effect. Her capacity to speak and sing in many different languages without an accent meant that her voice could simultaneously project distinct forms of national vocality and reach the status of a “global voice”: an acoustic abstraction, perhaps, matching the compass of her transnational persona. Whether or not she really spoke and sang English and Italian with the fine sensitivity of a native—something that is likely, albeit remarkably hard to assess, even considering the one surviving record of her spoken voice—what ultimately matters are the enlarged views that the historical commentaries enable us to behold.42 If we take seriously the reproductive capacity critics attributed to her voice, multiple interpretive windows on shifting linguistic practices and the sometimes cluttered gardens of music historiography open up before us. Patti’s “global voice,” as I am imagining it here, might best be conceived not as anything too objectlike, anything too readily available for hearing and definition. Its global qualities lay, rather, in its capacity to adapt to changing soundscapes, in its very escape from any fixed features. What makes this voice attractive for my purposes in this chapter is its profile as a technology closely aligned with the ear. I shall return to this oral/aural interplay later, when I discuss historical attempts to define the so-called Italian voice. For now I wish to emphasize a second point. The fact that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century commentators from various countries so often and so precariously suspended Patti’s voice between music and language, between ravishing operatic utterance and the more prosaic (yet never trivial) sonic material of speech, alerts us to the broader politics that her vocal emissions mobilized. The mid- to late nineteenth century was a moment when the mapping of vocal difference, at the intersection of speech and singing, sustained not only the search for national linguistic standards but also the related concerns of music critics and vocal theorists on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Transatlantic Voice Trades In a recent study of the relationship between sound and race in America from the antebellum period to World War II, Jennifer Lynn Stoever has retraced the emergence of racialized listening practices during the two decades or so that preceded the Civil War, a period of rapid economic transformation and burgeoning sectionalism.43 Representations of aurality reflecting different conceptions of social order and modernity crystallized into binary oppositions aligned with the imaginary North- South divide.44 Stoever’s analysis centers on corporeal technologies that produced what she calls, adapting an expression from sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, the “sonic color line”: a modality of hearing and listening that assumes and simultaneously constructs racialized bodies as entities with characteristic audible contours. From the 1840s and ’50s, she suggests, blackness and whiteness became well-defined sonic categories, a process that allows us to understand the essentialization of vocal timbre as historically coterminous with the reification of race as a visual phenomenon.45 One thing that becomes clear when we sift through the contemporary American press is that the naturalization of vocal timbre reached far beyond colonial racial dynamics. Time and again, journalists sought to establish what characterized the true “American voice” by drawing comparisons with European vocal cultures. The main point of dispute was the extent to which the national voice could be said, in the domains of both speech and singing, to be a corollary of local climatic conditions. A popular belief with roots in an old tradition of European environmental determinism held that the American habitat was hostile to the development of pleasant voices, a line of argument that the majority of those writing rejected on the grounds that voices are the product of listening and training. An anonymous New York critic summarized this point in 1872: We ourselves [Americans] . . . find that no people speak as we speak. . . . We feel as if universal catarrh had seized the nation; everyone sounds as if he were haunted by an uncanny demon of a steam engine, and were trying to out-scream it; and we, too, begin to bemoan ourselves over the “American voice.” There is no such thing as the American voice. People may talk as much and as learnedly as they please and can, about the thinness of our air, its stimulating quality, the prevalence of disorders of the mucous membrane of American heads and noises, and so on. This is all nonsense. It is only the American habit of speaking which is at fault. . . . But the fact still remains, glaring, indisputable, mortifying, that the average American

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has a voice and intonation which torture sensitive ears, which identify him instantly and unmistakably in any quarter of the globe.46

On traveling to Europe, this writer further explained, Americans grow accustomed to toning down their speech, returning to their country after a year or two with better modulated voices. His confidence in the reshaping power of listening to the vocality of foreign places casts but dim light on his dispirited final remark: by and large, he concludes, an American voice will not fail to betray its provenance as its owner strolls in speaking mode around the world. Both observations construe vocal difference as the result of the circulation of people: “voice culture,” the social and artistic endeavor to cultivate healthy American voices, took impetus from burgeoning global mobility.47 The critic’s words also imply that the strengths and weaknesses of the “American voice” were gauged specifically by the British, a voice that shared much of the same linguistic substratum as the American. If expanding transport and communication networks fostered, from the 1860s, a belief in an ethnic and linguistic unity of the AngloSaxons dwelling on both sides of the Atlantic, listening to the sounds of spoken English exposed an altogether more fragmented picture of that same transatlantic milieu.48 Midcentury inquiries into American vocality were one incarnation of the musical and cultural inferiority complex that troubled the United States at least until the turn of the twentieth century.49 As we saw earlier, in the early 1860s American singers were still weak commodities on the global operatic market. The dominant strategy among their compatriots to promote them was to present their voices as manufactured products: sonic objects developed through training, whose contours were unhinged from the natural environment even when climate was acknowledged to play a part in shaping them. These voices were described as “pure,” “clear,” “fresh,” and “bird-like”: qualities that distinguished them, particularly those of prima donnas, from their more robust Italian counterparts and the overrefinement of the French. Clara Louise Kellogg, a native of South Carolina and the quintessential American cantatrice of her time, established her reputation in New York in the 1860s through “sheer hard work and Yankee pluck.” Her voice was held to encapsulate “the pure American soprano—clear, fresh, true and sympathetic.”50 Although there was no consensus on whether Patti was a true American, she also occasionally impressed US critics with her “American voice, warmed with a little Italian heat.”51 In Europe, conversely, American vocalists were notorious for their loud, shrill, and nasal voices, an almost symmetrical reversal of the US domestic trope. An Italian émigré musician writing for Ricordi’s

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Gazzetta musicale di Milano in 1889 disparaged Annie Gleason, a soprano he had heard in San Francisco and who was known in Italy as Miss Alameda, for having “one of those American voices as strident as the whistle of a steam engine.”52 Since earlier in the century, operatic goods including voices had been entangled in the logic of capitalism. In London, the commodification of Italian vocal luxuries and attempts to assimilate foreign traditions to local singing practices reflected the mores of the British Empire.53 On the other side of the Atlantic, from midcentury onward, operatic voices were discussed in the same breath as the trade goods that regularly traversed the ocean. Transatlantic exchanges, which saw America excel in the exportation of agricultural products and, increasingly, machinery, provided the context for interpreting the surge of American singers on the global market. While the Old World had long been alone in supplying artistic and cultural products of some value, the new continent, Americans opined, was now also in a position to export “superior articles” of the same standard as European prima donnas.54 Global stars such as Adelina Patti, her sister Carlotta, and Kellogg demonstrated the US capacity to “surpass the Old World in singers as well as iron-clads, sewing machines, pianos and big guns.” Even leaving aside those voices that had already set sail for Europe, America had “plenty of the same, and even better, materials left.”55 A journalist for the Chicago Tribune reckoned that, following a century of exchanging domestic cereals, cattle, and gold for European silk, spices, and bijouterie, America was finally able to “send them [Europeans] scores of light soprano voices.”56 The language of an economic system founded on commodity exchange and circulation shows how vocal difference constituted not only a field to be listened to and mapped, but also an arena in which voices were revealed to be mass-produced. The two preoccupations fueled one another. The increased mobility of performers and people in general raised such techniques/technologies as diction and accent to the status of devices capable of recording and reproducing—in perceptible, audible form—the dominant cultural and linguistic master narratives. Here lay part of the reason for widespread concern among Italians about American singers and the role they were starting to play in changing the equilibrium of the peninsula’s operatic scene. In the 1860s, foreign vocalists were taking Italian theaters by storm, their mouths issuing forth sonic distortions that made them scapegoats for all things going awry. Often known indiscriminately as inglesi, Americans were among the chief culprits—infamous, as mentioned before, for their loud vocal habits.57 An 1867 book-length account published in London by one Lucius

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describes the challenges that US operatic aspirants, particularly female ones, faced when they first crossed the Atlantic. Entitled American and Italian Cantatrici; or, A Year at the Singing Schools of Milan, the volume is a first-person account of the everyday misadventures of better- and lesserknown prima donnas in what was then Italy’s operatic capital. The book, which claims to be a record of real incidents in the life of real people, plays around with intentional misspellings. The names of key figures on the contemporary Milanese stage are repeatedly corrupted—together with dates, the author explains in the preface—“for obvious reasons.”58 The great Bohemian dramatic soprano Teresa Stolz, who had debuted at La Scala in 1865 and would become one of Verdi’s closest interlocutors, is presented to the reader as “Stalz;” Errico Petrella makes his entrance in the guise of one “Petrilla;” and Carolina Ferni, the violinist and operatic soprano who would one day teach Enrico Caruso, has her name transformed into “Ferti.”59 I would suggest that these alterations are more than a rhetorical device to avoid too blatant a commentary on contemporary operatic affairs. As a strategy to disguise critical judgements and fictional stories woven around famous people and situations, Lucius’s slight reinvention of a few proper names is glaringly insufficient. His misspellings must also be an attempt to capture Milan’s changing vocal soundscape. What he paints as he journeys through the backstage of the singing profession in the late1860s Lombard city is a melting pot of national cultures accompanied by characteristic (or stereotypical) sonic markers. In his words, the classes taught by the sought-after “Mestro Gomperti,” alias the renowned singing teacher and bel canto theorist Francesco Lamperti, were “a musical Babel [in which] every nation, language, style, and stage of voice was . . . present.”60 The linguistic confusion hosted by Lamperti’s shabby apartment even seeps into Lucius’s narration, which, in a fashion diametrically opposed to the intrusion of foreign accents in Italy’s vocal soundscape, embeds snippets of Italian and occasionally Milanese dialect into its English. The author’s hodgepodge of languages recalls the practice, widespread among Victorian and Edwardian translators, of retaining a number of phrases in a given text’s original tongue in order to lend the translation an air of “foreign-soundingness.”61 Was Lucius similarly attempting, through his writerly recording device, to reproduce something of the din, something of the sonic distortions that the throng of “screaming divinities” in the Italian maestro’s classes unleashed upon the country’s opera houses?62

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(Re)producing Language The material aspects of the Italian language for which Lamperti’s bunch of foreign protégés seemed so unfit lay at the center of animated debates that spanned both speech and singing in the post-Unification years. As Laura Protano-Biggs has shown, the period between the 1850s and 1880s was one of deepening nostalgia on the peninsula, owing to the perceived disappearance of its old vocal tradition. Bel canto—that slippery term forever in search of meaning, roaming modern music historiography along and across the semantic precincts of style, tradition, technique, method, sound, and ideology—was mourned as an object “lost” somewhere in between changing compositional and performance practices. Two subsequent waves of debate in the press sought to explain its decline, with journalists gauging the strains to which contemporary musical works first, and changing vocal styles later, had subjected singers’ vocal organs. Much of the squabble centered on the unhealthy exertions associated with modern canto declamato: a speechlike style of singing, often accompanied by thick orchestrations, characteristic of French and German opera, but also increasingly fashionable in Italy through Verdi and some early experiments by Bellini. At the same time that critics took sides for or against the new declamatory style, their preoccupations rippled out to vocal pedagogues who attempted to define the exact boundaries of bel canto in order to prevent its ultimate demise. Lamperti and Enrico Delle Sedie each wrote treatises on the subject, texts that rank among the most influential ones their generation produced as aids for training opera singers.63 That the term “bel canto” itself gained retrospective currency as a substantive noun precisely at this time points further to its crystallization not only of a waning musical style or vocal method but also of larger political and cultural anxieties.64 It will come as no surprise, once placed within the context of voice politics on the peninsula during the period, to find that the same Filippi who praised Patti’s polyglotism also heard in her vocal deliveries a living embodiment of bel canto. Together with various colleagues, he championed Patti as a remnant of the old Italian school of singing, going further to extol her as a matchless model of Italian pronunciation.65 In his eulogies of the soprano he tuned his readers’ ears to matters of diction: he reckoned that a “clear, distinct, pure, Italian pronunciation” was one of the most important and most neglected duties of modern singers.66 Italians were paradoxically just as guilty as foreigners, since their unintelligible utterances beset the theaters as much as the more articulate but wrongly inflected vocalizations of nonnatives.67 On the other hand,

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Patti offered a perfect example of how Italian should sound: “From [her] lips one does not miss a single syllable; it could even be claimed that she makes commas audible.”68 This clarity of diction that Filippi recognized was, as mentioned earlier, impervious to the effects of her globetrotting. In his article minimizing the importance of locating her origins, even Fortis concluded, in agreement with his colleague, that the one reliable method of ascertaining Patti’s home country was auditory: “Whoever hears her pronunciation will have no doubts that her first wail was in Italian.”69 And yet the fact that neither critic attempted to define the phonetic substance of Patti’s delivery is worth pausing over. What sounds did each of them have in mind when they invoked the orthodox pronunciation of so-called Italian? In the 1860s and ’70s, along with the troubling decay of its vocal tradition, Italy witnessed a resurgence of the centuries-old questione della lingua (language question). Since the sixteenth century, Tuscan had been the language used in written communication, a language that had its roots in the fourteenth-century literary models of Petrarca and Boccaccio. Even as late as 1861, however, few inhabitants of the peninsula could speak it, the large majority still expressing themselves in local dialects.70 Aside from the shadows of political failure that this linguistic fragmentation repeatedly projected in Italian historiography (most notably that of Antonio Gramsci), the lack of a common tongue fueled a celebration of the material, nonsemantic aspects of language that came to distinguish the Italian voice abroad. A long and influential Enlightenment critical tradition, running from Rousseau to Madame de Staël and later appropriated by Italy’s own cultural thinkers, praised the sonorous beauty of Italian vocality precisely because its phone constituted a kind of countergift to the logos (unavailable to Italians) of “superior” Northern European tongues and literatures. As a site of both dearth and excess, language constituted, as Delia Casadei has put it, the fundamental “hinge between sound and geopolitics” in Italy’s journey toward modernity.71 While this phone/logos dichotomy may well have been unshakable at heart, debates about language and literacy after Unification suggest that the sound of Italian, whether Florentine or some linguistic hybrid, was one of the tools that could help to produce a more unified linguistic identity. If the questione della lingua took a new spin from the 1860s compared to previous decades, this departure lay in the broadening of its scope from the strictly literary to the social and political sphere. Italy’s celebrated man of letters Alessandro Manzoni, author of I promessi sposi (1827) and proponent of early efforts to redraft the relationship between spoken and literary idioms, wrote a fundamental essay in 1868 that brought the prob-

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lem of linguistic unification to public attention. Invited by the minister of education, Emilio Broglio, he had presided over a commission, comprising both Milanese and Florentine members, in charge of formulating a plan to select and disseminate one common national tongue throughout the peninsula. In his report on the group’s work, published under the title “Dell’unità della lingua e dei mezzi per diffonderla” (On the Unity of the Language and on the Means of Disseminating It), Manzoni indicated that the lingua franca for the new nation-state should be elite, spoken Florentine.72 His view drew mixed responses from contemporary scholars, such as the linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli; it held that only a living tongue—as opposed to the dead language of literary tradition—might have the necessary vitality to function as the shared communication medium for the entire Italian society.73 Manzoni and his commission pinpointed an issue that is central to my discussion in this chapter: namely, the problem of identifying “mezzi” (means) to disseminate linguistic practices. Manzoni’s recommendation was that Italy’s national tongue be spread with the help of dictionaries: a vocabolario of modern spoken Florentine would serve as point of reference for a number of other texts ensuring that language’s translation into all existing dialects, and vice versa. Yet, as a fleeting orthographic choice in the closing lines of his essay betrays, linguistic unification also required standardized pronunciation. In that final passage Manzoni expressed hope that his recognition of the existence of a suitable national language would not vanish “come un suono vòto nell’aria” (as an empty sound in the air).74 His aptly chosen sonic metaphor summoned forth the ephemerality of speech, and simultaneously molded the word vuoto in the phonological shapes of modern spoken Florentine—which commonly replaces, even today, the diphthong “uo” with an open “ò.” A speech sound that might have abided as a mere source of sensuous beauty, as a surplus untethered from claims of verbal communication, could and ought to become an instrument for generating semantic value.75 Manzoni’s proto-recording fantasy—his dream, if that’s not taking his words too far, of a tool through which an individual’s voice might, by ripple effect, generate that of the nation—captures the heart of the problem of (re)producing language during the pre-recording age. Linguistic sounds could only propagate through physical human encounters: faceto-face mimicry lay behind the transmission of vocality, normative and otherwise. The expansion of oral exercises in French education from the 1880s demonstrates the point, as does Manzoni and his colleagues’ proposal to send Tuscan teachers to all primary schools of the new kingdom to help spread living Florentine.76 In Italy a teaching agenda centered on

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pronunciation can be found in embryo in Michele Coppino’s school programs of 1867. Although his name is more often associated with the 1877 decree that made the first three years of primary education compulsory for all Italian children, Coppino, one of Broglio’s immediate predecessors, had already played a key role in teaching reforms ten years earlier. His 1867 primary-school syllabi addressed the question of dialects explicitly for the first time, stressing to teachers that practicing orthophony would also breed improved orthography. The Italian lessons comprised a series of “work packages” founded on exercises in writing, reading, grammar, vocabulary, and sentence analysis. But it was “correct pronunciation and orthography” that constituted the first, crucially twofold principle the teacher was expected to instil in her pupils.77 A partial response to the challenge identified by Coppino, Broglio, and Manzoni also came in the form of treatises that laid out the rules of accepted Italian orthoepy. In his review of the Guida prática per la rètta pronúncia della língua italiana (1862), by the Triestine playwright and actor Isidoro Tedeschi, the critic for Il diavoletto praised its attempt to establish “a fixed and invariable rule” of pronunciation with the aid of written accents. These signs, primarily placed on vowels, would ensure that Italian’s “native physiognomy” did not get distorted—an idea similarly proposed by Roberto Lamprecht in his own orthoepy manual, also dating from 1862.78 Lamprecht set the stakes of a uniform manner of speaking even higher: the preservation of Italian’s “beautiful pronunciation” was for him a matter of safeguarding the qualities that had long guaranteed the tongue its status as chief “language of singing” throughout the world.79 Where pronunciation treatises sought, with obvious limitations, to discipline distinct local oral traditions by relying on notation, so-called metodi fonici for teaching children and adults alike how to read and write attempted to place the constituent parts of language directly in their mouths. With origins in late-eighteenth-century Germany and a deep role in the redefinition of French oral culture a century later, phonetic methods became increasingly common in Italy from the 1850s, after some forerunners earlier in the century.80 As they gradually supplanted syllabic and spelling systems, known as metodi sillabici and metodi compitativi, they reversed the emphasis those methods placed on signs and sounds. Unlike those preexisting approaches, metodi fonici started by teaching the pupil the sound of each letter, rather than its name, and then gradually asked them to combine those sounds into syllables and meaningful words (figures 3.2 and 3.3). Put differently, they privileged the role of the mouth in shaping and projecting the sonic substance of Italian over imparting its symbolic, written representation. They also taught pupils

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F igur e 3.2 . Extract from Francesco Gazzetti, Insegnamento contemporaneo di let­ tura e scrittura col metodo fonico (Venice: Antonelli, 1858), 17. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Capretta Misc.561.17. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo / Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Firenze. Fur­ ther reproduction prohibited.

to discern between meaningless noises and purposeful sounds, training them by way of repeated listening and imitation to accomplish the ever more “effortless glide from ma to Mama, Nature to culture, sound to language.”81 The oralization of the alphabet that, following Foucault, Kittler has described as a watershed in nineteenth-century theories of language

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F igur e 3.3. Extract from Insegnamento teoretico e pratico del metodo di lettura fo­ nico (Cremona: Montaldi, 1870), 26. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, V.MIS 245.19. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Tu­ rismo / Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Firenze. Further reproduction prohibited.

was especially important in Italy, where the dissemination of Italian coincided with the gestation of an “artificial” mother tongue for the majority of the country’s inhabitants. In most cases, Italian was not their lingua materna—they were not native speakers of it—yet that language could and ought to acquire a use and affective value as it came to be mastered by the entire national community.82

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That the ideological and practical concerns traversing the fields of linguistic, educational, and operatic discourse often overlapped is clear from Francesco Lamperti’s L’arte del canto, a treatise published by Ricordi in Milan in 1883 and in English translation the following year.83 A staunch advocate of bel canto as a vocal method, Lamperti was professor of singing at the city’s conservatoire from 1850 to 1875, an activity he complemented with private teaching at his aforementioned apartment, crowded with undisciplined foreign stars in the making. His students included the tenor Italo Campanini (Italy’s first Lohengrin), Teresa Stolz (Verdi’s Aida at the 1872 La Scala premiere), and Austrian mezzo Maria Waldmann (who created the role of Amneris in the same production). Throughout his career, Lamperti authored several manuals for those in the singing profession, beginning with a Guida teorico-pratica-elementare per lo studio del canto (1864) that contains a few scattered remarks on pronunciation. His teachings drew on the methods of earlier pedagogues, such as Giovanni Battista Mancini and the celebrated Manuel García Jr., and on the work of French physiologist Louis Mandl; they would, in turn, be carried into the twentieth century by his son Giovanni Battista.84 L’arte del canto deals with issues in anatomy, respiration, ornaments, phrasing, and other subjects; it comprises an introduction and three parts, the most focused and most original of which, the second, is devoted entirely to pronunciation.85 García’s Traité complet de l’art du chant, published in Paris in two volumes in 1840 and 1847, had already tackled the challenges of pronouncing vowels, consonants, and tonic accents in a proper Italian fashion, placing greater emphasis than the later Italian work would on the physiological aspects of voice production.86 Delle Sedie’s own Arte e fisiologia del canto (1876), published and vigorously promoted by Ricordi in Milan, also briefly discussed vowels, consonants, and orthoepy.87 Lamperti’s reappraisal of these topics not only is much more detailed than the account of his predecessors, but is also inflected by the vocal and cultural concerns of his time. Among the tropes he imbibes from the operatic zeitgeist is the belief in Italy’s invasion by foreign singers and their inability to pronounce “the language of Dante with grace.” Lamperti’s reference to the great medieval poet is a clear appeal to his cultural authority, cemented in 1865 by the Florentine celebrations that had marked the sixth centenary of his birth.88 The emphasis on graceful pronunciation aligns with the marked linguistic spin that the pedagogue puts on his discussion of vocal training. The most remarkable and, in his own view, most innovative aspect of his treatise lies in its attempt to tame the current state of theatrical vocal disorder by policing different accents.89 Deviant vocalizers of various nationalities rub shoulders with each other,

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and with Italians from both Northern and Southern regions, as one and all are subjected to the pedagogue’s meticulous aural X-ray. Their mispronunciation of Italian comes in different shapes and degrees, but not even Florentines and Romans—reputedly the wellspring of the purest Italian diction—come up to scratch. After attempting to bring some analytical clarity to this chaotic orthoepic panorama, Lamperti explains the mechanical movements of the mouth necessary to emit particular vowels and consonants: what he calls a “branch of acoustic knowledge.”90 In particular, he dwells on the most unruly element of spoken Italian, the vowels, paying special attention to the “e” and the “o,” which can be either open or closed. His catalog of pronunciation errors and concomitant pronunciation tips for aspiring opera singers then culminates in an annotated version of the recitative from Norma’s cavatina, in which he spells out the most common pronunciation mistakes using diacritical marks (figure 3.4). Lamperti’s choice of “Sediziose voci” as a wedge for sorting out aspects of normative Italian vocality is at once understandable and puzzling. A paradigmatic bel canto opera, Norma was an obvious point of reference for his exegesis of the old school of Italian singing. Unlike “Casta diva,” the slow movement that follows, and unlike its endlessly stretching ornamented phrases, the grand opening scena that introduces Bellini’s druidess nevertheless proceeds by marked martial pronouncements, steeped in the singer’s lower and middle range and delivered in snaps of syllabic declamation. There is none of the smooth, legato quality or the flights of airy coloratura that were and are typically associated with bel canto; nothing of that supposedly innate musicality of the Italian language that advocates of Italy’s old singing school could use to combat the raging “Germanic” vocal style. Nothing, unless—as I think was the case—Lamperti’s aim was to propose a bonding of music and language yet more intimate than a highly ornamented aria might convey. “In Italy,” he writes, “music and words are identical, so much so, that bare speech is in itself a melody.”91 The concept was not new, but the pedagogue used it in a new way to redraft the relationship between sound and meaning. Only a recitative could disclose the characteristic sonority of Italian speech and the true nature of Italian singing. For the soprano’s lines, the only part of the recitative that Lamperti transcribed, seem ideally suited to project a notion of Italian vocality in which the word is charged with imparting both phone and logos. The seditious voices that Bellini’s Norma rebukes are also the sounds to be tamed and subsumed in the (re)production of the Italian voice.

F igur e 3.4. Extract from Francesco Lamperti, L’arte del canto in ordine alle tra­ dizioni classiche ed a particolare esperienza: Norme tecniche e consigli agli allievi ed agli artisti (Milan: Ricordi, 1883), 54. Biblioteca del Conservatorio Statale di Musica “Nic­ colò Paganini” di Genova.

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Bel Canto (as) Listening This brings me to the final question I should like to address in this chapter: the question of what the voices we have encountered in these pages might afford us historiographically. In light of the cultural conversations on vocality that took place in Italy and elsewhere through the 1860s and beyond, we might ask whether the recurring concern with the relationship between the oral and the aural might not help us to reappraise that long overwrought concept, bel canto, whose meanings in the modern era have floated between different areas of historical and critical analysis. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century interpretations waver ambiguously between general and narrow definitions, between long and short chronologies, broaching aspects of voice production, tone quality, and compositional style spanning the late sixteenth to the late nineteenth century, all in an effort to unpack the concept.92 These accounts betray a tension between a desire to capture the particular features of bel canto as a styletradition-technique-method-sound-ideology, and the term’s resistance to exegesis. In a key if somewhat en passant remark dropped in her history of the castrato, Martha Feldman sensibly warns us that any attempt to prove that a particular historical configuration of singing is (or was) bel canto is ultimately bound to be “more like vocal theology than history.”93 Once we shift focus from historical notions of Italian singing per se to its intersections with Italian speech, however, a whole new set of concerns comes to the fore. Filippi and his colleagues scrutinized Patti’s vocality at the border of what are today largely separate historiographical territories, proving themselves to be participants in that all-encompassing aural consciousness of language that was developing on both sides of the Atlantic in the wake of burgeoning global movements. Patti’s vocal organs functioned as both a speaking and a recording machine: one capable of registering and reproducing impeccably the sounds of the linguistic landscapes she went through. Well before sound recording technologies instilled an even greater ethereality into the bel canto concept, and at just about the time when Thomas A. Edison conceived of the phonograph as an instrument intended (also) for preserving languages and teaching correct pronunciation, Patti’s human proto-recording device was disseminating the cultural prefigurations of such technological objects and fantasies all over the place.94 One even wonders whether the emergence of sound recording on the operatic scene in the 1890s and growing scholarly interest in the materialities of sonic apparatuses in our day have not led us to treat voices and vocal styles too resolutely as entities that histori-

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cally would have been understood as things to be preserved: as objects of storage, transmission, reproduction. Their intrinsic nature as media (in a Kittlerian sense), as techniques/technologies always receiving, retooling, and propagating existing sonic materials, has been all but obscured.95 But there is more to the story we might start to tell here. Among the few but important areas that have remained untapped in scholarly enquiries into bel canto is listening: specifically, the role that new practices of attending sonically to language might have played in nineteenth-century understandings of the concept. Here is where critical discourses on Patti, with their emphasis on the singer and her voice’s transnational work, might help us to rethink some of our narratives. We could perhaps consider whether in our histories more space could not be given not only to bel canto’s global work—the émigré pedagogues who upheld Italian singing across the world, or the cross-cultural conversations that touring opera companies produced as they performed Rossini in distant lands96— but also to the historical work of the global in (or for) bel canto. I am thinking neither of the well known oppositional logic—German versus Italian vocality—that historically shaped the concept, lending it a gravitas that only the fury of nationalisms could have enforced. Nor am I thinking of the role that worldwide music institutions and recording technologies played in crystallizing “Italian” voices, particularly after the Americas rose to prominence operatically and technologically around 1900.97 Rather, I am wondering whether that close relationship between orality and aurality that the growing circulation of nineteenth-century voices encouraged might not allow us to recast bel canto in yet more auditory terms, as a historical way of listening to voice as much as one of producing it: a way of listening, a configuration of the ear, in which language was paradoxically at once more and less central than we might have expected. More central, since prosodic singing and the correspondence of tone and text that are traditionally regarded as distinctive of bel canto were far from the only objects of linguistic auscultation: listener attention reached deeper, into the minute realm of phonology. And less central because this novel sensitivity to diction and pronunciation cut across national and linguistic boundaries: it was no mere by-product of the aestheticization of Italian alone. In the historical emergence of this mode of listening, what I have called Patti’s “global voice” functioned as an audible and yet constantly vanishing ideal. Certainly her paradoxes remind us that—to paraphrase another uneasy denizen of his own time’s linguistic order—language is never a possession; rather, it is an always partial, always strained act of inhabiting.98

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“Ito per Ferrovia” O p er a Pr od u ct i ons on t he Tr acks

In the summer of 1871, Bologna’s mayor, Camillo Casarini, the publishers Francesco and Giovannina Lucca, and a group of employees from the Teatro Comunale set off to Munich to attend performances of Lohengrin at the Hof- und Nationaltheater. The German city, which in 1867 had become connected to Verona, in Veneto, by the Brenner railway line, was a popular destination for Italians desperate to get to know Richard Wagner’s works, none of which had yet been staged in Italy. The 1871 trip was an official, municipally funded expedition made, as one bolognese explained, “to consider and copy as much as will serve us.”1 Rumors that the Comunale was working to produce Lohengrin had been in the air since the summer of 1869, when news had leaked that the impresario Luigi Scalaberni was pursuing this enterprise, most likely in a shared initiative with the local authorities and the composer’s Italian publisher, Casa Lucca.2 That project seems to have been conceived as a combined operation between the theaters of Bologna and Lugo, both managed by Scalaberni.3 The enterprise nonetheless failed; and when, two years later, on November 1, 1871, Lohengrin was eventually brought out on the Comunale’s stage, Scalaberni was no longer behind it. Well into the summer of that year, the impresa of the theater was still vacant; arrangements to mount Wagner’s opera were initiated by Casarini and the distinguished conductor Angelo Mariani.4 From early on, Bologna’s Lohengrin was heralded as an aesthetic product that would adhere to the Munich production “with unequaled accuracy.”5 The theater agent, stage technician, and set and costume designers from the Comunale had all participated in the German expedition. The performances they went on to create were enveloped in an aura of transplanted authenticity—a desire to reproduce both the sonic and the visual dimension of the Hof- und Nationaltheater’s staging—even though the

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actual details of what was copied and how it was done remain unclear.6 Lohengrin was produced, in an abridged Italian translation, with a cast that included the tenor Italo Campanini (later the most famous early Italian Lohengrin); the Austrian and German sopranos Bianca Blume and Maria Löwe Destin; the bass Giuseppe Galvani; the baritones Pietro Silenzi and Ludovico Buti; and, most notably, Mariani—who did much to familiarize Italians with foreign operas. The Bavarian composer and kapellmeister Ernst Frank was appointed régisseur, a figure new to Italian opera houses of the time. Flocks of visitors, including many political and musical authorities, traveled from all over the peninsula to attend the performances. These were reportedly a tour de force of orchestral and choral direction, while the mise-en-scène with sets by Carlo Ferrario was described by one local newspaper as of “truly Asiatic magnificence.”7 The cultural politics underpinning this first-ever Italian Wagner staging are well known to opera historians. As hinted in chapter 1, by the late 1860s Bologna had taken over from Florence as the most “progressive” Italian musical center, a reputation it established by premiering a stream of modern operatic works from abroad: grands opéras by Meyerbeer and Gounod, but also Verdi’s own Don Carlos. The local administration, which directly controlled the theater, was deeply involved in these productions, key as they were to the city’s cultural competition with other urban centers, particularly Milan. From one point of view, the 1871 Lohengrin was only the latest in a series of forward- and outward-looking stagings aimed at defining Bologna’s cosmopolitan identity against that of the contemporary capital of “Italian music.” It was a skillful maneuver of local cultural politics, one that, as Axel Körner has noted, was part and parcel of the “modernising ideology of nationalism.”8 A number of circumstances nevertheless lent this 1871 Wagner moment a special historical and, later, historiographical significance. In a bid to increase the prestige of the performances, the municipal authorities had initially planned for them to coincide with the International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archaeology, held in Bologna in early October. Eventually the production was delayed, but the irony looming behind the near simultaneity of an “antediluvian” congress and the stage debut of Wagner’s “music of the future” was capitalized on by the press: one critic noted that this juncture was tantamount to a cry of “Down with the present,” a present obfuscated by the “double fog of the past and the future.”9 Further impetus to political and cultural rumination came with hindsight. The European premiere of Aida in Milan in February 1872, the sensational failure of Lohengrin in the same city in 1873, a string of further Wagner premieres in Bologna in subsequent years: all of these bolstered

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a view of Bologna as the late-nineteenth-century Italian capital of Wagnerism—or “Le Bayreuth italien.”10 This view, which has lasted into our own day, rests on the narratives of contemporary critics and political authorities. Often crafted with municipal values in mind, these accounts may tempt us to believe that latenineteenth-century Italian cities were discrete operatic milieus, forever in competition with each other and at best communicating through discursive journalistic networks. As the first three chapters of this book have shown, the situation was not so simple. Structural synergies among urban centers have been acknowledged en passant by various scholars. We know, for instance, that Bologna and Florence were caught up in close operatic relationships from the 1860s, relationships displaying “a certain cultural dependence” of the latter city on the former, or a shifting cultural economy whereby Bologna took over from and became capable of “export[ing] its culture to the Tuscan capital.”11 Yet what we still do not know is what these transmunicipal interactions exactly consisted of. We may wonder whether they involved more than the circulation of operatic works and critical ideas between distinct urban environments, whether they were underpinned by physical movements, or whether gaining a better sense of who and what enabled them might alter the picture we have of late-nineteenth-century Italy as a country steeped deep in campanilismo. As we shall see, the Munich expedition was only the first of several journeys that defined the political, technological, and aesthetic project of Bologna’s Lohengrin. These journeys were national and international, historical and fictional, past, future, and near-contemporaneous. They resonated with Wagner’s dramatic stage action and spoke to broader debates about transportation. The pioneering nature of one particular transfer— the relocation by train of the entire Wagner staging from Bologna to a different locale—anticipated trends that would take root in subsequent years, when full-blown opera productions started to go more regularly on the move. Retracing some of these journeys, and thereby unmooring the 1871 Lohengrin from the stationary interpretive frameworks focused solely on late-nineteenth-century Bologna, allows us to recover a forgotten form of operatic interplay between Italian cities: a type of material interaction that challenges the notion that the peninsula’s urban centers altogether resisted the nation’s unifying impulses after 1861. Late-nineteenth-century operatic “translocations,” as I shall call the physical transportation of all or most of the human and material apparatus of a production from one city or theater to another, lay bare conflicting historical attitudes toward movement.12 Digging into how they arose and how they signified in specific geographical, political, and tech-

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nological contexts goes some way toward answering the call, mentioned in this book’s introduction, of the mobility studies scholars Tim Cresswell and Stephen Greenblatt to pursue microhistories of movement that address its various actors, alongside the structural constraints that different mobilities resist, and occasionally produce, in particular cultural settings. In what follows, I shall describe the institutional labor and the practical problems generated by Bologna’s Lohengrin and subsequent productions on the move; then I will shift my attention to the cultural and aesthetic implications that emerge if we examine these translocations in conjunction with the uses and technological apparatus of the railway. Railway operatic mobility, I suggest, helps us to probe the aesthetic status of opera at the fine secolo, a period that saw the emergence of notions of sound reproduction and a nascent industrialization of Italian culture. Seen through this double institutional and technological lens, these late-nineteenthcentury transfers do more than add a more material dimension to transmunicipal identity politics in the post-Unification years. They point to opera as a key site of a burgeoning Italian technological consciousness.

“Ito per Ferrovia” Five weeks after Lohengrin’s opening night at the Comunale, the conductor, cast, chorus, orchestra, stage band, theater staff, sets, costumes, and stage machinery were all relocated some fifty miles by train to Florence’s private Teatro Pagliano, an undertaking that required the transportation of between three hundred and four hundred people. The three subsequent performances and the requisite transfer were arranged at the last minute by one of the Florentine theater’s impresarios: no less a person than Scalaberni himself, who was running the season together with Michele Morri. The operation necessitated negotiations not only between the two opera houses, but also with both mayors and a few third parties. After Unification, municipal theaters were not commercial venues that could buy in or tour complete productions. Their orchestras, choruses, and staff were municipal employees, and so-called deputazioni dei pubblici spettacoli (committees chosen by the city council) oversaw all theatrical business, posing logistical obstacles to full-blown translocations. Scalaberni could dictate at will at the Pagliano, which received no municipal dote, but he had to negotiate infinite details when he worked for or with publicly funded opera houses. Following Lohengrin’s triumphant debut in Bologna, he approached the mayor of Florence, Ubaldino Peruzzi, in the hope of obtaining a subsidy for the transfer and help facilitating arrangements with Bologna’s city council. Of foremost concern was secur-

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ing leaves of absence for the Bologna performers and staff for the period of their stay in Florence. To complicate things further, some of the chorus members were due at La Scala at the time of the Florentine performances. The impresario was thus forced to ask for permission, again via Peruzzi, from the Milanese theater’s management to delay their arrival. The Florentine mayor acted promptly with Casarini, Mariani, and the Milanese authorities,13 yet neither he nor his giunta would countenance Scalaberni and Morri’s requests for financial support, no matter how loudly the impresarios asserted that the performances would enhance Florence’s cultural prestige.14 Under the circumstances, Scalaberni and Morri were compelled to sell public subscriptions to finance the enterprise.15 On December 6, the ominous prediction of an anti-Wagnerian critic— that Lohengrin, “born in, or, to be more precise, transplanted to Bologna, will die in Bologna”—was magnificently overturned.16 A colossal troupe from the Comunale, consisting (according to one account) of a chorus of eighty-four, an orchestra of ninety, forty dancers, eighty extras, and a stage band of thirty, was greeted at Florence’s Maria Antonia train station by the local National Guard.17 Lohengrin, “ito per ferrovia” (gone by railway) to the Tuscan city, literally drained Bologna of its musical resources, since the majority of the Comunale’s orchestra and chorus were also employees of other local institutions.18 The depletion was such that the Cappella di San Petronio, the main church and a symbol of civic prestige, was forced to cancel vespers and a solemn pontifical mass, owing to a shortage of performers.19 The operatic transfer was unprecedented in its scope. As critics from Bologna as well as Florence noted, the three performances at the Pagliano (on December 8, 9, and 10) would feature the same production as the Comunale’s, down to each single material and human component. A journalist for a Florentine paper elaborated: Non adopero a casaccio il verbo trasportare. Si tratta di mettere in iscena il Lohengrin al teatro Pagliano con i medesimi artisti che lo cantano ora al Comunale di Bologna con tanto successo; e si tratta anche di portar qui i scenari, il macchinismo, il vestiario, il Mariani concertatore e direttore, e una parte anche, se non quasi tutta o tutta l’orchestra di Bologna. [I am not using the verb “to transport” at random. We are talking about mounting Lohengrin at the Pagliano theater with the same performers who at the moment are singing it to great success at Bologna’s Comunale; and we are also talking about bringing over the scenery, the stage machinery, the costumes, Mariani in his role as maestro concertatore and conductor, and some, if not most or all, of Bologna’s orchestra.]20

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Everything would be “bagged [insaccato] with the low-speed freight train no. 49,” explained the Florentine newspaper Il fanfulla with a gastronomic pun on the word insaccare—which also refers to the act of stuffing meat into casing, to produce cold cuts like salami.21 Lohengrin was to be transported in its totality albeit in a dismantled form: “in one piece, or, to put it better, in about four hundred pieces,” as another commentator hastened to clarify, thrilled at the size of the human contingent.22 No less tricky than the relocation of performers and staff were the arrangements for props and scenery, which belonged to the Comunale. Information is scant, but we know from documents concerning the redelivery of these materials that some of the backdrops were reconfigured to accommodate the larger size of the Pagliano.23 This operatic relocation was, to my knowledge, the first of its kind in Italy and possibly in Europe: an instance of operatic mobility that challenged the institutional system of municipal theaters and, as we shall see, revealed a growing medial status for opera during the fine secolo. The stakes of Scalaberni’s project were high for both cities. Bothersome practicalities aside, Bologna’s prestige could only benefit from the media reverberations of an event that amounted to the exportation of a local product with considerable cultural cachet. Casarini pressed for control over the performances in Florence, and even lost his temper when, after Mariani fell ill and proved unable to conduct the dress rehearsal, Peruzzi and Scalaberni failed to consult with him about the conductor’s substitute.24 In this exchange, Florence was on the weaker side: not only were its local authorities questioned in their decision making, but the whole trading operation risked undermining the prestige of a city that had itself once been preeminent in promoting “modern” music. In a polemical outburst that says much about Florentine misgivings, a Tuscan critic protested that the transfer transported nearly the entire Bologna opera house to Florence.25 Diplomatic and practical challenges notwithstanding, the scope of Scalaberni’s enterprise seemed at one point on the verge of expanding even further. Rumors circulated that the Comunale’s production— packed, as it were, in the impresario’s “duffel bag,”—would set off on a national and possibly even international tour.26 The press reported the news with some inconsistencies about the destinations: they were to be Rome and Turin; or Rome, Naples, and Genoa; or the Théâtre-Italien in Paris; or a “grande tournée à travers la peninsule”; or “the towns of Italy and Germany.”27 Plans to expand the initial project, assuming they ever existed, never became a reality. Yet through such talk Lohengrin’s oneoff translocation came to prefigure grand end-of-the-century touring en-

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terprises. Often expanded to impressive size to sonically promote municipal and national values, Italian theater orchestras increasingly went on tour from the 1870s in connection with special events and competitions. Those of Turin and Milan both traveled to Paris in 1878 to participate in a series of concerts at the Trocadero organized as part of the World’s Fair.28 As to operatic practices, the main difference between early- and late-nineteenth-century touring projects lay in the routes and the size of the human and material contingents associated with them. In earlier decades, touring opera in both Europe and the Americas, and what John Rosselli has called “package deals,” referring to Italian impresarial endeavors, typically involved relocating the musical materials, the company (with costumes), and only a few choral and orchestral musicians.29 Scenery and larger groups of performers traveled sporadically; counterintuitively, they were limited to much longer transatlantic transfers during a period when permanent opera companies in the Americas were still few and far between.30 Moving the entire musical corps and materiel of a theater’s production became established, including in shorter transfers, only in the later nineteenth century, and required the mobilization of a bulkier institutional and technological infrastructure. Trasporti or trasferimenti di spettacolo, as late-nineteenth-century operatic translocations came to be known, became relatively common in Italy after the Lohengrin experiment, both at a transmunicipal level and locally. Take the Pergola and the Pagliano theaters in Florence, for instance. The former was still owned by the Accademia degli Immobili, and although it was not a municipal theater in the same sense as Bologna’s Comunale, after Unification it still acted as the elite opera house on which hinged the city’s attempts at cultural self-representation. It received a more or less annual subsidy, subject to negotiations, from the city council, which was represented on the theater’s board of directors. The larger and private Teatro Pagliano, which attracted a more middle-class audience, instead relied entirely on ticket sales. These differences in management caused no little fuss with the city council when the seasons happened to be run by one and the same impresario, for financial interests often led him to transfer productions between the two venues. Scalaberni adopted this strategy during the years 1875 to 1877.31 Besides the obtaining of permission to relocate singers and orchestral players, the main problem was the scenery. The impresario’s repeated requests, usually to the exasperation of the Accademia and the municipality, that he might use tele di carta instead of canvas exemplify the practical and political stakes of such exchanges. Contemporary accounts suggest that paper was not only cheaper but also more easily folded, and could therefore be more easily transported; yet its

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use undermined the stature of the performance, and thus was admitted by the authorities only in exceptional circumstances.32 At the same time, the relocation of performers caused broader concerns citywide, for “nobody pays ten when they can listen to the same thing paying four,” as Peruzzi complained in the wake of a stray production of Donizetti’s La favorita.33 Duplication was the escamotage of an impresario facing financial obstacles and seeking to make the most of his resources, but it carried with it undesirable aesthetic and cultural costs. Even more challenging was setting up systematic translocations between cities. Between 1876 and 1877, Scalaberni was either directly or indirectly in charge of the seasons both at the two Florentine theaters and at Bologna’s Comunale. As early as the summer of 1876, he explored a “combination” among the three venues.34 On the strength of a yearlong deal with the publisher Lucca that enabled him to hire and freely circulate scores on all three stages, he approached the Comunale’s and the Pergola’s managements about his intentions to transport some of the upcoming productions from Bologna to Florence.35 The operas caught up in this circuit—Meyerbeer’s L’africana, Salvatore Auteri-Manzocchi’s Dolores, and Wagner’s Rienzi—were transplanted with the same scenery and mostly the same casts. Again, permissions had to be obtained from the local authorities for use of paper sets—a sine qua non for Scalaberni to be willing to undertake his duties.36 The news about the trasporti soon made it into the press: one critic for Milan’s Gazzetta dei teatri announced that “Dolores [would] leave the treacherous stage of Bologna and be transported, lock, stock, and barrel, to Florence.”37 Unlike the 1871 Lohengrin, these relocations involved some level of prior arrangement among the various opera houses. They did not, however, amount to what we today know as “coproductions,” or to earlytwentieth-century experiments with “trusts” that sought to coordinate seasons and circulate stagings among the principal opera houses of Europe and the Americas.38 Such global circuits, with the shipping and trucking involved therein, were and are sustained by shared capital: in the case of coproductions, a joint ownership of sets, costumes, and artistic direction among various companies. However anxious Scalaberni was to promote operatic mobility, the stagings he embarked upon during the mid-1870s were grounded in a fixed conception of theater-making, a conception in line with contemporary attempts at establishing teatro a repertorio. Modeled on the practices of Northern European opera houses, this innovation involved a shift toward stable companies plus sets, costumes, and props stored for ready use. The system had been under discussion in Italy for some time; Verdi himself, in a letter to his friend Count

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Opprandino Arrivabene, expressed his mixed views on the subject.39 Yet the practice failed to take root in most opera houses until well into the twentieth century. Scalaberni, “the planning impresario par excellence,” as he was designated after his Lohengrin feat, was recognized by some as its early instigator.40 He was a figure who stood on the threshold between the old and the new, a man caught up between the conflicting impulses of his age. He sought routes for disengaging opera from local, institutional bonds, and yet he operated within, and paradoxically reinforced, that same municipally-minded apparatus. The dialectic of stasis and motion that his late-life impresarial endeavors encapsulated is poignantly evoked by the all-too-ponderous procession that drew the curtain on his life. After he died on November 18, 1876—ironically the same day on which, by his efforts, Rienzi received its Bologna premiere—over four hundred of the crème de la crème of Florence lined up to escort his body to its final resting place. Today, all movements gone, his mortal remains lie in a halfabandoned Florentine cemetery.41

Railway Mo(ve)ments Scalaberni’s Lohengrin transfer was enabled by a modern technological apparatus. The Bologna-Florence railway, along which the Comunale’s performers and materials traveled, had been completed in 1864 in the wake of a post-Unification boom in establishing train connections between the various regions of Italy. By 1861 Bologna was a key node in a network that linked the main urban centers of the former Papal States and the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia. Its new connection to Florence via Pistoia meant that that system became integrated with Tuscany’s Leopolda railway, which ran up to the thriving port of Livorno. The northern and central-southern sections of Italy’s train network, which in 1865 was entrusted by the government to five multiregional companies, thus became connected. Interregional traffic was to remain slow and troublesome for years, owing to lack of uniform policies, but the developments were constantly and eagerly monitored.42 Contemporary accounts exude wonder at those modern technological feats of railway work and travel. The Bologna-Florence line was a major engineering accomplishment that required the excavation of no fewer than forty-six tunnels across the Apennines, a figure that not even opera reviewers failed to acknowledge in their Lohengrin marginalia.43 As tunnels were opened through hundreds of meters of rock, travelers started to jot down descriptions of locomotives “serpentining up” the mountains, “plung[ing] into the[ir] viscera,” and emitting “roar[s] of echoing

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F i gur e 4.1. Front cover of Panorama della Strada­Ferrata delli Appennini Bolo­ gna, Pistoja, Firenze (Bologna: Litografia Giulio Wenk, 1864). Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence, NAI 194. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo. Further reproduction prohibited.

sound.”44 The material shape of the landscape and the new geographies of railway travel took visual form in maps and photographic reportages compiled for both scientific and artistic purposes. A three-meter long Panorama della strada-ferrata delli Appennini Bologna-Pistoja-Firenze was published in 1864 after the inauguration of the line (figure 4.1). The lithograph seems to have been commissioned by the same company that had carried out the engineering work and sponsored a photo essay. To produce it, surveys were executed along the entire route, for to detail (as railway guides also did) the topographical and historical features of the lands that passengers traveled through was to fathom—to make legible—the formless spectacle that rolled by outside their carriages’ windows.45 Writers from the Risorgimento and the Liberal Era celebrated strade ferrate as vehicles of Italian unity and progress, downplaying Italy’s dependence on foreign architectural styles as far as the construction of stations was concerned, and overplaying the political and economic impact of the contemporary national railway network.46 As early as the mid-1840s, in the early days of Italian railway construction, the future prime minister Camillo Cavour and the general Giacomo Durando asserted a close connection between the emergence of a modern transportation system and the consolidation of ties—social, economic, and cultural—between Italians from different regions. Cavour reckoned that only “an incessant

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movement of people in all directions,” made possible by an organic railway network, would eradicate petty municipal self-interests and bring about national integration—what Durando elegantly termed a “material and moral rapproch[ement]” of the various parts of the peninsula.47 Cavour and Durando were both from Piedmont, the most industrially developed part of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia and the pre-Unification state with the most extended train network. In March 1861 this network constituted 38 percent of the total length of tracks existing in Italy: more than five hundred miles out of more than thirteen hundred. By the time Rome was annexed in 1870, the extension of the total national network had almost tripled.48 In an 1868 essay titled “Giuseppe Verdi e la musica italiana,” the music critic Francesco Flores D’Arcais directly broached the subject of railway travel. His interest lay with the cultural effects brought about by three technological breakthroughs: steam power, electricity, and railways, the classic nineteenth-century triad. Besides collapsing distances, he argued, these developments meant that “differences between peoples in terms of their habits and customs” were becoming ever slimmer, to the point that they would one day “altogether vanish.” The critic singled out the heightened sociocultural connectivity at a European level brought about by the locomotive and its sister inventions as one of the roots of recent changes in the musical arts. “The arts and letters no longer have any boundaries,” he explained, simultaneously laying out unlimited territory for Verdi’s operatic dominion and justifying the more eclectic aspects of his music.49 D’Arcais’s technological gloss was rooted in tropes and anxieties that transcended his historical moment, but it also pointed to a recent transnational railway boom. In the same year that he wrote his essay, the Mont Cenis Pass Railway was launched to speed up communications between northwest Italy and southeast France, and work on the nearby Fréjus Rail Tunnel accelerated, leading to even faster connections when it opened in 1871. Both engineering projects created more direct access from northern Europe to the Far East, particularly after the Suez Canal was inaugurated in 1869. At the installment of Parliament in Rome in November 1871, literally days before Lohengrin was transferred to Florence, King Victor Emmanuel II himself welcomed the “speediness of the journeys and the ease of the exchanges” between nations that the recent transalpine advancements foreshadowed.50 Even while it was a product of modern forms of physical mobility, Scalaberni’s Lohengrin translocation reinvented older notions of operatic travel. As well as rerouting classic trajectories of touring opera from outward movements often departing from Italy to movements toward and

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within Italy, it substantiated a specifically Italian transfer, one that could hardly be fathomed through the interpretive models in operation in other countries. The center/periphery dichotomy that British or French theatrical translocations between metropolises and provinces articulated is barely useful for comprehending Italian productions on the tracks.51 Italy was not “one large town with iron streets,” or “one gigantic city” of the kind that spellbound nineteenth-century English impresarios.52 Not even by the utmost stretch of the political and technological imagination could its cultural geographies be shaped into the radial economy that London and its metropolitan surroundings seemed able to sustain. Power relationships between urban centers were more fluid, and operatic traffic was less steadily channeled along predictable arteries. Furthermore, Italian railway debates hinged less on the advantages of faster, more direct travel than on heightened connectivity. Many contemporary commentators reckoned that winding lines should be preferred to straight ones in railway planning whenever several historic centers of production and culture could thereby become linked together across the peninsula.53 Lohengrin’s transfer almost coincided chronologically and resonated symbolically with another key move in 1871: the relocation of the Italian capital itself from Florence to Rome.54 The handover, sanctioned in February, set in motion a complex machine for transferring the entire diplomatic and administrative apparatus to the recently acquired papal city. Thousands of officers who in 1865 had moved from Turin to Florence now packed up their possessions, vacated their desks and houses, and set off again. To judge from the impact that the earlier capital-city relocation had on train traffic, the 1871 transfer must also have prompted a good deal of railway activity.55 The Florentine population indeed decreased by about 14 percent in two years, dropping from 194,001 in early 1870 to 167,093 in early 1872.56 The political, social, and economic repercussions were immediate, and were exacerbated by the sudden interruption of that grand urban renovation that had sought to enhance Florence’s cultural image. The city’s divestment, which took place mostly in the summer months, was both physical and spiritual. Ugo Pesci, the author of the Florentine recollections that opened chapter 1, describes in his Firenze capitale how “every single one of those thousands upon thousands of leavers . . . carried away with them some atom, however invisible and imponderable, of that material and moral complex” that had been the late 1860s Tuscan city.57 Both Scalaberni’s operatic transfer and the translocation of the capital were carried out within and against institutional systems that resisted the free circulation of things and people. Each project revealed a complex dialectic of fixity and movement, permanence and change. What is more,

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Scalaberni’s traveling production was associated with more poetic forms of movement. Contemporary critics read Lohengrin’s railway journey against aspects of Wagner’s opera itself: its tensions between the near and the far, between coming and going. The operatic stage itself became an interface where various spaces and travels could meet. The famous scene in act 1 in which Lohengrin enters onboard a boat towed by a swan was one of the moments that generated the greatest enthusiasm among Italian audiences, and was elevated as a symbol of the production’s own glamorous mobility. As plans for the transfer to the Pagliano started to materialize, one Florentine journalist joked that, “instead of arriving by railway, [Wagner’s opera] will come onboard the ship led by the poetic swan; and this perhaps in order to avoid quarrels over the international train”—the so-called Valigia delle Indie (or Indian Mail Route), then a hot topic of discussion within the government.58 On the day of the operatic troupe’s departure for Florence, the “divo Mariani” himself was soaked up in this blurring of distinct travels: one bolognese announced that the conductor was “due to board th[at] evening the mystic ship together with the sacred battalion of the artists whom he leads as an expert captain.”59 As the Comunale’s production rolled on to a different theater and city, its transit began to mirror—and be mirrored by—the internal movements of Lohengrin’s dramatic fabric.

Nexus Systems One late-nineteenth-century caricature captures this interplay of distinct mobilities in ways that speak both to Italy’s ambivalent attitudes toward technology and to the integration of the railway into opera’s hard media system. Its author, Augusto Grossi, was a prolific painter and illustrator from Bologna, as well as the founder of various satirical magazines. The lithograph, entitled “La caravana del Lohengrin” (The Caravan of Lohengrin), was first published, together with a description, in John GrandCarteret’s Wagner en caricatures in 1892, though it was most likely executed at the time of the event it portrays. It depicts the Comunale’s 1871 production literally on the move: a giant Scalaberni is riding a railwaydriven swan and is at the command of his operatic caravan en route to Florence (figure 4.2). Various people involved in the premiere are featured: Mariani (dressed as a wizard, in one of Scalaberni’s pockets); one of the sopranos (in another pocket); Campanini, starring as Lohengrin (on the neck of the swan); and the conductor of Bologna’s municipal band, Alessandro Antonelli (poking out of the wicker basket along with the musical instruments). The sets are also being transported—they pop

F i gur e 4.2 . Augusto Grossi, “Caravana del Lohengrin.” Lithograph from John Grand­Carteret, Richard Wagner en caricatures: 130 reproductions de caricatures françaises, allemandes, italiennes, portraits, autographes (Paris: Larousse, 1892). Biblio­ teca Marucelliana, Florence, AI.C.XII.118. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo / Biblioteca Marucelliana di Firenze. Further reproduction prohibited.

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out of the bottom of the wagon—and the choristers, with their reputation as drinkers, are portrayed in the shape of growlers. The little birds in the cage represent the Comunale’s dancers, while the cat was apparently the impresario’s pet.60 The picture is no satire of Wagner, whether of his status as an emblem of musical modernity or of his mythological paraphernalia. The composer is nowhere to be seen, except perhaps in the guise of the semistrangled swan. The key figure is, rather, the entrepreneur responsible for the traveling production: Scalaberni, one of the last influential impresarios in Italy. As he shows off his material and cultural possessions, his display points at once back to and beyond traditional models of theater management. His despotic attitude, his sceptrelike walking stick, and his steering pose stand on the verge of anachronism at a moment when opera production was falling under the control of music publishers. At the same time, the stock of properties he exhibits, suggestive of children’s toys or a traveling circus more than of a momentous technological achievement, satirizes the contemporary redefinition of operatic products as industrial commodities.61 Historically, parallels between trains and theater were the outgrowth of the spectacularization of travel that the new medium of transportation brought about. If at its origins the steam engine served as a public attraction for circus audiences eager to take a ride on prototype models, in later years the “panoramic” perception of landscape that train travel generated gave rise to descriptions drenched in theatrical imagery.62 One recurrent trope likened the locomotive to the stage manager.63 In Grossi’s picture, Scalaberni vaguely recalls such association, yet spectacle and machinery stand in a reversed relationship: it is opera as technology that greets us as the impresario’s swan-locomotive glides down the tracks. The assemblage of opera’s traditional components is laid bare precisely at the moment when the integrity of the artwork—the production—gains aesthetic currency, its full-blown relocation now also becoming technically possible. Old and new, bodies and machines, exist side by side here, and epitomize Italy’s ambiguous relationship with technological modernity. Lohengrin’s journey stages—enacts, even—the transportational advances of the nation. But the disproportionate body dwarfing the train’s comically slim engine and wheels acts as a reminder: the path trod by late-nineteenthcentury Italian culture more often resembled that of an errant toy train in a bourgeois child’s playroom than it did the lofty, straight tracks of the technological sublime. By 1892, when Grossi’s lithograph was published, several operatic transfers modeled on Scalaberni’s enterprise had materialized, usually involving (again) a mixture of private and municipal theaters. In 1880 a

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Figur e 4.3. “Andata . . . e ritorno di una Stella . . . cadente, a Firenze.” Lithograph from Cosmorama pittorico, July 3, 1880. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, P.GIO Gi.1.347. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo / Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Firenze. Further reproduction prohibited.

trasferimento di spettacolo took place between Piacenza’s Teatro Municipale and the Pagliano. After its premiere and a full run of performances promoted by a committee of piacentini, Salvatore Auteri-Manzocchi’s Stella—almost the entire company, a chorus and orchestra of seventy each, the conductor, the chorus master, the direttore di scena, and theater sets—was removed and dispatched to Florence in a train journey that took fourteen hours (see figure 4.3 for a caricature of the locomotive being pushed with difficulty up the Apennines).64 Perhaps not coincidentally, the rights to the opera were owned by Edoardo Sonzogno, the Milanese music publisher and proprietor of newspapers and magazines who in the final decades of the century extended his control over a vast network of theaters. Although he was not alone in promoting an integrated production and advertising system for opera, his publishing house was at the vanguard of marketing strategies that reshaped the operatic medium along modern industrial lines.65 Later in the 1880s, Sonzogno himself catalyzed some translocations. During the 1889 Carnival season he arranged

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for a series of “ready-made” opera productions to be transported from the Teatro Costanzi in Rome to Florence.66 The arrival of “Sonzogno the magician,” with more than two hundred people brought over by a special train, caused agitation in La Pergola’s orchestra, particularly when the impresario took productions to the Pagliano as well, further displacing local musicians.67 Supporters defended his delivery of complete operatic “packages” as inevitable, due to lack of rehearsal time. A journalist writing for Turin’s Gazzetta piemontese assured his readers that the same approach, carting “tutto già allestito” (everything already set up), would be adopted in Venice after the Florentine season.68 The most well-known incarnation of the overarching technological and ideological apparatus that such translocations involved is no doubt Angelo Neumann’s traveling Wagner-Theater, an offspring of Wagner’s Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The theater, which in 1882–83 took the Ring to twenty-six cities spread across seven European countries, was predicated largely on aesthetic premises: the touring production of Wagner’s tetralogy was to be a faithful recreation of the 1876 original Bayreuth staging. The recreation was to include every single portable component, down to the opera house’s curtain.69 In later years Neumann measured the achievements of his enterprise against the yardstick of the legendary tours, begun in 1874, of the Meiningen Court Theater.70 As Gundula Kreuzer has argued, Neumann’s Wagner-Theater was conceived from the start as an “itinerant amplifier” of the Festspielhaus’s productions, which were supervised by the composer.71 If Bayreuth was a stationary festival and a recording device of sorts that fixed Wagner’s stagings, Neumann’s touring project reproduced the aura of that location and those operatic experiences elsewhere. Touring was a means of propagating authenticity, of rendering it reenactable anywhere and at any time.72 Similar principles lay behind the late-nineteenth-century rise of opera staging manuals. The increasing sophistication of the Italian disposizioni sceniche, particularly those printed from the 1880s onward, points to the contemporary redefinition of opera as medium, a process that Alessandra Campana has read as being entwined with an emergent industrialization of Italian culture.73 As specific forms of near-total theatrical recreation, in which so many of the original personnel and materials were retained through subsequent performances, late-nineteenth-century productions on the move were nevertheless ultimately independent from such forms of textual support. The transfers themselves were not encouraged by staging manuals, even though they participated in the same cultural logic described by Campana. Operatic translocations were as much attempts to disseminate authoritative versions of the works as they were attempts at a performance’s

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mechanical reproduction: gestures of disinterment, as it were, with an iterative quality; undertakings that made the train into an early record player of sorts. That a Wagner work marked, as far as we can tell, the beginning of this practice might be read as significant: almost a corollary of the composer’s famous determination to prescribe every aspect of his stagings—the new, expanded “operatic works.”74 His status in Italy as the operatic Other, a cipher, even, of Northern European musical modernity tout court, may lead us to credit him for this further watershed in Western operatic history. Yet conflating these various coterminous developments into a single narrative of cultural progress risks lending too much weight to aesthetic ideas, forgetting the agency of material objects, transportation technologies, and self-interested practical concerns. Bologna’s transfer took place well before Bayreuth opened, capitalized on a recently built railway line, and was devised by a profit-seeking impresario. As if in a parody of Wagner’s theories, the translocation also required, as Grossi’s caricature makes clear, the display of those very means of technical production—musical instruments, material sceneries, and so on—that the composer wished to conceal in performance, in an attempt to “camouflag[e] the technological origins of his multisensorial spectacle.”75 Far from upholding the lofty aesthetic experiences that the composer envisioned, Scalaberni’s traveling Lohengrin hovered between an industrial machine and a cheap commercial entertainment. “La Caravana del Lohengrin” further draws attention to the fact that railways were no mere accessory external to the production. On the contrary, they were fashioned as part and parcel of opera’s basic infrastructure. The “gigantic and complicated apparatus” that made full-blown operatic transfers possible meant that multiple human and material components combined to form a single whole.76 The result was an extension of the railway’s own “nexus system,” where each part—tracks, train, signals, and so forth—performs a separate function that is indispensable for the working of the entire machine.77 In later years the Fascist thespian cars that toured Italy, bringing operas, spoken dramas, and demountable playhouses to provincial audiences, took this portable, heterogeneous totality to an extreme. The Fascist approach was to turn the labor that preceded and accompanied the performances into a source of spectacle itself, with the assembly process exposing the ethos of efficiency and the corporatism that marked Italian modernity as envisioned by the regime.78 Opera and railway technologies thus became tightly integrated with each other, a fact made manifest by the more imaginative historical ruminations on the subject. The new commercial strategies that Scalaberni and Sonzogno had inaugurated lie behind a critic’s joke in 1889 about ru-

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mors that Alberto Franchetti’s Asrael, just performed in Florence, might be translocated to Rome. “Here,” this distraught observer opined, “truly important new music comes by freight train.”79 His outburst of parochial anxiety was surely due to some recent memories. In April 1887, following its debut at La Scala, Verdi’s Otello had traveled to Rome with “168 people and 14 tons of equipment and materials.”80 The impresario Guglielmo Canori, who ran the Costanzi, was responsible for the transfer; before the opera’s premiere in Milan he had secured the right to put on a series of performances from the publisher Giulio Ricordi and La Scala’s management. Initially the Roman production was to involve only the Milanese company and the conductor Franco Faccio, together with a dozen or so chorus members from La Scala. To make up the remaining resources, Canori had recruited the orchestra and chorus of Rome’s Apollo. Yet, when the Roman musicians proved unavailable just a few weeks before the performances were due to start, the impresario hastened to hire the entire musical corps of La Scala. Eventually only the soprano and mezzosoprano were appointed anew, while the original set designs by Carlo Ferrario were refashioned by Giovanni Zuccarelli, based on Verdi’s input.81 Railway technology was key to the eight performances at the Costanzi, not only because it enabled the relocation of people and materials, but also because it created a discursive space where train travel coalesced with Verdi’s work and the labor of its performance. An article from Il pungolo describing the departure of La Scala’s “artistic caravan” from Milan’s station neatly articulates the relationship between transportation medium and opera. The train plays an interesting double function: it stands at once as a medium of locomotion and as the tangible operatic work itself. A special convoy of ten or so carriages supplied by the Mediterranea company, it is pulled by a puffing locomotive suitably called “Apollo.” Three wagons are assigned to props and costumes, while the remaining are stuffed with “otellisti.” The latter’s luggage surplus assumes significance beyond the immediate context of this Verdi transfer: in the author’s retelling, it evokes what by then were customary scenes of Italians emigrating to the Americas. From the 1870s the numbers of those seeking their fortune in the New World had drastically expanded; opera singers, musicians, and impresarios, long prominent participants in these transatlantic movements, were among the most precious native resources that Italy was losing.82 A medium intended to displace—to uproot and reroute—“the incarnation, so to speak, of Verdi’s latest work,” the train also becomes identified with the human and material substance of the production.83 The “treno Otello,” as it has since been known, is an amalgam of technological and nontechnological components whereby operatic travel becomes autono-

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mized, perhaps even absolutized. For that reason, it serves as a backdrop against which other mobility experiences can be evaluated, particularly ones that were central to Italy’s operatic and cultural world at the end of the century. Following a stop back in Milan, Otello’s trip continued to Venice, where the Roman company and the original La Scala sets were joined by local musicians. The recruitment of Venetian performers was much to the relief of those who had feared that La Fenice might fall back on foreign resources when it came to hiring orchestra and chorus.84 Municipal anxieties were ever lurking, particularly in the context of such translocations, where no piece or step of the operatic package’s delivery was predictable. On the eve of the opera’s Roman debut, after rehearsing yet again the allure of sameness—the same Otello, same Jago, same Cassio, and so on as in Milan—a local critic voiced his unease at the uncertainties of a transfer machine that was liable to leak from any of its myriad parts. “If it is the case, as everybody assures us, that we will lose nothing at all in this exchange,” he predicted, “the success of Otello will be equal to that which it has had in Milan.”85 If it is the case. Traveling productions were the offshoot of performances that were themselves, alongside so-called works, starting to be deemed canonical. Sharing in a function that musical compositions had served since earlier in the century, stagings could now be vaunted as media for activating aesthetic and historical experiences that traversed the boundaries of space and time.86 Yet their relocations could not avoid exposing the foes of what Cresswell has called Western thought’s “sedentarist metaphysics”: the more menacing aspects of modern mobility, its threat to order, its dysfunctional character, its resistance to acts of control and regulation.87 Behind the railway’s highly interconnected system, behind its staging of efficiency and mechanical precision, there lurked the possibility of unexpected accidents and malfunctions: of the train breaking down, being delayed, even dreadfully never arriving. For all the appeal that the “treno Otello” carried along the route, it could not dispel qualms about a form of operatic movement that projected as much potential for loss and disruption—aesthetic, cultural, technological, and financial—as for authenticity and equitable exchange.

Deadly Spins One final thread I should like to pick up and weave into the tapestry of ideas explored so far is the deathlike quality that these acts of operatic transportation ultimately throw into relief. The aesthetic implications of “deadness” have been beautifully explored by Jason Stanyek and Benja-

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min Piekut in their study of the recombinatorial possibilities opened by sound recording technologies. Stanyek and Piekut analyze what they call “intermundane collaboration”: interactions between human and nonhuman entities, both dead and living and from the past as well as the present, that occur within modern recording studios and are evidenced by musical products such as posthumous duets. In their view, the “co-constitution of bio- and necroworlds” in these collaborations reflects a broader shift from a sound recording culture that around 1900 was still focused mostly on preservation, to one that by World War II had become focused on dis- and rearticulation. “Deadness,” as theorised by Stanyek and Piekut, refers not to the condition of the not live or the not living, but to the unpredictable productive capacities inherent in any intermundane encounter.88 This framework helps to explain many of the impulses also at work in the operatic translocations arranged by Scalaberni, Sonzogno, Canori, and their late-nineteenth-century colleagues. Grossi’s caricature captures the interplay of humans, objects, and media magnificently, and exposes the paradox that an act aimed at preserving and transplanting authenticity ultimately required “deadness”: a disassembling and recombining of the opera production’s various component parts. It is all the more intriguing to think that in the 1870s, when sound recording fantasies and technologies were just beginning to emerge, ideas of reproduction occasionally darted away from preservation and nodded toward interpenetrating pasts, presents, and futures. Yet the various “scenes at a station” that we can more or less vividly recover from nineteenth-century accounts also evoke deadness in another sense, putting the mobility of operatic works, stagings, and labor in the uncanny company of mortal remains. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, railway stations were designated for the performance of a variety of public rituals. Florence’s Stazione Maria Antonia, which in 1871 served as the official reception area for the Lohengrin performers, had a special relation to civic space. Its vestibular status as portal to the modern nineteenth-century city was heightened by its unusual location right in the heart of the urban center, mere meters away from the historic church of Santa Maria Novella (for which it was renamed after Unification). Inaugurated in 1848, the station was erected after an 1846 decree by the Tuscan Grand Duke lifted the ban on the construction of train stations within the perimeter of the city walls. The four archways on its original facade—no longer visible, as the building was demolished in the 1930s—allowed passengers to catch a glimpse of the church’s square and apse as soon as they arrived at Florence. Those outside the station could, in turn, imagine an endless extension of the city along the railroad tracks.89 This conjoining of urban

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and national bodies was reaffirmed by a series of fleeting station rituals. In 1865, following the relocation of the capital, King Victor Emmanuel himself was welcomed on the Maria Antonia’s platforms upon his arrival from Turin.90 Bodies greeted at such heterotopic spaces as stations were as likely to be dead as living, however. In the summer of the same year that saw Scalaberni’s Lohengrin arrive from Bologna, the ashes of the Italian poet Ugo Foscolo came in from England, his late-life abode, for reburial in the national pantheon of Florence’s Santa Croce. The celebrations arranged on this occasion were typical of contemporary Italian funerary tours, the most famous of which was that of Giuseppe Mazzini, whose corpse, before being buried in Genoa at the Staglieno cemetery in 1872, set off around Tuscany and the Emilia-Romagna. Indeed, as the historian Sergio Luzzatto put it, in the culture of the time, “corpses travel, and they do so by railway.”91 Take this larger cultural dimension of train stations into account, and the operatic translocations I have described in this chapter assume a more somber cast. There is something funereal about the “dragging” that Apollo, the locomotive, accomplishes as it disappears from Milan with the “treno Otello” into the distance; or about the iterative farewells, only minutes earlier, between stayers and leavers on the station’s platforms “at every move of the train believed to be definitive.”92 If, on the one hand, as it sets off on rails, the operatic cargo fulfills a gesture of autonomization, evoking the shift from operatic works understood as texts to operatic works understood as stage realizations, on the other hand it is the steam engine, not the mass of bodies and materials, that propels it forward. The freight is dead weight, far from self-sufficient in providing its own motion. These deathlike undertones, perhaps another a manifestation of those aforementioned anxieties relating to the railway’s dysfunctional character, once again reveal the tensions between mobility and immobility, medium and message, and oldness and newness that have emerged in this chapter. Indeed, another paradox underpinning late-nineteenth-century operatic translocations lies in the comparative oldness of the railway as a technology by the 1870s and ’80s when juxtaposed with the newness of the operatic movements it came to channel: oldness not only by European but also by Italian standards. This recasting of an old technology through a novel technocultural gesture reminds us that the politics of movement is as much a function of physical and technological conditions as it is of the encounters between different and sometimes unsuspected historical realities.93 Rather than subsume different nineteenth-century experiences under a single rubric of heightened mobility, operatic or otherwise, we may as well choose to pursue their diminished technological and geographical

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claims even further. The paradoxes that late-nineteenth-century trasferimenti di spettacolo lay bare encourage us to do so. At the very least, they halt some of the momentum of our grandest scholarly narratives, throwing back into our path objects and actors that are all too easily erased. As they traversed newly connected physical lands that for centuries had prided themselves on different political and cultural traditions, those early Italian traveling productions also moved through and between imagined territories: “Italy,” “Bologna,” “Florence,” or so many others. Those regions, heavily textured spaces of representation, were—indeed still are—as resistant as the sturdiest of material fabrics. I like to think that the hard media system that made possible those operatic intrusions also challenged the odd cultural boundary, setting in motion the occasional local image.

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Aida, Media, and Temporal Politics circa 1871–72 “Sì: corre voce . . .” (Yes, it is rumoured . . .). Aida’s act 1 curtain plunges us into the middle of a conversation. As earlier commentators have noted, the opera starts in medias res, with all musical, verbal, and dramatic cues suggesting some ongoing business. The four-pitch contrapuntal figure in the cellos grows out from a motif heard a few measures earlier in the prelude, and Ramfis’s opening words to Radamès point to a dialogue in progress (example 5.1).1 The disposizione scenica for the opera sets out clearly Verdi’s intentions for this beginning: it explains that the two men talking onstage should feign a casual attitude.2 The drawing of the curtain similarly works to undermine any marked opening gesture. While the composer’s autograph score positions this movement in sync with (or an instant before) the cellos’ kickoff of the act, the later reading reflected in the staging manual erases any demarcation between concluding and starting musical activity: it calls for the curtain on the penultimate bar of the prelude.3 Emanuele Senici has observed that this initial exchange between Ramfis and Radamès is studded by verbal references to “voices reporting.”4 Communication is evoked through allusions to information delivery: “un messo recherà il ver” (a messenger will bring the truth), “Ella ha nomato” (she has named), and “reco i decreti al Re” (I report the decrees to the King). All of these utterances except “Ella ha nomato” point to some kind of movement, with the aforementioned “Sì: corre voce”—which literally translates as “Yes: a voice is running around”—further emphasizing that this news circulates. The sense that voices move is so embedded in these opening lines that it spills over onto the orchestral writing, where ten cellos chase one another in a three-part canon. In Senici’s words, their contrapuntal imitation invites a “pictorial hearing” premised on a convention of musical terminology: the practice of calling contrapuntal lines “voices,”

E x a mple 5.1. Verdi, Aida, act 1, scene 1, mm. 1–5

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which tunes us in to the circulating rumors depicted simultaneously by the music and by the literary text.5 Whereas word painting helps to account for many aspects of Verdi’s writing in Aida’s opening scene, it is less useful in explaining another instance of voices in circulation later in the act. After the duet-turned-trio for Radamès, Amneris, and Aida, the priests and the King enter, followed by Ramfis and the palace court, to a fanfare. Successive entrances of trumpets, horns, and trombones produce a crescendolike effect that perceptually evokes the approaching of the cortege. The King’s address to the Egyptian people brings us back to the news context with which the act had opened: the messenger has now arrived and we listen to the “gravi novelle” (serious news) that he has brought. Egypt has been invaded by the Ethiopians, who are marching towards Thebes under the leadership of Amonasro. Brief interjections by the chorus cut into the messenger’s report and then give way to a weightier intervention by the King: “Sì: guerra e morte il nostro grido sia” (Yes, let war and death be our cry)—to all intents and purposes a declaration of war. At this point, cries of “Guerra!” (War!) erupt from all parts of the stage: Ramfis, the priests, and the ministers and captains respond to the King’s summons to military action. Yet they do so less as one single voice—the “Tutti” thundering out of the libretto—than according to a rhythmic and voice-type pattern based on the characters’ positions on stage. The instructions in the staging manual are crucial: this document goes into great detail to explain how the chorus of ministers and captains should be divided into three “well separated” groups, placed at a distance of “about three steps from each other.”6 The priests are to form their own assembly, farther removed from the rest of the chorus. Taken together, the various groups should be positioned so as to create a neatly spaced semicircle, at the front of which stand the lead singers (figure 5.1). The array of bodies is no mere visual display, for it is vital in creating a sonic effect whose full realization requires an orderly distribution of voices within the three choral groups. First tenors, second tenors, first basses, and second basses must remain separate, albeit with some overlap of two voice types in at least one unit.7 The French livret de mise en scène prepared after the performances that Verdi conducted at the Thèâtre Italien in Paris in 1876 throws further light on the spatial arrangements he likely had in mind. An annotated diagram suggests that first and second basses were gathered into one group, while first and second tenors were arranged in separate units (figure 5.2)8 When the cries of “Guerra!” start, they are thereby fashioned to rapidly sweep across the stage, at the same time that they transmute in pitch. Ramfis’s shout is picked up by

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Figur e 5.1. Extract from Disposizione scenica per l’opera Aida, versi di A. Ghislan­ zoni, musica di G. Verdi, compilata e regolata secondo la messa in scena del Teatro alla Scala da Giulio Ricordi (Milan: Ricordi, [1873]), 10

Figur e 5.2. Extract from Aida. Mise en scène pour le Théâtre­Italien de Paris par An­ toine Vanhamme, f. 3r. Ville de Paris, Bibliothèque historique, A 13 (I).

the priests on one end of the stage (house right), moves through to the basses at center stage, and then passes to the tenors at the other end of the stage (house left). All this before one last, homophonic iteration of “Guerra!” by the whole ensemble, after which the three-bar passage is repeated (example 5.2).

E xa mple 5.2. Verdi, Aida, act 1, scene 1, mm. 368–87

E x a mple 5.2 . (continued)

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Figur e 5.3. Extract from Disposizione scenica per l’opera Aida, 11

The same movement, if in the opposite direction—house left to house right—occurs a few measures later when the King names the man chosen by Isis to lead the Egyptian army. His exclamation of “Radamès!” is again taken up by the crowd. This time, a collective vocal outburst triggers an echoing chatter that passes the name “Radamès” from the first tenors to the second tenors, then the first basses, and finally the second basses (see figure 5.3 and example 5.2). Visually, both situations are punctuated by bodily movements synchronized with the vocal outpourings. Each “Guerra!,” the disposizione scenica explains, must be matched by a small step forward and an extension of the right arm toward the King. “Radamès!” should be murmured as some ministers and captains “turn slightly to each other, imparting this news reciprocally,” or else as they gesture toward the commander with a motion of the hand.9 Verdi’s portrayal of voices and bodies weaving disparate parts of the Egyptian community together marks an iconic moment in Aida, one that nineteenth-century commentators singled out for its overpowering effect on audiences. Shortly after the opera’s first performance in Milan in 1872, the critic for Lo spirito folletto mimicked the “Guerra! Guerra!” sequence in his review: “War—shouts the King. War—yells Radamès. War—the chorus. War—maestro Faccio with his baton. War—the violins and cellos, but above all the bass drum, which covers everyone’s cries with its beats. The effect is so powerful that even in the auditorium everybody runs to take up the sword.”10 In some respects, Verdi’s treatment of the chorus in these passages was hardly new. In its realistic depiction of the

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E x a m p l e 5.3. Verdi, Simon Boccanegra (1857), act 1, scena e sestetto nel finale, mm. 56–60

crowd of ministers and captains, Aida expanded on the experimentation of previous operas, particularly Simon Boccanegra (1857), a work that had marked a shift away from crowds understood as entities with a corporate identity toward crowds as made up of individuals. Julian Budden characterized this opera’s act 1 finale, dropped during the 1880–81 revisions, as “built on naturalistic lines,” calling attention to the cluster of words that early on are “tossed from one choral group to another like an exclamation.”11 As Amelia suddenly appears after her kidnapping, everyone onstage yields to expressions of relief in asides, prompting a series of hiccupping “Ella è salva!” (She is safe!) that spans almost the entire vocal texture (example 5.3). Abramo Basevi, author of an important early study of Verdi’s operas, reported that at the work’s premiere in Florence in 1857 this phrase was intermittently repeated from various parts of the stage with unintended comic results.12 Realism and comic caricature do not lie far from each other. Verdi’s approach to word of mouth in Simon Boccanegra differs from his later one in Aida in one small but crucial detail. Whereas in Boccanegra separate groups of characters, enclosed in distinct acoustic worlds by the convention of the aside, are not supposed to hear and pass the “message” on after hearing it from surrounding mouths, the repetitions of “Guerra!” and “Radamès!” by the chorus in Aida are configured as relays, with the

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two words transmitted like electric signals. These propagate across spatial voids, from one choral group to the next—but also through bodily contact, among first and second basses, gathered in the same group. With each pronouncement, a wave of voices paired with gestures rolls across the stage. The King activates a sequence of audiovisual movements whose dramatic efficacy has to do less with the content of the words and music and more with the messages’ real-time reproduction. Written by Giulio Ricordi, but supervised by Verdi to reflect the staging as he conceived it, the disposizione scenica for Aida claims that, “if properly executed,” the “Guerra! Guerra!” scene will attain “carattere grandissimo di verità” (the utmost truthfulness).13 This scene precedes the hymn “Su! del Nilo al sacro lido,” a martial chorus launched by the King and Ramfis, then joined by the crowd in an ever thicker vocal and orchestral texture, contrasted only by an anguished countermelody sung by Aida. This piece is an exhortation by and for the Egyptians as they prepare to take up arms against the Ethiopians, and is rounded off by a new statement of the “Guerra!” passage described above. The latter both prepares and confirms the nationalistic fervor of the hymn, sculpting this sentiment in remarkably effective musical language. As Anselm Gerhard has noted, before Verdi only Meyerbeer, in the “benediction of the swords” from Les Huguenots, had succeeded in capturing the “gradual unfurling of criminal energies” in a mob with such stark realism.14 In Aida, something of that live discharge of bellicose energy comes from the orchestra, which as an “immense cauldron” (to borrow Budden’s suggestive metaphor) feeds the choral outbursts with sweeping chromatic scales and tight dotted rhythms.15 As the staging manual’s painstaking instructions imply, however, the power of those outbursts is all but lost without the precipitating stereophonic and visual waves. Verdi’s “truthfulness”—the sense of dramatic immediacy he sought—points beyond sheer volume of sound, beyond the cumulative effect of unleashed vocal and instrumental forces, to the timing and spatial layout of the “Guerra!” and “Radamès!” signals. This final chapter examines Aida within the technological order and imagination of its time: the years around 1871–72, when the opera premiered six weeks apart in Cairo and Milan. My exploration marks both a continuation and a departure from the core concerns of earlier scholarship. In his classic essay on Aida and empire, the literary scholar Edward Said laid the groundwork for a postcolonial mode of engagement with Verdi’s work that would inform most of the scholarly activity that followed. He set out to illustrate “what connects Aida to its historical and cultural moment in the West” by inspecting the regime of power and knowledge that the

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opera at once reflected and produced. In particular, he noted the circumstances of its commission for Cairo’s Khedivial Opera House, the composer’s despotic attitudes when arranging the first production, and the work’s Egyptological baggage. He suggested that these are the Orientalist premises that align Verdi’s aesthetic project with nineteenth-century imperialism, especially its cultural manifestations in late 1860s Cairo. At no point in his analysis does Said broach those technological instruments of control and enforced Westernization that recent studies have now placed at the center of the emergence of Egyptian modernity and, more generally, of the spatiotemporal politics of late nineteenth-century empires.17 The telegraph was one such tool—a device that, as we shall see, was crucial to Aida’s composition and early dissemination. The terms in which Said described the relationship of Verdi’s opera with its contemporary context are striking. In a key passage he claims that Aida is “like an echo to an original sound,” a “highly specialized form of aesthetic memory” that perpetuated the authoritarian attitudes of Europe. He goes on to suggest that Orientalism “left a set of ghostly notations in the opera’s visual and musical text,” notations which he begins to identify and—opening a path that many were to follow—decipher in the guise of hieroglyphic inscriptions.18 The field Said is at pains to survey is largely that of symbolic meanings: Verdi’s opera as an imperialist document awaiting reading and interpretation. This concern explains Said’s reliance on images broadly connected with writing, a token of the semiotic investments of postcolonial theory. Although not immediately recognizable as upholding the opera’s representational logic so central to Said’s argument, the notions of memory and echo, too, evoke writing as inscription, suggesting that Aida functioned as a proto-recording device that stored and reproduced its Orientalist “origin.” In revisiting Verdi’s plans for Aida and its early performance and reception history, I want to address aspects of its politics that eschewed the domain of textual or “inscribed” meanings. Instead of treating Aida as an aesthetic object that either reflected or recorded the imperialist dynamics of the period around 1871, I shall reposition it, as both a work and an event, against a backdrop of Italian and international experiences of longdistance communication and temporality prompted by contemporary media. Evoking “contact zones” between the musical and the scientific imaginations of any given period is a perilous operation, easily resulting in the kind of “musicological enchainment” arguments for which Carolyn Abbate has faulted cultural historians and sound studies scholars.19 A deterministic shadow is always lurking when we ally musical objects with technology, or when we turn to machines to account for changes in the 16

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human sensorium. As media, literary, and opera scholars have nevertheless all demonstrated, such enchainments are not always historically inaccurate. In the nineteenth century, electric communication appealed to a motley crew of thinkers and practitioners precisely because it existed at the midpoint between an idea and a technology. Metaphors comparing scientific and cultural phenomena to the transmission of electric currents on telegraph wires underlie musical, medical, spiritual, and political writings, making it almost inappropriate for the historian to disentangle different domains of contemporary experience, given that the analogical mindset was what defined the age.20 My pursuit of voices flashing through space in Verdi’s “Guerra! Guerra!” scene draws on historical associations between telegraphy and a “virtual orality.” Verdi’s voices enact a communication circuit morphologically akin to telegraph wires, and thereby invite us to listen as contemporary telegraphers listened to the signals transmitted by their “speaking” machines.21 As the words “Guerra!” and “Radamès!” travel between and within the three choral groups, they also point to the dual nature of nineteenth-century electric transmission: to telegraphy understood as a disembodied form of communication that simultaneously allowed distant people to stay “in touch.”22 Above all, Verdi’s circuit reveals the enormous effort that effective real-time communication requires. In what follows, I retrace this effort and discuss the technological discourses and apparatuses that constituted the 1871–72 “Aida moment”: a moment when experiences of (mis)communication and near simultaneity were at work in the opera’s composition, production, and reception. Some of the political and cultural meanings that accrued around Aida are best understood, I suggest, in relation to these experiences. Relocating Verdi’s opera within its early multilocal and technological context allows us to ponder how not only one of its most powerful musico-dramatic moments but also Aida as a whole participated in the temporal politics of the time.

Misplacements Few operatic works have been as steadily associated with the locations of their premieres as Aida. First performed at the Khedivial Opera House in Cairo on December 24, 1871, the opera has all but been identified with Egypt. This conflation was partly born of its aesthetics and subject matter. The setting in Memphis and Thebes, along the banks of the Nile, and the Orientalist display of ancient splendor in its musical and visual language have both grounded Aida firmly in its dramatic locale. Since the late nineteenth century, several commentators have also postulated a link

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between the work and its contemporary geographical milieu at two material and, broadly speaking, technological points d’appui. The American critic Henry Edward Krehbiel best summarized them in 1909: Two erroneous impressions concerning Verdi’s Aïda [sic] may as well as not be corrected at the beginning of a study of that opera: it was not written to celebrate the completion of the Suez Canal, nor to open the Italian Opera-house at Cairo, though the completion of the canal and the inauguration of the theatre were practically contemporaneous with the conception of the plan which gave the world one of Verdi’s finest and also most popular operas.23

Some time during the mid-1870s—the exact moment is difficult to pin down—the story of Aida’s premiere was retrofitted to coincide with the inauguration of Cairo’s Khedivial Opera House, which in reality had opened on November 1, 1869, with a performance of Rigoletto. This historical distortion, which usually involved postdating the inauguration of the theater rather than backdating the premiere of Aida, was especially common in France. The narrative circulated in various versions: some claimed that Aida had been commissioned for the inauguration of the theater; others implied that the theater had been erected expressly for this grand Verdi premiere.24 The relationship between compositional and architectural business became so confused that the prominent French critic Arthur Pougin took on the task of clarifying it in 1878.25 Perhaps what is most baffling about this misconnection is how quickly it became accepted and linked with talk about another event. Cairo’s opera house—a traditional horseshoe theater standing at the center of the city’s new European quarter—had been built to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal. The engineering feat, which changed transport and communication systems between Europe and Asia for good, was inaugurated in a great assembly of European journalists and dignitaries on November 17, 1869. As Budden has argued, the fact that the manager of the opera house, Paul Draneht, had invited Verdi to write a hymn for the opening of the building is likely to have spurred the second anecdotal tradition mentioned by Krehbiel.26 Although the composer rejected the invitation in his characteristically bad-tempered style, by the final decade of the century Aida’s premiere had also been conflated with the opening of the canal.27 Prominent and presumably well-informed figures such as Verdi’s late-life friend and collaborator Arrigo Boito peddled this AidaSuez narrative with enthusiasm. In 1910 Boito repeated the story, by then considered common knowledge, in a letter to the French critic Camille

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Bellaigue intended as nothing less than an unimpeachable elucidation of Aida’s chronology.28 Various hagiographical, nationalist, and imperialist agendas came together to spread the spurious tale, with Italian and nonItalian commentators alike fashioning Aida and Suez as overlaid global junctions that united all nations in a grand-operatic manner.29 I shall return to the canal and the implications of other technological developments in the area later; for now I wish to introduce one last set of historical discourses. In the first few years of Aida’s existence, the CairoSuez nexus that later would become the norm for situating the opera geographically and historically competed with a host of other connections. In 1876 an early biographer of Verdi, the Genovese critic Giuseppe Perosio, opened a short study of Aida by acknowledging the coordinates of its world debut: Cairo, December 24, 1871.30 After summarizing the plot and briefly reviewing the music, Perosio concluded that “the true chief date of this masterpiece’s triumphs nevertheless begins with the memorable performance that took place at Milan’s La Scala on the night of December 26, 1871.” A prospectus of performances up to 1876 appears on the next page and, as if to visually confirm his assertion, Cairo is entirely left out of the picture.31 Perosio’s emphasis on Aida’s Milanese—that is to say, Italian and European—debut reflected broader trends in the reception of an event that bore a special local and national significance. His awkward phrasing—“the true chief date . . . begins with,” rather than simply “is”— betrays in its expansive temporality a yearning to construe that date as a moment both ephemeral and infinite. What strikes anyone familiar with the early performance history of Verdi’s opera, however, is not the awkward syntax but the date itself, which is wrong. Aida was mounted at La Scala, with a stellar cast that included the soprano Teresa Stolz, the mezzo Maria Waldmann, and the conductor Franco Faccio, not on December 26, 1871—the traditional opening day of the theater’s Carnival season—but on February 8, 1872. The chronological lapse occurs again in other contemporary sources, though it is usually the Cairo premiere that is postdated to the following year.32 Stray connections do not stop there. In a yearbook published in London in 1877, the small city of Perugia in central Italy is spotlighted as the venue of an oddly isolated and oddly celebrated Italian run of Aida, while the opera’s debut in Paris, at the aforementioned Théâtre Italien, is dated a year earlier than when it actually occurred.33 The French capital features in another article, Benoît Jouvin’s 1880 review in Le Figaro of Aida’s first production at the Opéra, which situates the opera’s “origin and chief destination” in an indefinite middle ground between Cairo and Paris.34 These geographical and chronological misplacements reached their peak in a

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couple of slightly later texts that adjusted Aida’s performance history to such an extent as to locate its starting point in the same year as, or shortly before, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. (In one case the author, the American soprano Blanche Roosevelt, even invoked the calendrical authority of a prominent newspaper.35) Much can be made of these erratic connections. Some, such as the reference to the Théâtre Italien premiere in the 1877 yearbook, are probably nothing more than oversights: lapses prompted by the liminal chronological context (just after the end of the year under review) in which the author was writing. Others seem to be more self-conscious gestures. Jouvin’s statements betray the close historical relationship between the Paris and Cairo opera houses, where the latter was considered almost an outpost of the former, and they furthermore evoke contemporary attempts to cast Verdi’s work as French.36 The contested timelines and the disparate geographical appropriations of Aida speak to a variety of nationalist biases that took advantage of the opera’s complex genesis (on which more soon) and its aesthetics, cutting across Italian and French idioms. Aida is a work whose national affiliations have indeed prompted an extraordinary amount of debate among both critics and scholars. Since its premiere, commentators have attempted to pin down the opera to this or that country: to identify which nation it is “about” or “belongs to.”37 These nineteenth-century misplacements, which created a blurred geotemporal shadow around Aida’s premiere, raise a number of questions regarding the impulses that prompted them in the first place and the historiographical potential of those few moments of fake synchrony. Taken together, the manipulations of the opera’s origins and early performance history could be described as a misplaced search for simultaneity: a search that casts the “Aida moment” not as a moment of “reflection” or “inscription” of international power relations by and into Verdi’s work, but as a moment when multiple places and events aspired to become connected in time. The misplacements suggest that Aida’s politics were not only spatial but also temporal.

Telegraphic Matters These politics began in Verdi’s contractual negotiations with theatrical authorities in Cairo and Milan. From early on, the composer hoped that Aida would premiere simultaneously, or nearly so, in Egypt and in Europe. His earliest draft of the contract with the Khedivial Opera House makes his intentions clear: “While the opera is being performed in Cairo, Maestro Verdi can have it performed simultaneously in another great the-

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ater of Europe.” Tellingly, as this document was passed on to and revised by the two French promoters of the Aida project—the archaeologist Auguste Mariette, author of the opera’s French scenario, and the theater manager Camille Du Locle—the clause concerning the timing of these first productions was altered: “As soon as the opera Aida has been presented in Cairo, M. G. Verdi will be free to have it performed in Europe.” To this later version of the contract Verdi requested that a clause be added granting him permission to premiere his work in a different theater six months after the agreed opening date at Cairo if an “unforeseen circumstance” delayed the Egyptian performances, planned for January 1871.39 His request was prompted by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870, which ultimately deferred Aida’s debut by almost one year. At this early stage, La Scala did not yet feature in Verdi’s negotiations with Cairo, though it was already prominent in his correspondence with Ricordi. In a little-quoted letter remarkable for its clipped, telegraphic style, the publisher expressed hopes that his “ideal, that is, Verdi = Aida = Scala,” would come to fruition.40 As Pierluigi Petrobelli has noted, Ricordi always saw Cairo as “a speed bump,” “little more than an anticipation of the ‘true’ [Milanese] premiere.”41 Arranging near-simultaneous events meant that the two casts had to be hired with care: Verdi was adamant that the choice of singers for Cairo should not restrict his options for Milan. Meanwhile, events overtook the planning on multiple fronts. When in late 1870 La Scala tried to set a date for Aida’s opening night, neither Verdi nor Ricordi could recall the timing that the composer had agreed on with Cairo in writing a few months earlier. All scheduling had to be halted because the sole copy of the contract was trapped in Paris, by then under Prussian siege.42 What is more, the costumes and sets for Cairo, produced by designers from the Opéra, were also stuck in the French capital, making the time frame for the Egyptian performances equally unpredictable. As Draneht put it, fearing that Verdi might threaten to apply the six-month clause, the whole “idea of creating a national work” celebrating Egypt was on the verge of “becom[ing] the victim of a matter of dates, caused by completely unrelated events.”43 Such, in brief, are the well-known vicissitudes that beset Aida’s genesis and early stage life. Inevitably, given the geography outlined above, transportation and communication networks were key to the opera’s composition and first productions. Post, telegraph, balloons, railways, and steamers all frantically relocated people, objects, and information among at least four locales: Cairo, Paris, Milan, and the Parma countryside, where Verdi lived. It was from his villa at Sant’Agata that in July 1870 the composer broke the news to his friend Giuseppe Piroli about early negotia38

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tions with Cairo: “I must tell you . . . that the contract has not yet been signed . . . but since my conditions—and they were tough—have been accepted by telegraph, it must be considered done.”44 The conditions Verdi referred to concerned mostly financial matters: the compensation he expected to receive for composing the opera and the rights to the libretto and the music. He set them out in a letter to Du Locle, based in Paris, and the theater manager then transmitted them to Mariette in Cairo, by telegraph. A few days later the archaeologist replied succinctly using the same medium, as did Du Locle in turn to Verdi.45 The composer’s implicit comparison between the pending signed physical contract and the agreement he had reached with Cairo by telegraph at once asserts and casts doubt on the interchangeability of the telegram and more traditional forms of writing. Whether a contract and a telegram could be regarded as equal sources of authority pertains not just to operatic practice—what was or was not accepted in contemporary negotiations between a composer and other parties—but also to the epistemological status of the “textual interface” of Samuel Morse’s communication system. Media historian Lisa Gitelman has described the challenges for the modern scholar posed by those early electronic exchanges via wire. The question, she notes, of what constituted “the best evidence of the [telegraphic] message as semiotic entity” is troublesome.46 What was the original? What the copy? The sender’s version? The recipient’s? In mid-nineteenth-century American legal hearings, different courts answered these questions differently, leading Gitelman to question the putative “written-ness” of the telegram.47 Telegraphy’s paradox as an inscriptive medium that encodes and transmits information, yet does not store it in any single data carrier, only grew as operators dropped the use of paper tape, beginning in America in the 1850s, and took up live transcription. From then on, the telegraph was imagined increasingly as an acoustic medium, one that might have even constituted “the first major example of listening in a media context.”48 The problematic authenticity borne by the telegraph emerges further if we consider its dual status as both an idea and a technology. As John Durham Peters reminds us in a compelling rereading of James W. Carey’s classic essay on the subject, historically telegraphy spoke to multiple fields, from spirituality to aesthetics, communication theory to medicine. In particular, since the late eighteenth century electricity had been understood as a phenomenon closely connected with the functioning of the human body, with much physiological writing describing nerves as telegraph wires, or telegraph wires as nerves. To cite Peters, from a historical point of view “it is almost incorrect to say that these [depictions]

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are metaphors, since it is utterly unclear what is literal and what is figurative.”49 Telegraphy’s capacity to cleave together distant parts of reality by allowing information to move independently of physical bodies in an “electronic elsewhere” also explains its invocation as “a form of neutral truth-telling.”50 The unmediated communication it supposedly guaranteed crystallized ideas of omniscient narration and objective reporting that were then being developed in early Victorian realist fiction and journalism.51 Belief in the transparent projection of human thought across a distance did not, however, reflect actual telegraph practice. If we consider the telegraph as a technology-in-use, instances of miscommunication were all too common. Epistemologically speaking—and as was so often lamented by nineteenth-century operators—the telegraph was “a flawed communications device”: a tool that, while promising unmediated access to knowledge from distant locations, was capable of lying.52 Scribal errors such as misspelling and transposition were everyday intrusions in the process; and given that a message rarely went from its origin to its destination in a single go, they increased with the number of relay points necessary to deliver the dispatch from sender to receiver. Verdi himself, when writing to Piroli, must have considered the possibility that the information he and Du Locle had exchanged with Mariette traveled unstably along the wires. Two of the telegrams mentioned above were affected by mispellings: written in French, both bear the hallmarks of words misunderstood (or misdelivered) by the telegraph operators.53 However much widespread transnational perceptions shaped a kind of “telegraphic ideal”—signals flashing along wires; distances collapsing; cables, bodies, and machinery dissolving into the air—in reality, electric technologies were far from reliable. Just as crucially, they did not exist in a media vacuum. From both a speed and an operational point of view, telegraphy’s relationship with other communication technologies was more complicated than we might assume. Telegraphic exchanges to and from the countryside, where delivery relied on the postal service, often resulted in protracted delays, a point Verdi made clear in a letter to Du Locle. Asked by the Frenchman whether there was a telegraph office where he lived, he replied that the nearest one was in Borgo San Donnino, about fifteen miles away. Any telegram sent there in the evening would reach him the following day at noon. All in all, only twenty-four hours would be saved over a message sent from Paris by mail—a fairly irrelevant advantage when one considered the benefits, especially content size, that a letter still offered.54 In Italy telegraphy was introduced, initially for governmental purposes, by the grand duchy of Tuscany in 1847, and then by the other pre-

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Unification states between 1850 and 1857. In 1861, regional networks were still poorly integrated: messages were sent using different types of devices to transmit over lines built from different materials. A “deeply entrenched telegraph paradigm” became established only during the first fifteen years following Unification, with a watershed around 1870–71.55 The expansion and unification of regional lines, the opening of new offices, and a drastic reduction of fees at this point all resulted in an increase in the number of messages sent within the peninsula. International telegraph traffic, on the other hand, had been at its highest during the 1860s, when Italy served as a key communications node for British correspondence to Africa and Asia. In the early 1870s, the end of the Franco-Prussian war and the laying of submarine cables redirected Northern European communications around the peninsula rather than through it.56 Meanwhile, the speed of communication between Italian cities depended less on distance than on the number of necessary relays. In 1881, Italian telegrams required an average of three such retransmissions, a figure that applied mostly but not exclusively to provincial areas and secondary lines.57 A decade earlier, even a city like Rome, which had just become part and capital of the kingdom, was still poorly integrated within the national network: a telegram from Milan took longer to deliver than one from Milan to Naples, which was further south.58 When Aida premiered in Cairo on December 24, 1871, news of its outcome was immediately sent to Ricordi in Milan by telegraph. As we shall see, the telegram in question was then broadcast by the publisher through the press, creating the illusion of an unmediated real-time communication between Italy and Egypt. Yet no matter how fast and how directly the electric signal supposedly traveled, in reality the dispatch would have taken several hours and wires to arrive. It would have had to be transmitted first to Alexandria; then to Malta; then to Modica, Sicily; and finally all the way up through the peninsula to its final destination—a process that would have required between three and twenty-four hours.59 The dream of distant simultaneity that telegraphy encapsulated was fueled by its tensions with other transport and communications media.

Media Meet In a sense, media have always been central to the historiography of the Suez Canal. A number of largely official contemporary reports and most modern histories of globalization describe the canal as a key factor in and symbol of the time-space compression that characterized the late nineteenth century.60 The waterway, which drastically shortened the steam-

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boat journey from Europe to Asia, is itself often depicted as a grand geographical “medium”: a fissure that, almost by the sheer physical power of its opening, prompted a mobility breakthrough, after which the globe shrank and people and things traveled faster. In a compelling history of the variegated forms of movement in the region, Valeska Huber has nevertheless questioned this traditional view. The narrative of the canal as an unequivocally modernizing, globalizing force was forged, she explains, from the values of progress, civilization, and expanding markets of the Europeans who attended the opening ceremony and formed the majority (khedive aside) of the Canal Company’s stakeholders.61 In reality, the symbolic capital of the new waterway was multifaceted. The thoroughfare signified less a simple “global accelerator” than a “lynchpin of various forms of mobility.”62 Whether it advanced or hindered movement depended on who or what was moving—whether tourists, pilgrims, soldiers, smugglers, or even microbes. A variety of coordinated processes determined the canal’s choreography. To some travelers, held up by checks and controls or fighting the boredom of sluggish navigation, the rite of the passage could even feel intolerably slow. Others mused on the interlocking technologies—ships, letters, telegrams—that characterized such newly built towns as Said or Suez, the last contact points with home for Europeans off to the Orient. These cities were blank canvases that had sprung up on the map from nothing: border zones whose cultural essence was condensed in their networking function.63 The liminal status of the Suez area and the shifting media ecologies that accompanied the progression from the West to the East (and vice versa) were captured in the early twentieth century by Rudyard Kipling, who cast the Canal Company’s garden in Port Said as a site of neareschatological revelations. That garden, he mused, happens to mark a certain dreadful and exact division between East and West. Up to that point—it is a fringe of palms, stiff against the sky—the impetus of home memories, and the echo of home interest, carry the young man along very comfortably on his first journey. But at Suez one must face things. People, generally the most sympathetic, leave the boat there; the older men who are going on have discovered each other and begun to talk shop; no newspapers come aboard, only clipped Reuter telegrams; the world seems cruelly large and self-absorbed.64

Back in the 1870s, an Italian traveler describing a recent trip to Java produced figure after figure in an attempt to convey the size and commotion of the canal. As for how traffic patterns worked, he explained that

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the waterway bore a close resemblance to more familiar European landscapes. “The existing signals, regulations, and stations place this passageway in exactly the same condition as a one-track railroad. There are telegraphs, signals, stops. The running aground of a ship up ahead halts however many follow it.”65 The technological tableaux and frequent schedule disruptions identified by contemporary writers in Suez were relatively new. Egypt had only become a key telegraphic hub in the 1860s thanks to infrastructure projects—chief among them, aside from the Canal, the creation of a national railway network and the laying of submarine cables—that strengthened its position as a communication and transport node between Asia and Europe. The transformations were accompanied by the emergence of new cultural practices: an Arabic press developed in Cairo at the end of the decade and soon became the locus of both calendrical and textual reforms prompted by encounters with Western timekeeping. In 1870 the leading Cairene newspaper, Wadi-al Nil, subscribed to the Reuters telegraph service and for the first time incorporated Western Gregorian dates in its foreign news column. Also during the early 1870s, Cairo’s local time started to be distributed by wire to the provinces, allowing for the simultaneous start and end of Ramadan throughout the country. As recent scholars have explained in studies of timekeeping in precolonial and colonial Egypt, this accelerated, technologically induced reorganization of temporal experience was nevertheless far from straightforward. Synchronization was often hindered by communication delays and calendar mismatches; global interconnectedness produced temporal relativity as much as it homogenized timekeeping.66 Aida’s production in Cairo premiered at this key cultural moment. Word of Verdi’s plans to compose a new opera for Egypt, to a libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni, was released in Italy in August 1870. Ricordi’s Gazzetta musicale di Milano broke the news, adding that the composer reserved the right to mount his work simultaneously in a European theater.67 A few weeks later, to Verdi’s dismay, an early synopsis appeared in several papers, and reports followed in subsequent months with updates on the delays caused by the siege of Paris.68 When Aida eventually premiered in Cairo at the end of 1871, a telegram transcribed in the Gazzetta announced its successful outcome (figure 5.4). The dispatch, dated December 25, was distributed as a one-page supplement to the undated issue scheduled for publication on the 24th. Presumably the message was released to the public immediately after Ricordi received the telegram in his office in Milan. Visually, this page is unlike any other typically encountered in Italian music periodicals from the period. The layout—the prominent letter-

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Figur e 5.4. Supplement to the Gazzetta musicale di Milano [December 25, 1871]

ing, the stark blank background, the single-page format—constructs the telegram as the medium entrusted with delivering the news. In its transcribed form, the dispatch bears the mark of the cities on either end of the communication—Milan as well as Cairo—though the place of origin and the destination are set apart by markedly different fonts. The two locations articulate a spatiotemporal relationship that is at once flat and

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hierarchical. They share the same date—a mark of contemporaneity that could only have been “stamped” on the message upon receipt, confirming that it was successfully delivered the same day it was sent. Yet their distance is measured against the finest details of time: the 9 a.m. transmission arrived in Milan by day’s end. Framed within these markers of near simultaneity are forty-five words distilling, in the most conventional way, the essence of the operatic event. For the next ten days or so, all we know about Aida’s premiere in Cairo is the warm reception given the performers, composer (in absentia), khedive, staging, and music.69 If the Gazzetta’s telegram created an imaginary direct link between Cairo and Milan—a virtual uninterrupted wire annihilating space and time as it delivered Aida’s “signals”—other technologies for news dissemination brought geographical distance and slower temporalities to the fore. The post was one of them. On average, mail took more than a week to arrive from Egypt, with the result that when news correspondence reached Milan, the stories—often published alongside telegrams—were frequently outdated. On December 28, 1871, the weekly Il mondo artistico nonchalantly published two reports: one a letter from Cairo announcing Aida’s upcoming premiere on the 26th, two days later than it actually occurred; the other, on the following page, an edited version of the Gazzetta’s telegram reviewing that very event. A contemporary caricature in Turin’s weekly Il Pasquino added further communications media to the mix (figure 5.5). The artist, Casimiro Teja, was a prolific painter and cartoonist who directed and collaborated with several satirical magazines. Set in a stereotypical Egypt—palm trees, pyramids, sarcophagi, and all—his lithograph portrays an improbably deferential Verdi in a meeting with “Pharaon-Ismail”: the khedive Ismail Pasha, who had commissioned Aida. The composer, who actually never went to Cairo, holds in his arms a half-naked, olive-skinned Aida—a predatory, metonymic Western depiction of his latest opera. We can see that Verdi has received generous remuneration from Ismail for his work, but the financial and creative expenditures translate into a different kind of profusion in the upper right corner of the image: the “sacred bird” “PippoPippi”—the renowned Milanese critic Filippo Filippi—flies away home with wings full of journalistic news. At the invitation of the khedive, Filippi had traveled to Egypt to attend Aida, recording his impressions of both the opera and his trip in a series of newspaper articles for Milan’s daily La perseveranza.70 These accounts, entitled “Lettere egiziane” (Egyptian Letters), are given a topical inflection in Teja’s caricature. The bird in the picture is almost certainly an al-

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F igur e 5.5. Casimiro Teja, “Gli italiani in Egitto.” Lithograph from Il Pasquino, January 14, 1872. Palazzo Moriggia, Museo del Risorgimento, Milan, P BER 760 © Comune di Milano. Further reproduction prohibited.

lusion to the carrier pigeons used during the recent Parisian siege, when telegraph lines were cut by the Prussians and the French mobilized balloons to take news into the capital, and pigeons to take it out. Some of these reserve technologies were repurposed and reconceived. Photography, a medium primarily of figural representation, achieved new prominence as a means of transporting textual information: microscopic photographic dispatches were fastened to the tails of pigeons and read by being projected onto a screen upon delivery.71 In Teja’s illustration, Filippi’s half-animal, half-paper wings conflate newspapers with an out-of-theordinary mode of communication while simultaneously conjuring more common modern media. In the contemporary Italian imagination, carrier pigeons, which had been used for centuries and would survive into World War II, were not regarded as technologies of old; on the contrary, they were often compared to transport and communication systems born in the nineteenth century. Shortly before Teja’s caricature, an anonymous essay in the Rivista minima, codirected by Ghislanzoni, praised the speed of these animals, which could deliver news “in just a few wing beats.” If

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they were not quite as time-efficient as railways, the author contended, they were still capable of flying at more than a mile per minute.72 According to the novelist Edmondo De Amicis, Filippi’s “Lettere egiziane” went on to furnish the raw material for one of two parody plays, both entitled Aida, that premiered at the Teatro Fossati and the Teatro Re in Milan at the end of January 1872.73 The plays themselves have not survived, which makes it impossible to establish how closely they might have been based on Filippi’s reports and other available sources. Yet the language that greeted their appearance on stage reveals the cultural preoccupations of the “Aida moment.” Taken together, a local critic argued, these two parody Aidas were nothing less than the “pacemakers, precursors, . . . relays, couriers of the true one” that was just about to arrive at La Scala.74 The plays partly anticipated and partly disseminated the operatic work-event that had been on display in Cairo and would soon reach the Lombard city. Once Verdi’s opera debuted there in February, the reverberations of its “long-distance” premiere continued to inform critical discussions within the new local and national context. Unlike the pervasive “ghost” images of Paris, Cairo, or Suez, which have loomed over Aida’s entire scholarly history, Milan has featured only marginally in modern studies of Verdi’s opera. To some extent this is surprising: Aida’s was the first major operatic premiere in united Italy, and it followed the production of Lohengrin in Bologna by only three months. It also marked the end of Verdi’s retreat (begun in 1845) from Milan’s operatic scene, restoring the city as the chief national and global center of Verdi activity even more forcefully than the premiere of his revised La forza del destino had done in 1869. Milanese critics delighted in trumpeting this restored cultural bond. One journalist, Rodolfo Paravicini, forged a suggestive metaphor to absorb Aida’s soundscape into Milan’s cityscape. Writing in Il secolo, he remarked that on his first hearing it, Verdi’s music reminded him of the “vague shapes” of Milan’s cathedral on a hazy autumn morning. The contours of the opera-duomo shrouded in “fogs”— presumably Wagnerian fogs so often blamed on Verdi—remained somewhat indeterminate, constantly vanishing. Only now and then did its pinnacles peek out from the haze to reveal their colossal size, though the towering presence of the edifice could be perceived at all times.75 Whereas Paravicini fused Verdi’s opera with features of Milan’s urban fabric, others were more concerned with fusing its “two world premieres” through a shared cultural imaginary. The Egyptian event had famously attracted a rich international audience, who mirrored the diversity of Cairo’s local population. The opera libretto, printed in four languages (Italian, French, Turkish, and Arabic), captured the experience of multilinguis-

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tic profusion. The opening night at La Scala was also unprecedentedly cosmopolitan, the general atmosphere in the city suggesting an assimilation (or toned-down Italian version) of Cairo as if by osmosis. In Milan it was Italian idioms that commingled. “Dialects from all over Italy, above all the veneto and the bolognese,” filled the central Galleria, opened in 1867 and dedicated to King Victor Emmanuel II. “A ceaseless coming and going of letters, telegraphic dispatches, requests for seats, rejections, and anxieties” traversed both the city and the whole of Italy in a scene of bustling animation.77 On his return to Paris after the opera’s premiere, the French publisher Léon Escudier reported that “the entire artistic and aristocratic society of Italy had gathered, coming from Palermo, Naples, Venice, Rome, Florence—everywhere.”78 At first sight, such statements read as fairly ordinary, packed as they are with all the critical clichés of assumed cultural authority. The “distillation” of Italianness that the 1872 Aida exuded is as telling of Milanese desires to defy the cosmopolitan hegemony of operatic Bologna as it is of the emerging myth, established once and for all by the 1881 National Industrial Exhibition, of Milan as Italy’s “moral capital.” The thrill of the moment is not to be found in the clichés, but in the communications technologies that articulated them. As in Cairo, telegrams served as the chief medium for publicizing the outcome of the premiere, bearing Aida news “on electric wings to the four quarters of the globe.”79 In a nostalgic gloss of Verdi’s latest masterpiece, the journalist Eugenio Torelli-Viollier measured the event’s significance against the yardstick of social connectivities old and new. He commented that, in this great Verdian occasion, he felt echoes of “those times”—read: overtly political times—“when theatergoing was public life” to Italians. Aida created an “excitement in the nerves of our population” that only the elderly could recall.80 In Torelli-Viollier’s view, Verdi’s opera reactivated Risorgimento memories, or perhaps fantasies, that had a distinctive geographical and temporal quality to them, for the media and working range of this excitement had drastically changed. “Operatic premieres have [become] cosmopolitan,” he explained, railways and the telegraph having extended their social and cultural impact to an area with a radius of three hundred miles.81 Italian thought and sentiment could now spread all the way through and beyond Italy’s electrified body, with Milan resembling a relay station receiving and delivering operatic signals from and to other places.82 If the Cairo-Milan communications network bolstered—and simultaneously cramped—the grand, space-collapsing gestures afforded by the electrical sublime, the talk generated by Aida at La Scala served to align Italian experiences of space and time along a continuum of shifting historical configurations. 76

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Temporal Politics Torelli-Viollier’s fantasy of socio-operatic connectivities boosted by new media was rooted in the period’s musical aesthetics. As Ellen Lockhart has shown, in the mid-nineteenth century Italian theorists began to analogize the aesthetic effects of good melodies to electric “shocks” that spread not only from performer to listener, as an earlier tradition had it, but also between listeners. The electric-aesthetic relays took on the capacity to bind together entire audiences, with political implications that would have been only too obvious during the Risorgimento, when the Italian community was still fragmented. Several musical compositions, typically scored for winds and in the dance form of the galop, made these imaginary human chains audible. Drawing on a set of conventional figures, they translated (or interpreted) the telegraph’s electrical pulses as music that “leaps and patters rhythmically, dancing.”83 We need only wait until the 1870s to see electric fantasies embodied on stage: Il Telegrafo elettrico (1873) by the choreographer Luigi Danesi is the first of two Italian ballets that celebrated national achievements in electrical science. Danesi, whose protagonist is none other than the inventor of the battery, Alessandro Volta, envisioned the telegraph as a technology that had unified the entire world’s population.84 Although his choreography and the accompanying music are lost, we can gain an idea of what late-nineteenthcentury “electric” dances might have looked and sounded like from Luigi Manzotti’s Excelsior, premiered and performed endlessly at La Scala in 1881, in concomitance with the Industrial Exhibition. This ballet comprises hundreds of dancers arranged in rows onstage, and in the “Dance of the Telegraph Operators” composer Romualdo Marenco even calls for a telegraph to play with the orchestra, in the jaunty rhythmic patterns by then typical of telegraphic galops.85 The cross-stage transfer of voices explored at the beginning of this chapter for the “Guerra! Guerra!” scene from Aida thus builds on established modes of sensory perception; yet it differs in at least one respect from the musical-electrical affinities detected by Lockhart. While Marenco and the other composers of electric galops depicted the telegraph’s impulses musically or used the device itself to conjure its presence, Verdi enacted the “electric” relays in and through the performance: the staging itself was and remains the medium. Drop one of his meticulous instructions for the spatialized chains of “Guerra!” and “Radamès!” and the entire dramatic effect is lost. Of course, Verdi was not trying to evoke telegraphy in the same sense that Manzotti, Marenco, and others were. His music is not about electricity, nor is telegraphy the signified of

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his stage action. His “telegraphic aesthetics” passes over technology altogether and harnesses the idea of telegraphy to create a sense of oral realism and social connectivities. For Verdi used his audiovisual circuits to trigger the binding together of a community: the Egyptians stirred to war by the voice of their king. The visceral effects of their coordinated cries and physical gestures even extended into the auditorium if, as suggested by the critic for Lo spirito folletto cited earlier, several in the audience “ran to take up sword” jointly with the singers and the orchestral players.86 In an opera characterized by so many crowds and grand public scenes, including one that pivots around a crucial moment of group bonding, it is all the more startling that the famous final scene marks not just a decisive retreat from the world but the very pinnacle of communication failure. Remember Aida’s opening bars: how they set rumor against the voice of the truth, hearsay against the veridical information awaited and then received from the messenger and Isis. Early in the last act, a voice again reports the word on the street, albeit now in purely negative terms: “Sparve, né più novella s’ebbe” (She vanished, and there has been no more news of her), as Amneris explains to Radamès, referring to Aida. The heroine is to reappear unexpectedly to her lover alone, once he enters the subterranean chamber after his trial. The darkness that enfolds them in the tomb and their final moments of singing in unison construct an idealized space where the couple is as isolated from the outside world as one could be. That Amneris chants her prayer in the temple above as they bid farewell to life below furthermore presents two different experiences of time: parallel and simultaneous, yet in no way connected or synchronized. This brings me to one final aspect of temporality in relation to Aida. As we have seen, issues of simultaneity lay at the heart of Verdi’s plans from early on; they underpinned discourse around the Cairo and Milanese premieres; and they resurfaced in early accounts of the opera’s performance history. They also emerged, I now want to add, from a request that the composer made insistently during 1873 and 1874. By then, Aida had been “started on its way,” and the time was ripe, he thought, to stage it simultaneously in multiple theaters.87 Verdi expressed this view most forcefully (though not exclusively) to Ricordi, in a series of letters that capture his urgency: Per l’Aida io sono di parere ora di renderla popolare. Dopo cinque successi mi pare ora soverchio il rigore. . . . Siate dunque ora un po’ più correnti per Aida, e datela ove credete meglio (prendendo però alcune precauzioni indispensabili) e datela in molti teatri insieme, in una volta (Verdi to Giulio Ricordi, September 6, 1873).

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[As for Aida, I think it should now be made popular. After five successes, I think severity is excessive. . . . From now on, then, be a little more easygoing with Aida; do it wherever you think best (taking some indispensable precautions, however), and do it in many theaters at the same time.] Io sono sempre di parere che tanto l’Aida come la Forza bisogna darle, ma in molti teatri contemporaneamente (Verdi to Eugenio Tornaghi, November 3, 1873). [I am still of the opinion that Aida, like La forza [del destino], must be done, but in many theaters simultaneously.] Non sono mai stato ostile a ridarsi Aida alla Scala, ma, l’ho detto e scritto cento volte, avrei voluto che contemporaneamente venisse data in molti teatri (Verdi to Giulio Ricordi, December 23, 1873). [I have never been hostile to giving Aida again at La Scala, but I have said and written a hundred times that I would have wanted it to be done simultaneously in many theaters.] In quanto al progetto di andare a Firenze e Roma sta bene quantunque io, come dissi altre volte, non avrei più tanto rigore per Aida, e la darei in molti teatri alla volta (Verdi to Giulio Ricordi, October 20, 1874).88 [As to the project of going to Florence and Rome, that is fine, although, as I have said before, I wouldn’t be so strict about Aida and I would do it in many theaters at the same time.]

No doubt Verdi wanted his opera to circulate, having been largely responsible for its limited travels until that point, as he had insisted on controlling all aspects of the first few productions. Shortly after the premieres in Cairo and Milan, he supervised stagings in Parma and Naples, while agreeing to have Faccio conduct a run of performances in Padua with four of the five original singers from La Scala. All of these cities proved good launching pads for the opera, thanks in particular to the accomplished messinscene.89 Yet requests by other opera houses for permission to mount the work were turned down by the composer and Ricordi on the grounds that the cast, chorus, orchestra, and staging all required special supervision: Verdi alone, or at least a trusted collaborator, could oversee them. The composer’s reluctance to hand over Aida to third parties drew criticism aimed at the publisher: in March 1872, Ricordi was forced to rebut public accusations of burying works in his archives. In a column in his own Gazzetta he explained that it was simply impossible to stage Aida “in

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twenty, thirty, forty theaters in one single year”—an idea he had already expressed privately to the Roman impresario Vincenzo Jacovacci when sending his regrets that he could not “put together ten companies and give Aida in ten opera houses contemporaneously.”90 Given the shortage of suitable singers and the opera’s unique staging requirements, there was simply no way to arrange multiple simultaneous productions. Verdi’s and, by implication, Ricordi’s resistance to opening up Aida to free circulation tapered off in late 1873, as already mentioned. Yet lifting the production ban does not by itself explain the composer’s insistent requests for simultaneous stagings. Much as he wanted his opera to be disseminated, Verdi was not just seeking operatic ubiquity. He was not simply suggesting that Aida should enter a national or perhaps global circuit that his antagonism to external collaborators had until then prevented. His rationale was, in part, that the publicity apparatus involved with simultaneous productions would itself benefit the opera. Were Aida not to do well in one place, he reasoned, it would do better in another.91 Perhaps he also hoped that concomitant performance runs would produce a nationally shared experience: that, as a later observer reckoned, “from the Alps to the sea the whole of Italy [would on the same day] be absorbed with” one and the same opera.92 The work that prompted this geographical preoccupation was Pietro Mascagni’s Le maschere, a three-act opera with a prologue that premiered in six Italian theaters on the night of January 17, 1901. The critic Amintore Galli, writing for Il secolo, hailed this event as something “altogether new in the history of opera.” He was echoed by an anonymous writer from Paris, who thought Mascagni’s idea a business stratagem that neither Verdi nor Meyerbeer, for all their shrewdness, had ever dared to envisage.93 Le maschere’s sixfold debut in Rome, Milan, Genoa, Turin, Venice, and Verona, with Naples joining two days later, set the composer and the librettist Luigi Illica on a frenzy of journeys up and down the peninsula to supervise the various productions. Following the opening nights, and in response to a disastrous reception almost everywhere, Mascagni hastened to telegraph identical amendments to the score to all theaters except Rome’s Costanzi, where he personally conducted the performances.94 His six simultaneous premieres conjured fantasies of geographical interconnectedness that had first circulated in relation to Rossini in the 1820s. As his operas crossed the Atlantic and wandered further afield to Asia, Rossini had grown into the subject of an imaginary critical conversation whose interlocutors spoke, through the press, from distant corners of the globe.95 In the case of Mascagni it was the temporal convergence of his six contemporaneous opening nights that caught critics’

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attention more than anything else. With Aida, Verdi never attempted anything conceived with such horological precision. And yet the question arises again: Was a geographically and culturally binding experience, incarnated in different ways and degrees by Rossini and Mascagni before and after him, all that Verdi aspired to with simultaneous productions of Aida? More to the point, what were the technological premises and aesthetic implications of his plea? Since the 1850s, Italians’ temporal experience had been going through a process of gradual standardization. Several cities had introduced socalled tempo medio—mean solar time—a form of corrected real solar time that took into account seasonal changes and established a fixed fictitious day of exactly twenty-four hours in which the sun was, on average, at its highest in the sky at noon. Turin was the first city to adopt this system in 1852 and was followed by Rome in 1855, Bologna in 1858, and Milan and other municipalities in 1860. During the subsequent decade, numerous publications targeted at both specialist and popular readerships unraveled the intricacies of tempo medio by going into no small level of astronomical details. They explained, in more or less accessible ways, why time itself had suddenly multiplied and why sundials were no longer reliable, and furnished readers with tables to convert real into mean time, and vice versa, on any day of the year.96 Such efforts at scientific explanation notwithstanding, temporal chaos on the peninsula still reigned supreme. Although the introduction of tempo medio meant that any given city could synchronize its public clocks on an average local midday, with benefits for timetabling local activities, time still varied between different cities. In 1865, Florence’s Il giornale illustrato published a powerful visualization of the temporal wildness that characterized Italian timekeeping (figure 5.6). Forty little clocks, their hands frozen anywhere between twenty-two minutes behind and twenty-two minutes ahead of twelve o’clock, marked by the clock in the middle, capture the difference between Rome’s mean time and the mean times of other Italian cities. In order to meet the needs of expanding transportation systems that required temporal coordination, the following year a royal decree established that the six Italian “railway times” should be synchronized. Turin, Verona, Florence, Naples, and Palermo all set their station clocks to Roman time.97 What is more, over the next twenty years (with the exception of Sicily), beginning with Milan and acting on independent municipal initiatives, individual cities also gradually adopted Rome’s mean time for other aspects of public life, thus erasing a further layer of temporal discrepancy.98 Timekeeping was of course a topic with wider political implications across the world than those revealed by the practices and debates that

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Figur e 5.6. “Differenza di tempo in Italia riferita al meridiano del Campidoglio.” Lithograph from Il giornale illustrato, June 3–9, 1865. Biblioteca Marucelliana, Flor­ ence, RIV.A.6. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo / Biblioteca Marucelliana di Firenze. Further reproduction prohibited.

traversed Italy in this period. In an age that increasingly aligned itself under the rubric of the “global,” clock time and calendar reforms sustained a Western imperial ideology of interconnectedness by projecting a “natural” temporal order onto ever larger portions of the earth. Still, and as already mentioned with regard to Egypt, time standardization was an uneven, contested, and highly laborious process. Changes to existing national timekeeping practices were often dictated less by the appeal of a “universal” time system or the advantages of easier global movements,

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and more by domestic needs. More or less concomitantly with the introduction of national mean times in Europe from the 1880s, several scientific conferences lay the basis for instituting worldwide time zones, first conceived of in 1858 by the Italian mathematician Quirico Filopanti, but only rising to international attention through later scientific work from the late 1870s.99 As Peter Galison has explained, these attempts at temporal coordination were conducted at the intersection of practical and intellectual arenas, in a merging of objects and ideas that—using a metaphor from physics—he terms “critical opalescence.”100 In this fin de siècle context, simultaneity emerged as a key site of debate and contestation: a verifiable scientific concept midwifed by the synchronization of distant clocks via telegraphy. Its significance as a realm of inquiry sprang from encounters between lofty theoretical abstractions and the concrete, material pulls of politics, commerce, and engineering. It took the minds of philosophers and scientists, as well as the messy exigencies of war, trade, and technophilia, to open it up as a domain of knowledge and to even make it conceivable in the first place.101 At a time when simultaneity was a “procedural concept”—something that could only be defined, be given significance, through practical operations—Verdi’s iterative calls for contemporaneous productions of Aida take on a suggestive ring.102 There is more, I think, to the composer’s requests than a desire to equip his work with an emergency media parachute; more than a wish to proclaim himself the harbinger of a newly connected Italian and global operatic experience. I would argue that this late-nineteenth-century Verdian search for simultaneity—no matter how loosely, how unmathematically understood—also speaks to growing possibilities of disseminating distant events in real time: to collapsing temporality as much as to expanding the geographical reach of operatic networks. We could hardly make sense of Verdi’s pleas for synchronicity were it not possible for opera productions mounted in far-flung cities to be “packaged” into one and the same perceptual realm. Simultaneous performances of Aida, as its author desired them, could only “mean” something if they were experienced as simultaneous.103 The theoretical and the practical, as the high-speed global traveler in Jules Verne’s Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours is constantly reminded, need to go together. When planning your trip, you cannot “jump mathematically” from one means of transportation to another; you need to take delays into account and come to grips with storms, shipwrecks, and rail accidents, with all the unforgiving constraints of actual lived experience.104 Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that, as described in chapter 4 of this book, the 1870s were also the time when full-blown opera produc-

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tions started to travel by rail. Both strategies of operatic dissemination— the delivery of complete operatic “packages” to theaters and the nearsimultaneous media distribution of performances from different cities—rested on similar assumptions: a dynamic interplay between mobility and immobility, permanence and change, materiality and abstraction. Just as trains were starting to be integrated into opera’s basic infrastructure, concepts of distant simultaneity were prompting (and being prompted by) a newly networked sense of Italian operatic experience. Above all, the “electronic elsewhere” precipitated by telegraphy proved to be a space where unpredictable operatic realities could hope to emerge. It was a phantasmatic non-place in which elements of separate distant productions, distributed simultaneously by wire to and then via newspapers, could merge with each other, transcending all the initial stagings. In a sense, and contrary to some of the standard assumptions encouraged by the prescriptive nature of contemporary staging manuals, the Aida Verdi wished to bequeath to posterity existed “out there”: unmoored from the premises, whether aesthetic or political, of any individual production. It inhabited a space only one step removed from the interactive experiences enabled by modern-day simulcasting. While live broadcasts use technology to allow distant audiences to participate in the same operatic events as distributed from given locations in real time, Verdi envisioned technology as an instrument toward achieving a hybrid aesthetic object shaped by a multiplicity of places and events. Seen from this perspective, the various analogies between technological processes and aesthetic or cultural production that this chapter has retraced through the “Aida moment” extend the politics of Verdi’s opera far beyond the enclosure of the operatic work “itself.” The technological framework directs us away from Saidian notions of imperial “memory” and “echo,” and toward an understanding of Aida as and within a technical network. In the late nineteenth century, opera more generally not only embraced the reproductive paradigm of contemporary communication technologies, but also shaped—or aspired to shape—the scientific concepts and media experiences of the time. And it did so in ways that at least occasionally departed from the communicative praxis of cultural activity in the age of empires. For the politics of Aida cannot simply be traced to the work’s “reflection” or “inscription” of contemporary political hierarchies. The opera’s mediality, in the multiple configurations it took around 1871 and 1872, was the locus where that politics was repeatedly played out. Verdi’s statements in 1873 and 1874 open up space for a compelling counterpoint to those narratives, old but also recent, that seek to set boundaries around Aida’s geographical and national affiliations. They

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capture the aspiration to simultaneity that characterized the “Aida moment,” while also highlighting the stakes of this desire’s only partial coincidence with reality. The extreme horological precision involved in latenineteenth-century efforts at temporal coordination coexisted with a much more practical, much looser approach to timekeeping—one that allowed that long-dead American critic, Henry Edward Krehbiel, to call the inaugurations of the Suez Canal and the Cairo theater “practically contemporaneous” with Aida’s premiere. Krehbiel’s fuzzy sense of simultaneity might well be given pride of place in the historical mindset equal to that of the seemingly antithetical impulse to comprehend the coordination of time through abstract scientific concepts. Perhaps this is where Aida’s media ultimately both approached and fell short of accomplishing something new. The simultaneity underlying the opera’s composition, performance, and reception remained an ephemeral, conceptual category. It failed, in the long term, to produce transformative cultural realities.

Author’s Note

The writing and publication of this book have been made possible by fellowships from St. John’s College, Cambridge, and the British Academy, as well as by grants from the Faculty of Music of the University of Cambridge and Music & Letters. An AMS 75 PAYS subvention from the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, supported the engraving of musical examples for chapter 2. An earlier version of chapter 4 was published as “De(Railing) Mobility: Opera, Stasis, and Locomotion on Late-Nineteenth-Century Italian Tracks” in Opera Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2018): 3–28; it is reprinted by permission of the Oxford University Press.

Notes

Introduction 1. An early and influential study of opera that adopted a local framework was An­ selm Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Operatic urban studies have since proliferated. For a recent edited collection that covers a variety of approaches, places, and historical moments, see Suzanne As­ pden, ed., Operatic Geographies: The Place of Opera and the Opera House (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2019). 2. For two excellent introductions to Risorgimento historiography, see Lucy Ri­ all, Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation State (New York: Pal­ grave Macmillan, 2009), esp. 37–52; and Axel Körner and Lucy Riall, eds., “Alberto Banti’s Interpretation of Risorgimento Nationalism: A Debate,” special issue of Na­ tions and Nationalism 15, no. 3 (2009): 396–460. For a recent overview and persuasive critique of traditional approaches to studying opera and the Risorgimento, see Mary Ann Smart, Waiting for Verdi: Opera and Political Opinion in Nineteenth­Century Italy, 1815–1848 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). 3. Carlotta Sorba, Teatri: L’Italia del melodramma nell’età del Risorgimento (Bolo­ gna: Il Mulino, 2001); Jutta Toelle, Bühne der Stadt: Mailand und das Teatro alla Scala zwischen Risorgimento und Fin de Siècle (Wien and München: Böhlau and Olden­ bourg, 2009); Axel Körner, Politics of Culture in Liberal Italy: From Unification to Fascism (New York and London: Routledge, 2009); Laura Protano­Biggs, “Musical Materialities in Milan and Liberal Italy at the fine secolo,” PhD diss., University of Cal­ ifornia, Berkeley, 2014; and Emanuele Senici, “Delirious Hopes: Napoleonic Milan and the Rise of Modern Italian Criticism,” Cambridge Opera Journal 27, no. 2 (2015): 97–127. See also my “Verdi Reception in Milan, 1859–1881: Memory, Progress and Ital­ ian Identity,” PhD diss., King’s College London, 2014, which has appeared in print as four separate articles. Further studies of opera in nineteenth­century Florence and Bologna are cited in chapters 1 and 4 of this book. 4. Alberto Mario Banti has discussed this “morphology” in his influential study La nazione del Risorgimento: Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), now available in English as The Nation of the Risorgimento: Kinship, Sanctity, and Honour in the Origins of Unified Italy, trans. Stuart Oglethorpe (Abing­ don and New York: Routledge, 2020). For a critical evaluation of Banti’s main claims,

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including the problems they raise when applied to studies of opera reception, see Körner and Riall, eds., “Alberto Banti’s Interpretation of Risorgimento Nationalism,” and Roger Parker, “Verdi Politico: A Wounded Cliché Regroups,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 17, no. 4 (2012): 427–36. 5. Serenella Iovino, Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance and Liberation (Lon­ don: Bloomsbury, 2016), 1, 3. 6. See Nathalie C. Hester, “Italian Travel Writing,” in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, ed. Nandini Das and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 2019), 206–20, here 216–18. On exiles, see Maurizio Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post­Napoleonic Era (Ox­ ford: Oxford University Press, 2009). For Italian emigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its impact on the society and economy of the pen­ insula, see Mark I. Choate, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2008). 7. Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), 910 (emphasis in original). Another influential study of nineteenth­century global­ ization is C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 8. Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, 5. Osterhammel describes the operatic economy at midcentury as predominantly Western and metropolitan­driven, and suggests that Paris was its “clear radial point.” 9. For some recent studies on these developments, see Ditlev Rindom, “Bygone Modernity: Re­imagining Italian Opera in Milan, New York and Buenos Aires, 1887– 1914,” PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2019; Matteo Paoletti, A Huge Revolution of Theatrical Commerce: Walter Mocchi and the Italian Musical Theatre Business in South America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); and Gavin Williams, “The Reproduction of Caruso,” forthcoming. John Rosselli also explored the shifting power relationships between Europe and Latin America across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on transatlantic networks of Italian opera performers; see his “The Opera Business and the Italian Immigrant Community in Latin America 1820–1930: The Example of Buenos Aires,” Past and Present 127, no. 1 (1990): 155–82. 10. Benjamin Walton makes a similar point, with regard to operatic globalization from the 1820s onward, in his “Italian Operatic Fantasies in Latin America,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 17 (2012): 460–71, here 462. 11. As Silvana Patriarca has shown, assertions of cultural crisis and moral degener­ ation were part of a discursive strategy through which Italians fashioned their mod­ ern national self, by appropriating foreign perceptions of Italy and its inhabitants. See her landmark study Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Laura Protano­Biggs has discussed ideas of vocal crisis and vocal exhaustion associated with Italian sing­ ing from the 1850s. Interestingly, she reads these concerns as indexing not just Ital­ ian anxieties but the end of a pan­European dream of modern productivism, which applied to both human and industrial bodies. See Protano­Biggs, “Musical Materiali­ ties in Milan and Liberal Italy at the Fine Secolo,” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2014, 65–96. Axel Körner has emphasized outward­ and progress­oriented narratives in his account of Bologna’s operatic culture during the Liberal Era; see Körner, Politics of Culture.

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12. On Italy’s “backwardness” and the fundamental role its South played in shap­ ing notions of Europe as well as Italianness, see John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Na­ tion and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1999); Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Ques­ tion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Roberto M. Dainotto, Eu­ rope (In Theory) (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007). 13. For a similar point, see Emanuele Senici, Music in the Present Tense: Rossini’s Italian Operas in Their Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 14. 14. See Alan Mallach, The Autumn of Italian Opera: From Verismo to Modernism, 1890–1915 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2007), 14–20, 363–65; and Jay Nicolaisen, Italian Opera in Transition, 1871–1893 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1977), whose title betrays the author’s view even while he describes the twenty­ two years separating Aida (1871) from Falstaff (1893) as a period of key transforma­ tions in the Italian operatic world. Julian Budden also detects a turning point around 1870; see Budden, The Operas of Verdi, 3 vols., rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992; reprint 2001–2002), vol. 3, 261–92. 15. For a discussion of various aspects of operatic canon formation, see Cormac Newark and William Weber, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon (Ox­ ford: Oxford University Press, 2020). This book was published too late for me to be able to engage with it in this study. 16. Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 1. 17. See Stephen Greenblatt, “Cultural Mobility: An Introduction” and “A Mobility Studies Manifesto,” in Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–23, 250–53. 18. On asking the question of who is mobile, where, and how, see Jonathan Hicks, “Erik Satie and the Subject(s) of Mobility,” in Music, Modern Culture, and the Critical Ear, ed. Nicholas Attfield and Ben Winters (London: Routledge, 2018), 75–90. An­ drea F. Bohlman and Florian Scheding’s rich article on Hanns Eisler shows, I think, some of the dangers inherent in using mobility as an instrument of historiographical revisionism, even if well­intentioned. Throughout the essay, “mobility” means sev­ eral different things, and ultimately the authors’ treatment is strangely traditional in that it fashions Eisler’s works and biography as an organic whole. See Bohlman and Scheding, “Hanns Eisler on the Move: Tracing Mobility in the ‘Reisesonate,’” Music & Letters 96, no. 1 (2015): 77–98. 19. On Meyerbeer’s cosmopolitanism, see Dana Gooley, “Meyerbeer, Eclecticism, and Operatic Cosmopolitanism,” Musical Quarterly 99, no. 2 (2016): 166–200. For an overview of recent scholarly approaches to cosmopolitanism and the concept’s prob­ lems and potential when used in music research, see Sarah Collins and Dana Gooley, “Music and the New Cosmopolitanism: Problems and Possibilities,” Musical Quar­ terly 99, no. 2 (2016): 139–65. Martin Stokes has called attention to the need to study cosmopolitan musical attitudes and musical practices in relation to specific notions of place, a view I develop in my chapter; see Stokes, “On Musical Cosmopolitanism,” Macalester International 21 (2008): 3–26. 20. The most well­known example of this fascination is the interest aroused by Verdi’s early operas, extracts of which, in reality or myth, provided the soundtrack for patriotic demonstrations during the Risorgimento. As Smart has shown, overt politi­ cal uses of Verdi’s music were uncommon before 1848; his operas became identified

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with the expression of Italian popular sentiment only gradually; see Smart, Waiting for Verdi, 152–83. 21. William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human His­ tory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 2. 22. Mark Seymour, Emotional Arenas: Life, Love, and Death in 1870s Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 23. For an excellent discussion of the ideology of the Italian voice, see Delia Casa­ dei, “A Voice That Carries,” in Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense, ed. Gavin Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 150–71. 24. The first Italian railway line was the Naples­Portici, inaugurated in 1839; the first telegraph line, the one operating between Pisa and Livorno, which was estab­ lished in 1847. 25. See the entry “network, v.” in the Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed .com (accessed November 24, 2020). 26. Carolyn Abbate has criticized the technological determinism to which music, sound, and media studies scholars fall prey when they assume that new audio(vi­ sual) technologies have a direct impact on the human body and sensorium. See Ab­ bate, “Sound Object Lessons,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 69, no. 3 (2016): 793–829. 27. John Durham Peters, “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph Revisited,” in Thinking with James Carey: Essays on Communications, Transportation, History, ed. Jeremy Packer and Craig Robertson (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 137– 55, here 143. For similar points, see Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Ellen Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770–1830 (Oak­ land: University of California Press, 2017), 133–50; and Lockhart, “Circuit Listening,” in Nineteenth­Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination, ed. David Trippett and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 227–48. 28. See Körner, Politics of Culture. 29. Gundula Kreuzer has come to similar conclusions with regard to Angelo Neu­ mann’s traveling Wagner­Theater, discussed in Kreuzer, Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wag­ nerian Technologies of Nineteenth­Century Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018). 30. See Alessandra Campana, Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth­ Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 31. On this watershed marked by telegraphy, see James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 203–204. On the historicity of our current understanding of “communication,” see John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. 1–10. As Peters ex­ plains (8–9), central to the modern understanding of communication is also the idea of a “contact between interiorities”: an exchange or two­way transfer. 32. For a more recent disciplinary trend that reflects a different approach to the interplay between history and aesthetics (via the “quirk”), see Nicholas Mathew and Mary Ann Smart, “Elephants in the Music Room: The Future of Quirk Historicism,” Representations 132 (2015): 61–78.

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33. See my review­article “Not in Their Minds,” Journal of the Royal Musical Asso­ ciation 145, no. 1 (2020): 251–57, and some of the texts cited therein. 34. John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 2. 35. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Lon­ don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964). 36. On the potential of use­centered histories of technology, see David Edger­ ton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (London: Pro­ file, 2006). 37. See, for instance, Lorenzo Bianconi and Thomas Walker, “Dalla Finta pazza alla Veremonda: Storie di Febiarmonici,” Rivista italiana di musicologia 10 (1975): 379– 454; and Louise K. Stein, “How Opera Traveled,” in The Oxford Handbook of Opera, ed. Helen M. Greenwald (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 843–61. 38. Broadly speaking, here, in this attention to material as well as human actors (and their interaction), is where my thinking resonates most closely with Bruno La­ tour’s. For the capacity of objects to assert themselves (exhibit their “thingness”) when they stop working for us, see Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22, here 4. 39. Some of the richest and most compelling work on nineteenth­century Italian identity and on Italian opera’s political, social, and cultural role in different global cul­ tures has come from researchers deeply invested in studying processes of representa­ tion, an approach that I have myself pursued on several occasions. The Leverhulme­ funded network “Reimagining Italianità: Opera and Musical Culture in Transnational Perspective” (2016–19) has recently hosted three conferences that featured presenta­ tions on various aspects of this subject. Some of this research has now appeared in Axel Körner and Paulo Kühl, eds., Italian Opera in Global and Transnational Perspec­ tive: Reimagining Italianità in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Chapter One 1. Ugo Pesci, Firenze capitale (1865–1870). Dagli appunti di un ex­cronista (Flor­ ence: Bemporad, 1904). All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. Born in Florence to a lower­middle­class family in 1846, Pesci attended the military acad­ emy in Modena and fought as a grenadier officer in the battle of Custoza (1866). He later embarked on a lifelong career as a journalist and patriotic memoirist. On him, see the entry by Costanza D’Elia in the Dizionario biografico degli italiani 82 (2015), http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ugo­pesci_(Dizionario­Biografico)/ (accessed May 7, 2020). 2. Pesci, Firenze capitale, 5. 3. Pesci, Firenze capitale, 6. 4. Pesci, Firenze capitale, 7. 5. Pesci, Firenze capitale, 47. 6. Already in the 1820s, Tuscany was seen from outside, and was being constructed from inside, as a particularly liberal political milieu; see Romano Paolo Coppini, Il Granducato di Toscana. Dagli “anni francesi” all’Unità (Turin: UTET, 1993), 247–48.

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This image was sustained and reinforced in the late 1840s when Leopold II granted a degree of press freedom and a constitution. The latter was introduced in 1848 and abolished four years later. 7. See Walter Adamson, Avant­Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cam­ bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 15–51. On foreign views of Florence circa 1900, see also Bernd Roeck, Florence 1900: The Quest for Arcadia, trans. Stewart Spencer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). 8. In April 1850, the Monitore toscano printed 2,000 copies a day. Three years later, the Gazzetta di Genova sold 1,200, of which 209 circulated in Tuscany. See Franco Della Peruta, Il giornalismo italiano del Risorgimento: Dal 1847 all’Unità (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2011), 66–67. On the fascination that the Crimean War (1853–55) ex­ erted on the contemporary European imagination, see Ulrich Keller, The Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the Crimean War (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 2001). For the role of media in the construction of wartime sound in and around this war, see Gavin Williams, ed., Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Un­ making of Sense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 9. See Dana Gooley, “Meyerbeer, Eclecticism, and Operatic Cosmopolitanism,” Musical Quarterly 99, no. 2 (2016): 166–200. The main studies of the early critical re­ ception of Meyerbeer’s grand opéras in Florence and other parts of Italy are Fabrizio Della Seta, “L’immagine di Meyerbeer nella critica italiana dell’Ottocento e l’idea di ‘dramma musicale,’” in L’opera tra Venezia e Parigi: Atti del convegno internazionale (Venezia, Fondazione Cini, 11–13 settembre 1986), ed. Maria Teresa Muraro (Florence: Olschki, 1988), 147–76; Fiamma Nicolodi, “Il grand­opéra di Meyerbeer da fenomeno elitario a spettacolo di massa,” in Orizzonti musicali italo­europei (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990), 43–75; Anna Tedesco, “‘Opere a macchina’: La fortuna di Giacomo Meyerbeer in Italia dal 1840 al 1870,” PhD diss., University of Bologna, 1998; and Gloria Staffieri, “Grand Opéra in Preunified Italy: Metamorphosis of a Political Genre,” Opera Quar­ terly 25, nos. 3–4 (2009): 203–29. 10. See Martin Thom, “City and Language in the Thought of Carlo Cattaneo,” Jour­ nal of Modern Italian Studies 5, no. 1 (2000): 1–21, here 2–3. Cattaneo’s essay from Il crepuscolo appeared in four installments: October 17, October 21, December 12, and December 26, 1858. 11. See Martin Thom, “City, Region and Nation: Carlo Cattaneo and the Making of Italy,” Citizenship Studies 3, no. 2 (1999): 187–201. 12. Cattaneo, “La città,” Il crepuscolo, October 17, 1858. For a study of the close his­ torical relationship between città and campagna in Tuscany, see Carlo Pazzagli, La terra delle città: Le campagne toscane dell’Ottocento (Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1992). 13. “The most complete, most popular, most cultured [example of] municipal life was found in Tuscan civilizations. Everybody knows what wonderful legacy it left in the letters and the arts. . . . But what distinguishes Tuscan cities, and especially Flor­ ence, is the fact that they instilled, down into the lowest people, a sense of justice and civil dignity. . . . The Florentine artisan was the first in Europe to participate in scientific culture. The mechanical arts were intimately connected with the fine arts; and these with geometry, optics, and physics.” Cattaneo, “La città,” Il crepuscolo, De­ cember 26, 1858. 14. For a case study focused on a particular singer, see Claudio Vellutini, “Fanny Tacchinardi­Persiani, Carlo Balocchino and Italian Opera Business in Vienna, Paris and London (1837–1845),” Cambridge Opera Journal 30, nos. 2–3 (2019): 259–304. On

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impresarios, see Jutta Toelle, “Opera as Business? From Impresari to the Publishing Industry,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 17, no. 4 (2012): 448–59. For the circuits of both singers and impresarios, see also the work by John Rosselli cited in chapters 3 and 4 of this book. 15. For an exception, see Laura Protano­Biggs’s study of the reception of the Lon­ don premiere of Le prophète, which aims to correct this trend: “An Earnest Meyer­ beer: Le prophète at London’s Royal Italian Opera House, 1849,” Cambridge Opera Journal 29, no. 1 (2017): 53–73. 16. Joseph Méry, Les Nuits italiennes: Contes nocturnes (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1853), 82. 17. Méry, Les Nuits italiennes, 82. 18. Alexandre Dumas, Une année a Florence, 2 vols. (Paris: Dumont, 1841), II, 77. 19. See Antonio Chiavistelli, Dallo Stato alla nazione: Costituzione e sfera pubblica in Toscana dal 1814 al 1849 (Rome: Carocci, 2006), 126. 20. Richard Bonfiglio, “The Painful Pleasures of Travel: George Eliot’s Proximate Cosmopolitanism,” in Imagining Italy: Victorian Writers and Travellers, ed. Catherine Waters, Michael Hollington, and John Jordan (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 138–49, here 138. 21. Méry, Les Nuits italiennes, 88. 22. James Fenimore Cooper, Excursions in Italy (Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1838), 23, 27. The Boston art critic and pioneer art collector James Jackson Jarves sim­ ilarly noted that the “singular feature of Florentine society is its cosmopolitan char­ acter.” Jarves, “Sights and Principles Abroad,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 8, no. 47 (1854): 617–24, here 623. 23. Cooper, Excursions, 49. 24. The epithet “world­city” is explored in Celina Fox, ed., London—World­City: 1800–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Paris’s association with moder­ nity and luxury extended across the Atlantic. See, for instance, Charlotte Bentley, New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859, forthcoming. 25. On the late­eighteenth­ and nineteenth­century myth of Florence, see Luigi Mascilli Migliorini, L’Italia dell’Italia: La tradizione toscana da Montesquieu a Ber­ enson (Florence: Le Lettere, 2006); Anna Pellegrino, La città più artigiana d’Italia: Firenze 1861–1929 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2012); and Adamson, Avant­Garde Flor­ ence. For eighteenth­century British views of the city, see Rosemary Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour: The British in Italy, c. 1690–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 2012), 65–98. In contrast with the limited attention it had received in the Grand Tour literature, Florence became a signal topic among foreign visitors and guidebook authors after the Restoration. 26. Mascilli Migliorini, L’Italia dell’Italia, 44. On Vieusseux and communications, see Nada Fantoni, “Le comunicazioni possibili: Tempi e vie della corrispondenza,” in Antonio Meucci e la città di Firenze: Tra scienza, tecnica e ingegneria, ed. Franco An­ gotti and Giuseppe Pelosi (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2009), 85–95. On his Gabinetto, see Laura Desideri, ed., Il Vieussex: Storia di un Gabinetto di lettura, 1819– 2003 (Florence: Polistampa, 2004). 27. By 1861, Tuscany had one of the most developed road networks of the penin­ sula. Railways initially connected the main Tuscan cities with one another; only after Unification were Tuscan railways linked to those of other regions. See Stefano Maggi, “Costruzione e identità dello spazio toscano,” in La Toscana nella costruzione dello

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stato nazionale dallo Statuto toscano alla Costituzione della Repubblica, 1848–1948: Atti del Convegno di studi, 30 maggio–1° giugno 2011, ed. Massimo Cervelli and Claudia De Venuto (Florence: Olschki, 2013), 35–61. 28. Dott. G. Boschi, “Riflessioni sul prolungamento del Lungarno,” Bollettino delle Arti del Disegno, repr. in Lo scaramuccia, April 7, 1854. It was Pierre Grosley who in 1770 first compared Florence to Athens; see Migliorini, L’Italia dell’Italia, 16. 29. See Gaia Ledda, L’idea di forestiero: L’incontro con l’alterità a Firenze. Un’inda­ gine realizzata sui periodici pubblicati a Firenze tra il 1815 e il 1848 (Florence: CUSL, 2001), 11; and Attilio Zuccagni­Orlandini, Ricerche statistiche sul Granducato di To­ scana, 5 vols. (Florence: Stamperia Granducale, 1848–54), vol. 1 (1848), 518. 30. See Antonio Chiavistelli, “Le comunicazioni controllate: Confini, dogane e circolazione nella Toscana della Restaurazione,” in Antonio Meucci, 71–84. On cen­ sorship in Restoration Tuscany, see Domenico Maria Bruni, “La censura della stampa nel Granducato di Toscana (1814–1859),” in Potere e circolazione delle idee: Stampa, accademie e censura nel Risorgimento italiano; Atti del Convegno di studi nel bicente­ nario della nascita di Giuseppe Mazzini, ed. Domenico Maria Bruni (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2007), 330–56. 31. See Ledda, L’idea di forestiero, 24. 32. See Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. 33. Anonymous letter published in Il buon gusto, May 1, 1853. 34. Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1846), 265. 35. On La Pergola’s unobtrusive design and its position within Florence’s cityscape, see Eugene J. Johnson, Inventing the Opera House: Theater Architecture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 243. Carlotta Sorba discusses various models of ownership and management of nineteenth­century Italian theaters in her Teatri: L’Italia del melodramma nell’età del Risorgimento (Bolo­ gna: Il Mulino, 2001), 17–93. Sorba notes that the “teatro­monumento” (61), the opera house clearly projecting from the city’s material fabric, was a product of eighteenth­ century beliefs about the civic function of theater. For an overview of the history and architecture of Florentine theaters, see Paolo Lucchesini, I teatri di Firenze: Origini, storia, spettacoli, aneddoti e curiosità dei teatri, esistenti o scomparsi, che dall’epoca ro­ mana fino ad oggi hanno animato la vita della città (Rome: Newton Compton, 1991). 36. On Romani, see Saverio Lamacchia’s entry in Dizionario biografico degli ita­ liani 88 (2017), http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/pietro­romani_(Dizionario ­Biografico)/ (accessed May 7, 2020). 37. Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter­Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth­Century France (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 117–18. 38. See Terdiman, Discourse/Counter­Discourse, 117–46. 39. See Emanuele Senici, “Delirious Hopes: Napoleonic Milan and the Rise of Modern Italian Operatic Criticism,” Cambridge Opera Journal 27, no. 2 (2015): 97–127. 40. On the three journals owned by Guidi, see the introductions by Marco Capra for the Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals, at www.ripm.org (accessed Novem­ ber 27, 2020). For a brief overview of the nineteenth­century Italian musical press, see Alexandra Wilson, “Music Criticism in Nineteenth­Century Italy,” in The Cambridge History of Music Criticism, ed. Christopher Dingle (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 2019), 190–207. 41. Gazzetta musicale di Milano, March 13, 1842.

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42. The first article in Basevi’s “rassegna” appeared in the Gazzetta musicale di Fi­ renze on August 23, 1855. Basevi was a staunch promoter of foreign instrumental mu­ sic, and he advocated Meyerbeer’s stylistic eclecticism as a route to an operatic reform in Italy. On him, see Jesse Rosenberg, “Abramo Basevi: A Music Critic in Search of a Context,” Musical Quarterly 86, no. 4 (2002): 630–88. 43. The first one, published in 1858, was that of Guglielmo Tell. Further pocket scores published by Guidi were Meyerbeer’s Gli Ugonotti, Peri’s Euridice, Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, Paisiello’s own Il barbiere di Siviglia, Meyerbeer’s Roberto il diavolo, Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto, and Spontini’s La vestale. 44. See Cormac Newark, Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 41. 45. On this tension between fixity and circulation as characteristic of nineteenth­ century grand opéra and its cultures, see Laura Protano­Biggs’s introduction to the special issue “Nineteenth­Century Grand Opéra on the Move,” Cambridge Opera Journal 29, no. 1 (2017): 1–4. Arnold Jacobshagen has noted that until midcentury the livrets de mise en scène for grands opéras published in Paris were, with the exception of the one for Auber’s La Muette de Portici (1829), very concise documents, produced by theatrical agents not involved in the original stagings. This trend changed around 1849: Louis Palianti’s production book for Le Prophète is much more detailed; Meyer­ beer, who oversaw the premiere, was the driving force behind it. See Jacobshagen, “Oper als szenischer Text: Louis Paliantis Inszenierungsanweisungen zu Meyerbeers Le Prophète,” in Giacomo Meyerbeer: Le Prophète. Edition–Konzeption–Rezeption, ed. Matthias Brzoska, Andreas Jacob, and Nicole K. Strohmann (Hildesheim: Olms, 2009), 181–212. 46. Charlotte Bentley has examined these cultural dynamics in relation to the the­ atrical culture and musical press in early­nineteenth­century New Orleans. See her “The Race for Robert and Other Rivalries: Negotiating the Local and (Inter)National in Nineteenth­Century New Orleans,” Cambridge Opera Journal 29, no. 1 (2017), 94– 112, and New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera. 47. The installments appeared on January 1, January 15, and February 1. 48. Newark, Opera in the Novel, 14. Newark discusses the place of Balzac’s novella within changing modes of French music criticism and ideas about technology as a source of musical innovation. After publication in La Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris in 1837, Gambara was reprinted as part of Balzac’s Le Cabinet des Antiques (Paris: Souverain, 1839), Le Livre des douleurs (Paris: Souverain, 1840), and later the Études philosophiques of La comédie humaine (Paris: Furne, 1846). 49. The first Italian translation of Gambara, in a volume also including Il figlio maledetto and Massimilla Doni, was published by Treves in Milan in 1914. 50. “La musica in viaggio (Dal francese),” Il vaglio, April 1, 1843. 51. Newark, Opera in the Novel, 39. 52. See Anselm Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 119–21; and Gerhard, “‘Tanz auf dem Vulkan’: Meyerbeer, die Eisenbahn und die Revolution,” in Le Prophéte (Berlin: Deutsche Oper Berlin, 2017), 5–13, here 5–6. 53. “Viaggi della partizione di Roberto il diavolo prima della sua discesa in Italia,” Gazzetta musicale di Milano, June 2, 1844. 54. “Da Parigi a Brusselles [sic]: Storia Vera,” L’Italia musicale, July 3, 1850.

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55. Ermanno Picchi, “Estetica musicale: Il profeta di Meyerbeer a Firenze,” Il genio, January 18, 1853. The article appeared in three installments; the first two were pub­ lished on January 7 and January 11. As it happens, the Italian premiere of Guglielmo Tell took place not in Florence, but in Lucca in 1831. 56. See Il corriere dell’Arno, December 31, 1852. 57. Un Saint­Leon in­18.°, Lo scaramuccia, January 21, 1854. 58. Paul Smith, in Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris, January 1, 1854; repr. in Lo scaramuccia, January 20, 1854. 59. The Prophet: A Grand Opera in Four Acts, Arranged for the English Stage by H. Russell. First Performed on the English Stage at the Royal Surrey Theatre, Aug. 7, 1854 (London: Chapman, 1854). For a chronology of major world performances, see Rob­ ert Ignatius Letellier, Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète: A Parable of Politics, Faith and Tran­ scendence (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2018), 183–89. 60. See C. A. Gambini, in Gazzetta musicale di Milano, November 10, 1850; La Direzione, in La speranza, March 31, 1853; and Il pirata, November 3, 1853. 61. On this performance, which took place on March 17, 1853, see Pierluigi Fer­ rari, “‘Con particolare e ristrettissimo invito’: Una rappresentazione privata del Pro­ feta di Meyerbeer per la corte lorenese del Granducato di Toscana,” Musica antica 10 (1997): 33–36, at http://www.maurouberti.it/ma/ma97.I/Ferrari.html (accessed November 29, 2020). 62. Henry D’Arcis, in Revue et Gazette Musicale, April 3, 1853. 63. See Picchi, in Gazzetta musicale di Firenze, February 15, 1855. 64. “Art is cosmopolitan” is, however, the incipit of Picchi’s review of Il profeta for Il genio (“Estetica musicale. Il profeta di Meyerbeer a Firenze,” January 7, 1853). The critic sketches a short philosophical argument in which truth, beauty, and art are held together by their unchanging status across space and time. What is true and beautiful in art today, Picchi argues, will always be so, anywhere and at any time. Picchi is here trying to preempt criticisms from those who might reject Meyerbeer’s opera on the basis of its northern European lineage. 65. See Gooley, “Meyerbeer, Eclecticism, and Operatic Cosmopolitanism.” 66. Lo spettatore, February 4, 1855. 67. The first use of an electric arc lamp in a theater took place in London, at the Princess’s, in 1848. For more on early uses of Duboscq’s arc lamp in German theaters, see Scott Palmer, “A ‘Choréographie’ of Light and Space: Adolphe Appia and the First Scenographic Turn,” Theatre and Performance Design 1, nos. 1–2 (2015): 31–47. For a description and illustration of the lamp, see Duboscq’s Catalogue des appareils employés pour la production des phénomènes physiques au théatre (Paris: Chez J. Du­ boscq, 1877). 68. It is unclear whether the Royal Italian Opera’s arc lamp was based on Foucault’s model, or was even imported from Paris. Frederick Gye, the director of the theater, filed a patent for an arc lamp in 1878; see David Wilmore and T. A. L. Rees, eds., Brit­ ish Theatrical Patents, 1801–1900 (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1996), 42. 69. See Anna Tedesco, “Il grand opéra e i teatri italiani: Un caso emblematico; Il profeta a Parma (28 dicembre 1853),” Musica e storia 11, no. 1 (2003): 139–60, here 145. Louis Palianti’s Mise en scène: Le Prophète (Paris: Brandus, [1849]) notes that the Opéra’s electric arc lamp was manufactured by Lormier. The livret is reproduced in Robert H. Cohen, The Original Staging Manuals for Twelve Parisian Operatic Premières (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragron Press, 1991), 151–82.

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70. See Paolo Brenni, “The Physics Cabinet of the Istituto Tecnico Toscano,” in Cabinets of Experimental Philosophy in Eighteenth­Century Europe, ed. Jim Bennett and Sofia Talas (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), 215–41, here 221–26. 71. Cesare Bordiga, in Il buon gusto, January 2, 1853; and P. L. D. E., in Il genio, January 4, 1853. 72. See Marcello De Angelis and Elvira Garbero Zorzi, eds., Lo spettacolo meravi­ glioso: Il teatro della Pergola; L’opera a Firenze (Florence: Polistampa, 2000), 203–4. 73. Il corriere dell’Arno, December 31, 1852. 74. Cesare Bordiga, in Il buon gusto, January 9, 1853. For a short biography of Car­ raresi, see the obituary in the Gazzetta ufficiale del Regno d’Italia, October 14, 1878. 75. See the description in the anonymous article, reprinted from an unidentified paper, in L’arte, January 15, 1853. 76. See Il pirata, November 3, 1853; F. N., in L’Italia musicale, January 14, 1854; Teatri, arti e letteratura, April 26, 1855; S. Dalli, in Il buon gusto, June 15, 1856; and La Direzione, in Il buon gusto, October 4, 1857. Carraresi’s engagement in Ancona is also attested by a playbill for the Teatro delle Muse’s 1855 spring season, which announces that “the electric light that [in the ballet Guglielmo di Blankemberga] simulates the effect of the sun will be directed by the well­known chemist from Florence Giovanni Carraresi”; see Archivio di Stato di Ancona, Amministrazione del Teatro delle Muse, fasc. 155, b. 18. The impresario was the Florence­based Azzolino Tanini. 77. See the letter by D. B. reprinted in Teatri, arti e letteratura, February 9, 1854, and the contract signed in Florence on May 16, 1855, between Pierucci and the Marzi brothers, held at the Archivio storico del Teatro La Fenice, filza 265, Rendiconto estate 1855. Pierucci agreed not to accept any other theatrical appointments through­ out his engagement at La Fenice, and to provide the batteries, lenses, copper cables, and acids necessary for the electric sunrise. The impresa in turn committed to putting an assistant at his disposal. Teatri, arti e letteratura ( July 21, 1855) described Pierucci’s sun as producing “a dazzlingly bright light, as glaring as the sun.” 78. On Pierucci, see Roberto Vergara Caffarelli’s entry in Dizionario biogra­ fico degli italiani 83 (2015), http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/mariano­pierucci _(Dizionario­Biografico)/ (accessed May 11, 2020). For Pierucci’s connections with Florence, see Brenni, “The Physics Cabinet,” 227. At Turin’s Teatro Regio, it was Carlo Jest, the instrument maker in the physics department of the city’s university between 1852 and 1900, who operated the electric­sunrise machine at the local premiere of Il profeta in October 1853; see Lo scaramuccia, November 4, 1853. The machine seems to have been developed by Carlo’s father, Enrico Federico Jest; my thanks to Matteo Leone for providing me with this information taken from a catalog entry at Turin’s Museo di Fisica. In the spring of 1853, Carlo had also organized the first electric­light displays in the city; see Alberto Viriglio, Torino e i torinesi: Minuzie e memorie (Turin: Lattes, 1898), 215. 79. The first attempts at introducing gas lighting at La Pergola were made in 1834, but the new system replaced the former oil lamps only gradually between 1867 (in­ troduction on stage) and 1875 (auditorium); see Marcello Conati, “Aspetti della mes­ sinscena del Macbeth di Verdi,” Nuova rivista musicale italiana 15 (1981): 374–404, here 387n31). 80. More precisely, the “bilancia” (gas batten) was “a battery consisting of thirty flames with spouts positioned horizontally on a wooden suspension, hung about 6.4 meters above the stage. The flames are fed through a pipe made partly of metal and

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partly of leather, which runs from the main duct in the street to the aforementioned battery.” Copy of a letter by the engineer Flaminio Chiesi, dated Florence, February 6, 1855, held in the Archivio dell’Accademia degli Immobili, Florence (AAI), 36.3 (1855), 1963, f. 6. Further correspondence and minutes attesting to the use of gas alongside electricity can be found in AAI, 35.3 (1852), 1882; 36.3 (1855), 1963 and 1980; and 88.2 (1852). For a description and image reproduction of a gas batten, see Stefano Maz­ zanti, Luce in scena: Storia, teorie e tecniche dell’illuminazione a teatro (Bologna: Lo Scarabeo, 1998), 33–34. 81. On the tension between innovation­ and use­centered histories of technology, see David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (London: Profile, 2006). Laura Protano­Biggs has explained that the early years of permanent electric illumination at La Scala (from 1883) were also characterized by a critical discourse that fashioned the new lighting system, in continuity with ear­ lier technologies, less as an aesthetic medium than as a fixed element in the the­ ater. See Protano­Biggs, “‘Mille e Mille Calme Fiammelle’: Illuminating Milan’s Te­ atro alla Scala at the Fine Secolo,” Studi verdiani 23 (2013): 145–67. For a critique of the tendency to construct operatic technologies simply as objects of wonder, quite apart from more practical and prosaic concerns, see Benjamin Walton, “Technologi­ cal Phantoms of the Opéra,” in Nineteenth­Century Opera and the Scientific Imagina­ tion, ed. David Trippett and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 199–226. 82. See Paolo Brenni, Il Gabinetto di Fisica dell’Istituto Tecnico Toscano (Florence: Polistampa, 2009), 21–27; and Paolo Brenni and Massimo Misiti, “Costruttori italiani di strumenti scientifici del XIX secolo,” Nuncius: Annali di storia della scienza 1, no. 1 (1986): 141–84, here 142–44. 83. For a demonstration of Duboscq’s arc lamp in action, see the video by the Fon­ dazione Scienza e Tecnica Firenze at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz9ip9H Vekg&list=PLslExxbg3O­cc­tiNa5DcSmrLyY­GW4bQ&index=19&t=0s (accessed May 11, 2020). The Fondazione still preserves most of the instruments from the Isti­ tuto’s physics collection. 84. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 166 (emphasis in original). 85. See Palianti, Mise en scène, repr. in Cohen, The Original Staging Manuals, 167. 86. See Il profeta: Opera in cinque atti di Scribe, musica di Meyerbeer, da rappresen­ tarsi nell’I. e R. Teatro de’ Sigg. Accademici Immobili in Via della Pargola in Carnevale 1852–53 (Florence: Galletti, [1852]), 32. 87. L[uigi] F[erdinando] C[asamorata], Supplemento al n. 4 della Gazzetta musi­ cale di Milano, January 23, 1853. See also P. L. D. E., in Il genio, January 4, 1853. As late as 1860, La Pergola’s productions of Meyerbeer’s opera retained this altered setting; see L’Italia artistica, October 25, 1860. 88. For some nineteenth­century set designs, lithographs, and stereographs of the cathedral scene, see Letellier, Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète, figs. 62a–66. Anna Tedesco notes that Ronzi was in possession of a copy of the livret; see her “Le Prophète in Italy,” in Giacomo Meyerbeer: Le Prophète; Edition­Konzeption­Rezeption, 565–602, here 586. 89. See Palianti, Mise en scène, repr. in Cohen, The Original Staging Manuals, 167–69. 90. Carlo Lorenzini, Un romanzo in vapore: Da Firenze a Livorno; Guida storico­ umoristica (Florence: Mariani, 1856), 54. 91. Lorenzini, Un romanzo, 56.

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92. Lorenzini, Un romanzo, 56–57. 93. Lorenzini, Un romanzo, 57–58. 94. See Bruno Brunetti, Romanzo e forme letterarie di massa: Dai “misteri” alla fan­ tascienza (Bari: Dedalo, 1989), 76. 95. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of Cal­ ifornia Press, 1984), 104. 96. See Lorenzini, Un romanzo, 56. 97. Carlo Lorenzini, I misteri di Firenze: Scene sociali (Florence: Fioretti, 1857), 118. 98. I misteri di Firenze, for instance, opens with a masked ball at La Pergola, and borrowings from the theater can be found everywhere in Le avventure di Pinocchio: Storia di un burattino (1881–83). On Collodi’s activity as theater critic, see Daniela Marcheschi, “Carlo Collodi critico musicale, Gioacchino Rossini e il Risorgimento,” Bollettino del Centro rossiniano di studi 47 (2007): 5–27. 99. See Giorgio Mori, “Dall’Unità alla guerra: Aggregazione e disgregazione di un’area regionale,” in Storia d’Italia: Le regioni dall’Unità a oggi; La Toscana, ed. Giorgio Mori (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 3–342, here 7–8. 100. Giulio Giovannoni, Tuscany beyond Tuscany: Rethinking the City from the Pe­ riphery (Florence: Didapress, 2017), 90. 101. See Luba Freedman, “Florence in Two Pollaiuolo Paintings,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa: Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, series 5, 2, no. 1 (2010), 275–96, 391–94. 102. Giovanni Fanelli has argued that perceptions of Florence’s environment changed after the walls’ demolition, with the dichotomy between “inside” and “out­ side” giving way to that of “center” and “periphery.” See Fanelli, Firenze, architettura e città, 2 vols. (Florence: Vallecchi, 1973), vol. 1, 423. 103. See Fanelli, Firenze, architettura e città, 426.

Chapter Two 1. Errico Petrella’s words, reported by Antonio Petrella and quoted from Giovanni Carotti, Cenni biografici e ritratto di Errico Petrella (Turin: Tipografia di Giovanni Borgarelli, 1877), 11–12. 2. A[ntonio] G[hislanzoni], in Emporio pittoresco, April 22–28, 1877. 3. See Giuseppe Cosenza, La vita e le opere di E. Petrella (Rome: Biografia della Rivista d’Italia, 1909), 88. 4. Il goriziano, April 18, 1877. 5. Minimus, in Gazzetta musicale di Milano, April 22, 1877. According to Il gori­ ziano (April 18, 1877), it was the ensemble closing the procession that, “all of a sud­ den,” started to play the march. See also the accounts of the funeral in Carotti, Cenni biografici, 12–13, and Cosenza, La vita e le opere, 88–92. 6. Carotti, Cenni biografici, 13. 7. Carotti, Cenni biografici, 14. 8. Hannah Malone has noted that deathbed scenes became more common in real­ ist, bourgeois funerary sculpture during the 1880s and ’90s. The presence of the rela­ tives around the bed of the dying person provided evidence of his or her value, thus offering “a secular form of immortality”: Malone, Architecture, Death and Nation­ hood: Monumental Cemeteries of Nineteenth­Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 79.

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9. See Sergio Luzzatto, La mummia della repubblica: Storia di Mazzini imbalsa­ mato (Turin: Einaudi, 2011), and Alberto Mario Banti, “The Remembrance of He­ roes,” in The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth­Century Italy, ed. Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 171–90. Mazzini, whose body was transported from Pisa to Genoa by train shortly after his death in 1872, was also buried in Staglieno. His funeral cortege was attended by fifteen thousand people. 10. For two in­depth studies of these and other late­nineteenth­century develop­ ments in Italian death culture, see Dino Mengozzi, La morte e l’immortale: La morte laica da Garibaldi a Costa (Manduria, Bari, and Rome: Lacaita, 2000) and Moritz Buchner, Warum weinen? Eine Geschichte des Trauerns im liberalen Italien (1850–1915) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018). For a fascinating account of changing attitudes toward the dead body in Europe and North America from the Enlightenment to the present, see Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015). 11. Petrella’s funeral march is still performed today, particularly in Puglia and Si­ cily, as part of the processions that reenact Christ’s Passion on Good Friday. Several recordings are available on YouTube. 12. See Sebastian Werr, Die Opern von Errico Petrella: Rezeptionsgeschichte, Inter­ pretationen und Dokumente (Vienna: Praesens, 1999), 87. By the end of August 1857, Petrella had begun new negotiations with La Scala; see the correspondence in box R, doc. 34 of the theater’s archival collection at the Biblioteca Livia Simoni, Milan. 13. Recordings of this piece were made by Giovanni Valls (HMV, 1905), Augusto Scampini (Gramophone, 1908), Mario Gilion (Fonotipia, 1910), and Augusto Dianni (Polyphon, n.d.). Petrella’s sinfonia was also played during screenings of Jone o Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei, a 1913 silent film produced by Pasquali that was one of several early­twentieth­century cinematic adaptations of Bulwer­Lytton’s novel. See Marco Ladd, “Film Music Avant la Lettre? Disentangling Film from Opera in Italy, c. 1913,” Opera Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2018): 29–64. 14. [Giuseppe] Rovani, in Gazzetta ufficiale di Milano, January 29, 1858. On the novel’s publication history and multiple cultural adaptations in nineteenth­ to early­ twentieth­century Italy, see Maria Giovanna Bertani, “Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei e i primi passi della decima Musa: L’antico sulla pagina e sullo schermo (nel 1908),” Di­ onysus ex machina 5 (2014): 311–49. 15. K., in Il diavolo zoppo, November 13, 1858. L’Assedio di Leida ends with a flood­ ing. Vesuvian eruptions feature in Giovanni Pacini’s L’ultimo giorno di Pompei (1825) and Daniel Auber’s La muette de Portici (1828). Sarah Hibberd has shown how the eruption in the final tableau of La muette can be understood as part of a melodra­ matic tradition of scenic cataclysms typical of grand opéra finales; see Hibberd, “La Muette and her Context,” in Cambridge Companion to Grand Opéra, ed. David Charl­ ton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 149–67. 16. See, for instance, A[ntonio] G[hislanzoni], in L’Italia musicale, January 27, 1858. Similar criticisms of the staging were made in Naples; see K., in Il diavolo zoppo, November 13, 1858. 17. For a list of these and other Petrellian errors, see, for instance, G[iuseppe] Staffa, in La musica, December 1, 1858. 18. Rivista euganea, July 15, 1858. 19. See, for instance, Gnau, in Farfarello, February 1, 1858.

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20. Il Nano Milanese, in Il trovatore, February 3, 1858. 21. A[ntonio] Ghislanzoni, in L’Italia musicale, February 17, 1858. The other two theaters in question, besides La Scala, were the Carcano (staging L’Assedio di Leida) and the Santa Radegonda (staging Le precauzioni). 22. Gazzetta uffiziale di Venezia, quoted in L’Italia musicale, June 26, 1858. 23. Il trovatore, quoted in Sebastian Werr, “‘Musica Adatta all’Intelligenza ed alle Esigenze del Pubblico’: Giuseppe Verdi, Errico Petrella, and Their Audience,” Verdi Newsletter 25 (1998): 24–27, here 26n4. 24. Il diavoletto, March 8, 1865. For a chronology of Jone’s first performances in Italy and abroad, see Thomas G. Kaufman, Verdi and His Major Contemporaries: A Se­ lected Chronology of Performances with Casts (New York and London: Garland, 1990), 196–204. 25. This burgeoning elite/popular divide, to which Jone fell prey, emerges clearly from the following comment in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano, January 18, 1880: “At the Carcano we have had yet another little successful and very little desired produc­ tion of Jone, an opera that ought to be given some rest, together with many others that are, so to speak, the warhorses of minor theaters.” According to Kaufman (Verdi and His Major Contemporaries, 204), Jone’s last staged performance was in Palermo in 1924. Radio broadcasts from the Neapolitan station of the Ente Italiano per le Au­ dizioni Radiofoniche took place as late as 1929; see Radiorario, February 24–March 3, 1929, 43. The opera was revived in a concert in Caracas in 1981, where it was recorded for the Bongiovanni label. 26. The novella was published in its definitive form in volume 3 of D’Annunzio’s Le novelle della Pescara, 6 vols. (Milan: Treves, 1902), having appeared in print in two slightly different versions in 1885 and 1886. 27. For evidence of extracts from Jone being performed by American wind bands during the 1860s, see John Graziano, “New York Bands in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Wind Band in and around New York ca. 1830–1950, ed. Frank J. Cipolla and Donald Hunsberger (Van Nuys, CA: Alfred, 2007), 31–46. 28. For some preliminary thoughts on opera’s circulation outside nineteenth­ century theaters in multiple “folk” forms, see Roberto Leydi, “The Dissemination and Popularization of Opera,” in Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth, ed. Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 287–376, esp. 323–31 on wind bands. 29. Il Nano Milanese, in Il trovatore, February 3, 1858; and Rivista euganea, July 15, 1858. For Lucca’s advertisement, see L’Italia musicale, February 27, 1858. 30. The first eleven pieces published by Cottrau were advertised in the Gazzetta musicale di Napoli on May 6 (136), while a complete list appeared on October 28 (288). 31. The four manuscript scores, dated April, June, July, and August 1858, are held in box 3194 (38–41) of the library of the Conservatorio di Musica San Pietro a Ma­ jella in Naples. Eduardo Buonomo (b. 1825) studied violin, piano, and composition at the Regio Collegio di Musica, later specializing in piano and voice teaching. Be­ tween 1846 and 1860, he composed much military music, having replaced his father, Camillo Buonomo, as director of the fanfare of the Bourbon army. See Michele Carlo Caputo, Annuario generale della musica: Volume I. Dal 1° ottobre 1873 al 30 settembre 1874 (Naples: S. De Angelis, 1875), 50–51. 32. See Angelo De Paola, La banda: Evoluzione storica dell’organico (Rome: Ri­ cordi, 2002), 90–91. On arrangements of operatic music for Italian wind bands more

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generally, see Luca Ferretti, “L’opera in piazza: Per una drammaturgia delle trascri­ zioni operistiche per banda,” Studi urbinati, B: Scienze umane e sociali 66 (1993–94): 447–86. 33. See Antonio Carlini, “Le bande musicali nell’Italia dell’Ottocento: Il modello militare, i rapporti con il teatro e la cultura dell’orchestra negli organici strumentali,” Rivista italiana di musicologia 30, no. 1 (1995): 85–133, here 90–96. 34. This arrangement, dated April 26, 1864, and held at the Biblioteca Comunale “Clara Gallini” in Crema, is by Vincenzo Petrali, who directed the city’s municipal band between 1860 and 1872. 35. Funeral march no. 6, arranged by U[lisse] Faleni, register 154, Fondo Musicale della Filarmonica di Fiesole, Archivio Storico, Fiesole. 36. ALA a.BS­0115, Fondo Musicale della Banda Sociale, Biblioteca ed Archivio Storico, Ala. 37. The journal was El eco de Marte, founded in 1856. See Juan Carlos Galiano Díaz, “De los grandes teatros de ópera italianos a la Semana Santa andaluza: La recepción de la ópera Jone (1858, Errico Petrella) en España en el siglo XIX y su presencia en los repertorios bandísticos,” Música oral del Sur 15 (2018): 109–45, here 123–31. Ga­ liano Díaz notes that the release of this arrangement cannot have been prompted by Jone’s popularity in Spain. By 1867, the opera had been staged only once in Barcelona. The earliest Italian print edition of Jone’s march scored for band was the 1900 one by Giuseppe Mariani, published as part of Ricordi’s Biblioteca popolare pei corpi di musica e fanfare. 38. See Juan Carlos Galiano Díaz, “Los inicios de la marcha procesional en la Se­ mana Santa andaluza (1856–1898): Una revisión histórica,” in Bandas de música: Con­ textos interpretativos y repertorios, ed. Nicolás Rincón Rodríguez and David Ferreiro Carballo (Granada, Spain: Libargo, 2019), 149–71. My thanks to the author for shar­ ing a copy of his essay with me. In Mexico, Petrella’s march seems to have been widely used during funerals of famous political leaders; see Proteo, in El siglo diez y nueve, August 27, 1871. 39. Cosenza, La vita e le opere, 27. 40. The two earliest and most extended accounts of Nabucco’s origins are found in Michele Lessona, Volere è potere (Florence: Barbera, 1869) and Verdi’s so­called “Autobiographical Sketch” (1879), published as an appendix to chapter 6 of Arthur Pougin’s Giuseppe Verdi: Vita aneddotica, con note ed aggiunte di Folchetto (Milan: Ri­ cordi, 1881). Both accounts center on the “Va pensiero” anecdote, which was likely invented by Verdi himself. The anecdote is discussed in Pierluigi Petrobelli, Music in the Theater: Essays on Verdi and Other Composers, trans. Roger Parker (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 8–12; and Roger Parker, “Arpa d’Or dei Fatidici Vati”: The Verdian Patriotic Chorus in the 1840s (Parma: Istituto nazionale di studi verdiani, 1997), 33–37. 41. See Jone: Dramma lirico in quattro atti di Giovanni Peruzzini, musica del maestro Errico Petrella, da rappresentarsi nell’I. R. Teatro alla Scala il carnovale e la quaresima 1857–58 (Milan: Lucca, [1857–58]), 33. 42. See Edward Bulwer­Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii, 3 vols. (London: Bent­ ley, 1834), vol. 3, book 5, chapter 4, 229ff. 43. Bulwer­Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii, vol. 3, book 4, chapter 7, 27–30. 44. Petrella’s autograph score, which consists of four volumes (PART03207_01–04),

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is held at the Archivio Ricordi in Milan. Sixteen loose folios (PART03207_05) and a “Variante Atto IV” (PART03208), both in a different hand, have also survived. This “Variante,” in which the tempo of the march is described as “di marcia funebre,” pre­ dates the definitive reading of act 4 recorded in volume 4 of Petrella’s autograph and in early piano­vocal editions. Examples 2.1 and 2.3 in this chapter are based on the 1858 piano­vocal score published by Lucca, with plate numbers 11270–11288. 45. This manuscript score, whose frontispiece reads “Jone / Dramma lirico in quat­ tro atti / di Giovanni Peruzzini / Musica del Maestro Enrico Petrella / Rappresentata nel Real Teatro S. Carlo / L’anno 1858,” and, at top right, “Riveduto con la copia di Milano,” is held in the library of the Conservatorio di Musica San Pietro a Majella and is viewable online at http://www.internetculturale.it/ (accessed April 24, 2020). No indications of the exact moment when the band should walk on stage can be found in Petrella’s autograph score. 46. Another example of an operatic funeral march for band that in its dramatic context involves a shift from the solely aural to the aural and visual is the one from Nabucco. This march accompanies Fenena to execution in act 4, scene 1, and is played in an extended form in the following scene. 47. See Petrella’s autograph score, vol. 4, f. 379v and ff. 381r–381v. 48. See Corinno Mariotti, “Rassegna musicale,” Rivista contemporanea 11, no. 32 (1863): 303–6, here 305. 49. See Emanuele Senici, Music in the Present Tense: Rossini’s Italian Operas in Their Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 179–214. 50. See the contract signed between the Fratelli Marzi (impresarios at La Scala) and the Reggimento Reischach’s bandmaster (whose name is illegible) on November 30, 1857 for the forthcoming Carnival­Lent season, held at Milan’s Archivio Storico Civico, Fondo Spettacoli Pubblici, 108.2. This contract was for a band of at least thirty­ six musicians. My thanks to Davide Stefani for sharing a copy of the collection’s in­ ventory with me. The list of revisions to Jone’s costume and set designs requested by La Scala’s artistic committee on January 2, 1858 (COST 2852) suggests that the cos­ tumes of the band musicians were designed after those of the lictors. In contrast, costume design COST2851 lists “Banda” (24), “Comparse” (20), and “Ufficiali” (2) below the Roman guard uniform. Both documents are held at the Biblioteca Livia Si­ moni in Milan. When Jone was staged again at La Scala in 1862, it was with the Corpo di Musica della Guardia Nazionale; see Pompeo Cambiasi, La Scala, 1778–1889: Note storiche e statistiche, 4th ed. (Milan: Ricordi, 1889), 171–72. 51. Of that opening night, Galeno d’Arpa commented: “The Act 4 funeral march is what may be called aesthetic in the musical art; what a shame that we were not able to hear it played by the band, whereby it certainly lost much of its effect.” L’Italia mu­ sicale, July 14, 1858. 52. The Sinfonia occupies ff. 1r–37r of the autograph. Folio 39r carries the inscrip­ tion “Jone / Melodramma in quattro atti / Posto in musica / da / Errico Petrella / Giugno del 57,” and, at top left, “Autografo: ultimato e consegnato il 28 giugno 1857.” The preludio—which still survives, is forty­four measures long, and begins in C mi­ nor, later modulating to C major—also contains a few short hints of the funeral march. It occupies ff. 39v–44v of Petrella’s autograph. An annotation on f. 1r of the “Variante Atto IV” suggests that Jone’s last act was also revised later, sometime after June 1857.

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53. This would also seem to be implied by the slight differences in scoring between the sinfonia and the preludio. The scoring for the act 1 introduzione matches that of the preludio exactly. 54. Antonio Carlini has noted that the dark, thick sound typical of nineteenth­ century bands often resulted from extensive doubling of instrumental lines, volume being considered more important than color. See Carlini, “La musica militare austri­ aca nel primo Ottocento: Gli scritti di Giuseppe Fahrbach sulla Gazzetta musicale di Milano,” Musica/realtà 47 (1995): 147–79, here 159. 55. The words corresponding to this moment in Petrella’s autograph score (vol. 4, ff. 401r–401v) differ, however, from those found in the libretto and in Lucca’s piano­ vocal score. Instead of “Impreca a me ancor nell’ira cieca” (libretto) or “nell’ira estrema” (Lucca’s score), Arbace was originally supposed to sing “Ascolta! L’ora estrema a lui già suona,” directly responding to the sound of the march. 56. An example can be found in the coro, gran scena e duetto from act 2. In this piece, Burbo convinces Nidia, secretely in love with Glauco, to give the young Athe­ nian a magic potion that will help her win his heart. A mere six measures of festive music, played by the offstage chorus and band in the most unexpected and timely manner, come to Burbo’s aid in the process of persuasion. The music reminds Nidia that her rival Jone is enjoying the love and praises that she is not, hence weakening her hesitations to comply with Burbo’s advice. 57. See Verdi’s letter to Francesco Maria Piave of November 24, 1845, quoted in Marcello Conati, La bottega della musica: Verdi e La Fenice (Milan: Il saggiatore, 1983), 165. 58. Michele Girardi has examined the different functions of the band, both interna (offstage) and sul palco (onstage), in Verdi’s operas in his “Per un inventario della mu­ sica in scena nel teatro verdiano,” Studi verdiani 6 (1990): 99–145, here 112–17. 59. [Michele Ruta], “Ricordi pe’ giovani compositori: La marcia funebre,” La mu­ sica, May 5, 1877. 60. [Ruta], “Ricordi.” 61. [Ruta], “Ricordi.” 62. Giuseppe [ Joseph] Fahrbach, “Organizzazione della musica militare austri­ aca,” Gazzetta musicale di Milano, August 16, August 30, October 11, November 8, and December 13, 1846. For a reprint and historical contextualisation of Fahrbach’s ar­ ticles, see Carlini, “La musica militare austriaca.” 63. Here is Fahrbach’s complete definition of the marcia funebre: “It is written in 4/4, is meant for funerals, and therefore must have a sad, sorrowful tint [tinta]— which is why it is always set in a minor mode. Every measure marks four steps and their pace is the same as that of an ordinary march [ninety­five steps per minute]. In the funeral march, drums are muffled with a black cloth, and Turkish cymbals and glockenspiel are not included in the band.” Of the military march in general, Fahr­ bach writes: “The march’s function is to make marching more noble, to alleviate the soldier’s physical exertion, and to preserve the uniformity of [his] steps. The principal characteristics of the march are a well­marked rhythm and a virile, warlike character.” Fahrbach, “Organizzazione,” Gazzetta musicale di Milano, October 11, 1846. 64. According to Raymond Monelle, the “funeral march” topic dates from the 1790s, when funeral celebrations became a key part of the cult of the French Revolu­ tionaries. Through most of the eighteenth century, no “funeral marches” are found in military collections, and simple slow marches were played at funerals. Although

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Monelle emphasizes the evocative function of the “funeral march,” calling it “one of those topics that originate, broadly speaking, as expressive habits, not as aspects of social music,” Ruta’s description calls us to consider the practical functions that, at least by the late nineteenth century, such pieces had come to serve. Raymond Monelle, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral (Bloomington and Indiana­ polis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 125–30 (quotation at 130). 65. See Marcel Mauss, Sociology and Psychology: Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (Lon­ don: Routledge, 1979), 70–88. 66. Haun Saussy, “Contagious Rhythm: Verse as a Technique of the Body,” in Crit­ ical Rhythm: The Poetics of a Literary Life Form, ed. Ben Glaser and Jonathan Culler (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 106–27, here 113. 67. Mauss, Sociology and Psychology, 76. 68. The concept of “affordance,” a term coined by James J. Gibson in ecological psychology, has received a certain amount of attention from music scholars in recent years, as a corrective to New Musicological approaches to music’s social content that are centered too firmly on semiotics. See, for instance, Tia De Nora, After Adorno: Re­ thinking Music Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 45–58; and Richard Taruskin, “Afterward: What Else?” in Representation in Western Music, ed. Joshua S. Walden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 287–309, here 303–6. 69. William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human His­ tory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 2–3. 70. See Monelle, The Musical Topic, 113–15. 71. On the introduction of gymnastics in Italian school education, see Suzanne Stewart­ Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians 1860–1920 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 157–67. As Stewart­ Steinberg ob­ serves, however, the most regimented, choreographic aspects of the military or “Ger­ man” method of gymnastics were challenged by advocates of the “Swedish” method, which emphasized natural and individual movement. On the same topic in relation to Britain, see Erin Johnson­Williams, “Musical Discipline and Victorian Liberal Re­ form,” in Musical and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject, ed. Sarah Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 15–36. 72. For an overview of the key functions of nineteenth­century Italian bands, see Carlini, “Le bande musicali.” 73. According to a widely quoted statistic, over 50 percent of the municipal bande and fanfare (1,607 in total) active in Italy in 1871 and 1872 had been established after 1860. See Istituti e società musicali in Italia: Statistica (Rome: Regia Tipografia, 1873). 74. Emanuele Krakamp, Progetto per la riorganizzazione delle musiche militari del Regno d’Italia (Naples: Gargiulo, 1863), 5. 75. Krakamp, Progetto, 12n1. 76. On these attempts at reform, see De Paola, La banda, 147–74 and 177–86. 77. Vito Fedeli, for example, writing of the international competition of bands and choral societies at the 1898 Turin National Exhibition, hailed the technical pro­ gress whereby “the old vulgar and reboant band is becoming a real orchestra of wind instruments, gentle and well balanced.” Gazzetta musicale di Milano, August 4, 1898. 78. Alessandro Vessella, La banda dalle origini fino ai nostri giorni: Notizie storiche con documenti inediti e un’appendice musicale (Milan: Istituto editoriale nazionale, 1935), 212. 79. Antonio Carlini, “La banda: Strumento primario di divulgazione delle opere

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verdiane nell’Italia rurale dell’Ottocento,” in Verdi 2001: Atti del convegno internazio­ nale, Parma, New York, New Haven, 24 gennaio–1° febbraio 2001, ed. Fabrizio Della Seta, Roberta Montemorra Marvin, and Marco Marica, 2 vols. (Florence, 2003), vol. 1, 135–43, here 138. 80. On the bell/band comparison, see (drawing on Marco Fincardi) Mario Isnen­ ghi, L’Italia in piazza: I luoghi della vita pubblica dal 1848 ai giorni nostri (Milan: Mon­ dadori, 1994), 129. On the bande da giro, which were and remain particularly common in the Puglia region, see Bianca Tragni, I nomadi del pentagramma: Le bande musicali in Puglia (Giovinazzo, Italy: Libreria Peucetia, 1985). 81. See Mengozzi, La morte e l’immortale, 66–73. 82. See Buchner, Warum weinen? 267–68. 83. See Mengozzi, La morte e l’immortale; and Tommaso Petrucciani, La rivolu­ zione entra a suon di banda: La scoperta della politica in alcune comunità laziali nell’Ita­ lia liberale (Castelli Romani 1870–1913) (Velletri: PM Edizioni, 2016), 236–40. Men­ gozzi (152–55) has shown that crowds became a key protagonist in funeral corteges only from the 1880s and ’90s; before then they retained a marginal, spectatorial role. 84. In addition to the texts discussed in this final section of the chapter, I have come across references to Petrella’s march in Quidam, “Un corteo,” Il lavoro 24 (1883): 402–9; Bollettino della Società della Gioventù cattolica italiana, June 15, 1886; La caserma, October 1, 1886; Musica sacra, March 1888; Gazzetta musicale di Milano, March 31, 1889; Grazia Pierantoni Mancini, La signora Tilberti (Città di Castello, Italy: Lapi, 1900), 45; and Matilde Serao, La mano tagliata (Florence: Salani, 1912), 94. 85. Mark Seymour, Emotional Arenas: Life, Love, and Death in 1870s Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 114. 86. Ernesto Pozzi, Un’estate in Sant’Andrea: Diario d’un prigioniero politico (Lodi, Italy: Società Cooperativo­Tipografica, 1872), 92. Pozzi’s diary was first published in 1869 in Genoa’s republican newspaper Il dovere, of which he was the editor. 87. Pozzi, Un’estate, 92. 88. Luzzatto, La mummia della repubblica, 10. 89. Farina, Amore ha cent’occhi (Milan: Brigola, 1885), 88. Farina’s novel was first published in the Nuova antologia in 1882, before appearing as a book in 1883. 90. Farina, Amore, 90. 91. See Dino Manca, “Introduzione,” in Il carteggio Farina–De Gubernatis (1870– 1913), ed. Dino Manca (Cagliari, Italy: CUEC, 2005), ix–cxvii, here xc–xciv. 92. The two classic accounts of the “Southern Question” and of nineteenth­century representations of the mezzogiorno are John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Ste­ reotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1999) and Nel­ son Moe, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). For an examination of the place of Italy and its South in the construction of a modern European identity, see Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2007). 93. For a chief example, see the article by Doctor Veritas (alias Leone Fortis) in L’Illustrazione italiana, April 15, 1877. 94. For a discussion of the theme of disease in Capuana’s novel, see Edwige Co­ moy Fusaro, “Profumo o il mal di parole,” in Luigi Capuana: Experimental Fiction and Cultural Mediation in Post­Risorgimento Italy, ed. Annamaria Pagliaro and Brian Zuc­ cala (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2019), 125–43.

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95. Luigi Capuana, Profumo (Milan: Treves, 1922), 114. The book was first pub­ lished by Lauriel in Palermo in 1892. 96. Capuana, Profumo, 109. 97. Capuana mentions Jone’s march, this time in the context of a funeral, also in his Sicilian novella “Don Fano Amarù,” published in Capuana, Le ultime paesane: Novelle postume (Milan: Treves, 1923), 51–67. 98. On Pigorini Beri, see Paola De Sanctis Ricciardone, L’Italia di Caterina: Demo­ logia e antropologia nelle opere di Caterina Pigorini­Beri, 1845–1924 (Rome: Bagatto, 1990). 99. For an overview of Italian folklore studies from a historical perspective, see Alberto M. Cirese, “Folklore in Italy: A Historical and Systematic Profile and Bibli­ ography,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 11, nos. 1–2 (1974): 7–79. 100. Caterina Pigorini Beri, “Il Venerdì Santo a Pioraco,” Natura ed arte 5, no. 9 (1895–96): 743–54, here 751. 101. Pigorini Beri, “Il Venerdì Santo a Pioraco,” 752. 102. Pigorini Beri, “Il Venerdì Santo a Pioraco,” 754. 103. Seymour defines “emotional arenas” as social spaces, whether physical or imagined, “where interplays between subjective feelings and the external world are continuously shaped and staged.” Seymour, Emotional Arenas, 12. 104. Salvatore Farina, “Errico Petrella,” La lettura 13, no. 11 (1913): 1029–36, here 1036. 105. For some remarks in this regard, see Hannah Malone, “New Life in the Mod­ ern Cultural History of Death,” Historical Journal 62, no. 3 (2019): 833–52, here 838 and 852. 106. G[herardo] Gherardi, “E gira!” Cordelia 50, no. 6 (1931): 281–84, here 281. 107. Gherardi, “E gira!” 284. 108. See, for instance, Mariotti, “Rassegna musicale,” 305; and El Siglo Diez y Nueve, August 27, 1871. Matilde Serao also mentions Jone’s march, performed on a barrel organ, in her Gothic novel La mano tagliata (1912). 109. First 1244/65 (sinfonia) and First 3038/65 (act 4 trio). These recordings, which have been dated 1908 (terminus ad quem) and 1909–11 respectively by Pietro Zappalà, based on the FIRST’s historical catalogues, can be listened to at http:// musicologia.unipv.it/dipartimento/first/digitalizzazioni.html (accessed April 29, 2020).

Chapter Three 1. The anecdote appears, in slightly different versions, in Harper’s Weekly, March 24, 1860; Théodore de Grave, Biographie d’Adelina Patti (Paris: Librairie de Castel, 1865), 5–6; Filippo Filippi, in La perseveranza, November 14, 1877; Michel Mortier, Biographical Sketch of Madame Adelina Patti (New York: Steinway and Sons, 1881), 8; Maurice Strakosch, Souvenirs d’un impresario (Paris: Ollendorff, 1887), 11– 12; and Herman Klein, The Reign of Patti (London: Fisher Unwin, 1920), 6–7. For the mostly fictional character of this narrative, see John Frederick Cone, Adelina Patti: Queen of Hearts (Aldershot, UK: Scholar Press, 1994), 11–12. 2. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 25.

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3. [ J. B.] Rheinepont, in La caricatura, November 16, 1865. A long biographical tradition, including Rheinepont, mistakenly places Patti’s birth on a range of dates between February and April 1843. 4. De Grave, Biographie, 6–7. De Grave’s biography was reprinted and translated in L’Italia artistica in the issues of November 18 and 27, 1865. 5. See, for instance, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Memoranda of the Life of Jenny Lind (Philadelphia: Peterson, 1851), 12. 6. Karen Henson, Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Cen­ tury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 145 (emphasis in original). 7. Literature regarding each of these developments is cited below. On acoustic ex­ periments centered on voice and their implications for contemporary music theory and pedagogy, see Benjamin Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 178–214. 8. The expression “due mondi” appears in articles from Il sistro, supplement to the issue of November 13, 1865; La perseveranza, November 16, 1865 (by Filippo Filippi); Il trovatore, November 24, 1865 (by R. M.); and L’arpa, March 12, 1866. The second quotation is from Tic., in Il fischietto, December 28, 1865. Antonio Ghislanzoni also called Patti “a worldwide celebrity”: Gli artisti da teatro, 6 vols. (Milan: Daelli, 1865), vol. 6, 72. 9. See Cone, Adelina Patti, 9–14. 10. Quoted in L’arte, November 20, 1877. 11. See Cone, Adelina Patti, 27, 33, 37. 12. See De Grave, Biographie, 17–21 (quotations at 24–25). 13. On Patti’s American performances during both her early and her later life, see Hilary Poriss, “She Came, She Sang . . . She Conquered? Adelina Patti in New York,” in European Music and Musicians in New York City, 1840–1900, ed. John Graziano (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 218–34. 14. See John Rosselli, Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 144–46, 186–95. On transatlantic networks of opera performers between Italy and Latin America, see also, by the same author, “Latin America and Italian Opera: A Process of Interaction, 1810–1930,” Revista de Musicología 16, no. 1 (1993): 139–45, and “The Opera Business and the Italian Immi­ grant Community in Latin America 1820–1930: The Example of Buenos Aires,” Past and Present 127, no. 1 (1990): 155–82. 15. Il mondo artistico, October 11, 1871. See also Ghislanzoni, Gli artisti da teatro, 72 (“Adelina Patti began where the other great [singers] end, in the theaters of Amer­ ica, Paris, and London”); and Klein, The Reign of Patti, 52–53 (“The progress of the Patti triumph in an opposite direction to that of the ordinary solar orbit—namely, from west to east, instead of from east to west—furnished quite a new and amazing record”). 16. New York Herald, March 23, 1865. 17. Il giornale illustrato, November 25–December 2, 1865. 18. Doctor Veritas [pseud. of Leone Fortis], in L’illustrazione italiana, Novem­ ber 11, 1877. In addition to her 1865–66 performances in Florence and Turin and her 1877–78 tour, Patti sang in Italy on a second tournée in 1879, in a performance of La traviata in Milan in 1893, and in concerts in Rome in 1899 and 1903. 19. One Vincenzo Ghinassi evoked Patti’s Italian blood in an 1865 poem: “Fata del suolo ispano . . . uscita dal gentil sangue italiano . . . ed un senso profondo / nel du­

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plice emisfero / desti di meraviglia” (Fairy of the Hispanic soil . . . born of the gentle Italian blood . . . a deep sense of wonder you arouse in both emispheres). “Il canto di Adelina Patti,” in Canti (Florence: Le Monnier, 1874), 229–33, here 229. 20. See Alberto Mario Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento: Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), translated in English by Stuart Oglethorpe as The Nation of the Risorgimento: Kinship, Sanctity, and Honour in the Origins of Unified Italy (Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2020); Banti and Paul Ginsborg, “Per una nuova storia del Risorgimento,” in Storia d’Italia, Annali 22, Il Risorgimento, ed. Alberto Mario Banti and Paul Ginsborg (Turin: Einaudi, 2007), xxiii–xli; and Banti, Sublime madre nostra: La nazione italiana dal Risorgimento al fa­ scismo (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 2011). 21. The three unsuccessful bills were presented by Giovanni Battista Cassinis, Vin­ cenzo Miglietti, and Pisanelli. Vacca’s own proposal became effective on January 1, 1866. In the following discussion of nineteenth­century Italian citizenship law, I draw on Carlo Bersani, “Modelli di appartenenza e diritto di cittadinanza in Italia dai codici preunitari all’unità,” Rivista di storia del diritto italiano 70 (1997): 277–344, esp. 329– 44; and, particularly, on Sabina Donati, A Political History of National Citizenship and Identity in Italy, 1861–1950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 22. Jacqueline Bhabha, Francesca Klug, and Sue Shutter, quoted in Donati, A Po­ litical History, 38. 23. A[mintore] Galli, in Emporio pittoresco, November 18–24, 1877. 24. See, for instance, La Lanterne, September 14, 1898; Le Figaro, September 14, 1898; and Truth, September 29, 1898. 25. See Klein, The Reign of Patti, 29, 315; Amintore Galli, in L’emporio pittoresco, November 18–24, 1877; and Eduard Hanslick, “Adelina Patti” (1879), in Music Crit­ icisms, 1846–99, ed. and trans. Henry Pleasants (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1963), 167–83, here 171. Patti herself, in a short autobiography, claimed to have been fluent in French, English, German, Italian, and Spanish from an early age, and later to have been able to “converse fairly in Russian and Portuguese”: T. P. O’Connor, ed., In the Days of My Youth: Containing the Autobiographies of Thirty­Four Well­Known Men and Women of To­Day (London: Pearson, 1901), 81. 26. Klein, The Reign of Patti, 315. 27. Filippo Filippi, in La perseveranza, November 14, 1877. “Yriarte” is most likely a mistake for Sebastián Yradier (1809­65), a Spanish composer author of the song “La calesera,” which Patti occasionally sang in Rossini’s lesson scene, and which she also recorded. “Home! Sweet Home!” was one of her favorite interpolations in Il bar­ biere; I have found no evidence, however, that she ever introduced songs by Schubert or by Nadaud. For shifting performance traditions associated with Rossini’s lesson scene, and Patti’s role within them, see Hilary Poriss, Changing the Score: Arias, Prima Donnas, and the Authority of Performance (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 135–68. 28. See Franco Pasti, Un poliglotta in biblioteca: Giuseppe Mezzofanti (1774–1849) a Bologna nell’età della Restaurazione (Bologna: Pàtron, 2006). 29. See the chronology of Patti’s performances in Cone, Adelina Patti, 323–81. Ac­ cording to Cone’s list, the operas that Patti occasionally performed in French were Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, his Le pardon de Ploërmel, and Gounod’s Roméo et Ju­ liette. At the Théâtre de l’Opéra in New Orleans during the 1860–61 season, she sang several roles in Italian while the rest of the cast performed in French. She neverthe­

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less decided to sing Les Huguenots in the original language as a gesture of friendship to her French­speaking colleagues and the local audience. My thanks to Charlotte Bentley for explaining this. 30. For a list and discussion of these recordings, all made for Gramophone & Typewriter, see Roger Freitas, “Singing Herself: Adelina Patti and the Performance of Femininity,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 71, no. 2 (2018): 287–369. 31. Klein, The Reign of Patti, 31. Hanslick also states that Patti herself described English as her mother tongue; see Hanslick, “Adelina Patti,” 171. Although I have not come across any observations on Patti’s pronunciation in their writings, Ameri­ can commentators also occasionally stated that English was, in practice, her mother tongue. See, for instance, the comment by the critic for Harper’s Weekly (March 24, 1860): “Miss Patti is almost an American; the English is the tongue she knows and likes best.” My remarks on listening to and reading mispronounced language as a community­bonding experience are indebted to Delia Casadei’s discussion of Adri­ ano Celentano’s “Prisencolinensinainciusol” (1972–74) as a staging of Italian “collec­ tive mishearings” of English; see Casadei, “Crowded Voice: Speech, Music and Com­ munity in Milan, 1955–1974,” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2015, 170–227. 32. Klein, The Reign of Patti, 160. Klein here returns to the Strakosch episode, fur­ ther emphasizing the contrast between his “‘zou’ and ‘zee’” and Patti’s flawless pro­ nunciation of Handel’s lines. 33. See the entry “Received Pronunciation” in Tom McArthur, Jacqueline Lam­ McArthur, and Lisa Fontaine, eds., The Oxford Companion to the English Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), at https://www.oxfordreference.com/ (ac­ cessed October 20, 2020). 34. See Stephanie Hackert, The Emergence of the English Native Speaker: A Chap­ ter in Nineteenth­Century Linguistic Thought (Boston and Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 63–88. As Hackert explains, the Oxford English Dictionary ascribes the first use of the phrase to the New England philologist George P. Marsh, who employed it in an 1858 address (published the following year) at Columbia College in New York. 35. John E. Joseph, Language, Mind and Body: A Conceptual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 169. 36. See Joseph, Language, Mind and Body, 168–71; and Hackert, The Emergence of the English Native Speaker, 91–112. 37. On early­twentieth­century British elocution mania and efforts to purify the voice by way of “subtraction,” see Steven Connor, “Introduction: Vocus Pocus,” in This Is a Voice: 99 Exercises to Train, Project and Harness the Power of Your Voice, ed. Jeremy Fisher and Gillyanne Kayes (London: Wellcome Collection, 2016), 6–16. 38. Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 1–14, here 7, 6. 39. Benjamin Steege, “Vocal Culture in the Age of Laryngoscopy,” in Nineteenth­ Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination, ed. David Trippett and Benjamin Wal­ ton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 44–62, here 49. On the “ammo­ niaphone,” a medical device invented by the Scottish doctor Carter Moffat in 1884, which promised to purify harsh northern European voices through inhalation of ar­ tificial Italian air, see also Melissa Dickson, “Something in the Air: Dr Carter Moffat’s Ammoniaphone and the Victorian Science of Singing,” Science Museum Group Journal 7 (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.15180/170702.

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40. Filippi, in La perseveranza, November 14, 1877, repr. in Gazzetta musicale di Milano, November 18, 1877. 41. Jillian R. Cavanaugh, “Accent Matters: Material Consequences of Sounding Local in Northern Italy,” Language & Communication 25, no. 2 (2005): 127–48, here 131. 42. This single recording is a New Year’s greeting that Patti captured on disc in 1905 as a memento of her voice for her third husband, the Baron Cederström. 43. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016). 44. See Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth­Century America (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 45. On this topic and the need to decolonize vocal timbre, see also Nina Eidsheim, “Synthesizing Race: Towards an Analysis of the Performativity of Vocal Timbre,” Trans: Revista Transcultural de Música 13 (2009), at https://www.sibetrans.com/trans /article/57/synthesizing­race­towards ­an­analysis ­of ­the­performativity­of­vocal ­timbre (accessed December 12, 2018); and, by the same author, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music (Durham, NC: Duke Uni­ versity Press, 2019). 46. Hearth and Home, quoted in The Musical World, August 17, 1872 (my emphasis). 47. See Scott A. Carter, “Forging a Sound Citizenry: Voice Culture and the Em­ bodiment of the Nation, 1880–1920,” American Music Research Center Journal 22 (2013): 11–34. According to Carter, the notion of “voice culture” was firmly in place by the 1880s, although the phrase had appeared in the United States around 1850 to describe elocutionary training in public schools. 48. See John M. Picker, “Threads across the Ocean: The Transatlantic Telegraph Cable, July 1858, August 1866,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth­ Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga, extension of Romanticism and Victorian­ ism on the Net, http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=john­picker­threads ­across­the­ocean­the­transatlantic­telegraph­cable­july­1858­august­1866 (accessed December 14, 2018). 49. For two studies that explore different responses to social and cultural anxieties surrounding opera in the nineteenth­century United States, see Katharine Preston, Op­ era for the People: English­Language Opera and Women Managers in Late 19th­Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) and Larry Hamberlin, Tin Pan Op­ era: Operatic Novelty Songs in the Ragtime Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 50. Scribner’s Monthly, April 1871, 686. An almost exact contemporary of Patti, Kel­ logg (1842–1916) also studied with Muzio and other Italian voice pedagogues in the United States, finding herself caught up in the debates about Italian­ versus English­ language opera that raged there from the mid­nineteenth century onward. From 1873 to 1877 she managed the country’s most important English­language company. On her, see Preston, Opera for the People, 27–32, 54–57, 182–98. 51. Scribner’s Monthly, April 1871, 686. See also the New York Herald, November 6, 1867: “The full, rich voice of Mrs. [ Jenny] Van Zandt and the nightingale tones of Adelina Patti are exclusively American.” Jenny van Zandt (b. 1840), also known as Vanzini, was a student of Francesco Lamperti’s. Strakosch praised several early Amer­ ican female opera singers in his Souvenirs d’un impresario, 197–210. 52. R. A. Look [pseud. of Riccardo Lucchesi], in Gazzetta musicale di Milano, April 28, 1889.

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53. See Claudio Vellutini, “Interpreting the Italian Voice in London (and Else­ where),” in London Voices 1820–1840: Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories, ed. Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 51–69. 54. New York Herald, November 6, 1867. 55. New York Herald, February 8, 1868. 56. Chicago Tribune, November 6, 1867. See also the definition that the critic for the Musical World (August 31, 1861) gave of Patti on her debut at the Birmingham Festival: “our recent musical importation from America—an importation in the eyes of sundry enthusiastic musicians worth all the cotton ever sent from New Orleans.” 57. According to the Dwight’s Journal of Music (December 21, 1878), “a short time since . . . there were over two hundred American girls pursuing vocal studies” in Mi­ lan alone. 58. Lucius, American and Italian Cantatrici; or, A Year at the Singing Schools of Mi­ lan (London: Cautley Newby, 1867), [1]. 59. Lucius, American and Italian Cantatrici, 42, 109, 108. 60. Lucius, American and Italian Cantatrici, 42. 61. See David Bellos, “Fictions of the Foreign: The Paradox of ‘Foreign­ Soundingness,’” in In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, ed. Es­ ther Allen and Susan Bernofsky (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 31–43. 62. Lucius, American and Italian Cantatrici, 44. 63. See Laura Protano­Biggs, “Musical Materialities in Milan and Liberal Italy at the fine secolo,” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2014, 65–96. 64. See Martha Feldman, The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (Oak­ land: University of California Press, 2015), 109. Philip A. Duey discusses some early uses of the term “bel canto” in his Bel Canto in Its Golden Age: A Study of Its Teaching Concepts (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1951), 4–12. 65. See also Hanslick, “Adelina Patti.” 66. Filippi, in La perseveranza, November 13, 1877, repr. in Gazzetta musicale di Milano, November 18, 1877. 67. Filippi, in La perseveranza, repr. in Gazzetta musicale di Milano, May 11, 1884. Filippi’s statement appears in a review of Francesco Lamperti’s L’arte del canto (1883), of which the critic offers a section­by­section summary. His statement is loosely based around a similar claim made by the pedagogue. 68. Filippi, in La perseveranza, November 13, 1877, repr. in Gazzetta musicale di Milano, November 18, 1877. 69. Fortis, in L’illustrazione italiana, November 11, 1877. 70. According to Tullio De Mauro’s 1963 estimate, only 2.5 percent of the popu­ lation spoke Italian. More recent studies have brought this figure up to about 10 per­ cent, further suggesting that the number of Italians with at least some familiarity with the national language was probably even larger. See Derek Beales and Eugenio F. Biagini, The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy (London and New York: Rout­ ledge, 2002), 74–80. 71. Casadei, “Crowded Voice,” 9. See also, by the same author, “A Voice that Car­ ries,” in Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense, ed. Gavin Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 150–71. 72. Alessandro Manzoni, “Dell’unità della lingua e dei mezzi per diffonderla,” Nuova antologia di scienze, lettere ed arti 7, no. 3 (1868): 425–41. 73. For a summary of these responses, see Brian Richardson, “Questions of Lan­

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guage,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture, ed. Zygmunt G. Ba­ ranski and Rebecca J. West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 63–79, here 65–70. 74. Manzoni, “Dell’unità della lingua,” 439. 75. For a fascinating examination of language and/as pure sonority in Arrigo Boito’s poems and compositions, some of them dating from the 1860s, see Arman Schwartz, Puccini’s Soundscapes: Realism and Modernity in Italian Opera (Florence: Olschki, 2016), 15–44. 76. See Katherine Bergeron, Voice Lessons: French Mélodie in the Belle Epoque (Ox­ ford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 69–120; and the appendix, signed by Manzoni, Ruggero Bonghi, and Giulio Carcano, to the “Relazione intorno all’unità della lingua,” 439–41, here 440. 77. Istruzioni e programmi per l’insegnamento della lingua italiana e dell’aritmetica nelle scuole elementari, Regio Decreto, October 10, 1867 (Florence: Stamperia Reale, 1867), 4–5; and Paolo E. Balboni, Storia dell’educazione linguistica in Italia: Dalla Legge Casati alla Riforma Gelmini (Turin: UTET, 2009), 18. For a brief overview of the place of orthoepy in post­Unification linguistic debates, see Michela Dota, “‘In aiuto all’unità della lingua e contro gli errori provenienti dal dialetto’: Il sillabario e il vocabolarietto di Antonino Traina,” Italiano LinguaDue 2 (2015): 169–96, here 171–74. 78. Il Diavoletto, March 1, 1863. Tedeschi asserted the need to “bring together, as brothers, all those peoples who constitute our great and educated nation as soon as possible, including through uniform, correct pronunciation of our classic language.” Tedeschi, Guida prática per la rètta pronúncia della língua italiana e mètodo per dif­ fónderla mediante l’ortografia (Siena, Italy: Tip. all’insegna dell’Ancora di G. Landi, 1862), 12. 79. Lamprecht, Manuale dell’accento tonico e della pronuncia delle lettere e, o, s, z della lingua italiana (Trieste, Italy: Nuova tipografia Herrmanstorfer, 1862), 8. 80. See Kittler, Discourse Networks, 27–53; Bergeron, Voice Lessons, 77–92; Fran­ cesco Paolo Japichino’s entry “sillabario” in the Enciclopedia Italiana (1936), at https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ (accessed November 29, 2020); and Michela Dota, “Le ‘sottigliezze di certa didattica superlativa’ della grammatica elementare: Storia (attestata) del metodo rafforzista (1814–1914), Italiano LinguaDue 2 (2017): 397–417. 81. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 51. 82. On the paradox of Italian as a “mother tongue,” at least until the age of radio and television, see Giulio C. Lepschy, Mother Tongues and Other Reflections on the Italian Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 17–25. 83. L’arte del canto in ordine alle tradizioni classiche ed a particolare esperienza: Norme tecniche e consigli agli allievi ed agli artisti (Milan: Ricordi, 1883), translated in English by Walter Jekyll as The Art of Singing according to Ancient Tradition and Personal Experience: Technical Rules and Advice to Pupils and Artists (London: Ri­ cordi, [1884]). 84. See Antonio Rostagno’s entry on Francesco Lamperti in the Dizionario bi­ ografico degli italiani 63 (2004), at http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/francesco ­lamperti_(Dizionario­Biografico)/ (accessed June 12, 2020); and James Stark, Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 42–45, 99–104.

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85. See Lamperti, The Art of Singing, 35–50. 86. Manuel García, Traité complet de l’art du chant, 2 vols. (Paris: Troupenas, 1840– 47). See also Stark, Bel Canto, 42–45. 87. See Protano­Biggs, “Musical Materialities,” 69–70. 88. On Dante’s reception in a range of nineteenth­century Italian media, see Aida Audeh and Nick Havely, eds., Dante in the Long 19th Century (New York: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 2012). 89. “In most of the treatises on singing the whole question of pronunciation has been either omitted, or only partially discussed”: Lamperti, The Art of Singing, 38. 90. Lamperti, The Art of Singing, 42. 91. Lamperti, The Art of Singing, 42. 92. On the lack of a standard definition of “bel canto” and the term’s ambiguity in twentieth­century scholarship in particular, see Stark, Bel Canto, xvii–xx, and Owen Jander and Ellen T. Harris’s entry for “bel canto” for Grove Music Online (2001), ed. Deane L. Root, at https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.02551 (ac­ cessed November 29, 2020). 93. Feldman, The Castrato, 109. 94. For a reading of bel canto as an “ideal of song and of singing” bound up with modern discourses of transmission and dispersion prompted by early sound record­ ing devices, see Gabriela Cruz, “The Fairy Tale of Bel Canto: Walt Disney, Theodor Adorno, Kurt Weill Play the Gramophone,” in Opera and Video: Technology and Spec­ tatorship, ed. Héctor J. Pérez (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2012), 13–44. Edison published two articles in which he explained the future functions of his phonograph as he envisioned it: “The Phonograph and Its Future,” North American Review 126, no. 262 (1878): 527–36; and “The Perfected Phonograph,” North American Review 146, no. 379 (1888): 641–50. A subtle account of vocal technologies as “crudescences of consolidated cultural behaviors, . . . mere accoutrements of wider techniques for pro­ jecting voice,” is offered by James Q. Davies in “Pneumotypes: Jean de Reszke’s High Pianissimos and the Occult Sciences of Breathing,” in Nineteenth­Century Opera, ed. Trippett and Walton, 21–43, here 23. 95. Storage, processing, and transmission of data are the three fundamental functions of Kittler’s media. For a discussion of different responses to the German scholar’s media theory by proponents of so­called “cultural techniques” and “media archaeology,” see the essays in Alexander Rehding, ed., “Colloquy: Discrete/Con­ tinuous; Music and Media Theory after Kittler,” Journal of the American Musicolog­ ical Society 70, no. 1 (2017): 221–56. Writing on an earlier moment in the historical intertwining of live voices and electricity, Ellen Lockhart explores some of the is­ sues I have raised here, specifically how particular operatic voices became associated with electric shocks transmitted from performers to listeners. See Lockhart, Anima­ tion, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770–1830 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 130–50. 96. For some considerations on these issues, see Susan Rutherford, “Bel Canto and Cultural Exchange: Italian Vocal Techniques in London 1790–1825,” in Umbruchzeiten in der italienischen Musikgeschichte: Deutsch­italienische Round­Table­Gespräche, ed. Christoph Flamm and Roland Pfeiffer, in Analecta Musicologica 50 (2013): 129–42; and Benjamin Walton, Global Opera, forthcoming. 97. Ditlev Rindom discusses the operatic power shifts between Italy and the United States circa 1900, with particular reference to how American recording tech­

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nologies reshaped notions of Italian vocality, in his “Gramophone Voices: Puccini and Madama Butterfly in New York, c1907,” 19th­Century Music, forthcoming. 98. See Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

Chapter Four 1. L’arpa, September 11, 1871. See also L’affondatore, September 16 and 24, 1871; Mariani’s letter to Carlo Del Signore (September 9, 1871), in Umberto Zoppi, An­ gelo Mariani, Giuseppe Verdi e Teresa Stolz in un carteggio inedito (Milan: Garzanti, 1947), 261–63; and Camillo Casarini, Ai nostri concittadini: Risposta dell’ex­sindaco Commend. Camillo Casarini e dei suoi colleghi di Giunta (Bologna: Società tipografica dei compositori, 1872), 11. 2. See the various journal extracts reprinted in Carlo Matteo Mossa, “Una Messa per la storia,” in Messa per Rossini: La storia, il testo, la musica, ed. Michele Girardi and Pierluigi Pietrobelli (Parma, Italy: Istituto di studi verdiani and Ricordi, 1988), 11–78, here 43–45. Luigi Scalaberni (1823–76) was active during the 1860s and 1870s in various theaters of the Emilia­Romagna, as well as in Florence, Genoa, and Nice among other cities. 3. See Mossa, “Una Messa per la storia,” 44. 4. The capitolato for the 1871 autumn season is dated May 26, 1871, yet due to lack of applicants the impresa was not filled until mid­August. Two projects were at that point considered: one presented by Giovanni Bolelli on behalf of Emidio Lambertini, and another presented by Scalaberni on behalf of Cesare Gaibi. See Archivio Storico del Comune di Bologna, Scritture private 1871 and Atti della giunta municipale, July 15 and August 19, 1871. Lambertini was eventually appointed impresario. Lohengrin had been announced as opera d’obbligo a few days before this happened (Monitore di Bo­ logna, August 11, 1871). The letter suggesting that Mariani and Casarini were behind the Lohengrin undertaking was sent by the agent Luigi Monti to Giulio Ricordi on August 5, 1871. The document is reproduced in Frank Walker, The Man Verdi (Lon­ don: Dent, 1962; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 375. The page number refers to the Chicago edition. 5. L’arpa, September 11, 1871. 6. Set and costume designs for early productions of Lohengrin in Italy were of­ ten based on German models when not directly prepared in Germany; see Mercedes Viale Ferrero, ed., Da Rossini a Verdi: Immagini del teatro romantico; Disegni di co­ stumi per opere e balli (Turin: Stamperia artistica nazionale, 1981), 47–49. 7. F. M., in Monitore di Bologna, November 2, 1871. “Magnificenza asiatica” was a common nineteenth­century phrase for exceptional displays of splendour. 8. Axel Körner, Politics of Culture in Liberal Italy: From Unification to Fascism (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 237. On opera and Bologna’s nineteenth­century cultural politics, see, in addition to Körner’s book, Cormac Newark, “‘In Italy We Don’t Have the Means for Illusion’: Grand Opéra in Nineteenth­Century Bologna,” Cambridge Opera Journal 19, no. 3 (2007): 199–222; and Körner, “From Hindustan to Brabant: Meyerbeer’s L’africana and Municipal Cosmopolitanism in Post­Unification Italy,” Cambridge Opera Journal 29, no. 1 (2017): 74–93. On the transmunicipal dis­ courses in which early Italian productions of Lohengrin were embedded, see Emilio Sala, “Il ‘cavaliere dell’oca’ cacciato dalla Scala: Il fiasco milanese del Lohengrin (1873)

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e il suo contesto,” in Un duplice anniversario: Giuseppe Verdi e Richard Wagner, ed. Ilaria Bonomi, Franca Cella, and Luciano Martini (Milan: Istituto lombardo di scienze e lettere, 2014), 9–32. 9. L’affondatore, September 24, 1871. See also Gazzetta dell’Emilia, September 1, 1871, and L’arpa, August 18, 1871. 10. Le monde artiste, March 22, 1896. 11. Ute Jung, “La fortuna di Wagner in Italia,” in Wagner in Italia, ed. Giancarlo Rostirolla (Turin: ERI, 1982), 55–225, here 159; and Körner, Politics of Culture, 235. 12. Throughout this chapter I use the words “transfer” and “relocation” as syn­ onyms for “translocation.” 13. See Archivio Storico del Comune di Bologna, CA 1871, tit. X, 3, 4, 9676, 9787; Mariani’s letter to Carlo Del Signore (December 1, 1871), in Zoppi, Angelo Mariani, 310–11; Gazzetta d’Italia, quoted in L’ancora, November 29, 1871; and L’Italia nuova, November 29, 1871. 14. See Archivio Storico del Comune di Firenze, Affari generali 1871, Uffizio del Sindaco, 3842, 4019, and Deliberazioni di giunta, November 21 and December 11, 1871. 15. See L’Italia nuova, November 24, 1871, and Il sistro, November 24, 1871. 16. L’affondatore, November 11, 1871. 17. See Monitore di Bologna, December 7, 1871. For the musicians’ welcome in Flor­ ence, see Gazzetta musicale di Milano, December 10, 1871. 18. L’ancora, December 10, 1871. Ito, from the verb ire, is an archaic form for andato. Today it survives mostly in Tuscan dialect. 19. See L’ancora, December 6, 1871. 20. Gazzetta d’Italia, quoted in Monitore di Bologna, November 15, 1871. For simi­ lar reports, see L’affondatore, November 18, 1871; Gazzetta toscana, November 15, 1871; L’ancora, November 29, 1871; and La stampa, December 10, 1871. The news also ap­ peared in the foreign press; see Pall Mall Budget, December 22, 1871. 21. Il fanfulla, November 23, 1871. 22. Il corriere italiano, November 24, 1871. 23. See Archivio Storico del Comune di Bologna, CA 1871, tit. X, 3, 4, 10369. Writ­ ing to Carlo Del Signore on December 1, 1871, Mariani pointed out the sonic impli­ cations of the opera’s relocation: “As soon as I arrive in Florence . . . I will arrange a rehearsal in order to study the effects produced by the acoustics of that very large hall [the Pagliano theater]; I will then do a dress rehearsal . . . and I believe that these two rehearsals will suffice to accustom our forces to the size and acoustics of the new space.” Quoted in Zoppi, Angelo Mariani, 310–11. 24. See L’ancora, December 13, 1871. 25. See Boccherini, February 20, 1872. 26. Il mondo artistico, December 17, 1871. 27. L’affondatore, November 11, 1871; J[essie] Laussot, in Dwight’s Journal of Mu­ sic, February 24, 1872; Gazzetta piemontese, January 25, 1872; Le Ménestrel, Decem­ ber 31, 1871; and Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, Volume I: 1869–1877, trans. Geoffrey Skel­ ton, ed. Martin Gregor­Dellin and Dietrich Mack (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), 439 (entry from December 14, 1871). 28. See Giuseppe Depanis, I concerti popolari ed il Teatro Regio di Torino: Quindici annate di vita musicale, 2 vols. (Turin: Società tipografico­editrice nazionale, 1914– 15), vol. 1, 195–224. Between the 1830s and the 1880s it was almost exclusively “enter­ prise orchestras,” created, led, and managed by single entrepeneur­conductors, that

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went on tour, both in Europe and in the United States. Among the most famous were the Strauss Orchestra, Jullien’s Orchestra, and the Theodore Thomas Orchestra. See John Spitzer, “The Entrepreneur­Conductors and Their Orchestras,” Nineteenth­ Century Music Review 5, no. 1 (2008): 3–24. 29. John Rosselli, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 147–49. On touring opera in the United States, see Katherine K. Preston, Opera on the Road: Traveling Opera Troupes in the United States, 1825–60 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Il­ linois Press, 2001). The Paris­London circuit was also well­trodden; see Alessandro Roccatagliati, “Parigi­Londra andata e ritorno: Musiche, cantanti e faccendieri fra i teatri d’opera italiana (1830–38),” in Pensieri per un maestro: Studi in onore di Pierluigi Petrobelli, ed. Stefano La Via and Roger Parker (Turin: EDT, 2002), 193–210. 30. For the tours of the first Italian opera troupe to circumnavigate the world in the 1820s and 1830s, see Benjamin Walton, Global Opera, forthcoming. Charlotte Bentley discusses the first permanent North American opera company, at the French­ language Théâtre d’Orléans, in her New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Op­ era, 1819–1859 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). 31. The operas involved were Donizetti’s La favorita and Poliuto, Salvatore Auteri­ Manzocchi’s Dolores, Guglielmo Branca’s La catalana, Meyerbeer’s L’africana, and Wagner’s Rienzi. La catalana was performed only at La Pergola in 1876, but the sets had been prepared for a production planned at the Pagliano the previous year. See Ar­ chivio Storico del Comune di Firenze, Affari generali 1875, 4791; Archivio dell’Acca­ demia degli Immobili, Florence (AAI), 54.2 (1875), 2678, 2683, 2688; AAI, 55.1 (1876), 2696, 2697; and AAI, 55.2 (1877), 2717, 2718. After his death in November 1876, Scala­ berni was succeeded by Enea Brizzi at the Pergola, and probably by his own son Al­ berto at the Pagliano. 32. See Francesco Righetti’s letter to Giuliano Capranica ( July 30, 1860), repr. in Teresa Viziano Fenzi, Il palcoscenico di Adelaide Ristori: Repertorio, scenario e costumi di una compagnia drammatica dell’Ottocento (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000), 310n25; and Ar­ chivio dell’Accademia degli Immobili, 54.2 (1875), 2678, 2683. 33. Peruzzi to the Presidente dell’Accademia degli Immobili ( June 10, 1875), in Ar­ chivio dell’Accademia degli Immobili, 54.2 (1875), 2688. 34. L’arpa, June 9, 1876. Scalaberni was represented by Enea Brizzi at the Pergola and by Ercole Bolognini at the Comunale. 35. On Scalaberni’s deal with Lucca, see Il sistro, June 26, 1876; and Guarany, in Rivista italiana, repr. in Gazzetta musicale di Milano, September 9, 1876. 36. See Archivio dell’Accademia degli Immobili, 55.1 (1876), 2697; and Archivio Storico del Comune di Bologna, CA 1876, tit. X, 3, 4, 5446, 6073, 7041. The scen­ ery was designed by Tito Gianni (L’Africana and Dolores) and Cesare Recanatini (Rienzi). Chorus and orchestra do not seem to have been relocated. A playbill for the Comunale made the plans for circulating the musical talent clear: “The distin­ guished performers engaged for the current season at the Teatro Pagliano in Florence are at the disposal of the impresa of the Teatro Comunale.” Repr. in Luigi Bignami, Cronologia di tutti gli spettacoli rappresentati nel gran Teatro Comunale di Bologna dalla solenne sua apertura 14 maggio 1763 a tutto l’Autunno 1880 (Bologna: Agenzia Com­ merciale, 1880), 208. 37. Gazzetta dei teatri, October 28, 1876. On Rienzi’s Florentine peregrinations, see V. M., in Gazzetta musicale di Milano, May 2, 1877.

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38. Such as the project for a Società per il teatro lirico italiano (1904; never es­ tablished), the Sociedad Teatral Ítalo­Argentina (1907), the Società Teatrale Inter­ nazionale (1908), and La Teatral (1910), all discussed in Matteo Paoletti, Mascagni, Mocchi, Sonzogno: La Società teatrale internazionale (1908–1931) e i suoi protagonisti (Bologna: Alma Mater Studiorum, 2015); and Paoletti, A Huge Revolution of Theatri­ cal Commerce: Walter Mocchi and the Italian Musical Theatre Business in South Amer­ ica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 39. Verdi’s letter to Arrivabene (February 5, 1876), in Verdi intimo: Carteggio di Giuseppe Verdi con il Conte Opprandino Arrivabene (1861–1886), ed. Annibale Alberti (Milan: Mondadori, 1931), 185–87. For these debates, see also Girolamo Alessandro Biaggi, “Rassegna musicale,” Nuova antologia 25, no. 2 (1874): 491–502, here 495–97. 40. Il mondo artistico, December 17, 1871. See also Il sistro, June 26, 1876; Bocche­ rini, August 31, 1876; and Gazzetta dei teatri, November 25, 1876. 41. See Archivio Storico del Comune di Bologna, CA 1876, tit. X, 3, 4, 11028; and L’Italia artistica, December 1, 1876. Scalaberni is buried in the Cimitero della Miseri­ cordia. 42. See Albert Schram, Railways and the Formation of the Italian State in the Nine­ teenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 116. 43. See L’ancora, December 13, 1871. 44. Charles Richard Weld, Florence: The New Capital of Italy (London: Longs­ man, Green, 1867), 1, 5, 2. For a negative judgment of these engineering achievements, one that criticizes the way trains strained to scale the mountains and the smoke that accumulated in the tunnels, see the anonymous article in La perseveranza, Novem­ ber 29, 1865. 45. See Renzo Zagnoni, “Una singolare veduta della ferrovia transappennina del 1864,” in Panorama della Strada­Ferrata delli Appennini Bologna, Pistoja, Firenze, ed. Renzo Zagnoni and Gian Paolo Borghi (Porretta Terme and Pracchia, Italy: Gruppo di Studi Alta Valle del Reno and Pro Loco, 2008), 2–5. This edition of the Panorama is an anastatic reprint of the 1864 edition published in Bologna by the Litografia Giulio Wenk. On views from the train as compared to projections of magic lanterns, see Luigi Arcozzi Masino, Il Cicerone delle strade ferrate: Linea Torino­Ciriè, illustrata da sette fotografie eseguite dal Cav. Montabone (Turin: Foa, 1869), 4. 46. See Schram, Railways, 3–5, 157–64. 47. Camillo Cavour, Le strade ferrate in Italia, ed. Arnaldo Salvestrini (Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1976), 61; and Giacomo Durando, Della nazionalità italiana: Saggio politico­militare (Lausanne, Switzerland: Bonamici e Compagni, 1846), 75. Ca­ vour’s essay was first published in French, as “Des chemins de fer en Italie,” in Revue nouvelle on May 1, 1846, 446–79. 48. See Stefano Maggi, Le ferrovie (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003), 44–45. 49. F[rancesco Flores] D’Arcais, “Giuseppe Verdi e la musica italiana,” Nuova an­ tologia di scienze, lettere ed arti 7, no. 3 (1868): 566–75, here 567. 50. Quoted from Enrico Bottrigari, Cronaca di Bologna, 4 vols., ed. Aldo Berselli (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1960–62), vol. 4, 210. 51. On touring practices in French theater after the 1860s, see F. W. J. Hemmings, Theatre and State in France, 1760–1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 156–59. For a multicenter approach to opera in late­nineteenth­century France, see Katharine Ellis, “‘How to Make Wagner Normal’: Lohengrin’s Tour de France of 1891/92,” Cambridge Opera Journal 25, no. 2 (2013): 121–37. On touring opera in Great

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Britain, see Paul Rodmell, Opera in the British Isles, 1875–1918 (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), esp. 131–84. 52. Walter Maynard [pseud. of Willert Beale], The Enterprising Impresario (Lon­ don: Bradbury, Evans & Co., 1867), 99–100. 53. For the debates about the Milan­Venice line during the 1830s and ’40s and the role played by Carlo Cattaneo in supporting the so­called linea delle città, see Adolfo Bernardello, La prima ferrovia fra Venezia e Milano: Storia della imperial­regia privilegiata strada ferrata Ferdinandea Lombardo­Veneta (1835–1852) (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 1996). 54. An anonymous critic for the Gazzetta musicale di Milano sardonically asserted: “After the opening of Parliament in Rome, [the Lohengrin transfer] was certainly the most important event that could have happened in the Kingdom of Italy.” Gazzetta musicale di Milano, December 10, 1871. 55. In the wake of the 1865 capital­city transfer, the number of trains traveling through Bologna increased markedly within just a few weeks. See Maurizio Panco­ nesi, Le ferrovie di Pio IX: Nascita, sviluppo e tramonto delle strade ferrate dello Stato Pontificio (1846–1870) (Cortona, Italy: Calosci, 2005), 243. 56. See Ugo Giusti, Demografia fiorentina: 1862–1914 (Florence: Barbera, 1916), 17. 57. Ugo Pesci, Firenze capitale (1865–1870): Dagli appunti di un ex­cronista (Flor­ ence: Bemporad, 1904), 511. 58. Gazzetta d’Italia, quoted in Monitore di Bologna, November 19, 1871. See also Monitore di Bologna, December 6, 1871, and L’affondatore, November 18, 1871. 59. Monitore di Bologna, December 6, 1871. 60. See John Grand­Carteret, Wagner en caricatures: 130 reproductions de carica­ tures françaises, allemandes, italiennes, portraits, autographes (Paris: Larousse, 1892), 235–36. The caption calls the image a “caricature inédite.” Almost all the other carica­ tures in the volume are reproductions; the few that were made specifically for it are listed at the end of the book. Grossi’s is not among them. 61. On these developments, see Alan Mallach, The Autumn of Italian Opera: From Verismo to Modernism, 1890–1915 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2007), 208–24; and Jutta Toelle, Oper als Geschäft: Impresari an italienischen Opernhäuser 1860–1900 (Kassel, Germany: Bärenreiter, 2007). 62. Kyle Gillette has discussed the British engineer Richard Trevithick’s “Steam Circus” (1808) in his Railway Travel in Modern Theatre: Transforming the Space and Time of the Stage ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 7. Wolfgang Schivelbusch has fa­ mously described the railway’s transformation of landscape into panorama in his The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 52–69. 63. See Gillette, Railway Travel, 5–8. 64. See Gazzetta dei teatri, June 24, 1880, and Il piccolo, June 27, 1880. The trans­ fer was seemingly set up by the impresario Guglielmo Speroni and the Tuscan Enea Brizzi, and required the intervention of Piacenza’s mayor. See Gazzetta musicale di Firenze, June 30, 1880; Cosmorama pittorico, June 25, 1880; and Archivio di Stato di Piacenza, Comune di Piacenza, Spettacoli e feste pubbliche poi Pubblica sicurezza, Carteggio generale (1.15.1.1), b. 52. Two rather unsuccessful Stella performances took place at the Pagliano on June 24 and 26. 65. On Sonzogno, see Silvia Valisa, “Casa editrice Sonzogno: Mediazione cultu­ rale, circuiti del sapere ed innovazione tecnologica nell’Italia unificata (1861–1900),”

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in The Printed Media in Fin­de­siècle Italy: Publishers, Writers, and Readers, ed. Ann Hallamore Caesar, Gabriella Romani, and Jennifer Burns (Cambridge: Legenda, 2011), 90–106; and Marco Capra, “La Casa Editrice Sonzogno tra giornalismo e im­ presariato,” in Casa musicale Sonzogno: Cronologie, saggi, testimonianze, ed. Mario Morini, Nandi Ostali, and Piero Ostali Jr., 2 vols. (Milan: Casa Musicale Sonzogno, 1995), vol. 1, 243–90. 66. Sonzogno’s relocated productions included Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, Thom­ as’s Mignon, Auteri­Manzocchi’s Il conte di Gleichen, and Paolo Taglioni’s ballet I due soci. The Florentine casts for both Orfeo and Mignon coincided only in part with the Roman ones. See Archivio dell’Accademia degli Immobili, (AAI), 59.1 (1889), 2937; AAI, Manifesti 1147 (Orfeo) and 1148 (Mignon); and, for some press news, La tri­ buna, February 15, 1889 and A . . . , in Gazzetta musicale di Milano, February 17, 1889. 67. Aroldo, in Il mondo artistico, March 1, 1889. The figure is taken from La tribuna, February 15, 1889. For the complaints see, for instance, La tribuna, February 26, 1889. 68. Gazzetta piemontese, February 27, 1889. Whether or not the Costanzi’s full mu­ sical corps was due to relocate to Venice, eventually only the three singers who had sung Orfeo in Florence starred in a performance at La Fenice in March. Presumably the scenery was brought along for the occasion. More indicative still of Sonzogno’s attitude toward opera as a “package” was his supply of musical personnel and staging materials from Rome to the Théâtre de la Gaîté in Paris, for an Italian opera season during the 1889 World’s Fair. See Le Rappel, April 3, 1889; and “Programma degli spet­ tacoli che si daranno nel Teatro Costanzi dall’Ottobre 1888 all’Aprile 1889,” Archivio Capitolino (Rome), Gabinetto del Sindaco di Roma, tit. 25, b. 108, f. 4. 69. See Gundula Kreuzer, Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth­Century Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 95. 70. See Angelo Neumann, Personal Recollections of Wagner, trans. Edith Livermore (New York: Henry Holt, 1908), 243. 71. Kreuzer, Curtain, Gong, Steam, 223. 72. See Kreuzer, Curtain, Gong, Steam, 220–23; and Gundula Kreuzer, “Authen­ tizität, Visualisierung, Bewahrung: Das reisende, Wagner­Theater’ und die Konser­ vierbarkeit von Inszenierungen,” in Angst vor der Zerstörung: Der Meister Künste zwischen Archiv und Erneuerung, ed. Robert Sollich, Clemens Risi, Sebastian Reus, and Stephan Jöris (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2008), 139–60, here 144–48. 73. See Alessandra Campana, Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth­ Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), esp. 1–14. 74. As Kreuzer reminds us, this expanded notion of the operatic work was not, however, produced solely or abruptly by Wagner; see Kreuzer, Curtain, Gong, Steam, 6. 75. Kreuzer, Curtain, Gong, Steam, 15. 76. Neumann, Personal Recollections, 311. 77. John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 94. 78. See Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Staging Fascism: 18BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 17–22. 79. A . . . , in Gazzetta musicale di Milano, April 21, 1889. The transfer did not, how­ ever, materialize. 80. L’elettrico, April 9–10, 1887. In other reports the human contingent ballooned to two hundred; see Corriere della sera, April 12, 1887. 81. See Vittorio Frajese, Dal Costanzi all’Opera: Cronache, recensioni e documenti, 4 vols. (Rome: Capitolium, 1977–78), vol. 1, 81–82; Matteo Incagliati, Il teatro Costanzi,

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1880–1907: Note e appunti della vita teatrale a Roma (Rome: Tipografia editrice Roma, 1907), 73–79; and Angelo Pompilio and Madina Ricordi, eds., Carteggio Verdi­Ricordi 1886–1888 (Parma, Italy: Istituto nazionale di studi verdiani, 2010), 108–9, 190n8. The agent Carlo D’Ormeville was the intermediary between Canori and La Scala. See Biblioteca Livia Simoni (Milan), box L, 26. While an extremely detailed disposizione scenica was published by Ricordi, this had not yet been produced when the Milan­ Rome Otello transfer took place. 82. On late­nineteenth­century Italian emigration and its implications for Italian operatic cultures on both sides of the Atlantic, see Ditlev Rindom, “Bygone Moder­ nity: Re­Imagining Italian Opera in Milan, New York and Buenos Aires, 1887–1914,” PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2019. 83. Il pungolo, repr. in Gazzetta di Venezia, April 14, 1887. On the departure of “treno Otello,” see also Corriere della sera, April 12, 1887, and Gazzetta musicale di Mi­ lano, April 17, 1887. 84. See the declaration of the impresarios Cesare and Enrico Corti in Gazzetta di Venezia, January 29, 1887. 85. La tribuna, April 16, 1887. 86. See Francesca Vella, “Milan, Simon Boccanegra and the Late­Nineteenth­ Century Operatic Museum,” Verdi Perspektiven 1 (2016): 93–121. 87. See Cresswell, On the Move, esp. 26–42. 88. Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut, “Deadness: Technologies of the Inter­ mundane,” TDR: The Drama Review 54, no. 1 (2010): 14–38, here 17, 27. 89. See Andrea Giuntini, Leopoldo e il treno: Le ferrovie nel Granducato di Toscana, 1824–1861 (Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1991), 199–202. 90. See Pesci, Firenze capitale, 63–65. 91. Sergio Luzzatto, La mummia della repubblica: Storia di Mazzini imbalsamato (Turin: Einaudi, 2011), 23. In 1887, Rossini’s remains were also transported from Paris to Florence and buried in Santa Croce. 92. Il pungolo, repr. in Gazzetta di Venezia, April 14, 1887. 93. For a calling into question of histories of technology focused on invention and innovation in favor of use­centered approaches, see David Edgerton’s classic The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (London: Profile, 2006).

Chapter Five 1. See Roger Parker, “Motives and Recurring Themes in Aida,” in Analyzing Op­ era: Verdi and Wagner, ed. Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 222–38, here 223–25. 2. See Disposizione scenica per l’opera Aida, versi di A. Ghislanzoni, musica di G. Verdi, compilata e regolata secondo la messa in scena del Teatro alla Scala da Giulio Ricordi (Milan: Ricordi, [1873]), 7–8. My quotations from this document are adapted from the English translation published in Hans Busch, ed., Verdi’s Aida: The History of an Opera in Letters and Documents (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), 558–618. 3. “As the curtain opens, the cellos start immediately.” Verdi, Aida, autograph man­ uscript, f. 7r (Archivio Ricordi, Milan; microfilm copy held at the American Institute for Verdi Studies, New York). See also Disposizione scenica, 7. Given its date of pub­ lication, July 1873, which can be inferred from its plate number (43504), the dispo­

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sizione must reflect aspects of the opera’s first stagings in Milan, Parma, and Naples, which were all supervised by Verdi. See Paola Camponovo, “La scena dell’atto II.2 di Aida nell’allestimento scaligero del 1872 secondo Quinto Cenni, la disposizione sce­ nica e il bozzetto di Girolamo Magnani,” ACME: Annali della Facoltà di Lettere e Filo­ sofia dell’Università degli studi di Milano 69, no. 2 (2016): 127–44, here 138–39. 4. Emanuele Senici, “Words and Music,” in The Cambridge Companion to Verdi, ed. Scott L. Balthazar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 88–110, here 107. 5. Senici, “Words and Music,” 108. 6. “The stage director must agree with the chorus master on a good distribution of the voices in the three choral groups; these groups must be well separated and there­ fore stand about three steps from each other.” Disposizione scenica, 10; repr. in Busch, ed., Verdi’s Aida, 563. 7. “The choral groups are placed so that the word ‘Radamès’ is pronounced first by those on the right, then by those on the side, and last by those in the rear, i.e. by the first tenors, the second tenors, the first basses, the second basses.” Disposizione scenica, 11; repr. in Busch, ed., Verdi’s Aida, 564. 8. This manuscript livret, prepared by Antoine Vanhamme, is held at the Biblio­ thèque historique de la Ville de Paris (A 13 [1]). My thanks to Michela Niccolai and Pauline Girard for sharing electronic copies of the document with me. 9. Disposizione scenica, 11; repr. in Busch, ed., Verdi’s Aida, 563–64. 10. P., in Lo spirito folletto, February 15, 1872. 11. Julian Budden, Verdi (London: Dent, 1993), 240. For Verdi’s characterization of crowds, see Budden, “Simon Boccanegra (First Version) in Relation to Italian Op­ era of the 1850s,” in Verdi­Studien: Pierluigi Petrobelli zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Sieghart Döhring and Wolfgang Osthoff (Munich: Ricordi, 2000), 11–32, here 18. 12. See Abramo Basevi, The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi, trans. Edward Schneider with Stefano Castelvecchi, ed. Stefano Castelvecchi (Chicago and London: Univer­ sity of Chicago Press, 2014), 232. Basevi’s study was first published as a series of arti­ cles in Florence’s L’armonia between June 1857 and September 1858, though the chap­ ter on Boccanegra is based on two separate articles not originally part of the series. No staging manual for the 1857 Boccanegra exists, and it is thus impossible to estab­ lish what stage business Verdi had in mind for its act 1 finale. As is well known, how­ ever, the composer’s interest in staging manuals originated around this time, more precisely when he supervised the premiere of Les Vêpres Siciliennes at the Paris Opéra in 1855. 13. Disposizione scenica, 11; repr. in Busch, ed., Verdi’s Aida, 564. 14. Anselm Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nine­ teenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 231. 15. Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, 3 vols., rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992; reprint 2001–2), vol. 3, 206. 16. Edward W. Said, “The Empire at Work: Verdi’s Aida,” in Culture and Imperial­ ism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 111–31, here 112. An earlier version of Said’s essay was published in 1987. 17. See, for instance, On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); and Roland Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth­Century World: The Telegraph and Globalization (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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18. Said, “The Empire at Work,” 125. Studies of Aida that have taken impetus from Said’s postcolonial approach include Paul Robinson, “Is Aida an Orientalist Opera?,” Cambridge Opera Journal 5, no. 2 (1993): 133–40; the articles by Katherine Bergeron, Steven Huebner, and Gabriela Cruz in Mary Ann Smart, ed., “Primal Scenes: Verdi in Analysis,” special issue of of Cambridge Opera Journal 14, nos. 1–2 (2002); and Ralph P. Locke, “Beyond the Exotic: How ‘Eastern’ Is Aida?,” Cambridge Opera Journal 17, no. 2 (2005): 105–39. 19. Carolyn Abbate, “Sound Object Lessons,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 69, no. 3 (2016): 793–829, here 793. 20. This point is made most explicitly by John Durham Peters and Ellen Lock­ hart in the essays cited below, and in Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 21. Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 9, 80. 22. Jay Clayton, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Cen­ tury in Postmodern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 64. 23. Henry Edward Krehbiel, A Book of Operas: Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music (New York: Macmillan, 1909; reprint 1920), 176 (my emphasis). A recent academic iteration of the Suez Canal myth can be found in Jürgen Osterhammel’s The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), 691. 24. The earliest example I have been able to trace is Félix Clément, Deuxième sup­ plément au Dictionnaire lyrique ou histoire des opéras (Paris: Boyer, [1873]), 767. Clé­ ment claims that Aida premiered at Cairo on December 24, 1871, and that the opera house had opened in November. For other early examples, see Ch. de Sarlat, in L’Or­ chestre, May 8, 1876; The Monthly Musical Record, August 1, 1876; James Mason, The History of the Year 1876, Containing the “Year Book of Facts” and “The Annual Sum­ mary” (London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler, [1877]), 130; and Atti parlamentari, Camera dei deputati, tornata del 12 giugno 1882, 11547. 25. See Arthur Pougin, “Verdi. Souvenirs anecdotiques,” Le Ménestrel, March 3, 1878. This article was the eleventh instalment in a series of essays by Pougin later re­ published in Italian as Giuseppe Verdi: Vita aneddotica, con note ed aggiunte di Fol­ chetto (Milan: Ricordi, 1881). 26. See Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. 3, 163n. 27. See Martin Roeder, “The First Performance of Lohengrin in Italy,” Boston Sym­ phony Orchestra Programme, March 22 and 24, 1894: 701–7, here 704. 28. “Here I am writing to you: Aida was staged for the first time at Cairo’s Khe­ divial Theater on December 24, 1871, on the occasion of the great celebrations that Khedive Ismail arranged to inaugurate the Suez Canal.” Arrigo Boito’s letter to Ca­ mille Bellaigue ( July 28, [1910]), repr. in Giampiero Tintori, “Il carteggio completo Boito­Bellaigue del Museo Teatrale alla Scala,” in Arrigo Boito musicista e letterato, ed. Giampiero Tintori (Milan: Nuove Edizioni, 1986), 151–79, here 172. 29. See Poultney Bigelow, “Suez and Panama,” The Independent, March 17, 1910. 30. See Giuseppe Perosio, Cenni biografici su Giuseppe Verdi seguiti da breve analisi dell’opera Aida e della Messa da Requiem (Milan: Ricordi, [1876]), 18. 31. Perosio, Cenni biografici, 21–22. Perosio lists productions of Aida both in Italy and abroad, starting with the Milan premiere. Italian cities are listed in chronologi­

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cal order (with the years), and foreign cities in more or less random order (with no years). A couple of dates in the Italian chronology, which ends with the 1875–76 Car­ nival season, are incorrect, while some of the foreign runs go unmentioned. 32. See The Monthly Musical Record, August 1, 1876; and Mason, The History of the Year 1876, 130. 33. “Since [the Cairo premiere] it has been given at Perugia; and more recently (in the spring of this year—1875) at Paris.” Mason, The History of the Year 1876, 130. Aida premiered in Perugia under the baton of Emilio Usiglio on August 8, 1874. The cast included one of the original singers from the Cairo production, and two from Milan. 34. “Written in Italy to inaugurate the Italian theater in Cairo with the appeal of a national festival, Aida belongs, through its origin and chief destination [destination première], to the Paris Opéra. . . . Like Don Carlos, Aida was destined for the Opéra. The fate [destinée] of the opera was, before appearing there, to make a detour through Egypt.” Bénédict [pseud. of Benoit Jouvin], in Le Figaro, March 24, 1880. 35. See Bigelow, “Suez and Panama,” 577; and Blanche Roosevelt, Verdi, Milan and Othello: Being a Short Life of Verdi, with Letters Written about Milan and the New Op­ era of Othello; Represented for the First Time on the Stage of La Scala Theatre, February 5, 1887 (London: Ward and Downey, 1887), 60. Roosevelt quotes from what she claims (impossibly) to be an account of Aida taken from the Chicago Times of February 11, 1871, a full year before the Milanese premiere. 36. See Karen Henson, “Exotisme et nationalités: Aida à l’Opéra de Paris,” in L’Opéra en France et en Italie (1791–1925): Une scène privilégiée d’échanges littéraires et musicaux, ed. Hervé Lacombe (Paris: Société française de musicologie, 2000), 263– 97, here 278–79, 293. 37. As stated clearly by Lydia Goehr in her “Aida and the Empire of Emotions (Theodor W. Adorno, Edward Said, and Alexander Kluge),” Current Musicology 87 (2009): 133–59, here 135. For a study that looks at Aida and its international networks, in relation to geographical contexts that have received little attention in scholarship on the opera, see Aníbal Enrique Cetrangolo, “Aida Times Two: How Italian Veterans of Two Historic Aida Productions Shaped Argentina’s Musical History,” Cambridge Opera Journal 28, no. 1 (2016): 79–105. 38. Verdi, draft contract for Aida [ June 1870], repr. in Ursula Günther, “Zur Ent­ stehung von Verdis Aida,” Studi musicali 2, no. 1 (1973): 15–71, here 57; English trans­ lation from Busch, ed., Verdi’s Aida, 472. 39. Auguste Mariette and Giuseppe Verdi, contract for Aida ( July 29, 1870), repr. in Saleh Abdoun, ed., Genesi dell’Aida (Parma: Istituto di studi verdiani, 1971), 8–9; English translation from Busch, ed., Verdi’s Aida, 473–74. 40. Giulio Ricordi’s letter to Verdi ( July 14, 1870), digital copy of the original re­ ceived from the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani. This letter is quoted in Pierluigi Petrobelli, “Verdi, Ricordi, e la nascita di Aida” / “Verdi, Ricordi, and the Birth of Aida,” in “Celeste Aida”: Percorso storico e musicale tra passato e futuro, ed. Gabriele Dotto and Ilaria Narici (Milan: Ricordi, 2006), 29–43, here 30. 41. Petrobelli, “Verdi, Ricordi, e la nascita di Aida,” 40. Contemporary Italian crit­ ics were of the same opinion as Ricordi. Francesco Flores D’Arcais, skeptical about the standard of musical performance in Egypt, heralded the opening night at La Scala as “the first performance of Verdi’s new opera.” D’Arcais, “Rassegna musicale: Aida del maestro Verdi,” Nuova antologia di scienze, lettere ed arti 19, no. 4 (1872): 890–97, here 892.

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42. See Giulio Ricordi’s letter to Verdi (November 13, 1870), trans. in Busch, ed., Verdi’s Aida, 104–8, here 105. 43. Paul Draneht’s letter to Verdi (December 22, 1870), quoted from Busch, ed., Verdi’s Aida, 117. 44. Verdi’s letter to Giuseppe Piroli ( July 16, 1870), repr. in Franco Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, 4 vols. (Milan: Ricordi, 1959), vol. 3, 375; English translation in Busch, ed., Verdi’s Aida, 34 (translation revised). 45. See Verdi’s letter to Du Locle ( June 2, 1870), Mariette’s telegram to Du Locle ( June 10, 1870), and Du Locle’s telegram to Verdi ( June 10, 1870), all translated in Busch, ed., Verdi’s Aida, 19, 23. 46. Lisa Gitelman, “Modes and Codes: Samuel F. B. Morse and the Question of Electronic Writing,” in This is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William War­ ner (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 120–35, here 124, 135. 47. Gitelman, “Modes and Codes,” 135, 124. 48. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 153, and more generally 137–54. See also Menke, Telegraphic Realism, 184–85, 205–6; and Clayton, Charles Dickens, 64–65. Sound devices arrived in Britain in the 1870s; in Italy in the early 1890s they were still few and far between. 49. John Durham Peters, “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph Revisited,” in Thinking with James Carey: Essays on Communications, Transportation, History, ed. Jeremy Packer and Craig Robertson (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 137– 55, here 142. See also Otis, Networking. 50. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Tele­ vision (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 9; and Menke, Telegraphic Realism, 9. 51. See Menke, Telegraphic Realism, 89–98. 52. Otis, Networking, 9. In a study of a later communication technology, faxing, Jonathan Coopersmith has also shown how its supporters praised its capacity to transmit unaltered copies of messages and images, something that granted it, at least in theory, a greater accuracy and authenticity than the telegraph. See Coopersmith, Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 209–10. 53. The telegrams are reprinted in Günther, “Zur Entstehung von Verdis Aida,” 53–54. 54. See Verdi’s letter to Du Locle ( June 9, 1870), repr. in Busch, ed., Verdi’s Aida, 22. A few years later, Maggiorino Ferraris similarly lamented that in Italy, mail was still often speedier than telegrams. See Ferraris, “Il telegrafo ed il giornalismo in In­ ghilterra ed in Italia: A proposito di due disegni di legge,” Nuova antologia di scienze, lettere ed arti 31, no. 2 (1882): 281–329, here 293. For a study of telegraphy “in use,” focused on Great Britain and its empire, see Roland Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth­Century World: The Telegraph and Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 55. Simone Fari, Gabriele Balbi, and Giuseppe Richeri, “Telecommunications Ital­ ian Style: The Shaping of the Constitutive Choices (1850–1914),” in Italian Technology from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century, special issue of History of Technology 32, ed. Anna Guagnini and Luca Molà (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 235–58, here 238. 56. For an overview of telegraphy in Italy during this period, see Simone Fari, “La

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telegrafia italiana dall’Unità alla Grande Guerra: Aspetti politici, economici e tecno­ logici,” PhD diss., University of Bari, 2004, esp. 79–198. 57. See Gianni Paoloni, “Il servizio dei telegrafi nell’Italia post­unitaria: Aspetti istituzionali,” in Sul filo della comunicazione: La telegrafia nell’Ottocento fra economia, politica e tecnologia, ed. Andrea Giuntini, Quaderni di storia postale 28 (Prato, Italy: Istituto di studi storici postali, 2004), 111–33, here 118. 58. See Cosmo Colavito, Telegrafi e telegrafisti italiani del Risorgimento: Storia delle prime comunicazioni elettriche in Italia (Ariccia, Italy: Aracne, 2014), 339–42; and the table in Direzione Generale dei Telegrafi, Relazione statistica sull’esercizio dell’anno 1871 (Rome: Botta, 1872), 32. At the time, the Italian network consisted of two main arteries, running parallel to the west and east coasts and connected by seven trans­ versal branches. 59. My thanks to Simone Fari for confirming this. 60. As discussed in Valeska Huber, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globali­ sation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 2013), 2. 61. See Huber, Channelling Mobilities, 41–43. See also Emily A. Haddad, “Dig­ ging to India: Modernity, Imperialism, and the Suez Canal,” Victorian Studies 47, no. 3 (2005): 363–96. 62. Huber, Channelling Mobilities, 70, 1. 63. See Huber, Channelling Mobilities, 45–51, 70. 64. Quoted in Huber, Channelling Mobilities, 37. Vanessa Ogle similarly describes late­nineteenth­century ports and colonial cities as “incubators of modern globality and, as part of this condition, temporal pluralism.” Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870–1950 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2015), 121. 65. Antonio Bottoni, Da Genova a Batavia: Ricordi (Milan: Treves, 1877), 22. 66. See On Barak, On Time. On the early Arabic press in Egypt, see also Adam Mestyan, Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press), 130–45. 67. See Gazzetta musicale di Milano, August 21, 1870. 68. See Il trovatore, September 8, 1870; Busch, ed., Verdi’s Aida, 69n1; and Gazzetta musicale di Milano, December 18, 1870. 69. The Gazzetta adopted a similar approach to Aida’s premiere in Naples in 1873. The day after the opening night, it published a one­page supplement consisting of a telegram dated “Napoli, 31 Marzo–Ore 1 35 ant.” 70. Filippi’s letters were published between December 30, 1871, and January 18, 1872, and were then reprinted in slightly altered form in Filippi’s Musica e musicisti: Critiche, biografie ed escursioni (Milan: Brigola, 1876). 71. See Michèle Martin and Christopher Bodnar, “The Illustrated Press under Siege: Technological Imagination in the Paris Siege, 1870–1871,” Urban History 36, no. 1 (2009): 67–85; and Geoffrey Belknap, From a Photograph: Authenticity, Science and the Periodical Press, 1870–1890 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 89–90. 72. “Curiosità scientifiche: I piccioni messaggieri,” Rivista minima, no. 24 (De­ cember 1871): 23–27, here 27. For a nineteenth­century account of the use of carrier pigeons in both the ancient and the modern world (including during the Parisian siege), see Carlo Anfosso, “Rivista scientifica: Piccioni viaggiatori,” Rivista letteraria, June 29–July 6, 1878. 73. The play based on Filippi’s letters was by Ulisse Barbieri. See Edmondo De

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Amicis, “Ulisse Barbieri” [1876], in Ulisse Barbieri, In basso (Rome: Sommaruga, 1885), 1–15, here 7. The other parody play entitled Aida was by one Ficarra. See Il pun­ golo, January 28, 1871; and Gazzetta musicale di Milano, February 4, 1872. 74. P., in Lo spirito folletto, February 8, 1872. 75. Rodolfo Paravicini, in Il secolo, February 11, 1872. 76. On Cairo’s cosmopolitan soundscape at the time of Aida’s premiere, see Il se­ colo, January 7, 1872. 77. [Filippo] Filippi, in La Perseveranza, February 10, 1872. 78. Léon Escudier, in L’Art Musicale, February 15, 1872. 79. Evening Post (US), March 25, 1872. See also Corriere di Milano, February 9, 1872; and S. Farina, in Gazzetta musicale di Milano, February 11, 1872. 80. E[ugenio] Torelli­Viollier, Corriere di Milano, February 11, 1872. 81. Torelli­Viollier, Corriere di Milano, February 11, 1872. 82. For a similar metaphor, one used later on by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) to describe the Milan of his youth, see Laura Protano­Biggs’s discussion of the electrification of La Scala from 1883, in her “‘Mille e Mille Calme Fiammelle’: Illuminating Milan’s Teatro alla Scala at the Fine Secolo,” Studi verdiani 23 (2013): 145–67, here 164. Marinetti dubbed Milan “the central power plant of the energies and optimisim of Italy.” 83. Ellen Lockhart, “Circuit Listening,” in Nineteenth­Century Opera and the Sci­ entific Imagination, ed. David Trippett and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 227–48, here 231. For the ways in which these electrical anal­ ogies emerged as a mode of response to performing operatic voices across early­ nineteenth­century Europe, see Ellen Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770–1830 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 133–50. 84. See Lockhart, “Circuit Listening,” 242–44. 85. See Lockhart, “Circuit Listening,” 246–47. On Excelsior, see Gavin Williams, “Excelsior as Mass Ornament: The Reproduction of Gesture,” in Nineteenth­Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination, ed. Trippett and Walton, 251–68. 86. As Lockhart explains in her discussion of this “electric” mode of opera per­ formance earlier in the century, and particularly in relation to Giuditta Pasta, the vis­ ceral effects depended on the exact coordination of musical events with sudden mo­ tions or poses by the performer. See Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music, 143. 87. Verdi’s letter to the president of the Teatro Comunale in Trieste (September 6, 1873), quoted from Busch, ed., Verdi’s Aida, 347. 88. Transcriptions of Italian originals provided by the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani; English translations adapted from Busch, ed., Verdi’s Aida, 346, 351, 358, 371. 89. Aida premiered in Parma on April 20, 1872; in Padua on July 3, 1872; and in Naples on March 30, 1873. For Verdi’s thoughts about the Parma and Naples pro­ ductions, see his letters to Ricordi and Opprandino Arrivabene, repr. in Busch, ed., Verdi’s Aida, 295–99 and 340. For a chronology of early performances, see Marcello Conati, “Cronologia delle prime rappresentazioni dal 1871 al 1881,” in Genesi dell’Aida, ed. Abdoun, 156–77. 90. Giulio Ricordi, in Gazzetta musicale di Milano, March 3, 1872; and Ricordi’s letter to Vincenzo Jacovacci (February 28, 1872), repr. in Gazzetta musicale di Milano, March 3, 1872. 91. See Verdi’s letters to Giulio Ricordi (September 6, 1873) and Eugenio Tornaghi (November 3, 1873), quoted in Busch, ed., Verdi’s Aida, 346 and 351–52.

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92. Il secolo, January 17–18, 1901. 93. Galli, in Il secolo, January 17–18, 1901; and an anonymous letter from Paris, pub­ lished in Il resto del Carlino and reprinted in Il palcoscenico, January 30, 1901. Massenet had tried to arrange simultaneous premieres of Hérodiade at the Paris Opéra and La Scala, in French and Italian respectively, but the plan failed because Auguste Vaucor­ beil, the director of the former theater, rejected the opera due to its plot’s incoher­ ence. Hérodiade eventually premiered at Brussels’s La Monnaie in December 1881 and at La Scala two months later. 94. See Leporello, in L’illustrazione italiana, January 20, 1901; and Corriere della sera, January 20–21, 1901. 95. See Benjamin Walton, Global Opera, forthcoming. 96. See, for instance, Il nuovo orologio della Piazza de’ Mercanti in Milano, ossia Istruzione popolare per regolare gli orologi (Milan: Bernardoni, 1859); Il meridiano di Roma, il tempo vero e il tempo medio spiegati al popolo (Turin: Moretti, 1867); Gia­ como Frassi, Nozioni popolari sul tempo vero, il tempo medio e il tempo di Roma con tavole numeriche e figure (Milan: Salvi, 1871); and Quirico Filopanti, L’universo: Le­ zioni popolari di filosofia enciclopedica e particolarmente di astronomia e di antropolo­ gia (Bologna: Monti, 1871–74). Rome introduced mean time only unofficially (via no formal decree) in 1855. 97. See Regio Decreto no. 3224, September 22, 1866, in Raccolta ufficiale delle leggi e dei decreti del Regno d’Italia, Anno 1866 (Turin: Stamperia Reale, 1866), vol. 16, 1821–22. 98. See Giuseppe Rocca, “L’ora universale,” La rassegna nazionale, May 1, 1893, 38– 76, here 45–46. As contemporary publications explain, Rome, which was not yet part of the Italian Kingdom in 1866, was chosen by the royal decree largely for practical reasons. The city’s meridian cuts the peninsula almost exactly in the middle, mean­ ing that the difference between its real time and that of the cities that are farthest re­ moved from it in longitudinal terms is the smallest possible. 99. Filopanti described his system of twenty­four time zones in his Miranda! A Book on Wonders Hitherto Unheeded (London: James Morgan, 1858). 100. Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004), 40. 101. See Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, 13–47. On late­nineteenth­century timekeeping, see also Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time. 102. Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, 33. 103. Il secolo was the first Italian newspaper, in 1876, to introduce a regular inde­ pendent telegraph service, sending its correspondents to the field to deliver news in real time. The appeal of Il secolo’s telegrams on readers was such that the dispatches were exhibited every afternoon in the reception of the building where the newspaper was housed. See Valerio Castronovo, Luciana Giacheri Fossati, and Nicola Tranfaglia, La stampa italiana nell’età liberale (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1979), 64. 104. Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days, in Jules Verne: The Essential Collection (New York: Race Point, 2018), 587–710, here 597. Verne’s novel was first published as a feuilleton in Paris’s Le Temps in 1872 and then, as a book, by Hetzel the following year.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abbate, Carolyn, 143, 174n26 Accademia degli Immobili, Florence, 25, 115 Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence, 35 accent, vocal, 91–92; British, 89; foreign, in Italy, 96, 103–4. See also diction; Patti, Adelina, vocality accents, written, as guides to pronunci­ ation, 100 Aida (Verdi), 4, 11–12, 765–77, 110; “Aida moment” of 1871–72, 12, 144, 147, 157, 166–67; Cairo pre­ miere, 157–58; contract negotiations with Khedivial Opera House and La Scala, 147–49; disposizione sce­ nica for, 35–36, 133, 136, 140, 140, 142, 205n3, 206nn6–7; as French work, 147; “Guerra! Guerra!” scene, 135– 39, 137–39, 140–42, 144, 159; Milan premiere, 146, 148, 157–58; Mise en scène pour le Théâtre­Italien de Paris par Antoine Vanhamme, 135–36, 136; performances in Parma, Naples, and Padua, 161, 211n89; performances in Perugia, 208n33; politics of, 143–44, 147, 166; Said on, 142–43, 166; simul­ taneous stagings in multiple theaters, 12, 160–62, 165, 167; and telegraphy, 143–44, 150–60; wrong chronologies of performances, 144–47, 207n24, 207n28 Albertini­Boucardè, Augusta, 48, 49

alphabet, oralization of, 101–2 American and Italian Cantatrici (Lu­ cius), 95–96 American opera singers, 94–96. See also “American voice” “American voice,” 93–95 ammoniaphone, 194n39 Antologia, 24 Antonelli, Alessandro, 121, 122 Apennines, railway tunnels across, 117–18 Arabic press, 153 arc lamp. See electric arc lamps Arena Goldoni, Florence, 33 Arrivabene, Count Opprandino, 116–17 Auber, Daniel, La muette de Portici, 179n45, 184n15 Auteri­Manzocchi, Salvatore: Dolores, 116, 201n31; Stella, 124, 124, 203n64 Badiali, Cesare, 84 Balzac, Honoré de, Gambara, 29–31, 34, 179nn48–49 banda. See wind bands banda da giro, 71 banda sul palco, 47, 188n58 Banti, Alberto Mario, 85 Barbieri, Ulisse, 210n73 Barili, Ettore, 83 Barili, Francesco, 79 Barili­Patti, Caterina, 79–80, 82 Barracani, Ettore, 36

236

barrel organs, 59, 72, 77 Basevi, Abramo, 27–28, 141, 179n42, 206n12 Battaglioni dei Cacciatori, army of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, 51 Bayreuth Festspielhaus, 125, 126 Bechi, Emilio, 35, 36 bel canto: definition of, 82, 97, 106, 198n92, 198n94; and globalization, 10, 82, 107; as listening, 2, 106–7; view of as lost tradition in Italy, 97. See also Lamperti, Francesco; Patti, Adelina, vocality; singing Bellaigue, Camille, 145–46 Bellini, Vincenzo, 45, 77, 82; and canto declamato, 97; I Capuleti e i Montec­ chi, 47; Norma, 104–5, 105; Adelina Patti’s roles in operas of, 83, 84, 88 Bengal lights, 49 bergamasco (dialect), 91 bilancia. See gas batten (bilancia) Bishop, Henry, 32; “Home! Sweet Home!,” 87, 88, 193n27 blood, and Italian identity, 85–87, 192n19 Blume, Bianca, 110 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 98 Boccherini (journal), 27 Boito, Arrigo, 145, 197n75, 207n28 Bologna: and 1871 opera season, 199n4; as “Le Bayreuth italien,” 111; as most progressive Italian musical center, 5, 20, 110–11, 172n11; Rienzi premiere in, 117. See also Lohengrin (Wagner); Teatro Comunale, Bologna Bologna­Florence railway line, 117–18 Bonfiglio, Richard, 22 Bordiga, Cesare, 35 Brandus (publisher), 33 Brenner railway line, 109 Briol, Giovanni, Guglielmo di Blankem­ berga, 35 Brizzi, Enea, 201n31, 201n34, 203n64 Broglio, Emilio, 99, 100 Budden, Julian, 141, 142, 145, 173n14 Bull, Ole, 83 Buonomo, Camillo, 185n31 Buonomo, Eduardo, 51, 185n31 Buti, Ludovico, 110

in de x

Campana, Alessandra, 11, 125 campanilismo, 3, 111 Campanini, Italo, 103, 110, 121, 122 Canori, Guglielmo, 127, 129, 205n81 canto declamato, 97 capital­city relocations, Italy: from Florence to Rome, 5, 120; from Turin to Florence, 5, 42, 120, 130, 203n55 Cappella di San Petronio, Bologna, 113 Capuana, Luigi: “Don Fano Amarù, 191n97; Profumo, 74–75, 190n94 carbon arc lamp. See electric arc lamps Carey, James W., 149 Carlini, Antonio, 188n54 Carotti, Giovanni, 45, 47 Carraresi, Giovanni, 35, 36, 181n76 carrier pigeons, 156–57 Caruso, Enrico, 96 Casadei, Delia, 98 Casamorata, Luigi Ferdinando, 27, 38 Casarini, Camillo, 109, 113, 114, 199n4 Cassinis, Giovanni Battista, 193n21 “Casta diva,” Norma, 104 Cattaneo, Carlo, “La città considerata come principio ideale delle istorie italiane,” 20–21, 42 Cavanaugh, Jillian R., 91 Cavour, Camillo, 118–19 Cederström, Baron Rolf, 195n42 censorship: of the press in Tuscany, 24; theatrical, 38, 39 chamber music, in Florence, 20, 27 Chiavistelli, Antonio, 24 Cimarosa, Domenico, 49 cities: colonial, 210n64; and introduc­ tion of mean time, 163, 212n98; Ital­ ian, 20; Italy as “land of a hundred cities,” 2; and the nation’s unifying impulses, 11; and opera, 26, 111; op­ eratic interactions between, 1, 2, 111; speed of communication between, 151; Tuscan, 21, 176n13, 177n27. See also individual cities citizenship law. See nationality law, Italy civil codes, 85 Clément, Félix, 207n24 Coluzzi, Giovacchino, 33, 35

in de x

communication: accelerated pace, 3, 10; in Aida, 133, 144; modern under­ standing of, 12–13, 174n31; transmis­ sion model of, 12. See also telegraphy communication networks, 94, 148, 151, 153, 158 communication technologies. See telegraphy Conservatorio delle Arti e Mestieri, Florence, 35 Cooper, James Fenimore, Excursions in Italy, 22–23 Coopersmith, Jonathan, 209n52 Coppino, Michele, 100 Cordelia, 77 Corridi, Filippo, 35, 36 Cosenza, Giuseppe, 52–53, 58 cosmopolitanism, 33–34, 95; and Aida premiere, Milan, 158; and Florence, 22–23; and Meyerbeer, 8, 20, 21, 33– 34; and musicology, 173n19; and operatic Bologna, 110, 158 Cosmorama pittorico, 124 Cottrau, Teodoro, 51, 185n30 Crepuscolo, Il, 20 Cresswell, Tim, 7, 112, 128 Crimean War, 17, 176n8 Crispi, Francesco, 86 critics, professional, emergence of in Italy, 20, 27, 29 Danesi, Luigi, Il Telegrafo elettrico, 159 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 50 D’Arcais, Francesco Flores, 119, 208n41 D’Arcis, Henry, 33 d’Arpa, Galeno, 187n51 De Amicis, Edmondo, 157 death culture, 47, 72–73, 76–77, 183n8 De Certeau, Michel, 41 De Grave, Théodore, 80, 83 De Gubernatis, Angelo, 75 Delavigne, Germain, 29 De Mauro, Tullio, 196n70 deputazioni dei pubblici spettacoli, 112 De Staël, Madame, 98 Destin, Maria Löwe, 110 Diavoletto, Il, 100 diction: of Italians, 104; of Adelina

237

Patti, 4, 10, 88, 97–98; as technique/ technology, 95 disposizioni sceniche (opera staging man­ uals), 125, 166; for Otello, 205n81. See also Aida (Verdi) Donizetti, Gaetano: La favorita, 116; L’assedio di Calais, 82; Adelina Patti’s roles in operas by, 88; portrayal of, 31 D’Ormeville, Carlo, 205n81 Draneht, Paul, 145, 148 Du Bois, W. E. B., 93 Duboscq, Jules, 34, 180n67, 182n83 Du Locle, Camille, 148, 149, 150 Dumas, Alexandre, 22, 31 Durando, Giacomo, 118–19 Eco de Marte, El, 186n37 Edison, Thomas A., 106, 198n94 Egypt: and calendrical and press re­ forms, 152; as communication and transport hub between Asia and Eu­ rope, 152; distribution of Cairo local time by wire to the provinces, 153; and pace of mail to Italy, 155. See also Khedivial Opera House, Cairo electric arc lamps, 2, 8, 10, 14; first use of in a theater, 180n67; at Florence’s Teatro della Pergola, 35–36; at Paris’s Opera, 34, 180n69; relocation among theatrical stages, 3; at Royal Italian Opera, 180n68; video of, 182n83 electricity: historical understandings of, 144, 149–50; and illumination at La Scala, 182n81; introduction of into operatic theater, 34; and modern concept of communication, 12; and musical aesthetics, 159–60. See also electric arc lamps; “electric sunrise”; telegraphy “electric sunrise,” 8, 21, 34–37, 181nn76–78 Elementary Education Act of 1870, Great Britain, 89 emigration, of Italians to Americas, 127 “emotional arena,” 9, 72, 76, 191n103 emotions: associated with Jone’s marcia funebre, 58, 72–78; and community bonding, 2, 70

238

enterprise orchestras, 200n28 Escudier, Léon, 158 Europe, northern: Florence’s relation­ ship with, 8, 19–20, 26–27, 29, 42; and the social novel, 40–41 Europe artiste, L’, 28 Fabbrica Italiana Rulli Sonori Trafo­ rati, 78 Faccio, Franco, 127, 140, 146, 161 Fahrbach, Friedrich, 51 Fahrbach, Joseph, 68–69, 77, 188n63 Fanelli, Giovanni, 183n102 fanfare (brass bands), 51, 70, 189n73 Fanfulla, Il, 114 Farina, Salvatore, Amore ha cent’occhi, 73–74 Fascist thespian cars, 126 faxing, 209n52 Fedeli, Vito, 189n77 Feldman, Martha, 106 Ferni, Carolina, 96 Ferrario, Carlo, 110, 127 Ferraris, Maggiorino, 209n54 filarmoniche societies, 48, 51 Filippi, Filippo, 196n67; “Lettere egi­ ziane” (Egyptian Letters), 155–56, 210n70; parody plays based upon “Lettere egiziane,” 157, 210n73; on Adelina Patti, 87–88, 91, 97–98, 106 Filopanti, Quirico, 165, 212n99 Fischietto, Il, 81 Florence, history and image: as capital of Italy, 5, 18–19; cosmopolitanism, 22–25, 177n22; demolition of medie­ val walls, 18, 41–43, 183n102; foreign population, 24; and northern Euro­ pean modernity, 19–20, 23, 37, 42–43; perceptions of movement, 7–8, 24– 25; railway stations, 24, 129–30; rela­ tionship with surrounding country­ side, 20–21, 42; and the social novel, 39–42; views of, 18–19, 21, 42, 176n13. See also capital­city relocations, Italy; Florence, operatic and musical life Florence, operatic and musical life, 25– 31; first staging of Il profeta, 21, 32–33, 35–39; and Meyerbeer’s grands opéras,

in de x

7–8, 20, 26, 28–39; music journalism, 20, 27–31; relationship with Paris, 28– 30, 32–34; and status of local theaters, 25. See also Lohengrin (Wagner); Teatro della Pergola, Florence; Teatro Leopoldo; Teatro Pagliano, Florence Florentine, as proposed national lan­ guage, 99 Fortis, Leone, 85, 98 Foscolo, Ugo, 130 Foucault, Léon, 34, 37 Foucault, Michel, 101 Franchetti, Alberto, Asrael, 127 Franco­Prussian War, 147, 151; and de­ ferral of Aida premiere, 148 Frank, Ernst, 110 Fréjus Rail Tunnel, 119 Frezzolini, Erminia, 84 funeral march: as a genre, 67–69; social function of, 47, 72 Gabinetto Scientifico­Letterario, Florence, 24 Gaceta musical de Madrid, 28 Gaibi, Cesare, 199n4 Galiano Díaz, Juan Carlos, 186n37 Galison, Peter, 165 Galli, Amintore, 86, 162 galops, 159 Galvani, Giuseppe, 110 Gambara (Balzac), 29–31, 34, 179nn48–49 Garcia, Manuel, Jr., 103 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 73 gas batten (bilancia), 36, 181n80 Gazzetta dei teatri, 116 Gazzetta di Genova, 17–18, 176n8 Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 27, 31, 68, 95, 153–55, 154 Gazzetta piemontese, 125 Gazzetti, Francesco, 101 Gerhard, Anselm, 142 Gherardi, Gherardo, “E gira!,” 77–78 Ghinassi, Vincenzo, 192n19 Ghislanzoni, Antonio, 46, 50, 53, 59, 136, 153, 156, 192n8 Gianni, Tito, 201n36 Gibson, James J., 189n68

in de x

Giornale illustrato, Il, 84, 163, 164 Giornale militare ufficiale, 71 Gitelman, Lisa, 149 Gleason, Annie, 95 globalization: and bel canto, 10, 82, 107; and increased mobility, 3, 94, 106; and opera, 3, 32, 116, 172n10; and the Suez Canal, 151–52; and timekeeping, 153, 164, 210n64 “global voice,” 92, 107 Gooley, Dana, 33 Gottschalk, Louis Moreau, 83 Gounod, Charles, 88, 110, 193n29 Gramsci, Antonio, 98 Grand­Carteret, John, Richard Wagner en caricatures, 121–22 grand opéra, 179n45, 184n15; stagings and discussions of in Florence, 7– 8, 26, 29–39. See also Meyerbeer, Giacomo Great Britain: attempts to standardize national language, 89–90; and teleg­ raphy, 209n48, 209n54 Greenblatt, Stephen, 7, 112 Grimaldi, Michele, 45 Grossi, Augusto, “Caravana del Lohen­ grin,” 121–23, 122, 126, 129 Guicciardi, Giovanni, 48 Guide musicale, Le, 28 Guidi, Giovan Gualberto, 27, 28, 179n43 Gye, Frederick, 180n68 gymnastics, 70, 189n71 Habsburg­Lorraine rule, in Tuscany, 17, 18, 22, 33 Halévy, Fromental, La regina di Cipro, 26 Handel, George Frideric, 88; Israel in Egypt, 89 Hibberd, Sarah, 184n15 Hof­ und Nationaltheater, Munich, 109 identity: collective, shaping of, 69; of Florence, 19, 31, 42; Italian, 1, 4, 85, 175n39; linguistic, 98; local, regional, and national, 18; and newspapers, 19, 26; of Adelina Patti’s voice, 80; trans­ municipal identity politics after Uni­ fication, 4, 112

239

Illica, Luigi, 162 Illustrazione italiana, L’, 85 industrialization, of Italian culture, 11, 112, 125 International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archaeology, Bologna, 110 Istituto Tecnico Toscano, 21, 35–37 Italia musicale, L’, 27, 32 Italian South, clichéd images of, 74–75 Jacobshagen, Arnold, 179n45 Jacovacci, Vincenzo, 162 James, Henry, 23 Jarves, James Jackson, 177n22 Jest, Carlo, 181n78 Jest, Enrico Federico, 181n78 Jone (Petrella): arrangements and edi­ tions, 50–52; autograph score, 54, 59, 186n44, 187n45, 188n55; Milan pre­ miere and critical reception, 48–49, 59; popularity, 50; sinfonia, 59–64, 61–64, 187n52. See also marcia funebre (Errico Petrella’s Jone) Jones, Daniel, 89 Jouvin, Benoit, 146–47 Jullien’s Orchestra, 201n28 Kellogg, Clara Louise, 94–95, 195n50 Khedivial Opera House, Cairo: and Aida premiere, 143, 144–45, 147–48, 207n28; inauguration of, 145; and Paris’s Opéra, 147 Kipling, Rudyard, 152 Kittler, Friedrich, 79–80, 101, 107, 198n95 Klein, Herman, 87–91 Körner, Axel, 2, 11, 110, 172n11 Krakamp, Emanuele, 70–71 Krehbiel, Henry Edward, 145, 167 Lambertini, Emidio, 199n4 Lamperti, Francesco: bel canto teacher and theorist, 96, 97, 195n51; Guida teorico­pratica­elementare per lo studio del canto, 103; L’arte del canto in or­ dine alle tradizioni classiche ed a parti­ colare esperienza, 103–4, 105 Lamperti, Giovanni Battista, 103

240

Lanari, Alessandro, 26 “Land of my Fathers,” 88 language: attempts to standardize na­ tional language, 9, 89–90, 99–102; aural consciousness of, 106; debates about in Italy, 97–104; Florentine as proposed national language, 99; in­ tersections of speech and singing, 92, 93, 97, 106; Italian orthoepy, 100– 104; Italian vowels, 104; monolingual paradigm, 90; proportion of Ital­ ian population speaking Italian, 98, 196n70; questione della lingua, 98. See also Patti, Adelina, vocality; voice Laschi, Luigi, 33, 35, 36 Last Days of Pompeii, The (Bulwer­ Lytton), 48–49, 54, 184n13 Latour, Bruno, 175n38 Leopolda railway line, Tuscany, 39, 117 Leopolda station, Florence, 24 Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 18, 22, 35, 176n6 Lind, Jenny, 80 listening: bel canto as, 2, 106–7; to lan­ guage, 89, 94; racialized listening practices, 93; voices as the product of, 93, 101 Livorno, 24, 39, 117, 174n24. See also Teatro dei Fulgidi, Livorno; Teatro Leopoldo livrets de mise en scène. See disposizioni sceniche (opera staging manuals) Lockhart, Ellen, 159, 198n95, 211n83, 211n86 Lohengrin (Wagner): Bologna premiere, 109–12; as prefiguring end­of­century opera touring projects, 114–15; trans­ fer from Bologna to Florence, 112–15, 117, 119–23, 122, 126, 203n54. See also Grossi, Augusto, “Caravana del Lo­ hengrin”; “translocations,” of opera productions; Wagner, Richard Lorenzini, Carlo (Carlo Collodi): I mis­ teri di Firenze, 41–43, 183n98; Un ro­ manzo in vapore, 39–41 Lormier, M., 34 Lucca, Francesco, 27, 51, 109

in de x

Lucca, Giovannina, 109 Luzzatto, Sergio, 130 mail: pace of from Egypt to Italy, 155; pace of in Italy, 209n54 Malone, Hannah, 183n8 Mancini, Giovanni Battista, 103 Mancini, Pasquale Stanislao, 86 Mandl, Louis, 103 Manzocchi, Mariano, 83 Manzoni, Alessandro, 98–100 Manzotti, Luigi, Excelsior, 159 marching bands. See wind bands marcia funebre. See funeral march marcia funebre (Errico Petrella’s Jone), 45–46; arrangements, editions, and performances of, 8–9, 50–52, 58, 59, 186n34, 186n37; autograph score, 187n45; composing process of, 52–53; as conduit for heightened emotion, 76–78; as “excess,” 58, 74, 76; and ex­ ecution procession scene, 53–58; in Holy Week processions, 9, 48, 52, 72, 75, 184n11; as mechanical music, 59; and musical repetition, 58; perfor­ mances in Italy today, 184n11; per­ formances in Mexico, 186n38; played for Petrella’s funeral, 46–47; in works of fiction, 73–76. See also funeral march Marenco, Romualdo, 159 Maria Antonia station, Florence, 24, 113, 129–30 Mariani, Angelo, 109, 110, 113, 114, 121, 122, 199n4, 200n23 Mariani, Giuseppe, 186n37 Mariette, Auguste, 148, 149, 150 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 211n82 Marquis de Caux (Henri Roger de Cashuzac), 86, 88 Marsh, George P., 194n34 Marzi, Fratelli, 181n77, 187n50 Mascagni, Pietro, Le maschere, 162–63 Massenet, Jules, Hérodiade, 212n93 Mauss, Marcel, 69 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 47, 130, 184n9 McLuhan, Marshall, 13

in de x

McNeill, William H., 69–70 mean time. See tempo medio (mean time) media: definition of, 6–7, 10; role in Aida’s composition, performance, and reception, 133–67; stagings as, 128, 159; and the Suez Canal, 151– 53; twentieth­century notion of, 13; voices understood as, 106–7. See also carrier pigeons; railways, Italy; telegraphy Mediterranea railway company, 127 Meiningen Court Theater, 125 memory: and Aida, 143, 166; cultural, 53; musical, 58–59; and the Risorgi­ mento, 158 Mengozzi, Dino, 71, 190n83 Mentana, battle of, 73 Mercatale, 17–18, 19, 34 Méry, Joseph, Les Nuits italiennes, 22–23 metodi compitativi (spelling methods), 100 metodi fonici (phonetic methods), 100– 102, 101, 102 metodi sillabici (syllabic methods), 100 Meyer, Leopold, 33 Meyerbeer, Giacomo: as “industral­ ized composer,” 31; Les Huguenots (Gli anglicani), 7, 26, 28, 32, 33, 142, 193n29; Roberto il diavolo, 7, 26, 28– 33, 179n43. See also Florence, oper­ atic and musical life; grand opéra; Prophète, Le (Il profeta) Mezzofanti, Giuseppe Gasparo, 87–88 Miglietti, Vincenzo, 193n21 Milan: changing vocal soundscape, 96; competition with operatic Bologna, 110, 158; as first modern Italian city, 27; as Italy’s “moral capital,” 158; as national and global center of Verdi activity, 157. See also Aida (Verdi); Jone (Petrella); Teatro alla Scala, Milan; Teatro Fossati, Milan; Teatro Re, Milan Milan­Venice railway line, 203n53 mobility: as conceived in modern West­ ern societies, 7; cultural, micro­

241

histories of, 7; increase in during nineteenth century, 3, 94–95; inter­ play with immobility, 166; in mid­ nineteenth­century Florence, 7–8, 24–25. See also railways, Italy; “trans­ locations,” of opera productions modernity: Egyptian, 143; and Fascism, 126; Florence’s relationship with, 8, 20, 23, 28, 42, 43; Italy’s relationship with, 123; and language in Italy, 98; theatrical modernity as shaped by Paris, 37; Wagner as emblem of musi­ cal modernity, 123, 126 Moffat, Carter, 194n39 Mondo artistico, Il, 84, 155 Monelle, Raymond, 188n64 Monitore toscano, 17, 19, 176n8 Mont Cenis Pass Railway, 119 Monti, Luigi, 199n4 Moretti, Franco, 37 Morri, Michele, 112, 113 Morse, Samuel, 149 multilingualism: and monolingualism, 90–91; and opera libretti, 28; and Adelina Patti, 87, 88. See also poly­ glotism “muscular bonding,” 9, 69–70 musical aesthetics, and electricity, 159–60 Musical World, The, 28 music journalism, in Florence, 27–31. See also critics, professional, emer­ gence of in Italy Musique, La, 32 Muzio, Emanuele, 83, 195n50 Naples: Aida premiere in, 210n69; Jone premiere in, 51; Errico Petrella’s de­ but in, 45 Naples­Portici railway, 174n24 national exhibitions, Italy, 17, 158, 159, 189n77 nationality law, Italy, 85–86 “native speaker,” concept of, 89–90 Natura ed arte, 75 Negrini, Carlo, 48 networking, definition of, 10, 13–14

242

Neumann, Angelo, 125 newspapers: as media, 7, 8, 10, 14; and telegraphy, 166, 212n103; and urban identities, 19, 26–27. See also music journalism, in Florence Nicolini, Ernesto (Ernest Nicolas), 86 Norma (Bellini), 104, 105 Ogle, Vanessa, 210n64 opera houses. See theaters opera staging manuals. See disposizioni sceniche (opera staging manuals) orality, relationship with aurality, 107. See also speech, and singing Orientalism, 12, 143–44 Orphéon, L’, 28 orthoepy, Italian, 100, 103 Osterhammel, Jürgen, 3 Otello (Verdi), 127–28, 130 Pacini, Giovanni, L’ultimo giorno di Pompei, 184n13 Paisiello, Giovanni, 49 Palazzo Pitti, 33 Palianti, Louis, 179n45, 180n69 Palmo’s Opera House, New York, 82 Panorama della Strada­Ferrata delli Appennini Bologna, Pistoja, Firenze, 118, 118, 202n45 Paravelli, Elisa Valentini, 83 Paravicini, Rodolfo, 157 Paris: and Aida, 135, 146–50, 153, 156– 58, 208n34; and Florence, 32–34; international band competition of 1867 in, 71; and Massenet’s Hé­ rodiade, 212n93; and Meyerbeer’s grands opéras, 8, 21, 28, 29, 31–32, 34, 39, 179n45; as model of urban life and cultural luxury, 23, 177n24; and the social novel, 40–41; and the World’s Fair of 1878, 115. See also Thèâtre de la Gaîté, Paris; Théâtre de l’Opéra, Paris Pasha, Ismail, 155, 207n28 Pasquino, Il, 155 Pasta, Giuditta, 211n86 Patriarca, Silvana, 172n11

in de x

Patti, Adelina, 82–83; birth, 79–80, 192n3; career trajectory, 80, 83–84; critics’ confusion over origins and citizenship, 84–87; early tours and stage debut, 83; English as mother tongue, 194n31; and Handel’s orato­ rios, 88–89, 194n32; musical educa­ tion and training, 83, 88–89; operatic repertoire, 83, 88, 193n29; perfor­ mances in Italy, 80–81, 82, 84–85, 192n18; recordings, 88, 92, 195n42; and Strakosch, 83, 88–89, 194n32; as transoceanic diva, 80, 82. See also Patti, Adelina, vocality Patti, Adelina, vocality: “American voice,” 94, 195n51; bel canto style, 81, 82, 97–98, 196n67; English accent, 89; “global voice,” 92, 107; “Italian voice,” 4, 81; linguistic fluency and partic­ ipation in multiple speech commu­ nities, 9, 80, 87–90, 91–92; as model of Italian pronunciation, 97–98; un­ marked native accent, 9, 89, 91; voice as product of circulation, 91; voice as proto­recording device, 9–10, 106. See also Patti, Adelina Patti, Amalia, 83 Patti, Carlotta, 95 Patti, Salvatore, 79, 82–83, 88 Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 49 Perosio, Giuseppe, 146, 207n31 Perseveranza, La, 155 Peruzzi, Ubaldino, 112–13, 114, 116 Peruzzini, Giovanni, 48, 49, 54 Pesci, Ugo, 175n1; Firenze capitale, 17–20, 34, 120 Peters, John Durham, 10–11, 149–50, 174n31 Petrarca, Francesco, 98 Petrella, Antonio, 45 Petrella, Errico: biography, 45; death and funeral, 45–47; lack of technical skill as a composer, 49; La contessa d’Amalfi, 46, 50; L’Assedio di Leida, 48, 184n15; and “Neapolitan school,” 49; seen as a Southerner, 74. See also Jone (Petrella)

in de x

Petrobelli, Pierluigi, 148 phone/logos dichotomy, 98, 104 phonetic methods. See metodi fonici (phonetic methods) phonograph, 106, 198n94 Picchi, Ermanno, 27, 32, 33, 180n64 Piedmont, 119 Piedmont­Sardinia, 18; civil code, 85; rule by House of Savoy, 5 Piekut, Benjamin, 128–29 Pierucci, Mariano, 35–36, 181n77 Pigorini Beri, Caterina, 75–76 Piroli, Giuseppe, 148, 150 Pisanelli, Giuseppe, 85, 193n21 Pitrè, Giuseppe, 75 Poch, Carmelita, 48 pocket scores, 28, 179n43 Pogliani, C., 82 polyglotism: of Mezzofanti, 87; of Adelina Patti, 10, 81, 88, 91, 92, 97. See also multilingualism Port Said, 152 Pougin, Arthur, 145 Pozzi, Ernesto, 73, 74, 76, 190n86 Profeta, Il. See Prophète, Le (Il profeta) Prophète, Le (Il profeta): coronation scene, 37–39, 42–43; “electric sun­ rise,” 21, 34–37, 181nn77–78; European and global circulation, 28, 32–33; Italian premiere in Florence, 21, 32– 33, 35–39; Paris premiere, 34. See also Florence, operatic and musical life; Meyerbeer, Giacomo; Teatro della Pergola, Florence Protano­Biggs, Laura, 2, 97, 172n11, 177n15, 182n81 Public School English, Great Britain, 89 Pungolo, Il, 85, 127 questione della lingua (language ques­ tion), 98 railway literature, 39 railways: and carrier pigeons, 156–57; dysfunctional character of, 128, 130; and Meyerbeer, 31; and panoramic perception of landscape, 123

243

railways, Italy, 10; Bologna­Florence line, 117–18; and funerary tours, 130; Leopolda line, 39, 117; maps and photographic reports of, 118; Milan­ Venice line, 203n53; Naples­Portici line, 174n24; Panorama della Strada­ Ferrata delli Appennini Bologna, Pis­ toja, Firenze, 118; planning of, 120; political and economic impact of, 118–19; and status of opera as me­ dium, 11, 112, 126–28; and time stan­ dardization, 163; tunnels, 117–18; in Tuscany, 24, 177n27. See also Lohen­ grin (Wagner); “translocations,” of opera productions railway stations, 129–30 realism, in Aida, 140–42, 160 Recanatini, Cesare, 201n36 Received Pronunciation, 89 reception studies, 12–13 Reggimento Reischach, band of, 59, 187n50 régisseur, 110 repertory, concept of in opera, 28 repetition, and musical memory, 58–59 Repetto, Pietro, 51 Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris, La, 30, 32, 179n48 Revue franco­italienne, 28 Ricordi (music publisher), 28, 68, 94, 103, 151, 153, 186n37 Ricordi, Giovanni, 27 Ricordi, Giulio, 127, 142, 148, 160–62 Risorgimento, 1–5; memories of, 158; and railways, 118; and Verdi, 173n20; and wind bands, 70 “Risorgimento canon,” 85 Rivista minima, 156–57 Rivista musicale di Firenze, 27, 29–31, 30, 34, 42 Romani, Pietro, 26, 32 Rome: introduction of mean time, 163, 212n96, 212n98; and telegraphy, 151; as third capital of Italy, 5, 119– 20; and “treno Otello,” 127–28. See also Teatro Apollo, Rome; Teatro Costanzi, Rome

244

Ronzi, Luigi, 26, 36, 182n88 Roosevelt, Blanche, 147, 208n35 Rossini, Gioachino, 29, 107, 205n91; global spread of music, 107, 162–63; Guglielmo Tell, 32, 179n43, 180n55; Il Barbiere di Siviglia, 50, 87–88, 91, 179n43, 193n27; and the “Neapoli­ tan school,” 49; Adelina Patti’s roles in operas of, 87–88; Tancredi, 32, 58 Rousseau, Jean­Jacques, 98 Royal Italian Opera, London, 34, 180n68 rullanta, 46, 59, 64 Ruskin, John, 162 Ruta, Michele, 67–69, 77, 189n64 Said, Edward, 142–43, 166 Sanquirico, Antonio, 82 Santa Croce, Florence, 130, 205n91 Santa Maria Novella, Florence, 129 Sardinia, 74 Scalaberni, Alberto, 201n31 Scalaberni, Luigi: attempt to produce Lohengrin in Bologna, 109; depic­ tion in Grossi’s “Caravana del Lo­ hengrin,” 121–23, 122; funeral proces­ sion, 117; as impresario in Florence and Bologna, 112–17, 199n4, 201n34; as instigator of teatro a repertorio, 116–17; transfer of Lohengrin from Bologna to Florence, 112–14, 117, 119– 21; transfers of operas between Bo­ logna and Florence, 116; transfers of operas between Pergola and Pagli­ ano, 115–16, 121, 201n31 science: in Florence, 21, 35–37, 176n13; and time reforms, 12, 165 scientific imagination, and music, 143–44 Scribe, Eugène, 29 Secolo, Il, 157, 162, 212n103 Sedie, Enrico Delle, 97, 103 “Sediziose voci,” Norma, 104–5 Senici, Emanuele, 2, 27, 58–59, 133 Seymour, Mark, 76, 191n103 Sicily, 8, 45, 74–75, 151, 163, 184n11 Silenzi, Pietro, 110

in de x

Simon Boccanegra (Verdi), 141, 141, 206n12 simultaneity: and Aida, 144, 147–48, 153, 155, 160–67; concept of, 12, 165; and Le maschere, 162; and telegraphy, 151, 153, 165 singing: Italian as “language of singing,” 100; Italian vs. German, 49, 97; and vocal crisis, 172n11. See also bel canto; Lamperti, Francesco; speech, and singing; voice Società Filarmonica di Ala, 51 Società per la esecuzione della musica classica, Florence, 33 “sonic color line,” 93 Sonzogno, Edoardo, 124–25, 126, 129, 204n66, 204n68 Sorba, Carlotta, 2, 178n35 sound recording, 106–7, 129, 198n94 Spain, 9, 48, 52, 186n37 speech, and singing, 9, 82, 92, 93, 97, 104. See also language; “native speaker,” concept of; Patti, Adelina, vocality; voice Speroni, Guglielmo, 203n64 Spirito folletto, Lo, 140, 160 stagings: of Aida, 4, 135, 142, 161, 162, 166, 206n3; circulation and dissemi­ nation of, 10, 13, 116, 129; as expanded “operatic works,” 11, 126; of Jone, 49, 184n16; of Le Prophète (Il profeta), 8, 33, 36–39, 179; of Lohengrin, 109–10; as media, 128, 159; simultaneous, 160– 63; of Wagner’s Ring, 125. See also disposizioni sceniche (opera staging manuals); “translocations,” of opera productions Staglieno cemetery, Genoa, 46, 47, 130, 184n9 “standard language,” concept of, 90 Stanyek, Jason, 128–29 steam engine, 123, 130; and vocal com­ parisons, 93, 95 Stewart­ Steinberg, Suzanne, 189n71 Stoever, Jennifer Lynn, 93 Stolz, Teresa, 96, 103, 146 Strakosch, Maurice, 83, 88–89, 90, 194n32

in de x

Strauss Orchestra, 201n28 submarine cables, laying of, 151, 153 Sue, Eugène, Les Mystères de Paris, 40, 41 Suez (city), 152 Suez Canal, 119, 153; inaccurate confla­ tion of opening with Aida premiere and inauguration of Khedivial Op­ era House, 144–46, 167; as symbol of time­space compression, 151–52 Surrey Theatre, London, 33 symphonic music, in Florence, 20, 27 Teatro alla Scala, Milan: electric illumi­ nation, 182n81; premiere of Aida, 146, 148, 158, 208n41; premiere of Jone, 8, 48–49, 59, 184n12, 187n50; premiere of Otello, 127–28 Teatro Anatomico, Genoa, 46 Teatro Apollo, Rome, 35, 127 teatro a repertorio, 116–17 Teatro Carcano, Milan, 185n21, 185n25 Teatro Carlo Felice, Genoa, 47 Teatro Comunale, Bologna: operatic transfers, 112–16, 121–23, 122, 201n36; premiere of Lohengrin, 109–11 Teatro Costanzi, Rome, 125, 127, 162, 204n68 Teatro dei Fulgidi, Livorno, 36 Teatro della Pergola, Florence: intro­ duction of gas lighting, 181n79; Ital­ ian premieres of Meyerbeer’s grands opéras, 7–8, 20, 26, 32; owned by Accademia degli Immobili, 25, 115; position within Florence’s physi­ cal and political fabric, 25–26, 42–43. See also Prophète, Le (Il profeta) Teatro delle Muse, Ancona, 35, 181n76 Teatro di San Carlo, Naples, 26, 51, 54, 82 Teatro Ducale, Parma, 26 Teatro Fossati, Milan, 157 Teatro la Fenice, Venice, 36, 48, 128, 181n77, 204n68 Teatro Leopoldo, Florence, 35 Teatro Leopoldo, Livorno, 35 Teatro Municipale, Piacenza, 124 Teatro Pagliano, Florence, 25, 35, 84,

245

201n31; operatic transfers, 124–25, 201n36, 203n64; transfer of Bologna’s Lohengrin to, 112–15, 121, 200n23 Teatro Re, Milan, 157 Teatro Regio, Parma, 34 Teatro Regio, Turin, 181n78 Teatro Santa Radegonda, Milan, 185n21 technological determinism, 174n26 technology: opera as, 123; sound re­ cording technologies, 106–7, 128–29; technologies­in­use, 13, 14; theater technologies, 21, 34–37; understood at material and metaphorical levels, 10. See also electric arc lamps; rail­ ways; telegraphy Tedeschi, Isidoro, 100, 197n78 Tedesco, Anna, 182n88 Teja, Casimiro, 155–56, 156 tele di carta, 115–16 telegraphy: as flawed communication device, 150; historical discourses about, 144, 149–50; as inscriptive medium, 149; in Italy, 10, 150–51, 174n24, 210n58; and newspapers, 212n103; role in Aida’s composition, performance and reception, 143–44, 150–60; and “virtual orality,” 144 tempo medio (mean time), 163, 165, 212n96 Tenca, Carlo, 20 theaters: civic function of, 178n35; de­ livery of complete operatic “pack­ ages” to, 166; introduction of electric­ ity into, 34, 180n67, 182n81; invasion of by foreign singers, 95, 97; munic­ ipal, 112, 114, 123; networks of, 124; orchestras of, 115; status of in Italy, 25–26; teatri minori, 50; and wind bands, 59. See also “translocations,” of opera productions; and individual theaters Thèâtre de la Gaîté, Paris, 204n68 Théâtre de l’Opéra, New Orleans, 193n29 Théâtre de l’Opéra, Paris, 21, 28, 146, 148, 180n69, 206n12, 208n34, 212n93 Theodore Thomas Orchestra, 201n28 timekeeping, 153, 163–65, 164, 167

246

Toelle, Jutta, 2 Torelli­Viollier, Eugenio, 158, 159 touring opera, 107, 114–15, 119–20, 125, 126. See also Patti, Adelina; “translo­ cations,” of opera productions traccola, 75 “translocations,” of opera productions, 11, 109–31; and Fascist thespian cars, 126; and implications of “deadness,” 128–30; and Meiningen Court The­ ater tours, 125; and Neumann’s trav­ eling Wagner­Theater, 125. See also Lohengrin (Wagner); Otello (Verdi); Scalaberni, Luigi; touring opera transnational persona, of Adelina Patti, 87, 92 transnational self­fashioning, in theatri­ cal matters, 28, 34 trasferimenti di spettacolo. See “trans­ locations,” of opera productions trasporti di spettacolo. See “trans­ locations,” of opera productions “treno Otello.” See Otello (Verdi) Trocadero, concerts at, 115 Trovatore, Il (journal), 50 Turin: as capital of Italy, 5, 19; and in­ troduction of mean time, 163; na­ tional exhibition, 189n77; orchestra of, 115; Adelina Patti’s performances in, 82. See also Teatro Regio Tuscany: censorship in, 24; nineteenth­ century image of, 18, 22, 175n6; and railway networks, 24, 177n27; and telegraphy, 150 Unger, Caroline, 32 Unification, Italy: and citizenship law, 85–86; and linguistic debates, 10, 97– 99; and operatic historiography, 5–6; and railways, 117; and telegraphy, 151 United States: cultural inferiority com­ plex, 94–95; music education in, 83. See also American opera singers; “American voice” Vacca, Giuseppe, 85, 86, 193n21 Vaglio, Il, 31

in de x

Valigia delle Indie (Indian Mail Route), 121 Van Zandt, Jenny, 195n51 Vaucorbeil, Auguste, 212n93 Venice: Il profeta performances in, 36; Otello performances in, 128; planned Jone premiere in, 48; and Sonzogno’s opera packages, 125, 204n68 Verdi, Giuseppe: Don Carlos, 110; La forza del destino, 157; Nabucco, 53, 186n40, 187n46; Otello, 127–28; and politics, 5–6, 173n20; Simon Boc­ canegra, 141, 141, 206n12; and stag­ ing manuals, 206n12. See also Aida (Verdi) Verne, Jules, 165, 212n104 Vessella, Alessandro, 71 Victor Emmanuel II, 47, 119, 130, 158 Vieusseux, Giovan Pietro, 23–24 Viotti, Emanuele, Margherita di Scozia, 35 voice: as a geocultural locator, 91; “global voice,” 92, 107; as innate pos­ session, 90–91; as medium, 107; as a property assimilated from the envi­ ronment, 81, 91; traditional Western concepts of, 90; voice culture, 94, 195n47. See also “American voice”; bel canto; language; Patti, Adelina, vo­ cality; singing; speech, and singing Volta, Alessandro, 159 Wadi­al Nil, 153 Wagner, Richard: in caricatures, 121– 23, 122; opera premieres in Bologna, 110–11; Rienzi, 116, 117, 201n31, 201n36; Wagner­Theater, 125. See also Lohen­ grin (Wagner) Waldmann, Maria, 103, 146 Weber, Carl Maria von, Il franco caccia­ tore (Der Freischütz), 26, 31–32 wind bands: Andalusian, 52; inter­ national competition of in Turin, 189n77; in Italian funeral processions, 9, 46–47, 71–72; and “muscular bond­ ing,” 9, 69–70; post­Unification boom in, 70–71, 189n73; reorganization of in

in de x

Italy, 70–71; use of by Verdi, 66. See also banda da giro; banda sul palco; funeral march; marcia funebre (Errico Petrella’s Jone) women, citizenship status of, 86

247

Yildiz, Yasemin, 90 Yradier, Sebastián, “La calesera,” 193n27 Zingarelli, Nicola, 45 Zuccarelli, Giovanni, 127